Sarah Dowling, Entering Sappho

Mythological personages supplement lively
post offices. What they most resemble is a pan-
theon of hungry dogs. What they most resemble
is an advanced stage of a bacterial culture. What

we most resemble is the end of the world.
We are conspicuous, we pluck the strings
of historical association and make another
exclusion. We are a winnowing, a slow tick

of the intellectual pacemaker, a growing edge.
Wait till they get up close. This movement
happened in more than one hundred cities:
Agricola, Bovina, Pomona, Marathon, Akron,

Ajax, Salix, and others extending in a long line
below the wet cloud blanket. (“THIS WORD: I WANT”)

Toronto poet and critic Sarah Dowling’s long-awaited fourth full-length poetry collection is Entering Sappho (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), following Security Posture (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010), Birds & Bees (Troll Thread, 2012) and Down (Coach House Books, 2014). The book-length suite of poems that make up Entering Sappho play off naming, from the community of Sappho in Clallum County, Washington, to the ancient Greek poet, utilizing the Greek moniker upon American soil as a way to open up a conversation around indigenous considerations, erasure and colonialism. What is the impact of one name attempting to overwrite another? As the back cover offers: “Driving along the Pacific Coast highway, you come to a read sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement – about why we’re here in front of this sign?” The play between this seemingly-incompatible and ancient naming is a curious structure to frame the collection, akin to Toronto writer Margaret Christakos referring to the town of Alexandria, but the one in Glengarry County, Ontario, and not the infamous and ancient Egyptian city, via the title and title sequence of her own debut collection, Not Egypt (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1989). It is as though Dowling works to construct an engagement and conversation around Sappho, Washington with all its contradictions and confusions, writing the ghost of a town named after a long-dead Greek poet, but wrapping her conversation intricately around queer identity, naming and Sappho’s few remaining fragments. 

Well did they have the hotel at the same
time as they had the store? Yes, it was all

built together. All built together, and the
hall too. What did they use the hall for,

other than dances? Well, in the wintertime
they used to use it to dry clothes, mostly.

It had a big mangle up there, a drying
mangle, they used to mangle the clothes

and sheets and everything. You mangle
them – now, you didn’t have electricity?

No. just rolls about that big around and
about that long. (“ORAL HISTORY”)

Dowling’s Entering Sappho fragments into sections and subsections—“Possession Sound” that includes “Clip,” “Entering Sappho” that includes “Oral History” and “Soft Memory,” “Neoclassical Place Names of North America” that includes “This Word: I Want” and “US,” and “Leucadian Leap,” that includes “Ornament,” “These Things Now For My Companion / I Shall Sing Beautifully”—as well as a prose afterward or coda of sorts, “White Columns.” The shapes of Dowling’s lyrics shift and shimmy, denoting a particular precision of the line and line-break, attempting a large canvas in portions, from archival materials, oral histories and blended mythologies. “You may forget that one day with my little red / girl in my pretty red boots when they came // by mail from Tacoma. I had been cruising out / of my claim. I had been promised roses of Lesbos,” she writes, as part of the poem “US,” “I had turned a pallid pink.” Dowling explores our past and potential future relationships to colonialism and local acknowledgment, even as she writes out Sappho, Washington in all its former glory, ghost-town appeal and queer associations. As her afterword, “White Columns,” begins:

Entering Sappho is a portal into history – the bits that are meant to be meaningful to a person like me, as well as those that are repugnant. Entering Sappho is taking on a series of voices, versions of the ancient poetess and traces of the town. Entering Sappho is addressing history and its daughter colony, the present.
            Entering Sappho is a silly ritual. When you’re driving to the coast on Highway 101, you come to the sign, stop, and take a picture. Entering Sappho is how you pay tribute to the original lesbian and to the generations of queers who’ve also passed here to photograph themselves. Entering Sappho is a moment of gleeful excitement. Cars zoom past, going much faster than seems possible. It’s a little scary, but entering Sappho is also hilarious. Picture the hand gestures, how people pose, decade after decade, in front of this unwitting monument.

