|
|
Earl Coleman
Interviewed by Wayne (Al) Lanter, founder and co-editor of River King Poetry Supplement (Autumn-Winter 2003).
Al: Since most interviews begin at the beginning with why do you write, and that kind of thing, why don't we begin at the other end: what is the state of your art right now?
EC: A good idea. For the last three years I've been concentrating on the following: internal rhyme, cadence, broad angle to close-up, focus, emotionality, rhymed (but not necessarily end-rhymed) endings. Last September my wife and I vacationed in Paris, rented a flat in the Marais (3rd Arrondissement), and lived there for some weeks. I made notes while there, and wrote the first draft of a poem called "The Information of the Blood" on our return. When I'd finished a draft which satisfied me in October, I submitted it to South Carolina Review, which had published me previously. They accepted it in November. The poem is of particular interest to me because it embodies some of what I've tried to teach myself.
The Information of the Blood
Religious Jews of Le Marais
consult an inner vision that
Muslims, Christians, have no way to view. This vision
cautions Jews to bide their wary time and wait the dropping
of the other shoe. The Camps were sixty years ago, but
always
one more shoe, nicht war? And after one more
shoe, one more.
They know that “moving target” is a free translation
of “diaspora.”
Brisses lead to Polizei and razor wire, dogs.
This
knowledge has tattooed nishumahs, guts, the very
soul.
We watch three young Talmudists, emerging from
yeshiva now, in hot dispute, cross Rue de Temple
without looking either way, their eyes upon the argument.
Kabala magic, and an oak door yawns. A watchful,
skull-capped, burly man steps out to cover them, to
interpose
his body should it come to that. They enter rapidly,
disputing
still. He sees them in without attack. His concentrated
gaze,
like lightning, mine-sweeps up and down the street.
For just
this moment safe. He follows, and we hear the bolt slide
through, as though it bears the weight of half the world.
And yet a single panzer tank could take them,
destroy their Torahs,
the security they pray for from the El they pray to,
guarding them
with outstretched arms and miracles, with plagues, with
thunderbolts
as it is said. We hear the trains. They are
at Gare de Lyon right now,
but tomorrow, who can say? Trains go everywhere. And
shoes. That
is the code that’s written on their skins -- this
information of the blood.
Al: You write frequently (political and otherwise), in what can only be seen as autobiographically, of poverty of spirit and body.
EC: When I write of poverty -- spirit or purse –– the work is based, but never slavishly based, (meaning all good writing is "fiction," as Hamlet calls it), on first-hand experience. The initial fifteen years of my life (1916-1931) were lived in the kind of fog that some prisoners -- perhaps especially POWs –– experience. There's a poem I've written that speaks to those early years.
Closed Universe on Tremont Avenue
What I wanted,
really wanted
was my star to glow,
though in my cosmos
some black hole
would do, had done.
As for our magnetism
in that bleak environment,
defying laws of gravity,
there was no touching,
each of us a world,
attracted and repelled.
My light years telescope
and bang, this crystal prism's here,
and suddenly, ta-da, my ray
comes dartling out to you,
my infra red, my witty cool,
my dazzle, lighting up our night and day.
Because the human spirit is resilient, and the capacious mind absorptive, we do retain a great deal, fogged and deafened as we may find ourselves. If we're lucky enough to stumble across the access keys to that treasure trove, it's always there to be retrieved. I'm also mindful of the line from the Jacques Brel song "Sons of . . . ": "Who is the child with no complaint?" Although my burden seemed enormous to me, there's no child with no complaint, including my own sons and my grandchildren, who are their sons and daughter.
As for my politics -- they came later. First I had to bust through the fog, as in Turner's paintings.
It has always seemed to me that I've never looked my age because my life didn't really begin until I was 16 or so. And even then, in a world exploding with the politics of that time, it took me till age nineteen (1934-35) before I could right myself enough to discover a smidgeon of some real person on which to build, and only then could I enter the real world. Of course the real world was and is political.
Al: Then you didn't start writing until you were nineteen?
EC: It was probably a little earlier. As a kid of eleven I had attempted to fashion some dramas -- using chairs and cardboard boxes as props, with me directing friends, writing, acting. But that got buried as quickly as it got born, not to surface again until I wrote a story at City College, when I was about nineteen. The story was praised by Professor Teddy Goodman, a doubly treasured treat, because he was noted for his toughness. Sadly, I'd only established a tiny sliver of self as worthwhile, had built little on what was essentially jerry-rigged, and flunked out of City. In all I accumulated less than a year of college credits.
