Good Gramma! Emily Liebowitz & Kate Durbin in Conversation

At Gramma's weekly periodical, Weekly Gramma, Kate Durbin and Emily Sieu Liebowitz discuss their writing practices and their experiences of the world as writers. Kate Durbin leads the conversation by asking about Liebowitz's new book: "Tell me a bit about your process writing National Park. Where did you write these poems, when did you write them, how did they come to be?" Let's pick up there: 

Emily Liebowitz: The poems in National Park were written over a long period of time. Something like 7 years. And physically written over a few spaces--northern California, where I grew up, the Midwest, and the Northeast. Also during this time, I took a lot of cross-country trips, visiting the South and the West primarily. So the sense of landscape is huge, and sometimes I imagined myself as a pastoral or cowboy poet; but the poems, like myself, give into the gnawing fields of meaning (scientific, metaphorical, superstitious, metaphysical etc) outside the physical landscape. And perhaps in another time, living in a different system of knowledge I could have lived happily--as a shepherd, with my sheep, songs, echoes & odes.

The process of writing them is somewhat nebulous and intuitive, and is in some respects the best way of articulating how I saw the world over that specific period of time...As both the place where the abstract notion of the West seemed to turn language into a kind of sonic Manifest Destiny, and also as the place of inexplicable phenomena, songs and spells. Sometimes I try to get there by struggling with the mythos of the individual; my mind has a hard time breaking the construct and so I have to do it over and over again.

I loved going through your writing, and also found myself equally engaging with your visual art. How do you think your visual work functions in conjunction with your text or writing? Further, how do those elements work together when moving a visual narrative form, like television, into poetry?

Kate: Some of my artworks like Hello Selfie, a performance where a group of performers in Hello Kitty stickers take selfies in a public space without talking to the audience, don’t have any relationship to written or spoken language.

Yet I do focus on language in other works, particularly found language and cultural scripts. That can be anything from Valley girl speech in a reality show like The Hills, which I explored in my book E! Entertainment, or the kind of hyper-misogynist, video gamer language in Men’s Rights forums online that I explored in my karaoke-style sing-along video, The Supreme Gentleman, which re-enacts Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger’s final Youtube address. In these works, I’m  translating these texts from one medium (for example, reality TV) into another (for example, a book of literature) in order to offer the audience a different perspective on them, and to get the audience to consider their own culpability as spectators.

I love that you wrote your poems in such a variety of US landscapes. I definitely get that sense of scope from the text, all these various terrains. I spend a fair amount of time in National Parks here in California, as a hiker--are you someone who engages with the landscape in that type of way, or is it more of an out-the-window kind of experience for you? I was just reading a biography of Georgia O’Keefe, who painted outside in the heat of New Mexico, often. I’m also reminded of Sylvia Plath’s trip with Ted Hughes through the Mojave Desert, where she wrote “Sleep in the Mojave Desert.”

Read on at Weekly Gramma.