Della Watson: Let’s start at the beginning: What did you eat for breakfast?
Steffi Drewes: This morning I made a mango coconut raspberry smoothie and immediately decided I should have one of these every day.
DW: Good god, that sounds delightful—much like your poetry, which seems to have a jazz-like quality, as root sounds repeat and mutate. How does sound develop in your poems?
SD: It usually starts with a single phrase or line, or a couple of words that sound like they belong together even though they signify totally different things or emotional contexts. I try to pay a lot of attention to word connotations, because I want there to be multiple interpretations available to the reader. But I basically start riffing off that one word combination or image and see where it leads me. I do like the comparison to jazz because there is definitely a sense of play and improvisation, of tuning into the words and trying to establish a balance (or rather a tension) between logic and mystery, pleasure and peculiarity, beauty and discomfort—in sound and context. The story unfolds itself. I try not to let a preconceived narrative interrupt the language.
DW: You and I both received our MFAs from art schools. Do other art forms have a role in your poetry?
SD: Absolutely. I have always sought out museums and galleries as sanctuaries and sources of inspiration. In grad school, getting to my classes involved walking past installations of student work or in-progress critiques of all kinds—architecture, sculpture, fashion, painting, photography—so I was constantly surrounded by creative energy. Taking book arts and photography classes also informed my writing, in terms of visual presentation, collage and splicing techniques. I like thinking about the overlap between the visual and literary art worlds—the shared vocabularies, the possibilities for collaboration. I had a great experience collaborating with a photography student and would love to do something like that again. Right now, I’m working on a series of poems with the working title “Installation” that is very much in conversation with the practices of visual art-making, gallery installations, and everyday scenes that strike me.
DW: Tell me about the “Horizon Line Drawings” series.
SD: It was part of a writing exercise I started a few years ago. Each poem was originally named for a day of the week, but I renamed the series because each poem seemed like a simplified account of the day’s events, like an outline or line drawing. For me, “horizon line” was about the fact that I wrote them at the end of each day, looking back long after sunset and tracing where I had been. I assigned them arbitrary numbers because titling them with days of the week felt just as arbitrary, yet numbers seemed to indicate that there were many more entries, either existing or yet unwritten.
DW: There’s a phrase in your poem “Days Before the Tunnel Failed Us” that struck me as interesting: “how these nets are nothing more / than loops and loops of vowel sounds.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and identify this as a statement of poetics. If you care to join me on my limb, answer this: Are you the fish or the fisherwoman?
SD: As far as writing goes, sometimes I’m the one swinging the net and sometimes I’m the one getting caught—but I can usually escape! To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a poetics statement in mind when I wrote that. In fact, I’ve revised that section of the poem multiple times but always kept that phrase the same. Ars poetica? Maybe so. For now, I will happily join you on the limb.
DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?
SD: Only those poets who like to go camping, because it is important to have allies and I enjoy being outdoors. But I don’t find the labels all that helpful when it comes to my own work—maybe because I’m so deep in it. Every poem I write feels like an experiment—that’s what keeps it exciting for me. I try to challenge myself and my readers with different forms and rhythms, phrasing and narrative structures, but maybe that impulse to try new things is a reflection of both my attention span and writerly intention. I wouldn’t keep writing if it felt predictable and safe.
DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?
DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?
SD: Are you in need of a hard yes or no or “I am X” for this one? I seem to have received this question several times. . .
DW: It must be an email glitch. Just ignore any repeat questions.
DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?
SD: OK, now it’s just getting funny. That’s probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve received this question via email. It’s almost as though the computer refuses to accept my vague question-dodging answer. As if it is imperative that I answer this question. Nothing like a little ghostly technological persistence to make a girl batty and doubt her words!
DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?
Interviewer’s note: At press time, Steffi Drewes’s email account was still being bombarded with the persistent poetry-camps question. We fear that Steffi may be haunted by this question for the rest of her life.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Don Mee Choi talks with Dot Devota for Friday August 6th's reading
DON MEE CHOI: As I was reading your poem “Insurgency,” published in Action, Yes, I thought of Ch’oe Sung-ja’s poetry, a contemporary Korean women poet I translated in Anxiety of Words. I found the relentlessly abrasive, rebellious images and thoughts in the poem breathtaking. Then I started to think that a brilliant line such as this “An idiot asking a valid question in a world that didn’t have to be a world because it was already validated as one, its own, Hall of Fame” could only be written by an insurgent translator of some sorts, living in a time already realized—“children’s books will be best. Small cabins will not be kind. Neither will the cockpits of planes.”
How did you come to write “Insurgency”?
DOT DEVOTA: The “Insurgency” poems came after writing a series titled “Defenestrations”. There was very little planning—titles came to me and I began writing to them. I was a dog with its nose to the ground following a scent, turning corners every once in awhile but all the time not looking ahead or even up.
Of course the title “Insurgency” comes from news coverage on US wars. I grabbed the title like a toddler who picks up the word “fuck” from their parents—having very little idea as to what the word actually means but by spilling it over and over again they become a part of the condition of that word. Because it is obscene, gets attention, and for the toddler it has consequences. As soon as the “Insurgency” poems started “Counterinsurgency” poems began appearing on the same page. So I had these mutinies trying to distinguish themselves but with similar characteristics or “tactics” they were completely indistinguishable. The titles become bogus. The poems might as well not be titled at all, or maybe they should just be called “Fuck”.
DMC: Any thoughts about being or posing as an insurgent translator?
DD: I think of the insurgent translator as engaging in armed resistance by taking a foreign language and making it ones own. Although I feel pretty weaponless. Poetry not being much of a weapon in the US. Being a poet here feels like being a soldier without any arms or legs to wield weapons. Maybe that makes the poet a war vet, having lost recognizable human form during battle, possibly becoming hyper-human simultaneously, because they were totaled by the experience—thus lineation in poetry.
DMC: And what about the “Fat Ghost” of the “Insurgency Day”? I’m curious about this fatty ghost. Fat with curtains or something else?
DD: Fat with its ghostness, I suppose. As an invisible entity getting larger, becoming monstrously invisible, taking up all the space but invisible nonetheless. It’s infuriating!
DMC: Your manuscript, The Division of Labor, was one of the five finalists for Omnidawn’s full book poetry contest. Are you distributing it elsewhere? If you were to say to a publisher of your choice why they should publish this manuscript, what would you say? Any insurgent thoughts will be most appreciated!
DD: I imagine the insurgent wouldn’t abide by rules of poetry publishing. I’d ask myself, “How do insurgents get their concerns across, their demands met?” Do some literary beheading. I imagine I’d have to break in through the air vents of Bookthug’s office, or into the Waldrop’s basement, or as literary anthrax sent to New Directions. It would be easier than finding my capitalist spirit and trying to sell anyone anything. I know people say “but lots of writers peddled their manuscripts door to door.” But this is largely a folktale passed down to us by people who mean well. I’m not a man doing business on a golf course. My poetry is my sex. It’s how I plan on sleeping my way into a book. A lot of insurgents have great PR—videos from undisclosed desert locations, and car bombs always get attention. But really, more than anything, I would want a friend to publish it, and I would say to them, “You are my friend and I want to die. Take these poems they belong to you now.”
