Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in
the small press ecosystem
Interview #16: Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021) and Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day newsletter, The Slowdown and Having a Coke with You podcasts and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She first published with HangingLoose Press as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.
Michael Sikkema: I've been
spending some time with your forthcoming manuscript Data Mind, and it
got me thinking about the idea of "Body Genres," coined by Linda
Williams. Are you familiar with it? If not, the idea is basically that some
genres work on the body just as much as the mind, namely horror, melodrama, and
porn. These genres make us avert or cover our eyes, make us cry, or physically
arouse us, working on bodily systems which are not at all logical. I'm thinking
specifically about 2 poems from the manuscript which appeared in Black Sun
Lit, Out the Window, a Cat's Cry is a Portal to the
Internet and The Haunted Houseplant. In the first poem, you give us
this great image: "my skin curls itself around the digital clock,"
and it calls up body horror, exploring the separation/connection between our
bodies and the digitally dreamed up bodies that we farm inside us. The image
would be at home in a Cronenberg movie, I think. In the latter poem, we have
another time-related image with a hint of horror: "can the ass of the past
sprout fangs?" And we also have some porn-y images which continue to
explore the connections of our bodies to the digital world, including hard
drives ripping off their databases to reveal washboard abs, and a monitor
sporting a gold-plated strap-on. These poems, like most of the poems in
manuscript pull off these genre moves while also being really really funny. I
guess my question, finally, is what do you think of poetry as a body genre,
specifically the kind of poetry in Data Mind, which some people would
surely call 'surreal,' a word much used and abused. What ideas sparked this
manuscript, and what fed into the image system that you've created, which
includes questions like, "what monster fits best in a fur purse?"
Joanna Fuhrman: First, I’m glad you thought the poems were funny! I have definitely given readings in my life when I thought I was reading funny poems and no one laughed. It’s the worst.
I love Cronenberg (though some of the movies are terrible). I think I am especially influenced by Videodrome and eXistenZ. Those films capture the physical experience of having one’s mind changed through the intersection of technology and media. So yes, I think that spirit went into the writing of some of these poems. The two poems you mention are from the later half of the manuscript. I was thinking that the poems in that section happen after the body has been completely transformed into the data processing machine state. I was trying to create images that captured that feeling of being subsumed, of having one’s consciousness being taken over by the monster of online life.
When I wrote “The Haunted Houseplant,” the original impulse was to try to write a poem that captured how it felt to discover Trump had been elected president. When I look at the poem now, I see no one would ever know that, because as I worked on the poem, the images changed (kind of like O’Hara’s ORANGES in “Why I Am Not a Painter” ).
The earlier poems in the book try to capture more of my love of the internet, but as the collection continues and the reality of social media (which I still love) having led to Trump and Brexit and the rise of incel and pro-ana communities sinks in, the images become more horrific.
I don’t think that “body horror” is the primary “image system.” I think the internet itself contains all past media, the present and the future and the past are all swirled together, so I was trying to embody that feeling.
Surrealism is still important to me, not so much in terms of effect, but process. I am a big believer in not trying to control meaning too much, of trying to write towards the edge of what one understands.
MS: I’ve given no laugh readings and it is indeed the worst. It’s also interesting how poems can get big laughs in one city and no reaction at all in another.
I love and can relate to what you say about not controlling meaning, writing towards the edge of what one understands. It calls up the ideas of play, both in the sense of a “looseness” but also play as in playing, experimenting, improvising. The poems are playful and funny and sometimes horrific (and funny) as the manuscript progresses. What was your writing process like? How much mapping compared to reaching into the unknown?
JF: I started writing the poems in the book during a very difficult period in my life. My mom was very ill, and, after having finally gotten “my dream job,” there was a problem and there was a decent chance I was going to lose it. I felt totally at the edge of everything—hanging over an abyss. So I would wake up at 3 in the morning each night and write for a few hours in the notes app on my phone. It felt a little like the “dictation” [Jack] Spicer talks about. They weren’t final drafts, but there was enough there to work on/play with.
After a while, I realized I was writing about digital life as a non-digital native, so then I decided I should write about my thoughts about the internet. I wanted to use the poems as a way to think about how excited my contemporaries were in the mid to late ’90s, and what about the internet still brought me joy.
Film kept creeping into the poems, I think because the internet contains everything. So then I thought it would be fun to write more poems where old films were rewritten to be part of the Internet age.
As the manuscript started to grow, I also started to think somewhat more concretely about how the internet affected certain areas of life. I gave myself an assignment to write something about gun violence and abortion, trying to think about how the internet changed these realities.
After the book was accepted, my editor sent the manuscript out to an anonymous peer reviewer who said that she thought the book would be stronger if there were even more internet language and tropes. I agreed with her, but I also thought the poems I had written already were tight, and I couldn’t just throw in a bunch of internet language. It would make it sound like flarf, and that wasn’t what I wanted. So I thought I would try to add news poems that included more internet language. I tried to listen to podcasts about internet language and subgroups to get ideas. I ended up writing nine new poems within a week. I don’t usually write quickly, but I was really excited by the assignment, so they just came to me, and many of them are my favorites in the book. I also think the section headings were not working, so I decided to change the sections up a bit and use poetic memes instead of section titles. I think this choice also makes the book feel more “internet-like”
MS: Also, I know that you have significant experience teaching poetry writing to children, and from my experience with that, play is central. Many kids’ minds are playful, they play with language, and they’re often very comfortable not controlling meaning. How has working with children affected your own poetry writing?
