“I Put Language on Top of It”

erica: Oh right, I forgot that we did that.

Nicole: It looks like we're doing lines. So we each wrote stuff and then we cut it up and mixed it together, was the idea.

Matt: This was the first time, this was at Nicole’s place.

erica: Oh whoa!

Nicole: God, I should get my hair cut.

Matt: We did it twice.

Nicole: It's true. We did it two years in a row. The second year, we were writing about superhero women or something.

erica: That’s right.

Matt: Nicole, what made this issue into a poetry issue?

Nicole: Well, Ursula invited me to be the cover story and I deflected by dragging The Poetry Project into it.

Matt: You’re so bound up with poets.

Nicole: Poetry still feels like it’s the last good, pure thing in New York, to me, and I always turn to poetry for ideas, so I read with an agenda. I try to not do that all the time and maybe being friends with you two has helped me with that because I’ve got your books and I just want to read them and see what you’re doing without trying to take, you know?

Matt: I'm always using poems to try to get myself going. But it doesn't always work, or it makes me feel bad.

Nicole: Poems of other writers?

Matt: Other writers—it’s much more satisfying when that happens. I will do this thing where I’ll carry around a poetry book for months, and every time I need that jolt, I will read it. But at some point those books are like: Enough. Stop doing this to me.

erica: I often start from images. I tend to do the opposite of what you do. I wish that I could be a visual artist and I can’t do that, so I take a lot of pictures and I sit with images. That’s how I do a lot of generating of language. I remember you had a show in Chelsea years ago, and I gave myself the assignment of trying to make a poem that included titles for all the paintings that were untitled. And I wish I remembered what that became. I’ll do things like that. My phone is full of photos of art that I’ve come across, whether it’s on the street or just different images that I then try to figure out how to think through as a way to get to language.

Nicole: That surprises me somehow. What do you take pictures of?

erica: I could show you. I also just collect words that I find interesting from other places too, so.

Nicole: Oh, that’s cool. I'm trying to think of what the painting equivalent would be. Like collecting a drawer full of paint marks?

Matt: You’re a ransacker of the tropes of art history!

Nicole: Yeah, but a word only equals a paint stroke.

Matt: It doesn't equal a gesture?

Nicole: Don’t you need two or three words to make a gesture? Or no, I guess you could have a one-word gesture: Fuck. That’s definitely a gesture.

erica: I get fixated on a single word and then suddenly the word appears in places. This is a picture from when I was in Budapest in July. Here we go. So this is something that I've been totally obsessed with.

Nicole: This is an image of a wall...

erica: ...in the Jewish quarter.

Nicole: And it almost looks like Pepé the Frog or something. It’s these very cartoony space-alien psychedelic frog faces. There’s one with celestial eyes and then there’s an eyeball with the words “Para Man.” Para Man is an eyeball on a wiggly stick.

erica: Which is the thing that I was the most excited about, because “para” is the word I've been thinking about and I was like: Oh my God, there it is. And then I was like: This is weird.

Nicole: What does “para” mean? Is it like, almost?

erica: Yeah, kind of like alongside, near. I’ll show one more.

Nicole: I can’t believe this is your inspiration! This one is a roll-down gate with a very big Memphis-y looking cartoon of a three-eyeballed animal with a boom box and a little spray can…who is a friend of his? He’s holding a spray can friend?

erica: Yeah, it's street art in Tel Aviv.

Nicole: And it says, “Frenemy.”

Matt: And there’s an animate rain cloud. Also, the boom box is just about to come alive.

Nicole: And then there's a little wig, a little character with a three-dimensional wig next to it. That's psychotic.

erica: This block is amazing.

Nicole: This is your inspiration. What the hell? This is funny and surprising, and, sorry, but I’m a little shocked. What happens when you encounter that? You're just surprised it exists in Tel Aviv? Or are you just happy?

erica: I feel really happy about it. And I’m also totally baffled because it’s kind of insanely joyous and somewhat of an act of dissent. There’s something about the encounter with something that’s surprising and compelling in its bigness and brightness that helps me find language. The language one generates when an image, or spectacle, seems to be telling us directly what we should see. Resisting those moments is useful to me. I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense. But I compulsively read a lot, too.

