Those that can...

...should show somebody else how to can. That's my teaching philosophy. If you want your kids to be better writers, than they need you to model it for them, as scary as it sounds. Don't be afraid to make yourself a writer in your own classroom. That was the main topic of discussion in my interview with former Indiana Review editor Alessandra Rolffs. But really the best reason to click is the picture of my daughter, Little Miss Knowitall. Check it.

Everything is Everything: Mitchell Douglas' Cooling Board (Part II)

Mitchell Douglas has a new poetry collection out, Cooling Board. It's dope. Go buy it. This is the second part of our interview...

What's your favorite Hathaway cut?

That’s a toss up. It’s a tie between “Thank You Master (For My Soul)” and “For All We Know.” The former is on his first album Everything is Everything, the latter is on Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. “Thank You Master” gave me the title for the book. There’s a moment in the song that feels totally ad-libbed when he starts testifying with the familiar phrase “My bed was not my cooling board, my sheet was not my winding sheet.” When the music gets quiet and it’s just Donny on the piano delivering those words, you feel like you’ve witnessed the most private moment in the world. It’s not the kind of thing you can plan.

I'm real fond of "Be Real Black For Me" on that Roberta and Donny album. I think the title is a little corny, but there's a lyric, "Our time, short and precious/Your lips, warm and luscious/You don't have to wear false charms" that kills me every time. The "Thank You..." joint reflects how amazingly Donny could switch from gospel to secular.



What are you working on now?

I’ve got a manuscript of autobiographical family poems called stitch that is on its eighth or ninth life. I started working on that book before Cooling Board and I’ve continued to write new poems and revise it. Every time I think it’s done, I make another major change. We’ll see where it ends. I’ve also got two other projects I can’t say much about right now. Those works, in part, will be a return to persona poetry. One looks at an infamous death in the world of rock’n’roll, the other honors the life of an artist from my hometown, Louisville, KY. Of all these projects, stitch is nearest completion, the others are in early writing and research stages.

Last, but not leastly, where do you poets get all that money from? And how can I be down?

Ha! You know there ain't no money in this!!! When folks start making movies after books of poetry, the world will be a better place (lol).

Mitchell is a low-key brother, and I knew he was going to try and play it cool, but Misstra Knowitall was at Jericho Brown's book release party during AWP and has actual visual evidence of all the dollars these poets are clocking!

From left: Jericho Brown, Mitchell Douglas, and Frank X. Walker

Dang, I got to write me some poems.

**UPDATE:

This picture needs an appropriate caption. Ideas?

Everything is Everything: Mitchell Douglas' Cooling Board (Part I)

Photo by David Flores (dflo.net)

You couldn't tell Misstra Knowitall I wasn't going to change the whole game up when I first stepped up on that campus in Bloomington, IN. I going for an MFA, but I was going to show them Hoosiers something! I had my scholarship check (nobody told me it had to last all semester) and was about to let them square suckers know what was up! I thought I was too cool! That was, until I met Mitchell Douglas--who taught me what a for-real, smooth-writing-brother looks like.

Douglas' debut collection, Cooling Board, was published recently by Red Hen press. When I read that it was a "long running poem," I have to admit that I (briefly) thought: "Kneegropleeze. No way I'ma sit here and read a whole book of poetry in one sitting."

Next thing I knew: I was sitting there reading a whole book of poetry in one sitting.

Needless to say, it's dope and you need to get it (as in, buy it, not text message Mitchell to see if he's got a copy you can "check out"). It's all about the life of singer Donny Hathaway, a personal fave of mine. It's funky and soulful and beautiful. Just like Mr. Hathaway hisself.

Donny Hathaway - "The Ghetto"

I asked Mitchell some questions. He had some answers.


Taking the leap like you did with this book, investing so much time and creative energy into a collection that surrounds a single figure, must have made you nervous. What makes Donny Hathaway such a compelling figure for you?


