poetry

[REVIEW] this is no longer entertainment by Christodoulos Makris

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(Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019)

A video online might make you laugh, say aww, or appall you — whatever the reaction, one of the most common actions after the viewing is to scroll down to the comments and see what everyone else is saying, and agree, disagree, respond, or, if you’re like me, lurk behind the screen, eavesdropping with your glass to the digital wall. Christodoulos Makris has taken this oddly satisfying online social activity and made poetry with his new book, this is no longer entertainment, a work of documentary poetics that sources all of its language from the comments section of various websites. As you might expect, there is much language that is harsh, insensitive or mistaken at best. But there is also language here that approaches profundity, oftentimes in a voice that smells like a world-weary cultural critic (and it may well be) more than it sounds like a petulant youth complaining online about pop music, immigration, or the demise of Great Art.

The book is wide-ranging, as you might expect — Makris covers pop music (Huey Lewis and the News make an appearance), impressionist painting, international travel (the Balkans, France, Ireland), and dabbles in immigration, gender, as well as class politics, and it does so in an acrobatic manner, darting between poetic registers, code-switching from satire to sentiment. For example, in “7.” we see that

         He also says, “Like rain

         Passports outside the Western world do not let us 

               Citizens pass any port

         Ask Snowden or Assange how free is the western

Followed by the next poem, “8.” A poem that responds to “7” indialogic fashion:

         I don’t believe the writer

         Why didn’t he stay with many of his fellow 

             countrymen

         Looking like a Somali I would be concerned if I 

             Wasn’t stopped and questioned 

         It’s happened to a Muslim friend of mine who also

              Travels a lot in his line of work (telecoms)

         I get calls where a number is displayed but when I 

               Call back it’s disconnected

         I suggest getting rid of the beard (21-3)

The book’s most affecting moments happen when the mind puts those two poems together (that is, after having read both). These collisions mark the book — between poems, between registers, between East and West, between ideological positions. Speaking of those positions — reading the book, one gets the feeling that the comments might have been posted by those that fall on the ends of the ideological spectrum (a spectrum that changes based on the given poem’s subject), and Makris writes in a way that takes note of the pleasures and pitfalls of extremes while displaying a wariness of both as he watches dialogue between two sides that are dug in.

As much as anything, the book reaffirms the idea that the internet is a place, with an ethos of its own, (the phrase, the internet wins recalls similar phrases used by hikers and hunters when speaking of the wild). That said, this reader has the sense that there’s a bit of despair in this place. Yes, authority has been diffused, but the economic and political power structures to which so many poems here speak — often in diatribes, sometimes in lament — those are very much in place. I mean to say that the book seems to assert that the internet is to dissent what the steam valve is to the tea kettle. But Makris also offers wonder and hope. After all, that same steam once powered locomotives, and here we are, a few months removed from a video of George Floyd dying with a knee on his neck, a video that sparked online outcry and a global movement for justice, widespread talk of reform, and a handful of policies and laws (local and national) that have already been amended. A way of happening, Auden wrote of poetry — this book by Christodoulos Makris happens in a similar fashion to the way the internet does — leaping, at all turns witty, unexpectedly poignant, and brutal in the most disgusting and hilarious ways. This book is a testament to the relationship between poets and physics — as long as there are space and time, the space being physical or cyber, poets will occupy that space, and listen.

—

Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator. His work has appeared in Gravel, the story collection What Doesn’t Kill You and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. He serves as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. You can reach him at hayden@theliteraryreview.org.

Future Fridays – Art & Poetry

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We’re thrilled to bring you the incredible work of two New York City Teens! An art portfolio by Lola Simon and the debut poetry of Carol Brahm-Robin.

