“Something Rattling Apart: A Conversation with Michael Snediker” — curated by Lisa Olstein


Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?

Michael Snediker: Scrapes, scraps, back of embroidery (the mess of it). The paper used as a kind of blotter for collecting the excess marks of some more conventional drawing laid on top of it (coloring in a sky as rapidly as possible); reality effect of what survives surviving elsewhere; which (by definition, more or less) isn’t necessarily legible according to the forms by which it had been given before the erosion or overstep that the survival follows.

LO: “Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson, and I believe her. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?

MS: Imagining something like centrifuging the scraps in a loupe, shifting the shape of thought from qualities of cohesiveness to the entropy of thinking (thought freed by form rather than from it as effort at crazing, in the manner of clay, back to something shy of thought-objects, to loose perseverating threads, little emblems worn down). The more stringently lineated poems as effort at exploiting properties of isolation by which discrete clauses and the like might register themselves as in a bullpen.

(Having spent many awkward-bodied childhood years on swim-teams, the bullpen as theater-in-the-wings, literalized site of holding pattern. Dread of near-future, Isabel Archer’s midnight vigil rescheduled for late morning suburban blaze, young din, Speedo and flaying, abashing thrill of exposure. Once in the pool one’s dread at least having the narrow Hockney lane constraining where the inward flourish swims out; in the bullpen, on the verge of trying to contain oneself, the gun going off and the comedy of sublimation (goggled, kick-turned). Waiting underdressed for the event in this nearby vacuole, and the ribbons, sometimes, to show for it—antique girlishness of a boy’s ribbon collection—what the bullpen has to show for itself proving harder to track.)

The intimation of thought and form as co-evolving, of co-evolution in the unfolding (in the un), reminds me of Barthes: “As a fantastical digression, this: it goes without saying that we’ll be thinking of Living-Together as an essentially spatial fact (living together in the same space). But in its most basic form Living-Together is also temporal... the ultimate sign of Living-Together—to ‘talk together’” (How to Live Together, 5). Second queer tableau of boyhood’s athletic half-determination: anxiety of being on a bicycle, some ways behind twin brother and his bicycle, all their comparable efficiency. And the fear of school-buses, ditches, falling, falling enough behind that one would need to find one’s way home without the twin and his unfailing sense of direction.

“Talk[ing] together” as one twin (exasperated, shrill) calling to the other: WAIT UP. Which is to say the tableau of trying to stay in a frame before the tableau itself speeds off, and the new scene (un-scene) then, in which one would find oneself, proverbially or otherwise. Tableau lag and teeming bullpen as closet variants.

“They no longer shuttle between the traumatic and the critical. It is our task to catch up to them, to find out what happened: wait up! Were we to take on the tactic that sustained them throughout their struggles, we would return to their desire for utopian beauty, for absorption in new attunements to emancipating image or sound. We would have no choice but to be gratified that, finally, these two hypervigilant minds have come to rest in their bodies without being dead or crazy” (Cruel Optimism 153).

Form, thought:

“Gradiva walking, one foot raised, in the bas-relief.” (How to Live Together, 115)

“Expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. With my own eyes I could see silences that had assumed bodily shapes.” (Blumenberg, citing Valéry)

LO: What’s the relationship between the speaker’s “I” and you, yourself? How is the book’s “I” informed by your I and/or eye?

MS: The book’s “I,” by virtue of living mostly in a book and thus somewhat freed from the pressure of maintaining a self for and against the world, has the luxury—freed, in other words, from needing to sustain a continuity felt somewhere else as aspirational, from needing to be sustained (the “I” as carrot dangled some ways ahead)—of appearing as a site of poise (where the poise comes and goes), rather than poise itself. That the “I” recognizes itself as muscle-memory only fleetingly, as “the points/ upon which various and misguided winds/ can agree” (Peter Richards), doesn’t mean its imprint isn’t found on the world traveling through it. What these imprints accumulate—accumulate as—as seems different, wishfully, from a self moved through difficulty like a peg or avatar. To this end, the “I” of the book is like a position taped on a stage that gives an impression (of the stage) of movement.

The relationship between this “I” and “you, yourself,” then, is a bit like Munchausen-by-proxy run in both directions. A child pouring pretend tea for its doll, who pretends to drink it. If the virtue of fantasy, as Freud suggests in “A Child Is Being Beaten,” is that one is free (such as this is) to occupy any and all coordinates of a scene, then it’s not always clear when the self or the eye is the child, or the doll, or the imaginary thing steeped between them. A lot of the time my eye feels responsible (whether it is or not) for the arrangement of these loci, while doing its best to forget its hand in the darting around. Which is to say that the self, when it’s there, might be indicated in the small clamors by which the disavowal of responsibility (which surely comprises a fantasy in its own right) gives, in fact, itself away.

LO: How do the book’s aesthetics inform its ethics, or, how do its ethics inform its aesthetics?

