Doing research for his dissertation, Carl Boon sent me a series of 15 questions. It’s going to take me a couple of days to get through them all, but it occurred to me that this really was an interview & Carl consented to the idea of posting them here. Here are the first five questions:

1.  My thesis is that your poems describe explicitly and consistently what I call the "clash zone," the space where technology meets nature, where, in Heidegger's terms, "World" meets "Earth." To what extent are you conscious in your work of addressing environmental concerns, the environmental crisis? For example, a passage from Jones reads, "Diamonds cut into the walk where once trees were planted, harbor only rubbish, and here a great burst of yellow-headed weeds through the cracks in the walks" (24). Seemingly "things" replace nature. This happens in many of your poems. Would you discuss this phenomenon?

I don’t think of myself as a naturalist or even as especially ecologically minded. I do however try to be conscious of how I live in the world.

I grew up in what I would characterize as an urban suburb. By the end of the 2^nd World War, the ring of towns along the north side of Oakland: Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, Richmond had, at least in the flatlands where I lived, largely filled in any open space that might have existed when my mother – who’s not quite 20 years my senior – was growing up in the same house. The family across the street had a chicken coop in their backyard, but no chickens. I used to hear of cows grazing along Gilman right where the BART tracks come up out of the earth into an elevated system now, but there was no evidence of it during my lifetime. But when I got to know some of the “rich kids” who lived in the Berkeley hills – they were all the children of UC Berkeley faculty, mostly psych department faculty – I could see how the infill of new housing was transforming even their privileged world. That faux forest effect of affluent suburbs – exactly the kind of space in which I now live – was rapidly being replaced.

And although Berkeley has one of the great nature areas in Tilden Park further up in those hills, no more than three miles from my house, we never went there when I was a kid. My grandfather’s idea of spending time outdoors was going to watch trains along the tracks off Albany Hill, or maybe driving out by the airport to watch airplanes take off. So nature in that sense was always Other.

Yet San Francisco across the Bay was clearly a far more urban environment than the one in which I grew up. Kids lived in apartment buildings (which I did also, but only during the last year or two of my teen years), there was no space whatsoever between houses. When I had a friend, George Murphy, who moved to the City when we were ten, I never saw him again. I tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up in that environment, but I couldn’t.

Now for reasons that are much more social than natural, I’m somewhat obsessed with documenting “the invisible” in our lives. If there’s an enduring theme in my work, that’s it. And in urban environment especially, nature is one of those dimensions that recedes. One tends to forget that sparrows are great urban foragers, or how weeds fit into the ecological chain, but they’re there.

Jones is a work in which each sentence describes the ground – one sentence per day for a year, to be exact. Jones Street, from which I derive the title, is – or was in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when I worked in the Tenderloin – the most déclassé street in San Francisco. It was where the transvestite prostitutes worked, for example, and it had unquestionably the worst residential hotels. So that’s what invoked by that title, but in practice, I wrote about whatever bit of ground I found myself in. A few times, such as once in New York while staying with James Sherry, I remember running downstairs at one point to his street, Bowery off Houston, in order to be able to write something.

That piece is a companion to Skies (one of a few such pairings that occur in The Alphabet) in which the same kind of discipline was turned toward the sky – a sentence per day for a year. I discovered as I wrote that piece, which is “earlier” than Jones chronologically, that often what I described was the horizon, the border of the earth (usually civilization quote unquote) and the sky itself. Looking at the sky will tell you a lot about the world that abuts it.

In fact, one of the great attractions of Hawai’i for me is not that it is the lush tropical habitat of the travel ads, but that as a series of lava rocks jutting out of the ocean, everything there has arrived by transit, all the vegetation, for example, coming as seeds in the stomach of birds. Which is why the ecosystem there is so volatile. The most common bird one decade might well have receded twenty years later. It was apparently the bulbul in the 1950s, but when I was there in the 1980s it had become the mynah. So the idea that natural is in any sense “timeless” or ahistorical is one of those myths that we impose on the world.

2.  I argue repeatedly in this project that technology, as one of the most powerful weapons of capitalist global ideology, is nefarious. First of all, do you agree? If so, do you think technology can be "saved"? Can it be useful as a tool to ease worldwide oppression? If so, how? Or will it continue to be a part of globalization ideology?

Technology predates capitalism & might outlast it as well. Capitalism is much more a consequence of technology than the other way around. One could say, in fact, that capitalism arose precisely because it enabled technology to become “self-motivated,” to progress faster. Disruptive innovation, the process by which one technology replaces another, literally doesn’t happen in socialist societies. It’s clearly never in the interest of the people who would be displaced.

If you read the most passionate love-letter that capitalist innovation ever received, the Communist Manifesto, a document written before electricity had been fully productized, it becomes evident that even as the Manifesto revels in the process by which capital tears down whatever it has just created, the form of organization it envisions to combat this problem is predicated first on industrialism, with its concentration of workers into debased and demeaning and dangerous manual labor, and second on the idea that capital, as all-powerful as it might seem, is and will continue to be relatively immobile. The first was a remarkable recognition of a process that would not reach its apotheosis for half a century. The second was a phenomenon that would not change really until after the Second World War. But both conditions would eventually be transcended, leaving movements created by workers in the untenable position of attempting to fight the last war while entirely vulnerable to the one that is going on today. 

