Charles Jensen on “The First Risk”

Charles Jensen is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award;  the founding editor of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT; and the director of The Writer’s Center, based in Bethesda, Maryland. His new book and first full-length collection of poetry is The First Risk, a marvelous work that features four extended sequences, each with its own focus and identity and yet each resonant with the others on a number of levels. The first section, “Safe,” revisits the murder of Matthew Shepard in October 1998 and juxtaposes that crime with an exploration of the myth of Venus and Adonis as depicted in a painting by Luca Cambiaso. The central sections — “City of the Sad Divas” and “The Double Bind: A Critical Text” — respond to the characters, plotlines and persistent themes in two films: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, respectively. And the final section, “The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon” — previously published as a chapbook in its own right — explores the often chilling, ultimately heart-rending attempts by physicists Edward and Maribel Dixon to reach “The Ghost-World.”

Jensen read from the just-pubished collection in September at the Fall for the Book Festival and graciously agreed to a few questions here about how the book came together.

Art Taylor: Many of the poems in The First Risk respond to or are inspired by other stories, both real-life and fictional: the murder of Matthew Shepard, a Renaissance painting, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Does your work usually grow out of your “readings” of news stories or films or other arts? And to what extent do you anticipate that your own readers’ experiences will depend on knowledge of those sources?

Charles Jensen

Charles Jensen: While this book in particular is very ekphrastic in nature, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily typical for me. I’ve been very interested in exploring voice in the last few years, trying on different guises. And I like blurring the lines between reality and fiction, which I think this book does extensively (the “real story” is murky with mythology, while the most invented story appears to be the most factual/documented). Since finishing The First Risk, I’ve been working on a sequence of poems in the voices of Dorothy Eady/Omm Sety, who was the most “reasonable” evidence for belief in reincarnation; Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon Church; and Dorothy Gale, the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz. As a whole, the three voices are negotiating the relationship between faith and love, faith and certainty, and faith and reality. For this sequence, because the voices are so enmeshed in those ideas, I’ve included “historical notes” with the poems to give them context, but doing so makes me wonder if somehow the poems haven’t failed. I’m still working that out. I think a lot about what my reader needs to know when encountering the poems, and I’ve been trying to determine, particularly in readings from The First Risk, how to fill them in. I hope that readers can still enjoy the individual pieces or sequences without having ALL the background information, but I think knowing the stories behind the poems gives them added dimension.

The World Is Fat (And The Schedule Is, Too)

Last night, Tara and I got sucked into a reality television show: NBC’s The Biggest Loser — a show which, needless to say, reinforced our recent resolutions to eat less and exercise more (and my own private resolution to watch less bad TV). With the new year already a week old, lots of folks are making — and maybe already breaking — similar resolutions. The new year is also bringing us a new crop of books and bookstore readings and signings. And somewhere in there is a transition to this week’s schedule of events down in North Carolina and up in the D.C. area, because first on my list of things to recommend is an appearance by Dr. Barry Popkin, talking about his new book, The World Is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race. 

Popkin is a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of UNC’s Interdisciplinary Obesity Center, and he has written widely on issues of nutrition and obesity for a variety of newspapers of newspapers and magazines ranging from the New York Times to Scientific American. Popkin declared a couple of years ago that there were more overweight people than undernourished people worldwide (1 billion compared to 800 million), and his new book explores some of the causes and consequences of the global obesity epidemic. He’ll be speaking at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, N.C. on Thursday, January 8 at 4 p.m. — the first event of the store’s 2009 reading series.

Other venues are also gearing up the new year’s readings, signings and discussions. See selected highlights below.

North Carolina

In the late 1990s, Sheri Reynolds delivered an impressive trio of books with Bitterroot Landing, The Rapture of Canaan and A Gracious Plenty — the middle of which became an Oprah Book Club pick and earned a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Seven years passed between her third book and her fourth, 2006′s The Firefly Cloak, but Reynolds seems to be back on track, touring now with her latest novel, The Sweet In-Between. A Boston Globe review of the new book called Reynolds “a gifted writer with a deceptively simple style and a keen ear for dialogue” and it’s those qualities that make her upcoming Triangle appearances such a draw for readers. The author — a South Carolina native and Virginia resident — will be reading from and signing copies of the new book on Friday, January 9, at 2 p.m. at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village, and again later that day, at 7 p.m., at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop. 

The same night at 7:30 p.m., NYT bestselling author Kate Jacobs stops by Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books to discuss her latest novel, Knit Two, a sequel to The Friday Night Knitting Club. 

On Tuesday, January 13, at 7:30 p.m., Quail Ridge hosts N.C. State University professor Rob Dunn, with his book Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys. 

And next Wednesday, January 14, at 7 p.m., the Regulator welcomes Jill Conner Browne with her latest book, American Thighs: The Sweet Potato Queens’ Guide to Preserving Your Assets. (See my review of Browne’s previous Sweet Potato Queens book here.)

Northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland

A couple of the authors above are also swinging through the D.C. area en route to North Carolina. Kate Jacobs, for example, will appear at the Borders at Baileys Crossroads on Thursday, January 8, at 7:30 p.m., and Jill Conner Browne visits the same store next Tuesday, January 13, also at 7:30. 

But amidst these and many, many other writers bounding through the area over the next week, it’s a trio of other events I want to call to your attention now.

First, Kyle Semmel, interviewed here just before Christmas, joins fellow staff members at the Writer’s Center this weekend for a reading of their own original poetry and prose. Semmel, for example, will be reading his translation of a story by Danish author Simon Fruelund, and other readers will include Charles Jensen, Carol Cissel, Abdul Ali Abdurrahman,Caitlin Hill, Janel Carpenter, Peter O’Brien, and Sunil Freeman. The reading takes place Sunday afternoon, January 11, beginning at 2 p.m. at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Then, poet Nikki Giovanni — who delighted standing-room-only crowds two years ago at the Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason — will visit Politics and Prose in D.C. on Monday, January 12, at 10:30 a.m. to discuss two new books for children:  Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship and  Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry With a Beat. (That last one comes with a CD too!)

And riding the Roberto Bolaño wave: P&P also hosts Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Lorin Stein for a discussion of Bolaño’s overwhelmingly acclaimed  2666. That event takes place next Wednesday, January 14, at 7 p.m.

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