From the Heart, An Interview with Kathleen FraserJack FoleyThis interview is an edited transcription of two radio programs I did with Kathleen Fraser. The occasion was the publication of il cuore: the heart, Selected Poems 1970-1995, Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1997, 212 pages, $16.95 paper, $35.00 cloth; nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in Poetry. The programs were broadcast on KPFA-FM, Berkeley, CA, on February 25 and March 4, 1998. Jack Foley: My guest today is poet and teacher Kathleen Fraser. We'll be talking about her new selected poems, il cuore: the heart. I want to introduce her by quoting a passage from her prose: "From as early in my life as I can remember, I resisted others' categories and imperatives, perhaps because there were so many of them. I didn't like being identified too readily or absolutely, nor did I wish to represent anything that could be described ahead of time." That's from an essay, "This Phrasing Unreliable Except as Here," which was delivered in 1993 at SUNY/Buffalo and later published in Talisman (No. 13, Fall 1994 / Winter 1995). Kathleen, why don't you begin with the first poem in il cuore: the heart. Kathleen Fraser: This is from "Seven Uneasy Songs," and it's the first song, "What I Want."
KF: At each point it was trying to undermine a single understanding of that phrase or that word and to find out what would happen if you recombined it with another word. You keep getting a slightly different shift on what you thought you understood. JF: It also has something to do with the relationship between "What I want" and "Because you"-that relationship between the pronoun "I" and the pronoun "you." Who is who in this poem? The poem is called "What I want," but the first thing that's talked about is not what I want but what you are doing. I believe you echo this sort of thing in the essay I quoted from, "This Phrasing Unreliable Except as Here." That essay would be an excellent introduction to il cuore. It's a shame it wasn't published along with it. KF: That would have been an interesting idea. Unfortunately, Wesleyan had a very specific page limit. By the time Peter Quartermain's introduction was cut back and the table of contents was put in and my author's note at the end was put in, nothing else would fit. I had to cut out a lot of poems that I would have liked to include. On the other hand, I like the idea of containment. I've always used Basil Bunting's Collected Poems as a model of what is a good size for a span of work, so that you can get a real sense of development. Hopefully, the high points or the solid things remain, poems that feel as though they still pertain and that you still enjoy very much the way they were made, etc.-rather than just the poems of struggle, where you're twisting under the pin and allowing yourself to because that's part of what you're working out at the moment. JF: It's interesting to be aware of the "process" rather than the sense of "perfection." "Process" rather than "perfection" seems to be one of the ways to think about the work here. KF: Yes. JF: There are a lot of process words, words ending in -ing, in this particular poem. KF: The ongoingness of something. That's quite conscious, actually. JF: The last word of the book is "furling." It's a wonderfully interesting word. We usually think of "unfurling" as being some kind of liberating word. "Furling" is "a folding back in," but though it's a folding back in, it has all the feeling of a moving out, especially because it's a process word. In "This Phrasing" you say-echoing "What I Want"-"For me, any early conviction of what I wanted shifted, over the years, into one based more in scrutiny and attention to what was going on in the writing process itself, how it changed and what the sources were of those changes as the drafts of a piece accumulated." And then there's a wonderful sentence: "I began to savor the unreliability of error." Even error is unreliable! KF: Yes! It certainly is, as we found out when we both discovered a typo in one of my pieces, "this. notes. new year," right in the paragraph where it was talking about error. It was the first time in a work that I made an error and then consciously decided to keep it and allow the writing to "unfurl" out from that point. And then to discover after all this proofreading that in fact, in that exact place where it was supposed to say "stories," instead it said "stores"! It definitely changed the meaning into something I couldn't make any interpretation of. JF: The typesetter's error, as opposed to yours-that's a very different thing. You wrote that poem in 1979. It was a very important poem for you, and, just generally, it's a very good poem. Let's talk a little bit about what happened to you. You began by studying with Stanley Kunitz, who is not known as an experimental writer! KF: No! I was an absolutely beginning, baby poet when I went to New York after I graduated from university. I happened to hear of a reading Richard Wilbur was giving at a community college on Staten Island. Since I really had no money to go anywhere, I went out there on a Saturday on the Staten Island Ferry, and it turned out that Stanley Kunitz was on the same program. Richard Wilbur was one of the few live poets whom I'd ever read or heard of-through some friend at school, not in a classroom. So I went to hear him. Anyway, Stanley Kunitz read too, and I was just stunned by his work! I spent my complete