The Brooklyn Rail

Rosa Alcalá (Rail): I like to think of Your Kingdom as a celebrity mashup of two other books of yours, The California Poem and You Animal Machine, in that it brings together particular approaches to the question of belonging employed in those earlier books, with this latest book expanding/exploding the mirror of the self through phylogeny, which contains, you write, “the notion of the organismal lineages we all passed through.” You go on to define phylogeny as, “all the plants who grew to be you. All the animals who did. I don’t mean because you were the telos causa, the reason or end result … I mean because they invented earth. Eventually they also invented you.” Throughout the book you address the reader with a sense of joyful camaraderie, and with a good bit of humor, to remind them of the infinite similarities or connections between life forms, such as, “I’m sorry to inform you that your resting heart rate / and a cockroach’s are the same.” Can you tell us how you came upon phylogeny as the basis of a poetic inquiry? Why was this exploration important for you?

Eleni Sikelianos: I love thinking of books as celebrities! And of exploding the mirror.

In The California Poem, and more recently in Make Yourself Happy, part of my work was wading, even bathing, in the grief of animal extinctions. I remember feeling, at age four or five, piercing heartsickness about more-than-human animals disappearing. My mother says one of my early sentences was, “Mommy, are the buffaloes estinking?” so I was already aware of and worried about extinction as a child in the late sixties, early seventies. That distress is all-encompassing now— it’s reality, permeating every fabric of our being. It’s a lot to live with, that much existential mourning. What do we do with our broken-heartedness? How do we also touch joy in relation to this big living context we’re in? After I finished Make Yourself Happy, I had this simmering feeling that I needed to find a joyful way of thinking with and being with all the other animals, who we are pushing, along with everything else, to extremes—to celebrate, not just grieve. Your Kingdom is essentially a paean to animal connection, set into motion by the specific event of watching a fire-red salamander lumber over a dark, wet log in a redwood forest, and remembering that we carry the amphibian invention of hip and shoulder girdles around with us every single day.

Rail: Your books often include visual elements—photographs, drawings, documents—and draw from history, dreams, science, the imagination, family lore, etc., but as I read I experience them as a fluid, living organism, rather than individual elements or sources stitched into cohesion. The text itself, too, rather than confined to flush left, breathes and expands from margin to margin; there’s a real sense of embodiment on the page and from cover to cover. I’m always curious about the ways books come together, how they are imagined and brought into existence, especially when those books aren’t composed necessarily of individual poems. At what point did you have a vision of what Your Kingdom as a whole would be? When did you know it had come together?

Sikelianos: The shape of things came somewhat late. I had this long central phylogenetic poem that kept growing, and then all these related satellite poems around it. I could have tried to fit all the smaller poems into the big one, or numbered things and imposed a corpus. But I’m drawn to between-states, where there is overall organic form but not a strict structure. An elemental biome for me is the tidal zone, a place sometimes underwater and sometimes under sun. After The California Poem, I realized that moving between various forms was also something like moving between tidal zones, as well as a resistance to genre (and its bedmate, gender).

I had the long title poem, “Your Kingdom,” at the beginning for a while, but the whole thing kept toppling over—some of the shorter poems had no life when they came after it. And that poem itself took some work to calibrate visually. It actually started as a visual collage (I’ve since misplaced that), and somehow when I first typed it up, it ended up flush left which was all wrong. I was always impressed that Alice Notley’s “Descent of Alette” didn’t have the quote marks at first. One can take heart from that. Getting the lines right took maybe a year or more, till I came to a loose form that references the double helix and the exchange of genetic materials, as well as genetic/syntactic pivots, where material is repurposed or shared between stanzas. (Some of the visual markers between parts are in green in the original version, but that was too expensive to print.) I have a tendency to create a number of beginnings and endings—a rejection of opening and of closure!—which can drive my editors crazy. In your other celebrity pick here, You Animal Machine, I began to think of endings as false bottoms, and that has been carried through a few books now. So, in this book, there’s the last poem, which ends, “this ice is free of what you know.” But then there’s a glossary, and notes, and a gratitude section, and another poem at the end of that, a kind of outtake tucked back in, reminding us that “a piece of your past / hurts when you fall on your ass / where you lost your tail.”

