He is the editor, publisher and designer of unbound books, “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books,” that can be found @benjamingantcher, at the unbound books Substack, and HERE.
What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?
My daughter was just told that she is curious and courageous because she went to an intense summer program that brought her into contact with different kinds of people in an environment that was designed to stress the kids out physically and mentally. She appreciated the praise but was surprised. She said, “I just do stuff.” That’s how it is for me when I’m writing well: I just do stuff and language comes up. I follow the language or the feelings. For some of the poems in The Coronation of the Ghost, I was trying to transpose a certain kind of motion, the way a drop of pigment unfurls in a glass of water, or smoke billows, but the motion also connects with the flight of a hunting swallow — the way the plucking out of the air reveals where the bug was and the curves and layers of the carnal air. There’s a question in that image: what’s there that isn’t obvious? Sometimes getting at that is more strenuous than at other times. When I’m not writing well, I’m trying to just do stuff, which involves running it through my internal censors who check it against whatever notions are preoccupying me at that time.
In the context of our violent idiocracy, I ask myself about the utility of poetry. It’s an anxious question, the clashing of pots and pans that drowns out what I know to be true about the vitality of art, but I have tried to answer it in some poems. I noticed, for instance, that my feelings about sirens had changed. When I was small, they meant one thing; now they also summon things that I know about distressingly many places, near and far. I tried to write about the change in imagery and emotion, giving a reader my childhood relationship to the phenomenon of sirens at bedtime and also what they do to me now, tried to make both versions real.
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?
I like to read theory, but I know that my attraction to it is one of my weaknesses in that it gets in the way of making art that is — I lose sight of my experience and set out to write a poem that starts elsewhere. In that vein, I’ve been irritating myself with a current obsession: staking out a political and economic position on art in response to this moment. It’s been important to me to articulate the virtues of poetry and other art in the face of pressing needs for direct political action, but I have needed to keep it separate from the writing. It gets in the way of making poems that are lively and felt, not dragged down by injunctions or sloganeering or meeting what I think are expectations of the moment, serving up ideas that could be stated plainly as not a poem.
And are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like reading to an audience. I used to perform as an amateur musician, and I miss that; reading to an audience scratches a similar itch. I get nervous before a reading, as I do before I sing, but preparing for a reading has become part of the reading — choosing poems and working through my patter is part of the exchange between me and the audience, which is the point. And reading to a crowd of any size, and sharing the audience with other writers (and artists and musicians), and the audience reacting — everyone could be someplace else, but we’ve chosen to meet in those physical and imaginary spaces. Every person there loves or at least cares about one or more of the readers or language or poetry specifically. When I was starting out I wasn’t sure what a reading was for, although sometimes I could feel the goodness of it. Now I see giving a reading as art-making that can be collaborative.
Are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature, music, science, visual art, yes! I live in New York City and often think about natural landscapes. Some of the poems in Coronation take the urban landscape as natural. For some that meant an attitudinal shift, accepting that built things are natural because humans are part of nature; for others, it took translation from mundane to marvelous. The idea was to not regret the lack of grass here and the shrieking train alarms and the bad air. The idea is to keep the passage open to delight.
I read widely and listen to podcasts about all those things and to a lot of music. One of the questions from astrobiology that sticks with me is whether or not consciousness is fundamental in the universe, a fact of matter, which works nicely with how I see the world: personalities everywhere.
In Coronation there’s a poem that invents a Northern Renaissance painting and alters a Hockney, part of speaker’s memories of a visit through a museum, the context for a meandering reflection, suggesting rooms on rooms of experience, entered and glimpsed. And another one names the video artist Pipilotti Rist in the title — she’s so joyous, whatever else she’s doing, just naming her brightly colors the ironies in the poem. In my previous book, Snow Farmer, there’s an ekphrastic prose poem that interprets a Vermeer. That one I wrote to put a personal, un-art-historical reading into the world.
I like to work with visual artists, too. I used to, and might again, publish unbound books, a zine series comprised of “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books.” Many of them were collaborations between visual artists and writers. Cornerstone Press let me include facsimiles of three of them, three I did the writing for, in Coronation. I think they came out well in the book, and two represent a kind of parallel play of word art and visual art — not one explaining the other, but each influencing your experience of the other. The third is like the prose poem about the Vermeer but more bananas.
Years ago I tried to invent writing systems analogous to 20th-century music composition systems, including tone rows and aleatory procedures. I’ve also tried to adapt visual art practices to writing. Serra’s verb list was exciting, as much for the way it looks as it’s generative potential, and I made a four-axis grid of ideas, taking pains to develop handwriting that would look good. It’s a fine artifact but didn’t help me make poems. Another time, I thought I’d divide poems into vertical auras, like a Rothko. All those trials were generative in a caffeinated way — not producing specific works but swirling the energies around. I wasn’t able to find an explanation of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, but the music, the texts I was able to find on it, and the name itself were exciting. I don’t hanker after a system anymore, but liner notes can get me going. I just read about Steve Coleman’s M-base — trying to translate what he describes as a very open system of improvisation into poetry composition is appealing, though, again, I don’t plan to make a system like it.
The scope of art in NYC is just one of the gorgeous tradeoffs for the indignities of the subway. And some of it happens right there on the platform! I am grateful for all of it. Recently I got to hear three of my favorite musicians, two different shows at Roulette, a storied organization housed in an elegant old theater, an intimate concert hall. Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson played their album Bone Bells straight through. And Marc Ribot played solo guitar; I have his most recent album on repeat: Map of a Blue City.
I’ve been laboring over a poem about a map of myself and recent ancestors; after this interview, I think I can go back to it with less labor and more pleasure.
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