Sonic References

A conversation with Anahid Nersessian

Anahid Nersessian is one of our best living literary critics and someone I’ve been lucky to meet on multiple occasions. She writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and anywhere else cool, chic, and thoughtful. Her work harbors a cool precision that’s still amiable—readable and layered, sharp and moving. She often writes about poetry, history, and the contemporary novel and has taken on behemoths like Walter Benjamin, Schattenfroh, Rachel Kushner, Keats, and Bjork. We talked about the idea of group reviews, taste, Marx, and being hot.

What is the substantive quality of a book or piece of art that you look for when deciding what to write about?

I like assignments, not because I mind pitching, but because I appreciate the opportunity to think about a book or show or whatever that wasn’t already on my mind or radar. My own tastes are pretty niche, so it’s not a given that I’ll pick up something a lot of people want to hear about. Luckily I work with editors who have great instincts when it comes to pairing a critic with an object. For example, the biography of Walter Benjamin that I reviewed for The New Yorker a few weeks ago wasn’t something I would have read on my own—as an English professor, I can’t say I feel in need of extra Benjamin—but Namara Smith, who’s an incredible editor, suggested it to me, and I thought, oh, yeah, of course! And that review turned out to be a blast to write.

I really loved your piece on Bjork---writing about Fossora for NYRB alongside so many other poets or translated literature---what was it like to approach writing about a musician in that way?

That piece is another example—Jana Prikyl at the NYRB asked me if I wanted to review the new Bjork album, and how could I say no? I listened to Bjork a lot in high school and a little in college, but I’d honestly sort of forgotten about her. (I’m one of the rare people who hated Vespertine when it came out, and my love for Bjork never really recovered.) I was the music editor of my college paper, and I used to want to be a music journalist: Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis are still two of my favorite writers, and I wait with baited breath between articles by my friend Carina del Valle Schorske, who for my money is one of the best minds on popular music out there. When I write about poetry or literature, I approach them the way I learned to approach music. How does this sound? What is its volume, its shape, what are its sonic and rhythmic references? So, in some ways, that NYRB piece just allowed me to do the kind of writing that is closest to my own practice.

There was a lot of ado about your “Nightboat School” moniker in a recent piece for Bookforum. How do you define the lyrical contours of such a genre? Or the social matrix poets like Rosie Stockton, Nora Treatbaby, or Kay Gabriel inhabit? To me it feels like a more opaque antidote to the glut of third-rate Frank O’Hara imitators. I think here too of your piece “Notes on Tone,” and the challenge of outlining trends.

I hesitate to do what you’re calling outlining trends, because I think it’s easy to jump the gun and do a disservice to something real: no shade but that “Brodernism” essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books comes to mind. Usually when a critic names a trend, she’s talking about something she doesn’t like or thinks is lame. That doesn’t interest me so much. I’m a poetry scholar by training, and after observing some of these writers—Kay, Rosie, Nora, Imogen Xtian Smith, lots of others—for several years, and feeling like Nightboat was just hitting it out of the park on a regular basis (here I’d also want to mention Lindsay Turner’s exquisite translation of the late Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life), I decided to think about the possibility that the press was allowing something like a “school” to coalesce.

Obviously throwing out a term like “Nightboat School” is tendentious, and of course people are going to be annoyed if they feel left out or like their work isn’t being “elevated” to the status of a movement—although I tried to make clear that I don’t think being part of a school means your poetry is good or bad, it just means it shares a robustly specific social and aesthetic character with poetry written by your contemporaries. I did hear some of that “ado” through the grapevine. A lot of it seemed to be coming from older male poets, many of them with a toehold in academia, either because they teach at universities or have PhDs or publish their work with academic presses. That’s a different milieu, and it’s an interesting one, and great poetry has come out of it. It’s just not what I was writing about. I was writing about young queer poets with precarious jobs, many of whom don’t have MFAs or PhDs, who publish with a Brooklyn-based small press. It’s a description, not a competition.

