Ava: So why are your books piled up on the floor instead of on a shelf?
Maya: Because then I can look at them. I keep them associated in groups. Like this is very heady, theoretical stuff. Then this is white man poetry. I'd say a lot of the books that I have here I acquired while I was in college. But the ones I brought from home are books that I have nostalgic feelings for. I was really into the Beats in high school. So I have “Howl” from home and then Gary Snyder. I was drawn to buying books when I started liking the Beats because they had really beautiful visuals on the covers, and I mostly collect books because they're really beautiful to me—the fonts, the drawings within them, especially poetry books and the covers. I don't know if this is cliché or pretentious, but I think of it as an art collection. The book is an art object.
A: What about the Beats are you drawn to?
M: If I'm being completely honest, it's not so much the content that draws me as much as their aesthetic. They like black and white. The spacing is also very experimental. Before I had exposure to experimental poetry from marginalized people, I was drawn to the Beats. I feel like as I get older I find books that aren't Beat literature, maybe like avant-garde or works associated with the Beats, that mean more to me in terms of the content. As I got more mature, the content and what it looked like combined.
A: So the way you found the Beat poets was by looking at the book itself first?
M: Yeah, and what they were talking about appealed to me: outlaws and mountains and being an outsider. I guess I started with the mainstream idea of "outsider," which was these well-off white men who appropriated the aesthetics of the outsider poets who now I've come to love. My best friend Sophie is a big reason why I collect books, they introduced me to "Howl." Sophie and I were both marginalized people who found poetry through these douchey white guys primarily because their aesthetic subconsciously spoke to us. And then we were able to articulate that and include ourselves within it through our own poetry and through discovering people like Danez Smith and Kenneth Patchen and Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. We really feed off each other; we're both super visual people.
[bringing out her sketchbook] I've always been very artistically inclined but not very technically trained. So bookmaking was a medium that made me feel comfortable in making art, because it's something I'm acquainted with. And I'm very influenced by the books I have when I make those things. I wanted to be an artist, but that didn't work out. I couldn't take critique.
Anyway, I think most of what I've been talking about thus far is my early stages of liking books and poetry. When I was in our Beginning Poetry Writing class, I was completely aesthetically focused.
A: What changed that?
M: Getting older and thinking more, I guess.
A: Not being such a douche bag.
M: Yeah... reevaluating my douchbagness, reevaluating my relation to the Beats, because as I got to college I realized how racist and sexist they are. And in high school I knew that—I always wondered how I would fit in with these people, like they would probably just sexualize me… but I wasn't presented with other alternatives. But now, for instance, one of my favorite books is Bob Kaufman’s “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness."
A: Were all of them writing at the same time as the Beats?
M: Yeah. But they're not really considered Beats. For instance, Amiri Baraka started with the Beats. He was friends with Allen Ginsberg and all of those people and then was disillusioned by it and left. And I don't know about Bob Kaufman, but Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez are associated with the black arts movement.
Kenneth Patchen is a huge person in my book collection. He’s the love of my life. He makes picture poetry, where you can't divorce the content from what it looks like. And he really experiments with book form. “Journal of Albion Moonlight” is the most nonsense thing you could ever read, but I love it. It looks like a book, but it's not a book. He's also someone who's associated with the Beats but was the child of factory workers and is known as a proletarian poet.
A: Your sensibility and the book you made for Jane Hilberry's class looks a lot like Kenneth Patchen.
M: Aw, thanks—I quoted Kenneth Patchen in that: "There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which one of them is death. We shall be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands." I think Diane [Diane Seuss, Advanced Poetry professor] quotes that too, in one of her poems. Which is another amazing thing about Diane: I feel like no one really talks about Kenneth Patchen anymore. She has this poem "Self Portrait with Double Helix" that references Patchen, which I read after Jane’s class. The poem says "The book Mikel gave me—” Mikel was one of her best friends—“my inheritance he said, / Kenneth Patchen. He’d read me a few lines before handing it over: / 'We shall not be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands…" It meant a lot to me (I emailed her about it) because my best friend Sophie was the one who introduced me to Kenneth Patchen and that made me love poetry.
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Another really special book is "Folktales of India," which is my mom's. It's mythology and folklore of regions in India. This is probably my most valuable resource for creative inspiration. I write the myths into my poetry and make it a kind of auto-mythography. I translate my life into a myth, so I like collecting myth books.
