 |
Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm, a poetry collection published by Octopus Books. She lives in Atlanta and is a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University.
Hannah Gamble is the reviews and interviews editor for Gulf Coast, and she teaches Intro to Fiction at the University of Houston. You can find her poems in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other places.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, A Green Light, Rise Up, and A Plate of Chicken. With Joshua Beckman he wrote Nice Hat. Thanks., and with Joshua Beckman and Anthony McCann he wrote the secret book Gentle Reader! It is not for sale.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary and The Man Suit, both from Black Ocean Press. He co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books, and teaches film, literature, and writing at Portland State University and Portland Community College.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist. He is also co-translator of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. His third full-length collection of poems, Come On All You Ghosts, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. He lives in San Francisco, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert.
|
|
|
|
"Good Warm Sad Blood
Spilling Out in the Forest"
a conversation with Heather Christle, Hannah Gamble, Matthew Rohrer, Zachary Schomburg, and Matthew Zapruder
The following conversation took place over email in the fall of 2009, although, as Matthew Rohrer articulated in a preliminary exchange, we would rather have been together in a hotel conference room eating Chinese takeout. Gulf Coast organized this conversation because it seemed, to us, that a new generation of surrealist- and absurdist-influenced poetry had emerged in the U.S., written by poets ranging from their mid-twenties to mid-forties and rooted in small presses like Wave Books, Black Ocean, and Octopus Books. But what does “surrealism” even mean, in American poetry today? We decided to ask some of the editors and authors associated with these small presses what they thought about the “surrealist” label and their relationship to it.
Hannah Gamble: When I first emailed the four of you about this interview, I indicated that I saw surrealism as part of your poetic lineage; much of your work employs surrealist staples such as dream logic, collage, collaboration, tragicomic approaches to human existence, and inventive syntax which tries to get at a usually-inaccessible kind of hyper-reality. How do you feel about your work being referred to as “surreal”?
Zachary Schomburg: I’ve noticed poets of my generation often feel a bit leery of labeling their work as “surreal,” and suspicious of others who call themselves surrealists. But maybe this is a larger contemporary issue of poetry labels in general—nobody is willing to strike a pose, in fear of becoming a poser. I do feel proud when my poems are called surreal, because I think that adjective is not far off. French Surrealism is something I studied extensively at the University of Nebraska, and it became integral to my writing. What the original Surrealists were doing is something I, too, am trying to do, so I feel I am a part of that lineage. I’m certainly influenced more by them (and the Russian Absurdists perhaps) than by any other poetics. However, that label is far too simple. The process through which I write is entirely different from Breton’s (or what Breton may claim), as are my politics, my philosophies, etc.
Besides, the word “surreal” has—in our broader, non-poetry lexicon—come to mean something much simpler: strange, unreal, weird. I’ve read too many poems that are labeled surreal only because they are not obviously confessional or sincere. I’d hate for the word to become a catch-all, one that has no recollection of Breton. In other words, if we’re going to label something surreal now, those poems should probably resemble each other in some tangible way, or they should perhaps resemble the French Surrealists’ poems in some tangible way. There should probably be a new word for it, and a new manifesto, and maybe this conversation can spark something like that.
Matthew Zapruder: Mainly when my work is referred to as “surreal” I feel a mixture of resistance and self-consciousness: Resistance, in that the term surreal is often used just to ghettoize any act of the imagination. It seems dismissive and unthinking, and the use of it makes me want to rescue its original definition, and think harder about what poetry is and could be doing today. Self-consciousness, because unlike me or anyone I know, the French Surrealists in the 1920s and ’30s, led by Breton, were engaged in a comprehensive attempt to alter themselves and humanity. They were, for better and also definitely for worse, true revolutionaries, willing to throw everything away; their commitment was total. And, unlike me, they believed (at least in the early years of Surrealism) in poetry and art as more of a by-product (or maybe even excretion) of the activity of un-severing the artificially severed realms of the real and the imaginary, in order to save humankind.
