by Brian Evenson

Anybody familiar with literary history realizes that the writers praised by their contemporaries are not always the writers that last the longest. Look at a 20-year-old copy of the New York Times and see how many of the Books of the Year are still available, how many of the names still hold respect today. Indeed, very often what strikes reviewers, critics and readers as necessary to the moment is not what lasts over the long haul. Herman Melville, for instance, was all but forgotten until the discovery of Billy Budd, but since has been defined as one of the giants of his period. Aphra Behn was largely ignored for 200 years, but now is seen as one of the most significant voices of the 18th century.

There are many different methods used to sort out literary history, each of them with their own flaws. At one end of the spectrum is the traditional method, the so-called Test of Time. It goes something like this: if a book is genuinely good, it will last while lesser works fall by the wayside. Such a view has tended to generate a canon that's quite conservative, that doesn't readily admit new additions, and that remains somewhat musty in the way it reads the work it includes. It relies on notions of taste rooted in the 18th and 19th century, is hostile to "otherness," generally considers literature a mimetic enterprise, and isn't always kind to innovative work. At the other end is the notion that individual experience is primary, and that the works that are valuable are those that represent a diversity of experience. Such a view validates works of literature that the Test of Time excludes and is kind to minority viewpoints. The difficulty, however, is that at its worst, such a method ends up validating work that quickly feels dated, quickly resembles local color. And like the Test of Time it validates certain kinds of works and certain kinds of readings, looking at writers in terms of race class and gender and perhaps excluding those writers who don't quite fit into those boxes.

One side emphasizes the timelessness of literature, the other its timeliness. Either method, as I've said—and all the methods in between—are flawed; too much slips through the cracks. Thus, readers tend to negotiate several different aesthetics as they read contemporary writers, hoping that one writer will lead to another, that one can wade through the books being published to find work that strikes one as genuinely good. To do so one needs, however, a little bit of distance, some way to gain a perspective on the work of 20th- and 21st-century writers.

One way of doing that is to go abroad, for to be outside of American culture can create a distance analogous to the distance that time can provide. Oddly enough, some of the best writing on American writers is being published not in America but in France, in Éditions Belin's "Voix Américaines" [American Voices] collection. The series is directed by critic Marc Chénetier, who has translated into French writers such as Alexander Theroux, Jerome Charyn, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Russell Banks, Denis Johnson, Willa Cather, Mary Caponego, and Robert Coover, among others. Chénetier himself has also published, in both English and French, work on writers ranging from Vachel Lindsey to Richard Brautigan, from Paul Auster to William H. Gass, from Stanley Elkin to William S. Wilson. His book Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960 (U Penn Press), is one of the best studies of American writing of the '60s, '70s and '80s available.

Indeed, it is no surprise that a series directed by a rigorous foreign critic and scholar, who remains quite aware of contemporary trends in American literary criticism but who has maintained a careful commitment to the text and to language, would be itself rigorous and first rate. While many similar American series, including Twayne's American author series, are written for the lowest common denominator (beginning college students), and as a result often oversimplify the work of some genuinely interesting writers, Belin's "Voix Américaines" demands more of its readers. It refuses to dumb down the writer.

Each of the more than 40 volumes of the series is 128 pages long, and each tries to offer a fairly precise overview of the author along with careful analyses of the major works and acknowledgment of the criticism. Writing my own book on Robert Coover this year, I found Jean-François Chassay's opinions in his Belin book on Coover invaluable as something to play my own ideas off; indeed, published in 1996 it is the most recent book on Coover and the only book to discuss works such as Pinnocchio in Venice and (very briefly) John's Wife.

The Belin series contains books on well-known American writers who have often been written on in America, such as Willa Cather, Arthur Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson. It contains as well more contemporary acknowledged masters such as Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and John Edgar Wideman. It also includes writers such as John Barth, John Hawkes, James Purdy and Robert Coover who were highly regarded in America in the 1960s and '70s but who since have been less visible in our country. Belin's books make a good case for the strength of these writers, suggesting that they might have fallen out of favor for the wrong reasons. It is astounding, for instance, that James Purdy hasn't had a book written on him for several decades, despite the fact that some of his stylistic gestures were at the heart of the development of the minimalist aesthetic in the '70s and '80s. Figures who have been written about in America as popular icons but seldom with any depth considered as literary writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan, are included as well. Intriguing are the inclusion of writers such as John Ashbery, William Gaddis, and William Gass. Finally, most intriguing of all are the inclusion of a few writers who have never had much written on them in America and certainly not a book: for instance, Guy Davenport and Robert Steiner. Davenport in particular, though he is respected, puzzles Americans. Well-read and quite original, as proficient as an essayist and translator as in fiction, he doesn't fit easily into any American box and thus has been unjustly ignored. Indeed, while Belin's series reaffirms the greatness of American cannon writers and commemorates once-popular, now-forgotten ones, it more importantly culls writers we've neglected, though they are world class.

In all cases, these short books offer views of American writing that focus on the stylistic qualities; they suggest that current American writing has a relevance that moves beyond the confines of our own nation. While we may not share the French opinion of, for instance, Jerry Lewis, we have quite a bit to learn from the seriousness and insight with which Belin's "Voix Américaines" approaches American literature.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Promethean Risk: The Poet as Translator
Risking It: Scandals, Teaching, Translation.

by Kristin Prevallet

Editor's note: the following paper was presented at the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Conference as part of a panel moderated by Tom Radko of Wesleyan University Press. Radko asked panelists Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Donald Revell, and Kristin Prevallet—all poets who are regularly engaged in the taxing labor of translation—to comment on the dangers and advantages working poets face when translating the great masters of another tongue. The papers by Eshleman, Joris, and Revell can be found in the Summer 2003 Print Edition of Rain Taxi.

