It would be, in every sense, a fool\u2019s errand to try and pin\ndown what particularly interested me so thoroughly in cris cheek\u2019s work that I\nwas compelled to reach out to them for an interview; not because it couldn\u2019t be\ndone, but because any attempt to delineate singular points of interest would\ninevitably only serve to push away others just as present as I read their work.\nTo say, for example, that I was drawn immediately to the way in cheek\u2019s pickles & jams<\/em> that words, lines,\neven stanzas dance staggeringly across the page, often floating towards and\njuking away from stability, while certainly true, would ignore how equally\npulled I felt toward the way cheek\u2019s refusal of alphabetic context in fukc all the king\u2019s men: the tower and a few\nbeasts living in its rubble<\/em> simultaneously implodes reading-as-such and\nconstructs images so literal they refuse to not be read. Perhaps the most sensible\nargument I can make for the following interview is that cheek\u2019s work is, at\nevery point, a performance; therefore, like all great performances, cheek\u2019s\nwork inspired in me the festering curiosity that ignites every\nbehind-the-scenes documentary. I needed to know the distance between the artist\nin the wings and art unfolding on stage. More importantly, I needed to know\nhow, and by what crafty devices, the distance might be crossed so fluidly, so\nfully, and with such clarity of motion that I found myself unsure the distance\nactually existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n (Where possible, I have provided endnotes with links to\navailable versions of referenced works.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trevor Root:<\/strong> I\u2019m curious about the expectations you set for both pickles & jams<\/em> and fukc all the king\u2019s men: the tower and a few beasts living in its rubble<\/em>. In the acknowledgements for each you lay out a terminology for the poems: \u201coccasional poems\u201d for p&j<\/em> and \u201cspeculative poems\u201d for fatkm<\/em>. In doing so, you seem to both lay out and unsettle an authoritative process for reading (\u201cthere is a way to read these poems, but it\u2019s a process of reading tied to and only present in the poems themselves\u201d). To what extent are you interested in using your work to challenge the understanding of reading (and perhaps understanding itself) as a universal process, and what affordances do you think such a challenge generates and works with? <\/p>\n\n\n\n cris cheek:<\/strong> I am also curious about both occasional<\/em> and speculative<\/em> when brought into whispering distances with the capacious discipline of poetry. The poet as intimate and intricate responder to occasion<\/em> is one useful way to get under the skin of the performances of the institution of poetry and the performances of a poet in what can be written among substantively differing cultural, topographical, lexical contexts. Sometimes a poet simply needs to stay attentive while they get down in the mud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I worry immediately that i am conflating occasion and\ncontext, but i hope not. I tend to orbit terms, phrases and sequences that have\ntrouble with boundary, that worry and fret too much so that at times they\ncannot sleep to become sore from discomfort. AN occasion might be an invitation\nto respond to a themed issue of an online and or in print zine, or an event to\ncelebrate and or honor the memory of and or to marry or wave goodbye to, or the\nbringing of an attention to x<\/em> y<\/em> and or c<\/em>, performing a measure of love and or a recognition of friendship\nand or a response to and or debt owed to conversations that gave rise to an act\nof language (some might use a word such as inspired). AN occasion might be more\npublic<\/em> and more private<\/em>, more and or less although when less bye-bye intention\nmore, dang to all these cloisters, gateways and scare marks. Although the time\nto play among the borders of the possible is a gift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I talk sometimes about the performances of poetry as an\ninstitution at a presidential inauguration or some kind of entertainment for\nthe broad court, for example. I think about all of the various forms of\nvillage, city, state, local \u2013 trans-local functions, including arguments\nagainst such \u2018posts.\u2019 AN occasion might be an attempt to make it rain, as in\nJohanne Haaber Ihle\u2019s all too brief and giving no time to be anything less than\nexcellent documentary focusing on aspects of poetic performance and the culture\nof circulating song-poetry on tape cassette in the Yemen, \u2018Men of Words\u2019 whose\ngendered title makes me giggle.