Interviews - April 2011
On being stubborn
Close Listening with Christian Bök
Editorial note: Christian Bök is the author of ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, Crystallography, and Eunoia (which won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002). Bök performs his poetry around the world and teaches at the University of Calgary. The following has been adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded on April 20, 2005, at Studio 111 at the University of Pennsylvania. The audio program is available on PennSound, along with an associated reading by Bök. Charles Bernstein hosted and produced the show; it includes comments and questions from his undergrduate students as well as from several visitors, including Bob Perelman, Jena Osman, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. The interview was transcribed by Michael Nardone. — Katie L. Price
Penn student: Do you think poetry is elitist? Is it accessible?
Christian Bök: If you’re asking me if poetry is elitist because it’s the expression of our best sentiments, requiring skill and ingenuity to be good at it, then yes, it’s probably an elite activity. It’s only the chosen few who are willing to dedicate their lives to this activity.
Charles Bernstein: If it’s the chosen few, then how did you and I get involved in it?
Bök: Well, that’s what I mean: “I chose you.”
Very few people are actually willing to make the kind of commitment that’s often required to be immersed within this kind of literature, especially since there are very few material rewards for such dedication. In that sense, the kind of work that people practicing poetry might produce is the side effect of a certain elitism.
If you’re asking me if poetry is exclusionary, and therefore it prevents certain kinds of people from participating, then I don’t believe so. It’s an extremely democratized milieu, and anybody can find a way to enter it and enjoy it. I certainly think that poetry functions in such a way.
Student: What method, if any, did you use in writing Eunoia?
Bök: The word eunoia is spelled E-U-N-O-I-A. It’s the shortest word in English to contain all the vowels, and it means quite literally, “beautiful thinking.” It’s probably my favorite word in the language. When I first encountered this word, I thought that it would be a great title for a book.
In order to write Eunoia, I had to write five different stories: five narratives, each of which uses only one vowel. In the first chapter, only the letter A appears; in the second chapter, only the letter E appears, etc.
I did this work by first reading the Third Webster’s New International Dictionary, a three-volume dictionary. I read it five times. It has over one and a half million entries, so I had to look at about seven and a half million words in the course of accumulating the requisite vocabulary. I then sorted all the words into topical categories by hand. I didn’t use a computer to do the searching or the sorting, because I thought that it would take about as long to learn the software necessary to do such a task as it would take to actually do it by hand, and I wanted to get started. So I just simply threw myself into the task. I thought that getting the vocabulary was going to be the most arduous part of the work — sorting it into parts of speech, figuring out what the topical categories might be amongst those words, all in an effort to determine what could be said with them. Then I proceeded to arrange them, like a jigsaw puzzle, into something that would be intelligible and that would have a kind of artful, poetic value.
It turned out that the actual search for the words themselves was the easiest part of the work. The remaining seven years required to produce the book involved a tremendous amount of labor and a kind of stubborn commitment, all under very disappointing and desperate conditions.
If the book reveals anything about me personally, I think that it reveals something about my stubborn mindedness — or my obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Student: I was wondering what you experience when you feel as if you have succeeded in creating a poem like Eunoia. What effect does that have on you, when you feel as if you’ve said exactly what you wanted to say?
Bök: When I was working on the book, I noticed lots of spooky moments in my activity. There’s a great deal of paranoia in Eunoia. I began to think that the vowels were, in some way, conspiring amongst themselves to speak on their own behalf. Whenever there were these kind of synchronistic coincidences, where words would fall into place and suddenly say something that seemed very uncanny, if not sublime, then I knew that the work was going well.
But such events occurred with sufficient infrequency that, most of the time, I was in a state of really black desperation. Nevertheless, these little moments of euphoria would occur. These little moments of spookiness would occur with just enough regularity that I would actually feel reinspired to continue the labor necessary to complete the work. When I was finished, I felt a kind of breathless elation at having completed such a lengthy project. Suddenly I realized that my faith in the actual language itself, its ability to work under these extremely adverse conditions, was well warranted. Language is extremely flexible and, in a certain sense, it can’t be censored. I felt a great deal of optimism about this fact when I finished the book.
Student: Can we look forward to a consonant sequel to Eunoia?
Bök: A consonant sequel? No, I’ve promised myself that I won’t ever write another constraint-based book again. The blood pact, which I have with my peer group, is that every book we write will be radically different from its predecessor — that the entire oeuvre will be completely heteroclite. The next project requires me learning a whole new skill set, retraining my brain to learn something else. I probably would not have the endurance now, or the perseverance required, to actually finish a constraint-based book.
Student: Clearly, Eunoia is very constraint-based, and from what you’re saying, you’re probably going to set yourself a new set of rules every time you write something new. So, are you arguing for something? For going back to the sort of poetic formality that has existed forever, against the tide of free verse or stream of consciousness?
Bök: I have no problem with such poetic forms. My only complaint about them is that they do not feel much incentive to innovate, to produce something new in order to reinvent themselves in a manner which is exciting and stimulating. To me, it’s not so important that poetic works actually demonstrate some sort of formalistic character, so long as they have some kind of innovative rationale for their practice. I’m not making a case for a return to a rigorous formality. I’m not that fascistic or schoolmarmish in my sensibilities. I did this project, thinking that it was a kind of experimental work. I didn’t know if it could be done, and I merely conducted the experiment to see what would happen. To me, that’s what writing poetry is about. It’s a kind of heuristic activity, where you indulge in a completely exploratory adventure through language itself.
Student: Speaking of innovative rationale, where did your constraints, your content constraints about the nautical voyage and so forth, come from?
Bök: In Eunoia, the five chapters have a thematic thread, which runs throughout the entire book. Every chapter must allude to the art of writing. All the chapters have to describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableaux, and a nautical voyage. These four scenarios are indicative of a vocabulary common to all the five vowels. It’s possible, for example, to say something erotic or culinary in theme throughout all the vowels, because they actually have this vocabulary in common. I wanted there to be a sort of thematic consistency across the entire book. I didn’t want it to be just five separate, individual stories that had no correlations with each other. I wanted there to be some sort of thematic parallelism — and it just so happened that these were the lexicons that were common to the five vowels. So, I included them in the story.
Coincidentally, those four scenarios are also the kinds of scenarios that you typically see in Greek epic poetry. For me, the word eunoia, which is originally from Greek, means quite literally goodwill — it was a term coined by Aristotle to describe the frame of mind that you have to be in, in order to make a friend. It reflects a kind of neoclassical set of values about beautiful thinking. Certainly, there is a kind of classical story in Eunoia. The retelling of the Iliad in chapter E, for example, alludes to these four scenarios, which are common to a classical form of storytelling. You would find these scenes in such an epic.
Student: So, did the classical idea come first? Did the research for what was common come first, or was it sort of an homage to the classical traditions?
Bök: It’s all a side effect of the actual vocabulary itself. I didn’t plan to write about these four scenarios. The vocabulary determined what it was possible for me to say, and I simply said it. It just so happens that they are easily integrated into this rationale, this explanation. It is just a coincidence that it has something to do with a kind of neoclassical, Apollonian rigor in aesthetic value, which I think the Greeks exemplify.
Student: Have you ever thought of joining an a capella group?
Bök: No, I don’t think that I would join an a capella group. I’m too much of an auteur.
I have no vocal training. I’m not a musician.
Bernstein: I always thought Eunoia was what people said about poetry like ours: “You annoy-a me.”
Bök: That was the standard joke that my friends used when the book was outwearing its welcome: people would describe it as “Annoy-you,” or, better yet, “Ennui.”
Student: Considering the notion that imposed constraint thematically describes other inherent constraints: the most foundational and, perhaps, important element that arises out of Eunoia, and the construct of it, seems to be that language, even as it exists within conditions of both internal and external being, still stands as enduring and amazingly resilient. In many ways you have exploited the language’s benefit, the very linguistics or languaged associations and fixings that so many currently decry as problematic, something requiring remedy. Do you find that, having laid forth this enduring quality, both powerfully and convincingly, you have also laid a foundation that acts as a sort of defense of discursiveness? Leaving the aims of, say, Language poetry as more of a linguistic preference than a linguistic necessity? In other words, have words been shown to be so very resilient that they, in fact, do not require any sort of cleansing or reforming? And, in this way, do you defend what is often viewed as conservative or contaminated poetics?
Bök: If you’re suggesting that I’ve demonstrated that it’s possible for a person to be an avant-garde poet and actually mean something, then right, I agree. When indulging in this kind of formalism, I could say yes — what seems true about any combination of words, according to any series of formal rationales, is that what we call meaning is really a side effect of a particular kind of activity. No matter what combination of words that I might use, no matter how they are arranged or disposed, no matter what kind of formalities are brought to bear upon them, you’re going to find some sort of way to make those associations mean something to you. It seems to me that meaning is always the side effect of such an activity.
T. S. Eliot used to say that meaning was the meat that the burglar threw to the dog. You had to put some meaning in the poem so that something else could take place. You had to satisfy those readers who were begging for some sort of rationale, some sort of purpose for this activity, which, in many respects, is done for its own sake — as a kind of hedonistic enjoyment of language, language free from the need to mean. It takes a little holiday. That’s what’s going on in Eunoia: language has taken a little holiday from the dictionary. I’ve merely shown some sort of incipient, possible combinations and permutations of the words, all of which are actually imminent within the dictionary, within the language itself, but which have been somewhat occluded or eclipsed by other activities in language. That’s what many poets are trying to do nowadays. Certainly, the Language poets do that as well. They’re attempting to show various aspects of ideology in meaningful production, aspects occluded by standard, normative uses of the language.
Student: Do you find reinvention to be a means to some end or an end in and of itself?
Bök: That would be like asking a scientist if their practice of science is supposed to be pure or applied. I think that we’ve got lots of applied language: certainly, instruction books and information manuals. Those are kinds of applied modes of linguistic usage. I think that a poet is much like a pure scientist doing a kind of experimental, research activity. It’s all research and development. I would like to be a mad scientist in my basement designing a new brand of nerve gas that I could just spring on the population. And I am doing it through this kind of viral thing called language. That’s how I would respond to the idea about innovation. It’s a kind of research activity that you do in order to produce knowledge, quite literally — something that is a surprise, something that you’ve never knew before seen.
Student: How do you see that playing into the bigger social discourse?
Bök: I hope that it brings readers who might not have otherwise enjoyed poetry, or that it might produce new poets who would be encouraged to conduct, if not extend, these kinds of research activities. I certainly hope that it has an impact upon people’s attitudes towards their own use of language: that it helps them modify their own everyday, quotidian uses of it.
Student: Is novelty worthwhile for its own sake? Do you find you have a relationship with novelty through your own work?
Bök: My joke has always been: “New and improved — twice as many adjectives!”
It’s an attitude towards novelty that’s kind of an upgrade to ideology. You get the old thing, but now it’s 2.0. Or the old thing, but 3.0. These constitute modes of updating your, otherwise outdated, activity.
But in a certain sense, the new is not a fashion. It’s not a fad; it’s actually a value. Barthes would argue that it’s a fundamental value to most artistic practice in the last one hundred years, and that it’s actually impossible to produce knowledge unless you are invested in the new. You have to be able to produce surprises: produce a minimal difference that, in fact, makes a difference. That’s what I mean by the new: it’s a difference that makes a difference.
Bernstein: Better new-oia than old-oia.
Bök: That’s right.
Student: My question is what inherent value, if any, does Eunoia hold for a non-English speaker?
Bök: That’s interesting. I’ve had nonnative speakers of English comment that, when reading this book, they try to imagine what it would be like to conduct the same experiment in their own language. Many of them say that it would be effectively impossible to produce the same kind of work with the same depth, or complexity, across all five vowels. Spanish speakers said that, if they were to write the O section, it would be somewhat boring, because it would be composed of nothing but spondees with a long O sound: “poco, loco,” that kind of word, over and over again.
English has a relatively robust vocabulary and a very large lexicon. As a consequence, it made the act of writing the book in English much easier than doing it in other languages. In Quebec, some French writers have attempted to translate elements from chapter E with the same constraint and the same semantic content, and they’ve successfully managed to translate a few paragraphs after much arduous work. I would be very curious to see if somebody could actually do an analogous version of this book in some other language. It would be interesting to compare the two exercises. Most poets have simply confessed that they think that it would be impossible, but that’s what they said about conducting the experiment in English. Most writers who theorized this kind of practice thought that it couldn’t be done, certainly not at this length, and certainly not across all five vowels. But nobody really ever put it to the test. That’s the important thing for me: that I’ve attempted to put it to the test, despite being told not to.
Student: If you were born in Mexico, do you think you would still pursue a career as a poet?
Bök: If I was born in Mexico? I don’t know. Probably. I imagine.
Bernstein: I’m midway through my translation of the Canadian into the US language. It’s been arduous.
Bök: We speak American up there, you know?
Bernstein: I do ten minutes after I wake up each morning. It’s very similar, almost identical in terms of the letters and the configuration of the letters, to the Canadian.
Bök: We’re missing the letter zee though.
Bernstein: But I keep the letter zee. I try and stay as close to the Canadian as possible.
Bök: We’ve got the zed instead.
Bernstein: Many people would see very little difference, except that I’ve translated it, and I spent all this time.
Student: Do you think technology such as sorting programs or more advanced pattern-based algorithms could assist in the production of constraint-based writing such as Eunoia? And, at the extreme, could that supplant the poet?
Bök: This is a question of concern, and interest, for my peer group. I almost wish that I had access to the technology that would have made it possible to automate most of this process. I think that, if not now, then certainly in the future, poets may be required to learn a catechism outside of their formal, literary training. They may have to learn how to be typographers and typesetters and computer programmers, learning how to program Perl scripts in order to actually mine the vast exobytes of information that are out there on the Web.
In the future we could easily imagine poets being celebrated not so much for the quality of the poems that they write so much as for the quality of the programs that write poems on their behalf. We’ll celebrate poets as writers of code, not just as writers of words.
I haven’t got a problem with that. I actually think that computers are very useful prostheses, and I am very interested in the kinds of literary work produced by machines. I’ve written at length about the only published computer which has produced a book of poetry: Racter, the author of The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed, a very marvellous book of surrealism. What’s interesting about such a poet, for me, is not so much that it might someday supplant me and my job, but that, right now, it might write better than a human being. What’s fascinating about this particular computer program is that it knows nothing about poetry. It has no training in the formal history of such an activity, and yet it writes better than a human being who knows nothing about poetry. You would think that, surely, a computer that is ignorant of this activity wouldn’t be able to do a better job than a human who is ignorant of this same activity. And yet, I would probably prefer to read the doggerel written by this device than doggerel written by a human who has no training in poetry.
Student: Where do you think sound poetry is going now that it’s beginning to seem more like beat-boxing and vocal percussion?
Bök: Sound poetry — at least as it’s practiced by avant-garde poets — seems to be in decline. It’s waning. The greatest practitioners in the world, the people who, I think, are very influential, people like Paul Dutton or Jaap Blonk, are very classically minded in their activity. They use, as a musical metaphor, references to jazz for their practice. That’s the musical metaphor that’s typically evoked when describing what they do, and that seems increasingly antiquated — not illegitimate, but just an older notion of what it means to be a poet. There are no younger practitioners doing the same sort of activity. I’m maybe one of the few people my age who try to learn, to sustain, that older repertoire.
