.007 Giulia's Dreamscape (with Giulia Bencivenga)
Giulia Bencivenga talks with me about their new chapbook of poetry from Dirt Child Press
“Each poem is a specific affectation of the poet’s voice,” Giulia Bencivenga tells me on a video call from their home in Los Angeles.
They’re on their couch, while I’m in a corporate cafe in New York. Giulia’s cat wanders in and out of frame and occasionally they take a pull from a peach pebble.
We are talking about dreams and pain and desire and time and death. We are talking about Giulia’s new chapbook, Comorbidity, or The Reckoning (2024, Dirt Child Press).
Giulia tells me a poem is like an essay.
Giulia tells me a poem is like a dream.
Giulia tells me that Simone Weil tells us that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. Giulia asks me if a poem is not like a prayer.
There is a poem that is an awful lot like a prayer about halfway through the book that captured my imagination. Giulia gave me permission to share it with you here.
Here’s What I Want
to watch roses whimper in a slight breeze,
for my lover to call out my name in his sleep,
to be able to leave and know she will be taken care of,
a voluptuous amount of tragedy with minimal pain,
those little east coast oysters,
copious amounts of chilled sauvignon blanc,
the drawing out of daylight as spring dies,
some pause,
for language to carry the weight of my melancholy,
to make myself up so beautifully I end the world
as you know it
To want, to yearn — to desire things both ‘high’ and ‘low’ in equal measure — flows through the experience of prayers, of philosophies, of dreams.
“If I’ve dreamt of something I write it down,” Giulia tells me. Not that these poems all came from dreams, but there is a sense of flowing between planes of being while reading these poems
I ask Giulia for an invitation to the dreamscape of Comorbidity. They oblige with a Google Drive full of references, inspirations, images that are poems themselves...
“Joy is outside of time in a way that other feelings aren’t…it opens you up to healing and healing happens in the past and it happens in the future.”
Comorbidity is the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient. We speak about the pain. We speak about death. But we spend a long time speaking about sensuality and desire. “We’re living through another Victorian era,” Giulia says. “It’s important to enjoy the sensuality of life. We’ve been so alienated from that.”
These poems explore sensuality, the body, dreams, beauty, to (as the title suggests) reckon with illness, pain, fragility. If these poems are like prayers they are also like spells. Giulia believes in more than the purely corporeal. “We are in a spiritually dead time and I think the revolution that is coming will be one that is centered around magic,” they tell me.
As seen through one vector, Giulia Bencivenga is a grad school dropout, a student of philosophy, of feminist theory and post-structuralism.
But through another, they are someone who hates institutions and hierarchical thinking. Whereas academia demands a rigidity of form, poetry allows for exploration. Still, “each poem has its own logical structure.”
From influences like Rosemarie Waldrop’s The Lawn of Excluded Middle and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Giulia found a path to explore philosophy through more playful forms.
I suggest that writing poetry is akin to writing essays, that both operate under the same desire to explore a subject of curiosity.
“Yes,” Giulia says. “A really good poem poses a question that’s so delectable that it changes the focus of your vision and thought and it’s sublime.”
“I started thinking about time and love and how I carry that time with me,” Giulia tells me, as we are speaking about the first piece that was written in what would become this collection.
‘The Wailing of Some Animal’ includes the lines:
So it is we live
in concurrent time.
So it is we are alive
and dead at once.
This poem, which Giulia describes as extremely cathartic, prompted them to think about “reconstituting time” and the “fractured sense of self”.
There is a sense of folding in of time — so that past and future may touch — and also of consubstantiation, of oneness with another life, that pervades these poems.
They explore what it means to live, through many different lenses. What does it mean to exist in time? What does it mean to exist in a body? They are posing delectable questions.
I ask Giulia about their writing practice.
“I’m lucky in that I write a lot,” they tell me. “Often, I feel like my head is empty and I don’t know what I think until I write it down. But if I didn’t write it I wouldn’t have the space to play.”
Giulia’s writing centers on the quotidian. These are poems about small things experienced in a big context. They are hermetic poems; they are meditations.
I want to know how Giulia knew the collection was done. They tell me that more of those alterations, those reconstitutions, happened during the editing and ordering process. “Seeing them all together, I was very struck by how open some of my wounds still were.”
There is a coda to the collection — a dialogue between Giulia and a medium, titled ‘The Birthday Present’ — that is preceded by a quote from the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. I would like to leave you with it.
“Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.”
August Strindberg
Comorbidity, or The Reckoning, is available from Dirt Child Press, on presale now and releasing this Friday, August 2.
Fortnight Ahead: July 29–August 11
Wednesday, Jul 31: Deleted Scenes: Readings in Soho, feat. Alexander Raubo, Curtis Garner, Jethro Turner, and Maxine Beiny. | 7 pm at Beasy Bar (58 Greek St, London). Free.
Thursday, August 1: The Drift Issue 13 launch party feat. Diana Kole, Gideo Jacobs, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Talin Tahajian and more, plus a DJ set by Ludwig Hurtado. | 7 pm at Public Records (Brooklyn). $20 / Free for subscribers.
Thursday, August 1: Diva Down: A Reading and Party feat. Greta Doyle, Masha Breeze, Michael Love Michael, Zachary Lynn, and more, with music by Sergia, Coyado, Eva Loveless and Male Merge. | Readings 8–10; Party 10-4 at 4 Irving Ave. (Brooklyn)
Saturday, August 3: Hegelian E-Girl Launch Party feat. Sierra Armor, Victoria Campbell, Theo Thimo, Nick Dove, Coldhealing, and more. | 8:30 pm at 248 McKibbin St. Rooftop
Sunday, August 4: Dirt Child Press presents: Launch of Comorbidity, or The Reckoning by Giulia Bencivenga, hosted by Carson Jordan. | 7:30 pm at 2220 Arts + Archives (2220 Beverly Blvd, LA)
