Sam Cha in Conversation with Ariana Reines. 2024.

During the pandemic, I (Sam Cha, yours truly) heard–probably from Suzanne Mercury, a wonderful poet I know mostly from the Boston Poetry Marathon–that Ariana Reines had started a Zoom community/group/”study hall” called Invisible College, in which people were getting together to read an eclectic mix of myth and poem.  All around me the world was a homogenous mush of dread and boredom and contagion and paranoia and anger–a kind of death porridge.  Sign me up, I said. 

The Zoom meetings for Invisible College became a kind of lifeline for me, and probably for everyone there, Ariana included.  Many lifelines, then, criss-crossed and woven together.  A net that helped free us. 

Recently, I had the chance to have the following conversation with Ariana, via email and Google Doc, about her new book, Wave of Blood.

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SC: This hadn’t quite consciously registered with me until I was reviewing Wave of Blood, but it seems to me that a lot of your work can be read at least in part as travelogue.  You have an affinity with the epic–in Wave of Blood you talk about teaching Milton, and I first got to know you when you were teaching The Descent of Inanna.  I was wondering whether you could talk more here about your relationship with epic journeys that are also katabatic descents into the twinned structures of the universe and the soul?  And how that feeds into Wave of Blood?

AR: You’re right.  All of my work– maybe beginning with A Sand Book (2019)?-- has been travelogue.

The epic mode, at least as it was first taught to me, involves men setting off on boats– going to war, or going in search of the father.  The feminine epic does seem to involve both ascent and descent, as we discovered with Inanna: she structures and crafts the realm in which she comes to reign, the middle realm.  Having brought the me down from heaven she establishes a new order, then goes to the underworld to be stripped of every single power and honor she has acquired for herself.

I guess we might suggest then that the Greek epic and the Sumerian tradition have travel in common: these poems require that their heroes go somewhere.  I feel like Eileen Myles, in The Importance of Being Iceland, though they don’t personally write much in the epic mode, has created in and of themselves a kind of epic hero, the figure of the poet out in public, moving across and through the world, and they’ve been a big inspiration and comfort to me in my journeying.

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SC: And maybe a bit about the way we structure our own lives as epic?  What are some things that you get out of your life, if you read it as epic; what are some things to look out for; what wolf and what leopard and what Anzu-bird?

AR: It helps to have a form to refer to.  It helps, when you feel like life is turning you inside out, ripping you apart, etc, to refer your soul’s torments and confusions to a structure with enough vigor in it to give you the courage you need to pass from one ordeal to the next.  I think this is one of the real functions of poetry: it makes a place for us where no place exists, it names and somehow dignifies aspects of reality normative thought does not know how to name, or what to do with.

My sense from what I’ve been learning from Inanna is that wolves, leopards, and Anzu-birds just naturally show up.  That when we make a decision and take action in our lives, good things and people arrive, helpers and lovers and friends, and also riff raff, squatters, thieves, and randos– it’s natural.  Some decisiveness and pluck is required of us if we’re ever going to build something, and yet, if we’re going to remain poets, we also have to be willing to lose everything, to go into the bowels of the earth the way Inanna– but also Dante, Persephone, Prometheus, so many others– do….

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SC: Part of the structure of the travelogue is the return–if not to the place of origin, a place that mirrors and betters it.   A home.  You’ve spent a lot of your life, as you say in Wave of Blood, feeling like you couldn’t have a home.  I’m wondering whether that has changed for you, or is changing, even as you strive for “a mind that abides nowhere”?

AR: You know what’s wild Sam?  I swear I didn’t plan this– couldn’t possibly have planned it.  But two weeks ago I moved back to Queens, which is where the home was that I gave up while writing A Sand Book, because I couldn’t live with myself letting my mom end up on the streets again (even though, eventually, she did end up on the streets again.)

It’s a thought I’ve held in the most delicate and private way lately– a very quiet but somehow epic feeling of homecoming.  Thank you for asking me that.

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SC: One thing that’s really hard to capture, in any review of your work, is the dynamic between sincerity and irony.  I don’t know whether those are even the right terms.  I’m thinking here of the MOSAIC section of A Sand Book, in which you are recounting a real mystical experience, but at the same time it is also framed as something learned, something analogous to “the ‘bliss’ [...] heard about in old books.”  It’s so subtle, that layer of artifice, and that subtlety is one of the many things I admire about your work.

