“Writing Towards the Future”: An Interview with Marc Vincenz
Two poems by Marc Vincenz are also featured in the new Ocean State Review. Click on the title to hear Marc read them.
In the not-too distant future, in some distant sun-system, the
engines of the economy will go silent. On lunar holidays the
Consortium will meet to discuss soft matters, wafer-thin trin-
kets of colored glass, the red moon on the horizon, the gentle
moss-covered hills with their panoply of shimmering beetles.
They will celebrate the Union at the Source, the wind and wa-
ter-dust, the hanging foxes in the Caverns of Pantoum, or the
light-giving lodgings awake in song and reverie. You won’t un-
derstand until you start hearing it, the heartbeat of the night
blossoms and their attending creatures who recite poetry be-
hind the old people’s home.
Amongst the hundred eyes at dinnertime, behold the papri-
ka sprinkled on the cinnamon river, watch the yewbirds rise,
strumming the grasslands in their plumes.
It has been said that all is done for, that the world no longer
holds. For a while, some places glow in harmony, still others
with their torches and magnets will blemish the way. And just
who is this obstinate group who simply hands over their skins?
I.
Was needed for propping up the world; all smelted in out furnac-
es, and hand-cast, teased into the edges and bevels we all so well
know. It was said, in our foundry a lone bat lived in the eaves,
a giant fruit bat who dove for mangoes and apple stalks after
the second shift in the third quarter, after the decommissioning
of Workshop Number Forty-Five: stainless steel was no longer
called for in the Decomposing Age. It must rust and flounder
and flake under the weight of years; it had to brown and gray,
it had to get under the fingernails like the bugs we found in our
bed. They were funny those little segmented raisins, scattering
from wall to corridor; and they’d let you take them in your hand,
and they ran patterns of eight and zero; zero was a favorite. I
always bet the zero. Infinity was more your piece of toast.
II.
Handcrafted is the approach we wish to take,” said the manager
in Workshop Number Forty-Two. His glasses were skew and
looked like they would slip off his nose. His hair was full of
grease and his khaki tie was a shade of slate at best. His mouth
pursed as he spoke and one of his eyes quivered, but he was
known to string together the best folk; he wore a chain around
his neck, a talisman as a reminder of what might have been,
Every second link had a thorn.
He eyed the crowd gathered around his podium and pointed
at me: “Tell me Citizen, how do you feed the fire?” I beamed,
stood square and shouted out: “As the blessed lord may please,
with shards of his soul!” “May the soul feed the fire; may the
fire feed the soul!” shouted the manager. “You have to know,”
he said, “we were brought onto this planet for a purpose, for the
pain of it, not for your iridescent smile.” The workers applaud-
ed, tapped their chests, swept back their hair. They knew every-
thing lay in their own hands, and for that, they were grateful.
“Writing Towards the Future”: An Interview with Marc Vincenz
by Cassandra Atherton
Marc Vincenz is a poet-philosopher whose creative practice interrogates consciousness and panpsychism. His poetry makes use of associative techniques that join disparate concepts and challenge the reader to think laterally and widely. The familiar is frequently recontextualized, reframed or re-presented. This means that reading his poetry is often an uncanny experience, involving the metaphorical rewiring of the optic nerve of perception to create new worlds within an almost Schlegelian universe. Vincenz’s poetry connects to Schlegel’s idea of “a dialogue [that] is a chain or garland of fragments”. It is a way of “deep seeing.”
Vincenz is Anglo-Swiss-American, born in Matilda Hospital on the Peak in Hong Kong. He has traveled and lived all over the world, and this peripeteia informs his work and thinking. He is also an award-winning translator and multilinguist, and his gift for language feeds his interest in sonics in his poetry. He has published 20 poetry books, has many more in progress, and is publisher of MadHat Press and New American Writing. Vincenz lives in rural western Massachusetts with his wife, Miriam and dog-child, Emily—named after Emily Dickinson.
I met Marc on LitBalm, an international, interactive poetry reading series that he co-hosts on Saturday evenings on Zoom. He begins the series by reading one of his poems. The timbre of his voice and the emphases he places on the sonics in his poetry provide new ways to read and consider them on the page. For this reason, I urge you to listen to these sound files of his two poems.
Cassandra Atherton: In these poems and in a lot of your poetry is this world-building—there is real attention to detail, not only in what is expressed in the poems but also a richness in what is peripheral and what frames but is not necessarily mentioned in your poems. Can you talk about worldbuilding in poetry, especially the importance of the detail and image-making in your writing? And its associated evocativeness?
