“A Leap into the Void”: A Conversation with John Keene

This interview took place over Zoom on January 26, 2023. It has been edited for clarity.

BME: I wanted to start by talking about your generosity — as an artist, as a scholar, as a writer, as a reader, as a citizen of the literary arts. Contributor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews refers to the worlds of your writing as "generous to the extreme." Another contributor, Matt Brim, notes your generosity in interviews and toward your readers. I wonder if you could meditate on generosity and artmaking for us, especially as it relates to your writing but also to any creative practice you engage in.

JK: Well, that's a very interesting question, and it's not one I think I've ever been asked.

I think about my teachers I've had over the years. Some I had for a semester, some that I had for a few days, some that I never studied with formally. I also think of many peers of mine, and I think about the innumerable moments of generosity and openness and kindness they showed me that were not devoid of criticism, either. Of saying to me, "Hey, what about X, Y, and Z?" or challenging assumptions I had. It was not about antagonism or competition. In the case of teachers, it was not about needing to mold me into another version of themselves, but rather pushing me to be the person and artist they knew I could become, letting me know that I shouldn't feel limited, that I needed to do the work, to think and create with rigor whether or not that would be rewarded. That's another thing — the reward system has changed dramatically since I was in my twenties.

I've been in environments of radical generosity. For example, my time with the Dark Room Collective. It was just . . . it's hard to even put words to the kind of atmosphere that existed there, an atmosphere of free exchange. It was not without contention or clashes. It was not without disagreement, but at the same time, there was a kind of aliveness, a sense of freedom tied to generosity. That was a very important laboratory for me. I've mentioned Ishmael Reed before. There was another kind of generosity I witnessed in the classroom because this was a person who I had read as a child. My parents thought the world of Ishmael Reed's work, my godparents as well. He treated everyone in that class with the utmost respect and urged us to go hear writers who would come to town, took us to a reading and at the end of the semester, took us to a poetry festival. He literally brought the class to a poetry festival. When you see that kind of approach, it has a powerful effect. Of course, I have to mention Cave Canem, which is another incredible space of generosity — a different but invaluable space of generosity, full of the greatest poets: Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez and Michael Harper, and of course the founders, Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte. And then Elizabeth Alexander and Harryette Mullen — Harryette Mullen was a visitor teacher there when I was there, and I'm leaving out some other teachers, but they were all superb, and then there were all the poet-fellows who were at Cave Canem, and other visitors. Just extraordinary people.

Again, again, and again, you see how generous people are, which doesn't mean people cannot be critical, but there's a sense that it's a collective experience, born out of love. We have similar goals. It's a collective goal, a collective desire to see what we can do to bring Black poetry, Black words, Black lives, Black imaginations to life and to the wider world. Those kinds of experiences had a really profound effect on me.

BME: There are two things I want to highlight in your response. First, I appreciate you singing the praises of Ishmael Reed as a generous presence in the literary world. He is not often characterized that way though it's materially obvious: he edited and published so many people. Even in this moment of renewed interest in his work, people rarely talk about his substantial editorial work and his interventions in the publishing industry. I'm not surprised to hear that he was also a generous and principled teacher. Second, I'm curious about your observation of changes in the literary reward system across your career. Can you tell us about how those changes have affected your work, how you teach, and how you approach your life?

JK: We have these moments of social transformation — I won't call it advancement — but once they occur, a consequent backlash happens. So I think it's — and of course, these are gross generalizations, forgive me — but I think it's fair to say that after the activism of the 1960s, you know, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Arts and Black Power movements, and then the other related social and political movements of that era — women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and other people of color pushing for equality — all of these things had a profound effect on the literary world. In the 1970s we begin to see publishers who were really not publishing any Black writers or any Black women writers or any LGBTQ writers — or hadn't since the Harlem Renaissance, say — well then, some of the bigger publishers started publishing writers, and some of these writers achieved great fame. At the same time, part of what comes out of the '60s is an early version of the DIY movement, so there were a lot of independent publishers, and there was an extraordinary flowering of Black creativity. Then, we get the backlash.

