Interview with Dennis Hinrichsen on Flesh-plastique — March 1, 2023
Flesh-plastique is Dennis Hinrichsen’s tenth full-length collection of poetry. His most recent work includes schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press, and This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the 2020 Grid Poetry Prize. His other awards include the 2015 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize from Map Literary for Electrocution, A Partial History, the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press for Skin Music, the 2010 Tampa Poetry Prize for Rip-tooth, the 2008 FIELD Poetry Prize for Kurosawa’s Dog and the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize for Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights as well as the 2016 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a 2014 Best of the Net Award. Work of his also can be found in two anthologies from Michigan State University Press, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice, and RESPECT: An Anthology of Poems on Detroit Music. He lives in Lansing, Michigan, where from May 2017–April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area.
Connor Yeck: Reading Flesh-plastique, I was struck early on by “[Iodine],” a poem that conjured up fond memories of a workshop you once led at Western Michigan University in which we had the chance to discuss another intersection of nuclear industry and baseball—the existence of the Albuquerque Isotopes, who play their minor league games just an hour south of Los Alamos. In “[Iodine],” bodies and erotic potential are viscerally likened to spent fuel rods, photons, and burning cores, while a newborn child is held “radioactive in my arms.” Considering the ways such images echo throughout this book at-large, I was wondering if you might speak a bit on this guiding thread—how, when, or why you knew it became necessary to inhabit “the nuclear age” for this project, a space where the human form is ceaselessly reimagined through technological, industrial, and elemental lenses.
Dennis Hinrichsen: After completing my MFA in the last millennium I worked as a technical writer for a decade in Boston, the last five years with an engineering firm that built and maintained nuclear power plants. I rode the Red Line in, reading Dante’s Inferno and then sat at my ninth-floor desk for a firm that made light. This was post-Three Mile Island and for a while, pre-Chernobyl until that reactor went critical. Right away I began thinking about the connection between poetry and technical writing, bouncing from Eliot’s “Prufrock” to Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, then paying two dollars to sit in the centerfield bleachers at Fenway to drink beer, watch El Tiante and embrace the curse of the Bambino.I even wrote a few poems, one that that crashed Dante with a nuclear steam generator and scorpion from Texas one of the engineers brought back for me. But that project failed. I didn’t have the imagination for it 35+ years ago. My previous book, schema geometrica, however, rebooted that connection, and with Flesh-plastique I thought I’d address that period more directly.
Yeck: As a follow-up of sorts, two crucial root notes seem to be those of fission and fusion, which produce an inescapable tension between fracture/merger, explosion/implosion, expulsion/subsumption. How do you see these two forces, concepts, and physical phenomena as providing a sustained poetic catalyst?
Hinrichsen: Fission and fusion work in a couple of ways: first, literally, as the book’s opening poem deals with Sellafield and Chernobyl and the re-racking of spent fuel rods at plants in the Great Lakes area. Fukushima also radiates through the book. It seemed relevant to me to write more directly, given the recent conversation from Bill Gates and others about embracing small nuclear plower plants as part of our electrical capacity. Fusion is there as the dream solution—as it was 35 years ago. Both work metaphorically. Fission as decay of family, relationships, technology, the environment set against the Whitman-esque desire to fuse with other. I’m connected to it all, implicated via my acts of consumption here in the developed world in harm pretty much everywhere. I want to map as much of that as I can as I continue writing.
Yeck: Perhaps the first thing a reader will notice in your work is its formal and visual agility—not just its sweeping use of blank-space but the variety with which we move through section and sequence. I especially love the narrative breakage allowed by the landscape-oriented zoetrope poems and the inverted reading experience of the becquerels (those twelve black pages felt like stepping into a darkroom of sorts, almost subatomic in their imagery and shortened breath). How did you happen upon these choices, and how do you glimpse them functioning within the book’s experiential arc?
