Podcast #126: Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum on Clarity and Cruelty

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Maggie Nelson is a writer of poetry and auto-theory, including Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, and, most recently, The Argonauts. Recently she joined Wayne Koestenbaum, a prolific writer, visual artist, and musician, at the New York Public Library. The two share a long friendship, dating back to when Koestenbaum was one of Nelson's professors. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Nelson and Koestenbaum discussing clarity, procedures to approach cruelty, and how a book is like a ribbon thrown into the wind.

Elaborating on a sentiment expressed in The Argonauts, Nelson discussed the way that she views herself as a writer. She described herself as invested in the magic of clarification:

"I don’t feel like a very creative person; I feel like a clarifier, and I think via the act of clarifying the magic is that you may end up making something... [T]his kind of idea of writing or via clarity you could show yourself you know, offer the thread that leads back out of the labyrinth so that you got back to someplace before you became trapped seems to me the whole game, you know, and I think what’s amazing about it, and this is the amazing thing about words is that well, I always think about this Robert Creeley quote where he said, 'in poetry I’m trying to express something very, very specific, it’s just not the same as saying, I’ll be back in five minutes or I have to go to the bathroom, but it’s still something specific that you’re trying to say.'"

Responding to the notion that perhaps a person has only one memoir "in" her, Nelson described a book as like a ribbon thrown into the wind:

"A whole book to me seems like a ribbon thrown into the wind, and it does what it does and then it falls and I think there’s something really living, and I guess all of which is to say yes of course people in my family or anywhere are going to appear differently because it’s just brutal and deadening and horrible to have life offer you one narrative and one thing and one focus."

While Nelson and Koestenabaum's work do find commonalities, Koestenbaum noted a procedural difference between the two writers:

"I feel like that there’s a difference in our temperament and it has to do with maybe the difference between the procedure in The Art of Cruelty and my procedure in Harpo. It’s like I set up a kind of conceptual endurance test, that I have a curiosity of some kind and I’m going to make myself the experimental subject and I’m going to make myself annotate everything Harpo did, even though I know it courts inanity, idiocy, it’s not the proper way to think. But it’s taking for granted that I want a certain amount of claustrophobia mentally and that I’m going to either aestheticize that or re-mine it as an aesthetic principle to keep me going. And you put yourself also in claustrophobic spaces but it’s with the intent, it’s sort of like Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, it’s not to step back into the feedback loop of the Theatre of Cruelty, it’s to step outside it and figure out why would people including yourself want to even be at that carnival. And that seems like whether it’s that I’m more of a masochist, I’m less lucid, I’m more compulsive. It’s just it’s a different way of looking at the rigor and confinement that is consistent thinking and writing... [W]e hold between us as the third thing a sense of procedural rigor and a certain like hungry logorrheic patience, but just we’re going to do it, but your aim and I think it has to do with something Buddhist, something Eve Sedgwick–like—and gratitude, that you’re interested in expressing gratefulness to others, and I’m not so sure I am. I think it’s a different mission."

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