AN

I wanted to start by asking you about lineage. You’re a writer who is dedicated to a notion of poetry as an inheritance and a genealogical project. More specifically, you believe in poetry as sacred utterance and as vision—like John Milton, William Blake, Diane di Prima, others we could mention—in a way that’s unsentimental and serious without being self-serious. Where does your work come from?

AR

I think I'm a product of the New York School. The beautiful thing about the New York School is that self-seriousness is not tolerated within that poetics, and yet the seriousness of being a poet and what it means to take on the vocation of “poet” as a mantle is immense. For those poets, poetry is a complete lifestyle. It's not just an art form. It’ s a total way of being. Becoming a poet is like joining the Bloods or something. It’ s for life. At the same time, there’s a belief that narcissistic self-importance is bad for poetry. That was good for me to hear as a young person, because I had a lot of bombastic teenage self-seriousness and cloying, witchy tendencies—after all, I’m from Salem, Massachusetts. And that’s important too. I’m a product of Salem, Massachusetts specifically and a product of Massachusetts generally, by which I mean I’m an inheritor of the Confessional mode, of Plath, Sexton, Lowell, and so on, and I also come out of the poetics of the Holocaust, especially Paul Celan. All of the twentieth-century writings of disaster have marked me. Another person I would point to is Jerome Rothenberg, and his work editing anthologies. His term for what he did was ethnopoetics, and it takes poetry way beyond the written: it’s a little bit anthropology and a little bit history and a little bit modernist and postmodernist translation. Those books will totally explode any limits you have about a given subject.

AN

That’s so funny, I have Rothenberg’s pamphlet Ritual on my bedside table right now. It’s such a wonderful, bawdy book, both mystical and coarse in the best sense. 

AR

Well, the thing about mysticism, as you know, is that as you integrate mystical experience it becomes impossible to separate from the completely ordinary. Living mystically is very meat and potatoes. Some people know when they’re hungry, or when they want to sleep with someone, or when they want to buy something. We know when we want to write something. Of course, a lot of impulses come from what we call “personality,” and most of what we call “personalities” are shit. It’s just reactive roughage that accumulates in response to a situation, not the pearl that is really you. I wrote all my books for the purpose of clarifying myself; for the purpose of changing. In many ways I’m a person who’s only matured through writing books.

AN

You’re definitely very prolific, which I love, because I come out of academia, where calling someone “prolific” is often a covert insult, implying that the work hasn’t been given the time it needs to incubate, and that you haven’t suffered enough to produce it—as though being prolific isn’t itself evidence of suffering!

AR

It is absolutely evidence of suffering!

AN

In the case of Wave of Blood, it was quite brave of you not to sit on the book for another five years and wait until the paint on the chessboard of what is and isn’t acceptable to say in public had dried. And yet, even though it was written with a tremendous amount of speed, it has an internal rhythm that’s opposed to the temporality of the hot take.

AR

When I wrote the book, I was thinking—as many people were—that the war in Gaza wouldn’t still be going on by the time the book came out. The social media climate has shifted, which isn’t surprising because social media is an entirely reactive genre—it’s like the toilet of consciousness. But as for me I was on tour at the time the war began, and I thought, well, what can I do? People have different kinds of burdens, privileges, and responsibilities as artists; one does what one can. I thought, well, I can document this.

I’m human, so I was reacting in immediate, visceral ways. But if social media is one kind of mirror, art is another, and it’s much deeper. Art can demonstrate the reality of a historical moment by lifting it up to a different vantage point, a vantage point that, for whatever reason, is very difficult for us to reach as a culture. It’s not a perfect or omniscient vantage point—there’s a reason why there’s only one completed poem in the whole book. There’s a rawness there, but also an attempt to present a true history or chronicle.

AN

You mentioned Celan, and I don’t know if you were reading him while you were writing Wave of Blood, but I wanted to hear who you were reading, or what texts were around you?

AR

You know, the poets of silence.

AN

That’s so interesting. We often hear that “silence is violence,” but at least in an aesthetic domain, silence is a medium. I’m thinking of the unpronounceable title of Fady Joudah’s book […], and of course all the empty spaces in Celan.

