Loading summary
Transcript33 lines
- [00:01]
Sean Webster
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Sullivan Sommer
I am the grandchild and great grandchild of rail workers, both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed upon their bodies that interdicted their rest during their employment. They were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car which stole their ability to sleep. That robbery of rest, a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. It is a familiar formula. I am trying to extend the sentences that arrive to me from my mother and later the railroad's archive, extend them into a different kind of exhaustion and limit point to see where their lines fracture and whether I can step into the space made by their splitting. I am attempting to insert the curvature of the comma into the sentence and line. A speculative practice emerging from a desire to converse with ghosts. Haunting words from the book without untraining an archive. The first work of nonfiction by two time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, Sean Webster. Sean, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:18]
Sean Webster
Thank you for having me.
- [01:20]
Sullivan Sommer
Sean, talk about the impetus for this book. I'm really curious, kind of where it came from.
- [01:27]
Sean Webster
So it's without. Terminuses lived with me for a while. I had begun an interview. I began doing interviews with family members just to document some family history. And in the course of interviewing my mother in 2015, um, she was telling me about her father and his work as a porter. He had. He had died. It was about eight years before I was born. And she was mentioning so casually how he had worked for 25 years and retired without pension. And I think that it was the. The casualness with which she approached and told me that information that gave me a lot of pause and really stoked a lot of curiosity around knowing more, around asking more questions from her, but also looking into the National Archives of Atlanta, where his employment records were and his medical records, and thinking about the period, but then also thinking about it was one question that kind of bloomed into all of these other questions in relation to the role of the porter, to other ways that porters had been historicized and written about. So I think that the book, it really started with that interview and then there were just all of these various little steps from there. There were failed proposals that I had written to journals that I was attempting to write something about it. As I was thinking about trying to deal with the ugly feelings as like seeing the guy talks about and what, you know, the historicizing importers was often placing them in this kind of narrative arc of like middle class uplift and how stories like that of like, my grandfather really broke from so much of that. And like what does it mean when you know, there's a way that, whether that be film or novels or other kinds of depictions of porters places them even though there's a recognition that the work was harder, that the treatment was terrible, that ultimately like they prevailed. And there is this like level of dignity in relationship to the job. And I wanted to think about, well, what if they really display. What if there's this underside of you know, this dislike of the job. And not only dislike this, this hatred of like in bitterness around perhaps like what you're having to. To do. Which is a lot of how my mom described his own experience, like as a porter. So I think it was just like it was one question and it was like 50 questions and then it was like, you know, so it was just like a following along the lines of. Of where those questions led. So. So I think that was the impetus is that my own personal connection to it, but then also the way that I was. I felt startled by what I was told by my mom and wanted to investigate that more.
- [05:17]
Sullivan Sommer
I'm reflecting first on. I think so many of us have the experience when talking about, talking to our parents or grandparents use the term casualness. The casualness with which we hear information about their lives that's. That's just mind blowing and traumatic and terrifying. And it gets talked about in a way that's like the same way you talk about the weather. I want to talk a little bit more about. About the form in this. You started to talk about the substance. But I feel like in this book that, you know, you can't talk about the substance without talking about the form necessarily. And you said, you know, there were some failed journal proposals. And I'm curious as this was coming together, if at any point did it take a different form than the form it has now.