I was a teenager when that backlash happened. To say it's conservative or to link it to one particular party is unsatisfactory. It's linked to neoliberalism, even though you did have political conservatism gaining traction, but even on the left, an accommodating liberalism and neoliberalism were gaining traction. What has happened is that now the ethos of neoliberalism is incredibly powerful and constitutes the baseline. I don't fault individual artists. But the ethos of neoliberalism, of turning everything into a market, of branding and selling oneself as a kind of individual agent, and that everything should be viewed in the sense of being commodifiable, is foundational. The self-commodification that has taken root, to me, is quite different than what came before. Not to say that it didn't exist in the past, but it's really taken root over the last twenty-five years. The process probably spans longer than that, probably the last forty years.

It's very interesting to me because I think when I was a younger writer, my expectations were different than younger writers' today might be, which is fine. I'm not criticizing them. I want to be clear about that. I guess it's a systemic thing and a structural thing. That's something I think about all the time. What are the expectations? With social media, it's changed as well too. For example, one of the best things that has happened is that people are publicly talking about how they got into print, this is what I experienced in terms of rejection of my work, and this is what it took to get an agent. A lot of publishing and publishing-related processes have been demystified. On the other hand, it's almost like a badge of honor for people to say I have this contract now. I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do, but it creates a certain level of expectation for people who don't have that. Because it's not just I'm trying to write and get this work into print or these are the ideas I have and I want to play with them, but now people see in even more granular material form what they believe success looks like. This sets a sort of standard in their heads and if they don't meet that standard, what then? I think about how this produces all kinds of anxiety, feelings of shame and failure if you don't reach a certain level and you're not getting a certain amount of money and acclaim. This demystification is interwoven with neoliberalism. At root, the deeper question is what work are you trying to do? What is the nature of this artmaking that you're engaged in and how can we return that once again to the center? And I feel like sometimes that gets lost.

BME: I have a colleague, Thulani Davis, who often talks about how different social spaces and opportunities have disappeared — at least the kinds of spaces and places she experienced as a young person and as a young artist. Hearing you talk about the intensity of neoliberal logics in our current literary cultures and the corresponding pressures to brand, to individualize, to success-monger —

JK: The star system, yes. [nods]

BME: — which of course displaces the art, removes it from the center, makes me wonder how the various forms of sociality you chronicle in Punks have changed. I was quite surprised by the richness of the sociality you catalog. I think, in part, because you do it in places like Boston where I don't know that I imagined abundant Black queer socialites existing [laughs]. When I think across your work, place is so central. In Annotations, for example, the entire literary space is very placed, very located in the specificity of the lifeworlds you cultivated in and by way of Missouri. In nearly all your writing, place shows up in ways that are distinct and tied to forms of "being with others" that matter crucially to artmaking and worldmaking. Can you speak about how your relationship to social life and place has changed across your career? Is Punks, for example, a nostalgic look back or is it still possible to engage in the ways you've chronicled? I'm curious because we're talking about artists and how they are formed, and what they can write about and what they can know about the world and other people.

JK: Right. These are very good questions. A few things. I love that you mentioned Thulani Davis because on the one hand, she is from a generation, I'm from a generation, up through now, where increasing numbers of Black people have had the opportunity, fraught though it still is, to go to college as undergraduates. And the process of desegregation really started in the 1950s through the 1970s, so we had access to many more kinds of spaces and places as undergraduates, and increasingly in graduate and professional schools too. I remember many people who are my age, some who are no longer with us, being the first people they knew to go get Ph.Ds. or MFAs. I can recall when far fewer institutions offered MFAs or Ph.Ds. in creative writing. But there was a proliferation in the 1980s and 1990s.

