Lina ramona Vitkauskas - As in Antonioni’s great films, the body is clothes and the clothes are part of the visual atmosphere. A dress moves through a toxic landscape, or a ‘toxic love.’ The ‘trysts’ are movies, fantasies, art. Vitkauskas is ‘surreal, primitive, impressionist, whatever’

Lina ramona Vitkauskas, A Neon Tryst, Shearsman Books, 2013.

linaramona.com/

A NEON TRYST is a collection of ekphrastic poems featuring the films L'Eclisse (director Michelangelo Antonioni); Seconds (John Frankenheimer); and Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman). Though divided in three separate sections by film, the collection stands as one, cohesive piece, as all main characters share an internal conflict—losing identity with the passage of time. One flees an unhappy marriage and throws herself into fleeting, cold relationships against a rigid and futuristic atomic backdrop—all of her apocalyptic decisions revealing the "time bomb" within. One alters his identity completely by committing pseudocide, then undergoing an intense surgical transformation, only to return to his "old" life. The last, a retired professor in his golden years, takes a journey to his alma mater to be honored for lifetime achievement, only to discover along the way that his life has been anti-climactic at best. The three pieces as a whole illustrate that human tendency is to erase before evolving—as Daumal said, "I become conscious of myself by denying my existence"—and that this is dangerous, liberating, and necessary.

“The ‘trysts’ of Lina Vitkauskas’s book are shot through with ‘neon’—that is, they are saturated with chemicals, textures, atmosphere, and media. According to this synthetic cosmology, ‘In an affair / arms laugh, / they become sheer.’ That is to say, they—arms, bodies, weapons, trysts—become both medium and adjective, both see-through and material. As in Antonioni’s great films, the body is clothes and the clothes are part of the visual atmosphere. A dress moves through a toxic landscape, or a ‘toxic love.’ The ‘trysts’ are movies, fantasies, art. Vitkauskas is ‘surreal, primitive, impressionist, whatever.’” - Johannes Göransson

If film is linear, the ultimate time-based medium, during which we are supposed to listen and watch attentively, passively, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas’ poems in A Neon Tryst talk back. These poems create simultaneity, layers, and distillations toward new narrative logics like ‘Let’s laugh until panties.’ Vitkauskas is watching for the poem in the film, writing her own subtitles—deliciously peculiar subtitles— and in their irreverence they are expansive, wise, and sometimes very funny. Her playful gestures in the face of the tightly choreographed imprint of film create incidental and embodied new texts, and this may very well be a feminist enterprise in its daring, toppling film’s male gaze with ‘I have to half you.’ So if Bergman or narrative expectation of any stripe ever presses on you with too much force, don’t worry! Take A Neon Tryst in hand, ‘Be frothy/and rascally’ and soon you may delight in talking back to the screen everywhere, perhaps adding, with a shrug: ‘I can’t stand chalets.’ ” – Jill Magi

“Everything is true,” he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.” — Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I’m always surprised that in 2013, there’s still a strain of cinemaphobia in some parts of academia. We’ve all heard the by-now well-worn arguments. Movies make us passive. Movies are the Roman bread-circuses of our time. The image is by its very nature oppressive, etc. There’s a deeply conservative strain of argument behind some of this thinking. We see the fear of the image in Plato, for example, where all things are appearances, false images that are nothing but debased forms of the true Concept. An image is doubly evil in this worldview since it is really the shadow of a shadow.
In contrast, there has always been a counter-tradition that sees images as additions, as surplus. And the lack of ground beneath the feet of the Image is really the lack of ground below our own feet.
Derrida used to say film and photography revealed something that had always been the case anyway — the world is full of ghosts. We’re ghosts to ourselves and others are ghosts to us. The fear of Image is often linked to the fear of anti-foundationalism. In this sense, all films are ghost stories.
*********
What is Lina Vitkauskas’ A Neon Tryst? A meeting place under a neon sign? A meeting place between poet and film, under the light of the marquee? Three movies are involved: Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, Frankenheimer’s Seconds, and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. - James Pate

Lina ramona Vitkauskas’s ekphrastic book of poetry, A Neon Tryst, has just been released by UK publisher, Shearsman Books. It begins:

Contents

Black Patent Translations 
toL’Eclisse                                                                                                     7

Wilson, 722 
to Seconds                                                                                                     29

Into the Black Flocks 
to Wild Strawberries                                                                                       59

These parts each begin with a short summary of their respective film:

L’Eclisse (1962) stars the sleek-silver-hypnotic Monica Vitti as a lost woman re-discovering herself after leaving her husband…

Seconds (1966) stars Rock Hudson as an aging, bored, East-coast man who is encouraged to commit pseudocide by an ominous group of wealthy men called ‘The Company’…

Bergman’s classic film, Wild Strawberries (1957), tells the tale of an aged, retired professor travelling cross-country to his alma mater to receive a lifetime achievement award.

