The phenomenon of Jennifer K. Dick’s bilingualism all started for me at Ivy Writers Paris, a cycle of bilingual readings that she has organized for nearly twenty years. It was there in the early 2000s where I first attended the reading of a great American poet and long-lost friend Michael Heller. I kept thinking, “Whoever invited Michael to read, that person must have good taste in literature!” And indeed, the hostess who had curated Heller’s reading was Jennifer K. Dick. The poets who have graced her space include Lyn Hejinian, Stéphane Bouquet, Jerome Rothenberg, Alice Notley, Habib Tengour, Jacques Sivan, and Pierre Joris, a choice that reveals her primeval interest in linguistics and semiotics. Her courses at the Université de Haute Alsace in Mulhouse are roughly centered around that question: how do we express ourselves simultaneously in several languages? I spoke to Jennifer K. Dick about her book, That Which I Touch Has No Name (Black Spring Press Group, London, 2022), recently translated into French, and Shelf Break (BlazeVox Books) forthcoming in 2026.
Let’s start with the cover. Why did you give this book the title That Which I Touch Has No Name?
The title was a line that never fit into any poem. I kept kicking it around, trying to slip it in somewhere. Then, when I had my first draft of this collection, I felt it was what held everything together—the reversal of word-becoming-thing, where, here, thing lacks word, seeks word, stretches towards it. The namelessness is also an all, a shared. Once we name, we categorize, we separate. But also, the painfulness of not being named is central to the “stories” in here. For example, in Afterlife, the erasure of the name of the woman who becomes known to us as Dibutade (even if, I believe, now someone has found her original name) is politically charged with the way women get written out of history. So, there is something feminist in my attack on this history of art stemming from a woman whose name history erased in favor of subordinating her existence to that of her father, Butades. The title also includes a sense of how tactility, the thing touched by hand or by sound, by poem or imagination, is stretching to uneased namelessness.
What prompted you to write this book? It reads to me as a highly personalized memory, or memories refined and jumbled together.
In fact, this book emerged from a feeling of “permission.” I was asked to blurb Jill Darling’s wonderful A Geography of Syntax (Lavendar Ink, 2016) and it surprised and delighted me when I saw how her manuscript was in fact a collection of poems. For so long, I had been reading poetry books that were either one long poem opening over pages in sections and subsections, or collections of poem sequences all stemming from a single (often thematic) exploration. Jill’s book was refreshing in its variety, in how each poem had and held its own space, both thematically and technically. So, “conceiving” (your word below) of the work in That Which I Touch Has No Name as a book began with me gathering up all of these poems I had in “miscellaneous poems” files, many of which were, as you rightly note, poems which emerged from personal memories of travel mixed with reactions to art shows, books I was reading, etc. Those small, individually-titled poems I arranged to become sections I and IV. Then I had the series The Island, which, in an earlier form, existed as the art book Conversion (Estepa, 2013) with paintings by Kate Van Houten weaving through its folio pages. That found a new home here as section II and opened the path and the page towards the third, longest, and most central section, Afterlife. Like many of the short poems in sections I and IV, “Afterlife” vacillates between French and English. It is a long poem echoing at times the place (Lesbos and the rock of Sappho) and the life of Sappho which appeared in “The Island.” And it, for me, anchored the themes in the other work and ties all of that back to the title as well.
The first look that a reader takes at your book leads them to conclude that its writing style is not homogenous, or rather that it is homogenous in its heterogeneousness. I detect several writing styles in it, several languages, several stylistic layers—cut-ups, or highly stylized layers of writing. Does it attest to that old Heidegger saying, “What is not poetry is not fiction”? Do you agree with him in that? Were you thinking about an “abolition of our narrative” when you conceived it (as in your poem “Popular Mechanics”)?
