parkbench sinner
Friday, April 30, 2004
Jim Behrle edits can we have our ball back? and serves as Roving Poet for WBUR's syndicated radio newsmagazine "Here & Now."
Edmund Berrigan was born in Colchester, England, moved to Chicago two weeks later, and two years from then went on to New York to study rent escalation. He is the author of Disarming Matter from Owl Press (1999). Recent poems have or will appear(ed) in or on Lungfull!, Pom, 3ammagazine.com, Van Gogh's Ear, & Cock Now.
Jim Cory, a 25 year veteran of the Philadelphia poetry scene, has been a Yaddo and Pennsylvania Arts Council fellow and published seven chapbooks of poems.
hassen writes poetry & fiction & lives near Philadelphia. Poems have been to Skanky Possum, Nedge, Barque Press' One Hundred Days Anthology, and in the upcoming issue of Frequency Audio Journal. Hassen likes summer a lot.
Sofia Memon is a poet and welfare rights lawyer who lives and works in Philadelphia. Sofia has read her work at The Khyber, the Asian Arts Initiative. Her poetry will appear in the soon to be published anthology, Writing the Lines of Our Hands. Her writing is an exploration of sound, lyric, and form as well as an expression of cultural fusion, muslim spirituality, and humane politics.
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore's poems have appeared in Zyzzva, the Citys Lights Review, and The Nation. His books Dawn Visions (1964), and Burnt Heart, Ode to the War Dead (1972), were both published by City Lights Books. His latest collections are The Blind Beekeeper and The Ramadan Sonnets. Visit his new website:
Deborah Richards is known for her colorful wraps and her slips into British English. Her first collection of poems, Last One Out, is now out from Subpress.
Molly Russakoff has published and performed her poems widely over the past 25 years. She was a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in 1995. She currently owns Molly's Cafe & Bookstore in Philadelphia's Itlanian Market, where she hosts poetry and prose readings and tries to sell quality used books. She also is an editor of Joss, a poetry magazine, and the poetry editor of The Philadelphia Independent.
Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). Her poems and other writings have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Agni, Fence, The Women's Review of Books and others. She lives and writes in New York City.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Jim Cory:
7) I know many visual artists, and I spend a lot of time visiting
galleries and museums. I sometimes have the experience of being moved to
tears by a painting. But I couldn't say one particular visual artist has
provided a model for what I write, in the way that, say, reading the New
York School, Beats, San Francisco poets, Black Mountain people, etc.
showed me how to write poems. I love Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, O'Keefe
and of course Joan Mitchell, DeKooning, Pollack and that gang. I like
color and the attraction, for me, to painting, is every bit as powerful
as the attraction to literature or music. But the method of creating a
painting, vs. making a poem, is altogether different. Painters think
like poets, but then again they don't. Then again, if I see a certain
visual image that overwhelms, I tend to analyze it. I try and mentally
re-create the process that brought it into existence. I do that with
anything that gets past my guard. The greatest art, of whatever genre,
belongs in a genre of its own.
8) I think it might be one of those rubber shrunken heads people used to
dangle from their rear-view mirrors in the 60s.
9) It'd depend on the time of day and circumstance. If I'm just back
from the the big Borders on Broad St. here in Philadelphia, having
perused shelves and shelves of mediocre books that somehow made it into
print, your pill would change me into that creature Sigorney Weaver
faced down in Alien. On the other hand, if it's a rainy Saturday
afternoon and I've taken to my bed with, say, "Poems for the Millenium,"
or Zukovsky's Collected Poems, I would walk in the bathroom to pee and
suddenly see, looking back from above the sink, a gardenia that could
smell itself.
Sofia Memon
7. I learned pottery from this beautiful woman named Roseanna Cruz. Boy, I'll be so embarrassed if she reads this. Anyway Roseanna was this audacious woman who was stunningly, but not conventionally beautiful and had this great black curling hair and didn't mind sweating. She was fabulous to watch-and she said while she was throwing a massive bowl that it was the shape inside of the pot that was most important. That insight, by analogy, informs just about everything in my life, including poetry. Poems work best for me like containers, telling you a thing by showing you its perimeter; humble, like bowls.
8. I don't know. I didn't know what L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry was when I was asked this question. I'm still not entirely sure what it is. But here's a gesture at an answer: I might not like Ezra Pound or William Blake, but I love playing with form. I love the freedom to play and I love the form with which to start playing. I want both and I enjoy both. So I guess L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry would be brown goo which would be nice if it were chocolate that could be scraped into bites, or if it were paint and I could take a sieve and separate the colors and start again winding my way carefully back to brown goo.
9. Once an Egyptian man living in Italy made me a meal. He fried whole, finely breaded fish. It was a little grotesque as I was a vegetarian and the fish eyes were all glassy. But it was so decadent and so irresistible. He made a spicy meat stew and drained the juice into the rice for cooking. He mixed feta cheese with olives and put oil and pepper on the every green but lettuce salad. He pulled out the only table from the wall in his one room house and set it with simple white plates. That table, set with the eyes of the fish staring up at me; that's what I see in the mirror.
Prageeta Sharma
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who
is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
There are so many visual artists. I currently am loving Chinese Conceptual art as well what is happening in my generation of painters.
8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift,
what would it look like? An orange parka.
9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way
you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what
do you see? I wouldn't see it in the mirror but I would feel wonderful all of the time.
Molly Russakoff
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who
> is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
> My sister Julie, who I am sadly no longer in touch with. She inspired and
influenced me in most ways. She had a very joyful and intuitive approach to
painting. She painted large cartoonish canvasses, had a great sense of
humor in her paintings, lots of bright colors. They were also fairly
narrative for paintings. My parents have one of her paintings hanging that
is a large literal depiction of the song ST. Louis Woman.>
> 8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift,
> what would it look like?
> Refrigerator magnets. Just as an aside, what really did arrive in the
mail...was a free sample of special KY Jelly that heats to the touch. The
weird thing was that it was actually addressed to my mother.
> 9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way
> you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror,
what
> do you see?
I look like a gazelle traipsing through a field of flowers.
Jim Behrle
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is
it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
Jim: Tom & Jerry. And X-men comics.
8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift,
what would it look like?
Jim: (At this point I stood up and stripped off to display the homemade
Charles Bernstein LANGUAGE POETRY Wiffleball Team jersey I wore under the
Pirates' jersey I had on. They will soon be available.)
9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way
you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what
do you see?
Jim: I quit drinking 6 months ago. This pill doesn't sound like it would
jive with my sobriety. Sorry.
7. So far as I can think, no artist has directly inspired my poetry.
However, there are quite a few who have provided re-affirmation of
life-perspective I mentioned earlier/above. Immediately to mind come
Cornell, Duchamp, Goya, Wyeth. C for wonder and play, D�s possibility and
humor, G�s truth, vigilance, W�s ability to listen, reflect. Oh! another: I
have a pic of a painting on my bedroom door � Brad Eberhard�s �My Squid Suit
Brings Isolation.� It�s a found image - of Wyeth�s �Christina�s World� - but
Eberhard painted a goofy red squid suit on her. One of the best things I�ve
ever seen. The work of some artist friends really excites me, too. To answer
the second part of this question � my poems are not directly, so far as I
know, informed by their work, but again, they likely (hopefully) reflect a
certain perspective to living these artists reinforce. Now that I think
about it, I wouldn�t be surprised if the Crap I often frame (for coin)
inspires me to subtly deride one or two specific & overrated artists in a
future poem.
8. It would be portable steps. & reversible.
9. It seems like a funhouse mirror. I can only
.focus.on.how.the.mirror.distorts.my.image , which might be, what, a
transforming sky? shadow? vapor? Hey now...
Edmund Berrigan
7) When I was 15 I went to the MOMA with my mom and looked at some cubism
paintings. It blew my mind and I had to leave 5 minutes later. It seemed to
be just like the way I wanted thought to work.
8) It would look like a stone. I would love it for being a stone, and it
to my collection. I have two cats who sometimes knock the stones off their
shelf. They break apart. But they're still stones, and still great.
9) I see nothing, because I have no eyes. I feel gaseous and peculiar, and
everything is motion. After awhile I can tell that the types of motion are
different. Then I stop having human associations.
Deborah Richards
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
I loved this question. I'm interested in modern art-- anti-art movements such as in Fluxus, Vito Acconci's procedures, Jeff Koons kitch, Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden project. I find that I'm energized by conceptual art. I enjoy the space of the installation, and minute detail of a Chuck Close portrait.
I would like my own work to take up space, be large, yet have the quirky detail that calls the eye to attention.
I once trained to be a volunteer docent at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, but I left before I could do real tours. I'd love to learn more and use some of the concepts and techniques in my work.
I have started (almost!!) a collaboration with Alicia Askenase on trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye)because of an exhibition I saw in Washington about a year ago.
8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift, what would it look like?
It would be a collection of excyclopaedia, bound in mauroon leather-look fabric with a gold trim. The pages would be fine, and the print would be small, but it should be well-written and include actual examples of texts. As I like research, it would be a perfect gift.
I'd prefer the hard back version of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, because I'd find it easier than browsing the C.D-rom. Though, the C.D- rom would be easier to take with me if I moved.
9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what do you see?
A "magic eye" picture that, with closer investigation and concentration, becomes an image. The poet is not trying to hide the image, but create another of view of a series of lines, dashes, and squiggles. In the magic eye book there are some pictures that are easier to read than others, and that's the fun, the seriousness, and variety of the form.
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
I can't mention William Blake enough, it seems. He is the real Sufi English poet and illustrator of heavenly realities for me, even as his nude figures would be frowned on by the sterner and more puritan "religious" Muslims. But from the first time I saw his work, luminous, making the unseen palpable, actually radiating light as in (or out from) the paintings of Turner, I felt the breath of his multi-worldly dimension on my cheek and wanted to inhabit it. As an artist in both graphic and verbal realms, he is the model of the rugged innovator, an earlier Harry Partch (in music), certain of his mission, working in obscurity though he didn't want to (he hoped for more unanimous cultural usefulness, as did Whitman and Van Gogh), for the sake of social, political and spiritual revelation, but from the deep soul's standpoint in every case. As well as the fluidity of his figures and the amazingly otherworldly light in his paintings (seeing his paintings "live," as at the Met show a year or so ago, I was often staggered by the actual radiance that seems to emanate from within his works), his non-insipid angelic beings and spiritual entities, always Michaelangelesquely muscular and energetic, the reality of his imagination always stands forthright and strong and vigorous. As he said in the "devil's" voice in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight."
From my manuscript, Angel Broadcast:
SHOWER OF ANGELS
There's a shower of them, a downpour of
intelligent angels through the air,
landing and seeping into the ground everywhere.
They're impassive as they slide down into
matter and go, like cutouts, past its
surfaces, eyes always ahead, tinged with joy.
How could angels heed warnings? They do what they're
told, they have no
way to deny except to
burst into flame and burn
incandescently on a cloud-edge or eyelid-edge
forever, heart-edge sharp as broken glass,
their face-cavalcade showering through the air
toward and away from us
going out in a mist above the bay-waters of
human commerce.
8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift, what would it look like?
