Interview with Selah Saterstrom

Sorry for the weird spacing on the first post...hopefully this one works!

April 21, 2008


Hi there –

Thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work – and for these wonderful, thoughtful questions! I will do my best to answer them…

1. What does the color pink signify in this work?

I often find that the logic for a work arrives embedded within the work…so I often also look to the work for clues about its becoming - the ways the narrative should be sequenced, formal considerations, thematic considerations, and so on.

At some point while writing TPI, I wrote a poem. It didn’t work with the book and couldn’t be included, but for some reason it held a dynamic – a kind of energy – that I knew was essential to the book I was trying to make. So it taped it above my desk.

In that poem there was a line: the pink institution wrap-it round spell. As I was completing the book, I realized that the reason I had the poem above my desk was because the title was embedded within that line. “The Pink Institution” is a kind of metaphorical umbrella which cast a ring around multiple ideas about institutions: the institution of “history,” the institution of marriage, the institution of the Law, the institution of familial relationships, and so on.

The color pink – for me – is associated with Crepe Myrtle trees. In Mississippi, during spring, these trees release small, detailed pink petals in huge abundance. So much so that as a child I used to consider these petals a kind of snow – and it does look like that, as if it is snowing pink petals. I kept thinking of that image while writing, and also the color pink represents a feminine space for me.

One of my concerns was to give visibility to stories/voices that were historically marginalized, and to an extent, this book is dealing with women’s narratives. I was thinking about how these marginalized narratives, when told, offer alternatives to the “history” we are given (in books, in other places). So “the pink institution” on one level also refers to a feminine kind of narrative space.

2. The book is extremely visually appealing; why did you use such a non-traditional style/form to tell this story? Or rather, how does that unique structure change/complement the meaning of the story?

I started out writing this novel with this idea that I’d write a book that behaved in the ways I thought, at that time, books should behave. Eventually, I gave up on that plan because it just flat-out didn’t work! The work suffered. My mind was busy generating strategies for how to tell the story, meanwhile the actual story was hiding out elsewhere, in the details that made up the stories.

When I stopped imposing an order on the book and surrendered all that I thought I knew about this story and really listened to the work – that is, attempted to see the logic it had within it and on its terms – that is when the formal aspects of the book came together.

In this case, the forms erupted from the content out of necessity. For example, in the first part of the book there is a great deal of negative/blank space between words/phrases. In terms of the narrative, this is the “oldest portion” of the family’s history – and so those negative spaces give visibility to the gaps, breaks, and fragmented nature of memory, of the passage of time.

This book required that the form and content mutually illuminate and realize one another. So when thinking about memory, for example, I created a form that works like memory works – a form with gaps, a form that includes the fragment as a dimension of consciousness.

3. In our class, we talk a lot about the use and significance of white/blank space on the page, and to me, space seems to play an important part in this novel. So, I was wondering, for you, how does white space function? How does it interact with the text?

I’m a big believer in “the gap” – the “blank space.” I find it in text, but also in the world. For example, abandoned parking lots are gaps. The walk from my apartment to the grocery store is also a kind of gap. Furthermore, I think the universe uses and fills these gaps. I’m always looking for found text when I walk around. I am energized by a writer and artist to consider the potential divinatory significance of the signs, traces, and fragmented notes we find in the gaps. Being vigilant to gaps keeps me asking questions, keeps me engaged, embodied.

In terms of text – gaps/blank/white spaces – these can signify various things within the book. They can be places that give visibility to silence, for example. I don’t think of silence as the opposite of language, but as one of its aspects. It can also give visibility to memory, its processes – the gaps therein, and so on.

I often feel that the gaps within our texts are haunted – littered by the traces of things that are absent (but of course this is a kind of presence). And I guess, on some level, I believe in genuflecting to “the dead” – the “no-longer” (that which is transformed into a new kind of presence). Like an eraser….you can remove words, but you are left with the marks of erasure: the sign that something was there, then wasn’t (which gives it only a different version of presence).

Perhaps this is a way for me to engage with a kind of spectrum-based consciousness within my work…trying to create work which genuflects to a resonate complexity – the complexity of what is seen and heard, and the complexity which is not seen or heard, but is nonetheless present.

4. Was it hard for you to know when to insert the "tableau" in between the stories, and why did you make it a point to include them?

The tableau idea came from a Southern Confederate Pageant that took place in the town where I grew up. This performance was put on for tourists and was a series of vignettes introduced by children (dressed in hoopskirts), holding placards which had a small, descriptive narratives describing each scene which was about to be performed. These scenes were meant to depict what life was like before the Civil War (which, according to this production, was nothing short of paradisal, a mythological Eden).

Growing up observing this performance I was very struck by it as a form, and as a form used to write/present history – a history that of course left out vital narratives in exchange for a kind of public dreaming which very much felt to me like a public form of mass-numbing out. In other words, I thought it was messed up and that it continued a kind of violence. I began to consider how the ways in which history is framed is itself a mode of violence.

So this book provided an opportunity to work with that form – the form of the tableau – but in a transgressive way. I wanted to see what would happen if that form were applied to a very different kind of narrative, one that didn’t reinforce a mythologized “history” but revealed portions of history that had been ghettoized.

5. I appreciate the values that peered through the novel of the south and the church and things of that nature. What value did you most want to highlight?

Hmmm…I’m not completely sure I understand the question, but if I’m on the right track here…I’d have to speak again about history – who gets to tell it and why…and my desire to create a kind of alternative to the history that was given or on offer. A large part of this project was exploring what happens when the stories we relegate to the margins are liberated…when silence and painful gaps are given visibility within the story.

I also wanted to juxtapose “ghost stories” - horror stories, if you will – with the horror stories of abuse, addiction, and so on. Ghost stories were celebrated in my family, and in Southern culture in general, and I wanted to explore the relationship between ghost stories and other kinds of “hauntings.”

And I was very interested in how patterns bloom across time and space, through various fragmented fields, and multiple generations (of living, of memory). How does addiction look here and how does it look there? I was interested, in other words, in how certain threads persist through lineage and culture. I was interested in observing this pattern language.

