An Interview with James Loop
In this ongoing blog series, we interview members of the Belladonna* Collaborative, delving into their ongoing practices as writers and artists. We hope to illuminate some of the contexts and affiliations that support a writer's work.
Poet and Belladonna* Program Director James Loop at his desk in the Belladonna* studio
Zoe Tuck: How did you become involved with Belladonna*? How has your work with Belladonna* influenced your own writing practice?
James Loop: I was hired as a "studio assistant" through an actual formal job search and then just kind of stuck around. It's been a wonderfully plastic job which I feel like I've co-created in a triangular collaboration with the collective and the work that needs to be done. The question about influence is an interesting one. I think the best way to put it is to say that Belladonna* has brought me into literary community and brought me closer to an understanding of what the living activity of writing and publishing is and is for. And the aesthetic variety of the work we publish has also pushed me deeper into my own idiosyncrasies. It's been liberating.
ZT: What are you working on now?
JL: I'm finishing up a short sequence of grotesque Catullan heartbreak poems. They are profane and pretty funny and wretched. I hope I'll be done soon because they are a bit depressing to write. Soon they will be other people's problems!
ZT: What non-artistic activities feed into your writing?
JL: I think movement is my main answer. I live in New York where indoor spaces tend to be cramped and inhibiting and most of my poems begin while I'm on foot. Also not something that I currently do but which fed my writing enormously while I was doing it was teaching English as a Second Language to Japanese business men for a few years. This was a great exercise in de-naturing English to me, I became fascinated by parts of speech, the weirdness of prepositions and compound verb tenses. I highly recommend this activity for young poets.
ZT: What's your relationship to the word feminist? The word experimental?
JL: "Feminist" seems to me to be such a capacious word. I think about how little life is actually encompassed by or capable of being expressed by patriarchal means. How little the male is permitted to know. It's like the tip of the iceberg. And then there's this vast portion of repressed reality which by dint of this weird thing that is gender falls to (falls on) the feminine. And so "feminist" aside from its literal and important meaning pertaining to the liberation of women and femmes, also has come to seem to me to be about an orientation to and responsibility for reality, and the play of discovering the means to express that reality, often by misappropriating the tools of patriarchal culture. Which unfortunately can't always just be thrown out. Well, some of them certainly can. Like a "supreme court" I know we could do without. What even is that. But, like, the alphabet… I don't know, I like the alphabet.
"Experimental" is a word I'm wary of. I acknowledge its basic utility in marketing but I do feel that the binary we've inherited from the social poetics of the 1960s between the "academic" and the "experimental" is inhibiting and shallow and badly in need of an update. Because much of what was once called "experimental" aesthetically has now been codified and institutionalized and bled of its social utility. The academy has gobbled it up in such a way that now I feel the writing it describes I often experience as pretty dry and elitist. I think it's a pretty dead word unfortunately. But the experiments continue.
ZT: Your play Appletini or, The Perills of Speeche lampoons early Modern English—I'd love to hear about the authors or texts that influenced your writing process.
JL: I wrote this play with my friend Claire Devoogd in a few days in a vacation home someone had allowed us to set up in in Provincetown in February 2021. It was a writing experience like no other I've ever had, it felt like the writing took possession of us and wouldn't leave us alone until it was done. There wasn't really any study or specific reading for reference involved, except the names on the tombstones of the Puritan Cemetery there, wild things like "Mrs. Experience Rider" which is how we got started thinking up ridiculous names for Puritans. And we're both sort of Shakespeare heads and had both read Moby Dick relatively recently and it just went from there. A lot of high school American "classics" are there in the background, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, etc. And I think Claire had a Jonathan Edwards phase a few years ago which came in handy when it was time to do the theological bits. So it was a way of reveling in the plasticity and freedom of the language at that point in its history by taking it to really absurd heights, which also became a way of skewering the whole political institution of the English language and its idiotic colonial appendage. It's probably my favorite thing I've ever written, maybe because I wrote it with a good friend. Whenever I'm feeling depressed I just read a page of it and laugh.
ZT: What books / writers are you most excited about right now?