Labyrinths in lab coats with tongue depressors or
lang. gauges like Laplanders with little lights on
talking through mazes where amazement manifests
age after age in angelic formations
though to our minds or minefields
miasmas of ams as in "I am" or "you am," (Popeye)
"I never met a poem I didn't like" (Will Rogers)
as against
"I never killed a poem that didn't deserve it" (Al Capone)
(Hey, some of my best friends are L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets)
or could (should) be�
I consider some Eskimo songs poems of this ilk
(elk)
The milk of kindness flows from poem to poem
in vessels as varied as faces or surprises
9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what do you see?
I came of age in Oakland and San Francisco in the 60s, met and knew the old school poets Ginsberg, McClure and Ferlinghetti, was energized by massive poetry readings attended by blissed out multitudes packed to the rafters who hung on every word and waited for every new book of poems to come out�"news that stays news" (Pound), started a poetry theater company, The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, writing ecstatic texts to be declaimed to the night skies of psychedelic Berkeley, then in 1970 entered a Sufi realm where the poetry of Mevlana Rumi was the portal, and the diwan (or poetry-song collection) of our enlightened teacher in Morocco, Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, became our daily reading and singing, along with studying and reciting the Qur'an, whose acknowledged sacredness of language and elevation of meaning was beyond anything I'd ever encountered. I can't be blamed, therefore, for having a take on poetry that is rooted in Beat directness but heads into stratospheric empyreans (as Jim Cory calls it) in search of new meanings and fresh inspirations. I mean, I can be blamed, of course, but I've got a good lawyer.
So when I look into the mirror, I may not see a glib or cocky self, may not see a corduroy'd poet with leather elbow patches, may not see respectable member of the poetry community looking straight back at me with confidence and even a certain self-effacing brio, but having seen a new dimension of poetry as a way toward direct, experiential knowledge of God, and as a means through ecstatic excitement and vaster dimensionality to lead others to a simultaneously experienced knowledge (as against one previously experienced and then rationally explained)�(I mean one experienced at the very writing of the poem!), though I make no similar claims for myself in terms of a station of elevation, yet having sat with someone whose "poetry" didn't come from sitting down to write, but rather from being overwhelmed with angelic dictation (see Jack Spicer�but think in terms of Sufi or Judeo-Christian mystical tradition where such ideas are assumed and expected - Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, even Japanese Zen Master Dogen, for example)�
so that hopefully
if I looked into a mirror after having
swallowed such a pill
bitter sweet or bittersweet
I might see rolling hills with a strange green light splashing over them
rainbow-lit ocean waves heaving over their silvery fringes
or a hood with no face in it looking back at me
and in that open space
God's light itself
o
Sunday, March 28, 2004
QUESTION 4
Please respond to the follow excerpt from Ann Lauterbach's essay "After
the Fall":
"A form contains. The forms of freedom are not without restraint,
as in 'free verse,' which is not the same as formless. If we do not know
how to restrain, retrain, our desires, then we will not know how to align
our power to the limited resources of the world. If we do not begin to
re-imagine our power, we will use it mainly to constrain others...."
--American Letters & Commentary, issue #14, page 9
THE ANSWERS:
JIM BEHRLE:
This is complete bullshit. I wish I was powerful and could constrain
others. There are plenty who should be constrained. But there's nothing
more powerless than a poet.
EDMUND BERRIGAN:
I agree with Anne 100% & I think that she has tried very hard to use the
brief national spotlight on poetry, which Laura Bush accidentally triggered
in her plastic surgery haze, to great effect. Anne Lauterbach understands
her responsibilities to the world.
JIM CORY:
Containing is only one function of a form. Form's other purpose is to
express whatever's essential about content. I like poems in form which
set out to, and succeed in, subverting form. I like the work of poets
who create fresh forms for each new poem. Obviously anyone can write any
way he or she wishes -- this is where aesthetic freedom comes in -- but
conventional forms invariably signal conventional thought and
conventional language. Was it Pound who admonished the writers of his
time to: Make it new! Well, he was right on about that.
Form is the great challenge and responsibility of the poet. It's what
matters. Content's an expediency, and often a trap. People who mistake
content for the heart of the poem write poems that turn to dust in an
instant. It's not what the poem's about, it's what you do with what it's
about, therein opportunity lies. And of course nothing interesting
happens without passion and directness.
HASSEN:
4. When I first read this, I thought it about said it all. I further
considered & wasn�t sure it said so much but maybe implied it all. I suppose
a form contains. Though I�m unsure that�s always the case. Does containment
imply imprisonment? If so, then I don�t believe a[ny] form contains so much
as outlines or suggests a pattern or contour for our senses to determine (or
not). As for free verse, I agree it�s not necessarily without restraint and
of course not formless (anyway, can�t form be found of anything if only in
the idea of any thing?). Forms of freedom not without restraint - OK. I
agree with the third and fourth sentences, though the leap seems great from
the second. I�m sure she�s talking about tyranny, anarchy & freedom & if I
think about the previous question re Pound, I make a direct connection with
all of these thoughts. However to summarize, I could better understand
something like �If we do not begin to imagine forms outside of the those we
insist upon � as well as understand there are forms beyond our understanding
� we will tend to constrain others and in so doing strangle ourselves.� or:
�let loose the noose� �live and let live� �unnet lucy the goose.� Likely she
said it perfectly and I�m just not completely getting it. But I probably
agree. �Form,� I guess, is just a really vague term to discuss greed/abuse
of power & doesn�t seem to me as pertinent as something like �point.� How
about specific forms? For example, an enforced or premeditated form may be
a symptom of systemic insecurity � resulting from, among other things,
denial/ignorance/disrespect of self/other/intuition. I wouldn�t say the
overall utility of Form In General determines how or why one would seek
excessive power. Or was she simply saying we all need some form of restraint
so we don�t constrain others & I�m, in proper convoluted form, beginning
(for I am utilizing restraint by discontinuing) a mess of it...
SOFIA MEMON:
Ann Lauterbach, on the other hand, is very interesting. I'm understanding better know how you've put together these questions, Conrad. Are you really thinking about all of this? Freedom, structure, the limits of postmodernism, the problems of eventual nihilism, narcissism?
I agree with Ann, like this:
>>>>>
form contains, restraint re-imagines: freedom;
desires, without restraint, constrain freedom.
we do not know how to retrain, align
we begin without, use power: not freedom.
our limit of resource is formlessness
forms retrain our voices versed in freedom.
>>>>>
or something like that.
DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE:
While I am not a "formalist," chaos theory has shown us that there is a persistent and consistent form even in the seemingly "formless," the greatest "formlessness" being that dimension beyond death, perhaps (from which no direct flesh-and-blood messenger has returned, alas), but while we're here we're all in some form or other, even the jellyfish, the miasma, and, I would wager, even the Imagination itself. In poetry, however, total formlessness, in the formal sense, might end up giving us all migraines, although Gertrude Stein goes a long way to the edge and peers down into the abyss (which many contemporaries seem to shinny with ease). Though we might set out eschewing the Tennysonian forms, the even-metered forms, the iambics and dactyls, and crash out of them with intensity of purpose, after the long practice of inspired writing, a sense of "rightness" comes. As Wm. Blake said: "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become Wise." A Jackson Pollock painting, at his peak, takes you inward through an explosion of traditional forms, plus a new, wild way of working, though you can spot someone else's imitation in a second, should anyone be rash enough to try, since he ended by creating a "form" by way of a certain jet-propelled yet ultimately lyrical "formlessness."
A poem in this regard (perhaps obliquely) from my manuscript: The Book of Infinite Beauty:
IN THE GLASS ON THE TABLE
In the glass on the table shone the mountain
in the glacial mirror on the mountainside
shone the sun and moon in their season
and the sky wrapped itself around them both
and at the core was the mountain
and at the mountain's base the glass
and you picked up the glass to drink and the
mountain shimmered
and as you tilted back your head
the sun and moon swam in their parameters
and as you swallowed
there was a new image aglow in the glass of the
curvature edge of things like a
blade slowly coming down that sliced the
mountain clean off its base and cut the
glass in two and left your
head as sun and moon enveloped in each
other's gaze your sunlight and your moonlight
entwined on the terrace where we
sat as you placed your hand around the
glass and I could see reflected in its water
the mountain its peak and beyond its
peak the sky in all its splendor
and your face like the sky in even
greater splendor in the
sunlight
Lauterbach's quotation above actually is talking about a dimension beyond simply the writing of poetry, however, and in fact now strikes me as more political than poetical. Be that as it may, I also recall Rimbaud's words from his Lettre du Voyant (Letter of the Seer): "[The poet] is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he must make his inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he carries back from down there has form, he gives it form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found - besides, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come!"
DEBORAH RICHARDS:
I probably rambled on with this question in the live version of this blog. I said that I saw this an American question. I still feel the same, and I'm probably going to be rambler here too.I have read the rest of essay, so I can't speak for the focus of the original argument.Excuse my attempt at thinking through the meaning of power with this quotation.
I think a Brit does not view "power" in the same way--there is the feeling that "we",in England, think the same, as though it is still a monocultural society. It is not. This means that we accept power relations of our society because that's the way it has always been. This is one of the reasons I am exiled (temporarily) from Britain. Of course, no one really cares what "we" think these days.
So, I see this as a question that asks us to understand the systems of the poem and the world. An awareness of the system and the kinds of privilege of being part of this system--by being American or an American-based writer--is something that should be noted and examined. Our "freedoms" even when challenged (and especially because they are challenged)are accepted and expected. There is an assumption that the "we" consume the resources greedily without restraint.
Note: I assume the "we" in Ann Lauterbach's quotation was the American.
MOLLY RUSSAKOFF:
I think this is a pretty wrenched metaphor. Poetry, as it is written, is
so solitary and meditative. It really has no correlation to the actual
resources available in the world. I do, however, believe that free verse is
not formless, that poetry itself is a form, a form of art and of speech and
of communication. A poet's main restraints are the margins or edges of the
page. How's that?
PRAGEETA SHARMA:
I think she is discussing the possibility of linking our forms or styles to a more enlightened possibility when we make decisions in our poems-- Lauterbach has a certain integrity in her innovations that I find inspiring.
---------
QUESTION 5:
Tell us about a poem you read at some point during your formative years
that woke you to the possibilities of poetry.
THE ANSWERS:
JIM BEHRLE:
I blew this question when it was first asked. I'm enjoying my formative
years right now. I could go on and on about John Berryman's "Dream Song
#1." It means little to me know, there were poets in that room at the Philly
Sound weekend that show me more about the possibilities of poetry.
Berryman's "Dream Songs" just showed me at the time that all poems didn't
necessarily suck.
EDMUND BERRIGAN:
Dylan Thomas' poem "The Hand that Signed the Paper", shined a great
light on my forehead when I was 15. His collected poems had the language in
it between thought and articulation, which I heard and hoped to utter. This
particular one was easier to comprehend, which helped for that particular
moment; as well is was an antiwar poem, and the first gulf war was happening
& so it joined two worlds together for me, poetry and reality.
JIM CORY:
When I was 12, I shoplifted a copy of the Mentor Book of Major
American Poets from the gift shop at the Stamford Museum & Nature
Center, in Stamford, CT. It became a Bible, and I mean that literally in
the sense that when I opened it up, the words on its pages seemed like
sacred text. Even those I couldn't understand. (Crane's "The Bridge,"
for instance, reprinted in entirety.) Nineteenth century poets such as a
Poe, Longfellow or even E.A. Robinson were discernable, logical,
entrancing. I memorized big chunks and went around reciting it all to
amused or irritated adults. But the Moderns were another story.
