above/ground press author spotlight #5 : Steph Gray

Poet-filmmaker Steph Gray is the author of eight poetry collections, including the above/ground press titles below, the book Shorthand and Electric Language Stars (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), and chapbook A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction (Argos Books, 2015). Work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, A Perfect Vacuum, The Recluse, Boog City, among others. Gray’s experimental super 8 films and videos have screened internationally, including retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), San Francisco Cinematheque and Mono No Aware (NYC). In Canada, Gray’s work has shown in a retrospective with the 8 Fest (2022, Toronto) and film festivals including Antimatter (Vancouver) and the Inside Out LGBTQ+ Film Fest, among others.

She is the author of three chapbooks with above/ground press: Go Under The Surface (2018), Words Are What You Get / You Do It For Real: poems and prose poems (2019) and Never Saw it Coming: prose poems (2025).

You’ve published three chapbooks so far with above/ground press. How do you see your work progressing between titles? Were these titles deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units, or part of larger, book-length manuscripts? How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?

This is such an interesting series of questions, as now that I think about it, I actually don’t write intentionally for chapbooks or books. I think the poetic machinations of my brain work in individual poems, and later, I see if they all work well for a chapbook or book. I just write when the ideas come to mind, but deep down, I know the poems are connected on a subconscious, serendipitous level – for some magical reason, the poems I often write back to back end up working together, in a subliminal method-of-making-sense e.g. some mysterious inner workings are somehow orchestrating psychically. I often go back to the poems and the groupings in a chapbook and find interconnected themes that I didn’t realize consciously were happening, but they were there. This reminds me of something the poet Jack Spicer said – (forgive me for not remembering perfectly or having the footnote) — to the effect of, that poets should read their own work, like he was kind of hinting at, like, “read your own work” to see how it speaks to you, like really speaks to you, like really reading your work. I seem to recall Spicer might have been lamenting maybe poets don’t read their own work, to read it, like what do you really learn from it, and not for proofreading purposes. Whatever he really meant – this is what I took from it. I know this is a long, winding answer to how I approach my poems and their later groupings in chapbooks and books, but if I could digress a bit here and come back full circle to your questions.

I keep a file on my computer of phrase ideas (and way too many digital “sticky notes”) and overheard phrases and “over-read” phrases, and when a phrase comes back to mind (usually to haunt me to use, yes, the cliché, but really, for real) or the time or head space opens up, then the poems kind of come out. They are always prose poems, and I know many might beg to differ, but I feel prose poems have an obvious internal rhythm, to me and my “ears” for the words on the page. It feels like a wall of sound or an orchestra – (which when you see one on a stage, it looks like many musicians all lined up, but there’s many of them contributing to this one composition) – with subtle musical machinations if you listen close enough, maybe like listening to a Fedders AC if you listen hard enough for too long if you are bored (*slight footnote here to the chapbook I did with Brenda Iijima, I Thought You Said It Was Sound / How Does That Sound). What I mean by this, and maybe only My Bloody Valentine fans might get this or distortion music fans, or cyclical experimental music fans (perhaps Buffalo Daughter – see “Airport Rock”), is it’s a wall of sound akin to, perhaps, MBV’s song “To Here Knows When” – there are subtle variations in the wall of intense sound, or in this case, what many may feel is “just” a wall of words, but there are subtle and not-so-subtle cadences of each line.

As I know you know, rob, given your being with me for 3 chapbooks now, you likely “hear” those subtle repetitions/variations, pushing through line after line. And it’s more than repetition, and I didn’t even know what it was until poet Michael Kelleher (formerly of just buffalo literary center) introduced me for a reading and said there was something called “insistence” (the concept of poetic “insistence” is something Gertrude Stein coined, I believe) different from repetition, where the repetition/insistence was more like calling across a crowded loud room over and over until one is heard, changing the wording ever so slightly to help the listener hear the words, until one or an idea is fully heard.

