Dalia and I have known each other since the spring of 2021, when our mutual good friend Julian Talamantez Brolaski set us up to meet as poets in Templehofer Feld in Berlin. Our friendship developed during the height of the pandemic; at first we met mostly outdoors, taking long walks in Berlin’s parks or lounging by the canal. We often talked about what we were reading (Sean Bonney, Ibn Arabi, Jean Genet, Audre Lorde, Emily Dickinson, Farid al-Din Attar, Diane di Prima, Haythem El Wardany…), what was happening at Hopscotch Reading Room, Café Plume, or AL. Berlin that week, or just shared things we had scribbled in our notebooks, which we always had on us. I noticed they contained a bit of everything: first draft poems, ideas for creative prompts and somatic practices, addresses of places we needed, books to read, movies and music to see, and short journal entries. If I remember right, Dalia wrote in pencil, which I thought was so tactile and not something I see every day anymore (I use a gel pen).

Our friendship was already pretty solid by the time we found out that Dalia’s book The Swarm would be published by The Elephants Press, and a few months later, that my book, Detonated Mirror, would be as well. I remember laughing with joy about this on a walk down Karl Marx Straße, both of us amazed and elated that our work was coming out on the same press. This past spring, I moved back to the Bay Area after being away for a few years. Dalia and I are still close friends, although we now live across the world (nine hours’ time-zone difference!) from each other. The following conversation is collaged from our recent phone calls, texts, voice messages, and written correspondence.

-SL

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Sara Larsen: So let’s start with what we often talk about when we hang out, after the gossip is out of the way: writing stuff. What, with everything going on in the world, is the role of poetry and creativity and imagination right now? I’m so curious what you have to say about it.
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‍Dalia Neis: My dear Sara, since you have left Berlin for California, things have taken a turn for the worse in Berlin. There has been increasing and amplified state repression: cultural events — including poetry readings — have been censored and canceled, friends have been blacklisted and threatened when any solidarity with Palestine is expressed, with, of course, Palestinians living here being the most targeted and affected. All the organizing on the streets has been steadfast in the face of tremendous police brutality. I have found deep solidarity and support in community, and for this I am very grateful.  

Poetry events now are more intimate and charged than they were before; mostly done without institutional backing, and predominantly taking place in grassroots venues, like people’s living rooms, studios, or in small bars and cafés, they’ve become more open, explicit, and expressive. In some ways, there is even more kinship and urgency among politically engaged poets and activists in the community here. The question I have been more preoccupied with over the last months, although not new, is, what is the role of poetry in times of genocide? I don’t really have an answer to that and haven’t written much during the last nine months, but I have been incredibly fortunate to have had creative outlets for making music, and attuning to body-based practices such as the martial art of Aikido.

During this time, I have also explored more deeply the tools of somatics, a kind of adjacent poetics, if you will, designed to help articulate the language of the felt senses through the intelligence of the body. I had been teaching workshops and classes in literature and filmmaking, and rather than just focusing on the content, I wanted to find ways to deepen my facilitator skills, to support students’ creative and emotional processes. I also was keen to move away from institutional teaching toward supporting others on a more one-on-one basis, as well as in grassroots and activist group settings. A former student recommended a training program and I have been drawn to this work ever since. I am in the process of building a kind of first-aid toolbox with key practices that support myself and others, incorporating them into my political group and sharing with allies from the community. Some of these tools come from a lineage called Generative Somatics which offers a very helpful centering practice where you get to drop in, and embody the dimensions of length (dignity), width (community), and purpose (from your center, the point just below your naval). Other practices come more directly from my own lineage, taught to me by my mentor, Myra Avedon; these incorporate Kabbalistic concepts and my embodied applications of the radical Jewish diasporic principle of Doykayt (translated from the Yiddish as “Hereness”) into a guided meditation that I recorded, and will soon share publicly.

