Joseph Mosconi is a writer, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. A former Google computational linguist, he is the executive director of the Poetic Research Bureau (PRB), a hybrid arts space that hosts weekly readings, performances, and films by today’s most progressive poets and artists. Mosconi is also a co-founder and programmer at 2220 Arts+Archives and a contributing editor at Make Now Books.
In the following interview, which was conducted virtually, Mosconi discusses his life as a curator, his background as a linguist and lexicographer, and Ashenfolk, his latest “book,” which is an ever-changing Fluxus-like box of zines. As Mosconi explains, Ashenfolk draws as much from punk culture and black metal album art as it does from the Language poetics of Clark Coolidge, Stephen Rodefer, and Bernadette Mayer.
Thank you to PRB Editions for allowing us to publish six pieces from his Ashenfolk-adjacent chapbook A Knocks.
William Lessard: Obviously, I’m a very New York person, but it seems like what PRB is doing is very LA, and I mean that in the best sense. It’s not siloed or territorial as things here in New York. PRB is cross-disciplinary and comes from the creative culture fostered by an institution like CalArts.
Joseph Mosconi: PRB has a close relationship with CalArts. I know many of the faculty members there, and some of them are long-time friends. Just, for instance, among 2220 Arts+Archives programmers, Harmony Holiday and Corina Copp both teach at CalArts, in poetry and film, respectively. Their students come to a lot of our events, and sometimes even host or read.
As a programmer, I strive to feature work that is not limited to my particular taste. I want to host poets and writers that are important to the literary community and to other poets that live and work in Los Angeles. I try not to be too exclusive around that kind of thing. A lot of times, people will propose programming and ask to host an event themselves, present it themselves, and that’s fine, too. I program events where I host and present work, and also where other people guest-host and bring work in from their own networks and communities. Sometimes the readings will have a party vibe, sometimes they’ll have an academic vibe, sometimes they’ll feel more like a traditional reading—it just depends on how the people I’m working with want to run the event.
WL: I’m hearing that part of your curation involves documenting the now, in the sense that something may be outside your own aesthetic preferences, but it’s something that’s happening, and you feel that it’s important to give it a platform.
JM: Exactly. At the new space, we have the capacity to host events that are hybrid, where we can present short films or music as well as poetry. I’ve done a few events like that with Corina, at her film series Rotations, where a filmmaker might also be a writer, so we’ll present both film and poetry. And Andrew Maxwell and Rebecca Baron. Rebecca is also a filmmaker and professor at CalArts—together they host a series at PRB called @SEA, which they’ve done for many years now. It is very explicitly hybrid. They bring in music, video, and film, and usually a poet or two, and they call it a “live magazine.”
WL: Tell me about your former life, Joe.
JM: I was, for many years, a computational linguist at Google, and I worked on machine learning and text classification. We weren’t quite doing large language models or neural networks, but we were the team that created AdSense and AdWords; this included creating models and software that could automatically classify texts into particular taxonomic categories. I built many of the taxonomies.
WL: And basically, those taxonomies facilitated ad placement.
JM: Among other things. Once you can classify data into a category, you can use it for all types of different purposes, not just ads. But ads were where the money was at for Google, definitely. Much of my poetry utilizes data sets. At some point during my tenure at Google, I found myself collecting lots of different types of language in my poetry-work, similar to how I was collecting language at my work-work. Eventually I found that I’d collected hundreds if not thousands of CSV files and spreadsheets of different types of language.
I didn’t explicitly think about it at the time, but now that I look back at one of the first books I made—Fright Catalog, it was 10 years ago now—it’s definitely a specific type of language, and it could be described as a specific application of a data set. And I collected this language in a file, and it wasn’t randomized. It was collaged with specific intention, when published. And then my newest book, Ashenfolk, is partly about the “California Ideology” of Silicon Valley and the legacy and fallout of that approach to language usage, and its culture’s technological determinism.
WL: Ashenfolk embraces a polyphony of voices, a polyphony of personas, and it seems to thrive on digital indeterminacy, which isn’t experimental, but a realist expression of how we live in the 21st century.
JM: I think that’s accurate. There’s no single voice in the book. I don’t think it’s a conceptual book in any kind of “conceptual poetry” sense, other than that it embraces different voices. It’s not really a book of lyric poetry either, though it has some lyric poems. Some of the methodology includes appropriation and collage, but these are well-established methods of composition, so I don’t think it’s experimental in any strong sense.
