Come and Sit
Poetics, downtime, and revolution with Aaron Shurin
This interview was conducted in May 2025 from Portland, OR, and edited a year later in May 2026 from Seville, Spain. Skip the editorialto go straight into our conversation.
Walking back to the hotel in Seville, Spain, along a wide path shaded by London planes following an afternoon at CAAC (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporánio), I noted the strangeness of seeing so many benches along the way. Even in a slower, quieter part of town largely insulated from foot traffic, benches were prolific. Even stranger was that none of them had backs, none of them had bars in the middle. Some were even in the shape of large squares, flat slabs projecting up a foot or so from the earth, large enough for a small family or group of friends to have a picnic, or for a couple stuck in the mid-afternoon heat to lie down for a brief siesta.
A man in construction neons lay on one of the slabs with a lunch pail at his side. A little further down, a man with a straw hat lay stretched out lengthwise on a bench. Neither seemed concerned with the world around or worried that they might be rushed along. I thought of the squares in Madrid and how families gathered there late into the night—visiting with neighbors, playing hacky sack, eating ice cream cones—and how I’d had to press against the urge to rush through, an urge that comes from living life in a America where architecture is hostile,1 loitering is a crime, and public spaces are generally engineered to keep people in motion.2 What happens to people who feel they can never rest, who believe that to demonstrate fatigue is to lose one’s place in the world? To fall out of step with the machine that makes possible, one day in the future, a life worth living?
I had forgotten that, a year ago, Aaron Shurin and I had talked about benches. We lamented the loitering laws so foundational to the character of the United States, and reminisced about our respective experiences in Central America, Mexico specifically—the memories of which loomed large with benches. It wasn’t until I returned to the room in Seville and started editing the interview I’d conducted all that time ago (what feels like lightyears now, with all that has happened since—both in the world and at home) that I was reminded. My husband and I are in Spain for our honeymoon, also a year late. Both events, I am seeing now, are right on time.
I’d planned to publish this interview in time for the release of Shurin’s latest collection, Elixir: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2025), but life events made bad bedfellows of rest and productivity, and many things just didn’t get done, making something of my chat with Shurin being one of them. Now that I am at it again (just in time for the one-year anniversary of Elixir’s publication!), I believe more than ever that I am just one small speck in the cosmos of it all, and that one should never be too precious about timelines and plans. Sometimes, the plans we make just aren’t very good. Sometimes, life expands and time contracts in ways that even the best choreography cannot compensate for.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes: “One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew…shared a habit of mind… They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice.”3 I am trying to be less like this: less insistent on my desired outcomes and more accepting of those most impactful events which are entirely outside of my control.
The first poem of Shurin’s “Involuntary Lyrics”4 portrays an alternate approach:
I.
If the judgement’s cruel
that’s a wake-up call: increase
energy, attention. These little pumpkins ornament
themselves with swells, die
pushing live volume packed spring-
form hard as a knock: Decease
and resist. Content
surges exactly as memory
closes its rear-guarding
eyes
—the world rushes in not by! just be
steady, receptors, measure is fuel:
whatever moves move with the
drift which moving never lies.
I have gone long stretches throughout my life where poetry is all I’ve read and all I’ve written, but not so lately. Lately, I’ve not written any at all and I’ve found it increasingly difficult to read, too: a change I might blame on the atrophying of certain muscles by social media, by busy-ness, by increasing pressure in our gig-economy to commodify every spare moment, to always be doing two things at once. But when Dante Silva at Nightboat reached out to see if Pool Party was interested in doing a review or interview, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to reacquaint myself with the practice of quiet, close reading that poetry requires. Plus, it was Aaron Shurin: a pioneer in LGBTQ+ studies who co-founded Boston’s Good Gay Poets Collective and “spearheaded the resurgence of the prose poem as a crucial form of modern art.” I won’t attempt too much biography here—David Grundy has said more already than I can here, and better, I am sure, than I might.
