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Extra-Terrestial Material: An Interview with Tracy K. Smith

12/17/2012

 
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What is the last great book that you read? 

Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems is such a monument to a vision and a moral conscience.  It feels like a Bible for the modern age—something that could save people.

"Life on Mars" alluded to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Starman and other films.  If we were to peek into your Netflix cue, would there be a good amount of Sci-Fi fantasy? 


Not so much anymore.  In fact, you wouldn’t find much of anything in the cue these days, which speaks mostly to the effects of parenting upon my attention span, free time, and sense of indulgence.  But when I was working on the poems in Life on Mars, I was watching quite a lot of Sci-Fi, very pointedly.  I wanted to gather a clear memory of the particular aesthetic sensibility that characterized the 1960s and 70s view of the future.  I also wanted to dip back into the nostalgia that those films trigger—privately as well as culturally.  But I’d divide the films into different camps.  Kubrick’s film, to me, sits at the top of the Sci-Fi canon, along with Tarkovsky’s Solaris, perhaps—films that open up a sense of grandeur and mystery.  And then there are the movies that are perhaps a bit more dated, a little kitschy, many of which happen to star Charlton Heston, that kind of felt like a tender reminder of America during what now feels like its “adolescent” stage.

Moving forward, I think the themes that I’m becoming interested in will have to do with the environment in a more terrestrial sense.  The planet, the water, natural resources.  I don’t yet know if or how cinema will play into that, but I do love the way that film helps ensure that my vocabulary for whatever I’m considering remains, at least in part, visual.

In "Duende" you channel individuals such as John Dall (a displaced Native American), a nine year old girl whose dead body was found on a Rio street, and three woman who were kidnapped by a resistance army in Uganda.  In "Life on Mars" you write about prisoners from Abu Ghraib, and a father who kept his daughter locked in a cell.  What is it about these displaced characters that attracts you to them? 

I think a poem, by its very nature, urges a deep commitment to subjective experience, and so it’s something that very often helps me to explore some of my ongoing questions about the nature of experience.  I’d wager that the basic theme running throughout all of my poems is some version of this question: “What are we doing to one another?” Those real people that you mention are people whose stories disturbed me rather powerfully and thereby pushed their way into my poems.

Do you find that the stimulus for many of your poems come from outside sources (news stories, popular culture) or is there an emotional impetus, which you then frame within the context of historical events?

I think it’s got to be some combination of the two that makes me responsive to certain public events, and allows me to see them as related to one another and illustrative of a larger theme—a theme that often bleeds over into my understanding of some aspects of my own private experience. I think that’s just how our imaginations work, as humans. We take in the world, and the questions that it sets into motion help us to order our sense of what is happening around and within us.  

I imagine it was overwhelming to win the Pulitzer Prize.  Did it affect your writing life? What are you working on right now?
 
Mostly, it has made me a busier person than I’ve typically been, which means I have less time to write than I prefer.  But the prize has also brought me into a larger and more diverse conversation about poetry and the culture—a conversation that will certainly amplify the kinds of themes I seek to explore in future poems.

What poets do you keep going back to?

Lately, it’s been Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, and Elizabeth Bishop.  

You've taught at a number of universities. If you could give one piece of advice to an emerging poet, what would it be?

I really do think that nothing teaches us how to write poems more than reading them, and reading across genres, schools, eras and tastes.  Beyond that, I’d also say that it was very liberating to realize that I could ask questions in poems without having to answer them.  It’s allowed me to be honest with myself about what I don’t understand.  I believe that it is usually what we haven’t yet come to grips with that makes for the most interesting material.  

What natural talent (besides the ones you have) would you like to be gifted with?

If I could sing, I might not have started writing poems.

What's your current state of mind?  

I’m curious.

TRACY K. SMITH received the Pulitzer Prize for her most recent collection, Life on Mars.  She teaches at Princeton University.


A Roguish Operation: A Conversation with Sawako Nakayasu

9/2/2012

 
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Steven Karl and Hitomi Yoshio spoke to Sawako Nakayasu in Shimokitazawa (a hip neighborhood in Tokyo) and via e-mail about insects, Chika Sagawa, and her favorite films.

SK: Sawako, you actively write and publish original work and translations. Which came first? 

Writing, definitely. At first I didn't even know enough Japanese to translate. I started writing poetry mostly as an undergraduate, but didn't start translating until I was in graduate school.

SK: Do you remember the first translation you worked on and/ or published?


The first work I translated was for class, and it was an excerpt of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes.  Translating was a chance to write for myself works that I thought were so great that I wish I had written them myself. And I still feel that way, about everything I've translated.

Eventually I shifted to translating from Japanese, partly because it seemed that the world had fewer translators from Japanese than from French, so it was a better use of my abilities. Also, because Japanese is really my first (though not my strongest) language, it meant that there are more slight nuances to the language that I am able to pick up on, compared to a language like French, which I learned as an adult.

As for publishing, the first few translations I published were poems by Hiromi Ito. It was published by HOW2, but turned into a whole censorship issue because the HOW2 website was sponsored by Bucknell University, who got upset about the poem called "Killing Kanoko," a poem about infanticide. They didn't want it to seem that the school was promoting infanticide, and in an attempt to keep them from pulling it altogether, my editor and I had to write a long introductory note explaining that the poem was not promoting infanticide.  The poem seemed to serve an important purpose of addressing the difficult, darker aspects of motherhood that people would prefer not to acknowledge.

SK: The language, tone, and style of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut and Ayane Kawata’s Time of Sky/ Castles in the Air seem so different. Can you talk a little bit about what attracted you to translating these books? Also, it seems that most of your translations have focused on underrepresented female authors.

I didn't have too much of a political agenda when I first began translating - I was simply trying to translate what I was interested in. And even though Hiraide and Kawata seem aesthetically quite different, they do have some common ground - it turned out that Hiraide was one of Kawata's early supporters when she started out.  I just got an e-mail from Forrest Gander saying he thought that Kawata's work (i.e. the work of hers I had translated) was so close to my own sensibilities that he did a search to make sure that she wasn't a fictitious author I had invented!

