I’m irritated that my editor has suggested I pursue a more personal work-related direction for the intro to this interview I’ve been working on with Ariel Yelen, about her poetry collection I Was Working. It’s Friday night, and I’m too tired to go out but not tired enough to procrastinate working on revisions to the interview that will eventually appear before you. I’m irritated because I have spent the whole week working already, and I don’t want to think about work or anything like it anymore. It’s taken up the time it was supposed to take. It’s now time for everything else in my life to fill the beautiful expanse of the weekend. It feels so boring and heavy to write about work, I could cry. It can’t go in this intro, it just can’t—I need to write about like: Labor! Workers! Something optimistic about organizing with fellow workers! How I feel in the negative space around my desk job shouldn’t be so consequential, but it is. It’s actually unavoidable and is the reason it’s taking us so long to finish this interview.
Thinking about weight and time, I guess I’ll return to a note I took, cherry-picking a question from Lauren Berlant, writing about an untitled John Ashbery poem in Cruel Optimism, just to map it onto myself: “How long have people thought about the present as having weight, as being a thing disconnected from other things, as an obstacle to living?” Good question. Why do I think the space around my time spent working doesn’t merit attention?
In “Poets Need So Much,” a poem from I Was Working which locates the intersection of need and desire, Ariel writes a kind of riddle—“Eruption needs a bigger sound/Binding contracts need soothing.” The speaker’s hands are flagging cabs, but dreaming of daffodils. “The poet wants money/The problem is she’s thinking.” I think of the poet in this poem as, well, anybody who has to live in the shrieking cognitive dissonance that occurs when what makes life worthwhile is another expense we may not be able to afford. Throughout I Was Working the poet, who needs so much, confronts the limits of her time and the logics of those limitations, showing the ways in which work becomes a force as big as time itself, dictating form and consciousness.
Miri Karraker: Something Austin Adams mentioned in his review of your book in Rain Taxi is that these poems don’t reveal the specifics of what you are doing for work, which is a thought I want to pick up only to put it back down. This book is about what work does to your consciousness rather than work as the subject of these poems. I’m thinking about “This poem says yes,” because it’s so material—your little grey cube at work is being cut in half but you get to go home early. Your space and time are determined by your employer. How do you think work has shaped your poetic consciousness?
Ariel Yelen: I think poets are poets wherever they go, and something poets often do is bring a kind of attention, in your terms “poetic consciousness,” to things that others might ignore. If working a job structures my day, my time, (as it does for most people), and if I attempt to fit the writing of poems into the day, then yes, there’s probably a good chance the poems—the objects, syntax, rhythms—will be influenced or slightly warped by this clock…the poems might be job-shaped… Or at the very least in conversation with it, because my attention has been trained on the sound of the microwave that heats my lunch, or the particular language in an email.
MK: Making something in, with, or in spite of friction is necessary. Thinking about the lineage of poetry about working, we could point to some key figures who came up writing poems about their jobs (Carl Sandburg, Philip Levine, etc.), but work as a subject doesn’t feel central like a super prominent topic. It’s the consciousness around work and working that feels much more important to what the poems are trying to do. Even so, in thinking about your book, and in conversations we’ve had prior to this interview, I’ve wondered: Why don’t more poets write about their jobs?
AY: I think maybe there’s an idea that jobs are not “poetic material,” because many jobs do have a way of deadening the senses. And it is nice to leave the job behind for the day. And also maybe it would be almost torturous for some people to imagine writing about their jobs… they might think like, how could they possibly write poetry about that paper they just graded? the meeting they had with their boss? their hours clocked in Adobe Suite?
It’s hard to do well, I think. Maged Zaher, an Egyptian-born poet who worked as a software engineer, is one of a few examples of poets whose work, once I read it, permitted me to lean into writing about the nuances of my experience with my computer or my screensaver for instance. Karen Brodine’s poetry as well.
MK: Where do you think that need for permission comes from?
AY: The prior belief that it is probably just too boring to write about my screensaver. That there must be a limit to how dull I’m willing to get. Turns out there’s no limit!
