Michael T. Young: Thank you, Okla, for agreeing to an interview.
Your new
collection of poems, The Cartographer’s
Ink, has such a wonderfully provocative title. I wondered if you could comment on the title
itself and the significance it has for the collection. What is it meant to suggest?
Okla Elliott: I recall precisely when I came up with the title. I was
taking what I call a brain-walk, which is when I take a break from work and
just wander around aimlessly for about an hour, thinking through some movement of
a piece I am working on, or just wrestling with whatever political or
philosophical conundrum is caffeinating me at the time. That evening, I was
running through possible titles for the collection, just letting random
associations play out as they would. Then the title just popped into my head,
and I knew it was the title for the book without any doubt at all. In a way,
the entire collection is a mapping of personal, cultural, and literal
geographies, thus the cartographer of the title seemed fitting to me. And there
was something pleasantly undefined about the idea of a cartographer’s ink. I
imagined it as still in its bottle, on an eighteenth-century desk, textured
paper of an unmade map of some uncharted territory beside it. I know that’s
very specific and awfully Romantic-sounding, but that’s how the image came to
me along with the title that evening walking across University of Illinois’s
campus on one of my little brain-walks.
Michael T. Young: Birds show up in this collection in significant places, at
the end of sections and in the last poem.
What do you see as the significance of the birds in the collection, what
they symbolize, perhaps?
Okla Elliott: All of these dark birds and birds-that-aren’t-really-birds—but
rather bats or war jets—kept popping up in my poems for about a year. In fact,
I had to discard several poems because they got too repetitive, but my general
rule is to trust these unconscious or semi-conscious obsessions, because the unconscious
and semi-conscious parts of our mind are often smarter than the conscious
parts.
It is
worth noting that no pretty birdies show up, only birds of prey or death. The
only colorful bird in the entire book is a dead cardinal, so it’s safe to say
these aren’t spring birds singing in the joys of new life, but rather autumnal
birds reminding us of death and human destruction. Not sure if that says
something good or bad about me or the poems, but it is what it is. There is
also something defiantly transgressive about many of the birds in the
collection. And they often have companions in their apocalyptic landscapes.
This suggests that even in a world in drastic decline, they are not without
hope, and companionship can help ward off the sufferings of the world. They’re
not completely bleak figures, in other words.
Michael T. Young: A number of the
poems, especially toward the beginning of the collection, deal with historical
events or confrontations with the past such as the poems “Blackened,” “Visiting
Lenin’s Tomb” or “Alien War, Human War.”
What do you see as the importance of confronting these elements in the
past in the context of the collection?
Okla Elliott: The geography I am mapping is partially personal, but it
is also cultural and historical. You might have seen one of the various
internet memes showing all the violent conflicts around the world over the past
century. If you haven’t, go find one. It proves that any cartography of human
culture that leaves out war and other historical calamities would be delusionally
remiss in its duties to historical truth and intellectual honesty. I teach
Holocaust studies at the University of Illinois, and my dissertation deals with
trauma centrally, so these are interests of mine, but we just have to read the
Senate Torture Report or any number of history books produced every day to know
that these sorts of events are ubiquitous.
Michael T. Young: “Learning Russian (a Letter to My Schizophrenic Mother)”
says, “You’re not what I keep of you” and “Pointless Movement” says, “Our
patterned selves, playing at being ourselves.”
Over the course of the book, the poems seem to wrestle with the conflict
between our social or public self and our genuine identity. Do you see this as central to the collection? In what way?
Also, do you see this as a general problem we face in our society: that
is, conflicting versions of the self?
Okla Elliott: Issues of the self are philosophically and psychologically
complex, which is part of my point in this book and other things I’ve written,
particularly in my creative nonfiction. The first thing I feel pretty certain
of—and there is very little we can be certain of on this subject—is that there
is no stable self. Everything from Buddhism to existentialist philosophy to
contemporary cognitive psychology bears this out. Our psyches are a series of
patterns always in a state of flux, however subtle or slow that flux might be—though
often it is incredibly fast (just think of the vast changes in our desires and
demeanors that occur during puberty).
This is
why, when I hear someone say “be yourself,” I cringe. There is no permanent,
settled self for me to be. Even over the course of a single day, what I want or
think will change drastically. We are ever-changing projects, and the only way
we can judge our authenticity is at a given moment and in a particular
situation. What is hardest is to not feel beholden to past selves and therefore
stick to beliefs or patterns of behavior that are no longer valid for the new self
we are and the new selves slowly emerging on the horizon.
