Stuart Cooke in conversation with Forrest Gander
My introduction to Forrest Gander’s work began with The Blue Rock Collection (2004). I remember exactly where I was when I first opened it: in my bunk on a three-day ferry from Puerto Montt into Chilean Patagonia. In one of those divine coincidences, the book’s language provided me with the template I needed for what would become one of my great, ongoing obsessions: the imagination of a neo-Gondwanan, semi-surrealist fusion of American, Antarctic and Australian landscapes. Gander’s hyper-flexible lyricism, his geological objectivism enmeshed with an unearthly, spiritual grammar reminiscent of Hart Crane, became the bedrock—no pun intended—for the book I would then write (Opera, 2016). In the years since, his work has only become more central to my understanding of phenomenology, cosmopolitanism and ecopoetics. I believe he is the single most compelling figure writing in English today.
But Forrest is not only a writer; he is a voracious reader across multiple languages, and without doubt, he is the world’s finest translator of Spanish-language poetry. His translations of Latin Americans in particular constitute a signal curation of some of the most remarkable poetry of the past half-century. He provides not only a major poetics for ecological and cosmopolitan relation in the 21st century, then, but also, through his peerless translations, a crucial window into a continent jam-packed with astonishing poets and astonishing ecosystems.
And yet—in addition to all that—he is also a beautiful human. I had intended for what follows to be an interview about his life and work, but in a characteristic display of generosity and buena onda, Forrest insisted that we have a conversation instead. So, for those who will be disappointed by my interruptions, I must apologise—and to compensate I would urge you to investigate his many titles, some of which we allude to below.
‘Poetry invites readers to experience the event of language uncurling from these attempts to distil and convey. The ‘real’ world is dizzy with maladies, but there is pleasure, beauty, catharsis—power—in poetry’s bold and manifold efforts.’
Poetry for this issue was guest co-edited by Mark Nowak and Angela Costi.
This interview originally appeared in the 2025 Rabbit Annual.
Forrest Gander: Hi Stuart. I’m writing you in June from Olympic Valley here in Palisades Tahoe, part of the dramatic Sierra Nevada range in northern California. It’s about three and a half hours northeast of where I live, closer to the coast. I was up here back in May to celebrate Gary Snyder’s 95th birthday. He still lives alone in the house he built with friends—including Allen Ginsberg—by hand. One of his sons lives nearby and keeps tabs on him. During our visit my wife, Ashwini Bhat, mentioned to him that she was working on sculptures influenced by yakshis—female nature spirits in southern India, where she’s from—and Gary’s eyes lit up. He knew all about them. Advised her to be careful. ‘They’re dangerous,’ he quipped, only half-joking.
Right now—late June through July—everything is in bloom here, especially at the higher elevations. After morning classes (with The Community of Writers) focused on generative poetry, I hike up the Shirley Canyon trail which parallels a chilly stream and its series of swirling cascades. The rocky soil is charged with chocolate-scented daisies and bright red paintbrush, with lupine and yarrow, glacier lilies, and mule’s ears with their fat yellow flowers. The base elevation is 1890 metres and the peak is at 2,758 metres. It’s steep and slow going around all the glacial till. I come back down sweating like a hog, as we say. Despite that hogs don’t sweat.
What about you? Where do you find yourself right now?
Stuart Cooke: Wow, Forrest, your account is like a brief survey of a big chunk of my cultural geography—an ideo-region? Ecolo-ture? Ginsberg, Snyder, and the new poetries, particularly as they came westwards, and entangled with Native American and Asian traditions, to say nothing of the heritage of those names: Sierra Nevada, California, and the remnants of Spanish conquest, then Mexico, Olson in the Yucatán, etc …!—which is where you emerge, of course, as central to an expansive (not expansionist!), inclusive, transgressive and exploratory poetics of the 21st century Americas—which suddenly (at least it feels that way) has become anachronous, if not downright antagonistic, in the isolationist, MAGA-polis of the Trump administration.
