12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jessica Laser

Jessica Laser was born in Chicago. She is the author of two books of poems, Planet Drill (Futurepoem Books, 2022), winner of the Other Futures Award, and Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships from Brown University, the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Mastheads, and Purchase College. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Solar, Rainbow Agate, No Materialism, Lana Turner and The Yale Review.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

There’s a take on free will in Dante that says something like, “Set in motion by a happy maker, the soul turns to what pleases it.” When they published Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides, Lisa and Josh at Letter Machine set me in motion in this way.

Over the last few years, I have slowly but completely reversed my thinking on, for lack of a better term, the affective fallacy. This has been the single biggest factor in changing the surface of my work. Before, I judged poetry (my own and others’) on the extent to which it seemed aware of itself as made of language; I judged poetry on what it chose to do with that awareness. Now I judge poetry on whether it is moving. These aims are not mutually exclusive, and now that I write this out, I see that any distinction between them is false, because of course I was and am still extremely moved by the way poems recognize themselves as made of language.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

As you can see from my previous answer, I’m not so good at rhetorical argument. Poetry seemed to me the medium best able to release rhetorical argument’s fantasy of control by weaving itself of contradiction, by privileging how we actually feel over how we feel we should feel. That’s my thinky answer, but in some sense I was always headed this way: even as a very young writer, I was driven by music more than by narrative or description.

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?

It’s always changing and I feel a lot of resistance to describing it.

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?

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Oh wait, that’s Robert Frost. For me, a poem begins wherever there is an opening, engineered or spontaneous, for language to pour through, sometimes even in the middle of another poem. Deep down, whether I want to or not, I believe that poetry’s potential for greatness lies in the discrete poem and not the book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes. I prepare for a reading as I would for any performance: I rehearse. Perhaps because of copious theater training earlier in my life, I am uncompromising about my belief that members of an audience deserve to feel confident in a performer’s preparation, so they can sit back and receive the work. It drives me crazy when, in the middle of a reading, the poet asks the audience how much time is left. 

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?

I have currently abandoned all my theoretical concerns to try and become a true student of practice.

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?

What is the role of inner life in larger culture? What is the status of emotional truth? What kinds of information does our newsy reliance on “fact” leave out? Where do we think experience takes place? Stevens: “The blood of the mind fell/ to the floor. I slept.” Writers should keep us awake, and, thankfully, there are a lot of different ways to do that, many of which, no matter how difficult the subject matter, are founded in a sense of play.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I might regret saying this, but poetry happens in editing (not writing), in the writing becoming aware of what it is. In my experience, the best editor is one who loves the poem enough to recognize a full fruition the poem might not yet have achieved, and who can see a way to steward the poem toward that fruition, not one externally imposed. This question is timely for me: in the last few months, I worked with editors at Solar and The Yale Review who were able to, as it were, take the telescope I had built and see beyond me, and the poems were better for it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I love advice; here’s my arsenal.

A.  “Listen, and allow yourself to be surprised.” An intellectual mentor of mine, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, wrote this in an email to me in 2010 when, having never taught before, I was offered a creative writing course with little notice and asked her for teaching advice, though obviously this advice also holds for writing poems, being in relationship, appreciating life, etc.

B. “You can write whatever you want, but you actually have to do that.” Carlos Lara put this piece of gold on the internet and I continue to sit back and watch it shine. In writing as in life, “whatever you want” is no default state; it must be cultivated, protected, accessed.

            C. Anti-advice advice in Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim: The Yehudi speaks on Psalm 13:2—“How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart by day?”— saying, “‘So long as I take counsel in my soul, there must needs be sorrow in my heart by day. It is only when I realize that no counsel can help me, and know of no help save that which comes from God—it is only then that help is accorded me.’ And then he added: ‘This is the mystic meaning of the ritual bath.’” A bath I would take.

D. A physical therapist, Susan, once told me: “The pain isn’t always where the injury is.”

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

None. But I can say that if I do not have an active, relaxed and joyful reading practice, then I have no writing practice, either. I begin my day by walking my dog.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I try to get in touch with the permission to fail. Recently I was helped along by the first draft of James Wright’s poem “Hook.” At the top of the page, after typing the date, he’d written, “I will call it Hook,” which, I am probably projecting, indicated to me that he was in something like the ideal mental state for writing poetry. Right at the start, he took the permission to write the whole phrase as it occurred to him, to let go of any premature desire to distinguish between language that would ultimately be in the poem (“Hook”) and language that would be cut (“I will call it”)—because until the poem comes to be, who knows what language it requires, and you wouldn’t want to miss the poem because you refused to recognize as poetic the language it was calling for. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Obsession by Calvin Klein.

