from "Automatic
Manifesto #1"
Sound like a man on
the verge of blogging? Nick Piombino DID make his way to the blog,
starting fait accompli (http://nickpiombino.blogspot.com/) on February
11, 2003. The September 11 tragedies of 2001 may have pushed
Piombino finally toward blogging, at least toward the communities
that have sprung up around blogging.
Poet and web artist
Bill Marsh has said of fait accompli that "...at heart, in
the middle, underneath (the space of remediation is difficult to
manage), the steady return to moments of writing through
now written into the domain of Fait Accompli. Offered up as
a done deal, the site is nonetheless always recreating itself,
dealing again, perhaps just in time to figure things out...."
Bill's referring here to Piombino's habit of offering up older
poems -- work dating back through the 60s -- on the blog. Nick is
adverse to working in a chronological vein -- the objects in
Theoretical Objects span the 70s and 90s, and appear in an
order best suited for their style and content, as opposed to a
strict chronology. This, for me, is one of the most fascinating
aspects of the blog as well -- the older poems somehow highlight
current strands of thought, as if progress itself were an
illusion. As such, its an anti-hierachical approach: or, more
precisely, a "poly-hierarchical" approach, in that Nick is
obviously viewing the work not as the "master narrative" that
peers from every object modernism has left us, but as
transparencies, past ideas lying over present thoughts, tracing
kinship patterns, sure, but also allowing new shapes to emerge.
It's a very zenist approach to composition, and also an approach
that lies at the heart of the best of contemporary
work.
I was recently
granted the opportunity to correspond via email and telephone with
Nick about fait accompli and Theoretical
Objects:
LL: SMITHSON QUOTED ON FAIT ACCOMPLI: "A great artist
can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be
as solid as any thing or place, but the society continues to cheat
the artist out of his 'art of looking' by only valuing 'art
objects.' The existence of the artist in time is worth as much as
the finished product. Any critic who devalues the time of
the artist is the enemy of art and the artist. The stronger and
clearer the artist's view of time the more he will resent
any slander on this domain. By desecrating this domain, certain
critics defraud the work and mind of the artist. Artists with a
weak view of time are easily deceived by this victimizing kind of
criticism, and are seduced into some trivial history. An artist is
enslaved by time only if the time is controlled by someone or
something other than himself. The deeper the artist sinks into the
time stream the more it becomes oblivion; because of this,
he must remain close to the temporal surfaces. Many would like to
forget time altogether, because it conceals the "death principle"
(every authentic artist knows this). Floating in this temporal
river are the remnants of art history, yet the "present" cannot
support the cultures of Europe, or even the archaic or primitive
civilizations; it must instead explore the pre-and post-historic
mind; it must go into the places where remote futures meet remote
pasts."
Robert Smithson, "A
Sedimentation of The Mind: Earth Projects",
1968.
The web is often
characterized as ephemeral, and work on the web is at times said
to lack an object -- though, of course, this isn't entirely true:
programmers speak of objects as collections of properties (traits)
and methods (gestures, acts). One "embeds"(a word now stained by
the current political regime) a flash object or java applet in an
HTML page; indeed, the web teems with objects that lack a certain
physicality; it's presence, but a presence we are as yet unused
to.
Language seems to
share this "object-less physicality" with the web, and can be seen
as the REAL prototype for the web. The Smithson quote above fairly
screams Lacan, who mapped out the relation between the gaze and
desire. But what is being gazed at on the web? Where is the object
of desire in your poems, Nick?
