Wednesday, 29 May 2013

Sharanya Manivannan

Sharanya Manivannan 
Self Interview
Sharanya Manivannan

Which of your current poetry projects—you have two manuscripts in progress—is the poem “Secret Theatres” from?

It’s from Bulletproof Offering, which is the manuscript that exists on a mythical plane (whereas the manuscript Cadaver Exquisito exists on the reality of the city of Chennai). It’s one of the poems in which the two mythological figures I’m working with in this book—Sita and Lucifer—come together in their own internal logic. The devil/angel imagery, the stars—that’s all obviously Lucifer. But these performances I’d been watching, the context in which I watched them, most of that was from the Ramayana and other Hindu mythology. There’s also the reference to Inanna (the line about the will to be reborn is from Diane Wolkstein’s book about her) whom I feel is the conduit between Sita and Lucifer. They all go into the underworld: Lucifer falls from grace from the heavens, Sita prays to be returned to the bosom of the earth after having endured exile thrice, and Inanna (the original hellraiser) demands to be let in, stripped of all she possesses, threatening to destroy the cosmic order if she isn’t. That choice interests me. The choice to perform that excavation, that initiation, the voluntary dismemberment of the self so a stronger one can emerge. Demanding passage, and paying the price.

So you’re working on two very different collections of poetry at the moment, and you’ve had a novel in the works for many years. But you also have a couple of projects that you haven’t spoken of much—an art installation and a collection of short stories among them. Can you say more about these?
Well, my novel is a prolonged love. Of all the things I’m doing, I think that might be the last to be completed. But I don’t know.
The art installation deals with my leaving Malaysia (where I grew up) a few years ago under very traumatic circumstances—which included getting into trouble with their government. I was quite consumed by Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present—it led me to think about absence, the intangibles, the ghosts of things. My friends are haunted to this day by my not being there—they keep telling me of how they entered some gallery and almost heard me laughing, almost caught sight of the flowers in my hair.

I am haunted to this day by the circumstances of my departure. I’m still developing this project, which is currently called “The Country of Intangibles”, and it’s an entirely new genre to explore—above all because the installation pivots on my not being there, which is new territory for me, considering how much I love performance and bringing my aura and energy to a scene. So there isn’t a time-frame in which it might happen. As with all my many projects and passions, I’m doing it because I want to, and I haven’t a clue when or if the world will ever see it.

The collection of stories is tentatively titled Always The Bond Girl; the initial seed for it came out of the same period that the poems in my Chennai manuscript started emerging from. The idea of, you know, being always the Bond girl and never Bond—always the one left behind while the hero jets out of town. I would blanche if anyone said it was chick lit, but I’m definitely writing from a female perspective, the perspective of what it means to be a certain kind of woman in a certain kind of city.

And what does it mean to be a certain kind of woman in a certain kind of city?

I feel as though, in both life and art, I have to invent my own paradigm. The role models are insufficient. The coded and conditioned ideas about sex and relationships haven’t worked for me, but at the same time I’m not above them, I’m not above feeling battered and beautified and destroyed and validated by them. I do live in a misogynistic society, but it goes beyond that: the scenario seems little different for my friends, other complicated women, in other parts of the world. The challenge is to learn to be a person who loves deeply, but whose crux of power is not derived from an institution, a social standing, a marriage, a man. Which is to say—how can one love deeply, and not get swallowed within these institutions, these obligations, and either be able to co-exist with them or say fuck you to them and mean it? So you question the equations: you question commitment, but you also you question polyamory, you renegotiate what betrayal and belonging mean. The heart becomes this precious loot: you have to guard it with your life, but you have to let it breathe, it must constantly recalibrate to its own flights and whims. You can’t withhold it from the world. So that’s what I’m working on. Turning the house of the heart into something so strong and self-contained that it is enriched, and not vitiated, by its many transient guests.


How does this also hold true in art?

The currently available trajectories for a poet or for a writer in the South Asian Anglophone world don’t interest me. I’m not good at playing certain games, which would allow me success within the existing system. A large part of me is quite happy being on the fringes, being a cult artist. But it’s also hard—how do you keep perspective? What is your context? How do you stay true to your art in an inauthentic system, when the rewards of that system seem so alluring? So in my work I’m also trying to find a paradigm that feels honest, that accepts neither mediocrity nor manipulation, and which not only rejects but reinvents. My role models, if any, mostly come from outside the literary culture as well. So I guess I’d like to live in the countryside like Tori Amos, engage with life voraciously like Frida Kahlo and be badass like Mae West.

Is it true that you are a dangerous woman?

It’s true. And I am most dangerous of all to myself.

What’s your favorite joke?

A bus conductor notices a ridiculously sexy nun on the bus one day, and when she gets to her stop, he starts telling the bus driver how much he wants her.
The driver says, “Oh you could get her easily. Every night she goes to the graveyard to pay her respects at the tomb of a saint. Just find her there, and tell her you’re Jesus.”
So this is exactly what the conductor does. He goes to the graveyard, and indeed, in the darkness, is the nun is at the tomb.
“Behold! I am Jesus,” he announces. “And I want you to have sex with me.”
“Okay,” says the nun. “But I’m preserving my (problematic patriarchal definition of) virginity. So we can only have anal sex.”
And they do.
When they’re done, the conductor throws off his costume and declares diabolically, “Ha ha ha ha! I’m actually the bus conductor from this morning!”
And the nun turns around with a big grin and says, “Ha ha ha ha! I’m actually the driver.”


