Aisha Sasha John is a choreographer, performer, and the author of three previous collections of poetry, including I have to live, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and THOU, a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award.
total is a work of contemporary mysticism, a lunar erotics of grief and rage. Here the glory of the quotidian is balm, study, and companion for the poet’s pilgrimage across deserts of loss and absence. total is prayerfulness as claws out, eyes wet, throat open, eyes turned up and in.
Interviewed by Heike Lettrari
Note – Interview was conducted over Zoom, and has been edited and condensed.
Heike Lettrari (HL): So starting off, I wanted to say thank you for this rich, rich book of poems. There’s so much in here. We won’t get to touch on everything, but I wanted to start off maybe in an obvious spot. For much of my experience reading the poems in this book, I had two images in my head: One was a megaphone right up against my ear, and the other one was a fire hose going at full blast. And it was probably a product of the all caps. I realized, wow, there’s a lot of intensity and urgency that’s coming from the use of so much all caps that wraps itself in the way that I was experiencing the poems. The all caps really conveyed, “This needs to get said now.” It offers immediacy and a sense of almost like the unfiltered, a little bit of discombobulation, juxtaposition of images, scenarios, snippets, song, thought, chant. There’s a lot in terms of how it’s functioning altogether, but it is in all caps. It’s intense to read. Was it intense writing it and spending that much time with all caps or what’s the function of the all caps for you coming through?
Aisha Sasha John (ASJ): Yeah, so all the poems that are all caps began as lines on my Tumblr, which is, you know, a blog. So I made them all caps to create a sense of uniformity—the lines are more symmetrical in all caps. It feels to me like a ledger of sorts.
There’s a version of my solo performance the aisha of is which culminates with me reading one of these all caps poems from a (vertical) scroll. This is after I climb to the top of a platform and unfurl the scroll so that it falls all the way to the ground. Because the Tumblr page is almost endlessly vertical, it did feel to me like the true home of these all caps poems was a scroll. I’ve also referred to them as ladder poems.
If there were one or two or three poems in all caps, I could see them as signifying yelling, but because there’s so many poems like that in the book, to me they’re not yelling so much as proclaiming. And obviously there’s some juxtaposition around the form and what is being proclaimed, which can be quite banal. There’s this contrast between the megaphone and the material.
I kept those Tumblr poems all caps to distinguish them from the book’s other poems also because with the Tumblr poems there was this question of cutting, of selection: what to designate as beginning and end. If the essential consideration of lyric poetry is where to break the line, with these it was where to break the scroll. Sometimes I would rearrange the order of the lines, but there is a sense of them being continuous, that maybe all of the all caps poems are part of one long scroll that has been interrupted. If you go to my Tumblr now, there’s new material, but if you dig, long and deep enough, you’ll find the OG versions of those poems in total. And it’s just like scroll after scroll after scroll, like years and years of writing there. And it’s true though that now I no longer write in all caps.
You said it was an obvious question, but I think inside of the obvious questions is where you’ll find the most mystery. And the truth is I don’t know why I stopped writing in all caps. I think sometimes the work is kind of seething, like there’s like a restrained anger or… I think I do have this capacity to work with what I think of as white heat, like the very, very tip of the flame—or maybe the base, actually—where it’s really, really hot. It’s so hot it’s not red. That kind of grief-y rage-y state for me isn’t explosive. It’s generative in terms of poetry; it’s a very language-y place. It’s a place where I can actually think—it’s slowed down—and I can see and sense; it’s where I’m really paying attention, or where I’m really drawn to a kind of careful attention.
It’s like the Justice card in the tarot: in one hand she hold the scales, and in the other hand she holds the sword. So there’s this real kind of balance. It’s not without feeling, but it almost produces a trance. It’s actually quite placid, quite calm. Yeah, there’s a calmness. It brings to mind an assassin: there’s a deliberateness and a precision and a capacity to move within, to move the energy and to use the energy, to direct the energy. It’s like the energy is in a pen. Yeah, yeah—like a laser.
HGL: The all caps help express things that are being proclaimed. I can see that as much as I had the image of a megaphone right beside my ear, I totally agree that the content of what was being expressed in all caps felt very interior and not things that you would necessarily spit out in a megaphone that typically is used to talk to a big crowd of people. So yeah, I think that’s an important thing to note. It’s almost like it’s something being whispered in a megaphone.
ASJ: Yeah, it’s the amplification. There’s intimacy there. Yes, a lot. So the whisper gets amplified through the technology of the caps.
HL: I’ve got a question about the title of the book. But first, I wanted to acknowledge where “total” is used in the poems. I think it only appears in one spot—can you tell me a little more about that?
ASJ: Yeah, I think one of the primary veins in total has to do with how though life can be devastating and painful, we ourselves cannot be ruined. Or that devastation and its consequences can be included in/as our wholeness. In total absence is the condition for Presence. Really though, what the title means is continuing to unfold for me, even months after publishing the book.
