This interview, conducted by Alli Warren via email, was originally published online at Sustainable Aircraft, which seems to no longer exist. The last question was cut from the original publication, but it has been restored here, like a long-lost scene from a classic film.
I’m a chapbook lover. Don’t get me wrong, I love all them
perfect-bound book-length works too, but chapbooks feel better. Their shape,
their production, the way they pass from hand to hand. Fatback vs. turkey
bacon. Otis Redding vs. Sam Cooke.
It’s within this frame that I want to talk about two
chapbooks by Bay Area writers: Suzanne Stein’s Hole in Space and Michael
Nicoloff’s “Punks.” Not only does the work in these chapbooks make me think,
and twist and laugh and re-think poetry, but the facts around their production, from whence they emerged, seems to be a
valuable tale.
“Punks” was published
in 2007 by TAXT Press. TAXT Press “makes visible the work of
contemporary poets, writers, & artists previously under-represented in
publication. TAXT chapbooks are always free.”
Is it important to you that “Punks” was
published by a small Bay Area chapbook press put out by one of your friends?
Hi Alli. I can’t help but take this as a question
about community, which tends to lead me to really frayed lines of thought. Community, friendship, locatedness (see, my
answer is already fraying into your next question) are central preoccupations
in my work and life, and I think recently I’ve been exploring those ideas in more
head-on way that seems poised to shift my writing practice. That’s a vague statement, I know, but I don’t
care to be more specific than that right now, which isn’t an attempt to coyly
generate intrigue for readers out there, but rather not to fuck myself up via
early release of what’s presently less than formed (Jennifer Manzano says it’s
like I’m swimming in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit of the mind).
What I am ready to say is that while my
feelings towards the poetry community you and I share at this point vacillates
between okayness and semi-alienation (and I’ll take responsibility for the
parts of that that are my own doing), I’m always grateful for the moments when a
collaborative impulse draws people together into making things like chapbooks. Writing “by yourself,” however theoretically
debunked, is still more collaborative than it’s often perceived to be on a
lived level, even in “innovative” writing—we own up to and/or laud ourselves
for our acts of appropriation all the time, but the contributions of
unpredictable flesh-and-blood humans tend to end up confined to the
acknowledgment section in the front matter.
But regardless of the degree of
acknowledgment it receives, when someone reaches out and says, hey, I want to
publish your poems / for you to be part of this performance I’m doing / want to
write an indecipherable novel with you—at its best it can strip away some of
that difficulty and ambivalence one (I) might feel towards one’s poetic
community and shifts one’s perspective back to one of the other centers of
one’s writing life—namely, books, objects, thingies. The activity of my poetry community seems to
center around the poles of going to readings and of the abstract idea of being
amongst actively writing people (even if they’re not talking about it). But those poles, important as they are, can
feel too cerebral, interior, and diffuse, like mental activity without
concomitant object-making. It’s easy to
lose track of what you’re doing. At its
best, making a material object with other people serves to channel that diffuse
energy into something more concrete.
And that’s what, I guess, I felt in my
experience with “Punks”, which involved Suzanne Stein proposing the
chapbook and then madly rushing to design, set, print, and compile the book in
time for a reading I was giving a few weeks later. There was plenty of consultation and throwing
around design ideas that happened between us, and I give major credit to
Suzanne for her excitement in that process, as it, in turn, gave my interest in
“Punks” a new life, too, after it had been sitting finished on my hard
drive for a year and a half. I know Suzanne
enlisted David Brazil, Judith Goldman, and possibly others in stapling and
putting the books together, which extends the collaboration, as far as I’m
concerned. I think you and I have felt
the same excitement when we were putting out Bruised Dick, and Jenn and
I have felt it too in working on olywa press.
If I had to reduce this to a thesis
statement, I’d say that I believe this (a?) community is at its healthiest when
there’s a steady stream of books/chapbooks/objects being produced by
individuals and groups of people and then having those items trade hands on a
steady basis. It’s an economy in the
broadest sense, and while I believe in quality control and, by the same token, don’t
want to idealize the mimeo era, I think we might be better off as a group of
people if we took a page out of their handbook and stepped up the local collaborative
production schedule a notch or two. I
think that kind of steady publishing schedule is what’s made TRY! have
such resonance for Bay Area folks. It’s
part magazine and part house organ. So,
you know, more stapling parties, maybe?
