K. Lorraine
Graham makes poems, texts and sometimes performances. She is the author of The Rest Is Censored (Bloof Books) and Terminal Humming (Edge Books) and a recent chaplet of new work from Belladonna. Her work appears in Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books), Omniverse, and Postmodern Culture. Graham has taught at The Corcoran College of Art and Design, California State University, San Marcos and the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Washington, D.C. and writes about the arts and humanities for the University of Maryland, College Park. You can find her on twitter and instagram @klorrainegraham
1 - How did your first book change your life?
How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
It felt good to have my first book, Terminal
Humming, in the world as something I could celebrate
and share with others, but it didn’t change my life. I used to think that the The Rest Is
Censored, my second book, was very different from the
first. Formally, it is. Terminal Humming is dense. The Rest Is
Censored is spacious. But they both emerged through interventions into my
daily routine. I wrote Terminal Humming when I was research assistant at
a think tank in Washington researching US-China-Taiwan relations and missile
defense systems. I’d read Vallejo’s Trilce on lunch break and then write
for a while in my cubicle or outside. I wrote The Rest Is Censored on my
daily bus commute between Carlsbad, CA and UC San Diego. It was a beautiful,
miserable, hour-plus ride along the Pacific Ocean. I’d write until I was too
nauseous to continue.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or nonfiction?
I wrote fiction first and some nonfiction, too.
I turned a lot of my long emails into short lyric essays, although I didn’t
have any context for what I was doing at the time. I went to college in
Washington, D.C. and studied Chinese language, history and politics. I thought
I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to write and I did not want to
live in the United States, and being a journalist was the only way I could
imagine doing that at the time. But I started going to poetry readings in D.C.
with a friend who was taking creative writing classes.
The poets and scholars at those readings were
doing work that was interdisciplinary and engaged with both language and social
observation—People like Tina Darrah, Kaia Sand, Allison Cobb, Sue Landers, Rod
Smith, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon and Mark Wallace. And then there were all
the people who came to town to read—Nada Gordon, Abigail Child, Laura Elrick,
Rodrigo Toscano, Nancy Shaw, Kevin Davies. All of these poets are still
important to me. Until I began going to readings, I didn’t even know that
contemporary poetry existed.
That last year of college and in the years
immediately following, I also went to shows at the National Gallery, Hirshhorn
and Corcoran, which also solidified my interest in poetry and
interdisciplinary, language-based work. The Ana Mendieta and Cai Guo-Qiang
exhibitions at the Hirshhorn were both formative, and also the 2001 Xu Bing
exhibition at the Sackler Gallery.
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 work comes out of sloppy drafts, copious
notes, doodles and images that might be extraneous to the poems. I write
and collect and then I edit forever. It
usually takes me only a few months to a year to write a first draft, but then
it can take me years to finalize something. Most of the projects I’m working on
now should exist in multiple forms—as book, as performance, as installation, as
party. I love books because they are so portable and easily shared, but I
suffer when I am trying to wrangle a project into the constraints they require.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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 am always working on a large project, usually
several. Usually I begin with a set of concerns, interests or questions. Often
these initial ideas are vague. I just finished a project called Opera
that began as my attempts to read and write during a period of deep depression.
Sometimes I could not leave the house or my bed, and going upstairs to watch TV
was my big accomplishment for the day. So I’d sit there watching whatever was
on and write a little. Eventually it became an exploration of the
intelligibility of grief and melodrama.
For Terminal Humming, it was more
specific. I decided that I was going to explore the socioeconomics of work and
romance and incorporate overheard and found language. With The Rest Is
Censored, the goal was to write until I was nauseous and continue when I
was not. So the question was pretty basic: how long can I write on the bus
without throwing up? What are the limits of my body? I usually have a
moment about halfway through any project where I assess and figure out what I
am actually doing, and then proceed accordingly. Sometimes this means I
incorporate additional practices. When I was writing The Rest Is Censored,
I added the rule that I had to sit next to someone on the bus, even if there
was only one other person riding with me—I was inspired by George Ferrandito’s
performance piece for the New York Subway, “it felt like i knew you,” where she
falls asleep on the shoulder of the person next to her. In San Diego, riding
any kind of public transportation at all feels like a spatial intervention. The
questions and concerns of a project become concise through the particulars of
the practice.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to
your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I usually enjoy giving readings, and often use
them to share work in progress. However, I have more problems with anxiety than
I used to. I try to use my on-stage feelings/sensations as a way of being
present.
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 obsessed with the way technologies of
everyday life intersect with / create / enable / conjure feelings and vice
versa. I care about bodies—thinking, moving,
working, feeling bodies. Maybe if I had continued dancing or somehow learned
about Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer earlier, I would be more of a performance
artist. What language emerges from a body caught the technologies of
living? Where does a person begin and end? I can only be myself when other
people are around. My writing is needy. Do you love me? Are we here?
