a vehic(cup)ular salut!-ation
A Conversation with Brad Baumgartner
OS Collaborator Brad Baumgartner talks about his new digital chapbook, Quantum Mechantics: Memoirs of a Quark, available now 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?
Hi, I’m Brad. Thank you for the opportunity to talk a little bit about this text!
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
That’s a good question. Maybe I can speak to that more in some of the answers below.
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)?
In a certain way, I’m always a bit leery of calling myself anything (for often when one calls oneself something it is actually quite the opposite, i.e. in the sense of sincerity, etc. once expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his meditation on “bad faith” in Part One of Being and Nothingness). However, being that I’ve already breached that rule by naming it, I might as well just say it, right? Hah! And writing bios is a part of the writerly life, anyways. So, yea, I am a writer who is drawn mostly to the genres of poetry, experimental writing, and critical theory — not necessarily in that order, though, and perhaps more in the sense of a kind of theory that is a poetry and a poetry that is a kind of theory (from the Greek theōrein “to consider, speculate, look at”).
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?
This is a difficult question and the answer is likely different for everyone.
Ultimately, though, I am colorfully drawn to Wassily Kandinsky’s definition of the artist. Like Kandinsky, I think that at its root the role of the artist is aligned with the spiritual essence of art: “If the emotional power of the artist can overwhelm the ‘how?’ and can give free scope to his finer feelings, then art is on the crest of the road by which she will not fail later on to find the ‘what’ she has lost, the ‘what’ which will show the way to the spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life. This ‘what?’ will no longer be the material, objective ‘what’ of the former period, but the internal truth of art, the soul without which the body (i.e. the ‘how’) can never be healthy, whether in an individual or in a whole people. […] This ‘what’ is the internal truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone.” (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler [New York: Dover, 1977], 9.)
What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
By and large, the general theme of rejected submissions I tend to get is that it is either too poetic to be theory or too theoretical to be poetry. I am quite alright with that, actually, as it means the work is kind of hovering in this third, indistinct space. And being that rejections are a part of the game, it is a pretty fair critique. One of the things I am interested in, creation-wise, is what Nicholas of Cusa once termed a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ or “coincidence of opposites,” where two opposing things come together as one. So perhaps my cultural/social role, if anything, might be to curate the conditions of possibility, or prop open the door, so to speak, for that coincidence to potentially happen in a readership of some kind.
Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing or making specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written / the work was being made? How or how not?
As I mention in the brief Foreword to the chapbook, essentially the text operationalizes a parthenogenetic-pathetic fallacy, attributing the ultimate (first, final, last, and never was) paroxyic paradox upon the quarkic Word (Logos). It seeks an impersonal knowledge-without-a-bearer, that is to say a knowing which knows nothing as voiced through the unbeginning Nemo-clature of an eternal, hopping quant-Al(l)ity.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
During the past several years, I’ve had a growing interest in several different but interrelated topics, including theoretical physics, the microbiome, artificial intelligence, the non-human — in these sorts of interdisciplinary musings is where I tend to feel most at home these days.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
It’s a silly title. But it is also indexical to what the text is “doing,” which is this sort of interpretive shamanic dance, pointing at itself, saying, “Look at me, if you can (because I’m slippery), but when you do don’t take me too seriously; but also do take me seriously, if you can (because I want you to hold me tightly).” I will talk a little more about that below.
What does this particular work represent to you
…as indicative of your method/creative practice?
…as indicative of your history?
…as indicative of your mission/intentions/hopes/plans?
In sum, I suppose this text could be 2 or 2000 pages — the length is sort of arbitrary. It could go on forever or stop before it even started. Though one could lodge critiques of anthropomorphism, etc. this text is more of an inhuman poetico-archeology of sorts, or a quantum auto-ethnography done by the quark itself, which is really neither here nor there — more nowhere than anywhere, but always everywhere.
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?
Without speaking too much for the quark itself, one of the things that this text might aim to achieve is to curate a relation-ship (or a vehic(cup)ular salut!-ation) between the reader and the non-human world — i.e., the quantum world — wherein the readers’ own eyes become the effervescing vehicle for a kind of transformation, whether mystical or otherwise. That is an inherently paradoxical statement, however. For if the text objects in the book do in fact perform as the quantum world does, existing/not existing as boggling and indeterminate, then essentially there is nothing to discover other than what we might call a subatomic, quantum ‘poetry-without-us’ — yet, it is one that paradoxically exists only when observed or read.
On that note, I wonder, too, if all poetic texts/readerships are part of this quantum entanglement.
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?
That’s hard to say, and even harder not to, but if I were to venture a guess, I’d put it something like this: I am always a little suspect of the word “hope” in any capacity, because sometimes, even with the best intentions, it often sets us up for failure via communal- or self-sabotage. When it comes down to it, then, I typically prefer the word courage over hope.
For instance, in the sense of Nietzschean ‘amor fati’ (or “love of fate”), an idea I put a lot of stock into, essentially nothing is any more important than anything else; that is to say that everything that happens is as it is, not as it should be, because it always already is as it should be. This is a complex idea, but coincidentally it is perhaps best expressed in modern pop cultural parlance via the “It be like that sometimes” meme. And it definitely “be like that” a lot. So we might as well dance with it while it is, which is also to say that in that very dancing, which may be clumsy, erroneous, even a complete failure, that we courageously open ourselves up completely to a kind of beautiful non-dancing, i.e. the potentiality of it simultaneously not being like that. And, in that very dancing, which is also a form of reading, we’ll quirkily/quarkily bounce around like the quantum ballerinas and magicians we already are — always and forever.
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social activism, in particular in what I call “Civil Rights 2.0,” which has remained immediately present all around us in the time leading up to this series’ publication. I’d be curious to hear some thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, privilege, social/cultural background, and sexuality within the community, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos.”
Ultimately, I’m all for para-academic mediums, creative outlets, publishing methods, anonymous texts, etc. that foster an open exchange of/for ideas. Our present day socio-political climate being what it is, it is especially important to curate venues for enacting a sense of community among people of diverse backgrounds and perspective — a community, no less, that is unfettered by oppressive hegemonic forces; a community that feels like being at a poetry reading with other like-minded poets and not like a contrived ‘graduation ceremony’ of some sort. In short: the role of poetics serves as a meta-/physical nod of the head or a wink at someone you think is cool, and they think you are, too.
It’s a community not just with other humans but also with non-humans — whether they be non-human animals, our quantum friends, mermaids, artificial general intelligence, (which we will undoubtedly see within the next decade or two, and may actually have been here all along, who knows!), etc. On the latter, we may not be able to foresee that future just yet — or ever, for that matter — but we may be able to meet it with the courage of open hearts. Perhaps what we need is a very particular kind of collective commune-(ent)ity that seeks to grow itself in and by love. In this way, I’d go so far as to call it a kind of apophatic networking, or group of individuals communing by their mystical knowing-nothing, which, to follow the Beguine mystic Marguerite Porete, gives us everything! So in the face of the challenges mentioned above, we find an unending heart-fountain of collaborative openness, the immanent pulsing of radical human freedom.
About the Author
Brad Baumgartner is a writer, theorist, and Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State. Recent creative work has appeared in Burning House Press, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, X Ray Literary Magazine, Vestiges, and others. Current projects include Weird Mysticism, a scholarly monograph, and several creative projects including a hybrid work entitled Stylinaut, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, and a play called the –tempered mid·riff.
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.
