<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Friends,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Last week, on Friday, Dec. 3, we met for our first
discussion of the work of David Shapiro. This Friday, from 3-5 in room 116 of
the Whitney Humanities Center, the poet himself will join us for a conversation
about his poetry and about the New York School of both art and poetry since
Shapiro is one of the key members of the second generation of the new York
School.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>He was a student of Kenneth
Koch’s, wrote the first monograph study on the work of John Ashbery, and edited
with Ron Padgett the important collection The Anthology of New York Poets
(1970).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In many ways, then,
Shapiro has helped define what the label “the New York School” refers to.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">During our discussion last week, a series of questions were
developed throughout our session that will be forwarded to Shapiro.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These are prompts that will shape but
not determine our discussion this Friday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Below that I will paste an interview with Shapiro from 2002 and I will
recommend that people take a look at this interview that Shapiro recently did
with Kent Johnson (himself a poet whose work we discussed in our sessions and
who visited a few years ago).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We
referred to Kent’s interview a few times in our recent session, so people
indicated I should send the link again. Here it ‘tis: <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml">http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Here are the questions, then I’ll post new of two upcoming
readings featuring WGCP members and then I’ll paste another Shapiro interview.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Until Friday,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p>Questions for Shapiro</o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">1). Although you have indicated a certain frustration with
the term “the New York School,” you are in part responsible for drawing
attention to this set of elective affinities.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>What constitutes these affinities and why/how does the label
perhaps overdetermine or underdetermine how such work gets read?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How would characterize</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">2). Your erudition is immediately evident in you’re your
poems, your scholarship, and your interviews.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>What do you believe the responsibility of a reader might be
in order to keep up with the layers of reference and allusion in your various
forms of discourse.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">3) In your book on Ashbery and in subsequent interviews,
your interest in theory, structuralism, and post-structuralism informs (or
seems to) inform your poetics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How
did this come to be an interest and how do you see Jakobson, Derrida, and
others impacting your sense of language both in the critical mode as well as in
your poetry?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">4) How has your sense of poetry—especially your
own—developed since you published your first book.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>How do you feel that publishing your work so early has
played a role in your development as a writer and a thinker?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">5) What is the role of humor or wit in your poetry?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is it a conscious choice to employ
this? Is it a way of playing with and against notions of a tradition of “poetic
diction”?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">6) We are, arguably, in an age of pluralism when it comes to
poetry and the arts in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In
that way, the landscape has changed greatly from when you began.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In what ways does this openness impact
poetry in general?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Has it changed
your own thinking about poetry you or others wrote that seemed to be in
response to dominate aesthetic ideologies?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">7) Given your devotion to poets, writers, painters, and
thinkers of the generation before yours (those born in the 1920s, say), how do
you think about questions of literary inheritance, tradition,
counter-tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is not a
question about anxieties of influence, but about filial debt (which is no less
Freudian!).</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">8) Do you still play music?<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>How has that continued to be a factor in your sense of
poetry?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What about your sense of
how visual art inform your poetry?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Or your interest in philosophy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>The questions would be revealing in your idea of the connections as well
as the differences between these arts.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">8) In your Ashbery book, you write: “a poem is not merely or
primarily the consciousness of the author—it is a dynamism, a dissemination, a
scattering of screens.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In what
ways does this describe your own poetry and poetics?<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>And yet, your poems seem very much to be the dynamism of
