August 01, 2007

 
9for9
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set 2 of 9

Jennifer Coleman
Shanna Compton
Maria Damon
Tom Devaney
Brett Evans
Greg Fuchs
Nada Gordon
Daniel Nester
David Trinidad

copyright © 2003
to all participating
poets upon publication

questions by
CAConrad

published by
Mooncalf Press
POBox 22521
Philadelphia, PA 19110
MooncalfPress@hotmail.com

9for9 is a collection of 9 questions for 9 poets and their answers. This is the 2nd set of 9 sets. Some of the questions came from dreams, others from waking ideas. The project was conducted through e-mail, questions arriving in Inboxes once a week, usually on friday.

If you wish to communicate with any of the poets included, please feel free to send correspondence to the e-mail address CAConrad13@aol.com, with the subject line "9for9 correspondence". I promise to forward your message to the poet you wish to connect with.

Thank you,
CAConrad
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QUESTION 1
If you were SUDDENLY the opposite sex, what name would you choose? How are your poems changed?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Lars. Or Jack, or Zach, or Huck. No: Lars. My poems would pitch an old army tent in the front yard and put on overalls and dig holes and dream of having some masterful purpose -- which is what they do now -- only they would do it more sincerely. They might have a lot more upper body strength and a higher center of gravity and love, love, love to do push-ups. My poems would hold words out near the chest, not down on the hip. I would take the poems now nested and close, and I would scatter them like seeds. And then, when the Suddenly-ness of it was over, I might find out my poems are really pretty much the same.On the other hand, I really don't *HAVE* an opposite sex-- I *AM* sex. So I might suddenly be the opposite of my sex, without body, without flirtation or engagement. A clear, sexless life -- like an amoeba. I would be an amoeba, and my name is Myxo-ogenella. And I'd sweep words up into my vacuole to form them into poems, but they'd only stay the same, only more slimy. Sigh. "Oh, Myxo-ogenella," I'd say to myself, "you have no poems. You only have sticky words in your pseudopodia." If I was Myxo-ogenella, I might say this: Midnight rain and the city street is mean. If I was Lars, I might change it to: Midnight rain, the city is pissed. Feel my finger whorl faster than the street. What means to me is divine; what is divine, means. My body won't let me down.

If I was Jen, I would say:
Midnight rain is glittering panties on a steep city. Your lips, lips. My finger whorls. In the streets cabs pass like applesauce. What means is divine what is divine. Means. We are wrapped in a climb and our bodies won't let us down.
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SHANNA COMPTON
I've thought about this before. Gender is a fundamental part of a writer's voice, no matter how much one tries to neutralize it. As much as I attempt to take myself out of my poems and speak through characters and personae instead, the characters are always some version of myself, and I suppose that's true of everybody. (Like you, Conrad, with your Frank poems.) I just find characters--or playing parts--more interesting (or less taxing, perhaps) than being myself. It relieves the pressure of self-consciousness. Tames the fear of putting oneself too much out there. And many of my characters are male. Like Anthony, a homeless writer in Brooklyn, who asks for pens, pencils, and paper as well as change in front of the Western Union, and when he's out of paper he writes on himself, his clothes, the sidewalk, in the snow, however he can. Or James, who's named after a friend of mine, but all my James does is shave in front of his bathroom mirror--ceaselessly. I think if I were a man, I'd really enjoy shaving or maintaining some complicated configuration of facial hair. Or there's another guy I play around with a lot, though I've never named him. I usually just call him "The Man in the Grocery Store." He shops as much to feel a part of the lives of the other shoppers as for necessity. He's in love with shopping for food, and the wish fulfillment that's so easy in a supermarket. He also has a crush on Yolanda, the express-lane clerk, but that's another story.

I tried the name S. Compton for awhile, thinking that the initial might lead people to assume I were male, but there's already a sci-fi poet with that name, can you believe it? So am I talking about making myself invisible in different ways? I guess it sounds like it, but that's not what I mean. It's more about neutralizing the ready answer, or something. And when I have written lyrical poems with "I" as the speaker--if that "I" is really me--I end up feeling self-indulgent. I have an alter-ego named Chevy, after my old car, who's Chicano. And one named Reagan--who writes erotica. They're both girls, though I guess those are names that could go either way.

Speaking of names, there are several Shanna Compton's out there too, and I'm writing a poem for them. One's a veterinarian (my occupation of choice as a child until Mom made me realize I'd be dealing with death on a daily basis). Then there's a stage actress who's also known as "The Original Nightshade" (I was in several plays in high school). And a vollyeball/basketball/track athlete in somplace called Crystal City (I played those sports too). And a real-estate agent in Georgia. Once on a message board after September 11, 2001, I saw a posting by a Shanna Compton who1s a native New Yorker but now lives in Austin. I'm originally from a little town near Austin, and now live here in NYC, so that was a weird coincidence too. So it does seem, with the common traits the Shanna Comptons share, that names are determinants, that they point you in a certain direction.

I guess if I were a man, more of my characters would be women. It's playing the imaginative game of becoming something other that's interesting. Or maybe I'd just write about my penis.
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MARIA DAMON
I would be Tambriel, archangel of timbral beauty, nomadic amber and textual dance. My poems become abundant, expansive, unafraid, unstoppable, oh to be the opposite sex, the sex that makes the word turn red, the sex that flashes upon the end of the golden arrow of blake's jerusalem. they lose none of their sensuality though they gain in confidence and number; my energy is a prolific niagara of viagra. There would be permission for glorious incendiaries of anger and fireworks of extravagant verbiage exploding and then drifting across the blueblack sky like what ezekiel saw.
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TOM DEVANEY
I would choose the name: Franca. My poems would continue to be written in English, but they would be written in Italian as well because the Franca I knew taught Art History in Rome and she was a passionate Renaissance and Mannerist scholar. She also rode her three-speed bike with a wicker basket and a proper straw hat all around the city. My poems would be published together in both languages. That would be my thing.
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BRETT EVANS
I was all set to appear in print as Violeta Duplain until my main man Ernie K-Doe died.

I had work, K-Doe Codas, upcoming in "The Other South," an anthology of not James Dickey Southern poetry (Univ of Alabama Press). I was looking forward to the break-in (as myself) but couldn't risk being banished from the Mother-in-Law Lounge, my favorite place to be in the city Sunday nights.

See also: Lee Ann Brown trying to videotape the goings-on there and getting rousted by Antoinette K-Doe.

[Ernie] K-Doe had been ripped raw and shackled by evil record co. fuckos once upon a time, and since had been supersuperstitious of people glomming onto his good name, plundering his thunder, etc. If he saw the anthology (1/22,000 chance?) he probably would have thought I was making beaucoup $$$ off of...POETRY.

I'd rather be Violeta and have him raging still on the big blue marble. He left the building, I morphed back into Brett - life blew pigcock for a while (and is still K Doe-bereft when I stop to think about it) and being myself if the anthology was pretty much pretty flowers for the funeral.

His funeral procession was mind-blowing: one of the craziest this city has been. The second line battery heading to St. Louis #1 cemetery on a July day lasciviously reinventing heat feels like forever: God has been soooo good to me.

So... uh, Violeta. If then. Today I would go Clelia and play guitar in my underwere [sic] and write sonnets about she-giants and I guess about my own ass iron-ons singing songs like Peaches. Whoa. [Flathand headslap.]

Can't Brett be a girl's name too? What is it with me and shortcuts?
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GREG FUCHS
Name I would choose: Neva Gremillion Saucier

Poems would be changed little. Subject matter would definately include partying, sex, and stopping the male tradition of war.
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NADA GORDON
If I were suddenly the opposite sex, my name would be Gordon. Gordon Gordon.

My poems are suddenly: sensitive, gently allusive, and abstract;
arcane and opaque of diction; investigations of "open form:"

while while// [[[pulchritudinicity]]]
crinkleplush ... saws

eggy... sackbuts...

the (either) and (and) the (or)
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DANIEL NESTER
First thought: I can now fuck myself -- by proxy at least: Daniel and Danielle Nester, together on one stage.

I have often heard people tell me to "go fuck yourself," which I always heard as "fuck myself."

The earliest known appearance of the word "fuck," according to Jesse Scheidlower and author of the great reference book The F Word, was in 1475.

My poetry would turn more aggressive, I think, as opposed to my effeminized, loose-lipped male poetry I write now, because I think one driving force of poetry, no matter how we try to drive away from our New Critical leanings, is to strike a balance, idea of order, whatever.
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Cindy?
I write poems about boy bands and G.I. Joe.
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QUESTION 2
Play the following scene out:
(A blue car pulls up beside you, they crack the tinted window)
Voice From Car: POET! WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE WAR!?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
ME: Which of the wars?
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SHANNA COMPTON
Shanna Compton: I'm sure I'd be at a loss for words if that actually happened. If a blue car pulled up next to me, I'd be likely to cross the street PDQ. As for what we should do about the war, it seems like we're all doing it and it's not helping. We're saying no. We're demanding that a country founded on democracy abide by the vote of the U. N. Security Council. We're standing in bookstores and on stages and library steps and writing and reading poems about how we feel.

