The question you ask, was I writing voluntarily, is a marvelous one, and one I have asked myself every so often all my life. Does one ever write voluntarily? I suppose such people exist, people who do things simply because they volunteer to do them. The moment of volunteerism in Mercury occurs on its final page and it’s a bit cryptic. Perhaps this shall not make sense to the casual reader, but in many ways the magic at work in Mercury consists of me volunteering to do what I am already in any case compelled by forces external and numinous to do.
People who wake up one day and decide they’ve had a good career breaking horses and running the numbers, why not sit down and write a poem… I have nothing against these people because writing a poem is always a good thing to do. These people are perhaps my distant cousins but they are not my sisters. Alejandro Jodorowsky prescribes morning poetry writing to every living human as excellent medicine, as a kind of universal nerve tonic, and I think he’s right; so that would be a kind of voluntary poetry writing that would be great, truly a health. I can see myself doing that, although I don’t do it now. I think if I could do that then I could write my own gay science like Nietzsche’s gay science: the book of my great health.
That said Mercury is of course also a book meant to take your temperature and harmonize your chakras and do acupuncture on you and improve your overall health.
My best writing seems to have to be forced from me by some other force but that force has to be one whose power I agree to serve.
What I like to work at and what I was very careful in the assembly of, in Mercury, is a ground, a field, a structure in which the poems can resonate together as much more than merely themselves. And that takes voluntary work, and it is work I enjoy doing pedantically and maniacally, over and over until it is almost right.
To write the science fiction novel I have planned will require real physical supports, four walls and a door, a regular drug supply, good light, someone to help out around the garden (because I will want to have an herb garden for the novel), and trees, and a large bed in which to dream. I wrote many of the poems you say sound petulant on my Blackberry in the summertime. The best state for writing poems, for me, is having enough money to eat and living in the same place for a little while (not too long), having a big bed, and being in love. Then whatever it is that forces me to write the poems does so without hurting me too much, only as much as it hurts to reach the total nadir of existence that one can touch on any given day or night and that can only be exited through a poem. I admit to you Carina that there are times when I am sure I would die if I weren’t writing right now. How can i know? It is like that nightmare or ghost story about the woman with the ribbon round her neck. All that said I think I am through writing poems for a while, maybe forever.
Ariana Reines interviewed by Carina Finn