JF: It depends on what age the children are. Little kids and sometimes non-neurotypical somewhat older children have access to amazing images that appear to just come to them. I remember when I was a young child and I would yell at anyone who would sit on the chairs where my two-inch-tall imaginary friends were sitting. The border between the real and imaginary was so permeable, and this ability to live in a kind of dream world creates wonderful poetry. Older children and teenagers often forget how to do this—how to live in this in-between space—so as a teaching artist I try to encourage them to connect to their imaginations again. As I am writing, I often ask myself the same sort of questions I might ask a student as they are working on a poem. I try to inspire a hyper-specificity that makes the abstract concrete. When one is working on a group poem with a class (a common method for teaching artists), one often asks them to add additional detail to their images and to remember that anything can happen in a poem; it doesn’t have to conform to the rules of the world. As I am working on my own work, I can hear this voice in my head.
MS: It seems like community is important to this project, in the sense that you had your editor and another reader giving you feedback, but also in the sense that the internet itself can provide a community, across huge swaths of spaces. And again, you say the project involved thinking about what the internet did for your community of writer friends and others. I believe you worked closely with David Shapiro, who recently passed away? Can you talk about that relationship and/or the importance of David’s influence?
JF: I have always been a fan of David’s poetry, and his book on Ashbery was important to me when I was young. I was lucky that I got to meet him in the Spring of 2001 when I was invited to a party at Frank Lima’s in Queens. No one told me it was a boxing watching party. Anyway, neither David or me wanted to watch boxing, so I was able to meet him, and then I ran into him in Barnes & Nobles a few weeks later and he asked me to interview him for Rain Taxi. This was how we became friends, and over the years we would talk on the phone and go see art (usually at the Met). I learned so much from what he told me to read, look at and listen to. David was incredibly generous and willing to spend time talking not just to me but to dozens of younger (now no longer young) poets. His very musical poetry is important to so many of us because he was able to combine a playful approach to language with a tenderness and a philosophical approach. His work could be wild, but it was never just wild. He combined wit and gravity in a such a unique way.
MS: What other writers and artists do you see Data Mind in conversation with?
JF: I will start with artists: I think the reason I was originally thinking so much about “The Algorithm” and the nature of digital life and how it affects our sense of time was because I am a huge Hito Steyerl fan. Also, some of the titles in the book are lines from Simon Evans collages which I saw at James Cohan early in the process (right before the pandemic). I wrote down a handful of lines, and I found myself returning to them over time. I also think I was influenced by Elaine Equi, who writes beautifully about digital life in her books Click and Clone and The Intangibles. I would say David influenced Data Mind in the way he uses cartoon characters (like Goofy and Huey and Luey) in pretty dark, strange poems. I suppose Ashbery does, too—but David’s poems with cartoon characters tend to be darker. I don’t use cartoon characters in Data Mind, but I do have a lot of figures from pop culture floating about in uncomfortable terrains. Barbie also appears, and of course it’s impossible to write about Barbie without thinking about Denise Duhamel. I also think I was influenced by Flarf, though (as I said) the book is definitely not Flarf. But like the Flarf poets I am interested in expanding what kind of language is available to me as a poet. Also, related to your question about “body genres/body horror,” I think reading (and often teaching) poets like Bob Kaufman and Kim Hyesoon influenced that kind of imagery in my work. I also really love poets who use sci-fi imagery, like John Yau in his book Paradiso Diaspora; he also riffs on films throughout his work, which I am sure also influenced me. I am also literally in conversation with poets in my Zoom writing group, though the members have changed over time. My friend Boni Joi, who lives in Switzerland, also writes wonderful poems about internet culture. We are going to publish a few of them in the next issue of Hanging Loose.
MS: I’m excited to see the physical book of Data Mind when it comes out, and hope it gets reviewed! Are you working on anything new already? Or is there new work we might find online or in print?
JF: I am working on a manuscript called The Last Phone booth in the World. It toggles between poems about my mother’s death and poems about phone booths, and some other topics. The poems are less dense—maybe less strange than what I usually write. (I just went through the manuscript and pulled out some of the wackier poems to save for a different manuscript.)
Here are some links to poems from that project:
Weekly Feature: Poetry at The Arts Fuse - The Arts Fuse
https://thebaffler.com/poems/interior-design-fuhrman
https://plumepoetry.com/the-last-phonebooth/
https://swwimmiami.substack.com/p/kiss-me-santa
I am also now just getting back into making poetry videos for new poems. I took a break from creating new ones for a couple years, so I am enjoying doing it again.
Michael Sikkema lives and gardens and makes art stuff in West Michigan.
