SYSTEMS COMPOSED AND UNMADE

A CONVERSATION WITH DANIELLE PAFUNDA

Greetings! Thank you for talking to us about your process today! Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?

Hello, I’m Danielle, she/her/hers.

Why are you a poet/writer/artist?

Because I have a great deal of undelivered speech, because I believe in the capacity of poetry to articulate the previously inarticulable, because I think we each might contribute to the record of human culture, because my brain is like this, because art has the potential to meet us, activate us, create mystical and phenomenological space, because it is a place to lodge affect and aesthetic, because there is much unfair and wrong that cannot be readily corrected with logic or will alone. Because it takes some people a lifetime to learn that other humans not themselves are also sovereign, because some people never learn it. Because you can flip a weapon on its creep or light a friend’s match. For vindication and revelry. And more.

I don’t understand how systems of power maintain purchase. Sociopolitically, I unpack their function with feminist theories, disability studies, critical race poetics, affect theory, capitalocene critiques, but cannot convince myself of their inevitability. Systems of power dictate our relationships to other people, flora, fauna, bacteria, protists, minerals, space, time, everything. Still, these relationships have the capacity to generate phenomenological zones of resistance, ways out of power. To figure out how, I render the speculative possibilities and the violence that got us to this intersection of despair and hope.

As personal and collective trauma recklessly collude, our individual and shared cultural experience gets unmade in our hands. When experience stops making sense, poetry has the unique capacity to disrupt language’s insistence on sensible expression. Where trauma resists narrative prose, the lyric articulates the inarticulable. I’m trying to find the language for what’s happening to us in general, and me in particular. So, I’m not trying to produce beautiful or even necessarily good art. I’m committed, instead, to the pungency of the project, doing whatever it takes to speak a silenced ontological atmosphere, helping people name what they feel and be.

There are yet feelings we’re — readers and writers, both — resistant to exploring. I often work in these minor and ugly feelings (see Cathy Park Hong, Sianne Ngai, etc), shaping the architecture of spite, shame, anxiety, silliness, irritation, impatience, indignation, and more. Like our relationships, these affects are both result of and breeding ground for oppressive conditions, and might paradoxically be our best sites of resistance. My poems, if sometimes eager to be beautiful, transcendent, uplifting, or revelatory, must also be rude, abrupt, mired, pushy, indiscreet, turgid, sharp, immature, or overbearing. I hope to insight a circuit of cringes and blooms in the reader, to shake loose from our good/bad binary. To create alternately muscular and clairvoyant lyrics.

In an ailing culture that manipulates people by insisting we become immune to our own emotional weather and our material intensities, I want to get better. I want to be re-enfranchised, less lonely, changing. I want reckoning and sanctuary in equal measure, and I want the existential ecotones only poetry provides.

When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?

I was lucky to have many books in my childhood home and to, somehow — I imagine owing to my amped up constitution — learn to read before I started school. Writing seemed to me an organic extension of reading. Once, when I was ten, my mother, grandmother, and aunt heard me say I wanted to be a writer. “You have to be good to be a writer,” they said. I knew I’d be good, in this case, but later I realized that good was not really the aspiration for me. Pungent or realized or other was the aspiration. Impossible was the aspiration.

What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway? What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?

The role of a poet is to articulate what previously hasn’t been articulated, or articulate it somehow more effectively. Because I’m committed to social justice and sanctuary for thought and being, I have an additional charge to apply my poetry to those causes, though not necessarily in a conventionally edifying fashion. I also see my cultural role less as a creator of beauty and more as someone who sees artistic projects through to their furthest manifestations.

Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?

This book came out of my affection for and frustration with modernism’s grooms, most especially André Breton. It came out of the bad dynamic between hetero lovers in the couple-state. It came out of a consideration of Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body and the notion that masculine genius posited itself not only on feminine has passed corpses in art and literature, but reinforced white supremacy and patriarchy by projecting a theatrically amplified whiteness, impossible standard of beauty, and biologically counterintuitive impermeability onto those corpses. It came out of chronic pain and the medical industry. It came out of the obliterating hostilities of institutions that disregard the rights of people while simultaneously co-opting those human rights for their own protection and profit. It was vexed by the limitations of my own speech, and was also encouraged by this and that infinite quality possibility.