When I was about twenty and in love for the first time, I copied a poem from The New York Times (of all places) to send to Joan, who had enraptured me. As I was about to place the poem in the envelope I was overcome with shame at proclaiming love while using someone else's words and lying about it at the same time (Christian had no such compunctions about using Cyrano's words). Instead, I picked up a blank piece of paper and wrote my first poem.
Al: Unpolitical?
EC: Just love-struck. A cut above doggerel. I'd not read much poetry, except what I'd been assigned, and no poetry of that amazing time: Eliot, Pound, Rukeyser, to name a few, and reading poetry, as you know, is the sine qua non of writing it. I got to none of those great ones until a much later time.
Al: If you hadn't read poetry, why did you turn to writing it?
EC: I was first moved by poetry in high school. Because I was a good speaker, surely not because of my scholastic achievements, I was asked to recite poetry by heart from the stage during Assemblies. I still remember some of it, which is testimony to the impact it made on me and the value of much-derided rote learning. Even today I can see the very pages on which I read "Caliban in the Coal Mines," "Miniver Cheevy," "The Hill," and "Grass." That experience taught me that a writer, if he had something to say, or some new way of saying what had already been said, could have a voice, could make an impact. Although at the time I understood neither the lesson itself nor the ramifications of what that could mean. I caught up to that understanding later.
I'd read Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt and Main Street) by the time I was fifteen, and Hemingway's "The Killers" and "Twenty Grand," by the time I was seventeen. I was probably drawn then to writing when I finally understood that I could use writing as a way of "expressing myself" in a world where it was difficult for me to do so, but not as a thought-through attempt or desire to be a serious writer. It wasn't until later, during the War and after it, that I discovered for myself the poets, (Neruda, Hikmet, McGrath, Blau, hardly household names at that time) who influenced me profoundly and made me realize what it was I wanted to write about.
Al: When you were coming to adulthood, what was the specific political/social appeal for you? A perceived injustice concerning your own poverty?
EC: Nothing so direct. I think it was my parents' lack of honesty and openness of emotion, accompanied by guardedness, and hypocrisy. I took that for a paradigm of society at large. Hypocrisy, hidden agendas (sometimes apparent upon examination), and outright distortion I've always found offensive and upsetting.
That's the reason Hamlet's scene with Rosencranz and Guildenstern holds so much emotional wallop for me. You'll recall that's the scene in which his so-called friends, on a mission from Claudius, are trying to ferret out his secret thoughts, subverting him, and Hamlet asks "Will you play upon this pipe?" offering a recorder to Guildenstern. Guildenstern answers, "My Lord, I cannot." After some thrust and riposte Hamlet says, "Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would sound me from my lowest note . . . " It was what I took as subversion of the weak by the powerful that profoundly angered me at the time, still does. Things like the current subversion of the citizenry by our right-wing press, the spin doctors of the Administration subverting our will as demonstrated in the polls, selling us on their plan to go to war, playing upon us, fingering our stops with their ingenious and creative weasel words. It moved me then toward left-wing politics and moves me now to participate in the demonstrations that are taking place in Washington, New York, around the country and around the world, although unreported on by much of the media.
Al: Given these feelings, what led you into business of all things?
EC: Desperation. Plus a saving dollop of pragmatism. A fuck-you stance long before they made it á là mode. My poem "Focus" speaks to just that.
Focus
Because I await nothing --
not Godot or Lefty
epiphany
my money's worth
an honest politician
the Second Coming
good works reciprocated -- or
the triumph of good over evil -- or
fulfillment of sweet promisings -- or
my Muse, who comes at her own whim --
I get a lot accomplished.
Al: Your business career spanned 1947-1992. It must have been an adventure, building a substantial publishing house. Plenum brought you into contact with people at some of the highest levels of various governments as well as heads of many publishing houses, and authors, some of whom were Nobel Prize winners.
EC: That adventure has been written about in many newspapers and magazines, and yet -- never in full, and I could speak of it for hours, but this is a literary forum, and we must stick to our knitting.
Al: But there are lessons derived from business that can be transported to writing and the life you live now?
EC: Lessons galore. The identification of objectives for one. Identify the goal: goal-less-ness seems frivolous to me, always has -- then go to it in a direct line. Sounds a lot easier than it is. It takes focus, as my poem says.
Al: Satchel Paige said, "pitching is easy. All you have to do is know where to throw the ball, then throw it there." But try it.
EC: Yes. As with most of our occupations, as we live our lives, many run, but few can run the four-minute mile or take that as their goal. Many are in business but few can identify scope, goal, and/or a path to that goal. Day to day is the normal route. Many people write. There are hackers by the million, but relatively few writers comprehend the basics of the goal (and there's a good bit of dissent about what that goal is.) For me the goal of writing and of all art is communication. We might compare what I call "goal" to Bush Sr.'s failing at the "vision thing."
