To what in the past is my current language indebted? Words are not fixed in their meaning, mine are never only mine. They are preceded, porous, always in a web of relation to the past and to their use over time.

Mike Lala’s The Unreal City navigates this territory of how poetry exists between history and presence, that creative acts are themselves the result of interactions and relations. Across the collection, the poems accrue voices in relation and interdependence, culminating in the flickering force of “Work: A Poem” as it renders a brutal New York, source texts across millennia darting by the speaker and reader. After reading Virgil’s Georgics, Lala weaves in Dante:

This book is laden with grief for the contradictions of writing poetry under capitalism, shrewdly confronting the noise of postmodernity. Mike and I corresponded about his book via email, in a shared document, and on a video call at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024.

—Miri Karraker

Miri Karraker: When I opened this book, I was startled to see such a hefty epigraph from Andreas Malm’s The Progress of this Storm. Malm splits postmodernism apart so that:

Mike Lala: The book is interested in exactly this: how we live moving through a swarm of ideas, ideologies, media, propagandas, speech, thoughts, emotions, and understandings of self and other—how any single experience of our world is multivalent and fractal, and only afterward do we narrativize it, to impose a unity, and the ways that narrative and language itself collapses reality into meaning. The poems try really hard to stay in the present moment and only offer summation on the way to (and in the form of) more experience, more of the fractal. So they have little moments of passing clarity where we can ask questions: are we looking at reality, or are we looking at a perversion? If the perversion is undergirded by ideology, might we use ideology to see through it? How does a subject move and think through the world when subjectivity—personhood—is porous and open to influence—outside events and narratives and subjectivities—leaking in? But the poems resist lyric clarity, revelation, or identification. They try to sit in the flow of time and accrue experience in a way that feels true to being alive, to the moment, and to the limits of poetic form.

Another way of approaching your question is to look at time itself, and how we understand the past and the present moment. What parts of history manifest in the present, and further, how does that influence how we might think about rectifying history, or at least addressing its effects on and in the present? And how might this thinking about history and the present inform how to practice poetry, a craft with a particularly long history, now?

The temporal reality of climate change gives us an unparalleled, palpable opportunity to think through these questions: industrial activity from the past is wreaking havoc on the world now. We breathe in and move though the ghosts of past lives: plants decomposed into fossil fuels that industrialists dug up, burned, and released into the atmosphere as externalities. But of course there are no externalities, because the earth is by and large a closed, interdependent system, and the choice to, for example, relocate textile manufacturing in the 19th c. Britain away from rivers and into cities, using coal, echoes in the present in a whole host of ways: our relationship to speed, time, and place; the ongoing urbanization of the planet due to the ways capital organizes labor pools; the latent effects industrial pollution from the past has on weather and ecology today. Historical powers very concretely have their hands in the present, so that the present and the future are never just themselves. They are indebted to each other in unusual but verifiably material ways, and the poem tries to respond to this reality in a way that integrates past, present, and future through various formal structures—historical reference, present-tense lyric, and speculative writing—that render isolated moments of time and the representative meaning-making of capital as thin—as unrealities lacking the larger context of interdependency and flow.

MK: Your work, in this book but also in other projects, isn’t simply trying to render this unreality though, it’s also asking about art and poetry’s place in these modes of representation, reproduction, and debt. In “Work: A Poem” you write:

I’m interested in your thoughts on what a poet’s role is.

ML: I don’t think there’s any one role, but I do think lyric poetry’s conception of self, feeling, and personal insight is insufficient in addressing the interconnected nature of biological and geological systems, because the lyric “I” in practice often underpins a falsity: our conceptions of self as severed from others and from nature. A poetics in which self-regard is primary isn’t up to the task of being in the world in a meaningful and meaning-sustaining way. At the same time, epic poetry’s function of community-building has historically been in service of violent political ends—of nation making.

So one of the formal questions The Unreal City asks—and I think Exit Theater asks this as well—is whether there’s a poetics outside or between the lyric and the epic up to the task of navigating our ecological reality and economic unrealities, of addressing this high-tech, militarized, neo-feudal crony/post-capitalism from inside its center, of rendering an autonomous self with whom it is possible in reading to have a relationship without a false sense of psychic merging or narcissistic identification—with whom ideas and experience can be shared. Can the poem exist in this time and space and culture, articulate a subjective position in opposition to much of it, and yet articulate relentlessly against delusion around its own position within nation, empire, etc.? Further, how does a poem create a space for the reader to be themself, in their own position, inside the poem too?

In recent history, avant-garde poetics effected this by sucking the subjectivity out of the poem—think the cool and detached poetics of certain New York School poets, the almost objective spatial thinking of their French contemporaries Claude Royet-Journoud or Anne-Marie Albiach, or the almost comic lack of self awareness in more recent, so-called conceptual poetries. The subject in these poems feels thin or distant, perhaps innovatively rendered but almost universally incapable of an aesthetic strategy that resists the thin, meaning-making capacities of technological domination or monetary value, much less making a profound semantic break.