DMC: Last you traveled to Lebanon and Syria. Why Lebanon and Syria? Who translated your poems that appeared in As-Safir? Did you get to read with the translator? Would you be able to show one translated poem here?
DD: After writing The Division of Labor, which eventually turns its gaze towards the Middle East, I needed to go. As Americans, we’re constantly being inundated with all this information about the Middle East, but we have very little understanding as to what it’s actually like there. I needed to see what was going on street-level. My boyfriend Brandon Shimoda and I contacted a bunch of Arab poets there, such as Sabah Zwein (who translated our poems) and Etel Adnan (who also lives in California and Paris) and asked if they wanted to meet. Originally, I had full funding from the University of Montana’s Arab Studies—a program specifically designed to promote conversation and cultural exchange—but then the US issued a travel warning and suddenly the school pulled my funding and refused to answer my calls. It was the same week that Obama gave his hyped-up Cairo speech to the Arab world, talking about the need for dialogue and understanding but simultaneously issuing warnings and bans making it impossible for me to go as an academic. I went anyway.
Brandon and I were asked to give a reading in Damascus in a basement for about 200 Syrians. They were the best audience you could imagine, because they are actually alive at poetry readings—yelling out, trying to read along, drunk, asking to have the poems afterwards like it’s the set-list from a concert, demanding to be won over by the writing, i.e. engaged.
DMC: You have recently embarked on a much longer trip, a journey back to the land where your grandmother, Dot Devota, had once lived. How does your grandmother’s identity as a rodeo star overlap with yours?
DD: The land—280 acres in mid-Missouri—is still in my family, bought by my grandparents in 1940, although it’s not a working ranch anymore. But it’s beautiful country, very Tarkovsky-esque. It has hidden pastures and quicksand. My grandmother wasn’t a rodeo star herself, just gave birth to them. Rodeos weren’t really popular in the US yet when she was growing up. Still just a bunch of cowboys then. But as for our identities, I’m not sure they do overlap. More than any identity, it’s about connection to the land. Having the exterior landscape mirror my interior landscape. I feel like I was sort of kidnapped from the country before I was even born, exiled from a time and place I had never experienced, so it’s not nostalgia and it’s not idealizing the past, because it’s alive and still in my bones. More like abduction from a way of life—having been taken to a city and given possibilities only to scheme my way back, except now I’m horseless and without farm skills.
DOT DEVOTA fled Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Her poems can be found in Boonville, MO.
Don Mee Choi's first book of poems, The Morning News Is Exciting, is now
available from Action Books. She has
translated When The Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish, 2005), Anxiety Of Words
(Zephyr, 2006), and Mommy Must Be A Fountain Of Feathers (Action Books,
2008).
How did you come to write “Insurgency”?
DOT DEVOTA: The “Insurgency” poems came after writing a series titled “Defenestrations”. There was very little planning—titles came to me and I began writing to them. I was a dog with its nose to the ground following a scent, turning corners every once in awhile but all the time not looking ahead or even up.
Of course the title “Insurgency” comes from news coverage on US wars. I grabbed the title like a toddler who picks up the word “fuck” from their parents—having very little idea as to what the word actually means but by spilling it over and over again they become a part of the condition of that word. Because it is obscene, gets attention, and for the toddler it has consequences. As soon as the “Insurgency” poems started “Counterinsurgency” poems began appearing on the same page. So I had these mutinies trying to distinguish themselves but with similar characteristics or “tactics” they were completely indistinguishable. The titles become bogus. The poems might as well not be titled at all, or maybe they should just be called “Fuck”.
DMC: Any thoughts about being or posing as an insurgent translator?
DD: I think of the insurgent translator as engaging in armed resistance by taking a foreign language and making it ones own. Although I feel pretty weaponless. Poetry not being much of a weapon in the US. Being a poet here feels like being a soldier without any arms or legs to wield weapons. Maybe that makes the poet a war vet, having lost recognizable human form during battle, possibly becoming hyper-human simultaneously, because they were totaled by the experience—thus lineation in poetry.
DMC: And what about the “Fat Ghost” of the “Insurgency Day”? I’m curious about this fatty ghost. Fat with curtains or something else?
DD: Fat with its ghostness, I suppose. As an invisible entity getting larger, becoming monstrously invisible, taking up all the space but invisible nonetheless. It’s infuriating!
DMC: Your manuscript, The Division of Labor, was one of the five finalists for Omnidawn’s full book poetry contest. Are you distributing it elsewhere? If you were to say to a publisher of your choice why they should publish this manuscript, what would you say? Any insurgent thoughts will be most appreciated!
DD: I imagine the insurgent wouldn’t abide by rules of poetry publishing. I’d ask myself, “How do insurgents get their concerns across, their demands met?” Do some literary beheading. I imagine I’d have to break in through the air vents of Bookthug’s office, or into the Waldrop’s basement, or as literary anthrax sent to New Directions. It would be easier than finding my capitalist spirit and trying to sell anyone anything. I know people say “but lots of writers peddled their manuscripts door to door.” But this is largely a folktale passed down to us by people who mean well. I’m not a man doing business on a golf course. My poetry is my sex. It’s how I plan on sleeping my way into a book. A lot of insurgents have great PR—videos from undisclosed desert locations, and car bombs always get attention. But really, more than anything, I would want a friend to publish it, and I would say to them, “You are my friend and I want to die. Take these poems they belong to you now.”
DMC: Last you traveled to Lebanon and Syria. Why Lebanon and Syria? Who translated your poems that appeared in As-Safir? Did you get to read with the translator? Would you be able to show one translated poem here?
DD: After writing The Division of Labor, which eventually turns its gaze towards the Middle East, I needed to go. As Americans, we’re constantly being inundated with all this information about the Middle East, but we have very little understanding as to what it’s actually like there. I needed to see what was going on street-level. My boyfriend Brandon Shimoda and I contacted a bunch of Arab poets there, such as Sabah Zwein (who translated our poems) and Etel Adnan (who also lives in California and Paris) and asked if they wanted to meet. Originally, I had full funding from the University of Montana’s Arab Studies—a program specifically designed to promote conversation and cultural exchange—but then the US issued a travel warning and suddenly the school pulled my funding and refused to answer my calls. It was the same week that Obama gave his hyped-up Cairo speech to the Arab world, talking about the need for dialogue and understanding but simultaneously issuing warnings and bans making it impossible for me to go as an academic. I went anyway.
Brandon and I were asked to give a reading in Damascus in a basement for about 200 Syrians. They were the best audience you could imagine, because they are actually alive at poetry readings—yelling out, trying to read along, drunk, asking to have the poems afterwards like it’s the set-list from a concert, demanding to be won over by the writing, i.e. engaged.
DMC: You have recently embarked on a much longer trip, a journey back to the land where your grandmother, Dot Devota, had once lived. How does your grandmother’s identity as a rodeo star overlap with yours?
