Elena Macdonald: It’s been lovely to see your progression as an artist through the few years that I’ve been following you, since I first read the poem that we featured from the New England Review, the “Blue Harp” poem. And then reading your first book, which I absolutely adore, and now this lovely chapbook, too.
Temperance Aghamohammadi: Thank you, that means a lot. As an artist, I strive to do this frankly very risky move of changing my aesthetic and nearly my writing style for each project. I do think there’s quite a marked difference between BATTALION SHAPED GIRL and Behnt in the syntactical techniques, the aesthetics, the scenarios, and even the music. BATTALION SHAPED GIRL was meant to have this militant, almost punk, sonic world to it. Behnt strives more towards something somewhat orchestral, somewhat synth-based. The music of Behnt wrestles between the orchestral and the synthetic, and the dark core in between the two.
EM: Thinking about the orchestral, but also the kind of mechanical, in “Behnt: Automata” and beyond, the speaker is propelled by “coccyx electricity” and is “arranging limbs mechanically.” Could you talk about the way the mechanical and the body converse in the collection?
TA: I’ll take a detour to answer this question. This book started in London, about a week after my mother passed away. I ended up in this flat in north London with a friend of mine, and I met one of her flat mates, Seraphina, who ended up being the most unexpected blessing during that time. Our conversations helped me unlock unknown archaeologies of my self and my grief.
One day I ended up at the Tate Modern. They were having a Hilma af Klint exhibit, I was there alone. I had my earbuds in, walking through the gallery, really taking 20 minutes at each painting, letting them wash over me, until I got to the Painting for the Temples series. Hilma af Klint was a medium. She noted that all her paintings seem to come from this one spirit that used to express itself through her, and instructed Klint on what to paint. These paintings had a massive effect on me. They’re ethereal, esoteric, and vibrantly pink, blue, orange: they are these massively saturated icons but possessing a lightness and a lushness.
I was so fascinated and changed by these paintings that I got the biography of Hilma af Klint by Julia Voss. In one of Hilma af Klint’s journal entries, speaking of her artistry and her mediumship, she wrote: “I will become the instrument of ecstasy.” The phrase just sort of latched onto my brain and felt the credo or axiomatic phrase to my existence post my mother’s death. Ecstasy being that point of absolute pleasure, absolute pain that opens oneself up to a world.
Ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning to drive out. To me, that feels like a bending. A bending of the self, of the spirit, of the body. Everything bends together. So, to the mechanical aspects that you’re picking up, well, take an orchestra, which is a sort of machine, no? The conductor raises their arm and sets things into motion. Everything must be exact, or the composition falls apart. There must be a cohesion and because of that cohesion, there’s an immense tension. Everything could fall apart at any moment. I used to play the violin, and the sheer bodily intensity of playing something hurts. You’re holding the one hand on the violin, your cheek is pressed down on the rest, you’ve got a strange angle, you’ve got your hands on the bow in a kind of crooked way, and everything must move. You must endure that discomfort. Meanwhile, on the sort of synthetic music side, in a way, it’s easier to play a synth, you can press the keys and they’ll play the note. You can spin the dials, arpeggiate it, increase the attack or the delay, etc. While you can create all these effects, there’s also still a risk, because machines can break, or there’s error there.
For me, image and sound are so intrinsically combined that in my process, sound begets image and image begets sound. As I was writing Behnt, I felt this music of intense vibrancy that would end in strange ways. Suddenly a different melody, tone, or timbre would start to play, and then it would cut again. It would constantly be cutting between extreme vibrancies that hurt, and then a dark music darknesses which didn’t console but also didn’t hurt as much. This was the constant oscillation of sound I experienced.
Now I’m wondering, why do we consider the mechanic non-human when the mechanic is very much human? It is so embedded in us. We are the ones who made machines, and if we are the ones that make machines at some level implicitly, imagistically, we modeled the machines after us. They make the music that we make. They need internal fluids to operate like we do: oil. They need care and maintenance, and if they’re left alone, they fall apart. It’s important to notice the ways in which we operate in a circuit or in a machine. Once we notice that, can we ever go back? Once the circuit is broken, can you ever fix the circuit? I know a lot of people will say that they write to survive. For me, writing does nothing for my emotions. It’s not a catharsis; it doesn’t process anything. It is an amber over the insect. It simply captures in a glistening way, but there’s something dark at the heart of it.
There is an insistence in poetry to write a certain way about certain topics, or that there is a right way to write at all. Certain rules must be followed, certain craft choices must be followed, one must make the writing extremely legible to the reader, etc. Legibility risks self-annihilation. There’s also this pressure, I feel, and perhaps this is just an internal pressure I felt, to write about one’s grief from a cold remove. As I was writing in London, I was just telling myself, if I ever write a book about this, it must be conveyed how it is right now: the extreme absolute end of ecstasy and nothing more or less. I made it my imperative: you will be in the heart of it with me, and you, the reader, either stay or leave, and I don’t care what you do.
