Adam Day

The Interview

Though your poems are often succinct and linguistically accessible, they’re as deeply explorative as much longer poems. How do you go about sparking those larger universal human concerns in so few words?

I think I secretly have a novelist/playwright inside of me. I don’t know if I quite know how I get to those larger universal concerns in so few words, but I definitely value the work of other creators who manage to do more with less, like poets: Mark Bibbins, Angela Veronica Wong, Michael Dickman, Catherine Wagner, Fred Moten, Monica Youn, Dan Chiasson, Laura Sims, Joe Wenderoth, Simone Muench, Raul Zurita, Molly Brodak, Carlie Hoffman, and others, and to go just a bit further back, Plath, Berryman, O’Hara, Oppen, Genet and Beckett, not to mention classical Asian (Buddhist) poetry. It’s probably no surprise that these writers are some of my absolute favorites.

Beckett’s famously concise plays do a phenomenal job of world-building, even if those worlds are bare-bones they convey so much, and I’m in awe of that ability. I think one way he manages the job is by putting humor, irony, imagery, loss, idea, &c., in quick and close proximity to one another, all against the idea of absurdity, where a person’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning, or people as puppets controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. I definitely depend a great deal on imagery, in particular, to convey a lot with a few words in a world that often feels absurd. And imagery in succession can do so much to build worlds, and to enlarge context, especially when it’s in conversation with idea.

The second thing that comes to mind as far as sparking larger universal concerns are a broad bunch of poems I wrote in indirect response to reading The Letters of Samuel Beckett just after the end of a very long relationship. I found myself penning unconventional narrative or non-narrative poems in which the speaker is hard to pin to the author, and which gesture at themes and ideas rather than addressing them by way of the direct or directly symbolic rhetoric of the concrete, linear poem. Beckett’s own strange, visceral, darkly humorous writing about loss of various kinds sparked my thinking about loss, which is, of course, inseparable from desire.

Many of your poems have an almost mythic, fable qualities. From melding human and animals worlds to a sense of antiquity and timelessness, from “bringing flame / from the other shore” to “My shadow sleeps / with wolves.” What is it about these ancient themes that resonates with you and how do you weave them into contemporary poems?

I’m fascinated with the inner lives of animals, both real and imagined. This began, I think with encountering Ted Hughes’ best book, the innovative and unsettling Crow. “It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wrote Crow mostly between 1966 and 1969, after a barren period following the death of Sylvia Plath.” Crow gets up to all kinds of mischief. He is very much a trickster, and is also very often tricked by the world he inhabits and encounters. I think that vulnerability and hubris are so “human” and open up the possibility of a great deal of action by us, and a great deal that can happen to us. This state of affairs transcends time (period), allowing the fable-like or mythic to remain a strong thread in our contemporary work. Another example of this is Dan Chiasson’s collection, Natural History, where both anthropomorphized animals and Pliny the Elder work side by side.

The body, animal and human, is a huge source of engagement for me, and Merleau-Ponty has always been influential for that reason; that engagement is probably linked up with how I write the unsettled or outsider body into poems. Kafka imagined the multi-layered horror of the human waking to the body of an Ungeziefer, but imagine the horror of the “verminous insect” waking to the body of a human. A body at loss of definition. Merleau-Ponty, Rabelais and others, as a corrective to the philosophical history of finding consciousness to be the seat of knowledge, placed the body as the fundamental site of discerning or knowing the world, and insisted that the body and that which it perceives cannot be extricated from each other.

My sense is that the world is violent, though that’s relative, of course, and I don’t think of violence pejoratively. But whether it’s accidentally running over a raccoon, breaking up with a lover, integrating mutually enjoyable rough stuff into one’s sexual relationships, instigating a coup, giving birth, going to war, tearing out the evergreen shrub in front of your home, giving a patient stitches or your kid their insulin shot, &c., it’s everywhere, and more often than not it’s interesting and nuanced. The Greeks and Romans certainly found room for violence in their poems and plays. In any case, I do feel that (American) poetry too rarely reflects that kind of content. And, too often, when it is addressed, it is done so in a way that memorializes, sentimentalizes, or prettifies it.

Rabelais, Beckett, Elfriede Jelinek, Genet, Pinter, Pynchon, Kafka, Chaucer, Ellison, Jakov Lind, Ionesco, Sterne, Joyce—there is a compelling viscerality, an urgent grotesque, an engaging grittiness that isn’t stunt or shtick, but rather a more objective, and fuller, reflection of life. I think poets like Chiasson, Hughes in Crow, Catherine Wagner, Ikkyū, Sandra Simonds, Aase Berg, Berryman, Gro Dahl, Hamony Holiday, Phil Levine, Moten, D.A. Powell, and others work to speak to the violence in our lives, in the world outside of our own lives.

My own restrained and at times mythic voice is probably related to my sense—though, I’m thinking of this only after or outside of writing—that violence is not strange, or unusual, or inherently personal or dramatic. Alternatively, part of what is compelling about it, is that it can be both everyday and of magnitude. It seems difficult to do justice to the magnitude of something if you can’t address it with some objectivity and distance; otherwise you take something you care enough about to write about and simplify it, drain it of its subtlety and complexity.

In turn, the body is political, especially the oppressed body. It can be hard to write about politics without sounding preachy. In any case, holding a protest in your family room is a political act, but its effectiveness is suspect, to say the least. Writing poetry is a political act, but on a spectrum, and also within a matrix where context matters a great deal. The act of poetry in Zimbabwe is not the act of poetry in Finland. The family room protest is less politically effectual than the act of poetry, obviously, but much closer on the spectrum, to my mind, than, say, community organizing, or working for the ACLU. That’s not to say, by any means, that creative writing isn’t or can’t be politically impactful. That seems obvious, of course, but I feel like a lot of poets are defensive about the whole poetry/politics thing. No one wants to think that their life or work is effete. Of course, we also live in a culture where most poets, or very many, seem to think that teaching at the post-secondary level is the primary way one might spend one’s life as a writer. I think the art and the politics of our country would be greatly enriched if there were more poets who pursued work as therapists, gamblers, engineers, journalists, attorneys, stockbrokers, &c.

I feel political responsibilities as a person, regardless of being a poet. But to what? In college, I was a political science major as well as a creative writing major, so maybe political and social issues are more at the forefront of my mind than for others. I don’t know. I suppose I don’t think about who or what I’m “politically responsible” to. But class, race, gender, sexuality, the environment, power, immigration, geopolitics, &c. are the things I see in the news, books, films, and art that I engage with, and those issues find their way into my thinking and writing. And they would be of concern to me even if I weren’t a writer/poet.

I do think you can spend a life writing poems without being actively engaged by, and engaging with, politics, social issues. I don’t know how that’s possible. I’m sure many would argue that practically every poet, at some points, does take on such issues. I’m not saying you have to write agitprop—some of the worst poetry is concerned with political and social issues, because it reads as one-sided, polemical and pedantic. But Kearney, Oppen, Laura Sims, Brian Teare, Moten, John Yau, Phil Levine, Timothy Liu, Juliana Spahr, Catherine Wagner, Nathaniel Mackey, Jason Schneiderman, Sandra Simonds, Holiday, Fanny Howe, among others usually do a great job of tackling such issues. I’m simply saying that I don’t know how you could be thinking analytically about your experience of life and the world and not find yourself actively coming to terms with larger political and social issues. Of course, this engagement doesn’t have to take place in the arena of one’s writing, necessarily.

There’s often a sense of outsiderness to the speakers in your poems, especially in lines like “It is / the human that is alien” from your poem “Aubade.” Can you speak to this unique perspective?

My mind goes back to Jean Genet and Beckett (and Crow, the trickster), again, as far as writers who almost exclusively feature outsiders as central characters. Or Sam Shepard with a play like True West about sibling rivalry between one brother, a successful screenwriter, and another, a thief and drifter who is barely getting by. I’m really intrigued by that drifter. What’s he up to? That’s interesting to me. The underside of things. What we’re not told. Where we don’t fit in. The jobless, the oppressed, the under-educated. They alleys rather than the streets.

I’ve spoken/written about this elsewhere. But, I identified early on with both “barely getting by,” and being a class minority among my peer group. I grew up in a part of Louisville that was relatively run-down, had a low education rate and a substantial jobless/quasi-jobless population, but otherwise was very working class with the requisite trailer park up the street, and with some gangs. My neighbors belonged to one. And I’d see or hear about fights involving table legs, bike chains, pool balls in tube socks.