NP: I’ve found Robert Smithson far more inspiring to
read than Jacques Lacan, who has always struck me as the ultimate
pretentious intellectual. Lacan’s writing is composed mainly of
terminology, which possibly was outdated by the time his writing
appeared in English, maybe by the time it appeared in French, I
don’t know, and terminology is a trap, at best, though I indulge
in it like any other writer, and any other psychoanalyst. Ever
since Freud published his work, many other psychoanalytic
theorists have tried to create new architectures while sustaining
the old foundation. The best of these were D.W. Winnicott’s and
Heinz Kohut’s. As a poet and as a psychoanalyst I’ve found very
little of value in Lacan. But maybe you just had to be there to
"get the joke." I have a hunch that Lacan, who obviously loved
classical psychoanalysis, and seeing that it was already pretty
much outdated by the time he arrived on the scene, made a heroic
attempt to bring Freud into the present. All these efforts are
doomed to fail and also unnecessary. Freud’s ideas, as far as they
were successful, and they were very successful, are already
completely absorbed into the culture. Lacan may have done more
harm than good to psychoanalysis by making it appear more arcane
than it actually is in practice, if not in its theoretical
manifestations. Much better to read Freud and forget Lacan, in my
opinion. Maybe best to start with The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, though, not The Interpretation of
Dreams.
If "object of
desire"means what am I after in my writing, what do I want from
it, this has changed and evolved over the 40 years I have been
writing. Early on I was strongly influenced by two cultural
movements: psychoanalysis and abstract expressionism. Not long
after, in the middle to late 60’s, when I read the work of Ted
Berrigan, Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer and Jackson Mac Low I
found a literary home in the ideas of conceptual art, and this
very much included Smithson. I met Smithson only once, we had
lunch at Max’s Kansas City, where I was introduced to him by Wayne
Timm, an artist I knew who was tending bar there at the time.
Smithson expressed his interest in poetry, chided his friend who
had joined us who had not been writing any poetry lately. I never
saw Smithson again because soon after he was killed in a plane
crash in the process of photographing one of his Earthworks. I
took a workshop with Ted Berrigan in 1967 who became a friend and
helped me to get some early work published. I took a workshop in
1972 with Bernadette Mayer, many of whose ideas about writing more
or less took permanent root in me from that time on, and whose
work and teaching was a great inspiration. I met Jackson Mac Low
in 1967 at an anti-war demonstration and was introduced to him by
Allen Ginsberg who I had met in the early 60’s. I took a class
with William Burroughs at the City College of New York in 1965,
whose work and ideas were also an early influence and
inspiration.
Bernadette Mayer at
that time worked exclusively by keeping journals. This has been my
practice ever since working with her and my journals are the heart
of fait accompli. Although I knew Jackson’s work before
this and found his methods very inspiring, I did not adapt them
for my own. Mayer’s ideas about journal writing allowed me to be
both personal and conceptual in my writing, both introspective and
theoretical. Many, if not most, contemporary innovative poetic
forms, mostly inspired by Ted Berrigan and John Ashbery, call for
conversationally-oriented charm, wit and humor, which I enjoy
immensely, but are not central concerns in my own
work.
One of the advantages
of journal writing over conventional poetic practice is the
opportunity to think through experiences concerning other people,
an interest obviously deepened by the practice of psychoanalysis.
After working with people every day for so many years my work
began to be consciously based on an assumption that the reader
ought to be a co-participant in the creation of the poem. I see my
writing practice as mainly concerned with interaction, that is
producing interaction as opposed to discussing interaction or
assuming interaction or even manifesting interaction: but not
necessarily only conscious interaction or even rational
interaction. Some of the most productive moments between people
are not necessarily clear or even articulated, brought to the
surface or revealed; nevertheless, such experiences may be
important, crucial or even decisive. This can lead, sometimes, to
people not getting proper credit when they deserve it. When I
wrote "Explications," I felt exhilarated and it was one of the
most freeing experiences of my writing life because it theorized
the existence of the poem in the mind of the reader, and not
anywhere else.
After the attacks of
9/11, like so many others, I felt a desperate need to connect with
a literary community. Charles Bernstein’s SUNY/Buffalo poetics
listserv was at hand and I began to exchange ideas with other
poets almost every day. This was very productive and helped me to
move beyond the resulting fear and chaos. It led to a dialogue
with Barrett Watten which was later published by Barrett on a
website and in Chain.
