A Conversation with Emmalea Russo

"More and more we use language for sales or quantitative purposes. Poetry undoes that. It can be an elixir for our language blues."

Emmalea Russo — a poet, astrologer and teacher — first caught my attention as a reoccurring guest on Barrett Avner’s freeform conversational podcast CONTAIN, which I listened to a lot during the summer of 2022 while I was packing to move. She and Avner discussed Simone Weil and Byung-Chul Han and modernity and mysticism. I recall being, for whatever reason, especially struck by Russo’s fixation on light, particularly cinematic light, even more specifically the use of light in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (one of my faves), which she deals with in her 2022 poetry collection Confetti. Russo, it seemed to me, understood the relationship between the queasy and the sublime, and didn’t shy from either.

As the once-expansive internet grows increasingly claustrophobic, Russo’s newsletter, Cosmic Edges, reminds me of something I might have come across in an earlier, more spacious online era, it exists outside the virality rat race. It’s an enlightening, open-ended and un-precious tangle of philosophy, literature, film, pop culture, horoscopes, and various esoterica. Click the ‘About’ tab and it reads simply “cosmic rigor & poetic derangement,” itself an interpretation-resistant series of words that nevertheless sums the whole thing up pretty well.

Russo talked with me over the phone a week or two ago about dead cinemas, institutional uncoolness, beach life, astrology, poetry, and “relinquishing ownership” of her 2023 book Magenta, which you can read for free as a PDF. Learn more about her work on her website.

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First I was going to ask you about what your day-to-day is like. You’re pretty prolific, so I’m wondering about your daily work practice. 

It changes. I’m usually teaching a class of some sort. Right now I’m teaching a four-week class on alchemy and it's once a week so I tend to prepare for class with lecture notes and research and that’s where my focus is towards the end of the week. During the week I work on newsletters and my own writing and do astrology readings and work with clients. And I also do various editorial work. I’m kind of all over the place. My focus often revolves around the material I’m teaching, and that material filters into Cosmic Edges. 

I kind of get the sense that everything you’re doing in your life is filtering into everything else. 

Yeah, otherwise I’d go crazy [laughs] It just sort of happens. Right now I’m just sitting here with my dogs.

You live by the ocean?

Yeah, I live at the Jersey Shore. I lived in New York for a long time and various other places and then we strangely ended up here. 

I feel like that adds sort of an interesting flavor to your work. 

[Laughs] Really?

I was re-reading, well, I read Magenta when it came out. And then I was just rereading it on my phone while I was on the subway and I was struck by this ocean theme that comes up here and there. 

I think you’re right. I hadn’t really thought of that but the Jersey Shore certainly informs Magenta. There are boardwalks and summer people and seasonal energy. And the emptying out that happens here in the winter. During summer, it swells to something like 11 times the normal population. 

That's really kind of dizzying. 

Yeah, it's interesting living here year round. I grew up in Pennsylvania, grew up going to the Jersey Shore in the summer. It’s best right now. The beach is quiet. Surfers and fishermen and locals and then in the summer…madness. I’ve written more since I’ve been here than I ever did in Brooklyn.

That makes sense. I think that kind of, that winter ocean energy comes through in Magenta, it feels very visceral i think, as a reading experience. 

Well, thanks for reading it!

I wanted to talk about your having released Magenta as a PDF. You may just have to bear with me for a second, but I went to see a screening of The Canyons the other day, and there was a Q&A with Paul Schrader after.

Really? I’m so jealous, I love that movie. 

Me too. You know how he has the shots of the dead movie theaters throughout the movie?

Yeah, I’ve written about that.

Schrader said something about how the messaging was, ‘Don’t feel guilty that you're watching this on your computer, because the theaters are all closed.’ 

I was relating that to the experience of reading your book on my phone, which is not something I normally enjoy doing, but in this case there’s something about the PDF format that works really well with the book. But also it's at this time that books are sort of fetishized, people are obsessed with buying books but not necessarily reading them. There’s something really pure about the experience of reading Magenta on my phone.

I’m not sure if that makes any sense, but I’m curious about your experience as the writer. What is it like to release something that’s kind of ephemeral?

This makes total sense to me and I’m really glad you brought up The Canyons. I’m obsessed with … I think it’s one of the great opening credit sequences. And Magenta is a lot about cinema and images. A lot of empty LA cinema moments in Magenta, or at least one that I can think of. And maybe I was channeling The Canyons. I love Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader and I was happy that they did that together [laughs].

