Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions. Edited by Ben Lerner, with an introduction by Aaron Kunin

I never choose poetry—still haven’t. I’ve always had the idea that if I ever write anything really good, it will probably be prose. Some prose or other. (Actually, I must admit, one of the few genres I’ve never taken seriously is the interview.)

            Something, by the way, that I’ve never understood: for every person who wants to write poems, there seem to be a hundred who want to be a poet. In the sixties, you know, it was a widespread notion that you didn’t have to write poems to be a poet, that in fact the “purest” poets wrote nothing at all. Perhaps it’s a peculiarity of mine that I can see wanting to do something (or make or have something) but I can’t quite fathom wanting to be something. (Also, I must say, purity’s not a priority of mine. The determination to will one thing leads to the ridiculous idea that there is only one thing.)

            I do intend to write more. Poems, or whatever. I’ve written less theatre than other things—probably what I would like to do most immediately, along with more songs. (Keith Waldrop, “Real Shadows: Interview,” conducted by Peter Gizzi)

I hadn’t even heard it was coming, so was floored to receive a review copy of Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions, edited by Ben Lerner, with an introduction by Aaron Kunin (Wave Books, 2019), a hefty and stunning collection that acknowledges both Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop as a creative duo, in their separate and combined selves as writers, editors, translators, supporters, instigators and publishers. At nearly four hundred pages, the book includes bibliographies for each of them, a complete bibliography of their small literary press Burning Deck (1961-2017), their introductions to the first two anthologies celebrating Burning Deck anniversaries (the first twenty years and the second twenty years), and, whether in full or excerpted, numerous interviews, sketches, notes and hefty amounts of reprints of long out-of-print works by both Rosmarie and Keith, including their collaborative memoir-dos-a-dos Cesi nest pas Keith / Cesi n’est pas Rosmarie (Burning Deck, 2002), a work I had long been interested in, and wanting to get my hands upon:

            IN FEBRUARY 1943,

I burrowed into a heap of potatoes as the ground shook. People prayed. When we climbed out of the cellar there were no streets, no rows of houses. Instead: craters, heaps of rubble, mortar, stones, walls broken off, a craggy desert, air thick with dust. A few houses were left standing. They seemed out of place, incongruous with their insistence on boundaries, definite lines. Mother hurried me up to our apartment and tried to patch the shattered windows. Father came back late from digging up bodies.

It was the first drastic change of my world. A second followed in 1945, a not exactly Nietzschean revaluation of all values. “Our leader” turned into “the criminal,” “the enemy” into “Amis,” “surrender” into “liberation.” This went deeper. And took years to understand.

I have always thought of poetry as a way of building a world. The world is certainly not a given, even if it occupies more and more of the sky. Building a counter-world, not better, but other.

After this bombing, nobody would consider taking shelter in a cellar. Rather catch it in the open and a quick death. Rather jump on bicycles at the first alert and make for the woods. Or flat in the ditches as the planes came roaring.

School stopped. We kids ran wild. The ruins became our castles. With an undercurrent of terror that we might find real bodies in our imagined dungeons. (Rosmarie Waldrop)

I don’t think I could overstate how important this book is, or how much more time I’ll require to fully absorb the massive amounts of writing, thinking and living lovingly curated into a volume that must have taken a great deal of time to put together. The wide-ranging volume of the collection articulates the considerable effect the two of them have had on American poetry, from their individual creative and critical writings, their translation work and years of active mentoring, even before the incredible amount of editing and publishing work, most of which was centred around their literary publishing house, Burning Deck, one of the most important American smaller literary presses of the past half-century. Part of what made their press, and their work as well, unique, was for the connections they made to contemporary writing from other countries, refusing to remain exclusively within the American bubble, but translating and writing on multiple writers from across the Atlantic, including Ferdinand Alquié, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, Edmond Jabès, Dominique Fourcade, Pascal Quignard, Xue Di, Jean Grosjean, René Crevel, Paol Keineg, André Breton, Pierre Reverdy, Esther Tellermann, Marie Borel, Charles Baudelaire, Peter Weiss, Alain Veinstein, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Emmanuel Hocquard, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Peter Waterhouse, Gerhard Rühm, Elfriede Czurda, Farhad Showghi and Jean Daive. While the Waldrops certainly didn’t invent literary translation, they may have perfected it through a thoroughly-engaged conversation between literary cultures, and the enormous amount of work they did in this direction most likely (I say, speculating, as my overall awareness of foreign translations of poetry entering the United States isn’t as sharp as it could be, to speak on such a thing) was an incredibly important bridge between American writing and other parts of the world. “A translation happens at a particular time,” Keith Waldrop wrote, in his February 2002 essay “Translation as Collaboration,” “in a particular place, and through a particular agency—a scholar, a writer, a committee … The work that then appears is, or hopes or pretends to be, the double of a previous work in a different language. In this respect it may be more or less successful. But it is also, and importantly, a work of its own time.” A bit further in the essay, he writes:

My thesis is so obvious, I hate to come out with it directly. But here it is: the translator is a collaborator, not exactly with an author, living or dead, but with a text. Thus there are two phases any translator must go through: first to read something, then to write something.

