This was originally published on the Conversant, but the site appears to be down, so I pasted it here:
(em)bodied bliss (Moria Books) by Marthe Reed
Megan Burns:
As a starting point, I think of several things while sitting
down with (em)bodied bliss this
morning outside the coffee shop on what’s shaping up to be a hot New Orleans day: one, how we seem to
have been at war or going to war all my children’s lives and, two, how over the
weekend a one year and an eleven year old died in shootings on the streets of
New Orleans. I think a lot about how violence infects us, how its presence shapes
our every day even when we believe we escape it; and I wonder about our
complicity and what it means. I think about how violence kills imagination.
The first poem in your book is titled “this doesn’t exist”
and I think maybe we can start there. What is invisible? What do we know and
not know or believe to know? And how does this reflect in our every day lives
and how is this part of our politics as a nation, as a society? “Resistance
amid the rough chatter of definition” (p 7).
How does the clear boundary of the poem shape our ability to define
terror: “our tongues are tied” (10) ? And how do we reconcile two worlds, one
where there is torture and unspeakable acts and one where we wake in the
morning amid the blues and yellows of the day? “language translates into
silence/ babel (gate of god) / enters by means of/ a language of flowers
(12-13). I see these motions in these poems, can you talk a bit about how you
got there? And how you feel these opening poems in the book begin to create a
landscape for talking about these ideas?
Marthe Reed:
When Julia
Kristeva writes, “what is abject…the
jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning
collapses,” she describes the conditions for which such violence is not
merely likely but inescapable. In the abjection of abandonment and erasure, the
functional results of poverty and racism, life has no meaning. The deaths you
describe deaths are the ad absurdum consequence of a hyper-capitalist ethos
where product and profit are sources of value. Ignoring suffering while
actively insuring the means of violence, our culture has implicitly asserted
that individual lives are meaningless, tokens in the massive production, sales,
and consumption of weapons insuring the wealth of their manufacturers and the
semblance of liberty (read: power) for those wielding guns. The deaths in New
Orleans—or Chicago or Philadelphia or Detroit—are as culturally meaningless
(valueless) as the bodies of the tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, the
victims of “targeted” drone assassinations, or the lives of U.S. service men
and women once released from their military service. Invisible and abject.
The composition of (em)bodied bliss became for me a means of grappling
with my own ignorance and unacknowledged complicity in such systems, in
particular the Bush administration's use of torture, black sites, and
extraordinary rendition to address terrorism targeting the U.S. after 9/11, and
the sustained detention said captives, even now five years into Obama's
administration. Still people are kept out-of-country, out of sight, buried
alive, force-fed when they protest their conditions, in effect tortured.
Torture coupled to indefinite detention has resulted in profound despair,
suicides and attempted suicides by prisoners who, outside of the protections of
both law and compassion, have been rendered invisible, their lives meaningless.
When the
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal were having their way, where was I? What
was I doing? Angry about the endless wars, the perverse "prosecution"
of revenge against Saddam Hussein as a means of procuring and securing access
to Iraq's oil reserves and fattening the corporate interests of American
companies such as Halliburton, and blind-sided by the revelations
of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere by proxy. I
had stubbornly held to some notion of honor, of "founding principles"
(written by wealthy, white, slave-procuring and -owning men -- what can
"principles" possibly mean in such a case? Good intentions? It hardly
seems possible).
In those years,
like most people, I was caught up in my own life: an international move from
Australia to the Deep South, a new job teaching nine courses a year, mostly
composition, writing a dissertation, a child dropping out of school at 13,
another child nearly as miserable at all the transitions. I largely tuned the
wider world out, listened inward to family dynamics, personal ambitions, the
day-to-day getting through. What we all do, ho we fail to attend, to listen. To
question.
I also delighted
in the new environs I found myself in. I traveled, wrote, read poetry. Gave
myself over to wonder when I could. In the aftermath of revelation, I could not
reconcile such delight, such self-seeking pleasure with the unfathomable
traumas of torture, the explicit policy of my country: its lawyers writing
briefs justifying rendition, water-boarding, humiliation, starvation,
"stress positions," isolation, loud noise 24 hours a day for days on
end -- systematic violence applied in the name of "security". Then
the official reactions to revelation, reasons, justifications, assertions,
innuendo. The slow pulling back of the curtain. Politicians, policy
wonks, media coverage: amplifying the noise to signal ratio. The canceling
power of white-noise.