Sarah Dowling, Down

What could make this aesthetics. Would could make me feel that. Make me many. Make me better. What could make me sexless and sexual. Make me better. What could make me sexless and sexual. Make me feel we. Make me feel made. Make me feel us. Make me feel matter. Make me feel this, for one. What could make me feel this commotion, this relationship to energy. What could make me feel this way. (“Sunshine Honey”)

Canadian poet Sarah Dowling’s third poetry collection—following Security Posture (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010) and Birds & Bees (Troll Thread, 2012)—is the newly-released Down (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2014), a collection that shakes and shimmys, utilizing repetition and a lyric ebb and flow that stretches out across the entire book. What compels about Down is the sheer vibrancy and velocity her poems radiate, managing to break and rebuild expectation and lyric structure. As she opens the poem “I’ve Got To Tell You”: “Can you Can you Can you Can / I promise If we talk and you know / But see / I don’t know if I / shouldn’t tell but if / I let you       can’t I’m talking Are you / I’m not lonely just       Say yes[.]” Hers is a sonic density of lyric and language, one that plays with narrative logic, the fragment, and space on the page. Her coda, “The Process Notes,” that closes the collection, opens:

I’ve been working on DOWN since 2009. It began as different project, Hinterland B. For years, I was writing about a big, bare field. There was a body in it. The newspapers said that someone was gone. The newspapers said that someone had been found. These were not the same person. The TV kept on chattering, people lost interest, the cycle moved on. I was thinking about this field as secondary: not Hinterland A, but Hinterland B.

            I thought that the hinterlands were the most rural and remote places. Turns out, this is not true. A hinterland is more familiar; the waste fields around ports and airports are hinterlands. A hinterland serves as a buffer between sanctioned spaces for living and working and the trade hubs where we are not supposed to go. They are the regions between the everyday and the truly rural lands that we too often imagine as depopulated.

[…]

At the same time that I was working on Hinterland B, I was also working on performance writing using song lyrics. I liked how the repetitions structuring chorus and verse shifted when stripped of their melodic accompaniment. Gertrude Stein said she was inclined to believe that there is no such thing as repetition, only insistence. Frank O’Hara said that what was happening to him went into his poems. This was insistence but with more anxiety.

As she herself writes, she worked to compose poems with the mutability, sincerity and lyric throwaway of pop songs, managing to create an impressive collection of poems that exude a soundless music and stylized lyric flow blended with a series of complex, staggered rhythms, an exploration of the public versus private, and what exactly remoteness means.

        but               his                            Yes, his

saw he says          friend had face as little cop

        , had                    was      fresh soon friend

            had bloodied handcuffed blood as

friend, face    up. and on I

in to cut His bleeding his saw

the the         boy in      , him

backseat window his           was across there

and face full back his was

he

was blood. gash

yelling across

me (“Starlight Tours”)

I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, eds. Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Camody and Vanessa Place

Why the term “conceptual” now? Why not come up with a new term, one which is actually new? And yet the term “conceptual,” because of its long association with visual arts, merits a wider gaze than it has been given in relation to writing. In other words, it is not a term which can belong to a select few, or be defined too narrowly, at least not at this point in time. The term “conceptual writing” warrants a period of discovery and describes, as illustrated in this book, a wide proliferation of forms and approaches. This anthology is hopefully the beginning of opening such a passage of debate and conversation. The fact is, that the term “conceptual writing,” for better and for worse, has thus far often been employed to describe a set of writing practices which seem, nonsensically, to preclude particular content. Not coincidentally, this content is often chosen by women. In this collection of work by women a reader may find that process and restraint driven writing is often expressive and intellectual, and that the assumption of a dualistic paradigm which claims that conceptual writing creates only ego-less works is actually another false construction. While looking at the work of women in this collection, it is evident that in conceptual writing methodologies do not dictate or predict the writing that follows, nor is methodology the only indicator of conceptual writing. (Laynie Browne, “A Conceptual Assemblage An Introduction”)

Perhaps one of the most highly anticipated anthologies of recent memory is the new I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2012), edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place. The editors include the work of “64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work.” This collection comes on the heels of some fiery debate, including the founding of both the VIDA (Women in Literary Arts) and CWILA (Canadian Women in Literary Arts) organizations, working for the sake of an increased dialogue with and about women writing and writers. In terms of Canadian writing, also, this new collection follows some other important works in a similar field, including Nate Dorward’s ANTIOPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (Toronto ON: The Gig, 2008), Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne’s Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) and Eichhorn and Barbara Godard’s guest-edited “Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today” issue of Open Letter (Thirteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2009). It seems baffling that still, after enough examples have been forwarded of women writers over the years, why does so much of it still get overlooked? Why is there still such a disconnect? Only recently, Ottawa poet, publisher and bookseller jwcurry lamented the list of Canadian critical studies on small press publishing, visual/concrete poetry and women’s works that have nearly erased the contributions of Vancouver’s Judith Copithorne, said to be the first woman publisher in British Columbia, producing works alongside Gerry Gilbert and bill bissett. Despite the fact that her work has been ongoing, with her first pieces published back in the 1950s, the critical silence is deafening.

