Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie and two collections of poetry: The Habiliments and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places. His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Prelude, Tammy, and elsewhere. He co-edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing], is a Contributing Editor at Entropy, and is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.joe-milazzo.com.

Why do you write? How do you begin, how does your process unfold, and who or what influences your work?

At the risk of coming off as clever or flippant, I’d like to say that I write in order to figure out what it is I’m writing about. Writing, for me, is an act of perception—the first step in my journey towards understanding. This is another way of saying that, for me, writing is about discovery, digestion (or distillation), orienting (and reorienting), remembering and projecting into the possible. My process is to approach the words as Pascal did the river, treating them as the substance (surface and depth; motion and matter) of a road that takes me where I want to go. This also means that I try and approach everything as potentially inspirational or influential. In terms of subjects or interests, chief among them are consciousness, language, narrative (historical and imaginative, assuming there’s much difference between the two), and the various ways in which all these phenomena collaborate to create our sense of the real.

If you were the last person on earth, and you pulled the last book from a pile of ash and cinders, what would it be?

I would hope that book would be a book I’ve not yet read. And not necessarily one I’ve been meaning to read. If not, I’d settle for a collected works: maybe Cortázar, maybe Le Guin, or Zukofsky; Bob Kaufman perhaps, or Gertrude Stein. A companion-book.

What books do you have on your shelf right now? Anything or anyone you’re excited about?

I am currently reading Clark Coolidge’s Now It’s Jazz, his book about Kerouac and, well, jazz. A fascinating read thus far, in part because Coolidge the essayist is not all that different from Coolidge the poet. But also because I find I don’t have much of an appreciation for Kerouac anymore—if I ever did (I don’t believe I’ve ever finished On the Road). Then again, I may find that I only really like Coolidge’s Kerouac and not the genuine article. Or, that Coolidge’s idea of Kerouac is more compelling than even the best Kerouac that Kerouac could muster. That said, I am most looking forward to the second half of the book, in which Coolidge recounts his personal experience (dare I call it “fandom”?) of jazz. I’ve read excerpts from this portion of the book before and am eager to dig into the whole of its casually (coolly?) haunting ekphrastics.

To read afterward? I’ll be browsing the following:

• Susan Lewis, Zoom
• Sesshu Foster, City of the Future
• Gisèle Prassinos, The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories
• David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld
• Bilge Karasu, The Garden of Departed Cats
• Jena Osman, Public Figures
• Adriana Widdoes, Allison Conner, Emma Kemp, Johanna Hedva, Mady Schutzman, Orenda Fink, and Suzanne Scanlon, Rockhaven: A History of Interiors

What space does/should writing occupy, especially in this present moment?

Literature is, always has been, and always will be social practice. Even the most hackneyed “creative writing” manipulates language against the grain, “the functional”… although maybe only in America do we instrumentalize language to such an extreme degree (and our overly workshopped notions of literary excellence reflect as much). As such, the space writing primarily occupies is its own; literally, what it marks out; the parameters it establishes for itself. But only the best writing is able to acknowledge the ways in which it is ideologically compromised (in the manner of all utterances, whatever the intentions that have channeled them from mind to tongue) while simultaneously freeing itself from what my friend and sometimes-teacher Joseph McElroy likes to call “the tyranny of the anecdote”—the notion that what has been strictly requires what will be.

What was the first piece you ever had published? Are you the same person/writer who wrote it, and if not, how have you changed?

I’ve had several writing careers: “music critic,” book reviewer, for-hire content producer. But I date my career as a writer as beginning with the appearance of this story in an issue of In Posse Review. A decade has since passed, and I am definitely a changed person. For one thing, I’m not sure I have another short story in me. Less facetiously, I’d like to think I’ve broadened my range and my notions of what “the experimental” can encompass. (I am, however, still in thrall to guitar solos. I can’t rub that generational disposition out of myself.)

