Squander a thousand strokes a day! Muddy the margins! The typist is an exuberant feminist! Dani Spinosa’s OO: Typewriter Poems revisits the canon of typewriter-composed visual poetry, impersonating and reinscribing work by major figures such as Henri Chopin, John Cage, Emmett Williams, and Raymond Federman, as well as lesser-known female artists and poets such as Johanna Drucker, Cia Rinne, and Mary Ellen Solt.
Spinosa refers to her experimental poems as “glosas.” The glosa is a Renaissance form that borrows and expands on four lines taken from another poet’s work. Loosely translating the concept of “line” with poems that may draw with letters or scatter across a page, Spinosa’s glosas pay tribute to her predecessors through a playful engagement with their work, inserting her own feisty feminist sensibility into a conversation that has been largely dominated by male poets. Titled with the names of the poets with whom she is in conversation, the glosas are each quite distinct in form and texture. As Spinosa puts it, “Each individual poet produced in me a different desire, gave me a different process, produced a different result.”
Comic. Messy. Boisterous. Although OO: Typewriter Poems is a printed book, it bears the visual texture of the typed page. Each poem bears evidence of the body: the uneven resolution of letters that indicate the weight of a hand or the wear of a typewriter ribbon; smudged letters; a fingerprint. In her glosa “Marianne Holm Hansen,” Spinosa derides the tidy, transparent work, asking: “Isn’t the clean poem / reserved for the / painless body / written like a logo.”
In this interview, Spinosa talks about the pleasures of experimental practice, the relationship between her creative projects and her scholarly work, and visual poetics.
—Eva Heisler
OO: Typewriter Poems is so much fun to read, and it reminded me that poetry can be rowdy and joyful. Did you have fun making these poems?
I have fun making all my poetry. In my life, poetry is there for fun. I’m not particularly interested in poetry as hard work, as intellectualism, as prestige, or even as a calling. I have enough things in my life that are taxing on my time, my mind, and my emotions. Poetry is a respite from all that. It’s a place where I can play, be precise, be joyful, and explore with relatively low stakes. Part of the joy of experimental literature is indeed that the stakes are so low—very few people are paying attention, little money is involved—so you can make mistakes, explore, and be silly. I also come to poetry from the academy, where too often literature in general is taken rather seriously. I spent enough time taking poetry seriously in graduate school. So, now I just love to play.
You refer to your poems as “glosas,” a renaissance courtly form that pays tribute to another poet by building on lines from that poet. The traditional form moves line to line, through time, but your glosas are in homage to visual poets. Visual poems are often experienced all at once, like a diagram, a map, or a drawing. Can you speak to your reinvention of the glosa as a visual form? How are you translating its operations visually?
Going off that first answer, I’m obviously playing fast and loose with the term glosa in this book. I think of them as vispo [visual poetry] glosas, which is just not a real thing. I made it up, I think. So, when I translate the glosa to the vispo glosa, part of what I do is fudge with the idea of the poetic line. What is a line in visual poetry? In some of the poems—like the bissett or the McCaffery—the lines were fairly distinguishable. But in others—the John Riddell or the Judith Copithorne—I’ve arbitrarily chosen what constitutes a line in a visual poem. Additionally, while several of the poems in the collection follow the immediacy and experienced-all-at-once-ness of visual poetry—the Peter Finch, for example—several others are decidedly more lyric and even sensical in their reading process—like the Cia Rinne or Colleen Thibaudeau glosas. For the most part, the poems—lyrical, visual, or combination—have four parts. And those four parts often have ten smaller parts within each. But that’s also something I’ve been rather loose with. I’m not much of a counter.
I’d love to hear about your process of composing the glosas. Is it simply a matter of retyping another poet’s poem and then seeing what happens; or do you make an image of the poem, and then type into that? Your process is not procedural, is it? By that, I mean, you are not using a pre-decided set of constraints as you enter a given poem, are you?
Great question; predictably loose answer. It depends, it depends. For the poem “Eric Schmaltz,” I took four lines from Schmaltz’s work in Surfaces, which took its lexicon from Amazon descriptions of printing and writing technology, and then I mined my own typewriter manuals for words of the exact same length to produce four ten-line stanzas where each line had the exact same number of letters. For the poem “Steve McCaffrey,” I took four lines from his “Suprematist Alphabet” and took away letters to produce lines that reverse-cleaned themselves up in their stanzas. For the poem “Bob Cobbing,” I typed his four lines spaced out, and then I just played around until I thought it looked like a teenage girl Bob Cobbing could have written in. For the poem “John Cage,” I used a Cagean mesostic procedure to create and then manipulate the poem I found by using Cage’s mesostic rules on Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. I figured Cage wouldn’t want me to use his own name or writing. I had no rules. Each individual poet produced in me a different desire, gave me a different process, produced a different result.
