“To Trap the Unwanted Creature”: A Conversation With Adra Raine

This interview is a conversation between Adra Raine and Operating System founder / managing editor, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson — it appears in the archival backmatter of her forthcoming 2018 book with The OS, Want-Catcher.

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

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

I love the spirit of being invited to “introduce yourself in a way that you would choose” as an alternative to being otherwise required to introduce ourselves in ways that we don’t choose, in ways that are imposed upon us by those people, institutions, or social conventions that mediate and limit our encounters with each other. At the same time, I recognize that changing the form of introduction does not in itself change the structure of U.S. Empire in which we encounter one another, such that I still feel like I can make a right or wrong choice here, since I might only get this one chance to meet you, and we live in such urgent times, I fear that if I don’t convey the right codes, many of you will lose patience with me, cross me off the list of potential community members, and move on, without me. This anxious reaction I’m having to your generous invitation reminds of the way my students often respond when I tell them that they can complete their assignments in any compositional form they choose, in order to move them away from the often-stifling conventions of the standard college “paper,” to validate and nurture the various forms of reading, thinking and expression each student brings to the table. They’ve told me that they are left wondering what it is I really want, certain that despite the rhetoric of freedom, there is nonetheless a correct and incorrect way to complete the assignment, with their grades, and in turn their economic futures at stake. So, I have to prove to them that they can take risks without fear of punishment (in the form of a “bad” grade), while trying at the same time to prepare them for the risks we’ll need to take together to fight for transformation, without any guarantee, shifting the stakes from individual security to collective care. What is at stake in my introduction to you all? It follows a similar trajectory. I want you to read my book. I want you to like me. I want a job. I want to tell you what I’m into in case you want to talk about the things I do and work on. I want to tell you things that might contextualize my writing. I want to represent the OS in a way that won’t disappoint the people who took a chance on me by accepting my manuscript. I don’t want to do this alone. I want to connect. I want to open things up to look at them together. I don’t want to fail. But I don’t want to be afraid either. I don’t want a guarantee. I want to try this out — answering your question in this polemical way. I want to make everything, including my failures, available for our collective analysis. We want things to change.

I’m Adra Raine, I’m a writer and teacher living in Durham, NC. I grew up in Boulder, CO and lived in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine before moving to North Carolina in 2010 to do my PhD. Right now I’m working on a dissertation on the works of Nathaniel Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Susan Howe in the 1980s-90s while teaching writing and literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. I’m currently working on a manuscript about parenthood in late capitalism titled Wonder Weeks, of which Want-Catcher is the first chapter. I have a closet full of super-8 film footage that one day I hope to edit into a series of short films to add to the small handful I’ve finished. I own an iPhone. I watch a lot of television shows. I listen to music on Spotify. I wake up around 6am to nurse my toddler who starts our day about 45 minutes later, so I’m very sleepy by about 8pm every night. I’m currently taking a break from social media except for tracking events and local b/s/t posts. I’m an introvert, but as a Leo, I want everyone to love me. I’m still an INFP (I thought maybe I wasn’t anymore). I don’t believe or not believe in astrology and the Meyer-Briggs personality types, but in my culture they are part of how we understand ourselves. I still struggle with the residual effects of the internalized misogyny I’ve spent much of my thirties throwing off. I grew up in an upwardly mobile middle-to-upper-middle class home in the 1980s in a hippie town where I attended a progressive, multicultural, bilingual school that I was surprised to discover was not representative of the world, or even of the town, but was “experimental.” I worked for seven years in “non-profit” contemporary art spaces, where I met a lot of great people and learned to be suspicious of cultural institutions. I avoid and resist forms of competition that pit one person’s livelihood or wellbeing against another. This is a struggle when you live in the belly of global capitalism. My writing and ideas are not copyrighted.

Why are you a poet/writer/artist?

First, as a way to process experience. For me, writing, filmmaking, and artmaking are mediums for observation and reflection. I look and feel around through them, think and ask questions with them. I consider artmaking a tool that doesn’t really have any special significance as an activity on its own. I don’t relate to artmaking as a rarefied activity, though it’s hard not to come to think of it that way, living in a culture in which art is understood primarily as an exchangeable good, both as a commodity and as cultural capital. Second, I am a poet/writer/artist in order to share, connect, and contribute to our social or collective processing of experience, observation, reflection, etc. It’s a form of conversation, because conversation is another way that I/we examine and make choices in the world — sitting on the front porch with my friends at night, talking it out, or reading a book of poems someone else wrote, talking it in.

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)?

