I read Aditi Machado’s second collection, Emporium, shortly after its release. I read it, and this does somehow seem fitting, though I suppose I’m not sure why, while it was heavy storming, a warm November afternoon near the North Carolina coastline, and I remember how tingly it felt, being wrapped up in that language that I could not fully parse—a recent college grad, still relatively new to poetry—and which I yet felt parsing me: I remember its wide-ranging mind, the exactness of its diction, the often enigmatic presentations of its voice: “What do I do? I sort / the idiolects.”
Material Witness, her newest collection, offers many of the same pleasures. To bend a quote of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s which is cited in the book, the whole thing feels “saturated with being.” Split up into ‘only’ six poems, each one accrues great strength as it travels through the I’s materials—“I lived in directionless desire. Intransigent. Bullish. I ventured out / in viral fields.”—or those of the leafy-eye’d world: “For matter is in discord / like the forked philosophy // of a leafy bract subtending / the last measled bloom // of which I am regent / and which I uphold // against everything’s / nothing.”
I had the pleasure of conversing with Aditi over email after the conclusion of the Spring 2025 semester. That conversation is presented here un-edited. I learned a lot from it, just like I did when I first cracked open Emporium. I hope, I suppose, that you will too.
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Compared to your last book, Emporium, you seem less interested in using the ‘I’ pronoun in Material Witness… half of the book’s six poems don’t feature an ‘I’ at all. And in a poem like “Bent Record,” one of the three that is spoken in first-person, the lyric ‘I’ is not always drawn in the most complimentary terms. Just one example, from near the beginning: “It was I / who ‘discovered’ the plant and I who named it imperially / after my own self.”
It gets to the point that the poem comes to read as, yes, partially the exposition of a complicit lyric speaker—“It was I who circulated / the yellow memo and I who poisoned the well”—but also as a kind of listed condemnation of all the things the ‘I,’ not necessarily only this ‘I,’ has done to both America’s letters and its land. Another example: “And I knew just enough / to be toxic to the earth.”
Forgive me for the long preamble—this is all to say that I found the poem’s thinking about the lyric quite compelling. My first question: Has your own thinking on the lyric changed since you wrote Emporium? What led to the broad use of the second-person in this collection?
Well—my thinking on the lyric has changed many times over the years, in small or substantial ways. It will probably always keep evolving. That said, I’m not sure that my thinking has changed all that much since Emporium, which came out in 2020. That book does primarily use the first person whereas Material Witness mostly relies on the second, but that has more to do with the questions/histories I was exploring and the conceits by which I was proceeding. Emporium’s “I” was a transnational merchant of sorts, traveling on a twenty-first-century silk road (that’s what I told everyone); the “you” in MW, I’m not sure… I’m flipping through my notebook and it looks like my earliest scribbles used that pronoun a fair bit (maybe it just sounded good to me?). At some point I must have decided it needed to be an essential feature of the two long poems (“Material Witness” and “NOW”) that bracket the book.
To go back to your question about the lyric, though: where I’m at now is that the “I” pronoun is not constitutive of the lyric. Historically as now, it’s the dominant pronoun—but I don’t think it’s required. You can use any personal pronoun, really, or none. Sometimes the pronoun is just an interface, or as Rosmarie Waldrop puts it in her preface to Curves to the Apple, “[The ‘I’] simply indicates that language is taking place.” Other times it’s critical that a lyric poem is delivered by an “I” and that the “I” represents the poet in a very deep sense. I like to be attentive to that as a reader.
What’s constitutive of the lyric for me is its relationship to time—no, that’s not quite it. More like: the time of the poem, its manner of unfolding, is what makes it lyrical. And the way a poem unfolds has so much to do with form, the performativity of language, the way everything slows down, echoes, digresses, seems endlessly now…
I don’t want to be too direct about what I was trying to achieve with “Bent Record,” but I very much enjoy your reading of it!
