Magic: A Conversation with Ariana Reines

In May I got to experience poet and legend Ariana Reines read in person for the first time. Ariana is very alive. The story she told to introduce her poems was very funny. Then she read her “actual” poems and my body kept a smile but also the smile spread: inward, upward, down. I think I experience her poetry as if I were a stoner in the passenger seat during a car wash—in awe of distinct, simultaneous, intelligent touch. Yes, Ariana’s poems touch me, psychically, in places I have previously only sensed from the inside. Anyway, it was wow. She's wow. 

Ariana spoke to me on Zoom before and during a walk to a grocery store in Key West. I sat on a couch in Montreal with the patio door open. The bot that transcribed our convo identified the following key words: feel, surrender, funny, find, embarrassment, humor, work, david blaine, art form jokes, submission, praising, willingness, person, life, laugh, mastery, thought, lets, great, giving, wrong, totally, traditions, natural, lauryn hill, deeply, revere,  living, vernacular, poetry. An excerpt of our hour-long chat follows below.

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Your humor doesn't exist for me in any particular line. It feels instead to me that your work smells (as if it’s) funny. Like it doesn't smell funny, but it smells funny, you know? As in, its humour is a function of tone. You're not making jokes, you're not even really winking—because when you do wink, say in Coeur de Lion, you come out afterwards and you're like, so I was winking. 

It’s my belief that if one tells the truth—devoutly, seriously—it will either get sad or funny, or both. That's why I think your work has a perfume of humor: it’s a function of its truthfulness, or your willingness to report faithfully.

I think that makes sense, at least to my own experience of my work. I remember James Joyce saying somewhere that Ulysses was a comedy, which maybe most people didn't understand because they were so intimidated by the surface of it. But actually a lot of the books that have been most influential on me are deeply funny without being literal comic works. I mean, I love the art form of stand-up comedy, but I don't really identify with jokes or one-liners. 

We all know what a cheap laugh is like at a reading or at an event—there's something grating about performers when you're feeling that neediness from them. Or when you’re the performer and you’re feeling that in yourself!

That said, I think performance is funnier maybe than the page because the entire scenario of a poetry reading is just so baldly ridiculous on its surface. It's just such an absurd setup that I have to turn it into some kind of comedy in order to enjoy it, and I can’t do it if I can’t enjoy it. That's usually going to mean finding a way to laugh with & at myself. Sometimes, what I'm reading is deeply serious– but the unveiling itself feels like something I can’t not play with. That's performance, though. 

But I love that you say that the work smells funny because I feel like I don't want to deal with anybody who has no sense of humor. I don't care if it’s a report on mercury levels in the water table—I don't believe in a person who has no sense of humor. I want to feel that pliancy and suppleness—I want to feel that in the spirit of the person, so that even if I'm reading something incredibly dry, or listening to an official give some bland report, there might be just a turn of the phrase or a twinkle in the eye that lets you know that there's a pliancy, that there's a givingness in there that makes that person human. I feel like you should be able to tell that somebody's funny even if they're not making jokes. I guess that's also part of the mysterious ground of literature. I feel like the funniest poem I know is that John Ashbery sestina about Popeye. But it's like every other joke sestina ever written since then can go like, suck a bag of dicks. You know what I mean? I don't really write joke poems.

One of the things that interests me about poetry and why I sometimes feel macho practicing this art is that it is so close to nothing. It's made of what everyone else is already using. You pretty much can’t see it, aside from books. How do we derive so much feeling from something that is so close to nothing? 

I also happen to believe that literally anybody can and should practice this artform. So what is so special about it, and how is it that at least for some of us it feels like the most overwhelming and almost obscene passion, an intensity of thought and feeling we almost can’t find anywhere else. 

Poetry can be hidden. You could go to another planet with it in your “possession” and nobody would know you had it there. You can carry it with you into the most unseemly places and circumstances– and it can carry you safely out of them. I find that deeply strange. It's also extremely funny, paradoxical, almost dangerous to make a life out of something we scarcely understand despite various social and cultural institutions, around which, nevertheless, incredibly formal traditions, structures, histories and customs have grown. 

Playing with the I-don't-know-ness or I-don't-know-what-it-is-ness is one of the things that is most attractive to me about this artform, which I often wonder if I don't love as much as other people seem to. I don't care about it as much as other people care—but it has given me my life. It has given me my life. It took me and gave me a life. And I can keep being like fuck you and like shitting into its mouth and like ripping it apart and no matter what I do, and no matter how badly I may practice it, I cannot hurt poetry. I cannot hurt it. Nothing I can do can hurt it. 

Poetry has shaped and taught me some of the most important things in my life. About love and relationships and also just the shape and evolution of thought. That's the surrender I think you were talking about when you said there's no meaningful life without it. So I've been very much in its thrall. I have surrendered to it totally and yet, it lets me play infinitely with it. It lets me fuck with it. It lets me shit on it. It lets me insult it. It lets me forget it and abandon it. I stop believing in it all the time. But it believes in me..

As a person who writes poetry and dances, I've been saying I'm working on being alive, essentially. And yeah, everybody talks. Everybody uses language. So poetry takes care of thinking and speaking—the what-is-possible-to-say-and-feel part. And then everybody is in a body. And dance takes care of managing embodiment. Anyway, it does feel like from the perspective of the window into your life that your poetry allows us to access—it feels really clear that it's real. But I’m saying obvious things.

I don’t think those things are obvious at all to the culture right now tho– but I wish they were. I love the place that life and living have in your work, your I have to live. Your work has an intensity and an immediacy that make me feel simultaneously like, I can learn to dance in this body, and also like, I can learn to speak.

It’s maybe paradoxical to revere an artform you also believe absolutely everyone should practice, and that the practicing of it is more important in some ways than mastery. I have my personal favorites that I revere, these almost angelic acts of virtuosity and genius– in dance, in literature, in any artform you can name– but it’s like, not everybody needs to direct a movie or record an album. We ALL need to move our bodies and we ALL need an experience of language that does some dignity to the great mystery of our even possessing this faculty– this magic thing– the word. This is a gift from the heavens that makes so much possible that we can't even really understand yet. I feel a lot of what’s been happening in recent times has been calculated to make human beings embarrassed about the faculty of speech itself, and cowed from even experimenting with its power.