If what I say about the goal of writing is true (it's my position that it is true) then it follows that to communicate you need a forum in which to communicate. In the case of writing that means publications and media that will accept your writing; in the case of painting, walls on which you're hung, etc. If you don't find a forum you can't and won't communicate, and then you won't (and can't) achieve the goal. As simple and as complex as that. If you don't achieve that goal you'll be writing to "express yourself," as I did originally. A generally pointless notion in my view, though perhaps valuable as therapy.
It's not often that I can trace so direct a line from this lesson as I understand it, to my subsequent action. Because I believed so strongly in the importance of the identification of goal, when I decided to begin writing full-time in 1992, I combed the profiles of the journals listed in Poet's Market and Writer's Market for weeks, choosing, according to guidelines I had laid down (sometimes it pays to be authoritarian and therefore arbitrary), those journals where I thought I had a shot, my only research the profile of each journal as printed. I wound up with a roster of about 300 poetry and about 200 short story journals (sometimes poetry and prose in one journal). My grand plan was to submit to all of them. (I hear you gasp at the amount of prospective postage, but my motto in business and life has always been: do it right or don't do it at all. Life's too short to crap around; find something, anything that you can give yourself to, and go to it, hammer and tongs).
I then constructed my follow-up plan, so that as each batch of poems or story was rejected (which most were bound to be, I reasoned, based on the sheer odds), I automatically put the rejecting journal on the list to be submitted to three months from the date of their rejection. I was as gung-ho about this new writing life as I had been about my publisher's life. I was going to make sure my stuff was out there! Constantly in circulation. If I wanted to communicate -- that was the only way.
Not surprisingly, if the product is good it gains acceptance, not immediately sometimes, but it builds, as did this. I'm currently accepted with either a story or a poem about once a week, sending out about 100 submissions a month. Twelve hundred submissions a year (3 poems or more per poetry submission); about 50 acceptances. Is that a good percentage (as we'd worry about in business)? I'm not sure. But it is reality. Obviously I have to write at a prodigious pace in order to keep inventory stocked. In that ten-year period I wrote over a thousand poems and thirty short stories, one novel and about two hundred pages of another, plus many essays. I've shifted my strategy somewhat, cutting back on submissions to what I consider B journals, and expanding my submissions to B+ and A journals, now that I have more confidence and more credits on my résumé, and now that I've established a "voice" which itself grows (I believe) in depth as well as musicality.
Al: You say there are many lessons. Others?
EC: One other is the value of work. Work! Productive work.
Al: As Voltaire said, "work, oh sacred work."
EC: As a publisher my usual work-day was about ten to twelve hours, sometimes more. That's what made Plenum grow from nothing, from a standing start, that energy. As a writer, a life I find even more challenging and interesting than that of being a publisher (although pay-less), I felt I could and should do no less. I knew that some writers wrote two hours in the morning and then went for walks. I knew that some writers only spent mornings or afternoons at work. I intended to work! Ten to twelve hours a day, as I had always done. I got a lot accomplished.
Let's remember I began late, so I felt I had to get a lot accomplished real quick. I'm 87 now. Time's running out. I should probably work more than I do. The record-keeping (never my forte) and paperwork alone is prodigious, submitting at the pace I do. And my working and re-working each piece endlessly plays hob with my hours. But it is necessary, if I'm to achieve a quality that pleases me, though it is endlessly joyful and satisfying, even more so than publishing used to be.
On the third hand, as Jabotinsky said to the Colonel, I really am at work twenty-four hours a day (this may be one of the few occupations which affords humans that possibility). There's not a moment of my waking day that I'm not open to my Muse, my next thought, the next burst of impression from the world, regardless of what I'm doing in that instant, whether it's driving, watching a movie, or eating. My pad and pen are in my pocket waiting to be used and I'm mindful that they are there.
Last night as my head was hitting the pillow I thought of the line, "It's bodies we obsess upon, but mind's the prize . . . " Of course I turned the light back on and wrote it down despite the sleep in my eyes. Where did that line come from? I never ask, since I'm always open to it and it seems a natural flow. Where does the line go from here, if anywhere? Well, it gets added immediately to my sixty pages of poetry snippets (examined frequently, waiting for one to jump up and bite me). Is it a good line and worth pursuing? Maybe. I'll know better when I look at the snippets to see if it or some other line intervenes first to claim my attention.