Like nearly
everyone, I was horrified. And complicit. I had not paid attention, I had not questioned.
I had tied my tongue. My ignorance was, of course, thoroughly intended by the
white-noise generators, a means of facilitating violence. But I did not suspect
either. As I grappled with these revelations and my feelings, I turned to
language to untie the knot of violence and complicity, of silence. Peeling away
the layers of deception and lies, to address the way language itself was a tool
in such violence.
In the poems, I
juxtapose two parallel realities, known and unknown, delight and horror,
mundane and monstrous, in reconstructing the unfathomable perversion, via
"national security" and "national interest," of what we
call with pride our "founding principles." Justice, "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Because if "we hold these
truths to be self-evident," then these rights must fundamentally belong to
ALL people, not just those who have not yet had the eye of the powerful turned
upon them in malevolence. (Now my government is spying on anyone, everyone, me.
Listening in. What do we value?)
"the rough
chatter of definition" is the work of reconstructing a past that has been
carefully hidden, secured, justified. An archeological excavation of language,
of words whose meanings have been reconfigured to perverse inanities. Torture
became "exceptional techniques" and extraordinary means: "harsh
interrogation practices" is infinitely more palatable than
"inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do
or say something, or for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain."
As these techniques were applied to
"terror suspects"—absolutely other, radically excluded—how expedient
that they remain nameless and faceless, in no way akin to me or mine.
I read the memos
of Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the investigative reports of prisoner abuse by the New
York Times and Amnesty International, official reports on deaths while in
custody, the history of the tortures employed, reports on the physical and
psychological consequences of torture. I directly integrated the language I
found in these “texts” into the poems, refusing to look away. I juxtaposed
Bybee's language with that of the tortured. I stitched this language and these
poems into a patchwork "quilt," alternating the new poems with poems
I had written during the period in which torture was being actively pursued by
our government, while I blithely "kept faith." Poems of place(s),
notions of the sacred, a "book of my days" plays out against the
language of a new Inquisition: blood gushed out of his nose and mouth
as if from a faucet. The poems for me became a way to hold both realities
at once, to return their contemporaneity to them. What I knew, or thought
I knew. What I did not begin to suspect.
Megan:
I get that sense
exactly from the poems as you say: "The poems for me became a way to hold
both realities at once, to return their contemporaneity to them. What
I knew, or thought I knew. What I did not begin to suspect."
Elaine Scarry in
"The Body in Pain" opens up her chapter on torture by saying:
"Nowhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so
visible as in torture." She then goes on to talk about the
"illusion" of torture's purpose, to extract knowledge again via
language. And how, "Intense pain is world-destroying" and how all
"made possible by language ceases to exist." I wonder how
poetry can carry these ideas. How did you decide what to give your reader as
far as knowledge/ images in the poems when describing these events? And what
are your thoughts on how language can be used in these two settings:
"poetry" and "torture." Is there a way that poetry
does more than just bear witness?
Marthe:
The compassion of
human-to-human connection, afforded by language, is obliterated by torture, by
the infliction of extreme suffering. Without compassion, without empathy we
become isolated from one another, lose integrity and coherence, are reduced to
an idea: "terrorist" and "torturer", "suspect"
and "infidel". A gut reaction whose expression is language but the
content of which is reductive, world-obliterating, violently utilitarian. One
kind of "thing" does "something" to another kind of
"thing" because that first "thing" "deserves" it.
What language, what art must do in the face of such erasure is to return
compassion to language. Torture can only be carried out in secrecy, or via
propagandist manipulation: "bad guys" are causing "us" to
suffer; "they" should suffer because "we" have. But there can
be no meaningful distinction between “we” and “they”: stuck in the torture
chamber together, only chance settling which role one occupies. Torture seals
us in isolation, destroying the possibility of (self-)recognition.