  • When We Slumber
  • Sitting Form
  • We Are One
    We Are One
  • Pose
  • Clementine

“My artwork focuses on desexualizing the female form.
In high school, faced with dress codes, I often found myself being told to put on a jacket because I was wearing a tank top on a hot day, when the boys in my class weren’t asked to do the same. I became uncomfortable with aspects of myself I couldn’t change. My junior year of high school, I took my first figure drawing class. Drawing the models, I gained a new perspective: the female body is beautiful and natural. I began drawing colorful illustrations of the body in order to further explore this theme.” – Lola Simon

Lola Simon is a senior at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City, where she majors in visual art. Her favorite color is yellow and her favorite artist is Yayoi Kusama. In addition to creating her own art, she enjoys museums, and has interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. She will attend Brown University in the fall.

Purple

 By Carol Brahm-Robin 

 I woke 
 sunken deep
 in a world of
 Purple
  
 What a nice
 dream
 swathed in mulberry hue  
  
 Nobody
 i could see
 Except for 
 Purple
  
 i was alone with it
 Lavender dream
  
 It wrapped its arms around me
 Pulling me further
 into plum
  
 I breathed it in
 orchid in my lungs
 Too deep now
 I Tried to inhale
 only Purple
  
 Only Purple now
 I was alone 
 in amethyst chains
  
 deep in a violet embrace
 Drowning in Purple

Carol Brahm-Robin is a young writer who lives in Brooklyn with her parents and two cats. She enjoys poetry and cartooning. “Purple” is her first publication.

Ask the author: Shira Dentz of SISYPHUSINA

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[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.

SHIRA DENTZ is the author of five books, including black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), a cross-genre memoir, how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist, and the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diálogos). She’s also the author of two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman) and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her poetry, visual writing, and prose appear in many venues including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), and National Public Radio, and interviews with her appear in journals such as Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, and The Rumpus. Shira is a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize. Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize, and Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award. Before returning to school to pursue graduate studies, she worked as a graphic artist in the music industry in NYC. A graduate of Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is currently Tarpaulin Sky’s Special Features Editor and lives and teaches in upstate New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com.

How to Love the World by Elvira Basevich

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Order How to Love the World Here

In this time of reflection, we invite you to sit down with our 2019 [PANK] Books Poetry Contest Winner, How to Love the World by Elvira Basevich and selected by Trace DePass. Basevich’s words are as haunting as they are beautiful in this stunning meditation on trauma, resilience and hope.

Set just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, How to Love the World is at once a condemnation of the world, a daydream of America, and an unsent love letter—written and rewritten over the course of ten years—to a dead family. A meditation on intergenerational trauma, resilience, and hope, How to Love the World is written in the tradition of epic poetry and follows the author as she retraces her mother’s journey to New York City in the summer of ‘89. A Jewish-Uyghur refugee, the author is born along the way, marking the unclear boundary when the memory of a family becomes historical memory, loss the condition of a new beginning. How to Love the World casts refugee women and daughters as the rightful judges of the world and the world as the rightful home of all human beings.

Order How to Love the World Here.

all our futures by Jody Chan

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Buy all our futures HERE

It’s day two of [PANK] Book Week and we’re thrilled to feature the winner of our 2019 [PANK] Little Book Contest, all our futures by Jody Chan, available now for pre-order to be released in April.

all our futures confronts a history of violence against bodies deemed disposable: sick and disabled queers and racialized people, who presently and historically faced state violence and genocide in the form of institutionalization, or incarceration, or forced sterilization. This poem refuses to turn away from the entanglements of race, class, disability, and environmental and reproductive injustice. It is an indictment of conversations about family and kinship that stop at the carbon footprint of raising children. It is a love letter to a future child. It is a reckoning with climate grief, and the worlds we build for each other, one decision at a time.

Weaving between generations and geographies, all our futures asks what it means to make a life in the face of climate and political crisis— how to let go of the shame that tells us we do not deserve to imagine a future we want, a future we belong in. Ultimately, all our futures says, home is a place we make. Though nothing is guaranteed — not time, not hope — Chan imagines a place beyond climate and political apocalypse (difficult, yes; abundant, yes) where queer, disabled people are needed, valued, loved. This is a book for artists and healers and organizers, and everyone who gives their breath and heart to the hard work, the heartwork, of movement-building.