Monday, 27 May 2013

Helen Benedict




Secrecy and Sexual Assault in the Military
Richard Wolinsky interviews Helen Benedict
November 15, 2012
After spurring an investigation of internal violence in the armed forces, the journalist explores the same themes through fiction.
Helen Benedict:

In February 2011, seventeen survivors of military sexual assault filed a class action lawsuit against the Pentagon and former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld, asserting that the military failed to properly investigate and prosecute claims of sexual abuse within the armed forces, perpetuating a culture of violence and secrecy. The case was inspired by The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, Helen Benedict’s 2010 nonfiction account of the dual war waged by female soldiers—against the enemy and against their own colleagues. According to the Defense Department’s calculations, one out of every three women in the military has suffered sexual assault. While 3,192 reports of abuse were filed in fiscal year 2011, the DOD estimates the real figures to be closer to 19,000.
Benedict has testified twice before Congress on behalf of service members both male and female who have survived harassment, assault, and rape, maintaining that while “violence is endemic to the military… our troops are not supposed to be enacting this violence on one another.” She interviewed forty female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan for her nonfiction project; her latest work, Sand Queen, is a novel rooted in the same research. Sand Queen chronicles the parallel stories of Kate, an American soldier, and Naema, an Iraqi medical student, and the wide gulf that separates their experiences of the Iraq War. As Benedict explains below, the “territory of fiction” granted her the freedom to explore the stories behind the interviews she conducted, or the “interior experience of living through a war.”
The following conversation was recorded in October 2011, and recalls old dilemmas in a new era. The military first vowed to eliminate rampant sexual abuse in its ranks in the aftermath of the 1991 Tailhook scandal, which involved the assault of female officers by naval pilots at a convention in Las Vegas; last June, thirty-eight women at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas came forward to report assault at the hands of their training instructors. “It’s an outrage that we aren’t prosecuting our people involved here,” said Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month, when NBC’s Natalie Morales noted that 240 cases were prosecuted out of the more than 3,000 reported last year. Benedict discusses ongoing military negligence in the context of her work, as well as the “dark period” of accepting administrative talking points and other media failures at the outset of the Iraq War and today.
––Interview published courtesy of Richard Wolinksy
Richard Wolinsky: Sand Queen seems to put the reader into the mind of an American female soldier and an Iraqi woman during the war in 2003 in a way that nonfiction can’t achieve.
Helen Benedict: The role of fiction is to go into the human soul, to go into the places real people are reluctant to talk about or even look into. For The Lonely Soldier, I interviewed women who’d served in Iraq with many different branches of the military, but as open as they were with me, there were still those moments when they fell silent or their eyes would fill with tears or they’d deflect questions with jokes or start to shake. In those silences, I knew there was another story going on, one they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about, which was the interior experience of living through a war—what it really felt like and what you thought privately. That’s why I needed to turn to the territory of fiction.
Richard Wolinsky: What about the decision to bring in Naema?
Helen Benedict: After all, this war has two sides. We’ve paid a fair amount of attention to our soldiers, and the trauma they’ve been through. There has been a lot of media attention about post-traumatic stress disorder, which is important and good, but there’s the other side: the Iraqi civilians who have been so decimated by a war which created millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of deaths. There has been maiming and birth defects as a result of the pollution of war, the poisons of war, and the bombs themselves. I wanted to address the innaccurate stereotypes about Iraqi women head on by bringing an Iraqi woman of education—a medical student—alive, and making her human as our friends are human.
Richard Wolinsky: But you don’t plot in advance. When you created the characters, were you sure about what their interactions would be?
Helen Benedict: I did have an idea about why they would meet and how, and an idea about the pivotal event in the novel, because it came out of something a real soldier had told me.
Richard Wolinsky: What was the true story this is based on?
Helen Benedict: One of the women I interviewed was a prison guard in the first and biggest American prisoner-of-war camp in Iraq, which was called Camp Bucca, right by the Kuwait border. She told me that her first job was to man—we don’t even have a name for it—woman the checkpoint. Iraqi civilians would come every morning at dawn to find out what had happened to their brothers and sons and husbands who had been arrested and put into this huge prison, and some of them could speak English.
Early in the war, there were interactions between the soldiers and the civilians. Sometimes they would chat, or trade sunflower seeds for jewelry, and that gave me the idea of how Kate and Naema could meet. Naema would speak English and make a deal with Kate. “I’ll interpret for you and help you deal with the crowd if, in exchange, you take a photograph of my father and brother who have been arrested, and find them and tell me if they’re alive and safe.”
Richard Wolinsky: It seemed that later on in the novel you might have originally intended for more interaction between these two characters.
Helen Benedict: I wanted to be realistic. It would not have been realistic for Kate and Naema to become best buddies and see each other all the time. That doesn’t happen in a war. It was realistic that they could meet, interact, and have an effect on each other’s lives in a way that’s very profound. The way it evolved wasn’t so much a surprise to me because I know enough about how war works and what it was like there from my interviews and research. I didn’t want any soldier or Iraqi to read this and say, “that never would have happened.”
Sand queen is a derogatory term that’s specific to the Iraq war, which comes mainly out of the army. It means an unattractive woman who is the object of a lot of attention from men because women are so scarce… it summarizes the denigrating attitude that so many military men have towards military women.
Richard Wolinsky: Other fiction writers will say, “if there’s a choice between telling the facts and giving a sense of truth, the truth is more important.” In Sand Queen, I felt that in creating a fictional view, you still wanted to stay very much within the context of fact.
Helen Benedict: What I wanted to do was keep it completely plausible. But I wanted to get to a deeper truth than I could get to in my nonfiction work with this subject. I don’t think they have to be contradictory. I needed the freedom to invent characters and a story to get to that deeper truth, because it would have been very hard to get any soldier or Iraqi to tell me about their really deep feelings.
Richard Wolinsky: This is all set against the background of things that happened and people you interviewed, so I’d like to go into some of the details that simply stunned me. Rape plays a major part in this book, and I understand that you wrote a play about a class action suit against the Pentagon by women in the army because the army refused to deal with rape.
Helen Benedict: The suit is on behalf of fifteen women and two men who were sexually assaulted and/or raped in the military, not just the army. It was inspired, in part, by The Lonely Soldier, which described the rates of sexual harassment, assault, and rape within the military of female and male soldiers, perpetrated by their comrades, not by the enemy, not by outsiders. The statistics are horrifying. Somewhere between one in five and one in three women are sexually assaulted while serving alongside their comrades.
Richard Wolinsky: There’s a scene where two soldiers assault Kate.
Helen Benedict: It isn’t an exact replica of any one story I heard any more than the characters are. They’re not conglomerate characters or disguised real people, but I heard many, many stories of rape.
Richard Wolinsky: At one point, Kate goes to the bathroom and sees these horrendous epithets on the wall, including “sand queen.” Is sand queen an actual term they use?
