Rachel Levitsky
This is Zoe tuck and Rachel Levitsky at 8:22am on the road from John Joy to the Rhinecliff train station. And we're going to talk about Under the Sun, but for the shits and giggles of it.
Zoe Tuck
So, Rachel Levitsky.
Rachel Levitsky
So, Zoe Tuck.
Zoe Tuck
How did Under the Sun come about? And how did it coalesce into a book?
Rachel Levitsky
I took Carla [Harryman]'s workshop for a week at Naropa in 1997, and that was influential on me, it helped me figure out how to do what I was trying to do. Which were these, you know, “book length narrative things,” to quote Laura Mullen. I wrote this piece called "Portraits One by One." I mean, "2(1x1): Portraits" in Carla's workshop, and then I made my first chapbook out of that. It's a cute little thing, I still really like it, actually.
Zoe Tuck
What's the chapbook?
Rachel Levitsky
It's like a mathematical equation: two by one by one. Two times one times one, right? And it's somewhat similar to Under the Sun in that it's about these radical bodies floating through space and making observations about how shit works. In the wake of a San Francisco/New York romantic entanglement that was not clear, was triangulated. And, you know, it's like my QED or something. One day, I was pondering it, and I was in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which was across the street from where I lived on Eastern Parkway in this little apartment, in a big building with lots of neighbors. And I would go to the Botanical Gardens quite often. And then the characters started to arrive to me.
Zoe Tuck
Lady and Turtle.
Rachel Levitsky
Yeah, and the book length project. My father wasn't yet dead, and somehow Ecclesiastes became the frame. That's "under the sun." And those are the chapters, the 12 parts of Ecclesiastes. Because I think my way of approaching that was like, “Am I really gonna write about a—I guess it was like a semi-unrequited—love affair?” but it was more like a triangulation and a distance and it had its own mechanics, and also wasn't - unrequited. When you write a love poem, there's always this moment like, “Am I really going to write another love poem?”
Zoe Tuck & Rachel Levitsky
[Laughter]
Zoe Tuck
But you can't not.
Rachel Levitsky
No, but my way of my way of caveating that was to have this frame of seasons and nothing ever changing. Ecclesiastes. It was my father's go-to quotable text. There's very little of that in my family, little go-to's. So that was a help. At the same time, I was still becoming a writer and I have always struggled with this lack of family story, even though there's obviously so much story. I was also really interested in things that I could hold in my hand that were related to me having some sort of historical life story to trace before that very moment, at any given moment. (Here's the left turn. Wait, not here, but under the F, and here 209 becomes 199. I hope this goes in the text. [Laughter])
Zoe Tuck
Yeah, this will definitely go in.
Rachel Levitsky
I start writing it. And then I thought, Well, I think I have this thing that’s ongoing. Dan was making a press and asked if I had a manuscript, and I thought, this is the book. I will say one more thing, which is that before that, Pamela Lu had asked me for a manuscript for consideration in a Kelsey Street prize. I quickly shoved together a manuscript and it wasn't strong. I feel like I am concept driven. And so this one, this one felt like, okay, it's conceptual enough that I can fill it in.
Zoe Tuck
What were the literary and political worlds that you felt like you were writing into?
Rachel Levitsky
Very much coming out of this amazing time in San Francisco Bay area in 1999. Syd Staiti has recently researched it quite a bit because it was a shining moment of queer people and people of color and many queer people of color-led avant-garde narrative poetics. Renee Gladman and Pamela Lu and Lauren Gudath and Mary Burger and Beth Murray and Chris Chen and Aja Couchois Duncan…. Several people who continued to make compelling work and community and it was just vibrant and easy and social and cute. [Laughter]
And I think that's why Syd's been researching it and I think Syd's reinspiring it, mindfully reenergizing Small Press Traffic – not only Syd but Syd did a lot of the groundwork for the collective activity that’s happening – so that it has more space. But anyway, there was a conversation about sentences. Renee Gladman, who had a beautiful Japanese stitch bound magazine called Clamour, was really interested in my work. I had written a chapbook called, "The Adventures of Yaya & Grace." Have you ever seen that?
Zoe Tuck
No.
Rachel Levitsky
I think you'd really like it. I'll get it for you.
Zoe Tuck
Thanks!