At the end of “Punks” you list the various geographic
sites of composition. Can you say some about how place influenced the work?
I’m
glad to be asked this question, because I think of “Punks” as fundamentally a
poem of place. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s a poem preoccupied with the idea
of place, seeking it out but not finding it.
The feeling of being dislocated was a constant as the piece was being
written. I started writing the book in
Portland, OR, about a year and a half out of college, in a period of time where
I was feeling acutely unsure about where I wanted to live, which is a question
that, for me, is tightly wrapped with questions of who I am and what I do.
There was an initial burst of activity over two days, in which I wrote 40
poems, and then the work of editing/revision/compression continued over the
next year. But, as you point out in your question, in year of writing and
rewriting I lived in five places, and on top of it, those places also were
pervaded with a feeling of transience, either because I was staying there in
anticipation of moving elsewhere or because I was in living situations that
never allowed me to feel settled.
Looking over the
sequence now, I can see again how that feeling comes through in the content of
the work. Not to lapse into too much close textual analysis of my own work
here, but if I look at the first four lines in the first poem (“1980 rested on
/ your mistaken identity / as this layman Buddhist / of the failure movement”),
I see my formal preoccupations at the time—to have fun with line breaks and
entertain myself with general tonal disgust—but also can see the personal
importance (to me) of the subject matter behind that language: 1980 is the year
I was born, the “you” of the “mistaken identity” is most definitely me, and the
“failure movement” is a turn of phrase that I found funny, but whatever that
movement is, exactly, it isn’t exactly suffused with locatedness and
positivity. All of that outside information isn’t important to anyone’s reading
of the sequence, and not all of the language in the sequence has so personal a
source, but throughout I think the language of frustration or disgust is
coupled with language related to lack of connection to place and to the
personal disruption (and just plain boredom, which is a real killer) that can
cause.
One of the first things I feel when reading “Punks” is
what I guess I might call poly-vocality. I’m interested in how you think about
“voice” and “sincerity” in your work? How do you think about “appropriation”
and “tone”? Do you consciously (and consistently(?)) approach your writing from
a certain theoretical perspective? Feel free to tell me I’m full of shit,
please.
I
think that in the writing of “Punks”
I was consciously trying to infuse a sense of polyvocality via an experiment
with pronouns—these unnamed you’s and he’s and she’s who say or do things
throughout. It’s been pointed out to me that that, coupled with the
fragmentation and density in syntax, lends that sense of multiple voices and
sources, and I’m willing to accept all of that.
But even as I may have had that formal impulse to scuff the surface, to
make the speaking voices multiple, underlying it is still the sense that I’m
writing, literally, for my own voice, my own speaking voice, with the idea of
me reading it out loud. I mean, there’s
a link there to Olsonian projectivity, with the poem on the page as a script
for reading, which is probably part of why I hate using periods in my writing,
because I rarely experience myself in day-to-day life as having those kinds of
hard stops in speech. It’s more like I’m
trailing off with the constant possibility of continuing. I have, in fact, become aware of my tendency
to end a large portion of what I say in conversation with “so…” I’m not unique in that, but I have no idea
how this happened. But maybe the line
break is my poetic “so…” equivalent.
But on what
feels a more bodily level, the focus on my speaking voice relates back to how I
really started writing poetry (maybe “working with” poetry is more accurate),
which was in a class with Bob Holman on poetry in performance. We read
“Projective Verse” in that class, so the theory was present, but it was the
experience of actually doing that kind of “projection” that sucked me in. Later, of course, I got heavy into NY School
and language writers and so on, with the disruption of the univocal I and all that. So I guess there’s always this tension in me
between a disrupted or polyvocal surface on the page and in live readings and
the fact that I feel like I’m writing for my own supposedly singular speaking
voice.
To return to
pronouns as an example, with “Punks” I
liked experimenting on a formal level with how setting those pronouns into
interaction with each other can have different effects, but what the pronouns are
saying relates back to my personal experience so often that really they’re
frequently interchangeable with “I.” I
mean, it’s not as though “get your face / outta the scuff bin, she says” is
just a veiling of “get my face / outta the scuff bin, I says,” but I
nonetheless experience those lines as personally resonant, as attached to a
personal emotional state, even if I didn’t seem right to phrase them so that
they’re coming out of my speaking mouth.
