Interview with Dirk Stratton
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Dirk, sometimes when I am moving this rivet gun into place ten times a minute for one hour and forty-five minutes between morning cigarette and lunch, I let myself start to obsess about you. There is no way to snap out of it. I think about your millions, Dirk, and my heart heaves up curses. To have your money, Dirk, to have your money. But I do not. William, it pains me to hear you say such things. I had no idea you felt this way. But, upon reflection, I guess I have been somewhat callous. Like when I visited you in Urbana during one of the times you were unemployed and living off of cantaloupe rind soup and the like, and I pulled out my wallet in your presence, a wallet that was not just bulging with cash but was literally—and I've been an English teacher so you can rest assured that when I use the word literally, I mean literally—my wallet was literally vomiting greenbacks, most of them Benjies, that's what I call a one hundred dollar bill, William, a Benjie-so my wallet was literally vomiting, I mean retching and puking bucks, which rhymes with upchucks, by the way (just one more piece of evidence establishing that I am indeed a poet, albeit a filthy rich poet, laden with more money, more stocks and bonds, more real estate, more equity in dozens of the most lucrative partnerships in the world, including a couple of professional sports teams, more than any one person can reasonably be expected to enjoy)-but as I was saying, my wallet literally ralphed money all over your shoes and the money was covered in half-digested carrots and peas and cauliflower and the butter sauce mixed with hydrochloric acid (or whatever juice wallets use to digest their meals) dripped down your laces and into your socks, and instead of cleaning up the mess, I just laughed and said, "Why bother? I've got lots more at home in my acre-sized vault. Plus thousands of priceless gems. And a few gold bars, but not many, couple hundred at the most, because, really, gold prices have been in a slump for years. William, I hope you haven't put much of your portfolio in gold. That would be incredibly stupid." Dirk, how has music influenced your work? William, in one of my MFA poetry workshops, each poet was required to make a presentation to the class about a poetry genre, e.g. nature poetry, political poetry, etc. And the rest of the class was supposed to produce an example of the type of poetry in question (my political poem, for instance, was about the Rodney King beating, and would have made an excellent Newspoem, though I didn't consider it as such then). I volunteered to give the first presentation after seeing the reluctance of my classmates to step up to the plate, as it were. Instead of a specific poetic genre, I decided to discuss the relationship between poetry and music, a subject that interested me greatly. My teacher was impressed with my presentation, but was disappointed in the class's response. And he told them so. He asked them how they could let my outrageous polemic denying any connection between poetry and music, which was obviously not true at all, go unchallenged. He said this in a way that suggested that he believed I'd been employing a deliberate rhetorical strategy, hyperbole perhaps, to goad them into responding and that they'd let both of us down by being so complacent. What my teacher didn't know was that I was deadly serious. I had profound doubts that poetry and music were anything alike, and all such comparisons between the two made me irrationally irate. I knew, of course, that historically poetry and music had been on very intimate terms indeed. The Ancient Greeks, for instance, had one word, mousike, that meant what we have divided into two words, poetry and music. Originally, all poetry was sung, so obviously, poetry was musical. But with the introduction and adoption of the alphabet and the literacy it fostered, combined later with the spread of print made possible by the invention of the printing press, the relationship between poetry and music eventually began to unravel. This took a long time, but I believe that the complete separation of the two was finally accomplished in the 20th century, though many a contemporary poet seems unwilling to admit it. But come on, not only is poetry not sung these days or even chanted, most poetry is delivered by a silent page to silent eyes above a mouth that doesn't even move its lips while reading: the only hearing going on is happening in the mind's ear. Silent poetry is everywhere, silent music is a contradiction. “But what about the rhythm,” you might protest. “Poems have rhythm, music has rhythm, therefore poetry is musical.” Your heart has rhythm, too, but you don't talk about the music of your pulse. To my mind, to speak of the music of poetry is to rely on a definition of music so broad as to be practically meaningless. Print has transformed what was once an oral/aural art into a visual art (that can be voiced, granted). Just as oral cultures favor the ear, print cultures favor the eye. We're a print culture and, as such, our poems are written by the eye and for the eye. And when the ear experiences poetry these days, for the most part, it requires the mediation of the eye: we attend poetry readings, remember, there's always a written text somewhere, usually on the podium in front of the reader (in those few cases I've seen when poets haven't relied on texts to give a reading, all they've done is removed the text from public view during the performance: what they're