Green Linden Press

 Karla Kelsey & Brian Teare in Conversation — August 26, 2024

Brian Teare: It’s such a pleasure to be in conversation with you about On Certainty! I’d love to begin with the codex as a container and the book as measure of poetic form and duration. My sense is that you’re unusual among our generation for having written, almost from the beginning, poems that are also books, poems that need time and space to accrue the necessary conceptual depth. Is that accurate to your own sense of your practice? And would it be accurate to say that more recently—especially in Blood Feather and now in On Certainty—you’ve married conceptual depth to the more narrative forms of biography and science fiction? If so, I wonder if you could speak to that shift in your practice?

Karla Kelsey: Brian, thank you for beginning our conversation with such generous, generative questions. I’m so happy to be talking with you about poetry, On Certainty, and Poem Bitten by a Man.

Indeed, since Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, my first book, I’ve worked in book-length spans. This is mainly driven by inclination and desire: I love novels, works of philosophy, monographs, films, exhibitions, evening-length choreography, a well-orchestrated set. This allows for formal decisions to accrue. To repeat and transform. Research of all kinds is a delight, and a book-length form provides the opportunity to dwell with material—to live with it. Don’t you agree that this is one of the most exciting, enriching things we get to do as the kinds of poets that we are? And, yes, with Blood Feather and On Certainty I have started working with narrative as part of the larger weave. In some ways this is less of a shift than a return. When I was beginning to write, long before I ever thought of making a book, I mainly composed page-length narrative poems. They would not necessarily begin as narrative, but this would take over and seemed to be the only way they could cohere into something rather than nothing. At the same time, because the narrative was invented—was from, I felt, beyond my autobiographical “I”—it also felt strange and disingenuous. A kind of trick. I had yet to find this fascinating. Within the course of time, however, (decades!), I’ve come to welcome the artifices and complexities that narrative, for me, proposes.

Each of your books is a distinctive environment with its own remarkable field of inquiry. At the same time, there is a thread of voice that invites me to read your work as an extended body. A self moving through different environments. A self that grows and shifts but that also maintains a syntax and sensibility across books. Part of this is the self-awareness that you bring to the page, allowing the reader to hear the “I” thinking. What role does this self-awareness play in your process of composition? In The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven and Poem Bitten by a Man it seems as if this self-awareness opens into a dialogic space. This is not to say that the space is closed in the other works—in Companion Grasses, for instance, the I is in robust conversation with the natural world. However, this dialogue with Agnes Martin in the earlier book— and, now, Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns—has such an interpersonal element.

Teare: That all makes so much sense! From the start, I experienced your body of work as unusually self-aware and self-possessed. I remember reading Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary with awed admiration, marveling over its rigor, formal control, and phrasal beauty. Within itself, the poem had a kind of poise both intellectual and aesthetic, perhaps because the book as a whole had a surety of its aims. I don’t think my work had anything even remotely approaching these qualities until my third book, Sight Map, and even then I was still thinking and writing poem-by-poem toward a larger vision. It might be my embodied prosody, process-based forms, and practice of field composition that unite that book with the later ones, and I’d agree that with Companion Grasses the books begin to cohere as books with more force.

Though each of my books has had its own archive—with my first it was Grimm’s fairy tales and trauma theory, with my second it was Gnosticism and religious myths of Eden—the earlier archives were elicited by and coalesced around stories I was compelled by individual and collective traumas to tell. After that, my work became less driven by trauma narratives, and the role my reading played in my writing changed. With Companion Grasses I wrote through a specific archive in order to understand better my own post-Christian experience of the landscapes in which I lived, loved, worked, and wrote. In that case, I wrote through 19th century American Romanticism (the Transcendentalists in particular) and American environmental writing more broadly (especially Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams). I had a sense from Jed Rasula’s marvelous book This Compost that I was doing something ecological in conversation with the New American poetics I’d absorbed in San Francisco, but later, with Doomstead Days, my poems offered a more literal and more social interpretation of ecology alongside a textual ecology of citations.

