Richard Young’s
Dinner with Henry
(from Ubuweb)

An interview with Henry Miller
in two parts

The Paris Review interview

Ezra Pound,
interviewed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The funeral of Ezra Pound

(photo by David Flores)

Nikky Finney
on Talk of the Nation

One value of Sarah Rosenthal’s sumptuous collection of interviews, A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Bay Area Authors, just out from Dalkey Archive, is Rosenthal’s introduction to the collection, which offers a solid history of Bay Area poetry. Like the interviews themselves – a dozen in all, averaging maybe 25 pages in length – Rosenthal’s intro shows a depth of homework on her part that may come as a sobering reminder to the Facebook generation that this is how it’s done when executed properly. The book contains discussions with Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratclife, Robert Glück, Barbara Guest, Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr & Elizabeth Robinson.

Not that the introduction is perfect. Whether it’s an emphasis here¹, or a detail there², one could argue the minutiae because the larger structures are basically right on. Rosenthal is careful to document her sources & qualify her approach, noting that Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics includes 110 poets, dozens of whom could just as easily have been interviewed here. Personally I hope Rosenthal continues her work here. Future volumes beckon. Some writers I would love to see Rosenthal devote this same attention to would include Judy Grahn, Lyn Hejinian, Al Young, Kit Robinson, Etel Adnan, Bob Grenier, Bill Berkson, Bev Dahlen, Dodie Bellamy, Mark Linenthal, Norma Cole, Joanne Kyger, Kevin Killian, Barbara Jane Reyes, Aaron Shurin, Robert Hass, Pat Nolan, Alice Jones, Stephen Vincent, Eileen Tabios, Bill Luoma, Laura Moriarty, Alli Warren, Stephanie Young, Jack Hirschman, Curtis Faville, Diane di Prima, David Melnick, Michael McClure, Norman Fischer, Adam Cornford, Mark Linenthal, Jack Marshall & Jack Foley. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure I’m forgetting as many others just as worthy.

The one thread I don’t feel Rosenthal’s introduction does sufficient justice toward is the relationship between post-avant writing & literary traditions that consciously understood themselves as working class &/or even lumpen in their orientation. One is that post-Beat aspect of street poetics that has roots in the New American Poetry, from the late Bob Kaufman to Jack Hirschman to many of the poets particularly around North Beach. A second is a similar approach to LGBT poetries. Paul Mariah & Steve Abbott are gone, as are Pat Parker & Paula Gunn Allen, but it would be really useful to note how the interactions of these writers informed & impacted much that is covered here. Mariah, for example, was as instrumental in keeping Jack Spicer’s memory & work alive in the first ten years after his death as anyone. I was surprised to see Claudia Rankine note the Left/Write Unity Conference spearheaded by Abbott & Bruce Boone in her blurb on the book’s back cover, but not to see it mentioned in the introduction. The important role Actualism – explicitly a Bay Area literary movement – played in the poetries of the 1970s (especially in the “poetry wars”) is entirely invisible here. Given Rosenthal’s own engaged approach to poetics, these little blindspots seem surprising.

All of which is to say that Rosenthal’s introductory history is superb, tho the reality was still a dimension or two more complex than even a first-rate telling can suggest.

 

¹ Barbara Guest, to my reading, didn’t just continue “to produce important work” once she moved to Berkeley in her seventies, she really blossomed, becoming one of the most influential poets of the past 30 years & offering a model for “late work” that may yet prove transformational for poetry going forward.

² e.g., “Spicer … spent much of his adult life moving within a few blocks in San Francisco’s North Beach” ignores Spicer’s soujourns to Minneapolis & Boston, his day jobs – when he had them – in Berkeley, and the simple fact that his home at Polk & Sutter, an address made famous for poetry by John Wiener’s Hotel Wentley Poems, is a considerable distance from North Beach. The same holds true for Spicer’s favored afternoon hangout of Aquatic Park.

Lance Phillips

In 1953, when The Paris Review published its first issue and included an interview with E.M. Forster (PDF), the journal made its largest – and one might say only – contribution to literary culture in popularizing what would become a new mode of literary discourse, one perfectly suited to the postwar years of the early 1950s. Kulchur, as Pound or Lita Hornick might have spellt it, was no longer merely the plaything of an educated elite. Just as television, that newfangled thing, was giving images to the radio plays & vaudeville variety shows of old radio & bringing into the home original drama and – especially through the auspices of one Walter Disney – cinema, one no longer needed to head out for an evening of the performing arts. One might even watch Korla Pandit, the African-American organist born John Roland Redd who used a mock-Indian identity to become the first true daytime music star of the new medium. All this occurring in the vast economic expansion that followed the end of World War 2, when the GI Bill suddenly made college accessible to a rapidly expanding middle class. (Thank you, UAW.). Everything from youth culture to rock ‘n’ roll was in the offing.

The interview was the perfect critical medium for this period because it permitted insight into the author as a person, a new kind of celebrity that many of the old modernists had shunned – Picasso was an exception & had she lived a little longer Stein would have been another. It was visibly modeled on the personal interviews that had become commonplace accoutrements of the Hollywood studio system. And, for a variety of criticism, it wasn’t all that critical. This was not Clement Greenberg on the Mount, nor the stern retro pieties of New Criticism. It did not pretend to be the litcrit equivalent of John Gielgud. Sal Mineo would do just fine.

But if you read those early Paris Review interviews, many of which are now online & downloadable, you will notice something very distinct about them, which is the preparation accorded each by the interviewer (often, for poetry, a young Donald Hall in those early years). The interviewer shows up at the interviewee’s door fully informed as to what the author has written, what the author has read, whom the author knows, whom the author has slept with & what the author has said in public & often enough in private also. This affords even a casual reader an enormous amount of intimacy in those pieces – you can tell right away that Robert Graves is a mean-spirited bully, and, frankly, he’s not alone among the greats of that era.