AR

In the last year, I—we all—have seen 10 million things that were the most evil, insane, stupid things in the whole entire universe. I could have responded as a pundit, but I’m not a pundit. I’m glad there are people who respond in that sort of register, especially if they’re not dumb. I’ve made a commitment to myself, that I’m a poet. Most of all I didn't want to make a product. There’s zero financial profit in this book for me. Ultimately,It’s not possible to look at this much slaughter and stay sane. I trust what Fady Joudah has to say. I trust what Ghayath Almadhoun has to say. And to go back—you asked me a simple, beautiful question, about what I was reading when I wrote Wave of Blood. I tend not to be able to read very much while I'm writing, but I read Fady and Ghayath and Etel Adnan. There’s something about her writing that is able to dissolve despair.

AN

I know a lot of people who have that relationship to Etel’s work.

AR

I really think it has a resurrectionary motor in it. And of course, Milton haunts Wave of Blood because I was teaching Milton when the war started. Paradise Lost is such an incredible, insane elaboration of what the idea of free will really entails, and free will is a very important thing to be thinking about right now.

AN

There’s a scene near the end of Paradise Lost where an angel shows Adam everything that will happen as a consequence of his decision—which we’re told is a decision made freely, because God says he’s created human beings “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall”—to eat this fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it’s the whole awful history of the world. He sees war, genocide, slavery, the destruction of the earth, and he realizes that he and Eve didn’t just fuck up their own lives, they fucked it up for everyone,

AR

Yes—our every action is creating generations. We don’t get to escape wrestling with questions of human nature, and that in itself is a vindication of the study of ancient texts. They grapple with questions that we haven’t been able to answer or to get beyond, and there is some comfort in having these poets from centuries or thousands of years ago help us work on them, or at least to entertain us until we die. I mean, I’m kidding, poetry isn’t just something that helps us pass the time. We have a literal need for the poetic imagination. It’s the bread and water of our existence. This is not a frivolous thing, what poets do.

AN

There’s a line I love in Wave of Blood: “Language, so long divorced from medicine, must snake its way back in.” I don't ever think of my own writing as therapeutic, but I do think of it as medicinal, and certainly I think of your writing that way. I mean, I’ve been asked if writing my Keats book [Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, 2021] was therapeutic, and the only response I have to that is, “yeah, in the sense that if I didn’t write it, I thought I might die.”

AR

It was out of fashion for the baby boomer artists to say their work was therapeutic—there was something feminizing about it, they felt diminished by the idea. To even put that question to someone—“is your work therapeutic?”—was to minimize its power. And if a woman is asked that question it’s even more insulting. It’s like, “Are you doing art therapy? Are you writing in your journal? Does that help you when you have PMS?” But interestingly, ancient medicine was often written down as poetry: Paracelsus, Avicenna. One of my teachers, Kenneth Koch, he kind of hated me and I kind of hated him…

AN

Those are the best teachers.

AK

Yes, and they stay with you. Anyway, Kenneth Koch’s PhD thesis was on the figure of the doctor in literature. If you think about doctors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, especially in drama, the doctor is always a crank, he's always doing disgusting things, he's physically vile and nothing that he does works. In Moliè re, when the doctor comes, it’s always bad!

AN

Have you ever seen the old Saturday Night Live skit “Theodoric of York?”

AR

No!

AN

It’s from the ’70s, Steve Martin plays this medieval barber who, because it’s the Middle Ages, is the closest thing anyone has to a doctor in the town. All these people keep coming into his barbershop sick or having been run over by a horse-drawn cart or whatever, and all he does is cut their veins open to bleed them or else amputate their limbs, it’s so violent and gory. At one point someone questions his methods, and he says, “Say! Who’s the barber here?”

AR

[Laughs.] Oh my god, I’m going to watch that today! It’s so funny that we have this idea that science is stable or that it's clean; it's such a messy trial and error process, involving weird people who are cutting things up and trying to figure out X, Y, or Z. The search for medicine on an empirical level is incredibly sloppy and gross and very comical. That’s why the doctor is such a figure of revulsion and opprobrium and cruel humor. And yet of course, we all clearly need healing. Some of our greatest writers and also some of our most life-giving writers were so physically ill—Keats, Proust. And I don't know what Chaucer was suffering with—Dante had a bad tooth—but I bet he had lots of issues. It’s a fascinating topic partly because it's so cringy. Somebody should write a book about it!

