JJN: Joel, are you now at the height of your
poetic powers?:-)
JC: Jane, If I really felt that I were, I
don't think that I'd say or even write
JJN:
A few years ago I was in Tokyo with Jesse Glass, and some of his friends
including British born Tokyo poet Philip Rowland, Japanese poet Yoko Danno who
writes poetry only in English, and Japanese and Chinese poetry translator
Burton Watson. Jesse asked us all lightheartedly if while in the midst of
writing a poem we felt like geniuses, and I have to admit during the drafting
of a poem in recent years I do often feel something like that;-) I didn't always feel that way; when I
started writing poems I felt intrigued but sort of lost often, not sure how to
get out of the jams my poems sometimes found themselves in .
A
poetry workshop instructor said it took him seven years to write his first good
poem. That comment was useful for
me.
When
I look at some of my earlier work, as in my first two books, I think it was the
best I could do at the time but I think I can do better or more now and achieve
better results faster with less effort, tho I also see things I still like in
the early work. I assume it would
be like playing a musical instrument-- an experienced musician I assume could
improvise easily and well compared to a beginner for example I would assume.
I
remember seeing a really spectacular poem written by Paul Hoover online
accompanied by his comment that he wrote it in a few minutes only, and he told
me in an interview that he wrote all of the 56 poems in his book Sonnet 56 in a few months etc. Many or
most or all? beginners may not be able to do that I reckon !
There
is a kind of dopamine rush (one of the courses I am teaching this semester has
a bit to do with pop psychology as it turns out and we talked about dopamine
recently!) I guess when writing a
poem, especially after you have been at it a while and do it with confidence
and playfulness versus fear and confusion or something like that --which may
make us feel like geniuses--temporarily.
Maybe that is what keeps us going?:-) Or the unrequited desire to keep writing
the perfect poem. Or because we don't have something more interesting to do (at
least, I usually don't:-)
JC: IÕd like to follow up on a couple of
your ideas. For me, also, there
have been changes in how I feel about writing and how I feel during the act of
composition. I too write more and
more quickly, and I revise much less frequently than ever before. Unlike the younger version of myself, I
now have to have more rhythms and words in my head prior to putting anything
down on paper or on the screen. You
speculate about more Òconfidence and playfulnessÓ having come into your
writing. Playfulness is essential,
I agree, and I believe that play has always been a prime motivator for me; when
that ceases to be part of the process, IÕll be done or dead. On the other hand, I think that there is
a very fine line separating confidence and fear. At the beginning of my seventh decade of
life, I work with the certain (confident?) knowledge that the days dwindle down
to a precious few(er), and with the simultaneous fear that the creative
opportunity window is ineluctably lowering.
Paradoxically,
I suppose, I still, more often than not, find it necessary to compose early
drafts in longhand, on paper, before going to the keyboard.
JJN: Many interesting points. I also compose
by hand! and then type later--The pen I am using, my handwriting that day, the
kind of paper I am working with, all influences the poem I later type I
think. My husband for example gave
me a notebook that was graph paper as a present and it led to some interesting
use of space in poems.
I
remember some earlier poems where I was feeling gutsy but also thinking--will
people actually go for this? You know, like, can I get away with this? But I found the reception to my
"weird" work was positive so I think that reception encouraged me to
keep sticking my neck out there so to speak... comments have helped sustain me
as a poet, as I live in a small town in Japan where English is not used and
nobody in my town cares to read my work and nearly all my friends have no
interest in poetry, etc. and if I hold a reading in Japan there are not many
people to attend, etc., so most of the encouragement I have to keep writing
thus comes from emailed comments from poets abroad, many of whom I have never
in fact met in person. I don't even
think of myself as an applause junkie!, but you know, otherwise I would be
writing pretty much to myself after all and there would be no reason to even
bother to type my work....even tho the thrill of the writing is what makes us
do it, right?, we don't just write it we type it up and send it to journals and
so on...and hope it connects with somebody, even a small group of
somebodies....
You
mentioned NYC-- How do you think
NYC has shaped your writing? For me
since I live in small town Japan, probably the isolation I feel as a writer of
poetry in English is shaping my writing, and my contact with English in
surrogate form now so to speak (the English I read and hear but not read/heard
locallyÉ).