Matt: Feels a little compulsive sometimes.

Nicole: Are you a compulsive writer, Matt?

Matt: I'm not a compulsive writer. I'm a blocked writer. But I am a compulsive reader.

Nicole: A searcher?

Matt: Increasingly, I don't finish anything.

Nicole: You don't finish writing or finish reading?

Matt: I often don’t finish reading books. I just want to hang out with voices that I like.

Nicole: Do you know too much? And you're like: Okay, I got it.

Matt: Or I'm only going to the book to take something from it.

Nicole: Maybe you need to go on a beach vacation and be stuck with one book.

Matt: I think you're right.

Under the Table -

Nicole: I met you guys through Litia Perta. I was invited to do a section of Parkett. I was like: All right, well, let’s invite poets to use my images as a jumping-off point instead of the usual art writing, and that turned into an epic night.

erica: The party after the issue?

Matt: Yeah.

Nicole: You were under the table, and you were also under the table!

Matt: Did you come under the table?

Nicole: We all did. And Jess Arndt was under the table. Ariana Reines was holding court. I remember she was talking about Proust and time, but I don't remember anything she said.

Matt: We talked about the moment when...

Nicole: You remember the conversation?

Matt: I remember her telling about the moment in the third volume with Swann, who we’ve followed through a lot of the story. Swann is a Jew who disavows it. He has this big romance that brings him low. But he’s friends with princes, he’s wealthy and has legendary taste, and he’s also a dilettante who never really did the thing he was supposed to do and write a great essay about Vermeer or whatever. He’s friends with the Duchesse de Guermantes, whom Marcel has worshiped the whole time. One night Swann goes over to pick up the duchess and her husband to go to dinner. She comes down and he’s like: I need to tell you something. The doctors say I’m going to die. And this is the moment he’s chosen to tell this to this woman, you know, after they’ve been close friends and allies in society all these years. They’re this pair of great wits, and then her husband comes down and she’s like: Oh, you know what, I should have worn the red shoes with this dress, and she runs back inside to get the red shoes. Devastating.

Nicole: Oh my god, I remember this fucking story. I remember Ariana telling it! But it’s funny, because now I think about us, and I see us from afar. I know we were under the table together, but I don’t see us from that point of view. I see us from above. It’s this weird thing that happens with memory. I like, float away from my original first-person perspective. I’ve been reading Annie Ernaux, and it’s a lot about remembering memories and trying to get back to the authentic place, like trying to re-embody an old version of yourself. I was thinking about that when they sent me the cover for Ursula earlier—it’s a painting I made of us under the table.

erica: With the salami?

Nicole: Yeah, that’s the one. I was trying today to remember if I could see it how I saw it as it was when it was happening, but it’s very hard to step back into your eyeballs, to step back into the self you were then. You can kind of get there, sometimes. But I was thinking: Oh, I want to have an authentic memory of this. What did it look like? And then I thought: Oh, right after that happened, maybe the next day, I thought that I wanted to make a sculpture where a table was on the ceiling and we were always under the table.

Matt: But it was so funny that we thought we had to get under the table. We were already in an apartment.

erica: I remember. I feel like I was the last to give in.

Matt: To come under?

Nicole: Yeah, you were! We had to pull you. We had to convince you.

erica: Yeah, because I remember I was wearing a skirt.

Nicole: Well, it was a good story we heard.

Matt: I remember that moment very vividly.

Nicole: Did you read that before Ariana told it?.

Matt: I had read it. But to hear Ariana tell it, I realized how it had stuck with me.

Nicole: And it's like three books into the story. He realizes his friend is completely superficial and doesn’t give a shit.

Matt: Or maybe she just can't handle that moment.

erica: I can see Ariana telling the story. But I didn't remember what the content was.

Matt: She’s a powerful describer, that one.

