Gabrielle Octavia Rucker in correspondence with S*an D. Henry-Smith
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer and editor from the Great Lakes in the United States. Dereliction is her debut poetry collection. She was invited into correspondence by S*an D. Henry-Smith, an artist and writer based in Amsterdam.
As it is now, they’ll let you believe it was always this way: the lightning-struck palace a burning facade, degenerate crown chasing those, whose labor is love, into submergence. In the death climate, they make hope the poet’s chore — tasked with remembering the wishful otherwise, or inventing it, whichever labor of hope suits a prolonging of a failed as-is. Which is a misinterpretation of what the poet does. Hope distorted, a stand-in for reformation in a broken world, or stasis with different clothes. But “the New Year long dead”, our omened speaker pulls the Tower, and is omened still. Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, the author of Dereliction, watches it burn to see what emerges from the ashes, if anything. What if the poet is the bolt that brought the flame? Maybe Meteor City was Detroit. Welcome the fall, mourn what precedes the Tower. Mourn having fell. The Tower was not the utopia that was nowhere to come.
Dereliction does not function towards a necessary positive. In this collection of poems, Rucker “sticks to the swamp,” gets to the bottom of it. “all I have are these poems & no kind of knowing outside of that,” she declares in “Brainfood” — a line that I sew into the hem of my living, and grounds me when I feel especially unfit in and tired of this world of prices and terrors. My piles, my poems, my life outside this life. The place to fight god was my own home.
The pandemic scattered many of us it didn’t kill, finding us in new nests starting over and parted from our libraries, now hidden in storage centers, the attics of friends, the shelves of our minds. Across a seven-hour time difference, and at the end of the hottest summer on record, bearing its disasters’ evidence, we talk a bit about anger, anime, poetry, and haunted pop over instant messaging platforms. The chat room meant there was no doubletriple textcallemail. brb, I’ll reply when I login again was the subtext. Dial-up paced in a 5G world. It’s not our race to keep up in. Here, we offer fragments from the talking rooms of the falling tower. At some point early in our kinship, (after she’d commented on the Circa Survive song I’d posted on my story) I bashfully sent Gabrielle an EP I made in high school with the math rock band I was in. I was humored and humbled by how much she liked it. “If we knew each other then, I’d be the merch girl for the band,” she kids. Well, knowing each other now, I am the merch girl of Dereliction. The copies are all stacked neat. We take Venmo, Zelle, and CashApp. Real cash preferred. No IOUs. Maybe a trade if your shit rocks like this. Doubt it does, tho. Beauty blurring by the window, Dereliction graces butter-thick cameos bracketed by sister-giggles. Rucker reminds us neatly it could’ve just been this. The way it is currently isn’t the only way it could have been. Another way is overdue, and it will not be easy to come by.
lil_sunchoke —
[12:47 AM]
“Fire is not destructive. The volcano is not destructive except in an indirect way. It is a cosmic anger, in other words, a creative anger, yes, creative! We are far removed from that romantic idyll beneath the calm sea. These are angry, exasperated lands, lands that spit and spew, that vomit forth life. That is what we must live up to. We must draw upon the creativity of this plot of land!”
[12:48 AM]
—from Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History, directed by Euzhan Palcy
[12:49 AM]
(i know you must be on the road/in the air/on the way some time today—wishing you ease & protection, traveling mercies)
gogogogoji —
[8:26 AM]
my bad! so caught up in travel and the demands of performance, good and draining!
lil_sunchoke —
[10:00 AM]
how is it performing from the book? We were lucky to have you read from it for the first time to an audience this past Dweller Education Night—a gift in the collected scream you offered. do you write knowing you might read these poems aloud? do you start on the page? or with something else?
gogogogoji —
[12:37 PM]
Well this performance I didn’t read anything from the book! It was all new material with the newest piece being something I wrote on the plane. With the book and new poems I don’t actively write to perform, if anything I think performance is a natural aspect for how I was taught (and I say taught loosely, informally) to write. That works out for me because it means almost every poem could be performed or could stand well both on the page and off. I don’t consider it though. Actually, now that I think about it, the times I have tried to write solely for performance have been tougher for me. Maybe because I was too aware of what I was trying to achieve.
