The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the first of a four-part series. The video version can be found here. Jennifer Denrow is the The
The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the first of a four-part series. The video version can be found here.Jennifer Denrowis the author of California (Four Way Books, 2011). Her chapbooks include How We Know it is That (Horse Less Press, 2014) and From California, On (Brave Men Press, 2012). Her writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, Alaska Quarterly Review, Octopus, and Poets.Org. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver and is the recipient of a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts.**Mathias Svalina*is the author of The Depression (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2020), The Wine-Dark Sea, (Sidebrow Books, 2016), Wastoid (Big Lucks Books, 2014), The Explosions (Subito Press, 2012), and multiple other works. He is the coeditor at Octopus Books and lives in Denver, Colorado. Svalina has operated a ***Dream Delivery Service*since 2014. He hand delivers poems to subscribers within a 4 mile radius of his home base in each city and delivers poems by mail to every other subscriber.**Roger Green is general editor of The New Polisand a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of *A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics: Enchanted Citizens.
**Roger Green:**Okay, welcome back. I am Roger Green, I’m the general editor for The New Polis, and this is the second in a series of literary conversations on The New Polis. I’ve been writing—last year especially—a long series on the ways that philosophers use literature. I particularly reread Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and I’ve been kind of critical of the ways that philosophers take a kind of utilitarian approach to literature itself.
So, I want to have more
literary material and literary aesthetic discussions on the website, and what
I’m doing is, I’m interviewing authors, writers hopefully who know each other’s
work a little bit. So, today we are with Jennifer Denrow and Mathias Svalina.
We’ve all known each other for several years. So, thank you guys for being
here.
I have questions that I sent
you. I’m asking people rather dense questions, but that’s just to kind of skip
over the pleasantries of like, what got
you into writingor the traditional interview stuff. People can look
up your names and your background and what else you’ve published and all that
on their own, and I always write a little piece after these.
So, I thought we would jump
right into your work, but just before we started recording you guys were
talking about how you write, so maybe we could just jump back to that for a
minute. Like, how you physically write …
**Jennifer Denrow:**I just write in a book with a pen and then when I fill up
the book, I just get a new book. Sometimes people send me books and then I just
write in those and then I just get a new one after it’s done.**Mathias Svalina:**What happens between the book’s physical existence and the
version that becomes something that you send as a file?
**Jennifer Denrow:**Oh, you mean when I put it into the computer?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, what kind of transformation, or not, usually
happens?
**Jennifer Denrow:**Oh, usually I write in a book and fill it up and then I
look back through the book and put some things into the computer, but not
everything. Sometimes I only fill up about 20 pages and then I’ll do it, but
sometimes I fill up the whole book or sometimes I fill up two books. And then I
look back through them and then I choose things. It’s like my time to choose
things.**Mathias Svalina:**How do you feel like your choosing happens?
**Jennifer Denrow:**I just feel like I choose them if I like what it’s saying
but if I don’t then I don’t choose it. So, sometimes if I fill up one page I
could only really just like one word or maybe one line. Sometimes I just write
something down and then I type it up on the computer. Like, with California, that’s what I did. I just wrote it
down one day in a book and then I just typed it up into the computer. And I didn’t
be choosy there, I just typed it all up. So sometimes I just type everything,
sometimes I’m making choices.**Roger Green:**You make choices spacing it out on the page then when
you’re …
**Jennifer Denrow:**No, usually I write it down and then I put that onto the
computer. So, the spacing is like how I write it.**Roger Green:**Oh, that’s great.**Jennifer Denrow:**But sometimes it’s not. If the page is too little or the
book is too small, then I have to make the lines longer, but if it’s a big book
then I have to make them smaller.**Mathias Svalina:**I think I’m interested in seeing between the book and what
becomes the file, because your work is so often, to me, this sort of stumbling
onto astonishments or collecting phenomena, which is very different from how I approach
writing. I’m curious if there’s a lot of excising or a lot of adherence to
whatever came first.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like there is—I don’t
know—but sometimes there’s not, but sometimes there is. But you like to write
on the computer.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I mean, I tend to write things that … I think at
least six of the seven books had a structural project to them or a repetitive
form, and so I mostly have one file and right on the computer and stay inside
of that form repeating over and over again, and writing usually two or three
times more than what becomes the final book and then just cut out what seems
boring.**Jennifer Denrow:**Do you write on Word Document?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I guess it is Word. Yeah.**Jennifer Denrow: **Do you even save it to your computer or send it to
yourself?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah.**Jennifer Denrow: **But how do you know if it gets lost? Oh no, Mathias, I
think you’re frozen.**Roger Green:**Hopefully he’ll come back. But it was good because you
said, “how do you know if it gets lost” and then he kind of got lost.**Jennifer Denrow:**Oh yeah, that was a good ending line. And he looks kind of
cool with that line, thinking about it. If someone gets frozen and you’re
recording it does it record them as frozen or do they get to be regular?
