Interview

Criticism By Translation: An Interview with Peter Valente

One of the exciting things about contemporary literature is how writing, translation, and criticism exist on a continuum, each practice bolstering the others to take the art to new heights. Occasionally, this continuum manifests in a single individual, a polymath of seemingly boundless energy. In the following interview, readers will discover one such individual, Peter Valente; his many publications and activities of the past decade are better described by him below than in any introduction we could write. With each of us curious about different aspects of Valente’s prodigious output, we had many questions, so we thank him for expansively addressing them all.

Rain Taxi: Tell us a bit about your literary background—how did you come to the world of writing?

Peter Valente: I first published poems in those xeroxed, hand-stapled mags that were still coming out in the early ’90s, such as Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy’s wonderful Mirage #4 [Periodical]—they published my first poem in 1994. Later, I published work in literary magazines like Lee Chapman’s First Intensity and Peter O’Leary’s LVNG. I had graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in American Literature in 1992, and I was living in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, working in a bookstore. I attended as many readings as I could at the Poetry Project and elsewhere in New York City—a great way to get a substantial education in poetry.

I also read everything I could get my hands on from the great small press publishers of the day—Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck, Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, Steve Clay’s Granary Books, Annabel Lee’s Vehicle Editions, Geoff Young’s The Figures, and many others. I used Spencer Selby’s list of experimental magazines to find places to send work, and when I sent some pages of artwork to John M. Bennett at Lost & Found Times, he wrote on them and sent me back photocopies to give out for free. These early experiences with publishers taught me so much about community and the possibilities for collaboration, which came full circle for me later when I collaborated on a book with Kevin Killian called Ekstasis (BlazeVox, 2017). Oh, and during this time (the late ’90s), I published my first chapbook, Forge of Words a Forest, with Jensen Daniels, an imprint of Talisman House.

All these experiences were important for a young poet, because they exposed me to multiple poetry scenes throughout the United States and Europe—different ways a poem could exist in the world—as well as to certain trends in poetry at the time. They also led me to correspond with editors and writers I admired—not only Peter O’Leary and Kevin Killian, but also older writers like Gustaf Sobin, William Bronk, and Gerrit Lansing—again, correspondence can be an education in poetry all its own. John Wieners was an especially big influence on me at the time; I carried his Selected Poems, 1958-1984 (Black Sparrow, 1986) everywhere, reading it on trains, buses, park benches, whenever I had a chance. I’ll never replace my worn-out copy since there are so many memories associated it with it. I remember seeing Wieners read with Eleni Sikelianos in the late ‘90s at the old Teachers and Writers Collaborative space on Union Square; I went up to him afterwards and told him I had just picked up Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (Good Gay Poets, 1975) and he said, “Hold on to it, it’ll be valuable someday.” The 1969 Angel Hair edition of his Asylum Poems is also one of my most treasured books. I’m glad there’s growing interest in Wieners’s poetry, with a collected poems edited by Robert Dewhurst and a biography of him in the works.

RT: What about translating—when did that begin?

PV: Well, I didn’t seriously start translating books until 2014, when I realized I was drawn to writers such as Antonin Artaud and Sandro Penna, along with certain voices from the ancient world like Catullus, because their writings in one way or another were centered on an exploration of the body. Filmmaking helped me change my thinking about my writing (which in my late twenties was somewhat abstract) by leading me out to the streets, where I became involved in situations that demanded a dialogue or some form of intervention; when I attempted to extend these practices to writing, the result was an interest in opening up conversations through translation—dialogues with writers who were literary “outcasts” and for whom the sexual body is an important subject. This includes the five Classical Roman poets I translated in Let the Games Begin (Talisman House, 2015) and especially Catullus, who I tackled with Catullus: Versions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), as well as the more modern writers I work on.

RT: A perfect way to segue into talking about the Italian poets you’ve translated over the past decade. What led to the creation of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014)?

PV: Penna is not well known in the U.S.; there were only a few translations of his work in English, all hard to find. Pasolini said that despite being a great poet, Penna was “destined to be a poet at the margins, not known, even despised.” The times have certainly changed somewhat—gay poets are more visible now than they’ve ever been—but there is still much more recovery work to be done; so many writers unjustly ignored in their time have poems that deserve a second look. Penna was openly gay and when Pasolini first arrived in Rome in 1950, he sought him out; they became good friends and frequent companions, their bond strengthened by their mutual love for young men (they both loved the ragazzi that prowled the outskirts of Rome). Penna also knew Eugenio Montale, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1975, but Montale objected to the homosexual content of Penna’s work, which led to a rift in their friendship. Penna published very little in the ’60s; the last book he approved for publication, The Sleepless Traveler, was published a month after his death in Rome on January 21, 1977. I think Penna’s various silences and refusals to publish were his way of showing that he didn’t care about how his work was received in academic circles. Anyway, when I delved into Penna’s poems I found them to be utterly brilliant, so I knew I had to translate him.

RT: Since you brought up Pasolini, let’s talk about him next; you’ve published translations of his poems in places like Jacket and The Baffler. Will there ever be a book of this work—and what is it like translating such an iconic artist, as compared to poets who are lesser known here in the U.S.?

PV: I don’t presently have plans to publish a book of my Pasolini translations, but I find him continually fascinating. Throughout his life he was an outspoken critic of what he believed was destroying Italy. In the United States, he is largely seen as a civic poet, but I wanted to focus on other kinds of poems. For example, his collection The Hobby of the Sonnet contains a series of love poems that show he was a lyric poet of the highest order. It was an eye-opening experience translating these poems, which have a fascinating backstory: While shooting La Ricotta (1963), Pasolini met the young man who would become his intimate companion for many years, Giovanni (“Ninetto”) Davoli; he was fourteen when he met Pasolini, who had just turned forty. Soon Ninetto became part of Pasolini’s entourage and began appearing in his films, starting with The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and culminating with The Arabian Nights (1974). “In me, he found the naturalness of the world he knew growing up,” Ninetto said, and I think that’s true: This was the world that Pasolini saw devastated by the changes Italy was undergoing in the ’60s. During the filming of The Canterbury Tales (1972), however, Ninetto told Pasolini that he intended to marry (which he did, in January 1973), promising that nothing fundamental would change as a result. But Pasolini was inconsolable. The series of poems he began in the fall of 1971, The Hobby of the Sonnet, charts the series of emotional upheavals Pasolini underwent during this time. After the wedding Pasolini’s anger subsided, and in 1973 he wrote, “seeing that you have retained a little love for me / exclusively, this means everything.” Desire had given way to affection and loyalty. In The Arabian Nights Pasolini cast Ninetto as Aziz, a character he described as “joy, happiness, a living ballet.” Ninetto’s first son was named Pier Paolo. The Hobby of the Sonnet wasn’t published in Italy until after Pasolini’s murder in 1975, and while I and others have published translations of some of the poems, the entire sequence has never been published in English as far as I know.

RT: And finally, you’ve given us Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout (Commune Editions, 2017). How did you discover his work?

PV: I first discovered Balestrini’s poems in the anthology The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975 (Sun & Moon Press, 1999). I had been aware of his novels in English translation published by Verso, but no book of his poetry had yet been translated—so I decided to translate this long poem, which is not only one of Balestrini’s best books but also extremely relevant to our time. Blackout is a requiem for the generation of 1968, whose hopes and ideals were exhausted by the time of the poem’s composition in 1979. The impetus for the poem was the New York City power outage of 1977, which lasted for over twenty-four hours and received widespread media attention because of episodes of violence and looting—but the historical events with which Blackout is concerned (and about which it is critical) span the revolutionary movement in Italy from 1969 to 1979, which involved not only university students but eventually the entire Italian working class, who took part in strikes, demonstrations, and acts of sabotage. Workers fought with fascists and police in Rome, Milan, Turin—and lives were lost amidst the violence.

As a result of mass arrests in 1979, Balestrini was indicted and fled to France; there he began to collect the materials that would eventually become Blackout. He was essentially creating a map to understand the political climate, examining the sequence of historical events whose consequence was repression and asking why no further revolutionary action is possible. In a sense, Blackout faithfully records the end of a world, the extraordinary period of creativity and hope that had characterized the late ’60s and early ’70s. But as much as it is an elegy, Blackout is also a call to action for future generations to counter the ever-present problem of power. We must collapse distinctions which enforce the duality of superior/inferior; we must imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps to arrive at a new language and way of perceiving the world. The threat of physical and psychic death is all too real in this unstable political climate.

RT: You also translate from the French; two of your most recent translations are the novel Nicolas Pages (Semiotexte, 2023) by Guillaume Dustan and The Illuminated, or The Precursors of Socialism: Tales and Portraits (Wakefield Press, 2022) by Gerard de Nerval. What can you tell us about these titles?

PV: I translated The Illuminated because I considered it an important book that filled a gap in Nerval studies. Collectively, its narratives of six men show Nerval’s attempt to map an alternative history of the eighteenth century through the eyes of these visionaries. They also show that Nerval’s descents into madness (he suffered from bouts of mental illness throughout his life) were followed by ascents back to reality that resulted in a clearer vision of truth; as he wrote, “Is there not something of reason to be extracted from madness?” And so, Nerval embarked on these portraits, extracting a kind of moral from each of these figures’ confrontation with the abyss opened by “the death of God,” in a century that relegated visionaries to the position of outcasts.

Published in 1999, Nicolas Pages marks a departure from the Sadean preoccupations of Dustan’s previous three novels. It is in essence a love story. The writing is trashy, corporeal, frantic, but also collage-like, encyclopedic, philosophic: Dustan includes articles that he initially wrote for various magazines on the history of “house” music, on the history of homosexual virility since the 1970s, on modes of transmission and repression of SM practices, on the links between literature and sexuality, and on the notion of gay literature. It is a call for gay rights, a vibrant plea for autofiction, a reconciliation with his homosexual identity, a message of hope and energy, and a hymn to life, humanity, love, pleasure, and desire. Inconstant, insolent, anti-conformist, and provocative, Dustan inaugurates a “gay literature” that is no longer painful or shameful but epicurean and cheerful without lapsing into idealism.

RT: How did The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014) come about?

PV: Essentially as an experiment. I had been interested in Artaud ever since I first read his work in college. Much later, I encountered Ezra Pound’s idea of “criticism by translation,” which required “an intense penetration of the author’s sense” and “an exact projection of one’s psychic contents.” I was thinking about these ideas when I wrote The Artaud Variations. I combined my own writing, as a kind of commentary, with my translations of sections from Artaud’s work. Writing this book was an intense and almost overwhelming experience. Sylvère Lotringer (1938-2012), the publisher of Semiotext(e), was one of the first to understand what I was doing, and he kindly wrote a blurb for the book that captures what I was going for: “Peter Valente has done everything that a translator/reader of Artaud shouldn’t do: he crossed the line and merged his own writing with the original. But he did it to such a mind-blowing extreme that Artaud’s voice becomes his own.”

RT: Since then, you’ve clearly doubled down on your devotion to Artaud, and have released three books from the London-based publisher Infinity Land Press: 2020’s Succubations and Incubations: Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947), co-translated with Cole Heinowitz, and two books in 2023, The New Revelations of Being and Other Mystical Writings and Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud. Can you give us a quick tour through these titles?

PV: Succubations and Incubations contains a selection of letters (1945-1947) from Artaud’s consummate work, Suppôts et Supplications [Henchmen and Torturings], which provides readers with a vivid, uniquely intimate view of Artaud’s final years. They show Artaud at his most exposed, and perhaps also his most explosive, tragic, sad, even humorous. Commenting on and elaborating key themes from his earlier writing while venturing into new territory, Artaud recounts his torture and violation in asylums, his crucifixion two thousand years ago in Golgotha, his deception by occult initiates and doubles, and his intended journey to Tibet—where, aided by his “daughters of the heart,” he will finally put an end to these “maneuvers of obscene bewitchment.” Artaud also speaks of his plan to create a “body without organs” and extends this idea to the visual arts, where he argues that painting and drawing must wage a ceaseless battle against the limits of representation. There is an unmistakable unity of vision that permeates the letters.

The New Revelations of Being and other Mystical Writings contains texts written by Artaud between 1933-1937, works that explore astrology, alchemy, Eastern philosophies, Christian ritual and magic, the Tarot, and the civilizations of India and Mexico. Artaud’s extensive reading and thinking on metaphysics and religion produced “Notes on Oriental, Greek and Indian Cultures.” Also included are the important essays, “Mexico and Civilization,” “The Eternal Betrayal of the Whites,” “The Life and Death of Satan the Fire” and “The Breath that Returns to God…” But the central text in this volume is The New Revelations of Being. In this work, Artaud is the “Revealed One,” the madman and fool of the Tarot, who possesses secret knowledge which he believes will allow him to enact his apocalyptic vision of a world transformed through destruction.

Obliteration of the World contains my own essays exploring the hermetic side of Artaud’s thought, focusing on a series of letters written, late in his life, to André Breton, Georges Braque, Marthe Robert, Anie Besnard, and Collette Thomas. “Artaud’s Sacred Triad” uses the Qabalah and ideas about the Tarot to deepen ideas about Artaud’s sexuality and magick. “Cubism and the Gnostic” presents Artaud’s criticism of Georges Braque, which goes beyond mere aesthetics to question the essence of representation. “Artaud’s Book of the Dead” explores the Tibetan idea of the afterlife and Artaud’s relation to it; for him, the body that has evolved through time and suffered ceaseless persecutions both in life and in the afterlife is the corrupt body born of the spirit of God—thus, God is one of Artaud’s greatest enemies. “The Incestuous Father and His Daughters of the Heart” engages Artaud’s relation to the various women in his life; to these women, Artaud was alternately sympathetic and cruel, manipulative and romantic. The final essay is concerned with Artaud’s travels in Mexico, focusing on the importance to him of the mystical staff of St. Patrick. These essays were the result of years of thinking about Artaud’s work.

RT: As you pointed out, this work focuses on late-period Artaud, to which translator-scholars like Clayton Eshleman and Stephen Barber have also drawn attention. What is it about this phase of Artaud’s life and work that is so challenging?

PV: I remember reading in Clayton Eshleman’s introduction to his translation of Artaud, Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works From The Final Period (Exact Change, 2004), that “there are two major projects facing future Artaud translators, the 300-page Suppôts et Supplications (Volume XIV) presented in two books, which Artaud considered to be his summational work; and the Cahiers de Rodez (Volume XV-XXI), over two thousand pages, worked at daily throughout Artaud’s recovery period in Rodez. There are also four volumes of notebook material from Artaud’s last two years in Paris.” So that led me to try to tackle thinking about and translating some of this work. Most U.S. readers only know Artaud from Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology (City Lights, 1965) and Susan Sontag’s and Helen Weaver’s Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) but even that book, though more well-rounded than Hirschman’s, “proposes that Artaud’s importance lies in the pre-Rodez work,” as Eshleman writes.

The later work is challenging: Artaud’s apocalyptic vision for mankind led him on a journey, beginning in Mexico in 1936 and ending, tragically, in Ireland in 1937, with a mental breakdown and silence. After the fateful journey to Ireland, he was placed in a straitjacket and eventually sent to the Rodez asylum. In the late work we see Artaud reconstructing a life that was destroyed. He develops a vast cosmology in which there are demonic entities and an entire panoply of beings that constitute the spirit world, and in which occurs a dramatic fight between these entities and mankind, which Artaud insisted had nothing to do with the spirit. It is a world completely unlike the surrealist and visionary one most U.S. readers associate with Artaud—and it is a cosmology that he ultimately rejects in favor of silence: In 1948, Artaud wrote: “At this moment, I want to destroy my thought and my mind. Above all, thought, mind and consciousness. I do not want to suppose anything, admit anything, enter into anything, discuss anything…”

RT: Do you have any more Artaud projects in the hopper?

PV: Later this year, Infinity Land Press will publish my translation of The True Story of Artaud-Mômo, which contains the complete text of Artaud’s final lecture, given in Paris on the night of January 13, 1947. It was his last public performance, one in which he forcefully ruptured all received and polite notions of performance, lecture, or even theatre–he pushed himself and his viewers past the realm of what could be comfortably absorbed. This work became an important reference point for various post-war intellectuals and artists, such as the Lettrists, the New Realists, the Beat Generation, and the movement of action poetry. What makes the text so riveting and powerful is that unlike in his other writings, Artaud is summing up a lifetime of experiences and pain at the hands of society and doctors—it is the closest thing we have to an autobiography.

RT: As if writing and translating weren’t enough, you also work in visual media. Why did you decide to make films?

PV: It came about by accident. In 2010 I started showing films (from my own collection of DVDs) twice a week at a nursing home in Jersey; although I was writing, I wasn’t publishing books. One night at the home, I met someone who had a Bolex camera and wanted to shoot a film; with no working script, we shot a film over a weekend, Liminal, that was shown at Anthology Film Archives. Later I made my own films, but without any money—I had to use what was readily available. I shot my first few films with a small point-and-shoot Canon camera and a few friends; in my later films, I dispensed with “actors” entirely, using myself or random people on the street when needed. I usually followed my instinct rather than a prepared script—in fact, I’ve never made a film with a script of any kind. I start with an idea and improvise from that, like free jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey. Georges Méliès had to improvise his films during the early age of cinema, and the result was magical: A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904) hold up even to this day. Improvisation governs almost all aspects of my life, and certainly those that have to do with artistic creation.

RT: You also have published photographic work—tell us about Street Level (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015).

PV: During the summer of 2012, I filmed, alone and with a cheap camera, homeless vets, former drug addicts, and gang members in New Jersey and on the Lower East Side. I was planning to make a documentary to be called Street Level; the film was never completed, but the book of the same name featured stills from the film. Despite considerable risk, I was trying to capture the language and face of despair and anger otherwise silenced in the media. There is, as we all know, an increasing divide between the everyday “normal” life of most Americans and the “extraordinary” life of the privileged, but many of the men and women I filmed live outside these two worlds—and thus they are invisible. But they have something to tell us, and we must listen. They have the possibility, as we all do, of being transformed. This would mean seeing all of us connected, where there are no false dividing lines, no mysterious Others, but a single body of which we are a part, working together and accepting our differences.

RT: Let’s close with some other strands of what you do in the writing world, starting with fiction. Can you speak a bit about your novella “Parthenogenesis”?

PV: “Parthenogenesis” was my attempt at writing a kind of science-fiction novella. It includes subjects like telepathy, cyborg bodies, time travel, pop culture, and class critique; in terms of narrative, I wanted to create a story that is essentially a series of fragments, moving between the past and the present—the impression of a narrative pulsing underneath rather than immediately apparent. That pulse, like a heartbeat, dark and violent but also transformative, drives the narrative toward the possibility of revolution and magic. A character in the book says: “Magic draws from the forbidden…the first magical act is becoming aware that I AM a self…distinct from others who carry the same social role.” In other words, the first act of revolution takes place within. “Parthenogenesis” and “Plague in the Imperial City” were published together as Two Novellas (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017).

RT: Among the plethora of books you’ve recently published are A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter (Punctum, 2022), and a poetry volume you edited, Breathlehem: The Selected Poems of Jim Brodey (Local Knowledge, 2024). Both are, in a sense, homages to artists largely unknown beyond devotees of film and poetry. How did these projects come about?

PV: Regarding the Schroeter book, I attended a retrospective of his films in 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; I had been aware of his name from having watched some of the so-called New German Cinema, but I was immediately attracted to Schroeter’s films because they seemed so unusual compared to the other German films at the time. I admired their theatricality and almost unhinged emotional quality; they seemed improvised and irreverent. Schroeter was a kind of romantic with both feet in the real world—his films don’t take themselves too seriously, even when dealing with serious subjects like the nature of love and death.

Also, as a filmmaker, I’ve worked in 8mm, 16mm, and digital, so when viewing his films, I asked myself questions like: How did he get that lighting to produce such an image? What kind of film did he use? What kind of camera? I also admired his use of texts from literature, such as the Songs of Maldoror by Lautréamont, which Schroeter used in both The Death of Maria Malibran and a later film, Deux. And I admired the way he used music to comment on a character’s thoughts, or to conflict with what is on the screen; most of my films do not contain dialogue but I made extensive use of different kinds of music, from opera to popular music to jazz. I imagine Schroeter must have been aware of Kenneth Anger’s use of music in his films, the way it comments on the images and adds another dimension to what one is seeing on the screen. So, I approached Schroeter from the viewpoint of a filmmaker first, and not an academic.

As for Jim Brodey: It’s been thirty years since Hard Press published Heart of the Breath, a collection of Brodey’s poems edited by Clark Coolidge, and all his individual books remain out of print—so I just thought it was time for a Selected Poems to bring his work back into circulation for readers. Breathlehem contains selections from all of Brodey’s work including some poems that only appeared in magazines and were never collected in a book. I also included numerous photos of Brodey, both alone and in the company of other poets. My aim was to document an active and exciting period in the New York poetry world that Jim Brodey was a part of—as well as to serve as a reminder that he was and is one of our best poets.