In reviewing a new translation of The Histories by Herodotus and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, the poet Charles Olson makes an analogy to a Bulldog Drummond mystery in which a man, exhausted from a day of exploring the streets of a foreign country, returns to his hotel room only to find that any trace of his existence has disappeared—the concierge doesn't recognize him, the room he was staying in has a new number on the door, and his luggage is not to be found anywhere. He begs the concierge to hear his story, but without tangible evidence of his existence, he is no one—and the concierge refuses to help him. To Olson, this scenario sums up two opposing but magnetic approaches to history—on the one hand there is the concierge who, like the early Greek historian Thucydides, is determined that in order for any event to be legitimate, there must be facts, tangible evidence, proof that it happened. On the other side is Herodotus who, according to Olson, would have taken the man's oral word for it, and represented his story as fact. He would have, in other words, respected the man's humanity. Confused as he may have been, certainly he knew where he left his luggage and therefore was an authority on his own whereabouts. Herodotus relied heavily on oral accounts and rumors, ritualistic traditions and folklore and took plenty of imaginative leaps when evidence was lacking. It was his humanity that Olson appreciated, the fact that to Herodotus, "the voice is greater than the eye (343)."

With interpretation as their nexus, certainly history and translation have a lot in common—dealing on the ground level with how language itself works, both must consider the authenticity, the truth-value, and the inevitable subjectivity of source texts. Like the historian, the translator is faced with a decision: to be Thucydides saying, "stick close to what the original text is doing. Try and rearrange the furniture in the room to look exactly as it looked before you began muddling with it." Or, the translator can choose to think like Herodotus who might say, "every translation is like being in a room that is constantly in the process of being rearranged. It is impossible to get the room to look exactly like it did originally. The furniture always has to be in a new place because any trace of the original room is itself subject to perspective."

Given either model, the original text is going to be changed. No matter what, it will be put through a kind of time/space warp and come out altered, disfigured, marred; (or, in some cases made over, new-and-improved, fixed.) Translation, reliant as it is on interpretation, essentially engages language's limitations to reveal either absolute authenticity or unbiased truth. Therefore, as the post-structuralists would say, the task of the translator is to reveal the play, the language games, at work in the act of translation itself. And yet, there are risks involved in straying too far from the text, from taking too many liberties, from imposing too much of our own human will—poetic imposition and play—on the remodeling of the text.

As the title of this panel (Promethean Risk: The Poet as Translator) suggests, perhaps these risks are related to the fate of the good-hearted but ultimately failed translator Prometheus, who thought that fire stolen from the Gods could work to further human knowledge. Tragically, (at least according to Shelley) instead of using it to develop science and culture, humans used it strategically in war to gain power over each other. Something was certainly lost in the translation, and for his faith in humanity, the translator had to pay with his liver.

How this mythological parable of tricked gods and selfish humans is being played out in current political events is yet another story of the risks of translation. After all, we're living right now under the rule of arrogant God-impostors, an administration of war-hawks who took enormous liberties in the manipulation and distortion of texts in order to justify an attack on Iraq, for which there was no solid evidence and certainly no immediate urgency. Many documentary distortions were presented as Truth. There were pages of manufactured reports and twisted interpretations of texts and evidence: Although the actual document submitted by Iraq to the UN in December 2002 was 12,000 pages long, the Security Council's 10 elected council members only received 3,500 pages of it—and of those pages, crucial information regarding the sale of weapons by US and European countries had been "blacked out," according to the Washington Post. Then, On March 7, 2003, Colin Powell gave a speech to the U.N. in which he attempted to prove that Iraq was duplicitous, using forged documents fabricating some arms shopping spree in Africa and a graduate student's paper from ten years (complete with spelling errors and inaccuracies) outlining Iraq's movement of weapons. A week before Powell's speech, there was a tape alleged to be the voice of Bin Laden which was broadcast throughout the Middle East (with the notable exception of Iraq). The tape was instantly translated and summarized by a variety of internet and cable news sources. MSNBC online reported that "the message also called on Iraqis to rise up and oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who is a secular leader." (The story I read on Yahoo had the headline, "bin Laden Calls Hussein an Infidel.") But an hour later, Powell comes up with a different spin: that in spite of bin Laden's disdain for Hussein, in fact this tape solidly proves the connection between bin Laden and Hussein. All Powell had to do was say the word, and the news agencies instantly re-wrote the story, altering their original interpretation and ultimately deleting the "Infidel" sentence entirely. Amazing. When there are no documents, create them; and as for the documents that do exist but don't reflect the official version of history, destroy them. This is a post-structural joke of textual reflection in which the mirrors themselves can't figure out which one holds the original image.

But these are just a few of many examples of the textual risks that are still being taken by this supposedly God-fearing administration. Promethean risks (in which the assumption of high power is democratically distributed to the people) have been subtly transfigured into Satanic ones (Milton's Satan, Prometheus's alter-ego, who stole powers from the gods not to benefit humanity but to benefit himself). I keep waiting for the good—gods, the ones we pray to for hope, not power, to descend and chain the real infidels to the Washington Monument, sending their battalions of eagles to slowly pick at the vile-infested hearts of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz. Or maybe Prometheus can come down from the mountain and return our fire to Zeus. Now that we're using it to build weapons and wage war over the existence or non-existence of weapons that may or may not be used to wage war, it is as if the weapons themselves are in charge. How is this logical?

