Interview With Daniel Borzutzky

James Chung McKenna: I understand you’re recently back from South Africa, where you were collaborating with another artist on a book?

Daniel Borzutzky: Yes, the book is called The Breathers, and it was written with South African writer and artist Stacy Hardy. It’s a part of a larger project called Transperformations, a collaboration between Stacy, myself, an anthropologist at The University of Chicago, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and South African musician Neo Muyanga. The project examines what we’re calling “the politics of breath,” including respiratory disease, and suppressions of breath as a tactic of colonialism and state oppression. 

The Breathers came out of an invitation to write a piece for a forthcoming anthology on Muriel Rukeyser, and we took her text, The Book of the Dead, as a starting place to think about the interlinking of capitalism, race, and respiratory disease. We were thinking about both mining practices, respiratory disease, race, colonialism as shared experiences between the Americas, South Africa, and Europe as well. The book is a choral opera, with several speakers, named “Breather 1,” “Breather 2,” and so on in a chorus. It is attempting to articulate something about breath, race, colonialism, and this larger construction of what we call “the politics of breath.” It is a co-written long poem that includes several drawings of mine and Stacy’s as well.

JCM: That’s exciting that the writing and illustrating were something you each did. I say that primarily because, as I understand, you also did the cover for this collection, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas.

DB: Drawing is something new to me. A couple years ago I was obsessively drawing, perhaps as a way of not writing, honestly, and I was able to find myself doing it for hours and hours and hours in a way that was very different from how I was able to write. The cover drawing has a title, called New Map of the Americas #502, and there are several map-like drawings that I made that were granular and obsessive. Drawings like those are also in The Breathers, along with various maps of mining sites that Stacy had created. I’ve really enjoyed working in an art form I’m unfamiliar with, whose discourses I’m unfamiliar with. It’s been extremely freeing to be in that space of naivete and desire. This is the first time the world is seeing a drawing of mine as well, so I’m grateful that Coffee House Press agreed to put it on the cover.

JCM: This collection picks up, in a sense, where Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 ends, by which I mean that you close out that collection with poems titled “The Murmuring Grief of the Americas” and this new collection opens as well with a poem by this title. Of course, this is not the first time that we see such calling back in your work; in this collection we see another “Performance of Becoming Human,” “Day #,”  “Apparatus #,” “Lake Michigan” scenes, “The Devouring Economy of Nature,” all make a return. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you write about what you think and care about, explaining the recurrence of these titles, but I’m wondering if you could speak to how this collection, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas feels like an extension, departure, revision, perhaps none of these, but how you see this book in relation to your past collections.

DB: There is a sequence in one of the “Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018” poems that goes:

“In the rupture,
in the rubble, in the pathological eye sockets,
in the counter odyssey of the whites of your eyes,
in the parliamentary assault rifle, the
parliamentary machine gun splatter,
the illegal bodies in cages are painted over
by the analytics and mathematics
of the hemisphere. How do you quantify the broken
toddlers rolling on the ground? How do you quantify 
the murmuring grief of the Americas?” 

I started this new book as an attempt to answer that question: how do you quantify the murmuring grief of the Americas? I’m not trying to statistically analyze anything, but I feel like the collection, to the extent that it is an “extension,” is thinking about the possible ways in which grief manifests, is quantified, and interferes with or coincides with bureaucratic and administrative state structures. The pandemic, and writing this during the pandemic, was a perfect illustration of how the quantification of grief was something that we were always coming into contact with: the counts of covid cases, the numbers of people dying, statistics about the psychological effects of isolation, rates of violence and alcoholism increasing, general social debilitation. The pandemic also clearly exposed the intersections of race, poverty, and respiratory disease; as well as the connections to poverty and dangerous working conditions. Those were all things that I was thinking a lot about as I wrote this book.  