So how does this all relate to your question? I see these chapbooks as part of these larger processes described above, and it’s almost like each poem or chapbook is an “insistence” of dealing with the everyday epistemology of life, and as such, meaning shows itself in rhetorical questions and throwaway phrases. Each poem, each chapbook and book seem to be getting deeper at this intractable epistemology of life, which can get clichéd and stereotyped in popular culture. If the poems end up working together as a chapbook — (which I find they often do, due to the above subconscious processes that I think are at play — yes, I’m “meta”-analyzing my own analyzing of my work, which can be a little freaky) — then they work together. As far as larger collections go, that is, books, they tend to take shape after a few chapbooks, and I often include them nearly as is, as they usually work together in interconnected ways.

As far as the work progressing between titles, I do see a deeper sense of a continuing concern with the epistemological concerns of existence in life. I was a philosophy and English major, but somehow just doing philosophy didn't cut it for me, with those (I know, I know) stereotypical “what is the meaning of life” kinds of questions that everyone thinks philosophy majors are asking at a desk, staring blankly ahead, pondering whatever. But somehow poetry allowed for the questioning in a way that I liked, but also, an acknowledgment of an almost agnostic, creative element of describing that “epistemology” of the everyday, but in poetics, and moments, and the mini stories that we all do in poems. I think the chapbooks are part and parcel of “the larger work”, which is this continuing questioning, and wall of sound of words that might emulate the subtle variations of chugging along in life, without always knowing the why of everything, but things keep moving along, within the specifics of that, and the prose poems I think are the result of the word processing of that — the “word processing” of life, perhaps.

At the same time, there are limitations to language and perhaps, though, maybe language is limitless. This was the subject of a past talk I gave — e.g. is language limited or limitless? And I think that is a driving force of what I’m doing in poetry. I do feel it’s limitless in some ways, and that keeps me going with these driving prose poems. But I also think it could be limited in some ways, and that adds the tension in life and the attempt of any art trying to represent some of life. One definitely doesn't want to “...reduce the world to words,” which is a quote from one of my poems in our new chapbook. I think somewhere between working with words, but not so much “it’s only words”, drives my continued work in these prose poems — how to strike a balance in poetry between limited or limitless language? That’s the/my eternal question.

I was curious at how these chapbook-length projects might get folded into larger manuscripts, but you make it sound more akin to an accumulation, when you have enough work for a larger collection, including chapbooks. What does that process of moving chapbook-length works into larger manuscripts look like? What’s involved, and how easy or difficult is it?

Well, this is a good follow up question. Not to sound clichéd as in the F****ook way of “it’s complicated,” but I do think it’s a bit complex, and maybe a la U2’s song, “Mysterious Ways,” it is a bit murky with the bigger book/chapbook work. On the one hand, it’s true I do approach work on an individual poem basis. And there is often a running current of a thematic concern that lurks in the underground of the work, that often threads it all together when I'm ready to do a chapbook, and later book.

I do take a look at the work and do think about the ordering and not to be New Age-y or anything, but “listen” to it and “read” the work a la per Jack Spicer in my answer further above and see how they work together. There are usually some poems that do not make the cut, that do truly seem more random, and I set them aside. Sometimes those poems live in individual magazine publications, or they end up having more in common with work later on down the line. Or as we all know, we have orphan poems that just live on their own. I usually do put the work into one document and listen to the beginnings and endings and see how they connect. The thing I was realizing in my other answer above is that there is an electric subcurrent, often, already working in the poems that often amazes me. So, I do work with the ordering and think about what “plane” of movement the reader is left on with each poem, and what plane they should pick up next, so to speak. In our new chapbook, an example of that would be as follows:

Let’s look at the last two poems. The next to last poem is called “It’s a story you can’t tell”, and then the last poem is “We thought it looked like words.” While I wrote those individually, with individual phrases and moments and overheard phrases haunting me so much I had to write something down, I was amazed to go back and see a running current between them. We have a story we can’t tell. So why? Is there a problem with the words? So, then the next poem is, well, we DID think / We “Thought it looked like words”, and that seemed an apt connection to that previous poem, totally purposefully as if I had written the chapbook on purpose with these poems in mind.

And I think there was a hidden force at work here, unbeknownst to me, but connecting it, as that is a psychic thing that I think artists possess, I think. I don’t say this in a silly/make believe way. I do think these things must work purposefully/serendipitously, because that must be how artists’ brains work. There’s something else going on in the subconscious that makes this all work. And it can even surprise us. I always say, I write to find things out, not so much that I have the answer first. And that is often what happens.

