Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Elaine Kahn

Elaine Kahn and I have a long-standing agreement that either of us can flake on any scheduled date we have to hang out because of reasons of emotional distress and/or exhaustion. This means that we don't see each other often because one of us is usually always crying, but that doesn't really matter. The feeling of knowing that your friend is letting you self-care is often the higher form of love than actually hanging out. And I love Elaine exactly as she is. Distressed, exhausted, and most of all, crying on Instagram.

My friend Claire says often that if you see a woman crying on the street, and you ask her why, chances are that she's crying because of some reason that is ultimately reducible to just being a woman, which might be the greatest horror there is. But on the flip side probably the best thing thing about being a woman is having the prerogative to burn it all to the ground. And no one knows this better than one Ms. Elaine Kahn. So her and I will say thanks very much and goodbye hey also I'd watch out for that gasoline if I were you.

Elaine Kahn is an artist, poet, and musician living in Oakland, CA.  She is the managing editor of Flowers & Cream press, performs music under the name Horsebladder, and is a founding member of the P.Splash collective. Her book Women in Public is just out from City Light Books.

~*~

TL: Let’s start with the most obvious, but also most telling question in honor of my favorite horror franchise, SCREAM: What’s your favorite scary movie? But also, why? Do you think this has any bearing on your aesthetic practice? And I do mean that in the most general of terms, since no one in this series identifies purely as a poet.

EK: The Last Unicorn. It’s a children’s movie, but it’s quite dark and has been scaring the shit out of me since forever. I was recently asked why there is so much corporeal decay in my writing and I brought up the scene where the unicorn gets turned into a human woman (the Lady Amalthea). Amalthea’s first utterance upon regaining consciousness is a groan of despair I can feel this body dying all around me! This idea that to be human is to be, like, encorpsed...sentenced to endure our own decomposition...is fucking horrifying. The story is further complicated when, while embodied as a woman, Amalthea falls in love with a human man. She is then faced with the choice of either staying a woman (death/love) or a return to her true form of unicorn (life/loss). Yes, this film has definitely impacted my creative work; pretty much everything I make is interested in exploring the manifold terror of having a body--in particular the terror of (suddenly!) having a woman’s body.

TL: I love that. Children’s movies, are actually remarkably similar to horror movies because there’s an undercurrent of didacticism that pervades all the symbolism. Like, The Brave Little Toaster is probably on my list of scariest movies I’ve ever seen. The part where the air conditioner commits suicide by launching itself out of its window frame? There’s been a long history of horror movies of adolescence, or womanhood becoming a kind of grotesque horror that can destroy the world in which it exists, but her body has to be destroyed too. I’m thinking of something like Carrie or even some of the recent vampire movies like Jennifer’s Body, some of the Tokyo Gore Effect stuff. I’m interested in this because I feel like your work is horrific in the sense of turning tricks within a spectacle of banality—the banality of feminine embodiment. Would you agree?

EK: Yes, definitely. And I am gratified that you identify turning tricks as an aspect of my work; I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that but I think a lot about how artifice and exchange are fundamental to honesty.

Also this reminded me that a few years ago a KQED music critic described one of my performances as “what it would be like to reenact a scene from Carrie in real life” and said I seemed so angry they thought the room would burst into flames. And like...they did not mean it as a compliment. I was so baffled by that. What more can one hope to achieve through performance than to wrench audience into a state of violent empathy?

TL: One thing I really appreciate about your work is that it does elicit this violent empathy. But it also seems to necessitate a violence towards yourself. Do you feel like this violence comes out of feeling self-directed horror, like that terrible feeling of oh god, I’m in this body? Does it feel like an exorcism when you can externalize it?

EK: That makes me think of this Louise Bourgeois quote where she’s talking about what drives her to make sculpture and she says: My emotions are inappropriate to my size, my emotions are my demons. So yeah, for sure. In general I am compelled towards experiences that puncture the internal/external divide. That’s one of the things I like so much about crying. And bleeding. I mean, the whole reason I started playing music is so I could scream in public. Sorry to get all emo but I am just actually very emo. Hmm...I am probably going to regret writing this.

