Adam Fieled

Matt Stevenson (Philly, USA): "Dan Grace in Space"

2006-06-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

This collage was constructed for my MySpace page (Dan Grace being my MySpace alter ego) by legendary Philly musician/producer Matt Stevenson. Matt plays keyboard & bass for Radio Eris, was the kingpin of Webster Street Gang Productions (which put out my Stevenson-produced album "Ardent"), a participant in This Charming Lab & the Philly Free School, & is now starting a new recording/production business from a new, extensive pad at 52nd & Cedar (which he shares with other members of Radio Eris). Matt's a multi-talented dude, so I thought a little promo here would be apropos. Check out some of the music I made with Matt in the archives here .

Feature Poet Interview: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

2006-01-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

By email exchange, December 2005-January 2006

Adam Fieled: Hand in hand with the intellectual rigor of your poems is a deep sense of suffering, an awareness of futility and fragility. One might see in your work a “poetics of suffering”. Just as the Buddha said “all life is suffering”, do you feel that, in some sense, all poetry must be “suffering” (or “a suffering”) too?

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: One of the fascinating things about having Drafts read is hearing about what they see in the poems. (Hearing what they see.) People’s responses construct a multi-faceted polyhedron for me. It is also fascinating to hear what words people choose to talk about their feelings for this poem and for poetry in general. You have chosen several very freighted words to open this exchange, including using the term of the Buddha. So I have taken a deep breath, and looked at your words(“deep”; “suffering”; “futility”; “fragility”; “the
Buddha”), and have re- engaged my sense of the poems. (By the way, don’t forget I am only the author of Drafts. I mean that with all the seriousness I can muster and no particular irony. What I say here to you is how best I feel at this moment and in relation to my history with the project and my agency in carrying it through. It doesn’t mean I know more about the work’s reception than you do. Readers are the ones receiving it and they can best speak to their engagement with Drafts. I am just simply the one writing it.)

I would say that suffering and fragility (your words) are close to
feelings I have about some of the themes of the work, but this is combined with a resilience, resistance, and even a rather inflected joy and awe. “Futility” is your word. I think there is a lot of futility in life, even, in some moods, in all of it, but I couldn’t myself get involved in the 20 year long construction of a poem thinking to communicate sheer futility. The tragic sense of life, the sense of
sublimity and rage, is different from futility, after all. Another of the words you use is “must be” what poetry “must be.” Poetry, to be worth something, evokes many, many feelings in readers: structural feelings of pleasure and dastardliness, feelings of being overwhelmed by the force of language, a sense of leaping forward into a world and being contained in relation to the large world by the smaller world made in and by the poem. There is a lot of pleasure in the artfulness of art, even if some of the feelings evoked by a work are overwhelmingly difficult and sad and hard to manage. Hence I don’t think that all poetry must be “suffering.” I can’t wrap myself around that generalization. With all due respect to your evocative terms, I think you are only apparently saying something about all poetry, but you’re really trying to say something about some of your feelings when faced with an art you admire for a variety of reasons. The work calls you forth.

AF: Your work shows a clear and ever-present awareness of post-structuralist theory and practice. Yet you also freely incorporate standard devices like rhyme and alliteration. Are you comfortable with the dynamic tension between “hallowed” tradition and new-fangled theory? Do you find it stimulating?

RBD: Another observation about being interviewed by email to join the first observation. Since I don’t know you particularly well, it’s not yet clear what you mean by the terms in which you are invested. If you were to say even a little about what you mean by post-structuralist theory and practice, we could make sure that we are the same page. When I went to college and graduate school, there was “no” theory; this means we were almost totally into an unquestioned paradigm formed by the New Criticism. I have by the way never given up my formal sense of the artwork learned under that rubric; it’s just not a pure formalist or purely aesthetic sense that’s ever at stake for me. Only as I exited
from my formal education did theory emerge as a set of discussable
positions, what I like to call theorizing practices. Or, say this another way: the political rupture of the late 1960s was also an intellectual rupture. This has meant, to me, that I am most engaged with the loop between theory and praxis coming out of feminism and gender thinking. It’s been, therefore, a thrilling time to
become self-educated in what people call theory, which I have always
taken as a thinking through. I could thereupon tell you what positions and works have been interesting to me, but they all would fall in the in-between formed by a kind of spiritual yearning and a materialist base. This would first be positions taken up by and in feminist thinking including the theorizing of Virginia Woolf, plus key works of French feminism (Irigaray, Cixous) and also Spivak and
Braidotti, all positions dealing with gender in culture; then
positions taken up by echt post-structuralists, most emphatically Barthes, but also Blanchot--these are hard for me to sum up except as being a gloss on spiritual investments and ideological analysis at the same time; and third, the positions of the Frankfurt School, particularly Benjamin and Adorno, plus one very important Marxist pragmatist: Raymond Williams. I have also been listening to and linked
to poet-critics from the U.S. and Canada particularly who were themselves intertwined with certain aspects of contemporary theorizing: Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Erica Hunt, Ron Silliman. I understand that this is a list of names more than a list of positions. The feature of theory that fascinates me, and that I’ve tried to deal with a bit is that only some of that
evocative list of thinkers ever directly and assiduously treats the poem, poetry, the poetic text. (Obviously, the poet-critics are different in that!) However, I see no contradiction between this set of positions and any poetic tactics I might choose to use! Any rhetorics, formal tactics, choices I make, desires to sound inside language, tripping and torquing tradition are my informed choice. Of course it appears to some that using rhyme links you to tradition, but it could allow you to trump tradition, answer back, and so on. No formal “device” (or choice) has absolute content but situational, historically contingent meanings that get created and recreated inside a specific work. Therefore I will use any poetic tactics I want, without worrying about toeing any line, real or imagined. You got it right for sure when you point to dynamic tensions. Any choice of any poetic tactic (free verse; three-step line; procedural sonnets) creates that tension since you are always in some kind of dialogue with prior users. Plus you are trying to separate from them.

AF: At one point in Drafts, a speaker says, “If I am not who you say I am, you are not who you think you are.” This cuts to the core of the political element in Drafts— the construction of identity through various “namings”, of the self and others. How does the construction of identity (as woman, poet, “speaker”, etc.) play into your poetics? Is the poem, or does the poem become, part of the poet’s “identity-construct”?

RBD: I sincerely think and hope that speaker was Ralph Ellison; it’s one of the citations in Drafts unchecked (or one of the unchecked citations). I cited it for the magnificent dialectics. (It’s in “Draft 48: Being Astonished,” my poem concerning a whole generation of female experimental poets and all the different subject positions they might be imagined to have and to take up.) My identity? There are a lot of parameters to identity (class, race, gender, religious culture, job category, national location, social usefulness). I try to
forget them all when I write. That doesn’t mean I am not engaging them, or engaging with them. I just try to work into them and beyond them at the same time. I know this is a paradox. That’s the paradox of writing. Of course the poem, a task and struggle as large as Drafts, becomes part of who I am now.

AF: Sense of place in Drafts seems to me multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, “numerous”. Is the voyage “inside times and inside pronouns” one with destination other than “a speaking” or “a writing”? Can you carry elements of this voyage into “dailiness” or is there an evanescence to it?

RBD: If I understand the question, you are asking does the poem—with its ethics and sense of being-- affect my daily life. The answer is—sometimes. I think the poem comes from everything I am, and has also changed what I am.

AF: You devote a substantial amount of space in Drafts to a dialectical exploration of Adorno’s famed quote that (to paraphrase) to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Do you believe that statements of this sort, i.e. deliberately provocative statements, are a healthy part of cultural conversation, or merely a nuisance, or can they be both?

RBD: Your question refers to a poem called “Draft 52: Midrash” in the
most recent book of Drafts, Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft,
unnumbered, Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). The poems in this book are all dedicated to specific people, and constitute a personal pledge of engagement with the issues of historical tragedy and spiritual questioning that the poems as a whole set forth. However, “Draft 52: Midrash” is deliberately undedicated. This is a commentary on the Holocaust and on the genocidal, killing fields, and mass murder tasks that nazi-fascism has taken up, no matter where it is active.

One of the notable poems in that book, “Draft 52: Midrash,” makes
an endless, unresolved gloss on Adorno’s sententia, After Auschwitz
to write a poem is barbaric, taking his statement as an important ethical talisman. (His statement comes in an essay called “Cultural Criticism and Society”; it appeared in Prisms.) I truly thought his comment was beyond what would normally be seen as provocative in a cultural conversation (to use your words) and came from an emotional and political space far, far beyond anything that could be
called nuisance. There are always some people who mouth off
about poetry and what poetry should or should not do, and articulate orders for poets but Adorno is far beyond being one of those people. His statement comes from the most wrenching revulsion, grief and human anguish. Therefore, because it was so absolutist, I respected it as such. However, because it was so absolutist (plus annihilating, as morally wrong or uncivilized, my desire to write poetry), I felt it
had to be discussed. Not answered, discussed. Opened out. Exfoliated.
Looked at again and again from any number of angles or facets. That is what my serial poem does. Each time I approach the statement, in the 27 sections of this poem, I try to honor the level of ethical revulsion and grief from which it came. So each of the sections tries to invent an answer to the question why did he say this in the immediate post-war context. What was he getting at by singling out poetry.

It is very important to me that this poem is called midrash. This word evokes a textual strategy from Hebrew interpretive practices. Midrash originally meant a continuous and generations-long commentary on sacred texts by those--males, in Orthodox tradition--invested with appropriate spiritual authority and learning. In writing this particular midrash on Adorno, I am taking a secular text, in the post-Holocaust context, examining it as a woman untrained in any philosophical tradition of argument, but someone who is invested in the notion of thinking in poetry. The gesture is therefore filled with critique.

Actually, Drafts as a whole project alludes to--but secularizes--this
genre of serious commentary, spiritual investment, and continuous gloss. By the title Drafts, I am signaling that these poems are open to transformation, part of ongoing processes of construction, self-commentary, and reconstruction. This similar to the collective processes of midrash. And, while some in individual Drafts can be very funny and witty, the whole project has thematic and emotional investments centering on loss, struggle, and hope, on the unsayable and “anguage,” the language of anguish. You can see why I had to respond to Adorno; our interests coincide in many, many ways.

George Bowering Interview Pt. 2

2005-12-24T09:07:00.000-08:00

AF: Several pieces in BOB are occasional poems for other poets. What draws you to this poem? Are they, for you, a kind of "serious goof"?

GB: I think you might be referring to what I call my tribute poems. Actually, they are arranged not in lines but in sentences that usually take up two lines on the page. I have been publishing them in a number of books, and there will be another group in my next book of poems, from Talonbooks in Fall 2006. These are pieces I write when a poet (usually) dies, or gets a big birthday and hence a commemorative anthology or issue of a magazine, or the like. I have occasionally (ha ha) thought of someday doing a volume of them, but then I think well, no, the procedure is that they are ongoing, a thing that happens when you get older in the art. There are some objects of these things that are still alive-- Leonard Cohen, Pat Lane, etcc. These are real occasional poems, as the occasion really existed and would have whether I contributed or not.

AF: Print vs. Online publishing: would you like to weigh in?

GB: I'm still a print fetishist, if that is the right and fair word. Lately, as in your journal, I have been publishing online, and though I have come to think that it is not totally secondary I still favor print magazines. I know that the circulation of online poems is bound (ha ha) to be greater, but what about books? Books are marvelous objects, amazing machines, so portable; I read a book in the post office lineup, which I don't do with online stuff. I have been using computers since they first came to individuals-- I hate to think how long that has been, but I noticed yesterday that I am still using a password a "techie" in Denmark gave to me in 1995. I loved having a feature shot in JACKET, yes. I guess it all depends. I think that my feeling about online mags is similar to my feeling about print magazines-- the attraction is the compatny. Who are you with?

Feature Poet Interview: John Siddique (UK)

2005-12-03T15:59:00.000-08:00

Adam Fieled: It’s clear from your poems that sincerity/authenticity is important to you. Do you find this quality lacking in most contemporary/ “High” poetry?

