Ask The Author: AT Grant

In December, “Four Pieces from Wake” by AT Grant. Grant will now take our questions.

1. How would you stop your dead sister from leaking?

Words live and die in the holes and through the words her blood leaks. Sometimes Dead Brother wants Dead Sister to stop leaking, but sometimes he wants the wrong thing. This is when Dead Sister teaches Dead Brother and me (writer, hand moving over their faces) that we must also leak. That he and I must die further into our death / further into Dead Sister / further into text. That leaking enacts a transformation. Or at least the beginning of a transformation (which is death / life, which is word, which is text). To live / die simultaneously and perpetually is to leak, she says, dancing between the boat and river bank.

2. What else does your blood darken?

My blood darkens my face darkens my mouth darkens my word. Which darkens the text. Which returns those transformed pieces of word / mouth / face / blood back to my body and they are metabolized again. Light shines hard in blood. Deep color saturation on the film strip. On the skinsuit. Which is a screensuit. Blood is darkened by a space created between / around / within writer, reader, and text.

3. Who would you use like a boat?

I keep thinking of William Howard Taft stuck in his bathtub. And in that moment, his body melds with the tub and they become boat. I climb on board and drift down the river until Mr. Taft’s aides come and dislodge the Taftboat from the river. At which point the river stops working and Dead Sister, Dead Brother, and I have to throw some fishing line into the water and pull the river back into motion again.

I wish my own body was a boat I could ride up and down the Mississippi. Ferry tourists. Tote some cargo. Cruise the locks and dams. All the way–headwaters to the gulf. Begin in the ice and eventually work down to the steam. A vacation through all the states of water. Wouldn’t that make for a good year?

4. Why are poets so fascinated with death?

Text is death. We (writer, reader, word) die into each other (text) and text dies into us. Which animates us all even as we die perpetually. The line breaks and re-emerges in a new place.

But it’s not just poets, right? What kid doesn’t want to poke a dead thing with a stick?

5. What did you do to get into the right place mentally to write these poems?

Most of the preparation had to do with light and sound. So not only a mental space, but also a physical space treated with big, heavy sounds. Slow drones / deep tones. Physical object sound.

I have a hard time writing during the day. Daytime has too much movement and the wrong quality of light. Daylight is very hard and brittle. These pieces needed a thick, textured light to match the sound. A light that can hold some weight–that lets you hang stuff on it. That quality of light only grows out of darkness. Maybe because of that kind of light I feel most present or awake around 10 pm: the early evening sludge burns down, and (for a short time) a shape begins to emerge from the murk. Right there between the sludge and the shape is a good place. It’s nice. In that place, you can write for awhile, then get up and walk around the room, maybe put on coffee/ a pot of tea, look at a wall, listen to sounds—all without leaving the space that is beginning to happen around the words.

I’ve been thinking about how great it would be to have a little black box writing room. A room I could gut and dress however the piece wants—paint, lighting, props, setdressing. A little stage. Maybe stand in the spotlight and perform a line then bring that back to the page.

Maybe this is all just an attempt to encourage leaking.

6. Who would you wear?

Probably someone who gets to organize stuff. Like an old scientist or a librarian. I mean very old. I’ve wanted to be an old man for a long time now, and that’s still a long way off.

Or maybe a boxer. But a romanticized, utterly fictional old-timey pugilist with a waxed mustache.

But you know. Television. Media. Saturation. I don’t know which skinsuit is mine anyway.