January 2010
Elizabeth Hildreth
features
An Interview with Amy King
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Happy day, Amy. I just got your books in the mail: I’m the Man Who Loves You and Slaves to Do These Things. The first thing that struck me was, maybe not surprisingly, their sheer physical size. I was pulling them out of the envelope and just kept pulling and pulling and pulling. A half an hour later, I had them in my hands. It seems the skeleton on the front of I’m the Man is only slightly smaller than my actual skeleton. Was the size a choice of yours, or is that just how BlazeVOX works it?
G’day, Elizabeth! BlazeVOX gives each author the option of making thimble-sized books all the way up to art books. In my case, I liked the feel of the “comic book” size, as the publisher refers to it. A friend, someone in the biz, once told me how unfortunate it is that my book is an “unconventional” size and how that makes the book awkward. But au contraire, comic book size permits one to butter croissants and eat them with jam and coffee and juice while lying the book flat to read through I’m the Man Who Loves You at the breakfast table. Comic book size enables the reader to drive her car with one hand and hold Slaves to Do These Things out, big as the dashboard, for all members of the driving expedition to dive into! My books go anywhere comic books go, can do more than they do, and are too large to be shelved and randomly ignored. It takes a special effort to ignore these books, especially when the covers are art themselves, thanks to comic book size and the generous artists who have shared their work with me, and now you.
Au contraire is right. I ate my meager dinner of rice and tomatoes tonight with Slaves to Do These Things open so nicely flat next to me. It suits my sensibility. And the artwork. It reminds me of Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights -- the middle panel specifically, with the nudes and fruit and birds. I showed my husband (David Abed, a painter) the cover and said, “What do you think’s going on here?” And he said, “It looks like they’re building (or rebuilding) nature.” I said, “I see the birds and horses made from wood. But the man and woman also have wooden planks strapped to their heads.” And he said, “Maybe they’re rebuilding themselves, too.” Upon opening the book, the first poem is, appropriately (based on my reference to Bosch’s painting) called “The Psalms Called ‘Breath.’” And indeed it does seem to be about a spiritual rebuilding, after losing a life of one kind or another. Specifically the lines:
I came out twice
sobered and married,
Then aimless and pregnant
And
I hold to confusion
that this space is blank, though
not intentionally so. It is so
because you are not yet in it,
though you are here […]
Did you intentionally so closely tie (to my mind at least) the cover art to the themes in the first poem in the book? And who did the artwork? I didn’t find a citation, though I’m terrible at looking for such things.
Funny you should ask: I spent a bit of time arranging and rearranging the poems’ order using mostly my intellectual mind. But poetry, especially for me, is an intuitive art, and the decision to use that poem as the first came near the end of the process and was a feeling one. It felt right and sets the tone, I think. In the past, my “objective” mind would have looked for the strongest poem, but I can’t tell what that is exactly in this pile of poetry. “The Psalms Called ‘Breath’” really does just gel with what’s going on in Orna Ben-Shoshan’s painting, “Two Carpenters” (credit inside front cover). Not so incidentally, Shoshan is an Israeli autodidact artist, who must also work intuitively. At least, that’s my suspicion, and that’s the unspoken element I like about her work.
As for the spiritual rebuilding and other themes you note, they were certainly considerations in the making of this book. I was pretty sick for a solid year after 36 years of very good health. My encounter with mortality was finally real (no longer the 20-something who wasn’t afraid to discuss death in the abstract), unexpected and difficult for me. I am not a good sick person though. I didn’t even think I was writing during this period, but somehow, two books appeared at the end of the tunnel, and Slaves is the first to come out of that period. The body, the material being, and the literal soul, among other considerations, worked their prominent way through this book as I sat up night after night in pain, trying to make my own way through how “being” was metamorphosing each night and day. So even during what felt like the deterioration of my existence -- and I was literally deteriorating due to malnourishment -- I was all the time rebuilding too. One hand holds the other; one eye inward with the other seeking elsewhere. I suppose the only ultimate way I had to work through that transformation was with words -- poetry is as material and spiritual symbiotically as we are; what else do we have in the middle of the night when we’re each alone?