7. What do you hope readers will take away from The Pink Institution?

Well, I guess what I hope people take away from this book is what I hope for in terms of what they’d take from any book.

On a good day, a book can change your mind. At times, a book can deliver you more deeply - more poignantly - into your existing questions (I’m thinking of Kafka’s notion that literature can work like an axe to break up the frozen sea within us). A book can give you new questions. It can enrich your engagement with the human condition in some way. I don’t know that I’ve done so with this book (or ever!), but it is what I hope for.


8. Do you consider yourself to be an Avant Garde writer? If so, why? If not, why

not?


I think the term Avant Garde is very fascinating – the history of that term, and the literal translation of that term (forward-looking).

In terms of the literal translation, I note that many forms emerge after atrocities and are sometimes called Avant Garde (for example, the constraint based writing that emerged after WWII as well as Butoh - the form that emerged in Japan after the Atomic bomb). Often the gaze of these forms isn’t only forwardly oriented. These forms ask a variety of questions, such as: how do we give visibility to radical absence, now? In other words, I think of such forms as looking in all directions at once.

Of course ‘Avant Garde’ means more than its literal translation or the way I’ve considered it in the above paragraph and all of which is to say, I’m delighted that your class is investigating this question of what Avant Garde means. This seems like a very good conversation to be having at this time – this moment in the world.

I have found the term “hybrid” helpful – this idea that I do something (with language) that uses the synergy of multiple genres (poetry and prose, for example. I don’t consider myself an Avant Garde writer, which I suppose doesn’t mean much – as I don’t consider myself any kind of writer in particular, though some words (such as ‘hybrid’) are useful.

Part II

1. What do the black and white pictures throughout the novel represent? How were they chosen and what are they supposed to evoke from the reader?

They genuflect to the idea of the “scrapbook” or the “memory book” – the visual, family history. They were also images/snapshots that I had around me while writing the book – so there was this way that the pictures held an energy that was congruent to the narrative and it felt right to include them.

Each reader will have their own experience with the images and how they work in the text – so I don’t think I can say what they are supposed to evoke from the reader…but I’d add that the synergy between text and image, in general – the energy that erupts from the proximity of the two – is one that I find fascinating, and I often like to bump images and text up to one another for this reason – to see what else might be revealed.

2. The theme of objects: Childhood, Motherhood, and Maidenhood, serve as reoccurring themes throughout the novel appearing in list form, what does this serve to represent? Is there significance to the ordering of these objects in lists?

In terms of the ordering, I tried to do it chronologically: first we are children, then maidens, then mothers… . This helped to structure the time-line of events for the characters that section of the book focused on, so that we, through “snapshots” or “object details” watch them grow up and acquire identity.

3. What is the significance of the book's cover? The image of the hanging pig reoccurs throughout the novel on the chapter pages, what is its significance?

This is really up for the reader to decide as it does not have a specific textual reference. The pig image works like a metaphor works, in a way. It also points to something, it suggests. But there are no actual references to slaughtering a pig in the book itself.

The image of the slaughtered pig actually comes from a Eudora Welty photograph in which she photographed a hog-killing (she was a marvelous photographer and her images are full of the uncanny, the sublime).

I work a lot with images (and used to teach Text/Image Arts) and find that when I’m working on a project I often make or locate a visual that feels like the visual-form of what it is I’m trying to express in words. The cover was a collage I made – and the text, to an extent, was an attempt to give words to that image.

The pig is painted an old piece of vellum from a book about moths. I overlaid this vellum on top of a janky Xerox photocopy of a photograph taken in the hometown where I grew up (the individuals in the photograph are tableau participants).

4. The confederate ball program guide, with all its "text smears" is meant to serve as an authentic artifact to set the scene, why did you choose this particular event/object?

That text came from an actual program guide for the tableau I discussed earlier (in the first set of questions). It is an old copy, and had become somewhat ruined over time – so where I wrote “text smears” – those were places in the original artifact that had been lost to time and water damage. Eventually, through the process of editing, I tweaked my own text, but that was its origin.

Interview with Selah Saterstrom

April 21, 2008

Hi there –

Thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work – and for these wonderful, thoughtful questions! I will do my best to answer them…

1. What does the color pink signify in this work? 

I often find that the logic for a work arrives embedded within the work…so I often also look to the work for clues about its becoming - the ways the narrative should be sequenced, formal considerations, thematic considerations, and so on.

At some point while writing TPI, I wrote a poem. It didn’t work with the book and couldn’t be included, but for some reason it held a dynamic – a kind of energy – that I knew was essential to the book I was trying to make. So it taped it above my desk.

In that poem there was a line: the pink institution wrap-it round spell. As I was completing the book, I realized that the reason I had the poem above my desk was because the title was embedded within that line. “The Pink Institution” is a kind of metaphorical umbrella which cast a ring around multiple ideas about institutions: the institution of “history,” the institution of marriage, the institution of the Law, the institution of familial relationships, and so on.

The color pink – for me – is associated with Crepe Myrtle trees. In Mississippi, during spring, these trees release small, detailed pink petals in huge abundance. So much so that as a child I used to consider these petals a kind of snow – and it does look like that, as if it is snowing pink petals. I kept thinking of that image while writing, and also the color pink represents a feminine space for me.

One of my concerns was to give visibility to stories/voices that were historically marginalized, and to an extent, this book is dealing with women’s narratives. I was thinking about how these marginalized narratives, when told, offer alternatives to the “history” we are given (in books, in other places). So “the pink institution” on one level also refers to a feminine kind of narrative space.

2. The book is extremely visually appealing; why did you use such a  non-traditional style/form to tell this story?  Or rather, how does that unique structure change/complement the meaning of the story?   

I started out writing this novel with this idea that I’d write a book that behaved in the ways I thought, at that time, books should behave. Eventually, I gave up on that plan because it just flat-out didn’t work! The work suffered. My mind was busy generating strategies for how to tell the story, meanwhile the actual story was hiding out elsewhere, in the details that made up the stories.