Growing up in a household in which art and writing were folded into daily life, I found myself often recognized by others as a writer/artist and was fine with that. In college in New Jersey in the late 1990s I majored in studio art and English, with an unofficial minor in creative writing. I ran a community life-drawing class, re-ignited the campus art club, and was the student manager of the university art galleries — so I was into it. But my encounter with the art world of New York City really turned me off — I couldn’t submit to the pressure to define oneself as an “artist” in order to market one’s work/self. As a writer, my confidence was rattled when I became enthralled to an older novelist whose misogyny really seeped into my own sense of self and I found myself contorting my strange, speculative fiction to the masculine “realism” of Hemingway, Carver, and Cheever. So, I felt uncomfortable for a long time calling myself an artist or a writer. It wasn’t until graduate school when I became friends with generous artists and writers that I began to play with identifying as a poet and filmmaker. One of my friends was particularly committed to introducing me that way, and I recognized her gesture as a deliberate and political one, made out of care for me and for a more inclusive culture. I really admire and am grateful to her for that, and I try to emulate that practice now.

What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?
What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?

Another reason that I am more comfortable now calling myself a writer and an artist is that I’ve let go (not completely of course) of the notion of the artist as an exclusive vocation, a title one earns by passing certain tests of talent, genius, success, productivity, CV lines, sales, and so forth. I think this idea of the artist and of art is very much tied to ideologies of empire and capitalism, as they coalesce monstrously in the particularity of American ideology: e.g. American exceptionalism, possessive individualism, and the American Dream. The cultural and social role of the artist/writer who wants to work against these ideologies is, I think, to see and articulate the structure, to re-vision the landscape of images and the architecture of language that holds and reproduces it, to dream alternatives, and to bring us together to do that work. The art we make provides a place to start, or to reflect, to plan, or to reconsider.

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?

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?

I feel most anchored when I have a regular writing practice, which isn’t always easy to sustain. In the summer of 2014, I was reading for my PhD exams and needed some structure to facilitate poetry-writing — otherwise, it just seemed like there was never time. I signed up for a poetry workshop with Anne Boyer, whose work I was devouring at the time, hosted through Small Press Traffic (SPT). Weekly reading and writing prompts, discussion and work-shopping was really working for me, got me back into the groove. The next summer, when I was a few weeks pregnant, I joined another SPT workshop led by Stephanie Young. So, I had these two structuring principles shaping the writing: the weekly reading/writing prompts Stephanie assigned, and the weeks of pregnancy, which are at once medical categories (the belly should measure xcm at week x, you can expect y changes in your body at week y, etc.) and a kind of common language in the world of pregnancy (“How many weeks are you?”). There are charts that tell you the size of the fetus by comparing it to other objects, like fruits — at week 7, the size of a blueberry, at week 20, a banana, at week 39, the predictable watermelon. Each week I produced pages of writing. I wasn’t sure if it would be a book or not, or what these writings would look like once I shaped them. I put them aside for a while, as I continued writing different kinds of poems through the first year of parenthood. I liked what I was writing and felt finally I wanted, in general, to start sharing my work with other people, but had never put a manuscript together. Since the pregnancy writing was already held together in its form, it felt like a project that I could finish and send out. I had just enough distance to edit it while still feeling connected to the place from which it was written. I tried to lift out what seemed most central in each week’s writing, without losing that sense of the diarist’s stream-of-consciousness. I had to resist the desire to correct my former self, to shape her into what seems to my current self a better or ideal version.

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?

After the two workshops with SPT, I took two workshops with Hoa Nguyen, who runs these amazing courses out of her home in Toronto with a call-in option for folks who aren’t local. The meetings were on Sunday afternoons — I’d light a candle and close the door to the office while my husband hung out with the baby for two hours, occasionally entering the room quietly to breastfeed. I like workshops because they go on the google calendar, and because they push me to play with form, to form my writing into poems. The encouragement I’ve received in those spaces from writers I admire has also been really important. The poet Lauren Levin, who was in both SPT workshops with me and was sharing work with us every week that was blowing my mind, was one of the first people who got what I was doing and told me to keep going.

More generally, living with a child has imposed structure and routine on my daily life that has removed what previously got in the way of writing — I don’t have time any more for anxiety about it, no time for hesitation. So, I write a lot more regularly now.

My biggest influences are my friends — we read other people’s work together, and each other’s work, and talk, talk, talk. It’s harder to trace, the way living together changes us individually and in relation, you don’t notice yourself or those close to you growing. You need some document of the past for comparison in order to see it.

The work I most connect to is, I think, really different from my own. It’s nice to check out writing that people suggest is similar, but I usually get a little bored by it. That used to trouble me, because it suggests that I’m not really interested in my own kind of work. But I think that makes sense. Why would you seek Sameness? At the same time, I think the reasons I like the work I do describes what motivates my own writing practice.

