Bhanu Kapil
Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches at Naropa University. She also teaches in Goddard College’s low-residency MFA. She is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry/prose, includingThe Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015). ~ from The Poetry Foundation
Published 05/07/17
Published 05/07/17
Howl: What is your writing process like?
Kapil: I have trained myself to trust the deep time of the book, the many years between its germinal and emergent stages. As an example, I began my third book, humanimal [a project for future children] in 2000, when I was pregnant with my son. It was published in 2009. That's nine years of not-knowing, of waiting for the materials of the book -- its figures and glimpses -- to orient: not to me, not to the reader, but to each other. Perhaps also I am waiting for the moment when the shards of the work begin to reassemble, begin to stream their own fire and water. This also might happen just for a few moments. My process has begun to include, over the last decade, an interest in installation, performance and ritual as sites for these "few moments" to be recorded, precipitated, dreamed. You could describe this as a kind of research, and it usually happens with others, co-researchers of many kinds. I think of the two years in the garden with my friend Sharon Carlisle, who was sifting the mud of my garden to make clay, and how there were a few days between the mud-making or clay-making, and the start of the sculptural part of Sharon's project (a reclining "mud female Buddha"). For just a few days, there was a kind of balcony beneath the arbor we had woven. And this was where I staged the cover of Ban en Banlieue: a diasporic work about a girl who lies down on the floor of the world, forever. I lay down there, in the stages between this other kind of making, and also was a part of the making that was not, you could say, for me. Afterwards, I made theory, postcolonial and ecological theory, from watching the installation degrade. At the same time, I -- and my family and friends and any visitors -- kept decorating/embellishing this rotted space, this space where the "body" -- the outline of the reclining female Buddha -- was barely visible. I would perhaps sit out there with my notebook and take notes. This is a lag too. This is what I would describe as a process without an outcome (publishing, for example) in the conventional sense. But it is how I understand or turn to questions of embodiment, culture and place in ways that -- allow me to shift time -- inside my own body. And this is the time of writing. Perhaps it is about memory too. I don't live in a place where my memories are easily available. And so, I have to travel in other ways, across and through time, to get there. To the garden I have yet to write.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Kapil: Generally, after many years of aggregating, you could say, fragments of various kinds, I wait for the four days when my son is not with me, and when I am physically alone. I then organize all the notebooks and print out anything from my blog where I might have written towards the work. I clear a space. I create a mandala: a quickly drawn circle with a sketch. I study the sketch. In four days (which was the process with Schizophrene, my fourth book): I flow with the gesture of this last stage, holding a feeling for the narrative that has, perhaps, some consistency. No, that's not exactly true. I don't know how I edit, perhaps. I know that when I give a reading from work in process, I pay attention to what feels right -- and what does not -- and that, en face, in front of a loose group, is a very quick way to figure out what belongs and what must: shed off.
Howl: From where do you get your inspiration and do you have any strategies or quirks to get the muses speaking to you?
Kapil: I meditate every day, and many times a day, to create a channel between my own form, my life, and higher consciousness, which certainly resembles the shift of time I am trying to describe. If I am connected in this way, then I could be sitting in a cafe in Loveland, Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, and a horse with a red ribbon tied to its mane would walk past the window (which happened), just after I had been writing in my notebook about a red ribbon, for example, and wishing I had a horse and could gallop away. To clarify, I never saw a horse walk by, on the sidewalk, ever again. Meditation, and mantra, have been the basis, for me, of a life of synchronicity. This life is the basis of the life in which I come to writing with my whole -- can I say the word? -- soul.
Howl: When do you know a poem you’re writing is finished?
Kapil: When what is in it appears beyond the frame. For instance, the book about the wolfgirls, humanimal, I knew it was complete when I opened the newspaper one day and there was a story about a girl in Laos, I think it was, who had walked out of the jungle after over a decade living with wild animals there.
Howl: What advice would you give to budding writers?
Kapil: Connect your breathing to the earth. Develop other ways of knowing. Imagine you are seated beneath a waterfall. Drink water, but not from the waterfall. Spend time with others who are not like you. Are these your radical others? Develop friendships with non-poets, and find work, or train, in what will put in the middle of: populations of many kinds.
Howl: Whose work are you currently reading that you’re excited about and would recommend and why?