I liked being reminded of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, in particular, geometric Monica Vitti dripping across the screen, her crystalline angles and lines, filmed in black-and-white.

Printed on the back cover of A Neon Tryst is this:

all the main characters share an internal conflict—losing identity with the passage of time.

The book’s cover art is a still from the film, of Vitti’s sleeping face, doubled and cropped. Vitkauskas manipulated the image herself. She has made it wilder: she has given it color:

This is a Neon Tryst. The monochrome Monica Vitti has been given layers. Her sleeping eyes lit from below, impressed from above, the Vitti on the cover sends a different signal than the Vitti of the film. We are reminded whose tryst this is—Vitkauskas’s: electric, in neon.

L’Eclisse, Seconds, and The Wild Strawberries were all made during the late 50s and early- to mid-60s, in black-and-white.

I located Wild Strawberries, invoked in Vitkauskas’s third and last poem, first, and decided to watch it for the first time in probably ten years.

The film is obsessed with the futility of time, in its classic images of hand-less clocks, the perpetual intrusion of dream sequences upon the story.

No matter which of Bergman’s films I watch, there is a quality they all seem to share, which never seems to waver: anything in life of any value resides in recollections of one’s childhood. Though Bergman was only 39 when he made Wild Strawberries, he seems to predict his own fate in the character of Isak Borg, the aged professor of his film. Bergman says in an interview late in his life, “I would have been happier if I’d been anonymous.”

Vitkauskas devotes 22 poems to the film. In German, the word for poetry means to condense. So I marveled at what Vitkauskas does with, say, this sequence, Professor Isak Borg’s strange, “humiliating” dream:

Vitkauskas writes “Dozing off”:

Unlanguage our blessings.
Listen as a professor.
You know so much and know nothing.
Her striped dress
as she runs through sheets,
rotten baby in a curdled bassinet,
her curls succeeding
your twisted branch.
Here the life breathes into the black flocks.

As this section of the book is called “Into the Black Flocks,” I wonder if this might be the most important image in the film for Vitkauskas. Certainly she knows something about breathing neon into black-and-white.

Invoking these films in her language, on her page, new sequences unfurl, almost as though new characters are speaking. The people on Vitkauskas’s pages have been conjured from the world of Bergman, but in that transmutation enjoy a new kind of existence.

For instance, when Isak Borg dreams of a real scene he was made to witness many years before, of his wife’s infidelity, there is the poem, “The swamp moss, the rusted ladder”:

Resistance is a board,
Laugh a pop of ice
among tenderized digits,
each number a calculated
sweet, an emerald lisp of jealousy.

Vitkauskas has given Isak Bork a new voice: a grubbier, bolder one, more saucy and motoring. In other poems, he cracks jokes, he assaults. Vitkauskas receives a late-night hum, works like an interloper, transmuting the film world into her pristine hint of wink and back row auditorium smack. There is something in these poems that at times feels smarter than the films they invoke. And that’s a good thing.

In this scene from John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, the character of Rock Hudson, framed by the ominous “Company”, has been transformed from bored businessman retiree to hip, young emerging artist via reconstructive surgery. A beautiful young woman he discovers on the beach (who he will later discover has been hired to dupe him in his new life) is instantly smitten with him.

“Nora Marcus”
Her bare feet in ocean,
all the power.
Mind her
and chop her
with two boys,
complete with microwave oven.
Kitchen floor
face
rain.
Finishing
the hurt.
She is so sweater,
she is so weather,
she knows I null myself
impure, that I am tentative.
Unturned.
Her teeth just like everyone’s.
It is very nice here.
The good things always happen with the rain.

At this moment, when the words of the film and the words of the poem are the same, Vitkauskas calibrates to the film’s original timbre, but on her own terms. In writing from the perspective of the “impure…tentative/Unturned” leading man, we feel very thick in a tryst, ether-ridden, a new moon quaking above.

