The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the third of a four-part series. The first installment can be found here, the secondhere. The video
The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the third of a four-part series. The first installment can be found here, the secondhere. 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:**Something in the way that I’m reading your work: so, we
were talking about northern exposure and a little bit about nostalgia, and
nostalgia, it means homesickness, and it was like a disease that colonizers
got, like melancholy as well. And I’m interviewing a guy in a few weeks on the
concept of melancholy, but I wonder—just to re-hit back onto the white
supremacy thing for a minute—I wonder sometimes if part of whiteness is that
ability to narcissistically reflect back on to oneself, one’s own homesickness.
So that nostalgia, as an
aesthetic idea, ends up being something that supports white supremacy. And I’m
always trying to ask, myself and other people, to question where white supremacy
is in the things that we love. It’s so easy to point to neo-fascists or to the
cops or whatever and, yeah that’s going on, but what is the stuff that’s
sustaining me in that way.
So, I think this is why I’m
really drawn to both of your work because I think that there’s something about
the dream element, something about the absurd element, and something even in I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur—Mathias’s
book, which would seemlike, this is
the capitalist subject, Iam very
productive,I’m producing all of this
work all ofthe time, but—there’s
something dismantling that’s going on.
And so, because of music, I
always translate this into the idea of the aesthetics of innocence. Like, what
is indie rock, what is in some ways white supremacist about indie rock and the
ability to perform innocence? And there are some people, people like Daniel
Johnston, who I would say perform the aesthetic in a different way than maybe
after the strokes come along. So there’s probably different gradations of like
indie rock or indie aesthetic.
We don’t have to talk about
music, I’m just really interested in that idea of innocence, the narrative of
innocence that white people tell themselves all the time. They find ways,
myself included. I use the term Euro-Christian for whiteness, but I’m not
trying to exclude myself from that. But I do think that your work,
respectively, could be misread as trafficking in innocence and I don’t think
that it is.**Mathias Svalina:**Definitely, for the more, sort of surrealist, fabulous stuff
that I write, I intentionally write in the sort of narrative structure and
usually pretty linguistically banal stuff. So, it’s at the extreme for the
dreams. Each one starts off like, you’re
in an ice cream shop, you’re in a forest glade, you’re in a castle, in
just the most simplistic approaches to narrative. And then trying to keep
things, in a storybook manner, open to whoever is the reader, regardless of
background, allowing for their presence and what they bring to it.
But obviously I’m also limited
by pretty obvious borders of my imagination. So, I think a lot of the innocence
that I try actively to work through and refuse as a tool, those kinds of
problems are there to try to strip away specificity. Which then the flip side
of that is stripping away specificity, and no longer placing things in a real
world, and no longer actively challenging the overall problems.
I mean, I could spend all day
talking how bad my writing is but I think that that flip of using innocence, or
using a simplistic approach to narrative and image exits it from a public
conversation, or exists it from holding a mirror back up to the society and
what vision can do. But also, there gets to be the point as a writer where it’s
like well, this is the shit I can do.
And I would never go around
talking about myself as a great writer, or even a particularly good one, but I
can do these couple things and I can do them at least like C+ level, so that’s
what I do. And as I try to write outside of the boundaries of what I’m already
sort somewhat adept at, that is when I’m like, oh yeah, I have certain
limitations.
Even doing that thing for the
Museum of Contemporary Art—taking the dreams—rather than writing a dream for an
individual subscriber and they’re the one to get in the mail, as this sort of
full synthetic transaction, I did a thing for the Museum of Contemporary Art
where I did 30 dreams around Denver that are located in spots and people go to
the spots and call up the audio tour and hear the dream that I’ve written for
that spot.
And immediately, because I’m
no longer in this playground, the sandbox of pure imagination, I had to contend
with what locations of Denver I was trying to present, what visions of Denver’s
sprawl and gentrification and white supremacy and this and that I was tapping
into or ignoring. You know, how to speak surrealism and speak nonsense back to
places that have historical and cultural importance to people.
