Interview

Mathilda Cullen & Dominick Knowles on Stanzas for Four Hands: An Ophanim

A wrench is a tool to maintain a machine’s smooth operation that can just as easily cause it to break and jam. Similarly poetry often seems to soothe readers into a kind of submission, or a book comes along that breaks down some previously churning part of us and forces us, even if just for a moment, to see inside of the machinery that we all help to operate. See how it can break.

Stanzas for Four Hands: An Ophanim falls as squarely in the second category as I can imagine a book doing. In seamlessly collaborative writing, Mathilda Cullen and Dominick Knowles’s recent book takes on capital, empire, and Poetry itself unflinchingly and with a balance of erudition, vitriol, and humor. Moving from the familiar to the far out to the future, the work breaks open compromised poetic forms, damning open secrets, exploitive industry norms, and a stifled world shaped by oppression, allowing us a hard stare into the inner workings of creation under capitalism. It’s an imposing machine but we have to learn how it works if we want to smash it. It’s a bleak and upsetting and hopeful and funny book. There are wonderful angelic illustrations by Matthew Yates throughout. It’s available now from Woe Eroa.

I (Patrick) interviewed them jointly in writing about the collaborative writing process, “Gala Poetics,” and prophecy.

PB: The book was written collectively in a very true sense: there is no demarcation of what words or ideas came from which writer, just a complete, seamless work with two joint authors. At the same time, there is a playful collapse at times between what one might call “the speaker” of the poems and the person writing behind it, as in the first poem which winkingly asserts “this poem wears a tattered cardigan/ because I do, see how that works?” 

Can you speak about 1.) how you found the process of writing collectively, and 2.) how that approach made you reexamine your relationship to the poems, your co-writer, “the speaker(s),” readers, etc.?

MC: One of the many epigraphs scattered throughout the book is a section from Ben Lerner’s “Didactic Elegy” which reads: “The lyric is a stellar condition. / The relation between the lyric I and the lyric poem / is like the relation between a star and starlight. / The poem and the I are never identical and their distance may be measured in time. / Some lyric poems become visible long after their origins have ceased to exist. // The heavens are anachronistic. Similarly, the lyric / lags behind the subjectivity it aspires to express.” The neoliberal poetic speaker is a like a neutron star: it wants to swallow the universe in a Whitmanesque bipartisan blink of empire. In writing Ophanim, Dom and I were attempting to produce a poetics that “evades the police without policing evasion,” to unkettle the lyric subject in the throes of riot, and one of the notions we discussed was the lyric that collapses in on itself. A self-destructive lyric that does not dissolve either of our individuals, but cloaks them in one another; two black holes circling each other in spatial austerity. Maybe they’re gonna kiss?

One of the questions we kept coming back to was: Why don’t more communist poets write collaboratively? And the answer is fairly simple: no matter your politics, the system of prestige will whittle away at you until they can put a Wells Fargo logo on the inside of your book. For some, this doesn’t take a lot; for others, it dampens the political fervor of the book immediately (if you’re looking for it). Poets are the spokespeople of empire, they always have been. Ophanim is fairly certain that its poetry doesn’t do anything to change that, but serves as a warning to our contemporaries, hence, “Gala Poetics” —  

DK: Yeah, exactly. Even “collaboration” as a potentially communist activity has been usurped and twisted beyond recognition by liberals in the MFA-industrial complex. Collaborating in their sense means more evenly distributing the desire for prestige—a kind of literary social democracy. That shit sucks and does nothing good for anyone except the poets whose bloodthirst for bloodmoney is tempered by a dribble of guilt. As in “collaborating” on a piece but filing a cease and desist if someone violates their publisher’s IP laws on the internet. Silly shit like that is so deeply important to a lot of poets—and it’s hard to de-interpellate from that ideology! Our relationship to our work is overdetermined, mediated by a thousand different processes and held together by the prestige economy. I can’t speak for Mathilda, but early on in the writing process I definitely felt myself making a distinction between “my” poems and “her” poems. Now, aside from a few longer ones, I can hardly tell who wrote what. That space in which the impulse-to-propriety dissolves is where collaboration might begin. It’s something I think we both want to develop further in other projects, even single-author ones. The consequences of collaborative—or collectivist—poetry go way beyond merely writing *with* another person. We also write through each other and everyone we read, as well as the misalignments of our own consciousness. 