I got your email before stepping on a plane to Alice Springs. Right now, I’m flying from Brisbane, just near our east coast, all the way into the centre of the continent. Alice Springs is on Arrernte Country and there’s much to say about that, but for now I’m thinking of its proximity to Pine Gap—a US-Australian military facility some 30 km from town. Locals aren’t allowed access into Pine Gap, and whatever goes on there is classified. That’s nothing new—in the sense that it’s the latest iteration of a colonial paradigm which first saw the First Nations barred from the machinery of state and the means of production—but the facility feels hotter now, a sign of our complicity in whatever conflict is about to break out over Taiwan or in the South China Sea.
You, then, Forrest, poet of the world and of worldly poetics, I am wondering if places like Olympic Valley are even more important at this time—not as refuges necessarily, but as places of reconnection or regeneration—‘Looking down for miles / Through high still air’ (Snyder’s Mid-August @ Sourdough Mtn)—with the original promises of Californian diversity all around you? How does an un-American American survive—or bloom—in this new America?
FG: Alice Springs. Curiously enough, I’ve ‘heard’ Alice Springs, but never seen it, never been there. I used to listen Ramona Koval’s ABC broadcasts, and at least once, she reported, delightedly, from Alice Springs, attentive to and articulate about what she was hearing. So I carry that memory of the place with me, a micro-dosed acoustic injection. Maybe I can ask you, when you’ve hiked to a spot that calls to you, to record 30 seconds of being there for me? I’ll swap you 30 seconds of early morning in my backyard—where I’ve returned—in the Sonoma foothills.
I’m very interested in your query about place names. Specifically, the site from which I wrote you earlier, Olympic Valley, was so-tagged after the 1960 Winter Olympics was held there. But until 2021, the surrounding area had been called—for more than a century—Squaw Valley, a derogatory term concomitant with a rote pattern of disrespect and dehumanisation of Native Americans. The Washoe Tribe, whose name means ‘people from here’, and whose ancestors had inhabited the area for thousands of years, worked with the Geological Survey to rename Squaw Peak and Squaw Creek to Washeshu Peak and Washeshu Creek. And Squaw Valley has been renamed Tahoe Palisades, ‘Tahoe’ being derived from the Washoe word for lake. (So Lake Tahoe is, literally, ‘Lake Lake.’) Small recompense for their losses. All around the Sierra Nevada, you’ll come across place names like China Basin, Yuba River, La Barranca Road, etc.—Nevada itself is, of course, Spanish for snow-covered. The names persist like cenotaphs for the Chinese, the Native Americans, and the Mexicans who lived there and were driven out.
Speaking of toponyms, there’s a stunning poem by one of my favourite contemporary Japanese poets, Kiwao Nomura, titled ‘On the Way to the Site of Doppo’s Lodge’. Kunikida Doppo was a major Meiji-era poet whose introspective work celebrates the so-called natural world and rural life. There’s a historical plaque marking the location of the little hut he built in a quiet, wooded Shibuya neighbourhood that is now one of the hippest and most densely-touristed spots in Tokyo. Nomura’s poem is a baffled phenomenological account of trying to find and pay homage to ‘the site of Doppo’s lodge,’ as he walks, ‘circling the vacancy called vacancy,’ through a palimpsest of emporiums and high-rises, cafes and factories all constructed over ‘the imprint of Old Edo.’ His mind is snagged between two time periods, between silence and tumult, memory and the immediate, and his journey begins to feel infinite, the destination infinitely far away. I bring this up thinking of ‘the small recompense’ of place names. Nevertheless, they can give us a handhold, if we’re looking for one, on the history of a place.
I’m reminded, since we were both just referencing him, that Gary Snyder, who wrote his senior thesis on a Haida myth, spent much of his adult life living in Washoe ancestral territory. He studied several native West Coast native languages (really struggling, he told me, with the pronunciation). In any case, in his assertion that ‘the land belongs to the land,’ he was, early on, drawing from Indigenous worldviews and pushing back against colonial and capitalist frameworks of land ownership.
