Orchid Tierney : part five

5. What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Where to begin? Cole Swensen, On Walking On; Abigail Child’s Mouth To Mouth, Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Chris Tysh’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic; Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [lukao]; Lisa Robertson, Three Summers,  Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Jazzercise is a language. Recordings on PennSound I’ve been listening to: Joan Retallack, James Schulyer, M. NourbeSe Philip, Larissa Lai, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Amiri Baraka. Lately I’ve also been listening and reading to more poetry from Aotearoa—Te Kahu Rolleston, Selina Marsh, Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford to name a few.

Orchid Tierney : part four

4. What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I think my poet’s syllabus is constantly expanding so this list is by no means exclusive, but the writers who have most informed by practice include Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Caroline Bergvall, Barbara Guest, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hyde, Robert Creeley, Bob Perelman, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone. Robin Hyde as a NZer is likely the odd one out in this otherwise American list of poets, but The Book of Nadath, in my opinion, is one of the greatest examples of the feminist epics in the 20^th century. 

Orchid Tierney : part three

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

Poetry is neither precious nor unique. It’s simply another form of scholarship, of interrogating crisis and complacency, and—for this reason—it always supposes another a question. Put another way, poetry is a kind of honest failure if we consider how other forms of scholarship, like the academic essay, take the appearance of authenticity and validity. Poetry, in my opinion, is rather honest in its dishonesty in that we can never fully surpass the ambiguity of language because the act of writing always precludes knowability. 

Orchid Tierney : part two

2. How does a poem begin?

My focus is usually seeded by an article or even a nugget of an idea that then kickstarts a broader inquiry through research. My Ozone project, for example, really began with some undirected collages, and it wasn’t until I read an article on the recent and persistent increase of ozone depletion chemicals in the atmosphere that I began to tighten my focus into its current trajectory. In other words, much of my work begins first with frivolous play, only to tighten through subsequent research once an idea takes root. 

Orchid Tierney : part one

Orchid Tierney is from Aotearoa-New Zealand, currently residing in Philadelphia. Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF, 2017), and a full-length sound translation of the Book of Margery Kempe, Earsay (TrollThread, 2016). She co-edits Supplement, an annual anthology on Philadelphia writing. Her collection, a year of misreading the wildcats, is forthcoming from The Operating System.

Photo credit: José Alberto De Hoyos

1. What are you working on?

I’ve recently completed my first manuscript, a year of misreading the wildcats (forthcoming from the fabulous Operating System), which is predominately preoccupied with the question of climate change, island disappearance, and oceanic pollution. The plasticity of oceanic violence however isn’t really a question that can be or should be settled easily, so my subsequent work continues to explore these intersections of, and the rifts between, poetic and physical ecologies. I’m currently working on two projects: a collage series, inspired by Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ recent publications, that interrogates Ozone depletion in the Southern Hemisphere, news of which was always in the background when I was growing up in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The second project is a poet’s anti-sentimental novel, blue doors.  I began this particular project ten years ago but I have only recently come to the realisation that I was critiquing the meat industry and neoliberal white veganism. I’m not sure what the endpoint for this last project is, since it has changed considerably over the last ten years, but my poetics is a slow percolation.