There's been a shift from certain kinds of informal non-institutional spaces, some of them were very important political charged spaces and sites where people came together. I think Ishmael Reed just wrote a fascinating piece in the New York Review of Books about the Umbra group and how its non-institutional workshop, created by Black writers themselves (and which drew a multiracial group of attendees) was a forerunner to the Black Arts Movement.1 And then you see the Black Arts Movement taking shape when Amiri [Baraka] starts his theatre up in Harlem. Ishmael talks about how people are moving between these informal spaces — it's not universities or colleges even though a number of the artists and writers did attend to universities and colleges, but many of them didn't. That's what was so fascinating about the Dark Room Collective. We had people who had gone to college or gone to graduate school, some who had not gone to college, some who had dropped out of college. We had people from the neighborhood. There's been a shift, I feel, from those kinds of spaces — though they do still exist — to formal institutions and those institutions have a different set of goals than the less formal or informal spaces. Part of what formal institutions exist to do is to preserve themselves and their putative values. Usually if you're an institution that wants to preserve itself, there are certain steps you have to take: you have to raise money, you have to become 501(c)(3), you have to think about whether what you are doing is going to upset funders, etc., as opposed to the kinds of counterspaces that existed before.

I've gotten older. There once was a time when I would just go and do. Not even really think about time. I won't say I wouldn't think about responsibilities. But one's sense of engagement changes as one ages, so it's kind of a long roundabout way of saying, yes, I think my sense of space and place has changed, but I also think that the world has changed in interesting ways. For example, the MFA system: there was that book MFA Vs. NYC that came out a few years ago.2 There were some compelling essays in it. People have rightly said you don't need an MFA to be a writer, and certainly not a Ph.D. As we look at the changing situation with the professoriate, with doctoral education and the job crisis, that's also changed many people's sense of what it means to devote time to get a Ph.D if they can't get a job.

I say all this to say, it's something I think about and reflect on, and in terms of my teaching, it has changed how I think about teaching. I have always tried to ensure that my students who wanted to publish and go on to teach would have that opportunity, so I was interested in how I could help that, help people get their book into print or help them get a teaching job. I feel like now the expectation is much more intense. For obvious reasons, of course. At Rutgers-Newark I'm teaching in a program that's fully funded though you're still spending a lot of money you don't have even if it's a fully funded program because the general cost of living is so high compared to the past. I'm always thinking now, these students are here, they're serious, they want to see their work in print, and ask myself, what can I do to make that happen? That's certainly more in the forefront of my thinking now when I'm teaching, particularly at the graduate level than before. It's not that I didn't think about it before, but maybe I was more idealistic, or it was borne out of that earlier sense that you're studying writing and literature and art because you're interested in writing or creating or making art. And yes, that still obtains but now, students are forced to think practically and envision a material outcome for this experience.

BME: Yeah, we're in a moment where even writers have to be practical, which is. . . [shakes head]

JK: Oh yes, yes.

BME: My partner — she is a jazz musician — recently made a fascinating observation about contemporary jazz practice. Now, it's almost entirely taught and practiced in universities (Chicago is the great exception). If you play jazz, if you are a jazz musician, especially at a high level, even thinking about avant-garde jazz, likely you went to conservatory and likely you work adjacent to or for a university. Likely, you do various kinds of guest performances and workshops for universities and draw a degree of social and cultural capital from them. Contemporary jazz practices are tied to the university in ways that are extraordinary given the music's countercultural history. It's interesting to think of Black literature as having a kind of parallel development.

JK: Oh, yes. Definitely.

BME: Let's talk about some of the essay contributions. Margo Natalie Crawford wrote about Seismosis. She begins with an anecdote from the graduate classroom, and I think this is fitting given how you just talked about your students. She recounted a student who was reluctant to use the word experimental in relationship to any writing because the student suggested that all writing is an experiment. Crawford gently pushed back against this idea and suggested that experimentation is useful descriptively and critically, and that there is something unique about Black artistic experimentation. She describes Black experimentation as a practice where the artist relinquishes the imperative to represent Blackness and by doing so allows Blackness to take on new formal possibilities. In your interview with Jeffrey Renard Allen, you said a number of similar things.  What purchase does the word or category "experimental" have for you? What is your response when someone describes your work this way?