Helen Benedict: It’s a derogatory term that’s specific to the Iraq war, which comes mainly out of the army. It means an unattractive woman who is the object of a lot of attention from men because women are so scarce. It goes to her head, she gets very arrogant, and she also allows herself to be used by these men who wouldn’t look at her twice at home. As one soldier said, “She’s a mattress.” The language they use about women is so horrific. I decided to use it not only because somebody says that about Kate, but because it summarizes the denigrating attitude that so many military men have towards military women.
Richard Wolinsky: In an essay, you wrote that “military culture is fiercely secretive and self-protective and soldiers who criticize it are treated as traitors.” Whistleblowers tend to internalize the accusation, which means that Kate, the real Kates of the world, or the real Third Eyes or Yvettes, can’t even complain that the soldier next to them is masturbating.
Helen Benedict: No, because they’ll be seen as whiners and weak soldiers. If you’re a soldier, you should be able to handle things yourself. Just as in any really enclosed society, there’s a fierce loyalty that grows up, and you’re seen as a traitor if you report anybody for wrongdoing. That’s considered worse in many cases than actually sexually assaulting someone. Talk about being a traitor! But in the values of the military, it’s commonly thought that women ask for it, invite it, they should handle it, and it’s the blaming of the victim and then internalizing. Self-blame is a common outcome of this.
Richard Wolinsky: Kate goes running in the morning and it’s policy to run with someone. Is that to protect women from Iraqis or to protect them from soldiers? If it’s to protect them from soldiers, then the army knew that rape was occurring.
Helen Benedict: The army is very aware. It is both, but there is a rule that came down very early in the war where women were not allowed to go to the latrines or the showers, which are often far away from where they’re sleeping, without a battle buddy—it’s supposed to be another woman—to protect them from the men on their own side. Which is ironic for many reasons, the obvious being why you need protection from your own comrades. The other is that there very often isn’t another woman to be your battle buddy.
Richard Wolinsky: Women are stuck in this place where anything could happen unless they find a male protector, but they don’t want a male protector because it makes them look weak?
Helen Benedict: Right, and they’re furious because men don’t have this rule. I had many women soldiers say, “Wait a minute, you bring me here as a soldier, you tell me I’m equal, and then I’m not allowed to go to the latrine without having to search for somebody to go with me? What is this? What kind of respect is this?” Another woman told me that her battle buddy, who was a guy because there were no women around, asked her on the way, “What would you do if I raped you?” She said, “I’m carrying a knife.” I heard many stories of women carrying weapons more with the idea of protecting themselves against the men on their own side.
Richard Wolinsky: The sequence where someone reports a rape and is then sent on a suicide mission—how common was that?
Helen Benedict: I heard that sort of story a lot. That’s part of the class action suit. Too many people who’ve reported rape—men and women—have been met with threats of punishment or actual punishment rather than judicial action.
Richard Wolinsky: In that case, it was a woman who turned her back on other women.
The mandates from the government, the permission to torture, the lack of of a clear mission, trying to run the war on the cheap, and treating soldiers badly, all of that erodes one’s moral compass, as soldiers like to say.
Helen Benedict: As with any oppressed group who haven’t had a chance to evolve much yet, there tends to be a great deal of competition and distrust between women because it’s so much harder to win respect as a female trooper than it is as a male. As one of them said to me, “You have to be twice as bad as the boys.”
Richard Wolinsky: Was Camp Bucca a worse-case scenario in 2003, or was it standard operating procedure?
Helen Benedict: I heard these stories from people in all branches, in different circumstances, in different years of the war. Camp Bucca was more primitive at the beginning of the war than some other camps in terms of its physical conditions. But in terms of how men and women treat each other, it was very standard.
Richard Wolinsky: The food that they were eating—these horrible packets of food that just stop you up—do you think that was intentional on the army?
Helen Benedict: They’re constipating on purpose so that soldiers don’t have to go to the bathroom so much when they’re off in theater, as it’s called.
Richard Wolinsky: Dehydration is pretty common as well.
Helen Benedict: The desert heat is unbelievable. Soldiers are passing out from dehydration all the time. I remember one soldier telling me she was afraid to drink very much because she was afraid to go to the latrines at night, so she was passing out all the time. She said she had IV tracks lines on her arms from being re-hydrated so often.
Richard Wolinsky: The abuse of the soldiers by the military and by each other—it makes something like Abu Ghraib a lot more comprehensible.
Helen Benedict: If you can’t treat each other right, then you can see how that would spill over very quickly to not treating detainees right and not treating Iraqis right. Because of the mandates from the government in the Iraq War, the permission to torture, the lack of of a clear mission, trying to run the war on the cheap, and treating soldiers badly—all of that erodes one’s moral compass, as soldiers like to say. It makes it more possible to be abusive towards others.
Women from the Iraq War in particular, but also Afghanistan, are in this unique position of being combat veterans and often sexual assault survivors, so they’ve got this double trauma.
Richard Wolinsky: How common is what happens to Kate, that her disconnect from her family grows and grows so she wants nothing to do with them because they’re totally clueless?
Helen Benedict: A lot of the soldiers in this war came straight out of high school. A lot of them joined up when were so young they needed their parents to sign a waiver—they were seventeen. When they get there and find out they’re not liberating and not helping, they get angry at the adults who encouraged them or allowed them to do this. They’ll come home, and as soldiers have done since the beginning of time, feel that civilians won’t understand what they’ve been through and what they feel. Or they want to protect the people they love from knowing what they did because they don’t want to inflict any trauma. Or they don’t want to be seen as a monster, and some of them feel they’ve been turned into monsters. There are many reasons why they fall into silence, but their anger is huge, both internal and external.
Richard Wolinsky: What about Kate’s reactions when she gets back to the VA hospital in terms of walking out on the group therapy session?
Helen Benedict: Women from the Iraq War in particular, but also Afghanistan, are in this unique position of being combat veterans and often sexual assault survivors, so they’ve got this double trauma. From previous wars, there were very few women who were ground combat veterans. So they either find themselves in therapy groups with combat veterans who are all men, which is very hard for any woman but especially if she’s been sexually assaulted, or they find themselves with women, none of whom saw combat. They feel quite alienated.
Richard Wolinsky: The other side of the story is Naema, who is an Iraqi, a medical student whose family members are taken away by the U.S. military.
Helen Benedict: There’s this idea that we’ve been partly fed, but it’s also just from a lack of information, that Iraqi women were no different from Saudi Arabian women or women in Afghanistan under the Taliban—not allowed to go to school, under the veil, completely oppressed—forgetting that Iraq was a secular country under Saddam Hussein. Women could dress as they wish, especially women living in Baghdad. They were lawyers, doctors, politicians, engineers. 40 percent of the workforce were women, a large percentage of students were women. They had more rights than any Muslim women in the world outside Turkey, all of which has gone backwards since the war.
Richard Wolinsky: The little things floored me: Baghdad as a city of trees, and yet Naema confides that virtually all the trees are now gone.
Helen Benedict: The trees were bombed, mowed down. Iraq had beautiful orange and date groves all over, many of which were plowed just as an act of war, thereby not only ruining the landscape but ruining sources of food and farmer’s livelihoods.
Richard Wolinsky: I read your review of the movie Restrepo, and in that you criticize the film. You say, “do not fall in love with your sources,” and that’s why embedding is dangerous.
