Poetry & Anthropology
by Nomi Stone
It feels great when meeting someone who is enlightening, engaging, and generous in the time and content they share. There’s hope for humanity because there are good people like Nomi Stone. Creative. Honest. Dedicated. Open. Inviting. Nomi Stone is the kind of brilliant mind who most definitely does not send emails in all caps or with numerous exclamation marks for whatever reason. She does not scream to be heard. She does not use language to belittle others or to alienate her audience. She is sage. She comes across as warm and sincere. She is an explorer, a thorough researcher. She teaches college courses at highly respectable institutions and still never gives up being a student, a learner of topics wide-ranging and always interesting. Nomi Stone is a poet. She is an anthropologist. In Nomi’s words, “I choose questions or problems that make me feel uneasy and restless, that complicate my position, and that push my seeing.”
Kill Class is Nomi Stone’s newest book published by Tupelo Press. Buy it and read it not only because it has been featured and reviewed by likes of NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books among others, but also because it will well worth it. Read Nomi Stone’s interview here to get a glimpse of a real shining star.
Kill Class is Nomi Stone’s newest book published by Tupelo Press. Buy it and read it not only because it has been featured and reviewed by likes of NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books among others, but also because it will well worth it. Read Nomi Stone’s interview here to get a glimpse of a real shining star.
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Dear Nomi,
How do you describe your poetry and your focus in anthropology and how do you manage to evolve in both fields? I’ve been braiding poetry and anthropology for about fifteen years. I began this trajectory because my fieldwork projects and scholarship—essentially extended inquiries about the world—feed and invigorate my practice as a poet. I choose questions or problems that make me feel uneasy and restless, that complicate my position, and that push my seeing. I believe these are all key forms of engagement for a poet, and anthropology helps bring me there. |
photo: courtesy of the artist |
I think that my life as a poet also helps me bring sensory lucidity and heart to my anthropological scholarship.
Can you tell us a bit more about your two books, Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008)?
Both Kill Class (Tupelo 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) are based on my anthropological fieldwork.
I wrote Stranger’s Notebook after living on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in North Africa: according to their own story of origin, they arrived on the island after the fall of the Babylonian Temple in 586 BC, bearing a single stone from its edifice. I was especially interested in the Djerban Jewish community’s lamentation rituals not only over their dead, but over land and home. I wrestled with my own understandings of place and borders, nation and belonging that were untethered to land. In tandem, I wrote a critical Masters thesis at Oxford University in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies and published an article in The Journal of Jewish Studies.
Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages constructed by the US military around America for war trainings. In these pre-deployment exercises, role-players of Middle Eastern origin acted out the villager, the insurgent, the mourning mother. It is a book about 21st century American Empire, an interrogation into war, power, collaboration, empathy, and violence, and my own complicity. Simultaneously, I worked on my PhD dissertation on the same topic in anthropology and published articles in the journals Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist.
My anthropological monograph Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire was a finalist for the University of California Press’s contemporary ethnography Atelier series and is forthcoming (2021).
What have you learned about how the world reads your poetry from the feedback you have received for your most recent book, Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019)?
It has been really exciting to watch the reception to Kill Class through beautiful reviews and interviews. My favorite engagement with the book came through an interview in BOMB Magazine. The interviewer, the poet Jasmine Dreame Wagner asked me so many rich, startlingly questions about or adjacent to Kill Class: in particular, about how war culture permeates not only capitalism but also our human connections, and about if it is even possible to write a poem whose forms are free from war.
Reading the reviews of Kill Class has been astonishing: to see where my intentions carried, and also to see where reviewers read in new directions. Reviewers have written about the fragmented consciousness in the book, about violence, about reality and the simulacra.
A few moments that really stayed with me: in The LA Review of Books, Claire Oleson wrote at length about the presence of meat in the book. It’s true that one of my obsessions when I was writing those poems was the violence of consumption: the notion that we consume each other. I was so happy that thread was traced.
In The Kenyon Review, Taneum Bambrick’s uneasy closing epiphany has stayed with me for weeks. She posited that the work and fervor of maintaining the game was in some way analogous to the “work necessary to generate excitement and pride in people on their way to a forever war.” This ambiguity in relating to nation was something I had long felt, but her terms reopened my seeing.
What other ongoing projects are you dedicating most of your time now?
