MiPOesias Magazine

An Interview with Anselm Berrigan
The following interview took place via email in November/December 2005.
Marcus Slease conducted the interview for MiPOesias Magazine.

What do you make of the quietude/post-avant divide? Is it somewhat useful to map yourself as a poet in this way? What do you make of efforts to recontextualize (or decontextualize) these two worldviews/approaches to language etc. (such as Fence magazine)?

It’s not that interesting to me when it comes down to it, the divides or the map-making on those terms. I actually think there’s some use to making attempts to quantify the amount of work being done by poets, because the sheer volume of production is so high it belies the degree to which poetry is ignored and/or degraded by mainstream culture media. Another way of saying that might be something like, “why are so many people writing poems if no one cares about poetry and no one can make a living as a poet outside of academia?” And that question is more interesting to me than the quietude/post-avant divide, which can occasionally make for good reading.

At the time Fence made its debut it seemed like a perfectly logical thing to do – it was clear by the late 90s that an increasing number of younger poets were looking outside the parameters of past aesthetic fault lines for influence and information. Some folks read this logic as a marketing strategy, but that’s another conversation. I think one thing overlooked in the general discussion about these things, such as it is, is the fact that there is simply much, much more work available by women and by writers of color than there was just a few decades ago – not to mention much more work, period. This is a basic fact of the art, and it has transformed the landscape of American poetry – and continues to do so – far more than anything else, if you want to get all historical and shit about it. You say that to some people and they think you’re trying to give them a sociology lesson, but it’s the kind of thing that’s so obvious it doesn’t get talked about in any real way. There are more people writing and publishing, and there are more worldviews and approaches to language to engage with as a result. A very general sensibility can be gleaned by looking at a couple of poles, but I don’t think it’s going to get you very far into the weird.

From reading Zero Star Hotel and Integrity and Dramatic Life, you seem to have a complex relationship with “found language.” How has the Internet affected your composition and reading of poetry? Do you engage in google-sculpting/flarf?

I don’t do flarf, and while I have used a lot of different techniques, the Internet has not come into play. I use more language I overhear and notice walking around at this point, and less of it comes from books and songs, which is where a lot of it used to come from – but I mine my older work sometimes, and sometimes quite heavily.

Quite a few poems in Zero Star Hotel are double-spaced (such as “Pictures for Private Devotion”). What are the relationships between the various wholes and parts in Zero Star Hotel? Also, what is your relationship to audience during composition and during public readings of your work? How do they differ? Also, how do you conceive of public and private discourses?

The poem you mention was actually influenced by some poems by Lewis Warsh that use a long, double-spaced line, as in his book Avenue of Escape. I was trying to work with good material from not so good poems and became interested in the idea that, as Warsh put it in an interview, the art could be in the arrangement. Very similar to Joe Brainard’s note of revelation in one of his notebooks that there are no colors that don’t go together. That made for a big opening for me, because I started realizing I could put any materials together, and trust my instincts for sound, feeling and meaning implicitly as I was going along. Attend to every small detail in the meantime – the spacing, the tone, the clamor. As for audience, I do not think about audience when I write. I write, and everything that has brought to me that point in time when I am writing may be available in some way. But I don’t care what anyone “might think” or how they can handle it or whatever. When I give a reading I want to give a great reading and I practice and I think about performance and what has worked with different crowds in the past and sometimes I still just say fuck it and read brand new work that I’ve never read before. I think I care for audience by making sure that I can really deliver when I read, whatever it is I may be reading, but, more particularly, by not letting them write my poems for me. I love giving readings.

A couple years ago I was talking at Bard College about a poem of mine called “Trained Meat”, an eight-page poem written in the fall of 2001, and I described its composition as absorbing the force-fed public language of the War on Terror and puking it back. David Levi-Strauss was there and he asked if all language wasn’t public language, which led into a pretty intense conversation. I know you’re asking about discourses and I’m talking about language, but that’s where I end up when I see the terms “public and private discourses.” Writing “Zero Star Hotel” after Doug Oliver died got me to a place where I could manage personal and public content within a single (longer) work, and I’ve been dealing with variations on that ever since, though the tracking of consciousness in my writing doesn’t have as much description of action on the surface as it has in the past, I think. Right now I wonder if private and public discourses aren’t the same thing, once the work is out and about.