I associate what I do as a poet, humbly, with surrealism, yes, but just as much with what in Wallace Stevens’s terminology could be called acts of the imagination against the pressures of the real. The pressure of the real in everyday life is absolutely overwhelming today. We can barely survive it.
My friend Anthony just sent me a video of Tom Delay on “Dancing with the Stars.” This is, I think, what would ordinarily in our culture be referred to as “surreal”—that is, a seemingly weird juxtaposition of two things that do not belong together (in this case, a Republican douchebag with dancing). In fact, one of the judges even called Delay’s performance “surreal.” Actually, though, it’s the opposite. His appearance on that program in leopard-print fringe, dancing the cha cha to “Wild Thing” and making eyes and pointing at the one gay judge (who cried out after the dancing was over, “you’re crazier than Sarah Palin!”) is not only predictable, but completely inevitable in that it follows exactly the wearisome and purely formulaic logic of a particular branch of show business: to take the most unlikely participant and get him to do something counter to his nature, for our entertainment. It’s the oldest trick in the book, like having a chimp in diapers and a suit and tie pretend to go to the office (which is admittedly hilarious, but not surreal). There is nothing disruptive or consciousness-changing about something so predictable and logical.
I long for some old-fashioned sleep talking, lucid dreaming. The danger of course is once you start talking this way, it seems as if you are against “real life” in art, which of course could not be further from what I am actually saying. As anyone who has ever had a dream knows, nothing but the real is the material of dreaming, as it is of poetry. But it’s just material. It’s more a kind of freedom from tedious “adult” logic, resulting in deeper truth, to which I aspire.
For all their flaws, the original Surrealists seem like great heroes to me, and I do not feel myself worthy of being placed in that category, though of course I am secretly burning with pride that anyone would, even unintentionally, put me in the same sentence as the mighty wizard Robert Desnos.
Heather Christle: It is a new thing for me to have my poems called anything in particular, so that in itself is somewhat unnerving. I’m also unnerved by my failure to live up to the “total commitment” that Matthew mentions in his reply. I’m afraid that Breton is going to rise from the dead to scold and/or excommunicate me. Happily, when I am writing, Breton does not scare me at all. In the act of writing I feel that I am tapping into the same pool that my friends Jacob and Peret and Desnos liked to splash around in. And I imagine we all arrive there because of our shared modes of experimentation, some of which, Hannah, you mention in your question.
One difference, perhaps, might be a desire to entertain. I would like to be making the kind of freaky noise that invites people to dance in the midst of their confusion. (This seems in line with seeking delight, but perhaps skids close to the vulgarity of bourgeois happiness and/or literary talent, both of which could bring down the wrath of Breton.)
Zach, I also want to echo your shout-out to the Russian Absurdists/the OBERIU crew. Their work in using alogical progressions of syntax and events, and especially the literalization of metaphor, has been just as significant an influence on how I approach writing and thinking as anything coming out of France.
Finally, I do honestly want to use poems to reach an unhinging of my consciousness, or at least an ability to recognize the hinges I’ve got. And the better I get at unhinging myself in my poems, the easier it is to discover and create the unhinged moments of my life. Then I am in the pool and extremely alert and happy. I would like everyone to come and play with us there.
Matthew Rohrer: I wish I’d gone earlier because you guys have all said so much, and so succinctly and well. I can only echo and cheer you on at this point, I’m afraid. I want to publicly agree with Zachary and Matthew and their hesitance about being called something that is so clearly defined and specific. I too am a huge fan and student of the French Surrealists and to me, the word “surreal” really refers to them—to those people actually, and to that time specifically, and to Paris, etc. I think we can all agree that the way our culture uses the word “surreal” is A) totally divorced from its original meaning (which is frustrating perhaps) as well as B) a way to avoid actually following the writer’s acts of imagination (which is insidious).
I’ve seen James Tate at many Q&A events get really, really bristly when people used the word “surreal” in talking about his poems, and it used to confuse me a little. I thought: well, his poems do make use of so much of the Surrealists’ techniques, how can he deny it? But later I came to realize that it wasn’t that lineage he was objecting to as much as to the current misuse of the word, and the underlying implication that what he was doing was just wacky or silly or worst of all, untethered from the real. I feel that same bristling myself when people use that word about me. But they never do anymore. Now all my poems take place on my couch.