To me, the more virtuoso work is taking place among people who are doing musical mimicry, like the vocal percussionists. Rahzel or Dokaka are quite exceptional performers who make avant-garde practitioners look completely naive by comparison. It’s amazing how such beat-boxers can upstage other performers in athleticism and complexity. They are truly incredible. That’s why I feel obliged to learn that particular skill set: in order to expand my repertoire as a sound poet. I do it as a matter of course. I want to try to sustain this kind of practice; that’s one of the fertile avenues of exploration. It seems to me that those kinds of people in pop music — people whom you might hear on Björk’s most recent album Medulla — might be poets more so than musicians, although they’re functioning in a totally different, artistic universe.
Bob Perelman: I want to try and connect the beginning and the end of the reading. I was struck by … what’s the piece that you said was rough? The aphorisms, the second thing you read.
Bök: Yes, I would like to call that book — if I were to actually write it — Umlaut Machine.
Perelman: Yes, Umlaut Machine. I found your use of boring very interesting. That drilling is thrilling, but boring is boring. This is, in a way, an older discourse. I’m thinking of Bruce Andrews and others who find the extension of narrative, and the opera scenery that you have to drag around in each sentence in order to construct a normative, novelistic sentence, really hard work to just sit through.
But then hearing in Umlaut Machine some of the moments like “after Auschwitz, the barber …”
Bök: After Auschwitz, barbers are poetic.
Perelman: Barbers are poetic. Yes, right. On the one hand, it’s a totally great line. On the other hand, it’s problematic.
Bernstein: Sweeney Todd.
Perelman: But anyway, the boring: the long narratives outside strike me as something that you are going farther and farther away from. The trajectory of your work is more and more compressed so that the puns, the events, the thrills, are happening closer and closer together. So when you get to “Drum Rondo,” which I found exhilarating, there’s, say, ten thrills a second. It’s really much faster than syllables. What is it? Morphemes?
Bök: Yeah.
Perelman: What you said at the beginning of this discussion really resonated with me, that you always want to write a new book. You don’t ever want to repeat yourself. I’m wondering if the boring might be quite fertile territory. Can you speculate about where you might go? It’s almost like going through the looking glass rather than getting faster and faster and more and more dense. What might happen if you use this other scale, the longer scale, which is, I suppose, the novelistic, the boring? Your reading demonstrates that the boring can be really interesting.
Bök: Among my peer group, boredom is a value that’s discussed at length. Kenneth Goldsmith, a good friend of mine, describes himself as the most boring writer on the planet, and he predicates his entire career on retyping other people’s work. That’s his act of writing. He’s hoping that he can write his books while watching television. It would be great if writing were a form of crocheting that just takes place in the background of daily life. That’s really what he’s going for. There’s, of course, tremendous ennui in many of these texts. But under scrutiny, and certainly with effort — if you are actually willing to sit and read these works (and they’re often truly encyclopedic in scale) — they give up tremendous experiences of interest. We learn a great deal from these particular books.
Kenny likes to remark that, if he’s going to be boring, he wants to make sure that he is not “boring boring.” He should make a kind of interesting tedium. I use the IKEA phrase unböring, which is a more appealing word to me because it’s got the umlaut in it. The idea for him, in his work really, is that the tedium is the message. You see his tedium at play in an almost kind of Warholian excess. It’s that eating up of time that’s at play within his books. And it’s a lot of fun to see what the outcome of that process is. He often cites John Cage or Andy Warhol as important influences upon his practice.
If I’m doing something that’s boring, it better be interesting in some other way. I’m always worried that, as a performer, I’m actually having more fun than the audience. A boring person is somebody who’s actually taking interest in themselves when nobody else is. That to me, is what a boring person is. What’s cool about Kenny’s work, for example, is that, despite the fact that he’s taking a kind of total disinterest in himself, a very interesting activity nevertheless ensues.
When I was working on Eunoia, there were some very, very long processes of boredom. Days, if not weeks, would go by, with nothing but ennui and tedium. It was a very desperate kind of activity that required an enormous amount of commitment and perseverance, despite a lack of accomplishment, despite the fact that it was generating boredom. Nevertheless, I think that the outcome of the labor is a little more interesting than tedium. It’s a kind of new ennui that’s innovative, that’s fun to contemplate conceptually.
Jena Osman: Could you describe the way “Drum Rondo” looks on the page?
Bök: People often ask how the sound poetry gets scored. I always say: “Well, you’ll be very disappointed to note that it is written down the way it sounds.” It’s all written without many diacritical markups. I just use regular letters, and there are little “word-corpuscles” placed on the page in a manner designed to provide a mnemonic aid. Some sound poets actually go to great lengths to notate their work very thoroughly so that some other practitioner can come along and reproduce exactly the singular, original performance. I see something slightly fascistic in such an attitude, because it leaves little room for interpretation of, or additions to, the work.
In the case of musical notation, we don’t really know how any of the original composers might have performed their work, say, two or three hundred years ago. All we have is a whole series of interpretations, in which performers themselves have added their own timbre or tenor to each performance. Some of those performances become canonical; some of them are the ones that predominate. With “Drum Rondo,” all that I’ve done is to provide a code, a little bit of cryptography, a series of letters which correspond to the making of a sound. For example, if I want to make the kick-drum noise, that [sound] noise, I just notate it as capital B, little h, little m. [Sound.] And if I want to do a little high hat, a little high hat [sound] sound, right, I put that as a capital T. So, if I wanted to say [sound] [sound], right, it would be B-h-m, dash, capital T. And that’s how I notate the [sound] [sound]. You just string those sequences together, even though it looks completely meaningless. It’s not a semantic word that’s being created; it’s just providing a notation for me to remember so that I know the order in which I’m supposed to make these sound effects. I could, I suppose, substitute almost anything. I could have done little colored blocks, or something, as a sequence. But this is easier for me to do.
Everybody has their own idiosyncratic way of notating sound poetry now. Many avant-garde musicians have very idiosyncratic methods for notating their music, often because the standard, notational systems are now inappropriate for such kinds of composition. Moreover, many people can’t read music now because they’re resorting to computerized technology, like synthesizers, or other forms of digital sampling, which makes standard notation irrelevant as a practice, because you can manipulate already prefabricated noises. In a certain sense, all these sound poems pretty much look the way that they sound on the page. They’re just written down the way that they sound. People are often very disappointed to see that.
Osman: You say that you want each project you do to be completely different from the previous one. So, what’s next?
Bök: Well, I have two creative projects that I would like to do. I’m working on one which is a long sound poem, responding to the history of electronic music. A kind of techno music provides the model for this new, poetic practice. Most poets resort to jazz as their major, musical metaphor. To me, jazz is an increasingly Jurassic technology, and I would like to be able to respond to a much more contemporary model of music.
The other project that I would like to do, one that requires me to raise capital because I have to get scientists to assist me in the production of the book, would be to write a single poem which would be translated into a four-bit alphabet, in which each of the letters corresponds to one of the codons in a genetic sequence. Then I would actually translate the poem into a gene, which could be implanted in a bacterium with a retrovirus. You could actually have a little bacterium that would, in fact, be the living embodiment of the poem. It would be a very cool, conceptual art project. I’m in the midst of trying to raise capital to do this project, with grants.
Bernstein: It’s a good thing you’re doing that in Alberta, because we don’t allow that in the United States.
Bök: Right, we don’t allow that in the United States. I know that. That’s what I hear.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: You talked twice here about stubborn commitment under desperate conditions, and I think that you meant writing conditions, but if you meant anything else I’d be interested.
Bök: Well, while I was working on Eunoia, I was a PhD student at York University. I was working sixty hours a week: forty at a retail book store, a giant monopoly. I spent the other twenty hours tutoring students in chemistry and algebra for fifty dollars an hour to make up for shortfalls in my income. Then I would go home, and I’d work for a few hours on my dissertation. I was trying to complete my graduate work at the time. Once that work had been completed, usually around ten or eleven o’clock at night, I would proceed to work from about eleven o’clock until four or five in the morning on Eunoia — and then I’d probably get up two or three hours later to go to work.
So, for about four or five years at least, I was quite sleepless — a real insomniac, I would crash on the weekends. I was unpleasant. I had a girlfriend at the time who complained about my commitment to this particular project. I couldn’t get money to support the project. It was impossible to get a grant. In the seven years I worked on it, I couldn’t seem to get funding for it. I felt vindicated when it was done — given that it was finally very successful.
DuPlessis: I wonder whether you can at least briefly comment on the material, ideological and the historical conditions of being a Canadian poet.
Bök: Canadian poetry, in effect, defines itself against the kind of colonial experience of being, at first, a political colony of Britain, and now an economic colony of the United States. There is, at least historically, a great deal of xenophobia around poets who are influenced by international practitioners of writing. For the last thirty or forty years, the main concern has been to produce a kind of homegrown, poetic experience that would be a lyric expression of innate “Canadianness.” What does it mean to be a Canadian? What exactly is a Canadian? I find these questions pretty tiresome because they always come up with the same set of clichés and hackneyed sentiments.
As a consequence, literary history in Canada is very conservative and doesn’t have a very rich avant-garde tradition. Despite the fact that the country has been around for as long as the avant-garde itself, it doesn’t have a long, or deep, experimental writing history. It’s very difficult to be a poet under such circumstances, especially if you are doing something unorthodox. At the same time, however, socialist democracy has meant that there is actually money available to support artistic endeavor and creative activity in a way that may not be the case now in the United States. But that’s changing of course. We have an increasingly conservative, political agenda in our country, which is threatening many of these institutions: cultural institutions created, in effect, to protect Canada from the cultural incursions of the United States.
Bernstein: You’ve been listening to Christian Bök on PennSound. I’m Charles Bernstein reminding you that close listening is sooner than you think.
A conversation with Caroline Bergvall
Preamble: Caroline Bergvall and Susan Rudy met outside the Royal Festival Hall in London on Tuesday, June 8, 2010. Our conversation began informally, over dim sum at Ping Pong, a twenty-first-century teahouse on the festival terrace of the South Bank Centre, and was followed by a formal, taped interview, which took place in a quiet corner of the Royal Festival Hall. The text below was created between July and December 2010 based on a transcription of our interview and supplemented by email conversation.
Susan Rudy: Say Parsley [1] is a collaborative sound and language installation that you developed with Irish composer and installation artist Ciarán Maher. How and why did you begin working collaboratively?
Caroline Bergvall: My first collaboration was with a photographer, Guri Dahl. Her work was very abstract, serial, black and white, and I was performing short prose pieces to go alongside her slide projections. What I really liked was the performance aspect of it, and the fact that as I was reading in the dark, my live voice functioned as a sort of voiceover. I remember that with much, much pleasure. I was also involved in FM radio for a time, and I would be testing some of my textual performances on air. Not always with the same approval rating from the listeners, I might add. So live performance drew out my interest in embodied presentations of text. When my collaborations became about interventions on site, or performances of site, they somehow broadened this focus.
Rudy: So you were writing your work for performance very early on?
Bergvall: No. I was writing and then I was also performing. But then Guri and I got funding to do an installation. And that was the first time I was invited to think about space as an issue for me as a writer. That was a weird project. Very abstract and strange and wonderful to do. It started my interest in the whole issue of writing on site, as site. If you are interested in performing spatially, somehow you will change your work; that will change your work. Similarly, if I have to struggle to read certain texts live, then that becomes part of the struggle of the piece itself. That was part of my work on language at that point. That struggle between text and performance was a sort of process of language acquisition. It was the acquisition of a voicing — I had to adapt or stretch or seek out my mouth, my reading, my breath, in relation to the event, to the space, to the acoustics, as much as to the work of my collaborators or my own texts, and not the other way round. I found all this really exciting, how to go about embodying or locating, placing a text in a dynamic relation. Of course, when one is in a site, on site, it changes everything, everything changes, about how I can write, about how far I can go with textual display or audio-placing, how much text the walls will accept, etc.
View of “Alpabet” and “For Walls” in Arnolfini Gallery 3, Bristol. Photo by Jamie Woodley.
Rudy: Even though you started on this path by working with a photographer, your work doesn’t actually engage with images, does it!
Bergvall: Very interesting point. I suppose I do work with language graphically on the page and across the pages, and also visually and spatially when on a site or on walls. But yes, I haven’t worked much with nonverbal images as such. Although I would argue that the spatial trajectory built to guide the viewer/listener through the Say Parsley show, the twenty-five hanging plumb lines, for instance, do create a mobile image, a sculptural instance that one accesses kinetically and visually. Also the seen/unseen vinyl lettering on the walls creates a perceptual image, one that changes as the reader walks closer to the display. For my upcoming show at the John Hansard Gallery. [2] I am working with the historic broadside ballad, which of course would always have had illustrations alongside the text and so here you see a move towards a more conventional and illustrative use of image alongside text.
Rudy: I’d love to hear more about that project.
Bergvall: I’ve been commissioned to do a piece for the John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton. The show opened in September [2010]. The John Hansard is a very good, internationalist, regional gallery. It has a solid reputation for being quite intellectual, and they’re very broad when it comes to the media they’re interested in. They haven’t done a writing show in this way before. So they invited me to do a new piece of mine.
Rudy: And what’s the piece called?
Bergvall: It’s called “Middling English.” [3]
First page of Bergvall’s Alyson Singes (2008).
Rudy: Is it the same “Middling English” referenced in the latest iteration of Say Parsley at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol?
Bergvall: Yes. That quote is adapted from a piece of the same name.
Rudy: So tell me about “Middling English,” then. Is it a critical essay?
Bergvall: It has become a sort of template of thoughts and methods behind the John Hansard project. More largely, it supports my writing as a whole at the moment. I’ve been writing this piece for the past year or so. The final version of it is forthcoming in my collection of selected texts, Meddle English, which has just appeared. It wants to be polemical and starts really by saying, let’s think about the medium of English. It has Middle English as a starting point.
Rudy: Is it related to your Chaucer work, then? To Alyson Singes, for example?
Bergvall: Yes, its starting point was the Chaucer work. But it’s also working its way to reflecting on other hybridized language use, and what I consider to be the role of the writer today. It explores the residues from the past contained by language. It then looks at a language in full transformation, Middle English, at the beginning of its own identity as a compound of French, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, etc., and ends up speculating about the Englishes of today, again in full flux, after a long historical period of domination — also linguistic domination, by way of trade notably, and colonial politics of dominance and occupation. So I’m interested in thinking about the various horizons of English, what kind of language is there, what kind of world is it signaling now, what is coming after it.
Rudy: That’s so interesting. You were talking at lunch about seeing yourself as a writer of the future. Can you speak a bit more about that?
Bergvall: What I meant was twofold. Mainly that I am not an artist but I am not exclusively a literary writer either, and I work as a writer in spaces usually dedicated to visual or sound artists. I need the spaces these artists occupy for my work with language and writing. It is quite pragmatic. Formally, this combined compositional and presentation focus of textuality and spatiality is in the lineage of [Marcel] Broodthaers, who in turn was working out Mallarmé’s influence on him. The future of the book has in more than one respect become sited writing, networked writing. I also meant that my approach to language as a complex, historically charged, culturally multilingual and politically postnational system is reflexive of a citizenship that does not yet exist or is not allowed to exist within current parameters of identity and belonging. The future here is idealistic, as much as dystopic.