But anyway, that’s a good question. Magenta was meant to be a physical book. And then when that didn’t happen, I guess it was a lucky accident because it makes sense as a slippery scrollable experience. You can zoom in and out, and I composed it mostly on my computer, digitally, and there are some strange typographic changes, and the poems kind of dilate and expand in a sense. There are also a lot of purgatory references, and I think there’s something purgatorial about the scroll. 

And yeah, also the color magenta, the CMYK, and the sort of …I don’t know, Magenta seems to make sense as a digital or computerized object. I was happy not to be precious about it, just releasing it into the ether. 

I was sort of impressed by what seemed like the release attachment to the physical object. And you had said in your last Substack post from last year, you said sort of in passing that ultimately the book not being released was a good thing. Could you elaborate on that?

Should I go into the back story? I guess you kind of know the back story. 

If you could quickly summarize it, I don't remember the details. 

So back in May – short, short version – my book Magenta was supposed to come out with a small press. They had requested the manuscript, they were really into it, we designed it together. It was released onto the website for presale and then that day one of the editors contacted me, very disgruntled, and upset because of some of my quote-unquote associations. I had published in places and been on podcasts with people that they deemed to have, you know, incorrect politics. 

I essentially said, please read the work I wrote for these places and listen to the podcasts because I stand by them and nothing hateful was said. I said, I hope we can still work together because this book means a lot to me. But I’m not going to explain myself or denounce anyone. We should be able to work with who we want, and freedom of association is crucial, especially for art. Very soon after that, the editors were like, nope, we’re taking it down, we’re refunding the preorders. 

Beyond everything else, it's so uncool.

It's really ungroovy, right? [laughs] A poet friend of mine described it as “ungroovy” and that was my favorite. It’s so lame, so dreary. What the fuck. 

I don’t remember saying that [in my Substack post] but it sounds like me, that I said it’s a good thing. It did reveal to me something rotten at the core of that particular sector of that – I don't know what you want to call it – experimental literary world, because after that I felt like I had more guts. I wrote a piece explaining what happened, which then I got a lot of shit for, and the press went on to release a statement about me. In the piece, I spoke about the importance of ambiguity, and the danger of this sort of coercive language they employed, essentially wanting me to disavow various publications and people. We see it all the time now.

Right.

Then, I released Magenta as a free PDF. I wanted to relinquish ownership of it. I dedicated it to the public domain. Many people attacked me for the piece I wrote but many people also thanked me. Some people came to me and said, I agree with you but I can't say that I agree with you because, you know, I don't want to lose friends or whatever. I thought of it as very uncontroversial, what I did, but apparently not.

I've been thinking about it in the recent context of artists and writers getting ‘in trouble’ with arts organizations; people – for a recent example – getting in trouble for expressing support for Palestinians … It seems to be more clear that we have to move past the current structures of how art is published, or writing is published. Artists are starting to figure out how to do it in a different way, moving towards something else. 

It’s almost like the cinemas closing. 

Yeah, figuring out ways around… it's interesting to see things that were previously accepted as cool — the small press, or art periodicals — and now it’s like, oh this is sort of not cool, and the people behind them are not cool, or they’re ‘ungroovy.’ I think it's sort of refreshing in a way to see these organizations showing their asses a little bit. 

Yeah, the institutional breakdowns. 

Do you see the people you talk to  or work with, moving in a direction that is similar to what you did with Magenta?

Like, going rogue or whatever? There’s certainly a trend of leaving academia for para-academic places that keep popping up and people offering their own sort of routes into texts. A big question that the whole Magenta drama brought into relief: what does it mean to publish with a certain house? Does that mean you agree with what they publish, that you have the same politics? What does it mean to publish next to someone? To be in the same lineup? We need to think critically about these things as opposed to policing one another’s every move.

I also wonder, what does it mean to say you’re for or against something on the internet, or in public? I mean, really. What the fuck does that mean? If I were to have said, oh, I condemn so-and-so, or this publication is bullshit or whatever they wanted me to say? I just don't quite grasp it. We haven’t quite come to a consensus on these things. I’m interested in other ways of relating.

It requires you to believe that belief is static, and fixed, which is also extremely anti-poetry. I don’t see how someone can be interested – presumably interested – in publishing poetry while also buying into this rigid yet unclear perspective on what it means to believe something. 

These certain signifiers like, if you have the ‘correct’ opinion on …  whatever it is, you’re in the clear and you can be worked with. How depressing. I like the idea of talking to anyone in public. That might be dangerous but to me it’s important. I don’t think it’s separate from poetry.

