Interview with Standard Schaefer
Standard Schaefer is a writer living in San Francisco, California. His first book, Nova, was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1999 and published by Sun and Moon Books. His second book, Water & Power, has just been published by Agincourt Books. His poetry and criticism has appeared in several U.S. anthologies, and two international ones. His fiction has appeared in X-Connect, Epoch, and Rosebud. He co-edited the literary journals Rhizome, Ribot and edited the Selected Poems of Paul Vangelisti (Marsillio, 2001). His currently the non-fiction editor of The New Review of Literature. This interview was conducted over email in the month of August, 2005.
-- Tony Tost
One of my favorite pieces in your new book is towards the end, "Central Avenue: or That Other West Coast Jazz." I want to pull up a couple lines in particular:
and what did she mean her favorite poem was Sun Tzu's Art of War
and going on about some road named Jack that went to New York to suck off Gore Vidal
and why Jack try to talk above the music there is nothing above the music,
it's bats all the way up, a few truffles, caviar, integrated schools . . .Although this particular poem is in a voice not especially common to your book, the passage seems pretty representative to me -- since the issue of music is raised in these lines, I want to ask about the particular type of music in these poems.
But first, a diversion: in seeing the general gist of the book, one can't help but think of maybe Olson's proposed epic on the West, but your poems operate in a manner completely different than one might expect for such a quintessentially American project. All I'm trying to say is that it seems such subject matter is usually presented more directly than Water & Power does -- you know, poets usually don't want to muddy up their scholarship, but your sentences and lines roll back on themselves, keep on revising the thinking processes they embody as they go on. A music of thought as much as a music of syllables. Your lines jump not just from one perception to the next, but seemingly from one possible dramatic/meditative situation to the next. It's almost like Ashbery in that regard - not as a series of cool non-sequiters, as a lot of poets seem to interpret his example, but as series upon series of movements through thought and perception. It really builds momentum. There are allusions to Willie Nelson & Charles Mingus and other musicians throughout, as well as poets such as Jeffers -- did you have an idea of the music of this project before hand? Were there specific goals (to attain or to avoid) in this regard? Models?
Standard Schaefer : I've always wanted to write lyrics that would convey the excitement I find in the really best bluegrass music. I don't know why. But I would like to imagine an equivalent in words alone.
Okay, the specific layering you describe I thought about in the course of writing as "sedimentation," so more akin one of the themes sediment, saidments, and I was interested in capturing a Spicerian poetry of statements.
But throughout the book I wrestled with trying to capture some of the music I associate with the west, and especially to the specific locales I was dealing with. This includes Stravinsky, Schoenberg (who taught at UCLA), Frank Zappa, and some country music. I would sort of imagine as an equivalent to their music in words. I doubt I was successful with Stravinsky (the poem about Disney and the metaphysical would be his) or Schoenberg. I like Stravinsky's use of folk music and it was helpful for letting me indulge in some folksy voices throughout the book.
Really I settled on Zappa as the model, all the wrong stuff he does, the stuff he borrows from Varese, the punctuation in odd moments, low budget orchestral stuff, etc. But I didn't want to write in Zappa's voice per se and that's hard to avoid if you know his music. There's only one poem where try to tweak Zappa's persona. A bit.
Re: Muddied scholarship: I didn't want the reader to have to know the history as well as I do. I did a lot of research but for my own interest and I wanted to give a sense of what is compelling out of my obsession with the West, its ecological devastation, its history of boondoggles. I was trying to draw a reader in and use these occasional statement such as "Bird song in the west is just hunger in a sentimental mood." These were designed to help reinforce the sense that the book should just be listened to first. There are reasons in certain lines where I deliberately muddle the history--such as one moment talking about Disney when I conflate his nature films for the VD films the military asked him to make. These conflations are meant to link a sense of Disney's odd interest in an image of innocence even as he agreed to make CIA propaganda in South America. The reader need not know this. The reader should just hear how discordant these things are. So the music of the poem itself is discordant.
Moving through thought and perception was the intention, but also I wanted to regulate or tweak these with occasional essay-like moments, almost moral essays. The West has produced very few, but since I think of it in many ways as an anti-Walden, I thought it would be fun to pretend to make up for this deficiency. Hopefully, the reader doesn't have to agree with them (I only agree with most of them) but whatever they trigger in the reader, I want that to carry forward until the next. I thought an essay-like poem with some rhythmic structure might help set the reader at ease about some of the politics or more controversial aspects of the work.
Ultimately, I have to admit that the single biggest model for me is this not well-known LA poet named Paul Vangelisti. He's got some essay sounding poems that really opened up a number of possibilities for me. He happens also to be my fly-fishing buddy and we'd often talk about some of the history scattered through the book. It's much a homage to him. I just don't want anyone not to know that there would not have been anyway for me write this book without his inspiration. He's a master of collage, but doesn't need the collage because he has mind that associates so freely. But I've got my own "philosophical" register and my associations tend to be more Ashbery-like than his. I've had to work to sculpt a harder, more serious music (most of the time) than Ashbery because as much I loved Ashbery, I hate his silliness and see it as a real dead-end.
RE: Robinson Jeffers: I went to Occidental College as an undergrad where they happen to have a large part of the Jeffers archive. Jeffers went there and in the special collections section of the library, where I'd sometimes go to write when I was in college, they have Jeffers' chair. I'd sit there and try to channel him, but it never worked because I didn't really understand his poetry yet. He became more interesting to me later when I was writing this book and living very near where he lived in Pasadena, California (around the block) that I realized how much he hated modernity. And how much I too have come to hate it. Now Jeffers largely withdrew from it and had inherited the money to do so. I recognized my own tendency to withdraw socially, psychologically, even politically. As I came to really love his curious retreat into a form of romanticism, I decided I would have to retreat to the future, to some after-modernity. It was partly my dissatisfaction with his route that caused me to become more interested in the history of social movements, the enclosures of the commons that precede industrialism...It became clear that the history of the American West is much like the history of the English enclosures that occur at the beginning of modernity.
As I wrote the book and wrestled with Jeffers, reading history to figure out why I don't agree with him, that I became certain I didn't want to be a liberal in the classical sense. I was attracted to his distrust of nationalism, but I've become more suspicious of nation states altogether. I didn't want to pretend there was an Eden to capture as Jeffers tends to. I wanted to convey in W&P that we could just reclaim the present. That's what the last poem tries to convey, the one dedicated to the unknown LA poet Bob Crosson. His project was failure itself. He rejected success and claimed failure as his project. I was hoping to convey that we can just create the world we want to live in now, among the three or four of us, say, who think they have anything in common.
[page 1 of 4 ]