Hinrichsen: I came to poetry out of mathematics via French New Wave and Bergman and Bitches Brew and John Cage and 12-tone music, so formal agility and a visual sense of the poem as graphic design were there from the beginning. It was only later that the ear got involved in my first creative writing class when my professor read a few of those Hopkins sonnets to us. That was a wonderful dose of sound and compression. Over the years that impulse has evolved into a focus on broken form, found form, invented form, using the whole page, and now with Green Linden and its amazing editor, Christopher Nelson, adding actual graphics, black pages, music via QR codes. The zoetrope poems came out of that cinematic/graphic impulse—a way to reframe or collapse a narrative cinematically and then, by turning the poem 90 degrees, use the page differently. My original intent was to use them throughout the book, but the overall design changed. I initially wanted the book to be comprised mainly of long collages cut with zoetropes, but a beloved uncle of mine died during the writing. He was born in 1942 with craniosynostosis—there was no surgery for this then (there is now) and so his skull didn’t expand as his brain grew. He was given a pretty short life span and given over to the state to raise. He was always around when I was growing up, however, and ultimately lived a very long American life—he was 79 when he died. Anyway, I wrote the poems quickly as a way to give him some presence in this digital afterlife we all share. Thus was born the debris field sections—he was human debris—he was thrown away—he was put in the ground without ceremony—and so the book concept changed to accommodate him. Honor him. The becquerels came out of my riffing off Ed Roberson’s Atmosphere Conditions—I wanted to minimize narrative and capture “essences”—a presence barely there. And that came to fruition when I hit the poems of Aimé Césaire. His surrealistic line not cut off from its causal agent made sense for trying to capture that strange, shutdown world early in the pandemic. This section I felt was the fission products being released into the book. The black pages made sense for that given the wonderful central image on the cover.
Yeck: One of my favorite sequence of lines from the collection occurs in the list poem “[Fission]”:
22. Are you listening?
23. I know you’d prefer a clean narrative line.
24. There is no clean narrative line.
25. Just the whipsaw ratcheting of time, everything happening all at once…
On reflection, I found myself linking these concepts to the process of titling and the use of epigraphs. Many poems in Flesh-plastique are titled so as gesture toward visual or sonic composition, an interlocking, jostling array of voices and materials—“[pastoral] [with a Bee Sting in It and the City of Florence]” or “[Despair in Open D] [with Gerard Manley Hopkins on Tom-toms] [and a Dead Flamingo].” Meanwhile, several pieces begin with fragmentary, haunting headlines that offer readers brief flashes of our anthropogenic turmoil: “The U.S. Put Nuclear Waste under a Dome on a Pacific Island: Now It’s Cracking Open,” “Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Could Meet its Doom within 3 Years.” In a way, it felt as if these titles and epigraphs were doing ongoing work to deny us the “clean narrative line” we might naturally seek among upheaval. Could you touch on your philosophy as to crafting a poem’s frame and front matter?
Hinrichsen: I think every aesthetic choice is a kind of criticism, so the poems in the book are a way of undoing the default, transparent, narrative lyric politely dropping down the page free of any indentation and without stanzas. I think I was also at a point where pointing the camera at self and following solely an autobiographical line made no sense. I admit it in one poem—my life is too boring. Or boring until I dig in and pose questions about where all the materials of this developed-world life I enjoy come from and where do they go when I throw them away. Those questions destroy narrative and result in neuron-like blasts of everything happening all at once. Hence, the collage which allowed me to expand small moments quickly and respond to bits and pieces of that “everything.” It’s funny, in a way, since it’s still very much autobiographical but in reverse. I’m not recounting experience, I’m making it up. The compositional problem was how to map the materials swiftly so the three parts of the poem—title/epigraph/poem—worked together. Geometry and music solved this in a way: the titles introduce the “key” of the poem—in music theory—the I chord—I just extended often and named the IV and V chords. Suddenly it’s three-chord rock-and-roll. It made sense geometrically since three points define an area, that is, the content of the poem. That was the schema geometrica of the previous book. The epigraphs were just a way to brushstroke in additional information to set up the poem, often the causal agent. The rest was play, making it new as Pound instructs, and then surprising myself. That seemed like a worthy goal, one I understand more completely now.
