MiPoesias: Revista Literaria
revision of old interview on teaching
with Angela Armitage
For VOLUME 19, ISSUE 3 ISSN 1543-6063
found in non-revised form here
[I've wanted to revise the tone and content of this interview for several years now].
You're a professor of English at Illinois State University. Presumably, you teach writing workshops. For the benefit of our audience, what, in your opinion, are the most common mistakes made by aspiring writers? How do you help them to improve their craft?
It's a great privilege to get to teach something as potentially important as creative writing, specifically poetry writing, which I increasingly teach as a mode of ethics. Because of this, the words “mistake” and “craft” don’t come out of my mouth. Those categories have no place in my pedagogy: I strongly feel these are terms of schooling -- schooling in the Illichian sense, in the sense that “schooling,” as opposed to education, destroys souls. So, I try to disabuse students of the notion that the categories “mistake” and “craft” can have anything to do with writing. Lot of these kids come in to our classrooms very shut down. I really feel they don’t need a teacher talking about mistakes. “Craft,” though a wonderful idea, is what German novelist and linguist Uwe Poerksen calls a plastic word: it connotes far more than it denotes, such that it has become more a tool with which to yield power and status and less a word that communicates, aids, teaches.
In fact I tell my students to welcome the experience that they had initially labeled “error”: do not try to avoid error; embrace it, use it, transform it. All rocks are broken rocks: once a young writer twigs to that insight, she’s home free.
So though students and I do talk about the how of writing, the thing I find they most seem to need to hear is that who they are, what they are, how they are -- right now -- is sufficient.
They do not need to be anything extra in order to write something that will surprise them and be surprising and useful to others. I have found that many of them need to hear it’s okay to toss work out, it’s okay that a lot of what they write might in fact bore them: my job is to help remove the pressure from them, not to increase it with notions like “mistake.”
Without exception they delight in hearing that poetry is not some kind of precious speech uttered by special beings. Once I realized that my whole life was more or less one continual mistake, I let go of the entire idea of mistake, or have tried to: and I encourage them to do so as well. To help with these modes of being and writing, we read essays by Epictetus, C. S. Peirce, Gertrude Stein, William James, Emerson, Baraka, and Bernadette Mayer, among others, on these matters. Also, we laugh a lot.
Talk to me about form. One of my professors recently said that she believes in free verse as the "strictest form," pleading her case by way of Charles Wright's use of blank space. Another professor, speaking of Jazz, mentioned that it isn't until one's learned all of the theory that goes along with music that one can dump it and simply jam. What do you think of these arguments, and furthermore, do you think that students of poetry should be taught to eschew or adhere to form when learning to write poetry?
I think one tends to hear the same things repeated over and over about "form” -- whether it’s the old canard that you must know the rules before breaking them, etc.
I feel quite often those who develop a violent and dismissive critical apparatus around the idea of “form” are doing so with an implicit and masked agenda about content. Take notice, as Jed Rasula does in his great polemical history The American Poetry Wax Museum, of the demographics and politics of those writers who advocate for the “formal”: they are in fact advocating for certain suppressed (and suppressive) content.
Rubén Darío said it this way, “Art is not a set of rules but a harmony of whims (caprichos).”
A useful book on this matter is Michael Magee’s Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing. It’s a groundbreaking book in the Modern & Contemporary Poetics Series, University of Alabama Press, series editors Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. So, in the pragmatist spirit of Emerson, in the spirit of John Dewey and of William Carlos Williams, in the spirit of Gertrude Stein and William James -- and countless others -- I say it’s true that one knows by doing -- one understands in doing, through doing, and one’s understanding is dynamic and ever changing, skeptical, riding the truth as it shifts. What is the “form” of fire?
I feel what some often label “form” is merely the attempt to pre-figure and thus avoid the very wrestling with writing itself.
Your call for poetry in this edition of MiPo encouraged "strange poems." One might argue that all poetry is strange; but given that so much contemporary poetry tries hard to be deviant, how do you identify a strange poem versus a mainstream, or "graduate school" poem? What is it that makes a poem strange?
You’re right. Asking for strange poetry is like going to Ben and Jerry’s and ordering cold ice cream instead of, say, vanilla or maple fudge. I cheated.
As far as your statement that “so much contemporary poetry tries to be deviant,” I’d just like to say that though it’s art’s job to be strange, whether it’s ancient art or contemporary, I’m not really sure that writers are trying to be deviant: they’re just doing what they’re doing.
