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The Poetry of Diasporic Memory with Ben Meyerson
Flamenco's haunting rhythms carry centuries of suppressed memories—the echoes of Spain's Jewish and Muslim communities, expelled and erased through centuries of ethnic cleansing. Yet somehow, these cultural memories persist through sound and verse, creating what poet Ben Meyerson calls "diasporic memory."
In this conversation that spans continents and centuries, Meyerson takes us deep into the inspiration behind his collection "Seguirías," named after a flamenco form known for its mournful depth. "I was using it as a shorthand for diasporic memory," he explains, "for the recording of diasporic memory or itinerant memory in various ways." Through his poetry, Meyerson creates a powerful bridge between the experiences of Spain's persecuted minorities and his own Jewish identity in North America.
The discussion moves effortlessly between practical craft considerations—like how to adapt flamenco's complex 12-beat rhythms into English verse—to profound questions about poetic subjectivity. Drawing from his academic work on medieval troubadour poetry, Meyerson offers a fascinating perspective: that subjectivity itself might be a formal choice rather than an authentic expression. "Choosing to be a subject in a poem is a choice," he argues, "it's not just something that we automatically do."
We also explore the limitations of contemporary workshop culture, where poems focused on personal trauma can sometimes create a flattened social interior where readers are only invited to validate rather than engage. Throughout, Meyerson demonstrates how poetry can be both intellectually rigorous and emotionally affecting—challenging readers while still offering them a way into the experience.
Whether you're fascinated by poetry's relationship to music, interested in cultural memory, or simply looking for fresh perspectives on the craft of writing, this conversation will leave you with new ways to think about how poetry preserves what history tries to erase. Discover how form becomes memory and memory becomes form in Ben Meyerson's remarkable work.
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Hello, welcome to VarnBlog, and today is another Poetry and Poetics episode. I am talking here with Ben Meyerson, who I know from two different worlds the world of philosophy and history, a la our joint involvement in the member school at different times, and also as a poet. Ben is a writer and musician times, and also as a poet, Ben is a writer and musician. I think you spend time in Spain and Canada these days. You have the dubious distinction of, like me, having an MFA in poetry and a philosophy background which dooms you to hell in most religions. I believe you also have a PhD in comparative literature.
Speaker 2:I'm working on it.
Speaker 1:You are in your pursuit thereof.
Speaker 2:Yeah, apd, which means that I guess I am deep in the writing process right now which is what I signed up for so.
Speaker 1:I was waiting for this the entire time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So we're going to talk about your most recent collection, sagarias, which is a term from Flamenco. I don't play guitar, I just play drums, which means I basically just count um. But um, cigarias itself is very interesting because it's counting is a little different than standard classical guitar. Um, which is about as much as I actually know about it. I mean, I know what it sounds like and I know that involves different counting um. But I wanted to ask you what inspired you to name your collection from black ocean um, after flamenco, you know.
Speaker 2:So that movement go ahead I mean, I I suppose that, like one thing that made it make sense to me was that, like, what flamenco represents is like this really interesting confluence of cultural influences that has been packaged in a very particular way within like a more unitary cultural sphere, because, of course, spain underwent in the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries, like a pretty thorough ethnic cleansing process of ethnic cleansing. So you have all these echoes of prior cultures that subsist within flamenco as these kind of called up memories, and yet, at the same time, there is, you know, like, within the flamenco voice, there is, like also a very imminent and close at hand, you know, cultural identity that is other than what, like the standard or mainstream Spanish cultural identity is. Mainstream Spanish cultural identity is specifically due to the ways in which flamenco has been nurtured and developed by the Roma of southern Spain. Now, the Roma have been marginalized in various ways within Spanish society since roughly 1499. 1499 is the date of the first kind of declaration concerning the Roma by the Spanish crown and that, I guess, othering that has gone through different phases of development, has persisted to the current day.
Speaker 2:Still there are massive disparities, and so flamenco is this thing that has been taken as this emblem of Spanish national identity. It's been exported as such, you know, in kind of a kitschy way that belies its true scope. You know, a lot of people are like into, like the frilly outfits and like the dancing, the dancing's great like. But the core of flamenco is actually the cante, the singing and the lyrics that are involved, the lyrics and the ways in which the lyrics correspond to the melodies. Everything else in flamenco is revolving around accompanying the singing. So using the seguirias as a palo or a palo is like a flamenco form, the song form that has a very particular history in terms of its reception. So a lot of the reception of flamenco in the Anglophone world has been through the poet Federico García Lorca right.
Speaker 2:And Lorca, along with the composer Manuel de Falla, kind of packaged certain flamenco palos, flamenco forms, into what they call cantejondo or the deep song, and Seguirias is one of these. So for them, like the palos of cantejondo harken back to, like you know, primitive Romani song, but regardless. So Seguirias has that kind of baggage to it and that's kind of been subsumed within its practice. But then, you know, regardless of the truth of that claim the truth of that claim is a little bit muddy it's very hard for us to trace back these forms to their origins but regardless of that claim, it's kind of gathered that baggage and taken it on in the performance practice. And then, beyond that, there's also, like the specific lyrics that typically pertain to the Segurillas, which have to do with, you know, complaints about social injustice, labor complaints, accounts of lost love, questions relating to generational memory and the death of one's parents, things like that.
Speaker 2:I think that in using the term, my goal was to say OK, so flamenco is this confluence of all these different things, all these different references, these echoes of different musical traditions and poetic traditions, and this compendium that contains a kind of variable memory, both the Romani cultural memory and also the memory, a memory that encodes those that preceded the Romani in the social roles that the Romani came to occupy, specifically the Jews of Spain who were expelled in 1492 and the Muslims of Spain who were forcibly converted and then eventually expelled in 1609.
Speaker 2:So it's got all of that as well as this kind of very specific vein of content that interested me. So for me it became this kind of interested me. So for me it became this kind of shorthand for diasporic memory, for, like, the recording of diasporic memory or itinerant memory in various ways. And so in a certain, in a certain sense, it also became like, like, like this thing against which I could elucidate some measure of my own diasporic sensibility as a Jewish person in North America, which so in that sense, the figure of seguirías and the voice that seguirías encodes, becomes this figure of historical solidarity, I could say, between various cultures. And to compound that, seguirías as a word, you know its root is seguir, which means to follow in Spanish, and so I kind of took that very literally, on purpose, and framed the collection as a way of following these different threads.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was reading poems from the collection no-transcript, so I think in rhythm. So I was looking for the rhythm and I'm like I don't know, I'm not finding it exactly. Oh, I'm not finding it exactly. So, preparing for this interview, I did some research in the origins of Flamingo and then I realized that, even though I kind of know what it is that I have no idea and also apparently neither does anybody else. We know that it's associated with the Romani, we know that it's associated with Berbers and with Moors, but even the origin of the word I found about seven different possible origins. So I was like, okay, I got nothing.
Speaker 1:And in a lot of cases, each of them is about as implausible as the next as well, right, but I find this often true in diasporic memory, like there are things that we can concretely nail down and then there's stuff that we're like I don't know, some people met some people and they said some things and this is what we got Like. But it is interesting. One of the things I get fascinated with Flamenco is that its relationship to sung poetry and its relationship to rhythms are kind of different, that that's like the national music we associate with Spain, because it's both incredibly Spanish, because it's also incredibly like, not really Castilian. So what were some of the other influences that went into this collection, like poetic, influences or.
Speaker 1:Poetic influences, historical influences. We're going to tease all of it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I mean you kind of gestured toward a bunch of things I know. So I mean, when it comes to flamenco, I was using it in this collection as much more of a conceptual figure, so I was not attempting to take flamenco rhythm and work it into the poetry. That's actually something that I'm working on right now. And, oh, interesting, yeah, uh, because well, there's different. There's a lot of flamenco forms that are just like in fours. There's some that are in twos but like the, what people like kind of glom on to is, like you know, the rhythms of the solea, the alegría seguiría, bulería, like these rhythms that are in 12, right, or well, this the bulería isn't really in 12 if you're playing it, but the others are Bulería like kind of emerged out of a 12 beat. Compás, compás is like the rhythm. It's like a, like a, like a, like a. It's like a clock with 12 and it goes so. So there's different. There's an emphasis pattern and the buleria kind of accelerated that and then abstracted it to the point where really, if you're playing it, you're playing in threes with it, with a cierre which, with a close. That's like, uh, like one and two and three and four, basically, so it's it's kind of a polyrhythmic in that sense. But yeah, the other ones are like definitively in 12.
