Aaron Tieger on CARVE

Originally CARVE was based in Boston and this was reflected by the poets who were published in CARVE. You’ve since moved to Ithaca. Could you talk about how your sense of a poetry community has changed and how that is reflected in some of the post-Boston CARVEs?

CARVE was initially conceived as a result of the sentence (uttered by Michael Carr) “There should be more print mags in Boston.” At the time (2003) there was still an incredibly fertile, if somewhat contentious, scene happening there and it seemed a shame that it wasn’t getting documented more.

Since moving to Ithaca, I’ve still kept the percentage of Boston poets pretty high, but though it’s where most of my poetic roots are it’s not where my community is located at all (and many of those poets are no longer in Boston, anyway). Both as a result of starting to run out of Boston poets and my own widening circle of acquaintances, CARVE is gradually getting more geographically diverse, which is obviously good in some ways but is less good in others— I miss having enough people proximous enough to a central location to have a reading party, let alone hang out with. On the other hand I have managed to avoid those inevitable social pains & hassles that come from a small, tightly-knit scene… I go back and forth on this.

The basic answer is that now that I’m living in a place where my immediate geography has not revealed to me a solid poetic community, I’m looking elsewhere for such nourishment, & the lineups of recent issues reflect this.

Could you speak about your editorial process? Specifically how you decide whether a poem is right for CARVE or not, and how you go about sequencing the poets and the poems by each individual poet?

It beats the shit out of me. Over the last couple issues I’ve started to become aware that I do have an editorial agenda, but I haven’t been any more successful at articulating exactly what it is. I tend to start with the poet rather than the poem — that is, I solicit a lot of the work I print and it’ll be by someone whose work I already know I like. So I’ll say “Do you have 5-7 poems that might work nicely in CARVE?” A lot of times the poems I get will be sequences or parts of sequences, so that takes care of that. Otherwise, I just try and get a sense of what it feels like to enter a poet’s selection and what it feels like to leave it, and what goes on in the middle.

In the case of actual, non-solicited submissions, it’s a little different, and in terms of the poems this is where I get a little vague. My tastes have evolved in the last year or two — I’m much more interested in a certain kind of abstraction or ambiguity than I used to be, and I still don’t quite know what to make of that. My interests vary but I wouldn’t say “I like anything if it’s done well.” I have little interest in poetry that feels too “crafted,” in which every word or image has been finely wrought into perfection and thus out of vitality. Likewise the “lyrical abstract” mode that seems to be so prevalent in the post-Ashbery/Stevens MFA world right now — lots of pretty (or weird) words that flow nice and flat . Yawn.

But one of the things I do look for is some kind of ideological connection. I’m interested in forging connections with other poets who have a vested interest in what I think of as “DIY poetics” and/or opposition to the mainstream. I’m not interested in working with poets for whom CARVE is merely another name on the CV. I realize I can’t really control that aspect of the process, but it’s something I think about.

You mention, “wrought into perfection” and “lyrical abstract” as two modes that don't work for CARVE. Could you speak to what kind of abstraction interests you? And what qualities distinguish the vitality of a poem/poetry?

It was your poetry, Jess, that really got me thinking about this, and got me to go and read some Whalen and some Coolidge & realize that I like work that invites some kind of participation from the reader in order to complete the experience of the poem. I think a certain amount of ragged edges also lets me know that the poet is aware that at the end of the day, these are just poems & not worth getting too worried about. I’m not disputing the need for some degree of craft — whatever that is — but I do think it’s important to realize one’s ultimate lack of control over one’s poems.

That said, I’m not really comfortable with work that seems to be “just” about language — I need some way in. I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that but I think it’s narrative — specifically, the transparency vs. opaqueness of narrative. That is, I think (perhaps naively) that there’s some kind of narrative that can be pulled out of just about anything, and for me it’s a matter of how strong — by which I guess I mean continuous — and how much work I need to do to get at it. I like to work, and be puzzled, but I don’t like to work too much, or to be told too much. (Back in Boston, James Cook once described CARVE as representing the “mainstream avant-garde,” and while I’m not sure it’s accurate –at least, these days— it does stick in my mind, for better or for worse).

How would you define the mainstream? i.e. Is it what is coming out of the institutions or what is being published? And if either, or neither, what is the relationship between CARVE and the mainstream?