Rudy: Can you speak a bit more about how you, as an artist, need the spaces that artists occupy?
Bergvall: As a writer-artist, I need other spaces as well as printed spaces. And I was also signaling the future because we’re still very constrained by ideas about publishing. I love getting published, but I also function in spaces that signal another time of work, another catapult, another way of thinking about commissions, another way of thinking about what it means to be working in language. It’s complicated: poets have a way of commanding language that is very different from artists. Artists often have a reductive or programmatic attitude to using language, and don’t quite relate to the many subtle, semiotic ways in which language operates. But they often show far more acumen about how to let the language be worked by a site. It’s really exciting because for all the precedents in the visual arts and the historic avant-gardes, this extrapolation of more complex forms of verbal work and textuality into spatial audiovisuality is still in germination. People like Arnold Dreyblatt, Christof Migone, Imogen Stidworthy, and other artists who use a combination of language and audiovisual technologies are very inspiring to me. At lunch you were talking about Erín Moure. Like Susan Howe’s work, Erín’s work has a very radical presentation on the page. The page becomes a meeting point of past and present. For instance, her scans of sewn texts in O Cadoiro complicate the textual reading of translation by resorting to both ancient (the sewing, the textile) and digital traces of activity and composition. This is how she chooses to re-present contemporary translational traffic, as the locked hands of different technological physicalities and temporalities. And then there are writers who don’t feel that print is necessarily the focus of their writerly activities anyway and work increasingly outside it.
Rudy: You also need so many more resources to publish outside of the page or the book.
Bergvall: Yes, but you’re a very different kind of animal when you compose for a gallery. At the moment, I run a project where I have a project manager and a technical team. When a project really gets going you can spend so much time on these aspects. For example, how the John Hansard project evolves will have a lot to do with the collaborators’ own brief, the ideas they have. Very little at that point has to do with writing. But it is all leading to the inscription of linguistic activities. I love the conversations, the tensions, the pragmatic demands. For the John Hansard, I was initially thinking about sound and architecture. So I invited an architect to work with me. After that it is a question of rethinking what I want to say with language architecturally. I have been finding Gordon Matta-Clark’s photographic work very interesting in this respect, his complex architectural descents, his distortion of perspective, and then also his love of truffles as methodology: treasure is in the muck. I want to use this to stage various depths and surfaces of language use in the new show.
Rudy: I’m still thinking about what it means that there are no visual representations in your work. At the Say Parsley exhibition in Bristol, for example, going into that space, it felt like walking into the Lacanian “real” with this alphabet on the floor, every letter but ‘h’ appearing in white vinyl lettering under a plumb line weighted down by a shiny red (read?) ball. At first I didn’t see the letters, but once you start pushing the lines and knocking the balls together, the letters are suddenly visible. It felt like this incredibly spare and yet absolutely full space of the continuum of the signified.
Alpabet
constellation of 25 plumb weights / white vinyl lettering /badge
The alphabet has 25 letters. We dropped one letter. Take it with you on the way out.
The ‘h’ is a troubled letter in English. Whether it is pronounced or not carries with it strong social markers. The dropping of the (h)aitch has for centuries stigmatized or located the speaker. The varying pronunciation of the letter ‘h’ can still be political. In the Irish language, the ‘h’ is very powerful. Its inclusion or omission along with its effect on pronunciation are often primary indicators of regional dialect The ‘h’ is heard as shibboleth.
Section three of Say Parsley, installed in Arnolfini Gallery 3. Note the missing ‘h’ in the title “Alpabet.”
Bergvall: Yes, that’s right. And the alphabetic language is experienced as such, letters on the floor, yet also at a remove, through the movements of the hanging plumb lines, in a sense.
Rudy: So many linkages are opened up, and there is such slippage and play. Do you see Say Parsley as a piece that explores semiotics?
Bergvall: What interested me with this particular project was ideas of perception. And how language perception and the creation of meaning is indeed activated by various codes. Because I was working with my collaborator, the composer Ciarán Maher, it very much had to do with language as sound heard, as much as language and meaning misheard. But in a sense this accumulation of mishearings both as sound source and verbal sense rest on similar issues of semiotics. This has to do with identifying features of sense and realizing how these verbal permutations also come about as sound formants and as microparticles of language, and this is what creates or enables so much rich confusion in the listening process. And then there was this idea of listening on the move. How the positioning of the listener was crucial to the experience of the piece. That was the starting point of the piece. That and my exploration of the power and violence of the shibboleth. So the whole installation is very grounded in various aspects of semiotics, active, social manifestations of language, of verbal understanding alongside somatic experiences of language, and poetic emphasis, in the Jakobsonian sense. So it starts with language mired in the social world of communication. And it’s coming at language as a physical value inside of you. What was important for me here is the way that language can be so physically imprisoning.
Speakers
Stereo speaker pair
The complex tones of the speaking human voice are transformed into simple waves. At these frequencies, speech can also echo the patterns of birdsong.
Section two of Say Parsley, installed with “Ampers&” in Arnolfini Gallery 2.
Rudy: The tension between the fact that by its nature language offers the opportunity for so much openness while particular language systems — social systems — shut down the possibilities of meaning rather than opening them up.
Bergvall: Yes. Say Parsley is really about how speaking and meaning are really a prison, how language is something that inhabits and becomes forbidding. So in that piece it’s not so much about the slide of the signifier in favor of the playfulness. It comes really out of the violence of identification; it’s really didactic.
Parsely
Data projection / 2 suspended speakers
Standing under a speaker, the listener can hear a list of words that runs from “Pig” to “Parsley” through small phonemic shifts and syllabic variants. The list on the wall reproduces visually the words heard as they would look in two of the languages that have influenced the development of English (Dutch and French).
Section five of Say Parsley, installed in Arnolfini Gallery 4.
Rudy: It begins with the hideous fact that at a certain moment in history saying, in the sense of pronouncing, the word “parsley” in a particular way could get you killed. The background information about Say Parsleyon the Arnolfini Gallery website tell us that “the most recent example of a large-scale shibboleth was the massacre of tens of thousands of Creole Haitians on the border of the Dominican Republic in 1937, when the criteria for execution was the failure to pronounce “perejil” (parsley) in the accepted Spanish manner, with a rolling r.
Bergvall: Yes. Say Parsley started with the need for testimony because it was done in the months after 9/11. The first version was produced for a show in Exeter in November 2001. And I was getting really freaked out about the kinds of things that were being said and done, both in Britain and in the United States, what was happening in relation to nationals and residents, and how this witch hunting was building up of those who are not the right kind of residents or even citizens. This was really horrific. And so the piece is very much in response to the realization that at any point your way of speaking or living can come and haunt you and single you out negatively. The piece is very much exploring and reminding of this violence and how it is inhabiting us, and how we could be made victims of that, or become the perpetrators, through intolerance and lack of genuine listening. There’s been a lot of that here recently with Eastern European nationals coming here to work with their very strong accents and their initially imperfect command of English. Quite apart from the obligatory outcries about jobs and social services, this has actually been creating grating at a much deeper level, that of the connection between verbal fluency and social fluency.
Rudy: There’s no question that the social is foregrounded from the moment you enter the gallery space and see the excerpt from “Middling English” that is inscribed in vinyl on the wall.
Prose text selected and adapted from Bergvall’s critical piece “Middling English” on a wall in the “Ampers&” section of Say Parsley, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. Photo by Jamie Woodley.
Rudy: My experience of the Say Parsley exhibition was completely framed by this reminder that “we each use a voice that speaks for us before we even get to speak.”
Bergvall: Yes. And then you move into the whole idea of verbal permutations, and you move into slowly building it up, from the alphabet, and then of course you move into the poetic.
Rudy: But the ability of the spectator to read the textualized space like a poem is crucial. Even the titles of the five sections of Say Parsley [“Ampers&,” “Speakers,” “Alpabet,” “For Walls,” and “Parsely” are so rich with meaning. Section one, “Ampers&,” includes and exemplifies the several uses of the visual/graphic sign it investigates — the & — in the title itself. In the exhibition guide you tell us: “The ampersand is one of the oldest exclusively visual/graphic signs of the western writing system. In its contemporary sense, it binds elements together and words as an additive device. In its medieval sense, it is a shorthand, used by copyists to speed up the endlines of words, such as ‘aspir&,’ ‘differ&.” And the piece “For Walls” consists of vinyl lettering on four walls.
Text on one of the four walls in the “For Walls” section of Say Parsley, Arnolfini Gallery 3. Photo by Jamie Woodley.
Rudy: As I was standing in the gallery space, I was in a kind of documenting mode, so I wrote down the letters that I saw on one of the walls. But that didn’t make any sense to me: “lang wedge keels.” And it did feel like I was writing down letters, not words. I didn’t recognize these groupings of letters as words. It wasn’t until I was reading through my notes in preparation to speak with you that I put these letters into my mouth and heard myself saying a word, that is to say, making a meaningful sound. Once I heard sounds that made sense to me, I wrote in my notebook words that make sense: “Say language kills.”
“For Walls” consists of vinyl lettering on four walls.
Bergvall: But you didn’t notice the word “over”? Did you see that?
Rudy: [Looks through her notebook.] I recall writing down some letters that couldn’t be photographed because they were in shadow, letters that were the same color as the walls — yes, I have written in my notebook the letters “ova” which appear under “keels” on the wall.
Bergvall: But you didn’t see the word “over”?
Rudy: No! Ah! I “see” now, now that I’ve heard you “say” the word “over” — I “see” “over” in “ova.” But what I saw and heard at the time was only “ova”! Right, language not only kills; it also “keels over”!
Bergvall: So that’s why you have the poetic coming in more as pronunciation, and it asks for the double take.
Rudy: Thinking about the double take makes me wonder what the word “middling” might signify. When I first saw that word in the title of the piece cited in the gallery, I thought about your work generally and about how much you like to explore middle spaces. And I know that “hybridity” is not a very useful term. But can you talk a bit more about your invention of that word “middling”?
Bergvall: Yes, but I’d like to think about it in terms of hyphenation. In my chapbook Cropper, which I gave you last year, for example, there’s that sense of wanting to just skip the hyphenation, remove the doubleness. One notion of the hyphen, of the hybrid too, to some extent, has so much to do with contemporary politics, with ideas of collective or singular migration, or migrancy, willed or unwilled — when you move to another country, the sense that you have to change your language, change your being. It remains a very powerful trope for me, particularly as it relates to my sexuality, since this is what kind of propelled me into English. But I’ve often thought about it as a process of invention. A conscious language acquisition process is obviously very different from the languages learnt as one grows up. I know that as a young gay woman I was being defined, often negatively, by others, and this means that processing language with pleasure for me became very connected to a necessary physical act of verbal distancing from home languages, and eventually physical migration. Responses to my sexuality were the main reasons why I moved both myself and my language’s work into English.
From Bergvall’s Cropper (2008).
Rudy: That’s fascinating; tell me more.
Bergvall: I really have always sort of felt that notions of hybridity have to do with enforced identification, just as much as with pro-active identity claim. In the 1990s, the notion of queer aesthetics as a radicalizing pastiche, a hybrid collage was very strong and I thought very relevant. It presents itself as a warped mirror talking back at identity and the identificatory strategies of power. The solution proposed was a mixture of pop, technology and politics, very much in fact in line with Bakhtinian thought. His ideas around engaged heteroglossia in the face of political stiltedness or monumentalism. Carnival as obstacle and refusal, as a breakdown through material forms. I find it a very convincing way of approaching writing in its relation to cultural politics. And identity becomes then about reading one’s own aesthetic premises in the contexts of social and political stratifications. This lack of ownership, of fixity to one’s process and thought can be very elastic. It gives an overview. It leads to processes of explicit intercoding, and asks what performative interrelations really can be about. Separating the idea of hybridity from the fake liberatory and dangerously homogenizing politics of global multiculturalism has of course been crucial to many artists and scholars.
There’s a point at which you start to produce your own artistic language in the new cultural context. You start infiltrating it with what else also comes with you, the other worlds or specificities that allow you to inflect your language use. Personally, it gives me a way to rethink myself within and beyond the Anglophonic cultures I’m now in. This whole idea of the middle is always a trajectory, a transit, the possibility of invention that we find ourselves in, conscious and unconscious.
Rudy: It seems significant that you’ve framed this being in the middle as an active verb. You are doing something; you are “middling” English.
Bergvall: Yes, to think about “other” as a verb, as Nathaniel Mackey famously does, that is very powerful. But I think also a lot a lot about Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. We were talking about that at lunch. When it comes to gender and sexuality, he is completely silent, but he is fascinating in relation to rethinking geography, historic and utopian space, beyond the middle passage, and slavery, this horrible, traumatic time-place of absolute darkness, of absolute loss, of names, languages being forced out. And you have this culture of the Caribbean that he and other writers have helped to create linguistically, poetically, as well as physically, through survival and invention and the making of the politics of the islands. But it is more than islander autonomy he looks for. As he says, Caribbean creolization becomes an example for the future. What happens in Caribbean creolity is rescuing the present from the horrors of the past and shaping an idea of the future beyond western universalism and internationalism. He also has a beautiful, utopian way of writing. Much like Nicole Brossard. And at the moment, it seems to me that I really just need that kind of imagination, that kind of optimistic belief in language, the engagement with it as a polemic as much as a poetic tool. It provides a way to think beyond the given parameters of the present. It shifts the temporal significance away from the exclusive, and I think, ultimately dangerous supremacy of the now that we have seen so much in art and poetics.
Rudy: Yes, absolutely.
Bergvall: So I love his language as much as his politics. He allies history, impossible memory, with the idea of the future, with a language practice very much rooted in the present of political and cultural reality. How can one then create a language practice that can adapt itself to mixed cultures, to mixed geographic fates, and shift the ideological premise of western control. All of that for me is part of the hybrid, the compound, the ampersandic.
Rudy: Can we talk a bit more about your “Via” piece?
Bergvall: Yes, of course. The ampersand is part of “Via,” in the sense of the instability of the translation and of the original. But first, Glissant talks about defolklorization, not sentimentalizing a starting point, not sentimentalizing a point of no return to a culture of origin, being critical of one’s own sentimentality and one’s sentimental needs. Really for me this is a very important idea, this concept of resisting identity and yet having somehow to claim it. I don’t want to claim queer identity for my work necessarily. But I do want to be able to examine the terms that I can use in my work and that are specific to myself, and a number of others, so that I can use in language and in culture such points of separation and of community, what constitutes community.
Rudy: But that’s so tricky. I was reading your notes on your “About Face” piece (“Piece in Progress: About Face”), and you talk there about your own contradictions and tensions, and you ask yourself the question “How deep is the bride?” and I was thinking about that word “bride” obviously as a figure in English but also about how the word “bride” in French means “bridle” and how, since I saw Say Parsley, I’m aware of not being sure of which system of signification we’re operating within (French? English?). I assume you mean both of them.
Bergvall: That’s right, yes.
Rudy: And I take it the question you’re asking is about how deeply these ideological patterns are embedded in us, and asking what we can do to get rid of them, or not, or embrace them, or break them?