John Siddique: The poetry and poets I find myself drawn to always have both of these qualities. Some poetry sets itself up to show us how clever the poet is, or its’ a bit like some kind of puzzle to unlock. If people want to write that stuff that’s up to them, but it doesn’t add to the literature of the world, and the kind of poet who writes that stuff obviously feels a need to create and defend a world that is for them and their elite, so lets leave them to it. I’m not sure what ‘High’ poetry is really, for me poetry has to add to the world by connecting with or showing me something of the life of its’ subject, be that abstract or personal.

AF: You have an interesting biography. Do you find yourself referring back to “pre-poetry” years very often? Do you feel that you learned life-lessons that you couldn’t have learned if you were already a practicing poet?

JS: I used to find that I referred back a lot, but my author’s voice actually got stronger when I stopped running away from my own life. I used to try not to write about it so much, and while it doesn’t dominate my writing, my own personal stories are now in some ways more important in my own life through their exploration in writing, almost as if to look at them gives them a polish. There are many life lessons that I don’t think would be available to me if I were not a poet, sitting back from the heat of emotion and trying to see the whole of a situation for what it is, a big one, but the biggest one is that before I wrote I was a very frightened person. Using my writer’s voice, and the practice of clarity, have made me a person far more able to interact in and with the world, and of course it gives me a vehicle to do that as well.

AF: You’re an active community-builder. Do you think it’s difficult to balance a lot of outward activity with the inward work necessary to create effective/affecting poems?

JS: In the last couple of years I find I have had to make some big choices in this area of my life. I have used poetry in many settings such as psychiatric hospitals, schools, galleries, with homeless people, and prisons. But you're right, when I do too much work in these fields it stops me being as creative as I would like to be as a poet. So I have really cut back this year, not that I think these things are no longer important. If one has a way to bring good stuff into the world, I see it as an extension of my yoga practice, then its' good to do that, but not to the point one harms oneself, which it is easy to do. If I am not being a poet first, then when I go into the community I am actually being a fake. So it is important for me to be centred in creating the poetry first, then I have something real in itself to offer the world. Both as a means to interface in community settings, but also I have come to realise that being a poet, and genuinely getting on with the work, i.e. being well read, writing, touring, publishing, writing truthfully about real things, and not letting fear stop me and so on is enough, and it is my way to make a contribution to our world. Unfortunately it is not easy to make a living being a poet, and so one then takes on work which leads away from this practice. One of the choices I have made this year, is to live more frugally so I can get one with writing, but then that too creates a tension, as it has an impact sometimes on how one lives. Being a poet is a real balancing act.

AF: I find your anti-elitist stance very appealing. How has it worked for you on the British poetry circuit? Have you encountered resistance from “ivory tower” poets? Adjacent to this, how are British poets treated in society generally? Is there a semblance of respect, or is it rough going?

JS: This is an interesting one. Respect is not part of the British vocabulary. Generally (we) they are mostly a very cynical people, in the nicest possible way. I count myself as British, but was raised by my Irish mother, and also have Indian heritage from my father, so I have never really fitted the old fashioned idea of Englishness. As a poet here it brings nothing except funny looks when you say you are a poet, and you know my stance on ivory towers, let the people who build towers them live in them, as long as we don’t think that what they have is some kind of answer or something to aspire to, we’ll get on, somehow. The US and Ireland, whilst not without their difficulties, are for more respectful of what someone does, and I think because of their more revolutionary spirits when you say you’re a poet it has meaning.

Feature Poet Interview: George Bowering (Canada)

2005-11-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

Adam Fieled: Your poems often allude to the great Romantics, particularly Keats. Do you find the Romantics have continuing relevance for you, though they often get short shrift from experimental/innovative poets?

George Bowering: On my study wall I have a bunch of pictures, including, to my right, two big portraits of poets. There are Charles Olson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know. That is odd. Before the summer of 1963 I resisted the Romantics, except for Blake, because everyone I knew was reading Blake, and not just because Allen Ginsberg had mentioned him. Ezra Pound was not happy about the Romantics, nor the "sludge" that followed them, before the light of day provided by Hulme. etc. So of course I read Pound and the people Pound said we should read. My friends and I were reading "Donna mi Prega" or whatever and so on; but in the summer of 1963, during the big poetry bash in Vancouver, Allen Ginsberg, just back from Asia, recited Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," and later "Adonais," and I was swept along. I had expected to follow Olson all over for those 3 or 4 weeks, but was surprised to find myself enjoying being in the orbit of Ginsberg. Then I went to Calgary and taught for three years, and then I went to London, Ontario, to be a graduate student, and took a course on the Romantics, and paid most of attention to Shelley, and so the years went by, and most of the Romantics fanciers I knew were hot for Coleridge, but I persisted in reading Shelley, even reading 10 biographies of Shelley. Eventually I went to Italy and checked out houses Shelley had lived in, went to the Protestant graveyard in Rome, saw grave of Keats and took a leaf to give to my Keats friend in Vancouver, saw the "grave" of Shelley, etc. Yes, I do allude to Keats, especially in my 14-page poem "Do Sink" that explodes Keats's "cease to be" sonnet. I have also written a miniaturized translation of Shelley's "Adonais," something called "He is Not." Etc.

Yes, the innovative poets don't lean on the Romantics much. Shelley, for example, rather than creating new forms, decided to write the best poem going in every verse form then known. I have for decades looked for a way to combine the accuracy of Louis Zukofsky with the openness to spiritual music of the Romantics. I suppose that the most pleasing source is Robert Duncan; and it so happens that of all the poets in the Allen anthology, Duncan was the one we were most early and most closely
connected with, my generation of poets here in Vancouver, Fred Wah, James Reid, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt and David Bromige, etc.

AF: The main sequence for which “Blonds on Bikes” is named reminds me very much of Kerouac’s travelogue poems “Mexico City Blues”, though I’d give you the edge for assurance and maturity. Was this a planned resemblance or something that just happened? Following this, do you go in more for conscious craft or happy accidents? Has this changed over the years?

GB: I think that you might be the first person who has noticed this within my hearing. Yes, that sequence was written with the Kerouac method in mind. Not "Mexico City Blues" in this case, but the ones in San Francisco. I made myself an extra rule, as I will do. That is, I had just one entry a day, trying to go as fast and unplanned as Jack, whatever was there, something that worked because like him I
was on foreign ground, in my case Denmark and Germany. Of course, I was older than K was while he was writing his, and I had his space to piss in. So thanks, JK.

I guess I go for happy accidents once I have set up rules, what I used
to call baffles. So I wrote a novel the way I wrote that poem. It was a translation of the Fragments of Heraclitus. That is, I carried that book with me, and what I wrote each day (and I did not miss a day) had to use whatever was in the Heraclitus that day, and also what I had seen and done that day. It takes place "Harry's Fragments," in Australia, Vancouver, Rome and Berlin. It also had to be a spy story, and it had to involve Thai restaurants, something not common
in 1985. Lots of happy accidents. I arrived for passage one in Sydney,
Australia, the same day as the Queen Elizabeth II and the SST, on St Valentine's Day, etc. The SST shows up later in Berlin. It happens that the day we got to Heraclitus's famous "The way up is the way down" on the day I first went to East Berlin,who had a rule that said that you must leave East Berlin by the same way that you entered, the S-Bahn, the U-Bahn, or Checkpoint Charlie. A lot of those happy accidents happened, as they do in all my books, it seems. Right now I
am writing a baseball fiction about the 1962 season in Vancouver, and I have found that there was a UFU that chased people out of the stadium one night in August. In an earlier book I chose to write about 1888-89 in Kamloops, and not mention baseball. Turns out there was a game on New Year's Day that was postponed by an eclipse of the sun. What could I do?

AF: I’ve noticed that you write very candidly and openly about the
aging process. Despite this process, have you felt a sense of
progression as you’ve continued to write? Is this progression perhaps
related to aging?

GB: I never set out to write about the aging process, but there it is, so
of course you have to write with it or you will screw up whatever it is you are writing. I always noted, when I was a young punk, that Hemingway's hero was about 3 or 5 years younger than he when he wrote the story or novel. He did get at the process, too, in his later books, Across the River and Into the Trees, for example.

I think that there might be a sense of progression as you suggest, but I don't know how to say anything intelligent about it. Like other people, I imagine, I see recent work as better than older work, having built on its practice. But once in a while one sees an early piece and wonders how one could have got that. Maybe one at the time was afforded a glimpse into the future when one would be writing better.

But really, a person keeps reading as he gets older, and so crams more
into his head, and one gets more sensitive to human experience. You do not want to repeat yourself, so you try something else, and you might as well make that something better.

Feature Poet Interview: Andrew Duncan

2005-11-14T10:26:00.000-08:00

Adam Fieled: Formally, the paratactic quality of your lines could align you with the Language poetry movement. Nevertheless, the narrative element in your poems is strong enough that one feels moved from "A" straight through to "Z" by them. Are you conscious of a dichotomy here between narrative movement and paratactic "zig-zags", or is this an unconscious process?

Andrew Duncan: I did quite a lot of work on parataxis at one stage of my life. The basic information I found was that it has strong associations with working-class speech, and that dialect writing has very infrequent parataxis. This was asserted of Vulgar Latin, 2000 years ago, so it is quite a deep distinction. I find this difficult to square with its presence in LANGUAGE poetry, written by people presumably of high educational levels. I would say that its presence in my writing correlates with listening to rock music and folk song a great deal. There is probably a link between parataxis and lines which are complete in themselves, without enjambement – like all song and all early poetry. I don’t think the decision about movement through a poem is conscious, although it is part of the process of composing every line. MAK Halliday coined the term “cohesion” to cover the area which includes decisions about parataxis, syntaxis, and hypotaxis, which probably has a lot to do with the question “is this a null and stupid line break or a good one”. This is a large topic!

Basil Bernstein used parataxis as a key component in his theory of language and class. Bernstein was trying to answer the question “why do children from income groups D and E do incredibly badly in anonymous written State exams” in terms of a gap between their language and the language of the classroom and exams. Other linguists misheard the message as “lower-class speech is poor in information”, got upset, and threw away the key question about academic success and social mobility. Science failed here because emotions became too violent. If you get a room of British people talking about these issues, they will very rapidly split into two groups who don’t want to listen to each other!

Where science fails, older and darker subsystems come into play.
There was a stage (say 1968-75?) when sociology, and sociolinguistics, seemed able to provide the solutions to the problems tormenting society. A lot of people got involved with them as a means of carrying out political commitments. The instrument seems to have broken under the pressure. The crisis of British Marxism may have inspired the most revolutionary stage of modern British poetry – and brought it to an end.This isn’t directly part of my problem in tuning cohesion in my poems. But if we take the thesis “we will promote social mobility by dumbing-down poetry and withholding information from the lower classes”, I don’t buy it! Not at all!

Writing a line is like designing something on Auto-CAD – I just keep on producing variations and looking at them from every direction until I find something that works. I am not conscious of why a variant does not “work”, or of where the variations come from. So, where do intuitive decisions come from? They may embody conscious activity – with its products which “sink” down and are drawn on, years later, when making intuitive decisions. This may have been unsuccessful conscious activity – an intellectual crisis faced with parts of a conceptual field which was never resolved. So theory played a role – including the theory I learnt from other people.

The superiority of the hypotactic style supposedly has to do with making the implicit explicit, whereas folk songs make everything clear without ever saying it. Although I do have a book called Text and context, I feel that science has not reached this area (and the book is too difficult to actually read!). This area is of course where poetry has problems crossing the Atlantic

The most attractive thing in verse movement is the sense of boundless freedom. I am aware that I deviate from this – my verse often circles round, is frozen like a snake in a glass box which keeps pushing its head against the glass and can’t move on. The I-subject is not simply enjoying glorious freedom – he is thwarted, blocked, and moving into a social structure which is arrayed against him. The ‘glass box’ ends motion but forces on us a qualitative shift – into thinking, into imagining the social order. If the snake could see itself in the glass, it would become a mammal.
You are probably aware that one of the key splits in the English poetry scene is between the London school (with great reliance on parataxis) and the Cambridge school (with insistence on complex syntax and argument structures). I don’t have any stylistic affinity with either school.

I don’t know anything about LANGUAGE poetry, I admit. A crude view is that this is a label which is supposed to reduce several thousands of disparate cultural complexes to a single category – which we can then, supposedly, understand. But in fact they are several thousand different things, and that informational complexity is what sustains a cultural life (which might just burn out after a couple of years).