Recently
IÕm working on a longpoem
(currently chapbook length) titled ÒBLANK CITYÓ that was begun before
the Tohoku incidents but incorporates them but also incorporates the language
of American TV etc. and some recent events in the U.S. and Europe, etc. While working on this in moments
stolen from university work, I also just finished what I will call minimalist
fiction (sort of hybrid) piece titled "invisible bodies" which
combines the US and Japan as a setting (though what happens in it could happen
anywhere—and I am reminded now of MallarmeÕs comment which I think was
that poets write in a language that occupies an imaginary country!:-)
forthcoming in a journal published here in Japan called Yomimono edited by fiction writer Suzanne Kamata. I think much of
what I write has no well-defined place in fact, finally, nor wants to, or is I
guess deliberately blurry; the events if any and language come out of various
overlapping contexts in terms of geography and history and media. Please, tell me about New York! a far
cry from my town of Anjo (in English, "safe castle" and the town name
is apt!!!) and how it is impacting your work--
JC: New York―the city that never
sleeps and is full of dreams.
Forgive me for indulging in Woody Allen-like romanticism at this
juncture where I sleep less and dream more than ever. I like to think, and I hope that there
is evidence, that the density, energy, and various musics of NYC find their way
into my writing. ThatÕs what I
strive for, in any case.
JJN: That sounds great to me, Joel! And having read your work....I think
so....
One
of the courses that I teach is an intro to American poetry for (Japanese of
course) undergrads majoring in British and American studies and my students
read Langston Hughes the other day (I also played the song "Backlash
Blues" co-written by Hughes and Nina Simone, a Hughes recording of him
reading his poem "The Weary Blues" and others....for my
students...). Sometimes I would
describe the poetry I like as complicated/difficult (much of it certainly is
that! shall I name names? the list
would be too long, but, you know, Scalapino, Waldrop, Lauterbach, etc........)
but at the same time there are poets like Hughes or Lucille Clifton who I like
a lot too and "complicated" may not be the word that jumps to mind
yet--your mentioning NY and the musics of NYC...the musical element of poetry
is also of course so much a part of many of the writers I do like and Hughes is an example of that
obviously...but interestingly ÒBLANK CITYÓ is the flattest sounding thing I
have ever written! like an announcement -- But-- So -- there are a great many possible
elements of a poem that could attract me...I guess one thing that would turn me
off would be unintended predictability (though I love intentional banality,
e.g. some of the early Roxy Music lyrics....e.g. the cliche-ridden
"Editions of You" -- I find those early songs irresistible! and poems
that would do that) or....?! Any comments on this?
JC: It seems to me that any significant
poetry challenges readers and thus falls somewhere along a continuum of
complexity/difficulty that includes work from any number of so-called schools
of writing. So, although currently
I do tend to seek out poets that one might label experimental, I also
frequently go back to canonic poems, if you will, which always reward rereading
because they continually confront me with all of their previous demands as well
as marvelous, newly discovered mysteries.
And donÕt labels quickly become meaningless, anyway? What great writers donÕt experiment,
donÕt play, donÕt attempt to soar as high as possible toward that Òupper limit
of musicÓ that Zukovsky insisted upon?
I suppose, then, that a reader might consider any poetÕs position not
just along a horizontal continuum but simultaneously on a vertical,
musical/sound axis. Of course, I
mean this only half (or less) seriously; but maybe that sort of metaphorical
graphing might be somewhat useful―for a minute or two, at least, before
the whole theoretical graph collapses and one falls back to the ground of
inarticulation. As youÕve
suggested, once one begins to define the particular elements of masterful
poetry, the enterprise rather speedily sputters out into silence or, even
worse, jargon.
Jane,
IÕm extremely curious about what you say youÕre doing with ÒBLANK CITYÓ and its
Òdeliberate flatnessÓ! Can you try
to explain and illustrate?
JJN:
Thanks for your interest. I will try --and also wish to talk perhaps a little
more about the "labels" notionÉ
About
ÒBLANK CITYÓ, I would prefer readers judge it on their own of course and tell
me what they see / hear in it! but as of now (as we conduct our interview)
parts of it have been recently published online in Otoliths journal, the 100,000 poets for change e-anthology on the Fieralingue website, and a new and I
think exciting print journal based on the east coast called Haven that asked for topical work.
A
stanza of ÒBLANK CITYÓ that appears
in the online 100,000 poets for change
anthology is:
earn
easy typing income. lather, rinse, repeat. in a contest
between
truth and beauty money wins every time. model
AF6200
is not as good as last year's but costs more. i may be
radioactive
iodine. what remains after the tidal wave. go ask Father Nature.
somebody stole my vertebrae. your browsing is history. we
are scientists after all. i worry where my eyes will go next. i would
like to move my hand across that continent but stop myself
Each
stanza so far has a similar sense of "style" (a kind of lack of style
:-) and sounds much like the one above, similar length and punctuation style,
etc. but I have tried to insert a variety of "surprises" (ÒsurfacesÓ)
into each stanza yet keeping the same (flat) tone and with certain overarching
themes connecting the entire work to keep it together as one unified interwoven
if obviously choppy and faux-linear piece. Whether the work stays chapbook
length or grows beyond that of course depends on many factors (my energy level
?)-- tho it's feeling quite done recently.
