9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 7 :: Susana Gardner on Elisabeth Workman
The Leisure-Fruit of Elisabeth Workman’s Poetry
What brings leisure to a given poetic text? What culls a poetic muse state? Is it different for the writer and then their intended reader? The idea of leisure found within a poetic construct of any particular writer is that of what mysterious unknown fruit it might offer. Rereading favorites, or much loved texts even decades later gives me the feeling of comfort, a steady grasp and constant, a model, portal, a how-to or formula even. I am thus brought again in this sentiment now when rereading Elisabeth Workman’s poetry. She is not the first, but it always begs the question… how? How are some poets capable in this ever whimsical engagement with their reader to the point of setting out on a new poem or project… encouraged to tap into that eternal well that is often without a static ego, or I? Workman does this in her smart betwixtment of the ideas and art of others throughout her works. Whether it via Turin’s Horse or lines from Chaucer, the tyranny of I in academia is its singularity, or monolithic finitude & masculinist superego, constellations of ancient Greek Gods and Goddesses or expounding on Pussyriot mottos to just name a few. This ability on the part of an author, allows for a lift and assist and often needful breath of fresh transcendence in enjoyment and further thinking outside the hum-drum, involving not one scene but many scenes and openings for a reader to enter. And, is this via our yesteryear, or Readymade Now? Or, can it also be toward our new fraught Future-sphere — we may have seen in the like of spraying ovations from Flarfic Pig Cupids spawning westwards? Or, is it a reader’s ability to learn how to engage from this thus said verso muse state? One might receive the words as instruction to step out of their own fugue graft to the page in way and delight of the comportment of idea waxing steady feelings alongside theory as we are offered a text that does not simply carry us, but trusts us in its messy collusion with the page. There are often more questions than answers in the leisure & fruit or leisure-fruit of craft. Surely, this will differ for every reader, but Elisabeth Workman is far-out there in the forward unknown, delighting in her playful and well-wrought avant nod to the page. The observance is that of a kind of traipsey, well-founded bliss and subsequent thought provoking leisure-fruit — offering becomes evident in the fresh and strange combination of langue she sets page after page throughout her work, but also now in my revisiting of which. Enjoyment becomes an entangled engagement of the text as it is — a trope in and of itself by the ever chimerical and ephemeral Workman. I first met Elisabeth in the early aughts via the virtual mailbox of DUSIE. She was living in Qatar at that time and her expat openness and understanding of collective performance and publishing caught my attention. Her two books Ultra Mega Prairieland (Bloof Books, 2014) and Endlessness Is No Desolation (DUSIE, 2016) and many chapbooks, anthologies and projects later, Workman’s writing still holds my gaze in a lush and curious way, whether under the niche of Flarf or experimental overture if one must necessitate poetic nomenclature. She questions as she contextualizes… like in her new chap The Box is the Womb Or from Dusie, 2020 which presents itself in writerly convo/ deconstruction/destruction and then rebuilding, setting herself and her readers as a Phoenix among the ancients.
Again, like the vacuous maw of an unending fisticuff, a holler in the night — an adamant siren’s screech both smart and disarming. Poetry is a language that is complex and manied — splintering at once cosmic and colossal.
Even in conjecturing of her own particular feels, Workman evokes bodily landscapes that lead to more feelings in the reader. Hmmm! Like yes! Let’s write more like this, in the langue — dismount reader, write now!
The Box is the Womb Or, Dusie, 2020
Must one only be I wooed in language that wounds or seduces? Could this particular form of poetic eroticism — typically written by and for poets — be enough? I would protest that there is magic and an ever-growing true inhabitance of language far out-reaching that of poets. But within poetics, we must grasp it when it appears and risks otherness in its form, in its cant or rendition.
(&) How do you write through the Divine Fucked?
Ambivalence?
Polyvalence?
Paradox? Simultaneity?
The frothy contestation of so many dog heads barking, invisible growths on the monumental certainty of the archaic torso?
How can writers overthrow the Tyranny of the I (the cult of personality, I for IMPERIAL)
from Endlessness is No Desolation, Dusie 2016
So many dog-heads in the night of the strange lychee-sack of Workman’s poethic isthmus, sings me with want to touch it, read or quantify the tyranny of the ‘I’ and enter in its leisure-fruit of illumination and instruction and write-on accordingly.
Q&A with Elisabeth Workman
Q: Do you have a particular process or poetic impulse when you begin a new body of work?
A: Impulse, yes, impulses that constellate or at least seem to promise constellation though I may not always be exactly clear on how they (inter)relate at the first. I tend towards the verb constellate because of its relational and astral associations — that these impulses are somehow outside of me, together/many, and like the title page to Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, there is never one view/possibility/word but many and the blame is mine as well as the right to protest and not know how to protest. To forget each time, to be terrified at the onset, and to proceed. A process.