Maybe I'd invite the folks in the car to the 100 Poets against the War reading we're having at Soft Skull Shortwave in a few weeks. If their windows weren't tinted.
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MARIA DAMON
boy this is a toughie. first my knees would buckle and i would swoon at being addressed as "poet." it reminds me of jack spicer's inflated "poet, be like god," as if we poets could just make the war stop, as god could, except that s/he won't because of this CRAZY LITTLE thing they call "free will" in western religion. we humans are free to screw up.

i assume the person calling to me from the car is not god, so i could ignore him/her. but what if it is. what if it's hillel's god who said do unto others, and also, if not now, when? if not you, then who? actually it was hillel himself, but as a prophet he could be said to be conveying a divine message.

so, poet, what should we do about the war?! is "we" "we poets" or "we people"?

i will assume the latter. okay, blue-car voice: do what you love, and also spread the vibe around. write if you love to write, and write to your congressman, or write a gorgeous manifesto, or write to your friends about opposition to the war. come up w/ wonderful slogans the way poets like lew welch came up with great advertizing lines: Raid Kills Bugs Dead. Poet, Do like emilie and lytle and put up posters of iraqui kids and get arrested and make sure all your friends on poetix know about it. Poet, do like brian kim stefans and start a website. Poet, do like Hilton Obenzinger and write Meditations on the situation and publish them informally on poetix and have your friends on poetix circulate them. Poet, do like all the poets who marched in New York Washington Seattle London Baghdad. Poet, do like Eliot Weinberger suggests and write prose against the war. Poet, do like Kristen Prevallet, Ammiel Alcalay and Anne Waldman and organize read-ins, teach-ins, read-outs and teach-outs. Poet, do like Mairead Byrne and Walter Lew and Pierre Joris and organize an anti-war event at the staunchly apolitical AWP. Poet, do like Katie Trumpener and start a program where universities hire visiting profs --artists, scholars, writers --from endangered places or places in which they are endangered. Poet, join a weekly vigil. Poet, do like Sam Hamill and compile an anthology to present to the first lady. Poet, send money medicine and toys to iraqui kids. And Vietnamese kids. And kids. And kids. Poet, do it all with as loving a heart as you can at any given moment. Do fun stuff to keep your spirits up. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering, including yourself.

Are there enough imperatives in the foregoing? Forgive the arrogance but the question's a tall order.

You can come up with your own beautiful action. make up a new word in the spirit of peace.

it is important to keep our spirits up in dark february in the face of this madness. most of all be very very sweet and loving to the people around you and that will create a pocket of peace with the ripple effect. and be brave and outspoken like many impetuous poets who don't like to always be sweet and nice and lovey-dovey. do whatever. we should --and i should have said at the outset how uncomfortable i am with the word "should" --do whatever is our strength and our pleasure.
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TOM DEVANEY
Blue cars don't wait for answers. From high school kids in blue cars yelling taunts, to men in blue cars shouting at and accosting women, all blue cars asking questions are get-a-way cars. Usually words are captions for images, but in this case the blue car is a caption for the question. Somehow the people in the car know I am a poet? How do they know this? They know because the way I take each step, one foot, then the next, then the next again. Poets each walk in a certain way, and as you know, and all very differently as well, which is what gives them away. Walking is not logical, which is why it's poetic. So I wouldn't say anything. I would continue to walk so this blue car would know where I stood (or had been standing) -- esp. in regards the war on Iraq (and the W.M.D. from our own Republican Guard). Walking, in a certain way,would be my answer.
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BRETT EVANS
Me: First, get the scram out of here and go buy some Clash records. Drive around for three hours blaring them with the windows down. That'll take you to 8pm, and then meet me at Pal's.

(Later that night, at Pal's Lounge) A no show? I'm waiting...
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GREG FUCHS
Greg Fuchs: (to himself: Are you a livery cab driver, a business man, a superstar, a law officer, a politician, a drug dealer, a pimp? Well you are all inside the same car. The only one with any possibility of having a drop of ethics or love of democracy, justice, and peace is the driver, you who can not speak. Maybe the superstar has ethics or love of democracy, justice, or peace but that's rare if you are the run of the mill greedy, eating disordered, selfish superstar.) You have the power to stop it, you are causing it, just stop it. Put down your guns. Stop your exploitation. Stop your racism. Stop your sexism. Stop your embezzlement. Stop getting rich by building weapons of mass destruction. Stop!
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NADA GORDON
At first this question floored me. I asked CA to ask me a different question, I couldn't face this one I felt so helpless.

But just now I realized what I would instinctively do: I would chant a Hindu chant I learned as a child -- I think it was recorded by the Radha Krishna temple singers and produced by George Harrison -- "Govinda" -- I don't know the correct words, but I'd fake it, I'd sing really loud, and if I happened to have my finger cymbals with me I'd play them.

But as a general rule of thumb, I don't tal kto strange men in cars who yell at me out their windows.
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DANIEL NESTER
Voice from Poet: The same as anyone else! The same as secretaries, bums, landowners, wannabe activitists! Run for your fucking lives! Say you're scared! Do something!
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DAVID TRINIDAD
David Trinidad (a la Faye Dunaway in _Mommie Dearest_): "You figure it out!"
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QUESTION 3
Explain how you see the internet's impact on poetry.
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Ok, it's like this: A tanker dumps a ship-load of golf shoes into the ocean, sixty thousand golf shoes, and they bob around and circle back and end up in the mouths of a few fishes and otters and finally make their way to shore. And someone collects the golf shoes, and brings them to an oceanographer, and he uses them to study the ocean currents. And the golf shoes are in a way so much better than ever intended. It's Deep. Simultaneous. Wide. Instant. Many-faced. A poet once told me there was no such thing as a poem without time passing, literally, down the page. She was wrong.
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SHANNA COMPTON
The internet is a terrific resource for all writers, including poets. I realize how addicted I am to instant information--what's the title of that poem that goes , or who wrote that book that they made that movie about, or what the hell are all those sirens in Downtown Brooklyn going on about--every time I go on vacation and don't have convenient internet access. And there's so much out there: library databases, full-text downloads of classics, mp3 files of poets reading UBUweb!. And of course, there are all the great online journals like La Petite Zine, failbetter, elimae elimae, and hundreds of others.

And e-mail! The Monday Poetry Report is a great idea--a poetry webzine that comes to you! The best thing about e-mail is the freedom it seems to lend people to write. Folks who would otherwise rarely communicate in writing find themselves doing it more and more because of the pervasiveness of e-mail in the workplace and in customer service situations. I idealistically think this technology can only strengthen our appreciation for the written word. In the long run, e-mail and the internet promise to curb illiteracy. It's hard to imagine kids coming up in school now being able to sneak through without being able to read and write--so much of our essential information is spread via e-mail and the internet--instantly, quickly, efficiently. I'm off topic though.

Friends, writers and otherwise, have written me e-mail poems, which I find delightful. I love Frank O'Hara and the way he was always typing a quick letter or note off to someone and including a poem and sending it off. E-mail allows everybody to be like Frank. I imagine that Frank would really love e-mail. How terrific would that be to see his name in your inbox?
click here

I mean, look at me. I can't even type without sticking in URLs all over the place.
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MARIA DAMON
the internet has made poetry even more fun than it was. for one thing, it's easier to stay connected and create community even across distance. for another, the internet has given rise to e-poetry, which is very dynamic and multisensory, multimedia and all that --new realms of stimulation and imaginative stretching. it has also made it easier to organize stuff, be it a poetry anti-war action or simply a visit to a city or school to do a talk or a reading. it's good for introverts and homebodies, gives us a way to connect. i would never know CAConrad existed if it weren't for the net, and here i am, the center of all beauty, answering these questions! Imagine!

at the same time, i'm wary of exceptionalist claims wherever they pop up, and internet poetry and cyber theory in general make large claims for unprecedentedness, absolute newness w/o earlier cognates, etc. while, as my friend e-theorist rita raley sez, one cannot deny that digital and analog are different, one cannot posit any absolute or metaphysical difference. what does epoetry do that page poetry can't? the coordinations and/or slight dissonances of the various senses e-poetry can engage simultaneously, which in turn create a space that cannot be fully articulated through any one sense --the performativity of it, the multi-media aspects of it. i imagine there would be a way to do this live, in 3-d, or in other media, but of course the effects are different. it's like the movies versus live theatre. each one does something the other can't do.

i think the aesthetic of diffusion, be it in a diasporic, nomadic or postmodern- fragmentary-antigravitational sense, is made manifest in much e-poetry in a useful way. If there is a new aesthetic emerging, I'd hope it would afford us new ways of being sensuous and emotional. New textual erotics and sensory perceptivity. in general, characteristics i'd name for epoetry are: multimedia, "intersign," speedy, dreamy (John Cayley's work), meditative (in the sense of repetition-with-a-difference) --hypnotic sometimes (Brian Kim Stefans' The Dreamlife of Letters), sassy (as in the google poems of the flarf list, or komninos's cartoonish animations), deterritorialized (Mez and Talan Memmott), compositional in the musical sense (Jim Rosenberg's "clusters"). I think Alan Sondheim's work exemplifies the possibilities for e-poetry in many of the above aspects. mIEKAL aND's work shows how intertwined it is with organic processes of growth, decay, composting, cultivating, hybridism, adaptation, etc all the practices or processes of eco-terra-beloved-firma living. various listservs (the poetix list,flarf) have created discursive textures that enable (or disable, some might argue) further creative forms to emerge. nick piombino, for example, has written about how his involvement w/ the poetix listpost 9/11 became something life-sustaining for him --who'd a thunk it: a bunch of cantankerous, axe-grinding sectarian poets and critics as core community --well it's one of mine too. is this a chimera? compared to what? i sit here with a purring cat on my lap, looking out on the ocean and the crust of salt-ice glittering the boulders, cup of coffee w/ dregs, books piled high (malinowski, damon YEAH MOI, wieners, aND, du bois, issues of the NMU's union newspaper from 1946,latest issue of American Literature, articles from Critique of Anthropology, old diaries, and tax materials), connected and communicating with CAConrad.

