An Interview with Aditi Machado, Author of Material Witness

Aditi Machado’s Material Witness—out today from Nightboat Books—asks the reader to reconsider the material world around them, to reveal the attachments between human and non-human matters. A flame “kisses you with the kiss of its mouth,” the sun is president, and all of it is seen by a “militantly aroused / resident alien of every which nowhere.” 

In our conversation below we discuss materials as relational, plural, and contingent, and ask what that means for language and politics—and Machado’s poetic practice.

All photographs are courtesy of the author.

—Dante Silva


Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the word material. Here you challenge our relationship to the material world, suggesting it to be mutually reciprocal—or more so than we might have thought. Materials are active participants in your poems, matter is “in discord.” 

How would you characterize the relationship between your poetic practice and material phenomena?

Aditi Machado: The phrase material witness arrived—happily—late in the conception of this book. But material was there before I started writing these poems, without my realizing it. I’m leafing through the notebook that tracks some of this. . . I’d just finalized the manuscript for my previous book and was terrified that I’d never write again. One of my earliest instructions to myself was:

I have to write notes

and another goes: 

DESCRIBE HOW

THINGS MOVE

I guess I just did those assignments for a few years. I’d keep annotating whatever was around as though it were a text. Those annotations became matter for the poems, language matter. In that sense, writing poems is a phenomenological practice. I orient it outward rather than inward (it’ll bounce back anyway). 

My notes were often about—taking place—in landscapes: the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, the Rocky Mountains, the streets of Cincinnati. The materials of those spaces enter the poems as annotations. For example, at the Gardens, walking through the massive area dedicated to the largest and most varied community of cacti I’ve ever encountered made me feel like I was an alien visiting a cactus civilization. Maybe they even called it a “cactus civilization?” That experience gave me one of my favorite lines I’ve written: “cacti cum inside themselves.” 

The more you attend the nonhuman world, the bigger and more mysterious it gets. Even the parts of it that aren’t creaturely, things supposedly “dead” or “inert” or non-sentient, feel incredibly alive: dominant and domineering. Around the same time I started working on this manuscript, I was reading this incredible book in French by Baptiste Gaillard called Un domaine des corpuscules: the entire thing is focused on the tiniest of matters, dust particles, shredded plastic, disintegrating bits of wet paper, clouds of midges. Reading (and then deciding to translate) that book influenced me deeply. A favorite sentence goes “Les feuilles sont des extensions matérielles du vent, révélatrices par tremblements.” In my translation: “Leaves are material extensions of the wind; their tremblings are revelations.” I remember sitting on my porch in St. Louis during the early part of the pandemic repeating that sentence to myself while watching the leaves tremble. To apprehend leaves as material extensions of the wind is to realize that matter doesn’t just stop at its putative borders. Its edges blur into what’s not matter.

Dante Silva: One of the recurrent materials here is food; “you / were peeling a turnip,” “some vegetable-colored sky,” “dated wines, you drank them all.” Food is a medium through which you interrogate the extant social and political structure, and also becomes an actor in and of itself; “THE INEFFABLE CURRY LEAF / INFUSING IT / REFUSES THIS / APPROPRIATION.” 

Could you expand on the significance of “matters culinary” in the work?

Aditi Machado: The main thing is I like cooking and eating! I don’t know that I ever begin with interrogation, though again, the longer I stay with something the more likely it is that interrogation happens. I love that you quote the curry leaf line because it’s funny and political both. I watch a lot of cooking shows (Top Chef’s my favorite) and I’m fascinated by the language of kitchens; chefs and food critics form a discourse community that you’re on the very edge of as a viewer who does not spend much time in fancy restaurants but does in poetry workshops. What’s understood as technique, training, and pure invention are at once similar and dissimilar. 

Anything can be a lens into what’s going on in the world, what has gone on in the past. At first I was just “inventing” recipes. I imagined a cookbook that someone would find in a flea market, a cookbook with the weirdest recipes I could think up (rabbit brains floating in goat milk, anyone?), but they began to transform into meditative texts that were trying to understand something about taking in—quite literally—matter and transforming it. Eating transforms matter pretty radically; what might similarly transform language or concept or belief? I think it’s thought (cf: chewing the cud); and poetry is a very special kind of thinking. (If you say “food for thought,” is that an equivalent swap?)

The significance of “matters culinary” is also that I took the phrase from De re coquinaria, which some people think of as the world’s first cookbook. The second two words might be translated as “culinary things” or “culinary matters.” I like that the word “matter” can refer to things as well as concepts, as in “What’s the matter?” 

Dante Silva: I wanted to ask you about the form of the long poem, which I know you’re a proponent of. How do you work with and against that form? 

Aditi Machado: Something I like about long poetry is that it troubles the idea of an “end” for poetry. Some poems are so long, it takes a lot out of me to read it in one sitting. But even if I did manage that, it’s quite hard to hold the whole of the text–or an idea of its wholeness–in my mind the way I can, say, conceptualize the various parts of a sonnet separately and together. A long poem isn’t graspable in the same way. This doesn’t make long poems “better” than short poems; more like, it’s a different durational experience and I enjoy it for that. It’s a way to access incompletion. Formally, the long poem is often (not always; I would not say anything like this categorically) better able to register what we don’t know, or that we don’t know, that we don’t know enough. This kind of apophatic gesture happens many times in Nathaniel Mackey’s two ongoing serial poems, for example; here’s one gorgeous example from section 98 of his “mu” series

  I saw no way to be wise enough. Tonal

motion made me weep. I saw no way to

  stay where I was, be where I was, what-

ever it was I was moved on, moved over,

                                          what-

   ever it was worried what I was. . . So it

    was green loomed outside my window,

 drawn light in Low Forest I was wise to,

  saw thru, aroused by light’s reluctance

                                           but 

  not to be caught out, no way could I be

                                wise

enough I                                   

  knew                                                

As for writing long poems, I like that I can write little sections of a work that doesn’t know how or when or if it’s going to end. It feels peaceful and attentive, allows thought to develop, achieve depth or even epiphany without entering into a crisis about it. 

Dante Silva: Your poetic practice is, you’ve mentioned, influenced by Paul Celan. You’ve referenced the poem “Threadsuns” in the acknowledgements—“there / are still songs to be sung on the other side / of mankind.” Could you speak to that “other side,” and how you see your work in conversation with Celan’s?

Aditi Machado: The phrases “influenced by” and “in conversation with” have suddenly terrified me. I don’t know that I can speak with a lot of confidence about Celan, but I do read him a lot and the translations are so variously enriching. The one you’ve quoted is, I think, by Michael Hamburger. Pierre Joris has it as “there are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind.” The choice each makes for the preposition jenseits harnesses somewhat different sets of associations. Hamburger’s (“on the other side of”) makes me think of mankind as a kind of fence but also of something like another facet to mankind. Joris’s (“beyond”) feels spatial and temporal, and also conceptual. Is the beyond a future in which humanity does not exist? Is it the nonhuman world that we live alongside? Is it a spiritual realm? The undecidability of that beyond I find provocative. Who or what will sing these songs that are on the other side of or beyond mankind? Is it something we can do now, or that poets (like Celan, perhaps) already do? 

It’s very difficult to think about the future outside of narrative (apocalypse, redemption, so-called progress). The more difficult it is, the more seductive maybe? Seductive to write through in poems, that is.