My initial idea for the book was to have an entire collection devoted to my musical heroes. The catch was that they were all dead and the poems were a kind of commentary on their lives. The more I thought about it, the more I hated the idea. I stopped thinking about writing Hendrix and Cobain poems and narrowed the focus to Hathaway. The choice was easy because he was the artist I knew the least about. Also, there were plenty of books about the other artists I wanted to write about and none, at that time, about Hathaway. I wanted to give him his due. I did worry about doing Donny justice and writing poems that would capture his spirit , but the more I got into my research and talking to people that knew him, I stopped being afraid.

In your acknowledgments you big up Kevin Young, particularly his long form poetry class at Indiana University. How did the experience in that class inform your approach to Cooling Board?

That class was the start of the book. We had a great reading list: The Spoon River Anthology, Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and a book that opened my eyes for Cooling Board, Langston Hughes’ Montage of Dream Deferred. Kevin explained that Hughes intended the book to be a long poem and we discussed as a class if he succeeded. With each poem as a treatise on a different resident of Harlem, we decided that Hughes’ single focus in many poems/layers constituted a longer poem or narrative. What was also fascinating to me is how he used persona. There was, for example, the Southern dialect in the epistle “Letter” and a voice that could be considered a heightened sense of Hughes’ own in poems like “Harlem” and “Theme for English B.” Hughes taught me how to raise the hollers of many tongues to speak for one cause. We had the option of doing a research paper or turning in our own long poem as a final project. I chose the latter, and turned in 30 or so pages of Cooling Board. This was about four years before the book was published.

One of the things I admire most about this book is the breadth of voices that speak in these pages. I'm really interested in the way you begin by telling Hathaway's story through the voices of all these people who loved him (Miss Martha, Eulaulah, Roberta Flack, Curtis Mayfield), but then it seems like you start to mark his depression by introducing other "uninvited guests" that represent the voices of Hathaway's schizophrenia. What were you trying to achieve with this dynamic?

Donny was who he was because of love. I’m a father, so when I see kids and a parent is telling them to shut up, I wonder what their lives would be like with someone who took the time to say “Hush, baby. It’s time to be quiet.” He was nurtured as a musician early on by his grandmother, Martha Crumwell. Miss Martha had Donny on a stage at revivals playing the ukulele at three (she was known as a strong gospel performer herself). His mother, Drusella Huntley, wanted the best for Donny, so she moved from Chicago to St. Louis to be with her mother (Crumwell). If she hadn’t done that, the world may have never known Donny. So starting the book with the voices of those who loved him, as you note—his grandmother, his mother, his college sweetheart Eulaulah, his college friend Roberta Flack—was a way to show where he came from.

By introducing the “uninvited guests,” and the more frequent appearance of alternate takes, I hoped to disorient the reader and show him/her what living with schizophrenia was like. I think Donny was fiercely independent and, from what I’ve been told by family and friends, he didn’t like to take his medication. There is a published account by a friend that says in his last days, Donny would talk in one voice in the studio and answer himself in another voice. Sometimes, I think I could have added even more of the “uninvited,” but what is there now, I hope, gives everyone a sense of Donny’s struggle.

Donny Hathaway - A song for you

Next...

Everything is Everything (Part II): How do poets get all that money!?

The Natural Way to Dro (Part III)

Funk art pioneer Pedro Bell got his first taste of the Black power movement during an extended visit with family in Florida.

"When I was in sixth grade I stayed with some family in St. Petersburg," he said. "They had separate schools down there, but that allowed them to do some things that you could never get away with in Chicago. They had an Afrocentric curriculum, which I had never seen before."

By the time he enrolled at Bradley University in the late '60s, the Black power movement was in full flower, even in Peoria. "I was just glad the revolution had finally arrived," he said.

On campus, Bell met people like Mark Clark, a Black Panther leader who started a free breakfast program for public school students in Peoria. "Youngblood was real cool with me," Bell said. (Clark was later tragically murdered, along with Illinois chapter president Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police in 1969).

Like many artists of the time, Bell's work began to reflect this Black Power aesthetic. His piece, "Motherhood in Red Black and Green" features a mother and son wearing thick brown Afros and defiant glares, their outlines suggestive of the African continent's shape. The piece was part of Indiana Review's Funk feature and is one of the few Bell still has from that period.

