For this next installment in this long-running interview series, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Michael Leong. Leong is a poet, critic, editor, and educator. His most recent books of poetry are Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017) and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018).
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He is also the author of the monograph Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the co-translator, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven (co•im•press, 2020). A Co-Editor of Journal of Modern Literature, he is Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College.
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Peter Mishler: What is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?
Michael Leong: This is such an interesting question to me, Peter, because I often think of poetry as something that is beyond the true and the false; so my initial response is that poetry’s strangeness is so tied up with how it productively messes with what we previously thought were stable truths and stable falsehoods. To get at your question more directly—I continue to be amazed by the untimeliness of poetry: the way that it comes to us at the oddest and most inconvenient moments.
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We’re often moved to write poetry when it’s not particularly suitable, which is most of the time (when we’re working our day jobs, when we’re driving, when we’re in bed having forgotten to put a pen and paper on the nightstand). Poetry acts like a wrench in business-as-usual, and we can either embrace it or tune it out, doing either at our own peril.
Poetry has an enormous synthetic power of constellating things that don’t seem to belong with one another, and it’s a strange and powerful aspect of poetry that T.S. Eliot grasped with considerable acuity. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot said,
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
What a strange thing it is to amalgamate disparate experience.
Poetry acts like a wrench in business-as-usual, and we can either embrace it or tune it out, doing either at our own peril.
Something similar is true when it comes to the reading and ingestion of poetry: lines of poems that we haven’t read or thought about in a long time will erupt into our heads in an involuntary fashion—when we’re taking a walk or brushing our teeth. There’s a Proustian aspect to it.
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I feel like I’m risking tautological thinking in asserting that, in essence, the strangest thing about poetry is poetry’s strangeness, but being committed to the perpetual pursuit of the strange is not as easy as it might seem. Many of us know the value of “making strange” or “defamiliarization” via Viktor Shklovsky or, to go back further, through Percy Shelley’s claim that poetry “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.”
The problem is that poetry does not achieve strangeness once and for all as our perception is always changing in response to shifting social, cultural, political, and technological conditions. In Neo-Surrealism; Or, the Sun at Night, Andrew Joron explains that “for surrealism, the vertiginous spiral by which the familiar is estranged can never end in refamiliarization” because “here, in the society of the spectacle, the empowering twist of estrangement tends to reverse direction and spiral toward the passive doom of alienation. Here, the techniques of surrealism seem to have been all too readily absorbed by the advertising system.”
Perhaps the strangest thing about the art of poetry is its adaptability, its ongoing capacity to remain strange.
PM: Can you talk about how you got interested in surrealism? Did your earliest poems have a surrealist or imaginative bent to them?
ML: So much of contemporary culture is suffused—in ways that are both subtle and obvious—with traces and outgrowths of surrealism; so, early on, I got, here and there, little snatches of what we can consider a surrealist sensibility. Reading, for example, some of the New American Poetry in college in the ’90s probably sparked an inchoate interest in “Deep Image surrealism” and “Beat surrealism”; but surrealism wasn’t explicitly on my radar as something that needed further exploration until the early 2000s.
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During that time, I was in graduate school and was interested in experimental writing more broadly, which was helpful in having an open mind about aesthetics, politics, and the nature of representation; I had read most of Ashbery and had an incipient grasp of a certain “New York School surrealism.” Things happened pretty gradually, with certain key events helping to anchor a larger constellation that would provide the lineaments of my intellectual and artistic destiny.
I remember enjoying teaching poets such as Jayne Cortez and John Yau when I was a TA at Rutgers University. I remember being introduced to Will Alexander’s work when I had audited Evie Shockley’s doctoral-level seminar on the African American long poem.
I also met my future wife in grad school, the visionary Chilean poet Cacao Díaz, who has published two books under the heteronym “Estela Lamat.” As a personal exercise, I wanted to learn enough Spanish to translate her second book I, the Worst of All, which I wound up publishing with BlazeVOX in 2009. There’s a passage from that volume that I continue to admire for its intensity and ferociousness: “my eyes see / my forehead sees / and my fingers see / as if I were a huge uterus bombing clairvoyant sons.”
