John Ashbery: an interview

Tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 22nd) at 5 p.m. Rome time (11 a.m. East Coast Time),
listen to an interview on RAI (Italian Radio) with John Ashbery on the occasion of
Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007

(translated by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan, with an introduction by Joseph Harrison)
having won a Special Prize from the Premio Napoli.

Go to http://www.radio.rai.it/player/player.cfm?Q_CANALE=3

An interview with Tim Gaze

New: Arch Literary Journal

Housed within the English Department of Washington University in St. Louis, Arch Journal publishes interviews, translations, poetry, fiction, essays, and other materials, and concentrates on publicizing important departmental events.

In #1 poetry by Jennifer Atkinson, Walter Bargen, Thomas Cook, John Gallaher, Robert Lietz, and interviews with Bruno Latour and Paul Muldoon.

THE SILENCE OF MALACHI RITSCHER by Kevin Kilroy

from Wikepedia: [Malachi] Ritscher came into the national spotlight after commiting self-immolation on the side of the Kennedy Expressway near downtown Chicago during the morning rush hour of Friday November 3, 2006, as a protest against the Iraq war and more generally against "the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country." Ritscher's suicide is one of only nine reported incidents of self-immolation performed as an act of protest in American history.

“The Silence of Malachi Ritscher,” by Kevin Kilroy—

There’s nothing like a shower to cool you down. Cool fool, nothing. When I watch my mind, it doesn’t move. Joe’s a fucking idiot. I go to work, on-time, I do my shit. Who does he think he is? Why do I care, really, though? My heart isn’t in it. I don’t have passion for that job. [pause]

Before Malachi self-immolated, writes Kilroy in a recent email conversation about his stage drama, I was working on a political play—something that had a purpose beyond attention to mind, imagination, and intelligent expression, which I felt I was spending too much time on. Utopic but with less outrage, more human emotion, trying to accept today's a-political climate and be in it without desiring a vision of how it should be.

All other discussion about Malachi were very surface level—basically: sane? or insane?—and I understand why that was the case as self-immolation is a very difficult action to contemplate. But I felt somebody needed to spend more time doing just that, contemplating this action, and so I did.

What is my point? My argument? What do I desire? Taxes- they connect me, everybody, to the blood we shed. More, go deeper. The two-party system will never work. Alright, yea – but these arguments have no effect. Everybody says them. What can I say that will touch people more than words? What can I do that’s deeper – people need to feel political. They need to get off their asses. Yelling at them, that’s not going to work – I need to show them… [long/snappy pause realizing he could self-immolate—that scary thought has returned to his head.] Those fuckers at my work, they think I’m a joke. Tonight, I’d work on the website more. Public Parking Party dot Org – people will get into it. I’ll get hits. [sighs again] [singing] “They say I’m crazy. OH, Oh-ohOH! But I don’t believe I can be that strong.”

Malachi self-immolated and thereby became a microcosm of fears and questions and nightmares and love and living. Is this an act of anti-patriotism? Yes and no. No, in that it is not anti-anything. But yes, because it contradicts the motions and ideologies of a patriotic gesture. This play is human, it's about relationships, it’s about fears and questions and nightmares and love and living in the world that is present and taking the time out of lives to connect with each other and discuss what is happening.

Also, politics—living politically on a daily basis, working towards a political consciousness— Malachi's reasoning for doing this: there are so few who could possibly feel any empathy for his situation, his internal crisis, and for the decision he made. We, as a society, are so far away from what his action represents, so I wrote a play that creates more possibilities for more people to gain sympathy for his crisis and, if nothing more, I am walking away from this play wiser about to what degree politics should be played out upon my body and the bodies of those I love. And, I hope, with a greater capacity for empathy.

What I am most proud of, and at the same time doubtful of, is the fact that this play does not say anything. I think it shows a good deal of the conflicts and issues and errors in living, but in the end there is no message which I have judged to be more worthy than any other possible message. However, staying connected to people, to loved ones, seems key to this world created in the play. Another message—avoid utopic actions. Another message—politics touches even the most intimate and private and special areas/moments of our lives.

