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Poetic Profile

Jen Hofer

As an introduction to this interview Jen wrote: I wrote the answers to these questions in one sitting (which turned into two sittings, but I did answer each question in one fell swoop, as they say), and I have decided not to edit my answers. Maybe someday I will turn some of them into short essays , but for now I'd like to see this "document" as an extension of the verbal conversations we began when I was in Chicago, and thus allow then to be more "verbal"  than "written"  i.e. fleeting & elastic rather than reconsidered & edited. In Chicago I spent a lot of time on L Trains looking at the seams between the buildings: in this (textual) conversation, I'm willing to let the seams show.

General Questions 

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I was born in San Francisco and grew up primarily in Berkeley. I grew up in a family that values the arts & education almost above all else. In her twenties my mom was a modern dancer in New York; she danced with Martha Graham & Merce Cunningham, and was in many of the first Dance Theater Workshop productions. (Oddly, though, despite this history she has a very difficult time “understanding” my poetry, though both my parents are hugely supportive of my work. My mom says her difficulty stems from what we expect of language, versus what we expect from, say, movement.) I’m not sure I’d say that poetry per se was a part of that mix, except perhaps harmonically. But most people in my extended family are happiest with their nose in a book (& a drink in their hand & a sumptuous meal on the way). 

I first remember becoming aware of poetry when I was seven. A poet named Jo Bradley came to my third grade class & did a week-long poetry workshop with us (I think it was through California Poets in the Schools but I might be making that up). In Spanish, there’s a lovely way of saying that something amazed you: me maravilló, it filled me with marvel, with wonder. And that’s how I felt when I first encountered poetry.

2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

I can’t separate the influences of writers & artists & musicians (dead & living; known to me & foreign & faraway; through their work & through their manner of being) on my work from the influences of all kinds of people & objects & spaces we might not commonly define as “art” or “artists” in & of themselves.  

3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poet become part of your everyday life?

I feel like I’m still — always — “becoming.” Not just as a poet, but as a person (as if there’s any difference between those two things, for a poet). A human animal.

I walked across half the United States in 1990 (on my near-requisite “time off” from Brown) & it was on this long, slow collective & very personal journey that I decided to dedicate myself seriously to writing. I was 19 or 20 when I made that decision. I find myself having to re-make it often — perhaps every time I write? 

4) Where were you educated? Was this important?

I have been formally educated at Brown University, The University of Iowa (where I did an MFA in poetry & an MFA in literary translation at the same time), (GO HAWKS editor's note)  and most recently in a kind of vocational training program at the Southern California School of Interpretation — learning to be a Spanish-language interpreter in the criminal court system. I was & continue to be informally educated by a voracious & nomadic lifestyle that includes the largest possible number of travels & conversations & experiences. Where I was educated has been important as any choice is important: any choice opens some doors & closes others. I have learned an immense amount from living and working in spaces where I feel at home & in spaces where I feel alien. 

5) You are a Californian by birth, and you were educated at Brown and Iowa; how important is place for you as a poet?

Place is important for me as a poet in terms of a present: I write from here & now. 

6) What is your favorite food?

I love food: I love to cook & I love to eat. I’m no good at picking favorites.

7) Sports Team? or Activity?

My favorite sport is knitting. Therefore, I have no favorite sports team. I also like dominoes & scrabble & cards, though I don’t play often. And I do lament the loss of my pool prowess. 

How can you possibly ask me what my favorite activity is?!?

8) Vacation spot?

 Likewise, there is no “vacation spot” (though I’m not sure I believe in the concept of “vacation” — which may be a problem) I can say I prefer over any other, except insofar as certain cities house certain of my most beloved friends & relatives. There is no place I can imagine that I would not like to spend at least a few days exploring. 

9) Curse word?

I use the word “fuck” a lot — so much so, in fact, that I cease to view it as a curse word. I’m fond of the elasticity of many curse words in Mexican Spanish, that the same word can be used to cuss someone out one minute, & then in a different turn of phrase to praise them the next (“chinga tu madre, güey” vs. “qué chingón” or “güey, qué poca madre”). I also really like that in Spanish you can curse by saying “¡Maldicción!” — literally, “Curse word!!”  (I suppose the normative English equivalent would be “Curses!”)

Craft Questions

1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry and organic or synthetic process for you?

