A Conversation with Annelyse Gelman
BY REUBEN GELLEY NEWMAN
Annelyse Gelman’s most recent book, Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023), won the 2022 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Gelman is also the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014), the experimental pop EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019), and the artist’s book POOL (NECK, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Best New Zealand Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Gelman also founded and directs Midst (www.midst.press), an app and digital publishing platform focused on capturing, saving, and sharing the writing processes of contemporary poets. Each poem published in Midst includes an interactive timeline showing readers exactly how it was written and edited—blank page to final draft.
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Reuben Gelley Newman: Annelyse, I am writing this on the plane back from AWP Kansas City, on February 10, 2024, where we met briefly but delightfully. I was working at a booth, you were exploring and preparing for a reading. There were many readings, many people, many words. There was a pro-Palestine protest in the bookfair the day before, and then many of us went on buying books and selling books and selling books and buying books. The accumulation of words and poems and writers and friends, joy and ambition and exhaustion and energy, grief and anger and envy and vanity, love and community—to me it all intermingled with the hypnotic yet propulsive lines of your recent book, the long poem Vexations, as I’ve been preparing for this interview. It’s an honor to have this conversation, and I’ll dive right into the poem.
In Vexations, which takes its title from Erik Satie’s 1893-1894 composition of the same name, you juxtapose dissonant emotions incisively. “Creamy as a cat, someone wrote, regarding excitement,” you write on one page. Much earlier in the book, in a similar list of nouns described by the adjective “creamy,” you observe “Creamy bursts, regarding flares dropped from choppers.” Or, rather, you observe that someone else wrote that. Later, toward the book’s climax, there are more uses of the adjective:
Daughter in the garden, caressing the grass
Creamy, someone wrote, regarding a woman in a dress
Creamy, the sharpened edge of a ceramic knife,
Creamy, a stone, limestone
On the anterior banister a bug waved one thingy around
Over the PA someone said, You know your mother doesn’t like to be disturbed when she’s
watching the war
These quotes get across some of the central themes of Vexations: motherhood, time, violence, nature, language, intertextuality. What work are you trying to get the word “creamy” to do in the poem?
Annelyse Gelman: Vexations is obsessive, and that repetition is one manifestation of that obsession. Each instance of “creamy” was conceived by, and displaced from, a different author’s work. What happens when all that remains of a book or a film or a song is an impression, a fragment, severed from its origins? “Creamy”—like “moist”—is both innocent and obscene, there’s an opacity and viscosity to it, sexuality and nutrition and the human-nonhuman relationship. The phrase “creamy like a library”—from Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, talking about schizophrenia—was one of my earliest reference points. I just love that phrase, how it points to the overflowing and infinite possibilities of literature—and to what (I feel) really happens to literature and language in the mind, which is that multiple unrelated voices become united by subjective connections—poetry as conspiracy. What you read changes you, but you also change what you read by placing it in a new constellation of understanding, one unique to you.
RGN: “Poetry as conspiracy”—I love it! There are a couple things I’d like to pick up on here, relating to referentiality and the temporality of the poem. Reading Vexations, I was struck not only by the numerous references, but also the past tense narration about the future, the accumulation of subjunctive verbs and imperfect constructions. Moving away from content for a second, why did you decide to use the past tense? To use six-line stanzas? Can you expand on what you mean by defined edges—or undefined ones—of people, of time/space, of the stanza, of the poem?
AG: Vexations started out as a project to create an “ambient poem”—something modular and rearrangeable, that would go on and on and never repeat the same sequences. That came out of my interest in experimental music, but really this is a concept I’ve been working with since at least 2012, when I was poet-in-residence at a neuroscience lab, exploring memory and mutability. That lab housed the brain of H.M., a famous patient who suffered from severe amnesia (a result of surgery to treat his epilepsy). Not only did he lose many past memories—what we normally think of when we think of “amnesia”—but he was unable to form new memories. He essentially existed in a present-tense bubble, able to actively engage with events, but without the ability to integrate them beyond the present moment.
What’s so fascinating to me is that these distinctions between past, present, and future feel solid, and we can see there’s some biological basis for that—but, of course, all we actually have is the present. The present is where recollection, imagination, and perception all happen. So as we look in this big-picture way at what it really means to be a person, we see that we already have this blurry experience.