Here, too:

“Convertible Dionysius”
What do you do with a drunken sailor?
Where’s the wild-wine-nipple Renaissance?
Here.
She fucks everyone’s accordions, flutes, and laurels.
Rock Hudson, I break you into coronets.
She in grapeseed residue pressed against fertile bodies,
braless bosoms, rosy-buttocked as Anne Boleyn.
She slips off her white dress
and rubs me in Santa Barbara:
a new model of a barrel life, laughing.
I don’t know any of these people.
I’m dying and that’s the world.

In taking on the transformed movie man’s voice, Vitkauskas cuts to the core of his yearning, while making him wilder, more clandestine. In the poems, I appreciate him more than I do in the film because, through Vitkauskas, I understand him differently, perhaps better.

My favorite poem in the book might be in the L’Eclisse section.

“The dogs of the neighbourhood”
Love is difficult;
drunk as an upright poodle.

The tone is Vitkauskas’s own: she has a rye glint in her eye, too wise to come on cantankerous. Hers is a resigned world-wear, the kind that is so much fun. “Wicker Clouds” begins:

Carmel Coral is too vulnerable
for a ring, for a new car, for a husband!

Then the poem spills into actual film dialogue, in italics. Vitkauskas appears again, at the end, for a real one-line cincher:

We sex for the keyhole game.

So the poet surrounds the film with her voice, playing it like book-ends.

I like how Vitkausas zooms in on one small item from a scene, making it the title of a poem, heralding the life of objects. Like in “Dino’s mini fan,” which “clashes with trading/screams at the ugly bell” of the stock exchange, in the “octopi pit/into the lamb dance of worth.”

In Vitkaukas’s biography on Shearsman Books’ website, there is a note that the poet is “fascinated by…retinas (after nearly going blind)”. This did not surprise me. Vitkauskas’s lens is kaleidoscopic, atemporal, hypnotic—and makes me wish “ekphrasize” were a verb.

- August Evans

Lina ramona Vitkauskas,  HONEY IS A SHE, Plastique Press, 2012.  

DOWNLOAD Standard edition »

Standard edition: A free download of the PDF version of this eBook.
Extended edition: This extended version of the eBook includes a selection of nine spoken word tracks (in MP3 format) from Vitkauskas' collection "Opaque Lunacy," as an audio prologue to the work in "HONEY IS A SHE." The extended edition will be available in early June, 2012.

"Vitkauskas’ poems possess the intricate peculiarity of honeycombs and Schiaparelli dresses, as she exquisitely fashions poems out of scientific particulars, cinematic references ('they place the horse head in the bed'), and metaphors’ associative logic. 'These girls are brave tailors in the blur of impossible femme,' and like her own subject, Vitkauskas is fearless as she navigates, interrogates, and ultimately, dislocates conventional gender dynamics: 'I rip the itch from gender.' The dynamism, humor, and marvel of her poems recall the surrealist Joyce Mansour, conveying a similar tenor as they negotiate desire and disease, ardor and animosity, with beehive fervor. Be stung and sung in the 'golden / drip science' of her resplendent poems."—Simone Muench

"Splendid, grotesque, violent, but always loving, Lina ramona Vitkauskas writes like a contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva through a landscape of the uncertain and surreal; the language is made from the nervousness and energy of every bee in the hive. Part “rotten aorta” and part “snapdragon wine”, the poems in HONEY IS A SHE form a buzzing network of inventive beauty.”
—Sandra Simonds



 
Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Range of Your Amazing Nothing, Ravenna Press, 2010.

Lina ramona Vitkauskas s poetry is richly textured and layered, a palimpsest pleasure. In The Range of Your Amazing Nothing, Ashbery and Superman, Lorca and Jacqueline Bisset, Nancy (the comic strip character) and Forrest Gander all coexist and inform her most amazing verse.

