“Nothing is transcendent.”
A Conversation Between Poets Monica McClure and Josef Kaplan
To live sensitively in 2016, on or offline, is often to be brutalized. As Josef Kaplan, the author of Poem Without Suffering says below, “I think we can both agree that life as currently available to huge numbers of people on this planet is a nightmare.” Kaplan’s Poem Without Suffering takes on the US American reality of public shootings and the subsequent collective grief, subjecting it to investigation through a moving book length poem. In this conversation he talks with Monica McClure, author of the acclaimed book of poems Tender Data.
Their conversation sent me back to another text, Bifo Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Berardi concludes his intro to the book by writing, “Now, the task at hand is to map the wasteland where social imagination has been frozen and submitted to the recombinant corporate imaginary. Only from this cartography can we move forward to discover a new form of activity which, by replacing Art, politics, and therapy with a process of re-activation of sensibility, might help humankind to recognize itself again.”
What follows is a dense conversation about the political psychosphere, the arc of life, and the so-called “risks” involved with writing (Spoiler alert: the only risk is of fucking it up).“
MONICA MCCLURE: I keep thinking about how Poem Without Suffering deals with a sequence of events in a backward and sometimes simultaneous manner. The last part of the book describes birth—with several pages spent on the outward passage through the liminal space between amniotic and conscious existence. And the beginning of the book is about abrupt, untimely deaths that show lives stalled out before they’ve even really started. In some ways the book is like a wind-up toy: you crank it backward to move forward. Even the fricatives sputter like the jagged movement of a mechanical soldier. In other ways, the poem spins its wheels in the ditch.
What interests me about the last part of the book is the conspicuous absence of choice in the matter of being born, especially given the shadow of murder-by-speeding bullet cast in the first few lines ("To have it happen, / but to have it not / be considered / tragedy…”) of Poem Without Suffering. Want to talk about the backward qualities of the poem?
JOSEF KAPLAN: My hope was that it could be a book that actually proceeds through contradiction. I thought the way its narrative would move forward would be through these “impossible” structural gestures, kind of like a trick or illusion. So, yeah, exactly: it starts at the end, with a death, and finishes at the beginning, with a birth—but the way we get there isn’t a reversal. Time doesn’t move backward. We’re always moving forward, but we end up somehow behind where we began.
Also it’s nearly a hundred pages, but because of the shortness of its lines it reads quite fast. It’s a long poem about a brief moment (a bullet being fired out of a gun) that gets described in this slow, expansive way that’s simultaneously experienced very quickly. It’s disorienting, which maybe speaks to how agency gets looked at in the work, where so much of it is described within a chaotic, digressive network of effects.
It actually reminds me of Tender Data. There’s a very well rendered tension in that book where you have voices struggling to articulate some sense of humanity or control in the face of an environment that constantly demands the forfeiture of both. But in your poems that forfeiture doesn’t just happen at the hands of overt repression, it also happens at the hands of pleasure. There are many horrible things about how we live that we enjoy, actually, because enjoyment can be inconsistent and furtive, but also because this world doesn’t just blackmail us with death or imprisonment or humiliation, it also blackmails us with delight. And that is terrifying. The things we love are in effect one way we are held in misery.
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