I think what I keep coming back to is the way culture uses tags or labels to instantly write off artists or artistic movements. We see it in the political arena as Matthew noted, and we see it in poetry too. And it constantly surprises me that otherwise intelligent-seeming people revert to these labels as if they actually mean anything, and as if they actually demonstrate some kind of perceptive thought on the part of the person who uses them. I can’t help but think of Ron Silliman and his totally fatuous and ridiculous “school of quietude” tag, which he throws around like it means something. That kind of thinking doesn’t expand us actually as people or artists. So I feel that our duty should be to challenge these simplifications wherever they arise. And I think when it’s the word “surreal” it’s even more important because of what’s already been said—that what’s at stake is the very definition of the imagination.
HC: I just wanted to jump back in for a second to say that it might be useful to mention Silliman’s other problematic phrase: “soft surrealism,” which he has used to label/denigrate Tate and others around him.
Silliman argues that “soft surrealism permits disruptions at the level of plot and character, but never at the level of poet-reader relations, where the power relations of writing remain unchallenged,” which relies on this really macho vision of the poet as righteous aggressor (kind of like when we’re supposed to go around “interrogating” things). So even within poetry communities, contemporary surrealist practices get a bad rap, which is unfortunate, and perhaps contributes to the uneasiness people feel with the term.
MZ: I’m glad, in a sort of exhausted way, that Matt brought up Silliman’s tautological category of “school of quietude,” and then that Heather mentioned his weirdly feminizing term “soft surrealism,” because I think it points to another way that surrealism is misunderstood, in this case in the literary community.
Basing the “hardness” or “softness” of surrealism on whether or not it challenges “poet-reader relations” and the “power relations of writing,” is not only ahistorical but beside the point. It’s like saying, “I like grandma’s meatloaf better than your meatloaf because your meatloaf is too coercive.” Coerciveness may or may not be an important value in meatloaf-eater relations, but it’s not what grandma or you were thinking about when you were making your meatloaves. Likewise, you can say “poet-reader relations” and the “power relations of writing” are the most important things to think about in every act of writing—I mean, that’s an opinion you can, tragically, have—but it wasn’t what Breton or James Tate or anyone else under discussion was thinking about. To filter surrealism through that idea is just plain foolishness, and not helpful, unless you are trying retroactively to raise the values of your own particular literary movement to an unwarranted position of transcendence.
Okay, but where does that leave us? Again, I think it is very helpful, as Matt wrote, to remind ourselves “what’s at stake is the very definition of the imagination.” If the purpose of poetry (ugh and I promise this is the last time I will write this) is to create “texts” (double ugh) that do not under any circumstances let “the power relations of writing remain unchallenged,” then the poetry one ends up with is a horrible fusion of shallow philosophizing and polemic.
Surrealism, on the other hand, provides us with an alternate version of what the poem can do, in my opinion a much more fun, powerful, playful one, full of potential and hope. At this point I do feel like I should quote Joshua Beckman: “Surrealism is old, so everyone should get some.”
MR: One thing you said, Matthew, about the critique of “soft surrealism” reminds me of a bigger issue regarding surrealism: people definitely reject the possibility of a poet today using the techniques of surrealism in the service of a “regular” poem. And I think that speaks to all of our poems—Zachary’s perhaps most of all. His poems are obviously using the techniques of surrealism, but they are by no means only surrealist. That’s true to varying degrees of all of our poems. And I think an analogy here will show how obvious and inevitable this is: it’s easy for us to see throughout the history of painting how Cimabue pioneered perspective only to pass it on to others, or how the techniques of the Impressionists were used by later painters. Is that evil? Is that politically reprehensible? Or is it just art history? I think different ages of poetry uncover different techniques and styles and bequeath them to future poets.
