I read Brandan Griffin for the first time in front of my parents’ television. Issue 6 of a then-unfamiliar-to-me journal, new sinews, had just been retweeted onto my timeline a few days earlier. I remember screenshotting it (I have, and I recognize this as a character flaw, 3,300 screenshots on my phone) for later ingestion. A few days later—after a birthday dinner at my parents’ place, I think—I decided to sit down and get some reading done, new issue of new sinews included, after everybody else had gone to sleep.
While that issue is full of work by people who either already were or eventually turned into some of my favorite writers, this one by Brandan Griffin, referenced in the interview below, is the one that stood me still. I still love it. There’s a common dictum you hear around, sometimes, that you should write that work (or submit that work) that only you could write. And while Brandan is obviously not the only artist doing such a thing, I think he might be the only poet I’m aware of doing it by attempting to create work that is, often, as unlike him as possible.
Few poems are as walkable as Brandan’s. Even fewer poems, I think, convince you they might actually get up off the page (or screen) and do all the walking themselves. The rooms they open—on the page, beneath your scalp—are expansive and delicate, windy and earthen, both familiar and alien. They are, more than anything, impossible to paraphrase. You should go to his website and see for yourself.
Brandan and I conducted this interview over email over the course of a few months this past semester. It’s long, and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think it could have been anything else.
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While I have a lot of questions about 4 Concretures, as well as some of the other work of yours I’ve seen sprouting up in journals as of late, I’d like to start by asking, in hopes that the question might help contextualize your work for our readers, about a particular statement that you made outside your poems. On August 16th 2024, you tweeted: “ecopoetry doesn’t exist yet *shrug emoji*”.
Because I got into poetry at a time, the late 2010s, when the existence of ecopoetry was already seemingly a tenured given, the settled stuff of anthologies and college classes, I found this pretty interesting. Could you say more about why the things popularly called ecopoetry aren’t what they claim to be, and what an actual ‘ecopoem’ might look like?
My perspective is that what has been called “ecopoetry” is about individual speakers looking at ecosystems from a human perspective, rather than about fully embodying those ecosystems in the poem itself.
In the 2010s form of ecopoetry, everything non-human gets filtered through the human mind, human language, human knowledge. Ambient climate anxiety is central. But ecologies themselves don’t just exist in human minds—they also exist beyond us, as systems of other, non-human beings. So I think there’s a limit to what this established mode can reveal to us about what makes our planet a planet, what makes our world a world. It’s not really letting us step outside ourselves.
I think of ecologies as systems of interaction that enable beings to emerge and temporarily persist in patterns of existence, each with its own inner world. Our environments are stacks of non-human worlds—atoms, minerals, cells, plants, animals, etc. So, my thought is that poetry as a textual form of such systems, and such worlds, would be much more fully ecological.
This is connected to my sense that poems are not just “about,” they are also “as.” They embody and enact things through their form, style, syntax, etc. Poems seem to emerge from some sort of inner world, as if emblems of it—usually the inner world of the poet. But they could also seem to emerge from other worlds. We can do the work on the formal and linguistic elements of poems to make them feel like they’re emerging from the various non-human beings that make an ecosystem.
I guess a simpler way to put this would be that I think ecopoems shouldn’t observe ecologies, they should make them. The new ecopoem would be a kind of artificial textual ecosystem. This would require poets to study things like biological theory, physics, information theory, etc., to try to gain a sense of how the universe works—not to then talk about those fields, or to poeticize them, or use them as “content,” but to actually embody them in text. This sounds hard, and it is, but it’s what I’m interested in trying to do! I think poetry like this will help us more richly perceive the world. And, as we enter an era of ever increasing artificialization, I think it’s also an honest and frank pursuit of what both text and nature are becoming (and perhaps always were).
A great way to begin. I think your answer is especially interesting in the context of your use of ‘visual poetry’ techniques—in a poem like “snail music” for instance. That poem’s kind of a masterclass in how one can use visuals to amplify, and this is a great term, a poem’s “systems of interaction,” bringing it closer to a kind of full-on ecological simultaneity.
