Erica Bernheim Interviews Katy Bohinc at Adroit Journal
What's the difference between pure math and poetry? Erica Bernheim asks Katy Bohinc about that and more as part of their conversation published at the Adroit Journal. Thankfully, math and literature are two (of many) subjects that Bohinc knows about. Bernheim explains in her introduction to this piece that Bohinc "grew up in the outskirts of Cleveland and graduated from Georgetown with degrees in Pure Mathematics and Comparative Literature, leaving her studies for a time to work in Beijing with the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, a human rights organization." From there:
Now living in New York City, she works as a data scientist and marketer. Since 2013 she has collaborated with Lee Ann Brown in directing Tender Buttons Press, a distinguished publisher of experimental women’s poetry for which she edited Tender Omnibus: The First Twenty-Five Years of Tender Buttons Press (2015) and Please Add To This List: A Guide To Teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets and Experiments (2014). Bohinc is the author of Dear Alain (Tender Buttons, 2014), letters to the French philosopher Alain Badiou about poetry, philosophy, and love, and a book of poems about the divine feminine, Trinity Star Trinity (Scarlet Imprint, 2017). Publisher’s Weekly describes her most recent title, Scorpio (Miami University Press, 2018) as “an astute, witty, feminist collection.”
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Erica Bernheim: I loved the range of surprising and sometimes succinct titles in Scorpio, my favorite being “Self-Centered to the Point of Remembering Birthdays.” In some cases, like “Obama’s Speech,” I got the sense that the title came before the poem, although I surely could be wrong! Do you have a deliberate or conscious process for pairing titles and poems?
Katy Bohinc: I was watching Obama speak in a bar in Washington D.C.’s U Street called Next Door. I went there often when I lived there. You are apt to pick up that with Obama’s Speech, yes, I think the title came first. With Self-Centered the title came after the poem, which was written at Tryst, a coffee shop in Adam’s Morgan. Or maybe it was written about Tryst, and many of the friendships I conducted there. It was a sort of “hang-out spot” when there were still IRL hangout spots that aren’t the internet. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. The focus is the poem and if the title comes after it comes after—which frequently it does. If the title come first, it comes first. Usually, broadly speaking, the title very often comes after for me.
EB: As a writer with a strong background in pure mathematics, can you speak to where these two disciplines intersect for you? I was reading about pure mathematics and its usefulness in finance and cryptography, and I’m wondering, also, if either of these fields has been in your mind when you’re writing. How—if at all—does your commitment or investment to each inform your poetry? I’m thinking specifically of your lines, not just the breaks, but the spacing in some of them, such as “Ohio”?
KB: I always say “beyond math is poetry.” Pure math sure has applications in finance and cryptography (and many many things from fintech to big data to astrology), but pure math is the language of logic and how logic works on spatial or geometric levels. The applications are endless. In poetry, the application is “getting beyond logic.” The poems in Scorpio come from an emotive place, a place of the “unconscious.” Many of the poems I wrote in a sort of haze and barely even recognized that I wrote them afterwards. Math is not like this. Math is completely aware at each step of the logical puzzle. Poetry is to me getting to a place where it pours out—it is a place where all the logic has been ingested and digested, and just a step beyond this math lies the poem. It’s a way to say it that encompasses the emotional consequences, which math does not. I only know this place because I know math.
Read on at the Adroit Journal.