**Roger Green:**Well, when you put the video back in, it shifts to
whoever’s talking.**Jennifer Denrow:**He’s gone!
**Roger Green: **Yeah, hopefully he’ll come back. I don’t want to read his poem
without him hearing it. Oh, there he is.**Mathias Svalina:**Sorry.**Roger Green:**That’s okay.**Jennifer Denrow: **Mathias, you got frozen.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, you did, too.**Jennifer Denrow:**I did?
**Roger Green:**So, Jen, you were asking Mathias if he’s afraid of work
getting lost on the computer.**Jenifer Denrow: **Oh right. Yeah, if you compose in Word how do you then
keep it? Do you send it to yourself?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I mean, I back things up, and I must say, I don’t
think I’ve lost any big chunk of thing before. It doesn’t scare me—I don’t
really care as much about the product I’m making as the time and energy of trying
to fill out that product. So, I think that’s why I like doing the drain thing.
Every day I just start dropping over again and I try to exhaust myself every
day, and then start again the next day and do as much as I can.**Jennifer Denrow:**Do you feel like exhausting yourself is a really important
part of your process?
**Mathias Svalina:**I think it’s more about my mental health than it is about
anything aesthetic. The process of writing that stuff keeps me at a much more
stable place than when I’m not doing it. So, I think most of my writing has
followed whatever is psychologically attractive to me rather than following
conceptual goals or ideological goals.**Roger Green:**That’s super interesting to me because your work, like in America
at Play, you say at the beginning of that book that it’s a
constraint exercise and that seems to be something that you gravitate to—or *I
am a Very Productive Entrepreneur*does the same kind of
repeat thing over and over again. But it reminds me of the Oulipowriters or Exhausting
a Place in Paris—which is a different kind of thing—but there’s
a kind of ludic quality to your work, there’s a kind of playfulness and then
there’s the kind of moment where you’re tired from playing too much, like when
you’re a kid and you don’t want to walk fucking home from the park because
you’re just dreading the field because of how far it is. But that kind of
emotion seems to erupt for me when I read your work.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I like forms and in undergrad I studied mostly
medieval and renaissance literature, and the stuff that I love more than any
other stuff is the Elizabethans, who are almost universally pretty shitty
people—I mean, like Spencer who is so beautiful at every single line also devised
a game plan for genocide. But that mode of repetitive formal controls and then
trying to find a way to untie them through repetition and uncontrol them is
appealing to me. So, finding a form and then doing it, like 300
times, because the first 20 might be some good ideas, but then once you run out
of ideas you have to keep going at it. Then, for me, I find myself getting more
interested in the uniform.**Roger Green: **Okay, this is great. I didn’t know that you were into that
period, but I’ve been teaching intro to literature this summer and I did more
than five hours of lectures just reading through Macbethfor
my students because like, *how do you like
read along?*But I want to look at a couple of things in The Depression, partly because I did like an early
modern poetry lecture and then I read this book and I was thinking of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets when
I read *The
Depression*this week.**Mathias Svalina:**Well, *Wastoid*it’s
based on the Sonnets.**Roger Green:**Oh, it is?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, that’s why there’s 154 of them.**Roger Green:**Oh yeah. I need to re-read it.**Mathias Svalina:**They’re not in order though, they don’t correspond to the
order of the Sonnets and I’ve forgotten the conversation.**Roger Green:**Yeah, so there are images, there are things that come up,
like the white Firebird comes up multiple times.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah that was my first car.**Roger Green:**But then you talk about nature a lot. So, I want to read
this poem, it’s on page 33 of The
Depression, and it says:
Nature found itself in a dictionary, but
then the dictionary fell apart & nature, like all the other words, got
meaningless & free. A piece of nature was loved by a human, who wrapped
that nature up in a poem. When that human died other humans laid down asphalt
over the nature & made trails through the nature & surrounded the
nature with walls neutralized all the animals that climbed over the walls. This
space was named Nature Park or Nature University or The New Nature. But then
the asphalt cracked & walls cracked & animals swarmed The New Nature,
& they too, soon enough, will find something to destroy with their love.
