Anthony Borruso’s Splice opens with: “It is a gross thing to see sound submit/ itself to skull” before the painting Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano by painter Salvador Dalí.
A self-declared “budding egotist,” his speaker pronounces: “My lyric ‘I’ / is oil slick and merrily, merrily confessing/ supposed sins, a smiling Steamboat Willie, / with violent urges and whistling resourcefulness.” In this four-act arc from symptomology, diagnosis, surgery, and recovery: the speaker faces matter-of-factly his obsession with “[t]his hope/ that the rope tongue its way towards my neck.” The slippage between the composure of an elated speaker towards the ennui of the hospital room are mirrored in the vast references drawn from pop culture, film, and literature in Borruso’s vision. His dolly shot is turned to “a rat/ trekking a slice of pizza down/ the tracks. This is where/ one goes when the lights go out, when the sterile gloves tread/ deep in the soul, this is where/ the metronome of the mind is.” The metronome of Borruso’s mind drifts into “taxicab transience” “latched / by these cells–between heaven and hell” of film to “find/ a nice patch of grass in the cemetery of what/ I pretend are my ideals” of contemporary American life. “Sometimes you have/ to confront the world’s malice like a mouse / who’s been burned too many times by spring-/ loaded cheese.” And so he does.
Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem, “Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano,” set up the collection that is to follow?
Anthony Borruso: When I first came across this Dalí painting, I was almost as struck by the title as by the painting itself. Its language is sexual, transgressive, and flabbergasting; it imbues the explicit solidity of the skull with the intangibility of that descriptor “atmospheric,” and there is an unexpected sonic beauty to its diction, that silky sibilance of the first three words yielding to that final long O sound in “Piano.” Which is why the opening lines of the poem are hyper-focused on the intermingling of sound and image, creating a sense of synesthesia by declaring that it is a “gross thing to see sound.” Like many other moments in this collection, this poem wants its reader to think about how their experience of the world is shaped by the language they use to describe it and the way various sense perceptions often blur with one another, especially in the realm of poetry where image, sound, and bodily rhythms are all so central to the reading experience.
I also wanted the opening of this book to have the quality of a poetic invocation. Just as Sappho calls out to Aphrodite to inspire her love lyrics or Dante follows Virgil as he makes his pilgrimage through the underworld, I felt that Dalí, with his disorienting imagery, mischievousness, and deep engagement with the unconscious, could serve a similar purpose on my own introspective journey. Starting with this reference to his painting gave me permission to surprise and defamiliarize, to take something blunt and rigid like the skull and make it malleable and amorphous. As someone who suffers from Chiari Malformation, a neurological condition that stems from a misshapen skull that squeezes the cerebellum (i.e., the back part of the brain), I felt as if I should learn to love my flawed cranium. The skull, it occurred to me, doesn’t have to be reduced to this harbinger of doom and mortality; it can be a more lively and changing symbol, something that, as described in my first poem, is “pliant, unreasonable, swollen / with honest deception....” This is why I keep coming back to the skull. As the collection progresses, there is a poem about Yorick’s skull from Hamlet, another about the skull-based surgery I had a few years ago because of my Chiari symptoms called “Self-Portrait with an Open Skull,” and one called “Foramen Magnum” which takes its title from the anatomical name for the opening at the bottom of the skull through which the brain stem passes. In all of these poems, it’s as if I’m detaching my own skull and scrutinizing it, considering its anatomical features as well as its potent metaphorical possibilities.
TT: What about the visual within the Dalí painting inspired this poem?
AB: I couldn’t get over the symbolic implications of that central image of the skull “sodomizing” the piano, and how it seems to be forcing itself under the lid and entering the musical instrument. This made me think of the dynamic of dominance and submission in one of Yeats’ most memorable poems, “Leda and The Swan,” which retells the Greek myth about how Zeus transformed himself into a swan in order to rape the mortal Leda. As in many Yeats poems, this assault seems to be equated with an overwhelming modern world in which traditional customs and beliefs could no longer be relied on. In its last two lines, the poem concludes by asking, “Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” Picking up on this note of uncertainty, my poem references “the selfsame beak that broke Leda” as a means of questioning the origins of lyricism and the extent of the poet’s agency. Is he merely an instrument played by larger cosmic forces, or is he actively finding a way to channel those forces?
Another aspect of the painting that I found intriguing is the two small figures sitting upon a half-constructed wall in the background, both of whom are turned away from the grotesque coupling of skull and piano. This suggested to me that the central image is akin to the collective unconscious of those two figures. Though they look away, their desires, perversions, fears, and fixations are inescapable, and they’re just as beautiful as they are horrific. This idea of revealing a hidden inner world, in the context of my manuscript, felt like an apt way to analogize my neurological condition, as it led to discomfort that no one else could see, along with obsessive thoughts and anxieties about what was going on within my own body. Like Dalí, I want to use my art to give access to my psychic interior, to ply the reader with sweet melodies as well as the unsavory copulations that occur there.