[i]<\/a>\nBut,<\/p>\n\n\n\n AN occasion might be to the inscription for a temporary\nmonument, to adorn a park bench, a sign for impromptu protest, a t-shirt, a\nstreet poster, a greeting card. A poem might be an occasion to pay attention to\nmental health, personal and community maintenance, psychic well-being and all\nof the above. Given that a certain kind of helping the self helps everybody\nelse to a certain extent. A context frames an occasion. These senses of\noccasion bring poetry a measure of function. Often not to do with conventional\nmonetary systems (whether statist or local currency), although the accumulation\nand redistribution of something operating on the social body in the forms of cultural\ncapital cannot be ruled out. I don\u2019t know why i am so desperate or playfully\ncurious about wanting to bring understanding of utility as well as necessary\ninutility of poetry back into conversations but i am. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I see and hear the influences of poetry in all our speech\nand script, everywhere. Poetry and rhetoric, the fanciful or satirical or\nhazing pun, the borderlands among poems and songs, the pacing of political\nspeech. An occasional poem and an occasional poet then. If i trot back that has\noften been the case. A walk. A drift through a district. A performance of some\nkind. A piece of music \u2013 i was writing poems listening to music that challenged\nthe limitations of alphabetic language in early books. A memorial to the\npassing by of a friend. Poems occasioned by conversations with place in\nattentively practiced spheres of flora and fauna. Poems born out of listening\nto rhythms and cadences among the curses of the vernacular. Pluri-vocal and plurilingual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I might say there are as many ways to read the poems as\nreaders, in the sense of their interpretative embodiment. Is that too extreme,\nif i bring place and time into play? If i tackle those two terms you mention\nthen Trevor, the occasional<\/em> and the speculative<\/em>, in terms of unsettling the\nprocess for reading, the first suggests that each text object has a context\nthat gave rise to it alongside its new sequential companionships and kinships,\nwhile the second involves speculation on everybody\u2019s part. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Making what i have come to call speculative poems<\/em> began as a way of referring to sign-making \/\ntrace\u2014and-even-trance-mapping that is not necessarily alphabetic on my part,\nbut that i intuited and recognized in myself of necessity to get perspective on\nthe typographic alphabetical i occupy and am occupied by in turn so much of the\ntime. I mostly filtered, partly erased, applied trace effects, magnified,\ncropped, reworked, inked in what seemed to me an indicated shape for a possible\npoem or ghost of a poem lost. Something i have doing for decades and shared via\nsocial media but rarely published in print. A rarity due to having internalized\nmy own letter of expected rejection, because the publication was not able to\nhandle the images for one reason and another. Whatever it is that holds me\nback, as much as whatever it is that holds me back from sharing the work i make\nin sound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I find i return to that relation to a speculative language object\nwith great regularity and had begun to think of them as being projective<\/em> and or speculative<\/em>. The trendiness of that s<\/em> word being vivid for me, having had numerous conversations about\nspeculative fictions. It might seem opportune but it struck me that i could be\nusefully playful by making a link to conversations i saw occurring among\nproposals about poetry, and shape (shape including both sound and image both\ncontained and projected by a text object) going on in the work in and around pickles & jams<\/em> and by many other\npoets i love to read. I stuck a few pieces up on social media with that Speculative Poem<\/em> tag and people had a\nvery positive response. I did several dozen in a kind of amused frenzy and then\nstood back to catch my breath. You ask about affordances and both terms offer\nplayful and generative openings, as i hope i\u2019ve shown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I find and hope to show generative spaces and places between\nmyself and the contextual environment of the work. I am concerned about\nenvironment and how writing can be and often is a literal as well as figurative\npollution. My fascination is in ink that does not behave according to\nbureaucratic orders. These poems have\nbrought a fresher skin on making those kinds of shall i dare to say readerly\/writerly\nshapes, rendered my interest keener. So that aspect of what i do have an\nenergetic lease on life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TR:<\/strong> One element of both works which seemed to particularly stand out was the role of movement, both within and eventually away from set forms. I\u2019m thinking, for example, of the piece \u201cmeal-mouth manifesto\u201d from p&j<\/em> where the poem seems to hint at, but ultimately resist, being centered on the page through lines that stray just slightly to one side or the other.