Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julie Carr lives in Denver. She is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as The Nation, Boston Review, APR, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Volt, A Public Space, 1913, The Baffler and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including: The Best American Poetry (Sribner); Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books); Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press); Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W.W. Norton); Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books; and &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing 2013, The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde (Nightboat Books), Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books) among others. Honors and awards include The Sawtooth Poetry Award, A National Poetry Series selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2010-2011).
A former dancer, she now collaborates regularly with dance-artist K.J. Holmes, and has created collaborative works with many other artists, dancers, and filmmakers. With Tim Roberts she helps run Counterpath, an independent literary press and a bookstore/gallery/performance space/community garden in Denver. She is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the Department of English where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics from the eighteenth century to the present.
What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
There are at least three that got me moving, and others that emerged as I went. First there was the question of narrative, what it is and how to do it. I’m fascinated by the question of what makes a story compelling, what draws me in and keeps me there. I don’t think it’s plot, but I do think it’s something about time, how time moves in a piece of writing. I wanted to create a feeling of time, or I should say, of times, because there are multiple temporalities happening across the book. The second and entirely related obsession was what the physicist-philosopher Karen River Barad has called intra-action. This has been an obsession for me throughout all of my writing (from long before I encountered the term). The epigraph for my first book was from Anne Carson: “contact is crisis,” while the epigraph for this one is from Celan: ”perhaps I was everyone.” I think there’s a development there! Perhaps now even more than ever, I wanted to write into the infinite ways in which people-creatures-events-disturbances-histories move throughout and alter one another.
The first image in the book is of a woman observing another woman smoking beneath a window. The smoke became a guiding metaphor for that intra-action. It itself is a material “thing,” but it does not exist without the breath that creates it, without the fire, without the tobacco or other flammable substance, and it cannot move without the air it moves through. It is an entity, with real-world effects, but it does not remain itself even for a millisecond, for as soon as it becomes smoke, it is also everything that surrounds it, in its history, in its now, in the future. Moreover, because it carries a kind of danger, a threat of toxicity, it binds the two women, both of whom are altered by its presence, in different and uncountable ways. Again, this is an image and a metaphor for what I feel is going on throughout the book. At one time the title for the book was Smoke.
The third impetus was probably Jewishness, which for me at the time of writing this book, the first in a trilogy called Overflow, was also about a relationship to time and a set of intra-actions with historical events, with people I will never meet and places where I am not and have never been. The Jewish messianic idea is, for me, less about any kind of arrival (and definitely not about arriving in a “homeland”), and more about the possibility of rupture at all and every moment. There is this idea of breaking, but then there is also the idea/feeling/fact of continuity. We are our ancestors; we are our descendants. And yet, everything is constantly open for renewal, in both hopeful and dangerous ways. These ideas are more explicit in the latter two books of the trilogy, but they were there, guiding this one too, especially when it deals with history and war.
Finally, there is the garden. About which maybe I can say more below.
“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?
I needed formal “choices” (they feel like inevitabilities) that kept the book’s “narratives” in motion, while refusing linearity. That’s very hard to do in writing, maybe impossible, but this was what guided line-length and both line and page breaks. Motion, but not movement that only goes one way. Continuity, but also the possibility of breaking.
Since form is a question not only of time but also of space (the space of the page), I should say something about the painting on the back cover, which is by my uncle, the painter Tony Robbin. Tony has spent a long career engaged mathematically and artistically with fourth-dimensional space. He has written about 4D (the mathematical extension of 3D) and rendered tesseracts through computer coding. He has then translated 4D onto the canvas through a variety of methods. This expansion of space (or spacetime) was another guiding theme for this book and affected my formal choices in ways that would be hard to describe. But maybe looking at his painting helps open that door.
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?
This is such a great question for this book! Perhaps more than in any other book I’ve written, stuff is invented. There are characters who do not exist in real life, and some who do, but whose stories and personalities have been conflated with others, embellished or altered. There are memories that never happened, exaggerated desires, dreamed up conversations. So, “fiction,” I guess? But, of course, this is always true of writing (of living). We remake experience by writing it, just as we remake ourselves in speaking. I think of the “I” here in the way I would think of the “you” in a poem directed in that way outward. It’s always a fiction, but it’s a necessary, motivating, intimate, vulnerable, made-up and true one, a “real life fiction.”
Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?
The book is dedicated to Karen River Barad and Tony Robbin. River was my teacher when I was in college. I was so lucky to learn physics, “physics for poets,” from them. I became obsessed and took other classes, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t do the math, so eventually that ended. However, it really never ended. Their book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, has been really important to me, as have been numerous videos of talks they’ve given, which I watched obsessively while writing this book. Because of The Garden, we’ve now entered into a wild and beautiful dialogue and collaboration, which feels utterly surprising and absolutely inevitable at once. Tony’s efforts, throughout my childhood, to explain 4D to me were baffling and thrilling and somehow (because he is) funny. He is the only living member of that side of my ancestry, and his own child died young; our bond has grown much stronger in recent years for all of these reasons. The book was written with both visionaries in mind, and they both become characters within it.
What felt riskiest to you about this work?
In this moment, everything feels risky. Everything is risky and nothing is enough. The urgency of the devastation in Gaza, the unimaginable suffering of Palestinian people, and in the name of Jewish safety, is unbearable every hour of every day. Likewise, the ongoing war in Ukraine, which falls out of the news, but which is very much an atrocity that has only accelerated. Likewise, the rise of fascism here in the US – all of it (I don’t need to detail, but just right now, I’ll say – how can I write a book that features the community garden at our arts-space, Counterpath, in Denver without mentioning my friends there who are in immediate danger of being arrested and deported?). This book is talking about war, but in an almost abstract way (the other two books of the trilogy are more explicit). That abstraction feels risky, ethically risky. At the same time, I am acutely aware of how past wars produce future wars, how violence begets violence, and I wanted to think on the page about that, and about the corresponding truth that at the same time, we create, we re-generate, we intra-act, we love one another and the world.
What feels risky is doing anything but grieving. But we do and we must, because, and I don’t mean this to sound melodramatic, but in a real way, if we do not create, we are dead. And then, the killers have won.
How do the book’s aesthetics inform its ethics, or, how do its ethics inform its aesthetics?
Emmanuel Levinas calls ethics the first philosophy. Ethics precedes all other questions, precedes being. Whatever a “self” is, it is formed first of all by its responsibility to others. I want to understand how that is true (I want it to be true). Perhaps the whole project of Overflow is an attempt to probe that thesis.
If the writing of this book’s narratives was an exploration of the motion between “self” and “other,” then that motion guides all my aesthetic choices. But this is not a neutral motion. As Barad writes in the acknowledgments to Meeting the Universe Halfway:
“The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting. How then shall we understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter? How to understand what is entailed in the practice of meeting that might help keep the possibility of justice alive in a world that seems to thrive on death?”
What’s your sense of the aural life of this work? What role did sound or music play in the generative process, in revision?
In this book, it’s all about rhythm. One hopes that the beats with which one breaks (lines, pages, etc.) translate into the ear/body of the reader. But who knows! Certainly, I feel all that whenever reading out loud.
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?
Tony Robbin’s paintings, the novels of W.G Sebald, the poetry of Leslie Kaplan, the poetry of Etel Adnan, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, the philosophical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, the physics-philosophy of Karen River Barad, videos of imaged molecules in motion, the poetry of Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions, and one film: Steve McQueen’s unforgettable Occupied City. Please watch it.
How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?
Books two and three of the trilogy. The second book is called The Guide (for now) and is very engaged with Moses Maimonides and with World War II histories in Ukraine and in Japan. It’s more fractured and recursive than The Garden. The third book, Turning, is working with the Jewish practice of teshuva and thinking both obliquely and directly about the current genocide in Gaza and how previous histories of genocide, not only of Europe’s Jews but also of Ukrainians under Stalin, refract in the present. What does it mean to practice teshuva (turning toward, turning away, turning inward, turning outward, asking for forgiveness, seeking justice) in this moment? What does it mean and how does it feel to turn and keep turning, to reject the desire for equilibrium, to move, instead, through and in an ongoing and unstoppable practice of being-with and belonging-to one another?