Forest Smotrich-Barr: I want to start with the portmanteau that you use to describe yourself, “echodeviant,” a variation on the title of CAConrad’s book Ecodeviance. How does “echodeviant” describe your creative practice, and how does it figure into E?
Noa Micaela Fields: Echodeviant as a naming for myself originates in mishearing. It riffs, as you said, on CAConrad’s book Ecodeviance. And in that playful echo, I feel the emphasis on deviance as a queer technology and also a renaming of my mishearing, rather than “hearing loss.”
“Echodeviance” gestures at that Disabled perspective in a queer way that also makes room for “access mischief” that can be a little bit excessive, a little bit ornate. I think that “access” and “excess” are maybe framed in contradiction with each other, but I don’t think that access and maximalism have to be in tension.
CAConrad is an important trans reference point for me. Their relationship to ritual in relation to poetic process really speaks to me and to my relationship to poetry as something that is deeply embodied and spiritual in practice.
FSB: It’s funny, because I’m recording this on a transcript website right now, and it’s mishearing everything you’re saying.
NMF: I’m not surprised. I have a “hard of hearing accent” that even digital technology struggles to transcribe successfully. Automated captions, which are sometimes a default form of access in meetings or readings when people don’t hire a captioner, create these mistakes or glitches that are sometimes frankly humorous, but also those glitches can be portals. And for me, I’m thinking of glitches as something that can be an alternate way of knowing something. Mishearing is a way of accessing another possibility that is co-present with what is actually happening.
I use the game of Telephone as a way of explaining mishearing to people. When I was growing up and played the game of Telephone, I always felt excluded from the game because people would whisper, and I wouldn’t even really be able to hear whispers. It would transform into something completely different.
FSB: Moving into talking about E, I’m curious why you were first drawn to using Louis Zukofsky’s “A” as source material for this project.
NMF: Zukofsky does a lot of homophonic translation in his writing, and that was something I latched on to as a genre that struck me as an avenue for creative mishearing. Usually it’s across languages, and my tweaking of it is to relate to my own language as an outsider. So homophonic translation, which emphasizes echoing the sounds and mouthfeel of the original source, is a mode of translation that I find really musical. Poetry for me is a musical practice, and I think in picking “A” as the source that I was playing with, there was also a musical joke in transposing from the key of A to the key of E to tell the poem of my life. Zukokofsy’s book “A” is the poem of his life serially over five decades, and my book captures just a small sliver of my life, specifically the last five years as I have been transitioning with hormones.
FSB: And transposing is taking something and putting it in the key that works for your instrument?
NMF: Usually, yeah, transposing is shifting the key. It’s a form of changing sound. And so there’s something satisfying also in gendering a voice level, even just that you’re moving the pitch of it higher, as if a male voice becomes a higher female voice.
FSB: What kind of themes are in Zukofsky’s “key,” and how do you feel like those themes shifted in your transposition?
NMF: Zukofsky’s “A” is regarded as a canonical touchstone for so many twentieth-century poetry lineages, especially Language poets. It’s striking how it is received by a lot of different camps, but he’s really noted for the ways that he’s engaging with history and Marxism and labor and family and everyday life, and emphasizing language as a material, as an object of labor. I think that’s part of what he was getting at when he coined this term “objectivism” for his writing.
Zukofsky’s “A” emphasizes “A” as the tuning pitch of the orchestra. His son was a prodigy violinist. And he also emphasizes “A” as this small unit of language; as a grammatical article of singularity, of what’s common. And I think there’s something in his gesture of, what does it mean to create a poem of a life that is trying to negotiate the singularity of personhood against a historical context?
E is fixated on change as a driving force. And I would say that femininity is maybe one of the defining aspects of the book, and maybe even a ghost vector of Hélène Cixous’s Écriture Féminine as one of its registers, inscribing the bodily and the spiritual in the transgressive white ink of Mother’s milk.
FSB: We’ve talked before about how this writing process felt divinatory for you. Do you want to talk more about the role of divination in your approach to the text?
