KATE GREENSTREET
author of The Last 4 Things (2009) and case sensitive (2006), interviewed by Derrick Mund I noticed that the DVD companion to The Last 4 Things is very transitory in nature. I’m wondering if your new writing reflects that at all. I took a lot of that footage when I was out last time with case sensitive. That was the first video I ever did. I swore to myself that this time I was out I would write and exercise everyday but I haven’t done either, not one day. This is day 25. [During readings] I read from the new book and sometimes I read from other things because the students have only read case sensitive, or someone wants me to read from the last chap book, etc. But in order to make it interesting to me, I make a new thing out of it. To do that I read parts of things—I’ll read on my set list and it’ll be, “first paragraph second sentence,” then I’ll flip through the book and I’ll just make new poems out of the thing by re-ordering it. That’s the closest thing I’ve done to new writing. How do you approach something that you’re making both for film and page? How do the two processes relate? Well, the first part of The Last 4 Things I wrote years ago, so that was written for the page. You know I did change it of course, but that was done and supposed to be the book. Then I wrote 56 Days. I had 56 days for writing, so that’s just where the title came from. When I wrote it, as I was writing it, I made the movie so those two things happened simultaneously. And that was a different kind of movie because I was just taking a piece of text—one piece of text I would say and one piece of text I would use as a subtitle just to work with that “dialogue/subtitle all in the same language” idea. It was a little bit more like a real film project in the sense that it wasn’t a transcription of the book. The other one, I’d been doing these experiments. First I made a whole recording of the book, then I was just fooling around with all the junk I had on film and I just, I felt like I really quickly tried to make some little parts. Some little parts, some little pages—they’re not poems.
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