And we have so little control over that! If I smell a lily and think of my aunt’s wedding seven years ago… I mean, think about how I’d even tell her about that: “The lily reminded me of your wedding” or “made me think of it.” The lily is the active agent here, right? Not me. I’m the object; this flower is acting upon me, changing my mind, basically without my will or intention. And this is a small example, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence of grammar—we are bound up that tightly with our environment. Of course we are, because we have evolved in concert with it, and it forms a part of us just as much as we form a part of it.
To me, the edges are undefined. Memory is involuntary. Observation affects subatomic particles. Your dog can smell where you’ve been. My father told me that one time, he woke up in the middle of the night, because someone had punched him in the face. And he opened his eyes and he was grabbing his own wrist. Conscious/unconscious, voluntary/involuntary, self/other, good/bad—these distinctions are useful, so we use them. But the reality is blurry.
—The ceiling is too close, said daughter
It’s not touching you, I said
—But the ceiling is touching the air, said daughter
—And the air is touching me, said daughter
—The air is coming inside me, said daughter
—The ceiling is coming inside me, said daughter
Here’s something else about time: I enjoy thinking about poems in the general mode I’ve seen in workshops and discussion groups—basically asking, what is this poem up to? What effect does this language have on me?—but this mode is really only applicable to a very narrow experience, the experience of reading a poem. I’m keenly aware of how little time I spend reading poems. What I am mostly doing is, you know, living life. So to me, it’s just as important to ask: How will I carry this poem with me? How will it affect me later tonight, next week, in a decade?
The art that I really care about is the art that I carry with me into the future. That means, at a minimum, I have to encounter it at one time and then spontaneously remember it in the future. It has to announce itself to me, over and over again. It becomes part of the fabric of my life, my thinking, my attunement to the world. That’s what I want out of art: obsession, expansion. That’s what I want to give people, too. You won’t remember all of Vexations, but there are all these opportunities for a line or an image to hit you in a way that sticks.
The formal structure relates to that. I’ve taken certain pressures off the table—like, say, the pressure to follow a really syntactically complex sentence (there are almost none), or to follow a story (it is threadbare and disappears for pages at a time), or to interpret a change in form (there isn’t one). Another poem might treat these not as pressures but as opportunities or central concerns, of course. But in this case I treat these formal considerations as “constants,” hold them steady, make them predictable, and then that guides your attention more towards the “variables” that matter in Vexations, like the shifts in tone and register, the felt sense of being in the “ambient” vs. the “narrative” space, lines that repeat statically, or that reappear in a mutated form, and so on.
RGN: That idea of formal considerations as constants is fascinating. As someone interested in formal structure—and as a reader preparing an interview—my attention personally dipped between those constants and variables. Here’s a list of the different uses of the word “attention” in the poem:
- “To care for her felt like begging for attention”
- “Like my predecessors I suffered from a crisis of attention”
- “An ellipsis held my attention on the subway platform”
- “It was easy to confuse attention for the performance of attentiveness”
- “Attention made the auditorium smell super-nice”
I’m especially struck by that last one, the hyphen in “super-nice,” as if the smell is unexpected, slightly sinister.
AG: I love reading those instances together like that! The “super-nice” move reminds me now of George Saunders, the way he sets down those verbal mannerisms. SuperNice™! To return to your question about the past tense—for me, the past tense flattens the poem even further, makes the edges blurrier. When I say, “The word impending no longer prefaced collapse,” I’m saying, this is how it was. I’m leaving open the possibility that the reader feels that this past tense refers to their present, or something close to it. I’m also leaving open the possibility that this situation isn’t contained only in the past—that it’s still ongoing. And, of course, the future that Vexations is spoken from is ambiguously distant from the reader’s present, whenever that is. The speculative elements work with the past tense, too, I think. You get these qualities of morality tales, fables, origin stories, but without pinning them into place.
We’re already historicizing the present, thinking about how history will (or won’t) remember us. What would it mean to talk about our cruel, violent present with such bug-eyed desperation to capture everything—the smell of expired milk, the way we treated dogs or children? That everything is, or can be, lost. That’s why this past tense is so radical for me: the more banal the observation, the more profound it really becomes. For example, what would have to be different—how would our worldview have to be—to prompt someone to say to you, by way of explanation, “there were living and nonliving ways of being”? Why would someone need to say that? Is that distinction no longer applicable? I’m bringing the reader into the future, making the reader assume the position of the presumed audience for the narrator who speaks in that future. And I’m implying that this future reader has a fundamentally different understanding of aliveness, right? This future is never clearly elucidated, but you can glimpse it through the kinds of descriptions the narrator feels compelled to give. I try to do this at different scales, from different vantage points. Behind “You could still drink straight from the ground in places” is the implication that this isn’t possible anymore: just through the past tense, and through using the word “still.” I’m telling you about the future by explaining the past. And I’m telling you about the present by implying the future. I’m enacting that blur.