Nicole: Yeah. It's funny. I just read this interview you did, Matt. You were talking about Great Expectations and how that girl tells Pip exactly what she is, at the beginning of the story. She's like: I'm cold.

Matt: Yeah.

Nicole: And then you have to go through the whole thing. And then finally you realize: Oh, she’s cold.

erica: Did you have birds?

Nicole: I did. I had a yellow bird named Omelet. She was flying all around that night.

On Medium -

Nicole: Would you ever want to be a painter? Would I want to be a writer? I can't be a writer because I suck at it. So that's case closed.

erica: I can't be a painter because I suck at it.

Nicole: Do you remember the time we did a class together? We should do that again.

erica: I would love to do that. That would be fun.

Nicole: Drawing and writing poetry from life.

erica: It's interesting because I've been trying to make things, as Matt knows. I've been trying all kinds of visual expeditions.

Nicole: What are you making?

erica: Well, I had a resin phase, where I just was trying to resin everything. And the only ones that are remotely okay have words and poems in them. They look kind of like something you would make in preschool. Lately, I've been trying to learn how to make watercolor stuff.

Nicole: Oh, that's nice. Watercolors are nice.

erica: But I don't really understand how to make it not look like a big glob of brown.

Nicole: Yeah, watercolor is hard because it requires some technique. It's finicky material.

erica: Yeah, I’ve been trying the wet-on-wet technique.

Nicole: You could go back into them after they dry. Because then you get a clean mark that’s not everything mushing or spreading out. Talking tech talk here.

erica: The second I make something, I get super frustrated and then I just put language on top of it.

Nicole: Oh, that's great. So you're writing on top of them? You should put one of these in Ursula. You’re going to do something, right Matt? Do you doodle when you're on the phone?

Matt: I draw.

Nicole: You draw!

Matt: I usually hate what comes out of my pen. But I really want to be able to draw.

Nicole: What do you have? A sketchbook and you make drawings in it?

Matt: I go to “drink-and-draw” right down the street.

Nicole: Tell me next time you go. I'll go with you.

Matt: Please do! It's a place called the Bat Haus. Every Wednesday night, they hire a live model. The model does a series of poses.

Nicole: Naked?

Matt: Naked. Does the poses. And there's, like, sixty people in there, drawing away. I go and make a mess.

Nicole: That's great. It's so funny. I'm as bad at writing, but I do try to write occasionally.

Matt: I don't think anyone believes you right now.

Nicole: You don't believe...

Matt: ...that you're not a good writer.

Nicole: Yeah, it’s terrible. I mean, it's … no, it's not terrible. It's that I really don't understand what I'm trying to do. It'd be nice to take a class, I guess. But it’s intimidating to have to read your stuff out loud.

Matt: erica is the great writing educator.

erica: We could do a little private class, the three of us. Because Matt is the best at coming up with prompts that will get you to make something excellent. Every time I don't know what to do, Matt gives me good prompts.

Nicole: Yeah, good prompts. All you need is a good prompt.

Matt: Will you teach me a drawing technique?

Nicole: Yeah, I can. Although, if there's sixty people in the room, it's a little hard to be like...

Matt: You’d get scared off?

Nicole: No, it just sounds crowded. I just think maybe we have to go out and draw in a bar.

Matt: For sure. That'd be better.

Nicole: Which I'd be totally game for, by the way.

On Embodiment (and Process Again) - Nicole: All right, I have something I want to talk to you guys about. So I had this conversation with Monika Baer, yesterday, about painting, and she was describing this really surreal thing of moving back and forth, when you’re doing the work. You’re in the room, the thing is there and you’re stepping back and forward, approaching it and then stepping back again and again. And this rhythm begins to happen and out of the rhythm energy begins to percolate, and out of the energy a kind of animus, a sparky thing, happens. I was thinking about poetry and sitting at a desk and writing gestures because I’ve been doing desk work the last couple of days. I’ve been doing these two-by-two-inch drawings. I don’t know if you write longhand, or how you’re doing it, but what do you think of your body as you are writing? What relationship does your body have to the thing that’s coming out?

