Jennifer Nelson: ANY CONCEPT OF ‘PURITY’ IS MY NO. 1 OR NO. 2 ENEMY. (a conversation with Jessica Tolbert)

Jessica Tolbert spoke with poet Jennifer Nelson about her book Aim At The Centaur Stealing Your Wife (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), in anticipation of Nelson’s appearance at the upcoming UDP reading at the Brooklyn Public Library on Thursday, April 21, 2016. They discuss technology, art, identity, and what it means to lose your wife to a centaur.

I saw you are a professor of art history. Which came first, your interest in art or your interest in poetry?

This is a really great question, which I think (because of the verb tense of “came”) ends up being about class. Like many people, I’ve participated in a lot of different classes in my life. But when I was little, the sort of “culture” things in my house were the piano, watercolors of golf courses, Egyptian hieroglyphs on papyrus, and those leatherbound books with the gold letters on them and the gold page-edges. The piano, a Chickering upright, was probably the most “authentic” of the objects. It was kept in tune and I took it pretty seriously, as a small kid.

My parents were in full-blown aspiration mode. Our class, as a unit, was shifting, and our culture things reflected that. I’m not ashamed of that, but it’s a real factor.

But the hieroglyphs were in my parents’ bedroom, so in any contest between poetry and art, the leatherbound books were going to beat the golf course watercolors every time. Keats, HUGE in my early life, then weirdly secularized for me when I took Helen Vendler’s Keats seminar as a first-year in college. (Was so saddened by her race-blindness in recent years, and I mean that term in both sad senses.) Who else. I never read Tristram Shandy but I opened it a lot. Anyway, that’s not poetry. Donne was there, too, I think? Definitely Shakespeare, Pope, a rhymed version of some Homer. In any case, poetry, definitely, was first.

Thank you for not asking which comes first now!

Aim At The Centaur Stealing Your Wife opens with a section called “Niccolo Paganini’s Variations on a Theme from Rossini’s Moses in Egypt,” referring to violinist Paganini’s take on composer Gioachino Rossini’s work. The third section has maybe the most complex title, “Angela Gheorghiu’s Casta Diva As Heard In The Films of Wong Kar Wai,” referring to a singer’s rendition of a composer’s song within a film. This theme, of the replication and interaction of artworks between different forms, continues throughout the book. How do you see your writing interacting with the works and forms you referenced?

I’ve been struggling to answer this question because I feel uncomfortable conveying my thoughts about my identity in words. But I want to talk about being mixed here, and being therefore very aware that reference itself is always mixed. It’s not just Rossini or Paganini, certainly not just the opera “Norma”. I don’t want to get all Depeche Mode “Enjoy the Silence” on this point, but there’s a kind of beautiful vanitas about trying to trace reference and anchor it. In my poems I try not to do things in vain. I want the references all mixed.

Another thing that made a big impression on me on this point was a conversation I had a long time ago in Prospect Park with Lucy Ives. We were talking about George Oppen, and the way his references signify referentiality rather than doing a specific citation. My words, not hers. She probably said it better. But for me I like just owning up to the complexity of reference rather than doing a specific citation. Having the works present in these hyper-mediated forms, as chains rather than individual works, may have been part of that.

(I also want to admit that having the section titles at all was my editor Michael Newton’s idea. His ideas are almost always good.)

Hercules’ actions, or painter Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s representation of them, are the focus of the section “White Wedding Sonnets.” In both the painting and the poems Hercules “aims at the centaur stealing his wife.” This is also the briefest section of the book. Why is the title drawn from these poems?

I was looking for a better title than carmina figurata, which was the original title of the book and a little too nerdcore for even me. And that line just jumped out at me.

When I looked at that line and made it the title, only afterwards did I realize why. This whole book is about fighting back.

Those sonnets might be the only things in the book from my MFA period. I was in Matthew Rohrer’s class and he gave us this assignment, and I wrote these sonnets while I was at my first Renaissance Society of America conference in Montreal. And I was obsessed with the Billy Idol song. And I hoped I was going back to art history. But I didn’t know how it would work. It was a year before I won a big art history fellowship that changed my life and gave me confidence again in the face of a lot of opposition.

By the way, the painting itself has been revised a lot. I mean, it has quite the conservation history. Worth looking up. So I felt that that was part of the fighting and the rescuing that the painting shows us.

Ultimately, the sonnets are sad. And the book, even though I decided to end on a kind of cautiously optimistic angry poem, is kind of sad. I’ve been grieving a long time for someone I lost a long time ago. Ironically, he died after the book was slated for print with UDP. Kind of weird to think he’ll never read it. I’d had to cut him off years ago, for safety reasons, but in the back of my head I always imagined he’d read my books once I got around to making them. But I think for most of my adult life, I’ve wondered: if things had been different and I’d been a little older, back then, could I have pulled off the Herculean feat of rescuing my wife from the centaur? (In real myth, it doesn’t end well for Hercules either. But poets don’t use myths to be literal about them.)

Anyway, the title is in the imperative. And I think because of that experience and that long sadness, and the long sadness of being a woman of color having survived various abusive experiences throughout the formative years of my life, I am determined to fight back. No one is stealing my wife ever again. Also, people who read my book, I thought–they should not let the centaur steal their wife, whatever or whoever that happens to be at any given moment.

Pretty emo! Sorry! But that’s why.