When the
President's lawyers write, "The President enjoys complete
discretion..." the perversion of syntax separates us, isolates each of us
into discrete cells of our own. "Anyone" could be a
"threat." What does it mean to say the President "enjoys"
"complete discretion", an inadvertent and insidious suggestion of the
pleasure implicit in torture and absolute power (any action then taken is, by
nature, justified). By inserting this language into the poem, the implicit is
made explicit. "appropriate and consistent with military necessity"? Necessity
asserts a totalizing authority: as organisms need energy for
life, the military needs...what? Information? Does it matter how that
information is obtained and that the means of acquisition contaminate the
information? Torture does not work because it destroys the possibility of
trust: if pain is inevitable then the only recourse is to refuse and die or say
what is expected. Employing a fatally flawed practice reconfigures its purpose:
"military necessity" is then understood to be a euphemism for
"hurting those who hurt us." Juxtaposing the bland, authoritative
language of policy against the testimony of the tortured and/or the pleasure of
being—which torture strips away—challenges the simple binary of "us" versus
"them", "good guys" versus "bad guys," makes
immediate the suffering of others: while
I was enjoying a coffee on a terrace overlooking Lago Maggiore, "A
thick plastic collar [was] placed around my neck so that it could then be held
at two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against a
wall." I/me, my coffee/my neck.
Megan: Thinking
about this connection with language, I would like to turn to the poets who
appear throughout the book, their words and their connections to your writing.
Looking at "Three: auto(auto)biography" which is
"for Lyn Heijinian and Leslie Scalapino" I was reminded of your work
with Proust. Could you talk about their influence in your writing especially in
regards to self and memory? Following that poem are three poems entitled
"Lilith" which all have quotes from Mina Loy, one of my favorite
poets; do you recall the first time you read her? And then Keith Waldrop
provides a quote for the poem following these titled "Lost Things"
and he also provides a quote to the final poem in the book "(em)bodied
bliss." There are more quotes and poets appearing throughout, but could
you talk about the use of others' language in your own shaping of these pieces.
Marthe: I do turn
to other poets as points of entry into writing, particularly when a piece of
writing is frustrating or resisting me, or when my reading of other's work
calls out to the writing I am working on. Sight, among other things, is
about relationship and it was a particular problem of relationship to place
with which I was grappling, my dis-location from place: remembering Australia,
where I had lived for seven years, from the distance of both my otherness with
respect to it and from the vantage of a new place (south Louisiana). Similarly
Proust's memoir and my reworking of it, like this particular poem from (em)bodied
bliss, actively constructs, refashions, memory and self. Performs a
distillation and a permutation. Displacement and dislocation, whether in time
or place or within one's shifting sense of identity, seems a constant in my
life, and writing functions as a primary means of inhabiting and working
through it. The longest time I have spent in a place as an adult has been in
Lafayette, eleven years. Always on the move and often outsider to the local
culture, I have had to engage in an active practice of building relationship to
place -- nesting in by means of learning about the geology, landscape, history,
politics, and culture of these places. Wanting to understand how it is this
place has come to be what it is, and then writing my way into/through/across
those histories as a means of forging a relationship that is not merely a job
and a house in the suburbs.
Loy is also an
important poet for me, her virtuosic play with language and unrelenting
resistance to tyranny. A foremother, much as Keith is something of a
forefather: he was my MFA advisor at Brown. He enters the work because at the
time of the composition of the torture poems, I was simultaneously immersed in
reading his work and finding resonances between it and my project, another form
of suffering and loss. The use of citations in the book is an artifact of my
reading and an intentional effort to bring a wider frame of reference into the
writing, so that it becomes not only my response but, in effect, a kind of
choral/communal articulation of resistance. Perhaps it is for me a practice
akin to a gathering of the ancestors at the onset of a rite.
Sound and Basin (Lavender Ink) by Megan Burns
Marthe:
I have been
reading Sound and Basin and find a
correspondence not only in your language of place -- "a tableau in golds:
yellowed newspaper clippings, the sunflowers of St. Bernard, dear Eros of no
land, in the antecedent of the day, agony of remembered winds" -- but as
well in the need to make the unseen seen, to bring into the light the
abandoned/hidden/ignored, in your case the devolution of New Orleans, beloved
city, orphan of innumerable catastrophes. Composed in four sections, Sound and Basin begins with
an excavation of the aftermath of Katrina, the need to "unhook
your tongue" and speak when all around you "Everyone is tying on
their shrouds" -- dancing at the end times, while the city "burns." Finding
a way to write against weariness, collapse, the seemingly unending catalog
of griefs, to resist silence or inchoate anger. Another hurricane,
another oil "spill", another epidemic of gun violence, another war,
another turning away.
a city talks and
talks to no one
a list of
complaints]
clears
cleaves
stationed at
equal intervals
a bit/ bite/
bitter tongue (49)
Could you start
by addressing living and writing in New Orleans, how the city comes into
the writing, how the writing takes form from the city? How writing the
political/communal is carried into the poetry and how the language holds
against the weight of history and loss?