Regarding the translation of under-represented women - on one hand I am simply translating what I am interested in. Though of course I'm also aware of the political weight that the endorsement of translation can have. I'm not so excited about the canonization practices of Japanese literary culture, so it's nice to have a means of highlighting an outside opinion - that is, my own. And translating is such an arduous, difficult, and thankless task that it just doesn't make sense to translate anything but what I love the most.

HY: You've been translating Chika Sagawa's poems for many years now. I came to know her works through the reprint of her one-volume anthology of poetry, and now there is even a collection of her translations of Anglo-American poetry. While I know that Chika Sagawa is an obscure poet, these anthologies have made her works more accessible and readable, which must be a completely different reading experience from discovering her works first hand in obscure journals or whatnot. How did you first encounter Chika Sagawa's work? What was your process of discovery and reading experience like? 


I first heard mention of her name in John Solt's book about Kitasono Katsue - a great book, by the way. In it, he mentioned Sagawa briefly - as someone who he thought might have been interesting to study instead of Kitasono. That got me curious, and when I looked her up online, I found all of her poems up on someone's website.  A teenage girl who had a copy of Sagawa's Collected Poems (rare, out of print and in the public domain) had transcribed and uploaded them on her website. The poems were so striking - very modernist, and at the same time so personal, absurd, and evocative.  I loved them and knew I wanted to translate them, and it didn't matter at all how "major" or "minor" a poet she was.  I went to the Waseda library to take a look at an actual print copy of her book, committed some slightly illegal activity in order to copy it for myself, and started translating. I'm now happy to say I have a perfectly legitimate printed copy!

HY: Do you think your work as a translator has influenced your own work as a poet?


I have no idea! I actually have little idea of what influences my work as a poet, except for the combined sum of the life I live and the art I've seen - but even then, how can these things be measured? Just the other day I finished writing something that involved a young girl with an "escape plan" - with a survival backpack and weapons. The next day, Marina (my two-year-old) was running around the house with her gaudy pink backpack, with an inflatable sword and a bag of crackers hanging from it. How did she know?

SK: Yoko Tawada has a short story entitled “St. George and the Translator" in which the protagonist struggles with the act of translation – that is, remaining true to the original text, the agency to take creative license, and the difficulty of separating the translator’s voice from that of the original author.  Instead of driving yourself to mental exhaustion dealing with these issues as a translator, you seemed to embrace these problems with your newest book, MOUTH: EATS COLOR Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa. This is such an exhilarating and brilliant book. Can you tell us how it came about and what your process was working on it?

It was exhilarating for me to work on it, too! I just got tired of the whole "lost in translation" rhetoric, and wanted to make all those issues central, or to throw them out the window altogether. And also to foreground the creative act that translation really is, and show something of the in-between process. It's a shout-out to Lawrence Venuti and his writings about "the invisibility of the translator" - I decided to become a very visible translator. It's a little bit unfair to frame it as a collaboration, since Chika is long dead - but the project also takes a few pages from the appropriation/conceptualism schools floating about these days.

The other thing that was exhilarating for me with this book was the publishing aspect - I had this idea shortly after the whole BlazeVox scandal - do you remember that? And the whole conversation it sparked about the economics of small presses, what writers and publishers are entitled to or responsible for.  So this book, and the small press that it launched, was partly in response to that. The press is called Rogue Factorial, and it's a roguish operation - I'll be publishing things when I feel like it, selected by whatever criteria seems appropriate to me at the moment. I was also interested in immediacy - when I make a performance, I probably go from conception to delivery in about a month or so. So I applied that to Mouth: Eats Color, too - I wrote, produced, and published the whole thing in a little over a month, and there is something very satisfying about that.

I've also always been interested in frames and framing, and how the book as a work of art is framed by the expectations of its genre. So I wanted a book that was both a "work of translation" and "an original work," and to subvert the original vs translation hierarchy (i.e. the translation is subservient to the original). I work with these issues performatively too, so last summer I made a stage piece that was an improvisation between poets and dancers. I was trying to create a space where both parties were doing two things equally: a) creating work in that moment, and b) influencing the other artists who were creating work in that moment. So myself and another poet, we sat at a desk on stage and wrote - and read from - poetry, while the dancers danced. AND there were insects! It was great.

I should also mention that I've just published Rogue Factorial's second book, Domestication Handbook by Kristen Stone. Kristen's chosen genre is "queeragripoetics," and this is her first book. I kind of love publishing someone's first book - it feels like a very special moment. I asked her a million times if she was okay with me and my strange publishing ways, but she seemed fine with it, and we're both very happy with the results.

SK: At your reading at The Poetry Project in New York City last spring, you switched between English and Japanese without translating for the audience what you read in Japanese. I’ve been thinking about your recent performances and how they play with the listener’s expectations, and how they perhaps completely shift the auditory experience so that we are almost hearing words and sounds anew. Could you talk a bit about your strategies and/or desires for these performances?


For my recent reading at the Poetry Project, there's a lot I was thinking about...it was all on the heels of the Linsanity craze, and I was in my born-again Asian-American phase. So in part, I was exploring what that meant in terms of this reading at the Poetry Project, addressing dynamics of race and culture via language, kind of a la Harryette Mullen - I love the image of her giving a reading, and looking out into a sea of white faces - imagine the thought bubbles of that one! So there are also issues of coded behavior, the trope of an American poetry reading (I'm remembering a funny Jim Behrle comic that made fun of the things people say during poetry readings) - so for example, if you take all the stuff that one says while giving a poetry reading, there is the part that is scripted (the poems you read) and the part that is not scripted (the other stuff you say, like "Hello" and Thank you for inviting me to read here" - I reversed those things, so all the banter was scripted, and a lot of the contents contained improvised matter. I also wanted to make the whole thing site- or moment-specific, so they involved the audience in various ways too (sometimes I was poking fun at the audience). I like to think of multi-lingual work as inclusive, rather than alienating, or inclusive via alienation - this is similar to my thinking behind Mouth: Eats Color.