MS: I appreciate the chiasmus/palindrome of this question, how it leads us to imagine aesthetics and ethics as mutually interlineating (as though each were a shell, and each the other’s nacreous if not silver lining). The project of these poems, I hope, is one of discrepancy, a word having to do, so I’ve just discovered, with something rattling apart. To follow this etymological line one step further, the Latin word for rattle or clatter is crepare, which is linked (onomatopoetically) to the sound of ravens.

As it happens, I was already thinking about Poe’s “The Raven” in relation to this question of interlineation, to the extent that its trochaic engine illuminates something like the chronic effort at alignment by which one’s ability to inhabit a world is sustained. Consider, for instance, “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.” To tightrope inside the acoustic shape of the poem’s world—a world invariably eroding more quickly than our counter-eroding efforts can manage and, as often, a world further worn away by the very repertoires we think will come to our shared rescue; a world, in other words, not unlike our own—one must dig into that opening And, “wedg[ing]...downward,” as Thoreau puts it.

Even as our instinct (or our instinct, at any rate, apart from the peculiar conditions of the poem) may be to move through And with all the efficiency on which the triage of our self-driven circumstances seem to insist. And if we do this, zipping through And on our way to the silken uncertainty on which the line precariates, we reach the purple curtain too quickly; metrically speaking, our foot tries to land on a line we’ve already used up, leaving us in air where we thought the line would be.

Trust fall fail, thin ice, or as William Carlos Williams writes, “as if we walked upon a cushion of light pressed thin beneath our feet, that insulates, satirizes—while we lash ourselves up and down.” 

I love this moment of vertigo, of finding oneself less in the poem than a kind of no-man’s land just to the side of it. As I suggest to my students, this glitch models the speed with which we are sometimes jilted from the world. And so my interest in Jones Very was to disappoint some of the repertoires by which experiences of readerly stability are achieved; not quite replacing one set of managerial modes with another so much as inviting the possibility of lingering longer in drastic hover.

In the presence of neither scenic reliability nor the consistency of a voice speaking the world through its cohering coordinates, the poems leave us, perhaps, with more filigree than we know how to metabolize. It’s not that the decorative governs the textual environment at hand, so much as the ancillary aspect of the decorative is freed from answering to those pressures of transparency to which writing, even experimental writing, so frequently proves susceptible.

If the ancillary, in Jones Very, is ornamentally everywhere, the ethos of the book’s coming into being extends to the openness with which we come to receive the turbulent impactions of this ornamentality, learning a soft receptiveness to its microscales without the trust of reception too quickly sharpening into a procedure.

LO: What’s your sense of the aural life of this work? What role did sound or music play in the generative process, in revision?

MS: I’m interested in how the sound internal to poems—a field, say, of overlapping acoustic geodes—takes up space that curtails how meaning comes to occupy and, over time, fob itself off as a textual currency (as is the way of artificial intelligence). That the aural life of words-in-relation fosters the atmosphere in which the words might be said to live sometimes gives the illusion (as over an expanse of several stanzas, several poems) of having preceded the scenarios (the residuum and germ of scenarios) embedded in it. The pleasure and travail of this acoustic shimmer thus make it difficult to cordon the atmosphere of the poems from the atmosphere that the poems, acoustically and otherwise, become in us. These aural afterlives approximate a kind of mysticism, if we imagine the latter as an environment in which something like the living swims, and which the living may occasionally (and rightly) confuse with itself: mysticism as those non-referential inklings and moods by which the ordinary is betrayed. Somewhat differently put, these sylphs of sound—which the poems variously induce or shed but can’t themselves hear—map something like the work’s libidinal ecology, suggesting less what desire is than where it is collecting, where it has been.

LO: What kept you company during the writing of this work? Did any books, songs, art works, philosophical treatises, snacks, walks, or oddball devotions contribute to a book-specific creative realm? 

MS: Appearing and disappearing within the rhythm of dusk and day, the bats of Yaddo (where this book was surpassingly lucky to begin) are a bit like a philosophical treatise, or artwork, or oddball devotion; or the bats name a shifting overlap within such a constellation that kept company and keeps doing so (“lisping as they flew,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes), since once one has experienced the sensation of a bat overhead in one’s room, the phenomenal space between the sensation of a bat being there and a bat being there grows astonishingly porous. The comedy and tragedy of a bat’s resemblance to the feeling or idea of a bat (from my vantage, if not the bat’s) amounted, for the writing of these poems, to a kind of parallel play from which the poems learned some of their own gestures—forest to sky to angle of ceiling and back again—of winging it, un-battening the hatches.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and two books of nonfiction: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006); Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009); Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press 2013), Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press 2017), Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press 2020), and Climate, a book of epistolary essays co-written with Jule Carr (Essay Press 2022). Dream Apartment, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2023. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and Writers League of Texas book award. A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs.