In which we talk grieving, loss, anxiety and ball-peens with the Jonathan Travelstead at The Rumpus.

And why do we this? Because despite doing a podcast with him, the world will always need more Travelstead. Excerpt? Word.

Rumpus: This reminds me of the time I was on a long run and a PSA came on the radio with Phil Jackson talking about breast cancer and I thought about my mom—who is a survivor—and I started crying profusely. But that’s not a question; my question is about anxiety and whether you think there are any benefits to struggling with anxiety when you’re a writer or artist?

Travelstead: In my case, absolutely. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I try to borrow the same motivations from my career as a firefighter and consider the writing process as seriously as I do entering a house with black smoke puffing from its eaves. In a poem any unconsidered line, word, or break can have toxic consequences to the speaker’s authenticity, or intent. Which is not to say I emerge from writing in the same state as I do after a structure fire—I just may feel like it, emotionally.

With any craft, or work in which someone takes pride and makes a living, I can’t imagine anxiety not being a functional tool for producing their best work. However, I consider it to be the best tool only when confined to the final stages of the writing process, and stifling in the early, creative stages to the point of analysis paralysis—that condition where the writer smothers the poem by over-thinking it, or planning too much. As a work is revisited and crafted I find anxiety to be helpful, necessary even.

I write for an imaginary audience that has ADD but that is also shrewd and discerning, and whose attention I will lose if it intuits a writer’s lack of authenticity—both in terms of my own struggle with the underlying tensions, and also of the speaker’s within the narrative. As writers, if we’re minding our craft—and a little lucky—then that struggle is passed along to the reader. It’s not only a motivator, it’s also a defense mechanism for combing out a word choice or movement that can throw off a poem’s voice, or identifying whether a risky line inches too far towards sentimentality.

So this is what Cobalt's first year of book publishing looks like, yo.

Totally. And much more here. So much more.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode One Hundred and Twelve - Luckiest Guy Ever, starring the Jonathan Travelstead.

So podcast we are, yo. And quite Travelstead too. We are also death and anxiety, Cobalt Press, poetry, mothers, the national guard and not actually being EMT at all. So do hit it, it just might change your life.   

Tanzer. Travelstead. Zoebrod. Quimby's. July 7th. Killing it.

Truth. Details here. Or here. Either.

These Books (of Poetry) Will Change Your Life - How We Bury Our Dead by the Jonathan Travelstead, Addicts & Basements by the Robert Vaughan and A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us by the Caleb Curtiss.

There is a passage from Cup & Saucer, a poem in A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us, Caleb Curtiss' terribly affecting map of grief and memory, where he writes:

     "and so we're left with what we're always left with:

     the line that separates then and now,

     the line that threads together our moments,

     passing through us as it goes."

Curtiss is writing of the loss of his sister to a car accident and how we try to make sense of such a thing. We make peace with it, somewhat, and grudgingly. We build new and different connections with those we love. Our memories shift, and warp, based on who we're talking to and the passage time. Sometimes what we feel is real and true, and other times as Curtiss reflects so effectively in the poem Still, it's all scatter shot and crazy. But there is always a line, a before something happened, and an after, and it is  in that before and after that Curtiss' work comes to life.
 

There are lines as well in How We Bury Our Dead by the Jonathan Travelstead and Addicts & Basements by the Robert Vaughan, but for Travelstead it is more than one line, parallel lines even, though not unlike Curtiss they are fraught with loss, grief and memory. There is the war in Iraq and what we lose when we are exposed to death and fear, our sense of stability, and of normalcy. But that isn't the only line Travelstead is bumping into and against. There is also the death of his mother, and the contorted feelings that come with a death of a relationship where the feelings were already contorted. From Paper Lantern:

     "Mother, forgive me.

     It took so long lancing the infection

     I allowed grow inside me, 

     and now a sweet pain rises there

     like the flickering eyes of paper lanterns

     lit and carried away by the night.

     Please forgive me for taking so long to know,

     I loved you even then."

Vaughan is looking back as well in a mix of poetry and flash fiction, both the truth and something else. But it is the past in so many ways that seeps out. Vaughan's line is about a life lived, and lost to history, and what youth looks like when we run from place to place, and person to person, but also find homes, temporary and otherwise, that form who we were, and where we are now. Less than Travelstead or Curtiss though, we don't have as much of a sense of where Vaughan is now, but we also have the sense that there has been so much life lived that we are being introduced to the start of something. The addicts and basements that haunted his youth, are just that, the ghosts of his past, and the now is this, writing and beauty, and more is to come if we can just be patient and wait for the words. From Shades of Gray:

     "The next day, I lie on the living room rug as they       

     carry all the furniture off. It seems random, rather  

     unpredictable. Did I live here?

     The last thing they remove is the first thing I hung.

     It's my empty birdcage.

     I walk around the blank shell like a visitor."

There is loss and there is life. There is also change, and all three of these collections are sure to change your life as they have ours, if only for a moment at that.

Holy fuck wow Four Fathers + Black Krim + How We Bury Our Dead Cobalt package deal.

Indeed. More here. Or even here. Totally.