                                                OF BETWEEN

Between the precious and the radical

Between the strategic and the tragic

Radiant and strained

Fountain is a folding fan of water.

The pressure of errant streams

massages precious togetherness open.

From the fissure clear water issues

as though from a purse

between clasps of discourses

and their embroidered surfaces

Between the institutions of pairs

The middle is a guess of worn surfaces

Between the privilege of two

Between the two of conformity

or the two of caution

if vanity is between us

as much as

we have yet to break

Between the surfaces of singing

and the surfaces of speaking

entre tes braz trestoute nue (Angela Carr)

With their contributions of sixty-four writers from ten countries, one might suspect that those contained within might all be aware of each others’ work, but borders are stronger than one might imagine, even with the added bonus of the internet, and journals such as Jacket magazine and Jacket2. The range of writers are enough that those in the anthology might even be introduced to someo f the others within for the first time, or for the first substantial time. The collection is organized in sections—1. Process (Constraint, Mimicry, Mediation, Translative, Versioning); 2. Structure (Appropriation, Erasure, Constraint, Formula, Pattern, Palimpsest); 3. Matter (Baroque, Hybrid, Generative, Corporeal, Dissensual); 4. Event (Documenta, Investigative, Intertextual, Historicism, Speculative); and 5. Concluding Remarks. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women is an important book in many ways, in no small part for the lively range of statements included by each author. As Sarah Dowling opens her statement, included after a couple of pages of her visual works: “I come to conceptual writing with a scholarly interested in description.”  In her statement, “Some Ambivalence about the term ‘Conceptual Poetry,’” Rosmarie Waldrop writes: “By these criteria, I am certainly not a conceptual writer.” She opens her piece, writing:

When visual artists go to conceptual work they stress the part of their process that depends least on the nature of their medium, which is sensuous. They in fact leave their medium and cross over into language.

            For writers, the situation is very different. The concept is an essential part of the word, hence the very nature, the very medium of writing—its bane, many would say, for it makes the language arts the most abstract, the least sensuous of the arts. I, like most poets, work at subverting the word’s transparency for its concept (loved by philosophers and other discursive writers) by stressing the “body” of the word, its sound, sometimes its shape. The literary movement that actually corresponds to conceptual art is concrete poetry, which tries to cross over into the visual.

On the other hand, Laura Moriarty includes as her sole contribution, the piece “The Writing Practice Formerly Known As,” which discusses the difficulty and complication of naming:

Experimentality in writing is universally acknowledged to comprise innovation, pushing the limits of literary genres or combining genres. These days, there seems to be an impulse to name experimental writing practice, perhaps from a desire to distinguish contemporary writing from older innovative practices or what could be called traditional writing. […] I recently participated in a conference that was called “post_moot” by its organizers, cris cheek, Cathy Wagner and Bill Howe. They used the term “post_moot” rather than employ the dreaded “post language” or “post” anything, as well as to emphasize the communality of current practice. “Moot” means “meeting” with the additional senses of “discussion” and “judging.” Many writers prefer not to characterize their writing or label it at all.

As Laynie Browne writes in her introduction (Caroline Bergvall includes one as well, and Vanessa Place contributes an “Afterword”): “The writers in this collection are not bound by a singular aesthetic intent, but rather by practices which, when considered side by side, form a mosaic of possibilities which resonate as a whole, perhaps because of a commitment to common concerns which span many practices, languages and cultures.” What is fascinating about having two distinct introductions (three with the “Afterword”) to the anthology is that it highlights the difficulties with wanting to place the collection in a singular context, as well as the complication of such a loaded term as “conceptual poetry”; instead, this collection holds a fluidity of approaches, styles, contradictions and geographies, existing as an anthology-as-container, and containing multitudes. The approach feels entirely appropriate for the concept and the materials, attempting to articulate a complicated and contradictory idea, instead of arbitrarily fixing a moving target. To define in almost any way would be to reduce, and therefore negate, that with which they are working to engage. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women is an ambitious work, large, rich and slightly contradictory, and entirely brilliant, and something that anyone interested in contemporary writing should immediately attempt to get their hands upon. In her “Afterword,” co-editor Vanessa Place speaks of the parable of the five blind men and the elephant, and their incomplete descriptions.