My entry point for such a collection comes from my appreciation and knowledge of Rosemarie Waldrop’s work, as her work has been a touchstone for my own for at least fifteen years [see my review of her latest here; see the chapbook I produced of hers here]; despite this, I know a great deal less about Keith’s output, and have but a scant contemporary overview of what Burning Deck has accomplished, something I’m aware of abstractly, and through review copies received over the past decade or so. What is glorious to come to realize, in a deeper sense, is not only those elements of the two as individual writers (I am appreciating the opportunity to get a far better sense of Keith Waldrop as a writer), but Rosmarie and Keith as a creative unit, one that seems to have been, for a very long time now, an enviable standard. Early in his generous introduction, Aaron Kunin writes:

            At the same time they are the most creative people I know. Robert Creeley called them “the wonderful, regenerating Waldrops.” That word regenerating is good. Look at the masterpieces of collage they have generated—or regenerated, if you think of collage as a process of turning books into other books. Look at the books in other languages that they have regenerated by translating them into English.

            Part of what’s inspiring about them is their sheer productivity. They have written a lot, translated a lot. They also publish Burning Deck books; Keith makes visual art. they are always reinventing themselves, always trying something new, always writing, always curious about what other people are writing.

            Isn’t that the best way of being an artist? When you hear them talking in the interviews collected in this book, you notice that they generate still more than they manage to get on paper. There seems to be no time when they are not proposing solutions to some technical problem of writing poetry. Everything they say could be a poem.

Lissa McLaughlin, Quit

it is astonishing each morning that we wake up sane

waiting to go in is like waiting for a job

interview hope you don’t smell

sorely assaulted

            and you with your tiny stink

The powerful and seemingly quickly-sketched poems that make up Madison, Wisconsin poet, fiction writer and clinical art therapist Lissa McLaughlin’s latest poetry collection, Quit (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2015), emerge from her work as a “grief worker at a hospice.” Her deceptively-small book, which shares elements of the daily journal (whether personal or professional), packs quite a punch, writing on grief, death, loss, possibility and the ordinary matters and frustrations, within all of this, of daily work. So much of the emotion of these poems live on the surface of the skin, packing an enormous amount into small spaces. The poem “the creation of death panels,” for example, opens: “my mother was named after a suicide                        so / why blame her // for hating a name like herself // or the belief circulating / freely in her family that nothing // kills like disgrace [.]”

why didn’t you send for me sooner

shakes her head at

medicine

            misgivings in a cup

lift your head to

            wet your armpit

In McLaughlin’s poems, life and death is daily but never rendered mundane, and her poems turn quickly from rushed observance to meditative elegy to daily report, often in the same breath. Given the nature of the work, even the smallest moment can become urgent, and her poems articulate that urgency, such as the poem “why didn’t you send for me sooner,” or “remember, gasping is not breathing.” There is an intriguing element of the poems in Quit that is shared with “work poetry,” a term coined and championed by Tom Wayman in the 1970s, but the collection is far more reminiscent of Ottawa writer Andrew Steinmetz’s memoir Wardlife: The apprenticeship of a young writer as a hospital clerk (Vehicule Press, 1998), a collection of short, sharp prose vignettes chronicling his time in the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department of a Montreal hospital. As McLaughlin is quoted on the press release for Quit:

“Writing Quit took some athleticism,” the author says, “Fleeing the job I loved I needed to move language, and fast. First raw discharge, then a kind of essay (quoting Buddhist texts; clinical reports; histories of Bedlam, and research into the prevalence of personality disorders in business executives), Quit alternately tensed up and softened. Footnotes disappeared. Humor tried to enter. Lines reincarnated. Ultimately, the distinctions between patient and healer, worker and boss folded up under the recognition that the dying remind us of ourselves. If we can just let life digest us, we might finally taste joy.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kristin P. Bradshaw