EM: So much to chew on there. There were also many mentions of God and the divine in the book, and I was very curious about the role of the divine in Behnt and in your larger artistic practice.
TA: The divine has had such an integral part in my artistic practice and in my life writ large. The Sufi poets of Persia have an extreme influence on me. What is their poetry if not the marriage between the bodily, the sensual—and by sensual, I mean the sensing body—and the divine? There is sort of an opulence of affect and sensation, which feels true to me, in the tradition I was raised in, and I want to carry that tradition forward.
I don’t think I’ll go a single day in my life without ever talking about Farrokhzad. She has invocations and evocations of a divine that is different than my divine, or even the Sufi divine, but marries strong affect with strong depictions of the sensing body, and the instrumentalization of that body.
In my practice, what I experience is akin to Hilma’s practice. When I spent a lot of time with her life, I felt as though it granted me permission to fully allow what was already happening in my life and artistic practice to happen, and not feel compelled to indulge in this ethics of cold remove. You can’t write from a connection or an experience of divinity at a cold remove. It is a driving force, an implicit or subconscious aesthetic form and ontological form that expresses itself through one’s craft.
Each of those paintings in that exhibit, for the Paintings for the Temple series, are altars, are divine portraits in a way. What if every poem did that? What if the ambition of every poem was to puncture the divide between our realm and another? And if that becomes one’s ambition in writing, then the entire practice must be divine. It is divine by necessity. That’s the bitter work of it. For me, when we speak of divinity, it is that external sense of transit, trying to move from this realm to another, or to even peer into the other and recover something. But it’s also about puncturing something within oneself to get to that brink, look over into the chasm, and see what’s there. In my relationship to the divine and artistic practice, it is a necessity for every poem to risk the annihilation of the self, and also the annihilation of the distinction between the cognitive body and the spiritual body.
EM: Thinking about the annihilation of the self and beyond, I noticed a lot of repetition of Nothing both in the poems and in the titles, and I couldn’t help but think of Emily Dickinson, etc. What role does Nothing play in Behnt?
TA: It’s seductive. He’ll (and I say he, because that’s how I personify him) in “I Had Nothing to Wear,” dance with you, but he won’t be there. But, you can feel that he isn’t there, so is he there in a way? Nothing doesn’t have anything to do with death. Nothing isn’t death. Death obviously isn’t Nothing. But Nothing is that apparition, which comes after a great bending. Nothing is a friend that will accompany you on that transversal line from where you thought you were going intersecting with the obfuscated. Nothing does not mean you harm. Nothing might mean to help you. He always waits for you. Nothing is always there, Nothing will always come in, and Nothing can’t help itself. So, what does it mean that Nothing is always there for you, but you can never hold Nothing? What do we do with that?
EM: I was also drawn to the way the body was referenced in the book, and you’ve talked a bit about annihilation of the body, etc., and there were a couple lines that I was drawn to, reference to “furious skin” and also the body and “instrument attendant to its breaking.” Could you talk about the way the body is used in the Behnt?
TA: Not just as artists, but as people in the world, it’s important not to take the body as given or as a priori because it is ever-changing. The body possesses us as much as we possess our body. This is contrary to the Cartesian split, “I think therefore I am.” But if we sever the mind from the body in that way, one of the consequences is that we will think of the body as ours when it’s a symmetrical relation. We are our bodies. The body can do with us what it will. The mind can control the body just as much as the body can control the mind. What we need to do is figure out a way to create an alliance between the body and the mind to steer ourselves into the lives and forms of being we desire to inhabit. That co-constitutive effect leads into a place where you inhabit the new form of your desire.
Obviously, there are ways to dramatize that in art. The first thing that comes to mind is any sort of body horror is obviously a commentary on the bifurcation between the body and the mind, at least to me. The Substance, for instance, the body becomes the vessel for the psychological turmoil of being a woman in a highly patriarchal, misogynistic, violent industry, and so the body literally transmutes.
For me, and for Behnt, the body’s doing something similar, but perhaps less apparent or less obvious. These psychological terrains and infrastructures of the poem are exerting a sort of force upon the body, such that the body must respond in various ways in those various poems. If you think about each poem as a painting or a shadow box or a tiny black box theater with movable parts, each of those stages have their own set of forces, those forces must resolve upon the body, and then the body will then act accordingly. The body has its own force which gets resolved within that matrix. Poetry is thus the art of making things happen. It’s the art of producing events, at least on the page. And if poetry produces happenings, it’s a continuous presence that isn’t fixed to one temporal unit.
