A Purposefully Cacophonous Heteroglossia
An OS [Re:con]versation with Judith Goldman, author of “agon”
Note: this interview was conducted and published in the backmatter of agon in 2017. Questions by Elæ Moss.
We are talking with Judith Goldman, author of agon. Thank you for being willing to answer some questions about your process for our readers!
Talk about the process or instinct to move agon into book form. Have you had this intention for a while? Did you envision agon as a collection or understand your process as writing specifically around a theme while this work was being written? How or how not? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?
What became agon was begun a number of years ago (about the summer of 2012) when I was searching for a prosody that could somehow express the inner and outer violence of monetization, especially, in so many ways, of the human body. I wanted to make a staccato performance poem composed of short phrases punctuated by numbers that would maybe go up to 20 and start over. At that time I was listening a lot to Azealia Banks’s “212” — practically every other word rhymes, the whole song fits together so intricately… Didn’t know what I was doing exactly, the way I was trying to mimic Banks’s flow within and against the number structure wasn’t working; I dropped it but had the poem in the back of my mind.
About two years later, I started to notice the word “weaponize” appearing everywhere. I started making lists of examples I had heard/seen but then expanded the lists to include all the social phenomena that might fit, even speculatively. Began to think about “weaponizing” as a lens for understanding the world, in relation to biopolitics (from the plantation down to intracellular commodification, i.e. micro-plantation), to sociality as anatomized and proliferated through social media, to financialization. (Obsessing about this last as I was writing about K. Lorraine Graham’s poems on debt and (affective) labor for Postmodern Culture.)
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work — or did you use in the creation of the work in agon?
A lot of my work is composed using both traditional and made-up highly structured forms, at micro- and macro-levels (e.g., from rhyme to larger book organization). For instance, the end of the titular poem in my book DeathStar/Rico-chet reworks Zukofsky’s A-7, from the perspective of the army staff in Abu Ghraib. Embodying a canzone — a chain of sonnets that interlock through their sound-schemes and repeated words — Zukofsky’s poem reflects on a wooden sawhorse in the shape of an “A.” In turn, my poem, also a canzone, thinks about letters in relation to the bars of a prison-cage. I was interested in how such an exquisite, baroque, mellifluous poetic form could take on a more regimented, tortuous, and possibly narrative character, given its content. Other poems I’ve made work with amalgamations of appropriated material: part of the intrigue, for me, is to find latent forms/patterns within found materials to expose, as well as to impose forms that do battle with their content. Or to push things to absurdity: I’ve had a sestina on the back burner that’s in rime riche: the end-words are pear,pair, per, père, pare, and par (with some variations that make it (even) more ridiculous).
With agon, I was still attached to the numerical prosody (I mention above). I planned to write a 1000-unit poem (100 stanzas of ten units), with the numbers present as a kind of foot or beat. One day I was fooling around in Microsoft Word with symbols collections, and experimented with bolding and combining vertical lines of various widths until I came up with the ersatz barcodes. I organized and reorganized the lists of weaponized items into themes and started numbering the phrases in cycles of ten, using the barcodes for spacing and as a kind of pun on reading/scanning. The “a” and “b” adjuncts to the numbers got introduced when I had formatted chunks of the list but was not done composing and reorganizing and had to make additions (!). The formatting was a bitch (as you know!), so that was my solution. And I embraced it, I felt it made the poems look even more impenetrably bureaucratic and ugly. And mean. The poems got more distressed as I then experimented with breaking up words even across the numbered units, creating confusion as to where many words begin and end, affecting very basic or mechanical levels of interpretation.
This circles back to the question of form: creating provocations around how we read — which so often now involves an almost autonomic intake of flows of information — has always been important to me. Ironically, while the overall structure came out of an impulse to produce (what for me would be) a new prosody, I ended up with poems that are a challenge to perform aloud. I honestly don’t know yet how I will score them (though they look so ominously pre-scored) — there are a lot of choices to make.
With regard to mixing the barcode poems with exposition: as I dug deeper into weaponization as our social ontology, Baraka’s poem “Black Art” kept coming to mind — I would think about it almost daily, parsing out the layers of its movements and feints. I wanted to try to combine writing about Baraka’s enactment of how to (literally and figuratively) do things with words with my own poetic enactments. And then after I participated in the “Color, Crosstalk, Composition” conference at UC, Berkeley and taught another iteration of my seminar “The Political Economy of Affect,” I began to think about how to connect the elements I had with further expository writing on different angles and layers of various profound political problems — involving race, class, gender, language, affect, poetics, appropriation, institutionality/education, power, and relation itself — that were/are being underscored in the last couple of years as central to poetic community/communities.
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 (poems, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
Above you ask whether bringing this book together was a “struggle”: agon means “struggle” or conflict. I wanted not to thematize conflict, but to get at how the tools we have for thinking about it, really the way we do almost everything in this society, has agon embedded within it. Later I learned of Chantal Mouffe’s term “agonistics” (which gets mentioned in the book), though I had had a somewhat different definition in mind.
Can you speak to the influence of certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings of other creative people (poets or others) which inform the way you work/write?