Helen Benedict: I called that review, “War, A Love Story: Restrepo.” The danger with embedding is that you put a journalist in with a platoon of soldiers—a journalist is not allowed to carry a weapon so the journalist is dependent on the soldiers to guard and protect his or her life, usually his. On top of it all, soldiers play this game with civilians and journalists which is, “We’re tough guys, we’re the macho soldiers, and you’re just a wimp with a camera. So we’ve got our in-jokes and we’re not sure we’ll let you in.” And then gradually as time goes on, they might start being nice or upset to the journalist and then the journalist feels like, “Oh, I’ve been let into the man’s club.”
It plays into the idea that “I need to be accepted by these macho men so that I can feel like one too.” Before you know it, you are beholden and dependent, even admiring the soldiers that you’re covering. You lose all objectivity. Not to mention, you’re censored when you’re embedded. You’re work is often looked at by a commander. Imagine if you were covering a corrupt corporation and you were sent to live with the CEO. You go to dinner with him, spend weekends with him, get to know his wife, go out, go to the pool, go to the strip club, whatever these people do, and you’re supposed to write an objective story?
Richard Wolinsky: Back in 2002 and 2003 I saw embedded reporters and their embedded reports and it struck me that the Bush administration knew all that and this was deliberate—it seemed like a total con.
Helen Benedict: It was actually invented by the Brits in the Falklands as a way of controlling the press. It’s about making sure that Vietnam doesn’t happen again, where the press went in independently and told it like it really was. Put the images up on the TV screens and fed the protest.
Richard Wolinsky: Why did you choose to write a play called The Lonely Soldier Monologues?
Helen Benedict: That play came straight out of my interviews with the soldiers. It was all in their words, the exact words of the soldiers. It wasn’t a work of fiction; it might be what you call a documentary play. Why did I do it? Because somebody suggested it, and I thought, “these interviews are so dramatic they would work very well on the stage.” Seven women, all different races, ethnic groups,, and ages played the women, the soldiers. We carefully matched up the actors with who the soldiers were. And at one point, the veterans came. They’d never met the actors before. They watched the play and met the actors, and the whole theater was in tears.
Richard Wolinsky: There’s a nonfiction book you wrote a while ago called Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. How do you think working on a book like that impacted your own work in terms of sex crimes in Iraq?
Helen Benedict: It wasn’t the first book I’d written about sexual assault and violence against women. It was the third book I’d written on this subject. When I first started doing research on soldiers, I didn’t know I was wading back into this subject. I was interested in why women wanted to enlist, what it was like for women to be in ground combat—as they are in Iraq, even though it’s still officially banned. When I started interviewing, I began hearing the stories quickly, immediately, about the abuse. Part of my self-education to write about sex crimes was training as a rape crisis counselor so that I would learn how to interview without retraumatizing people or hurting them, people who had been through trauma. I think it helped me to interview sensitively and helped them to trust me with their stories.
Richard Wolinsky: Was there anything that you wanted to put into the book and there was just no place for it?
Helen Benedict: I had a conversation between Kate and this male soldier who she has a relationship with—I don’t want to give too much away because it’s complicated—Jimmy, who’s a good soul. And it’s a conversation about “the things that I’m doing as a soldier are making me feel evil. Is it being a soldier in war that’s making me do these terrible things? Or was I always like that and it’s the war that’s bringing it out in me?” This is a question that’s interesting for people to wrestle with. But I couldn’t make that conversation happen directly in a way that felt natural—it started to feel like preaching—so I had to take it out.
Richard Wolinsky: That brings up the question of the relationship between activism and journalism. I know journalists are supposed to be “objective,” but what happens when you see a horror? How do you maintain “objectivity” and at the same time be an activist?
Helen Benedict: Journalists aren’t supposed to be activists. We’re supposed to just give the information and let people use it for their activism, which was my main goal with The Lonely Soldier: to give the main material to peace activists and to veterans. But I’m asked to speak a lot on this subject to organizations who see me more as an activist. I think any reporter who does exposés—essentially, what I’m doing is a kind of exposé—falls into looking like an activist or even an advocate because you’re pointing out wrongdoing and that is the role of the journalist. It’s just that the pointing out of the wrongdoing has been fact-checked.
Richard Wolinsky: It seems to me that the mainstream or corporate media has just simply not been doing its job in terms of presenting the material. It seems to be censored, but it’s an internal censor.
Helen Benedict: I think the early coverage of the Iraq War by the mainstream media, in particular the New York Times but also the Post, is one of its darkest periods. I mean, it’s admitted as much. The support for the Bush line, the buying the of the WMD story, the lack of criticism over why we went to war, the lack of questioning. There was self-censorship. The whole decision not to show the coffins of the soldiers coming back, even the way 9/11 was covered. On French television, I saw the people jumping. Nobody in New York saw that on their televisions. There was censorship almost instantly, which is so condescending and patronizing to the public.
Richard Wolinsky: Are things are better now?
Helen Benedict: I do think they are somewhat better. But I always feel that we should be paying attention, more attention, to the lies told by political candidates, and call a lie a lie. There is a fear of doing that because it doesn’t seem objective. But it’s perfectly objective when you can prove something’s a lie.
Richard Wolinsky: You testified twice in front of Congress. What was that like?
Helen Benedict: One of the most nerve-racking things I’ve ever done. Congress has actually been holding hearings on the abuse of soldiers by other soldiers for decades, especially since the first Gulf War. I keep throwing these mandates at the military to do something about it and it keeps being ignored. The first time was still under Bush, the second time was under Obama, and there was a difference in openness. I was glad they held these testimonies and we were able to be as frank as we wished to be. But there is this sense of testifying for the record and not for any actual effect. That you’re shouting into a kind of void. The military is amazingly unresponsive to Congress. It really acts sometimes as if it’s its own kingdom.
Richard Wolinsky: And what about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? How does the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell play into abuse?
Helen Benedict: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was an official tool of persecution. It officially allowed people to bully other people. Rapists used it to silence their victims. Men used it to kick out women who were rivalling them in how well they did their jobs, or were threatening them. More women proportionally were kicked out under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell than men. Once you give people an institution, an official tool of bullying, it spreads to all kinds of bullying. But there’s also been a lot of tolerance. Let us not forget that the majority of troops when surveyed thought that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be overturned.
Richard Wolinsky: Do you think you have changed things?
Helen Benedict: Somewhat. Virgin or Vamp inspired some newspapers to draw up guidelines about how to cover sex crimes more sensitively. The Philadelphia Inquirer for one. The Lonely Soldier inspired a class action suit, and I do know that several people in the Defense Department and several Congress people have read it because they were holding my book when I went to testify and said, “We read it.” The Defense Department did implement some of the changes I suggested. Mostly, I think, I have affected a few individuals here and there. I sometimes get very touching emails from people who have been moved or feel, “Oh, this happens to other people. I’m not alone.” You really never know whether you had a lasting effect.
Thanks: Guernica