Life has accelerated so much in the past year, and I believe that A.I. is, in large part, to blame. War, economic precarity, increased violence, and widespread censorship play major parts as well, of course, in producing a cultural climate made more of painful fits-and-starts than the banal ongoingness that makes the magic of art and writing possible. Reliance on A.I. shrinks us: we recoil from ourselves and others, from the hard work of becoming and undoing and transforming. Everybody is saying that A.I. is the future, and yet it forecloses on futurity: one cannot build new worlds on crumbling foundations.
Perhaps poetry is the antidote; it is, after all, one of the few things now that A.I. still can’t do.5
It Hurts a Little:
A Conversation between Aaron Shurin and Ryan-Ashley Anderson
Ryan-Ashley A. / Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me, it’s really an honor. While I’ve read a bit of your work here and there over the years, it wasn’t until reading this new collection, Elixir, that I realized how influential theory has been in your writing.
Aaron Shurin / Yes, I call it poetics.
R.A. / I’ve discovered that being in graduate school really alters one’s relationship to language. You start using words like ‘poetics’ and ‘liminal’ and it sort of changes everything.
A.S. / You know, I went back [to graduate school] when I was 33 and it was a gigantic experience for me; it really changed my life.
R.A. / What was most transformational about graduate school for you?
A.S. / It taught me rigor, and it made me be more responsible to my work.
R.A. / That’s relatable. I thought I was serious about my work when I went back at 37, but to produce anything meaningful or truly novel, I found, required both paying such close attention to everything I did, and also to what others were doing. For the first time I really started to understand what it meant to be in dialogue with other writers and artists.
A.S. / It was the same for me. It was a period of really intense argumentation and counter-theorizing with the Language poets and really tearing things up.
R.A. / I think I was all the way through my first year in this three-year program before I really understood why I was there. Since then, it’s been off to the races, but it took some time. I knew I was passionate about and interested in a lot of different things but was unsure how to channel my curiosity into something meaningful, something that served as a contribution to this ecosystem.
“Maybe I had to relearn to
love my early work.”
R.A. / You must be such a different person and writer now than you were ten, twenty, thirty years ago. What was it like selecting work for this collection written in so many different phases of life? Was there anything that you discovered anew?
A.S. / It was an extraordinary moment, ‘moment’ meaning the two years that I took to gather the work, put it together, and make sense of it, and the challenge was deciding how much of my early work I was going to accept. What could I call it and have it achieve a purpose? I came to understand that I didn’t need to, that I didn’t need to make the early poems adhere to my current poetics. Maybe I had to relearn to love my early work. To do this meant understanding where it was in its context, how it played out in its context.
For example, “A Woman on Fire,” which begins the ‘selected’ portion of the collection, is my earliest, published in May of 1975—literally 50 years ago, a lifetime ago—and I wasn’t going to include it because I just thought, well, this doesn’t adhere to contemporary poetics in its formal ideology. But then I met with a friend of mine, Micah Ballard, who runs the U.S.F. Program, and he said to me, “Well, you’re including ‘Woman on Fire,’ aren’t you?” It was just a joke out of the blue, but then I went back and read it again and I thought it was incredible. It didn’t need it to be anything else other than what it was and I welcomed it in: that really opened the whole book up for me.
R.A. / Was there any early work that you returned to that you ended up editing for this?
A.S. / Well, I made the decision with Brian [Teare], who wrote the forward, that I wasn’t going to excerpt longer work, that whatever was going to be there would be complete. This decision changed the structure of the book a little bit because we ended up with longer sequences, but I think that it was the right thing. Often when you pull out a little section from a long piece, it loses a lot of its infrastructure. It was painful, but I had to honor it.
R.A. / Was there anything you wanted to include that you didn’t because either it was too long or just didn’t fit contextually?
A.S. / There’s this thing called Codex which is really complicated because it has three different type faces conjoining, and it’s, I think, maybe thirty sections—the idea of typing it was just horrifying to me, and when I read it, there was enough other work in relation to it that I could leave it out.
“It’s grim, like a sinkhole that just lifts from one of the poems.
It’s really fierce.”
R.A. / I am obsessed with the interview you did with David Grundy .
A.S. / That was a really good interview.
