This is not an oral history of The Poetry Project, for instance, though a great deal of information that might qualify as
anecdotal history of The Project and its numerous social and artistic contexts
can be found within. It’s not a scholarly book or a book “about” poetry, though
one may find out a great deal about poetry as a living art form flowing through
the costume of each interview. It is an anthology of a type, and many readers
will naturally jump around the book while reading it, but the book is also a
collection of stories filtered through the form of the interview into one
longer story made of overlapping circles. As such, it will reward readers who
take on the experience of reading it from beginning to end. Characters appear,
recede, and pop up again in surprising places. Jobs, death, illness, war, and
money problems come up as frequently as references to the arts, and the
chronological structure of the book belies a sense of time that often reaches
back to the 1960s and earlier, while examining the future from the perspective
of that particular day a conversation is taking place. It is not a linear
chronicle of an era, but it is a chronicle nonetheless, an assemblage verging
on accidental chorus that presents ideas and discussion about poetry in the
charged words of the poets, not in unreadable academic speak, and not in
insulated literary terms divorced from the broader ground of the world and its
inexhaustible complexities. Its necessity is bound up with the casual intensity
of its invitation: you won’t find many people who speak on and for poetry, or
anything else for that matter, in such high and ordinary terms. The ride is for
anyone to take. (Anselm Berrigan, “INTRODUCTION”)
Produced
to “coincide with the fiftieth anniversary season of The Poetry Project at St.
Mark’s Church” in New York City, is the hefty anthology WHAT IS POETRY? (JUST KIDDING, I KNOW YOU KNOW): INTERVIEWS FROM THE POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER (1983 – 2009), edited by Anselm Berrigan (Seattle
WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2017). As Berrigan writes in his introduction, the
series was originally founded “in 1966 out of the need for a stable ongoing
reading series/gathering point/community center for the overlapping circles of
poets in downtown NYC. Those circles included and came to include poets
variously associated with the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain,
Umbra, Language writing, and the Nuyoricans—associations which are variously
highlighted, fleshed out, made ambiguous, undermined and otherwise reformed in
the interviews found herein. In one sense, these groups and their outliers are
a source-in-common for the poets and artists this book casts its light upon.
But The Poetry Project has always been a site of challenge and respite for
individual poets who refuse to take conventional paths, who want live
experience with fresh material right now, and who, as Ted Greenwald puts it in
his conversation with Arlo Quint, ‘want the work out front.’ That’s the ethos.”
7:44 PM 7/29/96 Dear Barbara, …Writing in
fragments seems to be a very contemporary response to the postmodern
distraction, the channel-surfing attention span, our fractured sense of time,
on the one hand. People I know, poets and academics, are writing literally on
the fly, taking their laptops aboard airplanes. That’s what we share with the
business passenger working on a spreadsheet or annual report. On the other
hand, when I think of poetry in fragments, I also think of Sappho, whose work
comes to us, like classic Greek art and architecture, as enigmatic shards and
evocative ruins. Given the human capacity to destroy civilization “with the
touch of a button” the same way we microwave lean cuisine, ancient ruins stand
as a figure for the obliteration of ourselves and our own culture. We imagine
that some extraterrestrial archaeologists might someday examine our fragments,
and wonder what manner of beings we were. In some contemporary work, including
my own, the artist is engaged in a kind of archaeology of the detritus of
consumer culture, the artifacts of the electronic age. That’s why I immediately
recognized Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Houses, in Detroit, as visual art
equivalent of what I was trying to do in Muse
& Drudge. David Hammons has a similar approach to recycled resources.
I’m also inspired by the work of Leonardo Drew, which is more abstract, but
still carries the emotional charge of abandoned and reclaimed materials. (“An
Interview With Harryette Mullen,” by Barbara Henning; October/November 1996,
No. 162)
As
Berrigan writes, the interviews collected in this volume were originally done
for publication in The Poetry Project Newsletter, with a collected thirty-eight interviews that range in dates
from 1983 to 2010, conducted with poets (some who are included here more than
once) including Red Grooms, Paul Schmidt, Bernadette Mayer, Allen Ginsberg and
Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel R. Delany,
Renee Gladman, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Larry Fagin, Tina Darragh, Edwin
Torres, Brenda Coultas, Will Alexander, Ron Padgett, Ted Greenwald, Eileen
Myles and Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers. As fascinating as the interviews are
in the collection, editor Berrigan presents a whole array of information and
insights on The Poetry Project in his introduction, including the suggestion
that perhaps a proper history of their five decades-plus might be worth someone
finally putting together. There are ways in which the interviews, collected
here as they are, do present a portrait of the ongoing activity and environment
of The Poetry Project, one that comes with friendships, apprenticeships, arguments
and pitched battles, all while attempting to do the work of writing and
continue a writing life. This is an enormous volume, and one that should already
be seen as enormously valuable in terms of both history and craft, and
showcasing the value of The Poetry Project itself, for hosting, assisting and developing
a wide array of writing and writers. And, if nothing else, this volume should
point readers into understanding just how important it might be to start
reading the contemporary issues of The
Poetry Project Newsletter, to keep up with what else is happening.
Lisa Jarnot: I want to talk to you about Allen
Ginsberg. Partly, what was your relationship with Allen like?
Ed Sanders: I was a senior at high school and
read Howl and I bought Howl actually at the University of
Missouri Bookstore on a fraternity weekend. And it seemed like, as a young man,
about everything I’d been looking for in terms of a model for writing poetry
and combining poetry with your personal life in a way I thought would be
appropriate, although I was living in the Midwest, in a ‘50s type all-American
environment. Then I moved to New York later and saw him from afar. I attended
poetry readings at places like the Gaslight on MacDougal Street or the Living
Theater on 14th Street. I saw him read as I did other poets—Edward Dahlberg,
Kerouac, Corso; I saw Frank O’Hara read. So wherever I could go to find poets
that I admired to watch them read I went, but I never considered introducing
myself or trying to be a part of it; I was just a witness. And I was going to
New York University trying to study languages so I didn’t really meet Allen
until 1963 when he came back from a long stay in India and Japan and Cambodia,
Viet Nam, and other places—he went to the Vancouver Poetry Festival—and then he
came back. And before that I had corresponded with him. I sent him Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts in
India and he liked it and sent me this really important poem, “The Change,”
where he kind of changed spiritual directions and came to terms with his body
on atrain in Japan after visiting Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder on the way back
to Vancouver. So anyway, from 1963 on, when I formally met him, and he took me
to a party at Robert and Mary Frank’s house, I began hanging out with him any
time we were around in the same area until he died 34 years later. We had many,
many capers and adventures and he called all the time and we saw each other now
and then. A number of people could say the same thing. He was part of my life,
and part of my family’s life. He was part of the household. He gave us advice,
a lot of advice. And you know, he’d give advice on what kind of furniture to
have in your kitchen; he was very much a teacher. (“An Interview with Ed Sanders,”
by Lisa Jarnot; October/November 1997, No. 166)
The
book does make me wonder if it might be worth putting some of the other
interviews online, a la The Paris Review,
for the sake of a wider readership and even scholarship. Given there are more
than two hundred interviews (at least) to date, what else is out there worth
reading?
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