The last section of your book is not glosa-driven, and you say the poems were generated using “confessional practices.” Can you explain what you mean by “confessional practices”? I am especially interested in the pieces “Coding Practice” and “I Want a Confessional.” Are you willing to talk about how these poems came about?
They are two of the oldest poems in the collection. I often consider them to be companion pieces to “I Swear,” which was likely the first poem I ever wrote on a typewriter as typewriter poetry or visual poetry. “I Want a Confessional” is a straight-up lyric poem broken down to its constituent parts. It started as just playful writing, wondering what a poem would look like or sound like if I forced myself to mash together the kind of confessional, lyrical writing I’d do in a journal with the kind of visual typewriter stuff I liked to read. It begins with the desire to write the love poem (that hidden “Jesse” in the top left corner is the name of my lovely partner), and it retraces over that naming to strike it out, to try to rid myself of that kind of confessional, autobiographical writing and lean more towards the visual. The process of writing breaks down quickly as those two polarities work against each other. Ultimately, I find, at the end of “I Want a Confessional” that too far to one side (impersonal form) or the other (formless affect) feels false, that I want instead “a breakage of the clear layer” between them.
“Coding Practice” is more like lineated research notes. It was inspired by the essay “For Scoping Girls” by Erín Moure, collected in My Beloved Wager, in which Moure writes, “it is critical to consider the body not as self-enclosed and complete but as a coding practice.” It’s a poem that wonders about my body’s relationship to its technology, including the typewriter and its various technologies, and the computer, the scanner, the printer that I used to digitize and alter the poem after it was typed.
The book starts with Carl Andre, the minimalist sculptor, who has referred to his floor pieces constructed from readymade industrial materials as “cuts in space.” He has also used the word “cut” to describe his process of making poems. Do you see your own practice as one of making cuts into the larger field of male-dominated visual poetry?
I think I did when I put OO together. I think that less these days. I think that work of cutting has been done already, particularly for white women. And I am a bit tired of cutting myself in. So now I’m just playing, and I think about that process much less like cutting and more like rearranging, building upon, overwriting, altering, that sort of thing. I love the way Andre’s work with the typewriter mimics and builds off the blockiness and brickiness of his sculptures. But I suspect the violence of that word, cut. I’m not so interested in inserting myself in space. I’m interested in space. And, of course, one cannot ignore the serious problems with Andre as a figure in the art scene (rest in power, Ana Mendieta). Anyway, the point is, whatever I’m doing (making space) in OO and after is something less violent than “cut.”
Let’s talk about white space and poetry. How do you see the white space of visual poetry as operating differently than the white space of a lyric poem on the page?
The white space on the page of visual poetry and the white space on the page of lyric poetry work differently because those two forms of poetry work differently. And then, they work in similar ways because those two forms of poetry are not so different. The truth is, I’m not sure I think about white space much differently from how I think about black space, or red space, or pink space, or now purple space. It’s space. When I am thinking about size and shape and margins in my poetry, I’m using the same guiding principles of how the image works. Sometimes I use quite a bit of white space; I think OO has a good amount of white around it. In my most recent work, I’m interested in the image of the poem as one small segment of a larger whole I can never truly see, in the vein of Robert Duncan and his Passages. So, there’s very little white space in my most recent work. I like stuff. If I’m making a visual poem, I like to cram stuff in everywhere.
Carl Andre referred to the typewriter as “a machine or lathe or saw, to apply letters on the page.” He said that typing was like “embossing or applying physical impressions on to a page, almost as if I had a chisel and was making a cut or a dye and making a mark on metal.” How does the typewriter itself inform your practice, and how do you see the relationship between typewriter aesthetics and digital practices? I ask because some of the poems are made digitally, or enhanced digitally, right?
The typewriter for me is very much a tool like any other, except that it comes with this strange and rich history, this gendered history, this history of labor and standardization and industrialization that has become niche, hip, nostalgic. It would be unfair of me to say the typewriter is just a means of putting a letter onto a page because that would elide that history. Every time I type a poem, I carry that history of the medium with me. The digital is not so different. It’s a tool like any other. And it has histories for its various media like any other. I am not precious about where the analogue stops and the digital begins. I don’t know where and how to say “this much is typewriter and this much is digital” in these poems. I like that line to be porous and unclear. I am inspired, for example, by the digital turn that Judith Copithorne’s poetry has taken. I am inspired, too, by the laborious and beautiful typewriter work of Chris Warren. I am inspired by any work that wants to complicate that line between the analogue and the digital.
OO: Typewriter Poems came out just last year, and your scholarly book Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry was published in 2018. Were you making the typewriter poems while researching Anarchists in the Academy? Does your practice as a poet inform your practice as a researcher, or is it the other way around? I’m interested in how creative practice and research practice might reinvigorate or reenergize one another.
