Ray Bianchi is the hidden hand (or maybe not so hidden) behind a couple of the more exciting websites related to Chicago poetry these days, such as Postmodern Collage Poetry and Chicago Postmodern Poetry. The latter site has a growing roster of interesting poetry interviews or, as the site calls them, profiles. With the exception of the Charles Bernstein interview – Charles opted for cutesy replies throughout – I’ve found the profiles illuminating. There is a brand new one from Pierre Joris, as well as others by Catherine Daly, Jen Hofer, John Tipton, Sawako Nakayasu, Brian Clements, Simone Muench, Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy & Kerri Sonnenberg. Here are a few of the answers from my own as-yet-unfinished profile. You’ll have to wait until Ray posts the whole thing to read the rest. This tidbit is offered here as part of the William Burroughs “The-first-one’s-free” Act….
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
While I born outside of the Hanford Nuclear Reactor facility in the Tri-City region of southeastern Washington, my parents moved back to my mother’s home town of Berkeley when I was maybe 10 months old. They separated when I was two and my mother moved in with her parents in Albany, just north of Berkeley, where I and my brother shared a two-bedroom house with two other generations until I graduated from high school. There were a few Readers Digest condensed novels and an encyclopedia – The Book of Knowledge – but very few other books in the house. I read poetry in school but did not “get it” until I discovered William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music in the Albany Public Library when I was 16. From that moment forward I knew that I was a poet, even if I wasn’t very sure what that meant.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Robert Duncan,Williams, Zukofsky, Creeley, Pound, Stein, Bob Grenier, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout have all been major influences & are to this day. The question of other media is interesting. In painting, there was a time when I really loved the early work of Frank Stella & I once saw a great retrospective, going from that period into the “fuzzy protractor jut from the wall” later work at the Pompidou in Paris. Beyond him, tho, Hans Hoffman & Pollock among the abstract expressionists. A lot of the performance artists of the 1970s were important to me, especially Terry Fox. And in music everything from Balinese gamelan & Ketjak choral singing to (again early) Steve Reich & the minimalists to the jazz of the Chicago Art Ensemble, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Steve Lacy & Anthony Braxton. I’ve never seen the Watts Towers in person, amazingly, but Simon Rodia’s ideas about making art have percolated in my head for decades.
3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
I’ve written about that before in “The Desert Modernism,” so don’t feel much of a need to go into it here. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that I knew I was a writer very young, at the age of ten. The question then became one of what would be my form. That was the question that my encounter with Williams answered.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
On the streets of Berkeley in the 1960s as much as anything else. I did take classes at San Francisco State, most usefully with Jack Gilbert, George Hitchcock & Wright Morris, and studied for a year-and-one-half at UC Berkeley, most usefully there with Robert Grenier, James E.B. Breslin, Jonas Barrish & Dick Bridgman, who was right in the midst of writing his Stein book at the time. But I was 20 when I started college & already was very self-directed, indeed already was publishing, so I paid relatively little attention to the prescribed program, which is one reason I never got around to graduating. I didn’t get into all the classes I wanted when I first started at SF State, so I used the time instead to read through the library’s poetry collection, A through Z. Robin Blaser had just left his position there the previous term, so it was, for that brief moment, a great collection. And it was as useful as anything I did in a classroom, maybe more so.
5) You are a West Coast person who is now in Philadelphia: what are the biggest differences poetically?
In the Bay Area, poets make many life decisions because the economics of housing are so horrific there. Pennsylvania is quite affordable, by comparison, although I think that a lot of younger people in particular distrust it for that reason. If you’re 24 and a poet in Philly, why aren’t you in New York? Although, with the internet, I think that the distinctions of where one lives and with whom one “hangs” as a poet may finally be breaking down. Another aspect that is quite different is that Philadelphia has some arts institutions that could really only exist in an older city. The Arts League, for one thing. Or a private museum like the Rosenbach.
