INTERVIEW WITH POET RACHELLE RAHMÉ

IN CONVERSATION WITH M. ELIZABETH SCOTT

Rachelle Rahmé is an artist, writer and philosopher. Her debut poetry monograph, Count Thereof Upon the Other’s Limbs, was illustrated by Jennifer Shear, published in late 2019 and can be ordered here.

Interviewer M. Elizabeth Scott is a poet and esotericist based in New York. She is the co-founder of arts collective Cixous72 and its derivative imprint, 72 Press.

M. Elizabeth Scott: What, in your words, does the title of your book, Count Thereof Upon the Other’s Limbs, allude to?

Rachelle Rahmé: It’s funny because when I read it, I work through the words and they give me an image. What I see when I read it is sort of – not even full body – it’s a close-up of a thigh, a leg… there’s a gesture of reaching out for it. So, to me, what does that image mean? I think that’s something the book is trying to express. To introduce this information about the self, the body, an intimate gesture that relates to “the other” numerically, and everyone will have their own understanding of what is the “thereof.” For me, it’s a confusion between materiality and ideas.

MES: In that vein, what do you feel is the role of abstraction in your work? What does that signify to you?

RR: I think abstraction is always important to me, something that’s not really spoken. From the very beginning, when I first started to interact with language, abstraction was a way to begin a form of communication that could manifest completely from the individual. I always struggled using other people’s language and expressing ideas to people through common language. What I enjoyed about poetry or whatever I was trying to do from the very beginning was like, I can write something and it doesn’t have to have a blatant meaning. One can come to be aware of it and learn what something means. So abstraction has been a part of my practice and my role as a poet. 

How abstract do I need to make this concept? How much do I want to communicate in my own language? Abstraction comes in rhythms – there are ideas that are abstract until they come into play with other imagery. And I sort of like the way that feels, and that’s the way I approach thinking in general. Complication has its own rhythm. I think that I frequently come into play with abstraction, while moving through the world.

MES: What does your actual poetic writing process look like? How did you begin this project?

RR: I think with this book, the writing of the poems – they began more as words and ideas, and the ideas of the words, which would then create feelings and images from this chain of concepts – rather than stringing words together as a group in order to present an image outright. With this book in particular, I started out with a lot of ideas that I wanted to explore: different ideas about my place in the world, our place in the world as laborers, as people who live in and press up against an urban environment – however they choose to do so, politically or apolitically. And then I worked with these ideas, stretching them out a bit, to make space for images. The more I thought through the ideas, the more images would come… and I began to reason with how these socio-political concepts related to the images that were introduced. The reasoning is my hand in all of this, where I am positioned in each poem. And I sort of left it there. But aside from that, I mean – you know this, having worked with me through the editing process – there’s a lot of refinement of the mixture of theoretical, political and lyrical imagery. So, I edit a lot [laughs]. Thinking about the process as though it were a sculpture helps me understand what I do.

MES: I was just about to say, there’s something about the work that really feels like it was carved, as though each of the poems were carved out from some sort of sculptural material. There’s something so magical about poetry; it sometimes feels as though each poem has its own perfected or ideal form, which is fully realized through the editing process. With some poems when you hit that point of editing, you really feel like, “here we are: this is its final form” – and that point of completion feels so specific. The poems collected in Count Thereof feel very sculptural in this way.

RR: The trajectory of my poetic writing has seen through that impulse to carve away, and I know it intimately. I used to write poems that I would chip away at until there was hardly anything remaining, just a spine on paper, yet the poems somehow retained their full weight of meaning to me, perhaps even more so. But I took this process to the logical extreme, until I found that there was nothing left. As an aesthetic, I thought it was very beautiful at the time, but it also left me in silence for a few years. And book spines still fascinate me.

MES: It’s really frustrating, because you sort of begin to wonder, “what of this poem is really essential?” – and perhaps you begin to feel like, “well, maybe none of it is essential!” I often write so much and whittle it down to nothing. I really enjoyed reading Count Thereof because, although the poems may not be super, super long, some are (comparatively) on the longer side, and yet they still manage to feel very essential, very spare.

So, moving forward – I know that you put out a science fiction book recently, and I wanted to ask you a little bit about that.

