The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the second of a four-part series. The first installment can be found here. The video version can be
The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the second of a four-part series. The first installment can be found here. 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:**That reminds me of what Jen was saying, a few minutes ago, about repetition because there’s a way that California—when I read the “California” poem—California is not utopic to me. And that is really, really important to your work, that it’s not and in the same way—I just finished an article on Walter Benjamin—it’s not messianic.
So, on page 15 of Californiait says:
Instead of going to California I make my
husband a ham and cheese
sandwich to take to work. He doesn’t
like the way I place the cheese on
the bread.
When he leaves for work I sit in a quiet
house.
I told him I couldn’t have this
life.
This wasn’t me living here.
I was living in California.
He said cruel things about having me
committed.
He brought the ring from the cabinet and
tried to put it on my finger.
I said no.
I said I can’t be married right
now.
He said this happens every year.
Now, there’s a way to read
that in this very like*Yellow Wallpaper*kind
of feminist, mad woman in the attic kind of thing going on there, but I think
that’s a totally reductive way to read the “California” poem. It’s not that
that’s not in there, but like when you say, “I was living in California” in
that line, in the middle of that poem, the whole rest of the poem—if you read
the rest—is like this person who wants to go to California.
So, I feel like California
keeps changing what it means even though it’s repeated. It’s unstable in the
ways that Mathias was maybe getting at.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, you know that song that John Prine wrote before he
died, that says (singing):
The lonesome friends of science say
“The world can end most any day”
Well, if it does, then that’s okay
‘Cause I don’t live here anyway
I live down deep inside my head
I just love that song because
I do feel like it’s like that, I just kind of live places in my head, as we all
do. I mean, I think everyone does that, but I’m just like you know …
**Mathias Svalina:**It’s like prince said, “I live in my own heart, Matt
Damon.”
**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah! Yeah, I do think it’s funny because Jesse was
telling me that … what was he saying? I can’t remember but he said something.
Anyways, yeah, I know. Well, all of that’s true though, that page you just
read. That wasn’t something I pretended, that really happened, and I did feel
like I was living in California in this one way. So maybe I was.**Roger Green:**It is funny because I remember you won that that award
that year and the woman called you to give you the award, to tell you that you
won, and she said I hope you get to
California.**Jennifer Denrow:**Oh yeah, I forgot about that.**Roger Green:**And then from Californiaon
you don’t actually end up in California and now you’re in Portland.**Jennifer Denrow:**I know. This freezing thing is happening again. What
happened? You froze, or maybe I froze.**Mathias Svalina: **Are you back?
**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah
**Mathias Svalina:**We said really, really smart shit.**Roger Green:**No, I was saying that it’s interesting because, in the **From California, Onbook you’re not
in California. You’re not living in California now because you’re in Portland.
So. there are these—I mean, you just said it—very autobiographical moments in
the text but there’s some sort of slippage there as well. Maybe it’s what
Mathias was saying about not having hard categories between these things.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, it’s funny, I wrote something last summer about
California. I feel like just every year, maybe, I’ll write a California thing.
I was in California—maybe it was a couple summers ago—we were in San Francisco
for the summer and I wrote a long poem. So, maybe I just keep trying it out
because I feel like if I keep trying it out—I don’t know—it can still be a
place I can go, or something like that.**Mathias Svalina:**Does the mythos of it change every time you write about
it?
**Jennifer Denrow:**I guess it has changed from that initial thing because
initially when I started writing about it had more of a … well, I guess that’s
not true. I was going to say it had less to do with the place and more to do
with the place where I was, but I think it’s like that every time. It’s always
just about escape in this way or something or imagining an escape place. I
mean, I do this, too, like daily, you know. I just have these imaginary places
I always go in my head.**Roger Green:**Of all of my friends, no one can get obsessed with a song
and repeat it over and over again, like you. No one I know listens—and I know a
lot of musicians, right—no one listens to that same thing over and over and
over.**Jennifer Denrow:**I know. Actually, I see Wren doing it and I’m like oh gosh. She just watched this movie, Feel the Beaton Netflix, and then she watched
it like every like morning for two weeks straight. Which is what I used to do
as a kid. I used to watch that movie Dream
a Little Dreamwith Cory Haim and Corey Feldman.