If there
is a conflict between this flux of selves and society, it is that society
insists as often as possible that we remain one ossified version of ourselves
in perpetuity. If you change your taste in music, your style of dress, or your
political beliefs, etc., or if you ditch your religion, society tends to punish
you as being fickle or flimsy of character. So, in effect, there is a lot of
pressure to stay consistent in our patterns of self, even when those patterns
are antiquated artifacts of previous selves that no longer hold authentic
interest for us. I mean, how many times have you watched someone hold onto an
affectation that was part of his/her identity long after an honest interest in
it was gone? How often have we all done this?
Michael T. Young: Nikola Tesla turns up in more than one poem in the
collection. What is his importance to
you and to the collection?
Okla Elliott: I began college as a physics and computer programming double-major
and remain an amateur enthusiast for science. Newton and Tesla both make
appearances in the book, as does science more generally. I think I like those
two figures because they were basically so smart it drove them insane, yet the
visionary way they approached the world was something almost superhuman. That
tension between the powers of intelligence and the dangers of it intrigues me.
As it turns out, on a related note, depression is much more common among those
with higher IQs. I think there are several explanations for this, but the one
that comes immediately to mind is that intelligence can alienate people from
those around them. I don’t imagine Tesla was invited to a lot of cocktail
parties for his gripping conversation, ya know? And he must have felt so
removed from the thoughts and concerns of others. Yet his vision of the world
was transcendently genius. It is that tension that interests me, and I also
like the idea of trying to understand the minds of such thinkers, to humanize
their technical and theoretical pursuits.
Michael T. Young: Many of these poems seem – as one poem puts it – “fertile
with bizarre need.” They seem to suggest
we are driven to sometimes dark places by those needs. Yet, they also suggest there has to be some
kind of acceptance of this, like the bat in the final poem that we are
encouraged to “make its future our own.”
Do you see this embrace of or acceptance of the darker side of our
nature as essential to our survival or at least some way of decreasing the
violence in our world?
Okla Elliott: Well, I would say that ignoring the dark cargo our species
carries with it everywhere isn’t going to do much good. As the self-help cliché
goes: you have to acknowledge the problem before you can fix it. As a person
who teaches Holocaust literature and does research in trauma studies and the
ways violence and suffering shape our lives, I spend a lot of time wrestling
with some of the more horrifying things humans have done to each other and
continue to do to each other daily. And even if we bracket the genocidal
horrors and constant wars and daily reports of rape, murder, and general mayhem
from every corner of the Earth, I find our species riddled with pettiness, greed,
scorn, and small-mindedness.
There are,
of course, generosity and love and kindness as well, but I think any honest
assessment of the way the vast super-majority of us deal with our fellow
humans, and certainly how groups of humans treat other groups of humans or animals
(don’t get me started on our sadistic cruelty toward animals), would reveal
that we bring much more suffering and destruction into the world with very
little concern that we have done so, often not even being willing to
acknowledge we’ve done anything damaging.
So, what’s
my point? It’s not that we have no hope, but rather that we have to admit the
depth and breadth of the violence our species has wrought on each other and the
world around us before we can make the proper steps toward correcting it. It is
only after we internalize the problem of homelessness—I mean really internalize
it on an empathic level—that we might volunteer at a soup kitchen or donate to
a homeless shelter. It is only after we fathom the suffering of animals that we
might change our habits toward them. Only after recognizing the victims of our
wars as full human beings who live full internal lives like we do will we stop
agreeing so blithely to allow our governments to bomb the hell out of them. In
effect, I want to show this stuff in visceral detail and get people to acknowledge
it on both the abstract philosophical level and on the visceral gut level,
because it is only by integrating our reason and our empathy that we have some
small chance of improving the state of affairs in the world and reduce the
amount of suffering that fills every second of every day.
Michael T. Young: The main figure in “The Philosophy
Student,” thinks to herself, “There is no convincing proof that we have any
right to happiness.” Do you feel this is
true? If so, how do you see it in the
context of the darker issues addressed in the book: war, violence,
helplessness, etc.?
Okla Elliott: Given the situation of the character in that poem—her
brother is already at the Chechnyan front; the young man she has romantic
feelings for is about to be sent there; and her family is haunted by Soviet
oppression from previous generations—I was exploring how a deluge of horror can
alter the way we philosophize about the nature of human existence. Given her
situation, the philosophy student in the poem has deduced that our lot as
humans is unhappiness and that we can’t really expect much more. I am not quite
so pessimistic personally, though I see her point.