i am especially grateful for the chance to have been involved with some epoetic projects myself (literature nation, eros/ion, semetrix, erosive media/rose e-missive --ALL TO BE FOUND AT JOGLARS), which might never have come about if i hadn't been online, though i am still a neanderthal when it comes to technology. the internet has made the beauties of collaboration a lived experience for me. The effect is that co-authorship is far more appealing to me these days in all my work, both "creative" and critical, because you double the energy and ideas available. I like the creativity of the people involved in e-poetry, and the excitement generated by mutual appreciation for each other's work. In terms of drawbacks, it can be expensive and one has to stay on excellent terms with one's collaborators, so it's a social exercise as well, which can present special and ultimately welcome challenges for curmudgeons like myself. I guess, in many respects both literal and metaphoric, i appreciate the "networking" aspects and challenges of the medium.

We have a chance to contribute to world peace through creating beautiful, ephemeral entities dependent on the fragile but infinitely generative and permeable world wide web of interbeing.
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TOM DEVANEY
Whether it’s poetry or anything else the internet’s impact is its ability to get your word *out and your screen *on. That’s why rumors and other reverberations flourish there. So my answer isn’t just about poetry, as you asked, though hopefully poetry isn’t just about poetry either. Another way to put it is “What is poetry’s impact on the internet?” Poets can find each other here, (hey),

_C

_O

_N

_R

_A

_D (!)

that’s true and good. But I wonder what poetry’s impact on the internet is, if anything? In a way, we behave as if the WWW is flat –- which it both is and isn’t; though it's not round either. As it stands I think the current use of the morphology of the screen is thin. To put it simply we’re *screened-in*. Working with design and poetry in ways that explore the spacical possibilities of our *sceened-in* environments is one place to start to think about new ways to be able to see new spaces. Because of poetry’s self-reflexive nature and its concern with process -- IT, fused with design -- is most apt & ripe to engage the media and our notions of what is possible.
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BRETT EVANS
Just last night, as we were going to Port of Call, Michael Dominici asked me this about the Internet -- he's sort of returning to poetizing after some time in the pasture. I thought there was a certain eau de javu when he brought it up.

Anyway, the short of it is that I really had nothing intelligent to say about it. I did that White House press secretary thing of veering away from the question, wondering aloud instead about the whole mystery lineage of awful open-journal poetry aloud [ow!ed].

Really, I still much rather read poems off the page. I enjoy reading weblogs like DAILYKOS.COM, but poems -- there's usually not a whole lotta HTML going on there, so why on-line? I think the Net is a postage-saving way of sharing poems to be printed later. Naturally this doesn't apply to 9 x 9. It's all in the scrolling: I don't mind scrolling prose but scrolling through the line breaks leaves me cold.
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GREG FUCHS
Listserves in lieu of community make my ass tired. A trap between writing and a phone conversation.

Terrific publishing potential. Have liked East Village Web, Cross Connect, Realpoetik, among others. I haven't witnessed a poetry journal that has created a truly open source, democratic, scene like Indymedia. Brian Kim Stefans is heading that way perhaps.

Down with web logs. Don't blog me. If I wanted to hear your private ramblings I'd be your friend and drinking buddy.
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NADA GORDON
Since I am, according to an internet test of personality disorders, so narcissistic, I think I can only explain how I see the internet's impact on *my* poetry, and by extension on my life.

If it were not for the internet, I think I would still be in Tokyo, riding the Chuo line back and forth to work each day, wondering when the next big earthquake was going to hit and if Aum Shinrikyo was going to strike again.

Instead, I now ride the F train back and forth to work each day and wonder if Bush is going to go ahead with his petulant "I don't care what they say, I'm going to attack Iraq anyway" and if Al Qaeda is going to strike again.

If it were not for the internet, I don't think I would have published any of the four books I have published in the last four years, because if it were not for the internet, I would have never met my champion, muse, rescuer, and paramour Gary Sullivan who pulled me out of expatriate obscurity into the throb and glamor of New York, where I now have the pleasure of hobknobbing with writers who have been my favorites for years.

Of course this has had an impact on my poetry. Before I moved here, I asked Gary if he thought my poetry would get all cynical and one-liney like so much NYC poetry is, and he said, no way, you're way too Cali. But it turns out he was wrong. I now write really smartass sarcastic stuff. And if we look back at the chain of causality, it's all because of the internet.

Everyone I know writes Google poems of various kinds. Me too. How can we help when there is now so much language at our disposal? We barely have to rearrange it! I remember writing twenty years ago in my master's thesis (on B. Mayer) about a time in the future when all verbal messages might be considered art. I think we may be getting close to that time, thanks to... the internet.

I love it love it love it it's a vast octopus with infinite tentacles embracing engulfing consisting of and exuding our combined consciousnesses. It is without a doubt the most important invention of our time, one of the most important in human history, and it may possibly be our salvation. BUT WE HAVE TO ACT FAST.
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DANIEL NESTER
*Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus* “The mountains will be in labour,” Horace writes in “Ars Poetica,” and “a ridiculous mouse will be born.” 400 years of nouminal tyranny of movable type has been overturned! The poem is freed, hybridized, ephemeral! No more colleges! No more pages! No more text, a poem is like a machine at last (William Carlos Williams). A poem is not made up of words, in the end, it's made up of moving the furniture to make sure people know where to sit. Because of hypertext, the line break has become a skill for all of us. We are all poets now.Because of source code, we have all become close-text readers again. Because of the mouse, because of the ridiculous mountain-worked mouse, we touch poems again, as we did with animal skin, papyrus, paper, Xerox sheets, mimeos. CGA VGA flatcreen Palm Pilot = our new meaty vellum. Text is now a backlit stepchild. The poem’s godliness heckles the stars. Am I talking about the will here? Perhaps. “Cause I made 'em play it, made 'em say it/ made 'em okay it, made 'em obey it!”
LL Cool J, “Jack The Ripper”
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Oh, it's created a few more magazines . . . .

The Internet is great for some things (such as shopping and fact checking), but I’m coming to trust computers less and less, particularly in regard to the writing of poetry. And this after recently completing a three-year project that benefited from the Internet: collaborating with two other poets via email. It would have taken us forever if we’d relied on "real" mail. But I’m beginning to have an Anna May Wong-like reaction to the computer---like it’s stealing little pieces of my soul. I’m about to return to writing poems on a manual typewriter. One of my students gave me a beautiful vintage Hermes 2000 with lime green keys. It’s being cleaned.
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posted by 9for9 1:42 PM

 
QUESTION 4:
There's a new poetry library in Philadelphia and you are in charge of choosing the sculpture for the entrance. What is it?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Oh, hell, yeah! Finally, they picked me, me ME to be the one who is in charge of public sculpture! How wise. Oooh! I like this so much, I'm going to have it be a whole GARDEN of sculpture, a hydroponic and organic garden of sculpture, so's it all grows out of a pool. And it's going to be a sculpture that records on its face the weather and particulates and sound of Philadelphia and all that pass in and out of the library, and also it will record and play the music of all of it. Plus, it will shimmer and be see-through, and it will have smells, and the smells will be triggered by the words people say as they enter or exit the library and so it will count up the words of the people and the most-used word will trigger a puff of orange and the word used with the most esses will trigger a puff of clove, and any rhyme will trigger licorice and any repetition more than three times in a single sentence will cause a mist of orange blossom to hiss from a thin and shimmering pipe. Plus, while I'm in charge, I'll hire attendants to care for and groom the sculpture, and they'll be really excellent at talking to people and figuring out just what poet to recommend.
How's that, hah?
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SHANNA COMPTON
Oh, what a fun assignment! And a couple of possibilities spring immediately to mind. The first is a piece by Richard Humann. Maybe the resin books he makes--they're clear resin in the shape of an open, oversized dictionary, but they have these tiny black individual letters floating on various planes throughout. He cuts and punches these and floats them in one by one! These are some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And looking at one, you get the same sense of anticipation as you do reading a poem--that something important or gorgeous or funny is about to be revealed. Because the letters are suspended at different angles and at different heights in the resin, you find your eye moving from one to the next--each letter being as vital as each word in a poem. They're really breathtaking. I could look at them for hours. So maybe three or for of these on simple pedestals or bookstands--each with it's own light. But I'd want people to touch them--no velvet ropes!

Here's a similar project Richard did, using the same technique, called Possessions for Judgment Day--these are in the shape of gold bricks, though. He chooses the text accordingly, too. It's not just random letters in the resin--they actually would say something, if you could read them. He's also done braille sculptures--of the lyrics to Talking Heads songs! Want to see one? Then click HERE.