your singular consciousness (and also to be about that very thing).</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">9) How would you describe the differences between yourself
and other peers of your generation such as the Language poets?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How were those differences negotiated
in the 70s when you were all coming into your own at the same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or do you really think of yourself as
belonging to a prior generation?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">++++++</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Readings:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Dec. 11. Poemetry: Readings by Mark Horosky, Nancy Kuhl, and
Jasmine Dreame Wagner. Curated by Jason Labbe</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Detritus, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>located at<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>71 Orange St. 7-10pm.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:
Helvetica;color:#246016">Ordinary Evening Reading Series Presents<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:
Helvetica;color:#246016">Cynthia Zarin and Phillip Lopate<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:
Helvetica;color:#246016">at the Anchor Bar, New Haven<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:
Helvetica;color:#246016">Tuesday, December 14, 7 PM</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">++++</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Pluralist Music:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">An Interview with David Shapiro<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">by Joanna Fuhrman<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">David Shapiro's ninth book of poetry, <em><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-family:Times">A Burning
Interior</span></b></em> (Overlook Press, $24.95) has just been published. He
has also published books of criticism on John Ashbery, Jim Dime, Jasper Johns,
and Mondrian's Flowers, and edited the important <em><span style="font-family:
Times">An Anthology of New York Poets </span></em>with Ron Padgett. All of his
writing is simultaneously earnest and explosive. To read a David Shapiro poem
is to enter a space in which "emotion" is as abstract as theory and
an "idea" is as visceral and tender as the best pop song. Currently a
Professor in Art History at William Paterson University in New Jersey, Shapiro
has taught poetry and architectural aesthetics at Cooper Union for the past
twenty years. This interview was conducted at the café in the Cooper Hewitt
museum on a sweltering August Monday, drinking <em><span style="font-family:
Times">decaffeinated</span></em> diet cola. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Joanna Fuhrman:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
How has your idea of what poetry can do changed since you were young? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">David Shapiro:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
Poetry was very important in my family. My uncle had published sonnets in <em><span style="font-family:Times">The New York Times</span></em>. My grandmother was
very literary. My mother read something like a book a day and loved to read to
me. One of the great influences on my life was my father constantly memorizing
Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and he had me do the same, as soon as I could
speak. Music was also important in my family, so my idea was that poetry was
this musical/theatrical thing. What a Russian called "the articulatory
dance of the speech organs," I associated with songs. So when I was about
nine writing a song with words, something about an irradiated man, I realized I
just had written a poem, and I started to write poetry an hour or two a day,
like violin playing. One of the things I tended to do was to fall in love with
a poet-for example I would memorize <em><span style="font-family:Times">The
Wasteland</span></em>, 1958 or so, then try to write like that. I went through
a Beckett period where I wrote a lot of bad plays. I fell in love with Theodore
Roethke, and if he would use the word "tendril," I would use the word
"tendril." It got to the point where I would memorize their voices -
I had a lot of the Caedmon records - just like one would a concerto. I kept
being influenced by different people. The French Symbolists one year were very
important to me, and then they were important to me forever. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I was about 12 or 13 when the Donald
Allen anthology came out and I memorized that too. I was called the "Beat
Prophet" in eighth grade. I would go to parties and recite <em><span style="font-family:Times">Howl</span></em>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">My ideas of poetry changed very rapidly
between the ages of 9 and 15 in the sense that a different poet would be a
different universe. I liked the big golden voice of Dylan Thomas. Kenneth Koch
read my poetry to me, when I was fifteen, in a very quiet voice-I liked that. I
had considered the poem very fortissimo, a little bit like D.H. Lawrence but
also with Dylan Thomas in mind. When he read it very quietly, I liked that. He
also showed me new work by John Ashbery, <em><span style="font-family:Times">The
Tennis Court Oath</span></em>. In was in July or August of 1962, and I thought
it was fairly ugly: "To employ her / construction ball / Morning fed on
the / light blue wood / of the mouth," and so on. Then I came upon sections
which were more melodic, and I had a big conversion to the idea that he was
floating melody inside static. Lines like: "I must say I / suddenly / she
left the room, oval tear tonelessly fell" or "I moved up // glove /
the field. " <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">And I thought, oh he's using the word
"I" like it's any other word in the dictionary. That's interesting.
