Closing Statement
i want to be your friend. everyone wants to be your friend. you are cool. you are the coolest.
Showing posts with label emilie kneifel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emilie kneifel. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 February 2020
Thursday, 13 February 2020
emilie kneifel : part five
How do you know when a poem is finished?
i guess my answer depends on our scope.
one option: on the scale of one’s whole life, a poem is never finished. you can always take the cookie dough back out of the freezer, in the same way that you can choose to be in a long term relationship as long as you understand that its participants and the relationship itself will continuously shift.
HOWEVER. i am really precious about artifacts. as a medium-sized kid, i would fix spelling errors on toddler-me’s masterpieces, which now makes me shudder. that feels like defacement. now i keep my drafts mild-to-mediumly obsessively. and those poems, the ones who live in drafts evermore, are untouchable (is that the same as finished?) once they’ve been wrung as much as i can wring them within the next, oh, let’s say two months. why?
because on alie ward’s ologies podcast, futurologist rose eveleth said that the way people have predicted the future in the past is most interesting when understood as an exemplification of the era being predicted from. because my petri dish poems (the ones blobbing around in various drafts the way we’ve shelved old sicknesses) are an imprint of a self from a certain point in time. to my mind (right now today), it seems more important to preserve that evidence of prior existence than it does to keep paving over the same road.
being the hypocrite that i am, i did recently tinker with a really old poem (i obviously left the original(s) unperturbed). but i might argue that the new draft is a different poem altogether. or a reboot of a show that no one really asked for.
i guess my answer depends on our scope.
one option: on the scale of one’s whole life, a poem is never finished. you can always take the cookie dough back out of the freezer, in the same way that you can choose to be in a long term relationship as long as you understand that its participants and the relationship itself will continuously shift.
HOWEVER. i am really precious about artifacts. as a medium-sized kid, i would fix spelling errors on toddler-me’s masterpieces, which now makes me shudder. that feels like defacement. now i keep my drafts mild-to-mediumly obsessively. and those poems, the ones who live in drafts evermore, are untouchable (is that the same as finished?) once they’ve been wrung as much as i can wring them within the next, oh, let’s say two months. why?
because on alie ward’s ologies podcast, futurologist rose eveleth said that the way people have predicted the future in the past is most interesting when understood as an exemplification of the era being predicted from. because my petri dish poems (the ones blobbing around in various drafts the way we’ve shelved old sicknesses) are an imprint of a self from a certain point in time. to my mind (right now today), it seems more important to preserve that evidence of prior existence than it does to keep paving over the same road.
being the hypocrite that i am, i did recently tinker with a really old poem (i obviously left the original(s) unperturbed). but i might argue that the new draft is a different poem altogether. or a reboot of a show that no one really asked for.
Thursday, 6 February 2020
emilie kneifel : part four
How does a poem begin?
once, the poet melissa lozada-oliva tweeted about how horniness and the impulse to write are the same feeling, which could truly be my entire answer. horny is such a good word for it because both horniness and the writing pull (and any kind of desire, really) are often steeped in prohibitive shame. also, horny being a kind of silly word tells me that a visceral poem tug doesn’t always have to be born of momentous dee-sire across an abyss of lack (though of course it can be); it can just be a crush, buzzy and sweet and already dissolving. you can have simultaneous crushes, or crush while also knowing that this one is gonna hurt. “just a crush” i say, even though a crush is never just a crush; it’s a mini incarnation of your life’s larger grief/joy. because what you look for, what you notice, what AROUSES you, all of that is informed by what has made you, what you’ve made.
also, to keep the sexy metaphors going, i think a poem has the capacity to do to us what actor alia shawkat once said (somewhere in an interview for her movie, duck butter) an orgasm does, which is that it’s one of the only times in our lives where we actually forget about death (which is what i think i mean when i call a poem an extra-temporal unit of time).
once, the poet melissa lozada-oliva tweeted about how horniness and the impulse to write are the same feeling, which could truly be my entire answer. horny is such a good word for it because both horniness and the writing pull (and any kind of desire, really) are often steeped in prohibitive shame. also, horny being a kind of silly word tells me that a visceral poem tug doesn’t always have to be born of momentous dee-sire across an abyss of lack (though of course it can be); it can just be a crush, buzzy and sweet and already dissolving. you can have simultaneous crushes, or crush while also knowing that this one is gonna hurt. “just a crush” i say, even though a crush is never just a crush; it’s a mini incarnation of your life’s larger grief/joy. because what you look for, what you notice, what AROUSES you, all of that is informed by what has made you, what you’ve made.
also, to keep the sexy metaphors going, i think a poem has the capacity to do to us what actor alia shawkat once said (somewhere in an interview for her movie, duck butter) an orgasm does, which is that it’s one of the only times in our lives where we actually forget about death (which is what i think i mean when i call a poem an extra-temporal unit of time).