SK:  Do you work on translations and your own work simultaneously?


No. Usually one or the other.

SK: What’s the last “great” film you watched and what was so good about it?


Oasis - by Lee Chang Dong - I think the actress got a lot of credit for her role, but it's really the male lead that's amazing in that film - that perfect degree of being slightly off, but not too far off - I can only imagine how hard that is to do well. I also really liked Lily Chou-Chou no subete (All About Lily Chou-Chou) - the lighting in some of the scenes is just so gorgeous; I also liked how the use of lighting (in the dark scenes) was sometimes not realistic at all, but worked in this strange way anyway. Also watched Kitano Takeshi's Dolls again - a very very beautifully made film.

SK: What, if anything, are you working on now?

It's a secret...

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Sawako Nakayasu writes and translates poetry, and also creates performances and short films. Her recent book, Mouth: Eats Color –Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals is a work of both original and translated poetry. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Two books are forthcoming in 2013: Sawako Nakayasu's Book of Ants (Les Figues Press), and a translation of Sagawa Chika’s Collected Poems (Canarium Books). More information can be found here: http://sawakonakayasu.net/

Steven Karl is an editor for Coldfront Magazine and Sink Review. His first full length collection of poems is forthcoming from Coconut Books. His most recent chapbook is a collaboration with Angela Veronica Wong titled, Don't Try This On Your Piano or am i still standing here with my hair down (Lame House Press, 2012). He lives in Miami, Florida.

Hitomi Yoshio received her Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University, and recently joined the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University. She works as a translator and interpreter in her spare time. She lives in Miami, Florida.

Music is Time in Air:  an interview with Sebastian Currier

6/6/2012

 
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The Aviary: What are you working on at the moment, like today? 

I’m literally, I think, today, just finishing up a piece for the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing. 

For the egg?

Yes! NCPA, “The Egg,” this beautiful new arts center in downtown Beijing, invited five composers there, and we all traveled 6000 miles through China.  Each of us is writing an orchestral piece which will be premiered there in December.  The idea is that the piece will somehow relate to our experience there.  And I’m sure we’re all thinking, How do we undermine that expectation? Maybe they were expecting a Terra Cotta Warrior suite, or a Great Wall Symphony. 

What's your piece like?

Mine is more abstract and responds to the Chinese language, particularly the written characters, which are of course totally incomprehensible to me, but also seem to posses amazing energy and aesthetic appeal.  If you are reading a Chinese newspaper, you see this continual stream of single figures.  So my piece is like that too.  Short little bursts of information, in three measure units.  It’s an analog of me trying to learn Chinese script. 

You were awarded one of the most prestigious composition awards , the Grawemayer Prize, in 2007.  I assume you haven’t just been solely composing since then.  What do you do when you’re not writing music? 

Um, I have been solely composing!  I go to MacDowell and Yaddo a lot, and I’ve been interested in parallel art forms.  Other than that, I haven’t had that many separate projects that haven’t involved music, other than, life in general.  I mean, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my romances.  (Laughter)

You seem fixated on the concept of Time in your work: Time compressed, elongated, deconstructed etc. especially in “Time Machines,” written for Anne-Sophie Mutter and premiered by NY Philharmonic last year. What’s your fixation about?

Time is such an important medium for music.  Rhythm and phrase structure are obviously products of Time.  What people forget is that pitch itself is a product of Time, of cyclic Time; pitch is higher or lower depending on how many times the air column vibrates…So in a certain way, music is made up of nothing but Time in air.

"Time Machines" explores the difference between actual time, clock time and psychological time. What we are experiencing shapes how Time moves, so what happens in a piece of music affects the way we perceive time, so there’s a sort of circular relationship there.  It’s like Einstein joking about people misunderstanding his theory of relativity.  He said:  “An hour on a park bench with a pretty girl can seem like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove can seem like an hour.”  So  the sense of how Time flows is very much affected by what we’re experiencing. 

What are you reading right now?

I just finished two memoirs by friends, The Guardians by Sarah Manguso and  Revolution, by Deb Olin Unferth.  I'm also reading the Peter Acroyd biography of  William Blake, and Martha Schuchard's William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision.

In your piece, Bodymusic, the music of the 3rd movement comes directly after the sound of a recorded sneeze.  It seems an unlikely inspiration.  Why a sneeze?

A sneeze itself has all these religious connotations, the idea is that you die for a second, you let part of your spirit out.  There is a sense of expulsion.  You have Ahhh-Chhoo.  In Bodymusic the “choo” becomes a pitch which gradually spins around the room and is taken on by the instruments, so everything kind of comes from this spewing out.  I like the idea that it seems so implausible.  It would be easier to do something comedic, but I didn’t want to something comedic. 

It would make a good title of a short story, The Sneeze. 

Well, you remember in Gogol's Dead Souls, when the guy returns, it’s his sneeze that he’s recognized by. It’s like a trumpet call, and they all say “oh yeah, there’s our hero.”

What were the recorded sounds for the movement called “After Sex”? 

It’s more like pillow talk.  You don’t hear what’s spoken but you just hear that calm of two voices, just in the distance. 

You’ve been venturing into Multimedia, with Nightmazes and Next Atlantis.  Did it bother you that Antony Tomassini, in a 2010 article, lumped you together with active, American composers that he characterized as “the middle ground”?  “Those who more or less write pieces for conventional instruments, largely eschewing electronics.”?

Did it really say that?  That’s actually factually wrong.  It is irritating when they don’t do their homework.  In a first rate organization like the Times, one has a right to expect more.  I don’t like being lumped in that way.  The fact is I’ve done stuff with electronics only since 2004 or 5, but clearly he’s not up on that. 

You attended Juilliard School and MSM.  Did you ever have a day job?

Well, I taught full-time at Columbia, does that count?