  “Inside these drunk, ridiculous, and belligerently interesting poems are pre-Aeneid rocket people, Sartre
cowboys, and orgasms under trench coats. Vitkauskas uses savage
invention, the hook of good fiction, and the everyday and insane in poem after poem that go headlong
over the edge. But—all the everything aside—something is at stake and you will laugh and you will
be disturbed and you will be seized into an entirely new galaxy of
poetry.”— Fred Sasaki

“Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poetry is richly textured and layered, a palimpsest pleasure. In THE
RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING, Ashbery and Superman, Lorca and Jacqueline Bisset,
Nancy (the comic strip character) and Forrest Gander all coexist and inform her most amazing verse.
While the bright surface of her poetry employs humor and kitsch, the dazzling underside confronts of
intolerance and terrorism with a wise brilliance.”—Denise Duhamel

"It is strange to occupy the world of Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poems, a world where beef takes
nebulous forms, Jacques Derrida and Batman speculatively coincide, where cumin forms into fists,
where W.H. Auden sets things on fire, while Sartre cowboys ride into a present tense that combines
the Handmaid’s Tale with mad science with the meaningful meaningless dialogue of politics and
propaganda. But while these poems are filled with wild images, they are also subtle in their devious
shifts and proclamations. The dream capsules of amazing nothings of this book are, to paraphrase
Wallace Stevens, both there and not there. These poems are fun, soothingly frantic, and optimistically
generous."—Daniel Borzutzky

Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening.

Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poetic persona is one of, as the title alludes, dizzying range, as are the poems themselves in The Range of Your Amazing Nothing; one recurring theme and also the title of one of the strongest poems is the “execution of lively girls.” From the poem titled same: “ . . . the men in white have a hunch/ for girls like you:/ unfamiliar understudies of existence.”
At times the speaker’s perspective is that of someone trying to deconstruct a lively girl, and the speaker is the first to laugh at their confusion. “Poised like a mathematician/ upon sleeves of papyrus,/ my god, every bit of you is vicarious,/ I have been this quilt of crushed,/ radium smiles before.” The pun on the poet’s last name and vicarious, whether intentional or not, is an entertaining way the wide-ranging speaker infuses her protean “I” with personally-felt substance. The motif of this poem—the unalienable agency of male actors (and men) as contrasted with the bit parts often given to lively women in film—makes the “brutal chrysalis of identity” of which the poet speaks that much more profound. While the rich imagery can at times overpower, the poet’s frequent use of italics and the abundant intertexual references help guide the reader to through the thicket of signification into lodestars of meaning.
From “Bird Into Building”:

She is certain to have recalled
winter’s nunnery, her tongue
from previous ecstasy releases
thoughts like little hats
all of her sick hero moments,
in an enclave of economies.

References to Vitkauskas’s Lithuanian heritage appears amid so many other cultural references as to suggest that the myth-making of this debut collection is more about identity formation on the cosmic (even Vedic or Gnostic) rather than nationalistic level, as the speaker searches for elements of language (“Crying hieroglyphs,/ arrogant from the bake/ of lifeless theatres”) still capable of communication.
“My Retinal Detachment” alludes to Vitkauskas’ multiple eye surgeries beginning in 1996 to correct a degenerative optical condition: the thin line between dread and fearlessness is palpable, and the acute tension between “being sighted” and being capable of the act of seeing (versus looking, or being seen), sensed throughout.

I’ve made the bed three times
and replaced my eye with a better voice.
Sotto voce. I’ve never been outside . . .
Even de Leon can’t locate the theatre of my fountain.
I am not afraid that this sounds.

The poet asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening. From Kidnapping Brides: “ . . . since the bias-cut/ has come back, since the/ hypothetical dossier rendered/ me the interpreter, since the/ premise shifts, since energy/ cannot be created nor employed,/ since my money is no good here,/ since I’m falling/ so gracefully.”
Plathian in her wry ecstasies, generous in her nods to poet-predecessors (among the collection’s quietly lyrical poems is a five-line homage to Szymborska) and sensitive to the implications, often dangerous, and joys, often overlooked, of postmodern discourse, Vitauskas’ debut collection is a veritable treasure-trove of sonic intensity issued from a sleuth-like intelligence, “cracking parallelograms/ on the linear beach blanket,/ bending blonde participles. This is a jar like a lottery./ Like my first Dramamine pie.” - Virginia Konchan

 


Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star, Dancing Girl Press, 2006.


The First Gardenia

"Give me a museum and I will fill it."
—Pablo Picasso

You are air and I am air
but what we really are (when we dissipate)
are unrelated planets. The rooster

risks nothing, dips to the umbrella
feeds churches and quantum penalties.

Should I have undone the doctor,
cosmologically undone myself,
undone the doctrine in this state

of granite and velvet? Maybe
the universe cleans us
of all the universals. Burning,

the gecko gardenia in silk
strains of skins makes love,
a different one each session
below the Belt.

