12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jay Besemer

Jay Besemer’s books and chapbooks include The Ways of the Monster (forthcoming, *KIN(D)/The Operating System 2018), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil), Telephone, Chelate (both Brooklyn Arts Press), and Aster to Daylily (Damask Press). He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. He tweets frequently @divinetailor and sometimes does things on Tumblr http://jaybesemer.tumblr.com.

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

This question makes me laugh, because my first book was such an anticlimax and at the same time a generator of such ambivalence, in myself and (weirdly) in others. Some of that has to do with my age: I was 43 when my first book was published, though I’d been in mags and journals for about 25 years by that time. I had shed a lot of my fantasy notions about what a book would do. That’s not to say it isn’t/wasn’t important to me. More than changing my life, I think TELEPHONE coincided with a period of intense change that began with its publication and is still hotly ongoing five years later.

There’s a chronological assumption that people make—mostly non-writers, but some writers too—that books are published consecutively in the order they were written. Because of the way I work, that would never be possible for me, but even people who work more traditionally don’t experience their publications in that order. For me, the order of the books’ publication has obscured their relationship in ways that are probably pretty fertile. Telephone is actually the first in a trilogy formed with Chelate (my third) and The Ways of the Monster (forthcoming in December 2018) and drafted more or less in sequence. But the intervening two—A New Territory Sought and Crybaby City—were erasure/cut up projects that were both begun somewhere in 2009-10. Crybaby took seven years to finalize and place, and in fact its final version was determined by some of the practicalities of the production process.

I once joked, with my editor/friend Joe Pan, that all my books are the same single huge book, done differently and published as a loose “serial.” I think I was adapting a quote from George Bataille. Anyway, all my work has certain throughlines that I will touch on in other answers. I use different methods and structural choices to make them happen, but they’re all obviously mine.

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

I didn’t come to poetry first. Or maybe I don’t understand the question. I stared writing fiction and non-fiction before poetry. Very little of my fiction has been or is likely to be published, and the non-fiction is moving into a different mode, which will not see publication for a while. If you mean, why did I emphasize poetry or why is poetry the main thing I do now, I’ll quote my convenient tweet: I'm a poet because poetry is the only vehicle that allows me to simultaneously occupy all possible dimensions.

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? & 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 don’t have a way to generalize about temporality with my work, for two reasons. The first is that each project is very different and works according to its own sequence, its own temporality. The second is that I myself operate on a temporality that’s quite different from other people’s. This, combined with my working process (having multiple projects in varying media/disciplines) makes it impossible to put a sequential start-stop chronology on projects. Some things are offshoots of other things that then become more fully formed as their own project, while the original also continues. I’m always-beginning, always-continuing, sometimes-finishing. (Not everything gets finished; not everything published is something I see as “finished”).

Also, some of my work is sourced (cut-up, collaged or erasure work) so that has its own temporality, its own duration, its own physical limits in terms of length, start-stop (an erasure work tends to be self-contained, not starting before the source text starts, not continuing after the end of the source text).

Regarding “bookness,” combined shorter texts, etc., it is safe to say that all of those fit! I’ve done it all those ways. It’s mostly determined by the projects themselves how it tends to go.

My last in-person reading was at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee. I passed around the notebook in which I have been drafting the poems I read aloud (I’m still working on that project). I like de-mystifying my various working processes, but not all of them begin in a notebook. That green notebook containing what’s become The Horse shows how little revision a non-sourced project of mine tends to undergo. The ones that draw on source texts can have a lot more iterations and a lot more complexity in the revisions.

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

You’re asking this at a time when my relationship and approach to public readings is changing drastically to reflect changes in my capacities and needs. So my response is not fixed in space-time, exactly. Historically, I’ve always enjoyed reading/performing in public, and attending others’ readings/performances. Both things have been vital to my sense of connection with a community and in discovering my audience (or that I have one at all!). But I have never been able to “tour” and lately I am not able to even (physically) attend more than two or three local performances/readings a year, much less perform myself.

This has everything to do with my own needs as a disabled writer, both as an audience member and as a performer. These needs are complex and often mutually-contradictory, and no matter what I do I’m pretty much guaranteed to have to sacrifice some form of bodily safety in order to be physically present at an event. This isn’t acceptable, so I’m far less physically involved than I was.

These days, I’m emphasizing remote participation using adaptive tech like videochat services (Skype etc.), which often involves having to argue for this as a legit form of disability accommodation. This takes valuable energy, so I’m overall very choosy about what invitations I’ll accept—“acceptance” meaning “send my list of accommodations needs with an affirmative contingent on their meeting those needs.” I don’t try to secure gigs for myself any more, for the most part. I don’t have the energy.

Another change in my approach to performance involves moving away from more traditional readings. Because a traditional 15-20 minute in-person reading slot can be too much for me, I’ve been trying to find ways to either mix this with a video projection or have the video be the performance. This is actually great for developing stronger video works, and for getting more of the videos out there. But there’s a downside to that as well. Everything takes energy, everything takes time and not every space or curator can accommodate that kind of work. I’m also often unable to produce work that fulfills my own commitment to offer poetic experiences inclusive of those with other kinds of disabilities, so I have to live with the disappointment of falling short there.

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?

Many. I am deeply engaged with queer theory, affect theory, various “crip” theories, theories of failure and precarity. I’m deeply involved with language as a mode of shaping reality, from thoughts to policy to bodies and built environments. I’m queer, trans, disabled. All of those things inform my writing, but I think it’s more accurate to say that I write from/through those embodiments, and the theories arising from and around them, than to say that I write “about” anything.

