RLU: In an interview with The Adroit Journal in 2020, you remarked, “When I started writing and started to think of myself as an artist, that sense of pleasure informed the things I wrote and how I imagined my reader experiencing the things I wrote. Around the time that I matured as a teacher, when I had to introduce my students to the complicated contexts that surround every piece of art, my sense of art as a pleasure-generating thing got inflected by the sense of art as having ethical imperatives.” 


I’m curious about these ethical imperatives, these tasks which we take on as poets and artists, and who or what we are beholden to. In some ways this is a question about audience—who poems are for or who a poem must have integrity for—and in other ways this is a question about genre—schools of poetry are as defined by their political roots and endeavors as they are their aesthetic function.


Can you talk about the confluence of pleasure and the ethical imperative? Or, art as bending itself between that which feels good and that which is right?


RB: Maybe this is an unusual angle to take in response to your questions, but the first thing that comes to mind is the notion of art as always being an autobiographical act. That is, the idea that the making of art always begins in the impulse to record the self—the sensations of the self, the experiences of the self, the emotions of the self. I think all art-making is rooted in that imperative, even if the artist is producing work that has apparently nothing to do with themselves at all. You and I could make a list of many writers who aren’t ostensibly writing about themselves, but their work nonetheless manifests a perspective that is both inward and outward in its resonances. The work can’t help but tell something about who the maker is.  Pleasure comes in, I think, in the joy of communing with the self, whether the work is autobiographical or not. There’s pleasure in engaging with your own sensibility, your own senses, as your work interacts with the reality around you.


The ethical dimension of all this comes into play when the work registers the self in relation to everything around the self, including other people, society, culture, history, politics—the concentric rings that surround and shape an individual. When you’re an artist, part of your job is to interact with all of those concentric rings, and that begins to involve other considerations beyond the pleasure of making. I mean, making art that is meant to communicate with others activates ethical understandings about the complicated ways we relate to what’s outside of us. When you produce something that’s going to end up in the hands or in the mind of somebody else, that introduces a set of obligations you then have to consider, about how legible the work is to others, and how it speaks and means to others. In this way, it’s then possible that–to echo your terms–what feels good can be in harmony or in tension with what’s right.


RLU: I think the word obligation is an apt one. That one’s work will live in the mind of someone else reflects other questions I have for you; a consideration for the valence of an image and the ways we can enact harm through the images or through the histories that our work presupposes or reiterates or reconfigures in the minds of others. Poets and artists don't take a Hippocratic Oath, but there is an ethical question of what harm your art is avoiding or recreating. What I also hear you addressing is how an artist may configure their work’s relationship to the reader or viewer.


RB: As you suggested earlier, I think we need to trouble the idea that what we write has a single, set audience. There's writing that’s private, that’s meant only for yourself, and it's coded with things that only you understand. That writing stays close to home, and therefore you don't feel the need to make it clearer than what it is. Then there's writing we do that begins to involve others. Maybe you're writing a love poem meant for one person, or two people, or for a coterie wherein you refer to a set of codes that many people won't understand but a particular group of people will get. This kind of writing is intimate, and it feels like a gift created for a defined number of recipients. Then there's a third kind of audience, which is everybody. You want your poem to show up in The New Yorker or someplace like it because you want everybody on the planet to have access to it and gain something from it. Therefore, you've written a poem that you feel is legible to everybody who interacts with it. 


Those different audiences have different obligations for you to reckon with as a maker, knowing that these different audiences will bring various perspectives and awarenesses of what's happening in the work. For me, it's liberating to know that when I write anything, I can think about which audience I want this thing to meet with. That creates a thrilling question for me about how to approach the making–to write a poem that's very near in scope or write a poem that intends a more public posture.


RLU: Your work, particularly in The Galleons, but really suffused throughout, needles coloniality, colonialism’s many faces, and the systems that manage the turning of our own lives, which are undeniably defined by colonial ventures. In an interview for The Galleons someone remarked to you that your work seemed to be about revealing or portraying “colonialism in a mundane setting.” In this observation I thought they might be inscribing a presupposition that colonialism is ecstatic or exclamatory, yet colonialism’s success takes part, in place, because it warps into the every day or the “mundane.”


Holding that there, I was reminded of Viktor Shklovsky 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” in which he remarks that the purpose of art (or one of its purposes) is to make a stone appear more stoney. To sensitize ourselves to what we have become habituated to, to take notice of the thing in front of us and not just the image of the thing in front of us.