There are many other lessons I could speak of, but we're limited by space and time.
Al: I'm struck by the way you talk about it, as though it really is a business. Is that good?
EC: The proof of the pudding and all that. I couldn't swear to "good," but it is my mode and I do get a lot accomplished. I'm reminded of Simenon. (When I began writing again in 1992, I had Simenon's agent, Max Becker. Until Max died). Max used to caution Simenon constantly, or so he told me, "Georges, Georges. This needs more editing." Simenon's answer was "I don't have time to re-work it. Take me less time to write another."
Al: There is a story about a man who came by to see Georges one day and his wife replied that he was unavailable. She said, "Georges is busy, he's in the middle of writing a novel and has asked that he not be disturbed until he is finished." The visitor said, "that's all right, I'll wait."
EC: My memory is that he turned out literally hundreds of novels (I've read only a handful, and found all of them flawed). Max had perversely told me the story because Simenon was so successful and Max was attempting to hurry me along on the novel I was writing. But I'm a firm believer in re-writing and never compromised on that.
On the other hand I always think of each last draft as just that, a draft. Even when a piece has been published I make corrections. I can't stop myself from trying to perfect my words, a direct holdover from when I was a publisher, I'd write three- or four-page letters, and then rewrite draft after draft. These were my words! They represented me! They had to be my surrogates.
Some go crazy with this need for perfection. That's when it's good to be arrogant. OK! This is good enough! This represents me as best it can for this moment.
Al: Let's speak of creativity, if we can call it that, and the difference between creativity in business and creativity in art.
EC: I see no difference. Perhaps it's the fungibility (a financial term) of creativity that enabled me to go so readily from business to literature. Look at the current business scandals and the creativity of those who cooked the books. Put aside for the moment the reality that cooking the books in large companies is a quotidian event, regardless of what the Administration and CNBC say about the basic honesty of entrepreneurs. Having been there, I know better. Put aside for the moment that it is money and ethics we're dealing with, and just regard it as a game, which in some measure it is. The creativity involved is on a par with the best in art, regardless of the fact that art is benign and cooking the books corrupt. That's why we gasp in delight as we watch some super-scam succeed in the movies. That's why we're on Leonardo DiCaprio's side as he matches wits with the FBI. He's creative! We wish we could be as creative! Well, of course we do.
Al: You might get an argument on that. Especially about their creativity. Clive James characterizes them as "clever but unimaginative."
EC: I agree. Some are clever but unimaginative. When we turn to the CEO of Tyco, for example, who hired the genius who made him billions that allowed him to buy $6,000 shower curtains on company money, we feel contempt, and see clearly his greed. It's why we feel ambivalent about Martha Stewart, who made something creative out of the shambles of her life after her divorce, but let her hubris gain ascendancy, which led her to cheat for so small an amount (although all businesses cheat legally and illegally every day, all day long). So, I find, for example, no difference between the genius of the ad writer who creates the Target ads and the genius of Brecht. They're on different sides politically (probably), but they both hit the viewer in the gut, which is the goal. Brecht wants to encourage his viewers toward distrusting the bourgeoisie, the ad writer wants viewers to spend money on his products.
A word on painting, with some trepidation -- I have no scholarly background in anything, including art. I'm an avid museum-goer, but that hardly qualifies me as an authority.
On the other hand there was a war-revulsion worldwide, after World War I, perceiving the war to have been about profits, rather than democracy, about land-grabs, raw material-grabs. That revulsion reflected itself in the work of the artists of the time. One needn't be a sociologist or fine-arts scholar to note that. The Dada movement was an outgrowth of this distrust of the bourgeoisie, the corporate world. Dada held them up to contempt and ridicule, was outrageous, shocking, as I say in my poem "Subversive Activities."
" . . . expressive as
Picabia and Arp, denying trains must run
exactly on a 4 foot 8 point five width gauge
when we have freight requiring a wider track.
Implicit in such heresy is scorn for number-crunchers
who insist that one plus one makes two,
when three or even five is where our dreams
transport us to."
At the risk then of sounding tendentious, or worse, like a mugwump, let me turn to my take on Pop (which my artist friend Hank Virgona -- hung in the Whitney -- calls "advertising art.") With him, I find that Pop is the opposite of Dada, that it's anti-political, not only accepting of the corporate world, but glorifying its products (and therefore its nexus, centrality, its bottom-lineness).