Matt: For me, the poetry experience that I compare to all others is, you know, that poem of mine “Lucky 7s”? I was walking through Williamsburg on a very cold day, and every hundred yards I would stop and write three more lines, leaning on a mailbox. On the move, picking stuff up as I went. It was a truly embodied writing experience, and I’m often trying to replicate that very physical aspect of noticing and connecting. Also, it’s very hard for me to sit still.

Nicole: That's brilliant.

Matt: And I didn't ever do it exactly that way again because I thought: Oh, it'll come out kind of forced. But it’s how I want it to feel.

Nicole: Walking a hundred yards, you’re going from one world to a completely separate world. Then there is the much smaller gesture of moving your pen, picking it up and putting it down and picking it up. Is there anything that accumulates or is it just wrist cramp and exhaustion from sitting?

Matt: erica, can you talk about how you compose?

erica: I do a combination of generating a ton of language and collecting language from other places. I do it all by hand. This big kind of repository of language. And then once I have a lot, I type it all up, I print it out, and then I make poems. I write by hand, and I color-code, and I cross things out as I’m moving them around.

Nicole: Editing yourself down to a poem.

erica: Yeah, sort of. It's more like collage. I pick and choose, but I constantly have to recopy because a lot of how poems happen for me is what they look like on the page and if they sound the way that I think they're supposed to sound.

Nicole: But they don't sound collaged.

erica: That’s because I keep working on them until they’re there. So it’s a lot of drafting, reading, then trying it a different way, and then trying it a different way again. So I keep the notebook that has the raw material. And then I have a notebook where I have one set of drafts, and then I have a notebook where there’s what I imagine it’s going to be. If I feel like a poem’s finished, I recopy it again. Because when I write something, I hear it in my head. I have three notebooks with me today, and this is the notebook where, when the things feel finished, they go here. So it looks really clean.

Nicole: Oh, wow. And your handwriting is really small and precise. It's like green ink on blue paper, it's really pretty.

Matt: Graph paper, too.

Nicole: That's like shorthand. It looks like code language. Well, also, I'm looking at it upside down.

erica: And then this is a different version of one of those. So sometimes they're like this. [Showing the notebooks.]

Nicole: Your process is super complicated.

erica: Yeah, and then I'm constantly confused about the best place to put things. I'll show you the other layer. And I also have to travel with all of the options.

Nicole: You have to carry all the notebooks, all the different stages. Is Para Classic the new book?

erica: Pre Classic maybe.

Nicole: It's a trilogy. This is a wonderful way of working, because this goes back to what the Dadaists did, but you’re using your own language.

erica: But then you could see, I typed it. I cut it. And then I started to recopy. And then it stops, because I was like: Oh, this isn't actually going to work.

Nicole: This is a really beautiful page.

erica: It's not close to being done. This one I had to give up on for a little while. I always have at least two notebooks. Most of the time it's three. And I'm always moving things.

Nicole: I also like how you draw these boxes around things. Sequestering them.

Matt: The trilogy has a trajectory, right? What are the three parts?

erica: Well, the part that I’m on is changing. The first part was Milton. And it was about reimagining what an epic hero could do in a world where everything is always fallen. And then with the second book, which intended to grapple with Homer’s Odyssey and Gilgamesh, suddenly everything fell as I was making it because there was Trump. So I had to rewrite the whole thing. And that changed the contour of how I was thinking about the trilogy. That book became more about translation and disobedience through language than it was about the epics that it began with. For this book, I thought I’d work through Virgil and Dante, but I’m having a really hard time, so it might just be Virgil. There’s something that I’m drawn to in the idea of fleeing the fall, something that feels more writable than a slow descent (even if Dante’s Inferno as an epic is more interesting to me). There’s also a moment in Virgil that Milton echoes, the seeing of the future—that moment in Milton is what set this entire trilogy idea in motion. But with this last book I’m somehow not able to stay close to any text, and I am trying to only work through language that I generate. This is a shift for me, away from word banks and found vocabularies, so I’ve been relying on images to spark lyric. So my process is a bit unconventional in some ways, I guess. And then if I feel like I can’t do anything, I just recopy and recopy.

