Sentence Case

An Interview with Courtney Bush on Every Book Is About The Same Thing

“Language works – you look at it, it’s working.”

The following interview with writer Larissa Pham was conducted shortly after the publication by Newest York of Courtney Bush’s first full-length poetry book, Every Book Is About The Same Thing, which is available for purchase. Courtney was later selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series for her second book, I Love Information, which will be published by Milkweek Editions in August 2023 and is available for pre-order today.

Larissa Pham: I’m curious about what you see as the core of the book – thematically, outside of content?

Courtney Bush: When I was writing the book, I was getting a divorce and writing two separate books in two really different ways. One of the ways felt very fast – it was internety kind of writing about this crazy crush. Then I had this other document that ended up being the book, which was these sentences. 

In the first section of the book, which was originally a chapbook put out by blush_lit, I didn’t really have a plan. I kind of just trusted that it was going to go somewhere – but it actually really rounded itself out in a way that was mystifying to me. I felt like I could try that as a form… and could trust being involved in that form. 

After I wrote the chapbook, I wanted to try to use that form again. I didn’t think of it as a poetic form, but I felt confident in it in an intellectual way. When I was having a kind of nervous breakdown in LA, I used it again, and it took me somewhere solid. And then I was like, Well, I want to try it a third time. So it really became about that form – just starting somewhere and letting your thoughts carry you, and believing it will take you somewhere. And it will.

I’m so glad that you brought up form. I was really struck by everything being a complete sentence. Even if it’s a fragment, it’s punctuated like a sentence. That felt like such a commitment to the thought and to whatever feeling or idea was being expressed, or image being described. Like, you’re going to go all the way to the thought, and you’re going to punctuate it so that I know. There’s something really beautifully declarative about it because of that. I was curious about where that comes from.

I think it comes from this really central belief that if you follow your thought, if you follow a thought all the way to the end, that something will be there. In poetry, once I almost get to the end of a thought, I often feel this impulse to shift away, to turn away, and not complete it. Which I get – I don’t think what I’m interested in here is like a closure or anything. But I think people, including myself, really resist going all the way to the end of a thought.

It’s scary.

Yeah, it is scary. And I feel like I’ve been in a lot of situations where other writers around me are talking about how language is a failure. That’s a whole schtick. It’s fine. It is just as fine as anything else. But I don’t think that language is a failure – I think it’s really powerful. I think it does a lot of work on its own. 

It is a tool, and it’s not broken.

Yeah, language works – you look at it, it’s working. 

I feel like one place it came from, honestly, was the person I ended up marrying and divorcing – his name is Andrew. I was really interested in the way that he spoke because a lot of the people around us kind of cut themselves off in the middle of what they were saying. I noticed with him, as long as it took, he would wait to figure out how to complete the sentence. He spoke in complete sentences, and most people don’t, if you’re really listening. That was one of the things that I really liked about him and why I wanted to be his friend initially. That drew me to him – like, "Oh, he’s speaking complete sentences. He’s committed to complete sentences." I thought that was really admirable, and I started trying to be more like that in my life but also in writing.

Something I noticed about my ex, whenever we would fight… I would want to have the fight right away, within the two hours that I was upset, and I would never get that fight. What would happen is he would come back to me with "Well, here’s what I was thinking, and here’s how I was feeling." It would be so articulate and considered, so fully formed as a statement of being. I would always be kind of embarrassed about my initial ways of expressing myself, like this idea of, “I’m just going to say everything.”

Right – like I’m going to have to find a way to say it now. I’m the opposite, like your ex probably. I’ll be mad and upset about something and just think it through in such detail. Then I’ll eventually try to express it, like "Here’s my detailed presentation. I figured it all out." Of course, you’re speaking to a human being, and so it’s not like they’re going to be like, "Yes, I accept that." I think a lot of Virgos have a really intense feeling of not being understood. But sometimes it’s hard for me to accept that the problem isn’t that the other person doesn’t understand my argument. The problem is they feel differently, they disagree.

I feel like I’m always struggling with language being in some ways an incomplete artifact – I want to turn to a quote from the book where you say,

"I hate when writing is made out to be the villain, as if it wedges itself between consciousness and some more theoretically pure experience, and proceeds to eat up whatever connection there might be between the two."

I was really moved by that, because so often it seems like something is hovering in the air – an event or an action or an experience – and the moment you start describing it, pieces of it fall off. That was always so hard to me as a writer of nonfiction. But I still return to language. I still return to writing, even though I’m frustrated with that.

I think it’s frustrating for a lot of people. It’s one of the big things that people can spend their whole lives thinking about and trying to solve. In grad school a lot of “experimental” writers would talk about, again, the impossibility of language, the impossibilities and the failure of it. I always felt confused because I didn’t really understand. I understood what they meant, but I was like, "To me, that’s not true." I started to get really angry, and I had to try to get rid of that anger.