(33)
**Mathias Svalina:**That’s uplifting.**Roger Green:**Yeah, yeah. So actually, when I was reading it, I was
like, oh this is like the Book of Nature,
which is a big theme. I’ve always thought that if I was smart enough, I would
write a history of The Book of Nature.**Mathias Svalina:**From Pliny?
**Roger Green:**Yeah. Well, and not so much Pliny but I was thinking of The New Organonor Sir Francis Bacon.
That kind of moment of moving things towards automatons and the early modern
period, and where nature becomes this kind of thing that people read like it’s
a book—like nature becomes a text.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, which is an old medieval trope.**Roger Green:**So, then there’s a sacred forest that shows up later on in
the book. I’ll just read it:
In the sacred forest people throw
parties for gods & the gods show up looking clean & lustrous. The
parties blaze & everything nevermores in the blaze, no one a woman or a man
in the blaze, no truth or devotion in the blaze. Drums clang & twist the
dancers & forest delirious. Or that’s what I hear, anyways. I am not
allowed in the sacred forest. Each time I try to sneak in I am caught. That
could be fine, I could live a sneaker’s life, but I am the sheriff of this town
& I must exert control. I am waiting outside the sacred forest, hoping some
god will make an exception for me, holding this sack of corn, dressed in white,
face painted with symbols I don’t know how to read.**Mathias Svalina:**I don’t know, I don’t remember what I was doing when I was
writing that. I was trying to cheer myself up, I think. But when I was editing
it, I was really trying to think of it as fables and think about what kind of
what kind of lessons I wanted to pass on through the fact of this mode. But I
don’t really like lessons. I think I wanted them all—or mostly all of them—to
not reach their goals.
I like the kind of surrealism
that comes out of the Eastern European stories, the really short stories, the
really tiny ones, fable style, moral, the end.**Roger Green:**So, it seems like you do this, but you’re consciously
working in a surrealist vein, you would say?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I mean that’s the only way I can really do anything,
that’s just how the world appears to me.**Roger Green: **I asked you guys some questions in email and I can write them
into like my writing piece—so I don’t have to repeat them all here—but I was
really interested in how there are a lot of elements in both your work that
seem to resonate with forms of enchantment and maybe forms of states of
exception. But I had asked you in an earlier question about the surrealist
project, like this early book by Julien Levy, Surrealism,
claims that there are politics to the movement. So, there was a quote I gave
you guys by Pierre-Olivier Lapie on the surrealist insurrection, from 1935,
that seems to think that surrealism is aesthetically aligned with Soviet
politics at the time.
So, I wondered if you think
of your work as participating in that political aspect of things. I mean, you
mentioned Spencer and genocide, and I think there’s definitely a deep ethical
thing going on with that.**Mathias Svalina:**What do you think, Jen? have you place your writing in
relation to larger ethics or politics?
**Jennifer Denrow:**I mean, I don’t know if I do. I just think that … Okay,
this is what I think, or this is what I feel that I think: at some point in
time, I think how to know became so weird and so industrial and so economical,
or so related to something like progress. And I don’t feel like I can know
good. Or, I think about knowing more as intuition or feeling.
So, I don’t know if it’s
related to this, it’s probably so different because I don’t think this is some
kind of thing like what you’re talking about. It’s not, I don’t think—I mean, I
don’t feel—like surrealism is … I mean, I do have some feeling against the
rational because it doesn’t make sense to me. But I’m not sure if that’s enough
to connect it to a surrealist ethic.
I don’t know, maybe the
enlightenment—I don’t really know, politically or historically, at what point
in time or maybe it’s always fluctuated about how to know—I just feel like how
I know things is not related to knowledge or something. I don’t know, I just
feel like I don’t know how to know. So, I don’t think that’s really surrealist,
but I can’t really describe what I think, but I feel like it’s something like
that. What do you think?
**Mathias Svalina:**I think that when I think of the surrealist tendencies of
your work, they’re more like Francis Ponge’s approached with surrealism and
that sense where, if you look very closely at what appears to be the rational,
the controlled, the useful versions of knowledge, and you keep looking at it
intently the inherently irrational is going to surface as well so that you
can’t just focus so much on uses of language or trying to control specific
facts or trying to turn things into objects.
