Interviews

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.

April 3, 2011

Eight discourses with Kim Rosenfield

Divya Victor

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.”

April 2, 2011

Seven discourses with Vanessa Place

Divya Victor

Vanessa Place

Discourse 1.

Divya Victor: Let’s start at the very beginning. As Fräulein Maria knows, it is a “very good place to start.” Ontology, ab ovo, is obviously obstinate in its negative tie to its Other, and so let us start at the beginning while also always considering the end. Since in the beginning, according to the KJV, was the Word, and since there are those who know that imago Die is merely imago and that the Word is merely Other to its fictions, let us begin with signification and begin too with its death.

Bataille claims that “the fundamental right of man […] is to signify nothing.” This fundamental right meets its socially constitutive Master in the constitutional right of free expression.

Vanessa Place: The big fuck you to the big O, aka “I love Daddy so.”

April 1, 2011

Asking Creeley about Williams

Al Filreis

Note: Robert Creeley was a Kelly Writers House Fellow in April 2000. I conducted a public interview and moderated a discussion on April 11 before an audience of eighty people. The recording (both video and audio) of the interview has been available both on the Kelly Writers House site and at PennSound. Recently Michael Nardone transcribed it. We expect to publish the entire transcript in Jacket2 before too long. Meantime, below we present the portion of the discussion in which I ask Creeley about William Carlos Williams.

Al Filreis: Now back to Williams, your initial response to Williams — according to something you said at Camden in December [1999] — was that what mattered to you in reading Williams, particularly The Wedge, was that the work was driven by anger. This is what, at least, Ron Silliman posted to the Buffalo poetics listserv afterwards. And then he went on to comment on how Williams had a huge impact on him as well, but it was a very different Williams. So, if anger is not quite operating as much, what’s your Williams now? How does Williams animate you now?

Robert Creeley: Back to Ron’s point, that that wasn’t the Williams he read, he reads the later Williams.

Filreis: The Desert Music.

Creeley: Yeah. Which is not an unangry poem, so to speak. But it certainly isn’t nearly as angry as the poems he was writing in the thirties or twenties. Spring and All, for example. Or The Descent of Winter, or “March First.” Many of the early poems are really angry, and their emotional base is their revulsion and anger at the world he finds around him.

Filreis: So, now when you look back at Williams, how does it feel?

Creeley: Well, it feels very much like my own life. I, when young, felt a dismay, let’s put it, that such things as the Holocaust or the Second World War or the Depression or many other factors in one’s real life, that these could be so unremarkable to the body politic, that it seemed not to matter.

March 31, 2011