DD: The land—280 acres in mid-Missouri—is still in my family, bought by my grandparents in 1940, although it’s not a working ranch anymore. But it’s beautiful country, very Tarkovsky-esque. It has hidden pastures and quicksand. My grandmother wasn’t a rodeo star herself, just gave birth to them. Rodeos weren’t really popular in the US yet when she was growing up. Still just a bunch of cowboys then. But as for our identities, I’m not sure they do overlap. More than any identity, it’s about connection to the land. Having the exterior landscape mirror my interior landscape. I feel like I was sort of kidnapped from the country before I was even born, exiled from a time and place I had never experienced, so it’s not nostalgia and it’s not idealizing the past, because it’s alive and still in my bones. More like abduction from a way of life—having been taken to a city and given possibilities only to scheme my way back, except now I’m horseless and without farm skills.
DOT DEVOTA fled Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Her poems can be found in Boonville, MO.
Don Mee Choi's first book of poems, The Morning News Is Exciting, is now
available from Action Books. She has
translated When The Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish, 2005), Anxiety Of Words
(Zephyr, 2006), and Mommy Must Be A Fountain Of Feathers (Action Books,
2008).
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Trevor Calvert talks with Eric Baus for his August 6th Reading at Studio One Art Center
Trevor Calvert: Hey Eric,
I read Tuned Droves again and this time made notes! So you'll be reading at the Studio One Reading Series in August, so I think it would be good to chat a little bit about your writing in context of Tuned Droves, your current projects, antecedents, sensation in your poems, multiplicity, audio recordings, and maybe helix owls...
To start, would you mind speaking a little as to what writing has helped form your poetics? I recall from when we met you were really into French Surrealism and poets like Nate Mackey and George Kalamaras—how have these writers influenced you?
Eric Baus: Hi Trevor!
Sure, no problem. When I went to college in the mid 90's in Indiana I met George Kalamaras, who was one of my first poetry teachers. He was incredibly generous and encouraging and gave me some reading leads to follow up on. George actually brought Mackey to my school for the visiting writers series and he taught Eroding Witness and School of Udhra a few months before he came to read. When Mackey read I bought Bedouin Hornbook (the first book of epistolary fiction) and that opened up a lot for me.
TC: Wow, so Kalamaras introduced Mackey to you initially. That's great! Would you mind, talking a little bit about how these two influenced your writing and do you see threads still existent that you can trace back to them today?
As I recall, didn't you work collaboratively with Kalamaras later on after you graduated? And since then you've worked with others as well—how important (if at all) do you think it is to work in this way with other writers?
EB: Well, in a very direct way the phrase "Dear Birds" which starts a lot of the poems in my first book, The To Sound, is from Mackey's novel Bedouin Hornbook. I only noticed the phrase after I'd had the book for a while and I ordered an SFSU Poetry Center recording of Mackey reading from it. The phrase "Dear Birds" appears briefly as a description of how a musical instrument (a flute?) sounded, what it seemed to "say" during a performance. I loved that recording and would listen to the tape on repeat. One time I was walking into the room and that phrase stood out, literally stopped me in my tracks. Hearing it helped me to start thinking about how to merge intimacy with distance/dispersal.
That recording is now available on Pennsound:
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mackey/Mackey-Nathaniel_San-Francisco-State_1987.mp3
George and I are still close friends (actually I plan on spending a few days hanging out with him in Colorado in the next week or two). After I graduated we've kept in touch, including the collab you mentioned. George's influence is so persistent in terms of his own writing and work he showed me. His writing feels like it's always talking to me every time I write.
I think it's been helpful to work collaboratively. I haven't done it as much lately. It helps me to shake off some of my tendencies and talk through another person's logic, especially their syntax.
This might seem a little off topic, but I remember coming across Juliana Spahr's first book in Cal State Chico's library right around the time you and I met and became friends. I didn't know her work but I'd just read Lyn Hejinian and saw that she picked for the NPS. It was so exciting to track down new writers and magazines at that time. I think we were together when I bought a copy of Chain magazine and Hambone at Cody's too. Thanks, by the way!
TC: Yeah, I recall when you bought those too. I was very excited to discover writers who were writing poetry that, for me, was so vastly different from the poets I had been exposed to up until around then. I remember you showing me some of your poems which had been published in Key Satch(el) and being really thrilled with a lot of the poems; really your writing has always been the same for me--I always am surprised with what I discover in your work!
Actually, I'd like to ask you a few questions about your own writing. I recall Burroughs once stating something like words are microorganisms whose meaning only exists because of gradations of order. When reading your poems I kind of get a similar feeling--that over the course of pages a sort of syndetic structure begins to emerge. That is, your poems seems to have emergent qualities thanks to its structure over the course of a series. I am curious if you'll speak a little to the way your poems come together structurally and become the "haunted house of Eric Baus" that Andrew Joron mentions on Tuned Droves' blurb.
EB: Yeah, I want the poems to have some level of illusion of being autonomous but I'm also really interested in dispersing and distributing little echoes of sound and image. I've always liked reading work that takes into consideration the ways poems blend and bleed into one another. That sense of being haunted by a feeling of recognition but not necessarily being able to place it is something I am always trying to work with.
When I go to write a new poem it's often taking some small part of an earlier poem I've written and trying to tease out new threads, new vocabularies, new sound variations. There's a lot of clipping and grafting that happens. Often I end up with the beginnings of 2 or 3 new poems with a similar tone, vocabulary, length, etc. to them, then I go back to them individually at different points and finish them by trying to push them away from each another a bit. There are usually a few major features that get repeated across the space of a manuscript, particular figures that I'll try to work in from time to time in order to give a feeling of continuity within the different textures.
TC: So as you are working on a collection of poems, do you feel a tension between them? the frission between creating a echo and trying to pull away from the generative original?
EB: Definitely. The longer I write and the more I know my own tendencies and instinctive gestures the more I try to work kind of myopically or microscopically at first. Now when I begin writing a new manuscript from scratch I try to let in as much dissonance as possible, then I stand back from it and try to find the elements that could be carried across several poems. I want the poems to keep their strangeness so I try not to force them into a superstructure right away.
EB: But I'm always thinking about echoes. A long time ago (late 90's) on the Suny Buffalo EPC site, I listened to a linebreak interview of Jena Osman by Charles Bernstein. Osman and some other performers read her piece The Detective which literally echoes the same or similar pieces of text while it's being performed to create these variable waves of language. She used the phrase "echo system" to describe that and it's always stuck in my head as one model for the book.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak/programs/mp3/osman-jena_linebreak_buffalo_1997.mp3
TC: Terrific. Thank you for the link!
I like that--echo system. That's great. It seems to take Stein's idea of insistence, and then derange it a little and make it more complex.
EB: Yeah, Stein is always in the background too.
TC: Eric, what starts a poem for you? I mean are there key ideas, methods, etc that you use when beginning a poem? Tell us your secrets!
