Alex Zitzner
When I first encountered Dr. José Felipe Alvergue’s writing, I was eighteen. At eighteen I was a first-year creative writing major attending the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and would visit The Local Store to buy books from UWEC’s faculty as way to “get to know them”. Reading José’s first book, gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015), opened up a new world to me of what was possible with writing. This world brought my attention to typography, etymology, overall crafting of books, and so many more ideas. Now, at twenty-three, after closely following José’s work and having the opportunity to study with him, I’m stoked to have had the opportunity to interview him about his latest book, scenery (Fordham University Press, 2020), winner of the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. This is somewhat to say that these questions don’t only come from the month I spent reading/re-reading scenery, but also the past six years of engaging with José’s writing. Whether you’ve read all of José’s work or none of it, this interview touches on just five ways one can approach writing, which I hope inspires you (reader!) to read/re-read José’s work and ultimately, write.
Alex Zitzner: After reading a “review” of scenery on Goodreads, one commenter claimed it felt like your writing was just, “stream of consciousness.” This confused me. I’m not sure if any writing comes unconsciously unless it’s slightly hypnagogic, but I’d like to use that comment as a prompt for how you approach the page. Philip Whalen said, “If you want a poem, find a blank page.” However, even notebook pages have lines which guide and confine writing within a space, and sketchpads, even without lines, limit writing with the size of their pages. Since you’re writing with Adobe Illustrator, I feel like you actually are approaching a “blank” page, or one without lines, and are met with a new set of confinements. With that being said, how does Illustrator influence your translation of thoughts/ideas into writing? How do you think your writing would be different if you primarily wrote in a notebook (lined or unlined) with a pen or pencil then transferred it into a computer program like Word/Pages?
José Felipe Alvergue: I’ve read that comment. It’s not a good idea to read reviews on Goodreads but that doesn’t mean I haven’t. Mostly because one doesn’t know who these folks are, what kinds of readers they are, and so on. But to speak to the comment, I think it reflects the situation of a reader that does not feel fulfilled in getting something from the text that is useful for them. And maybe even “useful” is not the most generous term, but I do think the engagement of reading poetry is something we have been conditioned to expect as a relationship of subservience of the poetic text to the experience of the reader’s emotional satisfaction. The commodification of literature has only underscored this.
In that relationship, we come to place a responsibility of the poetic text to, in turn, demonstrate emotional possibility within a narrowness which encompasses what is recognizable, what has been already. I’m not talking about conceptualism here. Just the emotional dimension. In many ways the unique “blankness” of an artboard vs. a document is rather daunting in the absence of confinement, even if simultaneously rewarding in the limits of possibility that can be explored.
“When I write I do write by hand on paper first. Sometimes in pencil. Sometimes in marker. I sometimes use a notebook. I sometimes use butcher paper that I unroll to a length that allows a lot of “vectors” to explore a physical limit. Or mapping if you want to call it that. ”
When I write I do write by hand on paper first. Sometimes in pencil. Sometimes in marker. I sometimes use a notebook. I sometimes use butcher paper that I unroll to a length that allows a lot of “vectors” to explore a physical limit. Or mapping if you want to call it that. And what poet doesn’t make notes or compose verse on random scraps of paper shoved into pockets? I use these multiple sources when finally composing a book in Illustrator. This also perhaps speaks to the other dimension of any one of my books and this reading of “consciousness”; my work is always an engagement with a question. I don’t write discreet poems. For me the artboard is more akin to the experience of printing on a letterpress, which might seem to be an odd association. But I see a greater freedom in printing than writing composing in a standard computer format. Especially if one has ever been around a truly talented printer that is familiar not only with typesetting but also really intuitive with the use of color, and using woodcuts, or other modalities of holding and transferring ink. These two realities come together in my books: a prolonged emotional-conceptual engagement, and a process that breaks down writing into compositional acts that are mitigated by writing technologies, and indeed the movement of text as type.