I think of the mainstream as pretty equivalent to Bernstein’s “Official Verse Culture,” encompassing the usual suspects like Poetry and The New Yorker as well as most university presses. I also tend to think that if you’re a poet employed in an academic capacity, you’re automatically part of the mainstream machine. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does confer a certain degree of safety that seems mostly concerned with perpetuating itself.

At the risk of sounding disingenuous, CARVE’s approach to these institutions is largely to ignore them. The vast majority of work I see coming from those places completely bores me whenever I allow it into my orbit, which is thus not often.

CARVE seems to be very conscious about getting the numbers right between male and female poets, could you speak about the motivation for doing this?

Most of the poets I know are men, and the Boston scene I came out of was pretty male-dominated. I feel it’s my responsibility as an editor and an anarchist to challenge that wherever I can.

That said, it’s troubling that 90% of the submissions I get are from men. There was a lot of talk about this on the Buffalo list a year or two ago, though I don’t remember the upshot of it. There are plenty of great female poets out there. It gets difficult because I’ve printed most of my favorite women (mostly friends, or friends of friends), and you start to feel creepy after awhile, soliciting women specifically. But I try.

What would you say the percentage of non-solicited poems to solicited poems that end up in CARVE is?

Without getting into the specific numbers, which elude me, it’s safe to say that most of the poems I’ve printed have been from poets I’ve solicited. However, that’s not to say that an unsolicited submission stands a worse chance of getting in — it’s just that I know lots of poets whose work I like & want to print, & obviously I’m going to like more of their submissions than those I get from the anonymous, random masses — a fair number of whom don’t appear to have ever seen an issue, which is their first mistake.

In CARVE 6 you made an announcement about CARVE Editions, what will the relationship be between the Editions and the Magazine?

The chapbooks will continue the trend I started in #3, when I decided to start printing more poems by fewer poets in an attempt to deepen their representation. The chapbooks will provide even more opportunity for this. That said, I don’t know how I’m going to decide who ends up where. I’m sure as I get more used to thinking in terms of chapbooks and the magazine simultaneously, I’ll work out some system or intuition about it, but for now I’ll just have to wing it.

What other presses or magazines do you support or would you like to acknowledge as being of like mind as CARVE, or following the small press ethos?

Well, there are lots of small magazines & presses doing a lot of good work (The Canary, the tiny, etc), but relatively few I feel a real connection with. Pressed Wafer has obviously been a big influence on me, though they’re operating at a more advanced level than CARVE. Ugly Duckling has also been a huge influence, as has Chris Rizzo’s Anchorite Press (not just design-wise but also in Chris’ approach to developing a roster of poets, like a record label does). Scott Pierce’s Effing Press also does beautiful work, & though I don’t always dig the work I think we’re coming from a similar place, politically & aesthetically. I also like Stacy Szymaszek’s work with Gam, which chronicles a really interesting & stimulating scene in the Midwest (ditto Bob Harrison’s Bronze Skull Press).

A couple other influences which might not be so readily apparent are L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Angel Hair/United Artists. Not so much because of the work itself — though it does interest me — but because of the sense of community and shared purpose they evince.

How do you fund CARVE?

Largely from my own pocket, though that’s changing. When I’m working I tend to make just enough to cover an issue. Fortunately my recent (and ongoing) stint of unemployment has coincided with several nice swells of popularity for CARVE, and by combining a few small windfalls with a spate of new subscribers, I’ve managed to keep it up despite having no personal income to speak of. It also helped that I moved somewhere with a very reliable print shop that is half as expensive as the place I used in Boston.

About how many current subscribers do you have to CARVE?

About 20 at the moment.

How many CARVEs are printed in each edition?

200. It used to be 250, but I started running out of room in my office. Also, it’s cheaper.

What is on the horizon for CARVE in the foreseeable future?

Hopefully more chapbooks per year whilst continuing steady magazine output. I’d like to get some readings together, too – I miss them.

Robert Pinsky sends you five dynamite poems (ha!) for CARVE, do you print them?

No. Even assuming these poems really are dynamite (and that’s a big assumption), Pinsky has absolutely no relationship to anything I’m interested in. He doesn’t need the readers, and odds are most of my readers don’t need him.

One could say “Well, what about Bill Corbett or Clark Coolidge?” Those are two cases of poets who I feel varying degrees of kinship with and who have established commitments to small-press publishing. I’m really not interested in names.