Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and five chapbooks, including recently Security Theater (Present Tense
Pamphlets, 2016). His poems can be found in Crazyhorse,
Jubilat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies.
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?
My first chapbook, Life of Richard, was published in a
beautiful accordion book, by my friend and collaborator, Liana Katz. It was the
first title for a press we started together, Damask Press. It felt like a piece
of my body—a scrap of flesh that had been magically liberated from my body. I
think of that text as, in a way, the model for Arcadia, Indiana, my current book. Like Arcadia, it centers on the sonnet (Life of Richard is 7 nonce sonnets), using the form to push the
limits of syntax. Like my current book, it’s about the weight of history, the
weight and persistence of violence. Although each of my projects look very
different, they are all concerned with that weight: they ask, insistently, how
can we make the future possible? Or, more precisely, how can the future be
different from the present—rather than an intensification of its violence and
inequity?
2
- How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry because my
dad started writing poetry. I’m not sure why he did—he’s a photographer by
vocation, but for a few years when I was a teenager, he became a passionate and
dedicated writer of poems. We used to go to open mics together; I’d read
adolescent imitations of the beats and he’d read intricate formal poems about
marriage and desire. We were, to say the least, an odd pair. I’m very grateful
to the poets I met then—poets like Nina Corwin and John Starr, who encouraged
and welcomed me, naïve as I was. They gave me the confidence to imagine a life
in poetry.
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’ve talked about this before, but Arcadia, Indiana began as a sonnet
sequence—a collaborative sonnet sequence between my wife and I called, um, Sonnets to Orifice. But I wanted to put
more stuff on the page, to complicate the sonnet’s closure and limitation. The
result: a divided page, riven or cloven. Each of the pages in Arcadia, Indiana has a sonnet on the
left side and commentary, in prose or verse, on the right. The page itself
becomes a space of performance, of conflict. The text itself grew out of that
conflict: it emerges from material disturbance and indeterminacy. I describe
this at length because it seems representative of my process. I don’t just
write poems, I design a page-scape, an architectural happening. My projects
emerge and take their shape from the materiality of the page.
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 find the idea of the individual
lyric somewhat terrifying. I compose on the level of the book or the
chapbook—and I find the demands of composing at that level productive, rather
than constraining. The demands of a book project carry me into dark and
unexpected places; I write poems that otherwise would remain unwritten.
5
- Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love performance, but I hate the
Poetry Reading. You know what I mean: twenty folding chairs in a gallery or a
bar; three readers, in front of a microphone, clearing their throats and making
jokes. I think the reading should be more than a chance to present a written
artifact: the reading should derange writing, should challenge the primacy of
writing. It should be an opportunity to transform the text into a score for
performance—an object which is incomplete without the participation of its
readers, their bodies on 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?
In my criticism, I think about the
homogeneity of the present: the way that capitalism tends to suppress temporal,
historical difference. How can poetry resist that kind of temporal homogeneity?
How can poets find ways to fracture the present and bring shards of the past
into the now? These questions seem pressing to me, crucially so: the new, the
unexpected, the avant-garde requires such temporal difference as the resistance
against which it grinds.
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?
In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher notes a “widespread sense that not
only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it
is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Let’s say you
agree. Doesn’t that mean that utopia is the task of the poet? That our job is
to leap beyond the epistemic and economic boundaries of our world and imagine
something soft, nourishing, new? Let’s say that’s one thing poetry is uniquely
qualified to do—though not the only thing.
8
- Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or
essential (or both)?
For this book, I was lucky to work
with Tyler Crumrine, the editor and founder of Plays Inverse. Lucky because
Tyler is an exceptionally sensitive and detailed editor. He has a way of asking
for small changes that transform a project. Tyler comes from a theater
background, so he’s used to thinking about texts collaboratively. That’s
refreshing. I wish more poets thought of their works in a collaborative
frame—as part of a dynamic series of interactions that continue long after
“the” poem is published.
9
- What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
In her interview with Rachel Zucker
for Commonplace, Claudia Rankine says
(I’m paraphrasing) that research is the real heart of writing: that writing
acquires its fragrance, its purpose, through its contact with an, the, archive.
I find that refreshing, even liberating—since we are so often told that good
writing is pure and unmediated; that our task as poets is to discover “our”
voices. No. Our task is to surrender to the archive.
10
- How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to plays to
performance to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I understand critical and creative
writing to be ways of knowing and thinking, ways of producing knowledge. I
think of so-called “creative” writing as its own form of research—and I often
take the discoveries I make in poetry into my criticism, using the apparatus of
scholarship to expand and to give language to things I find out in poems.
