12 or 20 (second series) questions with Syd Staiti

Syd Staiti lives in Oakland and is author of The Undying Present (Krupskaya 2015) as well as chapbooks Between the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series 2014), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press 2010), and Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008).

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?
I feel more at ease now. I feel like I trust that I can write books. I think all my projects will have similar overall concerns but they'll look different and/or come at things from different angles.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not so good with rules and conventions. Poetry gave me more permission to stray.

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?
Sometimes a piece comes together quickly but usually I’m pretty slow, especially in the beginning. Once the work starts to have a character of its own the momentum builds and I'll work a little faster. I wrote The Undying Present over four years and the final version has some fragments from very early drafts. I see those fragments as the parts that helped it along to becoming what it ultimately became. Little threads that held the thing together over the years.

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 can't sit down and say "now I am going to write a poem" and then write a poem. I often have to trick myself into writing if I don't have something substantial already in the works. When I have written short poems they're usually with my next project in mind, like I'm brainstorming things or using them as stepping stones toward the larger work. I think I need to feel the possibility of expansiveness. Containment is not my thing. Neither is knowing in advance what I'm going to be writing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes I really enjoy readings. I especially like reading work that isn’t totally polished/finished but isn’t brand new either. For me readings are perfect for that work in the middle, work that has started taking shape but is still in formation. I like to feel how it takes up space in a room, hear it when it's floating around outside my head.

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 think the current questions vary depending who you ask. My own concerns and questions often deal with subjectivity, gender, narrative, memory, time, sociopolitical forces, struggle, individuals and collectivity, urbanism and environment, I don’t know I could probably go on.

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 like I’m supposed to say something like public intellectual. But I think if a writer is really good at carpentry or gardening or parenting or healing, that’s great. It's all necessary. I can't see a single role applying to all, especially some kind of privileged role. Writers are just like any other group of people: many of them suck, some are alright, a few are really admirable people.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like working with editors. By the time work is in almost publishable form it can be sort of blurry. I've got all the layers of past versions ghosting the background so it's hard to see the current iteration alone. Editors are helpful because they are invested in the work being as strong as it can be, but they’re separate enough that they can sometimes see things more clearly than I can.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Someone once told me that Eileen Myles once said that if you don’t feel nervous before a reading then you’re not doing it right. You’re not risking anything.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a writing routine. I can’t write if I’m not feeling it. Most of my writing is done on weekend mornings or afternoons because that’s when I'm the most open. I have a hard time writing in the evening after the accumulation of a day. My days typically begin with me waking up pretty early to read for an hour or two or go for a run (or if I can fit in both) before work. Weekends also start with reading, then writing, if I’m feeling it. Lately I haven't been feeling it but that's because I'm not totally into a new thing yet.

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

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have a terrible sense of smell. I don’t know.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
films primarily

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read less poetry than I used to but I still read a fair amount of poetry/creative prose. I like taking on challenging or durational reading projects like Capital and all of Proust. I read a lot, lots of nonfiction dealing with race and queer issues and gender and revolution and histories (both global & in the us) that you'd never be taught in school.

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

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
occupation doesn’t mean much to me. I need a way to make money, that’s all. sometimes I dream of making money doing a thing I love but I wonder if that would make me love it less. if I wasn’t a writer I’d be a filmmaker. I have often thought over the years that I should’ve gone to film school instead.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t know, I was a pretty weird teenager. I felt out of place growing up on Long Island. I think writing helped me through that time. I didn’t think of it as something i could do in my life, or would do, as an adult. It was just something I did. In my early twenties I moved to Portland OR and was feeling like I was finding myself and was more comfortable in my surroundings but I kept writing. It wasn’t a need anymore, a way to connect to myself, it was more of a choice and an interest. I was writing a lot and reading some of my work at open mics and stuff and also obsessively reading poetry all the time so it finally clicked that I should probably try and take it seriously.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
the last great books I read were Frank Wilderson’s Incognegro and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. and I keep going back to Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio over and over. The last great films I saw were Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Zulawski’s Possession, and Innocent by Lucile Hadžihalilović.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m not sure how to talk about it at this point. too new.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Erika Staiti, The Undying Present

I haven’t consulted the map. I didn’t know there was a map until after they returned to the car at the beginning and spread it over their laps. I know I am trying to get to the magnified view as indicated. I will have to go through many rooms. In some cases I might have to stay overnight. It all depends.