Your question “contains multitudes,” as Whitman would say! I can start by admitting that I rarely conceive of a book, and in this case less than in most of my projects. “Afterlife” definitely does have a narrative—that of telling and responding to the story of Dibutade, but which also strays and thus, as you say, abolishes “our narrative” as coherent force. As for the fragmented, and at times erratic cuts from one line/place/rhythm to another, I feel it imperative to clarify that in no way is this work related to any sort of cut-up. None of this work was ever cut up, or emerged at all from a cut-up process—unlike a few of the prose poems which appeared in my very first book, Fluorescence (UGA Press, 2004). My second book, Circuits (Corrupt Press, 2013) emerged entirely from a variety of interwoven cut-up grids, using chapters and titles from George Johnson’s popular science book about locating where and how memory is formed (neurologically), and intermingling cut-up paragraphs based on his work with other cut-up paragraphs from real memories. In that case, I revised the cut-ups into new forms of narrative, writing out and in additional, now fictionalized, “memories” (and science). This created a very dense, highly confused syntax and storyline that, for me, coincided with the abstract seeking out of science through theories that then often led to dead ends, to circling back, to reconsidering the mind and time. In this current book, the writing is highly driven by sound-image and lexical fields being pressed to “get at,” to “move towards.” I can admit that this may also have created jagged narratives, allowing the non sequiturs or a single word to take the memory down new paths, but it was composed from left to right, up and down the page and never cut up at all. I think what all of my books share is my natural openness to loose connectivity, grammatical fluidity, and promotion of connections related to word sounds over specific meaning. In this case, this also extends to sounds between languages and how they suggest otherness of/in language; buried, forgotten, lost connectivity.
As you revealed above, the beginning of the book deals with the complex issues of existence as erasure of memories. What is the process of forgetting to you? Is it the annulment of language, of a Language (in “Demolition”, in “Collectif”), or is it the appropriation of our different bodies? Or is the work of this book an attempt to name the unnamable through the memory of it?
Wow, I love these questions. I think there is something about the ongoing existence of beings and things even if the memory of them has been erased. But then, are they no more? Are they able to be felt anyway through a legacy of generations after who feel them through other things even if they are no longer recognized (like the etymological root of a word which we may not know—but do we feel it? Like Dibutade as a being, beyond the name we still have, having erased her original, personal name—do we, can we, mustn’t we still feel that actual her?). “Demolition,” which opens section I, was written standing in front of a photo by Rabih Mroué, in which a city I do not know has been partially demolished—whose memory is that, now that I am seeing the photo? In what ways does my connection to the destruction, to the feel of the place from my feeling of the photo connect me, transport me, to that place and moment of its vanishing from the photographer’s “real” memory?
In “No Title,” which closes section I of the book, the people are absented, as opposed to erased, but there are at the end of the poem others who stand at the edges of a town (place, existence, a world) and seem to be awaiting them. This leads me to the origin of that poem—once again with Rabih Mroué—where I began scribbling it as I stood before a mixed media art piece of his, including a video installation, photos and text. Originally, I felt my poem was almost an accidental response, a few words to his work. But later that day and over the weekend following my visit to the museum, these initial jottings oddly coincided with real loss—I learned that same day that a distant relative who had been missing had now, alas, been found, hit by a car. The revision as that poem grew mixes the initial scribbling at the art show with what was added in personally and, on a shared front, with the fact that that initial visit took place on the famous Friday, Nov 13th in France as we (all of France) witnessed the first mass drive-by shooting. The losses and the generalized, shared outrage of that attack are embedded behind the simple language of presence/absence in the poem. What is curious to me is to be reflecting on and rereading that poem now, in the new current political environment. It has become politically charged in my mind in a new way, a way Mroué likely already envisioned in his own work, but in ways I had not yet connected to mine. People are being absented, being disappeared, deported, or entering a space of waiting in internment camps where no one really knows the outcomes of their situation in a country I am from, just as they had been in places he came from or lived in at different times. What is the role of remembering in that? In recognizing there was someone next door, but now…? In what way is our body, and theirs, appropriated by recalling, admitting we remember, or not? In what way does a poem wait, await another, touch that loss/recollection? Can it?