[ii]<\/a> Given your focus on performance and visual work as well, to what extent do you consider and deploy the poem as a kinetic (or perhaps, more accurately, anti-static) space?<\/p>\n\n\n\n cc:<\/strong> A simple way to respond to your perception about movements informing both those books would be to point to my fairly lengthy engagements with movement-based performance arts, dance, and live art, weird processions, rituals. I\u2019m partial to those kinds formal and informal intersections. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That meal-mouth is clearly missing a y<\/em>, so that the \u2018mealy-mouthed,\u2019 as being afraid to speak in a\nstraight-forward manner becomes an ars poetica. The meal-mouth <\/em>already sets a lot of serious play into motion. Is it a\nmouth eating itself, for example? Just fun musing. I take pleasure in acts of\nlanguage that seek to decenter our attentions to literal and figurative affect.\nThe figure of the poem on the page remains of great interest to me. The\nplacement of the text object within that paginated frame, and how its placement\ncan both play into and play away from conventions about notational order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I do want all manners of resistance and rebellion to play\nits active part. Yet i worry about the extent to which my ongoing experiences\nof sound composition and the text object as a prompt for embodied performance\nmight hinder some readers of poetic texts from engaging with my writing. That\nby insisting on a dynamic between the stability and the instability of any\ngiven text anxiety gets in the way. Where and why and how a text begins, how\none page faces onto and is in conversation with another, much along the lines\nof a folding diptych, one frame and its figure closing onto another when a book\nlies flat. I want to share a sense of both risk and play with readers both\nwithin and outside contemporary poetic discourse boundaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I might be characterized as wanting to have my cake and eat\nit, by design. Of overthinking everything and bringing that sense of reading\nthe devil in the details too alive so that its anti-authoritarian drives become\noverwhelming. That an invocation of the kinetic, even if it is brought and\nbought at the expense of controlling a reader\u2019s interest is harassment right\nnow. As i write this i find myself circling a question that has intrigued me\nfor almost 40 years. Can the movements and agencies afforded by a poem moving immersed\nin and among what Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg write of in trying to define\naffect as \u2018the world\u2019s obstinacies and rhythms\u2019 be instruments of perceptual\nchange?[iii]<\/a>\n Can poetry set its readers free, even\nfor a microsecond, within its giving frame? <\/p>\n\n\n\n TR:<\/strong> To focus for a moment on p&j<\/em>, I\u2019m interested in how you use the interjection of computer graphics and images to disrupt or perhaps disorder the poem. Pieces like \u201cLiberty Plaza is no nearer,\u201d \u201cthe people\u2019s microphone,\u201d and \u201cif anything should happen to you\u201d seem to use the infiltration of graphics to decenter the formal authority of the \u2018poem\u2019 so to speak.[iv]<\/a> In your writing, how do you conceive of the relationship, or perhaps tension, between linguistic and graphic expression? In the same sense, what about a poem seems to necessitate, or perhaps just appeal to, the intervention of graphic or visual elements?<\/p>\n\n\n\n cc: <\/strong>The design of our hardware and software platforms for writing are relatively<\/em> recent aren\u2019t they. They carry the history of other computational reading and writing frames for sure, well-known examples such as Denise Schmandt Besserat\u2019s theory of the origins of writing as tokens for inventory purposes,[v]<\/a> Ada Lovelace\u2019s contribution to bringing text and textile back together,[vi]<\/a> William Carlos Williams\u2019 description of a poem as \u2018a small (or large) machine made out of words,\u2019 Bob Brown\u2019s The Readies<\/em>,[vii]<\/a> Vannevar Bush\u2019s post WW2 memex<\/em>,[viii]<\/a> Mina Loy\u2019s Alphabet<\/em> brilliantly rendered in recombinating 3-D by Margaret Konkol,[ix]<\/a> and the work of Doug Engelbart\u2019s team resulting in \u2018the mother of all demos<\/em>\u2019 showing the potential of the computer mouse interface &c.