Marc Vincenz: That’s very interesting. It’s not a conscious act, I don’t step back and sketch it all out before I write the poem. And I don’t have a concept, or think, “what’s this mythology, what’s this world like?” I think it creates itself out of the poem, so it’s kind of like a phoenix rising out of its own mythological ashes. It’s rather alchemical, really. I set myself in a place or in a parallel world, with all the information from my past, and I try to channel those things and become that place in that particular moment.
CA: So, how does your personal kind of history feed into this world building, how does it inform the different worlds you’ve created?
MV: Okay, so, for example, with the poem, “All the Steel,” I have very, very strong visual receptors of memory from all my experiences in China—walking through factories, working in factories, seeing steel pieces churned out on machines by the thousands. There were mothers nursing daughters as they were punching out rivets, sleeping next to the machines. But also, I remember going into the foundry and seeing steel actually being melted down from ore, cast and then punched out. So, I saw the process from start to finish and had all those images in my head when I wrote that poem. Then I tried to reflect on its historicity, how steel has influenced the world, how it’s created the substructure that we so heavily lean upon. And, it’s amazing to me—and this goes into one of the fundaments of my poetry—its essence. It’s amazing to me that we, as humanity, mine, tap, resource, use and absorb all these resources from Mother Earth (that we were born on) and turn them into something else. That is actually alchemy, I mean imagine you pouring five chemicals out of the earth and creating a light bulb, for example. So that facility, is pure magic—alchemy. If you view it in the spectrum of evolution, in Darwinian thought, the network of creatures on the planet—including reptiles, humans, primates, insects, birds—is a root element. So, we all came from the original substance. What was that original substance? All consciousness comes out of that.
CA: That taps into a question I was going to ask you about your poems having an eco-poetic pulse that run through them, where animals and nature are in harmony and humans can occasionally also find a symbiotic relationship if they don’t destroy it. Why is the environment, and this kind of balance, so important in your poetry?
MV: I have so much to say about this. First of all, we humans hail ourselves as the sentient beings on the planet, which in my mind is complete and utter bullshit. Yes, we have developed technologies that are way beyond just sticking a twig in a hole. Is that a good thing? Is that a positive thing for, shall we say, a continuation of a beautiful universe? I don’t know, I couldn’t say. But I think the separation between man or humanity and other living creatures on this planet changed dramatically, of course, during the Darwinian times. There was a strong kind of disconnect or some kind of expression of “we are this and you are that” sort of thing, or “you’re part of the wild and we are civilized,” or something like that. But, of course, today, no one sees things like that—although of course there’s another disconnect with nature, which is our virtual world, our mobile apps all this kind of stuff. So, I try and figure out all this in my approach to animals and nature. My core belief is that we are all one: plants, animals, humans, moss, any single tree on the planet—one ecosystem. We are all part of Mother Earth and we have to coexist and respect each other. We have to treat each other with reverence. When I take my morning walks with my dog, Emily, I try in that hour, or hour and a half when I’m walking with her, not to think about anything else, except being with her in nature. And if she wants to go down a little path that some squirrel might have walked, we’ll go down that path and check it out. In that time, I just put everything else out of my mind and focus on that moment. And I suppose, in a way, that’s also how I approach my poetry as well. Every poem, every piece that I write is hyperfocused in its own mythology.
CA: Yes, I remember you based your previous book, A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, on what Emily would bring home from those kinds of immersive experiences in nature. By contrast, in your poetry, many humans are terrible people who are ordered into hierarchies of oppressive leadership.
MV: Certainly, my ten years in China working in and out of hundreds of factories and running a big industrial design company with many employees figures in my work. And for that part of it, I’m grateful, because I think it allows me to have a scope on the managers’ eyes, the workers’ eyes, and give the world another perspective of how this interconnects with the grand scheme of the politico or whatever is riding the wave at the moment. I have no solution. Lenin had a very good idea, as did Karl Marx. But that has nothing to do with what Putin is doing today. And unfortunately, all of those folks who adopted or started out idealistically adopting Lenin’s and Marx’s thoughts on the way the world should work have ended up turning it into something that is just another dictatorship. I’ve read many books about Mao. And I visited most of his sacred sites. My feeling is that he definitely started out—as probably even Stalin did—with an idea of a more egalitarian society and a more even society, where your value was not just based on your capital. And then eventually this becomes its own whirlwind of thought, and suddenly it becomes something else, and you’re just in the middle of it, with everything swirling around you, and you don’t even realize where you are. You still believe, or that central person still believes, that they are following their idealist goals. But actually, they’re somewhere else entirely. That’s also what I write about—self-delusion or a fiction that creates something. A Brief Conversation with Consciousness is obviously ironic. First of all, how can you have a “brief” conversation with consciousness? That’s impossible. But what is consciousness anyway? So it’s definitely [blows raspberry] to all you quasi-intellectuals out there. Let’s get on with it, let’s get serious!