"I lent some artwork to the Black Panthers for an art show they were doing," Bell said, with a laugh. "Later I asked them when I was going to get my shit back and they told me that it "belonged to the people."

That incident, along with Bell's brief participation in a Panther protest that caused his expulsion from Bradley ("I was there holding a sign for five minutes and they got me for perpetrating some shit!"), soured Bell on the running with the Panthers, but he never soured on the Movement itself, particularly the music.

When James Brown dropped Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud) in 1968, Bell said the whole game changed. To illustrate how much, peep The Godfather's performance on Playboy After Dark.



With it's proto-funk bass line and soul-centric message (We're people/We're just like the birds and the bees/We'd rather die on our feet/Than be livin' on our knees) dropped like an atomic bomb on the consciousness of Black America.
"Some revolutions have happened to the sound of music," he said. "But with that record, James Brown helped make it cool to be Black. That was important."

Before he started working with George Clinton, Bell said his musical education was rounded out by two other legends, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix.

"I saw Hendrix in May and B.B. in June," he said. "The first time I saw Hendrix, tears started coming down my eyes. Then I went to see B.B. and all these white kids were yelling in the crowd and I had to tell them to shut the fuck up so I could hear him play. And when you think about it, Funkadelic is just Sun Ra + Hendrix + B.B. That's it."

Judge for yourself:

Peep Hendrix on the Dick Cavett show, talking about his Electric Church (9:29 mark), which sounds like something right out of the book of P-Funk.

Here's a clip from Sun Ra's 1974 movie Space is the Place. Sun Ra is credited with his jazz innovation, but he is one of the first Funk philosophers.



And then there's B.B. Of course. This footage is taken from the 1974 concert in Zaire, during the Ali/Foreman fight. Thanks to my compatriot Vanessa, who hipped me to the fact that there's a movie coming out about the concert.

***Bonus
I wasn't sure how to work this in, but when I asked Pedro what contemporary stuff he was listening to, the surprise answer: The Stanky Legg. This was surprising because the only way I learned about the Stanky Legg was through my students, who never tired in their conversations about who did the best Stanky Legg, what personal variations they put on it, which teachers could do it (no, I will not do the Stanky Legg, even after you finish your writing prompt!), etc.
"Nice hooks, beats are okay," Pedro said, with a smile. "Lyrics could be better, but I don't expect much."
Without further ado, the soundtrack to my first year of teaching:

The Natural Way To Dro (Part II)

Verily, those soulfulifically jaded swashbucklers of agitpropitic burnbabydom --FUNKADELIC-- have descended from the Original Galaxy Ghetto to cleanse thy wayward souls THROUH MUSIC worthy of the immortals themselves. --Pedro Bell, Cosmic Slop liner notes.

Pedro "Dro" Bell isn't down with the Kindle. "It ain't there yet," he said. "It's like those first Macs that came out. I call it a Pimpscreen Mac because it talks a lot of shit, but it's not ready. It's going to be necessary because we can't keep killing all of these trees, but it won't replace the book in this generation."

Bell has a personal appreciation for computer-assisted reading because in recent years this visionary has lost most of his sight and can only read by using an electronic magnification device or audiobook.

Despite his disability, the self-confessed "techno-head" is wary of the move to "convert" an analog world into digital.

"For stuff like newspapers, that's not such a big deal because they are not as important to keep," he said. However, Bell said people underestimate the importance of preserving artificats of their culture, in multiple formats. "You better beware of that cryptogenic bomb. Everything you have will be wiped out."

The other day I posted about Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, which posits that technology and biology will become indistinguishable in the near future. "The Singularity" is the moment where the machines basically "take over". Looking at Dro's liner notes from Funkadelic's Cosmic Slop album, I'm struck at its prophetic tone. The first lines are both a warning and a call to arms for all of the world's Funkateers:

For virtual decades of alembic time parsecs, I have gazed upon the so-called highest life form on this planet with unbridled disgust! For the very source of life energies of Earth have become the castrated target of anile bamboozlery from homosapiens' rabid attempts to manipulate the omnipotent Forces of Nature!
Their directionless efforts to achieve the metaphysical state of godliness, eons premature to evolutionary destiny have, indeed, become an invitation to species extinction.