To return to the immediate topic of this panel: a text undergoing translation is always in danger of being scandalized—meaning, in danger of being used to prove or disprove allegiances to nation, identity, boundaries, or larger structures of power. (This use of the term "scandal" comes from Susan Stewart's book, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For example, in the ballad tradition there are several players involved in the creation of scandals—one example is the English ballad collectors who came along in the 19th century, and the Scottish "folk" who, since the 12th century, had been singing ballads without writing them down. The ballad collectors, instead of transcribing the songs directly from the folk who sang them, re-wrote the songs as embellished English verse—an undertaking that ultimately served nationalist and certainly colonial endeavors. Not only did these collectors establish another class of readers for ballads (stealing their soul away from the largely illiterate people of the hills who sang them and publishing them in chapbooks for drawing room entertainment), but since many ballads originated in Scotland, this tearing at the root of tradition allowed England to achieve a certain cultural as well as political and economic dominance. What these scandals of poetic translation bring into question is the problem of authenticity—in the case of Scottish ballads, there is no definitive author, no "Homer of the hills" who composed the ballads and then set about spreading them orally among the people. What there is, over the course of over 500 years, is a constantly evolving genre as each singer of each generation in each town took license to change the ballad at her or his will, passing down a song that held a trace of some original, authentic ur-ballad, but in reality was a hybrid composition—a constantly evolving translation. However, although the songs were constantly being reinvented, they ultimately served the purpose of renewing and rejuvenating an oral tradition in order to preserve cultural memory from generation to generation. And this is very different from the motives of the ballad collectors, who translated the oral tradition into English verse with the intention of wiping away the identity of the people who originally sang them.

In his essay "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights," Borges writes about the scandalous translations of The Thousand and One Nights, a text which was thoroughly abused by English translators who projected every sort of insecurity onto it, removing any iota of tone and logic from the original Arabic and embellishing it with their own moral dilemmas—one generation of translators taking out scenes that were deemed too offensive, and another generation embellishing erotic scenes beyond belief in order to titillate English social codes. This is a text that suffered extreme impositions of poetic license—every translator defaced and maimed the text a little differently than the last, depending on the agenda (either his own, or England's) to which he was complicit. Like the ballads, Orientalism itself is another scandal, aided by overly poetic translators, who would take such liberties with Asian and Middle Eastern texts as to render the rhetoric and logic of the original language into nothing more than placid parlor reading. Again, there is always an imposition of a larger social and political context onto the original text as it is being translated. There is no translation without a motive—and although in these so called progressive modern times our gestures towards the original text are more self-conscious and sensitive, still we play out larger contexts in how we approach texts.

In her essay "The Politics of Translation," Gayatri Spivak writes about the responsibilities that we have as Western readers and writers to question our position and privileged identity over, in particular, third-world translated texts. "Translation is the most intimate act of reading," she writes. "I surrender to the text when I translate." Surrendering to the text means careful attention and awareness of both the logic and the rhetoric of the original language—an attention that would be difficult to master without doing the hard work of actually immersing oneself in the culture and language of the text being translated. Ammiel Alcalay, in an interview with Benjamin Hollander, writes that learning another language is crucial in the agenda to "stretch the American context to engage with experiences that are not made to fit existing models"(184). To Alcalay it is crucial to resist mono-lingualism and to "give permission to other languages, literatures, and cultures to come into the space of the language you happen to be writing in."

There are numerous ways that, in creative writing classrooms, teachers and students get around this issue of intimacy, and set about translating texts from languages they know nothing about. For example, homophonic translations, or exercises in which students are asked to mix and match four or five different translations of a text in order to come up with their own, English compromise. In a way, these kinds of translations (when they are done as a first, and last step) are another kind of scandal—they reduce the original text to a linguistic experiment and teach nothing new about language. What they ultimately teach is that anything can sound good in English. The dangers that poet-translators are capable of inflicting onto texts when our own poetics expand to overtake an original is a question, once again, of authenticity and ownership. Who has the right, the permission granted, to rewrite...and for what purpose? What kind of colonization is being taught when texts are handled in this way, and what nation, empire, or ideology, does it mimic?

This issue of translation in the classroom brings Spivak to call for students to do the work of learning both the rhetoric and logic of a foreign language—most specifically a third-world foreign language—before translating it or even before reading translations from it. To apply this to creative writing programs, I will simply question how many creative writing programs have any language requirement attached to them at all. This question is one that I ask myself in reference to the BFA writing students I used to teach at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They all wanted to be writers—they all wanted the assurance from me that they had what it takes to be published. And yet, how to "have what it takes" is the last thing I wanted to be teaching them. My goal was that they began to question their motives in wanting to be writers, and from there, begin to critically examine how language works in the larger world around them. Translation offers multiple ways for young writers to be estranged from their language, to put their cockiness aside and actually feel what it is like to struggle with a text, to contextualize their own writing projects within an understanding of language as a complex system of meaning-making.

And yet, I know that most of these students will never learn a foreign language. So what does that mean? That I avoid teaching translation all together, or do it in an "experimental" way that teaches them good lessons about textuality, but nothing about larger cultural and political ways that culture and language work to create meaning? I am torn about how to handle translation in the classroom—Herodotus and Thucydides both taunt and challenge me to come up with a solution to this dilemma.

Before relaying my personal solutions, I'd like to introduce myself and talk briefly about my own first encounter with translation—since certainly it shapes my thinking about these issues. I can say with some confidence that translation changed my logical framework, and thereby changed the entire direction of my work as a writer. I had three years of high-school French, and spent two semesters of my sophomore year in France. While I was in France, I was taking language courses but ironically ended up failing them—literally. I did learn how to read and speak French with some proficiency, but probably due to the difficulties I had with learning the logic of French grammar, have never been able to write in French. My failing of French was probably due to the fact that at that time, although I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had not yet encountered any teachers who stressed the idea that poets could do more than write poems.

I returned from Paris to the University of Colorado, where in my desire to hang out with the bohemian-cool students, I encountered Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and Naropa, and saw my first glimpses of the kind of poetry and intellectual pursuits that I still follow to this day. Reading Rothenberg's ethnopoetic anthologies, hearing Brakhage talk about Duncan's poetry as akin to the kinds of explorations he was making in film, working on Ed Dorn's magazine Rolling Stock and from there learning about Clayton Eshleman's Sulfur magazine—I picked up on the amazing revelation that the poems I was writing (mostly about love affairs gone awry, or Proust-imitations on lofty things I knew nothing about) were terrible. Dorn stressed the necessity of young writers to embark on what Olson calls a "saturation job" of one particular author or subject. I chose surrealism, and from there developed my first poetic project, of translating Ernst's collages into prose poems.

