Anny Ballardini has transcribed a short interview she did with me, the night before she headed back to Italy. At the Poets' Corner, here. Straight from the old paint's mouth, not doctored up.

We were on this patio in the backyard, it was getting dark, & we were waiting for people to show up for the farewell party.

"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world."

I've never been too interested in Kent Johnson's obsession, the problematic nature of authorship. But reading through the latter part of his interview in Vert makes me wonder if there's a connection between his idee fixe & the version of negative capability[?] I wrote about earlier here - the idea that the emotional ground of a poem is where both author & audience connect, and that this emotional area is outside the author's control. (On some level, is every poem written by Anonymous, then? That's stretching it. But neither is "identity" in a simple identifiable state at the moment of composition.)

This might also have some relation to the notion of sincerity which Kent also discusses. Edwin Honig was always concerned with distinguishing between the authentic poem and rhetoric : he would often slash away at whole stanzas of others' poems, saying "you don't need this, it's just rhetoric". Perhaps what he was getting at was the difference between authentic emotion in poetry & the rhetorical manipulation of a phantom emotion. (Honig also once proposed an anthology made up entirely of poems by Anonymous. Not incidentally is he one of the leading Pessoa scholars.)

Kent Johnson interview. Expand your mind.

Feeling a cold breeze blowing from blogland since my stance on the Houlihan brouhaha. The world is as small as the people in it. Though I was harsher than I should have been on Fence (every magazine has its mix of good & not-so-good) & on the poem Houlihan chose from it (still, sans the sarcasm, I think my evaluation of it was about right).

Josh Corey has some interesting musings on Atlantean communityhood. I am far more sceptical than he is. If membership in the true a-g requires some non-aesthetic political mutual understanding or allegiance (as per Steve Evans), that's fine, if you want to be political; but it's not worth selling out your poetry for it.

The poet, in my view, is working with an originary, primordial, anarchically free mode of speech, the special aptitude of which is to absorb & transmute everything (political, social, religious, aesthetic) that comes within its range. I'm not saying it transmutes all these things in reality : I'm saying that within its own sphere it remakes them into something else (poetry). The values of poetry that remain through time & historical change are centered in this originality : we don't value Whitman or Dickinson or WC Williams or Crane or Pound or Stevens or etc., for their political opinions or social commitments, but for the original force of their poetry, which synthesizes all the various social & ideological & intellectual & emotional elements into something rich & strange.

I've said it again & again & again & again (see especially the interview with Kent in Jacket #10). . the ideals & commitments of various social & political communities may be very noble & fine, but when they try to use these values & ideological formations to make claims on poetry, they exude, as Mandelstam put it, "the unclean goat-smell of the enemies of the Word."

[added later:] However, the notion of poetry cleansed isolated idealized iconized - as if it were a living entity and not a human creation - only sterilizes the notion of poetry & dehumanizes its cult-worshippers. What's the answer to that? The poet, as poet, expresses human feeling & thought & commitments & values through & within poetry; this process cannot be judged, channeled, manipulated, massaged, promoted, or controlled by anyone or anything outside it, without corrupting it & losing its essence. (Pantaloons, indirectly, reminded me of this.)

I think the remarks in previous blog post (on Mandelstam's Redemption/free-play symbiosis) run parallel to some of WH Auden's discoursing. Also, I think the following excerpt from a poem titled "One Evening (Early Spring)" (which appeared in the Jacket interview) illustrates some of Paul Lake's comments on fractal-recursive order in poetry:

         7

  
         Around the synagogue in the evening light
 the houses cluster in their modest drab integrity.
 Walking through their vocations (under blight
 of a voracious contracting whirlpool city)
 the humble continue. . . gathering on holiday
 outside the bronze double doors of their temples.
 The writer (an unnoticed bystander) crumples
 a scrap of crosshatched paper and throws it away.

  
         And the wind lifts a corner of the scribbled page,
 not yet finished with the end of the universe.
 Over the brilliant dome a small cloud of rage
 disguises the sun – cries:  I will immerse
 in tears – I will burn with fire – I will erase. . .
 (– pretending once more deep within heaven
 not only to destroy all creation and then
 again rebuild the whole cracked edifice

  
         but to do all this in the manner of a scribe
 with one hand at his aching brow and one eye
 peering at a mossbound, moldy parchment –)
 and Lord, we have deserved your diatribe.
 The parched earth groans for a comet's finality.
 Your mortified heart stretches through space and
 swelling spreads (ubiquitous) the fiery ointment
 of your love, of your forgiveness, of your peace.


      
                                                3.26.97

Ron Silliman's give and take with Rodney Koeneke on the question of the unconscious & religion in contemporary poetry. Some thoughts from me on this can be found in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket.

There is more table talk about Mandelstam, long poems, and the HG scheme of things in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket issue #10. My only regret about that interview is that I was a little contemptuous (& uninformed) about the New Formalists (not that I will ever be a New Formalist).