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Ariana Reines: At this point it's become a constructed way of speaking, but it might have been something different before. My sense of interpersonal propriety when it comes to social interaction has probably evolved to be so old-fashioned and "ladylike" because of the candor in my books. On the other hand, honesty and candor are always refreshing, in person and in print, but there's a constancy of attention that it would be shattering and even stupid to sustain--like never taking one's eye away from the microscope while trying to describe the smell of leaves.I am not sure if this will make sense, but the feeling that no one bears witness for the witness, to deform some lines by Paul Celan, is a way to describe the pressure I have felt to write as I have written. Poetry is a hermetic art to which few pay any real attention. So I've been free, in its space, to be laser-like and rigorous in my dissections. When I made Mercury I had to build into its structure the weird ways that fantasy, image, memory, and experience coalesce materially, and to find a way to contrast ways other people want to see/fuck a person with the desires, doubts, and past generations that cross and recross a person's heart. But it's not really that personal, and I'm not sure the "intense sexual relations" that come to bear in Mercury are even mine really, and even if they are, I doubt that in the end they really have that much to do with me.
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Here is how it went. I wrote the poem "Mercury," not including the five symbol incantations at the beginning, in one day in 2008. That was first. I think that's around the time I lied and said I was writing a book called Mercury, sort of like I lied and said I was writing a book called Coeur de Lion in 2006, long before I wrote it. Then I wrote "Save the World" in a day in Oakland after seeing the movie The Watchmen in April 2009. At that point I decided Mercury was a book with five books inside it, ‘cause I had written a ton of other poems, including two other book-length sequences, but I scrapped them in 2010 because I didn't think they were good. "When I Looked At Your Cock My Imagination Died" was written in the winter of 2009. "Leaves" and "0" were written in 2010-11. The book was really made May through July 2011. That was a magical time.The design of the book also really brings a really stark body for the words to sit in: between the reflective silver cover that shows the reader back at him- or herself, and the current of strange symbols that are inserted. How did the content of that design come together?
I wanted the book to be a mirror as soon as I knew Mercury was going to be a book, but it wasn't clear how to make that show up on the internet. I wanted it to oscillate between symbol and image because I'd started studying some magic and I learned that certain modes of intuition and insight can be developed by stimulating the imagination with signs that do not merely depict, but which are diagrams for the structure of certain true phenomena. It took me a while to realize that the book was about the internet and looking, but also about searching for essences in a world of illusion. That's a Renaissance project, a Shakespearean project, but also a project of cranks and basement madmen. I've always been attracted to symbols and hieroglyphics, how they speak without tyrannizing the way images can, and without foreclosing or going in merely one direction the way language can. There's a Judaic/iconoclastic side of me that's deeply uncomfortable with looking, but also I'm a person like anybody else. So I guess that's how it came together. I hope it's a sieve that anyone can make use of.
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Yeah, I feel totally antsy to be elsewhere all the time. And yes, once I went to Haiti I didn't want to be anywhere else. But I didn't want to be there in some false pose of avuncular aid-giving either. Haiti is a genius the world does not understand. I studied Haiti's revolution because it's the most impossible thing that has ever happened on earth. To begin to understand Haiti I would like God to turn me into a tree growing there. But right now I'm a woman. I want to run away from everything all the time. I don't like to be counted on for anything, except if I'm sent on a mission far away that's fine, as long as I don't have to stay for too long. I suppose that is a little bit mercury-like.Performance seems also inherent to your writing: Both the creation of it (beyond the book I think about your former blog YES and how much energy the sentences there seemed to channel) and when you do readings, how you've said you never like to do the same thing twice. How does sound or the feeling of being in a body when writing and trying to get that sound out affect your writing as opposed to reading it aloud?
Some of the poems have more of a conceit of orality running though them than others. I guess I like extremes of artifice/plasticity crossed with what's intense and immediate, and that goes for both writing and performing. I used to be really uncomfortable performing but I figured out ways to do it so I can enjoy it. Somehow my body has gotten used to the artifices of literature and performance and bent itself somewhat to them, and I guess I've bent the artifices of literature and performance to fit my disposition and physical person to a certain extent too. I like your question about sound, Blake, but it's almost too hard to answer. Everything is so physical--sound too. Aren't all writers musicians, even Nabokov, who supposedly had no ear for music? I think you are.Is the internet evil?
No, it's a pharmakon.@blakebutlerPreviously - The Multiplying Hells of Pierre Guyotat
