He takes Auschwitz in one hand
And Japan in the other––
The flash that gnarls out proposes to marry him.
–from “Louis Slotin Improvises”
(scroll down for full text and a link to the source poem)
Michael Lista is a twenty-something Toronto poet who, with his first collection, has managed an incredible thing. He has written a book that, without straying far into the political, the religious, or any of the more traditional means of rendering an insult, has an opportunity to make a lot of people very angry. His book, Bloom (Anansi 2010) has the power to piss people off on purely aesthetic grounds. Written as a series of poems that each take their structure, form, and often content or voice from a previously written piece (ranging back to 14th-century Pearl Poet and as close-at-hand as Karen Solie), Bloom tells the story of Louis Slotin. Slotin was a Canadian physicist who worked on The Manhattan Project and, amidst personal problems, died mysteriously during a routine procedure at his laboratory. Bloom is both dizzingly complex and completely readable. I loved it to bits.
Quite graciously, Michael Lista agreed to sit down (electronically, anyways) and talk about his new book. The result is a little long, but worth your time, I believe. The guy has a lot of good stuff to say.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this, Michael. The element of the book I want to talk the most about is your respect for art’s multiversal capabilities. We never really see Louis Slotin directly, as he’s either filtered through these surrogate fictions (Odysseus, Leopold Bloom) or his experiences are being reflected through your own decision to fill the book with re-writes and adaptations of other works. This creates a number of complementary worlds: the visible, invisible, unchronological, fictional, interpersonal, and they’re all sort of piled on each other in a really interesting way. Most of your alluded-to sources are poems but, as an example, you pull away from the narrative’s big climax to take your readers to a scene from the premiere of a Hollywood movie about the Manhattan Project, in which a character is loosely based on Louis Slotin. What inspired this reliance on the allusive and intertextual?
Michael Lista: In a good heist movie, in the scene where the master thief is busting into a safe—he’s got an ear to the safe door, listening—there’s a shot of the three lock rings revolving into place, the little “U”s of the combination lining up for the tongue to slide through. That’s what it was like the first time I read about the Slotin accident. There was this sort of triple occlusion happening in the lab that day; Slotin in front of the atomic bloom, shielding his colleagues from the radiation; the actual experimental apparatus, with the two half-spheres of Beryllium closed down around the core; and even at the atomic level, the neutrons coming loose and sliding through neighbouring nuclei, coming between the protons and neutrons, going critical. In that moment of alignment, which cast its harmonizing, mutative rays out across the decades, I saw where we were: in Polyphemus’s cave, the Cyclops blinded by “Nobody.”
At first, the English-to-English translation technique worked because it was a pretty faithful simulacrum of Slotin’s experimental technique that day; dangerous, reckless, taboo. It also had the happy coincidence of updating “the man of many ways.” And as I continued to write the book, and focus more on what was happening between the people in it, I realized that the key figures in Slotin’s life that led to his behaviour in the lab that day were Harry Daghlian, his predecessor who died after performing the exact same experiment on the exact same nuclear core nine months to the day earlier, and his replacement, Alvin Graves, who was having an affair with Slotin’s wife (weird: I had incorrectly written “life”). And what was happening between them all—ontogeny mirroring phylogony—looked just like what was happening at the atomic level, later in the lab. Therefore Slotin was in an exciting musical moment for me, where the present is ripe for improvisation, though it’s set in the key of the past. And that’s the poet’s position before the canon, the dragon.
But most of all—and this is something I hope my readers see—it was also the way I figure the world looks. Something that has bothered me enormously as a reader of poetry is the failure of poets—especially the so-called avant-garde—to pick up on the formal complexity of the world as revealed by the various scientific disciplines. Biologists have shown us the double-helix, the root not only of physiology but also of behaviour, cognition; chemistry gives us Bach and personality; and physicists are proving we’re more math than matter. And yet so many poets give us a world that looks profoundly out-dated; disordered, solipsistic, self-made, random, positively 20th century. I think a more honest book is one in which the spontaneity of personality is set within the strict—and ancient— clockwork of the world.
JMM: I’ve heard you use, in more casual settings, the “English-to-English translation” expression before. That shorthand definitely helped me understand the book in advance of reading it but, having spent time with it now, I’m not sure if the process suggested by that phrase “translates” (Cheesy Punner’s Remorse…) into my reading experience. Are you really “translating” these poems in the way an interlingual translator would conceive of the word? A translator reassembles a poem unit-of-meaning by unit-of-meaning, but I’d argue that when approaching Bloom as a functioning organism (or compound), the atomistic units are the source poems. When a reader needs to understand Slotin’s wife’s grief and guilt you have, say, Karen Solie’s “Determinism” there as a representation of that emotion, with the several-dozen little changes made to suit your taste and the demands of your characters and setting. My worry is in the intellectual marketing of the thing. Are “translations” really the most exciting way to think of these poems?
