AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (ADAM FELL)
Bio: Adam Fell is the author of Catastrophizer, winner of the Sixth Finch 2022 Chapbook Contest, and two books of poetry: Dear Corporation (Forklift Books, 2019), and I Am Not A Pioneer (2011), winner of the Posner Poetry Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He has had more than thirty poems published in various journals and magazines, and is an Associate Professor of English at Edgewood College in Madison, WI, where he also curates the Monsters of Poetry reading series.
Book Title: Catastrophizer
Press: Sixth Finch Books
1. What is something that surprised you during the writing, editing, or publishing process for Catastrophizer?
The amount of hope that swept in while I was writing them. I originally sat down to get all the rage out about our American political and environmental landscape but found that there was a hopeful presence that surged against it time and time again. Flickers of my stepson and son and wife. Flickers of their energy and creativity and the compassion and curiosity with which they engage the world. While I was writing I would hear them in different rooms and it always brought that feeling back. I couldn’t help but imagine a bright future for them, despite evidence pointing to a dire future for America. Community and tenderness flowed in between the cracks in the apocalyptic façade. I’m surprised by that still, the way hope leaks into the poems despite my own resistance to it. I’m very glad for its insistence, its beautiful infiltration.
2. How might you describe the “experiment” or challenge of this chapbook? What form, procedure, sound, or mystery enlivened your mind while writing?
The seeds of the poems came from my file full of lines I’ve either never found poetic homes for, thought were just pretty weird and surreal, or that I’ve cut out of other poems for various reasons and I felt energy pouring from and wanted to repurpose. The first Catastrophizer poems then became a sort of emotional collage, adapting these lines to a certain feeling that I’ve been grappling with: what does it mean when one feels generally happy and safe in their personal life, but the world feels like it’s falling apart? There’s not an answer in the poems (I don’t think my poems answer questions particularly well; I’m not sure any poem does) but there is a sense of foraging through it, searching. That was the big experiment I gave myself at the beginning, and then, later, I tried to create lines that felt as if they were collaged, even though I was just kinda wandering through them in a more casual way.
3. Can you discuss an edit, idea, response, or interaction with another person that helped this chapbook find its way in the world—aesthetically, materially, visually, structurally, spiritually…?
Catastrophizer would not have existed without my fifteen-year-old stepson and my (as of this writing) seventeen-month-old son. I, admittedly, have, in my life, had a difficult time having what others might call “fun” or being “silly.” There’s probably a host of reasons in my brain for that, but the kids in my life have necessitated a real attempt at actionable change, especially recently. I need to be open, present, mindful, unabashedly silly and that has been a struggle for me historically. My mind whirls, lots of flames, lots of junk backed up, so to clear that all away is difficult, but I’ve been finding more and more moments of peace and grace and joy in the attempt. I hope I’m getting better. That’s really up to them to decide, though. That search for presentness is fast becoming a pretty holy thing to me, and I’m finding joy in retraining my mind for such important people, though I also get frustrated sometimes by my failures. I type this all here because it’s those beautiful interactions and the tough moves I’m trying to make my brain do that force me to contemplate a catastrophic, chaotic future of environmental damage, disinformation, and bigotry for my stepson and son. It burns me with guilt and contempt to imagine that, for it to be a possibility. I hate society in those moments because of that fact. It makes my attempts at presentness even more precious, even more essential to get right as soon as possible. Plus, it means I’m way more fun for them.
4. Is there a physical place or space you associate with the poems in Catastrophizer?
At first, we had a little office space downstairs beyond some french doors. Then, at the start of the pandemic, we moved it upstairs to our bedroom dormer so I could teach remote classes up there. Then, we moved it back down because our baby needed to sleep in our room and the dormer was the perfect space for that. Last month, we had those french doors taken out and a pocket door put in and our once office became the baby’s room, thus the desk went back upstairs to the dormer. The transience of that space has only aided in the transience of where I feel comfortable working. It’s easier to sneak in moments of writing at the kitchen table or in bed or on the couch, now. So, the entire house has become a sort of wandering office space depending on where I can find the time and momentary quiet. I don’t mind this way of working. I’m around if I’m needed but away enough. I like being able to hear everyone downstairs, baby padding around, laughter, muffled records. Or my wife singing, playing guitar in another room. It’s calming, helpful, conducive to the poems, and it’s probably where a good amount of that hope sneaks in to the apocalyptic poems of Catastrophizer, like muffled sounds of loved ones having fun in other rooms.