I went to SUNY Buffalo for my M.A., and it was there that, quite accidentally, I re-encountered French as poetic tool, as something that would enable me to hear my own language, my own poetry, in new ways. The poet Peter Gizzi, who was at that time working on editing Jack Spicer's letters, went to Paris and found a poem by Jean Cocteau called "L'ange Heurtebise." (Heurtebise is the angel-guide in Cocteau's film Orphee who helps him navigate the underworld. Heurtebise also plays an important part in Spicer's poetic cosmology.) Peter asked me to translate this text, although I had never translated anything before. This text was basically written by Cocteau when he was on an opium high to soothe his grief over the death of his lover in WWI. It is a text that abounds in word play, puns, and illogical leaps that end up exposing language as suspicious, alien, and not to be trusted. It took me months to translate it, a total immersion into the rhetoric and logic of French that I had never before conceptualized. I said earlier that translating this text changed my writing forever—and it did. More than anything else, it developed my ear, the way I heard English and the way I then explored tone, measure, and line in my writing—and made me want to pursue poetry as a means of investigating the way language is used to shape my relationship to the world, as an artist and as a thinker.

I'd now like to give some practical suggestions for ways in which translation can be handled in the space of the creative writing workshop. Assuming that creative writing programs will likely never adapt a foreign language requirement, and assuming that most MFA writing programs are comprised of primarily English speaking writers (who, if you ask them, maybe took a few years of French or Spanish or German in high-school), the question is how to engage students to open up their field of knowledge and expand their assumptions about what poetry is and can do. Also, translation exercises can challenge students to question English-only, question their identities as writers, and ask them to consider what "responsibilities" writers have in their textual dealings.

These ideas are centered around a classroom designed after what Charles Bernstein calls "Creative Reading Lab" as opposed to "Creative Writing Workshop." In all my poetry workshops I hand out a heavy dosage of texts, many of which are statements on poetics, manifestos, articulations of what the writer is doing and why. So it is always through close reading and intimacy with other texts that creative writing happens in my particular classroom. What I have done in my creative writing workshops is to make translation and issues around translation the "hub." Which means that I include a wide representation of international texts and movements (Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg's anthology Poems from the Millennium is good to teach for this reason, as is Carolyn Forché's anthology, Against Forgetting. However, finding poems printed with both the original language and the translation is more of a challenge.)

I begin with what I have been calling the "experimental" translation exercises, which again I have adapted from Bernstein's curriculum. (See Translation Phase One of my handouts, located at: http://www.kayvallet.com/Syllabi/translation.html) I think of these experimental exercise as a means and not a ends to the translation workshop. I have seen these exercises taught in a few different writing workshops, usually in order to get students to appreciate the English language and to connect some basic post-structural dots such as: (1) that translation is impossible; (2) that texts are always open to interpretation; (3) that writing is an active practice of reading. These are all valuable lessons, but again, they are only the beginning. There is still the pervading questions of logic and rhetoric, politics and culture. To deal with this, after having students do a translation experiment, I have them collaboratively work on an actual translation. (See Translation Phase Two of link, above.) After they have worked together to produce this translation and have written a response about what can be learned navigating between two languages, they then have to do a close reading of the poem and research the poet and the country he/she is from. A close reading means looking up all of the references, exploring the cultural history of the poet's country, as well as figuring out what was going on in the world during the year or decade in which the poet was writing (even if the poet is not herself writing about politics). After doing this, the class is ready to talk about the larger cultural and political issues that many of the poets face: issues of war, exile, homeland, censorship, and how their use of language may be situated within these larger concerns.

This is just one example, and I hope to develop more as I continue teaching writing courses. My ambition is that these exercises work in some way to encourage students to pursue foreign language study on their own, and to make translation central to their own lives as writers. In other words, I would personally like students to see the contextual links between history, politics, poetry, and translation. When poets are trying to figure all this out, poetry is understood as a means of working through knowledge to arrive at a understanding of, as Benjamin Hollander formulates in a question to Ammiel Alcalay, "the boundaries we've drawn around what we left in or exclude from our understanding of poetic practice, and from how we think and act in relation to the world in a time of emergency." Alcalay, in responding to Hollander, makes a very practical analysis that provides a conclusion for the larger point I'm attempting to make in this essay: "The turning away from a grounded poetics and the backlash against its concerns in much of what is now in vogue seem to me a great loss of breadth and scope, a willingness to not only settle for less but to become domesticated and so willingly participate in, and accept, structures of power...we have pretty much come to the point of removing poetry from knowledge, and sticking it in the creative writing department." The creative writing department is not just a factory for producing poems and stories that are then published and consumed, but is a site where minds converge and think through writing about language, self, boundaries and the larger concerns of the world.

Bibliography:

Alcalay, Ammiel. from the warring factions. Venice, CA: Beyond Baroque, 2002.

Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights," translated by Esther Allen. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 34-47. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Cocteau, Jean. "L'Ange Heurtebise," translated by Kristin Prevallet. Chicago Review, (Winter 2001/Spring 2002): 181-186.

Olson, Charles. "It was. But it Ain't" in Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. University of California Press, 1997.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "The Politics of Translation." In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 397-416. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Newsclips:

"Some Call Iraq Declaration Pile of Disjointed Data," Washington Post, December 18, 2002.

"Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake: U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Documents on Purchases were Forged." Washington Post, March 8, 2003.

Pitt, William."Osama Rallies Muslims, Condemns Hussein." Truthout, February 12, 2003.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

by Jessica Bennett

Anthony Bourdain has come a long way since the release of his first two mystery novels, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. His curriculum vitae now contains two hit nonfiction books (Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour) and the television show A Cook's Tour, which, with the possible exception of Iron Chef, is the best show on the Food Network. Bourdain's following includes fellow chefs and restaurant workers, as well as those of us outside the industry who admire their outlaw lifestyle and love good food.