Williams, Eliott, Stevens proved impenetratable. I gave up trying,
assuming I was too much of a dunce to get it. What was happening was
that I couldn't find a way to get beneath the surface of a poem, so I
stuck with the poems which were mostly surfaces. Then one day I was on
the porch reading this book and a guy who was painting our house,
probably early 20s, with goatee (most unusual, even subversive, in 1966)
came down from the ladder. He asked what I was reading. I held up the
book. "Can I show you a poem?" He seemed both interested and kind. I
handed him the book. He found what he was looking for and opened to the
page with Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream." "Here," he said, "read
this." I did. "What do you think it means?" I shook my head, feeling
rather ashamed of my stupidity. "It's a poem about a funeral," he said.
"See here where it says..." -- pointing -- "If her horny feet
protrude/they come to show/how cold she is/and dumb" and "Let the boys
bring flowers in last month's newspapers." I could see how the images
led with a certain inexorable magic to the final lines. What he had
shown me, of course, was metaphor, and how it works. It was the key that
unlocked most of what, up to that time, had been hidden behind technical
mysteries.
HASSEN:
This poem woke me to the possibilities of a certain perspective of Life!
poetry being my/a reflection of it. I�m not so interested in the
possibilities of my poetry as I am the possibilities of my life. In any case
this one poem contains lots of stuff that turns me on � wonder, imagery,
play with reality/convention, simultaneous seemingly conflicting �truth,�
silliness/absurdity � especially regarding such things as mortality.
SOFIA MEMON:
Stylistically, it was that Emily Dickenson poem that starts "Ample make this bed..." It's delicious how she uses words. And the cadence never fails. It's kind of amazing how urgent and sensual she can be while still being relevant to the rest of us.
But emotionally, it was that ee cummings poem with a line that talks about "the shocking fuzz of your electric fur..." Who knew body hair could be so sexy?; this made adolescence bearable.
DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE:
The poem is by Mexican poet, Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, born in 1932, translated as follows:
ENTHUSIASM'S FOUNDATION
O singer enthusiasm, you pierce the crypt of trills
with loudest din and most avid song!
Your power is the sunrise that unfurls its flags above the hill,
the sky that unloads its purple baskets over a ravenous precipice,
the foliage of bells you ignite in an enchanted wood.
For you, who illuminates my trust,
I clear brush from the path and remove its verdant traps.
For you, who flows on a giant ocean swell
as frail as the bones of a turtledove,
as vulnerable as geranium-thatch on a wall,
as fragile as a warrior who defies an avalanche
with the single bright wafer of his shield,
I now braid my enamored offering.
For you, possessing the password required to rule in the Southern Cross,
the first to hurl yourself in between creaking rafters,
escaping from the night of the world by a frayed cable,
for you, unique word, solar incarnation of all miracles,
I stretch the stalactites of poetry all the way to the ground
and with strange lightnings ignite the heart of mankind.
I was 22, living in Mexico, had dropped out of the University of California in Berkeley to write poetry, had already been mightily turned on by Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Patchen, the French Surrealists, et al, but met Marco personally in Mexico City, and was amazed by his stolid and even anciently indigenous authority (yes, Indian) in the realm of the pure and fluid imaginal world. Part of the mystique was that as I was learning Spanish, romanticizing it incredibly in terms of its daily usage because of its musicalilty and the latino's love of talking, I began translating his poems, difficult because of his use of abstruse words and complex imagery, and felt I was peeling back veils from a real mystery in so doing. This poem is an example of his work, but its exaltedness, ecstatic bursting of song, and what he called "plasticidad" of image-making, where an image is in movement rather than static, really inspired my lifelong work in writing poems. He sat in his rooftop studio, drawing in pastels, drinking far too much, his long Indian face and slow manner of speaking from some deep source, and then these almost ritual poems, which seemed to come as if by miracle, were an exciting revelation to me, that even later led to Blake and Rumi, Hafez and 'Attar.
DEBORAH RICHARDS:
This was a difficult question, because I was not turned on by poetry when I was younger. I liked "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare because I learned it for school.I tried to write my own rhymes, but I learned fairly soon that poetry was not something that people like me did. I believe that I didn't have the capacity to learn how to write those kinds of poems.
I was influenced by African American writers--Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou (she's a regular visitor to London). Prose was the answer, but I didn't seem to have the stamina for it. I ended up with poems--sounds a bit like the second prize to competition with only 2 contestants.
About the Gil Scott-Heron choice. There was a documentary I watched in England where Heron walked the streets of Washington D.C. He was the first person who gave me the poetry bug, but it was the politics, the poem, and the poet combination.
I've seen Scott-Heron perform in London, and a favored memory is exchanging a friendly glance with him at Heathrow airport a long time ago. He seemed like a nice guy.
Maybe I should have chosen him to for my drag persona. A nice mellow black man rather than a loud white guy. I'm Gemini.
MOLLY RUSSAKOFF:
The poem that comes to mind first, as always, is "Dirge Without Music"
which floored me with its audacious claim that the poet, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, was not resigned to death. There is no other place that a thought
this futile and sorrowful can be expressed so forthrightly and with such
elegance.
PRAGEETA SHARMA:
I am not embarrassed to say that I read everything out of the Norton Anthology--it is great in high school, it's like looking at baseball cards. (Conrad, you have a whole response to this)
---------
QUESTION 6:
What are your thoughts on creative writing degree programs?
THE ANSWERS:
JIM BEHRLE:
I wish that no other degree programs existed. That everyone would be
foreced to become a poet and to teach other poets.
EDMUND BERRIGAN:
I think creative writing programs are useful, but that I would die of
restraint if I attended one. I'm not interested in the University route,
but only because everyone takes it. It surely has its uses as it does its
power structures. I'm choosing to struggle with a myriad of unrelated jobs
in an attempt to get a different set of experiences. Most of my friends &
family have MFA's. But University politics are ridiculous, and there's
plenty of shit to wade through before you get the diamond that no one buys.
JIM CORY:
These programs can have value -- Naropa, for instance, is a great
institution -- assuming the student learns to make his or her own
judgements. Unfortunately, many teachers seem to regard aesthetic
mimicry as the measure of success. They want to turn out clones of
themselves, disciples. And so many who come out of those schools carry
with them the virus of academic snobbery. Symptoms? Condescension,
competitiveness, rank envy. Mao had the right idea, sending them all out
to plant rice.
HASSEN:
I�ve never been drawn to it or taken any such courses so I don�t think I
can fairly say too much outside of it seems like a good way to spend time.
If I were asked to say more, I�d wonder if there is danger for the creative
individual in any institution if being a unique voice/perspective is
important. & certainly not to say resistance is futile. Some of my favorite
people/poets are creative writing program vets.
SOFIA MEMON:
It's nice I guess to have the excess to have such things as creative writing degree programs. Except when creative writing degree program students only have insight to offer about writing and things written and the life with enough excess to attend a creative writing degree program. I don't know. Study is useful; it does more than it ever seems to do. I like that we have (I have had) that excess. But I feel bad when writing becomes so referential to some canon or another that the rest of us louses who are trying to make a living, love beauty, make more beauty, don't know or care much anymore what another writer is talking about.
On the other hand, if I were in a creative writing program, maybe someone would keep sticking Ann Lauterbach's essays in front of my nose. Maybe I would assimilate parts of her useful critique and commentary and let them shape me (without ever referring to her or her poems in a poem), and maybe that would make me a better writer.
DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE:
I must restrain myself on this question, though I have a constellation of answers, and am genuinely puzzled by the situation at hand in our present literary culture. I was counseled by a professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley that I would have to learn to write a formal essay if I wanted to remain in the department, but that, from the evidence of a paper I wrote on Walden (that was in no way formal), which he read very enthusiastically to the class, I might really want to just go elsewhere and write. So I did. The climate of the 60s in Berkeley was certainly a factor, but the idea of shouldering academic anemia and pressure, and the fact that it seemed every professor in the department was walking down the corridors with a knife in his back from one rival or another (though Thom Gunn was on the faculty, as well as Louis Simpson and Tom Parkinson), I decided to go it alone into the savage world without a safety net. Since then, I've traveled, worked at various jobs, none of which was teaching poetry or even undergraduate English in a college or university or even a high school, and have always written poetry late at night, after a day's work, resulting in over 48 manuscripts, some quite large, but attracting over the years very marginal peer or editorial recognition. I also sometimes feel the lack of an actually solid academic education, being, since then, more of an autodidact in my reading and assimilating. But then I also took another path altogether, and became a Muslim-Sufi in 1970 which led in another direction, toward Morocco and Mecca and the scholars of Qur'an and the world of spiritual realities, something I might really never have done if I'd stuck it out in the University, gotten a little teaching job somewhere, or a big one, become a more published poet perhaps, etc. etc.
One of the main plusses but also minuses of writing degree programs, it seems, is that one enters a "culture" which supports, gives grants and prizes, and may even publish and make "famous" the member practitioner of poetry, but I wonder about the results. Nothing can substitute living and writing because you have to. Most poetry readings are attended these days by fellow poets. This is a clich�. Most poetry I read or hear at readings has become cerebral and inbred. The fire of the beats, who fired me up, has largely been tamed by university acceptance of wild creativity, highjacked perhaps by degree programs where students learn all the tones and voices and techniques and loosenings of inhibitions necessary to write, but may miss staggering lost in a Mexican forest at night, or falling into the London canal while working on a barge in Little Venice, or buying tins of pilchards in the markets of Nigeria, or�which I don't posit as better than a degree, necessarily, but whose life experience may give a bit more grit, perhaps, than approval and applause from like voices. Do I envy the success of published works of degree holders and graduates from the warm and feathery wings of creative writing mentors and poet professors? Sometimes.
Perhaps someone who wants to write great poetry should major in brain surgery or astronomy, comparative religion, or even, for God's sake, banking, and then write as if his or her life depended on it (hello there Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives�). Are we in a hall of echoes where everyone begins to sound alike? Will all the poets in the audience please raise their hands? What! No janitors, aviators, marine biologists or even petty criminals in the audience? (Ach! I'm talking to myself again�)
DEBORAH RICHARDS:
I learned a lot from the Temple Creative Program. I think programs work if you happen to be in the right place and with the right people. One year either way might have influenced the positive feelings I have for my program. This is a bit hit-or -miss. I like reading and having access to the libraries, so any kind of study would suit me.
It feels that a Creative Writing Degree gives you access to a writing community, and it annoints the writer as accredited and able to "teach" in the University. In my case, I don't think I would have been able to finish my writing if I hadn't studied in a formal way.
There are lots of ways to be a writer.
MOLLY RUSSAKOFF:
Oh, if people want to go that route, it is certainly available. It might
be fun to be around all those people who are writing poems. I mean, it was
fun when I was at Naropa. It seems a bit like an industry. But who I am I
to say? I have loved many people who partook in these programs. I guess
it's just not for me, if for no other reason than I don't have the time or
money.
PRAGEETA SHARMA:
I had a wonderful time, I learned how to make the transition of writing privately to a public dialogue. I learned the value of mentors and poetic traditions.
THE QUESTIONS
1) You are invited to do a drag show poetry reading, what poet will you
perform?
JIM BEHRLE
This is a strange and wonderful honor. We don't have drag show poetry
readings in Boston, that I know of. I would say Anne Waldman, who would be
fun because she's so energetic. Can sing, dance, write: she's a
triple-threat. I'd have to shave the moustache, though. But even more fun
would be a Victor/Victoria swing: me pretending to be a woman pretending to
be Robert Pinsky. That's a show you could take on the road.
