Adam Fieled

Adam Fieled sings Big Star's "Thirteen" at the Eris Temple

2012-01-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

Preservation Issues

2012-01-01T03:59:00.000-08:00

Post-modern ethos and praxis aside, poetry isn't meant to be ephemeral. It's meant for an educated, adult audience, who like not only their hearts and crotches but their brains touched. As such, I start the new year on a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a wonderful gift for me and many others that The Argotist, Great Works, and Tears in the Fence are being archived by the British Library. The page for The Argotist, which is representative, is here. What bothers me is that there don't seem to be any American counterparts. Why aren't American online journals being archived? Why doesn't the Library of Congress (or someone) get involved? The message from America and American libraries to poets and poetry is clear: they're not interested in us. Whether we've earned their solicitation or not is an open question. But the issue needs to be raised, if America is ever going to develop a serious literary heritage of its own, to rival some of our European counterparts. And it needs to be dealt with soon.

Excavation and Recuperation (and Contextualists and Dissidents)

2011-12-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

Built into the structure of the Internet is a certain amount of depth and density. Google searches don't bring up everything; some sites are "embedded" more than others, and it varies country to country, continent to continent. Excavation can become a wonted task, and old texts that were not widely noted upon release can be recuperated. Excavation and recuperation are not just Internet processes; they are artistic processes as well. One goal I set to/for myself with the Blazevox book Apparition Poems (2010), was to excavate and recuperate certain aspects of the Romantic ethos. More specifically, the ethos that was set in place by William Wordsworth in his Preface (to Lyrical Ballads). That the task of the self-respecting Author was to enlarge the mind-capacity of his/her audience; that the dignity of the human mind is inherent and indestructible; that the human mind may be subtly, rather than grossly, stimulated; and that common situations can embody portentous meanings when recuperated with and by imagination; this corpus of notions hinged on other interests that were certainly not Wordsworth's (what about sexuality and sexual situations?) Almost precisely eighteen months after the release of the Blazevox book, I was able to excavate the following List-Serve directed (and quite jocular!) missive from a UK website, scribed by Desmond Swords:

Bob Sheppard's Star Student Scott Desmond's Words Flyte Fielded.

Yes, yes, one read the pose by this 'poet, critic, and musician' colleague, currently where erm, you were a year ago, nearing the end of that long hard road to attainment as a pro in doctoral po-biz, Jeff - collegiately alleging a claim that nearly everything to follow Four Quartets has been 'dross'.

One chuckled at the ambition, audacity and foolishness of deploying such a term in the forum of Letters; before turning one's focus to adducing the verse and other critical prose assays by the author Adam attempting to pull off such a theatrically audacious play as this.

"She told me I love boy/girl poems, love
scenes in them based on a deep degeneracy
inherited from too much heat around my
genitals, as manifest in tangents I could only
see if I was getting laid. She told me this as
I was getting laid in such a way that any notion

of telling was subsumed in an ass as stately as
a mansion, which I filled with the liquid
cobwebs of my imagination."

Yeats would be proud of the cant and ergo argoist, very very classy Adam Fieled's verse. Proper spillage. High Art indeed from our playboy crown-prince doing what one does.

Effecting agreement among this reader, on X and Y being the only two one is on collegiate amity and perfect accord with Adam about, as a bosom buddy chum and prophetical practitoner with the imbas to know why, when, what and how, for example, Eliot can successfully operate as a symbol for agreement between Fieled and oneself.

High and Low Art in the 'making' of verse activity, you know, as a 'poetry' - there's often very little agreement about, and in America, poetry atomised into 10,000 different individual, unique and original practices, all curated by a genius with big ideas about what kind of reality Poetry is, adam, the only critical debate in AmPo parish at present, as you know, has one essential point of agreement most practitioners of contemporary American poetry found as your datum: MFA.

