JH: I wanted to start by talking about the concept of a work being finished. While you were writing Dear Lettera 32, you ‘finished’ the text on three different occasions, only to feel compelled to pick it up again and add more to it; this is how we ended up having the work in four sections, each section break represents a failed attempt to finish the poem. It was something we spoke about a lot while you were in the process of composing Dear Lettera, with you asking me how you would know when the work was finished, a question I was never really able to answer. I remember sending you pages from Parallel Movement of the Hands, John Ashbery’s posthumous collection of ‘unfinished longer works’ and particularly the quotation ‘I am disturbed that it’s incomplete, but maybe that’s good.’ 

I wonder if you could talk about your relationship with finality and the text’s relationship with finality? Dear Lettera 32 is now being published as a book, but why did you feel the end of the fourth section was the correct place to conclude it, and do you think a work so deeply involved with themes of trauma, pain, and hurt can ever truly conclude?

CC: In Parallel Movement of the Hands, Ben Lerner talks about Ashbery’s book as ‘“hymn to possibility,” to borrow a phrase Ashbery used when reviewing Gertrude Stein in 1957, a hymn to ongoingness’ which is to say that I think this book’s publication as a material object finishes the poem off. Throughout the process I kept being told the project wasn’t over and even now I don’t think it’s done, but I wanted to write through the specific violences I/we were encountering till it felt easier to breathe; I realise I’ve probably failed any kind of resolute affective valences but I think the desire to stop falling like the wounded in the direction of their wound (to borrow Denise Riley) was, in some sense, concluded, even if the traces of those impacts vibrate way beyond the end of the text; really, I don’t know if it’s going to feel finished till it’s gone.

JH: The subject matter of Dear Lettera 32 is deeply personal but you approach it with a wonderfully analytic and theoretical eye that allows what would otherwise be a closed text to open up into something much more ambiguous. What is your relationship to ambiguity and nuance, and how did you try to navigate the idea of writing the possibility of openness and difficulty into such a personal text? 

CC: I think I wanted to keep track of that kind of transmutation into language, into the analogue, or even within the process of the digital. It felt like a process of figuring out how the structures worked. The surface of the digital and of the typewriter held so much in common while remaining vastly different machines which both engaged with the linear shattering of time which occurs under conditions of trauma and distress. I think they both have a fascinating relationship to language as a form of memory. I’d never actually touched a typewriter before starting the project in 2020, I didn’t realise the paper wasn’t meant to endlessly coil around the carriage, I think some of that openness came from not being able to see more than one line that had been written on the paper so by the time I ran out of space, what unfurled was a very lucid encounter of isolation, grief, desire, and longing for an elseness. There’s a very, what I think, amusing oscillation between a lyric I and a consultation of the typewriter manual to figure out what its parts are called, how it comes apart, how to change the ribbons, and so on.

JH: You use the typewriter as a proxy figure in the book; it becomes audience and author, context and subject. At times ‘Dear Lettera 32’ is very directly standing in for ‘Dear [Various Unnamed Real-World Figures]’. It seems to me that whenever you decide to use a specific theme or structure or conceit in your writing, you do it with such multiplicity and in so many different ways, that any divide between the personal and the critical begins to break down. I wonder if this is an expression of your engagement with crip theory and how trauma [physical, medical, emotional, etc] can permeate every aspect of a life?

CC: At first the typewriter wasn’t mine; the address of an [Unnamed Real-World Figure] felt true as the machine was something borrowed which is why one appears as a gift at the end of the second section. I think the lack of critical/creative boundaries definitely does emerge out of the academic work I’ve tried to engage with on crip theory, queer studies, and medical humanities - by the time I was introduced to ideas around disability, gender, and genre I was already chronically ill and trying to figure out how to make undiagnosed chronic pain habitable amongst hostile medical and social institutions. Living inside the theory was something I could intimately feel. I think the multiplicity comes from the “theory” as much as there is any real divide, being at the end of our fingertips. Be it phenomenological or structural, pain is perceived in the body.

JH: and pain is perceived in the page too, visually Dear Lettera is a ‘difficult’ text in the way the words bunch up and blur together. Obviously this is illustrative of a learning process; of you learning to play the typewriter like an instrument, but I feel like there's a lot more you're achieving with the scripto-visuality of the work (to borrow a term from Redell Olsen.) 

CC: You’re right about the acoustic learning curve of the typewriter, and a large part of its density owes to kHarLaMoV's aNkLe: A Utopian Fantasy by Robert Majzels, which is one long prose sequence broken only by full stops. It’s a spell, there’s even a hex at its heart. It taught me how to write out of the kind of captivity pain, lockdown, and grief had given me, to occupy a counter-universe, an anti-gravity. I acknowledge that it’s a difficult script to read normatively, but I think that allows it to hold a capacity for being read slant, to encounter the text by cluster, or by verticality rather than in order from left to right. 

JH: Could you talk some more about people who influenced the text? Dear Lettera 32 is part of a canon of disabled poets composing on typewriters and incorporating the field of composition into the text itself; I know you and I are both fans of Hannah Weiner and Larry Eigner. The actual work is very intertextual, and incorporates your voracious consumption of poetry and theory directly into itself.