Or another artist who would be perfect is Roni Horn. She once did an installation project with Emily Dickinson poems--blocks each with one word from a poem placed in the corners of the room, along the walls, or free standing. I saw a photography installation of hers too, a few years ago in New Mexico. I think it was Another Water. (I have the book somewhere, but I'm at work!) She'd taken several photographs of the Thames river--nothing else in the frame, just the water, the little ripples and waves--and underneath them ran all kinds of captions. Each caption was keyed to a number on the photo above, and as you moved through the room reading the captions and studying the surface texture of the river, which was always changing, a sort of narrative began to emerge. I remember she had several poets and writers in there--Hart Crane and Virginia Woolf--maybe because they drowned themselves? Anyway it was a great thing to see and read and walking along it felt like walking along a river, and the motion my eyes made moving from the photo to the captions and back was kind of a buoying motion--so it was a physical poem, one I read with my whole body.

And I like Donald Judd so much too. I always get the idea that looking at one of his cubes, walking around it, trying to pick out the variances or dings or spots, is like reading a poem or writing one. It's a study in sameness and contrast, in attention and gaze. They're terrific.

Or maybe you and I should make mudpies, Conrad, with fortunes inside. Here's yours: Your letters are always a welcome diversion.
---------

MARIA DAMON
It would not be something you could actually see and touch, but it would be an energy field that would make all seeing and touching, smelling and sensing, tasting and hearing possible. It would be stimulating in a not-quite-palpable way, auratic rather than absolutely concrete, rainbow-hued without actually being visible, sonorous without actually being heard with the outer ear (or what the skalds call the "hear-hands"), deeply and deliciously textured without having only one finite decribable message for the fingertips --rough and refined, rich and dappled, mutable but not distressingly so --it would transform the passers-by subtly as they walked past it into the library, preparing them for the sensory experience of being in the presence of so much poetry --so much cognition, beauty, pain, form and history --without being either shut down or overwhelmed. it would be endow on passers by the feeling of having had sex with an angel.
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TOM DEVANEY
Most sculptures in front of most buildings are invisible. So creating an invisible sculpture is one idea. I think I’d consult people who know better in this matter. The first person who comes to mind is curator named Dean Daderko. He gets physical and non-physical space as well as anyone I know. It’s important that we come up with something to encourage people to have an experience with the space since they have to live with this space everyday.

The idea of *what it is* would not be the first question I’d ask. The goal would be to create something cool and stirring as rivers and oceans conspire with the ozoney clouds.
---------

BRETT EVANS
At the poetry library, in a foyer of deep dreamy purple, I would have two sculptures - one to each side. At left would be Giovanni da Bologna's Rape of the Sabine Women. To the right would be a commissioned piece by Marc Robinson, who has lived many years in Philadelphia and now Whitneys like Houston from his NY mission control. He has some sculptures which are amazing busts of historical figures he likes and other less representational, more kinetic works. Of the latter type he once did several sculptures of chairs a la houses of cards, projecting up and preposterously somehow holding together. I would let him decide to do something like this but with books not chairs or a bust of a famous preferably Philadelphia poet: Marianne Moore, say, although she's not my favorite. No, let's go with the furniture.
---------

GREG FUCHS
Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneeman including photographic documents of original performance and text.
---------

NADA GORDON
That ancient many-breasted Venus figure -- like the old Motown song:
"So Many Mammaries..."
---------

DANIEL NESTER
It's an interactive sculture with a paper tablet, where every patron must write a line. Philadelphia is one big underrated poem, and the only way to bust out of it is to let its own voice be transcribed in one big Philly Cento. Either that, or a bust of Patrick Kelly picking his nose, naked.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Something by Claus Oldenberg. A giant . . . something. Or does Wayne Thiebaud do sculptures? I'd commission him to make a huge pink cupcake.
---------


QUESTION 5:
Give us a solid 90 seconds of automatic writing on the topic of canned peas.
---------

THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Canned peas, canned peas, I want some please if you've got to get the green in the can, you got to get the sweet young ones that's right the sweet and fresh the canned greenies no mush on a flying fork for me yessir the can in the distance is the can in my dream a can for crushing can can dancers sang in the land of the green pea can and don't you stop but open the clock for the sweet pea, the sweet spinach of my youthful can can in the can of the rock solid lifting height of open sweet young pea, sweet pea, does it ever need to be told that the soft and round are also the ones in my mouth, young tweety bird? Lots of cans in the cupboard give me the one not the chick or the organce not the spinned silky little corn but the yess you guessed it yes I want a mouthful oh the splendid resplendid greenie green feelings of the tiny pittle pea.
---------

SHANNA COMPTON
You miniature planet
You singalong ball
Of the consonant's name and the vowel's gentle curves

You cloud full of fog
You jewel of the stirfry
You of the comparison, the tiny amount

You scent of the library
You missile in lunchrooms
You impossible melon, from the too-tender vine

You vegetal laughter
You tempting the spoon
You're there in the shot of the baby-butt wrinkle

You princess waker
You fairground prize
You gem under plastic in Grand Central Market

You good rhyme with me
You accent mark
Mamaw's in a bowl with butter and bacon

You infant delight
You lurker in the pear
You punctuation, alone on the plate
---------

MARIA DAMON
canned peas are not my favorites, i like canned asparagus and that's about it for canned vegetables. in terms of frozen, i just still don't like peas. they are only good fresh out of the pods in summer, scrape the pods with a finger or your teeth and the peas are sweet and crunchy otherwise it is hard to justify their existence as food, maybe the color's nice that's about it, plus they are a starch, not even a real vegetable like the leafy greens that are our so friendly friends. canned peas are a challenging topic but i like tapioca, which contains the word topic, and the syllable "pea."
---------

TOM DEVANEY
How to tell if your can is canned peas? Look at the label does it say PEAS? Does it have pearly green peas nested like fish eggs all over the label? Or is the can just a can without a label? If so, open it up and take a look. Yes, you’re looking at hundreds of canned peas and un-canned words, which (at the age of 34 you know) are the only words which can make canned peas.

When I think of canned peas I do not think of cans or peas. I think of the sleek canoe-like pod zipped open with a half dozen pearly peas perched like a roller coaster each pea shining with a sliver-of-sun on the edge of its perfect pea body. I think of LUNGFULL!’s Brendan Lorber and frozen pea & pasta dinners, which we had more than once, which makes me appreciate how smart and wily and good for you they are (and he was). Canned peas more than fresh make think of the expression “Don’t cut peas with a knife,” and also peeing which has nothing to do with fresh peas -- just being in the can. (Sixty seconds writing, 30 seconds editing, and a few moments of deceit.)
---------

BRETT EVANS
La Soeur silver suggestion to the top of the key came another dark album emitting mercurial joy. Mashed sometime potato clouds broker glances between floats. Clouds stack. A picnic in the ape of the question makes reefer the best choice yet.
---------

GREG FUCHS
Pre-face mask football kicker
Versus Jolly Green Giant
War is coming
Eat inside a bunker
The peas will last forever
& ever & ever
& remarkably taste fine
Unlike canned chicken.
My friend's momma
Used to make what we call roux
Peas, stirred in over rice.
I liked mine mixed with gravy
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NADA GORDON
sinister mushy sweet tinny claustrophobia
primordial ugh confinement industry jolly jolly jolly a
bit of pepper miming the unbearable as babies the
murk the liquid ooze, bite of can opener into
metal, clunk, clench as jaws or neck or forehead solidly
automatic no sweet no snap
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DANIEL NESTER
I threw away peas in a can, toilet Maple Shade, spring, in my mouth, carpe diem, put them away, flushed them down, one spat up, caught, fear, trucker fear, secretary fear, beating fear, and sequestered in the one-window room, taste of those fucking shitty peas that I never liked, no matter how much I put those puppies in gravy, no matter how much mashed potatoes I put them in, next batter for the Dodgers, next batter for the Cardinals, one on one, called out, beat up, if they're good for you why did I write this
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Canned peas, canned peas, the Jolly Green Giant comes to mind, ho ho ho, which makes me think of corn niblets, which I loved they were so sweet, 40 seconds has gone by already and I'm typing as fast as I can, now 60, I don't know how long it's been since I ate canned peas [I froze during last 10 seconds]
----------


QUESTION 6:
You knock on my door just as we're ready to begin a seance to contact dead poets. Who do you want to contact? What do you ask?
----------

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Ooh! I'd call William Blake. I don't think I'd have to pose a question -- he'd have something to say. I might ask him what he thinks of Walt Whitman.
----------

SHANNA COMPTON
James Merrill! You know he's just sitting there waiting for somebody to get out the Ouija board.

I'd also love to talk to Frank O'Hara. In fact, I pretend to talk him all the time. His poems make him seem so approachable. I had an imaginary conversation with last summer, kind of a "True Account of Talking to the Sun" kind of thing. You know the way he always rushed off poems from the typewriters at MoMA or stuck them in letters or notes? I figured he'd be a big e-mailer these days. Here's one of his responses (from the Monday Poetry Report):

E-Mail from Frank

"Poetry is a rival government always in
opposition to its cruder replicas."
--William Carlos Williams

Frank O'Hara surprised me
this morning with an e-mail.
He attached a picture of himself.
He looks pretty good,
considering. He said not to feel bad,
now that school is out,
even though we have a stooge
for president, now that MoMA's
moving to Queens.
He said everything still looks
good to him where he sits.
I asked where's that. He told me
not to blind cc him anymore, said
he wants to be included, but thinks
things should be done right.
He said he'll be in touch later,
when he gets back from
Rome.