With the notable exception of Tom Beckett, I’ve never had an interviewer as well prepared as seems to have been the norm for the Paris Review in the 1950s, and I’m used now to the post-interview drill of going through a draft transcript closely because I can’t presume that an interviewer will know that there is no “e” in Olson, that Ginsberg’s first name is not Alan, that there is no “u” in his surname, or that Zukofsky has an “f” and no “v.”

So my sense of the form is that it’s one that is easily debased. As I know I’ve recounted here before, my template for the ill-prepped interview is one that I by chance happened to sit in on between a newspaper reporter in Bangor, Maine & Omar Pound, son of Ezra & a poet & translator in his own right. The reporter, a one-time high-school English teacher gone to seed, leaned forward in the midst of this session, held in the cafeteria at the University of Maine campus circa 1984, and half-whispered in a conspiratorial tone to Pound, “So what kind of communist was your father?” Omar blanched, simply looked at me and asked, “How would you answer that?”

Hey, at least the guy knew that Pound had been in trouble for extreme political views. And in 1984, those were the only views he could imagine as excessive. Maybe he was foreseeing the day when Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan & Donald Rumsfeld made fascism mainstream once again, albeit this time with the happy-face logo of America & apple pie.

In recent years, however, the form of the interview has undergone not one, but two fundamental transformations. The first is email & the written interview. This is really an electronic extension of an already existing form – the mail interview, which can be found even fairly early in the pages of Paris Review. It’s how Beckett interviewed me for The Difficulties. There are advantages to this approach: the interviewer isn’t likely to go for the “gotcha” type question, that carryover of the old Hollywood interview & legal cross-examination (&, in Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason episodes, a bit of both); and you can ensure from the get-go that names like Zukofsky get treated properly. But there’s a complication – what is lost when you stretch out the time of exchange in this manner is spontaneity. Might I have said something different if I had been asked the same question aloud, perhaps over tall glasses of ice tea with a tape recorder whirring nearby? Almost certainly. However, this expansion also gives the interviewee time not just to answer (or to seem to answer) the question, but, in doing so carefully, also to direct where the next question might go. If the loss of spontaneity is the downside of the written interview, collaboration between interviewer & interviewee can rise substantially, which from my perspective is a plus.

Most recently, there has been a spate of interviews that in many ways aren’t interviews at all – they’re surveys. Preparation for the individual interviewee is unnecessary because you are asking the same questions of everyone. These are interesting to the degree that the questions are thought provoking – I declined one recently that wanted to know about my theory of washing dishes – and the people solicited are themselves interesting & willing to offer substantive comments.

The first of these surveys that I’m aware of is Here Comes Everybody, which Lance Phillips started in June 2004 & kept up thru January 2007, over 130 interviews in all. Phillips figured out that he was onto something pretty quickly – I don’t think he envisioned that many responses when he began. The questions he asked might be asked of any Anglo-American poet (and with the change of a single phrase in question 4, of any English-speaking writer in the world, from Australia to Nigeria to India).

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

2. What is something / someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers / colleagues? Why do you read it / them?

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

6. What is something which your peers / colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

7. How would you explain what a poem is to a seven year old?

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon : 
Chiseled :
I :
Of :
Form :

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

That they might be asked of any poet is both the strength & weakness of the survey form. There were never any follow-up questions. If you have a poet who has a particularly complex relationship to one of the questions, there’s no way to probe more deeply. The late kari edwards worked very hard to avoid being identified as either man or woman, having lived for periods as both – kari once made a point of thanking me when I wrote a review that avoided using any pronouns at all. Here is edwards’ response to that last question:

all I have on this earth is this body, everything else is just things and other bodies doing things. if I do not place myself in the core of my body I can not even attempt to connect to reality and end up in the grand illusion. My body is what allows me to feel others and the universe. if I want to speak of the possible I have to be in touch with the present present in the body that is in my body.

I can’t imagine an active interviewer not following that with a question about gender itself & its place in edwards’ work. Instead, this is the actual end of the interview, a silence that feels even more tragic now that edwards is gone.

Phillips at one point tried to transform these surveys from a blog to an anthology, only to meet with resistance on the part of several participants. Happily, he’s left the blog itself up, and I’ve continued to link to it among the “collective blogs.”

Now, as a couple of people have shown already (here and here), with a survey, you don’t need even to be asked to participate. It’s conceivable, of course, that all 1,700 of my daily visitors could respond to the Here Comes Everybody survey and Phillips would then (a) have more than enough for an anthology and (b) we’d have something like a census of poetry, or at least we’d have some idea how everyone responds to lemon chiseled I of form, which strikes my ear as a decent first line for something.

But I for one miss the old-school in-depth kind of questioning that occurs far too seldom today. What if somebody actually prepared for an interview? Knew the work, the bio, the social networks? Possibly, regardless of the person being interrogated, just possibly we might learn something.

Responding to Harvey Hix’ 20 questions got me to finally sit down and address a set of questions that had been posed to me by David F. Hoenigman for Word Riot. It was a piece that took longer, especially in what I’d characterize as the ruminating stage, precisely because its questions were more writerly, i.e., about the personal process of writing & its place in my life. I wonder if, as an interview, this project might not seem less interesting to a lot of readers precisely because it’s more personal.

What projects are you currently working on? 

I’m at work on a half dozen sections of Universe, which is the next major part of my long project, Ketjak. The Age of Huts, Tjanting, and The Alphabet were the first three stages of this project, and Universe is the next. “Ketjak” is also the title of the opening poem in The Age of Huts, and continues in The Alphabet. It’s the Balinese word for “monkey” and is the title of a ritual performance the Balinese do for tourists based on the Ramayana epic. It was actually cobbled together by Western folklorists to give the Balinese a means of extracting some cash from the auslanders above & beyond gamelan. So it’s an allusion back to the tale itself, to the powerful cumulative sound of the ritual, and to the process of globalization, where everything is brought into the circle, but on the worst commercial terms.

