12 or 20 (second series) questions with Geoffrey Olsen
Geoffrey Olsen
is the author of
Nerves Between Song
(Beautiful Days Press 2024) and seven chapbooks, most recently
In Sleep the Searing
(New Mundo Press 2025) and
Neck Field
(Portable Press @Yo-yo Labs 2025). He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 1 - How did your first book orchapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to yourprevious? How does it feel different?
The primary change for me is that thecreation of NervesBetween Song allowed me toconceive of writing “books”. As a young poet, I could write series -- 5-7 poems-- before losing focus, then I eventually shifted to chapbook length forms forthe next decade of writing. NBS accumulatesfrom these 10 - 20 poem series. Now, I write in terms of the book-length work,as if the book gave me permission for this practice.
I feel more assured in my activity aspoet and it’s been nice to have more people reach out to me. More friendships,more sense of the visible nexus of poets and our community that invigorates thewriting.
In some ways, Nerves Between Song is my“previous work”: the oldest poems in the book are over a decade old, thoughedited and changed over that time. Across my work there’s an attention to themotion of the poem -- a sense that the poem beckons, but does not dictatemeaning. The writing that follows is always going to play against the impulsesdriving the previous work, as I try to ascertain what new possibilities canemerge.
2 - How did you come to poetryfirst, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wanted to write fiction at first: itseemed the only way to be a writer. Isoon realized that I was not interested in narrative, in character, and thatinstead I was interested in the emergence of detail and language as in motion.I’ve always been drawn to improvisation when it comes to creative activity, andpoetry seemed the ideal medium for me to explore this.
3 - How long does it take tostart any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly,or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their finalshape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Each work is continuous on some level,though I have been interested in exploring particular forms. Despite writingwithin somewhat similar structures throughout my work, on some level it isimpossible to repeat the form of the poem as it moves with a continuallyaltering pulse of consciousness. We respond to unceasing change: the conduitsof material crisis promulgate poetic intent. Writing exists as accumulatinggesture of undercurrent and submerged energy.
Poems start in motion and do not changemuch from initial writing. There’s a pruning of the work that always happens:cutting away here and there, growing out other aspects.
4 - Where does a poem usuallybegin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into alarger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?
It is difficult to think of the shortpieces that I write over time and the final book itself as distinct. It tendsto morph as it moves along. That said, my recent manuscript, Rend, -- a portion of this has just beenpublished as the chapbook InSleep the Searing -- wasintentionally prepared as a book-length series of formally united poems: myfirst time writing a sustained work where the form is stable andself-contained, rather than determined in its gradual unfolding over a seriesof poems.
5 - Are public readings partof or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoysdoing readings?
I love doing readings! In the past, Iwould get so nervous and do them rarely, but I’m fortunate to have had enoughopportunities to do them over the years so that the anxiety they generate canbe channeled into excitement. I want to think more about my reading practice,particularly in relation to music. Readings with the musician Ceremonial Abyss,who generates a sonic field alongside the poetry, have been incredibleexperiences and helped me hear the work in new ways. I know I’m not alone inthis -- Ceremonial Abyss has been relentlessly touring and reading with so manypoets across the US. It’s energizing to see the collaborations he’s convening,not just with him but with other musicians, such as with composer and movementartist Lia Simone, who performed with poets Jared Daniel Fagen and Jessica Elsaesser the evening of my first reading with Ceremonial Abyss.
6 - Do you have anytheoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are youtrying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questionsare?
This is a huge question! The currentquestion for me is how can the US continue to exist in this way where itexploits beings all over the planet so as to perpetuate the control of thewealthy? And then the second question, which comes from this, is where doespoetry arrive and occur in this calamity? What is the space of imagination asinterwoven with our concerns for survival? I also wonder at what can be “said”with the poem, and become more immersed in it as beautiful noise, churningwithin what I experience, what I want to know, what I fail to understand, andyet still drawn to a more abstract music that moves with this, vacated of me.There’s always a certain skepticism involved in my approach to language, andwith that a lot of uncertainty.
7 – What do you see thecurrent role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? Whatdo you think the role of the writer should be?
Reading Eleni Stecoupolous’s wonderfulnew book Dreaming in the Fault Zone: APoetics of Healing reminded me of the George Oppen quote that poets imagine themselves “legislators of the unacknowledged”. This brings to mind Robert Kocik’s call for poets to make law. I don’t know where I stand. In the unknownprobably.
8 - Do you find the process ofworking with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with Beautiful Days cofoundersand editors Joshua Wilkerson and George Fragopoulos was such a satisfying andsupportive experience. They were very thoughtful about the work and onlylightly intervened to refine NervesBetween Song. Poet and novelist Brenda Iijima, who published my chapbook NECK FIELD several months ago, is alongtime friend and influence. I am deeply fortunate to have her as an astutereader of my work for almost two decades now, and as an editor she helped mehone in on the underlying root structure of the poems. It’s essential!