It reminded me of a Raushenberg collage and suddenly I fell in love with it. I
was converted by <em><span style="font-family:Times">The Tennis Court Oath</span></em>
and I still love Cubo-Futurist style. I liked a lot of the lowness and the
cheapness of the words. Allen Ginsberg said to me, "But can you memorize
it," and after I recited a lot of it he said, "Oh it's like Alexander
Pope." I didn't think it was like Pope, but I liked its elegance. I loved
lines like: "Over Mount Hymettus / And sudden day unbuttoned her
blouse" and I know Kenneth liked that line too. I liked what was very
fresh about it; it seemed to be draining all the sentimentality I loved in
Theodore Roethke out of poetry. It was definitely something new. I feel like I
had good taste in that sense, for a fifteen year old, but I must say my taste
has continually changed. The difference between me and other New York Poets is
that I never gave up my love of what I already loved. I'm still a person who can
see what is good in Eliot, Stevens, etc. I don't feel like I renounced earlier
ideas of poetry. I like the idea of something synthetic or pluralist. I don't
like the idea that one style beats another style. Kenneth said to me in 1962,
"You'll see there's only me, Frank, and John." We were on a hill in
Staten Island, and I said "What about Martin Buber?" And he said
"He's a minor Jewish philosopher." And I said, "Sometimes it's
better to be a minor Jewish philosopher than a dogmatic poet." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">My idea of poetry now is pretty
endless. I know people who just like Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, they just like one
kind of thing. Particularly because of music I tend to not think in that way. I
like John Cage and I like Eliot Carter. They don't like each other. I once said
to Eliot Carter, "What do you think of John Cage?" He said, "No
I don't really think so." And the same thing happened when I asked Cage,
"Don't you like Carter?" "No." " What about the
'Polyrhythms'?" "Not really." They both hated each other, but I
think poetry can <em><span style="font-family:Times">combine</span></em> these
different things. I like a sonnet and I like shattering a sonnet. I like <em><span style="font-family:Times">The Tennis Court Oath</span></em>, but I also like <em><span style="font-family:Times">Some Trees</span></em>. This puts me in a bad
position because you might say I therefore lack certain purities. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">JH:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
What about your own work-how do you think it has changed? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">DS:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
When I was young, my work was very expressionistic, sort of like my brain.
Obsessive and expressionistic. Like anyone else I felt like I had to drain
that. Ron Padgett once mocked me-I had written a poem when I was fourteen
called "We are gentle" and he said, "We are gentiles," and
Ted Berrigan called it, "We are jungles." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Ted once said to my sister, "The
difference between your brother and me is that he writes, 'I am on a beach,'
and I write 'I am on a beach ball,'" but that doesn't seem to be very
fair. The truth is that like everyone else I wanted my poetry to be as tough as
this table top [he taps on it]-I wanted it to be cold and tough like Formica.
When I was seventeen Marianne Moore said about my poetry, "He is not stark
enoughÉ He is an accomplished man and artist, but he is not stark enough. I too
lack dynamite." They used some of that blurb, but I used to brood on
"adequate starkness." I liked the severity of Jasper Johns's newspaperese
period. On the other hand, I wrote books like <em><span style="font-family:
Times">Man Holding an Acoustic Panel</span></em> in a science/hardware kind of
interrupted style. I constantly was changing from one style to another. One
thing I liked was the melancholy of Johns's smallest light bulbs. I wanted a
poetry, and I think I still do, that would be as melancholy, dense, and severe
as that. I wanted a poem that would somehow emit that kind of darkness. I also
wanted poems that would go from one tempo to another. I loved Mozart's
divertimenti and I liked the fact there would be one movement, another
movement, another movement, but they would form a unity. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I like the poems of Ashbery like
"The Skaters" and "Europe" that you might say have one
style but are also very multiple. My best poems attempt that. I also wanted a
poem that was more Lucretian, that would <em><span style="font-family:Times">explain</span></em>.
What I loved about "The Skaters" was that it seemed so vast. I asked
Kenneth what "The Skaters" was about before I had read it, and he
said it was not about anything, it was a whole philosophy of life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Still, I also love writing smaller
poems that are like watercolors. I like the immediacy of Cézanne going out with
just red, blue and green. I recently wrote a poem where I just used a Ryokan
index of first lines and changed the nouns-it's like a little watercolor. And
sometimes I feel I am really getting someplace in my collages. I hope they lead
to a new impersonality, but not Eliotic. I am not a confessional poet, but
there's enough in me of Jewish guilt to make a lot of my poems more
naturalistic than what other people might find. Someone once said there was
very little sex in my poems and I said, "What else is there?" <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">When I am writing a long poem I think
about how not to merely intimate. I want something more like an epic, but I
found I'm not as good at that. Kenneth Koch once said "Write an epic poem
about the history of music"-I haven't been able to. That generation was
very good at the long poem: Kenneth, John, Frank. My best long poems are
sequences, and I actually get sad when people ask, "Why hasn't he written
a long poem?" I really do regard my sequences as a long poem. I've keyed
them so that one part follows the next like a divertimento. Or I think of them
as panels of paintings that go together. But people don't always read it like
that. I think that's a problem with my work. I sometimes print them as separate
poems so people just see them as separate poems. Eliot did that with the <em><span style="font-family:Times">Four Quartets</span></em>, but no one thinks of them
like that. If the seams show, maybe that is a problem. I love the idea of