Bourdain's latest book, The Bobby Gold Stories, is a short collection of self-contained stories about a New York mafia tough-guy, and Nikki, the sexy sous-chef he falls in love with. The disparate stories add up to a crime novel that's a comedic page-turner. I talked with Bourdain in Minneapolis about fiction, food, and a few other sizzling topics during his recent book tour.

Jessica Bennett: Do you consider The Bobby Gold Stories to be, at heart, a love story?

Anthony Bourdain: Well, it is kind of a love story, a dysfunctional love story. I didn't know that I was writing one at the time. I'd been writing about myself for two books, talking about myself on television, and frankly I'm bored with the subject. Maybe I'm working through some personal issues here. I was also very much under the influence of the Pat Hobby stories by Fitzgerald. Not that I write anything like Fitzgerald, but he wrote these stories when he was at his abject lowest point in his career, all about a failed screenwriter named Pat Hobby. He wrote them to put his daughter through Vassar and sold them to magazines. And when they were published in a collection it was this lovely sequence of long short stories, all with the same character, and all of them, at least putatively, in order. And I thought, wow, that's a really fun thing to do, they can both stand alone and have some sense of continuity. I just wanted to enjoy myself, and I didn't want to have to chase my characters up a tree, the denouement—I don't care who done it in crime books or why they done it, I care what they're wearing, what the room smells like, what's cooking, that sort of thing. I think those things speak volumes about people.

JB: And what they're listening to as well.

AB: What they're listening to. The record collection, always very important.

JB: I notice that you mention the Modern Lovers in at least a couple of places, which thrills me to no end, because I think Jonathan Richman is a genius.

AB: You know his greatest album, he hates—the first record, The Modern Lovers. He won't perform it. I love "Someone I Care About." There's this great line, "There's a certain kind of girl / That you care about so much / I don't care what you guys do to me / but her, don't touch." It's just a guilelessly wonderful song. I'm a huge fan of that album, that mixture of naiveté and earnestness and cynicism and everything else.

JB: There's also this concern there for the people around him, for people who are destroying their lives, in a similar way to how the people in your books are sometimes destroying their lives—especially with the biggie, drugs.

AB: Yeah, well, it's very autobiographical. I deliberately set out to make my hero and heroine as unsympathetic as I could possibly make them and yet still make you want to keep reading. I don't know whether I pulled that off, but to me, it's not will they get the bad guy, or will they get away with it; what interests me when I'm reading is whether I'm still going to like this guy next chapter. That issue is seriously in doubt in The Bobby Gold Stories. And I always try to find a way to like the bad guy a little bit.

Bobby is a little guy in a big body. He's bulked up to this monster size, but he's basically a pussycat. He's shy, he's socially inept. I guess it's kind of a parable for what you become when you become a chef. Also, this book is very much a reflection of... you know, I got health insurance for the first time a couple of years ago, after I wrote Kitchen Confidential, and I had my walls painted for the first time, and I bought a little furniture. And I was just so giddy to be doing something normal. I'd lived on the fringes, paycheck to paycheck, for 28 years, and I'd always been curious about the massive, abstract entity out there in the dining room. What was it like to own a home, have a lawn, own a car, have kids, any of those things. So it's about two people who have their nose pressed against the glass, but who in their own weird dysfunctional way are trying to emulate Beaver Cleaver.

JB: It's a natural fit for Bobby and Nikki to end up together, Bobby the gangster and Nikki the cook.

AB: I think so. She made herself into this rough, tough, heavily armored character and so did he. They both want something, and in their own, inept way, they're looking to play house.

JB: There are places in your fiction where you write voraciously about food, and the other place where I see that kind of passion is in the sex in the books. There seems to be this really strong connection between food and sex in both your fiction and non-fiction.

AB: Taking pleasure in food has always been associated with sin. Food and sex have been closely aligned in the Judeo-Christian ethic going right back to the very beginning and the apple. If you don't like sex, if you don't like music or movies, chances are you're not eating well, either. Yes, I think there's a close connection personality-wise, but also physiologically, you undergo many of the same physiological changes in anticipation of a good meal as you do with sex. I think they're closely aligned. I read a lot of food writers, and I'm always thinking, this person writes about food like they've never had good sex in their life. I think they're interchangeable in that if you can't take pleasure in one, you probably can't take pleasure in the other.

JB: So what food writers do you like?

AB: (pauses) Um...

JB: Do you like Jeffrey Steingarten at all?

AB: Yeah, now there's a guy, the authoritative crank done well. Really, really well. I kind of like Ruth Reichel's stuff. Not my style, but she makes it interesting because she's so kooky and writes about her own dysfunctional life. I also like the Nigella Lawson stuff. It's all about eating, she doesn't set herself up as an expert.

JB: Do you like any of the classics, like M. F. K. Fisher?

AB: Great writer. I've been accused of being more interested in chefs and in the lifestyle, than in the food, and that's true. Ludwig Bemelmans, George Orwell, Nicolas Freling, they all write about chefs, and about the life. But, you know, if you're in the life, chances are you love food. I guess I'm more interested in the tribe of cooks, and their customs, attitudes, and argot, than I am in ... well, you know, when you write about food it's like writing pornography. I mean, how many adjectives can you use to describe a salad? After "crunchy," "garden fresh," and "redolent of unkilled fields," what are you gonna do? It's like writing for Penthouse Letters.

JB: One of your other apparent passions in fiction is writing about the mob. Does writing about the Mafia offer you a way to explore the characters, or do you think it's just fun to write and read about?

