Khadijah Queen | April 2020

Eleni Sikelianos

EXCERPT

Eleni Sikelianos’s work feels rooted in an expansive curiosity. Her process seems one of perpetual movement and growth, in which imagination and capacity for invention strikes me as endless. All of her books eschew predictable structures and engage the world in the way that poetry is meant to—with language that feels full-hearted and vulnerable, generous and unflinching, transparent and mysterious, wise and yet still able to capture astonishment.

What I Knew tackles our obsessions with virtual reality, internet connectivity, and social media by examining the knowledge that each of those new modes of human interaction can influence and deliver. In a single stream of consciousness poem, an epic existing as a counterpoint to our age of compression, Sikelianos reminds us of the value of nonvirtual ways of connecting with each other and the world—and points out the negative and possibly long-lasting effects of the apathy, isolation, and disconnection ignited by the prevalence of virtual selves and constant surveillance.

Sikelianos is the author of eight previous collections of poetry. She has received numerous honors and awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including the National Poetry Series, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Fulbright, residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, the James D. Phelan Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, and the New York Council for the Arts Translation Award. Her latest poetry collection is What I Knew, published in April 2019 by Nightboat Books. Sikelianos teaches creative writing at Brown University.

Khadijah Queen: Eleni, I’m so grateful for the chance to discuss your latest book, What I Knew! The title begs the question: what kind of knowledge were you seeking as you began this book, or did it feel more like you wanted to share what you knew? Or, were the poems inspired by both impulses?

Eleni Sikelianos: Hello, Khadijah! I’m so happy to have this chance to spend time together, even if virtually. When I was writing this book, I was thinking about the way knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing has changed so dramatically in my lifetime. One of the first things I noticed in our hand-held device era was how quickly fact-checking became part of our daily interactions with friends and family—that moment when somebody has said something about a movie or a song, and maybe there’s a little argument, or maybe nobody can remember who wrote the screenplay, and suddenly a phone is whipped out, someone consults the oracle. We’ve all gotten used to the fact-checker “disappearing” into the device-hole for a moment (she’s seen her email feed too), and also to the way conversation, memory, and knowledge have changed because of the internet. I’m interested in the way that the poem, in large, can’t be fact-checked or surveilled for most of what poetry knows and has to convey. Writing was one of our early aids to memory, and it changed what we carry around in our heads (think about someone like Homer, whoever that was, carrying around 12,000 lines of poetry in his/her/their head). We’re in this major transition again. What’s it doing to memory, to imagination? I was also thinking about how these devices so linked to our writerly lives (I’m typing on one now) are gathering knowledge about us. At the same time that I might feel more in touch with more people and information around the world, my life and how and what I know definitely feel more circumscribed by this data gathering. I read an article right around the time I started the poem about how our internet search histories know more about us than we probably know, or are willing to admit, about ourselves. I started to consider poetry as sanctuary from that.

Queen: Why is it important to you that the knowledge in your book “can’t be mined or verified by search engines or easily surveilled”?

Sikelianos: We are in a moment when so much of our living is public information. And that information is being collected by corporations who are trying to sell us stuff and manipulate who we think we are. I wrote the poem before Cambridge Analytica broke, but I was already freaked out about the way ads selling, say, neck creams and leather boots were popping up when I went online. Everything we post, share, like, or search for online is being used to target us. Facebook is not my friend. Mark Zuckerberg is not our friend. (My autocorrect knows that “Zucherberg” is not a word, but “Zuckerberg” is.) Almost everything about us is being used for market. What does that mean about how we live? One of the things that pushed this poem into being was recognizing poetry as a refuge from anything that can be surveilled in a “useful” way or sold to us. Poetry’s ancient forms of knowing: dream, memory, bodily knowledge of family histories, sound, linguistic rhythm—none of these can be extracted by marketers and manipulators (thus far). We should all spend more time in the house, the refuge of poetry! I was also thinking about poetry’s ipseity—its identity identical only to itself. I said this in another interview, but I love that if you put a line of poetry into your search bar what will come up, if anything comes up, is probably something about that poem or that poet. I just tried it, opening at random Dawn Lundy Martin’s Good Stock Strange Blood. (Dawn was just here in Providence, so I’m thinking about her work.) I tried three times—no results that matched. On the fourth try (flipping to “The I is made of many arches and windows,” page 71), what comes up is a review of Dawn’s book. That singularity reflects the singularity of what poetry knows. I was (bizarrely) invited to present at the Delphic Economic Forum this winter. A number of the panels were about data mining and democracy, and one of the speakers was Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower. Wylie laid out the very scary ways Cambridge Analytica created an Alt-Right, starting with data scraping, using online behaviors to identify a tendency in someone and amplifying it by isolating them in chat rooms, making them believe that there are others in the chatroom with more defined versions of those ideas, etc. It’s a form of predatory grooming. Cambridge Analytica was exposed, but how many more popped up in its place? Who will regulate these online entities and keep them from manipulating citizens and governments? FB business is about profit. What about governments? Can we trust them with regulating intimate knowledge about us? Of course, creating notions of identity about or in us has long been a method for control and power. How do we resist a world in which every fiber of our being is being mined for manipulation and salability?

