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The Argotist Online |
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Michael
Rothenberg Interview Michael
Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, editor and co-founder of Big Bridge Press
and Big Bridge a webzine of poetry. He has been an active
environmentalist in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 25 years. His poems
have appeared in many journals including Exquisite Corpse, Berkeley
Poetry Review, Fulcrum, Sycamore Review, Ironwood, Lungfull,
Pearl, Pharos, Prosodia, Rockhurst Review, Rolling
Stock, Shuffle Boil, Van Gogh's Ear, and Zyzzyva. His
books of poems include Favorite Songs, Nightmare of the Violins (Twowindows
Press), The Paris Journals (Fish Drum), Grown Up Cuba (Il Begatto
Press, Amsterdam), Monk Daddy (Blue Press) and Unhurried Vision (La
Alameda Press). His songs have appeared in Hollywood Pictures' Shadowhunter
and Black Day, Blue Night, and TriStar Pictures' Outside Ozona.
Other songs have been recorded on CDs including: ‘The Darkest Part of
The Night’ by Bob Malone, ‘Difficult Woman’ by Renee Geyer, ‘Global
Blues Deficit’ by Cody Palance, and ‘The Woodys’ by The Woodys. He is also
editor of Overtime: Selected Poems by Philip Whalen (Penguin), As
Ever: Selected Poems by Joanne Kyger (Penguin) and David's Copy: Selected
Poems by David Meltzer (Penguin). Jeffrey
Side has had
poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg
Review, and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window,
A Little Poetry, Poethia,
nthposition, eratio, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket, Textimagepoem,
Apochryphaltext, 9th St. Laboratories, P.F.S. Post, Great Works, hutt, ken*again,
Poets' Corner, The Dande Review, Poetry Bay, Dusie and
CybpherAnthology. JS:
You write songs as well as poems. Which did you start first: song writing or
poetry? MR:
I started writing what I thought was poetry about 40 years ago. Though it might
have been songwriting, I just never tried to set it to music. By the time I hit
my teens I had heard Howl, Coney Island of The Mind in recording,
and was listening to Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, collecting the Caedmon series of
recorded poetry, and reading John Keats. It all seemed about the same to me. JS:
Apart from the obvious differences between songs and poems (namely music) what
do you think are each of their relative strengths and weaknesses? MR:
I
am confused about the idea that there are "obvious" differences
between songs and poems. Over the years it has
occurred
to me that there are fewer and fewer differences. I tend to want to join the
terms, song and poetry, any time I am speaking about this subject. Like
"poem/song." It seems that In The Beginning was the song. What we
think about "poetry" today has something to do with the church, the
printing press, universities and libraries. If poetry and song, poetry/song
fulfills its promise then the strength and weakness of the two ideas should be
the same, to carry the news, to spread the word, to tell the stories of the
tribe, to heal the sick, raise the dead, to be the prayer and celebration of
every aspect of life. One came out of the other and is still the other. Song to
Poetry, Poetry to Song. JS:
Perhaps I should clarify my position on poetry and song. I agree with you that
historically songs were the original poems and that what we now call poetry is a
later development. And I also agree that there is no intrinsic difference
between poetry and song. What I mean by ‘the obvious differences between songs
and poems’ is that songs have melodies, the lyric is sung, and there is a
performance element that (spoken poetry aside) written poems don’t have. I
find that of the two mediums (during the past 40 years), it is the song as
opposed to the poem that seems to be fulfilling more effectively what you say
both should be doing. MR:
I agree with you, song has been doing a better job of doing its job in recent
years. Though I invite experimentation, whatever you want to call it,
deconstruction, the evolving abstraction and plasticity of much of contemporary
poetry, visual poetry, field poetry, whichever and whatever, poetry seems to
have gone into being too theoretical or too milk toast (see National Public
Radio) too often. The emphasis is on ‘too often.’ I want to make sure I am
clear in saying that I support the theoretical and experimental relationship the
poet has to poetry today. I publish it at Big Bridge. And I think Universities
can do good things for poets, much of the work I publish at Big Bridge is
generated through University environment. But I am worried about
heart-connection. There seems to be something being lost in the
"process." Theory becomes theory and MFA's become careers. I
tend to think of poetry as the "research and development" department
of culture. But then there is this other thing that poetry does that is also not
hermetic and experimental, telling the story of the tribe and we poets need to
be doing that too. I don't think we need to pander, or simplify our work to
"reach the masses", but we do need to look across the poetic landscape
and make sure we are supporting all of the poetic manifestations, not just our
own "Poetic Stronghold", and make sure we give voice to poetry's many
manifestations, individual voices and styles. We are a very specialized and
niche oriented society and we seem to market poetry until it becomes all the
same thing, whether it's the same thing experimental or the same thing workshop.