The
parts in the recent Otoliths are the
earliest parts, which my sister, a filmmaker, described as an avant-garde film
in words...but the work has been morphing in various directions—tho I
think maintaining a core.
About
labels and what we like in poems--and other things you have brought up that
interest me greatly--I too oscillate between reading contemporary
"experimental" works by living writers and works from other eras and
different genres and styles -- I
have a thing for medieval literature alsoÉ.well, again, broad--Shakespeare,
Donne, Chaucer, Anne Bradstreet, Gwendolyn Brooks, the many many great living
poets in various countries too, etcÉinfiniteÉBut as you imply, a lot of poems
now considered conventional from previous eras are quite complicated. This would include many of the poems in
the textbooks I use in courses -- written long ago. What none of the textbooks do include
are works that I would call simplistic even though few if any avant-garde works
(unfortunately!) are included in them.
On
TV the other day was a documentary about American director John Ford and guests
in this film describing his work as deceptively simple whereas actually there
were opposing tensions in his films that made them anything but simple (to
quote from memory from the documentary).
With a poem I / we like too I think the same exists--Some slam poetry and
I don't want to dis slam poetry because I have not attended a slam in years and
can't discuss it thus, but some I heard had the musical element but not the
semantic / semiotic complexity I was looking for --it is many levels working
together that finally work for me I suppose, and I have realized there is too
an attitude or outlook (on a semantic level) that will either appeal or
not as part of any work for
me. One person in the Ford
documentary said ambiguity was a characteristic of all good art. I thought yes, that is part of it for
certain with a poem too--in a letter I received from Kevin Killian he wrote
that for him all good poems had a sense of "mystery" to them and
perhaps it is that, the thing that allows us to find individually different
things and have different experiences on different days with the same works and
different works etc. which makes it fascinate us. And the ambiguity keeping the works from
becoming authoritative or closed off or simplistic.
Still,
some of my favorite poems would include poems like Lucille Clifton's "miss
rosie", Thylias Moss' "Rush Hour," Hughes' "Theme for
English B"É.Marvin Bell's "Ending with a Line from Lear" which
is one of my favorite elegies (another favorite is a rock song I heard in my
car the other day, "Fire Maple Song" by US hard rock band EverclearÉthe
lyrics of many of the songs on their early albums are like short stories..)
certainly a -- deceptively simple? -- work and a musical one and a shorter one!
may be easier to recall of course but--certain specific lines or parts from
certain so called contemporary "experimental" poems will be easy to
recall whereas we could not easily recall a long complex "chaotic"
work at will in its entirety—I mention this because ÒmemorableÓ work is
work that is capable of being recalled! Making some great (complicated) works
lessÒmemorableÓ:-).
I
have started writing "experimental" poetry in quotes because I feel
uncomfortable with the label. Part
of my discomfort may be because I have heard the word uttered dismissively by
people who don't seem to like it butÉanother part could be the notion or nuance
of something being "only" an experiment like hasty or trivial which I
don't think is appropriate hereÉbut, of course -- whatever word I attempt to
substitute will be at most fleetingly (if that) satisfactory, like
"exploratory" poetics--though at this minute in time on this day I
like that expression --is anybody using that? I thought of it on my own tho no
doubt others have thought of it already too-- as you said, we could attempt to
codify it, let it become jargon, reinvent jargon endlesslyÉyet I'd rather spend
my scant free time writing poems than inventing poetry jargon in essays I
suppose finally soÉ:-) tho could be fun there too--
Julia
Kristeva I believe wrote about the
"translinguistic" and used the word "semiotic" to
mean the effects of meaning irreducible to language or operating outside of
language (used I think differently than I learned the word "semiotic"
as a grad student majoring in linguistics-- from memory!)--this may be crucial
to the practice of reading and writing poems and helpful to illuminate the
problem of nomenclature and why it does not "work"―The meanings
run away on their own from the words we useÉ.
JC: Thanks for giving me a sample from
ÒBLANK CITYÓ, Jane. With all due
respect, I wonder if, in your characterization of that workÕs style as Òflat,Ó
you are being unfair to yourself.
