by John Herbert Cunningham

Adeena Karasick was born in Winnipeg and raised in Vancouver. She earned her MA in Toronto and her PhD in Montreal and now resides in New York City, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the City University of New York. She is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet, media artist and author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory: Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks, 2009), The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), M�mewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), as well as 4 videopoems available on YouTube. All her work is marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. For over 20 years, her linguistically provocative, philosophically complex wordplay has excited audiences nationally, internationally and locally, and she has recently been granted the MPS Mobile Award as the world's first "Mobile Poet," whereby her work is being made available on mobile devices (cell phones and smart phones) throughout the world. Her writing has been described as "electricity in language" (Nicole Brossard), "plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory" (Charles Bernstein), "a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak" (Globe and Mail) and "opens up the possibilities of reading" (Vancouver Courier).

John Herbert Cunningham: In your second book, Mêmewars, you show a propensity for playing with words--and the minds of critics, as you haven't numbered the pages, making it impossible to reference references--and incorporating other languages or making up your own. For example: "It's all play. Appelez. As I put it into [] as I / come out and [] in a / field of interplays. / Just common plays--plies plais or placates / as I call into and / re-play." In places, you've used [and abused] English, French, German, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Are you a "cunning linguist," to quote Dennis Cooley, or do you just like languages and, if so, how many do you speak?

Adeena Karasick: Is there anything more exciting and important than the "play" of language? To play: "put on," theatricalize; revel in its jouissance, its utter unbinding (and subsequent reweaving). And it's true--I do abuse my language. I undress it and whip it and make it do unseemly things in public. Frequently foreground its ever intricately interwoven complexities, shine bright lights on its idiosyncrasies, blemishes, imperfections. Show how each word is intra-textual, a web of desire of pleasure & paeon. No word is a safe word. As for what languages I speak--well, only English with any real fluency, but I have lived in Quebec, Germany, Africa, Israel and Egypt, and inevitably the sound clusters, rhythm, texture of those worlds seep into the text showing how language itself is never pure, and the text becomes not just a "useful" vessel of information, but a semiotic eruption where all languages, sounds, codes feed off each other in a kind of cannibalistic euphoria.

Examples like "the lacunian can / ['cause she mixes it with love / and makes the wor(l)d/ text good], from M�mewars, reminds the reader of bill bissett or bpNichol or a combination of the two. Do you see your playfulness with language having been influenced by these two poets?

Both bp and bill pervade so much of what I do. From an early age, it was their soundplay, their attention to language on a molecular level; showing me how it is possible to work simultaneously along syntagmatic and diachronic axes--make sense while exceeding it, in any traditional normative narrative way. With bp there was a kinda romance there, where the letters came alive, were saints, were spiritual, and I so connected with that. bill, his chanting, humour, where lines / words infinitely traject, spiral, layer upon each other, making you dance with them until you are dizzy, ecstatic and see the world anew. I continue to perform with and learn from him each day; his continual investigation of language and meaning; voicing the concrete, foregrounding the physicality, materiality of language. Reminding me always how letters are alive; a palace (a plais) to live in.

You seem to have a great deal of respect for the religion into which you were born. In The House that Hijack Built, you include a piece titled "Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation." In M�mewars, you refer to the Zohar and the Bahir. But then, in Amuse Bouche, you write a poem titled "I Got a Crush on Osama," in which we find the lines "So, forget the romantic flowers / why don't you fly into MY Twin Towers / Hide out in my dark cave / This is what I really crave" and then record it as a videopoem in which you appear dressed in a harem costume. What gives?

