_ 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.

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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. 

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)

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.

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.