Housing the Flux of Creation
Kathleen Reichelt
April 2019
An interview with Adeena Karasick
Adeena Karasick is in motion. Flying in from NYC, the world performing poet arrives to a chilly spring in Canada’s capitol, and takes the stage at the annual VerseFest during the last week of March 2019. Glittering in a plugged in turned on turned up languescape*, the magnetic performer fills the room with muchness, reference, sound crossing connectedness, associations that embrace being in the world. During Adeena’s set we are treated to morsels from her theatrical production Salomé: Woman of Valor, where my ears pick up familiar melody. Was that a sound bend from the pop song Mustang Sally interweaving with music of Klezmer and jazz? What am I hearing? It’s dazzling, disorienting and intoxicating to listen to Adeena Karasick’s poetry. It’s a reminder of possibility in sound and word, to references that are everywhere. And that anything is available if you crack it open.
I first became aware of this Canadian born poet, who has spent most of her career in New York, after interviewing bill bissett in 2017. Adeena was a student in Vancouver when she met bill through her then professor Warren Tallman in the early 80’s.The two have been friends and colleagues since, touring together for over three decades. Spending time with Adeena and bill, it is clear that they have a deep bond and shared love of writing, philosophy, invention. The two poets joined us as artists in residence at the Thousands Islands Film & Stage Artist Residency following Versefest. Spending time in person, in the house, in the studio, working together, eating together, I came to know Adeena beyond our interneticalness, beyond the screen, the page.
While interviewing for a film, we talked about creation process in writing and editing. Adeena told me that her editing is as intense as her writing, that she does not know when a poem is coming but that “senora clusters are rolling around in my head and sometimes get abutted by a snippet of speech, a Kabbalistic concept, a phrase in a pop song”. The poet draws inspiration from being in the world, and doesn’t seem to be trying to destroy or escape it, but rather reshape it as a celebration. I am fascinated by the rhythms of Adeena’s words, her use and love of language lexicons, mixing of modern with brand name media and her post conceptualist avant-garde gutsy glamour.
On Talonbooks website, under Adeena’s bio, her writing is described as marked with an urban, Jewish, and feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes.
KR: Starting with the obvious or not so obvious, what normative modes are you challenging?
AK: Well what is really “normative”, anyway? – as this probably shifts according to who is reading it, in what context and when. I guess you could say, the work has always been focused on questioning, problematizing, challenging traditional modes of meaning production – highlighting language, not just as means of communication, but how it functions as a system of differential relations for recombination and permutation; graphematic and sonic elements of pleasure, power play. And how through feeling and seeing language differentially (ie through non logical idiomatic usages, a playful sense of palimpsestic punning, the infusion defamiliarizing elements, difference, deferment,) will inevitably lead to new and more productive ways of seeing the world, leading to social and political transformation and change.
KR: Since you first started writing, performing, publishing, teaching, what ideas, issues, concerns have changed or deepened in your work?
AK: I’ve been at this for now over three decades, and what i’ve noticed is that since the first book, The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks: 1992), I have always been focused on aspects of disruption, nomadicisms, exile and desire – a diasporic poetics that celebrates a sense of being between – between cultures, codes, idioms; between identities, subjectivities, even between languages – English, French, Spanish, Yiddish highlighting an overwhelming sense of jouissance (which i like to think of as a jewy essence) marked by a strong dose of irony, pleasure, play.
And bizarrely AIRPLANES : ) as in the process of thinking about a Collected, I’ve realized that through all 10 books there is a fascination / almost a manic preoccupation with airplanes. The new book I’m working The Book of Lumenations, will feature a full collage genre blurring essay entitled AEROTOMANIA which will merge all my aesthetic obsessions – the palimpsesting of aesthetic boundaries, poetry / poetics / critical theory / visual infusions / a range of typographies and vispolicious otherness, travel, power, play and eroticism – investigating how and in what ways the airplane is structured like a language.
I think what’s deepened most is that over the 35 years of permuting letters for a living, i’ve tried to teach myself how to balance working along variant axes of communication – how to both be playful and communicative. How the work can be multiplicituously sonically erotic, yet still communicate in a meaningful way. So I would say that finding this balance; between the playful and the political, between the erotic aruatic, oratic, communicating on many levels simultaneously has been the greatest challenge and the greatest pleasure.
KR: Are you a stream of conscious writer? / do you use that technique? …I ask that because of how “CHECKING IN II” feels to me…How did CHECKING IN II develop?