So I had this very close and extended contact with a particularly explosive strain of contemporary Latin American surrealism. Meeting Cacao was, of course, a transformative moment in my life overall, but it also had a deep impact on my writing life; translating her book prepared me to complete and publish my first poetry collection e.s.p., which also came out in 2009.
That seems like a key date: that was also the year I met John Yau; it’s hard for me to recall exactly what we discussed during our first sit-down conversation, but I had, out of curiosity, looked up the earliest message from him in the inbox of my personal email account and we had—apparently—been talking about César Moro, who remains an underrecognized surrealist in the Anglophone world.
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Yau had also published a very supportive review of e.s.p. and had mentioned surrealism, which must have concretized in my mind how a deliberate affiliation with surrealist practice could be a productive path forward.
Yau had introduced me to Andrew Joron, who had graciously blurbed my second book Cutting Time with a Knife, which I consider my first mature work. And that’s the first book-length project that I created with a technique that I call to myself, somewhat jokingly, “semi-automatic collage.” I essentially locate some source texts and blow them apart and piece the fragments back together in intuitive ways, following, to the best of my ability, a strange, logopoetic music.
Much of my previous writing was, I think, hindered by an overly Apollonian mindset (probably due to the fact that I had been partially indoctrinated, as an undergrad and then as an MFA student, into the cult of the “well-wrought urn”…in retrospect, I’m really thankful for that “partially”); the procedure of semi-automatic collage had ensured that Dionysus gets into the equation.
PM: Is there an image, feeling, memory, or story from your childhood that you think in some way presages that you would become a poet, an artist, in adulthood?
ML: I believe so, but I want to begin by saying I really appreciate the way you formulated this question with the focus on “presaging.” I’m generally used to being asked—it just happened the other week, in fact—if I could talk about the moment when I first fell in love with poetry or when I knew I wanted to be a writer.
My answers to those types of questions tend to be canned, perhaps because they all involve a post-childhood consciousness: I usually talk about translating Virgil in high school and grasping something important about poetry, diction, and syntax, about marveling at poetry’s capacity for transcultural transmission. As “true” as this story was (or is), it seems overly marred by the neatness of a retrospective fiction.
I essentially locate some source texts and blow them apart and piece the fragments back together in intuitive ways, following, to the best of my ability, a strange, logopoetic music.
Here’s a story that still remains shrouded in mystery: before I started going to school, my mom, who worked as an elementary school teacher, used to bring home a lot of school supplies for me to use, hoping that I could get a “head start” with my learning and education. (In that way, it was a very recognizable Asian American upbringing.)
I remember a series of phonics workbooks that I studied: I can nearly envision their late ’70s/early ’80s colors and the geometric cover designs. I don’t recall any of the details, but I assume I was being apprenticed to “the shape of the signifier,” as it were—to the form of letters and the sound of syllables.
I also remember these large sheets of paper that were ruled on the bottom for writing and that had a blank space on the top for drawing. I remember my mom told me that I should use these sheets to draw a picture and then write a story about the picture.
I have no idea what I drew and no idea what I wrote, but I clearly remember the empty templates that structured the paper. They were like invitations. You can probably already intuit how I’m setting up this primordial experience, being immersed with linguistic exercises, with the activity of text- and image-making, to be a presaging of my current poetic practices; but I believe there is another important layer to the story that I haven’t grasped until now.
I did all this activity in the basement of the ranch-style suburban house in which I grew up. It was this semi-finished basement that acted like a playroom for me and my older brother.
In one section of the basement, we had these toy bins in which were crammed unfinished Lego assemblages, obscure Star Wars figurines, a broken Jack-in-the-Box, and the like. We had one of those Fisher Price telephones with the string. There was also a somewhat derelict ping-pong table, whose net, for some reason, was difficult to keep taut. It was dark and musty with a generous supply of spider webs and insects.