One could argue that this stance mirrors a social reality. That in the '20s and '30s we were distrustful of the corporate world and today we're all "investors." Is Pop then only "holding a mirror up to nature"? Perhaps that is my view -- that Pop is holding a mirror up to nature. If that is true, then as the world changes, as indeed it always has, Pop (already faded as a fad) will recede into a corner, having instructed us neither about art nor our lives, never having communicated something valuable to us, or unifying us in a more insightful understanding of our world.
Al: So art has to be political?
EC: Oh no. How dull that would be. But what we need is for artists to marry us to life, to each other, to ourselves, to our own minds and hearts. When we trivialize ourselves in writing, or trivialize the human condition, or glorify our dumbness, then we're on a less than fruitful tack. Even when love is the subject artists have the option to advance the audience, bring them something. An interesting movie, for example, is Last Tango in Paris, thought by many to be alienating and mostly about kinky sex. I found the movie profoundly emotional and informative because at its core it speaks of being alienated, the pain involved in that alienation (I'm no stranger to that pain), and also about the ensuing loneliness inherent in being alienated. The sex in the movie is the veriest parody of love, and even of sex, which parody, in my view, is intentional on the parts of the writer and director.
I try to speak to some of these notions in a prose poem called "Comrades."
Comrades
We come together on this page. It’s strange to meet like this because we have no history. There’s this decision to be made: my minstrel’s words will bore you, you’ll ignore me and I’m history, or they will needle, quirk, engage, and you’ll read on. We’re human, there’s the history we share, and where we intersect, not only on this page. I could sing songs of sex but that’s been done. There’s not a minstrel doesn’t sing an air of heady love and snatches. Why duplicate? Is bed the only thing that catches us? The maudlin heartbreak of regret? How sirens sang their song to us just off the bow when we were young and now, well look at us, all puffed and jowly, concentrated only on the Dow, and how, search as we may, we’ll come to no good end? Not even mildly satisfactory. Young Werther had a sentimental thrust like that but that was in a century gone by. I trust we’re over it. Not just humanity connects us through these words. We are a polity, the only polity we’ve got. Bombarded by an omnipresent sex and jollity, a canned inanity, a zapping of our minds till we have lost our sanity, the fact is you are reading and I’m writing this, which demonstrates we have survived, at least what has been thrown at us till now.
And do you catch my drift, as Mrs. Lovett said to Sweeney? We’ve met the enemy but they’re not us! They’re them. They make short shrift of us. We are their shepherd’s pie, their meat. We are their bread and butter and their treat. We laugh our heads off at our risk when they will grind them up, lobes, pan and all, to make some spicy bisque. If you’re still with me, as indeed you are, since willy-nilly, we’re in this together you and I, true whether you’re far right of me or left, less artful than I am or deft, you’ve learned the burden of this song to you -- we’ll have to navigate with just these flimsy oars, our words, absurd or wonderful, this song to you, and yours to me when you get down to it, our shared humanity, our recognition that these oars alone will take us to a reasonable state, whereas elected whores will take us nowhere but to someone’s plate. I’ll leave you then with this -- our blood can boil with politics as readily as with a kiss.
Al: Still, you speak mostly in political terms. Surely you didn't bring politics to your business. And surely there are artistic problems as well as political ones that concern you in your art?
EC: Early on I learned in business to render unto Caesar, etc. As a publisher and the CEO of a public company my concerns were those of the shareholders and the health and welfare of Plenum. That didn't mean I'd lost either my mind or my principles, or my ability and willingness to question social policy in appropriate venues. It comes down to appropriateness and pragmatism. Not every confrontation has to be a pitched battle to the death. As a writer I take my cue from Balzac ,who was a Royalist. Because he was a good writer he portrayed his characters without bias, but his works of course carried the flavor of his basic philosophy. Because I'm the person I am my writing will always be flavored with my social and political concerns.
I have several current artistic concerns with which I'm grappling. A primary concern is the very nature of the poetry enterprise. How did poetry become irrelevant when only a hundred years ago or less it was central to life, as well as to literature and thought?
Al: Is that a matter of politics?
EC: I don't know. I don't have either the skill or the knowledge to examine this question from an academic point of view, and haven't read nearly enough (although I read continually) to be able to say that I'm steeped in current poetry. But it seems clear to me, as a non-academic, that poets have managed to alienate the vast majority, despite poetry jams and open mikes. I have been aware of this decline for decades (perhaps it's all in the perception, since many believe that poetry is making headway). I feel this elision of poetry-as-a-central-force keenly, especially as a teacher and participant in workshops, where I watch the level of knowledge (of all that's gone before, including our history) go down the tube.
TV of course has zapped some of that knowledge. The foolish idea of abjuring rote learning zapped some of it. The dumbing down of the populace zapped some of it. And surely the marketplace has swamped some of it.
