Jim Daniels’ fourteenth book of poems, Birth Marks, was published by BOA Editions in 2013 and was selected as a Michigan Notable Book, winner of the Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award, and received the Gold Medal in Poetry in the Independent Publishers Book Awards. His fifth book of short fiction, Eight Mile High, was published by Michigan State University Press in 2014. A native of Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Charlee Brodsky, a fine art documentary photographer and a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University, describes her work as dealing with social issues and beauty. In 2012 she was honored to be Pittsburgh’s Artist of the Year chosen by Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. A selection of her awards includes the Tillie Olsen Award with writer Jim Daniels for their book, Street; an Emmy with the film team that created the documentary, Stephanie, which is based on her friend’s life with breast cancer; the Pearl of Hope award given by Sojourner House for her work with her students in the Pittsburgh community; and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships. She continues her documentary projects but also has a body of work that uses her little white dog, Max, to voice words by great thinkers. This work is a series of artist books and prints and can be viewed here. ---------
Jim Daniels Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
Thank you so much for sending in these poems and photographs. I’m interested in the message you included when you sent these poems in to the Poetry Column: “The photographer Charlee Brodsky and I have collaborated on two books of her photos and my poems, Street, and From Milltown to Malltown. These are poems and photos from our latest project together, Trace. These photographs were made in a large abandoned industrial site that sits next to railroad tracks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Every photograph contains a shard of something left by someone. We all return to earth—that’s part of the deal. But we leave traces behind—also, part of the deal—traces that are then swallowed up by the carrying on of the world, despite our futile attempts at creating permanence. Also, part of the deal. The traces are clues to lived lives, and maybe we are the detectives, or the archeologists of the heart, trying to decipher these incomplete stories, or maybe we are simply telling our own stories through what we observe and how we observe it. We offer up these shards.” It seems to me that, a lot of the time, when people talk about creating permanence, leaving something behind, people are talking about their individualized, singular mark on the world. But I realize, especially as I think of your project, a lot of what we leave behind (or maybe all of it) is collaborative. Even our children – our bloodline, perhaps the most basic of all things living beings leave behind – are collaborative in a sense. My question is, how do you think of, or how do you contextualize, leaving behind something that is collaborative? Is that, in a way, leaving behind something that is more you or less you? Does it matter whether what is left behind, or what remains, is you at all?
Great question. I guess I try not to think about this too much in the process, but I do believe that this specific project is very elemental and comes down to life and death. I couldn’t believe how much God was showing up in the poems—I’m not a believer myself, but think about it a lot. This notion of what we leave behind, the futility of trying to leave anything behind, really struck me in looking at these traces, these modern ruins. I didn’t really give a lot of thought to the collaborate aspect in terms of leaving things behind, but I guess like the project in general, we are each individually leaving something behind, as well as jointly. We make a new third thing with each collaboration—something we share.
I’m thinking about your poem “Quarter Moon” when I ask, is everything connotation? And I don’t mean that in some kind of Derrida, lit-theory kind of way. I mean something more along the lines of, is everything in a sense something that we use to meditate, something to which we attach a feeling, reminder, or reaction? If so, do you use that to affect for the better (or worse) the way you interact with the world? Do you try to attach meanings that work in your favor in some way (for instance, that elicit a positive reaction from yourself)? Or do you think there’s more truth, or other value, in attempting to strip away the connotations we attach to things and see them for what they are in form, their denotation? Or do you simply observe and write about the process?
I answered all the other questions first. This is the hard one. I do think I agree with you on this, that everything is connotation. I think one challenge in this collaboration is that on the one hand, I don’t want to simply describe in words the photo that already exists, but on the other, I don’t want it to be like an ink-blot test so that the response just seems arbitrary and distanced from readers. In a lot of my other writing, I’m very literal, so this work smudges the lines a bit in an interesting way (at least for me). I don’t think I consciously try to attach meanings that work in my favor, but I do try to recognize meanings after the fact (in revisions) and bring them out more, try to make them more accessible. I don’t know about the truth and value issue, but I do feel that the connotations these photos spur for me are not the usual, predictable connotations, and that gives them value for me in terms of surprise, discovery. I feel that these poems are much more about process than the more narrative poems I often write.