Rachel Levitsky
And then Hoa Nguyen got 2(1x1): Portraits into Renee Gladman's hands. Hoa and I had connected on the Buffalo listserv, in backchannel complaint about the clueless men with whom expressions of feminism and interventions against racist and homophobic micro-agressions always created an argument.
Zoe Tuck
Oh, right—the Buffalo poetics listserv was big then.
Rachel Levitsky
Hoa found me and my politics and that's really what the Buffalo Listserv really gave me: Renee Gladman and Hoa and all their people. Hoa was one of these people that was in that scene, then they left. The New College scene. And oh, and Aja Couchois Duncan’s was in that scene. Do you know Aja's work?
Zoe Tuck
Yeah!
Rachel Levitsky
She was a good friend back then. And still. Can you imagine? I was coming from New York where it was so masculinist you wanted to vomit, and so white. It was never all white, but the way these white men were entitled was really, really intense.
But in San Francisco these were the leaders [Gladman, Lu, Duncan, etc.], these were who everyone was looking toward for what was happening in writing and it was so clear. It was a really clear delineation. I thought, wow, that's my world. Sometimes people think I'm a San Francisco poet. That's where the poetics came out of for that book. If you read works by this group from that time, there's a lot of continuity. I think of Beth's gestural work, Aja's excavations and collage work, Mary Burger’s “narrative book length thing,” Sonny. There’s a lot of similarity in the poetics. Difference, yes, but existing as a genre. And then I changed a bit after that because of reading more Gail Scott and getting more into Carla's work. By the time you get to The Story of My Accident Is Ours, my sentences thicken. In fact, the plot thickens, in a way.
Zoe Tuck
How did this book contain the seeds for the next one?
Rachel Levitsky: Oh yes. So, I literally am going from my big building to the Botanic Gardens across the street, thinking about this triangulation and passing this repeating group of neighbors right outside the door, so the neighbors start coming into the book. And I was hanging out with Akilah Oliver a lot on this block I lived on. She had moved to New York from Boulder too.
(I think this turn is toward the station.)
Zoe Tuck
Take a right?
Rachel Levitsky: (River Road. Yeah, right here, and we do have right on red here, not in New York City, but in New York State.)
I read the book and thought, wow, there's this really nosy pesky judge-y neighbor. Watching me. There was a particularly a couple from the building that I lived in. The man would see me walking with Akilah, hanging out. And I could tell he was wondering what we were up to when we were walking around at night. And then there was a character in there who's this guy who had custody of his daughter that I mean, maybe there was a woman at home but I never saw her. And yeah, so all these characters of ‘the neighbor’ showed up in that book’s spatial reality. And then, and then I kept writing these neighbor poems after that, little pieces on scraps of paper, actually. So yeah, the neighbor coda. And I do think the next book NEIGHBOR has more narrative musculature than Under the Sun. Under the Sun is very poetic and visual. Atmospheric and a lot of lines.
Zoe Tuck
You were saying last night that you were trying to do portraits.
Rachel Levitsky
I feel like those poems are drawings. There are a lot of references to lines.
Zoe Tuck
And few actual lines.
Rachel Levitsky
Which I feel weird about.
Zoe Tuck
No, I like that.
[Laughter]
Rachel Levitsky
As I was looking at it last night with you, I thought, Oh, these, these prose blocks are actually really musical. That's where the music comes in. The poems are asking people to look the way I look at things. To see things in this sort of way. So in that sense, they're almost like, maps or like, drawings.
Zoe Tuck
I like that. Poem as a map.
Rachel Levitsky
And I think there's insistence about an idea I was working out on relation and distance. Questioning how much you can, bodies can, join. And, yeah, I think that that was my question. Very much like, now. What happens when you tumble together and where those lines collapse and where distances collapse or don't collapse and how thick is the line that separates or does it connect. The amount of distance isn't really gone, it's just reconfigured into a compression or something like that. That that's what I was thinking about.
Zoe Tuck
The way you talk about it sounds like physics, or math.
Rachel Levitsky
Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Two by one by one. Yeah. That's interesting. I should have been a mathematician.
Zoe Tuck
Or maybe you are.
Rachel Levitsky
Oh, I like that. Then it's not too late. That might be a good place to end it.