Over these last months, I have been thinking of you with so much warmth and admiration for how you show up in the world, and how poetry for you feels so integral to your way of being. You really exemplify this for me on many levels, from your daily routines to your political commitments. You have been a really important friend to me.
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‍SL: You have been such an important friend to me, too! I’ve been thinking of you for so many reasons… I think one of the things that you and I have in common is that we both are conscious of the alchemical aspect of artmaking, and I find this to be related to what you bring up in terms of the role of poetry in times of genocide and horror. For me, to write poetry is to engage in life-making and in visionary work, and by that I include the sense in which we can envision a new world, a new rubric.

Something that really connects you and me as friends is that we spend a lot of time considering the somatic in terms of the political, in terms of the creative. I feel like we are both aware of the somatic’s relationship to consciousness, social justice, and just the basic fact of being. For me, it’s important that I’m also dancing, practicing yoga or meditating when I’m working on a book. I need an outlet for my body — and I need to not be stuck in my head. I also need to feel connected to others by way of the feeling that we are all sentient beings in an often-harsh world. Just feeling other parts of myself helps me access, when I sit down to write, what I need to access. Dreams are important, too, so I guess I’d add sleeping as a somatic practice. I often write out my dreams in the morning and use some of the images or associations that come up in that dream writing in my poems. They become intertwined with awake attentions I also try to note down… what animals are doing, the basic noticing of the material world around us. And my proprioception in it. The writing is engaged in all of this.

I think with somatic practices as they relate to writing and grounding us in the world, we both seem to find some prismatic depth there.    
     

DN: There is definitely a feeling of depth — the vertical dimension, which feeds into our friendship and unfolds in our poetry too. There’s a line in your book which speaks of the fungal, the roots into earth. We both are exploring rootedness, but not in a way which is familial, or even human.

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SL: Yeah. I was just thinking about the rhizome, as well as actual fungus. Who am I and others in relation to these vast networks we can’t see from above ground? I’m fascinated with what’s hidden but powerfully functional and I’m interested in the “secret” part of this; that there is another layer at work. Part of this has to do with absences, too (“The Losses” mentioned in the excerpted text below).

DN: I really visualize that. I just sense the nutritional and eerie quality of the mycelium oozing within me. It really does light up your brain when you read it; it sends these luminous networks into your body.
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SL: Thanks for saying that. I think of history, the present and the future being really intertwined and co-present. Interconnectivity has something to do with that — time isn’t strictly linear, nor are our habitual notions of separation, which I suppose is a habitual way of conceiving of space. I was exploring that a lot in the book; every poem was a way to prismatically look into the openness of these questions. But honestly, I realized what I was writing as I wrote. I don’t usually come with a thesis ahead of time or something.
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DN: It works on a similar level for me, it’s not preconceived. It feels much more shaped by the realm of the unconscious, if you call it the unconscious, or, those multiple realms that speak through us when we write. So, when we’re in relationship to the many realms of reality, then things aren’t linear anymore. But I can theorize it until I’m blue in the face! When you do it through poetry, it goes a billion miles per hour across time and space. Do you know what I mean? Poetry’s incredible in that lived potential.
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SL: Totally! Poetry can bring us right into the experience instead of theorizing and just talking about it, which I guess is also fine. But, you know, sometimes I want to be in the experience. This is why poetry is incredibly important! It creates the space for us to envision, to enact, to be part of the mystery of things without our minds just babbling on, telling us rhetorically what is and what isn't. You know what I mean? True poetry makes space for a lot of things to be simultaneously at work.

DN: We use different tools, such as spells, to enter portals, which allow us to feel that deep sense of interconnectivity. Bathing in the Ottoman baths became a daily activity which allowed me to enter its ancient past: I began to hear melodies and chants, a phantom choir resonating in the baths. This became a key motif in The Swarm. I played around with the acousmatic — a film technique where you get to hear a sound while the source of the sound is hidden.‍
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SL: I love that about The Swarm. Those acousmatic sounds resonate so potently throughout. I think poetry is the optimal way to be inside of a spell or a ritual, because poetry has so much room for constellation, association, and paradox, and to hold things that are tough to get across colloquially, you know?‍
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DN: And in your poems you use juxtaposition in such an alchemical way. You just have all these different images coming together which defy any kind of logic.
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SL: Yeah, I like unexpected language. I like the charge in the language that comes of it; it pleases and often surprises me. Unexpected form can be like that, too. One of my lines goes: “As I drive on, my humiliations become quite pitiless and brutal, as if a spell has enjambed me.” Here I’m using enjambment as a way not to talk about poetry, but about what poetry is doing to me (or the person in the poem). And it’s in a prose poem, which is a little ironic, I guess.