When early this year
Ron Silliman and Gary Sullivan encouraged me to start a blog I
didn’t yet realize that blogging may become the most interactive
literary form that has ever existed. It doesn’t have to be so in a
plodding, literal way, like composing "collaborations," which can
be interesting and worthwhile, but blogging can also be
collaborative in a more spontaneous and subliminal way, for
example through html linking. What I want from literary practice
is for poets to have a more productive exchange, to give and get
more credit and enjoy doing the work and sharing the process much,
much more than ever before.
The interest on the
part of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets in conceptualizing the
poetic process as part of their poetic practice has always
impressed and energized me. Also the concern of such practitioners
as Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Douglas Messerli, Leslie
Scalapino, Carla Harryman, Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten to
encourage recognition for the work of so many poets has been
important and inspiring.
What I want from my
experience of writing is to discover what I want from life and
writing and what I want to have with and from others. Not to
proclaim it: to discover it. It goes without saying that
approaching art this way means keeping this an open question. This
is difficult living in a culture like ours, but not impossible,
with more than a little help from my
friends.
I just realized that
what you are getting at about objects also has to do with the idea
of the materiality of the "book" and how that connects with
materialism. I have always been troubled by the materialistic
aspect of culture and the whole book culture, and the culture of
competition and the frequently artificial creation of reputations
is part of all of this. This is particularly a problem with males.
Males are fiercely competitive and poets are not exempt from the
desire to be "top dog." Many, if not all, male poets, and more
than a few female poets, indulge in putting down other poets, and
comparing poets. Much energy is wasted in trying to reveal the
best and the best of the best. This can be seen in the desire to
be the one who has the most books in print, be the one most
frequently mentioned, be asked most frequently to give readings,
be most frequently anthologized, etc. This is equated with success
in our culture and is sadly the basis of self-esteem. It is very
hard to resist this because there are so few rewards of any kind
for doing innovative writing. This might also partly explain the
occasional suicidal tendency in older poets when their fame gives
way to the successes of younger poets. To get beyond this means to
get beyond hierarchical thinking. I think this is at the heart of
what motivates many of my poetic theories. Maybe part of the idea
of discovering who is best is to try to undermine the way
reputations are falsely created. But this will never work. What
has to happen for all this to change is for writers to be
positioned to acknowledge the importance of other people in their
lives, all the other people, not just the kingpin people, and not
just other artists and poets, alive or dead, known or little
known; I am interested in this sort of acknowledgement being an
important aspect of the process of my writing. Every aspect of
living is collaborative; therefore, every aspect of thinking and
saying is collaborative and it not enough just to say this and
acknowledge it. We must go further.
LL: I’ve always seen existence as a weave of
dependencies -- and dependency should here be stripped of its
negative stain, a stain that has come to adhere to it in the
United States, where anything that might deface or diffuse the
individual is seen as harmful and "the enemy" (this is the heart
--despite the obvious tragedy -- of the current bewilderment and
political bullying heading the foreign policy decisions of the
United States: how could someone do that, we wonder, safely
intstalled in the sovereignty of our cars --how could one succumb
to such a mentality?) . It’s cliché, but really, telling someone
that "It’s all connected" is both the most reassuring and true
thing one can impart.
You mention in this
context the idea of interactivity. I would ask, then, this (which
is all too often, on the environment of listservs, far too heated
a debate): is there bad faith in embracing the computer as a means
of literary production, especially in the case of the
"programmer-poet"? I know one thing
has has often disappointed me in writing about and being an
audience for what is touted on the web as "digital poetry" or
hypermedia is that it’s far too often too self-referential, and
therefore missing the whole idea of the "network" entirely. Why
aren’t more of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets experimenting with
hypermedia and computer forms other than the blog? I feel often
that the basic skeleton of what these poets could be said to be
seeking in their individual works
collectively is the very meat of
hypermedia, and that many of these poets would, if they were so
inclined, make incredible and innovative net.artists. Will Ron
Silliman ever write code? And what, from your perspective, both as
a blog artist and a poet and a human being, is the relation of
code to poetry? To living?