EDMUND BERRIGAN
I would arrive with the top half of Anne Waldman, and the bottom half of
a tank.
JIM CORY
Anna Akmatova. So seductive, so intense. Noting this now makes me
want to run to the other side of the room, take down her Collected
Poems, and read something. In fact, I just did!
HASSEN
Charles Bukowski.
SOFIA MEMON
Agha Shahid Ali. How interesting to be a Msulim woman in hijab in drag as a queer Muslim man, both devout. The question is-does s/he wear hijab?
DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
Skimming backwards from H.D., Stein and Dickinson, I would be Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, Sufi poet and mystic from 8th century Basra, which now finds itself famously within the borders of the modern map of Iraq. She was a spiritual powerhouse who also performed many miracles, although outwardly she was a poor servant who looked after her master's house during the day, and prayed in her room at night that would be flooded with light from a divine source. She wasn't a poet in the conventional sense of writing poems, but many of her words cryptically couched in poetic phrases have come down through the centuries, statements and verbal encounters of hers which make her a poet of wisdom and light. One of her poems, an anecdote really, that has survived, is the following:
Girl:
"It's Spring, Rabi'a-
Why not come outside,
And look at all the beauty God has made!"
Rabi'a:
"Why not come inside instead,
And see the One who made it all-
Of course, to perform this "poet" in drag, I would have to sit in a room so flooded with light you couldn't see me at all�
DEBORAH RICHARDS
I said Charles Bukowski in the live version of this blog, and I think I want to stick to my first thought. Why Charles? I'd like the opportunity to be obnoxious, opinionated, and difficult. I also admire his poems for his ability to include himself in the mess of his life. My own poems and life are masked because I suppose I'm trying to find a way to be myself--whatever that is!Being Bukowski would be liberating--for a while.
MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I would perform CA Conrad because he was thoughtful enough to ask this
question.
PRAGEETA SHARMA
Rabindranath Tagore or Byron
---------
QUESTION 2
President George W. Bush has just decided to appoint a poet to his
cabinet. You are chosen to fill that position. At your first meeting with
him, what will you ask or suggest?
JIM BEHRLE
I think this could be a lot of fun. The White House staff gets all of
August off, which is way better than the time off I get at my job now.
Would I get a tank or a bomber to use on my poetic enemies? Could I send
them to Guantanimo?
EDMUND BERRIGAN
I would ask Bush for a paltry sum for literacy, but tell him I'm just
gonna give it to my friends. It fits his methods as it's meaningless, he
can use it for exposure, & the old boy network is in action.
JIM CORY
I might suggest that we jointly compose something, in exquisite
corpse fashion, a nature poem, the subject being, say, the lust of big
cats. (Did you know lions fuck up to 25 times a day? And that their
range -- even into the time of the Roman Empire -- once included
Northern Europe, and England?) If he's not game (no pun intended) for
that, maybe we could fashion something using only words beginning with
the letter Q. That would be fun. (I he got snippy, I'd be willing to let
him choose the letter.) Should the President fail to exhibit enthusiasm
for either exercise, I might suggest a quick round of Risk, or maybe
that we jointly explicate one of Hart Crane's more dense and
many-layered productions, such as "For the Marriage of Faustus and
Helen." That would pique his interest. I happen to know W. is a BIG Hart
Crane fan.
HASSEN
I�d suggest he immediately spend a few weeks with the Dalai Lama or a few
months (if not years) in a ghetto without funding and without communication
with anyone outside of his neighborhood. And no T.V. (unless public
broadcasting?). But ghetto survival + optimism/realism takes a certain
amount of wattage if one is alone and, well, he�d probably not rise to the
occasion. Better stick to plan A. If that fails, make plan B an insidious
(but ultimately benevolent) plot of [my] power-of-suggestion.
SOFIA MEMON
I might just check him out. I'm not convinced he's a real person, but maybe I'm just naive. After all, I believed Clinton right up until the end. I mean, who could lie to start a war that has decimated two countries, have that lie be discovered by even the most ardently ignorant, and still be grinning like Howdy Doody? I'd be looking to answer the question is he evil or just an imbecile? Future political and poetical tactics would depend on the answer to that one question.
I might also suggest that he might practice saying words that rhyme with Iraq (_i'roq_ not _eye rack_). I'd definitely ask Fidel Castro's advice beforehand.
I'd suggest that, since his poor brain is so monumentally taxed by his being the Leader of the Free World and the Bringer of Liberation and Democracy to Nations He Wishes to Dominate, he take one of his very long vacations to one of those little fishing huts out on a frozen lake (New Hampsire, Nova Scotia, the Arctic Circle. the moon?), with Amiri Baraka. I think a few weeks in a tiny cabin with Amiri Baraka would do him a world of good. I don't know if it would do anything for the world or the "President's" (I always have to put this in quotes) foreign policy, but the two are kind of suited to each other, on a long-term, pressure-cooker-situation basis. I admire but have reservations about Amiri's sense of things too, though I support his right to have them more than I do Bush's, since the former is more in the realm of radical and provocative motormouth expostulation pointing to a truth, while the latter is more in the realm of bloody-minded, war-mongering Empire Expansion based on lies and self deceit as well as wholesale betrayal of the American Way he pretends to represent.
Of course, I consider this answer a bit irresponsible as well� in keeping with the levity of the question. But how do you persuade a crusty, hardened ideologue like Bush (as I would, as a Cabinet Poet, wish to do) to really look into the peoples of the world, the sufferers, the hopeful, and see with heartfelt eyes what the world needs, instead of bolstering with tired rhetoric what peer ideologues have worked out in the migraine nights of their disgusting brains?
I'd like him (as well as many of the world's leaders) to contemplate the following, a poem from my manuscript book, A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time:
TYRANTS DRIVE PAST STATUES OF THEMSELVES
Tyrants are fleeing their countries in
black limousines
driving past statues of themselves
huddled in back seats, counting
on anonymity,
driving past statues of themselves
erected during their salad days,
hoping against hope to get to the borders unrecognized,
their last days of iron-fisted action
backfired, explosions bouncing back
like repeated radio broadcasts
in their hectic brains,
their loyal armies shooting into shouting crowds of comrades
backfiring until
giant shouting comrade-crowds filled palace doorways
demanding
tyrant blood
who now flee by back roads, at night, in
black limousines
driving past statues of themselves.
DEBORAH RICHARDS
My first reaction would be surprise, as I am a British citizen and not an American national. Anyway....I'm sure the President understands the power of language, yet I'd ask him to examine how words are thrown away, manipulated, and stretched to their limits within his/our world.
What would happen if he spent a week listening, recording, reading, and thinking? What would happen if he didn't have to react, "do" something important, or deal with "that" threat?
What would happen if each person in this country chose a week without speech? What would be the first words we would speak after this silence?
I could say more, but I'll move on.
MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I would probably resign because it is not in my nature to sit in a cabinet.
But before doing so, I would probably suggest that he calm down, use longer
breaths in his lines and not use so many exclamation points!
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I will ask him to replace every seventh word from his speeches with a word from the dictionary. No, really, just because I am curious, I would ask him to write his own speeches. It would be some sort of truth telling.
---------
QUESTION 3
During World War II Ezra Pound openly and actively supported fascism in
Europe. Does this affect how you read his poems? Why or why not?
JIM BEHRLE
I don't really care about Ezra Pound. I don't read his work. But I'm
not sure why we continue to single him out. There are lots of poets with
asshole opinions. It's not as though we're dealing with the poems of
Mussolini or Hitler. I guess if I read one of his poems and didn't know it
was him and liked it and then found out it was him I might be caught up in a
wave of guilt. But if we cast out every poet who had dopey opinions from
being read or enjoyed, we'd become an inconsequential art.
EDMUND BERRIGAN
Though I may occasionally wonder why he did what he did, I don't look to
poetry as the summation of one's entire life or actions, I look instead for
whatever is helpful, and believe-you-me I find it there.
JIM CORY
Poor Ezra. Won't they ever let up on him? I say this now though if
I'd been alive in 1942, with the Nazis overrunning Russia and the
extermination camps in full swing, I certainly would've felt
differently. I would've regarded Pound with the same near-ungovernable
loathing I feel on viewing, say, a Tucker Carlson or an Ann Coulter, the
sort of people who fashion careers defending privilege in all its
various guises, using sophistry, sarcasm and spleen as their weapons.
They deserve whatever the Fates dispatch. But consider: We remember
Pound's vile politics only because of the great genius of his poems,
which not only broke new ground but laid the aesthetic basis for
literary Modernism, Anglo-American version. His work remains readable
and alive, thrilling in the way only great poetry is. It was the best
part of who he was, and what he was was complicated, exasperating,
brilliant, ruthless, and a little mad. But only a little.
HASSEN
It doesn�t affect how I read his poems. However, when reading his
poetry/poetics, I am often struck by elements that I imagine also shaped his
politics �pedantry & �authority� but most of all proscriptive & dictatorial
undertones. &tc...
SOFIA MEMON
Nothing about Ezra Pound's work ever really appealed to me. I can't help it. I never liked it. Like I never liked William Blake. Not only do I not like it, I find it sort of frumpy and annoying, even when it's trying to be vehement and universal and profound. And I read them that way before I knew Pound was a fascist. But it's very possible that the characteristics that make Pound's writing heavy handed and reminiscent of bad dark wood paneling are the very characteristics that made him sympathetic to a particularly dumb, paternalistic and racist kind of nationalism.
More generally, I think poets will inevitably and should be, though not exclusively, read in the context of their lives. I think one very sound and interesting way to read poetry is like historical fiction-like a very human, very visceral way to get a handle on the world as it has been and the people who have lived it. So were I to be able to stomach Pound's poetry, that might be the most useful way for me to read it.
DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
The first statement needs more subtlety really, since Pound in his often misguided egomania was really against war and capitalist decadence, the banking system which he sniffed was Rothschild-controlled, etc. etc. He compared Mussolini to Thomas Jefferson, hoping he was an agrarian reformer for his nation, and a supporter of the arts. There's an amusing and sad anecdote about Pound's one meeting face to face with the monster, hoping he'd read some of his poetry (alas, aren't we all prone to this all too poignant failing!), and to Pound's dismay Muss kind of glanced at it, said, "very nice," and changed the subject.
But, really, if character of a poet determined reading his or her poems, fewer poems would get read than they do, I think. Knowing about a poet does inform the work (someone has said that Rimbaud was really a man of action, as evinced by his restlessness and his later mercantile ambitions, so his work, especially the later works, should be read in this light, and Season in Hell is really a manifesto of a call to action above all�), and Pound isn't exempt from this angle, and yes, I think I do read his work knowing his extremism (but then, I don't like his denigration of the Taoists as dismissable "mystics" in the Cantos, nor his ignorance of Islam either)�
Still, Pound for me is a brave cantankerous soul, who dared to speak in the public arena and suffered for it, with all his faults and mistakes. He's not quite Ossip Mandelstam in his being incarcerated for insubordination against authority (treasonous radio broadcasts with anti-semitic overtones may not be equivalent to dangerously mocking descriptions of Stalin's moustache), but somehow there's a sad story here of the military culture and the strict severance of radical thought and the trajectory of policy. I don't know what that means, but it sounds interesting.
