Interview with Nathan Anderson

Nathan Anderson is an “experimental poet and artist from Mongarlowe, Australian,” and he’s an advocate for the joy and excitement of experimental work. He’s part of an artists’ collective called C22 press where members publish and promote their work at minimal cost as they feel it’s ready, which I think is a wonderfully efficient way of approaching publishing. You can get Visitations, his latest short and delightful work, as a free pdf, or you can buy the print version.

Fortunately, he agreed to answer some questions about his approach!

1) Reading Visitations feels like listening to happy jazz; it's fun and refreshing. You're playing around with sound, form, shape. Did you enjoy writing it, or was the process more painful than it seems?

I’m glad to hear you had such a positive experience with the book. Writing it was a real joy. The only difficulty for me is in beginning such a book. These things come to me as shapes that have little form, a title, a word, a vague feeling. How do you begin to mould such a thing into its preferred shape? This is the realm of thought, of potentially endless thought. I could sit and meditate on the shape, of the form of the thing, endlessly and have it never fully materialise. At some point you just have to put a word down, just begin and the book will make itself. And it really is that free, it will make itself if only you give it the will to do so. I trust the process now. With my very early books there was a lot of forcing things into the idea of ‘poetry’, how it should look, how it should sound. I’ve given that all away now. The writing is a kind of meditation, exploration and improvisation. How could anything that free not be a joy?

2) Can you tell us a bit about the publisher, C22 press, and how it works as a writing collective?

C22 came about from conversations I had with fellow poet Joshua Martin. We had discussed the problem of being prolific but there being so few presses available to submit avant garde work. The reason for operating as a collective rather than a traditional small press was to try and get away from many of the pitfalls we saw in that model. C22 has four main members: myself, Joshua Martin, Lachlan J. McDougall and Vernon Frazer. Each of us is free to publish any of our books through C22 in whatever form we wish and we each keep the entirety of our royalties. Later we launched our Open Editions chapbook series where along with work from our four members we also solicit work from writers and artists we enjoy. Again each member is free to approach and work with the writers of their choice and these writers receive 100% of their royalties as well. We use a free wordpress page for our website and put out our books both as free pdfs and through print on demand which allows us to run the press at no cost. Without the burden of finances and with the ability to keep the workload small, C22 has been a real success and a joy to be a part of.  

3) In an interview with Version (9) Magazine, you say:

"I edit very little. My changes are generally minor as I've found that I can easily destroy by overediting. I tend towards a more curatorial approach, simply discarding those poems that don't work and keeping those that do. Editing line by line seeking some form of meticulous perfection doesn't work for me."   

What are some reasons a piece might not work for you? How do you know when it's working or not working? 

The reasons are not always entirely clear, only that it just doesn’t fit. There’s some element to the overall work or the shape of the work I’m trying to convey which it doesn’t connect to or distorts through some incongruity. They stand apart from the whole in this incongruity and really can’t be shaped to fit in any satisfactory way. Though at times such a thing can be helpful, to set something in a new direction or to provide a sharp countermelody so to speak. Some minor changes that occur are often a result of the improvisational nature of my work, the brain can at times limit itself in search of expediency and so unfavourable patterns may emerge in language or form that I’ll want to eliminate. Not all works are discarded however, I recently made a book of visual poetry that I felt in the end was lacking in some respect, just a little empty in a way. I took the better pieces from this book and folded them into a longer book of poetry that will be released at a later date. So there are works that receive a second life. 

4) In poetry mini interviews, you say how much Will Alexander and Gertrude Stein have meant to you. Can you recommend some of their work that especially pleased you?

Gertrude Stein and Will Alexander are both deeply important to me not only because of the admiration I hold for their work but what they provided me in a formative moment in my writing. I discovered both of them at a time when I felt lost in my pursuit of a form of artistic expression. They showed me the possibilities of the written form and demonstrated that there was an audience for work like that. They along with a few others acted as the entry point for me into the avant garde.

As such I’d like to recommend the books that sparked my initial attraction to their work and the avant garde as a whole.

For Stein it is hard to look past Tender Buttons for its amazing shaping of language. As one of her most famous books, it can be found just about anywhere. I’m also sure there would be a free version somewhere on the internet.

For Will Alexander I’d recommend all of his work but especially Exobiology as Goddess, the first of his books I read. Now out of print, but a pdf can be found on the Duration Press website.

5) Your new book is called Visitations. Who might be the visitor, and who might be the visited? 

I suppose I must be the visited, as for the visitor, that might also be me, haha. It might also perhaps be everything, the incomprehensible, truly absurd whole of it all. Or at least the detritus of the whole. But to be visited upon also suggests an invitation of sorts. Do I invite the absurd and incomprehensible? Or does the absurd and incomprehensible invite visitation? In which way are we facing? I’m entirely unsure. 

6) I think there's a perception that experimental work is more intellectual than emotional, full of puzzles reserved for esoteric types. What would you say to readers who feel a little afraid of the avant-garde, like it might be over their heads?

I think that is an understandable perception, but an unfortunate one. It is a natural reaction to writing that is difficult to understand, to try to think harder, to read closer and with more intensity. I think this is a grave mistake. What a joyless and unpleasant way to read! I would suggest that readers go in the opposite direction, to relax their mind and let the work take them where it may. While some avant garde writing is, as you say, full of puzzles and obfuscated meaning, much of it (my work included) is more experiential than intellectual or logical. A reader must release themselves to it. I have spoken in the past about the idea of a third text and the desire to aid in its creation. The first text is the written work, the second the mind of the reader and all that comes with that. The third text, and the most startling and beautiful of them all, is that of the combination of the two, the mind of the reader in collision or fusion with the text, what that creates is unique and awesome in its brilliance. In this sense such avant garde works are much easier to read than more standard work because they lack prescription. You come to it as you will and take from it what you like. And even for those works whose author has seen fit to create puzzles and obfuscation I would say, who cares? Their idea of how a book should be read and what can be found in it is limited by their bias and perspective and should mean little to the reader. And I can’t imagine a quicker way to kill the vitality of a work of art than by trying to remove its wonder and access hidden meaning. Those scholars who spend years of their lives attempting to unravel the hidden text within Finnegan’s Wake seem absurd to me. It’s like trying to shape a Pollock painting into a stop sign.

Thanks for your thoughts, Nathan!