Elaine Equi

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Elaine Equi  
                                                                    

The wry poet on the crossover between poetry and the punk rock scene, O’Hara and Ginsberg, and embracing technology.

Elaine Equi is not a poet’s poet and not a people’s poet, and yet she is both. Her poetry is wry and sparse. Often less than a page, her poems read something like eloquent one-liners that along with laughter effortlessly provoke profundity: a little Wang Wei, a little Frank O’Hara, a little Nicanor Parra, but mostly, just a little.
The daughter of Italians, Elaine discovered poetry in the schools and universities of the Chicago area. She gained notoriety for her performance poetry in that city’s punk scene, where she met her husband, poet Jerome Sala. The poets were invited to Los Angeles to read in the 1980s, where author Dennis Cooper was curating the performance space, Beyond Baroque. A few years later they discovered a thriving poetry scene in New York—which Elaine calls the “the switchboard”—and they decided to stay. In addition to writing poetry, she teaches literature at New York University, the New School, and City College.

Her poems appear in general readership publications like the New Yorker as much as they do in online poetry zines. The annual Best American Poetry series has showcased her verse several times. Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems—a greatest hits drawing from earlier collections The Cloud of Knowable Things, Decoy, Voice-Over, and Surface Tension—was nominated for the Los Angeles Book Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

This year, Coffee House Press published her new collection, Click and Clone, the title of which was appropriated from The Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. Click and Clone refers to our zeitgeist as Elaine sees it. However, Elaine also experiments with a series of poems composed solely of the words she reads over people’s shoulders on the subway (“Reading Isabel Allende Over Someone’s Shoulder On The Subway”), one sonnet written from headlines from the tabloid, the New York Post, and short, poetic blurbs meant to accompany movie stills (“Cinema Tarot”).

We met at a café near her apartment in Manhattan. While Elaine described New York to me as a writer’s city, I noticed two men behind her discussing a manuscript, a neat pile of white paper nestled between their coffee cups. It seemed that, as Elaine was saying, so many people in New York are writers. For a moment I thought that maybe what Elaine says in her poem, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” was true: “the locket of bookish love / still opens and shuts.”
—Jesse Tangen-Mills for Guernica

