May 16, 2012, by Hannah Fries
Lia Purpura’s new essay collection, Rough Likeness, includes two essays that appeared in Orion, “On Coming Back as a Buzzard” (September/October 2009) and “There Are Things Awry Here” (November/December 2010). Lia is also the author of the essay collection On Looking and the poetry collection King Baby, and was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Orion‘s Hannah Fries caught up with her to ask a few questions about Rough Likeness and what’s next.
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In both On Looking and your new collection of essays, Rough Likeness, you engage in a kind of “looking” that takes immense energy and intention—a sharp kind of inquiry that refuses to take things for granted, that hungers to peel away layers and screens of all kinds. Is this a practice you were consciously aware of when you began to write these essays? Am I right to call it a “practice”? If so, how did it become one for you?
In one way, I think you’re absolutely right to call it a “practice”: paying attention is a way of being. It’s not an easy way of being, because porosity (registering, holding) does mean a kind of commitment to registering painful things. Or, maybe it’s a helplessness before such things. Probably that. I don’t know how such a stance became a stance for me—and others have asked this before. I do think the desire to turn outward, to see, to not turn away from, is counterbalanced by the drive to write, which requires a turning inward. I suffer, as many writers do, from feeling I’m not “doing” enough, not being an attentive enough public activist or advocate…but I’ve come to trust, too, in the tools I’ve been given—the capacity to sit and write—and have tried to strengthen my belief in those tools as “useful”—in showing alternate ways one might, as a reader, engage with the world attentively, in helping to provide language for states of being that are hard to word, but certainly shared by all.
Rough Likeness seems particularly concerned with language itself. As one might pick up an object, turn it over, examine it, see how it catches the light—even break it open—you do that with words. It makes the reader very aware of the shiftiness of language. What has compelled you toward this hyper-attention to words and language, and what role does it play in this book?
Language is really very physical for me. Words hurt, scrape, detonate, sidle up as companions, tap shoulders…I’m fascinated by the way we “use” language, how we accept it as either a blunt-edged tool, or a highly refined and nuanced precision tool. Writing feels almost sculptural for me—not so much a “honing and perfecting” kind of gesture but, I guess, just as you say, a practice in which I can look at language from all angles of vision—as if walking around a sculpture. I was wholly focused on poetry for many years, before I began writing essays, so the kind of training poetry and perhaps especially translating offered, that patient, close attention to singular words, words as smaller units in a phrase and component parts of lines, lines as tensile parts of sentences…all this absolutely influences my prose.
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