12 or 20 (second series) questions with Andrea Abi-Karam

Andrea Abi-Karam [photo credit: Lix Z] is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for forthcoming publication with Les Figues. They toured with Sister Spit March 2018 & are hype to live in New York. EXTRATRANSMISSION [Kelsey Street Press, 2019] is their first book.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first chapbook, “it is a tight little world that we live in and i am [trapped here]”, emerged out of a small chapbook publishing collective called Mess Editions, whose connectivities were formed out of solidarity in uprising. I had had no formal training or mentorship in poetry at the time and mostly wrote one page poems, a couple 2-3 page poems, and some nightmare series inspired by Diane Di Prima. This process connected my love of print (immediacy, untraceable, dispersion) & poetry.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wrote poetry in highschool and then moved away from it to fiction during a heavy Faulkner reading period. My first girlfriend in undergrad reintroduced me to poetry through the works of Marianne Moore & Elizabeth Bishop. From there I geared my english towards 20thCE poets & postmodernist playwrights like Caryl Churchill & Sarah Kane.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
My work begins by trying to tackle & untangle large political problems running alongside personal obsessions & inspirations. I’m always writing in to a project, that sometimes becomes a book, a performance piece, a one off poem, or a party.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings, performing & curating. Facilitating social spaces for queer, trans, radical writers is very much where I began first identifying strongly as a poet. My friend Drea Marina & I co-hosted this series in Oakland, CA called Words of Resistance, an open floor radical poetry night that fundraised for political prisoners’ commissary money. Having upcoming readings is essential to keeping my writing practice momentous, it’s the truest deadline. When I was invited to tour with Sister Spit in 2018, I prepared a performance piece titled “ABSORPTION”; For the performance, I stapled each page of the text to my own body in front of a glitching projection. As the text was adhered to sheets of reflective mylar, or screens, they reflected the projection back at the audience. I did this every night for two weeks on tour, and although this particular element wasn’t necessarily visible to new audiences, the accumulation of the incisions & bruises from the stapler approached the limits of what I could withstand. It was on this tour that I pushed myself beyond bounds of the “poetry reading” into that of performance.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My creative work is driven by intermingled experience & research catalyzed through a critical, theoretical lens. My first full-length book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), arose from intensive study of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir Puar, Significant Injury: War, Medicine, and Empire in Claudia's Case by Jennifer Terry, & experiences as a queer/trans arab punk. By applying queer fluidity to Frantz Fanon’s three steps of decolonization, my chapbook THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016) attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. My second full-length book, Villainy (Les Figues, 2020), is a writing-through of post-Ghostship Fire & post-Muslim Ban grief via desire towards Tiqqun (“How Is It To Be Done”) & Fred Moten’s (Black and Blur) concept of the expansive singularity.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I very much thrive through creative discipline, deadlines are great, readings are even better. I love the durational, time-stamped somatic rituals of CA Conrad, & I also love timed interval writing just for generating the raw material that may become poems later.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Queer dance parties.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Humid spring.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Performance, Punk, collaboration.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Etel Adnan, Eileen Myles, Juliana Spahr, Solmaz Sharif, Jasbir Puar, &&&&&

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve been deeply immersed in the work of Cecilia Vicuña. I read Spit Temple at the end of 2019 and have been living with her New & Selected Poems which came out on Kelsey Street Press just before EXTRATRANSMISSION.

It’s 2019! I’m constantly thinking about BLADE RUNNER.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on finishing my trashy punk romance novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lindsay Turner

Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018). Her translations from the French include Ryoko Sekiguchi's adagio ma non troppo (Les Figues, 2018), and Stéphane Bouquet's The Next Loves (Nightboat, forthcoming 2019). She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she teaches English and Creative Writing at Furman University starting in the fall of 2018.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Songs & Ballads felt really different from anything I’d written before. The biggest difference between older poems and the poems in Songs & Ballads is in form: around the summer of 2014 I started playing around with quatrains and off-rhymes and crazy repeating patterns I made up for some of the poems, and I couldn’t stop. (I thought this was over when I finished the book, but I don’t think it’s out of my system yet.) I don’t know if my first book has changed my life. I feel more certain of myself as a poet—even if I never write anything else starting tomorrow, I will have written a book, and that feels solid and good. Also I feel like the slate has been cleared, or the thicket of work I had to write before writing the book has been cleared, and I can start over for the next one.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I started writing poetry as a kid growing up in Tennessee before I knew that people actually wrote poetry, and before I read any poetry—so it’s hard for me to say how I ended up with poetry. I took a poetry workshop my first year in college, and everything absolutely clicked: I realized I wasn’t the only person who wanted to read and write in this bizarre way. I’ve thought about writing fiction or non-fiction, and even tried, but I find it hard to sustain longer projects (even longer poems)—and impossible to believe in plot.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Sometimes a poem takes a while to build up and then comes out in a rush. Sometimes it just comes out in a rush. Sometimes it’s a struggle and a lot of tinkering and deleting and re-doing, although these are the poems I often end up throwing out. I’m always taking notes, but they don’t always make it into poems.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

