tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7165716.post-1135209170859155552005-12-21T18:29:00.000-05:002006-01-01T19:49:04.576-05:00<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3411/335/1600/JSkinner15.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3411/335/320/JSkinner15.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Jonathan Skinner is a poet, translator and critic, as well as editor of the journal <a href="http://www.ecopoetics.org">ecopoetics</a>. Skinner recently completed his Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo, with a dissertation on ecology and twentieth-century innovative poetry and poetics. His first full-length poetry collection, Political Cactus Poems, appeared this year with Palm Press. He currently is a Fellow with the Center for the Humanities at Temple University. Buy his book <a href="http://www.palmpress.org">here</a>. See a review of it <a href="http://versemag.blogspot.com/ ">here</a>. See some work <a href="http://www.palmpress.org/chapbooks.html ">here</a>, <a href="http://www.morningred.com/friend/2001/03/dream_of.html ">here</a>, <a href="http://www.poetryproject.com/poets&poems/skinner.html">here</a>, <a href="http://www.slope.org/archive/issue21/21%20poetry%20skinner.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.morningred.com/friend/1998/05/frameset.html">here</a>. Some thoughts on eco-publishing <a href="http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Summer05/Skinner_Sprague/Skinner_Sprague.html ">here</a>. Some essays on translation and some translations <a href="http://www.durationpress.com/poetics/translation.htm ">here</a>, <a href="http://www.morningred.com/friend/1998/11/pages/report.html ">here</a> and <a href="http://www.morningred.com/friend/1998/04/frameset.html">here</a>. See a review of the previous e-book <a href="http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002039.php ">here</a>. See some comments on Charles Olson and SPACE <a href="http://olsonnow.blogspot.com/">here</a>. See an entry on Grace <a href="http://www.morningred.com/friend/1998/05/pages/dictionary.html ">here</a>. See a correspondence with poet Eleni Stecopoulos, with some work, as part of a "Rust Talks" series <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/rust/2/dialogue.html ">here</a>. <center>1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?</center> Impossible question to answer, as loves (and origins) seem always multiple. The first poetry (in a strictly chronological sense) that I must have loved would have to be what I referred to, at that time, as “Greek Myth and Hero Tales”-- i.e. <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html">Homer’s Odyssey </a>and, most likely, <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/agamemnon.html">Agamemnon</a>, by Aeschylus. My dad probably read passages out loud from the Ancient Greek. The strange brutality as well as the earthy and briny entanglements of the language fascinated me. I was attracted to Athena’s androgyny and, of course, to the monsters, etc. We were traveling in Greece at the time (I was seven) and these works brought the stones to life. Otherwise, the first poem I probably loved enough to memorize was Shelley’s “<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/41/515.html">Ozymandias</a>.” <center>2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? </center> Just last night I was reading Thermodynamics and Ecological Modelling, ed. S.E. Jorgensen. But that wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with my work. I love to read, and use, science texbooks and field guides. I also read too many newspapers (“daily prose”). And I enjoy rudimentary history texts and timelines, as in Essentials of World History— I like to get the basics, free of embellishment. Not out of belief in an ultimate layer of fact, so much as desire to catch up, from not having paid attention in school. Or maybe it’s that facts are relaxing. Though anything’s literary enough, when read slowly. <center>3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? </center> The fight between philosophy—“that old dog barking at her master”—and poetry is critical to the health of either, and keeps language alive. When making verses and asking questions get separated they become pastimes. This isn’t to say that poets must refer ontological and epistemological concerns to philosophy. And the best philosophers probably don’t need a Wallace Stevens to tell them when they are doing poetics. At the same time, wide and deep reading in philosophy saves one from the pipe dream of a unified theory, outside the terms of the poem itself, a “poetics” that would ground poetry. As an editor, I do feel responsibility to test and sharpen concepts: right now