Kristin P. Bradshaw is a language-based writer and artist who works with poetry, collage, photography and soundscapes. Her current critical inquiries converge around fragmentation, uses of language in art, and the tension between immediate and emergent encounters with texts (including artworks, performances) and experiences, and the ways that historical, rhythmic, spoken and visual aspects of the English language are deployed in contemporary poetic writing. Her poems have appeared in journals such as the New Orleans Review, New American Poetry, Chase Park, and No: a Journal of the Arts, and a letterpress chapbook and audio CD, “The Difficult Nature of Contemplation,” is forthcoming from Tiger Food Press/Percival House. She holds an MFA from Brown University, an MA in Religion from Yale Divinity School, and now teaches in the Liberal Arts department at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Burning Deck Press released her first book, Apologies, in October 2014.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book took over fifteen years to get out into the world (as a book), and over that time, I lived in Providence, New Haven, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. After graduate school, I struggled to find decent work and to get much traction. I wrote a good bit, put together flimsy copies of inkjet printed chapbooks. Later I turned to recording sounds, then photography. I listened to a lot of music (or maybe a lot of the same music over and over again), which is something that hasn’t really changed in my daily life. Right now, some of my most recent work includes more “apologies.” And then apart from “poetry” in book form, I have a separate set of visually based works that meditate on the iterative process of seeing, writing, and thinking. It feels different in that I can work with smaller chunks of text, and therefore I don’t have to wait while my work accumulates into a full series. Technically, I also end up using different computer programs for design purposes, and different machinery (letterpress) in order to fully actualize the work (poem-image-print).

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My cousin is an avid reader, and he gave me a number of books when I was a pre-teen.  One was an anthology that covered poetry in English generally (so Dickinson, Shakespeare, Milton, but also Henry King and James Wright), and the other covered contemporary American poetry including a Denise Levertov poem that I adored. While I read novels, essays, plays and history texts throughout high school, I returned to these anthologies often.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I’m not sure it takes all that long to start a project, but it seems to take forever to finish. Of course, this is not the case for short individual lyric or aphoristic pieces, which come rather quickly and decisively, but for the pieces that make up a series the process seems rather protracted. I used to work more from notes (usually in a notebook and from scraps of paper, envelopes, etc.) and compose on a manual typewriter. Now I compose mostly on a computer.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem can begin with a phrase or word, just a fragment of something, or it can begin with a full line. I usually work with the idea of a book or series in mind from the beginning. When I write occasional pieces, they are often short lyric-like poems or quasi-aphoristic text blocks. Sometimes they go on to live in another series, but some are candidates for being employed as part of a matrix for a printmaking or sound project. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m interested in exploring the idea of what a public “reading” can be, what it might look like other than a person reading into a microphone or from a lectern. I’ve always wanted have a reading of a short series entitled “The Difficult Nature of Contemplation” and place a laptop at the lectern (or better yet, in a chair, with a glass of water nearby, and a microphone) and play the accompanying sound project “the difficulty nature” instead of giving a live/spoken reading. Or, what would it be like to record a selection of texts/poems and play them in a loop while “the audience” milled around, sat in chairs, conversed, drank and ate, as if it were an art opening. Audience members could sit and listen to the loop, or chat, or allow any combination of these things to occur at once.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I have some ongoing curiosities. My current critical inquiries converge around fragmentation, artists’ uses of language, the tension between immediacy and emergence in encounters with texts (including artworks, performances) and experiences, and the ways that historical, rhythmic, spoken and visual aspects of the English language are deployed in contemporary poetic writing.  

For me, in poetic compositions, writers interact with language, sometimes in an attempt to make sense of the real, even if through the unreal or dreamlike, and in some cases to describe visual or aural connections to language, with or without the desire to express sense or meaning or to “pin” anything down. I understand poetry/poetics in multiple ways, as an open genre that accommodates lyric and narrative elements as much as it accommodates fragmentation, collage, systems, and chance. This openness also allows writers to engage the spirit of inquiry, and I think the questions are myriad. The critic Marjorie Perloff has suggested that the contemporary unit of poetry might be the page rather than the line. Following that thinking, I’m curious about where poetic expression might exist—on the page, in LED displays, in paintings, or in any number of screens and devices. This multi-planed understanding of poetry as visual, auditory, verbal and written allows me to incorporate both traditional approaches to writing and to explore the move from the line to the page, and from printed material to digital platforms.

Poetry is a medium through which practitioners of all levels may ask: what can a poem be? and how can a poem or act of poetic writing operate in the world? In what ways can ‘poetry’ be read and constructed out of fragments of the mundane: street signs and voices overhead on the walk home? How is that material transcribed, visually or through sound? What are some of the techniques employed in making a poetic writing work? And what are some approaches to writing poetry in the 21^st century? How can methods taken from the long history of versification, from contemporary writings by Paul Metcalf or Jackson MacLow, and from contemporary art practices by artists like Johanna Drucker and Jenny Holzer generate useful ways of interacting with language? Further, what do (and will) new poetic territories look like? I am interested in these questions and how potential answers make an impact on the ways that poetic writing may be composed and considered, and in how language offers a platform (a medium) through which to translate critical thought into a formalized structure of some sort (an essay, a novel, a story, a poem, or image, etc.).

