Interview with Donna de la Perrière
Q1: Aside from subject matter, in what ways are your works dependent on, or influenced by, your Southern background and ancestry?
DdlP: Well, I’ll start by telling you a story – because, of course, story-telling is both a ubiquitous part of Southern culture and (in the South, at any rate) only very rarely about conveying subject matter. The essence of the story is almost never in the “what” but in the “how.” In the word choices and the syntax, the way it sounds and the way the structures loop around one another and dodge and repeat and double back on themselves. These interesting dances of repetition and juxtaposition and variation. You see those structures in C.D. Wright’s work, for instance. (And by saying that I don’t mean to suggest that my writing is like hers per se, although I’d kill to be able to write like she does. Well, maybe
not kill, but definitely maim. Some solid maiming. She’s a genius, in my opinion.)
At any rate, here’s the story: When I was very young my parents would take me to visit my grandmother, who lived in a town about thirty miles outside of the small city where I grew up. This was mid-1960s Georgia – which was a very strange place, although of course I didn't understand the ins and outs of that strangeness at the time. On these Sundays we would drive out of Athens, the main college town in Georgia, and into the countryside, which during that pre-strip-mall era was real country-country. You'd leave the city limits and all of a sudden be surrounded by nothing but empty fields and pine woods, this tremendous enveloping green.
And back from the road, behind the fences, you'd always see abandoned buildings: everything from large houses to barns to shacks, all of them empty, all left to rot – except in Georgia, old buildings don’t just rot. They get covered with kudzu, a parasitical plant some agricultural genius brought over from Japan. It was supposed to control soil erosion, which of course it did. But it came with one drawback: once it took root in the ground, you couldn't really get rid of it. You couldn’t kill it and you couldn’t contain it; it just grew over things – cars, houses, barns and trees, entire fields – until you were left with this weird, shrouded landscape. All shape and movement rather than identifiable objects.
So the South always seemed to me a place that was both deeply uncanny and essentially secret, always giving up only bits of itself, allowing you to see just a tiny part of what was actually there. And I think that sense of the world and of perception has affected my poetry in pretty much every way imaginable. It's how I understand language and consciousness, and perception, and other human beings – all of which and whom are the most enormous mysteries. And I'd also say that my Southern-ness is probably somewhat responsible for both my sense of language as torque and music, as well as my sense that narrative is everywhere and unavoidable (but never fixed or singular) – that "story" is form is movement is motion (not just "and then this happened, and then this happened...") – that it is incredibly capacious and various, and deeply, deeply strange. That there is always more meaning rather than less.
Q2: Could you describe, or refer to passages in your work that show, how language inflected by Southern culture differs from that which you have found in, for example, the Far West or, in particular, the Bay Area where you now live? The differences are certainly real, but how can one talk about them?
DdlP: Well, indeed. I don't know that one can without being reductive. And I imagine whatever ways in which my written language differs from that of your average West Coaster are so ingrained in me that I probably can't parse them. That said, I think that the linguistic structure of, say, "Field Composition (Fort-Da)" from True Crime is very Southern-inflected – the way it dodges and circles back on itself, the way it eats it own tail. Another example might be the long poem "Occupational Marks and Other Signs" from Saint Erasure, which employs some of the language of hallucinatory/visionary/spiritual states that,
though not exclusively regional, has certainly become a familiar trope of various "Southern" writers and artists.
Q3: Nothing of Southern Gothic?
DdlP: Oh, Lord, yes! It's all hugely Southern Gothic – even the work in Saint Erasure which is perhaps less explicitly so than that in True Crime, if only because Saint Erasure is less explicitly about place. But it’s doing a lot of the same things, both using language in similar ways and exploring the language and structures of various visionary states in similar ways. (Brenda Sieczkowski does a beautifully nuanced job of addressing all this in her recent review in Drunken Boat:http://www. drunkenboat.com/db15/saint-erasure.)