I don’t know whether what I’m trying to say is completely clear.  Maybe an analogy is the way to go–although, as you point out, it is an “imprecise mechanism.”  But often I read your work and what I experience is like a kind of exploded diagram of myth and representation of myth–there’s the real Lucia who is gouging out her own eyes, and there is the saint, sublimed into story, who does so without pain or compunction, and there’s the icon of Santa Lucia, calmly holding out her own eyes on a platter, as if to say well, do you want this or not?  What do you make of it?  And the thing is, your poems are all of those at the same time–pain and story and emblem, grief and rage and love given “form [...] and formality” is how you put it, early in Wave of Blood.

I’m wondering whether it was harder to maintain that level of control in Wave of Blood, given that large parts of the book are based on transcripts of your public speaking?  Could you tell us a bit about the process of putting the book together, and of structuring it?  How was it different from the experience of putting together A Sand Book?  Or, since you were writing it just before (?) Wave of Blood, the experience of putting together The Rose?

AR: Sam this is such a beautiful and generous, subtle and precise reading that I hesitate to add to it.  I feel such gratitude for it.  But to answer your question, and simply: yes.  It was hard.  Excruciating actually, to maintain control in Wave of Blood.

Speech is sloppy– it’s the spirit behind the words that people receive, so you can use the wrong words, or even somehow flop around them and never even quite say them, but people feel you, and they know what you mean.  Speech has to be edited to satisfy me as a writer– at least mine does– but I tried not to edit all of its sloppiness out, or I’d kill off the best thing about it, which is that speech is alive.

I also gave myself the somewhat insane task of not writing memoir.  Of not writing a memoir of my mother’s suicide.  And not exactly writing a memoir of watching a genocide unfold, while nevertheless feeling that I myself would die if I did not at least try to make a record of both.

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SC: In “Absolute Zero,” the first poem in Wave of Blood, faced with the image of the “crimson hole / In the delicate skull of a baby” your speaker says “I did not know how to see / God almighty if there is a God / You must see it for me.”  And what I get from that is that there is a way in which you’re trying desperately through poetry, through language, “despite its corruptions,” to speak into existence a kind of many-souled, many-bodied one who does know how to see such things.  Who can, in some alembic womb, carry the dead.  This, in opposition to the mind of war, the “mechanistic–machine-like–forces moving across the world,” the latest manifestation of which, for you, is AI, as a “Frankenstein god in its uncontrollable infancy.”  This reminded me a lot of Blake, another poet who learned from Milton: “Milton loved me in childhood & shewed me his face,” he says somewhere.  Milton sounds there almost like a mother for Blake, which makes me think of the part in Wave of Blood where you quote your friend Jaguar Womban, who says that in all of history there is only one womb.  And I was wondering if you could say something about community, about what’s passed down and around from poet to poet, warm and living hand to warm and living hand, across time?  And who (like Milton for Blake, regardless of sex) are your mothers in poetry?

AR: Another astonishingly subtle and generous reading, causing me goosebumps of gratitude.  I think Jaguar’s teaching is masterful and immense: it has the kind of authority of those very few things in life one needs to hear only once to be changed forever.  The word community has been raped, stretched out, and abused almost to death by our political overlords– but there is something quantum in there, something extending from life to life, that stays alive forever in poetry, and my mother’s death really drove this fact home for me.  The poets do not die.  Their poems outlast even the languages they were written in, and certainly they outlast the cultures they were written for (and against).  That is community.  I’ve only experienced it in and through poetry– its living hand is indeed warm and capable, and as ghoulish and absurd as that may sound, it’s a hundred percent real.  We know it because we feel it– Keats reaching toward us, Blake mothering us.  My mothers: definitely the women of the New York School, Generation Two.  Hurston, Deren, Michel André (my father).  Louise Labé, Chaucer, Montaigne, Duras, Pasolini. More mothers: Avital Ronell, Sylvere Lotringe, Michael Silverblatt, Hedi El-Kholti.  Too many to mention.  I would add Chris Kraus but it’s too cloying to call her a mother, though in many ways and for many reasons, I owe her my life.

SC: Thank you so much, again, Ariana, for agreeing to do this interview!

Sam Cha was born in Korea.  He earned his MFA at UMass Boston.  A Pushcart Prize winner, he has been published and anthologized widely.  He's the author of American Carnage (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs: 2018), and The Yellow Book ([PANK]: 2020).  Long a resident of Cambridge, MA, he now lives in Brooklyn with his family.