Ask the author: Shira Dentz of SISYPHUSINA

[PANK] Books, 2020

A new interview with Shira Dentz, author of SISYPHUSINA, as she elaborates on what poetry is and the intense collaborative process at work in her new book, available from [PANK] Books.

PANK: Your book opens with a letter to your readers about your formal
approach to these poems, including concerns like text weight, placement on the page, etc. One thing that jumped out to me was your note that “form is sculptural.” Do you approach your writing practice like visual art-making, with text standing in for a medium?

SHIRA DENTZ (SD): I do regard text as a visual stimulus that impacts one’s reading experience, whether or not this stimulus is foregrounded, though I don’t approach it as a stand-in for a medium; part of its medium is its visual nature. Along with referential meanings, written language has shapes and a surface that it’s shaped on. Before children learn to read, for instance, they respond to letter forms as characters or moods. Of course, as we grow and keep learning, we filter what we attend to, and for good reason, as we’d be overloaded otherwise. I understand, too, that one cannot look and read at the same time, just as one can’t see the “crone” and the “young beautiful woman” simultaneously in the famous optical illusion. So I know that I am playing with a multiplicity when I forefront the visual in writing, and also implicating the reading process.

As a writer, I like to be able to draw from all the elements of my medium—language—and this approach embodies my aesthetic commitment to give space to possibly overlooked details—both in the handed-down handling of my medium and subjects of focus. Also, as every language has a limited vocabulary with which to express the range of human experiences, I try to challenge “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein), and experiment with the visual components of my medium in an effort to make language where there is none. All this being said, I am a visual artist too and am sure this is partly responsible for my attention to the visual nature of written language.

[PANK] I’m curious about hybrid forms and how authors define their work when it doesn’t fit perfectly in jars like “poetry” or “prose.” SISYPHUSINA has sections that look like “traditional” lyric poetry, blocks of text that look like prose, marks, and lines like a drawing, sampled text like a collage. Do you define what you write one way or another?

SD: That’s a great question, thank you! This reminds me of the ongoing debate about how to define “prose poetry”—there are many ideas, and for the most part, I think we agree that it’s a generative question in its elusiveness. So I suppose this could apply here. I do feel that I’m mostly a poet, but my aesthetic involves questioning received forms of doing things—what is poetry—I think most writers are engaged with their own “what is poetry” or “what is a novel” or “what is a short story” etc etc. But clearly I’m interested in juxtaposition, both in stillness and movement. I could define it as hybrid or cross-genre. Maybe it’s a genre-in-progress, possibly in the spirit of Lyn Hejinian’s “Against Closure.”

[PANK] Throughout SISYPHUSINA, there are bodies– female bodies that are “imperfect” by some measure, and exhortations or examples of body/appearance modification. In ‘redshift’ an italicized line urges us to “try liposuction!”; earlier in the manuscript, there’s an extensive exploration of how ancient Egyptians shaved, dyed, and styled their hair to change their appearance and achieve an aesthetic ideal; the speaker repeatedly notes trying to lose weight; in “Units & Increments”, the speaker repeatedly states “I’m thinking of eating again.” Text throughout the book is recycled or referenced, making the world of these poems feel claustrophobic in a way that is distinctly female. Is this a moment when art imitates life?

SD: Wow, I guess so, though I hope cumulatively it resolves artistically and doesn’t fall into that caveat of “showing boredom by being boring.” Something that I undertake in this book too is juxtaposing a singular, autobiographical narrative with other narratives as they’ve been constructed both historically and in the present, in a range of realms including science, advertising, and the artistic (including literary) canon, along with collaborations with several female artists in different media. The thread of singularity that your question points to I suppose evokes a beating pulse.

There is something that I keep circling back to, a definitive point that is aging, and for women that includes fertility issues. The recurrences in text are a coming back to the origin point that I’m regarding from different angles. How to open up a new narrative

[PANK] If you could ask a reader to do a little homework before reading your new book, what would your reading list look like?

SD: Part of such a reading list like might look like—

Selected visual art and writing by visual artists Louise Bourgeois, Glenn Ligon, Cy Twombly, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer, Kay Rosen, and Erica Baum

Selected poems and texts by Stéphane Mallarmé, ee cummings, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Walser, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Weiner, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Notley, and from The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry

Formally experimental collections by Barbara Guest,  Jen Bervin, M. NourbeSe Philip, Francis Ponge, Charles Olson (Maximus), Susan Howe, Douglas Kearney, Renee Gladman, Jenny Boully, Eleni Sikelianos, and Diana Khoi Nguyen

Liminal prose by Clarice Lispector, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rosmarie Waldrop

Journals/diaries by Anais Nin and May Sarton

Short films by Maya Deren And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

[PANK] I want to return to the collage-like aspect of SISYPHUSINA and consider your process. How did this manuscript come together for you? Did you collect visuals or text samples as you went? Create them as needed?

