{"id":126484,"date":"2018-06-14T11:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126484"},"modified":"2018-06-14T14:22:40","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T18:22:40","slug":"an-interview-with-maggie-nelson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/14\/an-interview-with-maggie-nelson\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maggie Nelson defies classification. She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry,<\/em> Something Bright, Then Holes<\/a>. First published in 2007, <\/em>Something Bright was Nelson\u2019s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. Nelson\u2019s nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. Those concerns are present in <\/em>Something Bright. \u201cI don\u2019t have to be ashamed of my desire \/ Not for sex, not for language,\u201d the narrator tells us in \u201cA Halo Over the Hospital.\u201d But in this collection, Nelson\u2019s heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. \u201cLive with your puny, vulnerable self \/ Live with her,\u201d we are told.<\/em><\/p>\n

While <\/em>Something Bright, Then Holes charts many landscapes\u2014from the polluted Gowanus Canal, to a friend\u2019s hospital room, to the inner tautologies of \u201cleave-taking\u201d\u2014the collection centers around the issues of love and loss. \u201cWhat part of this autonomy \/ am I not supposed to like?\u201d the narrator expounds in \u201cThe Mute Story of November.\u201d The self and the other (romantic, or intellectual) are like binary stars. They threaten to destroy or consume one another: \u201cYesterday we found something very hard \/ at our core, a fierce acorn. I don\u2019t know \/ if we were born with it, or if its mass simply accrued \/ in the darkness.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I wondered if you could talk about the experience of having a book reissued\u00a0ten years later. Is there a sense of Didion\u2019s invitation to check in on the selves we once were? An old friend come to visit? Or, the sort of estrangement that one often feels as an artist from the work that came before?<\/p>\n

NELSON<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a beautiful edition, so I feel very lucky. It\u2019s also sweet to me that my dear friend Tara Jane O\u2019N\u200beil did the first cover and then did this one as well. I feel estranged from this book in the sense that it is my last book of poetry\u2014not like, the last book of poetry I will ever write, but the last one I\u2019ve written, and it\u2019s wild that a decade has gone by since. But I can see many themes in these pages that have cropped up in my more recent prose books, so I feel a strong continuum of thought. There was kind of a magic splintering happening inside me at the time of\u00a0Something Bright<\/em>\u2014very painful, but also magic. It\u2019s also the last book I wrote in New York, and I can really feel that\u2014all that time spent talking to and about strangers at the canal, all that looking outward, all the late nights, the wandering, the perching. My life isn\u2019t like that anymore. Anyway, it\u2019s nice to see these poems again.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line in Something Bright, Then Holes<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>which struck me as a kind of legend to the emotional mapping of this collection\u2014\u201cthere\u2019s this enormous surplus of feelings and\/or words \u00a0\/ and we prick at the tarp, letting little pinwheels of light come in \/ \u00a0but never really touching the source.\u201d For me, this line exemplifies the visceral \u201cthingyness of things\u201d you catalogue in this collection\u2014\u201cThe Canal Diaries,\u201d which is \u201chome to piles \/ of tires, oil fires, suitcases \/ full of chopped bodies,\u201d or the line from \u201cThese Days\u201d\u2014\u201cLast night a stranger called \/ at\u00a02 a.m., said, THE CODE WORDS IS \/ SHOES\u201d\u2014and the way in which you posit the body as a similar collection of physical refuse. From\u00a037 Days<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t want to be writing these poems into winter,\u00a0the outline of your cock \/ still etched in my brain, all new life hiding or dying \/ as the canal chokes with ice.\u201d Love is both tangible and seismic here. Confessional and\u00a0biblical. \u201cI\u2019m living a lie\u201d ends a poem which a few lines earlier draws a parable aside the\u00a0polluted\u00a0Gowanus\u2014\u201cHe doesn\u2019t \/ really know what he wants<\/em>, the hippie says \/ as his dog sniffs the water.\u201d This desire to balance the tangible with the ephemeral is mirrored in the final section of the book in the line \u201cWe share a brightness \/ It\u2019s called death \/ in life \/ I toss and turn all night, hearing you say \/ I want to touch you \/ without using my hands.\u201d This dialectic has always offered, for me, such bursts of pleasure in reading your work. I wondered how you hold space for the particular and the universal as you draw them?<\/p>\n

