‘The Haphazard Combination of Things’

Reading your poetry, beings and things strike as having the potential to establish connections, ‘haphazard combination of things’ (‘In the Yellow Head of a Tulip’). Do you aim at showing readers unexpected correlations? Do you naturally feel vibrations between disparate elements of ‘The Floating World’,1 see resonances between irises and contortionists, drinking glasses and corollas? Or can we consider that, as a poet, you are trained to look at the world poetically? Thus, each word or letter opens up multiple possibilities and each object or subject is understood in a metaphorical way.

Before I started writing as a teenager, my medium of expression was photography, something that, of course, relies entirely on the visual world. I think I naturally see objects, and images that speak to me in a way that requires something of me. At first the camera helped me capture these images, which I enjoyed tremendously but then it was as if the camera blocked out other events that were occurring in my wider field of vision because I was often so intent on capturing a specific thing. For example, I once, riding in a car in New York City, saw a woman catch a pigeon with her bare hands and shove it into a paper bag. I wanted to preserve what I had seen, and since I had not captured it with a camera, I wrote it down. And this started a process of collecting images with writing. Also, images that I saw in my mind’s eye, it was not restricted to having to be seen through the view finder of my camera. I felt it was a more open way of being. And then my English teacher in high school read T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ out loud to us in class and suddenly I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was totally taken by the images in the poem and, of course, the mellifluous music of the language. All of this occurred after I had moved the first time to New York and I think that experience of having left Sweden and finding myself in a new city also startled me into a state of observing because I was in entirely new surroundings.

In Les Objets singuliers, Baudrillard states that a singular object has a life of its own, it becomes an event, free from any interpretation. Would you say that the poem entitled ‘From the Train’ (p. 19) displays neglected but singular objects?

I think so. It speaks of what is left of someone’s third-floor apartment after the building is halfway torn down. Therefore, what is left is exposed to the elements. I caught a glimpse from the vantage point of the train of that singular piece of paper which intrigued me and moved me enough to write the poem. It struck me that this was an indication of how fleeting our lives are here on the earth. Also, the train moving past it, that it was something I saw in passing added to this element of impermanence. This paper hung in what I imagine was a person’s kitchen and it felt private and almost intimate. And therefore, yes, as if it had a life of its own, like an unspoken thought of someone who is gone.

‘Gift Box’ (p. 39) offers a series of experiences, objects, beings, emotions and moments that seem to hold in a frame. However, constraints seem to generate more freedom: hence, ‘the whole world inside one box’, ‘the moon in a box’ inevitably escape… Can you elaborate on the notion of the world (hence the real) being impossible to contain?

I think the fact that the world is impossible to contain and/or grasp, let alone make sense of, is one reason for my writing. Writing is a way to engage and play with that unfathomable fact and that is fun. I think the frame of the poem is the litany, the list, and the fact that in a list you can leap to anything –nothing is out of bounds so to speak. In a sense, it is possible to argue that most poems are lists. And I am not only thinking of Whitman but reading him I was exposed to the power of the list, the incessant parallel structure, and the use of anaphora, of course. The inclusiveness of the form. This poem was fun because it itself was gift, it almost wrote itself. I was attending a lecture on the work of the painter Marc Chagall with my friend Michael Burkard, an outstanding American poet. And the two of us suddenly started writing after the art historian uttered the phrase ‘Chagall box’.

According to Jean Baudrillard, a successfully portrayed object exists beyond its own reality and creates a dual relation that can destabilize, contradict or deviate from our usual views. Can you agree with that opinion? Do you think that your poetry follows this idea?

These questions make me think of the exercise of drawing objects that are turned upside down. The premise of it is that we don’t really see objects as they are in themselves because our notion of what we think or have learned that they look like dominates what we think they look like and as a result our drawings of them become untrue. But if they are defamiliarized by being placed upside down, it is suddenly possible for our brain to get to know their true shape and lines more accurately. I do think that a successfully portrayed object has the power to defamiliarize and therefore allow us to experience it in a new way and by extension our larger surroundings.

In the poem ‘If There Is Another World’ (p. 3), a fossilized word seems revitalized by a new image. Shipwrecked screens turned down to the sand are compared to horseshoe crabs. The initial comparison (crabs in the form of a horseshoe) is empowered by the vision of computer screens and their antennas. Are you interested in what the sign can have in store for our imagination, what ‘the sign urges us […] through a few more intersections’ (to hint at two lines from your own poem, ibid.)? What is the place of metaphor or synaesthesia in your poetry?

