Daniel Sarah Karasik talks to Sharon Berg about their latest book.
1. There are authors who devote themselves mainly to one genre of writing, and others who can move between various genres without issue. You are known as a playwright, a fiction author, and a poet. In fact, in your Fall 2020 talk with Emily Chou in Prism International magazine you say you are also working on an EP of songs. That is a remarkable diversity. You are also a committed activist for several important social causes, and this comes across clearly through many of the poems in Plenitude. Can you speak to whether you feel the other genres of writing and creation that you engage with have influenced the development of your poetry in this collection? How do you choose which medium to express a particular idea in? Does it have anything to do with the structure of different writing forms?
DSK: I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I still don’t have a super clear understanding of why I gravitate to a particular form at a particular time. The explanation always seems so specific to the moment, so contextual, and often social. When my social world consisted largely of theatre-makers, for example, often I felt compelled to write theatre, to participate in the various conversations and relationships and institutional incentives that were active in that milieu. Whereas these days I’m more interested in making art that speaks to people who are active in social movements, or who have a set of politics and passions that would lend themselves to social movement struggle were any such struggle locally accessible to them, and I find myself choosing forms—political journalism, poetry—that seem, based on vague intuitions that may well be inaccurate, somewhat more likely to reach those people. So I guess, in general, my approach to form is often a question of audience: who do I want to reach, and with what formal strategies am I most likely to reach them, in a way that will satisfy both me and them?
2. You have dedicated Plenitude to “my comrades”. Clearly, even though your poems reveal a sense of being an ‘outsider’, you have a strong sense of your place within a community. It is interesting that you use the term ‘comrade’ instead of ‘colleague’ or ‘friend’ or ‘companion’, however, as it is usually associated with a period of gathering together against a common foe. Can you describe the community you refer to as comrades, and are you also speaking to people outside of that group? Plus, what do you hope these poems will say that you have not already articulated to your comrades? Are these poems speaking to new ideas for you and them, and why have you chosen poetry to impart these messages rather than fiction, or plays, or music?
Thanks for attending to that comrade vs. friend (etc.) distinction! It’s an important one for me. I’m drawn to the word and category “comrade” because I think it suggests something actually pretty distinct from those other categories: a comrade is, as you say, someone with whom you’re in solidarity against a common enemy, alongside whom you struggle. And who, for that reason, often shares with you some elements of consciousness and sensibility. And that person may be your friend; also they may not be! But you have a common project and often some shared circumstances, and that gives you a particular kind of bond, which can be as powerful as friendship even if you’re not friends in a typical sense. So that’s the reader to whom the book is dedicated, and whom it’s addressing, not exclusively but primarily. Not only my pals, but a broader category of people who share some of my core intuitions about and desires for the world. And why poetry? In part because I find it can take more or less familiar ideas or questions or problems and illuminate their contradictions in a way that can be helpful and moving, at least to me.
3. On March 1, 2021, in Briarpatch magazine you published a version of ‘a simile is more honest than a metaphor’ that is different from what is in the book, and again on March 3, 2020, in Briarpatch published a different version of ‘movement’. These two poems appear in Plenitude with some different line breaks and different wordage. In fact, you talk with Emily Chou in Prism International magazine in the Fall of 2020 about making a change to ‘Tight Pants’, a poem that they published. All of this draws up curiosity about your process as a writer. I’ve compared the versions of those poems and – revealing my own taste – in some cases I like the line breaks and wordage in the original more than what appears in the book. Things such as line breaks are often a very subjective choice, which obviously may differ at different points in an author’s life. So I wonder, a) do you feel comfortable with those pieces now? b) are you satisfied with the other poems in the book or noting something you wished you’d changed? and c) is there a point at which you can say ‘close enough’ and stop revising your poems?
DSK: Oh, that’s funny that you prefer some of the earlier versions! Maybe I messed the poems up lol. I tweak my work compulsively and endlessly, and I was working with an editor, A. Light Zachary, who’s at least as “detail-oriented” as I am; the poems all went through a rigorous, months-long process of revision in conversation with Light. I hope mostly they evolved for the better, though of course readers’ mileage may vary. I think I feel pretty good about the poems as they show up in the book, though it seems inevitable that I’ll keep wanting to change things about them, and I might in fact change things about them for public readings. During the editorial process for the book, the “close enough” stopping point for a given poem was generally just, like, do Light and I agree enough to stop debating this line break? The editorial collaboration created those goalposts; what constituted “done” was determined more by relationship, i.e. my relationship with Light, than by any other measure.
