DuPlessis’ s poems are exploratory, analytical, and reflective, and as capacious as the most compelling essay. And her essays, however rigorously argued, dart like poetry, urgent, playful, polyvocal, and unafraid of the occasional burst of feeling.
As a poet, DuPlessis is perhaps best known for the long poem sequence Drafts, written over the course of twenty years, begun in 1986 and stopped in 2012.
Reading the entirety of Drafts—across five publications—is to be dazzled by the range of forms and voices. While the poetic sequence includes close, often impassioned, readings of literature, philosophy, and political theory, its most pressing engagement is with the history of the lyric, asking what, and how, it means to be a woman and poet at work for years on a long poem, motivated by “desire to criticize and undermine the lyric, to wring its ideology out, and to envelope it in the largeness of another practice.”
Throughout Drafts, DuPlessis draws attention to the act of writing and its materiality—paper, page, ink, mark, alphabet. While the sequence remains present to writing-as-event, it also folds back on itself, some poems returning to, and commenting on, earlier poems in the sequence. This recursive movement of Drafts is characterized by DuPlessis as midrash-like, with its “doubled and redoubled commentary, poetry with its own gloss built in.”
Since the completion of Drafts, DuPlessis’ s many projects have included book-length visual collage-poems, such as Graphic Novella (Xexoxial Editions, 2015), Numbers (Materialist Press, 2018), and Life in Handkerchiefs (2017, unpublished). In this interview, DuPlessis discusses the status of the visual in her work and the role collage has played in her writing process.
—Eva Heisler
As a poet, you are perhaps best known for the decades-long project Drafts. In the poem “Writing,” an early sequence you have called a portal work—written just before the Drafts project began—each section begins with a period. You have said that this poem is “conceptualized as existing on the other side of a period.” Would you say more about the poem as existing on the other side of a period?I’d like to frame this particular question about a visual mark (and involving my long poem[s], serial works, and now collage-poems) by saying that The Book—as an idea or ideal or idealized item—is very much on my mind. With the long poem as a category of practice in modern and contemporary times, I even think that The Book (and its corollary the Gesamtkunstwerk) is a collection point for ideas about text and its practices (including visual text) in an artistic terrain that blurs and combines mediums, genres, and modes with creative panache—literary, visual, aesthetic, and political. Who is to say what any “border” is, when looking at the modern long poem, between epic analogies, allusions to quests, narrative traces, or any other single (or pretend-single) genre that people want to notice or to settle on. In contrast, I think polyphony and the poly-generic are what infuses the long poem. To complicate this interestingly, I think these traits can occur at any pace, pulse, or periodicity. Given that The Book lurks behind so much of what I have done, I have made various projects to call attention to Book as practice—or event. Eclectic, filled with visual texts usually naturalized (a lot of type on a page with just one mark or two, plus other glyphs), how to “do something” with a page while remaining idiomatic to poetry (as my aesthetic practice) has been a real preoccupation for my career. Over the years, the visual has become very interesting, too—which is why we are talking together about both.
One more pre-explanation. I want the coherence and oddity of words-in-poems. I only try not to simply make words or structures that travel too far into singularly semiotic babble from the semantic. I like negotiating the border between reasonably legible statement and articulations of the hermetic or half-speakable and its struggles. This is a boundary that, of course, one chooses (and plays with) in diverse ways throughout one’s career.
Almost from the very beginning of my poetic career, I didn’t want single poems only, or a set of single poems making up a “book of poetry” as an item with its own conventions and reward systems. I’ve written some single poems—for sure. But even within my first (belated), “pure” book, Wells (The Montemora Foundation, 1980), I was making serial poems, joining materials in a variety of suggestive ways, interested in the tactics of juxtaposing and sequencing. In 1985, I wrote “Writing,” which was at the center of my second book Tabula Rosa (Potes & Poets Press, 1987). The first two poems of Drafts appeared in that volume, along with a so-called “anthology” of missing women poets. That was a consequential book for me. I stepped from the real beauties of Wells right into Tabula Rosa and the long poem project.