When I stopped imposing an order on the book and surrendered all that I thought I knew about this story and really listened to the work – that is, attempted to see the logic it had within it and on its terms – that is when the formal aspects of the book came together.

In this case, the forms erupted from the content out of necessity. For example, in the first part of the book there is a great deal of negative/blank space between words/phrases. In terms of the narrative, this is the “oldest portion” of the family’s history – and so those negative spaces give visibility to the gaps, breaks, and fragmented nature of memory, of the passage of time.

This book required that the form and content mutually illuminate and realize one another. So when thinking about memory, for example, I created a form that works like memory works – a form with gaps, a form that includes the fragment as a dimension of consciousness.

3. In our class, we talk a lot about the use and significance of white/blank space on the page, and to me, space seems to play an important part in this novel.  So, I was wondering, for you, how does white space function?  How does it interact with the text? 

I’m a big believer in “the gap” – the “blank space.” I find it in text, but also in the world. For example, abandoned parking lots are gaps. The walk from my apartment to the grocery store is also a kind of gap. Furthermore, I think the universe uses and fills these gaps. I’m always looking for found text when I walk around. I am energized by a writer and artist to consider the potential divinatory significance of the signs, traces, and fragmented notes we find in the gaps. Being vigilant to gaps keeps me asking questions, keeps me engaged, embodied.

In terms of text – gaps/blank/white spaces – these can signify various things within the book. They can be places that give visibility to silence, for example. I don’t think of silence as the opposite of language, but as one of its aspects. It can also give visibility to memory, its processes – the gaps therein, and so on.

I often feel that the gaps within our texts are haunted – littered by the traces of things that are absent (but of course this is a kind of presence). And I guess, on some level, I believe in genuflecting to “the dead” – the “no-longer” (that which is transformed into a new kind of presence). Like an eraser….you can remove words, but you are left with the marks of erasure: the sign that something was there, then wasn’t (which gives it only a different version of presence).

Perhaps this is a way for me to engage with a kind of spectrum-based consciousness within my work…trying to create work which genuflects to a resonate complexity – the complexity of what is seen and heard, and the complexity which is not seen or heard, but is nonetheless present.

4. Was it hard for you to know when to insert the "tableau" in between the stories, and why did you make it a point to include them?

The tableau idea came from a Southern Confederate Pageant that took place in the town where I grew up. This performance was put on for tourists and was a series of vignettes introduced by children (dressed in hoopskirts), holding placards which had a small, descriptive narratives describing each scene which was about to be performed. These scenes were meant to depict what life was like before the Civil War (which, according to this production, was nothing short of paradisal, a mythological Eden).

Growing up observing this performance I was very struck by it as a form, and as a form used to write/present history – a history that of course left out vital narratives in exchange for a kind of public dreaming which very much felt to me like a public form of mass-numbing out. In other words, I thought it was messed up and that it continued a kind of violence. I began to consider how the ways in which history is framed is itself a mode of violence. 

So this book provided an opportunity to work with that form – the form of the tableau – but in a transgressive way. I wanted to see what would happen if that form were applied to a very different kind of narrative, one that didn’t reinforce a mythologized “history” but revealed portions of history that had been ghettoized.

5. I appreciate the values that peered through the novel of the south and the church and things of that nature. What value did you most want to highlight? 

Hmmm…I’m not completely sure I understand the question, but if I’m on the right track here…I’d have to speak again about history – who gets to tell it and why…and my desire to create a kind of alternative to the history that was given or on offer. A large part of this project was exploring what happens when the stories we relegate to the margins are liberated…when silence and painful gaps are given visibility within the story. 

I also wanted to juxtapose “ghost stories” - horror stories, if you will – with the horror stories of abuse, addiction, and so on. Ghost stories were celebrated in my family, and in Southern culture in general, and I wanted to explore the relationship between ghost stories and other kinds of “hauntings.” 

And I was very interested in how patterns bloom across time and space, through various fragmented fields, and multiple generations (of living, of memory). How does addiction look here and how does it look there? I was interested, in other words, in how certain threads persist through lineage and culture. I was interested in observing this pattern language.

7. What do you hope readers will take away from The Pink Institution? 

Well, I guess what I hope people take away from this book is what I hope for in terms of what they’d take from any book.  

On a good day, a book can change your mind. At times, a book can deliver you more deeply -  more poignantly -  into your existing questions (I’m thinking of Kafka’s notion that literature can work like an axe to break up the frozen sea within us). A book  can give you new questions. It can enrich your engagement with the human condition in some way. I don’t know that I’ve done so with this book (or ever!), but it is what I hope for.

8. Do you consider yourself to be an Avant Garde writer? If so, why? If not, why 

not? 

I think the term Avant Garde is very fascinating – the history of that term, and the literal translation of that term (forward-looking). 

In terms of the literal translation, I note that many  forms emerge after atrocities and are sometimes called Avant Garde (for example, the constraint based writing that emerged after WWII as well as Butoh - the form that emerged in Japan after the Atomic bomb). Often the gaze of these forms isn’t only forwardly oriented. These forms ask a variety of questions, such as: how do we give visibility to radical absence, now? In other words, I think of such forms as looking in all directions at once. 

Of course ‘Avant Garde’ means more than its literal translation or the way I’ve considered it in the above paragraph and all of which is to say, I’m delighted that your class is investigating this question of what Avant Garde means. This seems like a very good conversation to be having at this time – this moment in the world.

I have found the term “hybrid” helpful – this idea that I do something (with language) that uses the synergy of multiple genres (poetry and prose, for example. I don’t consider myself an Avant Garde writer, which I suppose doesn’t mean much – as I don’t consider myself any kind of writer in particular, though some words (such as ‘hybrid’) are useful.

1. What do the black and white pictures throughout the novel represent? How were they chosen and what are they supposed to evoke from the reader?

They genuflect to the idea of the “scrapbook” or the “memory book” – the visual, family history. They were also images/snapshots that I had around me while writing the book – so there was this way that the pictures held an energy that was congruent to the narrative and it felt right to include them.

