THE NON-PLACE EDGES TOWARD PLACE: AN INTERVIEW WITH TED DODSON
Asphalte editor Emmalea Russo sat down with the poet Ted Dodson (and his dog) in the summer of 2021. They talked about his book An Orange (Pioneer Works/Wonder, 2021), divination, time, horror, winter, and a new poem. They laughed a lot.
PART 1: DEATH STRUCTURE
TED DODSON: So, you and I were talking about small and large miracles. To be canonized as a saint you need to have conducted a miracle, but as I found out recently, you can do it from beyond the grave, which kinda blew my mind. I was thinking about this because I went to a Catholic church in Louisville, Kentucky with a poet-friend, Ken Walker, to visit one of the only ossuaries in North America. There were two full-on skeletons in glass boxes. They were the remains of two saints who were martyred in the third century.
EMMALEA RUSSO: Was it horrifying?
TED: No. I’m not particularly horrified by the dead.
(laughter)
But I’m not desensitized by any means.
EMMALEA: Was every bone present? Or were they partial?
TED: They were whole. And they were fully clothed in saintly regalia.
EMMALEA: In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas talks about the difference between things that are whole vs. in ambiguous pieces. Remains of remains tend to horrify more.
TED: I can understand that. I’m terrified of shipwrecks. They're hidden, murky and partial even if they are whole in a sense. But I don’t really know the extent of this phobia. I just know that I have it. Even seeing images scares me.
EMMALEA: Just thinking about a shipwreck? Or the fear of happening upon one?
TED: It’s probably the former. I don’t spend much time underwater.
EMMALEA: Have you seen the start of Titanic where they’re going down into the wreck?
TED: Yes, it’s horrifying.
(laughter)
EMMALEA: I was in mourning for most of the summer. I think Titanic is a good mourning movie. But, only up until the part where they say “iceberg straight ahead.” I love the beginning when Bill Paxton leads us directly into the wreckage.
(laughter)
TED: My fear is that the shipwreck exists. The big death structure, rather than evidence of individual mortality. A memento mori is different to me than a shipwreck.
EMMALEA: It is a death structure.
PART 2: DIVINATION, WINTER, AND TIME
EMMALEA: Jupiter rules your astrology chart from your third house of writing. Jupiter/Zeus is the king of the gods. Jupiter likes to find cosmic order and wholeness, asking how are things interconnected? Saturn is that which pops Jupiter’s bubble and reveals fractures and fragments, time and its discontents. Chronos, you know, eats his kids. Your Jupiter is housed by the lord of winter. We could read this as: writing that’s interested in restraint, or attempting to find freedom within certain wintry limitations.
TED: This makes total sense. I write more during the winter for some reason, and I have problems writing during the summer. I’m always attempting some constraint-based project even if it really isn’t working. Recently, though, I was talking with Saint John of the Cross, and he advised me to “find the structure within the poem” rather than writing with formal considerations already in mind. I talk with Saint John about once a month and have a dedicated tarot deck that I use to communicate with him. He’s my poetry mentor.
(laughter)
And he’s been talking to me recently about ditching structure and form. Specifically, we had a convo about Bataille’s idea of mobile thought in Theory of Religion. This idea of slippage and communal thinking, rhizomatic thoughts that aren’t just occurring to me but that have occurred to many people and how this can be an approach to a spirituality. I often feel this push-pull that you’re talking about with Saturn and Jupiter.
EMMALEA: I’m glad to know this about you and Saint John of the Cross. I suppose even the act of using tarot or any kind of divination makes conversations about time, order, patterns, and magic. It’s about signs and symbols, not cause and effect, even though people often trying to make astrology about clear-cut causes, which is absurd. Maybe Jupiter shows connections between signs and times. And Bataille’s mobile thought is quite Saturnian, this idea of man as particle moving amongst other particles. Saturn represents the limits of the visible. Another kind of vision takes over beyond the particle in the distance. How do we make a rhythm and break that rhythm?
TED: I’m taking notes.