The availability of “doing” more on the page translates into an availability of what you explore poetically in the language that occupies that page. Not only in a durational sense, but in the spontaneous manner of accidents-in-thinking. Realizations that suddenly emerge in the process of writing on paper, to transcribing into type, to “setting” said type in the software, organizing, and so on.
“When we think of “stream of consciousness” I think we assume a degree of non-intervention in the writing, which I find odd because in fact there is so much intervention between these different things I’m doing when I write. ”
When we think of “stream of consciousness” I think we assume a degree of non-intervention in the writing, which I find odd because in fact there is so much intervention between these different things I’m doing when I write. But what does resonate is the degree to which confinement is reframed in how I write, such that there is a purposeful engagement with it, and maybe this is what the author of that review is experiencing. Whether or not one, as a reader, is willing to go on that particular ride into “the limit,” so to speak, is a different question. And I get that. But that’s why there are so many different kinds of poetry. There’s something for everyone. As readers we should remember that poets are also readers, and they’re reading what they write. There are all kinds of poetry because there are all kinds of reading, and all kinds of needs. I need to feel the limit of an emotion, or a thought, or a “conclusion,” a history, an event, a relationship. I need to feel what fear or anxiety is present in that exploration, which is not purely academic but also braided to my experiences in my body, my memories, my language, my consciousness. There is much to fear right now, and fear is being exploited as a manner of sub-consciously molding people’s behavior. When the uncertainty of fear is disclosed in the public identity of poetic voice though, maybe this admits to our vulnerability. And admitting our vulnerability is the first crack in the settler-colonial vanity that is so much a part of American identity. Maybe this admission is the first step towards refusing the authoritative conclusions of a dominant voice that tells us it knows the answers, knows the solution to fear.
AZ: Building from how you approach writing, I’m curious how you approach voice in text. On pg. 44 you write in the first stanza, “Voice enacts context even while the demonstr / ative dimension, the enacting, transcends the / objective circumstances of what context brings / into relation”, and in the second stanza, “I am captivated by how voicing reaches and / approaches, finds new ways of speaking that / elude capture, elude detainment, export.” These lines reminded me a lot of Federico García Lorca’s ideas on duende. For one, how duende enters a voice when it tears in song (“deomstr / ative”) from its stretching, and two, his idea of rejecting the angel and Romantic ideas of poetry. With then thinking of his quote, “All that has dark sounds has duende”, I’m curious how you approached voice in the context of Whiteness (the background of a page, the literary canon, White Supremacy) and what it means to you for a voice to, “elude capture, elude detainment, export” ? Has Lorca or duende had any affect on your approach to voice? If not, who were the main people who influenced your approach to voice in scenery?
JFA: I can’t say I’ve ever been a big reader of Lorca, and I don’t mean that as a critique. I’ve just never really been drawn to it. But absolutely I think duende reflects performances of voice that can be found in a lot of writers from Jean Toomer’s complicated relationship to folk-songs, Hart Crane’s fugue, Walt Whitman’s geographical breath, Susan Howe’s archival specters recently embodied in her collaborations with the musician David Grubbs. I’d say even how contemporary docupoets work material documents and lyric simultaneously. The poet Douglas Kearny is working voice and mediatization in ways that floor me everytime I hear it. Claudia Rankine’s two books in the “An American Lyric” series are thinking about that spirit-voice relationship from the pervaded landscape of knitted speech acts often flattened-over by our observance of the image. For me voice, not wishing to come to an ableist conclusion, is a situated and embodied primacy of language that belongs to the enactment of Being––and this cannot be thought or exhibited separately from History. That’s the one thing about my take on Voice in that sense, which is that it is always in the context of history.
“To think about what different acts of “speaking out” have been across hemisphere and across history, this places a great deal of significance on that concept of Lorca’s duende, because acts of voice have not always been received without a violent and immediate silencing.”