EB: There are a few ways it happens. I can give one super specific example. So, I recently wrote this poem called Negative Moon. I'm not sure that it's done, but I wrote it because of a mishearing by Michael S. Hennessey (Pennsound's Managing editor) of the title of my earlier poem Negative Noon. He did a Pennsound Daily post about my recordings recently http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/daily/201005.php#26_19:20
where he heard "moon" instead of "noon" in the recording. "Negative Noon" is this weird palimpsestic poem that I wrote on top of the language of the poem "The Continuous Corner" which appears in Tuned Droves. I thought it would be fun to write this poem "Negative Moon" that Michael had accidentally imagined. So, there's something about mutation and palimpsest that's usually at the start of my writing. Here's Negative Moon, by the way:
Negative Moon
Minus magnetized his story’s satellites to form a negative moon. His echoes unearthed a hidden gong stored inside the core. The cloaked tone spread. Impacted kites released. The boom’s dust circled above the sky until its sails were cinders.
EB: http://www.ixnaypress.com/uploads/ixnay_reader_four.pdf
Negative Noon appears in this issue of the Ixnay Reader
EB: I like the idea of bigger poems having a kind of gravity and that there can be these little blips, these little satellite poems made out of detritus.
TC: [referring to a technical glitch with google] okay sorry about that--i had to log out and sign back in...
EB: now we are as one!
TC: Heh. Yes we are a synced wave.. actually, that kind of leads me to my next question--how do you see technology impacting poetry? Not just in terms of cutting and pasting, but rather in how electronic media (online journals, clients like wave, blogs, etc) may be affecting poetry. Has it affected your's in defined ways?
EB: First, I want to let you know that there is a pretty intense squirrel fight outside my window now.
Um, you know it's subtle but huge. I actually feel like electronic journals have taken off in a way that seems exciting. A few years ago I think there was more of a sense of an implicit hierarchy between print and online journals and now that's broken down.
I also think that my assemblage-oriented way of writing is mirrored in the way I read content online. Reading and writing feel a little closer somehow.
TC: That was probably causing the de-linkage in the interwebs...
EB: My computer has rabies.
TC: awesome!
TC: Yeah! I mean how many bookstores even have print journals of poetry anymore?
EB: I know. I'm not dissing the print journal or anything, lots of amazing ones, but the ones I tend to pay attention to now are more handmade, homemade, small scale journals by friends or acquaintances or friendly strangers. I think the hugeness of the internet has changed the print world of poetry into something that was unpredictable. It doesn't feel like the internet is annihilating print so much as it forces print to rethink itself in ways that can be exciting.
TC: Moving from the digital to physical--how has Denver been treating you? Has it had any affect on your creative process (besides ruining your baking)?
EB: Let me begin by complaining that it takes water like a month to boil here. Now that that's out of the way...
I like Denver. It's a very easy place to live and write. I sometimes miss Philadelphia because as a place it was so insistent and present. There's a great community (or series of overlapping communities) in Denver and Boulder that keeps things going.
TC: Eric, do we have time for a few more questions? I keep forgetting a bout the time difference...
EB: Totally, I'm not in any rush. I'm actually not meeting my friend for lunch today so I'm free free free to write.
TC: Excellent! One of the ideas I wanted to chat about with you is what role sense, as in the five senses, plays in your poetry. When I think back on your poetry it feels very cinematic--lots of images, lots of light, that sort of thing--a very visual recollection, but when I started going through Tuned Droves with this idea in mind, I noticed a lot of poems that included taste, touch, sound. How important do you think the senses are to your poetry?
EB: I think more and more I'm interested in mixing senses or collaging different types of sensory experiences. My poems tend to tune into the sensory world first and then bounce around until ideas get generated. Tuned Droves consciously stepped back a little bit from the exclusively visual and worked more with sound. I mean, it's a slight difference I'm sure but I think I had a different kind of ear when I wrote that book.
TC: literally?
EB: indeed.
TC: How do you see your writing changing in the future? If writing at least in part is connected to the physical body, then it's changing all the time in small ways. Can you speculate on how you perceive your writing changing?
EB: The manuscript I'm finishing now, Bee-Stung Aviary, is even more sound driven than Tuned Droves. There's a lot more dissonance, sonic play, homophonic and homonymic stuff going on, even though there's plenty in The To Sound and Tuned Droves. Actually living in Philly for a while maybe did that, made me want to get noisier and slightly more agressive with the language. I think of these new poems as similar to my old poems but "prepared" like a prepared piano or like I'm putting all sorts of stupid effects pedals on the language. I'm trying to kick the language around a bit more. Does this seem weirdly macho or something? I hope not.
TC: It does make me concerned for language's well being. Actually, it makes me think of one of your poems in Tuned Droves that ends with "I hear her hands are calling. They say ding. Or what it gloves" which is really plastic, in the sense that it takes meaning and sound and denatures them to a neat effect. When you are kicking language around, how conscious are you of language "gloving" meaning?
EB: "Plastic" and plasticity are great words for me to think about what I want to do with language. I tend not to experience language as gloving meaning but as meaning emerging from language's ability to stretch, snap, extend, and permeate. I like the way language can be clipped and shortcircuited. I like building meaning out of elements that seem like non-meaning. That's maybe what's happening more and more, I try to generate threads but I also try to generate little shavings of things that don't have obvious "meaning" at first and then I try to work with them until they resonate.
TC: Like you are using syntax and word choice as a tuning fork of sorts...
EB: Yeah, or maybe I'm setting up a bunch of different tuning forks in the same space and hitting them at different times with different materials. I think my metaphor just got unwieldy, but you know what I mean, it's less about a stable center for me and more about creating a reading environment that is kinetic, more constellated or like a magnetic field you can throw different chunks of metal into.
TC: I like that! Your clarification here is really perfect and prophetic as it is a perfect lead-in to a question I had prepared before this interview got started. Would you mind talking a little about the concept of multiplicity? swarms, droves, waves, rain; perhaps it's just me but it seems like there are a lot of collective entities/objects in your writing...
EB: I think you're right about collective entities, they're everywhere in the writing and there are probably tons of different ways I could answer that question. One way to answer would be that it hopefully bounces between individual somewhat identifiable subjectivity and something beyond that. So even though I use "I" a lot in the poems there's an emphasis on taking in the relationships between figures, objects, landscapes, etc. rather than focusing on the wisdom of the speaker or author. I guarantee that I have almost zero wisdom to impart. BUT hopefully the poems can enact a kind of experience the reader can participate in.
Also, I just love the experience of proliferation of seeing things explode and multiply. That seems like a pretty fundamental thing humans like. I love watching one branch of my tomato plant turn into seven. It's about pleasure in some ways, the pleasures of experiencing unexpected shifts, the pleasures of feeling overwhelmed.
TC: There is a pleasure there for sure! I hadn't thought of the pleasure of multiplicity in this way before--thank you. And thank you for this interview! Do you think we should talk about convex vultures and helix owls, or shall we save that for a later conversation?
EB: Thanks so much Trevor! Convex Vultures have delicious tentacles and I make a mean Helix Owl soup. I will prepare this stuff for you when I'm staying at your new apartment.