AB: All of the above. I worked with a bunch of those guys back in the seventies and eighties. I'm a crime buff. I watch a lot of trials, I listen to wiretap recordings, read transcripts of surreptitious recordings of mobsters. First of all, I like the sound. To me, it's poetry, the sound of mobsters talking—especially when they think they might be being taped, but they're not sure, and they're speaking in that loopy, elliptical way. To me, Joe Pesci is like Charlie Parker: beautiful to listen to. So that's number one. Two, it's a pressure-cooker situation, with moral gray areas, personal loyalties... it's a more extreme version of life. What is the great American family television show? It's The Sopranos. There's no more accurate representation of the average American family. You have to go to an organized crime family to see what Americans really live like and how they talk at home. So, in a sense, it's just a comfortable way to explore the kind of social relationships I'm familiar with. Organized crime, much like real life, is not The Godfather. Somebody makes a mistake, they screw up, they don't get whacked, it's not the end of the world. People betray each other in small ways all the time. You make a decision, and you move on, you try to do the best you can. So it's a comfortable world, it's a familiar world, and it sounds good to me. I like the way they talk. They're funny guys. Almost all of them. And they eat, and eat well.

JB: Although you do make fun of the way the mobsters eat in Bone in the Throat.

AB: That was very much based on this kid I knew, a chef. There was a lot of me, a lot of chefs I worked with, but I was very much thinking of this hood-y character from Arthur Avenue who had become a French chef in New York. I thought it was very interesting that he was half in and half out. I was a kid who grew up with pirates and cowboys. The gangsters are simply a continuation of that tradition of A Boy's Own Adventure.

JB: I like the conversational tone of both your fiction and non-fiction, and I've read in other interviews that you feel you developed your capacity for bullshitting in the restaurant world, in the kitchen. When you write, are you taking things from your own life and then "bullshitting" them out?

AB: You're never going to find me writing about Irish potato farmers. I avoid any characters whose voices I can't do. If I don't know them and how they talk, I'm not doing them. On the one hand, it's limiting, on the other, no, I don't see it as limiting. I've been in the business 28 years, I've met a lot of people, I know how they talk. It's comfortable for me. Catchy, realistic dialogue is intensely important to me. More important than anything else. To hell with plot. If I'm reading a crime book for instance, like the Spenser books, and Spenser and the girlfriend start engaging in quippy repartee, catching up on the plot, it stops dead for me. Who talks like this in their private moments, in perfect sentences? I hate that. And also, when I'm imagining the reader, I'm always gearing it towards the kind of people who are like my characters. I'm writing for cooks, because I don't know who anyone else is. I haven't had that much exposure to the general public, I don't really know what they want, I wouldn't even know how to begin to try and please them. What I don't want is a salad man in some restaurant to read one of my books and say, "This is shit. Who talks like that?" If no one else, at least I talk like that.

JB: So what mystery novelists do you like?

AB: Crumley is great at his best. Daniel Woodrell. George Higgins. I think The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the absolute benchmark of pitch-perfect dialogue and atmosphere. You can smell the beer on these characters. I like my characters. I want to hang out with them. And I guess that's what I'm doing when I write fiction, is I'm creating a little world that I can escape into for a while, a more dramatic version of the world I've lived in. I can disappear in to their problems and move them around as I like. For me, George V. Higgins is the benchmark of absolutely perfect, unreliable dialogue. Everybody's kinda bullshitting. He owns that territory.

JB: Do you like Ian Rankin?

AB: He's a good friend. Perfect example of a guy who owns his territory. Don't be writing any crime books set in Edinburgh, because Rankin owns it. Higgins owns Boston, as far as I'm concerned. Woodrell owns the Ozarks. Rankin's got Edinburgh. Ellroy, at least in the past, he owned '40s-'50s L.A. I don't know what he owns now. I like that. Nobody's ever going to accuse those guys of getting the voice and the characters and the clothes wrong.

JB: How much "bullshitting" creeps into your nonfiction?

AB: I think when you use hyperbole as much as I do, a constant mea culpa is required. I think the most boring thing about my life is that I was a junkie. We've all read that book, that's why I didn't talk about it much. But I thought it was necessary in Kitchen Confidential to mention it: If I'm going to say all of these obnoxious, sweeping, bold statements about "the business" and the people in it, people should be reminded that, hey, this is a utility level ex-junkie talking to you here. So every word is true. Not that I'm not wrong about stuff. But as far as my own life, what I've seen, what people have said, for better or worse, it's all true.

JB: It seems like the mafia world and the restaurant business as you write about them are these very male-dominated places where women can become tough and make it, but you don't see many "typical" women.

AB: I guess they don't interest me. Some of the greatest moments in my professional career are when I've had the privilege of working with women who identified, absolutely correctly, the kitchen as a meritocracy, and said, "OK, boys, I'll play by these rules." And they kicked everybody's ass, as well they should and could. I greatly admire them. So, yeah, there is an archetypal woman in a lot of my books and she's largely constructed from pieces of my wife and women that I've worked with in the kitchen. I'm always a little dismayed when I go into a kitchen and it's a boys club except for the pastry section. It breaks my heart, because I want to see—not that it's my place to want or not want—but I would like to see women sauciers and women sous-chefs, women bossing around a bunch of Neanderthals who got an education real quick.

JB: You must have an incredibly busy life, with book tours, TV—

AB: Just filming the show is, like, six months out of my year.

JB: When do you find time to write?

AB: In the morning. And I take three months off in the Caribbean every year, or I try to. So I'll be taking notes or a diary or whatever while I'm on the road or whatever I'm working on, then I'll take two solid months in the Caribbean where I do nothing but pad around barefooted, wake up first thing in the morning and write for a few hours. You know, it's a carrot and stick. I can't leave the house, have a beer, or go to the beach until I put in the writing. The first three books I wrote, the reason I could write them is because I had no time to write them. I was working seventeen hours a day. I woke up, I started writing, got through as much as I could, then went to work. I didn't have any time to think about all those metaphysical aspects of writing: is it good, is it worthwhile, is it important—I didn't have time. Just wake up, do the job.

JB: But why did you do that job?