There is so much of the body in this book. So many throats. So many torsos. It’s striking to compare this book to your last. The last seems denser and more consciously crafted. This one is so loose and free and, yet, seems to go right at the heart of things. There are so many points at which you bring the reader in really, really close. To my mind, the reader perceives this "closeness" all the more because you have this absurd, beautifully illogical, woman-made language. And then you butt that up against these simple passages that detail these quiet scenes that are almost… pedestrian. For instance, In "Just To Mind Fuck," you start out with the unreasonably bobble-y:
People are ample, and they take
so long through the torso
to bleed another mouth
where you too take
the trombone shot
And by the end, you get to this:
You were lying beside me
on a hotel bed
with strange people
in another room
watching remotely.
You kept massaging
my feet, you threw your legs
over mine and fell
asleep.
Was this a conscious choice? To be closer, to be looser, to contrast different types of language as a way of abruptly yanking the reader against you?
Interesting that you find this language looser! In fact, this is much more edited and “worked over” than my longer, more narrative pieces. I usually dislike spending a long time editing after something flows out, but I consciously decided to craft these word sculptures, more so than usual. I suppose I was successful at something if they appear to be freer! As far as being illogical, I certainly was working towards confounding logic-as-usual. To do so calls more attention to artifice; it makes one pause at the oddities they encounter and notice how things get put together: ideas, language, concepts, even “real” perceptions. If we can communally look at one thing that ends up meaning very different things to each of us separately, how does meaning bode for the world then? Or meaning-making?
Just went back to compare I’m the Man Who Loves You to Slaves to Do These Things. Yep, sticking with the original story. Seems less crafted and more free. Funny -- the powers of this “editing” you speak of. I love your idea of calling attention to artifice and the illogical and in so doing making people sort of slow down and take note. But let me present you with this idea: Imagine I am Insane Secret Santa. My only job in life: To fill strangers’ houses with oddities. For example, a twenty-foot tall dinosaur chiseled out of frozen beer. A king’s crown made of pretzel sticks. A small wading pool of applesauce. How long before my beloved strangers stop saying, “Oh my god, look at that thing. Cool. How’s she MAKE that?” And start saying, “Enough with the twenty-foot dinosaur bullshit. Where’s my beer and pretzels?” It’s something I think of a lot -- the merits of beautiful confoundedness versus friendly straightshooterness. I never come up with any answers, any aesthetic map. Maybe you can speak to this. I would argue that in addition to “illogic” functioning as a yield sign for your readers, it functions as a way of expressing love. I just read Kathleen Rooney’s Live Nude Girl: My Life as An Object in which she talks about how artists make sense of the world by disregarding sense -- by ignoring all physical constraints and realities: “I have heard that Ingres added an extra vertebra to the neck of his Odalisque. Picasso scrambled his loved ones’ features. Modigliani made their faces in almond shapes. Giacometti melted his people into metallic wires. Such are the things we do for our visions. Such are the things we do for love.” That’s you, your work, a little, right?
Hmm, it’s a good question, this sometimes-call for temperance or moderation. I mean, we fear extremes, especially when they are unfamiliar and feel too “in your face.” I’m not sure I’d want my neighbor to tout butterscotch ponds and wax figures on their lawn, but then again, I’m saying this to ease anyone’s fear of the odd or my desire for it. In actuality, I would sooo welcome a blip on the radar in my hood that breaks from the rows of wooden box molds that look the same! I’d also welcome a few more than just one instance of it all, more variation and dissimilarity, I say!
Let me give an example of how this “weirdness” began to call me. I started writing short stories during my senior year of high school. I won an award for one, selected by Lucille Clifton, and was presented with cash in a ceremony conducted by the mayor of Baltimore. I was the shit and felt on my way in the fiction world. I knew how to do narrative in a pleasing way. But what happened? One day later, early college and randomly, I acquired a Black Sparrow collection of Gertrude Stein’s interviews, poems, and portraits. They were too bizarre for words, pun intended, so I started to read them aloud to college friends on the phone to annoy them. I did this for awhile for I was a jokester and wanna-be comedian. Eventually, the joke became tired, and I finally had to admit that the phone was an excuse that permitted me to say the weird words aloud and revel in them. I loved the odd concepts, the new ways of picturing people, lathering up linguistic structures and expectations, confounding and locating new ideas, etc. Such bizarre feats were nearly orgasmic. I felt lucky that I had stumbled across this work because it gave me a permission to put into practice that part of my brain I always repressed and never shared because I knew it would not make the usual sense.
