What do you find most valuable (defined variously: inspirational for your own work useful for a conversation about the medium, whether it’s poetry, prose, or visual art plain interesting) about speaking to artists?īN: It allows me to look under the hood, pull back the curtain, and other metaphors. As the years have progressed, I find myself speaking with more and more literary folks, but hope to branch out (again) soon.ĮW: You’ve spoken with folks like Mary Ruefle, Brian Barker, and Paige Lewis, among many, many others.
From poets to collage artists to rappers to illustrators to translators to muralists and more. Along with where to find my writing (and offer my services), I really wanted to focus on the multimedia art blog aspect, in particular speaking with creatives of all types of disciplines. I launched in late 2016 as a one-stop-shop for all of my interests and curiosities. I want to talk about the site and your interview practice, especially with authors.īen Niespodziany: I’m grateful for that cold email, Evan. It seems to implore its reader to listen for a radio signal in the forest, to really hear it in its nuance, then to cast a lasso 'round the moon, just to give it a go-maybe it’s ready to be reeled in at last.Įvan Williams: We met during the fall of 2020 because I cold-emailed you after finding your Twitter account, which was linked on your website,, where all of your work is stored, including a slate of astounding poems and microfables, as well as a deep catalog of interviews with artists of all stripes. Niespodziany’s project is novel in method and tantalizing in message. No poem exemplifies this impulse better than the book’s final numbered piece, “”: The mode in which Niespodziany has written The Northerners contributes to this sense of just-almost-magic, each poem offering its reader a glimpse of the moon, the illogical, the impossible, or the fantastic, only to leave us on the edge of wonder for the next poem. It is the boy who seems most able to hold at once in his head the fact of worldly limitations and the presence of otherworldly wonder, the boy who seems able to convey both in a single stroke (from “”): Or, perhaps, they are too afraid to do so for fear that it’s just sand. The saint, forester, and butcher have become either so disillusioned by its hardness (“They catch the butcher in bed with/ weaponry and a pint of ink./ Feet of feather, tethered time.”) or so hopelessly optimistic that such an awful thing isn’t true (“The saint/ waits up late/ for a sign./ The moon/ does the same.”) that they have been dissuaded from chasing this magic. He writes in “”, “The real challenge is not/ lassoing the moon/ but reeling it in once caught.” Each of Niespodziany’s characters encounters this dilemma at some point or another each of them is able to feel the moon in their grasp but is able to bring it no closer than that. While the primary four actors in Niespodziany’s project provide a sense of stability in an otherwise fluid world, the ephemeral background players allow the book a sense of rapid motion through their whirlwind entrance and subsequent exit.Īt the core of Niespodziany’s project is the recognition that the illogical exists but is always just beyond our reach. Appearing briefly are the two monks, the neighborhood, the postman, the glutton, the pond, the coat rack, and the forest. Most present are the saint, the boy, the forester, and the butcher. Threading the episodic bursts into, if not a narrative, then at least a form of textually-depicted progression, is The Northerners’s cast of characters. The divisions between each poem are extreme, and yet, there are always two on a page and, save for the 37th poem, there’s always a degree of visual continuity.
De noorderlingen warmerdam movie#
The Northerners is episodic, like watching a movie in a theater cast in violent strobe-lighting.
Ben Niespodziany’s The Northerners (above/ground press, 2021) is a collection of 37 short, numbered poems written while watching Alex van Warmerdam’s 1992 film De Noorderlingen on mute.
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