It’s another question from Mark Tursi!

So, how do you decide what’s right for you? And, I don’t mean to be glib – I’m thinking about what Jack Spicer says about not getting in the way of the poem and the poem as dictation, and how this connects to what you think about the origin of a poem. He says this in a variety of ways:

“That essentially you are something which is being transmitted into, and the more that you clear your mind away from yourself, and the more also that you do some censoring—because there will be all sorts of things coming from your mind, from the depths of your mind, from things that you want, which will foul up the poem” (7).

“I do think that if you keep your ideas closed and your mind open, you have a better chance by and large (i.e. of creating a good poem)” (18).

“The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us – not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is – but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem” (61).¹

Basically, it seems to me, Spicer suggests ‘getting out of the way’ of the poem so the ‘Outside’ (whatever that may be) can dictate the poem to you (or through you). And, the last quotation I use here involving Duncan seems particularly close to your work. Does Spicer’s idea (via Duncan) about letting the writing explore its own path conflict with your ideas about the origins and process of a poem, or is it consistent in some ways? And, I’d like to try and connect it to my original question about “what is right for you.” That is, how is “what seems right” as a way of proceeding linked to where the poem comes from?

And, finally, I see a link between these ideas emerging from Spicer and something you said in a previous interview: “I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I’m not interested in ‘making things up.’”² That is, if the poem isn’t made up, where is it coming from?

At first blush, these strike me as being two separate questions, perhaps more, that swirl like a rather ethereal Venn diagram around a particular territory. The territory includes – but is probably not limited to – the relationship of any given poem to poetry. But if that is the horizontal axis of this question, the vertical is the relationship of the poem (or of poetry) to the person who is the poet. You don’t mention it, but of course there are ancillary issues about these relationships to and among readers, listeners, anyone who has a relationship to the poem but who did not him or herself write the damn thing.

But let’s just stick with what we’ve got in front of us. The word poet comes of course from the Greek word for “to make,” but there is a radical difference between making and “making things up.” What I’m NOT interested in is a fictive realm, one that posits all of the writer’s creativity along some referential dimension & which treats all of the other five functions of language (addressor/addressee, contact/code, signifier) as though they were transparent or unimportant. A literature that does not understand the implications of that kind of anesthesia is of no interest to me.

I would agree with Duncan – I do agree with him – that there is “really no single poem.” I usually state this as “I’m interested in poetry much more than I am in poems.” Now there obviously are great poets, really great poets, who work exclusively (or almost so) in the short poem form, so just as obviously there is something there that is, in their work, what we could call a “poem.” Robert Creeley & Rae Armantrout are the two examples that come most immediately to mind, or maybe Graham Foust. I see that sort of writing as highlighting specific aspects of a much larger process and that light – think of the prison tower’s klieg light as a visual analog – is what I see the individual poem as. This is very different – antithetical – from the sort of writing that just assumes that there are (or might be) boundaries and that one can fill a space with so much language & call it a poem.

My own bias is of course for those writings, from Melville or maybe even The Prelude to the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, that take on all six of the functions of language, and which do so on a scale that suggests a major life commitment. Yet I would still list Armantrout, Creeley & Foust among my dozen or so most favorite poets, even as I read them as specific instances in which something like The Cantos or “A” is the norm.

To return for a moment to Spicer’s terminology, which is one way among many to discuss these kinds of issues, the poet is a “counterpunching radio” principally to the degree that he or she is capable of counterpunching. The writer has to be open to anything coming into the poem – which is one reason I suspect that all of my poems, even those with the most predetermined exoskeletal structures, have always surprised me, taken me to places I had not anticipated when I began the writing (why, for example, the first poem in Universe insisted on being called Revelator, rather than Witness as I had planned). Call it negative capability or listening for the Martians, whatever. Nothing will cause the poem to go dead faster than setting out to write “about” X, something that gets proven over & over.

What I look for in the poem, any poem, mine or others, is that engagement with all of what Jakobson calls the six functions of language, not just sound (which lies on the contact/code axis) nor story (the life of the signified). Think of how in his very best work (Language, Book of Magazine Verse) individual lines in the poetry of Jack Spicer function almost as a kind of shrapnel, not as parts of discourse or argument. Thus, for example, “They will never know what hit them,” a sentence that takes up the latter half of the third line of “Smoke signals / Like in the Eskimo Village” in the Thing Language section of Language – which, as we are told point blank is “a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy” – returns at the very end of “Transformations II” in Transformations : “The Trojans / Having no idea of true or false syntax and having no recorded language / Never knew what hit them.” What then is the content, let alone the origin, of such a phrase? The capriciousness of fate? The horror of history? Where is, in such a target rich environment, the Outside?

Tomorrow I’ll address that initial question: how do I decide what’s right for me?

 

¹ All these quotations are taken from The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi. The lectures were presented over several months in 1965.

² Gregory, Sinda. “A 1982 Interview with Ron Silliman.” Modern American Poetry.