A lot of my poet friends will work on a book, and they’ll write the book and then the book is finished, and then they’ll move on to writing another book. I work on lots of things at the same time. I looked on my hard drive the other day and counted 14 books in-progress. Some of those books may never see the light of day, and others may eventually be combined with other projects. Ashenfolk contains things that I wrote 15 years ago, and also things that I wrote maybe a few months before it was published. The work accretes in this way across time and space. There are definitely poems that I salvaged from older projects that didn’t work out, but then I was like, “Oh, this piece of writing that I kind of threw away or has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time might work in this other context,” so I repurposed it.
WL: To me, what’s really interesting is that the fact that it’s in a box gives it a sense of fixity, but at the same time, when you actually read the words, you sense that as a Fluxus object or a Fluxus project, it’s really never complete. Flux means change, literally, so I wasn’t terribly surprised when you recently sent me an addendum. Is it really finished? Or is the reader expected to finish the work?
JM: Why not both? I embrace the reader-centric, post-Language way of reading, where the reader is partly constructing the poem. But also with that book, I thought since it’s in a box and there’s these individual booklets, I can simply keep adding to it.
WL: What you’re doing reminds me of 80s zine culture, whether you’re talking about weirdo, standalone zines, like Duplex Planet or Factsheet Five, which was like The Reader’s Digest of weird zines. You bring all these different textures together, so people experience them within a certain spatial zone.
JM: I made zines when I was younger, in the early 90s and in the punk rock scene, and those were my first publications. In some ways, they’re not that different from what I’m doing now. When this project started taking shape, I knew I would have to do it myself. I have very specific design expectations. I like to design my own books. I guess maybe I’m more of a bookmaker. I think first of the book more than I do the manuscript or poem collection. I always think of the object that I’m going to be creating, whether it’s Fright Catalog, which is in the form of a magazine, or Ashenfolk, which is in the form of a box set. I’ve accepted that this is my practice now. Maybe someday I’ll do a regular trade paperback, but I haven’t done one yet. I look to William Blake, who was also a bookmaker.
WL: I also feel like what you’re doing is a DIY version of Siglio. It’s really very much of a piece with Lisa Pearson’s work as editor and publisher. How she pursues that hybrid ground with writers like Sophie Calle and embraces the weirdness of John Cage’s journals, printing them in different colors. It’s excessive and wonderful.
JM: Siglio is definitely a big influence. I love Siglio Press and Lisa’s work there, so they’ve definitely been an influence. When Siglio was based in Los Angeles, the Poetic Research Bureau did a lot of events with them. But to get back to the 80s, 90s zine stuff, that was very specific. I knew exactly, I was trying to make zines that I could house in a box. Also, there was an artist here in Los Angeles, Darin Klein, who I also went to college with, and who worked more in an art book and zine context, who published a box set of books; not poetry necessarily, but art zines, and that was definitely an influence.
WL: Andrew Maxwell’s “On Ashenfolk,” which appeared in select editions of the box, is not something I was prepared for. It is both a mock-essay chasing down far-flung occult and popular references the way the TV show “In Search Of,” hosted by Leonard Nimoy, did back in the 70s and a dead-serious analysis of Ashenfolk’s taxonomy of meaning. The audacity and intellectual play remind me of Dave Hickey, perhaps best known these days for Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. The essay gestures toward being “the missing link” to the entire work, while never losing its sense of joy.
JM:I asked Andrew Maxwell to write something about Ashenfolk on the occasion of the book launch, which we held in the private banquet room at a bar and restaurant in Los Angeles called The Prince. I wanted to hold an event that gestured to the avant-garde banquets held by the surrealists and other groups in the early 20th century (recounted in Roger Shattuck’s book The Banquet Years). I invited my friend Scoli Acosta to perform. Geneva Skeen mixed up some soundscapes. Sophia Le Fraga made some custom napkins, and we all ate delicious Korean food and drank beer and soju well into the evening. Luckily there were no fisticuffs. Andrew’s essay was so good that we printed up 100 copies and added them as a “golden ticket” to select copies of Ashenfolk. Since then I’ve been occasionally adding other little booklets to the box; various texts that are from the same body of work, but for some reason or other didn’t make it into the initial publication. I like that I can keep adding booklets and cards to the box, if and when needed.
WL: Being in an independent community seems vital to you. What are the challenges of running an independent literary arts space? We used to have Mellow Pages here in New York City. Now the closest thing we have is Wendy’s Subway. All these spaces struggle with the same issues: High mortality rate, very thin margins. How do you do it?