Over
marketing and
homogenization.
That goes for song business as well. Will it play on MTV or VH1 or Top Ten
Radio? Now I'm talking about song/poetry. You know you have markets and genres,
this University thing, and Iowa thing, and Beat thing. We're going to kill
ourselves and each other, and wound poetry and the reader/listener, if we don't
learn more about each other and what each other is doing and learn to recognize
strength in diversity. Digression. Anyways,
I don't think poets can be blamed entirely (entirely) for the dumbing down of
the public, the public's increased inability to read and comprehend outside of
the sound-byte and the slogan. What I mean is the new big slogan machine is what
the public is hooked on, and they want it in their poetry/song too, the ‘buy
this slogan’, the slogan driven to sell product. The career poem/song. The
soundtrack poem song selling cars. And here it is important to say that the
song, because of its exploitation by media-industry is in major danger. It has
been co-opted to be a product placement accessory, for the sole purpose of
selling lifestyle, product attitude and product hipness, and has been whored to
death by the music industry and I am sorry to say, by musicians/poets
themselves. Evidence
of revolt against this whoring of music can be witnessed in the "Napster
Wars" and the increase in bootleg music and the proliferation of
independent music production, home studios, and on the road meet and greet
distribution. It's hard to keep music and song down. Likewise, poetry being the
same equation, poetry will rise to the cause, sneak through the cracks of the
inbred style clans and publishing authorities and will come back to itself more
often, inevitably. I believe that. But I am an idealist, and that's a whole
other problem. JS:
I find that because songs rely to a large extent on music to convey an overall
immediate mood or tone that this gives them a slight advantage over spoken
poetry, which normally can only achieve the same result after building-up to it
after a number of spoken lines. Is this a fair statement? MR:
Sure, in the conventional sense, you can use a musical prelude or hum a few bars
to help set the mood of a song. But then some songs have misleading, somber and
reflective preludes and then turn into marching songs. I'm not trying to be
contrary here, but I am interested in breaking down the bias of songwriters
about poetry and poets about songwriters. When I headed out to Nashville, LA and
New York, some 15 years ago, to learn more about songwriting and to give a try
with the music business, I was confronted with two troubling realities. Many
poets saw songwriting as an inferior, low, art and the songwriters were
absolutely opposed to the idea that a song could be poetry, because it was
highbrow and convoluted. I guess this all comes about from territorial
imperative and economics. Money for the music business. They didn't need any
more songwriters. And teaching positions in the Ivory Tower for the poets, they
didn't need a bunch of yahoo songwriters, without MFA or PHD, muddying up the
canon with "clichés". It gets weirder than that really. But I don't
want to digress unless you want me to. JS:
Phil Ochs has meant a lot to you and you have said that he was influential in
terms of showing you the relationship of poetry to popular song. Could you
expand on this? MR:
Phil Ochs embodied the poet I admired as a teen in the 60's. He was socially
engaged and he had a broad Whitmanic view. He spoke to everyman and spoke to the
intellectual. He was camp, pop, and sweeping in his vision. His lyrics in albums
like Pleasure of the Harbor allowed for a complexity of language that is
parallel to any contemporary "University" poetry. Like Dylan in Highway
61 or Blond on Blonde, Ochs was working with the image and expansion
of the metaphor; he was both abstract and surreal. I know that there are some
who preferred early Ochs to later Ochs, and early Dylan to later Dylan but as
far as I am concerned they had a body of work that showed elasticity and