RGN: Wow, “enacting that blur”! I wonder if, in some ways, that’s a function of literature more generally. It’s a really powerful effect, enhanced by the way you bring so many other texts and voices into the language of Vexations. Erik Satie appears through the title, a glancing mention of someone playing Airs à faire fuir (“Tunes to make you run away”) in the next room, awfully close to “the ruins of our civilization,” but as we’ve hinted at already, there are a plethora of other echoes and references winding through the poem. You’ve told me that you originally had plans for an author’s edition of Vexations with a German publisher, K Verlag. Can you tell me more about how the book manifested in its current form, and what other forms it could take?
AG: I’ve always imagined Vexations as an audio piece, and I’d still love to do that. I imagine the recorded version as something along the lines of Robert Ashley’s Private Parts, with musical elements intertwined with the language and the natural rhythm of the syntax foregrounded alongside shifts in tone. The more fantastical option is an audio installation, something more interactive (playing with these rearrangeable “units” of text—the line, the stanza, the page) and, especially, more spatial. In my dream world, I’d get to take over a dead mall or an abandoned school. Both of these spaces have built-in low-visibility PA systems, and rooms (storefronts, classrooms) that could be taken over by other artists for displays of paintings, sculptures, video art, etc. The language and style of advertising and surveillance are already at play in these spaces as well—I imagine what the Vexations bulletin board flyers might look like, the maps, the emergency instructions, the LED displays.
The author’s edition was a collaboration with a press in Berlin called K Verlag, but when a colleague forwarded me a joint public statement about their editor’s behavior, I decided to pull the project. I don’t believe in “cancel culture,” but I do believe in accountability, and I don’t believe that’s happened in this case. I was excited about this special edition, but I would have also been ashamed of it, you know? And I also want to model integrity for other artists, especially young women. It’s okay to walk away. You have to make the culture you want to see.
I’ll publish an index soon that dives deep into the references, inspirations, allusions, and appropriations in the book. I have a lifelong fascination with the creative process itself, a desire to understand it; this has always been an important part of my practice. At first I considered studying creativity as a research scientist—my undergraduate thesis in psychology involved research on improv and creative problem-solving—but I realized that the kinds of questions that most excite me can’t really be asked or answered in a lab. Midst is an obvious example of a more practical implementation of this kind of inquiry. We’re investigating how poets actually write poems, capturing the entire process of creating a poem from beginning to end (the blank page, the typing, the deleting, the editing, the re-editing, and even the process of translation) so the reader can understand its evolution (and, for most of us, all the “failure” baked into that process).
With respect to excluding an index from the book itself—I used to think of citation in a pretty straightforward, academic way. But as I worked on Vexations, this started to seem inadequate. I think there’s always a blend of memory, observation, imagination, and improvisation in art, and I’m suspicious of “originality.” Creativity is so much about creating unexpected combinations from what already exists—and this applies on every level, from rearranging the alphabet to writing a book, to pioneering an entire field by combining, say, computation and biology. I want my work to resist fear (the fear of plagiarism and its attendant paranoia and conservatism, in particular) and copyright (the belief that ideas originate from individuals, that we can own them like property, that creativity is about flag-planting). Acknowledging a constellation of inspirations isn’t actually as simple as “crediting one’s sources” like a scholar or journalist. Should I cite the phrase “wine-dark sea,” a Homeric epithet? Or “the medium is the message” (Marshall McLuhan)? Or the serenity prayer (popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous)? Or De Beers (“A diamond is forever!”)? These are vernacular quotations. And then there’s non-literary text, with which I take more liberties. The boldest theft in Vexations is a direct, unattributed quotation from a guide to horse field necropsy: “The entire pluck could be removed en masse for complete evaluation.” It’s a provocation, a violation of that text. I also steal from my own work (“Rain is only rain in mid-air”). Finally, there are all the species of language that cannot be traditionally cited, like an homage to a lullaby my mother made up and sang to me when I was a child, or a lover’s pet name, or a style of speech I love because my friend uses it, or a concept (say, the connection between wasps and orchids) that has been explored by many different thinkers. My point is that “bibliography,” in the case of Vexations, creates a hierarchy that inevitably erases these distinctions. It’s a lie pretending to be the truth, and the truth is complex enough that it really requires its own project.
