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Thursday, September 18, 2008

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Friday, April 11, 2008

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Interview with Tom Mandel by Sheila Murphy

This interview with poet Tom Mandel was conducted in two phases – Spring 1998 and Winter 2007-8.

The first phase focuses on Absence Sensorium, the book-length poem written collaboratively from 1993-1995 by Tom Mandel and Daniel Davidson, working via email and phone calls. Dan committed suicide in 1997 as the book was going to press.

Absence Sensorium comprises 526 seven-line stanzas; each line is either 7 or 11 syllables. The form is Spanish, called a silva, and was used by Luis Góngora, among others. Published by Potes & Poets, Absence Sensorium is available from Small Press Distribution .

The second phase of the interview began in late 2007 after the publication of Tom’s most recent book To the Cognoscenti.

SM: What aesthetic traditions most directly influenced the making of Absence Sensorium?

TM: I wanted to write a long poem with a peripatetic feel, sort of "let me walk you through my experience," and had been reading Dante and some other long Renaissance poems as a way of thinking about the project. In one of Góngora’s long poems I found a verse form called the silva and suggested it to Dan. We experimented with it and found that it was both extensible, as I'd thought it would be, and also ample enough to contain two minds, as I'd hoped would prove to be the case.

On the other hand, although AS is above all a poem of history, it was not influenced by Pound's idea of a "poem with history." Starting with the old verse form we chose, AS seems to *reach back* to root itself, rather than rooting itself in a method or theoretical position. But in the poem tradition plays a role of innovation; the gestures invoke or employ tradition, but are not traditional.

SM: I'd be interested to learn your perception of AS in relation to other long, meditative or exploratory poems or poem sequences you value. With this in mind, what particular aspects of AS seem to you unique?

TM: AS is at once autobiographical and "investigative," to borrow a word I heard Steve McCaffery use when he was visiting a few weeks ago. I don't think that's unique but it seems somewhat unusual among recent long poems. To the degree that the poem poses questions of poetics they are asked about (and of) the object of the poem rather than its form or structure or its status as discourse. This too seems unusual, maybe it's a matter of degree.

What's unique of course is the collaboration. Reading our work, Dan and I often could not remember which of us had written a particular section. Our contributions fused in the poem's crucible, yet as we wrote it seemed quite dialectical, often it felt as if we were as much contesting as considering. Contesting the object. This led us to treat the present as history -- a traditional and even prophetic stance for the poet? -- to return to your first question.

SM: AS seems very immediate in its engagement with a myriad of details reflecting both your and Dan's read on the present tense. These details spiral into stories, political statements, lamentations, dialogues, chants, foretelling, even prayer. Did the "frame" of the selected form feel large enough or broad enough to include all that your minds sought to bring in to the work?

TM: The form was a stable element in what was an unstable act, as all collaboration is and ought to be unstable. We were able to challenge each other, to encourage, object, cajole, demand. Surprisingly, we kept on responding. The result was - probably inevitably - a poem that in a way is in cantos, though they are not foregrounded. What I mean is that we addressed each other in the writing, drawing a picture or telling a story to convey something one to the other, and these work like cantos, contained episodes along a path of the poem. Obviously, this is not the real meaning of the word, but I'm thinking of the narrative function of a canto in Dante, for example. Given that, the formal frame of stanza and line was a known, even a comfort, setting off into whatever came next.

SM: Where/how does AS factor into your own development as a writer?

TM: That'll become clearer as time passes. I'm just starting another long poem and it most definitely takes off from AS.

SM: How does AS seem to factor into prior or other work by Dan Davidson?

TM: To speak simply and frankly, as I must speak of my lost friend, Dan was immensely proud of AS. To speak of his work, on the other hand, I think that may be beyond me. His death still seems like the present moment, like Dan now, something very hot for which I've found an insulated carrier but cannot put down, hoping for a time to come when I can unwrap it, handle it, feel and think it through.

A few words, all the same. From my first read of Product, Dan's work seemed to me to define and occupy obsessively an analytic solitude, a subject whose sole object was the social. His work had force and scale in its abutment to the social, which it pushed and that way knew. An interest in interacting with the solitude I felt in Dan drew me to our collaboration. AS seemed to recoup other qualities in his person; I found myself thinking for example that he might be ready to play music again - he'd been a musician and song-writer for some years, but not during the time I knew him. I remember once sitting in his room, monastico-leftism-mess, and he picked up an acoustic guitar and began to improvise a fluent beautiful music. I hadn't known even that he played, and it was a shock.

SM: What is most important about AS as to the genre to which the piece belongs, to your and Dan's work, and to you personally?

TM: "To be human is to be a variant" - where did I read that recently? What I like about AS, and want from poetry now, that I read and that I write, is variance and room for variance. AS is a phenotype that holds the genotype in judgment.

SM: Let's talk about the format selected for AS. Is there significance in the length of stanzas and the syllabics of the lines, or were these choices made arbitrarily?

TM: Not arbitrary, although I'd thought of the silva as a seven-line stanza, wrongly as it turns out. The other day I looked it up in the Princeton Encyclopedia for the first time. It's a verse form wherein each line contains either seven or eleven syllables but strophic breaks can occur freely. So I'd misconstrued it. But the number seven is not arbitrary it is immensely significant, even perfect. And eleven is a variant on seven. Yet, when you repeat something you are applying it and you are changing it. That is, a world arises, particular not formal, which also changes the formal device, adaptively one hopes. As the rabbis used to say, "to the wise a hint is sufficient."

SM: Was this poem created with any preconception relative to its length?

TM: Dan and I had written a couple of earlier collaborations, short poems just for fun - to see what would happen, that is. We wrote a sestina and a villanelle. So it seemed natural to stretch out. We quickly found that we had a large project on our hands. But we did not want to establish a set number of stanzas, the regularity of line and stanza length seemed enough. AS ends with the 526th stanza. That is, at a certain point we felt it was time to end it and we did something to bring it to an end.

SM: Were PROSPECT OF RELEASE and AS written concurrently? How would you compare these works in terms of focus, aesthetic contribution, process and direction?

TM: I finished Prospect of Release in 1992, and Dan and I began AS about a year later. They are very difficult works to compare, quite different. In AS the stanza form is used to propel the work. In Release the variant-sonnet is used to contain the individual unit of the work. I use a sonnet form in Release which I've never seen elsewhere, the stanzas are of 4, 3, 3, and 4 lines in that order, a form that reads as balanced and internal - unbreakable even armored. But repeated lines, phrases, words throughout Release propel the thought, the single, variant, broken thought that is thinking into, through and out the work. I could never write another poem like Prospect of Release, because it is as unique as that single thought. But I could write another poem like AS, despite the fact that its conditions were unique and my collaborator dead.

SM: What thematic currents in AS seem most important to you?

TM: I think I want to ask you that question. What themes stand out for you?

SM: I'm very interested in learning your perceptions about collaboration as an aesthetic possibility for writing. There seems to be growing interest in the practice of collaboration. Can you speculate as to what is behind this? Clearly, you and Dan have brought collaboration to new heights with AS.

TM: Collaboration is deep in all human making and doing, of course. It's great for it to become more of a possibility in poetry. My generation of poets is known in part for its effort to de-establish the "I" from its authoritative and even monarchical position in the poem, and of course collaboration does that directly.This revolution against the “I” is repeated, as the coup so often merely remodels the ego's throne room in the name of a revolution that in retrospect seems one of taste rather than poetics (viz. Surrealism).

I find it hard to sustain an interest in the theoretical discourse behind this effort. I was raised on philosophy, and I don’t see critical theory as having much of a grasp on its object, let alone the ability to re-frame it. That sounds sort of arrogant; others may view the matter differently. Perhaps I just don’t find critical theory useful to me as a poet.

In fact, thinking about the "I" in any form - sovereign, exploded, evasive, missing, etc. – strikes me as a boring mystery, somehow a way to imagine that the corner one has written oneself into and must write oneself out of is somehow more interesting than the object itself. Nope.

Perhaps the theoretical work of the last decade on complexity and emergence will open a bigger window on the processes by which poems are written and communicate, than what passes for critical theory, or Theory capitalized, or poetics as we have it, or whatever. But, I should *write about* this rather than make these kinds of pronunciamentos, and I don't have the time to do that writing, so . . .

. . . I'll say some more about collaboration. In the case of AS, collaboration with Dan turned out to be dangerous, as we entered into a deep and entangled dialogue and then my interlocutor killed himself. I have found it difficult to disentangle my spirit from this loss.

SM: A number of the following questions relate to thematic instances, stemming from your asking me about what themes stand out for me.

SM: Throughout AS, there exists the sense that experience consists of a "pileup" of present tenses that eventually comprise a history, fluid in character and laden with differently shaped "rules." At some point, there is a reference made to glass breaking into slivers that soon after do not show. Over time, things change, gestures evolve, and the remainder is transformed, sometimes to the point of imperceptibility. Quoting another passage, "An accurate picture of the inner world/ finely sifted over seven hundred years/ of plasticity, invention and pleasure/ fell to nothing in a day." And from another, "The present is the perfect rebuttal/ and is the easiest to apply. The past/ is completed before the plaster has dried." Would you address the issue of present tense, history, and experience?

TM: The first lines you quote are mine. In the second passage, which was written by Dan, I notice for the first time the play on grammatical tenses: present perfect, past complete (as in compound past tense, or the passé composé tense in French).

The view of history I inherit, and I think it's "our" view of history now, derives from Walter Benjamin's famous image of the angel of history before whose eyes the past piles up as wreckage. This image is an isomorph of Benjamin's statement that "every great act of civilization is also a great act of barbarism," which I know I'm not quoting quite accurately here.

It is important to think radically the meaning of these passages from Benjamin -- to think with them rather than about them.

The antinomian endgame Benjamin's vision implies, thoroughly motivated by the twentieth century he witnessed, must be absorbed well beyond an identification of the evidence for its truth in Benjamin's time and in ours. It is not enough, in other words, to bracket what humans have done in history in an ethical category of revulsion, to make it into the other human 'We,' of which we are only formally a part -- the Nazis, the church, the Chicago police. It has to be faced in the present tense, and the present tense is 'We' in a realer sense. It's Tom Mandel, it's Dan Davidson, it's Sheila Murphy; reader, it's you.

Not enough either to ignore or suppress the experience, the grammar, of intellectual and imaginative transformation which enters our lives from all that's happening with technology in our time. AS couldn't have been written without computers and email. This interview ditto.

In saying this I'm anticipating the end of the poem with its extended meditation on participation and resistance and its focus on what we make now, which though it seem the future is another past. In AS, the question of history immediately poses that of the individual, twinned in this telling but still the individual. How does the teller bear the tale he makes and tells? Experience in AS is a question posed. What I do rises up and asks me what it is I do. I'm not making the future but the past; what do I make?

We don't have available to us a level to which we can rise for resolution, as, at least formally lets say, Dante did. Or, we do, but we are aware of its evasiveness.

I like to think of the phrase "Grant unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," for example, on which so much of Christianity depends, that division of the world. I like to remember how easy especially Roman Christianity found it to cover in the dark the distance created in the daylight of this phrase. And I like to remember that these words are a moment in a centuries-long dialogue among the rabbis of the early centuries about how to view Rome. Without Rome, the rabble would destroy us Jews or the Egyptians would, one of them says. So instead the Romans destroy us? another replies. The issue cannot be resolved, but somewhere in the Talmud a prayer is repeated, somewhat humorously and altogether seriously, "that the eye of the policeman not fall on me." But, it did.

SM: One of the primary issues I derive from this book concerns privacy and communion, which could be turned and seen as privacy IN communion. One line, "Approach is easy, access indecisive" seems at least distantly related to this aspect of AS. When communion is referenced in the book, the sense is of a difficult, demanding one, imbued with a sense of its own unlikelihood. Could you say more about communion as related to AS?

TM: I think it's community or communication but not communion. Whatever else AS is it is a dialogue between two very different individuals and in that dialogue we repeatedly model but also miss the difficult acts of communication and building (or accepting) community which seem so critical in a world where very very little is of that form. The great value of poetry now is in modeling ways in which an individual creating form engages, in however demanding a way, the community we build on communication. What you are seeing as 'unlikelihood' - I think that difficulty is rather how critical such communication is.

The community we need and model in poetry is not like created, objectified culture - e.g. canon, value, meaning. It is like the communication among ants who by that communication span the distance between two branches (or roots) which otherwise would seem to be impossibly apart.

SM: Memory seems to function as a device for survival, a gradually depreciating supply of itself. On one level, memory (an arbitrary construct?) seems self-validating, either artificially or with some value. How do you perceive memory in AS?

TM: The questions you've been asking in this session turn me into a philosopher, and I'm not a philosopher, or rather I'm very given to philosophy but I hope I'm a better poet than a philosopher. Still, they are good questions, but I experience a struggle between answers that have to do with our intention and those in which I'm a reader of the poem. I don't know which are which or which are more useful.

In a notebook last year, I doodled out part of a song that went:

"'I remember, I remember.'
Memory says – the great pretender,

Claims it happened, it really was
One way or the other, and all because

It seems so in my head today
As present (presence) passes my way."

If memory is an artifice or construct - tho I think actually it is a form of adaptation - it is nonetheless of inexhaustible supply and not self-validating but a kind of glue to bind something problematic to something else which is posed as a known. That's the way it works in AS I think - and here I am answering as a reader, not providing insight into an intention - but the collaborative process gave the poets the opportunity each to question what might be a fixed value in another's words, so there is a lot of fluidity in the position memory occupies.

SM: As AS progresses toward the final (approximately) quarter of the book, there seems a buildup of intensity, wherein explorations from earlier in AS concerning present tense, history, communion, and survival confront contemporary life. The imperative of self protection intersects with politics and a larger, perhaps more threatening, picture. A fundamental solitude that permeates AS seems especially true here. Quoting again, "how to guard/our silence from an alien ear" and "No adjustment of your set is possible" seem also apt. I sense that we are looking at politics and life as spun from a great distance. Can you respond?

TM: The buildup of intensity in AS seems to me to be exactly the intensity of the poem experienced at a point where you have already read a lot of the poem, where you have a lot of the poem to bring to the later part you are reading. I'm interested in the phrase you use: "politics and life as spun from a great distance." I think that corresponds to an intention deep in the poem; the object of the poem seems to arrive as if from a great distance and with a lot of torque or spin on it. How to deal with its object, the poem itself what must it say and be? - it was very demanding.

Let me illustrate this point with a story: I had a curious experience once at a concert of the San Francisco symphony with pianist Charles Rosen, who played Schoenberg's piano concerto, an angular, harmonically-demanding work in two movements. Laura Davies Hall, like many modern orchestral halls, features a curving section of seats behind the orchestra. During the concert, a man in one of these seats, no more than a hundred feet from the piano, and seemingly right in Rosen’s view, began to twitch violently. Soon he was flailing his limbs in a mounting frenzy which seemed to be not just attuned to the music but a part of it, a strange dance to Schoenberg's music.

The seats around him were empty; his troubles went on for a long time. But, shortly before the end of the concerto, a couple of men slipped into the section where he was seated and helped him leave. I learned later that the man was an epileptic, and that he had recovered from the fit that had come upon him during the concert.

As it happened, I met Charles Rosen a few years later in Chicago and asked him about this strange event; what had it been like to play Schoenberg as it were accompanied by an epileptic fit?

Rosen recalled the concert, but in his concentration on the music and his musical collaborators, he had noticed nothing of what I described to him. It was news to him, strange and shocking.