[x]<\/a> The key aspect for me in that text-image material can be moved about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When i began to write all of the many many short poems from\nwhich the subset in pickles & jams<\/em>\nare edited i had one big baggy folder called Liberty Plaza is no nearer . consolation<\/em>, a folder in reference to\nthe occupy<\/em> movement. Nicole\nStarosielski and i were Altman Fellows for the Humanities Center at Miami in\n2011-12, choosing as our theme \u2018Networks and Environments.\u2019 It was a turbulent\nyear, as i mentioned in my brief introduction to the book. We were talking with\na group of scholars from differing disciplines about networks and power, then\nnetwork archaeology, about the \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 and \u2018Occupy\u2019 as events were\nunfolding. A very exciting and challenging series of conversations for me and\nextremely messy, especially as i was quite out of depth on the subject and\nneeded to learn how to swim in an ungainly fashion pretty quickly. Tough to get\na distance on. There were a couple of machinic intrusions into my attempts to save<\/em> poems into folders and i was thereby\nencouraged to pay particular attention to them and incorporate them, partly in\nthe spirit of acknowledging process<\/em>,\na trait i carry from way back, and partly because they offered meta-commentary\nabout the influence of tools and machines \u2013 to borrow a phrase from an early\nand continuing auteur in my thinking about poetry and limit cases Bob Cobbing. I\ncelebrate and seek to amplify tensions among forms of linguistic and graphic\nexpression to the extent that the linguistic can be understood as graphic and\nvice versa and find company among work by many contemporary poets i admire <\/p>\n\n\n\n TR: <\/strong>In reading fatkm<\/em>, one technique which seemed to ground the experience was the use of a sort of imagistic parallelism, in which pages that face each other mimic, if not the shapes present in each other, at least the rough textures, shadings, and curvatures of the other. This seems to break down in two places: the separation of the first and last tower image, and the seemingly photo-negative images split on each side of pages 11 and 12.[xi]<\/a> As you generated fatkm<\/em>, how did you conceive of the role connection and disruption would play in grounding or perhaps unsettling the experience of reading? <\/p>\n\n\n\n cc: <\/strong>That moment of breakdown in the mid-point of the book was an intriguing pill to swallow Trevor. I\u2019m glad that you felt it so keenly too. It was necessitated by mIEKEL AND\u2019s publishing format. No more than 24 pages he told me. I had generated about 650 variations. I had to pick a place for that to occur. Whilst the beginning and end of a loop through which time has passed and things have changed was easier to think through \u2013 I wanted that tower to be falling down, like London bridge in the nursery rhyme \u2013 choosing another spot presented me with many other pages that i lament having left out of this iteration of the sequence. Suggesting other possible versions of this series and yes there could at some point be another publisher to be keen on these, even though there are many other speculative poems i am working on. SO i chose it to be a place where rupture occurs across the double page spread. The book works at facing page by facing page rhymes mostly, and i chose the rupture to occur midway through the sequence with a facing double page, whereas the start and end of the whole loop begins on a recto and end with a verso. <\/p>\n\n\n\n TR: <\/strong>In fatkm<\/em>, I was particularly struck by the seemingly unrestricted, but at the same time guided, possibility of the work to point towards various allusions without necessitating any hegemonic readings or definitions. For example, in my reading, the sense that the work ends in the corrupted reconstruction of where it began (the tower reestablished, almost puzzled back together through the fragments generated by its collapse) as well as the mention in your acknowledgements of the \u201chumpty dumpty figure\u201d on page 2 seemed to gesture towards but not necessarily require a comparison with the fragmentary recurrence and nursery rhyme play of Joyce\u2019s Finnegan\u2019s Wake<\/em>. Thinking back to your claim that fatkm<\/em> is a work of \u201cspeculative poetry,\u201d I\u2019m interested to hear how you conceptualize and work with the ability of \u201cspeculative poems\u201d to suggest, or perhaps dance around, images, objects, and allusions while resisting the binding effects of clarity and singular readings or, to borrow a line from \u201cmeal-mouth manifesto,\u201d to \u201cpromote[s] englishes, not English.