Suppose that the most visceral and heart-wrenching kind of writing can purge you of suffering, cleanse your soul somehow. In the case of Ariana Reines’s writing, this is not merely a theory but an actual truth. To those unfamiliar with the force majeure of Ariana Reines I would say that her occult, intrepid, and soul-seeping writing is a modern spell. More than simply providing a way out of the perilous mess that we, the world, and our souls find ourselves in, Raines’s work serves as a proposal.

Ariana Reines, a Salem-born poet, playwright, and performing artist now based in New York, writes with an ancient and bleeding voice, deglamorizing contemporary poetry and writing at large.

Reines is the author of A Sand Book (2019)—winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Award and longlisted for the National Book Award—Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence in 2006. Her Obie-winning play, Telephone, was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre with a sold-out run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2009. In 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines created Invisible College, an online space devoted to the study of poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.

In her introduction to Reines’s book Telephone (2018), Chris Kraus rendered the writer’s distinctive ethos in the current zeitgeist by stating: “Reines has reinvented poetry for the contemporary art world with her books The Cow (2006) and Coeur de Lion (2007). Her books are models for punk erudition—manifestos of the paradoxical girl-state where disappearance beckons through to presence, and you are completely alert to a point where you can no longer stand it.”¹

As a protegé of Chris Kraus (Semiotexte), Rebecca Wolff (FENCE), and most recently Divided Publishing, Reines is renowned for a quintessential ability to lend her voice to echo a deeper truth, whatever the cost. The price Reines has paid throughout her life—healing ancestral trauma and navigating the abandonment and loss of her parents—to condense such shivering writing on the page has been more than one could possibly bear. Many of her most gut-driven, visceral sentences are pressurized with sheer dread and love at once. They atomize into non-equilibrial states of being, glimmering with what it feels like to be a poet in the 21st century.

During our Zoom conversation on Friday, November 8, which took place between New York and Brussels, Reines spoke about summoning tenderness and agony while writing her most recent book, Wave of Blood. She also discussed the alchemy behind it, the continuous insanity of the war in Gaza, the spiritual calling to record this period, and the complexities of intimacy. I asked the author about movies, her conversations with writers Alice Notley and Ottessa Moshfegh, intuition and prophecies, her commitment to writing, and her agreement with her soul.

Reines responded with clairvoyance and humour. She did not reel around pain, grief, and suffering; instead, she struck right at their heart. The author described how, in order to understand the grieving process properly, we need to acknowledge many other interconnected processes that touch and shape our souls—such as escaping numbness, the absence of wisdom, reincarnation, and cultural taboos, among others. With untethered and furious, non-sterile answers, Reines “moves between the worlds in search of the divine and the self”.²

Her book Wave of Blood starts with the line: “Science must not replace pain, because when that kind of a catastrophe happens, it has no mercy,” quoting from Etel Adnan’s Premonition. I wonder about the undeniable urgency of this sentence, right now, today; I wonder why and on what level we did lose touch with ourselves, with our spirit, with our ancestors, and with each other somewhere along the way. This conversation with Reines prompts us to seek ways out of the ennui and dread.

I met with Reines last year in October in Brussels during her reading at rile*, a local bookstore and performance space. I didn’t have a clue that Reines would later write Wave of Blood, I did not know she would turn the pages she’s read for her audience into such unvarnished, agonizing but tender work. But I reached out and found Wave of Blood when I needed it most, in some sort of decline, facing a certain mortality—an inevitable loss.

Talking with Ariana Reines about the power of her work was an experience in itself. Like facing both past and future, the ancestral and that yet to come, all at once.

 

 

 

They say the pearl is a grain of sand that’s irritating the oyster. And I think it’s painful. It’s like the animal’s vagina and then they make this beautiful thing out of it. It’s a nice metaphor for feminine creativity and the connection between pain and art.