What historical figure do you most identify with?

Historical figure?  That I identify with?  Oh, God, I have no idea.  Like Salieri?  Oh, I know.  I’ll say Bartok.  He seems human. He invented ethnomusicology, he respected music of other cultures. His music strikes me as very thoughtful, honest, amazingly well put-together, and very human.

What’s on your i-pod?

I have an i-pod.  Two things, audio books, and music.  I’ve been obsessive, listening to the same music. I know it’s all good stuff, but I repeatedly listen to Glenn Gould playing the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier.  And Horowitz’s Scarlatti.  And Fleisher playing Brahm’s waltzes. 

What is your greatest extravagance?

I'm not sure.  Nothing, in  a way.  Well, except the fact that every day I wake up and just write music....that seems VERY extravagant! 



Dragonflies and Rock Stars: An Interview with Claire Chase and Rebekah Heller

6/5/2012

 
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Claire Chase (left) and Rebekah Heller of ICE. Photo credit: Sara Mayti


The Aviary: I read somewhere that ICE was born on a Greyhound bus en route from Oberlin to Chicago.  What’s that about?

Chase: It's true! We were born on a bus. I was on the Greyhound headed from Oberlin to Chicago right after graduation, and that's when the idea came to me to start ICE. I tend to have "light bulb" moments on planes, trains and automobiles, maybe because time is suspended when you are in these spaces, metaphorically and otherwise. In this case, I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life post-school. I was somewhere around Gary, Indiana (cue the song!) when I said to myself "Chase, what the hell are you waiting for? Why don't you get off this bus in Chicago and start this group, stop thinking about it and start doing it?" So that's exactly what I did.

Within a span of a few months ICE is performing at Mostly Mozart (Lincoln Center), Washington D.C., Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cologne, Rio, Sau Paolo etc.  What do you guys do when you aren’t sleeping?

Heller: With this being such a busy spring and summer travel-wise, we're lucky we like each other so much! We spend a lot of time on the road, but when were here, we're practicing and preparing for the next big thing.  There's no real break for us between our residency at the Mostly Mozart Festival this summer and the start of our 2012-2013 season in September, so we're always looking forward.


Chase: Truth be told, we party a lot. We work hard, we play hard. I sort of can't have one without the other.

Did you always gravitate towards new music, or was the a period of your life when you were into say, Beethoven?

Chase: For me, music is music. I gravitate to Beethoven as much as I gravitate to Furrer.  And I start and end every day with Bach, a magician who is, in my book, the greatest experimental composer living or dead.

Heller: More and more, I think that there is much less of a distinction between old and new than, say, bad and good. I've always loved the excitement of exploring new works, and doing it with people who are so committed to such a high level of music-making, but there's nothing like going back to some of the great classics with fresh eyes.  Last summer, we played the Mozart Gran Partita at the Mostly Mozart Festival - this summer, we'll tackle the Schubert Octet.

I was talking to an artist friend of mine, and out of the blue said:  “I just saw a concert, and there was a performance by ‘a rock-star bassoonist.’”  I discovered he was talking about you.  How does it feel to have that label? 

Heller: This is awesome! In truth, I can't say it's the first time I've heard that, but it always puts a huge smile on my face.

ICE was awarded a MacArthur grant in 2011.  How specifically did this benefit ICE’s creative and artistic work? 

Chase: It was a MacArthur International Connections Fund award to specifically support ICE's educational, curatorial, performance and research work in Brazil this summer. We'll be going to Rio, Sao Paulo, and Manaus to give concerts, discover new repertoire, teach kids, work with local composers, and drink caipirinhas galore.

What’s on your I-pod?

Heller: So much! I generally don't listen to classical music (new or old) while I'm out and about.  These days it's a lot of slow-tempo 'navel-gazing' music like Royksopp, Sigur Ros, the Radio Department, Iron and Wine, the xx - all great for long plane rides.  Favorites will always include Bjork, Liz Phair, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Ratatat. Robyn is the best for running!

Chase: This morning: Glenn Gould playing Bach Partitas. Laurie Anderson's O Superman. Kate Bush's Mrs. Bartolozzi. Jordi Savall's Purcell arrangements. And a couple of stunning new tracks from Carla Kihlstedt's awesome Rabbit Rabbit Radio series (if you don't know about this series, folks, run don't walk to a computer to sign up for it at $1, $2 or $3 a month: http://rabbitrabbitradio.com/)

What’s your current state of mind?

Chase: Nostalgic.
Heller: Excited!

If you died and came back as a person or thing what would it be?

Heller: A lion.
Chase:  A dragonfly.

Skateboarding and Similar Rushes: An Interview with Bret Anthony Johnston

2/19/2012

 
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_ Bret Anthony Johnston at the MegaRamp, Camp Woodward

Jesper Andreasson for The Aviary: What are you working on at the moment?

I always work on more than one project at a time.  Right now, it’s a novel and a documentary film.  The novel is called THE UNACCOMPANIED and it’ll be finished by the end of the year.  The documentary is called WAITING FOR LIGHTNING and will premiere at SXSW this March.  It explores the life of Danny Way, the skateboarder who dreamed of jumping the Great Wall of China.  It’s directed by Jacob Rosenberg, and I’m embarrassingly proud of the film.

The men in your fiction often have a hard time expressing themselves, especially when it comes to revealing tenderness. It’s the women that have the emotional clarity and directness. Does this come from your own experience?

I think it has more to do with my characters coming from Texas.  The majority of my experience has been that men in Texas, for better or worse, hold everything in.  If you’re a boy in Texas, you come to understand this very early on.  It’s a code, an ethos. You don’t saddle other people with your emotions, you don’t burden them with anything that can be swallowed or worked out alone, in silence, and so when a man from Texas tries to express himself, there’s often a very deep conflict.  I’m not in any way saying this is a good or healthy way to live, but it’s a way of being in the world that I understand and I’m fascinated by the effects, positive and negative, of such habits.  I’m profoundly interested in the pressure of such silence—how the men think they’re doing the right thing by shielding their loved ones, how their loved ones so desperately want them to spill their guts.  I guess my hope, in a silly way, is that stories start to fill in some of that silence.