Don't say he didn't warn you. These are not merely liner notes, but testimony. The appeal is delivered with an urgency and precision that make them more than just compelling addendum to the excellent album inside, but an integral element in the art of this record.

The brilliance of the writing in the liner notes is matched by the beautiful and trippy art that accompanies it. Illustrations accompany each of the song titles listed on the inside. There are all manner of alien and familiar creatures represented, from flag waving eyeball handmonsters to Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Nixon, King Kong, and Bert from Sesame street. The funny part about it is that it all makes sense. It captures a world in the midst of great transformation (mutation?) where the techno and the bio are a funky mishmash.

Although the warnings are dire, there is a playfulness and irony to both the language and the imagery that hint at optimism. It seems to say that even if our future is uncertain, funk, in all of its forms, cannot be destroyed.

Here's a sample of the title cut, which tells a tripped out story about a wayward mother, a funkdified "Dear Mama" if you will.

By the way, I would recommend buying the Cosmic Slop album, even if you don't have a record player, for the amazing art and testimony that encases it.

Next...

The Natural Way To Dro (Part III): B.B.King, The Black Panthers, and The Stanky Leg

The Natural Way To Dro (Part I)

There only remained one piece of important business from my work at Indiana Review: Get funk art pioneer Pedro "Dro" Bell a copy of the Funk issue. We tried several times to send him his contributor's copies, but they kept coming back, so I figured the best way to get them to him would be to deliver them in hand.

After a season of cold spring Chicago days, a couple Saturdays ago the sun was finally peaking out from the clouds and it was getting warm. I decided to escape from the mountain of papers I had to grade and called Dro to see if he had time to meet up. I live on the Northwest side and Dro was over South in Hyde Park, so I had a train/bus ride ahead of me. He tried to give me directions, but I thought I was bad with my little Blackberry GPS and ended up getting lost. Anyway, I got over South finally and the cold wind off of the Lake had me shivering. I called Dro and told him to meet me in the Borders nearby because of the cold. He agreed and I went in. I'm familiar with that Borders because there are some Brothers who have chess games upstairs in the cafe. The guys talk all kinds of sheet, but they are good and quick, and although I hardly ever win, I learn stuff.

Dro said he was going to be wearing a long coat and a hat and that he shouldn't be that hard to find. He chuckled when I told him I had on a George Jackson t-shirt. "I know you cold," he said. I jogged upstairs to catch a quick game and ended up waiting for a long time. Finally, I extracated myself from a chess beatdown and called Dro to see what was up. He said that he had already been there, hadn't seen me, and went back home. He said he hadn't thought to go upstairs, but that he was almost legally blind and couldn't hardly see anyways.

He came back again and I met him at the entrance. He had a wooden artist's case, brown overcoat, and camoflage fishing hat that covered grey hair. Artists can be a strange lot, so it's hard to know how someone is going to be, especially when it's someone as influential (and cool) as Dro, but he put me at ease with a smile and a handshake. His coolness was further confirmed when we were getting ready to step back out into the cold streets and out of his bag, Dro pulled a cream-colored sports coat that fit me perfectly. "You going to need this, man."

Misstra Knowitall in coat (B-Boy stance)

Needless to say, I appreciated the gesture. We walked down to a nearby pizza joint and chopped it up for about three hours about all topics funk-related.

Pedro Bell, The Funkiest Drawer of Them All

One of the things I enjoy the most about Dro's work is the way he's able to dynamically combine words and pictures. Every illustration has some kind of textual component, either ironically commenting on the action or pushing you to look closer at the images. According to Dro, that's because he has always seen himself as a writer primarily. "I'm a writer who just happens to be an artist," he said, chomping on a burger with everything on it. "Writing was always easy for me. Drawing was work."

As a boy growing up all over Chicago, Dro learned to draw from his older brothers and learned the power of words straight from his daddy's Bible, specifically Genesis and Revelations, arguably the funkiest books in the Good Book.

