Buy: Windows 85 by Chris Campanioni | Roof Books | Oct. 15, 2024 | 160 pages | ISBN: 979-8-9896652-7-3
Can you talk about your use of form and theory?
Almost all the poems in Windows 85 are written in tercets or couplets, which is a pretty wide swerve from the books I’d previously published and that I understand to be poetry, even if they are sold today as nonfiction and fiction. It’s one of the reasons why Windows 85’s launch this month serves the strange occasion of doubling as my full-length poetry debut. Jay Gao, who was one of this work’s earliest readers, described my use of lineation as little suits of armor, or maybe he said shields, both of which speak, I think, to the notion of using form as a means of defense, as decorative buffer to re/cover or uncover interiorities without giving up all protection. I’m so often drawn to the lush foliage of prose—and I hesitated to do away with it here; the collection begins and ends with two sprawling prose poems—nevertheless, I do think the concision and constraint of the repeating tercets/couplets, and their aggressive enjambment, creates some unexpected ornaments of displacement, signaling a consensus culture of poetry and publishing but also a strategy for accommodating risk within these milieu. I said accommodating but maybe I meant smuggling. The shape of what some folks refer to as “line poems” is bait. I was seeking a mode to render the experience of an always on and instantaneous encounter, through which everything—time, space, sound, fear and desire, parts, holes, bodies—is both flattened and multiplied, disintegrated and intensified.
What are some key themes present in your book?
So yeah, there’s that. But also the book is interested in a lot of the stuff I’ve been working in and on over the last several years in my research and teaching, published in theory-heavy multidisciplinary and translingual venues like Diacritics, Social Identities, Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, Interações: Sociedade e as Novas Modernidades, M/C Journal, IC: Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. A short list of possible themes that might appear across Windows 85’s screens: copresence and virtual intimacy, voyeurism and surveillant assemblages, self-commodification, mistranslations and glitch, wish fulfillment and social media’s barter gift economy, fragile media infrastructures, withdrawal as a form of subjectivity, the incommensurable frictions of migration and passing, ecological precarity and digital waste, and the epistolary affect of internet correspondence. Apostrophe and address haunt these poems, but the “you” is neither singular nor stable, it isn’t even a “you.”
Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? This could be the room, the desk, the city, an MFA program, a fellowship, or any other environmental factor (you only wrote when it rained, you always wrote with fresh flowers in the room, etc.).
A lot of my work is generated in movement—I do most of my writing while in transit, during my commute or in the interval offered by waiting—and Windows 85, which was written during a twelve-week period of travel throughout Europe in the summer of 2022, is a good representation of my piecemeal, annotative method of composing. Today I teach a class at Pace University called “Composing on the Move” that wants to pay attention to iterative and embodied practices but also mediation—the interactions and discrepancies that occur when we move our texts across different sign systems—and in my work I am interested in retaining those elements of authorship—operations of transferal in the original meaning—that maybe have less to do with classic conceptions of a finished work and more to do with the conditions in which the work originated and through which it continues to be nourished.
What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?
I take different approaches for different modes of writing; with poetry, it’s almost always language that feeds image and image that instigates or upends narrative: a single line might trigger a scene or more accurately a scenario, whose vaporous contours float into other scenarios, or their premature vanishing points. I tell my students to keep a lot of windows open, and at all times.
Did another art form influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc.
I appreciate this question; one of the first things I ask my students when we meet is: how can we draw from other modes of art and incorporate their formal strategies in our alphabetical texts? It’s funny—Windows 85 is described as “a cyberspace opera” but rather than the librettos of theatre, this book, and my work more broadly, is shaped by cinema. The jump-cut dislocations, the accumulation of preparatory and unfinished scenarios and their ad-libbed stage directions, the arm’s-length dialogue, the denaturalizing processes of dubbing and overlaying, through which sound and image tracks misalign, all of these textual situations are indebted to film. My sense of style has been honed by watching the work of Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda, Abbas Kiarostomi, Paolo Sorrentino, Luca Guadagnino, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, Michael Mann, Gregg Arraki, Claire Denis, Nicolas Winding Refn, Olivier Assayas … these poems are especially animated by Wong Kar-wai and his frenetic, kaleidoscopic lens.
What was the impetus for this body of work?
Windows 85 is playful, giddy, tongue in cheek at times but also very critical of cultural systems and attendant norms that require we consent to our own subjugation through colonial methods of categorization, surveillance, authentication, where even and especially “resistance” is consummated through a desire to territorialize and authorize. I wanted to explore these intersections and dead ends, even if I didn’t know where I would end up while writing this book—thinking of each poem as if it were a waystation or a site of crossroads in my extemporary itinerary—but I did have an idea of what I wanted to test out, test the limits of. And I mention limits because I think these poems vex some readers; an editor at the university press that initially contracted Windows 85 for publication wanted an autobiographical narrative and a granular clarity that I often associate with the essay; they wanted me to write about the subjects of the book instead of my writing from within them as sense and experience—immediate and imminent and latent, with a sort of fuzzy realism that I want to say is representative of our glitchy, hypermediated inter/faces and exchanges. I think the danger or one danger of equating description with intimacy, or of absorbing the life of the artist into the work itself, is this conflation between knowing and owning. A friend reminded me of this when, aware of the situation as it was unfolding, he told me that what it was or what it amounted to is that they wanted to know me, to know what I am, so that I could be recognizable to them. In other words, that recognition could only be understood or ascertained vis-à-vis recognizability.
Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies?
What’s outside of writing? I tend to also favor Jacques Derrida’s assertion—Il n’y a pas de hors-texte—there is no outside-text. But seriously, I think one of the reasons why I write and why I’m able to fall in love (again) with language every day is because living and writing do not surf on different currents but just one, cascading on behalf of skin and sensation, memory, fantasy, experience; what gets written down is just the residue—the excess that becomes the primary text—of turning one’s self into a human recorder. And so, for that matter, writing and reading are very nearly the same practice, both feeding the possibilities of superimposing one life onto another. When I’m writing, I’m also running, and cooking, and playing tennis, and watching movies, especially at the cinema, and dancing, especially with our one-year-old, Desi, and riding the subway, and walking through museums and public parks, and waiting for others I’m about to meet or would like to meet, and eating, of course—I love eating, and my favorite thing to eat is pancakes.
Chris Campanioni’s work on migration and media theory has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary research and a Mellon Foundation fellowship, and his writing has received the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays and Latin American Literature Today. Recent books include a novel named VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), a creative nonfiction called north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), a notebook titled A and B and Also Nothing (Unbound Edition, 2023), and the poetry collection Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024). He teaches creative writing and media studies at Pace University in New York City.