Luke Rolfes: Poet Joanna Fuhrman is out with a new collection of poetry from Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press called DATA MIND. In her surreal and contemplative prose poems, she explores what it is like to be alive in the backdrop of social media, memes, the internet, and this brave new digital world. Thanks for discussing your book with us, Joanna! Can you tell us a bit about where DATA MIND came from? What was the genesis of this project, and how long did it take to come together?
Joanna Fuhrman: When I first started writing poems about the internet in the Spring of 2019, I wasn’t consciously writing poems about the internet. I was going through a difficult period in my life where I would wake up in the middle of the night and type on my phone (in the dark) whatever language came into my head. I would then transfer the language to the computer to finish the poem. I was trying to listen to what my subconscious wanted to write about. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was writing about digital life. As time went on, I realized that I wanted to use the poems as a means of thinking through (or perhaps more accurately “feeling through”) my conflicting emotions about digital life. I finished a draft of the manuscript in the summer of 2022, and then revised the book the following year. After the book was accepted by Northwestern, I added around 12 poems, changed the order a bit and added the memes.
LR: This manuscript is broken into seven unnamed sections, and, as you alluded to, each section is separated by a meme. Can you talk about this organization and what drew you to break up the manuscript in this way?
JF: Early in the process I wanted the book to not have sections. I was thinking about how being online can feel like an onslaught, and I thought the book should mimic that feeling. The problem with that idea was that the book without sections felt unreadable to me, too dense, too much of an onslaught.
I decided to break the book into sections with titles. I think the problem with the titles was that they worked too much like labels, and the labels didn’t perfectly fit. Then as I was revising the manuscript I was trying to give the book more of the feeling of being online—trying to infuse the book with more of the texture of internet—so I came up with the idea of using memes as a way to divide the sections and also give the book more of the “internet feeling.” The sections got a little shorter as I worked on the collection because the original divisions were too forced.
LR: The internet/social media is often your subject matter in this book—not really a muse but an artifact to behold and contemplate. It can be beautiful, a nuisance, a thing that hampers, a thing that shapes us in strange ways. It could be our unraveling. A thing of danger and violence. Could you talk about the craft of approaching the digital world? When confronting something that is so strongly infused into our everyday existence, should one have a specific agenda? Should one simply seek to document?
JF: I always think that writing poetry is the opposite of having an agenda. If I am writing political poetry—which I think I am in this book—I am interested in embodying complexity, not telling people what to feel and think. For me, the process is always about discovery and play. I don’t think I am documenting either. Around half of the internet-sounding stuff in the book is fictional. I hope that the poems give the feeling of embodying the experience of being online, but I don’t want them to just mimic the experience. I hope that the poems have a critical edge. The connection between social media and the deterioration of democracy is not original, but I think that perspective influences the tone and imagery.
LR: As a follow up to that, can you speak a little to your usage of form (mostly prose poetry) to approach/contemplate this new, digital world?
JF: I was really happy that in her blurb for the book Denise Duhamel mentioned that the square shape of the poems mimic the shape of the screens we live in. That is definitely what I was thinking, but I was also thinking about how prose poems are useful if you want the pace of your work to be quick.
LR: One of my favorite aspects of this book is how you juxtapose surreal imagery/scene alongside everyday internet concepts. "I open my laptop and hear a million voices speaking to me at once. Is this how Santa Claus feels when the world’s murmuring desires continually interrupt his Wordle?” Can you discuss this craft choice—the juxtaposition of the surreal and the everyday?
JF: I just wrote a listicle-style essay somewhat facetiously titled “4 Ways Poetry Predicted the Internet.” In the essay, one of the points I make is that a lot of poetry written before the internet was invented mirrors the texture of the internet. In one section of the piece, I talk about a Bob Kaufman poem that juxtaposes dream imagery, pop culture and surrealism. This sort of juxtaposition has always been something that appeals to me. Even my first book, which came out in 2000, has some of this texture. Part of what I love about the internet is that it mirrors the crazy kinds of juxtapositions that one finds in New York School or Beat or other kinds of what Anne Waldman called “Outrider poetry.” Personally, I find beauty in the sort of surprise these juxtapositions provide. The odd thing about writing about the internet is that what would have once felt like crazy surrealism now feels like documentation.