I’m curious how you go about paying, giving, or casting attention and I’m curious how you think about the every day, the mundane, and their relationship with the ecstatic or epiphanic.


RB: There are a lot of layers in what you just said, but maybe I can begin by acknowledging Shklovsky’s idea about defamiliarization, and how when we make art, we’re tasked with the defamiliarization he talks about, in the sense that you take what's familiar and defamiliarize it, therefore giving the reader a new take on what’s ordinary, what’s taken for granted, what’s no longer seen. Related to this is the work of familiarization that we also engage in as artists. That is, we take something that’s alien and far and we present it to the reader in terms that make it legible. I think this also relates to the project of empathy that art is often associated with: you write about an experience that is foreign to many people and you bridge the gap between their distance and the intimacy of the experience you're writing about. 


In my own thinking about colonialism these days, it's not just about historical colonialism. It's about the ways that toxic structures of power are all around us and manifesting in things like inequality, misogyny, homophobia, racism. In my mind, colonialism is an umbrella category and there are these other things underneath that umbrella that inform the systems we live in. The effects and structures of colonialism are profoundly embedded in our everyday lives, and maybe the work of defamiliarization and familiarization can be a place where we identify this embedding, this saturation. This is partly what I tried to do in the poems in The Galleons–to tease out how abstract notions like capitalism and colonialism are in fact concretely evident in things that we don’t consider via those terms, whether it’s the cargo in the semis that criss-cross the country like modern-day galleons, or the nannies in Manhattan pushing baby strollers, or the products of violent extraction that are plainly shown in the objects in a painting by Velazquez. 


When you move through your everyday life, it’s just your life. You’re moving through it as well as you can, hopefully without generating trouble for yourself or others. But colonialism is everywhere in that ordinary life. It's unavoidably so. It’s in what you eat, it’s in the interactions you have with others, it’s in the identity and status you carry as you move through the day. I don’t mean to suggest that we frantically apply an ethical lens on every bit of reality we experience everyday, but having some awareness about this complexity is a good thing to have. Making art can be one way of making this complexity visible. 


RLU: I often describe the kind of climate journalism that I do as anti- or de-colonial climate reporting. The way I explain it is that a story about climate change is inherently a story about land use. A story about land use in the U.S. is a story about plantation economies, enslavement practices and forced removal through federal Indian removal policies. These practices of genocide and enslavement foreground, literally and metaphorically, our lives in the U.S., therefore climate change is the consequence of policy decisions that can be traced back many, many hundreds of years whose effects are unceasingly repeating themselves.


For instance, I recently wrote a piece about returning buffalo to their homelands, and how tribal-led organizations and Indigenous communities are taking part in this return of buffalo as a way of returning to their own cultures, as a way of healing land, and healing ancestral connections. During the research process I learned that the near-extermination of buffalo on the Great Plains precipitated conditions for the Dust Bowl. You can identify what economic crises, war, immigration panic and destructive farm policies, among other consequences, followed. Our food production system—and the way we eat today—is a direct result of the Agricultural Adjustment Act that was passed to help bolster farm income in the Great Depression. These are the stories that I'm trying to tell. I'm always curious when I see that reflected in poetry not necessarily to explain something, but help make a connection.


RB: Let me go back to the Velazquez painting I mentioned earlier, which I wrote about in my poem “On Some Items in the Painting by Velazquez” in The Galleons. The painting is the very famous one in the Prado Museum in Madrid, “Las Meninas,” which shows the little princess surrounded by the figures of the court. It’s a painting about the power and pride of the Spanish royalty. But from another angle, the painting also points to the colonial violence that Spain brought to all of their colonies. In my poem, I talk about the curtain in the back that's red, and the dye for that red curtain was taken from cochineal, which is harvested in areas of Mexico. There's a silver tray in the painting, and that can be directly traced to mines in Peru. There’s also a clay cup in the painting, and to historians of material culture looking at that cup, they can trace it back to Guadalajara, which was a center of ceramic production for Spain. In all of these places, Indigenous populations were brutally used to extract the materials and make the products shown in the painting. So, the ostensible subject of the painting is the important royal household, but if you adjust your gaze just a little bit and ask certain questions, the painting begins to reveal the residue of Spain’s violent and extractive adventures in other places. 


