by Vasantha Sambamurti
What did the process of writing this collection look like — creatively and spiritually? Are there any key questions you were hoping to broach or even answer? In what ways does the process itself gesture towards the ethos of the work?
The book was borne out of a couple things. One is that I had been trying and failing, as ever, to put together a chapbook for a few years. No poem in those earlier "manuscripts" made it into Reconstructions, even though there are a few of them that I do still like. But the process of finding the book amidst the not-books (chipping away at all the parts of the marble that aren't the sculpture) meant really being in study with what it was I felt I needed to say. For me, the work has to have that valence of urgency that carries it into the public.
“We all have our own, not private, but personal utopias that emerge from where we’ve been marked, othered, and archived...”
More materially, the process was a lot of failed poems. I have a folder somewhere on my computer of bad drafts that accumulated through the process. And not drafts that turned into better poems, not even with good lines I could recycle—just attempts. Which, as it turns out, is pretty close to the ethos of the reconstructions: the partial, the bricolage. A ghost epigraph for the book, that I wound up swapping for the Gillian Welch line, is from a song by Arthur Russell: "I'm so unfinished." It's so perfect that it feels almost obvious to me.
So as a lot of the project was being written, I had to not only become comfortable with the process of failure, but sort of fall in love with failure. The poems as made things were demanding it, and what the poems were speaking about were also totally saturated with it. "Do you kiss your boyfriend with those verbs," which opens the chapbook, was the first big moment where I started to tune in to what the poems wanted to be orbiting, around speculative language. What, if any, kinds of social work can be done with language as the medium? What can become possible? These questions were happening in tandem with a real deep study of labor history and Marxist theory, whose fundamental propositions are that another world, a world outside of capitalism, is possible. So those two currents were informing each other, and then in the poems, that work gets underwired, I hope, by the concerns of a speaker's particular history, particular socialization. We all have our own, not private, but personal utopias that emerge from where we've been marked, othered, and archived; it was important for me to have the possible and the already-here share the foreground of the collection, speaking back to one another, announcing each other's limits.
“Maybe I’m scared of heritage. / Or not. But I got these looks & locks / like I’m debutante. Where’s my dance.” Several things stand out about this verse: 1) the implications of heritage and its inescapability 2) the speaker’s tonal treatment of these implications. How would you describe the relationship between the two, if you believe there is one? How does tone function in the work more broadly to articulate the speakers’ positionality to the narrative?
Tonally, I think of "Ekphrasis I guess" in debt to a sense of bravado—that feeling you get when you put on a pair of heels, or some nice jewelry, or a killer top. It feels good. I love trying to capture the stunt in language, particularly in syntax. The runway is a vulnerability: I'm showing up, showing off. To stunt needs an audience, even when you're glamming up for the mirror. I become a little bit more aware of faults, cracks in the facade, in those moments. The whole thing smacks of gender, as Dril would say. And you know, I'm an incredibly anxious person, so it could be that coming through. But in that poem I was trying, I think, to articulate a kind of glamorous, righteous anger that at the same is relentlessly questioning itself—am I afraid of heritage, and what it would mean be held accountable to heritage? To hold one's parents accountable? Am I forever fucked up by childhood, my socialization as a boy, and so on? What are we supposed to do with history? I certainly don't know. But I know, some days, how to look good. For a certain kind of pastoral poem, the big questions, like these ones, are so huge as to make the poet turn to the sky, or the trees, or the stag. I would say it’s that same idea.
You make so many interesting grammatical choices throughout the work. Namely, the replacement of “and” with an ampersand: “Us, wet & weatherless” (27); the rendering of with as w/: “every future’s still stupid w/ bones.” The inclusion of these symbols references a new terminology, giving it an almost runic/pictorial sense. What is the purpose behind these choices? Would you consider them typographic or linguistic or poetic? Or all of the above?
