Ariel Resnikoff is a poet, translator, editor and teacher. His recent work has appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review, Jacket2, Full Stop Quarterly, Mantis and the Dibur Journal. Ten-Four: Poems Translations, Variations, a collaboration with Jerome Rothenberg, came out from The Operating System press in 2015. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, Processions; and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating the collected writings of the translingual-Hebrew poet, Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a contributing editor of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, forthcoming ‘18), an anthology of multilingual modernist source-texts, as well as Holocaust & Human Rights Education (Frontiers in Sociology, forthcoming ‘18), a scholarly volume on genocide and pedagogy. Ariel teaches creative wreading at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and curates the “Multilingual Poetics” reading/talk series at Kelly Writers House. His writing has been translated into French, Russian and German, and is forthcoming in La Traverse du Tigre (Les Carnets d’Eucharis), a bilingual French-English volume featuring the work of twelve contemporary American poets, and Schreibheft Zeitschrift für Literatur. He lives in west Philadelphia, where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
POETRY & PEDAGOGY:
It’s rare these days that we see people who are able to support themselves solely on being a working poet — a lot of poets end up in higher education. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between poetry and pedagogy? What do poets have to offer as teachers?
Although I agree with you that few poets today support themselves through poetry alone (did they ever?), I think it’s worth noting that there are still many poets who support themselves outside institutions of higher education. Of course, the MFA industry is booming, & there are plenty of poets — myself included — who have pursued MAs & PhDs &, eventually, teaching jobs as a means of utilizing the University as a site of financial support; still, many others continue to take vastly different paths, working across a diverse range of fields, including arts administration, cemetery management, physical therapy, land surveying & union organizing, to name just a few that come immediately to mind.
Some years ago, before I ever had the inkling of going to graduate school or becoming a teacher, I supported myself by working in restaurant kitchens as a line cook. This didn’t afford me much energy to make art, & eventually I decided I would leave the restaurant industry & try to find a means of supporting myself that would maximize my reading & writing time. I started with year-to-year grants & fellowships & eventually made my way to graduate school. It’s certainly not a route I would recommend to everyone, since the academic hoops are numerous & can be stifling; I’m also completely conscious of the immense privilege tied-up in university life, which is why in so much of my university-affiliated work I attempt to re-distribute the resources of the university to people outside its purview, by hosting & publishing artists & writers who are not institutionally affiliated — spreading the university wealth outward, rather than consolidating it.
All that being said, I think poets often make marvelous teachers, & I’d love to see more poets in teaching roles. The poem itself has so much to teach us, I think, & poets often understand this better than anyone: that teaching poetry — like writing & reading it — is not about telling or even showing, but about holding & beholding. My greatest teachers have all been literary & visual artists & what they have offered me over the years has been a lot more than simply the what of poetry & art (something I think anyone with enough time & interest can discover for themselves); instead, they have guided me to thresholds of the how & why, those questions so radically entangled in the choice one makes to live as an artist in the world.
I know you teach both creative writing courses and literature courses — how does your own poetic practice impact your approach to teaching?
I often refer to the courses I teach as creative wreading (à la Charles Bernstein), since traditional literature classes (at least those that I’ve taken) often downplay the art of writing & demand of students a singular & strict academic form (anathema to writing) — while traditional creative writing workshops, in my experience, tend not to emphasize scholarly reading/writing & discussion practices enough. My courses ask students to wear many wigs — to practice across a gamut of discursive forms, as critics, translators, poets, philosophers; to think of themselves as a network of practitioners, rather than just a class, & to work from a sense of mutual responsibility to one another, rather than out of fear (or reverence) for me &/or the grade. I emphasize most of all in my courses an elemental nearness to the work at hand — our own & others’ — & a nearness to one another. I suppose in the end it comes down to what you want to teach. I am interested most of all in helping students learn to think for themselves in relation to others, since this seems to me to be the first fundamental step in becoming an artist.
How would you characterize your approach to giving feedback on student writing (creative or otherwise)?
