case sensitive

Kate Greenstreet

An author's statement

A woman is driving across the country. She has experienced a fracture in her life, a sudden opportunity. Her traveling companions: two books of Lorine Niedecker’s letters, writings of Agnes Martin, the letters and journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker, a biography of Marie Curie, and a collection of interviews with Louise Bourgeois. As she drives, she’s listening to a novel, a mystery. When she stops to eat, she brings a book into the truckstop with her, also her journal. Writing down some of her thinking from the past 50 miles, she is reminded of a comment of Modersohn-Becker’s to Rilke, which soon shares the page with observations about radium and a few scraps of conversation from the neighboring booth. Poems arise.

case sensitive is a narrative experiment. I had a character in mind. I thought about her. She thought about me. We were in it together. I had a question. Or two. What happens in the book I want to read? And: how would it sound?

case sensitive is a book of poetry. It’s made of five separate chapbooks—the handmade chapbooks of the character. She is not a narrative poet. But her chapbooks, taken together, can tell a kind of story.

“Is she hearing voices?” (someone asked me). Only in the sense that we all are, all the time. I used the interruption of footnote numbers and the notes pages between chapbooks to underscore her constant referencing to what she’s reading, listening to, remembering.

If a mystery is essentially concerned with what people have done and, in a narrow sense, why, I tried to write the opposite of a mystery. There is a minimum of plot. What eventually interested me most was a third question, one that emerged as I wrote: what was she like?

I was pleased when two new friends read the manuscript and each expressed envy at my luck, as if the character’s good fortune had been mine. “It’s fiction,” I said. And they seemed unconvinced.