 

 

 

My first question for you relates to your work as a writer—to your previously published collection of poetry but also to the newly published Wave of Blood. It’s been a year of many retrogrades and eclipses, but it was also a year of insane suffering, mass extermination, and a genocide that we’re witnessing as we speak… Reading your work, this part stuck in my mind “IF YOU REFUSE TO FEEL YOUR WRITING WILL DIE.” What I adore is that you approach writing—both in poetry and prosaic form—as some sort of talisman.

In your conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh via the Invisible College in 2020, Ottessa mentioned “that it's really unbelievable that you had to go through college with what was happening to your mom… and that you should write a book about that, you probably have,” and you responded that “you did not write a book about it, you wrote books around it.”

Do you believe contemporary poetry can transgress and perhaps heal such generational pain and suffering?

I think it’s not possible to transgress or heal unless you are willing on some level to transgress upon yourself. I guess what I mean is if I think about the history of what transgressive literature was—in the 80s, Burroughs, Kathy Acker, [Dennis] Cooper—a lot of what was being transgressed was straight-world norms about sexuality but also limits on what could be considered beautiful and what could be considered excellent in art, like what makes art beautiful, what makes it worth respecting. And it opened this door to saying: Well, you know what? A lot of areas that this culture refuses to look at or says are evil and ugly, there’s truth and beauty there. 

It’s true that in my entire career I’ve been, on some level, open about what’s been happening in my family because my mom first became homeless when I was still a teen. This family tragedy, which is also a social tragedy, has been the backdrop for my entire adulthood and my entire career. It always shows up in my work, but I’ve never literally sat down and written the story, like a straight memoir or a straight novel about a young woman becoming a poet while her paranoid-schizophrenic mom is on the streets. 

It’s partly because of the lifestyle that a poet leads. I just don’t have that kind of privilege to just sit down for a year and be like: well that was weird but here I am, you know in my country house and I’ll tell you how I survived it all. I think there is something rooted in the avant-garde about the forms your artwork takes, and how it relates to what academics would call the practice of your life.

My poetics evolved through the way that I was living, and the poet’s life is a very bohemian thing. It makes the shape of the artwork different in a way. I think that we’ve gotten a little bit stale around what we think is really transgressive anymore because now it is okay to write about sex, and perfectly bourgeois to organize your bukkake via an app and even to describe how liberating the whole thing was over a fancy dinner. It’s OK to write about a lot of things that used to be considered transgressive. 

What’s very transgressive now, in my opinion, is actually taking real emotional risks. In one’s life and in one’s work.
Searching yourself. In fact, a lot of Wave of Blood is about this.

It’s not enough to say that something is evil and should stop. This is bad. I want it to stop. That’s not enough to make you a good person anymore. Unfortunately, the bar is so low right now, for being human, and the numbness and abdication so high—that many people haven’t been able to simply say such things. But at the same time, because language itself is a twisty, mysterious medium, identifying an evil and naming it the better to separate myself from it in a time of almost incomprehensible complicity isn’t enough either.

For more than a year the people who are willing to say this is bad, this must stop have been shitting on (in various ways) the people who won’t say it.  This has been a very strange phenomenon—which has not saved a single life. 

Can an effective political movement be built on symbolic gestures? Posturing and shitting on people and saying who is beneath contempt, even arguing over what is or isn’t historically accurate or legal, what does and doesn’t have a right to exist? The killing is happening NOW. It is real NOW.  

What I’ve done with this book may have very little value socially or politically. But it was a necessity spiritually. It was an argument I could not have with another person, or inside my culture: I could barely even have it with myself.  Hence the necessity of literature.

We don’t have a culture vigorous enough, grounded enough, or sane enough to stop the war. To end war full stop. I didn’t wanna scream at my friends about this. In any case, I was too heartbroken to do that. So instead, I turned that rage on myself and I thought, Ariana, I’m gonna give you one last chance to wild out, go to town on your self-loathing, every form of negativity, go ahead and unleash. All the frustration, the rage you feel, the powerlessness, and the horrible feeling of, how can we have let this happen to our world?

