An Interview with Nora Collen Fulton

(Hiding Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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Writer Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal where she is a graduate student studying English literature. Recently, I received a copy of her new book, Presence Detection System (Hiding Press, 2019). Hiding Press publishes “new works of experimental literature as well as neglected older work in the same vein.” Publisher Andy Martrichn describes the work Fulton does in Presence Detection System as “refracting a dynamism of language wrapped up in a sort of codified imagery. Where are lines drawn? I think that Fulton leaves that up to us to decide, and for that reason there’s a good amount of space to move around, engage, and change one’s mind from within the text.” My interest was piqued. The following interview was conducted via e-mail; only minor edits were made by me.

As cat behaviourist Jackson Galaxy

points out, the ally figure reoccurs elsewhere, in two passages

from Mom’s work which both, interestingly, concern music.

We are further indebted to Galaxy for tracing this theme

to yet another PDS, this time by Keith the Chocolate Shaman—

A Rug Suspended 1,000^th / 1mm Of The Ground—which, as he notes,

explores “the monocameral walled wall’s petition-like dream”

(Toward the PDSs of My Mother, 98). From this point of view,

the golden dude bargaining with his own complicity and privilege

in the presence detection system’s lines symbolizes the camp itself.

~Nora Collen Fulton, Presence Detection System, 2019 [59]

 

CLARA B. JONES: Imagine that you have invited three persons to dinner and the four of you are discussing PDS. Who would your guests be, and what would you serve for dinner? Why these three individuals, and how does the food relate to your book?

NORA COLLEN FULTON: I love this question! I think anyone who has some familiarity with the way I present myself to the world knows that I love making food, especially for other people. I’m kind of good at it too. I’m going to be a bit liberal with your question and say that the three people I would invite are Laura Riding, Alain Badiou and Bertolt Brecht. The reason being that Riding is my favourite poet, Badiou is my favourite philosopher, and Brecht is my favourite short German revolutionary playwright. I think that Riding and Badiou would probably have really steamy chemistry with each other, but they would get constantly cockblocked by Brecht all night, because Badiou would hate him and Riding would secretly like him… But he would openly dislike her. I also think even though I love these three so much they probably are/would be pretty shitty about trans people. However, I would use my feminine wiles, self-deprecating charm and homey cooking skills to woo them over to the ways of trans-allydom. I would make the thing I always like to make for people when they come over, which is some kind of whole fish, Greek sea-bass probably, maybe pan-fried in oil with a cilantro sauce and tomatillo filling. The topic of my book probably wouldn’t come up.

CBJ: When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer? Who have been your greatest influences?

NCF: The first time I thought I might really want to keep writing poetry was in a class about contemporary Chinese poetry taught by a visiting professor and avant-garde poet from Beijing named Xi Chuan that I took when I was around 22. I remember one day he said: “Many people can be a poet for five years. Many people can be a poet for ten years. Many people can be a poet for twenty years. Many people can be a poet for forty years. Many people can be a poet for sixty years. But do you really want to be a poet for eighty years? Many people can be a poet for eighty years.” I thought that was fucking hilarious. I don’t really know what I think about my influences anymore. Of course, there are writers and thinkers who have impacted me greatly through the years, but today it’s actually friendships with poets and people engaged in the kind of thought that I’m trying to engage with that is more influential. Which reminds me of another thing from Xi Chuan’s class, since I brought it up, where he was describing this poem (I can’t remember by whom, perhaps this is anachronistic, it was a long time ago now) in which the poet is traveling through the snow at night with a lantern, on a journey to see another poet and friend who lives in a distant place. And the idea is implicit in the poem, like, “I will only be able to make this trip a few more times in my life.” The finitude of that. Those kinds of connections are the best part about poetry and thinking and are essential to it, I think.

CBJ: How does your gender identity influence your practice? Has the style or content of your compositions changed since you transitioned?

NCF: I’m not sure whether there has been a stylistic change in general, and it is not like transition has a clear end date or finish line, so I guess we’ll have to see. But PDS did change after I began transitioning. The book’s composition began before I came out, and it spanned an extremely difficult period of my life where I felt like I couldn’t transition, and I guess I was writing through that, through my having given up on myself. I had an extremely hard time finding a publisher for it – it was rejected by every remotely “experimental” press in Canada – so when I finally did find a press who saw some worth in it elsewhere, I was already well into transition and I returned to the book and did modify some things. I added some new work and cut some old work, and I restructured both the first and last poems in major ways, in terms of both form and content. And even more changed during the editing of the book for publication. But I didn’t want to change it too much: as corny as this sounds, I wanted to honor the person who started this book, even if that meant leaving in things that even now can immediately bring me back to the pain and hatred and hopelessness I felt in the past. This process felt like being the editor for someone else’s posthumous collection, which I’m sure is something that other writers whose transition interrupts a major writing project can relate to.

