By Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Joshua Marie Wilkinson: We're excited for your visit to Tucson. In light of that, I'd love to know what you think about the performance of your work—how it's evolved, how it draws from your practice as a writer or diverges from it.

Tan Lin: Well I don't like the idea of readings too much! …or poets reading! So I try to avoid it. That is why I like to screen videos or use artificial voices to read the poetry—there is so much ego in any given poetry reading, so much expression of personality, and I like to avoid this if at all possible. This also has to do with what I have termed the environment of reading, and either diffusing poetry or what is generally referred to as serious literature into other (less overly literary) arenas—like cookbooks, office productivity software such as PowerPoint, or films. Most people don't write poems or novels but they do compose reports, memos, restaurant reviews on Yelp, and grocery lists. Literature usually tries to assert its difference from such kinds of writing but I wanted literature to approach them, and by them I mean their specific genre conventions. Can literature resemble a cookbook? Or a PowerPoint lecture? I think so. 

Joshua: I've listened to your conversation with Charles Bernstein on Close Listening many times. One of the things that always strikes me is your unique answer to questions that Bernstein repeats. How much has your poetics changed over the years? How wedded do you feel to your old ways of thinking and working?

Tan: I've been interested in ambience, in one form or another, for quite a long time now, as well as machine-generated languages—this was apparent in Lotion as well. So in that sense, there are a lot of continuities—between the earlier and later work. The graphic element of books, as they intersect with textual matter is of course crucial to most of my later books like 7CV and Heath, and recently a collaboration I did with the photographer Diana Kingsley—where I indexed her photographs—but this graphic element is also present in BlipSoak01 where text bleeds across the gutter and also in LBG, via the various chapter divisions. The graphic elements of a poem or a book of poetry—everything from its layout, its font, titling and sub-titling, captions, stanza orientation, etc.—indicate that reading is much more than just a text that is read in a linear way. A book, any book, is a physical object that is navigated. A book with pictures in it is read in a different way than a book that is only text. In this sense it's useful to think of a poem as template or score or a very generalized architecture. The same could be said about a standardized form, or a memorandum, of a list. These are interesting formats to me.

Joshua: Can you give us a snapshot of your practice as a writer—in terms of methods, constraints, projects or anything that comes to mind that might give us a picture of how you like to generate work?

Tan: I like to sit in my office, which is really a closet that houses our HVAC system, and work for about 8 to 10 hours—if I'm not teaching. I read, make tea for myself, go for a short run, send emails, etc, and try to finish outside assignments—that sort of thing. I like to listen to music as a break. So every few hours or so, I'll go look for some music—I'm listening to Autre Ne Veut, Andrea Barnett, a bit of Disclosure and some London Grammar at the moment. 

Joshua: You recently taught a course at MOMA in New York. How did it go? What sorts of approaches to writing and composition do you try to inspire in your students?

Tan: Well the interesting thing about that project I think is it got filmed. We had four video cameras running simultaneously, covering the room. We have about 80 hours of footage and Lucas Ajemian, my filmmaker, and I will be putting it online shortly. It's not clear what we got. I love seminars and the workshop—and I am talking about writing assignments, dialogue, readings, and of course the poems brought to workshop. But there is also something hard to document: knowledge, the things that are actually learned, because I think that thing, knowledge is an ephemeral phenomenon—how exactly to capture its transmission?