Conley: I wanted to ask something about form, but the phrase "relationship to form" kept coming up and sounded awful. I know that you write in multiple genres and "form" is something you might play with, and that play leads me to believe that your personal beliefs about form are ultimately irrelevant in being your reader. So instead I wanted to ask this of you: Can you rank your five senses in order of importance during your writing process? Your work (I'm thinking specifically of Sun Cycle), is wonderfully cerebral, as if thinking and the brain are the ultimate sense, but how do you incorporate the physical senses of the body when writing? What does this process look like for you?
Selcer: I love this question! Yes, 'thinking' as the ultimate sense....beautiful. I'm obsessed with the senses, the sensory, sensing, and slippage between the words "sense" and "meaning." Historically, counter-sense, nonsense or aleatory sense got us out of meaning; my work wants new sense, new senses.
As a writer, I am always listening; this sense does not reside at the top of my body, but deeply within it, and distributed all throughout. A receptive orientation is my main sense. The other sense I love is proprioception: the sense of one's body in space. It gives me information about my surroundings, my subjectivity, and my relationship to all of it. Recently, I've been favoring it most. Sight reveals my work in ratio to "the beautiful." Alongside music, sight guides how I revise and edit, the major part of my writing process. I am not always attempting to make my work beautiful, sometimes the opposite, or tones in between. Ekphrasis is also something I employ all throughout Sun Cycle.
Worlds reside in the space between the senses. Lately, I've been thinking about synesthesia as reparative. Poet Sean Bonney is one of my favorite thinkers on the senses. I'll leave you with a quote, “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” Marx describes the smooth transmutation of human love into stone, metal, money, information and power (the five senses of capital). The possibilities of statement that [Amiri] Baraka would seek to embody in his poem attempt a block on that trajectory, seeking to show that those senses were built from stolen materials, and that they have in any case been violently limited by the forces of capitalist need. In a recent essay Baraka has suggested that the limitation to five senses was produced by capitalist alienation, and that there may be infinite sense, reaching backward and forward into time “in modes and directions that we do not even know exist.”
Conley: What a thing to think about—how we might be living under conditions that are limiting our potentially limitless senses. Maybe some of this limitlessness takes the shape of the worlds "[residing] in the space between the senses" that you explore in your work. If that's the case, I would guess that these worlds, as discovered by individual thinkers/artists/sensors, are, at least in part, idiosyncratic or autonomous. Can you give me some kind of idea of your worlds? The ones that you have discovered/are discovering on your own? I feel like, on a simple level, I'm asking you to give me a description of what you have seen of your imagination, but this is also about synthesis. What are your discoveries?
Selcer: I love your question again. I want to clarify. The premise of my idea (and Sean's) is opposite from worlds as discovered by individuals, but rather, full and deep perception of our world. I access this world vividly and fully lately at rave or dance nights where bodies move together sensorily in space, music expanding our social boundary. The electronic sounds being made now rework the technology we are forced to interact with almost all the time, technology which, inherent to its interface, its teleos and genealogy is capitalistic, atomistic, binaristic, and separating. This electronic music roots deeply in black culture. Sorting and shifting all these elements into patterns made for play and connection feels reparative. Taking formal inspiration from Nanni Balestrini’s book The Unseen, and The Bernadette Corporation’s collectively written Reena Spaulings, I am thinking about a project I'm calling CLUB SPACE. The Unseen was based on the space of political protest, and I want to illuminate a line between these two spaces, thinking about intentional collectivity, identification, affinity and boundary. Nightclubs have historically been spaces for queer culture and artists, the first iterations of performance art germinating in New York City’s downtown 1970’s clubs. I want to seek out Noah Brehmer’s “communism of the affects, the suspension of strictly commercial or state usage of communal space,” [1] and Jenny Schlenzka’s suggestion that, “Stumbling out of the club into daylight, I became convinced that contemporary art institutions should stop looking to museums or theatres as role models and, instead, learn from nightclubs.” [2] I also feel critical of any Dionysian teleology. I want to think about borders and exclusions, clubs and groups. My research into beauty has found Immanuel Kant’s sensus communis to be a productive driver of thought—communities of sense in agreement about taste, yet entrenched both genealogically and relationally in the requirements of the Greek agora: citizen as property owning male, a person not of color. What are aesthetic communities? Are communities driven by the aesthetic (by Eros)? What are the limits to the concept of community when we have “membership” reappropriated as reoccuring fees? When social death pervades U.S. social life? In Blank Sign Book, I write about sensory rich spaces: the Ferguson Uprising's common will and understanding...the complicated and imperfect relationship between Occupy and 'real life'...Dolores Dorantes' swarm of revanchist horror girls...my own solidarity with the decades-long protests of museums that show Carl Andre, the artist accused of killing artist Ana Mendieta. Senses are all around us. One thing writing can do is archive them in language.
Conley: That bit about electronic music—that's great. It's refreshing whenever you hear an aesthetic or artistic process-perspective that includes, rather than a shunning of the complexities of societal constructions, a recognition/reconstruction/repurposing of those elements. I like the idea that within the state sanctioned performance of living, there are hidden (i.e. buried?) worlds of living that are less performative to the state-prescribed tenets of what should constitute a "healthy" sense of identity. These worlds, like the nightclub, like electronic dance and music, use the tools of prescribed normality, like technology, to create a space where what is buried beneath the state-sanctioned visible world is unearthed and celebrated. Of course, this thinking largely comes back, for me, to the ideas of capital and technology—where constructs of control and normalcy are borne and projected through any given regulated medium. But I'll take a slight turn here (not that this isn't all related). How do you feel after leaving one of these clubs? And then, the next morning? The next day? The motion, the sound—how does this group recognition and celebration of what is largely unrecognized (on the mainstream cultural surface level—particularly institutionally as you point out) affect you as a human body, and then what steps do you take to "archive [this] in language" as you said?
