Ariel Goldberg on Criticism, Queer Art, and Polemics

Ariel Goldberg and I discussed their new book The Estrangement Principle during their last visit to the Bay Area. We have been friends for about ten years and although my feelings about their project are complicated and conflicted, I’m grateful for The Estrangement Principle as a generator of valuable conversations. I appreciate the risks Ariel took in exploring work of queer artists, writers, and performers that are in close social proximity to them. What I value most is Ariel’s willingness to exchange thoughts about the book, even and especially those that are less favorable. This interview is a conversation between friends.

Syd Staiti: Did you write The Estrangement Principle with a particular audience in mind? Is it written for young readers who are looking for a roadmap of contemporary queer art, or more for the artists and writers who appear in the book and those who know them?

Ariel Goldberg: I began to write this book to simply fill a void I felt and lived. Most of the time I was talking to myself and to my best friend Jess. I imagined an intimate audience. I wasn’t thinking about audience as much as the necessity to draw connections and articulate what I found to be silences.

At times, I had fun imagining a “queer theorist” reading the book because I imagined the energy driving the book as the artist fighting back—speaking for themself. I love the idea of young readers (who inevitably will also know so much more about so many other things than me—a grandpa at 34 years old), as well as those whose work I write about. I wanted to honor a certain group of lesbian experimental writers and of course I imagined them reading the book but when I did, I also imagined them thinking Ariel got it all wrong!

SS: It’s been five years since starting the book.

AG: Not including the sixth year, which was editing; and the seventh year which is now, reading from it and talking to people who have read the book. It’s an ongoing thing.

SS: How do you feel about the book existing in the world? Have your thoughts about it changed over the years?

AG: I think I’m proud of it most when I can see it’s a project that has been challenging for me at every turn. There’s never a moment of comfort. I feel like it’s up my ass all the time! The hardest thing about the book being in the world—and the duration of it—has been that I’m acutely aware of certain imperfections with it. I think the book at times comes off with an air of magnanimous support, but it started as a fierce polemic. Over the years it softened because I started to become implicated and gain agency within the communities that I was announcing myself to, which happens by virtue of growing older and creating friendships and connections and seeing that things are complicated. I think my ideas became tempered, and then I would try to reignite the polemicist. It’s kind of like the rolling hills option on the elliptical trainer!

There are some parts of the book that even now I would have written differently or added more writers and artists to. My nod towards grassroots activism inside the book and the epidemic of trans women of color being murdered in the US and across the world is, I think, handled with a roughness and uncertainty that I’ve continued to think about. How can a white, trans dyke identified writer acknowledge, but also not try to speak for, what is not direct experience?

“I’m proud of the book most when I can see it’s a project that has been challenging for me at every turn. There’s never a moment of comfort. I feel like it’s up my ass all the time!”

SS: I appreciated those moments when the original scope of your book expanded out to cover those less aesthetic and more political issues.

AG: Urgencies.

SS: It’s interesting you say the polemicist appears like rolling hills. I saw a lot of ambivalence in the book too, and it seemed like the ambivalence and the polemic were not so much alternating as being held together at the same time. It’s odd because these two things are so incongruous, but in the book they seem to occupy the same space. I wonder if you have thoughts about that, or whether that was an intentional thing.

AG: I think that’s an unspoken methodology of how it’s difficult to make definitions or huge statements. I want to value the place for the gray area as much as possible. Of course I approached this not as an academic but as a poet, so I was doing close readings of things that people usually don’t do, like a bio or a press release or wall text in a museum show or the way a press decides to frame an author.

It’s taken for granted that queer art is a thing; I wanted to stop before that “given” and move into this sort of poetic digression and keep digressing to argue that we shouldn’t take this for granted. I think what we are still seeing is that the scholars are studying artists and there’s a power dynamic. I wanted to disrupt that. Inhabiting both places is also a reflection of how I imagined the book to inhabit the realm of performance or experiment in that I just pretended to be a scholar even though I had no dissertation advisor.