TT: Chris Campanioni in his review of Splice for the Brooklyn Rail notes that “splice” refers to the cutting and joining of film at the turn of the twentieth century, the way it refers to surgery in the eighteenth and to genetics in the nineteenth century. I felt that in your opening poem and the poem that follows a sense of splice, in the melding of the self-portraits that turn the speaker into its persona, in the almost-obsessive insistence upon the contemplation of death even while questioning its ethics, and the physicality and emotional space of brain stem surgeries. Turning to the overall structure of the collection, how did you land upon the four-sectioned structure with a proem and ending golden shovel? Does your status as a film aficionado play a role in the ordering within sections?
AB: I’m glad you mentioned Chris’s review! He does such a fine job of digging into the term “Splice” and the various resonances it has within the collection—cinematic, genetic, surgical, and intertextual. Prior to coming up with that title, I was really struggling with whether or not the collection felt coherent and organized. I had some poems that were about my Chiari surgery, others that were about film and character actors, and others that were about figures from early American literature that I admire, like Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson, but it wasn’t clear to me that these subjects could all peacefully co-exist under the same title. Then I struck upon Splice, which allowed me to wrangle these ideas together while still having a productive tension. With such an inclusive title, it felt as if anything from Pete Davidson and Chang Tzu to The Odyssey and Jeopardy could be made to fit into my lyric montage. A lot of writing teachers will tell you to give yourself permission to write different poems and take on disparate subjects; however, I don’t think that, by itself, is enough. One should also use language and form in a way that enacts that permission. Without the right title, I wouldn’t have felt as free to write as expansively and defiantly as I did.
At the same time that the title “Splice” opened up the collection, I still knew it couldn’t be haphazard or jumbled. To tighten things up structurally, I naturally gravitated towards four sections that are somewhat chronological in terms of their progression. Because I bounce between so many different subjects and ideas, I felt that the structure itself should be fairly simple and reliable, something that would anchor the reader as they follow the many tendrils of my poetic persona’s ruminations. That is why the four sections essentially create a medical narrative, moving from symptomology and diagnosis in sections I and II, to surgery in section III and, finally, a period of recovery in section IV. And yes, film certainly informs the way I move within and between these sections. For instance, the proem that begins the book and the Golden Shovel that ends it both take a broad view on things, almost like a wide-angle expositional shot of a town or a city or a planet that might begin or end a film. Before introducing any characters or dilemmas, I wanted the reader to get an abstract sense of the world they were entering, one that is “honed in onanism and hopelessness,” where there is this intense isolation and writing might be a melancholic masturbatory exercise where you “stroke an I like a shadow / fondling its lack...” The Golden Shovel is similarly broad but much less isolating and horrifying. It’s about as close as I can get to a happy ending since the speaker has been able to find a sense of connection through writing and comes to accept that “They’re no big deal these things: / Brutus, Judas, we’re all chock full of betrayal...”
From these vast overviews or intellectualized landscapes, I often like to make sudden and wrenching movements inward. That’s why I go from “Atmospheric Skull...” and Dali’s limitless psychic desert to a poem like “In Defense of Voice-Over,” where the speaker is now entirely interiorized and purposefully plagiarizing the opening of Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation. by asking, “Do I have an original thought in my head.” I’m always amazed that films are able to make such radical transitions from exterior to interior. One of my favorite examples of this is in Uncut Gems, which was written and directed by the Safdie brothers and stars Adam Sandler. Its opening scene gives a bird’s-eye shot of an Ethiopian diamond mine and its many toiling workers. We then lock onto a particular worker who finds an outrageously decadent gem that the camera zooms into and seems to enter, revealing an interior of opalescent greens and blues. From there, the camera proceeds through a series of cavernous tubes as the color gradient changes, and eventually, we realize we’re in a human body. The camera is now showing us the inside of the main character’s small intestine as he experiences a colonoscopy. Besides being a smart way of hinting at the faraway discovery that will lead to this protagonist’s ruin (things are going to get a lot shittier than his colonoscopy), I thought this was the most perfect way to disorient a viewer and leave them feeling uncertain about where they were or what they were witnessing. There are a lot of places in my collection where I try to give my reader a similarly bewildering experience where, as they travel from line to line, they might just as likely be inside a gem or a colon.
TT: Speaking of form, in your writing process, does poetic form give rise to its content or vice versa? And what do you feel the “white space” in the caesura and stanza breaks contrasts with the prose poetry form in the context of your collection?