MZ: And one more thing, in light of what we have been talking about, and as a potential focuser: Mallarmé’s famous response to Dégas that poems are made of words, not ideas, seems relevant here. He could have been talking to a lot of poets today, in all sorts of different “schools.” The surrealist poets believed that words, like atoms, were full of unlocked potential. They weren’t “using” words to communicate ideas, but playing with and recombining the material of language. I’d love to hear more from everyone about how you think of the material, the word, in your poems, and how that relates to surrealism; this seems to me, at least, like it might be important.
HC: Well, a radical, scary way of loving words seems necessary. Even if we sit down at breakfast every day with our spoons and our prepositions, we should not stop actually looking at them and being amazed and telling them about it. And if a word is lacking a spark then we should take that word on a vacation. Or we should introduce that word to an exciting new one and then we will all be more exuberant. Or we should eat them. So I am happy that play is here in the conversation. Hannah, I had mentioned this quote to you before, but I think it seems relevant here, so I will halfway repeat myself. In a letter full of advice, Max Jacob wrote:
I think I can safely tell you to avoid facile satire: satire
blinds the way pride blinds. You don’t get very far on
the strength of having said: “Those idiots! Those middle-
class philistines!” and so on, with variations. Take it for
granted that everyone is quite perfect; it’s very salutary
to start from that lofty general assumption and then
gradually lower the individual sphere by finding little
blemishes in it… Great works of literature are premised
on optimism. Since the nineteenth century there have
been no great works, because of Flaubert and his stupid
pessimism. Balzac was inclined to see genius everywhere,
and so he was optimistic: although he is not an artist, his
work is great on account of its optimism. Think about that.
ZS: The imagination doesn’t seem like something that can be captured by language, but something that exists beyond language. Language’s only involvement, then, in the imagination is by creating it, accidently, somehow purely, through the “spark” that occurs when words touch each other. New meaning may be out of reach, or inaccessible, without that spark. So words can be like a positive and negative charge, rubbed hard on the carpets of vastly different rooms and then brought together (my science is terrible, forgive me).
To bring us back to the original question of the modern surrealist label, I think it is important to keep that definition of imagination as an experience, entirely new, illogical, and impossible, that is born from language, but not one contrived by language.
At some point, if we’re trying to define this elusive beast, we should mention the manifestos. Breton classifies the surrealist image in about seven different ways that I can count, but the one most fitting to our discussion right now is that the image should have irreconcilable logical and linguistic contradictions. Also, speaking of language, he repeatedly talks about his disgust with Dostoyevsky’s overuse of it, his endless descriptions. Description can strangle the imagination, and a fire is much more likely to be sparked with fewer conductors/words.
Also: The term “soft surrealism” is quite troubling for a number of reasons, many of which have already been covered, and I’m glad we can begin to denounce this term in particular. It sets up a situation where Tate (since he is the example we’re using) is like a tamer, less complicated version of surrealism. It’s unfair and untrue. And it reminds me too much of the term “soft porn.”
HG: I’m really glad Heather brought up optimism; over the past couple of weeks I’ve been not unpleasantly haunted by the final lines of Frank O’Hara’s poem “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean Paul”:
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues
to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible
isn’t it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it.
Could you all talk a little bit about the relationship between optimism and cynicism in your poems and/or the poems of others?
MR: Well, Max Jacob said it brilliantly in the letter Heather quoted. I see a lot of student poems that are snide or bitter: poems that ridicule certain bourgeois or mass-cultural things. And on the one hand, I can usually sort of agree in a general sense that mass culture is bad, or malls are alienating, or the suburbs destroy human potential, blah blah blah. But I think back to a very important moment in my own writing: I had written a poem in a park, watching a family, and the poem basically critiqued them for I can’t even remember what now. It was supercilious, really; who was I to say anything about these people I didn’t know at all? And my poetry teacher read it and said something like, “You want to watch out that you’re not an asshole.” And he was very serious, and looked at me with these penetrating eyes, and I realized this was a big thing for him, and for me. And then almost immediately I found myself drawn into a long apprenticeship with the historical Surrealists. I think they are very optimistic—so much of their interests were in human potential—the potential of dreams, of our unconscious, of all of the overlooked and uncelebrated things that make us human. It seemed to me like they really wanted to celebrate being human rather than critique it or box it in. And yes, as several of you have said, they were revolutionary, and no one is more optimistic than a revolutionary.