Was that part of your motivation in creating the 4 Concretures trading card game? Since I suppose one could describe card decks, as well, as “stacks of non-human worlds”… was one intent to create a textual ecology that is, like the ecologies we see in ‘nature,’ always being rearranged? In similar terms, it’s kind of cool to think of the card game as a burl growing out of the book’s surface, extending the project’s ecologies even further out into the world…
Forgive me if I’m talking out of my ass here. I guess I’m just asking about the thinking that led to the emergence of the 4 Concretures TCG.
I love all these observations—thank you. Yes to the burl, yes to the card decks as stacks of non-human worlds. I hadn’t thought of these readings, but I love them and completely agree. I’ve loved how these cards continue to evoke and unfold new interpretations in readers. And thanks for your comments about “snail music”—I have more to say about that poem, but maybe we’ll get back to it later, as I want to respond to your main question about creating the trading card game.
I owe full credit to Anastasios Karnazes, who runs Theaphora—the press that published 4 Concretures—for coming up with the idea for the cards. Designing them was a thorough collaboration, but the idea was purely Taso’s, thanks to his ability to see into my book in a completely unexpected way. He really x-rayed how I had written and structured the book as a network of four creatures at various developmental stages, a book both structured for linear reading but also with this latent possibility of being shuffled.
Taso is a dear friend of mine, and we have a sort of unfiltered rapport that really allows us to riff and improvise. With Theaphora, he’s created this funny image of micropublisher-as-corporation, which is both satirical and, in another way, deadly earnest—I think he’s really trying to treat book production as a means of investigating what a product is in our current moment. To that end, Theaphora has been creating a merch item with each book, thinking deeply about how merch can read a book by reinventing it in another medium. Which I’m not sure anyone has ever thought of before.
Anyway, this circles back to the cards because Taso’s idea for the merch with my book was these trading cards. I was never a huge Pokémon kid, but I got the general idea of how the cards worked, how the whole Pokémon universe sort of gets instantiated and “read” by the card game. I think what Taso latched onto is that trading card games themselves rely on ecologies of creatures. The full set of all possible cards in a trading card game is a sort of atemporal totality, which various players actualize as more specific, limited, local ecologies within their personal decks and through the stages of gameplay. This ecology is further entwined with economics because, of course, you have to buy the card packs—but also because the packs themselves are randomized according to a rarity algorithm that creates scarcity for certain cards, automatically making those cards more desirable. It’s a trading card game, after all, meaning that exchange is built in. I think this entangling of economics and ecology has turned out to be perfect for a book about the inner life of concrete.
So, to sum all this up by basically restating and affirming your point: the card game uses a preexisting product type to provoke readerly practices that mimic economic and ecological recombination.
I’m glad you got onto the topic of book production there, since I’ve always found it separately interesting that you produce so much work that pretty much shuts down the idea of book publication: I’m thinking of, yes, “snail music,” but also that poem of yours “the nut’s on public transit, then park” from New Sinews. Maybe it’s possible to produce those as books, but I don’t know. A scroll seems a little more fitting…
Anyway, to return to the beginning of your answer, I’d love to go deeper into “snail music”! There’s a lot of approaches I could take here—and I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend more than one question on that poem—so I think I’ll just start with a straightforward one. Why snails this time around? You covered “the inner life of concrete” in 4 Concretures and shrimp in SHRIMPONICS. (And I can maybe see why concrete and shrimp might make for similar subjects: their obvious [bio]mass, their status as foundational aspects of their respective environments, their taste—jk)—so what led you to create snail music, specifically?
I think of a long poem as existing as a series that can take one of two forms: discrete or continuous. Books are perfect for discrete series. Each page acts as a unit; there’s a leap from one to the next. Whereas in a continuous series, there’s no break—the digital allows us to create an unending scroll. I try to alternate between the two forms, and for a while it felt like I’d write a discrete page poem in the fall, and a scroll poem in the winter. But I do really love the scroll form, it feels like its possibilities are very new. You’re composing for the screen, for the movement of scrolling and zooming, rather than turning the page. Of course, with the digital, there’s the threat of the reader skimming, scanning, closing the tab before you’re done reading, more so than with print, I think. But if you can make those readerly practices into virtues, rather than faults—means of perception native to the form of your text—then that’s ideal, though I think “snail music” probably asks more of its reader than that. On the other hand, all its visual cues bring in an element of distraction, or this need to read with your peripherals open—a readiness to take in more stimuli at once than normal, a more packed simultaneity that feels very much a sort of contemporary attention.