I think I have kind of a remedial understanding of poetry. It’s similar to the feeling that I have about doing math, like, there’s an anxiety inherent in approaching math that I also feel with poetry a little bit. But it's sort of for the opposite reason because poetry is kind of — like you’re saying — the resistance to fixed meaning, or the resistance to – I forget what word you used, but the non-memeability of it.

I was wondering if you have thoughts about how people react to poetry, it being a thing where someone will say “I don't like poetry,” more-so than probably any other art form. I’m curious about your thoughts on the place of poetry in culture. 

Well I agree, there is more resistance to poetry than other artforms, like, oh God, poetry. It's so embarrassing to say, ‘I write poetry.’ I think it's partly because…I don’t know, it's an alternative language. It’s like a weird drug that makes you think about language not as a tool for communication or utility but for something else. And that can be freaky. In terms of its place, I don't know, we need poetry but I do feel like it's become a little bit – at least in the circles that I’m familiar with – it can become really cut off and elitist, and I think that’s a big turnoff. It’s a big turnoff for me too, and maybe that was a part of the Magenta PDF-ing, because I felt like, fuck, maybe more people will read it this way. It will be available even if they don’t sit with it and consider it. I think that was part of my hope, anyway, that more people would do what you did, read it on the subway. More and more we use language for sales or quantitative purposes. Poetry undoes that. It can be an elixir for our language blues. 

I think that relates to what I wanted to ask you about astrology, I was thinking about how just looking at my Gmail inbox, how many companies use astrology to sell stuff. Like, ‘if you’re a Scorpio get these yoga pants’ or whatever. I was curious about the horoscopes you publish in your newsletter, they seem like extensions of your poetry. Reclaiming the mystery of astrology, I don't know. 

[Laughs] So basically [you’re asking about] the relationship between astrology and poetry?

Yeah. [laughs]

That's a good question. Well, I mean, both can help us see the world differently. I think my relationship with astrology is similar to my relationship with poetry or philosophy. It’s circuitous labyrinthian self-help. For me, planetarizing states of consciousness or the feel of the world is more interesting than a didactic diagnostic outlook. I like astrology for its poetic capability. But I do think there’s a place, of course, for entertainment, for astrology as pop culture. And it’s funny. I'm not against it. I like the idea of horoscopes not as prescriptive but as cabinets of curiosity. Astrology and poetry are languages of association, linking up things that otherwise may remain disparate.

The idea of writing horoscopes is so wild to me. 

What do you mean?

Not even anything deep, just like, I can't believe you can do that. 

[Laughs] I look at the chart for the week and then pull up different signs and from these strange geometrical lines and how the planets see each other, the task becomes ‘how do I make something of that?’’ So it's kind of a way to fuck with my own mind a little, too.

Being tuned into what’s going on with the various signs, does that impact how you interact with people you know? 

I think because time is so slippery and we’re in this bizarre digital treadmill thing, looking at astrology every day, and working with clients helps me think about time in a way that is more exciting and textured. But no, I don't have it in the back of my mind when I’m interacting with people. 

I’m a yoga teacher so I feel like the more I’m teaching, the more I’m obsessed with other people’s spines.

Right, am I wondering, like, ‘What’s your rising sign?’ I mean, maybe on some level. If anything, best case scenario I think it helps me pay attention more to other humans, it's rare that …I’m trying to think of the last time I was like, ‘What's your sign?’ 

What’s your sign?

I’m a Scorpio.

Ohhh. [laughs]

By the way, how did you find my work?

Actually I heard you on the CONTAIN podcast.

Oh, I love Barrett.

Yeah, I love his perspective, it’s nice to listen to something where you don’t have to agree or disagree, there’s not an expectation of where the audience is coming from.

Yes, he’s really good at creating an arena for just zoning out and thinking. I think I started listening to CONTAIN because he speaks to so many different kinds of people. There are no litmus tests. 

It makes you realize how scarce that is. It is kind of radical.

I think it's really rare and crucial to listen [to people]. Doing astrology readings is all about listening.

How did you get into astrology in a serious way? 

Well, many years ago, I gravitated towards astrology books. I don't know why. On a whim, I decided to do a Hellenistic astrology training, maybe six or seven years ago. I have some ambivalence towards it, partly because it seems like everyone’s an astrologer now. [laughs] When I started, everybody was like, ‘you’re doing what?’ Astrology gets enlivened when you relate it to things that are around you in real time or other art forms, so I started Cosmic Edges as a way to do that. And because a lot of the writing I do is kind of obscure, I wanted to say hi to people.