Flannery O’Connor, who of course is the queen of Southern gothic, uses that language and those tropes to explore (among other things) the nature of and movement of (what she might call) “grace” in human lives. And that’s something that interests me a lot, too. I love O’Connor’s sense that the movement of the visionary is not only awe-full but awful. Her sense of that movement is a little like Rilke’s sense of the work of the angelic orders: it is terrible, and its agents are not cherubs or ingénues with harps. [Actually,“Occupational Marks” started out as a response of sorts to Rilke’s elegies – in particular, to that metaphysical but also very deeply embodied sense that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear.] In O’Connor’s work the movement of grace is and our moments of real vision are thoroughly rending. They tear us apart; they flay us – at least in part because only something drastic is capable of actually getting our attention, of cutting through our complacency and blindness and desire for witless, comfortable simplicity (see: almost everything Reagan or George W. Bush ever said).
I love that, in O’Connor’s world, everyone is freakish and monstrous. Every single person – no exceptions – even (maybe especially) the people who appear to be and think of themselves as being very nice and respectable. And I think perhaps
that’s a lot of where the Southern gothic sensibility comes from: this sense that, really, we are all such freaks – all of us humans – and that all human endeavor is both appallingly blind and misguided and also immensely (almost unbearably) moving – both in its longing for connection and meaning, and in its deep inadequacy to that task.
How can one not both love and pity freaks like that?
Q4: Reviewing Transtromer in the New York Times recently, the reviewer commented, "we read poetry for entertainment, not nutritional value." Ummm, OK, how would you respond to that?
DdlP: I think his "we" there does not include me. The primary reason I read poetry is for the nutritional value. I guess it depends on one's definition of the words "entertainment" and "nutrition" though. I certainly can imagine something being enjoyable without its providing much of what I'd think of as literary/intellectual/philosophical nutrition – and let me be clear that I like that sort of thing as much as the next person – but I honestly can't imagine wanting poetry to do that. To be honest, it even strikes me as being a little bizarre. Our whole culture is about entertainment: all entertainment, only entertainment, constant entertainment. Must poetry be part of that as well? Really?
But then maybe that's just me.
Q5: No, it's not just you, I hope. Since poetry is never going to pay the rent anyway, you never have
to worry about the audience with deep pockets. But, then, who isthe audience?
DdlP: That is true, and is in fact something I tell my students (many of whom are emerging poets) all the time. The fact is that even the most conventional, Prairie Home Companion-friendly poetry doesn't have anything approaching the "popular" audience that, say, music or film or even "literary fiction" does. And if you're a poet you can experience that as a soul-crushing disaster or you can experience it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’d argue that the fact that no one is really watching and no one really cares is, in this case, an active good. Think about it: if even vague, amorphous pipe dreams about “fame” or “popularity” or “success” are completely off the table, that means we can focus on creating actual art. Not on what’s popular or entertaining or comfortable or commercial. Just on making art. Period. Full stop. That is a staggeringly beautiful thing.
Q6: Didn't Williams tell the young Ginsberg, "In this art, the bottom line is perfection, and these poems aren't perfect" orsomething like that, sending Allen back to his desk for a few more yearsof work? Is there really a standard that would determine"perfection"?
DdlP: That is THE question, isn't it? I certainly have my own particular set of standards – all of which are flexible and shift repeatedly. That said, I realize that my standards will differ radically from others', and that's fine with me; it's difficult to determine how much finally comes down to taste. A lot, I imagine. I could, for example, provide you with a list of well-published writers who, to me, seem to have tin ears. But as far as a "standard" goes, anything I could say about that would probably veer so far into abstraction as to end up being useless. And as a rule I think that desire to systematize and categorize – or even the desire to create little "schools" of poetry or whatever – has always seemed slightly silly to me. I mean, anything even vaguely interesting finally resists and escapes category, doesn't it?
Q7: Teaching creative writing as you do how do you distinguish between good writing and poor? What do you mean by "taste"?
DdlP: One of the things I think is really crucial in teaching any sort of fine art is to get interested in figuring out what the emerging artist wants to do. If we don’t do that we end up trying to create little clones of ourselves and pretending there’s some sort of monolithic, normative standard for “goodness” or“smartness” or “aesthetic coherence” or “innovation” when in fact there isn’t. Now to me the statement I just made does not in fact mean that everything is then up for grabs, that there are no standards, etc., that everything is relative and that we are obliged to take any old crap that comes out of anyone’s mouth/ pen/paintbrush seriously. (That’s the sort of thinking that has given us the ghastly nightmare that is the Republican Party of the twenty-first century.) But what it does mean is that when I engage with emerging writers, I am absolutely obligated to try to meet them where they are. I am obligated to figure out what they are interested in, and then in light of that information I am obligated to steer them simultaneously in two opposing directions: the first direction being toward and further into what they
are interested in and comfortable with already, and the second being completely away from what they are interested in and comfortable with. Without that tension, nothing useful happens.