"He used to read Genesis, and that turned me on to dinosaurs and Godzilla," he said. "I also got turned on to Latin, and that's where I came up with the idea of having a Rumpasaurus. Revelations was all about the future, which lead me to reading a lot of science fiction."

All of these influences are clear in Dro's work, which is at once silly, ironic, visionary, scary, and thoughtful.

When it came time to finish a Funkadelic album, George Clinton would come to Dro and pitch him a concept.

"It usually had to have a quick turnaround because the album would be so delayed and the studio wanted it," he said. Clinton would describe the album, play a few cuts, and then Dro would get to work. "Most of the time I would come from those meetings with a big picture of what I wanted to do."

Dro ended up doing work on all of the Funkadelic covers, which included graphics and liner notes. He notes that many of his creations ended up in song lyrics, like the title song for the Clones of Dr. Funkenstein album.

In Rickey Vincent's Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One, he describes Dro's contribution thusly:

"Bandleader George Clinton and writer-artist Pedro Bell were the primary sources of an endless flow of offbeat black philosophy that mocked the self-importance of religious and political doctrines wile subtly creating their own...Bell was also guilty of perpetrating a bizzare, Afro-centric mythology on long Funkadelic album cover essays, which complemented his felt-tip marker-drawn mutant-scapes of urban black life. Bell's visual imagery had the seamless layering of twisted symbols from the uncocnsious that Salvador Dali was known for, whil Bell's dark ghetto eroticism and hyperbolic grammar forged a new realm of black language."

If you haven't copped that book, you need to, by the way. Dro says his best cover is Electric Spanking of War Babies ("Because I had the time to work on it!"), even though it was censored by the record company after they deemed it too controversial.

This was the original:

And this was the censored version:

Despite the censorship, Dro understands the importance of the visual component to Funkadelic's success.

"If you have have group that has a concept that's visual, people will by the product," he said. Groups like Mandrill and The Undisputed Truth were impressive, but didn't have the longevity of Funkadelic because they lacked a coherent (literal) vision of themselves, and the world they were creating. "If you want to survive, you better have some visual concept, and if you really want to survive you better have more than that."

He thinks contemporary groups have learned the lesson and gives props to the Wu-Tang Clan for having "blended multimedia concepts" that will help their longevity. He also notes that this kind of production has to be collaborative. "All of that can't be done with just one dude, man."

Next...

The Natural Way To Dro (Part II): The Cosmic Slop, The Amazon Kindle, and The Cryptogenic Bomb

The Wisdom of Jericho Brown (Part 2 of 2)

Jericho Brown's got a new book of poetry out, Please, which is so funky and beautiful it hurts. One of the featured poems, "All That Crawls Beneath Me," was in last summer's Indiana Review Funk feature. Jericho drops some more knowledge on you.

1. What is your favorite Donny Hathaway song?


I've been listening to the "You Are My Heaven" duet with Roberta Flack as this is something I've been thinking about a good deal lately in the midst of reading and re-reading Ed Pavlic's Winners Have Yet to Be Announced.


Right now, I'm pretty sure that Hathaway's voice is somehow the saddest--yes, even sadder than Phyllis Hyman. Hyman manages sass and grit in upbeat disco numbers; Hathaway, on the other hand, takes a lyric like "I won't let them take you away" in a song as light as "You Are My Heaven" and focuses on the fear of actually being left alone. Something in his voice seems to see the awful in even the sweetest of expressions. A good example is the way in which Lalah Hathaway, his daughter, manages to fully mimic him in her version of "For All We Know" (The Song Lives On with Joe Sample) save for the tragedy in his version. It wasn't until I heard her version that I realized that the song was about trying to get some and using a really lame line to make it happen. In contrast, I always thought the song was about the real possibility of death arriving before the opportunity to make love when I listened to the late Hathaway sing it.

 
Hathaway is special. More than that, I believe he was at once conscious and unconscious of how special he and his voice is. We can't say that about Aretha Franklin: she knows good and well what she's doing every song, every God damned note.