Continuing with the previous question, how does your public role as the director of the Poetry Project at St. Marks affect your work?

It affects my work by making me more desperate and overloaded with sound. I don’t try and finish things as frequently, lately, because the Project involves so much listening to other poets and, by extension, dealing with the transient nature of readings wrapped up with how things get in your ears and do things to your mind you can’t know right away. So I have become more deliberate in the completion of work by necessity. But I barely know that, if you understand me.

I’ve noticed a lot of affinities between your work and Philip Whalen’s (I believe you wrote an essay about Whalen in Jacket magazine a little while back). In Zero Star Hotel the poem “On a Plane” uses some of Whalen’s language (I am thinking of the “THUNK THUNK THUNK.”) How has Whalen opened up the possibilities between life and art for you? Can art and life ever be reconciled?

There are no commas in my mind, but there’s plenty of space between “thoughts” or what have you and Whalen is so casual about these things without giving up depth or possibilities for humor. Consciousness being tracked, and so unfrozen on the page. I don’t worry about reconciling art and life. Art is a result of life.

I am still pondering some of the implications of the title of your book Zero Star Hotel. For me, it seems to suggest a temporary dwelling for language without the spectacle of a solidified personality (our celebrity culture). Yet, the zero also works in tandem with ones in terms of binary codes. What do you see as some possible implications of the title Zero Star Hotel?

Well, the fact is that the title came out of hearing the owner of this hotel – no longer in existence – describe the place to some travelers as a zero star hotel. This is a place my brother and I used to stay at in Paris because it was right next door to the small apartment my mother lives in and was very cheap. I wrote that poem as an elegy for my stepfather, the poet Douglas Oliver, and the six-stanza-in-two-columns form, for me, is like windows on the façade of a building. Anything could be happening inside any one of them; they may be connected, may not, but it’s all in the building. And that was how I had to handle his death. A way of being in the world and in my emotional turmoil at his sudden death at the same time, in order to honor his life and work, which had so many levels to it, not least of which included the question of how to be an ethical person in a fucked up world in relation to family, friends, poetry, thought, social justice. All of it, or as much as possible. So it is hard to look at the implications of the title beyond that, personally speaking, and I leave that up to others with the understanding that their sense of the title won’t be mine.

There’s a lot of humor in Integrity and Dramatic Life. The humor seems very natural and unforced (coming from strange juxtapositions of discourses). This humor is of course entertaining (nothing wrong with that right?) but I was also wondering about the idea of integrity in relation to humor? For me, integrity implies a kind of moral center of the individual, whereas dramatic life implies the ruckus and noise and excitement of society. Is the title both ironic/humorous and serious? I mean, is there integrity in “dramatic life?”

The title is also the title of a poem in the book, and that poem is playing with high and low tones, as I remember it. I think I was interested in being embarrassed as a way to break out of writing patterns. In relation to the whole book, I chose the title because it represented to me this phase of life I was going through that consisted of moving back to New York City, where I grew up, and coming to terms with being there, being in this “home” of a city that both was and wasn’t recognizable, being a poet, which I was not when I left NYC at 17, and then dealing with the questions of money and employment while being jazzed by the millions. I liked the title because it was humorous and serious at the same time, yes, but I don’t think I was being seduced by irony so much as by the inner goofiness of a term like “dramatic life”, which could mean almost anything depending on what’s going on. I was recently in the woods in Vermont and at first whenever any leaves rustled I thought I was about to get jumped even though no one was around. That felt dramatic.

What are some of the books/poets who have fed you over the years? What/who are you reading now?

I like a lot of poets, and it is hard for me to make lists. I am currently reading a great deal of Robert Creeley, because he’s been on my mind a lot and at the Poetry Project we just had a tribute to him, a beautiful tribute, during which a great many people read his poems. I host a reading a week for roughly eight months a year, so I am always reading those people I am about to introduce. It sometimes seems to be passing by so fast, the time and the reading, that I can’t measure the impact of the work for quite awhile. I mainly know that I can be influenced by anything. Amiri Baraka, Fanny Howe and John Keats have been doing things to me in the last year, along with ten million other poets.