“all our futures  is a potent reckoning of physicality, reproduction and lineage. Part documentary, part confessional song and part future-manifesto, these poetic sequences dissect the legacies of eugenics against disabled and indigenous peoples. With impeccable skill, desires here are interwoven with threats of doom. It is exciting to witness such a fearsome poet as Jody Chan, who reveals a world in which “no one is born clean.” – Logan February

Buy all our futures HERE

[PANK] BOOKS – Sisyphusina by Shira Dentz

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Order Sisyphusina HERE

As we gear up for weeks of reading safely indoors, there is no better time to expand your library than with the incredible new books from [PANK]! For the next week, we’ll be featuring our April Releases — starting with Sisyphusina the beautiful hybrid collection of a reflection on female aging by esteemed poet Shira Dentz. Get a head start on National Poetry Month! You can order it HERE.

Sisyphusina is a cross-genre collection of prose, poetry, visual art, and improvisatory music, centered on female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack rich vocabularies to describe female aging, Shira Dentz uses the hybrid form as an attempt to suture new language that reflects internal and physical processes that constitute a shifting identity. By deviating from formal classical construction, and using the recurring image of a rose, Sisyphusina circles around conventions of beauty, questioning traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. Some of the book’s images are drawn from separate multimedia collaborations between the author and composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Kathy High, and artist Kathline Carr. A musical composition improvised by Pauline Oliveros, based on one of her text scores, titled “Aging Music,” is the book’s coda, and readers can listen to it online by scanning a QR code inside the book. The interweaving of these collaborations with the author’s voice and voices from other sources imbue this book with a porous texture, and reimagines the boundary of the book as a membrane.

Throwback Thursday: 3 poems by Kevin Phan

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Throwback Thursday is a monthly series that re-visits work originally published in [PANK] Magazine. 

—

Wow! 2019 was a wild ride. I had a beautiful time. Camping under the stars. Firing off submissions to literary journals. Trying out new recipes. Working myself like a dog. And winning the Mountain West Poetry Series. (Shameless plug.) My first full-length collection will be out in the Fall of 2020.

I also had a wonderful time reading your work, too, dear reader. I spending countless nights browsing literary journals, falling in love with language over & over. For its richness. For its compactness. For its tautness. For the ways that it luxuriates on the page. For all it says & the things it withholds. So many of the capabilities have felt negative.

I’ve also been listening to classical music to pass the time. Yesterday, I attended a live performance of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto no. 3, performed by the Colorado Symphony with Brett Mitchell at the conducting helm, & all I can say is that I left with my heart full of dark water. A bittersweet chocolate you can live inside. Also, I’ve been reworking my way through Mahler’s symphonies chronologically, one-by-one. And what a treat it’s been. Yet the most soul-satisfying experience I’ve had in recent memory has been listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony no. 3, where Portishead’s Beth Gibbons sings the operatic parts. Sinking inside her trill lush hauntings has been a highlight of my winter.

While being published in PANK was a wonderful experience, I never heard from you, dear reader. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want to reach out to shoot the shit about language, poems, recipes, travel stories, or to grab a beer if you’re ever in the mountain west. (Colorado, to be specific.) kevinaphan@gmail.com.

–Kevin Phan

[Kombucha & skincare]

*

Kombucha & skincare. Ointment & rice paper. Oil changes, jasmine dreams, sun salutations. I pray alone. For everyone. It floats up & through my living kitchen. This need to smooth in. Feelings, big as barns, gliding toward the sun. Lost in bright confusions, bone cancer at the center–she loved us once. Does god care for shipwrecked vessels, tending to the sick as their bodies, one-by-one, disintegrate beyond trembles? A feel good comedy, except some people, or flesh approaching compost. & In the book of Now, world’s gone wild.  “May all beings reach enlightenment, quickly.” (All the bats of the universe geolocate inside my prison cell.) Precious human birth–life I plan to taste just once–what’s one pure act I’ve done? A lyric running down my godless honey scraps. What a lesson. Something about how hunger swells us close to education. 

[Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel]

*

Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel, coloring my words & tongue—Presbyterian, Methodist, Unitarian, Baptist, on & on. May I learn to love again, for the first time. White eternal of my comforter snowing my room–bright flower, bright flower. Gutters, jamming with Fall’s rot leaves. I pledge Allegiance. Mother’s voice keeps calling to me in dreams. Says“in death we’re stronger than ourselves.” (Our Maker, neither punitive nor male.) Morning meditations into universal Love, praying alone for everyone, yet I fail to feed the birds! Eternities’ shadow breeds in my mind, raining a patch on the shed’s rusty nails. We’re overlapping presences. Jade rabbits enter purple heavens. There’s just no cure for that. I want to light every necktie on fire. I want to go slopping ‘round the ocean in a casket, amigo to whales, reeking storms & ancient secrets. 

[Just as time erases kisses from my body]

*

Just as time erases kisses from my body. Just as my family bows down to sadness & cancer. & I fall into dreams rehearsing the Dictionary of Distant Angels. & Rise from morning hay, clean as a salt lick, in a field of long division. I pray alone for everyone, recalling the Diamond Sutra. “However many beings there are in whatever realms of being might exist, whether they are born from an egg or born from a womb, born from the water or born from the air, whether they have form or no form, whether they have perception or no perception or neither perception nor no perception, in whatever conceivable realm of being one might conceive of beings, in the realm of complete nirvana, I shall liberate them all. And though I thus liberate countless beings, not a single being is liberated.” 

—

KEVIN PHAN is a Vietnamese-American graduate of the University of Michigan with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in English Literature. He is a former Helen Zell Writers Program Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he won the Theodore Roethke & Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prizes. His work has been featured (or is forthcoming) in Columbia Review, Poetry Northwest, Georgia Review, Conjunctions (online), Crab Orchard Review, Fence, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, SubTropics, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, & elsewhere.

HUMAN TETRIS: A conversation with Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz

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11:11 Press, 2019

INTERVIEW BY MIKE CORRAO

—

I recently had the chance to sit down with Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz to talk to them about their new book, Human Tetris (11:11 Press 2019), which repurposes the style of newspaper personals and online dating to explore the shape of desire.

 

MIKE CORRAO: I’m fascinated by the haptic nature of Human Tetris. It’s a book that you’re compelled to rotate and turn as you read. It’s something that has to exist in the physical world to fully reveal itself. Do you want the reader to recognize these qualities in the text? Do you want them to always know that they have this physical object in their hands?

VI KHI NAO: I think we want our readers to acquire the services of a chiropractor. Neck discomfort may be our thing, though only time can tell what other parts might be activated or stimulated by this text. The physicality and rotational quality are born like the game itself, where desire falls on itself and if it falls too fast and the player is unable to sort it organically, it can get entangled. Desire can be a game. Or the number 4. A book as a video game has more interactive dimensions than a book as a book. We might want the players or readers to tap into the reality of desire, its humor and its playful darkness. The book itself is very tetragonally light.

MC: The craning of the neck that you mention leads me to think of the ways that a book can afflict its readers with certain ailments. The immediate answer is weight, but there are other ways (through rotation or small typesets) that books can place strain on the reader. Is this what you would like Human Tetris to do to some extent? Would you like it to create discomfort in its reader?

ALI RAZ: Not wedded to the idea of exacting bodily violence on prospective readers; metaphysical is another thing. Which is to say that I’m not hoping to create either comfort or discomfort, and I imagine that if the latter occurs the reader, if wise, will stop reading. Nothing, I hope, would compel them to prolong their physical discomfort. There’s something to be said about choosing your own pain/pleasure, but ultimately I’m more drawn to the pleasures of reading, which are not simple, than its pains.

VKN: The discomfort only exists on a corporeal plane for the readers. Everything else shouldn’t be about pain, soreness, or psychic confusion, perturbation, or hardship. If it does produce such results, the readers aren’t on the right video game with us.