NP: Honestly, Lewis, I don't
have a clue about why L=A=N=G=U-A=G-E poets don't embrace
hypermedia. Your guess would be much better than mine. I only have
a very passing interest in it myself. The L=A poets love Jackson
Mac Low's work but they rarely use such randomizing techniques
themselves. Jackson once asked me why I seemed to admire his work
so much but don't use any of these techniques myself. I can only
guess it is generational thing. I still do all my writing by hand,
for example.
My guess would be
that L=A poets, despite their interest in the objective qualities
of language, greatly value opinions, as most of them were and are
intensely political. Since I am not greatly interested in machine
made poetry myself, I haven't looked into this area very much. My
interests in blogging have nothing at all to do with such
things.
LL: But it seems to me that that generation's political
thrust jibes quite well with the political thrust of hypermedia
and net art...
It's interesting what
you say about Mac Low -- but much of what I read in your "Confessions of a Blog Artist" also point in the
direction of hypermedia, or at least are ideas important to me as
one working in hypermedia...and it seems that the same things have
attracted us to this still-very-young
medium...
Machine-generated
poetry is of course a variant of hypermedia, but it's one small
part. You write in "Confessions of a Blog Artist" that interactivity
and collaborative effort were what drew you to the blog medium --
and how this helps subvert the traditional hierarchy of cultural
workers:
"With most bloggers,
from one degree to another, you have the sense of being
potentially invited over (to their blog, of course) for a chat
which is very unlike the one-way street of culture industry
products. I think this could create much more space for a
collaborative and interactive literary community. Contentiousness
may seem so frank and honest, but since most writers feel the need
to be interested in advancing their own work and names, how can
you believe their critical opinions which naturally tend to be
advantageous towards themselves? Blogging offers an alternative
where each person is their own literary producer and operates from
a perspective of equality to neighboring blogs or the universe of
blogs."
I feel this also ties
in with idea of dependency...after 9/11, you wrote that you needed
a deeper sense of community, of consensus...however, doesn't too
much consensus lead to a monological paradigm? (Please don't
misunderstand me -- I'm not being contentious here, just trying to
fit net art and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets into a context
--)
NP: Lionel Trilling wrote: "Our culture peculiarly
honours the act of blaming, which it takes as a sign of virtue and
intellect." In my experience of poets' social clustering, there
are invariably a few who take it on themselves to dismiss certain
other poets as not worthy of recognition or admiration. And there
are others, who struggle to bring recognition to as many poets
that they like as possible. There is one poet who I know who is
nearly always intentionally nasty to any new poet acquaintance of
mine who he would see me talking to at a reading or event. It took
me literally years to figure out that this was his way of keeping
control of the social grouping. If all the poets in the circle
were friends or fans of his, he could try to keep absolute control
of the opinions of the group. He has been doing this for over 25
years. Another technique of his was to come to every reading of
mine and praise my work highly to my face. However, he has never
once in a quarter of a century mentioned my name in print or in
any interview, or quoted my work, or complimented my work at all
in any way that could be documented, although he has had countless
opportunities. Famously, Andre Breton would dismiss certain poets
from the surrealist circle if he felt they were no longer
deserving of participation, according to his whims. The other day
I had a warm conversation with a poet who professed much love for
me, and my work, but he immediately dismissed any attempt on my
part to mention blogging or bloggers. After awhile, when people
have no questions at all to ask me about what I am doing, or my
work, they can tell me how much they love me or my work all they
want, I know they are not being honest. They just want to get
along and count on my "vote" and I guess that is fine, sort of.
When a person is really interested in someone, they never lose
their curiosity about what they are doing. They want to know more
and more details. The rest is politics as
usual.