I later discovered a good term for what “Writing” represents for me, as you noted. It was a “portal poem.” Ron Silliman, who also writes long poems/projects, used that term for work that opened the portal to his long poem. It’s to me a serious descriptive term for (one kind of) poetic development. Ann Vickery also once named the poem “Writing” as “Draft 0,” which (considering what it precipitated) was both witty and just.
Without fully understanding any of it, I was going through a new door. Everything was “after” that hinging pivot. Which is the answer to your question. That period at the beginning of each section—each was the imagined end of a prior [ungiven] sentence. Each written section wants to say—what do I need to write next, after the “period.” In that poem, I also literalized “writing” as an act; with a gutsy astonishment, I wrote onto some of the sheets prepared for photo-offset. My handwriting appears—my mark. The allegory of this is, in retrospect, amazing. Not only was there a new baby in this poem (making her mark in those messy ways that new babies have), but also my hand, my body was making this handwritten mark—one try—for several of the final sheets of a photo-offset. Getting otherness inside, marginalization as the poem, and negotiating between the period as End and the period as Beginning—blurring between “things on the side, things in the center”—these were all part of this poem. Also, getting the female body (one’s “period”) into writing. As it turned out, this poem was the beginning of the process of making my mark in the long poem. I was concerned with how to tell what was going on without continuous or coherent narrative, while also “not erasing the original signatures of the women.” So, you are quite right—that period was a powerful mark for this poem.
In the very first of the poem sequences that comprise Drafts, you start with two instances of the print letter “N” followed by two instances of a handwritten “N”—a smaller “N”— nested inside the larger scrawl. The nested letters might be read as a drawing of snow-capped mountains. After this letter/landscape, you reflect on marks in the landscape, and whether it is “framed” marks that make meaning. Why insert the handwritten letters among typeface?
It was a signal to myself. It had taken me so long (in my view) to begin writing the poetry I wanted to read—my poetry—and I had treated myself (badly) with so many qualms, perfectionisms, refusals to begin, or difficulty in learning how to read myself—that I might as well begin with the mountain of “N.” [No—and a period] that I had been climbing up and over for years. N. was a way of putting that N first, and staring it down. The glyph of N (written in that nested way) made it more suggestive, more comic than those two typeface capital “N.’s” (with the sealing of periods!). Did I fully know this at the time? Well, not so fully. By the time I could put them down on the page, I had lived a decade or more with those N.’s. (Of course, in this poem the later nested glyph of Y’s mean “yes,” and also the risk of “yes.” That is, the letter was not given in typeface but in my handwriting.) I will just say that I am also somewhat intransigent—it never occurred to me that this was weird or ungainly—I just had to put these glyphs in and keep them in. And, yes, given the trace of Ezra Pound in my poem, I had Basil Bunting’s “those are the Alps” on my mind.
In “Draft 5: Gap,” you first use the black rectangles that evoke redacted lines. Today it would not be unusual to encounter art projects that work with redacted records or employ an aesthetics of erasure, but at the time that the poems of Drafts first started appearing, the use of geometries of redaction was startling. I first saw a selection from Drafts in the journal Conjunctions in the early nineties, and I had never seen anything like it in a poem. What prompted you to first start using marks of redaction?
“Gap” was occasioned by the (somewhat sudden) death of my father, and when one talks of parents, there is so much unspoken, unsaid, repressed, also concealed on all sides that you might as well black out the space. Some parallel dark bits are concealing one’s own anger or confusion. The black cross-outs in this poem are also a tribute to overload, conflicted feelings so solid that you cannot sort out or even find out what is being repressed. When you need a mark badly, you claim it and use it.
Some black squares also occur culturally in records for the manipulated or concealing of historical materials; some are antic tweaks of convention (as in Tristram Shandy). I had also coincidentally seen politically redacted files (files of George Oppen where the FBI wanted to conceal names and identifying marks of their operatives and spies). I see by my answers that these marks are overdetermined—have a number of sources.