I am absolutely not the type to sit down and say: “okay, I’m gonna write a chapbook or book about xyz topic” and it will “be a series” etc. The only time I did was with the “...sound” chapbook noted in the other question above that I did with Brenda at Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, and that was because I was pretty excited about exploring all the different ways of sound with a hearing loss and how sound manifests itself in different ways.

Getting back to your question, while it is an accumulation in a way, of putting together these poems, I do edit out poems, and I often tinker with the first and last lines and make last decisions if I want to keep in “inspo” quotes or leave them out as hidden architecture.

When I get to putting past work from chapbooks into a larger mss, I find that I’ll look to see: “was there a psychic hidden electric current” working thorough these poems? And I swear, there most usually is. I find that I have more and more edited out my non-prose poem works and/or there may be a random poem that just fits less — that does happen. I’ll usually print out the work, and sit down with it and see – where is that electric current going? And more often than not, it’s there, and I often have not realized it, but when I go back and read my work as Spicer says to, I can’t believe what can work almost freakily, if one is an artist. And I think that’s part of being an artist. These crazy connections, or rather, “making sense” connections happen on a subconscious level that it’s a little scary even sometimes.

If I didn’t have these electric currents, or hidden architecture as I call it, it would be much more difficult to put together chapbooks and books. Another example in our new chapbook is for whatever reason, though I know some of the reason, the idea of “words” holding meaning came out a lot in this chapbook. That must have preoccupied my subconscious these past few years. So putting together the bigger book from the chapbooks is looking for those threads, and when they are ready for the needle, and that’s what determines the order.

If we look at another sequence in the current chapbook, we’ll see another example of this — we start with a poem of how they “rotate their vowels,” which of course, is a very core component of language in some way, and then we get to the next poem, wondering if it’s cruel to “reduce the world to words.” We pick up where the rotating vowels left off, and in my mind, it makes sense. Then the next poem wonders about “Knowning the Unknown.” Words and meaning make knowledge, and that's how we get to “Known the Unknown” which, as you know, rob, was written for Brenda Iijima, who I feel has both excavated deeper meaning in her work, and pushed me to reveal the unknown in mine. Even though these poems were written in different times, it makes sense, as words make meaning, even if we shouldn’t “reduce the world” to them. Then we hit the poem that is the title, “Never Saw it Coming,” which makes the perfect segue to me after how we think we can know the unknown, but may fail, and thus, we never see “it” / “something” coming. And it goes on. After we “never saw it coming” then our “thoughts fall into a sieve of what was,” the next poem. Haven’t we all done that? We go back and say to ourselves “how could I not see that coming?”, and then our thoughts go on and on about this, probably not so helpful, and that’s how they slide into the sieve.

This process above is what’s involved in putting the chapbooks and later books, together. I do go through each poem and look for the current. The chapbooks wouldn’t have been made if there wasn’t enough of a running current. Since these “running currents” often transcend and run across chapbooks, the process then continues with making a larger book. Some poems make the cut, some are shed, as they may connect to a different current in another period of time. In any instance, I do find it a bit destabilizing that these currents work like they do, but I do feel strongly (without being hokey about it) that is part of the psychic mysterious ways, I think, that many artists work — you can’t change it — that’s part and parcel of what makes this work — those magic connecting currents of poems, chapbooks and books.

Jack Spicer appears to be an important poet for your thinking. He’s important for my own as well, although my interest focused on the approach of his language, whereas you appear to focus on his insistence of being open, what he referred to as the broadcasts from the Martians. What is it you feel you learned best through Jack Spicer’s work? Do you see the composition of writing as something that comes from the outside (or even from the inside, the unconscious) that you simply need to be open to receive?

I have read selected work by Spicer — and like Warhol, it seems there’s always something he wrote that I’m still learning about, that I never knew! I didn’t know that part about the Martians/broadcasts, but it makes total sense! I am a bit more familiar with his ideas on language, but I must have read adjacent work to the “broadcasts” ideas in other short works of his, because I get that feeling from his work.