lunch money for the next week to buy his book, which means I probably spent about $1.25 per lunch. I bought it and loved it. It was so highly Romantic and passionate and so Yeatsian and had such a grand vision. JF: It rhymed! KF: I wasn't interested in rhyme per se, but I was swept away by sound and by this grand, passionate vision. So I shyly went up to him afterwards and asked if he ever taught anywhere. He said he gave a nighttime course, or would be doing that, at the 92nd Street Y the following autumn. I asked him if I could send him some work to apply to be in it, and he said absolutely. I'm amazed that he let me in. I just had these very beginning little poems. I hardly wrote a thing the first semester because everyone there was so "sophisticated"; I was just sitting listening to what they were doing. I was doing my own reading and thinking, but I wasn't able to write the kind of poems that were coming out of that class. That was the beginning of my understanding rather quickly that I wasn't meant to write that kind of poem. Even though I went out and walked by the river, trying to court the great feelings, all I did was get a cold. I really had to go back and start listening to what was going on in my own perception, my own multi-voiced brain, and to try to find some way of tracking what I was actually interested in and paying attention to. JF: One of the ways a person might feel after hearing that ecstatic use of language and thinking it was marvelous is, "Well, that's what I should do." What turned out was, precisely, "That's what I should not do." You were experiencing exactly the opposite of what you were going to be doing. You were getting messages about yourself, but- KF: Well, one can respond to so many things that aren't necessarily what you do well. It's absolutely legitimate to be lifted into the ecstatic by any number of things. If an ecstatic experience comes through language, it reinforces your desire to move towards that kind of material-that is, the material of words. And to try to create something out of yourself from that material. JF: I think the immediate reaction, though, is to try to do something that's exactly the same as the material you've experienced, because the material is so powerful that you want to have it come out of you rather than out of the other person. It seems so deeply intimate. Then you have to learn what actually comes out of you. KF: That's right. I think that earlier, about my senior or junior year in college, which is when I first started writing poems, I came across E. E. Cummings' experiments tacked up on someone's wall on little pieces of paper, and I was quite intrigued by this work. I'd not read Cummings because I was an English rather than American Literature major by that point and we were only reading dead authors from the British isles. When I saw the Cummings poems I was stunned. I loved his rule-breaking. I loved the things that are now obvious to us, but also the joy. He had a form of the ecstatic, certainly. JF: He's a tremendous poet and a poet people don't much read any more. They read him when they're teenagers and think, mistakenly, that they understand him. Then, when they reject their teenage selves, they also reject Cummings. KF: That's right. I did that. I rejected him for a very long time. I wanted to move on from there. I was into people like Olson and Duncan and Creeley and George Oppen and Frank O'Hara-people I was reading in the sixties when I was first entering into the New York writing world. JF: Were you reading Barbara Guest then? KF: Yes. But she was a very special taste. What happened was that, maybe two years after that Kunitz experience, I went again to Staten Island, to a summer conference. I couldn't afford to go away on vacation, I was getting such a tiny salary. I went, thinking that Daisy Alden was going to be teaching a workshop. I'd never had a woman teacher, and I thought it would be interesting. But she was sick, and Kenneth Koch came in her place. I'd never heard of him. I was in a situation where I'd never heard of anyone, so everything was new and interesting. Kenneth was a very troubling and provocative teacher. I learned a lot from him in the sense of his being open to the playful and the highly imagined and the manipulation of words and phrases; he was kind of a sixties Dadaist. I went on to take a couple of classes with him at the New School later. He would really make fun of people that had any kind of emotional predictability to their work, where there was a directness of feeling. That upset me because, first of all, I felt bad for the people whose work was being stomped on publicly, but also because I wanted there always to be an emotional place to touch down, to go back to in my own work. I didn't want to give that up, even though I loved opening up to the highly imagined and playful and was very grateful for that. Through Kenneth a great thing happened. There were a number of young people in that class who now are somewhat characterized as "second-generation New York School." I was invited to a lot of parties, and Kenneth introduced me to Frank O'Hara. He took me to lunch with the two of them. JF: You went to lunch with the author of Lunch Poems? Did he write a poem? KF: He did not. We just talked and giggled. He looked rather hungover, I remember. Through Frank I met Barbara Guest. Actually, Frank's roommate at the time, Joe LeSueur, said, "There's someone you have to meet." This was at