Marjorie Perloff writes
of Karen Mac Cormack, "No one writing poetry in North America today can match
Karen Mac Cormack's exquisite poise, the integrity of her poetic line, her command
of verbal nuance, pun, and paragram." Astounding readers since her first collection
of poetry, Nothing by Mouth (Underwhich, 1984) -- which Judith Fitzgerald
called "quite simply, a masterpiece" -- Mac Cormack has continued to produce
challenging and remarkably invovative texts, each volume continuing, yet expanding
upon, her interests in the nuances of language, verbal disjunction, the mechanics
of the sentence, and the discourse of both formal and quotidian textuality.
Born in Zambia,
and living at various times in the United States, England, Mexico and Canada,
Mac Cormack is the author of eight collections of poetry including Straw
Cupid (Nightwood, 1987), Quill Driver (Nightwood, 1989), Quirks
and Quillets (Chax, 1991), Marine Snow (ECW, 1995) and The Tongue
Moves Talk (Chax/ West House, 1997). Mac Cormack's work has been anthologized
in such collections as Into the Nightlife (Nightwood, 1986) and The
Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry (Sun and Moon,
1994), as well as the important Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative
Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Reality Street, 1996) and Moving
Borders (Talisman House, 1998). In 1998, Mac Cormack published her most
recent collection, FIT TO PRINT, a collaboration with British poet Alan
Halsey that utilizes and interrogates the structure and language of contemporary
newspapers.
Karen Mac Cormack continues to live, write, and edit in Toronto.
Stephen Cain is completing his Ph.D in poetry, poetics, and publishing.
--
Stephen Cain: You have recently published the collaborative project, FIT TO PRINT, with British poet Alan Halsey. How did this collaboration come about, and how did it work?
Karen Mac Cormack: FIT
TO PRINT is my first finished, published collaboration. (Steve McCaffery
and I now have two incomplete collaborative works, both titled "From a Middle."
The first was abandoned more than ten years ago, the more recent one we began
in June 1999.) FIT TO PRINT was already underway when I decided to re-read
Alan Halsey's Reasonable Distance at the end of December 1995. I wrote
a poem as a response to it (though not in the double column format that dominates
FTP) and sent it to Alan, whose own response (poem) to the then-recently published
Marine Snow crossed the Atlantic at the same time (January of 1996).
I then sent him the existing FTP poems along with a description of the project
and he responded to those, at which point we realized a collaboration was in
effect. (I should mention that I first met Alan in England in 1989 when he came
to a reading of Steve's and mine in Oxford. Prior to that I'd written to him
[after reading some of his work in Writing magazine earlier in the 1980s]
so a correspondence was already in place.)
FTP's
format on the page intentionally refers to that most daily of reading materials
-- the newspaper. However, the poems themselves, while displaying a concern
with and for daily events (and these range from earthquakes to conditions of
weather), do not adopt a "transit" theory of meaning. Together we approached
the newspaper format as a way of fusing issues of mass culture with a non-traditional
writing practice. The newspaper column produces unexpected ruptures that the
reader learns to negotiate. Our intention was to apply this achieved negotiation
to a writing that departs from the "habit" of a conventional language.
Most
of FTP was written on either side of the Atlantic and the poems were sent sometimes
singly to and fro, sometimes in batches. (Alan was still living in Hay-on-Wye
in Wales and we were both amazed that on average our letters took three days
to arrive in either direction! Alan bought his first computer while FTP was
in the works [his initial FTP poems were done on a word processor].) Alan did
visit Steve and myself when we were living in California in 1997 and that was
the only time we discussed the work face to face and wrote some of it in the
same locale. I don't recall either one of us suggesting changes to one another's
poems and the collaborative process was an arm's length one.
FTP
was eventually considered "complete" by summer of 1997. The order is more or
less chronological. I'd hoped to tackle as many aspects of the newspaper as
possible (but the Sports section defeated me, so I was delighted when Alan dealt
with that so effectively!).
SC: How do you feel the process of FIT TO PRINT affected your own writing? Would you work with other poets in the future?
KMC: The collaboration's
effect on my own writing is more difficult to express. To have another writer
as intensely involved in the same project yet whose work responds to that project
differently (and because of that makes one see one's own in a new way) impelled
me to test limits more strenuously than ever. By limits I mean the parameters
of the project (not all the poems in FTP took the form of the newspaper's double
column), and my own "risk taking" insofar as what could work seemed to escalate.
That experience has contributed immensely to my subsequent writing.
As for working with
other poets (or visual artists or videographers or anyone else!), Steve and
I haven't abandoned our second attempt at "From a Middle," and I'd welcome the
opportunity to collaborate in other situations.
SC: Can you talk about your new project, At Issue, which is in some ways a continuation of your exploration of print media initiated in FIT TO PRINT?
KMC: I decided that I wanted
to continue working with a form of mass culture (At Issue began while
I was still working on FIT TO PRINT -- I write slowly and my projects
often overlap). In At Issue I examine the format and contents of the
magazine instead of those of the newspaper. The interruptions and syntactical
dis-arrangements in At Issue reflect the experience of reading that format
(within what is certainly a critical agenda on my part).
At Issue
is a series of poems utilizing the vocabulary and spelling found in magazines
of a diverse nature. (An interesting if frightening fact is that there are fewer
typos in Vogue than in most scholarly books published in North America!) To
counter Vogue I have also been writing through Self (a health/fitness
magazine also geared to female readership). As other alternatives I've considered
a science journal (perhaps Scientific American), a news magazine, and
perhaps a computer-oriented journal. Originally the project was to incorporate
four (monthly) magazines at a year's worth of issues, one issue per poem. Having
gone through nine issues of American and British Vogue (at time of writing
I'm working on the tenth) and four of Self I think that those two magazines
will provide the right amount of material and that At Issue will either
become a chapbook or a section in another book.
SC: You hold both British and Canadian citizenship, and have lived in several countries including Zambia and the United States. Do you feel that geography -- or movement between various locales -- has played any part in the development of your aesthetic, or how you view borders (either textual or political)?
KMC: Most of my life has
been lived in an "elsewhere." I have access to three citizenships, having been
born in what is now Zambia to British/Canadian parents, who lived there only
briefly before embarking on what for me became a trans-Atlantic upbringing (I
was less than a year old when they returned from Zambia to England). Subsequently,
from 1974 to 1982 I lived for varying periods in Mexico, Greece, Italy and the
U.S. and there again (in California) in 1989 and 1997. Perhaps more revealingly,
between 1989 and 1995 my books were published outside of Canada, even if poems
of mine continued to appear in Canadian journals.. Then Marine Snow was
published here and the collaboration with Alan Halsey FIT TO PRINT. (The
chapbook Multiplex with work by Ron Silliman and myself [not a collaboration]
appeared in October 1998 through Wild Honey Press in Ireland.)
I don't identify with geography in terms of a sense of 'place' being core to
my creativity. Certainly the fact I've lived in many different places (as well
as travelling extensively) has contributed to my perception of how and in what
ways and degrees 'difference' manifests culturally, politically, personally.
I don't think that travelling per se has played any part in how I view textual
borders.
SC: How does gender play out in your writing, and in your view of innovative writing in general? While the appearance of -- and your inclusion in -- such anthologies as Out of Everywhere and Moving Borders suggest that much of today's radical poetry is being produced by women you have also noted the disparity in the ratio of women to men appearing in anthologies both past and contemporary.
KMC: The anthologies Out
of Everywhere and Moving Borders (the first published by Reality
Street Editions in the U.K., the second by Talsiman in the U.S.) both 'prove'
that women are innovative practitioners. I'm keenly aware of the fact that in
many English-speaking countries male innovative writers still outnumber women
in terms of published work. Certainly there have been discrepancies in past
anthologies in both directions (indeed, in gatherings of conventional poetry
women might sometimes outnumber men!).
Gender is certainly
part of my writing (there are differences between women and men and in the way
they express themselves creatively or otherwise), and sometimes I deliberately
draw attention to this. I've also drawn attention to the fact of difference
between languages (for example, the existence of gendered nouns, even in Old
English).
For
me to discover innovative work (writing, visual art, film, video) is a pleasure
and if a woman is the artist that adds to my pleasure, but it's not a prerequisite
for enjoyment. Nor does the enjoyment diminish if the artist is a man.
SC: As well as expressing an interest in the nuances and potentialities of language your poetry also exhibits a keen awareness of the page, and how the placement of words alter and/or generate meaning. What are your thoughts on the relation between typography and poetry?
KMC: I've been fortunate to have worked mostly with publishers/designers who invited and encouraged my participation in the publishing process of each of my books. I've learned from each one of them. Straw Cupid was probably the book I was most actively involved in in terms of design. Maureen Cochrane and I went through every decision and worked through every layout problem together on what was my second publication. But when Chax Press decided to publish Quirks & Quillets (as a trade publication) I wanted Charles Alexander to "surprise" me. (Chax Press's handmade, limited editions are extraordinary.) The proofs were sent to me but beyond that I had no idea what the book would look like (though I encouraged Cynthia Miller to do an original drawing for the cover and I'm delighted with her response to that work. She's also responsible for the artwork on the cover of The Tongue Moves Talk). Texts are always affected by typography, but I'm not a designer, I'm a writer whose projects sometimes require new (for me) ways of thinking about typography and making a text work 'on the page.' (My methods for achieving this aren't necessarily the most expedient, as I learned after the fact about FIT TO PRINT!)
SC: How would you characterize the development of your writing from your first work, Nothing by Mouth, to the most recent?
KMC: My early work was an
exploration of altering the way we perceive the day-to-day, while allowing "language"
to be shown as an entity itself (rather than a transparent vastness through
which to "see" our world). This led to an investigation of "sentence effects,"
particularly the integration of poetic line with prose period. (This was not
to enact a conciliatory synthesis of the two genres, but to delineate their
radical sympathies and contradictions, i.e. not to write a prose poem, but to
reclaim an exploratory usefulness from the sentence, in order to extend the
poetic form to more challenging/rewarding modes of readership.) So what began
in Quill Driver (1989) as a propositional language, becomes in Marine
Snow (1995) a fusion of propositional language with stanzaic configurations
(in order to explore phenomenological and social implications in perception,
when the latter is mediated through the orthodox and the errant trajectories
of language, writing and space). Quirks & Quillets (1991) explores a
similar state of mediation but utilizes a different momentum by suppressing
the period in favour of a series of brief, intense phrasal continua. For the
most part, the writing deliberately avoids punctuation so that grammatical patterns
can shift in both their functions and effects. The intention was not to produce
an 'abstract' or non-referential text, but to reveal how meaning emerges in
the sites of its production.
The Tongue Moves Talk (1997) explores the perceptions, misconceptions
and current role of the social concept of the "carrier." The poems deliberately
repudiate any of the "reader comforts" of familiarity and habituality of normative
language. The Tongue Moves Talk establishes a deliberate resistance,
structured upon patterns that offer a rigorous positioning of their linguistic
materiality.
SC: How do the somewhat aphoristic statements in your poetry function? (Ex. "Beauty is a cultural decision." [MS]; "Sex is its own conclusion for those who haven't noticed." [TMT]; or, "Take away the page and leave the writing." [QD]). While they are often taken up as the most quotable, or the "actual" expressions of your personal thoughts regarding writing and/or philosophy are they always intended to be so? Are they perhaps stylistic "red herrings" for those readers who tend to gravitate toward any sense of stability in de-centered texts?
KMC: The "somewhat aphoristic
statements" that recur become part of the exploration of meaning. "Beauty is
a cultural decision." is followed by "All hollow." There's a shift in "Sex is
its own conclusion for those who haven't noticed." (A reader can infer that
certain people haven't noticed that sex is its own conclusion and/or that that
conclusion is only for people who haven't noticed . . .) "Take away the page
and leave the writing." might refer to a computer screen and/or it could also
imply that writing exists independently of paper. I'm particularly inclined
to alignments that disrupt/ destabilize conditioned (or conventional) combinatory
meanings and some of these are more (or less) aphoristic, for example, "Begin
with four quarters a round-edged coin." is less aphoristic than "Don't covet
the past it belongs where it is over." (both from Quill Driver).
"Meaning" and the
weather both change. Why an insistence on the static as a given, in what is
anything but a stable environment? Meaning is at once precise for the moment
and shifting over time. Consider slang, for example. "Gay" meant something very
different for the Victorians than it does for us: a "gay" woman was a prostitute.
"Queer" as in 'odd' was in relatively recent usage, if not in North America
then in other English-speaking countries. The titles of two of my books both
came from slang, Quill Driver means 'writer' (at least eigteenth century,
possibly older), and Quirks & Quillets ('tricks and devices') was in
use in the sixteenth century). "Bread," as in "out of bread" formerly meant
out of work, slightly different from its 1960s meaning (the roots are over two
hundred years old). "Pig" referred to a police officer as early as 1811, but
who's to guess that "tickle text" refers to a parson?