Keats's that you wander in a very long poem, and I wanted an entire book like <em><span style="font-family:Times">To an Idea</span></em> to be one suicidal fairly
depressed poem-though in it there are different kinds of things. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">When I give poetry readings it is very
hard because I tend to see them as little encore pieces and don't play the
concerto. Or I am very worried about boring people with an adagio. Charles
Bernstein said, "What's wrong with boring people?" But as a
violinist, I hate to see the woman in furs yawning, as I once saw when I was
giving a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was playing "Gypsy
Airs," by Sarasate, and it's very hard and very flashy and the woman in
furs was yawning and I thought, "Ok, I am giving up music." But I
haven't given up music because poetry is music, and I don't care about parts of
the audience falling asleep. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">But I always liked the idea that poetry
doesn't need to be performed; my greatest moments in poetry have been quietly
reading. Like when I had the forty pages of "The Skaters," when I was
16-it was written on crinkly paper from Paris, and every page seemed more
beautiful than the last. Every line seemed up to the level of the last. When I
was finished with that experience, I really felt very great poetry had been
written in our time. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">JH:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
You mentioned the Donald Allen anthology. How do you think the state of
American poetry has changed since that moment? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">DS:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
I was saying to my wife, it's canonic to praise that anthology and I've
committed an anthology too, as they say. But it is interesting. One thing I
liked about the Allen anthology is it gave a lot of information that was hard
to find. I had heard of John Ashbery because I was reading things like the <em><span style="font-family:Times">Partisan Review</span></em>. Kenneth had a very
bizarre early essay putting down a lot of minor poets which ended by quoting
and praising a section of "Europe." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">But I will say, Kenneth wasn't very
well represented in that anthology. Frank O'Hara was. One of the reasons I
wanted to attend the Wagner Writer's Conference when I was fourteen and fifteen
was I wanted to meet Frank O'Hara. I knew his poems by heart. I loved "Ode
to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births)." It was a very great
poem. The beat generation was sort of known already. I fell under the spell of
Charles Olson for awhile-I loved "The Kingfishers." I really loved
his variations on Rimbaud. Also there were people in there who weren't such
great poets and that was very useful to see too. It was very clear that Olson
and Duncan were better than x, y, and z. It was clear "Howl" really
did something compared to others. It was harder to say how good Jimmy Schuyler
was, but there were some very beautiful poems: "Their scallop shell of
quiet / is the <em><span style="font-family:Times">S.S. United States</span></em>
/ It is not so quiet and they / are a medium-size couple / who when they fold
each other up / well, thrill. That's their story." I remember memorizing
that. It's a very pretty little piece, and John's poem "How much longer
will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher / Of life, my great love?"
So, that was a very good anthology because it contains differences; people like
Frank did not like Charles Olson very much. I think that's been one of the best
anthologies because Donald Allen was not dogmatically inclined toward one. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">The weaknesses of anthologies are
obvious. I know an Italian scholar who said his father would never have an
encyclopedia in their house. But then there's Diderot's great encyclopedia. The
eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is so beautiful. It has
(Donald) Tovey's articles on music, Whitehead on math. My father used to buy
them all the time and I would give them away just for the illustrations. There
are moments when a good anthology is useful. The bible is an anthology. But I
am always impressed by how many people were lit up by the Donald Allen anthology.
I think that's because it has these four swathes. It's funny that it didn't
connect them. It did connect them against a certain kind of poetry. It was very
clear to people like my friend John Ciardi, who I knew in youth, that they were
not in it. Likewise Richard Wilbur, who is a terrific translator of Moliere in
rhyme, represented a version of gentility that was not included. Though I love
tennis, I remember an anthology with a picture of him playing tennis and it
said, "What does a poet look like? He could look like this," and I
thought "Oh, no." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">JH:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
So what about the state of poetry now? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">DS:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
The hardest thing for me was feeling that the Language school had, as a group,
somehow "disappeared" certain New York poets. I put it this way once
to Charles Bernstein, which my son thought was too turbulent a way to put it
and he made me call Charles up to apologize, which I did. But I still sometimes
feel that a lot of us get no credit for what we did between '62 and '80 . <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">For example, an academic who will remain
nameless once told me she'd never seen 'C' magazine and had never read Joseph
Ceravolo's poetry, and this was after she praised people who were using the
same techniques but much later. In art history, we don't praise you if you do a
drip painting today because we have a sense Jackson Pollock did it in the
winter of '47. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I thought someone like Joe Ceravolo
never really was given his due. Or someone like Dick Gallup, who had an amazing
poem in 'C' magazine called "Life in Darkness." Now if it was published,
people might say "Very interesting poem in the style of, let's say, Bruce
Andrews," but that's not really fair. There are a lot of ways in which the
last twenty years created a labeling, or "branding"-horrible word-of
certain formal innovations that weren't really innovations. A tremendous amount
had been done by John and Frank and Kenneth, yes, but also by Ron Padgett and
Ted Berrigan and others, and somehow there was an inclination to overlook it.