AF: There’s an acute sense of dread in your poems, that goes beyond the simple bar-room noir of Bukowski or the operatic sturm und drang of Berryman. It’s insidious, existential, and very haunting. Is this a deliberate undercurrent, a kind of consciousness you attempt to impart on your words, or do you think it slides in without your knowledge?

AD: I find this hard to explain. I once read an interview with a guy from Radiohead, the rock band, where he said that they’d been told they would never get anywhere playing sad songs on a concert stage, and he laughed because he knew that was wrong. I have a radio tape of Radiohead, in front of a vast crowd at the Reading festival, some year, the singer announces “The Bends”, this unbearably tense, howling, angst-drenched song, and this huge cheer goes up! I knew that melancholic poems could make people happy, and I knew this when I was maybe 15 years old, it was one of my big realisations in life. Another radio moment was someone talking about a melodic profile or phrase which goes through all mammal vocalisations, a curve which triggers off a shivering reaction, hair bushing, etc., and an impulse to rush together to keep warm. The signal for cold is a sort of howl and linked to social touching. To understand a sad poem, you have to look at the reactions of other people in the room, and at what happens next. If you trigger this reaction at all, it’s very deep.

The decision to go with melancholic poetry, full of dread as you say, is divisive. It gets rid of most of the audience. I think this is much more the divider, with me, than being obscure or abstruse. But if you are drawn to it, the implicit knowledge which you share is wonderfully rich, and it creates a deep bond. I spent my childhood at a boarding school where most people disliked me, and I never thought I was going to achieve wide popularity; but I knew I had my audience waiting for me, and I didn’t ever get distracted by wanting to write like JH Prynne, or like a pop poet, or something.

I made a slogan once, Strength Through Angst. I made a joke about this style, but I didn’t want to give it up. My first poems which I kept were written when I was 20 – but the idea of writing in that way was there years before that. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to go on obeying the decisions of a 17-year old! Maybe it was a terrible mistake! Maybe I should have made beauty and happiness much more central. Maybe I should have focussed on writing about I love you, you love me. People like that too, I think.

I wrote four books which were consciously not about alienation, the cold, etc. For people who didn’t like the other ones. Which were. I blame myself for using anxiety as a drug to jack people’s intakes open and put them into acute states.

Every new line has to add something. All the time you’re supplying information, the picture gets closer and closer to being finished, and if you want to go on you have to create new information. A basic need is to preserve uncertainty in the text. If the poem is built about an I-figure, and that I-figure is affectively unstable, that builds in uncertainty; a lens fluctuating through the colour cycle. This high level of uncertainty is the engine that drives the poems – the pulse, the drum. The poet closest to me, in many ways, is Kelvin Corcoran, and his verse constantly has this high uncertainty. It’s not melancholic, though. He reaches that dance of reversals in a completely different way; more critical and dialectic. I think other poets got into the observer as variable through philosophy, for example phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty. I started writing poetry of high quality (my word for it) much earlier in life than a lot of people, and this is why the way I write is very subjective and not philosophical at all.

Alien Skies is about metabolism again through reptiles. If you look at reptiles, which just close down when it’s cold, you get a new view of depression as a setting of the metabolism, which governs perception. Mammals lose heat all the time, in a depleting way, but huddle together to keep warm, helped by sounds. This image may relate to The Drowned World, an early Ballard novel in which the earth goes back to Jurassic heat and people start acting like reptiles. This is your alien sky, with its coded light. I read this in 1969, so it’s another example of living out very early object-choices.

AF: The sexuality in your poems is raw and vital but seems un/de-politicized. One never gets the sense that you are flaunting it or grandstanding with it to get attention. How do you factor sexuality into your poems? Do sexual politics hold any interest for you?

AD: I don’t think they’re in the poems. I can’t write about personal experience in terms of conscious knowledge and the beautiful civic ideals proposed to us. This is like making love while you are being projected onto a screen 100 feet high – the same gestures acquire a second meaning which is visibly wrong.

Talking about l’amour is a good way of annoying people. My poems have a strong flavour; but the expectation that people will be attracted to your poems about love is no more likely than the expectation that they will be attracted to your person. I wouldn’t want to argue with anyone who disliked my love poems.

Let me quote from one of my favourite records, a song by doo-wop group The Dubs called “Where do we go from here? It took a lot of mistakes to ever get this far. But I want to know, I really want to know, where do we go from here?”

I used to have this experience with someone incredibly well-informed who would lecture me, late at night, about a hormone oxytocin, linked to trustfulness, suckling, orgasm, and internal pressure control and the release of fluids. I think she may have been making a point about how untrustworthy I was; but how much I might have learnt if I’d been able to stay awake. I always got confused and called it “oxytoxin”. Oxytocin is the messenger which makes fish release roe, or spawn, vascular pressure displacing the ocean. So we’re talking about a blissful regression in which we immerse and become weightless, the inner and outer waters flow together, and the ocean itself becomes a sexual medium, in which spates of precious fluids form spirals and constellations, sight is replaced by ripples flowing along the skin, personal identity and the time sense disappear. I can never remember this clearly. Sandor Ferenczi wrote a book Thalassa which says that we turn into fish during coupling. I thought it was nonsense. Fish? In Chinese poetry, love is symbolised by ducks. If I was devising a goddess of love, I might well make her a Mouse. Mice are addicted to Lurve, as we know. He was a very persuasive man.

My grandmother was told she would have to give up her job as a teacher if she got married. The State obliged her to become a housewife. This was a gross abridgement of her civil rights. I could cite a hundred such stories, and it would be idiotic not to be a feminist. I accept that property, in our society, is used as the site for a fantasy of domination, and that property is used as a metaphor for the status and obligations of women. It would be inconsistent then to write books in which women don’t suffer and where they are perfectly autonomous. Idealisation of the situation also idealises the male protagonist, something highlighted by feminists. I was most impressed by writers who questioned the monologue of male poets about women. The poem is my property, but I don’t own someone else’s experience. The gap between sex and love, between illusion and experience, between fusion of identity and domination,
between me and you, is not an invention. If you stop idealising the male figure, you can go on writing love poems. I realised that I could stay on air by writing about someone who wasn’t unusually sensitive, who wasn’t sophisticated, who missed his part in the music and made terrible mistakes. I could get away from writing reflexively by never rising above the immediate situation. I’ve always felt that if you present people with comfort and harmony, they don’t engage, whereas if you present them with characters in a terrible fix, they will think it through carefully to try and find out where do we go from here. So you show Love going wrong, basically. The poem takes place at a point on the curve well before knowledge arrives, where ignorance and conflict and uncertainty are at their height. It’s trapped at that point, where all the loose energy is. Then I cut to the next scene of conflict and improvisation.

The insights in my poems are drawn from people who were much more perceptive than I, who knew much more than I did, who saw the patterns and were generally my superior. These were the women I fell in love with. They explained things to me, often slowly and several times. This does raise the question of who owns the poem.

AF: The big debate among poets now seems to be about internet vs. print publishing. How do you feel about it? Do you prefer one to the other?

AD: From some point, before I was nine years old, I used to go to Loughborough market on Saturday mornings and buy American comics, Spiderman and things like that. And on Saturday mornings, still, I go to a library, a record shop, or a second hand bookshop. It’s one of those physical things like, do you write from 8 till 12 mid-day or from midnight till 4. It’s a habit which has scored itself deeper over 40 years, which gives me withdrawal problems if I don’t do it. And I do prefer shopping for books to scanning the Internet.
The issues raised by the Internet are fascinating. Evidently people outside the zones of dense cultural activity, the capitals, got into it much more quickly. It was much more useful to Susan Schultz, in Honolulu, than to someone living in London. It was a leveller. There is an issue here about proximity –

What does literature deliver?
How does it transmit a personality? Or is that Stone Age egoism?
What is the anatomy of group feeling? how does it decay as radius increases? What is the “inside”?

Identification (is this the same as “group feeling”?) is a Stone Age thing, fundamental to everything else yet resistant to theorising – where attempts are of great interest, but really tentative and conjectural. It’s much deeper than literature, and literature could presumably be replaced by a new way of carrying out the archaic functions.
Is there a connection between open and closed groups, and open and closed (impenetrable) texts? Should we talk about the design of the social network, rather than the design of the text?

I have just been looking at a vast anthology (Neofitsial’naya poeziya), all on the Internet, of 288 Russian samizdat poets. It was so hard getting samizdat books and magazines in the 1980s, now you can get thousands of pages of old samizdat poetry for the cost of your printer consumables. And, Russians are not interested in the era pre-1989 any more. This project is not commercially possible in print. I’ve also just spent loads of kronor on Swedish poetry of the 1940s, also bought via the I-net. Fantastic! Who was Sven Alfons?

I’m wondering how much small press poetry has to do with the daily intimacy of tiny in-groups. The stifling warmth of their mutual knowledge and rivalry. And the specialist shopping for magazines that are on sale, once, for a few hours, in one room. The ‘rich warm mud of Bohemian life’. Going to a poetry weekend in Cambridge where two groups hung out in two pubs and refused any contact with each other, & you had to choose which one to be allied with.
I propose the poem to a reader as a place they are in the centre of – fearing they will see it as a margin to their own moving centre.

I love shopping & am trying to write a poem “The History of Shopping” which starts with the Goths making the trip to Rome, seen as the inventors of tourism. Byzantine historians described the steppe peoples as insatiably acquisitive. It’s a sort of Imelda Marcos travelogue.

Featured Poet Interview: Donna Kuhn

2005-11-07T06:06:00.000-08:00

Adam Fieled: Your poems display a sharp sense of meaning and purpose while also playfully overturning conventional vernacular uses. Do you consciously seek to overturn conventions with your poems or are you more motivated by the idea of play and adventure?

Donna Kuhn: I think the playful adventurous nature of cut-ups and other experimental techniques I use automatically overturn conventions so it is both involuntary and subconscious and almost coldly scientific at the same time. The meaning is both coincidental and truer than true or it could mean nothing at all. If there was no discovery or surprise I couldn't do it everyday.

AF: Between words, images, and movements, your work often straddles lines, and you seem very comfortable working with hybrid forms. Could you talk a little bit about your attraction to hybrid/ “multi-media” forms, why they seem useful to you?

DK: I was doing visual and sound text poetry before I ever heard the terms, also giving readings accompanied by improvisational music. When I started dancing I wanted it to include words. Not being able to choose between art forms, I naturally gravitated towards hybrid forms where I would feel less like they were pulling me in too many directions and there was never enough time, to a more integrated place where they would feed and enhance each other. Getting more comfortable with technology has allowed me to explore music and video and not be dependent on others to collaborate with. I'm not sure the forms are more relevant today but I think computers make it easier for people to experiment with other art forms and to present and share them with large audiences.

AF: To follow up on an earlier question, I'd like to address "sense/nonsense" as a working dichotomy in your poems. Does this tie in to the conscious/unconscious mind of the writer or reader? Do you mean for your poems to resonate on a sub or unconscious level? Can nonsense, in the tradition of the "automatic writing" of the Surrealiats, have a kind of validity through this connection?

DK: I think most poetry works on a somewhat subconscious level for the writer and reader. People will read different things into it. I don't mean for them to resonate on a sub or unconscious level but I think they do. I think because it might seem nonsensical the reader probably tries harder to find subconscious meaning in it. if they can't find anything else. Or else you have to just let go and feel the poem, hear the poem; it might stir up emotions or visual images. It might hit you later in the day. I think it has validity. I feel very comfortable in the subconscious realm perhaps because I dance and paint. There's a lot of wisdom, power and magic there. My poems make sense to me. If reality/sense is Iraq etc/bird flu, I'd rather be a surrealist in a time of war.

AF: There's a big debate going among poets regarding online vs. print publishing. What's your view on this? Do you think online publishing can be just as efficacious as print?

DK: Although I love books and you can't replace books the online world has allowed me to get all my work out there so quickly and extensively I am forever indebted to it and am thankful to the better known poets who are doing e-books etc. to give it more validity. For poets who are often short on cash and time, it is easier, faster and yes, cheaper. I spend a lot less time at the post office. I like the newness of it.