NELSON<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been pretty obsessed with this particular, universal question for some time now. My book on the New York School takes it as its foundational question, refracted through the question of abstraction. In abstract painting, the more abstract the work gets, the more material, which fascinates me. That inquiry led to a related obsession with color in\u00a0Bluets<\/em>, as color is both a very material phenomenon and also felt by many to be a portal to the transcendental. Lately I\u2019ve been rolling the question over in a more political realm,\u00a0vis-\u00e0-vis Saidiya Hartman\u2019s work on the particular and the universal in the development of liberalist discourses around freedom\u2014i.e., the ways in which the universal subject always depends on castigated subjects and their \u201cfleshy substance\u201d to construct its \u201cethereal splendor.\u201d Anyway, poetry offers a terrific, focused arena for this play\u2014not in the one-way sense people always talk about\u2014like, Wow, your particular details really led me to some universal truths\u2014but more like, as Bob Creeley used to say, in poetry you\u2019re often trying to describe something very specific and material, even if it\u2019s a state of mind or emotional landscape. It\u2019s just not as specific as saying, I\u2019ll be back\u00a0in five minutes, or, I have to go to the bathroom. The title\u00a0Something Bright, Then Holes<\/em>, which comes from my mentor Annie Dillard, is about that, too\u2014it\u2019s a description of a hand by a newly-sighted person, a literal description of what she sees, while also serving as a description of a feeling, an apprehension of presence and absence.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In \u201cA Halo Over the Hospital,\u201d the narrator\u00a0has come to visit a sick mentor in the ICU who is paralyzed, her face \u201creconstructed \/ by a team of surgeons … your skin hung on a rack \/ and they gave you titanium cheekbones and a titanium jaw.\u201c \u201cI\u2019m there when you open your eyes,\u201d the narrator assures the mentor, \u201cas you\u2019re slightly stricken \/ upon remembering the prison \/ your body has become … I read you an essay \/ of mine about troubling the passage from the particular to the universal.\u201d The mentor offers this bit of advice, \u201cMaggie, the problem now is to think\u00a0the singular<\/em>.\u201d I wondered if you might talk about this idea of singularity\u2014a theme you wrestle with in all of your work. How does it relate to the shifting\u00a0you<\/em>?<\/p>\n

NELSON<\/p>\n

Well, she\u2019s a brilliant academic who, from her hospital bed, was explaining to me the argument of a book by the postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty. Incredible. She has since written her own amazing book, called\u00a0A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain<\/em>, which I highly recommend. I can\u2019t really speak to the singular in the sense she was using it, nor the \u201ctechnological singularity\u201d sense, but I can say that paying attention to a singular person or thing can be a way of expressing love, of paying homage to their uniqueness, their difference from everything else that exists. And that paying that kind of attention can be a way of understanding difference as something that holds us together rather than signifying our apartness. Then there\u2019s the fact that addressing someone singular in poems may be a way of paying attention to them, maybe even of loving them, but of course once it\u2019s published, it\u2019s a bit fraught, because you\u2019re making a public poem rather than a private communication, which brings you into different waters.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The ineptitude of singular pronouns in capturing the valence of gender and sexuality is a theme continued in The\u00a0Argonauts. <\/em>\u201cThe presumptuous of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need, need to put\u00a0everything into categories\u2014predator, twilight, edible\u2014on the other the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live. Becoming Deleuze and Guattari call the flight: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Similarly, the impossibility of defining a singular hue or color is echoed in\u00a0Bluets.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t know how the jacarandas will make me feel next year. I don\u2019t know if I will be alive to see them, or if I will be here to see them, or if I will ever be able to see them as blue, even as a type of blue.\u201d I wondered if you might talk about this act of\u00a0becoming<\/em>\u00a0in the text itself. Is it a radical act?<\/p>\n

NELSON<\/p>\n

Not sure I know what you mean here, about \u201cbecoming\u201d in the text itself. Certainly I would like my books to do something paradoxical, which is intimate things that fall outside of categories, or language, even, by being exceptionally clear about what I see, think, apprehend. That\u2019s the Wittgensteinian ticket. But I don\u2019t lay claim on radical acts, such a term feels pretty unuseful to me at this point.<\/p>\n