RT: What are you working on next?

PV: I’m currently editing a series of texts on the filmmaker Harry Smith. My experience in film had led me to working as a proofreader and general editor and I also helped to get photos for the reissue of Paola Igiori’s American Magus: Harry Smith (originally published by Inandout Press, 1996) that Semiotexte published in 2022. While working on that book, I came into contact with many people who knew him, and this resulted in my putting together a collection of texts, photographs, letters, and even an unpublished document by Harry. The book is going to be published by Inner Traditions in 2025. I’ll also have a new book of reviews and essays in 2025 from Punctum Books; that will include essays on John Wieners, Jack Spicer, and David Wojnarowicz, as well as on John Ruskin and Gavin Douglas’ translation of the Aeneid. The book will also include reviews of books by Will Alexander, Bernadette Mayer, and Cookie Mueller. After that, who knows?

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Fanatic Diptych: Laura Henriksen and Courtney Bush in Conversation

We, Laura Henriksen and Courtney Bush, are fanatics. Being fangirls is central to our practice as poets and as people, and since we happen to be rabid fans of one another, we are excited to have this occasion to discuss our new books. Here we talk about the world we want, the one we believe is possible, and how elements of that world can be built in poems.

In her debut collection Laura’s Desires (Nightboat Books, $17.95), Laura Henriksen forges her way toward a liberation of desire in two long, essayistic poems that joyously “show their work,” carefully unfolding thought, memory, and something like expert testimony. She consults a chorus of voices from literature and pop culture as well as family and friends, braiding their insights into the poems and breaking them down with her own.

Courtney Bush’s second collection, I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, $16), winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, contains poems that run language along the strange border between belief and learning, drawing from her experience working as a preschool teacher witnessing and mirroring the way children build and unbuild the world in their imagination and in their rapidly expanding access to language.

In an ideal world, our books would have their own conversation that we could listen in on, but until we write books powerful enough to do that, we get to talk to each other about them. Our interview takes the form of a diptych, following the form of Laura’s book, placing Control alongside Divine Messages.

Control

CB: I see Laura’s Desires as a massive, intricate Medieval diptych. On one panel, you have dreams. On the other, movies, or really, one movie: Variety by Bette Gordon. They’re both painted with the same hand, the same vocabulary. And the panels are not panels, of course, but long, essayistic poems that use the movie and the dream to explore, among so many other things, the poet’s relationship to desire. One common denominator dreams and movies share is the limited relationship we can have with them as the viewer. We have no conscious control of their narrative progression, their images, their intention.

LH: I’m so glad you brought up control, because one way I want to branch off immediately is by asking you to talk about destiny. I feel like we are both very concerned with whether fate is real, whether or not “everything happens for a reason.” What difference does that make for you?

CB: I say in my poems all the time, “fate is real.” My “fate is real” thing comes from this time in my life when I felt confident that life was total chaos, total disorder. I was very young. But then I had this realization that if the disorder were truly total, it would include something as structural and ordered as fate, somewhere, if only by accident. I remember talking to a poet friend about it back then and he commented if fate weren’t real, at least sometimes, the 19th-century novel wouldn’t exist. No one would make that up if it didn’t exist. An outlandish thing to say—about as outlandish as “fate is real”—but something that feels true. I think of “fate” as a narrative structure, something made of language. I don’t think of it much outside of language, but by recognizing language’s capacity to articulate order, there is a realness to it.

In “Laura’s Desires” (the poem) you write:

I grew up
a believer, splashing around in the pool
of God’s omnipotent omnibenevolence,
singing about the font of blessings,
asking it to bind my heart, secure
in the warmed and softened
predetermination of “God has a plan
for your life.” I gave up this belief . . .

You go on to describe the end of that belief in God’s power and benevolence. You write a beautiful scene involving a questionable sighting of a mysterious horse on Fulton Street during which that belief falls away. What’s left isn’t the freedom I might’ve expected, but a feeling of further entrapment in a situation that did not have to be this way. There are real stakes here, this question of whether or not there is a reason for everything. Can you talk about that also?

LH: First I want to go back real quick and say thank you for describing my book as an intricate Medieval diptych. I was so excited to get to ask you about fate, because I’ve been so moved by your investigation of it, that I breezed right past the fact that you described my book in exactly the way I have thought of it.

I had the strong feeling in reading your books, first Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022) and then I Love Information, that I wished I had read them a long time ago, before I wrote Laura’s Desires—like I wish I had them next to me the night of the mysterious horse, for many reasons, one of them being the blessing of your revelation that inside of perfect chaos there must also be fate, a fate that isn’t exactly secular but also isn’t exactly divine.

All believers sooner or later must face this question—if God is all good, all powerful, and all knowing, how can the world be so bad? Some people hold those contradictions, some people can’t. I couldn’t, and it was such an existential problem for me, losing through God’s absence also the possibility of any sense of order, because when you’ve come to rely on “everything happens for a reason” as the only available response to suffering, then suddenly you are left speechless in pain’s wake. It returns us to the question of control we started with, and as is often the case with control, it becomes a question of cruelty or indifference.

When I’m thinking about how it did not have to be this way, what I mean is that this was not inevitable—there is no logical necessity requiring that some people feast and some people starve, literally, that this happens because of structures that were invented and that only continue because they are violently enforced. Part of what is empowering about this knowledge is that it demonstrates that it will not always be this way, and part of what is devastating is that it requires confronting the reality that it is this way for a reason, even if that reason isn’t “God’s plan” but the requirements of settler colonization as a global curse.

So the stakes are, yes, absolutely, extremely high. Because if the “reason” doesn’t emanate from some untouchable realm of Heaven, but is instead from, for example, the fucking White House, then we are not powerless against it, not at all. We are in fact responsible for it, and as such we have a responsibility to remake it. I don’t mean to be so vague by saying “it” here, I mean all systems of oppression and injustice—I mean Palestine will be free, and when Palestine is free, we will be free too.

CB: Your book is called Laura’s Desires. You are Laura. I know the title serendipitously comes from within the cinematic universe of Variety, but I admire the way your book about personal desire is so communal. Desire in this book is filtered through the voices of many other artists and thinkers. It makes me remember we are all here learning from each other, making work for each other. In “Dream, Dream, Dream,” the meditation on dreaming and dreaming’s relation to conscious desire always starts by looking outward. Each new part of the poem turns toward what some other work of art says about dreams and moves inward from there. The first five sections, for example, stem from the ideas of your bad babysitter, Selena, Frank Ocean, and Oscar Wilde. Can you tell me about that gesture, what it did for the language and the thinking?

LH: Oh, it made it so much more possible! I find writing and thinking just so hard, not remotely relaxing, and as such, I feel like I’m always looking for engines for poems, any possible source of energy to sustain them beyond my own totally unreliable creativity. (I wonder if this is relatable to you, because I get the impression that you are just constantly writing and making things, which delights me.) With “Dream Dream Dream,” the engine was a list of dream pieces I kept adding to; I would just fill it in as I went along. I love writing prompts, and I love taking workshops—ideally I would do all my writing sitting next to other people who are also writing and use their beauty of focus to bolster my own—so writing in this way where every section touches something else offered me a version of that social, communal force.

What engines do you find or make for your poems? I think often about your vision of a poem that can think, which to me seems like the ultimate poem-engine in terms of offering some kind of spark that allows for a poem to continue endlessly—not to get religious again, but sort of in that prayer-without-ceasing style.

CB: The engine gets started easily. Sometimes a phrase pops into my head from seemingly nowhere, and if it sounds like it belongs to the same constellation of some things I’ve been thinking about, the poem starts, and then, yes, I try to get the poem to think, which I think means to follow itself and lead itself. I have always loved the prayer-without-ceasing concept, without ever being religious, because of how it reminds me of thought. Thinking never stops. I write long poems, maximalist maybe, and I have a much harder time stopping them than keeping them moving. I like the idea that there is no structural obligation to end a sentence, and I think of poems that way too: Within the language, there’s nothing saying stop. If the poem thinks, it doesn’t have to stop. We are the ones who stop.

I want to know about the process of writing your 100-page poem about a single movie. It feels like an exercise in handing over the reins, a way of giving up some control of the poem to a pre-existing narrative. How much did you know or envision about the poem before you started writing it? How many times have you seen the movie? How many times had you seen it before you started writing the poem? What was the research like? Tell me everything.

LH: Totally! I mean, I have this trick I’ve always loved to employ (sort of in the style of your brilliant device of writing poems named “Katelyn” when you don’t have a title), which is to suddenly summarize the plot of a movie in the middle of a poem. You can just do that whenever you want to, and it will improve your poem, it’s so fun. I am someone who is completely enchanted by narrative, but, to this point at least, I have demonstrated no facility at actually crafting a story. That hasn’t really been a problem, though, because there are already so many stories. I don’t need to make a new one.

I had actually only seen Variety one time before I began writing the poem, and I watched it one more time, very slowly, while writing it, and then once more before I started editing it. But really, the movie is so vibrant and present that it just immediately copies itself in its entirety onto your brain, so you can just rewatch it whenever you want to. It offered this incredible poem-engine, because whenever I didn’t know how to go on, I would just go back to summarizing the story of the movie, and it’s so capacious that summarizing even one moment would open up a million portals, and I didn’t have to do anything but tumble through them and try to offer some traces of what that tumbling felt like, and what it taught me.

As for research, I did more than I’d ever done for anything! I read the notes from the Barnard conference where Variety screened, and I read so many interviews and reviews, both from that early ‘80s moment and from the intervening decades. I have spent a lot of my life in the East Village, but I never really thought I would write such an East Village poem, because it’s so heavy with different meanings to different people. I think it was only through doing this research that it was possible for me to really talk about what it’s like to live here.

You describe this moment where an interlocutor says that when they read your poems, they have the feeling that everything in them really happened, that it’s all true. It’s not until that moment, according to the poem, that it occurs to you that it would be possible to include things that didn’t happen. I feel so interested in the ways you are a storyteller. Part of the profound pleasure I experience in reading your work is very close to the pleasure I experience in reading novels, but you remain perhaps resistant to invention or fabrication. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the relationship between telling stories and telling the truth. “Telling” is such a central part of your work as I experience, as in “I want to tell you what a sword is.”

CB: I do think of my poems as being written about my actual life or “the truth,” but at the same time, there are moments that I haven’t lived but that are still “true.” I am thinking now, for example, about these two lines in the book—one is “I illustrated a book on horse surgery with my closest friend,” and one is something like “I painted Merritt Parkway.” The first is a biographical detail about Hilma af Klint, whose show I saw when I wrote these poems. And Willem deKooning painted “Merritt Parkway.” Now, those things didn’t happen to me, but I read about them, and incorporated them into my consciousness, and they are lodged in there, and they are important to me as bits of language, as bits of maybe a more impersonal truth, one that is polyvocal at times, because we incorporate each other’s fragments, and so I like to tell those things as part of the truth, which is more complicated than just “what happened to me.” My life includes lots of other information that has nothing to do with me, is unaware of my existence, and I love that.

Divine Messages

LH: I am extremely fascinated by your relationship to language, which seems simultaneously skeptical, or fully aware of language’s limitations (“We are not made alive to sentences alone”), and also ecstatic-religious (“I received a revelation, I will have no other worry”). In reading your poems, which I would describe as visionary, I find myself thinking of the relationship between the message and the messenger, and the ways in which a poem is possibly both at once. It’s like the poem is both the angel and what the angel says, and the poet is the lucky or unlucky mortal who has to deal with the news. Although in phrasing it that way, I think I’m misstating how active the poet’s role is as receiver, when really what I’m hoping you’ll talk to me about is something like animating force—the animating force of language itself, of language organized into poems, of the poet organizing, of the poet and reader both being reorganized by the poem.

CB: I never thought about language as something with its own properties until I took a class called “Nonsense” with the playwright Mac Wellman. We talked about Wittgenstein’s ideas about language. I remember this idea that you don’t learn a language; you learn how to use it—that language is a set of strange tools that one learns to use by watching others play with the tools and by playing with them on one’s own. That idea made language seem both more simple and much more mystical to me. It certainly reorganized my understanding of humans’s relationship to it. Before, I thought language came from us, that it was ours. But now I see it as something independent, complex beyond our imagination, with which we form relationships by experimenting with it. In that same course, we learned how difficult it was to write “nonsense” by attempting to do it. The reading mind almost refuses not to organize language into some kind of sense. And if it’s that hard to process language in a way that would not incite “sense,” it must be extremely functional. There was/is also the popular idea of language being a failure. So many poems are like, “Oh woe is me, if only language could express my feeling, my idea!” But it’s like, no, language works great—that’s not a language issue, that’s on you, babe.

LH: Totally! It’s not language that’s failing us, but rather the incredible pressure we are under as beings in language to simplify complexity by organizing meaning too quickly, relying on too many assumptions—this need to make sense of things, to complete stories instead of letting them remain unresolved and mysterious. I think poetry does a lot to counter that tendency, to invite a different kind of clarity. Speaking of storytelling and failure, did you grow up religious?

CB: I didn’t grow up religious, but I was surrounded by the trappings of Catholicism. My grandparents were very Catholic and so was the community I was raised in as a young child. Catholic fishermen of Slavic descent. They had weird Catholic stuff going on that most Catholics I meet don’t even know about. My mom, for example, was vowed to the Virgin Mary for seven years because she had severe asthma. This meant that she was signed over as the property of the Virgin Mary to be healed. The priest and my grandparents negotiated a term of seven years, so she could only wear baby blue and white for seven years. She was like one of those twins from The Shining, but all alone. I was always interested in the lore. Saint Anthony would help you find things. What, why? Saints should have better things to do.

I want to ask you about devotion as it relates to the composition of your book. The two long poems are unrelenting in their project. They do not fragment, self-negate, or veer from their course. Both poems make their aims clear to the reader. I felt that the voice was one of dedication, responsibility. Does that ring true for you as the writer? Like there was something you were driving toward, and if so, is that a kind of faith?

LH: What a strange and radiant being your mom is! I love this story of her as the solitary Shining twin. I also love the moment in I Love Information where she uses a loaf of bread and some mismatched M&Ms to make a bunny to celebrate Easter with you and her recently dead boyfriend’s sons. Full mystical, wow.

Yes, that absolutely has the ring of truth for me. I have all these devotional tendencies I need to put somewhere, and so into the poems they go—and also into a transcendental belief in friendship, which I think is another thing our poems have in common. The only way I could continue writing these poems, the only way that I could keep driving towards what I wanted to drive towards, was to tell myself that I could keep them secret if I wanted to. Any clarity or transparency that is achieved was possible because I assured myself that if it needed to be a private clarity, I was the one who would get to make that decision. I could enter the portal and not tell anyone what I found.

But then, once I accumulated all this language, the temptation to test it is irresistible—I wanted to open it up and see if it can transmit to others something like what it transmitted to me. So the reader becomes more and more present as the poems go on, because it becomes more and more clear that the comfort of secrecy was only ever a tool, and gradually it is replaced by a different faith in something else—not the comfort of secrecy but the vulnerability of pursuing questions and desires in public.

CB: I love that so much. To return to the subject of skepticism, which I think falls squarely into discussions of the divine, I don’t find in your poem a skepticism of language or what the poet wants to do with it. In fact, you say, “I know that’s not why I write, or / I don’t think so, I’m just trying / to think some things through . . .” I love how unbothered this comes across. What the poet is skeptical about, though, is memory. The poems classify memory as something close to fantasy, and they are again unbothered by whether the memory is “true.” But the poem is wonderfully full of memories. Can you tell me about how memories, untrustworthy as they are in this poem, are also useful?

LH: This helps me return to your first question about dreams and movies as narrative devices to which we as viewers, if we want to have a good time, can only submit. We get to abdicate our sense of control and just be transported by the force of the movie, the dream, which is extremely sexy. And memories are not completely unlike that, because our control over them is far from unrestricted—we have the experiences we have, we have the memories we have, which are versions of our experiences, and then we have to negotiate and collaborate with them, in all of their complex and painful untrustworthiness, if they’re going to teach us anything worth writing about.

I’ve been using the word “portal,” which is a concept you helped me to understand—that the importance of portals (which are often memories) is not where they take you, but the possibility that you could stay inside them forever, in this in-between state. I’m interested in the relationship between the portal and the message, where it isn’t necessarily about the safe delivery of the message, but the place between departure and arrival. I find this quite transformative, and I wonder if you could speak more to this idea of life inside the portal, and any connections you perceive between the portal and the message.

CB: I first started thinking of the portal while reading In Search of Lost Time. I mean, that’s what all those hundreds of pages are about. There are all the famous “madeleine” moments where the narrator is transported by a sense memory through time and then picks up the story from a different place. My favorite instance of it is in the last book, where the narrator is an old man, and he rolls his ankle in the Guermantes’ driveway, and the rolling of the ankle sends him back to a place we realize is the moment when the narrator started writing the books, conceived of the project itself. It’s insane, and maybe that’s a misunderstanding of what happened, but it’s my understanding, and it was a “holy shit” moment for me as a reader. So I just thought it would be cool to spend any amount of time and produce any amount of language in that space between the two realities, but I don’t know. I hate to say it, but I don’t think it’s possible to do anything in there, or at the very least it’s not something you can force your way into. It’s unlocked by a kind of fatal sense memory, an unavoidable loop, which is why it’s so fun and maddening for me to imagine. You can’t do anything there, and you can’t get there on purpose. But the desire, of course, is what matters, and where the language you do end up with comes from.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Mixtape Poetics: An Interview with Alicia Cook

by Gerardo Del Guercio

Alicia Cook is that rare creature in the world of poetry publishing: an author who has had books become bestsellers and poems go viral online. Earlier this year she released the third and final installment to her “mixtape” series, The Music Was Just Getting Good ($16.99), following 2016’s Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately and 2020’s Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back as well as a poetry collection not in the series, I Hope My Voice Doesn’t Skip (2018); all have been published by Andrews McMeel, an industry giant. Her writing is known for how it compassionately takes up themes of trauma and grief, and she is a passionate activist in the battle against the opioid epidemic, writing essays and speaking publicly to shed light on how drug addiction affects the mental health of entire families. Also an aspiring songwriter, Cook holds an MBA from Saint Peter’s University and a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Georgian Court University; she lives with her family in New Jersey.

Gerardo Del Guercio: Let’s start with the basics: What is it that draws you to writing?

Alicia Cook: Writing was always my “safe space.” Even from a young age, it’s how I worked things out—made sense of my head. To this day, it is a way I can control my own narrative in a world built on perceptions and assumptions. It’s a way I can connect to people who may be a few steps behind me and help them feel less alone and more understood.

GDG: Like your first two books, The Music Was Just Getting Good is designed as a cassette mixtape. Tell us more about how and why you use this format. Was there something specific that set it off?

AC: Format-wise, I’ve divided The Music Was Just Getting Good into two parts; “Side A” holds ninety-two poems, titled as “tracks,” and “Side B” holds the “remixes,” which are blackout-poetry versions of those ninety-two poems. And there are other touches to the mixtape theme I lean into as well. I’m trying to create a more immersive experience than just sitting down and reading a book.

In the new collection, I’ve returned to the themes of mental health, hope, and grief. Grief isn’t confined to death alone. We grieve for who we used to be, for moments that never found their way into existence, for the physical places that hold our memories, and most profoundly, for our people—those who’ve departed earth, but also those who walked away and those we had to let go. It’s a profound exploration of the multifaceted nature of loss and transformation.

The poem that put this particular book into motion is the title poem, which I purposely put as the final poem in the book. The title comes from a line in a memorial card poem I wrote for my aunt, who unexpectedly passed away after a brief but brutal cancer diagnosis. But again, I’ve always been very aware that grief is not a linear experience, nor does it have a cure, so The Music Was Just Getting Good tries to examine grief in all its forms, not just death.

GDG: What artists have influenced your writing the most?

AC: From a poetry standpoint, I really respect Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, and Poe. They all, especially Plath and Poe, found a simple way to deconstruct the busy mind, and their openness about their own manic behavior struck a chord with me. The book that solidified my decision to pursue writing, though, was The Lovely Bones; my mother, an avid reader, recommended it to me and I can sincerely say it changed my life.

Songwriters that influence how I see and hear words are Leonard Cohen (though he’s both a literary poet and a songwriter), Kacey Musgraves, Amy Winehouse, Bright Eyes, Julia Michaels, Mac Miller, Taylor Swift, Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Jason Isbell, Tom Petty . . . the list goes on. I can talk for hours about music; it has been a lifeline for me.