AF: As an American artist circa 2005 working in mostly un-commercial idioms, do you feel marginalized? Do you draw strength from being a kind of "outsider" to Bush-World or is this not a consideration for you?

DK: I feel a bit marginalized and I can feel like an outsider in many ways. I both draw strength from it and get weary and scared sometimes. Other artists make me feel less alone. I don't feel like I have much choice. This is how I was born. I try to see it as a blessing.

Feature Poet Interview: Chris McCabe

2005-10-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

Adam Fieled: ‘You use a lot of humor in your poems. It's an all-purpose kind of humor that can be directed any which way-- towards George W. Bush, for instance, or towards yourself, or towards the act of creating a poem. How much of this is conscious? Do your favorite poets tend to be "cut-ups"?’

Chris McCabe: I’ve never really thought of myself as using humour, in the sense of a deliberate, literary device which attempts to have an effect on a reader. It seems obvious to me that poems that set out to be funny, once you’ve identified the poet’s intentions, fall flat and fail. The traditional vehicle for the ‘homourous poem’ is narrative, which doesn’t interest me at all: I’m much more interested in fusing together the seemingly disparate, crude bathos, clashes of cultural registers and any other shock tactics that can, first and foremost, surprise me as the writer. Dr Johnson’s comment that Donne took “the most heterogeneous ideas and yoked together by violence” is relevant here. Being from Liverpool (a city famous for its humour) and writing poetry, strangely doesn’t offer any legacy in terms of a more challenging poetics. The territory ends with McGough and The Mersey Poets and all that ponytailed tweeness. A lot of my poems seems to come about through the making of a connexion, for example George W. Bush & the Wizard of Oz, which interests me more than attempting to get a laugh. Obviously, humour can be used as a kind of survival tactic (certainly in Liverpool, a blinker against the memory of the slave trade), a communal ethic of moving on. There’s no great theory to this, but things are either funny to me because they make me laugh or because it generates a response against something that scares the living shit out of me. It was only five days after the recent London bombings when I heard the first joke made about it on televison. It was a huge tension reliever. In this sense, the politic poems that I’ve written have probably used humour as a way of dealing with The Fear.

My favourite poets all tend to use speed (harder, quicker, faster) as an element in their writing, but I wouldn’t say they are dsitinguished by “cut-ups”. Dadaism was an incredibly important movement, and one I go back to from time-to-time, but the idea of using this technique without some interesting form of intervention has probably had its day. I’m more interested in the effect that television has had on the development of the minds of people of my generation (the MTV generation) and the ability this brings to be able to soak up great streams of images and messages and still be able to read them critically. Poetry as a potentially more meaningful form of channel-hopping. Randomness and synchronicity is the everyday experience of dealing with life in the city and there’s little chance of a slow, closed, conventional poem doing much for anyone who’s just spent a few hours trawling the internet on broadband. Memetically our minds have been altered by these massive cultural shifts and I feel that poetry needs to change to retain the capacity to surprise and capture the imagination. Cards on the table time – my favourite poets include Barry MacSweeney, Ed Dorn, Tom Raworth, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara and Jacques Roubaud. Massively varying poets who are not necessarily distinguished by their use of use cut-ups, but who write with a kind of parataxis that has the capacity, in one way or another, to increase the possibilities of communication.

AF: You've published your first book at a relatively young age. As a fellow twenty-something poet, I was wondering if you could talk about how it feels to be playing what's traditionally seen as an old man's game. Have you felt your youth to be a liability or an asset?

CM: Age seems to work on a different dimension in the poetry world, with poets under the age of forty usually being classified as ‘young’. In a recent Poetry Society-sponsored Next Generation promotion (the corporate spawn of the original Pod People) the cut off age for a young poet was, I think, 55! In relation to that I suppose I’m comfortably in the young bracket, though I’ve had an extra 10 years to think poetry through and make decisions on which direction to take it than, say, Rimbaud or the MacSweeney of ‘The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother’. They are examples of precociousness on a preternatural level. I think the reality is that, although poetry has been traditionally an ‘old man’s game’ (this of course refers to the centuries of closed doors to women writers) much of the best poetry that’s been written has been done by young poets. The argument booted against young writers is that they haven’t got the life experience to actually have anything meaningful to say. This may be true if you’re interested only in a confessional, story-based, wizened kind of writing, but if poetry’s going to come directly from the poet’s experience in life - sourced by the fabric of a variety of culturally experienced factors - then it’s in youth that the future is embraced and the past not held close as a personal Golden Age. What comes next is valued more than what went before. This appeals to me as I’m interested in poetry of the present tense as opposed to a poetry that foists a nostalgia for the past. It’s also the case that younger writers can draw from developments and new directions in technology, music, film and, of course, the language itself, that might strike older poets as alien.
There’s nothing more detrimental to a poet’s output than the self-assurance that comes with certain publication. Poetry’s dominated by staid, complacent poets living off the glory of successful, earlier work. They don’t need to push themselves as middle-of-the-road stuff will do. They won’t take chances as this might lead to their publisher actually reading their work and becoming critical of it. Of course there are exceptions to this, and I’ve got great respect for Geoffrey Hill and late-career risk-taking of ‘Speech! Speech!’ and ‘The Orchards of Syon’. Resonant, meaningful work that smacks of nowness. There are also exceptions to publishers and SALT, the publisher of ‘The Hutton Inquiry’, are interested only in the merits and energy inherent in the body of work itself. This might seem like an obvious starting point for larger poetry publishers, but SALT are something of an exception – at least in the UK.
In terms of getting published in the first place youth is a real liability. Mediocre work by an established poet will nearly always be published before more exciting work by an unknown. However, if you’re trying to write because you believe in the work, for the sensation of pinning down the never-before-said and in attempt to push the boundaries of poetry as it’s understood, then youth is a distinct advantage. This doesn’t mean that you’ve got less to lose though. Paul Morley talks in ‘Words and Music’ of how trying to create the genuinely new when you start off in a band is far more risky than changing direction when you’ve got ‘a name’: you don’t risk giving up a reputation, you risk never having one in the first place. The same could be applied to young poets. If you can deal with this possibility though, then it’s as a young writer that you’ll have the energy, playfulness, insight and rebellious capacity to attempt to forge out a distinctive kind of poetics. The ultimate aim would be to keep such a fresh outlook and perspective throughout an entire writing life.

AF: Your "Progress Poems" work on many levels. They're frequently directed at specific individuals (often literary icons), and seem to play up the ironies inherent in "progressive thinking", but they could also be taken straight. Could you talk a little bit about how this series developed, at what point you decided to call them "Progress Poems", etc.?

CM: This sequence was named “progress poems” from its moment of conception, but at that point, it was to be only a temporary title i.e. ‘work in progress’. There were a few stray directions in my thinking that seemed to come together at the same time, both poetically and politically. I was reading a great deal of very different poetry at the time and was thinking of ways in which it might be possible, if at all possible, to write something that might be genuinely ‘new’. I was kind of conceding that every possible novel direction that poetry could take had probably already happened, and all that was left was to play around with the pieces. I didn’t find this thought as deadening as I might have done and it seemed to free up and, in a way, liberate the decisions that I could make when putting together what I considered to be a poem. I wrote the poems between January and about September 2003, following closely (with everyone else) the time leading up to the invasion of Iraq. It was insane how often the word ‘progress’ was used during this time, by both Blair and Bush, to justify their moral-ethical crusading. The more convinced they seemed of taking the world into a better place the more obvious it was - or at least it seemed, to everyone else - how dangerous and corrupt was their ideology. It set me off on the notion of progress as that ideology arrogantly put forward by the powers-that-be of every generation to justify their own idea of themselves as ultimately modern and to further their own careers. That the notion of everyone together moving forward in a society at any one time is a fallacy. The Industrial Revolution would be a classic example of this: the nine year old boy under the factory machine in 1803, asleep with nine blackened fingers on his hands. I started to collect quotes from all kinds of people from different periods on the idea of ‘progress’ and to put them together to see what patterns came about. The sequence starts with some of these. My favourite was the Tony Blair one: “the great thing about the human spirit is that it never gives up and that is how we make progress”. This very surreal time in history was a mindfuck for me in that my Dad was very ill with cancer (the book is dedicated to his memory), and when I look back at this sequence there is a kind of manic energy to these poems that I can’t quite account for.
In terms of the form for these poems I suppose I just wanted to show myself that a poem could come about from anything at all (bar nothing). Inspiration is what happens when you make connexions. I gave all of the poems random numbers between 1 and 2,000 and pictured the whole sequence as an internet search engine response to the word ‘progress’. As there’s no place to progress to, the sequence would be randomly jumbled and might suitably disappear up its own arsehole. I might get lucky in the trawl though and if not write something genuinely new, at least write something I could call a ‘poem’ (I saw Charles Bernstein’s ‘The Sophist’ for the first time after I’d finished these poems and really identified with the idea of a book of poems containing multitudes of genres). The first publication of the poems was fitting for its composition. The poet Peter Philpott took a group of about 20 poems for his ezine GreatWorks (it can be read here: http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/McCabe/Mcc0.html ) and jumbled them into his own order. He later added another 50 or so poems and put them into numerical order, which as they weren’t written or planned to be like this, was also a kind of randomness. I’ve enjoyed doing readings since then in which I’ve flicked through the sequence and read any random poem that I’ve landed on, then moved on to lucky-dip another. The strange interrelations and juxtapositions that have come about from this have interested me although it is also possible that I’ve inadvertently undercut my own project with more subconscious patterning in the poems than I realised.

AF: Where publishing is concerned, print vs.online seems to be the big debate now among younger poets. Where do you stand? Having been in a lot of online journals (Argotist, Great Works, etc.), do you find online publishing satisfying?

CM: I’d say that, broadly speaking, there’s a further division among younger poets based upon the kind of poetry they’re writing. This is in no way a truism but in my experience I have found that the more open-ended and experimental the poetry, the more the potential of cyberspace will be embraced. This is obvious in a way: if you hold the conventional close then you’re probably likely to reach for conventional methods of publication (i.e.printed matter). There’s also a certain inverted logic among technophobic poets that because ‘anyone’ can make a website, then publishing poetry online isn’t really publishing at all. It might not occur to them that with Desk Top Publishing within reach of the average western poet, anyone can make a book as well. What publication in either place will come down to is the judgement of an editor, which doesn’t (or shouldn’t) change depending on the medium.
What the web offers is instantaneousness. If somebody should want to read my poetry they don’t have to find out the publication details, publisher, ISBN, order the book and wait for it to arrive on their mat. I can give them a URL, mail them a link, and it’s there in front of them asking for no VISA details. The speed is there without the comfort. What’s often forgotten with books though is just what amazing pieces of technology they actually are. Diverse, compact, portable: I don’t leave home without one. For me, both forms of publication bring different possibilities and it’s never been a case of one against the other. The physical feel of a book (colour, weight, smell, sensations, portability) are certainly not threatened by a monitor and a clunk of plastic in your hand. What the internet does offer though is not only a potentially much larger readership (especially compared to small print-runs of magazines) but also a much wider one. Online communities are based upon shared interests to the detriment of other obstacles, such as location, physical appearance and even language. What I’ve also found fascinating is the experience of somebody latching onto a poem because they are interested in its subject – its straightforward content – and not just because it is a poem. They would never have looked inside a poetry magazine or book to find it in the first place. Where your poems could only be browsed in book form, they can now be searched and weeded out by people with massively different interests. It’s also worth pointing out to poets who are sceptical of poetry on the internet (who won’t of course, be reading this) that there is a whole generation coming through who will look to the internet to find about contemporary poets. If you don’t Google, you don’t exist. Personally, I’m always hugely satisfied with being published online. No more or less than in book form. It means somebody’s liked my work enough to go to the effort of getting it out there and that it then has the potential to be read by people. After the initital buzz of writing something you’re happy with, these are the two most important things for a writer. Or should be anyway.

AF: Your "Slices" is a lovely homage to Robert Creeley. Could you discuss a little bit the nature of your attraction to Creeley's work? Do you find many British poets who go for Creeley and other Americans, or is there some "poetic xenophobia" in the UK?