An odd place for me to be as I started to grasp these various systems of representation and meaning-making. But in many ways, this was the perfect place: perhaps I was imagining writing and image-making, these systems of representation (that some students find odious), to be adjacent with play. The playroom was, of course, a zone of magic and imagination; but it was also the zone of the unexpected. My brother once found a dead squirrel in one of our toy bins!
It also seems significant that the basement was a liminal place, separate from but attached to the “real” space of living, separated from but attached to the “proper” home. Perhaps this is where my sense of poetry as both a ludic and liminal process was born.
PM: I’d love to know how you view your earliest work and even your first book in relation to your most recent poem making.
ML: I find that my first book is somewhat marred by juvenilia. There are some MFA thesis poems in there along with some clumsy, half-baked experiments. It’s a tad unfocused and uneven. But there are pieces in that book that remain interesting to me.
In 2023, some of the students at my college organized a faculty, staff, and student reading called “My Professor Writes Poetry?” and for that event, I read one of my favorite pieces (a list poem) from e.s.p. because—even though that book doesn’t feel particularly representative of my current writing practices—I wanted to make a certain pedagogical point: we all have to start from somewhere.
PM: One thing I admire about your critical work is your direct critique of how racist, colonialist ideologies are baked into the poetics and poems of white poets, and I wonder if you can identify where in your writing journey this became particularly significant to you?
ML: Grasping how important it is to think deeply about race when considering poetic practices, traditions, and cultures roughly coincided with me getting interested in surrealism: in fact, both are ongoing concerns and require further work. This was definitely an awareness that evolved after I graduated college; as a post-graduate, I had started to unpack for myself just how white my undergraduate education in poetry was.
I mean: I had taken a class in the 1990s on contemporary American poetry—I don’t have a copy of the syllabus to prove this—but my memory is that we had only studied white poets. I do still have on my bookshelf, for whatever it’s worth, volumes from that class by Robert Lowell, James Wright, Denise Levertov, and Frank O’Hara. When we covered the Beat writers, I remember reading and discussing Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Kerouac with no mention of, say, Albert Saijo or Bob Kaufman or Shigeyoshi Murao’s fascinating zine Shig’s Review.
On the workshop side of things, I remember one of my undergrad poetry writing instructors—who was perfectly nice and a decently attentive teacher—making a weird comment about how she didn’t realize Robert Hayden was Black until she saw his photograph. (I mean: was she just reading “Those Winter Sundays” while ignoring “Middle Passage” and “Runagate Runagate?”)
So this very whitewashed approach to poetry was dominant when I was first starting out; at the same time, there were these very narrow expectations for non-white writers. All these people in the late 1990s were recommending that I read Li-Young Lee, as if my writerly success (and legibility) depended on me following a certain type of Asian American lyricism, which is, of course, fine for some folks but—here’s the catch—not for others.
PM: What was your experience like during your MFA?
ML: In terms of getting a broader take on literary cultures, things had improved by the time I was an MFA student in the early 2000s: I was reading, by then, John Yau, who remains an inspiration. Also, Harryette Mullen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Walter Lew, among many others. I had taken a good class on experimental literature. I also had some teachers that thought in more expansive ways: Jean Valentine, Suzanne Gardinier, and Stephanie Strickland.
That really helped to counterbalance the more reactionary elements in the program, which I quietly chafed against. For example, some MFA faculty and hordes of students spoke about, say, Billy Collins with hagiographical adulation. One faculty member teaching a craft class said Collins was a poet whom he’d most enjoy talking to at a cocktail party so that was a reason why Collins was worth venerating!
I mean Collins—a former U.S. Poet Laureate, who used to be known as the best-selling and most popular poet in the country—is so problematically racist. Tim Yu has taken Collins to task in his wonderful book of parodies 100 Chinese Silences, but there’s still so much to critique. Last semester, I shared with my class Collins’ poem “Ignorance,” which begins with this choice set of lines: “It’s only a cold, cloud-hooded weekday / in the middle of winter, / but I am sitting up in my body / like a man riding an elephant / draped with a carpet of red and gold, / his turban askew….”