Each reader will have their own experience with the images and how they work in the text – so I don’t think I can say what they are supposed to evoke from the reader…but I’d add that the synergy between text and image, in general – the energy that erupts from the proximity of the two – is one that I find fascinating, and I often like to bump images and text up to one another for this reason – to see what else might be revealed.

2. The theme of objects: Childhood, Motherhood, and Maidenhood, serve as reoccurring themes throughout the novel appearing in list form, what does this serve to represent? Is there significance to the ordering of these objects in lists?

In terms of the ordering, I tried to do it chronologically: first we are children, then maidens, then mothers… . This helped to structure the time-line of events for the characters that section of the book focused on, so that we, through “snapshots” or “object details” watch them grow up and acquire identity.

3. What is the significance of the book's cover? The image of the hanging pig reoccurs throughout the novel on the chapter pages, what is its significance?

This is really up for the reader to decide as it does not have a specific textual reference. The pig image works like a metaphor works, in a way. It also points to something, it suggests. But there are no actual references to slaughtering a pig in the book itself.

The image of the slaughtered pig actually comes from a Eudora Welty photograph in which she photographed a hog-killing (she was a marvelous photographer and her images are full of the uncanny, the sublime).

I work a lot with images (and used to teach Text/Image Arts) and find that when I’m working on a project I often make or locate a visual that feels like the visual-form of what it is I’m trying to express in words. The cover was a collage I made – and the text, to an extent, was an attempt to give words to that image.

The pig is painted an old piece of vellum from a book about moths. I overlaid this vellum on top of a janky Xerox photocopy of a photograph taken in the hometown where I grew up (the individuals in the photograph are tableau participants).

4. The confederate ball program guide, with all its "text smears" is meant to serve as an authentic artifact to set the scene, why did you choose this particular event/object? That text came from an actual program guide for the tableau I discussed earlier (in the first set of questions). It is an old copy, and had become somewhat ruined over time – so where I wrote “text smears” – those were places in the original artifact that had been lost to time and water damage. Eventually, through the process of editing, I tweaked my own text, but that was its origin.

Interview with Catherine Kasper

Thank you for reading my poetry. I’m happy to discuss the poems and I’ll try to be as helpful as I can. I’m not fond of explaining poetry as it seems to me that poetry tries to get at what can’t be explained in words, with words. That’s its challenge and its wonder. I do believe there is such a thing as “emotional knowledge” and “intuitive knowledge” and I hope you feel empowered to apply those.

1. Blueprints of the City: It’s many cities, not just one. It’s about the interests, but final consequences of being a “visitor” anywhere, of arriving new places with distorted preconceived notions, and the dangers of that, and of the reality versus the idea.

2. Monoprints has several female “characters” and voices. Some of these are bits of overheard conversations, some of them are fictionalized, etc. In many of my poems, there are several voices. Some are re-constructed. I like to hear women’s voices since they’re still not heard enough in the world. See the Monoprints discussion below for more.

3. Solar, etc.:

Begin with: Solar plexis: 1. The largest of the autonomic plexuses, lying in front of the aorta at the level of the origin of the celiac artery and behind the stomach, formed by the splanchnic and the vagus nerves and by cords from the celiac and superior mesenteric ganglia, and branching to all the abdominal viscera through its connections with the other abdominal plexuses. Also called solar plexus.

Your questions about “Thirty-three Articles” are wonderful. I think poetry, like life, gets us to consider and ask questions, (when it’s good) and focus on the question. I’m not saying this simply to be evasive. As in the last poem of this book, the questions are more important than any pretense of “answers.”

4. Some scholars argue that the term “avant-garde” is date specific, i.e., pertinent to Modernism. I just write, but others have called my work “experimental.” Few people are linear thinkers, and sometimes, I feel that forcing linearity on work is antithetical to what the work is exploring, or thinking through. For me writing is often “thinking through” something, and that’s emotional/intellectual together; I don’t artificially disconnect these two impulses of the brain. In terms of historical vantage, it also seems to me that to force linearity after Modernism and the events of the twentieth century still seems false to me so far. Writers like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce made a great deal of sense to me from the first time I read their work and thought, this is what I’ve been looking for, I understand this.

I don’t “push myself” into any genre. I write, and it seems to me that the nature of the work chooses the genre that suits it. I often do not see what is particularly “experimental” with my own work, whether it is poetry or fiction, other than in comparison to what is published by large publishing houses. There is much “experimental” work being published by small presses, just as there was in the twentieth century.

Being a woman writer is probably as difficult as being a woman in this world: there are many challenges, even down to the words we use, and especially in pay inequity. What is also difficult is growing up as a working class person who chooses to be a writer or artist. Few people understand the choice to be part of something that doesn’t pay a salary and is often berated in the popular media. We seem to fear not only people who think, but people who like to think, and give them all sorts of derogatory names. Learning not to listen to that AND to find a way to make a living where you have time to think is difficult for anyone.

5. The colors in Monoprints come from the monoprinting process. I’m very interested in the visual arts. The way the poems are on the page has as much to do with canvas as paper. I’m highly influenced by the poet Barbara Guest in this respect.

In observing a master monoprinter, I watched her lay in each color separately, and in the end, saw the 4 or 5 color print that was a color layer/image and at the same time individual colors: both of these were true at once. My goal was to see if the same could be done with words: I designated colors, sometimes for mood, sometimes in relationship to certain objects or words. This was about seeing how if a poem could work like this visual art process or not.

The locations are “familiar” to me. I wrote these poems while in the location—is that what you’re asking?

This is probably related to your question about inspiration. A writer draws inspiration from everything, I think, no matter how corny that sounds. I love to read, to draw, to walk, to make things. I’m interested in words and definitions, in the visual arts, in the sciences, in natural history, in graphic novels, in museums, etc.---the list goes on.

6.. I probably do write using first person, and in fact, have written many personal essays. I think especially in my poetry I try not to. After Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, and other examinations of the overuse of the first person speaker, the “I” exhausts me, even as it does in this short interview. I’d rather hear your voice, other voices, than my own. That’s where my interest in outside texts, words, and voices enters the poem that is always directed outward into the world, rather than only inward into myself, if possible, so we are all hearing a symphony of voices, dead and alive, all at once.