And I’m pretty sure I can’t define what I mean by “taste.” I guess by “taste” I mean that which leads me look at, say, Hans Hofmann and think “that is brilliant” but makes some other person look at it and say “my five-year-old child could do
that.” I may think that other person is sort of an idiot, but I also think they have every right to prefer, say, Andrew Wyeth. Doesn’t necessarily mean I want to discuss art or have an extended dinner conversation with them, but whatever. It
also means that there are any number of writers whom I “objectively”realize are brilliant writers but whose work I personally don’t really connect with and wouldn’t necessarily choose to read, all other things being equal. And, all that said, there is also work I didn’t much care for twenty years ago that simply blows the top of my head off now, as well as work I connected with twenty years ago that had faded for me today.
All of which is to say that it’s very tough to talk about this stuff without sounding either wishy-washy or essentialist. Or both.
Q8: I recently had to do a project on "endowed chairs" at various major universities and found that it costs the benefactor around 2.5 million to endow a chair at some universities. That sounds pretty much like the yearly budget for poetry in our benighted culture. Clearly the money is out there, somewhere. Why doesn't it wash up on our shores?
DdlP: Boy, do I wish I had an answer for that. Or perhaps more accurately: boy, do I wish I had an answer for that that didn't make me think we're basically doomed as a culture. Or maybe as a species. (Pessimist? Me?) Do you have any theories?
Q9: Gustaf Sobin, from his vantage in Provence, saw our world as slipping into cultural dark ages. But some arts do thrive. Curiously, poetry served a major function in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, then vaporized when their economies were westernized. What is it about our culture that trivializes poetry?
DdlP: Hmmm. This is just off the top of my head, but in light of what you just said (which rings true to me), I'm thinking that perhaps humans are more likely to look for meaning when things are tough – when we're in need of something real and lasting – whereas in times of relative comfort, we'd rather just sit around and watch our flat-screens and feel great about ourselves. Also I think capitalism trivializes a lot of really important things by putting a price tag on everything and thus leading us to believe that everything is "worth" only whatever dollar amount it will bring on the marketplace. That, to my mind, is a terrible (and frankly… yeah I'll say it… evil) way to think about worth. It leads to commodifying things that should not be commodified. It leads to thinking that life is a zero-sum game and as long as my nuclear family and I make it out of the forest
alive (and, ideally, with all of our cool stuff), then screw everybody else.
Funny but that reminds me of what the grad students in my San Francisco State"Writing the Body" seminar and I were talking around the other day. We were discussing writing about work and the commodified body, as well as violence and the gendered body, and after the discussion one of the students sent me this link (http://www.radiolab.org/2009/oct/19/new-baboon/), which actually provides a wee glimmer of hope for all of us mammals. It surprised me tremendously. So who knows: if baboons are capable of it, maybe we are, too.
Q10: One of the more intense discussions at the [Bronk] conference in the spring of 2012 had to do whether a poem is a crafted object or is received. Bronk's own position was the second. As a poet, do you think of your work as "received" (i.e., Spicer's radio) or as an object crafted self-consciously?
DdlP: I’m realizing, from our discussion here, exactly how much of a both-and person I am. And here too I’d have to say, “Both.” In terms of process, what that tends to mean for me is that, to a very, very, very large extent the initial “inspiration”parts of my creative process almost always feel very received, very much as if I am not “in control” of them – or perhaps more accurately the early drafts seem to me to be better, deeper, fuller, more capacious when I am not terribly in (conscious) control of them. In general, I try to just get out of the way as much as possible during the early part of the process – the part when I’m just generating raw material. I try to let go. It’s by far the most difficult part of the process for me.
At the same time, I also very, very much believe that the final draft of a poem (or of one of my poems) is a construct that needs to be crafted, shaped, changed, distilled. Loose is great, but personally I’m not very interested in sloppy. Sprawl doesn’t intrigue me much, and I tend not to be a huge fan of work that foregrounds process alone or relies solely on procedures.