There are other strategies: the lyric “we” Nate Mackey uses to navigate space and time and accrue experience around a group. Simone White and Catherine Wagner place the first person inside or in relation to (an often overwhelming portion of) abstract thought in ways that seem to mirror the overwhelming quality of capital’s abstractification of value. Kim Hyesoon blends and warps the world in ways that point to its many perversions, then interweaves the self in ways that point to how the world warps us. Benjamin Krusling positions his I in a world in a way that feels profoundly in relation, not interpolation.

Finally, there are theorists who point to new ways art might address these themes and crises, and what comes after: Byung-Chul Han, Franco Berardi, Nicolas Bourriaud come to mind.

MK: It’s interesting to look at the ways the poems enact these ideas in the subject matter they take up, as well as their formal qualities. This book makes it clear that different forms, texts, and voices—patterns—form, reform, and subsume us as subjects. You have some moments that are tonally really jarring because of juxtaposition. In “Elizabeth Street,” “[....] now, if I ever have cash (or / reader, loaded?), you / might find me live on Liz / street of my patron-funded dreams, past 1 / Spring, Marini / Manci, The Red Threads, Craig / Van Den Brulle, Pure Projects / Coop & Spree [...]” then the storefronts, the brands, rattle on. The speaker’s presence is almost buried by the world around them.

ML: Yeah, the poems are less invested in an intricately detailed interior world than an immersive and overwhelming exterior rendered with exceptional clarity. They try to render that external world as a shared experience with the reader, so that the reader themself can examine it, and if they come to insight around how the world shapes their individual subjectivity it’s therefore less by interpolation than by conversation. The poems refuse to tell the reader how they should read or feel.

This shared interplay with the outside world opens up throughout the book, so the first poem, “The Nudes,” is all about observing other bodies in action—in this case human subjects in paintings—a series of discrete representations toward which both reader and writer can turn, together, in an open space where identification with each subject is only fleetingly possible. From there the poems in the book gradually widen to let in more and more of the outside, and to identify and collaborate with it in wider, more varied ways.

MK: In the next poem, “My Receipt,” we find ourselves at a dance performance experiencing a kind of perspective slippage, and the poem ends with an attempt or a failed attempt to see something in the performance. How does this relate to the larger project?

“My Receipt” revolves around my experience of attending Alvin Ailey with an older friend, an artistic mentor, watching a piece by a white choreographer in a historic Black performance space. In it, I contemplate the history of the Ailey institution, this particular performance within that institution, and my place as a viewer in relation to both.

So much of my life in New York has involved people with more financial means inviting me to a performance (or dinner), so the poem takes place in a swirl of money, labor, race, spectatorship, and the white gaze, of which my viewership was a part. It grapples with the tension between an (idealized) lyric self or witness and the inherent impossibility of seeing fully from that position—seeing oneself, one’s actions, and one’s relationship to the world, including to others or a work of art, fully—much less rendering a kind of totalizing poetic insight out of any such experience. That itself points to a limitation of the lyric, and the poem tries to enact that limitation in a rupture or breakaway cut.

It’s with this limitation in mind that I go back to attempt a shared, relational space. What does it mean to ask a reader to assume the position of the first person in a poem? There is something fundamentally wrong to me about the authorial right to imbue a vicarious experience on a reader, to ask them to arrive at a shared insight through a poem’s rendering of that experience as subject matter, no less via some idealized lyric selfhood. There’s something fundamentally American about it. And so the poem attempts to render this particular experience and context in which the limits of the self—myself—are palpable, from within a lyrical mode that breaks open—to enact the impossibility formally—in order to break that mode or at least push it to its limit.

MK: In the long poem “Work: A Poem,” time unfurls and curls back in on itself through external sources, which point to the ways that language and knowledge produce and reproduce themselves. The results are often strange, uncanny, and jarring.

I’m thinking about instances where there’s a break from an existing texture in the language, as with “Dandy Aisle” when @dronestream lists drone strikes across the world, or when citations tempt the reader to flip back between the page they’re reading and the bibliography at the end of the book, which would create a constant flurry, and if I were to read both the text and the citation would create echo.

Given your chosen source texts, and the play with fragment and syntax, there’s this added sense of these phrases echoing across time and space. We see in these sources calls back to the postmodernists, modernists, classics, and beyond.

In the span of one and a half pages, we are grounded (if you can call it grounding) in Eliot’s “The Burial of the Dead,” shift hard to Dante’s Inferno and Virgil’s Georgics, then move through Hope Mirrlees’s Paris. How did you go about writing and thinking through ways to create this larger text? What was your process? How do you shape these poems when you’re writing them?