Speaker 2:And what I noticed, what I've been noticing, is that so if you're writing in Spanish, it's hard to approximate those kinds of rhythmic constructions, because Spanish as a language just doesn't have the rhythmic impact that English does. We've got, like that, those hard Germanic syllabics, right. So, as a result, like I don't, this hasn't really been done before in Spanish to my knowledge, but in English, what interests me is like actually building meters that map onto flamenco palos, so like thinking about, like it's like there's this word, hemiola, right, which is, like you know, like a rhythm that's divided in half and each half is like counted differently, right, and that like partially encompasses what's happening in like the 12 beat compass, but in truth, like, like it's more complicated than that. Uh, so what interests me is like thinking through okay, like, like, like where we can arrange the upbeats in particular ways, but like, how are you doing the downbeats in the metrical line? Because if so, like a soleal rhythm is like uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez, un, dos, so that's like the 12. So the first half is like two emphases with six beats and the second half is three emphases with six beats.
Speaker 2:So the problem is that in English, like, there's this principle whereby, like, if you're reading a line and you start reading in like, let's say, iambic meter, and then you move to dactylic meter, the dactyls that you read are at the same pace as the iambs. In other words, like a two beat, like a two, a bisyllabic foot takes the same amount of time as a trisyllabic foot to read. So I can't just have, like, I can't just do like you know, two like on one side, like two dactyls and on the other side, two Iams. It becomes more complicated than that. I have to find ways to clutter the rhythm. There's going to be more than two upbeats on like each side of the, or more than three on the other side as well. It becomes more complicated. You have to like, think in terms of double times and triple times and stuff. So I'm trying to puzzle my way through that. We'll see what happens with that.
Speaker 2:But uh, in the book it's not, it's really just a conceptual figure. Um, so in terms of influence, I mean, jeffrey hill is a major poet. For me, uh, has been ever since I was a kid. For me, has been ever since I was a kid, and so I think one of the oldest poems in the book actually is an elegy for Jeffrey Hill. He died in 2016, early July, and I remember because I was visiting some friends in New York and we'd just done like the classic like July 4th, like the classic like July 4th, uh, you know, festival of excess and uh, and so I was like hung over on the couch, on his couch and I, I like hear that, I like go on my laptop and I hear that, you know, jeffrey Hill has passed, and I start, I started writing the poem from the end and eventually, like reconstruct the beginning, uh, so I would have been, you know, yeah, because yeah, that's got to be the oldest poem in the collection, because I would have been like 24 it was before I even started my mfa, um, and but hill, hill was huge for me, uh, and been like you know, like a kind of unceasing influence, but the influence has morphed. So by the time I kind of got into this book, I wasn't necessarily trying to write like Jeffrey Hill, but I had kind of internalized elements of what he does with, like, in terms of phrase making and and the way he he uses compression to make arguments in his poems, like that has been a huge influence on me. Um, now, uh, I all like.
Speaker 2:A little bit later on I discovered nathaniel mackie and rhythmically, in terms of the way he manipulates breath, that was big for me as well. That was like a kind of mind opening thing. Reading Splay Anthem, which was my first exposure to his work, was kind of transformative. And then, you know, eventually I realized that like Mackie himself has written a little bit about flamenco and so I kind of tried to think about how you know, his internalization of like breath, the attenuation of breath, you know the breaking of voice, the raggedness and the recursivity with that, the kind of historical or or, um, yeah, the recursivity of historical memory that that's something like vocal attenuation can produce in you know, the enunciation of a poem, that that for for mackie, is what he's extracting from like Coltrane and from Dogon funeral rites and all of this stuff. But he also kind of puts flamenco into that, into the mix there, among other things.
Speaker 2:So you know, I start thinking about that in terms of flamenco and then I start thinking about it in terms of certain Jewish traditional practices, like the tiki-yaga-dola, the long blast of the shofar, like the tikiaga dala, the long blast of the shofar, and the purpose of that is to attenuate the sound as much as possible, to kind of stave off the failure of breath, even as you allow breath to fail.
Speaker 2:So this kind of, for me, instantiates the or kind of activates the two elements of the voice in the body. The first is its ability to make meaning right by sounding, by communicating, and the second is its status as this kind of somatic property, this telluric thing that emerges out of us without any intent, you know, like when we're startled by something, or when we yawn, or when we cry or when we laugh, like when we're startled by something, or when we yawn, or when we cry or when we laugh. And so the latter kind of precedes signification, precedes communication, and then the former is posterior to it, and this kind of produces this temporal loop, right, and so this is how I kind of repurpose Mackie's framing of things. Mackkey doesn't put it in those terms, but I do because I find myself needing to systematize things a little bit more collection. It's this desire to produce this spatiotemporal loop that activates historical memory and dredges up all that which has been suppressed beneath the surface.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I love both those poets, Mackey and Jeffrey Hill is one of my absolute favorites. I've read Tenebrae and King Log probably about 25 times. King Log is probably my favorite, hill, is up there. I mean, even though they're completely different kinds of poets, hill and Charles Olson are poets I return to over and over and, over and over again, and it's partly because they're difficult and they don't care. Yes, it's unapologetically like we are making an argument.
Speaker 1:We are making an argument through both dense historical reference and gnarled syntax and scansion. You really actually do kind of have to scan the poem and start getting the meaning. Um, and there is a rhetoric to that that Hill is articulating. And when I think of someone like Mackie, I've always been impressed by Mackie's ability to just kind of almost create forms. I mean, he's not explicitly an analogous form person and for listeners who don't know, that's people who find form from watching different things. And when we're talking about adopting Flamenco, the poetry, that would be an amount, an analogous form, because it hasn't been formalized, as the poetry said in english.
Speaker 2:Yet I think, um, I should always be careful when I say that, because as far as I'm aware, I mean there's, there might be somebody out there doing it, but if if they are, I'm I don't know. I don't know who they are, and and if you're watching this, whoever, that is like, hit me up, we all. I want to talk, but um.
Speaker 1:So I find that interesting that you're. You seem very interested in the, not just the oral and for those of you living that, listening that's A-U-R-A-L but the cymatic, the rhythmic. And I did notice that in your poetry even when I read it. But, as I said, it was clearly you weren't trying to mimic Flamenco or Segura in the poems. I was even counting this line's not long enough for that. I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 1:This line's not long enough for that, sorry about that, then I'll admit that I cheated and read an interview that was like, oh, okay, okay. But it is interesting that you are actually experimenting with the form. One thing I will say about a lot of contemporary poetry, and I say this as a person who writes what people often think is free verse. Now I say they think it's free verse because it doesn't rhyme. But usually I actually have some pretty crazy metrical counts that I'm actually trying to do and I've realized that outside of very specific MFA's, almost no one teaches scansion anymore.
Speaker 2:They don't even do scansion in the MFA.
Speaker 1:I mean, I had a-.
Speaker 2:I took one prosody class, so I had a generally good experience on my MFA, but, like, what I noticed is that, like a lot of people came in not knowing scansion because people are coming in with different backgrounds, right, and if they didn't know scansion already, they probably had to learn it on their own time and, like you know, just corner a professor in their office or something, cause it was assumed that, like you already knew how to write.
Speaker 2:Purpose the MFA wasn't to teach you how to write, it was like to help you write your book, you know. So, yeah, I mean, and, as a result, like what's happening. I mean, and, as a result, like what's happening. I mean this is like a complaint that I have is that you get people who are like coming out of MFA programs and, like you know, are now qualified to like teach poetry at universities, who have never been like taught properly how to scan. You know, maybe they can count out like iambic, pentameter or something, but like the kind of more involved stuff, it's not there, it's a failing and it's kind of baked into the system, I think, and I'm not sure how it can be remedied.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I mean, there's a lot of assumptions in the MFA system. I'm going to rock it out and allow us to go down this detour before I go down another one. But I am, as a person who has an MFA, and actually weirdly, when you said you like Hill, I was like oh wow, we share a taste and we're both Sephardic. I don't know what that is no, I'm Ashkenazi oh okay. I was like okay, well, I didn't know, because I was like maybe you're half Ashkenazi, half Sephardic.
