the disjunctive I and Other asterisks
an interview with Rivka Clifton
Asterisks delineate some geographical moment. A topology of the page, or sometimes a transition towards another moment. Rivka Clifton’s work is typically marked with a disjunctive style, where in our interview together, she states that she attempts to get to some truth-quality in a sentence, which at times can be marred with a falsy-type of value.
there are so many asterisks for queer people: trans*, lgbtq*, asterisks on hrt, asterisks in our medical charts, asterisks that cover our info as we doll out copays, etc etc.
Read more of Rivka Clifton’s interview with Carl Watts at OsmanthusTV.
The way that Clifton uses asterisks to express a multiplicative effect, or a continuation of sorts as Rivka points out that often times she wanted poems to try to fit in their boxes/sections but end up overflowing as an analogue to ideas that cannot be compartmentalized, tl;dr, etc.
Why not just write tl;dr summations for Reddit posts, but just lie?
Clifton later discusses ideas about lying in confessional poetry. In a way it does not seem that it’s actually lying, but just a way of going through self-censorship or information distortion. Ideas that later have a vibrance once the speaker is more open with themself.
Rivka Clifton’s interview with Carl Watts dives into ideas about poetics, musical tastes, and approaches reliability of institutions. Read more here.
Rivka Clifton’s poetry suite can be read here.
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