reciting is simply memorized text). So, William, to finally answer your question, for years I denied that music had anything to offer as far as helping me write poems. The first poet I admired enough to emulate was e. e. cummings and I was particularly attracted to his visual poetry, his proto-concrete work. For years, I was much more concerned about how a poem looked on the page, then I was with the way the poem would sound when read out loud. Not that I was completely oblivious to sound or rhythm. I've always been fond of rhyme, for instance, even when it was looked at with suspicion by the free verse ideologues I studied with during my first workshops in the 70's. And as I've grown older, I've mellowed a bit concerning the whole poetry = music equation. It really is more of a semantic issue than anything: when applied to poetry, the words music and musical have become more akin to terms of praise than description. And life is too short to argue as much as I'd have to make people understand my objections. This answer has gone on way too long as it is, but it could go on much much longer if I discussed my whole irritation with the concept of “voice” in poetry and my decades-old struggle with Denise Levertov (may she rest in peace) and her ideas about poems as “scores” (as in musical scores), but I've got to finish this interview some day and so will not delve into these issues unless you, William, request that I do so. Dirk, you spent 10 weeks in the Betty Ford Clinic, but I couldn't bring myself to quit drinking, and when I did quit drinking I smoked too many menthols and developed coughs I treated with Nyquil, quite a bit of Nyquil. Which passed easily back into Jack and coke. And then, with my first hangover in many weeks, I went to work, and every time I moved the rivet gun into place I saw you sitting there in silk slippers in the clinic tossing back a shot of wheatgrass juice. Rivet. Shot. Rivet. Shot. I couldn't get the time off, my insurance wouldn't cover it, and so I medicate my repetitive motion syndrome with Jack and coke. Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot. William, I went to the best because I could afford the best and, frankly, I deserve the best. And I highly recommend wheatgrass juice. I have developed a highly complex program combining diet, exercise, meditation and a variety of supplements, both herbal and synthetic, and wheatgrass juice plays a crucial role in maintaining the vigorous, vital, and virile physical specimen you see before you. Without wheatgrass juice, the vibrant glow that radiates from virtually every pore of my body would be reduced significantly. I'd suggest that in the future you try mixing your Jack with wheatgrass. Coke has way too much sugar and the carbonation destroys your teeth. Make the right choice, William, the healthy choice. Dirk, if an independent publisher with a quirky name were to bend over backwards to publish a volume of your work according to your precise whims, what kind of book would you instruct them to create? Playing cards, William, playing cards. The last year I lived in Maine, I was the Resident Director of a dorm full of freshmen and freshwomen. My hours were not 9 to 5 and I often found myself wide awake at two or three a.m. after most of my charges were asleep, or at least quietly sedated. I began taking long walks during the early morning hours, usually to the 7-11 store in Orono which stayed open 24 hours a day. When I had marijuana (which wasn't often in those days) I would get high before leaving the dorm. And I always took my Walkman to listen to tapes. Two that I remember listening to frequently were Roxy Music's "Avalon" and a greatest hits album by The Cars. While walking and smoking a small cigar, I would compose short poems in my head, committing them to memory so that I could write them down as soon as I returned home. Curiously, I usually did not use the little notebook I always have with me to make notes on the poems being created. I'm not sure why I decided to forgo this practice except perhaps for the very reason that it had become a practice, a habit I wanted to do without for awhile. In any case, because I wasn't writing down lines and images and ideas, and because memory is slippery even when not under the influence, the resulting poems were inevitably short and I began to refer to them as 'laiku,' that is, 'like haiku.' I had also decided that one of the goals of this project was to sharpen my observational powers, to force me to look at the world again, the grass, the trees, the moon, the parking lots, the streetlamps, the puddles, the birds, the cars (but, interestingly, not the people). My feeling at the time was that my poems were too intellectual, too rarefied, more familiar with the interior of a classroom than the mud under the author's feet. So these laiku walks became a conscious effort to expand my poetic repertoire, to break the logjam of artistic stagnation. Once I returned to the dorm, I wrote the poems down in a composition notebook and then, usually the next day, typed them out on the IBM Selectric II I had in my office. During the typing phase, I decided how to visually deploy the poems I'd written in my head. Usually, the lineation came during the typing, but as the project went on and I knew what was happening visually with the poems, I began to do some of the lineation work in my head during the walks themselves. Eventually, as a number of poems began to accumulate, I decided I wanted to write enough laiku to be able to make a set of playing cards, each of the four suits corresponding to one of the four seasons, since as the seasons changed so did the laiku. And I didn't want just a suggestion of playing cards, I wanted them to be actual, useable playing cards. Originally, I assumed this deck would be the standard 52 plus two jokers. But now I think I'd prefer to make a Pinochle deck (which has 48 cards, no jokers), because Pinochle is my favorite card game in the whole wide world. One of the things I like about this idea is that an infinite number of arrangement variations are possible: all you have to do is shuffle the cards and see what sequence of poems results. Your cars, Dirk, have always betrayed your classical tastes. Your cars, their lines, their chrome silver or gold ornamentation, were sleek, well-engineered, and you wore them casually, stepping in and out as if they were a pair of worn silk sneakers, as if to say: Well? It is logical that I should drive the best possible car. What can I say, William, except that you seem to have hit the nail on the proverbial head. I can find nothing in the preceding statement with which to disagree. I am particularly fond of my purple, customized '57 Chevy, with the Moroccan leather interior. I am sure it was an innocent coincidence, Dirk, that every model was a model I had served on the assembly line for. I built your cars, at least one rivets worth, and I felt I was entitled to something for that. Rivet. Rivet. Rivet. Rivet. This sense of entitlement worries me, William, because I think if indulged in too long or too often it will seriously hamper your ability to accomplish your goals in life. It's not that you aren't entitled to things, you are. However, no one is going to give them to you: you have to take them. That's what I discovered years ago and I adjusted my life accordingly. You can see where it has gotten me. Follow my example, William, grab life with gusto; don't wait for someone else to notice that you have not been given your entitlement. Dirk, I don't think I understand your work. Do I? What do you mean by "understand?" I believe there are several levels of understanding. If you mean you don't think you understand what the author intended to convey, it is quite conceivable that you don't understand my work. But, using the same criterion, it is just as conceivable that I don't understand my work. I take seriously D. H. Lawrence's tenet: Don't trust the writer! Trust the tale! (I'm not sure if I have the phrasing exactly right, but I know I have the typing all wrong: for emphasis, Lawrence used ALL CAPS to make these declarations. The only flaw in a wonderful book. He didn't need to pollute his text with an ugly row of capital letters. Trust the tale, Lawrence. ALL CAPS always signals desperation.) In other words (that Lawrence also uses, if memory serves): Writers lie. That's their job. Why should we expect them to stop lying just because they're talking about their writing? Particularly since writers don't always know when they're lying and often think they aren't when they are. While I believe I can be reasonably certain of what I intend to do when I begin writing something, so what? Intentions do not guarantee results. What I plan on doing and what I end up doing may be considerably different, without me realizing it, so powerful is the vision of my intent. Of course, more often than not I'm disappointed in the final work because it does not live up to the ideal that has formed in my head. So, when the work is not what I intended or hoped for, how does it follow that I am best qualified to interpret what it has in fact become, what it actually does? We only have limited access to all the forces that are engaged during a creative act. Our conscious choices provide only a portion of the content that ends up in a completed work. So while I may be a particularly astute critic of my work simply because I have been so intimately involved with it, that doesn't mean my interpretations can necessarily be considered the final word, because even I only know a portion of what constitutes the work and its effects. I resist monoliths. Every reader is unique: wouldn't it be incredibly arrogant to imagine I can write something that will be received in exactly the way I want it to be received, that the exact same message or meaning or effect or experience will invariably occur, regardless of the reader or that reader's circumstances and history? Even I can't read my own work that way: it changes upon subsequent readings, particularly if there's been a long stretch of time between readings. Why? The text hasn't changed; the reader has. I could babble on about this because this is a subject that is also very interesting to me, but I sense I'm getting long-winded and so want to answer your question directly. Yes, William, you understand my work. Whether your understanding is congruent with mine or to anyone else's, I can't say. Actually, for me the most important questions about my work that I'd like you answer would be: Did you enjoy my work? Even when you didn't understand it?"
Why do you count letters and syllables? Because I've come to the conclusion that I have no ear. That is, an ear for metrics. I write something in what I imagine is iambic pentameter and I'm told by an expert that it isn't correct. You write a poem about spring that you claim uses a specific metrical unit and I struggle with the text for days, scrawling scansion marks over the tiny letters of an e-mail hard copy, but my units don't correspond to the units you say you've used. I trust you. I believe that you are an accomplished writer of metrical verse. An Auden-in-the-making. But my ear simply does not agree with yours, apparently. (I still wish to have a talk with you about that poem some day. I was seriously troubled by the experience, and not just because it demonstrated the fraudulence of my title, Scansion Consultant for Spineless Books.) But, though I'm seriously deficient in the metrics-perception department, I still crave order in my work; constraints that produce predictable regularity appeal to me. So, since I'm lousy at counting beats and measuring stress, I've decided to count units I can easily and unequivocally identify. I also count words, by the way, and other grammatical units, like sentences or paragraphs. I would like to point out that while I no longer attempt to write metrical verse, I always test my poems to make sure they "sound" right, and I will revise lines that seem "clunky" when read out loud. So the rhythm of the line is important to me, but whether it conforms to some pre-existing metrical pattern is not. Dirk, I was personally pulled aside and discouraged from joining a union by a manager who had only ever barked at me. He called me into his office, sat across his desk, silently offered me a cigarette, went from hot to cold and back like an unreliable shower. It was not clear who he was addressing but it was obviously not me. I don't need the trouble. I have nothing saved up, I can't afford to miss even one month of rent, I have three hysterical gigantic cats to feed God fuck'em. I don't know why the manager singled me out. Probably as a test case. Having managed huge groups of workers, workers that both I and my superiors fervently wished to remain unaffiliated with any labor organization, I recognize the difficulties your manager faces. On the one hand, his immediate boss has made it clear that a union is to be avoided at all costs (except, of course, the costs required to meet the workers' demands), but on the other hand, the Big Boss, i.e. the federal government, has made it clear, via statute, that interfering with the workers' right to organize is illegal and to be avoided. How can he possibly do both? He can't, of course, but he also cannot afford to do nothing. So he calls you into his office and practices some half-hearted spiel that is not designed to change your mind as much as it is a way of fulfilling his responsibility to his corporate masters. Probably you were chosen because he suspects that you can't be bothered: thus he kills two birds with one disjointed monologue. He can truthfully report to his boss that he has been spreading the anti-union gospel and he can be fairly certain that you won't turn him into the Big Boss. Besides, since you can't be bothered, his speech is simply a non sequitur that wouldn't affect your decision one way or another; strictly speaking, then, he hasn't really interfered in a worker's right to organize: you weren't planning to organize anything anyway. And pardon the quibble, but one of your cats seems pretty ordinary-sized to me. Now get back to work. What are the basic units of your poems and how do they mean or do they mean? I'm not sure what you mean by this question. Are you referring to stanzas? Words? Lines? I am of the firm conviction that the line is all that poetry has going for it, which is why I'm highly skeptical of claims made for prose poetry, claims for its existence, that is. Not that I don't like prose poetry—Russel Edson's is fabulous—I just don't like the name, the category, the genre. It's hard not-to-like something that doesn't exist, but that's kind of how I feel about prose poetry. How has fiction influenced your poetry and who is responsible? Right now, I can't think of any fiction having influenced my poetry. I doubt there has been no influence, considering how much fiction I've read, but I'm not conscious of any. And, of course, always intent on practicing what I preach: I take full responsibility. I can't sleep, Dirk. I pass out drunk and then I wake up three hours later, burning with tension. Wheatgrass, William, wheatgrass. What time of day is best for you for writing? Having never established a regular writing time, this is hard to answer, but I would guess between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. Given that all my jobs, except the aforementioned dorm job, required the 9 to 5 or 8 to 5 regimen, this has proven problematic. Usually sleep wins out over writing. Why do you like Marcel Duchamp? Because he's like a whoopee cushion at a funeral, but an extremely intelligent and thoughtful whoopee cushion that you can't kick out of the church because you're really curious to hear what kind of eulogy it will give. Even the corpse sits up to listen. Is Priest Lake a real place? Yes. What do you think of Eliot's "The Waste Land," which, in your poem "The Bland Taste," undergoes some sort of severe thematic transliteration? It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that if I am a poet (I'm just being rhetorical here since I've already established my poet-hood, my filthy-rich poet-hood, elsewhere in this interview)—if I am a poet, it is because of Eliot's “Waste Land.” “The Waste Land” was the first poem that demonstrated to me how much poetry could do. My first encounter with this poem happened when I was a sophomore in college and an absolute poetry ignoramus (my idea of poetry before ““The Waste Land” was Richard Brautigan's telegraphic, epigrammatic—and make no mistake, thoroughly delightful—work). “The Waste Land” blew me away: here was poetry I could sink my brain into and so I immersed myself in the poem and the scholarly work that attempted to explain it. (In subsequent years, I've struggled to move beyond its influences, with varying degrees of success. The laiku project I mentioned earlier was an attempt to write non-Eliotic poetry.) “The Bland Taste” should be seen as an homage, really. I went to a great deal of trouble to produce as an exact a replica as I could of Eliot's poem (okay, a funhouse-mirror replica). I matched his line count as closely as I could, used rhyme when he used rhyme, attempted to copy his metrics when possible, developed an alternative system of images, symbols, and tropes to match his symbolic weavings. Ideally, each of Eliot's syllables would be replaced by one of mine, and each of his symbols would be countered by one of mine. There are several places in “The Bland Taste” where I think I came very close to the ideal I was aiming for. I'm quite pleased with Section V, “Lots of Wonder Bread' (though the title sucks a little); a couple of times, I think I nail Eliot cold. My major failure to get anywhere near my ideal, and the main reason “The Bland Taste” is shorter than “The Waste Land,” is my transfer of the pub scene in “A Game of Chess” to a high school gymnasium during a basketball game. I think the intent was right on, but I could never make that part work to my satisfaction. The “voice” isn't right. I still cringe when I read that part of “A Chain of Regress” (another title that sucks a tad). I was learning to write like Eliot by parodying Eliot and it remains one of the most profitable poetry projects I've ever undertaken. What amazes me about “The Waste Land” is that despite the fact that more ink has been spilt over this poem than has been spilt over any other piece of literature ever (relative to its size), despite the fact that one would think it could barely breathe, so buried is it in commentary and familiarity, despite the fact that how absolutely radical it was when it first appeared is obscured, now that it is firmly in the canon, despite all the baggage, and despite the fact that I've probably read it more than any other poem and spent nearly two years working on a lavish parody, I can still read it anew and when I do I inevitably say to myself, “Damn, how did he do that? That son of a bitch could really write.” Using what sort of poetic form do you feel you do your best work? To answer this question requires that I know which of my works I consider best. I'm not even sure I've written my best work yet. I certainly hope not. However, in both my prose and poetry, I seem completely enamored of the periodic sentence, endless, comma-filled, crammed with parentheticals, large spans bolted together with colons and semi-colons, the period always delayed (if not omitted entirely), with footnotes appended to continue the job of avoiding closure. If my “best work” exists, I suspect you'd find a periodic sentence at the heart of the enterprise. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. Eventually I would have to drink a "dog"—40 ounces of Colt 45 Malt Liquor—in the cab of my pickup, watching the sun rise over the coils of razor wire that surrounded the parking lot, just to stop trembling and face the rivet gun. It was on one such morning that I lost my hand in the line. I remember very little of this. Except that, in the waiting room at the emergency room, the receptionist was you, and you were unable to verify my coverage with the health care provider. "The computer is down," you kept saying, "the computer is down." Was this gesture of yours in some sense a rebellion against the increasing prominence of computer technology in the way poetry is written, read, and even, in the case of new media, composed? Are you, in some sense, nostalgic for a time when giant typewriters walked the earth? I'm sorry, but I was not the receptionist you encountered in the emergency room. In fact, this is the first I've heard of your unfortunate accident. My deepest sympathies. Quite likely, the pain and the shock were causing you to hallucinate. However, had I actually been the receptionist you mention, yes, it is entirely conceivable I would have made such a “gesture,” as you call it, and for the reason you have suggested, because, in answer to your second question, yes, I do miss typewriters. Computers are great and all, but for me a poem doesn't really exist until I can hold the hard copy in my hands. A poem on the screen just isn't the same. It's like a spirit waiting for a body to animate. With a typewriter, you're building the hard copy letter by letter, right there before your eyes, and you can see the direct physical effect of your fingers as they alter and manipulate pieces of the material world. I like to equate writing poetry with making sculpture and a typewriter was a chisel, an acetylene torch, a band saw, and a smelting furnace all in one. Well, Dirk, I think the librarians here are getting ready to ask me to leave. It is a public computer, but I suppose I reek. I haven't bathed since it last rained, and gin is what I have been using in lieu of toothpaste. One last question: How has working on endlessly cyclical satirical pastoral hypertext works influenced your poetry? Well, William, working on The Unknown (www.unknownhypertext.com) definitely has had a prophylactic effect on my poetry. And by prophylactic I'm referring specifically to the condom. A condom does not prevent the event, it simply contains the event. Acutally, this analogy doesn't make much sense and doesn't really answer the question. But that's the way it is with The Unknown. here > there |