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?
A writer arranges language and creates meaning,
feeling and sensation for other people to experience and interact with.
Sometimes, the best way to do that is to write a white paper with lots of
tables and graphs in an appendix. Poems don’t usually make good white papers.
White papers sometimes make good poems. This is the fun and advantage of poetry
as a genre—it’s resilient and
plastic. If you add stanzas and line breaks to a white paper, you break the
genre. The genre of poetry is unbreakable. Poetry continues as sonnet
but also as legal
document. Auden says that poetry is something that
“survives, A way of happening, a mouth.” I don’t like Auden’s work that much,
but I do love that quote.
So maybe the role of the poet is to survive and
offer new and strange strategies for survival—or to remind us
of strategies we’ve forgotten. More optimistically, poetry can offer
ways of being in the world that create possibilities different from those we
grew up with—or it might offer ways of reconnecting. I might be living
most of my life in a social media feed or at my job or jobs, but poetry gives
me a way of at least imagining alternatives to the frenetic, neoliberal logic
of media and labor.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an
outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve rarely had the chance to work with an
outside editor. I wish it happened more often. I am lucky to have a few people
I trust completely, though. I could give Jessica Smith any kind of manuscript
to edit and rearrange, and I’m certain I would be happy with it. Or maybe it’s
just that every book I make should have a Jessica version. My husband, Trevor,
is helping me rearrange Opera. I workshopped The Rest Is
Censored at UCSD, and I can look at almost every page and point out
specific choices that were the result of feedback and suggestions from those
classes. Shanna Compton is a fabulous editor, and her comments and feedback
made the book infinitely better.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've
heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
There’s Frank O’Hara’s poem, “My Heart.” The
poem is a refusal to write programmatically. It celebrates contradiction. I
mean, if only I really could “have the immediacy of a bad movie, / not just a
sleeper, but also the big, / overproduced first-run kind.” I’ve been writing
long enough to recognize my persistent interests in romance, technology, exile
and the sadness of everyday existence (especially work), but I try to
address my obsessions through different modes and methods. We always end up
sounding like ourselves, but I appreciate O’Hara’s reminder that the self is
contradictory. Once, I vaguebooked about my abysmal poetry career and my
confusion “about the extent to which my poems make meaning.” Linda Russo said
that “it is a poet’s job to be confused, to reckon with confusion, yes? And to
contradict herself, Luckily.”
Sandra Simonds’ “Letter to a
Young Nonprivileged Poet” has good advice,
especially about the importance of community and the relative uselessness of
“sucking up to authority figures and gatekeepers” if you are not rich and white
and male.
My psychiatrist always tells me to exercise and
spend time outside. My therapist always advocates finding ways of doing
less—especially doing less emotional labor. When I was in my 20s, someone told
me to spend less time worrying about publishing and more time reading and
writing, and that was good advice.
My friends show me by example how to survive
and feel joy—even though
survival and joy often seem impossible and everyone will leave us and we are
all going to die, etc.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move
between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Much of my work is in prose, and even my poetry
tends to be sprawling, though The Rest Is Censored is an exception.
Drafting prose is a slow process for me, but I find that the work needs less
editing than my poetry. So I am slower and more careful in prose.
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 write when I can, which usually means I write
during lunch break and for 30-60 minutes on the weekend. Since my son Desmond
was born—he’s nearly 18 months old now—I have less
headspace for anything other than employment and taking care of him. But my
approach to a writing routine has always been the same: Find uninterrupted time
and write. When I was doing my M.F.A. and working a bazillion jobs, my
only uninterrupted time was during my bus commute, so that’s when I wrote. Now,
I’m back to writing on lunch break when I can, although my job is busy enough
that it’s increasingly harder to do that. Every few weeks, I try and devote a
weekend morning or afternoon to writing, which works
reasonably well depending on how long Desmond naps—or whether or not I’m
exhausted enough to need a nap too, which is most of the time. I have no idea
what would happen if I only had to work 20 hours a week, or if I had 3 months a
year to mostly write. Or even a few weeks every year.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do
you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Usually I get stalled because I’m feeling emotionally
claustrophobic, or because I’ve mistaken my job or social media for the
universe.
I go back to Bernadette Mayer and Frank O’Hara
for comfort. But I turn to work in Spanish and French when I need to remember
that my daily poetry universe is not the only universe—and I always need to be
reminded. My facility with Spanish and French is sometimes very good, and
sometimes not. I read slowly, most recently Mapas &
Escritos, by Bruno
Montané Krebs, and the letters and journals of
Isabelle Eberhardt. One of my regular Friday lunch break exercises is
reading and translating Bolaño’s poems. But really this is me spending a lot of
time looking things up in dictionaries. When I am too tired to read in Spanish
or French, I read Henry James, or work in translation, or anything that is not
poetry. I love self-help books. I just ordered a bunch of new poetry books
through interlibrary loan, so I am finally reading Simone White’s Dear Angel
of Death and John Pluecker’s translation of Gore Capitalism, by
Sayak Valencia. I am always reading books about bird watching. When I was
pregnant, I read endless maternity books and birth stories. The point is
to read something expansive.