JK: First of all, I take it as a term of art and I don't have an issue with it at all. I'm proudly experimental. My fears are that when people hear the world experimental, they might think I can't pick this up because it might be too difficult for me to understand, that there might be some game being engaged that they don't have the rules for. When I think about Black experimentalism, on the one hand, one could say — and I feel like I'm almost stealing from Clyde Taylor here, all Black art is experimental, particularly in the United States or the Western hemisphere. It's always been a leap into the void. It's making the impossible possible. I think about Lucy Terry and Phillis Wheatley. There was that recent discovery in a commonplace book of an early poem by Wheatley. It's not signed Phillis Wheatley, but she likely wrote it. It has a citational reference along the lines of 'Black girl.' But it's likely Wheatley's work, at fifteen years old!

Think about it. Whatever people may say — I've always thought that the criticism of Wheatley as derivative was tone deaf. Like, what are you talking about? Her art, which makes ours possible, is the ultimate act of experimentation. You are not supposed to be able to write and speak and express yourself and yet you do it against every odd out there. That [shakes head, laughs] to me is experimental! It's a very powerful term. I also think that usually when people think or talk about experimental writing, the focus is on formal experimentation, but I've always been interested not just in formal experimentation but with content itself. Content that challenges the reader's expectations. For example, a book like Fran Ross's Oreo, which I love. I remember teaching it some years ago. I had heard about it and hadn't read it, but assigned it, something you learn to do when you teach. I assigned it to a class I was teaching at Brown University. The students loved it and I love where she takes that narrative and how she plays with form and content. Ross was a deeply talented author and comedian, writing for Richard Pryor and others. In this book she's rethinking the possibilities of genre and narrative on multiple levels: the quest narrative, the narrative of racial origins, the satirical novel, and the picaresque novel, among others. She weaves all these together. Just thinking about the content itself and how it's pushing against and creating counternarratives alongside the formal play was an incredible inspiration. There have been so many works like that. I take the concept of being an experimental writer as a badge of honor, and I feel like there are any number of figures in African American literature, Black literature writ large, who have shown how to push against received notions of what any artistic genre is, how experimentation can advance the art form.

BME: The working title for this cluster is "John Keene's Literary Experiments," so I'm happy we're not too far off the mark [laughs]. You've described your first book, Annotations, as having emerged from a distinct period in your life: amid the AIDS epidemic, in the time of high conceptual theory that questioned the self and subjectivity, and prior to the coalescence and full articulation of queer theory. In his contribution, Philip Brian Harper refers to Annotations as "highly elliptical and aphoristic." He especially notes the book's reliance on what he calls an "unembodied Blackness." Is Annotations a response? Were you trying to write a book you didn't see in the world (a la Morrison) about a complex and difficult moment? Is it an autofictional exercise, a purging of sorts? Is it an intervention into a discursive field from which you were absent? Is it a book you needed to write so you could be free to write other things (Baldwin describes Giovanni's Room this way)? How might you describe your first book, which comes out of this tumultuous period — this crucible of transformative events, forces, and ideas?

JK: When I originally began writing Annotations, I was in the Dark Room Collective, and I was writing short stories and poems. I had an idea for a novel about a Black gay couple dealing with the AIDS epidemic because that was at the forefront of my mind. But there were also questions about the numerous related social and political and economic crises that were happening. It was a brutal period. The crack epidemic was raging. Police violence was rampant. Housing crises were in the news. There was a mental health crisis. These were the Reagan years and the George HW Bush years, the late Cold War, South African apartheid, and so on. The US was involved in a variety of neocolonial wars and conflicts. I wanted to combine all these topics but I struggled. I was able to write some short stories and poems, but I just couldn't do it.

