WHAT FOLLOWS IS a recorded conversation between two poets whose respective work and lives are fashioned around the question of how poetry gets written. The conversation is followed by a series of poems titled Rob Me Then in which each poet invites the other to steal language and ideas from each other, troubling the tradition of single authorship and the contradiction at the heart of possessing an idea.

RACHEL RABBIT WHITE: I was thinking about that too recently if you can somehow be anonymous during your lifetime I guess I have a line thats like, To evade fame must be the height of luxury. But I mean thats about money. I feel like, its almost like the people that can write anonymously, or can afford to be off social media, are people with wealth, you know?

RS: Last night, I had this nightmare that I was stuck at the top of this mountain. I could see everything but could not touch anyone, and yet everyone could touch and see me. I woke up and thought, I need to scrub my image and name from the internet. Or I need to proliferate more names to fracture my selfhood. Either overexposure or total erasure of names would work. Ive always been like how to become ungovernable? You have to become un-Googlable

RRW: In my meditations, names come to me that make no sense. Almost like angel names, that are no-names, and Im like I wish I had more things to name, I wish I had names.

RS: I have so many email addresses with different names and my friends are like, which fucking email do you use?

RRW: I love that about hustler life and hooker life. I remember when I was first building my hooker website and had an advertisement out, I was corresponding with this one guy back and forth and my name, my first and last name, literally changed 15 times during the conversation. And at first he wasnt saying anything, and then he was like, are you okay? Are you going through something? Like, this name has changed so many times. And Im like, look! Im just trying to figure it out right now.

RS: Exactly, like if your own name becomes incoherent you must be mentally losing it.

RRW: Last night, during my insomnia, I was going back and reading Baudrillard, so I am going to get on my Baudrillard pedestal for a second. He writes that what happens in modern culture is that our society becomes so reliant on models and maps that weve lost contact with the real world and everything that preceded the maps. From there, reality begins to merely imitate the map and the model, taking on the appearance of a real world and real language too.

RS: That reminds me of what Sylvia Wynter says, Dont mistake the map for the territory.

RRW: Yes, like language is the first brick that keeps us from accessing reality. You know how we were talking about being anonymous I am thinking about folk songs spreading through culture to the point that its not even clear what culture it originally came from. Theres this really girl-world version that happened to me where I grew up with those hand-clap songs. Did you ever have those hand-clap songs? You know like, Down, down baby, down by the roller coaster, sweet, sweet baby

RS: Never let me go.

RRW: Yeah! And there are regional versions too, depending on where you grew up. I remember once reading that those songs are on all continents and have spread in a way thats completely mysterious.

RS: Theres this simultaneous beauty in the lost origin, like when something goes viral and there is a desire to know where it came from, why and how it spread. It makes me think about the idea of plagiarism and the contradiction at the heart of possessing an idea, or thought, or song. Im drawn to Kathy Acker in terms of this.

RRW: Oh my god, yes!

RS: Her work is all about repetition, mimicry, plagiarism. But its meant to undermine those concepts and point out the origin-less nature of thoughts, concepts, words, phrases. There are these childhood songs, like the hand-clap songs, passed down forever, where the origin is completely lost. And yet when you learn some version of the origin story, you can understand how culture proliferates, how ideology brings you into your beliefs through these innocent seeming songs. I think about political slogans too, where its like, on the one hand, they grow and the origin becomes totally obscure, and on the other, there is something so important about studying political genealogies and understanding the context in which a certain political phrase is coined. When political slogans lose their origin story, they become more easily neutralized or co-opted by the state and start no longer serving the local or historically specific political purpose that they once had. So shout-out to historians unburying subjugated histories, but also shout-out to Acker for being like, Im just taking this as if it is mine and running with it.

RRW: So my sister and I, Irish twins, entered kindergarten, I was in first grade and I remember one day, I walked into the living room and my sister was showing my mom the hand-claps. And my mom was laughing because some of the songs were kind of dirty. And I just remember, I was so mad, and maybe ashamed, because now my mom, the authority figure, could see us.

RS: Because she wasnt a kid because your sister told the secret.

RRW: She told the secret! Yeah! And I remember feeling very sullen and silent over this betrayal, you know?