An artist I always especially admired is Aaliyah—how she fiercely protected her private life and was well ahead of her time. If you listen to her last record from 2001, it holds up; it doesn’t sound dated. I try to emulate that by keeping current references and fads out of my writing so it can still be understood by future readers. You will never see me write “I got into an Uber”; I’ll use the more generic “taxi” or “cab.” Now, that might be a terrible example because Uber might replace taxi and cab in our lexicon entirely, but you see what I mean—I don’t mention pop culture or anything that might be fleeting.

GDG: This is a good segue to talking about your creative process. How does a poem start for you—with an image, a line, a narrative, or in some other way?

AC: An academic once described my work as an “over confessional style,” and I think that is about right. People who read my work know that it is personal; somewhere along the line I learned that the more detailed I get, the more universal it becomes. It’s fun to see how my writing is interpreted by readers.

In terms of starting, there is a poem titled “Springtime in the Cemetery” in my second book, I Hope My Voice Doesn’t Skip; the line that sparked this poem came from my father, who had come to Easter dinner covered in dirt because it had been raining and he still went to plant flowers at the graves of his buried loved ones. He said, “It’s not really Easter until you visit your dead.” I thought that was one of the most poignant things I had ever heard—it became the last line of that poem.

My creative process is something I have tried to explain many times, and each time I fail miserably. But maybe most creative people can’t describe how something “hits” them. It always changes. Sometimes it flows out all at once; other times it will just be an idea, or a line, that I then continue to revisit and build upon until I feel like it’s complete. Since I began writing songs, I have begun to think more in rhyme, and voice memos have become my new best friend these last two years.

GDG: What about the titles? Do you first compose a piece and then title it, or do you come up with the title first?

AC: I always title last, if at all. I like when titles give another dimension, or act as an extension, to the piece. For example, I once titled a poem “What I Wanted to Say That Night in the Shower” that I hope added another level of vulnerability to the poem.

GDG: And to follow up on your mention of songwriting: How is your poetry related to music?

AC: All my poetry collections are tied to music: each comes with its own playlists. At the end of each poem is a “currently listening to” song listed. To me, there is no difference between a beautifully written song and a gut-wrenching poem. I listen to certain singers for the same reason some people read my work: to feel something. We are all just storytellers.

I was watching A Star is Born, and Bradley Cooper’s character says, “Look, talent comes everywhere, but having something to say and a way to say it so that people listen to it, that’s a whole other bag.” That rang so true to me, I wanted to clap.

As I have grown in my craft, I have paid closer attention to meter, rhyme, cadence, and form. Not every poem benefits from these musical properties, which is a wonderful thing about the fluidity of poetry, but some really do.

GDG: We are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century. In your opinion, what is the current state of American poetry?

AC: Some critics may feel that we modern writers have mutilated the sanctity of poetry, but I just don’t agree. With any medium, it’s a mixed bag, but there are many authentic, talented people who came up through social media and have helped breathe new life into the art form. And we are selling books. People are reading them, purchasing physical books, reviewing them, taking photos of them, and connecting with people all over the world who love the same thing: reading. It’s a beautiful community.

GDG: What are your plans for the future?

AC: I hope to continue writing. All I want to do is help people work out how they feel, because as crowded as it is, the world can be a very lonely place. I know what’s it like to feel isolated and excluded. I want to continue to use my platform to advocate for families affected by drug addiction. And I want to keep growing, so though it is bittersweet, I am ready to put the mixtape series to rest and enter the next phase of my career.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Magical Monolith: An Interview with Álvaro Enrigue

by Allan Vorda

Álvaro Enrigue was born in Guadalajara, but at an early age, his family moved to Mexico City. His father was a lawyer; his mother, a chemist who was a war refugee from Barcelona. He received a degree in journalism from Universidad Iberoamericano and became editor of various magazines, including Vuelta, which was founded by Octavio Paz. In 1996, when he was twenty-seven, he was awarded the Joaquin Mortiz Prize for his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (Death of an Installation Artist); since then, he has published six novels, three books of short stories, and a volume of essays. Books that have been translated into English include Perpendicular Lives (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), Hypothermia (Deep Vellum, 2013), and Sudden Death (Riverhead, 2016)—the latter a hilarious tale of a tennis match between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo.

Pursuing his penchant for writing about the historical past in the most imaginative of ways, Enrigue’s latest novel is You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, $28); deftly translated by Natasha Wimmer, the book sets the 1519 meeting of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in a captivating dreamscape. We discuss this new book and much more in the interview below.

Allan Vorda: What was it like growing up in Guadalajara, and how has it and Mexico changed since then?

Álvaro Enrigue: I was born in Guadalajara, but I never lived there. When my mother’s pregnancy was arriving to term, my father, who worked as a lawyer for the local government, got a position in the Ministry of Finances of the Federal Government in Mexico City. As soon as I was born, the family moved to the capital. I am the fourth of four children, and Jorge and Maísa had been jumping from city to city in search of better opportunities since they got married, moving each time with a new kid in the car—a pale blue Rambler that kept working until the 1980s. When I was added to that car, they were masters of moving with kids, so I just lived in Guadalajara for the very few days it took them to register me.

That legendary move to Mexico City with four crazy kids was the last one. They never left and they still live there, in a little house in Coyoacán, two blocks away from the Blue House of the Kahlo family and three from Trotsky’s final address. It was a peculiar moment that left a strong mark on me. The ’70s were the apex of the National Revolutionary Party’s rule, its moment of maximum stability. A country that had been mainly rural and commodity-dependent was entering the spiral of industrialization that has made it the productive powerhouse it is now. The enormity of the oil reserves produced a strong middle class in which I grew up, bored as hell: Mexico City was already enormous, but it was also quiet, provincial, and ugly. No rock and roll for Mexico City kids—it was considered a nefarious imperial occupation strategy. Things changed, and from one night to the next morning, on January 1994, when NAFTA was implemented.

AV: What was your education like, and did your journalism experience help you as a writer of fiction and essays?

ÁE: Both of my parents were from small towns of opposite coasts. Maísa is a war refugee who arrived when she was a girl—my grandfather had escaped a few years before from a French concentration camp and arrived in Mexico thanks to the boats of President Cárdenas, whose memory we will always honor. Maísa grew up on the Gulf Coast, in a small city, back then not very different from Macondo. My father is from a small town perched in the sierras that end in the Pacific Coast. It’s named Autlán and may ring a bell for you because it is where Carlos Santana was born. They loved Mexico City—they both had gone to college there—but I think that they were also, and are still, always a bit terrified of it. It’s a city with the size and the population of a republic, after all. They sent us to Catholic schools that had connections with their hometowns.

I was very unhappy in Catholic school—discipline was brutal and the curriculum absurdly demanding for a kid that cared only for baseball and comic books—but as time passed, I ended up getting some benefits from it. Myself, as my brothers and sister, developed a strong work discipline that has kept us afloat economically. And when I arrived at college, I was already familiar with the great books of the humanist tradition, and rereading is always easier and more enriching than reading for the first time. I knew how to use a library and understood that if you don’t write well, you don’t think well. I think that we survived all right because before the first day of school, every year, my father would put us together in the living room and repeat an admonition: “Never, ever, ever, put yourselves in the situation of being alone in a room with a priest.” My father is Catholic, but he is also a realist.

Catholic school also gave another lifelong gift: I developed a love for soccer that has brought me great joy. We were coastal transplants, a baseball family, but the only thing that really mattered in Catholic school in Mexico City was soccer. For the kids, the teachers, and the priests, all was secondary to the coronation of our teams in the local tournaments. I find it the most welcoming of all sports.

Journalism was never as important to me. I never cared that much for immediate reality, but journalism landed me with decent jobs when I finished college. I’m thankful about it, but by then I already knew that I wanted to be a writer and a professor.

AV: Your first novel, La Muerte de un Instalador (Death of an Installation Artist) won the prestigious Joaquin Mortiz Prize for fiction. Will this novel and your other works currently available only in Spanish ever be translated to English?

ÁE: I don’t know, and I don’t care that much. I’m not sure I would like my old books if I read them. Of course, publishing stuff is always exciting, and the little money I make with the novels is always welcome—now it’s me who has four children. The publishing part of my work is done by incredibly generous and smart people. They know their trade and, if someone asks, I will have to sit down and read the work again before saying yes or no.

AV: What does a typical day of writing entail for you?

ÁE: I write in the mornings—first by hand in specific notebooks, always using the same kind of pens. Every day I use a different ink color because, once I begin to pass that first very messy original to the computer, the different colors feel like a compass. And it gives me a sensation of moving forward: a bunch of pages, a bunch of days. In the early stages of a book, I just write for a few hours a day: in a café, in a library, in a park, but never at home. Most of my last three novels and the essay book I’m working on now have been written between the New York Public Library and the legendary Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Ave. I tend to be the stay-at-home parent even when I go twice a week to the university, so my professional days are short and my afternoons with the children are splendid. When I move on to the word processor, I can keep working for an undefined number of hours—the real literary writing happens for me in that stage. But again, it is never eight or ten hours; there are children, errands, cooking; splendid afternoons.

AV: How does the reception of your writing differ between Spanish speaking countries and the U.S.?

ÁE: Reception is a mystery for me. There is the fuss about a book when it comes out, which in the U.S. tends to be enormous because the relations between the publishing industry and the media interested in literature are more intense than in any other place. That’s always impressive for me: I am still the boy from Coyoacán, and it was not in my horoscope that I would be sitting down signing books in a bookstore in San Francisco or Edinburgh, or that a New York Times critic would pay any attention to my work. Then again, twice a year, there are the usually depressing sales reports—except in Germany, which is another mystery. I never sell enough books to pay for the timid advances I get for my manuscripts. Critics in all languages tend to be very generous with my work—something I am not. I feel like an impostor, but I suppose everybody does.

Also: who reads and why? If I knew, I would be a millionaire. And what I find truly moving about my job is the opposite of fame. Once in Jaipur, India, I was having a tea and a cigarette on a beautiful terrace in the fantastic Jaipur Book Festival. I had just gone through the usual and very humiliating experience of not signing many books while next to my table were some literary superstars with enormous lines of people. A young man from Kerala came to the terrace with a pile of my books—in Spanish!—to be signed. He had made an enormous trip from South India so he could have those volumes dedicated. That morning justifies me as a writer: No matter what goes well or wrong in my career, I reached that person.

AV: Hernán Cortés, Moctezuma, and Cuauhtemoc are some of the characters who populate Sudden Death. Were you already thinking then about using them as major characters for You Dreamed of Empires?

ÁE: No, I was not even thinking about using them in Sudden Death when they jumped into that book. I discovered late in the writing process of the novel that the patron of Francisco de Quevedo was married to one of Hernan Cortés’s grandchildren. As I was working with a fellowship of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, I could ask for any book I wanted and it would materialize on my desk the next day. I ended up engulfed in the story of the heirs of Cortés and they naturally moved into the story; they were the Mexican connection that the novel was missing.

AV: What research did you do to write You Dreamed of Empires?

ÁE: The number of books I have read about Tenochtitlan and its fall is somewhere between ridiculous and oppressive. It’s a lifelong obsession. My parents, small-town folks living in the big city, took us out of town every weekend to have some fresh air. If you live in Mexico City, some of the day trips you can take include visits to archeological sites—there are hundreds of antique complexes you can see without ever repeating.

In 1979, it was discovered that the old citadel of the Temples of Tenochtitlan was still there, and it was excavated and open to the public. I went for the first time with my school, and it just blew my mind. We were the Rome of the Americas, and we were not even aware of it! From then, I have spent my whole life reading about it, never thinking that I would ever have a use for all that knowledge. Little did I know I’d be writing a small critical book about literary production in the years of the transition between Tenochtitlan and Mexico City. I also teach a class about it.

AV: What is your opinion of Moctezuma and Cortés as leaders in real life?

ÁE: Cortés was smarter and more sophisticated than in the novel. And crueler, if you can believe it—he was an infamous, evil man. He was also a very short guy. I took out all the references to his stature in the book because it is not my job to body-shame anyone.

We don’t know much of Moctezuma, except for his physical appearance, described by various Spanish soldiers: strong, tall, with a straight nose and, strangely, curly hair. He was in an enormous crisis in 1519. After expanding the empire for a decade as the most successful tlatoani of Tenochtitlan ever, he made one bad decision after another, including not killing the invaders immediately, which alienated his allies. When Cortés arrived, he knew that the Triple Alliance that controlled the empire from central Mexico was crumbling and used that information to his advantage.

AV: Did Moctezuma in real life consume magic mushrooms like he does in your novel? If so, did this contribute to his becoming an ineffectual leader?

ÁE: Yes and no. Yes, because the religious practices in Mesoamerica involved the consumption of hallucinogenic substances, and before being emperor, Moctezuma was the supreme priest of Tezcatlipoca. But the relationship to drugs of the indigenous people of central Mexico is completely different than ours. It’s heavily ritualized and responds to specific disciplines. It’s not something you do for recreation, or to tolerate the difficulties of life, but to access a different stage in your relationship with the material world.

AV: You depict Moctezuma marrying his sister Atotoztli—did this happen in reality? When Moctezuma was captured it was said he had one hundred children and that fifty of his wives and concubines were pregnant. What do you know about Moctezuma’s wives and children?

ÁE: Atotoztli and Jazmín Caldera, whom I see as the main characters of the novel, are completely fictitious. Moctezuma had many concubines, and they all were princesses from the other altepeme—altepetl in the plural—the equivalent of a nationality in old Mexico, something between a republic and a city-state. He had a first wife who ruled next to him, survived him, became an important entrepreneur and political figure in New Spain, and whose children were the royal family.

After the fall of Tenochtitlan all the children were taken to Spain and their descendants became part of the Spanish nobility. Some of Moctezuma’s progeny returned to Mexico where they continue to be a prominent family. For example, the current Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. is a Moctezuma, as is the most important living archeologist of Mexico, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. When I was a teenager, I was in love with one Moctezuma girl, but she didn’t have any interest in me. There is a legend I like about a Mexican empress who ruled alone just before Moctezuma’s father was named emperor. The legend says that she was named Atototztli. I took her name because I love how it sounds.

AV: You also describe how Caldera puts on a breechcloth—how did you research this topic?

ÁE: A big part of the novel was written during the pandemic, so we had left New York and were living in a tiny house that the Argentinian poet Lilia Zamborain lent to us on Shelter Island. On one of those really slow rainy mornings of the Long Island summer, I found a set of instructions to wear a breechcloth on a fashion site online. Bored as I was, I practiced with the bedsheets. I was very unsuccessful. It was impossible to keep it on for more than a few minutes, but it was not a total loss of time. My appearance was so hilarious that I provided my wife with tons of ammunition to laugh about me for days. It was a period when having something to laugh about was priceless.

AV: When Caldera shaves and cuts his hair, has he already made up his mind to stay in Tenochtitlan. By changing his appearance to assimilate, does he become a different person with a different identity?

ÁE: That’s for the reader to decide, but he sure tries. Caldera is a one hundred per cent imaginary character, but that doesn’t mean that he is an impossible character in the period. Cultural adaptability and open sexualities were more common in the 16th century than in the 19th or early 20th centuries. Many forms of kinship, extinct today, demanded a fluidity unthinkable in modern life: Only very rich and noble people had private beds, most jobs demanded the separation of families for long periods, and the known world was expanding like crazy. Thus, adaptation to change was an essential tool for survival. The historical Gerónimo de Aguilar, Cortés’s translator to Mayan, decided to go European again, as did Álvar Cabeza de Vaca, both after a long period living as Indigenous Americans, but many others never returned and even fought against the occupation of the continent. Gonzalo Guerrero, who was a friend of Aguilar, stayed with his Maya wife and children and died defending his adoptive land dressed up as a Maya warrior.

AV: Your work is highly metafictional; you begin one chapter, “If Jazmín Caldera had existed, if he had crossed the threshold into the throne room of Axayacatl’s Old Houses at almost five in the afternoon on November 8, 1519, he would have seen before him . . .” What went into your decision to inform the reader Caldera is a fictional character in what some might call a historical novel, and what was your main reason for creating him?

ÁE: I don’t think that I write historical fiction at all. In this novel I worked with historical archives to generate literary fiction in the tradition of Latin American literature of the fantastic: Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Juan José Arreola, just to name the best of them. And I don’t believe in the need to suspend credibility to read or write fiction—I think that is a 19th-century superstition. Caldera’s function in the novel is to provide a more modern point of view for contrast. He understands that the cost of the imperial expansion of Spain was too high: the original population of the Americas was reduced to ten percent during the first 100 years of occupation. It’s the worst war crime ever, after the annihilation of the Neanderthals, I suppose.

AV: You write: “Jazmín Caldera, who has to be a learned conquistador—like Hernán Cortés or, to a lesser extent, the surgeon Bernal Díaz—for this novel to work, would have admired the geometric design of the citadel.” This authorial intrusion is very interesting. Can you comment on why you used this technique?

ÁE: Contemporary architects leave a register of how buildings were originally when they remodel them. I think that writers can leave registers of how they wrote in the final version of their works.

AV: The paragraph begun with the sentence in the previous question continues as follows:

He would have seen it not as a proliferation of towers, which was how his European contemporaries saw it, but as an emblem or a contemplative vision—which is what it was. From the weighty base to the temples built on top, the structures were architectural variations on descent and ascent; on the passage from the earthly to the aerial. They were like stairways, up which mass was shed on the way to the plane of the gods. Only priests and their sacrificial victims went up these stairs, and to ascend the temple was to lose all earthliness until abandoning oneself in the paroxysm of death. When bodies rolled down the steps it was without their hearts, deadweight.

Juxtaposing beauty and death, this beautiful paragraph serves not only as an example of the quality of your writing, but as a metaphor for the Aztec empire. Why were the Aztecs so brilliant in so many ways (architecture, astrology, etc.), but also immersed in consumptive sacrificial bloodshed?

ÁE: Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, who directed the excavations of the Main Temple of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City, wrote a beautiful essay about that subject titled Muerte a filo de obsidiana—sadly, it has not been entirely translated into English. As gory as it feels to us, human sacrifice made sense for many cultures—not only in the Americas. The Mexica truly believed that dying on the sacrificial stone was a way of giving life to the world. It was a desirable form of death because it produced the best possible afterlife, and the moment of death itself was softened by ritual and the consumption of hallucinogenics. To die on the battleground in England or Spain was much more horrid, painful, and stupid.

Human sacrifice was a system meant to contend with the anarchy and miseries of war. Battles occurred only in the periods of the year in which the fields didn’t need to be attended and in places where the civil population would not be hurt. There were lunch breaks and resting time during the battles, and the idea was to capture other warriors for sacrifice, not to exterminate the whole population of the enemy city. The spectacle of a sacrifice was horrid for sure, but it limited the casualties of war to the professionals; no matter how many skulls they end up finding in the Huei Tzompantli of Tenochtitlan—the temple in which the heads of the sacrificed were displayed—they will always be fewer than the ones dispersed on the battlefield after any European mid-size conflict.

AV: Just as you contrast Caldera’s perceptions with “how his European contemporaries saw it,” it seems your writing has an anti-European slant. Does this reflect strong feelings among contemporary Mexicans?

ÁE: The occupation of the Americas is still a big issue in Mexico that generates enormous polemics. And what I stated in Sudden Death is real: No one ever visits the tomb of Hernán Cortés in the Iglesia de Jesús in Mexico City—not even by mistake. There are no statues of him or streets with his name. I find that much more reasonable—and less sad—than the way in which Americans have embraced their invaders with no questions, as if to be a second-class European was a desirable destiny. That is disturbingly disrespectful of the wonderful, enormous, rich, and deliriously diverse rock that is our continent.

AV: Spanish conquistadores destroyed the tzompantli (skull racks) five hundred years ago, which is estimated to have been home to forty thousand skulls. You describe the tzompantli as a “formal reflection on the foundations of any system of religious thought: We don’t last.” What a remarkably cogent proposition—can you elaborate?

ÁE: Not really: We don’t last and that’s the problem. It’s an essential flaw in our design.

AV: In 2015, archaeologists uncovered a new section of the Tower of Human Skulls; it now has over six hundred. What can you tell us about the tzompantli? Have you seen it?

ÁE: I saw it. Raul Barrera, the chief archeologist of Mexico City, took me there in what could be the best day of my life. I had been trying to reach him for a long time without success and in the end I sent him, hopelessly, the manuscript I was finishing correcting. He answered on August 11, 2021—the date is unforgettable because it was two days ahead of the 500th anniversary of the Fall of Tenochtitlan. He said: “I read your novel; you have some of the buildings placed wrongly. The politicians are not letting us work with the damned commemoration of the five centuries. Why don’t you come to Tenochtitlan tomorrow?” It was as if he had a pass for a time travel train.

And he does. Under all those beautiful baroque palaces of downtown Mexico City, there is now a system of iron pillars, and they are slowly bringing out the city of Moctezuma in the underground: the buildings, the streets, the temples. It’s so impressive. I think that some of the underground halls are open for visitors now.

