Michael Sikkema : part five

What are you working on?

Right now I have two projects going, in very different stages. The first called Music Before We Were Bodies, and is a personal, almost confessional exploration of my experience as a stutterer and how that has affected my approach to writing. A little sliver of prose from that project can be found here: http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2020/03/on-writing-170-michael-sikkema.html

This project is hybrid, includes verse and prose and is proving very difficult to write. Trauma is at the heart of it and it gets written in fits and starts and then sat aside for a while. While it’s certainly not individual standalone pieces, I don’t know yet if it’s a chapbook or a book length project, or more like a hybrid essay. I’m going to play along and see where it takes me. To be honest, it might not go anywhere.

The other project is also hybrid and plays with elements of video games, interactive storytelling, choose your own adventure books, police procedural stuff, horror tropes, and sci fi elements. It’s called Choose Your Fighter, and it actually lets you do that. It’s much further along than Music Before We Were Bodies, but is still in a seedling stage. I have a lot of notes and ideas, and some first threads written out. I’m designing the project so it’s clear what I will be writing next and that feels good. It’s still exploratory but has direction. I will have a brand new baby in about three weeks, so writing time will disappear somewhat.  Writing it in threads and understanding that it’s a long term project, and can be done episodes at a time makes it less overwhelming.

The manuscript allows a reader to choose a POV and to shift between them. I guess if it were a film, it’d fit into the psychotronic category, and I’d like for the end result to feel like reading is game playing, with an emphasis on play.

This one might not turn out how I have planned, but I’m confident it will turn into something.

Michael Sikkema : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I’ve moved from thinking that poetry was something made by already famous people, tucked in books, and stuck in a library or classroom to thinking that poetry is a way of being in the world, characterized by transformation, improvisation, and collaboration. This shift was a process of unschooling, of refusing to think of a poem as a riddle to be solved, or a little didactic lesson to be learned. It was also a process of moving away from received forms and expectations and taking a more exploratory route. While I still respect haiku and sonnets and traditional forms, at some point it became obvious that they were just a little bit of a vast ecosystem and you could make poetry by the yard without ever having to consider them. I became very suspicious of popular book blurb ideas of “mastery,” and a poet being “at the height of their powers.” The term exerimentation is overused and overdetermined, but taken at its most basic definition, it means the poet can keep trying new approaches, can evolve, can keep attending to new voices, and exploring. I began to suspect that a small circle of friends who more or less got what you were up to was more important than having grad students write essays about the “School” you were in. I shifted from setting goals to get into Big Important Magazine to supporting and interacting with the small press world. I realized that promoting and publishing and creating venues for others to perform was just as important as writing and getting my work published. I also realized that writing/making in and of itself was a reward and had amazing mental health benefits,so doing a fair amount of work that you don’t even consider sending out or sharing is important and necessary.

Michael Sikkema : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Since writing is all wrapped up with music and performance and image making for me, my list looks like this:

Kenneth Pacthen, Gary Barwin, Roger Miller, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Harryette Mullen, Will Alexander, Fanny Howe, Brenda Hillman, bp nichol, Pablo Neruda, Inger Christenson, C.D. Wright, Russell Edsen, Celia Vicuna, d.a. levy, Michael Basinski, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Richard Brautigan, Ruth Krauss, Lucinda Sherlock, John Prine, Tom Waits, Dogon, Gertrude Stein, A Tribe Called Quest, Tom T. Hall, ee cummings, Slick Rick, Scott Snyder, Warren Ellis, Emo Philips, Stephen Wright, the Muppets, especially Gonzo. 

Michael Sikkema : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

I think music and sound are pretty much central to my poetry. I often think of music and poetry as synonymous. Lyrics are poetry, and classical music gives us tone poems, and when poetry is performed well, the music lives right inside the words, rather than needing external accompaniment. I read all of my work outloud, score it for performance, think about the difference between how it works on the page vs how it plays on the stage, and will have different versions for different purposes. Listening to jazz, bluegrass, metal, and noise music has shaped my thinking about poetry vs the individual poem that I mentioned last time too. I love the way that musicians can choose destination out, can explore and interrogate certain themes. While I’m not a huge fan of self-indulgent jam bands who forget that they’re interacting with other people, I’m deeply influenced by musicians who will stretch a song so everyone can solo, and will blend voices so they’re truly collaborating, and will improvise, and see how far the edges can be pushed before they break. I wish more people in the poetry community thought more like musicians.

Michael Sikkema : part one

Michael Sikkema is the author of 6 full length books, and over a dozen chapbooks, most recently Caw Caw Phony, forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press, 2021, and Here On Huron, from Above / Ground Press. He edits Shirt Pocket, a chapbook press, and lives in Grand Rapids, MI.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I chose to answer this one first because it touches on some core ideas of my poetics and practice. I value poetry over the poem. Not thinking about the singular poem, but thinking about poetry is a great way for me to generate a lot of writing and get better thinking done. I don’t sit down and try to write a poem, with clear beginning, middle, and end, etc. I sit down and try to write some poetry and then later I’ll figure out where edges or borders or connections are. I try to wait a while and turn into the reader of my own work, trying to figure out what the poem is teaching me. I can then see how things are supposed to go together and maybe what’s missing. As far as when a project is done, it’s usually when I stop obsessing over it, or coming up with new ideas for it while doing something else. I think ‘finished’ is wholly subjective. People get a piece published, hate how it looks in print, and then rework it. I can usually tell when I’m done with a piece because I’m not interested in it anymore. I want it to leave the house and go off on its own adventures.