Your story, “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” which will appear in Esquire this spring, is about a dad giving his son’s troubled girlfriend a ride home.  It is only a few pages in length, but feels very expansive. Was this a longer piece you edited down?

Thank you.  No, I always knew the story would be short.  Every so often when this novel I’m writing starts to frustrate me, I will take what Flannery O’Connor called a “vacation” and write a story.  I wrote "Encounters" on my most recent of seven vacations. 

There’s a section where the dad stops the car in the middle of nowhere, and you think he’s either going to hurt the girl or hit on her (he’s shown some subtle interest), but instead he tells her to stay away from his son. It’s a protective and moving moment. Did the father’s reaction surprise you?

His reaction didn’t surprise me because I’d always known that’s why he drove her home.  However, I had no sense that she would react the way she did.  I’m always writing toward surprise; if there’s nothing for me to discover, no sense of moving into the unknown, then I grow very bored, very quickly.  Until she reacted in the way she did, I thought the father’s plan would work—just as he thought it would.  I was thrilled and elated and relieved when everything fell apart.

Do you try and write the first draft straight through to the end without editing? Or do you write a few pages one day, edit those the next?

It depends on what I’m writing.  With nonfiction, I tend to edit as I write.  With fiction, I tend to follow the characters through the whole narrative without looking back. 

Your skateboarding career ended with a broken foot. What did you learn about yourself in this “in-between” time, the days between having been a skater and of becoming a writer?

You’re awfully kind to call it a career.  Do you want some money?

If I learned anything—and I’m not sure I did—it’s that I truly love skateboarding.  There were a couple of years after the injury when I didn’t skate, when I tried to focus on other things.  I went to college, spent a lot of time getting beat up in jiu jitsu classes, applied to graduate writing programs.  Then, on the night before I left for grad school, I went to a pawn shop and bought a board.  I hadn’t really skated since breaking my foot, but I remember doing boardslides on these metal rails in the pawnshop parking lot and feeling like I’d found something I’d lost.  The notion of having been and becoming don’t really apply here, not for me.  They feel knotted together.  The more I skate, the better I write.

You still skate quite a bit. What does it give you that writing doesn’t? Is the payoff similar? I mean, is stepping off a ramp after a good run akin to finishing a solid writing session?

There is a similar rush, absolutely, and that rush—which certainly has to do with creating something that wasn’t there before, but also has to do with a kind of surrender that accompanies the act of creation—is addictive.  The addiction, for me, is the result of escaping myself.  A lot of skaters, including some of my close friends and some of the greatest skateboarders in history, view skating as a mode of self-expression.  The same goes for a lot of writers and writing.  I don’t see it that way.  I’m not trying to express myself with my skating or my writing; I’m trying to disappear.  That’s the challenge, the allure, the hope.  To forget yourself and let this other thing consume you with a kind of relentless purity.  I don’t want to express myself. I want to lose myself.

I know that sounds goofy and highfalutin’, but I think that’s where the payoff or rush is rooted: returning to yourself after a good run or a good sentence, and understanding that the world is now, necessarily, a little different. 

Hemingway spoke of his favorite stories being the ones that wrote themselves, like he’d overheard them somewhere and he’d simply written them down. Therefore he always felt slightly embarrassed over them. Do any of your own stories fit into this category?

Yes, I’m usually embarrassed by my stories. 

What young author excites you at the moment?

I hate all young writers.  I see them as threats, as greedy little animals that are clawing for my food.  Each one of these spineless marauders is trying to take me out, so I do everything in my power to sabotage their careers. 

Except you.  I like your writing a lot, Jesper.

What novel do you wish you wrote?

The one I’m writing.  I wish it was done and behind me.

Is there a certain verb that makes you cringe each time you see it on the page?

So long as they’re not used as dialogue tags, I’m cool with most verbs.  There are a good many nouns that put me in a stew though, and don’t even get me started on modifiers.  Every time someone uses the word “delicious” to describe anything other than food, I die a little.

If you were strapped to a meteor, plunging toward earth at a catastrophic rate, heading toward some remote Siberian tundra where no one would be hurt on impact (except for yourself, of course), what would be your last words? Remember, no one would be within earshot.

“This again?”

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, Corpus Christi: Stories received The Southern Review's Annual Short Fiction Award, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, and the James Michener Fellowship. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories, The Puschart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Sports Writing, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under 35. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, he is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard.

Jesper Andreasson was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Nominated in 2009 for the James Kirkwood Literary Prize, he is currently getting his MFA in Literature and Fiction Writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Los Angeles.


On Michael Jackson, Democracy and Terrible Longings: An Interview with Margo Jefferson

2/19/2012

 
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Amy Benson for The Aviary: What are you listening to now?

I’m a radio fanatic. Depending on the mood or what I’m writing or reading I will go from free form radio—a strange conglomeration of underground, strange rock, jazz, old folk or old hip-hop—to a standard jazz or classical station, to WKCR.  Right now I’m writing some material that has to do with certain kinds of racial proprieties at the turn of the century, so I am listening to concertized spirituals that Paul Robeson or Marion Anderson sang, and some of the slightly folkloric art songs that certain black composers wrote.

Is there an artist or genre that you know you’re supposed to like but you just can’t get there?

I have a lot of respect—she said dutifully—for Joyce, but I will never, ever go back to Ulysses. There are artists you basically never liked and there’s no justification; it just isn’t for you.  It’s nothing to do with him or me, we just don’t mix.

One of the quotes at the beginning of On Michael Jackson is about P.T. Barnum: “People want to believe and know they’ve been conned, as long as they didn’t know when or how.”  Are there things you feel you can see through, but want to believe in nonetheless?