So one needs the occasional odd houses made of clay and graffiti to break us out of our insistent searches for security and certainties via the steady and familiar structures. Because none of it is true in the immortal ways and a house made of bricks is as arbitrary as a house built underground, complete with Mediterranean gardens and fishpond. In fact, we need more of the unusual because that is the fecund ground of invention. Without the unusual, thinking becomes stale, repetitive, and we can no longer imagine what has yet to be conceived. I’ve said this elsewhere, but thinking “outside of the box” -- to use a usual metaphor -- is how Einstein, a trained scientist, arrived at the theory of relativity. If he had stuck with what all of the other mathematicians before had, straight logic, we may still be waiting to bend space and time.
Anyway, there is no real escape from sense-making as the brain, conditioned by society to speak in a shared-usually-narrative way, begins to put in order clues and infers the story of most “nonsense.” Of course, some give up if the nonsense seems too confounding and disorderly. But my work does follow more closely than some other poets’ the patterns of narrative and usual syntax, though I do try to open syntax so that more than the usual/acceptable/ordinary epiphanies can be gleaned, more meanings grow available, depending on the level of engagement the reader attends the poems with.
I love this sentence and if I can use it in all its earnestness, just once, before I die, I will be happy: I was the shit and felt on my way in the [insert, quite seriously, anything] world. But more that that sentence, I love that you phone-tied your friends with Gertrude Stein. I equate hours of turning the pages/reading the poems to touching prayer beads/reciting chants. I have to think it had to affect you metaphysically/psychologically, and, as a result, your writing. Did you know that there are electronic prayer beads? You can get one for your cell or Blackberry, and then they’re customizable; you can program different meditations or prayers, based on your preferences -- seven Hail Marys and eight Aums, what have you. Speaking of electronic, can we veer off the road a little? You’re a total force in the e-world. You’re everywhere. You’re on every listserv and you post a billion times a day. Are there actually hundreds of Amy Kings? In your mind, as well as your goals for poetry, have you kind of made it a priority, or maybe priority is too strong... is it an interest of yours to be really present in the day-to-day conversations about poetry? To completely loop yourself into the scarf that is contemporary poetry as it’s being knitted? Also, I want to tell you now what I think I have cowardly backchanneled you in the past: I really like how you call people on their racist/sexist/whatever-ist stupidness in front of hundreds of electronic people. I would never do that. I don’t like to make people uncomfortable. I mean, I DO make people uncomfortable because I’m sort of chronically awkward/uncomfortable, but I try to avoid it where I can. But, as a spectator, let me go on the record: I enjoy it.
I did not know about the e-beads, but I’m not surprised. If you can have “online sex,” order pizza online, watch old Miss Cleo commercials online, why not pray to Mother Mary electronically? I’m a fan of the online extension. As many have noted, especially via Facebook, the virtual world allows people to “catch up” and reconnect and just become and explore in new ways and so much more. I’ve been on listservs since I was a grad student at SUNY Buffalo. My then-teacher, Charles Bernstein, required his students to join class listservs, and though I lurked a lot at first, I quickly fell in with the medium. I felt privy to discussions that I may not have been invited to had they been taking place at real-world parties or salons of yore a la Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein. Of course, I also learned, especially on the public Buffalo Poetics listserv, that downsides sometimes prevailed. Online discussions are encouraging because you can move in circles you might not find as readily inviting in person, but hand-in-hand with this access and somewhat-anonymity comes a lot of bullying, ad hominem attacks and just plain old nastiness. This phenomenon, in my book, is referred to as “finding your balls online.” I discovered how this works the hard way many years ago. A dude was bullying me on said listserv and, despite backchannels that the bully was “really a nice guy in person,” I held him accountable for his online behavior in person and told him I wasn’t interested in being friends when we finally met. Of course, this led to his obsession with me for years, but that’s another story for another time.