One footnote, by the way. In Berkeley in the 60s I met Oswald LeWinter, whose website search turns up some kind of spy dirt about him, but in those days he was an older poet, I think in the PhD program at the University of California, and one afternoon in his apartment he showed a friend and I a letter about Pound from his file, then still in St. Elizabeths, from T.S. Eliot, in which Eliot said that he thought Pound was better off where he was. It was a shock to me I've never forgotten, and it really does color how I read Eliot's poetry. Here was a man who put Eliot on the map, and that prune-faced subverter of ecstatic verse in favor of the ecclesiastical rational (he disliked Blake, so I dislike him, tit for tat) turned against him when he was being asked to help spring Pound from the madhouse. It was Frost, as it transpired, who was instrumental in getting Pound freed, to live his later life in almost catatonic silence, since, I guess, opening his big mouth had gotten him into such hot and nasty water. Another ironic turn of events: Pound thought the State should support its poets, and his long incarceration in St. Elizabeth's provided him with a very nerve-racking but occasionally fruitful room and board, courtesy of the U.S. government! Though he had to keep his work hidden from the other noisy loonies who roamed the halls and tried to steal his food�
To answer this question, I'm actually reading a book by Eustace Mullins about Pound called, "This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound." Olson and Ginsberg also had negative things to say about Pound, though they owed much of their poetics to his groundbreaking fearlessness and depth of scholarship. Pound's ABC of Reading is still an invaluable guide to the poet's road.
Finally, as a corollary to his supposed stand for Fascism is his apparent anti-Semitism, and this is from the Mullins book: the great American and Jewish poet, Louis Zukovsky, says of Pound: "I never felt the least trace of anti-Semitism in his presence. Nothing he ever said to me made me feel the embarrassment I always had for the 'Gentile' in whom a residue of antagonism to 'Jew' remains. If we had occasion to use the words, Jew and Gentile, they were no more nor less ethnological in their sense than 'Chinese' or 'Italian.'"
DEBORAH RICHARDS
I am affected by Pound's views in the sense I know that they exist as a layer to reading his work. Yet I am also affected by Eliot, Stein, Woolf, and whoever else you could care to name who include negative/dismissive images of black people in their works. There is always a jolt for me as I read "classic" literature and see myself belittled. What annoys me more is that often critics or friends will tell me not to be affected by this language.
Back to Pound--I think that he was treated terribly when he was sent back to the States. It is always easier to demonize the individual--especially with hindsight--because we deny our own demons.
Yet, I will accept that someone will feel the same jolt I feel when reading Pound, that I experience when reading Heart of Darkness.
MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I was very relieved to find out about Ezra Pound's political
leanings/ravings because I was never a great reader of Pound, we just did
not get along. It gave me a good reason to discard him, especially in
speaking with intellectuals.
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I do think about it when I read his work and I think about his character.
---------
Sunday, August 17, 2003
9for9
---------
set 2 of 9
Jennifer Coleman
Shanna Compton
Maria Damon
Tom Devaney
Brett Evans
Greg Fuchs
Nada Gordon
Daniel Nester
David Trinidad
copyright © 2003
to all participating
poets upon publication
questions by
CAConrad
published by
Mooncalf Press
POBox 22521
Philadelphia, PA 19110
MooncalfPress@hotmail.com
9for9 is a collection of 9 questions for 9 poets and their answers. This is the 2nd set of 9 sets. Some of the questions came from dreams, others from waking ideas. The project was conducted through e-mail, questions arriving in Inboxes once a week, usually on friday.
If you wish to communicate with any of the poets included, please feel free to send correspondence to the e-mail address CAConrad13@aol.com, with the subject line "9for9 correspondence". I promise to forward your message to the poet you wish to connect with.
Thank you,
CAConrad
---------
QUESTION 1
If you were SUDDENLY the opposite sex, what name would you choose? How are your poems changed?
---------
THE ANSWERS:
JENNIFER COLEMAN
Lars. Or Jack, or Zach, or Huck. No: Lars. My poems would pitch an old army tent in the front yard and put on overalls and dig holes and dream of having some masterful purpose -- which is what they do now -- only they would do it more sincerely. They might have a lot more upper body strength and a higher center of gravity and love, love, love to do push-ups. My poems would hold words out near the chest, not down on the hip. I would take the poems now nested and close, and I would scatter them like seeds. And then, when the Suddenly-ness of it was over, I might find out my poems are really pretty much the same.On the other hand, I really don't *HAVE* an opposite sex-- I *AM* sex. So I might suddenly be the opposite of my sex, without body, without flirtation or engagement. A clear, sexless life -- like an amoeba. I would be an amoeba, and my name is Myxo-ogenella. And I'd sweep words up into my vacuole to form them into poems, but they'd only stay the same, only more slimy. Sigh. "Oh, Myxo-ogenella," I'd say to myself, "you have no poems. You only have sticky words in your pseudopodia." If I was Myxo-ogenella, I might say this: Midnight rain and the city street is mean. If I was Lars, I might change it to: Midnight rain, the city is pissed. Feel my finger whorl faster than the street. What means to me is divine; what is divine, means. My body won't let me down.
If I was Jen, I would say:
Midnight rain is glittering panties on a steep city. Your lips, lips. My finger whorls. In the streets cabs pass like applesauce. What means is divine what is divine. Means. We are wrapped in a climb and our bodies won't let us down.
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SHANNA COMPTON
I've thought about this before. Gender is a fundamental part of a writer's voice, no matter how much one tries to neutralize it. As much as I attempt to take myself out of my poems and speak through characters and personae instead, the characters are always some version of myself, and I suppose that's true of everybody. (Like you, Conrad, with your Frank poems.) I just find characters--or playing parts--more interesting (or less taxing, perhaps) than being myself. It relieves the pressure of self-consciousness. Tames the fear of putting oneself too much out there. And many of my characters are male. Like Anthony, a homeless writer in Brooklyn, who asks for pens, pencils, and paper as well as change in front of the Western Union, and when he's out of paper he writes on himself, his clothes, the sidewalk, in the snow, however he can. Or James, who's named after a friend of mine, but all my James does is shave in front of his bathroom mirror--ceaselessly. I think if I were a man, I'd really enjoy shaving or maintaining some complicated configuration of facial hair. Or there's another guy I play around with a lot, though I've never named him. I usually just call him "The Man in the Grocery Store." He shops as much to feel a part of the lives of the other shoppers as for necessity. He's in love with shopping for food, and the wish fulfillment that's so easy in a supermarket. He also has a crush on Yolanda, the express-lane clerk, but that's another story.
I tried the name S. Compton for awhile, thinking that the initial might lead people to assume I were male, but there's already a sci-fi poet with that name, can you believe it? So am I talking about making myself invisible in different ways? I guess it sounds like it, but that's not what I mean. It's more about neutralizing the ready answer, or something. And when I have written lyrical poems with "I" as the speaker--if that "I" is really me--I end up feeling self-indulgent. I have an alter-ego named Chevy, after my old car, who's Chicano. And one named Reagan--who writes erotica. They're both girls, though I guess those are names that could go either way.
Speaking of names, there are several Shanna Compton's out there too, and I'm writing a poem for them. One's a veterinarian (my occupation of choice as a child until Mom made me realize I'd be dealing with death on a daily basis). Then there's a stage actress who's also known as "The Original Nightshade" (I was in several plays in high school). And a vollyeball/basketball/track athlete in somplace called Crystal City (I played those sports too). And a real-estate agent in Georgia. Once on a message board after September 11, 2001, I saw a posting by a Shanna Compton who1s a native New Yorker but now lives in Austin. I'm originally from a little town near Austin, and now live here in NYC, so that was a weird coincidence too. So it does seem, with the common traits the Shanna Comptons share, that names are determinants, that they point you in a certain direction.
I guess if I were a man, more of my characters would be women. It's playing the imaginative game of becoming something other that's interesting. Or maybe I'd just write about my penis.
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MARIA DAMON
I would be Tambriel, archangel of timbral beauty, nomadic amber and textual dance. My poems become abundant, expansive, unafraid, unstoppable, oh to be the opposite sex, the sex that makes the word turn red, the sex that flashes upon the end of the golden arrow of blake's jerusalem. they lose none of their sensuality though they gain in confidence and number; my energy is a prolific niagara of viagra. There would be permission for glorious incendiaries of anger and fireworks of extravagant verbiage exploding and then drifting across the blueblack sky like what ezekiel saw.
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TOM DEVANEY
I would choose the name: Franca. My poems would continue to be written in English, but they would be written in Italian as well because the Franca I knew taught Art History in Rome and she was a passionate Renaissance and Mannerist scholar. She also rode her three-speed bike with a wicker basket and a proper straw hat all around the city. My poems would be published together in both languages. That would be my thing.
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BRETT EVANS
I was all set to appear in print as Violeta Duplain until my main man Ernie K-Doe died.
I had work, K-Doe Codas, upcoming in "The Other South," an anthology of not James Dickey Southern poetry (Univ of Alabama Press). I was looking forward to the break-in (as myself) but couldn't risk being banished from the Mother-in-Law Lounge, my favorite place to be in the city Sunday nights.
See also: Lee Ann Brown trying to videotape the goings-on there and getting rousted by Antoinette K-Doe.
[Ernie] K-Doe had been ripped raw and shackled by evil record co. fuckos once upon a time, and since had been supersuperstitious of people glomming onto his good name, plundering his thunder, etc. If he saw the anthology (1/22,000 chance?) he probably would have thought I was making beaucoup $$$ off of...POETRY.
I'd rather be Violeta and have him raging still on the big blue marble. He left the building, I morphed back into Brett - life blew pigcock for a while (and is still K Doe-bereft when I stop to think about it) and being myself if the anthology was pretty much pretty flowers for the funeral.
His funeral procession was mind-blowing: one of the craziest this city has been. The second line battery heading to St. Louis #1 cemetery on a July day lasciviously reinventing heat feels like forever: God has been soooo good to me.
So... uh, Violeta. If then. Today I would go Clelia and play guitar in my underwere [sic] and write sonnets about she-giants and I guess about my own ass iron-ons singing songs like Peaches. Whoa. [Flathand headslap.]
Can't Brett be a girl's name too? What is it with me and shortcuts?
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GREG FUCHS
Name I would choose: Neva Gremillion Saucier
Poems would be changed little. Subject matter would definately include partying, sex, and stopping the male tradition of war.
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NADA GORDON
If I were suddenly the opposite sex, my name would be Gordon. Gordon Gordon.
My poems are suddenly: sensitive, gently allusive, and abstract;
arcane and opaque of diction; investigations of "open form:"
while while// [[[pulchritudinicity]]]
crinkleplush ... saws
eggy... sackbuts...
the (either) and (and) the (or)
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DANIEL NESTER
First thought: I can now fuck myself -- by proxy at least: Daniel and Danielle Nester, together on one stage.
I have often heard people tell me to "go fuck yourself," which I always heard as "fuck myself."
The earliest known appearance of the word "fuck," according to Jesse Scheidlower and author of the great reference book The F Word, was in 1475.
My poetry would turn more aggressive, I think, as opposed to my effeminized, loose-lipped male poetry I write now, because I think one driving force of poetry, no matter how we try to drive away from our New Critical leanings, is to strike a balance, idea of order, whatever.
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Cindy?
I write poems about boy bands and G.I. Joe.
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QUESTION 2
Play the following scene out:
(A blue car pulls up beside you, they crack the tinted window)
Voice From Car: POET! WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE WAR!?
