Larisa Svirsky, poet and philosopher, featured in the Ocean State Review
Parallel
because I’m fading
to tell you I was thinking about how many days people
have had to stop counting
because of airport bars on the way home from rehab
to tell you out of focus
because of how little I know what to say
to tell you the light is just right and it made me think
of your letter
because no one writes letters anymore
to tell you love borne of concern has concern
as an essential ingredient
because I love parallel constructions
to tell you you have to call it something
because you do
to tell you about the map to the place you live
because I don’t know where you live
to tell you someone who didn’t know where I lived
sent an ambulance to my house
to tell you to visit, like it’s a place
because it’s nowhere
I first met the poet and philosopher, Larisa Svirsky, in Hudson, New York, at the John Ashbery Home School in August 2015, in Dorothea Lasky’s workshop. Larisa was the star, I recall, her poetry equally visceral and philosophical; we hit it off. I am not surprised and also tickled to no end by her poetic progression over these past five years. Her work, still, is rooted in things and thinking, but there is a profound confidence with a poet coming into her powers that is striking. Larisa’s poetry carves out its own space, separate from most contemporary poems and poets-of-the-moment. Her work is not afraid to ask big questions, yet it is also coupled with a playful, insouciant nod to language, image, and sound. I feel lucky to have met Larisa and lucky to have her as a poetic interlocutor. A longtime friend of the Ocean State Review (her poem, “Testimony” was in our 2016 issue), her new poem, “Parallel,” which we will be discussing, was nominated for a Pushcart.
Charles Kell: First off, I love this poem; I’m crazy about it. It’s both tactile and philosophical, both firmly in the physical world and also, strangely, otherworldly. It exists in that in-between space that draws me to particular poems, that make me want to read them over and over, attempt to step foot in their worlds. The title, “Parallel,” invites me on many levels, I am drawn toward the meanings: “occurring or existing at the same time or in a similar way, a person or a thing or a situation that is similar to or can be compared to another”; it also makes me think of your specific practice as poet and philosopher, your equal attention on the physical, as well as other realms, and how these are never really separate, how they cross over and intertwine, how they inform one another. Before we jump into the poem, can you touch upon the title a bit, your process of constructing this poem, poems in general, and your balance or any parallels between your poetic practice and philosophic practice?
Larisa Svirsky: Poetry and philosophy occupy very different places in my life. Most of what I learned about poetry I learned by reading and writing, and much more by reading. I never took a poetry class in school, although I have taken short workshops. With philosophy I found it impossible to find my way without formal study. Sometimes I think I got interested in philosophy because I was natively curious about it but had no natural aptitude beyond that. I’m an associative thinker, and having to force myself to slow down and be careful has been tremendously difficult. I know plenty of poets who approach poetry in that way, who take their time, but I can’t seem to do that even when I try. This poem is, in a way, about trying and failing to find language. I wrote it on my first night as a resident at Vermont Studio Center. I was trying to write an email to Dara Wier, who is a mentor of mine, after a long silence. I kept starting sentences with things like “I’m just writing to say” and realizing that however I finished that sentence, it would be sort of a lie. There wasn’t one simple thing I was trying to say. At some point I realized I was writing a poem rather than an email. So I let myself write some of those sentences and then chopped off their beginnings – the “I’m just writing to say” part. That’s where the form of “Parallel” comes from. I can’t quite remember where the title comes from. Maybe it was just from finding so many separate but continuous non-answers to the question of what I was writing to say. I’ve also always loved the word parallel and how it evokes both similarity and distance. My parents both did graduate work in math and my mom loves to share this story of one of her colleagues, who worked on non-Euclidean geometry. In Euclidean geometry parallel lines never meet, but they do in non-Euclidean geometry – think of longitude lines on a globe. This colleague supposedly got drafted during Vietnam and had to take an intelligence test. One of the questions was about whether two parallel lines meet always, sometimes, or never. He chose sometimes, which is true but definitely not the answer they were looking for. Apparently the military thought he was stupid and he ended up with being given very unimportant tasks for the whole war and missed out on the combat he desperately wanted to avoid. But I digress.
CK: The first two lines draw the reader into the poem in a medias-res type of way, that we’re in the middle of something, of an action, thought, a question that is attempting to be answered: “because I’m fading / to tell you I was thinking about how many days people/ have had to stop counting”; I’m fascinated by the opening use of “because,” and its reoccurrence, its use as a delayed anaphora throughout the poem; its use as a marker, repetition, the “for the reason that; by reason of,” which, on one level works and starts as an answer, but can also serve as an answerless verbal placeholder (why do things happen? Just because). And also the fact the speaker is “fading,” in the process pf being “less there,” of “fading / to tell you,” which is a delightfully odd/opaque way of saying “I want to tell you something,” followed with the number of days “people / have had to stop counting,” a line that reads as prescient. I’m drawn, again, to the speaker’s reach for communication with the “you” the speaker refers to. And, again, my focus reaches toward the middle, in-between spaces that pop up in this poem. Can you talk about these spaces, the middle, the reach, in the opening of your poem?