- [06:16]
Sean Webster
Yeah, yeah. I mean there are certain things that like, were consistent in the. Perhaps like the architecture and like the skeleton of it. But in terms of like, I mean at one point in time I thought of it like as a more clean historical narrative that tried to attempt to maybe add to the way Porters had prior been historicized and the limits of that kind of historicization that there are limits to thinking about, especially if over generalized the. The way that this role led to a middle class life for certain porters that participated in the role, the expansion of travel, these other kinds of things that are made available. But I think for me the question of form was one that took a while to really arrive at. If it was something that was really arrived at at all. Because I think. I think in some ways that I wanted to understand something about my grandfather and my mother. I wanted to understand something about the period and that those questions weren't ones that offered a kind of linear pathway to a narrative structure. I also think that there's a limit to narrative itself that, Like, a part of the reason why I think that there's this kind of particular way that porters are historicized is that we import a kind of narrative on the role, right? That we think about the history, and then we want to understand it through an uplift structure. Narrative, like an uplift narrative structure. And so I can understand the hardships of the porters, but I want to see there be some kind of resolution to that hardship through what was achieved in whether that be the unions or whether that be these other various outlets in which orders were able to perhaps get a piece of the better American life, right? And that wasn't something. That was something that was really frustrating for me. And so I wanted to see, like, how, for me, the story already arrived to me fragmented, and. And there were limits to what I could know because not only were there limits to what my mother knew and was sharing with me from memory, we, like, you know, memory is a. It's a. It's a limited resource itself, right? Like in how we can understand and know the past, right? And so how to. How to think about the way, you know, some of what I am doing is relying not only on. On. On my memory, but my memory of her memory, right? But also how. How the archive in relationship to, like, whether that be the National Archive in Atlanta or the photographic documents that I have pieced together in the. In the. In the book. That those are things that also, you know, are limited, right? Like that. That we are. We look at a photo, but a photo, you know, there is the subject of the photo, but there's also the conditions that make what's happening in the photo, right? Like, there is the photographer. There are those things that are outside of the frame of the photo itself that also aid in the production of the conditions of what we see in the photograph. And I was interested in, like. I was interested in those things also. So I think that, like, for me, it was about how to demonstrate that fragmentedness, how to demonstrate that I am. I am myself trying to wrestle with. With the language of historical documents, which means that I have to, like, I have to think about the way that language can be broken or that the way that my mom might Tell a story and she might tell it again. It's the same story, but the details shift. And there are these ways that something may be added or something may be changed. And how is it that we. How is it that we take into consideration the way the stories stutter? Right. The way that, you know, I have, you know, been told many a story from my mom or aunt or others that, you know, where when sitting and listening to these stories, you can see how like, you know, a story shifts as somebody is telling it and then somebody adds a detail where they're like, oh, no, like, you got that wrong. Actually, like, it was a. It happened like this. And wanting to, wanting to, like, think about the meaning of, like, what those stories were in relationship to. To this thing, like, which is my grandfather, but also the railroad, but also like the kind of dream archive that I feel I'm trying to access in some ways. And so I think it was a lot. It was a lot of different things. There was a lot of different things going on, but both in. Both in my approach, but also like in. In the questions and how. I think I was trying to demonstrate it in the book. But. Yeah, no, I appreciate that question. I'm not so sure I answered it. But let me know if you have other follow ups to what I mentioned.
- [12:15]
Sullivan Sommer
No, I do want to keep talking about this because I think it's, to me, it's what makes your work so unique. And I think that again, I think we could have many conversations about this. I. I'm also reflecting on the fact that for, for listeners, I think. I think listeners are now probably having the experience that readers have when they're reading the book, which, which is the form is not so easily definable, nor is the stor. Nor is the story, for all the reasons that you just, that you just talked about. And you know, when I introduced the book, I said this was your first work of nonfiction. The back of the book tells me also it's your first work of nonfiction. The back of the book also tells the bookseller to shelve it in memoir and essays. And so I get, you know, we all understand how marketing works. And the book has to go in the bookstore somewhere where readers will. Will find it and take it off the shelf. But I also think that, that, you know, this idea of genre is about setting reader expectations also. And I think if, if I were to shelve this book, I don't think I would shelve it under memoir and essays. So, yeah, so talk about, just talk about how you Think about that.