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 lead an absurdly regulated,
routinized life—by choice. I get up at the same time, walk the dog at the same
time, eat the same thing for breakfast. It’s how I keep the void at bay. Still,
my writing is defiantly unroutinized. I keep no regular hours. I go months
without doing much writing, and then I go months where I work obsessively on
projects, at all hours.
12
- When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of
a better word) inspiration?
I want to resist romantic ideas of
inspiration. I don’t think that poems descend from the air, breath of the
muses, flowing unpredictably around the poet. That’s not the way it works for
me, anyway. My work comes from research, from reading, from engaging with other
texts. When I feel inspiration waning, my habit is to start reading. I read
omnivorously and constantly—I try to find books that challenge my understanding
of what’s possible in writing. I hope to be transformed, to be split, by books.
I want books to destroy me—and in that way, to clear space for freshness and
possibility.
13
- What fragrance reminds you of home?
I will admit to being somewhat
detached from scent. I have a poor sense of smell. I respond only to strong
smells: not the habitual fragrances, but the occasional bursts of scent that
rupture the smell-scape of a place. The compost bucket after a week on vacation.
My sweatshirt after a couple of runs. An aerosolized pepper.
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’ve mentioned architecture above,
and I’ll talk about it more below. Poets and architects have, in some ways,
similar tasks: for instance, they are both charged with making spaces for
dwelling. Another example: both poems and buildings are made by the people who
use them. Part of the challenge of designing a building or writing a poem: you
have to surrender control. You need to build something which exceeds your
intentions, which contains pores and passages, through which other people can
take hold of and transform your creation.
15
- What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your
life outside of your work?
I recommend W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to pretty much everyone I
meet. I’ve never read a book that better describes my own condition, as a
secular, diasporic Jew. I’ve tried to articulate why before—and I always fail.
In part, I think because we think of identity in terms of presence: the persistence
of tradition, the continuity of culture. I experience Judaism as absence: an
utter aporia, a gulf. Sebald describes what it’s like to live with that gulf:
to belong to something and yet have no meaningful connection to it.
16
- What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to write a city plan,
perhaps in collaboration with an urban planner. I’d like to see poetry as a
force that might actively shape the world—if only by imagining possibilities
that exceed the reasonable, the rational, and the instrumental. What might a
city designed by a poet look like? A city designed by someone unrestrained by
the limitations of neoliberalism? A liquid city, a city made of sharp grass, a
city so small it fits inside a poet’s mouth.
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 played music before I went to
graduate school, but honestly I’m not cool enough for a career as a musician. I
don’t like staying up late. Poetry feels like the only real option, in part
because a career in poetry contains so many other careers. To be a poet, one
must be an expert in economics, architecture, theory, criticism, ecology,
nuclear proliferation, mass extinction. The purview of the poet is virtually
limitless and thus the work is constantly expanding, shifting, incomplete.
18
- What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Someone asked me recently if I enjoy
writing. Um, no. For me, writing is a compulsion. There was never really any
other option. It’s something I would do, obsessively, no matter what. I feel
very lucky to have made a life as a writer—to be part of a community of writers
whose work I admire intensely. If I had another job, or another group of
friends, I feel that I would be at war with myself and with the world around
me.
19
- What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m currently reading Der Nister’s great Yiddish novel, The Family Mashber—a
kind of Jewish version of the The Brothers Karamazov. It’s a beautiful novel, richly evocative of 19th
century Jewish life in Eastern Europe—and, as far as I can tell, one of his few
works to be translated into English. In poetry, I finally read Itō Hiromi’s Wild Grass on the Riverside, published
in amazing translation by Jeffrey Angles by Action Books. An epic of contemporary
displacement and environment devastation.
20
- What are you currently working on?
I’ve just finished a new manuscript,
Discipline Park. The book is about
the demolition of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago. The
building was a landmark of architectural brutalism. It was also my birthplace.
It was torn down by Northwestern—a university where I worked for many years. I took
this as a brutal allegory of neoliberalism: the way it makes us draw sustenance
from institutions that destroy our habitats and histories. The book obsessively
documents the demolition of Prentice, returning to it over and over again. But
it also tries to trace the residues of utopian possibility in our moment—even
as neoliberalism tries to root them out. Goldberg’s architecture and urbanism
might be one such utopian trace. As the book progressed, I found myself falling
in love with Goldberg, visiting his surviving buildings and his archive, trying
to raise his spirit into the present.
No comments:
Post a Comment