SS: I have always known you to perform in your projects; even The Photographer book was based on performances that I saw you do in the Bay Area.

AG: I wrote and performed the poetry at one of the most photographed places in the US, the Golden Gate Bridge. And then the lectures in that book I performed at Small Press Traffic in Poets’ Theater.

SS: With your performance background and the ways you’ve used characters in the past, I was wondering if the speaker in The Estrangement Principle was a performer, a caricature of Ariel Goldberg. The voice feels so close to you that I wasn’t sure. There were these moments of mimicry. You talk early on in the book about the film The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye. It felt like there was a relational thing happening there, where Cheryl Dunye made a film in which the main character, Cheryl, played by herself, is making a movie about her research, she’s going to archives, doing a certain kind of research—

AG: At public libraries, in people’s living rooms!

SS: Right, and you’re doing something similar in your book. And there are other moments of mimicry.

AG: I do locate cross genre, historical, critical, exploratory work as my model, also Tisa Bryant’s book Unexplained Presence, as a formally hybridized way to intervene on identity and representation.

SS: Yes.

AG: And that’s where you enter into the book. I remember when I came to your house for the first time and you were lending me a huge stack of language poetry books, or something, and I remember you just got Tisa Bryant’s book from Moe’s and you said “I’m not lending this to you cause I just got it.”

SS: Well okay. Now we’re going to talk about memory, my friend, because—

AG: Because that’s not true?

SS: That’s not what I remember! And I’ll be very honest with you, I read this book and that’s on page 10 or 15 or 21 or whatever, very early, and I put it down and couldn’t read it for a couple of weeks because I was so angry at you.

AG: Oh no!

SS: My memory was that I lent you Unexplained Presence and after a while I asked for it back because it was new and I hadn’t read it yet.

AG: Oh, wow, I should’ve ran that by you. I’m so sorry, Syd.

SS: But who knows. No, it’s fine, but it made me think.

AG: I did clear a lot of stuff with people but I think with some things, I didn’t think it implicated the person in any way so . . . Did you feel misrepresented?

SS: It made me seem ungenerous in a certain way. And I felt like I had been so generous.

AG: Thanks for still being my friend despite being angry.

SS: Well after putting it down for a while I was able to go back to it and have many thoughts about the book that are unrelated to my little ego.

AG: Some people are pointing out small inaccuracies or exclusions or how they feel about how they’re represented or not represented in the book. So that’s been really paranoia-inducing; but I also have to just work through it, let it go, and trust that people will see the book as an endeavor. It involves so many real people whose lives and work are so crucial and imperative to the existence of my own.

SS: Well that’s part of the question I had: there are so many people in it and it’s all very close to you, and so I wondered if you, the writer Ariel Goldberg, is speaking in the book, or if there’s a character that is speaking in the book as Ariel Goldberg. Did you create a persona that’s at a remove from yourself or is that you talking?

AG: It’s not me. It became something else, and I had to run with the personification that I was developing. I was growing beyond my inquiry probably two years into it, where I was starting to understand what my inquiry originally was and who I was developing to be. The book became a time capsule of what I had learned, which was something more lived. What I learned in the process of writing the book became an unspoken fabric of my being. It prepared me, in a sense, to be unprepared.

I often refer to the book as a YA novel. I think it has a young adult flair to it because I chose the persona of somebody who’s wandering, who depends largely on peers and books to guide them. I withheld from going all the way with the scholarly gestures. I read books or zines two or three times, studied them, but I did not do an oral history, for example on one chapter’s texts, Clamour, the “dyke zine,” which Renee Gladman edited from 1996-99. I wanted to write the book I didn’t have when I felt lost, and provide questions more than definitive histories.

“The book became a time capsule of what I had learned, which was something more lived. What I learned in the process of writing the book became an unspoken fabric of my being.”