So, it created a whole
different process of thinking through the ethics of a public surrealism, rather
than a private service. Which I oftentimes think of the books that I write, the
dreams that I do, as being focused on creating small intimacies, where trying
to create a more public things very different. And I found that having to pick
and choose between those simplistic images more carefully or more concertedly
than I do when I’m writing the dreams or writing the material surreal stuff,
where I’m like whatever happens, happens and then it’s played out and let’s see
what illogical end we can get today. I don’t know if that answers what you were
saying, exactly.**Roger Green:**I know, just because I’ve had some discussions over at MCA
Denver—and I love people over there like Adam before he left and Sarah Baie—but
discussions around race and whiteley spaces of the museum and particularly when
Arthur Jafa had a video installation there a little while back. But it sounds
like there’s a lot of dissent in your approach to those public spaces. That
sounds quite political to me.**Mathias Svalina:**Well, I was talking it through with somebody who was
helping me with editing, and I wanted an innate presentation of a vision of
Denver that is not presented by the scene very frequently. But I also didn’t
want it to be part of the work because I didn’t want to be seen as … so often
white artists end up bragging about doing the barest fucking minimum. So,
trying to catch up or check my own limitations, while also not holding up the
fact that I did a little bit of checking of myself as a bragging point.
And I wanted to continue to
do the thing I do but figure out how it felt more ethical when culturally
placed and replaced within the city. So, I don’t know, if this felt more like I
was just trying to contend with my own innate limitations and work, at least
slightly, beyond them rather than being sort of an activist with it.**Roger Green:**Yeah, but that’s such a different way than the Andy Warhol
kind of factory capitalist aesthetic, does traffic quite a bit in nostalgia in
a sense. I mean, just that Campbell Soup can, for example. There’s this great
album that Lou Reed and John Cale did in the 90s where all of the songs were
made from Andy Warhol’s diaries, and from their memories about that, and
there’s this song where Lou Reed’s singing with Andy yelling at them, saying
the most important thing is work, the most important thing is work. But the
importance of work in the way that you just characterized it is really
different, I feel like, than the Andy Warhol way.**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, I’m not interested in any vision of an artist being
supposedly entitled to do whatever they want without thinking about their basic
political principles. Which is nothing to brag about and not something that
should be this fucking crazy approach. But I’m also not a complex thinker, I’m
not a theorist I’m not able to understand sociopolitical complexity in any way
that I think I can say something useful about progressing a public argument or
public discussion.
My bread and butter is just
writing weird shit and that’s the thing I can do because that’s my life. But it
doesn’t, in any way, exit me from, or forgive me of the innate errands that I
run for race and gender and class and all these other things that, just by
being I’m benefiting from progressing those hierarchies of oppression that I
ideologically oppose.
I did just fucking quote one
of my own poems.**Jennifer Denrow:**You did what?
**Mathias Svalina:**I just quoted one of my problems about “running the
errands of race and gender.” That’s a line from a poem in this book I’m working
on. So, even in my moment of trying to parse out a level of ethics, I’m
narcissistically citing myself.**Jennifer Denrow:**No. No way. Well, I do think that—thinking about white
supremacy, and innocence, and the problematic nature that white people have
with their imaginations, and their ability to slip into the imaginative realm,
that everything’s fine or getting better, or whatever all the imaginings that
white people have done forever and still do and will probably always do, and
how as artists or poets or whatever our main working tool is the imagination—I
understand that that’s really problematic, but, Mathias, I feel like you’ve
totally disengaged from this system, in my eyes, that supports all of these
things that are …
**Mathias Svalina:**But it’s also because of my privileges, my many
privileges, that I’m able to. I know I can trust having ten dollars in my bank
account and biking across the country. I can trust that because, as a straight
white dude, I get to have the fantasy that things work out. And that
underscores the whole bullshit that I do.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, I know. I hear what you mean, and this is a problem
for me that I have been maybe trying to solve since I started writing. Which
is, I feel like the luxury I have of going into my imagination to trying to see
things, and the space that I have to do that, it’s not good. It’s not good in
terms of it not helping right any wrong, it’s not helping, it’s not active in a
way that it needs to be. There are a lot of problems with it.