JM: Fundraising is really a problem. We’re not being paid. We’re not paying ourselves. The space is run all by volunteers except when we have music, when we hire sound engineers. But otherwise, everything is volunteer-run. It’s really hard. It’s not a money-maker. I have a pop-up bookshop, but it’s not viable. I can’t open it during the daytime and sell my weird poetry books to the 10 or 12 people in Los Angeles who might come in. I tend to be open during events and that’s fine.
Sometimes I give talks at CalArts and other MFA programs, even though I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t take that route. I just started doing it myself. But students are always asking, “Well, how do I …” Because for them, if you’re just twenty-two, the idea of starting a space in Los Angeles or New York is probably daunting and seems impossible, and it probably is.
WL: You aren’t wrong.
JM: I always tell them, “You don’t need that, really. You can start an online journal. You can do something online. There’s less overhead.” People are doing things on Instagram and other platforms. Or making their own platforms. You’ll get more readers by simply sharing your work socially rather than doing something in a particular physical space. Or you can start an itinerant reading series and hold the readings in a different place each time, or in unconventional places. Parks, abandoned zoos, parking lots.
WL: What is next for you? What are you working on?
JM: This new space, which we moved into in September 2021, is taking up a lot of time. There’s a lot of programming. Some of it is performance art and some of it is poetry, and there’s some film screenings and lectures and talks and dance. Andrew Maxwell, who I run the PRB with, most of his time now is spent with the bigger space, 2220 Arts+Archives, so I’m doing a lot of the PRB programming myself. But I’m working on a lot of things. I’ve started another reading series with Corina Copp and Sophia Le Fraga, Language Garden. The artist David Horvitz is generously hosting this series at his 7th Ave Garden in mid-city. I’ve been working on a book-length narrative poem that’s partly about my time at Google, but is also sort of a cover version of Christina Georgina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.
WL: You were generous enough to share work with us. What would you like to say about the following?
JM: These poems are from a chapbook of Ashenfolk-adjacent poems called A Knocks. They were all written during the same time as Ashenfolk, and could have been included in the box set, but I wanted to set them apart a little bit. They are collage poems, essentially, drawn from my notebooks, overheard bits of conversation, things I’ve read, things I’ve thought.
WL: Thank you for chatting today. This has been a great excuse to get to know you better!
JM: Thank you, Bill.
Six poems from A Knocks
The Allusive Detective My Doctor
to move the crowd for what purpose?
pre-trial: the courage to recognize utopia
& close yourself off to it
prom-judge buffed out literal germ
ailing valveless drank like Sprite
one notion of time looped back one second
product transgression stuck in some grotto
judged by enemies rather than results
p.s. I asked my lawyer to send you a complaint
& waiver of appearance, so you know the score
Sexuell Healing=Dictatorship of Art
there is no unfair entry for adults
so why no advantage to the architect?
pissed, you re-reign youth’s light zeal
as if adventure predicts imagination
Soul d’out/RIP Slyme/Dragon Hash
all false tech is based on that—what
you think your anti-pathos will save you?
footwork prepares youth for retaliatory strikes
but you cannot believe in such a Jackson
no one believes in such a Jackson
Adepts of the Horizontal Moon
unless you drink as I do, how can you hope
to understand the beauty of ABC monopoly?
clean up your swirling mouth or get out
silence your cell when we talk about communism
we are here, alive…cash is anatomic
“stalker” just a made-up word
I am developing into a kind of bookworm
excess elements slowly being purged
comes a letter: medically discharged
S.T. Comberbache, Constraint
Carter Prayer Stole in Trance
fragrance exquisite as your outs
like the rain synapses go in all directions
I thought it was beautiful at the time
Anthony sat in awe simply
aquarian on his period English
& all told suspiciously
took the concept further
the last nonce-phrase dropped
swearing never to get involved again
Death to all teenagers who fuck
People Are Roasting These Syd Hospo Giants
even the scissors are mad
Dieter was a redundant comfort
in the San Joaquin with its offensive howdyism
recording eating noises while reading
where I would start with “ethereal poisoning”
“ethics & fixing an appetite”
—those are just a few of the MANY spiritual
ergonomic preliminary issues
that separate me from the crowd
theologically, I find that curious
I Cloned Playtime and I Regret It
you can sense the Saxon expletive
you’re not supposed to understand it
what but image portends “it from it”
it’s not science but at least it begets data
the color yellow doesn’t matter much
more merry-go-round than saucer
an eloquent testimony of faith in pastness
& the retro feel of it?
sorry, it’s been claimed
my daughter’s super-cute mini-kitchen
William Lessard’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FENCE, and Southwest Review. His chapbook, instrument for distributed empathy monetization, was published by KERNPUNKT Press. He is Poetry & Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review. Read more of his work at: williamlessardwrites.net.
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