TEN THOUSAND BY THE FOURTH OF JULY

Dale Smith & CAConrad discuss Dorn, AIDS, and community that holds us together and holds us to it

For years I've admired Dale Smith's poems and his undeterred route for expressing his thoughts and ideas. Even if I didn't agree with him I've been nothing but grateful that he was always forthcoming with sheer unapologetic honesty. There's not enough of Dale Smith's brand of frankness in my opinion, the kind of space needed for new ideas to shake loose. We had this often tough conversation over the last couple of months via email.

Hope you enjoy it,
CAConrad


CACONRAD:
There are many things I want us to talk about Dale, but let me just start off with a big one. Ed Dorn. Let's just go ahead and be dramatic by having his name stand as its own sentence. Ed Dorn. It's important, at least it's important to me, to find out some of the details behind his fateful pronouncements. I'm not holding back about being VERY ANGRY when I read his book Abhorrences, being that I'm a queer man who had a boyfriend die of AIDS, saw many others die of AIDS, worked with herbalists on Essiac distribution and other herbal cures being as desperate and traumatized as anyone else who lived in queer American inner cities in the late 80s and early 90s. And was paranoid that ACT UP was infiltrated and working with the pharmaceutical companies and on and on I could go with the wrath of our emotions at that time. But I feel enough distance from all of that now to REALLY WANT to understand how an American poet of note could write and say the things he did at such a time. In some ways the things Dorn said has put him in the category of Pound's open support of fascism for some people. I'm assuming this is a complicated answer, but please shed some light on this for us. For instance I'm feeling compassion for Dorn in that maybe he was angry at the loss of friends at Naropa? Meaning those who died of AIDS? And the means by which they contracted it? I don't know, but hope that you do.

DALE SMITH:
Conrad, thanks for inviting me to speak with you. I can't imagine what it must have been like in the 1980s and 90s to be gay, to watch people I loved die from HIV/AIDS. Life is brutal enough without feeling targeted by disease, and the opinions and prejudices that went along with AIDS in the early years. I was a straight white kid in Texas, very male in the sense I didn't have to question what that meant. At least not consciously. AIDS was a distant thing--something in the news--something that happened to others. It also brought queer sex into public view and into a mainstream imagination. And that was interesting to me. But I don't know. My sympathies have always been with everything that's not triumphant and celebratory in this craven and sad, crushed nation. I don't know why I feel this way. I lived in Yemen in the early 90s and had my suspicions of America confirmed there in many ways. It was like stepping outside a bubble. Life was raw and vivid there, if less defined. AIDS was beginning to affect life there, too, though the Muslim institutions that governed that small republic refused to acknowledge queer sexuality. I remember a teacher asking me if it were possible for boys to catch venereal disease by sharing a towel. I suggested that there may have been more going on.

This is all just to lead up to saying this: I don't think I can say anything to ease the complications you see in Dorn's late work. I don't want to be his defender, though I admire his writing. I met him once, spoke with him a few times on the phone, and so I have always been thankful for this very impersonal relationship to him. The impersonal is what I find most interesting in anyone. And Dorn was masterful at opening that impersonal space, a space that is scary and human and real. And sometimes the force of the personal can erupt and make the personal difficult. It's the space of the actual, really. And so for Dorn I always felt that the personal was in service to something other, and always something that must submit to other human capacities of thought and feeling. There was no chit-chat in his conversation, you know? He was the real deal, and complicated, and performed roles he felt necessary to perform. That anyone can associate him with Fascism is beyond my experience of the man or the work. I know for a while near the end--in the late 90s--there were attempts to defame him, taking the personal (overheard words, decontextualized statements) and publicizing versions of Dorn's persona that I know Dorn did not embrace. There were things published about him by pissed off ex-students in Exquisite Corpse and quite a lot of hearsay was distributed at the Buffalo Poetics List about Ed. He felt near the end as though his cancer had invaded him, and he knew those responsible. But that's a psychic level of Dorn I would rather leave.

Going back briefly, I'm curious, what was your boyfriend's name? What did you learn from him, and his experience with AIDS, that helped you, perhaps to better understand your feeling life, if not your writing life? I know this kind of moves in a different direction than you may have had in mind, but it also seems to run parallel, too, while we are here, for the moment, remembering the dead.

CONRAD:
Oh, this is an unexpected turn in our conversation. But thanks for asking, not many people ask. Which is weird, right? Maybe it makes them uncomfortable? Tommy Schneider, he was a beautiful man, and I'll just hemorrhage the personal for a bit here in saying that I fell in love with him the moment I met him. And he felt the same way about me, and he told me he had AIDS within 30 minutes of meeting, and I told him I liked him anyway, and we simply could NOT take our eyes off one another. He was working at a used bookstore in Philadelphia called The Book Trader, down on South Street. There's nothing you can do to resist love when you're in love, especially, in fact most especially if the other person feels the same way. There's nothing you can do but go into it. You go into it, and it's beautiful, and there's very little else on this planet that wakes every cell of the body so ferociously, like being chased by someone with a knife, I love that we love.

But my friends were horrified that I fell in love with a man with AIDS. It was an unanticipated, extreme battle, all of it, with the friends, with him, with us, knowing he was going to die. And I became obsessed with the disease. I had already been obsessed with it, and had gone to pagan gatherings to meet with herbal healers, and learned how to make the herbal formula Essiac, which I started making like a mad person with friends in Philadelphia. But it was terrible, really, knowing that this beautiful man I loved so much is not getting better, he's not getting better, and that's it, that's it, and there's so much anger you have for everyone, including the presidents as they came and went.

And just one step outside of our own personal drama with the disease were literally thousands of others, often with no one to love them and care about them. My friend Jim who is about fifteen years older than I am went to over 100 funerals of friends and ex-boyfriends in the span of several years. It's impossible to believe now, and I don't know how he did it. It's SO WEIRD being in 2009, it's 2009, and sometimes I think WOW it's 2009! I'm here! I'm actually here! You asked too how it affects the writing? I'll tell you how, it makes a suit of fucking armor for you, gets you ready for almost any battle that wants to meet you. I'm far less fearful than many people. STRIPPING away fear is nothing but fantastic for making poems, and I'll be an asshole right now and say this is not an opinion but a fact.

Getting back to Dorn though, I want to share here his poem "Aid(e) Memoire" from Abhorrences, written in the spring of 1984:


Aid(e) Memoire

If you screw
and are screwed by
everybody you meet
24 hours a day
every day of the year
you'll get a disease
as we learn from the History of the Renaissance
So why not forego
the gamble and drink
directly from the sewer.