SM: The book posits an ongoing tension between "participation and resistance" in human existence. Would you address this?

TM: A tension and an identity, or at least the need and the attempt to keep both active, an attempt that can fail. Yes this theme is at the heart of Absence Sensorium, a theme that can never be resolved.

SM: Your comments about variance and room for variance stimulate another question: Do you judge form in light of its capacity to generate variance?

TM: Yes, exactly. The variance and the variants a form spawns. And at a given time, any form may be productive in that way (e.g. our use of the silva in Absence Sensorium). For this reason the debate about form and formalism – 'experimental' poetry vs. 'conventional' poetry – seems misplaced to me. Experimental poetry can be as minimally variant, as indistinguishable from its sources and its neighbor-poems, as so-called conventional poetry.

Somewhere in A Poetics, for example, Charles Bernstein points out that many personal poems of memory, personal apotheoses, are like each other. I.e. far from being “personal” they reproduce conventional tropes; they’re pretty much all the same despite their stress on the uniqueness of the moment and of personal memory.

He’s right; it’s a valid critique, and I agree with him. Often you can't tell one of these poems from another, and you could interleave lines from one “unique” experience into another and little would change.

But, right or wrong, the critique reproduces exactly the one his opposite number, writing from the traditional camp, usually says about 'experimental' or 'formally-demanding' poetry. "It claims all to be individual but you can't tell one from another!"

The remark is itself a rhetorical trope. You can apply the critique itself invariantly. It says and means nothing.

I stand with what Osip Mandelstam writes: "an artist considers his world-view a tool and an instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason, and his only reality is the work of art itself." A stonemason doesn't waste time talking about his hammer, all new and different.

SM: The words "Everything survives its end" seem particularly painful, given the circumstances following the completion of the book. Perhaps more hopeful, "What will replace thought" calls into question the centrality and eternal nature of that kernel of existence? Can you comment?

TM: Perhaps instead we should see "Everything survives its end" as hopeful. I don't know. I wish what we wrote had a message. It does. I wish people could get the message. Well they can. I wish poetry could make a difference. It must make a difference, and perhaps it will. Perhaps it has. It does.

SM: I'm very interested in your comments about what I consider a syndrome of disguised mimicry, wherein certain practices are anointed "new," while their predecessors are branded as "old." Students especially may gravitate toward a passkey approach to writing, in an effort to sort "the good" from "the dross." This is probably de facto a process of secretly having a canon. In fact, *competence* (a writer's ability to work effectively in a form) seems a more pertinent issue in this case, certainly moreso than style. You've indicated that some distinctions are at least inappropriate and misfocused. Issues of *making* are more central. Could you talk about what you consider the most important aspects of *making*, as applied to AS?

TM: To orient yourself in any facet of life, you have to read signals in the environment. The most prominent ones are in essence indicators of what we might call "fashion." They tell you something about the subject at hand, but mostly they tell you whether it is in favor and in what ways. Until you are a fair way down the road and have gone through this orientation and reorientation many times, how can you know the significance - even the status - of this set of orientation signals? You can't, that's why you need them in the first place.

So, things may seem new which are not new; things may seem valuable which are maybe less so than you think. Other phenomena, especially those which are not assertively connected to the dialectic of fashion, may escape your notice altogether at first. And the social structure of the intellectual landscape may be invisible.

Maybe the problem is the lack of a canon, rather than that there’s a secret one, if it’s not too strange for an avantardist like me to call for a canon. Something to push against. Canons tell lies of course; they orient you – and they make possible the disorientation in which real ideas begin. So we need those little signals and we need to recognize them and drop them.

In conversation many years ago, Ron Silliman described us all as having constellations of figures (poets) in our minds and we orient ourselves and our work by these constellations. When you are young, the constellations consist of older poets and their work. As time passes, the points on these schemata begin to be occupied by one's own work the work of peers. That’s a really helpful way to look at it.

The past really does seem fixed, like the heavens which we can’t avoid seeing as already made rather than in the making. And, if you can't escape the sense that there is a fixed issue of form in poetry, wherein gradations of value inhere, you are in trouble as a writer. That is why we have nth generation NY or Language poets and even surrealists.

People like their expectations fulfilled. But new poetry should confound readers’ expectations. It should create new expectations. It’s a hard problem. The American “experimental” tradition is, by now, a pretty predictable phenomenon. But, then, poetry is always in a crisis and coming out of it.

SM: The awareness of active readership as a concept seems to be gaining momentum. At this meeting place of the writers, their work, and the reader, what are (at least) *some* of the important aspects that a *reader* must bring to the gathering?

TM: There are many kinds of reading of course. We don't read a new work of writing in the same way we read even a modern literary work with an established place of some kind in our culture. We don't read Tom Raworth the way we read Sam Beckett; nor read Jean Day the way we read Tom Raworth for that matter.

In fact, how useful is the word "read?" really. I read the sports section; I read Thomas Bernhard; I read a review of a new recording of Nielsen's 6th symphony; I read the distance to Lewes DE on a roadsign. Stopping for lunch, I read the name of the restaurant, the menu, then, while waiting for my salad, I read a new poem Doug Lang just gave me.

Active reading refers to what happens after I read, and that makes me re-read perhaps.

When I read Jane Austen, it's like looking at someone across the table from me. All of the work is facing me and I it, and I'm trying to figure it out. But, when I read Jane Austen, it's like being shoulder to shoulder with someone very far away, and we are looking not at each other but at a shared scene, and she is opening shaping defining teasing that scene for me; or we are collaborating to figure that world out we're both facing.

So what you bring to reading is what you bring to finding your way to Lewes DE, picking lunch from a menu, caring a lot what your friend has put on the page, sensing your place in the world from the writing acts in it undertaken by a close contemporary.

SM: Your remark, "A stonemason doesn't waste time talking about his hammer," prompts me to ask what you believe would be a useful exercise for students hoping to write, either alone or collaboratively.

TM: On seeing the work of Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes is said to have remarked: "I durst not speak so freely." I don't know whether my sense of what a starting writer should do is of a kind to be welcomed.

I notice that you frame the question as about "students hoping to write." But, my first advice is to stop being a student. Stay away from schools (especially graduate schools) of creative writing or poetics, above all. Believe that the new is what doesn't yet exist rather than what was just announced.

Move to a large city where you can be anonymous and hang around with the most interesting people you can find. Fill your mind with exceptions. Take seriously what people think is trivial. See if you can reconstruct a baseball game from a box score.

SM: In consideration of the type of experience that AS is, I'm wondering about the way time factored into the making of AS. Was the project "slow and steady" or were there pauses between segments? Were there points at which you needed to halt the work and clear the slate, or did it progress at an intense pace?

TM: There were some slowdowns relating to life issues of availability for the work, and there were other periods of really intense communication. Overall, however, it always had momentum. It was never on the back burner but always the current project for both Dan and me.

SM: (Your story of the Charles Rosen concert is rich and offers infinite possibilities. Sometimes when focusing on a particular historical situation, I find myself awakening to layer upon layer of realization of the significances from multiple viewpoints, in addition to sensing several adjustments resulting from the positioning of these viewpoints in time. There is no complete story.)

TM: Or none that is not complete, or there for us to complete. Situating event in context to purpose about describes every waking moment.

SM: Would you discuss the issue of access as related to AS? It seems that this work would be reachable (at least to some degree—impossible to project another person's ability to grasp) to individuals not already steeped in literary theory and contemporary poetics. Like other work of yours, this book offers the reader a way into the outer reaches, if the reader is willing to go. But there are ways in, in any case. Is this important to you, and is it conscious, or just the way the work evolved?

TM: I deeply hope you don't need to have studied literary theory or poetics to read my work! Poetry determines theory not the opposite. I use my own reading in - penchant for - philosophy (I really don't like the word theory and am glad to see that it is fading from use) and theology in just the way I use my experience of the quotidian world and other more formal interests.

I need to know some math and physics to write, because I need them to understand the world, and I can't write without some understanding of the world. I need to know something of the history of writing to write, because this history is necessary to the development of vision and technique, necessary in other words - like physics and math – in order to have something to say.

All of writing is about having something to say. Otherwise there are more rewarding ways to spend your time than spilling words on a page. Unless by so doing you reach practical goals like being published, winning a grant, getting invited to the conference, or getting tenure. There is nothing whatever wrong with these goals, they're normal issues of professional advancement, the exact equivalents of being promoted at GM or made partner in the law firm. They have of course nothing to do with writing, with poetry.

Somewhere Max Weber refers to two ways to communicate. By explanation and by example. A poet has to do both.

There is an ineluctable value for articulation in writing; however it may be counterbalanced by other needs and interests it never departs wholly and usually leaves a way to get to it (a sign or map of itself) at the heart of a piece of writing, however complex in form, that comes to have value for readers, for people. Perhaps the path in a work that leads to articulation takes the reader to as you call them "the outer reaches." Certainly, I could not know that about my own work or make such a claim for it.

But articulation does lead to the person writing being a whole and offering an example. What we call poetics is a section of a discourse that may lead along this path. Often, the wholeness or articulation or "something to say" is not visible in the piece of discourse we examine as poetics or theory. This does not mean it is absent, though it does mean that we may find ourselves misled by such a piece of thought. We may find ourselves devoted to the facts of truncation rather than those of implication.

People want what concludes a sense of meaning and shores up a sense of self. Just as they want a template for what is "good" writing and "new writing" even though this is by definition unavailable, so they want what I just lumped together in the phrase "some practical goal."

Our natures lead us to frame whatever is before us as the legitimate object of desire. A male pigeon courts a female pigeon, does his display. Absent a female pigeon, he will court another male. Absent these, he will court your shoes or a crack in the sidewalk. People are not significantly different in this regard.

SM: Do you think of a "composite third person" as the author of AS, or would you prefer to think of the situation in a different way? I'm interested in hearing about the development of the writing presence that created AS.

TM: I think of myself as the author of AS, and I think of Dan as the author of AS. I don't have a third thought which seeks to resolve these two. The second of the thoughts I have in an incalculably and irrevocably and annoyingly different way than ever I would have imagined. Think how much fun it would have been if you'd been able to interview Dan and me, and we'd been able to collaborate on being interviewed. Think of what a great human experience that would have been. Dan can't have that experience, and he has denied it to me. Infuriatingly, he denied me the chance even to say, "Dan - wake up! Don't forego the great experience that will come." Hence, I must say it now and here, and it must mean something totally different from what it would have meant to shout it in his living ear.

SM: To what extent were you thinking of a hypothetical reader as you wrote AS? Was the reader for you Dan, or Dan and others? Or no one in particular?

TM: Dan was the first reader for what I wrote - very much in the way one usually occupies the first reader position for oneself. And vice versa of course. His responses - in the form of what he did next on the book - took the place of lets say rewriting of which there is almost none in AS (save corrections). I at least had no hypothetical reader in mind. Dan was "in mind" but not as a reader as the writer, as in other words, another version of myself I guess.

SM: To what extent have you participated as a reader of AS? What are some of the things you've learned from reading it? As you read the work now, (how) has the work changed?

TM: That is a wonderful and difficult question. In a way, it asks "how have you changed?" as much as how has the work changed. I don't think I have a good answer right now. Perhaps I'll find my way back to the question as we go along here.

SM: If you were to project ten years into the future, what difference do believe the Internet will have made in developing communication toward "the community we build on communication"? Would you be willing to share how it feels to you to use the Internet for communication? (How) is it different from other ways?

TM: To project even two years into the future of the current transformation is impossible, let alone a decade! It's obvious what the limitations of the net are as social space, community space. Range of activity and expression are very limited; emotional range is really shallow; spontaneity hardly exists at all. There is no real social development without that people give to it with all their faculties and the net just doesn't have a way to accept most of what people are able to do.

That said, it's pretty extraordinary what happens between and among people even now. With a large number of people around the world my relations have changed immensely, deepened and become more significant, because of e-mail. And the Web offers people a pretty rich context for prepared communication and a context for spontaneous group communication which is...improving - that's the best I can say! As you know, I'm involved in this stuff, specifically in creating tools for open social space online. We have a long way to go.

Some tools and technologies are available; lots more are needed. One certain thing, at the point at which we really can experience social space online, we won't be thinking about the Internet, anymore than you now think about the telephone network when you call a friend. Dial tone, ring, busy signal - we don't experience these as technologies but as facts about the world.

Interviewer’s Note: The following segment of the interview began in the autumn of 2007.

SEM: Tom, your new book, To the Cognoscenti appeared a few months ago. As you reflect upon your own work over the past 30 years, what emphases or changes seem most important to you now?

TM: That period – 30 years ago; the mid-late seventies – is on my mind these days, because of writing The Grand Piano. I suppose I’m quite a different person from the one back then, although others would know better than I.

I imagine I began by thinking about poetry and then about people who wrote poetry; I don’t think about these subjects very much any more. I think about poems, and I think about poets. Seems quite different to me.

A poet is the intention of a poem. Over time, as one becomes one’s own biggest influence – or rather one’s experience does – the work gives up particularity for a greater individuality, becoming more like a body of water, a meadow, a desert of sand than it is like a cityscape or even a dwelling.

In that sense, my work of thirty years ago has changed – perhaps more than I have. Recently, while writing a piece for the GP, I reread a long poem I wrote in 1978 or ‘79 called Some Appearances. It ends

The stairs had been carpeted one by one
We perceive the object riddled with its error
Senseless parallels along which we padded
Now tell me your theory one more time

SEM: I sense from your response a renewed vitality of the empirical, or at least a questioning of an orphaned sense of theory. Would you comment on the place of experience in your recent thinking?

TM: Sometimes I think of myself as the only member of a literary movement to be called "restlessism." Of course, there may be many members of the school who know nothing of one another because that ignorance is part of what defines it. Still, I lay claim to having founded it.

We do tend, as human beings, to value highly whatever we possess in abundance. When I was young, and my thinking was unimpeded by experience while being propelled by the quick, fresh hardware of youth, I valued theory more highly than I do now that I have an abundance of experience. Now I value experience above all else.

This is true despite the irony as to theory in the poem I just quoted – Some Appearances, written in the '70s. Or perhaps the irony conveys my interest in theory back then. After all, the first thing irony does is assert the phenomenon it ironizes. One could say the same thing about the title of my newest book, To the Cognoscenti. Are there any?

I note that your question associates the empirical and experience – and seems to oppose them to theory. I've just been reading a lovely essay by Deleuze with the title "Immanence: A Life." I think it was the last thing he wrote. It argues for a "transcendental empiricism" not of sensation nor of representation. It is "a [1]qualitative duration of consciousness without a self."

Perhaps this conception allows us to recapture theory and experience in a single frame: the frame of poetry – 'frame' he says, and means a rim of flame. [1]

But, don't you want to ask me where I was born and what I learned from my mother?

SEM: What do you see as (some of) the most exciting aspects of current or recent poetry? Oh, and lest we forget your prompt, what role did your early life play in your writing? :)

TM: Uh oh, now I’m in trouble. I get sent a pretty good number of books, and I try to read as many of them as I can. But, that’s not enough for me to make an intelligent comment without leaving out too much by too many.

Mostly, the names on my reading list would sound like the waiting list for the old folks home.

I suppose my biggest interest in new poetry is that there be new ways for it to reach people. My measure in this regard is a 13-year old in Lahore. How does new writing reach her and how does she reach out for it? The advantage of mainstream media is that, for example, she may be found by e.g. Rae Armantrout’s work because the New York Times reviews it. The disadvantage of the burgeoning academic interest in new poetry (and this is not meant as a critique of ‘the academy’: that’s too easy) is that it expresses itself in contexts that won’t find my 13 year old – in hiding places, institutional endpoints, resting places of reputation.