R.A. / I was impressed with the way that he showed so much fidelity to you and your work and shared so smartly about everything he gleaned from your talk. I was thinking about your work with Good Gay Poets reading that, specifically what you said about freedom and the politics of poetics. Has your definition of freedom changed, or your feelings about it? I’m specifically thinking about the increase of censorship in this political moment we’re in.6
A.S. / I just found out that all these small presses were defunded, NEA grants taken away that were already delivered. Including Nightboat. That came out this morning.
You know, I’m not sure that anything has changed for me; the goals are still the goals. And the freedom, you know, it comes in parts. We’ve reached points one and two but there’s still three and four, five, six, and seven. So, I don’t think this moment is that different. The urgency feels different, but even if it were a non-urgent time, you would still be called upon to react in the same way.
I do feel an increasing urgency to stay alive, though, and I’m not sure how that plays out in poetry. I’m not sure that I can point to an urgent temper in my poems. I had written each poem in the Black Roses section singularly and then came to enclose them in this habit of black prose. I saw the temper was dark among them and, honestly, I didn’t really know why. It wasn’t me; I really didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to write some of those.
I remember that, in “Memorial,” the second poem in the book, it says, “you are written,” and when I was writing, I thought, I don’t feel that, I don’t want to write that. That’s not what I’m feeling. It wasn’t the aim and I wasn’t feeling that either—that kind of rage and, not despondency, but darkness. I really wasn’t feeling that. Well evidently, I was, but I didn’t know that I was.
So, it turns out that the darker mood, which sort of surprised me in Black Roses, I finally realized was kind of post-COVID. I wasn’t thinking of it that way, but I think it wore a post COVID armor.
R.A. / As I read, going back and forth between the newest works and then your selections from Black Roses, I noted here somewhere that it felt like there was a particular heaviness to the poems in this section: like when you’re walking but you feel weighted down, you know, it’s just like you said, armor, the weight of an extra coating or layer.
A.S. / It’s grim, like a sinkhole that develops in one of the poems and the rest slide in. It’s really fierce.
R.A. / So, you weren’t necessarily aiming for that at the time, it’s just what came? Channeling rather than feeling?
A.S. / Yes, I’m always channeling something because I don’t know where I’m going.
I just did an interview with Tiff Dressen and one of the things that I said, which I had never said before, was the articulated unknown, and that’s kind of become a new phrase for me, almost like the title of a new book. A phantom book. The articulated unknown: that really kind of describes my position.
“You start with a plug of yarn and
believe in the future.”
R.A. / Do you know of the researcher Lucy Cotter, by chance? I went to a talk of hers recently, and one thing she said that I keep returning to is that there’s so much expectation of artists and writers to be doing research all the time and that, really, when you’re a creative person, so much of what you’re doing is moving towards some place you’ll never reach. The experience of existing and moving in any direction is the work so much of the time.
A.S. / Yeah, sure, and one thing that’s become apparent to me more and more is that I was living in history. During great portions of my life, I was living in history, and I knew it at the time: I lived through Haight-Ashbury and the human “Be In,” and I lived through the turn of the gay experience with Stonewall. I lived through AIDS.7 So many of these historical moments were part of my life, moments that deeply made me, constructed me, so I’m very aware that I have this historical placement. I worked very hard when I was younger, and I’ve been trying to reclaim the part of my gay past when I was very active. I want people to know about that.
R.A. / Are you speaking specifically about doing more activist, liberatory work?
A.S. / Oh, yes. I was in the earliest conversations about gay rights being human rights. Just two months after Stonewall, I was participating in study groups—little offshoots from gay liberation in San Francisco—anarchist study groups, fairy circles… I was part of the original Fairy Circle in San Francisco.
Like Bob Glück, I’ve written a ton about gender, including “Woman on Fire” which is fifty years old. And my friend, Bob, says that we preceded Judith Butler. In a way, I think that’s true: I was studying a lot of gender material and the way I was writing about gender was clear and purposeful.
R.A. / Given how complicated the conversation of gender is right now, especially with all the legislation around transness, it’s obvious that there’s so much work to do and conversations to be had. I like that you brought up human rights because I think that, you know, at the end of the day, that’s what we all are. I suppose that, to me, so much of the work of art and writing is that it has this humanizing power, an equalizing power, it performs a kind of stripping down.
