Allan Douglass Coleman: A Self-Interview (5)

[As some of my readers know, in addition to my professional work as a critic, historian, and theorist of photography I’m an avocational, on-again-off-again writer of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. You’ll find information about that elsewhere at The Nearby Café.

In 2005 I began preparing for publication a book titled Like Father Like Son, combining my own poetry with that of my father, Earl M. Coleman. In its published form, our book has two front sides and no back side, so as to give equal weight to both my father’s work and my own. (For a selection of my father’s work online at The Nearby Café, click here.)

Earl decided to include in his half of the book an interview with him that the editor of a “little” poetry magazine had conducted and published. I decided to mirror that in my half of the book; but, having no apropos existing interview to use, and no available interrogator to conduct one, I decided to do it myself, asking myself a set of questions comparable to those my father had answered. This is the result, drafted between August 2005 and June 2006.

Periodically, here at this blog and elsewhere, I have discussed my practice as a critic. But I haven’t published much about my writing as such. This is the most extensive consideration of my craft that I’ve ever drafted. Since some readers have asked about my background, it seems fitting to post it during this 50th-anniversary year.

In this meditation I make occasional reference to poems from the book not included in this self-interview. You can download a pdf file of my half of the book here. The final part appears below; click here for Part 4. — A. D. C.]

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Allan Douglass Coleman: A Self-Interview (5)

… Q: You spoke just before about “performing” your poetry. Can you elaborate on that?

A: Along with writing, I’ve always had a public-performance aspect to my life. My father, who loved to sing, would bring me along to Greenwich Village parties as a kid to sing left-wing songs with him. I took theater classes and acted as a child, acted again in my teens. I began political speechmaking as an antiwar activist during my adolescence.

In graduate school, as I mentioned, I helped form a Bay Area rock band, singing lead and playing rhythm guitar. I sang lead in another band when I came back east in the late ’60s. Then, in my professional sphere as a critic and historian of photography, I started teaching, using the Socratic method, and also giving public lectures — accepting both of those as forms of performance. I’ve continued that to this day.

Unless you treat lecturing and teaching like the stereotypical academic tonelessly “delivering a paper” at a conference or droning away robotically at your students, you realize soon enough that this activity is de facto a form of theater. It’s not just automatically ear / speech / breath-based; it’s the engaging presentation of your words and the ideas embodied in them, done in the visual as well as auditory presence of your audience as listeners/viewers. So, as a dialogue-oriented teacher, you become in that process the director and lead actor of an improvisational troupe. As a public lecturer, you become the scriptwriter, director, and sole actor in an extended monologue, a one-person show.

If you learn to do those things well, a synergy develops. The experience of performance feeds the writing and the underlying organization of thought; you learn how to write in ways that minimize your limitations and maximize your strengths as a performer. And you learn how to perform what you write for maximum effectiveness before an audience. As I intimated earlier, this also often leads to revision; awkwardness and unclarity in your writing tend to stand up and wave their hands when you read your words aloud to someone else, regardless of their response.

I’m not talking here about slam poetry, because that’s not what I do, not by a long stretch. I require my poetry to work on the page, to function fully and deliver itself to the reader completely through the reading process, as well as to communicate in performance. So I strive to imbed all necessary clues to the poem’s auditory potential in its written form. That manifestation on paper isn’t just a faint trace of the performance, which is how most slam poetry appears to me when published — uninteresting as autonomous writing on the page and insufficient in itself, even if it makes me want to hear the live version.

Furthermore, the rowdiness of the slam environment — where a certain declamatory style dominates, a “goes to 11” volume level prevails, and a relentless momentum gets going and carries forward — really doesn’t work for those of my poems intended as very quiet or in a minor key. Others, my shorter ones, have a blink-and-you-missed-it quality that requires a very attentive audience in live presentations. Still, I write them all for the ear; I want them heard.