Some of that was racial violence, though most of it wasn’t. One of my aunts and her sons lived in some projects a few blocks from our house, and those were the most racially diverse places you could find in that area of town. It was also an area that attracted a lot of immigrants new to the States—Vietnamese, Laotians, then Central Americans (many escaping U.S. proxy wars: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, &c.), then people from the former Yugoslavia, then Sudan – you get the idea. It was more of a simmering to boiling pot than a melting pot, I guess. Walking home from the bus stop was often an “adventure.”

As I got older—by middle school (about 1989)—I was skateboarding and going to local (punk and hardcore) shows, two things that went hand in hand, and which were then very much not in the mainstream. And I was listening to a lot of hip hop: N.W.A., Eric B and Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, X Clan, Geto Boys. This was all crucial for me, at the time—I became so aware of social issues and politics through both genres of music. In addition to those rap artists I was listening to punk/hardcore bands like Born Against, Minor Threat, Big Black, Operation Ivy, Bad Brains—that spoke to sexual violence, U.S. intervention abroad, racism, the monotony of a certain kind of adult/domestic life, poverty, corporate exploitation of the workers and the environment, &c.

Anyway, the common theme throughout all I’ve said is, primarily, financial disadvantage – class outsiderness. You got low-income kids, with parents who are frustrated because they can’t pay the bills or afford their families the lives they wish they could, and that frustration gets taken out on their kids or is simply present for their kids to stew in; and because their parents are also working their asses off and/or are undereducated, and because their local schools blow (as is common in low-income areas), their kids are largely mentally unengaged and bored, and all of that frustration and anger is going to find an outlet somewhere: whether it’s through starting a band, finding a cause, dealing, moving to California to turn pro with a skateboard company, beating the crap out of someone, or becoming a poet.

The outsider also, in my mind, is connected to experimentalism; not that these poems of mine here are experimental. But I do think that in an effort to express oneself most fully, one may turn to experimenting with language. The poets who consistently do this are often outside the mainstream of (American) poetry, but they are gaining traction and attention, to my mind. Harmony Holiday, Douglas Kearney, Tyehimba Jess, and Fred Moten come to mind. It is probably no coincidence that each of these poets is working with issues of race; no coincidence because society does not seem to “get it,” so creators are pushed to find new ways of communication to try to get the point across. Further, being a minority, and an oppressed minority, means one is already outside the standard means of many things.

Lauren Berlant writes, “making a world for what doesn’t work changes the consequences of those failures in a way that produces new potential for relation within the structural space of the nonsovereign.” In other words, we experience encounters with otherness “that attain the stability of knowable relation only by way of an optimism that erases its negativity.” We encounter others, but can only do so to an extent (there is no intersubjectivity), and in doing so we encounter our own otherness – rupture and repairs, togetherness and separateness, and the possibility of coming to know ourselves in new and different ways by putting ourselves in positions of liminality, positions of potential rupture. If we don’t put ourselves in these positions of potential rupture, loss, &c., we learn little about ourselves, we remain static, as individuals, artists, and as a society.

Another line that seems to partially define your creative worldview is “These fragments, language, / my ruins.” Can you describe how language (which you’re inherently celebrating by writing these poems) can also be your (or our communal) ruin?

The written word is fluid rather than static and discernable, and for the most part, particular communications fade with time. Think of the endless number of authors no longer read. And again, words are an attempt at communication, which does not always succeed, or succeeds on a spectrum. Thus, language feels fragmentary, trying to avoid missed connections, always struggling to say it exactly right. Luckily, in poetry we are aided in our efforts to communicate by more tropes and tricks than in plain language/conversation. In any case, the success or failure isn’t just measured by the other, but within oneself.

I’m no deconstructionist, but another way to think of it is that, as Saussure suggested, language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Richard Rorty put it, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sensed observation, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form) ." As a consequence, meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs.

But part of the pleasure of poetry is the puzzle of how best to communicate given the tools at our disposal. Some poets, like Douglas Kearney, have gone beyond the usual, by implementing graphic poetry. See “Afrofuturism (Blanche says, “Meh”)” and “CAMH (On Sight).” Or Harmony Holiday who utilizes mixed media with language. We all have our different struggles with language, but they are usually more enjoyable than frustrating. That doesn’t mean the frustrating shouldn’t be addressed.