I am currently working on a new collection of poems called Fieldworkers of the Sublime, which explodes “fieldwork” beyond anthropology, and into a broader category of being alive. It is a book about awe, about fear, and also the ways we are each observers and participants in the sublime (through nature, science, the social world, and intimate life). The book also has a research component that segues from my previous work: I’m interested in the lives and work of scientists in diaspora in the aftermath of war. More broadly than this, I have been spending time with scientists in their laboratories lately: visiting geoscientists and honeybee biologists, getting glimpses into their ways of knowing. (I’m also teaching a spring class called “Laboratories: Ways of Knowing in Poetry and Science” this coming spring”).
This book is different from my prior work further because I’m refusing a binary between the Field and Life in the space of my own poems: being-alive overflows the grid in every direction. I’m writing about love and my new marriage and queerness and desire and my attempts to overcome my own limits. I’m also especially interested in form in this book, and I have been working on a series of sonnets.
I’m passionate about seeking form and tools of craft to render modes of being/becoming in world, and to speak the unsayable. (Which is the topic of class I am teaching in the fall!) Also, as I mentioned, I have an anthropological book under contract, Pinelandia (the University of California Press, 2021) that is the scholarly companion to Kill Class.
In addition, my wife, fiction writer Rose Skelton, and I are co-writing a long epistolary essay about the writing and reading life, love, solitude and togetherness. I’m also in the early stages of three other collaborative projects: I’m co-writing a hybrid essay with Sumita Chakraborty: thinking about the sentence and syntax and temporality within this particular political moment.
And a project on arroyos: river ghosts, dried river beds, with the photographer and filmmaker Jeff Whetstone. And a project on the co-imagination with the anthropologist Amy Krauss.
How do you determine topics of interest you’d like to explore further?
My projects have historically each lasted about a decade, and they each carry some kind of intellectual and emotional seed for the subsequent project.
Stranger’s Notebook was an inquiry into otherness, home, and nation (chafing against my uneasy relationship to Israel). Kill Class was an inquiry into otherness, home, nation, and war (opening my discomfort with America and militarism). Fieldworkers of the Sublime carries over the thread of science and war, but also, I hope will be a somehow more joyful, encompassing book: a reflection of my interests opening into, well, everything.
Last spring at Princeton I taught a co-taught class about the local Millstone River, one of my favorite experiences, a dive into the local ecology and anthropology of the river, and I had never thought much about rivers. Now I want to track rivers, and I want to spend time with ecologists and botanists and biologists. Now that I live in Texas, there is a Master Naturalist course I’m considering taking to learn about the local ecology.
What current literary works have had an impact on your views of the world we live in?
Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, a parable about Empire and resistance, about violence but also about love and tenderness, has undone me. It is a real haunting to read it amidst the contemporary horrors of the American State. The book reminds me also of our complicity: “We (forgive us) lived happily during the war”— how can we be wide-awake to the brokenness around us and live otherwise?
Who are the people and what organizations have supported you?
I am especially grateful to my publisher, Tupelo Press, and also to the institutions where I have studied or taught while writing my books: Oxford, Columbia, Warren Wilson, and Princeton. I deeply appreciate the literary outlets and journals that have carried reviews of Kill Class: NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, The Poetry Foundation, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Glass Poetry Press, Rain Taxi, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Yellow Rabbits, Time Now. Then most of all, I’m grateful to my family and friends.
What groups do you like to connect with the most?
As many groups as possible. Poets, of course. Anthropologists. But also visual artists and filmmakers and scientists and lawyers and rabbis and ministers and plumbers and crewmembers on my wife’s search and rescue team, and my own family.
Can you share with us your definitions of greatness, happiness, and decency?
Greatness is to me a capacity to be magnanimous, to take care of others, to be good to others, to make others feel that their lives and worlds are precious.
Happiness is being with my loved ones, experiencing sensory pleasure. It is mushroom-hunting with my wife on the island of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland, and plunging my hands into the moss (it feels like cake) and suddenly there is a buttery stem, a summer chanterelle fat as an apricot. The feeling of joy and laughter as we explore the world together. And happiness is also hanging out with parents, siblings, and their partners and kids: picnicking on a beach, drinking wine, shelling pistachios, laughing, playing with the babies.