I find enjambment interesting: within the tiny pause from one line to the next, something inordinate happens, something hard to describe. Like the line break does something in the same way that the spell does something. And it’s embedded in the form itself. The line break is magical in the sense that it can completely alter the music and meaning of a work. It’s both a boundary and a break. My understanding is that there has to be a boundary around any kind of spell or ritual that's done to properly direct the energy, and I can see the analogy in thinking about how we might consider the line break in poetry to work.
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DN: I think with me, part of the spell-making process happens through listening to voices, almost guiding me in the act of writing. The prose form in The Swarm is a stream of consciousness or a voice that just speaks through me, you know?
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SL: Yeah. I wanted to ask you more about that because there are so many places in the book where you have these prose blocks. I don’t know if you would call them prose poems or not. They’re often followed by quotes that are sort of spread out in different parts of the page. I’m interested in who the voices are. Is that the polyphonic aspect?
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DN: It really feels like it is just these persevering voices, and it comes from very deep. It wasn’t really me speaking. They’re kind of polyphonic conversations or scripts. Some of them are dialogues, others are trialogues.    

SL: Yeah. you have these moments that sort of break into the story, adding manifold dimensions; instead of just moving linearly through something, it’s this multidimensional way of looking at the story. I wonder, since I don’t know as much about film as you do, if thinking about how film works helped you find your form?
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DN: Originally it was a bit more of a film script as a form. You could even say it was a bit like a treatment to a film. As I developed it, I took that away, because I realized I don’t need to use the technique any longer. But it helped to give me permission to work in this way. The technique helped me to begin; it became a container.

So working across media helps to, just give a very multisensory experience, which is what poetry does, really. I’m not always doing poetry in line breaks. Sometimes. There are a few. They arrive more like songs. These songs also found their way into my music, and much of The Swarm inspired my musical project, Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm.

And — you also have these beautiful and weird little ditties in Detonated Mirror!
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SL: Well, I think about music all the time when I think about poetry. Poetry is music. That’s part of it. Often when I write, I follow the rhythm and the sound over the meaning. I start with the music of the words. I let the meaning emerge or co-emerge. Meaning is a collaboration for me with my mind and the bigger mind of the poem itself.
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DN: There are definitely songs in Detonated Mirror.
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SL: Definitely. There is this one called “Little Rat Moon,” which starts out with a particular song-like rhythm, then takes an unexpected turn in both image and sound. I can track some of that kind of move to Emily Dickinson, who I was reading a lot at the time and who is masterful at those kinds of sonic turns.

‍DN: It’s funny to think about all the beings who are accompanying you in the writing process. I had a lot of support from the living and the dead, and a whole lot else, and they became part of the writing. Figures come up. I was reading and I even quoted Sean Bonney while writing The Swarm.
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SL: Say more about it.      
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DN: I think Bonney’s book, Our Death, especially, helped me. I don’t know if you’ve read it.
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SL: It’s my favorite book of his.
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DN: It fueled me. In some weird way, it feels like it helped me to speak to the dead in a much clearer way than I could have previously imagined.
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SL: On one of the first pages of your books, you write that you’re reading Our Death. You’re getting these looks from people in the café, and you’re also reading The Conference of the Birds.
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DN: Yeah, The Conference of the Birds is what The Swarm aspires to!

