Tell me about the title. Had it always been Rumored Animals? Did it go through any
other changes?
It’s always been Rumored Animals. I think, sound-wise,
rhythm-wise, it just worked for me, but conceptually too. The book engages so
many different themes and forms that I liked the idea of one central idea or
image—of the spectral animal—running (or pacing) through it. With so much going
on in the various poems—family, desire, loss, art and literary history, art-
and literature-making—this strange bestiary was a way to bring it all together.
In some of the poems the animals are lucid, domestic, quite there; in others, the animals are
neither practical nor material nor totally discernable—they’re just the hint of
some strange intelligence or sensibility illuminating or darkening the
perimeter. Acting as an against, an
other, etc.
At some point, late in
writing the book, I found this wonderful Virginia Woolf quote that perfectly
encapsulated the kind of animal that I was imagining, its affects and effects.
In A Room of One’s Own, she wrote,
rather startlingly: “The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding
softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious
intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade.”
And so that became the book’s epigraph.
How often had you sent out Rumored Animals before it was chosen for the 2010 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press?
I sent out a much
different version of the manuscript to about five contests in the year or two
after I finished grad school at Columbia, and I had that experience that many
poets have of being a finalist. After that I put the manuscript away for about
five years. I think I knew it wasn’t ready to be published, and I wanted some
time to simply write new work without book publication being the loud,
insistent goal. Then, in 2010, I started sending it out again, and I clicked
that year with the American Poetry Journal Book Prize.
What was the process like assembling the book? How
many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
I tend to write short,
abstract lyrics and then much longer essayistic or didactic poems that keep to
a somewhat academic register. From the very beginning—and under the adept
advice of my grad school professors—I structured the book into sections that
isolated the long poems into their own individual chapters, and then grouped
many of the shorter, lyrical poems together in sections around them. Though the
poems within the chapters would change quite a lot over the years, as would the
chapters themselves, I basically kept to this format. It gave the collection
some buoyancy, some propulsion, this movement back and forth between tone and
length.
In terms of the actual
book, though, the first versions of the manuscript read pretty lovelorn: I was
in my early twenties, so love and love poems were the thing. But there was
always a tangible current of familial examination in some of the writing as
well. Later, after my mother died, this latter theme became more, as it were,
pronounced. The collection followed suit.
How involved were you with the design of the
book—interior design, font, cover, etc.?
I work in the art world,
where books are often seen and designed as art objects—even more so now with
the rise of digital books and web magazines. So I always had this sense that I
wanted the look of my book to be right:
very intentional and beautiful and contemporary. Early on, for the cover image,
I wanted to use a specific painting by the American artist Susan Rothenberg,
from her 1970s series that featured horses crossed out or halved by geometric
lines. Actually, last week I was reading a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, and an article
on Obama’s foreign policy was illustrated with a photo of the president in a
meeting in the White House, and this exact Rothenberg painting was hanging on
the wall behind him. I cracked up, but I was also impressed: he (or likely his
curator) have great taste. Anyway, in the end the horse painting was too
literal and illustrative with my title. I just couldn’t have an animal on the
cover, no matter how abstracted the animal actually was.
So I ended up asking an
artist in Los Angeles, Jennifer West, if I could use one of her experimental
film stills. I liked the idea of using a frame from a film, as image-making and
framing comes up so much in the book, which often has a filmic touch. And I
feel very close to Jennifer’s work: its themes of Southern California landscape
and counterculture, feminism and punk music. The still I used is from a 2011
film of some girls surfing on a beach near where I grew up, and the image is
totally blown out with psychedelic, fluorescent colors; the artist took the
16mm film stock itself and coated it in sunscreen, Cuervo, surf wax, Tecate, sand,
and a million other materials that have the same tenor.
Then I asked a Swiss
graphic designer based in Lausanne, Sarah Leugger, to design the cover. Book
design in Switzerland is a huge thing with a very important history, and I
really wanted someone here—where I currently live—to leave their mark on the
book. Sarah did an amazing job, and steered me to an insane new font by the Dutch typographer Jan Duiker. I wanted
something similar to Futura, with a modernist and postwar European feel to it,
like Godard title cards or old Frankfurt School paperbacks. Sarah and I didn’t
have any input on the interior of the book, but I think the publisher did a
really nice job and I was surprised how the outside and inside ended up
matching pretty well.
What about the publication of the actual poems in
journals and magazines prior to the book being published? Was there ever a
concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were
sending out your manuscript?
I had quite a few of the
poems published while I was in grad school and directly after, and then I took
a bit of a break—five years or so—from poetry publishing and the poetry world
in general. When I won the book prize and knew the book would be published in
the next year or two, I started sending out poems out again, as a way to get my
name out there and perhaps do some early publicity. To be honest, I definitely
should have sent out more, as it’s really the only way of publicizing your
book, besides doing endless marathons of readings. Still, it’s not, and it’s
never been, my main concern to have poems placed everywhere all the time.
Though it probably should be.
How much work did you do as far as editing the
poems from the day you knew the book would be published to its final proofing
stage?
I actually did quite a
bit of editing. My book took almost two years to appear after I won the prize,
some of which was my fault for constant tinkering and also pulling old poems
out and adding new poems in. I wanted to write one new long poem for the book,
the poem “Bathysphere,” and that took about a year to emerge, so.
