An Interview with David Greenspan
Emilio Carrero
David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press) and the chapbooks Error (Antiphony Press) and Nervous System with Dramamine (The Offending Adam). Recent work appears, or will soon, in Hunger Mountain, Iowa Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. Find him online at https://davidgreenspanwriter.com/.
David Greenspan’s Error uses language error, fragmentation, remixed text, and nonlinear temporalities to present a failure of childhood/a childhood of failure. Error examines parental abuse and animal death in Michigan’s crumbling palm, while also echoing life with an auditory processing disorder. Logic subordinates itself to aural pattern in Greenspan’s failures, turning from stutter to sustained wail.
– Antiphony Press
To read more of David Greenspan’s work as well as to purchase his books, including Error, visit his website.
Emilio Carrero: After reading your book, I found myself thinking a lot about discipline. The title of the book “Error” (and a word that often gets attached to it: "disorder”) has correctional, disciplinary, and maybe even masculine meanings associated with them. The book seems to be exploring these associated meanings while also exploring new possibilities for “error” and “disorder.” Perhaps “error” as a poetic practice? The “errors” and “disorder” in these poems continually subvert my expectations (I read/anticipate "clown car" but the poem actually reads "clown care," or "every father yells" and the poem actually reads: "every father yellow”). What's the significance of "error" and “disorder” for you in this book?
David Greenspan: I love that you approach ideas of error and disorder through their social webbing and that this approach is based in power and gender. That’s a great way to start any conversation, but certainly one about this project. When trying to describe Error, I wrote a whole thing about attempting/creating via failure. Rather than repeat that here, I’ll say I’ve been influenced by Jack Halberstam’s reframing of failure in The Queer Art of Failure. If failure, and its sibling error, have creative capacities like Halberstam argues, then how does one access them within a specific context and what opportunities do they afford? I picked language error through diction and syntax given my experience growing up/living with an undiagnosed auditory processing disorder and in the afterlife of trauma.
The process of turning these errors into text ended up being enjoyable, pleasurable even, which speaks to “error as a poetic practice,” your wonderful observation. Pleasure is one of the opportunities that reorienting failure/error offers—the ability to inhabit painful memories in a state of not-pain seems like a miracle—but I think there are other, broader opportunities as well. An attempt to challenge dominant ideas of disorder, to queer or crip them, is one. Your reading experience brought you to non-logical meaning-making before your brain disciplined phrases back to a state of logos. What is this but the inadequacy of language in the face of agreed-upon symbols and meaning; or the inadequacy of failure to queer and error to crip? But then one pauses and finds the non-disciplinary and non-logical. This pause is a way to elongate reading and meaning-making experiences, to stretch and distort them in ways that feel generative in all senses. I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to meander more and see what new places that meandering leads to.
EC: I was struck by the way the poems shift temporalities. The disorder of the poems feels as though the floodgates of time have been opened. Things are rushing by in different directions and speeds. It's disorienting yet also freeing. It's making me think again about how disorder carries the clinical meaning of "wrongness" and yet in the context of these poems, the wrongness is creative fuel. What are the appeals of writing toward/with disorder for you? And could you talk about the shifting temporalities in the poems?
DG: I used the terms “failure” and “error” above, but another appropriate term is “glitch (a favorite word—the larger project Error was born from is titled Glitch, Michigan). Writing toward/with disorder feels similar to glitching language. My glitching is indebted to Ato Quayson’s theory of aesthetic nervousness or the breakdown of normative representation and thought/experience/being when one brushes against disability in art. I like to think I’m taking Quayson’s ideas and hardwiring them into text through language glitches. I don’t know if I’m successful, but I’m trying.
One of my most profound reading experiences was Cynthia Cruz’s poem “Chronic.” In it, memory and the current moment continuously rearrange themselves as the speaker recalls time spent institutionalized. Temporalities become blurred, disordered even, at the level of syntax, grammar, and enjambment (all of which also elongate the reading experience). I felt so much possibility and freedom when I read “Chronic.” Cruz is one of my favorite poets, though she isn’t the first to play with time and the materiality of language. Why do I react so strongly to her poem and not another poet doing the same things? I think it has something to do with the poem’s embodiment of disorder. The small but important freedom this type of reading experience offers is everything.