EMMALEA: In a way we could say that winter, this barren time of decay, is the best time to make art. What do we do with the remains of what’s dead?
(laughter)
Your Saturn is in the 12th house, a kind of blind spot of the sky. Saturn loves being here because Saturn loves to hide. I always think about what Simone Weil said about how God had to hide himself in order to create. Your Saturn is tucked away in a mini-winter while feeding Jupiter. There’s this tense and creative relationship. They’re both in fixed signs, so they share an affinity for holding space. I’m thinking about what Marguerite Duras said about winter dusk being the only true dusk.
TED: The sun never really sets in the summer in New York City. Partly, that’s nightlife, the city that never sleeps, but I noticed this past winter, when we got really heavy snow, the lights of Manhattan were so bright they bounced off the snow and lit up the entire sky. That illumination at night only happens in winter. It’s like we’re allowed true darkness in the winter, but from where I am, there’s an incredible daylight-esque glow in the middle of the night.
(silence)
EMMALEA: Snow is also a muting agent. Saturn and Jupiter are in retrograde in your chart. I think of this as a relinquishment of the will.
TED: Yeah, that feels like one direction inspiration can take, a relinquishment of the will, speaking or writing through a sort of medium. I’ve never done true medium poetry like Notley, but I feel like a book coalesces for me after I’ve gone down a number of different paths and written a number of different things, and the work begins to speak for itself. There is a moment when I realize I need to listen.
EMMALEA: Is that how An Orange happened?
TED: I think so. What happened was I was writing a long poem alongside journal poems, and they inevitably began to overlap, which is that moment of relinquishment you’re talking about. What helped this to arrive, though, was I leaned into the chronos of the composition process and allowed that to give order to the book. I didn’t worry about titles. Instead, I just marked the poems by date. That became the structure of the book. I didn’t realize the long poem and the dated poems were going to become one thing, but they were running concurrently. Then, they crossed paths.
EMMALEA: Chronos and Kairos structure your book.
PART 3: HIDDEN REALMS
TED: I like to move through and transition between the abstract and the quotidian representational in poems. Hold on. I have to pick up my dog.
(Ted moves the dog, Marcello, from the floor to his lap)
Anyway, the two modes elucidate the other, Chronos and Kairos, figuration and abstraction. There is a symbiotic relationship. What’s accessed in the dream elucidates life and vice-versa. The communication between those realms is very important to me. I try to keep a daily writing practice, even if it’s just sitting down and thinking while I look at a blank page. Does that make sense?
EMMALEA: Yes, definitely. Sometimes those hidden arenas in the mind and sky can only be accessed through flashes of memory or insights. Saturn also rules dilapidated structures and buildings, empty or unoccupied time and space, things that seem to be disappearing these days. I experience the timestamps in your work as reminders: these things are happening in a time and a place and I am reading them in a time and a place. It reminds me of how Mark Fisher referred to those static-heavy moments in songs by Burial and William Basinski as “metaphysical crackle.” It transports and somehow points to many coeval times while also bringing us back to this one.
TED: Totally. I see the bridge between the abstract and the representational as being connected through rhythm and pattern-making. The best example of this is in the long poem in An Orange where an image of a wave is projected over the whole poem. That is the way in which the language moves, regardless of whether it’s abstract or concrete. It maintains that shape, and like that “metaphysical crackle,” provides a point of repair for the poem’s language. I also think about the space between words and lines, and even whole poems, in An Orange in a similar sense. They’re there to embody the experiential, not just a caesura or a break or a pause but a space of lived possibility. Interestingly enough, I listen to Burial pretty often while writing.
EMMALEA: I listen to Burial all the time while writing, too! This makes me think about what’s timely and untimely. What are you seeing a lot of lately? And what feels untimely in a good or interesting way, opening up a space of possibility?
TED: I seek out a lot of variety in what I read that I am thankfully met with, so I am not always certain what might be timely in terms of aesthetics. Maybe deep abstraction is untimely.
EMMALEA: What is that? Or did you just make it up?
(laughter)
TED: I just made it up! But should we come up with a definition?