13 - 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?

Pop music that leans country and country music that leans roots, because of a relationship I hear there between pleasure, vernacular, generic tradition and formal ingenuity. Psychoanalysis, the study and practice, has shaped my sense that language, adequately witnessed, to which one’s agency has been given over, is able to reveal truths we didn’t know we knew. And painting: figuration, abstraction, gesture, mark-making—these terms have been useful to me in exploring how to resist productively language’s constant pull toward the communicative.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I am overwhelmed by this question and am limiting my response to one author chosen not at random: John Cheever. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Have a child.

16 - 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?

A baker and a psychoanalyst, to the first question; maybe an actor or director (theater, not film), to the second.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I was recently saying to my friend Dan Poppick that being a poet is like being born speaking a language that no one else in your family speaks and that sounds to most people like nonsense, and then one day finding out that there is a large, international community and centuries of tradition of people speaking this language, and that you are, were always, part of it. Not all the time and not in every way, but poetry has helped me feel at home in the world.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Two books, instead: Nicole Krauss’s To Be A Man & Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse.

19 - What are you currently working on?

A new poetry collection.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Renee Angle, WoO

Their division into tribes. Their worship of Jehovah. Their notion of a theocracy. Their belief in the ministration of angels. Their language and dialects. Their manner of counting time. Their prophets and high priests. Their festivals, fasts, and religious rites. Their daily sacrifice. Their ablutions and anointings. Their laws of uncleanness. Their abstinence from unclean things. Their marriages, divorces, and punishments of adultery. Their several punishments. Their cities of refuge. Their purification and preparatory ceremonies. Their ornaments. Their manner of curing the sick. Their burial of their dead. Their mourning for their dead. Their raising seed to a deceased brother. Their change of names adapted to their circumstances and times. Their own traditions.

I’m late to the game, but fascinated by Renee Angle’s hybrid debut, WoO (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a book that moves through the legacy, myths and half-truths of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Combining blends of the outer edges of the prose poem, Angle’s WoO writes and overwrites histories, stories and mythologies, opening the first paragraph of the book’s “PREFACE” with:

I am the bastard great-great-great grandchild of Joseph Smith, in search of a textline, not a bloodline. I affirm the manner in which durability and transience are imposed upon the world of objects. My dedication is no longer comprised of belief, redemption, conversation, fact. I dream of becoming anonymous, the ELECTRIC LIBRARY set past and future.

The book blends facts and fiction, prose and poem in such a way that it does emerge as an entirely separate animal, composing a composition on composing a book on, around and through Joseph Smith, and the difficult line that often exists between science and faith: “What happens when you hand your relics over to science, and, what if science doesn’t want your saints?”

In an interview with Angle on Under a Warm Green Linden (posted July 21, 2016), interviewer Christopher Nelson begins with the acknowledgment that the title is “an abbreviation of Werke ohne Opuszahl, which you explain is ‘used to denote musical compositions surviving only as fragments.’”

Nelson: Because Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, is central to WoO, reading it as a seduction—a kind of persuasion—was meaningful for me. But we will talk more about Joseph Smith later.

One of the things I love about WoO is its formal variety, how many different shapes the poems and prose take on the page. There’s prose poetry, rhyming couplets, a question-and-answer motif, and these lovely little “box poems,” where the text is a two-inch square. What were your intentions in presenting your ideas in so many varieties, and how did you know which forms to use for any given part?

Angle: A lot of WoO is collage work, so some of the forms suggested themselves because of the methods I was using to generate them. The rhyming couplets, for example, are found pieces that I collaged together using a rhyme scheme as a constraint. To choose the texts for WoO, I looked at books that scholars think Joseph Smith had in his library or books he read over the course of his life. All of the little box poems were translations that I made using a Hebrew grammar primer Joseph Smith used to learn Hebrew to read The Bible. And some of the poems were generated as my own meditations on certain subjects, and those take a looser, prose-poem form.

I am very interested in formal range, as a device. I’m reminded of seeing a retrospective of Gerhard Richter when I was in graduate school. His work was very meaningful for me, and I was struck by these abstract expressionist paintings that he paired with photorealistic portraits of his daughter and others. So I had that in mind as something that I was aiming for.

Jessica Laser, Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

Fazana

When my woman says hello

She says what can I get you.

I had no time to peruse the menu.