LR: Let’s check out a couple pieces. One of my favorites was published in Laurel Review. It’s called “Does This Data Make Me Look Fat?” In it, the speaker imagines hiding from “the algorithm” and having a bird’s eye vision of her other self from the vantage of a helicopter. When I read this piece, I think back to a photograph somebody took of me when I was texting on my phone. It was strange to see how absorbed I was, and this poem seems to echo that idea. Can you tell us about the construction of this piece and the sequence/progression of images?
JF: I don’t remember too much about the construction of the piece, but what strikes me is how much of the contrast at the heart of the poem is spurred by thinking about the word “moist.” Supposedly, “moist” is the most despised word, which makes me want to use it. There’s a lot of gooey imagery here: “previous guests’ salvia” “puckered hot dog tails.” I think I was trying to contrast the coldness of “Big Data” with the tactile strangeness of living inside a body. In the first two stanzas of the poem, the speaker is hiding from the algorithm and trying to relive how it felt before the internet removed the speaker from the full reality of living in a body in the moment. Then in the last two stanza, the poem shifts to the present; it tries to capture the feeling of a post-internet world, of how it feels to see one self as a piece of data as a opposed to….
LR: A fascinating poem is “The Internet is Not a City.” In it, the speaker contemplates how different her life is from those who have grown up with the internet always being there—how when she was younger, she was able to immerse herself in poetry or a phone conversation in the same way some folks can immerse themselves in the internet. I’m struck by this ending: “I wrote in a poem, ‘Talking is like going swimming in a small pool. You think it’s the ocean until you bang into the rail.’” What was your motivation for this one?
JF: I think the title is ironic because the poem is exploring the way that the city and poetry pre-internet both felt like the internet to me. In both, I was interested in the feeling of getting lost, the way being in a crowd make one’s “self” and ego smaller. I was trying to think about the connection between the situationist idea of dérive and how that feeling could be similar to what one might feel online. The line you quote is actually a line that I wrote as a teenager.
LR: In the fifth section of the book, you reflect on and reimagine several films, including The Matrix, The Warriors, and Singin in the Rain. What inspired this series of poems? How did you go about choosing which films?
JF: I think the idea started with the two poems about The Matrix (which is not a film I like), but then I was thinking about how on the internet all of pop culture lives, including all of film. That’s why the meme before that section says “The future leaks into the past.” I thought it would be interesting to try to riff on older films, but to do it through the lens of digital life. (Of course, it’s also a feminist lens.) I chose some of the films because I love them; Something Wild is one of my favorite movies, and I teach Orpheus each year in my Introduction to Multimedia class. Some of the pieces started because I got a line in my head (and I would write down as if I was taking dictation). Then I would try to finish the poem. Others I had an idea about and would try to follow where the ideas traveled off to. I wanted to write about Sliding Doors (another film I kind of hate) because that feeling of being on the “wrong timeline” felt central to the post-Trump era. It took many tries to get to anything I thought was interesting.
Another poem that had a more conceptual origin was “Singin’ in the Rain.” I was thinking about how the film is about technology, so I thought it would be interesting to change it from being about the switch from the analog to the digital age, instead of from the silent to the sound era. Also, I wrote about “Dinner at Eight” because my husband and I had watched the film on Criterion for the first time. As I watched it, I was thinking about the role of the servants and how missing their story was from the plot, but as I was writing it, it was also the week when the protests against police brutality were happening literally outside my window, so that creeps into the poem too. That poem, like a lot of the poems in the book, also feel infused with the feeling of lockdown.
LR: What’s next for you and your work? Any new projects coming up?
I am trying to finish a manuscript about grief called The Last Phone Booth in the World. That book is, in general, less dense and more magical realist feeling than this book. I thought everything I was writing could fit, but last month I tried to order what I had and I realized a lot of my newer poems don’t fit the manuscript, so I guess I am working on a couple of different projects. I have also recently gotten back into creating poetry videos, which is a lot of fun.
Thanks so much!!
LR: Thanks so much for your time, Joanna! This is a wonderfully unique collection! For more info, check out: