"You holding, man? I got the bread." "I don't want your money, Honey: I want your Time."
William S Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk
“I feel it’s a bit absurd to be interviewed about an interview, but the book came out way better than expected, so I feel protective of it. I’m in my usual situation, which I think is called ambivalence. I know I have to do something with the press. I’m not going to J.D. Salinger this one out. On the other hand, I don’t relish being in a hall of mirrors, like MetaMetaMetaMaus.”Here, from The Atlantic online, is a selection of Spiegelman's original sketches that eventually framed the story for Maus.
a girl you've just that minute met
explains tenderly that she and only she
is your final descendant
come from the farthest future...
and you don't even have a now to give her.
(from Fire Exit, Robert Kelly)
The literary chameleon Robert Kelly has written of poetry: "The high tension of reading a poem is such that any reader is somehow, somewhere, secretly or otherwise anxious for The End, for the poem to end. That anxiety for conclusion is built into the nature of the lyric poem, the short poem, and we can't escape it. Poetry seems like a clash of Gertrude Stein's 'writing wants to go on' with a kind of Aristotelian 'the form wants closure' -- it may be the very tension that makes us love the delicate discomfort of the poem."
Kelly has a fifty-year writing career. His most recent collection of stories, The Logic of the World and Other Fictions (McPherson), was published in April, and Robert Coover called Kelly's science fiction novel The Book From the Sky (North Atlantic) "a vintage flying saucer .. a provocatively eccentric book of wisdom." Here is the writer's statement at the modern poetry conference at City University of New York, held in February, 2010.
I suppose poetry is
Listening Out Loud
And what one listens to is language --
language in one's head
(only a fool would confuse that with himself thinking
only a fool would think the things that he hears languaging in him
are things that he himself is thinking)
Most poets are too smart to believe in their own intelligence.
Witless, clueless, we await a sign.
Pindar tells us a sign is never clear (at least a sign from Zeus) --
hence the poem veers towards a kind of
lucid incomprehensibility,
[Eventually after a few hundred or thousand years we begin to comprehend the incomprehensible -- Dante, Aeschylus, Milton -- and they become classics and become of great celebrity but diminished use. But till then the texts are of great power, startling, provoking, eliciting. Some grand provokers -- Pindar himself, Li shang-yin, Lycophron, Hoelderlin, Stein -- still wait their turn, still turn us towards the poem we must write, the poem they force us to write, to make sense of what they do to our heads.]
The incomprehensible provokes the reader to acts of preternatural awareness.
This incomprehensibility factor is what the ancient Greeks called Mousa, Muse. [The Spartans -- sturdy workmen, who would have liked the sacred gizmos of Elshtain's gnoetry* -- called her Moha.] (I told her I would work her into this evening.)
The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense. That is, it creates sense -- the sense of something happening to you as you read.
And that's the only happening poetry has?
The luster of listening.
Or what we hear in poetry is groans from the battlefield where time struggles against space.
Kelly's own dream-like poetry is best described by the author himself when he recently wrote that "the page looked like this, in the sense that a sentence was continuing from an earlier page, but what is the earlier page of a dream? Is the answer any clearer than if I asked: what is the earliest dream?"
Kelly has written and published more than sixty books. His most recent volume of poems is Fire Exit (Black Widow Press), a group of 132 short poems comprising a single long work. For more about Robert Kelly and his work, visit his website at rk-ology.
*gnoetry: an on-going experiment in human/computer collaborative poetry composition.
from "Poem to Shout in the Ruins"(Louis Aragon)Let’s spit the two of us let’s spit
On what we loved
On what we loved the two of us
Yes because this poem the two of us
Is a waltz tune and I imagine
What is dark and incomparable passing between us
Like a dialogue of mirrors abandoned
In a baggage-claim somewhere say Foligno
Or Bourboule in the Auvergne
Certain names are charged with a distant thunder
Yes let’s spit the two of us on these immense landscapes
Where little rented cars cruise by
Yes because something must still
Some thing
Reconcile us yes let’s spit
The two of us it’s a waltz
A kind of convenient sob
Let’s spit let’s spit tiny automobiles
Let’s spit that’s an order
A waltz of mirrors
A dialogue in the void
Listen to these immense landscapes where the wind
Cries over what we loved
One of them is a horse leaning its elbow on the earth
The other a dead man shaking out linen the other
The trail of your footprints I remember a deserted village
On the shoulder of a scorched mountain
I remember your shoulder
I remember your elbow your linen your footprints
I remember a town where there was no horse
I remember your look which scorched
My deserted heart a dead Mazeppa whom a horse
Carries away like that day on the mountain
Drunkenness sped my run through the martyred oaks
Which bled prophetically while day
Light fell mute over the blue trucks
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places
Where in spite of everything the spirit of mystery rose up
Like the cry of a blind child in a remote train depot
French writer and editor Louis Aragon was involved with the early 20th-century's major creative movements Dada and Surrealism. His writing included novels, essays, a long study of Matisse, and a translation of Lewis Carroll. In 1961 he supplied the answers to a Proust questionnaire: "If I’m indulgent towards something that passes for a fault that’s only because I don’t consider it one." When he came to the question, "how would you like to die?" Aragon answered, "differently."