RR: I was moved to write this speculative, philosophical fictional work, Superveillance, because I was studying philosophy and had all of these excess thoughts that I couldn’t find a place for in logical systems. It occurred to me that melancholia and its profound doubt is a refusal to accept the logic of the world, its politics and programming. Melancholia and aloneness feels illogical and grey, but they can actually be tools to resist domination. I spent my summers writing this work, half of which I cut out, when I probably should have been doing something else. But I had these ideas that were demanding to be written. It was an interesting meditation, for sure. Robert Lowe put that out on Aventures earlier this year. The cover of that text has a Google Earth screenshot from outside of Anthology Film Archives. It’s amazing because it’s one of those great ones where someone is actually in it, and it’s just this crusty punk girl, splayed out in front of the cemetery.

MES: Speaking of Anthology, will you tell me a little bit about your relationship with them, and your background in experimental film?

RR: I have been involved with Anthology for a number of years now, since becoming very interested in experimental film and film poetry. I became familiar with the films of Jean Genet, Robert Frank, and Kenneth Anger there, and when you see a film like Scorpio Rising or Chant d’Amour for the first time, it’s so beautiful. So I have been working there for a while. I’ve shown my films and collaborated with a lot of people I’ve met there. Working and often improvising with some very unique artists was a really good way to absorb alternative approaches to the construction and execution of a project. Or just figure out the agency to make up my own way of doing things. These days, I’m still hanging out there sometimes.

MES: You mention Anna Kavan in your text and I wanted to ask about the significance of her work, or why you bring her into the poems.

RR: Specifically, in that poem, dropping that there was like dropping some kind of bomb – so that the author and her book, Ice, could become a unified object. Sort of the opposite of a black hole – not that it’s any kind of supernova or anything like that – I just like how it functioned, name dropping her there [laughs]. That’s the feminist poem. Karl Marx’s daughter, who I also mention, was in love with a Parisian communard. She was in love with him, but her elder sister had already married a poor guy from the same ranks. Papa Marx was like, “No, you can’t date this guy, I already have one daughter married to a communard.” This is documented in letters. So she ends up marrying this sleazy American playwright, who keeps going back and forth between Europe and America, and secretly ends up marrying another woman, too, an American actress. And ultimately, Eleanor commits suicide. I’m not saying the suicide is all due to that situation, but ultimately, Marx wouldn’t allow her to be with the person she wanted to be with – this very good looking, poor soldier guy. So I wanted to bring Anna Kavan into it.

MES: Are there any figures, particularly in poetry, that you’ve felt influenced by – people you’re reading and excited about?

RR: Another one of these poems was inspired by McKenzie Wark and Kathy Acker’s relationship, as it was told to me by McKenzie. But I just imagined it through my own lens in what became the poem Day in Central Park. I did read the letters, published by Semiotexte – essentially, they’re sexy emails, worth the read… but anyway, I had a real image of that. I had this feeling that Acker was the tough one, but through the emails you see they really begin to style-swap. Both of those authors have influenced me.

MES: In terms of what you’re working on now, what’s going on for you, project-wise?

RR: I'm hoping to write more poems from the place where I'm at right now, but 'racking focus' to a slightly different perspective on the butting up of thought and experience. I use that film term, 'racking focus,' to emphasize a shift in focus to something that is already in the compositional plane, but fuzzy. If this book is about real and affective labor, the world of capital and the day, then I would like the next one to explore the materiality of the after hours. I’m interested in writing down this imagery that comes to my mind, not putting so much emphasis on the concepts, but considering the image first next time. It’s hard to express subtle things. It’s an enhancement of the grey area, I think. For me, there’s a lot in this text to continue. There’s a sort of humor, although it doesn’t necessarily have a punchline. It comes out in other things, perhaps through the rhythm of repetition, or through contrasting images. There’s a sort of defeatist attitude conveyed, which is a sort of comedic attitude to have. So many comedians are defeatist, right?

MES: It’s funny, I actually didn’t “get” certain elements of comedy for a long time, really. Earlier this year, though, I read a book about ancient Roman slave theater – the comedy of Plautus. The author’s thesis was that self-deprecating comedy was actually, historically, considered radically subversive. I found it very enlightening.

So, are there any final thoughts you’d like to leave people with? Or would you rather leave the rest a mystery?

RR: I’ll say a couple things. For one, I think we’re always engaging with the past when we are awake. We’re always moving through history, which I grapple with largely through the use of imagery. Symbols are the past. But all of this talk of “I,” as well – I don’t believe in identity, per se, and I struggle with that concept in general, and always have. Which is why I thought, even though it should be the opposite impulse, that’s why I’ve developed the poetic voice… it’s not necessarily about where “I” sit in it, but just how “I” express myself in a way that is not necessarily significant, but nonetheless a good experiment when it comes to writing.