You’re also right, of course, that to be in dialogue not just with an archive but with a specific person and their archive brings greater charge, focus, and self-awareness to the work. I mean, I’m still a writer who can’t plan a project—or know ahead of time precisely what a given book will be—so my archive develops in tandem with the book as part of the process of writing it. The dialogue with Agnes was an accident. During an acute period of chronic illness, I read her talk “The Untroubled Mind,” then started writing through it as a way to reach toward something untroubled. But I didn’t stop writing, and I began reading more about her and her work, and then I started seeking out her paintings and drawings. At first I didn’t understand why, but as I wrote the book I understood I experience a loose analogy between undiagnosed illness and abstract painting. So material, so present, they’re somatic events without language.  

I’ll stop there and turn back to On Certainty—a book behind which hovers most presently for me two other books I love. One is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (which I also quote from in Poem Bitten by a Man!), and the other is Alice Notley’s classic feminist dystopia Descent of Alette. In the abstract, they’re odd bedfellows, but they make perfect sense in your speculative book confronting the very real stakes of virtual reality, fascist patriarchy, and who controls our collective experience of and interpretations of the real. I wonder if you could talk about how the archive that supports the book developed, and how the Philosopher, the Tyrant, and your speaker came to be the complicated triangle on which the book’s plot is built? 

Kelsey: On Certainty began as an engagement with Gardening Week by Week by Xenia Field from 1975 and Matter, a Time-Life science book by Ralph E. Lapp from 1969—both of which I found at a library used book sale. Both are illustrated and large format; their physical aspects drew me in as much as their language. Gardening observes the seasons but is obsessed with containing nature via pruning, pesticides, etc. Matter tracks the transmutation of solid, liquid, gas. Both describe the physical world while being very much of their time, revealing natural processes while simultaneously constructing “the natural world” through the lens of genre and socio-temporal context. I began to add research into visual art practices, another mode of working with the material world. This version of the manuscript, which would now be more than ten years old, had an ambient, disembodied narrator.

As I was working with this material I was also re-visiting Ludwig Wittgenstein, who I have always loved for his simultaneous clarity and opacity, his prying open of language from representation to use. His style, the movement of thought, the building and testing of ideas, remains useful, timely, and innovative. In his book, On Certainty, he proposes that knowledge claims must rest on “hinge-propositions” that are exempt from doubt—but this doesn’t necessarily mean that such propositions are facts. The Philosopher in my On Certainty is informed by Wittgenstein but is not biographically Wittgenstein, although, like my Philosopher, Wittgenstein was at the end of his life when he composed On Certainty, which he worked on the very day before he died. (Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, posthumously edited from notebooks and papers, is itself a kind of archival work). As I layered the Philosopher into my book, my narrator developed into a character who had been his student—a younger generation of thinker and maker with a necessarily different and (perhaps) more fraught relationship to questions of knowledge. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the introduction of these characters didn’t change the cadence and form of the poems—they amplified the rhythms and become different vehicles for elements that had been in the text all along. The Tyrant arose out of the book’s developing ecological catastrophe, questionable use of virtual reality, and rise of authoritarian leadership. When I began working with this layer it felt quite speculative: now I see it directly arising from our moment. At this point I understood my debt to Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, which was one of the first book-length poems I encountered and has always dazzled me, as it does the students with whom I routinely share her work.

When you say that your “archive develops in tandem with the book as part of the process of writing it” I one hundred precent resonate! And resonate with the healthy role of accident, a power I deeply respect (library book sales!). I badly want to know more about your process—the arc of building as well as the role of form in this process. Also: because I have just finished two intensive, multi-year projects around Mina Loy—Lost Writings, an edited volume containing two of her previously unpublished novels, as well as Transcendental Factory, a creative-critical response—I badly want to know how you conjure the beginnings of a new project. Like you, I can’t “plan a project” and am “all ears” for various techniques and courses of studies you practice as you embark on something new.