In these poems, the action seems to occur in many places at once, involving objects and events transpiring in different times and locations, as if in a permanent state of deja vu. Is this an intentional approach?

I think it’s largely subconscious. But I do think it’s a viable way of seeing the world, or recreating one’s experience of the world. As goes work that involves objects and events transpiring in different times and locations, I’m putting into order a book-length sequence of block poems entitled, Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire. It was initially spurred by C.D. Wright’s last book of prose/poetry—The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All—that came out right before her untimely death. The sequence’s poems speak to the intersection of culture, social justice (race, class, &c.), ways of seeing, the American and Western European prison industrial complexes, the present and its precursors, lived environments and ruins, immigration and the “native,” as well as the culture of security and terrorism, &c.

What role publishing Action, Spectacle plays in your life as a writer and a human being?

It’s a real joy to publish, Action, Spectacle. We publish from general submissions, but we also have about ten or so guest editors per issue who solicit work directly from artists and writers they choose themselves. It’s a mystery to me what we’ll receive, but it’s always fun getting to see the creators/work that other creators value.

Almost every poem in this group is marked as being after xxx. Can you talk about the way you explore or utilize the referenced poets’ work in your own? Is this a planned project or just something that happens from time to time as you read? What’s the right balance, for you, between generating independent language/ideas and reacting to preexisting writing?

This is something that happens from time to time as I read, and the balance varies from poem to poem. I seem to have worked in bricolage for some time now. I suppose it’s fitting, given how much I value the work of artists like Schwitters and Rauschenberg. I’m not sure how I keep the voice unified; I seem to assimilate the language pretty thoroughly, because honestly it doesn’t occur to me “how” to utilize those other texts (using the term broadly) in my own. They tend to stick with me long before I try to write with them; that may have something to do with that assimilation at the time of writing.

I’m actually just finishing up work on a book-length site-specific poem that utilizes a travel article from the New York Times: “36 Hours in _____” series as its template, over which is written a confusion of that article’s geographical context with an alternative geo-political context. There is a central character/speaker, but overall the poem is spoken in five different registers.  Within the poem, concepts and ideas function with as much import as traditional aesthetic and content concerns.

In any case, Simone Muench’s collection, Wolf Centos, played a huge role in writing these poems. They borrow heavily from her centos that themselves, as centos, are wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors. My poems featured here include my own language and that of others. And because I borrow from Muench’s centos, I’m borrowing in actuality from a huge number of authors, so many so that I can’t track them all.

I don’t tend to write if I’m not consuming film/theatre, music, or writing. Though, I rarely write in reaction to poetry, so writing in reaction to Muench is a bit of a one off. Reading poetry is enormously important to me, in general, and to my thinking about what’s happened and is happening out in the world (of poetry) and what might happen in my own poetry. But poetry isn’t what I usually go to if I need a catalyst for writing because when I go to write with others’ poetry in mind, I find I can only think of the particular work I’ve just read, in the particular form in which it appeared. It’s usually fiction, nonfiction, or film that gets me writing. Contemporary and late-modern literary prose in translation is massively important to my writing and thinking, including Jakov Lind, Jean Genet, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Gaston Bachelard, Camilo José Cela, Walter Benjamin, Georgi Gospodinov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Svetlana Alexievich, &c. Open Letter, Dalkey Archive, New Directions, New York Review of Books Press, Yale University Press, Archipelago Books, and Melville House are some very good presses for modern and contemporary fiction in translation. And film from people like Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Loach, Goddard, Buñuel, Almodóvar, Antonioni, Cassavetes, have been invaluable to my writing, both the content and the form of it.

The way that film moves is extremely important to me: not just its manner of telling a story, with its heightened ability to create successful gaps and make leaps, but also its ability to create a substantive, complex atmosphere, where atmosphere might stand in—for story, for dialogue, etc. These films are also so important to me for the dialogue they are able to get away with because the dialogue is complimented by music, imagery, movement, and an imposed pace, dialogue which might not carry so well in a medium as naked, or as wanting in plasticity, as poetry or prose often is.