Anyway, once I wanted to create the typographical form for “snail music,” I realized that my raw text was in some ways very similar to 4 Concretures—it breaks the snail down into four parts that “add up” to the snail, but which very much have their own thing going on. So, realizing that, I wanted to make this poem feel as different as possible from 4C. And, unlike 4C, it has these other texts, websites, and music that it’s pulling from, which I wanted to find a way of encoding in the form.
Why snails? Yeah, it’s kind of a funny question—since I write these poems that are about single things (concrete, a walnut, shrimp in my collaboration with Alex Bernstein, etc.), it’s like: what is he going to do next? And the question of progression from one subject to the next arises, of the overall shape that the succession of poems is taking. And partly in response to that I’m moving away from just doing poems about specific things, and mixing in poems that are a little more amorphous, resisting this impression of trying to catalogue the world one thing at a time, or to speak “for” other beings. I’m trying to pursue the idea of poem as artificial life form, but also hoping to complicate what we consider to be a life form to begin with.
But snails—I wanted to work with an organism that could be broken down into parts, to imagine the lives of those parts. Snails are relatively straightforward organisms for scientists to study, meaning humans can do things like map the structure of their neurons. I wanted the poem to enter this space of dissection, but by allowing for the proliferation of aliveness rather than killing to understand. I do also gravitate towards small, humble things. And I like trying to use poetry to suggest the expansiveness of seemingly tiny worlds.
I wrote the poem for an event hosted by EMAS, a great improvised music group in Kansas City. In between music performances, I and the poet Kate Greene read poems. I had some leftover PTO I had to use up at work, so I took off the week prior to the event and wrote the basic text for the poem. I was thinking a lot about music because of the event, so I wanted the poem to feel like four interlocking musical worlds meant to be read aloud. In retrospect, I’ve laughed at myself for thinking that what I wrote made any sense to read aloud. But I think the audience made the best of it and seemed to embrace the reading as a sort of curiosity. After that, I spent a good few months, maybe even a year, figuring out how to make the poem look right on the screen.
To loop back to the conundrum of how something like this poem could work in a book, I think that’s a very interesting problem! How to view books as participating in the digital—which they do, in our current era, but how to show that. How to treat the book as a print-out that acts as a viewing apparatus for a digitally native object, in the same way a chrome browser allows me to view html code. I think there are approaches here and there in other writers’ and artists’ work, and it’s something I’m interested in working through too.
It’s funny that you mention reading ‘snail music’ aloud like that, as I’ve actually also done a (very casual) ‘reading’ of the poem! I did a small in-person workshop here in Pittsburgh with some friends a few months back, and for the first meeting we each brought in a poem of someone else’s to discuss and read aloud etc. I brought in ‘snail music,’ lol, and, for what it’s worth, we had a lot of fun trying to bring it into the out-loud world.
Anyway, I’d like to talk more about those “readerly practices” you brought up in the beginning of your answer. I know it’s maybe a little played-out to talk about the reader’s involvement in the ‘construction’ of a text, but, considering your stated concern for the worlds out of which your poems emerge and which they do their best to recreate, I think it might be interesting to talk about the ways they end up interacting with the worlds contained inside the reader.
How do you see the reader’s role in ‘stewarding’ these textual ecosystems that you hand them? How much do you have that in mind while you prune them?
Well, to start, I do often have a bit of a theoretical backdrop to my writing. But I don’t think that having theories, or ideas, or overarching concepts necessarily makes your poetry any more interesting if the writing itself doesn’t embody those ideas while also charming the reader. That charm can come in many forms, and one of the things that artists do is reinvent the very nature of charm in the artwork—they recalibrate what we can see as interesting, beautiful, enticing, engrossing. I’m not saying I’m always able to achieve this charm, but I always try to keep it in mind. Ideally, the charm of the work and its theoretical underpinnings should be perfectly fused. In my case, I know that I sometimes make difficult poems, or that I choose to write in noisy ways when I could be doing something more lyrical and conventional, but I still am aiming for a certain charm that I hope will draw and keep the reader in.