ML: I think you’re right; translation isn’t quite what’s happening. One of the purposes of a traditional translation is to make available poems to readers who otherwise wouldn’t have any access to them. So therefore, for many readers, the original poem exists only as its translation in their language. That’s not the case with my poems from Bloom though; and the pre-conceptions that readers bring to my technique are part of what supplies the aesthetic tension I wrote Bloom to explore. I think creative plagiarism is one of the finest untapped sources of aesthetic possibility available to us today, and it has obvious extra-poetic relevance. In the last century a poem was censured because it was immoral; now they’ll be censured because they’re proprietary. Meeka Walsh, the editor of Border Crossings magazine, which first published some Bloom poems in 2007, called the poems allotropes which I think is pretty good. Others have called them palimpsests, or pentimentos, both of which I also like. A friend called them my irradiated mutants. I don’t really know what to call them, but I know what they do. What would you call them?
JMM: How about “renovations”?
ML: That’d work, if you consider children renovations of their parents.
JMM: Oh boy. I can tell my head’s going to hurt by the end of this one. Speaking of parental feelings, I found that the poems I had the hardest time accepting into the flock were those whose source material was the most important to me. The Paterson poem (“The White Lie”) and Solie’s “Determinism” are a couple of my top-shelf, all-time favourites. My reaction to seeing them being reno-ed was a bit like the lifelong fan’s first reaction to seeing a trailer for the Hollywood adaptation of his, or her, favourite comic. This is perhaps a part of that reading tension you were describing earlier. Which also has something of a helix shape, if you think about it, as your readers grapple with their own approach-avoidance instincts with regard to the recreation of original material they hold dear. I imagine this is something you’ve thought a lot about, and I wonder where you stand on it, now that the book has gone critical, so to speak, and its blooming (C.P.R., again) is imminent?
ML: That feeling you had is the exact feeling I wrote Bloom for. I don’t think there’s anything quite like it in poetry yet, and it feels like as close an emotional and intellectual surrogate I could get for atomic power. And it will be different for everyone; the more one knows about the source poems, the more they know about Ulysses and The Odyssey or nuclear physics (though in my case it’s admittedly surface), the more variegated and deeply will those feelings flower. Einstein wrote that “nuclear weapons changed everything save man’s way of thinking.” I must have said that over to myself a thousand times over the last three years. To write the poems from the modernist/post-modernist paradigm of “making it new” wouldn’t do, because human thinking hasn’t changed as much as they thought, and that’s the problem; we’re running 21st-century software on million-year-old hardware. The poems had to be both creations and decreations, because that’s the condition of ingenuity in the nuclear age. And for readers of poetry, I found it the best way to instill in them the fear and wonder of all that human genius has in store for us to gain and lose, because they have something personal, beloved at stake.
JMM: Absolutely. I believed that the trepidation I was feeling while reading those pieces was a trepidation designed by the author. I felt like it was part of the ride. One of my favourite recent topics of conversations, both casually and on-the-record, has been this idea of the “Project Book”. I know you’ve engaged in discussions about it in the past. You’re only one book into your career right now but, speaking generally, do you see the book-length project, or the long poem, as becoming your preferred structure? And if so, why? Is it easier to arrange your thoughts? Is it a more reliable long-term source of inspiration than the “occasional” poem?
ML: It is an interesting argument, though it’s one that more often than not is all straw men, red herrings, and reductive, self-justifying thinking. Not every gesture is a manifesto. I wrote Bloom the way I did because it needed to be written like that. If a poet is writing a certain way because it’s “easier” then she’s probably doing her poems–and her readers–a disservice. Poems, long or short, fail because of the shortcomings of the people who write them, not because of the ontology of the form in which they are written. In tennis, you lose a point because you hit the ball too low, not because the net is too high or the ball’s too heavy.
I’m not interested in sloganeering; I’m not here to turn people off “individual poems” and onto “long poems.” Not at all. I write both, as the poems require themselves to be written. And we should all read both. Dante and Dickinson are cordial neighbours in my head. Speaking of Dante, one of the important things I take from The Divine Comedy is that poems, like souls, come to assume the forms of their predispositions. That being said, I wrote Bloom the way I did because the form it required allowed me to do things that other forms wouldn’t. As I’ve said before, the long poem done right can provide a poet with opportunities for meaning that cloistered poems can’t. It populates the absences. The trick is to be scrupulous about the rules of mutual cohesion; otherwise you end up with the uber-unfortunate flab that gives some long poems a bad name.
And that leads me to my next point. Now, I don’t have any authority over any other reader about what I’m going to say next, but I’m going to say it anyway because I think it’s true: Bloom isn’t only a long poem. In others, poems are written specifically for inclusion in the greater whole. But with Bloom, the poems’ predecessors have lives of their own outside of my book, and so their nativity therein is tempered by their alienness. And I made sure that the vast majority of the poems that I transposed for Bloom were not originally from long poems themselves. So there’s an anthologistic character to it that, set in counterpoint against the cohesive structure, allowed me to produce an effect that the book required: to be able to zoom in and out of focus at the phenotypical, chemical, and atomic levels. I hope.
