KL: Thank you, Rae. It’s great to hear you read these poems. I think you could start in most places in your book, and it would give a sense of the things at stake in your work and your recurrent interests, but I chose this section because, in a very neat way, it introduces many of your characteristic poetic gestures. The rhetorical question, or the question as an aside. Sometimes the whole poem is a question, sometimes it’s an entire stanza. The way you move between proposition and question, rarely answer, to engineer or cut through with these strikingly colloquial, often jokey words, words like ‘ping,’ ‘doodad’ or ‘comfy’ – ‘comfy as hell.’ One of the things you said when we were having a bit of back and forth about how we might do this was when I asked you what often gets left out, because everybody writes about (for good reason) the markedly intelligent, propositional, ‘thinky’ character of your work, it’s markedly ‘intellectual.’ You said emotion and affect tend to get left out. Why don’t we start there with some of these poems?

RA: Ok, I like that question. It’s true. People often talk about the ambiguity of my work and how to make meaning out of it – how meaning might be problematised, which are all intellectual problems that are very interesting to me. I like your word ‘proposition,’ Kate. One thing I like to do is to throw out a proposition that may or may not be true, it could conceivably be true, and then pose examples of what it might mean and look like for it to actually be true. Often, the examples are problematic, somehow. It’s like they’re chunky, unwieldy pieces of the world, and how do they line up with these propositions that I’m trying to use to describe it?

So, having said that I want to get around to emotion since I don’t talk about it much. I may not be good at talking about it, but I can tell you that every poem of mine starts with a feeling. And usually with a feeling I can’t identify, maybe because it’s complicated, kind of a compound feeling of ironic yet wistful or a sad yet angry combination of feelings. But also, sometimes, I need help understanding the source of the feeling, and that’s where a poem starts – when I try to identify the source of a feeling. I could talk about that with ‘Child’s Play.’ I do have granddaughters. They’re seven now, but this was probably written when they were more like four, maybe.

KL: And they’re twins, right?

RA: They’re twins, yes. Twin girls. And, in the poem, they’re blowing bubbles outside. Because they’re around a lot of literate people, they sometimes pick up phrases that they may not totally understand the register of – ‘Oh no!’ would be one of those. They’ve heard that somewhere, and they’re practicing using it as they watch bubbles move and burst in the wind. I’m not sure what that means to them or where it comes from. I’m guessing they use a falsetto voice to indicate something like ‘air quotes.’ I guess the reason it seemed emotional to me is that, though the girls were having a great time, pretending to be upset when the bubbles popped, the suggestion of death was there for anyone who wanted to see it. Many of my poems are about events that make me feel both interested and sad. Why sad? Not because they were saying, ‘Oh, no,’ and not really for the bubbles because they might pop, but for something else. The combination of meaningfulness and meaninglessness always gets to me. That their language was both meaningful and somehow not.

KL: And this is a very characteristic move of yours. The doubled: ‘Oh, no’ is a transcription of theme. ‘“Oh, no!” they cry / as they leave the wand. / “Oh, no”! / already in air quotes.’ So, the first one, which doubles up, the negative and the leaving, is melancholic. And the second one, ‘“Oh, no”! / already, in-air quotes,’ is ironic.

RA: Yes. It’s almost funny, huh? You’re right.