In some poems, I’ve embedded the theory through discursive elaboration in the poem, while in others I’ve tried to let the form do all that work implicitly. One interesting situation came up with my poem “Econometrics,” which Zach Peckham published in Coma. That is a poem where a lot of thinking is silently encoded in the poem, perhaps to such a degree that you wouldn’t even know it was there! To deal with this, I wrote a short prose statement to accompany the text. When Zach published the poem, there was a brief discussion over whether the statement should come before or after the poem. We both agreed it should come before, as it would, in Zach’s words, “front-load” the theory and more directly promote “symbiosis between the critical thru-line and the thing itself.” But I do think it was an interesting question, of how to engineer the reader’s experience of the text in the right way. Of course, artists’ statements are particularly common in the world of visual art, and for certain exhibitions wall text can be essential for moving beyond a surface level reaction—but in the world of literature, I think there is a desire to have the text contain everything, to not need external commentary. Yet there’s a trade off: the more adeptly the poem can do things on a formal level, the more you start feeling the call of the prose statement to explicate the form. This isn’t a matter of trusting or not trusting the reader or pandering to a bourgeois desire for explanation, but of frankly assessing what you want to communicate and what you are actually communicating, of intuiting what a reader—even your perfect reader—will get out of a particular piece. And allowing the prose statement to become its own thing has been great for me, a chance to get ideas down as clearly and succinctly as I can, and seeing what charm the poem can pull off without the weight of having to explicate itself.
I often think of poems as “playing” the reader’s inner sensorium like a piano. That is, the poem is a kind of instrument that produces “notes” in the reader’s mind. These notes include the words “sounded” in your brain as you read silently, alongside the word’s meanings, their connotations, the images and other virtual sensory experiences they produce, etc. And I’m interested in how strange spellings produce a kind of polyphony in the silent reader’s mind, a sort of chord (in the musical sense) produced by the word’s possible pronunciations mentally sounded all at once. In doing all this, the poem has the power to deform your mind into something else, constructing melodies and harmonies that mimic alternative, even non-human, ways of having a mind. I understand there is no guarantee that every poem produces the exact same experiences in every reader, but I have the idea that each reader’s individual reading could be loosely isometric to every other reader’s—in the same way that a melody can be transposed into other keys by maintaining its internal relations of whole steps and half steps. I think this is roughly how abstraction works (or assumes it works) in visual art—the artwork’s internal relationships are projected into viewers’ minds to produce loosely isometric individual experiences. I’m interested in contextualizing the universalism of that abstraction by treating different modes of abstraction as representative of different types of beings, saying this aesthetic is a world, this aesthetic is a world, etc., even if each evokes differently for different people.
The idea of playing the reader’s sensorium also became a guiding factor in my digital book Holy Typing O 500 in a slightly different way. In that, I wasn’t trying to create ecosystems of different beings, but rather a collection of soothing “études.” I wanted to find a way to write again after my brother died in 2021 at the age of 18, and I found that I was more interested in—or at least, more able to create—soothing art. I thought of the poems in the book as texts that would play the reader’s mind—my mind—to create a harmonious experience that would move beyond nihilism and nothingness to produce a feeling of unity with our lost loved ones. The feeling of “the lightest touch” was a guiding factor in thinking about what aspects of the sensorium I wanted to activate. And though this is probably one of the most personal and human things I’ve written, in a way I view myself primarily as the reader, rather than writer, of the book, because I was really writing to produce these sensations in myself, as the book’s first reader.