What you seem to be saying here is that much of your writing is a part of so-called collective history (our dark times) and yet much of it is a part of individual memory. This makes me wonder about Dibutade and others who appear in the book. Is the appropriation of a body, any new body, a way to exist? Or does existence remain on the level of breath, like the appropriation of spoken words, breathing them in and out? (“…we are not cadavers”) To what extent are we existentially or socially determined?
Another very complex question here. I think we fear appropriation right now, and yet if we do not borrow and try on otherness, if we do not implicate ourselves in what happens, or can, to that different body, imaginatively, momentarily, it will become increasingly difficult for us to accept and realize the myriad of elements that really understanding others requires of each of us. I wonder about all that being together in a place but with our differences entails. I recognize that imagining ourselves within the body of another is always, as the French say, voué à l’échec (an action bound to fail). But this failure is perhaps, as you put it, a breathing them in and out, knowing, as Juliana Spahr far better explored in her post-9/11 book This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), that we are sharing the same air, that the air which goes into and out of you, goes into and out of me, and so we are not just socially determined, but we are politically linked, and environmentally, essentially connected. Back to Whitman again: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
A good part of your writing is written in French. Is writing in your ‘other’ tongue the same creative process as writing in English, your mother tongue? Does the subject matter differ, or rather how does it differ from writing it in your mother tongue when it comes to describing things?
I learned French late in life—after college. In fact, I really believed I was incapable of learning a foreign language, as I had done such a poor job of that in Spanish and German classes. But in the case of French, I was driven by a desire to read Stéphane Mallarmé, thus to get to a certain level in French, and I was learning the language while immersed in a country full of French speakers—I was required to use it daily to get by. But initially, as I began to develop a certain ability to write in French, that was a space relegated to academic criticism. My French “voice” as I referred to it, was the one that wrote my PhD in French. Initially I wrote all my critical work in French and all my creative work in English. Then, little by little, the barriers began to melt. On both fronts. I was asked to write a creative piece in French by Julien Blaine for Invece N°1 on Mary Reade, and discovered that the grammatical forms, rhythms, and movement of my critical French had little to nothing to do with the voice I needed for the creative writing I was doing. I began, as if anew, expanding my abilities in French. Meanwhile, I simultaneously started writing more critical work in English. This meant the lines between my two voices were fuzzier. A few years later, I spent a very intensive week with a “Collectif,” which poem 2 refers to, of Italian and French poets. We gathered to live, reflect, write and translated together. Our basic goals were trying to know each other, each other’s processes and drives, intensely and intimately in order to produce texts individually and then, via translation, collectively. This was the first of two moments spent with such a collective, and this first had announced the theme of translation. During our single week we spent two full days introducing ourselves and speaking around a table, hours and hours of that, which tried my American patience. Then suddenly a dynamic took over, some shared instant, and we all were off writing, then reading each other, translating, making a film, recording, seeing a visual artist with us draw and somehow her abstract lines and forms was an additional language—and I saw the usefulness of that time taken to really merge. We closed out our week with a reading in the middle of the countryside along a rural lane in front of farmers and locals who did not usually read poems. We all broke bread together around a bonfire before redispersing. The language that coalesced in “Collectif” is, first off, snippets by the others of some things they said which I noted down in Italian or French, and moments where sounds of words in French and Italian slipped in and through parallel sounding words in English and where I realized the significant differences in their meanings. Stemming etymologically from the same roots, these languages have branched out and the distance from their roots, the connections, may have been severed—or, this poem asks, perhaps there is still some collective soil? That is what got explored there at a time when we were trying to learn to work and translate together.
In the other works in this book, there are presences of French in the smaller poems based on echoes between languages, gaps and some drive for a sound or a nuance I could not get to in English. As “Demolition” opens, the placing in French “memory and forgetfulness” and repeating of it connects both to the shared French spoken by many people in Lebanon, as we do not share Arabic or English, and also places the idea and meaning of both recalling and forgetting in a foreign, harder to access, space. It is an exotic space, even, as it is other, not native, and must be pursued or learned or sought.