I want my poems to do very particular things, and for me that just does not happen without revision: sometimes months of revision, sometimes years, and sometimes decades. [Just this past month VOLT published a long poem of mine (“First Love”) that, all told, took me over thirty years to write. And, yeah, that is sort of nuts, but that’s what it took for me to get the poem right – to address the material in a way that felt both emotionally and aesthetically adequate.]
So I do think of the final poem as an object. But I’m not saying that I’m entirely in control of the crafting process either – at least to the extent that I wouldn’t say that the decisions I make during the revision process are always conscious ones. But they are decisions nonetheless. So if by “received” we mean that the decisions are unconscious to some extent, are intuitive, then I can go with the idea of a poem being received. But if we mean that even “received” work isn’t, in the final analysis, the result of choices – albeit choices that we couldn’t necessarily rationally explain or explicate, and often choices we’re not even really aware of as being choices –then I’m not entirely buying it.
Basically, all of this depends upon how one defines and understands and then makes use of terms like “craft”and “object” and
“receive.” Can I say that I am always – or even ever – entirely consciously aware of why I make this or that aesthetic choice? Could I always parse it for you, or for myself? Of course not. I might be able to backtrack and then sort of extrapolate what I might have been thinking, but really I’d just be guessing. Or making it up. Even though I’ve done this writing thing for a number of decades and tend to have a pretty decent sense of the cycles within my own process, I still find the process itself deeply mysterious. I don’t pretend to understand it or to think anyone else’s works in the same way. And I think we do a huge
disservice to young writers when we give them any other impression. It can make them think that there’s one big key to the whole thing, something that’s going to open it all up, or that there’s one “right” way to go about it, and as far as I can tell there’s just not.
Instead it’s really strange and really idiosyncratic, and I kind of love that about it. But then I guess I am very, very comfortable with mystery – with slippage and the uncategorizable. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that – in almost every area of life –I am very un-comfortable when people try to pretend that all things can be explained and systematized, that mystery doesn’t or shouldn’t exist, that it’s somehow “romantic” or lacking in intellectual rigor. And I don’t think that’s relativism either. I think it’s just acknowledging that we exist in a very, very big universe, and that we don’t understand very much.
Q1: Aside from subject matter, in what ways are your works dependent on, or influenced by, your Southern background and ancestry?
DdlP: Well, I’ll start by telling you a story – because, of course, story-telling is both a ubiquitous part of Southern culture and (in the South, at any rate) only very rarely about conveying subject matter. The essence of the story is almost never in the “what” but in the “how.” In the word choices and the syntax, the way it sounds and the way the structures loop around one another and dodge and repeat and double back on themselves. These interesting dances of repetition and juxtaposition and variation. You see those structures in C.D. Wright’s work, for instance. (And by saying that I don’t mean to suggest that my writing is like hers per se, although I’d kill to be able to write like she does. Well, maybe
not kill, but definitely maim. Some solid maiming. She’s a genius, in my opinion.)
At any rate, here’s the story: When I was very young my parents would take me to visit my grandmother, who lived in a town about thirty miles outside of the small city where I grew up. This was mid-1960s Georgia – which was a very strange place, although of course I didn't understand the ins and outs of that strangeness at the time. On these Sundays we would drive out of Athens, the main college town in Georgia, and into the countryside, which during that pre-strip-mall era was real country-country. You'd leave the city limits and all of a sudden be surrounded by nothing but empty fields and pine woods, this tremendous enveloping green.
And back from the road, behind the fences, you'd always see abandoned buildings: everything from large houses to barns to shacks, all of them empty, all left to rot – except in Georgia, old buildings don’t just rot. They get covered with kudzu, a parasitical plant some agricultural genius brought over from Japan. It was supposed to control soil erosion, which of course it did. But it came with one drawback: once it took root in the ground, you couldn't really get rid of it. You couldn’t kill it and you couldn’t contain it; it just grew over things – cars, houses, barns and trees, entire fields – until you were left with this weird, shrouded landscape. All shape and movement rather than identifiable objects.