The way poets evolve
a reputation is a complex thing, but in many ways it has a great
kinship with advertising and politics. Advertisers compete for
claims of quality, so do groups of poets, so do magazines,
critics, academic departments, and others who set themselves up or
are set up as experts. Blogging, as it has evolved in the circle
of bloggers I am a part of, does not work this way. It is more
like the "wild west." Bloggers stake their "claims" in the mostly
free zone of weblogging, just as miners went out west and filed
for a claim. Response comes or it doesn't. Who is to say what is
"good and bad" in poetry or prose? Time and again, historically,
writers were acclaimed during their lives but were forgotten
immediately after their deaths. The reason? Often their fame
depended more on their editing and anthologizing and politicking
and less on any actual interest in their writing. There is no
"pure" way to become known as a poet. You just have to take your
chances and do the best you can.
Of course I am
pleased when I have some work or a book published or when someone,
like you Lewis, interviews me, or someone like Clayton Couch asks
to feature me on a website. I am grateful, proud and honored. In
reality, however, such things happen as a result of a kind of
literary and/or social mutual attraction and that is very
gratifying to all parties. But others will feel overlooked and
will feel that time and space is being wasted on my work. This is
expectable and very human. Is this a move to create consensus? I
don't think so. It is a move to make some work more known that
somebody likes, for whatever reason. It is a kind of advertising
and that's what people have to do in our culture to draw attention
to something or someone, and has no intrinsic legitimacy over any
other publicizing that anyone else is doing. But when this is
done, of course, others feel excluded and ask "Why not me? My work
is far more interesting. Or, why not so and so. She deserves more
attention than she is getting." There is something essentially
unfair about the way opportunities emerge that will never be
totally eradicated. But at least with blogging it has little or
nothing to do with money, fame, or social advantage. Each blogger
stands on their own. I like the dailiness of blogging, and this
tends to downplay the portentous "arrival" of a book or an issue
of a magazine. 99.999% of what is published is forgotten in the
long run no matter what anybody does, consensus or no consensus,
critics or no critics. That's just the way it is. Only time
determines intrinsic quality in writing and art and nothing
else.
LL: You write time and time
again that what you value in blogging is its dailiness, its
diaristic qualities, and there’s much in your book Theoretical
Objects that reads like a diary. At one point in the book you
assert that poetry and psychoanalysis are competing paradigms; as
one who has seen analysts in the past, I know that one of the
first steps one takes in therapy is the composing of a journal.
What do you see as the major differences between writing "poetry"
and writing a blog or a book of "theoretical objects"?
Another issue you
touch on is the perceived ephermeral quality of writing on the
web. You describe the arrival of a book or magazine as
"portentous," and mention how blogging downplays this. And yet
there are signs that many literary and art web sites succumb
regularly to "archive fever" -- Rhizome’s artBase is a famous
example of this as applied to net.art. How do you view archiving?
Is an archive vulnerable to political
motivation?
NP: When I refer to blogging's dailiness I am not
thinking only of its diaristic qualities. Ordinary diaries are
private. If a psychoanalyst were to recommend journaling (by the
way, this is far from a standard recommendation) it would probably
be for the patient to have the opportunity to practice free
association. Everyday conversation is anything but free
associative, though without any aspect of free association
conversations are awfully unimaginative and tedious. When people
completely free associate in everyday life it is received in one
of two ways: as humor or as craziness. I have this hunch that the
success of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy arose with the
complete success of competition as a way of life, along with the
demise of religion among intellectuals. Today it is most uncool,
particularly for a male, to talk freely under any circumstances.
Expressiveness would involve openness about feelings and this is
all but impossible under severely competitive conditions. This is
why talking privately with nearly any male (for another male) is
usually so boring. "Everything is fine, just fine." Then there is
talking about the sports you both know, the news you both know,
with all the opinions you both know, the gossip you both know, the
books you both know, the movies and tv shows with all opinions
about them you both already knnow, the shop talk you both know,
"Yeah I feel great, terrific, things are going great, I just got a
raise (a new book, article, award, won a tournament, got a part in
a play, etc., etc.)." Thus the complete success of psychotherapy.
