DS: I'd say that any active tracing of thought through an environment, however mundane or insignificant, makes a profound registration. Or maybe the terms “profound” and “mundane” are rubbing me the wrong way today. Creeley's attention in A Day Book, like Thoreau's, measures a certain duration of time and place. That measure and attention to it is key for me and negates qualitative responses. Creeley's prose — or Beckett's, to mention the limits of the extreme mundane — is to me transformative, even redemptive. Out of the great slop of life come these few words retrieved from a particular time and place. I believe you could make very simple films like this too, very cheaply. In fact, I think filmmaking is much closer to poetry than many people think. Schuyler's cute aside about his own writing in relation to photography — ”point and click” — is a high acknowledgment that the world is infinitely interesting.
Yesterday I read for the first time in several years Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael. What he's dealing with there through Melville is myth and magic, not politics, which he abandoned not long before the publication of Call Me Ishmael. Privately, I believe Olson had deep local political convictions, but as a poet he reached for something other and came up with these great insights and reductions. In the opening pages (“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America . . .”) he says this:
Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, ox-wheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.
I admire Olson here for cutting through the self-positive projections Americans often make to articulate the active substance of our function on this continent. Technology, not politics, has been the essence of “our” collective experience. Henry Adams acknowledged this earlier than Olson in his essay “The Virgin and the Dynamo.”
My concern is this: if we live in a “now” dominated by political alternatives — illusions of active participation — what happens to the actual space we inhabit? The “present” is poetry's responsibility, and I think, like Olson or Melville, it must reach for actual conditions that register perhaps more closely to myth than politics or social melioration. Myth as active substance of our actions vs. a decayed idealism that has never served us. Poetry's liberating goal is to return sight to our eyes and restore us to life.
So I'm hopping off my soapbox now and handing the bullhorn to you. But first, I think the only political future is our children. The present is for poets to measure by all necessary means. “Now” is a conditioned blindness, or limited scope — something like that — despite a million worldwide protesters.
AG: Americans are always trying to finish off history. It seems to be part of the ethos of the United States, for a complex array of reasons: from the Protestant millennialism of the early British settlers, to the abundance of natural resources that seemed to promise a respite from worldly toil, to the genocidal ruptures that from its beginnings the US has never hesitated to perpetrate on other civilizations in order to guarantee its own survival. Conquering and mastering space seems innocent — and metaphorical — in comparison. As Olson was revising what became Call Me Ishmael during the closing months of World War II, he looked out toward a period of globalization that may seem sweepingly spatial in retrospect, but which has so thoroughly saturated present historical conditions that many people now experience it intimately, even claustrophobically. Moreover, this overwhelming sense of immediacy at times makes it feel as if history may be drawing to a close. I'm less interested in tunneling out of this immanence than tunneling into it as horizontally as possible — a process globalization facilitates — in the hopes of finding other networks within established networks, other information within standard information, other discourses within dominant discourses, and other temporalities within compressed temporalities. What's to be found is, as you say, neither profound nor mundane.
Again, I'm not so sure this is a question of transfiguration as it is one of interconnection, the intercultural, and interdisciplinary methods. And it's one of the few ways in which I can conceive of freedom, a constrained freedom that's less about one's own autonomy than establishing a space for autonomy to be negotiated and shared. Like friendship. Like parenting. With their rewards, pleasures, and difficulties.
DS: Has being a father changed your writing in any way?
AG: For the most part, I think it's probably too early to tell. You're going into your third year with Keaton; Sophie's not quite eight months old yet. As I mentioned, she's certainly changed my approach to time, keeping me focused on the all the demands of the moment, which I never before quite realized had so many demands. Of course I fret about not getting as much work done; but for almost any writer, visual artist, etc., I know — with or without children — that's always a concern. It seems as if you've managed to stay productive with your writing, editing, and publishing. Any tips?
One change I've begun to think about concerns the element of surprise and the unexpected in language. I don't know if this coincides with Sophie's birth or not; but she quickly taught me that babies can get just as bored as their parents. Children anticipate — and deserve — a more involved level of interaction than we frequently encounter in many other aspects of our social lives. How long will a baby take genuine pleasure in having a small toy or a stuffed animal waved in front of her face? Not particularly long. Children harbor a constant hope for delight, which still exists in some adults — one place you can see it come out is around children (and pets).
From another angle, this interest in the unexpected is also the result of feeling surrounded by so much stale rhetoric and recycled ideas in the cultural and political realms — from the mainstream and the so-called alternatives to it, and from the right as well as the left. As writers, one starting point might be to begin generating a different vocabulary. And as poets, since we have so little to gain these days, maybe we should risk losing ourselves and our presumptions more.