MC: The language of Human Tetris is reminiscent of the more digital and abstract spaces that we go when we seek companionship. Reading the text, I’m often reminded of forum posts or online dating – the ambiguous wall of disembodied voices. Imagery varying between the apiary, the cybernetic, the caffeinated. When assembling these iso (in search of) posts, did you picture them as coming from disparate sites across the internet or a singular location? Do they radiate out from the same point? Are there real people behind these voices? Or do you see them as strictly linguistic creatures? Or another way entirely?

VKN: I view the book as a literary video game for writers. It appears interactive, but not really. It appears as if there are two or more players, but it’s just adverbs having lucrative careers with stand-up comedy. It resembles the aftermath of programming more than anything human, sexual, or linguistic. Even desire is texture and has no narrative construct or philosophy of being.

AR: Online forums, dating apps – or a real-world bathroom wall. Disembodied voices get close to it. I can’t imagine many of the texts actually cropping up in a dating scenario, whether on- or off-line. It was, for me, very much a literary undertaking in the sense of moving through language, being animated by language: desire in the abstract rather than anything approaching the real, messy thing. Another way of putting this would be to acknowledge the text as a catalog of un-kinks and anti-love. Not only divorced from flesh-and-blood reality but negating it, violently making fun of it. Which is maybe what much of the internet does anyway, even in its mushier corners.

MC: I like this label of un-kinks. Throughout the book, there is an erotics of destruction /consumption/augmentation. There is a desire to consume or be consumed/destroy or be destroyed by your prospective lovers. “You want pasta; I eat your honeyed clit.” / “ISO women who are bad carbohydrates, carbonated lemonade…” Not sure if I’ve got a question here, but it’s a detail I’m really fascinated by if you’d like to talk more about it.

AR: There’s something to the idea of the various thresholds of consumption that run alongside daily life and speech. Biting someone’s head off, wanting to eat a cute baby: there’s not a whole lot that marks even simple linguistic boundaries between anger and love. I don’t think there’s anything new in this idea but it greys, for me, into the totally seductive manner in which so much of erotics flickers back and forth between sex and straight-up violence. Kinks and un-kinks.

There’s this, and then there’s the plain old idea of food as sex by other means. Plain, but compelling. For anyone who doesn’t know it yet, Vi is an outstanding cook.

MC: This is a collaborative book. Is it the first time that either of you has done this large scale of a collaboration? How did it come about?

AR: Definitely the first time for me. It was instructive; adapting to the presence of another in this single text. The most interesting thing that came about was moments of uncanny synchronicity: times when Vi and I, unknown to each other, would end up writing about the same things, images, the same concepts, and only realize after the fact. So there’s a text, and there are two people doing various things to it and it begins to feel like there are three of us altogether, Vi and me and a process.

VKN: I have done collaborative work with others (writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, etc.) before. They haven’t had a chance to get born or publicized or celebrated yet, so it appears as if this collaborative effort is new or first.  I was getting sick of reading boring personals that should not be personals and I asked Ali Raz if she would be interested in creating ‘fake’ ones for a book and she said yes. I mean, how does one go about creating personals that are impractical and nonfunctional? Whose existence is designed to pull a quixotic philosopher from the imagination and not from reality? How does one make love to a concept?

MC: On a similar note, I’m curious about the process itself. How did the two of you go about assembling this project? Was it the two of you working separately within the same premise and then compiling the results? Did you work as a hive mind – writing each page together one by one?

VKN: I wrote the first poem and Ali wrote the second and then we alternated. We executed the exercise over an entire month of December. We each wrote one a day and submit it to each other. We had twenty-four hours to create one. Each day is a ruler, which measures our imagination and displays such an imagination via texts. It is a game for ourselves and not against ourselves. Though I can’t entirely say that time was our opponent or adversary. Perhaps it was our supporter even.