After this, a forking occurs and we diverge into our own pool of plod and production sailor, not believing any of it matters. That our thinking is nought but a performance in print, anything other than that: Not real. Thought, Fielding.

Have a think about it. I'll get back to you.

What's interesting (and gratifying) to me about this piece is the context it arose from. I had just published a piece in the UK online journal The Argotist entitled "Century XX after Four Quartets." The gist of the piece was that poetry in the English language decayed horribly in the second half of the twentieth century. Other critical forays from this period, like "On the Necessity of Bad Reviews" and "The Decay of Spirituality in Poetry" got a bigger instant public reaction than this one did. A response that defended me with my Apparition Poems, and their excavated/recuperated Romantic ethos, was written and placed in a manner that straddled public and private spheres. Did Mr. Swords know he was being archived? The letter mixes jocularity (even, at points, to the edge of absurdity) with serious overtones. What could've been a post-modern performance from Mr. Swords was nudged in the direction of the Romantic by earnest edges. The dynamic between "Century XX...", the Apparition Poems, and Mr. Swords piece are interesting; on one level, radical and provocative conservatism is getting "filled in" by the ironic humor that is post-modernity's trademark. The Apparition Poems form a middle ground here, as a site- not bereft of absurdities or earnestness, ironies or direct statements. The meta-nature of the poem quoted is heightened by an intellectually challenging and substantial narrative. Mr. Swords chose to defend me with a poem that would be offensive to a "pure" Romantic ethos. It includes sexual slang, and pornographic overtones. But that I was excavating and recuperating something Romantic (and many consider Yeats a latter-day Romantic) is hinted at. The structure of the Internet has created many circles like this in poetry. Excavation and recuperation are processes that force the issue of repetition. What is, and matters most, must be repeated.

"Benjamin's Desktop: Unpacking the Phenomenon of Literature Online"

2011-09-17T06:22:00.000-07:00

In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin was led to exclaim, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (221). This essay itself is heavily tilted towards a focus on works of visual, rather than literary art; how film and photography were ushering in a new era, as of the first half of century XX. This era transformed aesthetic emphasis from the “presence” of a work of art’s “unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220), which manifested an auratic glow or sheen, and new techniques that opened up potentially broader (if also cheapening) vistas. To make a cross-reference, Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” treats rare books as if they are capable of emitting a potent aura, just from the spaces they are able to fill in the acquisitive psyches of those who collect them. The import of the two essays, when conflated and applied to the present moment in literature, is that what print books can create is auratic presence; and that this is what the Internet specifically denies. Internet reproduction of literary artifacts is “digital,” rather than “mechanical”; however, the net result is more or less the same; “presence” is diminished along with “aura,” and the acquisitive impulse may be starved. The Internet, like film almost a century ago, opens a vista that it could be construed as “broad” or “cheap.” The work of literature in the age of digital reproduction needs to be investigated, specifically because in diminishing the aura of print books, what consequences will follow are hanging in the balance.

“Digital reproduction,” when applied to literature, is a strange phenomenon. On one level, all it means is that a web-page containing a poem, essay, or story, will look the same to all who venture to gaze upon it. However, what is produced and reproduced on the Net will often seem to follow a diasporic pattern: it will start in a digital locale, and then migrate to another digital locale, in such a way that one’s feelings and reactions to the piece may be transformed by how and where they are seeing it. The “aura” of the piece is only present to the extent that some constituent element of the substance of the piece itself grounds it temporally, makes it part and parcel of a Zeitgeist. It must be looked into how much of Benjamin’s sense of the “auratic” nature of print books is an illusory and inessential collector’s conceit. There is no reason to assume that websites do not create and maintain, over periods of time, their own auras. Benjamin’s notion of “aura” is bound up in materiality; what the Internet imposes on Net-readers is the dissipation of material and materialistic impulses. The materialistic essence of century XX may be about to be replaced by a renascence to spirituality in this century. The “unique existence” of works of literature “at the place where (they) happen to be” (220) will encourage us not to find an aura in this literature as a material object, but to forge a chiasmus between the unique existence that inheres in the literature and a reciprocally unique existence it engenders in us. Benjamin sees the auratic as a form of Otherness; what the Net imposes takes this Otherness and forces a radical subjectivity onto it, by de-objectifying it and demystifying its materiality. Thus, the relationship we forge gets us over the hurdle of material acquisitiveness.