SD: I began it as a project proposal for which I was extremely fortunate to receive a fellowship from the Tanner Center for the Humanities that enabled me to devote a bunch of time to it in its initial stage. This stage included researching literature centered on female aging in the life, physical, and social sciences, humanities, as well as its artistic expression, past and present, and in pop culture and in the news media. I took notes, but for the most part the pieces that I wrote during this time developed directly from the snippets of discoveries I was making through my research. Some of these snippets incubated in my mind for years before surfacing in a creative piece. In my conversations, while working on this project, I found that many younger women were very, very interested in reading about and giving voice to this aspect of their life. At the same time, I took up the challenge of writing about aging within the context of my own life. I gave myself freedom to use all types of media, and to play with the nuances of typography as part of my writing process. I worked for many years as a typesetter before working as a graphic artist before returning to school and teaching and brought my experience with the minute shades of type to bear in my expressive relationship to classical notions of beauty and prevailing structures of social hierarchy.

Besides what I culled from research and my personal life, I drew from encounters with art and literature that I had stored in my mind over time. The first “Sisyphusina” poem was born from a constraint experiment given to me by a fiction writer friend when I felt blocked. My initial aspiration was to make a plan for this book’s architecture, but this isn’t my natural way of working, and eventually I let it go—I’m interested in the evolution of structure rather than imposing it prematurely, though I value the generative potential of constraints.

The manuscript’s working title was Rose Secoming—I had already identified that the rose would be a central image in the book, since it’s been associated with ideals of feminine beauty in literature from early on, as in “Roman de la Rose” from the Middle Ages in which the beloved female is, in fact, a rose. I chose “secoming” as a blend of becoming and succumbing. In earlier work, I had begun experimenting with making new words where none existed to articulate female experiences (for instance, there are no female equivalents of emasculation and castration, yet sexual violation of females leaves equivalent scarring).

I continued working on the manuscript beyond the time of this fellowship, naturally, and pieces continued to grow organically from my encounters with others, myself, and the rest of my environment. In 2016, an excerpt of SISYPHUSINA was published as an e-chap, FLOUNDERS in Essay Press’ GROUNDLOOP Series, which “seeks to bring together authors exploring diverse subjects through loud, innovative architectures.”

As I continued to work on what was to become SISYPHUSINA, I moved around for jobs, and during my first year teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I was drawn to expanding what I knew about new media, having always been interested in being artistically responsive to the current zeitgeist and the emerging new. While looking for artistic camaraderie in my new environs, I met musical composer Pauline Oliveros and visual artist Kathy High, who also taught at RPI, and eventually invited each of them to collaborate with me on extensions to this book. By now I regarded this project as an ongoing one, and for parts of it to spread outside the physical space of my book’s pages seemed “right.” I like the “skin” of video as an element in juxtaposition with my text within the context of this project. Around the same time, YEW, a journal of innovative writing & images, accepted several new pieces and asked if I wanted to collaborate with an artist on images to be published along with them. I asked my friend, visual artist and writer Kathline Carr if she might be interested in creating images in response to my text, and she drew many more interesting images than could be included. When I finally decided to call it a day and to say the book was Ended!, I thought back to these images that Kate had drawn and again, it felt “right” to me to expand the collaborative dimension of this book, its “skin,” so to speak, and asked her for permission to include some of them. I also asked Pauline whether I could include the piece she had improvised for a piece that extended from this project, “Aging Music” with this book’s publication. She had recorded it while performing it in 2015 in a building that she wrote “became activated by the wind and the banging doors and windows became an engaging percussive part of the musical dialogue. The building as an instrument played by the wind seemed expressive too of aging.”

This past year I learned about QR codes and realized using one would be a seamless way to integrate “Aging Music” with the physical definition of the book. A video-poem, “Saidst,” that I collaborated on with Kathy High is accessible via a URL published in the book and online at my website, PANK’s website, and Kathy High’s Vimeo page. Poet and designer Aimee Harrison, with whom I worked on adapting the manuscript’s proportions to the printed book’s dimensions and designed the book’s exterior and its table of contents, was my last but not least collaborator.

In other words, assembling this book was a continuous process and developed along with encounters with new technologies, locations, people, and signs of time. One of the final touches was my choice for the cover art, a painting that I did many years ago, in which I wanted to capture the active dynamic of visible light and crumpled up a piece of foil to use as my model. The result looks impressionistically like a heart, aorta included, or a female sprite clapping, and now, years later, it was decided that this painting would be “Sisyphusina.”

[PANK] Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you!

SD: Thank you so much for reading this, and I hope it spurs you to check the book out and to more conversation! And a shout-out of thanks to [PANK] and to you, reader, member of our writing and reading communities, for your support of newly published books during this challenging time. I’d like to share, too, my wishes for everyone’s wellness.

PANK’s note: You can read a selection of Shira’s work from Sisyphusina as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series here.

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