I encourage my students to keep going with their work & not to worry too much about any one piece. How important is any single piece they make in any one class, anyway? I tell them: keep going! try to make two more versions — now try two more! maybe somewhere in there you’ll find a poem, an essay, a speech. We process along the way, but my inclination is always toward helping them build their portfolio & giving them a wider sense for the art, more than “perfecting” any one work. I have always believed that students basically know what they’re doing, & it is our job as teachers to simply advise & support. Although I’m not a surgeon, I’m a poet, so —
What’s one thing that you’ve learned from a student that sticks with you? What’s one piece of advice that you have given to students in the past that you’d be willing to share here?
I’ve learned a great deal from my students, everything I know about teaching, when I really think about it. From my teachers, I’ve learned how to learn & from my students, how to teach. The piece of advice I give my students at the start of every semester is also a request: that they continue the conversations we begin in class outside of class, so that our time together does not simply function as an academic exercise, but instead has the potential to ripple outward.
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LITERARY CITIZENSHIP:
You said to me recently that it’s so important in life to “find your people” — that is, the people who challenge you, support you, and listen to you. Writers, I think, are especially in need of those kinds of support systems. How do you “find your people” as a writer? How do you advise that others find their people?
I find my people in many different ways & in many different places. Reading & listening is key: I’ve found many people (most, in fact), alive & dead, in books & magazines & recordings. These may not be best friends (though some certainly are) but if they are indeed your people, they will be more like a strange non-hetero non-nuclear art-family, a ragtag ensemble. My best suggestion is to follow the artists whose work echoes through you & through whom you find a means yourself to echo. Take time with these people. Treat them generously. Sit over long meals & longer conversations. Read their work again & again. Write them letters.
Finding your people also has to do with creating spaces for writers — you’ve created one such space in co-founding the journal Supplement. What kind of space were you hoping to create in founding that journal?
Orchid Tierney & I founded Supplement in 2016 not so much as a journal per se, but as a living print archive of poetry & art in Philadelphia. So the book is ongoing (in a series of volumes) — though not necessarily annual — & attempts to collect & record, as carefully as possible, the work of the writers & artists moving through the various worlds of Philadelphia poetry, poetics, & writing in the expanded field. Additionally, & as I mentioned earlier, we see Supplement as a way of opening the doors of the University outward, by using an institutional means of production (in this case, the generous support of Kelly Writers House & the Creative Writing program at UPenn) to collaborate with & publish artists that are not institutionally affiliated. This, I think, has always been my primary desire as an editor & curator: to create an equitable & diverse space for writers & artists to practice their art freely — a “haven” as HD put it.
To what extent do you think writers have a responsibility to be good literary citizens? How would you define literary citizenship?
I think all people have a responsibility to respond to the conditions they witness in the world as honestly & ethically as possible — to continually excavate the social-aesthetic landscape against the grain of the intense hegemonic forces attempting to control sight & sound. This would be my definition of literary citizenship then: a committed ability to respond to the world as a site of both immense life & incomprehensible systemic violence; a responsibility to make a record of those already disappeared & of the disappearing & of the still-here-for-now, & of the wounded earth.
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YOUR WORK:
Language and translation play a huge role in your work — can you describe how you work in multiple languages?
My life moves through multiple languages — that’s the first thing. Throughout the day, whether in books, letters, or live conversations, I toggle between English, Hebrew, Yiddish & Spanish. Sometimes I go to French, sometimes to German. Sometimes I find myself in Aramaic. I am not interested at any level of my language practice in what monolingual ideological interests call “fluency”; & perhaps this is one of the reasons I became a poet, to avoid the violence that fluency inflicts on my everyday language practice. In poetry, I found a whole slew of writers who, like me, have found themselves in exile from/in multiple languages at once & who use poetry as a tool of survival. How absurd, says the “self-exiled” high modernist — but it’s true; when you have no language at all to call your own, the role of poetry becomes first & foremost a question of need. I sometimes think of Pound’s multilingualism as something like going on a safari in an American-made Jeep, to gaze at & photograph the exotic plants & animals. But for someone like me, or any of us who physically feel the breaking terrain of language beneath our feet, poetry is a temporary & necessary dwelling in the most ceremonial sense.
My poems rarely begin in any one language, but often oscillate between multiple languages for some time before inf(l)ecting the English “host”: the poetry I make attempts to sew together the residues of language interchange, as a living quilt of translingual refuse — an art made from the parts of languages we are quite literally taught to forget. So my poetry goes after what’s lost in language, using translation as a map of the residual landscape, the languages that follow us throughout our lives, though often only in whispers. & rather than write poems in a language of the familiar (with familiar images, sounds, scenes, emotions) I search out in my poetry the unfamiliar, the stigmatized remains of language washed up on my tongue. It’s the difference between T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land & Yehoash’s “Oyf di khurves” (On the Ruins); in the Yiddish you open your arms instead of closing them.