    
 

Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Shooting Dead Films with Poets, Fractal Edge Press, 2004.

In this collection of exquisite poems, the fiction editor of Milk Magazine honors celebrities of film and literature with wondrous images linked together in mysterious ways revealed only to those unswayed by their surrealism, those willing to stay with the poems as they move deeply below the surface of appearance and syntactic parsing. The power of her diction derives from the powerful deep structure linking each image to magical path of layered interpretations they invite and reward.

“Lina ramona Vitkauskas writes a class of ‘found’ poetry that I will dub ‘found memory’ as she culls the rooms of the poems of the poets to whom she dedicates and finds word objects that make matter (see “Einstein’s Shoes”!) out of historical and spatial distance. Tender, defiant and fun, these poems are making it new.”—Rachael Levitsky

“Shooting Dead Films with Poets is an improbable treasure. These fourteen poems call out to Cocteau and draw from the gamut spanning Georgic bees and a Chicago found to be antipodal to the Volga. Subtitles twine immaculately. They invoke a Cyrillic voyeur penning captions for a movie that knows its own Democracy. This is a run of great poems made by great lines, a sequence of gracious acts in which Vitkauskas drops names like Galileo dropped the orange.”—Chuck Stebelton

 

Lina ramona Vitkauskas, The Meanest Man Contest, mother’s milk press, 2000.

My head is a vacant apostrophe.

The linen of the grass,
raincoats on Christmas
miles across my childhood
backyard fleeced on its iced
belly. The undertow of Ira—
a flipchart of mortar sealing
tablet doors, collapsing shut.

I am floating up
like a fetal parsnip—
it is almost dawn.
I am a spiny comb
in this glass menagerie.
I wonder if
Chicago will snap
to middle earth
into the molten squash of soil,
melting organs of strict,
black keys everywhere.
My cream is clarified.
The windows are caulked
with doilies.

You are more subtle than gifts,
a flecked, necessary note on my breast.

 

Litmus

(For Simone)

Girls just like to dance
to the politics,
wear the stamina
of a rosy Spain pear,
each one a clerk and tangle
of facets and fatalism.

Girls gleaming with Pavlovian
automatic, lubricated and absent,
posies for the camera, a tonic flash
like fireflies, fever moths,
subterranean sugar.

    Then belle and belle in the snow—
    smooth as jeweled hands over a mine
    beneath Dickens, dismantling
    the music with unfocused meticulous.

Public and nocturnal,
girls just like to dance
to the plotlines of gadgetry,
from bridle to girdle,
each hoping the butter unbeaten
by life spreads on morning toast.

    Yet we have text in our eyes
    and celosia smiles. Your record
    is on and the dance floor
    your aquarium: your operatic hair
    silks new notches
    in the air behind you.

 

Hypno

“In my dream, I am your customer.”
—Laurie Anderson, Words in Reverse

In a pagan posture,
in a Cadillac,
my body synched,
manipulated and ruptured
as a locksmith unpinned.
Soothe me,
listen for instruction,
there’s a sultan beneath my breath,
and here my arms: severed by the clock.
The gravel of hypnosis
in my pockets, a beakless swallow,
the grommet of clean pain:
“Handcuff me,” Gandhi said,
“still the strobe and create the motive.”

Spirit Laughs So Eventual

We can't do the voodoo of the everyman,
so let's begin to love myself all over again.
As goes the old Hugo novel, own your mysteries.
My skin only accepts natural spaces˜
cardamom and coves. Sleepwalkers you

procured in my tawny concentration, my dream
the left eye collapsed and met the child who tamed
wild moonrats. To rape oneself a humane
existence, the painful song. You and I only consist.
The riotous torch crowd˜derelict
arachnids on a parting gift I dreamt

possible. Father. What we clever cats culled
from roundtables and ruffians: the circumference
of electric sex. Performance of woman crane mirror.
As goes the seahorse tragedy of Gethsemane‚s fossil.
I never saw the movie which could cry. 

 The First Gardenia

       Give me a museum and I will fill it.
                                               —Picasso

You are air and I am air
but what we really are (when we dissipate)
are unrelated planets. The rooster

risks nothing, dips to the umbrella
feeds churches and quantum penalties.