Here’s a statement I recently provided to a curator who wanted me to describe my work. I think it’s relevant to the question: “Jay Besemer’s work inhabits and engages the tense spaces where body meets land, selves meet society, illness meets expectation and language meets its own failure. In this constantly shifting setting, the poem itself is variably-embodied, and serves both maker and audience as a mode of processing and experiencing an increasingly precarious existence.”

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?

I feel a writer’s purpose or role is to change, learn, grow, same as everyone else’s purpose. Maybe a writer has to do that more, though. Also, I believe that, like a doctor, the writer should do no harm. That’s not to say writers should not expose, criticize, take action, resist autocratic regimes, etc. We can and should. But I am anti-violence, and my commitment to nonviolence extends to language. I am unable to get behind any writer who harms others in their personal life, for any reason, or who behaves abusively (or even just badly) and calls it “political.”  I live my life from the awareness that we are accountable to one another, all over the world, and to the planet. I think other writers can and might commit to this too—but I honestly don’t have the right to choose for others what that looks like or how it should go.

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

I’ve had some truly wonderful experiences with editors, some just okay, some really bad. It’s like any other working collaboration/potential friendship; you show up to the process hoping to be as professional as you can as you try to meet what you hope are shared goals. I know any editor is going to be as goofy as I am; people are people. What helps us both is being clear about goals and expectations from the start. Also, because of the flowing and change-reliant nature of my working process, I’m generally very open to editorial input. Another person can give me deep insight into how something’s working that I wouldn’t get independently, so that is really important. There are very few things in any given project that are non-negotiable, but I do stand by those, and once or twice (in a writing/publishing career of nearly 30 years) they’ve been dealbreakers.

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

“Separate your hazards.” I learned that in driver ed.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to performance to video poems to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I can’t talk in terms of ease of movement or appeal in doing so, because it’s like asking my blood how easy it is to move through my body, or why it wants to do that. But I can speak to the moment of choice of medium. I experience it much like a food craving or a physical need. Sometimes it’s fairly general (“hmm. pizza.”) and sometimes very specific (“Bocce Club pizza with double cheese, sausage and pepperoni”). I guess the general is like a desire to have a certain type of experience (start a new video) and the specific is more a desire to have a more defined experience (go deep into this book and write a critical essay about it because there’s something I need that this deep engagement will give me).

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?

Take morning meds, feed cat, coffee, check twitter and email, plant care, probably some journaling. Mostly nothing gets worked on formally until after I’ve had enough coffee for whatever needs to get attention that day to present itself. I call it “listening” for the priority project, but it’s just paying attention to what my work needs most. If nothing presents itself I can choose not to work, or just to work on whatever. If I’m too symptomatic or in too much pain to work then I will read or watch stuff.

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

I don’t stall as much as recognize the need to rest, or the natural ebbs and flows of various projects. Everything I do needs phases of taking in, phases of processing material, and phases of making. They’re not linear or sequential, though! I’m comfortable with this and recognize where I am in these larger processes, as well as where each project tends to be.

Also, because of the realities of my various illnesses and the unpredictable levels of pain and fatigue I deal with throughout each day, I recognize that bodily realities/needs have a greater priority for my work cycles than anything else does. There are sometimes lengths of time when I can’t work, but this isn’t stalling. It’s the way my body works.

Having multiple projects ongoing (“open”) also means that sometimes I have energy for one project or type of project when I can’t muster energy for other types.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

So many versions of “home,” so bear with me:

Buffalo: road tar, radiators & wool, cool concrete & books inside Brutalist college library buildings, snow.

My father’s old place(s): summer hay, peonies, wood smoke, pipe tobacco, tomato vines, dirt, pine pitch.

Where my mother lives, on the shore of Lake Erie: mildew, “that lake smell”, concord grapes, oak leaves, grass, dust.

My own home: finished wood, books, sawdust, coffee, brown-fried onions, chopped garlic-ginger-green chiles, turmeric, coriander, plaster, linseed oil, nag champa.

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?

Yes, many. Architecture, film, several sciences, acting, experiences in built and not-built environments (i.e. “nature”), photography and the other visual arts I also practice, even stuff like cooking, gardening, landscape work, construction and farming.

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

This can only ever be a partial and woefully inadequate list, but here goes:

Tristan Tzara, Samuel R. Delany, John Keene, Eli Clare, TC Tolbert, CA Conrad, Trace Peterson, Max Wolf Valerio, j/j hastain, Bhanu Kapil, Tony Trigilio, Simeon Berry, Anthony Michael Morena, Daniel Borzutzky, Toby Altman, John Cage, Johanna Hedva, Laura Goldstein, Roberto Harrison, Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel Harris, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harryette Mullen, kari edwards, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, Una McCormack, China Miéville, Anne Boyer…

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

Skydiving. Not that it will happen!

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? & 18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I write because I need to write; it’s the sine qua non. I can’t not write. But if I could have continued to act (which I began to do in early childhood but could not continue) I would like to have done that. I know many (& of many more) actor-writers.

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

I’m a re-reader and re-watcher, so I’m going to limit my answers to recent one-time (pre-re) reads/viewings. Two recent great books: Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism and Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Film: Network.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Also just a partial list:

-finishing initial draft of a poetry collection called The Horse

-revising a memoir, The Winter Film

-several video pieces at varying stages of process

-a poem project on acting called Green Rooms

-a poem project dealing with family history & the legacy of lynching, called Spirit Knife/Appalachia

-various blips of mini-projects stemming from my mother’s ongoing end-of-life process & what I’m calling “caregiving while disabled.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Toby Altman

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 19^th 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.   

12or 20 (second series) questions;