-->
*
excerpt
from:
gustave
morin's first interview / questions by Renee Tomsich for UPFRONT magazine, may
2003
2.
What were your artistic influences/inspirations in making the book?.
i
don't like this question, but i'll try and answer it. the biggest influence on
my work is the life that i lead. all my work comes out of my life, first and
foremost. that is primary. the other artists and writers i like i can list, but
they don't necessarily have any bearing on this book, or my work in general, so
that won't really be helpful. as i mentioned, a penny dreadful is a collection
of concrete poetry. no one in the world even knows what concrete poetry is, so
it would be futile for me to name some of the writers i like that have also
mined this vein. (and i'm not trying to be vague, i'm simply keeping in mind
the readership of UPFRONT magazine...)
since i was a kid i've had a love / hate relationship with comics.
isimilarly have a love / hate relationship to the cinema. i read everything:
poets, novelists, philosophers, social-scientists, theorists, art history, the
pulps -- really, a little bit of everything. some of my favorite global
intelligences are: jwcurry, d.a. levy, f.a.nettelbeck, Bern Porter, Wallace
Berman, Roland Topor, E.M.Cioran, Willard S. Bain, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Werner Herzog, Ian
Curtis, F.W.Nietzsche, Joseph Cornell, Mark Laba, Gordon Matta-Clarke, Marcel
Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, Bill Knott, diter rot, ray johnson, Sidney Simes, Jess
Collins, Gustave Verbeek, Ed Ruscha, Max Ernst, Goya, Ernest Buckler jr.,
Alfred Jarry, B.S. Johnson, William S.Burroughs, e.e.cummings, Northrope Frye,
Thorstein Veblen, Cornell Woolrich, Ambrose Bierce, Heraclitus and Diogenes,
just off the top of my head. this list could easily go on and on until there were
2000 names on it. (& people tell me constantly that i don't like anything!)
_____
between
artaud
and
rot
lies
knott
what
a spot
where can I go
to
escape that lot
*
*
the
marathon poetry workshop: an idea whose time has passed (presumably)
*
it
was in the 1970s I think that the concept of marathon group therapy sessions
was most popular . . . the therapy group would stay together in a house for a
weekend, during each day of which they would engage in a group session that
lasted 14 to 16 hours straight (including meals), and breaking only for an
8-hour sleep period . . . the sustained time and focus (and perhaps especially
the stress and exhaustion) generated by these nonstop marathon therapy sessions
would lead, supposedly, theoretically, to self-discoveries and psychological
insights not achievable in the group's normal regular meetings . . .
so:
the idea was to do the same thing with a poetry workshop group . . . imagine a
workshop that goes on for 15-16 hours straight without a break, 3 days in a
row: 45 hours of poetry workshop in one weekend . . . many of you reading this
probably know the dramas and traumas of meeting for two hours once or twice a
week stretched out over a semester (even most private seminars or peergroups
are usually held only once a week) . . . what if you compressed all of that
workshop time into a 3-4-5 days intensive?
what breakthroughs or breakdowns, what inscapes or outscrapes, what
energies and enigmas might ensue . . .
—maybe it would have worked better with a peergroup, where
"leadership" rotates . . .
i
wonder if group therapy is ever practiced in a marathon format anymore; the
idea seems such an archaism from the 1960-70s, like living in communes . . .
*
*
Bei Dao in English translation reads to me like the poems I've tried and failed to write all my life—
Here's one as transed by Bonnie S. McDougall and Chen Maiping:
THE COLLECTION
The window makes a frame for the sky
the sky's in my collection
A black rubber mountain range
the century's evening
people who name stars can hear
the bugle sobbing
the metal's difficult breathing
a metal infant is born
inside earth's fence
on the open book of mankind
a peasant's hut curses loudly to the fields
the fan falls ill
the wind which interrogates the seasons drowns in the sea
shifting the thousands of lanterns which
light the way for the souls of the dead
The window makes a frame for me
I'm in the sky's collection
*
*
Upcoming at The Poetry Project: our spring 2012 workshop descriptions have been posted and are listed below. Spring workshops will be lead by Susan Mills, Will Edmiston, Matvei Yankelevich and Ariana Reines.
Oppression and Redemption Songs – Ariana Reines
TUESDAYS / 5 SESSIONS / BEGINS MARCH 20 (REGISTER)
We are going to write poems whose origins are sites of trauma, catastrophe, loss, forsakenness, terror, and sorrow. That means writing poems that may speak of enormities like war or geological catastrophe, or even a sense of nameless and mute malaise, the tiniest most inexpressible lack, the windiest most overwhelming horror-- but we will do so by proceeding from our ownmost trauma zones, and we must be both specific and precise with ourselves. That is the rule. This does not mean that the poems we write must be lyric or romantic or even expressionistic poems, necessarily-- on the contrary, we will experiment rigorously with the rapture of structure and form, and are free to make writings that do not exclude even the most highly refined procedures upon and within the plasticity of the word. We are free even to write ecstatically. But the rule is that we begin where it hurts. This is how poetry becomes the substance of transformation, a force whose origin's truth-- an aporia-- a misery-- becomes, when we write, the motor of a power that really can defy the world-- as it always has. This is what poetry is for. Even if redemption, in the end, can only be a song, well, a song is a lot, and a song can do it. We can do it too. We will write together, nourished on readings from The Book of Job, Louise Labe, Eileen Myles, Raul Zurita, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomaz Salamun, John Donne, John Clare, John Keats, William Blake, Amiri Baraka, kari edwards, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Bill Knott, Georges Bataille, Claudia Rankine, Osip Mandelstam, Antonin Artaud, Huey P. Newton, Paul Celan, Walt Whitman, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson, Bob Marley, Shakespeare.
/
Maybe it's some other Bill Knott. Or a misprint. In any case, I doubt my name has ever before appeared on a list between Ginsberg and Bataille.
"[T]rauma, catastrophe, loss, forsakenness, terror, and sorrow" . . . hunh?—but my poems are so silly and goofy!—for example,
Craig Morgan Teicher in Publishers Weekly when he wants to insult Chelsey Minnis concludes his review by tarring her with me:
"Petulant, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as poetry at all, though some readers — fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his silliest — may find much to like."
/
My poetry—which, according to Teicher, doesn't even qualify as poetry—can't be taken seriously.
(Seriously.)
///
från Lyrikvännen 2/72:
Död
Innan jag somnar lägger jag händerna i kors på bröstet.
De ska lägga mina händer så.
Det kommer att se ut som om jag flög in i mig själv.
*
Sömn
Vi stryker längs den andra, osynliga månen.
Dess grottor kommer fram och hämtar in oss.
*
*
All these rock'n'rollers propped up by publicists and the media with the honorific title of "poet":
how many times have you read or heard, 'Oh yeah, he/she's not just a singer-songwriter, he/she's a real poet.'
Oh yeah, well make Joni Dylan and all those other supposed "poets" actually live on the monthly average paycheck budget of even the most successful poem-writing poet,
and see how how many days before they start screaming
"No, no! I'm not a poet, I'm a popstar! Gimme back my limo! Bring back my maid chauffeur bodyguard cook! where's my PA?!"
//
