An Interview With Rachel Levitsky on the Work of Akilah Oliver

The new issue of the Brooklyn Rail is out, and features a conversation between teacher, writer, and Belladonna* co-founder Rachel Levitsky and Ana Paula of the Rail on the occasion of the five-year anniversary of Akilah Oliver’s death, and the ten-year anniversary of The Putterer’s Notebook, a 2006 chapbook by Oliver that continued the poet's investment in "historico-political notetaking." Another investment: anti-memoir.

Rail: And what’s anti-memoir?

Levitsky: In Akilah’s poetic statement for her piece in the Memoir/Anti-Memoir issue of Chain Magazine, she writes about exploring the unreliability of loss in female desire. Putting unreliability, loss, desire to the forefront is the anti in anti-memoir, for these facts undercut all manner authenticity/reliability in mainstream concepts of memoir. How does focusing on loss and the “blundering nature” of female desire simultaneously support and subvert the notion that you are your biography, your cultural identity, your background? Anti-memoir is both memoir and against memoir. Akilah was always both for and against her cultural historical positioning being the thing that made her, defined her.

Rail: Would you say this is supported in the line: “I, as in not a Freudian mistranslation” (The Putterer’s Notebook)?

Levitsky: Yes. And so much of narrative poetry nowadays is grounded in notions of direct translation (cultural historic positioning). The She Said Dialogues are about grief, but not as directly an address as in her following books, like Putterer’s, which investigate grief and mourning, what she calls lamentation, as a trans-historical position/experience in and of itself.

Rail: In that book there’s a part that says, near the ending,

In which pocket did I leave that “I”? Is “I” ever a thing to miss, a personage to mourn, if the “I” still lives in the physical body and is capable of re/articulation? if it desires mirrors? history? or and then narrative sensibility. If the mirror breaks one can buy another. consume then recreate then resume an/other I. history I curse thee to not be borne in mid-twentieth century garb, a French feminist theorist laboring over “new ideas” to bounce the vernacular mind.

Read the full interview, which precedes "FIBS 7809," a piece by Oliver that first appeared in Chain, here.