Bergvall: Absolutely, yes.
Rudy: Which makes me think again of Say Parsley. Can we close this conversation by talking a bit more about the history of the construction of that piece? It was created in 2001?
Bergvall: Yes, the first siting of this collaborative sound-language installation, then called “Say: ‘Parsley,’” was in November 2001 for the Spacex Gallery at the Exeter Maritime Museum.
Rudy: What kind of space was it created for in Exeter?
Bergvall: The Maritime Museum was a beautiful space, two floors, and it was abandoned, it was supposed to be demolished; now it has been transformed into apartments.
Rudy: And you had two floors for the installation?
Bergvall: Yes, we had the poem chalked on the wall downstairs, interviews, people speaking upstairs, the plumb line grid, a set of pairings that weren’t in Bristol, an audio text in the corner. And you had the lists and the letterings and the plumb lines moving. And the three white r’s in the distance.
Rudy: Did you include the piece called “Speakers” in that first installation?
Bergvall: The one that sounds like birds?
Rudy: Yes.
Bergvall: That wasn’t in the first installation.
Rudy: Was “Ampersand” in the first version of Say Parsley?
Bergvall: “Ampersand” was its own datapiece that I then put in a show I was sharing with Ciarán at the Bury TEXT festival in 2004. But that’s a piece that I’ve carried on my own.
Rudy: So it looked much different from the one I just saw in Bristol.
Bergvall: Yes, very, very different.
One of sixty-four ampersands found in a computer font library and projected onto the wall in Arnolfini Gallery 2. The small text on the right wall is from “Middling English.” Photo by Jamie Woodley.
Rudy: What struck me was how powerfully the ampersands function as signs when they are so massive. They were projected on a large white wall and took up the entire space. And when you stand there looking up at so many of them that they start to take on shapes, representations, figurations, because they take up so much space on the wall. They started to look like girls to me.
Another of the sixty-four ampersands found in a computer font library and projected onto the wall in Arnolfini Gallery 2. Photo by Jamie Woodley.
Bergvall: I’ve never gendered it actually but … it’s really sort of ironic, it’s a very anthropomorphic sign.
Rudy: And the piece “For Walls” — was that in the 2001 version of Say Parsley?
Bergvall: No, that’s completely new.
Rudy: So the Bristol version is really a completely different piece then.
Bergvall: No, it’s the same.
Rudy: Tell me about how it’s the same when it’s made up of such different pieces?
Bergvall: Well it’s about how the piece fits the space, for one thing. And of course the time that elapses between iterations. And the pursuit of the question.
Rudy: What’s the function of the letter ‘h’ buttons that you can pick up from the box in the gallery and take away with you?
Bergvall: That’s about dropping the ‘h.’ That’s just a game. And it’s also — it might be ‘h’ in general. You know each letter has a history, in some way. It’s one of those fascinating letters in English because it’s a letter that has a whole set of imported French words attached to it. In the romance period, sort of late medieval period, you have coming into English vocabulary a lot of French words. Where the ‘h’ is not pronounced — “honor,” for example. So there’s a whole sense of a letter being important for the fact that it’s not pronounced. And then of course it’s also about social class and stigmatized speech. So ‘h’ is just one of those fascinating letters. It carried so much charge for English, like what ‘r’ carries for the Creole/French. I put it in because although it may not have led to what was explicitly collective violence it certainly has led to persistent kinds of exclusion. There’s still a real snobbery here about speaking the ‘h’ or not speaking the ‘h,’ so that’s why that’s there — and to have that as a sort of badge. And then you can consider it as this lovely abstract figure too. It makes me think of the I Ching.
Rudy: And what about the plumb lines? What were you thinking about there?
White box full of ‘h’ badges, mounted on wall in the “Alpabet” section of Say Parsley in Arnolfini Gallery 3. Photo by Susan Rudy.
Bergvall: I’m using that again in the John Hansard show but in a very different way. I think about it in relation to pendular movement. But then somebody was telling me that really what one wants with the plumb line is for it to be still, for it to carry its weight.
Rudy: I wanted to go around the room and put them all in motion so that they were hitting each other.
Bergvall: Exactly — if you have something you can make with movement, you should. That’s part of what I’m saying with the work, the Freudian fort/da, the always moving, the to and fro, the yes/no, a reminder that everything moves on both sides of the hyphen as well. Spatial work that you have to walk around. And I was interested in the weights themselves, in a logic of weight. And of course we were in the Maritime Museum initially. This is a very strong trait with naval history. Somebody was telling me the other day that for them the plumb lines felt like demolition balls into language.
Rudy: In speaking with you I realize that when I experienced the Say Parsley show, I couldn’t help but think about the piece as though it were a long poem. Moreover, I imagined that what I was seeing was a particular edition of a long poem that had earlier versions. But I realize now that it’s a very different thing when it moves into a different space.
Bergvall: It is a different thing. But linguistically it is crucial to me that you remain very close to the material, to the linguistic system, because it started with the rolling r, with the phoneme, so you have to start with pronunciation and then start with the fact that you’re dealing with sounds which are part of a permutational system. Some of the things kinetically are there because they can be — you can move around the room, move the weights, have a look at the transparencies, the lettering on the wall. Which you can do on the page too. But it’s different to be there with your full body. It is in a poetic mode. But if it asks to be taken on as literature, it asks of literature that it move with us. When you said to me that you wanted to talk about the work I was so pleased, because I know that you are a literary scholar and so there really is this pleasure in my wanting to talk with you about the work instead of it always sitting inside a visual arts world. Because this is really where the work needs to take place. So that leads back to what we said about the future, and it’s actually a way of saying that we need other platforms on which to do poetic work.
Rudy: And that’s what I loved about the piece, because it was like being inside a long poem, and being able to walk around and inhabit it.
Bergvall: That’s wonderful. Thanks, Susan.
1. This conversation was initiated by Susan Rudy after she experienced the most recent iteration of Say Parsley at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, UK. The show ran from May 8 to July 2010; the exhibition guide can be downloaded here.
2. Entitled “Caroline Bergvall: Middling English,” the show ran September 7–October 23, 2010, at the John Hansard Gallery.
3. From the John Hansard Gallery website: “‘Middling English’ explores some of the pleasures and complexities of language use, in and through writing. The exhibition brings together multi-sensory elements — spoken pieces, audiophonic compositions, printed broadsides and the strange memory world of pop lyrics — all presented through a stunning architectural installation.”
Works Cited
Bergvall, Caroline. Alyson Singes. New York: Belladonna, 2008.
———. Cropper. Southampton: Torque, 2008.
———. Éclat sites 1–10. ububook, 2004.
———. Fig. Goan Atom 2. Cambridge: Salt, 2005.
———. Goan Atom. 1. Doll. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2001.
———. Meddle English: New and Selected Texts. New York: Nightboat, 2011.
———. “Piece in Progress: About Face (Goan Atom, 2).” How2 1, no. 6 (2001).
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-culturality and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Moure, Erín. O Cadoiro: Poems. Toronto: Anansi, 2007.
Renunciation
Aaron Kunin and Ben Lerner in conversation
In this long-running exchange, Ben Lerner and Aaron Kunin discuss Kunin’s latest collection, The Sore Throat and Other Poems, and the sources with which it is in dialogue, including Pound’s “Mauberley” as “a repository of lyric gestures.” Lerner and Kunin have previously published two similar exchanges in Jacket — one addressing Kunin’s novel The Mandarin, in Jacket 37; another, on Lerner’s Mean Free Path, in Jacket 40.
Ben Lerner: This is your second published book of poems, after Folding Ruler Star, but you wrote it first. So it’s possible to read the Mauberley series, which begins the book, as a kind of inaugural, as announcing your entry into poetry. Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is largely a farewell — a farewell to a poetic style, a farewell to British society after WWI, etc. Why is a poem of farewell the source text for your beginning? Does your poem renounce anything? Does it renounce Pound’s renunciation?
Aaron Kunin: The January eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender ends with Colin destroying his instrument, the oaten pipe, and vowing to sing no more songs. In the first poem in his first collection, Spenser says farewell to poetry: hello, I must be going. The gesture is conventional — Spenser got the idea from Virgil.
Not that I had any notion of this convention when I wrote my poems. I was a beginner. Fortunately, “Mauberley” is a great introduction to poetry. All the figures in this literary history of “a botched civilization” — all the funny, forgotten, and made-up names — acquire flesh, color, and life through Pound’s effort at renunciation. All the bad habits of “vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness” get to enjoy their moment of technical demonstration before they become garbage. In spite of the astringent tone, the poem is as full of “life and contacts” as the alternate title promises.
The life of “Mauberley” is its lovely, off-kilter rhythm. This rhythm is seductive and unique — there’s nothing else like it, at least not in poetry. (The edits in movies like The Conformist and Petulia, with their use of flashforwards, have a similar effect.) The poem stops, it goes back, gets stuck, repeats — then it lunges ahead very fast. It draws together materials from various ancient civilizations, and meanwhile, as early as the second poem, it starts cataloguing its previous moves, treating itself as its own sourcebook. That’s what I was trying to translate from Pound’s poems into mine. Is that the quality of “goodbye-hello” that you mean?
Lerner: Yes, that’s one of the great things about Mauberley — how you can feel it becoming archive as you read. It’s already using itself as a source text; in that sense your series is more of an extension than a displacement. And what you’re saying about the quality of “goodbye-hello” — that it’s largely a function of the poem’s prosody — is something your series proves. You reduce a poem with an almost parodically wide range of vocabulary (I always have to look up “mousseline,” “barbitos,” etc.) to a severely restricted language field, and yet the affects of the original are preserved, which reveals them to be largely formal effects. (Maybe this is a version of the conventional renunciation as foil for virtuoso display: you would think the radical reduction of vocabulary would be an austerity measure — a disavowal of the pleasures of rarefied language — when in fact it intensifies the life of the poem.)
But that’s not to say you ignore the paraphrasable content of the original altogether.
Kunin: Well, I tried. In some poems, you can see how hard I tried. For instance, “A can of rats” translates Pound’s “Envoi.” I wanted to do something special for this incredibly beautiful poem. The “Envoi” begins with what feels like a dismissive gesture, “Go, dumb-born book,” where the masochism of the speaker has turned the “go, little book” trope into something rather nasty. And somehow the same poem ends with the almost pure lyricism of:
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save beauty alone.
For me, the challenge was to follow this stumbling path from irony to beauty.
I was helped by the belated recognition that Pound was translating another English-language poem, “Go, lovely rose,” by Edmund Waller. By a lucky coincidence, I happened to be reading Waller just before I started writing. This discovery gave my poem its own path from the prosaic to the lyric. Contrary to my usual procedure, I did not follow Pound’s syntax, lineation, or punctuation, and instead introduced a new, shorter stanza based on the rondeau. I tried to bring the concerns and wording of the “Envoi” closer to its source, to translate Pound back into Waller. I also took from Waller the suggestion of marking a caesural pause with a dash. As a result of this confluence, my poem really is about what Pound’s poem is about: beauty as atomic fact, a kind of transportation without transformation.
Lerner: But Pound’s poem is also about a historical moment — about losses both personal and public.
Kunin: I didn’t have such good luck there. Two poems, “Anyhow, we do not complain” and “We know what choice we have,” translate the poems that Pound wrote for his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. I like to think that my translations successfully communicate some of the charm and energy of Pound’s portrait of his friend, and the anger occasioned by his loss, and the waste and confusion and abstraction of the war.
One theme in those poems was beyond my reach. In a crucial substitution at the end of Pound’s fifth poem, the “broken statues” and “battered books” become roughly equivalent to the “botched civilization” that Gaudier-Brzeska fought and died for. Since he was also a producer of culture, a sculptor, the statues and books may be offered as inadequate compensation for his death. My friend is gone, but at least I have his art to remember him by. In addition, the statues and books represent some of what civilization lost when Gaudier-Brzeska died: if he had lived, think of all the great sculptures and books that he could have made. Finally, the poem suggests something about Gaudier-Brzeska beyond what made him the best at what he did, something beyond his artistry and therefore not replaced by his art (whether he lived long enough to make it or not), and this extra something is represented by his smile and glance.
None of this shows up in my poem — not the calculations, not the ambivalence, and not the unique expression of Gaudier-Brzeska’s face. The social inventory of “Mauberley” is missing. The base vocabulary was not great for direct verbal portraits — I had “eyes,” and I could make them “wide” or “narrow,” and there were certain feelings and expressions that I could intimate — all mere suggestions and indirections, although I suppose I could have used them more imaginatively. I never even came up with a good equivalent for the idea of “an art in profile.” Instead, for the most part, I substitute my own nervousness for Pound’s portraiture. (For a new version of “Mauberley” focusing on the “art in profile,” I would recommend Brian Kim Stefans’s wonderful “Pasha Noise.”)
Lerner: One significant change between your poem and “Mauberley” that I keep pondering is the shift from the third person to the second. (I don’t know if “he” is in the reduced vocabulary; maybe that’s part of the issue.) In the original, Pound creates a persona, H.S., that he can load with his own characteristic (thereby composing Pound’s Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sepulchre). But in your translation, where we expect the poem to shift the author’s attributes onto a third party, we encounter “you”: not, “He strove to resuscitate the dead art …” but “You wish to begin the dance.”
Hard not to hear Pound’s definition of logopoeia here — “the dance of the intellect among words.” It’s as if the author sat down to model Pound’s creation of a persona, a “he” he could distance himself from, but he was interrupted, usurped, at the beginning of the poem (dance). It seems to me that your hand is addressing you — showing you who’s in charge.
Kunin: That wasn’t deliberate or necessary. I always had two third person pronouns in the vocabulary, both “he” and “she.” In the first series “he” appears only in one poem, “What’s your pleasure, brother?,” where the figure elsewhere called “the moron” is identified as male. I didn’t even notice that I had used “he” once and “she” not at all until years later, when I was preparing to write the Sore Throat poems. Then I thought, okay, this time gender should be in the foreground; I’m going to use a lot of “he” and “she.”
Keeping in mind that the tendency to substitute “you” for “he” was purely intuitive, let me propose a retroactive justification. I was treating “Mauberley” as a repository of lyric genres. To me it was the Greek Anthology, a collection of every kind of lyric — blessings, curses, romantic complaints, hymns, odes, epitaphs, everything. All of these genres really are in “Mauberley,” but if you want to bring out their lyricism, it might help to emphasize apostrophe, because lyric usually means a poem in which a first person appears and speaks to a second person who does not appear. Maybe if I’d thought more clearly about this problem, I would have chosen a different source text, “Homage to Sextus Propertius” or even Cathay, where the lyric affiliations are more on the surface.
As for “the dance of intellect among words”: I did actually translate this phrase in the second poem as “The dance of the mind about the word.” A close translation, I think. More often, though, “dance” and the imperative to “keep up the dance” refer to the halting rhythm that I love so well in “Mauberley.” The rhythm, not the themes, drew me to the poem in the first place. I mean, does anyone go to Pound for the content?