A.S. / When people ask me what poetry is, I say it’s a mode of attention. It gets people to pay attention to anything in their world instead of being overtly directed by capitalist impulses. Just look at the tree, really look at the tree. You can’t abuse the tree. If you really look at it, you have to respect it.
One of the great points in my life was during my first LSD trip. I went outside and there was a tree there, and I saw the tree. Oh, my God, I saw the tree—I saw its circulation, its pulsations, its livingness.
R.A. / That makes me think about the tension between grounded consciousness and the dreamlike quality of so many of your poems. One thing I felt consistently was the sense of being off-balance—not like being on eggshells or being anxious—just being sort of challenged, having my perception challenged, and I wondered if that’s just what happens when you write or if you are intentionally behind creating a somatic experience that manufactures this sort of vertigo effect.
A.S. / I think it is intentional. Definitely. But I’ve never used the word dream-like and I don’t really believe in that, actually. I do believe in kind of staking coordinates of the experience so that, at points, it’s fixed and naturalistic and at points, it’s loose. It’s uncomplicated if you surrender to it and that’s the goal, really. And that’s what I want to do, to grab onto something: I have its sensual presence, and then I let go and open my arms, and there’s the window right there, and whatever I can let in, I let in. The older I get, the more I am able to let in. But it’s not exactly imbalance, actually, it’s balance.
R.A. / Now I’m rethinking the question I sent over about push-and-pull, and the question where I quoted what Brian says in your forward about how “syntax carries the power of the erotic to change, with its galvanic charge…”
A.S. / Yeah. Oh my God. It’s such a good sentence.
R.A. / In “The Incarnate,” the line “running to keep up with the past—” And “Dome” at the very end: “nothing…It’s everything I needed to be…” Can you speak a little bit to the tension between motion and stagnation, to the tug felt in so much of your work?
A.S. / You know, one of the things one wrestles with is closure. Lyn Hejinian has a great essay called “The Rejection of Closure” and it’s something that’s always on my mind. The end of a poem is frequently, as I said, prosodic—it’s not necessarily semantic, not wrapping anything up. It may be as powerful as the lack of a period, like in “My Memorial,” we “are written and erased,” nothing else, there’s nothing there.
There’s no punctuation. Sometimes I’m asked during interviews whether that’s intentional and, yes, it’s very intentional.
R.A. / Ending on this line, “you are written and erased” and then nothing past that point gave me a feeling that there was a presence in the absence. It made me pause and read back through again and again, like I might see something on the repeat that I hadn’t before. Punctuation choices like that can be so affecting.
A.S. / Yeah, it hurts a little.
R.A. / We want to wrap things up, don’t we?
A.S. / Yeah, and I’m a punctuation queen. Really, I’m very fond of punctuation, especially the em-dashes and ellipses, you may have noticed.8
R.A. / Em dashes and ellipses feature prominently in “In the Sky of That Name,” whereas your newer poems don’t have quite as much punctuation play. Can you speak to that shift?
A.S. / I was compelled by eros during “In the Sky of That Name,” so that may recharge the landscape a little bit. It’s full of confusion, full of opposing erotic valances, and there was a sense then of being but partially known, or partially unknown. So there had to be a lot of space there. Also, that poem [“I. If You Were”] is all speculation— “If you were, as we were, if we were…” It can’t land anywhere, it won’t land anywhere, it’s all speculative and some of it is reverse speculation.
R.A. / Like the effect of that missing period at the end of “The Memorial, the effect on me by these punctuation moves was imposed meditation.
A.S. / They try to make whole something that’s filled with partiality: “…If you were, as we were, if we were…” like that one poem in that section that says, “two halves make two wholes.”
R.A. / And this circles back to the sort of push/pull tension we were talking about a few minutes ago.
A.S. / Yes, and I don’t know how you feel about “The Sky of That Name,” but I love that title.
R.A. / I had to turn it over: The sky of that name, the sky of that name, and I just kept wondering what name, and then also thinking that it could be any name. It felt like an invitation, some sort of opening, or like an invitation for imagination.