I read APR [American Poetry Review] as soon as each issue arrives. Not only do I understand little more than half of it, I am moved, truly moved, by a far smaller percentage, and then mostly moved intellectually, not viscerally. This is true of many, many other poetry journals that I read, in some of which I'm published. I'm their audience! If I'm not getting it, how many will? I'm engaged, truly engaged, by little that I read.
Of course I turn immediately to my own work as I've said, and ask myself, am I getting to my audience? In other words, I believe I'm doing what I'm doing better than I've ever done it, but is it enough? Am I engaging my audience? I had a short story, "A Charlotte Russe," published in Oasis, edited by Neal Storrs (the story is on my website). Neal and I correspond frequently and he is constantly scolding me for not being emotional enough. I try.
Who is my audience? I don't know. Journals aren't set up to relay fan mail. On occasion and by chance I'll learn that this story or that poem was received "favorably," but it's rare that I'm able to speak email-to-email or letter-to-letter with someone who has read my work. I do know firsthand from present and previous students that I've "changed their lives," that they see things in a whole new light. My hope is that I bring something like that to others, either in the lit journals that carry me or on my website or at my readings.
As you can see from "Comrades," I keep trying what for me are new modes of expression, internal rhyme, allusions, puns, in the hope that I can make the notions more immediate, compelling.
I ask myself why have poets gone down what I take to be an alienating, obscurantist, or at least less relevant road. Is it because they find the question "What is to be done?" unanswerable, or that they don't believe it is the right question for art to handle? Is it because questions are too harsh, too demanding, or is it because answers that lay out the bad news require action? It's much easier to eschew such questions and answers and go down an unpolitical road. After all, there are hundreds of things to write about, from scenery to sex, and, besides, the hesitant ones might ask, are we really going to solve the questions of this complex world?
Morphing from the political to the dense, formal, hermetic, are ways to escape, if escape we must, although Rukeyser says in her Life of Poetry, "poetry . . . is an art that lives in time, expressing, and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world . . . the capacity to make change in existing conditions."
When I turn from Rukeyser to Olson, let's say, I am struck by his conflicting approach, as indicated in his "The Present Is Prologue." " . . . the instant is its own interpretation . . . down with causation . . . you . . . the only reader and mover of the instant . . . you the cause." As I see it, he has thus split all of us into isolated clumps of cells, each person an island, not married to each other or humanity in a common enterprise as Rukeyser suggests, but married to the "instant." Nor is this a brand new thought -- my first reading of it was in Gide's Strait Is the Gate.
Thus, putting your energy into new forms that don't seem intended to communicate so much as solve some intellectual puzzle, can help the poet make believe that revolution's being made, and indeed, the Language poets consider themselves revolutionary. I wrote a poem about forms, called "A Cat."
A Cat
It seemed to me
an un-compelling art.
A cat was that
and nothing but a cat.
Not delicate
or calico or fat,
but just a sheline/
heline cat.
Language poets
Write like that
while Ginsberg howls
and Sexton screams
and Hall's bereaved,
believing poetry lives
in the gut, beyond
what we've perceived.
I've given you only a partial answer here. When I distance myself from form, I'm not decrying form. I've learned, for example, that form doesn't necessarily mean patterned rhyme, or specific meter, and the like. Form is the skeleton on which the flesh is draped. When I read a poem that moves me, I often re-read it, searching for the form because it seemed to have a form, and frequently I find just that, the skeleton, and then I know I'm in the hands of a master. I don't want to put a constraint on art, dictating that it must speak only from a political perspective, or actively oppose innovation and experimentation when I'm attempting to innovate and experiment constantly. As for subject matter, nothing's wrong with love poems, or poems about sorrow, the falling away. I write them often.
Mustang
Anne spends her evenings growing old and sleeps till ten,
but sleep has been her enemy this summer morn and here
she is awake, and it not even eight. The ducks expect
her crumbs at noon and she instructs her nurse to take
her place if her condition worsens and her doctor must be
summoned from his rounds of golf. She wanders to the margin
of her pond, dressed only in her dreams, and sights the geese
high-tailing it for coastal estuaries while her aged, flaccid self
is mired here below. The dying century hangs fire for her
in this beat of time. Her fury with her fingers, bladder, eyes,
with loss of power to control today, now interdicts as usual
the straw and bricks of memories with which she'd try
to build her recollections up, those distant echoes wound
about the Pole Star brilliance of the energy she once produced.
Oh pony, pony of my youth, carry me upon your back again,
she yearns, outrun these nightmare, sapless days and blaze
across the rubble of this barren space. Oh race me faster
to the far horizon line, or back to the beginning if you can.