Q: I know Flarf has figured into your process and development somewhat… is this still the case? And if other movements have contributed to your workings as a writer, could you name those as well?
Flarf is still a flavor of my weird heart but arguably the literal process of “Google sculpting” has been made boring by the refinement of algorithms, which squelch chance and the wildness it brings. Flarf definitely shaped my antennae.* It opened up/further dilated receptors for apophenia, chance, disjunction, WTFness, the aberrant, the messy, the excessive, the absurd, the shapeshifting, the bad, the crushing, the contentious, and the hilarious. And the vital, life-saving importance of 1) play, 2) writing in a community, and 3) the lactating mermaid apocalypse.
Other movements, yes! Collapsing, hyperextending, mutating, counterclockwise, Dada, surrealism, anti-poets, OBERIU, the mystery school of Eleusis, the heyoka, and individuals who’re movements in themselves — Stein, Sun Ra, Issa, Pina Bausch, Yoko Ono, Walter Benjamin, Pessoa, the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, bell hooks, Madeline Gins, Alice Notley
*(It seems antennae must always be growing, and that maybe the ultimate antennae overtake the bodied writer back into mystery?)
Q: Is there a line of cohesion between your different bodies of work that you find important and/or intrinsic — poem to poem, book to book or general drive & impetus?
A: This is such a good question, because I have always wanted to let whatever I’m working on be whatever it needs to be, even if that means straying from precedents I’ve previously established elsewhere. Maybe a consistency though is a desire to get out (of pre-established habits, synapses, myself, this world order) and a desire to mutate.
Q: What does your writing routine or habit look like?
A: My life has been in upheaval since last fall, so I decided that I would spend the beginning of 2020 applying to grants and residencies to help secure time in the future to write that is more than me writing poems on my phone in the dark after the girls have fallen asleep. I’m not so good at the administrative aspects of writing, so I really had to commit to planting those seeds and hope for some to take. It’s been a hand-to-mouth habit. A stealing time habit. A need to live I have changed my life to protect. Beyond me, I’m writing this on the vernal equinox, in which we all find ourselves in an unexpected time outside of time, as the coronavirus spreads at a terrifying pace worldwide. Routine has left the building, so I am curious what my writing routine *will* look like. I want more ritual around it and in support of it (dedicated reading time, morning meditation, dance, pillow booking). Larger expanses of time within which to write. How is the poison also the medicine? Dear reader, may you be safe, may you be well, may good fortune be with you.
Elisabeth Workman is a poet, writer, and teacher of writing, with a background in dance. Originally from the pharmaceutical suburbs of Philadelphia, she has since lived in Boston, rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, Qatar, the Standing Rock Nation of the Dakotas, and now Minneapolis. A recipient of a Jerome Emerging Writer Fellowship, a McKnight Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a University of Minnesota Marcella DuBourg Fellowship, and honors from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Minnesota State Arts Board, she has collaborated with visual artists and other poets on numerous projects including, most recently, URTH ANIMAL (with Feng Sun Chen, Paula Cisewski, and Haley Lasche) and The Codex of Quotidian Beasts (with Jenny Schmid). Her work has been anthologized in The End of the World Project (Moria Press, 2019), Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Aerial/Edge, 2017), among others. She is the author of ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND (Bloof Books, 2014), ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION (Dusie Press, 2016), and over a dozen chapbooks, including Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011); with Michael Sikkema, TERRORISM IS WHAT WHALE (Grey Book Press, 2014) and Moon Poon (Pity Milk, 2016); ANY RIP A THRESHOLD (Shirt Pocket Press, 2015); SHIMMERNUT (our teeth, 2019); and THE BOX IS THE WOMB OR (Dusie Kollektiv, 2019). A new chapbook, The Figures: A Litter, is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press.
Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry collections [ lapsed insel weary ] (The Tangent Press, 2008), HERSO (Black Radish Books, 2011) and, CADDISH, Black Radish Books, 2013. Her latest book, Somewhere Upon a Time / Oceanids & Dreampomes is soon forthcoming. Her poetry has appeared in many online and print publications including
Jacket, How2, Puerto Del Sol, Cambridge Literary Review and Chicago Review among others. Her work has also been translated into Icelandic, Italian and French as well as featured in several anthologies, including 131.839 slög með bilum (131,839 keystrokes with spaces) (Ntamo, Finland, 2007) NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (Fence Books, 2007), KINDERGARDE: Avant-garde Poems, Stories, and Songs for Children, Black Radish Books (2014) and in the CITY AND SEA Anthology, Drunken Boat, Providence, 2017.
She lives on an island off the New England coast where she tends books, writes and curates the online poetics journal and experimental press, Dusie.
