INTERVIEWS
AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE CARR (READY MAG) | 2018
“When I discovered the possibility of writing serially, everything opened up for me. I found I could explore a theme without feeling like the individual poem had to nail it. I think in long form - it's how my mind works.”
“MOST DIFFICULT AND MOST NECESSARY”: A MICRO(INTER)VIEW WITH JULIE CARR (TUPELO QUARTERLY) | 2018
“Now I’d say differently that I am interested in circling around whatever feels most difficult to say and most necessary. I say, “circling around,” because I don’t have enough faith in my ability, or in writing’s ability, to get to that “most difficult and most necessary,” but I read in order to get closer to those things, and so I would now say I write in order to get as close as I can to my own most difficult and most necessary truths. If that’s an ethics, then the aesthetics of the book serve that ethics by being as expansive as possible.”
SOFI THANHAUSER WITH JULIE CARR (ENTROPY) | 2016
“Today when I think about a narrativised self, it suggests the self in relation to structures: the family, the institution, the state. There exists a desire to escape all that, if even only (and importantly) in one’s mind. Perhaps the recording of narrative-resistant experience is, in part, the record of that resistance.”
“We often hear people speak of the difficulty of translation, groping to find the right word, regretting that some feeling about one language can’t be captured by the other. Instead of that frustration about the impossibility of equivalencies, we tended to feel excitement and interest about the diverse choices (in English) that present themselves as vibrant renditions of the original French text.”
SEVEN QUESTIONS FOR JULIE CARR (TOUCH THE DONKEY) | 2014
“When I was little I used to love, almost more than anything 1) amusement parks and 2) the plaster Easter eggs where you can peer into one end and see a little scene of bunnies and kids in spring clothing, or whatever. Both of these are installations – big and small – created worlds. I think I want my writing to act like that.”
A BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH JULIE CARR (CONDUCTED BY RUSTY MORRISON) (OMNIDAWN) | 2014
“But what ties those books together, and what ties them to Rag, is my commitment to writing into difficulty. I want the work to challenge me on all levels – not just technically, but also intellectually and emotionally. I gravitate towards writing that confronts, that tries to grapple with crisis and suffering.”
A.BRADSTREET INTERVIEW WITH JULIE CARR (A. BRADSTREET) | 2013
“And at the same time, when I finished 100 Notes on Violence, I thought, “It’s too contained!” I’m happy with the book, but I still felt, “Alright, where’s the wildness? This is controlled by these numbers, these numbers are controlling it, so how can I do this and still let more wildness happen?””
JULIE CARR ON 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE (THE CLOUDY HOUSE) | 2013
“I used to be an improviser: one of the things improvisers know is that constraint creates freedom. Once you have boundaries around what you are doing (provided they are the right boundaries!), you can explore more deeply than you can without. This is, I think, what draws people to received forms or to creating forms.”
AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE CARR BY NOAH ELI GORDON (THE VOLTA: TREMOLO) | 2012
“I don’t use appropriation in this book out of some belief that we have arrived at a point where we need only to reframe what already exists. For me, such a stance gives too much credence to what already exists and denies the possibilities that come with new life, new thoughts, new voices. Language, as in, the English language, is remade with every speaker.”
THE PAST IN FRAGMENTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE CARR (RAIN TAXI) | 2010
“Constrained within language the new person will nonetheless make use of language to find her freedom. I write of the baby “diagnosed by air: out and triggered,” which is to say we are defined by our environment, by the social environment as much as by the air we breathe, but we are also ready to go, ready, maybe, to explode, to find some kind of freedom at any cost.”
SARA MUMOLO AND ALISA HEINZMAN INTERVIEW JULIE CARR (STUDIO ONE READING SERIES) | 2010
“Perhaps poetry is a kind of listening, paying extreme attention in order to record, not the dominant narratives, the ones we already know, but the understories, the things we don’t usually want to, or know how to, hear. The one thing I don’t believe in is silence.”
Q & A AMERICAN POETRY: JULIE CARR (POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA) | 2010
“However, one does not write "as" an anything, other than as a person who knows a language. One writes not to reveal an identity, but to escape one, and, in escaping, to find something previously unknown. The analogy is to swimming: with each stroke, one attempts to reach beyond one's wake. But in doing so, one is always remaking that wake, redefining the boundaries of one's moving body.”
DAN BEACHY QUICK WITH JULIE CARR (COLORADO POETS CENTER)
“A lot has been said about how poetry’s Indeterminacies create a kind of ethics: an intersubjective or transubjective space in which multiple voices come together to form a kind of democracy within the body of the poem. I’m interested in that, but not sure I believe in it.”
LISA OLSTEIN AND JULIE CARR (FULL STOP) | 2022
“We need to hold each other in our fears and support each other in directing our actions, however fruitless they may sometimes seem. Facing terror means more than simply saying “I am terrified.” It also means analyzing why: sometimes interrogating the myopia of one’s fears, sometimes acknowledging that they are outsized, and at other times considering that one is not nearly scared enough.”
“BLOOD, SPIRIT, & NATION STUFF: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN RODRIGO TOSCANO & JULIE CARR” (BIG OTHER) | 2021
“As the pandemic has made so palpable, we are each other’s breath, each other’s air. The mask is that humble acknowledgement of our shared life, our shared spirit. In every way, then, the spirit that moves through me is planetary life, animal and vegetable life. Spirit means, as you know (I remember you performing Latin in Oakland 2002), breath. So, the answer is yes, of course the spirit moves through me. And what that spirit is, what makes it holy, is that it connects us, it is what makes us, and what binds us.”
INTERVIEWS BY JULIE CARR
THERE SHOULD BE BATTLES (JACKET2) | 2017
JULIE CARR AND JENNIFER PAP INTERVIEW LESLIE KAPLAN
SING OUR RIVERS RED (JACKET2) | 2017
AN INTERVIEW WITH TANAYA WINDER
TO RECOVER THE EVERYDAY: AN INVENTORY OF ABSENCE (JACKET2) | 2017
AN INTERVIEW WITH CHAUN WEBSTER
A PRACTICE OF 'TOWARDNESS': ARCHIVING HUMAN LIVES, TUCSON (JACKET2) | 2017
AN INTERVIEW WITH YANARA FRIEDLAND