Speaker 1:No, I'm ashkenazi with parents who are both scholars of medieval spain, so that's, that's the okay, yeah, um, I am bulgarian, sephardic and scott and scotch irish ancestry, so it's uh, and even saying bulgarian sephardic is weird, because what that means is we escaped spain, went through the Ottoman Empire and ended up in Bulgaria and then left.
Speaker 2:Well, you know that there was a flamencologist in the 1960s, hippolyto Rossi, who like went and heard I think it was Bulgarian, like Sephardic Jewish music and he was like. This sounds similar to this flamenco form called the Petenera, and the Petenera has a couple of lyrics that refer to Jews, in particular to like, the Jewish absence. There's a famous lyric donde vas bella judia tan compuesta y adesora? And then she answers voy en busca de Rebeco que está en una sinagoga. So it's like where do you go, beautiful Jewess? So composed and untimely, I go in search Rebeco's, like Jacob.
Speaker 2:So I go in search of Jacob who's in a synagogue, which is, of course, like the context of this being like. You know this is post-expulsion, when you know the synagogues have been totally repurposed and there are no more jews left. But I guess so hippolyto rossi is like oh, the petanera actually is based on like, like must be based on like, a, an old sephardic song that was then taken by the bulgarian, the, the sephardic jews, to various places, and now like has been, you know, passed down in this bulgarian sehardic community and it's this analog to the Petenera. The truth of the matter is almost certainly that this was him just like going off into fantasy land, you know, but the fact that, like that, people are searching for these correspondences to me is so interesting correspondences to me is so interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, I do feel like often I'm reading isadora of seville's etymologies and people are just making shit up, but which?
Speaker 2:is fine. Yeah, I mean like, especially when you ethnically cleansed your country. You have, you have to find ways to make.
Speaker 1:How much of the content, the kind of, let's say, the semantic content of this book, do you feel has that echo of ethnic cleansing in the background?
Speaker 2:Quite a lot. I mean, like the poem Alcante is is very much about that um, and and references it somewhat directly. There's a sento in there that, like you know a lot of the, a lot of the lines that it's lifting and it's taking stuff from flamenco lyrics, from you know various letters that were written by you know Muslims and Jews. You know various letters that were written by Muslims and Jews about their treatment at the hands of the Christians after the Reconquista. There's a lot of poems by Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain, and also there's some contemporary Sephardic poetry, some contemporary poetry by Romani poets. It's a three-part cento so I was able to fit in a lot of stuff. But a lot of the material in that and also the way it's assembled, kind of encodes precisely these histories of ethnic cleansing and the ways in which memory is suppressed and how one should deal with historical memory and and the memory of such events. Um, so there's definitely plenty in there that that kind of tries at least to confront this material.
Speaker 2:But you know, I I'm always leery of of being like too direct with that stuff as well, because I think that there is, I mean, and this might be like a kind of not the best way of putting it, but I think there's there's a point at which, when you're too direct, you risk uh, you know you risk it feeling like you're just beating a drum.
Speaker 2:It's inelegant, um, and, and you know, if the goal is to produce work, that's effective, right, like. There's a point at which, like over determining the message, so to speak, actually detracts from the effectiveness of the rhetoric, and that's something that I've always been perhaps oversensitive about. About, um, like, whenever people are too insistent, I, I kind of um, my reaction is like okay, I get it now. Like, like what, what else? How is this being packaged? Um, so, as a writer, I I think I am always um, trying to, you know, inject that content into things without making the thing solely about that. So I can write a love poem that's also about diasporic memory and just have it kind of vacillate indeterminately in between those two strata, as opposed to just writing about diasporic memory in and of itself, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I feel like I'm often writing about diasporic trauma, but I also don't like writing directly about diasporic or Southern American or race relational trauma, because I wanted to be there but I don't.
Speaker 2:I, to put it directly, I just think a lot of didactic poems are bad I didn't want to say it so baldly, but yeah, I mean there's, there's something about like, there's a, there's a.
Speaker 2:There's a place in contemporary poetics where, like, like, aesthetics and technical execution runs up against against, like virtuous desire. I would say, I would say, and, and that's like. I think, like, like, if you're, if you're writing, that's like probably the hardest thing to navigate, you know, because you can have, you can, like you know, be super comfortable with, like, all the techniques that you need. You can be able to do whatever you want, but when it comes to actually making the decisions, then you have to walk this tightrope, and the tightrope's unavoidable, it's, it's, it's. It's something that, like, I don't think I'll ever be comfortable with, and I maybe it's good that I'm not comfortable with it, because it means that I'll continue trying to be careful. But yeah, it's it, once the virtuous desire takes over, it's really hard to write a good poem. You have to tamp that down and find ways to to channel it into the technique, as opposed to just making it the thing that you're shouting from the rooftops.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, as a person who teaches high schoolers and sometimes judges performance poetry, both slam and otherwise, I find that I am increasingly a minority and being frustrated and overly didactic poetry that just wants to yell their virtues out but also can't do it musically or in a way that I'll remember in 35 minutes. So it's a problem and I try to be forgiving about it. But I do think the two things are somewhat related and that is this lack of formal training in musicality Because, like I said, I took one prosody class in my entire education. There was only one offered and it wasn't in the MFA. Now that I think about it, I was taking it for like restoration literature so that I could do scansion of like Alexander Pope.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I mean my, my prosody training was like mostly by myself and a little bit in like taking undergrad classes, but like a lot of the, a lot of. It was just like me really going down rabbit holes and then asking certain people for guidance, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:A lot of it for me also was just like having basic knowledge of music and I kept on being like, okay, how do we count beats?
Speaker 2:I will say that if you want to actually understand meter and poetry reading about what meter is in musicology and what rhythm is in musicology and the distinction between rhythm and meter I mean, if you're a poet, who, who knows how to scan a poem, um, and can write like I can write, you can write blank verse, you can write in tactiles like you can do that basic stuff but you want to know how to make it feel like it's just organic, you're not like necessarily following a pattern, but it's always there and there's like a rhythmic sensibility, even though you're technically writing free verse. You really need to think about the distinction between meter and rhythm. They're not the same thing. Meter is about the expectation that a pattern produces moving forward, and rhythm is about how you manipulate that expectation. So you know, the fact that you can use meter in your writing to produce an expectation about what comes next offers all these opportunities. So just one or two lines that are roughly in a meter allows you to go crazy and do all kinds of things with syncopation, with open, with broken space, with pause, all kinds of stuff. So so that I think, if, if I had to offer one bit of advice, is is what I would suggest, like you could cause. You can learn basic scansion on your own time and even if you're not getting the resources in your MFA or in your undergrad program or whatever, but actually having somebody explain then how that cashes out.
Speaker 2:In contemporary poetics, if you're trying to write a poem and you're not a revivalist, you're not trying to write in form per se, you're not trying to write a blank verse, sonnet or something. You're trying to do something that feels of a piece with what people are writing now. Uh, that that is like read musicology. Specifically, there's a book by justin london. Uh, that's really good. I'm trying to remember the title, uh, but it's. It's about rhythm and meter, um, and patterning and it kind of understands. It led me understand, understand this, I this, or conceptualize meter as like a surface and rhythm as a surface, and then they're interacting with one another, which is super useful, I think yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1:It's really important when you start doing stuff like playing with space. And why you do that? Because you're actually also messing with the rhythm. You're mimicking, like you said, you're mimicking syncopation. Um, ironically, when I looked at your poem on difficulty, I also have a poem on difficulty and I imagine it's it's inspired by the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um like.
Speaker 1:So like I was like oh well I'm not the only person who's written about this quote. Imagine it's inspired by the same fucking quote, yeah. So I was like, oh well, I'm not the only person who's written about this quote.
Speaker 2:Which quote are you thinking of?
Speaker 1:I'm thinking of a Jeffrey Hills, just like.