When I mention this to some of the "Language" poets, they say they
felt like we were already known, so they had to start their own team. At any
rate, language and experiment are not magazines or precincts. No one owns
language. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">So when you say what's happening now in
2002É I still think it is a useful period. You can feel in your generation that
people are not willing to buy a party line. I guess Americans really don't like
popes. And the New York School really had a tremendous sense of being a male
team, though with some women in it. I am still apologetic for having left out
Barbara Guest from the anthology-a turbulent decision-but I am happy that there
are twenty poets who had hardly been published before. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">This is a much looser period. Maybe
like the '70s in art. It's much harder to write minor imitations of Clark
Coolidge and call it an innovation, and so there are less claims that lines
like "Clump Peach Ounce" are dazzling. Clark's geology is so
singular: each word a stone. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I might seem like an embittered poet.
Maybe Zukosfsky felt like this at the end of this life. But I think there would
be a lot of information out if people had, for example, all of Ted Berrigan's
'C' magazine printed together. It's really amazing that people have gotten away
with an ahistorical take in an American culture that fetishizes history. It's
not because of a war of style, it's simply that in a mood of generosity I
wouldn't want to overlook the gifts of certain people. I still feel like people
don't know what Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath is, or Ceravolo's poetry or Clark
Coolidge's. I think a lot of things are buried that are very good. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">But it is always a good time to be
alive. It's good the way someone like Barbara Guest can be partially rescued by
younger poets who saw what she was doing with stained language and syntactical
disruption. But still, why wasn't Joe Ceravolo's book [<em><span style="font-family:Times">The Green Lake Is Awake</span></em>, a selected poems
published in 1994] launched with greater flair? Joe was remarkable for a
flawless Reverdy thing, and though he was a student of Koch, he went beyond
that in many ways. We edited only a partial aspect of his work, because Kenneth
wanted a perfect book. I wanted everything. It would have been better if Joe
had been represented by a 500 page book. We still really need that to know his
range. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">The other thing is I think almost
anyone like me who wasn't making a claim to a certain kind of technical
problematic was disappeared by a kind of taboo against certain subjects. And I
think we lost a lot because Frank O'Hara was much more of a pluralistic
acceptor. He liked my poetry, Frank Lima's poetry. He said to me about his
"Ode to James Dean," "Don't you think it's sentimental? Kenneth
thinks so." And I said "No, I love it." But then, we entered a
period in which poetry became less and less. I once asked Meyer Schapiro why
neo-expressionism was catching on and he said "People want more
meat." And he didn't mean it just as a put down. And it's true poetry can
be lovely in its reductionsÉ Ron Padgett could make the finest candies, like a
Robert Herrick. On the other hand, he himself will sometimes write a very
different kind of composition. It's very important to realize that poetry can
be like a honey that's sweeter, richer, but also a protein. Kenneth Burke
called it "equipment for living." I love Clark Coolidge not just for
his smaller poems, but for the whole Crystal Text. So, you can like a rock or a
water color, but you can also like a whole geological strata or a mountain. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Here I am using a kind of short hand.
All of these assertions would have to be made very particular. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I do want to say though it is
impossible to get away from the idea of groups. We are either alone or not
alone. I didn't invent the English language. "Even your dreams are
social," as Meyer Schapiro suggested, critiquing the surrealists. And I understand
that. It is wrong for me to put down any group of poets who push themselves
forward in different waysÉ that's just what young people do in a jungle. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">But I think there should be more of the
joys of influence than the anxieties of influence. The saddest thing in poetry
is where you have what I regard as male competition. Neo-Nietzschean noble
rivalry is one thing, but it becomes very male, in which one person wins and
one loses. Tennis: which is not poetry. Then there's the Swedenborgian
"the more angels the more room." Meyer Schapiro, if he praised
Jackson Pollock, would praise someone doing an equal and opposite kind of work.