Yeah, the prejudice is so crystal clear. And like most prejudice it's rife with ignorance, I mean, this is the very sort of nonsense my vicious working class family would say about queers, that we're just fucking fucking fucking all day long. Which by the way I've always felt is something said by heterosexual men who WANT THIS TO BE TRUE because it fulfills some fantasy of their own. But Dorn actually blames the victim here in this poem, saying, HERE, it's YOUR FAULT because you fuck all day long you dirty fucking pig, you should just drink from the sewer! It's this unclear eye Dorn had at times that I wonder about. I mean JESUS CHRIST how is it that he can be so fucking smart and not for a second before writing this stupid poem, then publishing this stupid poem, consider the social constructs of bigotry having a hand in AIDING men into feeling so lousy about themselves, hating themselves so much that they don't care about their health? THIS IS OF COURSE TO ONLY talk of the men who in fact were continuously having unprotected sex. My boyfriend Tommy caught it because he was unsafe one time, one night. That man's name was Carlos, and I went with Tommy to see him in the hospital a few days before Carlos died, and I remember HATING Carlos on the way to the hospital! HATING HIM! I kept thinking, "WHY are we going to visit this CREEP who gave my boyfriend AIDS?" But Carlos carried his guilt and shame and the resulting pain so blatantly that you felt it in the curtains. I remember walking to the window because I was filled with grief when Tommy and Carlos were crying together and hugging and I could FEEL the curtains had absorbed Carlos's complex emotional toxicity, and it made me sad when thinking his last days would be spent feeling this way about himself.

Eileen Myles recently gave the keynote address at the Belladonna Conference in New York, and she said that Jennifer Moxley had once asked her why she didn't get involved with the Language poets since she was that age. She said many things in response to that, but one thing that stuck out for me was when she said, "I have to ask where is the great language poem about AIDS, how could you watch so many people die and not write about it? I've always thought of AIDS as the Vietnam of my generation."

Dale, you've already made it clear you are not here to be Dorn's defender, but I wanted to share this because his poem "Aid(e) Memoire" is such a mark upon his legacy. As is his poem "Something we can all agree on" which is also from Abhorrences. In your remarkable essay, "Edward Dorn's Metaphors of Ilness," you quote, "[a] world where no thing thrives short of the total pestilence / of its spirit" which makes me think how Dorn too was OF the spirit of this world. A child, then a young man, then a man, all the while capturing philosophical understanding by it, of it, and eventually for it. That's why I asked the first question the way I did in our conversation. WHY? WHY? What was it that made the WHY behind Dorn's prejudice?

And we NEED TO FORGIVE, maybe. Because as you say in your essay, Dorn was nothing short of shamanistic in his dealings with illness. The shaman are those who nearly died, or fell to a great sickness, and recovered, or at least delivered wisdom through the illness while it was taking them out of this world. His metaphors for vitamins leaving with the urine, and how we pollute, and again his premonition of bodies after nuclear war, it's all shamanistic, and I'm so glad you weren't afraid of using that word. But back to the NEED TO FORGIVE, maybe.

SMITH:
Conrad, thanks for sharing that with me. What an intense, but devoted and loving experience that must have been with Tommy. I don't think in our conversations about poetry many of us are willing to put the private and intimate experiences of our lives on the line. So it's moving that you would share this with me here. Along with everything else, I'm interested in your knowledge of herbal healing and Essiac. But I suppose we should stick closer to the topic, so let me say a little about prejudice:

A poet's prejudices are necessary to the practice of the art in any real sense. I mean, we all draw our lines, and those prejudices can be useful--or they can be socially limiting. There are a number of ways to think about Dorn and his prejudices. I think one thing that poem you quote does in the context of all the other pieces in Abhorrences is say this: in a corrupt nation no one escapes. Our sex lives, or political lives, or social lives, or economic lives--especially our economic lives--they're all fucked, morally, and in the Reagan 80s he really sensed that. America's post war reach toward what he called "ruinous increase" intensified during those hollow and soul-sucking years. And it's in the context of that "ruinous increase" that he made those statements about AIDS. And, you know, there's something a little perverse in him at times, and I wouldn't want to reconcile that. But that's how I read the poem. I won't pretend to read the man. His legacy is set in stone. There will be scholars dealing with his work for a long time. It's rich and complicated. As you say, that metaphor of illness and infection runs throughout his work. So it's not totally out of line in that context. I think metaphors are slippery--and can get away from us. And in Dorn's case, you know, early 80s, he may not have had the same perspective we have today in 2009--a remarkable moment to live in for a number of reasons.

About prejudice though... A friend of mine--a woman--lost interest in William S. Burroughs when, you know, he began that business about wanting to just do away with women. Carry the White Goddess in tied to a stick, on the shoulders of naked boys, etc. When Anne Waldman was in Austin last year at a talk someone asked her about the sexism of the Beats and she said yeah, you know, that was there, and people like Burroughs really were far out in their writing about wanting to create these boys clubs--they just really wanted to excise the feminine. But she said too that they were wonderful men, and complicated, and that their prejudices were understood as that--not platforms for anything. These were advocates in any sense.

So find a writer who is free of prejudice and you'll no doubt encounter a phoney--a person of exquisitely refined boredom. And in a way those prejudices--Dorn's or Burroughs' or Ginsberg or whoever--we secretly, perhaps many of us, delight in their expression, too, because they give us release--in that shamanic sense you mention--from the terms of the social to encounter our own rage or despair through statements that seem ass backward to our experience. And I've known poets who are careful in their writing to offend no one, but in their personal lives, well, they're just wrecks. I prefer it the other way around--and all the textual complications that come with it. But I'm defending prejudice here, in a way, and not Dorn, per se. Because I have the fortune of experiencing AIDS as cultural manifestation. I don't have the direct personal sense of that catastrophe like you do. It's good, though, I hope, that we can talk about it, even if, maybe, there's no real sense of resolution?

CONRAD:
We don't need a resolution, it's just good to talk, yes? My anger is meaningless in all of this, especially since I intend to be angry until I'm dead. I'm also not interested in measuring dick sizes of bigots: Burroughs? Dorn? Let's face it, Dorn just wrote poems about how he felt, Burroughs shot his wife in the head and went on with his life. There are horrible men writing poems and novels all over the world, gay, straight, and every color. When I was still a teenager I went to a reading Norman Mailer was giving in Philadelphia, and some of his despicable friends in the audience shouted, "READ THE ONE ABOUT STABBING YOUR WIFE!" And they laughed. And Mailer laughed. And it wasn't funny at all because of course he DID stab his wife, and his wife didn't press charges, acting like most savagely abused people who identify with their oppressors. I've hated Mailer since. I intend to hate Mailer until I'm dead.

