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?
The wonderful
French poet James Sacré once told me, shortly after I published my first
collection Caramboles, that I had
written a livre-piège, a trap for
myself. He meant that I had written a book that would define my writing career
(a bit of a compliment, in a sense), and that I might have trouble innovating
any further than that, or have trouble renewing my writing and end up repeating
this initial gesture. Maybe so (that has been the case for a great many
writers’ first books), but I’ve come up with various ways of eluding the
problem. Appetites (2018) is only
partially in the vein of Caramboles
(2008); in some ways it’s a more dense and difficult book, but also more
diverse in style. Narrative, by way of The
First Supper (a novel in progress), has been a wonderful way of
diversifying my approach to writing, and so have the fragments of Dredgings, another work in progress. In Un grenier, I embrace formal diversity
as much as I can, experimenting with everything from intraverbal or subverbal
nonsense to unadorned “plain style” poems, and everything in between (including
verbo-visual collage and typographical experiments); it’s meant really to be a
statement of all the invention I’m capable of, perhaps to give the lie to James’
comment, after a fashion, a way of saying that so much more is possible when it
comes to testing the plasticity of language.
2 - How did you
come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to fiction
first, but found difficulty in the mechanics of storytelling, and lacked the
stamina and wherewithal to develop much fruitfully, so I turned to poetry,
which requires less sustained attention over the long haul; each poem can be
worked on fairly independently. It took me many years to make a book out of
these independent efforts, even though I was working constantly. I was 29 or so
when my first book came out in 2008, but have been writing since before I
turned 16. As a reader, I was first enchanted by fiction (David Copperfield, The Lord
of the Rings, for instance), and arrived at poetry as a teenager, exploring
the shelves at home and at the local bookstore in Moscow, Idaho. The first poem
to delight me profoundly was, oddly enough, a short lyric by C. Day Lewis. I
had to orient myself largely on my own, and was not attracted to modernists
like Eliot and Pound, for whom I have little enough esteem; I read Stevens much
too late for his work to have much impact. Bill Knott, on the other hand, was
crucial to my poetic development. So were Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke,
and John Berryman. See the words on influences here below.
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 quick,
sometimes slow. When a draft is completed, it’s generally finished, but this
only happens after incredibly long attempts at recombining materials as I
develop them (those are the copious notes, and a single poem can involve ten or
more pages of them). It’s more like making a mosaic than writing a poem one
line after the other. I work recursively, never in a linear way; I try out
different possibilities and different combinations until a whole emerges, like
sense gradually emerging out of nonsense. As for books, it depends. Sometimes I
start with a plan, sometimes I wait for one to emerge (see below).
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?
The answer is yes.
For my first and second books (Caramboles
and Trial Balloons), I eventually
accumulated enough pieces to make a coherent book; current projects are books
by premeditated design (see final question).
5 - Are public
readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of
writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes, I like doing
readings. The response is usual tepid or awkward, and I don’t really care; I
like to share my work one way or the other – the occasions to do so without
seeming obnoxious are fairly rare, it seems. However, I haven’t the foggiest
idea how readings contribute to my creative process. At best, they show me
which pieces make sense out loud, and which don’t.
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?
The current questions revolve around identity (gender and race in
particular), the artist’s political role, trauma (of all sorts, but
particularly abuse, sexual assault, the Shoah, and war), the commemorative
impulse, and the unrepresentable. The latter has been an obsession of the 20th
century, and I care little for it; it’s a part of language, and that’s that; I
think it’s a theoretical impasse and not nearly as fruitful for thinking about
literature as it’s been made out to be (see Lyotard or Agamben, e.g., most of
which reads like weird wallowing in the horrors of history more than anything
else). Gender and class play discreet roles in my work, and though I think
about them, they’re not central; race is barely on my poetic radar – but
Judaism enormously so, and all of this constellation of issues are important to
me socially and politically.
As for me, one question I like to daydream about is how meaning
emerges from nonsense, and how meaning doesn’t rely just on the words on the
page; meaning is something that results from the reader interacting with the
word; it’s a construction. That’s why we can “make sense” of a sentence such
as: “road the did cross why chicken the.” Our brains can intuit meanings even
when there are disturbances in the words on the page. Concomitantly, I’m interested
in the way social interactions are coded and scripted.
I’m fairly uninterested in the poetics of the image; mine is a
poetics of the expression – not sentimental outpouring, but of the tournure, the configuration of words in
patterns, rhythm. You might find two images based on an identical conceit, one
of which is boring and flat, the other exciting and full of energy; the
difference is in the configuration, which is more important than the
image-content.
