This is an interview with Aaron Kunin, who made my senior undergraduate year in literature. Stephanie will appreciate it. Other people may well, too. He’s great.
1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?
The problem with admitting that you love a poem is that it leaves you open to all kinds of attacks. “So you love ‘Little Gidding’ . . . Why don’t you marry it?” Such attacks are unanswerable because you’ve already declared that you’re essentially treating the poem like a person. What are you supposed to say? “That’s not the kind of love I mean.” “But I’m afraid of commitment.” “They want to amend the constitution so that same-sex marriage is impossible, do you really think they’re going to let me marry a poem?”
I am not completely opposed to treating books as people. But I still think that love between people and books is not a good idea, and anyway is not the best description of my emotional response to poetry, including love poetry. Wallace Stevens has a line in the dedication to “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”: “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?/ Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man/ Close to me, hidden in me day and night?” He loves the person he’s addressing, Henry Church; he doesn’t love the book. Or maybe he loves the book too–he embraces it, caresses it, talks to it, etc.–but the point is that whatever love he feels for the book is the wrong kind. Because the book can’t return love.
2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?
Cookbooks. In general, I’m not a serious or talented cook, but I’m okay at baking, so I have a fairly large collection of bread recipes. I prefer recipes that use complete sentences and spell out all the steps in pedantic detail. I also appreciate recipes that have a utopian outlook, where the writer seems to believe that your life will be profoundly changed by the introduction of this food item. I think once I quoted a Jane Brody recipe (an example of the latter type) in a poem.
In a way, baking is nicer than writing, because bread feels like an absolute good, whereas the value of what you’re producing when you’re writing poetry is sort of questionable. Making bread could also be an image of writing–creating a medium for bacteria to grow in. While it’s rising, the bread is actually alive; then, of course, you kill it.
3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?
I’m not a philosophical writer. Certainly not in method. I’m not a rigorous enough thinker to make sustained reasoned arguments; also, I don’t usually write on philosophical topics. On the other hand, I do read philosophy, and this reading probably has an effect on me.
One work of analytic philosophy that has been important to me is J.J. Thompson’s Actions and Other Events. (I also like Donald Davidson’s response in his Essays on Actions and Events.) Thompson’s example of an action, the only one she considers, is the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan. She dismantles the action in various ways: is Kennedy assassinated by the bullet, the gun, the finger, the act of pointing and firing, the decision to kill, the person who makes the decision? What I take from Thompson is a description of action in which intention is partly discontinuous. So, for example, Sirhan may be pointing the gun at Kennedy, but at that moment he may not actually intend to kill him, he may intend only the act of aiming the gun. Or maybe his mind is wandering–a phrase from a song is in his head, he wants a cigarette, etc.
Jalal Toufic, the writer I’m currently most interested in, is sort of a philosopher. But he also professes and practices on the side of the irrational.
The philosophy that really appeals to me is monism.
4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Marivaux, Stendhal, Gide, Jabès. The most important is Jabès, although his writing is practically a collection of things that irritate me. Currently I’m interested in Scudéry, but I’ve only read one of her books: The Story of Sapho, translated by Karen Newman.
Lichtenberg, Kleist, Hoffmann, Kafka, Musil, Doderer, Canetti, Kluge. Canetti is important. His book Crowds and Power is a total account of human civilization that proposes a psychology based on food rather than sex: the most important thing is not to be eaten. I wish someone would translate more of Kluge, at least the other two-thirds of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome.
Shonagon, Murasaki.
Galeano, Felisberto Hernandez.
Vico.
Gogol. I should say that I didn’t get Dead Souls until Michael Clune explained it to me.
5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?
I read a lot of poetry. I read a lot, compulsively. I also go to the library almost every day and spend an hour or two taking books off the shelves and looking at them. Usually not reading whole books, just a page or two. Sometimes they are books that I own and could be reading at home. I guess this practice is a form of research. Anyway, it seems to be important; I depend on it.
But I think that excessive reading is not necessarily good for you as a person or as a writer. You start to mediate every experience through some book that you’re reading or remembering. Also, people who have read too many books are unlikely to respond to a particular book: it can’t influence or even touch you because all the other books insulate you. Whereas if you’ve only read one book, that book addresses you directly.
6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?
People who know that I teach 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century English literature often assume that I know something about medieval literature, or, at least, that I’ve read Chaucer, or, at least, that I’ve read some of The Canterbury Tales. I don’t, I haven’t, I haven’t, I’m not going to. I have enough interests for this lifetime, so I try to be protective of books that don’t interest me, because I don’t want to read them.
I admit, within the past year, for professional reasons, I had to read Troylus and Criseyde.
7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?
I’m no expert on child education, I don’t find it very easy to talk to children, but, for what it’s worth, I would suggest that the seven year old try writing a poem.
8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?
The short answer is no. There’s more than one way of being a poet, and there are many kinds of poems that we haven’t seen yet. But that’s not very helpful, so I will offer some suggestions.
One model for poets might be the career of the filmmaker Raul Ruiz. His work is experimental in the strong sense that he is interested in trying out unfamiliar procedures, and not terribly interested in whether his movies are good or bad. He makes movies with whatever resources (people, money, time) happen to be available; he assimilates everything to his work, so that he is basically always making movies. His movies are non-recurrent events: they don’t resemble one another. Also, he’s completely unpretentious–he describes himself as a maker of B-movies.
Another model would be the work of Madeline Gins and Arakawa. They propose radical solutions to problems. For example, their version of architecture, “reversible destiny,” is an attempt to build spaces in which death would be impossible. They are also unusual in that they privilege disabilities (such as blindness and deafness) as modes of perception.
The work of Marjorie Welish shows that the genres of lyric poetry can be used as tools for thinking and not just misplaced concreteness.
The rare moments in the history of culture where a radical politics coincides with a commitment to formal experimentation are inspiring: John Milton, Russian Constructivism, and Language writing.
To paraphrase Richard Foreman: art is subversive when it implies that the choices we’ve made as a culture are wrong, and everything could be different.
9. Word associations.
I have never been able to do word associations.
10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?
In my writing, movements tend to be a little awkward and not very fluid; one bodily configuration is abruptly replaced by another.
Sometimes people are just called “bodies.” Specific body parts are named: “the face,” “the back of the head,” “the inner ear,” “the knee,” etc. But the bodies are not highly individualized: just “the inside of the mouth” without the identifying marks that distinguish one person’s mouth from another’s. Although I often write about skin, hair, and eyes, I don’t think I have ever mentioned a particular skin color, hair color, or eye color. (In my writing, eyes are usually closed.)
Gender is sometimes assigned to bodies, but more frequently to voices. Voices are often detached from bodies, sometimes synched with other bodies, and sometimes attributed to inanimate objects.
Usually the bodies are clothed. The clothing always has pockets, except in one piece which takes place before the invention of pockets.
My writing includes exhaustive delineations of the different stages of waking and sleeping and hunger and eating.
The privileged senses are: sight, hearing, and taste. Over these I tend to privilege perceptions that are not based on crude physical sensation or clues.
There’s hardly any severe physical pain, but a lot of discomfort. Sore throats, headaches, unnamed threatening “incurable diseases” and “conditions.” Sometimes they die; sometimes death seems impossible; sometimes they die and come back.
There is no sexual intercourse in my work. All sex in my work is intercrural.
