An Interview With Christian Hawkey (+3 poems)
Christian Hawkey’s two collections of poetry, The Book Of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004) and Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007), are wonderful examples of, as Charles Simic said generally about poetry, a place where the “I” of the poet, by the kind of visionary alchemy, becomes a mirror for all of us. The first time I finished reading The Book Of Funnels and had to return to a world of objects that purported to claim meaning, there was a sense of emptiness as though his poems siphoned the colors of the world. When this sense wore off and things appeared full again, I felt the need to stare at a garden hose, see if it would do something. It did do something, to be sure, though all the while it lay coiled and reposed as garden hoses are wont to do. This could also be said about Christian Hawkey’s poetry in no uncertain terms of various interpretations.
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NOTNOSTRUMS: In Citizen Of you write, “Is a dead language a body that has consumed itself to the point of having no point? Is a dead language an empty stomach growling? Is a dead language capable of speaking beyond its own grave, late at night, when a low moon drifts through the banyan roots and a child wakes, unable to wake, and begins whispering for the sake of whispering, for the sake of keeping time with his pulse?” How do you understand emotion in respect to the writing process?
CHRISTIAN HAWKEY: Given the passage you quoted I think your question is surprising. There’s a distance between the passage you quoted and the notion of emotion. What strikes me immediately is the relationship between the body and language, which that passage circles around. We often think of emotions and emotionality in relationship to feelings, or feelings that are somehow connected to a specific instance of autobiography. For me, the presence of emotion in an utterance is a another way of extending the body into the poem. I see the body as a site not only of analytical or conceptual discourses, but also emotional discourses, threads, nodes, historically felt ideas, perceptions. I also like to think of individual and collective bodies, multiple bodies, groups of bodies. Crowds have their own emotional reality, for example. Large-scale historical events connect bodies in specific, often troubling ways. When I sit at a computer I have one body. When I (attempt) to dance I have another. When I marched with 400,000 people down 1st Avene on February 15th, 2003—jostling up against strangers, feeling an anti-war chant unfold like a wave down the avenue—I had yet another. Each position or setting is connected to specific emotional responses, responses that are complex, interconnected, and consciously or unconsciously stored in the body. Each informs, in the lexicon of dance, one’s phrasing. One’s animal phrasing.
NN: Does emotion carry more or less weight than other literary components?
CH: No. It’s just part of the field. I try to allow for as many different modes of perception as possible, and to include them in a way that’s non-hierarchical, that doesn’t privilege a humorous mode—for example—over an analytic mode. This seems important to me, if only to create a body/poem that is as complicated and alive as it can be, that is true to itself and true to its aliveness. O’Hara’s pants are always tight, but his shirt is often untucked, and wide open.
NN: Does the term organic have any place in poetry today?
CH: I’ve been thinking about this term partly because I’ve been looking at a lot of 20th concrete or visual poetry. It’s a tradition, as Rosemarie Waldrop points out, which resists the Romantic idea that there is an organic relationship between form and content—where the content of a work generates its own structure; instead, it argues that structure itself is content. It represents itself. It interrogates this representation. It’s not using words to express something else. It’s looking—often literally—at the structure of words as material, formal expressions. I like this. I like it when poems do this.
NN: Does organic apply more to product or more to process?
CH: I think it’s both. Language is an organic process in the best sense, i.e. something deeply human. However the term “organic” often implies an ease of referentiality that is “natural,” innate, and therefore unexamined. We know language is more complicated than this, that it’s a construct, and that it’s constructed along multiples axis—semiotic, historical, cultural (to name a few). When I moved into this Brooklyn apartment three years ago I placed an old Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (9th edition) on a slab of stone in the backyard, and opened it to the word “language.” It’s been lying there for 4, 412 days, decaying. I photograph it once a month to document this process. The tension between organicity—in this case, decaying matter (which falls apart in time) and a constructed system of representation is what interests me. After I year I noticed—and documented—a squirrel in my backyard hopping up onto the dictionary, tearing off words, stuffing them into his mouth, and carrying the words up into a large catalpa tree, where he stashes the words in small nooks and cracks in the bark. He’s saving, of course, nesting material, but I also like to think of him as my Editor. Our Editor. He’s editing our language. And he’s also our Recycler. He’s returning the tree to itself.
NN: Does organic have an antithesis?