If you mean flat as a synonym for Òunmusical,Ó then I beg to
differ. I hear/feel rhythms and
sounds that are highly charged and wonderfully shifting and layered. Keep in mind Ron SillimanÕs commentary
regarding the potential ÒmeasureÓ of the sentence and of the stanzaic
paragraph. Of course, there is a
great deal of ÒproseÓ that is regrettably flat. But that is certainly not at all true of
the section you sent.
Can
you clarify your usage of ÒflatÓ?
JJN: Thanks! I think the poem is coming to me
sometimes in the voice of a 30-something white male (sorry for the stereotype)
TV announcer who is bored with his job/life and self-medicates as a result:-) I
hear it in my head as monotone --
I do realize admitting publicly that I hear voices and write those down
as poems says a lot about me but ...:-) Though that hardly makes me unique. I like to think about where the voices
come from and where they will go, what part of the body do they inhabit, how do
they travel inside and outside the body, whose body they might enter nextÉ.:-).
I
am thrilled that you hear something in it (anything at all!). That's what we love I assume about
poetry -- not just the dopamine rush
of course but the varied experiences that poetry makes possible,
and, I absolutely agree with poets
(like Spahr I think who is very interesting to me, what she says about
poetry...among many other interesting poet-commentators) who say poetry expands
their thinking. We must be forming
more new neural connections / synapses in our brains I suppose the longer we
read and write poems !
Now,
Joel, please share with me if you don't mind a snippet of something new or
recent you are working on, and
comment on how you see it and/or about its or your objectives.....?
JC: In 2010, probably in the aftermath of
teaching some sort of grammar lesson, I started thinking about punctuation
marks. Not at all strange, right? In any case, I eventually formulated two
sentences on the subject of periods, and then I thought IÕd try developing a
sequence (of courseÉ) of sentences and sentence fragments that all, to one
degree or another, had to do with ÒperiodsÓ of different
kinds―punctuation marks, durations, chunks of time, menstrual cycles, and
so on. I collected sentences from
many different sources, and I created/made up close to an equal number. I tried to be very conscious of not only
the content of each sentence, whether ÒgatheredÓ or invented, but also unique
rhythmic and other aural elements, even in groups of words that were quite
scientific or technical in nature.
Then I worked on pairing up these two kinds of sentences, appropriated
and original, one of each category of sentence in every pair. I ended up with 100 pairs of
sentences. As I developed the
sequence, I gave considerable thought to how each word group in each pair
resonated/rhymed with its Òpartner,Ó and then―ultimately―to the overall
order of these 100 units. Since I
was composing in what is traditionally called Òprose,Ó it seems to me that much
of what I was dealing with in this sequence (entitled PERIODS) overlaps with
your creation of BLANK CITY. Here
are the first several sections and the very last one from PERIODS:
.
.
. Each end-stop contains an infinite
number of points.
. For five weeks, he and his gray dropped
off mail down through all the northern counties.
.
.
. As he thought about his
daughter―he desperately wanted her to be happy; she was unhappy, perhaps
desperately―he noticed cars from the late-morning train rushing
by―orange, black, red: he
found no connection.
. Every painting is a step toward the
next.
.
.
. I spent most of my days at my
grandparentsÕ house, learning the language and absorbing the American culture
through television shows.
. Realization: it is now whole cloth―the
behaviors; the scandal; the scandalÕs history.
.
.
.
After he failed to close the deal, he sat alone in his bright, empty
office and stared at the spot on the desk where his pen-point kept hitting.
. Periods complete sentences, which are
complete periods.
As
you know, Jeffrey Side recently published roughly the first half of the entire
sequence, as part of his Argotist Ebooks series.
JN:
Yes, and I enjoyed it immensely.
You have written a lot of chapbooks,
Joel! and I haven't myself really.
My book notational started as
a chapbook titled disappearance
(allow me to thank the Anemone Sidecar for publishing disappearance online) but...and perhaps ÒBLANK CITYÓ will grow
further yet (not sure!) but-- tho maybe it will remain a chapbook-- Is there
something about the chapbook length work that appeals to you - -I mean
obviously there must be something--what is that something?
JC: In 1978, when I was still maybe six
years or so away from putting out my first collection, George Oppen published
and I purchased his slim volume entitled PRIMITIVE. I remember the great pleasure of holding
that book in hand, of being instantly taken by the haunting simplicity of the
cover design, of the actual feel of its letter press texture; it continues to
be a joy to handle this literal object that contains within it miraculous
Objectivist Poems. Then, yes, the
poems themselves. ÒOnlyÓ thirteen
poems that accumulate to an immeasurable collective density; each piece
possesses an astounding depth. I
understood right away that the richness, the profundity of that text has
everything to do with its brevity.