(Actually, that epigraph from Williams would have been a great response to question 8!) And I've got plenty of questions for Wallace Stevens, though I'd hesitate to actually ask them. He's one of those imposing father-figure types that makes me tongue-tied. Laura Riding would be cool--but do you think she'd do most of the talking? Or Gertrude Stein.
---------

MARIA DAMON
I want to contact bpNichol to ask him to send me some of his wise vibe and gift for warmth and expansiveness --and some of his energy and talent and self-confidence to boot! I want to make sure he knows how loved he is, not just by those who knew and loved him but by those like me who encountered him in his whole soul loveableness through his work, from Martyrology through Art Facts, from the most
expansive and ambitious life-work down to the minutiae of a playful cartoon here and there, or a single conceit worked into a graphic design of great hilarity and charm.

The child geniuses --Rimbaud, Chatterton, etc --just to see what they're like... i wouldn't know what to ask them, i just want to dig their vibe...and maybe ask Rimbaud if it's true did he really turn to slave trading or was it just guns after all.

And how about the big guns: Sappho, Dante, Ovid, King David and King Solomon, and whoever wrote (if it was one person) Gassir's Lute --put 'em together in a room and listen to them talk poetics, ah that were paradise enow...

And then some of the old Norse skalds, Egil Skallagrimsson and Snorri Sturluson, and some of the women poets too, whom we only know of when they're quoted in the sagas. I'd like to get everyone above into a big room and have them talk about what poetry is and what cultural work it performs. And if, from their perspective as dead people, they've changed their minds over time about what poetry is or should be.

I think i would be in such ecstasy it would be painful. i don't know if i could contain all of that intensity. i will have to work on expanding my capacities --that's what i would ask of bp --for his help --in order to be up to such an experience. I might even ask
them to all write a collaboration, or to at least devise one. Overhearing the process of deciding how to go about such a thing would be worth the price of admission. Wow, can you imagine.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
A wonderful question and a main reason why I continue to be poet so I can be in touch with many dead (as well as many living) poets all of the time. I don't have one question or one poet. I mean, the ones I am in contact with (all of whom are very private) change on a daily basis: some just speak to me; some we both speak; some I overhear as they whisper to me while I sit and drink my morning Darjeeling tea.
---------

BRETT EVANS
And getting Dead Poets Seancy with it just inside the witchy door, now with the gentle people caught by candlelight... well, immediately I think of Ted Berrigan and Ernie K-Doe because they are heroes I always go back to. Praps I should leave them in Heaven's Lounge undisturbed though; on the corn to pea can with the Great Beyond-me is someone I don't often do cum Bible requirement.

So now I'm thinking of Joe Strummer because he just moved on and then let me summon... John Keats because I read him close to first [not counting the Dylan lyricbook] and maybe I can ask something... I was going to say "relevant" but then, do the dead need to be relevant to me? Shit, these days dead people can't contain themselves.

Suddenly it hits me Frankie O would be great to talk to but I don't want to make the circle impatient.

To Joe Strummer: Thank you for being political and simultaneously melodious in your songs. I wanted to ask what it felt like watching all [or most] of the things you howled after in your songs nonetheless end up in circles of the jackbooted winners? I'm thinking of the Sandanistas, and then, having to watch Reagan the Sequel come back when the first run was so way bad enough.

So then - besides knowing that one has to do what one has to - why continue on? Why play beautiful music to the wilderness when the Heads of the States listen to petroleum-based seashells?

To John Keats: Dude, when I was a young man I used to always say to myself, If I haven't made it [poetrywise] by the time I'm 24, I'll just off myself. The thing about Truth is Beauty when, well, Truth can be a Shit sometimes... Does focusing on the beautiful (from the Mermaid Tavern to vases to heathen cascades) help the ugliness of the world go away at all? What was it like to have to write about these things living in [imperial man-witch] Britain.

Roddy Frame said "overdose on Keats" and "Pictures of Strummer fell from the wall/ and nothing is left where they hung" on the same record.

Maybe I could find Roddy to make this supernatural conference call.)
---------

GREG FUCHS
Ted Berrigan, am I terrific?

Steve Carey, how many licks does it take?

Jeffrey Miller, is Codrescu lying?

W. H. Auden, did the bartender at the Holiday really give you free drinks for poems?

Frank O'Hara, what's the quickest route from New Jersey to St. Mark's Place?

Alan Ginsberg, why can I only think of male dead poets for whom I have questions?

Kathy Acker, do you remember when I had to sit at the kid's table?

H.D., is Kathy Acker considered a poet in heaven?

Gregory Corso, what's hell like?

Douglas Oliver, should I do a story on woman sexual tourists in Africa?

Lester Bangs, you really considered yourself a poet, right?

Blaise Cendrars, what's it like being feminine, marvelous, and tough?

William S. Burroughs, can you please order these questions to be rearranged, cut-up, and made?
---------

NADA GORDON
Mina Loy. What hair products do you use?
---------

DANIEL NESTER
I want to talk to William Carlos Williams. I want to just be awkward with him in his front room, for exactly 26 minutes, with my Honda waiting outside, and Flossie serving me unsweetened iced tea. I will ask him stupid questions, ones that haunt me for the rest of my days, an ever-revised embarassment. Williams will grumble at some point, and I'll ask stupid questions about paintings and words and typefaces.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Actually, a number of dead poets speak to me through my Ouija board in my new book, _Phoebe 2002_: O'Hara (who thanks me for showing my students where he lived on University Place), Schuyler (who scolds me), Spicer (who delivers a message to Alice Notley), and of course Anne Sexton (who tells me how much she loves me, just loves me).
---------
posted by 9for9 1:41 PM

 
QUESTION 7:
How do you see literary criticism affecting the direction of poetry?
---------

JENNIFER COLEMAN
I don't know nothin about no literary criticism. Seriously. On the one hand, criticism is a different genre from poetry -- but that's not always the case. On the other hand -- if there's ever an audience, there'll be someone thinking and speaking about how a poem works. Are we talking about textual, theoretical, comparitive or historical criticism? Or are we talking about an evaluation of whether a poem works, or is "true," or reveals a psychological, social or ethical truth? Etheridge Knight said that the poem happens between the poet, the spoken word and the audience -- so a poem isn't a poem until it's been received and reacted to, says he.

My favorite kind of poetic criticism is the one that happens spontaneously, when a poem becomes a part of an individual or a community's very brain. I was with poets Douglas Rothschild and Michael Sharf crossing the Verrezano bridge, and one of the fellows remarked that the ocean looked like a particular line in a particular Wallace Stevens poem -- or was it a Williams poem? Was it Williams writing like Stevens, or Stevens writing like Williams? The ocean, the poets, the remembered line, the present, the history, all folding in to one another for a spontaneous and human bit of
litcrit right there in a U-Haul rental truck. That's HOT!!! But it doesn't answer the question.

I guess a whole other question is scholarship -- and the academy -- and how the study and practice of literary criticism as defined by institutions affects the direction of contemporary poetry. And -- the direction of contemporary poetry -- heck, I don't think it's moving on any one plane, really, so it's hard to say? It's a huge vat of worms, really. Huge worms.
---------

SHANNA COMPTON
This is a tough one, because I don't really seek out literary criticism--though I do read a bit of it where I happen to find it. I mean, I read book reviews on a regular basis because of my job at Soft Skull, and I'll read the poetry-related essays in Harper's on the Atlantic Monthly or the other magazines I get regularly. We do a forum or interview in each issue of LIT, so obviously I read those too. And Joshua Clover's stuff in the Village Voice is always interesting. I've read several excellent pieces in the Boston Review online. But as for how it affects the direction of poetry, I can't really say. Does it? I guess there's the famous example of Emerson's remark about the American Poet which Whitman took as a challenge as one answer. But at the same time, it seems funny to think of poets sitting down to answer or refute a particular critic's charge.

Of course, I'm a huge fan of "appreciations." Enthusiasm for an out-of-print book or neglected poet is contagious, and those kinds of pieces are more likely to send me rushing to the library or alibris. And I'm also read literary biographies ("Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet by James Atlas is excellent, as is Brad Gooch's "City Poet" about Frank O'Hara) and books like David Lehman's "The Last Avant Garde." And I collect essays and criticism by writers like Auden and Jarrell.