Speaker 2:I was actually reacting to something from JH Prynne. In that poem. Jh prinn has this oh, okay, has this essay on resistance and difficulty and the difference between resistance and difficulty. Um, and so I was thinking about that. You know that that resistance is about what the writer experiences in producing the work, and difficulty is what the reader experiences. And on a certain level, the purpose of difficulty is that it's the product of the resistance. But if the reader is experiencing the resistance that the writer felt, then that's not good. The difficulty that you're producing for the reader should be designed for the reader, if that makes sense, Right?
Speaker 1:It basically shouldn't be to put this in a bald-faced way your therapy session for the difficulty of writing the poem itself. Yeah, exactly yeah. I find that tension interesting and I will say this we both seem to be attracted to quote, unquote, difficult poets. Reading your interviews, reading your book, it is clear to me that you draw inspiration from a lot of poets that would be considered difficult for a variety of reasons, some of which is metrical, some of which is Jeffrey Hill, yourself, Olsen. As I mentioned earlier, they have no problem bringing up historical events in memory that they know. You probably don't know. They're not going to make that easy for you, but I don't think it's there just to be difficult in your case or in Hill's case.
Speaker 1:Go ahead, poems produce opportunities there, just to be difficult in your case, or in hill's case, um, I think it's there, you know, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Well, it's. Poems produce opportunities, right, like, like, if you, you, if you are making an argument and you have to pause and explain what the historical event is that you're referencing, then you, you lose the contiguity between that historical event and the image that you're making or another historical event that you're placing alongside it. And once you lose that, you lose the friction and the kind of you know to use, like the kind of sound that the friction makes. You know, like you can. The advantage of compression is that you can make connections that wouldn't otherwise be viable. But sometimes those connections are between two things that would otherwise need to be unraveled, right, so you can unravel them in a note or you can let the reader Google it. You know there are, there are multiple approaches. I do have a pretty, you know significant, you know, kind of note apparatus in in at the back of segirius for the purposes of making life a little bit easier for the reader. But yeah, my goal is, uh and I always say this like I want that, want that stuff to continue to, you know, like that's never going to leave my poetry, that, those kind of exacting elements, but I want the poem to be enjoyable regardless, like even if you don't go to the back of the book and like figure out everything that's going on, or I want you to. I want there to be kind of like a sensuous enjoyment of the writing, whether it's like a vivid image that sticks in your mind or the sounds you know. Like that. That's really important to me and I think it was important to hill too.
Speaker 2:Um, like, I started reading hill when I was 14 years old, um, and at that age there was, there was a lot of stuff I didn't understand and I was not capable of like chasing down all those references.
Speaker 2:I didn't have the wherewithal to do so, uh. And so you know, like I I did some with some of it, but like, like, a lot of my enjoyment of hill, you know, came with his phrase making, with the rhythms of his work. Um, you know the way some of his metaphors stuck in my head. He really, like, was capable of these wholesale sensory enhancements. That, to me, like, like that, that as much as like his ability to, you know, take history and bring it together and all this, all this stuff like that, like to me, and theology, like to me, the like. All of that stuff falls to the wayside if he didn't have first the sensory elements down. So like when I, when I teach poetry, I'm like be specific, build strange images that everyone will remember. Once you're specific and strange and you're able to manipulate the senses, you can get away with orders of magnitude more in your poetry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always tell people poetry is not a riddle, but riddles might be in there. Yeah, exactly, I like your bringing up of the semantic, the somatic, because although I just may have portmanteaued an important word, but anyway the, because I do kind of remind people, poetry is a tactile medium in the sense that it was originally made to be recited out loud and its techniques were about memory. Um, and then we add to that sensory language and particularly, you know one thing I'm always telling uh, kids, because I teach kids creative writing, um is like, do not be afraid to be weird. Yeah, um, uh, in fact, not only don't be afraid of of it, try to be weird, and if you go too far we can cut that back. As opposed to where, if you use a bunch of cliches, I'm not going to have any real feeling for what you're actually trying to say, even though you're saying it directly, the feeling of the statement is not there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I do think you can get away with being really hard as far as what you're pairing, or Jeffrey Hill, I mean Hill Olson, another person that comes to mind I know you're familiar with as often. You can get away with that if those most important thing in a poem is basically the mantic, or or didactic, or rhetorical, like they think the meaning is the thing that you should approach first, and I'm often like no, even as a poetry writer, it's the thing you approach last, it's important.
Speaker 2:Like, no, even as a poetry writer, it's the thing you approach last, it's important, but it's like, yeah, I mean, it might be the most important thing, but it's not the most important thing in the writing process. Right, like the poem springs from this, like synaptic association, that you're doing that like sparks, like a sensory feeling in your body, right, and then you like layer those and try to make sense of them, and that's when this, the, the semantic content emerges, right, but but before you have the, the, the thing that's, that's kind of beyond explication. You can't build the argument. I mean, that's that's what makes poetry kind of something that, that, something that can't be replicated anywhere else. The distinction between something that's poetic and a poem, I think, would be that Something that's poetic makes use of things that would be proper to poetry in other contexts, but it doesn't spring from that initial connection. You know, um, so yeah, like you, but but there's only so much you can do to convince people to start there. You know there's right, like I want to talk about my divorce.
Speaker 2:I always use the divorce example, partly because I teach. I teach people who, like are way too young to be divorced. Um, uh, so for them it's like funny. If I was like doing a continuing education class, I would probably choose a different example. But yeah, like, if you're, if you just want to write about, like, how terrible your divorce was, it's always just going to feel oppressive, right, like, because it's always just going to be. You know, here's the situation. Here's my exposition. You know, like it's essentially following the same formula, like a short story would follow, and, and for me it's like OK, no, like the first thing you have to do is is take away the context from that feeling and figure out like the kind of strange sensation in your body that it produces and find a way to describe that sensation in and of itself and then relate that sensation back to the context. If you can start from that kind of thing beyond sense, then the poem kind of spills out from there. That's how I feel, anyways.
Speaker 1:I find myself fairly in agreement with that. I mean, I always think about, as a person who writes, theory and philosophy and I'm not quite sure I consider those things the same thing. But I don't want to go into the actual difference between theory and philosophy right now. But my writing style when I write that stuff is frankly god-awful because it's so incredibly obnoxiously precise, because I was trained analytically and then I deal with all these continental concepts, so blah, blah, blah, blah. And if I wrote a poem that way, you know, if I just broke up a paper into verse and cut out the citations, it would still be god-awful and for me it's actually a tension. I remember when I was finishing my MFA and my my thesis advisor was like quit reading so much theory.
Speaker 2:I was like Thankfully nobody told me that I feel like.
Speaker 1:I got lucky there. I will say I did come from an FA that was particularly anti-theory, which was kind of weird mine was kind of split across the middle.
Speaker 2:Workshops were hard, because there are some people who are like I don't care about ideas, and then there were other people who were like I don't care about ideas, uh, and then there were other people who were like really deep into it, like like I, it was nice that we had a lot of flexibility to take courses outside the department. So, like, most of the courses that I took were like in, like were theory classes and like complet and the french department, like like various places, uh. So you know that meant that actually, like a lot of the poetry that I was writing was like you know me trying to work through all this other material that I was that I was encountering and and people in my workshop were like I, like this isn't fair, like like you, you're, you're not talking to us, um and so and so there was like a certain amount of breakdown there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I had a similar intention where I was almost just basically accused of being an intellectual terrorist in my poetry, so it was. It's like. It was just like, uh, quit referencing things we don't know, and I'm like, well, I was younger and even more of a jerk, so I'd be like, why don't you just read more? I don't know what the issue is here. Um, yeah, I had that. I had that.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say that now I had that genetic makeup as well. I'd say, uh, I have bellowed a little bit as well over time, um, but not in my work, just in my generosity towards other people. I'd say like I, I, I think like the more I teach, the more I I, you know, am really happy that that. You know, people are using poetry to kind of work through their feelings, especially at the undergrad level when I'm like you know, you get students who come into your office and they're like you know this, like, like writing poetry helped me work out my relationship with my dad and I'm like great, I want that, like I want that for you.