That decolonial gaze–what happens when we look at the things in our everyday lives and begin to ask questions of them. Like: What is it? Where did it come from? What did it cost to bring here? What parts of the world were altered or destroyed in order for me to have this thing in front of me? These questions are about the critical thinking we can practice, even as we have our cake and eat it too.


RLU: Painting and visual art are core to your practice, both referentially as well as through forms like ekphrasis. You respond to or take inspiration from those like Agnes Martin, whose grids you remarked appear to be taking part in a “vocabulary of order.” 


I’m hoping that this isn’t too much of a reach: I want to counterpose this attraction to Martin’s work against the critique of colonialism levied by your work. Police and state forces aim to control a populace through the imposition of order, but your work seems to aim at a maintenance or emergence of a different kind of order. You’ve said that one hope is for readers to achieve a kind of “critical clarity” about the world. I wonder if there’s another hope here too, about a kind of order as an organizing principle that, rather than maintained through force, is maintained through a series of agreements consented to within relationship. 


Am I on the mark here? What have you learned through poetry’s relationship to painting about order and restraint?


RB: There's a lot there. One way I can begin to answer is by saying that my engagement with other art forms has dramatically changed over time. In my early life as a poet, the experience of engaging with art mostly had to do with the pleasurable accounting of engaging with beautiful things, of engaging with beauty. But as I hinted in what I said about the Velasquez painting, these days I’m pretty cognizant of the contexts that surround the art that I’m drawn to. I haven't jettisoned the sense of pleasure, but it has been complicated by the awareness that a work of art or an artist is operating within a context. These days, I tend to think of art as having multiple ways of engaging a reader or viewer. This encompasses the experience of beauty that usually brings us to art, but also other experiences that are more critical and lead to ideas outside the artwork itself.


In regards to “order” as it relates to art, the order that I’m thinking of is, of course, not the sense of order as social coercion or control. I’m thinking of art as a space wherein deep attention, deep feeling, and deep understanding are activated for the person experiencing art. Critical clarity is certainly one possible result of that experience, and also aesthetic pleasure, and emotional intensity. When an artist creates something that will be experienced by another person, maybe it’s not so much order they’re creating but a structure of experience that’s predicated on the consumer’s sense of freedom, imagination, and reverie. Experiencing art can be an incredible manifestation of autonomy and selfhood for the person engaging with art, in contrast to the transactional optimization that usually defines much of our everyday actions.



RLU: Yes, yes. What you’re bringing up for me is a question of how one reads into a poem, and in that poetic space is where new selves emerge. I started off so adamant that there is a queer aesthetic within poetry. The more that I've talked with people, I don't know if there is a queer aesthetic. Maybe there's poetry that you like—there's poetry that's exciting and there’s poetry that isn’t. Sometimes someone queer wrote the exciting poetry, sometimes someone straight wrote it. 


RB: I've been thinking a lot about that phrase, queer aesthetic, because it's foregrounded in your project.  I’ve read through a couple of your previous interviews, and I've been trying to formulate my understanding of that term based on my own experiences and the great love I have for a lot of queer artists. I think the formulation I arrived at is that it's art made in that zone of tension between the private and the public. You could say that's the same for any artist, right? But I think that's especially so for the queer artist, because the queer artist’s private life is what’s in question, it is what’s being surveilled and judged and even legislated by others. Any artist negotiating that space between who they are in themselves and who they are in public, and the art they make in that between space–I think the queer aesthetic is the result of that. It's not a stylistic definition–that is, it’s not a style or aesthetic that defines the queer aesthetic–but a definition of positionality. 


RLU: You're pulling together so much that I have not been able to find the words for. Because I work with words for my rent-paying job, it is just rare that I'm not able to articulate what I'm thinking. It's really  pleasurable to be able to think with someone. I so appreciate you for offering that.


RB: I was thinking about the different mindsets you have to occupy as a journalist and then as a poet. Because you work with language in both realms, the two realms would seem pretty adjacent, maybe even porous. But I think they're actually quite different, and maybe you can confirm this, because you actually live it. In your life as a journalist, you're participating in the use of language in a strictly denotative way—language has to mean clearly and specifically what it means, as a way of conveying information and quantifiable things. When you shift to poetry, that's a really different space. There, language is not strictly denotative, it's now appreciably connotative. Suddenly, words can mean two or three or four things, and that’s good in a way that wouldn’t work in journalism. In poetry, you want to harness that variability and embrace the dynamic experience that the reader will have with that variability. 



