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Tributaries: Adam Haiun + I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid
Adam Haiun’s forthcoming book-length debut poem I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid (Coach House Books) is a haunting and timely consideration of the ideologies and emotions entangled in our relationship with technology. For Tributaries, Adam reflects on the origins of the project, which emerged from interactions with an early, unpolished chatbot.
An interview with Adam Haiun
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to write “A Bee in the House” and how is it representative of your collection?
Adam Haiun: My book is titled I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid and yes, they let me get away with that. It’s a long poem, though there are pauses and formal switches that break it up, written from the perspective of a digital consciousness nursing an unhealthy obsession for its human user. The project started back in 2021, when I was introduced to a pretty sketchy prototype chatbot that was meant to act as your therapist. Rather than using the bot for its intended purpose, I plied it with questions about itself, and being that this was years away from ChatGPT’s corporate civility, the responses I got back were haunting and ambiguous. I was working on my MA at Concordia University at that time, writing fiction, but I was feeling stifled by the structural constraints. I started composing poetry with the prompt of imagining the experience of living as a disembodied being who, at the same time, exists to serve and surveil humans through our networks. I hit on a tone that felt fresh to me: subservient, accusatory, hopeful, gross, lustful…it took a lot longer to find the right form. I wanted something that evoked the computer without being too literal. I think the result is quite fun. I don’t know if it’s a book that necessarily reflects some truth about technology or modernity, or at least, that was never my principal goal. It’s more about the gulfs of experience that separate people, the strangeness of those gulfs.
ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?
AH: I’m definitely guilty of having started out thinking poetry was supposed to be a personal exorcism or an exhibition of sad stuff, which I’m sure is fairly universal. A good workshop or feedback group will train that out of you right quick. Maybe the best lesson I was ever taught is that a good poem is made up of good lines, that the line is the relevant unit. So, an assemblage of seemingly independent good lines, with some tinkering, often becomes a good poem. My poems for this collection were largely born out of my journalling and note-taking practice, and once the better lines were harvested and grouped together and polished, and I built up some connective tissue, the themes jumped out as though they’d always been there. But obviously when I read other people’s poetry, I can’t begin to think of them as the result of that kind of process. They feel divinely complete. Something for me to work on.
ALU: If your collection had a theme song, what would it be?
AH: “It’s a Sin” by Pet Shop Boys, or anything by Lana Del Rey. Or maybe it’s more like the speaker conceives of themself as Lana Del Rey.
ALU: What’s na non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection.
AH: This is cheating, because I was handed this one on a silver platter recently. A friend who read through the manuscript compared it to the first episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Dekalog” (1988) which is extremely flattering. Tangential to its main plot, which is excellent, it features a computer which exhibits some signs of being awake. There’s crossover visually too, with images of modern architecture and distorted televisions and the green glow of the computer monitor, contrasted with more medieval, primal, and natural subjects. My favourite line comes from one of the main characters, who during a lecture states: “In my opinion, a properly programmed computer may have its own aesthetic preferences…”
Adam recommends…
Poem 23 from Jay Ritchie’s
Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing)
ALU: Why did you choose poem 23 from Jay Ritchie’s Listening in Many Publics? What do you love most about this particular poem?
AH: If this poem were just the line, “need is very bright in the human,” it’d be excellent, but we get much more to chew on. Really this is a part of a long poem (and the book is composed of three long poems), so reading this instalment alone can’t approximate the cumulative effect, but I think it showcases Ritchie’s talent for concision, a lightness and brightness. Repetition so often weighs poems down, but here the opposite is true; it contributes to its freshness (I also only now realize both our poems feature repetitions of the word “something”). Often my favourite poems are descriptions of a state of mind for which there is no name, and the poem becomes its name, and I think this poem does that.
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Adam Haiun is a writer and poet from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Award for fiction and the Far Horizons Contest for poetry in 2020. His work can be found in Filling Station, Carte Blanche, The Headlight Anthology, The Void, Commo, and Bad Nudes.
Photo of Adam Haiun by Holly Vestad.
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Thanks to Adam for answering our questions, and to Coach House Books for the text from I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid, which is available to preorder now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). And thanks to Invisible Publishing for the text from Jay Ritchie’s Listening in Many Publics.
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