My students were flabbergasted at Collins’ simile in brownface. To make matters worse, the poem was reprinted (not terribly long ago) in the TLS as a “poem of the week” accompanied with a stock image of a South Asian man, well, riding an elephant. As if Asianness were simply a decorative element—a way to “spice up” a rhetorical figure or add illustrative ornamentation.
I appreciate your supportive note about my critical writing: while I’m on the topic of Collins, you might like an essay that I have coming out in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. It’s about the politics of place and landscape, and I dig into Collins quite extensively. I get that it’s easy to diss Collins; but doing a deep analysis takes some real thought.
In this forthcoming piece, I don’t talk about “Ignorance,” but I analyze the white suburban ideology of poems such as “Looking West.” I make a somewhat brash transhistorical argument, basically saying that Collins recodes the privileged and appropriative gaze of eighteenth-century British loco-descriptive prospect poems into an American suburban context. So that kind of poetry, which I was taught to revere, is a big problem for me.
PM: When I was in undergraduate and graduate school, there seemed to be a kind of surrealism, too, that students are taught to revere, no?
ML: Exactly. As an MFA student, I was taught–at least by the male faculty, who had the loudest voices–that surrealist poetry simply meant either French dudes in Paris or James Tate, Bill Knott, or Russell Edson in a US context. It was pretty strange: surrealism was also treated as a passing phase for young writers that one should eventually “outgrow” in order to produce more “mature” and “serious” writing. That was the Thomas Lux trajectory.
So I was happy to find poets who defied that model as I was happy to explore the enormous archive of surrealist cultural production by non-white artists and writers…and—to bring in issues of gender—the importance of surrealist women. The only class that I’ve taught that was solely focused on surrealism was in late 2020 at CalArts and that’s when I realized that there is so much more work for me to do.
PM: Could you tell me more about the class?
ML: Before I drafted my syllabus, I began with an image: a work by the artist Sam Durant from his 2014 show Invisible Surrealists. His graphite drawing “Poetry Must Be Made By All, Not By One” appropriates and revises Man Ray’s classic photo of the surrealist group in the Bureau of Surrealist Research by including, among this core coterie, figures from the Caribbean and North Africa.
What attracted me to Durant’s gesture was the filling in of writers and artists left out of popular narratives and understandings of surrealist practice. I knew, in other words, that I didn’t want to pursue a status quo approach by assigning a reading list exclusively built around the usual suspects of, say, Breton, Éluard, Aragon, Desnos, and Péret.
Durant’s drawing suggests a critical approach as it makes visible—and critiques—the exclusions of standard accounts of surrealism; it was an approach I momentarily considered. A critical gesture might be to read Suzanne Césaire alongside Philippe Soupault or to consider the art of Max Ernst with, say, Wangechi Mutu’s.
Nevertheless, the spatial logic of Durant’s drawing vividly concretizes the limitations of the critical approach: it reinscribes the centrality of the canon. For example, at the far-left edge of Durant’s drawing, the Afro-Chinese Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and the Egyptian poet Joyce Mansour occupy marginal positions at best.
Following what might be understood as a largely reformist position, I wound up creating a course that followed in the footsteps of two groundbreaking anthologies, Surrealist Women (1998), edited by Penelope Rosemont, and Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009), edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley.
By examining fiction, drama, poetry, and essays by Joyce Mansour, Alice Rahon, Valentine Penrose, Aimé Césaire, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, Adrienne Kennedy, Bob Kaufman, Jayne Cortez, Will Alexander, Sandy Florian, John Yau, and others, we challenged the assumption that surrealism was a movement of only white men.
Shooting for a predominantly “reformist” strategy, I wanted to provide my students with “a reformation of the standard picture”; here I’m quoting Luvell Anderson and Verena Erlenbusch’s article “Modeling Inclusive Pedagogy: Five Approaches,” which some faculty at CalArts were discussing at the time. I’m also invoking some of Anderson and Erlenbusch’s categories (“status quo,” “critical,” and “reformist.”)