A perfect answer, I think. While we’re on the topic of “manners of unfolding,” I’d like to talk about your forms for a moment: specifically your use of the one-line stanza. After reading Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles, I can’t help but associate the form with her—though there are other great examples—and also with a kind of poetics of ‘dailiness.’ The form does seem to lend itself well to the art of recording, to noting down one’s, or someone else’s, day, and I think it’s fair to say that you spend some time using the form that way in the book:
so noon the shadows of things get concentrated inside the things
so hot, your shadow
you tilt, imbalanced
there is gray matter at your feet
you absorb this puddle
something radiates out your molten core
My question is: what attracted you to the one-line stanza here? It’s a personal favorite of mine, so I always love discussing it… What made it so suitable for so much of the work of this book?
You’re right, I think, about the monostich’s facility for capturing quotidian rhythms. Not that that’s the only thing it can do, but certainly that’s one of its potentials for me. It probably has to do with my process of collecting bits of matter that could end up in poems. It’s rare for me these days to conceive of a poem as a “whole” unit, even provisionally. And it takes so long to write anything at all. I’m happy to arrive at a good phrase or line, especially if I remember to write it down. The monostich affords an ease with moving these matters around. I also enjoy the monostich for the amount of visual pressure it puts on a single line that must serve equally as a stanza. Like, it better do something on its own. Sometimes I’d think about how the monostich could effect a pause or rupture within itself without relying on enjambment. So the comma in “you tilt, imbalanced” might, depending on how one attends that line, serve as an awkward fulcrum across the two monosyllabic words and the off-balance multisyllabic “imbalanced.,” enacting an auditory imbalance.
I’d like, next, to play off something you said in your previous interview with Dante Silva: “The more you attend the nonhuman world, the bigger and more mysterious it gets.”
The nonhuman world, and the ways in which our ‘own’ world is materially fused with it, is one of this book’s major topics. I think I’d like to ask, though, about mystery as its own material. How do you maintain the mystery of the nonhuman world in your poems? In what ways is it possible to communicate such a thing?
If you mean whether it’s possible to reproduce that mystery in language, my annoying answer is: yes, no, and I don’t know. I guess I try to, though in the end the experience of mystery is negotiated between text and reader. I like to think there are ways to work with language to (attempt to) recreate the feeling of material fusion, as though language itself were the catalyst or glue or lens by which one might better attend one’s own imbrication in the world. For me, sometimes that happens via an off-kilter usage or abruption like “your hand in the earth grows more,” wherein I feel keenly what I’ve felt before while digging through soil (a favorite pastime).
I also think language is mysterious all by itself and sometimes you’re just taking a photo of it in the proverbial wilds. I enjoy noticing how words develop quite specific but ordinary meanings in localized contexts: when the context is removed or replaced, the word develops a luster of sorts. I remember hearing the phrase “lowgrade depression” for the first time and thinking it meant “low-quality depression” (it doesn’t), ersatz somehow, an imitation of name-brand depression. I’ll mull a phrase like that for a long time before it finds a place in a poem (it became “lowgrade sunshine”). Sometimes poetry affords the chance to “fix”—to rejuvenate—corrosions of language effected by the neoliberal machine of efficiency and productivity. I don’t know if I’m talking about mystery anymore! But I’m definitely talking about the pleasure of taking a mallet to words like “policy” or “restructuring” by exposing them or making them do something different in a poem.
I saw in the book’s notes that you were in a Latin reading group at the University of Denver—and your reading in that language is where, you say, you got the title for your poem “Concerning Matters Culinary.” Besides that title, how do you see your study of the Latin language show up in these poems? Any obvious influence? I’m always curious how people work the past—both near and far—into their poems. As Paul Celan would say: “For the poem does not stand outside of time.”
Oh, I can think of quite a specific influence! The phrase “kisses you with the kiss of its mouth” riffs on “osculetur me osculo oris sui” (“let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth”) from the Canticum canticorum (Song of Songs) in the Vulgate. We translated a passage from it one meeting and I couldn’t get that bit out of my mind. It’s so sonically excellent and so erotic. The kiss is doubled by the use of both the noun and verb form; then the repeating Os and Us require the mouth to open into two kinds of kissy shapes (that’s the technical term) as you articulate the phrase, multiplying the kiss several times more… I don’t achieve quite that level of devotional eros in my line, which is differently oriented anyway, but I’m happy to have gotten some Os in with “an orange erupts in odorous flame and kisses you with the kiss of its mouth.”