- [13:40]
Sean Webster
Yeah. I think that there are ways that, like, you know, genre is always a limited set of tools and lens around how we understand, like, a work, Right. Like, I mean, how do we describe Gene Toomer's Cain? Right. Like, Gene Toomer's Cain is doing more than what we would say a fiction, a work of fiction is doing. Like, you know, it's drama, it's also poetry, Right. Like, so I think that, like, there are ways that we have always been doing things that break with the expectations of form in relationship to black writing, whether it be like, you know, Gene Tumor's Cane or James Weldon Johnson's the Autobiography of an Ex Colored man, which is autobiographical not only in its form but title, but also it's a novel, right? Like, and so, you know, Jamaica Kincaid's the Autobiography of My Mother. How does one write the autobiography of their mother? Right. And so. Which is also a novel, right. Or Audre Lorde's Zombie, which is a biomythography and in which, like, you know, she describes herself as the character Audre Lorde. Right. Like, and so I think there are ways that these kinds of experiments are not. They're not new and. And they're not. I think they are very much a part of a black tradition of writing. It's not limited to the. To a black tradition of writing, but there is a way that. That. That black writers, both in the United States and throughout the diaspora, have. Have been taking this up for quite some time. And I think that, you know, consistent with my other work, I've always been really attempting to move in and outside of forum. And so I think that a part of what this book without terminus in my describing it as a work of nonfiction, with my publisher designating it as a work of memoir and essays, I think that a part of it is also just thinking about just how much I think memoir can do outside of what we might think of in the. Perhaps a paint by numbers association to what our expectations around that might be. And I think memoir has always been more unwieldy to linearity than autobiography. That memoir as a form. Like, I think that there has just been so much that folks have done with memoir recently that I. That I really deeply appreciate that. Like, I mean, and it's not even just to say some of them might even not be designated as memoir, right? But we could look at. We could look at Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and the way that Christina Sharpe works with fragment and the way that she works with photograph and the way that she thinks about the way that she thinks about memory, the way that she thinks about the citation of the document, which is inclusive of not just what we would think of as the kind of citation that a scholar might approach just in terms of theory, but also, you know, letters that her mother had written and these other kinds of documents that. That are placed on a kind of equal theoretical plane. So I think that there's things that, like, I really. I really like, you know, litany for the long moment. Mary Kim Arnold's like book, which is a long essay, but also, like, a memoir about transracial adoption that includes all of these various, like, modes that exceed what I think we would understand the essay to be and also the memoir to be. So I. I think that, again, like, I think as far as form is concerned, form is something where it's like, you know, I. I'm. I'm interested in hybridity. I'm interested in. I'm interested in. In calling something a thing, but it perhaps, like, subverting our notions of, like, what we understand that thing had. Like, what. Why. Why did Maxine Hong Kingston call Woman Warrior at its onset, an autobiography? She insisted on it, even though we mostly teach it as a novel, like, and understand it to be one. Right. Like, and it's doing, like, mythological work. Right. Like, and so I'm like, I just. I think that there's a way that. That sort of insistence on moving into form but also, like, expanding its territory have always been a kind of political act. Right. Has always had a political dimension to it. And. And I'm just like, you know, I think. I think genre itself, to me has its uses, but it's also like, you know, it can be a, you know, if we, if it's, if. If we're. If we're too locked into it, like, I think it can be a kind of. It can be a kind of prison in some ways. Right. And so I'm interested in thinking about how do we move in and out of form? Form is useful. Form can be useful. I appreciate it. I use it. And I'm also always thinking about extending it. So. And I don't know if that was even an answer to your question initially, but, like, how readers, like, are doing. Am I thinking about the reader expectation in relationship to, like, how they approach it? Like, I. I don't know necessarily in the writing that I'm. That I'm always giving a great deal of consideration to, like, what the reader expects. Will. How is it that the reader is going to approach the form? Because I don't think I'll write if I, if I do that with, with a great deal of intensity. I think that that would be a, that would be a hard thing for me to, to do in the, in the mode of like, in the actual writing of the thing. But I think is as far as, like in the post production of a thing. Like, do I consider and am I thinking about how a reader will have their expectations fulfilled or not? I think that there's, there's always going to be both. There's always going to be a mixture of, of all of those things. Some of the best books have done that for me though. Like, some of the wounds that, that I appreciate the most have disturbed some of my expectations around what they would be. So I'm also, you know, I just hope that there's like a. There's always an openness to surprise. I want to be surprised as I'm reading. Like, I don't, I want to. I want to have certain things. I want to take turns in the reading. I want to. I don't want to. I don't want to know it all upfront. So I don't know. Does that answer some of the.
- [21:37]
Sullivan Sommer
Yeah, I think. I don't, I don't know if I think anything you say is the answer to the question. And I mean that. And I mean that in a complimentary way. Like, because I'm thinking as you're talking about all of these different influences and I'm thinking about legibility. And so without term terminus was my introduction to your work. I was not familiar with your other work and I loved the book. I went back and read your previous work then afterward as well. And I find your work incredibly legible in exciting ways, but very resonant, very legible. Obviously, I'm not the only one. Hence, you know, your, your awards and recognitions. But like many of the work that you just ticked through, you know, it's not legible to everyone right now. Do you want to be like, I would. I don't know. But yeah, I think that's interesting thing to think about.
