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RANDY ROARK
Randy Roark: Interview by Jim Cohn
Randy
Roark came to Boulder in November 1979 to apprentice with the poet Allen
Ginsberg as he assembled his Collected Poems, and continued to work in various
capacities with the poet until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. He has published over
40 volumes of original prose and poetry and art criticism under his Laocoon
Press imprint. See http://randyroark.com/. This interview began in March, 2009,
and continued for several months.
Jim Cohn:
As a child growing up in a small town in Connecticut, did you have some kind of
idea early on that you would have a passion for the arts?
Randy Roark: I didn’t really have much exposure to the arts when I was a
child. I do remember seeing a photograph of a garden sculpture by David Smith
in an issue of The Weekly Reader when
I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade that moved me enough
that I cut it out and hung it over my desk. It was entitled something like
“Reclining Woman” and it was a metal sculpture of loops and curves longer than
it was high. First I looked for and found the shape of a reclining woman, and I
was feeling pretty pleased with myself because it was definitely abstract, but
then suddenly something happened and the sculpture kind of disappeared and I
was looking at the sky and the clouds behind it. Then my vision would flicker
back and forth—I’d see the sculpture, then I would see the suggestion of a
woman reclining, and then it would disappear and I’d see the sky and clouds.
There was this “leap” that I’ve associated with art ever since. That’s one of
the reasons I still go to museums—to change my way of seeing, to experience
that leap from looking at something to suddenly seeing something else,
something that was hidden, something that didn’t exist a moment before. I find
that experience most often when I’m reading a book or in art museums or at rock
shows. I think the experience of seeing in that way must release endorphins or something
because it’s a kind of high that persists even when I look away from the
painting. I can feel a definitely altered state of consciousness come over me
after a couple of hours in a museum—I begin to slow down, my awareness changes,
not only about the art but about everything—I become hyper-aware of the light
in the room, the silence, the people around me; what they’re wearing, the way
they stand and walk and talk to each other. I kind of disappear. I remember
once in the Denver Art Museum they had a temporary exhibit including one of
Cezanne’s paintings of Mt. Ste. Victoire and in this altered state of mind I
saw for the first time how cold colors receded and hot colors advanced, and for
a moment the painting became three-dimensional—it sort of reassembled in the
air between the painting and my eyes and I got so dizzy I had to sit on the
floor until I could stand up again. I had a similar experience after an
Impressionist exhibition at the same museum—when I left the museum it was dark
and everything was covered in silvery snow and the streetlights were diffused
through the fog and there were swirling crystals forming in the air like
thousands of diamonds and I felt like I was walking in an Impressionist
painting.
As for literature, I was fascinated with long novels,
especially the historical novels of Kenneth Roberts, as soon as I could read
them. I enjoyed opening a book and entering a world that I could get lost in. I
also bought poetry books from the Scholastic Book Services in grammar school. I
don’t know why I started reading poetry or kept reading it because I didn’t
really understand many of the poems and I can’t remember poetry even being
taught until fifth grade, but I would buy these anthologies and read them all
the way through just for the pleasure of the sounds of the words themselves.
They were like brief pieces of music whose structure was a measured line, and
they usually rhymed which was also fun. And they would keep this forward-moving
rhythm going on until they reached a full stop, usually ending with a
surprising rhyme so the last word would hit with a loud thump followed by this
weird, portentous reverberation. It was a different kind of experience than
when I was reading novels where I felt like I was living inside the story. There
was hardly ever any sensory imagery associated for me in reading poems—they
were more like overhearing someone talking in a fancy language that I didn’t
really understand but I knew it meant something to someone. I almost knew what
was going on, but I didn’t know how I knew. I’m also a little bit dyslexic so
poetry was easier for me to read because it was usually one poem on a page with
a lot of white space surrounding it. There was something pleasurable in that as
well, which is why I also bought a lot of books with jokes in them. Jokes were
also usually printed on a page that was mostly white, and they were square, and
they ended with a thud and a little surprise too, just like poems. The only
time since then that I’ve had that strong of a visceral reaction to reading was
when I got home as a teenager and read Gregory Corso’s Gasoline, and realized I’d been carrying a bomb in my pocket all
day long, just waiting to explode.
So there were two different experiences that I read for—one
was to lose myself in a story, and the other was more for the sound of the
words.
Then one day while I was reading an anthology of
Metaphysical poetry—poetry that said almost nothing to me at the time—and I
read John Donne’s poem, “The Flea,” and almost immediately I could hear that
specific narrative voice I’d always associated with prose, and I could
understand exactly what he was saying, and he was trying to convince a woman
into action, and he was imploring her, so she was in the poem as well. It was
like a little scene in a play, and by reading it the characters came back to
life, and they were living right there in the room with me, and I was in there
somehow too. And I was aware of how he’d crafted his thought into lines with a
very specific rhythm so the emphasis would fall on the convincing words, and
how the lines carried over into the next line with a strong forward motion,
like impatience, and how the sound of the words themselves created the musical
structure on which the meaning was carried, and how it told a little story, a
little vignette that only lasted as long as the poem did, like the 45s I was
listening to at the time, like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Paperback Writer.”
What Donne was saying was that he wanted to be a flea so he
could crawl under his lover’s clothes and walk along her skin. And although I
don’t know how—I was only ten or eleven at the time—I knew in an immediate and personal way what he really wanted because
I wanted it too. It wasn’t to be a flea,
really—so there was this leap and I understood metaphor. And for the first time
the experience of reading a poem jumped from being something outside of me to
something that was happening inside of me, and in that moment both of my
reasons for reading combined—there was the sound, and there was the little world
that opened and then closed.
The part of me where I understood what he was saying was a
funny place that was not really thought, or memory, or anything I could really
recognize as me yet. It was just this
sense of certainty—of knowing. I
didn’t know what it was, really, but I knew I wanted to be in contact with a
woman’s warm flesh in that way too, even though I hadn’t yet, and it opened
this ache in me or touched a place in me or something in me woke up. That
experience of words leaping off the page and at the same time hearing them in
some mysterious way inside of me, of having them open something up inside
me—some understanding or insight or even an ache or a longing—was something I
began to seek out and to associate with poetry and songs on the radio more than
prose.
As for writing my own lyrics, that began sometime when I was
walking to grammar school. When I left the house I would continue to sing
whatever song was playing on the radio, and the lyrics would get boring pretty
quickly and it was a long walk to school, so I began to make up my own lyrics.
I knew it had to rhyme, but I didn’t really know anything about meter and
rhythm. Even so every once in a while the whole line would fall into place—the
phrasing, the meter, the rhyme, and it would be the way I’d really say it if I
really meant it. And when it was an emotion that I could really identify
with—like intense anger or intense longing—the words came on their own if I
concentrated on the feeling itself. It was as if I was letting someone speak
through me, that I had opened a valve, and singing became a means to get all of
this emotion out of me. And when I could really feel the emotion I was singing
about, and if it was something I’d like to say in real life, I could fill the
words with air, I could stretch them out, I could fill them with all of the
emotion I was feeling.
Later, probably in fifth grade or so, I began to write long
loosely rhymed poems in imitation of the kind of poems that I was studying in
school—so they were full of allusions and extended metaphors, and I would call
my friends on the telephone and explain all of their hidden meanings for hours.
I was considered enough of a poet in seventh grade that I
was asked by one of the nuns in my Catholic junior high to write a poem to read
at the school assembly when our principal retired. My poem was entitled “The
Principles of a Principal.” The only thing I can remember is that people told
me afterward that I read so quietly that only the first few rows could hear.