I like work that is engaged in careful observation, plays with language as a dynamic medium for thought, analyzes and critiques the social world. I like work that gives me that feeling that the world is shit but that living is wonderful and exciting, work that makes me want to scream and dance. Here’s a hyperlinked list: Nathaniel Mackey, Ed Roberson, Anne Boyer, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, M.I.A., Ana Božičević, Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, Fredric Jameson, Angela Davis, Sun Ra, CAConrad, Le Tigre, Simon J. Ortiz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Catherine Wagner, Lauryn Hill, Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, Erica Hunt, Emily Dickinson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

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.

An unborn child is a lightning rod for so much cultural baggage. From the very beginning, deciding to become pregnant — talking to family and friends about it, going to the OB/GYN for a consultation, visiting the alternative birth center for a tour — I entered this structure that was so ideologically saturated, it was really intense. Because I was thirty-five years old when I got pregnant, I fell into the category of Advanced Maternity Age, which qualified me for free genetic testing that screens for chromosome problems early in the pregnancy. As a side effect, the test also reveals the sex of the baby — if there are any Y-chromosomes in your blood that weren’t there before, it means your baby is carrying them: “a boy.” There are so many things to say about this kind of testing, but I’ll skip past that to say that I opted in. We were driving when we got the phone call telling us that our “numbers” were “good.” The nurse asked if we wanted to know the sex. We said, Sure. And she said: It’s a boy. We were surprised to find ourselves disappointed. We’d been talking about the baby as a “she.” That week I wrote about the implications of this experience, recognizing the desires and fears that we were projecting onto this child — my husband and I, and the wider culture of which we are a part. When you tell someone you are pregnant, one of the most common questions people ask is about the sex of the baby. If you don’t know yet, then they ask, What do you want? It’s so common that you stop being weirded-out by it — you come to understand that when you live in a culture in which children are cordoned off from the adult world, and parenting is considered a private endeavor, there’s no common public discourse about pregnancy and babies, people just don’t know what to say. But I started thinking about this question and the word, “want.” As a graduate student at a research university, I have easy access to the online OED (which is otherwise behind a pay wall). I found two unexpected definitions, one is a creature called a want, which is a small mole, and related compounds: want-catcher, want-killer, want-taker, and want-hill. I also found an obsolete definition that means to desire to be free of something. Like to be free of all the fear and desire this child was already holding for all of us. A want-catcher is, I presume, someone whose job it is to trap the unwanted creature. But I hear an echo of dream-catcher in it too. Dream or want. The child as a want-catcher. Pregnancy as a want-catcher. Poetry as a want-catcher. I don’t know if Want-Catcher is about all of this exactly, but I think it registers that sense of the structure of feeling that life in late capitalism produces, what Douglas Kearney calls “an uneasiness” in the thoughtful and generous blurb he wrote for the book.

The titles always come last but in turn often provoke further revision. I play around with them a lot, to see what resonances they produce, and often learn a lot about the poem that way.

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

I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of aesthetic pleasure that derives from the satisfying turn of phrase, the profound insight, and other forms of “getting it right.” Because the world is not right. I want my work to register that not-rightness.

Sometimes when I’m teaching a class, I’ll find myself in this mode of ecstatic enthusiasm, because I’m so excited that we are onto something, when the students and I are breaking through something. But there’s this kind of icky feeling that follows — a sense of having lost track of what-we-still-don’t-get. The difference between joy that is productive and joy that makes living in the status quo more comfortable is not at all easy to discern. Susan Howe has this line that I repeat a lot: “Rungs between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling.”

For the sake of ego, I want people to read my work and say, “I like it! It’s great! It’s beautiful!” But in terms of what I really care about, which is for things to change, it’s important to examine what people’s reactions — positive and negative — represent and suggest about what is at stake. Sometimes it’s not good that they like it, sometimes it’s very good that they don’t.

All of that is to say that when editing the manuscript for Want-Catcher I tried to let go of my instinct to please people (particular or imagined). I wanted to make something true. I don’t think it’s beautiful or brilliant or ground-breaking, or any of those things that I’ve internalized art is supposed to be in order to be of value.

I think the aestheticizing of politics, as Walter Benjamin theorized in a different but related context, is something we have to be really cautious about participating in. He warned that fascism gives people the right of expression without giving them the right to change property relations. In other words, “the logical outcome of fascism,” he writes, “is an aestheticizing of political life.” This book represents to some degree the kind of work I make when I am attuned to this threat.

On a personal level, it represents me letting go finally, putting my work out there, as they say.

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

I’m not sure yet.

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?

The best possible outcome for the book is that someone reads it and it means something to them. Maybe it articulates something they’ve been thinking about or feeling or experiencing, or provides a contrast against which they can articulate those things differently than I have, or comes into dialogue with different thoughts, feeling, experiences of theirs. That it gets to participate in a conversation somewhere.