CA: I wanted to ask you about Iceland. Both of the poems “All the Steel” and “The Last Descendent” mention futuristic worlds. Why are you focusing on the futuristic at this moment in history? And you once talked about the lunar landscapes in Iceland that seem to play an important part in your work—does that connect in some way with your futuristic visions?
MV: So, to the Iceland issue. The Icelandic landscape is a great landscape to have in the back of your head. I remember being with my partner at the time, driving down in the highlands of Iceland in the middle of nowhere. In Iceland, basically everyone lives on the coast, nobody lives in the interior. The interior is like a lunar landscape, it’s crazy. It’s treeless, it’s windswept, there are craters and people have left cans all over the place. I don’t remember the name of the place, but I remember coming into the top of the center of Iceland and then there’s this vast wasteland like the Grand Canyon except with more clay, or richer, with this constant humidity. And it really looks like an alien planet when you arrive. My partner and I drove down into the alien landscape. There wasn’t a hotel, but there was a camping site. So just camping there in that alien landscape in that moment, drinking a vodka martini that I had just shaken right there in the dusk moments of the day—it was just an incredible experience. And yes, definitely images like that have been in my writing, always. I reach back to those things that I’ve seen and I try and pull them into some new context.
CA: And why futuristic, why narratives that occur sometime in the future?
MV: Well, most everything I write is written toward the future. I mean the past, of course, has informed us in so many ways, but what I’m interested in is the future—in my future, in your future, in my family’s future.…
CA: And the future allows you to talk about the present in more abstract and interesting ways?
MV: Yes, there’s all these kinds of “what if” questions that continuously arise, like those interactive books. You can decide: do I kill him, do I kiss him, do I throw them him off the bridge? And then, depending on that, it becomes the next part of the story. The future is the only thing that really matters because today we’re already living—we’ve lived. So, it’s always about tomorrow. We both agreed those vinegary Spanish anchovies, boccarones, are the best things! And so tomorrow, I want to eat some boccarones. I actually took them out of the freezer when you sent me that photo in a text. See, the thing is, you know about things, that they exist, so when you approach your next day or your next hour, all those things you know (or think you know) from the past or what you’ve experienced, influences your next step. But then my other question is, how does that all come together? When you think about your past life, for example, do you see it imagistically, do you hear and see it like a movie in your head? In my in my head, anyhow, it’s all a bunch of images, some words, some audio—a scramble of stuff. There’s not a movie that plays in my head from A to Z. It doesn’t happen like that. It’s also about making sense of all those images and sounds and tastes and sensations on your skin; your vision of the future.
CA: You have talked about the “alien eye” as a way to try and see the world as an outsider and explore, among other things, the mythmaking that humans use in storytelling to explain their decisions and choices over time. It results in some wonderfully uncanny moments. Can you discuss this approach in your poetry?
MV: Wow. Okay. One of the things I often think about is, how does another creature, another animal on this planet view us. What are they thinking when they see us doing a certain thing. For example, what does my dog Emily think I’m doing when I’m chopping garlic? Or if I’ve got a pan on low heat with some oil in it and I’ve just chopped the garlic and it goes in and then some bacon goes in and she’s like, “wow, this smells are amazing” as she is jumping around. But what is she thinking that I’m doing? How does she think about it? Or let’s take another example. I read a lot about animal communication. I read dozens of books about it and I watch every movie that I can get my hands on because I like the idea of thinking, how would a different brain see something? For example, on Netflix recently there’s a movie with an octopus.
CA: Octopus Teacher, I loved that.