Two years later I published my first poem in my high school magazine, The Sabre. It was rhymed and in meter
and was meant to be funny, and it was about how I enjoyed looking at women
getting dressed. The next time I read my own poetry in public was in 1980. I
had written a poem called “Why I’ve Never Read in Public” for Ted Berrigan’s
class at Naropa and he asked me if that was true and when I said it was he set
up a reading series and had me open for Rachel Peters on the final night. I
think he intentionally gave me time to prepare and learn from the more
experienced students before I had to get up and read myself.
JC: You
were a student at the Kerouac School in the late 1970s, in the school's first
decade and a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. What were you doing in the
years immediately preceding your involvement at Naropa that led up to your
focus on poetics rather than any of the other arts that were of interest to
you?
RR: I
dropped out of college after my freshman year, in 1972, when I was eighteen. I
got a job in the emergency room in Willimantic, Connecticut, and moved in with
my girlfriend, whom I would marry when I was twenty-one. One day one of the
women I was working with at the hospital was photocopying some poems, and I was
stunned when she said her husband was a poet, because I kind of assumed that
poets didn’t exist anymore. I specifically remember her saying that her husband
was a poet, not that he taught poetry. He turned out to be Sandy Taylor, who
was just beginning Curbstone Press in his basement in Willimantic with a large
format camera and a dark room and an old drum press. He was teaching poetry and
prose at Eastern Connecticut State College and I began auditing his classes,
studying Yeats and Eliot and Frost and the modern novels, including On the Road, which I hated at the time.
I was living with a radical feminist and read Ms. magazine every month, so the way Kerouac treated women in the
book was reprehensible to me. I actually threw the book across the room at one
point when they leave the wife in Utah, stuck with the hotel bill. It’s funny
but when I re-read the book ten years later, I thought it was terrific and the
way it treated women didn’t bother me at all. It wasn’t a manual on proper
gender relations. It was about something else entirely.
Then about this time I got a second job running the used
book section of a bookstore across from the university, and when the owners
built an arts center they gave me the job of running the reading series. The
first poet to read was Jim Scully, who had just published Santiago Poems, which was written during his first visit to Chile
in the days immediately following the Allende coup. It was the first poetry
reading I’d ever been to so I’d set up the room all wrong with the chairs
around a conference table as if we were at a meeting and Jim read from the head
of the table only a few feet away from me.
The poems were about the horror of arriving in Chile as a
literature professor prepared to collect indigenous Quechuan poetry and finding
a country in political lockdown, with swollen bodies floating down the river
and littering the streets. But the scariest part was his voice—it was flat and
unemotional, like the living dead, like something from beyond the grave. I
could see his fingers tremble as he turned the pages. There were long moments
when I literally stopped breathing, listening to him read.
He read a poem about how the soldiers chopped off the hands
of the poet Victor Jara for singing “Venceremos” to the prisoners who filled
the Santiago soccer stadium—“where torture became a national sport”—and jeered
at him, “Now, sing!” And when he continued to sing, “they killed him / they
couldn’t kill him enough.”
Then he read a poem about his visit to Neruda’s wife of
nearly fifty years who he found sitting in the darkness by an open window, with
a letter in her hand telling her that her husband had died of cancer while
still in exile. Then he read a poem about looking out of his fancy hotel window
at young men walking down the center of the street with their hands over their
heads, and women risking their lives to gather eggs for their families in the
morning, and the blackened bodies he stepped over on his way to the national
library.
It was through Sandy that I was also introduced to the
Eastern Connecticut poetry scene, which was made up of people who talked
intelligently about art and film and poetry and politics—things I really cared
about but had no one to talk to about. But most importantly I got to work with
Sandy in his basement, and I’d spend each Sunday late into the evening learning
how to work his old drum press and how to shoot and develop pages,
clothespinning the wet sheets on a laundry line, and collating and
saddlestiching his first books by hand, all the while asking him endless questions
about poetry. It wasn’t until I was working for Allen that I realized that a
lot of the people I met at the time had national reputations—including Sandy,
who was later very involved with Allen and Ernesto Cardinal and Anne Waldman
and Joe Richey and others when the Sandinistas were in power in Nicaragua in
the early Eighties. And also people like George Butterick, who Allen had me
write to for a copy of Ed Sanders’ Fuck
You, a Magazine of the Arts for a class of his on “The Literary History of
the Beat Generation.” It turned out George had gathered the best collection of
Beat and Black Mountain and New York School publications in the world as the
director of the rare books department at the University of Connecticut. And
then later, when I began a reading group to study Charles Olson after I
graduated from Naropa, I realized that George was also the guy who wrote those
huge annotated books on Olson’s poetry. And then in 1982, I wrote to Ann
Charters—the first biographer of Jack Kerouac and wife of music producer and
jazz historian Sam Charters—to encourage her to be part of the Kerouac
Conference, and I was shocked when I wrote her address on the envelope—it turns
out she lived across the street from me in Mansfield Center, this tiny town in
Connecticut where I was living when I worked with Sandy. It later turned out
that John Clellon Holmes was living less than three miles away from me in Old
Saybrook when I was living in Mystic, right before I moved to Boulder. But I
knew nothing about them at the time.
Then sometime in the fall of 1976, I picked up a copy of People magazine in the emergency room
where I was working and there was an article about Anne Waldman that mentioned
Naropa, and it talked about Allen Ginsberg’s apprenticeship program. So I applied
without much hope and was surprised to be accepted. I finally arrived to
Boulder with my wife and our cats in November 1979. The plan was to apprentice
with Allen for a semester and get my BFA from Naropa and the University of
Colorado in two years, and then return to Connecticut. But I’ve never left
Boulder, not even when Allen moved back to New York City in the early eighties.
JC: You
were both a student and assistant to Allen Ginsberg while at Naropa. You were
close to Philip Whalen at the end of his life and remain in touch with Diane di
Prima and Anne Waldman, to name four significant American poets that passed
through Naropa. Can you address what it was you found in yourself from having
been informed, on many levels perhaps, by these writers?
RR:
That’s an interesting way to put it—what I found in myself from being informed
by others. It seems like those would be two very distinct things—being informed
by someone, or finding something in yourself. But I know what you mean—it’s
that jump I was talking about. The image I always use of the apprenticeship is
of Allen talking to a very deep place in me and once I learned how to answer
out of that place, he gave me my self.
As an apprentice, I would go over to Allen’s house on Bluff
Street at least once a week and help him work on whatever he was working
on—mostly his Collected Poems—more or
less as his secretary, and in return he would look at my poems and tell me how
terrible they were, which they were. I was 25 and basically an under-educated
and under-read kid who wanted to be a poet. I asked him much later why he’d
accepted me as an apprentice when my poetry was so bad, and he said it was
because I was a good typist. And that I had been a medical transcriptionist and
he wanted some of his lectures transcribed. And that I had proven I could get
things done. But mostly he said it was because I was sincere, and there was
more hope in teaching a bad poet with sincerity than there was in trying to
teach a good poet without it.
I would usually spend the entire day there and deal with
whatever came up. My main job when I wasn’t working at his house was to
transcribe his journals and cull out any poems or anything interesting that I
found there. I would also run errands, answer the phone, open his mail, help
him prepare for his classes, drive him around, and deal with a lot of the
bureaucratic stuff related to his schoolwork. If I stayed through dinner, Peter
or Allen would cook, and afterward we’d listen to Ma Rainey records or Harry
Smith’s anthology or Dylan or Bach or Vivaldi. Once I brought him a new Rolling
Stones record and we listened to it over and over again.
Occasionally Allen would recite poetry to me from memory,
kind of acting them out so I would get what excited him most about them. That’s
something Sandy did as well—in class Sandy would enact Yeats’ “Leda and the
Swan,” for instance, slapping his hands to startle us on “a sudden blow,”
waving his arms in the air for “the … great … wings … beat … ing … still,”
staggering to “above the stag-ger-ing girl.” And at our first meeting, Allen
acted out seeing Williams reading at the Met in the late forties, and at the
end of “The Clouds” he leapt up and shouted “lunging upon a pismire, a
conflagration, a….”—and he waved his finger in the air, as if lost for words,
and looked down at me and said, “And I realized he was talking. Just talking.”