CM: What I like about Creeley’s work is the density of thinking disguised as apparent simplicity. He takes the dichotomies of nine-to-five thought, the received philosophies that are hidden in quotidian idioms and unties them, showing how we choose not to address things such as mortality as we go about our day. I’m intrigued by the idea of not having to do too much physically in order to make poetry, that the inspiration to write can be found in watching the seasons cast different shadows on the same walls. The idea of overhearing is important too, the rhythms and density of direct speech. That’s how Creeley comes to me: direct speech with the binaries gnarled so that what you think you should be getting straight away, actually takes days of unravelling. I was reading an interview with Ginsberg from the 60’s the other day and it was at the point that he was just starting to understand Creeley. Ginsberg had travelled the world, pickled himself with drugs and tried every branch of philosophy and spirituality he could before finding that Creeley had been right all along: you can just sit and think and listen and that’s enough inspiration – if you’re truly in the present – for great poetry to come out of. I carry little chunks of Creeley around with me the way some people carry a hipflask of whiskey: “simple things one wants to say like what’s the day like out there who am I and where”.
I recently read an editorial to a well-established British journal that was bemoaning the lack of any dialogue between British and American writers and asking for more submissions of them to arrive in his mailbag. I felt like sending a bunch of poems by people I know that are influenced by American poets and saying “look, you’re wrong – but I can’t possibly see (given the poetry you favour) just how you are going to publish these”. Plain ignorance. There is definitely a xenophobia from the big publishers over here towards anything that doesn’t look like its plied a formal trade and is too slangy and open and obviously US influenced. The dialogue is clearly there though. The most obvious display of this would be in the young Bukowskian gritty realists and those influenced by the Beats. There are probably two reasons for this. The first is that the work of Bukowski and the Beats is extremely easy to find and also has the attraction of suggesting a certain lifestyle for a career as a poet. All smokey, latenight bars and turtleneck sweaters. There is also no great theory or restriction to its accessibilty. There also seems to be Frank’s (O’Hara, obviously) presence lingering in a lot of UK poets’ work – the chattiness, direct vernacular (personism) and relative open-endedness. These crosscurrents are apparent on an obvious level. The conversation goes further than this though, through a path dug out through Raworth’s engagement with Black Mountain (particulary Ed Dorn) and Lee Harwood’s friendship and dialogue with John Ashbery. It’s quite interesting to find the conversation pingponging across the Atlantic. Roy Fisher, the great local poet of place (Birmingham, UK) was very much influenced by the Black Mountain poets as well, particularly the idea of the poem as a musical score and the music of spoken language. Having published since the 1950s there are American poets such as August Kleinzahler speaking up now to say how much he has influenced them (this is from the back of Fisher’s Collected I’ve been reading recently and have in front of me): “There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more”. The ‘tradition’, if you like, has become far less us / them, and I think that the freshness that American poetry has put back into English Poetry will become rather difficult to identify as coming from a straightforward source of ‘inspiration’. It will become unclear who’s influencing who. I could go on forever naming current British poets who are in some way influenced by American poetry, but ones that come to mind are Martin Stannard’s engagement with the New York poets, Jeff Hilson as a Zukofsky aficionado and David Miller (an Australian based in London) and his relationship with the life and work of Robert Lax. Such work is obviously far too fresh and open and experimental for the movers and shakers of ‘British Poetry’ to celebrate, and so much of this writing is picked up by the small presses over here. It’s alive and thriving and happening, though the powers that be are painfully unaware of it or simply pretend to ignore its presence.

"The Envelope, Please" by Swifty Lazarus: Spoken Word Noir at its best

2005-10-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

The major flaw in most spoken word albums (excluding the Masters-- Kerouac, Pound, etc.) is a lack of definite TONE. Modern poets tend to read their poems as if they were reading weather reports. What distinguishes Todd Swift (co-avatar of Swifty Lazarus with Tom Walsh) is a TONE which borders on (and often breaks into) the musical. Pound once remarked that when poetry ceases to be musical, it ceases to be poetry, and Swift has certainly taken this home truth to heart. He has the miraculous ability to ORATE without seeming pretentious, NARRATE without seeming condescending, and VERSIFY without sentimentality. That having been said, the TONE of "Envelope" is far from comfortable or comforting. This is SPOKEN WORD NOIR, owing in large part to Tom Walsh's tasteful (one might say tastefully sinister) use of all manners of musical collage-material: hip-hoppy beats, psycho-dissonant jazz, samples of Dylan records, loungey pieces, etc. The final picture is of a jagged, blackened, post-modern landscape, littered with shards of pop-culture artifacts, movie fantasies, news reports, and frail human lives wasted in motion.

For my money, "History is Dead/Read my Lips" is the masterpiece of the bunch. Over a musical score part Tom Waits, part Tom Lehrer, Swift spits out bits of psycho-babble and God-is-dead art-speak. We are, he says, "in the rapid fire line of information", at the end of ideological struggle where complicity in media meshigas has become commonplace. Also notable is "Robot Lamprey", which morphs in the space of two minutes from jazz to synth-drone to "Buckets of Rain". "Honk your horn in you're paranoid" is an amusingly twisted recollection (among other things) of "chocolate covered locusts", while "Flight Delayed" recalls the Radiohead of "OK Computer". The album closes out with the American Beauty style narrative of "Suburbia Mythologica", and the apocalyptic horror-movie creepiness of "Post-Requiem".

In short, this is as worthy a spoken word venture as you're likely to hear, NOIR and all. I'll upload details as to where it can be purchased soon...

This page links to bio info, and is from the company that released it

http://wiredonwords.com/SwiftyLazarus.html

*

They can order it this way, online:

http://www.poets.ca/pshstore/profile_book.asp?ISBN=WOWCD05

or

Releases currently in stock from Wired on Words. They are available by
clicking the "Catalog" button on the Cheap Thrills website
(www.cheapthrills.ca), and then typing the name of the CD or cassette
you
want
In the US and elsewhere in the world you can order Wired on Words
releases
on the internet through the Cheap Thrills website at
www.cheapthrills.ca

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Adam Fieled Interviews Todd Swift, author, "Rue Du Regard"

2005-10-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

Todd Swift is often referred to as the leading Canadian poet of his generation. His latest release, "Rue Du Regard" (DC Books, 2004), features poems remarkable for their humor, poignancy, formal acuity and willingness to experiment. Swift is a hard poet to pin down; he's "all over the place" in the best po-mo tradition, even as his poems display polished surfaces and honed diction. One could characterize him (if forced)as a Modern Formalist. He has internalized the po-mo revolution, and irony-layering, skewed perspectives, tinges of frivolity are taken for granted. Yet his sensitivity to linguistic nuance adds a touch of the classic to his work, of the enduring. Swift also works as an editor at the British online journal "Nth Position", and has won a slew of prizes over the years. I caught up with him recently and picked his capacious brain, hoping to gain some insight into the contradictions that animate his work. I was amply rewarded.

Adam Fieled: You’re a poet who seems equally interested in form and experimentation. How do you balance these? Do you premeditate before you write or does this happen in the revision process, or somewhere else?

Todd Swift: I think that every poetry generation (or epoch) has its particular crisis to resolve - such as Eliot trying to work out where to move on from the late Victorians (via the French and Donne as it turns out) - or Auden figuring out that Icelandic sagas and music hall ballads would help him shift High Modernist diction away from Eliot - or Lowell, with LIFE STUDIES, navigating between the confessional bent and free verse of the Beats, his own intense personal needs, and the urge to retain Eliot's and Auden's formal intelligence; all this to say, the first decade of the 21st century has its own poetic tensions that need to be resolved. The major one is the conflict between the schools often called mainstream and experimental (traditional and innovative is another formulation). What this really boils down to is a debate about what poetry is, and does - so, it's a vital struggle for the heart and soul of poetry. The key is how a poet thinks about poetry - is it primarily a thing made for or by language? This is the form and experiment tension, then. If a poem is made by language, the text of a poem will flow as thinking or being itself does, and open up into the kind of writing that, say, Charles Bernstein or Denise Riley makes. If the poem is made for language (that is, to set words like a diamond from Cartier) then formalism will be central - the shape of the poem will be structured by traditional, often lyric, imperatives - as in the work of Larkin or George Szirtes. I am fortunate to have had both Riley and Szirtes - both master stylists in their own ways - as tutor at university.
So, I think a lot about these issues. They matter, both in terms of what you are going to write every time you do - and also, where you will publish (a secondary concern but a real one for a poet who has a career and readers). Lovely rhyming couplets about birds seen in Wessex usually enrage people like Ron Silliman - and Wendy Cope isn't going to enjoy reading a 200-page poem about bio-chemistry mainly in Sanskrit and Japanese; oddly, I like the work of both Cope and Silliman. Perhaps I am schizoid. At the base of it, I love writing poems, and reading them, and find there are too many voices, styles, manners, and ways of being a poet, that I enjoy playing with. I must have been formed by Mr. Dressup, when young - his tickle trunk was filled with so many hats and capes. I want to be prince and princess (and Prince, the musician I suppose), wizard, postman, nurse, nun, chef and dog-catcher. This is considered post-modern playfulness, but I think it harkens back to Eliot's first stage of Modernism also. Basically, I refuse to be limited in the poetic act, by fashion now or then; and I am fetishist of poetry circa 1890-1939, especially by little known and often Edwardian poets.
Sometimes the lighting of a lamp at a lonely train station in autumn can break the heart, especially if a woman steps on to the platform in a summer dress. This turns me on, this haunting of poetry, the way a poem can be like antique furniture as burnished as the day it was bought. I digress. I write poems as they please me. I write often out of words, phrases or images that come to me. And I revise a great deal afterwards. I think my aim is to combine form and experiment, finally, by allowing traces of lyric tradition to skiter across very contemporary surfaces, or sometimes, inversely, present seemingly new surfaces troubled by issues and concerns old as the hills, the heart. I like to think through, past and back to form, as one aspect of language then, but also consider mood and image (in a cinematic way); my poems are often layered places, where moments from many sorts of poem and times meet, embrace, and part, like on the platform in 1917. This may be a dandy's poetics of eros, or an “erotics of poetry”.

AF: Fair enough. Perhaps not coincidentally, your work displays a keen awareness of popular culture— movies, popular music, etc. Do you find it useful to keep boundaries between “high” and “low” art in place, or do you buy more into the po-mo, egalitarian approach? Would you or could you, for instance, compare Dylan and Lowell, or Lennon and Auden?

TS: I have no problem enjoying Bob Dylan and Robert Lowell, on their own terms. I don't see this as a matter of high and low, but rather, song-craft and poetry. But I take your point. Can one compare KILL BILL to THE WASTE LAND? Well, yes - both were morally shocking examples of knowing pastiche that expressed considerable mastery of a genre. I enjoy alternative and popular as well as classic(al) music, writing, film and so on. Naturally, I'd like to think I prefer the best of each category, though, and sometimes even the categories blend. In terms of poetry, I'm aware that levels of diction need to be kept separate at times, and handled with care, like the famed duo nitro and glycerine. One doesn't want to mix Geoffrey Hill and HILL STREET BLUES, really - the pastiche value would soon be exhausted. In fact, although I have long advocated a fusion of marginal poetries (B-poetry, which is trash, indie, street or slam poetry, mostly, etc.,) with more established forms, I do think this should be done with admiration and love of what can be achieved when diction is pure. Houseman is delightful.
R.S. Thomas is bracingly austere and high-minded. Mindless barging in to an Anglican linguistic world simply to jazz it up is not poetically satisfying. My goal is not to disrupt texts or tenors or textures, but savor them - as opposed to simply sneering when they are not theoretically advanced or suitably French. I recently had a fascinating conversation with A. Alvarez, the editor of seminal 60s anthology THE NEW POETRY which championed Plath as a genius. He can't find anything to appreciate in Ginsberg, whereas I can. Yet he was one of the first to claim that Lowell was a great writer. His ear is strong. But some levels don't interest him. As I get older, I find myself having more time for levels in art that are high-minded, even sublime, in the sense that would have moved Wallace Stevens. One of the elements of my poetry that I regret sometimes is that my cluttered soul yields much impure ore. My poems may be true to the age, but are rarely as refined as, say, contemporary high-diction practitioners like Alice Oswald.

