About Anna

Anna Spirochova (she/they) is a senior graduating in poetry with a concentration in Experimental Humanities. Her senior project is “an exploration of poetic ritual, defined by what precedes the actual writing of the poem. A ritual might be listening to the radio and collecting the language that you hear, writing down words and phrases that you hear. Over half of the collection consists of receipt poems, which are the result of a practice she did every day for a month in the fall of 2023. This ritual was defined by frequency – every day they would write a poem on a receipt. The poems helped them establish a practice, transforming an entire day into a space of poetic ritual.

 

The ritual helped the poem find its foundation, an area where it will emerge from. It can come from anything – some of these poems surfaced from deliberately chosen origins, while others appeared out of completely spontaneous settings. This makes the poem, whether it was them pointing it to its heritage or the poem choosing its own.”

How did you come to Bard?

 

I grew up in Prague, Czech Republic, and I came to Bard in 2021. I wanted an American education, at least for my first degree. I had some sort of complex in my head that if I did that I would be set for life. I came to realize that it is not really true, but that’s fine. Nevertheless, I feel I chose well because I was able to do a lot of different things, which is what I wanted.

 

How did you come to EH?

 

I took Intro to Media with a vague intent of incorporating EH into my degree, but I didn’t really know what EH meant, you know. I was always interested in how art is presented online. That was my first way into EH, and my work with poetry has also become about how it can be used as a political tool.

 

EH classes fall right into that. And I’ve always done multidisciplinary things. It felt kind of perfect in that way.

 

Why did you decide to base your poems in rituals?

 

I knew I wanted to focus on ritual from the beginning. I had read a lot of CAConrad, who is a big inspiration to me. Their whole practice is ritual, though differently than how I approach it.

 

I’d always had trouble writing consistently (unless I had to bring a poem to a reading that night), so I was like, okay, what if I did something every day for a month? That was the only idea that I had starting up my project. Every day I’m going to write a poem. I’d had the idea with the receipts because it was something I always had in my pocket. 

 

I think some people have an idea of poetry as something that happens over a set amount of time. Like, you sit down, write, and after say two hours you have a poem. Maybe that happens to other people, but not to me. When I started writing poetry, I would draw inspiration from the language around me. Like, say I’m on a tram and I hear someone say something. I write it down. Then I’m reading something. Oh, that’s a good word. I have an idea about that. Write it down. Eventually, I’d have enough to make it into a poem.

 

Then I took my first poetry workshop with Jenny Xie, and she told us we should be collecting language. I didn’t know it was a form of practice, it was just something that I did. When I discovered that this can continue being my system, I felt I’d found a poetic practice. And I was like, aha! I’m not the only one who can’t write a poem in one sitting. The rituals are an extension of that form of practice.

 

How did you create the photos included in your SPROJ, and how did they relate to your rituals?

 

All of the photos that are in the SPROJ are from the month when I did the receipt ritual. Sometimes I placed them intentionally, but sometimes I just found myself in a good spot. Like with the bathroom photo, I was at work, and I just stuck it on the wall. 

 

Sometimes, I would try to make it from the same space and time. I would just write a poem and then take a photo of my friend holding it up.

 

Why did you decide to post them to social media every day?

 

To keep myself accountable. I didn’t trust myself enough to just write the poems every day. Not even because of the people that would see or not see, but more in terms of consistency.  Then, after it picked up steam, people would come up to me and be like, when’s the next poem? It’s 8pm. And I’m like, oh shit. 

 

How did posting them to social media every day change your views on poetry on social media, particularly coming from the Intro to Media class?

 

I think I was kind of detached from the idea that this is something that I’m presenting to the world. It was just a part of the ritual that I was doing. I write the poem at the end of the day, or in the middle of the day. It wouldn’t always happen at the end of the day. And then I post it.  And I don’t really care how many likes it has, or whatever. It was just something I had to do. 

 

I also realized that posting definitely makes it more real, you know what I mean? This is something that people can see now. It makes me think about how much stuff is behind a paywall now. There used to be things a couple of years ago where people would just post things and it’d be just totally chill. And now it’s just like, oh, you want to hear my poem? Buy this PDF or subscribe to my Substack. Not to say that I don’t want to pay people for their writing and art, but it is something to think about in terms of accessibility, how many layers we place on our work after we make it

 

I don’t think it really changed my idea of art on the internet. I think most of my work, except for the receipts, which were kind of modeled to work in this particular way, is meant to be read out loud. I’m not really a big fan of things that just work on the page and don’t work when spoken.