Why is a 13-year old in Lahore my measure? First off because I’ve met her; I know her. And also because my own relation to poetry was changed by what found me at that age: a Time Magazine article about Ginsberg and the Beats. It led me to the San Francisco Renaissance issue of the Evergreen Review, a volume I bought at a literary bookstore in downtown Chicago back then (I might have been 14) and which I still have on a shelf somewhere.

Blogs help new poetry reach new readers. And, I like to see work that actively uses the compositional and presentation possibilities offered by new technologies. Mimeo, and then affordable printing, transformed literary magazines. We need to extend that further online. Magazines and presses that mimic print online can be useful, but obviously much more than that is possible. I do like Jacket, Fascicle and particularly mark(s) which makes effective use of Flash. But so much more is possible – and needed. So I’m waiting for that and, probably, wondering why I don’t make something myself.

As to my early life, my mother, more about that anon.

SEM: Let’s conclude with some of your early influences and experiences, combined with what advice you might offer to new writers and readers of what we may continue to call innovative writing.

TM: Back to my mother? She wanted me to be a Doctor not a poet. She had been kicked out of medical school in Vienna when the Nazis arrived and had in mind that I would make this right. A few months before she died in the mid-nineties, she got to see my daughter get her MD, so all’s well that ends well.

The first poetry I read was Charles Greenleaf Whittier – is that how you spell his name? – in a book printed during the war on paper that had grown brittle and brown. I was a little kid, sitting behind an arm chair in the living room of my family’s small apartment in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. They had arrived in America only a few years ago; how they came by that book I do not know. I liked the way the words were splayed on the pages and that the brittle pages felt so frail.

My first influences were the beats – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Brother Antoninus. Then I read Eliot, of course, everyone did, and Pound. I was absorptive rather than selective since I didn’t know (or care) what was what. I remember with pleasure the Oscar Williams anthologies of modern poets; I loved the work of Gene Derwood, for example, and I still do – does anyone read her any more? Please do; hmmm, maybe I can drop in a link right there. Yes… there’s Gene Derwood

I was lucky enough to go to the famous Big Table Reading in Chicago in 1959 when I was still a teenager and hear Allen Ginsberg read from Kaddish. Gregory Corso read that afternoon as well, but Kerouac wasn’t there (although I saw and heard him read from On the Road on television! on the Steve Allen show), nor was Burroughs. You can’t have everything – still, why not try?

[1] Mandel, T. To the Cognoscenti. Atelos Press. January, 2007. 47.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Interview with Jessica Grim

Tom Beckett: Where did/does poetry begin for you?

Jessica Grim: I feel trapped and inarticulate approaching a question like this. who cares about biography? everyone? I didn’t read poetry until college, or very little. and then it was bad; I took a couple lit & “creative writing” courses at Humboldt State University in the early 80’s – Jorie Graham and James Galvin were teaching there and I took a course with Galvin. Oddly the passionate connection was from an end-of-career lit prof – I remember him looking out the window with these watery blue eyes, reciting pieces from memory by Shelley & Keats. I’m trying to think about exaltation. maybe that’s because I’m reading Fanny Howe right now. but wanting “discovery” to feel, have felt, exalted…. but guess what. because from here, at nearly 50, the exaltation attending discovery looks hopelessly young to me. I had embarrassingly juvenile experiences with poetry on into my twenties, at SF state (I’d transferred to a place with a “real” creative writing program) where I was taking a class w/Kathleen Fraser on women writers. it’s not that the poems I wrote were horrible certainly not more horrible than anyone else’s at my “level” -- so I guess that’s when – those classes at SF state – poetry began. the classes by the way included short story writing, which I distained based on no particularly good evidence and certainly on very little experience. I remember writing a story, ala Robbe-Grillet, about walking down a mountain road and coming to a deserted town and stepping behind a crumbled wall in a vacant lot and seeing a car drive slowly past. that was the action, the climax, a car moving slowly down the road of this deserted town. so thank god for poetry, right? there was a lot happening in sf at that time, 1984, 85, 86… a lot to take in, a lot to go to. I became involved with Michael Amnasan, and he was hovering around the fringes of the writing scene, forging difficult – which is to say always troubled, always problematic, ever unsettled – connections with some of the Language folks. but going to readings and talks. there were things that had already ended by the time I was starting to be aware of the scene – Perelman’s talks, the grand piano series… but still, there was a lot of vibrancy and intent swirling around. Mid-80’s San Francisco.

In terms of my practice now(adays) it begins infrequently, and rarely where I “left off” unfortunately. It’s rare for me to find the time & space to write, so I tend to start over again each time I write. But my son’s now 8, my partner’s cancer (the pivotal focus of the last year) is officially undetectable, and I’m starting to see the possibility of light in terms of the job I started just a few months ago (after many yrs as a reference librarian I made the move to collection development/mgmt). So maybe that’s all the past & present biography needed?

TB: Let me ask a bit differently, Jessica-- what gets you going? What makes you want to write?

JG: A quiet house, some peace, an awareness of what it is that constitutes – or approximates – equilibrium in my life. Sometimes a flare of anger or disgust or despair relating to situations or occurrences in the world; often times reading. Writing is required, back to the equilibrium thing… I realize I’ve approached the question(s) as if the responses are going to be about external motivators (is the weather right? the temperature? do I have the right cup of tea) which is unfortunately telling. I never have the right god damned cup of tea. Sometimes some okay writing happens anyway.

TB: It's a fact for most of us who write poetry that it all happens in the midst of life without much enablement. I know of no one early on saying to me, "Tom, your future is in literature. Go forth and inspire!" Quite the contrary. I have been disappointing relatives for over 50 years. I say this for comic relief, but also to make the point that this thing of ours (la cosa nostra, if you will) is a life decision which informs the way one sees the world and that it has consequences. What does it mean to you to be a poet? Is there some special responsibility involved?

JG: Once again I want to deflect the question and its suggestions. Too big, too grand, too claim-making. I mean really, a special responsibility? To what or whom, I wonder. But naturally these questions are not as absurd as they at first strike me as being. So assuming I decide to take the questions seriously – only fair, eh? – here’s the rub: I am uneasy thinking about such things right now in light of my “decreased output” as a poet in recent years, and my decreased (nearly to nil) engagement with writing community(ies). If I want to think about what it means to me to be a poet I’ve got first to recall that I am one (please excuse the melodrama). Let’s assume I can do that. Through writing I express – attempt to express – this existence I know. I express that existence because it is not enough to live it. It feels very small simply to live it in fact. Dailiness happens and the range of occurrences, thoughts, emotions, interaction attending – or making up – the dailiness is, well, compartmentalized and let’s face it often wholly mundane. Work life, family life, life with friends. Meaning is there of course but it all slides on through. The writing I do – the poems I write – do not create an entirely different meaning exactly, nor a meaning that is particularly imbued with a “higher” understanding of or approach to this existence I am in. But distinct I’d say, in some fairly dramatic ways, from the meaning created and lived in the dailiness. If the writing is working well there are connections that occur there that do not occur otherwise, at least not in my experience of daily life. And yet obviously those connections wholly refer to and are engaged with the mundane living I do. The pleasure I find in writing is the pleasure of the surprise, often, of creating something in the juxtaposition of words/phrases/sentences (even) and sounds that twists in just such a way. It’s a screened record, really. But one that feels “true”, to me. To how I think about the world and respond to it. This was the existence that I was in, that I created for myself as a human, with all the composite elements of what I was “handed” and what I made. It sits alongside. The responsibility is to myself – to create this parallel line which is my writing and which carries with it a response to my life’s days. I do think of a future reader in my son – which is probably pretty bankrupt. He may have very little interest (in some imagined future) in how his mother understood the world, or very little patience for getting to that through reading. Is that odd, I mean in the sense of unusual, I wonder, to write for my kid. In some measure. I suppose that looks a lot like responsibility of a kind too. The notion of consequences is interesting. I find myself thinking “if only” – if only I’d written to the detriment of something, against my -or anyone else in my lifes’ - better judgment. Hm.

TB: When I think of your writing I think of your preoccupations with physical location and with description. In your book Locale there’s a poem I’m fond of called “It/Ohio.” It begins so:

Because I’m afraid to fight

my heart ticks in my leg.

The poem is immediately anchored in a sense of bodily anticipation.

Would you talk a bit about how you came to write this poem and what was at stake for you in it?

JG: It was written in the first months I’d moved to Ohio (from SF, most immediately- but in any case I’d pretty much lived in urban circumstances up to that point). Amidst a fairly thick sense of alienation and a general condition of being stunned by this move I’d made. I was trying to negotiate with myself this thing I’d done -- packed my stuff and driven out in a truck, to take this job I’d applied for on something of a whim…

Ohio – what a great word! But here I was living in it. In a liberal arts college town that felt stiflingly conservative socially. Political progressives packaged up in nuclear families… and they all seemed to go to church! So landscape as escape. The flat, “uninteresting” landscape. Pretty much devoid of topographical noise, at least here in the NE of the state. Getting on my bicycle and riding out into the cornfields on these country roads was a kind of acting out, a bodily, as you suggest, reliance upon the power of landscape to ease my way. I was mourning in particular the sense of anonymity I’d always enjoyed. I was pretty pissed actually. I moved in August – it was hot, and it was humid, and there were cicadas. I could be interested in the physicality of these things; I could observe them, and judge them, and decide upon their narrowness… which was of course my rage at the narrowness of the humanity I’d smacked myself up against and annoyance at myself for having done that. I felt cowardly somehow, in the encounter. As if my inability to assert myself and my “singular” values, my inability to impress myself upon this community – instead sending myself out into its hot still loneliness… was a failure. But I could take something of all of this for myself, for my sensibility… I could cruise around on the roads dividing the acres of soy from the acres of corn… and notice some things about the sky and things about the bird and animal life… and then write those. When I’d only been in Ohio a few weeks I had one of those unsettling experiences that, because I had no equilibrium at all, became symbolic: I’d awakened in the middle of the night having to pee, and on my way to the bathroom in my still unfamiliar apartment walked right into the edge of a door – so had a kind of serious-looking black eye for a couple weeks. Domestic violence! Ohio smacked me! And this sense of distrust I felt from people around me – no one believes that people from places like New York or San Francisco willingly move to places like Oberlin – and they expect you to leave at any moment. So when you do things like buy a house or “settle down” with someone here – people get all relieved… “so you ARE staying!”. And after 16 yrs I’m one of the people who doesn’t trust that people from places like NY or SF will stay. I think I’ve strayed from “It/Ohio”. I wanted to put Ohio in its place. It was messing with me. And the love/hate relationship continues to thrive today.

TB: Heh. Tell me about it.

The list of innovative writers who left Ohio could go on and on. Hart Crane, Bob Perelman and Juliana Spahr most immediately come to mind.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of blogs, listservs and innovative writing in cyberspace, which has had something of a decentralizing effect in the poetry world(s).It’s now a little easier for innovative poets to operate from Ohio—or, say, Australia, than it once was.

You’ve so far resisted starting a blog. What are your thoughts about this new environment for writing?

JG:

At this point in the game becoming a more active participant in that environment as a poet doesn’t hold a lot of interest for me… even if it can, as you suggest, be a way of alleviating the “condition” of isolation which I sometimes whine about. I would rather use my limited writing time & energy in other ways. I find the blog scene interesting enough, and there are a handful of poetry blogs I skim with some regularity-- and projects like ubuweb, which pulls in such an incredible variety of fabulous content, really excite me. Another part for me is that I spend many hours of my work day up to the eyeballs in online communication of various kinds, no choice (and guess what! We have a library blog! And guess what! I feel guilt over not posting to it with enough frequency to make it dynamic and cool!). Another mouth to feed… I was thinking of a kids online “environment” my son & his friends were into a couple years back… kids “buy” a pet – some kind of cute fuzzy cartoon thing – and then they have to feed it, and if they let it languish, it gets all sick and weak. I don’t think it actually dies from neglect… but maybe it could? So, yeah… the intention is to continue my resistance. I kind of revel in the retro on this one. For the time being.

TB: What's at risk for you in a poem?

JG: Pretty much everything? What do I think about, hold important, how do I relate to the world I’m in, how do I pull it in, through language, to do something, anything… What am I capable of, really? It’s funny because when I get into the rare conversation about poetry with someone around here there’s this assumption, a given, that my work is inaccessible. I despise that conversation, yet never seem to have a great comeback. What’s accessibility got to do with squat, I mean I don’t want to talk about my work in terms of who “gets” it, of who it’s “gettable” to. And yet, yeah, just yesterday I had lunch with a poet in the creative writing program here and the topic of my doing a local reading came up… and her assumption was that I’d want to make sure to read with someone who was “more accessible” – so the audience, wouldn’t, what? Hate it? Hate me? But what’s funny of course is that I think of my work as being entirely direct, entirely transparent, and pretty ragged emotionally at times. Which is not to say it’s a walk in the park or something that’s going to lay out the linear stepping stones… but it’s as true to my experience of this life – right now right here where I am – as I can be. Everything is at stake for me then. At the same time that absolutely nothing is – it’s poetry after all.

TB: Who do you think of as your poetic forebears?

JG:Stein's important to me always, in and out of time. And Duras and Leduc, the 20th century French women narrative obsessives. Not that you'd see that in or know that from my work. And of course the west coast folks, Hejinian, Scalapino, Silliman, actually, all really important to me in the 80's when I was first encountering Language stuff. Coolidge I loved. Mine, My Life, Tjanting. Forebears sounds so heavy though, let's just call it all influence. Niedecker, her wondrous brevity.

TB: Could you speak a bit to your process as a poet? How do you approach writing a poem?

JG: For the most part I write in bound notebooks, in which I put somewhat random date markers; I then return to the notebooks -- usually after an "aging" period of 6 mos to a year -- and transcribe into electronic form what I find of interest, or usable. The percentage of the work I find "usable" varies, but roughly 60-70% I'd say. Sometimes there are long dry spells -- both in terms of the actual writing, and in terms of what I find of interest in returning to the writing. And there are also pockets of material, where I'll transcribe many pages almost verbatim. I generally keep the line breaks and other spacing from the handwritten work. I find that the rhythm and pacing as I originally thought them are usually right. Then I have these files of quite rough material -- with "titles" like "trans 10/06-7/07". Sometimes there are discreet sections (a page, several pages) that are "natural" pieces, and I pull them out-- often there's theme involved... stuff written while in certain places or while thinking about certain things, or in response to particular events or circumstances, or around texts I'm reading. On occasion I also write a discreet poem to be that, or where there's no question in my mind that's what it is. Usually, again, longhand in the notebook. I'm not necessarily thrilled with my process -- it seems, well, inefficient -- but I'm resigned to it, and find something about its cumbersomeness comforting.

TB: Why does poetry matter to you?

JG: In terms of the writing it's a singular site for me for exploration, all manner of delving -- be it personal, political, social -- and all manner, by extension, of learning. This'll sound corny but I understand the world and what I'm doing in it better through writing than through any other act, or situation, or encounter. And the encounter with (experience of? consumption of?) the world of texts "out there" - what miniscule piece of it I'm able to find my way to - is and has been life changing. Of course, and always. Transformative texts, reifying texts, troubling texts. How can that "mattering" possibly by articulated? Inarticulate texts...

TB: Is there a text of yours you can point to that came to you as a kind of breakthrough? And if so, could you talk about its occasion and what it came to mean for you?