In “Afterlife” the foreign language is where the poem started, even if the section where the work topples from English into French is about two-thirds of the way through the current version of the poem. I was invited by the Musée des Beaux Arts of Mulhouse to write a piece for a local exhibition by Véronique Arnoud and then read/perform it with Lyonnais dancer Olivier Gabry. I initially wrote in French, figuring I would have a French audience. But in the end, I also made and used some of this English version—the sections which are a parallel to the French, almost a translation—in that performance. The two versions of these middle sections are reflective echoes, as such are echoes of Dibutade but in two versions which thus disperse and divide thus fail to echo at all. This cross lingual sound-ricochet differs also because I did not always translate into English for meaning, but chased sound, thus words all with L in English and V in French for those sections. Later, after that performance had been completed and the show dismantled, my ongoing interest in Dibutade kept nudging at me. So, the poem grew from its center outwards in both directions. The initial opening now is all in English and is the prosiest part of the poem. It tells the reader a lot and interweaves my voice and that of an actual history of Dibutade, which appears in the lighter grey font set off the left margins. Then this central, imagined space arises, one that exists in a kind of doubling, a hinged shift from the English into and through the French, where the echo relates to a leap from studying Dibutade from afar, knowing of her, to a kind of stepping-through-the-door-of-the-wardrobe, imaginary leap back in time to her. Thus, it segues to where the poem grew longer at the end, too. In this final part, the back and forth between French and English remains, like a tug of war between spaces and times, between expression and erasure, war taking the man away while the woman is also erased by another kind of history, and where both are trying to remain, to be touched, connected to, by someone from out present time (me, you?). In the end, it is not his mark on the wall, the original silhouette, but that of her that we are trying to get at. To have Dibutade who is finally “vue,” seen: but also, in the nuanced sonic parallel with English, viewed, entailing for me a viewing from afar, the distance of her, the nostalgia of our, of my own, personal, attempt to get back to that woman so far from my own time and existence.
Finally, where do you go after this book, or what are you working on at this moment? In life, or/and in your writing?
BlazeVox, and Geoffrey Gatza, has accepted my book Shelf Break for publication in 2026. I am currently trying to be careful with all of my final proofs in that collection while also reading the truly wonderful translation of That Which I Touch Has No Name, completed this summer by Vicky Tzoumpa, incorporating into it some sections previously translated by Lénäig Cariou and Virginie Poitrasson, who will also be doing a reread as it moves towards publication in France. As for new drafts, I have been working on two book-length poetry projects. One is an ekphrastic book which began when I was asked to compose some poems for a stained-glass show in Chicago. It has expanded to include sections dedicated to two other artists working in varied mediums. The poems are very small, quite direct for me, and dominated by female protagonists that are a dreamer and a nightmare. The first of these to be published appeared on Arts Fuse on October 9th, 2025. My other project is a collage-architecture of the body, voice, and breath project where I interweave my voice with those of Leonardo Da Vinci (from his notebooks, primarily sections on the body and environment) and Kurt Schwitters (from a variety of writings by him). Some of these poems have appeared in print, but the book is still very far from coalescing into any finalized form.
Jennifer K. Dick is an author, translator, events organizer, and professor. Her works include the forthcoming Shelf Break (BlazeVox, 2026) as well as four other books of poetry and six art/chapbooks, most recently That Which I Touch Has No Name (Black Spring Press Group, London, 2022), Meridian (art chappbook by Estepa Editions, Paris, 2022) and Lilith: A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt, Sept 2019). She writes an irregularly appearing column called “Of Tradition and Experiment” for Tears in the Fence magazine in the UK and teaches at the Université de Haute Alsace in Mulhouse, France.
Nina Zivancevic is a Paris-based, Serbian-born poet,essayist, fiction writer, playwright, art critic, translator, and contributing editor to NY ARTS magazine. She has published twenty books of poetry and written three books of short stories, two novels, and a book of essay on Milosh Crnjanski (her doctoral thesis) published in Paris, New York, and Belgrade. The recipient of different literary awards and former assistant and secretary to Allen Ginsberg, she has also edited and participated in numerous anthologies of contemporary world poetry.
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