This has always been a struggle my whole life, hating myself, blaming myself for the bad things that happen in the world. I have noticed that seeing evil things happening actually decreases MY self-esteem: it provokes anger, I think, seeing innocent children mutilated and killed. Whom do I have to blame for it?  I can’t access the government.  So what it does is pull ME down, I hate ME for even seeing such things. And WE—the unwashed masses—we all somehow kind of hate each other for what we have allowed ourselves to see, to watch, to fail to stop. I had to punish something, someone–so I punished ME. Just go and wreck yourself.

But as much as you speak of the rage, Wave of Blood also includes so many parts that carry tenderness. The writing grabs the soul. It’s a wake-up call perhaps.

I don’t know how to explain this except in spiritual terms. Certain Mystics say that our soul is only partly in our body, a lot of our soul is in the other realms. And our soul knows more than we do. It’s in touch with our ancestors. It’s in touch with the stars. It’s in touch with these higher, larger planes of being, and we’re connected to it. Through the process of writing the book, I was in agony, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I was like a wreck—when we met in Brussels last year, at the time of that tour—I was an absolute wreck. 

I was in emotional turmoil over the war and I didn’t feel like [saying] Hey everybody, I’m a good person and why don’t you listen to me read my poetry 'cause I’m better than other people. Stop the war! Love me! I just wanted to crawl into a hole and cry and die basically and that’s just me. That’s how I am, alright? 

The process of writing Wave of Blood was so painful that something happened finally, I feel it was almost like a mutation, that something in my soul finally shifted. It was almost like a voice, but it wasn’t literally a voice. What I heard, finally, a voice inside me one day say, was: “This is too much suffering, Stop it.” 

And on some level there’s no analysis, there’s no political theory there. Just stop it.

Stop trying to analyze and understand what is happening right now; analyze it and judge it historically, racially, culturally, post-colonially, femininely, masculinely, morally, and socially.

The only wise thing to do is to just stop it! Just stop it! And turn toward life. I had stopped eating for about a month.  I had developed a fever. I was filled with anger and shock, not only about the genocide but also how the people in my world were reacting—we were blaming each other, shitting on New Yorker essays as though that would save lives, using posturing dead words to proclaim our ethical superiority to who knows what, while living comfortably bourgeois lives on, as so many of us love to say, stolen land.

The voice said: That’s too much suffering. Stop it. And on some level, that’s what we all know needs to happen. It needed to happen. A year ago was too much. 50 years ago was too much. But this is the weird reality of suffering. It’s like we don’t understand how to stop it. It’s very strange, that sense of the soul giving some life or beauty back to the reader somehow. Maybe it’s soothing to see somebody else struggling and saying it’s OK to struggle. You should struggle. Struggle to really face life.

 

 

Intimacy.  We can’t think clearly without it, and there are times in life when a book can be one of the only places to really find it.

 

 

Yeah, absolutely because that’s what I felt reading it. But it’s not only a lot of pain and suffering. Even if the book is not for everyone it opens a wider door to your poetry, but also your notes and parts that are more prose-like and the written records from the Invisible College.

Part of what the book is demonstrating is something rhetorical. It shows a person talking to herself in her notebook in a very intimate way: wrestling with things. Noting things down in weird observations in a notebook. That’s a very ordinary thing I do, but my life depends on it. I have to try and work out what’s happening in my life. I’m not able to understand things without writing them down. That is something that I do to try to have a sense of what’s really going on. I don’t even necessarily understand it while I’m writing, but I was observing while I was on that tour. For example, writing on the train or noting what happened yesterday in a jetlagged weird state. 

But there are also the things you say in a room with people—a physical room, not on Instagram or a podcast. The rhetoric is a little bit different. And then there’s a third place, which is Invisible College, where a group of people and I have been studying ancient texts and music and art and poetry since 2020 (and before). There’s an intimacy there, and trust that comes from real-time and serious study together that makes a whole different kind of insight possible. I wouldn’t necessarily be talking that way at a university lecture or on the street. You can have better ideas and greater depth thinking through things with those with whom you have worked and studied deeply. I feel we’ve lost that in our culture. We expect ideas to be kind of general and universal, and people don’t really work them out patiently and deeply in a context of trust.