SS: Some people might approach the book thinking that you’re doing an official scholarship in a certain kind of way, and that’s not what it does at all.

AG: I write with convoluted sentence structures and poetic obfuscations. I say I’m not an academic, but I’ve gone to private universities. and I have a masters, and I am a college professor. Who gives a shit that I don’t have a PhD. I’ve been a lowly adjunct but I am in that world; it’s important for me to acknowledge that.

SS: Yeah. But the book performs other genres. It’s critical but it’s also like a quest, an individual person’s journey . . . It even makes me think about a photographer in a certain way.

AG: That’s an analogy I do reference explicitly in the book. I’m watching, and I’m at the surface.

SS: And you’re taking snapshots, because you’re not doing a whole lot of exposition.

AG: I don’t go deep, I jump.

SS: Yeah, you stop at things, look from different angles, take a shot, take a snap, and then you move on to something else.

AG: That’s how my brain works—even my “line break” poetry is very frenetic. Each photo a caption. I’ve arrived at that form. And that’s how I edit also. I write an excess of crap, and then I have to sift through it to find a good line. It’s like shooting a roll and finding one good shot.

SS: Do you want to talk about May Lion?

AG: Oh I love talking about May Lion. May is a source of great pleasure for me. If I didn’t have May Lion, this book would’ve been torture I think. Should we say who May Lion is, first of all?

SS: You create May Lion as a way to get closer to Kay Ryan’s mostly hidden lesbianism, right? Kay Ryan is a lesbian, but her work never shows this.

AG: Except the dedications to her late wife Carol.

SS: And then this sort of alter ego is created, May Lion, who can kind of live out the unspoken.

AG: Yeah, May is an erotic poet. She’s a lesbian erotic poet. She pronouns. No they. I think that was also a rupture between me and May. I get to be my non-binary self and not lose my Democracy Now! baby tee roots, if you know what I mean.

SS: The thing that fascinated me is that through your performances of May Lion, this crucial object comes into play: the Silence=Death t-shirt. As you look closer at the t-shirt as a representation worn by your character, all these other questions come up, conversations that bring you to a whole different place. You say, “May represents one of my first intergenerational conversations, and it was an imaginary conversation that made me seek out real conversations about dyke visibility, the AIDS epidemic, and how they intersect.” So what started out as an alter ego created because Kay Ryan’s poems don’t have lesbian content becomes this much bigger thing, about bigger issues, and it’s the character that brought you there.

AG: May became on the one hand playful and, on the other hand, out of my control. Why did it bother me that Kay Ryan does not write about her sex life? That is a preposterous expectation of a reader. The reason I realized I had such an absurd desire is because lesbian sex life writ large in literature is repressed. We have very few people historically, in the United States, openly writing lesbian sex narratives. Poetry is repressed in this country; if poetry isn’t even honored, then lesbian poetry certainly isn’t. With Kay Ryan as the official poet of the United States, I wanted more than what I was getting. I wanted Kay Ryan to wear ACT-UP’s Silence=Death t-shirt. Ryan navigated a butch presentation as Poet Laureate; she did it with a lot of poise and self-preservation, and I respect her for that. Of course I wanted her to have a zero point fade from the barber down the street from the Library of Congress, but she probably gets a scissor cut. Who knows.

I don’t want my book so much to be a critique of Kay Ryan, but a critique of the way that literature is produced and supported in this country. I wanted to end the book with May Lion because she is triumphant and goofy and wears her emotions on her sleeve.

This is also the chapter I discuss HIV/AIDS activism. It’s the chapter where I talk about Jack Waters and Peter Cramer’s collaborative works. It’s where I talk about Visual AIDS the organization. It’s where I talk about the failure of Alex Dimitrov’s Wild Boys Salon and all it represented. So a lot goes down in this chapter and May Lion became the bridge.

“Poetry is repressed in this country; if poetry isn’t even honored, then lesbian poetry certainly isn’t.”

