On the value of making productive mistakes

When did you start writing your book, The Disinherited (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025)?

I started writing this book in 2021, or, some of the poems are that old. And then I got into grad school and went to Brooklyn College, and I feel like I kept on building up manuscripts and deleting half of them and adding more. In school, I kept on trying to think of a unifying idea, for a long or sequence poem, because my second chapbook centered on this vandalized Albrecht Durer painting, where I tried to come at the painting from several point-of-views, Duhrer’s, a lapis lazuli miner, and paint merchant. I had this bodega idea which I worked on for six months, where the book would be kind of a metaphysical bodega, where each poem moves along the supply chain of a specific item.

Do you think you felt pressure to create a book while in graduate school?

I like the form of the poetry book. At the bookstore where I work, people ask me all the time: “How do you ‘read’ a poetry book?” I think it’s common to have this sort of laissez-faire attitude towards it, that you can dip in and out, skip around, and read individual poems. But I think so much of constructing a book of poems is considering structure and rhythm, over the course of the book. So, I recommend people read front to back.

I have a lot of conflicting ideas about what kind of poetry book might be interesting right now, generally. I feel like a lot of new books are arranged into suites or long poems, as a way of giving them structure. And as I continued with my own project though, I loosened my ideas and I just wanted to have a collection of poems that I liked and that went well together.

The Dishinherited is technically a translation, right?

Yeah. I wrote it at the very end of grad school because I took this workshop with Monica de la Torre on translation. I had a little anxiety because everybody in the class spoke Spanish or Yiddish or Farsi, and I don’t speak anything well. I kept on telling her I’m not a translator, so she gave me this book by Johannes Goransson. He runs Action Books with Joyelle McSweeney. And, he has a chapbook on translation where he describes it as a transgressive act because of the impossibility of a pure translation. That idea kind of frees you up to do whatever you want.

You’ve put a lot of thought into the strangeness of translation.

Well, especially with the poem, because on top of the meaning of the individual words or a metaphor or a turn of phrase, you’re also trying to get the sound and texture of the words.

I guess you have to create a kind of hierarchy of significance, in order to translate a poem well?

And, you have to decide what you imagine it all meant to the poet. That if the poet returns to the same image-form, or variations of it, even subconsciously, it acquires these subtle intertextual resonances that might not even be apparent to the poet as they write it. Like in Nerval’s Aurelia, the narrator careens back and forth between the city and the country, staying with friends and lovers, but every ecstatic moment seems to happen on the side of the road or river, and you get this subtle repetition that not only echoes within the book, but within all literature. This roadside incident is not only like the other instances it occurred within the book, but is also like Saul collapsing on the way to Damascus, Oedipus at the crossroads, or the narrator of Hadji Murad finding the thistle in the flower field.

How did you translate from a language you don’t speak?

I found a French-English dictionary and I Googled every word, or I typed every word into the website. I got the translation and I built a crib, a sort of direct one-to-one translation of each word, as clear as possible. And then if it didn’t make any sense… My roommate went to Lysee and I would ask him, what does that mean, like rose tonic or something? He’d say, it means petal. And then I would sculpt it and if I didn’t understand something, I would do like a homophone or if it was a place or proper name, I would change it if I wanted. At the very end, with Monica, I peeked at another translation just to see if I was going in the right direction.

I think it’s good. We don’t need to know what it really said. I think that there’s a risk in translation of too much emphasis on literal meaning. There’s this book called Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg—it’s really funny. But, part of what it argues is that the actual words in a book don’t matter. All that really matters is the variation of sentence length, because what’s happening in a book is a temporal occupation, a transference of the occupation of time, and that rhythm, that sentiment in terms of brevity or expansiveness or curtness, that’s what matters, on a physical level, when we’re reading.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There’s this Garielle Lutz’s essay I return to all the time, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” where she argues kind of the same thing. That by regulating sentence length, sibilance, assonance, by varying grammatical structures like chiasmus, etc, etc, the rhythm and structure and texture themselves produce an effect on the reader that narrative only gestures at. I feel like when you think about your experience of reading Proust, or something, you remember all of the commas and the semicolons, and the sensation of experiencing a sentence…

I feel like you touched upon this subject, in a way, in The Disinherited’s introduction by bringing in the concept of unwriting, of moving through language to get away from the confines of language. Maybe you could talk about unwriting?