Do you mean intimacy? 

Yes, and in some ways, to be able to develop intellectually and spiritually, there has to be trust. We can’t just be thinking things in our heads and broadcasting them. In order for some things to develop carefully, you have to be able to work things out. Then in order to be able to get in there and really work things out you can’t be trying to cover your ass linguistically, worried that someone is gonna shit on you because you said the wrong thing. I’m trying to work something out here in a very deep way, at the roots, and I need to be able to move patiently and with great curiosity through all of it. So I agree. Intimacy.  We can’t think clearly without it, and there are times in life when a book can be one of the only places to really find it.

Recently I re-watched Donnie Darko, a 2001 psychological thriller about a troubled teenager who, after escaping a bizarre accident, is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes. Donnie receives warnings from the grim bunny named Frank. There is a part in a movie where he gets a recommendation for a book called Philosophy of Time Travel by Roberta Sparrow. This book actually exists in real life. And I couldn’t help but think of it in the flux with your writing. Do you believe in such a force that can come to you as some sort of voice while you’re writing?

I am definitely gonna rewatch Donnie Darko, thank you for that. I’m now visualizing it. I haven’t seen it since it came out. How it began for me was that desire to write in the first place. It starts with writing things down and you don’t know why. It doesn’t feel like anything in the moment, but then you go back and read it there’s something there. An energy that feels like life. And then gradually life starts to become more enchanted as you get used to it, reflecting a kind of shine back to you that you may not have noticed in the moment. You start to feel a kind of electricity and then still some days it feels a little dead. It’s almost like there’s no breeze. But then, there are these currents that you attune to, synchronicity starts to flow, or somebody puts a book into your hand or someone says come to this party and you’re really tired but for some reason, but you go and it fixes your soul. It heals you in some way [that] you didn’t realize. All I’m trying to say is that what I found comes through for everyone and in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes it’s almost like you get an instruction in your head and you just somehow say yes.

 

 

Wisdom and goodness do exist in this world and I think we are responsible for somehow finding it, connecting to it, and to the extent that we can, living in it.

 

Perhaps we forget to listen to our true intimacy? Maybe we’re becoming numb? Your writing is trying to escape the numbness.

I think it is very easy to lose intimacy with oneself. We’re in a very loud and cacophonous and very disturbing, deranging time, and everything is competing for our money and for our attention. And so navigating it, I realized that one of my problems, one of the bones that I have to pick with the way that art is taught right now, and also the way that literature is taught, it’s not only an intellectual decision. You don’t simply decide to have the right opinion about the world. Life has to be lived—it’s not an idea. The things we learn about life are real, not abstract theories.  Art has to be rooted in our living.

It’s like a calling? 

Yes, art is a calling. But also figuring out a good life or figuring out ethics, you don’t just simply decide to be ethical. That’s not how human beings are. Our intellect is very separated from the heart chakra. I forget if I put this in the book or not and it may sound corny maybe but: there’s very little wisdom available in public right now. If we wanna talk about the Left in the United States for example. There’s a lot of intelligence, lots of highly intelligent people, the best and the brightest in the country but there’s a very shocking absence of wisdom. We, the people of the heretofore left, have no real political movement of substance right now and have not had one for years.  

And because times are so cacophonous, perhaps unfortunately, one has had to turn inward during this time in order to make contact with wisdom: I do not know how I would have survived my mother’s suicide and the cruelty of our world without meditation. 

I’m lucky to have beautiful friends, but I have often—like many people—felt entirely alone. Sometimes I have survived on music, literally living off of it—projecting my entire soul into certain sounds, because there was no temple or hospital in the physical realms where I could rest.

I’m grateful to all the things that have helped me to live, but I think the reason my meditation is so valuable is because it is something one can give to oneself, without the intervention of a master—or a charlatan. There are things available out there that you can try, and some of them may help you. We have to clarify our intuition. We all have to navigate through the same cesspool, no matter what our personal advantages and disadvantages are.  Wisdom and goodness do exist in this world and I think we are responsible for somehow finding it, connecting to it, and to the extent that we can, living in it.