The reading group met for a year, though the first half of that year was probably just learning conjugations. Today I’d need to start over if I wanted to read in Latin. I don’t retain languages that well, but I feel like I can see the shadows of Latin (and Old English) at work in Modern English without looking up etymologies all the time. It used to be I believed that Latinate words are “less musical” or clunky/awkward (as is sometimes claimed in workshops); I don’t anymore. Latin does the hard C very well. English is a pretty capacious language, more flexible than often supposed.
Very much agreed, of course. Last question!: You’ve talked before, including in that previously-referenced interview with Dante Silva, about how your process for building poems often begins with the taking of notes. I’m curious, though, about the process of working with those notes… Can you talk a little about how you end up forming those ideas and observations from your notebooks into poems? This is also, I suppose, a question about form: your poems, for example, often take part in very different line-lengths. I’d just love to hear more about how, as they become poems, those notes end up taking on their final, fleshed-out shapes.
The hardest question of all (in a good way)! I find it difficult to describe the actual process of writing; it’s the slipperiest part. I have an incredible memory for some things, but it’s terrible when it comes to narrative (what happened, how it happened, and in what order)—which is why, I suppose, I take so many notes.
I’m going through various drafts as I write this answer; maybe that will help… I’m noticing a few different things. Sometimes I’m using sonic association to link a few phrases together (like “air balsamic,” “entropic transcript” and “thetic” on p. 66), in the process of which a particular kind of thought is generated: so the sound dictates how and what I’m thinking. Sometimes the poem/section maps movement through a particular landscape using notes as coordinates (p. 47-8 come from several walks in Colorado Springs). Other times I’ve brought notes from two or three different sessions together out of happenstance or some combination of happenstance and recurrent exigence. In most cases, I’m unlikely to remember why I put certain things together, but it turns out I remember one very clearly.
On p. 14, I recognize the phrase “the labored sound of its pipes” from a visit to Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center sometime in fall of 2020 (I’d just moved to the city for a job). One of the exhibits was called “Sounding Labor, Silent Bodies” by Mexican artist Tania Candiani. Its central installation was utterly extraordinary, a short film featuring an a cappella choir of women—I quote from the catalog—“reciting the sounds of disappearing forms of manual work […] as a requiem for four industries—metal casting, meatpacking, printing, and woodworking—that employed Cincinnati’s workforce in the late 19th century.” That music haunted me for a long, long time, intellectually as much as sensorially. I often think of it as my first proper introduction to this city I love. Another couple of phrases on this page—”spat on the inklings of flowers” and “Death to suburbia”—come from a walk home after a rare social event during that same period of time, i.e. high pandemic. It was perhaps a three mile walk from, not quite a suburb, but a residential neighborhood to my downtown apartment; the city would change dramatically along that path and sometimes I felt I might’ve been passing buildings that once housed those 19th century industries. I guess I also had some… feelings about having been “warned” not to undertake this walk when I could just as easily have gotten a ride from someone. This is a long-winded way of saying that sometimes a poem (or section thereof) forms at the intersection of two or three note-taking events (here, the Candiani installation and a city walk, both in and of Cincinnati) as I’m feeling through a particular experience or problem, like “What does it mean to live in this city at this time and in relation to these sets of histories and peoples?” None of this context is necessary to the poem, or I’d have just included it, but maybe it answers your question about process.
As for lineation: my drafts show that, though I moved the sections around in the two longest poems, I didn’t fuss over line edits that much. I’d set out writing both “Material Witness” and “NOW” with parameters: the pronoun “you”; go back in time vs stay in the deep present; and a sense of the line (e.g., no enjambment in the former until the last couple of pages) and syntax. This meant that although I wrote these poems in brief spurts across several years, there was an assuredness of form from the very beginning (form as the extension of content, etc.). But the lineation for the very first poem you asked about in this interview, “Bent Record,” took much longer. Excluding the first couple of failed drafts, I rewrote that poem six or seven times using different line and stanza lengths, even some cutesy indentations, until I found the monostich as a fitting vehicle for that brand of braggadocio.
I think this interview has come full circle!
Interview by Lloyd Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, FENCE, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. You can read more at his website lloydwallace.com.