some party up in Frank's loft. He looked around for her, but she wasn't there. It was Barbara Guest. So they set it up, and, somehow, I can't remember where... She wrote me a letter and invited me to her house. I believe that's the first time I met her, but you know how memory is! I read some of her work before I went to talk with her. I just fell in love with her work! She's a fabulous poet. But while I've learned a great deal from her, I never had any desire to write "like" her. It was one of those things where she put me in touch with the ephemeral, with silence, with the discrete qualities of word against word. Also, the fact that she was interested in paintings and collecting paintings reinforced my beginning interest, which had been there for quite a while but which had not flowered extensively. JF: There's a visual interest in both your work and Barbara's. KF: Yes, that interest is very strong in me now. That's one thing we really have in common. Plus, I loved her novel, Seeking Air, which I've taught religiously every time I got the occasion. I also wrote a few essays about it because I felt it had been completely underappreciated and that it was a great poetic work of high invention. People didn't know very much about her work. She was one of those figures who was temporarily erased. It was actually seeing that happen that turned me into a feminist. I'd been in New York in the sixties. I'd seen that she was a major figure among the New York School writers-granted, the token woman, but that wasn't her fault. Her art criticism appeared right alongside the others, brilliantly. She read in all the New York School reading series that featured those people; she appeared in their magazines. And then suddenly, when Frank O'Hara died-he was her champion in that group-her name and/or her work would seldom be mentioned in public discussions or presentations of New York School work. Guest wasn't included in the big New York School anthology that Ron Padgett and David Shapiro did, An Anthology of New York Poets. It came out in 1970, four years after O'Hara's death, and it included only one woman, Bernadette Mayer, who really wasn't around at the earlier time at all but who came later. She was a brilliant, young, inventive poet, but she really evolved from writers like John Cage and Clark Coolidge. The second generation New York School guys liked Mayer, they were interested in her experiments. Barbara's work was suddenly left out of the historic record. I was deeply upset by that. Now everyone knows Barbara Guest's writing and her books are read avidly. So we're talking about a darker time. JF: She's in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, as part of the New York group. That came out in 1960. KF: Yes. JF: Why don't we hear a bit more of your poetry. You mentioned the importance of emotion in your work. What about "Five Letters from One Window, San Gimignano, May, 1981"? One of my favorite passages in the book appears on page 86. KF: That passage is from the fouth letter, thus written in prose. This one was to Andrea:
JF: A good question! Another case of error there, perhaps. I tend to remember that quotation the way it is in your book, incorrectly: "The world is everything that is the case." I think it's partly because "everything" makes it iambic pentameter. We tend to remember iambic pentameter. KF: Maybe so. Also, "everything" is a little bit more like spoken speech, whereas the other is a written kind of thing. JF: It's very German: "Die Welt ist alles...." KF: But I hadn't intended to misquote Wittgenstein! That would not be good. JF: He's not somebody you want to subvert! (Laughter) Your poem, "The History of My Feeling," uses the word "feelings"-it's singular in the title but it becomes plural. I love the subtlety of that poem! You may have felt it as a great painful poem, and there's that in it, but at the same time there's such subtlety and delicacy of language, which is of course also a feature of your later work. "Your presence and your absence," the fact of unpredictability, "uncertain and resistent," "these states of uncertainty...the shifting reality," "the ongoing secret life," "boundaries"-these are all issues which are very, very important to you. Interestingly too, "The History of My Feeling" has the word "unpredictable" in it. That word almost always has a positive spin for you, but not in this case. In "this. notes. new year," you say, "I change my mind every day." In "Five Letters" you say, "I never wanted to make choices," "nothing is as planned," "Having a horizon to measure by alerts one to change." All these lines point to the importance of change, of having a space in which change-even uncertainty-may happen. There's also a quotation which is a very powerful one in this book and for your work in general: you write in the Notes, "in fragment lay potency." We need perhaps to talk about what you mean by both "fragment" and "potency." We also need to talk about the whole subject of "error." We want to talk even about grief. In "Giotto: ARENA" you say, "Grief is simple and dark." Marvelous line! I have no idea what it means. * Kathleen, we're going to begin the second show with "this. notes. new year," a poem in which you say, "I change my mind every day." This poem appeared in Each Next, which came out in 1980. Change as a force is extremely important in this book and in your work as a whole. This is a poem in which a powerful change happens. KF:
this. notes.