CBJ: I read PDS more than once, finding the hybridity between-sections effective and powerful as, perhaps, an underlying statement about the fractured nature of psyche and perception, in particular, and of society and reality, in general. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the collection is open-ended, in form and in content; in other words, there seems to be no conceptual framework or marker [e.g., repetition of one or more than one element] unifying the text. Now that I reflect, however, perhaps, the technical meaning of “presence detection system,” as a coded sign of sensation or perception, is a metadevice running throughout the book. In any event, keeping in mind Marjorie Perloff’s idea that an author’s “choices” or selectivity can, themselves, unify a volume, how intentional were the formal features [e.g., “splicing” of sections] of PDS—more specifically, what is the text about, and what motivated you to write it?

NCF: I think that if there is an idea that I’m committed to as a poet it is the idea of the multiple, or the way that Badiou has described being as a “pure inconsistent multiple.” This isn’t the same as multiplicity (diversity) and it’s also not the same as multitude (manyness), because there is no “one” and are no “ones” in being. Yet, paradoxically, for Badiou being is also “univocal” – it somehow always ends up speaking and appearing as one. The contradictoriness inherent in this view of being says something about poetry, I think. I try not to read a poem more than once. I try to not write the same poem twice, to never use the same form twice, to avoid making the same book twice. But in that, there is something speaking, I hope. I don’t see what I do in terms of composition as selection or curation, so much as decision. A decision isn’t a choice. Decisions are in a way made for you, and only then do you decide upon them. You don’t decide upon what to bring together like a curator, i.e., one who cures, who picks out the pieces of meat that are going to be good for curing and makes jerky, a kind of deferred sustenance – you decide on which gaps in the multiple are the most essential to keeping the multiple multiple, and you build around those.

CBJ: Kenneth Goldsmith has said, “Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus.” Do you identify with these propositions in any way? Do you consider PDS to be an example of “conceptual” poetry or writing? Do you intend PDS to be read? As an aside, I hope you intend for at least parts of the text to be read—I think “Coat” is excellent, “Prose” is fascinating, though I am not clear about whether the sections are appropriated material—if one needs to know that at all. In any event, what are your thoughts?

NCF: I appreciate you asking this question, because it’s a question that surrounded me as I was beginning to think about poetics, and it’s currently a question that most people consider to be passé or obsolete or closed. I have never identified with Conceptual Writing, and I despise it and its figureheads. My first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published in 2013 when this was a more timely conversation, and it includes a long poem that I described as a “conceptual memoir,” which looks like (and pretends to be) that kind of doctrinaire conceptual text but is in fact almost all “original” writing, made to be an imitation of appropriation. (Actually, one of the only sections of that poem that isn’t of my making is a transcription of a recording in which Marjorie Perloff awkwardly and unsuccessfully tries to get some kind of PowerPoint presentation to work for about five minutes.) One thing that this conceit allowed me to do, besides make fun of these kind of people, was talk about my first attempt to transition and be open about being trans in a way that was in fact the exact opposite of an “effacement of the self.” The joke was that if I came out within a poem that people thought they shouldn’t read, then I wouldn’t have to actually come out. No one got it, but it is still extremely funny to me! Which is another way of saying, yes, you should read things. In my view, Conceptual Writing constellated an array of techniques and methods – many of which I do still use and am interested in – but it also attributed fixed meanings to them, this “ethos” in the quote above which in the end is nihilistic and fascistic and born of privilege, which I disagree with on every point.

At the same time, I feel that in the wake of the well-deserved death of Conceptual Writing there has been a reaction that has uncritically swung poetics back into the realm of naturalism and lyricism. Rather than looking ahead, poets are now looking and identifying backwards, as if searching for a way forward through older aesthetic formations and oppositions. This is not a bad thing, but it has its risks. Now you have to confront the increasingly popular idea that poetry can only be political when it says that it is political, when the new “communist” poetry collection from the new “communist” press has poems in it with lines like “Gee I sure do enjoy partaking in the global proletarian uprising, comrade,” and the poet has a hammer and sickle in their Twitter bio. And when you’re a poet whose identity is in any way “marginalized” you also have to confront the increasingly popular idea that avant-garde and experimental practice can never be as expressive of or as true to your identity and experience as writing that is affectively direct, affectively recognizable, semantically communicative, semantically didactic. I was recently invited to an event for lesbian writers (where I would have been the only trans woman present), and the organizer asked me if my poetry dealt with lesbian or trans identity, because she “couldn’t tell by the look of it.” I have a poem in this book that is just a bunch of puns on Ja Rule’s name and various rule-based systems. Guess what: either that too is a lesbian poem and a trans poem (and a communist poem) because I’m trans and I’m a lesbian (and I’m a communist), or it’s just a poem because poems aren’t trans and poems aren’t lesbians (and poems aren’t communists). This is truly an open question, though, and it is one that I think should be left open because it is generative only when it is open.

CBJ: Writing on your Concordia University profile page, you state, “My research is concerned with the ways contemporary philosophical understandings of ontology and temporality as fundamentally contingent can inform the contested positionality of transgender life, subjectivity, and being. I am interested in how this contestation (and conversation with philosophy) expresses itself through literature and other media.” Can you expand on this statement for non-specialists—giving examples from the real world?