I’m fascinated by elegy and always have been – how words relate to
memory and the commemorative impulse, and this relates my work to concerns
dominant in post-1945 poetry. I’m also obsessed with the relationship between
language and desire, which seem to me to be of identical substance. And that’s
just for starters – I’ve got lots of theories and write a lot of theory. Dredgings, my poetic fragments currently
in the works, are meant as a kind of theoretic statement; I’m working toward
fifty pages of these fragments before I look for a publisher. I could answer
this question for well over fifty pages, too, I don’t doubt it.
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?
The role of the
writer can be just about anything, which is why it’s so hard to define “the
writer’s role”; too much depends on context and unpredictable reception. As the
philosophy professor and poet Philippe Beck once said in a course on esthetics,
“art is not a domain”: in other words, historical and social factors shape what
art is conceivable at a given time, but art has no predetermined boundaries; it
can involve any dimension of the human experience. I would love to have a
broader social and political impact on poets and people in general, but I think
I have little control over the impact of what I produce. I think politics will
emerge in the poetry if a poet’s concerns are deeply political, and that if
they’re not and she attempts to write a political poem, it is likely to be a
failure. In other words, politics emerge from the creative act, or they don’t;
if you try to impose politics on the creative act, it’s likely not to work. But
there are many wonderful political poets, moralists, and poets of that sort
writing today. There are always ethical consequences that emerge from
circulating poetic texts, but these may not be under the direct control of the
writer, or only to a limited extent. Writers have ethical responsibility after the creative act, not before. In
other words, creative freedom should apply without limits, but only during the
creative act. Afterward, one ought to consider whether a work is worth
publishing on ethical terms. Some works are worth writing, but not worth
publishing because of their unethical nature. Just because you wrote 100 Days of Sodom doesn’t mean you
should make that work available. That’s where ethical responsibility comes in:
the decision to publish or not.
To my mind, poetry at large is too
heavily politicized these days; topical “relevance” seems to weigh more heavily
in the balance than poetic innovation, and I think that’s too bad. I think
diverse voices are a wonderful thing, and I like to review works by those
voices – LGBTQ+, women, ethnically diverse poets -- but I think policing who
should be allowed to speak from what identitarian perspective is excessive;
literature is fundamentally empathic and I see no problem in a white man in his
forties attempting to write a novel from the perspective of a black lesbian in her
teens, or any other conceivable identitarian exercise in understanding the
experience of an other. Let me hasten to add: whether that man succeeds in portraying that perspective in an
ethically satisfying way is another matter entirely, and most such efforts fail
in one way or another. One way in which such an enterprise might fail is by
speaking in the place of a black lesbian teen writer, whose opinions about her
identity we might be inclined to value more than those of the white man who
attempts to speak in her place, and the competition for space in the public eye
makes this a real problem (in other words, let us read, publish and review
diverse voices; this seems to me a valuable priority). Nonetheless, that
particular white man’s perspective on the black lesbian teen ought not, I
think, be discounted or delegitimized without careful consideration of the
views proposed (which, as already stated, may well be judged flawed by biases
due to the privilege that white man enjoys). In any event, and very much above
all, the policing that goes on in MFA programs is to my mind entirely
wrong-headed, and contrary to the deepest purpose and value of literature.
“Find your voice” and “Write what you know” are deeply stupid precepts. Write
like someone else if you can – or try to; anyone can write like herself, but
only the exceptional writer can write like someone else entirely. And write
what you don’t know – in order to learn, to find out (which might require a
great deal of research, including extensive conversations with other humans –
among other things, in order to understand what it means to write from a
position of privilege, and to learn to write sensitively, and without silencing
the voices of others – which means we must read, review, publicize, and
encourage underrepresented voices).
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential, and
often pleasurable, but rare: many editors don’t tell you much about your work
these days; they either accept it or they don’t, more often the latter. Nobody
has the time. Louise Bottu worked very carefully with me on Rhapsodie curieuse, and it was very
stimulating and interesting. Another recent editor has delayed publication of a
work for years, mostly due to his consistent procrastination with regard to
correcting the proofs. That’s obviously not ideal, and everything depends on
the editor with whom one is working, and the harmony (or lack thereof) between
temperaments.
9 - What is the
best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Samuel Beckett)
To teach well, share yourself – your passions, your
interests, your inner life. (several people, and notably my excellent colleagues
at Virginia Tech)
10 - How easy has
it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical
prose) or even languages? What do you see as the appeal?
I have found little
difficulty here, though moving back to narrative after years of poetry meant
learning some of the basic mechanics of narrative, particularly managing
narrative rhythm. As my friend Alain Damasio told me, narrative is like an
accordion, and it’s important not to tarry on the scenes that bore you, as they
will likely also bore the reader. So you can stretch or shrink time to tarry on
the scenes that count. Critical prose comes extremely naturally to me; poetry
is much more work, but I enjoy both in different ways.