new year
Dear other, I address you in sentences. I need your nods and I hear your echoes. There is a forward movement still, as each word is a precedent for what new order. You can hear a distant habit. The sound of a low gas flame discharging. Even a hiss is only soothing because it is dark and nearing the shorter perimeters. When I run into boredom, I shift into another's past.
(She was "in a fury" and she wept in spite of herself. His letter told the usual stories in all the old ways. She swallowed them whole. Then came the nausea. She wanted a "flow" she thought, but in the translation it was corrected, displacing the o and substituting a. She could give herself to an accident. She was looking out the window.) This is the Year of Our Lord. Every year we always have these difficulties. The sound of water splatting from the bathroom, heard through the kitchen, the clank of a soap dish. "I'm going to take a shower," David bragged, striding through the room on his twelfth birthday. I tried to protect myself especially well. I had time to play at domesticity this year. Three-quarters cup of bourbon in the chocolate-covered bourbon balls. There were many occasions and I was there in a different skirt. I went to the sales with her. She believed in that and built up her vocabulary like a wardrobe purchased during ten different years, but only on December 26th. One man said of another that he was committed to the sentence. I sentence you. I could hear the terseness of his sentences and how seductive it seemed to move the words always towards a drop in the voice. What did it mean to be flat? Was there a principle of denial? Of manipulation? I'm worried. He is embarrassed. The French workers often raised their voices on the Blvd. des Minimes and along the tiny alleys of the Ile St. Louis. You could hear questions rising to the windows of the sixth floor of the Hôtel St. Louis, although the bathroom, if you wanted to take a tub bath, was on the fourth floor. Voices raised at the ends of sentences, as though all were in question. I wanted, suddenly, to speak French because of certain French women thinking about layers, thinking in layers, but as yet not translated. They had moved ahead but not in a line. It occurred to me that growing up inside of, yet opposing, a tradition peculiarly French and masculine appeared to give them a certain authority because the tradition itself assumed a dialectical plane and invited the next position, while echoing "I baptize thee in the name of the father and the son." She questioned the wistful half-truths he gained solace from, using a certain Rapidograph pen with its fine black lines. He gave the boy a drawing pen. He said it was for art. The boy's face broke open and filled with light. Enlightened. Boyish and tender. I question these wistful half-truths and why I sink into silence around them. Now that I've made the decision to attempt a separation from their hold on me, I am released into sentences. The gas heater is a constant I could compare. I change my mind every day. I think of my mother's love. The antique bracelet she gave me with dozens of flowers etched into the tarnished brass. A line from Kunitz surfaces from the year I was twenty-one. "A single color oversweeps the field." That is all my memory provides of it. But to understand truly, you'd need the lines before it, building up to that crescendo that thrilled me. A vast field of scarlet poppies in the south of France...a movement in front of one. As a season. In a second. The forward movement of slow motion. Even then, the field. Of many flowers moving at their own speeds. Not one then two then three. But moving. Split. Second. Rushing into petals. That was a peculiar passion I do not often encounter in the poetry of the late '70s, but do not want to deny. That urgency we call romantic, but which might actually be, in part, the willingness to be told lies. That rush. How I've wanted it. His romance. (He tried to deflect her anger. He tried to mystify her by leaving half of everything out. He made her laugh. He knew what she wanted. In her "worst moments" she wanted obsession, obliteration of choice.) You are against confession, because it's embarrassing. I want to embarrass you. To feel your confusion. Someone's rhythm sneaking in again. Sharing a language. The osmosis of rubbing up. Communing. I'll never make candy again. It is a relief to write this music. Who does it belong to? "Who can I turn to?" Las Vegas crooners with their soft, slimy hair styles. Feel the lyric hit, anyway. As soft as sniffing it. Where's the kleenex? Christmas is over and "I'm glad," I said to David. "It's such a pressure building up." He smiled, being twelve now, and not satisfied, even though we tried to cover all the branches with icicles and double strands of lights. Next year, it's snowing. JF: That poem seems to me, really, your whole life. It covers an awful lot of what you've been through. It also has very subtle and interesting verbal plays, which are delightful to encounter. "The bakery opening its door each morning to a view of pain au chocolat on trays. ‘Entrez, s'il vous plaît.'" "On trays" suggesting the French, Entrez. And there are various other things like that. Also, it sounds autobiographical, and some of it undoubtedly is