The sign is important since it is the building block of our language and as a result informs our thoughts and perceptions and even deeper feelings. I am interested in thinking about how our given languages inform our way of thinking of the world, as if the language is a box of sorts, that we place our world into to borrow from my own poem. There is a lot to say about this, of course, and it often comes up in class discussions on translation.
I think metaphor is central to my work since a metaphor is also an image. And metaphors make instantaneous connections between disparate things, things that may not otherwise be thought of together and thereby they defamiliarize each other. I have synaesthesia so it is an intricate part of my life. All letters and numbers have colors and words too. I used to think that everyone experienced the alphabet and words this way. Until one day I was told that that was not the case and that I had synaesthesia. Inevitably it informs my writing. There is an aspect of textures of words too that helps me feel my way along as I write.

Many poems of yours describe the world according to the logic of synaesthesia, ‘The Effects’ (p. 62), for example, alludes to ‘the flying whipped cream of the waves’, the possibility of ‘drinking from the tulips’ yellow and red goblets of light’. When we met, we also discussed your capacity of associating one word or letter to a color. Is this propensity as a synaesthete key to your writing? How?

It is a little hard for me to know how my synaesthesia affects my work as it has been with me always and I have never written poems without it. Often images or metaphors such as the ones you mentioned from ‘The Effects’ simply come to me as I see something, in this case the waves or the tulips. The colors of letters and words are generally more apparent as I hold them in my mind than when I look at words on a page or on a screen and I don’t always consciously think of their colors as I am writing, although I can like right now as I am writing this since it is in the forefront of my mind at this moment. But as I write my poems, there is a lot of waiting or listening for the right words and images to occur to me and that is why I think my process is often quite slow. It is a kind of searching in a way, searching for how the poem will evolve based on logic and imagery and the music of the lines too.

In the poem ‘Late at Night’ (p. 61), one train traveler witnesses another man eating himself up. This image is incongruous. Are you particularly focused on the unexpected or the mysterious in your poetry?

‘Late at Night’ is a poem that came from traveling next to a person on a train who was kind of biting his own arm repeatedly. I found it a bit unsettling and wrote this poem without much thought. It has an absurdist quality almost. The unexpected and the mysterious are both elements of poetry that speak to me.

‘Aloft’ (p. 5) encourages readers to ‘kiss the immaterial’ and observe a man taking his dustbins out but with ‘steel galvanized wings’. Is your poetry anchored into daily life in the William Carlos Williams’ way? Or are you starting from the imaginary to get back to the real the way Barbara Guest nourishes her poetry? Which poets influence your work the most?

I do think that my poetry is often anchored in daily life. And William Carlos Williams is a poet I admire and read early on. I love his notion of ‘no ideas but in things’ – it, of course, holds within it both the immaterial and the material. And that is something, in my experience, that adds resonance and depth to poems. The combination of things again like the world and a box, for example. The poets that influence me the most are so many but I will try to name a few here: initially it was T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Elisabeth Bishop, Charles Simic and some Swedish poets, Gunnar Ekelöf, Edith Södergran, Tomas Tranströmer – also the Polish poets, Wislawa Szymborska and Adam Zagajewski and the Spanish poets Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti to mention a few but there are many others from various countries around the world.

Is uncertainty part of your writing logic or appreciation of the world? In what way?

Yes, I believe so but have never quite thought of it as such. I think as an approach that uncertainty works well in many areas of life seeing as we really don’t know anything much beyond that we are here now with one moment informing the next, etc. I do like questions, to ask questions a lot more than to give answers as I believe for me that writing is a kind of searching if you will. Questions open things for me in a way that allows for new ideas and thoughts to come into being while answers shut things down, sum them up into something finite. For me writing is a mysterious process – each poem occurs in a different way that cannot be repeated.

To get at a certain truth about the world, do you pay homage to the reality you see or do you start from the strangeness of a word, object or situation?

I make use of all four at different times depending on the poem at hand and on how a particular poem is occurring.

Is the poem a plastic process for you? How important are sounds and language as poetic matter?

It is hugely important – as the poem is also a musical entity. It must resonate and engage on a level of musicality too.

Your poetry is driven by a minute attention to details. The world you describe appears experienced by its effects on beings. When you write, do you have in mind the (quantum) butterfly effect, for example?

Yes, I do believe that ‘nothing is without effect’ as I think Somerset Maugham wrote and I know that it informs my poems but I am not always that deliberate or that aware of what I am doing as I am writing a poem.