A Buddhist friend of mine told me recently that it's not a good goal to intend to stay angry. Anger's completely lost its charm these days for some reason. We Americans are four percent of the world's human population, this handful of people really. And we're here and we're paying our fucking taxes and the fucking taxes are buying bombs and bullets and it infuriates me every fucking day. Do you know the book CINDERELLA'S BIG SCORE? The book of women in Punk Rock? My friend Maria Raha wrote it, and she's been living in Philadelphia for a few years now, and has this way of drawing in folks to talk about the world. She was on the subway recently and a young soldier who literally just got back from Iraq started talking to her, asking her angrily, "Does anyone realize there's a war going on?!" It's a good question. I HATE having this long hair on my head, it's like a haystack and I fucking hate it, but I refuse to cut it until we're out of Iraq, because I INSIST that I have at least this one thing to remind me every single fucking day that I am a member, I am a citizen, I am an American of the American country which invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq and over a million people have lost their lives. I'm paying my taxes. I'm paying my taxes. And I'm paying my taxes, and my taxes are killing the world. We will pay more than our taxes if we get what we deserve.

It's all about believing what we deserve, when it comes to prejudice, right? Prejudice speaks from a voice of a body and mind believing that they don't get what they deserve, right? No one's perfect. Dorn wasn't perfect. Burroughs wasn't perfect. Dale Smith and CAConrad have probably fucked up so many times everyone's lost count a long time ago. To be angry, but to ALSO be CERTAIN that no writer has to have the burden of being a perfect human being in order to write, that's the hardest task sometimes.

IT'S SO DIFFICULT to walk the tightrope where American universities now unapologetically claim the term "Post Identity Politics." It's like all the work everyone did to get their race, their gender, their creed heard was just a lot of fun times, but the fun times are over. Can't we have it all? Can't we make room? Isn't it about making room anyway? I mean isn't that what all the culture wars have been trying to make? Room? Make room for everyone? Is it possible we're feeling growing pains in some way and will move into a better frame for all of this? See, I feel that the term "Post Identity Politics" is a pendulum trying to swing back. "Post," it's over, "Post," it's obsolete, old, rundown, get a new one because this one's dead. But the term is also saying "Identity Politics" as though that's WHAT IT WAS, just some fucking game. Because we all know how loaded the term politics is, right? Yeah, politics. As though historical facts of ALL THOSE DEAD WHITE MEN WRITERS is just our imagination. It's a war. It's a battle and not a political one, it's a much bigger battle our lives confront and it's no game.

A balance of anger for the wrong, but needing to work with everyone. Community? Poetry community? I guess I prefer Poetry family, because we're way too fucked up to be a community, what do you think Dale? Slow Poetry is how you talk with us about being a family or community of poets, right? I'm liking everything I read about it by you. I've been doing (Soma)tics to help get us seeing, hearing, smelling and intuiting our way out of routines and into a language we share but barely utter between our shared bodies and world, and spirit. How is Slow Poetry a way for us to help one another restart the collective creative core? I ask this because there's a strong feeling I get when reading your writings on Slow Poetry that it's about, ultimately, a better sense of caring. And I don't mean this in a corny way, but in the best sense of what it means to care.

SMITH:
It's not just our taxes, it's our way of life that's killing the world. Since Slow Poetry isn't really an aesthetic project, or a formal one--something designed to make any of us better writers--I hope it maps out a few basic strategies for addressing the situation of being who we are where we are as thoughtful, careful artists who take language as a basic material. The other day I told my freshman writing class that there are no such things as writers. There are only communities of writers. No mad genius sits in a closet banging out on a keyboard their perfectly elegant pieces. Erik Satie, one of my Art Heroes, did not dream up his lovely and
delicate anti-harmonies out of thin air. He was engaged with a community of artists that shaped his vision. He even went back to school at one point to become more capable of dealing with the insights of others. And that artistic community bumped up next to others. And for a period during Satie's life, Europe was at war. And its projects of colonization across Africa and China etc continued throughout his lifetime. It's same situation, in a sense, that we face today, though on a different scale. So I've been thinking of Satie these last few days as I've pondered how to respond to you. Right now I'm listening to a vinyl recording from the sixties of "Socrate," a piece commissioned by a lesbian princess--the Princess Edmond de Polignac. (She--Winnaretta Singer--was heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, too, by the way, which was good news for Satie, who could use the cash.) Anyway, this is all just preface to some thoughts I'll address here:

A quick, down-and-dirty description of Slow Poetry could begin with this paraphrase of Amiri Baraka: there is no such thing as art or politics, there's only life. My notes and comments about Slow Poetry over the last year really focused I think on this basic fact. The way we tend to set up boundaries and border off life from its diverse practices insults human intelligence and spirit. Poetry has been influenced by publishing markets, academia, and other minor troughs of prestige and legitimacy. Big deal. How might we imagine our practice instead as something alien, obtrusive, and obscene within those boundaries? For me, the real point of poetry is to reveal the world for myself and others. To share and better understand our experiences in a largely inchoate and complex space. We have to share our stories with each other. We have to work to comprehend the images we encounter. We must restore faith in a human community and not in professional markets. We do this by listening. Sharing. Withholding certain judgments while leveraging others. This is spiritual practice, really. There's no program. There's only what we are willing to give, and share, sincerely.

The other driving motive behind my initial impulse to describe a slow poetics is the terrifying fact that the U. S. economy is dying. Lihn Dinh and a few others get this. And we've worked to describe this fact and detail it. And this is going to be a significant thing for poets to get intimate with, because poetry for many is an art of luxury. So I wonder, as lux vanishes, who will remain within range of the poem? American wealth is being wiped out (shit, global wealth, too), and that wealth for the last half century has helped sustain poetry and the arts. War will be a permanent reality. Reduced resources and access to goods will become a part of daily life. American poetry seems largely checked out on these basic intrusions of reality. This summer, for instance, at Naropa I gave a talk and observed how our "way of life" was being drastically altered. Only one student--a young man from Mexico City--came to me afterward and said, hey, you know what, you're the only North American I have ever heard talk about this. In Mexico it's common knowledge. But in America no one pays attention to basic facts of resources, production, and distribution. And he's right. The poets here in particular are checked out. I look in from time to time at Harriet and am appalled by the level of complete disregard of basic facts that goes on there.