 

Yeah, I remember reading in the introduction that you came to poetry through poetry slams. How did you come from that origin to writing poems that play so much with spacing and format on the page? 

 

I never was in a writing workshop before college. I had never had any education in poetry. I started writing and then wanted to read what I wrote out loud. So, I went to poetry readings. 

 

I went to a couple of slam poetry events and enjoyed some of them, but there was a point at which some of the performances became super staged and practiced. That did not appeal to me. I don’t love a rhymed poem and I don’t love to be able to tell someone’s practiced a poem a million times before performing. The appealing part of reading is the unexpectedness – the audience doesn’t know what you’ll read and how you’ll read it. Sometimes you don’t even know. That’s the exciting part – the urgency, the transience. Maybe that’s why the collection is called in the next five minutes. 

 

I had started going to less staged readings in 2019 and that’s how I learned how things sound. I wrote things in the tram on the way there, and I’d do some line breaks where I felt a sound being accentuated, but in terms of like, left margin, right margin, center margin, I had no idea about that. 

 

I really only started thinking about how to use the page in college, and mainly with SPROJ. Utilizing the page in that way completely changes the way a poem sounds. I had so many poems where I would just write them on the left and be like, okay, well, it doesn’t sound like it’s on the left. It sounds like it’s somewhere else.

 

Conrad does this thing where a poem is rooted at the bottom of the page and then kind of spreads out. That really made sense to me when I first heard that. One of the themes of the collection is how the poems are ruled by their sound. When I write a poem, and I read it for the first time to myself, it sounds a particular way. It will most likely keep sounding that way.

 

I saw in your work that you gravitate towards massive ideas like urban life and political resistance, yet you also often ground your poems in human connection, either with loved ones or with the self, as an ending reprieve. What do those ideas mean to you, and how do you feel they relate in your work?

 

Yeah, it didn’t occur to me at all that those were important until my advisor pointed it out to me. I guess it was kind of subconscious, which happens a lot in my poetry. The ritual stems from being in a particular place. I was in Berlin in the fall. I had a great internship. It was in a bookshop and so many events played out. It’s so much language and so much new energy and you’re so charged with all this stuff that it’s just so great. And of course, October was very hectic and emotionally charged and the work itself became political without me even thinking about it.

 

I was writing about Palestine without realizing that I was writing about Palestine. I think it’s even easier to go there in English than in my first language because it’s so charged. Eileen Myles says that the English language is really violent. I think it’s really true. I do explore writing in Czech in the collection a little bit, but I find that it’s really easy to be very direct in English. I also started writing poetry in English, not Czech.

 

The poems being grounded with people came because of the constant stream of information at the time and the uncertainty we all felt. It felt comfortable to be bringing the poems back to the people that I was interacting with. I was doing it subconsciously. I usually didn’t have an intention behind positioning the poems, sometimes I just asked a friend to hold up the poem. I think it was an attempt to bring it back to something familiar.

 

So I guess it’s a sense of that where I’m like, oh, I don’t really want to deal with what this is about and how I can relate it to an image right now. So, by having a friend hold it up and relating it to what I find comforting, it becomes a kind of freedom.

 

How did you change your rituals when you came back to Bard?

 

I did a bunch of things with the radio. At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a lot of people back home were advised to prepare for a potential nuclear attack. My mom, who’s always really prepared for everything, made a bag with all this stuff. She bought a portable radio for it, which we fortunately never had to use, but I was really interested in it. Although we never used it, it had so much charge. 

 

I would listen to the radio, write down what I heard, and change the station every 30 seconds. I did that for like 10 minutes. I was writing down Czech, English, French, whatever I heard. By the time I was finished, I had three pages of language. There was a poem in there somewhere. Maybe you don’t see it for a week, but then you look back and it’s like, oh, it’s there.

 

What are your plans for after graduation? 

 

I’m starting a Master’s in Comparative Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam in September.

What would you say to people thinking about doing a concentration in Experimental Humanities?

 

I think do it. If you feel a connection to it, you should do it. I was never interested in AI. I never really cared about how technology affects me. But when I took EH classes, a whole new area of interest opened up. I see myself pursuing media in the future and experimenting more with sound. 

 

It expands beyond any expectations you would normally have for the subject. How do you use the internet as a political tool? How does it affect our perception of each other? How do you create art across and outside of forms? I think they’re all incredibly interesting concepts to think about, and EH is the place to do it.

 

Interview by Neil Bhatia