Decency is to be one’s best self, even when no one is watching. I think of the poem, “Question to Ask Once the Honeymoon is Over” by Jessica Jacobs as my register for the kind of decency I want to aspire to. In the poem, she describes seeing a box turtle on the road, when she is cycling, and deciding to pick it up and move it on the way back instead. Here is how the poem unfolds, when she cycles back:
“The turtle
was just where I'd left it, but with the top of its shell
torn away. The dead turtle,
a raw red bowl, its blood slashing the twinned yellow lines
into an unequal sign,
as in a ≠ b, as in thinking about doing the right thing
is not the same as doing it. As in, how many times
did I watch that old woman shuffle bags down the stairs
(really, how many?) before I went from watching
to helping? As in, with my wife beside me
I am the woman who does not hesitate
to lay down her bike and give a small life
safe passage. As in, I biked slowly
home, told no one. As in:
Will she love me
less when she learns
I am not equal
to the person I am when she is watching?”
What is something that made you smile today?
My mother-in-law is in town, from London, and she taught me how to make tea properly in our little periwinkle pot. I don’t drink tea, myself, but I’ll make a better cup for my wife going forward. Milk goes in first! Steep the leaves at least four minutes!
It would be awesome to share your thoughts about one or both of our ongoing campaigns included below:
#BeatTheBlues features works and confessions of artists and non-artists about experiences and ways to beat the blues and rise from the depth of darkness.
A month ago, I was in a four-car accident on the highway; a woman rear-ended me at top speed when she turned around to look at her child. It left me with a couple of herniated discs in my neck and pain throughout my upper body, as well as some real PTSD. It coincided with moving to a new city for a new job. I felt like I had to relearn an alphabet for happiness these past weeks, and it truly came through my senses. I’ve been so sore and haven’t felt like doing anything, but then putting some Louis Armstrong on the record player, and making a pot of black beans and rice with sausage, garlicky and full of cumin and cayenne pepper, I felt what can only be described as happiness. Walking outside to see the catalpa tree in my new front yard, the giant seed pods—I also learned it is called a cigar tree!— tumble over everything. They rupture and leave yellowish powder streaking over the windshield of my car, and I love it and them.
Happiness. Perhaps what I mean is no matter how life breaks, there is sensory plenitude and there is language. And if we’re lucky, also love. I have felt so loved by those who are dear to me in this hard time.
#WhatMatters A paragraph about what matters to you the most at this point in time and how does your work and life reflect that.
What matters to me most right now is love in all its iterations: intimacy, tenderness, Eros, care for others, and sensory exuberance—which come together as something like love of the world. I feel this spectrum all day, if I’m lucky: when I look at seed pods in the trees, with their wild yellow dust of pollen falling over everything; or walking through the quinceañera shops in my new neighborhood with their glittery, poofy dresses; or when I see my 15-month-old nephew Asher learn the words in Spanish for his head and nose and eyes, his eyes squinching at the sounds: ojo ojo ojo. I felt it while listening to the furious mathematical clack of flamenco this weekend; and I felt it today three times: at the swimming pool when my mother-in-law asked about my sore neck; when my wife set up the laundry line in our new home; and when we ate nutella out of the jar. It is this kind of world-love that ripples outward too, love in Cornel West’s sense: “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” And in this sense, love can equally look like fury, in times of punishing politics. So, my life and work try to live in those registers: be, feel, act.
Can you tell us a bit more about your two books, Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008)?
Both Kill Class (Tupelo 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) are based on my anthropological fieldwork.
I wrote Stranger’s Notebook after living on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in North Africa: according to their own story of origin, they arrived on the island after the fall of the Babylonian Temple in 586 BC, bearing a single stone from its edifice. I was especially interested in the Djerban Jewish community’s lamentation rituals not only over their dead, but over land and home. I wrestled with my own understandings of place and borders, nation and belonging that were untethered to land. In tandem, I wrote a critical Masters thesis at Oxford University in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies and published an article in The Journal of Jewish Studies.
Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages constructed by the US military around America for war trainings. In these pre-deployment exercises, role-players of Middle Eastern origin acted out the villager, the insurgent, the mourning mother. It is a book about 21st century American Empire, an interrogation into war, power, collaboration, empathy, and violence, and my own complicity. Simultaneously, I worked on my PhD dissertation on the same topic in anthropology and published articles in the journals Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist.
My anthropological monograph Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire was a finalist for the University of California Press’s contemporary ethnography Atelier series and is forthcoming (2021).
What have you learned about how the world reads your poetry from the feedback you have received for your most recent book, Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019)?