experimentation, reaching and passion. I did a feature for Phil Ochs at Big
Bridge hoping to highlight to Big Bridge readers the parallel and equal ground
that Ochs occupied with Dylan or any other songwriter and poets of his day. As I
see it, the tribute by many poets in JS:
You once said in an interview that 'There is nothing similar between McClure,
Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Snyder . . . they didn't write alike! Their line
constructions, their word uses and voices, were all unique.' Given this, do you
think the name “Beat Poetry” is meaningless as a label to lump all these
poets together? MR:
I
think the lumping together of all these poets is of temporary use, and maybe
more useless than useful. We may be in the third century of the Romantic
Movement; we just don't have much perspective on tendencies and evolution in
language and culture because we're in the middle of it. Marketing is myopic. We
are always reaching for names for periods and creative movements, sometimes they
last a whole day. What we do know about the Beat writers is they had some common
interests and they were friends, but then there were many poets from all around
the USA and internationally, who didn't read at Six Gallery, who were tuned into
a similar consciousness, or snapped their fingers to jazz. Maybe
we’re all Surrealists; we just haven't finished the poem yet. Some want to
call me a post-Beat Beat or something like that, but I remember Philip Whalen
telling me I was a "contemporary", even though he was 25 years older.
He said, ‘We're contemporaries. You're here aren't you? ‘ So if we get stuck
on Beat as a name then the namers would just have to call me a Beat poet, not a
post-beat poet, and imagine themselves living in another century or millennium
looking back on now. Blake and Keats are mostly thought of as Romantic poets,
but they had quiet a few years between them. But I don't know, we can't just
blame literary historians for these names, the poets like them too. It's a great
way to get attention. But mostly, eventually, these terms end up being used to
marginalize the writers they are "naming," and enable gangs of new
kids on the block to establish turf. When new tendencies become predominant, you
might want to call it some kind of poetry, Blah Blah Poetry, just for the sake
of short-hand, an abbreviation, to differentiate. But branding and product
placement is all the rage. Eventually the naming becomes a weapon in a class war
and doesn't identify anything. JS:
What do you see as the value of theoretical poetry? MR:
All
poetry is theoretical essentially, because it should be waking us up and moving
us along in our experience and perception. That's the magic of theory. And the
poetry we have been talking about, like "Language" poetry, are
absolutely important because they give us a way of revisiting reality,
revisiting construction, or deconstruction, and making new sense. Whether it is
political or not, emotional or not, well, I don't know. I tend to avoid too much
theory on theory. I get real lazy in that direction and confused. I could look
at a white canvas and tell you I like it, but I can't tell you whether it is
Marxist or not. And then if it is Marxist, how long is it Marxist, socialist,
anarchical? I mean after 100 years how revolutionary is Impressionism? I love
Impressionist Art, but I'm so tired of seeing Impressionist retrospectives in
major and minor galleries that I'd rather go shopping. And I hate shopping. I
guess it's not the art that bugs me so much, the Impressionist Art, because in
itself it is magnificent, but it bugs me to be sold the same curation over and
over again, by museum institutions, it gets on my nerves, I look for imagination
in the artist, curator, editor, and museum. Sometimes it seems as if there was
nothing else painted in the last hundred years but Impressionism, as if there
has been nothing else to look at for ten thousand years. What about a great
retrospective on the Pre-Raphaelites? I would travel to that. Or Gustav Moreau?