Redaction marks surface throughout Drafts. “Draft 68: Threshold” is almost entirely blackened. Sometimes the marks might read as something blacked out, as if something unseen is there beneath the surface. Other times, though, the marks appear to be a willful blackening, less a signifier of redaction than a refusal.
Yes, both these comments are quite accurate. The one thing: all these marks were done entirely from conviction. I don’t make odd, nonconformist, or any marks for decorative reasons. In “Draft 68” (from 2004-05), I was so perplexed and enraged by the ways the twenty-first century seemed to be rapidly deteriorating on its own miserable economic, political, militaristic, and exploitative paths that the marks were for me unspeakable rage. The poem I kept on trying to write could never get words adequate enough to say this feeling. I crossed out practically the whole poem. The poem registers this on a fed-up body with a lost sense of drowning in “haunted water.” What does emerge are clotted phrases like “despoiled news” and “A regime of predation.” It is a landscape of barriers to verbs—what action for these piled phrases?
Many of your poems in Drafts engage with visual art. “Draft XXX: Fosse” and “Draft 111: Arte Povera” is a beautiful reflection on a book work by Ann Hamilton. There are poems inspired by Ray Johnson’s postal art. Draft 111: Arte Povera references not only the Italian art movement, but also Kurt Schwitters and other contemporary artists. How have the practices of visual artists influenced your practice as a poet?
I have looked seriously at visual art my whole life. I like a good deal of art—for its image-making—as an act of poesis. Some works “influence” me because I like them—color, shape, concept, scale. As with the kinds of music I listen to, my desire to experience these sister arts is boundless. At a certain point in making Drafts, I used to compare the feeling of their fullness to a string quartet, or a symphony—many textures, timbres, and sounds, dynamic structures, often with change-ups, a desire to create an experience—often almost ineffable although (with poems) an experience from words along with sounds and rhythms of syntax.
But I generally don’t have that ekphrastic relationship to visual art that poetry sometimes stages. I may have alluded to art works, but I don’t usually describe them in that “make a picture with words by describing a picture” method. My response to Ann Hamilton might be the only consistently ekphrastic moment in all of Drafts. Or to say better, it is like an incorporative relationship—I meditated on her work as a topos—it entered my sense of The Book that I spoke of already. I began that meditation looking at one of Ann Hamilton’s pages where the writing is made from real little pebbles—it was fantastically suggestive to me. That poem also features typographic brackets around key, doubled words, and—to top things off—an image of a lapis lazuli ram caught in a gold thicket, one of the treasures of Mesopotamia in the University of Pennsylvania Museum. [“Ram in a Thicket,” from Ur, now Iraq, 2600–2400 BCE. I misremembered it as a “bull.”] The end of the poem resists both “foundational commandment” and “annihilating compleynt,” spelled just that way, with its “Go stony book.”
About seven years into Drafts, you began the practice of “folding” groups of poems into earlier Drafts, repeating motifs and phrases. You have referred to the folding of poems one into another as “an erotic strategy or set of energies.” Can you say more about this practice as an erotics? Have you been influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s writing on the fold?
Let’s answer the amusing question of Deleuze first. No—no “influence” because I don’t read theory to write my poems. I write my poems, and then sometimes I find I am confluent with some theory. Then sometimes when I read the theoretical text, it’s interesting/informative and I understand more, but sometimes I understand less. I am more prone to think of (and in) structures and detail for work in literature. I love trying to figure out how statement and structure interact, intersect, mutually construct.
When I began Drafts, I had no sense my poem was to be so long. I was making them on a line—one poem loosely linked to or emerging from the ground created by writing the prior poem. Getting years into the project, I began to wonder how to invent an idiomatic structure for what I was intuiting in scope or even whether there could be a structure aside from one-plus-one-plus-one, which is a solely temporally additive structure (next, and next, and next). After working on that question for a couple of years, in a really great flash, I came up with the idea of “folding over” which creates the recursive, goes back to go further, remembers prior elements in a semi-systematic way, and generally offers a sense of space (one layer piling onto another) as well as a touching among things (the poems, lines in the poems, themes in the poems, allusions). Touching is erotic and erotic energies—creating and sustaining “relationships” among elements—infuse the poem. Powers of a generalized eros (a synonym might be “poesis”) are the force of making (of the poem, of anything generative and humanly contributory).