We’re all brought up, especially if we’re leftist in some way, to believe in the Great Pronunciations.  We know, for example, with Thomas Jefferson, with Democracy, that we’ve been conned, but we still want to feel that we’ve been blessed, that we’re in some way made special by that tradition. 

If you love something aren’t you always conned by it?  We claim not to believe the word “objective” anymore, we want to believe we can master it somehow.  And yet we have to have some element of belief.  Belief is surrender, it’s yielding up your capacities even to necessarily be on equal terms with something. 

What surprised you in the response to On Michael Jackson?

I was surprised at how many people said to me “Well, you know, Margo, after reading your reviews and essays in the New York Times for so many years, we’re very surprised that you would pick a topic like this.” An academic of a certain age you might expect that from, but I was surprised by the range of people.  Some of that I think did have to do with the sexual scandal taint, but also with his aesthetic fall. Popular culture is as canon-obsessed as high culture ever was. At the time that book came out, Michael Jackson had pretty much lost his aesthetic credibility.  I thought at the time, Well, he’s probably going to have to die to get it back.  And I turned out to be right.
 
Do the questions that compelled that book still drive you, or do you feel you’ve put any to rest?

No, I think those questions in different proportions and in different guises are still driving me.  The dream identity you construct from what your life offers you is very interesting to me.  What forms that takes within the fixtures of class, race, gender, but also what forms that takes within the space where you believe you are free.  Michael Jackson really broke a lot of rules in that way, a lot of what we think of as the stricter racial and genre rules.  He was one of the first rock/pop/soul performers to be so thoroughly in love with a pre-rock and soul culture. 

I think of myself as an Americanist, I have to say.  I’m obsessed with what this particular nation—its psyche, its imagination, how it crosses over, mingles with and shapes we individuals. 

Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?   

What I’m working on now is a combination of cultural history, criticism, and memoir.  The general subject is the milieu I grew up in, which variously called itself The Talented Tenth, then The Negro Elite, then The Colored Elite, the African-American Elite, The Negro Upper Class, the Black Upper Class, and then it got called the Black Bourgeois, which it doesn’t like as much.  This dizzying array of names.  It was a world that was—I was born in 1947—very secluded, and yet some of its creation and identity partly depended upon the ways in which it emulated and appropriated white society.

One of my chapters is about an exchange I had with my mother when I was about 9.  I was at a mostly, but not all, white, very progressive private school, and we weren’t supposed to talk about social/racial things, certainly not class.  We were supposed to be privileged without talking about it.  But someone had asked me if my family was upper class.  I said, “Mother, are we rich?”  And she said, “No one’s supposed to ask that. That’s bad manners. But if anyone asks, you just say ‘We’re comfortable.’” And I said, “Well, are we upper class?”  And she said, “We are considered upper class Negroes [this was the 50s], upper-middle class Americans, and many people would like to consider us ‘just more Negroes’.”  And I thought, Oooohhh, okay… Let me work with this!” The project is partly about imagining what can’t imagine you.  Which is a very great, sometimes painful, sometimes wondrous thing to be able to do.  And it can give you a lot of power. 

So these are things you’re writing toward, are there things, on the flip side, that you’re writing away from?

As a working critic, I often feel increasingly that I’m writing away from a fixed tradition of critical authority.  I wasn’t always, when I was young I was busy establishing myself in some way as the Critical Authorial, “We”. But more and more I’m interested in how something called Authority comes from vulnerability, ambiguity, or coherently, eloquently addressed uncertainty, even confusion.

Do you have background in music or dance?  Does that allow you to understand performance from the inside out?

Yes!  Fortunately, I had both.  My sister and I had that kind of lovely thing about being bourgeois girls in the 50s: you always had to take music lessons and art lessons and dance lessons. I fell in love in my own kind of jumpy way, with music.  A little later, I fell in love with theatre and did a little bit of acting with one of those late-60s We are following in the steps of Artaud! groups, We are creating a riot in the theatre!   It left me for years with a longing—a sometimes terrible longing—to be back in theatre.

What was your instrument?

The piano.

If you could invent an additional borough for New York City, what would it be like?  What's missing?

Everybody who came would have to experiment with some art form that they thought they hated, and play around with it.  Definitely.  I would have art and culture spaces instead of old people’s homes for seniors.  Where groups of people who wanted to bond couldread newspapers or watch the news or perform arts together.  I would have those centers for them.

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS.  She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton), Best African American Essays, 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project.   Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.

Amy Benson’s book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize winner in creative nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.  Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as New England Review, diagram, Seneca Review, Hotel Amerika, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Black Warrior Review.  She teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University and is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series, Harlem.

NOTE:  Margo Jefferson will be reading at First Person Plural, a new reading series curated by The Aviary contributors Amy Benson and Wendy S. Walters on March 5, 2012. 

Hip Hop and iPads, An Interview with Major Jackson

12/3/2011

 
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The Aviary: I’ve noticed that you are pretty attached to your iPad.  Do you read books on that?  Or do you own a Kindle or “kindling” as I call them?

(Laughter).   I don’t own a Kindle.  I do have an iPad, and I do have a few books on there, but only because I travel so much.  I do have an amazing book collection, in defense of the poet who has an iPad. 

The Aviary: This summer you spent time in the Dabaab, a camp of almost 400,000 refugees, many of them Somalians exiled by war or famine, what has been quoted as “the most desperate place on earth.” Did you ever feel like, “What am doing here, teaching poetry?”

In fact, much of the opening sequence of my new poems from the Daabab Suite has to do with that very subjectivity of a) here are these people who are facing a kind of rupture of their lives that I’ll never have to face and yet here I am feeding off of their suffering to some extent.  This notion of bearing witness is not as fluid as it may seem.  I think one of the psychological transitions is moving beyond a sense of guilt and privilege and allowing oneself to simply be an artist, and maybe even owning it.  Maybe that’s part of the strategy of what I’m writing, owning the fact that these complicated feelings are worthy of artistic expression, as much as the very hard act of either writing persona poems in their voice or imagining their lives and language that goes beyond the journalistic.  That’s a very difficult project.  But I think one of the phases is what you said, thinking “What am I doing here?”  So I think once you move past that it then becomes an aesthetic project, one of closing the gap between those human beings and your own self.