At other times Allen would quote from something from Whitman or Blake to
comment on what was happening in the New
York Times. And when he wanted me to understand what he expected from my
poetry, he would read to me from Reznikoff and Williams. Then, when the
apprenticeship was over, I continued to work with him, first on a project to
transcribe and edit all of his lectures on Blake, and then as his teaching assistant
and an assistant in the poetics department.
But the poets at Naropa who had the most influence on my
writing were Ted Berrigan and Anselm Hollo. I still feel like I’m only just
beginning to understand everything Ted taught me about poetry. One time in a
class during the Kerouac Conference he described the poet’s awareness as
something like a helmet surrounding your head. It’s bigger than your thought or
sense impressions—it’s aware of all that, but it’s something larger. And poetry
comes from that place—the space that’s slightly outside and around your
head—and you just have to write it down. You’re not in control, you just have
to listen. If you can really capture that voice, that’s enough for any poem.
Anselm introduced me to Dada, and the writings of Marcel
Duchamp, and some of the very best poetry written in other languages, and he
encouraged a voice in me that I didn’t even recognize as my own. He would
winnow out the false voice in my work by highlighting certain lines and images
or sentiments or even phrases that had escaped my attempts to obscure and
over-intellectualize them, and he ignored what was false in my poetry,
believing that it would fall away on its own.
But the comment Anselm made that changed my whole
relationship to writing was when he said that it was really all just one long
poem. Once I truly understood that, it changed the way I wrote and collected
and presented my poetry. Now it’s not about individual poems—it’s about being
honest to my changing consciousness through a series of writings. And that a
poet is aware of all the white space around the poem itself, and hears in the
silence between the poems everything that’s unwritten. And that it’s in what’s
unwritten that most of the poetry occurs.
On the other hand Allen and Diane were actually more like
surrogate parents to me. They kind of took me under their wings. Allen and
Diane and I rarely talked about poetry. We talked about our lives, about who
was in jail or broke and what we could do about it, about my love life. I
confided in them and they listened and gave me useful advice. And, quite
frankly, I needed surrogate parents more at the time than I needed poetry
teachers, and it was very important for me to meet people I admired who
accepted me as I was and saw through my awkwardness into who I really was and
sincerely cared about me. Whatever social skills I have, I learned from them.
Anne Waldman and Philip Whalen have always been more like
embodied muses to me—I’ve known Anne for almost thirty years, but I don’t feel
I have a real connection with her personally the way I did with Allen and
Diane, any more than one would have with the muse. She’s more like an
electrical storm—I can’t really have a relationship with a force of energy like
that, I can only define myself in relation to it. Often a poem or prose piece
will form in my head as if it’s one half of a conversation with her—as if the
very highest state of awareness in me at the moment is talking directly to the
inspired awareness that I attribute to her.
Another important part of my education occurred in a series
of classes I took at the University of Colorado to fulfill requirements for my
bachelor’s degree at Naropa. I took classes there that weren’t offered at
Naropa—classes in composition and music history and journalism, and two
semesters of the “Great Books” with Professor Dennis Gilkey, who had a real
passion for ancient languages and literature. It was through him that I got a
chance to hear Homer, Dante, Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, Petrarch, Sappho, and Chaucer
enthusiastically read in their original languages. Ironically, the next time I
saw him was years later when I was working in the emergency room and he was
delivering The Denver Post for a
living, having been laid off at the university.
I also studied with a woman at the university whose name I
can’t remember who taught the plays of Shakespeare by first having us read the
text, and then we’d discuss it in class as literature, and then we’d see a
performance of the play, and then we talked about what we learned from watching
it onstage. After all that, we had to write something original about the play,
and she would write comments on our papers, asking us to expand on certain
ideas. Up until then, I was taught literature as something that one studies in order
to comprehend or create it, but she taught that both the text and performance
were things that I could respond to with my own creative intelligence, and that
I could have a conversation with it that was more important than what it “said”
or “was.” It was a conversation aware of what the play said and was, but it was
about more than that. Since then, if a painting interests me, I’ll read
everything I can about the artist and the movement and the time, and then go
back and try to see it again through the lens of all of that information. Then
I can see not only what’s on the canvas, but also something of what the artist
saw when they painted it, and what they wanted me to see. Then I stand an arm’s
length away, as close as the artist was when they painted it, so that I can see
the individual brushstrokes and sometimes even the sequence of brushstrokes.
It’s obvious that however great it is, a human being made it, just like me.
I know this is not a very popular idea with many of my
friends—they want to experience the painting solely as what it is as a visual
phenomenon without projecting a lot of information onto it, but for me it’s
often a lot like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” where the backstory makes
the great work of art even more interesting. It’s like that with almost
everything I get interested in as well, whether it’s a poem or a play or a
playwright or a film or a piece of music or even a specific time period. I
assemble everything I can about it and try to create a work of art out of what
I’ve learned, because I always forget most of what I read or hear if I don’t
write it down.
Take Picasso’s “Guernica” for example. There’s lots of ways
it can be seen—first as a painting, but you can also learn to appreciate its
technique of being painted on that scale and in black and white, or as an
imitation of the newspaper photographs by which Picasso and all of Paris first
learned of the horrors of the bombing of Guernica, the first modern terrorist
attack. You can try to understand Picasso’s symbols and images, and where they
came from. You can even get interested in the painting’s history, and what it
meant to other artists and critics over time, including that great story of a
Gestapo agent searching Picasso’s studio and, coming upon a postcard of “Guernica,”
pointed to it and said, “Did you do that?” And Picasso replied, “No, you did.”
And you can learn to see it both as a singular document of a specific moment in
time and at the same time as a piece of the larger story of the artist’s
trajectory from beginning to end. For a practicing artist, to appreciate that
is to get in tune with the process of creativity itself, not confusing it with
the creation of objects, or approaching it only as a student or critic. As a
poet I want to see myself looking at the painting too, or listening to the
music along with everything I know—I want to see them as if from the inside
rather than as an object separate from me. And I keep going until I understand
how it was made and then I get completely bored with it, and never want to
think about it again.
JC: To
see “from the inside rather than as an object separate” sounds like a good
description of what Steve Silberman calls “activist scholarship.”
RR: I
haven’t read Steve on “activist scholarship,” but I do know that I’m interested
in studying anything that’s of use to me as a writer or as a human being. For
instance, you and I could go out tonight and see Chaplin’s Modern Times, and we could enjoy it as a funny movie, which it is.
But if you look into it a little bit further, its significance changes. The
film was made during the Great Depression, and in the first years of the
assembly line and modernization. If you know that, then you can better
appreciate the film for what it was when it was released, and the predicament
when Chaplin finds himself as a tramp. For instance, there’s a scene of him
trying to keep up with a steadily accelerating assembly line, and there’s a
scene where the owners of the factory design a machine that can feed workers
while they continue working so they won’t have to take lunch breaks. And then,
if you want, you can go on and learn that films—especially comedies—up until
that time were mostly escapist fantasies. Chaplin’s previous film, for
instance, was The Gold Rush—a
fantasy, more or less, about a distant place and time. So for a comedian of
Chaplin’s stature to make an entertaining satire that led people to re-examine
their own lives and the inequities of the present social system was a
revolutionary act—right down to the title of the film: this film was about
modern times, about their actual lives. As time has gone on, that aspect of the
film has faded, but you can learn to appreciate it as well if you want to.
Now, you don’t need to know all of that or even be
interested at all in all that extra-textual information in order to enjoy the
film … or any work of art. Like I say, I have friends who militantly object to
the idea of studying a work of art outside of the artwork itself. But as a
practicing artist you can also learn a lot by studying how other artists lived
their lives and how they made their art. I’ve even worked with filmmakers like
Stan Brakhage and photographers like Kai Sibley and spent time with artists
like Sarah Chesnutt and Amy Hayes and David Treff and Tree Bernstein and
musicians like Jeff Grove and Layne Redmond and Tamra Spivey and Ronnie Pontiac
to better understand the way they see the world. Without that, my appreciation
for film and photography and art and music would mostly be passive or
intellectual. For instance, before I began working with filmmakers, I would see
a film mostly in terms of its story. I’m still primarily interested in a film’s
story, but now I also watch it as something constructed by the director, the
writers, the director of photography, the actors, even the set designer—the
film is the product of specific choices and imaginations and skills. I’m still
caught up in the story, but I’m also aware of the camera angles and the framing
and the lighting and the set design and how music is being used to create a
specific mood, and the choices the editors and actors and director are making.
Now, I’m not saying it’s better to be aware of all of that, but it’s something
that just sort of happens to you as you become more experienced.
I began writing LIT
as my attempt to rewrite the Norton anthologies. I felt there was more wisdom
in the Norton anthologies than in any bible—that most of what you need to know
in order to be fully human is included in the Norton anthologies—but no one
reads them any more. They’ve got more about the experience of impermanence than
Buddhism, they’ve got more on the different seasons of life than Ecclesiastes
or the Tao, they have all you need to know about loss and rebirth and love or
anything really important in human life. The experience of trying to rewrite
the great poets, one by one, was like becoming part of a conversation with some
of the smartest and most articulate people of all time. Western literature
would be more interesting if it included more women’s and slave’s voices of
course, but I found plenty of anthologies that were filled with the voices of
all cultures and times.
By reading the Norton anthologies I also began to get a
sense of what survives as literature, and why. Literature survives because it’s
saying something really important. Learning what’s really important—and what’s
been written about what’s really important—is a poet’s true education in their
art. Like Pound said, “Why rewrite in mediocre verse what’s already been
written to perfection?” Well, I decided that it was important for me to learn
what’s been written to perfection. Now when I begin to write, it’s out of a
context of at least being aware of the extent of what’s already been
accomplished, not out of ignorance of it. My reading is the foundation I stand
on, and it’s from what’s become part of my experience that I stand and look out
at the horizon. I can’t help it. It’s just a fact.
There’s also a transformative experience in reading all of
the great poetry from every recorded culture throughout time—it’s what they
used to call a humanist education or “the liberal arts.” I think of it as the
minimum information necessary to become fully human. I can almost separate my
friends into political camps based on whether they’ve read The Grapes of Wrath or not.
And it’s not only about what the work is saying, but
sometimes a work survives because of what it is. On the Road remains important because it’s about something
important, written in an authentic voice that is completely understandable now,
but was attacked not only for what it said but how it said it in its time. But
the relationship to his life and the mode of experience that Kerouac captured
in On the Road remains a possibility
for others to discover for themselves because it was actually lived and not
just imagined. It’s true. Likewise, when Ulysses
was first published, even the most literate readers couldn’t understand what it
was saying, because they weren’t aware of their own interior monologues. Now
writing from the point of view of the interior monologue is standard in most
novels since, say, World War II. In a way Joyce introduced the human race to
their own innermost consciousness in Ulysses—as
Kerouac did in his own way too—and that’s influenced everyone, whether they’ve
read the books or not.
So that’s one real possibility for writing—to change the
experience of what it is to be human. Or in the visual arts, to change the way
we see. Educated art critics literally couldn’t identify the subjects of
Impressionist paintings when they were first exhibited, but now the
Impressionists are probably the most popular and influential art movement in
history. But it’s even stranger than that. What we now consider the
Impressionists’ pretty pictures were actually revolutionary subjects at the
time—train stations and prostitutes and barmaids and beggars and drug addicts
and alcoholics. One of the early reviewers even spat at one of the paintings.
The “Impressionists” was originally meant as a derogatory term, describing
their paintings as unfinished, as no more than sketches. They were the first to
paint in plein air solely because
tubes of paint were invented in their lifetimes. While they were painting some
of their best known works, most of Paris was eating rats and straw because they
had just lost a war with the Prussians, and what followed was the Commune,
which was even worse. Renoir grew up in a slum and his family was made homeless
when Napoleon III tore up his neighborhood to build the Champs Elysees. “Old
Paris” was literally disappearing and “Modern Paris” was being born around them
as they walked to their studios and cafes over makeshift wooden planks.
Everything that is old to us now was once new, and if it’s lasted long enough
to become quaint, it was probably revolutionary in its time. Andy Warhol was
often considered a non-artist when he was alive, but now his style is probably
the most imitated in the world. Last week alone I saw grids of the same
photograph silkscreened in different colors in a Chinese restaurant, a travel
advertisement, and a film made in modern India.
What becomes immediately clear in the study of art history
is that the artist discovers the truly new work of art only in the process of
creating it—it can’t be something you already know before you begin painting,
because it doesn’t exist yet. Another thing you learn is that if you make art
in the hope that it will make you happy, that’s a bad bet, but if you make art
because it makes you happy, then you can’t lose.
Another thing you learn is that the best artists have a
capacity to turn adversity into passion. In fact, I have a theory that the best
art—like early Wordsworth, or the paintings of Van Gogh, or the first few
Velvet Underground albums—were created in an atmosphere of outright hostility,
and that friction with your audience files away all but the strongest parts of
your work, the way a grindstone sharpens a knife. And if the culture isn’t
receptive, it’s more likely that you’ll end up talking to eternity. It’s when
Whitman began writing to poets a hundred years hence that he became eternal.
That’s us, literally, that’s our generation. For others it’s more like Joseph
Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s Journey, where the artist is banished from his
home town for being “different,” and wanders through the unknown and discovers
something while in exile that the town needs, and when he returns he brings the
knowledge necessary to heal the whole tribe. And for others it’s more like
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where you
go in search of something and discover too late that you’re in the wrong place
for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.
Emerson thought that the universal mark of genius is being
misunderstood. He traces it back through not only the arts but in science and
philosophy and religion as well, including Socrates and Jesus and Copernicus
and Galileo. Sometimes when I get discouraged with my own work, or begin to
think that it’s mostly nonsense, I’ll remember that it’s not whether anyone
picks up on what I’m doing while I’m still alive or if I’ve really done
anything at all. It’s that this is what I’ve decided to do with my life. At the
same time it’s clear to me that I am no more in control of my work than I am in
control of my life, and that one comes directly from the other. It’s like what
Burroughs said about Kerouac: he was a writer because he wrote. It’s not a judgment, it’s a fact.
JC: It’s
well known to anyone with knowledge of Kerouac School history that you
transcribed over 28,000 pages of Allen Ginsberg lectures from his years at
Naropa. Recently (July 3, 2009––ed.), you were invited to give a talk at an
Allen Ginsberg Memorial in which you reflected upon eight pillars of Allen’s
teachings. As the person perhaps best qualified to comment on Allen Ginsberg as
a teacher, from the perspective of activist scholarship, would you elaborate on
that meditation you presented?
RR: I
spoke on Allen Ginsberg as a teacher, about what I called his “Eight Pillars of
Poetics.” The first pillar was complete honesty. Complete honesty is something
much deeper and more complex than what people usually mean by being honest—it’s
about an uncompromising look beyond the surface of what you would like to
believe is true to the deeper truth beneath it, which is usually something that
you are hiding from, something that only strikes you when your defense
mechanisms have broken down, usually through extreme forms of emotion, like
love or grief. In order to persevere to get to that point, you have to be
uncommonly dedicated to the truth, or beaten down to it.
The second pillar was a belief in the ability of poetry to
transmit actual states of consciousness. In Allen’s case, those were primarily
the states of consciousness he experienced in Buddhist meditation. If you’re
not aware of that aspect of Allen’s writing, you’re missing an essential
element in his poetry, especially the poems written in the second half of his
life. In fact, he believed that poetry honestly written while experiencing any
genuine emotion would automatically result in a text that transmitted that experience
to others, mostly through the specific breathing patterns that are
characteristic of certain strong emotions such as ecstasy and despair—preserved
mostly through punctuation and line breaks and white space.
The third pillar was a belief in the power of spontaneous
utterance—that the most powerful poetry was spoken in complete alignment with
the emotional, physical, and intellectual experience of the moment, including
an awareness of the audience and an historical sense of all that has gone
before, as well as the moment’s deepest significance and possibilities. As such
it brings the whole room’s focus into the present moment and place rather than
taking it somewhere else, which is what most poetry does. It’s not that every
poem has to be that, it’s just that that happens to be the most powerful form
of utterance, and anything you say will be measured against that.
The fourth pillar was his belief that to divorce poetry from
music was a big mistake, and that Zukofsky was right when he said that poetry’s
lower limit was speech and its upper limit was music. That’s why Allen loved to
play the songs of Richard Rabbit Brown and Bessie Smith in his poetry classes.
In the same way he taught that much of the poetry of the past was actually
written as lyrics to music that is now forgotten—like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience or the Child ballads
or the poems of Campion and Marlowe, or he’d compare a Shakespeare lyric to a
Dylan song without the music.
The fifth pillar was Allen’s respect for the poetry
preserved in the “Norton Anthology of Poetry”—especially pre-19th-century
poetry. For most of his time as a poetry teacher, Allen chose to teach out of
the Norton Anthology of English Poetry—and
not only that, but out of the first half of it, in order to concentrate on the
craft of poetry. He taught that it was necessary to understand the history of
poetry because modern poetry was written out of that tradition, and that if you
don’t know Shakespeare as thoroughly as Kerouac did you can’t really understand
Kerouac, or you would appreciate him for the wrong reasons. In the same way if
you didn’t know Shelley, you couldn’t really appreciate Gregory Corso. Each
semester he would begin with a survey of the various meters—like the iamb and
spondee and dactyl—and then would have us write poems in our own language in
classic forms like Sapphics and iambic pentameter and hendecasyllables and
12-bar blues and English hymns and ballads. What that practice does is it
begins to shape your thought into musical meters and forms, and you develop an
elegance of thought.
The sixth pillar was that a lot of important poetry was
written in other languages and in other cultures and times, and if you’re only
familiar with the poetry of your own language or era you’re missing some of the
greatest poetry ever written, and the inspiration for poets such as Yeats and
Eliot and Pound. When Allen put together his anthology of “Expansive Poetry,”
four-fifths of it was from other languages and cultures. And he himself
occasionally wrote in forms he borrowed from other cultures and times,
including Elizabethan lyrics, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese forms, rap lyrics,
calypso, the blues of course, and some forms he learned from Australian
Aborigines.
The seventh pillar was that poetry actually had a medicinal
value, and that a poet could heal social and psychological ills by writing and
performing poetry. He also believed that the poet had a social function as well
as a literary one—that there was a community of poets throughout time, and this
community included your elders and your peers and the next generation as well,
and that you especially needed to take care of those who couldn’t take care of
themselves because they might be the most important poets of all.
The final pillar was something I re-learned when I was
traveling with the percussionist Layne Redmond to Cyprus in 2009. She also
brought Mary Rockford Lane, who has written books on shamanism, and Nathan
Ells, the lead singer of a “shred” band called The Human Abstract, another rock
and roll band with a name from William Blake. Layne was there to return ancient
drumming practices to the Cypriot women, and late one night we four Americans
got carried away, making plans to return the Eleusinian Mysteries to the Greeks
in a cave on the island on Tinos, and the audacity of the idea was so huge that
we were a little bit embarrassed, until Nathan shouted out “Go big or go home!”
Living so close to Allen, I had to forget how important he was. But, looking
back, I can see how he chose to “live large,” in both his writing and his life.
And he took on the poets in the Norton anthologies and rose to their level of
intensity by pitching his voice there. In a broader social and cultural sense
he became one of Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators of the human race—he took
on governments and institutions with his voice alone, and by his example moved
others to live lives that were more humane and just.
JC:
Having absorbed any number of poetic traditions, what poems have you written
that both carry forward the poetics you found useful and also strike you as
significant works of art in their own right? Of particular interest to me, in
light of your mentioning Ginsberg's interest in the Norton Anthology, is your recent book of poems LIT.
RR: There
are basically three different threads that I’ve been working on in my writing.
The first began in 1980 when I was talking with Ted Berrigan and told him that
Dylan had written “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” out of the first lines of all
the songs he didn’t think he’d have the time to write before he died, and Ted
suggested I do something similar with my own work—take the best lines in all of
my unsuccessful poems and paste them together into new poems. That began a
project that lasted almost two years that has become part of my process ever
since. I go through my old poems and delete everything except what still
interests me. Later I re-read those pages of stray lines and begin to craft
poems out of them. I was never happy with just randomly arranging them into
14-line sonnets like Ted suggested, but I began to see poems in them, or I’d
see things I’d like to say but had never thought of before. I developed a
process I call “over-writing,” which is to writing what Max Ernst called
“fromage,” where he’d put a plank of wood under a canvas and run a black crayon
over it and then paint over whatever design resulted. I start with pages of
bits of my own writing and sometimes the writings from others and rewrite them
until they no longer resemble the originals at all.
The first thing I learned by working in this way was that
the poems I assembled randomly from stray lines were a lot more mysterious and
interesting than the poems that came directly from my intellect, and to read
one of them in public was a very different experience. It was often like
reading a poem written by someone else. This freed me from identifying with my
work, so the poem wasn’t about me, it was a separate object. I would work on it
until it became a meaningful dramatic monologue from a character who was not
me, and it freed the dramatist in me, and writing and performing became
interesting to me again. I wasn’t satisfied until the poem sounded like “a real
poem” and made literal sense, but they were less dry than when I tried writing
out of my intellect—there was a lot more room in them, a lot more space. That’s
something I’ve written about as “ending the tyranny of the I.”
The biggest part of that is merely temperament, certainly.
In order for me to be happy, I have to be involved in something that I don’t
control, because otherwise I get bored too easily. Duchamp got bored with
making art too, and quit painting at barely thirty. What if art is something
that’s happening around you all the time and to grab at one moment and spend
months trying to recreate it in a studio so you can put your name on the bottom
is to miss out on all the others? Duchamp became a chess player and played the
game as a sculpture that moved through time, and he was good enough to become a
member of the French national team. At the end of his life he would light a
fire in his studio and sit in front of it all day, and said he would only begin
to make art again if he could create something as interesting as fire.
It was in working in this way that I began to be able to
concentrate for long periods of time in order to create bigger and bigger
works, and I found a way where I could work for hours every night, night after
night, rather than waiting to become inspired with some upsurge of feeling or
thought. And what’s really ironic is that it’s only when I began to work with
collage and montage and pastiche and fromage and incorporate overheard
conversations and quotations from my reading and became more aware of the room
I was reading in and thought less about me that I found my self onstage.
Another thing I learned from this process happened when I
started getting interested in why I kept certain lines or phrases or images and
not others. When I looked over the lines I had chosen to keep, it quickly
became clear that they roughly fell into the categories that Pound identified
as the three elements of poetry—phanopoeia,
or the casting of images upon the mind’s eye; melopoeia, or the melodic phrase; and logopoeia, or the dance of intellect among words. I ended up with
nine categories altogether, but they could all be more or less subsumed under
those three. And this sensitivity to what was memorable about language made me
begin to notice it more often—certain strings of words had an inherent musical
quality in them, or I could “see” what they meant, or they were the kind of
witty comments that I copied down in my notebook. And I just had to capture
them, I didn’t have to conjure them up. It was something I could actually do. I
couldn’t write novels, a good poem was a rare thing, but I could turn it into a
craft. I had plenty of time. The art comes from making, as Yeats put it, “an
hour’s work seem a moment’s thought.”
So that’s the first thread—beginning to think of poetry as
something constructed and created, not something necessarily written. One of
the unexpected benefits of this change was that I began to write less
autobiographical poetry, and began to put all of that emotion and passion into
my real life, which is where it belongs.
The attitude toward writing as something constructed and not
necessarily written directly led to the next step, which was to continue
working with my own words in this way but at the same to incorporate words I
read or overheard. That began in 1990, when I went to Europe for the first time.
I had just finished my last three MFA credits in Dorf Tirol, Italy, studying
the work of Ezra Pound with his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz and her mother—and
Pound’s long-time mistress—Olga Rudge, at Brunnenberg Castle, where a lot of
Pound’s handmade furniture and tennis rackets and papers and library have been
preserved. I sat at his writing desk and looked through the red 20-volume
leather-bound French history of China from which he wrote the Chinese Cantos,
with Pound’s delicate penciled references written in orderly columns in the
endpapers, and opened his jacketless blue presentation copy of the first
printing of Ulysses with Joyce’s tiny
handwritten dedication to Pound on the title page.
Anyway, when my studies were over, I continued traveling through
Europe for another six months alone. And at one point during this trip I went
to stay on the Isle of Iona, off the western coast of England, because that was
where the Western tradition had been preserved during the Viking invasions. By
the time the Vikings arrived on Iona, the monks had constructed these tall
stone towers with one door at the top, and they stored as much water and food
and supplies as they could and rolled up the rope ladders when the Vikings
landed and lowered them after they’d left. It’s because of those monks that
most of the western tradition was preserved—much of Aristotle and Plato and the
Greek playwrights, Cicero and the Latin poets, plus the illuminated bibles of
the monks themselves. And I found it charming that the monks were instructed by
their Orders to preach the word of God, but who would they preach to, since
they were all monks? Well, they’d row out on Sunday mornings and preach to the
seals sunning themselves on the rocks in the harbor near Fingal’s Cave.
So I made a pilgrimage to Iona to honor those monks.
But—after I took a boat out to visit the descendants of the seals the monks
preached to, and explored the ruins of the stone towers and the churches and
the monk’s quarters, and walked through the graveyards and took photos of the
Celtic crosses—there was very little to do on the island. There were a few
books in the church’s gift shop, but none that interested me until I came
across a book called “The Myths and Legends of the Irish Race,” which was
published in 1904 or so. Later that night I began to read it, and quickly
realized that it wasn’t very interesting at all, but I had nothing else to do
so I continued reading and occasionally I’d read an odd phrase or construction
or image that intrigued me and I began to underline them, without really
knowing why, much like what I had done with my own work. Later, when I got
home, I unpacked the book and began reading through the underlined phrases and
they were interesting enough that I typed them up and began to work the lone
phrases into a series of short poems called “The Myth of the Irish Race.” That
began a process that I still use today that I call “collapsing” a text. The
title poem of Mona Lisa’s Veil—my
history of art—came from that process, as did the three collections that appear
in Map of the World—one a collection
of poems written from my study of alchemy, one from my study of dreams, and one
from my study of shamanism. LIT came
largely from that “collapsing” process as well. With Mona Lisa’s Veil, I collapsed an art textbook and also attempted to
mimic the evolution of the history of art in the form of the poem itself. And
in my first published book—a book-length poem called “Awakening Osiris”—I
attempted to create an incantation modeled on the rites of Isis described by
Apuleius in The Golden Ass, where
each spring the tribe gathers at night and attempts to recite the 1001 names of
the Goddess. It’s a bit like hunting Easter eggs—you have to be able to
recognize the face of the Goddess underneath her 1001 disguises. And if you’re
successful—and they usually were—the Great Goddess Herself would appear at
sunrise. Most of the information in that poem came from collapsing a Jungian
text on the Great Mother archetype by Erich Naumann published by Bollingen in the
forties or fifties.
The third thread in my work is my attempt to break down the
barriers between the different forms of writing in order to create something
that is more like life as it’s actually lived. You can’t fit all of life into a
collection of poems, or a collection of letters, or essays and interviews, but
what if I mixed them all together?
This began as something of a surprise when I was typing up
my journals from that first trip to Europe. I transcribed the writings exactly
as they appeared so there would be a poem and then a prose piece and then a
letter and then an essay and then a journal entry and then a dream and then a
quote from something from my reading and then a set piece and then a snippet
from an overheard conversation, all collected over a very diverse period of
time. And there was one particular section from my time in England when I was
simultaneously studying several different subjects at the same time, including
the letters of Heloise and Abelard, the relationship between Edward Burne-Jones
and the other Pre-Raphaelites and their lovers and wives, the poet Emmy
Hennings and her husband Hugo Ball, and following traces of the Beatles in
Liverpool and London. As I was typing up my notes, I decided I would do the
organizing later, but when I read the transcript I was surprised by how the
interweaving of these distinct stories suggested several real or possible
comparisons, heightened by the jumping back and forth between stories. It was
definitely more interesting than separating out the individual pieces of
reportage that it was made from. And this added significance was created solely
by chance, not by my conscious mind, and it was much smarter than my conscious
mind, which wasn’t even aware of what I was really writing at the time. I
eventually took this section out of the manuscript and published it separately
with all of the art and photography it described as Ekphrasis and Cathexis in 1991.
But this mixing up of the arts didn’t stop there. After I
published DODO—which was the complete
notebooks from my European travels except for Ekphrasis and Cathexis—I decided to retire from poetry, for a
variety of reasons. But then in 1995, Tom Peters caught me off-guard by asking
me to read at Penny Lane, and I impulsively said yes, and then panicked because
I quickly realized I had nothing to read. The only piece I had that I wanted to
read was Ekphrasis and Cathexis but I
couldn’t imagine how it could be performed because so much of it relied on
being able to see the photographs and paintings as I described them. Then one
day while I was out running I had an idea—I had recently been part of a
hospital relief mission to rebuild an orphanage in Mante, Mexico, and take
medicine into the mountains, which was the kind of thing I wanted to concentrate
on after I’d retired from writing. There I met Kai Sibley, who was with a
church group from Boulder to help with the rebuilding, and she mentioned that
she had been an art photographer when she was in college and wanted to get back
to it. After saying goodbye to her, probably forever, in a Boulder parking lot,
I was happy a couple of days later to have a reason to call her, and I asked if
she could shoot slides of some paintings and photographs and project them while
I read. Taking those slides turned out to be a lot more complicated than I
realized, but she had a macro lens and a projector and a friend who knew
American Sign Language—Barbara Jean Slopey—so at my reading I set up a chair
with a booklight on the right front of the stage, and Kai projected her slides
on a screen at the back of the stage, and Barbara Jean signed the text live
from the left of the stage. Wagner writes a lot about the gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of
art. He envisioned his operas as weaving together the best possible music,
poetry, drama, painting, and dance into a single experience. We didn’t go that
far, but it was the most fun I’d ever had onstage. It turned out that I could
really ham it up as long as people weren’t staring at me.