It has been really exciting to watch the reception to Kill Class through beautiful reviews and interviews. My favorite engagement with the book came through an interview in BOMB Magazine. The interviewer, the poet Jasmine Dreame Wagner asked me so many rich, startlingly questions about or adjacent to Kill Class: in particular, about how war culture permeates not only capitalism but also our human connections, and about if it is even possible to write a poem whose forms are free from war.
Reading the reviews of Kill Class has been astonishing: to see where my intentions carried, and also to see where reviewers read in new directions. Reviewers have written about the fragmented consciousness in the book, about violence, about reality and the simulacra.
A few moments that really stayed with me: in The LA Review of Books, Claire Oleson wrote at length about the presence of meat in the book. It’s true that one of my obsessions when I was writing those poems was the violence of consumption: the notion that we consume each other. I was so happy that thread was traced.
In The Kenyon Review, Taneum Bambrick’s uneasy closing epiphany has stayed with me for weeks. She posited that the work and fervor of maintaining the game was in some way analogous to the “work necessary to generate excitement and pride in people on their way to a forever war.” This ambiguity in relating to nation was something I had long felt, but her terms reopened my seeing.
What other ongoing projects are you dedicating most of your time now?
I am currently working on a new collection of poems called Fieldworkers of the Sublime, which explodes “fieldwork” beyond anthropology, and into a broader category of being alive. It is a book about awe, about fear, and also the ways we are each observers and participants in the sublime (through nature, science, the social world, and intimate life). The book also has a research component that segues from my previous work: I’m interested in the lives and work of scientists in diaspora in the aftermath of war. More broadly than this, I have been spending time with scientists in their laboratories lately: visiting geoscientists and honeybee biologists, getting glimpses into their ways of knowing. (I’m also teaching a spring class called “Laboratories: Ways of Knowing in Poetry and Science” this coming spring”).
This book is different from my prior work further because I’m refusing a binary between the Field and Life in the space of my own poems: being-alive overflows the grid in every direction. I’m writing about love and my new marriage and queerness and desire and my attempts to overcome my own limits. I’m also especially interested in form in this book, and I have been working on a series of sonnets.
I’m passionate about seeking form and tools of craft to render modes of being/becoming in world, and to speak the unsayable. (Which is the topic of class I am teaching in the fall!) Also, as I mentioned, I have an anthropological book under contract, Pinelandia (the University of California Press, 2021) that is the scholarly companion to Kill Class.
In addition, my wife, fiction writer Rose Skelton, and I are co-writing a long epistolary essay about the writing and reading life, love, solitude and togetherness. I’m also in the early stages of three other collaborative projects: I’m co-writing a hybrid essay with Sumita Chakraborty: thinking about the sentence and syntax and temporality within this particular political moment.
And a project on arroyos: river ghosts, dried river beds, with the photographer and filmmaker Jeff Whetstone. And a project on the co-imagination with the anthropologist Amy Krauss.
How do you determine topics of interest you’d like to explore further?
My projects have historically each lasted about a decade, and they each carry some kind of intellectual and emotional seed for the subsequent project.
Stranger’s Notebook was an inquiry into otherness, home, and nation (chafing against my uneasy relationship to Israel). Kill Class was an inquiry into otherness, home, nation, and war (opening my discomfort with America and militarism). Fieldworkers of the Sublime carries over the thread of science and war, but also, I hope will be a somehow more joyful, encompassing book: a reflection of my interests opening into, well, everything.
Last spring at Princeton I taught a co-taught class about the local Millstone River, one of my favorite experiences, a dive into the local ecology and anthropology of the river, and I had never thought much about rivers. Now I want to track rivers, and I want to spend time with ecologists and botanists and biologists. Now that I live in Texas, there is a Master Naturalist course I’m considering taking to learn about the local ecology.
What current literary works have had an impact on your views of the world we live in?
Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, a parable about Empire and resistance, about violence but also about love and tenderness, has undone me. It is a real haunting to read it amidst the contemporary horrors of the American State. The book reminds me also of our complicity: “We (forgive us) lived happily during the war”— how can we be wide-awake to the brokenness around us and live otherwise?
Who are the people and what organizations have supported you?
I am especially grateful to my publisher, Tupelo Press, and also to the institutions where I have studied or taught while writing my books: Oxford, Columbia, Warren Wilson, and Princeton. I deeply appreciate the literary outlets and journals that have carried reviews of Kill Class: NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, The Poetry Foundation, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Glass Poetry Press, Rain Taxi, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Yellow Rabbits, Time Now. Then most of all, I’m grateful to my family and friends.
