K. Silem Mohammad (Vimeo)
Ashland, OR on June 16, 2014
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DB: Thank you very much for agreeing to do this, Kasey.
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KM: My pleasure. Thanks for coming.
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DB: Would you please state, for the camera, your name, your date of birth, and the location we're at right now?
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KM: Kasey Silem Mohammad. October 10, 1962. We're at Southern Oregon University in Central Hall.
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DB: So, the first section is kind of short-answer. It's meant to get a sense of your digital practices now. So, we'll just kind of go through this and we'll talk more about the composition. So, what genres do you work in?
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KM: Poetry.
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DB: OK, and that's your primary genre?
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KM: Yeah.
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DB: What kinds of devices do you own, or have access to for writing?
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KM: This laptop, a MacBook. I mean, that's about it, other than whatever scratchpad I might put a note or idea in.
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DB: So you use only that one? Do you write on a phone? Do you write on any other things?
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KM: Usually not. I mean, the laptop is the main instrument.
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DB: The laptop is the main instrument.
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KM: Yeah.
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DB: And you have an Apple.
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KM: Mhmm.
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DB: You said you use some note paper sometimes?
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KM: I mean, if I'm somewhere and all I have is a piece of scratch paper because I'm in a meeting and I get an idea. But I don't really do that often.
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DB: OK, so it's pretty primarily on that computer?
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KM: That is mostly it.
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DB: OK. Do you ever make pre-writing notes for it, or—?
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KM: Because of the kind of writing I do, that usually doesn't come in to play.
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DB: Yeah.
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KM: Which I think will become clearer when we talk about the actual composition.
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DB: OK. In what format do you save your digital files?
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KM: Word.
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DB: Word doc.
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KM: Mhmm.
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DB: Do you save individual works as you go along, or do you simply save over what you've written? Do you save drafts?
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KM: Oh, no. I don't. I probably should, but I almost never save drafts. I just open up a doc and write over it until I think it's finished.
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DB: OK. And what are your naming conventions for your files?
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KM: Usually the name of the poem, followed by the file name.
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DB: And so, because you don't use drafts, it's just the one?
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KM: Yeah. I don't rename it once I've drafted it or anything. It just stays the same.
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DB: Do you print out your writing to revise it?
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KM: No, not typically.
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DB: OK.
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KM: Well, I mean, I might do that on occasion with something like an essay because it's easier on the eyes. But the poems are usually shorter, and again because of the specific nature of the composition, in some cases, you'll see I can't revise it really well at all if it's not on a computer.
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DB: Yeah. Do you ever save any paper copies of interim drafts?
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KM: Usually not. I think the only exception to that is maybe I have some paper copies somewhere of something I wrote in college and hope no one ever sees—maybe it's the way they're written. I don't ever bother to try and scribe them digitally.
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DB: Do you back up your work?
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KM: When I remember, yeah.
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DB: And how often do you do that?
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KM: Oh, god. I don't know. I probably need to do it right now—excuse me! Really, it's very erratic.
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DB: OK. Do you have Dropbox or anything?
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KM: You know, I've got a server here on campus. It's a backup server that I save things to. It's very simple. All I'd need to do is drag stuff right now, and I could do it to stop worrying about it. I've also got an external hard drive at home.
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DB: And if you're going to archive it, if you're going to back it up, that's where you put the work? And once a poem is finished, do you move it to a different folder?
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[00:04:40] |
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KM: Yeah, I've gotten kind of lax on it. I need to go in and update it, but typically what it'll be is: I have a folder—a main poetry folder—and within that, if there is a specific categories for certain projects, I'll divide them in to that, like a book project or whatever. And if something is published, typically, I'll put a copy of it in the Published folder, and then there would be like an Ongoing, or In-process, folder.
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DB: Yeah. Do you keep print copies of final drafts? Do you print them out?
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KM: Not usually.
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DB: And how about the media you've been published in? Do you keep the journals in a sort of space?
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KM: I do, yeah. I have a shelf full of journals and books.
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DB: OK. So, do you have any standard practices for archiving digitally or physically, would you say?
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KM: Maybe explain what you mean a little more.
