Jenny Boully - The Book of Beginnings and Endings

Interview

What gave you the idea for writing The Book of Beginnings and Endings?

I’m oftentimes attracted to a book as artifact or curio. A strange book on
doll-making or classifying weeds or an old astronomy book will appeal to me in ways that a great work of literature can not. I’ve always loved going to used bookstores and searching random books on different topics, and The Book of Beginnings and Endings allowed me to collect my various dream books in one place. The Book of Beginnings and Endings began during a long period of bleakness and searching. I had just finished my MFA at the University of Notre Dame, and I was back in Texas and then I was uprooted again when I decided to go to Brooklyn a few months later. I was working on a piece that I was calling Notes Towards Future Titles, which started feeling too limited to me; I didn’t feel as if I could develop it into something of book proportions. One day, on a subway platform, a train was arriving just as one was departing, and it hit me that perhaps I should write a book that did just that. I think that a lot of the displacing, the abandoning, the comings and goings that were going on in my life furthered the project. Before Brooklyn, I was used to sitting down at the same desk for months and staring at the same spacious landscape; in Brooklyn, there were constant interruptions, constant noise, worries, obscurings, struggles, and my whole life felt too busy to complete anything. Only about three “notes” from Notes Towards Future Titles ended up in The Book of Beginnings and Endings, but they felt more at home there than they did in their previous form.


Throwing your voice in so many different directions and tones for each section must have been a challenge, yes?

It was very exciting and fun coming up with the types of books that I wanted to explore or manipulate to serve my ends. I tried to come up with topics that would appear disparate from my narrative and see how I could infuse them with metaphor and intimations of a hidden life. For instance, how can I make a manual for caring and repairing books take on other meanings pertinent to the narrative at hand? Because this shift in tone and voice is ultimately taxing (I felt as if I had to live a certain voice or mode for a few days, a week, the span of hours), I could only work on a section or two a day when I was ready to compose. Sometimes, I wouldn’t be ready to compose for months, and sometimes I could compose for days in a row. There were some types of writing or books or topics that I just couldn’t get to work for me, and those were ultimately tossed out; it was fun exploring those modes nonetheless.


Like The Body, the core of this book circles around what is missing and unsaid. What do you think happens when a reader is given a story capped front or back, when they’re left to dream in the details?

When the reader is left to wonder, the book becomes, in a certain sense, written by the reader, owned by the reader. I have always been attracted to that strange proposition in life called possibility—what could happen, what might have happened, what might happen. I like allowing possibility to live out in all its forms, with a dash of fatalism and the inevitable, those elements that make life tragic when contrasted against possibility. For the reader, I think it might make for a sometimes frustrated experience, especially if the reader wants a clear progression of narrative. I have never been able to ask or answer, “What is that book or movie about?” I know I have misread everything I’ve come into contact with, and I love my misreadings. This experience with the manner in which I read books is something I explored in [one love affair] *. I think that when a book refuses to give all, it increases the probability of opening a great space in which to wonder and misread, to have a very private moment that no one can enter or experience quite as you do.


In an interview with Kenmel Zaldivar in Mipoesias, you remark that poetry is “not a form or genre, but an experience, a moment.” Could you talk about this?

I think that poetry is something that happens to you; it comes, unexpectedly, in small, intense doses. Some of us feel compelled to attempt to translate this something with language, which often fails us, I think. Some of us want to translate this moment in the form of what we think of as poetry, and some of us want to translate this moment in prose. There is a lot of writing these days passing under the guise of poetry, but the writing contains no poetry; on the other hand, there’s also much writing passing under the guise of nonfiction, fiction, or even scientific writing that contains much poetry. I think we should stop thinking about poetry as a genre and more as a moment. The genre should, more appropriately, be termed “verse” perhaps. I think the world, the experience of being alive and feeling our beings contrasted against an infinite time and space continuum sometimes passes through us with such intensity, and we feel such a hold, such a shock, such a deep awe; I think that’s poetry. It seems to me that the Haiku masters wanted to translate this feeling into a short form, a form that would be as intense and fleeting as the moment of poetry.


In that same interview, you say that a poet, “more than wanting to be understood, wants to be loved through his or her writing.” Do you feel that desire makes most writing insincere, even false?

The relation between sincerity and composition has consumed me for some time now; it’s one of the central issues in The Body. I think that this desire for love, acceptance, or communion with the reader does cause some degree of falseness and insincerity. It’s important to me when I compose that I not be too quick to revise or delete, but rather to give the writing as it is given in mind. I don’t really ever censor myself, however embarrassing or shameful my writings may be. The moment I censor myself, I think, is the moment that I stop composing in its pure sense. I think the hardest task for the writer is to find that compositional space in which the writer herself cannot interfere or intervene with whatever she is eavesdropping on. It’s all very antithetical to what the writer is taught; we’re taught to think of the reader, to revise, to get feedback, to revise based on that feedback. Excepting work for school, I never show anyone my work until it’s published and I revise like a quiet mouse; I think it helps to keep me pure compositionally.

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