And of course the “external language” I’m pointing to is suspended in solution with my own “internal” ideas, which I do not really believe are “mine,” since I believe every person is capable of thinking them. I want to place all these things on an even plane, to simultaneously flatten and highlight their differences, to create new relationships through juxtaposition, and to do so through polyvocal music. All of this is both more than and less than ekphrasis.
RGN: I’m very sorry to hear about the editor’s behavior and disappointed that you had to pull Vexations, but I’m also glad it found a home in its current form at The University of Chicago Press, and I’m glad it’s gotten recognition and reviews here as well. Here are two questions: first, what was the editorial process like for a book-length poem? And I love your idea of how citing artwork might not be too different from citing memory or aphorisms. Can you expand on what you mean by that? How does cultural memory evolve into the sayings in the world of Vexations?
AG: There wasn’t really hands-on “editing” by the press, but I did finesse some of the “genre work” (particularly the house fire scene) based on their responses. Their encouragement was really valuable, too—for example, there’s this really sing-songy passage in the poem that goes, “Chartreuse and red made a person feel dread / Whiskey and wine made a person divine / Water and bread made a person feel fed / Apple and pear made a person beware…” The series editor Chicu (Srikanth Reddy) sent me a marked-up manuscript, and he’d put an asterisk next to this passage and written, “Doggerel.” I remember reading that and going, Good, it works!
Vexations is enacting individual memory on a cultural scale. Information is neither stored nor retrieved in a logical, linear fashion. Memories become vivid in some places, barren in others—and memory itself, as we know from decades of research, is unstable and fundamentally unreliable: “Persistence of and confidence in a memory is no guarantee of its accuracy.” There are things I remember vividly for no clear reason, and things I “should” remember that I don’t. I’ll remember a detail and forget the plot. I’ll remember a face and forget the name. I’ll remember events but have no idea when, or in what order, they happened. My selection of individual sayings, or lines that eddy and loop, is grounded in my own preoccupations and intuitions.
This comes back to trust, too—I’m working from the inside out, not the outside in. I try to notice my own attentions and obsessions, and then I take them seriously; I trust that they’re working their way into my conscious awareness for a reason. In general, I don’t really feel I am in control of my own thoughts or feelings—I’m more reactive than proactive, for better or worse. I trust that a phrase or image that’s “catchy” for me—that keeps announcing itself in my mind, for months or years—will also be “catchy” for a reader. Vexations just takes this attentional chain and refracts it further, as though these individual habits of noticing are shared.
RGN: That idea of enacting individual memory on a cultural scale is really powerful because the book is epic and expansive in scope, even as it focuses at points on some deeply personal concerns. My next question might get at that a bit.
The speaker of Vexations has a daughter. People kill grasshoppers and daughter screams. The specialist operates on daughter, trying to treat a mysterious disease. In “the dark shape of her room,” on her mattress: “Her hands were stained with their green blood / Her hands were stained green with their blood.” Elsewhere, the speaker narrates: “I heard daughter screaming, then I heard daughter not screaming.” And later on: “Daughter and I pressed our respirators together / Like we used to kiss goodnight.” How did you write the character of daughter? How did you birth her into this world?
AG: I initially thought the narrator of Vexations would have no clear identity or positionality, so that the “speaker” of the language you’re hearing is purposefully ambiguous and unmoored…I guess in resistance to the abundance of the lyrical “I” and the implicit assumptions that carries, which the book is already interrogating (ideas about selfhood, epiphany, the cry of the heart, the personal as a portal to the universal). But parenthood allows for an exploration of attachment and agency that I felt was important—every adult was once a child, was once entirely dependent and beholden to others’ decisions. Adulthood is to childhood as history is to the contemporary; we’re living out the consequences of our ancestors’ choices, as future generations will live out ours. In retrospect, daughter is also very influenced by Balthus—not only his painting, which appears explicitly in the poem, but also in his preliminary work. The Fondation Jan Michalski, where I wrote the book, had a copy of The Last Studies, a collection of thousands of photographs of Balthus’ (young female) models. They’re beautiful and also undeniably difficult to look at. These girls are so vulnerable. It’s impossible to ignore the possibility of exploitation and abuse.
