An Interview with Sophia Le Fraga
Sophia Le Fraga’s I RL, U RL has just been released from Minutes Books.
Andrew Worthington:
Where are you right now?
Sophia Le Fraga :
I am…FUCK…I am at work, at the Hearst Tower.
AW:
What’s your job?
SLF:
I’m a copywriter and editor at this digital ad agency.
AW:
How’d you get that job? What sorts of ads do you do?
SLF:
Well so, I studied Linguistics at NYU and when I graduated, I was just all over the place, traveling up and down the California coast kind of like aimlessly, and one day this guy called me and was like, “oh NYU said that you could tutor me in Syntax and Semantics”, and I was like, “Yeah sure” and he was like, “ok be in touch when you’re back.” And when I got back, I hit him up to tutor him a couple of times a week, and when we met he was like, “I’m the SVP of this ad agency, do you want to just like… work for me?” And I was like, “Well it’s not like I’m doing much of anything else…” So that’s how I ended up here. I do all kinds of ads, from skin care stuff to like cable and internet stuff to banks and cancer treatment centers…it tends to be…an eclectic bunch.
AW:
Did you take writing classes when you were in college? Or was writing something you did on the side sort of?
SLF:
Yeah totally. NYU didn’t offer a Creative Writing major but I pretty much took enough credits to double up. I took a lot of poetry, some fiction, and for two years, did an independent study with Rob Fitterman on “Poetry of the Avant-Garde”. I feel like writing was always what I wanted to do, but I wanted to have the background in Formal Linguistic to kind of… better understand what I was doing.
*Linguistics
AW:
Can you describe some of the ways you may go about writing poetry? How did you compose I DONT WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET?
SLF:
Well, so, I DON’T WANT ANYTHING happened after I submitted a sort of “open call,” asking everyone I knew on Facebook, Twitter and e-mail if they wanted a “poem”… and depending on what medium they responded in, I took from their feed, or their wall, or their e-mail and gave them each a poem of sorts, using only their language. People love to hear themselves talk.
AW:
So I guess no one was upset with the poem you made for them, then?
SLF:
No, of course not! All I gave them was a word salad of whatever they’d already shared on the web.
But that’s not to say that people haven’t been upset with me. That’s all pretty extensively catalogued in “H8M8” [a section in I RL, U RL].
Sunday Service: Sophia Le Fraga poem and Jay Deshpande poem
should they may
be could you would
she called me up in
may and thought
she should but I would
not. can I may
could you might
then we fight —
he said should she
would she could but
which they might
and she could see there
only what she looked at
which was not there.
New York based Sophia Le Fraga holds a B.A. in Linguistics and Poetry from New York University. Her poetry has appeared in Lambda Literary Review’s Poetry Spotlight, The Broome Street Review, and Lemon Hound, among other publications. It has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, and in 2011, throughout Berlin. Her chapbook I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET is out now, and her book of Whitman erasures, Song of Me and Myself is forthcoming.
This poem was inspired by The Hanged Man card of the tarot deck.
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I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET by Sophia Le Fraga
I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET
by Sophia Le Fraga
Keep This Bag Away From Children, August 2012
45 pages / $5 Buy from publisher
If you accidentally drop Sophia Le Fraga’s I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET, the book is fucked. This text is unbound, typewritten, looseleaf and there are no page numbers, so one misshap and the whole thing is irrevocably scrambled.
Or maybe it is not fucked. The sequencing of these poems is malleable and they do not have to be read chronologically. This “randomness” lends itself to all kinds of questions about the way that we perceive the order of a book of poems. Bound books appear official, permanent, as though there is an art god or a poetry god who said “do it like this” and it was so, and it is so forever. But sequencing is really subjective. If given the chance to rip out the binding and re-shuffle, many poets would likely re-sequence their books shortly after publication.
And what about the god of the internet, the @Lord? Is there one? “do me a favor, / professional / consoler: / get outta my sky. / save yourself on a computer / and zoom in on a stranger,” writes Le Fraga. This text is tense, at once resisting and embracing the fleetingness of pop culture and the meme. The speaker is “sick with / sincerity” yet “mass texts” are rendered “a / worse feeling / than hearing / about suicide.” Likewise, “time is a waste of #Poetry” but “RunningOutOfXanax” and “#y’all” and “#Instagram” are immortalized on the printed page. If an electronic god exists, it exists everywhere—irl too. Any attempts to separate the lexicon of the internet from poetry, are futile. The internet is omniscient, a time traveler and in you.
13 Comments
September 12th, 2012 / 1:30 pm
September 12th, 2012 / 1:30 pm