He also must have had electric currents running through his prose work, with similar ideas, because now that I think about it, there's something to be said for the idea of “receiving” ideas that come to you as a poet. I can’t quite write that the way I want — it’s more than the clichéd “just be open to ideas” in the way that is sometimes made fun of. This is a serious thing that artists do, and it’s integral to being a poet. I think it must be akin to the (I know clichéd) idea that “lucky” is really the result of work — you are finally in the right place at the right time, but you actually put yourself there with your work or questioning before your “lucky” break. Being “open” to ideas might be like if you are constantly living your life as an artist, being surrounded by your notebooks, your collected quotes, your jotted down overhearings, then that openness may eventually come from all that “preparation”, perhaps.

Spicer saying, to read your work/be open to ideas/broadcasts from the Martians idea, reminds me of the process of keeping a file of poetic ideas (I learned this in a workshop with KPrevallet at the Poetry Project, where she discussed Olson’s work process — keep your ideas in a file and then when you need ideas or are ready to write, sit down with the file and pull ideas out and work with them) — and then you are able to receive those “subconscious” or “from the Martians” ideas that much more. It’s hard to explain, but maybe not — maybe it’s like how in photography/filmmaking, we always talk about how it’s more about “seeing” (that I think the filmmaker Stan Brakhage said) — a “way of seeing” more than the technique or putting the words on the page. I’m sure I’m paraphrasing or echoing something other artists have said — as long as you can get the eye for the “composition”, you can learn the techniques or get the final “technicals” done as a technicality (no pun or yes pun intended). I think this is related to Spicer’s ideas of openness and receiving those broadcasts. You will receive them if you are in the midst of your own internal broadcasts and surrounding yourself with questioning, e.g. like how city photographers talk about it’s more about taking continued walks around the city, day after day, and then the composition, the situations, the little things start to speak to you. You take more time walking around to receive those pictures, being open to them, getting those broadcasts. It’s like how effective documentary filmmakers will live with their subjects sometimes for years, before they even pick up a camera. That’s being in the “deep” of it so that you can be open to those broadcasts — that’s like the “reading” of one’s own work analogy that Spicer talks about. In the above documentary process example, you are reading the situation before you film, or in poetry’s case, you continue to read your own work, to see how it speaks to you before you move on to the next step.

I agree and see that much of what I’ve said above lines up with these ideas of Spicer’s and offshoots of them, and the composition of writing coming from both the outside and in. With the mix of overheard and “over-read” phrases and my continued questioning, it’s both outside and in, and it does come from a continued probing voice that is both knocking on the door outside, but tinkering with the door on the inside. To me, that’s a kind of poetry — engaging with the outer and inner worlds — if it’s only outer or only inner, I think it would be missing something. I do think part of my poetry process is yes, I do need to be open to receive, and it is part from the subconscious and outer and inner worlds, given a lot of the city comes into my writing, as well as colloquial phrases that seem like they are not saying a lot, but say a lot in that unsayness.

I think Spicer (in what I now realize is just a fraction of his output), taught me to be open, read my own work, but also, how to push up against or question the limitations of language. I found the quote that was inspiration for the talk I described in the question above — my talk was called “Still Stuck with Words” and Spicer’s quote was: “[we are] still stuck with language, still stuck with words, still stuck with what you know...” — maybe this is some of the language part that inspired you from Spicer? I ended up writing a whole talk being inspired by it. His line goes just as deep as any deconstructionist or literary theorist, and it's the word “stuck” that really stuck out to me (yes or no pun intended). He seems to suggest that words have their limitations, regardless of what we think we can do with them. This line seems to suggest either a distinction or commonality with what we “know” and what the “words” are. This reminds me of a line in a poem I wrote about growing up working class, and how when I moved away from a small town to a bigger city, how I read in books that my area was one of the poorest in the country with high poverty rates, and I didn’t know (I think kids are shielded with the wording of these kinds of things). I had this line to the effect of “I know what I know, and sure that I know,” but the “books say it knows more than me”, after reading about my area in a book with poverty rates. And we did not call it rate. We called it having little money or maybe not having enough money, but not a rate. And so this idea that books can know more than you, it kind of seems maybe Spicer is pushing up against that, we still are stuck with what WE know. We know what we know, and language as seen here in my example, shows how this language is limited.

