5 Questions with Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment,The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer,BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.

Kate Durbin will be reading from her newest poetry book, Hoarders (published by Wave Books) with special guest Alex Dimitrov, also reading from new work, in our City Lights LIVE! virtual events series on Thursday, May 6th!

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Where are you writing to us from?

Los Angeles, California. I’m sitting at my writing desk with a bowl of Lucky Charms.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I recently bought a View-Master from eBay, and I’ve been looking at all these beautiful old reels, of places like Yellowstone in the 60s, and miniatures of old Disney movies like Pinocchio. There’s something comforting about a little 3-D world inside a View-Master. It gives this feeling of a world continuing on, outside the frame, beyond your vision.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

Right now I’m reading Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, Henry Hoke’s The Groundhog Forever,Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, Divya Victor’s Curb, and Ted Dodson’s An Orange.

I return to more books than I can list here! I’m a big re-reader. The most recent is Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which are beautiful, short, strange meditations on everyday objects and spaces. I have been thinking a lot about objects, how mysterious they really are. And their complicated relationships to people. This object-person question is a thread through my books E! Entertainment, Hoarders, and a novel I’m working on now about my childhood.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was a big influence for my most recent book, Hoarders. Stein’s book is filled with slippery little objects with a language all their own. In Hoarders, the objects also have a kind of animism, or life to them, and a sense of humor too. For example, there’s a poem filled with surreal Barbies, that are real Barbies that have actually been made and marketed! Walk and Potty Pup Barbie, who comes with a tiny dog with nuggets of fake poop, Claude Monet Water Color Barbie, Tippi Hedren in The Birds Barbie, and many more.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My bookstore would be located inside the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas, somewhere near the shark slide. It would be called McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets, and our bestseller would be Jean Baudrillard’s America.

4 Questions with Hoa Nguyen, Author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. She is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, andA Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure which is new from Wave Books in April 2021. She has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and as a judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others.

Hoa is celebrating her new book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure on City Lights LIVE!, joined by Garrett Caples, on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021.

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City Lights: Where are you writing to us from?

Hoa Nguyen: I write to you from Toronto, the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation in the Dish With One Spoon Territory.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Poetry and my friendships, family. The love in my home; the love of my Dale.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people?

John Lemprière’s The Bibliotheca Classica, or Classical Dictionary containing a full Account of all the Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors.

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon.

A Guide to the I Ching by Carol K. Anthony or the collaborative translation of the I Ching by Anthony with Hannah Moog where they use a “clarifying method” to assist in that work.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Singer-songwriter traditions and folk song. Story as song in verse was something specifically that compelled me. An early musical lesson was from listening to Johnny Cash’s “John Henry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” next to Vietnamese folk songs on a reel-to reel. The poems’ narrative form in my new book is lyric that strays into fractures, checks out archive, and seeks musical reference—the orientation remains musical.

Another influence was Joanne Kyger’s work with biography in verse and her proposal of finding the lost tones of the poetry stone, specifically. A mythic orientation whereby you can render the actors of another era palpable and present. Along with that there was the experience studying Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee in a mythopoetics workshop (where we also read Kyger’s On Time and Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette). Thinking about how poems can address time; how to tell / retell and shape story, new relationships to meaning making, world making.

I was thinking through what it means “to document” to relate from memory. I was also looking into the history of Vietnamese music, especially the monochord of Vietnam, the đàn bầu. The music the bent string produces sounds like a voice and is distinct to the southern Mekong delta region, influenced by the Cham. The notes blur and bend in similar progressions as Mississippi delta blues and the slide guitar, too, has shared voice-like qualities.