A.S. / And a lack of certainty.
R.A. / Something that can’t be totally pinned down or named. And something that can’t be named evades surveillance. There’s the possibility of slippery-ness, or slipping, in that.
A.S. / “In the Sky of That Name” is very slippery because I felt I wanted it to resolve in some way. I wanted to come back to the beginning again and it kind of does that very delicately. Beginning again, but tentatively. But then it ends on “…aurora air…” I’m as happy as anything I ever wrote with aurora air. That just has it, doesn’t it? It sounds it, and it looks it.
It’s a bomb of a possibility. I wrote like a demon on that one. It was very hard.
R.A. / What was the hardest part of the work on this piece, in particular?
A.S. / Well, I had to enter the romantic space without being overwhelmed by it and find a way to make it new. Some of the really complicated ones, like “The Mirror,” that one was hard because eye beams are going in multiple directions: you’re looking at eyes and the eyes are looking at the other eyes, and it is hard to negotiate the arithmetic of it.
R.A. / When do you know what form a poem is going to take? Whether it’s going to take more of a narrative, prose-like structure or something more like that of “Raving #9” which takes more of a traditional poetic form but is also experimental, including slashes and wide spaces between words in single lines.
A.S. / It was really the arrival of writing prose poems around 1980 or so, and then that was that—I was a prose poet, and it so suits my disposition, my maximalism, I call it. I had so much room to say what I needed to say, and then to counter it, and to move, and wiggle, and to shimmer, and do all those necessary things.
“Ravings” was very, very early. I was writing first lines. And the only counter to it is “Involuntary Lyrics,” and bouncing off Shakespeare’s sonnets, it had a very particular structure and structure of lineation.
R.A. / In at least two poems, I noticed images of coins in pockets. Was that coincidence or is there some significance for you?
A.S. / I think that’s just an accident. I don’t have any particular vibration about it.
R.A. / It’s curious, when you think of historical placement. Now, we hardly ever see or use coins anymore. Coins jingling in one’s pocket is a uniquely historical experience, a disappearing one. It was banal. I mean, you’re just walking down the street, thinking about whatever, hands in pockets, just rolling a few coins around like worry stones and it’s as quaint practically as landlines now. So now, it means something, whereas then, it was able to mean nothing?
A.S. / Yeah, I think I wanted to be present in this ambling moment where you just look at all the points of reference. When I was starting that poem, there were so many little points of attention and that was sort of an ‘ambling indicator.’ Hands in my pockets, jiggling my coins; I’m looking here, I’m looking there.
R.A. / And ambling is also a little bit of a lost art. I mean, who ambles anymore? People walk with their phones in their hands, not noticing.
A.S. / Yeah, I’m a big ambler.
R.A. / I think ambling is a necessary artistic practice.
A.S. / I think so, too. Rebecca Solnit has a wonderful book, Wanderlust: The History of Walking, and it is a history of walking for pleasure, which wasn’t always a permitted act.
R.A. / I’m thinking about how resting, loitering, is also a forbidden act in so many places, and how political the codification of these modes of existing is. How here, in America, standing around or ambling is often seen as suspicious, whereas in Europe, gathering is core to the culture—gathering, ambling, resting.
A.S. / Benches. In Mexico, I’m always wowed by the benches.
R.A. / There are so many benches in Mexico!
A.S. / Yes, come and sit, they say.
R.A. / We’re just so busy here. We’re just rushing all the time. To do anything other than to rush is like a defiance of capitalism or something. The desire for rest is something we’ve got to squash.
A.S. / Right, yes.
R.A. / Futurity and world-building are embedded throughout this collection. In “The Incarnate,” especially since we’re talking about chaos and rushing, I felt so strongly the feeling that the poem was a provocation, pointing to the fact that, to do anything, to begin anything at all that takes time, requires so much faith in the futurity of this chaotic world and, specifically, in one’s place in its future. It was the line about the knitter: “You start with a plug of yarn and believe in the future,” and I thought my heart might stop.9
A.S. / You can’t commit unless you’re going somewhere and you have an idea of where you’re headed. And so that is absolutely futurity.