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 am an academic,
and my creative impulses must compete with many other responsibilities; as a
result, I generally have to steal time for creative endeavors. Additionally, as
a professor of languages, my creative output is not as institutionally valued
as my literary research properly speaking – there is only one creative-writing
oriented class at Virginia Tech, which I love to teach, but there is no
creative writing program in our department per se. I try to reserve some small
amount of time per week for creative work. I usually work in cafes, because I
like the hum of human life that surrounds me there – it’s a paradox of my
particular version of the ascetic writer’s life.
12 - When your
writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better
word) inspiration?
I usually just take
a break, but reading other poets or literary scholarship of quality can be
stimulating sometimes, particularly when I don’t agree with the modes of
writing or perspectives involved – disagreement is a wonderful spur to
articulate my own opposing views or stylistic choices. For a long time, I’ve
been meaning to write a screed against a writer I revile, Christian Bobin. I
should do it.
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
Maybe pinewoods,
but nothing, really. However, eucalyptus in the fog reminds me ineluctably of
my aunt Nancy and uncle Peter’s former home in the Berkeley hills. And the
sounds of grackles and starlings and katydids remind me of New Jersey.
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?
Taking a “forest
bath” is rather vital when I’m feeling badly. Music is a constant source of
inspiration and influence, particularly the French post-romantic tradition
(from Gabriel Fauré to Olivier Messiaen, let’s say: Debussy, Ravel, Erik Satie,
and perhaps A. Scriabin, though he’s not French, obviously – he’s a sort of
Chopin mixed with Satie, in a way) and post-punk (Joy Division and Bauhaus of
course, along with so many others, and have recently been enjoying the work of the
highly underrated Lizzy Mercier Descloux). Lyrically, there are a few musicians
who really stand out as influences – I was marked for life by Jeff Mangum’s
work (Neutral Milk Hotel), as well as that of Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia and
Magnolia Electric Co.), but also Scottish folk by way of musicians like Archie
Fisher. Oh, and I have an old soft spot for They Might Be Giants, as
inconsistent as they’ve always been. Goofy is good too.
15 - What other
writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of
your work?
The Biblical stuff
– Tehillim etc. In fiction: Tolkien, Lovecraft, David Copperfield, Melville, Rabelais, Julien Gracq, etc. In
poetry: Bill Knott, Paul Celan, Mallarmé, Corbière, Max Jacob, Malcolm de
Chazal, Lautréamont, Benjamin Fondane, etc. Among contemporaries, many women
writers: Sylvie Kandé, Amy King, Kate Greenstreet, Christine Brooke-Rose have
all made a big impact. Lots of stuff, really, but I gravitate toward ironists
and styles of excess. The writers my work gets compared most consistently to –
Joyce and e. e. cummings especially – I haven’t read all that much, in fact,
and didn’t really leave a big mark. I’m soaked in the French tradition, so much
so that contemporaries and I sometimes talk past each other: they say Stevens,
I say Apollinaire. H. D. is the only major modernist I’m really impressed by in
the American tradition, unless you count later figures like Gwendolyn Brooks,
who is astonishing.
16 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish a novel. See
Africa. Have grandchildren. Somehow contribute to solving the problem(s) of
climate change. Win a Guggenheim, or a Pulitzer, or something similarly
ludicrous. Get fan mail. All vainglorious literary things.
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?
Perhaps a custom
jewelry designer and creator, or something similarly artisanal; though clumsy
and with the hand-eye coordination of a drunk buffalo, I am good with my hands.
For a long time I thought about becoming an entomologist, but I hate working in
a lab, and the days of entomological field work are mostly over.
18 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
Bon qu’à ça, as Samuel Beckett once wrote.
19 - What was the
last great book you read? What was the last great film?
20 - What are you
currently working on?
I’m currently
working on a sort of novel made up of interlocking tales in several speculative
fictional worlds, under the general title The
First Supper. It’s in French, and I’m working simultaneously on the English
translation; part of the work has appeared in the French journal Catastrophes
under the title “Dèze le Mécréant, pionnier allophage” (https://revuecatastrophes.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/dc3a8ze-le-mc3a9crc3a9ant.pdf).
I’m also working on a collection of aphorisms on poetics under the title Déblais (Dredgings), some of which have appeared in English at the journal Plume (https://plumepoetry.com/dredgings/).
Finally, I have another collection in the works, this one also in French for
the time being, under the title Un
grenier (An Attic), composed of
poems and also visual photomontages built out of engravings taken from popular
journals of the turn of the 20th Century. Some of these pieces are
published in the journal Place de la
Sorbonne, issue 8 (2018) (http://www.culture-sorbonne.fr/placedelasorbonne/pls-numero-8-2018/).
That’s besides the research…