Speaker 2:But but I think you know, earlier on I was much more of an absolutist. Like you know, poetry must be like this, like like serious intellectual pursuit, um, and now I just realized that you know it, essentially it has boiled down to just different strokes, right like I, I can't convince people who have come to poetry via, like you know, rupee, car or whoever, to like like what I like, but I can convince them to to enter into this discourse and be influenced in various ways and to be exposed to various things that they otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. Uh, and and, and I find you know that, at the end of the day, like I'm just happy that they're there, uh, which isn't something that I ever felt. I ever expected to feel when I was younger, but you know, ever expected to feel when I was younger, but you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm with you on that. I mean, um, my one of my favorite things to do with the high school students, my creative writing class, is to take Rupi Kaur and like, actually try to make it interesting, because I I don't think Rupi Kaur is a terrible poet, despite the fact that I make fun of her a lot. Um, and, and after seeing where instagram poetry went, I'm like, oh, rupee car's like a breath of fresh air actually, you know. And then I also have to remind myself. I go back and look at like the best-selling poetry, like since the 70s, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that was like when I'm complaining about Rupi Kaur in the 90s it was Jewel, so like I really should shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't know that yeah, it was Jewel and like, and then in the early aughts it was Billy Collins, who's who's who I remember bill.
Speaker 2:I remember the billy collins era. I remember he came to my, to my undergrad institution and he said something that that stuck with me. Someone asked, like why are you always trying to be funny in your poems? And he said, um, there's nothing more more honest that you can get out of a reader than a laugh, or something along those lines. And I was like, well, he's not wrong. Like I, you know what. Like I, I can't disagree. Like I don't know how to dishonestly laugh by myself at a poem, but you know, like, like it also kind of sides. Yeah, I don't, I don't even know why I would either. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's not what I'm looking for per se.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, uh, yeah, I studied with him briefly when he was at Georgia Tech. Um, even though I was I was at a different school but we would come and do workshops with him and he actually found him to be a good moderating influence on my otherwise like penchant for obscurantism. So, but he was one of those people actually mailed me out because I was like, oh, once I understood he was doing like this is actually not easy to do, even if it's like deadpan comic timing and and like relatively simple verse form.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, yeah, that was that was the moment for it, right, like he was like the public face of it. But, like you know, that was the same period when, like all the writers were trying to emulate dean young right, who is kind of like the elevated version of what Billy Collins is doing in a lot of ways in terms of the way he uses timing.
Speaker 1:I can tell that we were in MFAs within a generation of each other because everybody, including myself, was trying to emulate Dean Young.
Speaker 2:I was in high school when that was happening. Okay, uh, so yeah, within a generation, like I, when I I started my mfa, when, like everyone was obsessed with ocean vlong and so much. Look like that was those two books like night sky with exit wounds, and look were like the 20s. I started my MFA in 2016. So that year it was the year of the personal is political.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Again, we've gone back around to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which actually touches on some of the things that we can talk about with respect to the medieval stuff, if you want to shift in that direction.
Speaker 1:I would want to go there because, like one of the things about about your, your poetry that I found interesting and the reason why I brought it up when we were talking about medieval. So I know you do study like troubadours and, um, uh, that's part of your comparative lit background, correct? Yeah, yeah, it's part of my project lit background correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's part of my project. I'm kind of this weird chimera of philosophy and various literatures. Right now it's mostly Iberian, but my undergrad was just in English lit. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm putting some stuff together and trying to to theorize complexity via literature and um and philosophy at the same time yeah, as a, as a person who's a obsessed with complexity and ecology, b also has a similar background to you, and that I'm both educated in literature and and creative writing and philosophy and anthropology. I actually was like, oh wow, our interests are very similar and I discovered you not you might find it interesting. I discovered you twice. Once I did a reading group with you at member school Right, the Jews and race in medieval Europe Right, and this the Jews and race in medieval Europe.
Speaker 1:Right and this whole like this like lit medieval emergence of our racial theories class that we kind of did very it wasn't really a class, but it was also kind of more than just a book group.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we bought it, we had. It was like a two-session thing and so like Jules and I kind of co-led it Correct and, and so like Jules and I kind of co-led it, uh, and we had a fun time with it.
Speaker 1:And then I discovered you again separately, and it took me a second to realize you were the same person, um, reading periodicities, which I read. Uh, I've actually had another guest on the show very recently, actually, who's published with periodicities too. And I saw your name again and I was like, huh, I'm gonna check this out. Oh, you publish with black ocean. That's like one of my favorite presses. And then I was, and then I was like what, you're the same guy I took that, that uh kind of discussion group with at memory school. Yeah, fuck, um, so, uh, but yeah, and so to get into the medieval stuff, I am fascinated by early, modern and late medieval poetry and and then going even back to the late antique poetry, like my favorite thing to mention is known as, and like I will admit, my audience is like who the fuck are you talking about? Like what?
Speaker 1:A sixth century Latin poet who may or may not have been a Christian but wrote about Dionysus. A sixth century latin poet who may or may not have been a christian, but wrote about dionysus. And maybe the first depiction of of explicit rate, uh, skin color based racism that we found in western literature. Maybe, we're not sure. Um, well, that's the kind of stuff I think about and uh and I don't talk about it on my show much because my audience would be like what? But I got the feeling you think a lot about late medieval poetry too, and particularly like the intersection between, let's say, folk poetry and folk music, and by that I don't mean like in the 20th century sense, I mean like in the 14th century sense, 20th century sense, I mean like in the 14th century sense, and you know kind of what we would consider today high art and the way that they actually inform and intersect with each other. So, um, how does medieval, uh, literature play on your work?
Speaker 2:well, I mean. So my academic work is kind of like subdivided in terms of eras, like so the the troubadour stuff that I'm interested in is like the first two generations of the troubadours, so we're talking like late 11th through like late 12th century. I would like to be able to tell a story about how, you know, medieval troubadour lyric might have bred certain kind of folk poetries, particularly the romances of the Iberian Peninsula, but there is no story to tell. It may or may not have, but we have no way of knowing and I'm just not in the business of speculating per se. So there are all kinds of theories about the origins of romances which are kind of these late medieval forms. They they arise kind of in the later medieval period, uh, or the early early modern period, and they persist today.
Speaker 2:Like a lot of flamenco lyrics are in the form of romances or in some cases are, you know, repurposed romances or in some cases are you know, repurposed romances. So you know, one of the theories, for instance, is like there's this Arabic braided, strophic form, the muwashach muwashachat is the plural and the muwashachat incorporate, you know, like what's the called a harja, which is like it's like, it's like in in, like a kind of. It has a kind of structure that that that would translate well into like, like the octosyllabic romance, and also there were some harjas that were written in romance vernacular, uh, and so you know, like scholars have drawn connections between the, the kind of evolution of the romances. However, like I just it, it seems tenuous to me. I mean, most of the, the charges were not in romance vernacular, you know, most of them were just in vernacular arabic as opposed to like high arabic, um, yeah, so I mean like, but there are, like, certainly, scholars of flamenco who draw that connection so as to kind of institute this through line between, like, arabic poetics and flamenco, and there's this desire to kind of claim these, these lineages, um, I I'm, I'm suspicious of it, but but you know, the alternative to being so, to, to not to accepting that, is to just accept that we can never know which uh, which I suppose is unsatisfactory to many.
Speaker 2:But in any case, so that's like the way the project is divided is really just thinking about, like these distinct spheres. You know, the sphere of the 11th and 12th century, troubadour lyric, the sphere of, you know, the early modern romances which then are taken by Sephardic Jews who were expelled in 1492 to the diaspora and and they're perpetuated orally for centuries to the point, and they're referred to as romances because it's in their judo-arabic or ladino um and uh. So judio spanish or ladino um and um. And the interesting thing is that, like so many of these romanzas are actually more similar to, like the, the earliest versions of romances that are being found, than, like you know, the, the versions that exist in spain in like, more modern periods. So there's been like less, but one interesting element of variance is that in certain cases these romanzas have been dechristianized.