There’s a piece in Murmuring Grief collection called “Lake Michigan, Scene #2022 {Nonessential Personnel}.” I was really interested in the pandemic practice of dividing people into categories of essential and non-essential.  

JCM: Quantification happens on both a global and political scale, but also on a scale that takes root in a person. I’m thinking of “Day #1101,” where the speaker says “I am tired but there is no place for tiredness/ Is my blood worth eighteen/ Is my sperm worth fourteen,” this logic that makes quantification, no matter how inhuman it feels, the only register by which the state may recognize you. The numbering in your titles, another form of quantification, feels important here. “Lake Michigan, Scene #2022,” can bring to mind the year, but also these poems tackle overt police and state violence; one imagines over 2000 scenes of this, and that can feel crushing and innumerable in its numbering. Can you speak to your relationship to quantifying in these titles?

DB: I can think of three answers in regards to the numbering. The first is that it is often a timestamp. The numbers are often dates: “Day #1101” signifies that I began to write it on November 1st. Second, I’m also interested in the notion of repetition and difference. The “Lake Michigan” pieces are, on the one hand, repetitions because they are supposedly taking place in the same location. Within that repetition, there are different registers of racialized violence. Murmuring Grief is also concerned with the environmental violence happening around the lake and the water. Third, I’m interested in the poetics of the numbers. Numbers and the languages of math and economics have a poetics that, for my purposes, are bureaucratic, non-poetic, and clunky. I’m really interested in bringing together non poetic discourses into poetry, and numbers and economics provide a way to try and do that.

JCM: To your point about repetition, something that feels special in this collection and where we see variation through repetition is in the collection’s sections. There’s this recurring question: “When will I be human again?” Which then is “When will we be human again?” Then “you,” and “they.” The variation in the repeating question is in the pronominal; how did this come to be as an organizing principle for the collection?

DB: I’m interested in the ways in which becoming human is connected to what we see as nonhuman or nonhumane characteristics: to be human is also to be violent, less humane, less interested in the humanity of others. The performance of becoming human is about the very human establishment of technologies of violence and death. 

The progression of I, we, you, they: there’s something obvious in moving from the individual to the collective as an experience, the “I” and “we.” The last section is called “Sustainable Growth,” which is a concept in both economics and also environmentalism.

JCM: In the first poem, before we get into the sections, is titled the same as the collection, and in the final stanza we are told: “But in the story you’ve been waiting for I will not be an I and you will not be a you.” Fady Joudah so brilliantly asserts about your work that it refuses “the distinctions between the interior and the exterior self… the cult of the individual is exposed as agent and puppet of the collective capitalist domination.” What we might call the lyric “I”, or others call  the poet speaker, the first person voice writ large, is integral to your work, and I wanted to know what your relationship to writing in the first person was for this collection.

DB: The first person, here, is a very fluid first person. It is rarely a consistent first person narration.

JCM: “FOMO” comes to mind, where the first person feels like a totally new character… it would be almost impossible to read this collection and think the “I” is the same person or voice the entire way.

DB: The “I” is as important or as unimportant as all of the other voices in the book. It is a poetic strategy to acknowledge my own subjectivity and to try and present it in a cacophony of other voices, ideas, and influences. It’s a first person that is always very suspicious of its own poetic authority, so it’s often subverting its own positionality and authority. 

JCM: We watch that scene unfold in the first poem through the “director,” and it's that particular point of view, and his title too, feels so important as well, one who is giving direction, and in the context of this book, dictator and dictate come to mind. In this boundedness of others inside a singular first person who is witnessing, I was thinking of the Dickinson epigraph in this collection:

“Of Glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal House—
The asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Stars”

It feels to me as though the asterisk is housed in the star, and the star atrophies into an asterisk. 

DB: I love Dickinson, and the book I’m currently working on has her all over it. That line: “The asterisk is for the Dead,/ The Living, for the Stars,” felt so visual and cyber, like something that lives in the moment of keyboards and not of pen and paper. The asterisk as a footnote, the dead as a footnote. The visual symbol of the asterisk pointing to the dead we cannot see.  