The point is that many people, like yourself, are afraid or just can’t be bothered with putting one’s thoughts out there on that screen and in that public space, so to speak, because a handful of idiots take the opportunity to attack, as though they will look cool or powerful somehow for being aggressive and putting an end to constructive exchange. What I finally determined was that I could do one of two things: I could retreat and shut up or I could declare public internet space territory I too was entitled to and shout back at key moments. I’ve done the latter, as you note, and am still learning to pick and choose my battles wisely. One thing I can say, there aren’t as many asses online as there are thinking individuals; the assholes just scream louder and are persistent, so they can distract and set a tone -- I try not to let that happen when I’m interested in a conversation. I don’t know how wise I’ve been in terms of engaging with the asses and wasting time, but I love these discussions enough to keep at it. Because really, the internet permits such a wonderful space for exploration of opinions and art and poetry and political inquiry and change that I really am an addict.
It has been worthwhile. I’ve met so many smart people through various sites and discussions that I’ve gotten a second education. If my standing up to bullies and ignorant declarations now and then can put a foot in such antics, then I’m happy to call people on their rudeness. I just want those who are afraid to join in to ignore such impotent behaviors and start talking despite them. Because the bullies will shut up. Ultimately, I find that once people start talking, unencumbered, I get to learn and that doesn’t happen so much from watching TV or going to the movies -- people come together and talk about a worthwhile subject who might never meet in person.
I’ve graduated from blogging to moderating WOMPO, and just recently, was invited to join the new organization, WILLA, that will shortly have its first conference at the New School next year, though we’ve organized online -- how cool is that? I was just reading an interview with Alice Notley in The Poker #9, in which she states, “…most Americans don’t feel very empowered, I don’t think.” I really feel that, no matter how much time I volunteer or classes I teach, it’s not enough. I want to say something and be heard. Talking about political issues on the Internet, which keeps public records of these discussions if so desired, is an important way to disseminate information; and in reality, poets of all people should be politically engaged in using language in public ways -- if there ever was a definition of a poet, in my book at least. Freedom of speech is one thing, but that freedom requires dissemination if it is to have any impact or influence, so unless you own a television or radio station, your protest on your local street corner isn’t going to be picked up by Channel 2 News. But the Internet is something of a leveler; if you can get folks talking about an issue you feel strongly about, you can advance understanding and cause a ripple in the status quo tides that want to wash over and drown us out. You can throw your oars into the Internet sea and make those metaphorical waves and change minds if you’re persuasive and determined enough. You can be heard, at the very least, and also change your own mind. As I noted on my blog recently, oppressions need silence to thrive; I won’t enable all of those –isms by letting the bullies shut me up.
Thanks, Amy. Like I said, it doesn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated. It seems I have yet to “find my balls online” -- or anywhere for that matter. Isn’t it odd when people are jackasses and yet other people can compartmentalize that behavior. My mom’s always like, “Neighbor A is so racist. Still... nicest person you’ll ever wanna meet!” I’m always like, “Yeah, I’m sure. Just don’t let it slip that you’re Lebanese, or she’ll set your evil-doing Arab spawn on fire when you’re not looking.” I’m always sort of amazed at how unrepentant people are, too. No matter how many times other listservers respond to their offensive/uninformed comments -- Um, that’s not cool -- they come back out into the room blazing, ripping their virtual shirts off, chests puffed out, like, “That’s right. I said it!” Aren’t writers supposed to have a great capacity for checking themselves/reflection -- I thought that’s what the job, in large part, was. Thinking thoughts and then thinking about those thoughts and reforming them? I can’t think of a graceful transition. How about The End? What’s next on the agenda? Any books or projects on deck?