I have previously identified many forms of conceptualism, ranging from the pure to the baroque. These are matters of form. I have come to consider conceptualism, qua conceptualism, that is, as writing that does not self-interpret, is not self-reflexive, at least not on the page. In other words, writing in which the content does not dictate the content: what appears on the surface of the page is pure textual materiality, no more (and often much less) than what you see on the surface of the page. Conversely, in the way of positive and negative space, conceptualism is also writing in which the context is the primary locus of meaning-making.

P-QUEUE #7 (“Polemic”) + 8 (“Document”)

WOLVERINE

I was only pretending

to be ephiphanic

she said, tossing the whole

day over the embankment

Is the heart collandered

or semiprecious

filled with holes

and therefore filled with light

This is just the sort of thing

that cannot be said upon a chair

Unless that chair is spotlit

and wolverine. Can furniture

be wolverine? No, because wolverine

is a noun. (Julia Bloch)

From the depths of SUNY Buffalo come two more volumes of the annual P-QUEUE, their seventh (2010) and eighth (2011), respectively. Given the stunning work in previous volumes of P-QUEUE, I’m disappointed, although not surprised, to hear that these two are the only remaining volumes in print. How many do they make of each, I wonder? With the first three volumes edited by Sarah Campbell, volume 7 is the last of four volumes edited by Andrew Rippeon, subtitled “Polemic,” and features the work of Rich Owens, Craig Dworkin, Julia Bloch, Janet Neigh, Jimbo Blachly and Lyttle Shaw, Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Steve Zultanski, Bhanu Kapil, Robert Fitterman, Patrick F. Durgin, Alessandro Porco, Craig Santos Perez, Vanessa Place and Sarah Dowling. What I’ve always appreciated about this journal has been the construction of each issue as a whole unit, as opposed to a gathering of pieces that don’t necessarily hold as tight together, however impressive the work might be. Sylvia Legris, for example, managed such a feat throughout her run editing Grain magazine. Reminiscent, somewhat, of the recent “Manifestos Now!” issue of The Capilano Review (3.13 / Winter 2011) [see my review of such here], editor Andrew Rippeon writes to end his “Editor’s Note”:

If Angers and Tacoma teach anything to vanguard artists (and it’s a travesty to even consider that they might), it is that neither exceptional individual experience nor movement solidarity exceeds that appetite. The first white wall of the village / Rises through fruit-frees… In our clamor to be among or name the object of that first, we wager the timbre of difference for our moment of arrival. The boots of the men clump / On the boards of the bridge… Does the collapse now so thoroughly permeate the air shared by collective and individual that we fail to recognize its event as only a symptom of itself? Like poetry after Auschwitz, French bridges and American stereos are crossed and sold, and continue to be apace. What barbarism there is exists not within the single poem, pedestrian, or audio component, but rather in the appetite that finds them interchangeable in what they offer. Confronted by the equal consequence of united front and individual mind, it is incumbent upon us neither to resist as a bloc nor to assert the value of the individual, but to develop practices that perpetuate the mutual unintelligibility of these structures such that neither reduces to the other. Hence, polemic. This is old song / That will not declare itself…

There are some fantastic poems in this issue, from Julia Bloch to Rich Owens to some Sarah Dowling gems, visually reminiscent of some of the work of American ex-pat poet Edward Smallfield and Toronto poet Jay MillAr. In his essay, “Polemic for P-Queue,” Steve Zultanski moves through an exploration and argument for proper criticism, as well as a scathing rebuke, and begins with the question “What is poetic about Conceptual Poetry?” He writes:

A common critique of conceptual poems is that they are totalizing gestures. This complaint is directed, most often, toward the works of Kenneth Goldsmith. Without naming names (unworthy adversaries don’t deserve names), the critique goes something like this: Goldsmith’s books are big, and they “reproduce” a masculine need to index the world, to include everything within its rational purview. Thus, it is implied (or directly suggested) that a properly feminine (or at least non-masculinist) poetics would be fragmented, poly-vocal, incomplete, etc. See: Kristeva, etc. See: sloppy readings of Derrida, etc.

What this argument fails to account for is the appearance of the incomplete, as such. For Conceptual Poetry, the incompleteness of the text (what we’ve referred to as the non-identity of concept and realization, or, the poetic element) can only appear in the apparent completeness of the project. Because the text is only apparently complete, its incompleteness is ever the more apparent in a given reading. The appearance of incompleteness in this form makes sense not only theoretically, but historically—insofar as Conceptual Poetry marks an intervention into the practice of poetry.

