An Interview with heidi andrea restrepo
Poetry editor Tuuli Qin-Terrill and heidi andrea restrepo talk form, inspiration, and humanity in this pre-publication interview. Find restrepo’s poem, “& how the body keeps is a black hole” on PassagesNorth.com. You can also find their new book, Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric, at Milkweed.org.
INTERVIEW
Qin-Terrill: I find the word choice in your poem “& how the body keeps is a black hole” so attractive in its particularity especially as it is married to the prose block. Could you talk about when, during your composition process, you choose the form of a poem? Does the form find the poem or does the poem find the form?
Rhodes: That ampersand in particular is about trauma, a counter-narrative to the popularized notion that "the body keeps the score." About the sources of trauma and how trauma expresses, including through the suicide of a loved one we lost in early COVID pandemic time. It is about how the body absorbs trauma into a recipe for illness, brings numerous deaths and birthings of self upon us. And also the transfigurations we find through trauma, how we relate through it, what we make of it. How we need each other in the face of the forces that seek to undo us.
Across this whole collection, the prose block appears to be the dominant bodying shape of each "poem" or ampersand. In the writing process, I was feeling an explicit connection between the body of the poem and neuroqueer bodies, acknowledging the assimilative imposition of form and form's legibility, into this thing we call "the Prose Block Poem" or "the Human." For me, these ampersands, as much as my bodied-ness, are ever more-than, ever in excess of form, of what is legible within a mainstreamed, neuronormative imagination. What appears to be bounded by a perimeter (of text, of skin) spills out so far beyond the visible limit that society reinforces as the real shape of a thing. There is an important relationship between what is more-than-meet's the eye and what is more-than-human.
Further, most of the ampersands stay on one page, “& how the body keeps is a black hole” does not, so maybe there is something significant, too, about this one spilling over onto the next. The property regime organizing normative ideas of "the book" and what is seen as the territory of the singular page, and the predictability (the governability) of the block, are all subverted by the ampersand's refusal to be finished as much as by their spillages of meaning, syntax, meaning-making, and referentiality.
I like to think form and poem are always becoming together in the with-ness of their perpetual unfolding, evading finality. The print on the page, less a concretion than a bursting-forth that behaves differently upon every read. What changes for us as readers and writers, if we consider form and poem as mutually desiring of each other, willing each other into existence, working to free each other as part of the work of liberation we are also trying to do?
Qin-Terrill: A number of your pieces have footnotes for quotes from a variety of external sources such as your poem “& how the body keeps is a black hole” which references the non-fiction work The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. What is your approach to incorporating other voices with your own lyricism and how do you find it influencing your poetic process?
Rhodes: I've been in a process of inquiry toward a refusal of liberal individualism and a crip, neuroqueer, more-than-human entanglement of our bodies and being, our existence, and what that does to voice, to citation, to sourcing. It feels complicated. I always want to name and honor those whose thinking and creativity have made me and made my own thinking and creativity possible. Especially as, historically, colonial-capitalist endeavors have included the theft and appropriation of ideas and thought (of women, of people of color, of queer and trans people, of crip/disabled and neurodivergent people, of more-than-human worlds) as part of a property regime that disqualifies certain lives as agential or relational, and submits us and what we make to extractive violence. So many have been denied personhood, and it isn't my wish to take that away from anybody who feels it is important they have achieved it. I've had my ideas stolen by white people and cis-men who have taken credit for what wasn't theirs to take credit for, which feels like a way for them to confirm that I do not matter, and it feels awful to face that experience in a world organized by ideas of intellectual property, and racist, ableist and sexist hierarchy, etc. That has been happening to writers, artists, thinkers, for centuries.
And, and, and....
more recently, I was reading how the Poetic Research Bureau in Los Angeles "favors appropriations, impersonations, 'compost' poetries...historical thefts" as a way to enlarge the public domain. This feels aligned with my efforts to articulate something about neuroqueer inter- or intra-subjectivity and citation, about quantum physics, about a decolonial communism of the word. What is a more-than-human public? And is this the question I want to ask?
I am deeply influenced by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's articulation of "echotextia" as an elaboration of autistic echolalia; as well as Petra Kupper's notion of "ecosoma." I am interested in the interplay between the echo and the eco—of textual bodies and flesh bodies. If all life and thought and being are a series of echos in the ecology of relation, what does this do to the "public domain" and to the politics of knowledge production, citation, tribute and attribution; and to the singular subject of "the Author"? What does neuroqueer more-than-oneness and more-than-humanness do to how we understand voice beyond the notion of chorus? What role do autistic mirroring and other social mimicries play in the echotextual/ecotextual and how do we understand this not as deficit (or failure to find one's "own" voice), but as refractive and diffractive methodologies for poiesis, or the bringing-into-being of worlds?
If the concept of the tabula rasa and "original thought" are rooted in western-European Enlightenment thinking, what are ways that we need to emerge from its hold to feel into the persistence of our collective "and-ing"? What if our sourcing is neither (merely) an event of divine inspiration in which, as the ancient Greeks proposed, we access already-existing, perfect knowledge through revelation; nor, as the Romantics claimed, an expression of sublimity and genius, poetic madness borne from individual reverie? What if it is rather (or also?) what Erin Manning calls the withness of being always more-than-one? How do we ethically experiment with ampersanding as a way to write, and a way of life? These questions, for me, reach into the cosmic expanse as much as the miniscule materiality of the everyday, and have implications for how we write and create as much as for how we respond to anti-trans violence, to ongoing genocides in Sudan and Palestine, to the production of climate disaster, and our planetary futures.
Qin-Terrill: What have you read recently that has really stuck with you? What about the work keeps it pinned in your memory?
Rhodes: In the last year-plus, I have been slowly, and with tremendous pleasure, making my way through Eleni Stecopoulos' Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing. I also keep returning to Joshua Whitehead's Making Love with the Land as well as to Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva. I think in each of these texts there is a leaning into the more-than of language, being, and relation, which compels me and nourishes me. They each feel kindred, or something in them makes me feel seen or cared for, invited to world together, in that they risk the difficulty of not-knowing, of mystery, of living in excess of the real and the empirical, of turning to intuitions, queer and indigenous esotericisms, vital materialisms, writing as a praxis of intimate unbecoming and becoming and unbecoming again.
All opinions expressed in Passages North interviews belong solely to the author and do not reflect the official views of Northern Michigan University, its Board of Trustees or campus affiliates.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal.
IG: @vessels.we.are
Tuuli Qin-Terrill is a poet, scientist, educator, and Chinese adoptee of the upper midwest. Her work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Dunes Review, and Bellingham Review, among others. Currently, she works as a remote biopharmaceutical researcher and is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University where she is a poetry editor for Passages North.
