Cara Benson
COURTESY OF PARACHUTE:
CONEY ISLAND PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL

You are a member of the Dusie Kollektiv. Would you explain how it operates?

First I must mention Susana Gardner as the founder. She had the great foresight to call into being this evolving network. It is an international constellation of poets who make a yearly poem or set of poems into handmade renderings of the work. Then everyone mails them to each other and Susana makes .pdfs of the work available online. The network ranges anywhere from fifty to (this year) nearly a hundred. Each poet is hand-stitching, pressing, printing, coloring, binding, sticking, stamping, sewing, ribboning, festooning enough to mail to the entire list. Plus they are archived at some special collections. Poet’s House. University of Arizona Poetry Collection. University of Buffalo.

What are some examples of work done for the annual exchange?

Last year was the “upcycle year” in which we were to reuse discarded materials in a way that increases their value. Elizabeth Bryant’s poems came in a toilet paper roll. Dana Teen Lomax’s were in used prescription bottles. Jared Hayes’ had fancy wine list covers, and the poems, which were recycled language from Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, were printed on old menus. Mine were adhered to pages of the New York Times to read in some ways as the anti-news. 


How has your Dusie participation affected your overall poetic sensitivity?

I think of poems for this project in their material manifestations rather than just text on a page or screen. Maybe this year I will glue together alphabet blocks. (Probably not, we have a hundred to make!) Also, the freedom and support of the project has fostered a space for me to go beyond what I think might fit a slot on a bookshelf, not only literally in the physical execution, but also symbolically or categorically.



In addition to making a hundred renderings of your own poem, you’ll be receiving an equal number of productions from other poets. Has this opened up your general understanding of poetry?

One of the ways Dusie has been instrumental in my thinking about poetry is that it is based on community. Much of mainstream literary production is still operating on the model of the individual creative genius. Sure, that individual may be thinking about himself as part of a tradition, but more often than not as a solitary participant of such. I think this can tend to foster competition, solipsism, and a need to be the next “it” writer.

Who are the most exciting contemporary thinkers (no poets!) you follow?

Off the top of my head because I’ll torture myself over this one… Cornel West, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein.

What do you personally do to bring on a poem? To “join the state of making”?

It varies. The most important thing, though, and this may sound cheeky, is to get the computer on, the pen in hand, what-have-you. The next book, Protean Parade, has involved research as a fishing expedition. Research usually is, but this book, for me, is quite broad in its attempts/subjects. So I drift — the Situationist’s dérive — in a variety of databases, archives and other potential sources until there’s some drag on the net, as they say. Then the writing begins.