Your writing touches on economic sentiments, most apparently in the poem “Occupy Wall Street,” which concludes, ”We must not submit to be measured in gold.” “The Future. Vergil The Enchanter” includes the lines “Let’s keep the future in the present tense/ Where we see the rise of math and science/ education as earnings potential/or sometimes straight up capital.” A section of the book is also titled “Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons,“ which strikes me as a loaded reference. To what extent do you perceive your writing as “political”?

I think all writing is political. I don’t think there’s a neutral. This is probably a commonplace by now, but it bears repeating. This is what snores through the drunk peasant’s teeth. But I definitely was influenced by friends like Emily Brandt and Bernard Zirnheld, and later Lara Weibgen, to be comfortable as a political writer. I’m glad that happened in time because I don’t think I would have become a successful poet (according to my own extremely modest definition of “successful”) without their help. Thanks, guys!

The pulled quote on the back of the book reads “you must believe/ all women and brown folk / on the inside are blue/ and the poem will give you a brown vagina / and this blue room / let’s all be alone in the same blue room.” These lines, especially asserting, “the poem will give you a brown vagina,” read as a powerful pronouncement of the existence of people of color. Can you talk about why you selected this for the back cover?

This is like, 90% Michael (Newton). He is really a genius editor. I sent him a larger section of that poem (“Lovers Don’t Read Kafka”) for promotional purposes, and he put an excerpt he chose on the back cover. I might have changed it slightly but not too much.

He definitely did not select it because he wanted to scandalize the conservative Catholic parts of my family with the word VAGINA, but that has been a great byproduct!

I think the lines are great for the cover, even if they’re way crasser and bolder than I usually like to be, because they get really specific about the form of fighting back that I say the book is about. The sense of sharing a forum and a space while retaining individuality is like, the only hope. And yet, the poem is actually quite cynical and skeptical about such a utopian project, especially if it is founded on a fetishistic belief in the power of the Other as the power of art/poetry. I like the tension in those lines as a little objective-correlativey thing for the book as a whole.

At the beginning and end of the book there is a reproduction of Pollaiuolo’s painting Hercules and Deianira, from which the book’s title is derived. Why did you choose not to include reproductions of the other works of art you referenced?

This is 100% Michael. I asked him what he thought about illustrations, especially for the Tiepolo poems. When I first presented those poems at the Poetry Project, I performed them along with a powerpoint (yes, I’m an art historian who still likes powerpoint. So not cool), and when Judah Rubin first published them in The Death and Life of American Cities, they were printed along with low-fi reproductions of the etchings. But when Michael said no, I was kind of into that, too, because I wasn’t really sure. I think about ekphrasis all the time, and–as I think this interview has already made clear–any concept of “purity” is my no. 1 or no. 2 enemy, and certainly I wasn’t trying to compete with Tiepolo. More like hang out with him. Maybe that party quest is made easier by not having facing-page illustrations.

The artist David Levine once told me that if I wasn’t competitive in a profound way, I was just highly repressed. Like, ok. Maybe. If so, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be repressed about for me, since I don’t think it manifests in shitty behavior towards other people? I think it would have become some kind of cruel pattern by now if it did. Anyway, I think he’s wrong. Maybe competition is just repressed love. I like to think that I learned early on that competition is death, and chose life in a profound way.

You refer throughout the book to technology, particularly video games and the internet. There are instances of digital renditions of physical art, for example in “The Mantegna Oculus Rift” (what a pun) there is a “jpg of the oculus” and elsewhere there are mentions of having “image-searched” or how the speaker “collected all the images I could find before the internet/ became a database.“ Other instances acknowledge a technological presence in thought, for example “There’s a discussion about death in my newsfeed” or “I learned the word ‘writers’ block’ from the internet.” How do you think about the interaction of art and technology in your writing?

I love you forever for noticing my pun in that poem, which also appeared in The Baffler (thanks to Edwin Frank), but no one said anything

I remember when I was maybe in middle school, I had this annoying beef that only a twelve year old can have, which is that technology did not exist. Everything was natural. In a perhaps slightly autistic, intellectually rigid way, I just didn’t think it was possible to escape nature. (I don’t think I was very fun to talk to. Social skills were slow going for me.)

Now, that was before the internet came to my house, which was maybe three years later. But I still kind of agree with my awkward twelve-year-old self. And I think the twelve-year-old understood the word “ecology” better than a lot of the crappy academic writing I have to look at. Not to correct your question, but to say that, as an enemy of purity, I love mediation and media. Video games, VR, internet, etc.–all this stuff is our substrate, and art’s, too. So I was probably trying to celebrate it as part of art and part of us.

I’m noticing in my answer my infernal, like really infernal, tendency toward writing praise poetry. Pindar is my favorite poet. My book is sad but it’s also full of celebration, I think. But I remember an email conversation I had awhile ago with my dissertation advisor, Chris Wood. And I told him I was really afraid to have “bad cheer.” Like, is this the kind of praise poetry that happens when a depressed country goes fascist?

But, much as I know that Afro-pessimism and other such philosophies are probably truer and realer in our moment, that is not where I’m at. I’m mixed and I have this strange will to live and will to enjoy that thinks celebration can be a kind of critique. So don’t think I’m trying to sell some VR headset that will give you spiritual nausea. I’m just trying to say the world is the real, and it is always available in an impure form.

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Aim At The Centaur Stealing Your Wife is available for purchase here.