TL: No regrets, I’m really emo too. I’m bleeding and crying right now. Transgressing that border between the internal/external, is always risky, it’s always embarrassing for the voyeur—and that’s what it is, voyeurism, whether unintentional or fetishistic. Which is what is so abject and horrific about your work. One thing I’m interested in though, is related to playing music. You said once that the thing about noise music’s lack of form can give people an excuse to think that their random, loud self-expression is important. And your poetic work has a very measured sense of control about it, especially because it’s so contained and aphoristic. So what gives? How can you make emo into good art, or bad art, or is that binary already false? Or is the true horror that it just doesn’t matter?

EK: All my deeply felt nihilism aside (nihilism is so boring) yes, of course it matters! When you are crouched in a nasty freezing basement in Iowa City, listening to some guy lamely caterwauling into a broken contact mic, that is fucking annoying! I had this idea a while back to host noise shows where people could get in for free but had to pay to leave.  I really think you could make a lot of money that way.

Look, there are many people whose unmitigated self-expression is totally vital and powerful and engaging—people for whom the very act of visibility is absolutely radical—but probably not some self-pitying white dude’s. Artists should be cognizant of the kind of space they’re taking up and the broader contexts and implications of that. If I am going to ask other people to pay attention to me (something I feel pretty conflicted about to begin with) I really consider what I’ll be presenting them with. So I edit the shit out of my shit. And often, what that produces is, as you say, fairly minimalist... which is not even an aesthetic I am particularly drawn to...but, in the most basic sense, I’ve always felt like...idk...12 minutes of something shitty is a lot more tolerable than 45 minutes of something shitty.

By the way, none of this is to say that I’m especially invested in whether or not an audience likes my work. Just that I demand a lot of myself in order to risk as much as possible. Each time I perform, I am betting the house on that performance. And, to clarify when I say “perform” I am definitely including writing on the page.

Also, now I’m thinking of all these instances where maybe a self-pitying white dude’s unmitigated self-expression could be cool. Like if they were bleeding and crying. But not for longer than 12 minutes.

TL: I think, and V says in his interview, that the truest horror is not even about horror. It’s not about blood, or guts or murder, even if sometimes it involves those things. It’s about risk. And it’s about enfolding the audience into that sense of risk, which means context. It means positioning yourself in opposition to whatever is happening in that context, and it also means insisting on being an outsider. And horror movies have a long history of playing with that insider/outsider binary. From The Faculty to The House of the Devil there’s always something odd about the Final Girl, or the main protagonists, they’re always a little awkward, as though they don’t fit in the genre or the frame even when they’ve been placed there to serve a very specific plot point or role. I often feel like being an outsider, performing it in an open way is actually more horrific to the people who are in-the-fold rather than for myself, although it definitely comes at an emotional cost—would you agree?

EK: I had a funny exchange at AWP where I was talking to this woman and I described myself as strange looking and she laughed at me and said “You’re not strange looking!” and I was like “Yes I am!” and got kind of defensive about it. I grew up in an airless, conservative midwest suburb where I was the target of pretty brutal bullying (one of the reasons I so appreciated the Carrie comparison) mostly centered around my alleged failure to physically conform. It didn’t help that my family, due to our bizarre practice of raising chickens and wearing second-hand clothes, was basically considered to be the town Addams Family. It has now been many years since anyone left a dog bone in my locker or spray painted “SLUT” on the family van. Yet, even while I understand the absurdity of continuing to identify as an outsider...idk I spent like 12 years having shit thrown at me everyday and that’s not easily repaired. I still have a lot of anxiety about “group” sociality and feel most comfortable at a scene’s margins. All this is to say: shit is real. One may choose to perform or aestheticize it, but it is not a performance or an aesthetic. And I think it is really important to like, put a bright line around that. So I don’t think I would agree with the idea that it is more horrific for those in-the-fold than it is for the outsider. And in, any case, I think when you perform, the audience only feels a fraction of what you yourself are feeling and so in order for them to be horrified, you must be even more horrified yourself.

TL: Are you the Final Girl, Elaine Kahn?

EK: omg

TL: She is.