- [22:57]
Sean Webster
Yeah. No, and I don't think that that would be my goal. I don't know necessarily that I'm attempting to be legible to everyone or that like, in every instance that legibility is the goal. Right? Like that in some instances, like, I'm exploring something that's outside of legibility. So for instance, like, you know, I grew up in the Pentecostal Church, right? Like, and even though, like, I would, I, I would describe myself as agnostic I'm interested still in what Ashon Crowley talks as, like, the aesthetic practices of the Black Pentecostal Church. And so specifically thinking about the aesthetic practice of speaking in tongues. Now, speaking in tongues is something that moves into a kind of illegibility, that it moves into a kind of abstraction, right? That there is these forms of articulation that are happening, but that these forms of articulation move outside of our rational comprehension of the articulation itself, right? And I think that a part of my interest in that movement into those spaces of abstraction or illegibility is something that I think is. Is. Is the value and importance of Black studies or aspects of Black studies that think about the limitations even of language to be able to describe some of the horrors of the history, right. That. How is it that we describe and actually encapsulate some of the everyday horrors that have been a part of black history, right? Which is not to say that it is only horrors, right? But to articulate those things, I think language becomes very limited. And so that's, I think, the use of those kinds of abstraction. That's, I think, the use of what M. Nor Besse Philip is doing in the space of Zong, right? That she moves into the abstraction of a archival document to be able to exceed what that archival document in its language is able to say, right? And I think that in similar ways, methodologically, I'm entering into various archival documents. Some of those archival documents are actual physical documents, like medical documents. Some of them are employment records, but some of them are the ephemera of memory, right? Like. And moving into the space of those documents, I'm attempting to also abstract them, right? And so I think, you know, it's. It's trying to take up different modes of going about doing that. Sometimes I'm taking like. Sometimes I'm attempting to do that by superimposing the text, right? Like. And so it is a way of layering the text on top of each other to produce a certain kind of poly vocality that as a single voice, we don't always. Or we are always, we're not able to produce in the same way. And so how to. How to. To capture something sonically plural, how to capture something that moves into what Edward Glissant talks about as din, right? But that din, in Edward Glissant's estimation, was also discourse. That that scream, or the illegibility of the scream had a kind of discourse to it. So. So I'm. Yes, there are legible things in and without terminus. And I would Love. And I hope, I hope that there is something about those spaces that get taken up and that folks find a space of entry. But there's also illegible spaces too. Right? But those aren't without entry. Right. When I was in the space of those Sunday services or those prayer meetings or those moments in which language was insufficient and all my mother could do was hum, there was something that was being said there at an asexual level that was understood, even though at a level of articulation, there wasn't something that was quite legible. Right. There wasn't something interpretive at the level of articulation in terms of her saying, my sadness exceeds language here. And so all I can do is hum. Right. But the hum does something to express where language is perhaps limited. And I'm interested in entering into some of those spaces. And I'm trying to do that in and beyond text.
- [28:08]
Sullivan Sommer
Also, I feel like I'm going to have to put together a syllabus for this episode because you have talked about so many fantastic other writers that I know listeners are going to be like, wait, wait, who is that? And be introduced to some people, hopefully that they. That they are unfamiliar with. One of the notes I was making as I was reading the book is I was making a list of the work that I was thinking about as being in conversation with your work. And in fairness, I made these notes. And then also I think some of them are actually in the book after I noted that, so I thought that was interesting. I was like, oh, wow, okay. But I want to throw a few of the names out there because I'm just curious. I would just love to get your reaction. And one again, I know because he actually blurped the book is Doug Kearney Baldwin, Fred Moten, Terence Hayes and Claudia Rankin.
- [29:14]
Sean Webster
No, I think that all, all of those folks are a part of, you know, a part of the dialogue with me. Definitely. Like, you know, Doug Kearney is. Is a mentor, a friend, was my advisor in my MFA program. And so in many ways, like, we've had an ongoing conversation for a decade plus. Right. Like, and so that. That is definitely, like, Doug's work has definitely marked my own in so many ways. And is. Was an entry point for me to thinking about, like, the possibilities within poetry. Right. So Fred Moten's work is deeply touched my own, like, you know, and so whether that be like the way that Moton talks about study, to the way that he thinks about Blur, to the way that he takes up Edward Glassant and in that trilogy and thinking about the consent not to be a single being. Right. So I think in those ways, too, I'm thinking about. And without terminus, though, there is a you that is used, like, throughout. Throughout without terminus, that you is shifting in ways. Right. Like in the. And the pronouns are shifting in ways because I'm thinking about something beyond a certain kind of singularity. So molten is a huge, huge influence. And obviously also, like, you know, the way that I think Claudia Rankin has opened up a way for folks to. To read work that has this kind of hybridity to it. Like, I think that there's a way that citizen and, you know, I think Don't Let Me Be Lonely, like in other work of Claudia Rankins, has opened up a way for folks to think about hypertext in ways that I think black authors have been doing for quite some time. So I think that it's a continuation of that conversation and dialogue. And so definitely these folks are a part of a tradition that I'm in conversation with.