JG: "Fort Recovery" is a piece about the death - the suicide - of my mother. I don't recall exactly how long after her death it was that I wrote it, but it was a good 6 months at least. It's one of the pieces I mentioned earlier that, uncharacteristic of how I usually work, took on theme/event quite explicitly, and took on sentiment and emotion. It wasn't breakthrough in a radical sense but it reminded me that I did in fact still find useful a direct and emotionally raw "voice"... I wasn't going to bother with my usual critique and self-editing self-consciousness... she jumped off the (god damn as I always seem to say) Golden Gate Bridge, afterall, so who was I to create anything particularly subtle or nuanced out of that? It gave the event, for me, its due dramatic response. Not "healing" mind you, never that, god forbid; but an iteration of (my) agency attaching to an act - a fact - that still these years later haunts me, and can overwhelm.

TB: As a poet, what most concerns and preoccupies you now?

JG: The power & privilege of language - the privilege I reserve for the language of my writing and how that works. The world I'm depositing my kid into -- in broad strokes and then trying to move beyond the guilt and panic of it into something else... or figuring out if that's possible in writing. And how my privileging of language circles back into those very trenchant concerns. Reconnecting with friends & writers I've been out of touch with... I'm very recently back in touch with Melanie Neilson -- she and I co-edited Big Allis in the late 80's/early 90's -- and we've started a collaborative project - which makes me very happy. That's the nutshell. Oh, and keeping the balls in the air - it is not a glamorous preoccupation but it suffuses all.

TB: Thank you, Jessica.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Linescapes: An Interview with Mary Rising Higgins

Mary Rising Higgins is the author of red table(S (La Alameda 1999), oclock (Potes and Poets 2000), )locus TIDES(( (Potes and Poets 2002), Greatest Hits, 1990-2001 (Pudding House 2002), )cliff TIDES(( (Singing Horse 2005), )joule TIDES(( (Singing Horse 2007) and Borderlining: Pieces from R and B (Small Chapbook Project 2007). Her poems have appeared in such magazines and journals as Blue Mesa Review, Cafe Solo, Big Allis, ecopoetics and Central Park, and she recorded poems for Vox Audio. This interview took place in her home in Albuquerque on February 11, 2007, just before her 63rd birthday. Two months after the interview, Mary again became ill from complications of breast cancer and began receiving hospice care. She died on August 26, 2007. Bruce Holsapple and John Tritica

John Tritica: Mary, I would like to start with the question of what you see as differences between red table(S [1999] and )locus TIDES(( [2002] , )cliff TIDES(( [2005], and )joule TIDES(( [2007] . There’s an obvious difference in how the poems look, yet you could take lines from red table(S and find similar lines in )cliff TIDES((. You could recognize the same poet as having written both. Can you address what you see as being the differences?

Mary Rising Higgins: If I think about red tables(S first, that was written while I was still teaching in the public schools full-time. So red table(S was fitted into working life, staying up past midnight with my students’ work, planning new things for them. And I was limited as to when I could write and would begin Friday evenings after dinner. I’d turn on two 5,000 watt neon lights to keep me alert. I’m sure my house glowed for blocks. But I would work late on Friday night, and then I would work as much as I could Saturday and Sunday. That’s how these poems came to be constructed. I couldn’t begin to think of the long poems that make up the TIDES(( trilogy; the process that goes into the work of these books is so utterly different because with them I’m retired, working perhaps three days a week at CNM [a community college in Albuquerque]. So, yes, the work comes out of the same center, but the process out of which the work derives is utterly different.

Bruce Holsapple: What does that mean to you, “comes out of the same center”?

MRH: Well, comes out of my center, a center of being, a center of collecting. Essentially, I have not changed in terms of requiring a certain auditory gesture, as the means by which I enter the poem’s beginning. However, with the TIDES(( series, if I say that I’m going to work a five-hour day and my window opens when I get out of bed in the morning, instead of after a week’s work, late on a Friday night, that’s a very different window from which to begin one’s creative work.

JT: That was 1995?

MRH: Yes, and I did that through the last year, because the needs of students are endless. But when I got to oclock, my life had changed dramatically. I was recovering from experimental treatment for breast cancer; my sister had come to live with me because I needed twenty-four hour care; she had dragged me through the illness. But I was exhausted and embarrassed by the amount of sleep I needed. Actually, oclock began with 9:00 a.m. I was amazed and depressed that I couldn’t even get up at 9:00 a. m. That was the first poem, and suddenly I realized: Write a twenty-four poem series that could embody the way I felt the poem could function. Also, I was fortunate. Peter Ganick, the founder of Potes & Poets Press, happened to read red table(S and sent an e-mail to me saying that whatever I project I was working on, he would publish it. I think I had gotten to the second poem by then, and I was delirious with the sense that, because of the kind of work Peter supported, I could go as far as I was capable with the work in oclock, and I did. In fact, indirectly, he suggested the title for oclock. I sent him the first draft [of the manuscript], and he wanted me to add body to 2 a.m. He did not say anything about how I should add body. 2 a. m. just needed to be able to stand with the other poems, which he called my “clock poems.” I thought, what a perfect title, oclock! I liked the foraging methods employed in working with oclock, so when I moved into the TIDES(( series, they retained elements from oclock. But these poems are each built around a particular letter. I think the first letter I addressed in )locus TIDES(( was “D,” because I love Beverly Dahlen’s work. So I thought that would be a good place to begin. I think “D” is less visual than succeeding works. The dripstone is something that occurs in a cavern, and I thought that was a good metaphor for how the work in that particular poem developed, because it was such slow going. I personally find the poem that works best for me is a poem where I just have to roll up my sleeves and do battle with the beginning. Then, suddenly, it will take off. Dripstone is like that.

JT: Beginning with oclock, the TIDES(( series develops a 8 ½ by 11 inch format. Why do you think that larger page format evolved, or at least is conducive to your work?

MRH: It started accidentally. I was toying with the idea of the arbitrary rectangle of the page and thinking about how a visual artist would approach that rectangle. That has to be addressed in the publication of one’s work. There have to be margins. You can only deal with certain perimeters. Editors and publishers don’t care to pursue the complexity of work that escapes those perimeters. So I started out seeing what I could do with the 8 ½ by 11 rectangle, leaving margins on all sides that would be appropriate for publication. And I simply became so comfortable with the page size that, even though I wanted to break the work down at different points for a smaller page, it just wasn’t conducive to the work that evolved in the larger format. Though it would be glib to say that the poems are built for the page, in fact I became enamored of doing everything I could think of to the page with the poem’s lines in the large format. So, it didn’t start out intentionally but now I’ve become rather intentional about it.

BH: You shift from a more traditional poetry, flush left, in red table(S and in oclock that boundary disappears. There’s a floating element involved. After you finish oclock, you turn to the abecedarium? So initially you have a frame you’re hanging things in, but then it becomes wide open. What tensions hold the work together after that?

MRH: I think in the TIDES(( series there are certain components in the way the work is built that hold the poems together. I collect words over time that begin with the letter, usually words I hadn’t heard or seen used in a particular way in text before. I mean, I had this clipboard, and I arbitrarily put twenty-six pages in it, and I carried it around with me. Do you really want to know about these things? Okay. I also had notes to myself about what I was going to look for. I was going to look for writers, words, and things I didn’t know enough about.

BH: Did you know the subjects?

MRH: Oh, not at all. The subjects were going to come out of the words collected, come out of dictionary meditations, meditations on the writing of the poets.

BH: You were going to invent?

MRH: Well, with language, one is never going to invent whole-cloth, because language creates the cloth. I feel so constrained within the language itself, and wanted to create an homage to text, as I’m working because of its beauty, because of its social-civil qualities, the conscience of language, the function of language, how one can construct a life out of the questions that language can present. So while I love that term, “whole-cloth,” I’m very much caught in the conundrum and quandaries of language itself, as we all are.
The shapes in TIDES(( become increasingly affected by the shape of the letters historically or currently. When all of those things are put together, the poems take on discreteness. I have to say, I get exhausted easily now, particularly over the last year. I’ve entered a re-diagnosis for the cancer. I’ve really been scrambling to stay on top of my work. But when I lie down at night, I always keep my journal next to me—it has a pillow—I’ve only taught one poetry workshop, but the students laughed so much when I began talking about my process. They thought I was really too weird for words. But actually it comes out of Denise Levertov’s poem “Writing in the Dark.” Here was a woman who had a full life, ran a household, and so when she thought of things in the night, she’d better get it down. I notch the page. I do not open my eyes. I can lay the journal down; I can pick it back up; I can find the notch and proceed, but I imagine how the poems are going to look on the page. That’s how I construct the forms. If it is the twelfth letter in the alphabet, it’s going to be a twelve-page poem. Now if it’s the second letter, of course it’s not going to be two pages, it’s going to be a multiple of two. If it’s the 26th letter, it will be a divisor. It’s a fabulous way to construct the poem as you wish. You have arbitrary boundaries to work within, but they’re nourishing and beautiful because they’re only about tethering the work on the page.

JT: So there’s an interplay between improvisation and structure?

MRH: The work is highly structured. It isn’t just numbers of pages. It’s structured in terms of line, how many syllables there will be in the line. For example, “Dearest L” in )cliff TIDES((, the lines are governed by the twelve-syllable line. I permit a thirteenth syllable simply because I don’t want the line to become sing song. I will permit an eleven-syllable line. But “Following L,” if I remember correctly, is twelve pages in twelve-syllable lines for the twelfth letter. However, the improvisational, and sometimes the stochastic, enters.

JT: It gave you, within that imposed form, a freedom. It generated the material, if you will.

MRH: Absolutely it helps generate the material, and as soon as I sense that it’s getting dead on its feet, change is called for. That’s when I will add, subtract, or bend a shape so that it looks more fluid.

JT: It’s far from “anything goes.”

MRH: It is never anything goes. Why? Because I think that when one deludes oneself into thinking “anything goes,” in fact we’re governed unconsciously by our sentiments, or orientations, and whatever is going on in our lives. Certainly these things are occurring in my work, but the work is always that homage to text, and how text functions, as a serious component for connecting us.

JT: Which contemporary poets—in the last twenty, thirty years—do you see your work fitting in with?

MRH: I think my work fits wherever there are women whose work pushes the envelope of how the poem has been written or appeared, say, within the last ten, twenty years. Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe are the two primary poets who let me see that I could write a poem about whatever and however I needed. During a two month writing retreat at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, in ’89 and 91, I was able to spend time with their work. I started the poem “Transitions for Eurydice” in Taos. That poem came directly from reading Howe’s Defenestration of Prague. That was the poem through which I began methods I use when writing now. It’s the longest one in red table(S, and has elements of collage and disjunction that are more about mid to late 20th century. You know, one has to write that way. Our lives are that way. Everything we are presented with is that way.

BH: Are there other poets in the concrete tradition that you call upon for inspiration—or do you understand yourself to work within the tradition of concrete poetry?

MRH: Not at all. I don’t understand myself as working with a tradition of concrete poetry. Why? The word and the letters with which I am working always take precedence over the form. The form generates out of language. Actually, I’m not terribly fond of concrete poetry. I’d like to think that, if my work were pushed flush left, it would work certainly as well as it does when it takes various forms on the page. So that takes me out of that tradition I think.

BH: You’re using the page more like Charles Olson and Susan Howe, for example, use the page?

MRH: I would say so, yes, and when I do enter engagement with visual form, it’s affected by historical or current shapes for the letter the poem builds around. Or, it has to do with an emphasis on the dynamics of the poem, a way of opening the line, so that the reader can have a gap or perhaps be drawn in a dynamic way toward the next line. It isn’t about, okay, this poem is going to look like that shape from nature. It’s never about that. I always can go back to the letter out of which the poem is deriving—or it is about sound and movement in the poem. Linescape, really.

JT: Speaking of movement makes me think of the structure of the TIDES(( trilogy. How did you conceive of that structure?

MRH: I had an opportunity for a three-day retreat at Abiquiu, NM, Ghost Ranch, and I wanted to construct a series that I could learn through, which I could grow with as a poet, where I could engage in an homage to those women poets whose work encouraged me to think about new ways that women have been writing since the 1970s, and I thought that an abecedarium was absolutely the right path for a poet to take. It’s endlessly interesting. Certainly in childhood I remember falling asleep by going through ideas having to do with the alphabet. Did you? It’s a marvelous way to set up going anywhere for any length of time about any topic. And so the original working title for the TIDES(( series was Driving from the Shoulders. This was never intended to be mainstream work, you know, right up on the road. Also I was thinking of the shoulders of women who had come before me. I am still working on a last triptych that addresses letters Y, A, and V. Just recently I’ve begun to think, even if that poem takes me a year, it will be fine, because what’s my intention with that long poem? It is to do as many things as possible that I have not done, to read and become aware of things that I have not become aware of, that can help to generate a poem.

JT: My next question is part statement, but it gives you full-range to respond, and disagree if you want. But I think in “waive SHIFT” [in cliff TIDES((] there’s an innovative approach to the placement of words on the page; in particular, I’m thinking of page fifty-six and fifty-seven where it’s almost like we’re looking at a mirror of some sort. There are dancing figures of language there:

Would you comment on how you worked out the visual design of the text and how the visual design impacts on the significance of the poem?

MRH: W is a beautiful letter. It’s very organic and here I’m focused on elements of its shape, so page fifty-six gives the reader an almost cubist perspective on “W”, but on page fifty-seven I’m focused on elements of shapeliness and brush stroke—I do like to give a brush stroke appearance, even to ancient letter glyphs. So that’s what was going on in my head. Though I don’t expect the reader to come away with what I intend, but rather the reader, entering the work, will come away with what the reader is able and willing to carry away.

JT: I wonder, though, about when you look at, say, page sixty-three, if we’re reading from left to right, there are a number of ways you can read this. Have you scored this in a particular way? You don’t offer instruction to the reader.

MRH: No, I wouldn’t presume to do that. Now if I were reading this for an audience, absolutely I would score it. When reading I want the text to come through in as straight forward a fashion as possible. Also, I don’t want to become caught up in an alternative reading. I don’t want to become lost in it (as my eyesight is no longer the greatest). But for the reader, my hope would be to approach this work as a viewer approaches an abstract painting, for example, or a listener approaches a piece of contemporary classical music. And that is, in the energies that you bring to the work, what do you carry away with you this time? And my hope would be that a reader who actually would come to this page two or three times would leave with something slightly different—perhaps quite different—each of those times.

JT: In that sense, who would be an ideal reader, if you could create a profile?

MRH: Well, it would be a reader somewhat like myself and the people with whom I have close relationships who are addicted to poetry; people who love to read contemporary poetry and contemporary writers. It would not be the reader who wants to be told what to think, or is reading to escape. It has to be a reader who will create meaning in an autonomous fashion—you know, without being dominated by authorial aspects, but would rather go into the work as a kind of adventure and take away what is possible, and actually become excited by how the work changes as you begin reading across lines, or in reverse, as opposed to straight down along the lines. That is when the work begins to breathe with you, I think. For poetry to work rhythmic knots of meaning begin to function in new intense ways—you breathe with poetry. It isn’t like prose that lies there on the page telling about something and taking you somewhere (in the more expected popular prose, at least.)

BH: So would you “allow” a reader to take whatever they wanted to from your poems? Could they come up with any possible interpretation?

MRH: Why not? If I go to a dance production, for example, I am looking for new vocabulary in that dance work. I’m not a dancer. I don’t know what I’m “supposed to be” looking for. But I am looking for movement, motions, steps, and what I take away with me, I love. Why couldn’t a reader approach the page as I approach dance, jazz, or contemporary classical music? trusting the beauty and surprise?