Megan:
I've been avoiding answering this. It's always a double
edged sword when I start talking about New Orleans. I love this city so
intensely and feel my very self is defined by my relation to it. And in the
same breadth, I have so many issues with the neglect of its people and the
ongoing gun violence and racial/ class separations that go hand in hand with that
violence. I can't talk about writing about New Orleans without talking about
Katrina, and that's another subject that still overwhelms me. I think I'll say
this about the city; the people who went through Katrina had the unique
experience of wholly losing not only their homes and possessions and in
terrible instances, family members and friends; but they also suffered this
complete loss of place. They lost their past and their memories that are rooted
in landmarks and buildings. They experienced for a time an almost complete loss
of an entire region and way of life that was in many cases all they ever
knew.
I think that marks us, that knowledge that everything you
hold as a part of your days and waking hours could be wiped clean. And for me,
the Deepwater Horizon disaster was like reliving Katrina but no longer confined
to a city, but now contaminating the waters that we depend on to survive. I
felt like it was possible that all could be wiped clean. My third child
was born in early 2010, and I remember breastfeeding her and watching the oil
gush into our oceans. I wrote to the poet Akilah Oliver telling her that when I
read my four year old a book about pelicans, he responded, "covered in
oil" and I felt helpless in the face of that reality. I felt like language
was not enough. Akilah said: "I don't know about how we will tell of the
fracturing to ourselves, to our children, but I do think there must be another
narrative in the cracks that is worth telling.
I know that sounds so theoretical, and I am trying out in my own life,
relationships, both micro and macro, how to make those gaps whole places that
can hold both the lamentation of these times (of my heart) and the possibility
of becoming (as the philosophers like to say).
BP has so much slipped out of the news here in the states (still central
news in Europe, or parts of it, curiously enough). I hate politics, the politics of silence and
fear, but for me, so much of my own despair (when it rears its ugly head), is
around what seems to be a split between the political and the heart. & what about Obama? I'm so disappointed in this administration -
they are cowards, business as usual.
I think we are our hope, the artists and writers, the brave
ones and fools, the mothers and awake ones.
“Hold your children tight, and for now, yes, I think we have
to keep trying to describe this, the New Orleans, the BPs, the holes in the
world. "
So, I am doing what she told me to do. I am writing about
the holes in the world. For me, that starts here in the city, here in the
landscape that we are threatening with extinction and here in the home where we
hold our children. They are all intertwined for me. I don't know if the
language holds, but we hold against the silence of not saying it, of not simply
allowing things to pass without our knowledge. I'm particularly interested in
specifics, in naming because I believe we cannot be blind to what we know in
particulars, to what we recognize in detail. So, it is not a body of water or a
bird or a way of life, it is a very specific name and detail applied to each
instance. We must be aware and make note of it before we lose it forever.
Marthe:
In the poem "Hewn," the first in the section "Bone,"
you write: "a city complacent in its loom" (38), "this is the
starving cradle" (38), "there is no natural fall / its been rehearsed
/ stalled and gaining momentum" (41) and later, in the final poem of the
section:
flesh to bone to morning wake
bury this tender plot
bone on bone circle a rite:
inside this
little calcified artifact: (writ hope)
This section reads as a dark elegy for a lost city, a
"reading of the bones" of the already dead. Is this New Orleans now
for you? Or the inevitable end of a city that enters the national consciousness
only in the midst of ecstasy (Mardi Gras) or catastrophe? Could you talk about
the figure of the bone that structures this section of the book?
Megan:
Shortly after returning to New Orleans after Katrina, I
became interested in the infrastructure and the metaphorical anatomy of the city.
