” The Sugar Book is a book about the intensity of art—and the pervasive anxieties about it, the attempts to restrict it, the rhetoric we use to discuss this discomforting, exhilarating, horrifying, possibly enslaving experience. So it goes from Ezra Pound’s translation-corpses and “corpse language” of Victorian poetry,  to Blanchot’s image-as-corpse (and/or broken tool), to Conceptualism’s simultaneous prudishness (“poetry is dead,” to write poetry is “necrophilic,” “poetry is gross!”) and violence toward poetry (which is why I rewrite the kill list in “the heart of glamour”). The epigraph is an insane quote from Lars Norén’s diaries—about cutting down his own aesthetic to something closer to surveillance footage—that I then try to destroy even as I feel seduced by it.”

Over on the Harriet Website, Mia You and I had a very extensive and in-depth conversation about translation, violence, ESL and poetry.