AF: I notice that you like to write about “place”, and it seems to be a thread running through your work. How is it that places (rather than, for instance, specific people) engage you, emotionally and aesthetically? Has travel been an essential element in your artistic development?

TS: I do write a great deal about place - as you say often instead of people (although this is not in fact the case as I write many love poems, but often not to clearly identifiable persons, as well as family poems) - and I am glad you didn't say travel poems. I do travel - I am an expat writer and have lived in Budapest, Paris and now London for the better part of a decade now - but it isn't really the places, or histories, per se, that excite my interest. Travel to, and through, a place, constitutes a series of complex motions and emotions which create an objective correlative for how existence itself seems to me - sun-dappled, fragmentary, exquisite, threatened, fragile, dangerous, erotic, different, rapid, elusive, and ultimately lost. In fact, I often write about figures in places - sometimes young women or men - whose identity is rather open-ended. My writing is based on the idea of the lyric, or the three-minute power-pop song - it should recall great emotion, capture a moment, a face, a scent, a mood, a trace. I'd say snapshots, but something much more rushing than that, and sensuous. Of course, there is a meta-narrative here: I am also writing about the experience of writing (poems) itself - which is as elusive as any holiday in Croatia, Moscow or Istanbul. The act of making a particular poem is the act of making a memory. How does this cohere, add up? It coheres into a canonized career, or it ends in forgotten postcards, tossed out or given to a charity shop upon one's one demise. To me, the angst of the poet is that her eloquence is up against a great indifference - as if beautiful women diving in to the sea off the rocks on Hydra were ignored. Would it matter? No, but Wallace Stevens saw the genius singing by the sea, and we saw him. His travels were of the mind mainly. Mine are both of the body and mind, fused in the poems.

AF: Beyond being a poet, you’ve written for the stage and are an editor at “Nth Position”. Do you find “multi-tasking” stimulating or annoying? Do you think that it’s a necessary skill in today’s poetry world?

TS: In terms of being a necessary skill (multi-tasking, as you say, or really, wearing hats of editor, activist, impresario) for being a poet: no. For being an engaged poet who gives as much back to the community as he takes: yes. I confess to having a hero or two, and one of them is Ezra Pound. Whatever he lacked in political sensitivity he made up for (almost) in terms of mentoring ability. I have taken a page from his book, and tried to discover and then nurture talent where I find it. This might seem like a basic and self-evident truth, that poets should do no harm, and in fact assist each other in the face of a mostly disengaged prosaic world. Sadly, most poets contribute to their own misery, by establishing a poetry world microcosm which is spiteful, vicious, small-minded, and, most oddly, intolerant. My experience has been, in the UK (but elsewhere too) that poets - especially poets who are editors - make poor listeners and readers. Rather than constantly casting the net wide, to catch new voices and talents, they stick close to their coteries. I won't name and shame, but there are several dozen superb poets, from India to New Zealand, Canada to South Africa, unknown and unpublished in the UK, who should be. On the other hand, very few Americans read British or Canadian poets. My work as editor and anthologist, and activist, while having nothing to do with the practice of writing, does have something to do with the practice of reading (surely publishing should be a branch of reading). And reading is a kind of writing. So: I help my fellow poets, and I learn new ways of making poems happen, in the process.

AF: Speaking of making things happen…how would you like to weigh in on the print vs. online publishing debate? You’ve done a lot of both— do you have a preference or a strong feeling either way? Does the success of a journal like “Jacket” surprise you?

TS: I am not surprised when a well-edited, informed, innovative and open-minded online journal like Jacket does well (whatever doing well in poetry means - I suppose, receives critical respect and a wide and/ or influential readership); Nthposition, the journal which I edit poetry for, is also a highly popular online presence, among certain kinds of writers and readers. What surprises me is actually how few poets use the Internet to either publish poets they admire, to submit their own new work, or to scout for new or familiar talents.
It is still, and somewhat correctly, assumed to be an uneven landscape, but, surely, editors that gain trust over time on the net should be accorded respect when it is due - as with John Tranter, and a few others. What mars the experience, for me, is the way some so-called editors use their virtual "power" to flame on or out, and attack submissions, or fellow poets (this often on blogs too) in ways that seem a tad grandiose or downright immature. The Internet is a bit like heady wine or a little learning - it leads people to act in ways that magnify their weaknesses, and often undermines their strengths. What Internet poetry publishing does (see the Nthposition e-books 100 Poets Against The War, etc.) is create large global communities quickly, and disseminate work ubiquitously and immediately, which, for short bursts of time, is powerful.
More interestingly, it allows for the creation of a demi-monde, a true Beat-like under-generation of writers who, while utterly ignored by mainstream publishing, swim like blind fish a thousand feet below the surface of books and thrive. One day these weird leviathans may rise, if they can get their act together, and overthrow the market-driven tyranny of so much mediocre published work today.

AF: I’d like to end on a light note. I’ve noted that you’re a big fan of Simple Minds. We, in the States, don’t know too much about them. Would you talk a little bit about them, how you discovered them and why they still resonate for you?

TS: I should say that I love music, especially popular and indie music between 1975-1995. Simple MInds were the band that most moved me when I was a teenager. I remember discovering them in 1982 or so - albums like SISTER FEELINGS CALL, SONS AND FASCINATION and then their masterpiece, NEW GOLD DREAM, seemed to reflect, for me, what it was to be young at a golden time. Their early work - before the commercial success of the second half of the 80s, post-"Don't You (Forget About Me)" their number one American hit - was both strident and exalted, purposeful and transcendent - in otherwords, very Scottish Protestant (half my roots).
Songs like "70 Cities as Love Brings The Fall", "Wonderful in Young Life", "Careful in Career", "The American" and of course "Love Song" were, to me, the epitome of poetry - shimmering, cosmopolitain, political, anti-empire, and yet sexy - Jim Kerr's voice flaunted a kind of arch-dandyism. I still think their work from 20-25 years ago matches and sometimes betters the work of U2 from that time, and, with Echo & The Bunnymen, The Cure and a few others, are the great New Wavers (you could add Depeche Mode and Duran and Duran and Tears for Fears). Simple Minds were crypto-Christians, at a time when I enjoyed reading German theology in translation (LETTERS FROM PRISON being my favourite) and I somehow managed to convince myself that they were singing just for me.
This was when the spring came like thunder and the ice cracked just like that and suddenly it wasn't colder than Siberia, so all life was good and strange and hard then.

Check out Todd's wonderful blog here

Mini-Interview: Noam Chomsky & Morris Halle

2005-09-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

Adam Fieled: I'm a poet & just becoming familiarized w/ linguistic theories. I've just finished (Noam Chomsky's) "Language and Responsibility" & "Reflections on Language". My question is simply this: if "universal grammar" is innate & accounts for language-structure abilities, is "poetic" ability (skill w/ metaphor, metrics, etc.) also an innate quality, rather than one fostered by interest, adaptability to "new" language-structures, etc.? Pursuant to this-- is investigation of poetics via linguistics a fruitful vista, do you think?

Noam Chomsky: There's quite a lot of works on poetics and linguistics. You might contact my colleagues and friends Samuel Jay Keyser and Morris Halle (both retired, but still at MIT, in linguistics department). They've done excellent work on it. There can hardly be any doubt that poetic ability (in the broad sense) is in part innate and universal, in part acquired, and in part just something about the person that no one knows how to explain. But not much more is known than when there were interesting speculations about these matters in the 17th-18th century. Schlegel and Coleridge, for example.

Morris Halle: I am not sure I know what answer you expect to your questions. Here is a stab at it. I take it that standing upright on one's feet, and walking and jumping are innate capabilities of every human. Some of us practice these abilities to the point where others will watch them, even pay money for the privilege. In parallel fashion, all of us produce (linguistic) utterances, but there are among us some who are able to produce utterances/discourses that have aesthetic value, whereas what most of us produce is aesthetically uninteresting. In part this ability must be innate: surely Shakespeare possessed an ability that none of us could hope to acquire, but lesser talents than Shakespeare no doubt learned how to write poems or plays or novels and got better at it. In sum, everything we do is to some extent innate (no one ever learns to fly or to jump over tall buildings), and practice usually helps.

First Autumn Crop O' BEAMs, etc.

2005-09-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still on the lookout for New Orleans elegies. If ya got 'em, send 'em (afieled@yahoo.com). In the meantime, I have a few new random things. This one, "Sprawl", is a Mary Walker Graham pastiche-BEAM. She's in there on a few levels...

I see you foraging through weeds in a field;
it's spring, air streaked green.

You build up a steady rhythm, nails thrusting,
knees sunk in mud-slop plots.

I'm with you in the field, I'm mud, or grass,
I'm beneath your nails, held fast.

Meat flakes off me. You pass on, satisfied.
Branches sway, flecked by tongues.

This is all real. Look at my garden's sprawl.
Do you see me here, or in the air?

On a not unrelated note, this one, "Wheels", concerns my ability to make anything STICK. It's sinister.

Rages & strains that blow bodies together
quickly & quietly disperse into sky's blank blue.
Only I'm still raging & straining, tempestuously,
hummed un-shifted vehicle. Choppy streets,
nothing turns, only memories of human bondage,
being more than wheels. What have I spun that
stuck me here? What glue-lining turned oil-lube?
I move, every "she" stays or broods beyond me.
Pot-holes in my head make dead silence the
playing tune. Shouldn't a let-up clutch leave
something behind? What's blown-out and
pumped gets put in the trunk w/ blankets.
What's jacked frosts over. I'm a trade-in.

Alright, so it's shamelessly MOR. What the hell, it's a tough world. Sometimes, I suppose, MOR is, in fact, MORE. Maybe not. Thanks to Steve Dalachinsky, Mary Jo Malo, Tom Savage, Jodi-Ann Stephenson for the contributions. Keep the faith.

New Orleans Elegy

2005-09-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

We're all floated bodies, splay-limbed, blue-faced,
limning gutters the lengths of America.

We've all looted, hunger-loosed, fever-freed,
prowling aisles set out in plastics.

We're a country w/ out levee.
Acid rain blows in from Gods & sand-rats,

blighting us. We slumber at flood-gates, star-struck.
Ciphers amble about, skin-flashed, scurvy.

We're all would-be snipers, trigger-trained, tensed,
limning bars, hearts of America.

We're all drowning, shudder-huddled, money-pitted,
prowling streets knee-deep in feces.

We're a country w/ out levee.

Learning From Bukowski

2005-08-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

There are few widely read poets in America today, beyond the minuscule community of poets & academics. One is Charles Bukwoski. Bukwoski is widely criticized by serious poets & academics for his self-mythologizing stance & lack of formal skill. I do not deny that Bukowski’s lack of formal skill is a serious flaw. I would argue, however, that it is no more serious a flaw than Pound’s obscurity, Shelley’s ethereality, & Creeley’s domesticity. Furthermore, poets & academics have much to learn from Bukowski’s approach to life & literature. The sum total of Bukwoski’s work presents nothing less than a compressed, crudely coherent philosophy of life. Bukowski’s best poems are triumphs of logopoeia, articulating serious & universal problems & finding consoling resolutions in solitude, seriousness, literature & memory. Bukowski, a blue-collar Proust, was, for all his crudity, as serious-intentioned as any poet writing in century-end America. It’s both reductive & cheap to linger on Bukowski’s rough-hewn surfaces w/ out acknowledging the polished if untutored precision of his worldview and its’ presentation-in-verse.
Take these lines from "the secret":

don’t worry, nobody has the
beautiful lady, not really, and
nobody has the strange and
hidden power, nobody is
exceptional or wonderful or
magic, they only seem to be.
It’s all a trick, an in, a con,
don’t buy it, don’t believe it.
The world is packed with
billions of people whose lives
and deaths are useless and
when one of these jumps up
and the light of history shines
upon them, forget it, it’s not
what it seems, it’s just
another act to fool the fools
again.