MC: Due to the nature of the formatting, Human Tetris has a pretty fast pace. That, paired with the style of the pieces, made reading the text feel like looking over the interface of a social media site. Like each page was a thread leading to a potential encounter or comment section or reply. How fast do you expect your reader to move? Do you want them to linger on each segment?

VKN: I want the readers to not eat a bucket of ice cream after reading each segment. I want the readers to move slowly as if they have been paused in a video game. I want them to experience erotic glitches as if the book has fallen from a 50-story building and the print screen is cracked, its palimpsest reset. Even if the medium refuses to be confused by another medium.

AR: I like your observation, Mike, about the experience of reading the book being like browsing social media. It moves in the same sort of digestible chunks. That said, as Vi notes, it’s probably not a good idea to consume a lot of these ‘digestible chunks’ in one sitting. I don’t have any stake in wanting a reader to read the book one way rather than another, but I’d be intrigued to know what makes the book feel fast or slow as the case may be.

MC: Vi, you mention a desire for erotic glitches. Often a writer will do their best to place their reader in a passive position, creating a large fantasy around their heads. Human Tetris instead fixates on the mechanical qualities of the video game.

VKN: I want readers to see the mirrors of their desire and laugh at them. Our culture takes sex too seriously. The films I watch – lovers are rarely shown laughing hysterically in bed. Erotic glitches break the mirror of fantasy.

AR: Laughter as emotional overload, aka glitch.

MC: Ali, in some of your short pieces, you’ve taken an unconventional approach to artist bios. One saying, “Ali Raz is a cyborg…” another saying, “believes in synchronicity.” Do you consider these to be extensions of the work that they are attached to? Do you see yourself as diegetic to each new fiction or poem you make?

AR: Holy smokes, no! The idea of being of a piece with a text is, to be frank, kind of horrifying. I’d rather be hoping for the opposite: a total split between the thing in the bio and the thing in the text. Which is why I’m drawn to lean, opaque bios that, when they’re not completely terse, don’t really say anything either. More and more now, I’m drawn to the simple, inoffensive bio, the opposite of a cyborg declaration: something so standard and innocuous it slips through the cracks.

MC: Do you listen to music when you write? Is there a genre or artist whose music provokes or inspires you to create your work?

AR: I’m musically slow: stuck in the same loops of music for months, years. Probably everyone else on the planet has a more sophisticated relationship to music than I do.

VKN: Silence is mine.

MC: Vi, this is your eleventh published book. You’ve released work with a variety of different presses. What’s your process for deciding which publisher is the best fit for a given title?

VKN: Some presses write to request a manuscript from me. Others I seek out through a submission window or opportunity (Fish in Exile). A few from writing contests (The Old Philosopher, A Brief Alphabet of Torture). Sometimes there is no best fit, just being at the right place at the right time with a particular publisher. Sometimes the universe helps me out by preventing a particular manuscript from being born as a way of protecting me from terrible publishers. We want some of our soulmates to wear thongs in the relationship without resorting to olive oil or ancient Greece.

MC: I’m always curious to hear what kind of work authors engage with. Were you reading anything as you wrote Human Tetris? Do you tend to read a lot? Do you read more contemporary titles or older works?

 VKN: I don’t read. I try to have a vibrant, impotent, prolific sex life with as many books and films as possible. Organically.

 

 

VI KHI NAO is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

ALI RAZ received an MFA in Fiction from the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Occulum, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

 

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MIKE CORRAO is the author of three books, Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing), Two Novels (Orson’s Publishing) and Gut Text (11:11 Press), one chapbook, Avian Funeral March (Self-Fuck), and many short films. Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and The Portland Review. He lives in Minneapolis. Learn more at www.mikecorrao.com

Her widely trashed prose poem can be found in Wikipedia

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BY MEG HANSEN

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MEG HANSEN is a poet, trained in medicine (MBBS), and a graduate of Dartmouth College (MA). She is a Vermonter who was born in India and has lived in the UAE, Italy, and Norway. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Flow Journal, Thinking Gender, Right Hand Pointing, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and elsewhere.