Barrera’s main contribution to Mexica Archeology is the discovery of the tzompantli, which they will be excavating for a long time. When we got there, we were standing on the balcony from which the tourists would see it. He got excited talking about it and said: “That’s what we will let the people see, but come with me,” and we jumped into an actual street of Tenochtitlan. “Take off your shoes,” he said, “and follow me.” I walked through a street of Tenochtitlan, one that may have supported the golden sandals of Moctezuma, and I got to stand in front of the columns of skulls that you can see only in pictures. Of course, I had to rewrite many chunks of the novel; again, we don’t last.

AV: Switching gears, you convey a fable of sorts about the ant when Tlilpotonqui (the mayor of Tenochtitlan) is talking to Cuauhtemoc (the general) and Atotoxtli (the sister-wife-princess of Moctezuma) about who made a call to arms without his knowing about it; you write : “The general and the princess shrugged, but their manner somehow suggested it wasn’t a display of ignorance, but a plea for him to understand something unsaid.” Is the ant a metaphor for something unsaid?

ÁE: The story of the ant characterizes Tlilpotonqui as a person who doesn’t give a shit about the mythology taught at school. We tend to think about people from the past as fanatic believers in silly stories. It’s one of the many ways of infantilizing Indigenous American civilizations: They believed in weird gods, so they were providentially defeated by Europeans who believed in the One True God. But of course, mythology is a literary form, a series of narrations whose function is to give a common background to a society: I can read and reread with enormous pleasure the Gospels or the Book of Job and understand their social importance and wisdom without believing in their divine origin. Tlilpotonqui, however, doesn’t even remember the story of the ant; for him it is just a children’s story. By the end of the book, Moctezuma (the better strategist, no matter how distracted, depressed, or high he is) teaches him an important lesson: it doesn’t matter if the ant story is real or not, what matters is that its power as a metaphor is enormous.

AV: Your depiction of the Nahua translator Malinalli is riveting. Cortés makes Malinalli live with him as his concubine so he can have her at the ready to translate, yet while she can understand what the conquistadors are saying, she translates only what is in her best interest. A fascinating and tough woman, she is even able to keep her dislike of the uncouth Cortés to herself. Can you elaborate on her as both a fictional and historical figure? I have read elsewhere that some Mexicans consider her a traitor.

ÁE: The interpretation of the figure of Malinalli as a traitor has lost a lot of gas in the last forty or fifty years, thanks primarily to female historians—some working in Mexico, others in universities elsewhere. When Malinalli was forcibly united to the party of Hernán Cortés, there was not such a thing as them and us. There was not even a word for “Indigenous people”; they were all in the Cem-Anahuac—the continent, the world—and that was it. It was the Europeans who began to see themselves as different than the people of the Americas, and that happened decades later. The Nahuatl word for local people, which means “us from here,” didn’t appear until the end of the 16th century.

And Malinalli, of course, could not know that these strange pink guys with guns and horses would eventually produce the worst genocide in history; they were just a small band of eccentrics in the enormous tapestry of a very populated world. She was a destitute princess who saw a chance to regain her power, and she did, not knowing the cost the people of the Americas would pay for it.

It’s important to state that I am not saying anything new. I worked with the ideas and research of many others to try to recreate this enigmatic character that has been fascinating and elusive to me for years.

AV: A hallmark of your literary style is that you frequently have multiple characters digressing in alternating paragraphs. Are there difficulties in trying to write like this?

ÁE: You have no idea how much I work to produce simultaneity in my books without using the word “meanwhile.” I don’t use it because the reality doesn’t work that way. There are no meanwhiles in life; there is only this simultaneous action that we try to capture with language. It’s like quotation marks, which I see as a lazy solution that ruins the sensation of fluidity that conversations have. They are painfully artificial.

AV: In your telling, Moctezuma could have killed Cortés and his men, but he wanted to learn more about the animals he calls “deer without antlers”—horses. If this is true, why didn’t Moctezuma attack when he could have?

ÁE: It’s the idea that sustains the novel, but I don’t know. The nations from the Americas that adopted the horse survived well into the 19th century. In You Dream of Empires, the historical mystery of why Moctezuma let the Spaniards get all the way to the city—and form associations with groups that resented the rule of Tenochtitlan—is addressed by the fact that he sees the military potential of horses (which admittedly makes it even less of a good idea to let them into the city). But that thing of the “deer without antlers,” which Moctezuma says with irony in the novel, is a lie designed to portray the people of the Americas as children. When the Spaniards arrived at what is today Veracruz, horses had been already killed and their dead bodies studied by Mayas and Totonacs, so the Mexica knew perfectly well that they were a different animal. The Nahua word “cahuayo,” which comes from the Spanish “caballo,” was used all the way up to the Spanish-Mexican war; it was the Spaniards who later spoke about the antlers thing, never the indigenous people.

AV: Horses were later critical for Cortés in the Battle of Otumba. This is a battle most U.S. citizens do not know about, but didn’t it change the course of Mexican history?

ÁE: It changed the course of world history. It changed even the weather; so many people were killed or died of the plague in the Americas after the battle of Otumba that the planet became considerably colder.

You know the story, but I will retell it for your readers. After an eight-month stay in Mexico City in which no one really knows what happened, the Castilians are defeated, humiliated, and expelled from Tenochtitlan. They are not chased because the new emperor must be crowned. Cortés wanders in the fields at the northeast of Mexico City, near Teotihuacan, and sends messengers to the Tlaxcaltecas asking for the restoration of their past alliance. While he is waiting for an answer, an army that is small but more than enough to terminate his adventure finds him outside the town of Otumba. The Mexica troops are led by the cihuacóatl of Tenochtitlan—the mayor, more or less—because the new emperor was not feeling well. As Cortés and his troops had been living in Mexico City, they knew the mayor. When they see him on top of a hill directing the combat, they run to chase him with horses and kill him. The Mexica leave the field to reorganize, and they send a messenger to the capital with the bad news of the killing of the cihuacóatl. The messenger returns with even worse news—the emperor has died from smallpox. The empire is headless: It is without both the tlatoani and his second in command. The warriors disband and the Castilians can now make it to Tlaxcala. There is a chance to take the previously undefeated Tenochtitlan—and they take it.

The fall of the capital of the Mexica implies the beginning of colonization as we know it, but it also implies the beginning of a massive movement of bodies from one continent to the other. African slaves worked for longer hours than indigenous ones; they didn’t have a territory to defend once they were transplanted, so revolts were less frequent; and, just like the Europeans, they were able to resist smallpox.

And the Fall of Tenochtitlan finally opens for Europe a fast and safe way to Asia through the China Galleon, which connects Acapulco and Manila. The world finally becomes round, and the economy, global.

AV: What has to be the most mind-blowing aspect of the novel occurs when Moctezuma is high on mushrooms as he enters the temple of Huitzilopochtli, where human sacrifices occur:

I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can’t imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of the great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex’s “Monolith.”
The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the music and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan. He smiled. That’s good stuff, he said. Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat. It’s nothing I’ve ever heard before, he replied, but I like it.

And then we get this freaky description where the priest “carefully lifted the clay basin in which the blood of doves sacrificed that afternoon had yet to coagulate—their decapitated bodies sensually dancing to ‘Monolith.’”

To transition like this from 1519 to 1971 is almost like having the reader on mushrooms—it’s totally unexpected. Why and how did you create this amazing passage?

ÁE: I love how you describe it. The novel has the structure of a Greek comedy, with unity of time, place, and action, four acts, and everything. But it should also feel like an afternoon mushroom trip—the real time you take reading the novel is more or less the same time in which the story develops.

I was very careful in trying to reproduce the way reality gets amplified when a natural, gentle hallucinogenic hits your brain. It’s the same world of everyday, but there are little disruptions, curious and intense, that eventually produce a world that looks wider but nevertheless sustains to the logic of life.

About the intrusion of Marc Bolan in the novel, I don’t know—the writing process is way coarser than I would like to accept. I was writing the visit to the temple and, to take a rest—I suffer from back pains that define everything in my life—I played the A side of T-Rex’s Electric Warrior. It’s something I do: listen to a few songs walking around to make sure I don’t stay in the same posture for too long. When “Monolith” began, it was obvious to me that there were connections between the invincible glam of Marc Bolan and the figure of Moctezuma: the feathers, the exposed shaved chest, the wavy hair. And the song is named “Monolith,” which echoes the “Sun Monolith” (the most famous Mexica piece of art) and the monolith that brings war to the world in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It felt fun so I just dropped the song in the scene, and it worked all right.

AV: It seems another song that would fit into this passage would be Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” which was banned in Spain. The song is so slow that it would fit seamlessly with a stoned-out Moctezuma, plus Young’s lyric “I still can’t remember when / Or how I lost my way” would seem to fit the mental state of Moctezuma as you depict him for most of the novel, at least until the end, as one who has lost contact with reality.

ÁE: Novels belong to their readers and not their authors, but I would dispute the idea of Moctezuma losing contact with reality in the novel. It may look like that as you see him getting higher and higher as the story progresses, but at the end you see that he always knew exactly what was going on, that he was high because he was reaching out to his gods in order to have their complicity to do what he had to do—as I wish he had done in reality.

AV: This colludes with yet another mind-blowing passage later in the same paragraph: “It took Moctezuma a while to bring it into focus because it came from very far away. When it was finally sharp and clear, it made no sense to him: It was me writing this novel in a yard on Shelter Island. Uh, he said, strange, and he was seized by laughter.” This mixing of fiction and reality via authorial intrusion is a technique that postmodern writers such as John Fowles have used to great effect. What are your thoughts about authorial intrusion?

ÁE: Well, it’s a tradition older than that, as old as novels themselves: The first character you see in Don Quixote is not don Quixote, but Cervantes finishing Don Quixote at his desk. Now, the reference is more focused in You Dream of Empires; it’s a timid tribute to Jorge Luis Borges that is there to make clear that the novel is not historical, but fantastic. When the main character of “The Aleph,” who is named Borges, finally gets to see the miraculous spot that contains everything in a simultaneous way, he sees the whole world and its whole history, including himself looking at the aleph and the reader who is reading about him looking at it. A lovely meditation: All literature is in everything we write, good or bad.

AV: The novel has a surprising end with a revisionist twist, one that makes me wonder what would have happened if Cortés had lost the Battle of Otumba and there hadn’t been a New Spain. Can you envision how different Mexico would be today if Cortés had not conquered Mexico? And what are the positive and negative aspects of the Spanish conquest of Mexico?

ÁE: The Americas were not prepared for the invasion, and the plague was already there when the battle of Otumba happened. King Carlos would soon see the treasure that Hernán Cortés had already shipped to Europe, so a second, or third, or fifth wave of Spaniards would have eventually taken over Tenochtitlan. By the end of the 16th century there were more Africans than indigenous people in Mexico City because of the devastation left by smallpox.

In history, the worst ones tend to win, no matter what national foundational myths are later invented. Just look around and see what the British and their descendants did to this beautiful country—it’s an environmental, political, and aesthetic catastrophe. We have our pathetic middle-class goodies, but we live in a horrendous, unbearably unequal world. And the same can be said about all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But, if things had been different, maybe the wondrous floating city of Tenochtitlan would have stayed as it was, because the Mexica, weakened by years of suffering the plague of smallpox, would have not been able to resist as long as they did—until the last warrior was killed and the last building destroyed. Just remember what Bernal Díaz del Castillo said about the first time they saw it from the highlands. The lake, the cities around it, with their fortifications and temples full of color, and, in the center, Tenochtitlan floating, an intensely green, self-sustainable city, so vast and so delirious that they could not compare it with towns they had seen, but only with ones they had read about in chivalric romances like Amadis de Gaula.

AV: Thank you for answering these questions. Your writing is magical.

ÁE: And your questions brilliant. Thank you.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Never-Belonging in Tandem with Light: An Interview with Tiffany Troy

by Rose DeMaris

To open Dominus (BlazeVOX, $18), Tiffany Troy’s full-length poetry debut, is to enter a world that is both recognizably earthly and potently mythic. Here, the epic, eternal essences hidden within the most prosaic acts (consuming ketchup), scenes (arguing in a courthouse), and relationships (familial or otherwise) are revealed through Troy’s alchemical mix of voice and form. The book’s speaker is an honest, sharp, and subjugated “I.” Sometimes she is “Baby Tiger” and sometimes a “tamed wolf without fangs” beaten down by the cruelties of capitalism, corporate America, and paternal masters both human and divine. An overworked attorney, she’s the daughter of an immigrant father and a faraway mother who, despite feeling at times like “every girl who ever thought / maybe she had wronged the world by existing,” retains a capacity for incisive observation, keen feeling, and adaptive mutability fueled in part by “life-affirming brekkie” and steaming cups of Earl Grey. Troy’s poems never hover delicately above despair; indeed, there is a deep and wondrous aesthetic refreshment in their refusal to do so. And it is precisely “through the thick residue of the window pane” that her lines reveal light, and become it. Baby Tiger is akin to one of autumn’s “frowning sunflowers burdened / by the weight of their golden mane” who “cannot help / but peek up and beam.”

In addition to Dominus, Troy is the author of the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press) and has published her poetry, criticism, and translations (primarily of Latin American women writers) in numerous journals and anthologies. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, an Associate Editor at Tupelo Press, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.

Rose DeMaris: The sense of place is so vivid in this book. “Ilium” is a place name used in Dominus, but it includes a broad spectrum of settings, from Flushing, Queens and Burger King to apartment interiors and subway trains. It’s a kaleidoscopic world you’ve built with words. How does your own relationship to “place”—whatever that might mean to you—and to New York City inform this work?

Tiffany Troy: Dominus’s sense of place derives from the exuberance of a speaker in a city that feels new and full of possibilities—it is impossible for her not to geek out at the tiramisu at Columbia University or the double whopper at Burger King, chase after the mallard ducks at Flushing Meadows Corona Kissena Park, and take in the metallic sheen of the Gowanus Canal and the glass bottles at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn. Kenneth Koch begins “To My Twenties” with the lines “How lucky that I ran into you / When everything was possible,” and Dominus is informed by that bubbly sense alongside the neoclassical architecture of the courthouses, which are solemn and meant to establish awe. This is the setting where the characters grow up, a world where the corporate and professional coexist with the natural.

In thinking about Ilium as “place,” Dara Barrois-Dixon recently sent me “Kurt Vonnegut’s House Is Not Haunted” by Sophie Kemp in The Paris Review. In this essay, Kemp writes:

Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be . . . In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

What a coincidence, right? As with Vonnegut, my Ilium is drawn from the rich cultural heritage of a town I’m familiar with, and it focuses on its identity as an ethnic enclave from the insider’s point of view.

Place is critical to the development of some characters who are “out of place,” being immigrants or children of immigrants. Transportation literally moves people to and from jobs—the seven train runs from Flushing-Main Street to Times Square-42nd Street, for example, while also reinforcing the hierarchy of the boroughs: Manhattan is glamorous with its skyscrapers and Museum Mile brownstones, Long Island with the Hamptons and foliage at Oyster Bay.

Chun Wai Chun, principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, recently shared a reel that began: “You think all the Chinese boys run laundries and are watchmen when they grow up? We want to be policemen, firemen, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, and sellers.” I identify with that statement and its double-bind maze of what we colloquially call the “American dream.” As someone who grew up in Queens and traveled to school in Manhattan, I am interested in writing Dominus to capture that sense of never-belonging in tandem with light.

RD: Ilium is also, of course, another name for the ancient city of Troy, a real place that is also part of Greek mythology. And there is a mythical quality to the way you work with names. The speaker is sometimes named Baby Tiger, or Shepherd Girl, or Little Maria (she identifies with Saint Maria Goretti). There’s also Master, the father figure to whom the book’s Latin title refers, and Grandpa Pindar, Friend, The Nurse, The Doctor, etc. Sometimes you use familiar terms like papa, mama, brother, grandma. And sometimes you use people’s actual names, like Ilya Kaminsky, Monica Youn, or Machiavelli. How does naming or not naming people work to propel your writing? Do the pseudonyms free you up a bit by providing some distance or a playful quality?

TT: The speaker’s various alter egos (“Baby Tiger,” etc.) are popular with readers, and the diminutives (“baby,” “girl,” “little”) in the two-word nicknames aid in creating a sense of endearment, or a proximity with that which is at once familial and youthful. There is something epic or heroic about the speaker figuring her way out of the Wonderland of the court, hospital, church, or corporation, where the bureaucracy has adopted its own lingo that often conceals what is truly meant. Characters with titles as names, like Friend, Doctor, or Nurse, explore the perils of taking that abstraction in corporate-speak too far because in treating people as statistics or resources, the characters literally become their title or position. Then Grandpa, Mama, Papa, and God, are blood or adoptive family that ground the speaker. They are wiser than the speaker in that they have experienced the world which has both “made” them and “maimed” them in some way, to borrow Margo Jefferson’s term for it from Constructing a Nervous System. Mary Jo Bang calls Maria Goretti a kind of “icon of pure goodness that acts as talisman,” and I feel Grandpa Pindar and Mama especially fulfill that role; their kindness is imbued with their personalities as the speaker’s fictional family pays homage to their role in the literary pantheon.

The specific names referenced stem from that same aesthetic consideration of the New York School, where names are the “violets that cannot be pinned upon the crucible.” Naming people there, like naming mythological characters, creates layering in this fictional city of Ilium where the imaginary (Procne), the historical (Maria Goretti), and the present (Monica Youn, say) can coexist.

RD: The lines in which Monica Youn features are memorable and moving, as she appears as a source of comfort: “what must I do to find my Goldacre / besides downing a Hostess box. / But I have waved goodbye to my sweet tooth, and // all I feel is my body, parts of it, like my thumb / in my mouth / my fingers pulling up a video of Monica Youn, / my wet ears on my phone, as I rock myself with shut eyes.”

This leads to another facet of your book I’m curious about: its abundance of food. From clam chowder and bagels to sausages and diced fruit, the food in these poems has many dimensions: it’s a source of nurturing (“Master feeds me at the red lights”) and of relief from pain: “each day I come up with an excuse for my sugar larks and plunges.” A Twinkie is “a Key to our repressed psyche,” and eating can be a means of psychological survival—”I swallowed to not be swallowed”—or an expression of ire: “I gobbled down two sweet clementines aware that my rage // was bubbling up.” Sometimes it’s tied to moments of humor: “Baby Tiger’s Adversary took a long nap from food coma after lunch.” Food is a link to culture: fish is “laced with emerald /. . . in fortuitously red plastic bags” at the Chinese market, while ketchup is a “symbol of solid American pragmatism.” And it’s a link to “memories of downing defrosted frozen fruits, their sugar already gone” and to a longed-for mother “frying rice with a smile” on “iPad wallpaper.” Food is sustenance received—”warm hot Swiss Miss”—or eked out, to the detriment of the giver: “I squeeze my breasts for milk / before collapsing from fatigue.” Even the speaker and her father are described as the “tongue” and “teeth” who must work together; the relationship at the very heart of the book is like a mouth. Can you talk about why all these edibles and moments of eating found their way into your poems—is there a relationship between consuming, digesting, releasing, and poetry?

TT: I have been a huge fan of Monica Youn’s poetry for close to a decade, and she has been a role model of what Asian American poetry and law poetry (or poetry by lawyers) can look like. I of course owe the idea of the “Twinkie” to her Library of Congress reading of “Goldacre” from Blackacre.

Food is tremendously important in Dominus because it is the nexus between the thinking speaker and the speaker as animal. The need to eat literally stops work. Baby Tiger, Little Maria, and Shepherd Girl are united in their love of chocolate and fast food. In one way, that makes perfect sense, because somehow these characters believe that by consuming the American happy meal they might attain a family that has been broken apart and shattered all over the world. So the Swiss Miss is a red herring. The life-affirming “brekkie” (a Timothy Donnelly import) sings the tune of a pathetic heroic where so much hope is not staked upon people but on sausage with eggs from Pop’s Diner, for example.

Food is a metaphor of the man-eat-man world of Ilium, where you are sized up the way a hunter might size up a prey. In Dominus, the speaker is hungry most of the time, and we see the speaker escape it with the plump, “sweet clementines” or the “fish laced with emerald.” Food can also be sinister: the twinkie (which I mentioned earlier) as “a Key to our repressed psyche” is a symbol of a kind of deracination that leads to the question of “just who am I”? The self also appears as food in “Squirrel on an October Late Afternoon”; “the swell of my nipples, that yellow muck / of bacteria, the crust of my skin crispy, // my garment tied with rope girding / an equator of red.” Here, at the “height of my suffering” is the body under attack by the body itself, in conjunction with drugs that are ingested, and their aftereffects.

