All Tomorrow's Poets 2016: Owen Connors
The second in our series of poet interviews, Cait catches up with Owen Connors to discuss sex under capitalism–– and finally return his copy of Ariana Reines’s Couer de Lion.
C: Owen–– I googled you and discovered there’s a constable in Counties Manukau called Connor Owens. Do you know each other? Are you affiliated in some way?
C: I’ve called you Connor. I hate myself. Let’s talk about Ariana Reines. Thank you for lending me this–– it’s fantastic. How did you come across Ariana?
O: I discovered her through my friend Elle [Loui August]. She was doing her Masters at the same time as I was doing Honours. Everyone who was writing at Elam kind of knew that we couldn’t get quite what we needed from art school, so we formed our own group. It was really good, really strong. We would share what we were reading and Elle shared Ariana’s Mercury.
[Ariana] is great. She goes to European Grad school, and this book Couer de Lion is kind of trolling that. Like–– being in this quite loose and liberal institution with really notable lecturers, and leaving a lecture to go and fuck someone in the toilets. I think that’s injecting some life into poetry, into academia.
C: How has your time at Elam shaped your writing practice?
O: In a way, Elam was really great because I was able to go and research whatever I wanted, but still have that security of an institution–– and also a space and community fostering that thought. I think the act of reading alone contributed a lot… Early on, because I was reading so much more than I was making things, I started to treat that as my material and gradually I saw more and more potential in writing to be an artform in itself–– as opposed to just supporting visual artists. C: Tell me about your event, Fuck Me. You recently hosted your third reading at RM Gallery which had a huge line up. What sparked this ongoing conversation around sex under capitalism?
O: ‘Fuck Me’ started with this interest in being fucked, but it has this really obvious double meaning of getting fucked over by a capitalist structure. I stole the name from a great French film called Baise-moi, about two young Arab women going around Paris–– fucking men and killing people. I was also watching Bruce Labruce at the time. His Raspberry Reich is a gay porno set ten years after the fall of the RAF, a German militant group which were fundamentally early anti-capitalist ‘terrorists’. Both of those films had this really distinct pairing of sex and desire with political aspirations that were opposed to a western capitalist system. I think if you break it down capitalism operates on desire, and I was interested in interrogating desire–– the how and the what of it, so to interrogate and reimagine alternatives economically. Which might be a bit ambitious. I guess my ‘curation’ of Fuck Me has this interest in the orificial, like the asshole, vagina and mouth (and other’s obviously) which means the event itself is really queer and has a real emphasis on female identifying writers. I don’t really know yet what the effect of this is, but I know I wanted us to fill a hole in our community where we could see our experiences intersecting. Fuck Me is aiming to be both an invitation and an exclamation–– so it becomes both a platform to express discontent, and build a community around it. It’s an ongoing thing, and hopefully will morph with new contributors which i’m always looking out for.
C: I noticed you don’t have much of your work online. Do you prefer your writing to be experienced aurally?
O: I do exist in text–– but in hard form normally. I’ve always been really interested in this. I did all this stuff around Sappho last year, that tradition of lyric poetry. It makes poetry a performative thing but also a temporal thing. It doesn’t stake claim to language, it doesn’t make anything concrete outside of that moment. In a way I have a perpetual fear of permanence and how we treat historical texts, particularly in regards to queerness–– like history becoming this interrogation of how past writers ‘identified’. My work being vocal kind of avoids that ever so slightly. It maintains a mystery. I guess performance over print emphasises how we relate to each other, the proximity of our bodies. It also emphasises community interest over career. There’s totally an economy around print (like everything else) which we should always be aware of.
C: Is there a particular writer that has really influenced you?
O: I really admire Dennis Cooper. His writing is really transgressive–– it brings up some dark stuff that is pretty cutting to the homonormative agenda. His way of writing is super experimental and interesting in regards to how forms and structures of contemporary writing influence how we write/think. His novel The Sluts is written through all these contradictory internet posts about fetishising gay snuff porn, and Marbled Swarm has this super manipulative narrator who seems objective but slowly gets sucked into the drama of the text. He ran this publishing house called ‘Little House on the Bowery’ which supported young queer writers, which I think is how a cross-generational queer community should aim to operate. He also had this blog which was constantly posting his own writing and others–– but it just got taken down by Google, and still is down, which is really fucked and potentially details how corporate censorship is going to operate in the future.
C: Is there a question you’d like me to ask your fellow poets?
O: Ask about writers in their community that they admire. I’ve only mentioned international writers. Mine would be Emilie Rākete. I find her writing incredibly exciting in terms of the way writing has the potential to really transform how we think, and how our community might hope for a different society. 