In contrast to the doubling of the fold, you also make of use of the grid—a flattening and spatializing of material that can be taken in all at once as opposed to the temporal complexities of doubling. In terms of the entirety of Drafts, how do you see the grid and the fold working together, or do you see them as competing energies?
That’s an amazing question because I never had thought of them as “competing energies,” but they do generate energy—perhaps it is from a clash. Do strategies fight over a poem! It’s large enough to be a battleground, but it is also large enough to provide enough for both forces to explore. I tend to see it that way, but it is true that there is a lot of energy created in this poem.
The grid was a result of the “turn” after nineteen poems after going one-plus-one-plus-one. There was a structural and emotional logic to the grid. If you are beginning again and linking to each prior poem nineteen “boxes” away, it seems a good idea to postulate a grid—so that each already-written poem could “expect” a poem next to it, or every new poem could expect a site in which to work itself out. I did know (I think I knew) before I thought all this, that notable article on “the grid” by Rosalind Krauss (from 1979). I thought the idea of a grid as “limited infinity” worked very well for my attempt (another move) to postulate a total possible number for Drafts.
One difference distinguishes my poetic grid from some of the visual modes of the grids of (e.g.) Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt. Martin has a self-similar “content” in each of the boxes, granted subtle variation in color, size of box-shape, and, perhaps, concept. When I made my grid for Drafts, extremely self-different kinds of poems could occur in each “box.” It was not so much a statement in the depth of flatness, repetition or an intervention in debates about representation, abstraction, and visionary modernity as a practical way to project a form into both space and time (the nineteen poems postulated as coming in each future set and the recursive fold back). The work as a whole gained dimensionality. The grid was “projecting a form.” And “projecting a form” is something I like to do with my poems individually, and in general. Don’t forget, if you shift the two interior letters, “grid” becomes “gird.” The (im)/balance between closed and open (formed and potential) always gives me pleasure.
Throughout your poetic practice, you speak of the materiality of the page, of letters and of marks, and you juxtapose multiple voices and rhetorics. There is a collage sensibility at play as well as an insistence on speaking of the material conditions of putting words on a page. What is the relationship between the collages reproduced as part of books and the collages before they are reproduced? For example, I do not see the collages in Graphic Novella as existing outside the book (more on this later). In contrast, I can imagine the collages in The Collage Poems of Drafts as stand-alone objects. Are they?
You are quite right about Graphic Novella, built up image by image, commentary by commentary, then sequenced, a book made of one group of collage poems. They are like a book of “making pages.” This is also true of “Draft CX: Primer”—they were separate pages, but given that there was an alphabet at base, it was decidedly built for one sequence. But it is true that the materials (in both cases) are separate collages on separate pages. All my visual collages are hand built and glued—there’s no grabbing images from the internet, as people say. Not only do I not know how to do this, I like the hand craft with all its choices and risks.
Here are several possible acts and products that we are talking about in the intermix of visual and verbal texts.
a) In a poem, a collage feeling is made with words, juxtapositions, changeups, jolts of juncture between words, sentences, citations, passages of any length that construct a poem—or a book. A purely verbal collage often involves rich choices of diction or social evocations from the different discourses that are juxtaposed. (A short example might be “Marriage” [1923] by Marianne Moore.) That’s like what I do with the multi-textured but verbal book called Days and Works (2017), which uses citations, often from newspaper articles as well as poems, narratives, dreams, reflections. All is entirely in words, sometimes different sources collaged together. This notion of verbal collage is a major mode of twentieth-century poetry.
b) A purely visual collage either abstract only (like Kurt Schwitters mostly) or with allusions to the real-world sources of an image as part of the social impact (like Hannah Höch sometimes). I have made some of this type of pure collage work, but it’s not our topic here.