Anyway, yes, Slow Poetry, I suppose, has something to do with a certain level of care--of communal care. Perhaps it's a hope that we can get through these coming days with some semblance of civility and grace. I believe that poets and artists and others are psychologically capable of getting through the drastic hardships we may all soon face. We're more prepared in a sense than others. We have capacities to re-integrate new realities. So as long as poets remain purposely checked out from these conditions they risk losing a psychological advantage. Flarf won't be of much use when the banks close their doors. And that may sound absurd to say, but the FDIC recently ran out of money. And the causal stream behind that surprising detail runs deep into every fiber of our "way of life."

CONRAD:
Dale you're invitation to the usefulness of poetry is invaluable, but you say that you and a few others see the doom, but YOU go beyond that in Slow Poetry by encouraging the building and maintaining of community. You are not merely facing the approaching fist anticipating annihilation and ready to evaporate into despair. You in fact seem more than a little certain that we can manage to pull our values up together in the stock of our collective creativity. And Dale I don't buy this fact you present that there are only a few. I could introduce you to a lot of poets who not only fully understand the doom but are LIKE YOU in knowing the power and necessity of a caring poetry family; I prefer family over the word community, and could care less how corny that may seem to some. Poets like Frank Sherlock, Brenda Iijima, Carol Mirakove, Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff, David Buuck, in fact this would turn into a very long list of poets. There's a new group of poets in Philadelphia and they call themselves the New Philadelphia Poets, and I guess they're more than 10 years or so younger than I am, and I LOVE their loyalty to building community/family in poetry. And how they literally mobilize with a day's notice to protest libraries closing, or to save a bookstore. Some of them met at Naropa, or at least went there, and you mentioned Anne Waldman, and Anne Waldman is one of THE MOST courageous templates for building care and for reconciling differences. She of The Outrider wisdom.

HOME is important to me in poetry. I will not mention their name, but a famous experimental poet (I choose "experimental" over "avant garde" when talking about
this particular poet in the sense that Kaia Sand chooses "avant-garde" over "experimental" for her own personal choices when she says, "because 'avant-garde' implies the social side of the work. There are a lot of ways to pitch in with an avant-garde movement--this is an inclusive frame. So many artists have shown us that if you want to extend what's possible, you need to build the ground to walk on--and that's collective action."), but a famous experimental poet said to me not long ago that I should consider moving to a smaller mid-western city. They said this when I told them how unaffordable Philadelphia was becoming with the influx of wealthy young hipsters jacking our rents up. THEY JUST DIDN'T GET IT at all! I explained to this older, WEALTHIER poet that I have nothing against these other cities, but THIS IS MY HOME, it's my HOME! And when I say HOME dammit I mean THE PLACE where I learned to write poetry and learned to love the world as a result! Philadelphia is my home, it's my HOME! My community is here in my HOME! My HOME isn't my fucking apartment I can barely afford, it's 100 people and things before it's my apartment! Philadelphia is where I learned community, and where I learned the inimitable process of truly connecting with other human beings to discover the usefulness of language. And ever since this ridiculous conversation with this wealthy, unsympathetic elder poet, I realize that they really don't GRASP the necessity of the social side of the work that Kaia speaks of, and that makes me sad.

I'm disturbed by the term "post-avant" that's being tossed around so liberally lately, said by poets as though they're walking to the frig for a soda. To me "post-avant" sounds like, "Post-thoughtfulness and caring." We must drive it back! Like putting the snakes back into Ireland that the idiot "saint" Patrick drove out! Philadelphia is my HOME, I repeat! It's the city where Gil Ott back in the 1980s CARED SO MUCH about his HOME of Philadelphia that he talked the Painted Bride Arts Center into letting him create arts centers in ALL the neighborhoods of the city! And HE DID IT! And then he had the amazing nerve to create a bus tour to MAKE all the uptight rich folks in the middle of the city go around to all these new arts centers AND SEE that art doesn't JUST exist on their gallery walls. "Post-avant" is not considering the formations of Action around the language.

I'm most interested in discussing the usefulness of poetry. Recently I was in the middle of conducting a (Soma)tic workshop when one of the participants said, "This is a luxury, all this poetry writing." It was a thoughtful moment, and it was an interruption that we enfolded into the process of the workshop. I was careful to not react, and instead asked everyone else what they thought. When no one had much to say I decided to talk about the poetry of Charlotte Delbo and Hilde Domin. Both of these poets NEVER WROTE A WORD of poetry until they were jammed into the black mouth of their own personal circumstances in World War II. Delbo was part of the French Resistance, and was shipped to Auschwitz, where she just barely managed to survive to be liberated from the camp. Domin went into exile in Santo Domingo. Both poets wrote poems AFTER their displacement -- in my opinion -- as a way of finding the usefulness of language to recreate their anchors for new ways to survive in a world that would never be the same, never be what they had hoped it would be. There are times, recently Dale, where I feel we too are like Delbo and Domin JUST BEFORE their own world in their own time took a nose dive into the abyss. Frankly I'm always glad that I'm childless because I'm not convinced I would be as clear and discerning about the world, that I would constantly be frantic and paranoid. Tell us, please, how being a father inspires your view of Slow Poetry and beyond?

SMITH:
Well, first, let me say, I realize I'm not alone in this: many see what's at stake politically, socially, economically. Kaia and Jules' book Landscapes of Dissent is important to me and has helped me think about poetry as a public force. But in poetry, there aren't many of us, really, having these conversations. Even with your Philly Posse, or with groups like PIPA in NYC, we are few compared to the larger forces at work. Maybe that's why we must remain so vigilant and insistent on a view of the world that is critical, comprehensive, and extensive beyond the limited range of aesthetic or "post-avant" move-making. I think many, many people understand what's going on in terms of the overall fuckery that's taking place, but it's difficult to know how to respond, or to act in the face of such naked aggression. I agree that this term--post-avant--is meaningless, or even sinister, in that it covers over the political and socially active aspect of the avant-garde--an aspect that must be nourished and not commodified.

But let me speak to your question by saying that being a father has made me a better writer, a better man. I listen better--see better. And I worry more. I don't know what kind of world my sons will grow into. But we talk and spend as much time together as possible. They taught me that poetry is not about work that you put on a page. It's the life around you. But children complicate life, too. I used to think that I would just do odd jobs and pay the bills while writing poetry. The kids came along and it became more and more difficult to publish a magazine, find work, and pay those bills. As a result, I signed up on the Academic bandwagon and just yesterday turned in a dissertation to my committee. I like the work. It's labor in a real sense. But I'll be going out into a job market that's more than weak now. So I don't know how I'll be providing for my boys in that money sense. Mostly what's important to me is building their confidence, showing them that it's okay to trust yourself, and that you don't have to obey larger ideological forces. It's okay to be in school or not. But we all have to make decisions at certain moments. How do we interact with the little snot-nosed shits on the playground? And that doesn't go away. And so I think that with my children I practice orders of attention that help expand all of our capacities to deal with life situations. And poetry is just an extension of these life situations. It's a marvelous art in which you learn to become more flexible and readied by the accumulation of experience.

