Conducted by Binx Perino
I learned of Daniel Borzutzky’s work after reading Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). I had just moved to Chicago and was interested in the socio-political environment of this new-to-me city. Borzutzky’s work is unafraid to face and name the hostility of his environment. His work extends beyond his own perception and invites the perspective of those around him, creating a more universal and societal voice. Each book of his builds and expands upon the last. I found The Murmuring Grief of the Americas to be powerful and profound, and I knew I had to talk to him about this undaunted new collection.
I’d love to know more about your process for The Murmuring Grief of the Americas. When did this collection start to come together for you? How did you arrive at the current organization of the collection?
I started writing this during the early months of the pandemic and worked on it for the next few years. I wrote the end of the book first, actually, but at the time I didn't know it would be the end. The book's sections move from the individual outwards—to other individuals, to several individuals, and then to the collective and to the ecological environment. The grief and the murmuring are things we do together; they are in the air and in the earth and the book came out of the experience of "griefshame," a word I put together in these poems. The griefshame we experienced watching so many unnecessary deaths during the pandemic; the griefshame we experience living with so many massacres. The constant state of grieving and the murmur as a poetic utterance from the body, the murmur of ghosts and the wind, but also the death murmur and the repetition of "mur," as in "more", as in "murder,", as in "wall" (muro/mural, etc…), as in
mere, as in moo, as in sea (mer), as in ur, etc….
How much did your earlier work inform this one? If so, can you explain that process, moving from one collection into the next?
My last book, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House, 2021), concludes with a few poems entitled "The Murmuring Grief of the Americas"; and at the end of WAAM I have a line that says "How do you quantify the murmuring grief of the Americas?" In many ways the new book is an attempt to answer that question. It's also related to Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), as I continue to write poems/scenes that emerge from the
prison site on the Chicago beaches of Lake Michigan. The books are separate books in time, but the same books in terms of my life. They are the book that has been my life over the past few years and I'm just not sure that as an author I'm writing separate books—is anyone? I'm making art and I don't really have much interest in newness and I like to imagine that the books of poetry can sprawl out over thousands of pages and include decades worth of writing, thinking, images, streets, sidewalks, bodies of water, bodies of bodies, physical objects, glass, rocks, leaves, feathers, and little cinematic movies that live between inside the pages.
During the time that you were putting this collection together, what was influencing the work? Were you reading anything or listening to anything that impacted the work? What was speaking to you?
The book makes its influences pretty well known: Vallejo (as always); Lispector; Dickinson. But also a lot of dry articles about the relationship between financialization and environmental disaster.
I was really interested in your "Performance of Becoming Human" poems, of which there are three. The first two occupy a space you call the "airbreathdeath theatre" and then the last one is in the "earthstatebank theatre." They explore a relationship between performance and being. Does that sound accurate? Where did these "theatres" come from?
I'm interested in how “theatre” is a space of both performance and of violence (for example, the theatre of war). The theatres came from a dream in which there was an actual venue where the performances of being human took place, and in these performances being a human was inseparable from debt which was inseparable from a relation to the self, and that the other that was defined by the conjunction of the earth and the state and the bank, forces which perhaps determine so much of how we live. I imagined in these theatres that massacre was a predictable event, one that was normalized and routinized, and one in which poetry was forced out of the body through air and breath and death. I thought a lot about the translation of breath, the road as a container of bodies and poetry, and the "innovation of extermination" as a fundamental human invention.
One poem stood out to me in particular, "Lake Michigan, Scene #131," because of its form. It's a very different poem, aesthetically, from all the others. Could you tell me about the thought process behind this poem and where the form came from?
Some poems want to be performances and some poems—as Cecilia Vicuña might say—want to be drawings and some poems want to hide behind other poems. Writing poems is less about following thoughts in logical ways than it is about allowing the art to be the thing that it wants to become. That this poem wanted to both eat itself and regenerate was something that I could not control with logic. I dream-wrote the form behind the form and the poem did the rest.
Going back to the collection moving outward from the individual, could you speak more about the "speakers" of the collection? Is there a speaker in the collection that is closer to you, as a poet, than, potentially, other speakers in the collection?
No, I don't think so… if what you mean by me is an autobiographical me who is somehow more genuinely myself than all the other versions of me that the book presents. I don't think about it that way. There are sometimes dozens of speakers in one poem. As the poet-character in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books" says: "The object of a poem is to try to put every possible thing into the poem so that the poem is not so much a poem but a container for the entire world
and in this way there might eventually be no distinction between living and writing and art and life and art and death…"
What other projects are on the horizon for you?
I'm finishing another book of poems right now. Working on several translations. Dreaming of books that don't behave like books, of blank books, of blank books filled with poems about blankness, of theatre-poems about fungus, of translation devices to be implanted inside of bodies, of breath as the ultimate translator.
Daniel Borzutzky will be reading from The Murmuring Grief of the Americas at Pilsen Community Books on September 5, from 7-8 pm, with Ananda Lima.
You can order The Murmuring Grief of the Americas from Coffee House Press.
Binx River Perino is a genderqueer poet from Texas with an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. A participant in the Sundress Academy for the Arts’ 2024 Trans/Nonbinary Writers Retreat, their work has appeared and is forthcoming in Tyger Quarterly, Hooligan, Door is a Jar, Cold Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Based in Chicago, they are an occasional contributor to Third Coast Review.