Simina Banu’s first full-length
collection of poetry, POP, is a
heartbreaker. Banu draws on pop culture, critical theory, and her own sketches
to tell the story of a relationship falling apart, and a narrator trying to
find some sense of self in the decay. Her writing is clean and crisp, not to
mention deeply funny. She blends the abstract and the mundane to depict disconnection,
prompting broader questions about the relationships between theory and reality,
art and Ariana Grande in the process. Each of the book’s five sections is
introduced by a different definition of its title, as in: “POP / verb / to
move, especially from a closed space” or “POP / noun / a beverage consisting of
soda water, flavouring, and a sweet syrup.” Using pop’s many meanings, Banu
explores how heartbreak refracts through all the things we love: food, music,
and, of course, poetry itself.
Rosie Long Decter (RLD): The collection traces the arc of a breakup. What’s your
process like when you’re writing about something intimate and personal like
that? Do you consciously try to separate yourself from the narrator?
Simina Banu (SB): It was definitely an interesting process because I hadn’t
written like this before. The poetry that I’d written was usually more separate
from my life. But for this book, a lot of it really started as catharsis. Then when
I started to think that I was going to publish it and put it out into the world,
I began to pull back a little bit and ask myself, how much do I want to share?
What details should I change to make sure that it’s fair to everyone? I really
tried to make it so that it was all my story.
RLD: I wanted
to ask about the drawings and the sketches that appear throughout the book.
What’s the relationship between drawing and writing poetry like for you?
SB: I’ve
gravitated toward visual poetry pretty often throughout my life, arranging the
text on the page into some sort of image that I thought was aesthetically
pleasing and also fit with the meaning. For this book, I shifted away from
arranging text onto the page and started actually writing things with my hand. They
became more like drawings and sketches than visual poetry, but I think that fits
into one of the themes of the book, which is being liberated from constraints –
just letting everything go.
RLD:
Right. It sort of begs the question of when does a drawing start to be a poem?
Does it matter if there’s a line between the two or not?
SB:
I’ve always thought about that. A lot of those visual pieces started off on
Instagram, pieces that I was doing for catharsis, which eventually made their
way into the book. But when I started on Instagram I was thinking “Well, what
is the hashtag? What do I hashtag for this? Is it poetry, is it visual poetry,
is it a comic?” I think there’s a lot of overlap between these art forms.
RLD: I loved
that so many of the poems feature – especially in the first section, “Food
Fight,” – these sort of mundane, domestic items like junk food. What drew you
to writing about Cheetos?
SB:
That was something that happened organically. The other sections that had to do
with music and poetic form – [those themes] were all intentional. For the food
section, though, I was just writing a bunch of confessional pieces that ended
up revolving around food a lot. I think it’s because food is such a communal
thing and such a simple thing, so essential to our lives. To have a fight be
framed by food in a poetic way ended up having a lot of significance for me.
RLD: It
provides a very intimate way of understanding the relationship – through what
the two people are eating, and also the way they fight about what they’re
eating. You mentioned that one of the book’s themes is breaking out of
constraints. One of the themes that stood out to me – and feel free to disagree
– was the juxtaposing of the highbrow and the lowbrow. There’s an insecurity
about the highbrow that comes through, particularly in the poem “A Discourse,” when
the narrator fantasizes about annihilating all the theories that their partner
admires. What, for you, is generated by putting Derrida and Ariana Grande in
the same collection?
SB:
I’m really glad that you caught that, because that was definitely one of the
main things I was working with. I have often admired experimental poetry and
theory, but at the same time I also wonder to what degree they’re a bit
inaccessible. It was a question that I was asking myself within my
relationship, and it was an axis where fights were occurring. In writing the
book, I really wanted to collapse everything and try to elevate the importance
and the significance and the beauty of something like an Ariana Grande song.
That was one of the main reasons I called it POP.
RLD: That
comes through really strongly and it does seem to map onto the relationship, or
be a source of conflict in the relationship. Especially in the poem “All of it
in Theory,” which makes the most explicit references to particular theorists
like Sontag and Bataille. Can you tell me a bit about that poem?