It would, indeed, be hard for the serious poet to ignore the technical flaws apparent here— arbitrary line-breaks, flat diction bordering on prose, boring word choices, etc. The poem does fail on that one level— but it is only one level. Even as it fails on the level of technique/formal skill, it succeeds wonderfully on content-levels. We are getting real, hard-won, useful knowledge, maybe even, (dare I say it) wisdom. The usefulness of this wisdom derives directly from its’ immediate cultural relevance, i.e., we live in a fame-saturated culture in which ciphers continually “jump up, and the light of history shines upon them”. Bukowski is writing this poem as a famous poet who sees through his own celebrated status. Rather than wallowing in fame, he rejects it out of hand, and encourages us, his audience, to do the same. In this day and age in America, this stance (for a writer as successful as Bukowski) is both radical & brave. It stands in bold relief to the shameless self-promotion of someone like Allen Ginsberg (probably Bukwoski’s closest analogue), who spent his whole life courting mainstream media & public.
The irony here is that Bukowski’s anti-fame, anti-celebrity, anti-historical (and, implicitly, anti-canonical) stance, rather than alienating his audience, brought them that much closer to him. Whether poets like it or not, the public could care less about conventional notions of craft & technique. They want their catharsis, & Bukowski, like no other modern poet, gives it to them. We may learn from the Bukwoski phenomenon that much of the general populace is both dismissive of popular culture & willing to read. What they don’t want is self-infatuated preciosity; they want poems they can use, poems with a logopoeia relevant to their lives. Bukowski clearly sensed this, & was willing to cut out Formalist re-bop & bare himself whole in these poems. Baring himself was enough, because Bukwoski had a substantial philosophic gift to impart, which, though “Base”, was nonetheless in tune with fin de siecle America Zeitgeist.
What can poets learn from Bukowski? Academic poets often consider Form an end in itself. They discourage, in their workshops & presentations, discussions of Content, as if Content was somehow secondary. This is rubbish & Bukowski was absolutely right to put Content first. More important even than logopoeia is rhetopoeia, the rhetorical impact of any given poem. We must be convinced by the poet’s rhetopoeia that a poem needs to exist, is a necessary entity. This Bukowski is able to do, time & time again, because (in his best poems) he has something to say. Bukowski is a superior poet because, while Form can be faked, Content cannot. You either have something substantial to express (whether it be on an emotional, psychological, aesthetic or any other level) or you don’t. In considering Bukowski & Form, give the man at least the credit of volition— his writing career spanned forty-odd years, if he’d wanted to learn Form, he would’ve. Content was obviously so important to him that Form was (mostly) superfluous; and whose to say he wasn’t right?
I’m not going to try & justify Bukowski’s technical incompetence, or to argue that the pursuit of Formal Rigor doesn’t have its’ own nobility. I merely want to make the point that Bukowski’s sacrifice of Form at the altar of Content doesn’t disqualify him from serious consideration as a poet & aesthete. It has its’ own validity, in the catharses of myself & the thousands of “normal” people around the world who share in Bukowski’s alienation, solitude, & appreciation of the redemptive powers of poetry & the written word in general.
Those who would deny Bukowski’s potential canonicity must remember that one hundred years ago, Whitman, roughly ten years dead, was in the exact same position that Bukowski is in now. Whitman was reviled by the academics & serious poets of the time, who now are considered irrelevant & hopelessly outdated. He had achieved some popular success (especially in England where his work was embraced by Wilde & others), but his place in the canon was far from secure. It took an impassioned essay from D.H. Lawrence in the early twenties to seal Whitman’s reputation as a superior poet. After this, Whitman maintained a steady influence in world letters. It may take some years for Bukowski to achieve the level of critical recognition that he deserves. Literary critics are notoriously inclined to refute the opinions of the general public (dismissing them, perhaps, as image-besotted Philistines). Nevertheless, it’s only a matter of time until a D.H. Lawrence shows up & assures Bukowski his place in world letters.

Rethinking Jennifer Moxley-- "Imagination Verses"

2005-08-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

I took flak from some poets I know for criticizing Jennifer Moxley's "Often Capital", especially as I hadn't seen her other books. Now I have, and am pleased to assert that one of them, "Imagination Verses", seems to me a bona fide modern classic. Moxley's voice here is free of prolix, abstracted excesses. She dusts off & uses the lyric "I" w/ impeccable taste, good humor, and stealth. A case in point would be "Neither Fish nor Foul", a sex-jealousy poem for the ages. Moxley writes:

I'll spill your ghastly evenings all over the Ivy League,
you know, those nights you've spent crying
by your claw-footed baignoire, praying your mother
can hear you from across town...

Fabulous. Moxley, unlike many of the post-avant elite, isn't afraid of assimilating "canonical" texts. Homages abound, to Keats, Wordsworth, the Greek Muses, even Bob Dylan (though that one's done a bit sideways). In short, the Moxley seen in "Imagination Verses" is a balanced poet. Artifice & truthfulness, distance & intimacy, detachment & engagement, lyricism & intellect, seriousness & humor; it's all here, existant without strain, without pose. Moxley is Marianne Moore for the Digital Age. What she'll do next is anyone's guess. She could do anything.

Two More "Regular" BEAMs

2005-08-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

The BEAM series is continuing to grow & develop. I've been on hiatus from it for a few days. It could easily become formulaic. Nevertheless, I have a few new ones that I think are worth posting. This first one is called "Cafe":

napkin-neat cafe decomposition

poster-plastered walls represent fresh being
repetitious modes of sensual self-sacrifice

not recoverable by any stub-cottony means
lightning track-lighting long-swallow lit-smoke

my grey-guts spattered on a table

unstructured strength it could be, cherry-red cowardice
parallel shadows unplaced by any given

finally flight is taken from time's impossibility
for solid substance, death's lettuce-deluge

self-maiming can't be where this winds up

This second BEAM is equal parts Berrigan & Thom Yorke. I composed it sitting in Gleaner's Cafe in South Philly, watching an all-too-familiar situation develop. "I" here isn't me. It's everyone who's ever been simultaneously thwarted & despised by a desired love-object. "You're so fucking special.." as the song goes. Can you imagine Ted Berrigan fronting Radiohead? Anyhow, the poem is called "Creep":

your fingered rosary has no red
your clutch-clasped hands no gravitas

I'm inclined to play creep w/ a bagel

off-white dough gets kneaded
black-shirted blue-jeaned green-horns

indented floors absorb sponge-light
looks for line-riches, coffee-crucial cafes

leg strokes render you from his palm
in paisley like an Oregon farmer

ploughs couldn't be more shared
as you leave me, hardly, knock-kneed

So, there we are. I have a bunch more, but it'll take some time to determine which of 'em are worthwhile & which ones belong on the dung-heap. Stay tuned-- my next post will be a radical reevaluation of Jennifer Moxley, pursuant to a trip through her gorgeous "Imagination Verses". Peace.

Mary Walker Graham: Two Poems in "Poetry", September '05

2005-08-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I find hard evidence that MOR isn't completely dead. Mary Walker Graham's two poems in the September issue of "Poetry" are such proof. Graham subverts MOR convention by positing an "anti-epiphanic I". That is, these are (more or less) lyric poems, that pay close and loving attention to syntax, craft, and melopoeia; but the protagonist of the poems goes out of her way to "preserve the mystery", keep the reader at a distance. Stanley Kubrick used camera angles to create a mood of alienation and unease; Graham uses her "I" in much the same way. These are the closing lines of "No where, No one":

Drowned or owned,

I'm now here. My face breaks with a bit of blue--
a bit of bruise and some rawness in the rushes.

Most MOR poems are puppy dogs, slobbering all over us in an attempt to gain love and acceptance. Graham's aren't. Graham throws a veil over herself and dares us to peek beneath, dares us to care. It's a dare because Graham is complete and self-sufficient in her isolated stasis; she doesn't need us. Exquisite alliterations in these lines, but they don't cloy, because Graham seems to be throwing them out just for the hell of it. She's moved beyond the faux-intimacy of Confessional poetry, into a realm of Impressionistic, free-associative chance. The "anti-epiphanic I" is sustained (though slightly diluted by hints of "approval seeking") in "Parts of a Story", but "No where, No one" is the essential piece, the most pure expression of Graham's original talent. It's nice to see "Poetry" taking a chance with some fresh, compelling new voices. It's even nicer to see Ms. Graham deconstruct the MOR lyric poem and put it back together in such an interesting, anti-ephiphanic fashion.

A Techno-Sonnet: Why Not?

2005-08-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

In further search of "mind-fucks", I've hit on a new form-- the "Techno-Sonnet". Use the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, then pretend you're skirting the edge of the dance floor at Shampoo on Weds night (Goth night). Maybe DJ #1 is handing you a vodka-tonic, maybe DJ #2 is offerring you a goofball (remember those?)So, a cute nose-ringed tattoed love-girl wants to hear a poem. This is what you read her:

Yes, yes; yes-- yes, yes; yes-- yes, yes; yes-- yes,
I, I; I-- I, I; I-- I; I-- I,
bless, bless; bless-- bless, bless; bless-- bless, bless; bless-- bless,
thy, thy; thy-- thy, thy; thy-- thy, thy; thy-- thy,
perfect, perfect; perfect-- perfect, perfect; perfect-- perfect, perfect;
face, face; face-- face, face; face-- face, face; face-- face,
worthy, worthy; worthy-- worthy, worthy; worthy-- worthy, worthy; worthy-- worthy,
grace, grace; grace-- grace, grace; grace-- grace, grace; grace-- grace,
lovely, lovely; lovely-- lovely, lovely; lovely-- lovely, lovely; lovely-- lovely,
hips, hips; hips-- hips, hips; hips-- hips, hips; hips-- hips,
ruby, ruby; ruby-- ruby, ruby; ruby-- ruby, ruby; ruby-- ruby,
lips, lips; lips-- lips, lips; lips-- lips, lips; lips-- lips,
sweet, sweet; sweet-- sweet, sweet; sweet-- sweet, sweet; sweet-- sweet,
feet, feet; feet-- feet, feet; feet-- feet, feet; feet, feet.

This is the new mother-fuckin' pentameter. That nose-ringed Christabel will be wailin' for yer demon love. Gertie is rollin' a doobie in her grave. Ez is headin straight for Shampoo. I begin to digress. Forgive me. O by the way, the poem is called "YES, I".

Wittgenstein's Song

2005-08-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be a nice mind-fuck to use the ultimate MOR form, the "pure lyric", in the context of a personae poem w/ Ludwig Wittgenstein (who planted the seeds of post-structuralism and with it L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry) for subject. This is Mannerism as I define it...mixing everything up in a complete confusion of styles, approaches, and syntactic angles. So here it is, a pure lyric personae poem from the prince of post-structuralism..."Wittgenstein's Song":

Merely brilliant is no match

for being intimate. When you catch

a wave that breaks, you can only

half-determine its' course. Lonely

is the determined man, whether

it's he who decides his fate or fetters

the world lays on him. This

I learned from a young man's kiss.

Thus, I've learned, said nothing.

To be silent is something

for the wise to practice. Words

go too far. How much have we heard

worth holding onto? How much said

that can placate what we dread?

I think what's next is a terza rima ode to Zukofsky, or a sestina to Olson or something. I'm officially on the prowl for "mind-fucks".

An MOR BEAM

2005-08-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to posit the versatility of the BEAM, I'd like to present an MOR "version". The BEAM is for everyone, including the..ummm...MOR people.
This is called "Drip":

I've received, refused one invitation into Middle America.
Her body was a cornfield, that's true. Everything in it

was ripe. She engraved the invitation on my bed,
mixed it into my drinks, taped it on the fridge.

It hovered between us like a mist, soon grew monstruous.
Shit or get off the pot, she said. Get while the getting's

good. I was lost in the green rows of her skin. I was
afraid of the Middle, it's ice-creamy easiness. It dripped.

By autumn, I blew it. The harvest moon shone on stubs.
The pissed Middle swore to evade me forever. I don't miss it.

So, there, the BEAM can do post-avant & MOR. The question is, will it?

More BEAMs

2005-08-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

I have a few more BEAMs lined up to "put on display". The first one is called "Silk":

if I could fashion a fashion from fashion

your fabric fluttered over my chest
styled slacks pressed the length of Chelsea

shapely shadows arrayed over cheekbones
shutters would close on our revelations

hair askew, damp in rouge-red blood-flow

a fashion past the lips of limitation
defined not to distinguish or over-vogue

but to green silk that had been dusky
and to tease out each stark blue

behind eye-lined, sky-lined walls of rigidity

Next one is called "Legs":

senseless propositions

seem ruddy-cheeked in sky-backed night
exhaust-fume dense from windowless space

you're black-hewn then, from spider-webbed heat
(rubbed, boned over propulsions)

clouded lights prove unstable, shoot themselves off
damp felt ends of feeling....

a state of affairs untouched by contraction
simulacrum of finite regression

puddles and spoon-handles confuse themselves

The BEAM factory is open for business. I'm looking for a competent CEO, so I can sit in the back and write....

The BEAM Hypothesis

2005-08-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

The BEAM is a short poem, 8-20 lines. It isn't necessarily impersonal or personal, but it must transcend mere subjectivity. "I" can't be played straight. The BEAM has its' roots in Surrealist and Objectivist poetics. Things needn't be what they are, but they must somehow be "seen" in a clear light. If you write, "she leapt burning through ashes", for instance, we know this isn't literal but it can be seen nonetheless.

The BEAM should be page-centered (which I DON'T know how to do on this blog, unfortunately....if anyone could let me know...). A BEAM must not be projective, its' predetermined form must act as a conduit to content rather than vice versa. Centering the poem gives it substantiality, while its' imagery lets it float into the stratosphere. It's like a sonnet with more space, greater airiness.

BEAMs should generally be written in couplets or single lines. A BEAM couplet fulfills the role a beam does in architecture-- it builds, structures, supports. Its' central position reinforces the impression of substantiality. Meanwhile, single lines interspersed function as "beams of light". They're pure shots into poetic space, flashes of imagery, insight, gist-phrasing, etc. Light-beams illuminate built-beams, built-beams support and buttress light-beams. Together, they posit the BEAM as a kind of "light-house" or "light-structure". A BEAM should blend concrete w/ ozone, specifics w/ abstractions, substantiality w/ ethereality. It's a form built to be "seen".

So here's two of the better BEAMS I've scribed, "Call" and "Loose Canon":

leaves and pavement fastened to my phone

you cast a salt-harbored spell from Boston
crabbing in a scuttle beneath me

born of phonological effluvia
carressed vowels 'twixt your tongue and teeth

taste of buttered lobster sans bibs
I moseyed, street streaked black, benighted,

tired, decompressed to nothingness...
sullen street-light scintillations

picked meat in your consonants
pavement gave way to gravy

my phone had an orgasm and gave out

That was "Call",BEAM #1, this is "Loose Canon", BEAM #2:

shots ricocheted at borders

coated walls absorbed friction-lit brigades
sensitive machines registered red hits

sleep fell on specifics regardless
universals fried sausages

not much could be spoken of remorse

second skirmish sent forces scattering
shards of green glass littered forest floors

irreplaceable antiques wiped their eyes
on the cuffs of the loosest canon...

I didn't expect immolation to arrive so soon

Alright, my friends this (for better or for worse) is the BEAM. Please let me know if you think I've discovered something worthwhile or if I should go back to free-verse....

Adam Kirsch's "The Wounded Surgeon" & the MOR Method

2005-06-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

MOR critical analysis hinges on consolidation & reinforcement. Rather than taking a new stance on any aesthetic issue, the MOR critic seeks to give more credit to the already over-credited. This insures short-term success-- publication, praise of the MOR intelligensia (to the extent that their is such a thing), maybe even healthy sales. What's sacrificed is the cutting edge of what literary criticism should be-- a scalpel piercing the thin skin of the Master Narrative, the positing of "new values" (Nietzsche's phrase), the critic "translating into another manner or a new material his impression of things".

MOR criticism doesn't seek to be revelatory, but shows great interest in appearing to be revelatory. "Faux-revelatory criticism" carries a great sense of self-importance, the full weight of conformist pompousity, passed off as achieved subject-mastery. This is the tone that informs Adam Kirsch's MOR text, "The Wounded Surgeon", released earlier this year. Kirsch seeks to re-secure, reinforce, and re-consolidate the reputations of six "confessional" poets already securely embedded in the American MOR canon-- Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Bishop, Schwartz, and Jarrell. The pretense of the book is that Kirsch will "redefine" what confessional means. He will show us, the unenlightened, how an enlightened reader assimilates confessional poetry-- how these poets, far from being merely confessional, were artists using artifical means to produce works of art. It's a decent thesis which Kirsch doesn't bother to carry through. He wastes time in contextual curlicues, literary gossip, and biographical voyeurism. Moreover, his MOR self-complacent pompousity leads him into asshole statements like these:

"What does it mean for a poet to tell the truth about himself? For American poets of the last half century, the answer has been found above all in a single book: Robert Lowell's Life Studies"

Oh, really! Think you better ask the New York School, the Beats, the Objectivists, the Language Poets, and, in fact, anyone w/ the slightest interest in post-modern poetics about that! In fact, in a work that attempts to "contextualize" the achievements of these poets, Kirsch's implied ignorance is astonishing. Kirsch seeks to create an illusion of comprehensiveness in a book about modern American poetry that doesn't mention Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Oppen, Olson, Zukofsky, or Creeley. Kirsch would have us believe that the poets he likes are the only ones that matter. A rote, facile MOR trick. MOR critics pretend that the middle of the road is the only road. Thus, it's safe to ignore the flaky avant-gardists hanging out on the fringes. No thanks, Mr. Kirsch!

Back to the "faux revelatory" thing. Kirsch attempts to create drama in his dull text by building towards critical epiphanies. His "epiphanies" are so trite, anti-climactic, and overwrought as to be hilarious. Here's Kirsch on Bishop's poem "The Fish":

"she resolutely refuses to grant the fish any anthropomorphic feelings or symbolic significance, and insists that it is simply "an object". The fish has been preserved in its' reticent composure: it has been seen, not used...she has succeeded, that is, where other fishermen have failed."

Kirsch wants revelation so badly he can almost taste it. Pun intended.

As for me, I freely admit that "post-avant" interests me more than MOR. More action, both in theory & practice. Yet I don't deny that Bishop, Lowell, & the others have written some good poetry. One advantage of avant is that Kirsch's brand of hierarchical, self-important posturing (his "we" resonates as "I", where for good criticism it's the other way around), beyond being discouraged, is considered so passe that it need not even be acknowledged. I acknowledge because if someone doesn't, poets might actually start mistaking this pabulum for progress. Kirsch would like nothing better than to close his eyes & wake up in 1955. His approach is terminally regressive & deeply unimportant (except as a classic example of MOR propaganda). Let's hope that someone out there is having actual revelations that will move American poetics a step forward. We've had enough "faux revelations" to last a lifetime.

Jennifer Moxley's "Often Capital": A review

2005-06-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

As of 2005, American poetry is split down the middle, hinging on the radically divergent aesthetic identities of two camps: "post-avant" & OVC (Official Verse Culture). "Post-avant" is avant-garde, more or less, & OVC is middle-of-the-road. I've come to the conclusion that one universal truth adheres to this situation: the "post-avant" camp is full of poets w/ taste but little talent, while OVC is full of poets w/ talent but little taste. It would take a strong poet indeed to stand in the middle, balance these seemingly contradictory approaches, fulfill the criteria for avant & MOR at once. Such a poet would have to be personal w/ out sentimentality, experimental/risky w/ out frivolity, ironically earnest & earnestly ironic. I believe that Jennifer Moxley has the potential to be such a poet; but, for my money, "Often Capital" misses the mark. It must first be stated that Moxley has released two books I haven't seen, both of which were written posterior to this. Maybe they strike the magic balance. "Often Capital", however, has caused quite a stir, and is being heralded as an "important" text. I want to lay out clearly my response, why the arguments for the "importance" of this text have more to do w/ its' style than w/ its' substance, w/ what it could be rather than what it is.
Moxley is an extremely ambitious poet, & this is admirable. Her almost grandiose desire to create a completely inclusive poetic idiom puts her squarely in the "post-avant" camp. No worn-out half-assed tropes for her, no self-indulgent & precious wallowing, no smarmy confessions & sappy ephiphanic reveries. Moxley's great weakness, however, at least in "O.C.", is an inability to show rather than tell, to fulfill the "palpability quotient" that good poetry (even in the post-avant camp) needs to satisfy. "Showing not telling" is one of the great cliches of the MOR camp, and can be carried to extremes...but as with all great cliches, it includes more than a grain of truth. "Objective correlatives" bring poems to life when mere language ("telling") leaves us starving for more. Here are a sampling of lines from "Often Capital":

a habit, what nationalism can lay down with weathering
golden one, the war saw socialists
speaking place names as if human
they betrayed an advantage of egress damn it
come home, life without you is only work

in hiding I know contempt
and the threadbare beauty of parliamentary parity
laced up in draconian measures

the nation is foreseen for fear
we are will ingrained by reason

Moxley desperately wants to be politically relevant, to create a poetics that works on both personal & trans-personal levels. Yet, her usage of political "buzzwords" (nationalism, socialists, parliamentary, etc) comes out dry, flat, and limp, not buoyed by the kind of images & formal beauty that make Yeats, for example, an exemplary & well-balanced poet. Reading Yeats' "Easter 1916" in comparison to this text is illuminating, to see the difference between art-achieved & art-attempted. Yeats writes:

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream

We have masterful use of metaphor & rhyme representing political realities. The palpability quotient is satisfied, but w/out sappiness & wallowing. The poem then moves back into a more concrete mode, but Yeats has earned it; its' a balanced construct.
It is this kind of balance I find missing from Moxley's presentation. She asks too much of her readers, and her style, superficially surprising, actually fits very neatly into the rote LP ethos-- non-linearity, unearned gravitas, music w/out melody, jumps w/out joy. Moxley's interest in the political could move her towards the middle, toward a balance of the best post-avant & MOR bits; instead, she squanders this oppurtunity by presenting things too bluntly, w/out art (or craft). The supposed "importance" of this text rides on the apparent "revolutionary" nature of the mix of "post-avant" poetics & politics & history; yet there's nothing here that Anne Waldman, for instance, hasn't already done. Moxley has talent, maybe even brilliance-- but to take her art to the next level, she'll have to give up her sterling "post-avant" cred & subject herself to the best lesson of WCW; "no ideas but in things" (ironic, of course, that in his day WCW was the essence of "post-avant", & now his precepts have been co-opted by MOR...turn & face the strange...)

Do we want our "PTV"?

2005-06-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that for the culturally informed & anti-mass culture stalwarts, blogs are the new TV. They certainly are for me. I'd like to personally thank PhillySound & Ron Silliman for making "Survivor" (is that even a show anymore?) & "Queer Eye" superfluous. This is PTV, Poetry Television, & the best is yet to come.
So I'm following these trailblazers & declaring the existence of my own "PTV" network. I'll try to update at least 3 or 4 times a week, & hope a few hardy Mannerist souls will follow me along the primrose path to aesthetic Enlightenment. Life is suffering, art is palliative, a life-in-art gives us the tools to heal ourselves. Excuse my "New Agey-ness" but I think the Buddha had one good point, Oscar Wilde another, put 'em together & you get a fulfilled existence. Maybe.
For two years I dated a painter-who-shall-remain nameless. She was beautiful, brilliant, & troubled. I was madly in love w/ her. You Romantics out there know the drill-- two brave young artists taking on the world, creating together, yada yada yada. I'll always love her & if she were a bit more stable I'd have married her (I'm looking for a wife, if anyone's interested). A few months ago she graduated summa cum laude from Penn, & I promised to write her an occasional poem. What resulted was a piece heavily influenced by Surrealists Breton, Reverdy & Paul Van Ostaijen. It's called "Hurdle":

It's standing
in an open field of blades
cornered w/ blue flowers
a tangle of red ribbons

You approach
on bare feet, tiptoe
raw as a pained oyster
supple as dark leafy branches

I watch from a high window
how you lift your legs
as if the approach were a dance
and you'd practiced before mirrors

my heart warms to you
as the blades become birds
destined for salt air
happily flapping your hair

and you go over

This is episode #1 of PTV winding down. Feel free to add comments to the site or e-mail me @ afieled@aol.com. You can join me on PTV & offer up your best quips, sallies, & jests. This is Adam Fieled signing off....