Nevertheless, I moved, at certain junctions, towards a critical mode. When covering figures such as Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, and Valentine Penrose, I included treatment of their better-known romantic companions (Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and Roland Penrose) to provide social context and to emphasize the importance of understanding Carrington, Zürn, and Penrose as more than just “muse” figures to their canonical male counterparts.
PM: Could you send me a copy of the syllabus? I’d love to dig into the readings. What did you call the class?
ML: I’m happy to send along the syllabus! You’ll see that I titled the class “The Persistence of Surrealism”—not only to play on the title of Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory—but to honor important work produced after what Mary Ann Caws has called “the heroic period of surrealism,” which ranges from 1916 to 1930.
Implied by my course design was the suggestion that the best surrealist work occurred after 1930 and much of it was produced by women and people of color. Such a corpus represents intensifications of surrealism rather than derivative examples of it. All that being said, I’m sure I didn’t get it quite right the first time. I’d love to teach another iteration of this class and have another crack at it.
PM: Can you talk about your recent poems as an extension or departure of (or in the context of) your earliest work?
ML: I’d say it makes sense to view my recent poetry as both an extension and a departure from the work that I first started to publish. Flipping through e.s.p., I’m noticing that many of those earlier poems were driven by conceit, by form, and/or by structure.
I also see that I had a tendency towards extravagant diction. My writing now is similar in spirit. A notable difference is that I had become, by Cutting Time with a Knife, interested in extended pieces and sustaining longer projects. And that continued through Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?; “The Philosophy of Decomposition,” which is the longest piece in Words on Edge; and my current work-in-progress “Disorientations.”
So “extension” is a good word because my early poems tended to be quite short with a few exceptions (“The Signals” from e.s.p. is a series of four related pieces). Now, I’m generally inclined to push things to the limit, which certainly pertains to the length of my texts.
I didn’t think I was capable, back then, of producing more expansive works. If Milton—according to Johnson’s famous quip—”could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones,” then I had (erroneously) thought that my poetic fate was to be a miniaturist, carving small stone after small stone. My solution to the problem was to aggregate many carved cherry-stones into a kind of Frankensteinian Colossus.
A few things helped move things along in that direction. I wrote a dissertation on long poems; so my reading life helped me to see that a poem could occupy a lot more space than just a small quadrangle in the pages of, say, The New Yorker. That kind of presentation suggests that poetry is a garnish, a mere accompaniment to the main dish of prose.
A specific editing experience comes to mind as well. When I was in the process of publishing an individual piece that would eventually make its way into e.s.p., I had the privilege of being in contact with Mark Yakich, who happened to be a guest editor for a journal that I had submitted to. Mark liked the piece—a poem in multiple short sections—and suggested that it be about twice as long.
He was right on the money: lengthening the draft made the poem a lot stronger. So that basic process of revision got me more comfortable going longer. (Mark also suggested that I read Nicanor Parra, which I find really interesting in retrospect, as the Chilean tradition has become quite important to me.)
That interaction with Mark must have been close to twenty years ago, and I don’t believe I’ve had such rich editorial guidance since! Finally, when I started to practice in a procedural vein, that immensely helped me to generate at length.
Another notable departure is that my sense of syntax is a bit different: it’s a lot more baroque and intricate. This connects to the fine micro-grafting that I like to do. I’m always creating a lot of syntactic folds and subordinate clauses, risking convolution.
In a short essay called “How I Sound,” in which I meditate on language and race, I call this approach to syntax “hyper-hypotaxis.” This is from the very end of that piece:
If my speaking voice tends to a flat neutrality, my printed voice accents itself with a hyperbolic ornamentalism. By luxuriating in such convolutions, I want to turn hypotaxis against itself. The objective is not—to quote Jaswinder Bolina—to “write like a white guy” nor even to “outwrite” white people but to overwrite English with another kind of English, to deform the sentence by exaggerating the high English of hypotaxis, to exert syntactic strain on English’s joints and appendages—as if, by barraging it with enough discursive density, I could make the English language relent and make it say “Mercy.”