NCF: Some of what I’m thinking about in that statement and my research is probably already apparent in this interview. But I guess I just happen to think that trans people exist, that it is possible to be trans – you know, mostly because trans people exist and being trans is a real possibility, which for me means that insofar as sex and gender and identity exist, and this existence is not anywhere nil, it is possible for sex and gender and identity to change, not just in terms of becoming, but in terms of actual being, to change in a radical way (rupture, not emergence). Among other things, I’m trying to articulate that view of transness in a different philosophical register than it is usually articulated within.

CBJ: In part, due to my interest in Surrealism, I am wont to employ psychoanalytic paradigms in an attempt to mine unconscious motivation of the artist manifested in creative works, including, literature. Based upon my online research about you and your writing, it is my impression that you consider Psychoanalysis to be opposed to your project. If I am correct about this, please discuss your opposition to Freudian and, I would assume, Lacanian and, possibly, Kleinian, formulations. Surely, you understand that some will consider your work, your gender identity, as well as, your typological use of “mother” to be mediators of or, perhaps, to be erasures of, Oedipal constructs? Also, transgender identity might be interpreted as “identification,” in the Freudian sense—interpreted, further, as “twinning” [Lacan] or “doubling” [with both father and mother, male and female, subject and object].

NCF: I like to strew those things around as bait for the psychoanalysts. When I catch one I keep them in a jar in my basement. I’m running out of room in my basement!

CBJ: It is my impression that many young, and not so young, radical poets are averse to the academy and to theory; however, that posture does not seem to describe you. Is this something you’d care to comment on?

NCF: I think that there are two importantly different tendencies of this ‘aversion,’ and as a result we can talk about two different groups arising from them. I think that the first group comprises people who truly do reject any kind of value or potential in the academy and in theory. For them the university and anything resembling a tradition or canon of knowledge can only be the enemy. This first and more militant group either wants to destroy the institutions in which this kind of knowledge production takes place, or they simply want to exist fully outside of them; they have various reasons for this that you can contest, but they have reasons. The second group, however, comprises people who often come from the academy at some point or have some kind of orbital relationship to it; an open relationship. These people turn away from academia and theory due to an apparent disagreement about “tactics,” but they still share the same “strategy,” to evoke that old distinction. These people choose a different tactic – which today might take the form of autotheory, for example, or popular criticism, and is found everywhere in culture writing – that pretends to disdain the elitism of academic specialization and high theory, pretends to orient itself to an imaginary “mass audience,” but really the strategy is the same, in that it just lets one middle-to-upper-class subject orate to other middle-to-upper-class subjects, forming a kind of therapeutic relationship that enables those subjects to find catharsis for their horizontally-mobile guilt and bad faith.

This group of pragmatists dilutes the exact same kinds of knowledge produced in the institutions of scholarship and theory, and they use the exact same tools, hidden behind the curtain of style, but they do so in a piecemeal fashion that is loyal to nothing, as if one can treat the history of thought as a kind of Build-a-Bear workshop that will allow one to make intellectual history and truth about the world as it is conform to one’s ideological goals. (This also takes place within the academy, and always has, of course.) I disagree with both groups. But I respect the writers and thinkers who can be placed in that first group a lot more than the “public intellectuals” of the second. At least the militants have made a real decision about where and how thought should proceed toward an emancipatory and revolutionary project. I’ve just made a different decision. Making a decision, one which can’t be retracted is difficult no matter where and who you are. And I think that as the university and institutions like it wither away (and they are clearly withering away) the position of people like me who think something can still be done with this where and how will converge more with that first group than the second.

CBJ: What are you reading now, and what authors would you recommend to your audience?

NCF: In terms of theory I’ve just started reading Calvin L. Warren’s book Ontological Terror, and in terms of poetry I’ve just finished reading Catherine Christer Hennix’s new Selected Works. In terms of authors to recommend, I will just list some poets (some of whom I know, some of whom I don’t) whose presence has inspired me in the last year: Anne-Marie Albiach, Bianca Messinger, Simone White, Mark Francis Johnson, Ted Rees, Stephanie Creaghan, Will Alexander, Diana Sue Hamilton, and Nicole Raziya Fong.

CBJ: Can you share anything about your future projects. What are your post-doctoral plans?

NCF: I have another book of poetry coming out in 2020 called Thee Display, which is about astrology, communism, my dead dog, transition, the sea, and some other things. It’s going to be published through the Documents series with Anteism Press, a Montreal publisher. As for post-doctoral plans, I have no idea. It’s a long ways off. I hope I can find a way to keep doing what I’ve been doing so far: reading, thinking, living, working, the usual.

CBJ: Is there anything else you’d like your audience to know about your identity and role as an experimental writer, about your practice, or about other matters?

NCF: You first.

CBJ: I’ll take you up on that by saying I intend to appropriate your notion of “imitating appropriation”—the phrase has so much “interpretive power,” as Helen Vendler would say. Thank you for your many cogent insights and opinions expressed in this interview, Nora.

—

NORA COLLEN FULTON is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.

 

CLARA B. JONES is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other writings, she is author of the poetry collection, /feminine nature/ [GaussPDF, 2017]. Clara also conducts research on experimental literature, as well as art & technology.