A Much-Needed Platform for Writing That Does More: A Perfect Vacuum

We're happy to help announce the launch of A Perfect Vacuum, a new "platform for poetry, prose, and conversation with an emphasis on writing that does more than perform existing models of power in and through language," edited by Judah Rubin. The first installment features prose by Trisha Low and Tyrone Williams; poems by Tilsa Otta (translated by Camilo Roldan), Afrizal Malna (translated by Daniel Owen), Josef Kaplan, El Roy Red, and Joey Yearous-Algozin; and interviews with Ammiel Alcalay and Anna Vitale.

Anna Vitale, author of the recent pamphlet Our Rimbaud Mask (Ugly Duckling, 2018), spoke with Rubin about space, haunting, David Wojnarowicz, dreaming language, and more. An excerpt from their conversation:

APV:  A lot of your writing moves through spaces – there is physical movement more than the inner-I-eye. How are you moving through collective desires and mapping them for yourself? If we are saying that the personal desires are not necessarily just personal, then how do you feel yourself interacting with that more collective or distributed unconscious?

AV: I have two thoughts – 1) I really love and appreciate this image that you’ve given me of thinking an arc, infrastructure, landscape, which hasn’t been at the forefront of my mind while writing. It makes me think of how Freud makes the unconscious a topographical  scene. And you can have other ways of thinking the psyche but maybe that’s one that I’ve chosen, or wanted to follow. 2) My relationship to symbols or iconography—In Our Rimbaud Mask, I turn in the end to the fact that I have this burning house tattoo and Ted Rees and Ari Banias also have Wojnarowicz tattoos, and this is a manifestation of something many of us have attached to that has felt highly particular in the way that tattoos are, and also, of course, not at all, which I think is extraordinary and strange. Then today I was folding a lot of clothes and I realized how many shirts and sweatshirts I have with symbols or icons—that particular hinge of my Aaliyah t-shirt or Simone White wore a Tupac shirt to a reading she gave—and I remember realizing t-shirts or tattoos are ways of calling someone you don’t know but you hope will pick up because they recognize the address, but you don’t even know who you’re trying to call but you hope they’ll answer. That’s sort of this collective form of address – how do you feel spoken to by people you’re not talking to right at that moment? Where does another piece of a relationship get extended?

APV: Reminds me of De Certeau who in Practice of Everyday Life, with street signs or the street space he thinks about four, five dimensional spaces – memory, linguistic customs – where you might be able to make very different depictions of how language and desire meet that does not happen when you’re just considering the specifics of the name.

But I am wondering about Amiri Baraka’s Preface To a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.  What is the preface doing – is it a tuning, a rehearsal, an eternally displaced desire?

AV: Prefaces cut both ways and point in at least two directions which makes the preface so much more than itself...

Read the full interview, and all else, at A Perfect Vacuum.