Adeena Karasick : part five

How did you first engage with poetry?

From a very young age i was writing. i didn’t really know what poetry was but i was always consumed with the physicality and materiality of letters and saw them as sparks of light, vessels of fiery potential. i loved the way you could make sounds through the juxtaposition of otherness, enabling one to say the unsayable, elevate the mundane, mixing, combing, spinning, twisting reference, syntax, idioms --- providing different avenues of connection…And, though they often get a bad rap, celebrating “the pun” as the highest art form; inhabiting what Freud might call a “psychic economy”, opening up the possibilities for infinite signification. As a young girl growing up in Vancouver, Canada, when everyone else was trading hockey cards, i collected these:

So, i think it’s safe to say that THIS was my first engagement with poetry, and to this informs a sense of parodic commentary / satire that marks so much of what i do.

Adeena Karasick : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

HA! My first book was called “The Empress Has No Closure” and my 2nd book had two front covers – so, closure is not something I’m fond of; ) All to say, even when i think a poem is finished; is published and bound in a collection, i still find myself re-working it, supplementing because the world keeps shifting; new ideas are always coming, the poem is alive, breathing ever-evolving. Often I will live-edit the already published piece in performance / infuse it with variant rhythms textures, sound clusters, puns.

Also sometimes lines that work in the US don’t translate as well in Canada, India, Italy or Prague; needs massaging. Or what works for a jazz poetry bar in NY might need tweaking for a giant outdoor festival. So, yes depending on venue, culture, ambience, i‘m constantly reworking even “finished” pieces. Particularly, this is true in the case of my recent book, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) which features a series of faux Facebook updates – i continually think of new lines and now a whole new book is erupting from it. As i think i said in The Empress Has No Closure, “a finish is only a gloss”.

Adeena Karasick : part three

Why is poetry important?

Poetry is important because it asks us to navigate the world in new ways. I’m interested in a poetry that’s marked by irony and parody, puns, slips and ellipses, fractures and paradox; a poetry of surprise that asks questions vs providing answers; adopts a wild mashup of idioms, textures; draws from different registers and asks us to crawl inside and revel in its non-normative patterns of syntactic logic, its deliciously luxurious heterogeneity. A poetry that foreground its own labor presents new ways of communicating, helps us to celebrate that sense of otherness in our daily lives. Do i think poetry can heal the ills of society – no, but it sure can and shift reality re-shaping the ordinary into ever-expansive possibilities of meaning and being.

Adeena Karasick : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is integral to my writing process. When writing I am hearing the cadences, rhythms, textures of language and so the work inevitably highlights its sonoricity, erupting at times into constellations of syntactic collages highlighting what Zukofsky might call “upper limit music”. In Italian the word sentire is both to hear and to feel, and this sense of musicality that runs deep into the subconscious, into the body -- reminds us how language is not just a communicative vehicle but physical, visceral, material and acoustic. Recently, I’ve enjoyed taking the work a step further, and performing with music -- my recent spoken word opera, Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padua Press, 2017 and the English edition by Gap Riot ress, 2018), is performed with live music, featuring an original Jewish-Punjabi klezmer-bhangra music score by Frank London, performed with hi on trumpet with Indian percussionist Deep Singh (on tabla and dohl) and Middle Eastern keyboard player Shai Bachar, and presently we’re working on the album which should be out  February, 2020 with Chant Records. Stay tuned!

Adeena Karasick : part one

Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. 

What are you working on?

Celebrating the 100^th year anniversary of the first commercial flight, and realizing that almost each of my 10 books of poetry features airplanes in some way, I am working on a borderblurring collage essay, called Ærotomania. Between leisure, labor, utility and entertainment, it exposes how the airplane as an erotic theater, a social text of secret motives, is structured like a language. Like the cubism of Picasso and Braque or Gertrude Stein’s “studies in description”, through “a system to pointing” calls attention to the process of recognizing an object and to the role of language in that process”. Its taking up all my time energy passion – every day and night I am obsessed; stealing into language and flying through planes of meaning and being; thinking about how Marshall McLuhan pronounced, “the airplane is an extension of the entire body” --

We are the letters travelling through space.
Seated letters speaking ourselves 
against the sky inverted through flying circuits 
coded ciphers secrets’ shaded silence 
of shuttered truance

We are the letters, the interletters between rows of text
awake / in the flux of discomfiture

The spoken sentence 
between destinations
of dissemblance
liaised in the labor of 

hours aisles eros sorrows aeros

parataxiing down the runway

in the heft of day --