When Theaphora and I were creating the cards for 4 Concretures, we thought a lot about how to charm the reader. We didn’t use that exact word, charm, but that’s what we were doing. The cards, with their randomized packs, tradeability, cheeky almost-gameplay, and callback to childhood, make the book+card bundle a fun purchase (you can read all about Theaphora’s philosophy of purchase-as-reading at Theaphora’s Secrets). The cards aerate the book, in a way, creating breathing room by allowing the reader to exist in the space between the book and the cards. I think this was a good experience in learning how to bring a project to life, to make a non-human world enticing to readers. It was also a good learning experience in making something that the reader has to participate in constructing, without it becoming tedious and feeling like extra labor has been foisted upon the reader.
I want to create simulated artificial ecosystems within the reader. And I want to create poems that are interesting and rewarding to move through—after all, you have to somehow convince the reader to want to have this imaginative experience—poems that are maybe challenging in the way a video game can be challenging and thus fun. Maybe in this sense the reader would steward the poem as if it were a tamagotchi. There’s that Marianne Moore line about a poem being an imaginary garden with real toads in it. Could we talk about a real reader with virtual organisms inside them?
I love that “playing the reader’s inner sensorium like a piano” figure, as well as what you said about the way misspellings get morphed in the mind into something more mouthily dimensional… both comments are extremely true, I think, and also help explain why people (the ones I know, at least) respond to your work the way they do. I do think there’s a (nearly?) literal kind of expansion that occurs in a reader when they’re opened to such work.
I think I’d like to end on a more open note: you’ve said in previous interviews that you’re interested in trying to make something “radically new” with each project, and you mentioned earlier in this one that you’ve been trying to work on things that are “a little more amorphous.” Can you say any more about those projects you’re working on now? I’d love, too, to hear more about the jumps in your thinking that led to this new approach (if you have more to say).
It’s funny you bring up my comment about “amorphous” poems because I’ve been thinking about that exact phrasing and trying to decide what I really meant. Partly, it’s that I don’t want to over-literalize the poems as “persona” poems about animals, plants, etc. I want to resist the sense of speaking “for” another being on one hand, and sock-puppeting them to speak for me on the other. I don’t want my poems to feel like they’re “actually” about me. Instead, ideally, I’m right there next to the poem, lending it a hand while it tests its legs, figuring out how far it can move independently. Or, if I’m in the poem, or part of it is made from me—some of my senses, or organs, or thoughts—I’ve started experimenting with explicitly marking that with a timestamp: “brandan griffin wrote at 2:54 pm…”
I bring this all up because sometimes I imagine a future where animals and plants can somehow speak English, or we can effect some sort of two-way translation between them and us, and then they read my poems (lol). Which sounds like a self-important fantasy, but really it’s an exercise in expanding who/what counts as a reader. I wouldn’t want all the animals and plants to hate me haha. I want my poems to feel like unfamiliar presences, but I’m no expert in any of these species or beings. I observe things on my walks, I read articles and scientific papers, I work on developing my imagination, but I don’t have any privileged access to the experiences of others. Part of my point is the artificiality of this poetic activity.
So there’s a little bit of a bind here. I try to address it by making the poem not “snail,” but “snail music,” not “concrete” but “4 Concretures,” etc., to show there’s a slant to the way these poems deal with non-human beings. I think of Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on “Becoming-Animal” in their book A Thousand Plateaus, where basically they say (as I remember it) that becoming-animal (or becoming-plant, becoming-mineral, etc.) really involves a meeting place between the human and the animal, where the person becomes a person-animal and the animal becomes an animal-person. The two beings get transformed from static objects into vectors that modify each other as they zoom past. I think this is helpful because it can let you say, for instance: what kind of textual space will enable me and a snail to zoom past each other? Or, maybe I can’t write as concrete, but I can write as a concreture, this artificial being that is concrete if concrete were made of human text, or is a human text if humans were a concrete slurry.
So that’s one way of hedging all these concerns. Another way is to give up writing directly with real things at all. This resists the urge to totalize, to turn the poem into a zoo: a total catalogue of living beings, held captive for display. So I’ve been thinking about poems that work as speculative beings, rather than real ones. In a sense, these poems might better be classified as hypermorphous or multimorphous rather than amorphous, because so much revolves around their form’s ability to cohere without outside reference to real things (e.g., snail or concrete). I have a poem coming out in Empty Set, a new technology magazine, called “Time-Deep Multiples.” I think of this poem as an organism-machine with lots of moving parts—procedurally arranged text from sources like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, plus some runicode (unicode for runic characters), some autobiographical stuff, and further riffing on those texts to create a kind of scaled structure. I want it to feel like a living thing, made of human materials but not human itself, while also not claiming to represent the experiences of some specific being in the real world.