It seems that what certain people end up doing instead is reproduce that numbness toward other people.

Yes, very well said. This numbness and rage about the world that I’m feeling in myself, I’m reproducing all around me in my addiction to rage and blame.

But that’s also a tool for mass control because some people do it almost on an unconscious level and that’s so terrifying to me. It’s the opposite of life and more a weird fucked up version of some matrix and kind of zombie land. We laugh about it, and yet, it’s very fucking real. 

Very real. We’ve been living in it. In a sort of the night of the living dead. But the real nightmare is when you realize you’re the nightmare. And to go back to your question about healing: we’ve heard a lot of platitudes about healing recently, and it was healing to me to write this book [Wave of Blood] but not while I was doing it because I was fucking miserable. 

Hearing this from you feels exactly like the opposite of that social numbness. I wish more people would respond to what happens the way you did.

But it took so much suffering. And what it feels like for me now is that we’re all gonna be opened up in our time somehow. How does Dolly Parton put it?—“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” So to me, it took a lot of suffering to get to this place.

Hardly anyone would be able to put up with what you went through and write two new books [Rose and Wave of Blood] the way you did.

I made a commitment to myself to endure. Endurance has been a good friend to me. It’s one of the things that I wish, among many others, was taught as a value in our culture, especially for artists.  

We all think we’re the only empathic ones, we’re the only people who care, we’re the only nice people, we’re the only good people and it is fucking not true. We do not have a monopoly on goodness. We can be just as ugly as everything that we want to separate ourselves from. And sometimes if you really wanna do deep work, a big part of it, and I think this is probably true for business, for science, for anything, this is one of the things that spirituality helps with—is to be able to endure painful or ugly circumstances while holding true to your intention. 

I had to make a commitment to myself not to go crazy. I’m not gonna commit suicide. I’m not gonna let my life become just a shit pile and say it’s patriarchy's fault or look at all this bad stuff that happened to me. 

There were some days when all I had to hold onto was that promise that I’d made to myself to endure. I think it’s the agreement I made with my soul. There was one time I remember feeling so distraught. About seven years ago, I went through a breakup and my mother was about to become homeless again. All these things were about to go upside down in my life, things I had worked very hard to heal and rebuild already, and I was working my ass off to pay for it all. 

I was exhausted and I just couldn’t calm down. And I don’t know how it happened, but people talk about angels or their ancestors and their souls. But I was so wretched and I just couldn’t feel better and nobody else was helping me. It was a weird time of the night in a weird time zone. I was all dis-regulated and I feel that’s when people really go crazy, when they’re jetlagged. Their nervous system is off, that’s when people fucking lose it because you feel crazy and it’s the middle of the night you’re in some weird place and you’re all alone with your soul.

And what happened was that I remember looking in the mirror and feeling: I will not abandon you. I will not abandon you. I will stay with you and we will heal. I will heal you. I will heal you. It was like almost talking to my higher being. And then in my consciousness, we looked at every point in my life that was hurting me. Everything that was making me feel sad and almost ready to just jump off a bridge. We looked at my mother becoming homeless again, the love falling apart, my body falling apart, and each thing that I hated about my reality. And it said again: We will heal this. I will not abandon you. 

 

 

 

I’ve never heard anything like this! That’s truly magical to hear about this experience and it feels like one needs to have a tremendous amount of sensorial-spiritual responsiveness. I believe you need to be someone who really sees and wants to see these signs along the way and knows how to receive and accept them. Some people may walk their whole life without ever feeling or seeing anything as such, no?

