Selected works from "The Network" and an interview with Jena Osman, as conducted by Anna Elena Eyre for Barzakh. AEE: The Network opens with “The Knot” and cites Cecilia Vicuña’s instruction to use an etymological dictionary: “To enter words in order to see.” It feels to me that you are entering the words in the etymological topography that you’ve constructed to, and I paraphrase what you’ve written elsewhere, to really see with eyes closed without an image. [where did I say this?] These etymological maps, for me, address a line in particular from “The Franklin Party Section” which is “How to map a changing thing, rather than a target of frozen particulars.” Would you describe the process by which you came to create these maps and how they allow you to really see the invisible of words? JO: The etymological diagramming began during a residency at the MacDowell Colony (I think it was in 2002). I found an etymological dictionary edited by Eric Partridge—at least I think that’s the one—in the library (interesting how hard it is to retrace your steps even with a map). I have always been really interested in Vicuña’s approach to etymologies—she proposes that if you look deeply into a word, it begins to say things about cultural connections that have been erased/forgotten in time. So in some ways I guess I was trying to test out that thesis. While trying to make visual maps out of purely textual information (lots of abbreviations!), I started to notice that certain words were related although their meanings seemed antithetical (for example, “peace” and “propaganda”). It was as if the word roots took some unexpected turns and created a family that didn’t really get along. Many of the words I worked through had interesting sets of relations, and the diagramming forced me to acknowledge these relations rather than pretending they weren’t there. That initial diagramming led to an early fragment of “The Knot” (the first poem in The Network) which was published in Rattapallax. I was already thinking about the history of words alongside the history of street names (I spent a lot of time browsing around in Gotham by Burrows and Wallace). I returned to MacDowell in 2005 and did some more diagramming with that same worn-out etymological dictionary. When I was asked to do a piece for a special section (on inventing a world) in American Letters & Commentary I did a fuller version of “The Knot,” called “Aphetic Lexer Net”—but once the piece became situated in this larger manuscript, the title seemed more distracting than useful, so it became “The Knot.” When I returned to MacDowell in 2008, I was working on the long piece “Financial District” and I continued to think about how the history of streets might parallel the history of words. I decided to narrow my investigation so that I was looking at words about finance only. But this time around I could no longer find the etymological dictionary in the library—perhaps it had been discarded because it was falling apart—and I wished I had stolen it on a prior visit. Luckily, I think I located the same version in a great used bookstore somewhere in New Hampshire. I should say that my understanding of this dictionary and the way it tracks relations between words in time is probably completely wrong. However, the diagramming had me thinking actively about how words are attached to geography and
empire, as well as how words are always slowly evolving/changing according to their use. On the one hand, our language controls what we imagine to be possible; but on the other hand, our language bends to serve our needs. And this double-capacity seemed to synch up with how history evolves as well. AEE: If we are to think of Vicuña’s performances of ancient knot writing or texts, The Network performs and grapples with the space between the knots. The interesting juxtapositions of the history of the Joker and Dutch or white sugar in “The Joker” asks the reader to draw connections between them. The role of the writer in the text is the selector of juxtaposition that causes tension, the writer does not explicate nor describe their connection but parallels can be inferred. The choice of what to fill in between is asked of the reader as much as of the writer and to this extent I think is co-performative. I’m curious as to who your influences were in the creation of this form and why you are attracted to it. JO: I’m very influenced by writers who are combining different language registers— writers who mix sound-play with historical investigations, who mix lyric subjectivity with documentary materials, who mix poetry and the essay…that said, here are just some of the writers (in no particular order) that I think about a lot—I’m sure their work has influenced my forms: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictee), Thalia Field (Bird Lovers Backyard), Juliana Spahr (This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and “Dole Street”), Charles Reznikoff (Testimony), Kamau Brathwaite (Trench Town