A Toast in the House of Friends
Author Interview

On A Toast in the House of Friends: Akilah Oliver in conversation with Rachel Levitsky

Rachel Levitsky: When did you first start writing? How does the impulse behind your first inclination toward [writing] relate or not to the project of your current book, A Toast in the House of Friends?

Akilah Oliver: I was born in a time of collective mourning, into a culture of post-nostalgic, early 1960s turmoil where my early consciousness was marked by public death: Malcolm X, John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. Because I was so young then, barely in grade school, my memory is both constructed from flesh memory, that which my body recalls, and artifice, the literary and film narratives that retell that time, that fix it as a kind of truth. So in a way, everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention. A Toast in the House of Friends, to some extent, is a continuation of how, for me, the public and private bodies are constituted in narrative. It is a kind of haunting, I think, the work of poetry, of repossessing the body as fiction and truth. For me the haunting started early, in grade school, and is very much related to my sense of being able to make myself appear and disappear. Like many children, I thought I could will myself in and out of visibility, and could use language as a conduit to travel from my imaginary position as the trickster to join the world, in a sense, as embodied speaker. And looking back on it, it now seems important to go back to that child body perspective where the world, to me at that time, appeared as a translation of the real, rather than the real. Maybe it’s because I lived in the imagination and seldom spoke to people outside of my immediate family for many years, but the world, as I perceived it, was something slightly mysterious and unknowable, so I too was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself as at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real “real.” Maybe it was also the times: mid- to late sixties through the seventies, growing up in Southern California, the Ed Sullivan show on Sundays, going to “Festival in Black” events around L.A. and afro combs with closed fists on them, Venice Beach, Stax Records and the Beach Boys, “burn baby burn,” and burning the bra. So many cultural references staged themselves as the world during that time. Strangely, I was in contact with all these worlds through my divorced parents who led very different lives. I wanted to dialogue with all of them and did. My body, my life, has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric, and that feels right. This impulse to follow the openings that come from the rips, that’s what still sustains me as a writer.

My work for several years has been concerned with investigating the body, these bodies that are the rips in the fabric. From the collective performance work with the Sacred Naked Nature girls in the mid-to late 90s to the she said dialogues: flesh memory to A Toast in the House of Friends, I’m still following the beauty, mystery, and betrayal of the body: writing to restage, then collapse, then make it real again, the ‘real’ for these bodies. Ultimately for me, though, writing has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent, and that continues.

RL: Rip. I love that. It suggests so much to me, street activism, mourning (as in rend, what Jews are supposed to do when someone dies, and I suspect many others too), bodies that don’t fit the proscribed form of the prêt a porter clothes available at Kmart or Bloomingdales. What Japanese girls do to their clothes to make the fashion their own. Punk. Etc. You talk of this ripping as a way of connecting to the world and shaping it. Where has this action led you and to whom? Who has found you as a result of it?

AO: One place it led is to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where I’ve been on faculty at the Summer Writing Program for many years. This idea of an investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might be always just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between, perhaps, language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism. But, at any rate, an engaged, questioning poetics is what I found and still find at Naropa, sustained by friends and teachers like Anne Waldman, Eleni Sikelianos, Jack Collom, and many others. Teaching too, has been a source of community with other writers, young writers primarily, many of whom have become writing colleagues and friends. So for myself, to stand in the “rip,” as we’re calling it, is also a way of creating within a floating community of writers and thinkers because I think many writers innately occupy double positions: that of observer or even flaneur, of cultural worker, that of idealist, that of seer, even, and critical insurgent as well. And from this space of the gap, everything is relevant: Paris Hilton, the Iraqi occupation, the internet, arguments around the value of narrativity, the “I” as a shifting referent, the price of gas, the disappearance of outsider public spaces like CBGBs in New York, the disappearance of independent bookstores such as Aquarian Bookstore (which was black owned, situated in South Central L.A. for a couple of decades and ironically, was burned down during the Los Angeles insurrection where in the ashes, I found a charred copy of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time…). Everything is relevant: academic poetry, slam poetry, line breaks, consumer culture on cable, blogspheres—all of these communities of ideas exist in the possibility of the poem at any give time. The body as belated, the mind as diasporic, the world as retrievable, the poem as a participatory body, all these ways of being and knowing the world enrich how I come to the page and what emerges from there. Nothing is excluded from an investigatory poetics.

RL: Your poems seem to be in conversation with many traditions and innovations without being loyal to a single one and there is something else too...an extension, or a rebellion of form, which make space for something previously left out of poetic discourse—a complexity in the presentation, a lack of singularity, which adds yet another level of dialectic. What are the traditions you are self-consciously working with, and what are you formally trying to build?

AO: The relationship between voice and form is a tricky one for me. I think part of the reason I’m dancing between and without one specific form is because the “writer’s voice” is a misleading concept for me. There is this notion of a poetic voice each poet is supposed to possess, or strive to find, the one that is talked about so often in writing workshops. Then the notion of voice quickly becomes wrapped in representations of that voice, which has become a way to think about form, or formal practices. For me, form is not so much about this solid thing where I’ve found my voice and now can write from that space, but form has more to do with framing. Different pieces require different framing techniques depending on what is being done in the poem. For example, in A Toast in the House of Friends, I use various frames that I hope house the investigations (as I now like to think of poetry, as this investigative practice, that hopefully still offers something towards that old notion of beauty, but also goes back to poet as thinker…). They are frames that hold, in an expansive way I hope, the shape of the thinking (which is also to say, of the imagining) of the pieces that also render themselves up as an offering to the reader. In some cases, I’m seeking to deform, to de-familiarize, especially to de-familiarize death, or elegiac representation, since many of the poems in this book are engaged with loss. Because I engage so many forms and techniques in this book, I see it as choreography. The poems are bodies in a grand dance. I hope the reader finds a way to embrace this cacophony of forms, perhaps in the way we do good friends: as known companions and lovely mysteries too.