DS: Being a parent has certainly changed my relations to the world, to say the least. As Keaton grows, new sets of problems present themselves. There's an interesting parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS) that Hoa and I try to follow. Basically, the goal is to let children resolve conflicts themselves rather than always butting in for them. For instance, if we're at a playground and another kid dumps sand on Keaton's head and takes his shovel we don't automatically interfere. Though I'd like to kick the other little shit in the pants, we try to help Keaton find creative solutions to the situation. It's difficult and time consuming, but I like the way it works so far. How to be actual in the world, with children or adults, is demanding. It's easy to fall back on habit and internalized forms. It's necessary to nurture and preserve those autonomous spaces you mention. It's an almost tribal situation we're in. Luckily, with communication technologies, a crucial sharing of affinities is not restricted to geographic locations. Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) is I guess what you have in mind?
AG: As far as Temporary Autonomous Zones go, I would put the emphasis on “temporary” (a recently published second edition of Bey's book contains a new introduction by him that complicates his original proposal). We're all implicated in institutional structures, discourses of power, and hierarchies of oppression that we don't always want to own up to; and it's naïve to think we can completely elude these for more than brief spells — if ever. I don't know if it's a question of getting older, becoming a parent, having the same job for a few years now; but I've begun to think that acknowledging one's complicities with power can be as “radical” a gesture as proclaiming one's independence from it. The former perspective enables one to take steps toward better understanding one's complicities, with the idea of trying to change the conditions that allow for them — and their inevitable ensnarement of others — as much as is possible. I find that the latter attitude of overestimating one's independence from power relations can sometimes perpetuate an ignorance of one's own blind spots.
DS: The other day you were talking about writing an article on Charles Olson's earliest publication. What was that and what are your interests in it?
AG: I had always thought that Olson's first books of prose and poetry were Call Me Ishmael and Y & X , the latter a small five-poem chapbook Olson published in 1948. In fact, it turns out that in 1944, while working in the Office of War Information (one of the US government's major propaganda machines for the war effort), he published a poetic pamphlet entitled Spanish Speaking Americans in the War. The Southwest , which included photographs by the WPA / American Communist Party-affiliated / socially progressive artist Ben Shahn (whom Olson later asked to teach at Black Mountain College ).
I'm intrigued by the idea that Olson — who's touted as the inventor of the term “postmodernism” (wrongly, it turns out; Perry Anderson's book The Origins of Postmodernity describes the invention of the word and concept “postmodernism,” and contains an insightful and sensitive reading of Olson's writing and its crucial role in propagating the notion of “postmodernism”), and whose poem “The Kingfishers” is considered to be perhaps the first significant postmodern poem (another dubious claim) — should at one time have had a direct connection to the proletariat / red / New Deal / politicized aesthetics of the 1930s that 1950s High Modernism combined with cultural and political McCarthyism attempted to eradicate from history. I like the image of Olson tracking the mud of that period into the increasingly pristine formalist spaces of postmodernism, in the same way that I'm fascinated by the soles of old leather shoes that proliferate in Philip Guston's later work, replacing the daubed abstractions he painted in the '50s.
DS: How do you see that “politicized aesthetics” specifically in relation to High Modernism? It makes me think immediately of Oppen too, who instead of writing in a party style to accommodate his idealism quit writing in order to pursue political beliefs, putting thought into action. It seems both Oppen and Olson shared some political affinities but poetry could not accommodate them in that somehow. For Olson, politics gets transformed into Polis through the literary persona of Maximus, while for Oppen political action becomes for him an experience of actual labor and isolation from poetry. I guess I find it striking that for them political activism and poetics are not entirely compatible. Both Oppen and Olson, coincidentally, had Pound as formidable mentor, a man with an opposing political position. It seems relevant in our discussion here of poetry and politics to consider these divers reactions politically. They indicate to me, at least based on the political and social environments of the period, a limitation or boundary poetry enforces. Do you ever think of the poem as its own organism, something indifferent to the poet's own ideals and beliefs?
AG: The politicized aesthetics of the '30s seem to be in opposition to High Modernism. I'm tempted to be more generous about this opposition and describe it as a productive tension had High Modernism — in a broad and discontinuous spectrum stretching from Clement Greenberg to McCarthy(ism) to the CIA — not waged a kind of (cold) war on the writers / artists of the '30s and their socially progressive preoccupations. In the realm of aesthetics (which is never inseparable from the realms of politics and culture), High Modernism is an apotheosis of the self-contained literary / visual / cultural object. Not coincidentally, High Modernism was obsessed with recovering a lost object — one perhaps ultimately indefinable by the High Modernists or by us. Because High Modernism demanded that the fundamental properties of an art object be inherent within the work of art itself, the High Modernist art object frequently inscribed its own death as a substitute for this lost object; hence, the sense of mourning that pervades the work of so many High Modernists: the later Eliot and Rothko are obvious examples.
