Juliet Cook

Juliet Cook’s poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Action Yes, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Diode, Oranges & Sardines, Robot Melon and many other online and print sources. She is the editor/publisher of her own one-woman indie press, Blood Pudding Press. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including MONDO CRAMPO (Dusie Kollektiv 3), PINK LEOTARD & SHOCK COLLAR (Spooky Girlfriend Press), and Tongue Like a Stinger (Wheelhouse), with a new chapbook, FONDANT PIG ANGST, coming very soon from Slash Pine Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, ‘Horrific Confection’ was published by BlazeVOX in 2008. For more information, feel free to visit her website.

What is your poetic statement?

My most recurrent poetic themes revolve around my perception of consumption as a kind of antithesis to creativity. I am interested in creation rather than modes of production that involve churning out or buying machinated products or hot commodities. Yet it seems that I am pervasively encouraged to go with the assembly line flow. My themes are also intertwined with conflicted perceptions of femaleness—societal versus personal, outer versus inner, trying to reconcile the fictive versus the real when it comes to self-constructs and larger constructs. Within this context, the assembly line could be perceived as a doll injection mold. I think of my poems as resistant mutants working within the doll injection mold.

Imprinted somewhere in my head is a cookie cutter that I am both trying to fit into and trying to creep out of. Much of my poetry is situated in the realm of that conflicted resistance. If I could grow some new appendages like a misshapen tail or tentacles, then I wouldn’t fit the mold. I think of my poems as appendages on a larger body that is trying to evolve into a new breed of misfit.

I like poetry that borders the unappetizing and grotesque. Despite the visceral aspects of my poetry, though, it is not raw or half-baked. I am precise about word choices. I am attuned to the overall arrangement of each poem. It is important to maintain a tone that serves the internal logic of the poem. I enjoy imaginativeness and unexpected language usage, but I like it to be contextualized. I am a fan of multiple connotations, underlying evocations, provocation, and disconcerting juxtapositions. I am interested in juxtaposing cuteness and other seemingly innocuous girlish traits with horror, danger, disgustingness, and misfit rage.

I like to bake horrific confections. I like to play with alternate meanings of edibility. Some of the ideas at play within my poetry involve variations on looking good enough to eat, eating or being eaten, manifestations of voracious appetites, insatiability. I think about consumption as purchasing power, as devouring, as disease, as death. I include consumables in my poetry—delectable consumables, corrupt consumables, women consuming, women choking on what they’re supposed to consume, women being consumed. Women as dessert products, because they are both delighted in and deemed sinful; they are both adored and dismissed as fluff. If they don’t fit the mold, then they may be demonized. If they’re not easy on the eyes/easy on the mind, then they may be castigated. It seems as if women who do not fit the mold are presented as anomalies, but most women don’t fit the mold. I’m not trying to present women as victims, but am more than willing to present them as flawed, warped, conflicted, and complex.
List up to five bullet points any major historical (may be personal events such as getting married or having kids or graduating) events which changed or moved your writing experience.

Five events

I’m not good at thinking in terms of time, time frames, or events in the context of time frames, so my list will be more random.

1. Horror movies, female victimization therein, female beauty standards, female complicity therein, cosmetic surgery, performance art, my own complicity

2. Feminism and its various inclusions and exclusions, pussy-centrism

3. Misfit-ism, not fitting in to the doll injection mold, alienation, being in-between

4. My husband and his past, my own past, irreconcilable love and death, fear of death

5. Choosing to embrace microcosms instead of big pictures, but still struggling with this

Please tell our readers what projects you are currently working on.

I just published a new Blood Pudding Press chapbook, ‘The Spare Room’ by Dana Guthrie Martin, now available via www.BloodPuddingPress.etsy.com. Blood Pudding Press will now take a little hiatus so that I may focus on my participation with the Dusie Kollektiv 4, through which I will be self-publishing a small collection of personal poems, tentatively titled ‘Soft Foam’, which deals with intersections between love and death. I’m kind of nervous about this collection, as some of its some of its content seems overly personal in a vulnerability-inducing way, but I’m thinking it’s a good thing to move beyond one’s usual comfort zones in the creative realm. Before that chapbook comes to fruition, though, I have a chapbook called FONDANT PIG ANGST to be published very soon through Slash Pine Press; pre-order available now via http://slashpinepress.blogspot.com/. I’m quite excited about this chapbook; to me, its content is pretty perverse in an oddly oblique kind of way and I’m delightfully surprised that it was selecte as one of two manuscripts to be published from Slash Pine Press’s first open reading period. Other than writing and publishing poetry, I’m working on various reviews and blurbs, plus doing some writing for a local independent film company, etc…

What was your biggest triumph in the last 10 years?

I’m pretty proud of the fact I’ve been able to achieve some success as a poet (based on my own ideas about success, not societal definitions) even though I never got my MFA and am not entrenched in academe. The majority of poets I’m acquainted with do have advanced degrees and/or some affiliation with academe and for a while there, I felt like it was more difficult to develop writerly connections without being privy to that kind of built-in network of community that an academic environment provides. For a while, I felt that I had no community, but now I feel like I do (although I still don’t understand how so many poets are able to attend numerous writing conferences and travel around for reading tours and so forth, because I can’t financially afford that sort of participation and sometimes it makes me feel left out). Starting up Blood Pudding Press in 2006 was a big step in helping me feel more involved.

Do you have any regrets and if so what would you have done different?

I don’t have many big writing-oriented regrets, but I do have an ongoing sense that nothing I do is good enough and that I do not know how to do things right, whatever that even means. Fortunately, I do not feel terribly bound by such insecurity or parameters when writing poetry.

Which publication had the biggest impact on your work and why?

I can’t really pin this down, because the publications that impact my work are always evolving, as my work evolves. I will say that I’m a pretty voracious reader and writers who don’t read other writers’ writings irk me.

Provide advice for someone that is just starting to write poetry and submitting their work.

If it’s a hobby rather than a passion for you, then I wish you wold just move along to something else; if it’s a passion, then pursue what you need to pursue and relegate other’s reactions to secondary status.

Please share one poem of yours which you feel best represents your work in the past 10 years.

It’s nearly impossible for me to choose one representative poem; I’ll offer up the title poem from my chapbook ‘MONDO CRAMPO’::

Mondo Crampo

I have big bad “cramps” &
“bloating” & such inappropriate desire
to piss in the chicken soup.

I’m craving more deviled eggs,
but my tongue is too swollen
to fondle them before I swallow.

I just want to chew chew chew.
I just want to swallow swallow swallow.
I just want to spit spit spit.

Shove it all in me, there’s no real limit
to what I’ll consume. When I’m overloaded,
I’ll just shove some kind of pills down there.

I’m feeling like a dumpling academy
stuffed full of little juvenile delinquents &
charm school rejects & art school misfits &

alien witches who can’t control their own cauldrons,
which are oozing some kind of red ectoplasm,
and bitching about their “water weight”.

My tongue is so swollen it’s like a cow tongue
and of course they’re going to make a sandwich
out of it—some kind of PORNO sandwich.

I’m craving a long ride on that carousel,
on which all the horses have rainbow-striped
dildos sticking out of their backs,

& of course I’m going to get it all bloody & gross.