Should I have undone the doctor,
cosmologically undone myself,
undone the doctrine in this state

of granite and velvet? Maybe
the universe cleans us
of all the universals. Burning,

the gecko gardenia in silk
strains of skins makes love,
a different one each session

“Eight Questions for Lina Ramona Vitkauskas” by Anita Wota

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, a Lithuanian-Chicagoan poet and fiction writer, has published three chapbooks (short books which contain poems and/or short stories) and poetry books, some of which include Shooting Dead Films with Poets (a poetry book published in 2004), THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (her newest chapbook, published in 2009), and Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (published in 2006). Lina has was also co-editor of the webzine, Milk Magazine (http://www.milkmag.org

quick payday

), which was composed of poetry, essays, visual art, short stories, and other works from artists all over the globe. Much of Vitkauskas’s work was inspired by surrealistic writing, which sparked her interest ever since she was a young girl. However, her enticing literature isn’t only based on surrealism. It serves as an inspiration for young writers because it’s relatable to people of all ages and genders. These are many of the reasons why I felt the urge to ask Lina Ramona Vitkauskas about her life, her success, her inspirations, and how she influences her readers.

What motivated you to become a writer? What motivates you to keep writing?  As a kid, I spent a lot of time in my room drawing and making storybooks. I read quite a bit and attempted to read some of my father’s astronomy and history books which were obviously way too complex for me at the time, but I still tried because I was fascinated and wanted to learn. I distinctly remember Asimov’s  "Cosmos" on his nightstand and how I attempted to fathom the beauty of supernovas and the infinite size of the universe.
One story that I wrote in 4th grade was about a planet named Zebron. The inhabitants of Zebron were trying to steal the Earth’s food and water supply by toying with its gravitational pull, and most importantly, the main astrophysicist in the story was named Dr. Rinard. Of course, I referred to him as the “head scientist”. It was published in a publication put out by the school’s gifted program.
I continued to write stories, but I was also interested in plays. Throughout school, I performed in many plays and began thinking I would pursue playwriting. My senior year of high school, I completed my first play, however, I angstily decided it was horrible and set it on fire in my backyard. I started to write and read poetry after that. The first poet I ever read was Anne Sexton. Obviously, there were some marital themes that she touched upon that I could not fully understand, but her poems were so fragile and powerful at once. I was greatly affected by her lonely images and the clever juxtoposition of fairytale concepts and blunt/bleak reality.
In college, I pursued writing fiction, then poetry. I was introduced to Wallace Stevens, some New York School poets (O’Hara, Ashbery), some Beats (Ginsburg, Burroughs), some Russian poets, (primarily Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva), and stumbled across the early Surrealists/Surrealists (Breton’s “Earthlight”, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Apollonaire, to name a few).
After exporing the works of these writers and many others, I could not stop writing. I began expressing my thoughts by trying to write it they way they would—using some of their tactics and then inventing some of own. It was fun to experiment. I continue to read poetry and experimental writing as much as I can. Most times, my writing schedule is inconsistent. I wish I could write every day, but when I do (every few weeks or so) it really pours out of me. I feel I need to write. It truly is a part of who I am.

A lot of your writing represents very surrealistic styles. Why did you choose to focus on this type of style specifically? 

Surrealism is just the discipline or style of writing that fascinates me most. I am not into theory or sterilizing poetry by analyzing it. I like the unknown—feeling something without knowing why necessarily. Dreams affect us this way and Surrealism is largely based on dreamwork. Much like images in dreams, words come to me randomly. I’d say I first hear them in my head and then they collide. Then images spring from those word combinations. 

What other kinds of writing styles and themes appear most frequently within your poetry? What kind of significance do these styles and themes have?
There is social commentary throughout my poems (gender roles (female identity, sexuality), politics) and then there’s my Lithuanian heritage, which has made me recognize some interesting “subconscious” traits in my work. Ongoing oppression is a large component of Lithuanian history, and many of its oppressors rotated frequently—Poland, Sweden, Germany, Russia. This has led to the country itself and our people feeling fearful and uncertain to say the least. Yet, although this uneasiness existed in daily life, it is counterbalanced by a tremendous swell of nationalistic pride.
In this vein, my poems boldly / authoritatively declare vulnerability / uncertainty. Further, my poems are personal yet detached because I am Lithuanian-American: I believe straddling these two cultures allows me to be both omniscient and involved simultaneously.
My poems are a way to take both identities and languages out and put them on the examination table.
In addition, I enjoy words and language sounds. Knowing three languages (including some Spanish) makes creating language combinations fun and interesting. I never know when I write a poem where it will go.