TC: Sweet! We can wash it down with a Chinese herbal tea.
EB: Yeah, the tea my acupuncturist gave me yesterday looked like it had a blond Fraggle wig in it.
TC: So you'll be at the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland on Friday, August 6. Will you be reading from the new manuscript?
EB: Yeah, mostly I would imagine.
TC: Eric, thanks again for chatting, and I look forward to seeing / hearing you on the 6th!
EB: Thanks, I'm really looking forward to it. Wooooo!
Eric Baus is the author of Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) and The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004) and several chapbooks, including Bee-Stung Aviary (Further Adventures, 2010). He lives in Denver and thinks about audio recordings of poetry here: To The Sound http://baustralia.wordpress.com/
Trevor Calvert is a poet and librarian living in the East Bay. He is the author of Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler Books, 2008), and has appeared in Bay Poetics (Faux Press 2006), Mrs. Maybe, Weird Deer, and others.
I read Tuned Droves again and this time made notes! So you'll be reading at the Studio One Reading Series in August, so I think it would be good to chat a little bit about your writing in context of Tuned Droves, your current projects, antecedents, sensation in your poems, multiplicity, audio recordings, and maybe helix owls...
To start, would you mind speaking a little as to what writing has helped form your poetics? I recall from when we met you were really into French Surrealism and poets like Nate Mackey and George Kalamaras—how have these writers influenced you?
Eric Baus: Hi Trevor!
Sure, no problem. When I went to college in the mid 90's in Indiana I met George Kalamaras, who was one of my first poetry teachers. He was incredibly generous and encouraging and gave me some reading leads to follow up on. George actually brought Mackey to my school for the visiting writers series and he taught Eroding Witness and School of Udhra a few months before he came to read. When Mackey read I bought Bedouin Hornbook (the first book of epistolary fiction) and that opened up a lot for me.
TC: Wow, so Kalamaras introduced Mackey to you initially. That's great! Would you mind, talking a little bit about how these two influenced your writing and do you see threads still existent that you can trace back to them today?
As I recall, didn't you work collaboratively with Kalamaras later on after you graduated? And since then you've worked with others as well—how important (if at all) do you think it is to work in this way with other writers?
EB: Well, in a very direct way the phrase "Dear Birds" which starts a lot of the poems in my first book, The To Sound, is from Mackey's novel Bedouin Hornbook. I only noticed the phrase after I'd had the book for a while and I ordered an SFSU Poetry Center recording of Mackey reading from it. The phrase "Dear Birds" appears briefly as a description of how a musical instrument (a flute?) sounded, what it seemed to "say" during a performance. I loved that recording and would listen to the tape on repeat. One time I was walking into the room and that phrase stood out, literally stopped me in my tracks. Hearing it helped me to start thinking about how to merge intimacy with distance/dispersal.
That recording is now available on Pennsound:
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mackey/Mackey-Nathaniel_San-Francisco-State_1987.mp3
George and I are still close friends (actually I plan on spending a few days hanging out with him in Colorado in the next week or two). After I graduated we've kept in touch, including the collab you mentioned. George's influence is so persistent in terms of his own writing and work he showed me. His writing feels like it's always talking to me every time I write.
I think it's been helpful to work collaboratively. I haven't done it as much lately. It helps me to shake off some of my tendencies and talk through another person's logic, especially their syntax.
This might seem a little off topic, but I remember coming across Juliana Spahr's first book in Cal State Chico's library right around the time you and I met and became friends. I didn't know her work but I'd just read Lyn Hejinian and saw that she picked for the NPS. It was so exciting to track down new writers and magazines at that time. I think we were together when I bought a copy of Chain magazine and Hambone at Cody's too. Thanks, by the way!
TC: Yeah, I recall when you bought those too. I was very excited to discover writers who were writing poetry that, for me, was so vastly different from the poets I had been exposed to up until around then. I remember you showing me some of your poems which had been published in Key Satch(el) and being really thrilled with a lot of the poems; really your writing has always been the same for me--I always am surprised with what I discover in your work!
Actually, I'd like to ask you a few questions about your own writing. I recall Burroughs once stating something like words are microorganisms whose meaning only exists because of gradations of order. When reading your poems I kind of get a similar feeling--that over the course of pages a sort of syndetic structure begins to emerge. That is, your poems seems to have emergent qualities thanks to its structure over the course of a series. I am curious if you'll speak a little to the way your poems come together structurally and become the "haunted house of Eric Baus" that Andrew Joron mentions on Tuned Droves' blurb.
EB: Yeah, I want the poems to have some level of illusion of being autonomous but I'm also really interested in dispersing and distributing little echoes of sound and image. I've always liked reading work that takes into consideration the ways poems blend and bleed into one another. That sense of being haunted by a feeling of recognition but not necessarily being able to place it is something I am always trying to work with.
When I go to write a new poem it's often taking some small part of an earlier poem I've written and trying to tease out new threads, new vocabularies, new sound variations. There's a lot of clipping and grafting that happens. Often I end up with the beginnings of 2 or 3 new poems with a similar tone, vocabulary, length, etc. to them, then I go back to them individually at different points and finish them by trying to push them away from each another a bit. There are usually a few major features that get repeated across the space of a manuscript, particular figures that I'll try to work in from time to time in order to give a feeling of continuity within the different textures.
TC: So as you are working on a collection of poems, do you feel a tension between them? the frission between creating a echo and trying to pull away from the generative original?
EB: Definitely. The longer I write and the more I know my own tendencies and instinctive gestures the more I try to work kind of myopically or microscopically at first. Now when I begin writing a new manuscript from scratch I try to let in as much dissonance as possible, then I stand back from it and try to find the elements that could be carried across several poems. I want the poems to keep their strangeness so I try not to force them into a superstructure right away.
EB: But I'm always thinking about echoes. A long time ago (late 90's) on the Suny Buffalo EPC site, I listened to a linebreak interview of Jena Osman by Charles Bernstein. Osman and some other performers read her piece The Detective which literally echoes the same or similar pieces of text while it's being performed to create these variable waves of language. She used the phrase "echo system" to describe that and it's always stuck in my head as one model for the book.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak/programs/mp3/osman-jena_linebreak_buffalo_1997.mp3
TC: Terrific. Thank you for the link!
I like that--echo system. That's great. It seems to take Stein's idea of insistence, and then derange it a little and make it more complex.
EB: Yeah, Stein is always in the background too.
TC: Eric, what starts a poem for you? I mean are there key ideas, methods, etc that you use when beginning a poem? Tell us your secrets!