I guess I'm saying I don't know whether criticism is effective in so far as changing the direction of poetry, but it does often direct my reading. Is "changing the direction of poetry" even what critics set out to do?
---------

MARIA DAMON
well this is a tuffy cuz i'm mostly identified as a critic. i don't have the traditional romanticized hostility toward criticism that is supposed to accompany a poetic sensibility, but fortunately that is a fading stance; many contemporary poets are also trenchant critics and are well-read in poetry scholarship. litcrit affects poetry through a process of analysis rather than evaluation, though advocacy is an inevitable aspect of it, like it or not; the writing that gets a critical mass of scholarly attention seems to get more airplay, more recognition --to a degree (there are exceptions like maya angelou, who has not gotten a lot of critical kudos as a poet but has been enormously successful at the mainstream level mostly due to her recognition by former President Clinton; the spoken word phenomenon is another exception, where critical or scholarly attention is just now catching up with a popular/mass movement). as a critic i can only write about the stuff that really catches my attention and seems quirky enough to tangle with; so some of my favorite poets and poetry i have no inclination to write about. sometimes my enthusiasm overwhelms my ability to have anything usefully analytic to say. i feel sometimes that friends want me to write about them and i don't have the critical distance. they think i'm wasting my time writing about, say, bob kaufman and john wieners when i could be making *their* careers (as i see it they impute way too much importance to what i can do with an essay or a review). i guess what i enjoy as a critic writing about living authors is feeling that i've enabled them to experience their own work in a different way, or even simply that they feel understood and appreciated, which is important for human community though it has a limited value intellectually. or perhaps not. i had a prof in grad school who i thought was kind of a meatball, and when we got to john berryman he hauled out an interview in which jb said to the interviewer that he (the prof) was the one who'd most understood what jb was up to. at the time i thought "oh so what" but now i can see how ego-gratifying it is, this mutual admiration society between writer and scholar, to for instance get an email or a phone call saying, i love your review/paper/essay on my work i'm so glad you're out there doing your thing. it can also make it hard to be critical in the sense of uncomplimentary or challenging. It becomes difficult to separate ego from ideas.

two caveats:
1) i realize i am using at times the terms scholarship and criticism interchangeably
2) i haven't really answered the question so much as done a little confessional processing dance.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
Good ideas are unstoppable.
---------

BRETT EVANS
Before addressing Question 7, which right now I can think of nothing incisive to say about, I was thinking of another question of discourse after I left the racetrack today. I had answered questions 1-6 here without looking at any 9for9. Since I've now read the ish previous; it seems like I've been answering my questions with a dorky earnestness that is far less entertaining than some of the other poets. Do I change my answering style (consciously or sub)? It makes me think of how shows like The Real World and Elimidate eventually fall into grooves of behavior formed by those players late enough to the game to have watched previous episodes: e.g., in Elimidate if any two of the four girls want to automatically make it to the semifinal, all they have to do is feign sapphic longings and the guy will prompty ditch the straighter [yawn] two.

Okay: literary criticism. Well certainly the problem with a lot of current off-off L$a$n$g$u$age school stuff being written now is that it reads more like criticism than poetry. I mean, there's a whole lotta idea-o-matics going on but there's notta mucha music [and I'm mining Ornette with Neil Diamond] whatsoever. I think there was probably a freshness to earlier lang slang that was informed by the hot semiotic injections/ ass-rebellions of the day. Stephen Rodefer's Four Lectures does nonreferentiality/aut[h]o[r]-destruction about as sexy as you can do. It feels like he's writing with the genie fresh out the bottle. By the year 2003 a lot of like descendents of this seem pretty tired: it's like somebody you see on the bus with a pink mohawk. [Make your own punk, douche.]

Now I that I think I've firmly established idiocy in such matters, I should say that I read very little fiction when I'm not reading poetry, but the nonfiction that I read is usually apocalyptic, political, cultish, or culinary: I very rarely even shake hands with criticism when we pass in the hall. Keep in mind as well that I'm not working in academia. Ultimately I think good poems are more like people full of ideas than ideas. The light from the flashlight under the covers not the batteries. Reading Habermas may help set the points on your sparks but I don't know how it could figure much into making the poem [glow].

I like when it rains with girls at the drive-in movies.
---------

GREG FUCHS
I'm not about to make proclamations on the state of poetry, on how it's been affected by other literary genres or where it's headed, it grows in just too many directions simultaneously to boil down to a succinct generalization. I will say I've enjoyed reading John Berger, a whole lot, he's informed my visual art and writing practice. I think he's got terrific cultural and political insight and he's not a know it all, yet he writes with elegance and ease. I think he wasn't taken seriously for a long time by academics nor serious experimentals but when I was in South Florida visiting my parents I ducked into the Barnes and Noble. I looked through a new Edward Said reader, he's doing some revisionism on Berger, so we may soon see him becoming the darling. I also have been influenced by Susan Sontag, Martha Rosler, and David Levi Strauss. Now it occurs to me that all the writers I've mentioned with the exception of Saied are really considered art writers. So what do I know? What about Barthes? Dig Barthes on Barthes. See my unpublished manuscript Spoken Words On, In, and Around Contemporary Poetry to find out how I feel about discreetliterary or art genres. Isn't it all just the work?
---------

NADA GORDON
Oh god, at this point (babies' intestines being ripped out by shrapnel), who cares? What do you mean by literary criticism? You mean like Harold Bloom? Or you mean like a review that might appear in _Tripwire_? This is a stuffy question, it makes me feel stuffy and turgid to try to answer it. I also don't know what you mean by the direction of poetry. There is no direction of poetry anymore, nor should there be. Think of it more as an exquisitely spiky DAHLIA whose petals point in all possible directions. I do not, personally, feel literary criticism of any sort affecting my poetry, if that's any kind of reliable finger to the wind. I used to be affected by lit crit, when I was but a callow maid, trying to figure out what the landscape was like. But I have put away childish things, given away (20 years later) most of my college texts with dreary titles like _Textual Strategies_. On the other hand I do find certain critical texts useful for confirming the directions in which I find myself anyway -- most recently (but not that recently, having enjoyed McGann's writings on the Della Cruscans and Bakhtin on Rabelais. The word I like best in your question is affecting.
---------

DANIEL NESTER
This is the question that makes me feel the most self-conscious. Whenever you read an essay from, say, Baudelaire, when he's celebrating the painters of modern life, I don't care who he's talking about -- he's talking about an idea, or an ideal form. And he's celebrating it. That helps.When I went to graduate school at NYU--oy, vey, a very very crunchy granola pedagogy, if there was one at all, no lit crit at all--I was way jealous of students in the more theory-laden programs out there where the teachers would chapter-and-verse every idea, every line break, with criticism. Somewhere in between these mindsets, I think, is the answer. To paraphrase Stevens, I think all poets should know everything about lit crit and show none of it in their poetry. At grad school, I tried to patchwork this together with classes in decadent late New Criticism--Rosenthal and Bloom and Donoghue--all of which I still love for its veracity despite its Garamond font simplemindedness. I think people should be able to sort out what poetry they love first and foremost, rather than what doesn't work. Jarrell writes that we turn to criticism to sort out what we cannot do in our own poetry--and I find that to be totally true. Why not refer to prose sometimes? I love the S&M role of prose in this function--prose being the lapdog of poetry--good boy!--helping us in our poetic projects. Put that ball in your mouth, prose! Bend over! Trying to figure out why something resonates or affects people is so much better than playa-hating poetry or lit critc or official verse this or official that. Official verse your momma! I think there's a lot of reactionary poetry out there from people, what I call the Poets of Pedigree, and it's all an exercise in merely avoiding their own hearts. Poetic cruciverbalists never changed anyone's life, ever. Neither have those oblivious of the Great Explainers. I think criticism is a great exercise, then, but it's a cul de sac at the end of the day. I'm talking, in relation to the Crit-Addicted Pedigreed, I guess, but also about subject matter, language, forms that challenge, or using surrealism to the point of denigrated to the point of pointlessness. Just because you listen to Pavement or Captain Beefheart or know painted won't make one's poetry interesting. Ya gotsta read, too, if nothing else than to know how to dis and dismiss it.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
As long as poetry is written, I imagine criticism will continue to make sense of and classify it. I guess this kind of criticism is rather benign. On the other hand, criticism that attempts to control or manipulate the way poems are written scares the hell out of me. As far as my own work, I’ve always looked to poems, rather than to criticism, for direction.
---------


QUESTION 8:
Since the American war against Iraq began some poets have been saying that this is not a time for writing poems, and that our energy should only be focused on fighting against the war. How do you feel about this?
---------

JENNIFER COLEMAN
To me, war in Iraq is one outcropping of a larger force -- larger than the current administration. People (and societies) are capable of cruelty and injustice both institutional and individual. As we fight an unjust war in Iraq, struggles continue elsewhere against disease, poverty, and violence caused by the injustice of corporations, law, or any number of social systems. This war doesn't end -- so I hope with my guts that political and social atrocities aren't so able to take over our intellectual lives that poets give up their practice.

I am proud of the poets that are speaking out through poetry and public action against war in the Mideast and an administration we can't believe in -- poetry as witness and resistance. I think it was Anne Waldman who said history will hold us accountable for what we're writing today. But poetry as a creative, thoughtful practice of articulation is a tool against violence and injustice -- no matter the subject of the poem.
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SHANNA COMPTON
Well, this seems completely wrong-headed to me. Poems can be written in protest as well as in celebration. And celebration in the face of war can be its own form of protest, I think.

Or think of Paul Celan or Wilfred Owen. Or Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf. Or countless other writers. The wars they lived through didn't keep them from writing, and aren't we lucky they didn't?

