From Out of the Blue Issue #41

Maggie Nelson’s experimental new short embraces the monochromatic

By Alexandra Bush
Published: August 1st, 2009 | 12:00am

Bluets is a small book at 95 pages, stunning in both its lightness and density. It’s the kind of book you should sit down with when you have a few hours and absorb all in one go. According to Maggie Nelson, it’s about being “in love with a color — in this case, the color blue.” It’s also about philosophy, sex, literature, heartbreak, art history, paralysis, and science.

Bluets — a strange hybrid of philosophical treatise, memoir, and pillow book — shows Nelson’s penchant for defying traditional categories. “I have always had an interest in formal innovation,” she says. Before Bluets, Nelson published three poetry collections (Shiner, The Latest Winter, and Something Bright, Then Holes); the experimental story of a murder in her family (Jane: A Murder); a memoir about the same murder (The Red Parts: A Memoir); and a study of heretofore ignored women poets (Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions). Next up for the prolific writer is a book of “experimental art criticism” entitled The Art of Cruelty. She currently teaches in the critical studies department at Cal Arts, where she does her best to emulate her own teacher Mary Ann Caws, “a walking and talking vessel of anarchic joy.”

It’s clear from her books that Maggie Nelson is smart: a true intellectual, if not a conventional one. She describes Bluets as “horny and hedonistic,” and talks about contending with academic “heavyweights,” as she calls them. “By ‘heavyweight’ I mean someone who thinks that there are certain fields of study, or certain writers, who are ‘off limits’ to you,” she says. “Which is hogwash, of course. As a writer you have to presume you have the permission and the ability to read, and to use, everything. That’s the main difference — academic writing asks you to be scrupulous; ‘creative’ writing demands that you be promiscuous, impulsive, and irresponsible.”

Nelson knows about impulse. She moved to Los Angeles sight-unseen, “thus fulfilling a fortune (from a fortune cookie) that I’d been carrying around for years: ‘You are headed to a land of perpetual sunshine.’” Like her life, her writing is guided by her instinct. “It’s a cliché, but I think you do write the books you have to write — you have to go where it’s ‘hot.’ You have to learn how to recognize, and then follow your curiosity — how to feed it, hunt with it.” A sort of mystery hunt, where you don’t know what you’re hunting until you find it, and “you never know where you might end up. A friend told me about Andy Warhol’s “Blue Pussy” which somehow led me to the story of the transfiguration of Christ. Things can get far out.”

More than impulsive and curious, Nelson is also gutsy — the kind of gutsy it takes to lay yourself out on the page, give your experience to thousands of strangers. Bluets is a very personal book, and Nelson doesn’t shy away from that. “I think of most of my books, but perhaps Bluets in particular, as a record of my influences and interests,” she says. “Putting it all together is like making an unexpected party of the results. The figures in the book — from Joni Mitchell to Sir Isaac Newton to Marguerite Duras to Dionysius the Areopagite to Joseph Conrad — are the subjects, the invited guests, as much as are all the blue objects, stories, and facts.” She is fearless in the face of baring her soul: “I like books that use their shame to become shameless.”

The result of all these traits — love of experimentation, intellect, intuition, and fearlessness — is a lovely little book made up of tiny moments that contain a universe of ideas. “Bluets may be the first of my books that I love,” she says. Does that make her more nervous about sending it out into the world? “In some sense it makes it quite relaxing, because the book is exactly the book I aimed for it to be, and no criticism or silence or whatever can change that. On the other hand, it also makes it not relaxing, because you’d really like it to find the right people — you want it to do more than make a little twinkle star arc then melt into the night-blue sky. But again, if that’s how it goes, so be it — the book still stands.”

Maggie Nelson, on the making of Bluets
I wrote the book in a veritable fever, in about a month or two, after literally a lifetime of collecting blue things, and of thinking about blue. I thought I’d collected more blue information than any one book could contain, but when it came down to it, my ‘condensery,’ as the great poet Lorine Niedecker once called her poetry-making-machine, proved powerful. It got rinsed thin and clean.

1. Years of collecting blue objects, stories, and correspondents.

2. Writing down each blue anecdote on an index card and making a wallpaper of the cards.

3. Copying select opening lines of propositions from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on index cards and making a wallpaper of the cards.

4. Sitting down and writing while looking at the two wallpapers, marrying a blue story to one of Wittgenstein’s sentence structures. It was a graft, one which miraculously took.