R.A. / And also, the faith that I will have time to get to the place I’m going.
A.S. / Yeah, definitely. That was a very hard poem for me to write, I couldn’t quite get the dimensions I wanted with that line of…
R.A. / “In the middle, not the beginning or the end—a thunderclap that has him fleeing from the house (how else would the jungle prevail?)—running to keep up with the past…”
A.S. / That was the hardest. Its model was a boyfriend of mine who was terrified of thunder. He had known two people hit by lightning.
R.A. / That line, “then let him wrestle the lightning,” was potent.
A.S. / Well, he’s an ex-boyfriend. I had to give him something else to do.
R.A. / Do you have any craftspeople in your life? Any knitters?
A.S. / No, and I’m not one. I have no experience at all.
R.A. / A question that surfaces frequently in conversations with peers is about whether it is okay to write on things that you don’t have personal experience with, that you don’t have expert knowledge on. The reason I’m bringing this up is because I think there’s this pressure to be beyond reproach in one’s academic work, like being so well-read that your citations are beyond reproach, that you can say conclusively whether you are writing with or against other thinkers at any given time. Reading this line about knitting as somebody who taught knitting professionally, consistently, for over fifteen years, I was struck by this phrase, plug of yarn, because I’ve never heard it used before. It was so evocative and now it’s what I want to say all the time—not ball, or skein, but plug. I think that if you were a knitter or had close experience with knitting, you wouldn’t have come up with that phrase, and so it reminds me that, while anything can be learned, to be ignorant enough to be novel is a real gift.
A.S. / Well, the fact is, I have an imagination and that’s how I came up with it. I think the rest is B.S., really. You have an imagination, you use your imagination, and you understand human behavior, and you see what it accomplishes or doesn’t accomplish, and you go there. Half of my work features female protagonists, and why shouldn’t it? I have mothers and sisters and great friends. I see them and I know them. I am not them, but they’re part of my human experience. Same thing culturally. It happens to me when I’ve just spent a bunch of time in Mexico and, you know, one of these poems comes up. When writing about details of Mexican culture, I’ve thought, well, is this cultural appropriation?” And my feeling was, well, I’m spending every day going there, looking around, reading about it, thinking about it, and that’s part of my experience, too.
R.A. / Absolutely. These experiences are being subsumed into our subconscious all the time, regardless of whether we are seeking that out or not.
Since we’re nearing time, just a couple last thoughts. I wondered if, in everything that you’ve done, if there were times you might have experienced obstacles of some sort, whether creative, interpersonal, or whatever, and had to lean on something you were proud of to keep yourself moving in a time where you maybe felt more like standing still. I’m thinking about a forthcoming publication or a mentor, for example.
“Keep reading, pay attention to history, and pay attention to futurity. Locate what you want, what you want to see happen, and make it happen.”
A.S. / We’re talking about over fifty years of writing, and I was lucky enough to have it by me, in my hand, so I could move through all these wild historical experiences. And one thing I always gave myself was the gift of downtime. If I wasn’t writing—I could not write for a year or two years—people would say, oh yeah, writer’s block. But I’d say, no, I don’t have writer’s block, I just don’t want to write right now. I think it’s really important to let yourself have the time. Stay by it, but don’t push it, and, you know, give yourself the gift of tempo.
R.A. / That’s such great advice and it plays into my next question: what would you say to writers who are finding their voices right now or struggling to figure out what it means to be active without succumbing to the pressure to produce all the time? Specifically, queer writers and artists right now who want to be active as we were chatting about earlier but maybe are feeling a little unsure in this moment of how to do that in a meaningful way.
A.S. / If you want to find a moment, go back to 1969 or ‘70, and see how difficult that was. I mean, you’ve got the wheels greased at this point, you know. I’d say just keep reading, pay attention to history, and pay attention to futurity. Locate what you want, what you want to see happen, and make it happen.
I moved to San Francisco in 1974 and people ask me, what were you doing? I said, “Well, I moved to San Francisco to live my life as a poet and make the gay revolution, and I did.