The last thing I’ll add is this: writing Ophanim also changed our relationships to poets. Being on poetry twitter—a bourgeois cultural dungeon—and seeing how poets behave when they’re not giving readings or otherwise performing as good liberal subjects, has given us real insight into why the publishing industry is such a cesspool. We’ve seen poets who’ve landed book deals with big presses refuse to condemn those presses (or their distributors) even when bookworkers expose labor violations, transphobia, antiblackness, etc. Clearly, the bosses and their instruments will always be the main targets of our work. But poets do themselves no favors when they cape for owners, most of whom don’t give half a raw turd about poetry, even when it’s good! For owners, poetry is simply a way to launder surplus value and get a tax break without the blatant cruelty that attends investing in the arms industry. If you’re a poet born into wealth, sure, those are your people. As for the rest of us: Why would you defend what will never love you back? How many members of the trustee board have actually read your new book? So we wanted Ophanim’s content and method to respond not only to the structures of class power but also the class collaborationists in our ranks. Gala poetics, especially, is (like Mathilda said) our way of warning comrades about poetry—and poets themselves. 

PB: A repeated subject throughout the book is poetry’s relationship to capital, empire, and fascism. In particular, there is a recurring series throughout called “Gala Poetics”: poems that are often pointed illustrations of ways in which these issues manifest themselves. Can you define “gala poetics” and talk about how you decided to target the specific institutions and actors that appear in these poems? 

DK: I think I’ve been to maybe one actual gala in my life, and it sucked out part of my soul that I’ll never get back. It was an utterly depressing event where rich people got dressed up to perform their humanitarian sympathies for oppressed peoples who were, of course, not invited. Part of what makes the gala so heinous is that it won’t admit what it is: bourgeois theater. Poetryland often feels like that––except it’s almost worse because nobody’s even *that* rich.

“Gala Poetics” is our attempt to demystify the social relationships that make poetry possible and reveal poems to be dynamic, historical records of exploitation. The idea for the series arose from the ongoing “crisis” plaguing what passes in the United States for a literary community. Places like Rattle, SPD, and Poetry Foundation have become targets of widespread criticism, with many poets calling for their abolition. In addition to hosting actual galas, these organizations have deep connections to anti-communism and anti-blackness, which are always co-constituted in the logic of empire. CIA affiliations, corporate and pharmaceutical endowments, union-busting, and landlord-backed community demolition are some of the objective phenomena that generate their prominence in the poetry world.

Too many poets tend to think of themselves as intrinsically against fascism, empire, and even capital itself by virtue of some mystical element in their poems––a tendency to believe that the “imagination is the real site of resistance.” “Gala Poetics” is a critique of this notion. We wanted to hijack the imagination in order to indict it. A line reiterated several times throughout the poems is “what if a poet was yr boss.” We intended it as an exercise in imagining the actual conditions of poetry, a kind of anti-thought experiment against the micro- and macro-forces that generate the gala. Foundations, awards, submission processes––all these things replicate the antagonism between labor and capital; they make capital-P Poets into middle-managers and literary organizations into bosses.

PB: I love this project of demystifying some of the elements of poetry and imaginative work you mention. I agree that for a lot of writers there seems to be an insistence that the imagination is de facto always a weapon against oppression, but obviously the imagination of a fascist is a dangerous fascist imagination; the imagination of anyone invested in the trappings of capitalism is probably reactionary, at least to a large extent. Sometimes those things are revealed subtly but of course sometimes they are not, and the book is adept at calling those instances out. In this way it seems to me the “Gala Poetics” series (and other poems in the book) is at least partially attempting to position itself as criticism in addition to being invested in creating something new through its own imaginative work. Do you feel that there is an affinity between poetry and literary criticism? Do you think there ought to be? 