Spending time with art helps. I used to go to the National
Gallery, the Hirshhorn and the Phillips regularly. We haven’t quite figured out
a new looking-at-art routine with our son yet, but I suspect I’ll occasionally
give up a writing morning to look at art instead. Or sometimes we just bring
him along and accept the unpredictability. When I’m really lucky, I spend some
time with the Phillips collection and then hear chamber music there. I studied
the flute and classical music very seriously until I went to college. It’s nice
to return to music in a less competitive way—and I know almost nothing about
music for piano and strings.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine trees and sea salt are Maine.
Night-blooming jasmine is Singapore. Eucalyptus and ocean and sage and dust are
San Diego. D.C. is magnolia blossoms.
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 return to music and dance, two things I have studied seriously
and less seriously for some time. And visual art, too—the artists I mentioned
above and many others. Language can be energizing, but I often find it
exhausting and want to get away from it. I work in communications, so I am paid
to write, which is sometimes terrible for me. I have been listening to Brahms’
piano sonatas at work. I like Ornette Coleman for when I want to concentrate
but feel too anxious to do so, which is most of the time.
In 2010 I made a “map of influence” before a reading
at 21 Grand in Oakland—it’s still pretty accurate. Vincent Price is
prominently featured in the lower right corner.
Also: Sophie Calle, Övind Fahlström, Eleanor Antin, Louise
Bourgeois, Merce Cunningham, Pina Bauch, Yvonne Rainer, Ana Mendieta.
15 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read a lot of pop-psychology and self help
books. Some favorites: When I Say
No, I Feel Guilty, If the
Buddha Married: Creating Enduring Relationships on a Spiritual Path,
The Ethical
Slut, and The Dance
of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships.
Some of the writers that are most important to
me are fiction writers, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Colette, Jane Bowles, Paul
Bowles, Kathy Acker, Peter Matthiessen, Alejo Carpentier, Dodie Bellamy.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't
yet done?
I’d like to live outside of the U.S. again—this
is probably my most ambitious life goal, at least in terms of money and
logistics. I guess that’s something I have already done,
but I haven’t done it for long periods of time as an adult. There are endless
places I would like to travel and hikes I’d like to hike. I would like to
become better at cooking Chinese food. I’d like to finish some of the
fiction-like things I have written and publish them. I have never seen an
albatross. I would like my Spanish to be good enough that I could read two
books a month instead of one every six months. I would like to always be
reading more work in languages other than English, and also in translation.
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 work in media relations and anticipate
working in media relations or communications until I am at least 70, so in some
sense I am a professional writer. But I would love to see what it’s like to
just be a literary artist. I don’t even really know what that would mean.
If I were to do something else? I like statistics and I’m reasonably good
at quantitative analysis, which is a great surprise to me. It’s too late for me
to be a mathematician, but working with data is interesting. I really cannot
imagine a life in which I do not need to be employed, and it is hard for me to
imagine being employed in a way that is truly life-affirming—though obviously
there is a spectrum and some jobs are much more terrible than others.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
I fell in love with a poet. Before falling in
love, I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have any focus. If I hadn’t fallen
in love, I probably would have gone (back) to China—my
undergraduate degree is in East Asian Studies and Chinese—and tried to become a
fiction writer and journalist. Falling in love and being in a relationship was
good; going back to China would have been good, too. But I stayed in D.C. and
worked in public policy for a while. If I had fallen in love with a performance
artist, I might have become a very language-based performance artist. Poet. Fiction
writer. Journalist. Performance artist. I’m sure that regardless I would still
be working with language.
19 - What was the last great book you read?
What was the last great film?
A baby sleep guide called Precious Little Sleep. I am really
liking Simone White’s Angel of Death. I just finished watching The
Americans. I manage to see a movie about twice a year. I thought Get Out,
Logan and Rogue One were all fantastic.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I have a very new project that’s maybe about
kinship and white supremacy and how I’m directly related to Nicola Marschall, a
German portrait painter who designed the uniforms for the Confederacy and
painted Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first leader of the Klu Klux Klan. It’s not
a lineage I’m proud of—but I do believe that our ancestors are in us, so it’s
not something I can ignore. I have no idea what form this project will take.
I’m also editing project called Feed—a
part of which was just published as a Belladonna chaplet—which is a
diary/documentation my social media feeds. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr didn’t
exist when I wrote Terminal Humming, but I’m clearly still obsessed with
and overwhelmed by the eros of technology. Love as technology. “The stirrings
of the soul” as something we make with prosthetics and media.
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