AB: Because I had the opportunity. I've never toiled away in a garret writing unpublished manuscripts. Absolutely everything I've ever written has been published. In almost every case, it started with either a short writing sample, a lucky break, or I wrote something short to entertain a limited audience, and an opportunity opened up where I could tell a story for money. Or love. And I could. I'm a hustler. I make the most of opportunities. Give me a crack at the bigs and I'll do my best.

JB: In that sense, do you feel that the way you got into writing was similar to the way you came to be a chef?

AB: I have exactly the same work ethic. I don't see writing as anything more important than cooking. In fact, I'm a little queasier on the writing. There's an element of shame, because it's so easy. I can't believe that people give me money for this shit. The TV, too. It's not work. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift. A few months ago, I was sitting cross-legged in the mountains of Vietnam with a bunch of Thai tribesman as a guest of honor drinking rice whiskey. Three years ago I never, ever in a million years thought that I would ever live to see any of that. So I know that I'm a lucky man.

Click here to purchase The Bobby Gold Stories at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

by Tom Devaney

It is not for nothing that The New York Times has called Eileen Myles—poet, novelist, critic, editor, former Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, and current Director of the Creative Writing Program at UC San Diego—"a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde." Thirty years at it, Myles's intimate, intelligent, in-the-know conversational tone has become a palpable influence, asserting itself through sirenic poetry and prose and urgent critical essays. In "Fear of Poetry," a review of Muriel Rukeyser's lost classic The Life of Poetry published in The Nation, Myles gives us insight both into Rukeyser's work as well as her own:

The Life of Poetry—this entirely inappropriate document, this leftist manifesto, this Modernist tract touting poetry as a "theater of total human response"—came out during the McCarthy era (yes, she was investigated). Rukeyser was not of her time, not in the correct way. The book is in part a response to the New Critics of the forties and fifties, who rejected her socialist leanings, her need to write poems "about" crying babies and un-reconstituted nature, and even the occasional remark from God. Yet because of Rukeyser's wily, independent aesthetics, the lefties didn't accept her either. So she created a book that spoke for her.

Likewise, Myles has been working toward an aesthetic which is as wily as it is independent, veraciously creating a body of work that speaks for her. Her three most recent books are Skies (Black Sparrow Press), on my way (Faux Press), and the non-fiction novel Cool for You (Soft Skull Press).

The story of how Cool for You came to be published is telling about Myles's career in general. Before the anarchist indie press Soft Skull published the book, it had been "rejected massively" by almost every major publisher. As it turns out, Soft Skull was the perfect press for Myles, having won notoriety with books such as Fortunate Son, a critical and controversial biography of George W. Bush, and Get Your War On by David Rees. Of the relative success of the novel, Myles says that, "I think for stringing an odd relay of poetics, prose, gender and class in a surprisingly readable package, I made the mainstream shake their heads."

One aspect of Cool for You is Eileen's relationship with her father, who at the end of the novel is dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. Myles describes the book as a "poet's novel" and it is here where her resources as a poet are most tangible; in the novel's final pages, the lyrical and the matter-of-fact are a spliced wire at once conducting and testing the limits of language. With emotional candor and artistic restraint she writes:

I heard my father die. I saw him die, but it was the sound. I know his final notes, not the words, words are nothing. Believe me. Words are empty. It's the squawking of the animal, the wheezing, the desperate wind of a life rattling through the body. I heard him, he was not alone.

It is fitting that after publishing her first novel Myles now says she feels "more clearly a poet than ever." She continues: "a poem is an extravagant grandiose and trembling form, for better or worse always alive; I've brought those weaknesses and virtues into novel writing and I'm dying to do it again." Myles is currently at work on her next book, a novel called The Inferno.

This conversation took place in Philadelphia, after a reading Myles gave at the Kelly Writers House.

TD: What made you decide to write a whole book about skies? Is writing about the sky its own genre?

EM: Absolutely—there's a lot of interest in the sky among painters, photographers, filmmakers. It's the ultimate abstract/figurative project. It's a subject and a space. It's a way for a writer to consider depth. Also I was able to unload a lot of my art writer training there and write a semi-narrative poem and take on subject matter obsessively without being responsible. After all, the sky moves.

TD: The way you register the moods, feelings and atmosphere is distinct in your work. Sometimes it feels like a kind of physical, emotionally meteorology. It's certainly important in Skies; the lines "the pressing / blue / I'm pressing / through" are wonderful. How do you articulate atmosphere?

EM: When you are figuring out what it is you are writing, you're also figuring out what language is. Did you ever sail? I'm absolutely not a big sailor but I've become fascinated. Since our English comes from England, a big imperialist country that both waged war and expanded its borders by means of the sea, you discover what an implied metaphor sailing is even in our American language. People are always bluffing and coming around and seeing what's on the horizon. You take this tack or that. The more you approach sailing the more you realize the English language was largely born on the water. And propelled by the wind. I mean I didn't start sailing, I started watching it. Sitting on the beach watching the wind blow my hair around, and the flags planted on the beach. You can't escape it, it's a kind of line. The invisible influence of the wind. Writing is like that. The body, the boat, is invisible. Certainly the human carrying language is moving through space, even abstractly. You are navigating something. In some ways performance makes this clearer than writing something. And my writing has been affected by my performance experiences and even the things I've learned observing performance. One of my favorite things is Bhakti yoga. Did you ever hear of that?

TD: No, I don't think so.

EM: The Bhakti yogi is a person who addresses this thing—the Bhav—it literally means the quality of the room. The Bhakti yogi's job is to move the Bhav around; you tell a story, you get people chanting, you do something that will move the Bhav up and down. It's like human weather. Each person has this whole sequence of weatherings going on. Anyone who bothers to write poems, I think, ought to change the Bhav a bit—even be self-conscious in public ways that will do that. And even in terms of your own writing practice, you think of times when you write and times when you don't write, and you realize that writing is like shifting the Bhav, individually. The air kind of shifts and keeps shifting when you work. Gets still when you don't. Anticipating, perhaps.