But we don’t know that we’re allowed to do that. We don’t even know that’s possible. Miracles come from that and have always existed and that’s a liberty that we all have. It’s a very subtle strange thing but it’s like sometimes how you were saying “Does it come as a voice”—sometimes through these little signals, it’s like the whole world has a lot more. There are terrible things in the world, but there’s also help and support in the world. And sometimes the help is in your own inner being or your own infinite soul. Sometimes it’s literally the sun shining. There have been times in my life where I am so miserable and so fucked up that you couldn’t help me if you tried. If you came in with a marching band or like $2 million or 12 dancing lovers. I would not have been able to receive any goodness or any help and to me, that is a real abyss of misery when you’re deaf, dumb, and blind to the many things that actually want to help you. And that’s why sometimes we all need to be reminded…

I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you. When I think about your work and writing, I think of influential writers such as Elizabeth Bishop, Anna Kavan, and Clarice Lispector, especially her book Hour of the Star, and Virginia Woolf, and Ursula Le Guin—how do you relate to such powerful voices?  

These are all wonderful writers and I was thinking about Lispector a lot actually in the last few weeks. What I love about Lispector is the inner realm, which she showed to be immense. The inner meaning—as vast as the universe. She’s been on my mind a lot and I actually haven’t reread her in years. I read everything 15 years ago and it all changed me forever. But I’ve been thinking about re-reading her because the more I live, the more this experience of the soul is real. Lispector’s reality is amazing—she’s an amazing realist. She is describing the immensity of being in a very accurate real way. It’s also dazzlingly beautiful because her work shows that we are not only existing in this dimension. This dimension is extremely important. There’s a reason why we are mostly here, but actually the more united we can become with our own soul, the more dazzling and miraculous our life becomes on a quantum level. We are here but we’re somehow consciously in relationship with other time streams, the other realms. Sometimes I think that this era of technologization is almost like teaching time where we’re all in different time zones, in different languages and in different bodies. It’s almost as if we’d have a parody or a joke version of what really being tuned in could be. 

Yes, I feel what you mean—it’s like an offer to us but also it is up to us whether we come to terms with self and world realization or not. Do you think the most deep, lurid, creative impetus for one to write comes from a place of discomfort?

Not exactly although sometimes it can be figured by discomfort. They say the pearl is a grain of sand that’s irritating the oyster. And I think it’s painful. It’s like the animal’s vagina and then they make this beautiful thing out of it. It’s a nice metaphor for feminine creativity and the connection between pain and art.

 

 

 

We, the people of the heretofore left, have no real political movement of substance right now and have not had one for years.  And because times are so cacophonous, perhaps unfortunately, one has had to turn inward during this time in order to make contact with wisdom: I do not know how I would have survived my mother’s suicide and the cruelty of our world without meditation. 

 

 

 

 

You describe the importance of bleeding and the entire cycle of menstruation. A vast amount of people still consider it as a huge taboo. People talk about all kinds of bullshit, and yet they can’t fathom talking about a process that lies behind giving a life.

I’m thinking back to Ottessa, again—You could write a book about straight things. Why didn’t I do the straight thing? And say how it was to have a crazy mom. Or here’s my book about menstruation and why we should respect it. And I guess I’m not that kind of artist. I want to create a prism somehow. I often joke, it’s a joke but it’s true, that my eyes were operated by a trans tennis star and so my eyes don’t go together.

Well, you can’t tell… 

I don’t have stereo vision. I don’t look at things head-on. I kind of flow through them because that feels more attractive to me artistically. But yes, I could’ve written this book about the history of menstruation and why it’s beautiful and important, and how creativity for people who menstruate is tied to pain and empathy, but that’s like some boring shit to me. That’s not my lineage. But what’s interesting about that cycle is that the menstruation cycle is also a grief cycle. There’s a way in which that irritability, the pain, the physical pain, the sense of being turned into liquid, the sense of being very connected to gravity into the Earth, being suddenly on a cellular level, opened up even more to all the suffering in the world and grieving it. Basically feeling extra grief about it on a kind of schedule. Something is fascinating about it and kind of taboo about it. And you know to go back to your question about transgression, it’s a bit of a transgression to talk about this. How do we know it’s a transgression? Because very few people talk about it which means we have a taboo. We have a cultural taboo that we’re not even noticing. 

Pondering the cyclic forms reoccurring in life—in Birth, a 2004 movie by Jonathan Glazer, the main protagonist faces the death of her husband but a 10-year-old who appears in her life believes he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Do you believe in reincarnation? Do you believe in life after life?