The most recent volume, the eighth, is the first co-edited by Holly Melgard and Joey Yearous-Algozin, subtitled “Document,” and features the work of Anna Vitale, CAConrad, Ish Klein, Thom Donovan, Chris Sylvester, Jena Osman, Lewis Freedman, Brad Flis, Andrew Topel, David Buuck, Josef Kaplan, David Wolach, Divya Victor and Lawrence Griffin, as well as bookending essays by each editor, written as a letter to the other. As Joey Yearous-Algozin opens, writing:

Dear Holly,

What has stimulated our collaborative process in this volume has been the occasion to shed fidelities to a previous design scheme, without sacrificing the appearance of formal continuity. For this journal, which we are carrying forward after Andrew Rippeon’s illustrious run as editor, to share more than just its name with the previous editions, it was necessary for us to treat its architectonics as a pre-existing structure. Since the decisions behind this exterior pattern were not our own, we were free to follow them without necessity. Instead, in choosing to engage with the arbitrary details and constraints of a preformed template, we were able to arrive at a designed ambivalence. Therefore, it is in the splendor of contradiction that this phrase enlists that I want to inaugurate this volume of P-Queue.

Sectioned into quarters, the section headers run from “A” to “AN” to “AND” and “THE,” stretching the document on the document, citing essential connector words between the sections as much as titling them. When I first became aware of P-QUEUE some years ago, part of the appeal as a reader and potential contributor both (I have work included in a long-previous issue; try to figure out which one) was their eye for works that didn’t fit anywhere else, and this issue runs a range of styles, from a sharp-eyed visual sequence by Andrew Topel, a selection of related works by CAConrad, and an excerpt of a longer poem-essay by Jena Osman, “The Beautiful Life of Persona Ficta,” that begins with a quote by Muriel Ruykeyser, “A corporation is a body without a soul.” How could she have known, so many decades back?

scientific selection of the workman

an assembly line cog:

I realize I’ve pictured the cog incorrectly—

as a spoke—

when in fact it’s just one tooth of a gear

a small part that requires interlocking with another

I spoke a small part without teeth

14th: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State small make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This Amendment, adopted to end slavery once and for all in 1868, subsequently employed to protect an artificial person in 1886. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad there is no written opinion granting corporations 14th Amendment rights; was it simply the slip of an errant court reporter?

The human body a machine that winds its own springs.

To order copies of these, or of their chapbook series (which I have yet to see), visit their website at www.p-queue.org or write P-Queue, c/o Holly Melgard, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo New York, 14260 USA

12 or 20 questions: with Sarah Dowling

Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture, published by Snare Books as the winner of the 2009 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her work has previously appeared in Action, Yes!, The Capilano Review, Cue, EOAGH, GLQ, the ixnay reader 4, West Coast Line, and elsewhere. Sarah Dowling is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is working on a dissertation on multilingual poetry.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t think that my first book changed my life, but I certainly met a lot of people through the process of publishing it, and their various presences in my life do constitute changes of different kinds. This is not to ignore the changes that can come with book publication, such as eligibility for certain kinds of grants, and even for certain kinds of jobs. But my book was published quite recently and thus far I haven’t made any attempts to secure any of those big-boy benefits I’ve heard so much about.

To answer the second two questions, my recent work is somewhat more similar to the first manuscript that I wrote, which was not the manuscript of my first book. I have returned to an angrier mode of writing, and one that is more explicitly quotational.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I probably came to poetry as a reader at the same time that I came to other textual forms, because my parents were very focused on education and always really emphasized reading. We read poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in our house, and we listened to and played a lot of music. I can remember receiving T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats for Easter one year, and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery another. And there was a lot of E. Nesbit around.

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?
My writing is very, very slow and it requires a lot of “non-writing” writing time. I’m also very committed to revision, so it can really take forever.


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 work on series of questions, and I often think of these questions as “books” because I have a feeling for how long I will need or want to spend thinking about them. Having said that, my first book took the opposite approach, and it was only after I had amassed several short pieces of about 5-7 pp. each that I realized that in addition to the formal similarities among them, there were probably also theoretical similarities, and that if I could isolate those, I would then have a book project. But even though the process was reversed from what I had done in the past, I was still working with “the book” as a compositional unit.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do really enjoy doing readings, and I find them enormously helpful, partly because they offer an occasion to generate and test out new work, and partly because versioning a text for performance can be crucial for revision. I also find the conversations generated at readings really valuable – this, of course, is especially true when I am not the one giving the reading!