Selcer: I feel the atmospheric drop from inside to outside; I am a sailor coming back to land. We are ridiculous, ancient, working with infinite time; we have not done anything, we have been non-productive, we triumphed, invigorated by stupidity and sound. We are curling on the sand to watch the sunrise (it's pink) then gently unpieceing into dreams next to dreams. Or I am alone, I am lonely. The light is too thin. I organized space, I am a godlet. I'm not defending it.
Says artist Sharmi Basu, "sound is a variation in atmospheric pressure." "Sound can be a model for where the material and immaterial intersect and are one and the same." "Creating sound allows us to be the trigger rather than being triggered." In Sharmi's sound workshop I wrote, "voice is a transducer to transform absence to presence." Sun Cycle and Blank Sign Book concern the difference between presence and visibility.
Conley: I have to know more about the sound workshop. This is not something I've heard of before.
Selcer: Sharmi Basu is one of my favorite artists right now. Her sound opens a space anchored by myth, history, transformation, and jouissance. I have not before experienced such synesthesiacally color-rich compositions, nor have shared such fiercely femme sound space. Her sound workshop [3] has been widely taught. She also performs as Beast Nest [4]. Oakland is lucky to regularly get to hear her.
Conley: Your work in Sun Cycle seems to lean into that idea of composition. There's a multiplicity of voices or a pooling of resources and thoughts and ideas—and it all seems like a part of the whole thing, the work that is being done. How much do orchestration, arrangement, and composition play into your process? In some cases, like with “The Picture of Dorian Gray (at 16 frames per second)”, this is the obvious technique. Is this always a part of your process? Do you tend to fold in resources or do they sometimes lend themselves to being the catalyst for a given piece? I imagine that it is a bit of both, but I'd just love to hear how you handle this a bit.
Also, to end on a note of dessert, what has been bringing you joy lately on a day-to-day level?
Selcer: Your question gives me a chance to talk about my Cleveland connection. My "great uncle" is Ben Selcer who was the first chair violist of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1934-1978. I met this sparkling person at a family event when I was around ten and bonded to him immediately. He was the first artist I'd met in my family, or maybe ever. He wore a bow tie and I loved him. In forth or fifth grade, for a school project, I asked him for the "story of his life." He wrote me a series of ten page long-hand letters which included his history of labor organizing the Cleveland Orchestra. I do not subscribe to essentialist or genetic origin narratives, but I've wondered if a tendency toward music in my family lays ground for the "orchestration, arrangement, and composition" (as you put it) in my writing. There should be another sense to name what happens—like listening with the eyes while a giant oar guides sense aurelly underneath, where sound and vision come together, where reading with the eyes and ears merge into a new sensory competencies. My poetry is orchestrated by the music and mathematics of human speech, of literature, of rhetoric, and of actual music. Discovering dissonant and non-resolving music was huge in my early development; it opened everything. In Sun Cycle, I play in the rhythm of Western thought, mostly in the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics. Throughout the book, there are incursions or drop-out pieces which perform an abject, feral feminine cast out of what constructs her. Then there are moments in Sun Cycle when insurgent energy rises. This power is gathered, accrued, borrowed, and built upon from my time (the 80s through Trump) and place (the upper West coast of the North America), and shared with readers in the form of a gigantic black abolitionist anti-sun.
When I recently made the performance piece "The Sadness of the Supermarket: A Lament for Certain Girls" [5] I got the chance to play with digital sound editing. The piece layered a long poem, live opera, and recorded language elements. Moving a needle over bits of language and deleting, repeating and layering felt like a breakthrough! I had a similar feeling when Sonya Rappoport made my poem "The natural world frozen" into an art installation [6]. Something about moving from two dimensions into three. Recently the Cordite Review published "Main Street Mamas: Stay Safe Beauty:)" [7] which I plan also to take off the page into sound or sound+image. Last year I performed “Sun to Moon” [8] a few different ways in different places. I read in front of a video with a soundtrack that moves from a slowed down song by The Fall to a up-tempo pop song by Kiiara. On screen, slow motion legs dance in a lace dress throwing shadows all over the visual field. I worked along the contours of the tone change in the poem "Sun to Moon" from Sun Cycle, which is about sexual violence as well as the ambient violence of gender [9]. Other artists I admire who are working this way are Ronaldo Wilson, Juliana Huxtable, Jennifer Scappettone, and Caroline Bergvall.
[1] https://blindfieldjournal.com/2019/07/18/rave-accelerate-die/
[2] https://frieze.com/article/what-art-spaces-can-learn-legendary-berlin-nightclub-berghain
[3] http://www.sharmi.info/decolonizing-sound-workshop
[4] http://www.sharmi.info/beastie
[5] https://www.instagram.com/p/B71J7zehmpR/
[6] http://www.sonyarapoport.org/portfolio/the-transitive-property-of-equality/
[7] http://cordite.org.au/poetry/earth/main-street-mamas-stay-safe-beauty/
[8] https://www.instagram.com/p/BpyqH4JnGCn/
[9] https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp_IpoQn9mg/
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Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 First Book Poetry Competition, as well as the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Her writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound.
Jon Conley is a writer, musician, and educator from Cleveland. He is currently a first-year poetry candidate in the NEOMFA. His work has been published at Hobart, Bending Genres, Bodega, FIVE:2:ONE, Bad Nudes, Hello Horror, and others. He produces and performs music as Beach Stav. Find him online @beachstav.