SB:
That one was actually a hard one to write, because I think it’s one of the ones
where I was more emotional while I was writing it. It has to do with that
conflict within the relationship, where a lot of theory was coming from my
partner and there were all of these sorts of intellectual gymnastics and games
that we would play, while underneath it all there was a level of pain that
wasn’t really being addressed. To actually write that poem I used something
called the postmodernism generator on the internet. A lot of the quotes are not
real. They’re just a combination of phrases from various postmodern texts used
by the computer to generate sentences that are in some sense coherent, but not
very coherent.
RLD:
That makes sense, because I was trying to parse it and I was like, “I’m not
really getting anywhere by trying to parse this, so I’m just going to ask about
it.”
SB: Absolutely,
that was the effect that I was going for. It’s a bit mean on my part to these
theories that obviously do have value. I’m not saying that they don’t. But
that’s what I felt during the relationship – there was so much going on that
really felt like that, like I couldn’t parse it, and it was kind of used in a
weaponized way.
RLD: I
wanted to talk a bit about music in the collection, too, especially the series
of earworm poems, which are handwritten in the shape of CDs. Can you tell me a
bit about those?
SB:
That was one that I was editing up until the last month or the last few weeks,
because it went through so many iterations. I knew that I wanted to include
something in a CD format to represent a repetition or an earworm or some sort
of message that was being ingrained, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I printed
off a bunch of actual CDs and wrote on them and tried taking pictures, but
eventually I came to this more minimalist approach.
The text that’s included is actually
text from a website that I came across – healthyplace.com – from an article
called “How Did You Brainwash Me?” The objective with that series of poems was
to condense the information that I had found that helped me and place it in the
book. To read the text in those poems you have to spin the book around, which I
thought was cool because it represented a feeling of everything being flipped
upside down.
RLD: In
the third section, poetry – or a poem specifically – becomes a stand-in for the
relationship that’s falling apart. You reference several different forms of
poetry – haikus and epics and sonnets – before the relationship “flatten[s]
into prose.” Why the poem as metaphor for the relationship? What do you make of
the irony that you’re writing poems about a poem?
SB:
They seemed to me to be kind of analogous, poems and relationships. In poems,
someone is trying to fit their emotion perfectly into stanzas and rhyme
schemes. Obviously, there are a lot of different types of poems and many of
them don’t have these constraints, but I was particularly interested in the
constraints because to me they feel similar to the constraints that we tried to
put on our relationship. We tried to redefine it 800 different ways and nothing
worked. I was trying to do the same thing with these poetic forms.
RLD: A
lot of the collection seems to deal with this process of creating. The poem
that opens Part Four asks a series of dichotomous questions, like “is this
nervous laughter or an inside joke,” and “is this a sunset or time for
breakfast,” repeating over and over again the same answer: “Either way, the
artist has created both.” How do you see the act of creation as depicted
through these poems?
SB:
That particular poem was inspired by an image that I posted on Instagram –
there was a comment that asked, “is the little guy doing this or is he doing that”
and then at the end the commenter was like “either way, the artist has created
both.” And I thought that was wonderful. The process of creation was definitely
at the forefront of this book for a lot of reasons. In part, I was having a lot
of anxiety about writing about something so personal, and at the same time, I
was thinking, “if I’m going to do this, why am I doing it?” Because of that I
think a lot of questions pop up inside it, questions of why people create – is
it for Instagram, is it for catharsis, is it for a brand deal, is it for
aesthetic reasons? There are a lot of reasons. I don’t have an answer yet.
Simina Banu is
a writer interested in interrogating her own experience with technology,
consumerism, pop culture and the poetics of (un)translation. Her poetry has
appeared in numerous journals, including filling
Station, untethered, In/Words Magazine and the Feathertale Review. In 2015,
words(on)pages press published her first chapbook, where art. Her second chapbook, Tomorrow, adagio, was released in 2019 through above/ground press. POP is her first full length collection
of poetry. She lives and writes in Montreal.
Rosie Long Decter is a writer and musician based in
Montreal. Her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Vallum: Contemporary
Poetry, THIS, Briarpatch, Reader’s Digest, Montreal
Writes and elsewhere. Her compositions for film and theatre have featured
at festivals including Toronto Fringe, Revolution They Wrote, and Visions du
Réel. In 2019, her band Bodywash released their debut LP, Comforter.