The Silence of Malachi Ritscher
Opens at Theatre Building Chicago
Mar. 23 - Apr. 21*

*After the final performance the script will be burned

talking with Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and art critic living in London. His publications include Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press), Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press), and The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), as well as contributions to books and catalogues on artists ranging from Henri Matisse and Alighiero Boetti to Jessica Stockholder and Gillian Wearing. He runs the poetry series at Parasol Unit in London. I met Schwabsky last year. When he told me his wife was a banker, I asked him so many questions about economics, we never got around to poetry. I'm making up for that with this conversation:

Linh Dinh: Contemporary American and British poetries don’t overlap much. In the journals of each country, different poets, minor and major, appear. In England, J. H. Prynne is considered a central figure, but he’s barely known in America. Conversely, when I mentioned Michael Palmer to my British friends, many of them didn’t know who he was. Their familiarity with new American poetry ended with John Ashbery and Ron Silliman’s blog, not his poetry. What is your take on this division?

Barry Schwabsky: Yours is an exaggeration based on the truth. My sense of things is that in the '60s and '70s--when people like Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood were emerging poets in the UK--there was a more organic connection between American and British poetries. After that, the so-called mainstream of British poetry became much more conservative, and the poets who represented the "modernist" wing became marginalized. If you look in the poetry section of a good, non-specialized bookstore in London, you'll find very few contemporary American poets and very few contemporary-sounding British poets. What you will find is a lot of poetry that more or less sounds like the Georgian verse that was supposed to have died in the trenches of World War I, only updated in terms of subject matter, so that if it's a male poet he might talk about football (i.e., soccer) or if it's a woman poet she might mention changing nappies (i.e., diapers). But in form, it all seems a century old. So the innovative poets who persist--and there are some very good ones--may be more interested in mutual support at home than looking for alliances across the ocean.

LD: Talking of Raworth, he’s an inspiration to many young poets in Cambridge. They have an excellent reading series, coordinated by Sam Ladkin. He scheduled me with Dublin-based Randolph Healy, who was outstanding, a real discovery for me, and Fiona Sampson, who was, how shall I say this, self-assured in the worst way. She’s the editor of the Poetry Review. Ladkin lumped us all together as a way to build bridges, I think. It had mixed results that night. Sampson irritated Raworth so much he ran straight out of the pub where we had drinks afterwards, after talking to her for maybe a minute. One second he was there, the next, gone. As far as promoting new experimental poetry, Cambridge has to be an exception. Am I wrong?

BS: There seems to be a very close-knit scene in Cambridge, with Prynne as the figurehead but Raworth being quite important too. It's interesting that Sampson was on the bill with you--I think her editorship is seen as a conservative move for Poetry Review. But I'm glad Ladkin is trying to build bridges. Not enough of that goes on here. Things tend to get very polarized.

LD: I went to a poetry reading at a pub in Peckham Rye, an out-of-the-way neighborhood on the South Bank of London, to find the young readers surprisingly good, the crowd enthusiastic. I also attended a pub reading in provincial Norwich, and the place was also hopping with poetry lovers. How would you compare the grass roots poetry scenes in England and the US? Do young, experimental-minded English poets have places to publish? Do they publish themselves?

BS: I may not be the best person to ask. Having lived here for six years, I publish almost exclusively in the US. But my sense is that there are many fewer venues for readings than in New York or the Bay Area. That's one reason why I started the reading series at Parasol Unit--because there didn't seem to be many readings going on, or if they were happening, it was hard to find out about them. My impression was that it was easier to hear new poetry in Cambridge than in London, and that just seemed ass-backwards. Likewise, publication venues seem fewer, and not only in print. The whole online publishing and blogging thing hasn't taken off as energetically here as in the US, though of course it exists. There are a few great presses--Reality Street, Shearsman, and so on--but they don't take on too many young poets. Barque is a significant press but following a very particular line. Things feel a lot less fluid than in the US.