Anonymous sharing of feelings with a trusted professional so you
can get back in there are say "Great, fine, terrific" with all
your "close" friends.
Weblogging is not
like writing a diary. It is more about trying to be open with
others in a more honest and personal way. I always smile to myself
when people say to me so proudly: "Oh, I would NEVER put my diary
online." One of the most popular blogs is that of Jim Behrle and I
think this is because he is attempting to be open about his
personal dilemmas. His blog reminds me sometimes of the comedian
Richard Lewis. They are able to be very funny by telling how they
really feel, while giving the impression that they themselves
think what they are experiencing is very
funny.
My blog fait
accompli is unusual because I've kept a literary journal for a
long time and have previously published very little of it. It is a
very therapeutic experience for me because every day it confirms a
maxim I live by: "Take a backward look and transform it into a
forward step." I created this koan for myself in an attempt to rid
myself of regrets and this effort, so far, knock on wood, has been
quite successful. I have always been fascinated by time and doing
fait accompli has taught me that the past is a fiction in
the sense that once events are past, we have to try to understand
that when we replay them in our minds the word "happen" no longer
applies. While things in the past have occurred, when we replay
them in our minds we have a sense of ongoingness. This is an
illusion. Even though the results live on, and sometimes the
feelings, since we cannot change these events the only action we
can take is understanding. This is the whole point behind Freud's
central insight: neurotics suffer from
reminiscences.
What I mean by the
dailiness of blogging is a dailiness of connecting with other
writers. On blogs poetic work is seen for what it truly is:
provisional. I had always loved the finality of books. I am quite
sure I loved books so much because my father was such a closed and
secretive man. Authors were all the wise fathers and mothers who
would share their inner feelings, thoughts and memories with me,
something my father was unable to do. But I had to imagine all the
interactions with them in my own mind based on the dialogues, in
the case of the novel, and the reactions of other writers to their
ideas in the case of non-fiction. I was after the wise words my
father did not offer me. I went to psychoanalysis for a long time
for the same reason. Eventually I learned that, as the poet James
Schuyler put it: "The past is past/ I salute that various field."
But I don't only salute it. The trick I learned was to convert
feelings about the past into knowledge I can apply to the present
and the future.
I have pretty much
lost interest in a certain idea of writing -- whether poetry or
fiction -- that presents itself as a permanent object to be reread
-- like a piece of sculpture or a painting in a museum. I like the
idea of writing that presents itself as an image of thought and
interaction in the here and now -- but not in a literal way -- in
a way that includes the unconscious and precognitive dimensions.
Douglas Messerli gave me the phrase "theoretical objects" to
describe the writing I had been doing in my journals. I loved it
because I was trying to theorize about what I could do with
writing that would more closely meet my needs. The poet Elizabeth
Fodaski started a magazine called Torque and was the first
editor to specifically ask me for pieces like this for her
magazine. I edited "Theoretical Objects" (Green Integer, 1999)
with the help of Toni Simon. She loved my "automatic manifestoes"
which where free associative theoretical objects. I had complained
to her countless times about many aspects of being a poet. Once
she said: "So why don't you write about that?" In putting together
"Theoretical Objects" I went to my journal entries and published
writings, and chose mostly works which explored such issues having
to do with the process of writing and the life of the writer. Many
of these pieces were diary-like. I began to realize that most
contemporary poetry, probably all modern writing, was an excuse to
express one's feelings, under cover of serious literary intent.
Thus an opportunity for expressing and communicating one's
feelings and experiences could now be subsumed under the
universally acceptable and obsessive competitive drive for
achievement and personal power and
recognition.