NMF: Yeah, divination is a tool for learning about the self. There’s something really powerful about divination as a process that implicates you in material that precedes you or exists alongside you. And finding myself in relationship to that other text made for a gradual process where things would be surprising. Things would come up that I wouldn’t necessarily know what it meant at first, and I would go along in an intuitive fashion, until some association brought to life what was unfolding on the page. But I would say, even now, reading the book in its finished form, the book teaches me more about myself than I thought I knew.
FSB: How did you prepare yourself to be in the headspace where that intuitive writing could arrive for you?
NMF: I had writing rituals as part of the making of this book. I usually would write late at night. There would usually be a candle or a tarot drawing that would set the scene in an intense way. Opening up a portal activated something for the writing to go somewhere.
Sometimes I would listen to recordings of Zukofsky reading his poems. Sometimes I would annotate in the margins directly of my copy of “A” or, reading a PDF, write in my journal or on a Google Doc right next to the tab open. So it was definitely chaotic and not a super organized process in writing those drafts, but over time, as I was rewriting those drafts, I would continue to play Telephone. So it was increasing rounds removed from the original text. I wasn’t looking back at the Zukofsky passages when I was editing poems that initially originated from Zukofsky. I would replace lines with new lines that sounded similar, like echoes of those lines. So gradually, the poem would become itself, which, to me, became a way of honoring the process of transition, the process of drift and slow growth and accumulation over time.
I have all these timestamps of drafts that I’ve saved over the years of some of these poems. And it’s really striking to look at a journal that published an early draft of my poem and compare that with the version that’s in the book, and compare that with the version that’s in a performance. And all of those versions are real, there’s no final or more legitimate version.
FSB: How have you changed your work for performances?
NMF: The performances that I do really vary. I consider them remixes. Sometimes I’ll do them with dance music. Sometimes I will perform the material in a different order, or just take some of the lines from it, or repeat lines or improvise with the sounds, and get more playful with emphasizing the sonic qualities of it.
FSB: And you play violin, right?
NMF: I do. I played violin in a video poem I made with my collaborator MMM four years ago, which was shown at Elastic Arts. And that video has earlier versions of a few poems in the beginning of the book, and those early poems are totally different than they are now. I looked totally different at that time, my voice sounded different. And some of my aesthetic inclinations even, in terms of what the video looks like and how I edited it, are different than maybe how I would do that now. And even when I revisited the material two years ago, let alone now, and screened that video again at another venue in Chicago called No Nation, I felt the need to create some sort of live intervention with it. So what I did was, I performed simultaneously with the video playing to create that sense that there’s been a continued change outside of the frame of the video.
FSB: You have this line in “Fig. 8” about the calamity of “becoming something else ‘un-alphabetic,’” referencing a line from Renee Gladman. How are you thinking about what it means to be “un-alphabetic?”
NMF: Renee Gladman is a deep, deep influence on how I think about language and legibility.
I love specifically her Plans for Sentences and Prose Architectures; her asemic drawings as an extension of her writing practice. For me, becoming unalphabetic is to give shape to transformation in all of its unruliness; is to be willing to cross a threshold and to risk moving beyond legibility. What do you not know about yourself that you want to know? To go into the space of the unknown requires daring to be “unalphabetic;” to move beyond the tools that you already know. It requires unlearning. It requires a beginner’s mindset. It’s leaning into writing as actively investigating living as a process that is unfolding without a clear narrative. That’s at least how I mean it.
FSB: As in, we’re seeing the process of your writing as it unfolds?
NMF: Exactly, as it becomes something else. As I start with a passage from Zukofsky and the same sounds drift to different words. It’s really awe-inducing to go through a process of transformation, and to stop and look back and realize how far you’ve come, and then to look ahead and realize how much further you might go as well.
FSB: Yeah, it’s really trippy, to say the least.
Should we talk about “Louise Zukofsky,” where she emerged for you in your writing process, and why she’s a technobottom? Is technobottom a real phrase?