RLU: Rick! It’s very funny to hear you reflect that back, only after talking to me for an hour, because I often say to others that I turn to poetry for all the things that I can't say in journalism, which is usually my outrage or my sadness or my sorrow. I'll talk to someone on the phone who is experiencing the worst kinds of pollution, the pollution of their bodies. I have to make my work legally defensible and I have to write an article that can stand up in court. So for instance, I have to say “this person was diagnosed with cancer after a polluting facility was built a mile from her home.” Then, in a poem I can say, who are we as a country to allow corporations to poison people for profit? Obviously, not in those words, but I can have a human response. It often feels like being a journalist and recording the harms of the world asks that I set aside my critique. 


In our last few minutes together, I’m hoping we can talk about the cognitive leaps in your poems and how syntax is a tool to, as you’ve said previously, “hypotactically extend” one image to another. How can syntax join what appears to be disjointed? What is the value of that?


I hope it's clear that I’m trying to draw connections between questions—possibly intimating that there is a kind of order in imagistic relatedness rather than the randomness or the arbitrariness we are told arises out of an inability to think linearly. I also wonder, with poetic lineation, the line is a mark drawn from one concept to the next. Western thought would teach us that time and progress move in that one direction along that one line. Can you connect these things for me?


RB: I don’t know, evolutionary speaking, how different human consciousness is now compared to earlier eras of our species, but I wonder if the human mind has always moved in the scattershot way that it does. I think of a dozen marbles rolling off a table and the effort it takes to contain all that kinetic energy. That’s the mind. A poem, or any linguistic construct, is an attempt at organizing that unruliness. For me, a poem is a space wherein many things converge, and the elements of craft that I employ, whether that’s syntax or imagery or music or lineation, are in service to creating some kind of meaningful coherence among those different things. All the mind ever does is leap, and it is language’s job to make a choreography out of all that motion.


As for the poetic line, as I suggest above, I think of the line as a unit of coherence. A unit of meaning. A unit of thought. Also a unit of breath. A unit of music. One of my favorite definitions of poetry is from the British poet Philip Larkin, who said that a poem is “emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.” Which is to say that the things we employ in making a poem, whether it’s lineation or the other elements of craft, are meant to dramatize the story and the intensity of meanings associated with that story. In the same way that a play, in its production, requires a script, a stage, actors, costumes, lighting, and everything else, so too a poem requires these elements of presentation. The line is one of those elements.


RLU: I want to ask about your employment of the erotic, of eros, in your poetics. Specifically, I want to inquire about the men of your poems, who are so often facing away or are just out of reach from the speaker. This proximity could be the distance from one’s lover where one is able to see them clearly. This gap between people may be the terrain where some relevant cognitive leap takes place: whereby eros allows us to connect subjects even when they stand opposite one another. How we read this opposition, how we read this image, might be along an index of eros. How do you think about eros, sex, and modernism? How does the erotic other play into your poetics?


RB: We’ve been talking about the queer aesthetic, and I like to think that there’s a sub-category of this aesthetic that is a specifically gay aesthetic. And the eros that you’re referring to is a core part of this gay aesthetic, with the beloved turning away or turned away or distant in some way. As I was coming of age as a young poet, both my lived experience and my writerly experience seemed to be grounded in that trope of the gay aesthetic, that trope of misalignment. The trope was a kind of fulcrum for explaining the

emotional experience of being gay, and the fulcrum, too, of the poetic experience, which seemed to depend on the perspective possible when standing some distance from the intense experience or the intense object of desire. 


A very formative reading experience for me in my 20s was Anne Carson’s astonishing study of eros, Eros the Bittersweet. The book’s great insight could be boiled down to the formulation she describes about the geometry of eros, which is a kind of triangle comprised of the lover, the beloved, and the obstacle that comes between them. Carson’s triangle was borne out in all the poets that mattered to me as a young gay poet, from James Merrill to Reginald Shepherd and a dozen other gay poets I could name. Another writer who was profoundly important to me as a young poet was the Argentinian writer Antonio Porchia, whose aphorisms W.S. Merwin translated and collected in a book titled Voices. For me, one of Porchia’s aphorisms perfectly distills eros and the problem of eros into one sentence: “I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received.”