Steven Seidenberg is the author of the new book Coda. His other books include Anon. He is also a visual artist, and he's based in San Francisco.
Q: What inspired you to write Coda?
A: I don’t understand my project as a writer as the product of inspiration as it’s generally construed. I write––and make art generally––from necessity, which is to say it constitutes my way of being in the world.
This is not to suggest that each new project doesn’t set its sights on different ends, but that those shifts from one poetic/philosophical investigation (as I conceive of all my work) to the next are a compendium of previous ventures, both in the continuing creation of my oeuvre and in the course of my life as a reader.
A writer is a reader moved to reciprocity––who longs to epitomize the discovery of one’s aesthetic possibilities as the disclosure of a shared, ecstatic phenomenology.
In the case of Coda, my influences and references are myriad, unified in the attempt to reassess the poetic and comedic prospects of philosophical investigation and poetic repose, in the telling of story of a story undermined.
Such influences range from Rabelais to Cervantes, Melville to Lispector, Bernhardt to Bachmann, Spinoza to Kant, and need not be recognized by the reader to settle into the broad history of literature and the language in which the text partakes; I hope the reciprocal impulse that initiates my process finds traction in those who follow its entertainments and confusions towards a similar compulsion to make work.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Suggesting the book is a Coda––the ostensibly concluding passage of an unknown disquisition, or a summary and recapitulation of related lyrical themes, both presented in my previous work Anon and in the works of those forebears mentioned in the previous answer––is both a joke and a pretext, a parody of its primary conceit and an admission of its impossible themes.
It was a name I considered from the initial stages of the work, and as it continued to develop over the years of its composition, I began to write and revise towards its implications, even before I knew it would be the final choice, or so I recognize now.
Q: The anthropologist and author Tarek Elhaik said of the book, “Seidenberg has created a genre-defying work that transfigures the pre-modern forms of fable, treatise, panegyric, and novel, into something entirely new, a tragic/comic mashup that extends beyond description.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think Tarek’s usual brilliance is at work here––he sees what I’m doing, and understands the ways in which his own confusion, surprise, laughter and unease in the engagement with Coda are precisely how the work succeeds, and the measure of its imperious effects.
It is indeed the case that I understand Coda as attempting something entirely new, both tragic and comic, lyric and parodic in its reassessment of philosophical and narrative forms.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: In any delineation of such expectations, I need to first acknowledge my awareness that the meaning of any work of art is overdetermined, extending far beyond authorial intent, and although I long for readers to have just the sort of response Tarek has––surrendering to the novelty of the new form Coda brings into the world, and the comic/tragic dissolution of certain shapes of philosophical resolve in the swirl of its ecstatic lyricism––I also recognize that part of the joy of seeing one’s work in the world is the myriad of unexpected ways in which that work is reflected back, the unpredictable variety of responses that reveal what I didn’t know I meant but now can’t deny.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m always working on multiple texts and projects, in many different forms. At the moment, beginning a new lyric/narrative work that continues to emergent pursuits of Coda and Anon; editing a collection of aphorism; and in the middle of an experiment in iterative narrative, propelled forward in propositional form.
I’m also a visual artist, and I’m working on a new book of photographs, due out in Fall 2026, from a project in Kanazawa, Japan. Additionally, I have a show of my work at the Lilley Museum in Reno, Nevada, opening in January 2026, and I’m working on that selection with the curators now.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My website, www.stevenseidenberg.com, has links and information to my other literary works and images of my work as a visual artist. You can also find reading dates as they develop, and free audio versions of many of my books (and Coda by the time of publication).
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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