c) Visual glyphs on a page—inside the poem contributing to a poem-object, maybe playing around with typography. That would include my black visual text in poems that we were talking about, but also incipit initials that I use in one poem that spell out INCIPIT.
d) Concrete poetry using typography to “make” abstract objects, not necessarily legible (smudges, overprinting of, or crossed-over sentences and non-readable letter allusions are possible). Or concrete poetry making a picture of an object (like a wave) using words, ink color, maybe typeface choice.
e) Collage in visual art with letters, numbers, or a few words, or with the use of something with letters on it as a piece of shaped paper. (I made “Draft CX: Primer” this way before I decided to put aphorisms on it. It was made in two stages.)
f) Collage next to poems in some relationship on an alternate double page spread—that is like what I do with NUMBERS and with some of Graphic Novella.
g) Collage and writing together on the same page—aphorisms, poems, passages of semantic, message-bearing writing on the same page as collaged material—making one unified visual-verbal page. That’s in “Draft 95: Mail Art,” “Draft CX: Primer” in its completed form, an online chapbook called “Churning the Ocean of Milk,” and an unpublished work—Life in Handkerchiefs.
With The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), you are working quite explicitly with collaging found materials. Why the move from the collage sensibility in writing to physical collage? How does making collage objects (as in The Collage Poems of Drafts) extend the project of Drafts? Has making collage (as an object in the world) always been a practice parallel to the making of poems?
The mystery of why I added a medium (as a challenge) remains somewhat mysterious—a little inexplicable and odd. But to answer, I’d say a negotiation with dialogues between the mediums, back and forth talk, almost performative sounds, and a cross-medium suggestiveness are some of the results—and an advantage and motivation. My poetry has always been very dialogic or double voiced, even engineering suspicious back talk inside a poem. Sometimes this impulse has expressed itself in genres as in “Draft 89: Interrogation” and a recent work “Tenso,” or in moves such as “Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss” or “Draft 98: Canzone.” (That last as in Vita Nuova, where first Dante writes a poem, then does a literary critical gloss of it.) Further, the practice of serial poems is, on the largest scale, an unspinning of a variety of vectored examples, each modifying the other. So, making pages in which a visual text evokes a poem, or a poem talks into or from a visual text, or a visual text comments visually and is picked up via a poem or aphorism—all these acts began to seem quite appropriate for representing our lives. Fundamentally, the mutual interchange is dialogic. So, there is a consistency of practice in that dialogue between the elements.
Moving away from Drafts, I’d like to ask you about Days and Works (2017), a rumination on living in the world, in history, and the problem of writing work that takes into account what is in the newspaper and what is scrolling across the computer screen. How did Hesiod’s Works and Days inspire and inform this work?
I was attracted to both words, “Works” and “Days”—one a struggle with time, and the other the fact that time just happens, and you try to cope. So the work combines cosmologies, myths, daily problems, beauties in nature and art, war, dreams, horrible social things deteriorating around us that need to be pointed to, precarity and inequality, plus bits from the newspaper as “it is” happening—no matter what “it” is. I liked that the work of Hesiod was a compendium of various genres: almanac, retellings of myths, advice book, and a discussion of the difference between good struggle (work) and problematic struggle (war). Finally, I deliberately used a translation made at the beginning of World War I, the war after the sickening rehearsals of killing fields by acts of European and U.S. imperialism; this war and prelude quasi-genocides kicked off the twentieth century with delusions (that have rarely ceased). My work has sociopolitical meanings in poetry and poetics because we live in the world.
Graphic Novella is a collection of prose meditations mixed with collages reproduced in black and white. Let me begin with a question about the first two pages. Text on the left page appears to be interrogating—or attempting to “translate”—the text/collage on the facing page. The right page looks to be the draft of a poem, with typewriter-keyed lines, handwritten phrases, and collaged papers, including one with the date 1980.