Kapil: I love a site called contemptorary.org, created by Eunsong Kim and Gelare Khoshgozaran. The site is a training in fierceness, courage and decolonization. Ethics and mood states are both, equally, activated by this site.
Howl: What do you think about the current state of poetry in America and where do you see it heading?
Kapil: Experimental writing/poetry community in the U.S. is dealing, right now, with issues of race and appropriation. I am taking a bit of a break; speaking up around these -- issues, which are not issues -- they are states of being -- or things -- that get lodged in the tissues of the body -- has been powerful and also kind of terrible. I am most interested in being part of community when we are sensing, together, what it might be -- to decolonize: this. See: Thinking Its Presence conference this Fall in Tucson, Arizona.
Howl: What do you feel the responsibility of the poet is to the reader and vice versa?
Kapil: To dream together, for a little while.
Howl: When you were growing up in London, you cited Salmon Rushdie as an influential writer for you. What about his writing struck you and how do you believe you’ve incorporated this influence in your own writing?
Kapil: Perhaps, mostly, trying to connect with the memory of that time, in which I read Rushdie, it has been an influence on my life -- to think of writing as a political form. To never throw a book on the ground, even if you yourself have to lie on the ground in order to write the book. To remember that it is part of the duty of the writer to return the history of a country to: itself. To remember. To remember what might otherwise: ebb off. I am speaking, in particular, of works set in immigrant neighborhoods that have been, over time, gentrified, or changed in other ways. Is the neighborhood a biome? I feel a duty to connect, to remember, to retrieve a smudge.
Howl: What’s in the works, coming up next, for Bhanu Kapil?
Kapil: Getting on a plane to Heathrow Airport in three hours time, to fly to London for a reading at the ICA!!!!! I will be a few minutes stroll from Buckingham Palace. Perhaps the Queen will walk her corgis down the Mall and wander into my event. Perhaps we will have tea in her garden, with Victoria Sponge cake from Fortnum and Mason's. Perhaps then we will watch re-runs of The Crown on her sofa, and I can then casually suggest, since we have now become top pals, that she return the Koh-I-Noor Diamond to India. I am not sure, though, what I mean when I say, India. Ideally, the diamond would be -- buried -- once more -- in the earth. But then, I guess, this -- earth -- would have to be heavily surveilled and monitored.
Kapil: I have trained myself to trust the deep time of the book, the many years between its germinal and emergent stages. As an example, I began my third book, humanimal [a project for future children] in 2000, when I was pregnant with my son. It was published in 2009. That's nine years of not-knowing, of waiting for the materials of the book -- its figures and glimpses -- to orient: not to me, not to the reader, but to each other. Perhaps also I am waiting for the moment when the shards of the work begin to reassemble, begin to stream their own fire and water. This also might happen just for a few moments. My process has begun to include, over the last decade, an interest in installation, performance and ritual as sites for these "few moments" to be recorded, precipitated, dreamed. You could describe this as a kind of research, and it usually happens with others, co-researchers of many kinds. I think of the two years in the garden with my friend Sharon Carlisle, who was sifting the mud of my garden to make clay, and how there were a few days between the mud-making or clay-making, and the start of the sculptural part of Sharon's project (a reclining "mud female Buddha"). For just a few days, there was a kind of balcony beneath the arbor we had woven. And this was where I staged the cover of Ban en Banlieue: a diasporic work about a girl who lies down on the floor of the world, forever. I lay down there, in the stages between this other kind of making, and also was a part of the making that was not, you could say, for me. Afterwards, I made theory, postcolonial and ecological theory, from watching the installation degrade. At the same time, I -- and my family and friends and any visitors -- kept decorating/embellishing this rotted space, this space where the "body" -- the outline of the reclining female Buddha -- was barely visible. I would perhaps sit out there with my notebook and take notes. This is a lag too. This is what I would describe as a process without an outcome (publishing, for example) in the conventional sense. But it is how I understand or turn to questions of embodiment, culture and place in ways that -- allow me to shift time -- inside my own body. And this is the time of writing. Perhaps it is about memory too. I don't live in a place where my memories are easily available. And so, I have to travel in other ways, across and through time, to get there. To the garden I have yet to write.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Kapil: Generally, after many years of aggregating, you could say, fragments of various kinds, I wait for the four days when my son is not with me, and when I am physically alone. I then organize all the notebooks and print out anything from my blog where I might have written towards the work. I clear a space. I create a mandala: a quickly drawn circle with a sketch. I study the sketch. In four days (which was the process with Schizophrene, my fourth book): I flow with the gesture of this last stage, holding a feeling for the narrative that has, perhaps, some consistency. No, that's not exactly true. I don't know how I edit, perhaps. I know that when I give a reading from work in process, I pay attention to what feels right -- and what does not -- and that, en face, in front of a loose group, is a very quick way to figure out what belongs and what must: shed off.