This will register to some as a loss. If there were not compensatory excitements, in an age that demands sensory stimulation, then it is unlikely that literature on the Net could be considered “phenomenal.” The compensatory excitements the Net offers for the loss of materiality and (ostensible) permanence are stunning. The aura around the Net itself involves danger, risk, heedlessness; the Net paradigm insists on Net practitioners upping certain antes, as though the Net were a kind of gambling den. The aura that has accrued to literature on the Net must, of course, shift and transmute over time, but the present moment (and the Net, with its tinge of American ideology, insists on the intermittent preponderance of present moments) is steeped in Net practice working, both for writers and readers, as a kind of intoxicant. “Fast, fluid, and without boundaries” is a level and prescription of, not only the American but the Romantic— the “I” that belongs (through mutual empathy) to everyone, and forges instantaneous connections. So that the compensatory excitement of forging instantaneous connections is one frisson the Net offers. It is reminiscent of Barthes’ discussion of wine in “Mythologies”: “it is above all a converting substance, capable of reversing situations and states, and extracting from objects their opposites— for instance, making a weak man strong or a silent one talkative” (58). The pleasures of print are restrained pleasures; the wait of a period of months or years, the solidity of the material object once it arrives, its auratic presence on a shelf with other titles of a similar nature or from a similar source. If gratification is perpetually delayed, where print is concerned, creating a sense of permanent deferral from present moments, then the Internet creates moments intensely lived, that engender more expectations of intensely lived moments. If the Net can, as wine, “deliver (us) from myths, remove some of (our) intellectualism…make (us) the equal of the proletarian” (59), then perhaps the Net even has its own version of vino veritas: the frisson of sudden, unlabored truth.

It should go without saying that, if literature on the Net were not a subject that had a good amount of heft, where nuances and complications were concerned, it would not be worth writing about. Bataille’s name for the general overabundance of life on earth, the “accursed share,” also supplies a necessary wedge into the subject. Literature has proved, over a long period of time, that it does not need the Net to validate it. It is true of literary society as well as society in general that it “produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it” (Bataille, 106). So it is with literature on the Net: the surplus quality of Net publishing will be determined by how (and why) it is used. One possible use for literature on the Net, and also the investigation of the Net as a process, is that it can function as an antidote to the atrophied armature of post-modern thought that still hangs over avant-gardists on two continents. Post-modern poetics, especially in America, has always favored indeterminacy as a mode of expression; but I use the term “atrophied” because this kind of poetics has become closed on indeterminacy. Poetry, which has as a component part of its function the imperative to engage emotional and psychological levels, when made indeterminate as to at least some connotations, is only a few notches past banality. Net processes open indeterminacy up for investigation, by being determinative; you are in this place, doing this, and hiding is not an option. If a crisis forces you to react, the impulse towards banality cannot be followed. The Internet opens up vistas for psychologies and emotions to develop, beyond theoretical baggage. It could be the therapeutic solution to the traumas of post-modern practice, for those still young enough and dynamic enough to make moves.