Lerner: I agree with you that “Mauberley” can be thought of as a repository of lyric gestures, gestures that could be brought into relief by apostrophe. But I want to press the notion that the author here is as much the object of address as he is it’s subject. We know that “he” (H.S.) really means “I” (E.P.) in the original; this makes “you” mean “me,” at least at the poem’s opening. I think this shift is crucial to what you describe in the note on method as an “inversion” of “Pound’s psychological experiment”; it’s a refusal of the attempt to go outside oneself, the internalization of the split of persona. Maybe your unconscious knew what it was doing: this shift was “intuitive,” the availability of third person pronouns was repressed (“until years later”).
Kunin: I’m open to the idea that my hand could know something that the rest of me did not know. At the same time, I would not want to give up on the idea that my hand is part of me, and if my hand knows something, then that’s my knowledge too (even if I only have access to it through my hand).
It’s true that I did not avail myself of certain third person pronouns in the Mauberley poems. But this does not mean that the poems are written in one voice, or that speaker positions are fixed. There are a number of third person figures, like the moron and the rats, and they sometimes speak in their own voices. The most obvious reading of “A can of rats” is that it’s spoken in unison by the rats; the demand for “change” in “What’s your pleasure, brother?” is also attributed to the rats as a group. Even the first poem includes some narration as well as apostrophe, and I’ve never been able to decide who is speaking in the last quatrain, whether the original speaker just keeps talking, or whether the addressee replies. Maybe the addressee mishears liking (in “I like you as you are”) as likeness: “I do not know what is ‘like me.’” (That line could be a slightly doctored quotation from Henry V, in which case Catherine of France is the speaker.)
Lerner: You mention your desire to inhabit your hand vocabulary as fully as possible in the note on method, “because [you] really believe that the part of yourself that you’re most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art.” What’s so shameful about your hand alphabet or the habit that produced it? What is the relation between this kind of automatic writing and shame (the affect around which Folding Ruler Star is organized)?
Kunin: Shame can attach to any object. (Adam Frank, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Silvan Tomkins have written about the “binding” tendency of shame.) I can feel shame for my voice or for silence, for being stupid or smart, for nervous hand gestures or stillness, for dressing extravagantly or simply. The objects acquire the strength of the feeling that I, by compulsion, put into them.
Think of a rat encountered on the sidewalk, or a centipede on the wall in the kitchen. The rat and the centipede mirror me, because I am also on the sidewalk or in the kitchen. They are part of me — or we are both parts of the same whole — and they know exactly how I feel about them. The rat knowingly wields the full power of the disgust that it inspires in me. That is why it seems utterly without fear; that is why I move to give it space on the sidewalk. The rat disgusts me, and the disgust shames me, because what is the difference between me and the rat?
David Larsen once asked me what I learned about rats from writing these poems, and I was stumped. I said something like: David, I’m not a zoologist! He asked a good question, though, and I didn’t like my answer. You know, having spent a month of my life writing and thinking about rats, I should have something to show for my studies. Now, years later, it occurs to me that I may have learned something after all; maybe the defiance of the collective voice of the rats reflects this knowledge.
Lerner: You seem OK with transferring human feeling to rats. And yet the rats at one point in these poems demand “the thing in itself.” On the jacket of the book, there is a long (and I think accurate) list of genres and situations your poems explore, including: “riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness.” I’m interested in that last term, that fallacy.
Kunin: We poets are in the business of misplacing concreteness. Where does concreteness belong? A Platonist would say that a building is less concrete than the number 12, since it would be difficult to destroy the number 12. A Marxist would say that concreteness pertains to social structures rather than individuals.
Whitehead, who names the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, has a peculiar sense of the proper place of concreteness. He derives the technical term concrescence “from the familiar Latin verb meaning ‘growing together.’” According to Whitehead, in order to concretize something, you have to connect it to a lot of other things. You misplace its concreteness when you limit its position to one place or one moment, or if you assign its qualities to your own perceptions. Thus Whitehead says that the poets, not the empiricists, are right to give credit to “the rose for his scent, the nightingale for his song, and the sun for his radiance.”
In poetry, there are no secondary qualities: the song is in the nightingale. For this reason, Whitehead congratulates us, the poets, for keeping concreteness where it should be. But the other side of the picture is that we misplace it. Tropes mix up the abstract and the concrete, the temporal and the eternal. Images dematerialize objects. The line cuts time into space.
Lerner: As a transition to the translations of Pelléas et Melisande, the book’s second source text, it might be worth noting that the boundary between these two parts of your book is fluid, hard to mark. Is this book one series with two sources? Two distinct series?
Kunin: I prefer to think of the book as a collection of poems. In the introductory note, I acknowledge the relationship between the poems and the sources, but I don’t want to make too much of it. The groups of poems are not clearly articulated; they run together, and there are competing versions of The Sore Throat. (To my mind, the title of the collection suggests that there is one genuine poem called “The Sore Throat,” and the rest are “other poems.”) The poems don’t acknowledge their sources either. Each poem can be read on its own, without reference to the source texts, the other poems in the collection, or the hand alphabet.
Lerner: Another way to put the question might be: is the problem of Golaud the same problem as the speaker(s) in “Mauberley”?
Kunin: When I wrote the poems in the first series, the vocabulary felt inadequate to the content. Not many words to begin with, few substantives, almost no particulars. And the particulars tended to be overparticularized. In the first poem, “Jesus” appears in place of Pound’s “Penelope.” In the second poem, I used the compound word “hard-on.” Not one of my happier inspirations: “a prose kinema” becomes “a machine hard-on.” In both cases, I remember thinking, a little goes a long way; I shouldn’t use that word again for a while. I didn’t want the Christian or phallic element to overwhelm the others. The machine and the rats, on the other hand, were richer concepts for channeling universals into particulars.
The problem felt very different in the second series. Suddenly it felt as though I could say anything with these 200 words. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was just more comfortable in the vocabulary. There were more words than before, and I created still more words by systematically reviewing possible compounds, particles, and elisions. I squeezed words out of other words: “mess” and “age” made “message,” “thinking” broke into “thin” and “king,” and so on. Also, the dirty secret of this project is that there may not be more than 200 words in Maeterlinck’s vocabulary!
Anyway, I started working with Pelléas, and discovered that I could translate it kind of faithfully, which hadn’t been the case at all with “Mauberley.” But I didn’t want to do a faithful translation; I wanted to write a new poem. Instead of using Maeterlinck’s decisions to guide mine, I used his text more impressionistically, to suggest themes or occasions.
Lerner: “The poems don’t acknowledge their sources either. Each poem can be read on its own, without reference to the source texts, the other poems in the collection, or the hand alphabet” — why the note on method? Why the “knowledge blobs”? (You seem fond of paratexts — your novel had a summary and an index.)
Kunin: The preface and the postface are supposed to communicate some information about the process of composition. (In the case of the postface, this doesn’t necessarily mean accurate information.) The goal is for the process to live in the object, like in a Marianne Moore poem where you get to see the sources, their provenance, some of her drafts — you’re watching her put the poem together. This is a modernist value that I like. As a reader, I want to see all the decisions that go into making a book. I don’t want to replace the book with a conceptual scheme, but I want to see the method of its composition. To revert to the terms of my limited vocabulary, I affirm “the machine” rather than “system.”
Lerner: You model many of the stanza patterns of “Mauberley” in your translation; Pelléas et Melisande, however, is not in strophes. So where does the (often wild) structure of The Sore Throat come from? Does it have any relation, however oblique, to Pelléas?
Kunin: The stanza patterns are not based on Pelléas. I introduced them because I wanted a pattern of shapes, a pulse, on the page, and there wasn’t anything like that in Maeterlinck.
Like lines, the shapes of stanzas have a rhythm. In a sense they do what the line does: they transport material, only they do it vertically. Also, unlike the line but more like an arrangement of city blocks or a seating pattern in a bus, this rhythm doesn’t measure anything; it’s just a pulse. (In Spenser, and I think in Dante, the stanza is actually a metric — this is one of the calendrical pretensions of the Shepheardes Calender — but these poets are unusual in attributing significance to the numbers of their stanzas.)
We were talking earlier about Whitehead. His chapter on “process” derives all of metaphysics from the first two lines of the hymn: “Abide with me; / Fast falls the eventide.” Permanence and change: something abides, and something falls with overwhelming speed. This “complete problem of metaphysics” is a target for art. Coleridge describes an improbable folding of variety into unity in his effusions on the Spenserian stanza: “That wonder-work of metrical Skill and Genius! That nearest possible approach to a perfect Whole, as bringing the greatest possible variety into compleat Unity by never interrupted inter-dependence of the parts!” I don’t think that’s an overstatement. The stanza tracks movement against persistence in time. I sometimes think of it as a hydraulic operation: you’re trying to control a fluid moving through a channel.
Lerner: Speaking of fluid mechanics, the “machine” is everywhere in this book. We’ve largely been discussing the mechanics of your composition, and sometimes the machines you’re describing seem fairly exact figures for the poems’ procedures. The hand alphabet, for example, could be “a machine / for concealing your desire.” And making that machine into art could even be considered “inventing another / machine for concealing the / machine.” But your machines are also technologies of expression, e.g. “machine of weeping,” “a machine hard-on.” I’m interested in the way the machine is alternatingly expressive and repressive, or how repression passes into expression, often against the wishes of the machinist: “Every machine / has more beauty than the last, / for everything whose purpose / is to conceal seems to change, / in the end, into a sign / of what it’s concealing.”
Your poems also address the mixture of metaphysics and mechanics described in your answer above: “Dear machine — // You are not so much a brother / To me, more of a god, I guess.”
Kunin: I’ve written a lot about machines. Why is that? I’m not mechanically minded, and my relationship to the machines that I use is primitive: I depend on them, but I don’t know how they work, and I don’t have any genius for making them work.
I tend to write about machines as machines. Always the general term. Maybe I don’t see a useful distinction between levels of technology. Complexity does not belong only to electronics, and beauty does not belong only to handcraft. Kitchen equipment and software give me the same problems, more or less.
You’re right to say that my machines are expressive. I have a poem in Folding Ruler Star about how mechanical emotion basically is: “it’s precisely in // blushing crying and / loving that they are / most machine-like.” I hope that doesn’t sound like behaviorism. I’m not trying to reduce the mysteries of psychology to a set of predictable responses. I see emotion as mechanical in two ways (and I guess these must be the two senses of “the machine” in my usage). First, emotion repeats. My responses are personal — perhaps no one else has quite the same pattern of responses — but they describe a definite pattern; and each response reflects and magnifies itself. Second, emotion is a force, and it treats you as an object. It’s the experience of being moved, after all. Somewhere in every emotion is a vertiginous pleasure in being an instrument. The Stoic tradition that sees emotion as a kind of bondage may be on to something; for Marcus Aurelius, the only measure of freedom in a deterministic and eternally recurring universe was to behave as though his emotions did not touch him.
Lerner: At certain moments in the book, the machine seems to be breaking down, or maybe you’re attempting to “invent / a machine for disinventing.” I’m thinking of those poems where syntax more or less collapses:
Can see, in my, me a, say that you think
Nothing, head you, gain you, it’s all you see
But you won’t see, must not, right if I won’t
Begin, we can’t, no rats, left
Seeing, begin report, left
I can’t tell if the machine is failing or if it’s receiving or giving instructions — “left” at the right margin starts to seem like a command to return to the left margin, to break a line; “begin report” sounds like an imperative, maybe to reboot. What’s going on here?
Kunin: I see why you describe the syntax as breaking down or broken, but I would take a different perspective. I think of these poems as something like graffiti. Other poems in the book have a chiseled quality, but here I was imitating a different kind of public writing, not just terse but crude, diagrammatic. These are elementary combinations of words, not built up into anything complicated. The phrases are short, sometimes incomplete, and linked by comma splices, and you can also read through the commas and combine phrases across the lines. Part of the point is to expose the machinery, to show the elements of the word list and how they fit together. Here is the skeleton, and here are the joints. The main point is to achieve a tone efficiently, using the simplest means. The operation is similar to the translations of “Mauberley”: drawing a diagram of a poem’s tone.
Lerner: Did you ever watch Star Trek? Data — who was an android — was always baffled, as Spock before him, by human emotions. But this bafflement was of course quite human; really it made Data the most human character on the show. I remember one episode where Data is playing a violin solo and, like everything Data does, it’s technically perfect — he’s incapable of error. But one of his companions tells him that he’s missing something, that, while his performance is flawless, or maybe because it’s flawless, it lacks an emotional charge, and so it isn’t really art. This is a version of a familiar opposition between virtuosity and sincerity, or, in Coleridge’s language, between mechanical and organic form. It sounds like you reject this opposition and the Romantic critique of Data’s performance.
Kunin: The root meanings of mechanical and organic are almost the same. “Machina” means “device,” and “organe” means “tool.” The etymologies are not related, but the concepts they name are quite close. Both mechanical and organic form are formal; that is to say, they organize parts into wholes. As Sol LeWitt clearly states in “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” the difference between them is not that the former is totally controlled while the latter is absolutely free. The difference is where the controls appear. Mechanical form makes all the decisions at the start of the process, and organic form makes new decisions at every step.
What has to happen for Data to become “a machine that makes the art” (to borrow LeWitt’s phrase)? Silvan Tomkins, whose writing on shame is important to me, has an intriguing suggestion. He says that machines will never be intelligent until programmers stop behaving like overprotective parents. In order to be intelligent, the machine has to learn, and in order to learn, it has to be able to make mistakes. But the designers and programmers never let them do that. In a sense, Tomkins proposes organic form as a model for artificial intelligence. Not every decision can be made in advance.
On the other hand, you might hear something surprising if you gave a violin to a robot — even a highly disciplined robot such as Data, whose name suggests that he is only information. The robot follows instructions perfectly, but a lot of the sound that you expect to hear coming out of a violin isn’t going to be in the instruction manual. Certainly it isn’t in the sheet music. Even a Norwegian choir (human professional musicians, not Norwegian robots) can make “The Star-Spangled Banner” sound new and surprising. The Norwegians aren’t used to hearing the song in school and at baseball games, so their stylistic decisions will be somewhat unprecedented.
What Data does with the violin should have its own distinctive sound. He might invent a new fingering. Or maybe he doesn’t use his fingers. Maybe he pays attention to bowing but not tone, so his violin has a scratchy, old-timey sound. Or maybe his mimicry of concert styles of play is uncanny in its perfection, but what styles does he know, and how does he choose one style rather than another? Provided that he is sufficiently curious, Data has a freedom that would not be available to most classically trained musicians, and he should be able to satisfy the Romantic criterion of creating a sound that no one has ever heard before. Why wouldn’t he take advantage of that freedom?
The sung word
Caetano Veloso in 1979
The following interview was first published in 1980 in Código, a review edited by Erthos Albino de Souza in Salvador (Bahia), a publication that today is a collector’s item. Erthos financially supported several major projects by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, such as their edition of selected texts by the forgotten poet Sousândrade and the complete edition of Poetamenos, a volume of poetry by Augusto. He was an engineer who worked for Petrobras and used his computer to experiment with poetry. I can’t remember the date of his death. I remember instead a generous person who promoted cultural initiatives.