4. How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point, or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
I’d love for it to be a book that complicates that distinction! Able, that is, to challenge the notion that politics and aesthetics or politics and culture can ever be fully disarticulated from each other and the notion that the relationship between them is straightforward. I think artworks are determined in a million subtle ways by the political structures that surround them, and I think it’s cool for art to try to bring those connections to light and say something true about them, even if it can’t fully escape their determinations.
5. Can you reflect on any social contexts that might have been inspiring or generative for this work?
DSK: Volunteering with prisoners and former prisoners. Becoming active in some social movement organizing in Toronto, like the Fight For $15 [an hour] and Fairness campaign, IfNotNow Toronto, and the network Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty, which five comrades and I started a few years ago to try to multiply and deepen connections between artists and radical political organizers. Coming out as trans, in various non-linear stages. Doing all of that at around the same time. (My astrology-minded friends might summarize the life moment in question as my Saturn return.)
6. What would you say is the most fundamental difference between your earlier work and this new collection?
DSK: The new collection makes the gay stuff much more explicit! It’s also way more critical about its politics, I think. The earlier work had politics, of course, but they were largely unexamined and contradictory and not thematized by the work, whose conscious subject matter was love or sex or religion or alienation, etc. The new collection is also about those things, but it’s much more actively interested in the social and political factors that shape them, factors that can often appear to be trans-political or apolitical.
7. How would you characterize the stance taken by this work in relation to the most immediate socio-cultural concerns of the readers it is intended for?
DSK: Curious, open, indeterminate, asking questions to which I don’t have simple answers and, often, to which the answers are just generally not very clear. The book also doesn’t sentimentalize that lack of answers. We desperately need answers, practical and theoretical ones, to the pressing social problems of our time; an “I just ask questions, I don’t need to know the answers” posture too easily lapses into a kind of quietism, an honourable seeking after humility at a time when we absolutely also need the boldness to act, and the insight to act effectually. The questions are a means of getting there, not an end in themselves, for the most part. The book takes that stance.
8. Are any aspects of the book that is autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?
DSK: I think I used the poems to experiment with possibilities for living, to try stuff on, either in advance of or simultaneous with my attempting those possibilities in non-literary ways. When I wrote the earliest drafts of the book’s most apparently autobiographical poems, they were more speculative and prefigurative than documentary or confessional, even when (occasionally) operating in a confessional mode. The poem “rehearsal” reflects on these dynamics.
9. Is this book in conversation or in response to any other work? Or is it a response to a literary personality? Or a literary event?
DSK: I think it’s trying to be in conversation with social movements and political organizing more than with literary reference points or figures, though it’s definitely also in conversation with other literary authors who work in a “tradition” that might be called anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or socialist. I spent a pretty long time revising Plenitude’s notes and acknowledgments section, and it was important to me that those notes would refer not only to books and authors but also to people who make culture in ways that are less easily categorized. People whose non-literary work, and whose lives in general, reveal emancipatory possibilities.
10. In thinking of this work, could you name a source that served as an inspiration during the earlier stages but is no longer an inspiration, rather something you are currently conflicted with or even hostile towards, that you discarded between drafts?
DSK: I think when I started writing the poems that preceded and evolved into Plenitude, there was a spirit of rebellion to some of them that could flirt with being outrageous for outrageousness’s sake. That no longer interests me, and it hasn’t interested me for years, but I think at the time I needed to burn through some drafts of “fuck everything” poems to interrupt this horror I’d developed of writing the wrong thing—wrong by others’ estimation, my own, or both. I do feel you should try to write with as much care as possible, out of respect for words’ power to affect people deeply for better and for worse, but what was stopping me from writing at that time wasn’t an excess of care or some other nice-sounding obstacle, it was just plain old fear of making a mistake. Which wasn’t productive. So, to break through that wall, I wrote some rude, puerile poems, which only a couple of friends have ever seen. One borderline case did make it into the book, though. Not saying which poem it is. 🙂
Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) is the author of five previous books, including the poetry collection Hungry and the short story collection Faithful and Other Stories. Their work has been recognized with the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award, the CBC Short Story Prize, and the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Award. They organize with the network Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty (ACMJIS), among other groups, and are the founding managing editor of Midnight Sun, a magazine of socialist strategy, analysis, and culture. They live in Toronto.