It’s interesting that you mention “Quarter Moon.” I’m involved in this crazy project that is going to send poems to the moon (in 2016, if it all works out)—but that’s another story….Anyway, looking back on that poem, I’m wondering if the moon was on my mind because of the moon arts project.
What is the story of you sending poems to the moon? How did that come about, how did you get involved, and what does it mean to you? I think it's interesting that we were talking about preserving self and work through time, and now we're talking about sending/preserving them through space!
Here's the website for the moonarts project, though it's out of date—for example, the date's been pushed back to 2016, and I'm not listed as being involved—but it gives you some idea. I got involved because they want to represent the various arts and wanted some poetry. Poetry about the moon to send to the moon. It sounded like such a crazy idea, I couldn't resist. Everything's in process right now. A lot of the stuff is mind-blowing and I don't understand all the science, but my job was to find moon poems. Right now, I have it narrowed down to 185 pages of moon poems, though it's not all finalized. I ended up writing a whole series of new poems to the moon, trying to explain earth to the moon.
Yeah, the parallel is really there in terms of this whole preservation idea. They're going to use diamonds and this special metal and micro-etching. Somebody said at one of the meetings that the way the technology is advancing, it'll be like sending eight tracks to the moon in a few years. Time and space. So, I go from writing all these books that focus on Detroit to thinking about poetry on the moon. Gotta love it.
I’m wondering how your thoughts work when you write ekphrastic work. Do you guide your thoughts, or let them flow, or some combination? Do you talk to the photographer (here, Charlee Brodsky), or just view the photos? Would you call the work here ekphrastic – and if so, are both the poems and the photos ekphrastic?
When Charlee and I started working together, maybe a dozen years ago, I had never even heard the word ekphrastic before (my computer still underlines it as not being a word), so I’m not sure how to define what we do in terms of that word.
We’re pretty good friends now—through the collaboration—so we talk about what we’re both working on in the natural flow of our conversations.
My writing has always been heavy on the narrative side, so one of the great things this collaboration does for me is that it makes my writing more stream-of-conscious, more spontaneous, jumping around, etc.—a lot less guiding than usually goes on when I write. Of course, I do more guiding in the revision process, but I let the original pull of her photographs take me wherever it wants.
I’m not pulled in by all her photos, and some of the poems end up going nowhere. What usually happens is that I go over to Charlee’s house, and she’s got this big old table that she spreads her photos out on from whatever project she’s working on and I pick up the ones that strike me. It’s like wandering through an art museum—you stop and linger longer over some pieces than others—when I write about her photos, I’m trying to figure out what prompted me to linger over certain ones.
When you do collaborative work like you have here with Charlee, how does the collaborative process work? Is the process always basically the same? To what extent is each part of the process collaborative and/or more individualized?
I’m going to overlap a bit with the previous answer here, and circle back. Charlee and I were involved in the founding of this new center of campus, the Center for Arts in Society—it had a great title, but it ended up being more of a group to study arts in society, not create, and Charlee and I were two artists among all these scholars—misfits, at least I felt that way. One time I was sitting next to Charlee at one of these boring meetings and I think I passed her a note saying I thought we should work together on something.
We started with these poems I had written that I called Brick poems, where every word was in all caps and they were spaced out like a brick wall on the page. Turns out Charlee had all these great photos of brick walls, and I was inspired to write new poems about her photos. We never did much with those wall poems and photos, but one thing led to another, as things do when you’re collaborating, and we ended up with Street, the first book we collaborated on. It’s an interesting process every time—we both do our own thing separately, but every couple of years, we end up feeling like it’s time to do something together again.
She has a great eye, and things just open up for me in her photos. This year, she made an artist book of one poem I wrote, “Returning to Earth”, where she took apart the lines and matched photos to individual lines, kind of reversing the process we normally used—me starting with the photos, and laying things out so the poems and photos face each other, like in the work here.