When and why did you begin writing?

I began in fifth grade. My teacher that year, Vance Teague, had us write for an hour each week, every Wednesday morning. There were no rules, no genre limitations, just write. It very quickly became my favorite time at school.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When I was a teenager, about a couple of years before I seriously started to try to do the real stuff, as distinct from the kid writing projects I did in school.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Crow, which was published by Ithaca House in 1971, was written very much under the influence of William Carlos Williams & especially of Spring & All, which Frontier Press had brought out in 1970, after having been out of print for over 45 years.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

When you get to be in your sixties, that list becomes too impossibly long. Williams was certainly the first & in many ways deepest influence, but Spicer & Zukofsky & Creeley cannot be denied, all of my language poetry cohorts – Rae Armantrout & Barrett Watten in particular. Most recently, I’ve been influenced by the Flarf Collective, tho I can’t say I’ve written anything that would qualify even remotely as such.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

Under Albany, which is as much a memoir of growing up as it is an explication of the first poem in The Alphabet, goes into this in painful detail. My work with the Grand Piano collective has more. Suffice it to say, I write to know who I am.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I’m a straightforward realist.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

Poetry. Criticism.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

It sounds silly to say “Be Here Now,” but I think that’s the message of all good writing.

What book are you reading now?

Last night I was reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day & this morning I spent awhile reading around in My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. P. Inman’s Ad Finitum is to the left of my desk here & I will be poking around in it again later today.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

There’s the Flarf Collective again.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work? 

The presumption that I’m a “difficult poet.” I was pleased the other day when Andrew Ervin reviewed The Alphabet for The Philadelphia Inquirer and said reading my work was no more difficult than looking out of the window of a SEPTA train here in Philly. It’s a trope that Ervin borrowed (sans attribution I would note) from Barrett Watten’s original introduction to Tjanting in 1981, when Watten argued that a “bus ride is better than most art.” It’s good to see that some people are getting it, that you can just read what’s there and that will tell you everything you need to know about my work.

Ervin dropped me a note when this appeared on the Word Riot site to say that he had not seen the 1981 edition of Tjanting & had come upon the transit trope independently. Given how long that edition was out of print before Salt reissued the book in 2002 (with a different Watten introduction taken from the early drafts of The Grand Piano), Ervin’s correction makes sense. I am intrigued – and pleased – by the parallel, given that they’re descriptions of different books more than a quarter century apart. Hopefully one could say of both, as Watten concluded his first intro to Tjanting, “It is possible, in fact, to read this book on the bus.”

When I linked to H.L. Hix’ “20 Questions” project on the Best American Poetry blog the other day, Harvey sent me his questionnaire &, rather impulsively, I responded straight away, answering 18 of the 20 questions. My answers may sound flip, but they’re not. That last question, for example, is completely serious. I’ve been in BAP & had volumes co-edited by people I completely respect, but year after year it’s almost as depressing a reading experience as the Pushcart Prize.  

1. What poet should be in Obama's cabinet, and in what role? 

Simon Ortiz, chair of Truth & Reconciliation Commission on the Subject of the Genocide of Native Peoples (a new position)

2. If you could send Obama one poem or book of poems (not your own), what would it be and why? 

William Carlos Williams' Spring & All, in the 1970 Frontier Press edition.

3. What other poetry-related blog or website should I check out? 

There are so many. But let's point to The Annandale Dream Gazette, the only site I know of devoted to the unconscious of poets

4. Who is the most exciting young/new poet I've never heard of, but whose work I ought to find and read? 

This will vary greatly by person now, won't it? How about Tsering Wangmo Dhompa?

5. What's the funniest poem you've read lately?  What was the last poem that made you cry? 

I tend to resist poems that go for only one emotion or the other - what feeling do you get from Louis Zukofsky's "A"?

6. William or Dorothy?  Robert or Elizabeth Barrett?  Moore or Bishop? Dunbar or Cullen?  "Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully" or "No ideas but in things"?  Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Tender Buttons? 

Both / and, both / and, both / and, both / and, "No ideas but in things," Tender Buttons.

7. Robert Lowell wrote a poem called "Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid." What supposedly immortal poem puts you to sleep? 

The Four Quartets does it best, since it makes dreaming impossible. But most anything by Lowell will do just fine unless I've had tea after 9 PM.

8. Even for poetry books, the contract has a provision for movie rights.  What poetry book should they make into a movie?  Who should direct it, and why?  Who should star in it? 

I've only seen that clause in Yale Younger Poets contracts &, as I recall, Jack Gilbert told me he got an advance from a studio for Views of Jeopardy way back when.

But let's go with The Cantos, starring Brad Pitt. Woody Allen, because it would interesting to watch him negotiate the Pisan Cantos.

9. What lines from a poem you first read years ago still haunt you now?   

Helot for what time there is
in the baptist hegemony of death.

Jack Gilbert, from "Singing in My Difficult Mountains," in Genesis West, no. 1, 1962.

10. What poem do you love, love, love, but don't understand? 

Hart Crane, The Bridge. Or (which I love less, but also understand less) John Berryman's Dream Songs.

11. If the official organ of the AWP were not the Chronicle but were the Enquirer, what would some of the headlines be? 

I will leave those for Kent Johnson & Kenny Goldsmith to invent.

12. If you were making a scandal rag for poetry in the grocery store checkout stands, what fictitious poetry love triangle would you make up to outsell that tired Hollywood story of Angelina and Brad and Jen? 

I wouldn't.

