Daniela Naomi Molnar : coda

What are you working on?

In terms of writing, several in-progress manuscripts:

The Lost is an excavation. It’s the book I didn’t want to write but had to. Via poetry, narrative, and image, it tells the story of my grandmother Rosalie’s life, the intense traumas she experienced, and the way that trauma passes mysteriously and inexorably from generation to generation. Fundamentally, it’s about the way that the invisible/unknowable world that lies beyond the visible/ the known is ultimately more powerful than any known or visible thing.
Or: “The visible is thick but the invisible is thicker.” Brenda Hillman

Pry is an unapologetically furious collection of poems and images that confronts the heteropatriarchy, trying to expunge its hold on and within my own (femme, queer) body.

A third yet-untitled water-obsessed manuscript, including:
“  }  ”     : a long poem about the ocean and its birds and its trash and its power;
“WEB” : a series of visual poems which are about the varied, maddening, urgent, beautiful experience of being bodied on a dying planet;
“we woke up early so we would know how to survive” : a long poem about what I call the Misanthropocene and is better known as the Anthropocene;
“River notes” : a lyric essay which wades deep into my riparian obsessions.

I’m also working on videopoems, teaching myself the form haphazardly as I go.

And a poetic/critical/memoir on feminist chomophilia*.

And a poetic/critical/memoir on poetic space and its social/political/ecological implications.

And I’m working always, moment-by-moment, on staying awake — politically, emotionally, spiritually, physically, creatively — in a culture that constantly nurtures and coaxes us into the opposite — a sort of resigned, comfortable, complacent deadness. This awakeness is the precursor, for me, for any type of creative pursuit.

* Chromophobia, in the words of David Batchelor: “Colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture. … It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed and groomed. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia… [C]olour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. … Colour is the corruption of culture.” Chromophilia the opposite of the above. If an embrace of color is ascribed to a demeaned feminine “other,” chromophilia is an embrace of this otherness, a colorful confrontation.

Daniela Naomi Molnar : part five

How does a poem begin?

With sound. I write every morning in my journal. Most of what I write is just about the act of writing. Pen to paper, taking a line for a language-based walk. I often start out with Marie Howe’s excellent writing prompt, which I have been writing from for many years: write 10 observations that do not use any metaphors. (It’s harder than it seems.) I invariably drift away from this constraint into writing with metaphor about stuff going in my life, in the world — more abstract things that benefit from having started with concrete observation.

Some mornings, I find myself inside a poem. I keep writing in my journal, then transcribe whatever I wrote to my computer, editing and adding as I go.

How do I know if I’ve stumbled into a poem?
If the language begins to leave me behind, I am in a poem.
If the language leaves me both slightly disoriented and fully alert in a way that both encompasses and surpasses the senses, I am in a poem.

Daniela Naomi Molnar : part four

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

My cat, Stir Fry, aka LKP (Lord Kitty Potato) is the first to hear my poems, because he sticks nearby (often on) me as I work and I read my work aloud as I write.

In addition to his insightful feedback, I am extremely grateful to currently be working with Solmaz Sharif, who is my mentor for my final semester in Warren Wilson’s MFA in Poetry. I’ve also had the immense privilege to get support and feedback on early drafts over the past two years from from Airea D. Matthews, Connie Voisine, and Sally Keith. After cats, poets are my favorite people.

And I feel so lucky have a few poet and writer friends who I often share early drafts with, including Jay Ponteri, Sebastian Merrill, Dane Slutzky, Aaron Hauptman, and others. They’re all so incredibly smart and kind! For several years, I was a regular member of poetry workshops with my friend, the poet, novelist, and visual artist Zachary Schomburg. These workshops profoundly shaped my understanding of poetry and Zach’s voice is still present with me as I work.

True to my extremely introverted nature, for many years, I didn’t share my poems with anyone (other than LKP). I had a wakeup call via my closest friend, a person I’ve known for 20+ years and with whom I speak regularly. I mentioned in a conversation that I was working on a poem. She responded, “You write poetry?” So… I realized that I needed to be a bit more public with my work. I am so grateful to now have what feels like a wealth of diverse voices with and from whom I can learn. Because poetry is meant to be shared. In the words of Miłosz: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.”

Daniela Naomi Molnar : part three

Why is poetry important?

Danielle Vogel defines language as: “a communal lung that holds and remembers all things through us. … A neural interconnectivity … an extended nervous system that we all share.”

Poetry nurtures this shared nervous system, sometimes by shocking it and sometimes by soothing it. Both can be a form of necessary nurturance.

Poetry is living ecotone that requires our participation.