Its length matters and produces matter that truly matters. So achieving what Oppen does in
PRIMITIVE became a (probably impossible) goal for me, early on. And in recent years IÕve tended to think
and organize by means of poetic sequences, which lend themselves to chapbook
length, for me, at least, because my own attention and scrutiny―and those
of most readers, I believe―have a limit, and outer parameter of forty
pages, tops.
JJN: I like what you say about the
"feel" of the book. One book from the past for me that felt a certain
way (nappy!) in my hand that I liked, and almost fit the size of my large
hands, and looked a certain way outside on the covers and inside by the choice
of arrangement of words that is stuck in my head forever for some reason I
don't know was/is Tom Clark's book SMACK. There are so many great poetry
publishers now making the most beautiful handmade books too--too many to name
but--
So
we have all developed ADHD (I include myself)...that's interesting, Joel. I myself have gone the same way, to
start thinking and writing in sequences.
My first little book did not come about that way at all, I hand picked a
variety of poems over years of publishing that I thought worked together and
thought hard about how to organize them and order them etc. but I think ever
since the short series "evil nature" or in more recent years I
started working much more with concepts and series like you say. I wonder if this career trajectory is
common to many other poets?
JC: The process of selecting and organizing
your first book is precisely the one I employed in putting together collections
at the beginning of my own publishing Òcareer,Ó if I may be allowed to use such
a term. But if I broaden, loosen,
the definition of Òsequence,Ó I can argue that even in those early books there
are sections or in some cases long poems that are sequential in nature. For the past two decades or more, IÕve
thought, planned, and composed serially, very intentionally and in ways that
now seem natural if not habitual.
Your question regarding the commonality of such writing, in the work of
other poets, prompted me to take a look at my bookshelves. In no particular order, and basing my
little survey on my expanded notion of what a sequence might be, these names
presented themselves: Spicer, Stevens,
Reznikoff, Haryette Mullen, Notley, Silliman, Scalapino, Oppen, W.C. Williams,
Whitman, DuPlessis, Osman, Taggart, Clifton, Duncan, Rukeyser, Pound. Sequence (of one sort or another) after
sequence. The issue of a common
ÒtrajectoryÓ is less open to generalization, I think. However, serial vision and overall
structure is quite undeniable in the work of major poetic voices.
JJN: What you say makes sense. There are also poets who seem to
experiment with more styles and genres throughout their careers than others.
I
think "evil nature" is the first consciously serial work I wrote, and
it was only four or five not so long parts (appearing in my 2nd and
3rd books) and when I got to my 3rd book, that book is a kind of
almost two series running concurrently, a series of poems written in boxy
shapes similar to prose poems but I think hybrid or what to call them
debatable, and then non-boxy
tabloidy poems (written mostly later) that make many references to American pop
culture but in a few cases also Japanese pop culture and Japanese literature. I
hoped putting the two strands together in the same book would create an
interesting result butÉ
My
4th book (The Meditations) is a
series of poems that appear pretty much in the order I wrote them, so like one
long diverse poem with some common threads and "refrains". The fifth book I wrote came about from a
desire to try to write a book that was mostly in form, especially after the
longish mostly free verse Meds (those
poems were medicine for me; I was messed up with a back injury during a lot of
the writing of that book, and unlike what I am working on now that bookÕs
sources are largely bookish); the poems do not appear precisely in the order
written but I set out with a plan to write a sonnet, sestina, ghazal, pantoum,
villanelle etc. and to see if I could make a book based on different forms,
which is what happened. notational as I mentioned started out
as a chapbook, with a central thematic concept that I extended and made into
the longer book and now ÒBLANK CITY" is a serial work, working with the
non-literary (the language of the everyday) as my material, an attempt to make
the non-literary literary.
