E.J. McAdams : part seven

Why is poetry important? 

Everything is important and poetry is part of everything so poetry is something important too, no more or less than anything else, including nothing.

E.J. McAdams : part six

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I am reading THE THREADBARE COAT by Thomas A. Clark and SWEET ON MY LIPS: The Love Poems of Mirabai by Louise Landes Levi.

E.J. McAdams : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Moscow Conceptualism and Charles Reznikoff.  When I was in college most of the poets were English majors, but I was a philosophy major. One of my best friends, the poet Phil Metres, also translated Russian and he introduced me to the Moscow Conceptualist poets, Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinstein.  I was very turned on by this poetry and how little personality there was in it, compared to English and American mainstream contemporary poetry.  (In this way it reminded me of the Japanese haiku poets.)  They gave me hope there might be this different possibility in poetry, a possibility that I couldn’t even find in my MFA program at Columbia University, where I didn’t exactly fit in.  I actually found this other possibility after graduate school on a sign in a NYC subway. It was a Charles Reznikoff poem, “If there is a scheme…”:

If there is a scheme,
perhaps this too is in the scheme,
as when a subway car turns on a switch,
the wheels screeching against the rails,
and the lights go out —
but are on again in a moment.

I read more Reznikoff which led me to the Objectivists like Oppen and Niedecker and then I was off on an alternative path that foregrounded process as much (or more) than product/publication, an off-the-rails path where your lights may go out.

E.J. McAdams : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes and no.  I have always wanted to be a vehicle for a poem – to get E.J. out of the way.  In the beginning that was mostly through intoxicants. Since, I have tried chance operations, procedures, mediation, non-writing, somatics, citations/sampling, GPS, bird song, scientific techniques, prosody, etc.  Some have worked better than others, but the seeking remains.

E.J. McAdams : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t always.  However, I remember a line that I believe poet Tracie Morris shared at a workshop I took at the Poetry Project here in NYC that went something like: the poem is finished when you stop working on it.  I always liked that.  There is no victory, only some kind of surrender that comes at the end.

E.J. McAdams : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

One of the few poetry books in my house growing up was a copy of An Introduction to Haiku by William Higginson that was my Mother’s. It was a small book with a very attractive cover of a woodcut print of ducks floating on hilly waves.  I was taken by the specificity of the images and the connection to the surrounding environment in those three 5-7-5 lines, and the way the poems telescoped (or was it microscoped) seeming to unlock something cosmic.  I tried imitating some of those haiku. 

Then I got serious about poetry in my last year of high school.  I was not a very good composition writer and so my worst class was always English.  Because I was in the low-level English class I was introduced to creative writing while everyone else had to work on their AP tests.  I liked that poetry had no rules and low expectations.

E.J. McAdams : part one

E.J. McAdams is a poet and artist, exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. He has published five chapbooks: '4x4' from unarmed journal press, 'TRANSECTs' from Sona Books, ‘Out of Paradise,’ an e-chapbook from Delete Press, ‘Close-range Divinities’ from Shirt Pocket Press, and most recently, 'Middle Voice’ from Dusie Kollectiv.  UDP published his 4x4 – “BOOM/BOOM/BOOM/BOOM” – in its Poste series. He had a solo exhibition, an installation called Trees Are Alphabets, at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and a mail-art piece in a group show at Phoenix Art Museum. His poems have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Pamenar Online Magazine, The Paris Review, EOAGH, eccolinguistics, About Place Journal, unarmed journal, and others. Recently, a selection of poems were collected in the anthology Poetics for the More-than-Human World. He was chosen by Laura Mullen and Angela Hume for 'Heir Apparent' in The Volta's Trash Issue which featured a visual TRANSECT. Another visual poetry project, ‘Wayfaring,’ was covered by author Robert Sullivan on A Public Space's blog. He curated the Social-Environmental-Aesthetics reading at EXIT ART from 2009-2012 and was a founding board member of the interdisciplinary Laboratory of Art Nature and Dance (iLAND).  

Photo credit: : Stephen DeVita

What are you working on?

It is tentatively called Bird Opera.  If “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Bird Opera is the thing with more feathers.