How did you become involved with milk magazine? Why did you choose to be involved with this magazine? 
Larry Sawyer was a poet I had met in Dayton, OH in 1999. Larry was the editor of Wright State University’s literary magazine, Nexus, and, during his tenure, had compiled 2 – 3 issues of work by influential members of the Beat, Black Mountain, and NY Schools of poetry, Larry envisioned doing a magazine much like Nexus when he graduated from college, so, from his own pocket, he created the first issue of milk magazine in print (the only print issue to date). I suggested he take it online due to costs. The Internet was pretty new and free and lots of people were starting e-zines. I designed and maintained the site, Larry made editorial decisions. By the second and third issues, I was heavily involved in the editorial process.
We created milk because Larry and I both had the same vision as writers: a unique outlet for international work (poetry, visual art, fiction). We both strongly felt we were creating something special in the literary community. We were one the first comprehensive online lit mags next to Exquisite Corpse, Web del Sol, Big Bridge, JACK, and others.

I continued to design, maintain, and stay very involved editorially until 2008.

How did being a co-editor of milk magazine contribute to your success (as well as the other works that you have written)? 
I think it was a good stepping stone to meet other poets and writers in the community. Facebook and MySpace didn’t exist— no social networks did for that matter—so, when we started milk, everything was done via e-mail introductions, meeting people at readings, and just checking out other people’s magazines / sites. I think, in later years, as milk became more well-known among our peers, it helped to get my work in the door a little easier. Being an editor offers the responsibility of selecting work, yet, as a writer, you are still trying to get your work out there and published. Rejection is part of the process.

I recently read your poem, “The Most Girl Part of You”, and was very intrigued by it. What inspired you to write this poem and what message did you want to send to women and young women by writing it? 
Fiction writer Amy Hempel wrote a story of that exact title. I first read it when I was 14 or 15. It was a very poignant story—about kids who lose parents, then have sex for the first time; their relationship and the narrative was quirky, endearing, and real. I thought of this story when writing the poem because I was comparing the innocence of the interaction between these characters and how that seemed somehow lost among my generation to some degree. The poem attempts to let girls know that “a most girl part of you” is often misinterpreted as the physical. It’s a call to girls to view and represent themselves as thinking individuals not as body parts.  
What kind of impact do you hope that your writing will someday have on society? 

That’s a huge question. I really am just thankful that people still read and are interested in poetry. My hope, much like any artist, is to intrigue people, arouse their thoughts and hearts.

What kinds of new projects are you currently working on and why? 
I am currently writing two new chapbooks. One is more light-hearted than some of my other work, and one is a thematic collection surrounding “honey” (the word and the sweet, sticky stuff). I also have one manuscript under submission, which is a response to three films.  I would love to complete a long-term goal: a spoken word CD.
For more information on Lina Ramona Vitkauskas as well as her literary work, visit her website, http://www.linaramona.com

quick payday

12 or 20 questions: with Lina ramona Vitkauskas

Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the recent winner of The Poetry Center of Chicago’s 15^th Annual Juried Reading, judged by poet Brenda Hillman. She was also recently nominated by Another Chicago Magazine for an Illinois Arts Council Award (in the poetry and fiction categories). She has won an honorable mention in STORYmagazine’s Carson McCullers Award contest (1999) and placed as a semi-finalist for the Cleveland State University Open Poetry Series (2002). After obtaining an MA in Creative Writing from Wright State University, she authored three poetry books and chapbooks including: THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING(Ravenna Press, 2010), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006), and Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004).

Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies including: The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), The Prague Literary Review, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris),The Chicago Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Aufgabe; Drunken Boat, White Fungus (New Zealand),MiPoesias, Paper Tiger (Australia), and the In Posse Review Multi-Ethnic Anthology edited by Ilya Kaminsky. Poet Denise Duhamel has noted that her poetry “employs humor and kitsch…the dazzling underside confronts intolerance and terrorism with a wise brilliance.” Her web site is www.linaramona.com.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook was published in 2004 by Fractal Edge Press (Chicago) and is titled Shooting Dead Films with Poets. The next one was published by dancing girl press (Chicago) and was titled Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star. My first full-length book of poetry is coming out in 2010 on Ravenna Press (Spokane,WA) and it's called THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING. The publication of all of these works came at critical times in my life. The first came soon after I'd moved back to Chicago from Ohio, where I completed my MA in Creative Writing (in 2002).