When you include Spanish and other ‘foreign’ language words in your poems; when your poem’s speaker is ambiguous, perhaps multiple; when you mulch words with visual elements—drawings, connective lines, inventive spacing, etc.; and when you write of the way that ‘imaginations and their stories’ are grounded in place, it seems to me that you’re taking up similar concerns. What are you at work on now? Is it connected to your trip to Alice Springs?
SC: Hold on. Before we go any further, I need to know how and why you were listening to Ramona Koval on the ABC??
Fascinating, your account of Washoe nomenclature. A few years back I went to UC Berkeley for a conference on Australian poetry (of all things), that was convened by the inimitable Lyn Hejinian. To kick things off we had a ‘Welcome to Country’ (as we would term it here) by a local Washoe guy. I had the sense that it was relatively unusual to commence academic proceedings in this way at Berkeley, but we were all grateful for it. Actually, one of the conference’s co-convenors was Kate Fagan—and I think it was through Kate that you and I were put in touch all those years ago? (Thanks, Kate!) Back when I was starting to read and translate Mapuche poetry, and making some very elementary errors … the generosity of your feedback—even back then, when you didn’t know me from a seed pod—was astonishing.
I’ve just finished an essay that traverses Mapuche-Huilliche-Tehuelche territory (southern Chile & Argentina) and Shoshone territory (a little further south of Washoe lands). In the North American sections, I sort of half-walk/half-dream/half-drive through that intimidating, spectacular region of southern California and Nevada in an effort to spend some more time with the spirits of two recently departed loved ones. Even with this basic overview you are probably seeing why your recent Mojave Ghost (2024) meant so much to me. The book seems to provide a language for the ‘arid’—for tremendous compression, space, surprise and blue skies. On every page, I was struck by the compression of narrative, voice, image and perception into a blending of dimensions. But rather than get bogged in an undifferentiated morass, the poetry remains vital and fresh—like torn orange or lemon skin—because of how you cut or jump between one zone and another—or your willingness to let each thing be, to keep moving, but never too quickly, as if your sensory organs looked both inside and out, and forwards and backwards in space, and in time.
In an email I’ve asked you if this was geological—or pure geology—in that you take us into a form of knowing that is millennia-deep and miles-wide—and always, always moving. For most of us, perhaps, geology is about numerical data and rock samples in stuffy science labs, but for you it seems to be a much larger and more powerful ontology—an earthly phenomenology, perhaps?
You asked me about languages and marks and subjectivities, and for me these are becoming increasingly geological: words are like feathers on the back of an enormous and very ancient creature who usually moves too slowly for the uninitiated to notice. And today while walking around Uluru I learned that the Pitjantjatjara word for ‘tadpoles’ is kurtji kurtji, and then—moments later and thanks to my partner, Maddie—that the Tagalog (or Filipino, as Maddie likes to insist) word for the same creature is kiti kiti. In a flash, I caught a glimpse of the giant, Austronesian snake making its way across south-east Asia. Maddie’s time on this continent doesn’t go back as far as mine or my family’s, but the languages she speaks and the people and place she comes from makes her a far closer relation to Aṉangu Country than I ever will be.
Do you think your own interest in poetics and their translation stems from your sense of the depth and possibilities of geology, of geological time?
FG: You first asked about Ramona Koval. I met her many years ago in the US when she was reporting on some literary events on the east coast. It was a tumultuous period in her life, I think, and we were friends for a while. She interviewed me for an episode of her show, kept me up to date with her travels and the exploits of her talented daughters, introduced me to Sean Scully’s paintings, and for a couple years, sent me recordings of her radio programs.
