Alessandro Porco’s latest book of poetry is Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems, published by ECW Press in April. Re:Print caught up with Alessandro for a brief chat about the book, the poet’s career, and his busy-busy life. Porco is currently at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is working on his dissertation. His poetry has appeared in Matrix, Grain, and Queen Street Quarterly. He blogs here.

Tell us about your latest book:
My latest collection of poetry is Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems (ECW Press), which will be officially released in late March / early April. It’s been four years since I finished writing The Jill Kelly Poems (ECW Press)—my book-length ode to the adult-film star affectionately referred to as “the anal queen.” I’m suspect of teleologies of progressivity and enlightenment, meaning you’re not likely to catch me telling you how I’ve “developed” over the four-year publishing interregnum (though, I guess, four years ago I wouldn’t have used the term teleology on account of it’d likely make me sound like a douchebag! I’m comfortable with that now). In fact, the collection’s title long-poem, “Augustine in Carthage,” deals with this very suspicion of progressivity, amongst a variety of other things.

What’s it all about, really?
Ultimately, “Augustine in Carthage” is a trans-historical re-imagining of Book III of St. Augustine’s Confessions in present-day Montreal. It includes picaresque scenes and interludes involving, for example, philosophizing strippers (who apparently like to quote Whitehead while giving lap dances), Tampico bombers (my homage to Ed Dorn), drug-induced hops down rabbit holes, coprology (what can I say, I’m a fan of Pasolini!), and even some comic-book heroism (in the form of that adroit character Plastic Man). But for all its bombast “Augustine in Carthage” examines, quite seriously, ideas related to the experience of experience, the morality of poetry, and the hypocrisy of spiritual conversion. Of course, perhaps the most famous allusion in modern poetry to Book III of the Confessions takes place in Eliot’s The Waste Land: “To Carthage then I came” ("III. The Fire Sermon"). There he quotes directly from Augustine; the passage from the original reads, “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.”

Basically, think of Carthage as Vegas and you get the picture (and, to boot, Augustine wasn’t yet a saint ... all the better). Indeed, Eliot serves as a Tiresias-like guiding presence over and above the poem. (One other key literary text against which a continuous parallel is established is Petronius’s Satyricon.) But all this makes it seems way more highfalutin than it perhaps actually is—I mean, the first page and a half or so includes a length description of strippers at Montreal’s famed Club Super Sexe ...

That said, it is a difficult poem and one that I—and my reputation, such that it is—have much riding on. In that sense, the impending release of the collection is very nerve-wracking and frightening (not feelings I felt initially with my first book, to be honest). Of course, I should admit, however, that the nerves and frights are also associated with the other conspicuous poem in the collection (hopefully not so conspicuous though as to be the overwhelming focus of critical reception): the book ends with a 21-part series titled “We So Seldom Look on Nantucket.” Basically, as the title would suggest, it’s 21 limericks—but not of the anaesthetized Edward Lear variety. These are 21 of the filthiest limericks I could think to write (in the words of limerick scholar G. Legman, who, referring to his anthology The Limerick, wrote: “This is the largest collection of limericks ever published, erotic or otherwise. Of the 1700 printed here, none are otherwise.")

Basically, these little artifacts began as a dare and evolved into something quite lovely (albeit, depraved, too). As a whole, these limericks make The Jill Kelly anal-sex poems seems like a rather Victorian G-rated affair—hence, my nervousness. While I certainly don’t want to spoil anything (here’s my pitch: by the book to read what I’m talking about), I can give a hint of what I’m describing: e.g. the Holy Mother Mary satisfying Jesus and, maybe, just maybe, there may be some sexual intercourse involving amputees. If that sounds like something you’d be into, please do pick up the book (and, then, maybe you should see somebody)!

There’s plenty else, of course, that exists in between these first and last poems. Things I’m very proud of: some translations (loose translations a la Robert Lowell’s Imitations) of 20th century Italian poets Ungaretti, Campana, and Quasimodo. There are what I’ve dubbed as “remixes” of classic English poems. Also, there’s a couple performance pieces. Hell, even a love poem or two. Overall, to borrow a formulation from Paul Muldoon, the collection’s “much of a muchness,” if you know what I mean—though that “much of a muchness” is compressed into a tight little punch of beautifully designed book (17 poems over 60 pages).

It’s an exciting time for me these days. The book’s release looming, I have a series of readings I’ll be doing in the spring and summer months. That should be fun, allowing a little travel time for me, catching up with friends in various cities (including Montreal where I’d f!@#$% love to bring the book into Club Super Sexe! That seems fitting, given my early mention of the joint.). Hopefully the book’s release will inspire some heated debate, some positive reviews, some negative reviews—either way, I just hope that it sets discussion about things into motion.