And I try in other ways in my
life to live inside of those actions, but I do feel like in writing I’m part of
this huge problem where I’m just this white person that kind of goes in my mind
and thinks about things. And even though I try to write into moments of wonder
or astonishment or bewilderment or I try to be up close to that feeling, that’s
doesn’t seem like a worthwhile cause in the eyes of justice in the world. So
yeah, it’s really hard.**Mathias Svalina:**On the other hand, as an artist you gotta play the hand
you’re dealt. We’re all able to do the things we’re able to do.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, no, I like that. I think that’s true, too.
It’s funny because when you
wrote that in those questions, Roger I never really thought of my work as
innocent, but I guess it is. And I don’t know what to do about it other than
continue to think about what I can do about it, and hopefully, at some point in
time, do something. In other places in my life, like teaching, I don’t feel
that way. I feel like there are more things that I’m able to actively do in my
professional life that hopefully help, and not harm, people of color.
I feel like in my writing I
don’t do anything. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time and I
don’t have anything really articulate to say about it other than it’s like kind
of horrible to have this relationship with my imagination that I have.**Roger Green:**Just to be clear about the questions that I asked, I don’t
necessarily think of your work as innocent or trafficking in innocence—that’s
some term i’ve just been using today, “trafficking in innocence.” There are
moments like this, in Californiaon
page 11, where the speaker says:
When I went to the backyard I
said to myself, this doesn’t look like California, and nothing in my life does.
And my husband says he’ll have to deal with this forever.
I want to go so bad I clench my fist
hard in the air.
I push my finger into his chin and cry.
It feels like this, I say.
I need it this bad.
So, there’s obviously
oppression going on with this character in relation to her husband but then
there are these moments that are really sensual, like that touching his chin or
blowing into his mouth at one point, or talking into his mouth—this character
wants to go to California and her husband says no and she’s like well, can I talk into your mouth then. He lets
her, but then says that it tickles too much, right.
I mean, I guess you could
read something like that as innocence, but I see a kind of sweetness around
that that gives a kind of reality or a kind of dimension to the character that
isn’t just like yeah, I’m this this
unhappy wife who wants to go to California and my husband won’t let me,
kind of thing. So, I guess that’s why I’m trying to tease out.
I don’t think of either of
your work as necessarily trafficking in innocence. I don’t think of it as
supporting a liberal order of things, or certainly not a liberal progressive
order of things. So, it’s not messianic in that sense. It’s not trying to save
the world, but there’s this kind of guilt or something that’s operating around
that.
So, what I’m sort of
interested in is figuring out what it is that the work is doing. Because there
used to be a time where you could say, surrealism in the 1930s is communist
because the proletariat needs the space to be able to dream in that particular
way. But that’s a really different kind of dream space than being an
entrepreneur or getting a business degree.**Mathias Svalina:**I think when I heard innocenceabout
Jen’s work, what I took from that was the—even in the part that you read, you
know, I clenched my face, I did this, I
did that—simplistic, but not as an insult, but just a pared-down approach
to the telling of complex or fraught events so that there’s something in the
tension between an almost like childlike reporting of what happened in a moment
and the very complex, and adult, and very fraught thing that’s being reported
about. That’s what I see as a tool of narrative innocence in Jen’s poems, where
the most complex things are told in maybe the least complex ways so that it
requires, or conjures, a multiplicity in the moment.