BH: But I think you’re also saying that your poems are meaning-based. Doesn’t that involve intention?

MRH: Oh, yes, they are meaning-based! And when I read them aloud, I follow what I think is the most standard way of reading the work, so that someone in the audience who would not read it, but is willing to listen will come way with something fresh and new and be able to say, as people sometimes do, “Well, it sounds good.” [Laughs.] “I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I like the way it sounded!” .

JT: So would you say that a reader has to grant you a certain amount of semantic excess?

MRH: Yes, I think anyone who came to this work in a prescribed way would be disappointed or become confused, would be actually quite frustrated.

JT: Yes, I’ve been there. Not for long, but I know the feeling.

BH: What would you tell that reader?

MRH: To go inward and to permit the work to mean differently, creatively each time he or she approaches it.

BH: So in some way your poetry is about the meaning-making process itself?

MRH: It is about that and that is my homage to text. I can remember reading things as a child and having no clue what they meant, but knowing, trusting the text, knowing that if I let it go and returned to it later—even if I had to wait a year, it would begin to mean for me.

JT: It’s also giving one’s self over to the reading process?

MRH: Yes, deep reading is a process. Also, I would say there is sometimes disjunction between auditory elements and textual elements in the work and that is on purpose, because there is sometimes a joy in the music of the syntax that is not necessarily the same as the meaning of those words in the labyrinth of their construction.

BH: So there is a multiplicity of approaches and there are layers that you work from?

MRH: Each poem is highly layered, I feel. Any word in conjunction or disjunction with another word is going to refer and refer and refer, if you just go back into the clause.

JT: To what extent are these poems verbal meditations, as opposed to silent meditations?

MRH: What a great question! I will confess, they are primarily silent meditations, but when I stumble, when I just don’t know what word to place next, I begin speaking aloud, whatever those lines should be, to know what has to come next. One thing I avoid is a loose, limp line. I want a tight line.

BH: How do you determine whether the line is tight or limp?

MRH: I think of the tight line as one made with no unnecessary word, with rhythmic tensions at the level of the syllable.

JT: If I could chime in here—as you state in the “afterword” to )cliff TIDES((, there are “rhythm knots.” There has to be tension. Where there’s a syllabic structure sometimes, there’s a very strong rhythm, and the rhythm holds it together.

MRH: Yes, rhythm holds it together, and if I think, oh, this could be a line of prose, something will be deleted. I’m sure other poets could argue that some of my lines are prose-like, but always I’m looking for tension, and that does make the work exhausting, especially for a reader who comes to the poem for escape. One thing I have to say is that I do not write so that you can remember something you forgot, like from some earlier point in your life. I mean, a reader may be reminded of something in their life, but I do not write a narrative poem that reminds us of events, a middle class nostalgic towpath along what might or might not have taken place in the lives of most Americans one knows around life or death or birth or divorce…those things we like to be reminded of, an escapist reading.

BH: And what is it that irritates you so about that approach?

MRH: It isn’t that it irritates me. It’s that if I want that approach I could simply get in my car, drive to a bookstore and find books waiting on the shelves. I don’t want to do what I’ve seen done before. Someone could argue, oh I’ve seen work just like yours. But no one has done that in relation to my work. My feeling is, I started writing poetry too late to spend time writing like someone else.

JT: That’s a key point. You didn’t start writing until you were thirty-nine years old.

MRH: Right, my first poem unfolded finally when I was thirty-nine.

JT: Some twenty-four year ago, but that’s not that long, and you didn’t have the apprenticeship some have in their twenties and thirties.

MRH: Right, I think the apprenticeship was served differently.

JT: What happened took place much more intensely and there are some fifteen years between when you write your first poem and when you retired from being a schoolteacher.

BH: What is the transition? What are the recognitions that go into being “innovative?” Where does Lee Bartlett’s class at the University of New Mexico enter into this?

MRH: I should be honest about my beginning, eclectic reading. As a child I read whatever I could get my hands on. When I was eleven, I happened by accident on a Wordsworth poem. That is where I first discovered the difference I look for between poetry and prose. Of course, I was reading poems voraciously when I went into Lee Bartlett’s poetry workshop. I was reading contemporary poets. I was reading New Mexico poets, a lot of John Ashbery—I loved Ashbery—he is my favorite poet all the way through red table(S and probably appears in numerous disguises from poem to poem. I hadn’t read anyone whose work I liked as much. Then I was introduced to the Language Poets, I think in 1983-84. Somehow I got into the graduate poetry-writing workshop with Lee Bartlett and Lee was just so open to a highly creative point of view. During one class he said, it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you can put it into a philosophical construct. He said many things that felt perfect for me, because I knew I’d have to write poetry in some ways unlike what I’d already read. I’ll tell you, I was by necessity a sleeper in class—I’d been working all day—and if it wasn’t exciting, I was dozing. But when Lee brought in the Language poets (in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), what I heard led me to think, oh, this is new—like “news that stays news.” And I could try to write a poem that might be read with serious attention to its content! And right off, you’ve got a higher number of women than any place else, and women are not objectified or marginalized, but an integral part of articulating Language Poetry. And I felt, okay, now I can address a poem at the scale I felt a poem should be addressed. I had just read Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie for another class. And that was not about the means by which I would write a poem, just as if I were a painter, I could not paint trees as I remember particular trees from childhood. Suddenly, all right, the poem could disjunctive, about the functions of language itself. The poem could occupy a larger scale and from varied perspectives.

BH: This was your chance to walk the blank, so to speak?

MRH: Yes, I had kept journals and toyed with lines, but only as I considered visual work. I wanted to become a photographer, but that’s a whole other story! I couldn’t become a photographer after I purchased a house where the water was too hot to use for all the darkroom equipment I had purchased. (And the water heater was not up to code and I had no way of changing that.) Well, thank goodness, what a relief! I had already become so tired of all the chemicals. Poetry has no polluting chemicals that must be carefully recycled! It is so clean! [W. C.] Williams thought about becoming a visual artist—as did I. Well, you have all that equipment and set it up, and I’m tired by then. Poetry is not like that. The more one writes, the more one wants to write. So it was a great gift that the water temperature at this little house was over ninety degrees and nothing could fix that. You have to have water at sixty-two degrees max, if you want to process a good black and white print. And I was fortunate to get into Lee Bartlett’s class, so I said to myself, I will just stick with this, give it a try. I was teaching fifth-graders in public school and my mind needed something outside of the classroom.

JT: In )locus TIDES((, there’s a poem called “rotations of N,” and I love the first line: “day bridge event phase you try telling[.]” Here is my sense of your work: although there is almost never a linear narrative, nevertheless I still feel that you tell bits and pieces of stories. And there is still some biographical hook. Earlier you were talking about the process of meaning making. I think it’s related.

MRH: Language becomes a highly experiential medium at times.

BH: How do you mean language becomes an “experiential medium?”

MRH: How one articulates an experience actually modifies that experience. Yet these are words. I’m thinking of Wittgenstein’s remark that language is contiguous with nothing. But we fit into language, and language fits with us. So, indeed, my work is extremely experiential: “day bridge event phase you try telling[.]” I mean we know that when we tell an event we leave out so much and put in some things. Later we might remember things that we put in and forget completely the things we left out. I’m exaggerating, perhaps. But the experiential components of language are profound in terms of what’s provided by and what we must provide to language, if we address the world through it.

JT: I feel that once you go beneath the structured surface of your poems, there’s a code that becomes intimate. I don’t think it depends on you as a personality, ever, but that code enriches my reading.

MRH: I’m glad to hear that. Move to page sixty-four, the last page of “rotations of N” [in )locus TIDES((], because there’s a quote by Anne Noggle, the photographer, who used her face and body as part of what she was depicting. I heard her say on a PBS television program: “Who will look into my face and find me there?” What does the face tell us about the self? What does the word self mean in her question? It becomes exquisitely layered.

JT: And that’s, I think, how the philosophical concept of identity comes out in your work, and so it strikes me that although your work is philosophical and difficult, if a reader persists, she will find points of connection, a kind of intimacy, if you can learn that code.

MRH: Yes, I think it’s a process, an experiential process with language, where word by word I’m carefully building a line that engages, as often as it can, with the experiential components of language in a fresh way. I don’t have opportunities often to talk about my work, so forgive me for sounding naïve, but I would posit that, for most of us, the concept of self is quite delusional, you know, how we use that word, what the word means to us. Those are profound words: me, self, I. How do they mean? That this quote would come from a photographer who devoted her medium to self-portrait and who then asks this question—I loved hearing that.

BH: What role does self have in your work? What is the “concept of self” for you?

MRH: It is a permeable, modified, always changing center, and that is why I use, for example, the “I” not the tall “I”. I think the look of I, as opposed to the capital, is particularly important. I have a definition of self, but it’s spiritual. The self is a medium through which all the unknowable source of all that is and is not explores the manifest and non-manifest multiplicities of reality. That sounds too metaphysical. But if I wrap my head around that, how self constitutes, well, what is not possible? What is possible? The range is endless. Where are we?

BH: I notice a politic and an acute awareness of what nature “does”—the walks, the observations—in your poetry, so there’s a political aesthetic in your work.

MRH: Yes, the political does enter. I can’t seem to avoid it. Yes, it permeates.

JT: In what way do feminist strategies in constructing meaning enter in?

MRH: I think if we thumbed through all the TIDES(( books we would find very few male pronouns. Part of this is reactionary; I mean, you can guess I’m sure that as a girl I didn’t read a book that had feminine pronouns unless it was something like Little Women or The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew. And I grew out of those books rather quickly. So the really important things I read always had male pronouns, and my work sometimes compensates in response to that. What else would you ask about that?

JT: One feminist strategy is to upset traditional patriarchal expectations and hierarchies of meaning…

MRH: Absolutely. I’m always exploring how language functions. I avoid didacticism. If the reader is willing to re-enter the work, some poems can be repaginated—as the source pages of )cliff TIDES(( indicate—some poems can be read in reverse or from various entry points. Often there are opportunities to go in a different direction, by virtue of the fact that there might be two columns or a letter shape in a different font and shade that drifts behind the main text. There are fonts co-existing with one another. It isn’t that one must dominate the other, and the reader can choose to read them separately or contiguously. So there are choices.

JT: In “O Canvas” [in )cliff TIDES((] another example is the different voices?

MRH: Oh, Ophelia, Orithyia, Ona, the North Wind, yes! These are based on visual art and literature. If we look at page sixty-five, “O figure,” there’s Ophelia talking to Hamlet (and herself). She drowns herself, then realizes things could have been quite different. She takes on strength; yes, it’s a feminist engagement with Ophelia’s ghost. She becomes assertively no nonsense. And Orithyia becomes another figure, from mythology, who is carried off by the North Wind. I have to add that the epigraph by Rochelle Owens is wonderful: “On the bus she hobbles/ in golden stirrups.” That makes anything possible. Some epigraphs must be placed in the poem after the first draft is well completed because they’re constraining, but this was an epigraph that I wanted right up front because the image was so nourishing for me. When Ophelia becomes mixed with Lady Mac Beth on page sixty-seven I need that encouragement. [She reads.]

my own river hem scarves about my feet
                                     on days I am worn
                                   jewel shards mirror in
                                  long-lipped shadows lit
                                        you see yourself
                                      orchid scent spackled
                                                                                                a foiling length
                                                                              I kiss the sword blade blood groove
                                                                                           tang and pommel ring

                                                                             invite me

She becomes, I think, intimidating, as she begins to realize her power, as opposed to the Ophelia who drowns herself.

BH: What you said about a reader taking anything they want from the text earlier, I understand that you allow that process, but I also hear you speaking in fairly “intentional” ways about what you’ve expressed, so in some ways you have an agenda. If a reader doesn’t follow that agenda, fine, but you propose to let anyone to read what they want, yet connecting the writer and the reader—as you phrased it earlier—would again broach the problem of intention in poetry.

MRH: I suppose one could read this without ever realizing that speaker is Ophelia. I can also imagine someone thinking it’s about me. But that’s neither here nor there. “O Canvas” may have taken on more precision because of the shapeliness of O and the literary figures, Ophelia and Orithyia. However, I’m not a particularly didactic person. My intention is to facilitate meaning for the reader; I respect a reader’s ability to come to this text and get things from it that I wasn’t aware were there. Why was I not aware? Because I am working with language, which is so rich and continuously beyond me. I trust that if I write a line and you read that line, you can bring more, or certainly differently, to that line than I bring, and can leave with more than I got out while writing it. Because I think that happens often for writers, don’t you think? But I do have hope that I could write a line and you could go away with more than I ever thought about for that line, by virtue of the richness that you bring to it.

JT: Is it wrong for me to think because of its circular form, that it’s a feminine letter?

MRH: It’s a feminine letter and to entitle it “O Canvas” I was thinking actually of images. These take shape in feminist “sub-poems.” Orithyia becomes almost dangerous. She might have been carried off by the North Wind, but she has the last word. She will let go of everything except who she has become through challenge and time. Yes.

JT: And there is anti-war discourse in your work.

MRH: There is. Yes, in “O Canvas,” right here, it so happened, while I was working on it, on page seventy-four, fighter planes from Kirtland [Air-Force Base] flew over—they were deafening—I mean, yard birds were actually knocked off their perches, knocked to the ground by the fighter planes going overhead. So the date and time is here.

fighter planes explode high thin air above
gray cloudcover housing for distributed world
this afternoon though not yet will I cut my throat
while small yellowed hailstones roof tin snare clatter
high desert sleet wet air smelling of seasalt and
shell fish or blood mixed with tears just before
swallowing as disfigured doves and sparrows
shoot up to scatter struggling for balance

Of course that quote, “not yet will I cut my throat” comes from Oppen. But yes, disfigured doves because they’ve been eating everything we have in our environment, so they’ve got strange faces, beaks disfigured. It’s quite a literal “snapshot” of what happened. That is pointed out in the source page.

BH: And to some extent, your whole approach is a political stance?

MRH: It cannot be avoided if one is going to be innovative. The very act of innovating is a political act. John and I had a conversation yesterday, and it awakened me to the fact that I despair at the beginning of the 21st century, that we are embroiled in this “pre-emptive strike” war. What a grief! And sometimes when I’m writing, because I’m engaging that experiential language, the overtly political just comes in and takes over.

JT: You incorporate various elements of what you term “Newzak.”

MRH: Late 20th century it was “Newzak.” With the current administration, it’s become “Newsblast.” The news is no longer something you could listen to in an elevator. It used to be you could do a task with the news on in the background; you weren’t suddenly caught up in something horrifying. Perhaps one should have been caught up that way. I wasn’t that sensitive. But now I have to very careful, and I notice most of my friends express a common concern about how and when they listen to the news, because it so very, very sad and dark and full of grief.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

INTERVIEW WITH NOAH ELI GORDON by Thomas Fink

Thomas Fink: This interview will focus on your latest three books, the first of which is Inbox (Kenmore, NY: BlazeVox, 2006). Inbox is nicely prefaced by your Sept. 12, 2004 email seeking permission to quote a lot of people’s emails to you. You explain the rationale of this “temporal autobiography”:

I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I were to take the body-text of every email that was addressed specifically to me (nothing forwarded or from any listserv) currently in my inbox (over 200) and let all of the voices collide into one continuous text. The work is arranged in reverse chronology. . . . [Inbox] sculpts the space between the everyday detritus of dinner plans to discussions of fonts and notes from long lost friends. To be honest, as I’m a person pretty free of drama, the bulk of the work is boring, but intentionally so, in the generative, ambient way that Tan Lin writes about, well, one would hope anyhow. It’s the collision of voices that makes the work compelling, at least to me. The only thing is. . . . I didn’t write any of it; you did! (4)

First, when you say “take the body-text,” do you mean that you preserved each email from start to finish—you didn’t edit them?

