BOWL OF ORANGES
I first read Jos Charles’s feeld as a Word document two years ago. I admired her first book, Safe Space, and wanted to know what she was working on next. When I started to read the poems in the new manuscript, I felt like the words were physically lifting up off my laptop screen toward my eyeballs. It was that rarest thing—a totally new sound, riffing on Donne and Chaucer, yes (Celan and Lispector also loom large), but still totally new, an unprecedented syntax to accommodate an unprecedented experience. Every poet gropes their way towards this kind of sui generis utterance, but so few of us achieve it so absolutely. “i am speeching / materialie,” she writes. I recently chatted with Jos about the book (and about unwieldiness, and oranges, and transness, and hope).
—Kaveh Akbar
KAVEH AKBAR I remember when we talked the first time you mentioned John Donne was your first favorite poet. That seems telling. I’ve been thinking about metaphysical loudness; how “Batter my heart, three person’d God, for you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend,” for instance, those staccato bursts of stressed syllables, amplify the quiet after. Like the silence that follows a gunshot—the silence of punctuated loudness that seems more quiet than regular silence. Feeld, I think, is interested in silence as an architecture—not as negative space to language, but as its bedrock. Language as negative space.
JOS CHARLES It is a quiet work—quiet in its clearing out of certain was like that. For I wanted to be severe, though—to be trans and speak for and to severity, discipline, formality.