As for the ephemeral
aspects of weblogging, blogs are no more ephemeral than any other
kind of writing. Interaction is considered ephemeral while
speeches and monologues are considered permanent. This is because
interaction involves another person and how can you copyright
this? Under cover of art "movements" the collaborative nature of
all art can be manifested. But the typical artist uses a
"movement" mostly to launch their own work and then goes on their
own way to seek "fame and fortune,"make a name for themselves. It
is a sad fact of contemporary life that self-esteem must be based
on the achievement of personal recognition and making a "name" for
oneself. There is little choice about this. This is the way the
human mind functions. But that doesn't mean this is desirable or
even healthy. To opt out of this means mostly to be left out and
left alone.
As for websites,
there is a fundamental difference between weblogs and websites.
Websites want to restore the illusion of "permanence" and so are
presentable as unchangeable and unchanging.
The solitary nature
of the drive for personal achievement leads to a "poetics of
disappointment" and intense personal depression for many, if not
most, writers. This leads, in turn, to a drive towards grandiosity
and personal power and "leadership" for some, which contributes to
a manic-depressive cycle.
The scientific
paradigm of a new discovery outdating all other discoveries when
applied to the arts leads to a cul-de-sac. The arts need a
different concept of time which is cyclical. Contemporary art and
writing seek the timeless by means of "originality." "Originality"
is a way of restoring a false, useless and manipulative concept of
personal power and dominance. This is how so-called "critics" make
a name for themselves and a living, by choosing themselves as
experts who will determine what are the original minds. Poetry is
not "news that stays news." Poetry is an anachronism because it is
based on a false concept of original ideas. Creativity is
collaborative in its essence. All art and poetry is an ensemble.
Blogging is a form of writing that may have some possibility of
temporarily transcending some of these false paradigms. By
publishing one's work on a daily or nearly daily basis, poetry can
reveal more of its process oriented and interactive components.
Just as the internet brought more speed and simultaneity into the
scientific community, blogging is capable of bringing many more
communicative and social aspects into the writing community.
However, as in all attempts to bring community into artistic life,
it will be countered by the drive for commercial applications and
the drive for individual dominance.
As for the point
about archives, I understand that accumulating history is viewed
as "conservative." But archives also preserve a record of the
interactive components of weblogging.
LL: You also mention, in both personal conversation and
various texts, how you view time in relation to a poet's
development. You admit that Theoretical Objects is not
chronological; but how do you feel about the blog format's use of
datestamps? Would you get rid of datestamps on your blog
altogether? And how does this view of time relate to your love of
diaristic writing?
NB:
I like the time and date stamps on blogger. For one
thing, with these one can sort of guess when someone’s blogged
writing might be a response to something someone wrote earlier,
whether intentional or not.
For a long time when
doing fait accompli I would sometimes try to "echo" the
date -- i.e., I might place something from September long ago on a
date in September in the present. Early on I started to notice
lots of synchronicities between what I was thinking and feeling at
the time of the entry and what I was experiencing at the moment of
putting it on my blog. Now, when I read back I see quite a lot of
intentional and unintentional correspondences. One of the things I
mean by time travel is to notice when events in the present
correspond to events in the past. I might also try to find entries
in my diaries that correspond to certain experiences I am going
through now, or put entries next to each other that are ten or
more years apart that have correspondences. When I go back and
read fait accompli I see that I am frequently working on
similar literary issues over long spans of time. Well over ten
years ago I realized that I was writing quite a lot about issues
having to do with time, memory, and sort of "planted" references
to time travel, some of them bordering on a kind of fiction
writing. I loved when I came across these when putting entries on
fait accompli.
Sometimes I like to
go back into my archives and other bloggers’ archives to look at
certain issues that were being discussed. It is particularly
interesting to read some of the blog entries during the war in
Iraq. That moment in time had a big effect on bloggers, many of
whom were very active in anti-war demonstrations.