How can I explain? I begin with a phrase or even a word in any language — any language I half-understand — & I begin by breaking that phrase or word against another phrase or word in another language. What breaks off, I gather, leaving the “originals” to rest, while fusing together in sound & sense what remains of the breakage. I follow the tectonic fault that all languages entail, the site in the eye & on the ear where one language register ends & another begins. There were other languages here before this one, what were they? There will be other languages after, what will they be? Where does a language go when it “dies”? These are the most basic questions of the translingual reality I inhabit.
You probably get asked this question all the time, but you come from a distinguished family of poets and scholars. Was poetry always your preferred mode of expression? At what point did you become certain that you wanted to participate in the world as a poet and writer and scholar?
Actually, there aren’t too many writers & artists in my family, & I remember as a child my parents mentioning to me that our cousin Charles Reznikoff was a “Jewish poet,” since this was a pretty special thing — but that he had become a lawyer first, to support himself (though this was really only half-true). The other artist I knew growing up was my cousin, Isaac Resnikoff, who became a very good sculptor. I always looked up to Isaac, & from a fairly young age I knew I wanted to be an artist too, though it started with music — listening first, & then playing — & then drawing, photography (which I practiced obsessively as a teenager, skipping entire days of school in the darkroom), then film, & finally writing.
At some point in my first year of college, my teacher, Louis Chude-Sokei, asked me if I had ever considered becoming a writer — I was studying literature of the Caribbean Diaspora with him at UC Santa Cruz, & he somehow recognized me as a writer even before I had recognized it myself. Writing was something I had done consistently throughout my life, in journals, & school newspapers, & essays for classes; but it was not something I had ever thought of as art. Soon after that conversation though, I wrote a short story, & then a poem, & the following year I began translating, & that was that. I became a poet still later on, I would say, after college, when I realized that what I loved most about writing was poetics. Then I began dreaming in poems — in translingual verses across Yiddish & Hebrew, both known & unknown to me. My world as a poet began as a means of translating these dreams, from languages steeped in multiple histories (both real & imagined), with me in-between, transcribing from the dregs.
What relationship, if any, is there between your poetic interests and your scholarly ones?
My scholarly interests & my poetic interests are one & the same — & though I wear many hats (as anyone who knows me knows), I am interested in an art of discovery first & foremost, in whatever form or (dis)course that might take. I find that my scholarly tactics often inform my poetic tactics & that my poetic tactics often inform my scholarly ones; & the hat I wear most often of all is my translator’s hat, which is not really a hat at all, but a wig, or perruque (thinking of Corteau).
I’m asking because I personally struggle with this (stage fright like you wouldn’t believe), but how do you envision performing your work? As you write a poem, are you thinking about how they’ll be performed, or is your primary concern how they look and feel on the page?
I write most of my poems aloud, sounding each word as I transcribe it. Lately, in fact, I’ve been working by reading my notebooks to my computer — which transcribes my voice as I speak — disrupting my clarity, tone, pitch & rhythm as a technical & poetic mode of composition. So yes, I’m definitely thinking about performance; & the work itself exists, I think, somewhere between the pages & the various soundings, scattered across numerous versions.
How would you characterize your writing process in general? Are you the kind of person who writes every day, or do you go through productive periods and not-so-productive periods? Something in between?
I am writing all the time, making lists in my notebook (which I carry with me almost everywhere) of things I hear & see, or think of, which I will often re-purpose later as materials for poems or essays. But I do not have any stable writing process, if that’s the question; just a continual practice of accumulating language & interacting with it in various ways. I read & write every day, as a discipline, but I am not disciplined in my reading or my writing, if that makes sense; my friend Zali Gurevitch calls this “serious play.” & for me it is in the space between spontaneous thought & the intense ceremony of writing & speaking, that I feel most like a poet.
What advice would you give to a young poet trying to sustain a writing life?
Let your writing sustain you, also. Don’t give up; even if you feel you’re no good at all, remember: all things human take time.