CC: I know we’ve talked about it a lot, about the relation between disability, language, and the process of writing. We’ve spoken at length about what an intersectional crip poetics might look like for us now, and about what accessible, liberatory, and joyful practices of composition, editing, and publishing can be. The list of tutelary spirits is long, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Boyer (who’s Pulitzer winning book you very kindly gifted to me), Abi Palmer, to name a few, all let the practice of writing infuse the writing. I think it was March 18th 2021 when you sent me that gorgeous quote from page 132 of the Studying Hunger Journals; ‘Laugh because now I’m up to the typewriter dream where the whole set of keys come out as if in a drawer, the mechanisms are up above and you know I want a typewriter like this to fill my whole mouth up, the machine’s workings a giant sculpture, separate from the keys, a work to observe, it will intensify thought. [...] “Your name is written on it.”’ She was right about the percolation of thought moving through the instrument and the visceral dimensions accessible through the typewriter which hover over the field of language.

I’m glad the publication preserves the original, hand-done typesetting as well as including the quotations section at the back, as you wrote recently in your book Proetus: ‘I would like / to be as truthful / as possible’. As the typewriter is such an acoustic machine the writing process felt more like an act of listening, to the keys, to the sounds coming off the screen in lockdown, to the language being put into the air around me. These are my vibrations.

JD: There’s an interesting juxtaposition in the text between the presence of the typewriter, the influence of all these poets we love from the 70’s, placed against the omnipresent hypermodernity of social media. A lot of the references in the text are to livestreams on instagram, zoom, etc. It reminds me of Lana Del Rey ending her song The Greatest, which is full of personal and cultural nostalgia, with the lyric ‘oh, the livestream's almost on’ and singing it almost like a sigh, like ‘this is what reality has been replaced with.’ What role does social media play in the book and how do you reconcile this with the analogue?

CC: I’m sorry this answer took a moment to compose, I think the typewriter and the phone often feel like a juxtaposition because of their mechanical differences when they’re both still on the same continuum - our phones make the sound of hand-typed text and like the poets we love, watching poets over Zoom and Instagram Live is another way of being in the room together. I know it’s not the same as name-dropping an exhibition, painting, or sculpture  like O’Hara, musicians or poets like Hannah Weiner, or the artists (and their cats) that we count among our friends, as often revolutionary and communal as these acts are, but language has found ways of travelling through the air. Perhaps just as the typewritten text can be felt through the page our machines are connected even just by the practice of listening. We recently went to a podcast recording of an interview with Dionne Brand together, and when she said ‘I want accompaniment’ it felt true of our instruments of recording, be it our keyboards, touchscreens, or typewriters. I wanted to think through the shared musicality of our linguistic instruments, the percussive indentations of the keys against the carriage and the music emanating from the electrics.

JD: One of the phrases in the book I’m most struck by is the way that ‘is this a poem I’m writing to you’ transforms into ‘is this a monument I’m building to you.’ I think something that links our work is this paradoxical fascination with and ambivalence towards form, structure, genre, etc; I think we’re both obsessed with understanding the rules of these things, but only so we can understand how to break, alter, ignore, and subvert them. Dear Lettera 32 might be a poem, but it might be a collection of letters, a diary, an epistolary novel, a work of autobiography. What are your thoughts on how others might attempt to categorise the text?

CC: Can I ask you something here? Does Dear Lettera 32 feel like a retaliation? I’m not sure what genre that might be or whether hope, longing, desire, or survival have a default structure, but I’ve been working on genre theory for a while and I’m starting to think that a part of the ambivalence may be an apathy towards taxonomic legibility. For whom are the categories observed? This is to say, maybe it's a badly written novel.

JD: I guess that’s what you’re doing in the text; challenging the reader about their assumptions of how they will approach it, and in doing so challenging them to think about the subject matter, the events, the poetic persona, etc? It’s inviting, but it’s also combative. You call it a retaliation, and you’ve called it a hex before, and it feels like it could be comforting or confronting depending on how it is approached. 

This is going to be the first book published by PermeableBarrier, and there’s always an anxiety in launching a new press of not knowing where the book is going to go and who, if anyone, it will reach. I think that goes back to where we started, about knowing when the book is finished; is the book finished because it’s in the world or is that just another form of beginning, and one that you have less control over. I wonder if we could conclude here by you talking a bit about how you feel about people reading and interpreting your work?

CC: The ‘if anyone’ as a clause is comforting. I think when she was asked Dionne Brand said that a poem was finished because ‘it was’; I know the unsaid hangs over the language like a veil. At the level of interpretation she also acknowledged the universal as a ‘very contentious’ construct and I think I agree that I’m not writing after an imagined universal reader but engaging in the writing of a collection that is at once deeply personal while maintaining an openness for the resonance of the reader is an interestingly discursive project. Ultimately, the poem was a survival strategy amidst various hostile structures, actions, and entities and engaging in a sense overwhelmed by the reception of the language would be a form of rumination. Thank you for putting this book out, for approaching it with generosity.

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JH: Thank you for allowing me to publish it, I hope readers find it as rewarding as a text as I do.