Nicole: And then something shifts and gives. Matt, somehow I picture you on a computer.

Matt: I actually do a lot of the same things that erica does. If I don’t cut things up, I'll turn into a bad narrative poet. I’m definitely on my hands and knees on the floor with lots of little pieces of paper. I learned a lot from erica, and from John Coletti, who walks around with a binder.

erica: Keeping the different versions is something I learned from John.

Matt: He walks around with these binders.

erica: Full of different drafts of poems.

Matt: The edits get reprinted, then go back in the binder.

Nicole: Collage. It works! It’s something I’m trying to do—more slicing and dicing. I do paintings that are really narrative and built on a space that’s stable. But there are these other things I’ve been trying to do where space collapses, story collapses, and it’s just, say, a head or a body part. A hand or a head. And how far can you push things around and have it still be that thing? I think my work has had so much gathering—this idea of gathering material and weaving it into your work. And sometimes I want to step back from that and not have anybody else’s voice in my head. It means looking at less stuff. Because everything I look at, I’m like: That’s the perfect way to do it, you know? There’s so much good work.

erica: I push up against that, too, because I work so much with found material that at a certain point I feel like—and this is a point that I'm hitting now—I don't want to work with found material. I want to work with my voice.

Nicole: It’s good, too, to be part of this lineage of writing. When you're taking other people's writing and putting it in your own, or taking things, do you feel like you're undermining that stuff in some way? That question’s for you, dude.

Matt: It's a good question. I hear what you're saying.

Nicole: Because we’re talking about Virgil and Dante.

Matt: Everyone at this table is interested in the canon. But I know what you’re saying: What if I actually reached down and accepted that I have all the tools? And that the ideas are digested in me. Could I just make a thing that’s mostly me—everything’s been metabolized enough that I can make a gesture and I don’t need another hand to help. I think about that as a good place to aim for. I love writers who are so singular in that way. I mean, Pessoa—he never mentions another writer. Of course, he has also fragmented himself.

Nicole: But do you think it's hermetically sealed in its own space bubble?

Matt: Kind of. I don't quite know how to get there. But I do think it's worth trying to make your own leap.

Nicole: Doing both at the same time is a good idea. Having some corner of your practice for that. Because the canon is incredible and inspiring and needs to be fucked with and played with.

erica: I was thinking yesterday about the last book of the trilogy and how I’ve been struggling with it a lot. I think that maybe the problem is that I have the arc of the constraint set up, and that runs counter to how I think about what I do when I make a poem, which is in some ways intuitive. It just feels a certain way to me. I was working on this poem that’s called “Prophecy,” and I’m working through pieces of language that I’ve been collecting from newspapers that have to do with Bitcoin. So that’s my word bank. But the poem’s not working well. So I wonder what that word bank is doing that I’m not able to figure out how to say myself. And then how do I figure out how to say it. What am I hiding from, by giving myself all of these limitations?

Nicole: It feels like limitations when the thing's not working. You're actually giving yourself a lot of new and insane language!

Matt: Blockchain.

erica: Crypto-currency.

Nicole: Fungible.

Matt: I have a question.

Nicole: Okay.

Matt: My question is: The painting with the ladder, the bicycle, the two people... [Destiny Riding Her Bike (2020)]

Nicole: Uh huh.

Matt: Do you feel like that's full of gathered material, or mingled with someone's voice? I think of that as quintessential you in a way. I know you work in many registers, but that kind of psychodrama thing you do...

Nicole: Yeah. I feel like with that one, I wasn’t looking at anyone else’s work. I was thinking about Douglas Sirk, or it could have been a still from a Todd Haynes movie. The style of that painting is no-style style. It’s a workhorse painting, where you are just trying to tell the damn story.