In December 1979, Caetano Veloso was in São Paulo, I believe for a tour of his show Cinema transcendental with the group Outra Banda da Terra. Incidentally, that year, the Brazilian Congress, which at the time was controlled by the military, approved a law that granted amnesty to political prisoners and those who had gone into exile, persecuted by the dictatorship. The vote was preceded by a popular campaign that was violently repressed. And although the law was favorable to a redemocratization of Brazil, it made it impossible to punish acts of torture committed by agents employed by the dictators, something which is criticized to this day.
Two years ago I found that an Internet blogger, Barbieri, had republished the interview on his blog, Do próprio bolso. I was surprised to find that someone knew about Código. I decided to republish it on Sibila as a result of my encounter with the poet Antonio Cícero in Brasília. Although we are separated by geography, Cícero is a dear friend. He put together the panel “Poem/Music Lyrics” in the seminar of Portuguese-Language Community Countries, where I spoke on the state of the Portuguese language in the online domain. Sitting in the audience during the discussion period after this panel, I argued that to compare a poem to popular lyrics limits both genres, because their natures are quite different. Lyrics normally have short lines and few stanzas (Bob Dylan being an exception).
To consider a popular song’s lyrics a poem is to create a closed, suffocating model for the poem and for poetry. In this way, there would be no Mallarmé, no Hugo Ball, no Walt Whitman, none of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, no João Cabral de Melo Neto, none of the exceptional concrete poems by Décio Pignatari (such as “organismo,” as can be seen at YouTube), which Caetano used in his film O Cinema Falado. There would be no George Oppen, no Charles Bernstein. A song’s lyrics need the body of the song; in contrast, the musicality of a poem can be silent: it doesn’t need to be read aloud nor with musical accompaniment.
Furthermore, one cannot impose literary “models” on song lyrics, since lyrics are an eminently oral genre. They are connected to spoken language, such as the brilliant lyrics by Lamartine Babo. There are countless differences between poem and song lyrics that I don’t want to get into here. They may have converged at certain points in history. This is an old topic and there’s nothing new to be said about it, despite Dostoyevsky’s dictum that “There’s no topic so old that something new can’t be said about it.” I was never a huge fan of Música Popular Brasiliera (Brazilian Popular Music). This was my loss. In the 1970s I listened to MPB due the fact that I knew Caetano Veloso. It was thanks to Veloso that I discovered names such as João Gilberto, Doryval Caymmi, Lamartine Babo, Noel Rosa, Jorge Ben, etc.
Godard directing the Rolling Stones in his film One Plus One (1968).
In my youth I listened to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, the Doors, Johnny Winter, King Crimson, Muddy Waters, blues, rhythm and blues, Motown. And, starting in the 1990s, I listened only to cool jazz. About five years ago, I began to listen to rock and roll again, especially the Rolling Stones of Beggars Banquet (1968) and Exile on Main Street (1972) as well as Some Girls (1978). I know that Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix are much better, but there’s something, among a number of things, that attracts me to [the Stones]: the lyrics are used as yet another musical instrument. Mick Jagger doesn’t even pronounce the words completely. He distorts them in a personal, original way. Jagger and Richards never intended to write “literary” lyrics. They were always my favorites. Instead of having written the song “Rocks” in his album Cê, perhaps it would have been better for Caetano to rerecord “Stray Cat Blues,” from Beggars Banquet. It would have been better for him, for his sense of humor.
Suspicion
Both poetry and MPB, or pop music, became unoriginal “replicant” entities after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Rolling Stones today are a caricature of themselves. In the 1950s and 1960s, MPB had only three top-notch lyricists: Vinícius de Moraes, Caetano Veloso, and Torquato Neto. I speak without a lot of knowledge or authority. There are others. But I don’t know if one can take the exception as the rule: the lyricists I’ve mentioned, in their best moments, are rare, although even so, they may not be poets like Baudelaire, just as good poets are rare nowadays. Nowadays, Ferreira Gullar, whose work is uneven (repetitive and sparse at times), is considered “the greatest Brazilian poet alive.” I would add, “the greatest poet” in this lifeless, dull vacuum that Brazilian poetry has become nowadays. The exuberance of the irrelevant, to use the formula a friend coined. The great lyrics by Dylan or Lennon were never considered poems in the English-speaking world.
In Brazil, people confuse the word “poetic” with poetry. Caetano’s impact in the 1960s and 70s was poetic and mistakenly thought of as poetry. (I know that Antonio Cícero disagrees with me about this.) In fact, there’s no more access to education, and criticism no longer is there to raise suspicion, but rather to “sell” musical products and highlight caricatures of poetry most of the time. Culture is a corpus of knowledge that allows someone to have a critical stance. Here, in Lula’s Brazil especially, this means traditional, conservative, and commercial forms of expression. There’s a cultural blackout in this country, and few voices are being raised against it. Read, for instance, what Manuel Cruz, a philosophy professor in Barcelona, has to say (in “El ocaso de las ideologías,” published in El País, September 26, 2009):
When transparency is taken for granted, that is the immediacy between knowledge and the world, criticism disappears as an overseeing, articulating instance which gives rise to doubt. If the statement that things are such as they appear is generalized, that reality does not hide its sign. There is no longer the possibility of critically appealing to certain instances (such as the profound structure of capitalist society) when trying to explain things. Such instances would thus develop their activities from the realm of shadows.
We are condemned to the realm of shadows, to literature as sociology, to the “rubberstamp” prizes granted by multinational corporations and governments, to cite György Lukács, to “capitalist realism,” the captive mind, as Czesław Miłosz described it. We are also condemned to axê music, to the sanitized carnival, to pagôde, to soccer, to the same old soap opera, “celebrities”: in a word, the “customization” of popular culture, the adaptation of products and processes to the “consumer’s” taste.
Last Tango in Paris
Caetano is incoherent, but his incoherence was liberating in the 1960s and 1970s as opposed to the leftist, “boutique” coherence of Chico Buarque, with his nostalgic, “poetic,” out-of-date lyrics, a Chico who is more of a felicitous replay of some songs by Orestes Barbosa and by Noel Rosa. Okay, so he composed protest songs during the dictatorship. Okay, so it was his way of seizing the contemporary moment. Songs, therefore, can’t be reduced to ideology; they are not an “instrument.” Songs must exist in their own right. Chico represents the paternalism of the society described in Gilberto Freyre’s classic The Masters and the Slaves. Caetano’s incoherence, for his part, led him at times to a certain cultural irresponsibility, especially starting in the 1990s. He is a prominent figure, and it would have been useful if he had assumed more responsibility. Still, though, I prefer his legacy as is — his consistency — over that of other figures of his generation, and even of those who came after him. (I do like Cazuza.) I agree with the summary two American critics, David Bertrand Wilson and John Alroy, give of Veloso’s work at their site:
Caetano Veloso has been […] the foremost exponent of “Tropicalismo,” a Brazilian approach combining traditional samba with a variety of Caribbean, US, and European styles, political enough to get most of its practitioners exiled by the military dictatorship. It’s more an attitude than a musical style per se, a mysterious, sophisticated blend capable of incorporating anything from hard rock to opaque elegies to delicate love songs to elevator music. […] He has a typically Brazilian complex approach to harmony, and can craft a simple melodic hook with the best of them. His voice is rather ordinary, and his guitar playing is more notable for his timing and drama than technical skill, but he’s a huge talent and a fascinating character.
In the meantime, the most striking thing about my encounter with an already mythical Caetano in the Eldorado Hotel in Higienópolis (São Paulo) in December 1979, when I had hardly begun to write poems, when I was an “ingénue,” was that, thanks to him, I met Maria Schneider, the star of Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The plot of the film is a simple one: in Paris, an American middle-aged widower who owns a hotel finds a teenager in an empty apartment. The couple starts a purely sexual relationship in which they don’t even reveal their names to each other. The hotel owner is played by Marlon Brando; the movie was filmed in 1972, but it was released in Brazil only in 1979 due to the censorship restrictions imposed by the military dictatorship. Maria Schneider was in Brazil to promote the film at the time, and she was annoyed with the journalists, who only asked questions about Last Tango and knew nothing about her subsequent work. Schneider, who was born in France and played Jeanne in Last Tango, was, at age twenty-seven, at the peak of her beauty when I saw her like an apparition, an angel’s face, dark curls, and incensed. The scenes of Schneider’s frontal nudity were liberating at the time. And the movie became a great success. The actress was right to complain about the press: in 1975 she had worked alongside Jack Nicholson in the movie The Passenger, by another Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni: a film which for me was crucial, even more so than Bertolucci’s. Insomnia ends up affecting one’s memory; I remember, however, that she excitedly asked Caetano about Maria Betânia, that Caetano was suddenly disappointed with her question, and that she complained about the local journalists.
— Régis Bonvicino, May 2010
Bertolucci directing Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.
Bonvicino and Veloso in Conversation
Régis Bonvicino: In Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970, John Lennon revealed that his favorite lyrics where those that stand on their own, so to speak, without melody, the ones that, at the end of the day, work also as poems on paper. That reminds me of the Galician-Portuguese troubadours. We don’t know their melodies and we only know their lyrics, which, even without sound, work marvelously as poems on paper. Would you use that same criterion in relation to your lyrics? Which are your favorite ones? Why?
Caetano Veloso: No, that criterion, in reality, is the opposite of mine, because what I’m interested in is the sung word.
Maybe that was the route that led the Provençal and the Galician-Portuguese troubadours to make poems that ended up being beautiful even without the melodies. Maybe that was the route, that thing about having the word already with the musical sound.
I believe that John Lennon’s criterion can be more or less that one, but I don’t know if, in fact, that is the one that corresponds to his poetic reality.
I don’t know … it could be that, a posteriori, after a long time, people can read lyrics without music and like them.
I think that when Lennon made that statement he meant that he was more linked to the text, you see? He quotes — if I recall correctly — “Across the Universe,” which he considered a very beautiful poem even without the music, but when he talks about how the poetry of rock and roll is great, he immediately remembers Chuck Berry and some things by Little Richard. He talks about stuff that you know is wonderful because they are those rock songs, and he found everything wonderful, very important without having read them on paper before.
About my lyrics, I wouldn’t know which ones I like best — it depends on the period. For example, the other day I was suddenly scared because I realized that lately I haven’t written my own lyrics. For the LP Cinema transcendental, I only wrote one partially on paper before writing the music: it was “Oração ao tempo” (Prayer for the Time). I wrote a few stanzas and I then immediately found a melody for the first stanza. Then I decided to repeat that melody for the rest of the text. I wanted everything to have the same meter, the same rhythm. Therefore, it was the only one I wrote on paper.
Tarso de Castro’s journal Enfim asked me to send some unpublished lyrics before the record appeared in order to publish them. I sent them “Lua de São Jorge” (St. George’s Moon), “Oração ao tempo” (Prayer for the Time), and “Menino do Rio” (Boy from Rio). The one I liked the most was “Lua de São Jorge.” I typed them up and didn’t pay much attention. I sent them to the journal, and they only printed the last two.
I find the lyrics of “Menino do Rio,” when I sing them, dazzling. I love the line “O Havaí seja aqui” (May Hawaii be here). It has something Afro to it. But when I saw it printed in the journal, I thought it was retarded, stupid. The line isn’t stupid — on the contrary, it’s quite beautiful when it’s sung! “Oração ao tempo,” on the other hand, stood its ground better, it could be read.
The sung word is, in sum, another type of raw material that is related to the written word and the spoken word, but that cannot be reduced to either. The sung word works, perhaps, as a synthesis of the other two; it has performed at least that function. Enjoying the word in a state of poetry has always been more intense in the arena of popular music that in the others.
Perhaps this phenomenon has to do a bit with fatigue, fatigue of the visual, of visual communication, of reading. At the end of the 1960s, McLuhan’s talk about that stuff was perhaps an indication of such a fatigue. The visual failed. The ear is something much more absorbing, more participatory. Sound comes from everywhere; it penetrates every pore.
Perhaps such a fatigue is temporary. Things come and go. I don’t believe that things go forward, as if there could be a kind of progress. I don’t share the Western idea of linear progress.
Cover of the double compact disc Caetano Veloso e Os Mutantes (1968).
Bonvicino: Although the production environments of “music poetry” and “paper poetry” are different, and perhaps even opposed (the first is linked to buying and selling relations of exchange, and the second isn’t), you said a little while ago that you didn’t make a distinction between a song by Jorge Ben and a poem by Augusto de Campos, both tasty morsels to you. Could you say a bit more about that?
Veloso: There’s something in your question which is not entirely true: the idea that “music poetry” is linked to exchange relations while “paper poetry” is not. That’s not true. I think they are both products, with the difference that at the moment, as a product for sale, “song poetry” has had greater success. It’s a market issue. The difference between one and the other is not the environment, but the level of intensity in terms of production and consumption. There is no difference or opposition. In reality, they are both the same; they exist on the same planet. Books can be sold, poetry can be a product, like a record. It’s just that written poetry hasn’t been successful from the 1950s on. And not just in Brazil, but everywhere in the world.
You said that “paper poetry” doesn’t have a real existence, right? Yes, it does. Let’s be modern — what’s happening is that paper poetry is going through a market crisis.
I don’t know why that happens. Maybe it’s a matter of the history of Western languages, a moment in the internal “swing” of those languages. As I mentioned, it’s a planetary phenomenon. The interest in the production and consumption of written poetry is no longer what it used to be. There are very few people writing a responsibly poetic poetry, with a link to what’s great in the history of poetry, and, on the other hand, few people buy any kind of written poetry, you understand?
Lately, there are a lot of people writing a lot of poetry, but it has no strength, it’s an empty animation. Nobody knows whether something good will come out of that context.
I believe that the distinction you make in your question is not precise. I personally don’t distinguish between things; I don’t separate popular music from classical music, etc. I don’t carry with me the idea of the “nobility” of the material. I detest that. Scientifically, you can separate the various forms of artistic expression, but I believe that that kind of perspective is old-fashioned. It doesn’t correspond anymore to today’s lived reality.
“Brazilians are very poor”
Bonvicino: Could you talk more about popular music? Why is it so strong in Brazil?
Veloso: Brazilian popular music is, in all senses of the word, very abundant. It is the only artistic expression in Brazil that is not poor. In reality, it is an aberration in Brazilian society: it’s different. Nowhere in the world does popular music matter as much as it matters here.
Popular music always manages to support itself, always manages to get enough resources to stay strong, something that doesn’t happen with written poetry, with film, with theater. It generates push, national pride. It has the mission of expressing the country.
A generation like mine, with Jorge Ben, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Paulinho da Viola, only managed to succeed because other good people were there before.
Not even in the United States is popular music as strong as it is here, because Americans also have other things. “There they have money, cars, lawns, food / all of that is cool,” to quote a verse from Paulo Leminski. Brazilians are very poor; they don’t manage to get together to get anything done. But in the midst of such chaos, popular music somehow works. Popular music is the philosophical expression of the country. It is much more important than all the college-educated people of all ages who already wrote about all the complicated things in the world. Popular music is a more totalizing expression of Brazil, a more direct one. It doesn’t mess with noble materials because Brazil is not a noble country.
I believe that the “paper” poets are in a more general way linked to a European tradition, and popular music is something more linked to the Americas. When it appeared, the Americas were already around. In that way, it is somewhat like cinema, and, at the same time, it is music because it is a very old thing.