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I suppose that different types of writers will (and should) have different roles in society (and I’m really referring to American society, or a particular slice of it). Perhaps contemporary poetry allows writers to connect with their own capacities to shape words and language to reflect, manifest, or project the semblance of a fractured/fragmented whole as an object-like thing or idea to be considered in ambiguity. Perhaps it is suited to investigations of all types of conflict—matters of the heart, religion, war, political instability — and can reference experiences ranging from the individual to the communal to the universal.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Probably both. I haven’t had much experience with this in the recent past, but I worked closely with an editor on a project a few years ago, and her comments gave me so much insight into my compositional choices (as well as into some of my shortcomings). I spent a great deal of time revising Apologies prior to submitting it to Burning Deck, and before it went to press, Rosmarie Waldrop and I discussed certain aspects of the numbering system, the deliberate gaps, and I was happy to preserve the original numbers, but also I found the feedback invaluable; it helped me better grasp and articulate my intentions.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

CD Wright once wrote this word at the bottom of a short series that I turned in for review: “Onward.”  Indeed. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry via collage and soundscapes to photography)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has seemed more natural than difficult, and done sometimes out of convenience, to move between poetry, collage, photography and sound recordings. I think the collage work is a sort of hermeneutic strategy/processing of what I’m “reading” around me, and that the sound work that I’ve done has primarily connected back to, or been an expression of, written work that I’d done before, as if the text begged to be translated into a different medium. Photography is usually something I pick up when I need to see (things in the world) differently.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Typically, I get up between 7:30-8am, look over email, attend to administrative things—like obsessing over my calendar—related to my job, and then by 9:30 I am doing some form of class preparation or grading. I teach in the afternoons this term, so I go in to campus around lunchtime. If I am not teaching, I follow the same pattern, but go in earlier than lunch and have meetings or consult with students, and after a few hours I spend time off campus reading for the next class or working on curriculum or working on my own research/work. These days can be especially good for writing. I like to think and write in the afternoon or at night. My process has changed a bit over the years, as I’ve moved from manual typewriters to computer/laptop. I keep a document open over a period of time, and generally get three or four sessions of writing time in during the week. I’m a slow writer; sometimes I write two or three words (that I keep), sometimes a few lines or paragraphs, in a sitting. I sit in a chair and listen to music through headphones. I stare a lot. I sit in a rocking chair and wear my pants out at the calf. I attend to the advances of the dog until I get her settled under a blanket, and then I repel the advances of the cat until she settles on the back of the sofa, or, I fidget with things around me: papers, books, study debris.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Usually I turn to a different medium, like photography or collage.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The scent of coming rain.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’ve always been curious about the way that music does or doesn’t influence my writing (process).

And I am inspired by visual art, from the Bauhaus masters (I wanted to be like Itten when I was in high school) to Barnett Newman, and from Jenny Holzer to Glenn Ligon, my work is deeply influenced by visual artists.

I started college as a music history major, and while I didn’t want to practice my instrument so much (I much preferred writing and writing and writing), I have always had a special relationship with music (Zukofsky’s “Lower limit speech/Upper limit music”). While I can’t remember everything I listened to in copious amounts while I wrote Apologies, I’m sure the list includes Radiohead, Tori Amos, Roxy Music, Neu, Shostakovich’s String Quartet’s, Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie and Gnossiene, and William Byrd’s Masses.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Of the people I know currently, Sarah Jaffe, a musician (formerly of Erase Errata) and writer (first novel forthcoming from Tin House, 2015), and Kate Copeland, a conceptual artist working in printmaking, book arts, and alternative photographic processes.

Of books or authors: Lyn Hejinian, especially TheLanguage of Inquiry. Horace’s Ars Poetica (in translation). Harold Pinter. Pound. Stein. Beckett. Zukofsky. Richard Foreman. Sir Thomas Wyatt. William Carlos Williams. Gwendolyn Brooks. David Antin. Virginia Woolf (The Waves!). Toni Morrison. Ben Marcus. Jennifer Martenson. Sarah Gambito. Norma Cole, E. Tracy Grinnell, MacGregor Card. Cole Swenson. Johanna Drucker. John Cage and JennyHolzer. Edmond Jabes. Rosmarie Waldrop and Keith Waldrop, each of whose work has influenced me in very different ways. So many more, and Marjorie Perloff’s and Craig Dworkin’s writings.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

So much, especially light projections and multiple screen-based works.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

What’s it like to work in a think-tank? I wonder about that from time to time. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

compulsion. possibly hubris. later defeat. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje and Waiting for Godot. Film: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A postcard series. And writings…more apologies, and something else still nebulous.

12or 20 (second series) questions;