toward writers who violate the pact ofsociability (Blanchot, Bernhard, Genet,Jelinek, Lezama Lima, Sarduy, Ponge,Huidobro, Celan, Guyotat)—comes from awish not to repair the slow-motion breakdownbut to nourish it, find a mirror for itin equivalently difficult literature, even asmy own writing seems, sometimes, so woefullytransparent and legible.MN: I don’t know if the term “breakdown”applies unless you’re chasing after a rock ofcrack in the carpet of a hotel room or beinginvoluntarily shipped off to Bellevue, butperhaps there are gradations, and if so, Ithink it fair to call them breakdowns. <strong>The</strong>reopening of my aunt’s case was contemporaneouswith a terrible accident suffered bya dear friend of mine, and tending to hernear-fatal injuries while being re-immersed(by the state, by the media, by my owncompulsions) in my aunt’s fatal injuries hassometimes not felt psychically tolerable.Judith Butler’s Precarious Life has helped:“To be injured means that one has thechance to reflect upon injury, to find out themechanisms of its distribution, to find outwho else suffers from permeable borders,unexpected violence, dispossession, fear,and in what ways.” A useful project, especiallyduring this horrible and pointless war.WK: Talking with you gives me so muchenergy! I want to belong to the School ofMaggie, to re-insert myself (post facto) intowhatever tradition or ecosystem you’re participatingin, even if I don’t belong...MN: Wayne, you have to be kidding. <strong>The</strong>School of Maggie? <strong>The</strong>re is no such thing!WK: And yet I’m inspired by your statement“I write on napkins, in notepads, onreceipts, etc., and then put it all down inone place and tote the pages with me to differentlocales...” I want to be in those differentlocales! I want those napkins, thosereceipts! I want your speed and mobilityand flexibility! I deplore my dependenceon filters (as in mentholated cigarettes):genre is a filter, publication is a filter, the“poetic line” is a filter, plot is a filter, fact isa filter, “I” is a filter, rhetoric is a filter...MN: If it makes you feel any better, I seemto have lost the “different locales” School ofWriting for the moment—I’ve been doingall my writing in my office at CalArts, around, navy-blue asylum, CA 70s motelstyle,which, as David Antin notes, has nowindows, so a huge storm could be ragingoutside and you’d never know it. Often Iemerge to find huge strips of eucalyptus flyingthrough the air like clubs.WK: A dear friend recently expressed surprisewhen I told him that I consideredmyself indebted to the so-called New Yorkschool of poetry. Are the traces of myindebtedness so difficult to parse? I don’tdemand that New York school(s) be cohesive—onthis subject I’ve learned much fromyour forthcoming book on women andabstraction in the New York school—and yetappearing in the <strong>Poetry</strong> <strong>Project</strong>’s pages feelslike homecoming. Maybe poetic identificationshould remain fugitive or exiled—butwithout the foster-parentage of Schuyler,O’Hara, Brainard, Ashbery, Cage,Feldman, Ginsberg, Myles, Notley, andWarhol, I’d be voiceless. This NYS affiliationmeans more to me than the old-school“gay” badge.MN: Yes—whatever the “NYS” was or is, Ithink of it as a rubric, a practice, a place, inwhich aesthetics can occupy the foregroundrather than gay identity politics, but withoutthe customary downgrading or erasureof being queer which that preeminenceusually (unnecessarily, homophobically)entails.WK: I love the picture of you chasing aftera “rock of crack in the carpet of a hotelroom”—like a photo of Liza Minnelli (byChris Makos?)... I’m enamored of thephrase “rock of crack,” like Artaud’s“claque-dents” (which Anne Carson borrowsfor “TV Men: Artaud”). Do we callthe phrase (“rock of crack,” “claque-dents”)a fricative? If only you could have recitedto your speech therapist Artaud’s last words(as translated by Clayton Eshelman andBernard Bador):“And they have pushed me overinto death,where I ceaselessly eatcockanusand cacaat all my meals,all those of THE CROSS.”Say after me: caca. I believe in spells. Andso, I think, do you: I turn to your first book,Shiner, and find “Ka-boom, ka-boom,” Ifind “chunky snow,” I find “Well I wantjack pie,” not to mention “pet rock” and“<strong>The</strong> plung-/ing wall”—signs of the claquedentaesthetic. We needn’t have undergoneelectroshock to understand that when wewrite we sometimes reapply the voltage weonce passively accepted. In “<strong>The</strong> Burn”(from Jane) you address this hyperaesthesia:“As a child I had so much energy I’d lieawake and feel my organs smolder.” Thissmoldering is inspiration, but it’s also thedeath-sentence shock of over-excitation.MN: I don’t know if I love the image ofmyself chasing after a rock of crack in ahotel room carpet. But “when we write wesometimes reapply the voltage we oncepassively accepted”—this I love. Maybe it’sprecisely here that writing becomes cruel—not cruel as in sadistic, but cruel as inArtaud’s “theater of cruelty”: the manifestationof an implacable, irreversible intent, akind of wild spitting back at the world thatbegot you without your choosing to bebegotten into it. You can hear this spit andcrackle, this rock of crack, in Artaud’s voiceon those final recordings. <strong>The</strong> earth moves.WK: In those recordings, Artaud sometimessounds like Shirley Temple.MN: Amen.WK: Being-about-to-burst: my primalscene of writing: sixth grade: teacher gaveus fifteen minutes to write a story: the noonlunch bell rang: I hadn’t finished my story:that sensation of wanting to crowd everythingat the last minute into my story (notenough time!) has never left me.MN: That’s how I feel almost every day inmy writing life. I don’t think it’s necessarilya “healthy” way to write, or to live – a poeticsof the rush may be interesting, but is apoetics of the cram? But when the blood-jetis on, that’s how it feels. I don’t know if Iwould get anything done otherwise, thoughI am realizing that always writing and/orliving with an undercurrent of desperationcan be exhausting. So maybe I’m movingaway from “<strong>The</strong> Burn” — first toward thecontrolled burn, then I don’t know where.It would be good to stay alive.Wayne Koestenbaum, Professor of English at theCUNY Graduate Center, has published onenovel (Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, SoftSkull Press, 2004), five books of nonfiction, andfive books of poetry—most recently, Best-SellingJewish Porn Films (Turtle Point Press, 2006).Maggie Nelson is the author of Jane: AMurder, <strong>The</strong> Latest Winter, and Shiner. Sheis a recent transplant from New York to LosAngeles, where she is now teaching at CalArts.22 APRIL/MAY 2006
APRIL/MAY 2006 23