Bonvicino: That would be the “transcendental cinema” of your album …
Veloso: Yes, precisely that …
Bonvicino: Since I have the chance, I’d like to ask you to speak about your legendary album Araçá azul (Blue Araçá).
Veloso: Araçá azul is not grade-A “Xingu Indian chic,” like the things Egberto Gismonti has been doing. It’s something else, not “Xingu Indian chic.” I’m more of a follower of Oswald de Andrade than of Mário de Andrade or the Brazilian Academy of Bossas. Even today, I find Araçá azul wonderful. I even make a reference to it in the song “Aracaju” on my last LP.
I wanted to make that record alone so I would be more uninhibited in the studio, because, for me, the recording studio is a very intimidating place.
It was only me and the sound technician, Marcus Vinícius, working in the studio. Later, I called several people, like Duprat, Perna, and Lanny, to complement what I had done. I love the result, especially that stuff with the conversations, the voices superimposed on body percussion, percussion on the skin.
But the sound was messed up. I didn’t know anything about recording in a studio. If I had the chance to do it again, I would do it with more depth and nuance in the colors of sounds. But nowadays I don’t feel like doing something similar anymore, mainly because, right after I launched Araçá, Jorge Ben’s record, Ben, came out, also in 1972, with songs like “As rosas eram todas amarelas” (The Roses Were All Yellow), “Quem cochicha o rabo espicha” (Who Brings a Tale Takes Two Away), “Taj Mahal,” and “Fio Maravilha,” an absolutely brilliant piece.
Then I thought to myself, wow, I did Araçá, and it looks like I’m an “artist.” I was mad, my God, I did that crazy album and everyone is going to think it’s an intellectually challenging, important work when in reality the really great record is Jorge Ben’s, incomparably better. Mine was a joke — I was mad about the kind of respect it elicited. I did Araçá in one week; it wasn’t my most elaborate work, as some of the critics said. I was mad because the great work was Jorge Ben’s.
A 1979 cartoon by Ziraldo in O Pasquim illustrates the ambiguity of the amnesty law.
Bonvicino: For my generation, the “spoken word,” the fascination for the colloquial, the oral, for the communication possibilities that exist in the oral, were just as important as the incorporation of the visual for the poets gathered around Concrete Poetry. In that sense, your poetry or Gilberto Gil’s are just as important, if not more, for my generation, than the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Augusto de Campos, or Décio Pignatari. What do you think of that?
Veloso: What about Chico Buarque?
Bonvicino: Before you answer my question, I’d like to explain why I didn’t mention Chico. With the exception of the view of women, in songs like “Folhetim,” I find his poetry old, a kind of 1950s lyricism, a mix of Vinícius de Moraes, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Manuel Bandeira. I think he needs a more electric side. He has that kind of good Brazilian guy thing, which is quite dull.
Veloso: I find it quite understandable that your generation likes our work more than that of the “paper poets,” to use the expression you coined. It’s good for our time. That makes you similar to other people, which is great. I also find it fascinating that people who are writing poetry (as opposed to songs) are connected to popular musicians.
Now, going back to that first question, when you quote Lennon’s phrase, you can clearly see there that there’s an interconnection between the poets and us songwriters. Deep down, we’re the same. By chance, by luck, we ended up leaning towards popular music. But, you see, we are also connected to the world of letters, of ideas.
All popular musicians were educated. Dylan talks about William Blake all the time. Lennon about Lewis Carroll, and he even says that when he read James Joyce, he identified with him quite a bit.
I also want to say that I don’t agree with what you said about Chico Buarque. He is all the things you said, but he is wonderful. He goes forward dragging tradition behind him, all of which matches his astrological sign, Gemini.
Chico writes in a wonderful way, the sung word in his work reaches the highest levels, it attains perfection, you see? But, indeed, he does have that kind of “nice Brazilian guy” thing. I, for instance, feel like a Swedish man in Brazil.
But I think Chico is marvelous. He is the super-Vinicius, the super-Drummond, the super-Bandeira with the spontaneity of Dorival Caymmi. The sung word in him is incredibly smooth. And you know that I think Dorival Caymmi is the best, the mother of the sung word, a genius.
Lennon’s “God”
Bonvicino: Do you, a poet-musician, close to black people, close to “paper poetry,” believe in the future of that kind of poetry, or you think that if Mayakovsky, for instance, was alive, he would have switched paper for a guitar, would have moved from Moscow to London or New York or Salvador (Bahia) and would sing, “Well, I’m goin’ to China to see for myself / Goin’ to China, goin’ to China / Just got to give me some rock and roll”?
Veloso: I do think it has a future. The very fact that written poetry stopped having an audience and entered another level of information is something that points to certain needs in man, which, at any moment, could explode again. As I said, everything is cyclical, breathing doesn’t stop, there may well be a genuine interest in “paper poetry.” I repeat, what’s happening now is that written poetry is in a market crisis. In the future, who knows, it may be that people will again feel the need to read, to take a piece of paper and write. The poetry that is written today may be pointing in directions that, although unknown at the moment, might eventually be successful, become hits. Nobody knows for sure.
Now, that image you suggested of Mayakovsky singing “I’m goin’ to China” is perfect.
Bonvicino: I don’t know, I always imagined John Lennon as a pop reincarnation of Mayakovsky. For me, they’re both warrior poets, impetuous bards … I don’t know, it could be my imagination …
Veloso: No, that’s a lovely story. Mayakovsky was actually quite pop. But, Lennon is the rock musician I like best. He’s my favorite because I love the Beatles. I like the Beatles more together. After they separated, the only record I find brilliant is Plastic Ono Band, from 1970, with the song “God,” by John Lennon. I love both the lyrics and the music in that album.
Bonvicino: That record you just mentioned, from 1970, was accused at the time when it came out, just like your own albums Muito and Cinema transcendental now, of being musically sparse, of having poor arrangements, of being a garage band thing.
Veloso: You see, and it’s a classic, right? But going back to what we were talking about earlier, Paul McCartney is also great. He is a Gemini, like Chico Buarque. He also drags tradition behind him, he joins the habitual to new proposals. John sometimes gets a little dull when he starts to invent too much, as for instance, in that song he made for Yoko Ono, “I want you (She’s so heavy).” But Lennon is my favorite.
Take for instance, Bob Dylan. It took me a long time to like him. I found his stuff too long, too rhetorical, too wordy, too metaphorical. His stuff is hard to understand, and I liked brief lyrics much better. I didn’t enjoy long lyrics. But I ended up liking him a lot, and today, I like him a lot. He is a wonderful singer. He’s like Donald Duck with a social consciousness, as Paulo Francis says, quoting an American. Dylan did make a poetry that was to be recited, because he came from that line of the folk blues spoken song.
Bonvicino: And what about Jimi Hendrix?
Veloso: I happened to be in London when he died. He even died near the house where I was living. Even today, I find him wonderful. At the Wight Island Festival I was close to the stage and Hendrix played a series of new songs. He didn’t elicit the kind of excitement that was expected, although he was well received. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped and said, “You want all of that old stuff?” Standing close by, I yelled, “All of it.” He turned around and winked at me.
Bonvicino: So you were blessed by one of the gods from up there …
Veloso: Hendrix was cute, sexy, he seemed like a little Candomblé boy from paradise … he was smiley, he had a light-hearted expression, not that tough demeanor on his album covers. That was the wrong kind of marketing.
São Paulo, December 5, 1979
Listen to Caetano Veloso singing “For No One,” by the Beatles, and “Tropicália,” with Andreas Kisser, on YouTube
Tropicália (1968)
Caetano Veloso
Above my head the planes
Under my feet the trucks
My nose pointing towards
The plateaus
I organize a movement
I orient the carnival
I inaugurate a monument
In the country’s Central Plateau
Long live the Bossa — ssa — ssa
Long live huts from straw — traw — traw
The monument is made from streamers & silver
The green eyes of the mulatta
The hair conceals behind the green forest
The moonlight in the sertão
The monument has no door
The entrance is through an old, narrow, crooked street
A kneeling, smiling, ugly dead child
Stretches out its hand
Long live the green land — land — land
Long live the multatta — ta — ta — ta — ta
In the inner patio there’s a swimming pool
with blue water from Amaralina
Coconut tree, Northeastern breeze and talk and lights
In the right hand a rose bush
Legitimizing an eternal spring
In the gardens vultures stroll all afternoon
Amidst sunflowers
Long live Maria — ia — ia
Long live Bahia — ia — ia — ia — ia
On the left wrist bang-bang
Little blood runs in his veins
But his heart swings to a samba and tambourine
Playing dissonant chords
From five thousand loudspeakers
Ladies and gents, he watches me with big eyes
Long live Iracema — ma — ma
Long live Ipanema — ma — ma — ma — ma
Sunday it’s “Fino da Bossa”
Monday it’s the dumps
Tuesday he goes to the backland. But
The monument’s pretty modern
He said nothing about the tailoring of my suit
To hell with everything else
My dear
Long live “A Banda” — da — da
Long live Carmen Miranda — da — da — da — da
—translated, from the Portuguese, by Odile Cisneros. This interview was conducted by Régis Bonvicino in 1979 and originally appeared in Portuguese in Sibila.
Eight discourses with Kim Rosenfield
Discourse 1.
Divya Victor: As the epidermis opens a body, the epigraph opens a book. Your choice of epigraph to the first section of Tràma takes from Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues. Ginzburg is an expert taxonomist of the domestic remnants, the civil debris, the uncivil de-ballasting of National reconstructions, and an archivist of the things that remained buried after “we” rummaged through the debris of wars, of traumas, of losses great and small. In this, she is also like a gravedigger and her work is never done. Your Tràma, like her work, often excavates, devours, and inverts that pleasing Anglican claim “All things bright and beautiful, / All creatures great and small, / All things wise and wonderful, / The Lord God made them all.” In Tràma, the treatment of cultural memory, fable, mythology, and childhood appear equally invested in cures as in casuistry, in curation as in curiosity, in dreams as in demonology — the latter in the sense of Frankenstein warning Walton that what is created will become a myth, and thus more dangerous than the act of creation itself. What the Lord God made includes these things in the argument moving through your book.
The movements of Tràma’s body musculate, like all good physical activity, provoking the sphincters that emit and excrete — generating waste and wonder in the same convulsion by digesting and rehearsing the texts that are passed down from mouth-to-mouth to record the trans-historic journeys of “Poor Little One,” the “guys,” the various scoundrels, orphans, assassins, the “Beautiful Child with Turpentine Hair,” unnamed Little Match Girls and boys of fairytaledom, and the texts that are buried in the earth to form “History City.”
I read an archive of small things treated as if by a lepidopterist: spread, pinned, boxed, and gazed at — except the lepidopterist is also a mighty historian and an amateur storyteller with a terrible memory. The narrative Father, cultural memory, the “proper place,” are usurped repeatedly by an angry mob or miffed Möbius that twists and continues the tales. Even as the epithets march forward briskly (“Some people bust with violence because they are sensitive to rumor and take big breaths to fan themselves against persecution”), they are immediately assaulted by their own skidding on the banana-peel-syntax and prosody of these prose pieces.
Could you say more on the musculature of the book? What went in, what came out, and to what processes of appropriation and excavation did you devote your writerly lepidopterology? What of the species interests you?
Kim Rosenfield: First of all, Divya, I want to thank you and Jacket2 for giving me this opportunity to delve with you so deeply into my own work.
The musculature of Tràma was based on Winnicott’s idea of “the mysterious middle” in which the infant takes in nourishment, excretes it, but there’s this magical strange thing that happens inside the infant’s digestive tract that is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat — I guess one covered in shit! Tràma’s exists in an infant-like state in which there are fragments of a self and disjunctive experiences of self and experience, but coherence or how the world is navigated has to come from an outside organizing subjectivity: the mother, the reader. Also, there are no brakes on fantasy — fantasy is magical and terrifying at times. For adults and small children alike there are often many blurred spaces.
I wrote Tràma shortly after the 9/11 attacks, when we’d just moved to Florence, and my daughter was three and synagogues in France were being bombed and water in the Tibor and drinking water in Rome had almost been filled with poison, and trains were being exploded in Spain and my Italian neighbors said to me “welcome to the world.” I was like Poor Little One in a spoiled state of wonder, naïveté, and pure shock. Tràma moves like the larvae before it is caught as the specimen, before it looses hold on “potential space” — Winnicott again.
Discourse 2.
Victor: I’m enjoying the way you are playing with the metaphors of the questions. Particularly that of digestive processes and lepidopterology, and I must thank you for indulging my whimsy. The shit-covered Rabbit that represents the “mysterious,” “magical,” “potential” processes of an infant’s digestion — that space which both inundates the economy of the drives, but also floods categories of what is and is not abject and worth ejecting, and the larvae that pre-exists the lepidopterist’s fancy: these both, excrement and butterfly, are specimens par excellence. We’ve relied on them foreva to tell us more about ourselves. This makes new things, by the way, of Alice going down the Rabbit hole — something quite appropriate for how I feel when I read Tràma — except, the timelessness of Alice’s fantasy world is, in your work, something that resembles the emerging history of a subject in the context of (psycho)analysis.
This leads me to wonder about the role of speech, voicing, the circuit of listening in Tràma and your mutual participation as poet and psychotherapist. Consider the following:
page 49, snip snip, from Tràma:
I am speaking to you, Poor Little One. You who knows the sweetness of salt, who believes that money can be gotten from seminaries, and who recognizes the right to camp as a last Will and Testament …
I don’t understand you — said Poor Little One, who began to tremble with fear. Patience! I will speak better: Sapiens put all their errors into their Cities.
from “6 Valentines,” snip snip, from Object 8:
Sacrifices may not result from
recognizable diseases
The girl retains the figure of her
father
hears a noise: a tick, a knock, or a tap
A woman should protect herself
against the sin
of sexual exploration
…
The instincts and their vicissitudes
the genitals being one’s real self,
they must be protected
Two little girls in a closet
from the “boy struck” period
Didn’t you ever shimmy down a pole?
Or rupture that bubble?
Dora the Oral Explorer, aka Dora La Exploradora Oral, is adventuring all over the Freudian landscape of the latter piece, and I sense too a working through of constructions of subjectivity around the mouth, the genitals, the orifices of edification, if we’re talking Old School. This seems to emerge later in Tràma as well — I recall, especially, one of the characters suffering a “night kaka” when he falls into a bear trap? In Tràma, it seems like the history of a subject, say Poor Little One, is a dossier or confabulation that builds around the kernel of an allegorical narrative between the ego and what he says — except, what he says is never clear, formally. The shuttle between speech and narrative forces a double listening, like an auricular double-take — as you say, because there are “no brakes on fantasy” — so, what moves us is the slip of the tongue. I am thinking too of Lacan’s reminder that the analyst “takes the description of an everyday event as a fable addressed to the wise.” This seems like a great and reversible description of some of the processes in your prose. I believe your work as a psychotherapist is in a different vein, but would you say there is a circuit between the speech-based work of psychotherapy and the project at hand? How does your own faith in a circuit between audition and vocality relate to how you work as a poet?