You’re Lebanese? See, those are the limitations of the Internet. We’re nearly done, and I’ve just found that out about you! Not sure what I would ask online but maybe in person I’d follow up with a question about common Lebanese cuisine or something. I don’t know exactly since we’re not in the flesh here, but I try to figure out and practice something that goes beyond “tolerance” -- i.e., what does it mean to co-exist and benefit from difference? Thank god, I don’t eat just Dutch, Italian, and Hungarian with a tiny side of Cherokee cuisine, as my own ethnic background would dictate, whatever that would consist of. As for the labels and the way people separate/segregate, I don’t even think we know what these divisions really do to us as a people. It’s not like all lawyers or lesbians or Lebanese are alike once we’re off in our own enclaves -- we figure out other ways to rank apart, and so on and on. I think it all comes back to something much more complex, but for lack of a better way to state this quickly, the default is that we think in hierarchies, rather than in something more symbiotic where we can retain our identities while morphing them, absorbing, being porous and expelling what we no longer use (but not in a violent way), to put things abstractly.
As for the role of writers, I agree: the writer needs to go beyond such stiff-minded limited ways of thinking. Again, for lack of a better way to put this: I believe writers, of all people, should feel some sort of moral imperative (lower case) to put things right in the world, among people. Figuring out how we can do that is up to the individual, but it’s no accident that poets of yore were so involved with politics and public pronouncements of the state of their nation’s conscience and actions. We are in a position, even now, to point out injustices, to celebrate wonders and kindnesses, to invent and explore unusual (& healthy) ways of thinking and co-existing, etc. I’ll get off this soapbox now, but I do wonder how many of our writers aren’t just perfecting their writing skills without having a greater agenda, however amorphous and unpinned, in mind as they go at it. When I say politically-minded things straight in prose and listen to the silence echo, I really speculate, mostly to myself or to Ana Bozicevic (my lady), why so many writers are happy to applaud cool surreal lines (without understanding the political inspiration/history to that use, as in the case of Daniil Kharms’s life of persecution and death by starvation) but are either wary or indifferent about putting their political toes into the worldly waters -- because aren’t we, after all, on this big green rock together? Don’t we all want to participate in improving? Is that an archaic notion now?
My latest reindeer games involve a manuscript tentatively titled, The Ugly Americans, which is a deceptive title. It comes from Gertrude Stein in her book, Picasso, and really entails only some condemnation of a few American concepts but will be more of a celebration of the best aspects of being American: the innovative, inspiring, exploratory, optimistic aspects of our histories here and the authors that also advanced them, even those investments in attitude that haven’t worked out so far, because our idealism still inspires and surely is worth further work. I’m afraid that the ongoing failings of our late-capitalism will only advance the trend towards a bleak and selfish “give-up” view of how we are to be as a nation. So I’m combating that, and that is the good kind of war sans blood and fleshly fatalities.
I’m also about to go at something of a memoir-living-biographical-portrait-sketch of Ron Padgett. Here’s a poet, translator, teacher, collaborator, editor, art connoisseur, etc, who has not received enough critical attention to date and is a friend of mine. We will commence a series of interviews over the next six months that hopefully captures many of the nuggets of wisdom I get from him every time we speak. He’s just a great, inspiring person to be around, and I’m humbled and honored to be able to work with him on this project!
As for the rest, I plan to continue what seems to be the unpopular path of thinking about political engagement on big and personal levels (correct me if I’m assuming the worst of my fellow poets!), grow my family bigger, and keep plugging away at my teaching life. Thanks for this engagement, Elizabeth! And one last thought, if I may: to anyone reading this missive, the rules of engagement are fluid, so take advantage and speak up: even if you are not in the habit of doing so, instead of putting aside the arguments that condense in your head when you come into contact with a controversial subject, speak up at least once, and report back on how it feels.
I am Euro-mutt and Lebanese, partly, my grandma was, and Arabic was her first language. As a result, here is the vast and useful Arabic I know:
Oh my god
You’re like your father
Look at Jealous over there
Jews!
Blacks!
The Devil!
I’m afraid
Ooooh, are you Lebanese?
Ooooh, money, money.
What a slut
Don’t like it? Eat shit.
Funny how 11 words really paint a portrait -- pretty much sums up good old Gram. She was super fun -- and fearful, cheap, neurotic, and racist. I adored her -- and her food. See, I CAN compartmentalize: delete above statement. Your Ugly Americans and Ron project sound amazing. Keep us, posted, Amy. And keep fighting the Good Fight.
Elizabeth Hildreth works as a writer and instructional designer in Chicago where she lives with her husband and daughters.
