Crip Poetics and the Logic of Error: an Interview with David Greenspan
Interviewed by b mossotti

b mossotti: As I bring you back to Error (Antiphony, 2024), I want to re-affirm the power of this collection. Through fragment, memory, and anti-logical language you bridge error with meaning-making. I am struck by the freshness that can be found in errors, in the carefulness of error-izing language. How has this collection remained with you, both on the page and in the body?  

David Greenspan: Let me begin by saying thank you, b, for taking the time to sit with these fragments, memories, and anti-logics. It’s a wonderful feeling to be asked to revisit my attempts, slightly frightening, too, but in a generative manner. So thank you for your thoughtful, engaged questions. 

The collection’s remained with me in a literal way in that I’m still tinkering. Error was drawn from a larger project, titled Glitch, Michigan, that sprawls. I thought it had congealed but am not so sure anymore. I’m an inveterate tinkerer. I can’t not. Trying to tinker in a way that’s helpful to the project, its mistakes and miscalculations, its errors, is the hardest thing. We’ll see if I’ve been doing that. 

BM: I read your interview with Southeast Review as I contemplated Error. When describing this ‘poetics of error’ you say, 

“What is this but the inadequacy of language in the face of agreed-upon symbols and meaning; or the inadequacy of failure to queer and error to crip? But then one pauses and finds the non-disciplinary and non-logical. This pause is a way to elongate reading and meaning-making experiences, to stretch and distort them in ways that feel generative in all senses.” 

I’m struck by this question, but also drawn towards the idea of the pause. In Error you write, “What garage? You unwanted as pennies in. Sweat while limestone, run once wheat.” Here, for example, the period breaks the logic of the sentence, requiring a pause. How do the mechanics of language (i.e. periods, enjambment) allow for a ‘cripping’ of language through the use of caesura? What is the relationship between punctuation and hearing on the page? 

DG: The mechanics of any system are in so many ways the most interesting parts. Focusing down to language, grammar and syntax are verb-like in that they knead and manipulate the words within their system(s). What’s more of a verb: the word sprint or the question mark which stops the reader’s eye after sprint? We’ve run into a wall as surely as the coyote in old cartoons. I guess this type of expected punctuation might actually be an anti-verb or a moment of shift between kinetic and potential energies. It FEELS powerful, especially when shuffling when and where punctuation appears. It seems to me, and I suspect to you too based on your question, a motion we might name cripped. Our consciousness continues even as our body has stopped. Our brain tries to make meaning in a novel way. We exist, even if ever so briefly, outside of received frameworks of sense. 

This cripped motion is also the relationship between punctuation and hearing, to address the second part of your question and its wonderful framing. Punctuation stops the eye briefly, the mind attempts sense-making, the eye continues because the punctuation occurred in a strange location relative to an expected grammatical pause, the mind tries to balance the process of sense-making with the process of reading, the whole system glitches. That’s what it’s often like when I listen to others. I’ve described this elsewhere as my attempt to wire disability into the text or encode rather than evoke. I like to think it echoes something from one of Jack Spicer’s letters in After Lorca. Spicer writes:

Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other.

Setting aside the gendering of “dead men”, my attempt to wire disability into a text is also my attempt to correspond to Spicer, Lorca, and countless other poets of varied genders and states of living/non-living. 

BM: Further on cripping language, I am interested in the precarity of time, of the temporal in this collection. It brought my mind to disability scholar Ellen Samuels’ essay, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, which contributes to the concept of ‘crip time’ – a mode of temporality specific to disability. In the essay, they write about betweenness, the often interstitial modes of time that disability, specifically chronic illness, requires. I am curious, after reading Error, how the idea of crip time might influence your poetics. In other words, how does the trauma//grief of your childhood through an undiagnosed auditory processing disorder act as a hinge for memory, time? 

DG: I’m excited to think through this question because I’m a baby scholar and thinker of crip time, of disability studies at large, by which I mean I find Samuels’ ideas revelatory. Samuels and other – notably Ato Quayson, Lennard Davis, and Leah Parker, a former teacher to whom I’m forever grateful – have created methods that explain my lived experience in ways I hadn’t considered. They’ve answered questions I wasn’t aware I asked. Reading and sitting with their ideas is narcotic without lethargy. I jump up surprised, recharged, and rearranged. 

I’m not sure how trauma and grief function as hinge for memory and time, crip or otherwise, other than to say they do. I suspect it has something to do with how memory is stored and accessed, which has to do with neurochemistry and a whole lot of things I know nothing about. Moving to how these hinges are experienced, which is to say the social dimensions of crip time, I grew up terrified of my parents and other children. This terror led me to experience life as a series of discreet moments rather than a forward passage. Moments started, stopped, reoccurred. Memory of these moments do the same. They move of their own volition. I find myself unable to stop picking at these scabs which themselves refuse to stay scabbed. I don’t love the violent connotation I’ve just evoked, but I also don’t have another metaphor that captures the sharpness of the memories. 