EB: There are a few ways it happens. I can give one super specific example. So, I recently wrote this poem called Negative Moon. I'm not sure that it's done, but I wrote it because of a mishearing by Michael S. Hennessey (Pennsound's Managing editor) of the title of my earlier poem Negative Noon. He did a Pennsound Daily post about my recordings recently http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/daily/201005.php#26_19:20
where he heard "moon" instead of "noon" in the recording. "Negative Noon" is this weird palimpsestic poem that I wrote on top of the language of the poem "The Continuous Corner" which appears in Tuned Droves. I thought it would be fun to write this poem "Negative Moon" that Michael had accidentally imagined. So, there's something about mutation and palimpsest that's usually at the start of my writing. Here's Negative Moon, by the way:
Negative Moon
Minus magnetized his story’s satellites to form a negative moon. His echoes unearthed a hidden gong stored inside the core. The cloaked tone spread. Impacted kites released. The boom’s dust circled above the sky until its sails were cinders.
EB: http://www.ixnaypress.com/uploads/ixnay_reader_four.pdf
Negative Noon appears in this issue of the Ixnay Reader
EB: I like the idea of bigger poems having a kind of gravity and that there can be these little blips, these little satellite poems made out of detritus.
TC: [referring to a technical glitch with google] okay sorry about that--i had to log out and sign back in...
EB: now we are as one!
TC: Heh. Yes we are a synced wave.. actually, that kind of leads me to my next question--how do you see technology impacting poetry? Not just in terms of cutting and pasting, but rather in how electronic media (online journals, clients like wave, blogs, etc) may be affecting poetry. Has it affected your's in defined ways?
EB: First, I want to let you know that there is a pretty intense squirrel fight outside my window now.
Um, you know it's subtle but huge. I actually feel like electronic journals have taken off in a way that seems exciting. A few years ago I think there was more of a sense of an implicit hierarchy between print and online journals and now that's broken down.
I also think that my assemblage-oriented way of writing is mirrored in the way I read content online. Reading and writing feel a little closer somehow.
TC: That was probably causing the de-linkage in the interwebs...
EB: My computer has rabies.
TC: awesome!
TC: Yeah! I mean how many bookstores even have print journals of poetry anymore?
EB: I know. I'm not dissing the print journal or anything, lots of amazing ones, but the ones I tend to pay attention to now are more handmade, homemade, small scale journals by friends or acquaintances or friendly strangers. I think the hugeness of the internet has changed the print world of poetry into something that was unpredictable. It doesn't feel like the internet is annihilating print so much as it forces print to rethink itself in ways that can be exciting.
TC: Moving from the digital to physical--how has Denver been treating you? Has it had any affect on your creative process (besides ruining your baking)?
EB: Let me begin by complaining that it takes water like a month to boil here. Now that that's out of the way...
I like Denver. It's a very easy place to live and write. I sometimes miss Philadelphia because as a place it was so insistent and present. There's a great community (or series of overlapping communities) in Denver and Boulder that keeps things going.
TC: Eric, do we have time for a few more questions? I keep forgetting a bout the time difference...
EB: Totally, I'm not in any rush. I'm actually not meeting my friend for lunch today so I'm free free free to write.
TC: Excellent! One of the ideas I wanted to chat about with you is what role sense, as in the five senses, plays in your poetry. When I think back on your poetry it feels very cinematic--lots of images, lots of light, that sort of thing--a very visual recollection, but when I started going through Tuned Droves with this idea in mind, I noticed a lot of poems that included taste, touch, sound. How important do you think the senses are to your poetry?
EB: I think more and more I'm interested in mixing senses or collaging different types of sensory experiences. My poems tend to tune into the sensory world first and then bounce around until ideas get generated. Tuned Droves consciously stepped back a little bit from the exclusively visual and worked more with sound. I mean, it's a slight difference I'm sure but I think I had a different kind of ear when I wrote that book.
TC: literally?
EB: indeed.
TC: How do you see your writing changing in the future? If writing at least in part is connected to the physical body, then it's changing all the time in small ways. Can you speculate on how you perceive your writing changing?
EB: The manuscript I'm finishing now, Bee-Stung Aviary, is even more sound driven than Tuned Droves. There's a lot more dissonance, sonic play, homophonic and homonymic stuff going on, even though there's plenty in The To Sound and Tuned Droves. Actually living in Philly for a while maybe did that, made me want to get noisier and slightly more agressive with the language. I think of these new poems as similar to my old poems but "prepared" like a prepared piano or like I'm putting all sorts of stupid effects pedals on the language. I'm trying to kick the language around a bit more. Does this seem weirdly macho or something? I hope not.
TC: It does make me concerned for language's well being. Actually, it makes me think of one of your poems in Tuned Droves that ends with "I hear her hands are calling. They say ding. Or what it gloves" which is really plastic, in the sense that it takes meaning and sound and denatures them to a neat effect. When you are kicking language around, how conscious are you of language "gloving" meaning?
EB: "Plastic" and plasticity are great words for me to think about what I want to do with language. I tend not to experience language as gloving meaning but as meaning emerging from language's ability to stretch, snap, extend, and permeate. I like the way language can be clipped and shortcircuited. I like building meaning out of elements that seem like non-meaning. That's maybe what's happening more and more, I try to generate threads but I also try to generate little shavings of things that don't have obvious "meaning" at first and then I try to work with them until they resonate.
TC: Like you are using syntax and word choice as a tuning fork of sorts...
EB: Yeah, or maybe I'm setting up a bunch of different tuning forks in the same space and hitting them at different times with different materials. I think my metaphor just got unwieldy, but you know what I mean, it's less about a stable center for me and more about creating a reading environment that is kinetic, more constellated or like a magnetic field you can throw different chunks of metal into.
TC: I like that! Your clarification here is really perfect and prophetic as it is a perfect lead-in to a question I had prepared before this interview got started. Would you mind talking a little about the concept of multiplicity? swarms, droves, waves, rain; perhaps it's just me but it seems like there are a lot of collective entities/objects in your writing...
EB: I think you're right about collective entities, they're everywhere in the writing and there are probably tons of different ways I could answer that question. One way to answer would be that it hopefully bounces between individual somewhat identifiable subjectivity and something beyond that. So even though I use "I" a lot in the poems there's an emphasis on taking in the relationships between figures, objects, landscapes, etc. rather than focusing on the wisdom of the speaker or author. I guarantee that I have almost zero wisdom to impart. BUT hopefully the poems can enact a kind of experience the reader can participate in.
Also, I just love the experience of proliferation of seeing things explode and multiply. That seems like a pretty fundamental thing humans like. I love watching one branch of my tomato plant turn into seven. It's about pleasure in some ways, the pleasures of experiencing unexpected shifts, the pleasures of feeling overwhelmed.
TC: There is a pleasure there for sure! I hadn't thought of the pleasure of multiplicity in this way before--thank you. And thank you for this interview! Do you think we should talk about convex vultures and helix owls, or shall we save that for a later conversation?
EB: Thanks so much Trevor! Convex Vultures have delicious tentacles and I make a mean Helix Owl soup. I will prepare this stuff for you when I'm staying at your new apartment.
TC: Sweet! We can wash it down with a Chinese herbal tea.
EB: Yeah, the tea my acupuncturist gave me yesterday looked like it had a blond Fraggle wig in it.
TC: So you'll be at the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland on Friday, August 6. Will you be reading from the new manuscript?
EB: Yeah, mostly I would imagine.