There is a movement both across the collection and within poems in thinking about food as a vehicle of thought. If you think of the first section, “When Ilium Burns,” as the act of consuming and digesting, the last section, “Plus Ultra,” would be a release. As Juan Mobili observes, there is a panning out concurrent with the maturation of the speaker. You see that between the “Hymn of My Fair Lady Boss,” where the speaker must shed the blood of the lady boss to prove her valor. By the last poem, the “life-affirming brekkie” is no longer about “chomp[ing] them down” with ruthlessness. What is left is instead a desire to repay “kindness with kindness.”

RD: Yes, the book’s structure of sections takes readers on a journey as the speaker changes. Regarding the structure of the poems themselves, you write in a dynamic variety of forms, some of which are strict. “A Twinkie’s Love Song,” for example, is a ballad in iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme, and “Metamorphosis as Cassandra is a rhyming sonnet with lines of ten-ish syllables. What’s your process for determining a poem’s form? Do the words come first, or does a form invite language?

TT: It depends. By that, I mean, forms in poems like “Sea Floor” start off with an image, such as that of the “Heineken and cigarettes the / hakuna matata of loss.” The speaker was devastated by that sight. From that sight, I built it up with the imagery of deflation. The form, which takes place in conjunction with the breakdown of language, draws heavily from Myung Mi Kim’s Underflag (Kelsey Street Press, 2008) and Penury (Omnidawn, 2009) in thinking of how the elements of speech can be repeated across, up-down, and diagonally. What results is a map of the “Sea Floor,” of what can be found by the speaker’s mind which “wanders to the sweet thread named surrender.”

Other poems take up a form that mirrors the briskness and breadth of the modern-day cityscape, like the kaleidoscopic quality you mentioned earlier. I actually created collages of the photographs I took through the seasons, of The Thinker, Alma Mater, Maria Goretti, the sun, the clouds, and the trees. Katie Marya says that “order is a performance” that “feels good because we can’t perform like that in our actual lives,” and I found that the modified quatrain form with the second and fourth line indented, after poems by Timothy Donnelly’s Chariot, helped me capture that sense of wanting to see the “sublime before the sea stirs.”

The origami frogs and the metallic flamingo generate this breadth and briskness that contrast, for instance, with the more austere poems in couplets like “Holy Saturday” where the crisis of the self in the perception of: “The clutter around me shows how the cockroach/ to be exterminated is me” defines how much can be said (in line length) and what can be said (as time is running out). I think I was interested in dressing down (as opposed to up), in contrast with the iconographic Holy Saturday or the idea of specializing in a specific field.

Sometimes, as poets do, I become obsessed over a combination of things. “A Twinkie’s Love Song” is essentially Twinkie meets the albatross in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I decided to run with it, and the ballad form is of course riveting, and gallops forward stridently, and so there the language is formal, and more playful in the sense that it draws from an eclectic mix of fables and histories to answer the question: Just “who am I, sheared of my golden mane?” Here, of course, food takes on the sinister quality, as a name for Asian-Americans who are yellow on the outside and white on the inside, having been fully assimilated into “American” society.

There is a limit, of course, to the information that poetry can contain. Sometimes the speaker’s excitement in going to Court overflows the poetic line and becomes prose, as in “Elegy to the Foolish and Undignified.” Poems that take a defined form are more time-consuming to write, but at the same time, poems without a defined form are harder to revise, in the sense that the form has to feel true to the emotion, diction, and direction that the poem is going. That’s why “Train” underwent several iterations and drafts before finding its final form.

RD: Though there is a limit to the information a poem can contain, your work illustrates that there is no limit to how much it can transmit in spite (or because) of the constraints created by the line and by form. How did you find poetry? What is next for you as a poet?

TT: I love that idea, because the formal constraint placed on language is often quite freeing and can create neoformalist poetry of great merit, even if at times poets like Aimé Césaire feel the need to topple that. He writes, in Return of the Native Land, that “you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Do you see what I mean? Poetry was for me the only way to break the stranglehold that accepted French form held on me.” This is in line with an Audre Lorde quotation: “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.” I feel that’s so true, and I suppose I often worry that my poetry isn’t too conformist.

Many English classes led me towards poetry—I read Paul Laurence Dunbar in middle school, Dante and Nabokov in high school, and so on—but I did not study poetry in earnest until my sophomore year in college. I took a class taught by Joseph Fasano called “The Crisis of the ‘I,’” which opened my eyes to just what stories poetry can tell. My favorite poem is Larry Levis’s “The Widening Spell of Leaves.” I admire how the poet looks at “that spell, that stillness,” through his encounter in a foreign country to reflect upon his personal history, political history, and the history of difference in the United States. Then there is the idea of the self as persona, as in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992).

I realized pretty quickly that I was happiest among poets. Though I was not as learned or as good as my peers, I enjoyed writing tremendously. In college, I was lucky enough to study with Deborah Paredez, Dorothea Lasky, and Alex Dimitrov, and they taught me how to think through form and the poetic voice, and how it’s okay to love the here and now through art. Through them, I was introduced to poets like Myung Mi Kim, Carolyn Forché, and Kenneth Koch, and they still shape my poems to this day. I am grateful for poetry and its blessings.

As with most things, to quote the wooden board at my workplace, “There is only one way to success—it’s called hard work.” The truly dazzling host Malvika Jolly recently asked me at a Powerhouse Arena event organized by India Lena González what my dream was, as I approach my thirties. I said something asinine like winning the lottery, but ultimately what I most want to accomplish as I grow from student to teacher and gain recognition for my creative output is to be there for others as my teachers have been there for me. While I’m not there yet, I am beginning to see the labor in editing as work that sharpens my appreciation for the beauty of life I am not privy to.

In terms of what’s next: I am working on a series of essays about being me and alive. These essays (“On Accent,” “The Sound of Rain,” etc.) helped me understand who I am, but also sent me down a spiral of “sad-and-sadder.” After all, it is pretty depressing to see myself as a diasporic writer who may never belong or be accepted by American society. Luckily, one of my best friends suggested that I incorporate humor into my essays, and I was able to do so by thinking through “the extraordinary” through the Netflix series Extraordinary Attorney Woo. In this new phase, I hope to better capture the uniqueness of the sounds of Queens as a borough and the multidimensionality of the immigrant community of Flushing in my new work.

Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Double-Tongued Troubadour: An Interview with Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

by Jim Feast

A self-described New Romantic poet, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is also a publisher, art and literary critic, eco-activist, impresario, filmmaker, and visual artist. He is author of nineteen books of poetry, most recently a collection of sonnets and collages titled Doppelgängster: Self-Portraits in a Funhouse Mirror (MadHat Press, $21.95); his work has also appeared in anthologies ranging from Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2023) to Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (Lamar University Press, 2022).

Wright, who published the long-running all-arts magazine Cover in the previous century and now publishes Live Mag!, has received the Kathy Acker Award for his publishing and writing. In the following interview, we discuss how all the doubles and others in his life as a poet add up to a singular, ongoing practice.

Jim Feast: My first question stems from a conversation we had about one of the poems in Doppelgängster, “Truth vs. Meaning”—you said that poem was “off to the side” of the main themes of the book. So, could you clarify what those main themes are?

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: The themes, motifs, and icons that appear in the collages and poems engage a muse. My subjects represent a search for individuality within a context of membership in a family, a tribe, and a relationship. Romantic love, sex. A pioneering spirit harkening to my upbringing in West Virginia and Arizona. And being hep, defined in some older dictionaries of slang as “someone who could swing on any scene.” I wanted to be that someone. A merger of the Beat’s forbidden fevered pitch and the New York School’s breezy, cosmopolitan elan.

“Truth vs Meaning” presents a larger-than-life character, a sort of Everyman called “Mr. Universe.” It hints at political strife, personal responsibility, and selflessness, but after a bravura beginning, the character fumbles—he is after all, “outré” himself, eccentric but prepossessing. Never quite fitting in and yet bearing within himself nobility, agency, and aplomb. Like a troubadour, he is staying in someone else’s castle, or as this poem has it, he finds himself on a set, as if in a dream.

JF: How do the themes inform your process?

JW: Themes help structure the poems and propel them along. They color in the persona and become like characters in a play, providing an anticipatory tone. Double entendres and conundrums vibrate. Phrases blur momentarily before snapping into focus, as when “a naked siren and a burning fire engine” are contrasted in an ironic exchange. Such super-packed images hint at Symbolism but generate new, contradictory meanings. Going back to “Truth vs. Meaning,” a false choice is offered between related—but separate—ideals.

JF: Your poems are full of complex interplays and inlaying—I have to ask how you put them together.

JW: You “hear” a phrase in your mind and go: get up some steam, mumble along trying to say something, a twist here, a turn there, and invent, record, note, steal, personify—“November is packing its brown valise.” I’m attuned to alliteration, music, rhyme, cadence, association, appropriation, even affectation—I use everything in the craft box to keep going with white hot volition.

Then you can rearrange lines and edit bits here and there. Sometimes the initial impulse is erased in the revision. Some poems are really opposed to being written in one rush. Still, poems that need too much editing probably aren’t worth it. As Ted Berrigan, my mentor, said mercifully, “A poem doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work.”

JF: In “Les Fleurs de Nuit,” you use the phrase “lead by dreaming,” which brings up a key dimension of your writing. You often begin with an evocation of a time and place: “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind.” Surprisingly, such evocations are followed by dream images: “We were toys in Babeland.” Can you comment on your combination of nature poetry with surrealism?

JW: That title began as an allusion to Baudelaire, but it’s also an unintended metaphor for dreams. That poem is unusual for me in that it has six dreams in it leading up to the final couplet, so it all fits together. I like to stick a dream in a poem if I can. It’s like an ingredient that most recipes can use—and inherently authentic.

Sometimes nature suggests a lesson. In “Rough Patch,” after “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind” comes “What’s above, calls / on what’s below.” We want to rise to the call. Nature becomes a stand-in for the muse, I think. I look and listen and maybe hear an inspiring line of description in my head. Images are the bones of a poem, and lyricism is the heart. From there you can jump-cut to other quotidian or ethereal elements.

“Learn by doing—lead by dreaming” is a misquote that I worked up. The poet is often seen as a dreamer. I think people look to poetry and dreams for the same things—magic, prophecy, and wisdom. One could also say learn by leading. The poet is fulfilling a shamanistic role in society, so there is often a moral bedrock revealed or an ambition pursued. Poetry has a spiritual quality people seek, especially as organized religion fades and leaves a vacuum. This is not new, but it is dire. The original Romantics saw nature as a gateway drug to the sublime.

People can be drawn to poetry for information as well as for an emotional reward. So I research topics and make the poems informative. It’s also good to balance adages, epigrams, encomiums, and dictums, such as “lead by dreaming,” with natural elements. It’s okay to make statements: “Let us be measured by devotion.”

I keep my eyes peeled for some connection with the natural world that suggests a simile such as “the wolf moon goes down like butter.” My poem “Temporary Sanity” starts off with a stanza that observes the natural world:

Winter’s white heart steams.
Venus pins night to the sky.
A few stars are hung out to dry.

And then I switch tracks, introducing the persona/observer who moors the collection: “On call at the dream hospital, / my gang of bells rings.” From there the poem goes into a persona-driven New Romanticism, interacting with the muse:

Listen. Your canals can hear
my eyelids beating time
into wings of gold foil.

This nod to classic Romanticism deepens the texture, mixing into and counter-balancing the jaunty banter. The poem is an embodiment of their juncture, their jouissance (and, yes, there is sexual content).

In the final couplet, the poem returns to the wider world it began with and ends up personifying nature: “Snow only really talks / when it starts to melt.” It suggests that to commune with our inner nature and each other, we must let down our guard. It also hints at the specter of global warming.

JF: Your poems often feature playful reversals and scrambling of cliches and commonplaces, which to me suggests a rejection of the dead language of banality. The line “I always led from the back of our class. / . . . It wasn’t / our thing to be official” suggests this rebellious stance began in high school.

JW: Yes, e.e. cummings and his nonconformity changed my world in high school. Playing with language is key for me. And I like that you say “commonplaces.” One can convert the cliche to make it a touchstone, a common denominator between the audience and the abstracted landscape of the poem. My classmate at West Virginia University, Jayne Anne Phillips, told me not to use cliches in 1972, but it only made me more aware of them as a class of phraseology that could be mined. Palindromes, anagrams, typos, malapropisms, mondegreens—all these offer new ways to “crack” the code, break the rules, refresh language, and find new meanings when combined with subjects that range from the personal and ordinary to the political and environmental.  

JF: You mentioned your use of a persona. This persona, moving amid the reverses and outpourings of your vivid language, seems a slippery fellow, yet he also anchors the proceedings.  

JW: He’s very slippery, but also revealing. The persona is upholding a set of principles, adhering to a standard as the troubadours did, and spreading knowledge of proper behavior for a courtier (see Paul Blackburn’s translations). Ted Berrigan’s “Code of the West” exemplifies this impulse to transcribe the tenets of the tribe and identify its boundaries.  

You have to lure a reader and then steer them through the poem using both conventions and inventions. You pack meaning, knowledge, and experience within the artifice of whimsey, lyricism, and imagery to create insight. And frankly, there’s an entertainment aspect audiences go for. 

Myths are another inspiration/ muse source: “Hello, Sybil. Old fortune teller.” Orpheus, Pinocchio, Santa, Cupid, Hippolyte, Circe—my persona hangs out with the myths to become a legend. Ed Sanders wrote about this with regard to the myth-making of Charles Olson, that he could do it “safely & without duplicity.”

The central thrust is simply discovering an order while pursuing varying threads to a conclusion. As my old landlord used to say, “Work hard, have fun.” Celebrate life and contribute.  

JF: Your poems are chock full of amazing epiphanies; have any come via a personal epiphany?  

JW: A breakthrough moment came in an Alice Notley workshop. She instructed us to write while she read some texts. My effort became “Malaise in Malaysia,” and you can see the word play there, the alliteration, assonance, and anagrammatic quality. It was a revelation about how a poem could be stitched together from various patches of language to make a crazy quilt.

JF: Your poetry also draws language and metaphors from many different realms, and as a publisher, you created Cover Magazine and then Live Mag!, both of which combine art and writing from various fields. I see in the publishing a link to your poetry’s all-embracing tendency.

JW: All-embracing—I like that. Ted Berrigan was rather “all-embracing.” In 1978 he told us young guns at St. Mark’s to start a magazine—publish your friends and some poets you really admire. I’ve been doing that ever since. Publishing has encouraged me to reach out to writers and widen the horizon.

My girlfriend told me one should read twenty poems for every poem they write. I never had better advice. Running a magazine means you really live with poems—choosing, designing, proofing. Reviewing is even more insightful; you see patterns emerge in others’ writings that may later become part of your own lexicon. The magazines are especially helpful in creating events and maintaining community. Writing art criticism also hones my language skills.

JF: You have often spoken of your poetry as part of the New Romanticism. Can you describe more about this movement?

JW: It’s about extending beauty and experiencing passion. At Brooklyn College (where I studied with Allen Ginsberg and William Matthews), I became enchanted with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sydney, who brought the sonnet, the persona, and a proto-Romantic impulse to the forefront. (I was also having a torrid affair and was deeply in love; my muse liked that.) I learned about Romantic symbolism such as the “blue rose” and discovered John Clare (one of John Ashbery’s favorites). The Romantic impulse never goes away. A lot of erudition started going into my work, and that continues.

There was also a New Romantic moment in the late 1980s that included fashion, classical music, and art, and I felt tied in with that. Lord & Taylor ran an ad in the Times that blared “New Romantic” and I used it in a workshop I taught. I thought we needed a better tagline than “New York School Third Generation” or “St. Mark’s poets.” And I still believe the emotional tenor of the Romantics is built into our poetry DNA, as is Surrealism. I find New Romantic qualities is in the work of contemporaries like Elaine Equi, Will Alexander, Bob Holman, Dorothea Lasky, Sampson Starkweather, Kevin Opstedal, and Andrei Codrescu.

JF: Another thing that gives your poems traction is reference to family. You say, for instance, “From my mother I inherited // easy grace and savior faire.” In the poems, this network of relations includes friends and colleagues, too. 

JW: Before I got to New York in 1976, my family moved a lot as my father climbed the academic ladder. So, we were a tight family, but I had to keep making new friends, and I was keen on knowing the latest slang as a point of entry.

I saw the New York school mentioning their friends all the time, and it worked for me. I’m in awe of my circle: “What dudes we be, / skimming masks of glass / across a bourbon sea.”

JF: Some poems in the book are paired with your drawings and collages. It’s almost a chicken-egg situation: Did a picture inspire a poem, or did the poem lead to the visual art? How do words and images interact in Doppelgängster?

JW: There is a recurrence of iconographic/archetypal imagery that appears in both my text and visual work. Sometimes the two overlap, but they’re not usually created simultaneously. Pinocchio is a natural “persona” for me to identify with—along with many others who have appeared over the years—so Pinocchio appears in both a poem and artwork. Other subjects include Tinker Bell, Aladdin, chimeras like the mermaid and the gryphon, and mythic characters.

Once I have a motif, I tend to recycle it from time to time. The cuckoo clock is an example of a motif I was repeating both in verse and imagery. Lori Ortiz, who designed the book, made the pairings based on feeling and tone, as well as subject.

So I would say these are parallel practices. There is a collage quality to my poems—juxtapositions of images, shifting scales and perspectives. A palette of varying textures. Rhyming shapes. Different directional focuses. The collage is built, and the poem is too—with a lot of pondering, structuring, and conjuring.

JF: In an artist’s statement you sent me in an email, you say these poems bring two aspects of your personality into juxtaposition, yielding “self portraits partially created by admitting an ‘other’ self (a doppelgänger).” Do you anticipate psychic benefits from this doubling?  

JW: Hopefully. [Laughs] You can only see yourself in a reflection in a mirror, a lover, or a muse—or in self-reflection. Self-reflection is another way of developing character, and you can find this ‘other’ self by trying to meet the challenges a poem requires. One deals continuously with the duality of being one among many, the observer and the observed, and to the extent that these two interact, the more the poems live.

The poem is an instrument that looks into your soul—both writer and reader.  

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Haunted Quality of Poetry: An Interview with Norman Finkelstein

by Joe Safdie

In 2018, Norman Finkelstein published an odd collection of poetry titled From the Files of the Immanent Foundation—odd in that it detailed the history of a secret organization as bureaucratic as it was gnostic, “a network of spies and secrets, / an infinite arcanum of hierophants and fools.” In a Broken Star followed in 2021; this book introduced the character of Pascal Wanderlust, who both is and isn’t the subject of a quest narrative. Now a third book, Further Adventures (Dos Madres Press, $23), completes the trilogy, weaving connections between Pascal and the Foundation.

Finkelstein’s oeuvre has always been “sensitive to the overlapping traditions of Jewish mysticism, radical poetics and post-modern thought,” as J. Peter Moore wrote in a collection of essays about his expansive body of work. Finkelstein has published thirteen books of poems and six volumes of literary criticism, and is a professor emeritus at Xavier University, where he taught for forty years. One of his central themes, according to the Poetry Foundation, is “the tension between secular and religious world views”—a subject that he discusses, among others, in the interview below.

* * *

Joe Safdie: Norman, thanks for doing this. I want to talk mainly about Further Adventures, but I don’t think that’s possible without talking a bit about the two books that preceded it, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation and In A Broken Star. My first question involves that word “further”: when did you know that you weren’t quite finished with this journey, and is there a chance that it’s still not finished? You say in the Afterword that time itself is a problem in this poetry: Is there a difference in how narrative time is structured in this book from what was established in the previous two?

Norman Finkelstein: When Further Adventures appeared, I was fairly sure the story of Pascal and the Immanent Foundation was done. But recently, I’ve returned to it, perhaps out of a desire to fill in some of the gaps in the narrative. In any case, my experience in writing these poems has been similar to my experience in writing Track. I thought that Track was over once the first volume was published, but months later I found myself writing what became Columns, the second volume. At a certain point I knew there would be a third, and I also understood that it would not be interminable (as, say, Nathaniel Mackey’s work seems to be). So I thought From the Files was one book, and in a sense it still is—it can be read as a stand-alone work—but when The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust came to me, I gradually realized that Pascal had something to do with the Immanent Foundation. I wanted to return to that world and somehow pull it all together. Hence Further Adventures, which is both prequel and sequel to the earlier books.

As for “narrative time” in this work, well, it’s tricky. By the end of Further Adventures, we can see that there is a definite narrative arc, a chronology. Pascal’s story intersects that of the Foundation at various points in time. But I also think that events in the poems occur in a phantasmagoric version of what Walter Benjamin calls jetzeit, “now time,” time at a standstill that has transformative, explosive potential. And there is also mythic time, cyclical time: Characters are themselves, but also avatars. There are archetypal resonances. There’s a forward trajectory but also a constant movement backward, a return to origins.

