“Text in its Bodily Dimensions”: A Conversation With Jared Schickling

This interview is a conversation between Jared Schickling and Operating System founder / managing editor, Elæ Moss [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] — it appears in the archival backmatter of his forthcoming 2018 book with The OS, Needles of Itching Feathers.

Greetings comrade!
Thank you for talking to us about your process today!

Likewise, greetings. It is my pleasure.

Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?

I don’t know that I can! Who “am” I — what is this “I” — this person was born, 1978, raised in the 80s, not exactly by choice, certainly without another option; at some point along the way, “I” must have spontaneously appeared and am currently residing along the Niagara Escarpment, north of Buffalo, on the eastern fringes of a National Sacrifice Zone. At locks 34 and 35 along the Erie Canal, Lockport has its own resident Superfund site. A wise person might try — which I did, or thought I was — to escape the place, not embrace it but, nonetheless, I feel attached to here. Mollie, my wife, is from the orchards down the road, Medina. It’s in our blood, I guess. We returned after some years of traveling and working to raise our family, which grew and shrank with the introduction of kids and the deaths of a cat and the dogs. The other cat — the O.G. of them all who brought Mollie and I together — is still hanging around. She reminds me of Bartleby, except that she is loved. Our situation seems precarious and filled with adventure, as Mollie manages a seasonal bakery on a farm and I cobble together teaching gigs and otherwise. Some years ago I acquired some kayaks, and between February and June can be found floating in the flooded solitude of the neighboring swamps.

Why are you a poet/writer/artist?

I don’t think I know. Should something like that — for myself, at least — be explained? Does it need explaining — It? I would not call it a choice, exactly. Not doing it is impossible. I’ve tried it. I can’t help it, frankly.

I enjoy the language that goes where language cannot, and just so am a consumer of all genres and most disciplines. Aspects of the text or otherwise at hand plus my reasons for being there equal how much time I commit to it, and in the end write far more poetry than anything else because, for whatever reason, it is the form in which I am most comfortable fleshing out ideas on the page. The associative nature of it seems amenable to connecting the dots, given my consumption habits. I like the idea of using ever fewer words to express a complexity, and yet I find myself reveling for now in Melville’s Pierre.

Thoreau is right, though, that writing is the art form closest to the human being, as texts must be carved out of the breath of life itself. Only through reading can the dead resurrect themselves. Music is close to the text in its bodily dimensions, but listening is less active than reading (which involves listening). And whereas music tends to muzzle noise by introducing a select aural experience into the environment, literature, through visual and aural means, tends to amplify noise in its natural, organic dimensions.

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 am a poet, though I don’t put much thought or stock into the fact. Living in the world prevents me from doing so. The alarm will go off. There is something active and vibrant in refusing to “value” my life as a poet. It keeps me focused on poetry itself, perhaps. I suppose it’s also simply my own way of relating to what it is I do.

As to when I started as a poet, it’s a story I hesitate to tell because I know it too well. It sounds redundant. Around 1997 or 98 I discovered Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and memorized “Desolation Row.” Two things happened from that. It mentions T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound “fighting in the captain’s tower,” so I read Eliot. Then, at work, utterly slacking as far as they were concerned, I turned off my gear and wrote out the lyrics, filling in the gaps I couldn’t remember with stuff I’d never remember. When I got to the end, I then wrote a poem. And that was that. Two decades later I have fleeting thoughts in earlier memories suggesting “poet,” but who really can know. The thing is, I wasn’t raised with books, I had to find them; meanwhile, my grandmother had piles of those soft-porn romance novels, from which I’d build forts and castles for imaginary characters, and my adolescence was spent outdoors.

What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?

Much like love or beauty — you often won’t know it when confronted with it.

What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?

I don’t really know. Clearly I have a role, as everyone has a role. Many roles to play. Roles within roles. In addition to writing I work with my friends on Delete Press, and have otherwise done such work, which I’ve always done without question. Recently I launched another venture, The Mute Canary. The arts have a long history of attending to and informing the cultural and social upheavals of the day. The CIA certainly saw value in propagating American arts overseas during the Cold War, regardless of the art form’s actual intent. More recently it looks like the tactics of the #MeToo movement, a profound moment in American history, were proven first among the poets and the “callout culture” they invented on social media. What the Mongrel Coalition accomplished from the perspective of poetics should not be underestimated nor casually brushed aside. And my only point is that American society and the arts are indeed hopelessly entangled; the fact that poetry has and has had an impact beyond the world of poets and their publishing will be obvious enough to anyone who looks at it. As a poet, and a publisher, my own concerns lie chiefly with ecology, relationships.

That said, I think it is always premature for the artist, including the poet, to imagine they understand what their work amounts to. And yet, I understand that having a reason for keeping the light on is necessary, too. Steve McCaffery once told me that — at some point a poet has to ask why they are writing. I hope that answers your question.

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? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?

Establishing the sequence of the book was not a struggle. It was extracted from a larger, unpublished project, “Missing ( ),” which took shape over a year. That manuscript happened as a singular project, meaning I was not, for the most part, writing singular poems at the time. I was writing a long poem, a book-length poem, partly as a way of forcing myself to stay engaged with my own writing. To arrive at the chapbook I identified certain strains in that work, picked one, and excised what did not belong to it.

Once the basic structure was there, once the pieces appeared there, alone, exposed, some re-vision needed doing — the fun, frustrating part — which of course then finds its way back into the original whole — re-writing from the inside out — this circuit or, more properly, feedback loop (given the magnitude of perturbation at each turn) might have repeated a few times.