So
I guess I did not get into more "serial" writing till I got to a 3rd
or 4th book. But before putting together a first book, a process which at the
time made me very nervous but now is something I find, fortunately, fun!, I was
just writing poems and sending them to journals and not thinking of books. That is still true to an extent now butÉ
You
mentioned the physical appearance of the Oppen book. After moving to Japan I probably became
even more attentive generally to the properties of material objects, than
before as a person who naturally gravitated to the abstract more than the
concrete from childhood and was one of those people who called not
"observant"Ée.g. you could have repainted the living room and i did
not notice..I was even dumped by a poet who I had hoped for a longer romantic
relationship with when living in Chicago allegedly due to my lack of fashion
sense--yes I mean clothing! i heard he did not like being seen with somebody so
unstylish—he gave up poetry BTW!;-) because of the (Japanese) culture
being so "visual" in certain special ways. So in terms of recent and
much older books where the look and feel of them stay much in mind for some
reasons, other than SMACK by Tom
Clark (All men should make pink
books! I love Gurly Man though to me
it's not so Gurly...I think Gary Sullivan has a pink book...PPL in a Depot? I parodied ÒThe Ballad
of the Gurly ManÓ in a poem in incidental
music...) another is Hoover's Sonnet
56 and Chernoff's Among the Names
with that sculpture on the coverÉ.the O Books War and Peace series
of anthology coversÉof course there are a lot of interesting poetry-visual art
collaborative books with art inside--too many to list for now--and poets doing
visual and concrete poetry in all kinds of ways now--and, so many great
handmade books like that Tinfish, Yo yo labs / Portable press and so many
others putting out, I have a real thing for the small handmade book, the poetry
art object.
When
I lived in Chicago I often had Frank O'Hara in my lap (his work I mean
obviously! he died before I was bornÉ! :-) on the train and re-read Meditations in an Emergency so
many times the cover is present in my mind even now--
I
mentioned my sister is a filmmaker and she also BTW did the cover art for my
first two books as a big sisterly gesture. I've been lucky in that for all the
books I've done so far I was given the privilege of being able to view and
select art by a number of artists whose work I admire and connects I think in
important ways to the poetry I had written and the kindness / cooperativeness
of poetry publishers to make it all work as a book and contribute their ideas
and design time etc.--that has made putting out books much more interesting for
me; I'm very grateful to the
artists and the publishers, beyond what I can say in words but I'd like to
mention that here. Because their
work is part of course of the collaborative element in the books--that the
books would not exist as they are of course without the artists and the book
designers and publishers etc. so--
In
a certain sense I think every poem individually is a collaboration of course
even if written alone because it is built upon the work of others that
consciously and unconsciously influences it. As far as collaborative poem writing
where two or more poets contribute different lines or stanzas etc., I've done
very very little of that recently tho I did some Japanese style
"renshi" with some poets recently (the result of one such
"renshi" will be published in Shampoo
this year—as writers we were/are all very diverse so it was quite
interesting for me to work with writers whose styles vary but came together for
the project)ÉDo you have any thoughts you would like to share on the topic of
"collaborations"? and/or the influence of visual art, philosophy or
music in your work--
JC: Yes, all writers, whether consciously or
not and to varying degrees of intentionality, are citizens of an ever-expanding
community of other authors that influence and inspire. To deny that is both foolish and
prideful. As far as more direct
collaboration goes, I have done very little. A few years ago, I was invited to
collaborate on a series of poems.
IÕm sorry to say that I donÕt remember who the other poet was. I ended
up being unhappy about the results, and IÕm more than willing to accept the
blame for that. I really was not
very good at the whole enterprise, and I admit that IÕve not, to this point at
least, been at all enthused by the whole concept. Now, I hope that is not evidence of an
unhealthy self-centering or exclusive absorption in my own compositional
endeavors. IÕd rather spin it all
this way: I have more than enough
difficulty collaborating/getting along with my own self, so to suck any other
innocent authorial victim into the ongoing struggle strikes me as unfair if not
downright criminal! There has been,
however, one collaborative relationship that I have genuinely appreciated. A former teaching colleague and visual
artist, Kristy Higby, has created several small Òbooks-as-art-objectsÓ that
feature cut-outs from some of my poems.
She sought my permission to engage in this venture, and the results are,
thanks to her, wonderfully complex and gratifying.
Music
in my writing? My father was a
professional jazz trombonist and vocalist.
Like ShakespeareÕs Miranda, I grew up with music as an element in the
air. Long before I was gripped by
the powers of poetry, I knew that I wanted to learn all I could about that
incredible music and to reach the point where I could at least hold my own as a
player. I had the great fortune, a
blessing really, of apprenticing with my father and his older jazz musician
colleagues; they were all extremely experienced, wise, and, thankfully,
generous and forgiving of all my blunders.
Eventually, I played keyboards professionally, full-time, with a jazz
quartet (Compass), in the early-mid 70Õs.
And it was during that time that I was beginning to be serious about
poetry and wanting to write. So, in
ways that are almost impossible to trace, I am convinced that music/jazz
informed my writing from the start.
(That probably worked the other way, also, but would be even harder to
articulate). One of the many
weaknesses of my early poetry was my inability to bring effective musical
elements into the language I was making.
As IÕve continued writing, IÕve learned more―from others and by
practice―about word-music and have tried to be much more intentional,
savvy, and diverse in working with these elements. As I say, IÕve tried, and I do hope that
my efforts have yielded some positive results.