It’s a quixotic project, for sure, but I guess that’s typical of my MO.
PM: Why do you suppose that surrealist writing seems to require a procedural element (other than as a way to access something beyond “the perpetuation of the status quo”). Would you be willing to interrogate other values of a procedural or automatic approach?
ML: I’ll begin by saying that going beyond the status quo is no mean feat—so I’m all for whatever can disrupt/transform the present order of things, which tends to suppress any number of alternative orders (and productive dis-orderings).
From the standpoint of practice, I think a major obstacle to writing is that we can get in our own way; many things are to blame, from the tyranny of subjectivity to our tendency to overthink things. (At least in the beginning stages of composition, I’d rather “underthink” in the sense of getting at the reverse side of rational thought…a sous-realism, if you like.) Surrealist procedures can aid in getting distracting aspects of our selves to step aside so the real work can begin.
I’m not sure that I believe in “pure psychic automatism”—I’m probably an “impure” surrealist—but my take on the Bretonian desire to express “the true function of thought” is that the mind is a potent juxtaposition machine, which can be a gift, but that power is significantly tamed and defanged by rationality, by being hyper-conscious. That must be why so many classic surrealist procedures from collage to the exquisite corpse to the if/then “game of conditionals” to the found object privilege juxtaposing items that ordinarily wouldn’t go together.
Some of those procedures are collaborative exercises which obviously are useful in getting us to get out of our own way, but my take on surrealist procedure is that it can help us collaborate with ourselves—with different parts of ourselves that may be otherwise submerged.
I mentioned above that proceduralism—collaging found texts at a very fine level of granularity—has helped me be more productive. It’s a generative technique that encourages a serial practice. When you haven’t been writing in some time, procedure can be an easy on-ramp back into the flow of things. Sometimes when you write a one-off, standalone poem, a kind of inertia can set in and you might be at a loss as far as what to do next in your writing life.
Not to get overly Newtonian about it, but following a procedure can help one stay in motion, as it were. The trick is to manage issues of repetition and variation so that you’re not always hitting the same notes all the time.
PM: Could you tell me more about your own procedures or process?
ML: It’s taken me quite some time to admit this to myself but my process of what I called “semi-automatic collage” might be a variation of Dalí’s paranoid-critical method. Maybe what he was doing on the level of the image, I’m trying to do on the level of text (but without the Freudian orientation).
Whatever the case, this method is especially fitting for someone like myself, who has a parallel life as a scholar of literature. I already have this hyper-developed ability in hermeneutics and familiarity with certain intellectual histories. That’s probably why some of my poetry writing seems like it is an odd species of philosophy or cultural critique.
So the critical aspect of myself is there whether I like it or not: it’s an occupational hazard. My paranoid self provides the necessary surrealist distortion that I would like to think gives the writing some richer aesthetico-epistemological interest. (By paranoid, I simply mean having the tendency to draw and insist upon far-fetched or “irrational” connections.)
I’m not sure if this exactly constitutes what you are calling “other values,” but, for me, my “paranoid-critical” collage poetry, which is absolutely driven by a procedural engine, is a contribution to the creation of knowledge on par with—or even more important than—the scholarly work that I do.
The problem is that within institutional contexts one activity is valued over the other in an asymmetrical way that often smacks of epistemological chauvinism. To be honest, I, myself, struggle to completely understand the poetry I’ve written, but I think that’s a virtue: I would like to think that my proceduralism allows me to tap into a source of knowledge that is far more profound than what my purely critical self can grasp and produce.
Surrealist procedures can aid in getting distracting aspects of our selves to step aside so the real work can begin.
PM: One of my interests, and how I started getting interested in reading your poems and scholarship—and now what you are saying here about the strangeness of poetry—was born from my own inquiries into surrealism’s “capabilities” to also communicate a poetry of witness and “timeliness,” to riff off of your word, untimeliness. What comes to mind for you on this subject?