Rap is poetry. It's uneven but sometimes we hear poetry at poetry jams that's inspirational, as is the DEF Poetry Jam, now playing on Broadway, which is a fascinating, exciting demonstration that poetry can come alive when it becomes relevant, whether its form is based on rap or on Pindar, whether we associate ourselves with the revolutionary Theatre of Alienation, á là Brecht, or the more formally traditional Hairy Ape by O'Neill (revolutionary enough for its subject matter in that time).
My bent, my leaning, my taste all lie in the political, but that's not all I write. Nor is it everybody's cup of tea. But my taste is what it is. It was content I was always looking for, not form. Tom McGrath was in the first poetry workshop I organized (but only for a short time, before he returned to North Dakota). His Longshot O'Leary, A Book of Practical Poesie is a treasure of mine, breaking every rule of poetry I thought I knew. I recall Bob Mende in that workshop, who was asked "Who do you write for?" He answered "The slobs on the block."
Even at the time I wondered whether that was a good enough answer. Yes, in my weltanschauung we want to be relevant. We want to communicate. We want "the slobs on the block" to be attracted to our writing, even to remember or memorize it. On the other hand we must communicate artfully. Failing that, we aren't doing art but have turned ourselves into polemicists or agitprop warriors. There is a place for that but it's not the art that I aspire to.
Al: Faulkner thought that while artists are trying to communicate, they are not necessarily trying to communicate with every sixth-grade idiot.
EC: Well, it seems to me, the audience (for Mende the "slobs on the block") for the art I aspire to must bring something to the table in my bring-your-own café. They have to come with some knowledge of what's gone before, some worldview that's thought out, something of an assembled aesthetics. If they come with nothing at all (as with most affairs) they will not gather or take away much of what is there. In like fashion when I critique, read, venture my opinion, it's with the hope that I'm bringing something to the table, that I'm not uninformed and ignorant, that I, myself, am not one of Mende's slobs on the block.
When I read Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin, Neruda, I am moved. When I read Fontamara by Silone (before World War II) I am galvanized. I believe that's because I do bring something to that reading. That's the thrill I'm after both in the reading and the writing. That's what I take away from what Bob Mende said.
The road chosen by the poets and troubadours I admire was the road to the greatest number of people, and it didn't and doesn't matter which road they chose -- some through what can be thought of as pop music (Springsteen for instance, Joan Baez, Dylan, James Brown). As the saying goes, "There are fifty roads to Rome." Not only mine. I have to remind myself of that many times a day.
Al: What about workshops? Have they helped you?
EC: I've found a workshop is only as valuable as the participants are insightful. For that, the participants must bring something to the table. The more they bring to the table from what they've read and experienced and written, the more valuable are their critiques.
There are two aspects to the workshop, the giving and the getting of the critique. Both are equally important. Not unexpectedly, the best writers give the best critiques. As to the process -- in the best-run workshops the author reads, then listens to the critiques, and takes notes without saying a word (after all, what he/she had to say is on the page). At the end of the critique the author is called upon to comment on the critique or amplify. I usually say "Thank you." Then I go home and rewrite. There's never been a time when the critique I've received has not helped me in the rewrite. In the rewriting process I toss what I don't find applicable or valuable in the notes I've taken. Then I rework where the critique has demonstrated the need to do so.
My current experience as a teacher is in a prose workshop for youngsters ten to fifteen (where we do allow poetry to be read occasionally). This workshop has been of enormous value to me, quite aside from being fun, and involving, and vital. By the time the participants get to the last phases of the workshop experience, they are old pros, able to go to the heart of the piece's strengths and weaknesses, which they can articulate precisely. Five of my students have had stories published in nationally-circulated lit magazines; one has become a sculptor working in scrap metal, one goes to Bard in a new hybrid course which takes the young student directly into the college experience, one was accepted in the fiction course given by Brown last summer, and one was accepted in the summer film-writing and directing course at Tisch [Tisch School of the Arts, New York University]. What I try to inculcate, more than anything else (because they all start smart and talented), are those attributes that have been useful to me, such as diligence, seriousness, and consciousness of the world around us and the value of words and art.
Al: What can ten or eleven-year-olds, as you put it, bring to the table?
EC: The answer underlines my constant amazement and excitement with teaching. I feel I've already lived several lives, but if I had the chance to live others, then in one I would want to be a teacher with a more wide-flung mandate, because I find it so thrilling and rewarding. In yet another life I'd want to study creativity and the cognitive process. How do we know what we know?