Speaker 2:So I want to explore that dynamic and also explore the ways in which receptions work. Some of the romanzas actually enter into circulation in the Sephardic diaspora, well, after the expulsion, because there are all these crypto-Jews that are going back and forth between, you know, like the Christian communities and the Jewish communities and are often, in some cases even, like you know, converting back and forth as they go. But so that's like an element of what I do, and then the flamenco is like the most modern elements of the literatures that I'm studying for my dissertation project. I kind of figured we'd focus on troubadour lyric, because I think that there are some really interesting things to be said about subjectivity and how it's structured in medieval literature, literature, and then how we think about it in contemporary poetics. Because, because subjectivity is something that we take as a given when we write poetry.
Speaker 2:Now, right, and I'm fascinated post-dante anyway, uh, I think it's more modern than that, like I really do, okay, uh, in the way that it's, in the way that it's being done, and I'm interested in why and what it does and where it comes from. So the first thing is, like you know, scholars of medieval troubadour lyric have been kind of, I think, like the subjectivity side is one side is one like. The question is like is there a subject in medieval troubadour poetry? Now, the reason why this is a question is because of the way troubadour poetry works. It's not just somebody, you know, like some listeners might be familiar with the reputation of medieval troubadour lyric is like this, you know, like, like some of the famous kind of tropes, like love from afar, you know, like this, the pure love, fina more, uh, you know this, this idea of of the like, like, kind of like directing these like hyper romantic lyrics toward, you know, the, the, the woman whom you're, who is the, the object of one's affection, etc. Etc. Like all of this stuff, right, like the courtly, courtly love, like that. That's, that's all from medieval troubadour poetry. So, based on that, you think that it's like all these people just, you know, wooing women, uh, by way of, you know poetic expression in, in, in expression in the courts of southern France and northern Spain and northern Italy. But the truth is actually kind of far away from that. That's part of it.
Speaker 2:So where does medieval troubadour lyric come from? Well, actually, there's a great book by Cynthia Robinson called In Praise of Song, and in that book Robinson kind of traces the movement of tropes from the Taifa kingdoms of Spain, so these independent Muslim courts that emerged as the Umayyad caliphate weakened, so in places like Toledo or in Saragossa, and so in these courts there is also this kind of poetic practice that is happening in the inner sanctum of the courts and one of the things that the poetic practice, these poetic practices, does do is, uh, they, they kind of elevate certain and produce certain tropes, uh, with respect to like natural beauty, uh, and also with respect to like homosocial love, um, so you know, meanwhile there are these you know kind of nobles who are spending time in these Taifa courts and then returning to the south of France. One of them is William IX of Pétu Guillaume, now in Oxon. He is also the first recorded troubadour. He spent time in these typho chords.
Speaker 2:Comes back, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, you see in in in the early troubadour lyric that you know, a lot of these tropes with respect to natural beauty and with respect to love are being reproduced, but in a Christian context they are being, instead of being rendered as homosocial. They kind of prop up the domina, the woman who's the object of love, as this figure who is the recipient of the pure love, this figure who is the recipient of the pure love, and the ways in which it's deeply sexualized and sometimes satirical, the ways in which it's structured, like it's clear that there is a kind of it is in some respects in the early period kind of a parody of the tropes that people like Gilliam now might have found in the Taifu courts. So it begins with this manipulation of tropes, what come to be known in scholarship as topoi. And as the topoi develop, troubadour lyric becomes this game where you arrange topoi in different ways and your arrangement of the topoi produces like a commentary on you know what people have done previously and also allows you to like dunk on your rivals and woo women and you know all kinds of different things. Right, things right.
Speaker 2:So you know the degree to which, like all of the troubadour poems are produced from a first-person perspective, but the degree to which the eye reflects, like the troubadour is questionable at best and it's unknowable. It might even have been unknowable at the time. And so, you know, this French scholar, paul zuntoller, in the 70s, was like, okay, there's just this circular recycling and reusing of topoi and and of forms, uh, to to produce, like you know, kind of new arrangements, like it's like there there isn't the subject here, like there's no subjectivity. Um, more recently, like people have identified, actually, like the arrangement, the ironizing arrangement of surfaces of topoi in the lyrics, as actually a form of subjectivity, that the subject isn't in the poem, the subject is in the poem's arrangement and it produces, like you know, an eye outside of the eye of the poem that you know is exerting a perspective that we can reconstruct. So there's a great book by Sarah Kay that deals with that.
Speaker 2:Now there are a couple of directions we can take this. The first is like well, why does this matter in the context of troublure lyric? Well, here's why it matters to me, or one of the reasons why it matters to me. So this actually refers back to something that we discussed in that group on Jews and race in medieval Europe. Do you remember the book the Singular Beast by Claudine Fabre-Vassas? Yeah, I do so. I will come back to that.
Speaker 2:But so one of the things that's happening in that Sarah Kay identifies in Troubadour Lyric, is that there's actually three genders going on. There's the woman, the man and the domna. Remember, the domna is like the, the object of affection, and so, you know, femininity in medieval true girl lyric is portrayed as, like you know, being fickle, unreliable, venal, you know, all these different, like it's, it's a bad thing for them. Um, you know, masculinity is what, what you'd expect. And then the domna is this interesting kind of hybrid thing where you, you, you see, like you know, like, like the status of masculinity being like masculine status being granted to the domina, such that, like the, the undesirable edges of femininity are kind of filed down and and the femininity is rendered passive and pleasing. And so now we return to the Fabre Vasa. So in that book, fabre Vasa is kind of tracing the ways in which the pig is integrated into, you know, symbolic, theological, familial, social practice in Christian Europe, and it's moving back and forth between the medieval and the modern.
Speaker 2:Anyways, one of the things that Fabre Vassas observes is about baptism. So one of the purposes of baptism is to purify the child such that they might rise, they might be protected from this internal temptation that they experience, and the internal temptation is framed as a pig bone. The pig is kind of treated as a metonym for the Jew. So the idea is that there's this inner pig bone, which is also an inner Jewishness, and that baptism is supposed to overcome it. However, baptism is only able to overcome this pig bone or this inner Jewishness when, or only able to properly overcome it when it's when it's a male who's being baptized. Why? Because women have these kind of quote-unquote, unregulated, uh, physical cycles, ie menstruation, that render them more similar to pigs, naturally, than men, uh, so, as a result, it becomes the baptized man's responsibility to protect the woman from, you know, the negative influences of like, you know of, let's say, like actual Jews or lepers or people who are, you know, excluded from the community, because the woman is much more suggestible and susceptible to that influence due to the fact that her inner pig, which is also her inner Jew, is not as suppressed as the Christian man's inner Jew or inner pig is suppressed.
Speaker 2:Let's return to the troubadour lyric stuff. Well, one of the things that the Domna, the figure of the domna suggests, with the, the kind of masculine influence, kind of curtailing these like negative feminine traits, is that, like there is this similar duty, that that masculinity has to protect the social interior and to control the kind of worse impulses of the feminine, such that the interior of Christian kinship might be protected from, you know, exterior pollution, right. So in a certain sense, you know, the ways in which topoi are arranged and all of these tropes are set up, is producing a social interior for the court that the troubadour, by way of producing these poems, is actually able to bolster or control or contribute to, which then grants him status. And it's interesting then that also, and fairly frequently, the ways in which the troubadour relates to the domna is described in terms that reflect social roles within the hierarchy they talk about. There's an early lyric by Gilliam. Now they talk about how Gilliam Now is kind of like a vassal on the charter belonging to the Domna. There's constant discussions of wanting to be the Domna's servant, all these different kinds of things, right. So the arrangement of forms produces a social interior and bolsters a social interior. The arrangement of topoi, which is also kind of a formal practice, right, of topoi, which is also kind of a formal practice right Now.
Speaker 2:The thing that I wanted to get into with respect to contemporary poetics and how this relates to contemporary poetics, is that I think that subjectivity in contemporary poetics is a form. I don't think it's just us speaking from the heart, I think it's us using a form and we use that form to produce a social interior in which the discourse surrounding, you know, poetic subjectivity unfolds. That's the kind of idea that I'm working with. You know, I think form is more diffuse than we give it credit for. Like, when we talk about form now, we're talking about, like you know, a sonnet or a villanelle or what have you. You know, and there is that element of form.