AN

Out of curiosity, what kind of response are you getting to Wave of Blood? Are people writing to you about it? What seems to be the reception of it? There was so much warmth in the room for you at your book launch at 2220 [Arts + Archives, in Los Angeles], and for me personally, seeing you and Harmony [Holiday] together was really something—two of my favorite oracles!

AR

I'm actually getting a lot of letters from people telling me that they're crying. I got a letter this morning from someone who said it made him cry in the doctor's office.

AN

Back to the doctor.

AR

Yeah, back to the doctor, interestingly. There’s something I want to say. I had an instinct with this book to not get blurbs on it. What would I want to the blurb to say, that I had the right opinion on the slaughter [in Gaza]? That this is the book you should read if you’re against genocide? I wanted to bypass all of that. I didn’t want it to be “a critical sensation.” I wanted it to meet people in a private place, because sometimes we really do just need to be alone with something, not to be told by a chorus of voices how we need to feel. The person who wrote me from the doctor’s office, I don’t even think he liked the book, I think he felt irritated by me. Well, ok: you were having a moment. I medicated you. You didn’t like it, but I medicated you.

AN

What I hear you saying is that you didn’t want to participate in a cultural economy where buying, reading, and posting pictures of the “right” book inoculates us against criticism or satisfies our moral responsibility.

AR

We’re talking about the slaughter of human beings. So what if I get a blurb from Eileen Myles—who has been vocal on Palestine for years and years, and I love Eileen and I think Eileen is right even when they irritate or piss me off—and the function of the blurb is essentially to tell people “here’s a book with the right opinions in it”? “You’re a good person if you buy it.” I absolutely don’t want to play into that mechanism.

AN

You don’t consider yourself an activist.

AR

No. It was very difficult for me even to become an artist. My mother killed herself. It was very difficult for me to heal my body, to experience sanity, to achieve change in the material substance of my life. And I have high standards for art. And it's very difficult for me to meet those standards. It's very difficult for me to meet the standards that I have for what I want in my personal relationships, in my loverships, in my friendships. It's very difficult for me to satisfy myself in those like very, very small arenas. I am not an activist and I'm not going to become one. I think something that we have on the left, and increasingly in the culture industry in general, is this idea that artists should be activists, and that art should be activistic. I think the greatest art is the most activist thing in the world but doesn’t operate as a mere response to an issue. It’s something permanent. It’s an emergency that doesn't go away. [Percy Shelley’s] “Ode to the West Wind” is an emergency right now. [Rainer Maria Rilke’s] “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an emergency right now. Life can change right now. There’s always some kind of freedom even in the most horrible circumstances. I really believe that, but I'm on a mystical path and that's the path that I chose. 

AN

As a way of wrapping up this conversation, I wanted to ask you about your relationship to visual art, and whose work you feel in dialogue with.

AR

I’ve been really, really lucky in my life to find these friendships with visual artists and musicians who have, in some cases, understood my work before the poets. Writers are so lucky to have artists. I think of people like Sanya Kantarovsky, Liz Magic Laser, Liz Larner, Isabel Albuquerque, and the musicians who have really carried my soul, including those you saw on stage at 2220: Daniela Gesundheit, the Lightman Sisters [Sari and Romy], Ariel Engle, and Leslie Feist, all of these Canadian mystical songstresses. For some reason, they’re all Canadian. I don’t even know how to explain my gratitude to the artists. The last one I’ll name is Jordi Savall, the Spanish conductor and viola da gamba player. I’ve used the sound of his music in my work before, and I went to Barcelona last winter to see him. Like you writing your Keats book, I felt like “if I don’t see him onstage, I’m gonna die.” I didn’t want to see him when he was on tour, I wanted to see him at home, in Barcelona. I wanted to see what that felt like. All of his music, and his playing, his conducting, his interpretations, his scholarship, it saved my soul last year. I depended on him so much.