What else is keeping you busy?
In March, I’ll start my tenure as the official hip-hop columnist for the online supplement of Maisonneuve Magazine, Montreal’s city magazine. I have free reign with the column, open to everything from standard reviews to interviews, hot topics and all that good stuff. The column’s a nice compliment to my current Ph.D. dissertation work on hip-hop poetics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It’s moving along, slowly but surely.
I’m desperately trying (usually in bars) to convince some of my more esteemed and mature academic peers and colleagues that Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is one of the best films of the last 10 years (slowly, I can feel them coming over to my side on this!).
I’m busy teaching a course this term on the subject of Sports Literature at SUNY-Buffalo.

Any Current Essentials we should look out for?
Repeated viewings (and I mean over and over and over again) of the first three seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which, quite frankly, is one of the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV.

I’m excitedly looking forward to the spring-time releases of Jason Camlot’s The Debaucher (Insomniac Press) and R.M. Vaughan’s Troubled: A Memoir in Poems (Coach House)—both examples of Canada’s finest literary artists.

—Nikki Tranter

Let’s get the obligatory mention of the duct tape corset out of the way straight off.

With the small sacrifice of an old tee and possibly the help of a close friend you can craft your own perfectly fitted and ‘slightly sinister’ corset. Besides this project, there are several other excellent features in Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister. The photography is sensational, even when the showcased project isn’t overly exciting. Black and white backgrounds provide a fabulous contrast to colorful (think ebony, blood red, and “ichor green") projects frequently adorned with skull motifs. The settings are invariably dungeon-inspired hangouts with antiqued decorations. Just flipping through and looking at the great pictures might keep you from noticing that a simple skull-accented hat is edged with faux FunFur. Which I didn’t realize came in black. I can’t actually picture this one on any self-respecting goth-chick, but the appeal of The Anticraft is not limited to those with yarn stashes exclusively containing various shades of black and red. All the better for the book sales, really.

A couple of favorite patterns of mine include ‘The Whilameenas,’ a crocheted two-headed rat, and ‘Three Owls,’ a mini-parliament of felted and embroidered feathered friends. There are many goth-leaning crafters out there (witness the success of The Anticraft website, now on issue number nine), and each of them can find something fascinating among the collection’s 25 projects.

The extra material in the book is a big plus. One feature is the ‘mood enhancer’ paragraph the accompanies each project, in the usual manner of listing materials and tools needed to complete it. Here the authors recommend music, movies, or books to match the mood of the project. Themed recipes and comic strips featuring the authors are also great touches. And the whole book is illustrated like an art project, with vine-like doodles, Victorian-style wood-block prints, and explanations of pagan symbols. At the back there is the customary crafting techniques section, although this one contains illustrated instructions on creating your own chain mail. On the whole, the book is a pleasure to flip through, but most of the projects are either too intricate or too impractical to really bother making.

The point is more about the inspiration and finding a place in the community of Anticrafters.

—Lara Killian

The Scotsman puts it best: ”It had to happen.” In the fine tradition of shows like Celebrity Love Island and Dancing With the Stars, UK celebs are signing up to compete in yet another lame-brained reality show. This one is called Murder Most Famous, and get this—the celebs, under the tutelage of Minette Walters, will study criminology and forensics in order to write their own crime novels. The winner will see their novel published by Pan Macmillan next year.

The competitors are a group of people The Scotsman calles “C-list celebrities”. Their names are Brendan Cole, Sherrie Hewson, Angela Griffin, Matt Allwright, Diarmuid Gavin and Kelvin MacKenzie. Famous in England, I guess.

What? I don’t even know where to begin. Shame on you, Pan Macmillan, for letting this abomination go ahead.

The news of the show comes hot on the heels of this article in The Guardian that poses the question, “are crime books easier to write than ‘serious’ novels?” The article talks about Joan Brady, a Whitbread winner, who sued the cobbler living downstairs whose weird cobbling chemicals seeping through her floor caused her to go a tiny bit mental. This new lack of brain function manifested itself, says Brady, in her abandoning her serious literary writing to pen a substandard crime novel. The fumes made her do it, she cried, and she and the cobbler settled out of court with Ms. Brady receiving quite a hefty sum.

So, according to Ms Brady, crime writing is for spaced-out dunces. It’s something a writer must be reduced to doing. But where did such thinking come from? It’s a big debate in Book World, that crime novels aren’t “real” literature, falling into the category of “genre” writing alongside horror novels, science-fiction, and romance. If you ask me, such thinking is pretty much bupkiss. Crappy crime writing is just crappy crime writing. It doesn’t mean all crime writers are lame, just the lame ones. After all, plenty of great modern literature is set in space. I think all well-rounded readers know this. So why can’t Ian Rankin shake the stereotype perpetuated by the Joan Bradys of the world?

