Interview with David Hadbawnik, Editor of Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics

MIP: The book is titled "Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics." What is (or are?) "time mechanics"?

DH: "Time mechanics" is a phrase from Jack Spicer, who writes, "A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer … Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem." I refer to it in my introduction, and Daniel Remein discusses the idea at length in his chapter. At heart, this is an observation about poetic diction. Spicer writes, "I yell 'Shit' down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as 'Alas.' But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word 'Shit' will ride along with them, travel the time machine until cliffs and oceans disappear." (Again, I would direct readers to Daniel Remein’s chapter for a deeper discussion of this passage in Spicer.)

The first part of that statement is pretty easy to understand. We encounter it every time we read an older piece of poetry in English and struggle with antiquated diction. Words that held currency and impact 200 years ago now seem dated, and if we were translating into contemporary English, we might simply clear those away and "update" the language. But in the second part of the statement, Spicer indicates that it’s not as simple as that. The poet grapples with "the real," which, as Spicer’s friend Robin Blaser points out, means not only the material world of things, but those inexpressible "gaps in the symbolic order" that hover beyond language. Each individual poet—a "time mechanic"—must find the appropriate tools, or words, to work on that real. That’s how Spicer arrives at the idea of "correspondences," which seems to mean actually encountering a new "real"—and thus new language—that corresponds with other poetry from other times.

Crucially, then, in Spicer’s first book of poetry in this vein, "After Lorca," the poet writes letters to Lorca—actually corresponds with him—and Lorca posthumously authors an introduction to Spicer’s book (penned by Spicer, of course). There are translations of Lorca, many of them quite "literal," but Spicer has to move through the poetry encountering the real behind Lorca’s words and using whatever language arises from that. He can’t see the same flowers, look at the same birds—therefore it would be absurd to simply translate the Spanish word for a particular flower into English and leave it at that. No, there has to be new experience that corresponds with that of the poetry, and that’s where the poetry comes from.

MIP: Are there different "kinds" of medievalisms engaged with in the book? How do various medievalisms differ?

DH: I'm sure there are many! I think what we need to keep in mind is the inherently artificial nature of the term "medieval." It can only exist in relation to other artificially demarcated time periods. From there it becomes a mood, a trope, a meme… For a lot of people of my approximate generation, the touchstone is "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":

"Must be the king."

"Why?"

"He hasn’t got shit all over him."

The medieval is about s--t and laughter, quests and castles, knights and fairies and magic. It’s almost become a place where we deposit everything imaginatively that can’t be contained in the modern. What I like about the idea of queer medievalism is that, ideally, it maintains a sense of wonder and fun without sacrificing rigor and ethics in what it studies.

MIP: Are there any contemporary poets who aren't addressed in this collection, but you wish they were? Or do you perhaps have a favorite piece of contemporary work that engages with medieval material that just didn't make it into the book?

DH: There are so many. Pattie McCarthy has been working with the medieval for a long time. We were able to publish a bit of her "wifthing" project—which engages with Margery Kempe and other medieval material—on eth press some years back, and the full volume was published by Apogee Press in 2021. Maria Dahvana Headley, who’d published a "Beowulf" adaptation called "The Mere Wife" in 2015, followed that up with an actual "Beowulf" translation that came out in 2020, which was already too late to be included in the volume. And really, there’s been so much going on with "Beowulf"—various translations and adaptations—one could easily devote a whole volume to that. One big blind spot in this book is what’s happening with Arabic. David Larsen has an ongoing project translating from Classical Arabic, which we were able to cover a bit in the postmedieval issue we edited, but it didn’t make it into this collection.

Having said that, I’m thrilled with what we were able to include. Caroline Bergvall has been doing extraordinary work in the medievalist vein for years, but my chapter in this volume is the first in-depth look at her from a medievalist perspective. Candace Barrington alerted me to Jos Charles, with whom I hadn’t really been familiar, and I’m happy to have a chapter on Charles as well. Likewise, I’m excited about the chapters on Robert Glück and Peter O’Leary, whose contributions in this field have been understudied.

MIP: Who is included in this collection—medievalists examining contemporary poets, scholars of contemporary literature, contemporary poets themselves, a mix of these?