But one problem now is that the bullies are so perverse and the systems that drive their perversities so delicately managed and stretched toward systemic collapse that no one knows how to act around them. The words you keep coming back to here--love and caring--are significant. Our affections, as that old poet-Fascist once observed in a cage in Pisa, are what remain. And so whether it's our home in Philly, love for my children, our devotion to art, etc, I believe that this is all we can do: follow our affection. The Greeks had rituals of aversion and tendance, and these, I think, remain relevant as strategies of living today. You tend what's good and avert the rest of it. I sometimes worry that I get so angered and outraged by what needs aversion that my energy gets sucked into that rather than into tending and nourishing the more important things. So that's something I struggle with, keeping my eyes close, my head clear. What rituals do you observe?

CONRAD:
It is easy to get sucked into anger. This conversation, especially about Dorn took me to places I don't like going to, very painful places inside me. What rituals do I observe you ask? (Soma)tics for me came out of years of being Macrobiotic, and that study of Macro(big) Biotics(life) astonished me daily, hearing my pulse in the food before I ate it. The space to love others and myself better came with that. The space for anger and seeing anger and arguments as a way of caring. Some years ago Anselm Berrigan and I were talking about the space for polemics and he said, "My mom told me once that people fought at the Poetry Project because they cared." Once again the wisdom of Alice Notley comes searing through the fog. YES, because we care! It doesn't have to STOP the fighting, but it puts into perspective almost in this instant universal way of understanding about care.

The different forms of denial of community has fascinated me as well in our world of poets. I had a friend who LOVED to go on and on about being in The Cave and being shut out and that THAT is where "the true artist" "should" exist. And I would say, "Oh yeah well why are you here at this poetry reading? And you gave a poetry reading yourself last week, and invited us all, and we were there. And you have a poem coming out in another magazine, and you're working on a new chapbook, and by the way WE MET at a poetry reading you were giving several years ago." It reminds me of a song my mother used to play all the time when I was a kid, MAGIC IS AFOOT or something, but the person in the song was healed by this magical source and would deny it after having sought the magic to be healed. Don't come to be part of us, and be nurtured and fed with us, then deny us to our faces, it's a lie, it's ridiculous!

SMITH:
Well, as we've been saying, poetry is more than words on a page: it's a spoken event, an act of love or destruction, a step outside of the routines society would have us accommodate ourselves to. In part of my work outside of poetry I devote a lot of attention to public sphere theory and I like where things are going in the social sciences and the humanities on that score. People like Bruno Latour, Kathleen Stewart, and, from another direction, Michael Warner all contribute ways to understanding how our attention to things informs the spaces we inhabit. And this is very Olsonian, because the poets have been there for a while, in many ways, but our vision is not as coherent as it could be. All this is to say that the notion of the cave just doesn't work, as you know. And the sooner poets get over that hang-up, the better. But there are many caves. Coteries are caves, too, and it's easy to become accustomed to their warmth. Poetry for too long has had a debilitating sense of its specialness and remoteness from dirty and difficult things like publics. And that has to change or poetry will remain kind of a culturally remote item of curiosity for most people. But this is all another story, perhaps for another time. I'm honored that you invited this conversation, and I appreciate deeply your engagement with me here.

posted by poet CAConrad @ 9:42 AM 0 comments

posted by poet CAConrad @ 1:40 PM 0 comments

posted by poet CAConrad @ 7:25 PM 0 comments

PhillySound Feature #7: Garrett Caples

We are pleased to bring you the prolific, masterful talent of Garrett Caples as the 7th featured poet on PhillySound. You can view past features at this link.

Enjoy this poet and his poetry,

CAConrad
editor of #7

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Garrett Caples is a poet who lives in Oakland, CA. He's written two full-length collections of poetry, The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square Editions 1999) and Complications (Meritage Press 2007). Narrowhouse Recordings released his lo-fi poetry and music disc, Surrealism's Bad Rap, in 2006, and Norfolk, VA's now-defunct music newspaper Ninevolt published a collection of his early writings on rap, The Philistine's Guide to Hip-Hop, with an introduction by Shock-G of Digital Underground, in 2004. Forthcoming from Wave Books is the biblio-critical work, Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English. He's published the odd pornographic tale, and has written numerous essays on poets like Victor Segalen, André Breton, Philip Lamantia, and Barbara Guest. Even painters-Gordon Onslow Ford, Joe Brainard, Bruce Conner, Brian Lucas, Brian Strang-aren't immune to his pen.

Caples is an editor at City Lights Books, where, among other projects, he curates the new poetry series, City Lights Spotlight, focused on under-recognized masters (#1: Norma Cole) and younger up and coming poets (#2: Anselm Berrigan). He also had the privilege of editing the previously unpublished MSS Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman (2008) as Pocket Poets #59. He is also a contributing writer to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, for which he writes on literature, painting, and, most frequently, Bay Area hip-hop.

posted by poet CAConrad @ 7:08 PM 0 comments

Nod Often
by Garrett Caples


i will sleep
with you

señor
citizen

one drop
in a human
ocean

tear in the
purple earth

pulse beating
itself to death

trying to graft
onto a life

the cyclops
ringing his
bell again

votes himself
worst nightmare

for the third
straight year
in a row

i hesitate
to run him
over

though i
know i
oughta

why me
lord

johnny cash
would ask

who weakened
my weekend

my overdose
overdoes it

needless
needles

courtesy
your local

police state
department
store

plant evidence
grow case

how do you
say stop
looking
at me

to a vacuum
power power
vacuum

sucking off
aloft a loft
the obvious
lobbyist

the genetically
sodomized
botanist

the codified
nine to five
legitimized
colonist

bipartisan
shit agreed
to a greed
long ago

coming soon
a water economy

in an event
known as the
wrinkle disaster

the secretary of
the office of
preoccupied
hiccups

cops a mug
to chug in
the tub &

is found
drowned
afterward

in a note
in another
hand he
laments

even tv
no longer
pretends

to give
a shit
about
you

posted by poet CAConrad @ 9:45 PM 0 comments

QUESTION: "Nod Often" is without a doubt one of my favorite poems by you. It's a bleak torrent in the true meaning of torrent being an incessant, powerful outpouring. The tear in the purple earth is where the crisis seems to give way like a devastating forecast. What do you not mind sharing with us about writing this poem?