Queen: How indeed! And speaking of the world, can you talk about the relationship between travel and knowledge in your book?

Sikelianos: I was thinking about experience as part of that private knowledge anybody carries with it. When I was twenty, I left the US and spent quite a long time hitchhiking and mostly sleeping outdoors in Europe, Turkey, and Central and East Africa. (This was thirty-four years ago, so the world was pretty different.) I haven’t written or even talked about those travels a lot, for various reasons. I was thinking about the things I learned firsthand, and carry in my body in a very private way, as an alternative way to be connected globally. These are things that cannot be excised or extracted by search engines. Why do we travel? For me, it was definitely a journey of finding out about myself in relation to others in the world. I couldn’t tell you in any exact terms what I learned, but I think those experiences made global inequities specific and real to me. It was also on that trip that I decided I would give up my studies in biology to write, which is what I had wanted to do as a child. Peter Gizzi recently called the poem “restless,” which made me think about the relationship between that near constant movement (I didn’t stay in any one place for longer than a week for eighteen months) and the movement in my work in general, be it between forms or ideas. The pursuit of poetry is more a pursuit of question than answer. And that movement (embodied in rhythm in language, experienced in the line, and in works that ask us to shift between forms) is one of the ways we know something is alive. I was recently asked a similar question, and it made me think about all those epic heroes who have to set out on a journey to find out something or accomplish something (Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu travel to the Cedar Forest, Inanna has to get to the underworld, Odysseus voyages home). What they end up finding out is something about what it means to be human. The epic has of course been a pretty male form. When we start to get more long poems by women in the 20^th century, we see forms of female immobility. Annie Allen, the eponymous heroine in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, doesn’t travel, but her lover does, and in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, Helen is whisked from Troy to Egypt, but it is still only the male lover who gets to travel. By the 1990s, Alice Notley’s Alette is able to move beneath the subway, and then travel up for air. There is also the way place names incite us toward dream. Places we haven’t been gather packets of possible knowing (and unknowing) around them like lustrous or horrible clouds of potentiality. There is a form of globalization possible in the poem that is not about resource extraction or exploitation, but about private experience and dreaming. (Tourism is also a form of globalization of course, which I didn’t think about as a young person, but I’m now worried about the environmental and cultural damage all this traveling wreaks.) There is something also, about the fixedness or tethered feeling of place names in tension with bodies and minds moving through them. And there is the strange desire (one of the primary movers of poetry) to be “there” not “here.”

Queen: Shifting gears a bit from places to traces, tracing knowledge is definitely a theme here—and this may be a naïve question—but does / how can poetry fill the “holes of history”?

Sikelianos: I don’t know that it can fill the holes of history, but it can read through them. One of the things poetry does is “extend the document,” as Muriel Rukeyser tells us; it feels (rather than fills) its way through the gaps in knowing. That particular passage calls forth Sappho, whose own work was shredded not only by the ravages of fires and floods but also by the men in charge of keeping poems and documents safe. And yet, here she still is, her fragments illuminating my mind.

Queen: Discuss the use of headlines as perhaps perceived as world knowledge versus the allusions to poetry, literature and language as… what kind of knowledge?

Sikelianos: These headlines stand as worldly, exterior knowledge. Someone who knows the days’ headlines is “informed.” Yet, these headlines are like monuments: the scale between a self and a monument is pretty radically insurmountable. Monuments inspire awe, stop us in our tracks or thoughts; the news is like that (awe, fear). What can we really know behind these words, of the situations they stand for? They cast a deep shadow, and somewhere in relation to that shadow is the self. Take this New York Times headline: “Scientists Warn a Million Species at Risk of Extinction.” I can’t ignore that. But how do I grapple with it, how do I know it? Impossible task.

Queen: Yes, and there seems in your book an assigned value to engaging with what is impossible to know, rather than ignoring it or moving towards apathy. I was in a workshop led by Renee Gladman a few years ago and she had us note particular energetic phrases in one another’s poems with quotation marks, and I immediately thought of that exercise when I read What I Knew. Can you talk about the energy around the words that are placed in quotation marks? Is the energy created by punctuational setting-off of a kind of knowledge, or is it calling to an unknowability?

Sikelianos: I think part of what they’re doing is waiting in a kind of anteroom as raw material. They are mostly verbs, not yet set into motion, but held idling in the grip of the quotation marks. Probably they are about language, syntax waiting to be called into knowing (or into standing for our knowing).

Queen: Stream of consciousness style seems to mirror physical movement. Did the book find its form right away, or did the form come later?

Sikelianos: This is one of those rare long projects that seemed to write itself, because it came as a rhythm and line driven by the oral. That orality breaks at various places in the poem, but that was how it was born. The other work like that for me was The California Poem, which began as long, driving lines like ocean breakers.