Then I began working for about five years with Kai, creating
more than two dozen of these slide-and-text performances, and at the same time
I began Dangerous And Difficult Art Productions in order to create public
collaborative experiences with other writers and musicians and artists, and restarted
FRICTION (magazine––ed.) and Laocoon
Press, and began the monthly on-line mag for
immediate release with NYC poet Jackie Sheeler to give us some outlets. The
next five years are far and away my most public and productive years. Creating
art with others and then performing it together was a lot more fun than sitting
in my living room working on a piece of writing. Plus having to read forced me
to finish things, or to create new things to fit the theme of the event.
Around this time Richard Wilmarth saw a performance of Hymns—one of my collaborations with
Kai—and asked if he could publish it. He had limited funds, and I wanted to
publish it with Kai’s photographs or not at all, so I took over the production
and handed the design over to the artist Amy Hayes, so that book is really a
collaboration between Kai, Amy, and myself. And then I gave Tree Bernstein a
poem I’d written called “one night” and she turned it into something that was
as much a work of art as a book.
It was at the end of this period that I met Katie Bowler and
we began a series of spontaneous collaborative writings that became Over Large Stars. One version of that
manuscript even includes our e-mails, letters, artwork, non-collaborative
poems, photographs, postcards, matchbooks, brochures from our travels, and
whatever else we collected during our time together that could be represented
on the page. That was probably the closest I’ve ever come to creating a gesamtkunstwerk. And
it was the excitement of creating something with that level of multiplicity
that completely killed what little interest I still had in creating collections
of poetry.
But that was more or less the end of my collaborative phase
for some reason. Much later, Tree Bernstein came up with the idea for us to
write a series of ghazals via the internet as she traveled around the world,
which we published as Away.
In 2002, I was invited to read at Philip Whalen’s memorial
in San Francisco, which I turned into a mini art vacation, and I came home with
the text of San Francisco Notebook.
What’s ironic is that I’d decided not to bring any books or do any writing
while I was there. I was going to leave my addictions to reading and writing at
home and just be where I really was for once, but on the way to the airport I
found an empty pocket notebook at the bus stop and had the funny idea that I
could write a book in it while I was in San Francisco. It was a funny idea
because I hadn’t written enough to fill a notebook of that size in the twelve
years since I’d gotten back from Europe. But it was the first time I carried a
pocket notebook at all times and I found I wrote a lot more when I could just
easily jot something down without trying to turn it into a poem. By the time I
returned, I’d filled almost the entire notebook, and I typed it up in
chronological order, so like DODO a
poem would be followed by a piece of prose or a letter and a journal piece and
a mini-essay, broken up with quotes from my readings at the time, which were
mostly from the poems of Rilke.
But somewhere in the middle of this process of typing them
up I also began to experiment with taking the poems that didn’t quite make it
and turning them into prose by erasing the linebreaks, or keeping the kind of
linebreaks that are forced on prose when you’re writing in a notebook so it
looked like a poem. Or I’d float a bit of poetry in the middle of an essay, or
continue the form of the poem through a long section of prose so the form would
be in conflict with the content, or I’d go quickly back and forth between
poetry and prose until you weren’t sure if you were reading a prose piece
interrupted by a poem or the other way around.
It’s about this time that I also began to reuse lines or
images whenever I repeated myself in my notes. At one point in that collection
I describe the same incident in a poem, a letter, and a journal piece. I
thought I’d choose the best one and take out the repetitions in the editing
process, but in re-reading the transcript they were like the reappearance of
motifs and themes in music, and I could understand what Gertrude Stein meant
when she said there is no such thing as repetition—that by the time you get to
the third rose in “a rose is a rose is a rose” it’s no longer the same rose.
And for the first time I began to write pieces in other
voices. I wrote an autobiographical piece in the voice of Rilke, and a poem in
the voice of Ellsworth Kelly, and a series of poems in the voice of Yoko Ono,
who had a full floor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the time.
Once that collection was published by Andy Hoffmann’s Elik Books, I thought of
it pretty much as a one-time thing, but as I continued to travel these
“notebook” works started to accumulate. In 2008, I published a collection of
them as What Have I Become, and at
the same time I published a collection of whatever stray works I had left over
as Happiness, which will probably be
my last non-notebook collection of work.
For the last ten years or so I mostly write only when I
travel, so I refer to most of my collections as my “travel notebooks.” But on
March 15th 2007, I began a year-long project that had its name
before I’d even written a word: A Year in
Remove. I was flirting with going to Europe for a year, transitioning out
of my job into something I could do as I traveled, and mentally preparing to
empty my house and rent it out, leaving everything behind. Since I wanted to
scale back on my traveling until then, I decided to create a project I could do
without traveling. I live within 40 minutes of the Rocky Mountain National Park
and I decided that I would drive there once a week and between visits I would
read books about the park—books about the geology or the Ute Indians or
accounts by the early settlers or guidebooks on the wildlife and wildflowers.
That project only lasted until the tourists showed up in mid-June, and very
little of that early writing survives in the final manuscript, but the idea of
writing for a year had taken hold, so I continued until March 15th
2008, and was surprised to find that I’d written a book by the end of the year.
So I immediately began another one, and that’s continued right up until the
present moment, where I’m almost finished with my third year-long collection,
and I already see it as a four- or five-year project, if not longer. At some
point during that process I also began to study the history of art and poetry
in as many cultures and museums as I could, and that’s become the focus of the
series now—what I wrote during this particular time while I studied world
poetry and art and whatever else happened to me during that time.
I think it’s important to say that none of this evolution in
my writing was planned. I would just get interested in something and pursue it,
without really knowing where I was going. Looking back, there are definitely
precedents. Lots of people have used cut-ups—from William Burroughs to John
Cage to Ted Berrigan—and there have been others who made poems out of other
texts—including Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky and John Ashbery. But I was never
comfortable passing off another’s work as my own. So, if it’s worth quoting, I
put it in quotes and source it. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this,
observing what I was comfortable with and what I wasn’t when using the written
works of others, and I realized there was a huge difference between taking
somebody’s words and taking their ideas. If I take some of their words—say
the title “The Myths and Legends of the Irish Race”—and change them to “The
Myth of the Irish Race,” I feel the meaning has been altered enough to create a
new idea, and most of my work is a lot more changed than that. That’s something
Ted impressed upon me too. He once wrote a poem out of words he cut out of an
essay in the New York Times by James
Dickey. He said he knew there was a poem in there somewhere but Dickey hadn’t
captured it. But, Ted insisted, you had to end up with something that even the
original author wouldn’t recognize as their own work. I didn’t quite believe
that was possible until I wrote a poem from the words of a local art critic and
gave him a copy, telling him where I’d gotten the words, and he refused to
believe me because he didn’t agree with anything the poem said. So, now, if a
reader finds the original text I’m writing from, and I sincerely hope they do,
they’ll better understand what I’m getting at and will uncover the invisible
poem that exists somewhere between the original and what I’ve made from it. But
I publish knowing that almost no one ever will, so if it doesn’t stand on its
own, or if it doesn’t make any sense, or if it’s too hermetic, or if there’s no
pleasure in it at all without knowledge of what I’m writing from, then I take
it out.
The idea of reproducing the random contents of a notebook as
a poem probably begins with Philip Whalen’s “Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” But I
think more important to me as a model for writing poetry is his statement in New American Poetry that his poetry is
“a graph of the mind moving.” That hooked in with Allen’s defense of Ezra
Pound—that his writings are a chart of the evolution of his obsessions over
time. That hooks into Anselm Hollo’s comment about it all being one poem. So
now I see my writings as the record of my mind moving over time, including my
studies and whatever I’m thinking about and seeing and doing at the time.