To think about what different acts of “speaking out” have been across hemisphere and across history, this places a great deal of significance on that concept of Lorca’s duende, because acts of voice have not always been received without a violent and immediate silencing. Either a silencing that is directed purely at voice or voicing, as in forms of structural disenfranchisement, or worse, forms of violence directed more generally at bodies such that they can no longer voice. And in a way that makes violence pedagogical as it teaches others to fear-to-speak in the future. While educating others on how to enact tactics of silencing on their own authority as privileged subjects. So when I affect/effect voice in a textual field I’m thinking of the sieves and torture devices voices have historically had to physically be pushed through by the momentum of history, violence, by colonialism, positionalism. And I keep in mind that even in the aesthetic celebration of various artforms by previously silenced communities there is still great gloss, irredeemable violence, uncertain futures.
“It” is truly broken in other words. When that “It” is an experiential even if subperceptible encounter with Voice, with language. Even as it works. It works as Being, in rebellion, in demonstration, in subversion, in intimacies. The broken times are those times which still meet Being with skepticism or selective enfranchisement. This could become a very long answer, but that we still have to hear people say “All Lives Matter” is fucking infuriating and a reflection of It being Broken. What I suppose really frustrates me is that Voice, when I engage it, is then forced into the pressure or having to both educate and express Being, whereas for the entitled, throughout our History, Voice has always been a “window into the soul,” so to speak. Purely and without skepticism or refusal.
AZ: Typographically, with the combination of text and its voice, the, “blocks, pillars, and slabs or beams” from pg. 12 make me think about the construction of each page through text, image, or their combination. Pages which you refer to as being textually radical—where text intersects text to form contrapuntals, where slabs are jointed to horizontal pillars, where text forms blocks, where text can be italicized, bolded, and greyed depending on the light read in—this makes the reader read and re-read sections by rotating the book. From the act of flipping the book around to read certain portions, there’s an awareness of the act of reading, as well as the physicality of the book and its pages. Some people will say that a work “touched” them, but that refers more to an emotional sense, whereas reading scenery couples the emotional with an actual tangible sense of “touch” with holding the book that I’m not sure I’ve been aware of while reading before. Where has your interest in the meta-ness (maybe sentience is the better word that you’ve mentioned) of actually “reaching” out to “touch” the reader come from, making them aware of what they are doing, where they are, and creating a reality that exists both within and without the book?
JFA: My reaching out to touch comes from the primacy of the book-object, and my experiences with handmade chapbooks and poetic community/-ies. I think it’s also pretty magical how books survive, and you can come across books either in an archive, a grandparent’s home, a library, or any other space, and from an entirely different moment. My quote in that section is from Wittgenstein’s language games. And my take is the impossibility of a pure experience with the creation of a language, in the sense of an impossibility of language ever being manifested in a context not overdetermined by power or colonization. The embodiment or physicality that you are describing in scenery, and especially what you’re noting as the counterpuntal rhythm of it, is that “touch” as an intimacy that remains in pure difference. My lyric relationship to parenting, and the parts of the book that are memoir, and deal with my child and my partner giving birth, these are rather obvious examples of this pure difference as intimacy. But they are also the building blocks of more complex differences that require intimacy. A reaching out that is not touch or refuses the grasp as a concept of power’s will-to-know, but instead a reaching out that stops each time in the extension of an openness. As if to touch were not to grasp but to be both reception and reach at the same time. There is a decolonial undercurrent to all my work that truly seeks to understand Power, even while wishing at all times to draw a light on it so as to walk away from it, to see it in a nihilistic light.
AZ: In gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015) and precis (Omnidawn, 2017), there are no page numbers. scenery then approaches its pacing differently with having some pages numbered and some unnumbered. Similarly to your previous books, there is no table of contents. This brings to mind again the awareness of reading, but also the emphasis on where there are no numbers, in addition to how scenery can be read as one continuous work, or sectioned by the unnumbered, “blank” pages. On pg. 45 you confront your aesthetics, and also the confines of genre, and (potentially?) theorizing of a post-poetics, one which, “would give form / to the collaborative, cooperative / speech from scenery as an act / against the humming of continu / ity”, and how, “Such a poetics is elusive.” This focus on what can be counted or quantified makes me wonder how you envision the future (and present history) of the lyric? Also how your understanding of ontology relates to the lyric? As I will admit, I am still struggling with my own understanding of ontology.