13. This is the Best American Poetry blog.  What's the best non-American poetry you've read lately? 

Aleksandr Skidan's Red Shifting, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya & others, published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

14. We read poems in journals and books, we hear them in readings and on audio files.  Sometimes we get them in unusual ways: on buses or in subway cars.  How would you like to encounter your next poem?

In my dreams tonight, so that I can write it down when I wake.

15. What poem would you like to hear the main character bust out singing in a Bollywood film?  What would be the name of the movie?  What would be the scene in which it was sung? 

16. Do you have a (clean) joke involving poetry you'd like to share? 

17. Tell the truth: is it a poetry book you keep in the john, or some other genre (john-re)? 

In one bathroom, the one I spend the most time in, I have several books of poetry including Shakespeare's Sonnets. In the other, I have magazines, including The Nation, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets & Writers, ComputerWeek, Information Week, ComputerWorld and CFO.

18. Can you name every teacher you had in elementary school?  Did any of them make you memorize a poem?  What poem(s)? 

No, thank heavens. I can't memorize haiku. But Vance Teague in fifth grade made us write for an hour every Wednesday and never told us what genre. He made me a writer as much as anyone.

19. If you got to choose the next U.S. Poet Laureate, who (excluding of course the obvious candidates, you and me) would it be?  Of former U.S. Poet Laureates, who did such a great job that he/she should get a second term?  Next election cycle, what poet should run for President?  Why her or him? 

PLOTUS (as Donald Hall called it): Linh Dinh, because he hears the "American" voice better than anyone I know.

President? Barrett Watten or Rae Armantrout – the ideal president would be a combination of the two.

20. Insert your own question here.

Why is The Best American Poetry so mediocre year after year, editor after editor?

An interview with Allyssa Wolf is just the 24^th in a series all about the impact of first books. Others interviews in the series include

Andrea Baker
Jen Benka
Simmons B. Buntin
Victoria Chang
Shanna Compton
CAConrad
Brenda Coultas
Brent Cunningham
Lara Glenum
Geraldine Kim
Amy King
Aaron Kunin
Frannie Lindsay
Rebecca Loudon
Raymond McDaniel
Juliet Patterson
Laura Sims
Stacy Szymaszek
Brian Teare
Matthew Thorburn
Tony Tost
Jen Tynes
Stephanie Young

If you’ve never published a book & are about to or just want to, this is must read stuff. Kate Greenstreet deserves a big round of applause.

This isn’t the only good series of interviews of poets, particularly younger ones who have not yet been given nearly as much attention as they deserve, that has been popping up on the web of late. Tom Beckett’s blog, e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e v-a-l-u-e-s, has ten interviews, including a second one with Shanna Compton, and one of Geof Huth co-conducted by Crag Hill & yours truly. Here Comes Everybody finally stopped after it had something like 130 interviews, including some folks on Greenstreet’s list (plus Kate herself) and some, like Mike Farrell, on Beckett’s. Ray Bianchi’s Chicago Postmodern Poetry site also has over 100 interviews, adding two a month or so two its list. One of these was given by Robert Creeley just one month before he died. John Tranter’s e-journal, Jacket, has published some 70. Another e-zine, The Argoist, has published 17, including a conversation between Joanne Kyger & Simon Pettet. And, of course, The Paris Review, the hardcopy journal that can claim to have invented the modern literary interview format before the journal lost its soul a few decades back, is attempting to bring as many of its interviews online in PDF formats as they can obtain permissions for, a prickly problem with so many of their eminences having now gone where even email cannot reach.

All this week I’ve been writing about projects that seem to withhold something – as Jessica Smith does her reins over reader response, or as the anonymous collection does it unveiling of authorial anything, or the way Thomas Pynchon withholds his own biography. In contrast, Craig Allen Conrad – CAConrad to his friends (all one word) – is someone who wants to get it all in. Deviant Propulsion, just out from Soft Skull Press, is Conrad’s long awaited first full-length book, beating out his other equally long-awaited The Frank Poems, due some fine day from Jonathan Williams’ fabled Jargon Press.

Conrad is a fearless combination of the out front & tenderness, subtlety in the literary equivalent of outrageous drag. For example:

“vacant land”
means no
people

”nothing but a few
prairie dogs”
means no
people

”we swerved, hit
a cat, but no one
was hurt”
means no
people

This poem, which when you let it settle in & think about it for a minute, is remarkably Buddhist in its relationship to its content, carries the title “Severed Leg Pirouette.” It doesn’t take much to push the simple parallels of this text into an infinitely gaudier display. Or, consider this:

It’s True I Tell Ya
My Father Is a 50¢
Party Balloon

my father paper thin
lost on the basement floor

but who will put their lips
to his stiff old hard-on?
who will blow him up?
who will want this
man floating
stupid
stuck in
a tree again?

Or this consideration of parenting as well (literally on the facing page):

A World without Condoms

she swears it was the cucumber

nine months later
a son with
her eyes and
cheekbones
but the seeded spine and
leafy complexion are all Dad’s

the nurse rubs a little Creamy Italian
on his bright green belly
they coo at one another
blow bubbles at one another
”this won’t hurt a bit” she says
and tucks the napkin
under her chin

You sense that, had he wanted to be, Conrad could easily have been a Cid Corman to the new generation – the distance between these satires & the gentle ear isn’t all that terribly far – but that CA has another agenda in mind.