EMMALEA: I feel like I see deep abstraction everywhere.
TED: Maybe the deep of abstraction is just me projecting my aversion to depths again, the big death structure. Not that we don’t have a ton of literature about oncoming apocalypse, but I do sense that there is a focus on either an understanding of the mechanics of ending, a living within whatever late structural apparatus, or a projection of living after an end. What I don’t see enough of is thinking that begins after you’ve kissed your ass goodbye. Joey Yearous-Algozin’s A Feeling Called Heaven is an extraordinary entry into this timely space of actual apocalyptic thinking, which seems to reside in gentleness, humility, and sincerity. Josef Kaplan’s new book, Loser, also does something similar, though his work cascades and has such an interesting associative logic to it that there’s more of an ironic distance. I like a dose of ironic distance, especially in work as acerbic as Josef’s. These things, sincerity and irony, are both a bit untimely and timely because I don’t really know if either are commonly leveraged in a way that doesn’t enact unintentional deception. I’m interested in a sincerity paired with honesty rather than pandering, and I’m interested in an irony that brings me closer to a subject or a writer and isn’t simply cruel or an affective gesture.
PART IV: (NON)PLACES AND (UN)SOUNDS
EMMALEA: Tell me about this new poem of yours I just read: A D I D A S.
TED: It was the first poem I wrote in full this year.
EMMALEA: I appreciate that it mentions specific books and writers.
TED: This is something that you and I share, along with our love of Bataille. What does he say? Bricks in the wall. Or, that’s Pink Floyd.
(laughter)
Something about how philosophy has to account for what’s around it, the ways in which it becomes conscious of itself. I include the work of others in my poems partly for that reason. It’s, in a purely utilitarian sense, a representation of how I become conscious of a certain idea. My poems are often about thinking. But they’re also not epiphanic—sometimes more inductive if they do have meaningful closure—and the idea they come to or are built around is often more of a poetry idea, an image. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say poems are non-productive expenditures of thought, that an individual poem embodies not a fundamental question or thesis but the idea of the poem itself, the poem-object. And embedded in that object are the markers of utility like books and art and experiences that helped me arrive at the poem.
EMMALEA: This relates to the setting of your poem: the giant Adidas store. We could maybe call the Adidas store a non-place. But maybe it becomes a place when something intimate happens there or when a poem gets written there. There’s an interesting play between consumer capitalism and intimacies. When does a place become a non-place?
TED: You’re getting at the reason I included the store on Houston Street at the end of the poem, though the action of the poem ends with a reversal of that question. I wanted to direct the poem towards a brutalist and tangible feeling, to concretize the imaginary and bring this real-world thing as close to real as the poem can have capacity for, to re-inaugurate the non-place with a place-ness. And, like yeah, that’s an erotic tension and part of the eroticism of the poem, the closing of aesthetic distance. And I have to thank my writers’ group, especially Diana Hamilton, for guiding me with how to best craft that sensation.
EMMALEA: You even say “the unsound disguised as sound.”
TED: Yeah, exactly. This poem has these affective and spatial modulations, things are moving away and together. The non-place edges toward place, and the unsound disguises as sound, the latter being more of a double-entendre. Like, I’m wanting that language to belong to the constellation of music in the poem—“humming,” “sustain,” and so on—but it’s also a shorthand explanation of the commercial objectives of Michèle Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses as a book that masqueraded as popular romance so as to make some money for Debord to publish Society of the Spectacle but was essentially a détournement of the genre.
EMMALEA: I once had a bizarre experience outside that Adidas store on Broadway. When I read your poem, certain memories flashed up. This juxtaposition of elements that wouldn’t ordinarily appear in proximity is dreamy.
TED: What happened at the Adidas store?
EMMALEA: The sounding of the unsound.
(laughter)
Ted Dodson is the author of An Orange (Pioneer Works / Wonder, 2021) and At The National Monument / Always Today (Pioneer Works, 2016). He works for BOMB, is an editor-at-large for Futurepoem, and is a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.