RS: Secrets are important. With an authority figure like a mother, or the state there has to be a refusal of transparency. You cant know my songs! You cant know our secret language!

RRW: Ive been thinking a lot about whats missing in my life I think it started when I was in Mississippi and I was isolated from my friends. When you leave New York, its hard to keep up with people, even if youre trying. But what I was missing was not the social updates or conversations, but like, that place you can get to when youre seeing someone close to you all the time and having conversations where language begins to break down, where grammar is breaking down. Everything becomes shorthand. That breakdown is where the poetic enters in. I think Elaine Kahn says this, about the poem needing a hole in it.

RS: Yes, like thats the way the poem works best: if it can point to the fundamental lack at the heart of language, at the heart of being a subject.

RRW: I got really into reading about chatbot technology recently. When they build the bots, they have all these metrics they use to determine how human is this conversation? The ways of measuring humanness are very funny, especially as a poet, one of them is no repetition.

But when I think about the chatbot I also think about sex robots. This fearmongering about the sex robot has been around forever. In Ovids Metamorphoses, sailors encounter a sculptor named Pygmalion who is carving ivory sex dolls so lifelike you cant tell them apart from real women. The question then was more about the human soul like if we can produce a truly lifelike machine does that mean a soul is no longer necessary criteria for being a human? Or is a soul no longer necessary to explain human behavior? And I find that way more interesting than our anxieties today, which are not spiritual, but more economical. If you Google it, youll find a million sex-robot-panic op-eds around the meaning of love and intimacy, but also about work, headlines like, Strippers are going to be replaced by mechanical strip clubs!

RS: This is reminding me of the Luddite textile worker rebellion. When we call someone a Luddite today, its like, this person is not up to date with modern technology, right? But actually, a Luddite is a term that comes from the textile worker uprising in England in the 1800s when their labor in cotton and wool mills was being replaced by machines. In the Luddite uprising, they destroyed the machines, smashed them, and threw them out the window. And theres this hilarious line in the Wikipedia about it: The workers destroyed the machines not because they were hostile toward the machines, but it was their way of expressing their hostility toward their boss.

RRW: Hostility toward work, yeah!

RS: I thought it was so cute that Wikipedia was consoling us that the workers actually felt solidarity with the machines.

RRW: Thats the thing! I feel solidarity with the machines. We are machines. The fear of, say, a sex robot, is totally reactionary. Because behind that fear, its like, your sex is being replaced by machines, your meaningful relationships when the very real threat has already happened when we sold our labor to the boss! We are already substitutable. Were already useless because all value is performance. Were already the robot, were already playing the automaton, you know?

RS: How human is this conversation? we ask the worker whose exploited labor is in essence already dehumanized.

RRW: I do think theres a point when, and I think the pandemic contributed to this, but also getting older, where you start to lose wonder with all interaction, its the same conversations every day, every bodega sells the same items, you start to feel a lack of awe with the things around you. Thats the reason Proust started to write, to find awe.

RS: Theres that amazing passage in Swanns Way where hes like, the danger of being a writer is that life will feel less lifelike, the narrative is the thing that gives you the feeling of being alive without the habits of everyday life.

RRW: Right! And you can only hope that youre going to get there. Remember what it felt like when you experienced those first freedoms as a teenager, and everything was full of inside jokes and alive and dangerous. It was all about connection. It was all about the other people you were meeting. And maybe finding the overlaps between you and that persons life was interesting that they werent a person you would have met before, but there were no gaps.

RS: I think the joy is in the incoherence. Its like groupchat energy.

RRW: And I feel like, you know, when you find yourself again in a place where security and money are your main worries, play disappears really quickly. I notice it in other people around me. Because everyones really scared right now, you know? And yet, you talk a lot about the increase in refusal to work and compulsion to work, like people are risking it again.

RS: Anti-work politics have been so important to me for so long. The tradition comes out of an autonomist, feminist, and anti-capitalist genealogy that basically argues that collective refusal of work is crucial for a transformative political moment. My interest in this is personal, I hate having a boss. I hate the way that labor is exploited. Theres this affective hatred toward the lie that work will ever lead you to the Good Life. And because that lie is propped up by the inequalities of racial capitalism, the refusal to work is not just about individuals refusing a particular job anti-work, to me, must be a collective stance against the capitalist system of production and refusal of the idea that work has some innate moral value. We are living in this time where anti-work politics are becoming mainstream, there is the Great Resignation where workers are leaving their jobs at the highest rates ever recorded month after month since last spring. It is more important than ever to not mistake this an individual refusal, and to understand the implicit critique of capitalism it carries with it. People are like, no fucking way, its not worth it. Work is not worth dying for.