Michael T. Young: You are as much a philosopher as a poet; the influence of
philosophy is very much in your poetry with references to Kierkegaard,
Heidegger, Kant and others. Outside the
obvious references, how does philosophy influence and inform your poetry? What do you see as the relationship between
these two fields?
Okla Elliott: Norman Mailer once wrote that literary writers are doing
important philosophical work because they operate on the edge of the language
system, and Martin Heidegger believed that literary language dis-closed truth
to us much more than rigid philosophizing. I take from their two statements
that the divide between literature and philosophy is not so great as it is
often assumed. The greatest writers—Atwood, Beauvoir, Dostoyevsky, Mailer,
Oates, Sartre, Shakespeare, Stegner, Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Wright, and a dozen
more I could name—are philosophers and literary authors in equal measure, or
there is at least a strong element of philosophy in their literary output. So,
I guess I see the relationship as being one of a large Venn diagram overlap,
where we of course have philosophy that is not literary and some literature
utterly devoid of philosophy, but the truly great stuff merges the two
seamlessly and productively.
Michael T. Young: What are your favorite activities that have nothing to do
with poetry or writing?
Okla Elliott: I love to cook. I think it’s an unsung art form—and a
highly practical one, at that! I am also an on-again, off-again gym rat. I
really feel at my best when I am working on various projects intensely, and
then take a break to go fully inhabit my body via a punishing workout. And then
I get to cook myself a huge meal, since I’ve earned it, thus combining my other
two loves.
Michael T. Young: Thanks for your
time, Okla. Let’s close with your
favorite poem from The Cartographer’s Ink.
Which is it and why is it significant for you?
Okla Elliott: I have several that are tied as nearest and dearest to me,
and even the poems on that list change every time I think about the book, but
the one that most often makes it among my favorites, the one that if you put a
gun to my head and forced me pick just one, is “Alien War, Human War.” It has
political scope without being preachy (I hope), and I like the way the ending
forces the reader to finish the incomplete line about the “gnawing void of the
world.” Something seems very fitting to me that those words should be forced
into the spaceless space of a reader’s mind.
Alien War, Human War
written on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion
1.
Death is an underwater bird,
not a bird at all;
an eel with wings. It is a metal bird
loaded up with techno-artillery.
War, this war,
borne by all of us.
in equal measure.
we diminish all things.
the image of a model’s ass that makes us want
to find that image in the flesh of the world.
toward its living targets—
the curve of a line representing
fatality statistics over a six-week period.
we diminish all beings.
it is gone to us. When the bird
swims into the earthquake
it is gone to us until its perennial return.
The guilt-threads are tightly knotted.
Imbrication, implication—the nouns sound
so alien, so Latinate
I can’t feel my way into their fact. Abstraction
alienates lived life. To make others alien
we must abstract them to mere ideas,
not particular flesh and thoughts peculiar
to them. To kill others we must make them alien.
of the world.
-----------------------------------------------1.
Death is an underwater bird,
not a bird at all;
an eel with wings. It is a metal bird
loaded up with techno-artillery.
War, this war,
war between the eagle and other
birds-of-prey
(different prey).
Death is depleted uranium,
radiating strangeness into the
cells of our victims.
It is a strangeness we are all born
into,borne by all of us.
It is a strangeness taking many
forms,
natural and un-in equal measure.
Stranger still to be guilty
of murders we did not commit.
2.
Making ourselves alien to ourselveswe diminish all things.
That curve of a bell, the curve of
buttocks
the bell-curve normalizing us all,the image of a model’s ass that makes us want
to find that image in the flesh of the world.
Making others alien to ourselves
we diminish all things.
The curve of a bell,
the curve of a missile scuddingtoward its living targets—
the curve of a line representing
fatality statistics over a six-week period.
When an alien dies, nothing human
is lost.
When we make others alien,we diminish all beings.
3.
When the bird flies into the stormit is gone to us. When the bird
swims into the earthquake
it is gone to us until its perennial return.
4.
The imbricated self, the implicated
subject.The guilt-threads are tightly knotted.
Imbrication, implication—the nouns sound
so alien, so Latinate
I can’t feel my way into their fact. Abstraction
alienates lived life. To make others alien
we must abstract them to mere ideas,
not particular flesh and thoughts peculiar
to them. To kill others we must make them alien.
Murder, therefore, is an abstraction
abstracted.
5.
Our appetites and terrors fill the
gnawing voidof the world.
Our appetites and terrors fill the
gnawing void
of the world.
Our appetites and terrors fill the.
. .
Keep up with Okla Elliott and his work at his website: http://oklaelliott.net/