JS: In the Afterword to Further Adventures, you mention the 12 x 12 form (twelve stanzas of twelve lines each) as an instance of your “stanzaic numerology.” Could you say something more about form in this book, and in your work generally?

NF: Obviously I’m not a “formalist” as that term is conventionally understood. I’m acutely aware of measure, of end stop, enjambment, caesura, but most of my work doesn’t “scan” in terms of standard English meters. I love rhyme, but I use it sparingly, and when I use it, it tends to be off-kilter. But I’ve always been, if not a formalist, a structuralist. “Stanzaic numerology” is a notion I keep in mind that helps me structure my poetry. I first became aware of it writing Track, where lines, stanzas, and sections are all “magically” determined by recombinatory numerical procedures. “Stanzaic numerology” is fundamental to my shaping of verse, from couplets, tercets, and quatrains to more indeterminately formed poems in cyclopean and granitic blocks, in which many voices can be contained. Song and sculpture. Even as far back as my first book, Restless Messengers, I was deliberately riffing on the structure of the Romantic ode.

I believe in what Robert Duncan calls the “form of forms.” But the Objectivists are also important to me, and following them, I tend to dislike poetry that sprawls. Writing Further Adventures made me acutely aware of the productive tension between lyric and narrative, or in operatic terms, aria and recitative. So, I move among many possible structures, guided by voices, sensing what’s called for, and paying careful attention to what used to be called “numbers,” poetic units.

JS: Well, as Pope wrote, “Most by numbers judge a poet’s song.” Now that we’ve covered “Further,” how about “Adventures”? You recall Pascal’s aphorism “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” but much of the adventure of this narrative happens in a room like that, doesn’t it? Do you see this as mostly a philosophical inquiry à la Gnosticism—or is the quest simply to keep going, to write the next poem?

NF: The search for gnosis implies a quest, but it’s not a search for the Grail, or for transcendence—though in the Pascal poems, there is always a sense of going “beyond.” I suppose you can say it’s a philosophical or spiritual inquiry, but that sounds too abstract for me. In Further Adventures, we learn that Wanderlust came into being as a failsafe, and has a mission—restore the Immanent Foundation if, as proves to be the case, it is destroyed (or implodes). But Gnosticism involves seeking self-knowledge, thus our hero’s understanding of psychic being constantly grows, even if many episodes reveal Wanderlust to be something of a schlemiel.

Where does all of this take place? Not only in Pascal’s room or mind—this is, after all, a series of adventures. I have any number of models, from The Fairie Queene to Epipsychidion to “The Comedian as the Letter C” to Song of the Andoumboulou. Arthur Green calls the Zohar “sacred fantasy,” a term that can apply to my work, and that of quite a few other poets who are writing quest-romance.

JS: There’s a certain “boys’ life” feeling about some of this narrative. In the Afterword, you mention Lovecraft and Neil Gaiman, and even, in connection with Augustus Sprechenbaum, the Marvel Comics character Dr. Strange. I wonder who else you may be conjuring here (or, as you say, “data mining”), and how these many voices correspond with Pascal’s late desire “to be free of all the ghosts.” You’re obviously paying homage, but is there also something else going on?

NF: Allusion has always been crucial to my poetry. Wallace Stevens says that poetry is the scholar’s art, and I’m all in. For a long time, I have thought of my work as a poetry of commentary, and the midrashic impulse is essential—it generates meaning, and I hope my readers are willing to play along. And I’ve come to move between “high” and “pop” culture. Some years ago, Mark Scroggins and I were imagining a mash-up of the life of Hart Crane with Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, merging Crane and the narrator of that story to make a single character; that made its way into the story of Bob and Pete in Further Adventures. Now who is going to figure that one out? But if they do, I think it will add to the pleasure of the text. Then there’s the Guide; at some point I realized that he bears a striking resemblance to the Silver Surfer. So, Pascal might wish to be free of all the ghosts—I think, psychoanalytically, we all do—but it’s impossible. Poets make use of that, and I love the haunted quality of poetry.

JS: Getting back to quest narratives briefly, though, who is the villain here? The Foundation was certainly nefarious, but is there an antagonist against whom Pascal and the others play out their complexities?

NF: In these poems, the antagonist lies within the self. That’s the case for Wanderlust, and even for the Foundation, an overreaching, schizoid organization if ever there was one. We are the Deep State, and our task is to go ever deeper. I wrote much of From the Files while doing my training analysis at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute. Consider the implications!

JS: I think I’ll refrain from that task, thanks! But psychoanalysis brings up the question of autobiography, and there are more than a few passages where I thought you were writing about yourself—most obviously as the “arch-mage” in the prologue, but at other times as well. In what sense (or in how many senses) is Pascal Wanderlust you, and in what sense is he an invention of (or an adventure in) narrative? Is he or you “the poet”? The narrator? The Accountant?

NF: I have thought about the place of the self in the poem for a long time. For me, poetry, even lyric poetry, is not primarily self-expression, and I could cite a number of poets who variously attest to this. Look, for example, at the beginning of Yeats’s “A General Introduction for My Work.” For Yeats, the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” I consider that an aesthetic ideal, so I try to write a richly affective, intellectually curious poetry that is not mainly about the self. To be sure, there is something of me in Pascal, in Sprechenbaum, in the Accountant, and so on, just as there are parts of novelists in their characters. And I deliberately inserted a voice, or figure, of “the poet”; he mentions himself at various points. The one character I am not, however, is Sprechenbaum’s cat—he is based entirely on my cat, Kitzel.

JS: I’m sure Kitzel appreciates it. I also wonder about oppositions: Pascal is both male and female (like the king and queen in the alchemical beaker?), but as you’ve said, the “adventures” might be internal as well as external; I sense as well an argument between Gnosticism and skepticism, an “Interminable / internal debate” as you have it in “Behind Every Poem.” Does Blake’s “Without contraries is no progression” come in here at all? It’s probably naive to think about resolution of any kind these days, but this is narrative poetry: does it just circle around, wandering in time?

NF: I interrogate several binaries in Further Adventures, and gender is only the most obvious of them. A debate between Gnosticism and skepticism? Maybe idealism and empiricism, or imagination and reason. The ratio of reason to magic, to borrow the title of my selected poems—my work has always measured that. Blake’s notion of contraries is certainly operative; I think of my poetry as dialectical, or dialogical. The narrative may come to an end, but the commentary never does.

JS: Thanks for doing this, Norman; I read all three books with great pleasure, and hope they find a wide audience. I have one more question for you, because your latest book of essays, To Go Into the Words (University of Michigan Press, $34.95), has just been published as well. Do you feel any tension between writing poetry and critical prose? Is there a state of mind that seems more conducive to one or the other?

NF: To Go Into the Words is a selection of my essays, mostly on contemporary poetry, going back to the 1980s. I’ve always been a “poet-critic”: after all, I have a doctorate in English; I was trained as a literary scholar; and I enjoy writing about poetry. As a poet, I have always felt a need to examine the work of my contemporaries and predecessors in an effort to understand its importance to me. What in the work resonates for me? What can I learn from it? If the qualities I admire in the work inspire me, I want to explain those qualities to other readers, so that they too can appreciate them. This is also why I started Restless Messengers, my poetry review blog. I want to argue for the importance of certain poets—why I think they should be read.

My poetry and my criticism are often in creative tension. I’ve written two books about Jewish American poetry, and Jewishness, of course, is a deep current in my poems. Track is in dialogue with On Mount Vision, my critical book on contemporary long poems that deal with the sacred. And there’s also this: When the poetry is lying fallow, I can usually manage to write critical prose. I can continue to think about poetry even when I’m giving my own work a rest. Then the time returns when I feel something stirring, I hear a promising phrase. And it’s back.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

We Make Things in Translation: An Interview with Angela Rodel

by Karen Noll

It was music, not language, that pulled Angela Rodel toward the East. She was already fluent in German and Russian when she heard the voices of Bulgarian folk singers live in concert as an undergraduate and decided that she needed to hear more of those dissonant harmonies and unusual meters. Her accomplishments as a scholar, a linguist, a teacher, and a translator are impressive, and she will talk about them—but when the topic is music, there is an added timbre to her words, and the ways that music enhances the art of translation are certainly not lost on her.

Rodel has been living in Sofia, Bulgaria for more than twenty years. After obtaining degrees in Slavic studies, ethnomusicology, and linguistics from Yale and UCLA, she now translates literary fiction and is the Executive Director of the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission. Her awards as a translator include honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages), the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, and most recently, the 2023 International Booker Prize for her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (Liveright, $27). Newly published this year is her translation of Vera Mutafchieva’s novel The Case of Cem (Sandorf Passage, $21.95), which we discuss briefly at the end of the interview.

Originally from the Twin Cities suburb of Burnsville, Minnesota, Rodel occasionally visits the state; she and I met in a public library space there to talk about music, poetry, Time Shelter, the art and business of translating—and, of course, the importance of public libraries.

Karen Noll: It seems to me that in recent months, translation and translators are getting a lot of attention in the literary publishing world. Have you found that to be true?

Angela Rodel: Yes, absolutely. I have been a translator since 2005, and I was actually a full-time professional translator for about eight years. In my experience it has changed, especially in the last couple of years, thanks to people like Jennifer Croft, who is one of Olga Tokarczuk’s translators from Polish. There is a movement on social media—#namethetranslator—that has been gathering steam. In the U.S., support has been growing for the idea that translation is its own art rather than only playing second fiddle to something more important.

It’s interesting—with the publication of Time Shelter, my name is on the front cover of the U.S. edition, but it’s not on the front cover of the U.K. edition, so I think there are differences depending on the markets. Within the U.S. there has been a concerted effort by organizations like ALTA (American Literary Translators Association), as well as by individual translators, to call out situations in which a translator has not been named. There was just a big brouhaha at the British Museum where an exhibit about China featured poetry in translation. So, yes, I think it’s becoming recognized that translation is an art of its own.

It’s a little bit ironic, though, because this moment of recognition corresponds to the rise of AI, which will change the work of translation. I’ve played with some of the AI programs, and they are quite good with grammar. They’re not so good with register, which tends to be uneven, and they’re not so good with rhythm. But we can’t ignore them, and we translators should probably think about how we’re going to use them as a tool, how we are going to integrate them into our practice, because I don’t think we can bury our heads in the sand and pretend this technology doesn’t exist. We might become something more like glorified editors in the future—I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we’ll see, we’ll see.

KN: How about the writers’ strike—the Writer’s Guild of America and the struggle to be fairly compensated and recognized. What are your thoughts?

AR: Yes, yes, creative work is work. When people think that just the joy of creativity should be the reward for doing it, it’s like—well, no, you should pay us as well! There is joy in it, but creative work should not be coming only from people who can afford to be creative; that’s not a society we want to live in. It’s hard to make a living just as a freelance translator. The only reason I was able to do it was because I lived in Bulgaria, where the cost of living is less expensive than it is here or in western Europe. Creative work is work that should be compensated as such, and I think we are seeing that idea get stronger in many, many different fields.

KN: Who have your clients been over your years in translation? Obviously this project was a literary client, but are there other non-literary clients that are more lucrative and that sustain your living costs so that you can afford to have literary clients?

AR: Well, now I have a day job—I’m actually the head of the Bulgarian Fulbright Commission, so I only translate things that I want to translate now, like literature. But when I was a full-time translator, I discovered you can’t translate literary fiction all day, every day. It’s too exhausting! So I did have other clients: I did some legal translation and a lot of academic writing. It helped pay the bills. I did not do medical translation, but that is pretty lucrative.

It would be very difficult to survive exclusively as a literary translator. I think maybe people who can survive on literary translation alone are working with a number of different languages—and big languages, like Spanish or Russian—so there is enough interest in publishing that maybe you could make a living out of it. But for a language like Bulgarian, I can’t imagine that you could make a living out of translating literary fiction no matter how much people were willing to pay you; you can’t do it fast enough or well enough.

KN: Oh, I have a question about Russian. I did a bit of reading about the sister languages of Russian and Bulgarian, and I found it fascinating. Can you offer a quick course for the uninitiated?

AR: It’s sort of like Spanish and Italian—they’re cousins. They’re both Slavic languages, Russian and Bulgarian. They are not the same branch of the Slavic family, so they are maybe second cousins, not first cousins like Russian and Ukrainian might be. If you know one, you will understand a lot of the other, like someone who knows Spanish and hears Italian—they can pick out things.

I actually studied Russian at good ol’ Burnsville High School in Minnesota: One of the French teachers—I guess she was inspired by perestroika—started learning Russian and offered it, so I took Russian for two years in high school. Then I went to Yale, where there is an awesome Slavic department, and since I always loved Russian literature—I was that depressed teenager who read Dostoyevsky—it was perfect for me. I studied Russian very seriously at Yale for all four years, but I didn’t want to be a major (though I think I was only two credits short); I had started out in Comp Lit, but I thought the people were too pretentious, so I went for linguistics, and I have my master’s in linguistics as well.

When I got interested in Bulgarian in the early 1990s, mainly through Bulgarian music, nobody was teaching it; there wasn’t the big wave of immigration that there was later. But if you’re a person who likes languages, and if you know Russian, then so many of the roots are the same. The way the languages work is the same. So I basically used Russian to learn Bulgarian. It was a good jumping-off point.

KN: Were you ever a professional translator of Russian or German?

AR: No. Maybe I was just clueless, but it wasn’t really a thing. Nobody really mentioned translation as a possible career. I mean, there must have been very high-level literary translators at Yale, but I was always interested in reading in the original language. I remember reading Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann. I read it first in English, and then I read it in German and was like, “Whoa!” It was so much better in the original. Maybe I ended up coming across a bad translation, and that inspired me to go back and read the original.

I wasn’t really interested in or plugged into translation as an art or a profession until I was living in Bulgaria. I had done a full year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar, and I was supposed to go back to graduate school at UCLA, and I was thinking, you know, there are no jobs in academia. And Bulgaria was such an interesting place and it was an interesting time, and I thought, “Okay, I can stay here. What can I do?” My husband at the time was a writer and a musician, so people we knew would say, “Oh, I’ve got this poem. Can you translate it?” I realized there was a niche: There were not that many native speakers of English that knew Bulgarian well enough to translate it. And I kind of had a talent for it. I enjoyed it—as a linguist, it was a puzzle. So it was in Bulgaria that I realized there was a huge need for this and that I could actually make a living from it. It was only later that I got plugged into the U.S. literary translation community—thanks to the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.

KN: And music was a spark for your interest in Bulgarian as well—and specifically women’s voices.

AR: As Bulgarians are a Slavic people, Bulgarian music has much in common with Russian and Serbian music, but since Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire, it also has lots of things brought by the Ottoman Turks. So it’s this awesome mix, the best of eastern and western folk music. And the women’s singing tradition is totally unique. They sing super loud in a chest voice—if you have done musical theater, it is like belting—but that’s how they sing all the time. And they use these really interesting dissonant harmonies that are not typical of western music. They aren’t thirds and fifths that we like; they are seconds, and they sound very dissonant but also very powerful.

During the Communist period in Bulgaria, some musicians took this folk tradition and basically married it to western art music; they kept the vocal style and harmonies and then added a three, four, or five-part harmony. There was a brilliant composer named Filip Kutev who realized what should be saved from the tradition and what should be added; he kind of souped up the tradition with western compositional techniques. Now there are choirs that are world famous; they won a Grammy in 1990. To me it is the most beautiful music in the world, but I’m a little biased. That was the music that I went to Bulgaria to study—both the traditional style and the new choral tradition.

To tie it back to translation, I think it really helps being musical. There is so much music in a text—there’s rhythm, there’s intonation, there’s the sounding of the language. It’s funny, I was at a translation seminar in London and there were a dozen of us from all over Europe working in different languages, and every single one of us was a musician! I would say it’s not a coincidence. People who can hear the sounding of the language, the melody, the rhythm—that is all a very important part of literary translation.

KN: Maybe this is a good place to transition to a few questions about

Time Shelter—I know that Georgi Gospodinov has said he likes to smuggle poetry into his prose, so it seems likely that your musical approach to translation makes you the right fit to bring his work into English! There are specific phrases in the book I especially loved, such as “through the trumpets of tautology.” [129] Was the original Bulgarian phrase also lyrical? This happened a lot as I read: a beautiful phrase made me wonder whether the original phrase was smuggled poetry.

AR: Sometimes we make things in translation—like an alliteration—rather than find an exact match. But “through the trumpets of tautology” is actually alliterative in Bulgarian, so that one worked! But yes, as a poet, this is so important to Georgi. In his previous novel, The Physics of Sorrow, there was a case where he was really drawing attention to the sound of the language. In Bulgarian the word for “the” is placed at the end of the noun, so you would say “book the” instead of “the book.” And it is a hard “tuh” sound like “tuh, tuh, tuh.” Georgi placed a series of these “tuhs” in sequence so that it sounded like somebody falling down the stairs on their butt—sort of “bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.” It didn’t really work with the sound of “the,” so I did it with a “d”:

Dear Young Man,
There are moments in a person’s life that are never forgotten. Today, with trembling hands you untie the knot of your scarlet Pioneer’s neckerchief, replacing it with a red Comsomol membership booklet. This is a symbol of the great trust the Party and our heroic and hardworking people have in you.
Be decent and daring in word and deed! Dedicate the drive of your youth and the wisdom of your mature years to that which is dearest to all generations – the Homeland!

This is yet another stellar example of socialist-speak, though I now see that it is a mouthful. But I wanted to keep this sound play, and I remember looking to see what the German translator did since it might give me some ideas—we always look at each other’s stuff. And he totally skipped that line! I gave him a hard time. For me, so much of the beauty of Georgi’s writing lies in those sound plays and word plays—so when I can, I try to save them, but sometimes I have to use a different sound or if it doesn’t work exactly in this sentence, I will see if I can find something that will work in a different sentence so the text will have that element of musicality that Georgi had intended—even if it’s not exactly the same word or phrase.

KN: How about the title of the book, Time Shelter. It seems to be a single word in Bulgarian. Is there a translator’s story there?

AR: It is interesting, because in Bulgarian it’s Vremeubezhishte, which mirrors the Bulgarian word bomboubezhishte, meaning bomb shelter; the words for time and bomb have the same musicality, the same syllabic structure, in Bulgarian. So the English title works really well in keeping the audible correspondence between time shelter/bomb shelter. But this does not work so smoothly in all languages. French apparently does not work at all, and the book’s French translator (whom I know and who is wonderful) was practically tearing her hair out. The German had to be altered as well—Zeitzuflucht doesn’t call up connotations to shelters like bomb shelters. In Italian it turned out really cool: Cronorifugio. So it depends on the language.

Titles are an extreme version of what we go through with every sentence—the tension between the form and the content. Georgi’s previous book I translated as The Physics of Sorrow; the word in Bulgarian for the last word is tuga, which has the element of sorrow, but it’s really more like melancholy than sorrow. But I feel melancholy just rhythmically sounds terrible. And also, we associate it so much with Freud, and I wanted something Slavic, something guttural like tuga. So I ended up choosing sorrow, and Georgi agreed, but there are naysayers out there who thought that either we should have gone with the more “accurate” melancholy or come up with a completely different title.

KN: I also wanted to ask you about words where you chose to use the Bulgarian and to italicize them using the Roman alphabet instead of the Cyrillic. In some cases, like foods that are Bulgarian specialities, I understand why you might make that choice—shopska salad. But other choices did not make sense to me—satrap, bacho, brate, horo, ajvar, hajduks.

AR: Hmm. Well, in the United States at this point, there is a tendency to discourage any kind of footnotes in literary translation. If you look at old translations, there are footnotes everywhere, but the idea now is that it pulls the reader out of the text—it’s distracting; it can kind of be pedantic; and do you really need to know this much about a single word?

So most publishers want translators to minimize the use of footnotes. We can put in what’s called a stealth gloss, which is trying to define the word in the text so the reader can just translate it on their own. But there is also this idea that we don’t want to domesticate things too much; we want to have a little bit of the flavor of the original language. And even with writers who are writing in English, like Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner—he teaches you about a dozen Pashtun words. For example, he calls the father Baba, and you just learn it as you go.

I think those two things together—the fact that it’s becoming more common to have foreign words in a text to keep some flavor of the original, and also the fact that we don’t want a lot of footnotes—are informing current translation practice. The publisher of The Physics of Sorrow refused to let us use any footnotes, so with Time Shelter, Georgi and I just assumed that we couldn’t, but they sent me some of their other translated books and we were like, “Hey! These have footnotes in them!” So we used them, but rather sparingly; I think there’s maybe ten footnotes in Time Shelter.

We decided that if it was something that was a one-off and we could explain it easily and lightly in the text, then we kept it, like with the mare’s milk, kumis—and that’s not even a Bulgarian word, it’s old Bulgarian, like a central Asian word. Or if it was something that we thought was important—like rakia, which is the brandy that comes up over and over—we thought the reader can learn this, and that the reader should learn something about Bulgaria when engaging with the work.