I'd jumped into the blossoming poetry scene by making contacts in the community and doing a lot of readings. Wayne Allen Jones, a fellow poet, was starting a press and wanted my book to be one the first that he did. I was very happy, of course, and was able to say I'd published. In 2005, Kristy Bowen, publisher of dancing girl press in Chicago, approached me to publish another collection of astronomy-related poems; I was thrilled to be a part of her catalogue of all-female poets--all very talented...to be among the likes of Brandi Homan, Simone Muench, Daniela Olszewska, and Kristy Odelius was a great experience for me. The book coming out in 2010 is a great accomplishment of mine. I am extremely honored that Kathryn Rantala (of Ravenna) is publishing it. It is about 108 poems written between 2005 to 2008. The book feels different because it is lengthy and feels like a comprehensive representation of my work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I began as a fiction writer, but I had always written poetry. I returned to poetry because I seemed to be able to feel more comfortable with it. It seemed more my niche.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My writing style begins when the muse visits. Months may pass and she doesn't stop by, then she comes and stays for months (always a wanted guest). I write in spurts and in a flash of inspiration try to capture it all before it slips away. I don't revise until much later, and even then, I am afraid to tamper too much with the initial products I produce. Nothing is ever truly finished, and poems become reincarnated as others at times.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Sounds, words, language. I begin with juxtaposing words that sound as if they belong together. I let the poem take shape as I write. I never know what I am writing about until it is finished, though there are distinct themes of politics, gender roles, shades of humanity, magical realism, surreal terrains, conversations I hear, botany, astronomy, and Lithuanian and Spanish vocabulary and nuances.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do readings and I do enjoy them. I like hearing audience response to my work. What other poets find in my work means a great deal to me. Often times, there are beautiful surprises in their responses.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Russian sociolinguist Bakhtin wrote of heteroglossia, the idea of language hierarchy or conflict within the mind and how it influences language decisions. This meant quite a large deal to me having spoken Lithuanian primarily as a child, and then English, and then studying Spanish. Soon, there was a distinct "language straddling" going on within me and I became rather entertained by the notion of being able to switch between and/or amalgamate words, if necessary. I believe this theory plays a large role in my loose method of writing. It at least fuels the playfulness in my work. Montaigne wrote of the meaning of "to essay" and referred to the Latin translation "to test" or "to try". Early in my master's study, I was quite drawn to this notion and still view the process through this lens.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The role of the poet in society is changing. I ask, have we arrived as authoritative voices on culture yet? It's becoming apparent with the explosion of citizen journalism and the immediacy of Twitter, etc. that writers have a challenge of maintaining credibility in the creative and non-fiction realms.

In Europe, poets are lauded, respected, and looked upon as great commentators of generations and time. The US has a great tradition, as of late, celebrating genre writers within the fiction realm and using commercial success and film adaptation as the benchmark. There is a distinct misconception among mainstream society about poets and poetry--often times people think of the Shakespeare they learned in high school or think of Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath. There is such a rich world of contemporary poets, talented documenters of our time, that has yet to be discovered. I believe poets deserve more recognition, though I think within the world of poetry itself, there is much mutual recognition and respect.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It is essential to the process to shape a published work to fit its medium, but should not alter the intent.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Pound's "show don't tell". Robert Creeley said (I'm paraphrasing) "If you don't know what you're doing--trust it." Jodorowsky said, "You cease to exist when you say 'That's what I am.' "

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I have only been able to slightly traverse between experimental short fiction and poetry. I prefer poetry.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

No routine for writing. For me, personally, routine it is detrimental and counterproductive.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I look to scientific texts, Wikipedia's random article, and foreign films.

13 - What did your favourite teacher teach you?

My drama director once told me that I am not as funny as I think I am.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Definitely science (astronomy and botany) and film.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Lorca, Mina Loy, Breton, Maykovsky, Akhmatova, many others, especially contemporary poets Heidi Lynn Staples, Catherine Wagner, Caroline Whitbeck, Simone Muench, Donna Stonecipher, Jen Karmin, Philip Jenks...so many to name and mention!

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Film screenwriter, comedy writer, travel more.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Screenwriter, comedian.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was something that approached me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I'm reading Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded currently. Synechdoche, NY was highly underrated and a great film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A poetic series of ekphrastic books in response to select foreign films, a spoken word CD with a koto player.- robmclennan.blogspot.com/