CAPLES: It's funny-I wrote that poem in late 2007 and hadn't really done anything with it because I wasn't sure if it was any good. It was the second poem I wrote after I'd finished Complications and I guess I felt like it looked like the poems in the "All Chemical" section and I didn't know how I felt about that. I thought I was done worrying about form as such, but this resolution was formed while the forms were changing of their own accord. The absence of change bothered me because I live in fear of getting good enough at a particular kind of poem that I can coast on it forever. You can go pretty far in the poetry world if you can give your own little twist, however faint, on some generally accepted mode, and you can keep peeling off poems long after talent has outstripped poetry. But the form came of its own and I finished the poem, which rarely happens at this point unless it's something I'll end up using, so I kept it around. I haven't written any others like it since, so my qualms appear to be unfounded.

"Bleak torrent," as you call it, is good. I was going through a bad time for reasons unrelated to poetry. And, of course, this was written when Bush was still in power, though really very little has changed under Obama, geopolitically speaking. And the militarization of the police to quash free speech; the insane lack of gun control; polar bears still not being added to the endangered species list; climate change treaties which, even if they achieved their tepid goals, are laughably insufficient; carbon trading; tasers; the inability to close Guantanamo; banning of gay marriage in California-you name it. I think it'd be foolish to deny we're better off under Obama, however, and I do think he's trying to improve things, but only certain things. Other evils of capitalism he seems quite at ease with. But still, it's hard not to like the guy as a guy; he's magnetic but seemingly human, and he's restored some dignity to the America's international standing. Not that I'm a patriot, but I don't have much choice in being American and it's pretty embarrassing when you travel.

I'm gassing on about this I guess because I'm not sure what to say about writing it. I'm working on a poem right now that I don't know if I'll finish, but in it I talk a little bit about writing poetry: "it's a combination of toil/ and automatic dictation." It sounds like Alexander Pope, but that's as good as I can describe it. Many of the phrases are automatic as is the general sequence of "events" or whatever you'd call them. The title came first, a few days later, the phrase "señor citizen," which generated the first bunch of stanzas; I remember there was some particularly vexed case going on on the US/Mexican border, which I think accounted for the manifest content, if you will, plus it's obviously built on "senior citizen," giving it a sonic plausibility even as undertones of the elderly seep into the automatic phrase, and the "sleep with you," also automatic, must be a degraded or accelerated form of marriage for citizenship. The first stanza emerged after the second, from the juxtaposition of "señor citizen" with the title.

Parts of the poem were more deliberately composed to bridge more spontaneous lines. Occasionally, as here, I have an earlier stack of phrases that I didn't know what to do with-"weakened weekend," "overdose overdoes," "needless needles"-and they suddenly find their calling. These phrases weren't automatic so much as noticed, and I literally discovered "needles" in "needless" from a typo in a document I was proofreading. "Automatic," for me, is most often this sort of slow accumulation. Yet, the poem is, I think, a bleak torrent; I was a bleak torrent at the time so the poem reflects this. And it reflects various obsessions of mine, like the poisoning of the Earth's water supply. I imagine water'll be scarce enough to become the basis of the world economy; I only hope it comes after I die. Genetically-modified food is another Earth-destroyer. The thing about tv was a spontaneous insight I had at a friend's house (I don't watch it at home and now that the digital conversion has happened, I literally can't, which is fine by me.) Commercials and reality tv treat viewers like complete morons; there's a contempt and loathing of the audience/consumer-often manifested through the fake absurdism that's become advertising's chief mode-that contrasts with the way tv used to conduct itself. It used to pretend to care about the people it was trying to sell things to, total bullshit, of course, but now the lameness of the viewer-and the viewer's acquiescence in this lameness-is presumed. So I thought it was a funny way to put it.

QUESTION: Magdalena Zurawski says punk rock saved her poems. Tell us how hip hop is an inspiration for you?

CAPLES: This hip hop thing has been a weird development for me. I don't know if you've ever seen any "hip hop poets"-there are some good spoken word people who might fall under that rubric, but in general, anytime I was confronted with a hip hop poet, it was someone who couldn't rap who wanted to use the slang. Someone who couldn't achieve hip hop, in other words. So I was a little skeptical about what a poet could borrow from hip hop.

That said, I'm immensely interested in what rappers do with rhyme. In our poetry world, rhyme has been as dead as it can be since-at the very latest-Weldon Kees. He was already something of an anachronism stylistically. Anything else has been Richard Wilbur-type reactionary rhyming, or Charles Bernstein-type "look how dumb these rhymes sound" things. (Thom Gunn, however, managed to do something with it.) But what rap shows is that rhyming isn't played out; it has a vibrant existence, just not in our poetry culture. Part of rap's success with rhyme was to think beyond the end-rhyme. There are lots of internal rhymes, the shifts between rhymes don't always follow a couplet or quatrain pattern. There's also much use of slant rhymes-probably most rhymes in raps are slant rhymes these days-and rhyming phrases rather than simply words. A very simple example of the latter occurs in a Mac Dre song in which he says something to the effect of being high off "a catpiss blunt" and in a car with "a catfish front." ("Catpiss" is a kind of cannabis whose smell evokes cat piss, though it's by no means so acrid.) But the phrases can be much longer.

I've spent the last four years writing on Bay Area rap for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Given time constraints, most of the music I listen to is rap, and I spend a lot of time running around various Bay Area hoods for writing purposes. And I've made a handful of close friends within this artistic milieu. So the stuff is on my mind a lot. Inevitably I've picked up bits of slang, not on purpose so much as through a combination of osmosis and simply trying to make myself understood in a world not my own. In the past couple of years here in Oakland, the word "lightweight" has come to signify something between "a little bit" and "sort of." I was interviewing a rapper and had my camera with me. One of his teen protégés asked me if I did photography as well, to which I automatically responded "lightweight," to the extreme amusement of everyone.

I tell this story because the slang is very attractive yet there's something ridiculous about someone like me using it. It would be easy to steal some of this slang-the more straightforward or obvious examples at least-and seem like a very inventive poet, but why do this? It's dishonest and unoriginal. It isn't my language, though I've found it creeps into my conversation outside the hood from time to time, handy words like "lightweight" or "a minute" to signify a long time ("I haven't seen him in a minute"). But I try not to do this. The one word I did self-consciously use in a poem is "grapes" to signify "marijuana"; it seems so incongruous with weed in a sense-compared with, say, "spinach" or "broccoli"-but "grapes" came in with strong, purple-colored weed that took over out here. Maybe once is ok, but the problem with that sort of thing is that few people who read my poems know that that's what "grapes" signifies.