ML: This is a really crucial issue, Peter. I’ll begin by saying we should distinguish between poetic witnessing and positivist observation since I believe that surrealism can offer a potent antidote to the latter while lending force to the former. I often think of the moment in Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism”—which is now a hundred years old—in which he takes realism to task and vigorously critiques what he calls a “purely informative” or “declarative style” in writing.
That style seems to dominate how we talk about culture and politics, how we discuss our individual and collective lives and the world we share with other beings, forces, and structures. While I’ve undoubtedly learned much from this style, I think that it encourages the perpetuation of the status quo; or maybe it’s that information always arrives to us belatedly, which makes us always feel like we’re perpetually two steps behind.
The surrealist approach, on the other hand, makes timely issues more urgent, more visceral and immediate, and reminds us that unlikely and surprising transformation is possible; it lends a necessary intensity to current concerns. As Breton put it, “‘Transform the world,’ said Marx; ‘change life,’ said Rimbaud: these two watchwords are one for us.”
PM: Would you be willing to expand on that distinction between poetic witnessing and positivist observation? I imagine that this could dovetail with your remarkable new essay in The Hopkins Review, so I’d be excited to share some of your thinking from that essay with this new audience, if you also see the connection?
ML: I associate positivist observation with an ideology that assumes there is an objective reality exterior to us that can be unproblematically witnessed, measured, and then understood. There are contemporary issues of vast importance that are vital to confront but may elude—for some reason or another—our empirical senses (as well as the prosthetic technologies that we employ to capture more detailed and complex data).
I think there is a place for positivist science as there is a place for first-hand observation. But those shouldn’t be the only games in town. This is to say that I’m interested in non-normative modes of witnessing and non-normative epistemologies—for example, non-ocularcentric witnessing.
Maybe it would be useful to put on the table one of the first articulations of “a poetry of witness,” which comes from Carolyn Forché’s 1993 anthology Against Forgetting. Forché collected a wide range of work by poets who have “personally endured” extreme violence and oppression such as genocide, torture, dictatorship, war, and exile.
While that project is a useful one (in spite of the numerous flaws in Forché’s anthology), I’m mainly interested in poetic witnessing in a broader sense—for example, second-hand and asynchronous witnessing or witnessing through mediated means, whether through text or broadcast media.
I suspect, Peter, that you’d be interested in Margaret Ronda’s “Lyric/Time: Capitalist Ecologies, Timefulness, and the Lyric ‘I,’” which is an excellent essay that precedes mine in The Hopkins Review (Winter 2024); she explicitly uses the term “witnessing,” which I don’t think I do. Her interest is how certain ecologically-oriented poems “enact a sensing, a felt apprehension” of “what can and cannot be witnessed or seen directly” such as “invasive and exhaustive practices” and “accelerating biospheric effects.”
That being said, you’re right that there’s an important connection between witnessing and my essay “Positioning First-Person Pluralities in Contemporary American Poetry,” which THR published as part of a special folio on “Locating a Collective Lyric ‘I.’” My gratitude goes to the folio co-editors, Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager, for commissioning me to write that piece; without their initiative, I wouldn’t have thought, at least in a sustained way, about issues surrounding the poetics and politics of plural lyricism.
Leila and Jennifer had already started an interesting conversation in their book Public Feminism in Times of Crisis (2022) about how leveraging a “collective lyric ‘I’”—which “dates back to the ‘lyric I’ of the Greek chorus”—can challenge “the ‘singular I’ that has been a primary mode of patriarchal culture.” It makes sense for me to try to recap what I did in my essay since I had decided to do a “montage” approach, moving from one critical snapshot to another without, for better or worse, the usual transitions and a pronounced argumentative throughline.
PM: Please do. I’d love to hear your thoughts about how you put this essay together.