There are many ways that I thought of the title while I was writing the manuscript. I was interested in a total work. Is that possible? Or a total system. I’m a big tarot person and a big astrology person, and those are total systems. And finite. The soul is total. Our lives are total and finite. I think I wanted through writing the book to feel total, to know my totalness empirically even though, sure, I understood, philosophically and intellectually, that I am, that I have to be, what we all are total—simply as a function of the miracle of aliveness—but it wasn’t enough to know that. I was writing towards an experience of embodied belief.
And I think that only very recently, in the past couple weeks, have I felt total in a continuous way. I do feel like I have access to that feeling, but it took a lot to get here.
HGL: I’m so glad you have access to that feeling. I think a lot of people don’t get there. It takes a lot of work to get to self-acceptance and feeling connected, a sense of wholeness.
ASJ: OK, total is also about loving one’s aloneness. There’s a way in which I see this book as a follow up to my second book, THOU. In THOU I said I thought the unit of human life was maybe closer to two than one because at the time I was really understanding myself through relationships. There’s a line in THOU that says, “Who I am is I love some people”. I felt so constituted by my relationships and I think that there’s obviously profound truth to that, that we know ourselves in large part in contrast and in relation. We’re social animals, etc.
It’s also the case that there is something true about us being essentially alone. We’re born alone; we will die alone—you know. There’s an encounter with life itself that no one can do for us that is our responsibility; we are totally responsible for our own lives. So total as in total accountability.
I think there’s also something about the presence of God in aloneness. Yes, we pray in community and God is with us in love—absolutely. I believe that very much. And yet there’s a particular kind of relationship to the divine that I think only happens when we’re alone. That space of aloneness that is total is full: it is in this “aloneness” where we might be most connected to the essential oneness, to divine and cosmic presence. But I don’t think you can necessarily experience that divine connection when you’re still reaching for what’s absent. Surrender and reception are important modalities of the book.
HL: That’s so wonderfully rich and thoughtful. I connect to a lot of what you said and especially what you’re reaching for when you say we know ourselves through relationship. There was this ontological stewing coming through with this book. When you were saying that piece around the unit of human life being closer to two than to one, and how we understand ourselves in relationship to others, the thought that popped to mind to me somewhat darkly is, Yeah, there’s a reason why isolation is used as a method of torture, right? Removing people from others like that. That social connection is so important to what it is to be human. Thank you so much for that interesting reflection.
One of the questions I had, reflecting on the ways grief and loneliness show up in the book, and also the few human characters, and that this is a book that largely looks at the relationship with the self, the interior, and the cat! The cat shows up several times! But the question I had is, is this book indirectly a COVID book?
ASJ: I started writing many of these poems back in 2017, 2018, so well before COVID. But there are some poems that were written during lockdown and during the uprisings.
HL: I wanted to conclude with a bit of a question around who are you reading these days and who are you inspired by? And I do want to say that’s meant loosely. It’s not just other books and writers. It’s YouTube videos. It’s people, songs. Can you give people a sense of what are some of the things that you’re interacting with that are inspiring you or you know?
ASJ: I recently read a Renee Gladman book that I loved, To After That, and then that inspired me to read a Marguerite Duras book: Two by Duras. And then I read another Renee Gladman book, My Lesbian Novel. Now I’m reading Marguerite Dura’s The Lover. So I’ve gone from Gladman to Duras to Gladman to Duras. And I’m like, okay, should I go back to Gladman? Like, how long can I keep this volleying going? (laughter)
HL: Last question. It’s a follow up to a comment about the cat. I appreciated the way that humor shows up in these poems. And the cat was almost like a Puck figure or like a bit of comic relief. Not to say that all of the content associated with the cat is “funny haha”, but a line like “the cat upchucked her chicken treat”—there’s nothing more real that. That’s the stuff of life. So there’s a moment of absurdity that comes with that. And could you comment on the way that humor, the cat, shows up and how it brings a different sense of the material? With those themes of loss and grief in the book, it could have been very heavy without those more real moments of humour.
ASJ: Well, I think if you tell the truth, it’s either funny or sad. I didn’t try and add any levity in. I would say total is a very lunar book in terms of how the moon is understood in astrology in terms of the everyday. Writing total was a receptive practice. So to me the reality of life is that your cat regurgitates and then you get a call from a family member about something happening. Like all those things sit within the day beside or top of each other in time.
My process for total was to be like a reporter, to simply record the objects of my consciousness. I had a sublet that came with a cat and her name was Fried Egg. Fried Egg was my first cat love. I’d never lived with a cat before. So she was on my mind because her catness was new to me. So it was remarkable. All of it was remarkable. My goal with total was to only remark upon those things that were novel. The tense of total is present tense. Especially in the all caps poems where I’m documenting whatever’s happening in that moment or whatever occurs to me. So if I’m at home and the cat’s doing stuff, that’s gonna show up.
HL: Thank you so much for all your time and answering my questions.