JMM: You’ve quite coincidentally wandered into another question I’ve been meaning to ask. The phrase “anthologistic character” (well, specifically “anthology-like element”) is written in my notes for this interview. That character is something that Bloom shares with its press-mate, Kevin Connolly’s Revolver. The structure of the project, even more than in demands that you channel a great variety of forces, use numerous different form and styles, and generally fold your native aesthetics into those of your selected original authors. What results is a very surprising paradox because, superficially, Bloom is an audacious act of authorial tyranny, what with the gall and presumption of rewriting known and often beloved poems. But the reality is that the authorial voice is subsumed by those other poems, these poems lose a lot of their Michael Lista-ness to the greater good. I wonder if this is something you’ve thought or cared about, and if there’s any fear attached to it, as many critics and readers are keen to list “a strong and unique voice” high among their reasons to engage in the work of a young poet?
ML: That’s a great question. Bloom has left a lot for me to worry about. But this is the book I needed to write. First let me say that I find something disingenuous about the breakout contemporary voice that strives to achieve idiosyncrasy to the point of the autistic; it feels, as I said earlier, like a sort of vestige of 20th-century thought about poetics as some sort of utopian realm where language can be sequestered and hermetically sealed. One of the most profound and disturbing moments for me is when I hear myself, in the middle of what I think is a novel thought or sentence, channeling my father or my mother or my grandfather. To hear their ideas, bound up in their syntax, coming out of my mouth. And so when I discovered Slotin, who seemed to be feeling a similar anxiety because of Daghlian’s influence, I knew I’d have to find a way of representing that which I’d never seen before in poetry. And again, the risk to me was a boon to the book, because it spoke to riskiness of Slotin’s work.
Secondly, I don’t think what I’m doing is “folding (my) native aesthetics into those of (my) selected original authors.” That sort of thinking belies the prejudicial way we see free verse as being the most native and honest mode of poetic expression. What I’m doing is using the structure of the extant poem, and its author’s voice, as a formal conceit, like a sonnet. Personality isn’t inhibited by form; it’s given dimension. And the form–as I push against it and it pushes back–lets me play out Slotin’s struggle against influence and the momentum of history.
But most importantly I think it’s incumbent on us to recalibrate our definition of “voice”; it’s not just a sonic quality. “Voice” used to have the connotation of “vision” but for some reason we don’t expect that from our poets anymore. It’s come to mean something like timbre, which is part of voice, but not all of it.
JMM: Hmm. While I agree with your model of the interaction between voice and form, I’m not sure I buy your source poems as being simply “forms”. If you were only using the poems for their formal arrangement, and throwing away the rest, I’d agree, but what you’re doing (in most cases) is more holistic than that. In the poem we’ve reprinted here, you’re re-using Hughes’s structure, but also his subject (improvisation) and elements of the poem’s mood, vision, and voice. That’s what I meant by shared aesthetics. And it’s a good thing. Exciting. Almost new.
Anyway, it’s your book so you should have the last word. You can respond to what I’ve said above and/or answer this: Where does Bloom fit into what cultural observers have been broadly calling “Remix Culture”. Bloom can reasonably be placed alongside recent works in visual art, film, and especially popular music that aspire to make new art out of old art. Is this too much of a “fad word” for you? Or do you think there’s something legitimate in the comparison?
ML: I know the comparison is going to be made. I’m resigned to it. Though “remix” isn’t my favourite term in the whole world for Bloom, nor do I think it’s entirely fair (though if people are going to do it, let’s hope I’m more J-Dilla than Girltalk). I think the poems are metempsychoses: transmigrations of the soul. We see poems transmigrate like this through history: Ruiz’s Book of Good Love turned into Boccaccio’s Decameron which turned into Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales. Amleth from The Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus turned into The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd which turned into Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The Book of J turned into Genesis. And so whereas I think “remix culture” is happening in other mediums like film and music for technological reasons–we have the equipment now to realize visions which we couldn’t 50 years ago—I think it’s happening in literature (or in Bloom at least) for more mysterious reasons. Ideas are cyclical and so is history (maybe history is remixing itself) and the mistake of the last hundred years was thinking we were at the end of it.
L o u i s S l o t i n I m p r o v i s e s
I’m beside Slotin
Who has the sun in one hand, a feather in the other––
The flash he tickles out giggles his name.
So he takes his zipper in one hand,
The Milky Way in the other––
The flash that fish-thumps out pronounces the alphabet,
In which every other letter is “I.”
He takes Auschwitz in one hand
And Japan in the other––
The flash that gnarls out proposes to marry him.
So he takes his stillborn daughter in one hand
And his sense of humour in the other––
The flash that claps out detaches him from history.
So he takes his grandfather’s skinned pelt in one hand,
And a smelted pickerel in the other––
The flash that cooks out spoils his ballot.
He grabs his wife’s lover with one hand
And his passed kidney stone in the other––
The flash that flirts out confuses the tenses.
And so he takes his sister’s fondness for hyperbole in one hand,
His sotto-voce in the other,
And the flash that booms out falls in love with him.
He holds his heart, pounding like an ache in one hand,
And with the other feels for a camera––
The flash that blooms out sings him an opera.
So he takes his birth-scream in one hand
And his death-please in the other
And lets the flash scorch him to dust.
And with a gesture any waiter would envy,
He pops the top on his creation,
Stands back, panting,
As if to say
Voila!
After Ted Hughes