I broke out in what CD Wright would call a ‘shit-eating grin’, when I read your sentence describing words as ‘feathers on the back on an enormous and very ancient creature.’ I’m with you, given more and more to the sort of animism that led the Maya to believe that everything, including rocks and water, possesses a spiritual essence and sacredness. Last month, I was in Honduras where I visited the Copán Ruins. As you know, on some of the temples and in the few Maya codices that the Christian invaders didn’t burn, the Maya depict death as an exhalation of life-force, ‘the white flower of breath.’ But that glyph is almost invariably rendered into English as ‘soul’—a mistranslation that serves to cram the more open, animistic, Maya concept into the tight-fitting boot of Christian dogma. It’s a continuation of the conquest that eradicates the richness of Maya spiritual beliefs. The power and ethics of translation …
I hope you’ll pass along that essay about your secular hejira through Chile, Argentina, California and Nevada. And certainly, I can understand why you’d do something like that as part of a grief-ritual for those you lost. In the desert, I’ve found it easy to lose my sense of personal importance to the magnitude around me. And in that humbling, it becomes easier for me to sense my connection to the inhuman. The quiet compels me not so much to listen as to listen into.
I think there are intuitions and insights only revealed by a long contemplative gaze. To enter the desert seeking visionary experience as humans have done for thousands of years is to repeat an act of vulnerable attentiveness, an act of taking perception, query, and understanding as events involving place, memory, and porosity. What we see on the surface doesn’t account for all that’s going on below. That’s as true of geology as it is of ourselves. I want to read about what you found there along the stations of your journeys. Despite that you speak Spanish, did you come to feel like a foreigner? And if so, was there something important, necessary, or expansive about experiencing yourself that way?
You asked me about poetics and geological time. Geologists are trained to construct a perspective based on toggling between large scale observations—say, above the valley over there on that thrust-fault mountain, we can make out folded older rock above layers of younger rock—and small scale (even microscopic) observations involving, for instance, the re-orientation of crystals inside the shear zone along that fault line. A whole other dimension of that perspective involves how incomprehensibly long ago the action took place, the imagination of which pushes us to think beyond the limits of human perception. I think maybe such a ‘grounding,’ which is both perspectival and philosophical, puts us in good position for our sense of humility to be activated. As the poet George Oppen wrote, ‘The self is no mystery, the mystery is/ That there is something for us to stand on.’
SC: I’m more than a little envious of your ability to duck down to Honduras so easily, Forrest! (For us here, getting to Central America is probably one of the longest journeys there is.) What a remarkable region, no? Where the tremendous forces of two enormous continents come colliding into one another … have you been to any of the other major Mayan sites? (I’ve only seen Tikal.) Are they roughly similar, or are they each irreducibly unique? My suspicion is that Palenque would be the most crowded, but of course that has nothing to do with the ruins. I absolutely share your wariness of soul and your fondness for animism. As it happens, I fantasised about starting up a journal a couple of years ago with the following credo: ‘unafraid of the intellectual and the experimental / unafraid of the beautiful and the political / unafraid of the materialist and the animist.’ To me, animism seems like the best way towards a cosmopolitan, ecological ontology.
It’s funny that we come to animism now, because from my earliest encounter with your work—The Blue Rock Collection, which sings (and draws) rocks to life—I have always felt a strong animist impulse in your poems, and I wonder how much of this is to do with the ‘long contemplative gaze’ that you have [long] adopted: ‘We must force ourselves open / to discoveries across the grain, contrary / to what we “know”.’ (I still plan to use this as an epigraph somewhere!) In the same collection, you point out that the biomass beneath the Earth’s crust might be more than double that of what lives on the surface. Taken together with what you said above, these moments suggest that the act of ‘looking beneath the surface’ is for you far more radical and extensive than the phrase might otherwise imply. On the one hand: a ‘literal’ surface, the surface of the planet, to get beneath which we need to be steeped in the wisdom of geology—which might then open us to a dramatically different time scale, where we become little second-like tics scratching about at the top of the mound. On the other hand, there are the surfaces of ourselves, physical, mental, etc., beneath which open up similarly dramatic expanses that might lead us … where? Back to childhood, to ribbons of DNA, or the accretions of minerals in landforms? Does this sound too circular to you? And would you distinguish so readily the surface of the earth and the body as I have done here?