Guernica: What’s it like being a part of a poet couple?
Elaine Equi: I like being married to another writer. You get to trade ideas. You get to talk shop. You get to complain. You get to gossip. And you don’t have to explain why you’re in such a bad mood when your work isn’t going well. Jerome is always the first person I show anything to. We have very different styles but we trust each other’s opinion. Last night I showed him three poems. Two of them got a yes and one of them was no.
Guernica: How did you and Jerome meet?
Elaine Equi: We met at a punk rock bar in Chicago, called O’Banion’s (named after the Chicago mobster and florist from the 1920s, Dion O’Banion). Jerome was something of a local celebrity known for reciting his poems in clubs and bars and I had just published my first chapbook, Federal Woman, so when we did meet, we were already aware of and interested in each other’s work. Plus there had just been some poems and photos of Jerome in a free newspaper kind of like the Village Voice and I thought he was incredibly cute!
There are so many different flavors of funny. It’s not all fluffy entertainment; it can be an important tool for survival.
Guernica: So there was crossover between poetry and the punk rock scene?
Elaine Equi: Very much so. In New York there was Patti Smith. In L.A. you had Exene Cervenka and John Doe who met at a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque and went on to form the band X. In Chicago, there was Jerome and I. Of course, a big difference was that we weren’t musicians, and we didn’t have a band, and we weren’t famous either, though I did have a guy playing synthesizer to accompany me at first. We did a lot of readings in bars and art galleries. The whole idea was that neither of us wanted an audience that would mostly consist of other writers. Eventually in the early ’80s we got invited to read at Beyond Baroque when Dennis Cooper ran the series. It was one of my all time favorite readings. We felt so at home there and met a lot of cool poets who are still among my best friends—people like David Trinidad, Amy Gerstler, Jack Skelley.
Guernica: Can you describe to me the scene at Beyond Baroque?
Elaine Equi: Well, I just went to read there a couple of times, but I loved the sensibility of most of those writers. Their work was so witty and edgy. What fascinated me most was how pop it sounded. If it had been a big deal for Frank O’Hara to write about James Dean, these L.A. poets seemed to have grown up, like myself, watching hours and hours of TV. Jack Skelley had a magazine called Barney, after the Flintstones character, and he’d written this great ode to Marie Osmond. David Trinidad wrote about Barbie dolls and girl groups. They aggressively and unabashedly upped the ante on bringing poetry and pop culture together.
Since New York and San Francisco are usually considered the big meccas of writing, in L.A. and Chicago, I think we felt freer to do something a bit more—well, actually, a lot less literary. Do you know the Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra? He has his poems and his anti-poems. Our idea was a little like that. We wanted to be writers but we also wanted something more populist at the same time.
Guernica: When did you discover Nicanor Parra?
Elaine Equi: I began reading him in my twenties and never stopped. I like that he has so many minimal poems now.
Guernica: I find both of your poetry funny, although I wouldn’t say that it’s light verse either. Do you think your poetry has ever been dismissed for humor or levity?
Elaine Equi: I would say no. The simple answer is no. I tend to like poems that are short as well as funny. I love Joe Brainard and Aram Saroyan. And I think their sense of humor and minimalist approach are pretty radical. For example, Aram has this chapbook called The Beatles. It’s four pages long and all that’s on each page is the name of one of the Beatles. I think it takes a lot of confidence to write a poem like that. I also like dark humor—Dada and absurdist stuff. There are so many different flavors of funny. It’s not all fluffy entertainment; it can be an important tool for survival. I find this sensibility in a lot of my favorite German poets like Oskar Pastior, Ernst Jandl, Gunter Eich, and Eugene Gomringer, the father of concrete poetry. Their work isn’t always funny in a jokey way, but it’s extremely playful and inventive.
Guernica: Wait, I thought it had a Brazilian beginning.
Elaine Equi: Yes, you’re right. Gomringer is the father of the European concrete poetry movement, though he was born in Bolivia. I don’t exactly know the chronology of which came first but I think the movements happened sort of simultaneously around the same time in the 1950s. I recently met Nora Gomringer, Eugene’s daughter. She’s a terrific poet too and was involved in the poetry slam scene in Germany.
Guernica: Have you always liked poetry?
Elaine Equi: I’ve always liked language and been a big reader. I always loved books as objects. My favorite time of year as a child was September when we’d go buy all kinds of notebooks and pens and markers for school. I think I wanted to be a writer just so I’d be able to fill up all those pages. But to be honest, I wasn’t crazy about the kind of poetry I found in high school English books. I didn’t get really excited about poetry until I discovered Lorca in college. If it wasn’t for surrealism, I’m not sure I’d have become so involved in poetry. I was attracted by the extravagant imagery and elements of fantasy. This was in the ’70s and it seemed to fit the psychedelic mood of the times. I found it liberating.
Guernica: When did you start teaching?
Elaine Equi: A long time ago. Maybe in the mid-’80s. I went to Columbia College in Chicago and studied with Paul Hoover and his wife, Maxine Chernoff. They were great and generous friends and mentors. After I got my MA, I started teaching a beginning poetry workshop at Columbia College. I was waitressing and teaching at the time. Gradually I was able to transition into just teaching.
Guernica: How is teaching?
Elaine Equi: I like it. I think poetry workshops get a bad rap. I’m sure some aren’t good, but in general, I like the format. I try and keep mine pretty informal. Sometimes we have wine or sake, and we read aloud, and we talk. It’s my experience that people write better when they feel at ease and free to experiment, rather than being in a competitive, hypercritical atmosphere. There are always a few students who want me to be tough or harsh, but it’s really not my style.
Guernica: What poets do you like to teach?
Elaine Equi: I try to assign combinations of books that will give a variety of approaches. Maybe something old and something new. Sometimes you get lit students that know a lot about the canon but virtually nothing about contemporary poetry and vice versa. I like to mix things up.
For the past couple of years I’ve taught a class at The New School called “The Minimalist Mystique.” In it we look at a lot of concentrated, condensed poetry. We read Sappho, Bashō, Paul Celan, Lorine Niedecker, Creeley, Rae Armantrout. I guess what I like best about teaching is that it allows me to explore my own interest with a group.
Guernica: In your essay about Frank O’Hara you say that “his poems no longer speak to us the way they used to.” Why do you think someone like O’Hara isn’t as widely known as say Ginsberg?