You don’t want it to be an encyclopedia entry. I teach translation, and Bulgarians who translate from English into Bulgarian are terrible with footnotes: My students might give a whole recipe in a footnote, and I’m like, “Guys. Really? If the reader is that interested, there’s Google.” It’s too distracting—you can’t put that in the text.

And of course, sometimes I think something is clear, but I have lived in Bulgaria for way too long, so the editor might say, “What the hell is this?” And I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s not a thing that everybody knows.” Between myself, Georgi, and the editor, we decide whether we should slip something into the text, translate it into English, or do a footnote if we really need it.

KN: At one point you use the French word vous to explain the polite form. Is that because there is no polite form in English?

AR: Yes. Bulgarian, like all Slavic languages, has this difference between the formal you and the familiar you. It’s often important in literature because it shows the relationships between the characters. Sometimes if the characters talk about it specifically, then you can use the French word vous-ing someone, because English speakers mostly know that. Or you can use madam or sir or some other kind of workaround so that it’s clear that it’s a formal interaction. Then if it switches between those two characters, they will start using their first names.

I always tell my students that we will get to the fun stuff like dialects and stylistics, but that first they need to think linguistically about the structural differences between the two languages—and honorifics are a big difference. Also, the way Bulgarian uses verb tense is completely different, so we have to look for where those grammatical mismatches exist. You need to find ways to elegantly work around the differences.

KN: Also, the words lass and lassie really grabbed me. Why use those instead of girl?

AR: Because those are old-fashioned words from Bulgarian folk songs, so I want the English to sound correspondingly archaic and folky. There are few words in American English that register in this way, but when it’s folky in the original, I think you have to find something. In American English we flatten register, and everything is informal, so it’s hard sometimes. British English offers more variety, but I’m not a native speaker of British English, so I can’t use those sorts of things.

If Georgi had used the average Bulgarian word for girl, I would have used girl. But he uses devoika, so I felt like I needed to try something that would give it a little of that flavor.

KN: Another phrase that really struck me was in the passage with a Frankenstein analogy about creating something from many pieces. Your English takes the words dismembered and remembered and chops them up to isolate the word member—a word with so much power in the context of communism. I was curious to know what the Bulgarian looked like.

AR: The Bulgarian has the same play. And actually chlen is really interesting in Bulgarian because it has the meaning of member as party member but it also has the same sexual connotation as the English member, so I got lucky with that! I had to do some finessing because the two extended words—dismember and remember—didn’t quite coincide, but it worked well enough that I could use it.

There were other places, however, where Georgi had a terrific play on words but I was like, “Ugh, that does not work at all in English.” This is a thing that AI is not going to be able to do very well.

KN: Only once in the novel—at the very end—did you choose to leave the original Bulgarian in Cyrillic. No Roman letters. No italics. No English.

AR: That last line is actually just Georgi banging on the typewriter. There is no hidden meaning, but we just thought it best to leave it in the Cyrillic, as the letters are beautiful.

KN: The narrator of Time Shelter is a trustworthy guide, and it seems to me that your choices contribute greatly to that trust. For example, after the narrator hears the sound of gunfire, he addresses the reader directly in the second person about this particular neighborhood in Sofia—“Just so you know where you are.” [188] It’s not a tour guide pronouncement, but rather a gentle touch on the shoulder.

AR: Yes, what I love about Georgi’s writing is that even while he is writing about huge historical things, he has an intimate tone. I think what is so brilliant—and I think this is something the Booker Prize jury recognized—is that he is writing about issues like nationalism and how we deal with history, but it’s always a personal experience. His narrator here talks to you as a real human being, a conversation partner, so I really tried to make sure that the voice captured that tone, that it was a real person speaking one-on-one with the reader.

I think that’s important also because Gaustine has a very different voice. He is not trustworthy—he is flamboyant and over-the-top—but we are processing Gaustine’s ideas through the narrator who is delicate and tongue-in-cheek. He has a good sense of humor, but it’s subtle and ironic, and I needed to capture that in the narrator’s voice.

KN: The narrator often refers to Gaustine as being a joker, but he is also unsure whether Gaustine is joking or not joking. The language of irony is nuanced, and I wonder whether you ever had to ask Georgi directly, “Is this line a joke? Is he joking?” just to clarify before you made your choices about irony.

AR: Yes. Sometimes I was like, “I think this is meant ironically, but let me check to make sure!” For the most part with Georgi, I can pretty much assume that if I think it’s ironic, it probably is. But you know, it’s tricky. He speaks English well, so he reads my draft and offers insights like “I’m not sure this is clear enough” or “maybe we should strengthen this,” and that’s always so helpful.

It’s interesting with Gaustine. He is an ongoing character who first appeared in Georgi’s poetry and then as a character in his second novel. He is a meta-textual character, so there’s always going to be a fair amount of irony, but Gaustine is sort of allowed to do things that Georgi, the writer, wouldn’t allow himself to do. It’s his alter ego for sure.

KN: Early on we learn that Gaustine’s name is a merging of Augustine and Garibaldi, and the narrator finds it interesting that the first captures early theology and the second late revolutionism. I didn’t find a lot of theology in this novel. Did I miss something?

AR: That might be indicative of Georgi’s generation: He was born in 1968 and grew up under socialism. Where he does talk about religion—not so much in this book but in his previous one—is more about his grandmother, who would still read the Bible but would cover it in newspaper and do it secretly. I think she secretly baptized him and his brother, because it wasn’t allowed. So it’s a fraught relationship with religion and theology; as a child he was interested but also a little afraid, because it was something that was forbidden.

So for his generation—at least this is true of other Bulgarians that I know, especially intellectuals—their religion is art and literature; that could give you a sort of spiritual experience of something beyond yourself, because you couldn’t really be a religious person in Bulgaria in that era. I would say that Georgi is certainly a spiritual seeker, but maybe because of when he grew up and where, his seeking has been more in conversation with the western literary tradition and the western art tradition.

KN: A very moving scene is when one of the clinic’s patients gets to meet the government agent who was in charge of spying on that patient when he was younger.

AR: Oh, that is my favorite scene in the entire book.

KN: It is brilliant. The patient has lost his memory, but the agent remembers everything. The agent supplies the details, some very personal and painful, to help the patient remember his life, but clearly both the watched and the watcher have suffered over the years. I thought it was a brilliant way to humanize the wounds of the surveillance state, and the encounter—long after the surveillance state has dissolved—is healing for both. Georgi refers to the pair as the “closest of enemies.” [54]

AR: Yes, and the word “wound” is so resonant. Bulgaria as a society has not really found a way to talk about what happened in their country like Germans have about the Holocaust, i.e., how are we going to move forward and discuss this? Bulgarians have not had that kind of reckoning about the socialist period. There are some people who have very positive nostalgic memories about the socialist period; there are many who are very negative. And it seems like those two camps have not found a way to speak publicly. So I just love that scene because it makes it personal but also taps a nerve that the entire society is still struggling with. There is blame, but both of those characters—the agent and the dissident—were in it together.

Until about six years ago, history books stopped at about 1944, meaning kids in school did not learn history past that date—because they didn’t know how to talk about it, they didn’t know how to teach it. Finally, the ministry of education said, Okay, we need to change our textbooks. And it was a big public to-do because some of the books were too positive about communism, some were too negative, and they tried to find a kind of middle path. But it’s a very real wound that is still being processed there. I think this story is so poignant because it shows that whoever controls memory has so much power, and that power can be abused. It is still a very real conversation in Bulgaria and in a lot of eastern Europe. Look what’s happening now in Russia with Putin: He wants to control the historical narrative.

I’m sorry, I’m going off on a tangent a little bit, but the Sofia mayoral elections are coming up, and one of the candidates launched by the anti-corruption, pro-Europe, pro-western parties is a guy whose parents were part of the surveillance state. I know him personally because he went to the American University in Bulgaria; he is a brilliant tech start-up guy who launched the first Bulgarian IT unicorn, and he is re-opening that whole conversation. It’s amazing. He is younger than I am and probably born in late socialism, maybe in ’85, so he is not somebody who benefited directly from the power structure of socialism, though his family benefited. So we are asking the questions: Is he worthy? Is he burdened by being from that family? Does he carry some blame? Are people able to judge him on his own merits? It is just such an interesting conversation. I hope he gets elected; he would be a great mayor. But there is a chance that he won’t because of his family’s history. These topics are very painful still in Bulgaria and in a lot of eastern Europe. They haven’t had the time to process it as a society.

KN: I was moved by this encounter between the “closest of enemies” simply because the agent became the one who could release another human being from the dark place that is Alzheimer’s. So I read it as an incredibly healing scene.

AR: But Bulgarians will read that scene very differently than you. They’ll see the power imbalance. They’ll see him with the potential to abuse that position.

KN: Yes, and he did abuse it, especially when the surveillance was about sex and love. Are there any conversations happening about a film being made of Time Shelter?

AR: Yes. I haven’t been part of them, but I know that they are happening. So his agent is busy. I think it would be a great movie.

KN: It seems that writing about memory is having a moment right now. Are there novels or films that Georgi has mentioned as having an influence on his thinking?

AR: We have seen many comparisons to recent things about memory, but I think Georgi looks to work of the past and not so much to contemporary literature. Proust and In Search of Lost Time—that’s who he is dialoguing with here, and Thomas Mann with the clinics, you know; when I was reading this, I went back and reread Magic Mountain.

That said, what the author intends is neither here nor there once the book is out in the world. And I think so many of us are realizing that memory is who we are and how we make sense of ourselves. A big part of mind control is memory control. I think that was part of what the Booker liked about Time Shelter—that it is a literary exploration of themes that we need to start thinking about pretty urgently. Georgi is tapping into a collective angst.

KN: Geez, Magic Mountain is quite a tome for anyone to take on in translation prep!

AR: I know. And because I am a translator, I had to decide, which translation should I read? Because it has been translated several times and they’re different. Georgi uses some quotations from the novel and I wanted to see which one fit best for my translation. This is something that happens not infrequently when Georgi quotes from other writers; the way they have been translated into Bulgarian is not always the way they have been translated into English, and for his use of the passage it would make perfect sense in Bulgarian but not so much sense if I used the English translation! And obviously both are departures from the original German, but the Bulgarian translator was a bit fancy free with their translation…

KN: So you had to find the English translation that best captured Georgi’s reason for using it.

AR: Actually, we have some funny examples of this from Georgi’s previous book. He was joking about how it was very difficult to get access to anything to do with sex during socialism, so kids would read German underwear catalogs, or The Godfather by Mario Puzo; he said there was a scene in it that was very racy, but it turns out that the Bulgarian version was totally censored—it still had a little juice, but the English was way juicier. We had a good laugh about the watered-down version; Georgi was saying how they didn’t even get the full scene but it was still steamy for them! We actually ended up putting the censored version in the novel so that people would understand what Bulgarian kids were reading and thinking. Bouncing between different translations here and there, it can be funny to navigate those sorts of things.

KN: Okay, I went down a rabbit hole with Thomas Mann translations and learned that his first translator was an American woman named Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, and that Boris Johnson is her great-grandson!

AR: What?! I will tell Georgi, he will get a kick out of that!

KN: What are you working on now?

AR: I just finished a translation of a historical novel called The Case of Cem by a woman named Vera Mutafchieva. She is not alive any longer, unfortunately. She wrote mostly during the socialist period, and she was actually an Ottoman historian which is kind of unusual because Bulgarians have a very fraught relationship with their Ottoman past. Like most European countries, they define themselves as not-the-colonizer. But she was a well respected Ottoman historian, and a really great writer. She wrote a lot of historical novels.

She wrote The Case of Cem in the 1960s, and it’s basically about Mehmed the Conqueror, who has two sons; when he dies, there is a war to decide which son will ascend to the throne. The younger son loses and goes into exile, then becomes a pawn for several countries wanting to limit the expansion of the Ottoman Empire; this is the late 15th century, when the Ottomans were becoming a threat to Europe. Instead of uniting and smacking down the Ottomans once and for all, the Europeans end up fighting among themselves, and the Ottomans take over the Balkans essentially and make it all the way to Vienna. So the question in the novel is, what if the Europeans had actually supported Cem, whose mother is Serbian, and what if they had pushed back in a united way against the Turks?

It explores alternate histories, but it is super avant-garde for 1960s Bulgaria. It is set in a court where you don’t ever hear from Cem but the reader is part of the court panel, and you hear from all the witnesses about different aspects of what happened with Cem and why he basically wasn’t supported by the Europeans. It is a very interesting structure.

But also, there are contemporary resonances. Vera Mutafchieva’s brother defected to France during the 1960s, which made her life complicated, so this is a personal, parallel story of a young man in exile who gets caught up in political machinations that he doesn’t understand. And then there is this queer storyline: You never hear from Cem, but you do hear from a Persian poet who is Cem’s companion, and it becomes clear that they had a relationship. (How on earth this got published in 1960s Bulgaria is a mystery!)

And it has a lot to say about what is going on with Ukraine now, because what the Ottomans did is divide and conquer. They paid off the Europeans to continue fighting among themselves while they took over southeastern Europe. This is what we are seeing with Putin. He is definitely playing that game with gas and energy and grain, basically playing Europeans off each other. I think there are a lot of lessons in this book, and it is very funny as well—she is a very good psychologist, so all these different historical characters come before the court.

KN: Who is publishing it?

AR: Sandorf Passage, which is a small literary fiction press. I am excited about it. It is a really fun book, a really interesting book, and it has been translated into almost every European language, including three or four different Turkish translations. English was pretty much the only European language that it had not yet been translated into.

The author is an interesting character as well. Right before she died, she was exposed as a communist secret service informer, and she was kind of defiant about it. But, you know, her brother being a defector, she didn’t really have a choice. She herself had a hard life. Her husband eventually defected and left her alone with her two daughters. She passed away in 2009; I never met her unfortunately, but I know many people who knew her.

KN: Like the narrator of Time Shelter, you are sitting in a place where you grew up, but you are a visitor after having been away for many years. What do you find yourself noticing, thinking, feeling about the passing of time? And if Minnesota were holding a referendum to select a decade to return to, which one would you vote for?

AR: It’s funny you ask that because my dad had a bee in his bonnet about having me clear out all my old stuff from his basement, so it really has been like a time shelter—I have been going through old photos from high school and college. But, hmm, the U.S. these days is an interesting place. The level of polarization is palpable. That for sure makes me sad. I also feel the U.S. has got to get the guns figured out—we cannot go on as a society with this level of gun violence. Living in Europe, despite all my daughter’s trials and tribulations in school, at least I don’t have to worry about her getting shot.

On the other hand, I feel like I notice many things I didn’t appreciate when I lived here. Like how beautiful the lived environment is—even where we are in now, this amazing public library that is beautiful and well maintained—living in a post socialist country, there is a sense that public space is not cared for as well. Eastern Europe still has something to learn. There is a legacy of being forced into the shared, the communal . . . I don’t necessarily want to, but I find I’m turning inward to my own home, my own spaces, and I feel bad because libraries are neglected in Bulgaria. Communal spaces in general are not well funded. So I appreciate that much more now when I come back to the U.S. and spend time in these sorts of spaces.

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Interview

Poetry Detonates Dualism: An Interview with Martine Bellen

by Chris Stroffolino

Martine Bellen has been a quiet force in poetry for over two decades. Her second book, Tales of Murasaki (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Rosmarie Waldrop, and acclaimed collections from Copper Canyon and other small presses have followed; in 2015 Spuyten Duyvil released This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems. A contributing editor for Conjunctions, Bellen also has composed libretti for three operas, and her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently in the 2023 volume of The Best American Poetry.

Elizabeth Robinson writes that the poems in Bellen’s latest collection, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, $21.95), “are capable of the most agile swerves, demonstrating that a serious inquiry can sail on music and play, through myth and dream: here are the malleable, chewy realms of metamorphosis.” Fascinated by these agile swerves, I brought some of Bellen’s poems into the creative writing class I teach, and I am grateful to my students for a spirited discussion—some of their insights and questions, in fact, are incorporated into the following interview.

Chris Stroffolino: I want to begin with a comment you made in a recent interview with Indran Amirthanayagam, that you “work more from the surreal than from myth.” I feel the first poem in An Anatomy of Curiosity, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” works through a Hollywood mythology, wending beyond that and crescendoing to a dream sphere:

You and I are in the body bag, sleeping beside
a volcano that vibrates and reaches up us
like a fist through a throat, signaling
to a lifeguard to swim across ages
and currents, through celestial meridians,
toward our swirling sound bridge,
beautiful mind, plenary weave, a coat of every note.

While the sinuous flowing music is transporting, I am also struck by the peril, and I wonder if the prayer to the lifeguard is answered. Do you want to say anything more about myth and surrealism in this poem, or elsewhere in your work?

Martine Bellen: A number of things drew me to the movie Bad Times at the El Royale. In it, nothing is what it seems and no one is who they say they are, so some of the poem is about washing away who we pretend to be or think we are. Because of this, detergents and washing machines play a part, though as you suggest, the last section of the poem turns menacing and violent—the soundtrack switches. This happens to me often in dreams; suddenly, the scene pivots and I’m alone and have lost my ability to speak. So in An Anatomy of Curiosity, the loss of voice that can happen when you’re in danger and can’t call out for help is a strand woven into the design. One can have the experience of being unable to reach the bridge between self and others.

What I meant in the conversation with Indran is that myths, being ancient, shared belief systems, have bridges and gates, and my poems roam the mythic landscape while quilting (in the surrealist sense of juxtaposition) “our swirling sound bridge, / beautiful mind, plenary weave, a coat of every note.”

CS: As I reread the poem in light of your response, I notice “bridges” can be a noun (common and proper, since Jeff Bridges is in the film) and a verb, and I feel the gated community of Bill Gates as well—your imagining’s sudsy synesthesia indeed washes the language. I also love that you bring your Zen Buddhist practice into this capacious trans-denominational quilting while you roam; the rhythmic alliterative flow of variations on the word “prayer” in “Deafening Prayer” is an especially joyful example. How did this come about?

MB: I started “Deafening Prayer” around Election Day, when a radio announcer said that voting is praying. I hadn’t thought of voting that way before, but it’s so true: We send out a petition for who we wish will win the race in the same way we pray for anything we want. Then I asked myself, What isn’t praying?—I realized that everything is a prayer. From there, a fragmented inverted list poem commenced.

Also, since you mention both Bill Gates and Buddhism: While working on this book, I was sitting with koans, those riddles/questions in Zen practice that a meditator focuses on (a popular koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”). Koans are used to free one from dualistic thinking, the idea being that the experiential is unimpeded by the limits of language, but when we attempt to describe experience in language, we crash onto dualistic Earth.

Poetry is, I think, a type of language that can detonate dualism. And Zen priests and practitioners have a long history of writing poetry. In fact, anthologies of koans are structured with the koan, a short commentary, and finally a capping poem, which is the experiential insight. Most of the koans I was sitting with when working on An Anatomy of Curiosity are from The Gateless Gate, a collection of forty-eight koans compiled in the 13th century; when meditating, “gates” or barriers are passed through and the meditator moves on to the next one. So throughout An Anatomy of Curiosity, I have included various “gates” (though not Bill)—for instance, in “Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird” I write, “‘Going up,’ elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate” (remember old-school elevator gates?) and in “Monkey and Spirit Bird Triptych,” “It’s all about where you drop the garden gate” (that’s Miles Davis’s music space). So yes—bridges and gates are the infrastructure of some of the poems, connecting our island delusion.

CS: I do remember those elevators, and I definitely see your gates and bridges working in many ways to pass through barriers of dualistic thinking and create connections. In this light, I’d like to look at “Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird” with you in more depth:

            “Going up,” elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate.
“Going down,” is chanted at the far end of the elevator bank,
                                    the river bank,
                                                banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
                                    from limbs to fins.

This short stanza brings so much into play: in the first line we sense the confinement of the elevator (symbol of progress, the ego at the wheel?), though the second line feels like a yin to its yang, and taken together with the first can possibly do “koan work”; its passive voice and its contrast of chant with chime suggests to me that “what goes up must come down” but also implies an echoing. Then the next five lines dance away from the confinement of the “banks,” taking on a chthonic (rather than economic) connotation. The language also suggests multi-directional transport, both “up” and “down” stream, as if a “gateless gate,” or at least a wider sense of subjectivity, emerges. The poem continues:

In this myth, you want nothing more
than to land in a fully stocked big-box stationary store,
but the mall is poorly lit, and portals lead to floors
of canopied woods before deforestation and paper mills.