Rosenfield: I really don’t think that we can ever express anything very well through language but it’s (sometimes) the best or only thing we have at our disposal. So much happens outside the aforementioned circuits that is transmitted “unwittingly” in both writing poetic texts and being involved in a co-constructed therapeutic matrix. Yes, emerging histories of a subject in the context of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis as its own “sobject”[1] is also one of the histories in the room. What reflects off what?
Like the discovery of mirror neurons that help us understand the meaning of actions as well as actions themselves — this is a neurological function, well outside the limits of language. I think, in my writing, I’m trying to channel my own mirror neurons or at least some collective societal ones. In my clinical practice, I’m trying to do the same while also incorporating someone else’s hard and soft wiring into what organizes me, them, and us. In my poetics, so much more of this can come through in a live reading.
I haven’t seen those Object poems in one million years. I hope I didn’t come across in them as Old School, although they feel very old. I was trying to illuminate the limitations of the Old School. I was trying to enliven constructions of subjectivity through orifices of thinking. Right now, if you were here, you’d see me tweaking my mouth and clenching my buttocks to illustrate this point.
Next discourse please …
Discourse 3.
Victor: The critique of Old School — what a strange phrase now that it also refers to a Will Ferrell movie! — is apparent in several texts in your oeuvre, Kim, from the older poems from Object to more recent work like 10 Perfumes put out by Belladonna, and poems featured in the Gurlesque Anthology, and so on. Your poems from Good Morning — Midnight —, like “Excelsior Reflector” and “Maximum Sapiens,” appropriate, cite, and mangle a wide range of cultural texts from scientific treatises and medical brochures to archaic now “bankrupt” biological theories of race, psychological case studies, pop magazines, cephalic indexes, anthropological texts, canonical literatures, and so on. In “Excelsior Reflector,” for instance, I spot references to William Langland’s Piers Ploughman. In 10 Perfumes, the thematic movements from the ephemeral fragrance of essences towards the putrid stench of political and materialist critique pulses with citations of/to F. T. Marinetti’s work.
These citations suggest ways of reading and attention as classification — but of failed or partial classification, which is very compelling. The intricacy of the network of references certainly multiplies, as you say, “the histories in the room.” But these histories reject the total bankruptcy of some of the documents they are built around, while also eyeing them suspiciously. This is the position that echoes both the shock and naïveté that you referenced earlier — the potential, blurry space of encounter with texts that precedes ideological judgment/acceptance/dismissal that are the symptoms of a (ahem, ahem) “Proper Education.” The larval engagement with many of these cultural materials, prior to pinning them down in the lepidopterist’s archive, is routed so as to return us to questions of gender and the semiotics of gender performance within the contexts of reading. So, to return your question: “What reflects off what?”: would you consider appropriation a way of reading, or re-reading a gendered cultural education?
Rosenfield: Yes, I would, but more as yogic counterbalance — moving opposing forces simultaneously in divergent directions engenders (pun intended) new flow (associations to this word welcome). Please see eloquent discussion above for a fuller answer to these questions. Also, I was raised with an extremely airtight and problematic relationship to authority — respect it at all costs, even if it might harm you, so therein lurks the tension or “blurry space” of my encounters with the Old School. Sadly, some of these archaic theories are not as “bankrupt” as they should be — think Sarah Palin or see Sue Grand’s essay on Sarah Palin — “Strange Vaginas: Us and Them.”[2]
Discourse 4.
Victor: Arielle Greenberg, one of the editors of Gurlesque Anthology, makes an interesting claim about your poems featured in the collection: “Here, as elsewhere in Rosenfield’s work, fashion is made central, adored and fetishized while criticized and deconstructed. The two attitudes coexist in ragged harmony.” I think she’s spot on in claiming this “ragged harmony” — it’s another kind of “blurry space” that we keep returning to in our conversation between the “fetish” and its “deconstruction”; it’s another way of thinking of those erotic zones posited by the difference between a hem and a sock, a sleeve’s end and the hand’s beginning, a lash line and an eyeball, a stiletto and the coy ankle. These raggedly (arbitrarily) demarcated zones of the imaginary body are flayed open as spaces of critique in your poems.
The work takes what we misname “superficial,” like fashion and the semiotics of gendered performance, to its critical end: as an absolute surface for social projection and identity formation in the citation of codes. These codes appear as commodities in your work to crowd every girl’s “own Blueprint for Heaven” as she performs the “unwitting burlesque of base female crime” as an “ever ready & waiting Xerox machine.” Could you say more about your interest in surfaces of projection — the fumus of perfume, the mirrors of fashion, the glad cladding of appropriated robes? How do you imagine the “unwitting burlesque” of the feminine and feminized? How does it relate to your participation in this anthology and your participation as a female poet?
Rosenfield: The work featured in the Gurlesque Anthology is older and very specific to themes of fashion/gender that I was working with at the time. This “ragged harmony”(I really like Arielle’s explanation here) of toggling between both an adoration and critique of these topics was really being sorted out in that text, Good Morning — Midnight —. I was also working out my position in the community as a young female poet who was interested in all the complexities of fashion, makeup, perfume, adornment, and personal/physical aesthetics that I felt were somewhat taboo subjects in my community, or at least considered insignificant. Stacy Doris was the only other writer I knew at that time also investigating these themes. There was an implicit rejection — I felt — of the feminine then, and, being so femmy myself, I had to find a way to work through what I perceived as a gender barrier.
I’ve since shifted my thematic focus less on fashion and more toward science — see re: evolution — and a psychological, linguistic, yoga zone that I can’t really describe — see Lividity forthcoming from Les Figues in 2012. I’m applying the same ragged harmony in that work to blur up a dominant discourse or to carve out a more interactive field that has always been the organizing principle in my work, both as a writer and as a psychotherapist.
Lately I’ve been thinking about this structure as an “as-if” or “invitational” space. When language becomes invitational, posited as a “try-on” rather than “this is so and has always been so,” we begin to experience it as a realm of possibility in which we can consider our most cherished personal and cultural assumptions to be tentative — as if — rather than unchallengeable truths. The as if stance of language helps us accept responsibility for our own belief systems and assumptions.
Discourse 5.
Victor: Kim, at the end of my interview with Vanessa Place, I asked her to ask one question of the next interviewee, and I will ask you to do the same when we approach the end of our conversation.
Her question to you was this:
Quel est le point de basculement? [3]
What is your response?
Rosenfield: Le point de basculement implique certaines conditions:
Le prix du petit déjeuner comprend un boisson (café, thé, chocolat) servi dans la chambre tous les jours avec du pain, des petits pains ou des croissants, du beurre et parfois de la confiture.
Il ne comprend pas le service dans la salle commune ou au comptoir, le breakfast à l’anglaise (avec oeufs, jambon, gruau …); il diffère généralement du tarif “voyageur” ou “courrier.” [4]
Discourse 6.
Victor: I enjoy the way you’re linking the tentative “trying on” and the responsibility that one does/does not/must/must not assume “for it,” and I am particularly fascinated by what you’re calling an “invitational space” — I was just talking to my students about gender roles and performing dominance, and we got to discussing the current obsession with vampires as upsetting certain ideas of sexual dominance (their argument, not mine) and the issue of the invitation, in which the so-called “victim” must invite (“let the right one in” etc.) the so-called “perpetrator” into a zone in which she can be nominated as such. New vamp/ire ethics. Though the analogy fails here because the reader and writer are more neck-to-neck than necking, imo … anyway. This is perhaps the fanged inverse of your notion of the invitation, but it’s the risk that’s interesting too — that difference between hospitality and hostility has, perhaps, “ne s’entend pas pour,” it is, perhaps implied as, a certain condition.
This praxis of “trying on” does lead me towards your re:evolution more directly — the dialectical somersault between adaptation and maladaptation of forms and “truths” towards the “as if” of creaturehood. There are fantastic mutations and malappropriations in this book, where taxonomic relations between art and the cosmetic are smuggled into Picasso’s studio in Helena Rubenstein’s handbag, where “molecules hang like dinner lamps,” where the exhibition of organs in formaldehyde with furs, bones, and skeletons conspires as a “small collection of deaths,” where vocality is troubled and everything speaks in tongues. The varieties of discourse cited and the types of address to the reader within the poems, as well as the multiple authors “present” in the form of the book, confabulate and fraction out polyvocally.
The book is part of Les Figues Press’ Trench Art: Tracer Series, and in keeping with the tradition, features an introduction by Sianne Ngai, an “analysis” by Diana Hamilton that follows your poems, and a “Research Paper” by Jennifer Calkins. But these genres are parodied even as they are mimicked — imitation as camouflage? These writers respond, collude, conspire, and discuss your work, but seem to do so in a temporality quite different from other book-forms that contain forewords and afterwords. They seem to talk alongside, or with, or over, evolving, mutating, and adumbrating the possibilities of the poems, rather than concluding them for us. How would you describe the process of putting together this form of the book? Do you see it as a collaboration? Other than these writers who are you presently colluding, conspiring, and in conversation with?
Rosenfield: The invitational mood has little in common with the vampyric coding of domination/ submission, victim/victimized, as I understand it (or don’t really understand it at all). But I like this idea from your students that permission needs to be granted, consent must be established before the ultimate takeover. It’s all so titillatingly S/M. I don’t think my work has that kind of direct play with power but is more blurry or muted.
The invitational mood is about this idea that language and ideas are a “try on.” In re: evolution I’m attempting to invite the reader in to formations of history, to shop theories of science, gender, etiquette to browse and see what fits or what doesn’t. My aim is to offer an invitation to break from inherited ideas of “truth and meaning” by offering multiple constructs of language and ideas. Language can thus become an open system of “accumulative fragmentism” (George Kelly) challenging ideas that language gives us access to the way things are. I’m very interested in Irit Rogoff’s work and her ideas of “without.” Without is a frame that encompasses knowing we have a vast array of theoretical models and histories to work from. But what happens when we’ve come to the edge of what they have to offer? We don’t turn our back on them but find ourselves in a new place that does not yet have a form or definition. Without doesn’t operate through lack, but rather through an active attempt to make way for something else to emerge. In re: evolution I was trying to work from that space.
Putting together re: evolution was a very collaborative process. Me, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, Sianne Ngai, Diana Hamilton, Jennifer Calkins, Yedda Morrison, Ken Ehrlich, Susan Simpson — we each contributed a piece to shaping the book and taking it outside the nucleus of the text. Like literary lysosomes! The images and accompanying texts both articulate and mess up further the “authority” of the form and content of the text. Or as you so evolutionistically put it: “mutating” and “adumbrating” the text.
Currently and always, I’m collaborating, conspiring, colluding, and in conversation with my family, my pets, my patients, my study groups, my poetic community, my neighbors, my neighborhood, my city, my state, my country, my race, my gender, my sexuality, my socioeconomic class, my DNA, etc. But I would like to make something with the Mulleavy sisters if they’re listening, and the newly minted ghost of Benoit Mandelbrot.
Discourse 7.
Victor: A question sprouted up today: I was reading a new essay by Judith “Jack” Halberstam and was suddenly reminded of something you had said earlier in our conversation about authority and behavior, something that I too feel quite acutely. I know we are not talking about this, per se — but I am very curious about what you make of this.
Halberstam:
We need to craft a queer agenda that works cooperatively with the many other heads of the monstrous entity that opposes global capitalism, and to define queerness as a mode of crafting alternatives with others, alternatives which are not naively oriented to a liberal notion of progressive entitlement but a queer politics which is also not tied to a nihilism which always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction. Instead, we turn to a history of alternatives, contemporary moments of alternative political struggle and high and low cultural productions of a funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly accessible queer negativity. If we want to make the anti-social turn in queer theory, we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica Kincaid, to make everyone a little less happy! (from “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies”)
Rosenfield:
I was raised with an extremely airtight and problematic relationship to authority — respect it at all costs, even if it might harm you, so therein lurks the tension or “blurry space” of my encounters with the Old School. (Discourse 3)
Query: Is there a place in art, as you see it right now, for disobedience, for being a total and excellent bastard, for this claiming of the “anti-social,” for this examination of the fetish of happiness, for the “monstrous”?
Rosenfield: First of all, I love this passage from Halberstam and think her work is extremely important. What I gravitate toward here is the idea of failure, messiness, “disobedience,” as you name it. All these ways to speak of the “anti-social” in poetry offer an attempt to open a new window of discourse (most notably in Flarf and Conceptualism). There is some meta-overlap with queer theory (and we really can’t say this about mainstream poetry that is defined by a long history of lyricism and modernist tradition) in that both are not widely accepted discourses and both certainly do not aim to make everyone happy. I think my work attempts to create that space by fragmentizing subjectivity and trying to do away with the frame that values something as either inside or outside, high or low. I think claiming the “anti-social” always demands roughing up what is culturally considered smooth.
Final Discourse.
Victor: You said that your next book, also coming out from Les Figues, will continue your thematic interest in science as in re:evolution and will move in a “psychological, linguistic, yoga zone.” The title of the book, Lividity, is provocative: it recalls the centrality of the intersection between affective, ethical, and biological responses to the environment that is taken up throughout in your work. I’m thinking especially of “livid” stemming from “bruise” or that bluish blackening of the flesh that suggests both the stagnation and the circulation of blood upon psychic or physical crisis/impact. “Lividity” also suggests “vividity” — both stagnation and exuberance of life forms — and usually refers to expression either of the countenance or verbal forms. But I know nothing else of the project. Could you say more about it here? Is/was this book built around the collaborative model of re:evolution?
Rosenfield: I first heard the term “lividity” in a description of a murder trial in which a body was determined to have been moved based on an assessment of its “lividity,” or way in which the blood had drained and pooled in the points of the body that made contact with the ground. I thought this was an amazing way to think about language and I wanted to make a book in which it felt like blood was draining out of the text, hence a few words/lines per page. I’m not sure if I really pulled this off as I’m prone to excess, so we’ll see. I also like this idea you bring up of “vividity” or “exuberance of life forms” and “expression” of verbal forms. The book also deals with language as acquisition, and as a transactional medium, like money — necessary and functional, imbued with power and emotional. I think of Lividity as more of a lone wolf and it won’t be constructed as communally as re: evolution was.
Victor: Kim, talking with you has been an incredible experience, and I am so grateful for the time you’ve spent with my questions. My only wish is that we had face-to-face conversations in addition to this.
Rosenfield: What a pleasure to talk with you vis-à-vis your astute interpolations of my work. I learned so much! Thank you for your unwavering attentiveness.
Victor: At the end of every interview, I request one question from the interviewee for the next interviewee, as a way of generating continuity and conversation between poets, and also as a way of constructing a series of questions that the interview process might have generated for you. Your question, should you choose to provide it, will be put to Myung Mi Kim, verbatim.
Rosenfield: Question for Myung Mi Kim: What is the role of poetry in your personal life and how do you see poetry’s function in the social/political sphere?
1. For more on “sobject,” see Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms, published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
2. Sue Grand, “Strange Vaginas: Us and Them,” in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 2009.
3. “What is the tipping point?”
4. “The tipping point implies certain conditions:
The price of breakfast includes a hot drink every day (coffee, tea, hot chocolate) served in one’s room, with bread, rolls or croissants, butter, and sometimes jam.
It does not include: service in the common room or counter service, English breakfast (with eggs, ham, porridge …), and it generally differs from the “traveler’s” or “postman’s” menu.