As writing gets closer to expressing the impossible, it gets stranger, more distended and recursive. It is pushing against the limitations of language. In the case of Nerval, he used this as a tool to transcribe his ecstatic and depressive mental states. Translating him, I too have to recreate his alienated relationship to meaning.

I really love this quote from Nerval you include in the introduction about language saying alive: “Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds. The magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation.”

Yes! In a lot of his books, Nerval is in love or lonely or walking alone, and he has these ecstatic moments where he sees ghosts and hears things and believes he’s with the woman that loves him, or something like that. And then a few pages after that he would write like, that would never happen to me, nothing ever happened to me and I’ve just been alone in a room. I would never have a moment like that. I would never dance in the street. I think for Nerval that directness was terrifying. And I think that was very exciting in terms of working with him or translating him, that I would be a part of the undoing of this work.

At the risk of using a weighty American term, there actually is a transcendental quality to a lot of your poetry.

Yeah, totally. No, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about. Is Whitman a Transcendentalist?

I think so? Have you read him?

I’ve read him. I’ve read him, but I’ve danced around engaging with him. And I remember in college I told people this about Whitman and Emerson and Thoreau, that I’ve read their work, but I’m kind of afraid to engage with them. And they’d threaten me and they’d say, “You’re going to have your moment with the transcendentalists.”

I think you are, but you’re approaching it from French mysticism.

Right. Well, I think I have a lot of the same concerns as them, how to be in a community and how to be two people in the community, how to be alone in a community, and how to engage with this idea of America, this idea of being a writer in America.

And romanticism, I would say.

Yeah. Romanticism as a kind of mover of ideas, if that makes any sense.

What do you mean?

This idea of Romanticism, in the traditional sense of Goethe or Byron, had to do with a struggle to recognize individual personhood amid the terror of the growing industrial revolution, and cities and so on, and this continued with American Transcendentalism, and manifested in this kind of diffuse hermeticism, drawing from Hinduism and German philosophy, manifesting in these decadent long sentences and beautiful language. But I think what draws me to Nerval, and to Maurice Blanchot too, is this sense of a coming community in their writing. That the poem or novel can approach an infinite point and never quite reach it, and beyond that point is paradisiacal togetherness, community, and love. I think of the third poem in Diane Di Prima’s Letters to Keats, where she writes, “I remember the message I gave Freddie for you / That I would see you again at the end of this. /… Not dreaming how far that would take us.” Or Ted Berrigan: “I open a beautiful letter / from you. When we are both dead, / that letter / will be Part Two / of this poem.” The end of this is after the book, after writing, and everything. And I think that’s what I mean by romanticism–as a way to move the reader closer to that period through language.

That’s beautiful! And also something I noticed about your poems is an equation of the natural world and the poem’s love object in a really interesting way. Lauren Berlant has this great lecture that’s called Life in the Ellipsis, On Biopolitics and the Attachment to Life is the subheading, and it’s about the stasis of losing romanticism as a propellant force. If you forget how to desire, you can’t really move and you become a stagnant person living in the ellipsis, like living in this broken space.

I think that on the converse side of that is someone like H.D. who in Notes on Thoughts and Vision believed in signposts or animating pure romanticism, being able to turn anything into kind of a, almost like a schizophrenic symbol of movement. And I think that’s what Thoreau is about also. I mean, Pound and William Carlos Williams, contemporaries of H.D., I think kind of carry on that romantic propellant tradition. Pound unfortunately to Italian fascism, but…

Yeah, totally.

In your poems, there’s this shifting position of the speaker’s perspective: they’re high and then low, and then they’re plashing on leaves, or they’re looking out at a field, they’re rowing a boat, and then all of a sudden they’re pulled up into space, occupying a God’s eyeview. I feel like that might relate to what you were saying about romanticism as a kind of tethering and untethering, or way of entering landscape and leaving landscape. I don’t know?

Definitely. And I feel like I’m tying that with the H.D. notion of the symbolism, of the terrifying, overwhelming power of the symbols of objects, which Nerval had as well. And I feel that shifting the speaker or the eye allows you to see new symbols. Since I write the individual poems over several days, when I come back to them I find it difficult to return to my writing from the same perspective. I feel like pulling back or moving in kind of allows me to continue writing it.

Oh, so what’s your editing process like then?