The Aviary: You worked with the 10-line form in your last book, Holding Company.  Are you still working with constraints in your writing?

I am actually.  These poems about Dadaab are kind of building off of what I’ve learned about writing the urban renewal poems. Loose, slant, off-rhymes.  Hexameter, 12 syllables, 6 beats per line, which is very French.  But instead of the subject matter being myself, it is other people’s lives.

The Aviary: You taught a class on “Rap as Poetry” at University of Vermont, I’m interested to know what was on that reading/listening list.

Yale Anthology of Rap Lyrics. 

Even though it is populist poetry, we all know that it has the same relationship to language and metaphor, cadence and rhythm that one would find in Yeats or Eliot; they could also find that in Jay-Z and Kurtis Blow. 

The Aviary: What rappers did you listen to, for the class?

Jay-Z, Immortal Technique, Wu-Tang Clan.  We looked at the lyrics of Salt n’ Pepa and talked about construction of gender and modernist attitudes towards sexuality.  The Rap as text, I started to think about its use in the classroom after I heard a wonderful lecture by the critic Christopher Ricks about Bob Dylan’s ballads as poetry.  Then I started to think about De La Soul’s ballads.  Slick Rick and many other Hip Hop artists started to use the ballad form to tell stories, often tragic stories about the neigbourhood.

The Aviary: In 2007, you wrote in an stunning article for APR that “many white poets do not have black friends.”  Do you still believe that?

I guess some part of me was was still aiming at a sense of provocation (laughter).  But yeah, I still believe that cross cultural conversations are a rarity. 

The Aviary: What are you reading right now? On your iPad?

Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan.  And my friend Touré wrote a book about race in America (Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?).   Evangeline by Longfellow, which is amazing.

The Aviary: And actual books?

The Muse as Music, by Meta DuEwa Jones, an Anthology of Russian Poetry that my friend Vera Pavlova recommended.  I think it’s essential for Americans to have a strong sense of know what’s going on globally in poetry.  And I think she is a wonderful representative of the continuation of great Russian poetry.

The Aviary: What natural talent would you like to be gifted with? 

Ooooh.  The jauntiness…(laughter)..the jauntiness…

The Aviary: Yes?

…of an actor.  I wish my poetry could take on voices, historical voices of say someone like Napoleon.  I could be like the black Napoleon of the 21st century!  I would love to be a minister in the Great Awakening, a preacher.  But I’m not an actor.  I think every poet has to have some ability to be performative and to step out of ourselves.  I think we need that when we write.  Part of the joy of writing is being mired in that ecstatic moment of creation.  Also it feels like we are inhabiting some other part of ourselves.  Some part of us is already engaged in that act of inhabiting another self.  But I wish I could do it with greater voracity.

The Aviary: If you could chose one place to live forever, where would it be?

Near water. 

As much as I love the Northeast…I was born in Philly and live in Vermont.  But if I could be on the beach where it was warm most of the time, it would feed my soul.

The Aviary: What’s your current state of mind?

Bliss.  No, almost.  Almost bliss. 

MAJOR JACKSON is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010, Norton); Hoops (2006, Norton); and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press). He has published poems and essays in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry (2004, 2011). He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.

Jackson has served as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Antioch University, a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Xavier University of Louisiana and the University of Massachusetts - Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence. He is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

(photo credit: Erin Patrice O'Brien)

Parallel and Simultaneous: An Interview with Janne Nummela

12/2/2011

 
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The Aviary: What is the first landscape that you remember?

I think it was a cornfield, in Autumn or Summertime, in the evening.  A Finnish corn field, not so large or horizontally open like the Russian farmland, but flourishing patchwork: half-glimmering and gilded, half-shadowed and fringed with coniferous forest.

The Aviary: Has this changed from the landscape that you live in now?

I live nowadays in a place which neighbours my home farm, where my sister now lives.  The landscape is basically the same.  It is very rural.  There has not been any dramatic changes, but there are less forests than before.

The Aviary: What was your first exposure to poetry?

In the small village where I grew up, there was a small school were my father studied.  His early schoolteacher was the Finnish novelist and poet, Viljo Saraja (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viljo_Saraja).  My father did not have a good relationship with him, so he had a negative picture of poetry, and literature in general from an early age.  Because of Saraja, he not was able to let go of those first preconceptions, so our home was not literally oriented at all.

My parents were simple farmers. The poetry that emerged from this environment was  the type described by Virgil in his Georgics. When I was at school, age ten or so, I wrote rhymes and short comic epigrams of other pupils, without any formal rules, just playing with language.  My teacher at that time noticed this and gave me a nice writing exercise book as a birthday present. After some consideration I decided to write a detective story.   Soon this filled the entire book.  But after a while, when I read it, I found the story rather inelegant. I decided to erase it word by word with a rubber eraser. The exercise book, I thought, was beautiful and deserved better.

After this I had a few years of writer’s block.  At the age of 15 or 16 I heard an old recorded poetry reading of the Finnish modernist and  word-magician Lauri Viita (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauri_Viita), who actually spent his last years in Oitti, in the same small village where I was in school at that time.  Viita’s poems made a strong impression on me then, as they still do now.

The Aviary: Describe your writing process.

There are always many parallel and simultaneous processes.  Experience has shown me that each process strongly depends on purpose.  But there is some kind of core method, which is common for each independent process.  Some processes are short and some are long, but the core processes are never-ending.