Part of it directly had to do with the AIDS pandemic. It's fascinating to see what happened with the COVID-19 pandemic. I see parallels, but of course, there are significant differences. One of the things that struck me about the COVID-19 pandemic is how easily and quickly people rationalized mass death. Over a million people died in the first year and a half or so of COVID-19. Over a million people, dead, and many people went on about their business. You know COVID's out there. We have the vaccines. It's not right in front of me or I didn't know anyone who passed away, so now we can think about something else or we can get back to normal. President Biden essentially said, the COVID-19 pandemic is over. It struck me because I said to people in the very first year of the pandemic, in 2020, I felt like I was suffering from PTSD. It reminded me of the profound trauma of being a young person and seeing people I knew and people I didn't know die and then disappear. Just become very, very ill before my eyes. And then also to witness in the broader culture an immense indifference — I mean there were clearly pockets of people who weren't directly affected at first who were moved and acted — but living through the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s sparked a weird kind of dissonance. I think that dissonance was very hard for me to process. That kind of relentless trauma alongside the indifference, the disdain, the fear, and the outright cruelty and hate was hard for me to process as fiction. So, I started writing poems and some of those early poems, a few of them actually, made it into Punks.

Annotations also was borne out of that internal struggle. I decided to listen to a voice — Alice Walker has talked about this — that came to me. I listened and I realized, before I could write about what was happening at the time in any extended sense, I needed to talk about where I came from. I needed to tell my personal story. This speaks directly to what Morrison has said about writing the book you don't see on the shelves, putting that into the world. But I also love Phil Harper's comment about "unembodied Blackness" because there's a way in which the body is both very present in Annotations and is abstracted. The self is very present, in detailed material form, and yet it is abstracted. I wrote it before I really knew the language of queer theory. I'd read a number of LGBTQ writers and of course LGBTQ Studies was underway, so I read some of those theorists and of course, I also read any number of queer writers, particularly Black queer writers. Samuel R. Delany is one of the people I invoke in Annotations. Also, non-queer Black writers like Ntozake Shange and Clarence Major. But really, I think that in Annotations I was trying to work through what I had lived and encountered. Also, coming across the work of Lyn Hejinian was very fascinating because Samuel R. Delany later asked me Did you read a lot of the language poets? And I remember when he first asked me that and I was like, I know who the language poets are but . . .  and then I realized well, some of them I had read. I'd read Hejinian, Michael Palmer, etc. but it wasn't like I was part of the language movement. I didn't even realize that Erica Hunt was one of the important Language School people but of course one of the books that actually informed my work, particularly Seismosis, was her book with Alison Saar, Local History. It was also, as you mention, a moment of high theory in the culture — the theory wars in academia. I was reading a lot of theory and out of that too came Annotations.

Annotations is very much a book of its moment because it weaves together so many strands from that era. You get the crises and transformations I was talking about earlier that characterized the late 1960s, the 1970s and early 1980s. Annotations offers a very localized personal sense of what it was like to be a child during that period, not just for me but for many people of my generation. But the book also telescopes out. I think Jeff Allen used the metaphor of the kaleidoscope. It keeps changing and moving outward, so you get a broader sense of society. I was fascinated when I went back and read it. I'm talking about gentrification [laughs], and you know, homophobia, and all these things are there, they're all woven into the text. You can miss them. But there's also this sense of play. I was interested in what would it mean to really play with language in a deep sense of experimentation. There are lines that are drawn from fast food packaging or instructions from various home products. By the time I was writing the book I had come across the Oulipo group, and I was fascinated by their stuff. I have a good friend, an amazing poet, Donia Allen (no relation to Jeff), and we would talk about numbers and numerology. So that's in there too: I believe the total number of words — I wrote this when you could first start to count the total number of words in computer text using your desktop machine — are divisible by 9. The book, in its brevity, includes these deep structures. Everything including the kitchen sink is in this extremely condensed little text that is a novel a work of poetry, a memoir. That's Annotations. It's sui generis, but it is also directly in conversation with all the work that comes before it, the work of its moment, and the work that comes after.

BME: What you said about the body in Annotations - that it is present but also abstracted, that the self is present but abstracted — I wonder how we get to a book like Punks where the body is fully present, and we are in it as readers. A contributor, Tyrone Palmer, discusses your treatment of desire and its formal qualities in that collection. How does desire show up in Punks? How has it changed across your writing? What struck me when I first read Punks through — knowing it is a collection of poems from across three decades — was the presence of the body, the immediacy of emotion, qualities that are not so prominent in your earlier works. Usually, when I read your work, I marvel at how intimate abstraction is. It is one of the things I love about your work. The intimacy is often surprising and disconcerting because it is in places and forms and events where I do not expect to find it. 