I read this pairing of texts as an older writer asking questions of a text by her younger self. The older narrator, trying to reimagine the creative process of the younger writer, focuses on the handwritten lines “cutting down / the rays / of plots” and, at first, admonishes her younger self for its hackneyed “record of inadequacy” but then yields to the odd “SEY” that “could simply be a sigh.”
Was your starting point for this book an encounter with drafts from your younger self?
Absolutely, with the codicil important to myself that I had been so good at self-blocking that not very much made it to the “shore” of a later self. The question asked of the younger self was—why didn’t you follow through then or figure out to do more with what you were saying? This is a question of “reading” oneself.
I found this work incredibly moving in its pairing of two writer selves across time, the older writer exasperated but also moved by her early efforts. Is Graphic Novella an anti-autobiography? (“Even origins have agendas,” you write.)
The work begins with that “sigh” that could have been the word “SAY” but didn’t manage to be. It doesn’t continue, except the reminder “sey” (a nonword) does reappear. You are really sharp to notice that. I don’t think it is an “anti-autobiography” unless I misunderstand your term. It is more like “exasperated” as you note—<OK, now SAY what you are seeing>. This work was made of an extreme social feeling of incipient crisis (and I point out with no happiness that it was made from 2012 on and published in 2015, before the current malfeasant regime in the U.S.).
Graphic Novella interrogates the desire to tell one’s story as if it were a novel. Despite a refusal to narrativize, the plots “just bubble up, unstoppable.” You write of “let[ting] the plots, the characters, the myths happen and wander here and there, among all these looser, less pinned-down visitants.” Who/what are these visitants? Is collage a counter to the bubbling of plots and “the patterns . . . lurking”?
The point is—it is more than my story (there are some borrowed stories that make up any one of us as individuals). We’re collectives, really, collectivities in specific bodies and sites—I suppose those are the visitants. No one “plot” is adequate. In fact—by definition any one “plot” (including of poems) is not adequate—that much is “graphic.”
As I say about this work, before beginning to make it, aside from being socially fed up, I was fed up at the ratcheting up of “newness” in the arts—people competing for the newest new. I wanted to look at the NEWS, not the “new.” So, I did. What’s graphic is the News and the “nouvelles” (which is news—so the pun on “novella” occurs in part there—like “graphic novel,” which this also isn’t. This is a very “per-verse” book.)
And going along with that is the recoil from standard issue genres or “standard issue” period styles in poetry: The questions center on “what happened here?” and then “how do I represent this plethora?”
In Graphic Novella, the collages are reproduced in black and white; their resolution appears deliberately amateurish and murky—I am reminded of 1970s conceptual photo works—as if the collages are not “objects” but documentations of a process. How do you see these collages functioning in Graphic Novella (as opposed to how your collages function in other projects)?
Well, I did want that handmade look—it was like a “trashbook” documentary feeling. But also—no one had enough money (my wonderful experimental publisher, mIEKAL aND of Xexoxial Editions sure didn’t) to even attempt a glossy-look, high-end product. It would have been anathema to the project, but that was matched by also being materially, financially impossible.
In a fascinating passage, starting on the bottom of page 38, you appear to be critiquing specific instances of collage:
These things, these “images” rarely combined. They rarely actually “collaged.” The aesthetic was in the trashbin. I ended up with strange exemplary pictures or some very unpleasant image-details on pages. These were like illustrations for a book that is missing, or like Incipit initials without articulating the useful letter of the alphabet.Are you referring specifically to the collages in Graphic Novella? This passage seems to be saying that, just because bits are put together, doesn’t mean they actually “collage.” To use the term “collage”—as verb or noun—implies an object that is more than its parts. What makes a collage “work”? Do you have an aesthetics of collage?
The statement is absolutely a commentary on the collages in this book and what unpleasant items I was making while making this work. Why did they look like that? This is like a self-addressed commentary on necessarily wanting beauty and prettiness. Sometimes you have to have an aesthetic sense and a structural sense—and that is enough. Being “nice looking” is supercargo. This said, I don’t have one aesthetics of collage for all situations. I have situations of making, and for making a work (collage or poem), I try to “read,” see, and evaluate for their ethos of sincerity in telling/making. I think this work does in fact “collage,” but not if you want nice looking perfected items. This is not an “enjoyable” book—and this makes me very happy.
