Be Your Own Problem: An Interview with Zane Koss
January 13, 2023
“I wanted to be able to perform the book in a way that replicated that groundedness in context, that inextricable bind with the world.” – Zane Koss
Ben Robinson interviews Zane Koss about his Innovative new colletion of poetry.
Zane Koss is a poet, scholar, and translator from Invermere, B.C., currently living in Brooklyn, N.Y. He is the author of Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022), as a member of the North American Free Translation Agreement (aka NAFTA).
Zane Koss. Harbour Grids. Invisible Publishing, $19.95, 144 pp., ISBN: 9781988784885.
Zane Koss’s Harbour Grids takes a long poem about New York Harbor and pins each phrase to a four-by-four grid of “s”es:
s s s s
s s s s
s s s s
s s s s
The book is at once conceptual, visual, musical and documentary, moving from the particular view out Koss’s window in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to the history of the island, to the difficulties of speaking within constraint – whether grids, poetry or English. It is a work that is innovating on many levels, but also deeply felt, coming back around to the self and questions of our relationships to community.
BR: I guess first of all the question is why “s”? How did you decide on that letter and how did that choice influence the poem versus your “v” poems in Invermere Grids? Did the “s” direct you to unexpected content or hold you back in any way?
ZK: So, when I began taking notes on how the surface of the New York Harbor appeared from Sunset Park (the park, in the neighbourhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn) in the notes app on my phone, I’m not sure if my original intention was to eventually place them in the grids or not – I think not – but I’d been working around the same time on a grid-based project that arose as a means of responding to rap music – later published by above/ground as The Odes (Incomplete). In that context, the 4x4 grid cites the sixteen-bar structure of a standard rap verse, and my idea was to make one “ode” for each letter of the alphabet, choosing songs that I could draw linguistic material from that would echo the sound of a given letter, a process that had started with Madvillain’s
“Meat Grinder” and “b.” Eventually, my drive to complete the alphabet became too forced, so I gave it up. (Also, like a fool, I was doing this in the most typographically frustrating way possible, which didn’t help.) But, the idea was in my head of listening to sonic textures, sensing a shared sound, and placing these materials into a grid organized (partially) by that sound.
In any case, I had been taking these notes on the appearance surface of the harbour in various weathers, times of day, etc. – reading too much Daphne Marlatt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Lisa Robertson, wanting to do something “phenomenological,” whatever that means – and decided to put them into a grid. The exact chain of motivation escapes me. Gathering all the notes together into a single document – what would make up most of “Part I” – I noted that “s” was the most common sound. There are also obvious ways in which “s” and nautical themes intersect usefully, but the decision was driven by the available material written in my notes, the recurrence of “s” in my attempting to make sense of my experience of sensing the harbour.
At some point, around when I’d started to accumulate enough material for second and third 32-grid sequences, I went home to visit family in the East Kootenays during a period of catastrophic forest fires and incredibly dense smoke. I began taking notes on the bodily sensations of being in that environment – sights, sounds, struggling for breath, etc. Obviously, I wanted to choose a different letter to distinguish the bodily sensations tied to those extremely different experiences of place, but again, the decision to pick “v” was based primarily in what I’d written in note form. Initially, I’d thought maybe “h” would give the right sort of crushed wheeziness of that (literally) suffocating atmosphere, but the “v” took over. Also, there’s the same sort of mimetic quality between the mountains and “v,” though once again not really intended consciously, I don’t think.
Of course, once I’d settled on the “s” for the harbour grids, phrases would suggest themselves that had an “s” embedded in them – albeit sometimes, frustratingly, the “s” sound was played by a “c” with no anchoring “s” in sight – or perhaps I’d neglect to record phrases that arose in my mind but that didn’t have a clear “s” anchor to hold it to a grid. Which is to say, yes to both questions: it held back certain things surely, but also dialed my attention to other words or phrases. Maybe something like “se solicita mesero” in scraping material from telephone pole advertisements in that section of the poem would not otherwise have occurred to me to include – or other common telephone pole phrases would have been substituted.
BR: I’m interested in what you’re saying here about retroactively applying the grid form to the observational material in your notes app. Can you speak a bit about this process of arranging? How did visual considerations influence your approach to the poem – your line lengths, your spacing, your syntax?