But none of that answers what you asked me. While growing up, my favorite was “Song for You” because the piano in it always made me cry. No matter how many times I heard the bridge, I couldn’t get myself ready for it. It’s one of those songs that put my childhood in slow motion. I mean that literally. I thought it was some kind of magic. I could play that song and people who only knew how to yell would start whispering.


Donny Hathaway - A song for you
Uploaded by benedictinelight. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Lately, though, it’s been “For All We Know” because it’s really good for foreplay.

2. Funkier: Neck bones or Candied Yams?

Neckbones. Yams are too sweet.

3. What are you reading?

George Oppen and the really good unpublished manuscripts of Dwayne Betts, Jennifer Chapis, Deniz Perin, and Sasha West. It’s a great show. You gotta see it.

4. What advice would you offer a writer whose considering an MFA?

Go to the University of New Orleans. It’s the only MFA in town.

Tim Seibles: Ten Queries of Funk (Pt.2)

Here's part two of the interview with one of my favorite poets, Tim Seibles, author of Buffalo Solos, Hurdy Gurdy, Body Moves, and Kerosene. He was most recently featured in Indiana Review's Funk feature.


6. Funkier: Kevin Garnett or Bill Russell?

Garnett, no doubt; you can see the funk in his walk and in his jumper. He's a totally EMBODIED brother.

7. What's your favorite funk cut/album?

My favorite funk album: George Clinton's TAPOAFOM (The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership), which came out around '94 and got NO play
whatsoever. I can't understand it...

8. Funkier: Blade or Blackula?

I gotta go with brother Blade. He's the avenging angel of all the funky ancestors...

9. What are you working on now?

I finishing up a collection of poems that features Blade, Frederick Douglass, and almost funky, John Brown as personas.

10. And finally, Funkier: Shirley Chisholm or Barack Obama?

Oh, I gotta go with my boy, Barack. Did you see him hit that jumper when
he met with those troops in that gym? He stepped back with a bop-step just like the brothers on the schoolyard playgrounds.

Tim Seibles: Ten Queries of Funk (pt.1)

Tim Seibles is one of my favorite poets because he's cool and generous and funny and clever and thoughtful and funky and silly and serious and subversive. And did I mention that the brother is cool?

One of my favorite poems of all time is Tim's "Natasha in a Mellow Mood," from his book, Hurdy Gurdy, where the poet takes on the voice of Natasha Fatale. Yeah, like Boris and Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. And what I really like about that poem is that it's hilarious, but still sexy (just like Natasha herself):

"...Oh, Boris, Boris
Badenov, I want your mischief-
riddled eyes to invent
my whole body, all the silken
slopes of fresh forgotten
by the blind cartoonist. I want
to be scribbled all over you
in shapes no pencil would dare. Dahlink,
why don't we take off
that funny little hat..."

Tim pulls this off because he's cool like that. He's also incredibly funky, so when we were putting together the Funk feature for Indiana Review, he was one of the first people that came to mind and we were blessed to have his work featured in the issue. As a matter of fact, his funk was so powerful that one of our visual artists, Noel Anderson, cited him as a influence on his stunning Blacktoun Citizen series that was also in the issue. I caught up with Tim recently and we rapped a bit about his take on various things funky.

1. How has Funk influenced your approach to your own work?

Inasmuch as Funk is feeling that operates at the skeletal, maybe even the
molecular level in our bodies, I think I am influenced by Funk in ways that I don't even understand. It's beyond the music-- definitely: It's a style of wakefulness, a way of being in your flesh that's both celebratory, reverent, and aware of the body's limitations-- the ultimate limitation being mortality...

2. Funkier: Bullwinkle or Rocky?

Definitely Bullwinkle. Rocky was way too stiff and goodie-goodie.

3. What writers do you think of when it comes to Funk?

I could write an essay on this question, but I'll simply say Zora Neale Hurston, Pablo Neruda, Margaret Walker, WS Merwin (especially in The Lice), James Baldwin (his short fiction especially), Tracy K. Smith, Tyehimba Jess, William Henry Lewis (his short fiction I Got Some People in Stanton). There are many more, but that's a taste.