Which do you find the most challenging and/or rewarding and why: fiction, poetry, or prose?

If the writing requires that I write about or with direct reference to myself—not a body, occupied and occupying, but a personality or set of exegetic atmospheric conditions—I find that difficult. The much more comfortable position for me is one in which I’m cupping the shards of my subjectivity in my hands, knowing that the next choice I have to make involves selecting and fitting another handful of those pieces into the puzzle of a new persona. With the novel, this salvage-cum-invention takes a great deal of time; the relationships that bind author and character are more monogamous, if that makes sense. And plot, or at least drama: its tautness is not the outcome of efficiencies, at least in my practice. Which is not to say that novel-writing is drudgery. It’s just that its pleasures, like Kafka’s Great Emperor, are often more anticipated than received. (Until you can make yourself a relatively disinterested reader of your own novel, I’ve found, those pleasures don’t fully arrive.) Poetry I find more convivial and quicker, its forms improvisations on everyday saying. It can take me weeks to write a finished poem (whatever that is), but the end is almost always in sight, and the horizon never looks like a deadline. That scope agrees with me very much these days, which are lived mostly from 9 to 5.

What are some of the challenges you face as an editor? What do you enjoy about it?

Time is a challenge. I want to give everything I read as much of my attention as possible. But I can’t. So I try not to be too arbitrary in granting authority to my tastes and interests. That is, I try to read as much outside of my proclivities as possible. Just as I am skeptical of the edict to “write what you know,” I am suspicious of the notion that “good writing” reveals itself as soon as it’s read. The apparent aesthetic neutrality of “good writing” to me seems like a form of self-deception, inasmuch as it denies the choices that codify preferences into default positions. But reading in this way—parallel to myself—takes a good deal of vigilance. Thankfully, it’s a skill I was taught in workshop, and one I continue to relearn every time I’m fortunate enough to spend time with unfamiliar authors’ unpublished writing. To immerse yourself in the work without submerging your critical sensibilities… moreover, to not idolize craft among all of the demiurges in that critical pantheon… that’s tricky. But I’ve found the effort more than worthwhile. Doing so has kept my world from growing small around me.

What projects do you have going on right now? What are your concerns/obsessions? Anything we can look forward to?

I am currently at work on three discrete poetic sequences and a novel. The novel (title still TBD) is set in Dallas in the 1970s and is something of a coming-of-age story. But it is also very much concerned with the history of the region, a history which many outside of Texas know nothing about even as it remains quintessentially American. If Crepuscule W/ Nellie (my first book) is a “jazz novel,” this new one is a “prog rock novel.”

Field Recordings is the first of these three evolving poetic sequences. The field in question is contemporary and largely rhetorical. If these poems offer resistance—as I hope they might—they do so by way of appropriating, repurposing and recontextualizing (via various discursive strategies; that is, I have endeavored in them to preserve a thematic unity without relying on a univocality) small portions of what is most awful about the current political regime’s discourse.

My concern in the so-called “name poems” of Acrostic Aspic is with the conditions of celebrity as they are lived by non-celebrities, i.e., “you” and “me.” Or: I suppose these poems are all about minor celebrity, as their titles, borrowed from the outer limits of fame, suggest. Our subjectivities so often cohere in the back and forth between narratives intensely our own and those widespread narratives with which we cannot help but make contact, or which are in constant contact with us. But the latter narratives are so much more easily represented, not to mention “relatable,” while the former remain largely untranslatable. So this self-exchange can never be equal. Still, people live as they live, and their names mean something to them.

Finally, the numbered poems that constitute homeopathy for the singularity represent my attempts to undertake a slow study of online existence as it stands in 2017/2018.

What advice would you give to a writer just starting out?

Rejection letters are paychecks. They certify your labors. They’re promissory. They’re also bankable—that is, dependable. Keep saving them up. Keep showing up for work.

You can read Joe Milazzo’s work in the third issue of Night Music Journal, which will be released June 27.