Brian David Crawford: Donna, I want to begin with a passage from your first book, The Reservoir, published in 2002. The opening poem, “Album,” begins:
Reading this now, more than twenty years later, it strikes me as an announcement of much that would concern you in the work to come: the city's architecture as an aesthetic frame, visual framing as an expression of agency, the observer whose act of seeing allows “what was dumb” to speak. Was this poem, in retrospect, a kind of ars poetica? Did you understand at the time that these preoccupations would define your trajectory?
Donna Stonecipher: It’s true, some of my obsessions have remained constant for the last 30 years, but I can only say that with the benefit of retrospect. I didn’t understand at the time that arches and framing and the mise-en-abime would hold enduring fascination for me. I like the idea of it as an ars poetica. It certainly seems significant that I placed this poem as the first poem in my first book.
BC: Your most recent collection, The Ruins of Nostalgia, opens quite differently:
Courtyard opened out into courtyard opened out into courtyard, and in the final courtyard an art gallery was closing.
There are echoes of “Album” here, the mise-en-abyme, the architectural recursion, but the conclusion has shifted. Instead of the observer's framing allowing what was dumb to speak, we witness the closure of a space for reflection, the elimination of the art gallery itself. How do you understand the distance traveled between these two openings? Is this a record of disillusionment, or is it something more complicated?
DS: Thank you for noticing. You could say it represents the distance traveled between the 1990s and the present, both personally and politically. Looking back, there was a kind of (foolish?) innocence to the exuberance of the 90s that has been completely eroded by today. The Cold War, under whose shadow I had lived my whole life, was over, the end of history was upon us, etc. And then history came back with a vengeance, didn’t it?
BC: It certainly did. In Prose Poetry and the City, you argue that the prose poem is, in some sense, “ontologically urban,” since it emerged from and remains uniquely suited to expressing urban experience. You trace this back to Baudelaire's Paris, to the flâneur / flâneuse, to the city's grid and its horizontal expanse. For readers unfamiliar with that argument, could you sketch the essential connection you see between the prose poem as a form and the city as a subject?
DS: That book was about exploring connections between the history of poetic form and developments in architectural form. Using a super-interesting architectural theory called “corporate verticality and civic horizontality,” as well as theories from linguistics of the axes of verticality (poetry) and horizontality (prose) in Saussure, Bakhtin, and Jakobson—along with a whole host of pleasurable detours—I traced the rise of the prose poem in Paris and also, to a lesser extent, of free verse in New York. The prose poem tracks with Hausmannian blocks and free verse with the skyscraper. Really, both are imbricated with the rise of the modern metropolis and the ways in which big cities broke down lots of traditions and social forms.
BC: OK. I’d like to follow this line of thinking a bit further, and examine these architectural ideas as they appear in the construction of the poem. You've said that you discovered in the prose poem “an architectural form that could serve as a kind of scaffolding for my thoughts in the way I wanted to arrange them.” Free verse was “too free,” but traditional forms like the sonnet didn't appeal. What does the prose poem's particular architecture, its block, its lack of line breaks, its reliance on the sentence, allow you to do that other forms cannot?
DS: It allowed me to avoid the line break, which I was finding quite tyrannical. It also led me to invent other strategies of patterning within syntax, and within the unit of the sentence and of the paragraph. Which I found—and still find—exciting. I have sometimes called myself a “formal prose poet,” and I like the double contradiction of that.
BC: I’ve noticed that each of your books employs a distinctive formal constraint. In Model City, all 288 sections begin with “It was like …” In The Ruins of Nostalgia, nearly all 64 poems end with the title phrase. You've quoted Shakespeare on this: “lest too light winning / Make the prize light.” What does difficulty, self-imposed formal difficulty, give you as a poet? And what does repetition, specifically, allow you to explore?
DS: Poetry has always been about constraint, of course; for much of its history in English, the poet proved her prowess by maneuvering through and outwitting these constraints. So in that sense, my need for constraint is actually quite historical. It’s also just fun—first, the search to find the right constraint, and then the process of letting it challenge, test, befuddle, and sometimes even defeat me. I find repetition very generative and I tend to love writers who use a lot of it. I’ve just been rereading HD for a presentation, and I’m reveling in her hallucinatorily repeating motifs. I am a ruminator, which is supposedly not great for one’s mental health, but I recognize repetition on some deep cellular level, and perhaps using it in writing or reading both acknowledges its power and redirects it.
BC: In Model City, you describe the experience of discovering a city through its representations. For instance, there is the delight of encountering a district whose street names are based on cosmic objects, followed by the sobering recognition of the neighborhood's grim economic realities. Those realities betray the expectations that the beautiful names implied. And then comes a further turn: the realization that the aesthetic pleasure of the observer may itself contribute to overlooking other people's suffering. I'm thinking particularly of Model City 26. Could you speak to this ethical dimension of urban observation, the pleasure of the flâneur and its potential complicity?