It’s between a diary and something else — it goes into other dimensions, of the miraculous. But that diaristic element is very important because it is also about what happens day to day, on the mundane level. It’s about reality in the many realms. So it includes everything: where I sit, the places I go, the cafés I frequent, the bathhouse that I go to. And the books that I’m reading. They all came into conversation with each other. The Conference of the Birds feels like a really revolutionary book. I read it as an instructive pragmatics about how to transcend ordinary reality and how to organize a liberation movement simultaneously. It’s about solidarity. It’s about how to find ways to prevail over terrible circumstances. So it’s a very practical book, and it also very obviously has that kind of transformative, mystical component, it’s poetic core. And I just think that all these components are somehow inseparable.

SL: Both of us think a lot about the mystical, visionary, or interconnected realms. But it’s not about any kind of visionary world that seeks to escape this world. I think there’s a more holistic, and therefore practical, outlook there. All of these worlds are robustly interconnected and in conversation with each other. So I hear you about being both diaristic and in other dimensions at the same time. I was interested in that interplay as well.

When I was reading The Swarm, I experienced some definite moments which in poetry we would call the volta. The part where things turn. When the lover leaves, then the narrator goes into this place of deepening her relationship with the bath spirits and really listening to them.
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DN: I was very inspired by Tropical Malady, a film which has two parts, and is shaped by a radical volta — the first part takes place in Bangkok, chronicling the story of gay lovers, and the second metamorphoses into an animal fable, the lover turns into a tiger, and there is a talking monkey That was a lightning bolt moment for me! I love works of art that are split into two parts, especially when the parts are connected enigmatically, and you are left to wonder about what happened in between. That’s the kind of atmosphere I was looking to evoke in The Swarm.

I really love this phrase, from your “My Secret Body” poems: “The secret is to be every form and live in everybody.” Where does that piece of ancient wisdom come from?
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SL: You know, where things like that come from is hard to say. But I can talk about the circumstances from which the line came. I would say there are three kinds of pieces in Detonated Mirror, and they’re intertwined. The reader wouldn’t know this necessarily, but I know it. There are lyric poems that were largely written in New Mexico. There’s the “My Secret Body” prose poems which were written in Berlin but are about New Mexico. And then the poems that have no titles and begin with italics, which I wrote in Oakland before the pandemic. And to me those are almost a whole other set (a whole other life, really), but they all speak to each other in the world of the book. I had to discover how all of these various “sets” of poems spoke to each other much later, months after the writing of all of them was finished. That became much more apparent as I experimented with putting them into a manuscript and allowed a conversation that I hadn’t previously anticipated to grow up among them.

But to answer your question about that line from “My Secret Body,” I think that part of the circumstances that allowed me to write a line like that is that I was in Berlin, and Michael and I lived in Moabit together, and it was lockdown, pandemic time. We did these timed writing practices. We’d go in separate rooms, set a timer, and we’d say, “Okay, see you in two hours.”
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DN: Oh my God.
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SL: And then we would write. So I remember often being in our kitchen writing these “My Secret Body” poems in a spiral bound notebook. And I think there was something about being under the timer, the time constraint, that allowed me to listen in this very specific kind of way. I would often start by writing a couple pages that never made it into the book, kind of like, blah, blah, blah.
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DN: A bit like the morning pages or something?
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SL: Yeah, exactly. I just wrote three or four pages, and it was often a lot of crap, but that got me into the headspace of being able to write more pages where I was listening very deeply in some other way. I put myself into a certain perceptual way of being by doing that. And that allowed me to get to lines like the one you just read. And also, I would have books with me. If I felt stuck, I would just open one and I would see a word that might set me into a new direction.

Books were truly companions during that time, both in writing and just to have another kind of community at hand during the pandemic. I didn’t have many of them because I moved around to so many places at that time, but I always had Jean Genet, whether it was Funeral Rites, Our Lady of the Flowers, or The Thief's Journal. Later, I was astounded by Prisoner of Love, but while I was writing Detonated Mirror, I believe I had his earlier works on hand. I was also pretty taken with Emily Dickinson, and my theory is that it was both her strange and semi-abstracted, sometimes-mystical and stubbornly singular style (I say that with abundant love!), as well as because she was under a kind of self-directed “lockdown” — not that she was a prisoner or subject to a global pandemic, but that she was living in a small social world (by choice). Susan Howe’s wonderful My Emily Dickinson is famously beyond reproach in looking at her process and the agency of her choices. Other books came and went, again because I was traveling and moving a lot, but I read them and used them and interacted with them in my work, creating my own little world in which to make Detonated Mirror.