In any case, what happened to some of my poetry after awhile wasn't related to slang at all, but rather to flow. What happened was, as I wrote "Chanson de Goo Goo," some of the material came to me in a flow-the rhythm of which I later realized came from a rap by Shock-G, with a little bit of one by Saafir, the Saucee Nomad. And the rhymes came out of this flow (not the other way around). This has happened a few times since; I'm working on one right now that contains a passage based on a flow by Dotrix4000, probably my best friend in the hip hop scene out here. But I haven't chosen these flows so much as they've chosen me in the course of a poem. I don't know if any of this counts as "inspiration," but it's how the hip hop has affected my work.

QUESTION: So you're saying you've internalized the tools? You were talking about the achievement of rap using rhyme in ways different from mere end-rhyme, and I feel that too of your poem "Silence License," also in your book COMPLICATIONS (Meritage Press, 2007). "soda / odor" for instance. Although my FAVORITE is "onion / noise" as if it could rhyme, and THE NOISE of the onion would know, right?! You're the perfect poet in many ways to be talking about this with, which makes me happy to be doing so. I've had fights more than once with poets in our experimental circles who balk at the mention of rap as poetry, to say rap IS poetry. When I would talk about the historical context of rap coming to us on the tree of fast-rhyme oral histories from West Africa, the answer then is, "Oh, so it's like folk art." To me this is another stamp of pedigree talking, to say "I'll accept it, but not as fine art." Anyway, that's probably too long of a debate into class and race. Back to your poems. I'm curious about the dedication to Michael Palmer for "Chanson de Goo Goo" in COMPLICATIONS. You pay respect to others too with different poems in the book, Philip Lamantia, Barbara Guest, and others. Not to mix these questions too much, but, how do these poets inspire you, while we're on the subject of how and what inspires the poems of Garrett Caples?

CAPLES: I go back and forth on how to characterize the relationship between rap and poetry (both forms of verse, perhaps). I have no problem with people calling rap poetry, though, on the other hand, I don't privilege one over the other. That is to say, rap doesn't need to be poetry, because rap is rap, perfectly valid in its own terms. And yet-how can they not be related? A lot of rappers I know consider themselves poets, so it's clear at least some of them feel the relationship. As a poet, in any case, it's useful to see the continuities and the distinctions. The fact that rap is for the most part recorded, and recorded with a beat, while a poem, for the most part, is written on a page, is important to keep in mind. A good rapper can use his/her voice to accomplish much that isn't possible in the poem in the sense that you have to write poetry whose voice will emerge from the marks on the paper. You can't rely on someone hearing your poem the way you think it goes; you need to write the poem so that it goes the way you want it to without you being there. I recall reading a poet once complaining about how her poetry instructor would read her poems fast, when she meant them to be read slow. Within your poem, you can shift its tempo, speed up, slow down, etc. But you can't just insist on the proper speed at which your work should be read. All this is to say that the rapper potentially has more control over the way the rap goes because he or she delivers it in oral form, whereas the poet can control some of the way the poem goes, but must leave a great deal open to the reader's various proclivities. If you can't accept this, you need to find another line of work.

The dedications are pretty straightforward, devoted to poet-friends like Andrew Joron, Brian Lucas, Jeff Clark, a handful for my girlfriend Anna. "Mildred Begley" was my great-aunt who died in her 80s. She was a wonderful person and I was sad because she's the type of person who slips through history, making her mark on her immediate friends and family but leaving nothing behind. I thought maybe I could preserve something, even though it's not a very straightforward elegy at all and doesn't give much sense of her as a person. I also enjoyed using her name as a title-it sounds like an Anthony Trollope novel. As for the older poets: "Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur" is dedicated to both Philip Lamantia and Robert Creeley, who died within a few months of each other. Mostly Philip-inspired, as we were pretty close, but Creeley is certainly in there. I remember telling Barbara Guest I liked Creeley's work, which she really hated, as it turned out. But I told her that my interest was largely formal, which is true; obviously our vocabularies and sensibilities are quite different. She approved of this, saying something like "That's very wise," a typically dual-edged type of Barbara statement. Barbara is the subject of "A Young Girl Recalls Meeting Erich Von Stroheim," as well as the speaker. It's based on her actual experience and, being a huge Von Stroheim fan, I couldn't resist writing it after she told me the story. She was still alive when I wrote it and I showed it to her; she approved, thank god. Really it's kind of audacious writing a poem in the voice of a living master, but again, I couldn't help myself and I'm very glad I wrote it as it was one of those stories that she never got on paper and it deserves telling. "‘I Have Seen Enough'" is another one about Philip but dedicated to Nancy Joyce Peters, the co-owner/publisher emeritus of City Lights who was married to Philip. I got to know her only after he died, when I helped her put his papers together for the Bancroft Library. This was basically the beginning of the process by which I eventually started editing for City Lights, so it was a real pivotal moment in my life. That poem was one of the few that was actually written more or less in the time it takes to read it. Everything in it-the strange encounters with birds, etc.-really occurred.

I feel like I'm both going on too long and not really answering the question. In terms of inspiration, Creeley influenced me on the level of the line, while Andrew Joron influenced me on the level of the word (when I read The Removes it made me feel like a lazy poet so I tried to step it up afterward). Barbara's influence is mostly in her fearlessness and continual variation. Philip may be the biggest influence but not in an obvious way because I think my poetry isn't very like his; he's inimitable and I wouldn't even try. But his influence was about being a poet and what that meant as a practitioner of an ancient tradition. He also taught me about poetry as a life as well as an art. And perhaps most of all, his own disregard for any careerism, his intense pursuit of his own interests regardless of fashion, and his strict standards of what to publish profoundly influenced me. It made me drop all the purely formal exercises in favor of sitting back and waiting for the poem to come, not forcing it or using a formula simply to generate product. You write less poems this way, but they're a hell of a lot better. And whereas I was driven by the desire to try forms, now the forms declare themselves fairly early in the writing process.

posted by poet CAConrad @ 8:54 PM 0 comments

MARCELLA DURAND
I remember exactly, precisely, when I first met Garrett Caples—1995 in the lobby of the Berkeley Art Museum, pushing a friend of his, Paul, in a wheelchair, and wearing a cap. We’ve actually only met in person four times. The other times were when he read at Double Happiness, raw full-on more nervous then perhaps I've ever seen a poet at a reading, then again when we met at a café near Moe's during my visit to California in 2003—he was reading The Garrett Caples Reader when I walked in, and he said, "I forgot how this is pretty good," which I found narcissistic and totally anti-narcissistic at the same time—and then last year when he gave a beautiful rhythm-layered read at the Poetry Project. We had gone out to eat beforehand at that super-cheap Japanese restaurant on St. Mark's with the giant panda thing out front with the flashing red eyes. (My encounters with Garrett have always had interesting backdrops). What I hadn't known through three of our meetings was that Garrett not only wrote poems with force in both sound and content—and here, inspired by a reading that his close friend and collaborator Brian Lucas gave, in which he flipped through Poems for the Millennium reading lines at random, I'll open a page or two at random from Complications and let my eye fall upon a few lines:

Barbara tell it on guitar
this tale of wunderbar

Those are from "A Young Girl Recalls Meeting Erich von Stroheim," dedicated to Barbara Guest.