This also varies for me. Sometimes a poem begins from a line or two, or sometimes an image. Sometimes—as with Songs & Ballads—it begins with a form or a shape. For Songs & Ballads, I saw the shapes of the poems as boxes to be filled in before I wrote some of them. As far as book structure: most of the time I half-close my eyes and cringe and try not to think about it until I’ve got about a book’s worth of material. I still don’t think I know how to write a whole book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

My work—especially the work in Songs & Ballads—is meant to be read out loud, and I love reading it. Plus I can never tell if a poem is finished until I read it out loud in front of someone who’s listening.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I write with the theoretical concerns I live with: what in the world is happening right now? Has it always been happening? How do the things I do and see and feel every day, in a medium-sized upstate South Carolina town, have something to do with global inequality, massive expulsions of populations from the places they live, climate change and attendant catastrophe, police brutality, the violence of gender at different levels, structural racism? How and where to end that list? To echo you, what are the current questions, and how do you live and write while asking them? I don’t have many answers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The writer definitely has a role in larger culture—I mean, the writer is such a constitutive part of larger culture. But I don’t think writers are very good at saying what it is, much less what it should be. I guess, just: keep writing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I haven’t done much work with outside editors for my poems. I have a few friends who are wonderful at giving suggestions. For prose and criticism, working with outside editors has been amazing: I think good, thoughtful, thorough editing can be a remarkable act of intellectual generosity.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My first poetry teacher insisted that a poem be rooted in the real, concrete world. When things are going terribly wrong in a poem, I go back to that.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?

Translating is relatively new for me: I was always intrigued by the idea of doing it, but I never thought I could. When I first started translating, it was because I could hear certain texts in English as I read them in French. It turns out that I really love translating, especially poetry, because it sends me back to the part of writing that’s a fundamental, material engagement with words and sounds.  It reminds me that writing is a material process. It’s a little addictive, because at the end of the workday you’ve got a poem, and you feel like you wrote it! But you didn’t have to have any of the ideas behind it. Sometimes I worry that translating’s just a very productive form of procrastination. But that’s not fair, because I do think it’s crucial that the writers I’m working with are available in English, and I’m excited for an Anglophone audience to encounter them. Besides, I can’t write good poems as often as I’d like to, so translating probably saves me from churning out a bunch of really awful work.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It’s terrible: I don’t have a writing routine or even a typical day. For about two weeks a year I can’t sleep and write from 3-5 in the morning. That’s great but can’t last. More normally, I have to get things like emails and errands done in the morning. I like to go for a walk or run or something in the middle of the day. Afternoons are my best writing time, at least for prose things and translation, and then evenings and nights are reading or poems. But this changes when I’m teaching or when I’m really into what I’m doing (or under pressure to finish). And when I start writing a poem I can usually work on it wherever, whenever. When I’m writing poems is the only time I ever lose track of time—like, the whole morning is gone and all I’ve done is fix a line.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

All I know how to do is take the dog for a walk, and wait it out.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cut grass and hot parking lot—summer in the American southeast.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I used to think all you had to do to be a poet was read a lot of “great” books, but now I think that’s wrong. This is a relief, because looking at things that are not books and doing things that are not reading have secretly always been more generative for me than reading (although I read a lot, and like it).  It’s hard for me to write without lots to look at: I love the mountains where I grew up, which are the same mountains I live near now, and I’m grateful to live in a neighborhood with gorgeous old trees and some hawks and owls. I wrote a lot of Songs & Ballads living on the west coast of Ireland, and it’s the only time I’ve had the ocean there to write about. Movies help when my eyes get too bored. Poets like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer have been so important for me lately: they’re models of writing from the center of real, worried, messy life—not museum life or library life or constant pared-down heightened-beauty life.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Etel Adnan, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Emily Dickinson, Silvia Federici, Jorie Graham, Henry James, Bhanu Kapil, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, John Keats, Adrienne Rich, C.D. Wright, Virginia Woolf…

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to travel to all the places I haven’t been, perfectly curate a minimalist closet of clothes I totally love, and write the next book.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Travel agent (budget travel for creative types). Translator of wine labels. Geographer. I liked waiting tables but I wasn’t very good at it.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I often think I should be doing something else. But I’m miserable when I’m not writing, and there’s probably nothing I could do that would fix that.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Chelsea Minnis’s Poemland. Also Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. A new documentary by Wang Bing called Madame Fang.