LD: Ron Silliman irritated many Brits when he observed that the number of “island poets with an ear that makes sense to a Yank auditory canal is exceptionally small: perhaps, in the past century, just four—Bunting, Turnbull, Raworth, Thomas A. Clark. This is not to fault others – from J. H. Prynne to David Jones to Douglas Oliver or Allen Fisher—whose ears may well make perfect sense on their own terms, but who don’t, how shall I say this, travel well on at least that one level.” The hostility towards England in the comment section also surprised me. Many Americans have an aversion to France, I know, but I didn’t know they’re also down on Mother England. What do you make of these auditory differences between American and island English? It’s not like we’re talking about Jamaica here, but even then, so what? As a gatecrasher, boatperson and wetback, I’m all for deforming English, buggering, dyeing and polluting it, even with all the mumbling, slurring, fucked up dialects spoken in England.

BS: I might not agree with Ron's list--mine would be a bit longer--but in principal I agree. Here's something I wrote in a review of a book by Simon Smith, whose poetry fits my ear like a charm: "Before I moved to London from New York a few years ago I had little acquaintance with contemporary poetry in England. Yes, I knew Lee Harwood’s work pretty well, and Geoffrey Hill’s too; Tom Raworth’s rather less so. I’d read Christopher Logue’s "accounts" of Homer and, because I’d liked Christopher Middleton’s translations from the German, a bit of his own poetry as well. J.H. Prynne was more than just a rumor to me, certainly, but not a lot more. Of younger poets, I knew nothing. Only after I’d arrived did my ignorance strike me as odd. I began trying to catch up with my new context but quickly saw it wouldn’t be easy. A lot of British poetry was and is hard for me to 'hear' even when I can see that it is good. Reading it could be something like reading poetry in a foreign language one happens to know quite well." It's not a question of hostility! But you have to make a different kind of effort--well worth it in the case of Prynne and Fisher and many others. And I suppose they have to make the same kind of effort to really "hear" much of our poetry. It would be interesting if someone could get sufficiently analytical about this to analyze it as a historical development. I hear the great poets up through Wordsworth and Coleridge without making any particular allowance for their Britishness, but somehow by the latter 19th century a split has taken place--the difference between Whitman and Dickinson on the one hand and Browning and Tennyson on the other is very great. And the difference has been there ever since. Didn't Wallace Stevens write, "Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility"?

LD: Are you in danger of not making sense, soon, to the folks back home?

BS: Maybe it's more dangerous to make the wrong kind of sense. In any case, I think being here has been great for my poetry. I'm sure I'll never take on a British ear, just as in speaking I don't take on a British accent, but I hear my own accent in a slightly estranged manner now. What's natural to me now sounds a bit artificial. Which makes the poetry in everyday language shine through so much brighter!


*Upcoming readings at Parasol Unit: March 3th, Peter Cole and Tony Lopez; March 29th, Lyn Hejinian and Barett Watten; June 5th, Michael Glover and Ernesto Priego.

Here Comes Everybody

"Here Comes Everybody" is a website featuring 132 interviews of poets, with brief bios and links. With the exceptions of Ton van 't Hof, Joris Lenstra, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Anny Ballardini and John Tranter, all are American, most of them under 50. Set up by Lance Phillips three years ago, the series concludes today with Paul Hoover. Each poet is asked the same 10 questions. Why these poets and not others? That's for Lance Phillips to answer, but as a resource, a group portrait and an often insightful and entertaining read, kudos to Lance for having this initiative.

SHIFTER

Launching a literary journal with an attitude is a domain of the very young. The energy, enthusiasm and hunger to promote your esthetic (and yourself) are found in abundance in editors in their late 20’s or early 30’s. Although most of these journals are ephemeral, appearing for only a few issues, with tiny circulations, their existence invigorates American literature. (Something that’s direly missing in Vietnam, for example, where there’s no liberty to publish, hence the underground samizdats.) Reflecting solely the taste and eccentricities of their editors, and not lorded over, checked by an academic junta, these independent journals tend to be much more interesting than the university variety. Among the major ones to appear in recent years are Tony Tost’s Fascicle and Daniel Feinberg’s and Dan Hoy’s Soft Targets. There are countless others worthy of attention. Shifter, edited by Sreshta/Rit Premnath, is virtually unknown among writers because it’s not, strictly speaking, a literary journal. Its statement begins: “Shifter's nature is such that it changes every issue. What worked in the previous issue doesn't work anymore. What failed may be substituted with new deficiencies.”