Elaine Equi: Frank O’Hara has a solid reputation. He’s unquestionably one of the greats. I don’t necessarily think Ginsberg is more famous, although he was much more of a public figure, public poet. What I meant in the essay is that it’s hard today to have the same kind of exuberance as O’Hara (at least I find it difficult) and to celebrate art in the same kind of way. Our age feels more cynical.
Now there’s the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn’t quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It’s real but not concrete.
Guernica: Do you teach Frank O’Hara?
Elaine Equi: Not so much because most of the students at The New School are usually already familiar with him. That’s probably one of the reasons they chose to study there. Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch both used to teach at The New School. And David Lehman, who heads the poetry program there now, wrote a wonderful book, The Last Avant-Garde, about the New York School. Actually, I often have gone back to O’Hara. I think his work is a good influence on anyone. You can’t go wrong with it. And his poems have a chameleon quality. You think you remember them and know then so well, but they always still surprise me.
Guernica: Were you imagining O’Hara’s New York when you came here in the eighties?
Elaine Equi: No, I don’t think so. My attitude was more like: “I’m not from here, but I wonder what the people here are like.” I remember very clearly going to see the Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire when we first got here. I sat in the darkness thinking, “So this is a New York audience.” I was curious to see how they reacted to different scenes, what made them laugh. I guess I wanted to get in sync. I had never lived anyplace besides Chicago, and New York is such a great city for poets.
Guernica: How so?
Elaine Equi: For one thing, there are so many of them. And people here genuinely love and respect literature. In Chicago, if you tell someone you’re a writer, they look at you suspiciously—as if to say “yeah, right.” In New York, people don’t question the idea. If you say you’re a writer, that’s what you are.
Guernica: What do you make of the changes in New York?
Elaine Equi: You need so much money to live here. The most bohemian person you see in New York has money somewhere. We’d never have been able to stay if Jerome didn’t work in advertising.
Guernica: Luc Sante once described New York: “We thought of the place as a free city, like one of those prewar nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions. I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.”
Elaine Equi: Yeah, that sounds like it was earlier, maybe the ’70s. When we got here in 1988, that was already over. Everyone told us, poet and hipster friends told us: “You missed it. It’s all over now.” We didn’t quite altogether miss it, but the city was more cleaned up and certainly didn’t have such a transgressive feeling. I liked it a lot though. The image I had of New York when we first got here was of a giant switchboard. I know that’s old-fashioned and really dates me, but it was so incredibly social here. There were readings and parties and friends kept introducing you to other friends.
Guernica: Name a writer you didn’t expect to run into but did.
Elaine Equi: I was really happy when we moved to New York because I worshiped Joe Brainard and knew I’d get to see him more. He had read at my college in Chicago and I had written back and forth with him, but when we first arrived in the city, Joe took Jerome and me out for a nice welcome dinner. Then David Trinidad moved from L.A. to New York about the same time we did. He knew James Schuyler, so one night the four of us had Chinese food at a restaurant near the Chelsea Hotel where Jimmy lived. Ann Lauterbach, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Raymond Foye, Rene Ricard… It was all very exhilarating…
Guernica: Advertising seems like an interesting profession for poets.
Elaine Equi: I have a lot of respect for advertising. If I didn’t teach and could go back in time, I might try and become a copywriter. I especially like print ads that combine a photo with a short caption or tag line. I think some of the German concrete poets I mentioned earlier worked in advertising. There’s the same kind of bold, concise graphic approach and interest in type and design that you might see in ads in their work.
Guernica: Teaching, writing, reading poetry… do you tire of it?
Elaine Equi: Yes, sometimes, but usually not for very long. I like to take photographs a lot just as a hobby and I like to go to galleries and museums. When I shut off the verbal, I like to escape into the visual. Although I guess I can’t stay away from poetry for too long because I’ve already done a couple of photo/writing projects. My poem “A Guide to the Cinema Tarot” in Click and Clone began as a series of film stills. I would rent some of my favorite movies from the ’50s and ’60s, pause them, and photograph the TV screen. Then later I added little poems/fortunes to go with each image [PDF].
More recently I’ve been posting my pictures on Facebook and calling them “photo haiku.” It’s fun because I think of it as picture writing—or making wordless poems. I’ve always been interested in Imagism and this just seems like an extension of my thinking about that kind of poetry. I like to look at the interface between words and pictures and wonder about which comes first, a sort of chicken-or-egg type of question.
Guernica: It feels like there is more thematic coherency to Click and Clone than in some of your previous books. I would think that what you’re working on now would be a total departure from that material…
Elaine Equi: I can never plan out what direction my poems will take in terms of either form or content. I wish I could but it doesn’t work that way for me. If I try to write something, I’d probably end up doing the opposite. In Click and Clone, I’d write a poem and a few weeks or months later, another poem on a similar topic would arrive. It’s as if I had more to say, so I began thinking of them as sets. There’s a set of dream poems, a set of portraits of women, the clone poems. They were like a bunch of serial poems having a discussion with each other. And as you mentioned, it was more thematic than my other books. I think fantasy was the common element. I decided on the title early on. It’s the name of an educational website from the Genetics Science Center at the University of Utah and they were kind enough to grant me permission to use it. I just love the sound of it. It’s such a seductive mantra.
I haven’t thought much about my next book yet. Right now I’m just happy to get a poem wherever I can find one.
Guernica: How did the “clone” come about?
Elaine Equi: Well, I wasn’t thinking of real clones, like I said, it was fantasy. Maybe a metaphor for how fast it feels like everything is moving. And I’ve always been fascinated by tales of doppelgangers and the idea of a double. If you look at my previous book titles Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, The Cloud of Knowable Things, Ripple Effect, and now Click and Clone, it feels like one continual exploration of self-estrangement and the differences between “real” and “copy.”
Also, my previous book, Ripple Effect, was a book of new and selected poems. There was something about assembling work from all those different periods (about twenty years) and giving it a new context that made me feel like I actually had created a literary clone of myself.
Guernica: Describe your writing process.