9 - What is the best piece ofadvice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Alan Davies once told me that one has todo the same thing again and again first before the new emerges, but to do thiswithout repetition. Something about being in the dialectical tension of therepetition and the seemingly new is where poetry happens for me. I feel theprocess is generating a personal syntax, and rhythm, as if one is improvisingon an instrument. That all the discipline is turning toward the practice inmotion.
10 - What kind of writingroutine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day(for you) begin?
My practice is centered on reading andlistening. “Writing” is a continuous occurrence, typically inside as I moveabout my day. I usually write in the interstices of my reading, since withpoetry or theory and then turning to my notebook and writing out a poem. Ialways handwrite poems and type them out usually months later.
I work a fulltime job as a staff at theNew School, so most days start with a commute, but I do try to read poetry inthe morning.
11 - When your writing getsstalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)inspiration?
Back to music, back to reading, back tofilm. Medium transfer transmutes stall into flow.
12 - What fragrance remindsyou of home?
Decaying leaves. I grew up on the edge ofa forest. Teenage afternoons were spent on the paths that ran through thewoods. I just would walk and be slightly spooked by the surroundings.
13 - David W. McFadden oncesaid that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influenceyour work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music always and often film. The poetryI’ve been working on lately has been influenced by electro-acoustic music andfield recordings, and often pieces of music that operate in both genres. Taku Unami and Toshiyo Tsunoda’s Wovenland series heavily influenced my recentchapbook NECKFIELD, particularlytheir attention to estranging “natural” sounds, generating a sort ofanti-pastoral of parks and streams and other populated outdoor spaces. Theestablished the field in which the horrors of the genocide in Gaza werereverberating through my daily attention and remain the focus of my politicalactivity outside of poetry. My work is (for better or worse) never direct, yetsomething about how they were approaching sound obliquely let me register morein the poems the dire urgency of this moment, when the United States continuesto arm Israel’s war machine over 600 days into this intensification of thegenocide.
As for film, I’m still trying to clarifyits direct importance to my work. I often reference films in my poems --frequently it’s been the filmmakers or . They both offer a duration of image that feels like thinking. Ilike to write alongside and into the feeling that opens up.
Recent work has been engaging with thefilms of Robert Beavers after I had the chance to see many of his films at aretrospective at the Anthology Film Archives. Rebecca Rutkoff’s incrediblerecent book on his work, Double Vision:On the Cinema of Robert Beavers led me to read his film almost as poetry,and as a medium of language, even if that may not have been his intent. I’minto rendering as poetry that which cannot be truly held by it.
14 - What other writers orwritings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My core poets: Leslie Scalapino, Will Alexander, Larry Eigner, P. Inman, JH Prynne, Myung Mi Kim, Roberto Harrison,kari edwards, Brenda Iijima, Nathaniel Mackey.
For theory (recently): Samir Amin,Vladimir Lenin, Raymond Williams
15 - What would you like to dothat you haven't yet done?
Write many essays and reviews. This hasbeen something I’ve found very challenging for some reason. It feels abrasivein relation to my poetry practice, requiring a focus that does not come to meeasily. I would also like to write a long poem, though this may or may notalready be underway.
16 - If you could pick anyother occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do youthink you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I honestly don’t know how to answer this.Maybe a musician, though part of why I became a poet in the first place isbecause that dream of music collapsed pretty quickly.
17 - What made you write, asopposed to doing something else?
I wanted to be a musician at first -- Iplay the piano, pretty much purely improvisation in solitude. When I began torecognize that wasn’t going to go anywhere, I switched to poetry as animprovisational mode that seemed more suit me much more, and not requireperforming with others, which seemed impossible at the time.
18 - What was the last greatbook you read? What was the last great film?
The last great film was Frederick Wiseman’s Essene: his documentary of a Benedictine monastery in upstate NewYork, released on public television in the 70s. There is a beautiful intimacyand fragility to how the monks relate to each other. It was moving, even ifreligion is not a part of my existence.
The last great book is challenging so Iwill list three! Tessa Bolsover’s Craneis a uniquely ambitious work that straddles theory and poetry. I was raptreading Jennifer Soong’s My EarliestPerson. Thomas Delahaye’s Numéraire wasa work that truly surprised me, a work that delights as the poetry turns inwardon itself.
19 - What are you currentlyworking on?
I started a second manuscript in 2021while I finished editing Nerves BetweenSong and submitted it for publication (which took three years from thecompletion of the MS).
This work, Rend is much more dense and led by sound that the more diffuse andambient Nerves Between Song.
While wrapping this work up on Rend, I have started a long poem. It’snot clear to me yet what this will be as it’s still unfolding. I want it to besomething unspooling wildy, playing with the sentence, which is not usually thelevel I operate on.