Matt: But there is that vein, in others of your paintings—the people pulling the cart, the town flooded with shit…

Nicole: Yeah. Although I think even those paintings have a more painterly weirdness. The bike one is a very illustrative painting, even for me, but it has to be like that because there’s so much plot in that painting. I wanted it clear that the two people are looking at each other as they’re in the midst of this accident. That painting was torture to finish.

On Overlaps, Covers, Capitalism - erica: There’s a question that Kay Gabriel asked us about working with both visual and verbal media and the overlap between poets and visual artists: “The Poetry Project started at a moment of pretty significant overlap between poets and visual artists, which tapered off in the decades afterwards and now sometimes feels resuscitated, at least in pockets or in particular scenes. In your careers as writers and artists, have you seen particular changes in the social overlaps of writers and artists?”

Nicole: It seems like there's more overlap now than there was, say, in 1995.

erica: How did you come to do Eileen’s cover for Maxfield Parrish?

Nicole: It was like ‘92 or probably ‘93 or maybe ‘94. I met Eileen through Laurie Weeks, and then they asked me to do the cover.

erica: That was how I first knew about your work. When I was in college, I used to go to the Strand. I would take the train from New Jersey and I would go, and I was just trying to read as many poetry books as I could, and I liked what the Black Sparrow books looked like. So I bought any Black Sparrow book I saw, and that was how I first learned about Eileen. And then that cover. I was like, wow, what is this?

Nicole: Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I like that cover. I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago from Eileen. It's a picture of a flower being built by a bunch of little flowers. I like seeing my work on the cover of poetry books!

Matt: erica’s books.

Nicole: Is it ok if I say that those covers are kind of perfect for the poems.

erica: Yeah, I think they're both absolutely perfect. I feel like there's a conversation that happens between the cover and the book that feels like a human conversation.

Nicole: Yeah, like it front-loads something, right?

erica: And the Pathetic Literature book, that looks amazing.

Nicole: It's a pathetic painting so...

Matt: So you're having overlap with writers. But what about other artists?

Nicole: There seems to be more attention for poetry now in general. I don’t know if that’s because of The Poetry Project. There aren’t so many ways, when you are making things, to resist the market, and if you are outside of it, often you’re trying to get into it—like, so many painters are trying to grab the golden ring. And I don’t think that’s the case as much with poetry, because the golden ring is like…

erica: It’s aluminum.

Nicole: Poets should get paid a lot. I mean you're trying to pay bills!

Matt: I’m not sure either of us expects to make any money from poetry, but I think you’re right that sometimes people come to poetry because it still feels like people are truly doing it as amateurs. Although there is professionalization in poetry, of course.

erica: There’s been a shift in some of the even more mainstream magazines. Like, there are good editors, too. So I think poetry that people wouldn’t have encountered otherwise is there. Eileen had an amazing poem in The New Yorker last week, which made me so happy. And The Nation has been having really good poetry. Anne Boyer’s been editing for The New York Times Magazine. There was a beautiful Peter Gizzi poem in there recently. So there’s a way in which it’s suddenly made its way into places where people are encountering it who would never have seen it before.

Nicole: It’s never going to be mainstream, because it defies reality.

–

Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. In 2019, her work was included in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include “Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” (2023–24), “Heads, Kisses, Battles: Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns” (2021–22), “Nicole Eisenman. Giant Without a Body” (2021) and “NICOLE EISENMAN. STURM UND DRANG” (2020). Having established herself as a painter, Eisenman has expanded her practice into the third dimension.

Poet, writer and teacher, erica kaufman is the author of POST CLASSIC and INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books) and censory impulse (Factory School). She is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. Recent poems can be found in e-flux. kaufman’s prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; and Reading Experimental Writing. kaufman is the director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.

Matt Longabucco is the author of the poetry collection Heroic Dose (Golias Books, 2022) and M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), a book-length essay about a landmark of French cinema and its creator. His essay “Poster Syndrome” appears in the Nicole Eisenman catalogue Incelesbian (2020). He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing, innovative pedagogy and critical theory at New York University and at Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.