Bhanu Kapil Interview with Jared Stanley
Bhanu Kapil: Jared, hi, this is Bhanu Kapil—I have some questions for you, after reading your beautiful book, The Outer Bay. Perhaps I can ask them of you as a matrix, and then invite you to form a short essay, or something resembling an essay, in response? I hope that’s not too rigid/European a way of going about it.
So. My questions for you, for your writing, are: If “chaos is sleepy,” then what wakes it up? What makes a poem oppose the left-right contact of the person reading it? What makes it look back at you, which is wrong? I’m asking because, reading your work, there are all these reversed flows connected to speech, all this speaking that “pierces” or interrupts esophageal logic. Instead of the lungs then the throat then the mouth, you go straight to the “smiling impasse” of teeth that are not in the mouth but “close to” it. Language emerges from an orifice that suggests the body but doesn’t adhere to the body’s limits. “The orator,” for example, is somewhere “among the trees.” The poem, in this formulation, doesn’t function as expression, but as memory, with all of memory’s unexpected displays, protuberances, and so on. In another example of a complex alignment, you link animal and vegetable presences to create “dissolute striped forms.” Then you collate a “striped road” with a “stenciled cypress,” linking organic and inorganic domains, which is cyborg, or monster, depending on how “hot and kind” everything gets.
So, is the poem a site of implantation? How do you make a site receptive, folded, nutrient-rich? See: “Weed Patch Floral.” Images of something altering “uprooted,” mixed with: “I dug into the earth/for an unfounded resemblance.” And what about the “dreamland”? The place where “you could fuck magic”? There’s something going on here. Dear Jared, who are you and why are you writing these things? I invite you to present your cunning notes.
Jared Stanley: So yes, what is speech!? A chaos of flows, a set of euphemisms, an enthusiasm pointed directly at/from trapped things, the shuttered, the peeling!? Ezra Pound goes “The bird, the phonograph, sing. Sound can be exteriorized as completely as plastic. There is the residue of perception…You deal with an interactive force: the virtu in short…It is not maiming, it is not curtailment. The senses at first seem to project a few yards beyond the body…[one] leaves [one’s] nerve-set open.” In the ideal (“That’s how we get interminable”) a flow of poetry-language moves from the needles of the pine, in and through and upon the very teeth, breathing back and having the speech updraft and back into the tree, and poetry becomes a thinking in reality that uses the lungs instead of the heart.
There is a more practical way of thinking about the situation. When one is staring and writing toward a given thing or ecology of things, one enters a cooperative relationship, and things activate each other. This is Oppen’s lesson:
Showing its whitewash in the daylight
In which things explain each other
Not themselves.
In “The Outer Bay,” however, this does not happen. The chaos-including speech includes things like inhaled diesel particulate matter, the surging heteroglossia of The Town, sycamores, a deep social neglect, high winds, the stupid things drug addicts do. A regular music of The Town. When chaos wakes up here, it makes me tremble. It is not war, but sometimes it’s a landscape of contempt. Four or five lawnmowers going at the same time.
I haven’t been able to describe to myself how unsettling the town is, especially in July.
But hope is weird and persistent. You speak of “reversed flows” in the poems. I think of these motions as furtive attempts at flows: jumping fences, music from car radios standing-in for being, parallax bent by heat. And I’m trying to put images into a relation with a particular rhetoric: I’m trying to use chattiness in place of imagism. I’m trying to bring imagism back into it’s habitat, which is not light; it’s habitat is words and sounds and musics and wind.
Another useful idea from the above-quoted Oppen is the implication that the poet doesn’t appear in the poem; objects explain themselves, not to the speaker, but to each other. The speaker in the poem is watching from a position of proximity, not involvement. This kind of thing happens. Not because the speaker doesn’t want to help ‘explain,’ but because that which is being described is kind of inexplicable. My little body, proximal and among, its breathing less an action of participation and more a masque of proximity.
Scott Inguito invented a movement called New Literalism, in which visual description is exact and particular to the given thing – that way you can’t sell anything with the language. Not that I’m against abstraction and generality, and not that I think specificity can save us. But specificity does help deny that one place is much the same as another, and therefore fit for grids. This way chaos is touching, actually becomes a harmony, in that it becomes the persistence of the given, the right there, a disorganized presence; specifically: the road is paved, the sun’s heat is such that it buckles the road; new cracks appear, and the green things come, attended by midges and vertebrates.