I began this work entranced with Leslie Scalapino’s The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrons Zoom, dazzled and challenged by the multitude of threads it interweaves. I’m not saying I succeed (!), but I wanted to try to ask (and respond to) questions posed in the style of my colleague and friend Myung Mi Kim. I have been also been taken with what feels like a more discursive style — I suppose along the lines of “lyric essay” — that has been appearing recently: Ronaldo Wilson, Catherine Taylor, Christine Hume, Brandon Brown, Gabriel Gudding, Allison Cobb, Aja Duncan, and especially Nathanaël (who has been writing this way for a long time and whom I admire in the extreme). All these writers are so different, and each writes so beautifully. Hard to say what I mean. I know the expository writing in this book is closer to academic writing (though it has an agonistic relation to it) than to any of these. I also have discursive crushes on Barthes and Lyotard (of The Differend), though obviously I cannot approximate them (not (only) because of French!). I did feel sometimes I got their tone in my head when writing even if I couldn’t voice it. I’m not answering the question.
Tell us a little about the relationship between scholarship and poetics in your life and practice — in agon you are drawing on a long list of source material, and moving between different types of language (both your own and in that source material); the result is, for me, a deeply scholarly poetics, but at the same time one that explodes and is critical of the ways in which we make scholarship (both in its content and form).
Can you shine a little light on how or if agon is representative of your body of work, scholarship, or practice outside of this volume? In your opinion, what can poets, even outside the academy, gain from scholarship, and what can scholars, even outside of poetics, gain from both creating and engaging with poetry?
One of my methods (?) for making poems has been to mix sources from a variety of discourses and registers/dictions — performing a purposely cacophonous heteroglossia and trying to create illuminating if jarring juxtapositions. I’m interested in using problematic concatenation as a form of inquiry. In my first book Vocoder, there’s a poem I wrote in college that combines the words from the instructional sticker on my answering machine with a paragraph from Kant’s third critique on the sublime, it’s called, “Can the Sublime Be Recorded?” On the file cabinet I had in my apartment as a grad student was an ad for some kind of service called “Materials Handling” that I strongly identified with — it was taped alongside the front of a Green Giant box of “Individual Green Beans” and a grainy page from an old National Geographic depicting the fancy stockings and shoes of a torero in the ring.
Many of the texts I work with in agon I’ve been studying for a long time, since I was in school. They very much reflect that mid-90s milieu in English and Comp Lit departments, though I don’t think that makes them less relevant to now. (What is the time of discourse, especially in the humanities?) As I get older, continuing to experience cultural politics at large and the politics of the academy, I get a bit more of a sense of the dynamics of discursive/cultural fields — and it has in turn started to seem more possible to me to meld scholarship with poetry. Or maybe I should say I want to push my scholarship to x-ray discourse the way I feel poetry often does. Though I wouldn’t say this book accomplishes that meld in the more radical (and aesthetic) way I feel some of my peers have achieved, it’s my first attempt at a cross-genre work, and I’m grateful to The Operating System for inspiring and supporting it.
In terms of thinking about the academy and institutionality: Bourdieu and his idea of “reflexive sociology” is important to agon: loosely speaking, Bourdieu’s m.o. is to turn the lens of criticism on the academy reflexively, scrutinizing very critically how academia, its hierarchies, fetishes, rituals, and languages are constituted. While I engage in questioning the academy as network of power and world-making, I am nonetheless implicated in it by using some of its tools: I would never claim to write completely without mystification or to take my own writing and institutional standing out of their race-class-gender relations. But I see it as part of my work to think about and question particularly these tools of language, how they actively structure our lives, as well as to understand their history, to work to delimit them so as to use them scrupulously if also irreverently or ludically or deconstructively or over-mimetically.
And the world is filled with knowledge that is (to some extent, contra Bourdieu) specialized not only for purposes of social distinction. I can’t fix a car, I can’t explain the Federal Reserve System. As I see it, examining the nexes of violence-language involves a kindred depth of thought/education/practice/ understanding/experience to knowledges of other domains. I make this inquiry through both poems and analytic prose.
Possibly this book may invite readers beyond people who already identify as readers of poetry, because of its more “scholarly” exposition. (I hope so.) But drawing the line between the inside/outside of the academy is not a simple matter, a complexity that goes beyond politics of academic labor/remuneration/exploitation/ debt. agon takes up topics that many in poetry communities in the United States (and elsewhere) are concerned about and tries to do a bit of work on parsing out the problems and their terms, for myself but also for others’ thought to further (and shift, refute, etc.). Many poets are academics (whether students or teachers or both); but perhaps more importantly many are intellectuals who live with this scholarly discourse alongside many others as an integral part of life. It is especially poets’ conversations, their expository writing, as well as their poetry, in many forums/platforms, that fed this work.
I also want to say how important if also imperfect the university is in this society. How important if again imperfect many institutions are. How so much of the work that is done in universities is service work and care work, how important education is (which is not to say education only happens in universities). Perhaps in this moment of their great peril, we will be able to see again institutions’ value and move to save if also to reshape and reimagine them.
Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder (Roof, 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books, 2006), l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya, 2011), and agon (The Operating System, 2017). She teaches in the Poetics Program at SUNY, Buffalo and is the Poetry Features editor for the online journal Postmodern Culture. She’s currently at work on ______ Mt. [blank mount], a critical-creative project that writes through P. B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) in the context of past futures and future histories of ecological collapse and recently performed a collaborative digital poetics project, Ice Core Modulations, at The Ammerman Center Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology (2016). Her scholarship focuses on contemporary poetry as “extinction sink.”