In a nutshell yes, I do. It’s not exactly a belief. I remember when I felt it. I was around 27 and I had a fight with my boyfriend, and I remember this weird moment when we were in bed, talking and it had just clicked: I felt that reincarnation is real. I feel like I’ve been a man. I feel like I’ve been men before, I feel like I’ve been women—I could just feel it. And after doing a lot of reading, studying and researching, I learned that many traditions, including ones you don’t necessarily think of as believing in it, in fact, believe in it. The Hindu tradition believes in reincarnation but so does the Jewish. The sorts of more esoteric sides of many traditions talk about it, although they don’t wanna talk about it in the same way. It’s not a belief that I need to defend—I don’t really know what our life is at the end of the day but what I definitely feel is reality.

You recently spoke with the magical poet Alice Notley for Gagosian Quarterly about both of your writings. I adore the part that says “The prophecy is alive” and it stayed with me as someone interested in prophecies in general. My grandmother used to have the book of Sibyls. You react to a line in Alice’s poem saying: “We can’t really talk about prophecy, I accept that, but there’s a way in which poetry is sort of always prophetic. It’s always holding the future.”—I want to ask you, as I feel that your poetry vibrates with the prophetic—Do you believe in “contemporary Sibyls”? 

If I remember correctly, Alice said that the Sibyls were bad poets. I thought it was really funny. It was classic Al—I loved that. I love Alice Notley's “smackdown” so much, but I find her work to be quite prophetic. Maybe prophecy is something we don’t understand or study enough in our culture. We hold it on this pedestal—saying—oh, you’re oracular, you’re prophetic. I think that all art as you say is “vibrating”—I think that this exists everywhere. I don’t think it’s in short supply. It’s just that we haven’t made it into an aesthetic value or a cultural value. Maybe we’re a little afraid of it so we tend to put these people like Alice—this witch living in this apartment on the margins of society. In a way, I’m on the margins of society here—a weird lady in my hut or something. And yet it’s a very down-to-earth thing. I don’t think that I’m an oracle or a prophet. I think that when art is really alive and in tune, it’s got that shimmer. It’s giving you that buzz, getting that tingle. There are literally thousands of ways that this is happening all the time. This is one of the little games that I like to play with Invisible College—we don’t teach whether art is good. I’m really interested in that tingle.

You were born in Salem—a city historically notorious for witch hunts and witch trials. I wonder what was your experience of living in Salem. And what do you experience in comparison now living in New York?

Salem is a lot nicer than it was when I was growing up, but it’s kind of a great town. It is spooky and it’s kind of gentrified now. Witchcraft used to be a really edgy thing. It was working-class housewives who really revived it in and around Salem in the 70s. So I have a lot of affection for it although it wasn’t my culture. It was a lot of Irish Catholic, Scotch-Irish, British Isles, working-class white women, mixing with the Afro-Caribbean, and Latin American kinds of religion. All of these kinds of traditions were really kept and maintained by working-class people. And it got a little bit college-gentrified with Instagram, but you used to make fun of people walking around wearing all black with brooms in Massachusetts. There’s a toughness to the working class cultures in the north of Boston that I’ve always felt attracted to and it’s always fighting against the yuppie Harvard thing—and that friction makes for something interesting. I have a lot of affection for it, even including what I find disgusting about it, I guess.

As I mentioned, I recently had a chance to watch your terrific conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh from Invisible College in 2020 and I loved the energy between you and Ottessa—almost mirroring each other in some ways, although she writes prose. You said, “You almost never get to see a poet and a novelist talking together.” And although you hadn’t seen each other for almost 20 years, it felt very magical to experience you two talking and sharing your insights into writing. I wonder how it is for you to talk to other writers and share your work with them?