I’m reading Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. (A vastly overlooked work, it seems.) If I had one philosophical aim for poetry, it could be to write space as eloquently as time. Like many of my peers, I probably look to political theory for a frame in which to make sense of one’s responsibilities as a poet of empire. But the relevance works both ways: how important is writing to my philosophy? For a long time ecology seems to have offered little of interest, philosophically: this has started to change with the ethical, political and ontological debates surrounding animal rights (Peter Singer, Cary Wolfe), with the philosophical reappraisals of cybernetics and systems thinking around technology and post-structural feminism (Donna Haraway, Kathleen Hayles), with anarcho-primitivist critiques of social ecology (David Watson, Murray Bookchin), with explorations of the “posthuman” by phenomenologists and philosophers of science (Alphonso Lingis, Bruno Latour), or with the ongoing assessment of Darwin and what it means to be “biological,” a critical study in our age of biotechnology (Daniel Dennet, Elizabeth Grosz). I sometimes wish I was a science fiction writer, since that’s where much of this philosophy gets explored in a playful way. But I also think the close-up on language experimental writing affords—the kind I try to publish in ecopoetics—has much to contribute to the study. How would philosophers and scientists change their thinking if they read more experimental writing? What gets in the way is the gap between disciplines and a fixed notion of what constitutes “poetry.” Conversely, the writing that reaches me via ecopoetics keeps my philosophical frameworks unfixed. To return to your original question, however, the importance of philosophy to writing is that it keeps my mind off the poem, as I’m writing it. Philosophy also presents one’s writing with the possibility of its uselessness, and this is galvanizing. <center>4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? </center> Pablo Neruda, for the folly of Canto General (to “write the Americas”) and the rash lyricism of his Love Songs; Anne-Marie Albiach for her extreme page poetry; Jacques Roubaud for his elegant structural interpretations of Old Occitan poetics; Rimbaud and Mallarmé and Baudelaire for clarity of word and rhyme (amidst emotional tangles); Jacob Nibenegenesabe and Maria Sabina for their metamorphic bravura; Cecilia Vicuña and Julie Patton for their delicate, interdisciplinary cross-weavings; Julio Cortazar for the Paris of Hopscotch and axolotls; Melvyn Tolson for his syllabic fire; Kamau Braithwaite for his fierce dedication to islands of word and place . . . And this isn’t to speak of most of the great writers before the Renaissance, who are neither Anglo nor American! <center>5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? </center> I seem to read less poetry than peers of mine who manage to keep abreast of new writing. There’s so much of it! I discover a new magazine, or a new poet, or a new scene, every other day. I’m not really a compulsive poetry reader (I find science and philosophy easier): perhaps because assimilating a new poet is like learning a new language. It takes time. Plus the conditions for reading poetry seem rarified, a state of grace I can never count on. Once I’m into a poet’s work, s/he never leaves me— I’ll come back on a daily basis to certain poems. I can’t tell if the contemporary poetry I read—or listen to at readings, which I attend plenty of—gets into my writing. I often work from the lines I write down at poetry readings, but they probably tend to get worked out of poems. When I edit work for ecopoetics I try to keep my own writing out of it, so maybe there’s a habit of writing away from the scene. Reviewing and introducing poets certainly involves getting cozy with others’ words, or distancing oneself from them, and professing one’s relationship in public. In fact, I rarely just read poetry—I have to do something with it. Translating another writer is an ideal way to read the work, and this cannot help but affect the tone and weight of word choice in one’s “own” writing. Reading the great poets is root work, and helps in cleaving to one’s own sound and vision amidst the wealth of influence and camaraderie: Dickinson or Whitman, Niedecker or Zukofsky, Baraka or Olson . . . One does not always feel accepted by one’s contemporaries, or sure of one’s own sense, nor is one likely to understand one’s contemporaries. (I’ve learned a lot from writers younger as well as older than myself about risk and disrupting expectations.) But we certainly can meet to discuss influences, or perhaps share a living teacher, as has been our good fortune with Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Charles Bernstein . . . And just as we write ahead of ourselves, when we are at our best, we need not comprehend one another to collaborate. Whatever be the level of exchange, the company of my contemporaries is vital to the act of writing—it would not, in these barbaric times, continue without them. <center>6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? </center> I haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Great Expectations or Beloved, and a lot of other books one was probably supposed to have read by now. (For example, I just read To Kill A Mockingbird for a course in the novel I was assigned last semester). I haven’t read Schopenhauer, Proust or most of Faulkner (outside As I Lay Dying). The fact that I haven’t read “The Bear” should shock anyone who knows my work. <center>7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? </center> I wouldn’t explain; I’d take notes from your seven year old. <center>8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? </center> Ultimately, I’d agree with Dante (without subscribing to the eugenic language employed by his modernist followers) that the poet is the shepherd of language(s)— a role fairly distinct from that of “Citizen.” I value the good old work of sound in language, not so much as in Zukofsky’s (or Adorno’s) “upper limit” but as a parallel, ambient practice. Sound that’s able to inform meaning, it seems, only insofar as it keeps its relative autonomy, both supporting and threatening meaning. In any case, languages are changing so rapidly that the role of the “shepherd” is up for grabs every day. (I’ve gotten a lot out of online debates—between the likes of Brian Kim Stefans, Ron Silliman et al.—regarding visual poetry: is it poetry? what is poetry?) I’d say that, amidst such flux, translation becomes a principal duty of the poet, and I’d put out a special plea for more work with the planet’s fast-disappearing “indigenous” languages. At the same time, I think the most interesting “Role” for poets nowadays is — to use Robert Kocik’s terms — “outsourcing” poetics and doing work beyond the ever more narrowly circumscribed field of (post)modernist aesthetics. (I like the way Barrett Watten puts this—in his recent book, The Constructivist Moment— as a need to approach postmodern form from the standpoint of modernist content . . . where, sadly, we’re still mired.) There’s plenty of work in this troubled world for the kind of intuitive, boundary-crossing “negative capability” poets seem to have in abundance. (Teaching is one such job, though far from the only one.) Too much poetry seems written for the small circle of self, or the slightly larger one of coterie. Poets could do worse than go undercover, in such times. My own “role” as a poet seems to involve pushing these contradictory notions to some kind of breaking point. <center>9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): </center> <center>Lemon** custard </center> <center>Chiseled** spear </center> <center>I** dog </center> <center>Of** or </center> <center>Form** letter </center> <center>10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? </center> To quote Niedecker quoting Stevens: “I am what is around me.” The body is that gate to what commonly gets referred to as “environment.” How humans ever got to thinking of their skin as a barrier, rather than membrane, beats me. French poet Anne-Marie Albiach has spoken most clearly about the relationship between “body” and “text”— about the body as “prey” to the grammatical elements, and writing as the effort to “stand up” amidst these elements. This parasitical scenario strikes me as more realistic than the hopeful way American poets have characterized “embodiment,” from “Projectivism” onward. (Such hopefulness, of course, undergirds what may be most glorious about American poetry.) Most of my writing tries to get down on the (forest or desert) floor: when we don’t acknowledge our nature as worm food, we barely deserve to write against it. Hopefully, texts I write proliferate perspectives, and the senses in which we consider ourselves to “have” bodies. My poetics have lately developed a co-dependency between writing and walking—a desired constraint. I would rather not presume to explain how this plays out in the text. Texts I produce certainly entertain, I hope, a referential and figurative as well as proprioceptive relationship to walks. If only because they tend to be written in pocket-sized notebooks, when they’re not dictated into a voice recorder. I’d like to steal artist Hamesh Fulton’s motto: “No walk, no work.” Buffalo, May 31-June 1, revised December 9-10, 2005Lance Phillipshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04352232797617468388noreply@blogger.com