Also on this note, Craig Dworkin and Kathleen Fraser both have books on tangents of this idea — Translating the Unspeakable by Fraser and Reading the Illegible by Dworkin — and I find that my work is likely consumed with those phrases. I keep those two books side by side on a shelf alongside Danielle Collobert’s It Then and Leslie Scalapino’s How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, as daily inspiration for how might I frame a composition of living in prose poetics, when so much of the how and why is shrouded in a kind of mystery. How do we translate what is utterly unspeakable if it's so engrained in living life? How do we read what is illegible because it’s “known”? Ironically, and freakily, there is a lot to say within that, and I feel I will never be done excavating it — it always continues to surprise me.

I’m fascinated by artists who work so heavily in two distinct genres. What is the relationship, the interplay, between your film work and your poems? Are they related at all? Do you see your film work as completely distinct from your writing, or separate aspects of a singular, particular way of thinking and responding?

Yes, I think my super 8 experimental films and language-esque prose poetry have interplay. They are related, particularly more recently. I have a film called “What you Thought You Know/What You Knew You Thought” focusing on mysterious compositional framed moments in the city. Both my films and prose poems work to find what’s hidden but is visible in front of us. The analogy is walking by something so many times and then seeing something that has always been there. Was it selective inattention that led you to not see it? Why? What happens in the “not seeing” of “seeing”? I’m very interested in that. I have a poem that starts with a quote: “Inattention blindness: instances when we don’t see something because it is not what we are expecting to see.” What happens in those moments? That’s often what I tackle in films and poems. The first line of the above poem is: “I have trained myself to notice what I see. Light in the dark. To see the whole picture. Did you get the big picture? Everybody missed it.” This is precisely what I’m trying to tackle in my films and poems — how do we “see” the “whole” picture when we often miss it? What’s in those moments?

I don’t think my film work is separate from my writing in terms of the approach. I do films and poems singularly often investigating the same issues, subconsciously. They are both similar particular ways of thinking and responding in questioning everyday life’s mysteries and the foreignness of overfamiliarity — e.g. you see something so often it can look foreign and why does that happen?

The interplay between the film and poetry is such that both have a similar composition, a way of seeing what is not seen. Much of my city filmmaking is obscure streets and corners or major ones, in the middle of hubbub with quiet details. What is the subconscious process running through that? In my films it may be a slow pan, single frame shooting, and/or slow motion of part of signage of a bakery. With a poem it may be repetition, insistence, recurring imagery and questioning. Both the poem and film are a “way of seeing.”

I’m curious about your explorations through ways of seeing, as you suggest, given the fact that you also live with hearing loss. Is this something you are conscious of while approaching your work? I don’t get the sense you examine any of this directly, but might living with limited hearing impact your choices, even the mere fact of working two such visual mediums?

I have addressed sound and hearing, albeit subtly, a bit here and there in my work but less obviously, probably, and maybe most obviously with Brenda’s chapbook she did with me about sound that I referred to in the other question, though I might not have ever said “I have a hearing loss” with capital letters. Though it’s an undercurrent — sort of like if you drive down a country road in the middle of nowhere and bits of a song come on (usually A.M. radio, for some reason) going in and out and you follow it with the static breaks. What is that muscle memory of the song in the blank breaks? That’s kind of an analogy of part of what I’m working towards. I remember this as a kid, driving on a country road, and you start to go out of range from your hometown radio station, and it's so ominous how the song starts to sputter, but you keep singing along with it. E.g. here’s a well-known Men at Work song: “Ghosts ... fade ... / Come ... another ... day...”). I remember “Overkill” sputtering in and out and thought it interesting that certain words held and others didn’t and maybe even thought of it as poetry at that time.

I think my way of hearing is actually a way of seeing, as my films are usually poetic city symphonic works that are edited in camera on super 8, sort of like musical improvisation. I will film signage, words, people at a distance, reflections, and/or structures that hint at a type of existence. My camera will pan to one sign, and then I will look for something that connects to it, often single framing back and forth out of context wording, e.g. I have a film where I was focusing on the last days of an old- school Jewish bakery called Gertel’s. And it had old fashioned neon signage. And then next door was a Chinatown shop called Galore Tile. And I went back and forth with the signage, Gertel’s Galore, lore, ore. Soon the shop would be lore, and it was well loved, so it was kind of like a gold ore, something valuable to the community. So, it’s kind of an associational/improvisational/ experimental approach with an overlap of how I work with words in both film and poetry. In my films, there is often no sound, and it’s more visual (super 8 has no sound anyway). If I show the film publicly later on, it’s silent or with a poetic voiceover or experimental sounds.