Whereas, a more controlled
approach to presenting the fraught situation would be to tease out the nature
of the psychology there, tease out the nature of the trauma there and present
that in more sort of taxonomical way or a more understood way. Which, I don’t
know if that’s responding to what you’re saying about this sense of like the
messianic goals of the surrealists as a clique or a group with a manifesto and
shit. I could feel like that work of poetry, of asking a reader to play along
and understand however small they may be, however minute or discreet or qualified,
understand that the heart of lyric poetry is also like part of that tension
between complexity and simplicity that I see in Jen’s stuff
That’s not big, it’s not
messianic. You can’t tease out the politics of the lyric because it’s not about
a public display or public structure making. The lyric is about reformulating
internalized experiences with another. Which then leads to a sort of immediate
jump of like, ergo it’s like not making the big change or something, and then
just sort of shitting on ourselves that both Jen and I did.**Roger Green:**What were you going to say, Jen?
**Mathias Svalina:**Yeah, sorry I steamrolled you.**Jennifer Denrow:**No, I loved hearing you talk.**Roger Green:**What you just said about the lyric, by the way, that was
amazing.**Jennifer Denrow: **Yeah, that was so good. I just think too, this is also
maybe linguistic, that going back to your question, Roger, about a post-truth
poetry or what poetry is doing now. I do think, Mathias, I feel this in your
poems, and again this could just be me feeling it and not your intention at
all, or not part of your process or what you’re doing, but I do feel like there
is this sense that everything is so much now, everything is so much like the
media, all the information, the language that accompanies all of this.
Again, I feel like I do this,
too, and maybe I’m just putting what I do on thinking about what you do, but I
do feel there’s something in your language that pushes against that. I mean
even like that poem, “The uncomfortable-able,” the way that your relationship
to language is pushing against the system of language that has been created and
is so problematic—how language just sort of fills us all the time.
So, maybe there’s, not a
simplicity, I don’t mean that or an innocence, I don’t think of it like that I
just think of it as direct. These words are more direct, it’s like they’re
trying to maintain control or sanity by opposing the superstructure of like
language that does nothing but serve itself. I’m probably not saying this
right, but I feel like there’s something linguistically happening in your poems
when I read them.
When I think about my poems
that’s just like kind of pushing against trying to over complicate something
for the sake of having it be over complicated and take more words. Do you know
what I mean? Why do things have to be so complicated?
**Mathias Svalina:**As Avril Lavigne said.**Jennifer Denrow:**Oh, that’s true. So, I don’t know if that’s related back,
Roger, to this question. I don’t know, it feels linguistic to me, too, this
conversation you know of what’s happening.**Roger Green:**Oh, certainly. I mean, I’m somebody who is committed to
trying to think about what some sort of recovered concept of the literary might
be after this kind of neoliberal takeover of literary studies in general. And
my friend Carl [Raschke], the co-editor, wrote a piece on The
New Polisthis
weekand he was saying that neoliberalism is sort of given birth,
in theory, by poststructuralism and people like Foucault in the 60s and
70s—then of course there are racialized elements going on there as well.
But part of that hope of the
post-structuralist moment was to be able to try to detach from things and to
see things as movement itself—there is no center, that kind of thing. It was
about trying to speak at the level of the apparatus, as Althusser would say.
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is one of his essays. Roland Bart
was trying to do this too, where it’s like I
don’t want to change around the words on the menu I want to change the menu
itself.
And so, the French New Novel, Writing Degree Zero,
all of that kind of stuff was trying to do that. And I don’t think that we are
in that moment anymore. I think in America everything becomes utilitarian. You
can use it to make money like in your job so that you do some material approach
to, maybe, gender in the 18th century and you make a living doing that sort of
thing, and it doesn’t really address on ongoing questions around gender.
People just like
professionalize a particular way of looking at things, of which I think, I don’t want to be part of that. But I think
that that language does sort of change over time and I talked about this with
Steven Dunn and Selah Saterstrom a few weeks ago, and Steven said something
that came to mind when you guys were talking. Steven was like, “yeah, I’m not
trying to write a tour de force, I never want my book to be a tour de force.”
And I totally understand the resistance to that kind of capital order, the
resistance to success, I guess.
