Travis Sharp : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Athena Farrokhzad, White Blight.
Julia Madsen, The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland.
Shira Dentz, how do i net thee.
Timothy Yu, 100 Chinese Silences.
Muriel Rukeyser, US 1.
Ronaldo Wilson, Farther Traveler.
M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.
Ed Roberson, City Eclogue.
Jill Magi, Threads.
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All.
Rachel Zolf, Neighbor Procedure.
Dale Smith, Sons.
Jessica Bozek, The Tales.
Julie Carr, Real Life: An Installation.
Steven Zultanski, Agony.
Cassandra Troyan, Kill Manual.

My undergraduates and I this semester are reading many selections. Eileen Myles. Martín Espada. Morgan Parker. CAConrad. Mary Oliver. Eve Ewing. Sharon Olds. Danez Smith. Sylvia Plath. H.D. Patricia Smith. Tracie Morris. William Shakespeare. Harryette Mullen. Alice Notley. Nicole Sealey. Randall Mann. Lorine Niedecker. Stephen Crane. David Ignatow. Gertrude Stein. Yedda Morrison. Douglas Kearney. Nikki Wallschlaeger. Guillaume Apollinaire. W. H. Auden. Phyllis Wheatley. Kate Durbin. Amaranth Borsuk. Claudia Rankine.
 

Travis Sharp : part four

What are you working on?

I recently finished a manuscript, Monoculture, poems on, in, of monocultures, the plant and the animal and the violent human kinds. The plant and the animal kinds are also human kinds, because only the depredation made possible by the human could fathom a monoculture.

I’ve begun writing poems about money. How money speaks, how we are hailed by money, the cuteness of its little coins, its neutral cruelty, its creepy lack of materiality. Money is nowhere, and yet.

I’ve been working on essays: on the rejection of industrial literature in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women; on Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall and the prevalent but incorrect alignment of a history of progress with liberation; on the avant-garde as a capitalist project that contributes to environmental devastation.
  

Travis Sharp : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When you stop reading or writing, a poem is finished. A finished poem might be finished like wood is finished or finished like a death is a finishing. When I stop reading, stop writing, stand up, get some coffee, look out the window, pet the cat, check my phone, send an email, the poem is finished.

Travis Sharp : part two

How does a poem begin?

Torn between idealism and materialism, I can’t decide if it begins in the mind, conceptual image, or if it begins in the placement of a mark onto a substrate, the drawing of a letter onto a surface. I’ll say that it is somehow, impossibly yet actually, both.

Travis Sharp : part one

Travis Sharp is the author of the chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press, 2018) and the artist’s book one plus one is two ones (Recreational Resources, 2018). He's an editor and designer at Essay Press, a teaching artist at the Just Buffalo Literary Center, and a PhD student in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program.

Why is poetry important?

Poetry, which is not escapism, can distance and make strange the real so that you can actually for the first time see it. Not all poetry does this, but it can do this, and that is why it is important.