Yes, I was working on these two projects at the same time. Anarchists is an edited version of my doctoral thesis. I was writing some of these earliest poems as I finished and defended my Ph.D. I got my first writer’s grant (a Toronto Arts Council Emerging Writer’s Grant) while I was editing Anarchists, so I was working on the earliest stages of OO while finishing up Anarchists. My practice as a poet and as a researcher is the same thing, most days, except one pays a little more. They are directly forming and influencing each other all the time. Often, my research gets exhausting, and I am increasingly jaded about the academy and academic publishing especially. Contrastingly, my poetry is exciting, and every day I’m excited about something new in the poetry publishing world. So, they need each other. I need to be excited about the poems to make me push the research. And I need to bring some of what’s great about poetry publishing in Canada these days—the inclusivity of the community, the small press and DIY initiatives, the boundary and genre pushing, the openness and the accessibility—to what’s bad about academic publishing in Canada these days—the exclusivity, the corporate takeover of the university, the repetitive nature of scholarship, the paywalls, the jargon, the closure of the field(s). I not only need the poetry to help change my research; I truly believe research needs to learn from poetic communities to grow.
In the introduction to Anarchists, you speak about the need to pay attention to “the digital and networked elements of all poetry, especially print-based (read: not born digital) poetry.” Can you explain this, particularly your assertion that all print-based poetry is also “networked”?
By this sneaky argument I mean that all poetry is networked. That we work in networks. That we share and produce and disseminate and grow in networks. That’s partially why I was so drawn to the glosa form in OO: it lays bare the networked nature of poetry. I often think of poetic language in all its forms as the commons, a place where everyone has access. Here I’m following Robert Duncan again, and always. I know that poetry is a conversation. I know that I need conversation to grow. Remembering that poetry is a network helps me to stay away from closed, authoritative notions of authorship. To say that the digital is a network is a given. No one would argue that. I am writing to you now, and then others will read it, and we’re all connected. But print is a network, too. It takes a little longer, yes. And some things are lost when we slow that process down. But some things are gained, too. I have boxes of small press poetry in my home. Those are networks. They are moments of connection to other hands, other printers, other speaking voices. I don’t want us to get utopian about the ways the digital connects us. Print connects us, too.
In your study of experimental poets, you point out that female poets, such as Susan Howe, Erín Moure, and Juliana Spahr, unlike the male poets, refuse to deny subjectivity. I am interested in those moments in OO in which your subjectivity slips in, such as at the end of the Raymond Federman glosa and the very wonderful last poem “Yeah Right.” Any thoughts on how your subjectivity, lyric or otherwise, refuses to go away?
Isn’t it so funny how other people see things in your work that you didn’t realize you put there? Honestly, I never really equated the work I was doing in Anarchists with Howe, [Harryette] Mullen, Moure, and Spahr with the lyrical subjectivity of OO. But, yes, of course, you’re absolutely correct. There is something that unites those two efforts. It’s a refusal to withdraw. As I discuss with Kate Siklosi in the femmeship conversation in OO, the experimental and visual poem these days is often a sign of the withdrawal of the speaking subject. And sometimes that’s positioned as a relinquishing of power. But I hope to have demonstrated in Anarchists that there’s a way to do that withdrawal that actually creates a more authoritative speaking voice, a more limiting text. I want the moments of subjectivity in OO—poems about my IUD, poems about my insecurities around work, poems composed with my partner’s handwriting, poems with my fingerprints, poems composed while still drunk and annoyed after poetry readings—to be like tiny open spaces for you to put yourself in, too. I want them to draw in your fingers, your annoyances, your handwriting, the pain of your cervix if you’ve got a cervix and it hurts. It’s feminist, but it’s also very much inspired by bpNichol, and particularly informed by Gregory Betts’s reading of Nichol (and resistant to Frank Davey’s reading of Nichol).
How do you see your own practice within the context of activist feminist poetics? What is feminist about your reinvention of the glosa?
What isn’t? That was the whole point. I wanted it to seem strange to have 75% of the glosas about men, and 25% about women, and then to still have people going “oh, I’d never heard of some of these women” and also to have several of those women not really being “visual poets” (insofar as, for example, the designation of “visual” does not properly describe what NourbeSe Philip is doing with form, or as the designation of “poet” does not properly describe what Marianne Holm Hansen is doing with the typewriter). It’s a play at what other people—Amanda Earl, Alex Balgiu, and Mónica de la Torre—are doing better and more seriously. I’m playing with a reclamation of poetic history. They are doing the reclamation work. And then, of course, what I’m writing is a reclamation of the femme as serious, as poetic, as substantial rather than purely flippant. That’s feminist, too, I think. Or, at least, it’s unapologetically femme. And sometimes (often) I don’t think there’s a difference.