- [31:37]
Sullivan Sommer
I wanted to talk a bit more about the imagery that's in your book. And of course, you opened by talking about the train. We need to talk about the COVID photo. So the COVID The COVID photo is a train car. And I did not. I had this book for some time I had been reading, was sort of laying on my counter very visible. And I had this book for many weeks before I realized that there's a shadow in the photo.
- [32:10]
Sean Webster
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like. I am just as fascinated by some of this as well. Like, I did not design the COVID photo, obviously. Like, you know, and so, like, the COVID was something where I think one of the artists that put this together selected really well in terms of the photograph that was there. I think that the image.
- [32:32]
Sullivan Sommer
I wondered if that was from your family archive or if it was just a train, you know, a train photo.
- [32:38]
Sean Webster
No, it wasn't. So I think it definitely was. Is. Was a. Was a beautiful point of. Of conversation with the other work that's in the. In the book itself. Yeah. And I think that the. The designer did really great, like, in terms of. Of their selection and they were really generous and, like, being in conversation with me about it. But. But, yeah, no, that was like. That was something that was just one of those. One of those kind of happy moments of convergence, like, between the work that I had written and then what the. What the designer for the COVID had put together
- [33:24]
Sullivan Sommer
along the same lines of imagery is. You know, we've. We've got this idea of trains, this idea of. Of terminus and terminals. The subtitle is Untraining an Archive, which again, was another one for me. It wasn't until I'd sat with this for a while, I was like. The word untraining. Huh? What. What does that. What does that mean? Like, what is that? I'm curious. Like, what is that? What is untraining an archive mean to you?
- [33:59]
Sean Webster
I think a part of it is perhaps to do some of, like, what we were discussing earlier in relationship to genre itself. Like, you know, the archive is in some ways a kind of genre. And I think in some ways I'm always attempting to undiscipline a genre like that. Training is a kind of like, you know, train as a machine, but like, in some of its definitions, like, it's a kind of like disciplining. Right. Like, how do we train to be something? How do we discipline ourselves to. To fit within a particular form. Right. And, you know, parts of. Of the story with. With Al Terminus is thinking about, like, the 25 years of service that my grandfather had as a porter on the Great Northern Railroad and how my mother was describing that work in retirement, being without pension and looking into the employment records and seeing a check that was written to my grandfather, which is included into. In the book, but that the check arrived a month later. Right. Like that it was. Right. Month after his death. Right. That he. He. He didn't. That's the only evidence that I have of pension. And then it arrived a month after his death that it was something that has a return date on it that ended talking with the National Archives of Atlanta about receiving the actual document as opposed to a photocopy of it that I'm not allowed to because they're only stewards of the document that's owned by the Railroad Retirement Board. And so I think that in some ways, like the approach to the archive, for some has been. And I don't know necessarily that I disagree with it in every case, but that for. For some it has been a work of how we have been elided from the archive and how is it that we can. How is it that we can expand the record and how is it that we can. How is it that we can include black voices and black histories within the space of these archives. Right. And so there's a way that being included in the archive is a kind of. It. Repossess. We get a kind of repossession of our history where in this instance, like, in terms of the check for my grandfather, the archive is actually what dispossesses me of this particular history. Right. There is a way that. That I become dispossessed of this particular material aspect of this history that is. Is done so by relationship to it being archived.
- [37:06]
Sullivan Sommer
Right?