DS: The promise of the flâneur was to escape this complicity. Baudelaire’s figure could roam the streets anonymously, observing but not participating, like Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.” For those born observers among us, what a boon! And this kind of non-participatory participation was made possible by the metropolis; there’s no flâneuring in the small town. Georg Simmel wrote about this and about the “jaded” character of the big-city dweller. The twentieth century was all about converting us into spectators, and it continues apace with Tiktok etc. But for some of us, who have trouble being jaded, this activity can be accompanied by pangs of conscience. I think the tension between being an observer and “getting involved” is one of the drivers of my work.
BC: When I was a student, I encountered Wallace Stevens's assertion that “Nostalgia is the failure of feeling,” and it shaped my attitude toward nostalgia for many years. I understood nostalgia as a kind of evasion, a sentimental retreat from the present. Your work seems to see it quite differently, as a potential site of resistance, which I find compelling. You've described nostalgia as “a strategy of resistance to capitalist erasure of the past.” How did you arrive at this understanding? And how does it relate to the Ostalgie you observed in Berlin, the nostalgia of East Germans for what was lost after reunification? At the same time, we're witnessing in contemporary American politics that echoes a much more local, 20th century movement based here in Berlin in which a call to return to a particular version of the past can become a call to dominate, to destroy, and to deprive certain members of society of their rights. How do you think about nostalgia's darker political valences alongside its resistant possibilities?
DS: To answer this question, I can offer Svetlana Boym’s brilliant division from The Future of Nostalgia of nostalgia into two types: restorative and reflective. Reflective nostalgia is harmless; it occurs on a personal plane, and studies have shown it even has health benefits. Restorative nostalgia is the dangerous kind you’re referring to, the kind that powers political movements. I’ve had some ambivalence about nostalgia myself; in a poem in my book The Cosmopolitan I wrote “Nostalgia is memory decayed to sugar.” But it was definitely the Ostalgie phenomenon that opened my eyes. After the Wall came down, East Berliners found their lives, histories, buildings, and stories being erased by a careless and rather arrogant capitalist West, and Ostalgie was a way of refusing that erasure. So nostalgia has more functions than we at first think. Boym contends that nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: you don’t get one without the other. She also says that nostalgia “is at the very core of the modern condition,” which seems to be truer and truer.
BC: In The Ruins of Nostalgia, you write about both Berlin and Seattle, two cities that, as it turns out, are now both being transformed by tech capital and the presence of the same corporate forces. Amazon has a highly visible presence in both cities, including a prominent tower here in Berlin, and Tesla recently opened a factory on the outskirts of the city. Seattle, of course, is Amazon's headquarters. What does it mean to feel nostalgia for two places at once when both are being reshaped by the same global economic forces? Is the same phenomenon taking place in both cities, or does each city illuminate something about the other?
DS: In 2018, when I was in the thick of writing that book, Seattle had the fastest-rising real estate prices in the US, and Berlin had the fastest-rising real estate prices in the world. It’s an odd coincidence. Many of the poems address the gentrification in both cities. I feel that in some sense, through my deep attachment to these two cities, I have a unique view into both sides of gentrification: in Berlin I am a part of gentrification, but in Seattle I am not. In any case I am a longtime skeptic of Big Tech (I still have yet to own a smartphone), and it’s dismaying to see how it is transforming these places I love.
BC: You've lived in Berlin for more than twenty years now, longer than many native Berliners. You've described the particular nostalgia of the Wahlberliner, the person who chose to live in a city and then watches it change. But you're also an American abroad, which raises questions not only of chosen home but of national and cultural identity. How do you understand your position? Are you an expatriate, an exile, a migrant? Do these words mean different things to you?
DS: In The Cosmopolitan I wrote, “The American man who was living in Tanzania was an expatriate, but the Tanzanian man who was living in North America was an immigrant,” and that says a lot I think—who gets to live where, and under what designation, is all determined by relative privilege. I have sometimes called myself—and others like me—“voluntary exiles.” In other words, people who have chosen to live far away from their families and the milieus they grew up in, for reasons that are not necessarily economic and that can remain somewhat obscure even to us. But it’s voluntary; we can go back. I have been interested in the implications of this choice and the long-term consequences of it.
BC: Economic dynamics are constantly being explored in your poetry, the transactions, the exchanges, the way capital reshapes cities and lives. I'm curious about the economic conditions that led you to settle in Berlin in the first place. What made it possible, or attractive, or necessary? And how have those economic conditions changed over the past twenty years? Berlin was famously “poor but sexy” when you arrived; it's now one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in Europe. How has that transformation affected your life and work here?