What do you remember about the day when you saw
your published book for the first time?
I got a profanely dirty
cardboard sleeve in the mail as I was about to take my dog for a walk. We
proceeded to the river and I stared at the book as we walked along it. I had
been so worried how the cover image’s fluorescent colors would come out, about
typos, all these insane, ridiculous things. But really it was just wonderful
and weird. I had been thinking of what my future books would look and feel like
since I was about ten years old, so it was really just extraordinary and
reassuring and strange, in this very normal way.
If you struck up a conversation next to someone
seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that
you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer
their next question: “What’s the book about?”
Well, it’s not about
animals, despite everything I said before. This is a difficult question. Every
review I’ve gotten of my book so far has surprised me in its diagnosis and
analysis; the reviewers have all been right, and so wonderfully acute, but I
never would have come up with many of the ideas and themes they laid across my
pages. However, that’s not much of an answer. I suppose one way I understand
the book is as an exploration of criticality and corporeality, of the way they
course through each other—of thinking through or against landscape, body, form,
ideas.
As has been pointed out, Rumored Animals definitely limns themes
of cinematography, of portraiture, of feminism. But I also sometimes think
that, as a poet, I work like some old-timey painter or photographer: I write a
landscape—the apocalypse of Southern California, the glowering West Texas
desert, New York, or heavy Mitteleuropa—and then I plant some sort of thinking,
feeling, contemporary figure within it. More specifically, though, the book
might be about grief—the inherited kind and the situational sort. It might also
be about my mother.
What have you been doing to promote Rumored Animals, and what have those
experiences been like for you?
I have been doing lots of
readings around Europe for the past six months, which has been wonderful.
Sometimes my audiences are strictly literary—I read with the poet and
translator Michael Hulse recently at the University of Basel—but more often
they end up being a crowd of artists, curators, critics, and musicians, as that
is my scene and set of contacts here, mostly. At first this was strange, to
read poems to people who were not poets, which is the expected audience for
poetry readings in New York or LA, where I read before.
But then it became
exciting. I started thinking of the readings as performances, performative
turns or lectures or spells. At my book launch in Zurich, I was accompanied by
five films by Jennifer West projected across the glass walls of the space,
which turned the whole room into a kind of magic lantern. And I read underneath
an enormous, gold Art Deco palm tree from the 1960s. That was super strange and
great. In Berlin, at the great bookstore Pro qm, it was much more
straightforward. I simply read to the assembled crowd of friends and strangers.
I had a particularly lovely reading in Geneva last month too, and an impromptu
one a few weeks ago in Elba, where I just finished a residency—it’s mostly been
excellent. I plan to do a small reading tour in the US early next year as well.
What advice do you wish someone had given you
before your first book came out?
Practically, I suppose it
would have been good for someone to impress upon me the fact that I would
absolutely have to turn into a crazy, self-promoting monster for a year or so.
No one did, though, or perhaps I closed my ears.
What influence has the book’s publication had on
your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the works?
One of the best and
oddest things about having my first book of poetry done and published is that
it completely motivated me to spontaneously and seriously devote myself to the
second. Rumored Animals took such a
long time to come together, it spans so many years and themes, that I felt like
moving into the exact opposite direction with my following collection. The new
book I am working on uses compression both as a formal theme and a conceptual
idea: the poems follow one specific form and then they spin off of quotations
from artists, filmmakers, writers, theorists. Taken together, the poems form a
kind of notational hive—not a linear construction of narrative or meaning, but
something more mutable and temporally unstable. Paradoxically, I also see it as
a kind of récit or poetic notebook—but we shall see.
I also just finished a
book of essays ostensibly about the artist Sarah Lucas, but also exploring
Artaud, Mexico, the modernist female nude, Sontag, fertility icons, Napoleon,
Beckett, colonialism, and distance. It should be out from Mousse, a publisher
in Milan, later this year. I am very excited about it.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in
the world?
This summer I became
quite obsessed with the second volume of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks.
I really can’t recommend it enough. She was quite close to Joseph Brodsky, and
her journal is full of his quotes and notes about him. Here are three from
December 1977, when they were in Venice together:
Joseph: “Censorship is good for writers. For three
reasons. One, it unites the whole nation as (or into) readers. Two, it gives
the writer limits, something to push against. Three, it increases metaphoric
powers of the language (the greater the censorship, the more Aesopian the
writing must become.”
A few pages later:
Joseph: “I feel like crying all the time.”
And a few pages later:
The poet-in-exile [Brodsky], born in Leningrad,
walking alone on the wet empty streets at two in the morning. It reminds him,
“a little bit,” of Leningrad.
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Quinn Latimer is an
American poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Born and raised in
Southern California, she was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia
University’s School of the Arts in New York. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, The Last Magazine, The Paris
Review, and elsewhere, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her
first book of poetry, titled Rumored
Animals, won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and was published in April
2012. She is a regular contributor to Artforum
and frieze, and her criticism has
also appeared widely in Art in America,
Bookforum, Kaleidoscope, and Modern
Painters. She recently edited the publication Paul Sietsema: Interviews on Films and Works (Sternberg Press,
2012), and her book Describe This
Distance will appear in late 2012 from Mousse Publishing in Milan. Latimer
is currently on the faculty of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she
teaches writing. Her website is: http://www.quinnlatimer.com/
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