"Suicide is the sincerest form of criticism life gets."
(Wilfrid Sheed, The Good Word, 1978)
It's funny how the words of some writers just stay locked inside your head. Much of that may have something to do with wit or style or language. I have a friend who can recite the first three pages of A Clockwork Orange; another parts of Major Major's ramblings from Catch-22, and a third who knows a pretty hefty chunk of Slaughterhouse Five. All three writers were masters of the shadow-play between word and meaning.
But reviewers and critics? Their words seldom reach that same level. This seems only fair since most reviewers are interested in telling readers in their estimation why the book is worth reading, and quit at that as deadline approaches. Wilfrid Sheed, who died earlier this year at the age of 80, was one of a handful of critics who have actually picked up the quill and tried the high-wire act of fiction-writing. Among his works are the heady and unpredictable Pennsylvania Gothic, The Blacking Factory, and the politically-unhinged People Will Always Be Kind (1973). It may be for this reason that his reviews, written on deadline, had a unique prose style that was a delight to read and why their broader observations are worth recalling.
Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together: this Sheed remark, which has stayed with me for decades, steered me down memory lane today. As a weekly reviewer Sheed also wrote much other, more topical material of America in the 1970s. I picked up a copy of his book of essays, The Good Word, as an aspiring writer in 1978, and read in awe Sheed's ability to broaden his critical writing from literary review to observation. Some of his thoughts make remarkably fresh reading. Here, in no special order, a sampling.
"Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing)."
"Hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as if it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns."
"Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we "did" McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers."
"Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session."
"Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling."
"Once E.M. Forster was identified as a homosexual, a universal writer was diminished to the status of a propaganda counter in a winless war. 'We've got Whitman, and I'm pretty sure we've got Byron, and we're still working on the big case, Shakespeare,' say the Gays. And the Straights reply by hanging on to Shakespeare's Dark Lady for dear life and giving up Whitman altogether. But who can read any of them intelligently with all this gabble going on? In the big game of is he or isn't he, the author is the one sure loser."
(1970 photo of Wilfrid Sheed in his apartment by Leonard Mccombe, from Life magazine)
...Auden was very funny, sort of generous but fussy. In the 'sixties, I used to go visit him every year or two, have tea. Soon after I came back from India, I went to see him with a harmonium and started singing Hare Krishna and various mantras and he sat and listened, but he was uncomfortable, like pinned wriggling to the wall, and having to be polite and really mind-wandering and not really interested in my great display of knowledge, because I was laying this trip on him.The next time I went to see him I brought my harmonium wanting to sing some Blake songs. He said "Oh no no no no, I just can't stand people singing to me like that, makes me terribly embarrassed. I can't sit here and have people singing. I'm quiet and prefer to listen to them in a concert hall, or on a record. Don't sing, have some tea, have some tea, please, you'll embarrass me".I think he got a little bit silly. When he was last in New York he was doing some work with a cartoonist making some funny little poems. So instead of my singing to him, he wanted me to look at those. I was full of big serious mantras and Blake and spiritual trippiness and he wanted me to look at all those little household domestic verses about how silly and comfy the Victorians were. Summer 1973 in London, we all read together - Basil Bunting and Auden and myself and (Hugh) MacDiarmid at Queen Elizabeth Hall and he read some really great poems saying farewell to his body, farewell to his eyes, to his senses one by one, evaluating them and putting them in place, dissociating himself from permanent identification with his senses, and preparing his soul to meet his ultimate empty nature God. So there was an individualistic, solitary complete objectivity that he arrived at.Apparently, he was very domestic but his apartment was a complete mess, there were papers all over, books piled up on end tables and shelves, just like a real artist's.I had a couple of funny run-ins with him different times, and always had a very uneasy time with him. I always felt like a fool, trying to lay a trip on him culture-political or otherwise. Once we had a big happy agreement about marijuana should be legalized. He said, "Liquor is much worse, quite right, quite right. I do think...end all this fuss".He must have been lonely because he said he was afraid he'd drop dead in his apartment and have a heart-attack and nobody would find him. Quite true because he did have a final heart attack a year later. I don't know if he encouraged local friendliness or not, but every time I called him up, he'd make a date for about a week later, and he'd be there and be expecting me and have tea ready."
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