TtD supplement #272 : seven questions for Jennifer Firestone

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry, including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse). She is the co-editor with Marcella Durand of Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (MIT Press) and with Dana Teen Lomax of Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books). Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Chair of Writing at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.

Her four poems “From Dream Sequence” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems included here as part of “From Dream Sequence.”

A: Dream Sequence came from what I consider a failed poetry project. I was part of a poetry salon run by Kimberly Lyons during the beginning of Covid. At the time I felt that my dreams were colorless. In fact, I don’t remember most of my dreams during this time period. Nevertheless, I needed to bring a poem to this salon and I brought a few pages from a dream I remembered. In the dream I was shoplifting, driving around lost, and then suddenly aware that I was teaching a class that I barely ever showed up to. I realized, as I had before, that my dreams were the same old anxieties and fears manifested into “night narratives.” I was a bit humbled by how simple I seemed.

My family loves to share dreams. I try to be a polite audience but I tend to lose interest. Is the reportage of dreams a low-level version of narcissism? From there Dream Sequence took off. Like most of my writing, the work typically evolves from resistance and perplexity. I began to write less about my dreams and more about the act of dreaming. What are the best “conditions” for a dream; is that such a thing? What happens when dreams are blurred with domestic noise and outside interruptions. Can I steer my dreams away from panic and cowardice and more toward desire and potential?

Q: How do you consider this project failed?

A: So the original project (hopefully not this iteration!) I felt failed as it was too self-conscious; I felt my hand in it. I think I was relying on the substance of my dreams to carry the poems, to do its magic and I’m not sure that’s as exciting for the reader as it is for the writer. The surrealists did a good job with working with dreams, so did Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley and many others. But it felt a bit surface to me; it lacked tension. I put these dream-poems away for a year and then came back again and realized I needed to bring in my critique, my doubts along with my dreamworld in relation to the material world. As Rachel Levitsky said to me after hearing me read some of these poems at Familiar Trees, wow a dream writing project that doesn’t include dreams.

Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: My other work right now is more documentary/investigative. Dream Sequence is a series that includes some research about the mechanics of dreaming and other writers’ perspectives about dreams but it’s not as project-oriented. In Dream Sequence I developed a persona who is somewhat unpredictable and subversive. I see the speaker as an anti-heroine of sorts. I’m also playing with the echoes of more traditional romantic poetry, with elements of the rhyme and diction, but transposed to the contemporary time period.

Q: You mention that most of your other works are project-oriented. What brought you to moving through project-based works?

A: I appreciate the grounding of a project-based work but at times the research and approach can feel similar to some of my more academic work. Dream Sequence feels a little more slippery, surprising. I’m not sure where it’s going to end up. Perhaps it’s like dreams where you don't know when they will come to a sudden stop and what the feeling might be that remains with you. Since I’m chairing my department right now and overwhelmed with work and the state of our country and the challenges my family faces, I needed something that could possibly address these various stressors but also be playful and suggestive and beguiling. Additionally, I tend to be restless and contradictory, so if I take on a particular writing approach or aesthetic I tend to abandon that the next time around.

Q: With a handful of published poetry titles under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Ah, “progression,” I think that can be a tough word in relation to one’s poetics as poetry/being a poet resist a linear trajectory. I just know that each of my books has some correspondence with the last one but also steps into a different direction formally and topically. I care less and less about trends and hold myself more to my own integrity: am I being too surface? Have I pushed the language? Who is the work speaking to? How does it move from my own habits, affinities and obsessions and reach to the unknown and defamilarized? Does my craft and form meet the needs of the subject? Am I including the broader world versus my own little microcosm? The questions go on. Being a poetry professor for over twenty years, along with participating in several editing projects, have made me more critical, word for word. My students know that I won’t hold back when offering critique. At the same time, I’m not about the “workshop poem,” and can fully embrace a messy, disjointed poem if that’s what the work wants to do. I think as you get older you become more aware of time so for me it’s not just about publishing, it’s about what I can offer that might be useful, joyful, interesting to others. I have many aspirations as I think about future projects. I want to keep exploring subjectivity and language-making as that is what informs our consciousness and awareness in relation to others. I want to continue using the vehicle of a camera and in extension, photography, as a way to investigate framing and perception. I want to keep including animals and plants in my work. I want to keep an eye to what is marginalized and devalued as that is where we can learn and understand systems, preferences and biases. I want to work with a traditional form and see how that will influence my poetics. I want to write long Ashbery-like prose blocks as I love his work very much. I have fallen back into essay writing (last year I created and taught a new course entitled The Poet’s Essay), and hope to write a book-length creative nonfiction about my father’s death but more so about my cultural concerns regarding rituals of grief. I might write a strange play. I am always thinking up new ideas. I also have done numerous collaborative projects and will probably do more. If only I didn't work full-time and have three kids. . .. but this is my life.

Q: Through your creative and editorial work, I’ve long had the sense that much of your writing exists in conversation with other writers and works. You mention John Ashbery; what other poets and/or particular works sit at the back of your head as you write?

A: I would say my writing is in conversation with my friends’ work. I feel very fortunate that I’m in conversation with many brilliant writers such as Brenda Coultas, Erica Hunt, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Karen Weiser, Cole Swenson, Kimberly Lyons, Albert Mobilio, Anselm Berrigan, Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, Hoa Nyugen, Pam Dick, Anne Tardos, Anne Waldman, Sarah Rosenthal, Eléna Rivera, Wendy, Xu, Tonya Foster, Dana Teen Lomax, Rachel Levitsky, KPrevallet, Julie Patton, Carla Harryman, I’m leaving off many more whom I adore. I think friendships can be overlooked, like you should first scan your bookshelves versus who is breathing besides you. My recent MIT Press collection, which I co-edited with Marcella Durand, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry, subverts the concept of influence. When you are deeply engaged with others’ writing to the point that the writers form your communities you can’t help but be influenced by them in your own writing. I don’t want to name particular works here as I tend to resist iconization of my favorite books. I am also fickle. I read toward my mood and need. Sometimes Stein is the perfect antidote and sometimes she gives me a headache. I have a genuine curiosity and generous attention to lots of diverse work. Although I tend to write what would be labeled as “experimental,” I’m quite open to various kinds of writing. That’s probably what makes me a good professor and reader of works, as I try not to let my own aesthetics entirely govern my reading practice. I like work where there’s a pressure on and attention to the language, where exploration of the subject and form is self-aware, nuanced: this could be Matsuo Bashō Wanda Coleman, Wallace Stevens or Susan Howe. I also like meaning to be just out of reach—when a poem has intention to some degree but perhaps doesn’t know its full sweep, where I can feel its thinking and struggle.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Again too many to list but I’ll try. Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Paul Celan’s Breathturn and Threadsuns, anything Ashbery, Myung Mi Kim’s Dura and Penury, Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, anything Lyn Hejinian and particularly her lecture, “The Rejection of Closure,” Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Drafts, her writings in The Pink Guitar, Emily Dickinson, anything Harryette Mullen. I’ll cut myself off here.