Then there is the seriously outrageous stuff, including a revenge fantasy against vaginas that wouldn’t go down well on the WOM-PO list. Part of what makes Conrad’s poetry work – which it almost always does for me – is that he himself is a mélange of so many different & unusual influences – southern & rural, urban & very definitely out of the closet. He also is a fulltime employee at one of the big chain bookstores in Philadelphia and, since the death of Gil Ott three plus years ago, visibly the greatest cohesive force the local poetry scene here has – he’s the one poet who knows everyone. Here is yet another poem involving the relationship with one’s parent, tilted this time on a completely different axis:

My Mother after
Knee Surgery

she calls it her
new knee it’s in
everything she
says her
new knee

hide my book of
poems tired of
explaining

she distracts herself
with television
I watch to
share her
concentration
into
dis—sss—stance

when it’s boring
she makes herself
a drink
pours
me one

drink gets
television
interesting

”hey, remember when i was
a kid i asked why humans
aren’t extinct, and you said
it’s because we’re afraid
of the dark?”

”bullshit, hey, c’mon now,
i’m trying to relax my
new knee dammit!”

Conrad’s best known work, “Celebrities I’ve Seen Offstage,” inevitably is the book’s high point, although I don’t think, really, it’s his best writing. First published in the Fall 2003 issue of Lodestar, the work is a not-so-distant cousin of Joe Brainard’s I Remember or perhaps some of Michael Lally’s more agitprop pieces:

Timothy Leary at Starwood having lunch with the Reverend Velveteen Sly a couple of naked pagans asked if they could get their pictures taken on his lap he twitched his gray brow with a big smile happy to oblige

Annie Sprinkle was dating my friend Marie they came over for a tarot reading we spent most of the time talking about herbs to cure AIDS I don't remember if the tarot answered anyone that night

Henry Winkler on Benjamin Franklin Parkway annoyed me to think of jerking off as a kid "Oh Fonzie, cum on my FACE! SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!" what was my deal back then?

The Frugal Gourmet shooting a segment of his cooking show in the Reading Terminal Market telling someone what a moron his cameraman was then oooing and aaahing over the pastries for the camera moments later

As much fun as this work is, & fun is inescapably the point here, Conrad is almost too sweet & gentle, a little too much Carson Kressley, not sufficiently Devine. So what I come back to are the quieter poems – like the following one, whose Pepsi moment is literally right out of the biography of Rimbaud:

I Still Have Keys to the Apartment

i let myself in
the new boyfriend
asleep with your arm
wrapped around his waist
looks like we did
i take my clothes off
to slide between you
but the cats fill my arms
i miss the cats because
they smell of you
i want to lick the hairs
on your chest flat
while the new boyfriend sleeps
but sniff the cats instead
i could feed my sperm
to your plants so part of me
would always be around
but you’ve swallowed
enough of me to feed
your bones and eyes that
you’re not going
anywhere without me
i walk into the kitchen
careful to eat just one,
two grapes from the bunch
i hold back tears
see you still have
the smiling soccer ball
refrigerator magnets i gave you
the new boyfriend
doesn’t know i bought them
i open the refrigerator
a little at a time
try to talk myself out of it
but open it anyway
i pee in the Pepsi
feel a little better
and grab my clothes
i want to leave the keys behind
but know i’ll want
back in tomorrow

Carl Boon, in his very first question during the interview that ran here a few weeks back, asked me to position my work towards what he calls “the ‘clash zone,’ the space where technology meets nature,” to which I responded: 

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.

This response provoked another question for Carl, as follows:

Why is it so important to document “the invisible in our lives”? Do you have some sense that sparrows and weeds are vanishing in our increasingly urbanized, “parking-lot” landscape?

This goes right back to the motivation for writing in the first place, or at least my motivation. When one is raised, as I was, in a household in which one of the adults has repeated, lengthy & fairly severe psychotic episodes – the apotheosis for me was being chased around a table at knifepoint – and no one in the family is able to speak the words “mental illness,” the question of the invisible comes up front & center.

Not that I would have articulated it as such. From the perspective of me at the age of ten, I had simply found a way – creative writing – that I discovered would cause most of my teachers to let me replace any major homework assignment that I found difficult, boring or otherwise repellant: I would offer to write a story or report on the general subject. Writing also gave me a safe place to be, and an acceptable reason for not interacting with that same adult, my grandmother, if I wanted some space, literally, for myself.

Although I didn’t recognize at the time, writing was also giving me a series of tools that were of exceptional value in terms of organizing the world as I was experiencing it – beginning by dealing with such obvious questions as why my family life seemed so different from that of so many (though not all) of the kids around me. I didn’t deal with those questions directly, at least not as a kid & really in many ways not until I got to the age at which my own father had died – 38.

Somewhere in the process, though, I got the idea that there was an awful lot of the contemporary world that was hidden from many, perhaps most, of the people around me. When I was a kid, I would have articulated that in terms of civil rights, and the individual rights of people – especially artists – struggling in Eastern Europe against the censorship of the state. If Jonathan Mayhew thinks I’m earnest now, he should have seen me at the age of 15 or thereabouts. I’m sure that I was insufferable.*

That equation – that the civil rights marchers had much in common with the Hungarian rebels in 1956 and that Eugene “Bull” Connor had even more in common with the heirs of Stalin – stuck with me & proved essential in not only giving me an orientation toward such basic terms as justice, but also gave me the ability & willingness to be the only member of my high school graduating class to file immediately for conscientious objector’s status, which I did within 48 hours of my 18^th birthday. Whenever I look at the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington & see the names of people I grew up with like Ray Nora and Chris Martinez etched into that marble, it reminds me that writing might very well have saved my life on more than one occasion.

So while I’m less concerned with weeds & sparrows, I am always conscious of how the invisible manifests itself, again & again in life. Certainly any man of my generation will recall just how radically differently the relations between genders were back in the early 1960s. It was exactly the “obviousness” of sexist patterns that seemed invisible to men back then, just as many people today have no clue of all the homophobic systems we have in place throughout our lives, the ways in which “daily life” could seem an active campaign for heterosexuality, especially to anyone who doesn’t share in that common myth. So I would articulate my interest in the invisible in terms of the social, more than the natural – especially since I think “nature” is a cultural category, rather like “God,” something we impose on the universe as we live in it – but I often feel that the commitments I felt when I was ten years old are an awful good test of not only my writing, but my life, & bringing the unseen into the foreground is central to those commitments.