Well, yes, much of my work is very Jew-focused--either foregroundedly so in terms of responses to being a Jew in post-Nazi Germany ("Flughafen," The Empress Has No Closure), responses to the Holocaust in Genrecide, or through Kabbalistic investigations of language in the Sefer Yetzirah translation from The House That Hijack Built. The Osama piece was a parody of Obama Girl. So, I'm not really seeing this as a betrayal of my heritage. In the words of Linda Hutcheon, it was "imitation with a critical difference"--an ironic investigation and comment on how we are so shaped by the media apparatus, our national obsession with celebrity, how we deal with fear. Yes, it's audacious, subversive, provocative, and (in the true definition of "irony") explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability, or the "homeyness" of our world. I can be a proud Jew and dress as a Saudi goddess cum bellydancer. What's your point? : )

Also, you gotta see this video as a kind of "assimilationist" brand of Jewish humour; not of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability--and chafes against all that I, as a Jew, feel insecure about (such as problematic semitic stereotypes). It's all dark 'n jewey; impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time--in a post-Woody Allen (Jon Stewart / Sarah Silverman / Chelsea Handler) kinda way . . .

You subtitled "Sefer Yetzirah" a homophonic translation. What is a "homophonic translation" and where does it come from?

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. So, in this piece, in the tradition of the TRG (Toronto Research Group) and Nichol / McCaffery homolinguistic investigations, I translate the translation of an ancient Aramaic text from English to English moving through and across sound, yet keeping all the original line breaks and punctuation. The focus of the Sefer Yetzirah is on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (how they were formed, how they inter-relate, how they make meaning). The text itself is inscribed through slippage, elision, rupture and undecidability, and language is foregrounded as "a continuum of letters," names, mathematical equations, gates of meaning. So it seemed fitting to continue this creative practice of linguistic displacement

Where did the idea of videopoems come from?

It's exploring language off the page and bringing it into a more multidisciplinary framework. People have been filming and recording their work forever and the possibilities of sound, text, visual manipulation to highlight differing aspects of language and meaning production is endless. My interest lately is in taking the form of say an MTV-style rock video and subverting it, pushing its parameters so it both draws on and exceeds those expectations. And through this process, perhaps making poetry a little more accessible to a wider non-poetry audience. Case in point, in the last few years, I've seen poetry videos on Broadway, on tv; (Bravo, HBO, IFC). International Film Festivals now are starting to have a section including them . . . ever expanding our definition of what poetry can be.

It's clear from your earlier poems that you write from a feminist poetics. And yet, the Osama videopoem. What gives?

Again, it was ironic! I was interested in playing with the images of women in pop music. The overt and destabilizing sexuality, ridiculous over-the-top antics for attention. And I was thinking about how not only the look of this constructed sexuality, but the sound of pop music, tends to nullify all thought; anaesthetizes us--lulls us into a false sense of security, complacency, apathy. It's like you can say almost anything and it gets washed over. So, I thought it was funny to use this structure / frame and say these totally outrageous things: "Forget Dar es Salaam and the Pentagon, Mamamia! Make me explode like Tanzania!"

Osama has become the ultimate symbol of Otherness, of defamiliarity, of all things that are alien. Caricaturing him undermines the power of that image, and the insane fear that the government and media here in the US have instilled within us regarding him. So, this video is not anti-feminist but a kind of a non-violent direct action creative protest against the construction of post-9/11 consumerist ideology. And fyi, he hasn't put out a video in quite some time, so part of me just thought I'd help him out : )

I understand that you are about to become a ringtone. Does this mean I can now slide you into my front pocket? Isn't that cool!! Thanks to Global Reader, the work is now available on mobile devices worldwide, accessible in over 160 countries in print, audio and video. As such it's an interesting poetic medium in that not only can I showcase already existent work, but can create mobile-specific media such as wallpapers / poems that transform themselves over time / and of course ringtones of wacky poetic snippets.

So, yes! You can (in a sense) slide me into your front pocket : ) but also open me up, press my buttons and share me with your friends . . .

Beginning with your first book, The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), you enter into a love affair with literary theory, incorporating quotations from theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, etc. For example, in "A Supplementary Positioning Statement on the Problematics of Writing the Other," you begin "According to Derrida, 'the supplement is an ADJUNCT . . .'" This process continues, but to a diminishing extent, through to your fourth book, Dyssemia Sleaze, where the only time you incorporate quotations is in "The Wall." This diminishing and its absence from your next two books seem to be heralding an assimilation of as opposed to an outright reference to literary theory and theorists. Would you agree?