Teare: Why do I feel like I don't have much to offer in answer to your question about process? Perhaps it's because we share a generation, and we also share a love of formally experimental writing that doesn't abjure lyric epistemologies. I imagine—though I don't know this—that coming of age during the Poetry Wars and being educated in the cultural context that pitted "Language" against "Lyric," formed your poetics too, as did having teachers, mentors, and elders whose work modeled a "third way" around or through this putative binary. Though we began and emerged from our early careers as very different writers, we seem to share critical reading practices that inform our creative practices that could be described, broadly, as versions of what Reginald Shepherd called lyric postmodernism.

In my case, I suspect having a critical practice prepares me for writing the way Agnes gessoes the canvas, readying it for the painting to come. At some point in reading and taking notes and living my life, I do feel a door in consciousness open. Sometimes a phrase will come that feels like the beginning or an engine of inquiry. From whence does it come? Sometimes it comes from a walk, in response to place, habitat, endemic species, or land-use history; sometimes it comes from bodywork, in response to the healer's engagement with a troubled muscle, bone, or organ; and sometimes it comes from reading itself, as an annotation of or argument with a text. "Then I what," I write in Poem Bitten by a Man. That was its engine of inquiry, the situation of beginning. At its best, such a situation puts me in the frame of mind the marvelous Lyn Hejinian (RIP) records in her manifesto, The Beginner: "Beginning will be an experience, unfolding more as it runs its course, we will follow, doing and undergoing. We have no particular end or plan."

Poem Bitten by a Man was like that: it was a commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to write a poem in response to the work of Jasper Johns. When I accepted the commission, I'd no idea I'd write a book. Before I started writing, I did art historical and critical research and spent time looking at his work. I was interested but not yet inspired. When I sat down to take the notes that would become early drafts of the book, associative links emerged immediately. I was copying out phrases from the Johns archive, and perhaps because of his resistance to biography, incidents from Agnes's and my own life emerged in parallel to an engagement with his art. I heard true- and off-rhymes between my life in San Francisco as a young queer artist and their lives in lower Manhattan as emerging queer artists. Breakups, breakdowns, breakthroughs...these rhymes were so strong that I called early drafts of the book Association Copy.

The origin story of On Certainty feels like powerful commentary on the very concept of certainty when it comes to making, to poiesis. I love that the book began when you encountered by chance two sources, and that the original encounter is in some sense untrackable in the final product. I also love that you allowed the process of the book—the layering of concepts and the intertwining of essay and narrative and lyric—to unfold over time. It feels important to the book that what began as an ambient, disembodied narrator materialized into a speaker with a specific gender and a sociopolitical context that indeed feels quite timely, even clothed in a speculative skin. And yet Modernist thought and aesthetic practice are crucial to your recent work. I'm thinking here of Blood Feather in addition to On Certainty, as well as your editorial and critical projects about Loy. I wonder if you could speak about what draws you back to that period and how it informs this recent work?

Kelsey: I feel called by Modernist thought and artistic practice, and curious. The more I investigate the past, the more the present opens in its complexity. What I want for my intellectual and creative life is a thickening and a self-education that dwells in some of the gaps and attempts to mend them for others (as with the editing of Loy’s previously unpublished novels and seeing them into print.) At the same time, I read in the present tense—H.D., Loy, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf live in their books as much as the currently living do, and I find them brilliant, fascinating, instructive, challenging, and very much alive. I may also romanticize Modernist relationships to cultural production and what it makes possible. The Modernists seemed to have understood thought and art to be potential sites of individual and communal liberation. I want our present moment not to lose sight of this, and I wonder what you think Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns offer us to keep in our line of vision?

Teare: That feeling of being called by other time periods, their cultural contexts and productions, resonates with me—as does the desire to continue living, thinking, and writing alongside radical predecessors as a form of continual self-education. The first period to beckon me closer was in fact Modernism. After my MFA, I started a PhD in English, and though I left that program to focus on writing poetry, my dissertation would have been on Woolf. When I later felt called by Agnes Martin and the Abstract Expressionist painters who formed her deeper context, I was well aware that I was actually still thinking about Modernism, gender, and queerness, as well as abstraction and form's intrinsic plasticity.