It's an interesting situation to be able to quite literally see the break down
of a city and its struggle to pull back together; I became obsessed with ideas
of what makes a city as far as the collective memory of its people combined
with the realistic needs of being able to support the modern conveniences
afforded cities such as roads, police protection, hospitals, sewage &
garbage as well as mail systems. All of these conveniences that we take for
granted are part of what makes a city and yet, and maybe especially, in a city
like New Orleans, there is an idea of what the city is: its music, its food,
its celebrations, its culture and history that live in the locals. I began to
correspond poetry to this idea of words providing a type of infrastructure to
language, so they, in a sense, are the anatomy. And a fleshing out of
these bones occurs in the ordering of the poem and a collective sense and
consciousness emerges in the communion of language. "Hewn" is a type
of elegy that recognizes in this millennium an emergence of disasters that
results from long periods of neglect and destruction wrought on this planet. I
end the section "Bone" with the poem "Scapula" that does
recognize the circular nature of life and death, destruction and renewal, and
within the bone, finds the "calcified artifact: (writ hope)." Bones
are like our world; we forget to care for them until disease or damage occurs
then we realize the whole system depends on this internal structure. Anatomy is
intriguing to me because within endless variety there is this somewhat
consistent structure that binds us, and I think language provides this same
infrastructure, so that meaning emerges from endless variety but the internal
system of sound and syllabics remains contained. I've heard these limits of
language called "failures" but we wouldn't call the human skeleton
system a failure because it can't fly; we simply recognize what it is intended
to do. In the same way, language does not fail, it does what it is intended to
do. It remains up to us to close the gap between the structure and our
desires.
Marthe:
In the third section of Sound and Basin, a distinct
formal pattern manifests, a pattern of frequent gaps in the lines, most
prominently in the five "Anniversary" poems. Interruptions, pauses. A
struggling for breath or words? The difficulty of speaking about what happened.
These are poems written in the aftermath of the BP blowout in the Gulf.
"Anniversary 1:3" takes me back to your earlier mention of the birth
of your third child at this time and reading to your four year old son.
source to species: song
a little soul worth
new day
for baby eyes discovery
world slips
open a chink luminous
to be a people of water not a
choice a stain
boot heels of modern sinner
weightless
These lines are not only puncuated with gaps, they are also
double-spaced, heightening the openness of the page, creating a ragged texture
on the page much like the coastal wetlands where they are criss-crossed with
oil-field channels and the encroaching salt destroys the roots of the anchoring
grasses. Could you talk about the ways you have opened up the line and the page
in these poems and their relation to this section of the book?
Megan:
I like how you compare the space of the poem to the coastal
wetlands; it reminds me of your work with images and words in regards to the
geography here as well. I don't think I was mimicking the landscape as much as
allowing for more pause in the line and a contemplative breath in between the
words. The "Anniversary" poems of which there are several were all
written on the one year anniversary of the spill, and in a way they too are an
elegy to the lives lost and the destruction that occurred. I think that
sometimes the sentence holds too much together, and in the face of some things,
it is only words or even syllables that emerge to really capture the trauma.
I'm thinking of mourning and the rituals of sound regarding loss, sounds that
begin to take on a physical presence in our world if we consider the
"Wailing Wall." And so, too, the poem is a physical presence that
attempts to capture the stunned realization of what has happened. And narrative
and cohesiveness become less important while rhythm and syllabics shore up our
sense of what is happening in the space of the poem. I actually always find it
hard to read these poems out loud because the spacing is unnatural and requires
too much pause, and so the actual voicing of these poems becomes a space of
discomfort not only in subject but in how the poem is asked to be read; it
forces the speaker or reader out of a normal rhythm of reading.
Marthe:
We both grapple with psychic and social dislocations that
result in paralyzing alienation of the felt/embodied/desired and the enacted/imposed/effected:
Kristeva’s “radically excluded” “jettisoned object,” whether a city and its
people, or the prisoners of Guantanamo, or the material ground of our being,
the environmental imperatives that make life possible. Seeking through poetry
and poetic language, asserting again and again, the inescapable obligation of compassion.
“out of the normal rhythm” of reading—and
thinking. Language (poetry) can afford modes of re-encounter and
reconciliation, if we, writers and readers alike, let it.
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