Speaker 2:And that element of form existed for the troubadours too. I mean, like Arnaud Daniel, a famous troubadour, was the one who invented the sestina right. The conso is its own form. You know, there's a, there's a really interesting form uh called the discord, which is just, it produces chaos and a famous discord by by uh, actually, you know, has like each stanza is in a different language and then the final stanza is each line is in. You know one of the languages uh d is. Each line is in, you know, one of the languages Dante actually plays around with, you know kind of correspondences to that, but in any case, the point being like, there are those kinds of forms in troubadour lyric too, but there are also like tropes that take on formal significance, that are being repurposed and that are indexing you know this broader tradition and they're being used not, you know, not just as like symbols, but really as like these, like set slides that are being placed on top of one another, like literal topoids surfaces right on top of one another, like literal topoid surfaces, right, and I think we could bring back that conception of form. I think it's still operative for us.
Speaker 2:In his recent book, optic Subbook, douglas Kearney talks about form, as you know, basically just an enclosure. So he talks about like just if two things chime and produce like a symmetrical relation that encloses, you know, the work that you're doing. That's a form of, that is a form. And you know, form always produces a containment, right, and this containment can sometimes index violence. It often is a kind of violence, and that got me thinking about subjectivity, because subjectivity is in a sense a correspondence between the I ascribed to the poet and the I being received, the lyric I being received by the reader. That's the enclosure that contains the rest of the eye being received, the lyric eye being received by the reader. Right, that's the enclosure that contains the rest of the poem. But it also then implicates the audience and implicates the poet, and I think we do. We perform subjectivity in our poems because it's a form to which we ascribe.
Speaker 2:It's the same as choosing to write a sonnet. Choosing to be a subject in a poem is a choice. It's not just something that we automatically do, it's a choice, but it's a choice. That's because not everyone makes that choice. By the way, there are some interesting, really interesting poets out there who choose not to make that choice, who choose not to be subjects in that way. But but it is a choice that has become like so ubiquitous that it feels like it's not a choice anymore. And I wonder what the implication like. I wonder if we could talk about the implications of that or if you think that that even tracks.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think there there has a. There's a lot of implications of it. One of the things I've thought a lot about is the performance of authenticity which I think we see in daily life now, but I do think we can accuse poetry of Going back to at least the 1950s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to bring up Robert Lowell's life studies and Plath and Plath Sexton.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean, I even got to the point where I was like man. This is almost a form of like human sacrifice built into it, because most of these people end up actively destroying themselves for the performance of their art in a way that seems almost constructed Right.
Speaker 2:Well, and then you like people like, look where I'm like it, it feels like like. It feels like, you know, like like a post-self-destruction subjectivity at louise gluck's work, like there's right, there's just something that's so like, like it's almost like like a voice that's detached from oneself so as to relate the self. Like that, the only way to relate the self after it's been sacrificed is to like distance oneself enough that you can, you know, produce this sensibility of like unyielding impartiality. And then there's the other way around. You get someone like Jack Gilbert who's just completely narrating his own very moving self-destruction with respect to the death of his wife Michiko, those famous poems from the Great Fires and from Refusing Heaven. I think of Osh, think wong as well. Like you know, for me, like that, that my mind first leapt to to night sky with exit wounds, because it was so like. You know that it was. It was the book.
Speaker 2:When I entered into the mfa, uh, which you know naturally meant that, like I and many others, like you know, while we could admire Vuong's talent, we also got very sick of that book, right, because it was everywhere and everyone was talking about it. But there are these poems in there where he addresses himself, literally just saying his own name, like the apostrophe, as a performance of, of subjectivity, uh, as, like the, this unveiling of the self, and and then, like you know, alienation of the self into the third person, such that, like, like you feel, like you know, in in himself, vuong is also addressing you as the reader. You know, that kind of thing is to me like such a formal, like it's such a like it's such a it unveils, you know this, you know choice towards. You know having a subjectivity in a poem, as you know what, like, like a, like an immutably formal decision. And in fact there are, you know there is medieval literature that does a similar thing, like you know, there are, there are, there are texts where, like, like, often, you know, like, jewish converts to christianity would write texts that you know consist of a debate between their former selves with their jewish name and their current selves with their Christian name.
Speaker 2:You know, this same kind of apostrophic or dialectic kind of movement that you know exteriorizes the self, such that, you know, the reader can feel, like, you know, they are also in being talked to. Are you, uh, which? Uh, you know, like, I don't know, I, I, there's something there, I don't know what's to be done, I don't know if anything needs to be done about it, but I just think it's. It's important to recognize that like that, that what this is doing, it's not just like a technical decision or a formal decision that, like you know, we make or we unmake, or whatever.
Speaker 2:It also produces a social interior, um right that it circumscribes, like what we understand poetic sociality to be how we relate to our peers, how poets relate to one another, how readers relate to poets, how poets relate to readers. Now, the whole, the whole apparatus of what we do, what when we we get up at an open mic in front of the microphone or at a reading, or we go to AWP and we do whatever it is that we do. We have panels about whatever it is. It's all just this subjectivity thing that we're doing. Should we try to escape it? I don't know. What do you think?
Speaker 1:try to escape it. I don't know. What do you think um I? I mean, I have a philosophical bias that all selves are created anyway. Yeah right.
Speaker 2:I mean I agree, like ontogenesis is like, yeah, you can't, I don't think you can have like a complexity theory without thinking through ontogenesis.
Speaker 1:So right, so, um so, so I do think a lot about it, and I think a lot about it as the way. I worry about it because there is a way in which and I don't think ocean Vong's actually guilty of this, but a lot of ocean Vong imitators are- oh yeah, I mean, it's always the imitators, right.
Speaker 1:Right, where the self is constructed as a political self or, like that, is constructed as a political act, um, but it is hollowed out and yet, um, this idea of a political character of it, of of a set of interiorities that you step into and step out of, is foreclosed for a lot of these poets. So, like the idea that, for example, this, this self, is a character self that I am stepping into because the role of which I have to play either artistically or even, um, or even socially, uh, that there is this weird obsession with authenticity and and a lot of the stuff that also, in a strange way, hollows out the relationality and thus creates a kind of very, to me, flat social interior, um, and it's one of the few things where, like I'm reading, when I'm reading new poetry, I sound like an old guy just yelling at the clouds, because I'm just like this is your deep inner feeling, and yet somehow I also feel like there's not a whole lot there.
Speaker 2:It's because it only gives you the option to agree or disagree. It's either you validate my experience and therefore agree with what I'm saying, because what I'm saying isn't like an argument that you can necessarily disagree with. It's just like this is me, this is who I am, and you, like you, you can read it and acknowledge it and then say like yes, I see you, I'm making space for you, but like, yeah, like I don't know how to respond to that work apart from doing that. Like I just like there's not much else to say. Like because, yeah, it's the main, the main thing that it offers is authenticity. We're not. I don't think either of us is arguing that, like, authenticity is authenticity and I'm not, we're not, I don't think either of us is arguing that like authenticity is bad.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think it's bad. I might think it's impossible, but I don't think it's bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, right, like like we want to be genuine. You know, even if it's impossible, we still should want it Right it's, want it right, it's. It's. More like you know that can't be the only thing you're selling right?
Speaker 1:well, I don't know. I agree with you. I, my most cynical self, says this is a product of the workshop, because if you make all your artistic expression about yourself, any critique of the artistic expression is critique of the self and thus is an act of violence. And thus, you know, thus we're gonna go all critique whatsoever yeah, or just like, like the, the workshop questions.
Speaker 2:Like you know, if you write authentically about yourself and your life and your struggles, you all of which are worthy material, don't get me wrong but if you do that, nobody can ask you what are the stakes of this poem? In workshop, that question only exists for for poems that are about things other than that. And and I guess, like, like, my perspective is that, like there should be um, like, first of all, the what are the stakes of this poem question should be retired, but but also, um, you know, like I don't know, that that it's any less valid to to you know, like, try to think through, like, like, like a thorny question relating to like theology than there is to try to think through, like you know, like like a trauma that you experienced, like I, just like, I don't know why, like, like, we should have to ask the stakes of one and not the stakes of the other, like, or we could just not ask that question at all, I suppose. But but and then the other thing is, like you know, going back to, like the divorce example, it's, like you know, lots of people get divorced, right, what is it about your divorce that you know, makes it. That makes it worthwhile for me to read about as a reader, like, and you know, when that's about divorce, it feels less callous or like a breakup. It feels less callous of a question than it is when it's a question about, like you know, somebody's trauma. Right, but at the end of the day, like you know, so many people experience trauma Like, what is it about this particular trauma and the way it's being framed?