This is part of the small
press world, as well, the economics of it. But I do think that it has to happen
at the level of language or langue,
in Ferdinand de Saussure’s sense of the term.**Mathias Svalina:**In addition to other levels, too. It’s like, if I were any
fucking good at anything else, I would also be doing that. But I can do these
small things, so if I try to do those consciously and try to put my practice
out into the world consciously, I hope that that is at least moving in the
right direction. And I think that that thing Steven said immediately resonated,
that sense of not only what it means to write a tour de force, to write the
great book.
The great novel is always a
structure. It’s never just one artist making a book. It’s got to be a structure
of marketing. It’s got to be a structure of capital that allows for the
printing. And there are people out there that I want that for. I want you know
Colson Whitehead to continue to write tour de force novels because I think what
he’s saying is important. What he’s saying is important, he’s an amazing
writer, I want him to have all the big house marketing and all the like big
house support.
But the level of language is
one way for understanding and change. The level of street activism is another.
So, trying to find what you’re capable of affecting and then affecting it seems
important on an aesthetic and ethical level.
And I feel, from my positions
of privilege, limiting what I try to affect is also important. Consciously, not
trying to buy into systems of prestige, systems of using art as a steppingstone
for being middle class, or something like that. While also, at the same time,
I’m benefiting from living on the margins of the art capital world.**Jennifer Denrow:**Do you want me to read this part of your poem? I love it
and I was thinking about it when I was talking last time. But it says on page
52:
I was running out of words each week,
each week more & more. First I’d run out on Fridays, which was okay because
I could spend the weekend wordless & avoiding others until I got all my
words back on Monday, just in time for work. But then I ran out of words earlier
and earlier in the week until I could only stay wordful through Tuesdays by
acting austere & silently judgey. The doctor recommended a lung &
throat replacement & I had her replace my lungs & throat with a book.
After the surgery everything I said became a fact & all I could do was say
things.
And it goes on it’s an
amazing poem. But I just love that, the way that words work in your poems.**Mathias Svalina: **To me that’s my attempt to explain the phenomenology of
depression. That’s just very straightforward, like when I know that depression
is rising up again and that’s as straightforward as I can be.**Jennifer Denrow:**Well, I thought that, in terms of like metaphor, there’s
this amazing thing, “I’m cooking a meal in a lightless kitchen. All the spices
taste the same. None of the flames are hot.” That feels to me the same way as
what you just said. That feels like a very straightforward, like this is what this feels like.**Mathias Svalina:**That was the goal of that book, just try to write fables
that, through my aesthetic attempted, say what living with depression, hope,
life is like.**Jennifer Denrow:**When you at the beginning of this book “I must look at
every part of me to remain a fixed thing.” I love that. I just wanted to tell
you that. This book is amazing, it’s so good, Mathias. I really love this book.
And those photographs! Can
you tell us about the photographs? I mean, I know you and John Pack are
friends, but did you go through a catalog of his work and choose ones, or did
he send you ones and you wrote to the photographs?
**Mathias Svalina:**We came to the book with separate piles of stuff and then
sort of fixed them together. He’s a professional photographer and he’s been
making photographs since the 90s, so he’s got this huge cache of photographs
and when I asked him and he said he’d do this book with me, he read the book
and came back with the photographs that he thought fit with it. Then I sort of
responded by editing the fables back toward them and then he picked more photos
and took out some. And so, it’s sort of a back and forth rather than a
collaboration, in the sense of making it sui generis together.
Because the book came out and
then COVID happened, this is the first time I’ve ever had to explain anything
about the book in public. We we’re going to do a series of events, first in
Brooklyn—he’s lived in Brooklyn since the 90s—projecting the photos in sort of
public spaces, like on the streets, and reading and just having like a list of
where we would be, and that would be the event, and if anybody felt like being
there they could.
Then we’re gonna do a flip
side of that, of travel for like a week in the southwest mountains and go to
ghost towns and project the photos and read them and just have a list of like here’s where we’re going to be, if anybody wants to
fill up and camp feel free and if not, we’ll just do it for the ghosts.
So, you have his city lifestyle and my traveling lifestyle represented in the
events. But instead, COVID happened.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah. Damn, that would have been so cool.