I guess that
begins to answer your question about sincerity and, with it,
appropriation. I once heard Anselm
Berrigan give a talk where he said that his poetry may have a fragmented linguistic
surface but that he felt like there was a direct, sincere kind of emotional
continuity to it, too, which is pretty close to how I feel about my work in “Punks” and in general. I value sincerity in writing, which for me
often equates with allowing messiness, emotional risk, and/or personal
obsessions to seep somehow into one’s work.
I used to call it a Poetics of Freaking Out. Sincerity equates with overflow, with what
you can’t control. (That can happen, I
think, with a range of techniques—sure, sometimes Flarf and conceptual writing,
to use the in-vogue examples, lives up to its purported ironic detachment,
theoretical distance, or “coolness,” but it just as easily taps into something
beyond just a clever, sexy surface.)
That said, I
think I have to earn my sincerity, both formally and emotionally. In the formal sense, I mean that I can’t just
baldly express my emotions without a formal structure and think that my
sincerity is going to get me a free pass in provoking the reader. In the emotional (if that’s the right word)
sense, I think that too much “sincere” expression of any one emotion tends to
diminish the force of that expression. Like,
no one wants to be friends with that guy who is always trying to pull you in
the corner and express how intense his feelings are. Regardless of the sincerity of intent, too
much of that expression, in writing or in life, has the effect of feeling
dishonest because the expression ends up rendered in a vacuum without a countervailing force or two. It needs to be
couched in a mix of approaches and registers—sarcasm, density, stupidity,
humor, whatever. Like, some small talk
please, dude. (It’s interesting how
emotional concerns immediately slide back into formal ones; my attempt at differentiation
of the two completely dissolves here.)
And all of that
shapes my approach to appropriation, too.
Often I’ll steal something because it feels like it has some kind of
emotional resonance for me (and I’ve found, incidentally, that the emotion
associated with what I appropriate is most often a variation on humor-inflected
agitation), but it might also be to create the right mix of shifts in
linguistic registers. I want to be
responsible in appropriating something, which is why I generally try to avoid
stealing something solely for ironic use (unless somebody is crying out to be
fucked with), but regardless, I’m always trying, with success or not, to use
that material to cut a sharp formal/emotional/conceptual balance.
When you read from “Punks” at New Yipes in April, 2008,
you read very quickly. Miles Champion-esque. I’m interested in how you think
about pacing in relation to the line and the form[1]
in this work. I’m curious if the quick pace happens for you only in performance,
or at the level of composition.
Ah
yes, the reading I can’t live down. My
perceptions of it are colored by someone’s review of it on her blog that
trashed me in a nasty and personal fashion, and after that it gets difficult to
talk about my choices in pacing and speed without sounding defensive. As an aside, I like Miles’s response people
saying to him “You read too fast”: “No, you listen too slow.”
In any case,
while that reading might have admittedly been a touch too fast, speed is an
important tool for me. This may sound
dumb, but I guess it’s the closest thing I can get in poetry to the feeling I
get at a good rock show. I read, I
think, in a comparatively blank affect, because I feel like if you’re going to mess
around with affect or performance you have to put as much thought and work into
it as the writing itself (see Amiri Baraka or Christian Bök) so it doesn’t come
off as an half-assed attempt to gussy up the work with an excess of persona,
which is what poorly executed performativity mostly feels like to me. It’s a quick way to ruin good work.
But even if I’m
dispensing with that kind of persona work or heavily performative affect, I
still want to retain a sense of movement and force to what I’m doing, and
reading faster (but hopefully not too fast) seems to be the solution I’ve
arrived at. The line remains primarily a
unit for organizing my cadence, and I recognize that that’s not always going to
come through for some listeners, that it’ll seem like I’m obliterating my line
breaks, but I hope that I’ve retained enough objectivity to say that when I’ve
done it right there’s still a sense of meter in the midst of the driving
pace. The pace also relates to the
tensions I’ve outlined above on polyvocality—speed is a way for me to take the layered
surface of the writing and draw it together into something more univocal and
directed. All in all, it just feels a
little more like something you can, like, dance to and imparts that in a way
that feels accurate to me. I take great
pleasure in the moments in my life where the conversational flow is exciting
enough that people can’t help but run their mouths as fast as they can.
