Varroa Destructor

Lee Rourke on his new book, Varroa Destructor.

Does this desire to cleanse language bear any relation to the varroa destructor, that external parasitic mite you’ve chosen for the title of your collection?

Kind of, yeah. I’m obsessed with the writings of Jacques Derrida and with the poet Francis Ponge, in particular a work of his called Soap, where he treats poetry as if it were an experiment in a laboratory. He wants to approach the event of the object through language and its cleansing. He’s obsessed with paring language down in this sense, with not being poetic, with not being ‘literary’. And this correlates with what Derrida says in his reading of Hegel in Glar.

As readers, he says, we’re like a drudging machine that plunges into the water and lifts up the silt and the shit and the mud. What falls away in language is that quantity we can’t really come to terms with; that’s what we’re left with. It ties in with Wallace Stevens and that unanswerable imagination that we’re always trying to reach. The varroa destructor bit for me is the glitch, the gremlin, the part where language destroys or expunges itself. We can’t really reach those moments of beautiful imagination because language is there eating away and destroying everything we’re trying to achieve. Also, I just love the title Varroa Destructor.

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