Short Conversations with Poets: Zoë Hitzig

Zoë Hitzig’s newest, called Not Us Now, is a collection of poems written against—into the teeth of—the particular kind of algorithmic society many of us are now ensnared in. A society in which our moves are tracked and goaded by corporate systems for guiding behavior and feeling. Which makes for a culture of trending and buzzing, immediacy, and profitable smoothness. Hitzig offers a vision for another, freer, wildly alive, and compelling use for the power of numbers. Which is to say, she uses the language of our society against it, to unmake and remake it in the imagination. Here, for instance, is the lyric power of “Greedy Algorithm”:

Is this or is this not
what you tasked me with.
To play our every hand.
To replace each arrival with
the nearest destination.
To keep you in what may
still be called breath.
Cliffs, ropes, pills, wings …
it’s not like you specified
any real alternatives.

The failure of imagination is not the algorithm’s fault but, as always, dear Brutus, in the imaginations that imagined it. So the poem finishes:

As the oak leaf assigns
a pattern to the cement,
you gave me this task.
I want to give it back.

And the language of our times, in these poems, gets skewered into a space neither clinical, entirely, nor deprived of sentiment. A potent mix: the almost dry and the yet still deeply feeling. Titles include “Technomasochism” and “Aftermarket.” Hitzig’s talents are jaw-dropping; such pure poetry sometimes that lodges itself just this side of the coherent, thus preserving both its integrity and profound pathos, like T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” or E. E. Cummings. An example of what I’m talking about, in Hitzig’s “Aftermarket”:

remember the month beyond
which inside of a somewhere
else I made my own wind?

The book is made of three sections, and woven into the gorgeous music of these poems are formulae—numbers, structures of math—and poems long and short, some of which assume Hitzig’s stunningly inventive forms. The title poem, a vivid and radiant fragmented dirge-narrative about time passing, is followed by pages called “tablets of unknown origin,” columns of repeating words that start to permute and shift like water or the mind of a computer digesting a problem. And its that aesthetic that seems to naturally generate the third section, and the dazzling long poem called “Exit Museum,” written in syllables like this:

wake – up – too – ea-rly – feel – sick

or

log – on – share – screen – see – faces
touch – up – app-ear – ance – hide – self

The poem makes a music of the mind gnawing at itself, discovering—and knowing too well—its own timbre of anxiety. And its futuristic—but really presentist—tones, the poetry becomes something unlike anything anyone else is writing today. And there is great wisdom in this book, even in its intent evisceration of sentiment. Which is to say its aim seems in part to make something that evinces feeling, but not by way of the tired conventions of the thinking, feeling “I.” It is a poetry that frees itself to speak as a human being living in the time of computers:

soundless and humble
             the deletion of self
             from the message

JESSE NATHAN: The book’s formal variation is immense. It reminds me that a poem can be anything, and that this art can always be made fresh again. I’m curious about how you think form. How do your poems take their forms, in your practice? Do you know the shape or the formal circumstances of a poem—the constraints and mechanics—in advance, specifically, or do those tend to overcome you more organically in the process, going from vague impulse to precise reality?

ZOË HITZIG: Form in poetry is very physical—for both the reader and the poet.

Form is how the poem introduces itself to the reader. It is a first impression. Before the reader reads a word of the poem, they get a sense of how it’s laid out, how many words per line, lines per stanza. On a preliminary read, the semantic meanings of words are subdued, and the rhythm and sound are foregrounded to create a kind of silhouette or shadow that precedes a fuller arrival.

I love how you phrased your question. It highlights how the anythingness of poetry—the endless reinvention that is possible in poetry—is really about form. Through form, language finds new ways to do things through and to the body. Poetry begins with the sculpting of silence through breath. The poem is not conveying information or narrative or even meaning necessarily; it’s mediating an embodied experience. So, new experiences, through poetry, have to begin with form.

Not Us Now is formally restless, I think, because it’s so preoccupied with the question of what it means to not have a body. It begins with the question of who or what we are becoming as we yield to a commandeering worldview that sees the body as an inconvenience, a friction to be optimized away. The book is fixated on what is not machine-legible—the aspects of human experience that defy codification, resist reduction to mere information, refuse to be absorbed into disembodied systems of surveillance and control.

When I write, formal rules emerge organically. But it’s always a chaotic scrimmage. So once I find some rules that work, I’m eager to inhabit them for a bit. After writing the first algorithm poem, for example, I learned that the algorithmic voice couldn’t handle the full silence of a stanza break—so all of the algorithm poems are a single stanza. Later this made sense. The algorithm can’t wait, isn’t patient enough, somehow, to pause for a stanza break. The algorithm is metronomic. A stanza break, with its stretch of silence, could introduce a fatal disruption, a glitch. So the voice needs to rush ahead, outrunning any threat of prolonged blankness. There’s an even more aggressive impatience in “Simplex Algorithm” and “Zero-Regret Algorithm,” which are composed entirely of monosyllabic words.

The long syllabic poem at the end of the book, “Exit Museum,” is, in many ways, the most grounded piece in the collection, though its silhouette looks the most foreign. It’s a simple poem: a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a day in the life in 2025, that’s been uploaded, compressed, and then corrupted in slightly different ways, leaving shards that feel both intimate and alien. Words split awkwardly—“ea-rly”—not how we’d naturally divide “early.” Each line is segmented into six “feet” of one or two syllables. Discovering this form—how it felt, in my body, to read “ea-rly”… I can’t explain it, it just moved me. So I ran with it. Now I see better what this form is doing. It forces a stumbling through the text, slowing down perception of this dense, hyperstimulated present in which we sling bits of information around faster than any of us can hope to process them.

The actual substance of the poem is quotidian—a party, a hangover, a subway ride, a Zoom call, a neighbor complaining about a leak, a cascade of texts from friends—but the way its shadow clashes with its material makes it feel like a preemptive elegy. At first glance, the poem looks like a computer terminal—monospaced, cold, punctuated by timestamps. But then, as the reader lurches through it, they encounter prosaic predicaments of the body… nausea, drugs, sex, the sting of nettles, invasive surgeries, elective surgeries. Through the poem’s halting form, I think a physical dread emerges: our present will one day be examined from a future that looks very different. What will that future look like, and what do we want that future to look like, and which complexities and messes ought we not optimize away?