NMF: That’s a word that I came up with. A few years ago I made a flip-book zine with MMM that was called “Goth Top, Techno Bottom.” Anyway, the wild thing about Louise is that I only kind of made her up. “Louise” actually appears within the book “A” in a different context, in reference to Lake Louise in Canada. So when I saw that, my mind started racing with the possibilities of Louise as a transfeminine version of Zukofsky, especially in parallel to a lot of the New Narrative writers that I really admired, like Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, and Dodie Bellamy’s [The Letters of] Mina Harker.
I think that Louise appears to me as an alter ego that I could engage with, and in the book, I introduce her in the form of a dream. But it’s also a way of drawing attention to the speaking double voice. There’s a poem in the book called “Louise Zukofsky Lost Her Hearing Aid at the Rave.” And yes, that was about me losing my hearing aid at a rave and finding it, but the language that I used to tell that story was entirely drawn from Zukofsky’s words and sounds. I reworked that material or remixed it in the language of nightlife, and allowed for this voice to come out of both of us.
FSB: Do you want to say more about how techno and nightlife come into the book and what they mean to you?
NMF: Nightlife, for me, represents a site of experimentation. Nightlife has pushed me to think more critically about how to make space for spontaneity and excitement, unpredictability, polyvocality and musicality, among other things, in writing and in everyday life. Nightlife is a presence in a number of the poems as something that they’re about, but also is an undercurrent of the rhythm throughout the book.
FSB: Yeah, I love the long poem “Ecstasy.”
NMF: That’s a hodgepodge Frankenstein poem. Just like all the other movements in the book, they originally were separate fragments. But then, as I continued editing those particular fragments, I played around with order and drew more and more connections between those individual fragments, and eventually structured it as a longer poem loop, which was where it came back to the first line at the end. “Ecstasy” is definitely at the heart of the book. It’s one of my favorite poems to read aloud in performance. It’s also a very dark poem. It hints at some traumatic things that have happened to me in nightlife spaces. So it’s not just a joyride.
FSB: Yeah, I feel like the looping is very techno too.
I’m also obsessed with your brilliant invented portmanteaus in E, like “faghagiography” and “phallo-sonic,” and am curious about where those came from.
NMF: That comes back to the fact that this was a project of divination, working with found material, making the language my own, which required me to get creative with considering the malleability of sound and language, where the edges blur and where they could break apart or come together in unexpected ways. I think of sound as a physical body, as a physical wave. So to think of sound changing in a physical way is inherently trans for me. And when it comes to portmanteaus, I’m deeply influenced by neobarocco writers such as Haroldo de Campos. His way of writing between words, blurring words for sonic effect, is incredibly mesmerizing.
It’s also play. It’s experimenting with, what are new ways of saying what I want to say? And sometimes those things that emerge are awkward in a specifically poetic way that exists between the spoken word and the unspoken word that appears in the mind’s eye on a page.
Mónica de la Torre, who was my teacher in school, was the one who actually introduced me to homophonic translation. Her writing often incorporates transcreation–which comes from Haroldo de Campos–a form of writing between languages–and she’s very self-conscious about, what does it mean to recognize the pitfalls of, say, false friends? Or what are the ways that translation has fault lines? That it’s hard to actually recreate something in another language, and it can’t be the same. It’s, by default, different.
So, with “faghagiography,” “hagiography” is pronounced with a strong a, but “fag hag” is pronounced with a soft a. So “faghagiography” kind of emerged out of a reader’s pronunciation; me not even realizing that “hagiography” would pronounce differently. So there’s this error that is preserved in that that I think is really beautiful, that you have this word that is impossible to pronounce to fully capture the essence of the joke.
FSB: And then there’s so many possible meanings, because it could be like the life of this fag hag who was a saint—
NMF: Or just a gay saint, right?
FSB: All of these alternate invented meanings remind me of one of the book’s epigraphs, from Juliana Huxtable: “It was really an experiment in posing alternate ways of conjugating myself.” How do the epigraphs frame the book?