Noah Eli Gordon: That’s correct. Although I did remove everyone’s name, along with whatever particular language was used to open and close each email, which allowed all of the text to merge. There are points where the shift from email to email is obvious, but the more compelling moments occur when it’s somewhat uncertain. After sending out that initial email, which, as you note, acts as a preface for the book, I did go back and excise several things from the project, mostly notes from those who expressed a little hostility toward the idea. Of course, such hostility is wholly warranted, as there’s something inherently exploitive about publicly airing what folks considered to be intimate correspondence. The only other instance of editing took place right before the book was published. There was a bit of text in there that signified strongly the opinion of one individual involved in the poetry community about that of another. I punted this person a note just prior to publication asking if it was okay to include the material. Interestingly, although not necessarily surprising, this person had forgotten the email I’d sent, the one which acts as the book’s preface, as it had been a few years since I’d gotten the okay. Honestly, I felt really bad about it, and so removed the mention. I suppose, in a way, this is what makes the project in my mind successful, in that it does involve a certain level of transgression, even of personal discomfort. The book itself was not difficult to write but the social dimensions of its possible reception were difficult to foresee.

TF: Authorial intention, then, is present in the selection of procedure, which doesn’t let you decide the distribution of continuities and collisions, whereas in most of your work, you deliberately choose the disjunctions and transitions.

Michel Foucault in The Order of Things and in The Archeology of Knowledge talks about regularities of discursive formations in intellectual disciplines in various epochs. Both the continuities between successive emails and in motifs recurring throughout Inbox (i.e. coaxing submissions from you, asking for you to look at the sender’s work, thanking you for having said something good or encouraging about the sender’s work, engaging in analysis of contemporary U.S. experimental poetry that articulates a position or the seeming impossibility of locating one amid the confusion) expose several of these regularities in this cluster of innovative poetry communities without your having to be expository, except a little at the beginning. So, because I’m very interested in these communities and how they function, I don’t find the book “boring,” in the sense that Tan Lin uses! Have you learned anything about the poetry communities from reading sections of the book publicly or from rereading it after publication?

NEG: In his introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lin writes about boredom as “a temporary non-event defined by a span of near-indeterminate waiting.” I think the content of Inbox revolves around exactly that sort of non-event. The constituent parts gesture toward happenings or report on their aftermath, but there’s no dramatic arc. In fact, I think the act of checking one’s email is one of simultaneous boredom and interest. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Boredom can be interesting. Boredom doesn’t interest me, but I’m interested in boredom, which is not in any way an oxymoron. Regardless, I haven’t ever read from the book publicly, and don’t think that I ever will, since I see it as moving through an oddly voyeuristic space that feels more generatively intriguing to the active intimacy created by a reader, rather than that of a passive listener. I haven’t learned anything by rereading the work after publication that I hadn’t already learned when I initially read the individual emails, although for someone else, I’m sure the experience is quite different.

I call the book a reverse-memoir, as it covers a discrete portion of my life and not the up-to-now whole an autobiography would imply. Because most of my life revolves around poetry, for better or for worse, the book is going to be representative of one tiny nexus of colliding communities. That a reader might learn something about such a collision, and therefore something about those regularities of discursive formation, is merely a byproduct of the text. I’m pleased it happens. I’m pleased that the book might in someway be a testament to the ancillary busywork of a poet—and thus a kind of behind-the-scenes extra—but I didn’t think of it that way until I started to hear feedback from some readers. I’ve heard from more folks about Inbox than I have about any of my other books. Of course, one might expect this, given that I’m often hearing back from the collective authors of the book itself, or from those who are mentioned within it. But what’s intriguing is the uniformity of the response, which I’d characterize as essentially an initial uncertainty about the value of project, followed by a sense of surprise, and sometimes delight, upon actually reading the book. I’ve heard from about a half-dozen people who read the thing straight through in a single sitting without intending to do so. Granted, I’m not going to hear from those that hate the thing and this all sounds terribly self-aggrandizing, but my point is that I suppose the book works initially, before one reads a word of it, as a conceptual text, infusing it with an aura of non-emotion, which, after reading is immediately shattered, marking the experience as unsuspected. Surprise is good, right? Can boredom encompass surprise? Am I allowed to contradict myself?

TF: Makes sense to me. Mr. Emerson, Mr. Whitman, you contain multitudes, and you can’t be bothered with the hobgoblin of little minds; you can and may contradict yourself/ yourselves: “Lots of stuff in quotes. Lots of implied (and hopefully distinguishable) voices” (Inbox 10).

A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues, 2007) opens with the section, “A Dictionary of Music,” followed by “The Right of Return,” whose titles all begin with the words, “The Book of. . . ,” except for the last one, “Postscript: the book of Cain.” “How
Human Nouns”—and our readers should know that your blog was, until recently, called “Human Verb”—is the third section, and in the remaining ones, “epic theater,” the “allusive,” and two other “book” references, “Book of Names” and a ”A Little Book of Prayers,” are mentioned. Granted that the first section takes music as its point of departure, but why are there so many references to “book” in the poem- and section-titles, as well as to language, textuality in general, and literature? (I think of Mallarme’s notion of the “bookness” of the book.) What does this have to do with the arrangement of the poems and the overall project or poetics of this particular book?

NEG: I suppose it comes down to an interest in dualistic moments of rupture, in a recognition of artifice, and a desire to explore rather than conceal what one is doing with a textual surface. There’s a line in “How Human Nouns” that reads: “but someone coughs & the theater caves in,” which I think of as basically exemplary of such concerns. I remember a class I took in graduate school where we were discussing whether or not the speaker in Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” had actually heard the song. Something about the discussion got under my skin, as I wanted to talk about that “solitary Highland Lass” as a kind of trope, a construct, something outside of experience but invented to simulate experience and explore notions of art and labor. Forgive me for wanting to read Wordsworth as one might read Stevens, which is a roundabout way of saying I’m completely aware that my interests here aren’t all that new or radical.

I guess if I owned a robot, I’d want that robot to know it was a robot. Maybe then it could do its job in a more authentic way. I like how Barthes calls Philippe Sollers’s Event “action, not product.” And who doesn’t like Cézanne’s canvas showing through? Isn’t it interesting when one can hear the screech of fingers moving across a fretboard along with whatever chords are being strummed? Things are layered. Why not poke a hole through them here and there? I’ve never seen an art show that featured photographs of people looking at photographs of people looking at photographs of people taking photographs, but I think I’d like to take a few pictures of one. The foremost concern of much of my writing is an argument with myself for its own justification. Will this interest everyone, certainly not, but then I like Jim Croce yet loathe James Taylor. If I were a choreographer, I’d have my dancers at some point climb into the audience. Once, while at a small indie rock show, the bass player handed the bass to a friend of mine. We were both standing in front of the band, as there was no stage. My friend didn’t know this band at all, but since he is an accomplished musician finished out the last minute or so of the song. I hope my poems can do that same thing. I hope they can be both the bass player and the person to whom the bass is handed off.

TF: Yes, your poems can fulfill that double task. What does Jim Croce have that James Taylor lacks?

NEG: Duende!

TF: Let’s apply your fascinating statement that your “writing is an argument with [yourself] for its own justification” to a “book” poem:

The book of hunger

the sound of smoke

was that of expansion

but the breaking of bread

like a dusk-shadow

became a name

losing itself in echo

until there was no sound

but the snapping

etched into each rib

which repeats

dust . . . dust . . . dust . . . (23)

“The book of hunger” is not the book of filled lack, of realized plenitude; like speech and writing, it is the deferral of presence. This “book” could be a text that either represents actual wants, needs, or desires of others, or acts as though language has its own desires, or propounds the author’s desire to win the argument with himself over the justification of the text. “The sound of smoke,” an auditory image implicitly aligned with a visual sense akin to the proliferation of actual writing on paper or typing on a screen, has “expanded,” if only gaseously (or not quite substantially) to fill enough of the space of writing to justify others’ attention to its textuality, “but” the physical fragmentation (“breaking of bread”) that signifies a stage on the way to the end of “the book of hunger” and to the realization of fulfillment is troped, rather than as being a solid, as having acted much less substantially than the supposed gas. After all, you may think you see “dusk,” but how can you feel it, and, if dusk is a shading or shadowing effect, to refer to a “dusk-shadow” is to entertain the possibility of a shadow of a shadow, the concept of a layering of progressive absences, like a “naming” as successive “echoes” that only gets farther away from the “veritable” thing-in-itself. Without taking too much discursive space by performing a reading of the rest of the poem (and leaving the Biblical-sounding “dust” for your interpretive gesture), perhaps I can say that you justify the poem’s existence to yourself in the act of writing tropes that comprise cogent and accurate ways of exposing a process of “expanding” lack that occurs while one, on the contrary, writes of hunger primarily as a means of replacing it with plenitude. How would you reconstruct the poem’s staging of the argument within you (or between you and you) about its justification?

NEG: Well, I’m not sure that I would, as you’ve picked a poem, actually a section from within a poem, which has a much more specific aboutness to it, although I appreciate your reading of it, and am happy to see it function on multiple levels. I hope that all of my poems might do so. “The book of hunger” is a section of “The Right of Return,” a serial poem that explores historical anti-Semitism and how it had essentially paved the way for the Shoah (the Holocaust). I wanted to create a work that would include numerous references to historical events and assumptions, very specific references, but one that would also be somewhat open, and employ elements of the diasporic experience that are undoubtedly universal, if only to demonstrate such universalities.

The title of the sequence nods to both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically to article 13, and that of the Jewish right of return, as created via The Declaration of Independence that established the State of Israel. In fact, within The Declaration of Independence, there is mention of the Jewish people giving to the world “the eternal Book of Books.” The book is just such a charged and important concept in Judaism, not that I’m by any means a scholar, or even a practitioner of it, but I am Jewish, and did attend temple until my early teen years. The titles of the various sections of the poem owe something to Edmond Jabès. His work was crucial to me at a certain point, and I felt a deep affinity for his own experience of Judaism, although I’ve never been expelled, as he was, from my homeland for it.

I’ll tell you a funny story: I once had lunch with Tomaž Šalamun, and was explaining to him the way I read, how I’m always looking at form, trying to figure out how the book does what it does. Midway into what I’m sure was beginning to become a murky monologue, he asked, “Noah, are you Jewish?” I said, “Yes.” Putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “That is the way with the Jew and the Book.” Of course, he was absolutely right!

As far as those references I’d mentioned, they’re all over the poem, although they can be hermetic at times, which is okay with me. I’m not big on the inclusion of notes pages in books of poetry and feel like the poet has done the work already and if one is so included to do some research, well, great, maybe it’ll make one’s engagement with the work all the more deepened, but it’s not wholly necessary. For example, “The book of rebuilding” quotes from a tablet which reads: “a month of fruit harvest/ a month of sowing/ one of after-grass.” Further on in the poem there is the line, “Knew they weren’t always wanderers.” Does it matter if a reader is unaware that I’m quoting from the earliest known Jewish calendar? No, it doesn’t, because one can infer that clearly agricultural activities means a peoples are rooted somewhere. There are allusions within the sequence which are well known, such as that of “a pound/ of flesh without a drop of blood,” from The Merchant of Venice, where the character of Shylock is representative of, and further propagates, anti-Semitic notions.

And there are also references to some of the ways in which we’ve tried to come to terms with the Shoah. I once watched all nine hours of the film Shoah, and was just completely devastated. That I watched it while I was an undergrad in a little viewing booth, with big head phones on, sitting in what was becoming an increasingly uncomfortable chair made it all the more unbearable. The first sentence of “Postscript: the book of Cain” is a reference to the film. It reads: “He took the train to an empty field which was not empty when an older train arrived years ago.” There are portions of the film in which villagers who had witnessed trainloads of people being shipped to the camps are interviewed while trains are moving down those very same tracks in the background.

Although I’m not so interested in fully explicating “the book of hunger,” I will say that the “expansion” mentioned is that of the death of the individual; it’s an expansion of self into otherness, as well as a solid into a gas. I think of the “hunger” here as very much that of literal starvation. Read through the lens of the camps, the poem takes on something quite different, no?

I realize that using such a charged historical landscape for a poem is an act fraught with numerous issues, but but but the poem doesn’t place the poet on a hilltop beaming down epiphanic quips about the human condition. As I said already, my intention here was to allow for a more open-ended reading. In a way, one might consider this the staging of that argument you mentioned. Does authorial intention matter? I hope not, but I also hope a work displays its presence.

TF: Your extremely useful explanation shows that intention can matter a great deal, even if it doesn’t constitute the horizon of interpretation. When I read the title, “The Right of Return,” I thought about the context of Israel, but then, I didn’t find anything in the sequence that seemed overtly related to it, perhaps because I haven’t read Jabès, so I figured that “return” might instead involve something like the “return of the repressed” in Freud. Yes, the Shylock references jump out at you, but at those points, I wasn’t thinking about the original meaning of “the right of return,” and I couldn’t connect this glaring representation of Jews with a thread of discourse about the Shoah. Now that you’ve brought all this up, your elucidation of specific intention (as opposed to the permission of “a more open-ended reading”) can enable my reading of the sequence to be much fuller, much more satisfactory, even if I don’t get around to reading Jabès in the near future. If there’s still anything of value in the rhetorical aspects of my brief and very partial interpretation above, they could be strengthened through contact with the historical frames.

I’d like to touch upon a dynamic raised in another sequence in the book, “Four Allusive Fields.” When Cy Twombly moved to Rome in the late fifties, the “abstract” marks in his paintings began to refer to textures and colors of ancient Roman architecture, and some works allude to Homer’s epics. There are plenty of allusions to this utilization of classical Greco-Roman culture in the four “allusive” poems, as well as descriptions of Twombly’s colors and surfaces and tropological flights that can be taken as imaginative descriptions. Here’s the first one:

Cy listens absently to absent Homer
& his refusal become a dead thing full of music
Smash it on a cyclotron. Drag it across a dozen centuries
Drips are old. Smudges are old. Talking a museum
out of its eternal monologue, it’s not embarrassing
to leak in waves & cones. Nudes fall from newspapers
as you fell from an oily twilight, from a painting
of the word twilight, arranged without letters, inkless
like a fire that consumes all before it, or better, inkless
as the phrase: “like a fire that consumes all before it”
Who wouldn’t be mayor of a worked-over surface
returning clutter for a broom, ever-after for Cliffs Notes
Work smudging talk; talk smudging work
Obedience is an awful word I think to get lost in (53)

In Burning Interiors”: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics (Ed. Joseph Lease and Thomas Fink. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007), your article, “Written and Rewritten to Order: The Gift of Generative Possibility in the Work of David Shapiro,” treats the rewriting of the texts of contemporary poets by contemporary poets—not “drag[ging] it across a dozen centuries”!—as evidence of the receipt of the “original” writer’s gift. It is also a reciprocating homage to and celebration of the source-poet and his/her work that actualizes possibilities inherent in the original text. In your own poetic practice, as manifested in A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow and your first two books (since we’ve already addressed the collage-technique in Inbox), I believe that you strive to enable source-texts, whether recent or “old,” to realize their “goal” of refusing “to become a dead thing full of music.” Even if you have to “smash” others’ language “on” your own version of “a cyclotron,” your reciprocal gift, homage, and celebration—a complicating, not a banalizing, simplifying “Cliffs Notes”—includes the intention of “talking a museum/ out of its eternal monologue,” of generating dialogic energy. Thus, “obedience” may be an awful concept, but paradoxically, some degree of obedience to others’ language affords, in Hart Crane’s terms, “new thresholds, new anatomies.” Could you please respond to my basic drift here and, if what I’m saying has some validity, provide a few examples?