The first “door” at the beginning, “She takes notes,” a poem that existed as an orphan floating around in the ethers, was put there rather late. It was a way to ground the whole thing in an individual, relational human observational moment, letting everything unfurl from there.

When it comes to form, I believe I am a person of excess. Of proliferation. I don’t think I understand, spiritually, psychologically, psychically or even physically beginning-middle-end. Maybe it’s because I went to a totally out of control free school as a child, or that everyone in my family is some kind of serious misfit. How would such a directional gesture (B-M-E) fit in the wild variation in form in bobcats and lichen and jellyfish, or how would they fit into it? And actually, it should just be rejected, because that directional arrow is what keeps bringing us to aftermath. In the end, we throw all our plastic bottles in the sea. And in the end, they all come back to haunt us.

I’m not saying there’s no death. It’s just nothing we know. We thought form and form thought us.

Rail: Who do you consider your (or Your Kingdom’s) literary kin? What artists or works of art “invented you” or this book?

Sikelianos: You know, Niedecker is always there, even if she’s not evident. There’s a telltale trace of her f’s (“Fish / Fowl / Flood”) in “if you like let the body feel / all its own evolution / inside, opening flagella / & feathers & fingers,” which I didn’t recognize till later. And in her concern and approaches to the densities of animal and mineral time in the time of the poem. Her great natural feeling for birds and humans sharing calls and feathers. Her love of Darwin and scientific texts.

And Vallejo is always with me for his incredible élan, his ability to leap by syllables between deepest lamentation and giddiest joy. Nobody does that as amazingly as he does. I mean, “All is joyful, except my joy”! There are traces of Cecilia [Vicuña] and Anne [Waldman] here and there, in their big-spirit, open celestial skull teachings. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, foundational, in the way he opens “self” and “other” to a relation of dissimilars: animate, inanimate, human, more-than-human: all are assembled. Those are a few poets roaming around Your Kingdom.

There were meditational objects, too, in particular the exquisite Blaschka glass models of sea animals. These were made by a Bohemian father-son team of glass artists, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. Before scientific research centers had aquaria, when it was difficult to send specimens, these two provided incredibly accurate glass versions of creatures. I encountered Dr. Drew Harvell’s work with the Blaschka models while I was doing a retreat at the Friday Harbor marine research labs off the coast of Washington. Harvell was instrumental in restoring a dusty and broken Blaschka menagerie at Cornell, where she is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. She then did diving expeditions to check up on the populations of species represented in the glass collection, which she documents in A Sea of Glass, where you’ll find a picture of glass Clione limacina (sea angel) alongside a real one, for example.

The poet Jon Woodward, who works at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, very generously gave me a tour of the deep vaults once, opening gleaming drawers of jewel-like glass cephalopods, and I was tingling. Harvell writes that “the glass models are infused with an eerie sense of consciousness because of the depth and expressiveness of the eyes,” and let’s drop that the Blaschkas also made prosthetic glass eyes. Leopold said, “We have the touch,” and gave advice on how to become a glass modeler of skill: “get a good great-grandfather who loved glass.”

There are a bunch of science and philosophy of science books that provided years of thinking. For example, I read the annotated version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The idea of a tree as a metaphor for understanding is ancient, but it entered the realm of animal relations and biosystematic iconography about one hundred years before Darwin adopted it. So I was thinking about that, especially because biologist Lynn Margulis took issue with the symbol of a tree; it’s a net, she said, with all kinds of exchanges in all kinds of directions. I found a book that documents trees of life, arranged chronologically, from strange bracket-maps of wading birds and of orchids from the 1500s, to quinarian systems for scarabs and crows from the nineteenth century, through the first known tree constructed and published by a woman (ornithologist Graceanna Lewis), and up to a branching diagram from the early 2000s, showing phylogenetic connections and tucking humans into a little curve of the circle among hundreds of thousands of other organisms. (The book is Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution, by Theodore W. Pietsch.)