There is just so much to see and learn about. We are caught in the art (see
poetry) marketing business to such an extent that esoteric can really just mean
unfamiliar. After a while I don't want to hear "Classic Rock" on the
radio. Van Gogh is starting to sound like a nostalgic drinking song. If poetry
is as I said, the ‘research and development department’ of culture,
informing all art and religion, then poetry is hermetic, and theoretical poetry
is hermetic as much as any "street poetry", it wants to break down and
transform language and how we see our reality. So we have to be careful about
using the term "theoretical poetry" as much as we do about using the
term "Beat Poetry". In overuse meaning gets lost. Anything
can get inbred and so institutionalized it can lose value. "Theoretical
poetry" can eventually become a craft for careerism, a duplication
reflection without soul or fire, job hunting, no longer resonating with the
community, society or culture. Theoretical poetry must be aware of fooling
itself so it can continue to give direction. Just because we’re obscure
doesn’t mean we aren't necessarily deep and meaningful. Same goes for poetry
of the everyday. People say I deal with ‘the extraordinary ordinary’ in my
journal work. Maybe I am just self-indulgent and boring. We run a risk, the mind
gets tired. But again, all poetry is theoretical when it is poetry. What you and
I are really complaining about, I suppose, is institutionalization of
experimentation, when the social function of the work dies and the reader turns
on the TV. Why doesn't anyone talk about Hart Crane these days? JS:
You have known many writers connected with the Beat movement (such as
Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Joanne
Kyger) and also those not connected to it, such as Ed Dorn, how did you come
into contact with them? MR:
Interesting
that most of the poets I have met, the ones you mention above, I met through my
tropical plant nursery and environmental activism and not through a "poetry
scene". I’ve had bromeliad and orchid nursery, Shelldance, in San
Francisco Bay Area for the past 30 years and have been active in the
environmental movement in my town, Pacifica. I was introduced to Joanne Kyger by
the journalist Margo Patterson Doss who wrote an article about the nursery,
‘Bromeliad Fever.’ Margo was a long time neighbor of Joanne's and friend and
supporter of many writers and the environmental movement. Joanne and I became
friends and eventually she introduced me to Philip Whalen. My ex-wife starting
sitting zazen with Philip and before I knew it we were having lunch. We hardly
ever spoke about poetry. He came out to the nursery a few times to look at the
flowers. He loved the orchids. An
ornithologist, Luis Baptista, brought Michael McClure out to the nursery to see
what we were up to. You know McClure has a great interest, understatement, in
ecology and the natural world in general. Michael and I became friends like
that, visiting or lunch, hiked up to Sweeney Ridge together . . . I met David
Meltzer when I went back to New College of California in San Francisco, for my
MA in poetics, as a returning student. I was writing songs then and David had
already been down that road with Serpent Power, and so became my friend and
mentor, helped me understand song and poetry in ways I had not imagined but made
perfect sense. Interesting thing, David and my friendship really began with the
plants again. A friend of mine, Dan Smith, we met at my nursery when Dan was
running a flower store in Mill Valley, (Dan was already an old friend of Joanne
Kyger and lived in Bolinas and knew many of the poets who lived out there), it
was Dan who turned me on to Meltzer. He bought me a Meltzer broadside, ‘The
Blackest Rose’ for my birthday fifteen years before I ever met David. I know
this is confusing. Dorn, I met at a poetry seminar about Black Mountain at
Chapel Hill-NC, where I got my BA in English back in around 1973. I
met Dorn again in SF when I moved West. But I never really got to be friends
with Dorn. My connection with his work had more to do with my interest in his
writing, the influence of Gunslinger for instance on my understanding of
how language can be cinematic and dramatic and still handy. There's a lot to say
about Dorn but not here I don't think. Dorn did have some important suggestions
on the nature of the "fragment," the only thing I could ever write. He
gave me hope that the fragment would be adequate. And I think I met Dorn because
of the cross-polination of the Beats and Black Mountain, these people were
friends. Sooner or later everybody gets to know everybody because it is a small
world and six degrees of separation, and poetry is a smaller world, maybe less
than six degrees. Then I heard from Anselm Hollo, who I met at Naropa, that
Jennifer Dorn was interested in having me edit Ed's work for a Penguin selected
poems project. I couldn't resist that idea. Dorn was a very cool genius and
essential in keeping me enthusiastic about poetry potential. JS:
Did you know any of the other first generation Beat poets such as Ginsberg or
Corso? MR:
Yes,
Ginsberg, Corso. JS: Did you ever meet Ken Kesey?
