Her poems “Shipwreck,” “Moon, Tide (Matter, Pattern),” “Sky Writing (Matter, Pattern),” “Afterlife” and “Fiction” appear in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Shipwreck,” “Moon, Tide (Matter, Pattern),” “Sky Writing (Matter, Pattern),” “Afterlife” and “Fiction.”
These five prose poems, or poetic prose, are moving parts from Matter and Pattern, a genre-fluid work-in-progress.
“Shipwreck” is a protest poem and it won’t settle, or finish. Soapbox: We’re in a fugue state of euphemism regarding the natural world. We need a new language game for what we limply and self-exoneratively call “climate change.” I’m looking to Robert MacFarlane’s Is a River Alive?, Jorie Graham in To 2040, Alice Oswald’s mythic river poems. And responding in “Shipwreck” to the cry from a line of graffiti that appeared on the concrete wall of the tidal river that’s directed through Providence, RI toward Narragansett Bay: “Where will we go when the water rises?”
The story behind the story of “Moon, Tide” (Matter, Pattern)” is insomnia—an insomnia so galvanizing to itself that it feels like fate. A city is erased in “Sky Writing (Matter, Pattern),” as graffiti is erased by the rising tide in “Shipwreck,” and the sky itself erases sky writing. Can we throw a wrench in the march of conformity, or death? Re-shuffle a fate that might be as structural as pattern?
Then comes the afterlife. What is it? Is it? I imagine a waiting room, like in “Sky Writing,” or an airport—liminal space where time hovers anonymously. And the the uncanny sentience of the armadillo—who knows the time zone of the animal? Maybe the answer is in “Fiction,” which draws the afterlife and the spirit of animals toward a miniature experimental epistemology.
Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: They are a departure from the vertically long and drapey, like tapestry, intensively lineated poems I’ve been writing since I started writing poetry. They are single-story still lifes. They’re short, but what they share with my novels, actually, is that they’re not formally surreal, but they snag on mystery.
Q: What do you mean when you say your poems “snag on mystery”?
A: I have to either extend my metaphor, or wriggle out of your question! The poems aren’t mysterious, but they’ve got mystery’s wool in their wire fence. That would make mystery the sheep. Mystery could also be the fence, a matrix, and the poems could be the sheep. I’m reading Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for half an hour in the afternoons in the wind blast of a standing fan. I love sheep—I was born on a thousand-acre sheep farm. Beasts of burden for our metaphors. Same word for singular and plural. Odysseus clinging like a human parasite to the belly of the Cyclops’ sheep to escape the cave—
I’m working mostly with really plain language that’s expected to do things like logicize, define, show, and tell. What’s the most mystery I can suggest from the least mysterious language?
Maybe it has something to do with my exhaustion with technology—being cut off from my own attention, overwhelmed, out-humaned—already outlived by AI by millions of years’ worth of data.
Q: With a handful of published titles under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see your work heading towards?
A: I’m trying to feel my way toward a narrating voice that’s sustainable and flexible, low maintenance, that I can take anywhere. I’ve backed myself into tight corners of extreme, hyper-sculpted style and intensive systems of experimentation with no daylight between form and content in previous novels and poems. Discipline! Constraint. A sense of performance, even ritual, in my relationship to myth, to classical mythology and psychological essentialism. At the moment, I’m unraveling a novel into poetry, and I’m also working within a novel-length fictional essay—autofeminism, I’m calling it—maybe—to find a looser, nimbler, more intimate voice I can take to places I haven’t been before.
Hélène Cixous calls women’s writing spaces the chaosmos!
Q: Is this something purposeful on your part, attempting to embrace the chaos, the accident? What might this allow that wouldn’t be possible otherwise?
A: I think I’m always working on a continuum between form and freedom. I don’t see them as opposites or antagonists but as co-conspirators, co-dependents. Opening the writing toward chaos, accident, as you say, the un- and informal, is a way to find form: in the new work, the form might be hyperrealism. The quick line that captures the whole posture, history.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What poets or works, if any, might sit at the back of your head as you write?
A: This project is definitely taking heart from experimental works like Malcolm de Chazal’s synesthetic collage Sens-Plastique, Stuart Dybek’s superflash fiction, Rosmarie Waldrop—entirely. Kimiko Hahn describes the hybrid, “hodgepodge” zuihitsu form as comprised of spontaneity, suggestion, and irregularity, and I find I’m bumping into that spirit in the dark.
I love this nail-polish red and black (a black sun? Eclipse?) book Hackers by Aase Berg with its off-kilter, vernacular, oracular aphorisms: “The machines are on,/the source code pecks./There you are no longer loved,/you’re observed.” Ana Božičević in New Life is working with huge, belly-of-the-beast ache and acerbic efficiency: “Sometimes I ride on my horse/Singing/Like a shepherdess/To another shepherdess…”
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I don’t have a very correlative or satisfying answer to this question! I’m a slow and impressionable reader, so often just a sentence or a line from whatever’s at hand does the trick of filling the well, starting strange wind across the surface of my own writing.
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