There’s a poem where the speaker has buried their body in the garden all night, yet they’re also playing the piano; they have two bodies, one buried in the garden, and one making music. There’s a poem in which the body transforms into a lycanthrope: it becomes a living apparatus in which the bones shift and change, the sinew cracks, and there’s this painful process in which everything in the body physically turns into something else. What does the brute force of grief do to the body? And not the obvious things: sadness, depression, remorse, guilt, survivor’s guilt. What type of body does it make? I want the reader to ask themselves, what type of body does my grief make of me? Because I am a different body now, post my mother’s death. Pre-Behnt, post-Behnt. There’s no going back to that previous body. On the level of just being out in the world, moving around, the level of speaking, the level of art, if I attempted to write BATTALION SHAPED GIRL after my mother died, it wouldn’t have happened. So, in a way, my first book is a capsule of a self that is dead.
EM: Could you tell me more about the title, Behnt? Cause I’ve been curious about the spelling myself.
TA: Well, what were your thoughts?
EM: To me, when I saw the H in the middle it felt a deeper break, a deeper bending than the normal bent. It felt just more intense to me.
TA: Sure, that is an effect, The H extends the bent, the behnding. But also, H. Breath. Oxygen coming down to cleave the word. A gasp, or an exhale. Something you can put in the word without hearing it. Nothing. Or a present absence, an absent presence. If I say itto someone, they will write B-E-N-T. But the H is still there. So, it’s a phantasm. H is also a beautiful hill. There are other reasons for the title, as well.
EM: It’s beautiful that such a small word can contain so much, but I guess that’s the beauty of poetry. I’ve got one more question for you. I was deeply drawn to the way performance was handled in the book. There are references to music, there’s references to body as performance, and more, and I’d love to hear the way you view performance and poetry in these poems, in this collection, and beyond.
TA: All poetry is performance. It is an act of disrupting and denying. Since poetry is a performance, so the speaker must be a performer, but what if that speaker is also a performance? When in London, I saw a performance of Cabaret. It’s my favorite musical, and it is so exquisite and delicious, but it’s also horrifying.
In the production, there are performers performing on the stage, but they’re also performing on the stage in that musical. We’re seeing performers perform. What that does is not only create this sort of bizarre, diegetic break or horizon, we might say in the phenomenological sense, but also reflect upon the ways in which we are called in to perform in our own lives and called on to perform in society in a larger way.
There are certain ways in which people expect you to grieve. There are the “right” ways to grieve. No one wants to admit it. But I’ll just say it: people want you to grieve in an appropriate and not uncomfortable way. They want you to cry at the wake and at the funeral. They might say it’s okay for you to cry a few more times after that, but you’re not to show emotion in public. You are supposed to go back to work. You’re supposed to act accordingly with friends, like nothing has happened. You are supposed to move on with your life. If you don’t, you’ll get called crazy. You’ll get called overly emotional. You’ll lose friends. You’ll lose family members. You might even lose a job. Not all these things have happened to me, but I lost friends, I lost family members.
After my grandmother passed, my mother lost her entire friend group. Her friends simply did not understand why she was so upset, or why she couldn’t go back to the way things were. You have that pressure on you to perform a sense of normality in the wake of an immediate apocalypse. What are all the other ways to perform that are breaking you? How many times a day do you betray yourself for the comfort of others? How many times do you negate or silence or choke yourself to be the member of society that society wants you to be?
The best way to dramatize that, or to enact that, or necessitate that, for me, is to put the body on the line as much as the effect. And so, that might also get to your question earlier about what the body is doing in this book. It’s confronting the reader, provoking the reader, and sometimes it’s denying the reader and turning them away.
And, sometimes, it means taking the poems into a space where the body is taken to its limits in a way that not only is unexpected, but sometimes uncomfortable for the reader. It puts them into a more receptive posture to receive the actual language of the work because it denaturalizes their relationship between themself and the art. Where, instead of the art being that event that one witnesses, receives, consumes, the art and its artist become the antagonist, reverse the power schema, and make the audience complicit in the event.
The body is now being put on its own and equal terms. The mind is now being put on its own terms. The spirit is now being put on its own terms in the mobilization that is performance. I do believe that performance needs to be taken seriously. On a meta-poetic craft level, from depictions of performance within a poem, from the writing itself, from my own of the poems, every event must be in alliance with each other toward the end of breaking a pattern and breaking a circuit which powers an untenable machine. The only way to break, to annihilate, the imposed performances by society, by certain cultural mechanisms, by vapid and pernicious structures of power, is to create a counter-performance that at least neutralizes the imposed performance, and ideally, annihilates it from your own inhabited being.
EM: I love the way that you were also able to wrap in the whole idea of breaking the circuits once again.
Interview by Elena Macdonald
Elena Macdonald (they/she) is a lesbian writer from Northern Virginia. They are an editor for Aftertouch Magazine. Their work has been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Silly Goose Press. You can find more about Elena’s work at www.elenamacdonald.com.