* Memo to self: write a piece someday on the importance of insufferable people. Insufferability is deeply underappreciated, just because it’s déjà toujours so obnoxious.

My allusion, in the interview with Carl Boon, to “getting a complete version of The Age of Huts ready” generated a number of email questions. Carl himself may have raised the issue most succinctly:

There are three works in The Age of Huts: Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197. What changes will appear in the complete version? Revisions of these works or additional new works?

The Age of Huts originally contained a fourth work, Ketjak, the first in the cycle of the four poems. When Barrett Watten offered to publish Ketjak as a separate book – an event that changed my life – I had not yet completed the other three works, which I worked on more or less simultaneously during the 1975-78 time frame. In addition there are two other poems, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps & BART, written during the same time frame that have what I would characterize as an adjunct relationship to the cycle of four poems.

Ketjak proved to be the hinge work in my life. Once it appeared in 1978, four years after I’d actually written the poem, I was able to publish pretty much whatever I wanted, at least in journals, a process that forced me to be much more careful about what I consider “complete” or ready to publish. The 800 copies of Ketjak printed by This Press, however, were already largely out of print when The Age of Huts was published by Roof in 1986. Tjanting, written after The Age of Huts – it’s the bridge work between Huts & The Alphabet – was published in 1981 literally within a couple of months of its completion. So the narrative of publication has not been the same as that of composition.

I’ve tried at times to articulate the relationship between Ketjak & the rest of Huts, going so far in the Quarry West issue devoted to my work to publish a chart.* Now, of course, with both books out of print, the question of order is truly academic. But Salt is about to reissue Tjanting and I hope to complete The Alphabet by the end of 2003. Once that is done, I will turn to The Age of Huts and deal with that in more detail. I’ve had a number of conversations with Charles Alexander about it as a project for Chax Press, so my hope would be that it ends up there – but I doubt this would be anything that will get done until later in the decade. Then, after that, I’ll start to think more seriously about one or two books of critical writing. That is the plan.

* Albeit one that I think must be confusing to anyone who doesn’t realize that I use the name Ketjak not just to refer to that original text, but also to the larger writing project I am in the middle of, containing Huts, The Alphabet & the poem I have yet to begin. The chart also fails to deal with BART & Sitting Up adequately. I may be the poet most apt to use charts in critical writing, but that doesn’t mean I always use them well.

Here is the third & final installment of Carl Boon’s questions:

 

7.  "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World" is your major contribution to the debate over reference in poetry. Some critics see the question of reference as the major theoretical battleground in the wide debate between "Language poets" and the group Charles Bernstein calls "workshop poets." Do you think the question of reference continues to be an important, relevant one? How have your ideas about reference changed, say, since the publication of "Disappearance of the Word" or The Chinese Notebook? 

 

“Disappearance” was really the first serious piece of theoretical writing I ever attempted, so I’m both very fond of it while simultaneously a little appalled at the impact it seems to have had over the 27 or so years since David Highsmith and Carl Loeffler talked me into writing it. I basically just sat down, banged out what I’d been thinking, sent one copy to their publication, Art Contemporary, with a second copy to Alan Davies,\ for his photocopied newsletter, A Hundred Posters. Since then, it’s been in The New Sentence, been reprinted three times in anthologies – one in a collection of pieces on Baudrillard that features a debate he & I had at the University of Montana of all places – and translated into Croatian, German and Dutch.

 

I do think that referentiality continues to be important, not because I privilege the opaque signifier as such, but because I think it reveals a range of phenomena both in writing and in the world that become invisible the instant that language is presumed to be transparent.

 

Whenever I think of Jakobson’s model of the six functions of language, I tend to group them into three pairs or axes: contact & code; addresser & addressee; signifier & signified. I envision the model in my head as a six-sided three-dimensional figure, not unlike a die, although in practice I don’t think it really works like one. Non-referentiality focuses on the signifier, de-emphasizes the signified, tends to ignore addresser & addressee and generally privileges the contact (e.g., the physicality of sound) over code (including, though not limited to, syntax). In practice, individual texts tend to be very complex & interesting when looked at in terms of their relation to these six aspects of the linguistic experience, and the idea that one would want to fixate simply on one of them seems to me inherently narrow & limiting.

 

8.  A related question. In his essay "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis," Bruce Andrews engages a roundtable discussion of poets and theorists on the question of reference. (Andrews, as you well know, has written extensively on the question-especially in "Total Equals What" and "Constitution / Writing, Politics, Language, The Body.") But in that roundtable, Jackson Mac Low, Barrett Watten, Nick Lawrence, Andrew Levy, and others discuss the political ramifications (and risks) of "obliterating" reference. In other words, if reference is obliterated (or even "diminished"), political change becomes harder because, in theory, fewer people can be reached. More people can be reached, perhaps, if the language remains transparent. You address this question specifically in The Chinese Notebook when you write:

 

192. A friend, a member of the Old Left, challenges my aesthetic. How, he asks, can one write so as not to "communicate"? I, in turn, challenge his definitions. It is a more crucial lesson, I argue, to learn how to experience language directly, to tune one's senses to it, than to use it as a mere means to an end.

 

If you would expand on that answer, just how do we "experience language directly"? Twenty years later, does your answer to your friend remain the same? Has history altered your answer? Does the current political situation (a conservative administration intent on dominating the world for economic interests) impact it? How would you frame the question today?

 

We experience language directly whenever we sense its presence as embodied, whether it is as a “pure” signifier or just as the embodiment of whatever message might be associated with it. Often, in practice, this is felt as a form of alienation. We hear someone’s accent as “difficult,” recognize a verb phrase as “non-standard,” or are irritated that a comment is sexist, racist or ageist. If the message is transmitted electronically, there may literally be static.