Thursday, 30 January 2020
emilie kneifel : part three
How important is music to your poetry?
i learned to speak french phonetically, so i am always noticing inflection, sonic overlap, so-called puns (though i think there’s more to wordplay than kitsch), etc. because my brain is still attuned to their significance. i think it’s still waiting to learn something from them.
let me explain. a phoneme is the smallest perceptible unit of sound that distinguishes word A from word B in a particular language. e.g. my mom often says (and okay i also sometimes say) “hate” instead of “eight.” in english, that h sound is a phoneme — see how lil “h” changes the meaning of an entire word? — but in french it isn’t. my mom can’t really hear the difference (this is because when hearing babies acquire language, they have to begin to ignore insignificant sounds to be able to hear the juicy important ones) but, being bilingual from birth, i can. being able to notice this kind of minutiae is probably a clue as to why incremental sound is so important to me. not because i’m trying to be cutesy, but because, at the level of the word, minute sonic differences actually create entire identity shifts. just a huh! just a huh.
i learned to speak french phonetically, so i am always noticing inflection, sonic overlap, so-called puns (though i think there’s more to wordplay than kitsch), etc. because my brain is still attuned to their significance. i think it’s still waiting to learn something from them.
let me explain. a phoneme is the smallest perceptible unit of sound that distinguishes word A from word B in a particular language. e.g. my mom often says (and okay i also sometimes say) “hate” instead of “eight.” in english, that h sound is a phoneme — see how lil “h” changes the meaning of an entire word? — but in french it isn’t. my mom can’t really hear the difference (this is because when hearing babies acquire language, they have to begin to ignore insignificant sounds to be able to hear the juicy important ones) but, being bilingual from birth, i can. being able to notice this kind of minutiae is probably a clue as to why incremental sound is so important to me. not because i’m trying to be cutesy, but because, at the level of the word, minute sonic differences actually create entire identity shifts. just a huh! just a huh.
Thursday, 23 January 2020
emilie kneifel : part two
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
right now i renew by rereading letters, letting the dog curl up on my stomach, lying in the purple snow. ie., regular-degular hermit behaviour. but when i wanna get art-horny, i eat those who stretch my understanding of what’s possible: my friend and writer nicole delcore-kaifetz, the writer elif batuman, the comedian julio torres, the only mr. rogers, sandi tan’s memories, sound-visuals by tierra whack, SASAMI, dorian electra, caroline rose. i watch poets jos charles and diana khoi nguyen break things. this video of tc tolbert and this poem by natalie diaz keep me safe.
right now i renew by rereading letters, letting the dog curl up on my stomach, lying in the purple snow. ie., regular-degular hermit behaviour. but when i wanna get art-horny, i eat those who stretch my understanding of what’s possible: my friend and writer nicole delcore-kaifetz, the writer elif batuman, the comedian julio torres, the only mr. rogers, sandi tan’s memories, sound-visuals by tierra whack, SASAMI, dorian electra, caroline rose. i watch poets jos charles and diana khoi nguyen break things. this video of tc tolbert and this poem by natalie diaz keep me safe.
Thursday, 16 January 2020
emilie kneifel : part one
What are you working on?
i really, really struggle with art’s relationship to the ego, which, in its fragility, creates an illusion of scarcity; viz., "I am the only artist making the only art, a method which I invented while living in a fully-furnished vacuum of, you guessed it, my own creation. (And I have to keep saying this, otherwise I will melt.)" it makes me feel not cut out for being an artist in any kind of public way. because i feel most whole when my ego dissolves, when i am purely giving/ sharing/ touching someone who needs to be touched. i think a lot about platonic touch, how rarely we are held by someone who is not asking anything of us (one of many reasons why i am obsessed with people who do hair). i do think art has the capacity to platonically touch, to look in the eyes, to create ego’s opposite abundance. i need to at least hope that it can. so i am working on making art that will maybe convince me. this includes writing letters and emails and poems to and with friends, especially my dear friend, scientist and writer nivretta thatra, continuing my work as an experimental critic, which is how i first started publishing, and also creating (ooh! this is the first time i’ve talked about this ~publicly) a kooky video interview series with my pal and photographer nadia davoli. because this is supposed to be fun! and i have choked way too many times on the implication — vibrationally similar to pretending to forget someone’s name in high school — that because this “person” in the ““scene”” doesn’t know who i am, i am not worth knowing! i want to shudder-dance the gross off my body! like a big and soaking dog!
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