But in Punks, it's like —  whew [laughs] — the body, emotion, intimacy is front and center. There is emotion as a way of knowing and making sense of the world. I wonder if that feels accurate to you, or if there isn't such a big disconnect between these two books, your first and your most recent.

JK: I think it is accurate. I think of Annotations as a deeply, as a profoundly personal book in which on one hand I want you to get a sense of the narrator's — or the narrators' plural, right? — interiorities but at the same time, keep things opaque at a certain level. I had not read Édouard Glissant when — I had to come to Glissant [laughs] — I wrote it, but the book was anticipating my reading of Glissant, let's put it that way. I learned from others who led me to Glissant. I wanted interiority, but I also wanted there to be a distancing effect to a certain degree because the other thing I was thinking about was that there was a lot of pushback against people in their 20s and 30s writing memoirs. The thinking was, if you're going to write a memoir or autobiography, you should be a middle-aged person or a senior person, you know? And in that moment of the mid to late 1990s, there were all those memoirs — really interesting memoirs. I even wrote a little essay about it, "Memoir and Its Discontents," in which I was trying to do a cultural critique and appraisal of the phenomenon.

But later I felt, maybe there is something valid about thinking you have something to say even if you haven't really lived all that long chronologically. I thought about how from the time I was born to the time I was almost thirty, so much had happened! To me and within the broader culture and world. I wanted to get a lot of that in there but also tell my story. With Punks I wanted to be more direct. I wanted to use lyric and to some degree narrative poetry to once again come back to interiority. You asked me earlier did I think of Punks as nostalgic. Maybe in a sense, there is a certain strain of nostalgia, but the other thing to I wanted to ensure was that the book was not just an extended elegy. There's an elegiac undercurrent. But I wanted to think about where we are now and what has been lost, particularly in terms of Black gay, Black queer culture. Not lost in the sense of irretrievable loss, it's gone and we should lament it, but rather how things have changed. Part of that did require me to think about the presence of the body and in particular my own aging body.

There are a number of poems that didn't make it into the book. At one point in the early 2000s I had written a poem called "Forties," and I used to read this all the time. It basically talks about being in your forties — and could apply to being in your thirties or your fifties or older — and what happens with the passage of time because your relationship to the world changes in interesting ways because the world itself is changing. As an aging Black queer person, I find my experience of life is different than it was when I was in my twenties and in my thirties, and the conditions under which I was writing have changed in fascinating ways. That's why I think of Punks as a kind of retrospective because it involves looking back and trying to remember. Sometimes I ask friends: we didn't have dating apps, and we didn't have social media. How did we hang out? How did we meet people? We had an earlier version of the internet. You could send email and there were the listservs. You'd call people on the phone. You'd go to bars or clubs or events, or conferences like Black Nations, Queer Nations, or OutWrite. You'd write letters and postcards. You'd go to meet people there. I think about how my partner and some friends drove to Toronto and we met people and later one of the people from Toronto, a Jamaican guy, contacted us and came and stayed with us. This was all before Facebook or even Friendster, MySpace, etc. There was no Instagram, there was no Twitter. I think about how important gay magazines and books were, about VHS and later DVD videos and going to movies and parties, getting invited to people's homes. Those things still exist but the culture and society's relationship to these informal spaces and places — going back to what Thulani Davis said — has changed so radically. If you saw a picture of yourself, it was because someone took that photo and then they had to go get it developed and then they would send it to you. They had to get duplicates, you know? It wasn't just that you could click, hit the computer, and see tons of pictures of yourself and people all over the world could see them. It's a very different relationship to time and to space and to selfhood that we're in now. What I think about with Punks is I wanted to give glimpses of that earlier moment, but also at the end of the book, I have a poem "Grind" which is very much a poem of today. This is where we are with our online selves. Anyway.