What I’m investigating here though, what engulfs me, is again, the body. I am looking at the body as the site of loss, and the body as belated and always in arrival. The work in A Toast in the House of Friends embrace the questions that arise around the death of a loved one, and how that absence becomes a source of investigation, a source of renegotiating one’s own relationship to mortality, morality, and the self. At some stages in writing some of the sections of the book, the reader or audience became my beloved collaborator in the sense that I was always conscious of this work as a kind of gesture: the extended hand reaching out to a gathering of witnesses, if you will.

Some of the poems in the book are consciously written for [voice] performance, especially those in the “Arriving Guard of Angels” section, which have been staged with as many as eight different voices and various musicians and was originally published as a limited edition chapbook with CD. The “Arriving Guard of Angels” section is an attempt to name and embody the impossible, in the sense that naming death and the experience of that, for me as witness to the absent body, seemingly defies the structural limitations of grammar, of syntax. So I wrote this section from the need to embrace language as an instrument of atonement as in to unite and reconcile, as well as to make reparations for a wrong or injury. I bring the work into public spaces to share with audience, who I experience as an extended body of witnesses. In the attempt to name the un/nameable, a string of “days” took shape. How does one name the first morning of waking up to the loss of a loved one? How does one name one’s own incomprehensibility? A percussive chant poem came out: “murdering days,” “beautiful boy days,” “days of let go,” “hush mouth days,” “days of ahh.” For me these chant pieces are a way to mark the days, and in that function the chants serve to say what cannot be said. The longer poems in the book are, for lack of better language, mind poems, which for me are the poems that I write from this really tactile need to be in language as an extension of the sublime. These poems aren’t written with the conscious sense of audience in mind, as the scored pieces for voice are. But taken together, the pieces written for performance and the mind poems are a collaborative gesture.

The book is dedicated in part to my son Oluchi, who died too young, in a complicated way, and at the time of his death, I was not seduced by our culture’s call for silence around mourning, a call partially seeped in fear and shame. It was also the particular circumstances of my son’s death, that he died neglected and ignored on the floor of a public hospital from a treatable condition, to remain silent seemed yet another kind of erasure of the loved body. I felt compelled, called, to create various sites where my poetry could participate in cultural activism around health care issues and serve as a kind of atonement for the fleeting bodies of particularly, young black men in the culture, how they are, as are many other “others,” erased in the culture. I wanted to chant a presence into being, even as I grieved the absent body, even as I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, a part of life. I want to embrace a public space for transition, grief and death. A Toast in the House of Friends is also my way of saying to the reader: be not afraid, in your own heart, in your mind, of death.

RL: That’s so interesting, and this is why I say that it is so: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E did a good job of critically articulating or furthering a notion that was already implicit, or which had begun to be articulated, by writers like Stéphane Mallarmé in France (which is given exegesis by theorists such as Roland Barthes) or Zora Neale Hurston in the United States (whose work was re-investigated and re-illuminated by Alice Walker, in the same decade that Barthes was writing about Mallarmé)—that the meaning of the work resides in the mind of its reader, the associations and memories and narratives they tell while reading. What I read as a radical approach in your work is that you are allowing the very form of A Toast in the House of Friends (as well as its narrative) to be invented or improvised by the person who encounters it?

AO: I like this idea of reader as one who participates in the reception and meaning of the poems. It is very relevant to this project for two reasons at least. One, because it is not entirely, but principally, an elegiac work, and also because I think of the book as a project of recovery and transference. Just to go back to your referencing Barthes’ work on Marllarmé and Walker’s on Hurston, as recovery projects bring to mind that recovery work unveils voices of the dead for the purpose of bringing those bodies into conversation or reception with contemporary readers. Some strange ritual combining homage, visibility, and discomfort is at work in recovery projects. I think of the section in the book, “The Visible Unseen,” which investigates graffiti art, specifically Oluchi’s public graf writing, as a form of recovery. I think the work of recovery is always an elegiac project.

Writers are one body of the holders of memory, that trickster. What I want to do as a writer is offer my flesh memory to the reader. The transference is then beyond me, and beyond a sense of meaning that any one poem may hold, to extend into the reader’s narrative of the world, of the body.

Rachel Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Her work is published in magazines such as The Recluse, Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum, Lungfull! and the anthologies, Boog City (vol. I & II), Bowery Women, and 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology. Recently her work was translated into Icelandic for the anthology 131.839 Slög Med Bilum by Eiríkur Örn Nordahl. Online poetry and critical essays can be found on such sites as Narrativity, Duration Press, How2, and Web Conjunctions. She has taught poetry workshops at Woodland Pattern, Naropa University, Poets House, the Poetry Project and the Pratt Institute. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics. Currently she serves as the CPW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.