Philosophy? As an undergraduate at Colgate
University, I majored in philosophy and religion. Maybe I didnÕt read the right
philosophers or translations, but I did become weary of the philosophical texts
I was examining, because, as fascinating as certain ideas, questions, and
arguments were, the language, the writing itself, seemed mediocre, dry, and
banal. There are, of course,
notable exceptions―Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Leslie Scalapino and Joan Retallack are
two major authors who have restored my faith in the possibilities and really
the necessities of philosophical inquiry.
Scalapino posits that poets are the new philosophers, and she herself is
probably the outstanding exemplar of a writer who uses startlingly exploratory
language―syntax and broader structures―to advance astounding ideas
about how we can see and try to understand and change ourselves and our
world.
JN: That is interesting what you write
about collaboration. Some people
have told me they want to obliterate the self, through collaboration or other
activities (like computer generated and found texts etc. and certainly I also
"find" and use texts--and, after all, I did not invent the English
language :-) -- but I want at this point in my life to guard against that thing
to some extent -- to be obliterated, to lose the self I have, and that self
appears more genuinely despite artifice in poems than other areas of life (yes
even when I am writing down the voice of an imaginary white male! :-) I also
wrote a sestina some years back that came to me in the voice of a British older
male...and some poems are female etc.) maybe where in other areas of life I may
feel a need to please others etc. and since my poem has no "market"
-- There are so many opportunities
to get lost in the group in my life but very often if always? not in a positive way, in a way where something beyond all
of us takes over --something not good and canceling out what is genuine in us
and making forget our purposes in life.
Because I currently live in a Ògroup-orientedÓ society I think I have
experienced both the pros and cons of so called collectivism particularly in a work
setting.
The
"renshi" I referred to I would not have participated in had it not
been led by such a capable knowledgeable and affable person (Jeffrey Angles an
expert of Japanese literature and a wonderful and of course also extremely
talented person) and done in a proscribed (Japanese) way where my role was only
to provide a verse when it was my turn and I did not have to edit or comment on
other people's work (or lead the whole thing). Also, I knew personally / had met in
person everybody but one participant (tho I got to know and like that
participant via emails and book exchanges etc and had / have a warm feeling
about him...). A worry I would have
about any collaboration is a sort of domination happening I guess. (Japan as a group-oriented society
is not of course always democratic...not that I view as a whole allegedly
democratic societies around the globe as such....topic for another day...and I
worked in top-down companies in the US while a college and grad student but--
but my need to write /read poetry is not only related to my ADHD but my PTSD
that comes from being . . .
"awake"?É.:-)
Stafford used the word ÒawakeÓ as a necessary condition for poetry --
But I hope to learn how to collaborate successfully, I'm very interested in
it...IÕve certainly learned useful tools for collaborating while in Japan that
I may not have learned otherwise.
I
envy your musical background! in that I could not live without music but play
no instrument nor do I sing yet music is crucial to my daily life. As with
poetry, my tastes have broadened over the years; the other day I was listening
to Japanese "enka" (sentimental songs, kind of like US country music)
in the car part of the day, later in the afternoon to Western classical music,
after that hard rock (I like guitar solos from the 70s:-) etc. in the same day
etc. This appreciation of
diversity of styles has come with age for me I think more and moreÉtho may
always have been there to some extent.
I minored in philosophy, majored in
literature at a Catholic university in Chicago before transferring to art
school to major in poetry writing as an undergrad, completing my BA at the art
school. I did my grad work as I
mentioned in linguistics. This was
actually just before all those master's in creative writing programs
proliferated in the US, but at the time I was concerned if I majored in
literature I would end up with the kind of many (but not all) lit classes I had
at the Catholic uni, where the teacher lectured the whole time and my task as a
student was to listen carefully and emulate the teacher's way of thinking in
order to receive a respectable grade etc.
In any case mainly because of the somewhat negative experiences in many
but not all lit courses and because
I was equally interested in linguistics I ended up majoring in
linguistics--which ended up in part bringing me to Japan but--
About
those lit courses--One teacher in particular who taught many of the lit courses
at the one uni seemed to me to present literature (not poetry actually this was
fiction mostly) as a kind of game in which the author cleverly inserted a lot
of symbols and the reader's task if s/he was smart enough was to find and
figure them out. Now that I teach
poetry I realize a lot of my students have that very idea and it's my task to
try to dispel them of that thought—this is not an easy task IÕve
learned! Because they think they
have won when they have "properly" decoded the poem and lost when
they were not bright enough to do so! (as Susan Schultz describes in her book A Poetics of Impasse). It's no wonder some people don't like
poems or feel intimidated by poetry.