MR: No.
JS:
Although not a member of the Beat Generation in the sense that Ginsberg
was, Ken Kesey is considered to be the main link between the Beat Generation and
the Hippies as far as attitudes to life were concerned. Yet as far as I’m
aware the there doesn’t seem to be a literary connection between these two
groupings. Was
there
a thing as hippie poetry in the sixties? MR:
This is a complicated question and maybe someone like David Meltzer or Karl
Young might have a more complete or accurate reply. I think you could say that
Ginsberg, Whalen, Amiri Baraka, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Corso, many
others, (I mean what about Burroughs?) like I have tried to say, had a lot to do
with Hippie life attitudes, concepts, concerns, though Burroughs seems to have
been adopted by the "Punksters", all of them informed the times. These
"beat" writers, were writing about the political and economic system,
ecology, race, war, peace, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanism, drugs, a lot of what
concerned the "hippies." I think of Whalen and Ginsberg and McClure as
just old hippies. Whalen was experimenting with peyote and writing about social,
economic, and moral conventions during the 60’s. You can read more about that
in Whalen’s letters. The consciousness of all those writers expanded and
embraced and propelled the “60’s” mind. Ginsberg
was chanting mantras with a harmonium at rock concerts all around the country.
McClure was hanging out with Jim Morrison and Hell's Angels and digging on
ecological concerns, and plays like The Beard, nudity, etc. Maybe these
were the senior members of the "hippie" sixties period but that idea
troubles me. Again the groupings become meaningless when you think about
contemporaries. I would be a hippie kid from some perspective and reading
McClure's Meat Science Essay as my introduction to many of the hippie
ideas. As time goes on people start to consider me a "baby beat" or
post-beat or third generation beat or some such stuff. Time changes these
perspectives of movements and cultural evolution. There are a couple of good
books on Kesey to read that came out in the last couple of years (Penguin) that
might clear this up some, I don't really think I can detail it here. I just have
some trouble with the "link" idea; it's too cut and dry. Kesey wasn't
much younger than the beat writers and they all hung out. Haven't you seen the
pictures of Ginsberg in long beard and naked? That's as hippie as you get. Or
Whalen on Mt. Tamalpais with beads and beard and walking stick. Senior members,
junior members, maybe Kesey took more acid than the rest. Maybe he wasn't from
New York or San Francisco. You have to look at regional variations. It's hard to
break this down, at least for me. There
were regional differences between the writers like New York's Ginsberg and Corso
and West Coast Snyder, Whalen, Welch. McClure coming in from Kansas. There was
the San Francisco Renaissance and the Berkeley Renaissance, and there were all
these people coming together with common interests, like the Black Mountain
poets, hanging out and reading-and was Bukowski a beatnik? I have seen that
assertion, writing each other. I've seen Creeley described as a beatnik poet. It
really is a little messy. You have to get over the Six Gallery event as being
the "beginning" of the "beat generation" and realize that
there were international tendencies at play and Kerouac drove a car and Kesey
drove a bus, and beatniks wore black and hippies wore tie-dye, stuff like that,
you begin to see that there was more of a milieu, a giant swimming that
coalesced. I am sure there are people who would site earlier sources than
Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso in New York, as beat. Who was the first to wear a
goatee and snap their fingers to jazz. You ought to check out Meltzer's Beat
Thing (La Alameda), to get a sense of the political period that gave birth
to the beat thing, also Meltzer’s Interviews with the Beats (City Lights).