* * *
lil_sunchoke —
[12:07 PM]
& more music—
A false history of the body occupies the masses
a playlist belated, listen how you listen, come later to title
gogogogoji —
[10:00 PM]
i listened to this playlist today while i was , something i hate doing but the playlist def made it more enjoyable. i’m making you a playlist now, as the laws of equivalent exchange demand
[2:24 PM]
this is a great spot to pick a fight w/ god
exactly 1hr long
gogogogoji —
[10:56 PM]
Unusual sailor’s love token, with three bone dice housed in a chain corresponding to a dainty shell and a heart medallion with the inscription “SJC”, the dice are arranged in the orders “215” and “562”. 19th century
lil_sunchoke —
[3:42 AM]
Untitled, 2010
Deana Lawson
* * *
gogogogoji —
[6:16 AM]
!play now that i’m older sufjan stevens
Now That I’m Older
gogogogoji —
[6:31 PM]
hello hello
Kristin Hersh – Tunnels
lil_sunchoke —
[6:42 PM]
love this //// you always throw me such charactered voices. what sort of vocals do you find you’re drawn to?
love how the guitars slur here too. lazy & direct, slips into a landing.
gogogogoji —
[6:55 PM]
i’m really into haunted feeling-sounding songs & voices at the moment…not sure how to characterize that otherwise beyond the general expectation/imagination of the word/sound… is “haunted pop” a thing? “haunted [insert genre]”? As long as it sounds like something is following you I’m into it. rn I’m into Mamaleek, Matana Roberts, and the latest Dawn Richards album Pigments. I just got into Water From Your Eyes. Also excited for the new Corrine Bailey Rae album. And it’s almost fall so I’m about to start haunting myself with my midwestern faves like Songs: Ohia.
[6:56 PM]
It’s Your Win Again
lil_sunchoke —
[7:21 PM]
equinox approaches, i get it. not sure if it’s simple nostalgia/getting older, or an extended being in a state of far away from, but i find that quality across emo—& certainly jazz & r&b as you’ve made note—of haunting so comforting. like oh ya’ll got ghosts in your ear, too? & some of those ghosts are yourself? The unresolve/able, the unheard/unhad/inner conversations made melody, if it allows itself that. Matana Roberts is exemplifying this for me too at the moment, digging into a familial history, & coming to know it differently through the horn. haunted pop! i have a haunted house in that Maurissa Rose/Theo Parrish release from earlier this year. the instrumentation collects like miles under tires. you can really hear an idea get worked out, disappearing into another when you divert your attention to the next thing coming over the hill. Rose singing over her own laughter, & when she edits (“let’s bring that back”) in real time in the cut, it’s an edit in real time again
[7:22 PM]
maybe the haunting is the collapse of time
I’m Done
[7:38 PM]
to jump to the book/your work in words, I’m eager to say!: I have the feeling you write w/ a haunted awareness, & maybe a knowing of the effect you can offer the unseeable world. Dereliction offers so many collapses from ancient to present. From the cover! We’re looking at a looking at, pushed and moved earth, molded over into form. this old clay becomes a baby & their bunnies.
gogogogoji —
[7:47 PM]
I don’t know if a poet can not be haunted, to some varying degree. It’s a haunted vocation in that it actually requires that one have and tend to the “ghosts in your ear.” Poetry is the alter of those ear ghosts or rather, the codex of their atmospheric pressure. Personally, I just write what I know or what I see. In my case, what I see or know isn’t always the reality directly in front of me. I have a very long field of sight, in all directions. I think that’s why I don’t like to drive, I can start seeing something beyond the road and that’s not safe for me, or really anyone else.
lil_sunchoke —
[9:52 PM]
Truly Sagittariun with the long sight. I’m thinking of the Walker Evans quote that opens “Murmurs”—which evokes the fear of oracular responsibility, and warns the reader if i showed this to you as it was shown to me, you couldn’t tolerate it—and towards the practice of making visible what is no longer in general view, but is rooted in life in all its states, and what it emanates. if it’s not helpful of me to ask, do disregard, but when did you recognize this sight? & that not everyone had it? & when did you know you had to translate/dictate what you saw? what allows you to reveal the altar?
gogogogoji —
[12:27 AM]
I’m not really sure when I noticed it or even if it is anything to notice but rather a form of embodiment. I think the need to articulate my view of the world happened early: I’ve always been talkative and bookish. Once a friend of mine described me as “quiet until you start talking” and my mom likes to brag that my first word (which was actually not a word but rather an onomonopia) was three syllables long. So communication has been beyond natural for me, like literally the most efforts thing in my life has been communicating. The desire or need was always there.
gogogogoji —
[7:49 PM]
Dereliction was very much a nascent articulation of that awareness. I wrote what I saw and I wrote along the outline of various experiences I have been witness to, some of those being almost or nearly personal (not quite…I found that my pen always rendered something slightly off—which was honestly fine with me, pen’s are tricky like that).
lil_sunchoke —
[9:55 PM]
(isn’t that just it! real life, but different. my life, but different. i get caught in poems so outside of my own biography, til i run again into the memory rendered pure i’m like oh! damn! there i go…dimly, but then face to face.)