One of the biggest transformations during the past ten or so years in my own approach to poetry and thinking about poetry (and cultural products in general) is a switch from a concern with the lost object and a critical-philosophical engagement with the idea of the negative, to an interest in possibility and unimagined relations. I hope this isn't the result of false optimism, even if in the current political environment a certain amount of self-induced false optimism may be necessary in order to make it through the day (or the next presidential election). Instead, I'd like to think of it as the product of a contextual, intercultural — and maybe even matrixial — cultural politics. I definitely see your work as a poet, scholar, critic, editor, and publisher being very much engaged with this sense of possibility and relation, as distinct from the self-contained, formalist art / literary object or a tarrying with the negative.
I'm not so sure Oppen abandoned poetry because he didn't want to write according to an imposed script. This idea of the '30s being a particularly doctrinaire time in US arts and letters is a myth mostly perpetuated by the anti-"communist" political climate and Cold War aestheticism of the '40s and '50s, which isn't to ignore the alienation writers like Oppen and Richard Wright felt when faced with some of the more stringent dictates issued by aesthetic demagogues affiliated with the US Communist Party. But every period and every community has its implicitly and explicitly requested modes and styles of producing cultural artifacts, usually buttressed by an institutional support network doling out rewards for those who satisfy these criteria (and neglect for those who don't). That's as true for the literary avant-garde of the '90s as it was for the literary avant-garde of the '30s.
I tend to think that Oppen stopped writing poetry on the eve of WWII because the primary forms of poetry immediately available to him — whether proletariat / New Deal or Objectivist — weren't political enough , not potentially too politicized. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that they weren't political in the precise form Oppen's always evolving sense of politics felt they should take at that particular historical moment (the overall trajectory of Oppen's politics would appear to be more complex than Olson's, for instance). I think this is what you're referring to when you talk about Oppen's need to put, “thought into action.” Poetry itself doesn't enforce boundaries (poetry by itself doesn't really do much of anything), history does (or maybe what I really mean to say here is that sociology does[?]). Which is another way of echoing your idea that for Oppen and Olson, “political activism and poetics are not entirely compatible.”
DS: I think poetry does a lot, however insignificant it seems. Surely, in my idealism, I give it a higher place perhaps than it deserves. But I believe its relation to the world is essential, that a world can only be as vital as the language that relates it. I like what you say about “unimagined relations.” There is a problem when the poem becomes the only focus, as if other divers responses to the world weren't already going on by other artists and activists. I've written extensively on radio and communications, really searching out the local uses of the airwaves. You write about art and music in addition to being an exceptional literary critic and poet. So I like the way the boundaries of writing open up to include a whole range of cultural possibilities, not just for us, but others too. But as poets, our sensitivity to language influences the other writing we do. Coleridge worked in this way too, to back up in time a bit. Maybe poetry's use isn't just for writing poems, but for a whole range of living and writing. Edward Dorn once said to me that a lot of people who think they're poets aren't, and many who don't consider themselves poets are. What do you think that's about? Maybe poetry's an ability or willingness to perceive actual conditions against the projected apparatus assaulting us from everywhere.
AG: Yes, but the creative critical use of language that poetry at its best enacts doesn't exist independently of the conditions of both its production and its reception. In other words, there's no such thing as language itself (the idea of language itself has always struck me as a metaphysics masquerading as a poetics). Perhaps I'm being too literal — or sociological — when I emphasize the material conditions of production and reception; but poetry's “willingness to perceive actual conditions” needs to include the social, cultural, political, and economic (or to use a different set of theoretical terms, the discursive and institutional) contexts in which poetry is produced, distributed, and received. I see these contexts as inseparable from any poem, which isn't to reduce the reading of a poem to them, or to say that they wholly determine our understanding of a poem. For this reason, it would be interesting to apply to various modes of contemporary poetry the model — or if not a model per se, then the information — you generated from your studies of local radio.
A contextual approach to thinking about poetry's interventions in “language” is as necessary as a focus on the array of formal and linguistic techniques a poem utilizes. This might be one way, albeit obliquely, of understanding Dorn's statement, i.e., that a self-conscious attempt to intervene solely at the level of (poetic) language isn't really poetry at all, or is an outmoded conception of poetry. It seems as if this is how Dorn read his own lyric poetry from the '60s — it's a body of work he increasingly distanced himself from.
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