R.A. / Hell, yeah.
R.A. / Before I let you go, just quick, are you reading anything that you’re really excited about right now? Any specific thinkers you’re really turned on to?
A.S. / Well, I’m going to be reading Ocean Vuong. There was just a piece in The Times about him and his new book, the new novel, The Emperor of Gladness , and I thought his first book was phenomenal. I’m looking forward to that.
Footnotes
[1] The subject of ‘hostile architecture’ arose in my recent interview with Kerri Schlottman as well.
[2] What is the antonym for ‘hostile architecture?’ ‘Inclusive’ and ‘human-centered’ design are antonyms I’ve found and I find the need for these designations to be deeply tragic. What is design if not human-centered? Or, at least, shouldn’t that be one of primary requirements?
[3] When I was visiting my grandmother a couple weeks ago—right before I left for Spain with my husband for our belated honeymoon—she gave me her copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a book both my husband and another close friend recently recommended. There is a small scrap of tissue in the book marking pages 48-49 and pages 135 and 137 are dog-eared. Unlike my husband who can’t seem to mark his place without a proper bookmark, I am my grandmother’s daughter (so to speak), relying on scraps and folds rather than what I see as an unnecessary prop. The quote I included can be found on p. 98.
[4] This sentiment is comforting as it applies to my own, what I view as ‘shortcomings,’ my own inability to press on at times I think I should, even when, for whatever reason, it feels like I can’t, but Didion’s approach is much more comfortable when it comes to things that are utterly beyond my control: perhaps if I take all the right vitamins, get lots of water, and reduce my stress, I might finally get pregnant after all; perhaps if I learn everything I can from my grandmother, record every conversation we have in this, the death rattle of her life, then I won’t really lose her after all when she goes at last. Maybe she won’t even go.
[5] While I concede there are some creative skills that A.I. imitates passably well when the stakes are low, nuance is not required, and plagiarism is of no consequence, I don’t think generative A.I. actually generates anything. Rather, it scrapes, hacks, and amalgamates. A.I. is particularly bad at imitating poetry. Poetry requires a sort of second sight, an ability to see something new, and to see it strangely, in a place where nothing was before. But A.I. can’t create something out of nothing, it needs everything—it gobbles it all up and then doesn’t even remember.
[6] Since conducting this interview, censorship has worsened. Books continue getting banned, media outlets have monopolized, news broadcasts have become unreliable (at best; criminally negligent at worst), and tourists are regularly turned away from the U.S. border because of the anti-Trump and anti-American sentiments promoted on their social media accounts.
[7] By happenstance, when we visited the Museo Sofia Reina in Madrid during the first leg of our trip, I saw that a Felix Gonzales-Torres exhibition would be opening the following week. We’ve missed it, I thought. In fact, it was opening the evening before our departure, the evening we would be back in Madrid in anticipation of our flight back to the U.S. the following day. I couldn’t have planned a better, more meaningful conclusion to our time in Spain which we had unintentionally bookended with visits to the Museo Sofia Reina. I have transcribed the statements and saved them as a PDF which you can access here. <Kevin, PDF in progress; will provide prior to publication>
[8] During this section of the interview, we briefly touched on Emily Dickinson, the original “punctuation queen,” whom Shurin has done some writing on. (include link to his work on ED)
[9] This is what I mean about being just a speck in the cosmos of it all. The night before I got back to work on this piece, I had a dream that I was gliding through the trees behind my grandmother’s house—think swing meets hoverboard. I was on some sort of tour, a guest in this place I knew so well, being led about. The seats sat close to the ground, close enough to touch the grass and slow enough to lift things from the ground. I didn’t want to be there but was obligated for some reason. I felt like a bratty child, but then I noticed that tangled in the grass was countless steel, circular knitting needles. I started scooping them up like flowers, so many that my arms were full of what might have been a bouquet. The line “—you start with a plug of yarn and believe in the future” can be found in “The Incarnate.” I am currently working on a family history project with my grandmother (who taught me to knit, by the way: and from hand-written instructions left by her mother) who is not well; I have to believe in a future that will allow us to complete this project together.