20 – What are you currently working on?

I like working on bunches of things at once, so that when something stalls I can pick up something else. Right now I’m finishing up two translation projects (Stéphane Bouquet’s Vie Commune, a wonderful multi-genre book [that needs a home], and a book of philosophy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s Postcolonial Bergson, out soon with Fordham UP) and digging into a third (Liliane Giraudon’s Love Is Colder Than the Lake, co-translating with Sarah Riggs). I’m picking at a book of prose poems, Essays on Waiting, which is basically finished. I’m reading for and thinking about an essay I want to write on Barbara Johnson’s essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” and race and reproductive justice. I’m making up syllabi for the workshops I’m teaching in the fall. My partner, Walt Hunter, and I are writing a chapbook called Wasted Empty Space. I’m working on poems for a next poetry collection, which might or might not be called Accomplice.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

trenchart monographs hurry up please its time, eds. Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place

We started Les Figues Press in 2005 to publish the TrenchArt series. In other words, the idea of the Press was the idea of the series. Or, simply put: we wanted to publish books as a conversation or group curation. As writers, we frequently discussed our work in terms of other people’s writing, even as our individual efforts were writing into, or against, a larger social inscription or text. This larger text could be what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary,” defined as “the ways people imagine their social existence,” including their expectations, relationships, and the “deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). To Taylor, the social imaginary is held together by the stuff of the imagination—images, stories, legends. If, as writers, we are making texts (poems, prose bits, novellas) in an increasingly networked world, what might our individual works, placed side-by-side, reveal about a social imaginary, which is also in/forming these individual texts? Fred Moten, in a talk at the University of Denver, refused to talk about writing “beginning,” because writing, he said (and I’m paraphrasing) is simply a way our ongoing sociality sometimes emerges. Writing, in other words, is a form of sociality. Writing never comes from one alone.

When we founded Les Figues, we (or to be exact, I) did not have this language for writing. Yet demonstrating this intuitively-held relationship between individual texts—and the larger social text—felt worthy of publishing. Vanessa Place, Pam Ore, and I had been talking about this “something” we wanted to make for a few years, and one afternoon we imagined a publication structure: TrenchArt. (Teresa Carmody, “For What Reason Is This Writing: Publisher’s Preface”)

I’m amazed by the remarkable anthology trenchart monographs hurry up please its time (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), edited by Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, an anthology collecting nearly a decade’s worth of publications created as part of the TrenchArt series produced by Les Figues Press. As Carmody’s introduction explains, the original TrenchArt essays, grouped together to be published as short monographs, were the origins of the press itself: to present work as a conversation, and works that would have no home anywhere else. Moving beyond those first, small publications, Les Figues is a press that has evolved over the past decade-plus to be one of the leading publishers of innovative, experimental and conceptual writing in North America, producing book-length works by Jennifer Calkins, Vanessa Place, Redell Olsen, derek beaulieu, Sophie Robinson, Timothy Yu, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, Colin Winnette, Sawako Nakayasu, Doug Nufer, Urs Allemann, Dodie Bellamy, Sandra Doller and multiple others, as well as producing another important anthology: I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012) [see my review of such here].

Depictions of the present are complacent; depictions of the future are implausible. For this reason, depictions are generally unimportant, unless they are made by important people like economists or real estate agents. These important people describe only the future, which they make sure is boring and plausible. A plausible future is just more of the present. The Empire never ends because the people in it are more important than the world that they deserve. Better to have a world that exists than a world that is better but might rock the boat: this is a good general view. Because if you rock the boat, the boat will take on water, and it might well sink. There are already people drowning in the bottom of the boat. Poetry succeeds as if the boat can lift off from the water and become an airy structure, with a few words surrounded by wide open space where the sun gleams off-white. This is not an important thing for the world to be able to do; it is not an important thing to be able to do with the world. Turn it into an essay where the dead things of the present are nailed to a bulletin board: that is at least a little bit useful. I’ve nailed every dead bit of my ego to this bulletin board that you have just read, and illustrated each one with a corny metaphor. Enjoy. I’ll see you in the future, or else in an extrapolative satire, or else I won’t see you. You are too important to be able to get out of this present world that wants to be with you till death. (Stan Apps, “On Unimportant Art”)