Not having a stable bookshelf was interesting and weird, after living a life in the Bay for a long time where I had lots of books surrounding me. When it comes to the Bay, I didn’t miss those bookshelves as much as I missed my friends and the vibrancy of Bay poetry culture. I was there for seventeen years before I went away for a bit, and being away made me realize how deep my roots were — emotionally, but also in terms of what I had learned about being a poet, a sort of adventurous aesthetic framework, rigorous attention to others’ work, and community-mindedness. It’s not like those things don’t exist elsewhere, or in Berlin, because they do; but I guess the amount of time I lived in the Bay Area grounded me in whatever that particular quality is about the Bay. I feel like trying to grasp exactly what it is I’m trying to convey is as hard as describing August light, or the smell of fog!

Moving back to roots, you wrote in The Swarm that the journey in the book is a “root dissolution voyage”:                                  

This strange journey — why do I do this, and for what purpose? Banshee told me to go and see for myself. It was a root dissolution voyage, she said: a ritual of dissolving all that was heralded and upheld as the beginning of things.                                           

DN: I was quite influenced by the way Clarice Lispector dissolves her roots into primal life, into the pus of a dying cockroach in her book The Passion According to G.H. But I am sure there is more to it. I was quite upset by how certain biographers of Lispector have tried to reduce her life and work to her Jewish roots in the Ukraine. I mean, I am sure these are influences, but that is far too limiting. This became a motif in The Swarm, and I even refer to Lispector in the book.          
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SL: Another motif I noticed in your book were the birds. Birds come up all the time, and they come up as a symbol of liberation. You have this other line where you’re talking about how “the dissolution of personal identity and familial trees is a prerequisite for abstract flight.”

Beautiful language, first of all. But this idea, again, of dissolving an origin story to create something else, to create some other form of liberation…
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DN: Well, if we go back to this idea of writing as a spell, I suppose the story itself is a kind of ritual framework for going beyond personal narratives, especially victim narratives. There’s a trauma and things have happened, but then what do you do with it? When you’re too preoccupied with personal roots, the roots of a people, a nation, it can recreate that cycle of harm and violence on others. So going back to this idea of interconnectivity, you gotta snip past your personal past to liberate yourself or awaken to other ways of being. You’re connected to everything: other beings and other communities and other struggles of liberation. That’s the guiding principle of The Swarm. I was very inspired by radical liberation movements like the Jewish Labor Bund, whose members were committed to acting in solidarity with struggles of other oppressed peoples or groups, such as factory workers. I was exploring an expansive idea of liberation as an interconnected and also interspecial activity. You know what I mean?
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SL: Right, right. Yes, I’m with you completely.

I was exploring in Detonated Mirror — and this is like where the title comes from — the wobbliness of the single self. It’s not a stable concept.

I think this relates to what you just said, that in The Swarm, you’re talking about snipping your attachment to your origin story.

DN: Yeah, at the time of writing The Swarm, I was living in Budapest. I was somehow able to open my senses and just be able to listen, as you said, to all these other kinds of messages. Perhaps this has something to do with hearing the language of Hungarian spoken by my grandparents and father. I never spoke it myself, but it sounded like music to me, its singular rhythms, intonation, and emotional quality; a kind of dream language rather than a functional one. Somehow this helped to create the space for my imagination to become activated, especially while I was sitting drinking my daily coffee in Bambi Espresso Bar, I would just listen to the sounds of elders speaking and playing drafts, dreaming up The Swarm, dreaming up the support team which eventually populated the book.

The Swarm is about an action. It’s about a group of all kinds of beings coming together and liberating themselves from these really constrictive kinds of situations, narratives, histories. But — what do you do when fascism is coming back?

You might go back in time. Or you just go to all the sources and resources that resonate in ways which can create that sense of joy and liberation, whether it’s through sensual activities like bathing or through...

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