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THE ANSWERS:
JENNIFER COLEMAN
ME: Which of the wars?
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SHANNA COMPTON
Shanna Compton: I'm sure I'd be at a loss for words if that actually happened. If a blue car pulled up next to me, I'd be likely to cross the street PDQ. As for what we should do about the war, it seems like we're all doing it and it's not helping. We're saying no. We're demanding that a country founded on democracy abide by the vote of the U. N. Security Council. We're standing in bookstores and on stages and library steps and writing and reading poems about how we feel.
Maybe I'd invite the folks in the car to the 100 Poets against the War reading we're having at Soft Skull Shortwave in a few weeks. If their windows weren't tinted.
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MARIA DAMON
boy this is a toughie. first my knees would buckle and i would swoon at being addressed as "poet." it reminds me of jack spicer's inflated "poet, be like god," as if we poets could just make the war stop, as god could, except that s/he won't because of this CRAZY LITTLE thing they call "free will" in western religion. we humans are free to screw up.
i assume the person calling to me from the car is not god, so i could ignore him/her. but what if it is. what if it's hillel's god who said do unto others, and also, if not now, when? if not you, then who? actually it was hillel himself, but as a prophet he could be said to be conveying a divine message.
so, poet, what should we do about the war?! is "we" "we poets" or "we people"?
i will assume the latter. okay, blue-car voice: do what you love, and also spread the vibe around. write if you love to write, and write to your congressman, or write a gorgeous manifesto, or write to your friends about opposition to the war. come up w/ wonderful slogans the way poets like lew welch came up with great advertizing lines: Raid Kills Bugs Dead. Poet, Do like emilie and lytle and put up posters of iraqui kids and get arrested and make sure all your friends on poetix know about it. Poet, do like brian kim stefans and start a website. Poet, do like Hilton Obenzinger and write Meditations on the situation and publish them informally on poetix and have your friends on poetix circulate them. Poet, do like all the poets who marched in New York Washington Seattle London Baghdad. Poet, do like Eliot Weinberger suggests and write prose against the war. Poet, do like Kristen Prevallet, Ammiel Alcalay and Anne Waldman and organize read-ins, teach-ins, read-outs and teach-outs. Poet, do like Mairead Byrne and Walter Lew and Pierre Joris and organize an anti-war event at the staunchly apolitical AWP. Poet, do like Katie Trumpener and start a program where universities hire visiting profs --artists, scholars, writers --from endangered places or places in which they are endangered. Poet, join a weekly vigil. Poet, do like Sam Hamill and compile an anthology to present to the first lady. Poet, send money medicine and toys to iraqui kids. And Vietnamese kids. And kids. And kids. Poet, do it all with as loving a heart as you can at any given moment. Do fun stuff to keep your spirits up. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering, including yourself.
Are there enough imperatives in the foregoing? Forgive the arrogance but the question's a tall order.
You can come up with your own beautiful action. make up a new word in the spirit of peace.
it is important to keep our spirits up in dark february in the face of this madness. most of all be very very sweet and loving to the people around you and that will create a pocket of peace with the ripple effect. and be brave and outspoken like many impetuous poets who don't like to always be sweet and nice and lovey-dovey. do whatever. we should --and i should have said at the outset how uncomfortable i am with the word "should" --do whatever is our strength and our pleasure.
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TOM DEVANEY
Blue cars don't wait for answers. From high school kids in blue cars yelling taunts, to men in blue cars shouting at and accosting women, all blue cars asking questions are get-a-way cars. Usually words are captions for images, but in this case the blue car is a caption for the question. Somehow the people in the car know I am a poet? How do they know this? They know because the way I take each step, one foot, then the next, then the next again. Poets each walk in a certain way, and as you know, and all very differently as well, which is what gives them away. Walking is not logical, which is why it's poetic. So I wouldn't say anything. I would continue to walk so this blue car would know where I stood (or had been standing) -- esp. in regards the war on Iraq (and the W.M.D. from our own Republican Guard). Walking, in a certain way,would be my answer.
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BRETT EVANS
Me: First, get the scram out of here and go buy some Clash records. Drive around for three hours blaring them with the windows down. That'll take you to 8pm, and then meet me at Pal's.
(Later that night, at Pal's Lounge) A no show? I'm waiting...
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GREG FUCHS
Greg Fuchs: (to himself: Are you a livery cab driver, a business man, a superstar, a law officer, a politician, a drug dealer, a pimp? Well you are all inside the same car. The only one with any possibility of having a drop of ethics or love of democracy, justice, and peace is the driver, you who can not speak. Maybe the superstar has ethics or love of democracy, justice, or peace but that's rare if you are the run of the mill greedy, eating disordered, selfish superstar.) You have the power to stop it, you are causing it, just stop it. Put down your guns. Stop your exploitation. Stop your racism. Stop your sexism. Stop your embezzlement. Stop getting rich by building weapons of mass destruction. Stop!
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NADA GORDON
At first this question floored me. I asked CA to ask me a different question, I couldn't face this one I felt so helpless.
But just now I realized what I would instinctively do: I would chant a Hindu chant I learned as a child -- I think it was recorded by the Radha Krishna temple singers and produced by George Harrison -- "Govinda" -- I don't know the correct words, but I'd fake it, I'd sing really loud, and if I happened to have my finger cymbals with me I'd play them.
But as a general rule of thumb, I don't tal kto strange men in cars who yell at me out their windows.
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DANIEL NESTER
Voice from Poet: The same as anyone else! The same as secretaries, bums, landowners, wannabe activitists! Run for your fucking lives! Say you're scared! Do something!
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DAVID TRINIDAD
David Trinidad (a la Faye Dunaway in _Mommie Dearest_): "You figure it out!"
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QUESTION 3
Explain how you see the internet's impact on poetry.
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THE ANSWERS:
JENNIFER COLEMAN
Ok, it's like this: A tanker dumps a ship-load of golf shoes into the ocean, sixty thousand golf shoes, and they bob around and circle back and end up in the mouths of a few fishes and otters and finally make their way to shore. And someone collects the golf shoes, and brings them to an oceanographer, and he uses them to study the ocean currents. And the golf shoes are in a way so much better than ever intended. It's Deep. Simultaneous. Wide. Instant. Many-faced. A poet once told me there was no such thing as a poem without time passing, literally, down the page. She was wrong.
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SHANNA COMPTON
The internet is a terrific resource for all writers, including poets. I realize how addicted I am to instant information--what's the title of that poem that goes , or who wrote that book that they made that movie about, or what the hell are all those sirens in Downtown Brooklyn going on about--every time I go on vacation and don't have convenient internet access. And there's so much out there: library databases, full-text downloads of classics, mp3 files of poets reading UBUweb!. And of course, there are all the great online journals like La Petite Zine, failbetter, elimae elimae, and hundreds of others.
And e-mail! The Monday Poetry Report is a great idea--a poetry webzine that comes to you! The best thing about e-mail is the freedom it seems to lend people to write. Folks who would otherwise rarely communicate in writing find themselves doing it more and more because of the pervasiveness of e-mail in the workplace and in customer service situations. I idealistically think this technology can only strengthen our appreciation for the written word. In the long run, e-mail and the internet promise to curb illiteracy. It's hard to imagine kids coming up in school now being able to sneak through without being able to read and write--so much of our essential information is spread via e-mail and the internet--instantly, quickly, efficiently. I'm off topic though.
Friends, writers and otherwise, have written me e-mail poems, which I find delightful. I love Frank O'Hara and the way he was always typing a quick letter or note off to someone and including a poem and sending it off. E-mail allows everybody to be like Frank. I imagine that Frank would really love e-mail. How terrific would that be to see his name in your inbox?
click here
I mean, look at me. I can't even type without sticking in URLs all over the place.
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MARIA DAMON
the internet has made poetry even more fun than it was. for one thing, it's easier to stay connected and create community even across distance. for another, the internet has given rise to e-poetry, which is very dynamic and multisensory, multimedia and all that --new realms of stimulation and imaginative stretching. it has also made it easier to organize stuff, be it a poetry anti-war action or simply a visit to a city or school to do a talk or a reading. it's good for introverts and homebodies, gives us a way to connect. i would never know CAConrad existed if it weren't for the net, and here i am, the center of all beauty, answering these questions! Imagine!
at the same time, i'm wary of exceptionalist claims wherever they pop up, and internet poetry and cyber theory in general make large claims for unprecedentedness, absolute newness w/o earlier cognates, etc. while, as my friend e-theorist rita raley sez, one cannot deny that digital and analog are different, one cannot posit any absolute or metaphysical difference. what does epoetry do that page poetry can't? the coordinations and/or slight dissonances of the various senses e-poetry can engage simultaneously, which in turn create a space that cannot be fully articulated through any one sense --the performativity of it, the multi-media aspects of it. i imagine there would be a way to do this live, in 3-d, or in other media, but of course the effects are different. it's like the movies versus live theatre. each one does something the other can't do.
i think the aesthetic of diffusion, be it in a diasporic, nomadic or postmodern- fragmentary-antigravitational sense, is made manifest in much e-poetry in a useful way. If there is a new aesthetic emerging, I'd hope it would afford us new ways of being sensuous and emotional. New textual erotics and sensory perceptivity. in general, characteristics i'd name for epoetry are: multimedia, "intersign," speedy, dreamy (John Cayley's work), meditative (in the sense of repetition-with-a-difference) --hypnotic sometimes (Brian Kim Stefans' The Dreamlife of Letters), sassy (as in the google poems of the flarf list, or komninos's cartoonish animations), deterritorialized (Mez and Talan Memmott), compositional in the musical sense (Jim Rosenberg's "clusters"). I think Alan Sondheim's work exemplifies the possibilities for e-poetry in many of the above aspects. mIEKAL aND's work shows how intertwined it is with organic processes of growth, decay, composting, cultivating, hybridism, adaptation, etc all the practices or processes of eco-terra-beloved-firma living. various listservs (the poetix list,flarf) have created discursive textures that enable (or disable, some might argue) further creative forms to emerge. nick piombino, for example, has written about how his involvement w/ the poetix listpost 9/11 became something life-sustaining for him --who'd a thunk it: a bunch of cantankerous, axe-grinding sectarian poets and critics as core community --well it's one of mine too. is this a chimera? compared to what? i sit here with a purring cat on my lap, looking out on the ocean and the crust of salt-ice glittering the boulders, cup of coffee w/ dregs, books piled high (malinowski, damon YEAH MOI, wieners, aND, du bois, issues of the NMU's union newspaper from 1946,latest issue of American Literature, articles from Critique of Anthropology, old diaries, and tax materials), connected and communicating with CAConrad.
i am especially grateful for the chance to have been involved with some epoetic projects myself (literature nation, eros/ion, semetrix, erosive media/rose e-missive --ALL TO BE FOUND AT JOGLARS), which might never have come about if i hadn't been online, though i am still a neanderthal when it comes to technology. the internet has made the beauties of collaboration a lived experience for me. The effect is that co-authorship is far more appealing to me these days in all my work, both "creative" and critical, because you double the energy and ideas available. I like the creativity of the people involved in e-poetry, and the excitement generated by mutual appreciation for each other's work. In terms of drawbacks, it can be expensive and one has to stay on excellent terms with one's collaborators, so it's a social exercise as well, which can present special and ultimately welcome challenges for curmudgeons like myself. I guess, in many respects both literal and metaphoric, i appreciate the "networking" aspects and challenges of the medium.