At the same time, there is something very specific about the paintings Martin and Johns made in the 50s and 60s that calls to me. Their serial quality—grids on the one hand, flags (among other icons) on the other—reminds me of lyric practice, the way a lyric poet will assume a regular posture within their poems and investigate a fixed set of themes. Lyric in this sense is not unlike a language game, and seriality becomes all the more remarkable when the artist adjusts their posture and/or introduces new themes, thereby changing the game—as after Johns and Rauschenberg break up, or after Martin returns to printing and painting in 1974, seven years after leaving NY for NM.

But your question about what Johns and Martin offer us now is a good one. I'm aware that what they've offered me as an individual might not be what they offer a collective we. Johns in particular tends to be Duchampian about meaning, while Martin had very certain ideas about what her paintings mean. She believed her work was about liberation—from this world. Yet I find that the materiality of her paintings in person calls me deeper into the world through an embodied encounter with traces of her making. Staunch individualists, they had little to say about collectivity. I often disagree with the little they did say. Still, if I had to summarize one thing they offer it would be this: how to make use of received forms, whether they be visual or social, a grid or a gender, a flag or a subjectivity.

I wonder if you would close out this interview by talking more about Loy and what her work has meant and continues to mean for you? You just celebrated the publication of your editorial project, Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, and your own poet's novel inspired by Loy will be coming out soon with Winter Editions. She seems to have loomed as large in your creative and critical lives as Agnes has in mine, but unlike Agnes in 2024, Loy remains a more fugitive figure despite attempts to restore her place in Modernist literature. What drew you to her novels in particular? How have her work and feminism influenced your own?

Kelsey: Thank you for this generous last question, for this lovely lyric flag image, and for sharing the way Martin and Johns have continued to participate in the exchanges that you’ve developed with them. One of the things both writing and art allow me to see quite clearly is that those who are no longer living actively participate with the living, are an important component of what constitutes being alive. This is part of what, or perhaps I should say how, Loy has meant to me. Coming to know her work so deeply has included studying her writing and visual art, her surrounding context, and the body of ongoing scholarship surrounding her work. This has opened my understanding of what it is to have and make a life. Of what it is to be. The two novels included in Lost Writings actually happen to address this topic, but also the experience of knowing someone through the slow medium of paper has been transformative.

While editing Lost Writings I worked directly with Loy’s manuscripts, which are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I also made use of the online, scanned version of her papers, which the Beinecke makes free and accessible to all. Spending months in the library with physical materials that were once part of another writer’s daily life is so intimate. The act of retyping her manuscripts flowed her language into me, and it is her language—her diction and syntax—that drew me to the novels, just as it has always been her language that draws me to her poetry. She has the ability to write in a manner that is simultaneously abstract and sensuous, delicate and irreverent. Akin to this is her flexibility with genre and form. Many know Loy as a poet from the teens and twenties, but she wrote and made art from her teenage years at the turn of the century through old age (she died in Aspen, Colorado at 84 in 1966). Throughout her long life she wrote poetry, plays, essays, manifestos, novels, and uncategorizable prose. As a visual artist she drew, painted, made lampshades and hats, and created assemblages from found objects. She also devised a series of marvelous inventions. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable, the catalog from her recent (and first) monograph exhibition is a magnificent resource for learning about her visual art. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde is a generous online, open-access scholarly resource for those interested in Loy’s fascinating practices.

While Loy was very interested in matters of the sprit, her work was grounded in material, which she endlessly explored. She persisted as a writer and artist in the face of much personal loss, two world wars, a global pandemic, and an economic depression. She often had very little money on which to live and did not receive the kind of acclaim and praise that she ought to have received. Yet, she pursued a creative life nevertheless. My poet’s novel, Transcendental Factory, is in many ways a love letter, not only to Loy but also to this creative spirit, which manifests not only in literature and art objects but also in the fact that humans connect to and care for others across space and time. We are so much more, and are capable of so much more, than we think we are. One of the many pleasures of sharing the space of writer and reader with you in our particular time, Brian, is that your work so beautifully asks for, and wonders over, and provides for, this more. Thank you so much for this conversation—the first, I hope, of many we will carry on having, into the future.