Rail: In the notes to your book you offer a definition of “Kingdom”: “Of uncertain origin; I choose the roots that go through ‘kin,’ and lead away from ‘doom.’ No king in kingdom … We’ve used these systems to classify relations between all living things, which means they’re rife with hierarchy … A kingdom is a conceptual space. Poetry is a form of deep phylogeny that turns the kingdom round.” I am especially fascinated by the contradictions and tensions between the origins of phylogeny (a system coined by a eugenicist, as you say in the beginning of the book,) and the ways your poetry attempts to dismantle the divides between animal and human, even bringing into question the ways language has been weaponized to depict or portray as a means of reinforcing boundaries and upholding hierarchies. Can you tell us more about poetry as deep phylogeny? What do we gain by moving this concept into the realm (kingdom) of poetry. Can it lead us away from doom?

Sikelianos: Poetry is a phylogeny in that it is a system of relations. The relations of poetry are revealed through sound, aural images, the living voice, and all the other modalities poetry is able to gather and use. Poetry is a remembering of tongue, to paraphrase Jacques Roubaud. When we allow poetry to handle the scientific notions of phylogeny, we get to that place where we redraw the questions and borders of how language has been employed. So, in the etymology of phylogeny, where phylo refers to a tribe or species, its sound leads us to homonymic connections with phyllo, from which we have strata or leaves (think of spanakopita, which uses sheets of phyllo), and with philo, to be a friend of, and even to love. It allows the mind’s tongue to turn us round toward relation again.

Yes, poetry and art lead us away from doom. Poems can’t change policy and action, which must happen, but they are integral to feeling the world as it is and was and could be, which is integral to action. Recently, I have been recognizing the poem (and the temporary autonomous art zone) as the site of utopia. Duncan and Olson called it the temenos, from the ancient Greek linear B syllabary, the sacred precinct. Temenos, yoked to Sanskrit tantram, a loom. It’s where you weave your mind-cloak, and it’s where you weave a place for others to dwell. That’s why it felt important to celebrate animal joy rather than animal doom—to offer myself and others a place to thrive. The work as you’re doing it is the dwelling, as is the work when you’re done.

Rail: What are you working on now?

Sikelianos: This kind of circles back to your first question, and questions of belonging.

For almost twenty-five years, I’ve been trying to write about my great-grandparents, the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and theater director, choreographer, and composer Eva Palmer Sikelianos. They had this idea that if they set up a Univeristy of Human Arts and Thought at the ancient site of Delphi, and rebooted the ancient Delphic festivals—with plays, athletics, and handicrafts—they could help humans love each other, and resist industrialization. They held the first festival in 1927, and a second one in 1930, by which time my great-grandmother had run through her considerable fortune and gone into debt. The festivals changed the course of modern Greek culture. At the same time, she had a whole hidden, wild lesbian love life, which she connected to Sappho. These were people who were hanging out with Colette and Rilke. I’ve been pondering their utopian vision for decades, trying to piece a narrative together. The narrative also leads to me, growing up on food stamps with very little obvious access to these cultural and monetary worlds, across a chasm from their story. So, it’s another kind of ancestry book. But more importantly, it’s the exploration of these people that totally, one-hundred percent made their own structures, and believed that art could save the world. There are so many beautiful archival photos and costumes, and so many moments to take into account. Everywhere I go in Greece, it seems, I turn over some new little leaf in their lives. I keep getting caught in eddies of information as I try to understand. For example, my great-grandmother insisted that rehearsal would be at dawn in the ancient theater, when they could feel the energy of the world awakening, and this simple fact changed some of the dancers’ lives forever. I meditated on that for months.

Rail: Thank you for this exchange, Eleni. I can’t wait to immerse myself in your great-grandparents’ utopic vision. Like Your Kingdom, it’s a book we need to lead us out of doom.