MK: Writing is, for me, much of the time, often a kind of compulsion. Something natural. But then there’s this horrible voice that’s like “oh don’t write about that, it’s too mundane.” I’m less interested in that horrible voice than I am in the poets who make poetry feel natural and limitless. Like Bernadette Mayer writing through or with the duration of the day. Or Alice Notley making the mundane mythic.
When it comes to work-poetry connections I feel really grateful to Carl Sandburg (among others) where work is actually the subject, but of course I also can’t neglect the dimensions of class and gender when I think about his work, presenting a limited or too easily stereotypable conception of what “work” can or should be, images of labor that only go so far. In your work, I’ve been thinking about how work shapes the actual poems themselves.
What about the actual place where these poems originate? What about your cube? I like that you don’t fetishize office work, but it is interesting that what you do for your job is not the subject matter at hand in the way that might be expected of those Sandburgesque “working-class” or labor poetries.
AY: Yes I think Notley’s underworld of the subway and Mayer’s writing about daily life and also money are two influences of mine. As for the “where” of the cube, I think while many of the poems are located in the office or from the cubicle, and often reference the objects and happenings that exist there, the location is also maybe equally a psychic one, having to do with time.
There’s the awareness of the clock, being on, being off, being somewhere in between it, and stealing time to write the poems. So maybe it could be interesting to think about the poem’s shape as assembled from this stolen time. But also the way that “free time” during a workday has a way of not “feeling free,” and this is maybe the “location” and explanation for how the middle section of the book was composed.
MK: Can you talk about how you wrote the poems in the middle section of the book, titled “In Free Time”? I’ve been envisioning them happening well, in free time, but tell us what that means.
AY: They were mostly written while I was either on lunch break or on the commute. I decided to give myself a writing constraint of spending no more than five minutes per poem, five syllables per line—five is an arbitrary number, but five minutes often felt like what my realistic attention span was during these windows..
I would set the timer, and then just like quickly form them, and then later, of course, edit. I think the compression in the “In Free Time” poems is competing for attention with the sense-making. I mean, they’re not senseless, but the constraint strongly dictates the turns, and I guess, what is “happening.” Setting the timer to five minutes forced me to give up control in a way. The timer was ticking so I often had to choose something like my tuna sandwich or something else just as arbitrary.
MK: The arbitrariness really hits for me. Artificially compressing the line and the poem echoes how much space creative work gets to take up in the speaker’s day and life. “In free time” is tongue-in-cheek. These poems may happen in the space where your time or your mind are free, but it’s always in service of the work that is to come, that failed promise of free time.
AY: Yes, not real free time, if that exists, but something called “free time.” “In Free Time” was the original title of the book, but two years into working on it with that title, I changed it to I Was Working, because that is what I was doing, even “in free time,” if that makes sense.
MK: Let’s talk about the eponymous poem then. It’s basically a fable where you play out the thought experiment of what might happen if everything was in service to labor—if life could be free of the things that compete with work, what that life would look like.
AY: What really drove this poem was feeling frustrated. I thought, “Do we really need to sacrifice our lives for this other life?” and I wanted to address my genuine frustration with a genuine proposal. Maybe it is easier to give up the things that make life worth living and devote myself to a job, many jobs. I wanted to play this out as an option, in a poem.
MK: Hearing you say that makes me think about the different concessions we make, but also the different forms of debt in this book. Like with “Tides Out (of Money)” which is this augmented sonnet crown. It’s a funny little detour in the book but I like how this section cycles the language of consumption and extractive capital within itself. “The time is now to invest in seashells…Ocean flooding veiny trails by drones/ As seaweed clings to a beautiful bomb…But is algae posing as a missle/ Pretending to be a windy blockade/ Made to look just like resistance seafoam/ For the purpose of fighting for the bay.” This section is so different from the rest of the book in its formal momentum, but makes sense to me because it’s another space where you’re playing around with late capitalist logic.
AY: I sometimes pretend this section doesn’t exist because it’s so different tonally, it’s kind of frenetic but written in this restrained form. Again, I kind of let the form guide the content a little. My main question for “Tide’s Out” was like, okay, how bad are things going to get? And how far away from life as we know is the logic of capital and debt going to take us? Like what’s next, the ocean’s gonna be in debt?