autobiographical, but at the same time the speaker is both "she" and "I." If you were writing a straight-on narrative and you said something like "Next year, it's snowing," that would be possible. This is what happened this year, and the omniscient narrator knows all about what will happen next year. But if you're writing something about your actual life, it's present, it's now. The speaker might have started a sentence with the words "Next year" and then broken off to notice that "it's snowing" at this moment. The two phrases might be completely unconnected-a reading which is made more likely by the fact that one would expect the future tense after the phrase "Next year." In any case, how would you know that it's going to snow next year? Of course it always snows at that time of year! KF: Depending on where you are! JF: Depending on where you are. There's so much in that poem, including the interest in women, in French women. I think it's one of the ways one can determine whether someone is actually a feminist. Someone asked me whether the heroine of the film, Jules and Jimwere a feminist. She's a very independent woman. I think the answer to that has to be no, she's not, because she doesn't talk to women. Simone de Beauvoir began her book The Second Sex by saying, "Women don't say ‘We.'" There are no women in Jules and Jim for the heroine to talk to. Part of the point of "feminism" is that women have something special and particular to say to themselves. I think feminism gets ripped off in so many films. You know, isn't she a strong, independent heroine? Independence is fine and to be valued in many ways, but I think "feminism" implies women relating to women. From this point of view, "independence" isn't really the issue. One of the directions we can go from this 1980 poem of yours-and it's just one-is to the magazine you edited from 1983 to 1991. With HOW(ever) you set up a forum. Often we tend not to conceive of the "experimental" as the "political." You understood the experimental to be political. You understood that "experimental" writing could be "feminist" writing. KF: I felt that there could be a place in that large project which was the formation of feminism. There certainly weren't many places where women were making their own choices in the "avant- garde" world. I'm talking now in a general way. Certainly you can point to individual moments or persons. But, in general, there was no place. At the time when I was feeling very interested in this and very urgent about starting what became HOW(ever), the feminist movement, which had such an expressive mouthpiece through poetry, was focused on "common" language as practised and written about by Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, and others. That was a very, very important thing to focus on. There was a reason they were doing it, and it spoke to a very large community. But it definitely left out and in fact elbowed away any poet who was interested in or who was there for one of the main things that poetry is about, which is the investigation of language, the relationships of words and grammars and syntactical structures. JF: "On trays," "Entrez." "HOW" and "ever." KF: And pure sound, the love of sound and potential multiple meanings in words as they conjoin with each other. To be denied that, and to be treated as though you're morally mistaken in wanting to do anything in poetry that isn't of a common language was an extremely difficult place to be in, particularly if you were a politicized activist who was working on behalf of women having a place and making decisions. HOW(ever) was about making editorial decisions. JF: Making choices? KF: Making choices, yeah. JF: What about "I never wanted to make choices"? KF: Luckily, I didn't have to do it all by myself. I had associate and consulting editors to help me. And all these amazing women came out of the walls. They were writing "strange" poems, and once they heard about HOW(ever), they presented us with all kinds of possibilities. The other associates and I were reading these manuscripts, and we were all talking about this work and about theory, too. We were trying to get away from the old concept of "submitting" and "rejecting." JF: "Submitting" is an interesting term! KF: As I'm thinking about it now, I'm seriously engaged in beginning HOW(ever) again as a web site, in the spring through Rutgers. They have an electronic center there. "CETH" it's called. I'm really thinking about the language we can use. I decided that I would use the word "propose." Someone could "propose" something, and then circulating editors would determine whether it were appropriate for that particular project. It's interesting how these words are so loaded. JF: "Proposition" is a loaded word, too. KF: That's true! I hadn't thought about that! But we're getting a little off the subject. JF: Yes, but in a way, it's not getting off the subject because "this. notes. new year." touches on an extraordinary number of things: your motherhood and David, your son-so there's autobiography in there. Also, lines like "three- quarters cup of bourbon in the chocolate-covered bourbon balls," "I was there in a different skirt," "I went to the sales with her"-these are all primarily "feminine," "female" experiences which are