Assistant Editor Lisa Low: This fall, we’ve welcomed poets Aditi Machado and Felicia Zamora as new faculty members at the University of Cincinnati. They’ll both read this Thursday, alongside Coordinator of Creative Writing Jenn Habel and our own Lisa Ampleman, as part of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference Reading Series. Ahead of Thursday’s reading, we’re sharing conversations with both Machado (today) and Zamora (tomorrow) on the blog. If you’re able to, check out the reading at 8pm ET on Thursday, and stay tuned for the second interview!
First of all, welcome to Cincinnati, Aditi! The University of Cincinnati creative writing program is so excited to have you join us here, though I’m sure the pandemic didn’t make it easy to move. These rapidly changing times have me thinking a lot about our practices and roles as writers and (for many of us) as teachers. What has writing and teaching been like for you during the pandemic?
Thank you for the welcome, Lisa! I’m thrilled to be here. It has been unusual, guilt-inducing even, to experience such good fortune while all else is calamity. It has made me, I hope, more attentive to the needs of others, especially those of students.
Teaching—the doing of it as well as my thinking on it—keeps changing, sometimes from hour to hour. At the present moment, just past midterm, I’m finally reckoning with just how much meeting my class (*shout-out to my brilliant Forms of Poetry students*) twice a week has anchored me in what would otherwise be a morass of time.
There are mixed feelings too. We tend to associate technology with innovation, but I’ve found my pedagogy becoming less daring, less capacious in its means and ends. The “discussion post” turns increasingly sinister. I’d replace it any day with a writing walk or group collage exercise, except I can’t. My assumptions and expectations keep getting thwarted: that an online classroom would improve accessibility or “level the playing field” turns out to be rather untrue. Then again, I’m witnessing incredible wit and compassion and flexures of intellect from the students. It just keeps changing!
As for writing—it hasn’t been a priority. I’m not a prolific writer and never expected the pandemic to be a hospitable environment for making. For a few weeks over the summer, I wrote some notes but haven’t had the chance to work on them. It disturbed me to discover that poems I’d written in late 2019 and early 2020 were rife with images of what now we’re calling a global pandemic.
I know you’re a translator as well as a poet. I’d love to learn about the relationship between your poetry work and translation. Where do they separate, and where do they overlap?
That’s a great question but also too big for me to answer adequately here. The simplest answer would be something like: they’re twin practices. Translating is writing too. I tend to think I became a more interesting writer after, and while, translating Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. There’s something about sinking into someone else’s—a different language’s—syntax and sonics that reorients your relationship to your chosen writing language(s). Increasingly, I place translation at the center of my practice, and translated literatures at the center of my canons/lineage, in so far as I cannot help but articulate influence in binaries like center-and-periphery.
By way of brief example: at the heart of Emporium lie a psychiatric report from 1908 by Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (it pathologizes four working-class women who were apprehended stealing swatches of fabric from department stores, acts which aroused them sexually) and a cinematic adaption of it by Yvon Marciano. I translated both texts in various and partial ways so often they leaked out into everything else I was living and writing; or, they delineated, enlivened, and enriched aspects of my life (my own love of fabrics and fashioning; my questions about money and haptic vision) that were already there—it’s impossible to say which came first. There is no first.
Lastly, congrats on your new book, Emporium, winner of the James Laughlin Award! I’m so excited to read it. As someone who’s putting together her first-book manuscript, I’ve been thinking a lot about how manuscripts change and are shaped into their final versions—which I’m sure happens differently and to varying degrees, depending on the book. Could you talk about your process of shaping your book (and if it applies, any differences stemming from it being your second book of poems)?
I think a book can be a way of asking a question repeatedly without ever deigning to answer it. Some Beheadings (my first book) and Emporium came together quite differently in part because I was immersed in a different sets of materials, landscapes, and queries—but also, with Beheadings, I didn’t always know what I was writing toward. At first, I was simply collecting poems that seemed to me similar. I’d try to make connections between them so as to better arrange and rewrite them. I kept at this for a few years, taking out poems and writing new ones. The book’s title changed a few times. It was only after I wrote the opening piece (“Prospekt”), a serial poem that’s twenty or so pages long (from which I culled the phrase “some / beheadings”) that I began to understand some of what I was exploring: the relationship between thought and landscape; an ongoing, thus-far inarticulable irritation with prevalent notions of the “lyric I.” It then became necessary to rethink all else I’d written, or meant to write, in terms of the landscapes to which they bore relation (rainforest, desert, etc.). That one poem helped me shape out the rest of the book, like a key, a prospec(k)t onto further questioning. I guess that’s one way of putting a book together.
I began writing Emporium shortly after sending Some Beheadings off to publishers. This time I realized more quickly what I was wanting to mess with. (From my notebook at around this time: “emporium as the arena of the poem—a destruction of private space,” followed by a list of words I was interested in as well as annotations of Marciano’s film Le cri de la soie.) The result is that as I was writing, I was creating little pathways to follow. The first line of the first poem I wrote goes “I came along a silk route,” so it followed that the book was to be a journey of some kind and that I needed to concoct encounters along its course. As I finished one section, I’d decide the next stop the speaker would make or the sort of object she would find in a market. That makes it sound like I had an easy time of it; I didn’t; but it was mostly a lot of a fun. I don’t think I’ll write another book like it.
Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her second book of poems, Emporium (Nightboat, 2020) received the James Laughlin Award, and appears from Nightboat Books. Her other works include the poetry collection Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016), and several chapbooks, the most recent of which is an essay titled The End (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Machado’s work appears in journals like Lana Turner, Volt, Chicago Review, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2. A former poetry editor for Asymptote (2011-2019) and visiting writer-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis (2018-2020), she now works as an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati.