It's just not that clear. As
a kid growing up I was already wearing beads when I first heard Ferlinghetti and
Ginsberg, and I thought, oh, I get it, these guys were saying what it was all
about. Ferlinghetti does not like to be considered a beatnik. Why not? So the
"beatniks" were the philosophers and poets of the time, like Leary and
Kesey, etc., they all became hippie leaders for me. The "beatniks"
were the poets practicing when I was a teen in the 1960's. After all, they were
young people, in their late 20's and 30's, not dead and ancient already like
Plato. Hippie poetry? Well these were the same poets, or maybe you could look at
the younger generation of poets closely involved with the "prototype
beats" or maybe even some younger poets like Joanne Kyger, Anne Waldman,
Brautigan, Meltzer, etc, etc, so many I can't even begin to list, I don't want
to leave all the beautiful writers out, that were writing then. I was only a
teenager then, by the time I started writing in any meaningful sense we were
already into the 70's. But then I was still reading Whalen, Ginsberg, Kyger,
Kerouac, Waldman, Corso, Kesey, Brautigan, Creeley, McClure, subjects and
density of text was changing, concerns were getting more specific to my baby
hippie concerns, I mean these were writers writing about the times, and they
were still young, and focusing on the immediate concerns, as say Vietnam became
more in focus and ecology issues became clearer then the poetry reflected that
more, these writers, the younger and the older "underground"
documented a period and continue to do so if they are still around with us. See
pictures of Meltzer with Dylan with McClure with Ginsberg hanging out together,
young guys. This tells the story in a big way. Or maybe a picture of me sitting
with Philip Whalen, eating popcorn and watching The Matrix on TV
in SF, 2000. JS:
How do you approach writing poetry? Do you have any particular writing
methodology or do you just play it by ear? MR:
Essentially I approach writing poetry as a journal writer. Daily. I mean I have
been keeping journals since I was a teenager. I thought this was the best way to
make sure that I got something written. You know artists are great
procrastinators. I try to get to the page each day, date the page, to know where
I am, a kind of "practice" in the meditation sense, and then see what
happens, as you say, ‘play it by ear.’ But definitely I keep myself
disciplined and productive by being there, or here, on the page, daily, as often
as I can. Sometimes, I just don't feel like doing it, looking at the page, even
writing the date, but after so many years of practice I usually feel better
sitting down to write, writing anything. Writing the date is a big
accomplishment sometimes, and then maybe I might write what I had for lunch or
snack or a fleeting thought, or some days I write everything, I can hear Joanne
Kyger saying, ‘you don't have to write Everything’, too much, my horoscope,
monotonous details, you can never tell what this stuff says until you step back
and look at it, sometimes a kind of juxtapositional narrative is set up just by
your eye moving over your life, something like Whalen calls ‘a continuous
nerve movie.’ Then I come back, when I get in the mood to look things over,
reflect I guess, and check out the journal, when I feel something has happened
and maybe is done being said. I don't know how to explain that. You
know sometimes a cycle of experience and thought or inquiry seems to have become
the preoccupation of a period and wants or has completion. So I might title the
journal for a week, or a month or two, or as in Unhurried Vision, a year,
or Paris Journal, because I was in Paris for a month and the groove
changed when I got there and the groove changed when I left. Then I might think
of the journal as one complete poem that needs a lot of editing, days deleted,
sections of days deleted, lines deleted, words, etc., and even the dates that
divide the entries might be deleted, concerns unite when you don't even know you
had a "thematic" concern. Or I might hunt through the journal for a
section that is an individual poem, or maybe there are a group of poems in the
poem. The journal as poem or hothouse for poems. You know some days, or
experiences entirely complete themselves. Some journals are no good for anything
because my mind never gels on anything, I realize I have been on automatic pilot
and it's just blah, blah. But you never know and I don't think you should edit
yourself too much while writing. Editing for me comes after. From another
perspective, I see it this way, if I go and write everyday it's like working out
in a gym or training for a race, lots of days nothing much happens but I
discover and experiment and keep myself warmed up, develop poetmuscles, and if
something comes down from the muse, the heavens, the back of my mind, some
extraordinary detail of daily life comes into my frame of experience that wants
noting, then I should be in good shape to take it down. Developing poet muscles,
something like that. I remember going through a dry period of writing, and then
heading off to USSR, and I was in such bad shape as a writer that I felt totally
incapable of writing what I was experiencing. You know, some times, no matter
how much you practice you have bad days. But the journal is my way of being
ready and in place and discovering. copyright © Michael Rothenberg & Jeffrey Side |