Interview with Christine Hume about Alaskaphrenia

1. What inspired you to create a work like Alaskaphrenia?

I was born in Alaska, but moved within the first six months so I have no recollection of it. For this reason it has always held a mythic space for me. I wasn’t interested in the state per se, just the idea of the place, as it is embedded in our national mythology, as an imaginative retaining space and frontier. I tried to think about the poetic line in the book as a kind of shifting frontier, and the poems themselves as speculating on, among other things, the American promise of renew and self-invention. Our national fantasy of Alaska’s limitless vertiginous vastness and freedom has historically informed the dynamics of individual and collective self-definition. Its fictive emptiness (“In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is,” says Stein) has always been read as an invitation to produce still more fictions, still more possibilities for transformation. If, as Alaska allows us to believe, identity exists as self-invention, one’s identification and explanation of the self might always be in flux—just as Alaska is in flux, existing as a place of multiple possibilities, formed around one’s attention to the messages arriving from “outside” (outside ourselves, but also more literally what Alaskans call the lower 48). So the real state does seem to hold a physical and psychic place for all disgruntled and down-trodden citizens who don’t want to abandon their country all together, but want to remove themselves from it in some part. If America were a brain and its map broken into phrenological assignments, Alaska would be the place of invention, imagination, and love-of-danger-and-the-unknown. That said, the book revisions Alaska as a mental space; it internalizes its paradoxes and stereotypes, and I hope makes a case for the reality of one’s imagined life.

That said, I’m sexually attracted to the cold. I also fear the cold, maybe the two are related. Unfortunately, I’m not kidding. This also last paragraph also answers, in part, your question about the color blue. Blue games! Blue films! Blue balls! Oh yes, and the ocean blue, the bluest blue sky—their indistinguishability and infinitude. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

2. "Comprehension Questions" appears to be a type of reading guide for the reader. By starting your collection off with this poem, is it your intention that the reader keep these questions in their mind and attempt to find answers as they read the rest of the work?

To the later question, no, though I have no objection to this practice. I wanted to create a sense of pre-existing story. The comp questions usually come at the end of a story or passage, and I wanted to plant the idea of a disappeared or invisible or given pre-existing text, which is what the idea of Alaska in itself is (everyone in America has an idea, a feeling for what Alaska is and means), and then go from there. I also wanted to imply a narrative by way of the questions alone. Growing up taking standardized tests, I often found a more interesting narrative and more interesting answers implied in the questions themselves—by skipping the master narrative and moving right into the questions, the sense of uncertainty, of piecing something together via the imagination. I also use a lot of forms in the book that draw from nonpoetic sources, like the guidebook or test, and I wanted to set the tone of the book playing with generic form. I mean the piece to be funny. As imperatives weave themselves thorough the whole book, and I think these questions take on the tone of imperatives, and reorchestrate received advice found in travelogues and psyschology manuals. The shopworm retrofitted to a different purpose and attitude hopefully calls attention to caesura, oppostitions, assumptions, and rhetorcis that they inhapbit or force us to inhabit. The form plays straight-man to the content in this case; in other cases there is a more urgent calling out for help and security. I wanted to use vast peregrinations of inquiry, and non-fiction forms useful for structureing the unknown and stimulating a feeling of uncanniness, and of remembrance and oblivion merging in a place of origins.
Also, getting back to the idea of reverals (comp questions usually coming last, not first—or as Beckett says “first last words”), I think of the site of the book is an optical illusion, a Fata Morgana, where the peaks of the Alaskan Range appear to be floating in midair or an inverted crystal island.

And getting back to the specific poem itself, the poem can be read self-reflexively, as a discussion of reading and writing itself. “What dark authority lurks among the unpruned spruce?” The poem invites a close reading, even as it discredits comprehension in any ultimate sense.

3. How do you feel all of these poems work together as a collection? Would you prefer that the reader read the collection of poems in order, or that they jump around and take in each piece on its own?

Well, I put them in order, and I hope there is a sense of accumulation and a loose sense of movement. One of Pessoa’s alter egos says that the best way to travel is to feel. Building on that, to travel is to follow with your imagination, to transform. Imagination collaborates with perception, and sets a community of moods in dialogue with empirical probabilities; when these conditions are extreme, one often reaches for a guidebook. Of course the authors of guidebooks have often inhabited a place so thoroughly, experienced it so intensely, that they have been forever changed by that place, and could never go back to write the book that they would have needed to read, if such a book could even exist. Instructions, maps, advice, litanies of caveats offer a sense of expectation, which becomes part of the actual experience, not necessarily a master-narrative onto which one’s experience is grafted, but a more fluid interchange and alchemical complication.

4. You appear to integrate different structures into each of your poems. For example, some are written in block text, some in multiple columns and some utilize white space more than others. What do these different structures add to each poem and to your collection as a whole? Is this variance in structure something you envisioned before you started writing Alaskaphrenia, or is it something that developed once the writing began?

Part of the act of writing for me is that each poem must find it’s own form. Form is necessary meaning, not outside meaning or alongside or even in relation to meaning, it IS meaning.

5. In the chapter, On the Horizon, what was the reasons for putting the text at the bottom of the page and why did you space them apart?

Like a landscape painting of a fog-covered coast, the poems are meant to enact horizon. Some of the horizon you can see through the fog, sometimes it’s just a fuzzy shape, connecting and isolating objects you see through it. Fog on ice, each hiding the other.

6. What did you want the reader to get out of your poems?

I want to kick butt! I want the reader to feel a sense of disorientation and recognition in extreme at the same time. I want readers to be involved in a headlong rush of emotion, the kinetic lickety-split of associations, logics, time frames—an accrual of elastic, electric presents/presences AND contemplations in enduring stillness. I want to allow their own freak thoughts to surprise them. I want them to be inspired by their own imaginations. But your question also leans on another one about audience. The question of audience is an impossible one for me, almost no answer seems even momentarily accurate, but the closest I can get is this: I write for a self that foregrounds the books and people I’ve loved most ardently and the aspects of those texts and folks that I’ve been lucky (sometimes unlucky) enough to be haunted by. In doing so I try to let the language-object lead that self into a wiser, heartier acre. I have the sense that language works to assert itself in more and more expansive, inventive ways. If I’m intuitive enough, I can create a place (not a representation of a place) in and of itself, characterized and composed completely with language.