 

There are multiple elements in play with any statement. All six functions come into play and there are many times in which something other than the signified is the most significant. This is most evident in forms of advertising, as when a McDonalds campaign introduced breakfast menus with the tag line “Dawn Good Foods,” the mind literally flipping that “w” upside down, for example, or political ads use omission and innuendo to make their points. But such phenomena present everywhere and at all times.

 

As your question suggests, we’re at an especially dangerous time in human history, but the ability to actually hear & read are skills that are always useful.

 

 

9.  Another related question. Your aesthetic, at least in many volumes of The Alphabet, is considerably more traditional (in terms of reference) than the work of Watten or Andrews. I see this as a departure from, say, Tjanting, which goes further in challenging our perceptions of words and grammatical construction. I think Tjanting is more playful with language than many of The Alphabet volumes. Am I all wrong, or does this perhaps indicate a discord between your theories on reference and your poetic practice? 

 

This goes back to the question of reference you asked in connection with “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World.” Referentiality is not a toggle switch of avant attitude, or even of playfulness. The idea of maximum non-referentiality is every bit as boring as the idea of maximum referentiality. Rather, there is a range, really a series of registers, which move both closer to and further from any idea of unproblematic depiction through language. I have no interest whatsoever in being at either extreme. What does interest me is a full exploration of the range & all the various points along the way.

 

One of the things I wanted to accomplish with The Alphabet was to explore as many different aspects of my poetry as possible. Almost by definition, that desire moved me into a variety of different pursuits. Simply repeating what I had done before would have been the least interesting of possible alternatives. Thus, to pick a pointed example, Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect continues the poem Ketjak per se, but does so without the repetition that was its original organizing device.

 

On the question of playfulness, I hardly know how to gauge that. Jonathan Mayhew’s blog commented the other day on the “earnestness” of my blog as though that were some kind of fault. But there has always been a divergence here between my critical prose and my poetry. Even in the poems, however, I’ve never been that attracted to the New York School mode of humor – from my perspective, it has always been a distraction to the many interesting things I find in their work. Anyone around in the 1970s & ‘80s got to see what the poet-as-standup-comic looked like, just as audiences at poetry slams get to see it today.

 

 

10.  Here is a quote from Gregory Jay's American Literature and the Culture Wars (1997), a book that captures (from the standpoint of pedagogy) the firestorm and subsequent debate E.D. Hirsch stirred up with his theory of "cultural literacy." Jay's book explores what's often sensationalized by the popular media in headlines such as "Berkeley's not teaching Shakespeare anymore" or "Yale doesn't require English majors to read Milton anymore." It's a book about the politics of the syllabus.

 

"What is the aim of teaching 'American' literature?" Is it the appreciation of artistry or the socialization of the reader? The achievement of cultural literacy or training in critical thinking? Can it be all these things without contradicting itself (or hopelessly confusing the student)? (5)

 

I have argued that your work is a better teaching tool than, say, "Sailing to Byzantium" owing to its greater capacity to "socialize" students. In demanding students (especially those new to literature) to be active, inventive, and always thinking critically, Hidden, for example, engages students on more levels than "Sailing to Byzantium," which demands, most of all, understanding. I have had great success teaching your work.

 

What do you think the aim of teaching American literature should be? Is there such a thing as the perfect syllabus? Should "classic," canonized works be taught at all? What would be the point of doing so?

 

There is a presumption here that this has something to do with writing. But the reality is rather the other way around. The question has to do with how poetry  might be utilized for other social purposes that are not really connected to the writing. That famed Martian sociologist might find it strange indeed that historically the basis for what once was the standard educational program, especially at the college level, consisted in good part of the systematic study of works that were produced entirely for other purposes & uses. The poet’s game becomes the student’s midterm.

 

I’m not qualified to pontificate about the broader issues of curricular theory any more than I am to prescribe medications for high blood pressure or provide a recipe for cheesecake.

 

Having said that, I do think that there is a difference between a canon and a classic. Every individual carries around within himself or herself an intuited view as to the works that matter – that is an inescapable part of being human. This intuited map might be characterized as a personal canon, but it is the adjective that matters rather than the noun in that phrase. Further, groups of individuals might share some of the same enthusiasms, such as the ones that have rescued the work of both Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky in the past half century, ensuring that their works stayed more or less in print, or which got Lorine Niedecker really into print in the first place. That is a social canon, and there are literally thousands of them co-existing at any given moment in time. Again, the adjective is more important than the noun.

 

It is when you superimpose one fixed structure over all of the possible ensembles of personal and social canons that you get a “classic,” which is essentially a canon with power. And that’s not about writing or literature or literary value. That’s about power, pure and simple: the power canon.

 

Before the 19^th century, the amount of actual writing in English was little enough so that there really isn’t that much difficulty reading key figures from the various centuries. But with the extension of the English speaking world, fissures seriously do begin to develop & by the start of the 20^th century, they are already pretty deep.

 

 

11.  You have chosen not to pursue a teaching career in the academy, yet professors and graduate students have written about your work extensively. At last count, there have been nine doctoral dissertations about your work and dozens of critical articles and books. Do you find this ironic? Do you find it disheartening that what you have taken a political stand against (the academy) seems to latch onto your work?--that is, at least a few of us.

 

Actually, I think it’s more like two people have written dissertations on my work while another half dozen or so have found it to be a useful terrain for examining whatever issues their dissertations directly addressed. My work hasn’t been so much an object of study as an example.