At first, this desiring “you” (inside the elevator that’s become a portal) seems disappointed or anxious, implying perhaps the death of our civilization, but also the loss of time-space coordinates—there’s no stationary place to land—but, in the next stanza, there’s an opening as myths mingle:

Nymphs flaunt their good fortune on escalators to faux fountains,
satyrs squeeze into try-on rooms,
whispering oaks, in maquillage, with roots of skulls and spine.

You cap it off with a shorter-lined lyric that, among other things, has me thinking about “countenance”:

The structure’s columns
mirrored
sartorial
wear
your countenance
bear
the ceiling
conceal the celestial, the cerulean.

To sum up: I wonder if this poem is structured like the koan anthologies you mentioned: koan, commentary, and then the capping “experiential insight.”

MB: Let me backtrack a bit to your reading of the lines

the river bank,
banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
from limbs to fins.

as multi-directional transport—I love your sense of how the words interconnect and sound. I was also attempting to wake up the positive devolution we can experience as we fall back on our full selves, shelves of selves (folded in The Gap) in which there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous—from limbs to fins, it’s all there.

Additionally, I’m very fond of your reading of the elevator as portal or time transport to our department store, a shared, common, ridiculous, fairy tale space in which it’s so easy to get lost (and is indeed never stationary). I believe those who design department stores intend for us to lose ourselves—personally, I have a hard time breathing when I’m in one. The poem “Mother Hubbard” also wends its way through a department store. And again, one gets lost.

CS: It’s interesting that both the poems you mentioned that include gates appear in the final section of the book: “Dream-Mares, Glue Traps, and Other Dark Matter.” When reading that title, it’s hard not to think of horses being made into glue as well as bridges becoming walls. What can you tell us about this section of An Anatomy of Curiosity?

MB: The book’s third section includes hauntings and threats. Readers might know a ’60s TV show called Lost in Space in which the family robot, when confronted with potential peril, would call out “Danger, Will Robinson!” The poems in “Dream-Mares, Glue Traps, and Other Dark Matter” don’t all have present dangers, but there is always something lurking—and yes, in these poems, horse glue might mucilage the broken lines. For example, in “Monkey and Spirit Bird Triptych,” spry spirit birds turn rogue and “suck out Monkey’s lifesaver hole”; in “Confession,” poetry itself devolves into protolanguage, and in the absence of language, transforms into a kiss—though the kiss is the one that revives Psyche.

CS: What you call “positive devolution” abounds in “Confession,” a virtuoso seven-page meta-poem in which I find, to borrow another of your phrases, “nothing lacking and nothing superfluous.” I’m especially amazed by its shape and narrative structure as it wends its way from crisis to quest to crisis to prayer to an encounter with the goddess Nyx before that “prodigal // Kiss.” Can you say anything more about the structure?

MB: Thanks, I’m so pleased you experienced that poem as tight and full also, as the tone is more conversational than most of my poetry. I tend not to write narrative poems, and not to write short-lined poems that proceed straight down a page, so I was allowing myself to explore a new field when writing this. Although the protagonist of the poem, Poem, is said to be losing it—and maybe in these dark days we’re living through, poetry is thought to have lost it—its breath is sustained, and even after the kiss, the breath doesn’t end with a period (nor does the poem). The short enjambed lines are an homage to sustained breath.

CS: I love the way you harmonize narrative and lyric impulses. On one hand, the reader gets empathetically involved with the drama of the inadequate, lost poem—searching for subject matter to give it direction so it can become a sacrificial victim in Nyx’s ritual—it’s a fructifying meta-myth with suspense and foreshadowing. On the other hand, the sustained breath of the short lines from the beginning (even in polysyllabic phrases like, “a born zigzagger, / topographically agnostic”) belies the narrative, or presages it dying into the lyric now.

MB: The lyric impulse, which is the final skeletal thread, definitely outlives the narrative one. Close to the end of the poem, as you note, everything devolves. To signal the loss of the narrative, there’s a quick sketch of the Canova sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss—which my husband, James Graham, kindly drew—that’s referenced in the poem.

CS: This is a brilliant and beautiful collaboration with your husband. In his sketch of the sculpture, Cupid’s face and body do not seem to be as defined as Psyche’s, which seems more muscular and active in the moment of embrace, but his wings evoke pillars of rope. Earlier in the poem, you had introduced the sculpture as a “wingéd marble man / revealed before a beauty / spiked into deathlike sleep.” At first, I had no idea this “beauty” was meant to be Psyche. Is the sketch meant to enhance the verbal description of the sculpture?

MB: I refer to Psyche as “beauty” since Psyche’s troubles arise because of her beauty. It’s great you see Psyche as active, as she is a journeyer in all her states; nevertheless, at this very moment Canova captures, Psyche is frozen because her curiosity, her inability to resist temptation, has gotten the best of her, yet again. The word “spiked” suspends the action as the last line of the stanza—that word is especially nuanced, waiting for viewers, listeners, readers to awaken and endow animation on Psyche, for Poem is nothing without its audience.

CS: Yes, there’s so much in these three lines, even the connotations of “spiked” from drunkenness to drug needles to violence—it’s as if, in order to revive Psyche, James’s sketch is killing the personified poem (or at least its narrative).

MB: Killing or freeing. When we’re freed from our stories, Psyche is finally immortal.

Once the poem lets loose its narrative, it begins to wind down, the wind and breath set free:

in the poem
in the palace
with its storehouse
of candelabras
and crystal vases

is where all our pictures and sounds are stockpiled, from our lifetimes and perhaps also the karma of our ancestors and relatives, and even miscellanea from the gothic castle/landscape of Coleridge’s “Christabel.”

CS: Gothic, yes, as Nyx provides the necessary atmosphere, amniotic fluid for this poem in which miscellanea can become:

giant tigresses
romping through
narrow
atriums
into a ventricle of the heart

Although Psyche and Cupid are not as foregrounded in “Confession” as Nyx is, but more in the wings (as it were), they take center stage in the following poem, “An Anatomy of Curiosity.”

MB: The story of Cupid and Psyche is one I have been drawn to from a young age, and with “Confession” and “An Anatomy of Curiosity,” I wanted to get inside the pleasure of that story. I loved the intimacy of Robert Duncan’s writing on Cupid and Psyche in The H.D. Book and, like him, I wanted to extend my experience with it. I’ve always thought of it as a hybrid fairytale/myth, but I’m not sure where or how I first heard the story; it was first written down by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, but I surely didn’t read that rendition until college. What caught me is how Psyche is reminded to repress her curiosity, and when she doesn’t, the story gets especially exciting: she spills wax on her beautiful lover, flies too close to the sun.

CS: I love the way you introduce the myth in Chapter One of “An Anatomy of Curiosity,” while Chapter Two brings into play a more modern myth, as Psyche becomes an object of the sublimated curiosity of “scientific analysis.” The contrast between narrative and sustained breath you noted in “Confession” is similar to that of the figures of the Detective and Psychic here, as you move beyond antithesis to a syncretic joining of the discourse of Freudian “drives” with mythopoesis: “Hemispheres of land beneath a surface of chaos, Chronos.”

MB: The dualities we discussed earlier are echoed in “An Anatomy of Curiosity.” In Chapter Two, the deducing Detective (and don’t forget Oedipus Rex, which inspired Freud, is maybe our first detective story, or at least an early one) and Psyche/Psychic/Soul are dichotomous spirits in that mysterious “black box of the brain,” and we know Psyche and Pandora couldn’t resist boxes.

CS: And in Chapter Seven, as “questions arise from the stem of the body” and Psyche lights the candle that scares Desire away, language becomes as musical as the unheard music it’s ostensibly about:

Think of a dream seamstress, a songster, a siren,
            A shore breeze with wavy tresses
       Bowling out the beaks of pipers,
                 The hollow low notes that dip on the concave clavicle,
                                                            Wending viola strings.
       Think of a pattern cutter, a dreamstress,
                              Tree witness and earlobe globes
Nothing permitted, permanent
The writhen octopus
Or octave written in wind.

Meanwhile, I wonder about the connotations, the tone, of “Nothing permitted, permanent.” At first, I feel sadness and despair here, but then I sense a double meaning of “nothing” as a presence, as if the voice is not merely lamenting but also signaling and singing the immortality of Psyche, or at least celebrating music freed from the page, even if it’s transient and unpermitted—the sublime gospel of the blues. It also recalls the first line of the book: “I left my permission slip in a past.” Forever changes, permission slips (as if it’s revealed to be merely administrative). Was this Da Capo movement intentional when considering the structure of the book? Can the book’s last line, “Off an eyeblink in a flame wink” be a koan?

MB: Those words “Off an eyeblink in a flame wink” appear at the end of the book’s final poem, which is printed in German (I wrote the poem in English and Hans Jürgen Balmes translated it into German). So if one were dreaming through this life and this book, and this dream is in a language which one sometimes understands and sometimes doesn’t, and one hears/reads Flamme winkt der Luft and then in a flame wink, one might find oneself suspended between language, in the marvelous still, in the pause of poetry.

Interview

The Have-Not Mystery: An Interview with Jim Feast

by John Wisniewski

Jim Feast is the author of several collections of poetry and a founding member of the Unbearables, an action-oriented literary group based in New York City that has also produced several anthologies, including From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream (Autonomedia, 2017). Feast has edited seven books by Ralph Nader and worked with legendary publisher Barney Rosset on his autobiography. His new novel Karl Marx Private Eye (PM Press, $16.95) pairs a teenage Sherlock Holmes with Marx and his daughter Eleanor as they work to solve a series of murders. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Nhi Chung.

John Wisniewski: Why did you want to write a mystery with Karl Marx as the main character?

Jim Feast: I can give the question two answers, since the book was done twice. In 1985, I finished a version of the book and gave it to agent Susan Protter, who tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers. Thirty years later, I rewrote the book from scratch.

I went to college in Chicago in the 1970s, which suggests why I first gravitated to making Marx a protagonist. In this time of campus upheaval over civil rights and the Vietnam War, many were consulting Marx and Bakunin for answers. Moreover, many of Chicago’s literary giants were political activists, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Upton Sinclair, if not outright Communist Party members, like Richard Wright and James T. Farrell. On top of that, my poet friend Jerome Sala introduced me into the Boho circle around painter Lady Bunny, which included activists like Eddie Balchowsky, who had lost an arm in the Spanish Civil War and kept alive memories of previous anti-rightist battles.

My wife, Nhi Chung, and I agreed that after we quit working, we would finish long-shelved literary projects. Once retirement came, she wrote her memoir Among the Boat People, about her escape from Vietnam and how she eventually reconciled herself to the past. After her book was published, I told her, “Now I’ll write my Vietnam novel.”

That’s only metaphorically true, in the sense that as her book deals with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, my mystery turns on the aftermath of the 1871 fall of the Paris Commune. The Commune occurred when there was a temporary working-class takeover of the city, which ended in a bloodbath. While Marx is labelled as one who believed in the inevitable coming of a Communist society, after the Paris defeat, he lost much of his optimism about historical progress and began to entertain Russian anarchist ideas—including, as his collaborator Engels put it, the idea that once the communist revolution was accomplished, humans might drop industrialization and return to societies practicing the mutual aid of the Russian mir.

JW: That’s all fascinating. And what inspired you to write this novel as a mystery?

JF: Having worked as a union organizer in Chicago and a housing organizer on New York City’s Lower East Side, I came to see the world as divided between haves and have-nots. I was attracted to American authors writing between the wars, such as Katherine Anne Porter and Claude McKay, who crafted a literature using the principles of the have-nots. While they wrote serious literature, I wondered whether their principles could be applied to genre fiction.

First principle: It is a sociological truism that the elite believe in individualism, in lone heroes like Phillip Marlowe, while the lower classes believe in collectivism, in the solidarity and group effort found, for instance, in unions, progressive churches, and feminist consciousness-raising circles. So, as I saw it, a have-not mystery must allow its detectives to be a collective—a bunch of characters conferring, making individual moves, and conferring again.

Second principle: Underclass literature must seize the themes, characters and plots presented by the elite and reconfigure them with mischievous vitality. To think of musical examples, between the wars, groups under the batons of Henderson, Ellington, and Chicago’s own Jimmie Noone took the stale tunes of Tin Pan Alley and remade them as vehicles for rollicking, free-spirited, collective improvisation. That’s something I think can also be worked through in genre literature.

In KMPE, I remake the figure of Sherlock Holmes, who in Doyle is an errant reactionary. As an example of this, remember that in the final Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, Holmes hunts down a secret society who come to England for revenge on a retired Pinkerton agent who exposed a wicked U.S. labor union, one Doyle modeled on the Molly McGuires. Here Holmes adopts the common (and self-serving) conservative idea that labor unions are nothing but conspiracies devised to fleece the workers and blackmail honest employers. Further, as the poststructuralist Catherine Belsey noted in Critical Practice (Routledge, 2002), Holmes has a major blind spot around women, who to him are indecipherable enigmas even his scientific method can’t fathom. Again, Holmes takes up the conservative stereotype of women as mysterious beings. So in my book, Holmes is reconfigured as a coltish youth who is led by Eleanor Marx to see the errors in the conservative stereotypes affixed to socialism and women.

JW: Who are some of your favorite authors and poets?

JF: The third principle of have-not genre fiction was developed to perfection by my favorite author, Chester Himes. In his mysteries, Himes shows that you find the solutions to crimes not by chasing individual villains but by examining social movements, which are the real motor forces of history. In Cotton Comes to Harlem (Putnam, 1965), for instance, there are two counterposed movements: a group led by Black minister Reverend Deke O’Malley calling for Black Harlemites to return to Africa, and the Back to the Southland group led by white Kentucky colonel Robert Calhoun, who urges the same people to return to cotton plantations where, he claims, conditions have miraculously improved. It is by delving into these movements that Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones break the case. In KMPE, solving the crime involves studying the Serbian independence movement and the actions of a group of displaced Communards.

Of course, you might ask: What’s the point of trying to refashion genres in a way that embodies have-not values? If as a working conjecture, we say that in the future the human world doesn’t disappear in an ecological collapse, the only alternative is mass democratization, which includes in its sweep family relations, cooperative workplaces and government. As Jane Addams puts it, “In a democratic society nothing can be achieved save through the masses of people.”

While such a society is being born, writers can contribute to it by making clear its guiding principles. This is a collective task in which multiple writers in multiple groupings are engaged. I might mention, for instance, those associated with PM Press, such as Michael Moorcock, Cara Hoffman, Allan Kausch, Marge Piercy, and Jonathan Lethem; those connected to Fifth Estate magazine, such as Sylvia Kasdan, Peter Werbe, Jack Bratich, and the late Peter Lamborn Wilson; writers in the Chicago Surrealist group such as Penelope Rosemont, Nancy Joyce Peters, and the late Jayne Cortez and Franklin Rosemont; or those associated with the group with which I am affiliated, the Unbearables, which includes such creators as Bonny Finberg, Yuko Otomo, Carl Watson, Wanda Phipps, Ron Kolm, Jose Padua, Kevin Riordan, and Carol Wierzbicki. These writers are working out a literature that upholds the principles of the have-nots, which include collectivism, a play with and traducing of desiccated elite symbols, tropes and rhythms, and the creating of artistic landscapes governed by the play of social movements.

JW: You wrote a collection of love poems to your wife, Nhi Chung. What was that like to write?

JF: I met Nhi in the early 1980s. For years, I had been slowly and laboriously producing poetry, but now, something new: I would be walking down the street when suddenly, a complete poem about Nhi would appear in my mind. These weren’t love poems. How could they be when we were both married to other people? However, two years after we met, we had broken up with our spouses and were living together as we are today.

Nhi, who had come as an immigrant from Southeast Asia in 1980, knew little of American culture, but I knew even less about the Chinese world. Chinese culture (or better, Cantonese culture), as far as Nhi is representative, is more sensual than American culture. It’s something I found in the deftness, precision, and fluidity of Nhi’s gestures, which appeared so graphically when she cleared away our living room furniture to practice tai chi. And it was in the music of the Cantonese language with its nine tones. To my mind, when Nhi speaks English, she has a complexity of emotional nuance in her voice that an English-only speaker like myself (without the tonal background) cannot achieve.

It wasn’t only Nhi that was so loveable; so also were aspects of Chinese culture she introduced me to. In New York City’s Chinatown in the 1980s and ’90s, there were four theaters showing Hong Kong films, which we attended almost every week. The best HK film noirs—none of which played in American cinemas—had a tartness and a view of corruption that was unflinching and invigorating. Take Arrest the Restless: A cop brings in a man who has brutally killed a prostitute. The police chief calls him to his office for a dressing down. “How dare you arrest the son of one of HK’s leading tycoons?” The killer is released, and the cop demoted. And there was a blinding originality in plotting. In Web of Deception, a woman is shot and it is thought killed. The killer doesn’t know the dead woman had a twin sister who just got out of prison and now takes on the dead woman’s role in a nail-biting masquerade.

It was the hard-nosed suspicion of authority and exuberant creativity in this HK noir that curved my writing toward crime fiction. As it was Nhi’s cosmopolitanism (evident in her speaking four languages), her questing intelligence, open-hearted generosity, and the abiding grace of her movements and conversation that has made our shared life so many-sided and adventure-tinged.

JW: Does writing come easily to you?

JF: Writing was difficult for me when I was starting out, but in the 1980s, Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press hired me to ghostwrite health and political books. Eventually I had ten under my belt, written to deadline, and I could pound out pages like the classic science fiction authors.

I was also editing. The most interesting assignment I had was helping Barney Rosset with his autobiography. Unfortunately for the speed of the project, Rosset was easily dissatisfied. After we’d spent the day painstakingly finishing a chapter, he’d get up in the middle of night and start revising, and when I came back the next day, he had thrown out all we had done. I felt like I was in The Odyssey, working for Penelope.

JW: Could you tell us about Help Yourself (Autonomedia, 2002) and Cool My Daisy (Appearances, 1998)?

JF: Help Yourself is an anthology of writings by the Unbearables literary group, which I edited with Ron Kolm and Alfred Vitale. Cool My Daisy is a tale I wrote about Rollo Whitehead, who is one of the imaginary characters, such as Tess Ventricle, Yoko Snapple, and Man Mountain McBrain, that the Unbearables created as fake, rowdy precursors.

Our group was founded in the late 1980s to battle literary stuffed shirts and engage in the type of madcap adventures recommended by one of our founders, Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his book T.A.Z. (Autonomedia, 1991). As an example of the former, we protested against the commodification of the Beats at the 1995 NYU Kerouac Conference, offering an alternative tour to the pricey one given by the college in which we promised, as Sparrow put it, ”to show you where Jack Kerouac bought his kitty litter.” As part of that protest, we held a Kerouac impersonator contest, which drew a lot of what bart plantenga called “wannabeats,” who found that to compete, they not only had to read a heartfelt poem, but also panhandle the audience in good old Beat fashion.

As to the latter, for ten years, led by Tsuarah Litzky, we did September readings with an erotic orientation on the Brooklyn Bridge, not in a bunch but spread out over the span, reading simultaneously, presenting an aural topography to passersby. In another event, this one organized by artist Shalom, rooted in the fact that we thought writers couldn’t appreciate visual art unless it was explained in words, Unbearable writers were blindfolded and led around the Whitney Museum while their artist guides described what they saw—that is, until we were booted out by security guards.

Our readings could take unusual tacks. In our séance reading, complete with a smoke machine, we channeled the spirits of dead authors. Lorraine Schein evoked Sylvia Plath while wearing a cardboard stove on her head. Tuli Kupferberg appeared as Karl Marx from beyond the grave. (The whole session can be found in Joe Maynard’s Beet Magazine, issue 9).

At our Unbearables initiation reading, we claimed aspirants, following in the footsteps of our imagined auto mechanic founder Whitehead, were stripped naked and put in a locked room with a pen, paper, a ball peen hammer, and a dented fender. At dawn, they had to emerge with a reconditioned fender and a poetic masterpiece. At the night’s high point, Sharon Mesmer stood on stage, swinging a censor and reciting the sacred syllables, “A, E, I, O, U” while initiate Jose Padua, who has since become a very moderate drinker but who that evening had a few too many, lay asleep on the stage floor. Classic Unbearables scene.

JW: Any future plans and projects, Jim?

JF: I have published two volumes of a trilogy about a literary group who get involved in solving mysteries—Neo Phobe and Long Day, Counting Tomorrow, both from Autonomedia—so I hope to do volume three. Working with new members Jason Gallagher and Gabriel Don, we revived the Brooklyn Bridge reading for one try. I wish we could do it again. Alfred Vitale caught the spirit of the event in a flyer: “Present this to any of the Unbearables reading on the bridge. Upon seeing this page, they will psychically shoot a burst of lust into your soul … you are then requested to embody that lust for the remainder of our trip across. Dance wildly around the walkway with strangers. Sing love songs to anyone … Run off the bridge streaking the parking lot at City Hall shouting, ‘I am the walrus’ or ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ Have an erotic time.”

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