The Grapevine Telegraph by H Bolin and S Whittemore

Can you tell us about your new book ‘Permanent Volta’? Where does the title come from? Anything in particular you’d like to say about the poems included here?

This project started a few years ago with a joke slogan my friend Patricia and I would say to each other: “wages for muses.” When I began writing this project, I was interested in the impossibility of compensation for being represented, what it would mean for the artist or politician to have to pay the people they represented, and pay even more to the people that were unrepresentable. How can the (un)represented subject/object revolt from this structural impasse? But then I ended up writing all these love poems instead. Of course the unmused muse doesn’t want wages, they want to abolish the wage. I wanted my love objects to refuse to be represented.

In my writing process I often set really strict restraints on myself, and write in forms like the sestina or the sonnet, and then let them naturally devolve. The title Permanent Volta is a play on the “volta” of a sonnet – a turn in thought that ends in resolution in the couplet. I set out to write poems that were turning and turning and never coming to resolution. “Permanent Volta” is also a play on Permanent Revolution, although I am interested in what emerges as “revolutionary activity” is different than what historical paradigms suggests it to be. Revolutionary activity is constantly happening and building in clandestine, local, and care based ways. That’s why I ended up writing a bunch of love poems, asking, ultimately, how to be together outside of representation in the political: in intimacy, in mutual aid, in love.

The poems in Permanent Volta come across as a beautiful torrent of language defying the rules of fact, of the ordinary world “O that I can’t prove even this fact of sky?/ We know it feelingly”, but this is only half of the story of these poems. The other half is the rigorous formal restraints you place your writing under. How are these things related for you?

We are always afraid of the thing we feel most strongly in ourselves but can’t admit. When I write it is like the flood, like an impossible deluge of language and association. Formal restraint is my ditch. I often write in the form of sestinas or sonnets and see how the poem breaks itself, see what can’t be contained. I like playing out these power struggles in the poem, making them explicit. Constraint can be freeing, especially when imposed from something other than yourself. But the sonnet is a rusted out form. What you are resisting always wins. The water always wins. I think that’s what I had to learn from the flooding canal.

Can you say something about the process for translating the Rimbaud poem ‘Tale’. What does Rimbaud really say in his poem, or what doesn’t he say, or what were all hitherto translators leaving out of this story?

This is one of my favorite Rimbaud poems. Translation is a loose word here – I really just read this poem alongside the Detroit River with my friend Addy one day – we talked about it for hours and then we both went to the bar and “rewrote” it from memory.
The poem is about a prince who was bored with the mundanity of his own power. He goes on an ecstatic rampage in the name of revolutionary truth and love, kills all of his followers, destroys all the gardens, burns down all the palaces, and yet no one complains, they simply cheer him on. All the people he assassinates come back to life and still follow him with devotion. One day he meets this imaginary creature who reflects to him the revolutionary love he was looking for. It is so blissful the prince can barely endure it, so he and this thing become one another, and in doing so annihilate one another. The last line of the poem has been translated many different ways, but I like this version: “There is no sovereign music for our desire.”
In my version I think about the prince inside all of us, or perhaps the prince we look to elsewhere — I’m interested in this moment in the psychic lives of our desires for a different world, a different music for our desire.

Tell us about the time you spent in the Midwest fighting flooding in your house.

For the past many year, I lived in a house on the edge of a canal. The seawall ended two feet outside the backdoor of the house. It had rusted out, so when the water levels rose as the wind changed, water would leak through, flood my driveway and drain into the sewer grate in the front of the house.

I spent weeks digging a ditch to try to divert the water. I became obsessed with it. I bought myself a brand-new orange trenching spade from Home Depot and dug. The water flowed right into the ditch, and accumulated right at the road, so there was still evidence of the leaking canal, but at least it wasn’t getting into the crawl space. The constantly leaking water totally haunted my dreams. Over the years the water rose more and more. Everybody in the neighborhood had a different theory about why the water levels were rising, but it’s probably fair to say it has to do with global climate destruction. The final year I lived in the house the backyard was entirely flooded and the ditch didn’t matter anymore.

What are you looking forward to seeing happen in the world in 2020?

I’m hoping this avocado tree in my backyard starts fruiting.

Best and worst political scandal of 2019?

Best: Stephanie Hoefeller leaking her dad’s restricted files.
Worst: The things that didn’t come out to the public as scandal are probably worse than I can imagine.