Speaker 2:That makes it, like you know, different, and and and I don't mean that I don't, I'm not saying that the content of it should be different, but like, like what you're doing with it, where you're going with it, like there needs to be an argument. It can't just be enough to say, like you know, this is who I am, this is what I've experienced, say yes to the text, um, and so that's that's, I think, like, like something that's hard to talk about because, like in a workshop, you know, like, if you, if I say that in workshop, somebody's gonna be very upset.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah and I mean, and for a good reason, because like, yeah, you, you, you are calling their experience.
Speaker 2:You are, you know, saying that your experiences are not significant enough for me and that's not really the content of the critique, but it's the unavoidable place where that critique is going to be going to go once it's interpreted in a particular way. So I mean, I think there's like a dual problem. One of the problems is, like, you know, the authenticity thing, but the other problem is the pedagogy surrounding all of this that we need to find ways to, you know, have conversations about the work that you know doesn't put people's you know, traumatic life experiences on the chopping block, like when you're critiquing a poem and it's hard. Like it's hard when you're teaching to do that. Like it's hard to read a student's poem and say, oh, here are all these things that you're not doing that would make this poem like a lot more interesting, without saying, oh, your trauma is boring right.
Speaker 1:No, it is a challenge because it is sort of you are sort of like how can we pull this, these more interesting images out? Our sounds are semantic experiences out of you, where I'm also being like and you're writing about one of the worst things of your life and I'm trying not to come at it, but you're not. Frankly, you're not portraying the worst event of your life very well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so delicate, especially with I mean what you think especially with younger students. But I actually think, like, once younger students get used to it, they bounce back better. But with people who, like, live with stuff for a long time and, like you know, feel like they're ready to tell their story, it's actually harder, have to be this like hyper intellectual thing where you're, like you know, pulling all these like, like pieces, like, and putting them together in like these fascinating ways and and like building this intricate series of claims, uh, or anything like. Like you could have a sensory argument that's going along with your account of the trauma, that frames it in such a way that we understand how trauma works in the sensorium, and that's's an interesting argument. So so your, the logic of your poem could be like a sonic logic, a visual logic, any kind of thing.
Speaker 2:It doesn't have to be, you know this, this hyper intellectualized thing, but but the key is that, like, like, subjectivity can't be the only form, like. If subjectivity is a form, then just like the topoi for the medieval troubadours, it's a form that's in dialogue with other forms, with other arrangements of other topoi, right? So so you have to be strategic about that. Like the subject can't, subjectivity, can't subsume all of the other topoi.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I both agree with you and also I'd be like me telling people that is not going to happen in a workshop.
Speaker 2:Maybe this is a critique of the workshop as the primary way of teaching poets, though, because I haven forgot about it. Yeah, I forgot about it too. I've taught workshops that aren't workshops before, and in some ways they went better, in some ways, in other ways, they went worse, though I feel like there should be workshops, but there should also be anti-workshops.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would agree with that. I think we both went through programs that had a lot of other coursework in it, but there are these MFA programs, even some PhD programs in career writing, that are like 90% workshop.
Speaker 2:I would not have been able to do that Like I would have been I don't, I would have left the program. I found workshop to be like so demoralizing. Not like, not even because like I wasn't even like getting these super negative reactions to my poems, I just it just felt like like I was running in place. Yeah, I wasn't learning things, and it wasn't even the teacher's fault or the fault of my peers, it was just the setup. Like I found that I learned things when I went out and studied things and then and then, and then, you know, like, like the workshop was at best this like referendum on like whether or not, like how I was executing my technique was, was effective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna say I never got anything out of a workshop, that's not true. But there has been a lot of times where I've been like I don't know, I got more from memorizing this bunch of poetry and like internalizing it's, it's, uh, it's soundscape. I mean I remember, for example, just memorizing like five dream songs and like really memorizing them and like understanding and how they work, both in a way to remember them but also in a way to like construct and deconstruct their arguments, the kind of constructive subjectivities of those poems. What's going on, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and of course you can turn over your head once you yeah, the racism of John Berryman. But once you can. Once you can turn a poem over in your head you like, without having to look at it on the page, like it starts to make sense in a different way Because you can imagine saying it.
Speaker 1:Things are intended in ways that you can't if you're just reading it poetry, but there is a deception about poetry on the printed page that you approach it like you to approach prose or like you to approach art, uh, visual art or plastic art, which is somewhat helpful, but usually not how the thing actually works, but also traditional poetry does take advantage of the printed page in a way that like, for example, performance poetry doesn't like, for, like, a subtle argument is going to be much harder than performance poetry because you can't reread it like um, which is, which is a lot of times, why there's a lot of slam poetry, for example, that I really like when I hear it, but when I read it I'm like, oh my god, I could take half this poem out like and yeah, no, that's true, it's a different, it's just a different.
Speaker 2:It's a different form like the true poetry is actually interesting because it was, like you know, written to be heard, but it relied on people recognizing things like it's like, oh, like, that's like, like if you're, like you know, a troubadour I mean it's kind of like in the 12th century in that way like kind of playing with tradition in clever ways, right, like like slam poetry is, is not the kind of thing that does that, as far as I'm aware. Um, it could.
Speaker 1:I mean, there are a few authors that do, but not many. Like, uh, like patricia hill will sometimes, but the funny thing is, once you start doing that, you're often no longer considered a slam poet right, yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 2:Like all of a sudden you're like there are all kinds of like really good contemporary poets who like started out in the slam space and kind of migrated over to the page and that and their work on the page. You know, it's not that it's not meant to be read out loud, it really is, but but you know it, but it takes on this much more textual element. The oral textual tension in poetry is something that we've never been able to escape. I don't think that logocentrism has totally won out in poetry ever.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, no. I actually find it quite interesting when I would read Derrida and I'd be like I don't think poets do this. What we're very ambiguous about, this whole printed word versus spoken word thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're trying to figure it out. Ever since poetry has been written down, we've been trying to figure it out. Ever since poetry has been written down, we've been trying to figure it out and none of us. Because the thing is, we can't control how somebody else will read the poem out loud and all we want to do is to control that. Like half the time when I'm using blank space in my poems is because I want the reader to be reading the poem at my pace, you know, but I can't ever know that they'll do that. It's just these futile attempts at control.
Speaker 1:Actually, this was one of these things that I started playing with in my own performances back when I was in MFA, as I get frustrated with people not getting why I was doing spacing for readings, so I just started like ignoring my own reading marks and reading the poem twice once with just like like pretending I didn't know what I was reading on my own poetry, and then the other would be like to try to hit the.
Speaker 1:That's the timing right oh, you must have made so many friends I was such a passive, aggressive fucker, but, um, it was, you know it. It was one of these frustrating things that I even remembered, like even and it was interesting to do actually, because, you realize, even I can't always reproduce- yeah, I know every time I read I read my own poems, they're different, so I can't yeah, I can't always reproduce.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, every time I read my own poems they're different. So I can't control myself, let alone another person.
Speaker 1:Right, I put all the stops here so you can tell, and even I can't always make it work. So, yeah, I need to wrap this up, but I have really enjoyed this conversation. Where can people find your work?
Speaker 2:I have a website, which is probably the easiest way to do it, and I guess I'm on like some of the social medias. I'm on blue sky, but I mean I post like once every two months, so you should check out my website. What is it? Is it benmyersonmediacom? Let me make sure that's. Yeah, is it benmyersonmediacom? Let me make sure that's.
Speaker 1:Yeah benmyersonmediacom. Yeah, and I will put a link in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, also come hang out at MIMBRE School and you can probably find both of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're around. All right, Thank you so much. All right, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having.