Originally solicited for publication in annual limited editions sets of four or five authors submitting an essay each, the anthology collects the entirety of the series in a single volume, with essays on writing, art and thinking by Harold Abramowitz, Danielle Adair, Stan Apps, Nuala Archer, Dodie Bellamy, Sissy Boyd, Melissa Buzzeo, Amina Cain, Jennifer Calkins, Teresa Carmody, Allison Carter, Molly Corey, Vincent Dachy, Lisa Darms, Ken Ehrlich, Alex Forman, Lily Hoang, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Alta Ifland, Klaus Killisch, Alice Könitz, Myriam Moscona, Doug Nufer, Redell Olsen, Pam Ore, Renée Petropoulos, Vanessa Place, Michael du Plessis, Frances Richard, Sophie Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Mark Rutkoski, Susan Simpson, Stephanie Taylor, Axel Thormählen, Mathew Timmons, Chris Tysh, Julie Thi Underhill, Divya Victor, Matias Vieneger and Christine Wertheim. As editor Place writes to end her introduction: “And so, the TrenchArt series followed the sound-sensical manner of Alice’s Queen of Hearts—sentence first, verdict afterwards. Which is an admirable way to run anything, especially sentences.” The pieces gathered in this anthology breathe a collective sigh in a multitude of directions, ways and purposes, each asking, why are we continuing to create in the same ways we have already done?

What of the making of things together? Collaboration. We get together to make a thing, a thing that will trigger an uncanny shift of perception in those who see it. This shift will expose a particular societal delusion so ubiquitous as to have been previously invisible. This object we imagine will perpetuate an act of radical haunting, that awakens the viewer to the world around it, but its success depends wholly on our collaborative BOO. I show up as Boris Karloff but my collaborator was hoping for a more Henry James-like spooking. Her laugh is not fiendish enough. He thinks my cape ridiculous. There is always a gap. We mind the gap fastidiously, obsessively. It is not what I had envisioned. My collaborators have deprived me of the sight I’ve grown used to. They have haunted my haunting … generously. “Have you ever really looked carefully at the thing we are making?” they ask. (Susan Simpson, “Untitled Aesthetic”)

As Place points out in her introduction, “[…] Les Figues Press was also born from a women’s art salon, Mrs. Porter’s, held most regularly from 2004 until 2013 or thereabouts. Everyone who attended presented some item for aesthetic contemplation (one’s own or another’s) during the first half of the evening; the second half was devoted to teasing out connections and distinctions between the works. To a consideration of how these scraps of writing or bits of art might tat together, not a telos, but an essay. As in essaie, as in try. Try as in trial. The trail, of course, in the TrenchArt series, was the work itself.” An anthology of this sort functions as a curated montage of divergent ideas on approaches to writing, attempting to prompt new ways of thinking about how writing is created, presented and absorbed, and there is a great deal within that can’t help but to startle the attentive reader into seeing writing in a potentially new way, whether their own, or simply writing in general. A book such as this wants to shake the complacency out of so much of what is currently being produced, disseminated and absorbed and somehow called “writing.” The possibilities are far larger than what most writing might suggest, and perhaps more (including myself) should be better at paying attention to the writers who are working to continuously push at the boundaries.

My art is guided by history: art history, social history, political history, and personal history. The historical and the personal are inextricably linked, like two sides of the same sheet of paper. My work is about how memory itself is political, and the process by which the political is transformed into memory.

I am driven by an urge to retrieve something lost or something that will soon be lost. Walter Benjamin has written about this impulse to return to the past in order to rescue it from disappearance. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History he says, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In uncovering the historic in my work, I don’t mean to tell the story, but rather I am interested in telling a story—something highly constructed and subjective. In rescuing and remembering the past, the work allegorically reinvents meaning—a new story is told. (Molly Corey, “Aesthetic/Politic”)

One of the more intriguing of an already-impressive gathering of exploratory pieces is Lisa Darms’ erasure essay, “½ EARTH ½ ETHER,” a piece she attempts to salvage through the process of erasure. As she writes in her “Postscript: Under Erasure” (dated 2014):

When I was asked to republish this essay, I thought of it in terms of my job as an archivist. I knew I’d probably be embarrassed by my writing, but that it would be a way to enact my belief that the highest function of the textual archive is to preserve mistakes, imperfections and failures.

