Justin Marks' full-length collection of poems, A Million in Prizes, was recently released by New Issues Poetry & Prose after winning the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize. His latest chapbook is Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope Press), and he's the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks.

I enjoyed reading both A Million in Prizes and Voir Dire, which is a semi-long poem. Here's one of my favorites from A Million in Prizes:

Matter of Fact

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky,
the intricate structure of a leaf

and thought by now
I'd have come close.

What joy I have in knowing
creation of that sort

doesn't exist.
The world has little

use for me.
Its glare blinds.

How glad I am
for the orbit I inhabit.

A planet to the sun.

*****

What are you up to?

Enjoying being a new dad. Working. Doing some writing here and there. Lining up readings for the spring and fall.

An entire section of your collection A Million in Prizes is one long poem: [Summer insular]. How is writing a long poem different from writing shorter poems?

Writing a long poem, for me, is more comforting than working on shorter poems. Something about knowing I have a large space to work in puts me in a good place emotionally. I mean, I love writing shorter poems, but they generally don't take as long to write and if I don't have anything else I'm working on, I'll start to get real anxious. But lately my short poems are all part of a larger vision/conceptual framework, a book or chapbook, so even when I'm done with an individual poem I know I have a lot more to work on in terms of completing that particular manuscript. It makes me feel more like I'm working on sections of a long poem instead of isolated one night stands, as Spicer called them.

The end of your collection is packed with prose poems. What do you like about the prose poem?

Those poems were a real turning point in my writing. I could sense that I wouldn't be writing too many more poems like the ones from the first section. Not because I didn't like them. It was just that...I don't know...the straight-up, individual lyric poem was starting to feel limiting to me. I was and am proud of the work that’s in the first section of my book, and absolutely stand by it, but in terms of my development it was just time to move on. One of the things a book is to me is in some ways a chart of a person’s development/growth as a writer during the time in which the book was written.

To try and enable that growth for myself I decided that I needed to focus on not caring about the end result and (as much as I possibly could) turn off my inner-critic and just write. One way I was able to make that happen was to not worry about line breaks any more. At the same time, I found myself thinking more in sentences than lines—or maybe more accurately: Thinking about sentences as lines. So that was one thing I liked about prose poems. I was able to sort of pack a lot in and move about in a more relaxed manner than if I were trying to write lineated poems.

Since then I've returned to prose a good bit. A new chapbook manuscript I'm finishing up is all prose. What I hope will be my next book is a series of sonnets, but even with those I keep trying to work prose lines in there somehow to kind of break things up and build some variety into the manuscript.

The poems in A Million in Prizes are all first person narratives. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction in your poems? Also, what do you like about writing in a confessional voice?

I don't think writing in the first person makes one confessional. My poems in this book—and in general—explore the lyric "I", certainly, but that's totally different than being confessional. I'm not confessing anything. Besides, there are so many problems with that term, even as it has been/is applied to poets like Lowell and Plath and that whole "confessional" crowd—it doesn't feel useful to me.

One of the things I try to do in my work is get an entire self (if such a thing exists) down on the page, so I don't really draw lines between fiction and reality. It's all fiction. And reality. I take from my life whatever is necessary for my work to progress/evolve/change. It potentially gets tricky when I start writing about other people from my life, but so far no one has objected or asked me to not write about them. If they did, though, I'd have to honor that.

Your collection won the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, and you're the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks. What do you think makes a good collection?

I think about this a lot, and every time I start to approach a conclusion I'm reminded of some book I like that breaks the rules surrounding whatever conclusions I'm approaching. I guess, on a basic level, I think a good collection is one in which the poems become something more than individual poems that are somehow similar in feel and arranged together to make a nice flow. The poems in a good collection are in conversation with each other and form something greater than their parts.

But that definition, for me, is always changing. Over the last few years I've become way more invested in books that are projects or series/serial as opposed to more traditional collections, books that are more akin to Spicer's idea of the serial poem, or are a book length poem, etc. One of my favorite contemporary books is Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The subtitle is An American Lyric. I don't know what that means, or how one might define it except to say, read the book. It's prose, but I'm not sure if it's prose poems. Maybe it's a lyric essay or memoir of some sort. It doesn't really matter. Martha Ronk's Vertigo is another book I enjoy immensely that I think is a little limiting to just call a collection of poems (though it does have individual poems). It's more like a series or cycle of poems.