AK: Interesting – well maybe in the Jamesian sense that it lends itself to myriad impressions – visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal that impinge on the consciousensss… and full of interior monologue. I’d say Checking In is more of a SCREAM of subconscious. And more than “written” it’s built, line by line, reference by reference. Each syllabic cluster, word, breath, association worked and reworked. However, I have no idea what will enter the poem next, all day n nite hunting and gathering, replaying the words as music, retuning them, re-orchestrating them and seeing where thy will best be heard. And this, for me, is the greatest pleasure of life.
Checking In II erupted out of Checking In my recent book from Talonbooks (2018), and basically operates as a list of faux Facebook updates. But when the book was done, I couldn’t stop writing it. Everything I read, saw, felt, thought was potential fodder for the poem. My brain was wired to thinking in terms of ironic palimpsestic mash-ups of cultural information.
And especially in this moment where truth is so at risk, where myth and history and meaning are so freakishly fluid and under erasure, where nothing is what it is, between the seeing and saying, the faux and the fou, facts reflected as frictive flexions in the flex of flux, Checking In provides a platform where each line erupts as a provocative self-reflexive mash-up that speaks to our ongoing desire for information while acknowledging how fraught with myth that information can be. Whether it’s Ornette Coleman flying Jazz, Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants, Immanuel Kant liking No Doubt, or bill bissett and Slavov Zizek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, it takes the reader on a satiric tour through the shards and fragments of literary and post-consumerist culture. Reminds us that we’re living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us; and our icons, idols and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing liking, laughing, loving; an exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous, insatiable appetite for data and connection.
And so, in a way, I guess, it is a s[c]ream or [s]traume of consciousness, a kind of inter-subjective theater of reframing. A celebratory rhapsody, reminding us how the internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. Its data is absurd, and as such speaks to the way we seek answers, but (in ‘pataphysical terms) are provided with answers to questions that have never been asked. We seek fulfillment but enter an unbound, unsettling, uninhibited flow of information where every data point only refers back to itself and the culture of techno-capitalism of the web; performing a kind of nekuia (as Susan Howe invoking Robert Duncan) says in Spontaneous Particulars), —a rite whereby the dead are made to speak again. Or for Joyce, (in Finnegan’s Wake), “a commodius vicus of recirculation”.
KR: In mixing popular culture with cultural theory, is there an intention to be accessible to a larger audience, and/or if there are other reasons? like pleasure? I find a lot of pleasure and play in this piece (and your other poems!)
AK: Aw thanks, Kathleen! It was really fun to write – and as you can see, i still can’t stop writing it ; ) It wasn’t that i was aiming to make it more accessible but i guess due to the infusions of more recognizable info it ended up being that way. Perhaps also, something about the collision of info, juxtapositions of diverse elements is the basis of much humor – ie decontextualizing something and apprehending it out of context can be kinda hilarious (in a Brechtian sense of defamiliarization), asking us to re-invest in new ways.
Though in my dreams there are ideal readers out there who “get” all the references, most people won’t. But, it was my great hope, that there’re so many trajects, and enough “accessible” moments, that it would be able to speak to a range of audiences. The book took 4 years to write, and in that time, i had the luxury of testing it with a radical array of receivers, readers / listeners – not only poetry afficianados but those focused on Media Ecology, General Semantics, Jewish audiences, international audiences (through India, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Canada, UK and the US), learning how to highlight, underscore certain flavors for different occasions – ie “Fancy Bread is in thy heart and in thy head… and also at Balthazar” would be edited for whatever international bakery was most famous in that place. When reading abroad, a lot of the culturally specific references went over their head but they laughed at the Literary references. The Media Ecologists didn’t get the Poetry but loved the McLuhan, Postman, Korzybski and all that relates to television, movies and songs. The Jews love the Jewy stuff: “Salomé is listening to the Talking Heads”, “Moses is Smashing His Tablet”, “Samson is Reading the Rape of the Lock.” It’s been a kinda great learning experience.
KR: How do your poems change or alter with live performance?
AK: For me, the poem on the page and the poem on the stage, are almost 2 totally different yet commensurate realities / experiences. What can be accentuated in performance in terms of voice / pace/ variant modes of articulation / dissonance, disruptions, aural codes – plus the sheer physicality of the performer ) is very different to the kinds of codes available when looking at the text – reveling in its own graphematic extasis, the very materiality of the letters, the spaces (black fire on white as the Kabbalists would say), the textual puns, the typography, the smell of the ink, the paper, the way it feels in your hands, in your own mouth. But nevertheless, performing live helps me edit, see / hear what’s working rhythmically, tweak, massage the sounds, rhythm, texture. As – depending on where I’m reading / to what kind of audience (culturally speaking, say) it’s interesting for me to see who gets what / what works in and in what context.
KR: You’ve been touring with bill bissett for three decades. Can you talk about his influence and the influence of his generation, your connection?
