New Voice #1: Julia Cohen

Julia Cohen's new chapbook, Who Could Forget the Sensational First Evening of the Night, is just out from H_NGM_N Books. Her first chapbook, If Fire Arrival, is with horse less press. Her other chapbooks, When We Broke the Microscope (collaboratively written with Mathias Svalina, Small Fires Press), and The History of a Lake Never Drowns (Dancing Girl Press) are forthcoming. You can find links to her poems on her blog. She lives in Brooklyn.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was a kid I wanted to be an archeologist. I loved the idea of studying human history and culture and then pursuing your theories through a physical activity like digging. I must have looked at a lot of picture books about the city of Pompeii. I have a distinct memory of having to write about what I wanted to be in my first grade class. I couldn't spell archeologist. It must have been the third or fourth time because my teacher got exasperated and told me to "go look it up in the dictionary." Which has never made sense to me as an appropriate response because I knew the definition, I just couldn't spell the word. And how do you find a word in the dictionary if you can't spell it? Anyways, my terrible spelling made me switch career paths because I was too frustrated. My spelling has never improved, although I guess I get away with it since I'm now an editor for scholarly books in education and poetry.

What are your poetry pet peeves? What moves are you a sucker for?

Of course, some poets can pull this off very well, but often I get agitated when I see the word "poem" or "poetry" in the poem itself. I am a sucker for word repetition when it'd done well -- when it changes the meaning of the same word each time it's used. I also fall for images that convey emotionality in ways I hadn't visualized before (but who doesn't go for this?). This morning I was re-reading Elizabeth Willis's Turneresque on the subway and the last line to one of her poems is, "She is always in costume, floating above us like a thumb." That's going to stick with me.

Who are your favorite writers? Do you also consider them influences?

Jack Spicer, Anne Lauterbach, Frank O'Hara, Paul Celan, Ted Berrigan, Charles Olson, Pablo Neruda. I think this list might read as a syllabus to an intro to poetry course or something, but these are the poets that come to mind. Also, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulker, and Kafka. I was most influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez because I was exposed to his writing when I was quite young, read his work in both Spanish and English. And he made me question the boundaries of what we usually think of as surreal and how one can create alternative landscapes (physical and emotional) within the context of relevant social and political climates.

Your recent chapbook has a lot of beards in it. What's the significance of facial hair?

I think my poems articulate this concept much better and in more dimensional ways than I can outside of the poems, but what draws me to "the beard" is that while it may constitute a flimsy method for our face to protect itself, I see it more as a way for someone to show an inextricable link to the natural world. We have so many protective layers (clothing, makeup, etc), but this is a layer that engages, in an inviting way, more than protects . It's kind of unkempt and connective, fights against current cultural standards of acceptable presentation as shaved and shiny. While a beard may initially appear to hide the features that we look for in identifying people, I see it as transforming into an identifiable, expressive feature. One that leans to the organic and discourages affiliation with what's artificial (although this is oversimplifying). A line in the first poem in my chapbook hints at where I go with this, "Your beard catches the children running through the grasses and turns them in a kind direction."

What's your collaboration process with Mathias? What collaborative work are you reading?

On the logistical level, we use a number of different methods to build poems together: passing a laptop back and forth when we're in the same location, emailing lines/stanzas back and forth, text messages, the occasional gchat session, editing poems on the phone. It's exciting to open an image and then try to see what different framework the other will use it in. When we begin with more declarative statements, we can see how the other person expands the concept through the imagery that surrounds it. I love that I can be walking to my local bodega and get a message that says, "40 pounds of sunlight flatten his pillow. The sister dust his forehead with.." and then I stop thinking about the soda I was about to buy and write back, "..dusts his forehead with dust to wipe it away. A pile of sugar. Sugar means.." and wait to find out what sugar means while I buy that soda. I'd rather not go into the conceptual process, but I'm looking forward to seeing our first collaborative chapbook come out this winter.

I don't specifically seek out collaborative work or think that I've ever read much that is, but I love the collections that The Pines puts out (which is Brandon Shimoda and Phil Cordelli) and the chapbook The Ohio System by Jen Tynes and Erika Howsare. I'd also like to read Figures for a Darkroom Voice by Joshua Maria Wilkinson and Noah Eli Gordon, although I haven't gotten to it yet.