Irresponsibility

Chris Vitiello

An author's statement

I wanted to test whether or not there was any point in doing what I had invested so much time and effort into nourishing—the ability to write poetry—after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001. There’s that Adorno line about poetry after Auschwitz being barbaric. Pretty much everybody wrote their 9/11 poems, but I really stopped writing poems and tried to apply these abilities that I have honed over the years to more practical use. It wasn’t too successful—I worked with a literacy group trying to read with kids, but the organization was dysfunctional. Then I tried to write for a leftist newspaper but that organization was too cliquish to allow me to have any responsibility other than proofreading.

After a while I realized that I felt at my most ideal—how I would have everyone be—while I was writing. I always write from an ideal kind of persona or curiosity, not myself really. So I thought that I could make a piece of writing that would be exemplary of this, which could be useful to others maybe. Once I had that idea of utility it was easy to write this book—the words just came into place on the pages. I want to capture it in a text that I could refer back to so I could be more of that writerly ideal in everyday life. While I am writing, I am a dedicated and successful activist, and I wanted to train myself to bring that over into how I interacted with people, situations, and things during as many of my waking hours as possible.

I am only interested in making work for the during of its making. The resultant text seems a waste by-product. It’s to have found out something I didn’t know, followed a curiosity, articulated something that I had only known or sensed amorphously. I write to have written, not to make a poem. Poems don’t do anything unless someone is reading them, anyway.

My iterative and repetitive approaches to writing result in a necessarily self-referential text. I have to at all places emphasize that a poem is artifice—to and beyond the point of tiresomeness. Iterative writing allows me to write something like a truth statement, and then interrogate and test that statement, and clarify it, eke it forward as far as language will allow the idea to go. Instead of producing a crystalline, perfect text, I leave all the work in there. Not that I value my process so much that everyone needs to see it. I just like to be able to retrace my own thought, frankly, because I don’t memorize things well. I move my lips when I read, for goodness sake.