I’m very curious about how we create meaning through secondary phrases, e.g. what we might call “filler” phrases or slang / rhetorical phrases that are expected to communicate large ideas in these throwaway phrases — and how loaded they can be. It’s kind of a thing that many in the hearing loss community who hear but rely on lip reading for clarity, can read lips and “get” all the very common phrases easily, e.g. “Well” or “But why...” or “We have here today” etc., and it’s the proper names that are the harder items to get. At the same time, so much of how we speak is loaded with “loaded” phrases that can seem very ephemeral like “You didn’t really get anything I said” or “did you get it?” or “we have no idea what’s going on” or “it’s over” etc. And I’m so intrigued by how very philosophical underpinnings go in these loaded phrases. That will come out in both my films sometimes with finding signage like “they’re going fast” out of context for say, a product, but you only see that part on the screen, and then I might pan to something super slow or film something in slow motion. I like to find the ephemeral phrases that can haunt our everyday existence and hint at clichéd questions but without cliches e.g. indeed, what is the meaning of life.

Regarding filler phrases, for example, while this is an older film I did, I had a film-video called “close yr hearing for the cap(shuns)” — the title is a play on the announcements in the 80s before TV shows that said “this show is closed captioned for the hearing impaired.” And I never knew what that was all about. I didn’t know it was connected to me and something I could have used. I only knew I had a hearing “problem”, but it was never stated to me it was “impaired.” And I may have had less informed adults around me that knew less about how to activate those captions. I don’t even know, maybe there was a special box like a cable box to get the captions? To this day, I don’t really know, and later when I found out, I was dumbfounded, as I realized maybe I could’ve had captions, but we just didn’t have the info. But anyway, in that film, I had a sequence where a speaker is trying to show me, the camera person, that “it’s a piece of cake” to operate a fax machine. And it being an experimental film, I repeated that sequence over and over both on film in separate takes, and then on replicated edits to show the inanity of the phrase. I showed me, the speaker/filmmaker saying on text on screen: “what cake/where’s my cake?” before it was finally realized that it was the colloquial phrase “it’s a piece of cake.” The repetition of that over and over becomes almost a type of poetry in that video/film.

I think a lot of what my films and poetry show are a lot of “over-seeing” instead of “over-hearing.” I used to be able to overhear conversations at diners, etc. and behind me, but now I have to see people’s faces and read their lips to “get it.” I hear the sounds behind me, etc., but need to lips to understand. In that sense, given that popular phrases or colloquial phrases that I mention above, e.g. “you didn’t miss anything” are extra represented in my poems as almost isolated out of context, as often those are the first phrases I “get.” I often have to ask follow-up questions for the specifics. So, these filler phrases kind of become, sometimes, a collaged (but also mixed in with my writing) quilt of a poem or film. A film I made called “You know they want to disappear Hell’s Kitchen as Clinton” plays with a lot of signage in that Manhattan, NY neighborhood that they almost become one stringed line after the next, e.g., "The algorithm killed / me perfection is debatable / vent special" But the composition of those words was created by cutting off parts. E.G. “Some” was “me”; “event” was “vent” and I cut off “Jeeves” after “The algorithm killed” to create lines of found city signage poetry.

I think doing this — and it is heavily on sight, so maybe that is related to hearing (though I do have a lot of earlier and recent experimental sound work I’ve done in the same collaged sound mix way) — is a way to try to pry mysteries and their solutions out of the everyday detritus of life. In the fragments of life around us, we can find bits and pieces of the mysteries that I’m after that may hold the lock and key to some kind of epistemological meaning, or in other words, “what does it all mean”?

Here, I’m reminded of an album cover that seems to hold the sentiment of this feeling — Yo La Tengo’s “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out”: https://matadorrecords.com/products/and-then-nothing-turned-itself-inside-out. What I love about this album cover picture is ¾ of the page is of what we more or less think of a certain kind of normalcy, e.g. the houses, the what seem like tidy lawns, but close up, one of them has a cooler and kid's bike on it, kind of strewn on the lawn, and extra vehicles kind of haphazardly parked across the grass, but there is a friendly nature-esque flag, and waaay in the corner of the picture, so that you almost miss it, someone, likely a working adult in some shape or fashion, with what looks like a 6-pack of beer in a tightly tied plastic bag, who is nearing the end of day or arriving home and looking up at something mysterious or there is a spotlight on this person. It reminds me of the E.T. scene when that extraterrestrial is landing in what seems like a “normal” neighborhood. What is it? Do we have time to notice “it” in our busy days of trying to survive, sometimes with a beer? This picture seems to really say it all: in our everyday lives, what are the mysteries we still don’t understand but we may not always get to, due to the busyness of everyday life? Even though we don’t see all of that literally in the picture, you get the sense the houses are filled with busy people trying to make a living, maybe due to he modest nature of the houses. And the person, there’s something about the large t-shirt and casual dress and posture that also does something here. Figuring out these every day mysteries — that’s a pull point I think in my films and writing, and yes, I often tackle it more with what is “seen” though distorted sound, which at times, does come into play in some films.

This might seem a dual or even convoluted question, but I’m as curious about your use of the specific medium of Super 8 (as opposed to video, say), as well as your interest in the prose poem, two threads that have endured across your work for some time. How did you get to the place where each of these are such standards for your ongoing work? What do each of these allow that working with video, or a more open poetic form, might not?

I’m going to share a bit of background on something and then explain a bit more about my connection to it, so bear with me for a moment. This idea of “film” vs. “video” can be a debatable topic in the moving image community, and I do remember when learning from elder moving image makers than when video first came out after film, e.g. more in the consumer and artistic realm, that video makers were not taken as seriously as filmmakers. Then around the mid-late 90s into the 2000s, when video started to get more accessible, e.g. no longer did you have to reserve a big mechanical deck-to-deck editing suite to edit your video — now you could do what was then called “nonlinear video editing” (instead of “analog” video editing) which now, for the most part is just “editing” — that is, editing on a computer instead of a big analog set up of tape-to-tape editing, or for film, when more editing took place on a Steenbeck or Moviola editing machines, e.g. reel-to-reel. What I’m trying to get at is I do think film looks different than video. And nowadays people use the terms film and video so interchangeably or “clip”, that unless you are a celluloid filmmaker, there is not as much thought to those terms as there was in the 90s, when film more often meant “film” and video meant “video” and computer files/computer editing meant “digital” or “computer”. It was all very separate for a certain time, e.g. the film geeks, the video geeks and the computer/digital geeks. I know more and more high-quality video has more “depth”, which is the main issue I think that celluloid filmmakers see as different than video. I do think video looks more “shallow” and less color saturated, though I don’t really shoot video, e.g. high def video. But I like the homemade look, the filmic look and the ability to process one’s own film, with super 8.

I do think that since I often deal with memory, meaning, and at times, non-clichéd ways to look at nostalgia, that super 8 is apt for that, as when we see “old home movies” online or on tv or movies, often what is shown is an old super 8 or 8mm film, with somewhat fast movement and often a big space between heads of people sitting at a table’s birthday party and the ceiling. Or people think of the Zapruder film and the bright pink or red colors. That’s usually Kodachrome they are thinking of, whether “super 8” (a bit bigger) or “regular 8mm.”

Something about super 8 feels more personal and artistic. With the right camera, you can do very close focusing, and you can do slo-mo, single frame and still get very vibrant colors with Ektachrome now that Kodachrome has been discontinued for some years. Super 8 is also portable. And I feel it has a depth of field that just isn’t in standard video. I will at times use video (that is, found footage usually, of old vhs tapes that have glitches or deteriorated tracking) to do a poetic or experimental take on something in found video footage that haunts me.

The super 8 format seems most conducive for finding or probing into mysteries of the city or other situations, e.g. because the look already calls to mind a kind of “memory” time capsule, it feels like it works the best for say, filming parts of the city that mystify me. That look of super 8 already adds to the feel I’m trying to do. Very rarely, I might film obscured shots of people for creative purposes like when I did some films about teenage angst and Metallica, and handwritten bubbly handwriting that called to mind 8th grade, but that’s not very often. I also shoot off the tv screen of glitched out videos where I’ve messed around with an analog tv’s dials for vertical lines, tracking and the “snowy screen” look of old tvs. This is all to probe what is hidden under surfaces, and those effects serve it.