Capital’s first defense has always been capital flight, whenever it becomes clear that modest (or not so modest) forms of tyranny will not quell the troublesome workforce. Marx’s presumption that international organization is anywhere on the horizon or remotely possible is itself predicated upon an implicit racist presumption that the white world is what counts and that the pre-capitalist Third World is not really an option for capital.

History however shows that capital flight and the rapid evolution of technology beyond the epoch of industrial organization both strengthened capital and proceeded to divide workers in new ways that they have yet to imagine themselves beyond. Indeed, it has been just capital’s willingness to go anywhere for a profit that has provoked the eruption of premodernist resistance by Muslim fundamentalists. Fundamentalism of all types can almost always be traced back to the reaction of premodern peoples to the intrusion of capital.

3.  Your series of volumes which comprise The Alphabet is my primary textual inquiry here. So, a couple of specific questions about The Alphabet:

a) Repetition. I couldn't help but notice, as I was reading Paradise, that many of the sentences in that book appeared elsewhere. Would you talk about how you see repetition as important to your project? You are certainly conscious of repeating images in several books (the plum tree, the parrot, etc.). Why do you do this, besides the obvious thing we tell freshmen, that a repeated theme or image must be an important one?

It’s interesting that you should ask that in the context of Paradise, where it seems mostly incidental, since it is Ketjak and Tjanting where the device appears as a relatively strict formal element. In each instance, repetition serves multiple purposes. Perhaps what I am most attracted to is the push-pull effect of two of these purposes: at one level, repetition ties a text of otherwise diverse materials together. It enables memory to create a matrix of thematic materials that impacts not only the reiterated elements but also many aspects of other sentences or phrases that now get thrown into a kind of spotlight. On another level it does this also rhythmically. In Ketjak in particular, that was the element I was most interested in.

But if it functions to bind a text together, strict repetition also calls up the impossibility of experiencing any written work synchronically. When I write “This this this this,” there is a beginning, middle and end. Individual words function differently even when they’re the same word. Stein of course makes great hay out of this aspect of repetition. It really disrupts the idea of before and after, and of progression. So on the one hand, reiteration ties the text together while on the other, it accentuates the separateness of individual elements.

b) Would you discuss your favorite volumes of The Alphabet, and why they are so?

This would be like discussing my favorite children. On any given day, I am apt to answer the question of which ones are my favorites with entirely different texts. I have had such an intense & uniquely personal experience with each that the idea of comparing it with another – which from my perspective would simply reduce it to writing – isn’t really possible.

So whenever I do tend to think of this question, which is only when other people think to pose it, I do so in terms that completely extraneous to the texts. I really like certain book covers – like the painting by John Moore that Geoff Young used for the cover when he published What. The neighborhood in which my mother still lives is visible down in the flatlands of that painting. That, or the typesetting that Charles Alexander did for Demo to Ink or that there was a hardback edition of Paradise or the wonderful image that Bill Luoma produced for the cover of ®, is what I think about when someone poses this question.

4.  Is the "new sentence," as you described and defined it in your essay of the same name, still a relevant way of describing your poetic method? Do you still adhere to that method to create poems? Have you deviated greatly from it? Would you like to update or expand, in some way, your discussion in that essay?

I wrote “The New Sentence” at a very specific moment in time – 1977 – when the turn toward forms of longer prose was just starting to be visible among the poets of San Francisco. I had written Ketjak three years earlier and had completed (or was very near to doing so) the other poems that make up The Age of Huts, and was just starting Tjanting. What I wanted to do in that talk was two things – first to situate what I saw being written in the mid-1970s into a broader historical framework, second to identify a device that struck me as turning up in various modes in the work of a lot of different writers.

The new sentence was/is any sentence placed into a text so as to minimize any cognitive mapping back to the previous sentence, as well as to limit mapping going forward. It might have been more properly termed the new space, insofar as it is in that gap between sentences – a location in the field of writing for which we still lack a decent term – that the new sentence’s functionality appears. But as this device turns the reader’s attention to the immanence of the sentence at hand, whatever it might be, I settled on that broader category for my noun.

I still use the device quite a bit – it’s sort of the default option for me – although I never was completely under its sway even back in the late 1970s. It’s one possibility amid a rich palette that any writer has at his or her disposal. But I think its moment as a social phenomenon, when it was being tested and tried by all manner of writers more or less simultaneously, had passed even by the time that talk made it into print. 

5.  How would you advise dealing with those in the mainstream academy (poets, professors, and critics), who continue to be downright hostile to the concerns of those who fall under the umbrella of "Language poetry"?

While I’m afraid I have a bad habit of tweaking their noses in print, my interest in both pre- and anti-modernists is more anthropological than literary. If they had any sense of history, let alone literary history, they would understand the implications of their own roles better. But if they did, they would have to change their lives.

Now, having said that, I should note that there are any number of conservative writers whose work I genuinely like and read with enthusiasm: Bob Hass, Annie Finch, Jack Gilbert, Paul Muldoon, Daisy Fried, Wendell Berry, Alan Dugan. I’ve given readings with several of these poets in the past and no doubt will do so again in the future. I think that it is completely possible to write such poetry from a position of integrity with considerable intelligence and skill. It may even more difficult to do so, given that the social conditions for such poetry disappeared roughly the moment the South seceded from the Union.