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n cc: <\/strong>I\u2019ll happily accept the structure of rhymes built for learning a language Trevor, as part of and party to this speculative play. Nonsense is not an absence of sense, nor the opposite of \u2018sense\u2019 i\u2019ll warrant. That straight modeling buys into a destructive binary about languages, that one ought to say what one means and mean what one says. Which strikes me as giving up way too much power to those who police the goalposts in a game of two halves comprising transparency<\/em> and opacity<\/em>. I\u2019ll take Duke Ellington\u2019s Transblucency<\/em>, which i first heard on a recording issued by RCA in the UK under the title At His Very Best<\/em>, following Creole Love Call<\/em>, on that side of the pressing after the Black, Brown and Suite<\/em>, an album that made a profound impact on me on its release in 1972, not least for the debt i owed as a clarinet player at that time to the playing of Jimmy Hamilton and the sublime tone of Johnny Hodges in that band.[xii]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n But i digress of course. That sense of fatkm: ttaafbwliir<\/em> as an exploded bracket between initial\nproposition and corrupted fall or collapse as you also quite rightly put it.\nThat, in the colonial imposition and its mutations and morphologies of capital\nEnglish, with its received pronunciation, riven against as well as by class\nsnobbery and the monstrous mouth of empire replete with stiff upper lip \u2013 o,\nthe moustaches, and subject of writing for capitalism by exhibiting servitude\nto the master rules in the master\u2019s game played in the master\u2019s house\nmaintained by the subjects of labor precarity \u2013 due recognition be glittered on\ntorquing that language to speak subversive truths to power by fracking its\nauthority. That kind of exploded moment, as if one could walk among the shadows\naround Cornelia Parker\u2019s installation of her exploded garden shed Cold Dark Matter<\/em>, which i was lucky\nenough to do for its first iteration at Chisenhale Studios in London\u2019s East\nEnd.[xiii]<\/a>\nThe scale and microscopic duration as a loop that is Finnegan\u2019s Wake<\/em> as you bring it. Thanks for making that link.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That engagement with reading. [i]<\/a> https:\/\/vimeo.com\/7183783<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [ii]<\/p>\n\n\n\n [iii]<\/a> https:\/\/www.dukeupress.edu\/the-affect-theory-reader<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [iv]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n [v]<\/a> https:\/\/sites.utexas.edu\/dsb\/tokens\/the-evolution-of-writing\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [vi]<\/a> https:\/\/massivesci.com\/articles\/ada-lovelace-first-programmer-science-heroes\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [vii]<\/a> http:\/\/rovingeyepress.com\/readies<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [viii]<\/a>\nhttps:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/1945\/07\/as-we-may-think\/303881\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [ix]<\/a> https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/37365955\/Prototyping_Mina_Loys_alphabet<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [x]<\/a> https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [xi]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n [xii]<\/a> https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=z4QjoyBb5Sw<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [xiii]<\/a>\nhttps:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/art\/artworks\/parker-cold-dark-matter-an-exploded-view-t06949\/story-cold-dark-matter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" National Poetry Month 2020 cris cheek is a documentary performance writer, sound composer, and photographer. They worked alongside Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths with the Consortium of London Presses in the mid 1970\u2019s to run a thriving open access print shop for little press poets. In 1981 they co-founded a collective movement-based performance resource in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2819,"featured_media":762,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201,202,210,1],"tags":[118,25,151,11,159],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events-readings","category-faculty-spotlights","category-interviews","category-uncategorized","tag-cris-cheek","tag-interview","tag-national-poetry-month","tag-poetry","tag-trevor-root"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2819"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/files\/2020\/04\/cris-1-1024x556.png\")
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