7. How do you feel about your poems being read in our Avant Womens Writers class?

I’d love to hear YOUR answer to this! I’m sure the frame of the class and the context of the other readings, which I’m very happy to be included in, gives you a particular and percolating reading of the book.

8. You use the color of blue a lot to describe things that would not be seen as blue in our world. Other than the fact that Alaska is part of the title, what other reasons do you have for continuing to refer back to blue throughout your work?

To answer this well, I will refer you to James Hillman’s essay on Blue in the first issue of the magazine Sulfur and William Gass’s beautiful philosophical inquiry, On Being Blue. “So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith.” Blue is a mood and music—the blue lucy is a healing plant. Psychologically, the word appeals to me as a state of suspension, a limbo between black and white, one saturated and insistent. It is the color of sea and sky, yes, and the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments. Examination books, blue bloods—and beards, coats, collars, chips, cheese. Blue stockings, blue laws, blue movies, and the look of the skin when affected by cold, illness, fear, suffocation, the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium.

9. Given that the poems are set to evoke an atmosphere of the beauty of this world and our place in it, how do you feel in touch with nature?

Oh, I love nature. I love to see it speeding through a windshield, and I love to leave it alone.

10. Would you consider this text to be a collection of poems and prose, or would you consider it a new way to structure the ordinary novel or book?

I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but I don’t think I have it in me; I’m not interested in traditional plot and character questions that I associate even with some more innovative novels. I’m fascinated by questions of genre however, and I’m reminded of a test I sometimes give my students about genre and expectations. If you blindfold a person, ask them to taste red and white wine without saying which is which, that person won’t be able to tell the difference. But ultimately, who cares so long as it tastes good, makes you want to keep drinking, fucks you up.

Stephanie Strickland Interview

What inspired you to create a work like this?
What gave you the idea to set a story in space?

My conception of poetry was already changing and straining against the limits of the standard print book, actually both in The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, where the contents are arranged index-style, meaning to indicate one can read the poems in any order, and then again, in True North, where I wanted the 5 sections of the book to ‘revolve around’ the central axis of the 5-part “True North” poem. It is just frustrating to try to enact these conceptions in print unless you make a so-called artist’s book. I first got involved with hyperspace when I did a Storyspace version on disk of True North.


What was most challenging about creating Vniverse?

For the first time, I had a vision that I myself alone could not carry out. That’s not so common for a poet, unless they are playwrights or librettists. I had to learn a lot about software and work with my wonderful collaborator, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, to actually implement the vision.


What do you hope that the reader takes away from Vniverse?

Delight in the poem, and in its relation to the print parts of V.
Different senses of how things can be organized (not just with respect to the page). Different senses of how time works, how waves work—

Perhaps they will become interested in other work of this kind and want to do some themselves. Perhaps they will feel that poetry and the 21st century have a wonderful history upcoming together that includes computation.


What do you want the work as a whole to communicate to the reader?

A wonderful book from Granary Press, called The Book of the Book, will show you many different examples of the ways books have been made, over time and as contemporary book projects, that have nothing to do with the format of a standard print book. The binding of two parts of a book upside down to each other is well-precedented. In fact, Penguin had published two coordinate novels in this way not so long before V.

What I wanted Penguin to do was to make the two halves indistinguishable—which could have happened had they used shrinkwrap and put the barcode on the shrinkwrap. Since they didn’t do that, and I couldn’t get them to do it, in fact the two sides are ‘coded’ somewhat differently. But so far as I could, I tried to have the entries to the two ‘sides’ occur equivalently.

What is most important to me is that V is a poem in three parts that exists in a mixed space that does not privilege one orientation over another. You can approach the book through the door of Losing L’una or through the door of the WaveSon.nets or through the Vniverse. [Very few folks know this, but there is actually another (hidden) entrance, namely an online setting of the poem “Errand Upon Which We Came” from Losing L’una http://califia.us/Errand/title1a.htm which I made with M.D. Coverley.]

In each case, your reading experience will be different so your choice matters a lot, as to how you begin it. You can’t go back and do it over—your first impressions will color everything that comes later. So whereas spatially, there is a great deal of freedom, with parts upside-down to each other, and able to come before or behind or between each other, temporally a reader has to take more responsibility than s/he is used to. Any beginning and any path-choice makes a difference.

An historic note: Emily Dickinson made some three-dimensional poems by folding and curling bits of envelope and pinning them together in different configurations. She also used + marks as superscripts on many words in her poems to refer to lists of words written at the bottom of the page (whether as alternates or supplements to the original word, or something else entirely, we’ll never know). Marta Werner [ http://altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6werner/6wern.htm ] and Susan Howe both write about this.


How did you decide to title each constellation?
How did you decide to define the constellations? Do the keywords of each constellation stem from one general idea or meaning?
Is there a pattern to the colors you chose to use for certain keywords?

Cynthia and I sat in front of a screen and drew them. I wanted to make ‘my own’ constellations, to emphasize the fact that we all can make our own ‘constellations’ and read our own ‘constellations’. Some of these constellations have more to do with a woman’s life—the embryo/fetus, or bull/oxhead=womb+Fallopian tubes, for instance. Goose was for Mother Goose. Only in the case of the Big and Little Dipper, here combined, is there an overlap with traditional constellations. The names were simply to keep track of them—“the Infinity Sign needs to be farther away from the Twins and Kokopelli”—in the course of our manipulations.

All the shapes are related to the meaning of the WaveSon.nets inside them (the Dragonfly is the emerald darner in WaveSon.net 47), and the keywords in any given constellation are thematic ‘keywords’ for the motifs in that constellation.