He liked the underdog. Sometimes I think there's an irresponsibility which
certain scientists know-if a scientist doesn't footnote a work on penicillin
it's considered a lack of generosity. Meyer Schapiro said the love of footnotes
was a love of generosity. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">JH:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
How did you meet Kenneth Koch? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">DS:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
When I was a kid, I was probably over-professionalized; I was sending out my
poems to bad magazines and loving that. And I had heard that Frank O'Hara was
coming as a guest to the Wagner's Writing Conference. One of my ninth grade
teachers said, "You are really not old enough for this, but I heard you
liked poetry." My sister's friend said, "This is ridiculous. The
conference is supposed to be for teachers." But I thought well, you never
know. So I sent them poems, and William Moss accepted me, saying "there
will also be this Puerto Rican juvenile delinquent who is nineteen and just out
of jail, who has written poems like, "I am going to beat you out of your
lunch money again for my drugs and evening fix." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">When I went to Wagner, I met Kenneth. I
hadn't liked his poems that much in the Allen anthology, except for "Fresh
Air," but I didn't tell him that. He was dressed in a white suit. Very
seductively, he said, "Oh, I see you like Rilke and you also like the form
of questions." Of course, I immediately liked him a great deal. I realized
he wasn't just a satirist. We got along. Then I met the 'Puerto Rican jailbird'
Frank Lima who became almost within a second one of my best friends for life.
We still talk to each other about once a day, and I just edited his selected
poems. He was just out of jail, but he was very gentle and very brave. He was a
boxer, very disciplined. He loved language. He became a very close friend of
Frank O'Hara. Lima still impresses me everyday. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Joe Ceravolo was there also, and he was
little depressive and a little older. He loved to talk about the poetics of
engineering. That moment was like the Donald Allen anthology. Edward Albee was
there too. Kenneth said to me, "If you don't beat that guy in tennis, I'll
flunk you." I said "Why don't you like that guy?" And he said,
"Oh, he's the kind of guy who knows what the weather is going to be like
the next day." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I met a lot of different people. There
was a whole swatch of academic people there who would say, "But Professor
Koch, Frank Lima's poems are disgusting." And Kenneth defended them
wonderfully, saying "Perhaps, but after having read them, I can no longer
think of English literature without them." Kenneth could be wonderfully
brave. In the hospital, I lied and told him he wasn't missing much when he
wanted to go out and get some fresh air and he said "Oh yes, I am." <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">JH:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
For twenty years you have taught at Cooper Union. Could we end by talking a
little about your experiences there? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">DS:</span></strong><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">
I was very lucky. This mad dean, John Hejduk, my best friend for twenty years,
believed architects should be thinkers, not greedy connivers, and that they
should learn from poetry. So bizarrely enough, though I have always taught
children and believed in it long before other people did, I began to teach
young architects. I saw them as structuralists of the imagination. I taught
them not just to write sestina, but then to build a house in the form of a
sestina, or to build a house in the conditions of a villanelle, or to build a
pantoum house. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Teaching architects at Cooper has been
very important to me. It was the first completely drenching experience I had
after teaching with Kenneth at Columbia, but Cooper was more widely open. When
you went into Cooper Union, you might meet a doctor, a surgeon, a poet, an
anthropologist. I invited Israeli novelists and French philosophers. We were
all interested in analogies-to see if you could get some immortal energy from
these different fields and make your architecture as fresh as a surgical cut or
your poetry as fresh as a spare cage. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">So for many years John Hedjuk was
scorned. It was hard to get through the accreditation processes. He had to make
the school very strong in practical ways so they could do this other thing.
Most architecture said we destroyed architecture. A lot of people felt like it
was a wonderland: enter here and give up everything but the imagination. John
felt a drawing was just as great as a building. He gave Emily Dickinson's
poetry as the best thing ever done to the president of Romania. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">It is very unusual for a non-mediocrity
to land on top, for a genius of creativity to be able to do the bureaucratic
work of creating a school where the faculty and the students could meet at a
place of thought. He used to say he'd done better than Black Mountain; there's
just person after person who after this experience has changed the vocabulary
of architecture. Now architecture with literature is taught all over the world.
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I wrote a poem that has a line
"Blessed is the school," and people asked, "What school are you
talking about. Is that David Shapiro's mad academicism?" But actually, its
kind of anti-academic. To me school became Cooper Union, a very special place
of freedom and thought.<o:p></o:p></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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