I can’t exactly say how I form a poem. I tend to feel that poems form me, and I in turn attempt (& re-attempt) to give them forms. It may be useful for me to mention here that I consider many things to be poems that are not traditionally seen as poems: views, for example, or certain musics, or certain films. Not that I can’t recognize differences between things, but if to some extent we might think of a poem as a way of experiencing the world around us or a mode of perception, then many things other than a text on the page could be considered poetry.

For me at this point (or points?) in time, poetry is an organic synthetic process. I can’t say that I know where my poems come from, and I also can’t say that I don’t. I tend to feel I’m blind as I write. I’m listening (I’d prefer not to define to what). I’m attempting to register/record my world, & myself in that world, & it in me. I have a terrible memory: if I don’t write an experience (however obliquely or densely wound into other textual considerations or movements) I can’t be sure it happened.

I do believe, as I’ve heard Pierre Joris say quite gracefully, that all writing is translation. The world, perception, feeling, thought, objects, people, experiences, theories, histories: these things which populate poems are not language, they are themselves & in the poem we filter them through language, through our very specific individual & in some senses shared language.

2) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

More often than not, I write in public places. On public transit, at bars, at readings, at films, in museums. I edit at home in my writing studio, or in cafés.

Ambience is important to my writing, of course. The world gets in us, and into the poems. I think there’s interior ambience (that is, the space inside me, which is made of thinking & feeling & hopefully — though not always successfully — concentrated presence) & exterior ambience, literally where we’re sitting when we write the poem. I know it’s obnoxious to quote yourself, but I do recall a line of one of the poems in slide rule, “Where you stand matters.” That came out of a conversation in a diner with the magnificent performance artist Rinde Eckert (credit where credit’s due).

I suspect I have rituals or habits — certainly the latter, if not the former — when I do just about everything. And much of what I do in my daily practice is endeavor to coax (or fling) myself out of my habits, perhaps from within some kind of ritual or habituated space. Translation is ideal in this regard. So is travel. So is conversation (reading, too, is a kind of conversation).

3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?

 I think — or maybe I think I think — that all language is found language to some extent, all language is “sources,” whether we recognize the sources or not. For instance, a number of people who attended my recent readings with Ana Belén López, one of the poets from the Mexican anthology, commented that her work reminded them of Niedecker’s. But she’s never read Niedecker. Does that mean the reference isn’t there? Of course not, especially since the poem and its meanings exist in the space between the writer & the reader, and belong equally to both parties, or to neither. I am often reminded of Mallarmé’s conjecture that we are all, in some deep way, participating in writing one immense unending book.

Questions About Sin puertas visibles

1) You chose mostly unknown women writers for the anthology - why did you do this, and do you think that it was positive?

When you refer to “unknown women writers” in your question, I’m not sure if you’re thinking of the U.S. context (YES) — where certainly the writers in my anthology were completely unknown before the book came out, as they’d never had any work translated into English previously and their poems were for the most part difficult to find even in Mexico, and literally impossible to access from here — or the Mexican context, where some of them are known, albeit as emerging writers, and some are totally unknown, more because of their aesthetic stance in relation to accepted literary structures than their youth or gender (though these, especially gender, are a factor). 

In terms of the reception of this book in the U.S., I chose to work with writers whose work had not been translated into English before because so little is translated — I think it’s crucial to widen our perspectives in every way possible. As I see it, any impulse that makes it more difficult to stereotype — to define “Mexican poetry,” “women’s poetry,” or even “poetry” — is immensely & immediately useful. I didn’t seek out “unknown” writers per se (in fact, many writers whose work is extremely well-known in Mexico have never been translated into English, so that particular criterion wasn’t, in fact, that limiting); rather, I sought out work that excited my intellectual & aesthetic passions, work that seems to me necessary in some way, or in many ways.

In terms of my decision to work with women poets exclusively for this project, I’d refer you to the introduction of the anthology, in which I briefly consider this problematic but in some important ways useful (though definitely provisional) maneuver.

2) How do you navigate in Mexico, the many obstacles, traditionalism, machismo, poverty, injustice, and the literary establishment?

