Describe yourself as a poet in three words: I resist this
What is your chief misery as a poet: I feel I have locked myself into writing about the same subject matter—trauma—for years. I thought that perhaps I only recently started writing about this, but then yesterday I had to put my Google Docs in alphabetical order to find something I was working on and, to my chagrin, discovered somehow all these (bad) poems from 2008 and 2009 were there; I was talking about it then, in florid empty words yes, in awkward raiments, in all this failed wizardry. But I could say “dragged into a room” amidst that blasted diction. I was thinking about it then but I didn’t have a clear enough language yet. There is this fear that if suddenly the curse of trauma left my head, so too would the spell of my work. The irony that the central ballast for my work is actually the terrible actions irrevocably done to me without control or thinking is certainly chief in my mind, and the paradox trembles under my vertebrae. This shitty semaphore of mind/body interruption. I think about this about 700 times a day, and still I write the matter. I trap it under the same shitty bowl. I twirl the pest around in my hands and decide this will be the pest to undo all my neurological tangles, if only I look at it from a different angle, if I only this time I notice its eyes. I capture it in a different form, with a different understanding, this time underscoring forgiveness, and I let the damn thing go. Other times I burn it in a pot to soot. I wake up with a different feeling, and I think this feeling will bring me succor until I touch my body and remember again that the curse isn’t memory anymore—it’s iterated itself into the skin, and the days are just a seam I have to push myself against to endure the same thinking differently. How I fixate on the past as I attempt to wriggle myself into everyday tedium, when identity becomes remainder in this pendulous sucking, all this plops down into the rendered fat I call my process. I’m sick of it; I keep going with the sick of it.
What do you appreciate the most in a poem: The inarticulate scream of my limbs when I read something outrageous. Everything is body-central. Let me read you this line from a book I’ve just started by Gale Marie Thompson called Soldier On, because it is the first book next to me as I type to you and I like proxy referencing: “It’s easy to understand this quest for new pasture. / A long migration through ceramic French doors.” I’m still a sucker for prosody, I can’t help but love the chains of structure. But when the music syncs with a centralizing logic, it breaks my heart. I love how, in a poem, the precision of structure is sometimes the kill-switch needed for a systemic meltdown. I love dual machinations. I love how we can spell ruin and pain and joy by moving words around on a page an exact or inexact way. Emily Dickinson says there’s a certain slant of light that oppresses, and of course duh that is the impact of a line (but and also always death too).
At the same time, I love when a poem declines discipline in favor of conceptual dismantling. Not capital ‘c’ conceptualism—we are learning quickly that capital ‘c’ conceptualism has a built-in white supremacy. I am not speaking of that, but of how concept assumes a failure over the poem, and presides over that failure. A wobbly failing, an anguished (mis)guidance. Think Dodie Bellamy or Alice Notley or Bhanu Kapil. Language is the salvo necessary to commit to a failure landscape of their choosing. These are the best poems in my mind, poems that invigor a new form of worshipping over place, over present. One archaic usage of “weird,” in fact, is worship, and so there lies innovation. This is a writing somatic and bright and unbuckling. I look up from their books and see a world of devastated materials. It’s the closest I get to the sublime.
If not a poet, what would you be?: I used to dance and loved it for a moment until my body became the tool and spectacle simultaneously. Isn’t that always a woman’s dance?, so I left. I used to play guitar and loved it until I found I could understand myself better in written form. My first love was painting and I painted and painted and painted, but I painted metaphors and I found that in order to explain my paintings, I had to write explanations and demand that my visuals be read. I started school as a journalism major. I didn’t really want any part of journalism but the pastiche of journalism: a notepad, glasses, herringbone jacket, an inexhaustible appetite for new information. I dreamed of being a math genius. I come from a family of physicists, and I wanted to impart formulas over these everyday miracles to explain to the world that when a pen drops, we’re witness to a miracle. It is a miracle that a pen and a car can be dropped from the same height and land at the same time on the same surface; that gravity is not dependent on weight, only resistance. I spent a lot of time dreaming about the things I would do that aren’t poetry, but when I think of these things I would do that aren’t poetry, they sublimate eventually into poetry from their thingyness.