AK: bill might have influenced me more than anyone in my life! He was the first poet i ever met 20 yrs old in Warren Tallman’s class, and truly don’t know what my life would be like without him. As my hero and my guide, he continues to influence me massively, both in terms of language use and in terms of performance. From an early age, reminding me to trust my own intuition; no matter what aesthetics were circulating at the time, to just focus on the work, connect with the letters, their transgressive potency, celebrating their mystical properties. He taught me how to communicate through the body, the significance of sonic space, how a sense of humor can cut tension, both on the page and off; taught me the importance of rhythmic timing and how to balance sets with a range of aesthetics; how one can both transport and be transported through the letters, as gates, vehicles, chariots. And, as a publisher (of blewontment) inspiring me (with Kedrick James and Wreford Miller) to start Anerca magazine a journal of renegade art in Vancouver in the 80’s. Inspiring me in love, in life, how it is all so inscribed in desire, cycles of beauty and transgression. And though i could go on forever, let me also just add that even though i’m not a visual artists, per se, his merging of drawing and painting with language, concrete, vispo, typewriter poetry, or the hand painted Lunaria –the way he, in a kinda Blakean manner, marries word and image through all of his books, continues to amaze and inspire me, exposing how interweaving genre is not only aesthetically but politically transformative; all celestial and spinning, providing a platform housing the flux of creation.
And of that generation, also influenced by languorous ruptures, raptures, swerves, curves contours of bpNichol, the soundwork of the 4 Horsemen, the homolinguistic translations of the TRG (Nichol with Steve McCaffery), and then later the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, specifically Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews and their neo-Marxist attention to the materiality of language; its non-commodification, the beauty of irony, ‘pataphysics. And also, French feminist deconstructive theoreticians (Cixous and Derrida) providing me with a vocabulary to articulate the multiperspectival hetroglossia, the verfremdugnsy subaltern excess, differances which pervades much of the work.
But through it all, almost 40 years of touring and writing, performing and writing together –through Canada, and the US, London, Paris, Dublin, Bath, London, Oxford, Wales, Mainz, Giessen, Berlin, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Brussels, Geneva, St. Petersburg, it’s bill who is my poetic “neshamah” (soul), and through socio political aesthetic transgression, exuberance and obsession, reminding me that life is language and how to live more fully in the landscapes we construct from it.
KR: Poetry seems to be gaining popularity in mainstream or, more youth are engaging through social media, open mics, contests, poetry celebrities. What are your thoughts on all this, the current and future of poetry?
AK: It’s awesome! Seems this new wave of interest started in the early 90’s with the advent of slam, an offshoot of Hip Hop, in conjunction with all the availability, accessibility with online magazines, and increasing open mics. Here in New York more and more bookstores are re-opening with robust reading series’, offering so many opportunities for new voices, a range of aesthetics. Poetry is alive not just in coffee shops and bars, libraries and classrooms, but perhaps in part thanks to social media, highlighted in mainstream movies, (recently a Zinc bar slam was featured in “Can You Ever Forgive Me”), large scale Music Festivals increasingly having poetry stages…and now even Broadway! Thank you Hamilton!
KR: What do you think of artificial intelligence putting artists out of work?
AK: Absolutely not – in my opinion, digital media provides more opportunities for further creation – pushes us to see what can be made with and through the new machinery, programs – inviting us to see an explore information through an increasingly wider lens, asking how can we use it to our advantage? ie take all the digital mapping that’s occurring, or the incredible vispo Jim Andrews is creating through his Aleph Null (who both bill and I have had the luxury of collaborating with). The question then, is not, is it good or bad but how and in what ways can we use it to process and reprocess language / make new kinds of work that highlights how poesis is always en proces enabling new modes of translation and exploration – which doesn’t shut down the work of artists but allows for opportunities that we haven’t yet even conceived.
KR: What are your thoughts on minimalism vs. maximalism in poetry?
AK: ha! Though have the greatest respect for say a WCW Objectivist Imagism, that is intensely measured and exacting, I tend to blend that with a sense of a maximalist excess revelling in a playful exuberance marked by abundance and overflow – one that rejects restrictive boundaries, closures, strictures, questioning the foundation of those borders and thinking praxes — and rather imports and navigates a layering of aesthetics that dances between genres, aesthetics, idioms, systems of logic, variant typographies; palimpsesting itself between pop culture and feminist theory, media theory and Kabbalah, Talmud, irony and deconstruction, an intra-genrous palette creating not so much a “High Art” by a “hi art” waving towards a polytextural intertextaticism of intermediatic opulence.
KR: What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?
AK: Finding the time to create all that I want to.