- [37:08]
Sean Webster
And. And I think in. In that sense, like, I'm attempting to think about, like, one. Is the. Is the archive possibly like a dispossessing technology? Right? And also, how. How do we. How do we deviate and undiscipline those kinds of practices? Like, how is it that we, you know, that I have a. I have a desire to document. I have a desire to. To write some of these things about my family and this history. And there are things that I. That I will never know. And there are things that, even though I am attempting to. To do or recover in some ways, like I'm. I'm attempting to recover some things, I think that I'm negotiating always between what is it that I can recover. And. And often that recovery is done through this. This means of, like, we're able to trace it and find some kind of archival evidence for it, right? And. And giving something a kind of proper burial. And so I think that I negotiate between those things often, and I don't know necessarily that I have an easy answer in relationship to whether or not is the archive always and only dispossessing or is recovery never available, especially to folks whose histories have been ruptured in some manner or another? I don't know that I have a singular answer to that, but I think that a part of what I mean by untraining the archive is attempting to do some of that work of undisciplining it. And even in terms of, like, when we think about the train, right, like in the direction of the train, like that. It's typically thought of in this singular way, like the train's moving in a certain direction even as we think about it metaphorically and we talk about it, right, like, you know, and we talk about this train is. This train is moving, right? We're talking about it. Like there's, like, now that the train is moving, there's not. There's no stopping. There's no moving in the other direction. There's a kind of singular path that's talked about or thought about to. To go forward. And so I'm trying to think about it in multiple ways, like, what if there are other. What if there are other ways to move, right? Like, the book begins with a citation from John Coltrane, who was said to say that. That he begins in the middle of the sentence, and then he moves both directions at Once. Right. And so in a lot of ways, like, the whole book is me trying to begin in the middle of a sentence and move in two directions.
- [40:13]
Sullivan Sommer
I'm furiously scribbling down notes as you're talking. I feel like I could write a whole essay about this collection I'm thinking about. You were talking about the train. The train goes in one direction. This. This attachment of trains to time. And the idea. The idea of time as being. Being a linear thing and the fact that we all are on the same clock time. And I mean, this kind of like, literally in the way that we move through the day, only came about with the advent of the railroads. Right. Historically. And because before that, all, like, towns had different times. Like, just they had. They were on their own clocks. And so I think there's something interesting there then about that and what you're doing, what you're trying to do.
- [41:10]
Sean Webster
Yeah, no, like, I mean, we get centralized time through that. Right. Like, in. There's also just the way that the train, as a technology emerges around a similar time as the photograph emerges as a technology. And they're doing two very different things. One is attempting to, one, reduce our spatial difference. And so I can go from this place to that place, and far short, shorter time. And so it reduces the amount of time, and it's doing so through the fast motion of the train. And then with the photograph, I'm trying to fix time. Right. Like, I'm trying to isolate a moment of time and fix it in place so that I can go back to it again and again. And I think that a part of the book is also trying to think about, though not as explicitly, those relationships between that moving technology of the train and the way that the photograph becomes this kind of isolated thing temporally.
- [42:27]
Sullivan Sommer
Well, and you're still able in the collection, though, to create some temporal movement even with photographs as well.
- [42:36]
Sean Webster
Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, with Alice, like, in the swing, like.
- [42:39]
Sullivan Sommer
Yeah, that's exactly. That's the one I'm thinking about.
- [42:42]
Sean Webster
Yeah. So, yeah, Like, I mean, that photograph with my great grandmother and that essay, that part of. Of the book came a lot later. Like, you know, because, I mean, in. In the. The timeline of the writing. Like, because the book went through so many shifts. Like, even in the editing of it, I think about, like, you know, it was like, the final transmission for the book was in 2025. Like, it. Like, May, June of 2025, like, in December, we went through some really big shifts, like, in terms of editing. Like, so I. I think I. I wrote. I rewrote like 50% of the book between December of 2024 and like May of 2025. So there were things that like. Like that portion of the book that weren't even there prior in terms of like Alice. But I was really wondering or thinking about that image of the swing, its movement, the fact that there was an empty swing beside her, like this notion of whether or not we're able to. To think about the desire, you know, on my own part, like. Of like, can you enter into those empty spaces? Can we enter through. Can we move through the, the two dimensional plane of the photographic image and like. And be present with what is perhaps not present with or who is not present with us now? Right. And so, yeah, I think that. I think that all of those things were. Were ways for me to try to. To maintain a certain kind of. Also to maintain a certain kind of tenderness in relationship to the text. Right. Like it. That so much of like, there was definitely a lot of. Of the. Of the material that for me felt very incendiary and, And I think a part of what I wanted to be able to do was to. To maintain a relationship to. How is it that you can maintain a relationship to. To structural accountability and structural critique that still felt lyrical and also could hold on to, you know, at the same time as I can have a structural critique of. Of the train and, and of the way the railroad inflicts this damage on my grandfather's body. How is it that can also maintain an understanding that he was a complex person that was himself very violent. Right. That. That the violence of. Of that training is an ability to grapple with that produced its own kind of violence. Right. Interpersonally. Right. And so I think that, you know, for me, like, those spaces with like Alice and others like were. Were a way for me to like, in the midst of dealing with like this challenge of like trying to like, grapple with how to like how to. How to move between these forms of critique and hold a lyric was also a way for me to try to think about holding on to a kind of tenderness when dealing with things that felt very incendiary.