Howl: From where do you get your inspiration and do you have any strategies or quirks to get the muses speaking to you?
Kapil: I meditate every day, and many times a day, to create a channel between my own form, my life, and higher consciousness, which certainly resembles the shift of time I am trying to describe. If I am connected in this way, then I could be sitting in a cafe in Loveland, Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, and a horse with a red ribbon tied to its mane would walk past the window (which happened), just after I had been writing in my notebook about a red ribbon, for example, and wishing I had a horse and could gallop away. To clarify, I never saw a horse walk by, on the sidewalk, ever again. Meditation, and mantra, have been the basis, for me, of a life of synchronicity. This life is the basis of the life in which I come to writing with my whole -- can I say the word? -- soul.
Howl: When do you know a poem you’re writing is finished?
Kapil: When what is in it appears beyond the frame. For instance, the book about the wolfgirls, humanimal, I knew it was complete when I opened the newspaper one day and there was a story about a girl in Laos, I think it was, who had walked out of the jungle after over a decade living with wild animals there.
Howl: What advice would you give to budding writers?
Kapil: Connect your breathing to the earth. Develop other ways of knowing. Imagine you are seated beneath a waterfall. Drink water, but not from the waterfall. Spend time with others who are not like you. Are these your radical others? Develop friendships with non-poets, and find work, or train, in what will put in the middle of: populations of many kinds.
Howl: Whose work are you currently reading that you’re excited about and would recommend and why?
Kapil: I love a site called contemptorary.org, created by Eunsong Kim and Gelare Khoshgozaran. The site is a training in fierceness, courage and decolonization. Ethics and mood states are both, equally, activated by this site.
Howl: What do you think about the current state of poetry in America and where do you see it heading?
Kapil: Experimental writing/poetry community in the U.S. is dealing, right now, with issues of race and appropriation. I am taking a bit of a break; speaking up around these -- issues, which are not issues -- they are states of being -- or things -- that get lodged in the tissues of the body -- has been powerful and also kind of terrible. I am most interested in being part of community when we are sensing, together, what it might be -- to decolonize: this. See: Thinking Its Presence conference this Fall in Tucson, Arizona.
Howl: What do you feel the responsibility of the poet is to the reader and vice versa?
Kapil: To dream together, for a little while.
Howl: When you were growing up in London, you cited Salmon Rushdie as an influential writer for you. What about his writing struck you and how do you believe you’ve incorporated this influence in your own writing?
Kapil: Perhaps, mostly, trying to connect with the memory of that time, in which I read Rushdie, it has been an influence on my life -- to think of writing as a political form. To never throw a book on the ground, even if you yourself have to lie on the ground in order to write the book. To remember that it is part of the duty of the writer to return the history of a country to: itself. To remember. To remember what might otherwise: ebb off. I am speaking, in particular, of works set in immigrant neighborhoods that have been, over time, gentrified, or changed in other ways. Is the neighborhood a biome? I feel a duty to connect, to remember, to retrieve a smudge.
Howl: What’s in the works, coming up next, for Bhanu Kapil?
Kapil: Getting on a plane to Heathrow Airport in three hours time, to fly to London for a reading at the ICA!!!!! I will be a few minutes stroll from Buckingham Palace. Perhaps the Queen will walk her corgis down the Mall and wander into my event. Perhaps we will have tea in her garden, with Victoria Sponge cake from Fortnum and Mason's. Perhaps then we will watch re-runs of The Crown on her sofa, and I can then casually suggest, since we have now become top pals, that she return the Koh-I-Noor Diamond to India. I am not sure, though, what I mean when I say, India. Ideally, the diamond would be -- buried -- once more -- in the earth. But then, I guess, this -- earth -- would have to be heavily surveilled and monitored.