I suppose, on the other hand, that actions can also be poems. Demonstrations and marches get their meaning from the like-mindedness and like expressions of the partcipants, and language is a primary element of that expression--coming together and speaking out together. And the chants and cadences are from the oral traditions.

I just don't understand the statement "this is not a time for writing poems." Is there ever an inappropriate time to write? Are poems not suitable places for protest or any other sentiments? The idea just doesn't make sense to me. In fact, all the protest-related readings, the 9-11 anthologies, and the recent 100 Poets against the War anthologies seem to prove the opposite point.

Yesterday, I was rereading a piece by Hilton Obenzinger from Jacket's tribute to Kenneth Koch. In that piece, Obenzinger recalls his experience of the Columbia University student protest against the Vietnam war in April 1968. At the time, he was on the staff of the Columbia Review, and was among the students who occupied President Kirk's office in Low Library for several days. As the conflict between the demonstrating students, the counterprotesters, and the police intensified, some of the faculty and administrators formed a cordon outside the building in an attempt to keep the peace. They kept the counterprotesters back from the buildings and the rival groups apart from each other, but their line also kept supporters from passing in supplies to the demonstrators inside. Kenneth Koch was part of this line. Hilton remembers looking down at him from a window in the president's office, and Koch yelling up something like, "So, have you written any poems while you've been in there?" Hilton and the other Columbia Review editors rushed to the typewriter and hammered out collaborations, filling several pages. He confesses they were terrible. He admits that while they "couldn1t bear to write tedious Fight-Team-Fight anthems or lugubrious, boring manifestos," the poet-protesters still felt compelled to try. "All we could knock out was intense, manic gibberish when what was needed was something entirely new written in a language no one had yet invented." But write they did, the quality of that writing wasn't the point.

Soft Skull is publishing Hilton's next novel, so we had a meeting with him yesterday afternoon. We'll also be publishing a comic book by Kenneth Koch. So naturally after reading this essay, I mentioned it to Hilton. He'd come straight from yesterday's 300K-strong protest in NYC to our meeting about his new novel, so I guess Koch's question really did stick.

Here's the link to the Jacket piece, if you're interested.
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MARIA DAMON
Any form of resistance is welcome. Some poets resist best by writing poems, some by becoming active in other ways. It's all important and it's not for anyone to say definitively what anyone else should or shouldn't do. To mandate against poetry is to cripple ourselves by removing one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of human expression and activity i.e. culture. But if any poets would prefer to write op-ed pieces or volunteer as human shields, why stop them. Some of the Objectivists took long hiatuses (pl?) from poetry, and that was okay; it fit their politics. Most people I know find this admirable rather than deplorable. Thich Nhat Hahn writes poetry as well as anti-war Dharma talks; most people I know value both, or at least nobody says, gee i wish he'd quit writing that poetry and focus on the activism. Lots of folks on the poetics list march in rallies, do extensive research on the web and share information as well as writing poetry and organizing readings against the war. It all creates a texture, a complex web of activity and verbal density, that strengthens the anti-war movement. Whatever we do, we could also do more. Whatever we do, we could be doing less. We do what we do.
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TOM DEVANEY
I would like to put my energy and my abilities towards an art articulating scale. One of the most frustrating characteristics of the war (and the general perception of it) is that there is little-to-no-scale for most people to take it into our consciousness. Straight ahead writing doesn't do it and the scalelessness of TV has never been more profound and dangerous.
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BRETT EVANS
In my first poetry writing class my teacher brought up the whole There Can Be No Art After the Holocaust idea, which struck me as somehow wrong at the time although I couldn't put my finger in the socket.

I articulated it later to myself and now to you: I don't get the arbitrary "line in the sand" [it blows] demarcating some imaginary Before - After. I mean, as wretched as the Nazi Party was, I seem to recall some decent American poets having written between our In-House Red Genocide and Stalin's red red purges.

There's a poet here in New Orleans who actually goes on record with the There is No New Writing bit. Wait... hold on a second so that I might quote...

Okay, this is from a recent anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from his M.O. blurb in the back: "All of the words (except those used by A. di Michele) and most of the phrases have already been written, so the myth of originality is one we have to outgrow with Santa and the tooth fairy."

Again, some imaginary chainlink separating B and A. I think the real problem here is that he actually has to work through a belief in the tooth fairy. Was Byron sitting around saying, All the Pope's been written, why bother?

I'm saying what about the line Truth is Booty, Booty Truth [mine]: this guy couldn't come up with quality like that. If you're gonna talk about unique soul kittens, shit, nobody but nobody's trumpet sounds like Herb Alpert's. What the fuck does that mean?

Somebody said that irony died the day Henry Kissinger received a Nobel Peace Prize. True, absolutely fucking true.
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GREG FUCHS
That's like the most ridiculous proclamation I've heard since G.W.B. said we're fighting to liberate the Iraqi people. A poet is only a poet if the poet writes poems. So if you want to be a poet fighting to end war, write some poems, protest, write letters to the president,lay yourself down in the streets. And write more poems.
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NADA GORDON
Why America Sucks. Corporate Pigs.
It's not going to work anymore. ...
(made possible by Loquacious)
america sucks dick! america sucks dick!
Bank of America Sucks Ass
anger management is a punch in the face
Corporate America Sucks!! ... I work at a desk
and no one sees me all day! Once again for the record...
Corporate America Sucks!! grrrr. I like big butts
and I can not Lie Corporate America Sucks!!.
Actually ... America Sucks The United States of America
is currently engaged in an illegal war against Iraq. America
SUCKS - Anarchy dirtworld/ community/sucks/ Corporate America sucks
no play this game so I can get a few cents.
due to the rules and regulations we're not actually allowed
to say that america sucks.
Can't Stand Being With You ANTI-SYSTEM:
No Laughing Matter. Spank! Youth Culture
SIX FLAGS AMERICA SUCKS! America Survives ...
Missing People Spit on America! America sucks shit!!!!! ...
RE: Spit on America! America sucks shit!!!!!
Funny, Satirical and Nerdy America Sucks
America Sucks (pudding) America Sucks Cock
biggoat Poodle Destroyka Punk Vitaminepillen
FIGHT THE STATE NOT ITS WARS!!
Chase Bank Sucks. Circuit City Lawsuit.
Coke Spotlight. Corporate America Sucks.
Discover Card Sucks. E-toys Sucks.
FedExGroundBeef.com. Home Depot Sucks.
I Hate Ikea. ... America Sucks By: Mr. Fucko.
It's never made ... a bitch. America sucks,
and I'm not afraid to say that I am ashamed to be
an American. I ... america aka "the land of the free"
isnt all that it seems. ... death by ignorace. Comments:
America sucks. America can rot for all i care. Japan can shine.
India is good, america sucks, but still, job opportunity
is more important to me than culture and family,
even though those are the most important things in ...
YAWHO???! HOT OFF THE PRESSES FROM
CHUNGASPANKS GAYASS COCK- AMERICA SUCKS!
(Associated Mess). MORE AMERICA SUCKS!! Hi America sucks,
I'm George W. Bush, the president of the United States.
You can call me Dubya. ... assholes ... In the parlance of our time,
Geek America 'sucks' geek america sucks. steve, hamster lover.
brent, last action hero. melissa, where is my home? word, and you can't tell
people to rise up and slice the monarch's head off--
but you can talk about how much America sucks ...
America Sucks! ... God Bless America Sucks on Many Levels.
After the Destruction Comes More Evil. ... ... i wish i was gay.
you are all halfway retarded, sheep, just pieces of the system.
america sucks. children rule, most adults suck. i hate everyone.
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DANIEL NESTER
I fucking hate hate hate it when poets direct other poets what they should or shouldn't do, especially in terms of morality and war. If a poet wants to write a poem against the war, great. Protest the war , super. Actually enlist in the armed forces and fight in wars, fine. We have free will and free speech, and poets will never appear as a voting block, and politicians will never march in our parades.

Short partially relevant story: A couple weeks before the war, I sent a link to the Poets For The War web site -- just a blank subject, the link in the body -- to about 8 poet friends. The site itself is scary and tragically comic in a way, and I wanted to share that; the poems are even worse than the ones against the war on its companion site, if that's possible. Anyway, one poet who didn't get this tragic joke of sharing this link advised me to send a second email to to all concerned clarify that I was actually against the war. Setting aside the issue of humor and the indignity of explaining it, I am still confused about this peculiarly American notion that all poets must be in lockstep politically on all issues of the world.
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Poets write poems, no matter what’s happening in the world.
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posted by 9for9 1:40 PM

 
QUESTION 9:
APTV is the new All Poetry Television Network. You've been asked to create a poetry game show. What is it?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
"I'm a poet laureate, get me out of here!" No, that's not it. Really, the two qualities most pervasive in today's network television in general and game shows in particular are money-grubbing and spectacle. So I'd go for that. Kind of "Fear Factor" meets "Gladiators." Contestants would bank cash for creating impromptu poems and reciting the poetry of others while under physical duress. Like, for instance, contestants would parachute from a plane and have to recite as many lines from Emily Dickinson as they can before touching the ground. I'd call the show "Skill to Instill" after Dickinson's line, "Teach me the skill, That I instill the pain..."
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SHANNA COMPTON
Oh, wow. Poetry TV.