MC: You kinda nailed it with that one. When Ophanim was just a Google Doc and we were still playing around with what to do, we were specifically hoping to find a sweet spot between poetry and poetics. Originally this was going to take a couple shapes: we would comment on each other’s poems in the margins in a kind of metatexual dialoguing to suss out a more articulate poetics; but after a while we wanted the poems to articulate it for us and decided to let our commentary be the improvisation off one another and the lines we weaved between our writing. 

DK: Totally agree that you nailed it, Patrick. We began, like Mathilda said, with this idea of critical paratexts supplementing the poem. We’re both scholars so the idea of a running metatext seemed very attractive. I don’t think we framed it quite this way when we were writing, but the very concept of a supplement—in Derrida’s sense—is that the *idea* of an original (ie, the poem proper) is invented by its copies (ie, the explication). So in less dorky words, our attempt to interpret each other’s work *became* the work, a kind of infinite dialectic that rid us of the need to separate poetry from poetics, original from copy. I think Terrance Hayes said something like “I wrote the poem so I don’t have to talk about it,” and I think we ended up using that method: the poem is the poetics and vice versa. Sublimation, baby! 

MC: I think Benjamin says in his “Task of the Translator” that translation is the vehicle through which we can see the wheels of language turning; well, he doesn’t say that, but something about how it is one of the only methods through which we can actively perceive the historical development of language and participate in it. If the page is a vacuum we wanted our poems screaming, teeming with context. The quotations and marginalia were an attempt to situate our poems as we were writing them with what we were reading, was our way of situating them in the history of their development. Most of our contemporaries would put an epigraph at the top of the page and call it a day (a practice I admire), but for the magnetics our poems required we needed each page brimming with history. Which is why you’ll find Mark Fisher next to one poem, Heriberto Yépez by another, and so on. Lots of Marx and Benjamin, no shit. 

PB: Speaking of wheels, the book is subtitled “An Ophanim,” which references wheel-shaped celestial beings with many eyes from the biblical visions of Ezekial. There is a key poem late in the book in which a broke poet has such a vision. What was the genesis of this reference, and how did you come to see it as such an integral element to the work as whole?

DK: So, the genesis of the reference is somewhat embarrassing because Mathilda and I were just texting each other memes, which is like 85% of our conversations anyway. The meme we kept sending each other was the one where a terrifying Old Testament angel appears in front of a stick figure and says “BE NOT AFRAID.” The stick figure has a variety of responses, but most of them are either “I’ve never been more afraid in my life” or “so true bestie,” etc. And, at least my take on it was like, these freakish divine messengers want to be our friends––but what if they were our *comrades*? What if divine retribution also meant communist revolution? I was clearly channeling a stoner’s version of Benjamin’s messianic angel of history, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The italicized bit at the beginning riffs on the biblical text before abandoning it pretty much entirely: the reference to wheels, the color of beryl, the popcorn drop ceiling “firmament”––most of the objects and events have their biblical analogues. The rest of it, which I’ll get into in a sec, takes up Ezekiel’s message, what Daniel Davies (a scholar of Jewish thought) calls “the deepest secret of the Torah.” I’m not a scholar of either the bible or the Torah, but, following Benjamin, the deepest secret of capitalism is the negation of the negation: communism.