LS: I have a complicated relationship to explanation, especially in poetry. I’ve been told not to explain too much, and had to learn to trust the associations in my writing to speak for themselves. I also love very archaic ways of talking about explanation or definition – for example, how for Aristotle something has an essence if there is a what that it is to be that thing. But I also spend a lot of time with things that defy explanation. There’s a Matthew Zapruder poem where he writes, “Then/tried standing in an actual stance of mystery/and not knowing towards the world./Which is my job.” And though we have different jobs (at least in the conventional sense, in which I am currently a bioethics postdoc), I think that’s my job as well. Just as I wasn’t just writing to say anything in particular, I don’t think any of these lines are real explanations, but they are related to the activity of explaining, communicating, making sense of. It’s also a cliché (a helpful one) about close relationships, that you can just pick up where you are with no need for explanation of what’s happened in the intervening time. I think mentoring relationships, no matter how close, are maybe an exception to this, because you want to tell your mentors how their support helped you get from where you were to where you are now. That was part of what was on my mind writing “Parallel.”
CK: I have a quick confession: I fell in love with “Parallel” when I read the line “because of airport bars on the way home from rehab.” Damn, for me, there is so much in that line, it evokes so many thoughts, feelings. There are the dual acts of movement and stasis. One goes to rehab because of some type of trouble, of, perhaps, a wish for or forced change. There are the supposed immense emotional, physical, psychological, philosophical movements that one either chooses to practice or is coerced into attempting, coupled with the physical stasis of being in rehab. I love, as well, the “airport,” before “airport bars.” These are not simply bars, but transient non-spaces. Also, the airport bars that a person stops at on the way “home from rehab.” Usually, folks want family, “home,” or to use substances around friends or even alone in some type of familiar space, or to try and keep up with the regimen of cleanness after rehab. I also think of Marc Augé, and how he views non-places as spaces that are “never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten,” places that “often puts the individual in contact only with another image of [them]self.” I also think of the constant wish some of us feel to always be elsewhere, on the move. As one with vast experiences with rehabs and airport bars, I am endlessly fascinated by the associations in this line. Can you talk a little about movement, or some of the movements this line speaks toward and also how these movements infuse the form of the poem?
LS: For me, that line speaks to how we can commit to trying on new selves but that there will always be tests that get in the way of our sustaining them – for example, that often someone returning from rehab will have to walk by an airport bar, where in theory no one would know that they had a drink. It seems to me that we always have to pass through old versions of ourselves to become something else, and that ultimately, we are only accountable to ourselves for that becoming. There’s also the possibility of false starts and foreclosing on change prematurely because of them. It’s been interesting to see how, during this time of quarantine, there is this temptation to take on new habits that feels sort of like a global restlessness. I’ve also been thinking about how rehab or places like it impose so many constraints on patients, at least theoretically for their own good. To me, stay at home orders feel very different than that kind of constraints. I think people who don’t have other experiences of confinement tend to underestimate how much they are free to do now, and how hard it is to change in a profound way, no matter how much one might want to. That whole section, “to tell you I was thinking about how many days people have had to stop counting/because of airport bars on the way home from rehab” was really also about expressing compassion for those who have false starts on their way back home.
CK: The other space that strikes me is the connection/attempt at connection of the speaker with the addressee. The wanting to “tell you” that opens the poem turns to “because of how little I know what to say”; that is, the speaker’s bind of wanting to say, to express, coupled with the speaker’s acknowledgement at the difficulty, impossibility of this expression. However, the speaker follows with a thought about how “the light is just right and it made me think / of your letter / because no one writes letters anymore”; and the letter, here both as object and object of correspondence works as a middle point, an opening, a hinge, one of the most important objects in the poem. I’m captivated, as well, by the insouciant aside that hits home so much: “because no one writes letters anymore,” and this makes me think of the people, the people I can count on one hand with two fingers, who I write and receive letters from, how those letters are the most important things in the world to me. What I love about your poems is the way they communicate on multiple levels—to the reader, to other poems, to thinking. This isn’t an epistolary poem, but can you talk a little about communication in this poem, and in your poetry in general?