Yes--I guess in the true Bernsteinian fashion of an "assimilationist poetics," it's true--at some point of reading / sleeping / being with these words of the other, they get incorporated into your sensibility and there is no inside / outside boundary anymore; they have articulated what's in your head, you have expanded on what they are saying everything organically is growing / trajecting / becoming something other. It's what Cixous would call a "writing WITH" or a Derridean "writing through," where those words / textures / ideologies get palimpsested / layered into this non-hierarchical space. And though I love intrusion, interjection, destabilization of text, sometimes outright quotation can present itself as fetishized, legitimizing, authoritative and overly weighty.

Each of your works demonstrates a tremendous mixing of genres. What led you to this?

The artificial separation of genres is ridiculous and poses unnecessary limits; they're constructed frames. Nothing is pure, whole, containable. Everything bleeds into and feeds off one another. Is it a matter of line length? word choice? texture? What separates autobiography from critical theory? poetry from prose from news / research / ad copy? Genrecide: the extermination of genre.

You have always been graphically oriented in your creations. Even in The Empress Has No Closure, you have included Hebrew letters, each occupying about half a page in "Alefbet." You begin to expand this graphicness in Mêmewars, which contains two pages of what appear to be photos superimposed over text. This graphicness explodes in Genrecide. In Amuse Bouche, this graphic quality seems to have taken on a new dimension with pages presented like a menu, small graphics interspersed within text, etc. Do you see this as the influence of bpNichol, for example his Captain Alphabet, but expanded upon, and do you feel that there has been a shift in the way you are using graphics in your latest book?

Well, perhaps to some degree bp, but also bill's dirty concrete, jw curry, Mallarme's Calligrams, The Humament, Midrash. Originally, i was just interested in fetishizing the materiality of the letter. In The Empress, the "Alefbet" (while focusing on each letter as an art object, as a sensual body of curves, lines, mounds, crevices) really works within a midrashic framework of analysis and re-interpretation in a non-linear, non-hierarchic way. As the books progressed, I became totally obsessed with typography--how each font had a different texture and affected how we read / thereby produce meaning. I loved how there could be a form / content liaison--i.e., you could use a font called "Group Sex" (which consists of stick figures in uncompromising positions) to talk about community or "public" discourse. I liked how the addition of colour made it kind of like a kid's book, which added this other element of defamiliarity. And then just packing it full of hot 'n bizarre intersections, collisions, unexpected and destabilizing intrusions which mirrors the ridiculous excess of this telemediatic, informationally saturated world we navigate through every day.

You have been involved with the Lollapalooza Festival, you are a ringtone on a cell phone, and now you inform me that the Japanese have translated some of your poems to be used in karaoke bars. How do you respond to the accusation that you are trivializing the art form?

Engaging in a dialogue with new technology and popular culture doesn't trivialize art, it democratizes it. Unless you are an elitist snob who believes art is too good for the masses, then I think it's important for art to penetrate all aspects of life. Shake people out of their complacent traditionalist views of "official verse culture"--what poetry is, what it can accomplish, where it can be found. Reminding them that (though not everything is poetry), poetry is everywhere. Yes, at rock festivals, and karaoke bars! In dumpsters, train tickets, maps, menus, spam mail and urinals. Between the compositional-breakdown-of-information-pull-tag on your pillow and that of yr silken negligee. It's about how language is used, not where it is disseminated. Whitman (and for that matter Dickens) wasn't worried about trivializing art when he published his work in penny newspapers. Leonard Cohen wasn't afraid to popularize his work by putting it to music (he too is a ringtone and in karaoke bars everywhere). Burroughs and Pynchon had their books / stories put into comic book form. Marx wrote a column for the New York Tribune. Trotsky wrote book reviews. Nietzsche's "God is Dead" appears in Rosemary's Baby. So yes! Hail the poetry ringtone--or better yet, The Poetry Alarm: Let the anti-lyrical ex-centric pregnantly elliptic use of language be A WAKE UP CALL--'cause that's just what poetry should be.