And as I’ve gotten older I’ve also noticed that what I write
about is what I remember. It’s like photographs—I end up remembering not the
actual moment I was trying to capture, but the photo itself. Once I realized
that what I wrote about is what I remember, I began to write about what I
wanted to remember. A poem in that way is one particular moment that becomes
crystallized into an object that would otherwise disappear.
But the real explanation for any evolution in my writing was
best summed up by the poet Mark DuCharme when I asked him what he was up to and
he said, “Trying to find new reasons for writing.” That’s it, really. It’s
mostly a matter of trying to stay interested in writing because writing and
rewriting is so exhausting and time-consuming. I must have retired from writing
half a dozen times because I don’t want to spend my life alone at a computer,
writing. It’s like what Dylan said about writing his autobiography—when you’re
writing about your life you’re not living it. But the fact is that if I’m not
writing, I’m not happy.
You were the one who gave me the final piece. You said that
people like us don’t really understand our lives except through the process of
writing. The act of translating the events of our lives into words helps us to
come to understand our lives a little, which are otherwise chaotic and
unfinished and unplanned. By arranging and shaping our feelings and experiences
on the page, they become part of the process we use to make sense of our
lives—making what the neuroscientist Dan Siegel describes as “coherent” rather
than an “incoherent” narratives. A poem is a point of focus that suggests
coherence. It’s what I mean when I say “the poem is elsewhere.” Even this
interview is a narrative created by selecting and attributing significance to
certain elements and ignoring vast amounts of contradictory information into a
story that aspires toward coherence. But it’s not life as it’s actually lived.
JC: The
thing I always love about a poetry interview is how the poet always goes back
to specific poems that are the real knowing eye of an explication on whatever
the subject is. I really failed you in this by not encouraging more mention of
specific poems that may illustrate your discussion by showing as a poet how you
may have expressed the same thing as a poem. Isn't that the reverse test
in a way?
RR:
Well, that’s probably my fault, mostly. I tend to shy away from talking about
specific poems, except in a general way. Once I read a poem by Lee Ann Brown in
The World Anthology and I told her
that it was my favorite poem of all time, and she thought I’d enjoy knowing how
it was made. It came from a class assignment where she was asked to focus on
one particular sense in each line, and then add a sixth line that didn’t come
from her senses but commented on them instead. When I reread the poem with that
information, it completely ruined it for me. It’s like the opposite of my
wanting to know everything about the works of art and artists that interest me.
Anyway, I’m afraid to do that with one of my own poems. In a general way I’ve
already talked about how some of my poems—like “Myths of the Irish Race” and
the poems in LIT and Maps and Awakening Osiris—were created, but I can include one poem that’s
both an example of my process and an explanation of it at the same time. It
answers your question without my having to comment on the poem at all.
About a decade ago you wrote a letter to tell me that you
were bewildered and disappointed by my current poetry, that you no longer
understood what I was trying to say or do in my work. I took that as a
challenge and decided to answer your question by writing a poem that explained
what I was doing and at the same time was an example of what I was doing. So the poem includes assemblage, montage, collage,
pastiche, cut-up, fromage, bits of overheard conversations, and notes from what
I was reading and listening to at the time. I won’t assassinate the poem for
you, but I will insert it here. It’s called “Deus Ex Camera,” or “God is in the
room,” which is the name of a medieval theological argument that God is present
in the here and now, not removed from us in heaven or wherever—and that we
can’t find Him or Her because we’re looking in the wrong direction.
Deus Ex Camera (for Jim Cohn)
The
death of a child by fire
like
Brueghel’s Icarus the boy falling
into the
sea, and there’s a ship and
anxiety
and the thin veil of the real,
the
place, the coordinates of
everything
I’ve counted on,
all of
these things
until I
no longer know
where I
am—
and I wonder
if
behind
these veils
are
monsters,
and the
black hole of all
my fears
and
operative
chance, too.
This.
For
people who are
not
heavenly bent
the
fabric of reality
is big
but it’s not
everything—there’s
the
logic of
dream and music,
to move
along as melody
with no
particular need
to go
anywhere specific
but to
delight in sudden
appearances
and
disappearances
—indirection
somehow.
Or how
poems have in mind
suggestions—how
the shape of
one’s
particular language creates the
picture
or suggestion—while music is
happy to
be no one—to have
nothing
to answer.
How can
anyone imagine
a poem
like that and then
add all
the other words—
all the
lines
that
fill the page with
how it might go—
a
perception translated into language
one can
get lost in,
but
instead
you just
go on.
How the
limits aren’t in
the
statement or even its
themes
but the limits are
in the
words themselves,
okay? Do
you see that
as a way
of writing,
going
into and out of abstraction—
a
completely ordinary sentence
but not
the whole sentence?
Of
course the weather continues—
the same
weather every day
and so
cold now it just continues—
the same
weather every day
returning,
and going on about that—
but how
the symphonic draws figures
aimlessly
within the possibilities of
limitless
gesture and the vanity
of
everything, how it happens quick—
how the
sound value—the tone of it—
changes
the meaning—tremors
and a
kind of nervousness in the voice—
Or
sometimes too fast—a fault
in the
reading, the sense of passing
mind—snowflake
fashion—how none of it
adds up
but arrives and continues
moving.
Or more
silence than you’re
accustomed
to—or sometimes a little
inner
laugh—sly humor or eye humor.
But it’s
pathetic, getting up and not
feeling
that way—even when everyone
laughs
or even when you laugh.
Or
Auden—how over-irony-ized
irony is
a way of not shooting straight—
of
indirection somehow, lack of direction, lost direction—
And then
the other thing, others being too
present
in the writing while writing—
a
multiplicity of readers and their sense of it—
or the
sense of oneself, myself, anyone
like
Frank O’Hara or whomever
against the corporate self—or that
“distant” you or we or I that we have
here—and sometimes a them or a he
that’s a multiple he—someone who can
write a poem like that—all of the various
hes and shes and theys of it—
or the words all frontal until you’re
conscious only of reading words, and
sometimes they’re sentences and
sometimes they’re syntax and sometimes
they’re rhetoric and sometimes they’re
ordinary prose—all these long, long
What are they? Associations?
all the things
you know and I know
in common—a parallel world to all these
word
worlds where words are words
first
with emphasis upon them—
Or where
words are physical in the sense of
physics
and have weight and shape and
their
own values—then in this—
in this
line—in this—to include
what we
know as human.
A place
for it.
—A person
who says
even this much in this way of
continually
speaking to oneself while
elsewhere—as
if one can
think of
it and it will be here—
Can you hear me over all this machine
noise?
Lick,
lack, luck, lock, lake, black
Latin
roots, rare and archaic words are
monsters
in a way.
Or
rhetoric—what is it?
Or how
always thinking
about
thinking adds a
feeling
of sadness or
danger
in the sense
of what
if you’ve
lost it
or don’t know
where
you are or
how it’s
gotten so
scattered—
all of
these things
in all
of this
as some
way of
What?
Disappointment?
Or where
the poem comes from—
the
source—where the energy is—
how
persuasive the voice. The
emotional
light of Pindar,
or even
that voice in Eliot—
in the
“Four Quartets” or whatever—
the
character—and that there are
people speaking who are
still
more Eliot than not—
Or a
sense of who you’re talking to or who’s talking or
Valery
who thought about poems for 20 years,
not
writing poems and then
not
writing poems written by
someone
other than their author—
Or the
“other” in the sense of
oracle
or medium through whom
these
words come, refusing to say
specific
things in order
to give
the rational mind
something
to chew on
designed
to destroy it.
Something
oracular in the way of
intention,
of incantation—
But then
what’s left?
And all
I had was music and
no sense
of how to make it music, but
That
these poems were beautiful—
That
they shimmered and shimmied—
That
they leapt fearlessly in that direction.