Andy Fitch Interviews Andrea Abi-Karam
Los Angeles Review of Books blog BLARB hosts an interview by Andy Fitch with Andrea Abi-Karam, the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION. "What happens when a poetics of 'the soft body' prompts a 'suite of vengeance poems'?" asks Fitch in his introduction. Picking up from there:
What happens when participatory punks start blurring distinctions between being “on stage” or “in the crowd” at a poetry reading? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Andrea Abi-Karam. This present conversation focuses on Abi-Karam’s book EXTRATRANSMISSION. Abi-Karam is an Arab-American genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg. Their chapbook THE AFTERMATH(Commune Editions, 2016) attempts to queer Frantz Fanon’s conception of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Simone White selected their second book-length assemblage, Villainy, for forthcoming publication from Les Figues. Abi-Karam toured with Sister Spit in 2018, and lives in New York.
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ANDY FITCH: I could isolate some of your opening “KILL BRO / KILL COP” section’s most pointed lines (“kill all the power dynamics in the room…. kill all the hierarchies of power of who is publishing who…. & that makes you select who to make eye contact with & who to ignore on alternating nights & which beer to schedule on which day & which bar to go to after which reading”), and I could wonder about the extent to which EXTRATRANSMISSION will end up reanimating many of the power dynamics that it claims to attack — and whether it will do so in a classic combative style characteristic of certain Bay Area predecessors that it claims to leave behind. But of course that weary reading starts to unravel when we reach this section’s concluding call to “KILL THE BRO IN YR HEAD.” So could you talk more broadly about what you have found most liberatory in assembling a “kill bro” poetics, and about the extent to which that poetics’ potential hinges on a performative self-implication that slowly ricochets across this first section? Or to make this question more concrete, could we take “KILL BRO / KILL COP’s” concluding admonishment (“I could be any of U sitting there. Reading. Remember that”) and talk about who all “I” and “U” already have become by this point in the book?
ANDREA ABI-KARAM: Part of my approach to hashing out and attempting to break through the massive hierarchies of power (patriarchy, military-industrial complex, global capitalism, etcetera) that shape the world is by finding specificity in details of their microclimates. My first attempt at writing about global capitalism failed. It was too large, too impersonal, too emotionally flat. I wasn’t implicated and neither was the reader. I love that you begin by asking about “KILL BRO / KILL COP,” since that was where this project began. I abandoned verse and lineation and wrote this suite of vengeance poems against bros, alongside pieces that translated into loud broadcasts the frustrations with misogyny, whiteness, and straightness that I encountered routinely at readings and punk shows.
When working on the “CHECK” poem I had a lot of conversations with poets around both naming and the refusal to name — whether to lean fully into New Narrative strategies or not. I decided against full-on naming. These instances are not singular, and I didn’t want people to get unnecessarily caught on the details. It’s not about the one nonprofit poetry org that’s trying but still not quite getting it right: it’s about all of them. It’s not about one bro one time at one show: it’s about the pervasive violence that bros perpetuate en masse. I arrived at a level of specificity in “KILL BRO / KILL COP,” detailed revenge fantasies that are honed and violent. There was this one workshop moment where my professor asked why the poems had to be so violent. My classmate mai c doan (whose first book water / tongue just came out from Omnidawn) responded quickly: “Bros are violent.” Why do they get to exist unquestioned?
Read on at BLARB.