AG: Why don’t you tell me what you don’t like about the book?

SS: It’s complicated. If I had problems on the level of how you handled race, for instance, I would tell you. But I’m reading into things. The book allows for a lot of misreading, or it sort of demands that the reader consider what your intentions were. Usually I don’t think or care about author intentions, but in this case I kept wondering why you wrote the book in this way. I didn’t feel the need to talk with you because it’s about tone and style or something. I mean the book opens doors to conversation. I’ve had very lively conversations about it, so that’s important. But let me see if I can try to explain . . .

AG: I’m ready, I can take it!

SS: On the one hand, because of the thing with me, I was wondering if you were actively misremembering things in order to serve the goals of the book, like using real people as figures to make a certain point.

AG: No. I thought my memory of you not lending me that book was accurate. That is my bad memory, and I stand corrected. I will edit it in the next edition if it shall ever come to fruition.

SS: No don’t bother, that means nothing. But it happens in other moments too.

AG: Look, we have to pretend that we’re not friends with people—or have friends of friends—when trying to make ideas sometimes, and that’s a mean thing to say. If we’re wedded to making everybody feel noble, how can we observe? Mistakes or problems—my own especially—in writing this are what’s important to look at. There was another line that was flagged by somebody when editing as offensive, because it referred to a poet as being less known as some other poets, but I kept it.

SS: So that’s what I’m talking about. Those moments when people flagged certain things, and you intentionally kept them.

AG: Because if I stripped it all away I wouldn’t have the polemic. The polemicist has to take risks.

SS: I’m confused about the idea of your book as a polemic because the topic itself is not controversial or contested. What is queer art, how does it get utilized by curators, artists, publishers to designate something or to be used as a kind of branding, is a pretty banal topic on its own.

What we’re calling the polemic is more about your style of discourse. You took on the role of a critic rather than a scholar. As in, rather than looking at a range of work on its own terms and allowing it to guide the framework, your critic determined a specific lens through which all the work would be viewed, and centered their self in relation to it. The characteristics of this critic, or, “fierce polemicist” were ambivalence, vulnerability, uncertainty, and a constantly shifting center—which almost felt like a trick being played on the reader, because despite all of that, they were still making strong and critical pronouncements from a self-appointed position of power.

AG: It’s interesting you use the word tricked, feeling tricked, because the topic is tricky. I think the book is about resisting the definition of queer art, but a reader may finish the book thinking I’ve defined queer art. I revel in banalities—which maybe isn’t controversial at all! What a relief. But my experience with this topic is that it is contested because we are dealing with representation of art and life that often gets ignored or misrepresented. So polemic is the wrong word, perhaps. Prescriptiveness and arbitrariness abound in what gets labeled as queer, and I felt compelled to point that out. To me, the stakes are high just by virtue of all the people and places and moments that I record from my flawed and limited perspective.

I like you pointing out that the style is the polemical thing. I chose to veer towards a criticism like Jill Johnston’s—as opposed to the scholarly distance—because it felt more honest and also humble. I’m all for the writer artist’s power in staking a claim. I am observing the world this way, while acknowledging I am just one person. I believe in the power of sentences! Most of my observations anyway are like, “Hey look, someone else observed a similar thing before me and I am just discovering it now.”

I began this book being an anonymous person in various rooms of artistic reception and production, but then the book follows my thinking while organizing readings in New York, developing friendships, embarking on reading practices, and seeking out intergenerational conversations. All these lived practices are outgrowths from the voice that drives the articulations of thought housed in the book. And I should say, most of the conversations are just beginning. The Estrangement Principle intends to be a vehicle for conversation.

SS: Now that the book exists in the world of queer art and writing, how would The Estrangement Principle write and think about it?

AG: I think the book would be uncomfortable about the book. The book would be wary of the book. The book would be very critical of the book. I think the book would probably be unable to read the book all the way through quickly. It would take years.