DS: If the first part of my life was shaped by the constraints and the limits of the Cold War, the second part was enabled by its dissolution. I have never been motivated by money and, perhaps as a result, I’ve never earned much of it from my work, and so I have always looked for ways to live economically, which is part of what first led me to stay in these post–Cold War environments (first Prague, then Berlin), where the financial circumstances had not caught up to the rest of the West. Both places turned out to be incredible gifts—my moveable feasts. I feel so lucky that I was 20 years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and enduringly grateful to these places that welcomed, or at least tolerate(d), my presence in them. When I moved to Berlin, it was full of people like me in that respect. You rarely met anyone with a full-time job; the city was full of “Lebenskünstler,” people trying to live creatively rather than pursuing lucre. Now everyone has to hustle and monetize and work full-time to pay the rent, and that has really changed the character of the city.
BC: You've been a member of the English-language poetry scene in Berlin for more than twenty years now, and you've been teaching poetry writing workshops to students for much of that time. What have you observed about the development of the English-language poetry scene in Berlin? How would you describe its features and dynamics from your vantage point? And how does living and working in a culture where German is the standard language shape your own practice of writing in English? Does the daily encounter with another language, on the street, in bureaucracy, in friendship, enter into your poems, or into how you hear English?
DS: When I first moved here, the English-language poetry scene in Berlin mostly consisted of a handful of poets from the UK. Occasionally, an American poet would turn up for a while, but then move on. I said in a 2012 interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson in the Denver Quarterly: “I used to expect a ship full of American poets to dock in Berlin, but it never did.” Well, it finally did! The millennial generation came, and now Gen Z, too. That said, I think we are probably as heterogeneous a group as any group of poets in any city. I don’t see a recognizable “Berlin style” emerging (do you?). Of course, life as a writer living abroad has changed drastically, and with the vast amount of living online we all do, sometimes it can feel like a quasi-abroad life. When I lived in Prague in the 90s, for most of the time I lived there I did not have a telephone—I’m talking about a landline. Keeping in touch with home meant writing, and waiting for, handwritten letters. I will never forget the joy of picking up a bundle of letters at the poste restante in the neo-Renaissance post office in central Prague. I wonder how the ease of keeping in touch with home nowadays has changed this experience.
BC: I don’t see a “Berlin style” per se, but I have observed some trends. The fact that many of the North American poets in Berlin also work as translators is a fact worth exploring, and you are one of these poets who has also worked translating poetry into English. Your translations of Friederike Mayröcker's prose poetry trilogy, études, cahier, and now fleurs, are a major undertaking. You've described opening the first volume in Dussmann and knowing within two minutes that this was what you wanted to translate. What was it about her work that seized you?
DS: I loved the stylistic innovations she was using in the prose poem. And I loved her intellectual ferocity, combined with whimsy, wry humor, and huge amounts of tenderness.
BC: You've recently completed a book about architectural ornament in Berlin, specifically about the fact that over half of the city's pre–World War I façades have had their ornament removed. What drew you to this subject? And what have you learned as you’ve researched and written this book?
DS: When I first moved to Berlin, I noticed that many of the pre–World War I façades of apartment buildings had had their ornament removed, but nobody, not even architects, could tell me why. I started doing a little research myself into the history of ornament, and what I found quickly pulled me into a full-blown obsession. Perhaps as with nostalgia, I found ornament to be an utterly fascinating, totally misunderstood, and totally unfairly devalued phenomenon that in some sense selected me as one of its champions. I became an ornament-evangelist, if you will.
BC: This seems like a project that sits at the intersection of your interests: architecture, urban history, aesthetics, loss. Is it a critical study, a hybrid work, something else? How does it relate to your poetry?
DS: I believe that ornament and poetry are deeply related in terms of their musical properties and their use of patterned languages, but my book is prose—it is a hybrid work of scholarship, memoir, investigation, astonishment, righteous anger, and reclamation. It is an “inexpert investigation,” I term I like that was coined, I believe, by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand; I read about it in a book by the wonderful inexpert investigator Allison Cobb. The “inexpert” investigator is free to make all kinds of intuitive leaps that an “expert” would be constrained not to. I am excited for it to be published, even though I’m expecting blowback. It’s a different feeling than with poetry, which sometimes feels like writing in code. This is a book that anyone, not just poets, can read—which makes it scary, but exciting.
BC: You once offered a writing prompt: “Follow an obsession, even if it seems like folly.” What obsessions are you currently following?
DS: My current obsession is with the Arts and Crafts movement and with Craftsman houses, including the Craftsman-style house I grew up in Seattle. I have a big intellectual crush on William Morris, and also on the curmudgeon John Ruskin.