Given that the book doesn\u2019t exist before it\u2019s written, it most certainly becomes. Of course once it\u2019s published there\u2019s a certain freezing of the flight\u2014the many books that might have been shrink into the one that is. But that\u2019s okay, because that likely keeps one pushing onward.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Hilton Als said in his profile of you for\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>, \u201cBalancing pathos with philosophy, she created a new kind of classicism, queer in content but elegant, almost cool in shape.\u201d\u00a0Having been in a long term gender-queer relationship myself, \u00a0I\u2019ve always wondered, Is the idea of \u201cqueering\u201d the text or the memoir, either formally or in terms of content, a statement you relate to? Balk against?<\/p>\n

NELSON<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really relate to or balk against it. Queering<\/em> as a verb has never meant that much to me, especially not these days. Sometimes I might use queer as an adjective, but mostly as a kind of shorthand for a particular scene or vibe. Also, it\u2019s a little strange to talk about queering a genre, like memoir, when so many of my favorite books in that genre are already so queer\u2014Eileen Myles, David Wojnarowicz, Herve Guibert, Paul Preciado, Audre Lorde, Hilton Als … the list could go on and on. It actually seems plausible to me that someone could argue the opposite of what Hilton here says\u2014that is, that some of my books present hetero content in queer form. Anne Carson\u2019s a great model in that regard. But what\u2019s queer form, anyway? I don\u2019t know. The art critic David Getsy has thought a lot about this vis-\u00e0-vis sculpture, in his\u00a0Abstract Bodies.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The body in\u00a0Something Bright, Then Holes\u00a0<\/em>is often referred to as a prison. \u201cWhen did this become a narrative of \/ captivity,\u201d the narrator in \u201c6:30 a.m.\u201d asks. \u201cFrom what am I trying to break free?\u201d I wondered if you\u2019ve since answered that question.\u00a0You\u2019ve spoken before of Wittgenstein.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nah, not yet. But I am writing a book about freedom right now, so more will come.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Love, as both an intellectual desire and a bodily imperative, is omnipresent in all of your works. And yet love and sex vacillate between the autonomic and the transcendent. In \u201cSeen It All,\u201d the narrator explains, \u201cJust when you thought you\u2019d seen it all \/ A man stands by the open passenger door of a parked SUV \/ rocking steadily, eerily \/ It takes a moment to see he is fucking a body \/ Not make of female, just thighs \/ White, hairy, gargantuan thighs\/ pushed overhead.\u201d Yet this visual and emotional remove is underscored by more trenchant lines. \u201cHow many ways are there \/ to get saturated in another’s mind?\u201d Or, in \u201cSeptember,\u201d \u201cI hosted \/ a flood here, it changed \/ my contours.\u201d Is this what love is? \u201cThe desire to hold anyone \/ who seems contagious?\u201d A \u201cHospital for Special Care?\u201d<\/p>\n

NELSON<\/p>\n

Autonomic, love it. My partner, Harry, has just written\u00a0a great book that has to do with the eros of the machine. Anyway, love is a great many things. Poetry would be totally deprived if we ever agreed upon a unitary formulation about it, as would life itself. So I can\u2019t answer to that. But, speaking of hospitals, I will offer you this quotation I recently came upon, from Bifo, in case it helps anyone in these miserable political times. \u201cNo one is depressed because he is aware that there is no way out of the trap. That is desperation, not depression. And desperation is a condition of the mind, not of the heart nor of the body … Even [Pope] Francis said it in a wonderful conversation published in\u00a0La Civilt\u00e0 Cattolica<\/em>\u00a0immediately after his election to the Throne of Saint Peter. He said that the church is a field hospital and that among the theological virtues neither faith nor hope are important. Charity is important: hugging, caressing, solidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Annie DeWitt is a novelist, short-story writer, and\u00a0essayist.\u00a0Her debut novel\u00a0<\/em>White Nights in Split Town City\u00a0made<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times\u00a0Book Review\u2019s short list. Her story collection <\/em>Closest Without Going Over, which is\u00a0in progress\u00a0<\/em>was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Maggie Nelson defies classification. She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry, Something Bright, Then Holes. First published in 2007, Something Bright was Nelson\u2019s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[34379,12033,34381,34380,16752,33937,34378],"class_list":["post-126484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-a-halo-over-the-hospital","tag-annie-dillard","tag-bifo","tag-david-getsy","tag-maggie-nelson","tag-saidiya-hartman","tag-something-bright-then-holes"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat's Queer Form Anyway? 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