I was lost in thought and English

Came last, after German, French,

And Dante with no mirror page.

I decided then that to eat

Would be fine, but to decide the dish

Translation. Croatia lost to Brazil.

I went to my room to make sure

Of everything, as I often needed.

There you were absurdly, suddenly

A parrot on my knee. Your plume

Fired in the background.

To see you

So upset me

I would have learned a new language

If it meant in English to disconnect my knee.

Between two other, similar versions

Not in the same translation

I found in myself the lyric I looked for.

I found it with its moral intact.

A poet must heat to song in the dark.

Lest reckoned the poet he died to see boil.

Chicago poet Jessica Laser’s full-length poetry debut is Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Seattle WA: Letter Machine Editions, 2019), a title that includes but a single sentence on the back cover as copy: “There are so many ways to think of us that I have thought them all.” Composed as book-length character study, Laser utilizes twists of language, literary and historical references and some damned sharp lines to create a complex and multi-faceted exploration of character and story. She begins her collection with a narrative poem that introduces “Sergie Kuzmich,” an older writer going through a divorce (and a multitude of affairs, it would seem) who meets the much younger, emerging writer/narrator and begins a relationship. The book then opens up into what constructs itself as a study through the lyric, but one that explores both subject and unnamed narrator, exploring, as Laser suggests, her subject from all sides. “When I complete a family / We are never better,” the voice of Kuzmich responds, further on in the first section, in the poem “Sensual Delight in Virtue,” continuing: “never / Than when our enemies love us / Which is to say when we fail. / But Sergei Kuzmich from all sides / There is no treason to describe.” Laser tells a story, and tells it slant, in a way reminiscent, even, of the work of Letter Machine Editions co-editor/co-publisher Joshua Marie Wilkinson [see my review of one of his books here], even as she ends the second section, the lyric suite/sequence “Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience,” with:

We are what we have and memoires

Keep us from comfort.

They are what we know.

You are what we know and I

I am the thing that knows you.

People apply

Their many logics.

They can’t all be right

And are each wrong

Two truths comprise our

O truths

Comprise our failures

And remember us.

Laser moves through her subject (or subjects, really) and through her own reading, including references to numerous authors and works, something picked up in a review of the book by Allison Casey, over at Barrelhouse, writing: “Jessica Laser’s debut book Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides wields a terrible blade of knowledge—one most of us can only wield via Google. Even the title boasts a wide-cast net of experience, referencing a passage from War and Peace, and the name of an obscure Russian soldier. I know this thanks to Google, the 80 pages of Tolstoy I got through last summer, and a helpful epigraph at the beginning of the book.” Later on in her review, she adds that “Laser brings everyone from Flaubert to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Eliot into the fray, and ironically, it’s in a move like Eliot (or maybe more like Anne Carson) that Laser risks losing her reader among the weeds in all her influences and allusions. At what point are they more for her than for the poems?”

Throughout the book, Laser moves from reference to collage, and her final poem/section, “Losss,” is made up entirely of quoted lines/stanzas (one hundred and seventy-one of them, in fact), footnoted and properly sourced, including lines from Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Leo Tolstoy, Vaslav Nijinsky, W.S. Merwin, the books of Genesis and Exodus, Alice Munro, T.S. Eliot and multiple others. It is curious how Laser moves through the collection, from sourced material to her own, writing out an exploration of character which includes explorations of the self, the self in relation to others and the self in relation to God, such as in the second section, where she writes: “When I saw the man, I / Lived unbearably. I had no vision / Of myself as a mystic, / No audience with god.” In the end, this might be a book about the finding ground, or finding place, utilizing the unnamed narrator as a means-to-an-exploration, writing a poem-essay on “Sergei Kuzmich” that has nothing to do with him at all. And yet, as the song goes, writing Kuzmich in a way that the character would move through this book, and think these poems are all about him (wouldn’t he?).