In terms of what I’ve actually amounted to that is not poetry, I write essays now, so I suppose I am also an essayist, which means I am always in the throes of attempt. In my poems I interact with trauma in such a way as to welcome others to think about their traumas, and in certain ways, this makes me feel like a counselor. I would welcome that at any point, and I don’t know if that is outside poetry, but I would like to build a safehouse for anyone who has ever been ripped open. I’m an editor of a literary magazine, so that is not poetry but it means I am always chewing on poetry. I handle ebooks all day at my dayjob and that is also not poetry. But HTML coding is a means of translating intention into a blank space to form text, and it is code that asks that blank space for certain order. I don’t think that’s outside poetry either. I think HTML coding is closer to poetry than painting or short stories get. <span> </span>
Who is your poetry hero and why?: I only get one? Fine. Claudia Rankine was the first poet who blew the gasket out of what a poetry collection could do. We call poetry a collection of poems because we seem to assume that the collection is just that—an aggregate of disparate poems that form a singular intelligence when placed back to back. Publishers don’t like poetry collections because they are not marketable, because they resist paraphrase when the rest of the civilization of literature enlists paraphrase. I don’t call Rankine’s books collections—they are not collections. They are methods and arguments that demand refutation on system, place, and people. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely unshackled me from this sense that a poem is up to delicate mischief. Fuck that. It isn’t delicate mischief what she’s doing, it’s a pummeling of compassion and spit and blame and relinquishing. The poem is up to rupture, exploding the surface, decentralizing all the worst parts of governance, systems, institutions. I have been thinking about the phrase “momentary lapse of happily” from her first book for what feels like a century. When Citizen came out, I cried before I even received it, so badly did this country need repair when it could do nothing but fuck itself over like nobody could see them there doing the horrible fucking. This country needs to be sutured shut. We’ve all been walking sore, with a limp, as we glimpse the decades before this moment, and the mightful decades after. Regardless, she has always been a poet of existence for me. The necessary madness in being alive. If I have language for what that means, it’s solely due to her.
What is your idea of happiness?: lol
What is your present state of mind?: Whenever I write about myself in any capacity, I get the nagging sense that I am in fact completely moronic. In the play, The Aliens, by Annie Baker, there’s this moment where the punk-bereft teen denizen goes into hysterics over someone’s death and wants to erase the meaning of that death by means of repeating a word until all context of everything whited out. He chose the word, “ladder.” Ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder. It goes on that way for about five minutes, his throat drying and stumbling and tripping over the forced exhaustive progression of the word on the page in the script. I guess what I mean is that I feel like I have just said ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder a thousand times to fill in space. I suppose I am worried about the very idea of substance, and if ever I can dig into my own brain-gravy for that substance. And I suppose worry is always how I feel.
I think about death as much as I think about trauma. The other day I watched an animated movie by Don Hertzfeldt called It’s Such a Beautiful Day and the narrator, in all his Herzogian doom-talk, breaks down the terror of life in the face of death. I had to pause the movie and cry loudly and violently for ten minutes. Big shaking tears. I still am crying to recall it. Later I would joke with friends at a bar that I cried over a cartoon about death and my friends would laugh and say “aw you’re such a poet.” I wonder how ridiculous it is to cry over something so maddeningly unknown and inevitable. There is nothing in this world like death, nowhere the mind can go to make complete sense of that ongoing erasure. I think I would like to laugh too about this, because it is hysterical. It’s as hysterical as shredding your throat to say ladder until the proscenium shutters and the viewers want to do anything but call what they’re witnessing a spectacle.
I think, too, this is an interesting question to ask because I tend to effusively embed my present mind into every bit of written language. We all do this, and it’s important. So this question serves to dip into that thick greasepit of despair and pull out the exact language. Today: I have sat on a green pilates ball which serves as my work ball at my 9-5 all day. I left once to get a kale salad. I regret all my dietary choices, and reget again how my work asks that I stay stationary. I was accepted into a prestigious residency this morning and I don’t know if I’ll be able to go because my work asks that I stay stationary. Due to this conflict I feel I have betrayed a role, and this sense of betrayal has curtailed what joy I might have felt about this acceptance. I am thinking about what it means to live between these roles, the mask I put on to be a corporate employee and the mask I put on to hustle my poetry life. Is either more earnest? I moonlight as a poet and editor, but all I want to do is say fuck the moon fuck the day and its wages, I want to live on this planet and make my art until my body gives out beneath me. I was so moved to read and write a response to a poem by Carrie Lorig in which she declares that she would die for poetry. Me too. I’m going to die for poetry no matter what. I want to write during the day for once. I want to walk into a cafe on a Tuesday and say I’m working on my art I’ll take that to stay and absorb all the day’s caffeine there. I have done ten reports over the course of this interview and proofread five ebooks. I get outraged so often about time, its uses and my material insistence over those uses. I’m about to leave work so I can stretch my body out on a yoga mat and then I’m going to have the rest of the night to work on a review that is due in two days. Shit is fraught but I’m a hustler. Still die, says Anne Carson.
Your favorite poem, ever: Tied: “I Cannot Live With You…” by Emily Dickinson and “Carrion Comforts” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Also, that’s a mean question.
Read Natalie’s poetry at Jellyfish
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