Grammarians Serena Chopra and Aditi Machado Talk at Jacket2

At Jacket2, Serena Chopra, author of Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017), is in conversation with Aditi Machado, author of Some Beheadings (Nightboat Books, 2017). Talk revolves around "epiphany and performance, the sociopolitical import of the line break, of decapitation, autoeroticism, and the sensorium." Chopra describes them both as proud "grammarians." A look at what that can mean:

Chopra: “Tendu” in ballet is to touch the floor with your foot. A tendril.
 

Machado: To attend.

*

in my heart wake I
I feel human like
like I made pain[13]

[…] I think
I’m not human, I’m grammarian.[14]

Chopra: Reading Some Beheadings, I felt like, yes, this is the work of a grammarian, rather than a human, traveling through the world. I also automatically thought of Andrea Rexilius’s book, To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation. Can you help me think this through: if to be human is to be a conversation, then to be grammarian is what?

Machado: Perhaps what Andrea means by “human” is what I mean by “grammarian.” What I dislike about much lyric poetry is the way it thinks about selfhood. In fact, lyricism is almost always conflated with subjectivity, whereas when I started out as a poet, in a vacuum as it were, I thought of it simply as music, what comes out of the lyre. Now it’s as if the default position of lyricism is this peculiar form of subjectivity that’s inextricable from biography or narrative or the sort of confessionalism that’s no longer daring because it is increasingly the dominant mode of communication in the world. Cooked admissions, a self-sympathizing that isn’t empathetic, the veneer of “what’s personal is political” coating everything without actually reconfiguring anything or (re)defining the terms of conversation. I am much more engaged with writing that answers or enacts Etel Adnan’s question, “Doesn’t the act of looking at an object become also one of its definitions?”[15] The more I think about it, the more I believe that Andrea’s “human” and my “grammarian” are closely related. Because grammar is social — the way it plays out relationships (pre-positions) of people to people and objects. It’s how I’m able to say that you are sitting across from me right now.

Chopra: So, when you are declaring “I’m not human,” it’s almost like you’re saying, “I’m not the object or subject of any of this thinking, I am the grammar of this thinking — or the grammar is the me of this thinking.”

Find the full conversation at Jacket2.