A Line of Flight
A conversation with Magdalena Zurawski
Poet and educator Magdalena Zurawski talks about her new chapbook,
“Don’t Be Scared,” forthcoming from The Operating System
Greetings! Thank you for talking to us about your process today! Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
I’m a poet and teacher, living in Athens, GA.
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
Because it allows conversations to happen. Conversations that need to happen. Conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?
I woke up one morning at the age of 13 and went to my desk and wrote a poem after having a strange dream. From then on I felt dedicated to poetry.
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?
A poet is someone who constructs forms out of words.
What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
I take teaching seriously. The classroom for me was a problematic but life- changing space, a line of flight. I feel obligated to make it that kind of space for my students. Sometimes I fall short, but I try. I take local and state politics seriously after the GA legislature made guns legal in my classroom. I work on campaigns etc. My motivation there is making sure there’s some sort of viable reality for my students to inherit. It seems like we’re losing on that front at the moment, but I’ll be working on campaigns here in GA over the coming year.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen?
This piece is what I’ve been calling an essay with line breaks. Given that my classroom has been under attack in several ways, it felt important to take the experience of teaching and my relationship with my students seriously, to externalize everything that is taking place for me when I enter the classroom. It seemed important, too, that my students might be able to read it.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated?
When I was a grad student at Duke I got to study and to know Fred Moten. One day, I think in seminar, he mentioned that he wanted to teach a course called “Don’t Be Scared.” The reading list would be all those huge works of literature people often are too scared to read. I remember The Making of Americans being on the list and Pamela. The discussion of this fantasy course was an aside, if I remember correctly, but something that I think about often because “Don’t Be Scared” is in many ways the perfect classroom philosophy.
Students are scared of not understanding things, of appearing to not understand something, etc. My job is to let them know they don’t have to be scared. They can think out loud, be wrong, confused, etc. and it’s all important and helpful for the work we’re doing together. When I started to write this piece about teaching, I was fixated on a memory of having to get students past the word Cartesian on the first day of a poetics class. That word felt like an opportunity because it turns what is essentially at this point a cliché (“I think therefore I am”) into a capitalized adjective, an intimidating
academic term that seems to stand for a whole world beyond what a student who is first encountering philosophy, theory, or poetics thinks she knows. But of course people who have never even set foot on a college campus have likely heard the phrase “I think therefore I am” as a punchline on a 70s sitcom or something. I bet there are even some business majors who have heard the phrase. Anyhow, it’s a good first lesson in showing students that they don’t need to be scared of not knowing something. Cartesian is just a name you don’t know for an idea you do know. Don’t be scared.
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)? What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
This book is an acknowledgement that my students are the people with whom I think and talk about art most intensely. The economic situation of poets in America has created a kind of diasporic poetry community. Many of us are bound to some campus. And even if we’re in major cities, we can’t really afford to live in neighborhoods alongside each other. Even in NY it seems no one can afford to live around The Poetry Project anymore. NY poets have a long commute to reach what used to be a neighborhood’s poetry space. So
this piece is an effort to take seriously the community I create with my students, to take seriously the thinking about poetry that happens with and through them. They are on a daily basis my poetry friends. My other poetry family is less integrated into my daily life.
MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI is the author of The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom (Wave Books 2019), the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
ABOUT THE COVER ART:
The Operating System 2019 chapbooks, in both digital and print, feature art from Heidi Reszies. The work is from a series entitled “Collected Objects & the Dead Birds I Did Not Carry Home,” which are mixed media collages with encaustic on 8 x 8 wood panel, made in 2018. Heidi writes: “This series explores objects/fragments of material culture-how objects occupy space, and my relationship to them or to their absence.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Heidi Reszies is a poet/transdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, Virginia. Her visual art is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts CLARA Database of Women Artists. She teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and is the creator/curator of Artifact Press. Her poetry collection titled Illusory Borders is forthcoming from The Operating System in 2019, and now available for pre-order. Her collection titled Of Water & Other Soft Constructions was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the Anhinga Press 2018 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry (forthcoming in 2019). Find her at heidireszies.com
