Q+A

What is something nonliterary that you are excited about these days?

Immediately, here in this room where I've spent most of my time the last year and half, I'm excited about the sky, and the big leafy mango tree out front that swallows circle around certain times of year, and the birds that sing in the morning and the crickets and cicadas that sing with their scraping in the evening. And I'm excited about the comings and goings of my beloved cats Klepon, Cookies, Bang Ben, and Atu, they're always full of surprises. And about the unpredictability of my neighbor's roosters' crows, they crow at all odd hours of day and night, suggesting some altered temporality (or temporalities) right here with us now. I'm excited about those temporalities.

How do you arrive at your poems?

There's a lot of different ways I arrive at poems, or poems arrive at me, but maybe generally, and certainly in the case of these Right on Time poems, I'm trying to really pay careful attention, to observe, trying to listen and let that listening become recorded as the poem. And this listening, this attention, which I feel as a kind of togetherness and a kind of honoring, has to do with opening up for all the inexplicable, shadowy impressions and faint voices, listening out for the play of selves and others, ghosts and the living and those in limbo and elsewhere, those near at hand and those from afar.

But the poems arrive too through the failures in this trying and the trying again—the clouds and feints and carnival attractions (and carnal attractions)— I can’t tell if one gets in the way (and the way of what?) of the other or if they are, in the entanglement of their motions and stillnesses, the way, the movement between the things of which listening is to, which an attempt is made to record. So one thing leads to another and I try to follow that, and try for an ethos of that trying too. And this listening is to and of feelings too, and of the play between feeling and saying, attended by a whole host of feelings that these movements remember, the variable questioning of what they might have at heart.

So, to put it another way, it’s listening and talking and feeling with these past, present, and future things, questioning all along. Or maybe it’s just messing around with the questions of memory, history, relation, improvising with what’s at hand, at heart, around. These things from all over.

Taking dictation maybe, but also swerving out of its way into other dictations, opening and closing of ears and spouts. Responding, tuning in, tuning out, adjusting the receiver, shifting attention.

Or I don’t know, maybe it’s just thinking about things and then trying to make that thinking into music and failing and following that failing and that trying, like walking a pack of dogs and each of them wants to go a different direction and trying to let all of them lead. There’s a poster above my desk that Rebekah Smith and Emma Wipperman and Ruby Kapka printed at Ugly Duckling Presse once with an image that looks like an upside down ship and the words “not arriving,” which serves as a reminder from Hélène Cixous (and Rebekah and Emma and Ruby). So I think about that in relation to the question of arrival too. The practice of endless non-arrival perhaps, but also not deferral. Also, the notion that a poem is always provisional, unfinished, unfinishable—a point of departure as much as a point arrived at—animates the ways I try to write.

But then there's the sense of trying to make something worth offering too, something for and with the people you care about, something that'll do something for someone hopefully, which edges me toward questions of communication and communicability, which might be some kind of arrival too, if only possibly rough, piecemeal.

We notice a strong sense of a voice, or voices, speaking in these lines. And we feel that this quality of speaking appears often in your work. It is a kind of speaking that only half makes sense - and we mean that in a complimentary way - a kind of speaking that engages playfully with forms of grammar, syntax, and rhetoric, yet which does not pursue them to their typical 'logical' ends. Do you care to talk about the use of voice and spokenness in your work?

I love voices and feelings and qualities of speaking, and sounds of all sorts. Talking, conversation, debate, music, echolocation… I love song too and that's another form of voice that's involved in these poems. Anyway, one of the delights and frustrations of talking is the way it inherently plays around with making, unmaking, and remaking sense. And I sense this in all kinds of language situations. I'm interested in the movements of these different kinds of voicings, among spokennesses and writtennesses and the ways they merge and break apart, which sets the scene for the pursuit or refusal of logical ends. Thinking in these terms, maybe it's a question about the meaning or the motion of means. Or maybe it's an interest in the fluidity of speaking's relationship with means and/or ends. In any case, it has something to do with language as a material of sociality that moves through and between and amongst people and worlds, and the ways we all shift along the mysterious coordinations of its sharedness. There's a familiarity and informality to playful engagement with language too. The pleasure of joking around, shooting the shit, jibber-jabbering with your friends.

Are there any influences, literary or otherwise, that were important for you in the writing of these poems?

In these poems in particular, I was really excited about some things I was reading and listening to and trying to pick up on, and I've been trying, throughout this whole Right on Time serial poem thing, to be really open to being influenced, to being affected, falling under influences, to be effected. An intention to not be right and to not be on time and to leave things unfinished I suppose animates a lot of my writing, which might get toward the "How do you arrive at your poems?" question as well. But to talk about specific influences that were important in the writing of these particular poems you're publishing here: I was reading Sean Bonney's Our Death  and Akilah Oliver's the she said dialogues: flesh memory and Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Cerita dari Jakarta and talking a lot about all sorts of things with my partner Diyah when I was first writing these poems, and also observing the places and times in which I found myself. 

—Conducted between Daniel Owen and Asphalte publishers Michael Newton and Emmalea Russo in July of 2021.