Importantly, the Net is not nihilistic. It signifies mobility, which is a mode and expression of belief (i.e. you move because you believe it is worth your while to move). There is and has always been a kind of nihilism to poetry books; they do not sell, they signify failure. Poetry as a commodity is, and has always been, with rare exceptions like Byron, a failure. Of all the literary art forms that can benefit from Net processes and exposure, poetry stands to gain the most. The nihilism of waiting, say, two years for a poetry book to come out in print that few will buy or read can be supplanted if the publishing imperative is made dual, and remains that way. It remains to be seen to what extent print becomes nihilistic for the whole of literature. It would be reasonable to assert that literature that does not at least acknowledge the Net as a vital new force is already veering towards nihilism. Of course, the post-modern impulse had much to do with what could be termed (to be blunt) “happy nihilism,” the gleeful pursuit of no significations. As such, it may be seen that the real “Lyrical Ballads” of a new form and era of Romanticism is the emergence of the Internet itself. It is also important for me to underline the facticity of the Net; it is popular enough not to need specific artists to proselytize for it. But it would be a supreme irony if post-modernity itself were toppled by a forward moving and thinking technology. It would also be a more sophisticated irony than most post-modernists could come up with themselves. As is rare with potent ironies, it ends in earnest triumph.

Adam Fieled

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share Volume I. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Adam Fieled's Apps at the Eris Temple, Pt. Two

2011-08-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

This video was filmed in West Philadelphia by Matt Stevenson on August 5, 2011.

Unreleased Apparition Poems Pt. 2

2011-05-05T06:31:00.000-07:00

#1625

The “I” that writes cannot be
(he told us, perched on a hill of
flowers which he crushed, but, of
course, incompletely, and not all of
them at once) strictly for-itself as it
has no substance: a student walked

up, pricked his forearm (the back side
of it) with a small razor, he cringed but
only briefly, leaning forward so that a
row of buttercups doused him yellow.
The “I” that writes has a relationship
that is very much for itself, but it has

a strictly independent existence, so that
what constitutes a human “I” has no
meaning for it. Now, you need to know
this: I was not the student with the razor,
but I supplied the razor to the student
that cut the professor’s forearm, but you

will never know how I got it, or why.

#1488

liquor store, linoleum
floor, wine she chose 
 was always deep red,
 dark, bitter aftertaste,
 unlike her bare torso,
  which has in it
  all that ever was
  of drunkenness—
to miss someone terribly,
to both still be in love, as
she severs things because
 she thinks she must—
 exquisite torture, it’s
 a different bare torso,
(my own) that’s incarnadine—

#1576

Who told poets to be poets?
Nobody tells anyone things
like this anymore— Poetess,
she comes to me with “this,”
it’s all wine and roses for two
nights, but I’m left dizzy— is
this the end of poetry? There’s
a war between poetry & sex, it’s
always sex’s dominance we fight,
she tells me this, but we still make
love. And it’s good & hard. I’m
pure in this, I tell myself. I know
what I’m doing. I do, too, in ways
limited by perspectives, of which
this is half of one. Is it enough?

Unreleased Apparition Poems

2011-04-29T14:07:00.001-07:00

#567

Oh, to be half in love in New York—
moments of almost caress in Union Square,
almost embrace in Alphabet City,
almost consummation on Brooklyn F Train—
remembering confessions at Fez,
Lafayette Place, eruptions of late-night
mania on Broadway, lusts at
Ludlow Street’s Living Room,
I wonder what half of us could’ve
fallen— now, I’m half at ease
w/ memories of half a love,
half lived in livid, lurid Times
Square, also smog-red Hudson
sunsets spent on half-lit banks,
hand-in-hand, hoping for an omen
from doldrums of a half-dead city—

#1546

What a tussle it was, I
could only see her eyes,
tiny bits of red above,
stark, blank blueness, I
felt animal fear between
us, but a poltergeist was
pushing our bodies into
one another, dead flesh
inhabited by spirits, for
the time nothing came
from our mouths, dead
liveliness, deep into the
wolf’s hour this went on—
our eyes couldn’t close.

#528

What will the poem,
a wary protuberance,
say to admixtures of
green grassy gardens
sprung sans respite, &
hood winked dudes?
Not to implicate you,
but someone must
choose, truly, when
this linzer tart stands
eating my plate, in
spite of all spite with-
held, beyond all dreams
you can measure, near
a fracas which seems
risible. Not that I care.