DH: Most of the contributors are medievalists who have a strong interest in some aspect of contemporary poetics. Christopher Roman—who’s also one of the editors of the New Queer Medievalisms series—has been moving more and more away from medievalist pursuits to different research areas. Sean Reynolds was in my cohort in the Poetics Program at University at Buffalo, and we shared an interest in contemporary-experimental poetry and engagements with older literature. Robin Tremblay-McGaw is the outlier—someone who’s really been a scholar of contemporary–experimental poetics, with little or no training in medieval literature. So what’s required is some courage in being willing to move outside your comfort zone and delve into a couple different discourses that might be less than familiar to you. Robin Tremblay-McGaw did a wonderful job working through some of those discourses to produce something that I believe really contributes to the field, as all the authors did.

MIP: Were there interesting challenges involved in the editing of this collection?

DH: A lot of this is described in the introduction: it’s incredibly difficult to identify a critical mass of scholars who have the desired background in contemporary and medieval poetics, and on top of that some familiarity with queer studies (also see the previous question). We felt that the audience is there, the material is there, now we just need scholars who are interested and willing to work on it. The other issue is that the fields of medieval studies and contemporary poetics are changing all the time, and some of those changes have been pretty tumultuous, having to do with who’s being represented in the critical studies, who’s doing the critique, how are we framing those critiques.

Let’s be honest: we’re talking about racism and sexism, first and foremost. Having been involved in both of those fields, I’ve seen the controversies unfold, one after another. The changes have come about pretty rapidly—though not rapidly enough, in some cases—and meanwhile, the timeline for an edited volume is very protracted. This project, from conception to publication, took four full years. The impetus behind it goes back much further than that. And I’d guess that’s standard in the world of academic publishing. Meanwhile, as just one example, the term “Anglo-Saxon” is one that a lot of scholars take issue with, as inaccurate at best and racist at worst—the latter, especially, as it’s been taken up by white supremacists who dabble in older forms of literature and culture to justify their beliefs about an “original” white European race. This is a fairly recent development; in the proposal I wrote with Sean Reynolds for our special issue of postmedieval, about ten years ago, we used the term Anglo-Saxon frequently. Nowadays, we’re certainly aware of these discussions as we think about how to describe what we’re doing.

As writers and editors, it’s our job to keep abreast of how the discourse is changing and consciousness shifting; but readers should also be aware of the timeline for academic work. A friend of mine from the poetry world once put it succinctly, talking about edited creative journals: when they come out, they’re “dead on arrival.” That’s true in the sense that the conversation that sparked this gathering of stuff has already happened—what you’re holding in your hands, though hot off the press, is an artifact. So as I say, I hope that "Time Mechanics" is timely enough that it can keep that conversation alive and contribute to new ones down the road.

MIP: Why do you think this book is important?

DH: The book is important because it really does fill a gap in the scholarship on recent poetics and medieval studies. One of the only books that explicitly addresses something like what we were after is Chris Jones’s "Strange Likeness," published in 2006, wherein he looks at Old English as a factor in the verse of several modernist poets. There really hasn’t been a whole lot since, even as medievalist themes, tropes, and languages have kept contributing to postmodern poetry and beyond. I am hoping that this volume provides a resource to scholars who are out there now preparing to do some research on similar topics, and that it sparks conversations among all those who enjoy and engage with challenging poetry.

MIP: You ask in the introduction to this very book the question "As for 'queer medievalism'—what is it, and in what way does this project contribute to it?" Can you answer that question again briefly here?

DH: I would say at the most basic level it means toppling hierarchies. If all we wanted to do was find contemporary poetry that’s derived from or influenced by medieval literature, we could look almost anywhere, and perhaps especially at poetry that consciously channels tradition. Instead, we were looking for poetry that, yes, engages with the medieval, but does not take it for granted that older is better or originary. So for example, Patience Agbabi and Caroline Bergvall work in various ways with Chaucer—explicitly with "The Canterbury Tales."

But instead of a “progressive” model of literary criticism, wherein a “Father Chaucer” inaugurates types of poetry in English, what if we viewed these poets along a continuum, offering critiques and shedding new light on one another’s ideas irrespective of time? What if, to call on Spicer’s notion, we considered the ways in which Agbabi, Bergvall, and Chaucer “correspond” to one another, giving us glimpses of various issues raised on the pilgrimage from different perspectives? So a queer medievalism would shift the discourse away from notions of influence and linear chronology, to a discourse marked by desire, intimacy, and immediacy. It’s an exciting and adventurous way to think about medieval and medievalist poetry, wherein a queer, multilingual poet like Bergvall contributes to a conversation about English as a truly world language, responding to Chaucer not as an acolyte but an equal.

MIP: Thank you so much! We really hope our readers enjoy "Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics," a book full of multiple exciting and adventurous ways to think about medieval and medievalist poetry.