Splice: An Interview with Anthony Borruso
by guest stacker Tiara Dinevska-McGuire
Splice: An Interview with Anthony Borruso
Anthony Borruso contemplates the absurd ways in which our mortality manifests through illness, art, and humor in his debut collection Splice, winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Award for Excellence in Poetry from Trio House Press. In this interview with Trio House volunteer poetry reader Tiara Dinevska-McGuire, Borruso shares the ‘over-under’ of putting together this witty and dynamic collection.
Tiara Dinevska-McGuire: [Splice is an] apt name for the collection for sure. I got the double kind of effect, like when I think of splicing film or when I think of it as a verb and I think of surgery and I think of scalpel.
Anthony Borruso: Yeah, I was thinking of splicing genes too, wanting to change your interior, your DNA. And even the idea of splicing your body and your experience to language. That’s why I love the cover. The Trio House designer did such an amazing job in how they show anatomy giving way to language, or converging with language. Having the skull and the title sutured together is such a provocative way to lead into the manuscript.
TDM: One of the questions I asked myself when reading Splice went something along the lines of “What came first - the chicken or the egg?” in regards to your influences and ‘becoming’ a poet. Can you talk a little bit about your path to poetry and how your love of movies and your Chiari diagnosis intersect with that timeline?
AB: My path to poetry was a weird one. Most poets I know tell me, “I’ve always written poetry’ or “I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid.” That wasn’t the case for me. I was a biology major during my undergraduate and for a long time I wanted to be a veterinarian. I did, however, always like writing – I journaled, I wrote stories, myths, and essays when I was younger, which is why when I was doing my bio undergrad, I decided to minor in creative writing. I’d take one creative writing course a semester as a little treat. I’d say to myself: “I’m taking organic chemistry, physics, all these really grueling science courses, I can treat myself with some fun every now and then.” Writing was important to me, but I didn’t know it could be a realistic career path. I didn’t know anyone who was a writer so it didn’t feel reachable at that point. Then, in my senior year, I was only one class away from getting my writing minor, and all of the writing classes I had wanted to take were full except for poetry, which I had never thought about taking before. And it worked out. I ended up falling in love with poetry, I even met my future wife in that class. It turned out to be a winner in a couple of ways and put me on an entirely new trajectory.
I was always obsessed with film when I was growing up. By the time I was finishing high school, I was going to the New York Public Library weekly, taking out ten or fifteen films at a time, however many they would allow me to: Kubrick, Scorsese, Welles, Altman…. Still, it didn’t occur to me that film would be a good poetic subject until I read a book by A. Van Jordan called The Cineaste, a collection of ekphrastic poems about film. After I read his collection, I felt like I had permission to actually attack this as a poetic subject, to write poems about character actors and favorite directors and see what kind of language that would help me to conjure.
TM: That’s cool how that [film poetry] came about. So where did the Chiari diagnosis kind of fall in with this?
AB: I was diagnosed with Chiari when I was fourteen or fifteen. At first, I wasn’t getting many symptoms except for headaches every now and then. I started getting more frequent headaches, along with dizziness, feelings of brain fog and stuff like that. The Chiari herniation had gotten a little bit bigger. A few years later, the symptoms got bad enough that I chose to have a skull decompression surgery. Basically, my surgeon removed part of my skull and spinal column to make more room for the back of my brain which was being squeezed by my misshaped skull.
Chiari wasn’t something that I was writing about immediately, but as I crafted the collection it occurred to me that the subject worked well in counterpoint to film. When I was writing about film, I was looking outwards and thinking about the images and messaging that the world confronts us with, while Chiari ended up being a way of looking inward, thinking about my body, thinking about what’s actually going on inside me. It also allowed me to take some of the language that I had from my biology undergrad, the language of anatomy, chemistry, evolutionary biology, and figure out how it could be used in lyrical and metaphorical ways. Many of my favorite poets merge different diction sets together or have collisions of signifiers from high and low art; poets like Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and contemporary poets like Monica Youn, Diane Seuss, and Ross Gay.
TM: That’s great insight. That contrast comes through in the self-deprecating humor, it’s especially strong with that; it still feels like you’re in a hospital at some parts and then you bring us out of it. You humanize a space that is very sterile. I think that’s important.
AB: For sure. It was also fun for me to try to bring in the language of conspiracy, especially with QANON and all these crazy movements we have today, and to think about how you can experience something similar within your own body, where you distrust it, where you’re not sure what’s going on inside and you expect something to sabotage you. That’s [related to] another theme that I wrestle with throughout the collection - how anxiety and creativity come from the same place. If you have an overactive imagination and you’re constantly inventing things or bringing things into your head, you’re going to tend to be a little bit worried about the world. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a fuel for your art.
TDM: In Splice, there is a constant interaction between the ever hyper-visible spectacle of pop culture and the opposing ‘invisibility’ of chronic illness. In “Foramen Magnum” you write “Did I mention my condition? / The brain, braving all elements, breaches its stony / fortress going god knows where. What a headache, / to see this dumb snail trailing CSF down my back / and across every page of this manuscript.” What was the process like rendering something obviously so visible to you but potentially unknown to readers into a cohesive collection?
AB: That definitely was a main goal that I had in crafting many of these poems, however, besides just making these things visible, I also wanted to get at the complicated and contradictory ways that I saw these elements of my own anatomy. For instance, when writing the “Foramen Magnum” poem, I had just read about Chiari and how it’s caused by the cerebellum, the back part of the brain, crowding into the foramen magnum which is basically a hole that’s at the base of the skull, its where the spinal cord passes through. In a non-Chiari body, just the spinal cord passes through there. But when you have Chiari, the cerebellum, the back of the brain, pushes into that space and compresses it. And so that word was one that really stood out to me because it was integral to the condition.
Foramen Magnum means ‘Great Passage’ in Latin, suggesting a really interesting metaphorical idea to me, that I could maybe enter this passage and be transformed, and to reinvent that passageway by hinting at the mythic quality of the language used to describe it. At the same time, it is an absurd poem. The brain slips through that foramen magnum and travels to different places, wearing different clothes, and rolling around like a tumbleweed. I like the idea of mixing the cartoonish with the grandiose, of having this brain think that it’s a really amazing thing despite its ridiculousness and vulnerability.
Another idea that I’m wrestling with throughout the collection is this blurring that occurs between the mind and the body. Lots of people with Chiari experience a broad set of different symptoms, plus the worry and anxiety that comes with not knowing if something is in your head or physically manifesting. That’s something that “A Hypochondriac Walks into Fourteen Lines” is concerned with, like in the line “I / feel the flaw within my chest, the moon is / crumbling at its crest.” This quick movement between inner and outer gets at the obscuring of boundaries between the body and its surroundings. How you feel something and then you’re looking at the sky which suddenly becomes a symbol for what you’re feeling. You have this weird feedback loop where you’re never certain if something’s happening in your mind or in your body. It’s definitely anxiety that is propelling that poem but it’s allowing me to do the creative work. I also think that it’s a poem where I can laugh at myself a bit and say “What’s the over- / under on my being being six feet lower?” I think when you laugh at yourself or when you make something humorous that is a little bit serious it becomes a way of making it more bearable.
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