#564

in your “not-I”
saying is sex
phonemes go
fricatives fill
in space for “I”
it’s all I said
(was I saying
anything red
for yr blood in
you at all for
being me?)

Equations

2011-02-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

Equations by adamfieled

Best of Beams Podcast

2011-01-01T08:52:00.001-08:00

Beams by adamfieled

Letters to Dead Masters #62

2010-12-20T02:47:00.000-08:00

John,

Dana’s in a low-key mood, and she’s playing fifties doo-wop rubbish. She just invited me, also, to one of her puppet shows. She’s talking to two of her friends about (you guessed it) herself. From a distance, I find her narcissism cute. But I’ve never spent more than a few hours at a time with her, and over long periods of time narcissists are horrendous bores. The interesting thing about Dana is that she’s not really a user— most narcissists need people around them to reinforce their perceptions, and will use people to that end. Dana reinforces her perceptions to herself, and holds them in. Her narcissism is only noticeable to the extent that she’s capable only of discussing herself. I’m not enticed by the idea of her puppet show, because she wants her entire life to be a puppet show. Her perfect body and pixie face— useless as winter rain. She’s sitting outside, smoking a cigarette, and it’s funny to watch innocent guys hit on her.

I’ve realized that everyone at the Drop is more innocent than me on every level. The experience I gain from coming here is of two or three different forms of naïve innocence— the innocent pretensions of young artists, the unthinking presumptuousness of music business types, and the desperate attention seeking of hangers-on. Middle-class types are getting mixed in randomly left and right these days, but the manifest essence of the Grind is this. Other kinds of manifest essences do present themselves with the new crowds— but middle-class innocence is spiritual, rather than material. And it isn’t necessarily positive innocence— it’s the imported innocence of lives spent watching television. The middle-class dream, of perfect material consonance, rips human souls to shreds in its titanic strength. It even applies to thoughts— material thoughts are those in line with everybody else’s, maintained and enforced by the media, over-souls of middle-class thought. I’ve been shocked by how many intellectuals go out of their way to keep these levels of consonance at their disposal. It gives their mind some grain, as Barthes would say. But the idea of breaking in and honing soul parts is anathematized, because the twentieth century trashed them in a generalized way. The twentieth century, spiritually, was garbage for the human race. The twenty-first presents a new challenge— of rebuilding human souls from ashes, feces, and dirt. Think globally, act locally works for spiritual life, too.

What everything always falls down around is what people do on a day-to-day basis. The spiritual discipline necessary not to watch television every day is what we, particularly Americans, need. My own prediction is that the twenty-first century will go two ways— some will rebel, and ascend; others will fall to unprecedented depths. I’m doing my own little bit to bring the human race up— my sword has been drawn against the vapid fraudulence of post-modern art. By blurring the line between cheap, crass comedy and high art, post-modernism accomplished the neat task of draining the vitality from what was a near-corpse to begin with. That’s the essential twentieth century image— a corpse. If I could get Dana to think thoughts like this, I’d be happier. She doesn’t realize that she is, herself, a puppet, or who the strings belong to, or why she needs to dance the way she does. It’s not like my strings can’t be pulled, either, but at least I keep track of what the forces coalescing around me are. And I don’t indulge in doo-wop rubbish.

Yours,
Adam

You can hear a podcast of this piece on Fieled Radio.

Adam Fieled Live in Brooklyn '09

2010-11-29T02:13:00.000-08:00

This video was shot by Amy King at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on August 1, 2009, as part of the Stain Bar reading series.

THREE SETS OF TEETH

Three sets of teeth: who
can check for cavities?
A three-way circuit: who
will start the striptease?
Three lovers in three ways:
how merrily the dance
begins. We spin, we spin,
we forget our instincts,
anima, the part of teeth
that cuts. We are sluts.
There is an “I” here that
stands for all of us, but
its eyes are shut. Sleep
lulls it to rest, not think. Or speak.