MZ: I think it’s important to talk about the image. That was the most important thing to the surrealists, the focus of their poetic efforts. Their ideas about the image are both different from that of mainstream American poetry today, but also (paradoxically) highly influential to it.
In American poetry today there is a prevalent, if not dominant, view of the image that it should do at least one of two things, if not both. The first is to describe something visually. The second is to represent, metaphorically or perhaps metonymically, something “greater” or “more significant” than what is ostensibly being described. For example, let’s say one is writing a poem about one’s feelings about marriage, and a flock of geese might go in a honking ragged V plaintively yet somehow with mysteriously sure direction over your summer house (hey, I just made that up a little too easily, uh oh). That would be something we could see and experience in our “mind’s eye,” and also something that is significant, that represents, stands in for, elaborates, complicates what the poem is “about.”
Surrealists, as Zach so rightly pointed out, had something very different in mind. They saw the image as a place where the real and the imaginary fused, the place where the writer, and then the reader, could actually physically feel and experience the actuality of surrealism. A bit like how ecstatic prayer can be a gateway to religious experience. Which is why the surrealist image should have, as Zach said, “irreconcilable logical and linguistic contradictions,” though I think almost immediately the surrealists were much more iffy on the second part of that sentence than the first.
HC: Hannah, I think when it comes to cynicism both Jacob & Rohrer have it pretty well covered. Maybe I will add that it seems useful to look at everything and think “you must be joking!” in a kind of stunned, pleased way, rather than to look at everything and sneer or smile knowingly. But that’s just the basics of attractive/hideous behavior.
It is hard to smile knowingly when you don’t know how things are going to react to each another, which is why it seems better to leave those V-birds alone, or at least not to hire them with some kind of predetermined contract. Birds don’t work. Images don’t work. They collide and make a weird light.
I’m interested, Matthew, in your statement that “the surrealists were much more iffy on ‘linguistic’ contradictions than they were on ‘logical’ ones. Dean Young is a poet who engages in some of those linguistic contradictions, like in “He Said Turn Here,” (from First Course in Turbulence) when he writes: “It seems like nothing / could change its color although / we couldn’t tell what color it was, / it kept changing.”
This feels like a moment of real collision, but sometimes I think that a linguistic spark is more beautiful to me than a logical one. (The best, I suppose, is to get both at once, or at least in quick succession.) Maybe the linguistic spark is so appealing to me because it is a phenomenon that is pretty unique to poetry, and I like to think that poetry is up to tricks that other media can’t easily replicate.
MZ: I think, Heather, what I meant is that while they began with poems that were often an onrush of language with a lot of grammatical collisions, most of the French Surrealist poets ended up exploring the strangeness of visual imagery in their poems far more than the possibilities of linguistic disruption. This of course is a huge generalization. But if you read Eluard or Desnos or even Breton (see “Free Love”) they are not so much trying to tear language apart, as to maybe recapture or recount—and/or build a portal to—alternate states of consciousness through the image. This is my impression at least, so I’m writing this as a question.
I absolutely agree that the stumbles and cracks in language—if they feel authentic and true in the poem—are a great part of what can draw me so much to reading and writing poems too, because, as you say, they are “unique to poetry.” I think this does have something to do with surrealism; I think the unfortunate or easy version of this is a smug nonsense speech that justifies itself by its very inaccessibility to a reader. Obviously that’s extremely fucked up.
HG: I know that all of you have collaborated with other writers, and some of you even with visual artists. Does collaboration change the way you approach reality in your poems, and if so, how? And why do you think collaboration was so important to the French Surrealists?
ZS: I wonder if collaboration is almost an artificial way, the easiest way, even cheating perhaps, to get at automation. I’m not sure it’s possible to get automatic and liberated language from a single sober functioning brain. But when two brains work without the knowledge of the other, strange contradictions—that one brain could have never come up with alone—can happen.