I used the terms “failure” and “error” above, but another appropriate term is “glitch (a favorite word—the larger project Error was born from is titled Glitch, Michigan). Writing toward/with disorder feels similar to glitching language
EC: Maybe this leads into what you call "remixes." I loved how you framed it (in the endnotes) as being a conductor of the wailing while also admitting that it remains unclear to you if you've composed the text. Could you say more about this? How are you distinguishing between conducting and composing?
DG: This is the area I was most nervous about when publishing Error. I didn’t worry about it while writing/conducting, but when sharing it with others, I was worried about plagiarism. That feels a bit melodramatic, but it’s true! Framing my incorporation of others’ text as remixing in the endnote helped ease my worry. For that, and so much more, I’m grateful to Ann Pedone, publisher of Antiphony Press.
I’m not sure there is a difference between composing and conducting. We’re assembled from our forebearers—poetic and otherwise—so it feels like splitting myself to try and tease out what’s conducting and what’s “wholly original.” I’ll note that what I mean by remixing is taking a fragment of another’s language and adding something of my own to it. Sometimes I did this through language error and sometimes through new writing. Sometimes both. The phrase “new hope for rodents” (pg. 20) is borrowed from an old ad for the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. The fragment this phrase comes from recalls a night my cat failed to kill a mouse. I took the mouse outside, though it returned the following day, and my cat succeeded in killing it. Situating the phrase, which I didn’t change at all, within contexts of animal suffering and the futility of human helpfulness shuffles meaning. This shuffling feels similar to taking a piano riff, slowing it down, adding other samples, and creating an instrumental piece of music.
EC: The aurality of the poems feels like it is powering the lines more so than a linear narrative. There is almost a Mad Libs feel to some of the poems? Mad Libs, I am just now realizing, also has that clinical weight of "madness" to it, but is also a game, a way of playing with language. I'm thinking now about Derrida and Foucault's debate over madness, and whether those deemed "mad" can actually speak from within the systems of power that they inhabit. Do you see these poems as tapping into the socially unacceptable? Or, perhaps, writing in a socially unacceptable way? To what extent are these poems exploring transgression?
DG: There’s a good answer to this question, though I’m not sure I’m the one to give it. Writing that circumvents narrative is transgressive in a way, though it’s also expected, to varying extents, from experimental literature. “The children of barbarians become the new tax collectors,” to quote the musician Pat the Bunny. That isn’t to say experimental writing can’t speak back to dominant and disciplinary systems of power, or, at least, make a ruckus in place of speech. Anyway, that’s all formal when the larger transgression, or attempt at transgression, is writing toward/with disorder, as you mentioned above. My hope is that wiring disorder into a text through playing with language’s materiality, or any other method, allows the neurodivergent/disordered/mad to speak in a way that is uniquely their own (our own? though I don’t want to claim ownership over others’ experiences and expressions). The detritus of language that itself has been deemed “madness.” An anti-logical language assembled from bits and pieces which are expressive and communicative in novel ways.
The detritus of language that itself has been deemed “madness.” An anti-logical language assembled from bits and pieces which are expressive and communicative in novel ways.
EC: A broader question I wanted to ask you about is the practice of incorporating philosophy and theory into your poetry. As a PhD student, I feel as though there remains an unspoken tension between critical writing and creative writing (a crude binary), but one that academic institutions maintain for their own financial interests. And I'm often stunned when creative writers roll their eyes at theory for being dense or inaccessible when those very people (poets, for example) write in a genre that is often seen as mysterious or inaccessible. A very strange irony is happening that I can't quite understand.
DG: I love your questioning of the creative/critical divide in academia. I’ve found the same and am guessing many poets within the academy have. Framing each as mysterious to the other is interesting, too, because while our goals diverge in many places, clarity of communication is one we share (even if that communication is experimental in nature). At the risk of laying blame at the feet of critics/scholars, I wish more would recognize scholarship and philosophy as creative. In many ways it’s more creative than traditionally understood creative writing! A poet expresses an idea or emotion, renders a scene, marvels in words and their relations, challenges whatever it is they want to challenge, and so on. A critic takes someone else’s creative output and re-expresses it in their own way, while also drawing connections between disparate lines of thought. As you say, this is a crude binary, but one that nevertheless captures the state of many English departments within the neoliberal university.
EC: This might be a good time to talk about Debord (whose work I'm not familiar with), but I am thankful for your endnotes, which provide context. Why did Debord's The Society of the Spectacle capture your interest? What did it allow you to access/unlock in these poems?
