Spring 2015 BlazeVOX Interview with Seth Abramson 15 Questions For you to Answer: Tell me about your book. Metamericana is a collection of concept-driven texts that combine original, appropriated, and remixed language. Each piece is intended as an entirely different conceptual space from any other, meaning that the book includes a wide range of language expressions and experiments: everything from the actual text of a cease-and-desist letter sent to me by Shia LaBeouf's attorney (long story) to an epic poem comprising four-word phrases from every song ever released by Taylor Swift (arranged in the order the songs were released). There's an actual transcript of the end of the world--a very particular virtual world that actually existed and had tens of thousands of inhabitants--as well as an original poem composed exclusively of phrases that have their own texting acronyms. My hope is that each page will give the reader a reading experience they can honestly say they've never before had. What influenced this book? In mid-2013 I turned aside from a decade of studying poststructuralism both in and out of the academy and became a dedicated metamodernist. Metamodernism is a small but growing movement that holds late poststructuralism to be both a political failure (from the standpoint of a political progressive, at least) as well as entirely inapt to today's network culture. Metamodernism, as a cultural philosophy, juxtaposes the idealism of Modernism and the cynicism of postmodernism by promoting exploration of what theorists now call "informed naivete" in an elevated middle space between the two. Metamodernism offered me a means of processing the wash of data we all experience every time we go online--specifically by allowing me to treat others' language and my own as interchangeable rather than in a constant state of contestation. Metamodernism offers a new framework for such literary techniques as misappropriation, remixing, mash- ups, conceptual confessionalism, meta-writing, and many others. The results are often as provocatively strange as poststructuralist writing is, even as they are much more readable and (dare I say) relatable to how we live now each day in America. My hope is that this book will be at once a fun read and an authentic performance of how we generally (and I specifically) process language in the Digital Age. Where does this book fit into your career as a writer? I think I've been headed in this direction a long time. My second and third poetry collections featured atmospheric, non-adjectival lyric poems whose atemporality and rhetoric-driven rhythms looked ahead (I hope) to a time when we needn't choose between writing "self-expressive" first-person verse and indulging a political and creative dead-end like late-postmodernist "conceptual writing." I've been trying to explore the middle space between ego-driven and deracinated poetry--and between audience-aware and audience- indifferent poetry--since the mid-2000s, and I think Metamericana is the closest I've come yet to the region of thought and emotion I'd like most to explore. A former professor once told me that my poems seem intent on creating "a wormhole between the head and the heart" without having to explore any of the space in- between, and thus paradoxically end up living almost entirely in that "in-between" space where the work is neither emotive nor abstract. I feel that's a pretty good summary of where I'm at, or at least where I'd like to be at. If you had to convince a friend or colleague to read this book, what might you tell them? I don't know whether people will like this book or not, but I can say (and I really do mean this to be entirely separate from the question of reception or even whether the book is any good or not) that very few people have read a book like this one before. This is a book for which even a quick review of the back cover--which is a language experiment that turns the notion of the "blurb" on its head--will communicate to most readers that the author of Metamericana really had little interest in reproducing poetry (or even the "poetry collection") as it's currently being written. Tell me about the last literary reading you attended. A few days ago my wife and I attended a reading put on by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. It was thrilling to see the range of work these students have written in the two years they've been in Madison: everything from lyric poetry with an abiding interest in Classical Greece to a sort of conversational and comedic metamodernism. One poet is even writing work we might consider "paramodernist"--a form of New-New Sincerity that's a return to the first principles of Modernism with full knowledge of the postmodern and metamodern periods that interceded between the Modernists and the mid-Internet Age. Anyone who thinks experimental writing is primarily happening on the coasts, or that creative writing in the academy is still such a provincial premise that all such writing is mere self-parody, should attend a reading like this one. More than ever before, poets are taking advantage of the patronage of non-profit institutions to explore the possibilities of language rather than merely seeking to meet institutional expectations. At this reading were works that would delight classicalists and lovers of poetry in translation, but also works that speak to the current metamodern zeitgeist and the possibility of eradicating cynicism and irony from poetry altogether--and in a way that doesn't at all cheapen our hard-won knowledge of the world and its systemic tragedies. When did you realize you were a writer? In the fall of 1998, when I was a 1L in law school. I discovered that half my brain--literally--was rebelling against being a graduate student in the social sciences. I knew by October of that first year of legal training that I wouldn't survive through my third year without learning to use language creatively as well as (as attorneys do) with a rigorous rationalism. Poetry literally got me through law school, and once I became a public defender I never looked back. My hybrid poet/attorney self-identity saved me from falling into utter despair as I watched people's lives get destroyed daily by the American criminal justice system. I realized then that while poetry can't single-handedly take down a system, it can provide hope for all renegades and, in time, a systematic alternative to the cynicism of conformity and compliance. Tell us about your process. Pen and paper, computer, notebooks--how do you write? I write on my computer, as computer technology is absolutely indispensable to cutting and pasting quickly when you're remixing original and found material. It's a change for me, though: I wrote many of the poems in my second and third collections (or at least many of their opening lines and stanzas) with pen and paper. How do you handle a bad review of your work? I think we as poets are lucky to just get read at all, honestly. A bad review that's thoughtful isn't at all bothersome because it's a sincere engagement with the text, and I think poets always expect that each reader will engage with the text differently and find its differentially generative for them. The reviews I find upsetting are the ones that are thinly disguised ad hominem attacks; these are distressing on both a personal level (because what sort of nasty spirit is required to dedicate oneself to dehumanizing another author in this way?) as well as on a professional level (because it speaks ill of where poetry-reviewing is headed). Generally, though, a bad review--or any review at all--is just a snapshot in the literary lifespan of that particular reader. Years hence that reader might feel differently, as I know I often have years after writing something critical about a text. And even in the present, a reader with different sensibilities than that particular critic is essentially having an entirely different life experience; not every book is intended for every reader, and as a poet I just hope to find my readership in time--however large or small it may be. Which writer would you most like to have a drink with, and why? Walt Whitman. If even 1% of his spirit and energy could rub off on me during the course of a single meeting, I think I could live the rest of my life appreciating the gift of sentience exponentially more than I do now. What's the biggest mistake you've made as a writer? Caring what anyone thinks about my writing or my ideas. I don't mean that as harshly as it sounds; in fact I've become much more attuned to audience as I've continued developing as a writer, and much more committed to understanding the tradition I'm writing in and against rather than just writing in a vacuum. But I think that, as an English poet of my acquaintance once said to me, once you get to the point where you've put in a necessary span of years writing and reading your own and others' poetry, you have to begin trusting yourself. All writers have to cut the cord with their community in this way at some point; workshopping (implicit or explicit, indirect or direct) is a useful tool for a time, but it's not a prescription for a lifetime in language.