I mean, lots of movies in my
childhood, but that one stands out particularly because I would watch half of
it before I went to school and the other half when I got home, and I did it for
months. And then I made my friend get her video camera and we recorded the
whole opening scene in the basement. And we got clothes and did our hair.
This is so funny because
we’re reading—actually Mathias, this relates to something I was going to talk
about with your work and dreams, but—Jessie’s holding like a book club for the
book Horizon…
**Mathias Svalina:**The Barry Lopez book?
**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah. So, he’s always talking about going into museums and
like spending hours sitting in front of a wooden boat to get to know it. And we
were talking about one of these passages—because it happens throughout the book
where he’s doing this, where he’s like going in and he’s kind of obsessively
spending time with a piece of art or something like that—and I think it was
Dixie who said god, who would do that?
that’s obsessiveand I was just thinking oh
really that makes total sense to me.
So, I think I do feel like if
I can look at something long enough or hear it enough or I can go to the same
space in my mind every night when I go to sleep—if I can do it over and over
and over again—there’s something in that that’s helpful to me. Or, I don’t
know, maybe not helpful, maybe actually detrimental. But, anyway, it’s just
something I do, and I’ve done it since I was little.
And now I see Wren doing it
and I’m like, oh crap, she’s gonna have
that same problem. But yeah, I can definitely look at a thing, listen to a
thing, watch a thing a lot of times.**Roger Green: **So, you were saying that you wanted to talk about Northern Exposure.**Jennifer Denrow:**Oh yeah.**Roger Green:**So, you both are re-watching that. I haven’t seen it since
I was a teenager and I really loved it, but what is it with Northern Exposure?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I remember you telling me that you would watch it
every night when you’re going to sleep, so it would end on the DVD menu and the
little loop of the theme song and that would just be playing all the time
around you. I don’t know, I was thinking about that. I’m currently watching it
as a kind of self-medicating while things have been bad. It’s partially just
nostalgia it was the only thing on tv that I was excited about when I was like
a teenager.
So, sort of like calling back
to seeing the references or ideas that were in play in it. It’s a funny fantasy
world.**Jennifer Denrow:**Mathias, are you watching it like streaming It, or how are
you watching it?
**Mathias Svalina:**No, it’s like it’s not on any streaming service but they
just reissued the DVDs. So, I bought the DVDs and then bought a tiny portable
DVD player. So, I sit in this garage that I live in and watch a seven-inch
portable DVD screen of a show from the early 90s in lieu of psych meds.**Roger Green:**What is comforting about that show for both of you?
**Mathias Svalina:**I think for me, I mean there is the nostalgia thing.
Ideologically, I hate nostalgia but, you know, it’s hard to resist. It’s that
fake small town where an unlimited number of ideas or concepts can try to play
out. So, it’s never like a show in which, I mean there’s like a romantic
through line and this and that, but like the shows would kind of pop in with
some slightly pretentious reference to Hume and then try to play it out in the
small town where there’s like the super conservative dude who was, despite
being super conservative, not evil.
And they would sort of play
that against the kind of hippie-ish *Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance*guy and the tropes in between.
So, it has the repetitive structural form that is in like any Law & Ordershow or anything like
that. Every plot beat is sort of perfectly set and everything resolves safely
at the end but it’s like slightly off-kilter ideas. Rather than just a murdered
body, and then you have a red herring, and then you find the killer, and then
you chase the killer, it has the same sort of narrative idiocy with just like
slightly elevated concepts in it in this fantasy world. And, it’s a totally
white fantasy, too, of Alaska where all of the Native Americans and a few
people of color are there to push forward the white storylines.
Also, it’s just pretty, as
somebody who’s beguiled by fantasies of the natural world—I find that pretty
helpful. But I think also this is something like an arbitrary leap of faith,
like once you’ve decided whatever bullshit it is that comforts you, then you
like watch it on repeat and it comforts you.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, I love everything you said. I was going to say, just
thinking about your work, that what it also has is a lot of dream sequences
where dreams happen and then they’re all of a sudden in these alternative
versions of their lives, which are always so great. I think we were probably
all around the same age when it came out, it came out in like 90 or 91 or 92 or
something—early 90s. Yeah, we were all teenagers.
