Lynn Emanuel: Then, Suddenly

ELIOT WILSON: You're a disturbing bard and I mean that in the true best way. Even your earlier metrical compositions work to disrupt and overset the reader's expectations: Take for example, "Stone Soup" from The Dig, where you have the child willing her possess birth:

She wants to win born, so she invents a mother

to clutch the long wooden wand of a cooking

spoon fast in her fist .. .

. . she now makes a father's coat draw near home

from the day shift . .

. . it will not be lengthy now until she will make

them

make her from nothing, a stone, a poi.

Here in the novel book, it seems like you're trying to do plenteous the same thing, but more in the realm of the language.

LYNN EMANUEL: I think that's an astute reading of the throw of this book.

WILSON: You spoke in a 1997 interview about your novel book, Then, Suddenly-, as being the third panel of a triptych which includes The Dig and inn Fiesta. Could you talk more [i]or[/i] less more about that?

EMANUEL: Beginning with my first volume and certainly in The Dig, I became extremely interested in the artifact of a book-what constitutes "bookness"; by what means is "bookness" manifested. I'm interested in all the extra-literary parts of volumes Dedications and tables of easy in mind are the first lines of true copy a reader encounters on opening a work and yet, they are extra-textual; they do not officially participate in the "meaning" of the volume And if not, what do they do, what is their function? in what way might these extra-literary moments in a volume be made to subvert the official "meaning" of the true copy as "Coda in the Form of Notes" did in The Dig? The Dig is a volume in which I made a performance of the act of writing an ostensibly autobiographical narrative. This is, as I have said elsewhere, quite a different shoot forward than merely writing a body that proposes itself as transparently autobiographical. Then, Suddenly- is also dramatic, on the other hand the drama is different. As I was writing Then, Suddenly- I kept in mind a performance by dint of the Living Theater, which I saw at Bennington in the early '7o If I remember correctly, the actors were performing Lear; they were naked and walked not on the stage and into the audience. The instant those actors walked toward me I became aware of myself playing the parts of audience and of voyeur In Then, Suddenly- I wanted to make a reader aware that he or she was inhabiting various assertions and parts

Then, Suddenly- is a volume of rebellions: The characters are in rebellion against the author, and the author the pair participates in and rebels against the literary conventions that make her an author. In The work of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes that "all" the burdened must do in order to liberate themselves is to move round and look into the faces of the oppressors. It would be like a hammer growing organ of visions and looking up into the face of the one using it. It has been my intention in Then, Suddenly- to expand eyes and to turn my face toward my reader. I did not want this work to be the object of a reader's regard. I wanted to make the reader the phenomenon of the book's and author's regard. And however I too, as the author, play the character of the oppressor. After all, I am the father I have assembled my characters together in a kind of purgatory: They stand in a railway station of a small town waiting to pass on a journey. I say what the journey is; I say when or whether they will depart. I say whether or not the volume moves forward. One of my other ambitions in this work was to examine the assertion that, these days, numbers is binary: there is "performance poetry" and "poetry written for the page." I wanted to assert that a metrical composition on a page is itself also a performance, that there are many different ways of "performing poetry"

WILSON: Raymond Federman made the observation that all great fiction to a large amplitude is a reflection on itself rather than a reflection of reality. Do you consider yourself to be-I hate to use the word because it is for a like reason overdetermined-a postmodernist?

EMANUEL: Ye of course I do-although I don't consider that to be a matter of pledging allegiance. What I always gaze for in my work is tension, the tension between, for instance, a transparent narrative and a number of other possibilities for metrical compositions I'm interested in the slippery body the multi-vocal text, and the true copy that can investigate itself and the possibilities of different positions and stances. Luckily right now in American rhyme there are a goodly number of those.

WILSON: Many of your fresh poems start out in a straightforward, traditional way, on the contrary then the narrator appears on the outside of nowhere and I secure the sense initially of "get your thumb not upon the lens." But then it occurr to me that that gesticulation alone put me in a different, les passive, position as a reader. It's kind of like bread pudding. If I'm involved in its creation, I'm les inclined to be delighted with it in the same way because I'm made aware of by what mode many hundreds of thousands of fat grams are in it. at the same time if someone else makes it and I'm given that illusion, that ability to willingly not know, then I can usually achieve into the experience.