JFA: It was tough because I never want page numbers. Fordham being a bigger press didn’t really want that, but the compromise actually worked in many ways because it does allow for “pacing” as you note. And as I describe above, I don’t write discreet poems. The work is an engagement with a question that I explore to its ontological limit. I think there will always be lyric as it might be conventionally defined. My hope is that experiencing the ontological limit of lyric begins to untrain our senses, and begins to truly open an inclusive space of the poetic commons. I think it’s easy for emotional exhibition to formulate shared conclusions on emotional being, literally bound limits on what can be known as lyric emotion, its conclusions and expression. We tend to fear what is possible outside of bounded limits. That’s the settler-colonial remainder that serves as the foundation of our American literary canon. This remainder can be extreme, but it can also work into benign interactions with text/s. I mean just see question 1, right. Another person’s consciousness might very well present itself as an unknown territory. Do we listen when others speak, when they speak on what they have concluded about what they feel?
AZ: In my own attempt at bringing in other influences to this interview, I did what may seem strange, but I let my Rider-Waite tarot deck charge on top of your book (Bob Kaufman’s collected poems were nearby however), then I read a few pages from your book to the deck before drawing a card. The card I drew was the Ten of Pentacles. The formation of the pentacles on this card comes from the same structure as the Tree of Life’s ten sefirot in the Kabbalah (Kaufman’s influence perhaps?) and its pillars. I know this may sound silly to a certain degree, but taking a prompt from this card, are you influenced by anything supernatural in your work? This could be “ghosts” or “spirits”, but also going back to duende, unseeable, “intangible” forces which cannot be observed, but still can be felt, potentially like music? You’ve mentioned that you’re sometimes a nihilist, so maybe that nullifies this question, but then, what does it mean to you to create meaning out of having nihilistic feelings, which can be optimistic and pessimistic?
JFA: I like this question. What I find interesting is that the “intangible” also encompasses pre-lingual/non-lingual events that form our consciousness. But I’m also culturally sensitive to the idea of spirits, and academically sensitive to the making of, and persistence of ghosts. Music is definitely a medium through which they travel, and one of my favorite experiences while composing is listening to music. Other poets have historically thought about other technologies as mediums for ghosts, like Kamau Brathwaite and his video Sycorax style which alluded to his computer as a medium for the ghost of Sycorax. I think if, in a hemispheric context, the “natural,” or nature exists as a contested space of settler-colonial occupation and simultaneously an opportunity for alternative epistemologies, for an indigenous ontology, then the “super-natural” must be included as a way of approaching decolonial research via an engagement like poetry. And not “super” as in an escape from, but literally a supernatural ability to leave the plane so as to look down upon it the ways ghosts or spirits can, and get a whole picture of it. Ghosts and spirits are only ghosts and spirits because they have chosen or are bound to stay with us. If it were truly an issue of a complete break or escape, we wouldn’t have these words in our vocabulary. That’s the nihilism I’m working from, a leaving behind of that which does not serve us, but very much also the labor of experiencing that leave-behind; from the decision to do so, to the anxiety of experiencing uncertainty, and the joy of the new. Burning it. Breaking it. Revealing it for its counterfeit reality and listening to/for the intangible in that there is something there worth considering in our attempt to exist towards shared realities––like Nation.
Co-sponsored with the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, José will be presenting, “Bearing Witness To The Truth Of Facts: Docupoetics And Documentary Writing In A Contemporary Context" on Tuesday, November 10th from 7-8PM, which you can learn more about here. To learn more about José, you can visit his website here. If you would like to purchase his books, just click the titles mentioned, otherwise, here they are again: gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015),