I just loved like the
imagination of it, really. And it’s still my favorite show because of that. I
think it’s pretty, too. The town, even though it’s in Washington, it’s supposed
to be in Alaska and I’ve always had a dream to go to Alaska.**Roger Green:**So, it kind of feels like there’s a kind of reverse
engineering of like Sherwood Anderson’s *Winesburg, Ohio*and—I
don’t know if you guys know that book—a reverse engineering of the American
small town. But I like what Mathias was saying about the underwritten white
supremacy in it. The way that Alaska functions as a kind of frontier.
And that’s not to reduce the
show to only that. I mean, I think that having a Jewish doctor out there in the
middle of that is kind of doing some complex work. For whatever reason, I’m
thinking of the episode where Chris, from the morning show, is trying to get a
long-distance degree and he’s dealing with the poem, “Casey at the Bat.” Do you guys
remember that one?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, we hit that one, rewatching it.**Roger Green: **And he keeps losing his dissertation defense, basically, but
then he takes the guys out to like play baseball. Chris is like this utopic
liberal type of fantasy character—was that who you meant by the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceguy?
**Mathias Svalina: **Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s like highly machismo masculinized,
and yet also inclusive and queer friendly and multicultural friendly, at least
in the attempts of the early 90s NPR culture. So, he’s like both a chick magnet
and also trying to introduce complex ideas to the small town. So he is, I don’t
know, a Dionysian like fantasy figure.**Roger Green:**So, I do what you guys do but with Twin Peaks, which is like another show from
that same time period, and I was thinking about how it is almost always all
white people in David Lynch. The other night I was watching it and I was like huh, it was just a moment that maybe needs
more unpacking.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, there is something about David Lynch’s version of
the surreal that is definitely not mine.**Roger Green:**Oh, interesting.**Mathias Svalina:**It seems almost pointless to talk about surreality or the
absurd because there’s no useful, working definition of it that actually
applies across it, that includes both Cortázar and Breton and, you know,
indigenous myths and all the different iterations taking the impossible
seriously.
I feel like it sort of gets
lost. And I do it constantly. I just slip casually between concepts of the
surreal and the absurd. I always kind of identify it by the ones that I don’t
connect with. So, like Joyce Mansour, yes and then so much else, no.**Roger Green:**Jen, were you going to say something there?
**Jennifer Denrow:**Well yeah, I was just going to say, Mathias, when we were
reading this book—I’m bringing up Horizonagain—I
was thinking about you specifically in this and thinking about the impossible.
But he’s talking about dreams in this section—have you guys read this book, the Horizonbook?
**Mathias Svalina:**Only a portion of it.**Jennifer Denrow:**Well, in one of the chapters he’s talking about the Thule
people, and he’s just wondering about their dream life and what their
dreamscapes were like because they slept for so long as a way to survive. So,
one thing he says is that,
The challenge in addressing the utility
of our dreams is not whether to reject them outright in an effort to privilege
the sort of logical truth the rational mind offers us, it’s to picture a
conversation between imagination and intellect. One that might produce an
advantageous vision, one the intellect itself cannot discern and which the
imagination alone is not able to create.
So, when I read that I was
thinking about you, Mathias, in your poems and your dreams and how your poems
are like your dreams, or are your dreams, or are our dreams, and how you have
created that bridge between imagination and intellect in a way that allows us
to occupy that space. Because what he’s saying here is that dream life changed
when clocks—not clocks—were invented but basically industrialization and then
we had to sleep eight hours and it messed with our dream rhythms and stuff.
And I think about your poems
inhabiting the impossible in a way that connects us back to that, maybe
earlier, way of knowing or communicating. I don’t know, that’s what it feels
like to me when I read your work. And, when I was rereading The Depressiontoday, I just was thinking
about that so much, how you allow us into that kind of intimate space, or it
feels intimate to me.
I mean, to hear you say that
writing for you is to like erase yourself or abolish yourself—what did you say?
That it’s to like get rid of yourself?—is so interesting because it feels so
generous for you to open that up for the reader. Maybe you don’t feel like
that, but I do feel like I’m going inside of what your mind is doing, or like
how it’s putting things together, or creating dream worlds, or creating these
worlds that you can enter into.