While Graphic Novella appears resistant to the genre of life writing, the project Life in Handkerchiefs is a buoyant survey of female experience, with collages that feature vintage embroidered and printed handkerchiefs. How did this project come about? (I noticed that, as early as 1990, “Draft 11: Schwa” recalls “a set of girl hankies, saying Monday, Tuesday.”)
You refer to the project as having “the look of a gift book and the ethos of empathetic critique.” Can you say more about what you mean by this characterization of Life in Handkerchiefs?
It is uncanny that you picked up that line about those hankies—good work! I have always used hankies in real life, and have collected them too, kept mine when they were almost rags, and bought some at tag sales where one can pick up useable detritus and attractive junk or oddities. An ethics of salvage is part of what contributes to my desire to make collage. Handkerchiefs do remind me of a certain timeframe, place, class, and set of gender expectations for a nice, tidy female life, clean, pretty, feminine, keen on family holidays (many handkerchiefs are keyed to holidays). I don’t mean to be too ironic.
Anyway, I just get ideas sometimes, so how this project came about was I got an idea to do it. It’s not really “my life”—but it is aspects of a combined female life, from girlhood, mother-daughter relations, growing up, love, motherhood, and babies—all in different tones, yearnings, realizations, losses, ironies, observations including on events simultaneous with this growing up.
It is a fond, poignant, and serio-comic work, about eighty pages of individual collage-poems made of fabric, lace, artificial flower trimmings, vintage handkerchiefs, string, paper. And words. The poems or aphorisms are printed variously on the same page as the handkerchiefs. The work is sometimes “framed”—more like a presentation box of handkerchiefs than a book of modernist angularities. It is a very colorful project, but consisting of color collages as it does, the project has been having the predictable difficulties coming into print as a whole, although work in it has appeared a good deal online over the past years (from about 2017 to now).
Throughout your projects, there are references to “the writing under writing” (“Draft 6: Midrush”). In “Draft 33: Deixis,” you compare poems to translations. Can you say more about your relationship to translation, translation as a practice and as a metaphor (“of trying to speak”). I’m thinking, too, of the relationship of gloss or interpretation to translation. (For, as you say in the preface to “Surge: Drafts 96-114,” your project “has made a structure where you cannot say which text has priority, that is, which text glosses and which text states, which is the original and which is the elaboration.”)
These are staggeringly large questions, and I will just sketch a few notes. I have—somewhat reluctantly—come to the feeling that, even if one’s language is minimalist, quite idiomatic, talky, realistic (and so forth), the act of entering poetry is writing another language in one’s own language. I just don’t want the work that emerges to seem too mannered and certainly not conventional, or only decorative or negligible (unnecessary). Poetry is the trace of that language under language. One looks for it in every poem—in a way, it is the test of any poem.
Then, I have never felt that I am translating a prior thought into language, or wording something into a poem. I am making the poem in struggles with the language. So that kind of translation metaphor has never worked for my work—this practice of “having an idea” and then “putting it into words” or “into images.” That prospect creeps me out.
I am working in acts of poesis; my medium is language (which means everything about language—syntax, cosmic redundancy, etymologies, other works as best one knows in many languages; social stories told by diction, wit, etc.). Third, I have had the enormous pleasure—the astonishing experience of being translated—literally—into French by Jean-Paul Auxeméry and into Italian by Renata Morresi. (Those are the main ones—a few other translation projects I have also experienced.) What one feels in trying to help with and participate in this process of choices and judgments staggers me: the nuances and shifts that create our sameness differently and our differences in a between zone of companionship—this is something I am still trying to put into words and acknowledge. One is making the same thing differently. I know I have answered here by literalizing the ontological shadows of your question. Perhaps all I can finally say to the question of language is—Yes.