A: Can you talk about a specific myth that has resonated with you or that you've worked with?
M: My grandma would always tell me the story of baby Krishna, who was playing in a sandbox and eating the sand and his mom got really fucking pissed, and she says, "What are you doing, spit that out" and he wouldn't spit it out and so she forced his mouth open and when she did that she saw the whole universe in his mouth. I've always related that to poetry and that's why in Beginning Poetry, I called my little chapbook "Dirt Songs" and used eating dirt as a metaphor for poetry.
And then there's one called "The Porcupine Daughter," which is regional to Gujarat where my family is from. It's about a dad who wants land for farming, but it's owned by someone else, so he tries to do a trick where he digs a hole and puts his daughter in it and makes his daughter pretend that she's God and say to the farmers, "This is not your land." Then, when the father tries to retrieve the daughter after the trick worked, she turns into a porcupine. And that's why porcupines, when they make sounds, sound like crying children. And I don't know why, but I really related to that when I read it in the moment that I was in. It doesn't objectively have anything to do with my life; it just spoke to me. So in my poem, “The Porcupine Daughter,” I translated it into my relationship with my parents.
M: I also have a lot of theory books that mean a lot to me—like Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks.” “Archive Fever” by Derrida is a really beautiful book. I just got it.
A: Is it readable?
M: Not really, but I really like it.
A: What draws you to Derrida?
M: This one particularly appeals to me because I'm interested in the concept of the archive in a race theory and postcolonial context. I guess my interest in books is super archival… storing and recording and having a personal archive of my intellectual and creative development.
Dante's “Inferno” is another really important book to me. This is my favorite edition—favorite translation, favorite cover, favorite everything… Robert Pinsky does a very sound-y, musical translation of “Inferno,” which I love.
A: Why do you love Dante?
M: I think similar to my folktales, it's a forever-applicable story that I draw a lot of creative inspiration from. Especially “Inferno”—I haven't read “Purgatory” or “Paradiso,” but I already know that “Inferno” is my favorite because it's about bodies; it’s super physical. And I feel like everyone loves shit about sinners.
A: I love the figure of Satan or Lucifer in literature.
M: Satan's so crazy in “Inferno.” He has three heads and is eternally gnawing and frozen in his own tears. “Inferno” has a super visceral image base, whereas I've heard “Paradiso” is super intangible. Sophie loves “Paradiso,” because they love intangible floaty things, and I love “Inferno” which has stuff like “the strumpet with shit-covered fingers.”
A: Haha. I feel like Satan is an outsider too, so that makes sense.
M: Yeah. And then this Lorca book is really special to me.
A: Can you talk about how you came to Lorca?
M: When Diane read my poetry she told me, "You need to learn about 'duende,'" which basically means "trickery." I still don't entirely understand it in a definition sense, but I feel like Johnny Cash has “duende,” and “Inferno” has duende. Duende is not an angel or a muse, it's like a trickster figure. Lorca’s whole thing is that the muse and the angel come from outside us, but the duende is in the blood. It’s very corporeal. Like "Dark shuddering descendant of the happy marble and salt demon of Socrates." Like a demon or Satan, but not as scary as a demon… like a troll maybe. Like disorder, human pain. But I feel like duende is in all of the books that I'm interested in: mythic body-centered things.
A: You love the devil card in tarot.
M: Yeah, and tarot's very visual too. A lot of these books are kind of like the devil card.
A: What's your favorite circle of hell in Dante’s “Inferno”?
M: The last one. Cocytus, where Satan is and where the people who’ve committed treachery are. They're all frozen in Satan's tears. They can't move. And that's where Uglino the cannibal is. I'm really interested in cannibalism.
A: Like cannibalism as a metaphor?
M: Yeah, like in a postcolonial sense. Aimé Césaire’s "Discourse on Colonialism" has a lot of cannibalism imagery because colonial subjects were thought of as cannibals, but Césaire subverts that and says, "Actually, colonialists are cannibals," because colonialism is a kind of zombification of the colonized body, draining its contents. I'm also really interested in the blurring of lines between self and other, in transcorporeality and bodily porosity. But in a racial postcolonial sense.