Today we often—and rightly—treat exploration with some measure of suspicion for the various colonialist tropes it conjures, but of course such suspicion can become an anti-intellectual nihilism, or even bigotry, when we refuse the exploration of even our own selves. So I am wondering if that delightful, geological ‘toggling’ between scales that you’ve described is what leads in so much of your work to corresponding ‘toggles’ between forms, media, and even artists? In the sense that the thrust-fault mountain you mention is a form of collaboration between folded older rock and layers of younger rock, so too do we find Rikki Ducornet’s artwork beside your poems in Blue Rock, or the work of three photographers with your prose and poetry in Core Samples from the World (2011). The core sample provides us with a needle-like bookshelf of many strata, and I imagine that the least interesting samples are probably those which contain one stratum only? In turn, the contemplative, long-gazing, geological poet would need to make books containing poems of many forms, combining many kinds of language, as well as drawings, photographs, and other glyphs?
In terms of my own ‘geological’ experiences, I suppose that much of my relationship to Spanish and to English could be typified by this same toggling of scales—or, if not, by a fractured sense of the relationship between my words and their referents. In many ways, Spanish and English are languages of travel, of trade, of exploration. They are languages that pass through places, that connect those places with many other places. In other ways, of course, this is total bullshit: there are probably even more varieties of Spanish than there are of English, and many of them are localised, regional and particular. Hence this ‘fracture’ I mention … Always, I feel this sense that my words are like oil on water, that they slip off the surfaces of things—but at the same time—because I’m frankly bored of all the melodrama about the ‘failures’ of language and so on—this is also their great virtue—because Spanish and English teach me not to be a linguistic essentialist, not to believe that one language structures and determines my reality in a way that is fundamentally different from another, and that the most important function of words is actually to remind me of the world which might (or might not) provide all of them with a home. So that in this very ‘slipperiness’ there is a resonance between words and things that can become temporarily sacred when the poem clicks into the right place. By ‘sacred’ I don’t mean access to anyone else’s spirits; I just mean that sudden sense of awe, wonder, whatever, when I feel a poem entangle me with (in your words) the inhuman, the listening into, the ground, the ‘something’ I’m standing on … Poetry, as you say in Blue Rock, ‘is the discourse / in which the greatest energy / is still possible.’
FG: When you question the hard distinction between the surface of the Earth and the body, I’m right with you. We recognise that the main thrust of Western philosophy has served to wean us, the so-called rational animals, from our sense of mutuality with all we stand on and with. But we’re not actually so different from mushrooms, excrescences from a living earth to which we return. Our breath is part air, our blood part water, our bodies partly dirt. The origin myths of earlier cultures all connect humans to soil. And so the etymological link between human, humus, and humility. The calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, and the oxygen in our lungs come to us courtesy of this planet. Meanwhile, the bacteria and microbes in healthy soil are closely related to those in our guts; and our immune systems evolved in dialogue with the Earth. Which is why many philosophers we’ve been reading refuse to distinguish the human from nature.
As for that ‘long-gazing, geological poet [who] would need to make books containing poems of many forms, combining many kinds of language, as well as drawings, photographs, and other glyphs,’ well, that’s the poet you face in the mirror each morning. And I, for one, have been inspired by and have gratefully borrowed, as in my ‘Redwood’ sequence in Twice Alive (2021), from your inventive, collaborative graphisms.
And speaking, as you do, of languages ‘that pass through places,’ I can’t help but think—since I’ve been spending so much time there in the last few years—of India, where the hard borders between languages in many Western linguistic contexts disappear and local languages shift every 20 miles or so. One almost never hears a conversation take place in a single language. With so many people speaking in linguistic gradients that include several of the 1,600 spoken languages or dialects in India, you might imagine that ‘mother tongue’ there is more of a place than a fixed idiom.