We have a chance to contribute to world peace through creating beautiful, ephemeral entities dependent on the fragile but infinitely generative and permeable world wide web of interbeing.
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TOM DEVANEY
Whether it’s poetry or anything else the internet’s impact is its ability to get your word *out and your screen *on. That’s why rumors and other reverberations flourish there. So my answer isn’t just about poetry, as you asked, though hopefully poetry isn’t just about poetry either. Another way to put it is “What is poetry’s impact on the internet?” Poets can find each other here, (hey),
_C
_O
_N
_R
_A
_D (!)
that’s true and good. But I wonder what poetry’s impact on the internet is, if anything? In a way, we behave as if the WWW is flat –- which it both is and isn’t; though it's not round either. As it stands I think the current use of the morphology of the screen is thin. To put it simply we’re *screened-in*. Working with design and poetry in ways that explore the spacical possibilities of our *sceened-in* environments is one place to start to think about new ways to be able to see new spaces. Because of poetry’s self-reflexive nature and its concern with process -- IT, fused with design -- is most apt & ripe to engage the media and our notions of what is possible.
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BRETT EVANS
Just last night, as we were going to Port of Call, Michael Dominici asked me this about the Internet -- he's sort of returning to poetizing after some time in the pasture. I thought there was a certain eau de javu when he brought it up.
Anyway, the short of it is that I really had nothing intelligent to say about it. I did that White House press secretary thing of veering away from the question, wondering aloud instead about the whole mystery lineage of awful open-journal poetry aloud [ow!ed].
Really, I still much rather read poems off the page. I enjoy reading weblogs like DAILYKOS.COM, but poems -- there's usually not a whole lotta HTML going on there, so why on-line? I think the Net is a postage-saving way of sharing poems to be printed later. Naturally this doesn't apply to 9 x 9. It's all in the scrolling: I don't mind scrolling prose but scrolling through the line breaks leaves me cold.
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GREG FUCHS
Listserves in lieu of community make my ass tired. A trap between writing and a phone conversation.
Terrific publishing potential. Have liked East Village Web, Cross Connect, Realpoetik, among others. I haven't witnessed a poetry journal that has created a truly open source, democratic, scene like Indymedia. Brian Kim Stefans is heading that way perhaps.
Down with web logs. Don't blog me. If I wanted to hear your private ramblings I'd be your friend and drinking buddy.
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NADA GORDON
Since I am, according to an internet test of personality disorders, so narcissistic, I think I can only explain how I see the internet's impact on *my* poetry, and by extension on my life.
If it were not for the internet, I think I would still be in Tokyo, riding the Chuo line back and forth to work each day, wondering when the next big earthquake was going to hit and if Aum Shinrikyo was going to strike again.
Instead, I now ride the F train back and forth to work each day and wonder if Bush is going to go ahead with his petulant "I don't care what they say, I'm going to attack Iraq anyway" and if Al Qaeda is going to strike again.
If it were not for the internet, I don't think I would have published any of the four books I have published in the last four years, because if it were not for the internet, I would have never met my champion, muse, rescuer, and paramour Gary Sullivan who pulled me out of expatriate obscurity into the throb and glamor of New York, where I now have the pleasure of hobknobbing with writers who have been my favorites for years.
Of course this has had an impact on my poetry. Before I moved here, I asked Gary if he thought my poetry would get all cynical and one-liney like so much NYC poetry is, and he said, no way, you're way too Cali. But it turns out he was wrong. I now write really smartass sarcastic stuff. And if we look back at the chain of causality, it's all because of the internet.
Everyone I know writes Google poems of various kinds. Me too. How can we help when there is now so much language at our disposal? We barely have to rearrange it! I remember writing twenty years ago in my master's thesis (on B. Mayer) about a time in the future when all verbal messages might be considered art. I think we may be getting close to that time, thanks to... the internet.
I love it love it love it it's a vast octopus with infinite tentacles embracing engulfing consisting of and exuding our combined consciousnesses. It is without a doubt the most important invention of our time, one of the most important in human history, and it may possibly be our salvation. BUT WE HAVE TO ACT FAST.
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DANIEL NESTER
*Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus* “The mountains will be in labour,” Horace writes in “Ars Poetica,” and “a ridiculous mouse will be born.” 400 years of nouminal tyranny of movable type has been overturned! The poem is freed, hybridized, ephemeral! No more colleges! No more pages! No more text, a poem is like a machine at last (William Carlos Williams). A poem is not made up of words, in the end, it's made up of moving the furniture to make sure people know where to sit. Because of hypertext, the line break has become a skill for all of us. We are all poets now.Because of source code, we have all become close-text readers again. Because of the mouse, because of the ridiculous mountain-worked mouse, we touch poems again, as we did with animal skin, papyrus, paper, Xerox sheets, mimeos. CGA VGA flatcreen Palm Pilot = our new meaty vellum. Text is now a backlit stepchild. The poem’s godliness heckles the stars. Am I talking about the will here? Perhaps. “Cause I made 'em play it, made 'em say it/ made 'em okay it, made 'em obey it!”
LL Cool J, “Jack The Ripper”
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Oh, it's created a few more magazines . . . .
The Internet is great for some things (such as shopping and fact checking), but I’m coming to trust computers less and less, particularly in regard to the writing of poetry. And this after recently completing a three-year project that benefited from the Internet: collaborating with two other poets via email. It would have taken us forever if we’d relied on "real" mail. But I’m beginning to have an Anna May Wong-like reaction to the computer---like it’s stealing little pieces of my soul. I’m about to return to writing poems on a manual typewriter. One of my students gave me a beautiful vintage Hermes 2000 with lime green keys. It’s being cleaned.
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QUESTION 4:
There's a new poetry library in Philadelphia and you are in charge of choosing the sculpture for the entrance. What is it?
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THE ANSWERS:
JENNIFER COLEMAN
Oh, hell, yeah! Finally, they picked me, me ME to be the one who is in charge of public sculpture! How wise. Oooh! I like this so much, I'm going to have it be a whole GARDEN of sculpture, a hydroponic and organic garden of sculpture, so's it all grows out of a pool. And it's going to be a sculpture that records on its face the weather and particulates and sound of Philadelphia and all that pass in and out of the library, and also it will record and play the music of all of it. Plus, it will shimmer and be see-through, and it will have smells, and the smells will be triggered by the words people say as they enter or exit the library and so it will count up the words of the people and the most-used word will trigger a puff of orange and the word used with the most esses will trigger a puff of clove, and any rhyme will trigger licorice and any repetition more than three times in a single sentence will cause a mist of orange blossom to hiss from a thin and shimmering pipe. Plus, while I'm in charge, I'll hire attendants to care for and groom the sculpture, and they'll be really excellent at talking to people and figuring out just what poet to recommend.
How's that, hah?
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SHANNA COMPTON
Oh, what a fun assignment! And a couple of possibilities spring immediately to mind. The first is a piece by Richard Humann. Maybe the resin books he makes--they're clear resin in the shape of an open, oversized dictionary, but they have these tiny black individual letters floating on various planes throughout. He cuts and punches these and floats them in one by one! These are some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And looking at one, you get the same sense of anticipation as you do reading a poem--that something important or gorgeous or funny is about to be revealed. Because the letters are suspended at different angles and at different heights in the resin, you find your eye moving from one to the next--each letter being as vital as each word in a poem. They're really breathtaking. I could look at them for hours. So maybe three or for of these on simple pedestals or bookstands--each with it's own light. But I'd want people to touch them--no velvet ropes!
Here's a similar project Richard did, using the same technique, called Possessions for Judgment Day--these are in the shape of gold bricks, though. He chooses the text accordingly, too. It's not just random letters in the resin--they actually would say something, if you could read them. He's also done braille sculptures--of the lyrics to Talking Heads songs! Want to see one? Then click HERE.
Or another artist who would be perfect is Roni Horn. She once did an installation project with Emily Dickinson poems--blocks each with one word from a poem placed in the corners of the room, along the walls, or free standing. I saw a photography installation of hers too, a few years ago in New Mexico. I think it was Another Water. (I have the book somewhere, but I'm at work!) She'd taken several photographs of the Thames river--nothing else in the frame, just the water, the little ripples and waves--and underneath them ran all kinds of captions. Each caption was keyed to a number on the photo above, and as you moved through the room reading the captions and studying the surface texture of the river, which was always changing, a sort of narrative began to emerge. I remember she had several poets and writers in there--Hart Crane and Virginia Woolf--maybe because they drowned themselves? Anyway it was a great thing to see and read and walking along it felt like walking along a river, and the motion my eyes made moving from the photo to the captions and back was kind of a buoying motion--so it was a physical poem, one I read with my whole body.
And I like Donald Judd so much too. I always get the idea that looking at one of his cubes, walking around it, trying to pick out the variances or dings or spots, is like reading a poem or writing one. It's a study in sameness and contrast, in attention and gaze. They're terrific.
Or maybe you and I should make mudpies, Conrad, with fortunes inside. Here's yours: Your letters are always a welcome diversion.
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MARIA DAMON
It would not be something you could actually see and touch, but it would be an energy field that would make all seeing and touching, smelling and sensing, tasting and hearing possible. It would be stimulating in a not-quite-palpable way, auratic rather than absolutely concrete, rainbow-hued without actually being visible, sonorous without actually being heard with the outer ear (or what the skalds call the "hear-hands"), deeply and deliciously textured without having only one finite decribable message for the fingertips --rough and refined, rich and dappled, mutable but not distressingly so --it would transform the passers-by subtly as they walked past it into the library, preparing them for the sensory experience of being in the presence of so much poetry --so much cognition, beauty, pain, form and history --without being either shut down or overwhelmed. it would be endow on passers by the feeling of having had sex with an angel.
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TOM DEVANEY
Most sculptures in front of most buildings are invisible. So creating an invisible sculpture is one idea. I think I’d consult people who know better in this matter. The first person who comes to mind is curator named Dean Daderko. He gets physical and non-physical space as well as anyone I know. It’s important that we come up with something to encourage people to have an experience with the space since they have to live with this space everyday.
The idea of *what it is* would not be the first question I’d ask. The goal would be to create something cool and stirring as rivers and oceans conspire with the ozoney clouds.
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BRETT EVANS
At the poetry library, in a foyer of deep dreamy purple, I would have two sculptures - one to each side. At left would be Giovanni da Bologna's Rape of the Sabine Women. To the right would be a commissioned piece by Marc Robinson, who has lived many years in Philadelphia and now Whitneys like Houston from his NY mission control. He has some sculptures which are amazing busts of historical figures he likes and other less representational, more kinetic works. Of the latter type he once did several sculptures of chairs a la houses of cards, projecting up and preposterously somehow holding together. I would let him decide to do something like this but with books not chairs or a bust of a famous preferably Philadelphia poet: Marianne Moore, say, although she's not my favorite. No, let's go with the furniture.
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GREG FUCHS
Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneeman including photographic documents of original performance and text.
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NADA GORDON
That ancient many-breasted Venus figure -- like the old Motown song:
"So Many Mammaries..."
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DANIEL NESTER
It's an interactive sculture with a paper tablet, where every patron must write a line. Philadelphia is one big underrated poem, and the only way to bust out of it is to let its own voice be transcribed in one big Philly Cento. Either that, or a bust of Patrick Kelly picking his nose, naked.
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Something by Claus Oldenberg. A giant . . . something. Or does Wayne Thiebaud do sculptures? I'd commission him to make a huge pink cupcake.