The poem, like labor, has mechanical processes: meter and rhyme and feet that are measurable and propel a poem forward. So to approach poetic form from an anti-work perspective, Im like, I am going to smash this machine so we can play. I just get so much joy out of sabotage.

RRW: The poem has to write itself. The poem takes over you. I want to give life to that poetic voice so that it keeps coming to me. I want to decorate my life for that voice. And it cant be a conscious thought, it has to be in this meditative state where the poems are pushing me, pulling me, dressing me, giving me the clothes. The poems are making the decisions, theyre building the project, and Im going along with them. Im just the channel they play on.

Going back to the risk of anti-work politics, I think poetry and art need a sense of risk. You have to have a sense of risk to be like, okay, Im becoming this poem now. Do I agree with what Im becoming? It doesnt matter because you square it within you to subordinate yourself to the poetry.

RS: Its like that Amiri Baraka quote: My poetry, then, has always been aimed at destroying ugly shit.

RRW: Right! And theres terror in beauty too, the terror of going after beauty, going into the terror, not away from it. When Im engaged and the poem is making me or when Im trying to write prose or trying to write essays, I refuse to fake anything, I can wait, I let it come to me. You know?

RS: Its such a gift when that happens.

RRW: With these algorithm-based, Instagram-influenced ways everythings getting so sanitized and flattened, whether its the way we talk or social justice or relationships. Thats why the human conversation is a natural next poetry project for me. Thinking about phenomenology, where a human is a split-up object, theres the fantasy, theres the real, and in the real we have the other, the others otherness, and then that gap, you know, where we cant ever fully perceive that other, we cant see all the sides of the dice at the same time. When I wrote the Paradise Edition of my book, Porn Carnival, I was interested in the phenomenology of romance and how we talk about love and romance as optimizing your life in structural terms so that relationships support your work and finances. And I, being led by this poetic project of falling in love, letting that terror and passion lead me, I was more interested in engaging in someones otherness and individuality, where you dont overlap, in the gaps, where people are damaged or problematic. For me that seems much more like real romance, like a human conversation.

RS: Im working on a new project right now thematizing desire and the gap, or how we project onto a love object. Except my love object is the End of the World, not a lover. The World like capital-W World is a destructive regime that eclipses earth, life, difference. How can we end the World to save ourselves, to save the natural World?

Im thinking about the collective political desire for a revolutionary horizon as if you're experiencing a crush. Im trying to work with this idea of romantic love as perversion, taking an object that cant be possessed and trying to possess it. Im traversing my desire for the End of the World in these love letters where its total simp energy.

RRW: Oh my god. Are you finding that youre able to do it without much personification, or does some sense of human energy show up when youre writing that?

RS: Definitely. Its super personified. I love playing with that. What if the end of the world is onstage? On the stripper pole? Shes the end of the world, and Im giving her all my money, shes draining my bank account.

RRW: I once had this peyote trip in my early 20s where I was in this other dimension, with all these other dimensional beings, like mechanical elves, and in the middle was a pink stripper pole where this gorgeous slug was dancing. I was giving her all my money. Her image was so, like, enrapturing. She was sensual, this slug.

RS: Of course it was a slug.

RRW: A lime green slug. She showed me the end of the world. I reached into my bag for a pen to write down what she showed me and had a full-on, open-eye peyote hallucination, that above us was God, but instead of the usual God it was Hello Kitty. And I was laughing because everything is a joke.

[When my secret is discovered in the fracturing of a Death Synonym. Your housing search, the secret to my housing search. We keep each other for each other, always leaking, never kept. The angel creaks, splurges on claustrophobic fun, like all signs are a difficult code to be cracked. Tell me the map and nothing else. Let me hide in my own mistakes. Give away all your best lines. Jesus it would be. Jesus my name. I stretch like money in my basement utopia. Light leaves me private, where anything could happen.]