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?

Your questions give me pause. Even though I was consciously writing a book-length poem, I wouldn’t say I was conscious of the book I was writing. A deliberate effort, to be sure, but through accretion, where poem is worked on and worked over many times before and after others join it, onward, in loops. I describe the whole because, like a bird that laid an egg, it’s what let the smaller chapbook happen, which then passed through a similar gauntlet.

The chapbook, I would say, finds pleasure’s pulse in the precarious state of the psychological fascia still keeping us human. As the tissue stretches and tears, birds fly in.

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?

Because I read poems of the sort, I will often dabble in so-called “inherited” forms which, to greater or lesser degrees, prove only to be starting places. The methods I use are my own, or have been internalized so deeply through practice that I no longer recognize them, and I am indiscriminate of form — any and all modes should apply. In thinking about the possibilities for criticism and the handling of historical material, or news, both through and beyond poetry, Barthes (S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text), Federman, and Reznikoff have been instructive. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée seeped into my work in ways I haven’t tried to account for yet. In terms of philosophy, I look to Dickinson and Melville for sustenance more frequently with time. I hesitate to go too closely to these places, though, because my true interests range widely.

I also enjoy abecedarians. All kinds, especially for kids, Edward Lear or Edward Gorey or the elaborately intoxicating Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I don’t know why. I’ve written two.

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.

Well, there are a lot of birds in the chapbook, ornithology in various ways, so I thought it was important to capture that. But there’s a lot of death and boredom and violence undergirding all the life and exuberance and beauty, as the book is adjacent to something amoral. There is also a personal, quasi-autobiographical whiff about it, something I hadn’t realized until afterward. It caught me off guard and, through many re-readings and the like, I couldn’t shake the feeling. I don’t think I write from a self-involved perspective and tend to get rid of it later when I do. In this case I let it stay and let the birds in and amplified it, which was utterly disconcerting, especially given those birds. It is perhaps a subtlety that won’t be noticed, but I see it. So, all in all, “needles of itching feathers.”

What does this particular work represent to you as indicative of your method/creative practice, your history, mission/intentions/hopes/plans?

It is indicative of a time and place. In my work, not just here but in all of it, the places are real, and most of it depicts events as they happened. I use the term “event” loosely to make room for the imagination — the contested, prime real estate of “place.”

What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?

It does nothing. Actively. Which is something, I suppose.

The reader, however, will do more. If this book can be a part of that, then it will have served a purpose.

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?

My honest answer is that I actively do not think in these terms. I mean, it’d be great if it could do this or that, but this line of inquiry into my own creative intimacies only causes unnecessary problems for my writing. My philosophy is to write and work without attachment to result. I am only increasingly interested in expressing ideas through poems. Non-attachment helps me set aside or, in some cases, slough off entirely itchy intentions and respond to the writing as it happens. It makes me more attentive to what the language is doing.

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.”

When it comes to practicing poetry, I must confess my hermetic preference. I need as much peace and quiet and solitude as possible to effectively practice, to read, think, write, edit, publish, nap, all of it. Indeed I’ve felt at times that poetry has ruined my life. If so, so be it.

I have also felt at times that literature, particularly transgressive literature, is an inherently childish and therefore evil activity for an adult to somehow enjoy, let alone build their life around, especially where poverty is involved. I am not alone in that sentiment.

However, it is also true that art is the fuel of grassroots activism. It’s the vitamins, the very sun and rain. Art opens the mind to what is possible by educating the consumer on what is (or was or will be) in a way that other information venues cannot. It tunes us into a better, more enlightened place than the one we must otherwise endure. Art, however, is not good at governance or policy, which is why it manages to accomplish what it does in the first place: bring diverse groups of people together with shared visions.

Artists do what activists strive to do: find a voice or language to tell a story or paint a picture that, when it is honest, and informed and beautiful, can be shared and/or embraced by others. Activism is a long game whereas art is momentary and yet, oddly enough, progressive politics seems to thrive on art and wither in its absence. Naturally, I’d say, the push for diversity in publishing, as in any other industry, matters and will continue.

As for the challenge of speaking across lines of identity, which I take to mean the difficulty of writing beyond the limits of one’s own cultural experience, it amplifies the voices and experiences that history omitted. It is a good challenge — a difficult passage to a better place. I do wonder if we’ll ever get to a point on this shrinking planet, since we actually are all in it together now, where identifying labels beyond “human” or, better yet, “animal” won’t matter, as it’s naïve to think we’re anywhere close.

As fast, cheap means of production help publishers flood the market with all kinds of ephemeral poems, ephemeral poets and ephemeral venues, modern technology does present a unique opportunity in the push for diversity. Given that the primary currency among writers is still text (I hope it is, anyway), it is (still) possible to participate in these developments virtually, such that geography and distance from the usual centers of activity become less important. Literally anyone anywhere can and do have their voice(s) heard now.

Is there anything else we should have asked, or that you want to share?

Just a sincere thank-you for what you do.

Jared Schickling’s most recent books of poetry are Needles of Itching Feathers (The Operating System, 2018) and The Mercury Poem (BlazeVOX, 2017). Other books include Province of Numb Errs (2016), The Paranoid Reader: Essays, 2006–2012 (Furniture Press, 2014), Prospectus for a Stage (LRL Textile Series, 2014), and he edited A Lyrebird: Selected Poems of Michael Farrell (BlazeVOX, 2017). He lives in Western New York and edits Delete Press and The Mute Canary, publishers of poetry.