ZK: Despite what I’d just said about this project being grounded in a sense of sound, I tend to think of myself as a predominantly visually-oriented poet – though not really a practitioner of visual poetry, per se – and this project was no different. The idea behind the original grids was to render the sonic architecture of rap verses in a visual form, so here it was a sort of continued interest in using the grid as a sort of visual means of mapping the page – a map of the page, a map of sound, and a map of the harbour, in a sense too, with the harbour’s sort of dual nature as both emptiness and palimpsest, depending on your perspective, historical awareness, so on.
In any case, once I’d decided on the “s” it became a matter of copying and pasting, trying to find the notes that would fit into the grid, which has two major constraints: the “s” obviously, and the number of letters that can fit between each “s.” I recall that I just had a series of blank grids open on one monitor and the collected notes open on the other, and it was a matter of working down through the notes to see what could be made to work, adding words, changing words, eliding words where it seemed necessary to fit one or the other of those constraints. A lot of my other writing tends to take on its “poetic” quality through elision: I’ll delete words here and there in a draft, typically keeping blank space where words have been deleted (see, job site, The Blasted Tree, 2018) or exaggerating that blank space at other times, so the sparse syntax and visual arrangements on the page that the grids demanded felt right at home to me.
At all stages of writing and editing, there were shifts in which points on the grid the words would hang on – especially during the final push once the verso-recto relationships and order of sequencing were clearer – not wanting to repeat the same drift too much, or have everything anchored statically to one side – or alternately, doing that precisely for the emphasis. So, yes, visual considerations were huge and often in a way both primary and a final determinant of the poem’s aspect. Initially, it was a purely visual project to me – like I say, I hadn't been particularly tuned into the sounds of poetry, it was only in writing the rap odes that I started to notice sonic textures of my own poetry more – and then at some point I read the first section out loud to Kate, and she’d said it was the most beautiful sounding thing I’d ever written, so I thought, “huh, guess it’s a sonically interesting poem too” which is, of course, a point that would be obvious to anyone who thinks for a second about what all those s’s add up to, but apparently not to me.
I feel like I sort of talked past your question there. Maybe because the process of translating the writing from notes app to grid was done so intuitively and organically that it’s hard to comment on. Really just a matter of thinking about the grid/page as a visual space in which the words can hang, and the finite/infinite possibilities/constraints offered by each grid and thinking about how the words sit in relation to each other on the page. I enjoy that. I enjoy the visual arrangements of words in space. How your eye can skip around, read linearly, or take in the overall shape at a glance.
BR: Your noting that Harbour Grids began as a “purely visual project” is interesting because, while your attention to the visual is so clear throughout, the book also engages with a unique mix of genres and modes, involving the conceptual, the lyric, the documentary. It’s a total reframing of, if not the poem, then the poetic line, such that I’m not quite sure how to quote from it (I like that rob mclennan, in his review, just opted to take photos). How do you think about Harbour Grids in relation to genre or modality? Was it important to you to have the work move beyond the visual and be multifaceted like this?
ZK: First, let me say thank you for that immense compliment, about the total reframing of the poetic line you see. For someone intellectually and emotionally invested in a lot of the innovative poetry of the last century, it’s a sort of overwhelming compliment. Stephen Ratcliffe’s blurb for the book had quoted from the book using just the full grids – and also had been formatted with monospaced font – and it was amazing, but we had to figure out some way of normalizing his blurb so that it could actually be used for the book. That was a moment, I guess, of realizing that I’d kind of broken something. But I always find myself apologizing for it: I wrote this book in this annoying way and now everyone else is very graciously dealing with how to respond to it.
Truly, though, I didn’t set out to mix genres and modes. For someone with a doctorate in poetry, I am surprisingly dumb about these things. For example, after it had been written, people kept asking how I would read it out loud, whether I enunciate each “s” individually or read them as a long hiss, or whatever else. I hadn’t thought of it at all. Not at all. In my mind, I’d just read the words like any other poem. Luckily, a couple years ago I got to host Jordan Abel for a talk and performance around Injun, and he talked about how he wanted to write poems that presented a problem for performance, and then to figure out how to solve that problem. He does it for that book with two overlapping recordings of his voice and various electronics that allow him to loop and stutter the recordings in the way that those poems sort of fall apart and re-cohere on the page. It’s incredible to watch!