I write line by line and the shifting of the perspective allows me to continue writing, because I write in one perspective, and leave my notebook or the computer, and when I come back I can’t quite access the same voice again, so I come at from a different angle, and then continue that perspective for as long as I am able or have time for.

What does composing one line look like?Is it something that comes quickly or do you get a piece of it and then build slowly?

What I usually do is I think of a line, I think of usually the opening line of a poem, and I kind of walk around with that and I shower and I try to get it to three or four lines, which is as many as I can remember, I think. And then I’m whittling the lines down to simple ideas or gestures, so I usually open the poem with an action, or a gesture, something tied to physical movement. Then, I’m speaking them, I’m speaking them to myself. If I’m alone, or in my room, or in the shower. I guess if I can make a distinction I mean inner voice, like a thought that is still tied to the weight and breath of spoken language.

I’m always curious if people are writing to express themselves or in pursuit of some sort of formalism.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that expressing myself is definitely a part of the equation, but at first it’s just expressing a memorable image or thought in the opening line. I think one of my influences here might be Ted Berrigan, who is one of the best writers of opening lines. He writes “Today I woke up / bright & early / Then I went back to sleep” or “Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame.” That almost innocuous situation of the reader in time and place is very inspiring to me, and is kind of a springboard to continue the poem downward from.

I had a pen pal when I was younger and he was very smart, and he told me that you can write something and it can just be for yourself, but then you edit it to make it for other people. And that feels like something poetry’s kind of uniquely good at—being for other people—because it can sometimes approach the objectivity of a painting or a sculpture. A poem you love, you can feel like nobody wrote it.

Yeah, I was going to say that I think it is a durational thing where you’re inside the novel, and I think you can admire or observe a poem outside of time, and it becomes durational during performance.

Yeah. Poetry is freed from the obligation of time in the way that other kinds of writing aren’t.

Or engagement, in the same way as a novel might be.

Who are your favorite poets? People say not to ask that in interviews, but I’ve never not enjoyed knowing.

I think they’re the poets I love and admire, whose influence I feel like I’m still under the spell of. I love Rimbaud and Ashbery and Alice Notley and I love them always. I also like Coolidge. I went back to this book, Black Mirror by Saint John-Perse. Have you heard of him? He’s just like a French weirdo that nobody really reads anymore. And Peter Gizzi, I like a lot. Diane de. Prima. Oh, who’s the Bay Area guy? Bob Kaufman. I like him a lot.

I used to have this problem where whenever I wrote something I felt good about, I would immediately think I had plagiarized it. And then I would go back to the source material I thought I was stealing from and realize it was totally different.

I think it’s more fun to actively steal. I steal from Chaucer and other people like that.

And Nerval.

And Nerval. It’s okay if they died 100 years ago.

You take the exact words?

No, I take the idea of a line. I like this quote of Lacan’s that I feel like I come back to all the time: “Usually I make myself understood inexactly, which is not such a bad thing.” I sometimes think of translating, and sort of all writing, as productive mistake-making. By introducing new mistakes into Nerval, I make new productive mistakes for myself, which allow me to explore new avenues of writing.

That’s not stealing!

Yeah, I guess not. It feels like stealing? I think that’s a good and normal thing to do.

In Of Grammatology Derrida makes an argument that spoken language and written language are distinct and it requires an act of translation to get from one to the other. And so, I was thinking about what you were saying about how you don’t speak another language fluently, and want to say that I think there’s actually an English to English translation that a lot of us are engaged with all the time, which is putting spoken language into the written script.

Definitely, translating spoken language into script, trying to interpret written script, and more nefariously, where scripts speak to each other without any intervention.There’s also multiple Englishes. Accents, regional dialects, patois, pidgin. Growing up around my dad’s family they spoke in patois, something I always had a hard time understanding, although I always found it to be the most beautiful. Rhythmic short cropped phrases, rearranged syntax, an almost Cockney nicknaming system. But even if you don’t understand the words you see the eyes of the speaker, and their face and body language. I just went to the island my grandma is from, and had this very polyglottic speaking experience, communicating in English, Spanish, nods, gestures, and pointing, and I thought how fun it could be if the poem gestured at you, which it does in a way.

That makes me think about how we’re just all going to miscommunicate all the time. And that there’s not this objective knowability that comes from language. A lot of it is just like comfort, or feeling, or sound, or repetition. There’s not some core truth to language, I think.

Yeah. In a conversation, or while hanging out and being with other people, the talking is just the function of what you’re doing.