I agree with Matthew when he says that surrealist poets, including neo-surrealists whoever they may be (Is that term problematic? Does it matter? No? Okay.) are “not so much trying to tear language apart, as to maybe recapture or recount—and/or build a portal to—alternate states of consciousness through the image.” Or, more specifically, I would argue that the way they do tear language apart is by using mostly mundane, common, familiar, over-used language. They tear it at its core, and not at its edges, without stretching it to its capabilities. The more familiar a surrealist’s words, the more unknown they become, essentially tearing at the basics (like tearing math apart by saying that 2+2=5). In his “Angle of Sight,” Breton wrote “a well paved road / leads you to the edge of the unknown.” The sublime moment can be sought only through the words the reader recognizes so well that he/she forgets what they actually mean. Look at Breton’s famous line, “Always for the first time.” Both concepts are contradictory, and entirely simplistic (linguistically) to one another and therefore rendered illogical, but it is this exact illogic that forges a new, more mysterious kind of logic, a surreal logic. If the reader accepts the absurd concept of infinite first times, he/she must abandon the logical connotation of “always” and adopt a more abstract and emotional definition outside the limitations of reason. The reader must rely on his/her own emotional connotations rather that to submit to given cultural standards/definitions.
HC: I think that where Freud lived in the heads of the Surrealists is where cognitive scientists live in my own. I love to learn about the ways we process language and the world and then to make those processes apparent in a poem. That space was carved out in the first place, though, by Matthew (R) and Joshua Beckman. This is maybe a backwards way of getting at collaboration, but babies sometimes crawl in that direction first, so.
I am a little bit younger than these dudes, luckily for me, because by the time I was learning about poetry in college they were already out in the world making things happen, much to my glee and benefit. I saw Matthew and Joshua perform at the Enormous Room in Cambridge and immediately wanted to go home and make my poems this way, one word at a time, with friends. The moment when everything changed for me, though, was a few years later, after listening about a thousand times to Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. I realized that I could, in fact, collaborate with myself. I could turn my brain on and off so that I only ever thought of one word or sound at a time, and could hear, like a chord, the notes of polysemy inherent in the morpheme. I wrote poems like that for a long time.
Collaboration still seems important for the way it allows us to attend to some of the principles of Surrealism. It lets you escape, momentarily, what can feel like the dictatorship of your own consciousness. It can help dissolve your artistic ego / belief in your talent. The painter Philip Guston once said (or wrote?) “When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”
The less we are “here” the more we get to be “there,” even and especially when “there” is totally imaginary. So I think that collaboration helps us to disappear, not only in the moment of its occurrence, but later as well. It can teach your brain how to stay limber enough to reach beyond (or perhaps between) the language of reality.
MR: I also now feel like I can collaborate with myself! But what I think this really is is collaborating with the words as if they weren’t my own. Which of course they aren’t. I think now in the right mood I can view almost every word, or at least every line, as something “given” that I can collaborate with. Even if I wrote it.
And I guess the next step is to figure out how you collaborate with the given language. I think it’s probably a combination of tearing up language and expanding upon it. I mean, sometimes you want to confound the given and sometimes you want to help the given come along to something even bigger and better than it thought it could be.
I guess I would be surprised if I found out most poets didn’t at some level think that what they were doing when they write is a form of collaboration.
ZS: Nice Hat. Thanks. was my very first favorite contemporary book of poems. It felt so exciting to me because it seemed so liberated and uncontrolled, as if the poems were receivers of the language around the poets and not the creators of those ideas/languages. I’ve since gone on to love Matthew R.’s and Joshua Beckman’s individual books as much as, if not more than, that collaboration, but it is clear to me that those images from the individual books are more controlled than in Nice Hat. By “more controlled,” please know I do not mean less successful—just that they’re less open to the accident. But to complicate this further, it’s not simply the accidental that defines surrealism. Rohrer’s A Green Light feels quite surreal to me (and is easily on my Top Fifteen list of all-time favorite po-books); I learned more about how surrealism is supposed to feel from those books of his than any of the French Surrealists. Perhaps that feeling has something to do with humor, and how to give it to people so they can hurt their own hearts with it.