In Mexico, navigating obstacles of tradition (& traditionalism), machismo, poverty, injustice, literary establishments (& governmental establishments, which — and this is very strange to the gringo eye — are often one & the same) is as difficult as navigating such obstacles in a U.S. context, and at the same time the difficulty is vastly different. I think that being an outsider is in many ways a privileged position: I am not expected to play by any rules in Mexico, & in many instances I am not even expected to know what the rules might be (& I usually prefer to feign ignorance in this regard). And perhaps there is a certain privilege — or benefit (blessing?) — to discomfort: complacency is not an option where there is no ease: nothing is automatic.

3) You lived in Mexico City, for a long time. It has been said that Mexico City is a combination of Sodom, Paris, and Rome, a place far more fabulous and far more spiritual and far more poor that anywhere in the USA.  What informed you about Mexico City?

Mexico City is known as “la ciudad sin fin” — the city with no end. It is as dense as the most crowded streets of New York (or New Delhi), as dispersed as Los Angeles. It is an apocalyptic dystopic paradise. The instant I first arrived there (as a tourist, in 1995) I felt compelled to live there, to learn the city & inhabit it as fully as possible. Perhaps such massive urban energy always elicits an extreme reaction: the desire to flee or the desire to enter. My desire was, & still is, to enter. I learned Mexico City as best I could, & continue to learn it, through walking around at all times of day & night, through taking public transportation, through staying out late & getting up early, through reading, through markets, museums, street corners, plazas, cantinas, cafés, bookstores, flea markets, through conversation with all kinds of people in all kinds of contexts. I look & listen as much as possible, & still usually feel that I’m only barely skimming a surface or surfaces.

4) In many Latin American countries Poetic Lions exist one thinks of Neruda, Paz, de Andrade, Dario, people who set what is poetry in the region.  What do you think of this patriarchal structure?

The model of hierarchical structures within poetry or any art strikes me as deeply foreign to my idea & experience of art & the world. The structures which lionize or reify certain writers as arbiters &/or gatekeepers of culture seem to me antithetical to a poetics of inquiry (to use Hejinian’s superbly apt phrase) or a poetics of real & extreme openness. And such top-down hierarchical models exist in some capacity in every poetic culture I’ve encountered, including in USAmerica. The idea that there is a poet (or poets) who will set the standard for what is poetry, what is innovation, what is politically or linguistically radical — to my mind, that idea is inherently anti-innovation & anti-radical. I might even say anti-poetry. To repeat an oft-repeated refrain, form & content are not separate: to think outside the previously programmed boxes, we must think systemically & specifically. On the other hand, and simultaneous to the above, we all come from somewhere, or somewheres. There is immense joy in sharing poetic antecedents with fellow-travelers.

5) American Avant Garde poetry is very different from Latin American poetry, where do you see the differences? And where are the places, where they come together?

 Though I find myself falling into a use of this kind of terminology all the time (because one wants to be able to talk), at heart I don’t think we can actually define “American avant-garde poetry,” and perhaps that is precisely what makes it “avant-garde:” the impossibility of static definition, so what remains differently the same over time is an impulse or air toward adventure & curiosity, rather than any form or content we might fix as “avant-garde” or “experimental.” I think we can functionally — i.e., provisionally, temporarily, as travelers — refer to  (or think around & through) such concepts, but not actually, or concretely, or fixedly. That said, I’d venture that in terms of structures, traditions, developments, the U.S. avant-garde has little in common with avant-garde Mexican traditions (which at times seem indistinguishable from traditional Mexican traditions). And certainly the vast & exciting proliferation of independent reading series & autonomous small press publishing ventures (magazines, books, cds, what-have-you) that exists in the U.S. & which serve as a loosely-knit netting or skein the threads of which we can follow (& weave) in order to begin to read & know one another across all kinds of divides simply does not exist in Mexico. The reasons for this are very complex — economic, social, political, literary.

I am reminded again & again, as I seek to read outside my own comfort zones, that words like “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “innovative” are words (like perhaps all words) that exist in context. There is no definition of “experimental” writing that exists in a vacuum, so that we might carry with us a laundry list of elements to look for in searching out anti-normative or extra-normative texts when we read outside our own spheres of cultural knowledge (and even, I suspect, within them). This work is, as I said above in response to a different question, a constant process of becoming, of beginning & beginning again.

Vastly different poetries (from different cultures or from within a “single” culture) come together across all kinds of lines & borders in those resonances — kinships, harmonies & harmonics, points of congruence which then depart into flight — that transcend, or perhaps act as a foundation for, the actual & concrete differences that make us other than each other, & other than ourselves in different moments & contexts.