NMF: The epigraphs were a way of me bringing in a library of references that fed me and nourished me in my poetry journey and transition, pointing to people who showed me a path for finding myself. Juliana Huxtable’s line resonates with me as a philosophy of experimentation, a philosophy of self-reinvention. I think there’s something really beautiful about conjugating myself as a conjuring, finding my way into inherited language, working the angles so that I could somehow speak in a tongue that didn’t feel made for me.
FSB: I like the idea of inherited language, because it suggests that it’s actually not about feeling like you’re inventing a whole new language, but instead that there’s a specific lineage of trans poets that you’re in conversation with. I also think the epigraph from T Fleischmann about the “many handed hungers of transsexuality” is a gesture towards that. I like “many handed hungers,” because it’s kind of freaky and monstrous, and also suggests multiplicity, like the alternate conjugations.
NMF: A phrase that has become popular, perhaps to the point of maybe becoming trite in recent years, is “desire lines”—
FSB: Wasn’t that the title of that transfag documentary [by Jules Rosskam]?
NMF: Right, but desire lines as a concept for a path that strays off the official path, but is made naturally over time by other animals or other people before you. It conveys to me this sense of, “I am walking a path that is a digression from, say, what I was originally directed towards as a subject.” But it is not a path that I am having to create from scratch. It is a path that is following and building on work that precedes me and continues alongside me.
FSB: While reading E, I was thinking about Lauren Berlant’s claim that “love is the misrecognition you like, can bear, and will try to keep consenting to.” You write, “What troubles all lovers is needing to trans/late.” I’m curious if you can say more about this lovers’ burden of translation and how it unfolds in E.
NMF: The line that follows “what troubles all lovers is needing to trans/late” in my book is “in order to relate.” So I really love the enjambment within the word translate as a gesture towards a belatedness, first of all, to all communication. But the really important part of that is that we wouldn’t need to translate if we didn’t care so much about trying to understand each other. We want to understand each other in order to connect. That’s the stake of translation. And for me to think of love as a problem of translation is to acknowledge that intimacy is, at its core, an encounter with, no matter how close we get to another person, there is a difference between us. Even as you try to build a shared world or language built on gestures or experiences together or an image repertoire, you have to constantly, stop and process sometimes and be like, “wait, when you say x, do you mean the same thing as what I say when I say x?” Because we’re not saying the same thing most of the time, right? We’re circling around each other.
And there’s a real art to listening and being able to go beyond our own heads, and honestly, that is to my view, the whole exciting thing about love—that it pushes us beyond our worldview, beyond our sense of self, and allows us to grow because we recognize that there are other ways of being in the world. That encounter with difference is what inspires us to grow and enables us to expand with each other, and hopefully not just with another person within a relationship unit, but also beyond that unit, in relation to a community, your neighbors, the world. I think it’s really important that a chorus of exes or lovers is present in my book, because it speaks to a palimpsest of my love lives as various attempts and failures, and sometimes successes, at least for a while, and rupture points that led to new realizations, and I carry those with me.
FSB: Do you think about this burden of translation with your readers as well? How do you think about readers encountering this text, and their recognition or misrecognition in the reading process?
NMF: There’s a way that I organized the book narratively that made sense to me in terms of grouping poems in movements that were linked thematically. And I think that someone could read the book from cover to cover in an order based on what I created, and have an experience that is what I intended. But I also have to recognize that someone might just open to one page or read it in the middle. What does it mean for a poem in the middle of the book to be a fractal, or formant representation, of the entire book? I was very intentional in structuring my book so that the more “vulnerable” poems that speak to trauma that I have experienced are later in the book, not to bury them, but because I wanted those to be something that to some extent, a reader builds up to and earns at a certain point of getting to know me as a writer.
But I do invite other people who are reading my project to engage with my material collaboratively as well—to, in good faith, reinterpret or remix my language in a similar way to what I did with Zukofsky’s language, to narrate their own life, because I think language is a shared tool. And it’s so hard to say what you want to say. So if you can find a way to articulate something that strikes a chord for yourself or others, go for that.