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’m interested in poetry that works in tandem with theory; that is, the poetry I like is explicitly theoretical. I’m interested in works that ask and answer questions about phenomenologies of reading, citizenship, embodiment, historiography, and so forth. What I find interesting is how the generic gap between theory and poetry allows each to say and do things that the other can’t, and so I’m excited by reading the two in concert, as supplements to each other.


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?
There are certain fundamental ways in which it doesn’t make sense for me to think about “larger” cultures. Every intervention I can see myself or my work making is an intervention into a very specific context, whether that is a context of poets in a particular city, a context of friends, the context of the readers of a given publication, a context of other texts, etc. I think of a writer’s role in terms of participation in an ongoing conversation, but for me it makes more sense to think about these conversations in specified, localized ways, not as “larger” cultures.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I had a wonderful experience working with Rachel Zolf as the editor of Security Posture, and I really would not have figured out how to make that book what I wanted it to be without her help. More importantly, she taught me how to finish a project, which was something I had never really felt that I had done before. She also gave me a lot of really helpful advice on how the process of publication works.

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

Don’t take any wooden nickels.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I suppose I was working doggedly at writing critical prose before I was working doggedly at writing poetry, so it has never seemed strange or difficult to me to do both, as much as each is strange and difficult individually. For me, the appeal is that writing in both of these genres extends what you can say and how you can say it. In other words, you have different ways in which to participate in those conversations that I referenced earlier.

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 have a fairly specific routine in which I wake up, perform virtually the same actions, and go to bed at virtually the same time every day. I don’t write poetry every day – far from it – but I read and think every day, and that is a crucial part of my writing process. Any poem that I have written generally has at least six weeks of percolation and obsession as the prehistory of its first draft.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Deadlines. Fear. Shame. Desperation.

13 - If there was a fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?
Something completely useless: my keys. Force of habit. I would grab my cat as well, if I could catch him.

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?

The biggest influence on my work is feeling stupid. After that, the biggest influence is the news, but this is less in evidence in my first book.

But to answer the question more directly, there are many forms that influence my work that are not literary or textual. The most obvious of these is probably visual art. I recently saw a show of Roni Horn’s work, and her “twinned” photographs were very interesting to me because of their investment in repetition and variation. I also really like Riopelle’s late work, in which the elements of his everyday environment are rendered as palpable absences. I find it very helpful to investigate non-textual arts practices, because I often don’t fully understand their intervention into the discourses of their own genre. In the absence of that global understanding I can focus on what’s happening with the form, and it’s very useful for me to think about the ways in which questions of form have been answered in and through materials other than text.


15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Divya Victor, Rachel Zolf, CAConrad, Nicole Brossard, NourbeSe Philip, the members of my dissertation writing group, my dissertation committee, Virginia Woolf, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Moten, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Laurence, Tracie Morris, Rosmarie Waldrop, Erín Moure, Fred Wah, Jena Osman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Caroline Bergvall, Sara Ahmed, Adriana Cavarero. Many, many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Lately I’ve been feeling pretty ready to move on to my next approximation of adulthood.


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 can’t imagine being a writer without having other occupations. Do people really do that?

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I am doing so many other things, and I will continue to do them, even at times in opposition to writing. I think that writing has to be a complement to other things for financial reasons, of course, but also in order for it to be at all interesting. Many of the other things I do are forms of writing, like the Ph.D. dissertation I am working on; many are otherwise related to writing, for example I run the Emergency Reading Series in collaboration with Julia Bloch, and I am the international editor of the new Jacket2. But others bear only the most abstract, tangential relationships to my writerly practice, for example, I am an avid runner, I am a baby- and pet-sitter; I am involved in organizing work through my university. I am a reader of the newspaper, I am trying to improve my Spanish, I am a neighbor in my neighborhood, I am a friend and a family member, a Non-Resident Alien, and so on.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great books I read were Specters of the Atlantic by Ian Baucom and The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism by C.B. MacPherson. The last great films were Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a new manuscript, currently titled “Hinterland B.” This project concerns the waste areas lying immediately outside of cities, the hinterlands, in their literal and metaphorical senses. Etymologically, the word “hinterland” refers to the land that is behind, to the areas on the fringe of communities. I am interested in what takes place in these regions that are neither urban enough to be considered as part of the city, nor remote enough to be considered as nature. I’m interested in thinking about actual events that have taken place in these areas, and also in investigating the coalitional possibilities that such areas might represent.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;