Oakland, California writer Erika Staiti’s striking first full-length book, The Undying Present (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2015), exists in the nebulous space between prose poetry and novel. Constructed as a collage-work, The Undying Present is a pastiche of scene-sections, including scenes presented from multiple perspectives, a set of semi-travel narratives, multiple examples of overlap, deliberate obfuscation and occasional contradition. Writing out a series of movements without specific details, the narrative allows itself to not be limited by a single trajectory or reading. As Ariel Goldberg and Rachel Levitsky wrote in their “Conversation about Erika Staiti’s ‘The Undying Present,’” as part of their “Social reading” series in Jacket2: “Under erasure, constant revision: questions left by Staiti’s outlines and silhouettes must only be answered in multiples, of bodies, desires, expirations hiding from each other, revealed in the reading, by the readers: for how long can a hand be held?” They continue:

In a narrative that is about an underground replete with unspoken dynamics that are probably sado-masochistic, the open field of the mystery is significant. The narrative is not master of its own mystery. The narrator is not in control.

“False harmony warms the network. Secrets eat through the spaces between bodies.”

There is something going on in The Undying Present but it’s a secret. There is a necessity of uncovering the mystery, the structural body of the scene that can’t be addressed singularly by the author who is included in it. How are we going to be asked to question the surface? To get to the matter, when intimacy lapses. The reader is being asked to help.

Narrative, one might argue, is as arbitrary as any other idea upon which to hang a story. Staiti’s narrator is not in control, they write, and yet, it takes a remarkable amount of control to allow such a space for the narrator to drift so artfully, highlighting a comparison and difference between this and, say, Richard Brautigan’s novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), in which narrator, narrative and, supposedly, author erode simultaneously. Staiti’s montage of prose-sections accumulate in such a way that are reminiscent of the novels of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, yet writing out longer scenes than his novels often include. Both writers, somehow, manage to create full-length prose-works that suggest that the order of the sections aren’t fixed, but simply one way of reading; might The Undying Present be equally readable if the sections were re-ordered? Would it make for an entirely different, yet equally satisfying, experience?

Staiti is also the author of the chapbooks Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press, 2010) and Between the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series, 2014), and in an interview conduced by Ariel Goldberg, Staiti discusses In the Stitches in a way that seems to connect to this current work: “There is some kind of world in which this language is existing but I don’t really know what it is. It’s partly an imagined/fantasized world but it steals objects and ideas from our world. I don’t feel so literate in this world at all. I feel pretty removed from it. In the earliest version, I was trying to write lines that would negate themselves. I wanted to see what something looked like if it could be itself and also its own negation. I was writing longhand, which I almost never do. As the piece over time transformed into this thing, I realized that something kind of ambient but real came out in the attempt to negate. I thought a lot about ambience. I wanted to see a world in which ambience dominated. It’s interesting about the different voices you mentioned because I’ve been hearing it as un-voiced, as a humming or something.” In remarkably precise prose, Staiti appears very much to be creating a world through halved information, presenting just enough to create an incomplete portrait, and make the reader aware of what might be missing. One might say that this new work is just as much ambient than setting or narrative, suggesting what another writer would have fleshed out more fully, yet most likely lessening the effect.

I walk through the City of Margins. Tall angular buildings shimmer in the sun. Dozens of people move past me walking in straight lines with conviction. I am moving in this way too. The streets push us to our destinations efficiently. We push ourselves there.

A narrow alleyway appears. I turn and walk down the torn street. I reach an empty parking lot. I feel the Second City beneath me. The shell of a burned out car sits at the edge of the frame. An abandoned and deteriorating building sags into the ground. This is where we enter.

I open the doors of the building and walk around peering in each room. The rooms hold remnants of the past, forgotten objects slathered in dust and rodent feces. I climb the stairs dragging knobby fingers over a dusty banister. A young woman is crumpled in the corner at the end of the hallway. Her body is a mouth, a dark open hole telling a story. Speaking not speaking.