HG: I’m wondering if you all have read Calvino’s essay on “Lightness” from his Six Memos for the Next Millennium? There, he says, “If I had to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose [this] one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity, he has the secret of lightness.”
How do we approach the real world through language and image to get at something extra-real? “Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness,” Calvino writes, “I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into the irrational. I mean having to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.” Lightness, Calvino indicates, is the ability to examine the real world from a new angle so that the world becomes unfamiliar to us.
So… Question 1: Could you talk about lightness/heaviness, humor/hurt in the poems you love and try to write?
Also, fill in the blank: “If I had to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose this one: _______.”
MR: Here are my two answers: The poem “Famous Flames” by Ron Padgett is always what I think I want to write when I sit down to write, but two things occur to prevent that from actually happening. One is that I remember he already wrote it. And Two is that some kind of “heaviness” or “hurt” as you say creeps in.
What I love about this poem, and Padgett’s work in general, is probably a lot of what we’ve been talking about—surrealistic techniques. But Padgett is not a surrealist, I don’t think he or anyone would seriously call him that. But what I’ve always loved about his poems is the movement. And this, as we’ve mentioned a lot in these exchanges, seems to be one of the defining things the Surrealists bequeathed to us. The movement in this poem is so light it’s easy to miss it on the first reading. I’ve always thought of his poems as moving from A to B to C to D but that by the time you’re at D, it bears no relationship to A at all; that each step is connected but that the overall movement seems wild and almost haphazard.
So I want that energy and lightness in my poems all the time, and I try to actively do that when I write. I think that relates to what I was saying about “collaborating with myself,” which is, after all, something I learned while interviewing Padgett.
But like I said, something else creeps in. The “heaviness” or the “hurt.” Maybe it’s that I can’t bring myself to be as utterly carefree as Ron. Or as truly beholden to chance connections. I think this half-ability to write the poems we sit down meaning to write is what we all do—we love some books and set out to write like them, but what we actually do is write the books that fit in between those books on the shelf.
I think if I had to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose this one: small groups of people gathering in their apartments reading poems to each other. What I mean is: A lot of moaning has been moaned about the lack of cohesion in poetry today (like there’s no more Merwin or Stafford or Bishop whom everyone agrees is “the best!”). All the little groups of poets have their “best” poets. That seems not only fine to me, but natural and inevitable under Late Capitalism (gasp!). And they’re not just reading poems to each other—the poems are exciting and energetic and wild like the Padgett poem and the surreal (and Surreal) poems we’ve been discussing, but they’re also sincere. They’re real to people, too. They are hopefully not afraid to say something, and to want to reach out and connect with people. I see that everywhere in the poems of my contemporaries, whom I love.
MZ: I don’t have so much more to add to Matt’s amazing answer. I can’t think of a more auspicious image than his. When I am trying to explain what it is I love so much about poetry, I always come back to this Wallace Stevens poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” because it is about that very thing, people reading together. The poem ends “How high that highest candle lights the dark. / Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.”
Being there together is enough. Yes. Hannah, your ideas about lightness and humor are aspirational to me, definitely. There is a word, sprezzatura, that I think means what you are talking about, but it has always struck me as maybe just one part of what poems I love involve, the other being the duende. What Matt calls the heaviness, or the hurt. A kind of identification, compassion, or sorrowful humanism—a sense that all our souls (or whatever they are) are permanently dented—drives me to experience art and also to make it.
Something funny and very cool happened to me the other day. My brother works at the internet radio station Pandora (he is the music librarian), and every once in a while they have free concerts at lunch for the employees. Last Friday Glen Tillbrook from the band Squeeze was there, and my brother called me at the last minute and invited me to come see the show. I have loved Squeeze for a long time, with a not-even-guilty pleasure. The songs are the exact opposite of surrealism: Every song was “about” something. All the words were in service of a scene or concept or idea. The rhyme was all very clever, the melodies and chord progressions sophisticated and well-organized. Pure craft. No wildness or experimentation or parataxis or the yoking together of unlike things in the image to disrupt anyone’s consciousness. And absolutely deeply moving and beautiful. I loved every second of it, and got very teary at times, and it occurred to me at the time, thinking of this conversation, that there is room for everything along the spectrum of dreaming and reality, or whatever illusory binary we want to think about, as long as it is human and good.