BM: This text is close to gender (“Every father yellows”, “Money / mothers the toy”, “Masculine as nothing under / play. I do. I do / not need to say father was American / man. But did.”). As a reader, I felt this closeness through critique – if logic is ‘Man’, what is error, anti-logic? How does the gendering of knowledge drive your writing, your inquiry to language?

DG: The trite answer is that error and anti-logic is feminine and traditional, received knowledge is masculine. I say trite because I’m not convinced this binary serves a generative purpose. It maintains the framework even if a thought slips outside. To attempt generation, I’ll say that error and anti-logic represent a dialectic between gender and whatever’s other than gender. They disrupt normative thought, and time to continue our discussion of crip time, to open space for something else. What is that something else? I don’t know and I’m less interested in defining it than I am in thinking through how to get there. Process v. product. I’ll acknowledge here that’s a cop out and also part of a broader intellectualization and fetishization of the revolutionary I struggle with. If I don’t define the new space as it relates to knowledge creation, then I leave that space open to whoever does define it. Maybe I’m thinking my way to collective action: I don’t have to define this space because a comrade will.  

BM: More broadly, could you talk to me about your relationship with the line? In Error, error is centered in the making of the line. How has this relationship shifted or expanded in your current writing? 

DG: The line has so much energy in the abstract, but the moment I sit down and engage with it, especially when using traditional grammar and syntax inside of it, it loses that energy. I think this is my way of saying I’m afraid of the line. I don’t ever feel that I’ve lived up to the opportunity it offers. 

My current writing is nonexistent. I teach technical writing to engineering students and have been beaten into a state of dullness by the semester. This past summer was generative and toward the end, as the days boiled and moved slower than I thought possible, I started writing in something like a form: short lines (max ten words), two- or three-line stanzas, as little punctuation as possible. The lines were mostly self-contained statements though sometimes spilled over. I was able to get one poem close to a state of completeness. I titled this poem “In Adoration”, which fits with its content but also now feels like a statement toward the line. I adore it, worship it, and fear it. I work out a poetics through fear and trembling. 

BM: Twice now you’ve brought up the notion of fear and terror – both in relation to the poetic line and to memories of growing up. Fear provides the body with choices: face or flee. I’m curious to hear more about this ‘trembling’; in what ways might terror, if at all, function as a generative force, rather than a stoppage of thought, language, or embodiment?

DG: I experience fear, and its less acute cousins shame and embarrassment, as social. I’m afraid of people, what they think, what they’ll do. This anxiety swirls around my head, so my fear is social but also deeply internal. It’s thought. Any generative contours of fear and terror come from the fact that their particular variety of thought defamiliarizes, transforms the world into something other-than-itself. They allow one to see the stone as both stonier and scarier, to appropriate Shklovsky’s dictum. Restraining fear and terror to the line, they feel in some ways like a challenge. Will I be able to live up to the line this time? The answer is always no, which means I’ll return again and again. 

BM: Connecting this discussion to other work, in your poem “We eat every part of the egg yes the shell yes the note inside” there is an embodiment of language similar to that of Error – “We dress like ambitious / vowels,”. Could you share more about how you utilize devices such as vowels, homophones, and metaphor for challenging normative poetics or creating ‘crip’ poetics?

DG: Crip poetics is a great formulation. If there’s crip time, then there should be a cripped poetics, too. I love it. Vowels elongate, they’re the trough of a word’s sound-wave, while consonants are the sharpened peaks. To move back to something we talked about earlier, the elongation of time and meaning making that vowels offer is something other than normative time and meaning. If we stay inside the vowel, ride it to its extreme possibilities, we experience time and then find meaning
that are anti. I’m in love with EE Cummings’ work and would argue that if we stay inside the vowel, we can find ourselves
“in Just- / spring          when the world is mud- / luscious the little / lame balloonman”. I don’t think it’s an accident the balloonman is lame, or “queer” and “goat-footed” later in the poem, though I will admit to an atemporal reading of queer. This character’s other-than-normativeness lets them stay in “Just- / spring”, in a “mud-luscious” world that’s “puddle wonderful”. I’d like to stay there too. (Poetry Foundation).

BM: In the endnotes of Error, you describe the work as “a questioning with no answer”. It feels true to the text, but also to many moments of life, of the collective. How do you see questioning without answers as an orientation towards inspecting normative truths, or even further, building futures on the page and in community? 

DG: I think my answer here comes in large part from the poem of mine you pulled the lines from above. The clause “We dress like ambitious / vowels” comes right before another that reads “…, like Directors // at the Museum of Knives.” While this location isn’t nearly as idyllic as “Just- / spring”, it is a position where the we of the poem – the dispossessed and disposed of – hold institutional and cultural power backed by violence. If my challenging of normative time, sense, being, poetics, et. al can be said to be revolutionary in any way, this is how. That’s a hopeful abstracted thought, but to get closer to the practical: reading the work of kindred writers and thinkers gives me so much energy. I’m renewed after I read one of Cynthia Cruz’s poems or an article by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I hope and suspect I’m not alone in this renewal. So, to question without answer is also to engage with others in the small, silent camaraderie that reading offers. 

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Error by David Greenspan is available now with Antiphony: a journal and press.

David Greenspan