The best possible outcome for me personally, as the author of the book, is that it connects me to people, that people would reach out to talk to me about their reading of it or anything else, and share their work with me.

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.”

I’ve been trying to articulate this cultural shift that I think we are living through, which in the broadest terms I describe as a shift from aesthetics to politics in our judgment of art. That’s a tricky way to put it, because those terms — aesthetics, politics, art — can be pretty misleading, particularly when they mean different things to different people and separating them may signal a philosophy of art that has taken on various politics over its history. But what I’m trying to respond to are things like this: When Beyoncé released Lemonade in 2016, the debates people had about it were predominantly around political questions: Is Beyoncé a good feminist or a bad feminist? Is she a black radical or a sellout? Is she an activist or a capitalist? While these questions were tied to traditionally “aesthetic” questions about the album’s form, analyses of the lyrics, responses to the musical production, identifying artistic influences, and so forth, even these were aimed ultimately at making a political judgment about the work. In other words, the dominant value judgment — the answer to the question, Is it good, or bad? — has become a matter of evaluating whether the art expresses good or bad politics.

This moment would appear to finally make those debates over whether or how art is political officially irrelevant. But I see a new problem emerging, as the shift from aesthetics to politics runs the risk of aestheticizing politics as Benjamin warned us about — such that the difference between “good or bad politics” becomes merely a matter of personal expression as opposed to social effects or outcomes. Because when the outcome always seems the same, which is that nothing changes — the powerful become more powerful, the war machine grows, the tools of exploitation continue to innovate — then “politics,” which is about the action of change, becomes inert, merely a container for ethical concepts and moralism. Benjamin theorized that the opposite formula — the politicization of art — was communism’s necessary strategy on the cultural front. But how do we discern the difference?

The turnaround time between the politicization of art and its cooption into its opposite is so fast that we hardly have time to keep up. Overnight we see our politics turned into mere matters of style used by the dominant ideology to sell commodities like Pepsi and mobile apps, to sell ideas like diversity and liberal progress. So, we have to stay ahead of that, have to keep checking in on whose agenda our art is serving and what effect it is producing. And it’s hard: “Rungs between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling.” The question that moves then to the foreground is one about strategy and organization. How to keep in circulation the voices of people who are shouting out the truth about what is happening, how to reach each other through all of these layers of capitalist mediation. Small presses and the Internet have been an important answer, but I think even those spaces, despite our best efforts, are getting pretty thoroughly consumed by the blob that intrudes on our encounters and silences us by taking away our ability to hear each other. Particularly in the way we see all of these self-selecting micro-communities, or isolated “silos” as you put it. In a 2014 interview, the musician Anthony Braxton responds to a comment about how online communities don’t facilitate the kind of tension that cultivates change: “If you like polkas and you go to the Internet and find people who like polkas, you’re with a group that feels the same way you feel. The Internet, which is so incredible for all the possibilities it’s given us, also gives us the possibility to find kindred spirits in every domain. So, this concept of tension is really a wonderful way to talk about this. There’s no tension when everybody agrees.” Under these conditions, I think we are in the process of shifting strategies. I’m not sure exactly what it looks like or where it is located. I think right now there’s a tension between the energy that is going into building the social relations that we want to be in practice when the revolution comes and the energy that is going into mass organizing that has to compromise in order to build the numbers we need to bring on the revolution. Can we make this tension productive? And how do we revolutionize the notion of “revolution” in an era of globally militarized capital? Where is the cultural front when aesthetics gives way to politics? Is “art” as a category necessary or even relevant to what we are trying to do, what we have to do?

So, I have a lot of questions, but my answer to your question is that if the primary role of the creative community is to facilitate tensions that cultivate change, the challenge is to outrun those forces — external and internal — that render the politics of our art ineffective, to not let those tensions be obfuscated either by repressing them under silos of consensus or by emphasizing them as a battle of morals, but to keep them active and dynamic.

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

These questions were so great — I appreciate the way you provoked me to consider both my ideas about art making in general and the chapbook in particular. There’s more consistency between the two than I thought! It has helped me understand myself as a writer/artist, the things I already have a very strong sense of and commitment to and the uncertainties I’m still working through and shaky on. I’m really grateful. Thank you!

Adra Raine is a writer living in Durham, NC. She is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she teaches literature and writing and is completing a dissertation on contemporary U.S. poetry titled Resonance Over Resolution: Resisting Definition in Nathaniel Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Susan Howe’s Post-1968 Poetics. Otherwise, she is working on a book length manuscript of poems and prose about parenthood in late capitalism titled Wonder Weeks, of which Want-Catcher (The Operating System 2018) is the first chapter.