Martha Stuit Interviews Rob Halpern at Pulp

In advance of his reading tonight at Literati Bookstore, Rob Halpern spends time with Martha Stuit at Pulp where the two discuss, among other subjects, Halpern's newest book, Weak Link. In conversation with Stuit, Halpern explains, "One thing I really like about the way Weak Link turned out is that it has shown me how my work over the past two decades has been shaped by a more coherent vision than I ever knew, even if I wasn’t always unaware of what I was seeing." Picking up from there: 

It’s sort of like suddenly being able to look at the unconscious of my writing life, if that’s ever possible. For despite this book being joined together from lost parts dating from 1998 to the present, it feels very much like a cohesive thing in its own right. This jibes with my sense of one’s writing life as a kind of sedimentary rock, or -- to use a more textual metaphor -- a palimpsest, where the material that impacts the work or makes it what it is as it evolves over time gets buried or covered beneath the work’s surface, only to reveal itself later by scraping or digging. 

Q: Since you now share your time between Ypsilanti, Michigan, and San Francisco, California, do the two distinct places influence your writing in Weak Link? How so? 
A: Wherever one happens to be influences one’s writing -- right? I mean, how can it not? Sometimes the influence of place is immediately recognizable and conscious.  Sometimes the influence is more subtle. Everything from climate and history, food and community, job and trees influence one’s writing. Since I moved to Michigan and began coordinating and teaching poetry workshops inside Women’s Huron Valley prison, for example, my writing has been impacted by my relation to the carceral state, mass incarceration, and other forms of detention. And while the prison system is everywhere and omnipresent in the U.S., its effects are not evenly distributed across places and demographics. Mass incarceration and the social devastation it has wrecked on our social life has become much more immediate for me here in Michigan than it has been anywhere else I have ever lived. That doesn’t reflect negatively on my life here in Michigan, which I love. It’s just an experiential fact for me right now. One poem in Weak Link that speaks directly to my work at Women’s Huron Valley prison is called “After the Prison,” which is a creative translation of a prose poem by Arthur Rimbaud (“Après le Deluge”), and I wrote it for the incarcerated women I work with. The opening goes:

When the idea of detention fails to keep us from the secret of our unhappiness, everyone’s organs will revive in the halogen fog of creameries, merging dreams of care & waste. There’ll be fossils for gathering lichens and utensils will invent new feasts! Lilies will awaken in the debris of San Quentin, as once tortured wounds withdraw now swollen with hypertrophic music. Out on the beaches, not much will have changed, but everything will be different. 

Continue reading at Pulp.