JL: I've been reading a lot of poetry in translation this year, partly through my second job at World Poetry Books. I highly recommend Everything I Don't Know by a Polish poet named Jerzy Ficowski. And an incredible book published by Ugly Duckling called I name him me: Selected Poems of Ma Yan, translated from Chinese. I love that instant immersion that can happen with great poets, where suddenly it’s their language and you're just in it. And it's a whole world where things move and dissolve and accrete in unique and compelling ways. Your defenses are just annihilated by the artistry. I've been feeling that with these two books.
ZT: What is your relationship to using humor in your writing?
JL: My writing seems to be getting funnier as I grow sadder and the world more frightening. I think it's partly defensive and reactive, something about holding a space for the play of a variety of tones and a shirking of the pious and self-righteous posture that I think it's really easy or even expected for poets to slip into, like we're the high priests of morality or something, so ridiculous. Like this very 1855 notion of the avant-garde that all your readers have just stepped out of their cabriolets and you're meant to harangue them about how horrible the world is while they're on their way to eat oysters. That doesn't feel like the situation to me at all. At least for me, poetry is a bulwark against despair and humor is a very important tool to that end. And I think it's partly about letting more of myself into my work as I get older and relax. I make a lot of jokes in my daily life, it's a big part of how I navigate the world and community. And I've felt much less compelled to be taken seriously by pretending to be Serious once I figured out how classed and stupid that kind of a social performance is. And lastly it's a way of undercutting my own tendency toward grandiloquence and pomposity.
ZT: What books / writers are you perennially interested in?
JL: Toni Morrison. Tolstoy. I want to write an essay comparing their philosophies of art. I guess that's just "perennially right now." I've had a very prose-heavy few years. I always think, I wish I knew how to do that!
ZT: You're from Florida, you reside in NYC, and you've traveled to Morocco and Italy. What is your relationship to place? How do your travels influence your writing?
JL: I moved from Central New York where I was born to Florida when I was 12 years old which I experienced as a horrible shock and imaginative impoverishment. It was a replacement of community and family with virtuality and humidity, the loss of a very specific place (personally, historically, culturally) for what I could only experience at the time (and kind of still) as No Place. So a big strain of my writing has always been about a desire to demonstrate to myself the specificity of place and time against the dissolving powers of capitalism and to try and navigate something like integrity while being clear-sighted about the fact that my presence as a white american is always as an agent of the latter and not the former, despite my intentions or my attention.
ZT: What is your relationship to other forms of art (dance, visual art, film, etc.)—as practitioner or audience?
JL: Music and performance were my first arts. Before I wanted to be a writer I wanted to be an actor, and then a rockstar. I think these passions are irremediably baked into my writing, my desire for melody and drama. I could never write one of those poems where you're very boring on purpose to teach your reader a lesson or I don't know what, for instance. I think I'm always trying to entertain. When I need inspiration I watch clips of actors I admire on YouTube. I love to think about their choices, or about a kind of training you undergo the effect of which is to bring you closer to your instincts. And I like to imagine the page as a place of improvisation which for me feels not like you say whatever you want but that you are in a heightened state of alertness and finding ways to answer each of your choices with another choice that creates a sort of accumulated hum.
Lately I've been thinking and reading a bit about singers. I went through a long spell of not writing barely a single word this year which was horrible and because I hate the phrase "writer's block" which sounds so strenuous and weirdly full of machismo I started to take solace in the idea of losing one's voice (temporarily, dramatically). I had lost my voice! And so I was reading about opera singers and discovered another fact that delighted me, which is that an opera singer's voice rarely "matures" before their early 30s, that this change happens generally anytime between the ages of 30 and 50! This feels much truer to my experience of being a poet than just beating my head on an anvil and was a welcome reprieve against perennially encroaching fears of belatedness and futility which have to be driven hence always with torch and pitchfork. Nasty capitalized thinking!
James Loop is the author of I Put This Moment Here and co-author with Claire Devoogd of Appletini, or the Perills of Speeche by Anonymous Botch, both published by Terrific Books. His writing has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Lambda Literary, Prelude and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and coordinates the activities of the Belladonna* Collaborative.
Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author of Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light) and the chapbooks "Vape Cloud of Unknowing" (Belladonna*) and the "The Book of Bella" (DoubleCross Press), the latter of which is bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel's "Peach Woman". In addition to teaching creative writing and literature classes, Zoe is the co-host of The But Also reading series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn and the co-editor of Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Brown. Since 2019, she has been a proud member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, where she has hosted readings, publicized books, and composed the newsletter.