TC: Eric, thanks again for chatting, and I look forward to seeing / hearing you on the 6th!
EB: Thanks, I'm really looking forward to it. Wooooo!
Eric Baus is the author of Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) and The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004) and several chapbooks, including Bee-Stung Aviary (Further Adventures, 2010). He lives in Denver and thinks about audio recordings of poetry here: To The Sound http://baustralia.wordpress.com/
Trevor Calvert is a poet and librarian living in the East Bay. He is the author of Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler Books, 2008), and has appeared in Bay Poetics (Faux Press 2006), Mrs. Maybe, Weird Deer, and others.
Dot Devota, Eric Baus and Brandon Shimoda Read on Friday August 6th at Studio One
DOT DEVOTA fled Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Her poems can be found in Boonville, MO.
Eric Baus is the author of Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) and The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004) and several chapbooks, including Bee-Stung Aviary (Further Adventures, 2010). He lives in Denver and thinks about audio recordings of poetry here: To The Sound http://baustralia.wordpress.com/Brandon Shimoda was born in California. His collaborations, drawings and writings have s
ince appeared in print, online, on vinyl and on walls … and most recently in The Bowling, with Sommer Browning (Greying Ghost) and Lake M (Corollary Press). The Girl Without Arms and O Bon are forthcoming in 2011 (from Black Ocean and Litmus Press). He is currently on the road, and lives nowhere. doors 7
reading 730
entry by donation
parking on street or in rear
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Andrew Wessels talks with Craig Santos Perez for his July 2nd reading at Studio One Art Center
Andrew Wessels: unincorporated territory is a project that now spans two books. Do you see this larger project being at some point in the future being assembled into a single, 'completed' form? Or is the fracturing of both the entire project as well as the poem-threads something integral to the project itself? Any idea or knowledge of how far you are planning on taking the project?
Craig Santos Perez: I will continue this project as long as Guahan, my homeland, continues to be a colony of the United States--as long as I continue to be "from unincorporated territory." Sadly, I may continue this project as long as I live. Yes, I can foresee the books being collected into a single book--but never a 'completed form' as the excerpting and poem-threads are indeed integral to both the making of the project and the project itself.
AW: You have mentioned Paterson as a touchstone for your writing, but when I initially posited a connection, your response made me think that you did not actively and overtly look to Paterson during the writing of this book. The book, though, uses found language as well as epigraphs, so intertextuality is overtly at work here. I'm curious to know more about your various approaches to using texts and what you see as, perhaps, active and passive 'uses' of text?
CSP: You're right, I did not actively look to Paterson during the writing of my books; yet having studied Paterson as an undergraduate left an impression on me. Like Williams, I also interweave lyric poems, historical & political documents, individual speech, and discursive information as a statement not only about a place, but also about how the roots and routes of a place can highlight the experience of colonialism. Research is an important part of our projects--as well as the problematics (and rewards) of finding ways to incorporate that research into the flow of the poetic text. In the same way that the Passaic falls and its river flow through the books of Paterson, water (hanom) also flows through my own books. In terms of how I use text: as you mention, I use many kinds of documents in my work--such as sources from history, politics, anthropology, journalism, popular culture, cultural studies, etc. Almost always I will purposefully manipulate a text's syntax, punctuation, and typography to defamiliarize it--a kind of ritual cleansing of a text before it enters the poetic tide. Often, I will place these shifted texts in new contexts, giving the text new meanings and resonances. Sometimes, texts will be disbursed across an entire thematic trajectory, putting the text in conversation with personal, familial, or cultural memory. So I think my use of documents--of the inter-, pre-, and post-textual--as active in a variety of ways.
AW: I was able to hear you read some poems in Denver at AWP. However, this is before I had read the book. I wish that I could switch that order or be in attendance for this upcoming reading. Now, having read your book, it is apparent that the page as a space or field of composition is vitally important to the existence of the poems. Additionally, you utilize typographical conventions such as bolded words, crossed out words, and italicized words. As this interview is in preparation for another reading, I'm curious to know: How do you translate these physical representations of the word on the page into your live reading?
CSP: I wish you could be in attendance too! In terms of space, I try to embody the space by pausing during my reading, by creating waves of silence that wash over the aural text. Larger spaces require longer silences--in the same way that a larger period in Robert Duncan's work requires a longer pause (tho I am not as mathematical in my pauses as Duncan was). In terms of other typographical conventions, I haven't yet found a way to embody bold or crossed out words in a live reading--so I just read them and hope that it provides a nice surprise to the reader who takes the book home with them.
AW: I'm interested in particular about the conversation in your work between land and the sea. I see the sea as a space where history vanishes nearly instantaneously. Ruins and archaeological remains exist on land. The sea swallows this past, is a continuously blank surface. Like an Etch-a-Sketch in a way, maybe. Your work attempts to navigate this space, I guess these islands, in which this constant-present of the sea is juxtaposed by the history of land and, particularly, of documents. Or, maybe, the difference is a difference between tradition and history?
CSP: I see the ocean (or tasi, in Chamoru) as overflowing with signification, history, politics, transit, story, life and death. Ruins exist in the ocean as well--especially around Guam. For example, there is a "dive site" where you can actually dive into two ships from World War I and World War II (the SMS Cormoran & the Tokai Maru) in the same place. And as we know, the ocean does not swallow the past completely. It hovers or plumes and washes ashore. We can think of the oil spill in the Gulf or the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," the floating island of toxic plastic waste growing exponentially in the Pacific. If only we could Etch-a-Sketch these things ways. If only we could Etch-a-Sketch the fact that in 2009 George W. Bush signed three declarations—under authority of the u.s. 1906 antiquities act—placing the Marianas Trench and the waters around three islands of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) and 21 undersea volcanoes, as the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in the Central Pacific Ocean and the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument in American Samoa, under the jurisdiction of the u.s. government. These new Pacific Monuments measure about 200,000 square miles, and are managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce, Department of the Interior in consultation with the Department of Defense. Among other things, the declaration quotes (and yes, this is going in my next book): "to protect the training readiness and global mobility of u.s. armed forces and ensure protection of navigation rights and high seas freedoms under the law of the sea which are essential to the peace and prosperity of civilized nation." Just as the land is never truly terra nulls, the ocean--the Pacific--is never truly a blank surface. It is mapped--sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly--by imperialism, colonialism, geopolitics, tourism, and militarism. So to me, my work hopes to navigate (and de-navigate) the constant-present-past-future of both ocean and land (as land, too, is an ever-changing tidal surface that bears the scars of colonialism. Both land and ocean have history. Both are part of my tradition. The land (tano) and sea (tasi) are interwoven. Tano' tasi: land of the sea. Tasi tano': sea of the land.
AW: The part of your life we are talking about right now is your poetry life. But you have another life as a graduate student in ethnic studies at Berkeley. I'm curious to know more about the push and pull between these two pursuits. How does one inform, encourage, or at times possibly get in the way of the other?