MK: That hits on a feeling I have just…all the time. Like “Really, this is where we are? If I order pizza, there’s a payment plan for that.” You know shit’s bad when we have to introduce debt into new sectors of our lives.
Can you talk about why you decided to start writing with constraints, both inherited like the sonnet crown in “Tides Out” or invented like with “In Free Time”? I mean, whenever you’re working within a form, whether it’s self-determined or inherited, it’s always going to force me to consider a future that otherwise may not exist. you’re yielding control. What really comes through for me in “Tide’s out” is this reckoning with what the speaker thinks the future gets to be, and who actually gets to make it. The formal or material forces of the poem determine it, the poem cannibalizes itself, circles back and extracts from itself.
When I think about sonnets, I think about desire, and desire for me is temporal—it’s about wanting a specific outcome or future. The crown of sonnets you’ve written is really fun and depressing in that the future is foreclosed. I’m thinking too about Mark Fisher saying “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” Of course, when he wrote that he was thinking through nostalgia and our expectations as consumers of art and media, but it chimes.
AY: Right. In “Tide’s Out,” the desire you’re referring to might be… the wish to, through the language of capital, cast a spell, reveal its senselessness. Or through incantation, use the language of economic uncertainty and global financial collapse to try and poke holes in the logic of capitalism? Which sounds absurd, because of course I did nothing except write a poem in this case. I’m thinking about a 2012 interview with the late Joshua Clover where, among many things, he talks about one of the reasons that there aren’t many good protest songs like there were in the sixties for our charged political moment. He says it’s because:
Now we have a structural crisis of capitalism, of value production. The materialism of production reasserts itself. And this is not so easily metabolized into a cultural response. I think it is a very different and finally more sensible project to make a song or a poem about arms dealers or Kent State or even ‘picket lines and picket signs’ than it is to make one that grasps after the declining rate of industrial profit and the corresponding rise of finance capital and the reorganizing of the global division of labor…but if we don’t reach after that we are leaving our moment’s dynamic untouched.
So perhaps that was my attempt with “Tide’s Out,” to grasp or reach after that. But again, I did not succeed at destroying capitalism with my crown of sonnets. Language alone of course cannot rid us of our conditions. Is that very pessimistic?
MK: No, it’s just real.
I mean speaking of the neglect writing cannot solve, can we talk about “All morning, tax evasion?” This poem gets me in that I think language or poetry or art or whatever is great for recognizing, for naming reality, for asking questions about what the future could be, for making plans, but it is not implementation.
I like that this poem starts with mysterious subway liquid dripping on our collective heads, and the speaker muses that “Utopia’s attainable but pressing / On truth where it’s tender / Results in feeling metal / Bands around your heart snap open / It’s pretty hardcore.” I appreciate this especially because I’m also somebody who believes language is material, but it is not material enough.
The poem insists in the next stanza that only something more disgusting and brutal can take us from one set of material conditions to another:
“This poem is about the kind of neglect/Writing can’t solve/No amount of fragments will do/Only being more disgusting/Give me something brutal for lunch/Like escargot or liquor”
I read the speaker demanding to be served something brutal for lunch as taking these two paths, one that is tedious, slimy, maybe abject (escargot) or another that is caustic and swift, perhaps a relief (liquor). It’s interesting to me that the poet here is asking for brutality to be given rather than seized–it feels winking to me, where the poet is embodying a kind of hubris. What is your sense of this line?
AY: I think you’re right, and now you’re making me think it is maybe a masochistic poem… in which the speaker, a poet, kind of gives up. Like, if poetry won’t help, then fine, maybe something decadent or poisonous will. It is not an optimistic poem. There are poems and poets that have opened my mind and caused me to think differently, see things differently, or hear things anew, and I think this is one of the incredible things poetry can do. But I think this poem, and maybe this book, is full of poems that also attempt to address the limits of the poem (and the poet), and the conflict around what the poet wants a poem to do and what it can do.
In that same interview with Joshua Clover, he talks about how revolutions were not fought with poems. That the poets were fighting, but the poems were for later, after the revolution was won. He said, “I write poems now only because I want to be sharp if I make it through to a better time for poems.” I love that way of thinking about the limits and function of a poem.