5. What’s something that feels difficult about having a chapbook—or this chapbook, specifically—come into the world?
Being unable and unwilling to really tour this book into the ground is difficult for me. I’m proud of the poems but just cannot find the time or verve to doggedly travel from place to place, sleeping on couches, reading to crowds. It’s the one sure way to get people to buy some poetry books. But when I’m gone, I’m sad I’m gone, despite the warmth of those rooms, the camaraderie.
6. What do you appreciate about the press (Sixth Finch books) that published this work?
Rob MacDonald is the main editor at Sixth Finch and he made the process of putting Catastrophizer together almost unreasonably easy and anxiety-free. He let the poems speak for themselves, let me have a say in the cover art and presentation, took my opinions with grace, and helped these poems become better versions of themselves. He also worked fast to get copies out and is responsive. A wonderful press to work with in every way.
7. Do you recall the most recent small press (micro, indie, DIY, university) publication you’ve recommended? What made you want to tell someone about it?
I just told my students at Edgewood College about Familiar by Matt Hart, from Pickpocket Books, an imprint of Ledge Mule Press run by Dave Torneo and Ross Gay out of Bloomington, IN. Familiar is conceptually fascinating, emotionally fortifying, and constantly surprising. It’s essentially a re-translation/obliteration of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” from Spanish back into a contemporary English that expands, explodes, reinforces, destroys, rebuilds, confounds, colludes with, and contorts Whitman’s poem. As if in some alternate universe a human aging serum was discovered and Whitman lived to met Lorca, Stein, Apollinaire, Etheridge Knight, Ian McKaye, Kim Deal, and Familiar is the exquisite corpse they wrote together. It’s that messy, compassionate, strange, and brilliant.
8. Is there a text, song, piece of art, or made thing that your chapbook talks to, borrows from, fights with, or is in tribute to?
Low’s album Hey What came out in the fall of 2021 when I was working on these poems and I haven’t been as affected emotionally by music in many years. It’s both dissonant and full of excruciatingly angry guitar loops and angelically beautiful in a nearly holy way. It’s the perfect sonic distillation of what I feel inside most days: joy and grace and revelation with my family while America totters on the precipice of a sink hole. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s vocals hover above, clear and beguiling and stun me into silence while distortion and glitch-crushed sounds roil beneath. It is exactly what I was trying to get at with Catastrophizer. Writing myself through grief and anxiety and in to a sort of hope that we can help our kids fix it all (and how terrible we are for shouldering them with the burden). Just go listen to “Days Like These” and how the first searching, blue-sky verse is shattered by feedback in the second and then crumbles to an ambient calm. It’s everything I feel in five minutes of music.
9. What adventures are you looking forward to, thinking about, or practicing now?
I’m excited to wander fall with my family. Seeing all these familiar changes (temperature, leaves, the smell of the air, etc.) and all the fun midwestern stuff like apple orchards and pumpkin patches through our seventeen-month-old’s eyes is fascinating and it beguiles me, makes me feel like I’m seeing the world for the first time. I know that’s cheesy and a real “new parent” thing to say, but I don’t care. It’s true. Cheesy things are only cheesy when someone else is trying to explain them and doesn’t have the language. When you feel them, they’re often transcendent. Luckily, poetry does the same thing in a slightly different way. Which leads me to a practice I’m working on: reading slower. Connected living has made me read too fast, and not careful enough. It’s getting harder for me to read a book of poems and not have my mind wander away from the work. I find it offensive of myself to do that to myself. My class and I just read through and talked about the exquisite Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa and I had a hard time at first because of my brain, not because of the poems. Then, I sunk in and let the poems overwhelm me and Komunyakaa pulled me under. It was beautiful. Just gotta do it more often, more mindfully, keep reminding myself there are different types of reading as there are different types of water, of air.
10. Who will you gift a copy of Catastrophizer to? Or where will you leave it for someone to find?
I help curate a reading series in Madison, WI called Monsters of Poetry and at our last reading I gave copies of Catastrophizer to the amazing, dynamic readers Dantiel W. Moniz, Sasha Debevac-McKenney, Greg Zorko, and Matt Hart. Go run out and find their work online and in indie bookstores immediately. There’s also a really cute little free art library thing (a Little Free Bookstore but with cute pieces of art (most seeming to be made by kids) to take home and share) down the street I live on. I’m going to put one in there, I think. Maybe it can yap and coo and coerce some stranger into giving it a new home.