gogogogoji —
[7:54 PM]
I don’t want to call any part of the book ancestral, at least not today. today I am thinking that the poet, myself in this case, lives across a large expanse of collapsable time and that my writing of that book, or at least various parts of it came to me as if I was at both ends of an echo chamber changing form: yelling from one end and listening from the other, constantly shifting form and plane. so if it is ancestral than I’m the ancestor—and I say that with as little ego as I can safely maintain bc truthfully the concept of Gabrielle is not super interesting to me, though it might seem otherwise in the book.
lil_sunchoke —
[11:05 PM]
I know we believe in the poet in a particular possession/possessed by the role as an ancient ordinance, so perhaps the ancestral resonance is already in the call for you. Maybe this can come to mean Gabrielle the ancestor as in the timbre of voice, furrow of brow, perch, & gait, that arrange you across time, regardless of creature and name.
[11:09 PM]
There is a real protection of the child—who is to be protected, and wasn’t always. I don’t force this onto you in my analysis, but you were once a child, and that teeth-flashing in her protection is present, and somehow that might be where I see “Gabrielle the concept” most legibly, in the protective effort and the protected. Is that fair to say?
gogogogoji —
[12:31 AM]
Oh yeah, Gabrielle as a full concept is definitely most legible in my childhood which is also where Gabrielle the person (and the concept) got all scrambled up. The me that exists after my childhood is not a lesser version or anything but one in possession of a partial…partial what? I don’t know. I lost something.
[12:34 AM]
Protection and the need to literally fight to protect oneself if something I’m talking about in therapy a lot. And in the past I’ve been known to say things like “anger is like a sport.” I’m good at anger, I’m good at protecting myself because that is how I’ve had to protect myself and even protect others that I love. So much so that my sister once called me and said something like, “I need you to be mad at someone for me bc I can’t.”
[12:36 AM]
That teeth bearing is exhausting but it works. I’ve proven to myself that no one is a better protector of me but me. That’s helpful and lonely. Very feral cat under a car kind of relation to the world.
lil_sunchoke —
12:22 AM
I want to hear more about the sport of anger. Made me think of Hunter x Hunter, when Gon & Killua see the traumatized shell that was once Kite for the first time since he was attacked, and after all their time training. Knuckle, sensing the grave weight the boys now carry, asks what happened while they were away. Killua says, “We didn’t do anything. Our enemies did.” So burned in my head, those frames. Throughout the anime, we see how our main characters manage anger differently, and grow within, and equally suffer from it. Gon holds a private and explosive anger usually reserved in pursuit of justice, or at its worst is self-directed. Killua’s anger, once past his cool indifference, comes through coyly in tact & debate, but in its full force makes him imprecise. Leorio believes in a fundamental respect for himself and others, and when it isn’t met, he is comically and passionately hotheaded. Kurapika’s anger is solely trained on revenge; he, too, operates in a near indifference about everything outside of it. Which fighter are you?
gogogogoji —
[8:36 AM]
This is a fun way to think of and categorize anger. I’ll start by saying certainly NOT Kurapika. Kurapika actually really frustrates me bc he allows his anger to harm and limit himself. Which I do understand—he’s dealing with the grief of genocide and all—but narratively and functionally I really always saw his use of his anger as dangerous and shortsighted. His future died at the hands of his anger, something that I think unfortunately happens to many people.
[8:42 AM]
My first inclination is to say it manifests in a more Killua fashion but that’s just my Virgo moon talking. Realistically, I think my anger manifests in the ways it did for most of the Phantom Troupe. Feitan actually came to mind. Like all of them were truly just trying to survive their fucked up childhoods in Meteor City and through their need to survive learned that anger was something they were good at. 
lil_sunchoke —
[12:29 AM]
One’s self-defense comes from the urgent need to protect themselves, left unprotected. Trial by fire breeds different instincts—I tend to smile through my rage, probably for the worse. Unable to simply leave a hostile environment, the child survives it however they can imagine survival. But a role calcifies & stifles the imagination. When I think of what I don’t have access to from childhood, it’s an enduring sense of possibility. A wonder remains, but a defensiveness settled in, too & scars over. In this partial, what fills in the gaps? Does anything fill the gap? What shapes you now? What shapes do you want to occupy? Within & outside of possibility.
gogogogoji —
[8:30 AM]
hmmm…idk if gaps get filled in life—at least not my life. never have I found something that replaces or replenishes of balms anything. gaps remain gaps, always. if they didn’t I would forget them and I would repeat things I shouldn’t repeat. gaps in my life are looked at with a distance.
[8:32 AM]
what shapes do I wish to occupy? it’s tough to answer. I don’t want to be anything really. I want to know, more clearly every moment who it is I truly am. I hope to keep occupying and maintain that shape (even though I kinda of disagree with myself already bc formlessness, duh)