CH: There’s a interesting German word: naturidentisch. It’s essentially an adjective. Its literal translation, as you might guess, would be “nature identical,” but it translates more broadly as “naturally artificial flavoring” and it’s used to describe the ingredients in soft drinks, or food. It denotes a type of flavoring identical to natural flavors, but which is manufactured synthetically. Perhaps the process of engineering a naturidentisch, non-organic flavor is fundamentally an organic process, in the same way that I think the process of allowing poems to construct themselves is also organic. What is organic for me is the desire to make something, to play, even if this means playfully tearing something apart. However, rather than constructing a finished, consumable product, I think good poems invite themselves (and perhaps a reader) into the process of their own making, into the process of their own meaning-making. In such a space, distinctions between process and product, organic and artificial, are troubled, if not dissolved. In such a space, we prevent language from becoming ossified; we guard our ability to feel and think and see.
NN: In that case can there ever be a finished poem?
CH: I like poems that allow the dream to continue for as long as possible.
NN: Have you ever rewritten a poem that’s already been published?
CH: No. I’ve only regretted publishing the poem.
NN: Can you take me through the political motivations of some of your poems in Citizen Of.
CH: We write poems and we read poems in order to stay alive and to pay attention, to intensely pay attention to the world and how we represent it, how it’s represented to us. What was important for me in writing the book was to maintain a level of attentiveness to every aspect of my life, including my awareness of current political circumstances, and at the same time to create poems that weren’t a commentary on this attentiveness, or a didactic response to it, but actually a performance of what it means to pay attention. And in assembling the book I simply let such poems coexist along with other poems, poems that are paying attention to other things, and in different ways. I wanted, again, multiplicity. I wanted to make some noise.
NN: In some of your poems, especially those in The Book Of Funnels, I get a feeling of, for lack of a better word, miniaturization. For instance, “Out of boredom searching my face I found a vein, and searching the vein I found a scar, smooth as slate, and searching the scar I found a name, an old name—there were serifs—the name of a city I’d forgotten, which I whispered…” Is miniaturization even the right word?
CH: It is a right word, but there are others. One experiences a tactile pleasure when one’s perception becomes miniaturized, and when in the very next line it is yanked back and widened out into the macro. Such extreme perceptual shifts make my brain feel more awake. More alive. There are some Emily Dickinson poems that could, if read aloud in a graveyard, raise the dead. I was also just reading some minimalist poems by Aram Saroyan. In one, if I remember correctly, he writes the word “ocean,” and then underneath it, “forest,” then he draws a line below the two words and puts a plus sign to the left of the word forest. Visually the poem inhabits the structure of arithmetic: it invites addition, signification. And under the line, adding these two words together, he comes up with the word “horses.” So:
ocean
+ forest
horses.
The poem pushes our perception in the direction of a delicious headache. Here’s another example written by one of my students:
black
+ sauce
stars
NN: What about the absurdity of it?
Sure. It is absurd, but also sublime, in that the absurd can often activate complicated ways of meaning (rather than erasing it). I’m simply drawn toward these extremes, and toward any thinking or art making that pushes at boundaries and destabilizes normal relational perception.
NN: Is this bridging of the continuum between the micro and macro a device? If so, what is device and are there limitations to the idea of literary device?
CH: I’ve never isolated ways of thinking and ways of speaking and ways of making meaning and ways of subverting meaning with a world like “device.” For me, poems are one way to continually search for the experience of these relations we’ve been discussing. The minute I repeat a perceptual and/or linguistic experience to such a degree that it no longer feels alive is the moment when it starts to feel something like a device. I let it die off, and push beyond it. Sometimes it doesn’t die and you have to actively own it—kill it, or at least attempt to. For example, if I notice over a series of poems that I’m repeating a word, or image, I address that word, that image—write a poem using only that word or image.
NN: Some might say one person’s bag of tricks is another person’s style or voice, and within that bag of tricks is a world of infinite possibility.
CH: Words like device and bag of tricks strike me as unhelpful. Both compartmentalize a complicated process—one that involves, as you said, a world of infinite possibility. How do you define style?
NN: Shit, I don’t know. Maybe a style is what emerges from one’s process, how one undertakes and undergoes writing—how one experiences the process. The style is inherent in the process and emerges as a product.