If there was one thing you cant take away fromher its American Insomniaand that Anything could happen.

She changed her names, stretched like money.Evaded fame to live the height of luxury.She terrified herself and thought with her feet

She answered those textsand she worked,she worked very hard at it.

I told JesusRRW

I told Jesus if theres one thing you cant take its lose the origin but keep the trace

I told Jesus, sell me the map and nothing else give away my best lines/ like all signs are a difficult code to be cracked.

I told Jesus, change my name.

remove that ground on which I love to walkRhapsodizing vulnerability, you paint me an image of LOVING respect:

as if the present could ever slamagainst its throat

She worked very hard at it/a to-do list fractured every possession fantasy: rob me then as if there was an opposite to longing your housing search the secret to my housing search

Jesus, it would be/ Jesus, my name

stretch like money/ light leaves me private, I told Jesus, Its basement smog on this hilltop,Its the wrong fucking email address. This much she worked for its where the trace becomes the origin/ let me make my own mistakes

I passed by open garages and took everything I could, in theory. I dont remember because it was mine / psychosis is clear & all else is amorphous & incalculable/ flaunting object impermanence on a plot in heaven, craigslist selling sunset, Grecian sex bots the original cartographers/ three decades of spreadsheets, / No testimony, all miracle/ we keep each other for each other /

I told Jesus free my names

cant really say what I been doinglook back and see the past daysmaybe I was certain of somethingI am jealous for once having had that

I talk to you to talk to myself, even the anonymous have a profile even animals feel shame, I said I dont need to tell you that love gets fungible, she gets compact enough to make it she & all those who work hard

who work very hard to change their names

God is so popularRS

the self is a series of conversationsWhat is a body if not air huggingwater? Like feet know lucite,I talk to you to talk to myself,floating 7 inches off thecarpet, here to interrupt allnarrative.

You draw me a map of how to get to yours,but I already know how to get lost without you.

anyone can lose themselves, you wrote.As if there was an opposite to longing.

present in multiples, I plagiarizemy own best man. The one that fearsthe browning astroturf, growingaround the edges of the property line.

badly wired solitude I need alonetime from my own company, overstayingmy welcome, never making up the couch.

fungible love, childs rhymes replace auto-fic and any housing stock that mimics home.

I was thinking of telling youthis could be our incalculable strike:to keep our names a secret

I keep hearing new names of new angelsRRW

Through interfaces, infrastructures, and genetic data, so as to hide it in the technology ofconfession, from myself

I present in multiples, I plagiarizeFirst of all, fuck is paradise my boys have been smuggling this out of utopia

Well if you're you, constantly, you're never you

between the abyss of what is intended and what is produced, we study the multiplicitiesin ripples, in gaps

You say youve got 8 days before you go back on straight fluid karma, HRTso if anyone wants to get you pregnant, now is the time to speak up

which path to take on the map of cause and effect

Cause and effectRS

Because money of course. Because God.Love gets fungible, I get compact enough to make it.Cramped as fuck in here. (In the me for money.)Holy circlejerk longs for a viable sub.

Its going to be a good year: look how the lupine syncs with the chatbots.They work very hard at it: avoidantly attached, spiting never swallowing.Soul pups splash in the cement, giving away their anthem.Crushed out automation takes the place of our lack.

Thats how we baptize this spontaneousduet. Fake mothers fall in our lap,California King size heartbreak.

I carry her footsteps above me deep in the Law,splurging on order she gave me, unwillingly, unknowingly.

This much she worked for:four decades of spreadsheets,down payment on a plot in heaven,craigslist selling sunset.

Like Grecian sex bots, the original cartographers.

Now Come on God. Come God.Come to me God. Mother amen, motheramen. Amen God.

I keep hearing new names of new angelsRRW

So we study destiny, one ripple, a few months here, before another, looking for openings to reverse or interchange

A second house. Oh no. And there's no identifiable feature. Right. There are four perfectly cubic blank walls. Theres no personality, it's xanax.

Full sign classism. First house. We prefer that.

The moon sign, shes the one who is like, I want to suck your dick. If you dont let me suck your dick Im killing myself.

So this is an advertisement we're seeing. This is like, yeah. It's like an

So what is the plot here?

See the original post here:
The Hand Claps - lareviewofbooks