JCM: Maybe to pivot back to some of these first person moments, I was thinking of two poems in particular in your collection that struck me, “Poem Written Under a Pseudonym” and “How I Wrote Certain of My Books,” which very explicitly take a look at, whether it’s a contemporary cultural concern or not: “Who is the speaker? Is it the author whose name is on the cover of the book?” For instance, a line in the latter poem: “I wrote a bad book on purpose and it was the best book I ever wrote and I won a big prize and I was invited to give a reading at Harvard.” Could you speak to the role of explicit self-reference, what some might call an autobiographical move?

DB: “How I Wrote Certain of My Books” (the title of a Raymond Roussel novel) quotes a review of my own work, where a reviewer of The Performance of Becoming Human said: “It’s not that he’s a bad writer, it’s that he appears to be writing as a bad writer on purpose.” As you can guess, this was a negative review, but it’s actually kind of my favorite review of any of my books. Perhaps bad reviews should just be launching points: invitations to take the thing you’re criticized for and to do it even more. By “bad,” I think the reviewer means, “non-poetic” and “distasteful,” and those descriptors seem to me to be things to own rather than to feel some sort of remorse about. And so I’ve thought a lot about what it might mean to be a bad writer on purpose. And I’ve concluded that it’s not as easy as it sounds.

The question of authorship is centered in both of those poems. In “How I Wrote Certain of My Books,” it’s revealed that the narrator writes certain of his books after being given a thumb drive full of texts by a dying author. And in “Poem Written Under a Pseudonym,” there’s a salesperson who sells their poems to other poets. In both of those cases, I was trying to open up a conversation about authorship: borrowing, influence, appropriateness, etc.

JCM: The good and bad is sometimes made out to be lyric versus political, which feels like an incorrect demarcation as well.

DB: Yeah, the lyric or political, high language and low language, those distinctions are never innocent. As if: “You are being political over there when you use political language, but I’m not being political when I point out the badness of your non poetic or political language.” It’s a way of saying: “over there, you’re political because you use political language. But I’m not political even when I criticize you for your political language.

JCM: Something those poems do, and another poem as well, “Writing #1209 {In the Penal Colony}," is address the writing of the writing. You’ve written about this before, and the importance of the gag, and I wanted to know more about how you were thinking about the writing of the writing, and this poem as a vehicle for addressing this concern of yours.

DB: I have been thinking about Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” for forever, and in particular I’ve been thinking about the gag that the prisoner is forced to put in his mouth. The tour guide on the island is showing the foreigner the death apparatus that he was once proud of, but which has been abandoned economically by the bureaucratic infrastructure. In particular, he’s very embarrassed that the prisoner to be executed doesn’t get to put a fresh gag in their mouth, that they have to use a gag that has been used by so many prisoners before. I’ve been interested in the gag as the site of shared fluids, and of a silencing that is shared from prisoner to prisoner. Perhaps in this poem writing is about animating the shared silences that move back and forth from mouth to mouth, from body to body, of those who are about to die. 

JCM: We see that in the opening line: “The writing is the knot that binds the gag,” and so it is both the person who imposes that violence, who ties the knot, as well as “The writing is/ the word/ that will never arrive,” the person who is silenced. It passes between them.

DB: I’m interested in how literature comes out of different kinds of violent state mechanisms. Literature, the need to document, is somehow produced by the knot, the gag, the knot that holds the gag together. 

JCM: There are these two levels that violence is addressed through, a mezzanine of sorts. There’s a voice that is speaking to the violence of the state, the police, the ruling class of bankers, and there’s also a voice that asks: “Excuse me, sir, what time is the massacre?” which tonally has a different register. Are these different levels of voice—speaking to violence while at other times possessing a flat affect toward it—does something emerge between or among these voices?