Certainly no failure, Shifter has gotten increasingly more complex and intriguing, with each issue a work of art that rewards close reading and looking, its various components deftly woven together to yield constant surprises. Among many gems and tidbits, the latest, number 9, features “Exploding Bodies, Fragmented Territories, Hamas’ Martyr-Images and Palestinian Land-Body Metaphors” by Lisa Vinebaum, “The Disappearance of the Author? Hyperauthorship and the Case of Araki Yasusada” by Kristen Schaffenberger, and a prose-poem sequence by Jeremy Hoevenaar, his very first published text. I’d bet the amount of my next bounced check that it’s better than anything in the current Kenyon Review:

Proposal For a Future Monument To Memorialize All of History Human or Otherwise Offered in the Form of a Condensed Novel

Chapter the First
From the safe distance of spaceships one can make pronouncements like “constellating is the historic hospital for the human wound.” There is no need to fear reprisal. Reprisal is another node that can be appropriated by the vocal net and misconstrued into the negative potential of made decisions. It couldn’t be clearer. Which may be. Wait. A diagnosis is forthcoming. Something will have to be colonized under an expanded conception of colonization – a flag or a bronze folly implicating the generosity of empirical mishaps perhaps. What is the smallest component of rupture? How much time is left of money? One finger on the killing floor. “Blood Is Beautiful.” The past is ridiculous - a good opportunity to employ the word ridiculous. Propose space grammar. Ruin-syntax. Relax. Our doctors will set the broken appendices. It’s too late to explain.

Chapter the Second
Specters thrive in a vacuum and abhor ornamentation. Keep this in mind when raising your glorious monument. Use materials that glint or gleam when washed with light. You hope for a staggering effect. Also the ability to be interesting. Upstairs from curiosity is where most upstaging takes place. For _______ sake check the temperature! Insert rhythmic designation of that which circumscribes context. In other words – con the text before it cons you – out of your surplus medium, into running backwards and feeling philosophical – other effects are certain but remain undocumented. The last deposed dictator was famous for saying “it was never meant for us to build anything.” Above all use solid, high-quality materials. Take lessons from the Project for the New American Entropy. Otherwise you run the risk of your slashes tipping into a highly unstable hyphen-state.

Chapter the Third
You might call this the denouement. You might consider your audience to be the green flamingoes of Impetus Island. You might see Babel in every beehive. But these are only loose suggestions hard up for cash. Smoke is evocative. The faster you fly away. Vanishing talking points. Slather honey on yourself to ease your entry into the future. Thusly. “Something happened” can appeal to almost anyone.

I emailed Sreshta/Rit Premnath to find out more about him and his project. Here’s our exchange:

Linh Dinh: Please explain how you started this journal? What did you want to accomplish initially? How were your aims modified by the experience of editing, and by the contents of suceeding issues?

Sreshta/Rit Premnath: Three years ago, due to visa related complications I found myself back in Bangalore (India), and ended up spending a year there. I grew up in Bangalore, but had done my undergrad at the Cleveland Institute of Art and had just finished my first summer in Bard's MFA program. As a result the art community I knew was mostly in the States.

However, I quickly realized that there was a very young and experimental art scene in Bangalore and became involved in the contemporary art community there. I wanted to create a platform where both communities I was familiar with could dialogue. As far as I was concerned the internet was the only "commons" which could not be policed by US immigration policy. I decided to begin a topical magazine so that this dialogue centered around ideas that were not in themselves culturally specific, but that could be approached from different directions. The magazine has always been free, once again to circumvent the inequities of the global capitalist marketplace (exchange rates).