BME: I do want to respect your time, but I have two more questions. One of them is about your short book GRIND, which my library happens to own—

JK: Wow.

BME: I know, right? Unfortunately, it's in the Rare Books Collection. If it wasn't I would totally steal it because it's so hard to find. That book quite explicitly takes up internet culture and how it's transformed queer life for male and masculine people. I want to think about that book and put it in conversation with your translation of Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer. I'm curious about how those books sit together alongside your more abstract writing. GRIND is somewhat abstract, but it's also contending with Nicholas Muellner's photographs, selfies of naked and half-naked, self-consciously, and intentionally posed men which almost always sit juxtaposed to your original writing. Hilda Hilst's translated book is also abstract and is definitely a queer text. I wonder if you think of it as queer in the same way that your own writing in GRIND is. Letters from a Seducer relies on an offstage juxtaposition, a putting together of polar opposites in order to express its satirical force. It's satirizing something — a particular style of male writing contributor Brandon Menke suggests — but the book itself is also deadly serious in its experiments and investigations.

How do you think of your output from Annotations to Seismosis to GRIND to Letters from a Seducer to Counternarratives and now, Punks?What comes to mind when you think about desire across those works? I know that's a lot.

JK: I always come back to desire. I think of the Lacanian formation of desire constituted as lack. Then, I believe in Annotations, I say something along the lines of desire is a function of repetition. So, clearly there are patterns in there [laughs]. Part of what I'm trying to get at is desire, the nature of desire, especially Black queer desire in which Blackness is centered, in which queerness is centered. Black queer gazes are centered. Of course, Hilst was not Black. Some might say she was queer. Let me just say this about that book. If you had asked me ten or fifteen years ago, would I be translating a book by Hilda Hilst, I probably would have said no. Maybe a story or something. I do find her work absolutely fascinating and initially happened upon her work, in Portuguese, on a website she'd set up on the internet. I had written the introduction for the beautiful translation by Rachel Gontijo Araújo and Nathanaël of The Obscene Madame D, so when I was invited by Nightboat Books to translate the text, I perhaps foolishly said yes. When I started to read the book, I thought oh my gods, what have I gotten myself into? But I also thought, in a sense, maybe I was meant to do this because to me one of the most meaningful things about that book is that at its core, it is a book about writing and artmaking. It asks, what are the stakes of art? And I won't go into the whole long disquisition about it, I'll let readers go and find the book.

But that second section includes passages that are sublime, on multiple levels. Sublime in the sense that Hilst wants to discover what the limit is in terms of the representable and to go past it. But she does so in the service of saying, this is what someone is willing to do to be an artist, to write, to produce stories, to create a picture of the world around us  for others. I find her approach absolutely fascinating. The other thing I'm going to say that doesn't always come through in the English is that because she was a poet, she is experimenting relentlessly at the level of language, is pushing the possibilities of what Portuguese can do. Part of it is diction, part of it is sound, part of it is syntax, and this combination animates me immensely. It's an investigation of desire at such a fundamental level that it's very easy to miss what's going on. I feel like in each of my works that comes through in different ways. In a sense, I learned from Hilst, but I was in conversation with her even before I knew I was in conversation with her.

I think about Seismosis because Seismosis was a book that I wanted to be very abstract and somewhat difficult. Chris [Stackhouse] and I were thinking about this. That book is full of his very abstract drawings which are beautiful, sublime images. I wanted the text to be a conversation with them. I thought, how can I make texts that are — and Geoffrey Jacques gets at this in his afterword — on one hand abstract but on the other hand also very sensuous, alive? Texts that have rhythm, suffused with desires. Texts that desire, that are desiring machines, seeking to be in conversation with these drawings. How does that in a sense provide us with another way of thinking about Black abstraction and sociality? Desires that surge up from inside us, which really are about wanting to be with each other. Forms of sociality, forms of being, forms of thinking. I mean I love how K'eguro Macharia and others talk about this idea of thinking with. Rinaldo Walcott, Christina Sharpe, Canisia Lubrin, of course Dionne Brand. Thinking with and being with and writing with — not so much against or about or for — those are all part of it — but with. What does it mean to think about radical proximity and juxtaposition? At the level of form and content, this is something that comes up again and again in my work.