I blame James Patterson. And crime fiction publishers and marketers everywhere, truth be told. Patterson’s books, when viewed next to Ian Rankin’s, look a bit similar. And like Rankin, his books feature recurring, damaged characters in dire need of redemption. Their books are always mysteries, a couple have been turned into movies, and all can get quite grisly. The difference between the authors is, while James Patterson blurts out five novels a year, all told in the same gimmicky, rapid-fire and ready for TV style, Rankin waits a while between stories, and writes chapters that need more than a trip to the dunny to be fully digested.

But, this, too, is well-known. So, is it a case of some writers spoiling it for everyone? I think it is. There are serious crime writers and there are hacks. Just as there as serious musicians and crappy synth-ed robot people with guitars. It’s a popularity game, and we all know it, so why is the question still coming up? Why can Ms. Brady get thousands of pounds out of a poor cobbler for doing what every author and his dog who wants instant chart success seems to be doing?

The readers don’t help, either. Or is it our new fast and loose lifestyles that mean we only have time for Patterson-sized chapters quickly scanned before lights out? The readers demand these books—remember that statistic about Mills and Boon consumers from last week? Someone is reading, so publishers are getting that product out there. It’s business. And as with anything that gets too popular, too in-demand, the quality has dropped. I remember when crime novels were by Joseph Wambaugh and Norman Mailer, epic and researched and good. Even the popcorn-y ones like Stephen Hunter’s Dirty White Boys were more literary than anything Patricia Cornwell has shat out in past 10 years. It’s a cycle, maybe. As Pearl Jam Xeroxed a hundred times becomes Nickelback, so Norman Mailer becomes Michael Kimball. All hope is not lost, though, because while they’re lumped in with the crap, people still read Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane and Scott Turow, and the other thinking crime writers we do really need.

The Guardian‘s question is just wrong in its phrasing. It’s not easier to write crime novels, it’s easier to writer crappy crime novels.

Murder Most Famous airs on BBC2 in March. Patterson’s Double Cross was released in November. His Sail will be out in June. The paperbacks of 6th Target and Saving the World came out this month. The paperback of The Quickie arrives in April. Joseph Wambaugh’s Hollywood Crows in out in March.

And, just for fun, Joan Brady’s latest crime novel, Bleedout is out 29 January.

—Nikki Tranter

Most shocking news of the week:

Thirty five million Mills & Boon titles are sold each year worldwide. Think we have a stiff upper lip? Seven million romantic novels are sold in the UK alone ... which translates into a Mills & Boon book being put through our tills every three seconds.

Wow. That’s insane. Find out more strange facts about the Mills & Boon publishing extravaganza over at the Times Online. Their “Eight facts about Mills & Boon books” is scary. Apparently, over a thousand people write Mills & Boon books. And over a million people buy the 70+ books published every month. I had no idea the demand was so monumental. I knew the books were a bit of a publishing force (only because they crowd the shelves of used bookstores, so someone’s buying them), but this is just way out of control. I may look into this further…

The Times also has a great video interview with Stephen King about Duma Key. Check that out here. Didn’t King retire? He and Garth Brooks are giving real retirees a bad name.

This one’s for Leia, my favourite environmentalist / photographer. From the article, “Plant a Tree Every Time You Buy a Book” from enviro-blog, Triple Pundit:

It is a sad shame that the majority of publishers today do not print their books on recycled paper. There is no logical reason why books should be printed on virgin paper that equals 20 million trees each year. I highly encourage publishers, online booksellers, and retail stores to reconsider the environmental impact of printing books on virgin paper and partner with Ecolibris.

And the big news… the Judith Regan lawsuit is settled. AP reports: “The war is over: Judith Regan, the publisher fired in the wake of her efforts to release O.J. Simpson’s hypothetical “confession,” has settled her $100 million lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.” Find out more here. The bottom line? No-one is guilty of anything at all. How ironic. 

—Nikki Tranter

While 2007 was a busy year for new graphic novelists and cartoon artists of all kinds, particularly now that they’re getting some long overdue respect, one of the real treats for the genre came late in the year when W.W. Norton (in their infinite wisdom) re-released a pleasingly hefty pile of books by the late, great Will Eisner. As in father of the graphic novel, as in the churning vortex of industrious creativity during the bastard art form’s early formative years, as in mentor and inspiration to a generation of artists from Michael Chabon to Frank Miller, as in the reason that the greatest creative award in graphic novels and comics is named the Eisner Award. Yes, that Will Eisner.