The purpose isn’t to be strange for the sake of strangeness. The point is to slow down the perception of the reader, so that the reader is not experiencing the poem automatically. Once our perceptual habits become automatic, we’ve dampened our innate capacity for wonder. So, one enstranges language not to put on a gratuitous display, but to allow again for wonder, to make, as Shklovsky says, “the stone stony again.” Shklovsky says it better than I do, Angela: if you haven’t read his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” check it out.
Not really sure what you mean by “graduate school poem”: I’ve seen some straight-up geniuses both inside and outside graduate schools. Sometimes I think we adopt the practice of dismissive labeling as an all too common part of poetry culture. But the fact is each community has its own socio-aesthetic peculiarities: this is important because the local naturally resists rebarbative and dismissive labels imposed by dominant or subaltern cultures. I think where most communities fail in their culture work is where they subjugate the local and political and social aspects of their own work while simultaneously projecting their now “denatured” aesthetic as a universal one. In short, they forget or fail to realize that the social and the aesthetic are inextricably and intricately linked -- such that they feel that the way they see the world is the way it ought to be. The upshot is tepid work and a violent critical apparatus: what some call formalism. Too, it's important to note that some of the most formalist work I've encountered is found among post-avant practitioners. If there is a universal, said John Dewey, it is in the local.
On odd poetry: do you think that bizarre or surreal poetry is good for its own sake, or is there something far less odd at work in that sort of poem that makes it so compelling to the reader?
You ask about Surrealism. I don’t know much about it but I do know that first it’s not a synonym for bizarre. The cultural inception of surrealism was to say more, not less, about the real. Its purpose was and is to open up the real: it was not considered a mere exercise of the bizarre for the sake of the bizarre.
I’m of the mind that nothing is good for its own sake: I believe strongly in the salutary effect of linking value to use-value, which I guess I conflate with Benjamin’s cult value. I think it’s true to say that we write for others, as a gift. I feel that since all of us are “here” we should serve others as best we can.
My point is that the normative impulse to dismiss a lot of culture work because of its apparent oddity is the principle mode of quietism. Such dismissive statements about a work’s aesthetics (whether “odd” or “bizarre” or “bad” or “pointless”) are almost without fail masked dismissals of that work’s social action or cultural function.
A while back I read an essay by Donald Hall in which he bemoans the fact that so few writers are “ambitious” and writing “great poems.” It was as if he had quite forgotten, or maybe never knew, that we probably don’t write toward some soi disant aesthetic standard but for one another: we don’t write for the ages, but for people we know. I think the attempt to write great poetry will probably only end in disaster. To my sensibility, categories such as “odd” or “great” are meaningful in only very limited and specific situations. This is an old tension in poetry that has become quite electrified since the rise of industrial capitalism.
What are your thoughts on poetry slams or other spoken word venues?
Well, I guess the roots of Indo-European poetries are based in poetry as spoken word, poetry as benediction, malediction, celebration, contest, poetry as shaming, poetry as enwonderment and praise, poetry as verbal combat, metrical furor, poetry as living instruction or pedagogic spectacle. So: finally, poetry’s gotten back to its roots. It only took a couple centuries after the advent of industrial capitalism, but we made it.
Who do you read? Or, rather, who do you enjoy reading, and what is it about their work that excites you?
Am just now reading The Sullen Art: Interviews by David Ossman with Modern American Poets [Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Carroll, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Robert Bly, John Logan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Creeley, W. S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, LeRoi Jones, Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg] (Corinth: 1963).
Linda Zionkowski’s Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (Palgrave, 2001).
The Writings of Martin Buber, edited by Will Herberg (Meridian: 1956).
Karma and Chaos: New and Collected Essays on Vipassana Meditation, by Paul R. Fleischman, M. D. (Vipassana Research Publications: 1999).
Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems by Michael McClure, introduction by Robert Creeley (Penguin: 1999).
Just finished reading the poetry of about 350 poets who submitted work for this issue.
Conversely, whose writing do you dislike, and what sins have they committed?
The older I get, the less interested I become in disliking things.
Finally, what do you hope to one day accomplish through writing? Fame? Fortune? Revolution?
Fundamentally the only thing I see worth accomplishing is the purification of the mind and heart and the cultivation of a loving mindset toward everything and everyone in this life. One can’t do that simply through writing. But I can say, I think, that the best writing advocates for the possibility of true happiness: happiness free of delusion, distraction, fear. Thanks for your questions, Angela.