Historically speaking, both the ampersand and "w/" began at various times as shorthand, that over the years have been, if not codified, at least accepted and widely understood. I write most of my poems on paper, and a big part of how poems happen for me involves lots of note taking and copying things out by hand. I use the shorthand there because I'm focusing on transcription. Afterwards, keeping little abbreviations and conventions like that seem, to me, to establish a few things. It attaches the poems to their previous physicality on paper, and it gives me permission to set the rules for how language works—either in an individual poem, or in the whole collection. Once that happens, it gives me more room to play. Robert Kelly says that "We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness." Or like in The Matrix: once you can recognize that there is in fact a system, you have the ability to fuck with it. The balance I'm trying to find in Reconstructions is, how do I rematerialize language for the reader, wake them up to this daily and often violent system of reference, and also render that strangeness legible, affective?
I also think I'm just interested in the aesthetics of posting, and a lot of that sort of shorthand—textspeak, too, right?—is borne out in posts, in a way that always reads more "authentically" (for lack of a better word) than when I see it in poems or novels or what have you. I love posts, I think they're the ascendant literary form of the 21st century, and I want to study them with the same rigor as any event of language.
“Ekphrasis, I guess” is subtitled “after Ewan Hill” - how does this poem act as a reference to a succession of Hill? Does this reference underlie a greater notion of referentiality (wherein artists beget artists) throughout the collection? If so, how?
For that poem, the reference is largely a debt of language: Ewan, an incredible poet and librarian here in Boston, has a poem they performed a number of years ago now titled "Aubade, I Guess." I love so much about their work, the way they seamlessly weld intellectual rigor to a real vision of tenderness; for that particular poem, I think what drew me to the construction of their title was the invitation to mess around with form, announcing that it's like, a de facto ekphrasis. I want to say, too, that the poem "Hearing Loss" is also in debt to Ewan's work. The line "... bad bad bad girl" is a slightly altered version of a line they'd written and shared with me, which snuck its way into the poem, and unfortunately was not credited in the first printing of the chapbook. I'm grateful to my publisher for allowing me to change the acknowledgements to credit Ewan, and to Ewan themselves for their work, and their grace around my mistake.
As for a broader sense of reference and conversation—yeah, I think that's something I'm always studying. Reading is the single most important thing for how poems happen for me, and have been for the entire six or so years I've been writing poems. So I try all the time to embed myself in study, so as to write poems that are (always) more aware of the traditions and ancestries to which they belong. Which is also, like, my grandmothers, my mom—the ancestors I didn't get to meet in life who immigrated to the US—the land and animals and ferns I notice—and so on. It's all a little woo woo, but it's what resonates with me, intensely. Everything is already tradition; my role is only to belong more wholly to it.
What questions were brought up by the process of completing this collection? Were there any you felt were unexplored in the work itself? If so, how would you like to approach these questions in future (either artistically or otherwise)?
Well, I don't think the collection is completed. Obviously, you know, you can hold it, rip it up (I encourage this!), spill water on it, "finish" it as a reader, etc. But in terms of the project of the book, it requires being unfinished, to me. It's an ongoing mode of study that I think Reconstructions is, at best, only opening, or giving one permission to open. A place of departure. I hope that, at least. Just dipping the toe in the water. I'm working on an essay around this question right now, by which I mean, this word document with a few notes and fragments sure has been open for a while.
Mark Nowak has talked about each of his books being a kind of refutation of the book before it; that seems exactly right to me. And to take it even further, every subsequent poem I write feels like a refutation of every poem I've written before it. Every good poem, that is. They're all arguing with each other—explicitly, invisibly; even if only to my eyes. I wouldn't have it any other way, truly.
Questions: what is the role of the poet in revolution? how can I more truthfully hold the people I love along with myself? what's the relationship of my "I" to a broader sense of a "we" and what are the problems of that? Then, too, questions of, how much more studying and research there is to do, books I need to read, and so on.
All of this to say—always messier, always stranger, always (I hope) more tender, more radical. As I write this, in the midst of a catastrophe that feels like the first moment of real historical change in a very long time, I'm thinking about what it might be to exist in the world more militantly, and what place, if any, poems of mine could have within or around that. That could look like writing fewer poems, or it could mean different kinds of poems being written. Whatever I do, though, I want to be in service of struggle.
You can read Sambamurti’s review of Reconstructions here.
BRADLEY TRUMPFHELLER is from Alabama & Virginia. Their work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, jubilat, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. They co-edit Divedapper & currently live in Massachusetts.
