Signe
Can you tell me a bit about your personal journey to where
you’re currently at as a poet? How did you get started writing ↦ present day?
Julia
I've
often felt uncomfortable talking about myself, in my writing or otherwise. In
the Midwest, and perhaps Iowa in particular, where I’m from, there's this thing
about extreme humility and humbleness. It's very Protestant I think. But lately
I've been trying to break out of this, in my writing at least. I always think
of this quote from Richard Hugo's “Writing Off the Subject” where he says “to write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance, not in
real life I hope. In real life try to be nice.” Right now, my writing and film
work is centered on where I’m from and the landscape, people, and stories that
were there with me. I would go into more detail, but at the moment I’m a little
protective and afraid to jinx it, so to speak. It’s been inspiring to do this
work, and has felt productive in a new way. I would say that my work has moved
toward documentary poetry and the personal essay.
I grew up in a rural Amish town with a population of roughly a
hundred. My old computer would barely turn on, for the longest time we didn’t
have television, and there were no video games or anything like that. It was very
quiet. Silence was everywhere, sometimes peaceful and other times it
would eat you. But it was a productive locus in which to read and write. A slowness
rotating in the field. It’s how I mainly occupied my time.
As an undergrad I became
particularly obsessed with poetry. I would check out something like thirty
books of poetry from the library each week, trying to read as much as possible
and writing when inspired. That kind of obsession. A lot of self-teaching. But
at Brown, of course, I came into contact with electronic writing, which was pivotal
for my thinking, writing, and creative practice in general. I’ve always had a
strong interest in film and visual work, and my experience at Brown really
incited me to pursue this. I took a brilliant course on essay film with Carole
Maso that planted the seeds for the project I’m currently working on, which is
essentially an essay film. And of course working with C.D. [Wright], Forrest [Gander], and Cole [Swensen] was absolutely insightful, and I am so grateful and appreciative for the time I
had with them. C.D.’s documentary work in particular continues to echo and
reverberate, it’s like a steam train that’s always coming down the tracks, rattling
skulls and windows and anything else that might break. That’s the power of her
language.
Signe
Something I have at times struggled with is how accessible
to make my poetry. I feel like poetry missed me before coming to Brown because
it was an abstraction too removed from the immediacy of my home culture, and I
sometimes fear that as I grow to be deliberate with language I lose something
with people at home who have thick accents and use a lot of idioms, haha. Have
you ever felt this way? Could you speak a bit to the experience of working
class language as it relates to poetry?
Julia
I’m so pleased to hear that you’ve come to poetry, and are
thinking about important issues like class and voice – issues I certainly think
about as well, and I think it’s safe to say that, as you know, there are no
definitive answers. But this is where, to my mind, the role of the documentary
and documentary poetics comes alive. I am so inspired by the work of
documentary poets like Mark Nowak, who focuses on class and capitalism. I love Shut Up Shut Down and the way he uses
the archive as a means of gathering and amplifying working class voices. In my
practice, documentation involves inquiry and question asking. It involves research
of all kinds, including talking to people about their daily lives and
experiences. I’m genuinely intrigued by people and their stories and the way
they tell them. In interviewing people from home, there’s something very
grounded in the experience, perhaps different from the abstraction to which you
are referring. Although, as I’ve already touched on, this is somewhat of a newer
practice for me. In the past my work has been more theoretical, conceptual,
etc., and in many ways it still is. I think that all of these registers are
important for me to feel like my practice is running on all cylinders, so to
speak. But certainly there are rarefied, sequestered, removed, and privileged
aspects to the history of poetry that I’d like to think can change and are
changing.
Signe
In relation to the last bit, I’ve definitely struggled in
the past with relying on place in my poetry. I think a lot of first-generation
college students at Brown feel an attachment to place and local identity in a
way that reflects class anxiety, or at least that was a big part of my freshman
year experience. This semester I’ve been really interested in the poetics of
place, namely reading William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Charles Olson’s MaximusPoems and Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston, all of which instrumentalize working
class language/identity in a kind of unnerving way. How do you conceptualize
place as a poet?