It’s always delightful to see how people develop and also have them as the person who they always are. Sometimes people change so much and you have no idea that they have this in them. I have a friend, a wonderful poet in Buenos Aires, and her son has become a trap star, but we had no idea and didn’t see that coming but at the same time it’s so amazing. Ottessa was always Ottessa. And on some level, I was always me. And what was kind of sweet about doing that event with her was that nobody had ever put us together. I love her work and the few interactions that we did have when we were both in college were super respectful, and there was just something cool there. Sometimes you’re best friends and sometimes you’re not meant to be. I do remember when my mom became homeless and I got really skinny—I wasn’t sleeping. And Ottessa was literally the only person who asked: “You look really skinny. Are you okay?” And she wasn’t even my close friend. And sometimes when people say that, it can sound like something mean. But I could feel that she, for some reason, was truly respectful by asking that question. She’s a really good writer and a really good artist who sees people really well, with empathy. And I felt that, and I never forgot it.

One could feel that alchemy between you two. It is very precious that we have writers and poets who dare to write about ways in which we, or the character, experience states of suffering, and publishers who support them.

I would like to acknowledge the writer and editor, Rebecca Wolff (one of the former FENCE editors), who published Ottessa’s first book (McGlue, 2014) and mine (Coeur de Lion, 2007), and who is an extraordinary publisher. You cannot categorize the kind of work that they have published since 1998, although they are known for championing the work of women writers at a time it really wasn’t being done. And apart from that, FENCE published incredibly uncategorizable black writers and Latino writers because that’s who they are. 

But I would love to honor and give respect to Divided Publishing who just published my latest book Wave of Blood. Divided Publishing is such an incredible, young, and unusual project.

FENCE is what it is or what it was because Rebecca is a very unique and beautiful poet, novelist, and editor and everything she touches has that special “tingle” that we were talking about. She’s one of those people who doesn’t need to be told by somebody else what’s really good. She can tell right away. She picked McGlue out of the sludge pile and she brought me out of the sludge pile into the world. We really underestimate how people like Rebecca are important in keeping culture vital. Most people need to be told by the New York Times what to think about, or other cultural monoliths, but people wanna be told by somebody. And there are people out there who don’t need somebody to tell them… we should give those people the freedom to shake things up and make things exciting and beautiful.

 

 

 

Wonderful to hear your thoughts about Rebecca and FENCE. What was your experience with Divided Publishing? 

It’s brilliant. Camilla and Eleanor (Divided Publishing) also participate in Invisible College and I love what they’ve been doing. They were at my readings in Berlin [at Hopscotch Reading Room] and Brussels [at rile*] last year when I was on the tour, and then both of them also came to my Paris reading [at After8Books]. In Paris I asked them: ”Do you wanna make a book out of this?”—and I thought it would be simple but writing it I was in complete agony. I don’t know what they would say about working with me but they were absolutely sensitive and very precise. Their standards are really high and they’re a rare combination of highly empathic and highly intelligent. And that makes it possible to do some really interesting work. I think they’re fantastic!

Talking about the Wave of Blood and the process of writing it, and looking back to your previous books—A Sand Book (2019), Coeur de Lion (2007), or The cow (2006)—in what way does Wave of Blood to you feel different than your previous books?

With both books that I wrote this year—Rose and Wave of Blood—I felt that they both are a kind of returning. I felt very returned and connected to my first book—The cow. With Rose to Coeur de Lion. Because there’s a sense in which Wave of Blood is also kind of an essay or a hybrid essay and I felt like, I was back to that feeling that I had when I was like 23, 24, or 25 that I have nothing to lose, I have nothing to pretend. It came from this place that reconnected me to my danger. And it was just like well, fuck it, this is all I can do right now, so I’m just gonna do it—and there was something healing about that for me to go back to that sense of complete risk. I didn’t have anything to protect or defend. What can get harder for artists when we get older, is when we start to develop a persona or we become the head of a department or we become known for certain things, and for some artists, it may start to feel heavy. But you want to go in new directions and it’s always really interesting to see how that happens, to find a way to keep on developing. It’s harder to break through in some ways when you’re older because you know how to do certain things that you know how to do. Sometimes you return to the primary energy, with what you’ve started in the first place, and other times you go in a completely new direction. For me, this was a return to the beginning.