SC: Gertrude Stein appears to be a major influence on your writing, but what other figures, either Modern or Contemporary do you view as influential or inspiring? What about LANGUAGE writing? In the "Toronto Since Then" issue of Open Letter (8.8, 1994), Victor Coleman characterized you (and Steve McCaffery) as standing "a lonely watch" over the "paucity of language-centered poetry in Toronto." Is this a fair assessment: do you consider yourself a LANGUAGE poet, does the aesthetic itself require a geographic community (whether that be Vancouver or Buffalo) to be considered a viable force in the literary community (national or international), and has Toronto changed "since then"?
KMC: As to the question
regarding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and poetry, and my position therein: upper case/equal
sign "L" writing encouraged me to recognize and confront my own habits and formulae
-- to move on and grow, and I regarded "L" writing as more contemporarily vital
than anything else I'd encountered when I came to it in 1982. (As an aside,
I read Bataille's Death and Sensuality two years before reading any "L" writing.)
But it was through L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing that I went on to read the work of
such modernist poets as Mina Loy and William Empson. Though they are usually
overshadowed by the more luminous Joyce, Stein (and my 'favourite' Djuna Barnes,
whose Nightwood I read early, when I was sixteen]) their texts for me
are of considerable importance. Indeed, I would say that the writing of all
of the above-mentioned has influenced my own, though not necessarily in an immediately
apparent way. I would also add to the list the French writer Francis Ponge and
the Austrian Robert Musil.
I don't think a
writer's "position" should require a sharing of 'confidences,' explication of
'codes,' divulging of 'experiments' made-on-the-way-to completed works; in short
an "explanation," which may or may not benefit those interested. The act of
writing is simultaneously intensely personal and historically collective (whether
or not the writer is aware of prior works of shared or similar concerns and
explorations). This act is separated from the reading of text-on-page through
time, and the further removed one is (in time) the more general the context.
(Hence our perception of those 'decades,' 'eras,' and 'movements' of our own
century [and the many preceding] culminates in such blanket terms as "modernism,"
"neo-classicism," and "romanticism.") Thus L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing became LANGUAGE
writing becomes language writing . . . I'm not an upper case/equal sign practitioner
but the effect on my work is evident.
Certainly Toronto's poetry condition (yes, that's deliberate) has changed since
Victor Coleman's 1994 "Toronto Since Then," and geographic communities usually
prove to be unstable. Whether or not any version of language writing would ever
be considered a "viable force" in any literary context isn't the point as far
as I'm concerned. If texts survive because readers continue to find them rewarding
in new contexts then that's viable.
SC: You have objected to the term "experimental" in discussing the writing of, for example, Stein, preferring the term "innovative." What is the problem with "experimental," how does "innovative" differ, and where do terms such as "avant-garde" or even "normative writing" fit in your understanding?
KMC: Even today we live with the troubling term "avant-garde,"a word so familiarthat it's used without giving the meaning much thought. Most of the writers I know want no part of the "garde" even in some distant future, so being slotted into the "avant-garde" makes for an uncomfortable mis/fit. Others accept this term as a badge or indicator of their work being outside of the norm. Some prefer (and embrace) the soubriquet "experimental," if anything even more misleading, or as the late B.S. Johnson so aptly put it:
I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful: that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems. Where I depart from convention, it is because the convention has failed, is inadequate for what I have to say. The relevant questions are surely whether each device works or not, whether it achieves what it set out to achieve, and how less good were the alternatives.
Elsewhere, John Cage has written:
The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is not known.
If a writer, or any other
artist for that matter, applies the term "experimental" to an unknown result
in a public context then how can one suspend evaluation? If the various and
numerous acts the outcome of which "is not known," were to be combined with
an absence-of-evaluation then the recurring result would frequently be one of
mediocrity (at best) Without experimentation no 'new' results would be forthcoming,
but I concur with Johnson that one's unsuccessful experiments should remain
privately hidden away.
So we arrive at "formally innovative" or even "formally investigative" as alternatives
to the outmoded or inappropriate terms still applied to writing practices regarded
as variously "new" today. At this point "innovative" seems just as much a label
of convenience as any other but it signals a more positive (for me) sense of
departure from "normative writing."