1 hr 10 min
Herbal Essences & Lyric Essays: Jennifer Kabat Inspiration Practice
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- Arts
Jennifer Kabat’s essays have been included in Best American Essays, Granta, Frieze, BOMB, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Review of Books, and the White Review. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York, teaches at the New School, and serves on her volunteer fire department.
She was recently awarded a Silvers Foundation Grant and is currently working on a memoir on time and socialist uprisings. That memoir is actually part of 3 short novella-length essays on which she is working now. She is a dear old friend as well, whom I have known since I was 18 years old. Some of her recent works, if you wish to read more are as follows:
- “The Secret History of Weeds” Resistance and rhizomes in Frieze
- “A Dangerous Ornamental” Foraging for weeds and filing for UI (or) weeds and capitalism for Coffee House Press Writers Project
- “Double Dutch” Lynne Hershman Leeson’s doubles from avatars to antibodies in Frieze
- “The White Deer” excerpted by Chris Kraus in An/Other Magazine
During our dialogue, Jennifer read an excerpt from The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson and I have reprinted the quoted passage below.
"I hadn’t then decided how to become that other thing, which here I will call for the sake of brevity a poet, but indecision did nothing to lessen my vehemence about it. I had not learned the ordinary, workaday devotions; I sought a mystic portal. I was practising versions of an intensity I supposed necessary to my ambition, an earnest desire that had found in Walter Pater a little ledge of language to perch upon for a while: ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame,’ as he said, in his conclusion to The Renaissance, ‘a clear perpetual outline at the core of everything mutable.’ I thought I’d find the gem in sex, this being an available mythology for the seeking and sensual girl. But mostly the fleshy tempests, which I had taken to be at the heart of my research, amounted to ornate flickerings. I began to suspect that, after all, such tempests were the grid, extending outwards in a metric repetition of the beauty problem that would permit only the most asinine deviations from the assigned roles in the drama. Next, reactively, I thought I’d found the gem in solitude. The word itself had a gorgeous, monkish allure. But what I called solitude lacked neutrality; it too was guarded by the stout wall of personality that I had no way of dismantling. Both sex and solitude fizzled with aphoristic recklessness. The strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of myself, as Pater referred to it, would continue. There was no one position that could reveal to me the seemingly occult passage to the desired metamorphosis; I had not yet discovered the innate monstrosity of pronouns, nor the freeing boredom of repetition, and what did I impatiently burn for?..."
Our original theme music was composed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.
Photo credit for Jennifer Kabat goes to Marco Breuer and she is wearing a sweater knit by artist Ellen Lesperance as part of her project Congratulations and Celebrations. Contact her via Instagram @jenkabat
Jennifer Kabat’s essays have been included in Best American Essays, Granta, Frieze, BOMB, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Review of Books, and the White Review. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York, teaches at the New School, and serves on her volunteer fire department.
She was recently awarded a Silvers Foundation Grant and is currently working on a memoir on time and socialist uprisings. That memoir is actually part of 3 short novella-length essays on which she is working now. She is a dear old friend as well, whom I have known since I was 18 years old. Some of her recent works, if you wish to read more are as follows:
- “The Secret History of Weeds” Resistance and rhizomes in Frieze
- “A Dangerous Ornamental” Foraging for weeds and filing for UI (or) weeds and capitalism for Coffee House Press Writers Project
- “Double Dutch” Lynne Hershman Leeson’s doubles from avatars to antibodies in Frieze
- “The White Deer” excerpted by Chris Kraus in An/Other Magazine
During our dialogue, Jennifer read an excerpt from The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson and I have reprinted the quoted passage below.
"I hadn’t then decided how to become that other thing, which here I will call for the sake of brevity a poet, but indecision did nothing to lessen my vehemence about it. I had not learned the ordinary, workaday devotions; I sought a mystic portal. I was practising versions of an intensity I supposed necessary to my ambition, an earnest desire that had found in Walter Pater a little ledge of language to perch upon for a while: ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame,’ as he said, in his conclusion to The Renaissance, ‘a clear perpetual outline at the core of everything mutable.’ I thought I’d find the gem in sex, this being an available mythology for the seeking and sensual girl. But mostly the fleshy tempests, which I had taken to be at the heart of my research, amounted to ornate flickerings. I began to suspect that, after all, such tempests were the grid, extending outwards in a metric repetition of the beauty problem that would permit only the most asinine deviations from the assigned roles in the drama. Next, reactively, I thought I’d found the gem in solitude. The word itself had a gorgeous, monkish allure. But what I called solitude lacked neutrality; it too was guarded by the stout wall of personality that I had no way of dismantling. Both sex and solitude fizzled with aphoristic recklessness. The strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of myself, as Pater referred to it, would continue. There was no one position that could reveal to me the seemingly occult passage to the desired metamorphosis; I had not yet discovered the innate monstrosity of pronouns, nor the freeing boredom of repetition, and what did I impatiently burn for?..."
Our original theme music was composed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.
Photo credit for Jennifer Kabat goes to Marco Breuer and she is wearing a sweater knit by artist Ellen Lesperance as part of her project Congratulations and Celebrations. Contact her via Instagram @jenkabat
1 hr 10 min