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QUESTION 5:
Give us a solid 90 seconds of automatic writing on the topic of canned peas.
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THE ANSWERS:
JENNIFER COLEMAN
Canned peas, canned peas, I want some please if you've got to get the green in the can, you got to get the sweet young ones that's right the sweet and fresh the canned greenies no mush on a flying fork for me yessir the can in the distance is the can in my dream a can for crushing can can dancers sang in the land of the green pea can and don't you stop but open the clock for the sweet pea, the sweet spinach of my youthful can can in the can of the rock solid lifting height of open sweet young pea, sweet pea, does it ever need to be told that the soft and round are also the ones in my mouth, young tweety bird? Lots of cans in the cupboard give me the one not the chick or the organce not the spinned silky little corn but the yess you guessed it yes I want a mouthful oh the splendid resplendid greenie green feelings of the tiny pittle pea.
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SHANNA COMPTON
You miniature planet
You singalong ball
Of the consonant's name and the vowel's gentle curves
You cloud full of fog
You jewel of the stirfry
You of the comparison, the tiny amount
You scent of the library
You missile in lunchrooms
You impossible melon, from the too-tender vine
You vegetal laughter
You tempting the spoon
You're there in the shot of the baby-butt wrinkle
You princess waker
You fairground prize
You gem under plastic in Grand Central Market
You good rhyme with me
You accent mark
Mamaw's in a bowl with butter and bacon
You infant delight
You lurker in the pear
You punctuation, alone on the plate
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MARIA DAMON
canned peas are not my favorites, i like canned asparagus and that's about it for canned vegetables. in terms of frozen, i just still don't like peas. they are only good fresh out of the pods in summer, scrape the pods with a finger or your teeth and the peas are sweet and crunchy otherwise it is hard to justify their existence as food, maybe the color's nice that's about it, plus they are a starch, not even a real vegetable like the leafy greens that are our so friendly friends. canned peas are a challenging topic but i like tapioca, which contains the word topic, and the syllable "pea."
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TOM DEVANEY
How to tell if your can is canned peas? Look at the label does it say PEAS? Does it have pearly green peas nested like fish eggs all over the label? Or is the can just a can without a label? If so, open it up and take a look. Yes, you’re looking at hundreds of canned peas and un-canned words, which (at the age of 34 you know) are the only words which can make canned peas.
When I think of canned peas I do not think of cans or peas. I think of the sleek canoe-like pod zipped open with a half dozen pearly peas perched like a roller coaster each pea shining with a sliver-of-sun on the edge of its perfect pea body. I think of LUNGFULL!’s Brendan Lorber and frozen pea & pasta dinners, which we had more than once, which makes me appreciate how smart and wily and good for you they are (and he was). Canned peas more than fresh make think of the expression “Don’t cut peas with a knife,” and also peeing which has nothing to do with fresh peas -- just being in the can. (Sixty seconds writing, 30 seconds editing, and a few moments of deceit.)
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BRETT EVANS
La Soeur silver suggestion to the top of the key came another dark album emitting mercurial joy. Mashed sometime potato clouds broker glances between floats. Clouds stack. A picnic in the ape of the question makes reefer the best choice yet.
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GREG FUCHS
Pre-face mask football kicker
Versus Jolly Green Giant
War is coming
Eat inside a bunker
The peas will last forever
& ever & ever
& remarkably taste fine
Unlike canned chicken.
My friend's momma
Used to make what we call roux
Peas, stirred in over rice.
I liked mine mixed with gravy
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NADA GORDON
sinister mushy sweet tinny claustrophobia
primordial ugh confinement industry jolly jolly jolly a
bit of pepper miming the unbearable as babies the
murk the liquid ooze, bite of can opener into
metal, clunk, clench as jaws or neck or forehead solidly
automatic no sweet no snap
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DANIEL NESTER
I threw away peas in a can, toilet Maple Shade, spring, in my mouth, carpe diem, put them away, flushed them down, one spat up, caught, fear, trucker fear, secretary fear, beating fear, and sequestered in the one-window room, taste of those fucking shitty peas that I never liked, no matter how much I put those puppies in gravy, no matter how much mashed potatoes I put them in, next batter for the Dodgers, next batter for the Cardinals, one on one, called out, beat up, if they're good for you why did I write this
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Canned peas, canned peas, the Jolly Green Giant comes to mind, ho ho ho, which makes me think of corn niblets, which I loved they were so sweet, 40 seconds has gone by already and I'm typing as fast as I can, now 60, I don't know how long it's been since I ate canned peas [I froze during last 10 seconds]
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QUESTION 6:
You knock on my door just as we're ready to begin a seance to contact dead poets. Who do you want to contact? What do you ask?
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JENNIFER COLEMAN
Ooh! I'd call William Blake. I don't think I'd have to pose a question -- he'd have something to say. I might ask him what he thinks of Walt Whitman.
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SHANNA COMPTON
James Merrill! You know he's just sitting there waiting for somebody to get out the Ouija board.
I'd also love to talk to Frank O'Hara. In fact, I pretend to talk him all the time. His poems make him seem so approachable. I had an imaginary conversation with last summer, kind of a "True Account of Talking to the Sun" kind of thing. You know the way he always rushed off poems from the typewriters at MoMA or stuck them in letters or notes? I figured he'd be a big e-mailer these days. Here's one of his responses (from the Monday Poetry Report):
E-Mail from Frank
"Poetry is a rival government always in
opposition to its cruder replicas."
--William Carlos Williams
Frank O'Hara surprised me
this morning with an e-mail.
He attached a picture of himself.
He looks pretty good,
considering. He said not to feel bad,
now that school is out,
even though we have a stooge
for president, now that MoMA's
moving to Queens.
He said everything still looks
good to him where he sits.
I asked where's that. He told me
not to blind cc him anymore, said
he wants to be included, but thinks
things should be done right.
He said he'll be in touch later,
when he gets back from
Rome.
(Actually, that epigraph from Williams would have been a great response to question 8!) And I've got plenty of questions for Wallace Stevens, though I'd hesitate to actually ask them. He's one of those imposing father-figure types that makes me tongue-tied. Laura Riding would be cool--but do you think she'd do most of the talking? Or Gertrude Stein.
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MARIA DAMON
I want to contact bpNichol to ask him to send me some of his wise vibe and gift for warmth and expansiveness --and some of his energy and talent and self-confidence to boot! I want to make sure he knows how loved he is, not just by those who knew and loved him but by those like me who encountered him in his whole soul loveableness through his work, from Martyrology through Art Facts, from the most
expansive and ambitious life-work down to the minutiae of a playful cartoon here and there, or a single conceit worked into a graphic design of great hilarity and charm.
The child geniuses --Rimbaud, Chatterton, etc --just to see what they're like... i wouldn't know what to ask them, i just want to dig their vibe...and maybe ask Rimbaud if it's true did he really turn to slave trading or was it just guns after all.
And how about the big guns: Sappho, Dante, Ovid, King David and King Solomon, and whoever wrote (if it was one person) Gassir's Lute --put 'em together in a room and listen to them talk poetics, ah that were paradise enow...
And then some of the old Norse skalds, Egil Skallagrimsson and Snorri Sturluson, and some of the women poets too, whom we only know of when they're quoted in the sagas. I'd like to get everyone above into a big room and have them talk about what poetry is and what cultural work it performs. And if, from their perspective as dead people, they've changed their minds over time about what poetry is or should be.
I think i would be in such ecstasy it would be painful. i don't know if i could contain all of that intensity. i will have to work on expanding my capacities --that's what i would ask of bp --for his help --in order to be up to such an experience. I might even ask
them to all write a collaboration, or to at least devise one. Overhearing the process of deciding how to go about such a thing would be worth the price of admission. Wow, can you imagine.
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TOM DEVANEY
A wonderful question and a main reason why I continue to be poet so I can be in touch with many dead (as well as many living) poets all of the time. I don't have one question or one poet. I mean, the ones I am in contact with (all of whom are very private) change on a daily basis: some just speak to me; some we both speak; some I overhear as they whisper to me while I sit and drink my morning Darjeeling tea.
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BRETT EVANS
And getting Dead Poets Seancy with it just inside the witchy door, now with the gentle people caught by candlelight... well, immediately I think of Ted Berrigan and Ernie K-Doe because they are heroes I always go back to. Praps I should leave them in Heaven's Lounge undisturbed though; on the corn to pea can with the Great Beyond-me is someone I don't often do cum Bible requirement.
So now I'm thinking of Joe Strummer because he just moved on and then let me summon... John Keats because I read him close to first [not counting the Dylan lyricbook] and maybe I can ask something... I was going to say "relevant" but then, do the dead need to be relevant to me? Shit, these days dead people can't contain themselves.
Suddenly it hits me Frankie O would be great to talk to but I don't want to make the circle impatient.
To Joe Strummer: Thank you for being political and simultaneously melodious in your songs. I wanted to ask what it felt like watching all [or most] of the things you howled after in your songs nonetheless end up in circles of the jackbooted winners? I'm thinking of the Sandanistas, and then, having to watch Reagan the Sequel come back when the first run was so way bad enough.
So then - besides knowing that one has to do what one has to - why continue on? Why play beautiful music to the wilderness when the Heads of the States listen to petroleum-based seashells?
To John Keats: Dude, when I was a young man I used to always say to myself, If I haven't made it [poetrywise] by the time I'm 24, I'll just off myself. The thing about Truth is Beauty when, well, Truth can be a Shit sometimes... Does focusing on the beautiful (from the Mermaid Tavern to vases to heathen cascades) help the ugliness of the world go away at all? What was it like to have to write about these things living in [imperial man-witch] Britain.
Roddy Frame said "overdose on Keats" and "Pictures of Strummer fell from the wall/ and nothing is left where they hung" on the same record.
Maybe I could find Roddy to make this supernatural conference call.)
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GREG FUCHS
Ted Berrigan, am I terrific?
Steve Carey, how many licks does it take?
Jeffrey Miller, is Codrescu lying?
W. H. Auden, did the bartender at the Holiday really give you free drinks for poems?
Frank O'Hara, what's the quickest route from New Jersey to St. Mark's Place?
Alan Ginsberg, why can I only think of male dead poets for whom I have questions?
Kathy Acker, do you remember when I had to sit at the kid's table?
H.D., is Kathy Acker considered a poet in heaven?
Gregory Corso, what's hell like?
Douglas Oliver, should I do a story on woman sexual tourists in Africa?
Lester Bangs, you really considered yourself a poet, right?
Blaise Cendrars, what's it like being feminine, marvelous, and tough?
William S. Burroughs, can you please order these questions to be rearranged, cut-up, and made?
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NADA GORDON
Mina Loy. What hair products do you use?
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DANIEL NESTER
I want to talk to William Carlos Williams. I want to just be awkward with him in his front room, for exactly 26 minutes, with my Honda waiting outside, and Flossie serving me unsweetened iced tea. I will ask him stupid questions, ones that haunt me for the rest of my days, an ever-revised embarassment. Williams will grumble at some point, and I'll ask stupid questions about paintings and words and typefaces.
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Actually, a number of dead poets speak to me through my Ouija board in my new book, _Phoebe 2002_: O'Hara (who thanks me for showing my students where he lived on University Place), Schuyler (who scolds me), Spicer (who delivers a message to Alice Notley), and of course Anne Sexton (who tells me how much she loves me, just loves me).
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