RGN: It was fascinating and troubling to learn more about Balthus while reading your work, and I’m struck by how art can carry complex tensions about attachment and agency. In their ethos, themes, or characterization, I’m reminded of other books, films, and shows like Parable of the Talents, Station Eleven, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and The Broken Earth Trilogy. What are some of your favorite dystopian or speculative texts and media? These can be things you referenced in Vexations or things you’re just reading now.
AG: The prince cutting his hair—and riding off on an animal that knows its name—is a reference to another Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke, which is an all-time favorite for me. It’s sticky to articulate this in a world where “peace” is so often invoked in the absence of liberation and justice—a total farce—but “to see with eyes unclouded by hate” is still an absolutely foundational principle for me, in art and in life. I love Solaris, Borges, Calvino, LeGuin. 1984. La Planete Sauvage. Waking Life. Todd Haynes? Charlie Kaufman’s films, especially Synecdoche, New York. Oh, there’s so much! I’m sure there are so many things I’m missing here, and probably a lot of this doesn’t fit into those genres. Children’s books, too—Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny and The Little Prince. I also really want to shout out a poem called “Dreams” by the New Zealand poet Richard von Sturmer, which is composed with these wonderfully tight one-line descriptions. I heard it read aloud at the Dunedin Public Library more than a decade ago, and those images have never left me: “A man holds a bicycle wheel and walks into a cathedral,” or “Outside a tropical hotel, a hotel worker is struck by a large leaf.”
RGN: Princess Mononoke! LeGuin! Borges! There’s so much bouncing around the book, and I deeply appreciate that concept of seeing “with eyes unclouded by hate” even as there’s a lot of blurriness in the world more broadly. And art can be used for various ends, but at its best I hope it contributes to fostering love and justice.
Before I ask my last question, I want to thank you again for speaking with me. As a musician, I have to ask: what draws you to experimental music? Why Satie, and where can we find your own music?
AG: Thank you so much for these questions, Reuben! Everything I’m drawn to, including experimental music, comes from a place of an undeniable, visceral internal response—like a tugging or resonating. Hearing Satie’s Vexations as a teenager, in a 24-hour concert, made a huge impression on me, all the more so once I listened to his more, um, appealing compositions like the Gymnopedies. Experimental music as a whole I think places a lot of emphasis on context and production—it’s sort of conceptual, you get more out of it knowing how it’s made, and the process itself is a part of the product; all of that really appeals to me. Or the way that John Cage emphasizes the environment, the listener as a body in space, the event. The repetition central to a lot of non-Western music is also relevant here, like the raga or gamelan. It seems intrinsically related to lived experience, the way we habituate to repeated stimuli and become more sensitized to novel ones. When I was a kid, I used to be all about singing, the voice, lyrics—if you’d asked me even what instruments were played in my favorite songs, I couldn’t have told you. Gradually I started listening more closely, picking out what each instrument was doing, and understanding the artistry of that (in and of itself, and how it fit into the whole). And then as a young adult, discovering Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, even people like Arthur Russell—you listen deeper and deeper, and for me at least, I could really feel my capacity for hearing itself expanding in a radical way. Which deepens my entire experience of life. Vision is the most primary sense culturally, and I think a lot of this also comes from butting up against natural limits to that—my eyesight is a little blurry, and I’m colorblind, which means I have trouble distinguishing between hues that seem distinct to other people. Listening offers me more depth and more opportunity to experiment with subtlety.
My own music—I’m working on a full-length album right now, producing it myself, and I’m really excited about that. It’s surreal to have dozens and dozens of songs, written over more than a decade, that I’ve never properly recorded—it’s past time! I have a six-song EP out with a great Portland-based press, Fonograf Editions, called About Repulsion, which was produced with my friend Jason Grier, who also did all the original coding for Midst and really made that project possible. The work I did with him, and engaging with the composers and musicians who performed in and around the echtzeitmusik and Wandelweiser scenes in Berlin, was hugely eye-opening (ear-opening) for me. My songs are still “songs”—I’m not putting contact mics on sandpaper, or asking the listener to endure long spans of silence—but I do want to create from an expansive and nuanced sonic palette and work with the possibilities of sampling, layering, and field recording. Most of all, I want creating to be fun. I love making stuff with my friends, and most of the songs I’ve written in the last couple of years were composed on a toy instrument called an Omnichord, which has made songwriting feel less precious and pressured. Like Jean Rhys says: “All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