AB: For me, whether the form or content comes first depends on the poem. Sometimes I’m writing about a subject that I suspect would work well as a sonnet, or couplets, or a golden shovel. Other times, I just write and see what shape the language takes on the page. “5G Golden shovel” is a good example of the former. Since I knew right away that I wanted to write a response to Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant yet enigmatic novel The Crying of Lot 49, I wanted to find a form that would complement the book and its themes. To amplify the book’s obsession with ambivalent messaging and conspiracies regarding an alternate mailing system, I thought it’d be fun to make this poem a Golden Shovel where I could weave in a line from the novel by placing its words at the end of each successive line. This way, the reader could explore the poem and then get that extra little treat at the end, this deranged quote by an outlandish theater director named Randolph Driblette: “I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.” To add to the poem’s sense of disorientation and disrupted communication, I also tabbed the lines in a random yet repeating pattern and included a lot of caesuras that disrupt its syntax and allow for lines to have multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings. The American sonnets in response to Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville were also cases where I knew the form going into the poem. Following in the footsteps of folks like Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes, and Diane Suess, who have taken the traditional sonnet form and freed it from metrics and its preoccupation with romantic love, these poems use the American Sonnet to examine iconic early American writers and consider the relevance of their ideas in our digital world. These poems are especially indebted to Suess, who, in her collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, melds the American Sonnet with Ginsberg’s American sentence (a kind of linear version of the haiku) by keeping a consistent 17-syllable count in each of her lines. I’m not perfectly consistent with that, but I did feel that staying in the same syllable range helped to give these poems more rhythmic integrity and a structural consistency that would work to wrangle up their free-range thoughts.
Then I have poems like “A Hypochondriac Walks into Fourteen Lines” and “Void-Song,” where I had no idea how they might look on the page until I had started to get their language down. In “A Hypochondriac...” I opened with these frenetic trochees: “Poundcake, earthquake, paranoiac zest...” and tried to just let them have their way with me, seeing if I could keep up their rhythm or subtly shift it as the poem progressed. I didn’t realize it until after I had written the poem, but it’s fourteen lines, so you could (though I’m sure formalists would disagree) call it a sonnet; however, I had no intention to write one. For “Void-Song,” I remember beginning with that opening line, “I open door after door,” and wanting to craft a homage to Emily Dickinson, who has so many poems where ordinary domestic objects like doors, windows, and closets become portals into her expansive imagination and the paradoxical world of poetry. As I continued writing and these images of “doors” proliferated, I realized adding caesuras worked really well. Similar to Dickinson’s poems, they felt like little doors themselves that the reader could enter, where my language might make some room for their experience. I don’t want to dictate anyone else’s process or make grand proclamations about how to deal with form, but, for me, it feels right to allow myself to sometimes write to a form and sometimes discover one. I feel like I have more options and possibilities this way.
TT: The amplification of obsession through a received form versus writing to a form is a helpful distinction, I feel, from aspiring poets especially. This is your debut collection. What are you working on today?
AB: Yes, for sure.
Right now, I’m in the midst of working on a second collection that is thinking a lot about the history of the love lyric and how the digital world is weirdly similar to Petrarchan poetry in how it presents us with idealized, fragmented, and almost intangible feminine figures. For instance, think about Amazon’s Alexa, how she exists as purely a voice that responds to your needs and commands–to me, this feels like a logical extension of Petrarch’s Laura, whom the male author often described in heightened yet abstract terms, and who is ultimately a means of memorializing his poetic brilliance more than her beauty. I find these dynamics to be really interesting, especially as we head towards AI paramours and more algorithms that want to reflect our wants and desires back to us. Writing about this topic has been a fun way to deconstruct our often gendered language, and to return to some of my favorite old school poets: Dante, Phillip Sydney, Shakespeare.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the language of conspiracy lately. That culty, Q Anon speak that tells you to “do your research” or that manages to find vast conspiracies in even the most mundane observations. On one hand, it’s scary that folks fall so deeply down the rabbit hole, but on the other, there’s something almost poetic in how these grifters, cult leaders, and, in some cases, politicians, spin their narratives and craft a fantasy world for their followers to inhabit. This book I recently read, called Cultish, by writer and critic Amanda Montell has been especially inspiring to me. She really digs into the linguistic mechanisms behind cults and talks about things like the “thought-terminating cliche,” language like “it is what it is” or “maybe that’s just God’s plan,” and how this functions as a brick wall for critical thought to run into. One of the poems I’m currently writing, for instance, is about this satirical conspiracy theory called “Birds Aren’t Real” which lampoons conspiracy theorists by using that same manipulative language to perpetuate an outlandish conspiracy theory, that the government has eradicated all the birds and replaced them with bird surveillance drones. My poem reflects on this absurd conspiracy but also takes its conceit seriously, thinking about what effect these bird drones would have on the art of poetry since birds have been a loaded poetic symbol for a long, long time. What would this mean for Keats’ “Ode to Nightingale” or Coleridge’s foreboding albatross in “Rhime of the Ancient Mariner”?
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
AB: I don’t know how global my following is at the moment (haha). But I would just encourage them to keep reading, watching, and listening to the things that make them happy. Also, good friends give friends book and movie recommendations! To sneak in one more movie before I go, I just watched Anatomy of a Fall and it was a brilliant film. Suspenseful, well-paced, has a literary protagonist and some courtroom drama. Watch it. And if you like it, tell your friends to watch it, too.
Anthony Borruso’s Splice was chosen by Oliver de la Paz as the winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Award for Excellence in Poetry. Anthony recently completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University, where he was a Poetry Editor for Southeast Review and co-host of the Jerome Stern Reading Series. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and was selected as a finalist for Beloit Poetry Journal‘s Adrienne Rich Award by Natasha Trethewey. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Spillway, The Journal, THRUSH, Gulf Coast, CutBank, Frontier, and elsewhere.