Norton secured the rights to the Eisner back in 2004 (he passed away in 2005) and have been steadily releasing nicely presented trade paperback and hardcover editions since then. The trilogy that made up A Contract with God came out in 2005, while a quarter of Gotham-centric titles were bundled into the hefty Will Eisner’s New York a year later. Those four titles—City People Notebook, New York the Big City, Invisible People, and The Building; all originally published between the early-1980s and early-1990s—were then released last December as individual paperbacks.

As groundbreaking as Eisner was in pushing the idea that comics could be not just serious but also art, in a sense, there remains an overwhelming sense of the past around his work, even the material drawn only a couple decades ago. The rubbery-faced goons who galumph through these books, all exaggerated features and shabby clothes, seem at first like caricatures out of some Depression-era vaudeville. Eisner’s faces are rarely just there, instead registering Dickensian pathos or Broadway musical-style joy, without a lot of shading in between. The style is right out there and populist in the great early-to-mid 20th century style, located visually somewhere between Mad and Playboy. These stories of love and loss in the great big city of New York range from the two-page character vignettes of New York the Big City (all true then as they are now and fifty years hence) to the fairy-tale tragedy of The Building, many of them moral fables anchored around a particularly concrete piece of real estate, whether it’s a subway grate or office building.

Being the fantasist at heart, these books seem almost a truer expression of Eisner’s heart than the three weighty “autobiographical stories” bundled together in Life in Pictures (also released late in 2007 and reviewed in full by PopMatters‘ Erik Hinton here). Although the trilogy—To the Heart of the Storm, The Name of the Game, and The Dreamer—contain a number of sharply drawn portraits that limn the corners of the Jewish-American experience, whether in high society or a comics sweatshop, they seem more forced and less organic than the self-contained fables of the New York novels. Some things just beg to be made up.

—Chris Barsanti

I’m thinking of a Clive Barker line ... let me find the exact quote. “Every body is a book of blood. Wherever we’re opened, we’re red.” The one below is Oscar Wilde’s “every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future” from A Woman of No Importance.

Isn’t this just the best? It’s nicked from a LiveJournal blog I’ve steadily become addicted to over the past few months called Bookworms with Ink. The site invites readers to post photographs of their literary tattoos. Scrounge around a bit and you’ll find dedications to everyone Tolkien to Woody Allen to Vonnegut to Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s such a thrill to see certain words and pictures brought to life through tattoos. The site is moderated by LiveJournal user “Oh You Trendy Girl”, and has been up and running since early 2006. A museum of literary skin art—it’s an absolute treasure.

Check out this latest post from Tetaelzbieta:
“I’ve got almost enough money for my first tattoo, and the three things I love enough to put on my body are The Lord of the Rings, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safan Foer and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I’m either getting Tolkien’s initials or the white tree of Gondor (in black ink) on my left wrist. I think I’m going to go with the word “timshel” on my right wrist for EoE, and I haven’t decided on the EII tattoo yet. Anyone have any Tolkien, JSF or Steinbeck tattoos? From any of their works, I’d love to see them! I’d also love some recommendations for fonts for the EoE tat. What types of fonts look best, etc. Thank you thank you!”

The enthusiasm! It’s infectious. Read just a selection of the daily chatterings here and you’ll spend the rest of the day plotting your lit-tat. Some of those on the site are divine; others, I’m not so sure about. It’s all very much to-each-his-own, and that’s very much the point. Of tattoos in general. It’s all about you, isn’t it? What’s meaningful to you, what generates your desired thoughts and reminiscences. It makes sense, then, that as important as a Vonnegut quote might be to me, a Tolkien quote is to Tetaelzbieta. It’s interesting, too, to note just how many of these literary tattoos are of images from children’s books, suggesting their importance to the tattoo-ees has been lifelong. One of my favourite literary tattoos is the work of my very own tattoo artist, Squirrel from Tattoo Nation in Echuca VIC. He won a National Best Back Award for this:

Today I’m loving this “Hip to be Square” quote from American Psycho:

How affecting, though, must these varied works be to these people? There’s a beautiful sleeve on the site, owned by a lady called “Scum Queen”, that features an illustration from Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Scythe”. Now, this is not Peter Pan quote hidden away on the spine. This is a balls-out, massive half-sleeve. The work that’s gone into the thing, from design through to placement and actual inking is mind-blowing. And it’s on this tiny arm. You display that for life, that one story. What an advertisement— there’s got to be something fucking intense in a such a work for someone to want to be reminded of it every single day. I, for one, am going to hunt it down.

Other literary tattoos can be found at HubPages, and there’s a great essay here at The Believer which is worth a read, too, called “A Blank Human Canvas” by Margot Mifflin, author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo.

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures here were lifted from Bookworms with Ink

—Nikki Tranter