I think in a broad sense the aims have not changed since Shifter's inception. I’m still interested in editing a magazine which is open to change and failure and does not depend on revenue--so I don’t have to worry about sponsors or advertisers. Each issue creates a community of artists and writers who may or may not have seen each other's work contextualized together, and opens a dialogue amongst them. To me the most important thing is a space for intelligent conversation open to anybody who's interested in joining, which circumvents the economy of buying and selling, shipping and distribution... In a naively idealistic way I pine for an world where creative people are intensely engaged in dialogue with each other's work rather than competing for the attention of gallerists, publishers and collectors who invariably know very little about art.

LD: Although most of the contributors are American, most of them are in Brooklyn, as a matter of fact, Shifter still has an international scope. Is it fair to say that this is because of your own international background?

SP: You're right in so far as the last two or three issues of Shifter have been very Brooklyn based. This is partly because I moved to New York City a year and a half ago and to Brooklyn just a few months ago. I still get many contributions from artists abroad--some of the regulars live in Singapore, Spain and Russia. In fact the piece "Exploding Bodies" which you mention is by a PhD candidate at Goldsmith's in London. Strangely enough it has been difficult to motivate the art community I know in India to contribute.

In terms of my background I have always felt that growing up in Bangalore was, in itself an experience of internationalism--I grew up watching American and British TV and listening to Rock and Roll and Metal, reading everyone from Dostoyevsky to Kafka and T.S. Eliot, following global politics... but I also have five years of training in North Indian Classical Flute, speak three Indian languages and have travelled all over India. In some ways I suffer from the inadvertent internationalism of the non-westerner.

LD: You're a visual artist who deals with words. Please explain your relationship to writers and poets, either through books or in person?

SP: I have always read voraciously and would much sooner cite writers as sources of inspiration than visual artists. However I have always made things and been drawn to making things. There is something specific about the physical object which one can see in its entirety all at once (unlike a text which one needs to read through) and which has a complex relationship to the physical world and representation. Like a tattoo, it is both skin and a window into something else and sometimes even a mirror. However one's immediate impulse on encountering an object is to understand it, convert it into text. It has always been unclear to me where the art object ends and text begins, and I think interesting artists and writers explore this liminal space of the phenomenological world seeped in language.

Strictly speaking--as Wittgenstein would say--I feel that uncertainty extends to the very root of any philosophical question and artists and writers (those that I'm interested in anyway) operate within that space of uncertainty. While the topography of the questions we are dealing with are similar, the modes of representation and engagement are different. One cannot always be transposed upon the other, but they can be set side by side and though we may not always be able to point to the similarities we still understand the relationships.

To answer your question directly, I think the relationship between visual artists and writers/ poets is fundamental and has nothing to do with the use of text or image, which is only secondary.

LD: This is not a question, only an observation: in Shifter 8, Nora Schultz' piece on tourism at Chernobyl is excellent, but the many typos are a little jarring, especially in the passage quoted from the New York Times. I guess they're OK, since they contribute to the foreignness of the piece, but I'm not sure. The futbol piece by Ruben Verdu has one bit that's incomprehensible, however: "a place that dealt in unison with things." Huh?

SP: This is an important observation. Part of the Shifter project has been my attempt to clarify my relationship to editing. In Shifter 7 and 8 ("Science Seance" and "Rules and Representations") I tried something new which was to allow submissions to remain in whatever form they were sent to me. I gathered the submissions, ordered the pages and sent the issue back to the artists and writers to review it. If they were satisfied it was published as such. The result was a magazine with uneven page sizes and text left unedited. While I preserved the uneven page sizing for Shifter 9, the text was rigorously copy edited. In fact some of the essays were transformed as a result of discussions between the writers and myself. I’m still trying to understand the potential agency of an editor.

The theme for Shifter 10 is "Transparent White." Deadline for submissions is March 1. You can send an email to Sreshta/Rit Premnath at shiftermail@gmail.com for more information.

[images, from top to bottom: Maya Schindler, "the everything is this/this is everything" 2006; Sreshta Premnath, "The Skin Of Strangers" 2005, Semen and Turmeric on paper]

Chomsky Vs. Foucault - Part 1

Classic debate (1971)



Part 2 >>

Ali G Interviews Noam Chomsky