Rock), Susan Howe (The Midnight), Tisa Bryant (Unexplained Presence), William Carlos Williams (Paterson), Leslie Scalapino (Defoe), Rosmarie Waldrop (A Key Into the Language of America). AEE: You’ve cited Vicuña’s statement, “Debris, a past to come: what we say about ourselves.” And written of her work that in it, “disappearance is a result of disaster at the same time as it is a foundation for possibility.” How does this inability to recover what is lost without possibility of recovery and the necessity to do so in order to move forward inform your approach to history? How do you perceive of history as a poet? JO: That quote is from a talk/essay I wrote called “Is Poetry the News: The Poethics of the Found Text.” [http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-osman.shtml] In that piece I’m really trying to make a case for the ephemeral/found over the monumental. It’s an argument that Vicuña makes repeatedly in her work. My perception of history as a poet…that’s a big question…it’s connected to Vicuña’s phrase “what we say about ourselves.” Events happen and history narrates them, so fact is inevitably changed by interpretation and the fictional devices used in any form of storytelling. And those interpretations derive from the needs of the current moment, the needs of the teller. We know this—and so historical knowledge is very much a system that relies on a suspension of disbelief. I’m fascinated by that tension. It’s one of the reasons we did the last issue of Chain around the topic of “Facts.” I’m sure I’m not alone in my interest in poetry’s ability to unlock a “fact” from our usual ways of knowing it.
AEE: In an interview with Charles Bernstein you said that the poet needs to be both alive and dead—involved and removed. I wonder if you could speak a little more as to this stance and whether or not you feel the reader should be in a similar position. How is this paradoxical state one in which a person can culturally engage in a meaningful way? JO: That interview took place a long time ago—when I was a grad student. I was working on a dissertation that used Brechtian dramatic theory as a way to examine the claims that experimental poetry encourages the reader to be an active meaning-maker as opposed to a passive consumer of someone else’s meaning. Brecht wanted his audience to be both engaged/entertained and critically alert/evaluative (he liked the idea of a spectator smoking a cigar while watching a show). And so I was examining poetry that I saw to be encouraging similarly dual reception. The Brechtian ideal was that the spectator could stay detached enough that s/he could see parallels between the injustices enacted on the stage and those being performed out in the world. If there’s some awareness, then maybe there can be socio-political change. I’m not sure it ever works that way, but I do believe that poetry changes the attention—to words and to the world where those words are found. That is an increasingly important act. One could argue that today all readers are performing actions and creating content all the time, that all readers are absorbed and detached simultaneously. But unless there is a certain amount of self-reflection, such activity is entirely passive. I imagine it’s always been the case that poetry creates spaces for an attention that can’t really exist otherwise. It functions as commentary, in that it proposes an alternative to cultural default settings. AEE: The literary magazine, Chain, that you founded with Juliana Spahr was intended to make the editorial role as minimal as possible, in that many hands would editorialize or select and there would be no one “decider.” What are your thoughts on editorial transparency and the role of an editor? JO: Juliana and I have written about our editorial goals in a number of places. One response can be found here. And you can find information about each of the issues (as well as the new ChainLinks book series) here. AEE: The sound in your work has a naturalness that attunes careful notice of vowel and fricatives rather than say rhyme or slant rhyme. Do you play a musical instrument? How does sound influence your work—do you listen to music when you compose? Do you read your work aloud when you compose? What for you is the importance of having multiple voices present in a piece? JO: I can’t listen to music when I read or write. And I tend to read the poems aloud only towards the end of the process when I’m looking out for inconsistencies. I think my sense of listening to the pieces has more to do with a sense of balance, feeling the weight of certain registers and wanting them to work in relation to each other. I listen to the pieces I’m making very carefully, and my sense of what voices need to combine and
to what degree is mostly intuitive. And that listening process connects to how space is used as well, as I’m very concerned that there’s room for the reader to breathe and think while reading. Click to view selected works from "The Network" by Jena Osman.