 

Use in any critical writing targeted toward the academy is always something about which I’ve been ambivalent, partly because that is not where I myself would direct my own energies but also because the actual quality seems so random. Some of the most very positive articles about my poetry have struck me as being the crudest readings imaginable. And I think that one result of that is to reinforce some of the stereotypes of language writing or of my poetry, even when the article was intended in a helpful way.

 

Having said that, though, I’m hardly an absolutist in opposition to the academy or to teaching. I’ve taught at San Francisco State, UC San Diego, New College & the Naropa Institute over the years and enjoyed it every time. There is a genuine value to spending one’s time talking intensely about something you love with people who share that interest. But I am very sensitive to the proclivity of the academy toward abusive relationships, both of faculty and students. And while I’ve declined tenure track appointments, I’ve never been offered an academic position that did not propose to cut my earnings by at least 40 per cent per year. 

 

But if a school were seriously interested in having me teach, I wouldn’t be shocked to find myself doing more of it in the future.

 

 

12.  In her new book, 21st-Century Modernism, Marjorie Perloff claims, as other critics have previously, that Language poetry (she looks especially at the work of Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein) should be considered "a carrying-on, in somewhat diluted form, of the avant-garde project that had been at the very heart of early modernism" (3). By "early modernism," she means especially Stein and the early Eliot. Do you think Perloff's is a fair assessment? Would you like to elaborate on her position?

 

A year or so ago, somebody posed something very close to the question to P. Inman at Kelly Writers House and several of the students in the audience seemed surprised at his announcement “for” modernism. That is where that sort of stereotyping by one’s advocates comes in, joining language poetry to postmodernism simply because that latter term has, for a period, a certain cachet.

 

But this attraction to the modernist project has been a thread you can find in many, perhaps most, of the contributors to In the American Tree. I’ve never thought of langpo as being post-modern or post-structural, but rather much more in line with Habermas’ argument that we need to return to the modernist project and see how it might be done without the internal contradictions history imposed – totalitarianism chief among them.  

 

 

13.  What do you see beyond The Alphabet? Are there any new long-term, long creative projects on the horizon?      

 

I think I’m finally ready to tackle a long poem. I have some ideas about a project that I found literally on p. 61 of Anselm Hollo’s book Corvus where he writes “alphabet ends    universe begins” and I thought, Aha! So I’ve been making notes, looking a lot at Stephen Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science. But I’m a year away from completing The Alphabet – if I’m lucky – and I feel that I’m learning so very much right now that it would foolhardy to get ahead of myself.

 

 

14.  I think The New Sentence was one of the best books of literary criticism to come along in a while. Do you envision putting together any new books of criticism in the future?

 

I’ve had the makings of a new volume more or less ready for some time, but don’t really plan to do the work I need to package it up qua book until I get The Alphabet complete and make more firm arrangements for getting a complete version of The Age of Huts ready.

 

15.  And finally, recently you wrote to me that Bob Dylan is one of the few artists from (near) your generation still doing "relevant new work." I am including a chapter on Dylan in my project, arguing that his songs and liner notes from the mid-1960s constitute a kind of "Language poetry," that he indeed is one of the originators of the school. How would you respond to that? Additionally, why do you think Dylan's new work is "relevant"?

 

Well, as you might imagine from my previous responses, I don’t agree with the premises of your argument. Dylan as a musician has had a serious influence on poets, not just because of the extraordinary concision and use of metaphor in his lyrics, but also because he has been such an example of a person consciously shaping & changing an art form in response to his times. But his liner notes & the novel Tarantula are really imitative Beat fare, sort of adolescent Ferlinghetti as swirled through a blender that would include William Burroughs, Jacques Prevert & the surrealists. At that level, I would pay more heed to Ray Bremser or Charlie Plymell. & I would pose the question of what your argument has to do with either Dylan’s music or the writing to which you might yoke it.

 

In one narrow sense, though, you might be right. Burroughs is certainly the not-so-secret source of much of the imagery one finds in Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and, in the process, Dylan does demonstrate how such elements might be brought into play in the radically different form that is song. As such, he does demonstrate how any genre incorporates material from beyond its traditional borders, a process that Shklovsky argued was essential to the vitality of any art.** In showing just how far a mainstream medium such as rock & roll can go in terms of its exploration of meaning, he did set a bar, sort of a level of minimum acceptability, for any self-respecting poet, not in terms of style so much as in just how much the writer will require from him- or herself as a functioning artist. One could make the exact same argument – and I have, basically – about the early novels of Kathy Acker. If you aren’t willing to accept this level of risk, why would you expect anyone to want to listen to you?

 

Further, Dylan’s sense of what his style was or means has changed constantly, even restlessly, over the years. When I last heard him live just about a year ago, he was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a style that was on the hard edge of Nashville-type country, closer in tone to the Southern rock group Alabama than to either his earlier versions or, say, Peter, Paul & Mary. And the songs on his last two albums show him as somebody still responding actively and formally to his environment. At a time when most of the other members of his own generation have turned into historical recreators of their own younger selves – viz., the Stones – Dylan & Neil Young (inventor of that neglected genre, folk-metal) seem to be the among the few still pushing themselves as artists. But Roger McGuinn’s decision to resurrect the archive of the cowboy song, which has been the focus of his recent work, out of a concern that the current phenomenon of the singer-songwriter means that traditional songs per se are endangered is itself such a noteworthy project, so it really isn’t about the lyrics in that sense.

 

Similarly, the artist who may be closest in cultural impact to the young Dylan in how he pushes peoples buttons, Eminem, also demonstrates precisely how a form can expand & redefine itself. A song such as “Cleaning Out My Closet” could be examined in the terms that one sets for the analysis of any Dylan song (& its video adds layers Dylan has never achieved) or for the highest order poetry. But that doesn’t make it poetry any more than his extraordinary talent makes Marshall Mathers a nice guy.

 

 

** The absence of which is also the death of a genre, which is precisely what is wrong with the school of quietude.