So, I don’t know, I was just
thinking about that when you’re talking about like the impossible or I guess
when I think about absurd or surreal and what you’re saying about a working
definition and how I think about your work. It is kind of related to dream. And
I mean, obviously you run a dream delivery service, so you think about dreams
in that way, but I don’t know if you think about dream logic or dream life or
like dreamscapes in your other poems.
They feel related to me, the
dreams and your books of poems. So, I don’t know maybe they don’t to you.**Mathias Svalina:**No, I mean they do, but the dream stuff definitely came
out that repetitive serial surrealism. I really envy writers, poets and others,
who function with like an essayistic approach of trying to present ideas that
are well thought out and as much as possible confirmed. That doesn’t
necessarily mean factually confirmed, either.
Even some who gets sort of
loosey-goosey phenomenological, say Jorie Graham, you know, who is definitely
doing a Wordsworthian thing, like trying to present a theme and then like undergird
that theme, even her prayer stuff. I don’t know why I’m picking her as an
example, but I always envy that sense of believing, when I read a poet that I
want to believe the vision or vector that they’re presenting is true, because
my mind doesn’t do that in any respect.
So, the writing I do,
whatever components of it are working from my personal experiences and
personalities and personal memory, I’m always trying to write beyond and stop
myself from understanding what I’ve written. And I always think of it as like a
massive curve that is always approaching a line but infinitely never reaches
the line. And my job as the writer, with the kind of writing I do, is not to
present a confirmable feeling or confirmable state, but to leave—hopefully—if
it works—fruitful disconnections, so that, in the kind of cold read, boardwalk
fortune teller way, something meaningful happens that is beyond me.
But then it’s also through
the repetition of form that those ways of trying to leave meaningful gaps and
meaningful disconnections become rhetorical tools as well and become modes of
either obscurity or modes of openness. And I think that’s the stuff that, when
I was like spending a lot of time reading myth and a lot of time reading the
traditions of, especially, the European fable that I was really attracted to
where the arbitrary or the meaningless tries to make sense.
So that an ice cream made out
of living rabbits, if it’s prevented in a deadpan enough way and the reader is
willing to, has to be taken seriously and sort of attempted to be understood.
That’s the more the more attainable world to me than a world in which I can
understand how things making sense and I can present my understanding of how
things make sense to other people, either in a sort of an essayistic way or in
the traditional capital R Romantic aesthetics—artist feels a thing, creates an
object, transfers feeling to that object.
I don’t know where I’m going
with this, but that sense of dream logic I think is sort of tied up in
that—trying to rationally present irrational gaps. Or maybe not.**Jennifer Denrow:**I think that feels true to me. I can’t remember what you
said early on about how you’re not reaching for that truth or something, but
your poems feel true.**Mathias Svalina:**That’s not my fault.**Jennifer Denrow:**No, just the emotion of them feels so true, and maybe
that’s what you open, placing those things next to each other. Or, like the man
with the gardens growing out of his feet. I don’t know, they feel true to me. I
mean, not like there’s a guy walking around with gardens out of his feet, but
the image you’re using to express the feeling of the end, or of dying, or
trying to stay alive is really powerful.
So, I guess because I’m
someone who prefers emotional truth to like other kinds of truth your poems do
feel true to me, or they feel real. I don’t know, maybe I’m saying that wrong.
Anyway, that’s how they feel to me.**Mathias Svalina:**Do you feel like your problems have a visionary aspect to
them, for you as a reader of your own work?
**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, well they feel, to me when I’m writing them that I’m
trying really, really hard to see something, and that feels meaningful to me. I
don’t feel like it’s like I’m looking for a particular answer or like visionary
in that way of like visions, but I do feel like it feels like a worthwhile
attempt for me to engage with that imagination space.
And I could just do it
forever. I mean, now I hardly write because I’m teaching a lot and Wren, but
when I do get time—it’s hard for me to write when other things are going on, I
really need like no one around and I like to be really alone and I don’t have a
paper to grade, I just like to have nothing and then I feel like I can really
go into that space.
But the writing, for me, is
the most important part and the most valuable part. So, I don’t really read
back over them too much. I guess sometimes I will if I’m typing them up, but
just like being able to be in that moment of the writing is important. I know
that’s important to you, too, because the writing of it and the overwriting and
the volume of the writing is the activity that’s important for you and then you
just kind of let it go, either by deleting or sending them out and not keeping
copies.