deliberately put into the poem. KF: With a very tongue-in-cheek sense of irony, too, commenting on myself in a knowing way. I was conscious in this prose poem of putting in these parenthetical commentaries from the "she" point of view, rather than the "I" point of view, so as to break up the perception that was going on. It wasn't just the single "I" that was saying this is what I did and this is what I felt. I wanted to have this distance through the lens of "she," looking from a part of me that was another kind of witness, a social critic of myself, a person who was growing and changing all the time as I began to understand about things. To have this device of going into the parenthetical sections helped to get that distance. It also helped to propel me into the kind of multi-level perception I was reading about (primarily through the translations of Carolyn Burke) in Signs magazine, of certain French post-structuralist women writers who were thinking about capturing simultaneity of thought/experience levels in language. JF: "Voices raised at the ends of sentences, as though all were in question." "A testing and questioning of any final authority," you say in "This Phrasing Unreliable Except as Here." If you say, "I change my mind every day"-and by that one might read also "I change my mind every minute," "I change my mind every second"-what happens to identity? You talk about that shift between "I" and "she," which is one way to see it. But "identity" means being the same all the time, persisting through change. KF: Identity is a kind of recognizable shape. I'm thinking of something that has a kind of skin or a porous boundary around it. It's recognizable and can have many elements. In fact, the desire to change, the ability to become bored with one's thoughts and one's work product, etc., could be part of what characterizes an "I" or an identity-"I" standing in for a constellation of parts and personae and persons and thoughts. I really don't think I do change my mind every minute or every second. That's taking it much further than would be in my character. But I've always been a curious person, and this thing of trying to avoid being pinned down by someone else's single definition of who "I" represent, what "I" represent, that was a very, very early thing for me because my father was a Presbyterian minister, so I was in the middle of a community critique. You were aware through your parents that you were always being looked at, you were always being judged as to whether you were what you were representing. I didn't want to be anything that anyone else thought I should represent. I started very early with that strong feeling, and I know that this is what pushed me towards the path I pursued in poetry. JF: But I think there is, in the book and in your poetry generally, a tension between, on the one hand, an assertion of the I, of ego (I'm not what you think I am, this is who I am, I am I) and, at the same time, an assertion of change, which allows the ego (whatever it may be) to be continually fluid, discontinuous even, moving all the time. In "Notes re: Echo," you say, "both watchful and fluid," like water. You tend to think of your mind as water, as a pool or a river. The entire passage is: "Why, then, do I trust your language enough to enter it? I trust it because it is both watchful and fluid, allowing the variants of yourself to have voice. Am I who you hear?" KF: That's Echo speaking to Narcissus. JF: And presumably Echo can only "echo" Narcissus. Here she's saying something quite different from anything that Narcissus has said. In fact, that particular poem, which is addressed to Steve Benson, is very relevant to this poem: "Dear Other, I address you in sentences. I need your nods and I hear your echoes." "I need your nods": does that mean going to sleep, "nodding," or does that mean agreement, nodding yes? KF: Definitely agreement. JF: But it's at least ambiguous. From the same poem: "One man said of another that he was committed to the sentence. I sentence you. I could hear the terseness of his sentences and how seductive it seemed to move the words always towards a drop in the voice." KF: That was in the late seventies. By that time I'd become very, very aware of the different authorities-many of them highly admired male authorities-in my life, by the way...usually, although not always, poets I admired who were at great odds with each other, who often didn't like each other's work or what that work represented. JF: We should perhaps say the "l" word here, language, because that's to some extent what you're thinking of. KF: That came after many others, believe me. I grew up in the sixties, so the term, "language writing," really came in later. I became aware of friends of mine who were involved with it in the late seventies. I was reading many of the same texts that they were, but I wasn't subscribing to what seemed to me like a fairly narrow program. JF: I took the reference to "sentences," though, to be a reference to language writing. KF: Oh, absolutely...it was. This piece was trying to use irony and playfulness to take on something that was seriously bothering me, which was the absolutist quality projected in "the program." There were a number of fine women poets in this early phase of the