Brooke Ellsworth is author of Serenade (Octopus Books, 2017). She lives and writes in Peekskill, NY.
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?
Most of Serenade was written in a frenzy during
the late summer of 2014. In many ways, it was more of me working out the
tangles from my first two chapbooks, Thrown and Mud. I press upon a lot of history of feminine brutality and
eco-disaster, do a lot of urgent lineation around flood zones. Serenade
became some metacognition of me listening to water, while realizing this was a
self-eroding reflection. Serenade changed everything, because I
let the editing process chip away at the poems’ temporality. I was doing
a lot of hiking around the tidal estuary surrounding Indian Point Energy
Center.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not sure. I lineated my journals as a kid,
which felt like the most personal and direct and private I could be. My
mom is a nurse. As a kid I’d go to the hospital after school and type out
occasional poems on their nurse’s station computer and tape them to the door.
3 - How long does it
take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially 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?
I write in fits, I guess. I have trouble
distinguishing between drafts and new poems. An ongoing issue I have is
re-writing everything, but keeping the same title. The paradox of
Theseus’s ship? Maybe I should call this a liturgical listening process.
There are sequences of poems in all of my chapbooks and in Serenade
under the same title. I find arguments are most explicit when they’re
lineated and slowed down.
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?
I’m definitely more of a failed essayist than a
poet. I think of Serenade more of as a raging essay than I do a
collection of poems. I fixate on something and develop work in and out of
that.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I love audiences, and I love being a part of one.
Friends will tell you, I cry on either side of the stage.
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?
Serenade comes from a feminist/ecopoetic/angry
place. Lara Glenum writes in the introduction to the Gurlesque anthology
that the concept of “catharsis” is a homogenizing agent. All inherited
ideas about catharsis = a failure of imagination to conceive of catharsis
outside of the mechanics of power and control. There’s no such thing as
purity in art, outside of the modes of social and infrastructural displacement.
There’s nothing pure or timeless we gain access to through art.
This is especially important now, when this country actively neglects
populations displaced by weather. Artists and thinkers who are displaced
by canonical narratives. But do we pretend to forget history? That
in itself is a sad luxury.
I don’t answer any questions, but I definitely
wallow in my obsessions. The story of Echo shows up in Serenade,
for one. Echo is the main character in my first chapbook, Thrown.
Her inability to express her ecstasy, her sense of catharsis at the sight
of Narcissus. But she is certainly in this state of catharsis? She
communicates through her disability, which is the excess of repetition. Poems traditionally come at you with a
built-in sense of discovery, of some sort of awakening. Poems like that
for me are hand-in-hand with poems who have a project of dominance. For
me, Echo is part of an erotic dynamic conceived outside of the dynamics of
control. Which isn’t separate from her predetermined annihilation. Derrida really
tenderly talks about her story. About how she subverts Hera’s punishment by making Narcissus’s
language her own.
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?
Putting together a book requires physical structure
(walls, food, money). The people I care about want to make books, or not,
and keep their capital debt from destroying them. Or the people I care
about discuss carelessness with language and a divestment of literary arts interchangeably.
I’m also using “people” and “poets” interchangeably here. The poets
worth reading, the ones worth paying attention to, activate the complacent, or
at least expose them.
Cecilia Vicuña
on a Harriet blog post last year, “Language is Migrant,” writes about living under the Chilean dictator Pinochet: “Complex
public conversation goes extinct. Maybe the extinction of playful free speech
is related to the extinction of species we are causing as we speak.” Vicuña here matches ecological catastrophe with
language. Often it’s thought that pain breaks down language, or that writing
and art are in response to suffering. Vicuña
inverts the locus of agencies. One cannot say that one catastrophe begets the
other; our contemporary catastrophes saturate each other. Language and the
material world seep together, annihilating each other through political and
ecological catastrophe. Look at the effort by dominating political forces
to neglect flood zones or entire communities devastated by weather events, or
colonialist war events (Marshall Islands comes to mind as a horrific
intersection of all these things. Here’s an article that goes into that a little bit).
By contrast, consider the terra we actively
maintenance: the SUPERFUND site under Silicon Valley, where pipes and pumps
suck thousands of gallons of contaminated water every hour from vast
underground pools, which then gets shipped, treated, and burned in places like
Oklahoma and Arizona, discharging waste in small towns and on a Native American
reservation—all in the hope of making the water drinkable again and protecting
workers of the tech giants such as Google and Symantec from toxic vapors. This
toxic trail, like Echo’s (in)articulation, becomes an act of dispersement, a
stain that seeps into the water supply that Narcissus gazes helplessly into. We
cannot turn away from the reflection, we cannot turn away from language, nor
can we turn away from the semantics of industrialized progress.
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Definitely both. I’m pretty defensive about my
choices, and I really value friends and editors who ask me questions in ways
that open up the possibility for other choices.
9 - What is the best
piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t eat sand.
10 - How easy has it
been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see
as the appeal?
I personally don’t benefit from their separation.
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?
I do a lot of writing on my phone on trains. I
can be a typical house cat with my writing structures. Consistently, in
the mornings, in the same spot.
12 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
I turn back to Pessoa (all of them). I re-read
Hiromi Itō. Hélène Cixous’ The Book of Promethea. Everybody should
read Brett Walker’s Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease.
Also Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive.
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
Chapstick. Boat fuel. The combination of
pitch pine and cigarettes.
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?
I think it’s useful to know the rules for all these
material realities and languages, in order to imagine better ways to build
communities.
15 - What other writers
or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work?
Anna Kavan wrote a book called Ice, which
changed the trajectory of a section of Serenade afterwards. Albert
Camus’ American Diaries was a troubling, important read. For a
while, the 2nd section of Serenade bore an epigraph from his diaries
(“Endless good weather.”). It was maybe when I was reading it for the
first time, but the way he wrote about his depression went deep for me.
16 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?
My response to this is a little NSFW. So I’ll
go with visit Lisbon so I can Instagram a picture of me with Pessoa’s statue.
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?
I’ve always been a writer.
18 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
I mean, here in gig culture, we all do a lot of
things to keep afloat.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
Although hardly a recent release, I saw Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba for the first time last year.
20 - What are you
currently working on?
The working title to my
manuscript-in-progress is Disturbances. It focuses more on
invertebrates and depression.
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