ML: I composed “Work: A Poem” by interweaving excerpts from other poems and sources into a long poem that was itself modeled on two source texts: Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (a long poem that takes readers through Paris and its metro in the second decade of the 20th century, and which was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1919) and Virgil’s Georgics (a didactic agricultural epic dated to 29 BCE). Formally, the main body of the poem follows Mirrlees, as her poem has a remarkable ability to accrue anything and synthesize it into the whole, but my poem is also guided, à la Dante, by Virgil, who is set off from the main body, reciting his Georgics about how to live and work with animals and the land. So you have a poem from the second industrial revolution and a didactic agricultural epic informing a poem that takes place at the beginning of another industrial revolution, now, interwoven with references from across that sweep of time.

Those references, in turn, act as internal moments of recall for the poet, who is walking the reader through New York reciting things they have read and recalling things they are reminded of by what they encounter in the cityscape—echoes of history and past lives—and they are thinking about the future of industry and the planet, and the modes of personhood that economies make possible, at what feels like a breaking point for everything—during what Malm calls “the revenge of historicity.”

MK: I’m also thinking about the way your life itself does make its way in, both in the poems and in the theatrical frame in the closing pages. In “Viva Voce” you have two voices in dialogue, and I read it as a dialogue with yourself about the making of this book, but also as a way to synthesize these ideas about debt and reproduction in poetry but without being too neat, and it’s quite fun to read after all that comes before it.

Then you launch into additional acknowledgements of friends, peers, etc. who I assume were with or around you while writing this book. The self-interview form allows the acknowledgements to actually speak to the content of the book in a way that I found enjoyable. Can you speak more to this form and its relation to the book as a whole?

ML: Yes, the other texts are woven into these long poems in which my experience is not necessarily central. I like to think of this as a way to move between various dichotomies in poetic schools—lyric and epic, confessional and avant garde, in something like “removed first person”—in which the reader doesn’t need to “step into” the poet’s point of view (a wildly narcissistic ask, when you think about it)—but more so can join me (the poet) on a walk through the city, in a gallery, in the moment I get off work or take the subway to it—in moments of affinity or even solidarity but not false identification or psychic merging. We can be interconnected in the poem as we are in the world, but not under a delusion as to the shape of that interconnection.

And on top of this, you’ve got quotes from other writers whose times inform our own, so the poet-speaker and the reader are existing together in relation to the experience rendered in the poem and the history of poetry and poetics conveyed through the referenced texts.

All of that is a lot, so in response there is a book-ending play in which two characters share a dialogue reflecting on debt, production and reproduction, wealth, and lineage—two characters who appear in my first book Exit Theater and whose relationship is a little scrambled.

MK: Your new chapbook, Points of Return, seems focused on how we can make the present when we live in an era of “no-return” from global warming—the way humanity’s collective sense of a future has been foreclosed. Exit Theater examines mechanisms of action/inaction/complicities located in various structures of violence. Broadly, your work also feels obsessed with time–where does that come from in you?

ML: Regret. As the experience of a poem exceeds the literal qualities of the language of the poem, the experience of being alive exceeds itself. I look at my life and I imagine other lives or possibilities as I live on in this present—I am regretful, I mourn the world (and nation) I was born into, my position in it, the ways I must participate in order to stay alive, the ways I might have otherwise lived. These three projects approach different aspects of regret from different entry points, or with slightly different particular concerns, but the ghost of other possibilities, other worlds, runs through all of them.

MK: Doesn’t regret imply some degree of autonomy or choice? How can we regret a life that is thrust on us? How does this inform your relationship to possibility—to the future and the role of poetry in it and its creation?

ML: I don’t believe the automatic refrain that poetry (or art at large) lives outside the market. I do think, however, that one of the qualities of poetry is to produce an excess of meaning, and that excess, if wielded deliberately, can point to the ways monetary value and meaning is inherently limited, and perhaps even how capital obscures its own limits and contradictions, from within that very system of value. The creative act and object happen inside and in relation to those contradictions, and from that position can underscore them, can articulate new systems and modes of meaning and value that exceed those in economic play. When we understand art as not just the product of the creative process (i.e. a productivist understanding), but as the series of interactions, relations, and effects the art object has with the viewer or reader inside a culture, i.e. in context, then we can have a fuller conception of what art is: not so much a thing or product outside of time, as a role—an act—in time and social context. One of those roles can be fugitivity, and whether that fugitivity is in explicit critique or winking cooperation is no less important than the effect of its reception.

So perhaps I mourn this context—of necessarily making work inside and in relation to a culture obsessed with a particular conception of value—but in that mourning—in regret—there is a rift or opening for other conceptions, a kind of generative absence that poetry can rub up against, and take readers toward.