I've already invented a sort of poetry game, but I don't know that it would adapt well to television, because it's kind of a solitary game. My friend Charlie Orr is designing the game board. It's called E-Ching. It basically combines the throwing of I-Ching coins with the Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson and is a meditative tool. All the big themes are in her work, right? And the poems are numbered. I had been using the I-Ching and reading Dickinson kind of simultaneously a year or two ago, and then it suddenly came to me that I should substitute her book for the usual one. They were sitting right there together on the desk. We're still working out the numbering system, which is kind of complicated.

I guess a "Stump the Poetry Nerds" kind of trivia show would be fun. And I like those poem-on-the-spot challenges, though I could never do that. Those kinds of things would be better for television, I guess. Maybe two teams competing to see who comes up with the best collaborative poem on a randomly drawn topic.

I think the Brooklyn Brewery hosted a poetry Olympics once, pitting the local MFA programs against each other. I missed that, though.
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MARIA DAMON
Okay, here goes A TEENAGE POETRY FANTASY, based on a FUN dream i had many many years ago. The poetry game show is a sort of poetic and magical spin-the-bottle. The 3 poets on the panel must spontaneously compose and recite a spell/poem so powerful that it will conjure the presence of the person they MOST WANT TO MAKE OUT WITH (or whatever)!!! ON THE SPOT!!! The poem/spell can be anything; but it must be powerful enough so that the loved one will actually materialize right there in the room. The poet and the loved one do not have to make out in front of everyone --the studio audience and/or the tv audience -- if they do not want. they can retire discreetly to another room specially appointed for the activity.
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TOM DEVANEY
Here are a few suggestions for the shows:

Fortuna -- co-hosted by Juliana Spahr and Edwin Torres. We will not use the brilliant something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue name Wheel of Fortune, but we’ll crib some elements of the show for our show. In a nutshell, the show is a sweat inducing, mind & word bending game of skill and chance where contestants test the extent to which Fortune may be mastered.

The Just Shoot Me Show -- co-hosted by the ghost of Dorothy Parker and Tony Hoagland (author of the article “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People.”) The show is spin off, yes, but this is TV where there are no points for originality. Tony and Dorothy would co-host -- nice gloves off -- bringing in poets to tell each other what they really think -- shooting each other up and down!

The Dating Game -- hosted by Lee Ann Brown. Poets date other poets till all have dated each other; or at least they have all dated someone who has dated someone else. This all goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the guests on this show. People date and work on their work together confirming that groups are not only hot beds of ideas, but sometimes simply hot in bed. The winners know will know they’ve won by the look in their partners eye telling them that they are onto something.
---------

BRETT EVANS
APTV, huh?

I think this refers back to my HTML thang: unless some real teevee pros are gonna make this art telegenic... I don't know. I'm thinking of Tony Randall reciting this Scottish poem with heavy tra-la-la's on the first Brady Bunch variety hour slash reunion (did I mention that the Brady lads were dancing behind him in some proto-Flaming Lips bunnysuits?).

APTV should stick to essentially poetry videos [let the actual poems fly with some viz=u=els]. If I have to bling-bling it out by the pool with a bunch of Malaysian bikini angels, so be it. I'd prefer to kind of recreate the leather-among-the-heather avec maps and threewheelers look of the Big Country In a Big etc. vid.

Oh yeah - one more thing on this network: C.A. Con as the Charlie Rose of Verse world, interviewing some Miami Verse freak-phraser about the Meth, the Meth... the "method." Let it rock! Okay [no shit] I'm off to see Masters of the Obvious [for G. Fuchs' private glee: in the room where the now way-defunct School of the Imagination used to meet].
---------

GREG FUCHS
It'll be reality based game show titled "Poets On Pay Day."

Andrei Codrescu will be the host; Laura Rosenthal will be the Eddie McMahon slash Vanna White flirtatious, cohost. The theme will be Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly."

Andrei and Laura will choose six poets from applicants. They will make selections completely based on their on own unknown subjective criteria.

The six will be flown to New Orleans to spend six weeks in the French Quarter doing whatever Andrei and Laura feel like doing. The last poet standing will have a chapbook of their poetry published by Joel Dailey as an issue of One Fell Swoop.
---------

NADA GORDON
I imagine it would be like Hollywood Squares, but because I like Bollywood I would call it Bollywood Squares and make all the poets dress up in gaudy Indian outfits. There would be a wide range of types and ages of poets -- the first show might include, for example, Bill Bissett, Dorothy Trujillo-Lusk, Julie Patton, Miles Champion, Alan Sondheim, and Julia Vinograd. Rather than being asked questions requiring fixed answers, they might be given keywords or leading words and asked to extemporize something poetic. No one would lose (or win). There would be no prizes in the traditional sense, but everyone would acquire cultural capital.
---------

DANIEL NESTER
A couple ideas:

"Poetry Family Feud."

Aesthetic camps compete for cash and prixes. On this side, the New Formalists family, and on this side, the Private School Post-LangPo Family! The New Formalists would answer questions directly and shake each others' hands, and the Private School Post-LangPos would not answer questions directly and then hump each other, wearing private school sweaters and matching socks. The host would be David Lehman, of course. He would kiss everyone, including Gerald Stern.

"Prose Factor."

Students fresh out of MFA workshops are broken out of their workshop-heavy habits. In one Prose Factor Challenge, Poet-contestant read prosey poetry with artifical hip-hop rhythms in front of a real live indie bookstore or bar audience, and are then scored 1 to 10 by students on dates from nearby private universities. Bob Holman will host. No, shit, that's already been done!

OK, how about a Prose Factor Challenge wherein contestants are broken from their hard-wired habits of chopping up their prose into lines so that they would be understood by dim students in their workshop? In Prose Factor, Poet-contestants are forced to read Pessoa and Transtromer for a solid 12-hour period, then return writing deep image, make-it-new verse, and then face their dim-witted former fellow students. Contestants must drink 1 litre of boxed wine and still be able to relate the aesthetic turn their work has taken. If the poet-contestant holds out and doesn't vomit, we see how long each can hold out, timing by the second.

Another Prose Factor Challenge would be to apply electric shocks each and every time contestants make artificial up-stresses when reading their own work. The lowest-scoring contestants get to go to Mumble Island, where John Ashbery teaches them to talk like Paul Lynde on ludes.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
I’m sorry, but I’m drawing a complete blank on this one.
---------


ABOUT THE POETS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN is a poet in NYC and co-editor of the poetry journal POMPOM. She's also co-author of the chapbook Communal Bebop Canto with CE Putnam and Allison Cobb, and author of the chapbook Propinquity. You can see her work online at
The East Village, Speak Easy
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SHANNA COMPTON'S poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nerve, Gastronomica, Painted Bride Quarterly, CROWD, La Petite Zine, Good Foot, and elsewhere. She is the editor of LIT, the literary journal of the New School. She works for Soft Skull Press, and curates the Frequency Reading Series with Daniel Nester. Brand New Insects, her first collection, was recently a finalist for the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Award. Visit her online at ShannaCompton.com.
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MARIA DAMON teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. she is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, and co-author (with Betsy Franco) of The Secret Life of Words, and (with Miekal And) of Literature Nation, at JOGLARS . Her most recent article is on "ethnographies of loneliness" in Xcp:Cross-Cultural Poetics 12. also check out the interview.
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TOM DEVANEY is the author of The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press), a collection of poetry. He teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at the University of Pennsylvania where he is program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House. He also produces the monthly radio show "LIVE" on 88.5-FM, WXPN. Devaney is a regular contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer. His next book, Letters to Ernesto Neto, is forthcoming from Germ Monographs. Tom Devaney's webpage.
---------

BRETT EVANS is a Scorpio who enjoys crosswords, summer winds, and fish soup. His last book, After School Sessions, is a must-read: great for the plane. He resides in New Orleans, LA to keep within earshot of his favorite radio station, WWOZ.
---------

GREG FUCHS is a photographer and writer living in Brooklyn. He is the author of Uma
Ternura, Came Like It Went (Buck Downs Books), and New Orleans Xmas (Range). Currently, an exhibition of his photography is on view at Soho Letterpress.
---------

Sardonic troubador NADA GORDON's latest book, V. IMP (Faux Press 2003), has been described as "mood-riddled hijinx and impudent lyric protest" and "nonsense galore, as in a bathhouse." With Gary Sullivan, she is the author of Swoon (Granary Books 2001), a nonfiction e-pistolary multiform novel. She published two other books in 2001: Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night Swollen Mushrooms? (Spuyten Duyvil), and Foriegnn Bodie (Detour), a collection of poems written during her eleven years in Tokyo. Ongoing obsessions include song, odalisques, ornament, and all forms of life. Her more-or-less daily musings on life and poetics can be
found at ululate.blogspot.com.
---------

DANIEL NESTER is the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press), a meditation on his obsession with the rock band Queen. He is the editor of the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule, as well as a contributing editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and DUCKY. His work has appeared or will appear in Open City, Nerve, Columbia Poetry Review, LIT, Slope, Jacket, Crazyhorse, and The Best American Poetry 2003.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD's most recent book, _Plasticville_, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2000. _Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse_, a 674-page mock-epic based on the movie _All About Eve_, written with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, will be published by Turtle Point in November 2003. Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College in Chicago. See: Trinidad.
posted by 9for9 1:32 PM