The super 8 form seems to serve the getting to the bottom of the meaning of something the most.

As for the prose poem, and I know this is not a popular opinion or something that possibly many might not see the same way — and I know it may sound really odd, but the prose poem seems more lyrical to me. That goes hand in hand with super 8, which also feels lyrical, especially if you shoot “edited in camera” which means you shoot film purposefully for those 3.25 minutes of a roll of super 8, at the standard 18 frames per second. In other words, you are planning and shooting each shot in order. Now to professional filmmakers working in 35mm or even 16mm and in fields like documentary, that (editing in camera as THE order of your film, as you shoot) might feel like a ridiculous idea. But if you work with a kind of artistic associational process (I don’t really like the phrase “stream-of-consciousness”, as it feels more fly by night than I think I work, though I am adjacent to it improvisational creative way on purpose) as I do with both the prose poem and super 8 filmmaking, then it all makes sense to use these two creative fields.

I like making art that has a fluid questioning feel to it. And super 8 can do that, especially if you maximize the special effects like single frame, slow motion, and if the camera has double exposure (I haven’t found the holy grail Fuji camera that does that yet). The handheld look of super 8, while kind of bothersome to some (especially if it's TOO shaky), can give that personal fluid feeling.

And getting back to what I kind of perceive to be the unpopularity, at times, of the prose poem, I (ironically? weirdly?) think that the standard poetry line breaks often break up the flow of a/the poem. I know that sounds strange, as many feel the line breaks do something with the rhythm, but I feel the rhythm is kept in the long lines. I like the sound of a breathlessness of a chain of thought, like when we are thinking on “autopilot” when we are walking to work or school, or doing an errand or commuting, and you are thinking but not thinking that you are thinking, you know? Kind of like that 70s song “Take the Long Way Home,” and I only knew that song as a kid, and didn’t know the words, but they seem like the kind of words that are sort of those autopilot words on “the long way home.” So, to me, the prose poem seems to emulate that most, as I’m concerned with the thought process OF thinking as thinking, and finding epistemological answers, but in non-dense and non- UNaccessable ways. On the other hand, I’m not going into a film or prose poem, thinking directly, “let me write something that gets at the meaning of life and make it make more sense than a philosophical treatise.” For whatever reason, that is what my creative process-making had gravitated towards — and in a meta-thinking moment here, I agree with this! (haha)

I think that after reading my work, again, a la per Spicer, I’ve come to find these above-mentioned themes, and I think I was doing them for years before I really understood what I was doing. And then I realized, yes, I’m often wondering or thinking about these things myself, curiously just in general, which is still the philosophy major part of me. I think, and this is going to sound silly maybe, that stanzas in poetry, whether formed or free form, just sound too staccato to me. The prose poem feels more fluid. I know a common complaint about the prose poem format IS that people feel they can’t hear/see a rhythm or it’s hard to read. And I should know, as I’m a writer, right, and have taught writing, so like, I should know unbroken lines could be hard to read, right? (I’m kind of echoing some of the criticism I’ve gotten with prose poetry over the years on purpose here). But I beg to differ and ask readers to listen to the flow of the lines. Now of course not all lines may have this flow I’m talking about. And that’s what makes it prose poetry. I do think about the subtle repetitions and cadence and weight of each line, to put you in a thought-swirl moment and end on a plane of thinking or questioning. And then, with super 8, it being edited in camera, I think I’m going for the same/similar thing. I want to edit something in camera that is musical/rhythmic with the movement. I do see it in a family of/or offshoot of the idea of jazz improvisation, and that’s kind of what I’m doing with shooting on the spot with what I see in the city, but often that is the result of many walks of what I’ve seen over and over. And with the prose poem, it’s the result of things I’ve read over and over or collected phrases I keep in my sticky notes on my computer or screen shot file and then I go back and see what themes jump out to me.

So these two forms of art making – super 8 and prose poetry, I feel go together in this way of fluid storytelling that often dips into memory, some stream of consciousness (though I still feel that’s an imperfect phrase/descriptor), some improvisational rhythmic associational moving or writing making, to peel back layers of memory, nostalgia (for good or bad) and meaning making to get to the bottom of, sort of, or more or less: what is our everyday meaning in daily life?