JB: In ‘Something More’ (‘Etwas Mehr’) you used a word I wanted to ask you about.

‘That only if seriousness is handled playfully, relativistically,
experimentally and autoreflexively, is it not undercomplex, and vice versa
(no cheap inversion, but an additional turn of the screw ((with a nod to
Serner))): this game must be played with total seriousness, forfeiting
nothing less than one's own entire existence’

‘Dass der Ernst nur, wenn er spielerisch, relativistisch, experimentell,
autoreflexiv gehandhabt wird, nicht unterkomplex ist, und umgekehrt
(keine billige Umkehrung, sondern eine Schraubendrehung weiter
((Handkuss an Serner))) muss dieses Spiel mit einem Riesenernst, mit
dem Einsatz von nichts weniger als der gesamten eigenen Existenz
betrieben werden.’

It’s the ‘one additional turn of the screw’ (‘Schraubendrehung’). In what way is one more turn of the screw important for inversion or reversal?

AC: Sorry, I don’t understand what you could mean by this. Would you be so kind and reformulate in English?

JB: When you referred to the inversion or reversal of poetry in the conclusion of your essay, you said it cannot be cheap but that it must be one turn of the screw further.

I interpret this distinction as the cheap being the simplistic, lacking-in-craft approach, whereas this turn of the screw, it’s requiring the right tools, the strength to turn it more, to make it tighter or looser as it screeches, or a craftsman-like approach.

Could you elaborate further on ‘the one additional turn of the screw’? Are you referencing someone’s work with the word Schraubendrehung? Hopefully not too pedantic – am hanging on every word of yours over here.

AC: Now I am getting it. Indeed, whereas the English expression references Henry James’ novelette – which I just now happen to be reading with great excitement about the old Americanisms therein that rear their heads in such a fresh way – in German, the reference refers to Walter Serner and his use of the expression in his preface to Letzte Lockerung (Last Loosening was Serner’s Dadaist manifesto). Serner intended that one thing that this turn of the screw might be doing is loosening rather than tightening – but also, more generally, alluding to a widespread image for (material) dialectic, harkening Nietzsche’s famous ‘perpetual return of the same’ which takes the form not of a circle but of a spiral in time. It seems to me the image has something to do with kinetics. Force is somehow worked into the ideas when they are turned and pushed or pulled at the same time. Rene Crevel speaks – I don’t remember where exactly – of a pedestal that the thinker builds himself, ‘das ihn in die Luft schraubt’, i.e. a pedestal of thought that one builds under one’s own feet that propels one farther and farther away from people. For me, this image evokes Winsor McCay’s character Little Nemo and his bed.

Also, the image to me suggests a portion: the distance and scope of what one can sensibly do – and understand – with one flick of the wrist. Like, it would make no sense to want one’s poetry to push the general state of poetry further by, say, five turns of the screw … because that would merely be a stupid jump to make. No path. No continuity of intelligence.

Cheap, it seems to me now, was a not particularly eloquent way of saying this. Quite as you suggest, too simplistic a reversal. You know like when people, particularly on podiums, say ‘bla bla bla, but maybe also the opposite’. They could as well say nothing.

Also, an aversion to going back the same path one came by. Pedantic enough, no?

JB: I was wondering if you could tell me what you see as virtuosity in poetry? Is there such a thing as mastery of the art form? Can it be pursued?

AC: Yes, I think there is virtuosity in poetry – a certain ease and familiarity, which can lead to a lightness in tone or a formal lightness, but also to the most astounding manoeuvres with the ox-cart, quite without alternative. At the same time, I think some of the most beautiful artefacts are raw, or the result of a happy moment. Beginners’ luck. Or even the beauty of an obstruction felt and dealt with through the difficulties of a poem’s creation.

There is certainly no safety. Mastery can’t be had, it only rears its head in action. Whether someone says she pursues it or pretends not to is not terribly relevant, since I do believe good poetry comes from an excessive, jealous and superstitious love of language, a relation that is more intimate than mastery, and leads to a whole line of deformations.

JB: Final question, Ann, I promise. Was looking to conclude by asking whether you’d be willing to shed light on what you’re currently focussed on? I’m interested to know if you’re working on a project or your next book, but (far) more importantly, what are you focussed on thematically / stylistically / linguistically? That’s real talk. What are you FOCUSED on?

AC: Really hard to say what I will focus on next, since I am just finishing the last corrections on a book of stories that should come out in the fall (in Australian spring). To say it will be coming out might be more fitting than I like. I am curious what will happen when these stories hit the public.

I might take up the language studies that slipped out of my hands during the past year: Russian and Japanese. Too much, of course, but I can’t decide between the two and have started working with them both. And I want to finally read the central works of Hegel and Marx. But this doesn’t really answer your question.

I suppose I’ll continue to be focused on beauty, the question of different kinds of it, also questions of male- and femaleness, what it means to love beauty, and if it’s dangerous for one’s thinking. Hübsch, for example, in German means pretty, in contrast to schön – beautiful – and I’m interested in testing certain clichés, German or puritan, about cuteness precluding serious thought, particularly after having been in Japan. I’d like to disprove the generic compensation theories or dichotomies like intelligence versus beauty. Good poetry does disprove them, doesn’t it?

But my focus, I think, remains a glowing ball of lava that you can’t actually look at whereas my results, the information, the actual thoughts are pushed in crystallising fragments to the edges of that focus where it’s cooler.