The colors all relate to words in the texts that occur within that constellation, e.g. the Swimmer’s are red, and WaveSon.net 2 brings red and ruby.


How do you feel the WaveSon.net poems interact with the triplets of Vniverse? Should they be read simultaneously?

If you can! And also at the same time read the diagram visually and let your cursor stray, so even more text is brought into play. But if you try it, read say the WaveSon.net and then the triplet version, you will see that something has changed. Some of you will feel it is a little change, but still it somehow affects the poem, perhaps the sound of the poem? Some of you will feel it is a big change, and in some of the poems it is a bigger change than in others. Whichever way, does it affect the meaning? As you know, it is easy online for spacing to get messed up. Does that matter? There are certain structures where the smallest changes matter.



Why did you pull out the triplets you did for each poem?

They are the triplets that arise when you don’t delete or disorder the lines; therefore, they represent the smallest possible increments of change. Of course the poem was written in triplets, so in a certain sense the WaveSon.net is the form imposed on the triplets, and the bigger Wave that is the ongoing of the WaveSon.nets is a still higher level structure. Thus, “WaveSon.net emerging,” perhaps, rather than “triplet pulled out.”


Ideally, how would you like the reader to approach each piece? Should Vniverse be read numerically, or should the reader allow their cursor to guide them sporadically around the page?

Ideally, I would like the reader to think of Vniverse as an instrument, a textual instrument, to be played as they like on any given day. There would be no need or even wish to repeat a performance (though you could). I hope they would be patient and curious enough to discover what the instrument can do.



Is there a linear pattern when reading left to right?

The lines of the poems read traditionally left to right, of course, but what happens when you press a ‘next’ is that two poems interpenetrate each other and you have to choose what and how to read. If you allow your cursor to roam, while reading a sonnet, or group of triplets, you will be activating other colored keywords and triplets of text that then become part of the text onscreen. In these cases, you might read from right (the WaveSon.net) to left (your eye picking up some keyword or triplet that is unrolling in response to your moving cursor).


When you yourself look at Vniverse, do you prefer the Touch or Number reading approach?

Touch. Though I like the fact that the numbers let me move differently—abruptly elsewhere if I want; and also that, if I should wish, I could follow the whole thing in order by number. But if you want a linear unrolling, the print page is better.


How does Vniverse fit into V: WaveSon. Nets/Losing L'una? And can you tell us a bit about the collection as a whole?


It fits right in the middle. If you begin the book, from either end, you will arrive at the page with the url. You must then make some kind of physical move—stay sitting but turn the book over (and read through back to the same url, midway, from the other end); or, you must yourself ‘turn over’, arise and go to the screen, and see the part of the poem V, the Vniverse, that is situated there.

I talk about the collection as a whole in the next two questions.


What do you feel you as a writer gain from using hypertext that you do not gain from plain text? Likewise, what do you feel the reader gains from reading hypertext as opposed to plain text?

Hypertext refers only to the linking structure. Much more happens in digital literature than hypertext. The screen presents a different kind of frame, and, in this case, a different kind of space, based on the Director software (playing in the Shockwave player). It permits words to seem to emerge from deep space in a timed pattern. Oral poems arrive in a timed pattern, but words on a print page do not. The simultaneous presence of the diagrams (also emerging out of deep space) comments on the words, while not ‘illustrating’ them.


In the print book, as you know, very few of the WaveSon.nets are end-stopped with punctuation. It is entirely possible to read them straight through and feel that it is one long poem (whether it is exactly a narrative is another question). What you do, when you do that, is break the frame of the Son.net and instead privilege the Wave in WaveSon.net, the ongoing way they feed into each other. The numbering of the WaveSon.nets makes that fairly easy to do.

Oral epic, by contrast, usually was told episodically and piecemeal. [See John Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem.] The longer poems in Losing L’una are fragmented to the highest possible degree, punctuated by a double numbering system that moves along from 1 to 8, before the decimal point, and from 1 to 142 after it, numbering the tercets (triplets) sequentially no matter which of those 8 poems they occur in. These are interspersed with short poems with straightforwardly numbered tercets. And the final poem, “L’una Loses,” stays entirely within “0”: waxing from 0 to 12 and waning back to 0 all within itself. This lyric sequence is I think difficult to read as a single sequence, much less a narrative. In fact you can read it by saying the numbers before each section or by skipping over them, a choice you have to make—just as you have to choose whether to ‘read’ or skip over the quotes marks throughout Notley’s The Descent of Alette.

In an interview I described this numbering: “There are numbers that rotate like bicycle-lock dials in V: Losing L’una. What happens to the left of the decimal doesn’t affect what happens to the right. Two simultaneous orders of counting are happening—within one number. V: WaveSon.nets appears to show simple numbering, but these ordering numbers don’t serve to “discipline” the text which only rarely begins or ends in line with the number. It is as if a calibration tool were slipping over the surface of the text with a certain amount of play in it. In V: Vniverse the numbers name the stars, accompanied by keywords. One can reach any constellation by entering a number, like a code, in the upper circle.”

As you know V is dedicated to Simone Weil. In Losing L’una, the broken up part, Simone the philosopher is more prominent. In WaveSon.nets, Simone the religious mystic is more prominent, and a coordinate mythic realm, a realm in which “to recognize your mother,” is built. This ‘mother’ is a vulnerable fragile figure, but her realm is amenable to ‘epic’ style reading.

In the Vniverse, more frame-breaking occurs. Not only is the frame of the page broken, but the digital permits both a more synoptic view and a closer-in view, while at the same time forbidding that ease of reading straight through all of the WaveSon.nets. The digital version excels in an overview of the entire poem—several sweeps of the hand across the opening screen will produce a hundred words that will serve to orient you to the concerns of the poem.

The digital also allows a closer-in view: the oscillation of the triplet and Son.net forms, the relation of those forms to the diagrams and to other text from the poem one can introduce randomly by simply moving the cursor onscreen to bring forth new triplets overlying/underneath/nearby the stable ones. The ‘next’ command activates many implicit time-scales: the time of break-up, the time of emergence, and the time of cross-layer existence between dissolving and emerging poems co-exist with the time of reading forward in the same constellation. If you care about learning new ways to read and about new senses of time, the digital version is best for that.