So the South always seemed to me a place that was both deeply uncanny and essentially secret, always giving up only bits of itself, allowing you to see just a tiny part of what was actually there. And I think that sense of the world and of perception has affected my poetry in pretty much every way imaginable. It's how I understand language and consciousness, and perception, and other human beings – all of which and whom are the most enormous mysteries. And I'd also say that my Southern-ness is probably somewhat responsible for both my sense of language as torque and music, as well as my sense that narrative is everywhere and unavoidable (but never fixed or singular) – that "story" is form is movement is motion (not just "and then this happened, and then this happened...") – that it is incredibly capacious and various, and deeply, deeply strange. That there is always more meaning rather than less.
Q2: Could you describe, or refer to passages in your work that show, how language inflected by Southern culture differs from that which you have found in, for example, the Far West or, in particular, the Bay Area where you now live? The differences are certainly real, but how can one talk about them?
DdlP: Well, indeed. I don't know that one can without being reductive. And I imagine whatever ways in which my written language differs from that of your average West Coaster are so ingrained in me that I probably can't parse them. That said, I think that the linguistic structure of, say, "Field Composition (Fort-Da)" from True Crime is very Southern-inflected – the way it dodges and circles back on itself, the way it eats it own tail. Another example might be the long poem "Occupational Marks and Other Signs" from Saint Erasure, which employs some of the language of hallucinatory/visionary/spiritual states that,
though not exclusively regional, has certainly become a familiar trope of various "Southern" writers and artists.
Q3: Nothing of Southern Gothic?
DdlP: Oh, Lord, yes! It's all hugely Southern Gothic – even the work in Saint Erasure which is perhaps less explicitly so than that in True Crime, if only because Saint Erasure is less explicitly about place. But it’s doing a lot of the same things, both using language in similar ways and exploring the language and structures of various visionary states in similar ways. (Brenda Sieczkowski does a beautifully nuanced job of addressing all this in her recent review in Drunken Boat:http://www. drunkenboat.com/db15/saint-erasure.)
Flannery O’Connor, who of course is the queen of Southern gothic, uses that language and those tropes to explore (among other things) the nature of and movement of (what she might call) “grace” in human lives. And that’s something that interests me a lot, too. I love O’Connor’s sense that the movement of the visionary is not only awe-full but awful. Her sense of that movement is a little like Rilke’s sense of the work of the angelic orders: it is terrible, and its agents are not cherubs or ingénues with harps. [Actually,“Occupational Marks” started out as a response of sorts to Rilke’s elegies – in particular, to that metaphysical but also very deeply embodied sense that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear.] In O’Connor’s work the movement of grace is and our moments of real vision are thoroughly rending. They tear us apart; they flay us – at least in part because only something drastic is capable of actually getting our attention, of cutting through our complacency and blindness and desire for witless, comfortable simplicity (see: almost everything Reagan or George W. Bush ever said).
I love that, in O’Connor’s world, everyone is freakish and monstrous. Every single person – no exceptions – even (maybe especially) the people who appear to be and think of themselves as being very nice and respectable. And I think perhaps
that’s a lot of where the Southern gothic sensibility comes from: this sense that, really, we are all such freaks – all of us humans – and that all human endeavor is both appallingly blind and misguided and also immensely (almost unbearably) moving – both in its longing for connection and meaning, and in its deep inadequacy to that task.
How can one not both love and pity freaks like that?
Q4: Reviewing Transtromer in the New York Times recently, the reviewer commented, "we read poetry for entertainment, not nutritional value." Ummm, OK, how would you respond to that?
DdlP: I think his "we" there does not include me. The primary reason I read poetry is for the nutritional value. I guess it depends on one's definition of the words "entertainment" and "nutrition" though. I certainly can imagine something being enjoyable without its providing much of what I'd think of as literary/intellectual/philosophical nutrition – and let me be clear that I like that sort of thing as much as the next person – but I honestly can't imagine wanting poetry to do that. To be honest, it even strikes me as being a little bizarre. Our whole culture is about entertainment: all entertainment, only entertainment, constant entertainment. Must poetry be part of that as well? Really?
But then maybe that's just me.
Q5: No, it's not just you, I hope. Since poetry is never going to pay the rent anyway, you never have
to worry about the audience with deep pockets. But, then, who isthe audience?