A: That makes me think of the psychoanalytic literature on love and possession—love as a desire to merge completely with another and to just consume and ingest someone. Not explicitly race related but also kind of, especially if you're thinking about the relation between colonizer and colonized.
M: And a love of other cultures as possession, consumption.
A: Also, there's a Brazilian poetic movement called Antropofagia, which is all about “eating the text.” It's literally about literary cannibalism.
M: Woah!!
A: If you had your own manifesto, what would it say?
M: I've played around with the idea of making a manifesto about poems as bodies. If you're a marginalized person, for instance, you can think of poetry as a body you can scribble on top of the one you can't control—because a poem has rhythm and breath and sound and it's kind of sculpted into this body, like it has a pulse and a shape to it. My manifesto would probably include Bob Kaufman and Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, who are all super physical. I'd also probably put “Inferno” in there. “Inferno” is like reordering your world through poetry, reordering your body through poetry. That would be my manifesto. Rewriting your body through poetry.
A: And that's so cool because it speaks to how poetry is magic. It's like a spell, like you're literally transfiguring reality through words.
M: I love that. You should read the thing on duende. That's Lorca. He's so magic, his poems don't make any sense:
“When the moon rises
the bells hang silent
and impenetrable footpaths
appear.
When the moon rises,
the sea covers the land
and the heart feels like
an island within infinity.
Nobody eats oranges
under the full moon.
One must eat fruit
that is green and cold.”
It's so elemental, it's just these archetypal magical images. He's really influenced by this Spanish Andalusian concept of "deepsong." All of his poems are structured in this Andalusian gypsy genre with repetition and these really primal images like the moon. There’s that one famous poem of his that goes like, “black pony, red moon, olives in my pocket." These really hardy images. So yeah I also love magic. Tee hee.
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M: I'm also really influenced by Japanese poetry. I have a haiku book that I think I left at home. And I’m at really influenced by the American imaginary of Zen Buddhism, in how it translates to an American context. For instance, Diane would talk about haiku and she instead uses something called the American sentence, which Allen Ginsberg created inspired by haiku. He says haiku doesn't work in English because we don't talk in haiku, like we don't talk in syllables, we talk in sentences. So he would do these seventeen syllable sentences. I prefer haiku to that, though.
I also love shadows, and I feel like a lot of these books also have to do with shadows. Most obvious is "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" and "Invisible Man" which I don't have here for some reason. That's like my favorite book ever. Thinking of the marginalized person as a body without content or interiority, versus a white person who has both interiority and exteriority, like the Descartes idea [of the subject-object split]. Shadows as a shape that looks human but isn't human. People conceiving of marginalized people as nonhuman shadows, and also the idea of invisibility. Of not being seen but also being too seen.
I'm interested in the idea of nothingness and emptiness and how that relates to shadows and formlessness and possibilities within that nothingness, like a freedom in it. Not just thinking of it as a depressing thing. And I think Zen Buddhism turns nothingness into a positive thing, whereas in American or Western thought (I'm not versed at all in philosophy so this may just be utter bullshit), when you think, "Oh, that person's invisible" or "That is not a person" it's a very negative thing. And it is a very negative and violent thing with physical repercussions, but there's a way to gain freedom by being formless and through trickery (duende)—which relates to “Kith” by Divya Victor, who came to CC.
It was very important for me to read Victor’s work and interact with it while she was here because she's Indian and experimental, which I haven't really seen before. I asked her what it's like to be working in a field where you don't see yourself—like that invisibility question—and she said, "There's such a freedom in accepting the fact that you're an orphaned poet. And in killing the audience and just writing for yourself." So I guess that connects to my interest in Zen Buddhism and invisibility in all of these books: a freedom in nothingness and being free by accepting the reality of your predicament. And it is violent and horrible, but there's at least creative freedom in it, that I feel like people who aren't women or people of color or queer don't understand.
A: That makes me think about Derrida's idea about the signifier liberated from the signified and language just becoming endless play, because it's not attached to any kind of origin.
M: Which is the trickster idea, and playing, and magic! I feel like, have you seen that meme from “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia” with the guy with all these connected points behind him and he's like “ahhhhh!” That's how I feel right now. Magic, race, Satan, shadows, play, Zen Buddhism. All these connected themes.
Mediocre Issue | October 2019