MV: That’s just one example of communicating with another kind of mind. It is a mind that is stimulated and aroused by different things. Like just the other day, I said to Miriam, my wife, “Do you think when Millie starts barking and someone is walking on the road so far away that we can’t even hear them, is it the smell of them that gets her going first, or is it the sound of them?” Even thinking about how obviously a dog’s sense of smell and sense of hearing is far superior to us. So, which one is the one that gets her going first? And when she walks around sniffing the ground as we take a walk, what is she sniffing for, because she’s super intense in her sniffing. Is she trying to figure out what kind of creature passed by here? Is she trying to figure out who is the Lord of the road? What is she trying to figure out? This all comes into play into the way I approach writing in the sense that it’s important to try and get as much objectivity as you can when you approach what you’re writing. That is my personal precept, anyway! Always try your best to back yourself off from the subject matter as far as you can, to look at it from as big of a scope as you can. And then start honing it. So, that’s my approach.
CA: I love that because there’s an outsiderness and an insiderness that’s happening at the same time.
MV: And every once in a while I’ll also try going from the inside, out. I imagine myself to be a seed in a fungal network that becomes a mushroom that grows on a tree. And the tree then intertwines with another tree, and the mushroom grows all over the tree and spores. So, sometimes I’ll do it that way. But that’s just an analogy for the way I approach the writing, itself. Of course, it doesn’t always have to be a tree and a mushroom. But that’s the kind of expansive thinking that is part of my work.
CA: I want to talk about the wonderful humor in your poetry and the way it is allied to some bleak moments. And the idea of poetry is always there, almost as a form of resilience. I love the idea of “Caverns of the Pantoum” with its hanging foxes in “The Last Descendent”, and then the opposition of “infinity” and “zero” in “All the Steel”—“Infinity was more your piece of toast” is one of my favorite lines. Can you talk about your use of comedy (sometimes black comedy, often word play) in your work?
MV: Well, comedy is the glue of the world and if you have no humor in your work, you have no work, in my opinion. You need to evoke a response in your audience. And you do that in a dramaturgical kind of way and make them weep or laugh. And if you can do both, then you have them. I think there’s that sense of the playwright, in the poems on one level—a Shakespearean thing, I hope. But humor, I mean, they say every laugh extends your life by a minute or something like that. We can’t take ourselves too seriously. Everything is up for grabs, as the guys from South Park say. Make fun of everything because nothing needs to be taken that seriously. Yes, today, 3.5 million Ukrainians are refugees and Putin’s Russian war machine is beating down on that country and turning it to rubble. I think the number I heard today was 400 billion dollars worth of damage done already. That is also very important in my message. Why does one person, have a right to say, ‘I own this and you don’t’? Based on what? I have several poems called “Wall” or “The Wall”—this fictitious thing you put up to hide and protect your assets. Your assets? Whose assets? Who owns anything? We live in a capitalist world and we pay for things. But who has the right to say or not what the borders are? Why this is worth this and this worth that. I mean, yes, if we were to go back to barter it would be kind of difficult as a poet—I give you two books of poetry for a loaf of bread. I don’t have a solution, but we need to think about these things.
CA: I wanted to talk about is the way your poems can stand alone, but when they’re placed in a book they become a sequence or narrative that has incredible tension. Can you talk a little bit about how you think your individual poems stand alone but are also part of something larger?
MV: I’m always writing a book of some sort. So, there’s always a mythology within the book that I’m working with. So, it’s my personal goal that every poem should be able to stand alone and be part of a whole, always. And even with the fiction that I’m writing now, I’m trying to write each chapter, so it could be read as a separate story but also part of the whole story. There must be a word for this, whereby you have a piece of art within a piece of art. But that it’s part of the piece of art—a mosaic piece in the larger portrait or landscape. And yet that mosaic piece that was painted is also a painting, in itself. So then, hopefully, the paintings connect with each other, allegorically, figuratively, directly. But they also create this bigger whole. So you’ve got this kind of micro to macro kind of thing going. I see my different books as kind of layers in a larger thing. I think they are all interconnected with each other, or I hope they are. That’s also partly my goal—that each part, each word, each book interconnects with the other book on some level and informs the other. So hopefully if you were to read all 19 or 20 books that I’ve published, you will get a sense that there is something much bigger going on there than the one book.
CA: Like Schlegel and the idea of fragments—that they complete and whole and yet they’re also fragments; connected to other things and themselves.
MV: You know I don’t frequently go back to my earlier work, but I do sometimes and I see my own evolution somehow. Which is interesting. So, part of it is also this evolutionary thing, this natural, fungal sprouting and stuff that began here and now it’s here and I’ve just got to go with it. All the books that I’ve written are kind of like tests for the final book, because there’s going to be a final book before I die. I still hope that I have a few years left to do that! But they’re all sort of sketches of the final thing. The whole oeuvre is continuously focusing on trying to distil not only the language but expression and the narrative and the symbolism. I’m trying to do my own alchemy.