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DB: Do you have a certain kind of way you put it on an external hard drive, like you put all your papers, or your books, on a certain shelf and that's kind of like your "archive"?
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KM: Yeah. Right, yes. Like I said, I do have a shelf in my living room. It's like most of the journals and books and anthologies I've been published in. And as far as I said for the digital files, yeah, there's usually a "published" folder—which is way behind being updated.
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DB: So, have you ever received or sought out information about digital archiving, or any sort of practices in that way?
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KM: Not really, no.
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DB: OK. Would you be interested in receiving information?
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KM: Possibly, yeah.
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DB: OK, that was kind of the basics. And so, this gets more to your trajectory as a writer. It starts off kind of getting a larger arc of it. So, how long have you been writing "professionally"?
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KM: I'd say since roughly '98 or '99.
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DB: And could you kind of give us a sense of the arc of your career over that time period?
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[00:06:55] |
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KM: Sure. That's when I was just finishing grad school and procrastinating on finishing my dissertation. So, I kind of went back to my long-time interest in contemporary poetry. And I think I had tried to send a few things out to get them published over the years, a few times without any success or sense of direction about it. And then during this time-wasting period, I became aware of electronic journals that were publishing authors I liked. But before that, I hadn't known even how to submit work, you know, to the same journals that would publish the kind of writers I liked. Because, you know, I had tried—for example, 5, 10 years before—to submit to magazines that I knew published language poetry and things like that. And typically I'd get no response, or maybe a slip saying, "Sorry, this journal is no longer in circulation" because the only way I heard about them in the first place was from the library copies. I had no contact with any of the people involved.
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KM: So, the internet changed that. I've been published in a few online journals and made contacts with poets that way. And then it was pretty rapid, from an initial chapbook that was published by Kenning Editions—ran by Patrick Durgin—in 2001 called Hovercraft, and then my first book in 2003, Dearhead Nation, from Tougher Disguises Press, edited by James Mets. Then another book that next year by Mike McGhee's Combo Books—A Thousand Devils. A couple books at the end of the decade from Edge, edited by Rod Smith, and lots of journals and anthologies in the middle there. And a few other chapbooks that I've neglected to mention.
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DB: And now, the project that you're working on is the "Sonograms"?
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KM: That's my chief project, yeah.
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DB: OK. But you have other ones going?
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KM: Well, that's the one that I consciously think of as a project that I'm in the middle of. Occasionally, I'll write something just on a whim, but yeah, that's the main project.
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DB: So, we'll sort of talk about the couple of different steps in the writing process, and then we're going to go through kind of how it was in the early stages of your writing and how it's changed. And so, my kind of way of thinking about it is there's the "compositional" stage—which is where you're kind of creating it—and then you have the "revision" stage. Then you kind of have the "organizational/archival" stage, which is when you're putting it into books and getting it published. So, those are the three stages to talk about, and then how those have changed over the course of time. Sort of like three-by-three.
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KM: Sure.
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DB: So, when you first started writing—and this is even before you started writing professionally, maybe before when you were trying to find those language poetry journals—what was your composition process? Or, how were you writing? What were you doing?
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KM: It's really hard to reconstruct something that long ago. I don't think I have much of a method. I think I was really just kind of feeling around in the dark. So, I took a couple of creative writing classes in junior college. I took one as an undergrad that didn't really work for me. I mean I passed, but it didn't do anything for me. But yeah, I would just occasionally feel inspired to write something. I mean, it was very shapeless.
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DB: Yeah. So, how did you come to find the writing that you liked? I mean, to find the language poetry, to find the journals that you were sending out to?
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KM: I don't remember what led me to it, but I remember just surfing the web. I think one of the very first journals that caught my attention was Combo by Mike McGhee. They published Clark Coolidge and other language poets and younger poets I hadn't heard of. And at least some of it was online, I think, if I remember correctly. It was like limited digital sampling. And I just emailed them saying, "Hey, I just want to go about submitting work," or something like that. They liked the work, and I was published in there several times. It's the same thing with Kenning, which was also a journal—Patrick Durgin's journal. I think my first publication actually was in Fourteen Hills from San Francisco State. I went to a group reading for the contributors to that issue and met a lot of Bay Area poets. So, I established a connection with—I forget what the original question was now.