NEG: Oh yes, I think there’s validity to your basic drift. I’m a big proponent of drifting, of flux, and the notion of the gift in all spheres, whether it’s KRS ONE sampling Public Enemy, Dante reanimating Virgil, or the rabbinical practice of midrash, of inserting (asserting) one’s self into Judaism’s core texts. Isn’t this the poetic tradition in a nutshell? Art transcending linear time? Maybe I’m getting too grand here, but I think your reading of my poem is spot on. The Fiddle book is full of homage, dialogue, and general engagement with the work of others. Outside of the “Four Allusive Fields” sequence that you mention (& that I discuss here at length: http://raintaxi.com/online/2007spring/gordon.shtml), the other poem that loudly tries to talk “a museum/ out of its eternal monologue” would be “A New Hymn to the Old Night.” The poem takes two variants of English translations of the same bit of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, Dick Higgins’s “[d]own over there, far, lies the world,” and George MacDonald’s “[a]far lies the world,” as a kind of refrain, which I use as both digression and homage, attempting to open other possibilities, and in doing so, to effectively praise a meticulous uncertainty. The poem here and there nods to Novalis’s life, but in small ways, with mention of the loss of Sophie, his beloved, and the blue flower that figures so prominently in his novel, although, to be certain, it also includes things that are pretty far removed from Novalis. For example, while I was working on the poem I received an email from David Shapiro in which he mentioned his recent trip to Mexico, and how he was afraid of nothing. I loved the way he’d said this, how it rang with bravado and humorous self-parody, so I simply included it in the poem.

The danger in continually allowing in the work of others is when one uses it as a crutch, when one doesn’t attempt to further the work, so that a line or phrase from someone else becomes the most interesting thing in one’s own work. You should just edit an anthology if that’s the case. For me, I read as a kind of miner, looking for raw things, ideas, syntax, rhythms, I might extract, bring home, and then treat, alter, and polish; the final stage being the most important. The four sonnets that make up “Untragic Hero of Epic Theater” came out of my reading of Benjamin on Brecht, but it’s also infused with personal experience, as are all of my poems. I once watched “a display window where a bee stumbling/ between bits of jewelry” had me oddly enthralled in its epic tragedy. I’m not interested in the poem as book report. The poem that glues a chair out of books and then sits in, now that’s more interesting, as long as it’s willing to look out the window now and again.

TF: And the chair bears whatever poetic weight descends on it.

A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow features a variety of stanzaic-patterns, as well as modes of indentation, but the one-line stanza, which, I’ve noticed, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Timothy Liu, and Charles Bernstein also use to excellent good effect, is especially prominent. What advantages do you find in the one-line stanza? It would be interesting, also, to hear about whatever prompted some of the stanzaic decisions you made in various parts of the book.

NEG: I once watched a spider spin an entire web, from start to finish. This must have been sometime in the late 1990s. I was on my way out the front door when morning light caught the first anchoring volleys of the web, making it glisten and clearly visible. Normally, I’d have just pushed the threads aside and continued on, but seeing the little thing hard at work was too intriguing, its systematic creation—once I’d paused to watch—too stunning. So I let an hour or so get eaten standing in the doorway. I loved how the thing would weave back and forth, leaving behind these tiny boxes, which, in its next pass, were subdivided even further. Some sort of previously unarticulated understanding of form was beginning to oil the gears in the back of my mind. At the time, I lived with several housemates, and left them a note asking that they not use the front door that day. After leaving out the back, I returned home several hours later, and, having forgotten entirely the spider and my note, burst through the front door to find two of my housemates laughing at my transgression, at the sincerity of my note and my own ruinous forgetfulness.

For me, the line rises from just such a balance between diligent exactitude and explosive, ebullient destruction. A single line stanza is perhaps the embodiment of this kind of oscillation. It hovers, almost isolated, allowing one to consider all of its implications, meanings and possibilities as an autonomous unit, yet it’s also clearly wedded to its upstairs and downstairs neighbors, sometimes more closely to one than the other. There’s this moment before the sun has completely set when people have their lights on but haven’t drawn their blinds. Looking up at a multi-story apartment complex one might take in the buzzing life and brief private narratives of any of the individual windows, or step back and see the whole of it in the building itself. Not that I’m advocating voyeurism here, but the same is true with a poem’s stanzaic pattern. The first encounter with the page is visual. One is faced with a definite shape, a spatial arrangement that registers and projects a kind of order (or disorder) before one begins reading. I think this is something that you’ve been working with for several years now.

A lot of my own decisions about these patterns are based on an attempt to maximize the tension between that visual, pre-reading engagement with the poem and its later musical and referential dynamics. I like thinking about the relationship the line in painting has to that in poetry. In one of Cézanne’s letters, he writes about the horizontal line as giving breadth and the vertical as depth. I think there’s something there true to its similar function in poetry. I don’t ever compose in lines. I create them afterwards, which is why A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow took six years to write and the prose of Novel Pictorial Noise took about six months.

TF: Novel Pictorial Noise (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), selected for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery, consists of fifty prose-poems, each a page or less in length and each followed by a line or two or three or sometimes more of verse. Sheila E. Murphy’s “American Haibun” is a prose-paragraph followed by one line, but your approach is more variable. I like what Ashbery has to say about this in his blurb—that “each prose-bloc” is “modified or modulated by the ghostly fragments that interleave them,” and the ghostliness often has to do with grammatical anomalies, like two prepositions in direct proximity that don’t normally interact. The modifications that Ashbery talks about are mysterious to me; how did you establish a relationship between the paragraphs and the verse, at least in your own mind?

NEG: Forced proximity can be a funny thing. Isn’t that what we poets do, a little violent yoking? I’m glad to hear that there’s some mystery in the reading experience for you. I’m always compelled by texts that resist whatever default reading modes we bring to them. I haven’t seen the Murphy book that you mention, but the classic Haibun form—or at least what I know of it via Basho in translation—could be one way to consider the relationship the book sets up between prose and fragment. The reading that Ashbery applied via that blurb seems to gel with the gist of Haibun, an exploratory prose followed by either a summary or extending Haiku, which is here replaced with a fragment. It works if one thinks of the book as a progression, a kind of movement from one perception or inquiry to the next. But I’m not necessarily wed to that sort of reading.

One could think of the fragments as wall text accompanying the canvas-like geometric shape of the prose, or à la Williams’s Kora in Hell as an oblique sort of commentary on the prose. In fact, it’s pretty fitting that Ashbery selected the book, because his famous opening to Three Poems is probably the most useful way to engage with the prose/fragment dialectic: “I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.” To step out from behind the compositional curtain, the fragments are actually erasures of the prose, although they appear in the book in reverse order, which is to say that the fragment on page 2 is an erasure of the prose on page 99, so they touch their mirror images at the book’s center, on pages 50 and 51. I did this because I wanted to book to fold in on itself, to collapse and expand like a lung. As a fan of constraint, accident, and coincidence, I was pleased with the results.

TF: Could you explain specifically what you mean by “erasure of the prose”? Some of the words on page 99 are included in the fragment on page 2, but not all, so I’m not seeing how the non-repeated words constitute an erasure.

NEG: Sure. Originally this manuscript was called Fifty Paragraphs from a Perfectly Functional Book. I’d had an ambitious notion to begin work on a large scale, multi-volume poem that would explore lots of different forms. I’m about half way into another manuscript called One Thousand Lines from a Perfectly Functional Book, which should give some sense of the project’s scope, but I think I’m pretty much done with this idea, and will in time alter that title as well. Anyhow, after I’d completed the paragraphs, I realized that the book needed something else, some kind of counterpoint to the density and formal elements of the prose. Procedurally, I simply went through each paragraph, deleting its rhetorical framework, and retaining whatever minor elements I felt were somehow compelling. The words in each of the fragments appear in the same order as they do in the prose. The only word on page 2 that doesn’t appear in the paragraph on page 99 is the first, “composition,” which I must have at some point edited out of the final version of that paragraph. I decided to retain the capitalization within the fragments, which read to me like a kind of pictorial alchemy.

TF: The word “noise” comes up repeatedly in this book, and it harks back to sound references in the titles of your two first books, The Frequencies and The Area of Sound Called the Subtone. “The essence of pictorial fact,” you write not far from the beginning of Novel Pictorial Noise, “aspires to describe itself as a panorama, an impossible cultivation of pictorial elements” (15). Throughout the text, both the impossibility and appeal of such a cultivation of totality/ totalization is figured in diverse ways. I wonder, then, about the significance(s) of the title. Is its synesthesia a critique or (just an) acknowledgment of how the visual in U.S. culture saturates us wherever we turn? Does “novel” provide the less than approving connotation of novelty or the most positive sense of Pound’s “make it new”? Or is this prose-poem a creature of another genre, a novel including “pictorial noise”? Also, our readers can look up the book’s cover online and see the presence of “Prose” and “Poetry” with directional arrows and lines; if you feel like talking about the relation of Michael Labenz’s cover image to your own sense of how the title works, please do.

NEG: All of those readings of the title work, and all of them were intentional. It’s important to me to create things that work with multiple meanings, on multiple levels. I think this lends a sense of self-renewal to art. It’s not so much news that stays news as it is news that renews, news that opens in different ways with each encounter. Everything I write is acutely aware of itself on a sonic, aural level, and this awareness is part of its compositional structure, part of the way I proceed, rather than something that’s amended and altered in the editing process. The tuning fork, which is not an instrument at all, is also my favorite instrument. I’m not sure what exactly I mean by that, nevertheless I stand behind it with my entire being, because it’s an example of logical noise. Well, maybe it’s nonsensical music. It might be both.

As for the cover, I couldn’t be happier with it. Michael Labenz is a good friend of mine. He did cover images for The Frequencies and The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, as well as for all of the Braincase chapbooks that I’ve published. A new issue of Denver Quarterly will feature his work on its cover. He’s also gearing up to do all of the design work for a new press that I’m going to be involved with, but that’s a few years down the road. Mike is an incredible autodidact, a reading machine, and one of the funniest and most goofy people I know. When we lived in the same town, I’d often see him in the mornings on his daily pilgrimage to a café where he’d tackle all sorts of critical theory, philosophy, and poetry. The guy worked part-time and lived frugally so that he could read as widely and broadly as he wanted. He keeps small notebooks where he sketches out these almost hermetic graphic representations of his thinking, which are just incredible. Working with him is great because he’ll read the text and come up with an image that absolutely embodies its concerns, and that can further those concerns by adding a visual extension and depth, something that interacts with the writing instead of just representing it. I think that’s what he did with Novel Pictorial Noise, although I’ll leave the explication of the relationship between the image and the writing to someone else.

TF: The end of each prose section of Novel Pictorial Noise includes a rhyming or slant-rhyming couplet. (As you spent some time in Amherst, slant-rapmaster Emily is not irrelevant.) Within prose-poetry’s great flexibility, a formal feeling comes at the end. Of course, the rhymes are often humorous: “Snow falls over my perpetual excuse, turning the narrative loose” (33). Indeed, in this prose-poem, “each paragraph requires the participants to reposition themselves,” and the traditional constraint does not reassure, but offers a rousing disorientation: “If one were to take transgression as one’s starting point, then it would be limitation that throws one satisfyingly out of joint” (83). Rhyme might be the tuning fork that throws the reader satisfyingly out of tune or into an unfamiliar pattern. What was it like for you to use the rhymes as a constraint—that is, how did this element affect your overall process? And now that you’re another reader of the (finished) text, how do the rhymes influence your experience of the whole?

NEG: I did a reading from the book about a week ago, and afterward, a friend of mine—someone who’d never seen nor heard the work from this book—said, “I liked those jabs you had at the end.” Initially, I didn’t understand the comment, but after talking for a bit it became clear that the listening experience was one that, for this particular person, was punctuated with a sort of sly emphasis, that each rhyme served as both punch and wink. Of course, I was glad to hear it.

My intention with the rhyme was threefold: first off, I wanted to use a formal device that would call attention to the artifice of the work, like a photographer who purposely leaves a smudge on the camera’s lens; one is forced to recognize that there is a negotiation present, that there are layers to one’s interactions. Secondly, I wanted to trump some of the expectations that are tethered to the prose poem by combining it with a device normally associated with the lyric, with lineated works. Although the myriad definitions and considerations of the prose poem often focus on musicality, they rarely mention prosody, which makes sense, since one is not dealing with verse. However, I think of the sentence as a kind of line, a unit of measure, and moreover, the relationship between sentences as both mental and rhythmic caesura. I’ve been working with the paragraph form for about six years or so, and I see it as distinct from prose poetry, or at least as a subgenre with a separate set of concerns. I suppose that in trying to work out issues of form there’s something inherently polemical. The existence of the text becomes an argument for a position, for its position. Finally, and to more directly answer your question, I wanted to use a constraint that would push my writing in a different direction, or at least alter my compositional procedure. The most difficult thing about working in such a mode is trying to shake it. Acclimating was easy; I started thinking in rhyme. I was even inclined to include it in my critical writing of the time. After I’d finished the book, and so jettisoned its formal constraints (though not its formal concerns) from then current and future projects, I had to forcibly reject all of the rhyme that kept popping into my head. It was just invasive, and, at that point, felt formally dead.

TF: How does “the paragraph form” have “a separate set of concerns” from prose poetry?

NEG: With the paragraph, one can safely stow away the canonical baggage of the prose poem, which seems to be getting heavier and heavier each year. As I use it, the paragraph is a form that harnesses the pressure of having to sculpt attention out of a contextual void. It places a larger demand on immediacy and speed, which is compounded by the restrictions of duration, since more often than not I’m working without a title, and in such a way as to render a title superfluous. I’m interested in surfaces and surface play, but also in attempting to accrue some kind of depth. It’s like watching through a frozen lake as the shadow of a creature underneath darts by. The more intently one looks at a single spot with the hope of seeing it again the less the range one is able to cover, and thus the likelihood catching the thing is also lessoned. In a sense, the paragraph asks to be tackled quickly, but also in its brevity offers a palatable return. Of course, these things can all be true for the prose poem, however its leash seems to me to be a little longer.

TF: What are a few of the aspects of writing poetry and texts in paragraphs that you enjoy most—that keep you excited about doing it?

NEG: Being excited about writing, which I am, doesn’t necessarily mean that I enjoy it. It’s work. It’s what I do, what I think about. My brother, who is a sociolinguist, and currently doing research in Myanmar, once jokingly referred to me as a man of leisure. I think it’s a telling example of the overall, larger cultural perception of what it is that we poets do, as though I were wandering among some picturesque landscape with a quill pen, plucking fruit from trees, and jotting down metaphors about the purity of their taste. For me, writing is a way to work out problems. It’s an all consuming, anxiety-ridden, difficult activity that has completely reshaped the course of my life and the constituent components of each of my days. I absolutely love it, but am not so sure I enjoy it.

TF: Thank you, Noah.

NEG: And thank you!

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Interview with Alan Davies

Tom Beckett: Where did/does poetry begin for you?