The rest of the prose-poetics / glossary narrative––not sure how to categorize it––was a way for us to think through what meeting a revolutionary angel with god’s infinite knowledge would actually be like: that thing would be consistently frustrated with how stupid we are in comparison, with having to explain strategy and procedure over and over again, with our fear and the fragility of our lives. And yet, for it to be a real revolution it couldn’t be a deus ex machina; even in the original Vision, the ophanim could only perform a holy utterance. The people had to interpret and act upon that utterance. And when we do, we almost always fail. As the glossary terms develop into a narrative in which the poems’ speaker appears as a character, the poetics we’ve elaborated throughout the book return in different forms. Gala poetics, for instance, reappears at a book launch attended by poet-senators who, the text implies, are also part of the fascist militia.

The narrative itself ends with “the end of the poem”––a reference to Giorgio Agamben’s book of the same name, which I read a couple years ago. Agamben offers an interpretation of poetry that’s so simple it’s almost absurd: he defines “the poem” very narrowly as an enjambed text and concludes that since the last line of every poem by definition cannot be “enjambed” that every poem slides into prose the moment before it’s over. Obviously prose-poems exist, which dents his theory quite a bit, but I think the basic argument can be politicized to mean the following: the last line of every poem (prose or otherwise) is a transitional moment not between literary genres, but between activities: you’re reading, caught up in poem-time, then you’re not. Labor songs and the revolutionary hymns of enslaved people demonstrate this: one moment you’re singing, then next you’re breaking factory machines or burning down a plantation. That’s the relationship we should aspire to have with poetry, as well as the communist interpretation of Ezekiel’s Vision––make every poem a prelude to the total annihilation of our class enemies and the structures they’ve built to enrich themselves: the poem can only tell time. Now, it is time.

PB: As someone who was invested in Benjamin’s angel of history and time and biblical prophecies in my own recent writing, I was really fascinated by the use of these ideas and the ophanim figure in the book. Part of my own thinking about prophets involved trying to parse how much of thinking about potential futures should be about warning and how much about optimism for those that heed it. Taken to extremes this can mean catastrophizing versus utopian thinking, which are maybe both unhelpful, but I wonder if you have thoughts about that balance. The vision of fascist poet-senators seems like raising an alarm to change our relationships with poetry and empire, but “the end of the poem,” as you suggest, is a call for something new that’s about to happen to deter that outcome. And just before that you write: “a few minutes before the end of the poem is the best place to lie. your readers have already followed you this far; why not satisfy them all with a bloodless utopia?” lest we think that it’ll be an immediately happy ending. I guess my question might be: do you think a poem can say what comes after the end of the poem? Or, is it naivety to think the angel can even turn toward the future that it’s propelling the reader toward?

DK: I think about your book, Patrick, and the title pun on prophet/profit. I was reading P/P while I was writing some of the Ophanim poems, and it seems to me that the biblical and Jewish mystic material we both draw from takes prophesy to mean a combination of divine knowledge and collective will. The prophet as profiteer fakes the former and engineers the latter in service of capital accumulation. Benjamin’s angel, a proto-Ophanim for me and Mathilda, takes a much less calculated approach. Benjamin writes in his Theses that Social-Democratic theory (our analogue for liberal / MFA poetics) is “dogmatic” in that it takes historical progress as “irresistible…automatically pursued in a straight or spiral course.” The job of the revolutionary class is to “make the continuum of history explode,” which means, for our purposes, to sunder the link between prophesy and profiteering, even when it appears in “progressive” forms. If the angel of history, then, turns around to face the future, it will not be because of the inexorable flight-lines of progress, but because the revolutionary classes have forced the angel’s body around. When that happens, the angel will, like history, explode—it will become the debris that has gathered for centuries at its feet. Poems certainly can’t do that; they’re not designed to prophesy or profiteer. So no, I don’t think that any poem can predict what comes next—but it can be an urge towards the collective proletarian will that forces the angel into its “single catastrophe,” the revolutionary explosion of communism. 

MATHILDA CULLEN

DOMINICK KNOWLES

Dominick Knowles is a poet and PhD candidate writing about Cold War US poetry and imperialism in Latin America. They edit the poetry section of Protean magazine and co-run woe eroa, a press of militant poetics. They are a member of the Poets Union.

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