ML: I began putting the essay together by taking stock of how certain contemporary poets that I admire—Evie Shockley, Divya Victor, Nathaniel Mackey, and John Yau—invoke the first-person plural, whether they are critically questioning a “we” in which they are included, showing how participating among a shifting and ambiguous “we” can provide both pleasures and frustrations, or rejecting and appropriating a “we” that is imposed by political authority.
It was productive for me to do this since the subject matter necessarily avoided a more tired dynamic in which the supposedly autonomous lyric “I” and the observational “eye” complement one another, leading to an overly facile interplay between sight and insight.
I suppose there is in my piece an implicit argument about how experimental African American and Asian American poets both witness and then disrupt the “spacism” of the poetry page. I borrow the term “spacism” from the legal scholar Angela Onwuachi-Willig, who explains that “spacism” is “an emerging phenomenon by which Whites work to maintain white advantage through policing physical racial segregation.”
I’ve been working to see how I might use this concept in analyzing the cultural sphere, how poetry culture has been and continues to be segregated through formal and informal practices of gatekeeping and through the broad imposition of white writing conventions.
PM: Right.
ML: At the same time, these poets, each in their individual ways, enact a self-reflexive witnessing of processes that can’t be reduced to a single empirically graspable object. Shockley’s poem “alma’s arkestral vision (or, farther out)” is an ekphrastic piece that quite literally witnesses Alma Thomas’s painting Starry Night and the Astronauts but it witnesses much more as well: a larger tradition of Afrofuturist cultural production, one’s place within a heterogeneous socio-cultural collective, among other things.
Victor’s “Settlement”—which employs DMS coordinates in formally adventurous ways—also bears witness to multiple historical coordinates, how one might be implicated within a long history of immigration to white-supremacist, settler-colonial America. These are complex things to grasp that necessitate collaborative labor.
Ultimately, I wanted to tease out a correlation between marking the poetry page through unconventional methods (through, for example, creative typography or paratextual additions or variable margins), which creates more opportunities to layer different relational meanings and contexts, and refusing to conform to, say, the white suburban lyric, which generally relies on a narrower set of formal and generic conventions; but in order to construct such an argument that would hold water, I’d need more space beyond a short essay to connect a lot of needed dots.
As I mentioned above, what Andrew Epstein calls “the personal ‘suburban’ lyric of the 1970s and 1980s (as practiced especially by white male poets)” was a major part of the poetry curriculum that was foisted upon me in the 1990s, and it has taken me quite some time to reckon with this confused and confusing portion of my educational history.
What Andrew Epstein calls “the personal ‘suburban’ lyric of the 1970s and 1980s (as practiced especially by white male poets)” was a major part of the poetry curriculum that was foisted upon me in the 1990s, and it has taken me quite some time to reckon with this confused and confusing portion of my educational history.
PM: What’s a poem of yours that comes to mind where you see yourself reckoning with that part of your learning, reading?
ML: Probably every poem that I’ve written after graduate school (or at least my MFA degree)! I usually characterize e.s.p. as a transitional work and, in many ways, it represents a transition away from the mainstream white lyricism of the late twentieth century towards a kind of post-Language surrealism. I suppose that entire book comes to mind since all of those poems were actively looking for an escape route from official verse culture.
Any suburban lyrics that I wrote in college are probably lost; maybe there’s one remaining somewhere at the bottom of a file box on dot matrix printer paper, but, if so, I’m not particularly enthused about finding it! Nevertheless, I was curious to see what I had published in periodicals before e.s.p. came out and found an ekphrastic poem (after Odilon Redon) that a little print mag called The Sink published in 2005. I presume the publication shuttered long ago.
It’s not a great poem; but it’s not terrible. At that time, ekphrasis was important to me. I was also writing clusters of poems about objects and things–perhaps my clumsy way of following Francis Ponge–and I published at least one of those pieces in another now-defunct journal. In both cases, I was looking to go beyond a poetry that, to quote Hegel, merely strives “to display the contents and activity of the inner life itself.” Then (and now), I’m more concerned with what’s outside of myself.
