Conversing with Anne Lesley Selcer

Randee Silv
April 2025

Anne, could you tell us more about your project The Dread Path of Fire?  What motivated you? What inspired you?

I wrote the score for The Dread Path of Fire after watching Dune (2021). Its rhythm mimicked the loping, reaching quality of that movie—an epic with a strong feeling of movement toward an unknown destination. I was working with ephemera of failing systems amidst the ugly, disconnected sensory life of the post-industrial world. The piece expresses the strange jouissance of the present human transition.

In poetry, I generally work with “I” critically and performatively (in the spirit of Abramovic, Mendieta, Schneemann). For me, literature is not a site of disclosure or amplified self, but I am interested using the appearance of subjectivity as a valence to point toward other things. The voices in The Dread Path of Fire recite the exact same words, but intricate social information arises through the different speakers.  The “I” feels to be taking on different meanings. When they speak in unison near the end, it sounds like conjuring. My favorite line is “jump the turnstile.” The directive toward insurgent joy catalyzes the entropy lapping through the lines previous.

I mixed four separate recordings, patterning them in tension and release, as if creating a song. I originally presented the piece in a room of listeners standing and spilling over to the sidewalk outside. The openness of the space worked for this piece. I walked among the audience handing out a chapbook called Fire Suite. It contained “Main Street Mama: Stay Safe Beauty” (link).  That poem borrows language from an online thread of mothers who posted while evacuating in heavy wildfire smoke. It seethes with the particular sociality of class inequity among families. It announces the utter privatization of the survival of our collective climate emergency, and how that falls on people with care roles. One post tries to sound cheerful at being trapped in the city as others discuss their evacuations like vacation plans. I also solicited an essay from a wildfire survivor, their home burnt down. I printed this in the chapbook with my poem. A few lines from the account are braided into The Dread Path of Fire—the part that decribes the fire like the “roaring of a train.” I work with conceptual writing practices toward releasing new social and political meaning.

All that you included with this presentation of The Dread Path of Fire really helps to emphasize the intensity and impact of wildfires. It’s so relevant, especially now with the recent L.A. fires.  As I listen to The Dread Path of Fire, I can hear how creating a four voice sound piece expands your words into another life, opening up additional levels of engagement. The overlaps, the rhythm of voices entering in and out, almost create a sense of trance, a deep contemplation, a stirring of emotions, curiosity and questioning. Do you see this almost as a call to action for listeners? And if it is, what would that be?

The first idea of my practice is presence. My work wants to make contact, to move energy in a room. The Dread Path of Fire moves listeners through time together. Its rhythm, tension and juxtaposition contour the landscape of an apocalyptic moment. The four voices fill out this lanague of emergency with the particular intimacy of voice. It’s not a call to action. It’s more like a drum announcing what we already know. I found it cathartic when I wrote it in 2023. Manifesto marries language to the present.

Every thing I do, say, write, think, make now is against fascism and its death cadres of racism, colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and monarchism, as well as misogyny, which includes transphobia and homophobia. My projects are thinking into the next way of being human. This piece starts to play with choral subjectivity. Its composition mode emerged though previous projects of mine that examine voice as presence. Voice is often used as a metaphor used to mean representation of the self. I’ve been thinking about a concept of the human that goes beyond the current notion of the individual—not in a retro concept of collectivity, but rather, keeping the lovely, social gifts the internet has given us—being able to percieve each other, new empathies, fresh solidarities. Horizontal connectivity and its emergent lexicon betrays militaried surveillance-capital internet space, illuminates the ways we are part of each other. These days, I’m interested in actively taking that offline.

Voice as presence. Definitely vital. The sounding of your drum is loud and clear. I totally agree with all that you’re saying, especially about focusing your work on the “next way of being human.”  What projects have you been working on in this direction?

It’s not a central project, but Solar Rejoinder has the most in common with this piece. A poem cycle with themes of descent, ascent, transformation, trauma and maenadic joy, I am performing it as a ritual to be intoned twenty three times along with the audience-participants. It’s written for survivor Daisy Colemen. Each ritual has a different set of directions, and they will build upon one another. Here is sound piece  I made with that material (link) and here is some of its language (link).  I often work across multiple mediums like this. I want to see perceive the same material in different forms. Poetry is the fluid heart. I am starting to think about accretion, mimicry and repetition that was the original function of lyric. Poems can be like songs or prayers, carving new pathways in sensory memory where meaning is inextricable from rhythm.

I am also making a film called West O. Dreaming. It is prompted by Dreams of the Third Reich, a book of dreams collected in a Berlin neighborhood during Hitler’s rule. I am collecting dreams dreampt under Trump. We will work with each dreamer to portray their dream using performance, storytelling and possibly elements like animation. During the last months of Trump’s first presidency during lockdown, I started thinking about the dreams people were having in neighborhood as a form of ephemeral collectivity. The film is structured as an ensemble portrait composed of singularities.

Working from a similar place, Sky Will Learn Sky is a sound compilation I curated this fall. I asked poets, artists and musicians to describe or speak to the sky. It arises from imagining what bind or holds us in common, what goes between us. It’s available on cassette and on Bandcamp (link).

Finally, I am working on a first novel, CLUB SPACE. Following in the tradition of what I consider “movement novels” The Unseen, Les Guérillères and The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, the writing thinks elastically into the potential of time omn the spontaneous, uncoordinated, synchronous dance floor. Characters multiply, mesh, think each other’s thoughts, text dreams. Selves proliferate, change. It’s an allegory or future myth. You can read an  an excerpt here (link) and also in the forthcoming anthology Writing on Raving which releases on May 14 in Brooklyn.

February 2025 when you sent me the first question seems like a year ago. I have been doing almost nothing but paying close attention to the news. I’m also working on a series of short, anonymous antifascist essays for various non-literary online and print publications. I want to say something toward the aliveness, the inextricable interconnectedness, the unsayable beauty that cannot and must not end. It is scary to be living in the US at this moment. I want my work to contribute to igniting desire toward what we actually want.

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Anne Lesley Selcer is a poet, writer and artist. Collaborative and individual work has recently screened or been performed at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, The Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Coneshaped Top, Cork International Film Festival, Ribalta Film Festival, The Berkeley Art Museum, Crossroads Film Festival and ProArts, among other places. Their books include Sun Cycle, a book of poetry about the image, Blank Sign Book, selected essay on art + politics, and chapbook from A Book of Poems on Beauty. Poetry appears in literary magazines including Baest, Fence, Annulet, Prelude and The Chicago Review among others, recent fiction appears in Norient and Writing on Raving (forthcoming), and criticism appears in Jacket2 and Open Space. Art Writing has been commissioned widely for art catalogs and artist monographs, and includes publications Banlieusard and (Untitled) A Treatise on Form. They curated the 2024 sound compilation Sky Will Learn Sky, the cross-disciplinary Chroma Reading Series and events for poets making art and artists using language.

Anne Lesley Selcer website →