Maggie Millner Interviews Catherine Barnett at BOMB

Read a conversation between Maggie Millner and Catherine Barnett in the latest update at BOMB. Millner first encountered Barnett and her writing at a reading in the West Village, and later, became her student at New York University. For her first question, Millner asks: "It’s funny to be asking you questions about this book because so much of it is about being an asker of questions. How did questions become a central theme for you?" From there: 

Catherine Barnett: I think it’s temperamental. I have been told many times, either in praise or critically, that I ask many questions. I used to be a journalist, where it was totally acceptable to walk around the world doing that. So I got curious about the form of questions; what kinds of questions elicit what kinds of possible responses? I’m hoping to write a prose book on questions, and that’s where a lot of this material came from. I also taught a semester-long class on questions and poems: questions as a formal gesture—as a speech act—and also the kinds of questions that are underneath every poem. It’s a very fun way to read.

The book was actually going to be titled “The Accursed Questions”—though now I love “Human Hours;” it’s so quiet, and maybe a little disquieting. The 19th-century Russian novelists all wrote about the “accursed questions,” the huge questions of humanity. I learned the term from the poet Ilya Kaminsky and decided to use it as a title for each of the lyric essay sections instead.

Read more at BOMB.