I think experience emerges from a loosely scaled and nested structure in the universe: we experience what we’re made of. I experience being made of structures and patterns of neurons; those structures and patterns experience being made of cells; those cells experience being made of molecules; etc. Of course there are many more layers, but that’s the basic picture of how I think. So you could make a speculative being in a poem, as a poem, by engaging with what it’s made of. For instance, I have one poem I’ve started shopping around, “updation-Speck,” which is made of these couplets that feel like stray text messages, alongside glitchy poems about different animals and other things. I wanted to create this space where it felt like our messed-up psychological ecosystems, political and economic systems, our enmeshment in empire, and literal ecosystems were all existing alongside each other. Kind of what a social media feed feels like. And then I wanted to figure out, what is the being that would be made of all these things? That had a short-enough memory and capacious-enough form to contain both the demented and the innocent, the grief and the clownishness. And so it became the “updation-Speck,” which is not a real thing—though maybe it also is haha.
That poem is also one where I really try to let things show themselves as themselves without my editorializing, and where I (as I seem to be compelled to do again and again!) take the risk of writing clownishly, foolishly, ridiculously. But I think you have to take that risk, of allowing a level of honesty in your process that you write something that doesn’t fit into normal styles or affects. I think a lot about the oddness and luminosity of Leslie Scalapino’s writing. Or of Beckett’s sense of humor. Poetry so often gets marketed as something serious and pretty, that we forget that the seriously pretty stuff often gets made when you let go of that decorum.
In looking over my responses to your questions, I notice that I’ve been very focused on my own process and poetics, without really mentioning other writers. So I just want to say, whether it’s through the work Hannah and I do at New Material Books, including the poets and presses we get to collaborate with, or through finding stuff at used bookstores, discovering contemporaries online, talking with other artists and writers in Kansas City, or slowly expanding my reading of philosophy and science, I’m always doing my best to stay open to new ways of thinking and writing. I think, also, you know, one of the joys and rewards of being a writer can be developing your own style. But of course there is also a critique to be made of the “branding” (in the marketing sense) that this activity involves, or the way it can ultimately stagnate writers who “settle” too much into a particular style. But one of the ways to avoid this is to treat style as a thing meant to have some plasticity—that can evolve and learn from other styles, that can inflate to incorporate new means of writing, that circles and expands on itself. A style that could even, down the line, negate itself or become subsumed by a meta-style, a style of styles, without seeming as if the poet has lost their way. And that would come from learning from everyone around you, from building something with them. We’re all in it together, even when we’re off tinkering alone. We’re all trying to create new spaces in the imaginable, and thus the sayable. Which can do its own humble work against empire, genocide, possible ends of the human world.
As an example of trying to live up to this ideal of stylistic plasticity, I’ve started engaging with found text and using techniques inspired by chance-based, conceptual, and documentary poets I like. For instance, I’m working on a series of poems that perform loosely procedural operations on text from the subreddit for Dwarf Fortress to model the anatomical structures of fictitious worms. In this series, I think of the “swath of text” as the poetic unit. I think this is perhaps what I mean by multimorphous, a poem that is full of forms, that is itself a form-form, almost as if it were painted with text.
And then beyond even that, like some distant, ultra-speculative focal point, I’m interested in writing that could envision systems of beings that work to dissolve or leap beyond death, beyond the thermodynamic and metabolic requirements of ecology, beyond loss and killing and forgetting, writing that dissolves contingency and annihilation within ever-widening circles of the conceivable, just as some future society might dissolve the contradictions of economy. This would be the opposite of the technofuturist, transhumanist dream, which simply intensifies the problems of technocapitalism in the name of a restrictive, elitist conception of human destiny. Instead, I’m interested in how writing can reconfigure what we take for given about our cosmos.
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.
