Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Interview with Schloss-Post

Clara Herrmann of Schloss-Post (Akademie Schloss Solitude) conducted this interview with me regarding Occupy Poetics.

For the most part, I felt there was a potential historical value in a lot of this material, so I wanted to preserve that sense of the work’s artifactuality. I, for one, would write something very different now were I asked to address the political landscape, but I feel it is important to see a process, if only a process of becoming a little less ignorant and naïve regarding the truth of one’s place in the world, or of simply changing one’s perspective. I think Amiri Baraka is a kind of hero in this regard because his works stage the drama of changing one’s mind and position. Which is to say, they dramatize a process of becoming the person he is, which is of course ever-mutable, always changing, in relation to his contemporaries and contemporary events. This is also why as a general rule I refuse to rewrite poems years after their composition; because time changes how I write, and I want to admit time into the poems in different ways. Without acknowledging these time signatures/stamps, which become more acute with age, something is lost. Something proper to a moment, occasion, process, configuration, relation, or event.