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DB: Oh, it's fine. That's actually kind of where I'm pushing you. So, your writing styles in the beginning, your ways of composition—they're kind of formless—
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KM: Oh, yeah, yeah.
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DB: How did they start to progress, then? I mean, what was sort of the next step?
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KM: Sure. That's actually pretty easy to answer, because it's kind of, at least so far, been kind of a really distinct, three-stage process.
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DB: Oh, great!
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KM: Yeah, I can actually answer according to the terms of the question! So, that earliest work—and this would be everything up through the period I'm talking about—was just basically, I don't know how quite to describe it. Organic, or free-hand, you know. Just making stuff up and writing it down. Words would come in to my head, and I would put them on the page. So, typically, I would just type it and it would be like trying to compose a musical piece, or something. Like, what should go after this? How can I complete this rhythm, or set of images? Something like that. And then that began to change with—again, I say 2000, 2001, when I met Gary Sullivan and other members of the Flarf Group—and that itself, that second stage had kind of like two stages. At first, I became acquainted with Gary's writing on an email list that we were both on, and just for a joke he wrote some kind of New Year's poem, or something like that, that he called a "flarf poem." "Flarf" was the invented name for the method. It was basically just writing the stupidest, most shapeless thing you could think of. So it was full of non-sense and obscenities, emphatic noises with no real shape or form other than just, basically, roughly being broken in to lines. He and I and a few other people started doing this just for fun, and we created our own email list just so we could do it. I'm sure the full origin stories out there about—
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DB: Just for my clarification—it started on a different email list and then it moved to its own?
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KM: That's right. And I guess really it started, if I'm correct—I think this is what Gary related to me—when he sent a poem in to one of those online vanity price things. "Poetry.com." And the short version: he was trying to get rejected. So, he wrote just the stupidest thing he could think of, and it was accepted for consideration for the anthology, which you then pay for if you're actually dumb enough to go through with that. So, that was the origin. Then he just started writing more of them on the email list even after he'd realized he couldn't get rejected, because it was fun. So, a group of us that were on this list, and so eventually, I think it was Drew Gardner who introduced a method in the middle of this shapeless writing of using Google search results. Just going in to the Google page, doing usually a combination search for like two or three terms that you wouldn't expect to see on the same page together and then using that initial search result page as a base from which to collage excerpts. Not following the links, just—
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DB: Just the language that shows up in the Google cache?
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KM: That's right, yeah. So, my typical process—and this is the second stage, the big second stage where, for 10 years, I basically just wrote Google collages—was I would copy however many pages of the search result page... You know, because I'd click "next page," "next page," "next page" of about ten or a hundred results, and the page would turn in to words, and I'd start chiseling it down. Rearranging it, shuffling the contents, and occasionally cheating a little bit by putting a connector word or something like "and" or "the." Or maybe altering a word that was in just a slightly different grammatical form or something. But that gets back to what we were saying about not doing print revisions because, really, everything's done kind of like refrigerator magnets—just shuffling around. And I guess printing out a page, I could look at the thing and go, "Well, if I brought some of this down here...". But I never did that.
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DB: No, right. I mean, it makes sense. It's computer-generated material.
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KM: Yeah, and part of the fun of it was using the computer as a kind of canvas.
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DB: Yeah.
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KM: There was something kind of pleasing about pulling the components around and almost physically moving them around in that digital space.
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DB: And when you're copying the page, do you just, say, CTRL+All, grab it and drop it in? Do you get images and what-not with that? Or do you just drag the thing up and just get the text and paste it in?
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KM: Yeah. I mean typically, on a Mac, I'd just select the whole page, copy, and paste. I mean, there weren't any images because it was just the result page.
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DB: Just the result page, OK.
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KM: Right. What you would get was a lot of the, like, red or blue text, or purple text—the URLs and headers and things like that. But typically the first stage of going through the manuscript would be to remove all of that kind of junk-text. I mean it was all junk, but...
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MORE INFO: See the full interview at: https://ctrl-shift.org/interviews/transcripts/mohammad.html
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