DdlP: That is true, and is in fact something I tell my students (many of whom are emerging poets) all the time. The fact is that even the most conventional, Prairie Home Companion-friendly poetry doesn't have anything approaching the "popular" audience that, say, music or film or even "literary fiction" does. And if you're a poet you can experience that as a soul-crushing disaster or you can experience it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’d argue that the fact that no one is really watching and no one really cares is, in this case, an active good. Think about it: if even vague, amorphous pipe dreams about “fame” or “popularity” or “success” are completely off the table, that means we can focus on creating actual art. Not on what’s popular or entertaining or comfortable or commercial. Just on making art. Period. Full stop. That is a staggeringly beautiful thing.
Q6: Didn't Williams tell the young Ginsberg, "In this art, the bottom line is perfection, and these poems aren't perfect" orsomething like that, sending Allen back to his desk for a few more yearsof work? Is there really a standard that would determine"perfection"?
DdlP: That is THE question, isn't it? I certainly have my own particular set of standards – all of which are flexible and shift repeatedly. That said, I realize that my standards will differ radically from others', and that's fine with me; it's difficult to determine how much finally comes down to taste. A lot, I imagine. I could, for example, provide you with a list of well-published writers who, to me, seem to have tin ears. But as far as a "standard" goes, anything I could say about that would probably veer so far into abstraction as to end up being useless. And as a rule I think that desire to systematize and categorize – or even the desire to create little "schools" of poetry or whatever – has always seemed slightly silly to me. I mean, anything even vaguely interesting finally resists and escapes category, doesn't it?
Q7: Teaching creative writing as you do how do you distinguish between good writing and poor? What do you mean by "taste"?
DdlP: One of the things I think is really crucial in teaching any sort of fine art is to get interested in figuring out what the emerging artist wants to do. If we don’t do that we end up trying to create little clones of ourselves and pretending there’s some sort of monolithic, normative standard for “goodness” or“smartness” or “aesthetic coherence” or “innovation” when in fact there isn’t. Now to me the statement I just made does not in fact mean that everything is then up for grabs, that there are no standards, etc., that everything is relative and that we are obliged to take any old crap that comes out of anyone’s mouth/ pen/paintbrush seriously. (That’s the sort of thinking that has given us the ghastly nightmare that is the Republican Party of the twenty-first century.) But what it does mean is that when I engage with emerging writers, I am absolutely obligated to try to meet them where they are. I am obligated to figure out what they are interested in, and then in light of that information I am obligated to steer them simultaneously in two opposing directions: the first direction being toward and further into what they
are interested in and comfortable with already, and the second being completely away from what they are interested in and comfortable with. Without that tension, nothing useful happens.
And I’m pretty sure I can’t define what I mean by “taste.” I guess by “taste” I mean that which leads me look at, say, Hans Hofmann and think “that is brilliant” but makes some other person look at it and say “my five-year-old child could do
that.” I may think that other person is sort of an idiot, but I also think they have every right to prefer, say, Andrew Wyeth. Doesn’t necessarily mean I want to discuss art or have an extended dinner conversation with them, but whatever. It
also means that there are any number of writers whom I “objectively”realize are brilliant writers but whose work I personally don’t really connect with and wouldn’t necessarily choose to read, all other things being equal. And, all that said, there is also work I didn’t much care for twenty years ago that simply blows the top of my head off now, as well as work I connected with twenty years ago that had faded for me today.
All of which is to say that it’s very tough to talk about this stuff without sounding either wishy-washy or essentialist. Or both.
Q8: I recently had to do a project on "endowed chairs" at various major universities and found that it costs the benefactor around 2.5 million to endow a chair at some universities. That sounds pretty much like the yearly budget for poetry in our benighted culture. Clearly the money is out there, somewhere. Why doesn't it wash up on our shores?
DdlP: Boy, do I wish I had an answer for that. Or perhaps more accurately: boy, do I wish I had an answer for that that didn't make me think we're basically doomed as a culture. Or maybe as a species. (Pessimist? Me?) Do you have any theories?
Q9: Gustaf Sobin, from his vantage in Provence, saw our world as slipping into cultural dark ages. But some arts do thrive. Curiously, poetry served a major function in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, then vaporized when their economies were westernized. What is it about our culture that trivializes poetry?