DG: I read The Society of the Spectacle during the summer of 2020, as the world turned to Instagram and Zoom to replace IRL sociality and as Debord’s spectacle was enlarged exponentially. It seemed impossible to do anything that wasn’t mediated/coordinated by mass communication technology. So, the context within which I was introduced to Debord burned his ideas of alienation into my brain. I started thinking that if the spectacle is social relation mediated by images (Thesis 4), then the afterlife of trauma is a type of spectacle or, at least, spectacular. Memory that won’t stay memory, looping, recursive thought, and behavior learned as a defense mechanism all change how one relates to others. I wrote with this idea, in much the same way I wrote with disorder, and Error is part of what came out. Debord is interesting on a formal level as well. He remixes a lot of writers/thinkers throughout The Society of the Spectacle. Most obvious are Hegel and Marx, though he also samples ideas and phrases from Feuerbach, Lukács, and I’m sure, many others I missed. Sometimes Debord cites these people, sometimes he doesn’t. As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that one reason Debord is so interesting is that he does the opposite of what we were bemoaning above – he blurs the creative and critical in a way that generates something new.
Memory that won’t stay memory, looping, recursive thought, and behavior learned as defense mechanism all change how one relates to others.
EC: I want to make a bit of a sharp turn here because I realize I haven't asked you about "the Father" in these poems. Of course, the Father is a character in the book, but I found myself experiencing the Father in many senses. The Father can feel, oftentimes, like the ultimate Western narrative. But in the description of your book, it says that "something adjacent to narrative emerges.” What do you see emerging (adjacently) from the narrative of the Father? Is that adjacent narrative a way of processing trauma? Or does that just bring us back to the narrative of the father?
DG: Plagiarism was the area I was most worried about when publishing Error, but confronting Father, in all its shades, was the area I was most worried about when composing. There’s certainly the narrative father, though, again, as you astutely note, this is in so many ways the least interesting father. Rather than the narrative father, I found myself drawn to narratives of masculinity and questioning how and why fear was the avenue through which I learned masculinity. I guess this is how I’ll answer the question of what might emerge adjacently when interrogating narratives of father—a fuller rendering of gender, especially its creation and perpetuation through trauma. I like that this takes us back to your first question of disciplinary ideas of error/disorder. I learned masculinity through a very specific context. Though I wanted, and continue to want, nothing to do with that masculinity, I’m nevertheless trapped within its tread. I can only relate to it negatively or, as you write, I’m brought “back to the narrative of the father” even as I try to slip it. What might it look like to jettison Father/masculinity/gender completely? Perhaps a disordered text. I hope Error moves in that direction. As I read it with your questions in mind, I wonder if “[w]orms and rats / my closest” can be a way to conceive of gender outside of narratives of father?
On another level, I suspect there’s more Father present in Error than I’d like. I’ve talked about reshaping language’s materiality and hardwiring disorder into the text. These feel like violence. They make me think of myself standing over the text, scalpel, needle, and thread in hand. I’m Father to the text despite wanting to be a friend. I followed language as much as I could while composing Error, but even so, there seems something controlling and dominant in how I think about and describe the composing process.
I’ve talked about reshaping language’s materiality and hardwiring disorder into the text. These feel like violence. They make me think of myself standing over the text, scalpel, needle, and thread in hand. I’m Father to the text despite wanting to be a friend.
EC: The last thing I wanted to ask about is intertextuality. The book openly embraces other voices, other texts. Could you talk about the works that you feel the book is indebted to, as well as the intertextual spirit of the poems themselves?
DG: There are far too many debts to list. Most directly, though, Error bears the fingerprints of Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Shane McCrae’s Mule. “The Glass Essay” taught me the art of literary haunting, that a text can be temporally—and authorially—promiscuous, and that doing so allows the text to move outside of individualized and human sensuous experience. My Life taught me Hejinian’s marvelous open sentence, which gave me a shifting blueprint for how to write something that coheres through emotional response and syntax/grammar rather than logic. Mule taught me how to push coherence further and further, to stretch it beyond conventional meaning-making, as a means of writing with disorder. Again, there are countless other voices and texts, including the fragments I remix, but Carson, Hejinian, and McCrae stand out.
EMILIO CARRERO is the editor of Southeast Review. They are the author of Autobiography of the [Undead] (Calamari Press, 2025). They believe the truth is out there.
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