When people kept asking me how I would read it, I realized I had a similar problem. So I set to thinking about it. I’d mostly been understanding the grids negatively – as in, the hyperrational logics of capitalist modernity that divide and alienate, and so on – but there’s also a way of thinking about them in a positive valence, in like Merleau-Ponty’s sense of consciousness’s embeddedness in the world: there is no self without the non-self – or, rather, more radically, there is no self – our bodies are a ground that enables consciousness through contact with the world, or whatever. Don’t quote me on that, I’m a pretty poor reader of philosophy.
But in any case, I started thinking about the grids as a constant reminder of that grounding context, phenomenologically but also socially. I wanted to be able to perform the book in a way that replicated that groundedness in context, that inextricable bind with the world. I woke up one morning with the idea to use field recordings of Sunset Park to replicate that grounding, and I’ve never felt smarter in my life. I took a couple different recordings, but typically use one of the park, as it has a good variety of social textures and a lot less car and bus noise. When I perform the book, I try to start the recording at a slightly different moment each time, so that it becomes a sort of way of improvising with those sounds, with that context. Sometimes a skateboarder or a crying baby or a loud car will pass, and I have to pause my reading, sometimes mid-word, to let it pass, to give it time to speak before I resume. The neighbourhood dictates the pace of the reading, in that way. It’s not a sufficient form of dialogue, but it’s something.
That’s sort of the most explicit way, to me, in which this is a multi-modal project, but none of this was planned. I just had the impulse to put this poem in a grid, and the rest has just been about dealing with the consequences of that decision. Which is sort of a nice way of doing things. Be your own problem.
BR: Like the dark inverse of that Gandhi quote – be the problem you wish to see in the poem. I guess that’s what constraint is.
I think there’s something to this being dumb about your own work. What you’re describing seems like a mix of getting out of your own way enough to let the idea develop, but also, like you say, causing yourself some problems – both in the name of having the project unfold in a way that allows for surprise. It sounds like Harbour Grids really did that for you at every turn.
You mentioned Jordan Abel, who I’ve read works directly in InDesign, whose poems seem to be crafted with the physical form of the book in mind. I’m also thinking about your struggle to normalize Stephen Ratcliffe’s blurb (which sounds perfect). And you also mentioned earlier that seeing the poem’s verso-recto relationships changed things for you. I’m wondering what the process of typesetting Harbour Grids was like? Were you doing your initial composition in a word processor? Was finding an appropriate mono-spaced font an issue? How did this part of the bookmaking process shape the poem?
ZK: Ha! Yes, I think that Gandhi quote was hovering in my mind when I wrote that. And yes, that’s certainly a good way of looking at it: being a bit dumb about these things is a mode of allowing the process to dictate the poem’s shape, to be open to the world or at least to where the language and the constraints take you. To be surprised, yes.
I did learn the basics of InDesign last year to edit and publish the chapbook Mukt by Aditya Bahl for the Organism for Poetic Research. (It’s truly one of the best works of poetry I’ve read in the last few years, at least.) But my own process has been decidedly unsophisticated, which is to say: Microsoft Word. I mentioned that the grid form started with a series of odes that rob mclennan later published. I wrote those odes in Times New Roman in Microsoft Word, which meant layering two text boxes over each other, the lower layer with the grid of letters, the top layer with the poem, using 1px spaces to attempt to align the words with the grids as closely as possible – which is an impossible task with proportional font, and makes the poems untranslatable into any other font.
It was actually encountering Ratcliffe’s Temporality series, along with reading a lot of Larry Eigner and some Robert Grenier, that made me realize that I even could write in a monospace font, both from a practical and an aesthetic point of view. It certainly made the formatting a lot easier, while making it harder to fudge the length of allowable words within the constraint of the page.
For setting the initial drafts of the book and ensuring that constraint was properly maintained, I had a bookmark that I cut an s-sized notch out of, so that I could hold it against my monitor and flip through the PDF to make sure that every “s” was where it was supposed to be. Very low-tech. I also consider myself a master of using MS Paint to “photoshop” images, but that’s another story. My skills lie in doing difficult things with limited technology that would be a lot easier if I learned how to use more advanced software properly.