Queen: I love The California Poem, too, and it maybe can be called a regional companion to What I Knew, with perhaps more longing and exuberance, with longer lines to match. Both books have an aliveness, though, an action-based seeking at the heart. “Poets / will never stop / looking for the rock / at rock bottom” and later “to be in love with that rough wind”—would you say that poets seek out difficulty or harshness? Why do you think that is the case, if so? And where is the beauty in that searching, if any, or how would you characterize that seemingly negative attraction?

Sikelianos: In that first quote, I was thinking about the way poets are constantly seeking the beingness, the thing, in the deepest, darkest, hardest corners—how they/we are investigators of the real, of what it means to be. At that moment in the poem, it’s still linked to C.D. Wright, who had just died, and who appears on the previous couple of pages. She was such an unflinching investigator of the terrible and beautiful parts of being a human citizen. I think the “rough wind” is likewise being in love with experience—what also lets us know we’re alive. “Negative attraction” calls to mind Keats’ Negative Capability—that notion that a poet can hold two opposing thoughts without one canceling the other out. That’s what it’s like to be awake.

Queen: The use of prepositions to identify position (location) happens as if to invite comparison or concomitance of experience or knowledge (or call attention to experiential knowledge). Can you talk about locational language as a way to acknowledge or incite commonality?

Sikelianos: Prepositions can really push us around. They are some of the undervalued parts of syntax (Oppen reminds us that all the mystery lies in the little words). I learned the word “deictic” from one of my students a few years back and it helped me understand something that’s been happening in contemporary American poetry for a while. By saying “here,” “this,” “that,” we’re trying to hold the reader in the same room with us, to enlarge the room.

Queen: That attempt to hold does imply a drive to create intimacy, not only with the reader as you say and I tend to agree, but I’d also argue a drive to demonstrate an intimacy with the self. I love that interiority is capaciously presented in this book, and how connection to many kinds of knowledge does not preclude knowledge of self. Rather, the more one knows of the world, the more one finds in oneself. Can you discuss the relationship between interiority or interior knowledge versus externally focused knowledge, or is the dichotomy or separation of the two false?

Sikelianos: This book might be a taking stock of what knowledge I’ve gathered so far. How I’ve come to be a self (or at least parts of that coming into being). Poetry still teaches me in some of the most intimate ways what it feels like on the inside of a self, and also what it’s like to struggle between public/worldly and private structures and textures. The self and the world are constantly cutting their teeth on each other. They are inextricable, and thus too is their knowledge flow. Sometimes knowledge feels like it resides more toward one place or the other (if place can be a generalized gathering or a body, which it is). The self, like knowledge, like the world, like the poem, is also always in motion. This brings up a question of locatability that might be pertinent to the discussion of travel and movement above—the unlocatability of a self or a poem or of knowledge. There’s maybe a kind of humoring despair in the poem about not being able to pin any of it down (“The mind is awake in the twilight… / a bowl of milk around which / the flies have gathered. // They are fireflies. // What I am I cannot say.”) The bibliomantic quote from Dawn’s book above works here too: “The I is made of many arches and windows.” Things flood in through those orifices, and self can also pour out of them.

Queen: A final question speaking tangentially of movement—what is the significance of the bird in flight at the bottom right corner of the right-hand pages?

Sikelianos: The book designer plucked that bird from Alice Hameau’s cover art, but I love that it tells us that the poem is still in flight!

Khadijah Queen’s next book of poetry is Anodyne (Tin House 2020). She teaches at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Excerpt

from What I Knew

Near the Rockies, we get much older and learn Eternity is like
Infinity in time and teach it to our daughter

Metadata is out there

The bodies stacked in the morgue
The calcium livers of stars
That’s what we do in the night.
Pass out.
Invent fake Googlemaps.

If we own the body or own up to the body
        in Praetoria
we’ll congregate in meetspace, “a mute
        apostrophe flying through time”

Should I know          how to speak
Should I speak          how to know

               zodiacal light, airglow

in such brightening skies

                                       turn any epiphany around, when to me
                                                                               he appears like a god                    from Sappho

I learn the verb: phaino
                    “to appear” “to seem”
                                                        as he sits talking to you
and against it she detonates a prefix: epi

                      “on” “upon” (in space or time) “toward” “close” “near” “at” “among” “against”
                      I manifest, I reveal
                                         hard by, “above” you,
                                                            love, I appear: epiphaino

as Sappho did, like her own aphroditic epiphany, an unsearchable
bright stain spreading
through the holes of history

a sodium light heralding
what is utterable or un-
in our speaking, living
in our hypophanic, our undersleep, so

        see the lightning
        smell the truth
        hear the war
        touch the earth
        everybody say it

        lightning truth war earth

Excerpted from What I Knew copyright © 2019 by Eleni Sikelianos.
Reprinted with the permission of Nightboat Books. All rights reserved.