And then, I re-read it.

The archive documents failure, yes. But it doesn’t have to perpetuate it. This is the voice of someone who, after three vaguely demoralizing years in a studio art graduate program, has spent a year unable to find work, reading only holocaust memoirs and back issues of Artforum. The original essay’s stylistic pomposity and its humorlessness are qualities I’ve spent the last eight years trying to purge from my writing (and life). My first inclination, when I saw this essay in proofs, was to kill it.

But instead, I decided to retun it with extensive redactions—a sort of faux-bureaucratic disavowal of the more facile ideas, and an homage to the sharpie marker sous rapture of riot grrrl zines. I’ve found that the essay now expresses its stuttering logic more accurately. Because we don’t want to stop time; we want to reanimate it.

Sandra Doller, Leave Your Body Behind

So there he sits, condensing away. Condensating. Every vowel so purpose, so dirty hole. Who are the ones that shake it loose my way. Shake some action, my feet. Like a radio stop. Here we are at at the bridge again. I had nothing specific in mind. When I asked you to hold the bag. Nothing in particular when I put it in the park and walked up the see saw under the armpit border in another country in an orphan train. I’m getting loose away from it like all those slut shamey bypass pills. You should be paying me not to procreate. If I popped you’d be sorry then. I believe so much in shame. It’s just sluts that don’t exist.

I’m stunned by San Diego writer Sandra Doller’s remarkable Leave Your Body Behind (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), a book described as a mix between novel, memoir, exploratory essay and prose poem that, through the combination, manages to become both none and all of the above. Powerful, unrelenting and entirely physical, Leave Your Body Behind pushes and thrashes through an accumulation of short sections in which she “actively relives, revives and revamps her own memories.” Through the space of the book she explores memory, space and accountability, utilizing the structures of fiction, non-fiction and poetry to blend into something fluid, that exists impossibly easy and wonderfully complex. As she writes: “That Amy Tan really knows how to stay on track. If I could whip up something like a room, and a mother, and some situations, I’d really have something to share. As it is, I only have this little observation to offer, petty as it is. I hope you will accept it in the true and conflicted heart wrenching manner it is offered. Proffered.” Part of what has appealed for some time about Les Figues is its ability to refuse what many consider “bookstore designations” for its titles, including “literature” on the back cover instead of, say, “fiction” or “memoir,” either of which would have been an incomplete designation. Remember when Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo first appeared as “poetry,” and later, once the film adaptation was released, was reprinted as “fiction”? For certain works, the declaration can appear to be rather arbitrary.

Does work equal energy? Apart from physics. Work is demand. Energy is forgive. Energy is something you want and want to keep. Work is something you trade. Take my work, leave me my energy. College is made of people. People require energy which is work. You have to get rid of some things. Give up things. Spend your money. College gets a negative w-rap. Things that are similar are not things. There you could say stop asking me taking me. Now: you say, please ask me take me. Now you are lucky to get suck work. You are lucky to get work. You are lucky to give away your energy to people or things. You give it almost for free. Now. There is nothing similar. Not anymore. It’s a dirty word. Get burned. Stay bad.

Editrice of 1913 Press and 1913: A Journal of Forms, Doller is the author of four previous works—Oriflamme (Ahsahta Press, 2005), Chora (Ahsahta Press, 2010), Man Years (Subito Press, 2011) and Sonneteers (Editions Eclipse, 2014)—all of which display an engagement with a blending of forms and shapes and movement. In an interview posted in 2014 at Entropy, she writes:

Lately, I’ve been using this Lyn Hejinian quote for almost everything—from thinking about poetry & dance, to answering this question—so I’ll pop that in here. It’s from The Language of Inquiry...which bears reading/re-reading, yes/wow:

“The language of poetry is a language of inquiry, not the language of a genre. It is that language in which a writer (or a reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception. Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.”

Poetry is so many things—political speech, resistance, music, comedy—and has different roles in different contexts. In Slovenia and Russia and Mexico and Canada, in my limited experience, poets seem to be treated differently than in the US, where to say you are a “poet” to a non-poet listener is like saying you’re an anarchist who lives in the desert in a tent made of decomposing trash, by choice.