Anyhow, Harbour Grids was written in Consolas on 8.5 x 11” pages. I often like to write in book-specific sizes, so it’s surprising you mention that. Typically I adjust the page size in a new poetry document to 4 x 5” or 5 x 7”, so with Harbour Grids it was a bit liberating to have the full page size for a change – again, probably a Larry Eigner-influenced decision. But yes, that specificity made for difficulties in typesetting the actual book. Luckily, Invisible was willing to let me sprawl to their largest trim size, roughly 6 x 9”, with Dani Spinosa’s OO: Typewriter Poems setting the precedent. (An excellent book!) Nonetheless, that is still obviously smaller than 8.5 x 11”, and so Megan, Invisible’s in-house designer, needed to find a monospaced font that matched the house style and would fit my grids into that size of page horizontally without too much squishing. It was a bit strange to see the poems in another font at first, considering that the font was so central to the process of composition, but once my eye got used to it, I’m totally used to it. (And, as always, Megan’s work is excellent!)
BR: I’m with you on the low-tech solutions – if there’s browser-based software that will get me there, that’s what I’ll be using. The notched bookmark is next-level, though, I can’t say I haven’t taken a ruler to my computer monitor before.
I’m also interested in the other half of the editing process. With projects of a conceptual nature like Harbour Grids, I’m curious how a writer goes from an initial idea and carries it through to create a text that is dynamic over the course of one hundred pages, something multifaceted enough to sustain a reader’s attention. For you, it sounds like some of the process was accidental, or at least the result of experiment. But was sustaining the concept a part of your process of writing Harbour Grids and did your work with Fred Wah and Andrew Faulkner, the book’s other editors, help here?
ZK: It’s definitely the case that the process of composition led me through the various awakenings that the poem stages – which I think is part of the reason performing the entire poem publicly, as I’ve done a few times now, is such an emotional journey for me. Just going back through all of it in front of an audience. Like, I’m up there thinking, “Oh this is indulgent, no one cares about my descriptions of the surface of the harbour,” then I get to the part with ICE, and I’m usually holding back tears.
I’d started just wanting to do a sort-of-phenomenological thing – trying to understand the act of seeing, riffing on folks like Eigner, Ratcliffe, Marlatt, or maybe even more precisely the Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino book Seeing. Like, could I translate the experience of seeing into words if I looked at and wrote about the same thing over and over again? Using the grid as a prompt, I figured I’d make sixteen grids (4x4) which quickly turned into 32, and so on, losing the mathematical precision in the process. (Though, to be honest, I wasn’t very sorry to lose it. Except that I did, at one point when it was still a nice, square number of grids, have the idea that you could conceive of each stack of four grids as a 4x4x4 cube and do an Oulipo-esque rotation of the cube, such that all the top row of the original arrangement appears on the first grid of the rotated cube, second row on the second, or right to left, or left to right, bottom to top, upside-down, etc. An ever-proliferating project. Maybe someone clever could figure out a web version of that. Alternatively, I wanted to print the whole book on transparencies! That would be great!)
Anyhow, I think I just ran out of things to say about the literal appearance of the surface of the harbour, and I also began to question the politics of gazing in a neighbourhood already defined by a tension between working-class Mexican, Central American, and Chinese families and a new wave of white “young urban professionals,” myself included. Why investigate looking and seeing (i.e. the gaze) in such a context without also interrogating the politics of it? Or how even could you, really? And also interrogating my desire to belong to that neighbourhood. The desire to do less harm through my presence there – would that mean engaging or disappearing or what? (A question that also plays out on an ecological scale – how to do less harm but still be here. I’m not great at it, honestly.)
It also meant getting away from privileging seeing as a dominant sensory mode, hence why Part II and beyond go more into sonic and tactile sensory experience, coinciding as it were with the shift from late spring to summer. The book is almost perfectly one year of experience in that way, season by season, and totally by accident!
A friend at some point gave me a piece of advice that a project needs to hold three questions in tension in order to have enough going on to be interesting to other people. So, having those questions circulate around ideas of poetic constraint, sensory experience, and how to belong in a place defined by relations of inequality felt like it gave me enough to chew on. Questions that I still haven’t answered!