LS: If you give me your address I’ll write you letters! Aside from the pleasures of getting a physical object in the mail that isn’t a bill, I think what interests me in letters as a form is that I don’t really edit my letters. I start at the beginning with some familiar territory and am often surprised by where I end up. With important emails, I read them aloud from start to finish to see how they sound. I spend way too much of my life writing emails! And as someone who’s not very spontaneous, it’s nice to be able to be that way in letters. I think communicating through different media is important, and I take a lot of pleasure in doing very different sorts of writing (poetry, philosophy, and I’ve recently started a creative non-fiction project). I think poetry has a unique relationship to communication. People connect with poems for all kinds of different reasons, and though some people prefer poems with more structure than others, in poetry there isn’t the same mandate to explain oneself or to offer a narrative that’s easy to grab hold of. This gives poems an elasticity and a freedom that paradoxically makes them both more and less accessible.
CK: Larisa! Please write me, I’ll send you my address. I would love to have another letter-writing friend!
Back to the poem: the turn continues with the speaker noting “to tell you love borne of concern has concern / as an essential ingredient.” The emphasis on concern, particularly “love borne of concern,” works as a specific statement, and, makes me stop, read the line over and again, and question: what type of love is a love borne of concern? A love borne of concern seems to have a base of uneasiness, that the love is structured around and fostered through the worry of the individual. Is this the type of love a parent feels? I don’t know; I don’t have kids. (this line makes me think of other loves and what they are borne from as well) It makes me think, and I’m embarrassed to admit, a question I usually ask my intro to literature students when we read certain texts—what is love? A question I never ask other folks, peers, friends, upper-level students, and I don’t know why. I wonder because maybe I feel I can be more vulnerable around intro to literature students; or that I don’t even know myself. Because, in a sense, I think the older I get the less I know what it means, or that it’s always changing, becoming even more nebulous. Is it that I love less people, but more ardently perhaps? I’m not sure. Or that I really only love one person and could never do without this one person—my wife, Carrie—and the rest of the world could burn? Or, at other times, I love everyone and everything so deeply—my family, friends, books, animals, rocks, trees, all of my former students who I can’t even remember their names? (forgive me, I’m in a reverie). The question: how is love and concern at work in the relationship between wanting to make a connection, to “tell you,” in this poem? And, forgive me ahead of time, Larisa, what is “love” to you?
LS: I love that you ask your students what love is even though I doubt there are really great answers to that question. It reminds me of the time that I had a summer job teaching philosophy to middle and high school students. One of the exercises we had them do was to define “skyscraper.” The only rule was that they couldn’t look at the dictionary beforehand. They came up with various stipulations about the number of floors it would have to have, and the number of windows, all of which had straightforward counterexamples. After a while, we let them look in the dictionary, whose definition of “skyscraper” was “a very tall building.” I’m skeptical that there are informative and true definitions of any terms, much less anything so ineffable as love. But I think it can still be helpful to think about even if one never arrives at the answer. I find myself in a relationship where I would say I am experiencing romantic love for the first time, and I think about the shape and texture of that love a lot, even though it’s constantly changing. To me that love is very different than the love borne of concern I wrote about in “Parallel,” which feels more immediately bound up with a sense of duty. I think it’s easy to forget sometimes when you feel that sort of love that there may not be much to the attachment beyond concern for the other’s wellbeing. (Incidentally, a lot of philosophers talk about love as though as it its core it’s about wanting the good for the other. Maybe that’s true, but it seems a bit thin to me.) It may be hard to see the person for who they are if you are blinded by your concern for them. Maybe I didn’t really answer this question. I’ll forgive you if you forgive me.
CK: Two of my favorite moments in “Parallel” are the lines “because no one writes letters anymore” and the brief aside, “because I love parallel constructions”; the latter working to step away, undercut the tense moment where the “love borne of concern” is raised. These moments are not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, but they do work to balance some of the more serious, heavy moments in the poem. How do you pull off these deft movements? I notice this practice, as well, in much of your poetry, the balance between darker places with levity, humor. I wish I could do this more. What’s your balance and how do you think about these things?
LS: I’m one of those people who use humor to cope with difficult experiences. I also tend to kind of detach in some of those moments and think about my life as though it were a novel or a poem, think about how I would describe it to make it as vivid as possible to an outside observer. So I think that’s where that impulse comes from in my writing. I heard James Tate read about ten years ago and there was a Q&A afterwards. Someone in the audience asked him how he managed to write poems that were so funny and so sad at the same time. He had this way of pausing that lent everything he said some extra gravitas, so you’ll have to keep that in mind. He replied, “Inside each one of us…there’s a very deep well…and it’s very funny down there.” It seemed to me a wonderfully true thing to say.