What groups do you like to connect with the most?
As many groups as possible. Poets, of course. Anthropologists. But also visual artists and filmmakers and scientists and lawyers and rabbis and ministers and plumbers and crewmembers on my wife’s search and rescue team, and my own family.
Can you share with us your definitions of greatness, happiness, and decency?
Greatness is to me a capacity to be magnanimous, to take care of others, to be good to others, to make others feel that their lives and worlds are precious.
Happiness is being with my loved ones, experiencing sensory pleasure. It is mushroom-hunting with my wife on the island of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland, and plunging my hands into the moss (it feels like cake) and suddenly there is a buttery stem, a summer chanterelle fat as an apricot. The feeling of joy and laughter as we explore the world together. And happiness is also hanging out with parents, siblings, and their partners and kids: picnicking on a beach, drinking wine, shelling pistachios, laughing, playing with the babies.
Decency is to be one’s best self, even when no one is watching. I think of the poem, “Question to Ask Once the Honeymoon is Over” by Jessica Jacobs as my register for the kind of decency I want to aspire to. In the poem, she describes seeing a box turtle on the road, when she is cycling, and deciding to pick it up and move it on the way back instead. Here is how the poem unfolds, when she cycles back:
“The turtle
was just where I'd left it, but with the top of its shell
torn away. The dead turtle,
a raw red bowl, its blood slashing the twinned yellow lines
into an unequal sign,
as in a ≠ b, as in thinking about doing the right thing
is not the same as doing it. As in, how many times
did I watch that old woman shuffle bags down the stairs
(really, how many?) before I went from watching
to helping? As in, with my wife beside me
I am the woman who does not hesitate
to lay down her bike and give a small life
safe passage. As in, I biked slowly
home, told no one. As in:
Will she love me
less when she learns
I am not equal
to the person I am when she is watching?”
What is something that made you smile today?
My mother-in-law is in town, from London, and she taught me how to make tea properly in our little periwinkle pot. I don’t drink tea, myself, but I’ll make a better cup for my wife going forward. Milk goes in first! Steep the leaves at least four minutes!
It would be awesome to share your thoughts about one or both of our ongoing campaigns included below:
#BeatTheBlues features works and confessions of artists and non-artists about experiences and ways to beat the blues and rise from the depth of darkness.
A month ago, I was in a four-car accident on the highway; a woman rear-ended me at top speed when she turned around to look at her child. It left me with a couple of herniated discs in my neck and pain throughout my upper body, as well as some real PTSD. It coincided with moving to a new city for a new job. I felt like I had to relearn an alphabet for happiness these past weeks, and it truly came through my senses. I’ve been so sore and haven’t felt like doing anything, but then putting some Louis Armstrong on the record player, and making a pot of black beans and rice with sausage, garlicky and full of cumin and cayenne pepper, I felt what can only be described as happiness. Walking outside to see the catalpa tree in my new front yard, the giant seed pods—I also learned it is called a cigar tree!— tumble over everything. They rupture and leave yellowish powder streaking over the windshield of my car, and I love it and them.
Happiness. Perhaps what I mean is no matter how life breaks, there is sensory plenitude and there is language. And if we’re lucky, also love. I have felt so loved by those who are dear to me in this hard time.
#WhatMatters A paragraph about what matters to you the most at this point in time and how does your work and life reflect that.
What matters to me most right now is love in all its iterations: intimacy, tenderness, Eros, care for others, and sensory exuberance—which come together as something like love of the world. I feel this spectrum all day, if I’m lucky: when I look at seed pods in the trees, with their wild yellow dust of pollen falling over everything; or walking through the quinceañera shops in my new neighborhood with their glittery, poofy dresses; or when I see my 15-month-old nephew Asher learn the words in Spanish for his head and nose and eyes, his eyes squinching at the sounds: ojo ojo ojo. I felt it while listening to the furious mathematical clack of flamenco this weekend; and I felt it today three times: at the swimming pool when my mother-in-law asked about my sore neck; when my wife set up the laundry line in our new home; and when we ate nutella out of the jar. It is this kind of world-love that ripples outward too, love in Cornel West’s sense: “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” And in this sense, love can equally look like fury, in times of punishing politics. So, my life and work try to live in those registers: be, feel, act.