Kirsten Ihns On Meshwork, Networked Cues, and Building a New Future
WHEN YOU DECIDE it’s time to allow yourself a mental health break from any of the world’s ongoing crises, check out Jeff Alessandrelli’s interview of Kirsten Ihns on the Kenyon Review site. Here’s a quick sampling of some of the ground covered in their conversation about sundaey, Ihns’s debut collection, which Alessandrelli calls “a doozy of forms and styles, all encased in one solidified beating heart of a book.”
When Alessandrelli asks about form after noting that “there aren’t any lyric or narrative poems, no poems that seems directly concerned with identity or the singular body or even the day-in, day-out nuances of contemporary life,” Ihns responds (in part) that she is interested in:
a kind of second order notion of subjects—like, what if you could know a lyric subject as a way of moving, a kind of rhythmic tempo, a choreography of ways of moving in language, rather than as a “subject” in the default way we usually think of one. […] A subject is and is stuck in an uncomfortably shifting relational meshwork, not a well-bounded unity, to my sense, especially now.
That’s just a small slice of her answer. Alessandrelli also asks for some of Ihns’s thoughts on the idea of a writer’s control at the level of a poem or a whole project. Ihns says (in part):
I really think of poetry relationally, also—like the poem isn’t what’s written on the page, rather I think the poem is what happens in the reader’s mind/body in thinking through it. I think it also happens differently for each reader, because each person’s receptivity is configured differently, so whatever the poem is, ultimately, is a kind of working-out of how that particular mind can move in the poem, which should be a flexible but delimited set of (harmonically?) networked cues for feeling and/or thought. I think my job as the poet is to build a kind of plexus or network that emits energy of a particular frequency, if you will, when activated. But the reader has to be able to activate it, and then be sustained in it, and summoned also to make something on the terms of their own mind which can channel the energy of the thing.
If you’re getting the sense that Ihns is an extremely smart and creative person, you are correct. Alessandrelli asks about her sense of the performance of affect on the Internet, and its relation to creative or personal exhaustion. Ihns’s response includes:
Hal Foster, in a talk about his new book What Comes After Farce?, argued that theory has moved, in its relation to an idea of “truth” or “reality,” from a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” where surfaces must be interrogated to get at what is “actually” the case beneath them, through a kind of delight in the play of surfaces only, to a recognition that “truth” or “reality” must be actively constructed, citing Eyal Weizman’s forensic architecture practice as an example. I think something like this is also more broadly applicable vis à vis frameworks for feeling and meaning in relationship to the world and to others. I think we are at a historical moment when there is a lot of hope and/or thought around actively “building” a new kind of future that doesn’t really look like anything familiar, partially in necessary reaction to the brokenness of the systems that have existed until now.
These are just very small slices of what is an excellent, wide-ranging discussion. There is much more to read in Jeff Alessandrelli’s full interview with Kirsten Ihn’s at Kenyon Review.
You can also, of course order sundaey from Propeller Books (shipping is free).
Kirsten Ihns earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She is currently a Ph.D. student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where she studies texts that seem to want to be images, co-founded the Plexiglas series at The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, co-organizes UChicago’s Poetry & Poetics Workshop, and works for Chicago Review. She is from Atlanta, Georgia.