CA: You’ve had a rough year with a cancer diagnosis, scans and treatment. You’ve always prioritized discussions of consciousness and mortalities, which remind me in various ways of Heidegger and living in the knowledge of death. Has that intensified or changed in any way with your recent diagnosis or it is just an example of what you already thought was happening?
MV: I would say the latter, definitely—what I already thought was happening. In terms of dealing with mortality, I think I told you in another interview, I’m okay, with it. I think the most important thing is to just live the fullest life that you can every single moment—whatever that means for you. For me it means enjoying the most amazing sensual pleasures, from food to touch to language, to music, to art—as much as I can, every day. And my connection with my spirits—with my wife, my wonderful daughter-dog, my stepchildren and sister. Obviously, you know this wasn’t my first health scare, it was the second one in a row. The first one—the thyroid storm and heart failure—gave me like a big smack over the head so I was ready the second time. So there was a year, when I was just trying to get my heart back to a normal tick, which thankfully, it seems that I have now managed. By the way, Thyroid Storm is a great title for a poem!
CA: Prose poetry is my favorite form of poetry—and these two poems are prose poems. What is it you like about the prose poem form?
MV: I’ve been thinking for a long time, having only written lineated poems for years and years, about trying the prose poem form. And every once in a while, I write a poem in lineated form and I think to myself somewhere, you know, in the anterior, that this really should be a prose poem. But I felt I just couldn’t do it, as I’ve got into a habit of breaking lines. And so, finally, there was one day when I met this strange person from Australia who loved her prose poetry, so I just thought, “Okay, what the hell.” And so I decided consciously for the next book, I’m just going be free. So if, when I write it, it wants to be lineated, I let it be lineated. But if I feel even the slightest inkling that it doesn’t want to be, I’d just go straight to prose. So I decided, from now on I’m not going to limit myself the way I write. Every book, from now on, will have both lineated poems and prose poems depending in what the poem decides it wants to be.
CA: Many of the connections in your writing are associative and intuitive rather than relying on logic. Can you say what effects you aim for in working like this?
MV: There are several ways. One, of course, is sonic. And sometimes I hesitate to follow the sonic because it can easily turn cheesy. But I have this particular thing with assonance. I just need to hear that rhythm somewhere in the back. And so for me, that’s really what defines being a poem—having an internal rhythm of some sort. So there’s that part of it—the sonic experience—that not only includes the rhythm, but also the ambience, the expression (at least when it’s oral), which I think is also very important to inform the poem. Every single poem that I write, I always read it several times and record it and play it back to myself to get a sense of it from that perspective. Because when you read it on the page, very often you can’t tell how the author is actually going to read it. That’s the sonic thing and then there’s a visual thing whereby within a framework of what you’ve decided your mythology is going to be, you allow certain images to come in and others you don’t allow. And those can inform the poem. It’s very hard to explain how I do that but, for example, let’s say today I’m going to write a poem about being in a jungle on some level, I imagine that jungle in my head, all of it—the birds, the monkeys the insects, the moisture, everything. So that is my canvas, then I write the poem. It could also be, for example, a sewer in a city with thousands of rats. And then, for example, again, I draw my experience from India, being on the train station in Varanasi late at night, with thousands of rats running up and down the tracks or pigeons shitting by the thousands from above—creature controlled human effort. So that’s another canvas. I’m a very visual writer. I see images when I write them. Once again, going back to objective vision—how to pull yourself back—I think a poem is interesting for me when for example, you’re in a microfocus for a minute and you pull out into a big wide angle and then you come back into microfocus again. Shall we say, that’s like a cinematographer’s perspective.
CA: Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?
MV: The Age of Occasions is my big project. It basically comprises three novellas in one novel. The idea is that each chapter, which represents a prose poem, stands by itself. Each book, which is a novella stands by itself and there are three of them, but they work as one novel together. Each poem in every book stands by itself, but is also part of a novella, which is also part of a novel, which is all connected with this itself.
CA: Thank you so much for your time. It’s been so wonderful hearing you talk about your poetry.
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, artist and musician. He has published 20 collections of poetry, including more recently, The Little Book of Earthly Delights, A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, and forthcoming in 2023, The Pearl Diver of Irunami (White Pine Press). His work has been published in many venues, including The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing.
Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning prose poet and international expert on prose poetry. She was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Japan, and is currently Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. Cassandra co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, her most recent book of prose poetry is Leftovers.