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Ben Estes is a talented writer whom I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the past year. Last weekend, I got to spend some time with him and my best friend in Northampton, Mass, where we took some photos in his backyard. I had a good time asking Ben a few questions about his work, and his past life as a Tracy Chapman fan. I also learned that his hair was once in an abusive relationship with mousse.
You’re the editor of The Song Cave. Tell us a bit about The Song Cave and how it started.
The Song Cave is a small poetry press that champions the idea of the “long poem,” that I run with my fiend Alan Felsenthal. Ideally, we publish one chapbook per month. I moved to Massachusetts in the fall of 2009 to get an MFA at UMass, and I was really interested in “the long poem” as a form. At the time I was trying to write very long poems, so I began really searching them out to read.
I gave my first poetry reading that fall, and being very shy I’d decided I wanted to make something for the audience to look at or read along with, rather than just sitting there LOOKING at me - so I decided to print up the long poem that I was planning to read that night, as a little chapbook. That’s the first book by The Song Cave, how it all began.
Coming from art school, I also really missed making physical things, so making these books really helped me keep my hands busy, you know? Being completely new to poetry at the time, running a small poetry press also gave me an excuse to introduce myself to a lot of the poets I was reading and that I really admired… All of a sudden I had a reason to write to Ben Lerner and Lisa Jarnot for example, to say hello, and ask them for work. It was a way for me to help navigate and feel comfortable with the decision I’d made to try to fully enter into this crazy world of writers.
What do you guys have in the works right now?
Right now we’re just about to start publishing full-length books. It’s a big deal for us, and has turned out to be a much bigger job than I had initially thought it’d be. As of right now, we’ve got 4 books on the schedule, to come out within this next year or so. The first book will be a collection of poems by a “forgotten” poet named Alfred Starr Hamilton, that I’ve been appointed as the literary executor for. He’s an amazing writer, that I feel was way ahead of his time. It should be out around the beginning of 2013. The book after that one will be the first book by a poet named Jane Gregory, called My Enemies, and it should be out around the beginning of March.
The Song Cave also publishes limited edition art prints, to help us fund the literary side of things (there is absolutely no money in publishing poetry books, in case you were wondering). So far we’ve done a print with the painter R.H. Quaytman, and with Kim Gordon - but we’ve got a few more artists working on things for us right now too, who I’m really excited to work with. I love the idea of visual artists helping writers get the chance to bring their words to a larger audience, and it allows me to keep a toe in the two things I really love - art and writing.
What was your first concert?
Tracy Chapman…
Are you still a Tracy Chapman fan? Do you ever sing along to “Fast Car” when you’re alone?
Dude… as a young, chubby, painfully shy, suburban 11 year old gay boy I’d listen to Tracy’s tale of the desperation of her dead-end job, her alcoholic boyfriend… it was as if I finally had the troubled black girl best friend that I’d always dreamt of having, telling me all her secrets. I was in love. The dream of a different world where she finally found a true and tender love, a world where she truly belonged… I did too!!! I wanted all of those things too!!! We were like - the same! That final ultimatum at the end of “Fast Car” used to kill me - to “leave tonight, or live and die this way”… I’d lay there at night, in bed with my walkman, yearning for something even a fraction as real as what poor Tracy was having to go through…
You live in Northampton, Mass which I’ve recently visited a few times. It’s a very charming place. What’s your favorite secret Northampton spot?
There are a lot of really beautiful spots around here, lots of nice secluded swimming spots you can go to during the summer, but there is a spot that my boyfriend Juan and I walk to a lot, a place in the woods back behind Smith College that has somehow become an unspoken destination for the two of us when we we’re out walking around. A little hard place where we can sit and look at the river. Once last summer I got brave enough to take all my clothes off and get in the water there - but Juan got nervous and made me get dressed. It’s really beautiful back there.
Has there been a period in your life when you’ve worn a lot of hair gel?
Um, yes…
See, I’ve got very curly hair, frizzy in fact - and before I realized in college that the most civilized way for me to wear it was to just buzz it all off I had a really confusing relationship with my hair.
In middle school, I’d wear quite a bit of mousse… For some reason though, it never occurred to me that I’d need to apply it to my ENTIRE head. I’d just smear it into the unruly mop up top. It’d be quite slick and stiff above the ears, but entirely dry, and um… puffed everyplace else. It was so sad. I didn’t, um, really have any friends back then…
Hi.
What are you working on now that we can look forward to reading in the near future?
Well, I’m working on a manuscript, a book of poems, that I think is going to be called The Chimneys. It’s still a little ways away from finding itself in a final book form, though.
In the meantime, Flying Object and The Song Cave are planning on a little joint-publication of John Rafman’s Google Image project, 9-Eyes, I’m really excited about that. I’m also working with an incredible painter named Mariah Dekkenga on a project for Triple Canopy. It involves a very strange and willingly unfinished new poem of mine called Design for Living (which may or may not be based on the 1933 movie of the same name), with a lot of transparently gentle color-shifting and strobing geometry. It may or may not end up being be a series of screen-savers, downloadable from Triple Canopy’s website.
And I’m hoping to take a lot more photographs this winter. I think doctors should prescribe cameras for people suffering from depression. Everybody should have a camera. Not just the camera inside your little cell phone that you forget you even have until your friend spills her food all over herself or something - but an actual camera-machine that you need to carry around on your body. It’ll change everything. I’m totally serious.