I’ve used the title of Breton’s My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed (a limited edition folio of love poems) and a line or two from Communicating Vessels. I’ve reworked the narrative of Nadja, but not faithfully. Breton tells his protagonist’s story of the love affair with Nadja and then exiles Nadja to the sanitorium. Later, in Communicating Vessels Breton recounting a dream obliquely addresses his real-life relationship to Nadja, speculating on what might happen if she, “sane or otherwise,” were able to return and read his book about her. Spite asks, instead, what happens if the OG melancholy bohemian dream girl is the author and subject of her story.

Ultimately, my murky use of Breton is a way of removing the authority of men who exploit the (imagined or real) stories of women’s love affairs. It refuses to grant the cis-het man’s he-said copyright. I don’t think readers need to be even remotely familiar with Breton to read such a common story of the exploitation a man writer insists is the necessary cost of art. He was my vehicle, but his is just one of a zillion men protagonists who use a woman unto illness or death to get where he’s going or alleviate his own ennui or whatever.

What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?

I don’t often use formal structures or constrictive practices in any conventional sense, though each book does comes with its own rules and I tend to follow them. Worldbuilding is important to me in poetry as much as in fiction, and I need to intuit a given world’s mechanics and metaphysics. Sometimes a world’s rules have the quality of compulsive or magical thinking, as is true for our agreed-upon real world.

Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.

Spite is an underrated ugly feeling of great value, depth, landscape, quality, etc.

What does this particular work represent to you as indicative of your method/creative practice, history, mission/intentions/hopes/plans?

This particular work is perhaps a good example of what happens to texts when I synthesize them. It charts my relationship to the work of modernists, often both compelling and vexing to me. The mission here is not necessarily a grand or noble one. This book helps me consider the risks and rewards of embodiment and particular performances of femininity, how that femininity has been historically co-opted as catalyst for the development of the masculine artist, and how it might be re-narrated (if not improved). I don’t expect all art to be beautiful or even (conventionally) good. Sometimes, to succeed, a project must be flawed or even scan not-good in places. If a project is near to fully realized, then I feel it’s done and ready to go out into the world.

What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?

This book asks to whom the story belongs. This book takes liberties. This book speaks from a space of physical pain whose articulation is almost always assumed incomplete. This book resists and at the same time melds. This book wonders if there’s positive generative possibility in those feelings or states to which we ascribe negative quality. This book exercises its grudges alongside its reverence.

What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?

I hope this book will create the harmony of vindication or recognition for some of its readers. As an object, it records elements of human experience we often think below art’s notice or obstacle to art. With regard to my own practice, I hope these poems record something about how neurological firestorms informed my work during an era of acute hostility and pain. That said, I try not to indulge too many hopes for a book once it’s out of my computer and head, into the reader’s space. I hope, for the most part, it’ll do its most self.

Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. How does your process, practice, or work otherwise interface with these conditions?

My practice always questions systems of power, and how my speakers are both composed and unmade by these systems. This book in particular considers the ways in which love can seem revolutionary and prove otherwise. In our eagerness to believe in the radical power of love, we often embrace a love that ultimately reinscribes every oppression. That’s not meant to be uplifting or edifying, necessarily, but just to unpack some of the ways in which even our most intimate attachments get scripted and conscripted into the Capitalocene.

I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, ability, class, privilege, social/cultural background, gender, sexuality (and other identifiers) within the community as well as creating and maintaining safe spaces, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos” and/or disciplinary and/or institutional bounds?

Systems of power reproduce themselves in any field they find purchase. Ours isn’t special — plenty of breeding ground for privilege and plenty of opportunity to exploit privilege, maintain status quo. It’s not just that we need to bring more voices into the mix, but that we must consciously craft spaces in which conventional hierarchies can’t flourish.

DANIELLE PAFUNDA is the author of eight other books of prose and poetry: The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), Beshrew (Dusie Press), The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books), Manhater (Dusie Press), Iatrogenic (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), and Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press). She’s published two chapbooks: Cram (Essay Press) and When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land (Birds of Lace). Her work has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and a number of anthologies and journals. She teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.

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