Alan Davies: For me poetry is a natural manifestation like flowers or dogs or stars. Human beings appear to be its agent – but everything that exists has many agents (perhaps a primary one and numerous secondary ones). I’m glad simply to have my hand in it – and to let it go at that.

TB: Your response strikes me as being a bit disingenuous, somewhat unresponsive. Surely there was a beginning point for you, Alan Davies, as a poet. And your work is crafted with great care. It doesn't just happen.

AD: My answer is not in the least bit disingenuous.
     Perhaps it is macroscopic – while you were seeking a more microscopic answer. Perhaps you want to know about things that may have influenced my development as a poet. I’ll answer that question. My father was a preacher. There were times when I heard the same sermon several times – sometimes as often as four times in two weeks. People were attentive. The power of the word was apparent. That may have had some appeal. My father was not generally focused on us – he was spaced-out and in-love-with-Jesus. But at one time he read The Song of Hiawatha to us at bedtime over several weeks. The fact of his being more present than usual may have added to the ringing tones of the poem itself. I remember – By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water, / Stood the wigwam of Nokomis. I also successfully memorized Casey at the Bat. In high school I bought an anthology called A Gift of Watermelon Pickle which contained a poem by Wallace Stevens that compared a razor blade to a mountain range. I couldn’t make sense of it – so I took it to my friend Boyd with whom I shared such things and together we still couldn’t make it mean in any of the ways we thought it might. We took it to Alec Garland – who’d studied at the Sorbonne and who did a terrific job of teaching us French and English. We showed him the poem and I asked him what it meant. He said – I don’t know what do you think it means? Being thrown back on my own resources in that way – into that space of just-don’t-know – was marvelously liberating. In college I enrolled in pre-med to please my parents – found biology untenable after one semester – and quickly made my way to the English department from which I graduated. Shit! – What a lot of words! I think my first answer was a lot easier and more to the point. This has all been something of a distraction.
     All of this explanation might fall in the category of what I first referred to as secondary causes. The main cause of my writing is still what I said it was – it’s a natural phenomenon of which I’m a miniscule almost-non-signifying part – and I’m content to leave it at that.
     You ask about craft. To use your own words – I would say that being crafted with great care is how my poetry just happens. Pound noted from the Chinese that art should imitate nature in its methods of operation – and that’s about what seems to be the case. Yes – I read read read read and I write write write write write – so naturally I learn how to do what I do do do do do. But saying that – what have we learned? Each poem speaks for itself – each is its own cause – and each fails (let’s put it like that) in its own unique way.

TB: What about your intentions as a writer? Surely your poems aren't all autonomous creations which bear no relation to one another?

AD: Intentionality is always a difficult thing to assess – or to front for.
     I remember riding back downtown from one of those Avant-garde Festivals that they had a few of on a pier on the west side – seated next to Hannah Weiner in the back of James Sherry’s car. I asked Hannah why she wrote – she said – Because I see words – and asked me why I wrote. I said something about wanting to help other people or words to that effect. Hannah said – Humpty Dumpty.
     Hannah’s prediction has unfortunately proven to be very much the case.
     But I still have this idea that I can contribute something vis-à-vis showing how the mind works and how it might work better – if only we’d let it. I myself try to aim in the direction of clarity / centeredness / compassion. These things aren’t separable – if you’re clear and centered then compassion is the only natural response to situations / if you’re compassionate you radiate clarity and centeredness / centeredness is the pivot upon which the others find their balance / and so on. So those are things that I try to exemplify in my life and (my writing being a part of my life) in my writing as well (almost by default). Do I fail? – Yes.
     I also write a great many differing types of things. So to that extent they are “autonomous creations which bear no relation to one another” – and to that extent if it were otherwise I’d be bored. And boredom is not particularly conducive to clarity / centeredness / and compassion.
     There’s also something to be said for getting my ideas across to other people. I’m probably better at doing that in writing than in other ways.
     At the same time I wouldn’t want to forget that I write simply because I love to do so. Although I write more and more on the computer now (especially book reviews) – I absolutely love the feel of a pen moving over a more-or-less clean piece of paper.
     And – in the final analysis (if there is one) – the main reason that I write is because I can’t help it. Nor would I want to.

TB: You are associated, of course, with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Would you speak to that association and what it means to you?

AD: That’s a historical question – and I am a poet.
     But I can tell you a few things that I remember. When I was living in Boston in the early 1970s I published the magazines Oculist Witnesses and A Hundred Posters – and particularly through the latter I began to be in touch with poets in New York City and elsewhere. Among them were Michael Gottlieb and Charles Bernstein. During the year that I lived in Boulder (1976-77) I remained in correspondence with them – and with others as well. And then when I moved to New York City in the fall of 1977 I met people that I’d only known through the mail. My first reading here was at a large pub near Columbia – four people read – Charles was one of them – there was one of the so-called New York School of poets (second generation) – and I forget who the fourth was. That reading exposed me and my work to more of the people who would become known as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. That “group” of poets is named after the magazine started by Bruce Andrews and by Charles – and in the writing and production of which many of us participated. I typed some of the issues and was paid for it (for which I was grateful) – many of us got together to do mailings. Various people were also involved with James Sherry’s ROOF magazine. The Ear Inn series of readings was started at about that time – and I ran several series in collaboration with other people (a memorable series with Diane Ward through the midst of a very harsh winter – socks drying on the radiators as readers read and listeners drank). Occasionally there were get-togethers to share new work – I remember meeting at Hannah’s apartment in the East Village / at mine in Park Slope / and elsewhere. There were parties – and we got to know the work of like-minded people in other arts (dancers and film makers and musicians). People began to make connections – through publication first and then through reading tours as well – with our peers on the west coast / as well as with the few kindred spirits living on neither coast. I also got in touch somewhat belatedly (considering that I am Canadian) with some fellow-writers in Canada – Christopher Dewdney (with whom and with whose work I’ve always felt particularly close) in particular (and later with younger Canadian writers who were kind enough to take some interest in my work).
     My friend Michael Gottlieb has some excellent autobiographical writings about the early days of the “group” (particularly in New York) that I hope will be published soon. They’re much more thorough / and much more charming than my few remarks here.
     So all of these inter-lacings (and untold numbers more) made for a community. And the community began to be named by others after that seminal publication. It’s interesting to me that that naming was done by people outside (or adjacent to) the group. I can’t remember (or imagine) any one of “us” saying – We are (the) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. The name was applied – not chosen. I know that my peers and I have many times been asked this question – or other questions about this. But I know of no cases yet of people who did the naming being identified and asked the same question the way it might by interesting to have it asked – Why did you persist in calling them the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets? I think that might end up by being a more interesting project.
     I would like to say also that among poets in New York City and elsewhere I’ve had many (and continue to have many) valued friends and colleagues who wouldn’t be considered to have any association with that “group”. This becomes even more the case as I make friends with younger poets whose affiliations are sundry / and whose influences have been many – and who are very important to me as I continue to develop as a poet. It’s a joy.
     So what is really being described by the term L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (from my point of view) is more a community (and its machinations) than an ideology – although somewhat loosely shared senses of ideology (about both politics and craft) might have been instrumental in shaping the group’s project (particularly early on). What those associations mean to me in retrospect is also what they meant to me primarily at the time(s) – friendships of varying intensities and textures (but principally the chance to have had them at all). When people ask me about the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets I think first of people I love / of people I care about intensely / of people with whom I’ve had difficulties / of people whose work I admire (and from which I’ve learned a great deal) / and so on. Then (and only then) might I think of the work / and what it all means / and whether any of it has anything in common with any of the rest of it / and so on.

TB: Do you see your work, at this point in time, as some kind of a "social project"?

AD: No. I’ve never thought of my work as a “social project” (with or without the quotes). I’ve thought about it in human terms (some of which I talked about above) – and also in spiritual or universal terms (as I spoke about its being a simple part of the flowering of universal process).
     I do hope it to be of some use – but I’d be hard-pressed to define that use – and certainly much more hard-pressed to insist on it.
     This doesn’t mean that I don’t think about it a lot – I do. It’s just that this is all I’ve come up with!

TB: What are you, as a writer, most preoccupied with now?

AD: I’ll answer the question first in terms of my works.
     In 2000 I began a series of books (BOOK 1, BOOK 2, and so on) which I imagine will occupy me for the rest of my life. Each book is quite different from the others structurally / in terms of tone / in terms of what the available content might be / and so on. There’s something fragmentary about the material that goes to make up the texts – I think at this time it’s difficult (and unnecessary) to get beyond fragments – there doesn’t seem to be much that lasts or coheres beyond what a fragment might contain / express. Three of the BOOKs have been published in limited editions – the most recent being BOOK 5 (Katalanché Press, 2007). Many have been read in public.
     I was part way through BOOK 10 when some other sorts of things started keeping me up at night – and I found after some time that I had written a book of / and called ODES & fragments.
     I’ll now return to BOOK 10 – and have an idea of what BOOK 11 will be. Beyond that I’ll simply be able to happily surprise myself. The BOOKs as a totality do cohere I think – and I expect that to go on happening.
     I’ve also been writing a lot of reviews again (after a lengthy hiatus) – beginning toward the end of 2004. Many of these are of books by younger writers whose work I have found singularly engaging – and it’s a pleasure to speak to and of them in that way.
     Reading is also and always a great pleasure. I read a lot of diaries and journals by writers / autobiography and biography of same / books pertaining to artists I particularly admire (Giacometti and Bacon and Ana Mendieta of late) / some poetry books that friends send me / Japanese and Chinese poetry / novels / some philosophy / and other things. From time to time I’ll go back (it’s not really back is it?) and read work by predecessors I particularly admire – Creeley / Kyger / Whalen / MacDiarmid / Wieners / Notley are recent examples. I’ve been reading the classics as well – currently Horace’s Satires and Epistles.
     I’ve also been enjoying very much lately corresponding with writer friends. Among them are old friends with whom I had been for some time out of touch – like Larry Price. And there are newer friends among the younger poets – Roberto Harrison and Geoffrey Olsen and others – from whose correspondence I’m learning a lot about my own values and practice.

TB: Would you speak to your sense of purpose and process in your fragment-poems?

AD: I think I’ve said enough about my “sense of purpose”, to the extent that I have one. I feel as much driven by “it” as I feel capable of being any kind of driver – and the fact that I don’t even know what “it” is is perhaps what drives me most. I think it is.
     As for process – (I don’t know) – I’ve already said something about that also. But practically speaking – I write mostly at night. I’ve always preferred being awake then (when circumstances (job etc) permitted) – the quiet / fewer interruptions / control of space and activity / solitary motions and emotions. I’ve always loved the word lucubrations (which has the etymological connotation of work produced at night by lamplight).
     Words seem to appear – they wake me up (not (not) as it were) / or I wake up for them. They seem to come in little clusters / bump against my head (what I call my head) / and demand to be let in (or is it out?). I go on from there – or sometimes I go on from there / and sometimes I leave it at that. Process is what we’re all in the midst of.
     The phrases or chunks of words then seem to find their place by way of accretion – motivated in part by (sometimes prior) senses of style and structure. In the case of the longer BOOKs these pieces seem to arrive quite slowly – so that to complete one has been taking an average of nine months. Some other recent poems (from the series called ODES & fragments) have been written in a great flurry – but the sense of fracture seems still to be there (wherever there is).
      It might be interesting to think for a moment about the relationships between “sense of purpose” and “process” – does sense of purpose produce process (as we might (willingly) think)? – or is it process that generates sense of purpose as we go on (and on)? I would think that both of these might be the case in a sort of yin / yang way (but without the masculine / feminine notions often attached to that). In other words – sense of purpose and process are co-generative – and it is precisely that co-generative motion that produces the work of art. Neither is prior – if it were the work of art would always remain a hidden secret (which in some cases it does do).

TB: I'm always fumbling … In your poetry, ethics and eros seem palpably embodied in the turns that thought takes as it goes away. The texts, insistently present, are also self-consciously transitory. By way of example, here's the opening of your BOOK 8:

the slightly adult adept

the failure --
of the shadows --
of the leaves --
against the car

as though they are

as though they

the endangered third world --
earth

the end of the word --
as we know it

truncated bundles of hunger

I suppose what I've been trying to get to all along is a better sense of your perspective of what it is that is converging in your work.

AD: I really have no idea.
     I mean when I begin a piece I sometimes (sometimes) have a sense of things like tone / structure / duration / material – I would say that’s about it. (And I think that I used to have a clearer sense of those things when beginning than I do now – although perhaps it’s just that it’s become more intuitive.) But I don’t always have a sense of all of those things (I don’t know if I’ve ever done) – and sometimes have no sense of any of them at all. And yet to begin with a piece of language seems (of some kind of necessity (of some kind of necessity?)) to drag other (perhaps not overly dissimilar) pieces of language into being along with it. It’s a mystery.
     If I didn’t find it to be a mystery I wouldn’t do it – at least not still. I can bear almost anything but boredom – and I can bear even that if I get a little work done in the midst of it. Most things are interesting – but they’re interesting because they create their own uniqueness (by being (I suppose)). Even boredom is interesting.
     I don’t have a lot to go on with. One word is rather quickly a phrase (of some sort) – then (after however long a time) others follow along – and so on. At some point I’m satisfied that I have enough of them – that I’m quote done end quote. That point of completion is sometimes determined by the notebook I’m writing in – when it’s full I’m done (or maybe not).
     I don’t know exactly (or at all?) how you’re trying to get me to explain this. But it’s an organic process – self-initiating / self-perpetuating / self-limiting. Of course I have something to do with it – I’d be a fool to pretend that I don’t – but I’d also be a fool to try to convince either you or me that I know what that part played is. I’m a factor.

TB: Would you humor me by asking yourself a question and answering it?

AD: Q: How would you compare your earlier works with the things that you are working on now?
     A: My earlier works – those that I wrote after college and when in Boston and Boulder and then in New York City – and some of which can be found in Active 24 Hours (Roof) as well as in a an av es (Potes & Poets) and Mnemonotechnics (also from Potes & Poets) – often had experimentation of some sort as their call to existence. I wanted to find out how the language worked – and what was in (in (what was in)) it. I sometimes thought of the works as core samples – as taking a sample of the language in a particular place and time – and I usually accepted that as enough of a reason for doing that / although I also knew that I was expressing my self (whatever my “self” might be (might be thought to be)). I wrote around certain ideas – often involving duration and textuality – and modes of getting at (at) things. It was really a way of learning how to write.
     At about the same time I wrote a work called The Story of One Who Was Great In Respects – which is more personal (or which has (at any rate) more personality in it) – and there were others of that sort. I wrote a work for Mary Lane whose title I no longer remember but that ended with the line – Work abandoned. And in Boulder I wrote a group of at least somewhat satisfying lyrics – and they had a lot of me in them (as well as some of that trust in the language that I had learned from doing the other works).
     Later I wrote the much more personal works that are collected in Candor (O Books) – and in two subsequent unpublished manuscripts (called Life / and Lonely). But I have always written a variety of things – not contented to mine (to use a phrase appropriate to that earlier thinking alluded to) the same content or form for much time.
     I would say that the series of Books that I’m now working on – as well as (in differing ways) the manuscript just completed called ODES & fragments – owes much to those earlier researches (and the products they produced). But I feel now a greater confidence in the assimilation / the confluence / the conflation – of the various modes and tensions and substances that go to make up a work. I guess I would say that I feel more in control (now) of the what as well as the how of writing – and I know that that is what goes to make up the whole work (as a whole). It’s the best I can do – perhaps future moments will teach me new things to add to the mix / and the wherewithal and the how-to of doing so. I’m always as willing to learn from my own work as I am from that of others.