“If the place is itself an active element in the genesis of the event, then the metaphor of the root is…precise;” so says David Abram. Digging into the earth, there is a resemblance but it isn’t an actual memory. It’s the action of looking for the remembered thing, which is under another, similar, soil – The Town and the city share the same effluent. What one finds in The Town is a loam of familiarity, memory, and history. I’m upstream from home - the same watershed, but not the same place. Cave of resemblances.
Bhanu Kapil: I guess I’d like to hear more about how you think through “body” and conceptions of the “hybrid” in these poems, in which “objects” are found beneath “limbs,” yet the space itself is bounded by a lyric sensibility that you do not slit. I like that you don’t slit it, at least not immediately. What you write persists, transfiguring itself, until, as you write in “Poem”: “it’s so dead.”
js: I am charmed and in love with this question. Body to hybrid to lyric. These rings of circumference. I and Thou. This singing through one’s ecology. In the old stories of California, there is a song at the moment of creation. A meadowlark’s song. But all is human, at least for the time being, so now the birds mimic car alarms in their songs. My poems come from my body. My ‘we’ refers to the collection of its parts. Laura Jensen goes “I am cousin to the crow’s collection,” which means, I think, I perceive through whatever given part (a chill in teeth, a chafe somewhere) is being exercised. A part becomes a center, during a given experience. My ‘I’ refers to the same. Can one sing to a multiplicity or from it? I hope to sing as a body among voices.
Is the hybrid the air? My teeth’s air, and the air of the scrub jay hiding acorns on the back lawn. The reactive organic gases coming up from the compost. When I think of hybridity, I want to eat dirt. I want to think about the worms and I want to thank them in English.
Regarding the lyric as a product of admixture: I trust in pleasure, to a degree, in the “charm or luxury of the poem.” Reading Robert Duncan is delicious because his singing sounds like a wounded intellectual crane mating dance. I think the “suppression of voice” subordinates theory to song. Song wins. Showbiz got to be too fun, for poets, it seems; calling songs “compositions” and poems “pieces.” Reagan came to town. Fuck it! I try to write while listening to Jorge Ben. With attention paid to the feet and knees. bk: But how does a body touch a grid? Maybe that’s obvious. No, I want to know. In the world you make in these poems, there’s a crocheted link – I’m thinking of the Wertheims’ coral reef currently being exhibited in the Hayward Gallery in London – between the sentient parts of a person and the gathering umwelt or territory (I’ve been reading Elizabeth Grosz’s new book, “Chaos, Territory, and Art”) he doesn’t inhabit as much as lick. That unruly mouth again. Jared Stanley, please answer the question. I’ve got a bus to catch. I’ve got a fish to eat. I don’t mean to be rude, but your writing is very beautiful, and you have to be as beautiful as it. This would be the correct moment to say something about urban planning.
Jared Stanley: Your question arrives after a day of walking around Hetch-Hetchy, a reservoir in the Sierra Nevada, one of those high granite places in the world that exhibits (suffers?) the grid’s touch. On the approach, there are huge pipes cresting the higher foothills, carrying all the snowmelt water to San Francisco (San Francisco magazine asks “what does it mean when 50,000 of your neighbors are multimillionaires”). We (two friends and I) walked through a grove of bay laurel. I put some of the leaves in my pocket and smelled at my hand. A body part can’t help but touch.
It would be nice, huh, if there were a proper way to love a grid, since it is a symptom of the given. And really, I do love the grid. The designs of the early Victorian suburbs and their illusions of winding roads and swirling lanes didn’t do much – though their kind of fey organicism does beguile from above. It’s weirder now – the streets do the same winding, but the houses have become so boxy, and antagonistic even to their vestigial yards, swallowing them up under square footage. It’s funny. It’s pretty sad.