Julia
Oh, I love all of those books you mention! I’m really glad to hear that
you are thinking about the role of place alongside such tomes and compendiums
of fluorescent poetry. Susan Howe is another poet I admire whose work has
focused on place and documentation. I’ve watched so many brilliant essay films
on place—Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March
and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg come to
mind. And of course Robert Smithson’s work on location. Place is such a
character, isn’t it? A place has history and is haunted by history. A place
ages, changes, develops, degrades. As a first-generation college student I
absolutely understand feeling an attachment to place and local identity, as you
mention. I think that this is an attachment out of which evocative art can be
born. It’s a sort of passion. There’s so much beauty in local identity or what
one might deem commonplace. There’s much to uncover and/or recover, as well as
that which simply cannot be uncovered or recovered. The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre and Postmodern Geographies by Edward Soja have been pivotal for me in
thinking theoretically about space, place, and social issues like class.
Baudrillard’s America and Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space, too. A lot of
my work on place comes back to something very simple, I think, and that’s the
American Dream. David Lynch’s films are useful in meditating on this. The
places I am drawn to seem to simultaneously (and curiously) uphold and show flaws
inherent in the American Dream.
Signe
A more general question: how do the various communities
you’re in, influence your writing process?
Julia
I could begin by talking about my family and community back
home—a community that certainly influences me visually. So many moments and
images from childhood and home crop up in my mind when I’m writing and working.
It’s both settling and unsettling. There are dark moments. I suppose I could
broadly define this as the Midwestern Gothic. It’s hard to describe the feeling
of sleeping alone in an old creaking farmhouse with nobody around for miles.
And what if a stranger rings the doorbell in the middle of the night? That’s
happened. It splits the silence. And of course worse things happen—you don’t
need to look far to find what the fields and snow and silence covers, you just
have to look. Being back in academia at the University of Denver and the poetry
community here has been so helpful in thinking about the importance of our
stories, even when we think that they’re somehow not good or interesting
enough. It has allowed me to sharpen my instincts.
Signe
While reading “LATE-NIGHT TALK SHOW BEGINNING WITH COMMERCIAL” I started thinking about private versus public thought and
experience. How do you see the line between public and private manifesting in
culture and in poetry’s reflection of culture?
Julia
I am very influenced by the Situationist movement and
theorists like Guy Debord and The Society of the Spectacle. When I think of the public sphere I tend to think of mass
media and Debord’s focus on the social relationships between people that are
mediated by images. In the poem you mention, there is, to my mind, a blurred
distinction between public and private in relation to mass media, the latter of
which relies on the visual, the spectacle. The image, broadly speaking, is
endlessly fascinating to me. It is both outside and inside—our capacity for
vision is a complex relationship between the outside world and the function of
our brains. The poet Ronald Johnson has a great interview with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage where they discuss the evolution of sight from the reptilian
brain—something about how light created the capacity for sight. I love the
image of light pouring onto the ancient, reptilian brain. And this is perhaps how
mass media attempts to get ahold on the life of the mind, our innermost thoughts
and desires. This is how mass media can liquidate us.
Signe
What do you think technology’s role is in poetry: now and in
the future? Do you see technology impacting the accessibility of poetry?
Julia
I’m thinking of a quote right now from C.P. Snow, that
technology brings you gifts with one hand and stabs you in the back with the
other. Which reminds me of Derrida’s essay on technology as pharmakon, both cure and poison. To
illustrate his point he discusses written language and documentation as a
technology and prosthesis for memory that actually enables us to forget. And
then there’s Heidegger digging deep into the meaning of techne as poesis and “bringing forth.” Both technology and poetry
are acts of bringing forth, of revelation. How can they work together to bring
forth stories, images, voices, etc., in innovative ways, and how can they work
to disseminate these in ways that might increase poetry’s accessibility? I
think there are many answers and the question itself excites me!
•••
Signe Swanson is a second-year student at Brown University, where she is studying Literary Arts and Comparative Literature. Her writing is influenced by her experiences with place, class, and translation.
More of Julia Madsen's work can be experienced >>> here