With GRIND, that was the direct outcome of being at Image Text Ithaca and in conversation with Nicholas Milner and Catherine Taylor and all the wonderful literary and visual artists, photographers, and filmmakers, that were there. Nicholas and I were chatting. He had these photographs and I had these lines of poetry — what can we do with this? What happens when you put these things together? What's generated? I think there's something very exciting about that. It's something I try to come back to. Even with Punks, where you have discrete poems, what happens when you put these different sections together? What happens when you place these poems in different forms and coming from different traditions together? What happens when they're in proximity and you read them together?

BME: Contributor Yogita Goyal calls your work avant-garde not primarily for your formal experimentation but for your philosophy of history. In fact, she calls you an "avant-garde philosopher of history." Similarly, contributor Matt Brim suggests that you offer your readers an opportunity to imagine themselves in an altered historical relation. How do these two observations land on you with respect to Counternarratives? Do you have an imagined reader? A specific way of engaging and working on your readers? Certainly, you have a method for consciously playing with grand historical narratives, whether they originate from above or below. Can you talk about the kinds of relation you desire with your readers?

JK: Yes, I always feel like I'm writing both to an imagined reader or readers who are going to take up the threads I set out for them and engage with me in a dynamic way, an active way: readers who will think with me. I love this idea — thinking about the question of analytical fiction and the idea that it does involve a kind of philosophizing, there's a critical function woven into it. Work that stops you at times and makes you think, what am I reading? What is happening here? And it can go awry. But I feel like with Counternarratives, I wanted to rethink our understanding of time and history. Again, what does it mean to put these stories alongside each other? Does something productive come out of that? It's not the usual approach. I'm not criticizing traditional historical fiction or approaches to history in fiction, but I wanted to meditate on them. Even the narrative of the Americas or the United States — what happens when you decenter the US in a collection in which the US occupies a central role? I was trying to think about all those things, but also, I was trying to write a book that would engage and draw readers in.

Some people have said Counternarratives is very difficult, particularly the stories in the first section, because of the density of the text and information. It's not the usual approach. Part of what I strove to do was to write against convention. Take a story like "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution." Clearly, there have been any number of stories and novels about slavery, but I said, OK, this is going to be about slavery, but chattel slavery in New England. In fact, this is about chattel slavery in New England at the moment of the American Revolution. How and what do we think about that? Because the juxtaposition of those two things doesn't usually happen, and it should always be discussed, particularly in the North. But it mostly doesn't. Perhaps you get it in the classroom, but not in the wider culture. Moreover, what might a kind of radical untrammeled freedom look like from the perspective of a Black character whose very life is a countersign to the master narrative, which is the language in which that story is told? The prose itself keeps suffering a kind of destabilization. It's the master narrative trying to maintain a control over the story being told, and yet the story itself keeps ripping and tearing, something else keeps coming in, which is the presence of Blackness and resistance, recentering it. Even the title itself is a challenge to master narratives — such as Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. What does it mean to write against and challenge the prevailing discourse of history and historiography? To write against or into the ideas of someone who is considered to be one of the most important figures for thinking about that particular moment? I was thinking about what can fiction do? This is something I am always asking. That's not to say that I have succeeded in answering it. But I keep asking. What can poetry do? What can any artform do, not only in the sense of interesting or to amazing us, but in terms of its conversation with the world around it. How can it reframe our thinking? This is an old idea, the concept of defamiliarizing, which is one of the critical functions of art. But I'm very and deeply interested in it, and it informs everything I do.

BME: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time.

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Brittney Edmonds (@jussssjokes) is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been published in African American Review, MELUS, South, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, Who's Laughing Now?: Black Satire and the Evolution of Form, which provides a literary historical account of the substantial outpouring of Black satire after 1968.

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