I locked those habits in a drawer

Where I was told they’d be

What is the difference

Between now and forgetting

And if I infer from the drawer

Will my inference be in it

I look at reason in the dark

It seems to me to flicker

Not the flame and not the wick

It is the motion to and fro

It could be both though (“Tractatus”)

Andrea Rexilius, New Organism: Essais

I hear myself whispering to the wood, at night, on hilltops. I hear myself whispering at night in my sleep. What are my eyelids saying. At night the room fluctuates. Climbs other rooms, other landscapes. I am steaming in this room while the other room heaves forward. Embeds itself in the coat rack and the doorframe, seeps in between pages of a book. Later I find traces of it. A residue on the countertop, a piece of bark in the sink drain. The impression of an ear on the wall. I have the distinct sense that the room is listening. The room is carving out new ideas beneath the skin. The pores soak in their salt, sweat out the room, move the room upward into the light. Let the room sink like a stone cradled inside the ear. The stone will absorb the room, not necessarily bring the room. Some people live on borrowed rooms and their eyes are shakier for it. It is best to dissolve a room like this, to walk away from it and not turn back to check its progress. (“Séance”)

I’m fascinated by the essay-poems that make up Andrea Rexilius’ third poetry collection, New Organism: Essais (Tuscon AZ: Letter Machine Editions, 2014), a title that follows To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) and Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012). As part of her accompanying statement in The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books, 2015), she writes:

My work investigates the book as a process of inquiry and is interested in the nature of conversation, questioning, subjectivity, women’s history, and the proximity between physical self and textual self. In my writing and teaching I combine interdisciplinary research with creative process to spawn an approach that is both rigorously intellectual, in the sense of questioning, critical thinking, and essaying, as well as playful and engaged across the disciplines of performance, film, and installation. Related research interests include: contemplative performance poetics, book arts, text-off-the-page, feminism, and aesthetic theory.

There have been numerous poets over the years exploring the blend between essay and poem (with a shortlist of Canadian poets who immediately come to mind: PhilHall, Barry McKinnon and Erín Moure), and Rexilius’ explorations into the same exist deep in the tradition of the extended prose poem. New Organism: Essais exists both as a new collection of poems by Andrea Rexilius, and an argument of the forms in which she works, exploring, prodding and pushing at the boundaries between multliple genres, existing simultaneously within each work. There is something remarkable in the way that Rexilius explores the boundaries of the book as unit of composition, and one that is entirely unique in the realm of poetry-as-thinking, and the possibilities of the extended prose poem. Each poem within the book speaks to, and is intimately connected to, each surrounding poem, and the book as a whole exists as a thesis on thinking, collecting and states of being. In the sequence “Second Residue: The Woods,” she writes: “A territory is not a blank page. / It is the book buried beneath the ground.” The book exists in two sections: “New Organism,” made up of five sections of extended prose poems, and “Essais,” made up of two extended prose poem-essays. The tricky part is attempting to explain the differences, as her blend of poem and essay run throughout, yet one might say that the first part of the collection leans more towards the poem, as the second part leans toward the formal essay. And yet, in the end, to speculate on the differences between the two might be to miss the point entirely.

The animal that is my sex is not a novel. This is a novel. This caused a rhizomatic membrane. I am faltering here. In the white snow of the white page. Yesterday I watched a Tarkovsky film in Russian. The translation was “look how peculiar the sky. The sky.” I meandered back inside the doorway just as it began to pour. All of the grain in the field writhing. I struck the yellow leaves with my fist. I struck the grey sky and the mud beneath my feet. I don’t know what being human means. Is it to have eyes? Here is the ground, the field. The air around me a room. A room that pulses and heaves. The light, clear. The light, not yellow. My breath, not yellow or clear. The words, leaves upon my breath. the turning of the seasons fall off of my mouth. My mouth lingers. The sun sets. Some animal burrows its dark fur inside this sentence.

If Lisa Robertson is, as she once wrote, “a gentleman collector of sentences,” then Rexilius is the bricolage, and the first of her two essays in the “Essais” section, “Root Systems of Narrative: A Séance,” describes exactly the same process Stan Dragland does in his new book of essays, The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014). As Canadian poets Robertson, Phil Hall and Natalie Simpson, Rexilius is a serious collector, and, in similar ways, her writing is the result of a complex collage of a myriad of materials, picked up from a scattering of sources, precisely set in very deliberate ways. As she writes in “Root Systems of Narrative: A Séance”:

I tend to gather alike things in language. I obsess over an idea or a term or an image and use it over and over again in a variety of contexts. Images are cumulative or regenerative. They have to be allowed to exist in almost every context before we can pretend to know anything about them. I find I have to use my body in order to write well. I go for a walk first and gather things and pretend to be a diorama. Then word conduct themselves. If I don’t go for a walk first, I gather things from books. I move through books the same way I move through walks. I turn to pages and find the field jar. Then I put all of the field jar elements onto a page. Then I cut and paste them. I have to trust my first instinct or there is a massacre. I have tried many times to undo a massacre. Everyone knows things are hacked up and put back together when that happens. They sense a murder has occurred and are uncomfortable.