Let’s bring this chapter of our conversation to an end. Will you take a last question? I was re-reading this morning that beautiful little book you published a few years ago, Land Art (2022)—with your landscape sketches and graphisms, sometimes like ideograms, alongside some of the poems. The first section of ‘Edge, Hold’ ends:
if there were a single word it would be cradle
the way it has always been there, thinking within you
the way that it holds you as your thoughts start to fly
(don’t try to hold on
let it go)
the way there is nothing so small or finite as your body
but nothing so open to blueness, to the pull of the moon
And I thought of how, in so much of your work, you find ways to express the thickness of experience while charging it with intimacy. From cradle to moon; from ‘within you’ to ‘open to blueness.’ If by ‘thickness’ we mean something like the felt, inexhaustible depth or richness of being—how an event, moment, or phenomenon refuses to be exhausted by rational abstraction, but has experiential density—then your take on thickness might be linked to the term Dōgen uses, 密の道, mitsu no michi ‘the intimate way’ or the intimacy between self and all else. Would you agree that your poems often enact a non-separative experience of reality where subject and object, time and being, go undivided?
SC: Absolutely, 100% agreed, Forrest. Dōgen’s way seems best, but we could also think of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, or that sense I have almost every time I pick up a book of yours—to wit, the one on the top of my stack here, Torn Awake (2001), which begins on ‘the surface / of the visibly surging / without reference to a field of human presence …’. Then, ‘don’t look away,’ you urge us—and I, like you, have not. In looking this way, I’ve become aware that what I see is contingent upon so much: not least, these words I use to describe my seeing, which are not vessels of divine insight but only the spluttering outcomes of a rabidly non-linear history. If I had grown up in less of a linguistic desert, in a region of India, say, I probably wouldn’t be precious about ‘my language’ or Language-as-such at all, because always I’d be jumping from one to another or mixing bits and pieces together, and maybe I’d only ever start thinking in rarefied terms about writing in one language or another when I entered institutions of formal education. And so: if these English words aren’t necessary, or aren’t the only possible response to that intimacy (that flesh, that visible surging), then who’s to say that other things can’t happen as well—in other languages, and also in drawing, song, dance … again, so many cultures have never seen reason to separate these practices as rigidly as we’ve done in the West. While I continue to write poems in English, then, over time I’ve come to think more about where they begin and end—about their peripheries, and what might happen in such places—rather than in the somewhat abstracted spaces where nothing other than poetry, apparently, is possible. And perhaps because of this, increasingly I’ve been drawn to noisy, sprawling poetics with enough space for incompletion and for surprising, many-sided encounters. And who better to guide me than you, Forrest, not least for the geological breadth of your materials and the symphonic scale of your weave, but also for your translations, where Coral Bracho and Jaime Sáenz, in particular, were crucial, early templates for adventure.
As this particular voyage of ours comes to a close, I’m wondering if we could turn briefly to a future-inflected present tense: could you indulge me with some insight into what you’re working on at the moment? Are you writing about Copán, or India? And who are you translating—or, who’s at the top of your list?
FG: I’ve just finished translating a book we’ve titled Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems of Jeannette Lozano Clariond. Clariond’s a Mexican poet of that same generation as María Baranda, Pura López Colomé, Alfonso D’Aquino, and Coral Bracho, all of whom I’ve translated and who came of age as writers impacted by the Tlatelolco massacre of university students in 1968. Princeton will bring out that book next year. And I’ve been writing essays—on the desert, on friendship, on poetry. The most recent is focused on the hunting poems of a wild classical Arab poet, Abū Nuwās, so renowned for his homoerotic openness and his ‘wine poems’ that he gets mentioned in several tales of The Arabian Nights. He was also a master of a genre of poetry celebrating the hunt (with falcons, cheetahs, salukis, etc.). And in those poems, there’s a remarkable merging of human and non-human perspectives completely alien to most Western traditions. So you and I have both been writing essays, and I want to remind you, before witnesses, that you’re on the hook for sending me yours on the Mapuche-Huilliche-Tehuelche lands.