But I feel like in your
writing, with its sometimes constellating, or scattering, or arrivals of
astonishing things, pushed up against sometimes mundane things or personal
reflections or collaging that sometimes happens in different kinds of
experiences, it makes sense what you’re saying about that resistance of the use
value or going into a more immersive or inclusive kind of knowing, in which a
fact that could be employed doesn’t have a primary importance nor does an image
of a familiar beauty or an image of familiar constructs of profundity.
So, I’m thinking like about
your new chapbook, in those poems you’ll have a line that is very direct about
representing personal experience, and then the next line might be a seemingly
disconnected image, and then the next line might be a more prose style sentence
structure that’s more thinking about something.
And the ways that those are
all sort of—I said constellating already—but the sense of like projecting the
nodes of attention and then that attention is revealing
surrealism. Because aesthetically, I don’t like much of the French
surrealists. So, I have a hard time identifying with them personally. Oh sorry,
Jen. You were saying something I like.**Jennifer Denrow:**No, I like how you just said that because I do feel like
when I’m writing I’m trying to get as close as I can to what’s in front of me
to understand what it is because I don’t feel like I have enough of a framework
from any place else to make me feel confident in what that is, which is always
what I’ve written. I’m just trying to write into my understanding of a
thing.
So, what you just said makes
sense. When you’re talking about form, it’s so interesting, because you’ll use
the form hundreds of times and I think for me I can look at the same thing like
a thousand times just to try to figure out the difference or like is there a
difference or what that difference is. So, I think there is—in both of our
work—some kind of an obsessiveness with repetition or just sustained attention,
like what you were saying.
But I was gonna say, I was
writing down all these quotes from your book and I was just thinking about it
in terms of how we think about surrealism, which I think if someone just hears
that term that has not studied surrealism, or doesn’t really know surrealist
art, or is not an academic they just think of the strange and the familiar
merging—maybe that would be like the way that a lot of people think about it.
But I was just thinking about how so much of your work is like a problem with
knowing, or with how to know. Maybe it’s not that way for you but it is for me,
when I read it.
And I feel like that’s really
a big part of my work, too. And then, also, what something is. Like on page 88
of The Depressionyou say, “he
could not stop being a ruin,” or on 94 you say, “keeping itself a lake,” or on
109 you say, “finally becomes what he is,” or the one I said earlier, “in 1982
I was 1982.” And then you have this amazing line on page 81 that says, “knowing
makes things unsustainable.”
So, I feel like, when I read
your work, and it could just be because this is my own way—this is just me
putting my own construct onto your work—but I feel like there’s this really
uncertain sense, like everything is unstable or there’s this instability in it.
Which, I guess, when thinking about surrealism there is something that I relate
to instability or shiftingness or something. So, I don’t know. I’m just talking
now.**Roger Green:**So, I just imagine like some critic in like 20 years or 30
years, some graduate student, is working on poetry from the period and is looking
at your work. Like, I’m reading a book on the French New Wave right now,
because I’m teaching the French New Wave, and they’re trying to say, *well, what was the new wave.*And they
might look back and be like, well, you
know it was like the first two decades of the 21st century, and, everybody’s talking about like post-truth society.
And, I don’t think of your
work, either of your work, as being anything like what people mean by the
poetry of post-truth or something. I feel like there’s something anchoring, and
maybe it’s in the way that you’re using the absurd or surrealism, but your work
feels much more ethical to me—both of your work. So, the question of how you
know—I like how you’re talking about that.**Mathias Svalina:**I think, what I’ve seen in Jen’s work, a lot of the time,
is this sort of—I said it already, but—an attempt to record an experience of a
phenomenological mess, in the sense that it’s all a mess—so without any
taxonomies or categories. To me that comes back to that silly stuff in Shelley,
and so many other people, that the only way that one can ever really know the workings
of another’s mind is through art and the attempt to record, with some iteration
or construct of veracity, what it feels like to be that person at this
time.
So, I feel like I’m dropped
inside of a mind that is not my own. I’m very viscerally in the regions. And, I
directly connect that to maybe Brendan Behan. Sort of writing, attempting to
put it all in and not have categories of the poetic or the unpoetic and not
have categories of hierarchies of which phenomena, which experiences are more
worthy of being recorded. That’s very much not what I do, I try to write to
erase myself.**Jennifer Denrow:**You try to write what, Mathias?
**Mathias Svalina:**To erase myself.