I'M NOBODY / WHO ARE YOU

i’ve been up all night
trying to figure out how to want
loud enough to tie myself up
and out into the after all
of this luxurious thralldom
that keeps me in the way
of myself and my poem’s perineal body

autonomous bottom seeking
non-sovereign top
spit up into me
so my digestive track
can get a full night’s sleep
while the stars’ algorithm
churn out millions
squeezing lightyears, inciting a humming
that clocks my little shapes of pain

they look different erupting
out of this sinkhole of massive unseeing,
my right now controversy
on lock

i am all submitted to you
like you submit to the blossoming
that happens in the siloed collective gut
and gray water, a bacchanal inside us

we found each other under here
so we return the symbols we bought
we concoct new drives and partial objects
we barricade the speedbumps
disentangle the mission of highways

there where we are mother of each other
where we are brothers
baby birding disobedience
to our sense of self
cashing in on the Real’s residue

  but here call it stardust, call it umami,
  call me nobody, blur me out
 

SOVEREIGN EXHAUSTION
(after Tale by Arthur Rimbaud)

dildonic my massacre
a neo-gloryhole’d liberal fantasy
chafed, devotional and shadowy
  this truth
  this piety
generous my justice, a snapped little twig
oozing like dry ice, the other side of desire

embellished the oxytocin that could ever
honeycomb an inbox toward revolution
  in total coming together
  in synchronic transmission
of global and mountainous deprogrammed love

/
with my poetic prosthesis in your most laced crevasse
i slash the throats of my parking spaces
   my metric days
   my meter fees

i’m always so on time for you
i walk around the block
with the smashed plastic sea shore flooding
past the rocks to the downtown of my heart
just so i’m not too early
and you know my minds tied up
in imagining the casual riot
where the fence isn’t chained to fence
  isn’t keeping out our staged stamina
  keeping track of our charging cycles

/
i am dissolving in the waiting room
of the toyota dealership
an oil change splashed on my pronoun
possessive adjective on corporate forms
waiting out the twisted suspense
of a law firm bailing out
the logic of bail

better to destroy the boat, my aching trees,
than patch the sinking hole

let’s start over
  my ride
  my tectonic edgeplay
with the concept of who i am showered in
petroleum veins like
i want to be together
but I also want to be left alone
  my INFP commie conundrum
  my introvert version of togethering
  my close to death daisy, my weeded bouquet

/
lilac’d evening approaches
my gilded horror so unspoken
  i can finally speak

look now
the evaporation of trauma’d bank accounts
where we annihilate ourselves
to mediate our dyings

this shadow self locked up in self love groupons
  this medicaid appointment
  a sacherine elixir of redaction—

together in cinderblock’d health
we lack the form to want each other rightly
so my wonder spreads egoic and planless
not wanting to pass as reform

in bonfired bunks & bedridden poems
  i ask again, more quietly
  rejuvenate my cruelty
 

CAESURA FOUNTAIN

my ability to conjugate is rocky
swapping melted water for genetic grain
cracking sweet stains  & seeping wild
winged condensation into my cluttered
speaking patterns   all caesura’d out

my inch wants   a mile   it wants to
balloon that gap all O’s in there
machining a   nothingness to

loop and loop under the fountain’s infrastructure

where of course   i crave
the imperceptible   stone

i used to speak a language that
shone in   the galvanized pipe-
dream of me, a subsidized starlet

my breath indiscreetly   unknown

i loved and loved that crusted neglect
that secret punishment   so sweet where
water fell   so water   so dusty
with all that caked up future conditional

recycled and trapped in the same water
as last year   the year before

my machine yearns   for flood and for
fire that can’t be put out   with piss

imagination   some great stalwart
of discipline   like a strict fungal network
on molly   in the timespace of the marble pores
of being here   holding your hand

a sadness   is stalking me
its the shape of a chorus   its glitchy
double vision   gone when you look at it
the darkside of the gushing’s
shadow   it’s down the drain
it’s briny cornucopia of   feeling

a total entanglement seeps out of me
i’m drinking gallons of it
i am   chugging it   i am hydrated
strange and pissing   all the time

this body   a fountain   of filtered rocket
fuel and helping verbs   unlocatable

i let my caesura grow long as
that old fork   in the road
where the   wood pile rots

when fire   loses interest

his mother always told him
the squeaky wheel   gets the oil
as if oil   hadn’t already ended the world

i say   let the wheel squeak
let us squeak until
oil is obsolete let it rust
while we uninvent the wheel
let us fall in the wheel’s caesura

let the fountain   seep over stone
till we feel the damp tips of our shoelaces
puddled & enmeshed a marsh to touch

on every surface   the light can’t find

pause spewing pause
to learn the grammatical fact—
there is no going   forward alone

FACIAL RECOGNITION TOOL

if jesus had been
more of a kisser
and all his friends too
were sitting at that hang
kissing each other
judas’ plan wouldn’t
have worked out so well
& the cops wouldn’t
have known who to arrest

Rosie Stockton is a poet based in Los Angeles. Their first book, Permanent Volta, is the recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize, and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021. Their poems have been published by Publication Studio, Monster House Press, BigBig Wednesday, Flint Magazine, A Plume Journal, and WONDER.