San Francisco has always benefited enormously from its Asian & Spanish heritages. Philadelphia, on the other hand, is a city in which men actually made a revolution & it is something to stand in the room at Independence Hall where George Washington became the first secular sovereign to peacefully turn over his office to John Adams. I think that has to create a sense of scale for a young poet that is enormously liberating, and it’s not simply tourist hoo-hah.
5.1) You are a prolific writer and blogger, your blog is one of the most important meeting places for innovative poetics in the USA: how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep it interesting?
I can imagine some folks (Kent, Henry, Gabe)who might want to challenge the assumption that I do keep it fresh. For one thing, I don’t write it every day, and I often go off on little tangents that can take me three or four days to roll through. By the time I’m done, it feels as if it’s been ages since I’ve done anything else. But after 21 months, I’ve written over a half million words on the blog and I’m conscious of not wanting to repeat myself. Fortunately, American poetry – not to mention the poetries of Canada, the UK, the rest of the English speaking world & those other poetries with which I have enough interest & knowledge to say a little something – are so very rich & so very diverse that I worry more about how much I’m missing.
6) What is your favorite food?
Poached salmon.
7) Sports Team?
The San Francisco Giants. Following the Dodgers, Horace Stoneham moved the team out from New York when I was 12, just the right age for a lad to take on a total obsession. I must have listened to 130 games on the radio each year for the first three or four years. I once saw Leon Wagner hit a home run clear across 16th Street in old Seals Stadium, got to watch Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal & Willie McCovey in their prime, saw all the National League stars &, because my grandfather managed to get tickets, saw some American League ones as well in the 1961 All-Star Game (Mantle, Maris, Berra, Killebrew, who hit a homerun that just tipped off the glove of leftfielder Orlando Cepeda). That was the game in which Stu Miller was famously blown off the mound by a gust of wind & which was won in extra innings as Roberto Clemente drove in Willie Mays.
I can still name the lineup from the 1958 team: Catcher, Bob Schmidt; Cepeda at first; Danny O’Connell at 2nd, Daryl Spencer at short; Jimmy Davenport at 3rd; Mays in center; Felipe Alou in left field; Willie Kirkland in right. There were some interesting guys on the bench: Whitey Lockman, playing his last year, Hank Sauer, Leon Wagner, then a rookie. Jackie Brandt & Bill White got cups of coffee in the outfield. Backup infielders including Ray Jablonski & Eddie Broussoud. And the incomparable Valmy Thomas as the backup backstop. Johnnie Antonelli was the ace of the pitching staff, with Mike McCormick the young lefthander full of promise. Rueben Gomez started the first game I ever saw in person, but walked the first four batters, possibly on 16 pitches – and was yanked for Paul Giel, a long reliever who had actually once been a student of Jack Spicer’s at the U. of Minnesota. Giel pitched out of the jam and ended up winning the game. Stu Miller was the relief ace.
8) Vacation Spot?
Brier Island, Nova Scotia. It’s the spot to which I keep returning. Several of my in-laws own cabins or homes there. It’s a speck of an island off of Digby Neck with a year round population of about 300, most of whom are fishermen or else work in the D.B. Kenney fish factory. As the fishing industry has declined, compliments of pollution, over-fishing & global warming, some of the locals have figured out that they can make as much money if not more doing whale & seabird tours out in the Bay of Fundy. By the way, I have a very simple definition of vacation. It’s someplace where I do not have any computer larger than my Palm Pilot.
9) Curse Word?
I once gave a reading – with many other poets, as part of the Short Fuse anthology launch – on the same stage at the New School where they shoot Inside the Actors Studio & had the wits about me to ask that of another poet just as she was standing up to read (but not, alas, the wits about me to remember who). My mother-in-law, who comes from rural North Carolina, uses this one with such intensity that it is the most obscene word I’ve ever heard: Sugar!
10) If you could have a dinner party with 4 people alive today who would they be?
My mother, my wife & my sons.