DB: The repetition of that line, “Excuse me, sir, what time is the massacre?” is bringing a civilized politeness up against the most brutal form of destruction. It’s about the routinization and bourgeois normalization of the most extreme forms of violence. 

JCM: That rhythmic experience comes up for me in the phrase “but and,” which comes up in your poems. It gestures at this grammatic separation and unification at the same time. A stop-start, an encapsulating of forced division and a gesture at unification. In a similar realm, portmanteaus appear in this collection: “earthstatebank,” “airbreathdeath,” “griefshame.” What did these offer you in the writing?

DB: In the “but and,” there’s a weird poetic acknowledgment of myself, that I often begin lines with either “but” or “and,” and I’m drawn to the conjunction as a starting point. I often change my “buts” to “ands.” And here it seemed as if the conjunctions were both interrupting and continuous at the same time. 

In the world of this book, which has some relationship to how I see the actual world, it makes sense to put the earth, the state, and the bank into one capsule, to say that these are all forces that we can’t separate: the destruction of the earth from the state and the bank. “Timedeath” is a similar idea; we cannot think about death without thinking about time. In the book I wanted to present death and time as two things that are insurmountable problems that ought to be phrased together. 

In terms of “griefshame”. In Spanish, the word “pena,” can mean both “pain” and “shame.” I’ve translated it both ways and seen it translated both ways. I was thinking about the way those two things are contained in the one word, and the grief of the pandemic was so tied up in my own shame, or our communal shame, of witnessing the deaths of so many people in our own communities in ways that were preventable. I felt like I was experiencing grief and shame at the same time. Those two things felt, to me, inseparable.

JCM: In the final section of the book, titled “The Murmuring Grief of the Americas,” there are six poems of that same title, each single-stanza prose poems, and I was thinking about the final section of poems by the same title in your last collection, which you’ve said before came out of an intense period of writing after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue. How did these six poems come to be as the ending to this collection? What did the prose poem form offer?

DB: The book started with these pieces, and there were more that didn’t make it into the collection. In the very first one of these poems: “There are desperate laborers trying to cross the river. How much should we pay them? Market rate?” There is a thinking about migration and market while at the same time the river is being inundated with batteries and chemicals. In the whole section, the poems are centering the Americas, movements and continuums of violence and migration, alongside profit and capitalism and environmental destruction.

As well, there’s a talking with the dead in these pieces: “We ask the murmurers what they want to do with themselves now that they don’t get to live anymore.” These are the ghosts of the Americas and the ghosts produced by the conjunction of the earth, the state, and the bank.  

JCM: S. Yarberry has written about your relationship to the monostich, saying: “The monostich provides a form that allows for accretion while simultaneously allowing for the act of withholding, blanking, and stalling information. This is what one might consider a poetics of disclosure: a rapid transformation from one thing to the next.” I wanted to ask you: what is your conception of the line? 

DB: I’m interested in the blank space between those lines as much as I am in the line itself. It seems to me that if you’re talking about the line, there’s a space between one line to another, and that’s actually the thing I’m most interested in, what exists in that empty space: a separation of thought, a transition that reveals something new

JCM: As we pivot out of the world of this collection, I’m curious to know what writing and reading you’ve been doing lately, if it feels like a shift away from this collection.

DB: At the moment I’m much more interested in the book as a physical object than I’ve ever been before. If I could do anything right now, it would be to make something like ‘artists books.’

I’m feeling frustrated by the non-dimensionality of the traditional book, and I think a lot about what the book is when it’s stretched out or what materially holds it together. Part of this comes from my translation of Cecilia Vicuña’s Deer Book, which includes verse poems, drawings, it’s full of found texts from indigenous thinkers, thinkers about plants and the earth, and it reads like a library of Cecilia’s influences. I don’t know how she put this all together. At any rate, I’m thinking about what actually constitutes a book. I’d like to expand and stretch that out.