In your work there’s a lot of threads---the lyric form, Keats, Anti-Zionism, psychoanalysis, Walter Benjamin--how did you harness your interests? Or, how do they haunt you? Do you believe in taste?

If I have any kind of taste it’s very elastic, and I’m not a snob, except maybe when it comes to poetry: I find a lot of mainstream poetry, with its literalism and humorlessness and formal inertia, embarrassing for everyone, readers as well as writers. And if there’s a throughline to my writing, it can probably be explained by the fact that I went to graduate school and was trained in Marxist literary criticism, a method of reading and interpretation that also happens to align with my politics. Sorry but I just think leftists make better critics: Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Tobi Haslett, Lauren Michele Jackson, Ben Lerner…do the reactionaries have that deep a bench? I don’t necessarily foreground political topics in my work, but I see the world a certain way and I have certain values and beliefs about humanity and social life. If I thought those values and beliefs were dumb I’d abandon them, and then my writing would be different, and I suspect it would be worse.

Do you think the LA literary scene is fundamentally different from NYC? Howso? Your work seems to have a different sensibility, but I can’t label that or say how that manifests.

New York is the center of the publishing world the same way that LA is the center of the movie business. I think being on the periphery of your industry is good for you; it makes you feel a little out of the loop, not so saturated with information about what other people are doing. In general I’d say the literary scene in LA is less status-driven, more gentle and welcoming and—I know everyone says this—democratic. A lot of the credit there is due to people like Sammy Loren, Ruby Zuckerman and Evan Laffer, Joseph Mosconi and the Poetic Research Bureau, and David Horvitz, who curate or host readings in spaces across the city and bring all sorts of writers in front of all sorts of audiences. As for my own work, again, I’m pretty clueless—I have no idea who has a book deal or who has beef or where someone got her MFA, and maybe that frees me up a bit to follow my own instincts or preoccupations. I also just love LA, its vastness and improbability. I hope that love, and the city’s energy, makes its way into my writing.

How, oh how, did you approach reviewing Schattenfroh?

I was just talking about that book the other day! It’s an experience as much as a novel—a form of endurance art. Trying to capture that in a review while also giving readers some guideposts to what the fuck is going on was daunting, but as I wrote about Schattenfroh I found that Michael Lentz’s core commitments to narrative and the history of realism are much stronger than they might initially seem. The book is experimental but so are Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travelsand German Romantic philosophy and the other stuff it’s in dialogue with, work that’s become canonical over the years and that there’s a sort of cultural consensus on. It’s part of a tradition and less opaque when you consider it in that light. Also, Max Lawton’s translation is such a joy—buoyant and clear and just in love with language. There’s an immediate, sensuous pleasure in reading the novel that’s just as important as its avant-garde acrobatics.

Finally, we were both in On the Rag’s Hottest Critics blog post a few years back. How did you find that experience?

I mentioned Sammy Loren, the editor of On the Rag, already. I’ve found him to be an unfailingly positive, optimistic, and kind person, and for the most part On the Rag’s blog reflects that sensibility, even in an occasionally cracked or unhinged register. It’s all in good fun. What I loved about that thread was seeing so many of my friends recognized for being hot and beautiful and smart. That was lovely.

Overrated/underrated for Writers

“Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag.

I think this one has passed through canonicity, become banal, and now has risen again, like Jesus. Jesse McCarthy’s vintage n+1 piece “Notes on Trap” is a beautiful and hypnotic extension of the OG essay.

Autofiction.

Evergreen. It’s not always done well but when it is it’s delicious.

Astrology.

All esoteric forms of knowledge are undervalued even as they’re overexposed.

The Pitt.

I don’t watch a lot of TV but during the first season, I would be out on a Thursday night thinking about how when I got home I could watch a new episode of The Pitt. It scratches a certain existential itch for me because I wish I’d become a doctor. But the second season has been absolutely dreadful--so toneless and boring.

Reality tv.

The shows I find too stressful but that Netflix series ‘Trainwreck’ I will say is a joy.

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Image by Richard Diebenkorn.