A dialogue on somatic practices

112 hanu kapil and jonah mixon-webster are poets who write into the interstices between genres and bodies. In their books, both writers build worlds that feel at once fragmentary and replete—full of ellipses, yet dense with creaturely life—and explore notions of home, resistance, and monstrosity. For Kapil, who is British Indian and splits her time between England and the United States, the long, essayistic prose-poem is a space free from fictitious borders and colonial logic. Like the characters she favors— who exist often at the intersection of multiple identities and even species—each of Kapil’s six books proposes new ways to shirk the invisible strictures of grammar and nationality. Language is a similarly fluid medium for Mixon-Webster, whose poemsandessaysoftentakehisnativeFlint,Michiganasbothsubject conversation Bhanu Kapil and Jonah Mixon-Webster A dialogue on somatic practices B and setting; his debut collection, Stereo(TYPE) (2018) exposes numerous axes of systemic racism—physical and economic violence, public health crisis, the literature of white supremacy—through a kaleidoscopic array of modes. Weaving from poetic dialogues and “FAQs” to erasures and dream sequences, his work, like Kapil’s, offers a radically hybrid alternative to state-sanctioned categories. For this special issue, Kapil and Mixon-Webster—mutual admirers of one another’s work—exchanged letters on a Google doc about family, linear time, and somatic practices. —the editors from: bhanu kapil to: jonah mixon-webster Dear Jonah, I moved house today, in England, and my body feels like a fox body or a tree body, something not different from the outside of this apartment complex at the edge of a wood. I’ve been texting with my friend Aaron Brown in California all week. He wanted to know how I handle what he calls “the affective visceral lapse” that happens in conversation when the person you’re talking to changes the subject abruptly. And how this happens, in particular, when the conversation approaches a difficult topic, the history of racialized violence, for example. My computer charge is about to run out, but it’s what I want to make a note of here. To think about. Perhaps you could tell me a story from the in-between? I’m so tired tonight, as this full moon rises over the fens. (Though now it’s morning.) Just came in from an early walk with my mother. We watched the sun come up; she said: “Bhanu, you went mad for poetry when you were a baby.” She recalled my nursery teacher, Mrs. Anderson, beckoning her just as class was about to end. “What has Bhanu done now?” asked my mother. “Something horrible ?” “On the contrary, Mrs. Kapil,” said my teacher, “look…” At JONAH MIxON-WEBSTER | 113 Asha Kapil in Cambridge, UK, September 21, 2020. the age of five, I was standing on a table reciting improvised poems about the sun to a class of about twenty other children, occasionally pausing to ask them questions. Mrs. Anderson took out her guitar to accompany me and…well, here we are. I took a photograph of my mother telling me this story as the sun rose this morning. Perhaps for me there never was an in-between; perhaps it was always like this. At the same time, I feel impacted, in the last few years, by a kind of disillusionment with the avant-garde or experimental communities where I found a welcome when I first began to write and publish in the United States. I feel sick when I think about some of the things that happened in contexts I finally found the strength to step out of. I want to find a way to be with others in a new way. We’ll see. I feel as if I have been in service to whiteness, and that: must stop. I’m curious about other ways to be with others, and with poetry. What feeling hopeful again, about poetry, might look like/be like. What is it like for you? from: jonah to: bhanu Hello, Bhanu! Whatagloriousimageyou’vecaptured.It’sstunningandstarlightfalling all over over there, and as I sit on a bench beneath a peach tree in the backyard of my new residence in St. Louis, the peaches...