When I write about
the "portentousness" of a book or a magazine, I am specifically
thinking of the hopes and expectations that go into the
publication of a book. I think poets think of books like Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass or collections of Emily Dickenson, Rilke’s
Duino Elegies, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal etc.,
even Olson’s "Maximus" poems and so on, that emerged in a
different era of poetry publication. These books in turn echoed
countless earlier milestones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, etc.
Nada Gordon’s recent echoes of Whitman, for me, bring home the
necessarily ambivalent feelings of a writer in the post-modern era
in regard to the classics. There is Adorno’s oft-repeated comment
about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. He was
thinking, of course, of the classics. But he was also thinking of
what might happen to people emotionally, people like Celan, who
directly experienced the results of these events and who dwelt too
much inside their emotions the way poets used to and thought too
much about these things. There is an important relationship
between emotional survival and forgetting. We don’t desire
cultural "forgetting"and this brings us into the role of the poet
in contemporary life. This role has everything to do with history
and how it is to be interpreted in contemporary life.
Book culture has a
very different relationship to time than blog culture. I am
fascinated by the fact that I feel impelled to blog every day,
much the way a diarist might feel impelled to write something in
their diary every day. I have a group of readers and this group
changes over time, of course. I was saying to you earlier on the
telephone today that when I was a child I wanted to be a pianist.
Since my parents traveled they insisted on my taking up the
accordion, but this may have had to do also with my father’s
Italian background. I never liked the instrument because I was
interested in playing Chopin. Now when I blog from my notebooks I
like to imagine that I am playing a musical instrument from my
notes. As I write in response to you now, I am writing from notes
but also ignoring them, in a kind of improvisational way, but then
I am going back to them and consulting them. I like the way
diaries and blogs dwell on the details and specifics of everyday
life. This creates a flow that is more akin to everyday life than
fiction, for me. On blogs, for instance, poems are particular
events, not part of a collection. I like to see the way poems jump
out at you in a surprising way on a blog, when you least expect
it. Collections of poetry, by definition, lack this sense of
surprise. Even worse, poets feel compelled to make all the works
look the same, as if this were a virtue. I find that boring, so I
like to try out all kinds of different forms and vary them in my
collections of writings.
Bloggers, when they
post daily, or frequently, are not necessarily constructing a
collection of works to publish, though I do hope to publish my
journal writings on fait accompli. This book would not be
unlike my book Theoretical Objects. But with Theoretical
Objects I felt uncomfortable with being too obvious about the
fact that I was somewhat jumping around chronologically in putting
together the collection. I was "time traveling" but I didn’t know
it yet. In the collections I am now putting together I will
include the dates, but I probably will also have an introduction
to explain what I have been trying to do in fait accompli.
I didn’t do this on the blog because I have been proceeding
intuitively.
I became interested
in literary diaries when I realized that that they had many of the
features of fiction that I liked, but I also liked the sense of
experiencing the daily life of the writer in raw form, less
edited. Real life doesn’t flow like a conventional narrative,
which has to supply a point and some suspense. I like to focus on
the writer’s philosophical musings, but the literary journal also
allows for much more insight into the writer’s everyday conflicts,
ambivalences, doubts, anxieties. In fiction, whether you are
looking at a hero, or anti-hero, the writer feels she or he has to
satisfy the critics and be amusing and interesting and find a way
to deliberately hold your attention. I prefer it if the writer
actually takes a risk to be boring in the conventional meaning of
the term -- that is, telling you their actual feelings, their
confusions, their superstitions, their secret hopes and
expectations. I am interested when writers violate the everyday
boundary between private and public, but not in the usual way,
that is, to be "shocking." In novels, the writer has to be
"interesting." I often get very bored when people feel they have
to be "interesting." People always wonder if I get bored listening
to patients. The fact is, when you care about someone you never
get bored. People get bored when they forget how to care, and then
they need all kinds of stimulants just to get through everyday
life. Then they get bored with the stimulants because they are no
longer surprised by their reactions. Caring is the great
stimulant. You do become vulnerable when you care -- but maybe it
is more interesting to feel hurt than to feel
isolated.