Is this idea of the Universe central to humankind, women in particular, or one person you had in mind when writing?

Well the Vniverse is exactly not the Universe, yes? V has replaced U. So those *shapes* can easily be changed one into the other, U to V; but the meanings of them differ wildly. U by being part of uni- means just one, ‘the’ one. V is a mark of opening out, the book opens in a V and flies away to the screen.

The poem V is focused on certain kinds of bodily knowing, especially touch and hearing. And especially the knowing that occurs in a female body—and the history of such knowing, in the person of the witch as well as Weil. The poem does quarrel with the views of the witch put forth in Malleus Maleficarum, the Inquisition’s book on how to torture witches, i.e. women with presumed knowledge.

Simone Weil talked a lot about the soul, but for her the soul is always embodied. She said, “Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things.”

And here are some perhaps relevant quotations from an interview with Jaishree Odin:

Odin: In V, you create a woman’s language where patriarchal formulations of material as well as mystic experience for women are recast and retold from various perspectives. Your recasting is at several levels, invoking real women as well as mythological figures and stellar constellations. This results in imagery and metaphors that are very feminist in orientation and impact, yet what I find remarkable about your work is that you resist getting locked into that experience—it is just a jumping ground to more profound themes of human relationship to the world and to broader cosmos. Would you like to elaborate on that?

I said: “Simone Weil was the first woman I read whose style convinced me she knew her own mind, her mind inseparable from her clumsy, sensitive, empathic body. A wonderful value of her philosophy is how body-based it is. She had utmost respect for “the work entering the body” in the lives of laborers, fishermen, and farmers. Her concerns could not have been broader, the whole good of humankind, the way to use and value knowledge.

“She said, ‘Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things.’”

Odin: It seems to me that your use of numbers in V presents the pulsating movement, the rise and fall of events—the rhythm of life itself. Would you agree with that interpretation?

I said: “The rhythms of life, in and out of phase with each other, and the felt sense that seeming abstractions have profound physical effects, the weight of the wave.”

Odin: A number of feminists have commented on women’s relationship to mysticism in the West. For example, Luce Irigaray describes the mystic experience as an essentially feminine experience, represented best through the metaphor of touch as in this experience both the individual “soul” and the unknown or the “nothingness” touch one another without one becoming lost in the other. In V, you use the term Godde to point to a reality that is attributeless and you use the words “opening the channel” to come in touch with the waves or vibrations of this reality. I see here a shift from seeing to touching. But some poems also refer to hearing or “hallucinated hearing.” Do you use touching and hearing to represent two different experiences or one and the same experience?

I said: “Both touching and hearing are privileged in V. Both are disprized in our world compared with the visual. Children whose preferred learning mode is kinesthetic or aural have a very hard time with our sight-based education. Both touching and hearing are close to waves—vibrational touch and acoustic waves. V: Vniverse is visual, but in a diagrammatic way, not big images.”

Odin: The title V is very revealing. As you point out, it is an iconographic image, but it also stands for many other things, for example, virginity, abstraction, bird’s flight among others. Most of all it refers to the conical hat of witches who were persecuted for daring to seek knowledge. How did you stumble upon this multivalence of V in both written alphabet and the shape that symbolizes an idea?

I said: “V is at first the waveshape. Hold a stylus to stone and move your stone-holding hand back and forth. With perceptible physical effort, you inscribe the stone with V, with V’s, VVV, a waveform, zigzag, ricrac.

“V is next the shape of an open book, here opened far enough to let the text jump up to a vertical screen. V is the shape of an entire assembly of geese in flight. Flying in V formation the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if the bird flew alone.

“V is lifted wings and a witch’s hat, if you turn it over. It is critical that you do turn the book V over to read it. From this gesture in 3-space you move to vertical reading on a screen. The dimensionality onscreen is given by reader-action, by decays and overlays that reader choice brings about. It is also given by images such as the Dipper constellation. The Little Dipper portion is indeed a dipper shape, but it is paired with the Big Dipper which is a bear’s head, referencing its Latin name Ursa Major. This “condensation” of levels, of image and name, is very characteristic of electronic media, though usually the levels are text and code. But in receiving that image you are receiving some hybrid, a cognitive image operating on several levels.

“If L’una is the moon (luna), it is also a solitary female one (l’una). If the moon is the mother, then a shift in what “mother” is takes place. It is the solitary woman who comes forward. L’una, “the one,” is also the daughter Persephone disappearing, this time under the sea. The lost daughter is also Weil, lost to her mother at age 34. The mother-daughter and the solitary-wise-woman-witch figures become fluid, turn into one another. In V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, waves of sound on a network carry L’una away, but she resurfaces in V: Vniverse. At the end of the WaveSon.nets Weil stands swaying at prayer in the stance of a rabbi she could not have been, a dragonfly above her head. She doesn’t stand outside time or make a system. She works from this transgressive body, transgressive for a Jewish prophet.”

There is certainly an emphasis on women and their difficult historical experience in V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, in all of its parts. If there is one figure that comes through more than others, it is certainly Simone Weil.



Do you consider yourself to be an Avant Garde writer? Why or why not?

Sometimes I do, because using software to make poems, and thinking of poems as structures moving in suggested 3-dimensional space (or actual 3-dimensional space, as in an installation) is not a traditional practice. Poems with the constraints of galaxies or proteins—that has not been the traditional view. On the other hand, such poems are extremely firmly structured, which might be thought to be a traditional trait.

I sometimes feel like an archaic poet, because I am very immersed in and seduced by the music of poetry. I am interested in communal and collaborative structures which are, also, in a certain sense, archaic—though technology is certainly refiguring communality and collaboration. Poems were early forms of knowing. I think today, faced with the incredible complexity of worldwide interconnectedness (including multiple languages) and with the pressure of cascades of data, poems may again become a form of knowing—knowing ourselves, our world, and knowing more about the systems we are relying on—through means that only software allows us to discover.