To get back to the nitty-gritty side of your question, Fred was in the midst of a quite busy time when I approached him to look at the manuscript, and he said he wouldn’t be able to give it the full treatment, but I’m still grateful for the attention he did give it, which was a total dream of mine. He’s a legend. His intervention can be felt in the way the published version incorporates more open questions – something I’d been avoiding before he’d read it and before his suggestion that I could just leave things open and unresolved. (I’d say that’s a fault of being too much of an academic, but I know my academic mentors would probably also say that I could leave things unresolved and open more often.)
Andrew and Leigh both put a lot of work into this manuscript, mostly pulling and pushing on different lines and words to see if they needed to be how they were – in some places allowing for a little bit of an easier foothold for the reader, elsewhere attempting to dial-up the minimalism and fragmentation. The two of them both, in their own ways, really helped hone the manuscript, tightening and polishing it, making it really solid. One key conceptual revision at this stage was the pages where I touch on the history of NY Harbor – just sort of a prompt to go back to those pages (which I had been quietly unhappy with) and pushing me to get it as right as it was possible for me to get it. To sit with the trouble and put the effort in. They’re still imperfect – because my knowledge is imperfect – but that section is better now. But aside from that, I think they both knew that it was the sort of project where you couldn’t make too many high-level changes without the whole thing collapsing on my head.
But in terms of keeping my own attention conceptually, I’d written Parts I, II, and III and assumed I was done, but just kept being unhappy with it. Initially, I had submitted it to Invisible with only three parts. But it kept bothering me. And bothering me. One night I was laying awake on the couch trying to sleep, tossing and turning, and frustrated with how the manuscript didn’t feel right – how it felt disingenuous somehow. I wrote basically all of Part IV that night on scrap pieces of paper in the dark. Just laying there and I’d think of something, write it down, feel relieved, think “Now I can sleep,” and then come up with another line. Eventually, I guess I must have reached some sort of conclusion and fell asleep. Then it felt honest. Then it felt complete. I’d laid it all out. Luckily, I was able to add that section to the manuscript before Invisible had a chance to read it!
I’ve written a lot, but I’m not totally sure I answered your question.
BR: I think you have! It sounds like those considerations, ensuring the project holds enough questions in tension to be interesting to a reader, were happening on many levels for you, even on the verge of sleep – fascinating that that’s when you found the ending. This might be a nice place for us to end – we’ve talked a lot about the technical and formal work of the poem, but Harbour Grids is also working through important content. The line at the end that “the self is a location // in a system of relations // not a skin // to be shed” seems hard-won, but wise. Alongside these new formal ideas, it seems like the grid and the tension that it brought to observing, may also have helped you think through politics and relationality in new ways. Does that sound right to you?
ZK: Certainly, yes. Maybe not even the grids themselves, so much as the idea of their limitations as a larger means of framing a poetic practice. I think the process of writing this book has a lot to do with my struggle with the legacies of language writing, conceptual poetry, and so on. It began with a desire to write and think about the neighbourhood without having to frame it through my subjectivity. But then the slow realization that abrogating that position was both impossible and that the desire to be free of my subjectivity in this context was also a desire to leave the politics of my own positionality in Sunset Park unexamined.
Early drafts of abandoned projects about Sunset Park kept turning into a heroic self-narrativization as some sort of transcendental figure that could somehow heal the wound in the social body of a gentrifying neighborhood. It was a dangerous fantasy, so the logical first step was to eliminate the narrating subjectivity that stood in for me and that kept taking on that form, no matter how much I tried to avoid it. I say this realizing that the fact that this fantasy inhered in my mind at all shows just the sort of ideological delusions I was under – not a flattering picture, but it is where I started this project from.
Certainly, the act of suppressing my subjectivity enabled the book to happen. Ironically, I needed to undo that act in the book’s conclusion in order for its politics to become grounded in reality. Whether I want to claim the mantle of the “I” or not, “I was here this whole time,” to offer another quote from the closing pages. I can’t simply shed my position in the interest of some false ideological purity, but I can use that position as a starting point for understanding how I am in relation and to begin living those relations in a more ethical way. Or rather, I have to use that position as a starting point. It’s the only one I have. It’s the only one any of us have.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.