DdlP: Hmmm. This is just off the top of my head, but in light of what you just said (which rings true to me), I'm thinking that perhaps humans are more likely to look for meaning when things are tough – when we're in need of something real and lasting – whereas in times of relative comfort, we'd rather just sit around and watch our flat-screens and feel great about ourselves. Also I think capitalism trivializes a lot of really important things by putting a price tag on everything and thus leading us to believe that everything is "worth" only whatever dollar amount it will bring on the marketplace. That, to my mind, is a terrible (and frankly… yeah I'll say it… evil) way to think about worth. It leads to commodifying things that should not be commodified. It leads to thinking that life is a zero-sum game and as long as my nuclear family and I make it out of the forest
alive (and, ideally, with all of our cool stuff), then screw everybody else.
Funny but that reminds me of what the grad students in my San Francisco State"Writing the Body" seminar and I were talking around the other day. We were discussing writing about work and the commodified body, as well as violence and the gendered body, and after the discussion one of the students sent me this link (http://www.radiolab.org/2009/oct/19/new-baboon/), which actually provides a wee glimmer of hope for all of us mammals. It surprised me tremendously. So who knows: if baboons are capable of it, maybe we are, too.
Q10: One of the more intense discussions at the [Bronk] conference in the spring of 2012 had to do whether a poem is a crafted object or is received. Bronk's own position was the second. As a poet, do you think of your work as "received" (i.e., Spicer's radio) or as an object crafted self-consciously?
DdlP: I’m realizing, from our discussion here, exactly how much of a both-and person I am. And here too I’d have to say, “Both.” In terms of process, what that tends to mean for me is that, to a very, very, very large extent the initial “inspiration”parts of my creative process almost always feel very received, very much as if I am not “in control” of them – or perhaps more accurately the early drafts seem to me to be better, deeper, fuller, more capacious when I am not terribly in (conscious) control of them. In general, I try to just get out of the way as much as possible during the early part of the process – the part when I’m just generating raw material. I try to let go. It’s by far the most difficult part of the process for me.
At the same time, I also very, very much believe that the final draft of a poem (or of one of my poems) is a construct that needs to be crafted, shaped, changed, distilled. Loose is great, but personally I’m not very interested in sloppy. Sprawl doesn’t intrigue me much, and I tend not to be a huge fan of work that foregrounds process alone or relies solely on procedures.
I want my poems to do very particular things, and for me that just does not happen without revision: sometimes months of revision, sometimes years, and sometimes decades. [Just this past month VOLT published a long poem of mine (“First Love”) that, all told, took me over thirty years to write. And, yeah, that is sort of nuts, but that’s what it took for me to get the poem right – to address the material in a way that felt both emotionally and aesthetically adequate.]
So I do think of the final poem as an object. But I’m not saying that I’m entirely in control of the crafting process either – at least to the extent that I wouldn’t say that the decisions I make during the revision process are always conscious ones. But they are decisions nonetheless. So if by “received” we mean that the decisions are unconscious to some extent, are intuitive, then I can go with the idea of a poem being received. But if we mean that even “received” work isn’t, in the final analysis, the result of choices – albeit choices that we couldn’t necessarily rationally explain or explicate, and often choices we’re not even really aware of as being choices –then I’m not entirely buying it.
Basically, all of this depends upon how one defines and understands and then makes use of terms like “craft”and “object” and
“receive.” Can I say that I am always – or even ever – entirely consciously aware of why I make this or that aesthetic choice? Could I always parse it for you, or for myself? Of course not. I might be able to backtrack and then sort of extrapolate what I might have been thinking, but really I’d just be guessing. Or making it up. Even though I’ve done this writing thing for a number of decades and tend to have a pretty decent sense of the cycles within my own process, I still find the process itself deeply mysterious. I don’t pretend to understand it or to think anyone else’s works in the same way. And I think we do a huge
disservice to young writers when we give them any other impression. It can make them think that there’s one big key to the whole thing, something that’s going to open it all up, or that there’s one “right” way to go about it, and as far as I can tell there’s just not.
Instead it’s really strange and really idiosyncratic, and I kind of love that about it. But then I guess I am very, very comfortable with mystery – with slippage and the uncategorizable. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that – in almost every area of life –I am very un-comfortable when people try to pretend that all things can be explained and systematized, that mystery doesn’t or shouldn’t exist, that it’s somehow “romantic” or lacking in intellectual rigor. And I don’t think that’s relativism either. I think it’s just acknowledging that we exist in a very, very big universe, and that we don’t understand very much.