CSP: Don't remind me about the darker, seedier part of my life! Actually, being a graduate student in ethnic studies has been a real blessing for me. I received funding for my first two years through the university, which gave me plenty of time to continue writing poetry while doing my academic coursework. When that funding ran out, I received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship, which gave me plenty of time to finish writing my second book while working on the written portion of my oral examinations. Basically, when I get bored with my poetry I switch to the academic work; when I get bored with the academic work I turn to poetry. That's the push and pull. Because my current academic work is focusing on Native American and Native Pacific Islander Literature and Literary Theory, I am always thinking about how my own poetry fits into these indigenous literary traditions and how certain scholars might interpret / critique my own work. So it keeps me on my toes.
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Los Angeles, and Cambridge. He now splits his time between Istanbul and Las Vegas, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at UNLV. He is editor in chief of the literary journal The Offending Adam and co-edited with Mark Irwin the anthology 13 Younger Contemporary American Poets (Proem Press). Currently, he is a Cobain Fellow at Black Mountain Institute.
Craig Santos Perez: I will continue this project as long as Guahan, my homeland, continues to be a colony of the United States--as long as I continue to be "from unincorporated territory." Sadly, I may continue this project as long as I live. Yes, I can foresee the books being collected into a single book--but never a 'completed form' as the excerpting and poem-threads are indeed integral to both the making of the project and the project itself.
AW: You have mentioned Paterson as a touchstone for your writing, but when I initially posited a connection, your response made me think that you did not actively and overtly look to Paterson during the writing of this book. The book, though, uses found language as well as epigraphs, so intertextuality is overtly at work here. I'm curious to know more about your various approaches to using texts and what you see as, perhaps, active and passive 'uses' of text?
CSP: You're right, I did not actively look to Paterson during the writing of my books; yet having studied Paterson as an undergraduate left an impression on me. Like Williams, I also interweave lyric poems, historical & political documents, individual speech, and discursive information as a statement not only about a place, but also about how the roots and routes of a place can highlight the experience of colonialism. Research is an important part of our projects--as well as the problematics (and rewards) of finding ways to incorporate that research into the flow of the poetic text. In the same way that the Passaic falls and its river flow through the books of Paterson, water (hanom) also flows through my own books. In terms of how I use text: as you mention, I use many kinds of documents in my work--such as sources from history, politics, anthropology, journalism, popular culture, cultural studies, etc. Almost always I will purposefully manipulate a text's syntax, punctuation, and typography to defamiliarize it--a kind of ritual cleansing of a text before it enters the poetic tide. Often, I will place these shifted texts in new contexts, giving the text new meanings and resonances. Sometimes, texts will be disbursed across an entire thematic trajectory, putting the text in conversation with personal, familial, or cultural memory. So I think my use of documents--of the inter-, pre-, and post-textual--as active in a variety of ways.
AW: I was able to hear you read some poems in Denver at AWP. However, this is before I had read the book. I wish that I could switch that order or be in attendance for this upcoming reading. Now, having read your book, it is apparent that the page as a space or field of composition is vitally important to the existence of the poems. Additionally, you utilize typographical conventions such as bolded words, crossed out words, and italicized words. As this interview is in preparation for another reading, I'm curious to know: How do you translate these physical representations of the word on the page into your live reading?
CSP: I wish you could be in attendance too! In terms of space, I try to embody the space by pausing during my reading, by creating waves of silence that wash over the aural text. Larger spaces require longer silences--in the same way that a larger period in Robert Duncan's work requires a longer pause (tho I am not as mathematical in my pauses as Duncan was). In terms of other typographical conventions, I haven't yet found a way to embody bold or crossed out words in a live reading--so I just read them and hope that it provides a nice surprise to the reader who takes the book home with them.
AW: I'm interested in particular about the conversation in your work between land and the sea. I see the sea as a space where history vanishes nearly instantaneously. Ruins and archaeological remains exist on land. The sea swallows this past, is a continuously blank surface. Like an Etch-a-Sketch in a way, maybe. Your work attempts to navigate this space, I guess these islands, in which this constant-present of the sea is juxtaposed by the history of land and, particularly, of documents. Or, maybe, the difference is a difference between tradition and history?
CSP: I see the ocean (or tasi, in Chamoru) as overflowing with signification, history, politics, transit, story, life and death. Ruins exist in the ocean as well--especially around Guam. For example, there is a "dive site" where you can actually dive into two ships from World War I and World War II (the SMS Cormoran & the Tokai Maru) in the same place. And as we know, the ocean does not swallow the past completely. It hovers or plumes and washes ashore. We can think of the oil spill in the Gulf or the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," the floating island of toxic plastic waste growing exponentially in the Pacific. If only we could Etch-a-Sketch these things ways. If only we could Etch-a-Sketch the fact that in 2009 George W. Bush signed three declarations—under authority of the u.s. 1906 antiquities act—placing the Marianas Trench and the waters around three islands of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) and 21 undersea volcanoes, as the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in the Central Pacific Ocean and the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument in American Samoa, under the jurisdiction of the u.s. government. These new Pacific Monuments measure about 200,000 square miles, and are managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce, Department of the Interior in consultation with the Department of Defense. Among other things, the declaration quotes (and yes, this is going in my next book): "to protect the training readiness and global mobility of u.s. armed forces and ensure protection of navigation rights and high seas freedoms under the law of the sea which are essential to the peace and prosperity of civilized nation." Just as the land is never truly terra nulls, the ocean--the Pacific--is never truly a blank surface. It is mapped--sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly--by imperialism, colonialism, geopolitics, tourism, and militarism. So to me, my work hopes to navigate (and de-navigate) the constant-present-past-future of both ocean and land (as land, too, is an ever-changing tidal surface that bears the scars of colonialism. Both land and ocean have history. Both are part of my tradition. The land (tano) and sea (tasi) are interwoven. Tano' tasi: land of the sea. Tasi tano': sea of the land.
AW: The part of your life we are talking about right now is your poetry life. But you have another life as a graduate student in ethnic studies at Berkeley. I'm curious to know more about the push and pull between these two pursuits. How does one inform, encourage, or at times possibly get in the way of the other?
CSP: Don't remind me about the darker, seedier part of my life! Actually, being a graduate student in ethnic studies has been a real blessing for me. I received funding for my first two years through the university, which gave me plenty of time to continue writing poetry while doing my academic coursework. When that funding ran out, I received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship, which gave me plenty of time to finish writing my second book while working on the written portion of my oral examinations. Basically, when I get bored with my poetry I switch to the academic work; when I get bored with the academic work I turn to poetry. That's the push and pull. Because my current academic work is focusing on Native American and Native Pacific Islander Literature and Literary Theory, I am always thinking about how my own poetry fits into these indigenous literary traditions and how certain scholars might interpret / critique my own work. So it keeps me on my toes.
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Los Angeles, and Cambridge. He now splits his time between Istanbul and Las Vegas, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at UNLV. He is editor in chief of the literary journal The Offending Adam and co-edited with Mark Irwin the anthology 13 Younger Contemporary American Poets (Proem Press). Currently, he is a Cobain Fellow at Black Mountain Institute.
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