When I returned from service overseas at the end of 1945, I tried to decide if I dared to write full-time. I was already thirty years old, and here were these two kid writers, Mailer and Capote, with prodigious talents, not more than twenty. How could I compete with that or live up to it? How did they know what they knew? I surely didn't. Where on earth had they got it from? Was it possible that I could learn it? Later, I was fortunate enough to be in a workshop with Doris Lessing, who had recently immigrated to England (where I was then living) from South Africa, and who read us a story, later to appear in her collection The Grass Is Singing. All one could do was gasp! She looked so young (although she had led a very stormy and adventurous life already). How did she know all that?
A few years ago I had an identical experience in my own workshop with one very talented student who, at fourteen/fifteen, had already developed her own unique voice. And there was her story, her fiction, read to this rapt audience of smart kids, and there was I, with tears streaming down my face! How had she done that!? How did she know? My conclusion is that it's probable we all know much more than we think we know. The problem is one of access. Some of us can tap into our knowledge more readily than others. If I had time I'd pursue that notion, but I've got too much on my plate as things stand.
Al: Speaking of having too much on your plate, how did you feel, starting from scratch, as it were, at seventy-five? Did you consider your age?
EC: That's a very good question. The answer is no. Oh I curse often enough when I can't do this or that, or a body part doesn't work the way it once did. But I'm too occupied with the now, rather than either the hereafter or growing maudlin over departed years and opportunities, or feeling sorry for myself. In a short story of mine ("The Work Goes On," published in Eureka, Sept. 1999), one character (modeled on Max Becker) says, "You've seen the victims of chemotherapy looking to scrape nine days more out of the bowl? I refuse. I've lived a life."
By good fortune I suffer from no life-threatening diseases, but growing old is not easy for anyone. I explore this notion further in a poem "Being in the Right Place," the burden of which is that we're always in the right place, that where we are and what we're doing is exactly right (I believe it's also a Zen notion) if our mind is set properly and we can adjust to it and enjoy it as much as may be appropriate.
Al: The stoic dictum that "everything is just as it ought to be."
EC: I don't have much time (and never did) for "coulda, woulda, shoulda," and thus have a not large percentage of regrets (considering my long life) and no thought whatever of death with a large or a small D. I'll die at some point, of course. All living creatures, things, are innately obsolescent, dying as they live. I might cede a word of regret about my many failings, true; my arrogance in particular, which leads me too often to didacticism rather than emotionality, and for the huge lacunae in my learning, knowledge. But who hasn't such regrets -- if not these, others? I've very recently written a poem about my connectedness and my age called "Lightly Packed."
Lightly Packed
When I walk from my house in still, fresh snow
out to my vineyard and my woods, I'm self-directed,
cane and all. I'm open to the world, the all of it.
My tracks are clear as crystal and connect my dots,
two infirm feet, the cane for exclamation point.
Anyone can follow them, my steps; anyone at all.
Snow sees to it my tracks are open, leading me to
other lives, as well as theirs to mine. Follow them,
my footsteps. Expect to find my fire going and your
welcome in my house, my arms, or mid my vines.
Al: What about your exploration of the notions surrounding creativity?
EC: I think it is openness which lies at the very center of our art. It's as though we are ready to be used, much as a religious person would feel if he/she had a "calling." As artists we bring informed passion, talent, ourselves. That's probably why (in my opinion) the artist is at the heart of the collective unconscious, which in turn is why art is so vital (as with the great artists of the Altamira caves, driven to communicate with their fellow humans) forcing us to bring all of our powers of observation and inventiveness to the task of communication. I always think of Van Gogh as a shaman of some kind, offering himself, like the caveman artists. I wrote a poem to him.
A Palette Knife
Out of loathing for himself, his flesh, his awkward,
schizophrenic way, an outcast, Vincent cast an ear away.
Beatified with arrows of disdain, tortured by the poverty
of miners he could not support, new canvas unaffordable
so old re-used, since no one bought the ones he painted on,
on fire with his need to testify, declare, and yearning
for the voice of any one of us at all to say OK, you're
understood, not tucked away like some retarded child
we've hidden in the basements of our shame, he set himself
aflame with oil to be a beacon for the Hand of God, Who
he implored to send him just a pair of shoes, a bed, a mirror
to depict his own red head, since models were so hard to find
and cost too much. A single flinging of some stars would do.
If we're up to the task I've mooted in that poem, we bring mystery and reality, the glue that binds us all together, and the awareness of self. Self, both as unique, and yet part of the Everyone.
This interview was published in River King (Vol. IX, No. II, Autumn-Winter 2003).
back to top
|