- [45:57]
Sullivan Sommer
So I mentioned that after I finished this collection, I did go back to your other two collections, Whalesong and Gentrify. Or Gentrification.
- [46:10]
Sean Webster
I'm sorry? Gentrification.
- [46:12]
Sullivan Sommer
Gentrification. I apologize. And I was struck by the imagery of the square, like visibly square on the page. Whether it is a square or whether it is text formed into a square is imagery I saw in all three collections really clearly talk about that, yeah,
- [46:38]
Sean Webster
I really love the prose black. I think that I'm really attracted to the prose black. So, you know, I think that. I think that I'm thinking about something of a relationship between the. You know, a lot of, like, times when we're talking about poetry, we're talking about the line more than we are the sentence. But I'm interested in both the sentence and the line and a kind of interplay between the two. And so there are definitely things that I do within the space of, like, Whale song that have traditional forms, like the Hustle that, like, are operating at a line level. But also, I'm just. I'm really attracted to the lyric. And so I'm like. I think there's something about that interplay between the line and the sentence that I think happens in the prose block, or is possible in the prose block that I really appreciate. I think that there is something about, like, that limitation of space, its use of white space. It's that. That helps me to attempt to, like, synthesize something over time. Like, I'm not. I'm not trying to. I'm never trying to write a whole thing in terms of, like. I've never thinking of, like, a. In my writing. I'm never really thinking of a whole discrete poem. I'm rarely thinking of, like, a discrete poem in terms of, like, my writing. Like, as far as I am beginning a poem here and it ends here, most of the work is a long form, and it's through accretion. And so, you know, Whalesong, I would describe, like, as a long poem that has two parts, and I think that it has multiple forms, but I would describe it as a long poem. And I wouldn't. I don't have. And I would be hard pressed to, like, say. And I think that people that would approach something like Whalesong would be hard pressed to find. Okay, can you just read this one poem from Whalesong? Because I don't think that it's written in such a way where it's, like, you're going to find much that's going to be discreetly. Yeah, you could read a page here or there, and you can maybe find some of those things, but it's a little bit more difficult to, like, get a sense of, like, what that project is doing unless you, like, look at it through its. Through the. The length of its form. I think similarly, though, there are discrete things, and without terminus, it's. It's attempting to build something through accretion. Right. And at the same time as it's also A dissolving something, right? Like, you know that these pros blocks are accreting and building a certain kind of legibility and a certain kind of like something is being said. Things that we know about, about Reginald at the onset of the point of entry for Without Terminus, we have different material by the time we reach the quote unquote end of without Terminus. But at the same time, there is an image of Reginald that is slowly dissolving as you're moving through to without Terminus. And so I'm attempting. I think that. I think there are things that I was exploring in the space of gentrification as well as whalesong that I was trying to figure out because I was writing Without Terminus at the same time as I was writing both of those books. Like, I was writing this before I started writing Gentrification, my first book. And so in many ways those two books taught me how to. To approach like, like writing. Writing these books. There were things I had to learn in the process of writing those two books. And I don't feel like I had either the, the chops or the, or the design skill or the, or the understanding of like, maybe what attracted. Why I was attracted. So attracted to certain aspects of form until. Until exploring like without Terminus. So I think that Without Terminus is perhaps like, it's me more arriving at a more assure space of like, why I'm like, using particular methods than in those past two texts.
- [51:34]
Sullivan Sommer
Well, this book is Without Terminus. Untraining An Archive by Sean Webster. You can find Sean on Instagram ainstopoet and you have been listening to Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Sommer, a new books Network podcast. I am your host, Sullivan Sommer. If you like what you heard like, follow and drop us a rating on your favorite podcast app. We're on Instagram additionstothearxive and we're free over on Substack where you can find more great author interviews. In fact, Sean and I are on our way there right now to continue our conversation. Thank you for listening to Additions to the archive,
- [52:19]
Sean Webster
Sam.