It’s one of the qualities I look for when I read manuscripts for Kitchen Press. Take Hit Wave, by Jon Leon. I don't know if you've read it, but I'm not really sure what it is: a collection of prose poems? A lyric novella? I could only put it under the rather general category of anti-poetic. And writing I love.

But then there's Old With You, by Lily Brown. I don't think anyone would argue that that isn't your basic collection of somewhat thematically linked, individual poems. But I love that book too.

So I guess what I'm saying is: There are basic qualities that I think make a good collection, but I also really dig work that makes questions just what a collection of poems is/can be. (As an aside, Tarpaulin Sky Press is deeply invested in putting out work that others might not consider to be "poetry.")

Your bio mentions an infant son and daughter. Have they impacted your writing in any way?

They impacted my writing before they were even conceived. I wrote Voir Dire around the time my wife and I were getting serious about trying to get pregnant. There are lots of references to babies in that mini-chapbook. There are also a lot of babies in the two manuscripts I've been working on throughout my wife's pregnancy and since the birth of our son and daughter. In a sense, it's all kind of topical. I never mentioned babies in my work until we started trying to have one/had them. I mean, I'm not writing about my babies as individual people per-se. I don't really write "about" specific people or subjects. Though I suppose there are poems in A Million in Prizes that you could argue are "about" specific subjects. Generally, though, it's not my thing. Anyway. That I'm mentioning babies at all, to me, means my babies have had a significant impact on my writing.

You work as a copywriter. How do the demands of writing copy differ from writing poetry? Also, are there similarities?

Marketing copy has to be concise and to the point, say as much as possible with as few words as possible, and it absolutely has to get and maintain the reader’s attention, even if it is only for a few moments and all you're ultimately saying is "Buy Now". Poetry is like that. (Though there are certainly worthwhile poetries out there that are not at all concerned with the whole maximum-impact-with-minimum-words model.) But I think the most significant similarity is that marketing copy is pretty conceptual. You have to think about all the ways what you're saying can be interpreted and if that fits in with what you want people to take away. For me, with poetry, it's not that I necessarily have a specific idea of what I want people to take away, but I definitely put a lot of time into thinking about how any random stranger out in the world could interpret my writing. In that sense, being a copywriter has made me a much more conscious and aware (I guess "better") poet than if I were in some other profession.

This feels even more true to me when I think about the connections between putting together a marketing campaign and writing a book, or even an extended project that spans across many individual books. You have to really be aware of how each part interacts with the other, whether it's individual ads in a campaign or poems in a book (whether that book be a more traditional collection of individual poems or something more extended/conceptual).

There's also the fact that corporate and marketing lingo is some of the weirdest, most mind-blowing shit I've ever heard. Total goldmine.

But the biggest difference between copywriting and poetry, for me, is that I often feel restricted when writing copy. I may come up with an idea or a line, but so many people above me will have their feedback that I have to find a way to incorporate, and there's also the whole staying on brand and within the voice aspect as well. And that's cool. But poetry, for me, is in large part about freedom. I really don't have anything to lose or gain career-wise with poetry so I feel generally free to do whatever I want. Of course that feeling winds up compromised by various factors and circumstances, as it must, but I'd like to think that that sense of freedom that I try to start from still remains somehow at the core of my poetry.

Who have you been reading recently?

Joe Massey, Eric Baus, Rodrigo Toscano, Jack Spicer, Frank Stanford, Barbara Guest,

Mathias Svalina, Aase Berg, Zach Schomburg, Harper’s Magazine, Wired Magazine, the most recent issue of the Agricultural Reader.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I've been given such large heaps of bad advice over the years, I'm hesitant to offer any of my own. So maybe my advice should be, “don’t take any advice.” Then again, I've also gotten some good advice that has often helped sustain me: Trust yourself. Don't let anyone or thing stop you. Be willing to change. Persevere. Stuff like that. That’s my advice.

*****

Check out A Million in Prizes and New Issues Poetry & Prose at www.wmich.edu/newissues.

Check out Voir Dire and Rope-a-Dope Press at http://rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com.

Check out Justin Marks at his blog: http://justinanselmarks.blogspot.com/.

*****

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 3:45:07 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3]