I was on a local (Japan) electronic newsgroup the other day where
somebody referred to poetry as a high brow activity. Personally I don't think of myself in the past or now or tomorrow as
highbrow (anything but; in fact before moving to Japan I did an internship at
an Ivy League school where I worried pre-departure that I would not fit in
socially well enough – I figured I had the smarts but not the
ÒbreedingÓ), poetry is just something that attracted me early on like music,
something that became an obsession over time. One of the first poets I remember
becoming obsessive about was e. e. cummings (I would have been in my teens),
and also Plath... Maybe those poets encountered early will always occupy a
special placeÉ
Scalapino
who we both love is one of the most original writers ever IMHO and has had had
an influence on how I read poetry I think.
I
read philosophy but when reading some works I think of Reginald Shepard's
comment--about poetry--that some of the things that have influenced him most he
cannot claim to understand. When I
read philosophy I have an understanding of it, but I don't know how dissimilar
my understanding is to the author's or other reader's understandings, and some
philosophical works may depend a lot on an understanding of other works that I
donÕt know well enough. Overall I
feel like I don't know enough philosophy to claim to know much about it (though I've read enough poetry now, since
high school, to feel I know more than a little about poetry, and since I
practice it myself...you learn a lot from doing of course...). As far as philosophers, however, I have
been attracted perhaps especially to French writers who write both philosophical and literary works and blur the
distinctions between those--e.g. Irigaray, Sartre, Cixous, Kristeva, Derrida,
Deleuze and Guattari...but also to Kierkegaard because his work is so
passionate and ethics-oriented...
I
think Wittgenstein said all philosophy should be read as poetry? (I wouldn't
know how else to read it!!!) -- I think all poems should be considered
philosophical statements. I think
Derrida may have said in an interview that only a half dozen people, probably
poets!, in the world likely understood his work! Well, nice for us if so, eh?
So,
we've been influenced by music philosophy and other poets. For me visual art
forms including painting film and sculpture, even dance, etc. it seems all of
those become more and more influential to me and then my work but so is CNN
Japan news etc., the internet, the people in my daily life...
(The
online) Here Comes Everybody asks
poets who are some of their favorite non-Anglo-American writers. Tho much is made of multiculturalism
these days, the notion hardly seems novel to artists. ItÕs a good question to
ask I think however. A huge number of African American writers' works have been
and are on me a huge influence, too many too list--Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge, but sooo many others
...Chinese writers like Bei Dao, many French writers like Reverdy, Baudelaire,
Rimbaud...French writers still alive today whose work I struggle to read in my
intermediate French..the first Japanese poet I remember encountering in
Japanese was the concrete poet Niikuni Seiichi--before I came to Japan I
studied French not Japanese so I learned Japanese in Japan by watching TV with
a dictionary in my lap, listening to Japanese pop songs, then reading
children's books and then finding easier to read in Japanese poets like Tanikawa
Shuntaro and Ishigaki Rin, then attempting more difficult poems / poets in
Japanese --I have recently been interested particularly in the poets Tamura
Ryuichi and Ito Hiromi among others....I am still learning about Japanese
poetry and have much yet to learn.
I often buy anthologies which are translations from a variety of
languages such as Black Dog Black Night (Vietnamese),
Ambers Aglow (poems by Polish female
poets), Dreaming the Actual (fiction
and poetry by Israeli women) as some that I particularly enjoyed...and have
been re-reading Burton Watson's translation of the Late Poems of Lu You.
IÕve also recently been re-reading a book by Octavio Paz.
Would
you like to say anything about upcoming projects?
JC:
This summer, 2011, I hope to make progress with a play script that has been
sitting around and frustrating me for a couple of years. This is the fourth script IÕve
attempted. I am fascinated by theater
and all that it can do, all that makes it unique. Two of my plays have been given staged
readings in Manhattan. So far,
producers are not banging at my door, but IÕll keep at this, along with my
poetry, and weÕll see what happens.
JJN: That sounds really great Joel. IÕd love to see your work on a stage.
And Joel, thanks so much for collaborating on this interview with me! :-)
JC: The exchange has been a true
pleasure!
Bios
JOEL
CHACE has published more than a dozen print and electronic collections of
poetry. He lives in New Providence,
New Jersey. Email is joel dot chace
at gmail dot com.
JANE
JORITZ-NAKAGAWA is the author of six books of poetry and numerous prose
works. She lives in a small city in
central Japan. Email is welcome at
janenakagawa at yahoo dot com.