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One has to contend with and engage what is going on in a broader sense in our society. But we do imagine the press as creating alternate possibilities for readers and writers. Running the New York Improvisation Festival for seven years taught me a great deal about how to survive as an artist. And by survive, I don’t mean pay the bills. The event brought over 80 performers from around the world to New York for two weeks each year, and my partner, Sondra Loring, and I organized performances, workshops and jams all over the city. What I learned from that experience is that when you participate in your chosen art by making things possible for other people, that’s when your own work grows, that’s when you can invest in the field with full participation. The striving ego gets stomped on by the demands of making things happen, and this frees you to really make work without as much self doubt or anxiety.

—Julie Carr on serial poems The Volta: Tremolo

NEG: I pretty clearly sense that triad of interest in 100 Notes. To move a little deeper into your own background, it’s my understanding that you were heavily involved in dance before coming to poetry. I’ve always found the lack of physicality in writing to be annoying, so much so that I’ll sometimes go on what I call poetry walks, if only to try and retain a connection to the body while writing. Does your history with dance inform your poetry? Has it opened up your sense of pacing or the line?

JC: I have a few answers to this question. The first is about discipline. Dance training is all about showing up. You can’t skip class, or get out of shape, and then just do the performance. You have to dance more or less every day, and that discipline works its way into all aspects of your life (sometimes to ill effect). The various techniques I studied were less rigid than many (for instance, I did little ballet, and avoided the very strict modern forms like Graham and Horton technique), but all technique requires constant application. I learned early on that I could dance no matter how tired I was, or what kind of mood I was in. This constancy has helped me tremendously as a writer. I feel plenty of self-doubt, am often exhausted, sometimes bored, but I don’t allow that to get in the way of actually writing: on the contrary, I use these feelings to motivate me. The second answer has to do with the particular aesthetic education I got from the dance world I was part of. I studied and practiced with dancers who were part of, or descendent from, the Judson Church era: Steven Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Lisa Nelson, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham: in short, the leaders of avant garde and experimental dance from the early seventies on. These people invented their own techniques, techniques which respected the body’s natural relationship to gravity and momentum, and created dances which were based in chance operations, improvisation, and, sometimes, pedestrian movement. Many of their pieces were site specific, some demanded audience participation. From them and their students I learned how to value juxtaposition, the unexpected, the uneven: how to read collage, how to love abstraction. Then, since I was performing in the downtown scene in New York—PS122, Dancespace Project, DTW, DIA, The Kitchen—I was naturally exposed to other art forms that were operating within those same spaces. Even though in those years I was not part of the poetry scene in New York, I was certainly aware of it and went to readings, and some of the poets (like Edwin Torres and Eileen Myles) were collaborating with dancers, and I met them that way. As a curator of an enormous improvisation festival for seven years, I got to invite poets to participate, and so made some early inroads. Many of the dancers I worked with were interested in creating dance-theater: works that incorporated dramatic impulses, character, and, often, text. Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson were huge heroes of ours. Because I wrote, I often found myself creating texts for dances I was in, or, sometimes, for dances I wasn’t in. I grew very curious about when text and dance worked well together and when they didn’t. It became apparent that it was when the relationship between the two was most open, least dictated, but not entirely arbitrary – that the audience was allowed to feel, rather than feel oppressed by, the connections between language and movement. For example, I think of a work by the amazing choreographer Ann Carlson in which she danced to a recording of her voice counting. The numbers meant so many things, but most of all they signified time, and thus, death and the attempt to control time in order to control death. None of this was explicit. It was extremely delicate. I think I have tried to maintain this delicacy in my written works. I’m not interested in pure abstraction, but I am interested in narratives that are sometimes more felt than imposed.

—Julie Carr on serial poems The Volta: Tremolo

Finally, I practiced a lot of improvisation, both on stage and in the studio as a means toward creating choreography. This practice helped me to develop a pretty high tolerance for not knowing exactly what I am doing. However, improvising movement does not mean you just do whatever you feel like; there is always some kind of structure to follow. But most of the time, that structure would be pretty abstract – having to do with time, numbers, and space (rather than with dramatic intent or emotional content). I think this is directly applicable to the practice of writing. Even when writing something as content-driven as 100 Notes on Violence, I rely very heavily on the structures I set up, allowing for maximum freedom of content. Improvisers learn that tight structures (whether self-imposed or imposed from outside, like the jazz standard) allow for deeper and fuller range. If there’s no structure at all, then one generally just repeats one’s habits. We call that noodling, and while it can be fun, it’s the most boring thing in the world to watch. So, to sum up, I’d say dance taught me a lot about the balancing of discipline—or structure—and freedom, and taught me to hunger after both.

NEG: I’m curious about what prompted the move from writing text as dance accompaniment to writing poetry? You mentioned having been taken with Tennyson in college, when did you become, more or less, a fulltime poet? and how did this conversion happen?

JC: … The less nuts and bolts answer to your question is to say that it was becoming clear to me that there were limits to what I could talk about through dance. Some dancers (K.J. Holmes, Jennifer Monson, Jonathan Kinsell, Steve Paxton, Lisa Race, David Dorfman) seem able to say pretty much anything and everything with movement. I didn’t feel I had that range. Writing presents endless possibilities, which is both scary and exciting. So I went there to find out how many of these I could access. My curiosity about poems (my own and other people’s) is constant and constantly growing.

—Julie Carr on serial poems The Volta: Tremolo

JMW

Steam to Mist to Vapor to Fog

Misted leavings so cataracted along your spider wants into the well, your

lice want the moon & a net to shore

you look through the tea foliage to stomp

into bags for boiling I want the words

I gave you back. You want the words

I gave you to christen the moans

of a beforefuck now & I hold off

HN after JMW The Difference is Velocity

Name the ice rime on the glass insecty or bother like glass on glass

Crack it now but the mouse ate through the protective

screen We have to dump this out and start over again

You weren’t yourself then Erase the playback

Compose the sonnets or a sweet heart neck

lace that you did not garland for the charm

Knock boots you say & we do

—Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Hoa Nguyen | Likestarlings