Our time together passes in a flash and soon Adeena and bill are on the train to Toronto. Two days later Adeena will perform to a packed room at the Secret Handshake Gallery in Kensington Market, and then head to other cities where people line up to hear her read. (She soon will be touring for 5 weeks through Europe celebrating Checking In and Salomé: Woman of Valor on stages in Dublin, London, Paris, Forli, Padova and Venice.) Except it’s more than reading. It’s performing that leaves you buzzing. Buzzing with the electric, transformative effect that art and artists can impart when they are generous and connected, creating the world, creating new worlds, and opening spaces for the artists who come after. Adeena Karasick is doing just that.
In a hyper world of muchness, excess, stimulation, how do we read what is written, what is said, what is made, how do we listen? How do we write ourselves? Images are time stamped by their contents. Immediacy urgency qualities creating meaning overlapping tenses future fashion looking back relevance reverence cartoon politics where do we find hashtag art theory substance? if language releases sounds increases connection to tenses always present our mouths eyes ears portholes to other worlds the first computer tongues and fingers, of course this would all point to ©licking. We are consuming and my buzzing is from the drinking, absorbing of words and sounds, images that remind me there is much to enjoy in this world. Adeena Karasick knows it and grows it in your mind. Crack it open and enjoy.
CHECKING IN II
Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs
Fatwa is doing a cleanse
The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies
Alfred Hitchcock is using Windows
The smoker, the joker and the mid-night toker are wanting a vape
Old Man Beaver is wanting a 5 cent cigar
Loves Labor is Lost
Microsoft is getting hard
Form is wet with Content’s Dream
This content is not available
The Alte Kacker is with Kathy Acker
The Spy Who Loved Me is using Malware
The World Wide Web is at The W
The Cocteau Twins are at the Double Tree
The Giving Tree is dead
Hamlet’s Ghost is reading the Phenomenology of Spirit
Chick Corea is at the Tequileria
Deus ex machina is Raging Against itself
Florence and the Machine like this
E & G are saying F off
Happy Man is at Friendlies
Oh Fernando is at Nando’s
The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke
The sin-qu-a-non is overflowing
bp nichol is sinking in sin’s kin
Lynyrd Skynyrd is in the skin i live in
Roland Barthes is with his exes[s]
driving a polished lexis
Emily XYZ is reading ex why zee
Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position
The Riddler is with the Fiddler
The Saudi is driving an Audi
Siouxsie is eating sashimi.
Sad Boy’s Sad Boy is playing with his enWii
Kant is looking for Duty Free
Wynken, Blynken and Nod are at Sleepy’s
Gertrude Stein is at an airbnb
John Ashberry is where black swansdown settles on the city
William Butler Yeats is where the Inn is free
Yes Man is in the Noosphere
Google is mapping the territory
Narcissus is using his selfie stick
The House of Pancakes is waffling
Aer Lingus is serving vaniglia
The Disillusioned Lover is enjoying some secondary Orality
Ludwig Beethoven and Ludwig Wittgenstein are now friends
Fed Ex is totally “shipping” this
525,600 minutes are at Midnight Moment
The Sixty Minute Man is reading The Hours
Minute Maid is taking minutes
Time is on your side
Copper and aluminum are exposing their inner mettle
The excluded middle likes this
Dirty Concretists are overwriting
Van Gogh is eating a mango
The pedagogue is in the synagogue
The luddite is going analog
and says binary code is such a USER
The system is closed.
Fake News is at the Pho Bar
Mister Good Bar thinks this is fubar
William Burroughs is at Target
Robust hegemonics are undergirding themselves
Spanx, also reshaping identity, likes this
Rich idioms are with Poor Yorick
Dangling modifiers are going off the derech
Obadiah is saying La-Di-Da
The Lady’s Yes is cautiously optimistic
Saussure is talking by way of negation
The Flexitarian is having a healthy dialogue
Desire is in Language
The plums in the icebox are saying “pit it pit it little saddle pear say”
Conjunctions are negotiating an erotics of the between
The cold relentless vest is craving for a coat of arms
Molly Piccan is eating almonds
Second Hand Rose is with Sea Lily
Edamame is with Nobodaddy
Overdots are ascending on high
The Weird Sisters are establishing their own hagiography
The Ayin Hara is eyeballing it
By Adeena Karasick
Salomé Woman of Valor, at Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto, 2018
For Adeena Karasick’s website→
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Kathleen Reichelt is a writer, performer and visual artist who co runs an artist residency in the Thousand Islands, Canada. Her work has been published by Three Rooms Press, great weather for Media, Bone Bouquet, and in Artoronto, Otholiths, Paris Lit Up, and swifts & slows.
For more articles by Kathleen Reichelt on Arteidolia→
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