An example of this never-ending process is a project called “Poetic Encyclopedia”, which is a collective work I have been working on with two other writers over the past ten years.  It’s a cyclic alphabetic form of writing fiction. It has been published only in short excerpts. The project has taught us a great deal about the psychodynamics of working in a group. The responsibility of making one’s own poetic ideas objective in contrast to the ideas of the other individuals of the group has been the main principle for us.  When the work of art from this collective process is then outputted and published, it will again become subjective. The subject of the work is the group.  (I recently became acquainted with the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._I._Gurdjieff), an Armenian-Greek mystic, a teacher of sacred dances and a spiritual teacher, who wrote about the very detailed systematic description of this process.)  At the same time PE is a development platform for other more limited forms. It is kind of hypertext, in which it is possible to use to organize ad hoc texts in any purpose.

My first poetry collection has been assembled in a similar way.  The basis for every text has been part of larger hypertext published in an internet blog.  First I filtered out from the blog certain types of texts (aka Web search engine–based sketches). I saved them in one file and took them as a collection of ideas with some raw material.  Of course at this point I already had  some intuition of what the outcome would be. First I analyzed what I had unsystematically & half-intuitively assembled, and how these things worked together, and concluded whether or not they had potential to grow into some kind of satisfying form of literature.

The Aviary: What writers are you reading right now?

1. Nonnus: Dionysiaca.
2. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa: Of Occult Philosophy.
3. Leonhard Euler: Kirjeitä saksalaiselle prinsessalle fysiikasta ja filosofiasta (Letters on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy Addressed to a German Princess).
4. Marcel Proust: Kadonnutta aikaa etsimässä (Remembrance of Things Past).
5. Johannes Anker Larsen: Viisasten kivi (The Philosopher’s Stone).
6. Aleksei Tolstoy: Kärsimysten tie (The Road to Calvary, a trilogy).
7. G. I. Gurdjieff: Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
8. P. D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way
9. Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
10. Mathews, Harry & Brotchie, Alastair. Oulipo compendium.

The Aviary: Can you explain how you write your Google poems?

My ideas of Internet search engine poems, first published in 2002, are based on grammatical forms of the Finnish language. In the Finnish language there are no prepositions. Everything is included in the word itself.

Let’s take the most simple example. We could use the concept of allomorph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allomorph), which is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme). For example, the word ”istui”, (he/she sat down), is a combination of two allomorphs, which are represented in string of allophones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone) ”istu” and in allophone ”i”. ”Istu” is a body of a verb, which indicates the ’vertical-horizontal position’, and ”i” is a sign of a preterit form, which in the grammatical tense expresses actions which took place in the past. There is actually an invisible allomorph in the word, a so-called zero morph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(linguistics)). This expresses that the subject of the process (he/she) is a third part, not a part of the actual communication. In the Finnish language, one could produce dozens of long strings of allophones based on the body of one verb.  Just by modifying the body of the word one can produce an large number of contextual viewpoints where one can use a particular verb.  The body of the word itself strongly limits the way you can use it.

On the contrary, working from a database (for me the Internet is just one kind of database) by using certain forms of verbs you can discover specific contextual aspects. Therefore it can be predicted that these contents will be strongly related, because the same form of the verb has used. My first search engine-based experiments were based on this observation. So at the beginning, my aim was not directly related to FLARF; it has more in common with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poetry.

All of my search engine-based texts contain a basic idea.  It is an idealistic form of art. The idea could be some type of observation, hidden statement or hypothesis, which the text tries to prove.  The hypothesis could be related to language itself (“I believe this works this way”) or it could be more akin to a sociological root (“A number of people say this, and at same time they say this; I believe there is some kind of hidden contradiction in their mindset or philosophy.”) Or it could be just a flow of inspiration, a type of free association improvisation or automatic writing, which leads to some satisfying results.

One property of collage-based writing, based on the Internet, is that it clearly expresses some kind of sociological or political nature. Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who wrote influential works of literary and rhetorical theory and criticism.  He wanted to construct a ”objective psychology” which could effectively and clearly show contradictions of motives in an individual’s mind, or in pair of two individuals, or in Society as a whole.  For Bakhtin, verbal discourse was a product of the communion between the speaker and the social situation.  Freud talked about denying the unconscious mind as a mechanism, but Bakhtin asked: Could any “mechanism” make such refined logical, ethical, and aesthetic decisions? This kind of “mechanism” should be something else, something which is not included in a world of physical nature, but in a world of ideologies.  The concept of the unconscious mind is not for Bakhtin a objective scientific phenomena, but a proof of the mind’s hidden chain of ideology.

Therefore, the Internet has not only broadened public speech discourses which are intended to be literal, it has widened all types of communication with all possible intentions. And this is the real key of the ”objective psychology”. Some can argue: “Why should we make this zero-research? We already know the answer: banality!”   This is what I say: There are many things we know we don’t know, or we even don’t know we don’t know. Let’s leave the poetry to the big questions, which automatically avoid the trap of banality.

For the first time we can, by using Internet search-methods, discover what different ages, nationalities, and social classes really think, not only what statistics show or how they answer to polls. We are searching the unconscious mind, not the conscious one. It is more question of how things are repeated, not how they actually are.

The Aviary: What is your favourite place to visit?

Russia.

The Aviary: Why?

Russia is an absolutely contradictory country to Finland. I call the railway from Helsinki to St. Petesrburg “The Psychedelic Tunnel.” It goes from West to East. For me St. Petersburg is more “east” than China.  The main thing is that the metaphysical ground is different in Russia than in western Europe. These grounds are exclusionary to each other. In SPb I face the light, which is different.

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JANNE NUMMELA (born 1973) is an experimental poet, author of four books of poetry. His first book, On a short trip across thinly frozen ice (Lyhyellä matkalla ohuesti jäätyneen meren yli, poEsia 2006) was published in January 2006, and was the first Finnish poetry book made with the assistance of internet search engines. His second book frigidwinter (frigiditalvi, ntamo 2008) was created in collaboration with the architect Adalbert Aapola.  He is also the author of Medusa reactors (Medusareaktorit, ntamo 2009) His most recent collection, Ensyklopedia (Poesia 2011) is a large, 500 page collective work written together with poets Jukka Viikilä and Tommi Nuopponen.

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