CH: Another simple way of thinking about style is this: it’s simply the record of someone actively paying attention to something over time. I like that definition because it moves away from questions of originality. It moves away from comparative questions of one author being stylistically original or not original. It foregrounds both process and the importance of paying attention to something over time (accrual, accretion). And I like to think of style as something owned by the poems, not the authors of poems. At the end of Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he deploys this great phrase: “distracted attentiveness.” With these words together in a phrase we can think about what it means to be alive: constantly bombarded by multiple distractions, i.e. videos, advertisements, pop-up ads, ads on the sides of buses, ads at bus stops, written in the sky, written on people’s foreheads… This sense of distractedness can be overwhelming. But at the same time one can also pay attention to this distractedness. To do that continually over time is how a given style is demarcated. If you’re passively distracted, then you’re a victim. But if you’re actively attentive to distractedness, then you can claim a certain amount of resistance and ownership.
NN: In a dialogue I read between you and a blogger (kickingwind.com) you wrote in regard to seeing your name printed on the cover of The Book of Funnels, “The name on the cover could have been anyone's name; I barely recognized my own, as my own, which made me think of our names as objects that, once copied & reproduced within a given cultural space (the cover of a book, a space commanding both authority & authenticity), dissolve into empty, weirdly meaningless signs.” Does this idea have anything to do with the many and absurd pronouns you employ in your poems? For instance, in “Up Here in the Rafters Everything is Clear” from Funnels you have the “Keeper of a Crooked Nose… Spring Rain…Goat Over the Hill… Something Died in There… the Student of the Horseshoe Crab.”
CH: One of the things I learned from Ashbery’s work is this: a poem in which multiple pronouns occur, sometimes totally unannounced or without any logical relation, gives one the feeling of a much more rich and textured surface. That’s the first thing. I also love the way so many of the different pronouns in his poems are often attached to different voices. I try to think along similar lines, but I’m also interested in the way a subject or pronoun can be positioned in a poem and how that positioning is a site of subjectivity or perception. Rather than having one poem governed by one subjectivity or one perception or one voice—and this is more true of Citizen Of—I like thinking of poems as having multiple subjectivities both between poems and in poems themselves, and having each of those subjectivities unfolding their own particular perceptions at the same time. So you’re moving back and forth between the micro and the macro and you’re moving back and forth between units of perception. It’s a dance. It’s another way of feeling as alive as possible, and it also is true to my own experience of what it means to be alive.
NN: In a review online someone wrote you “[have] the perfect hipster sense of language.” Do you identify yourself with, for lack of a better term, the postmodern hipster?
CH: I have no idea! What strikes me is that phrase: sense of language. My sense of language is that language examines the sense of language. And save for sideburns, it has no sideburns.
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He runs as if he were on fire, as if his ass
were on fire, as if he actually had an ass
to run with, which he doesn’t, which is why
in truth he crawls, speed crawls, like a
crazed infant, an infant moving at such speeds
those observing him imagine him to be
an animal, on all fours, breaking into a gallop
as if he were being whipped, as if someone were
riding him, another infant perhaps, a smaller one,
but infinitely more intelligent, one with a
fake eye patch, leather jodhpurs, an AC/DC
t-shirt, a whip in one hand, spear in the other
which, at the last moment, rising up, screaming,
he hurls into the anus of an airplane.
~~~~~~~~~~~
River-water, hallowed into fonts. An
airborne noise proliferates. The river
moves, the river is moving, the lettered
skin of it. It moves given a gift. Given
a red gift. Given a red gift given absence:
a thought, cross-sectioned, go ahead, circle it,
altho a river in the form of a circle
is not a river but a moat. No I sometimes feel
I or my body or a diagram of any body
unfolding a hand or a limb or a piece of chest
into drawbridges, lowering, petal by petal
into our, our flower, the space
left behind once everyone extended
an airborne noise, or just born air.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Never unalone inside a body breathing.
“ “ “ “ “ politic.
“ “ “ “ “ electric.
“ “ “ “ “ speaking.
“ “ “ “ “ dying.
“ “ “ “ “ ’s texts.
“ “ outside “ “ experiment.
“ “ “ “ “ laughing.
“ “ “ “ “ ’s perspective.
“ “ “ the “ worn.
“ “ “ any “ ’s perspective.
“ alone “ “ “ unborn.
“ “ “ “ “ ’s grief.
“ “ beside “ “ ’s form
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Review of Citizen Of at Octupus Magazine
Buy Citizen Of and The Book Of Funnels at Wave Books