What I took from it is that asking language to capture experience or feeling is like asking something to be something else. We wouldn’t ask experience to express itself in language. I wouldn’t ask feeling to be language. I wouldn’t ask experience to be feeling – I don’t want to ask something to be something it can’t be. There’s this phrase from somewhere… “like trying to mop with a tennis ball.” And it’s like, oh yeah, well, you’re just trying mop with a tennis ball. You can’t do that. But you can do so many other things with the tennis ball. I don’t know, it’s just like – well, why do you want it to do that? There’s all this anxiety about not expressing how it really was or how it really felt. And like, to me it’s actually good that you can’t.

At some point, things just become sentences. I love how in this book, you talk about poetry as this powerful way of orienting yourself in the world. And I wanted to ask you about that – about what you see poetry as. I feel like I could tell someone what poetry isn’t, but I don’t know if I could tell someone what poetry is.

What’s important to me is the way that poetry tunes or can attune a person to the way things are connected to each other. Poetry can hold any logic, any kind of logic that you could find interesting – it can hold so many different things. And I was, and still am, really obsessed with the logic of talking. The way people talk to each other is so strange if you really listen.

To me, poetry can be similar to talking in its movement – it moves in one direction and it interrupts itself and there are breaks and there are lulls and there are accelerations and there are all kinds of detours. Or there’s directness. There can be a feeling of approach, or a feeling of arguing. Poetry and talking are both really capacious forms. And believing in them as valid structures has made me much more attuned to the ways that things are connected. There’s just an unlimited amount of stuff to pay attention to, and there’s an unlimited amount that poetry can hold. 

Whereas fiction, I don’t really know. 

Of all the forms, it does feel like the one where we’re most present with the speaker. There are all those memes about the speaker of your poems, blah blah blah. But you really are present with the speaker of a poem in a way that you’re not really with a narrator or even the voice of an essayist. There are different degrees of distance. At least in a poem – certain kinds – you can’t build up that distance. It’s not really allowed. It’s just there. It’s more like a conversation. And there’s also a lot of room for opaqueness – you can be purposely unclear about something and then also have these moments of really striking clarity, and no one is going to get mad at that. People are very okay with it.

Yeah. Or if they do, it’s like… just steer clear of them.

Like, sorry. You don’t get to hear the whole story. You get to hear what I choose to tell you.

I feel like I do tend to exist on the side of a kind of clarity though. I had this teacher I really loved, the poet Marie Howe. In class, somebody would come out with all this crazy language that maybe sounded and looked really beautiful or whatever. But she’d be like, no, just say it. Just say what you’re trying to say and see what that’s like. And maybe what you’re trying to say is not worth saying. Maybe what you’re trying to say is bad or whatever – maybe it’s not interesting. But it was like, just say the thing, and that probably will be more interesting and better jumping-off point than whatever you’re doing when you’re trying to not say something. 

Right – you’re dancing around it.

But you could just say it.

Instead of… doing an interpretive dance with language around it. I think that’s also what I love about this book – it’s so clear. There are parts of it, like the Hot Girl Summer section, where clearly, a lot was happening. This was not a good summer. Many things were very challenging for the person who’s writing this poem. But at the same time, the tone is so steady and level that I feel like the person is in control. Even if I know that she’s not maybe in control in this moment, the person is aware of not being in control and that feels like a real kind of grace. I think that stems from, yeah, just saying the thing. Or making an observation that is true.

Yeah, it was a really bad time, a really scary time. And I do think that writing in this way, writing in sentences, and separating the sentences and having them paced out in this way is really healthy for a certain kind of moment. Even seeing that section of the book now – it feels like, okay, it’s all here. It’s in these sentences. I can look through these sentences of something that was really chaotic. It’s about a moment where I couldn’t understand anything. I couldn’t make any kind of connection cognitively. So to be able to write it and to see it is restorative. 

I also love the moment where you write about sending the pages to Jessa – who you describe interacting with during that period – and being like, “Is this too much?” But she says, “No, that’s also how I remember it.”

I feel like writing about one’s own experience, at least for me, comes with a lot of fear of being too dramatic. Like, am I overblowing this? There’s this history and tradition of literary madness, writing about one’s madness, almost romanticizing it and how… what we sometimes want is for our experience of life to be unprecedented. And I think that I’m guilty of that. So many people are guilty of this fantasy that our experience is unprecedented. But it isn’t. Nothing is. There was something about that history which made me feel better, that made me feel kind of like, no, it’s okay – you’re okay. You’re scratching out your little sentences and you’re making your language and your poetry and your moment of “madness” is not unprecedented. You went to, or near to, a place where other people have been, and luckily, you came back. 

Courtney Bush is the author of I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2023) and Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York, 2022). Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. She lives and works as a nanny in New York.