In other words, poetry is an open text. Open texts reject rejects hierarchy, authority, commodification, closure, and control, instead inviting (requiring) the reader’s participation in the text.*

On a road trip through the California desert in 1968, Mary Corse became enchanted by the reflective qualities of highway paint, which contains glass microspheres. She began painting with these glass microspheres, which glimmer, shimmer, flicker, reflect, refract, and generate their own light. The paintings appear flat and monochromatic at first but contain a whisper of something more that compels the viewer to begin to move around, tilting her head or pacing. As she does so, the painting shifts in complex and mysterious ways. Like an open text, these paintings require participation in order to be completed. And like an open text, they are never still, never resolve into a product—they are nearly impossible to reproduce in photographs. A Corse painting makes the utter subjectivity of perception obvious (if one shifts her gaze even slightly, the entire painting changes), which leads to an understanding, at least momentarily, that the entire world is a fleeting, subjective illusion, that all of life’s apparently solid structures are helplessly subject to change.

If language is felt to be as mutable as light, if there is  “an unstable boundary : the body / the book” (Vogel), then we might begin to question where the borders of our bodies really are — where do we begin and end? Where does language begin and end? A radical, necessarily empathetic porosity sets in.

* “The ‘open text,’ by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The ‘open text’ often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.” (Lyn Hejinian)

Daniela Naomi Molnar : part two

Why is poetry important?

Our culture inflicts so much violence on language and attention. Poetry (to build on Yusef Komunyakaa’s idea) is the caretaker of both.

In a culture in which language is shaped and eroded

by algorithms
by phone keyboards
by the sheer quantity of visual communication lobbed at our eyeballs, everyday
by the myriad, aggressive manifestations of consumerism therein
by the growing racket of human-made noise which erodes our capacity to listen

poets are a needed force.

I believe, too, that poetry is unique in its capacity to hold an almost infinite multiplicity of meanings simultaneously. In a culture obsessed with certainty, in which the violence of authority and authoritative statements is another type of violence done to language, this ambiguity is a much-needed balm. Poetry’s ambiguity allows us to “listen in strange ways,” in the words of Ross Gay, a type of listening that is fundamental to being fully human.

Because real art is always subversive, poetry can also (and in recent years, has) foreground the voices of the historically marginalized and oppressed. Poetry allows us to hear the voices of precarity and survivance, the voices of everything and everyone that cannot survive or thrive within a neoliberal ontology, which is to say, all “externalities” to profit.

This unprofitable (or anti-profitable) world is the necessary voice of poetry.

Daniela Naomi Molnar : part one

Daniela Naomi Molnar’s work asks how to live in the ecotone of now/here, on the brink of socioecological collapse/rebirth. She works across forms, melding painting, poetry, writing, curation, editing, site-specific intervention, activism, and teaching. Her mediums, therefore, are paint, paper, water, varied types of language, and varied forms of community engagement. Place is always one of her mediums. She uses these mediums to try to shape and nurture generative new ideas, ethics, and cultural change. Her work for the past several years has been focused on the complex, intersectional sociopolitical-cultural issues of climate justice and climate grief.

Daniela is the founding Department Head of the Art + Ecology program and a full-time Associate Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students since 2007. She is a founding member of the Board of Directors, a backcountry guide, and an all-around integral part of  Signal Fire, providing opportunities for artists to learn about environmental justice by engaging with public wild lands. She is founding Co-Editor of Leaf Litter, Signal Fire’s art and literary journal and Art Editor at The Bear Deluxe Magazine.

She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, Bomb Cyclone, petrichor, LEON, Discursive Impulse, GAZE, Archivaria, and Submit.

She is a member of the third generation of the Holocaust and a daughter of immigrants. She grew up in and around New York City and lives in Portland, Oregon, in the Cascadian bioregion on the unceded land of the Clackamas, Cowlitz, Chinook, Multnomah, and other Indigenous peoples.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I grew up inside a braided river of languages: Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, Yiddish, a bit of Spanish, English, and, predominantly, Huroheyisen (a ragged agglutination of all of the above). My parents are immigrants and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in their immigrant community in Queens. I recall walking down the bustling street with them, my small arm raised to hold my grandmother’s soft hand, feeling sensorily immersed in a ragged river of heterogenous colors, sounds, scents — and languages — trilled, shouted, sang…

Because I didn’t know any of these languages fluently other than English, their sounds were allowed to just be sounds. And this attunement to sonic sense over rhetorical sense is, I believe, one of the fundamental orientations of poetry.

Poetry also found me in the songs and prayers of my childhood, which included a lot of time spent in Jewish synagogues with my parents and grandparents. Most of the prayers and songs were in Hebrew or Aramaic and often heavily relied on rhyme and repetition. I learned sound sense in these ways, too, while also learning what it sounds like to pray to a broken god: poetry.