The Surrealists developed techniques and ideas about poetry that were absolutely necessary, visionary, and revolutionary. I remain in awe of them. But I am not a surrealist, not because I in any way reject what they are saying, but because I locate myself, messily, somewhere between the aspirations of surrealism and those of writers who believe that life, human activities, emotions, experiences, memories, history, politics, and culture are all elements of poetry too. That poems need to be something other than automatic writing and disruptive images, that they can have a subject, and be “about” something, without inevitably betraying the nature of poetry, is something we can learn from the great Surrealists, like Desnos. And carry it forward.
HC: If I had to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would blindfold myself and go for a walk with a friend and point at areas until the friend said yes and I would choose that thing. (And wouldn’t it be funny if I were pointing at a small group of people reading their poems to each other in an apartment?) I suppose I want to say that everything feels awfully and equally auspicious. That’s the nature of prophecy and poetry, I think, that as soon as you look at a thing it swells up with meaning and significance. Or “lights up.” And that is also where the hurt comes in. That meaning is all in our heads, and the distance between the intensely physical belief in the significance of what we’ve seen and the wild meaninglessness of the world as it proceeds without regard for that belief seems designed for the specific purpose of heartbreak. To keep living (and writing) as if unaware of the wild meaninglessness is the saddest happiness on the planet.
Funny how Stevens always shows up when you need him, perhaps especially when he gets to interrupt surrealists—I’m thinking now and often of “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” and how devastated and amazed and edified I am by these lines:
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
I know that I am shifting light from weight back to illumination, but the two are sisters really. If we can stay nimble enough to catch the light when it’s about, and pretend what we need to pretend with great ferocity, then that will be enough to go on for a while.
I’ve been talking all this over with Chris DeWeese, who reminded me of something Russell Edson said: “Why should we have to be surrealists? Breton didn’t invent our imaginations.” At first, my reaction to the idea of applying a surrealist label to contemporary poetry made me bristle, made me want to say “But that was practically a century ago now! We are doing all kinds of new things!” (I hope this is true.) What Russell Edson has helped me to realize is that we are actually participating in something much older than Surrealism. That makes me feel lit up and airborne and oceanic. (If I add gritty to that list I will have covered the four elements, so I am going to do it.)
ZS: For me, the auspicious image for the new millennium may be my mother’s face. But only as I stare at it—really, really stare at it—for a long time while it twitches and moves, without the worry of her seeing me look (maybe I am behind a mirror), until it’s ugly, until it looks like a stranger’s face, until it looks more like a pumpkin, or a twisted pumpkin tree, until it makes a kind of mom-death, just hot flesh and cheekbones, the death of me and the death of home. That is where poem-trees come from—they don’t come from real trees. What is a real tree anyway? Or I sometimes think of that scene from Flight of the Navigator where the boy returned home after a short walk in the woods (turns out, unbeknownst to him, he was abducted by aliens for a few years) to find another family living there, and all the furniture had changed. And when he found his family they were all so much older than him. His younger brother was a man. Maybe it’s about being untethered from reality, being let go from reality, from family, from home, from self, in the moments of making a poem. Meaning is like blood. Heather even said that when you look at a thing, it swells up with meaning. She also said something that has echoed in my brain for days now, “To keep living (and writing) as if unaware of the wild meaninglessness is the saddest happiness on the planet.” The wild meaninglessness. We can’t live like this, aware of the wild meaninglessness. We can’t just stare in the mirror until we become trees. Matthew said there is room for everything along the spectrum of dream and reality as long as it is human and good. It is probably good to remember that poetry isn’t supposed to be anything. A poem is not necessarily more surreal according to how far it sits on the dream end of that spectrum, but perhaps more surreal if it confuses the spectrum, if it confuses hurt and light, meaning and meaninglessness, just good warm sad blood spilling out in the forest.
|