CK: Thanks so much for that moment, I love James Tate (and also Dara Wier) more than words…
Toward the end of the poem another shift occurs, and this is when the speaker asserts, “to tell you you have to call it something / because you do.” For me, the speaker’s urgency is laid bare, through the emphasis on naming, on a move toward calling. This urgency is further illustrated when the speaker relates, “to tell you about the map to the place you live / because I don’t know where you live,” and how the speaker is, in many ways, pressing the matter of connection, of wanting to form a connection with the addressee. I find this urgency heightened in the next line: “to tell you someone who didn’t know where I lived / sent an ambulance to my house.” This moment is so powerful. It makes me view the poem through a lens of urgency. It’s a moment of disclosure, yet it does not disclose everything. We know only the speaker was is some type of trouble. How do you balance sharing a moment like this without giving away too much, without it turning specifically confessional? How and when do you know what’s working? When you need to either reveal more or pull back?
LS: My first poems that I shared with other people had an overwhelming vagueness about them. A friend told me my poems were like someone whispering in your ear, “I have a secret that I can’t tell you,” which sounds pretty terrible if you ask me. When I’m writing I feel a lot of pressure to disclose exactly the right amount. My intention is to let the reader in on the emotional timbre of the moment without burdening them with too many facts or telling them what they’re supposed to feel. I am certainly more successful at that at some times more than others. It also helps that I’m not shy about sharing new poems, even when they’re not working. In my experience, there is nothing better than another pair of eyes for this sort of thing.
CK: The end, oh, it hits me: “to tell you to visit, like it’s a place / because it’s nowhere.” Again, as the entire poem balances, oscillates between parallels, the end gives the space, the place that can also be viewed as “nowhere”; I’m immediately taken back to the beginning, how the speaker opens with “because I’m fading,” and how this returns, how the space, the object is given, named, then taken away. And what is left is neither the object nor the complete absence of that object, but the trace, the remainder of its outline. Do these thoughts relate to your idea of the end of the poem in any way? What about to poetry in general?
LS: I remember towards the end of this poem that I was thinking a lot about the notion of home. I have another poem, or series…I’m still trying to figure out what it is, where I write, “I would be afraid to go home/if I thought I had a home.” There’s this attempt to communicate directly with the addressee but also some real obstacles to doing so, suggested by the idea that this connection can’t be forged in space. But it’s not simply a feature of the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, so much as the rootlessness of the speaker, that forces this on their interaction. There’s something freeing, of course, about not being from anywhere, but rootlessness can also be anathema to relationships. Maybe this is one way of interpreting what not needing narrative structure does to poetry, though I think on the whole that poems do better with rootlessness than human beings do.
CK: I can’t thank you enough, Larisa, for spending time talking about this magnificent poem. It’s been such a treat. I want to ask you how are you doing? How is everything? How is your work coming along? What are you working on? What have you been reading? A month ago you sent me some absolutely gorgeous love poems, so different from your usual work. Do you want to talk about these a little, their origins?
LS: Thank you, for such thoughtful questions and for your generous reading of “Parallel.” It’s certainly a strange and upsetting time now, but I’m doing okay all things considered. Even though I’m trained as a philosopher, in my current job I have a joint appointment in the Center for Bioethics and the College of Public Health at Ohio State. I’m adjacent to a lot of people who are directly responsible for responding to the pandemic, but I was always doing research and mostly working from home. I have some guilt about this, but my day-to-day life hasn’t changed that dramatically. I’ve been reading a fair amount but not all of it is stuff I’m proud to share! Some books that have meant a lot to me recently are Later by Paul Lisicky and Weather by Jenny Offill. I recently reread the Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, who was my favorite writer in college, and I’m reading a biography of him by Carol Sklenicka. I never used to reread things but it’s taught me how fickle my memory is, and the best books always have more to teach us. I have found it hard to focus on what I was working on before, but I’ve started some new projects: a philosophy paper on how we should understand the impact of one’s personal history (and in particular trauma) on responsibility, and some creative non-fiction. I’ve been wanting to write an autobiographical novel or something like that for a while now, mainly centered on my leaving home at fourteen to go to college. I’d tried to write about it before but always found myself sounding precocious in the worst possible sense. This time I’m coming at that subject matter sideways and in a more associative way. I’ve been writing about my family and my reasons for wanting to move away from them by writing about my partner. I love my family of origin, but I didn’t really understand what was supposed to be so great about family until I found someone I wanted to call my family. And I have been writing Cate (my partner) love poems as well. I’m so glad you liked them. This work feels very different to me and much scarier and more vulnerable than writing about some of the worst things that have happened in my life. I am afraid of becoming a big sap in my writing, even as I fully embrace becoming a big sap in the rest of life. But I feel lucky in every way to have what I have now.
CK: Larisa, again, thank you. I will be waiting on a letter.
Larisa Svirsky is a philosopher working at The Ohio State University. She was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, TYPO, Foundry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.
More of her work can be found at https://larisasvirsky.com/poetry/
Here is Larisa reading “Involuntary Sins” at jubilat.