language writing movement who were making fascinating works. But, generally, the theory or poetics of this group was being pushed by male poets. It had an old "territorial grab" feeling to it...a kind of déjà vu from various poets/movements of the sixties (East coast and West coast) and of French Dada and Surrealist manifesti. JF: I discovered your work through a 1982 issue of Ironwood magazine in which you comment on a collection of language writers. The magazine had a section called "Realism," which Ron Silliman edited. Your commentary is very interesting. It's very sympathetic, but at the same time you're trying to find ways to distance yourself from it. KF: I was asked to write that perspective "from the periphery." I would never have initiated such a piece on my own. Editor Michael Cuddihy had to talk me into it. I really didn't want to provoke useless defensive wrath, nor to engage in any battles. Not my way. I felt that if I didn't toe the line in a certain way, if I critiqued, that this would be automatically considered hostile. But I felt basically wary of anyone who was telling me that there was only one particular direction that was interesting or significant. I didn't want to be told that by the next group. Including women. I didn't want women to tell me that or men. I wanted to be able to be open to what was in the world to read and gaze at and take in and respond to and invent. I was listening to John Cage live in the sixties in New York City. This was not news to me. Jackson MacLow was my friend. I appeared in performances of his. Clark Coolidge was writing way, way before any of this was going on. Not to mention the ideas in painting and music and physics and composition. This stuff was in the air. We were all taking it in as we all lived through it. I didn't want to be constellated into a narrow version of it, although I found many of the works being written out of that version very interesting and very stimulating. JF: That's clear in your essay. This particular poem, "this. notes.," does take on a lot of issues. Stanley Kunitz, about whom we talked earlier, is in the poem, too, right along with the language poets. But, beyond all this, suddenly, in this poem, you find a "new way." What is that "new way"? KF: Perhaps you are referring to my graphic interest in error? This may have been the first poem in which I incorporated a typo, an unintentional error. As I was writing, I must have been typing some drafts as I was going along, or some beginnings, and I noticed that I had meant to type the word "flow" but I had typed in the word "flaw." So I decided to look at that new word and move the writing out of it, wherever it would go from that. This provoked the next direction. That was very, very interesting to me. Not in the simplistic sense of the "Freudian slip." Rather, that it suggested a "next direction." It meant that there wasn't just one branching or one via-I think of the Italian word-one "road" for the mind to take. Why not follow this other thing that appeared as an "error" and see where it was leading? I never consciously tried to make that happen, and I do think anything can be overdone but, after that, over the next period of maybe fifteen years, when I saw a typo I did work off of it and try to use it in different ways. One instance, of course, was in "‘La La at the Cirque Fernando, Paris.'" I published that poem in Ironwood in the eighties, but it just didn't fit into any of the books I was doing. JF: Why don't you read a little of that poem. Unfortunately, we don't have time for the whole thing. It's an amazing poem! Where does the title come from? KF: It's the title of a painting by Degas. Someone had sent me a postcard and it had a Degas picture of this girl hanging from her teeth in the circus. I was quite stunned by it. I had seen a circus girl doing that in my childhood and I immediately wanted to write about it. I had just driven along the northwest coast of France in February, when it was cold and snowy, and I'd seen Mont- Saint-Michel and had gone to some of those little towns nearby, like Honfleurs, where the village markets were. I had that as a background, and I just decided to take on this circus girl as a character. It was a completely surprising thing to write. It was a real kick-back to very early lyric work at the beginning. I'd been reading this book by Henry Adams, Mont- Saint-Michel and Chartres. JF: La La becomes a kind of "Saint Michel" herself, a kind of Michael the Archangel. She's winging her way in the circus and flying like an angel. KF: This "Coda" appears to La La after other "codes" come in:
dear arc angel
have broken code
now need speech
JF: "Broken" is an ambiguous word. It can be either a verb or an adjective. The code is "broken" in various senses of the word, some of which may have something to do with "error." You can read the words across from left to right, but you can also read them down the columns. "Dear, have, now, arc, broken, need, angel, code, speech."
KF: The matrix that came before it, also: I liked the way it showed up reading across or down. Those little words all came out of the text of the poem. JF: Kathleen, thank you so much for being on the show. I wish we had more time. KF: Thank you. I'm sorry it went so fast. Jack Foley |