Elaine Equi: I still write longhand in a notebook. Maybe I should try writing on a keyboard. That would be really different for me. But it seems so bland. I really like the element of color. I like to have a blue notebook or a yellow one. I’m very sensitive to color. I like to think the color is coloring my work. For a long time, I’d only write in green ink because green is my favorite color. One day someone told me that Neruda only wrote in green ink too. Siempre verde.
I don’t write every day, but if I go more than a couple of months without writing, I begin to get a little nervous. I usually have bursts of poems. Five or six come together and then I slack off and want to do something else. In order for poetry to exist there has to be not-poetry to contrast it with.
Guernica: Some of your writing seems to come from reading. What are you reading right now?
Elaine Equi: I recently read Sister Carrie for the first time and a great book by F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Crack-Up. It’s made up of all these lists, kind of like the The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. He was having a nervous breakdown, so he began making lists—hotels he’d stayed at, songs he liked, landscapes, girls he’d kissed. Somehow these helped him to get better. I love lists and list poems, so the idea really appealed to me.
I never liked the philosophy that you can have everything and be everything and that something is wrong if you don’t want that.
I also just got a biography called Furious Love about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s marriage. It’s the perfect summer escapist book! As for poetry, one of my former students, Ben Mirov, just sent me his latest chapbook, Vortexts, which looks awesome. I’ve been teaching for so long now that many people who studied with me have one or more books out. There’s Chris Martin, Erica Kaufman, Jen Benka, Shira Dentz, Ron Drummond, Mark Lamoureaux, and Julia Cohen to name a few. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what’s happening with younger poets.
Guernica: In “Role Reversal” you write that “reality is baroque and multifaceted.” What do you mean by that?
Elaine Equi: There are fewer and fewer philosophies that everyone subscribes to. We don’t seem to have as many beliefs in common as we used to. Also, we interact much more online. We have all these gadgets to help us manage different aspects of our lives.
In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world—cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there’s the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn’t quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It’s real but not concrete.
Guernica: How does Click and Clone play into that?
Elaine Equi: Click and Clone kind of epitomizes the problem I have with technology. It sounds quick and easy, but it ends up taking up too much of your time. I never liked the philosophy that you can have everything and be everything and that something is wrong if you don’t want that. I’m terrible at multitasking and find it hard to believe that no one protests this general trend of using the rhetoric of self actualization to sell you faster and faster phones and computers, BlackBerrys, etc.
I don’t like speed. I would have made a terrible Futurist. Even when I did take drugs, I never liked amphetamines and much preferred the slow taffy-pull of time that you get with opiates.
Of course, I know you can’t really stop technology. And there are many benefits to it too. But with this book, I wanted to look more closely at my own resistance to it. Basically, I wanted to complain a bit.
Guernica: What do you think is the difference is between making something like Aram Saroyan’s book The Beatles and something like Twitterature?
Elaine Equi: Maybe not that much in terms of an individual poem or book. But there’s a huge shift going on in publishing—the whole print versus digital debate. I don’t know how it will change things, but it certainly will. I can see the financial benefits of not having to print and store and distribute these bulky things we call books, not to mention all the trees it will save. But I wonder if books become in essence “files” if people wouldn’t write them differently. I’m used to writing print books and I enjoy the slowness of the whole process. It makes me more deliberate about everything I say.
Then again, I can appreciate the idea that with e-books more people would publish, the work would be easier to disseminate, and that it could even be interactive. Being a lover of photography, I especially like the idea that you could include lots of pictures—full-color pictures—with your writing. That to me is exciting! We’ll all have to stay tuned to see what develops.
Guernica: Nicanor Parra did a collection of postcards with pictures in the seventies, Artefactos Visuales.
Elaine Equi: I think I’ve seen some of them but will try and track those down. The postcard is sacred to me. It makes me sad that no one sends them very much anymore because of email and texting. I still like to buy them, but they’ve lost their original function and now just seem like reminders or mementos of what they used to be.
Guernica: What do you make of flarf [an experimental poetry movement that makes use of the Internet to produce and share poems]?
Elaine Equi: I’m not that into appropriation or collage myself, so I haven’t really read a lot of it. But I do like the idea that it captures a new kind of vernacular—the way people sound when they talk online. It’s interesting too in that it seems to embrace technology rather than resist it. Maybe that’s a really wise thing to do. Don’t be intimidated by it. Put it to work for you, make it write your poems.
Guernica: I found this line in O’Hara’s poems and in yours that poetry is a “machine.” Where do you think of poetry as “machine” starts?
Elaine Equi: We’ve all heard the William Carlos Williams line: “A poem is a small machine made of words.” Usually people think of it as a way to emphasize careful craftsmanship. In a machine, every part has a function. In a poem, every word needs to be there. But I don’t actually subscribe to that notion.
When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They’re not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be “real.”
I think it is real, but I like the idea of it being non-utilitarian.
Guernica: Along the same lines, how do you think concrete poetry relates to the objectivists?
Elaine Equi: There are a lot of similarities. They both emphasize the materiality of language. They both “put words in the spotlight,” as I once heard Aram Saroyan say. And they both use the white space around words to sculpt/shape their work, rather than simply seeing it as background.
Guernica: In your poem “I Interview Elaine Equi on the Four Elements” you say: “The earth has always supported me in all my endeavors. I trust it.” What associations do you have with the earth?
Elaine Equi: I tend to be a pretty spacey and scattered person, so anything that makes me feel “grounded” comes as a welcome relief. I think the more stability a person has, the more they can follow esoteric or intellectual pursuits. The inner and outer, the visible and invisible, the abstract and concrete—you’ve got to get the balance right (not that I do, but it’s something to aim for). Also, my moon is Capricorn, my rising sign is Capricorn, Jerome is a Capricorn. You could definitely say, excuse the pun, that I dig the earth!

And Thanks Guernica