4. Funkier: Tweety Bird or the Road Runner?

Road Runner, hands down. (Can you imagine Tweety in your funk?)

5. Your poem in the Funk feature is dedicated to Papa John Creach, can you speak a little bit about who he was and how he relates to Funk?

Papa John Creach was a blues violinist, a funky old brother. I mean, for me, the roots of Funk is in the Blues, which has roots that go all the way back to African drums and the field hollars of American slaves. Funk is a way of feeling your body alive, a groove that speaks the body's language. To be real, it's the language of the black body. It was a way for Black folks to keep their 'Africa' alive in a way that wouldn't scare whites folks too much. However, it can contain and speak through all human bodies.
There IS such a thing as a funky White person-- especially in this country-- because of the steady contact between Blacks and Whites. The Funk vibe "not only moves, it can RE-move, dig?"

Stay tuned for part two of this interview...

Post No Ills Interview

Misstra Knowitall got interviewed by poet Kyle Dargan for Post No Ills Magazine. Check it.

What the Funk?: Hannah Faith Notess

Hannah Faith Notess served as poetry editor of Indiana Review from 2007-08 and helped assemble the poetry in the awesome Funk issue. For Misstra Knowitall, one of the true pleasures of being the editor of Indiana Review was having the opportunity to work with such a brilliant team of creative people who are about their business and Hannah was no different. She was so committed that one of my fondest IR memories is coming into the office to find her curled up on the couch sleep. And if you've seen how small our couch is, you know that's saying a lot.

How was the process (reading, selecting, soliciting work, etc.) unique from the other stuff in the issue?

It's hard to get a group of people together in a room and decide if a poem is good or not. If you have seven different editors, you're going to have seven slightly different views of what makes a good poem. And then deciding if something is funky or not, on top of being good--that's even harder.

But all that aside, once we sorted out what was good, we just let the funk take over. Basically, a poem had to hit us over the head with its funkiness; otherwise we had to let it slide--or put it in a different part of the magazine. Fortunately, several poems hit us over the head with their funk...so it all worked out.


Funkier: Batman or the Incredible Hulk?

Well, the Hulk is green. That helps. Batman can be pretty cool at times, and he has had some nice cars, but he is honestly not that funky. Then again, as the rejection slip said, I don't consider myself the arbiter of funk. I appreciate your candor and honesty. I consulted my answer sheet and the correct response is Hulk. For more information, please consult this previous post.



Was there something you learned, about funk or poetry or whatever, from working on this issue?

I received a funk education. I knew almost nothing about funk prior to working on this issue. I still don't know a whole lot, but the music's been a great discovery for me.


Funkier: apple butter or grape jelly?

Apple butter's got more substance. Though I'm not sure either one is really funky. What do you think?I get the feeling that if they had a dance contest, grape jelly would be styling on apple butter, so I'ma have to go with the jelly.


What's your favorite funky IR memory?

It's hard to choose, because there were so many standout moments, but the Variations on Funk reading with Tyehimba Jess, Aracelis Girmay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Patrick Rosal that we had in the Waldron Arts Center stands out. I felt so privileged to be able to have a hand in bringing them to Bloomington; they are all such amazing poets! And the atmosphere in the room was electric.
Most definitely. If you go to the Indiana Review Bluelight blog you can hear what we're talking about. Just click on the "posts" icon on the top right and pick the Variations on Funk reading. Check it.



Funkier: Indiana University patriarchs Elisha Ballantine or Herman B Wells?

I've definitely smelled something funky in the halls of Ballantine. And check out his hair!

No doubt. I haven't seen a process that clean since Goldie in The Mack. Elisha is funktastic!


Funk jam you keep on heavy rotation?
"If You Want Me to Stay" by Sly and the Family Stone.

Classic!


Funk: Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
I would have to go with vegetable because of the way it grows on you.


What the funk is HFN up to, Post-IR?
I'm moving to Seattle next month! So right now I'm packing. Or pretending to pack.


Thanks, Hannah!