Andrew Michael Gorin : part five

What are you working on?

With the Aotearoa New Zealand-born environmental artist Amy Howden-Chapman, I’m working on an ongoing project called The Apologies, which draws on our research into the historical form of the public apology to represent imaginary apologies for the climate crisis. Twenty apologies from the project were recently put up in a room installation at the East Quay museum in Watchet, England. We’re researching and writing new apologies, which we hope to publish as a book and exhibit in the US soon. 

I’m also slowly completing a full-length experimental and research-based poetry volume, tentatively titled This Must Be The Place. It has to do with the ways the climate crisis is changing our paradigmatic experiences of emplacement. My chapbook based on this manuscript, Simple Location, will be published by above/ground press, hopefully before the end of this year. Oh, and I’m developing a sequel to my conceptual social-media poetry book Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017). I’m calling it Someone Like Two. But, I ask you, where are the conceptual pdf publishers of yesteryear?

Finally (and most robustly in the immediate present), I’m working on what seems like an infinity of job and grant applications. Isn’t everybody?

Andrew Michael Gorin : part four

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is important because it has sparked critical and creative thought about the language and rhetorical conventions that shape our thinking. For instance, I argue in my work on Amiri Baraka’s “Black Communications Project” that Baraka often used poetry to anatomize and critique liberal aesthetic norms which have historically invalidated necessary expressions of anger or racially-specific political convictions within art and public discourse. Poetry plays with and calls into question the social uses of verbal materials that, putting aside more profound material (economic) considerations, I believe most determine our thoughts, interpersonal relationships, and cultural attitudes. Because poetry is so often self-reflexively engaged with its own powers of representation and communication, it's the medium that is closest to what remains the primary substrate of our social experience: words.

The effects that poems actually have in the world/word, of course, vary. I agree with Erica Hunt’s conclusion to her excellent and important “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” (1988), in which Hunt writes that “writing itself cannot enlarge the body of opposition to the New Wars, it only enhances our capacity to strategically read our condition more critically and creatively in order to interrupt and to join.” Then again, if enhancing our “capacity” to interrupt and to join isn’t enough to qualify as enlarging opposition to the New Wars (by which Hunt means the post-WWII era of neoliberal colonial violence and social control), I don’t know what is. 

For me personally, poetry is also important because writing it momentarily takes me out of the temporality and mindset of self-commodification demanded by my daily efforts to continue to have an income, let alone a career, in academia. Without this alternative, I think I would be even more deformed by the soul-sucking requirements of the academic job market. I feel that, at its best, poetry provides this sort of respite for others, too.
 

Andrew Michael Gorin : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Liz Willis was a very influential teacher who opened me up to linguistic abstraction and verbal play. Anselm Berrigan taught me (semi-successfully) to chill out and (more successfully) to “love speech,” or the sublime accumulation of things people say or might say. Ben Lerner, whose poetry I admired before I became his student and assistant for a brief period in my twenties, taught me to how to make conceptual use of invented experimental forms, and also that poetry—for better and for worse—is frequently about using patterns of closure and anti-closure to create a formal and temporal experience (Ben would call this “prosody”) that moves us simply because it seems to do so. 

But other poets have taught me that poetry can be pleasurable, formally impactful, mind-bendingly experimental, and committed to more than just an aesthetic experience or diagnosis of the bankruptcy of aestheticism. Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Juliana Spahr, Rodrigo Toscano, Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, and Mark Nowak are among the more important influences. There are plenty of younger poets writing today about whom I feel similarly. I recently reviewed Wendy Xu’s book The Past, which I think is fantastic. You can find my review in the next issue of Chicago Review. 

Andrew Michael Gorin : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I think poetry often operates outside of capitalist economies of value and exchange, simply because it’s not deemed valuable by the broader culture. Many people know James Sherry’s old joke (as retold by Charles Bernstein) that “a piece of paper with nothing on it has a definite economic value. If you print a poem on it, that value is lost.” Of course, poetry in the age of social media and the academicization of the literary arts has a cultural capital which increasingly translates into actual capital. So I should say that poetry can operate outside of conventional economies of exchange, perhaps more than other forms.

This is good and bad. It’s bad because poets have trouble making ends meet, and those with independent resources have an easier time of it. It’s good because poetry may be somewhat less beholden to the economic interests of powerful institutions and corporations, especially given all the small press and self-publishing that goes on. To put it in more personal terms, I regularly feel the dismissal of poets and poetry that comes from the American professional elite and even from many sectors within the academic humanities. There’s nominal approval of our supposedly noble endeavor, sure. But deep down the lawyers, doctors, scientists, policymakers and other members of the middle or managerial class think poets are lazy masturbators. 

Because of this, many poets are able to write against the status quo, and many become activists in one way or another. Compare the number of formally experimental and/or politically active “successful" poets to the number of successful novelists who fit those characterizations. Whereas in my scholarly work, I’m constantly aware of and influenced by the demands of “professionalization” and the list of things humanities departments are currently looking for from prospective faculty, in my poetry, I tend not to think about these things, for lack of expectation that I will be rewarded if I do. This is probably naïve, because English departments are now virtually the ONLY places in the US where experimental poets can be financially supported for what they do.

Andrew Michael Gorin : part one

Andrew Michael Gorin (andrewmichaelgorin.info) is a poet, scholar, and Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the New York University English department, where his work focuses on the intersection of American literature and culture, media studies, and theories of the public sphere. He is the author of Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017), and the creator and co-editor of the collaborative writing project Executive Orders (The Operating System and Organism for Poetic Research, 2016-2020). His critical and creative writings have appeared or are forthcoming from journals and periodicals including Chicago Review, Criticism, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Urban Omnibus, among other publications, and he has been a Writer-in-Residence at Millay Arts and Yaddo. He also serves as an organizer and editor for the multi-sited poetics working group and small press, the Organism for Poetic Research, and as an editor for the climate-crisis-and-culture platform, The Distance Plan. Since 2012, he's taught courses on literature, critical theory, and creative writing on the campuses of CUNY Brooklyn College, CUNY Queens College, and NYU. In the fall of 2022, he will be teaching a course on “Media and the Environment” in the NYU department of Media, Culture, and Communication. 

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

The important shift for me came when I figured out that I think poetry should do more than be clever, or interesting, or beautiful, or weird, or funny. I got tired of readings where the most rewarded work was the kind full of clever one-liners that got laughs, or work that rebelliously disrupted the high-seriousness of the genre through inappropriately jejune or surreal images and tones (I’m certainly guilty of writing like this at times). I’m all for humor, strangeness, linguistic play, youthful freshness etc.. But the ivory tower of poetic self-seriousness was toppled long ago. Poets should set their sights on cultural problems beyond the literary ones, even if academic battles are often proxy wars for larger social conflicts. 

People tend not to think of him as a “political” poet, but oddly enough it was probably the time I spent reading and writing about Frank O’Hara that made me most interested in poetry that intervenes in oppressive norms of representation in the public sphere. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on O’Hara and the queer experience and politics underlying what I called his “dialectical sincerity.” I also gravitated toward the experimentalism of the Language writers, though it took me a long time to understand and critically assess the political implications of their work and theoretical writings (there’s plenty I now disagree with there). In general—and I think that many people who didn’t already feel this way have come to do so in the last 10 years—there’s too much at stake for any artform or cultural worker to neglect getting concertedly involved with the fight for social and environmental justice. And I absolutely disagree that there’s a necessary division between politically committed art and art that promotes some liberal ideal of aesthetic freedom from the exigencies of politics or the requirements of self-preservation. Sabotage of an oil pipeline is a very beautiful poem.