BIG BLACK CAR

Your middle: tongue
(hers), man (me), riding
together, I bitch (middle’s
middle). I tongue man
you, her, spacious, it, of
you, all of us, can’t feel
a nothing, I can’t. Not
of this, of you, of her,
of all of this riding, in
what looks big, black,
has tongue-room. I
can’t feel a thing. I feel
nothing of bigness, black
fur interior her you. Ride.

BACK OF A CAR

Asinine, as is, this ass is:
ass I zip down into zero:
anal, a null, a void, this is.
I’m behind a behind that
sits smoking, rubbing, pink-
tipped, tender, butt, button.
She watches me watching as
I go brown-nose in another.
Only her car-ness, averted by
eyes to a wall, seems happy.
Only she can stomach rubs
of the kind that want plugs.
Sparked tank, here comes
no come, & aggravation.

COCAINE GUMS

I ache: dull, sharp,
in a heap of paper.
All paper: picture,
bright, bold, dark.
I have nailed you
to a piece: black.
I darken touched
things: I’m used.
I write you, you,
you, as if kissed
by a fresh body,
rose-petal bliss.
I drowse: numb
as cocaine gums.

FRAMED

Nailed, two, across— I
have been glimpsing me
from above, as a camera
would, I am a still, this
is a film, this has to be
framed, no, don’t hold,
I can’t, it’s an offstage
arm, both you & you
speak like I’m (so) not
here, I’m celluloid, I’m
varicose, vein-soft, fake-
bloody, cut, I can’t move,
you & you & I minted,
taped, uncensored, dead.

DARK LADY

You’re more of a Dark Lady
than I have ever hoped for,
especially because when you
betray me, it’s with someone
I love: me.
You’re more of
everything, actually, & you’re
also a pain in the ass. That’s
why I haven’t let you off the
hook. I’ll wind up in my own
hands again tonight, sans
metaphors, like your full
moon in my face, but you’ll
never know there’s a man in you.

SPLAT!

What greatness thrust upon
me? Solitary Saturday night
fever, jive talking to myself,
doing lines of Advil, falling
off imaginary bridges: splat!
The familiar trope of falling
endlessly, this is how I stay
alive. All because you are, I
affirm, more than a woman,
but, unfortunately, not just
to me, but to many generally.
I suppose I could blazon you:
rhubarb thighs, persimmon
twat, etc, but not productively,
& what would Travolta say?

DEODERANT REDOLENCE

Rage is senseless, I rage
in a cloud of senselessness
against the confines of a
first layer of rage against
the confines of a region
of loneliness buttressed
by a feeling that deodorant
is an insult against redolence
that I haven’t guts to embrace.
I shower every morning, I
even bathe after I shower,
what this has to do with
anything is beyond me,
except that I like your dirt.

c. Adam Fieled 2008

I review of the book from which these poems were taken, When You Bit.., is available in Jacket #37. The review was written by Jeffrey Side.

The book has also been blogged about nicely here and here.

Adam Fieled reads the Apps at the Eris Temple

2010-11-21T05:33:00.000-08:00

Video shot by Matt Stevenson, March 2010.

LINKS FOR APPARITION POEMS IN VIDEO

#1327
The Argotist

#1335
Stoning the Devil

#1345, 1476, 1480
Jacket #40

#1488
Stoning the Devil

#1504, 1546, 1584, 1651
PennSound

#1514, 1571
Listenlight

#1602, 1603, 1613
PFS Post

#1576
Stoning the Devil

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.

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.

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.

Beams

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. 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 with ozone, specifics with abstractions, substantiality with ethereality. It's a form built to be seen.

The book which contains this series is also called Beams. It has been released by Blazevox. You can also read it, and hear a podcast of some Beams, on Issuu. An excellent review of the book, written by Jeffrey Side, can be found in Galatea Resurrects.