A couple of things that make our collaboration work:
We are both very interested in cities, urban landscapes, and the effect of those landscapes on the people living there.
We have similar work ethics—none of this stuff about writer’s block or flakey artistic temperaments—we both are obsessed and dedicated to our work, and we are, I think, very dependable. And we have a great deal of mutual respect.
I like being surprised, and this process continues to surprise me, pull me in new, strange directions.
In addition to writing poetry and fiction, you’ve also written several screenplays that have been produced. What’s it been like to see your work performed on the screen? And how involved have you been in the production process?
What I’ve found is that I am very stimulated by the collaborative process—whether it’s the work with Charlee or the films. My main collaborator on the movies is John Rice, a veteran cinematographer and director. The first film, No Pets, directed by our friend Tony Buba, was shot by John, and when I got a grant for another film, Tony suggested John direct it, and we’ve been working together ever since. Our official titles are John Rice, Director, and me, writer and producer, but on these small, no-budget films, we both do almost everything, from casting and editing to making sure everyone on the set gets fed. So, I’m very involved in the production—though I know my place! On set, John is the boss. We spend so much time on the script ahead of time, going back and forth, that by the time we shoot the film, we’re both on the same page with everything.
The acting auditions are unnerving in that someone can come in and read the lines, and I’ll feel like oh shit, who wrote this schlock? Then, another actor can come in and nail it, and then I feel better—but it reminds me how much the actors contribute. We’ve been fortunate to get some great actors for our films, from alumni from George Romero zombie films (he’s from Pittsburgh and filmed all his early films here) like Lori Cardille and John Amplas, to veteran TV actor, David Conrad, to local Pittsburgh theater stalwarts like Larry Meyers, Patrick Jordan, etc.
I squirm in the audience when I watch the films, but at least it’s dark so no one can see me (unlike at a reading).
The logistics of making a film when you have little or no money are pretty overwhelming, so it takes a few years between films just for us to forget how much work it is. We’re working on a new one right now.
Do you have a real-life ghost story (or stories)? If so, will you share?
As writers, I think we’re all haunted by various people and events—what comes unbidden into our minds late at night when we’re alone—but I don’t have any ghost stories. I think I’m most haunted by my aunt and uncle who died as children, leaving my father as an only child. My grandparents and my father never mentioned them, and I didn’t know they existed until I was in college. But I remember spending the weekend at my grandparents’ house, and there was one room that no one ever went in. It was a spare bedroom, musty, cold—it felt very spooky in there, and in retrospect, I may have been feeling the spirits of those two children who died there.
I live kind of close to Pittsburgh, so I’m curious: where is your favorite place to go in Pittsburgh, and why? And is there good food nearby?
I probably spend more time in Schenley Park than anywhere else. It’s a large park in the middle of Pittsburgh, and I live right across the street from it (Parkview Ave). To get to school at Carnegie Mellon, I ride my bike through the park. Great trails—a bit of nature right in the heart of things. When my kids were young, we spent a ton of time there. A refuge and a magical place.
Lots of good, small storefront restaurants within walking distance, but my favorite is Spice Island Tea House, run by a former student, Ron Lee (who wrote a book about how to run a restaurant!). Nice, funky, casual, with great food. Ron has also hired some of my students to work there—it’s a nice place to work between undergraduate and graduate school.
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Quarter MoonThe moon, a shelf
that will hold nothing,
covered and un-
covered by the grit
of our roman-
tic illusions
about dis-
appearance
and rebirth.
In a battle
of the wild spray
of stars against
the somber moon-
glow, no one wins.
The lesson in that
is a floating target, waxing,
waning.
Little Bumpsbecome big bumps
though little ghosts
have no reason.
I believe in ghosts
with the methodical faith
of the damned and super-
stitious.
I stand in line
in a methodical protest
against pattern.
I wouldn’t return to acne
but I’d take my freckles back
sweet Jesus
their random spray
across my face
across my face