And one more flip, falling upon a few lines from "Chanson de Googoo," dedicated to Michael Palmer.

el euro
es numbero
uno

dans les
etats unis

parce que
Chewbacca
is proper

And lest you think all Caples' poems are dedicated to someone or another (where's mine, Garrett?!?), I'll make a choice at this point, from "Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur." Oh, wait, this one is for Philip Lamantia and "secretly for Creeley."

now more than ever
no more than ever

poetry enters
the naked
phase

Anyway, but what I didn't know until our last meeting was that Garrett also wrote about hip hop. He is the author of The Philistine's Guide to Hip Hop and I imagine the complex, abstract yet emotional soundscapes of his poems, percussive and multitonal, take from hip hop, as well as the surrealists, Ted Berrigan, Guest, Lamantia. I know in the 1990s a lot of poets were interested in hip hop (called rap then) and its potentialities with speech and rhyme and stage presence, but somehow that all got lost in a widening division between the Poetry Project/Language poets and the Nuyorican scene. Now hip hop isn’t acknowledged much nowadays in something like, say, flarf, even though it probably opened some of the doors that flarf enters. Garrett looks at a lot of things—poets, music, art—with unshuttered eyes; I always learn a lot from him and like to catch up on his gossip of the surprising. I look forward to the fifth visit.



BRENDA HILLMAN
I met Garrett first through his work and later in person because we were friends of Barbara Guest. In the few years before she died, Barbara was made happy by her associations with those she called "the young surrealists." Garrett visited with her frequently. I don’t know when Garrett began his explorations in surrealism, perhaps through his friendship with Philip Lamantia.

Garrett's poetry seems to embody several qualities modernists received from poets of long ago—particularly Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the spirit of late nineteenth century séances. Sometimes it seems he is being witty about the occult, but it can also be a serious matter. Madame Blavatsky might have issued a warning to Garrett because his poems go deep and sideways on a path, they speak from below, with the Poe in poetry. The poet is a man walking on his hands. The world of Garrett's poems is the world of dreams and childhood, of the unexplained—a place where the fable meets the riddle.

Sometimes he delicately separates the small bones of a sentence ("Synth"). I appreciate the chemistry of word-pairings in his poetry. Words can stroll in twos like girls to a matinee: "coal/goal//lone/lust//tone/dust" ("Four Tune").

Or create a magic tumble: "stars are wet with children dressing."

When the demonic enters his work, I am reminded of Baudelaire’s interest in flowers: "Baudelaire's favorite flowers were neither daisy, carnation, nor rose; he would break into raptures at the sight of those thick-leaved plants that look like vipers about to fall on their prey..." (W. Benjamin quoting Champfleury in Arcades Project).

In their raids on the beyond—including writings of homage to artists who have died—Garrett's poems often show tenderness (the piece on Thom Gunn) and so create passageways between apparently private worlds.



ANDREW JORON
The work of Garrett Caples has always seemed to me a form of "anti-work," in more than one sense: "anti-work" as in "anti-aesthetic," demonstrated by his refusal to conform to any of the present trends of poetic practice, post-avant or otherwise; but also "anti-work" as in "anti-task," reflecting a sensibility that revels in the primacy of play, that rebels against the careerist call to order of the school bell or the MFA factory whistle. Instead, Caples's poetry manifests a laughingly dark umor (a paradoxical condition, first defined by Jacques Vaché, in which the power of death is reclaimed for amor). Here, the melancholia of the reality principle is swallowed whole by the pleasure principle, as if it were a Plutonian drug. What results is a kind of ecstatic doubt, a state of suspended fall: "The sun doesn't rise so much as light surrounds us until we ascend into night. We killed people, it's true, to adjust their attitude, but could you have lived in their town? A house that was eating itself before it was even home? My bed was in the fireplace," Caples testifies in the prose poem "Untitled," from his latest collection Complications. Throughout, Caples's lower-case "i" cases the lower casements of the real, returning in Orphic style, knowing that "the hole in the mirror laughs" (as he puts it in his prose poem "Orpheus"). In both of his full-length books, The Garrett Caples Reader and Complications (both featuring provocative designs by Jeff Clark), Caples purveys a poetic "synth" that fuses the lyric, satiric, and elegiac modes, and refuses the standard format of "the poetry collection" by including short essays and other prose statements. Indeed, Caples proves himself the trickster at every level of the poetic act, taxing the sins of syntax and turning the merely semantic mantic, as in the snakelike slyness of his phrase "Turning on the Tongue" (the title of a poem in Complications). Especially in his poems with short lines, Caples goes round with sound to found and confound meaning: "i nose / for noise," he confesses in "Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur." In phrases like "lamplit armpit" and "sup on pus," Caples bathes in high bathos, tickling the ridiculous until it sublimes. As the poet avers in "Gauntlet of Two" (from The Garrett Caples Reader): "It was simply a case of lost absolutes. A game of cat and mouth." He is is the brash actor who rushes unannounced into the action of the play of language (violating the script). He is Garrett Caples, agent of mad love.



BRIAN LUCAS
I first met Garrett Caples at the Taiwan Restaurant on University Ave. in Berkeley, CA in 1996. I had (or was about to) publish some of his poems in my magazine, Angle. Lunch was served and we ate heartily for about $3 each. We never returned together to Taiwan Restaurant for various reasons that have, at times, haunted me.

The one poem by Garrett that I like is "All Chemical" and this only because it is dedicated to me. I also enjoy the poems he has yet to publish, ones that I've heard read in the living rooms of our various friends in common, poems that if not dedicated to me I will pretend not to have heard.

Garrett continuously moves through phases, the most recent could be compared to Captain Beefheart jamming in Sun Ra's Myth Science Arkestra with an appearance by the Heiroglyphics. Garrett's words are open to everyone except the uninitiated. To become initiated would take iron lungs and a fondness for blue silk shirts.

I'm pleased to see he has been getting some attention in Pennsylvania because he's worn us out here in California.

posted by poet CAConrad @ 11:51 AM 0 comments