From the time I found my own primary, mature voice as a poet — say, from the time I wrote “All Mine” — I operated on the assumption that I would present the poems I wrote not only to readers on the page but also to listeners in public spaces. Thinking that way affects the way you write, and even affects what you write, because it engages you consciously and unconsciously with the idea of your reader as listener and the extremely intimate, personal act of speaking directly to someone else, without the distancing factor of the page between you. That’s as close to the experience of [Walter] Ong’s “first-stage orality” as literate people can get.

My father has a very similar approach, I believe. His work is very ear-based, musical. He’s acted, and sung. He’s an excellent teacher and public speaker, though he’s had much less opportunity to perform in all those contexts than I have. And fewer chances to present his creative writing in person during this phase of his work as a writer. But he’s a first-rate reader — subtle, expressive. Both he and [my mother] Fran read to me frequently as a child, and we all read aloud to each other at home just sitting around: passages from the Times and other periodicals, or juicy paragraphs from whatever book we had open. So I grew up accustomed to hearing the written word spoken.

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In the late ’90s I had the good fortune to come across a small cluster of poets in my own home community on Staten Island who emphasized public performance: Marguerite Maria Rivas, Wil Wynn, and J. J. Hayes. I joined up with them; in 2000 we formed a collective, The Sepoy Rebellion. (Hayes left the group in 2006; Rivas, Wynn, and I continue to perform as a trio, and in various duos. You can find us online here.) [Note: Personal and professional commitments led to TSR disbanding a few years later. — A.D.C.]

Consequently, since ’98 I’ve performed live with them dozens of times. Presenting as an ensemble has nuanced the individual work of each member of this group. I’ve also had numerous occasions to perform my work on my own, or alongside other writers. I’ve found all of that extremely valuable in my evolution as a poet.

Here’s a poem I’ve performed often with the Sepoy group:

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Royal Pain

Six months of don’t

            bother me led on to

a year of haven’t you

            got anything better

to do, after which

            a long silence broken

only by read my lips

            alternating with what

are you, deaf? From

            there we went straight

downhill, along mind

            your own damn business,

past do we have a problem

            here, deep into what part

of that didn’t you under-

            stand and all the way

to Jesus, not again, bare-

            ly skirting get the fuck

out of my sight. You’d think

            someone who claims to love

you would sooner or later

            run out of all that

why can’t you just leave

            me the hell alone.

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I now take that vocal aspect of the work for granted. Forinstance, when Nina Sederholm and I began designing the web version of spine, I recorded the texts and put them online; those audiofiles will also appear on a forthcoming DVD of that project. That led me to develop a live-performance multimedia version of spine that I’ve now presented several times. So the written aspects of my poetry and the spoken aspects of it have become complementary. Not exactly inseparable, but interlaced.

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Q: Your father’s not particularly sanguine about the state of the world. Do you share his outlook?

A: An interesting word, sanguine — meaning “flushed with blood.” The century of my birth reeks of wholesale slaughter. Passchendaele. Nanking. Dachau. Dresden. Stalingrad. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Rwanda. Cambodia. Sarajevo. Baghdad. Some things have gotten better in my lifetime. Some have gotten worse, much worse. Among the latter are forms of serious damage to our ecosystem that could prove irreversible. So I may have witnessed the unnecessary destruction of our basic support system. Forget the cyclical collapse of empire, the inevitable decline and fall of this or that civilization, even the various vast abattoirs of the past century’s worst monsters; that could prove itself the real bloodbath, the end of human life on earth, done not deliberately but out of dumbness and cupidity.

So things seem bad, in many ways. They could deteriorate further, and probably will. I’m no Pollyanna. But problems remain soluble, at least up to a certain point. And, for better as well as for worse, we remain hunters. Thomas Harris writes, in The Silence of the Lambs, “Problem-solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it.” I believe we have the capacity to solve many of our problems, even those that seem most intractable.

That doesn’t mean I believe that we will solve them. However, I remain not optimistic but hopeful, in the sense of the word as defined by Vaclav Havel: convinced that it is important to perform certain actions regardless of unfavorable conditions and even in the face of evidence that they may prove ultimately unsuccessful. For me, that’s the motive for continuing to bear public witness, via the written and spoken word, to the experience of life in my time as I’ve lived it.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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