I care for the grid – it causes a lot of trouble, though. My aunt found a deed for land in Idaho that had been granted to some ancestors. She found it among my grandfather’s effects after his death. The script was big, full of curving lines and arabesques. We entered the township and range coordinates into the Google Earth, and found some dunes, some little alluvial fans and creosote, called “The Donkey Hills.” What did these homesteading ancestors think of this place, bought for 40 dollars, seen from above by a satellite, disappointing relatives who wanted to build a shack there? Someone would figure out how to make it rain and they’d grow wheat? Is that what they thought? Salt and sand. My family seemed to accept that we were not suited to this place deeded to us. The grid said otherwise.
Let’s say a grid does these things: it implants a square on some occasionally very upthrusty, windswept, or water-made landscape, and it can create arbitrary distinctions between two sides, say, of a bush. This is the grid as unmoving disregard.
A body part can reach out across such a distraction independently (lick at fennel growing inside a chain link fence with cheap rugs thrown across it and for sale); when it does this, it becomes decoration: a façade of gesture on a regular square. Sometimes, this can hurt. I got my middle finger stuck in a moving bike’s spoke yesterday; then, the metal gestured off my skin. It is obvious. Engineering is obvious. You only notice it when it stops working, or you come to it with a little too much trust. An entropic glee arrives: “morphological lust” (Lisa Roberston) is the beautiful decoration of distinction by an overzealous bramble; an architect dislikes bulldozers because, in construction, “a sense of chaotic planning engulfs site after site.” (Robert Smithson). My guess is that some body parts have a distaste for grids – legs, for instance: people like to jaywalk in The Town. Minds do like them: the steady-flow dynamism that the grid tries to enforce has pathos in The Town, because it fails to encourage steadiness; it becomes a dream. The traffic lights on the boulevards are not timed to the train, frustrating drivers on the side streets. Maybe it is poor use that so vexes one’s approach to grids? Have we outgrown them? Have we become “other-directed?” Perhaps we haven’t done all we could do with what the grid offers? Maybe more and denser grids? Might our stymied love disappear from over-familiarity?
Lisa Robertson, speaking of scaffolding, presents a response, if we replace ‘scaffolding’ with ‘grid.’ “It rhythmically expresses the vulnerability of the surface by subtracting solidity from form to make something temporarily animate.” Of course, the scaffolding is always removed, revealing the monument. We might aspire to this for The Town. That its roads re-engage with dust and make us honest denizens of a very dusty monument to the power of water, sun, and wind.
Jack Spicer imagines the grid (as baseball diamonds and parking lots) as the thing which outlasts life. “Death is not final. Only parking lots.” and “We shall build our city backwards from each baseline extending like a square ray from each distance.” He’s crazy, though, drunk on the notion of the ideal city. Duncan: “these ashes might have been pleasures.”
Perhaps the best way to talk of the grid and a “body” is to speak of the blooms of the Gulf of Mexico. Houston and the great hog farms of Iowa, the dairies, in grids, of Wisconsin! The tremendous quantities of nitrogen! I want to be a moral person, and decry it, and denounce the past that made it. The algal bloom is the ultimate baroque, because it’s born of rational externalization. The primitive offspring of denatured natural processes that the grid represents, algae! It really makes my head spin. Humans have finally made an organicism with an unruly organic matter, and true to form, it kills. Mouth of a river? Delta silt.
But bodies, yes. Is it too stupid to say that the desire to lick, say, the chrome or plastic grid of a shopping cart is just going to have to be ironic? It is going to be done (I remember this desire to lick things, especially shopping carts) and the point of contact has got to be the mouth. You know! The mouth is a good place for things to gather.
I haven’t touched on the poems at hand. Did I mention that these are odes? I was fascinated by the Olympian Odes of Pindar – that the poet of the ode praises the athlete because of what his body did. But during the July of The Outer Bay, my own body seemed to be failing. The sun was making everything seem so miniscule, so I was trying to praise The Town in its constituent parts, which I was trying to celebrate and love. It is the weather of Macbeth and Lear. Monumental indifference, but no longer an inhuman indifference. A profoundly human indifference. Insisting that one put a town here, and then to live here and refuse to be in its weather: “Like everyone in this town I sleep next to, and in, I walk slowly, undeliberately, from shade, to shade, to controls for air, feeling actual heat for a moment after which I may return, like everyone in this particular world, to an actual wandering that eyes like, but troubles the mind.”