Jimmy Schuyler, of course, is a great teacher of all that. He shows you how you can write about the invisible. I noticed that a lot in his diaries. A breeze that moved through a house quickly, that's a subject. I suppose that inspired me too, to write this book.

TD: One poem from Skies seems to be referring to 9/11. When did you write "Milk"?

EM: "Milk" has become my World Trade Center allegory:

I flew into New York
and the season
changed
a giant burr
something hot was moving
through the City
that I knew
so well. On the
plane though it was
white and stormy
faceless
I saw the sun
& remembered the warning
in the kitchen of all places
in which I was
informed my wax
would melt.

The poem goes on and it has nothing to do with what happened that day, but it sounds like I wrote it the day after, with the plane, the sky burning, New York, the people... It was really written out of a sad personal moment. But there it is.

TD: Talking about 9/11 and poetry, I heard you say that you felt proud to be in the community of poets and writers; I felt something similar I think. What made you feel that way?

EM: Well, I read at St. Mark's in the reading they did right after September 11th, and the community was in need of such an event. I was very proud of poets then because fiction writers, The New Yorker ones in particular, were trotting out their statements, like I remember somebody saying the World Trade Center smelled like mozzarella. And that was a memorable moment. Gross. But the poets were pathetically great. Everyone got up and said I can't write. I've got no poem. One woman got up from her seat and sang walking toward the podium. It was like the old avant-garde—responsive and present even in its inarticulateness. People read prayers, read a Rilke poem. So I had this two-year-old poem that sounded like I had been watching the news and taking notes, but it was coincidental. I managed not to ruin my own secret; I just wisely shut up and let it happen.

TD: At the end of on my way is an essay, "The End of New England," that I keep thinking about; in it you write, "Silence is not allowed on TV or radio it's too expensive." What are some of the ways that you think about silence?

EM: Well, I'm all for honoring the silence—picking up the feeling on the inside of it and sometimes simply letting the sentence fragment be; sometimes a little piece of a situation breeds the rest in the mind of the listener. I feel like silence is where poetry (and everything) gets moral. You make a choice. You have to figure out when to talk and when to write over the holes.

TD: How do you think about silence when you are writing compared to when you are giving a reading?

EM: I realize as a writer—as a reader who performs—or whatever we want to call it, if you really want to give some deep quality to the mundane act of reading you learn how to use the silence. I don't fight it. You have to really be willing to stand in that silence and not feel precious, or shy, because again, it's not mine, it's communal.

TD: Silence and space can be powerful.

EM: For awhile. . . in the late '70s and early '80s, when I couldn't get anything else I use to do telephone sales, because you could just wake up and crawl into the office and go and work. In telephone sales they told me that your most powerful tool is silence. It's crazy because people can just hang up. But in the course of the pitch there are these various points where you can stonewall people and it does work. It's awesome.

TD: Earlier we were talking about phrases and combining music and poetry. How do you think about phrases in your own work?

EM: When you call something 'phrases' it just sort of shatters your notion of what poetry is. I think that's great. Because the word poetry has so much baggage attached. Maybe we would have an easier time and fewer limitations if we used 'phrases' in regard to what we're allowed to do and have it still be poetry.

TD: The fact that it's metrically weighted language, or language that's in phrases, i.e. what we call poetry.

EM: When you call poetry 'poetry' it's almost like we put an iron mask on it. And now the phrases have to dance in that little space, grand, grand, grand, but what if you take the mask away?

TD: Are there experiences where you've been able to take the mask away?

EM: I feel I do when I call it a novel, and performing still operates with cadence. But I think I'm really talking about working with a force of nature. Like when we were talking about the wind. When I teach I try and get writers to respond to some panicky force—a movie passing, a view, some fleeting language as the source of the poem—so they will get adept at loss and the choices you make in the face of it.

I like to work with music because a poet can't maintain her mask there. Once I was reading on stage with Sonic Youth. Originally I was going to read before them and then Kim's guitar player Ikue Mori suddenly had to go to Japan at the last minute so Kim was sort of at a loss—I mean she had some other musicians, but at the last minute she asked if I would do something with her. Also the show was running long, so I'm sure the idea was to shorten it by compressing acts. So here's another uncanny force to be a poet against, or next to.

TD: Does working in a situation like that change how you think about what your work is?

EM: Yeah, and that's what's great. What's great is the belief that either within my work, or within their work is some kind of furthering impulse that will carry this new third work.

TD: Coming up with a new kind of whole, which changes all of the relationships.

EM: Yes, absolutely. When I first started going to Richard Foreman plays or various slow-mo avant-garde theater in the '70s, I had never seen anything like it. Yet, I started to go crazy. At some point I started to think if what's going on stage is unconventional then the audience doesn't have to do what we normally do either. You have the right to get up and leave the room, smoke a cigarette, not pay attention, write a poem. If the work is going to be against the grain, then you get to be part of that work and fuck with it too.

I'm wanting to write looser pieces so that I can just throw my phrases in rather than thinking that guitar just blew out my hook, maybe a decentered poem... I'm probably reinventing language poetry or something. Who knows? My hero these days is Bjork.

TD: Really. What records? Homogenic?

EM: Yes, absolutely Homogenic. But it's how she drops words in. . . how she lets words drop into music. I feel like she is being mythic; it's not like the singer or the composer is the star. I feel like she's working with a grid. A lot of electronic music is doing that—clearly the voice and the lyrics are just modules in the whole piece. It's easy for me to imagine it as a painting. Which helps. A visual model helps me. Once I was on some record—a poetry thing. I had to go to [producer and musician] Elliott Sharpe's apartment in the East Village. He had tons of computer recording stuff in his crowded apartment, it was great. So I stood at the mike to read my poem, and while I was reading a cat jumped off the shelf and made a racket. I looked at him, like should I stop, but he waved me on to continue. Then afterwards, it was so amazing: he showed me the screen, a bright burbling line that represented me reading and this jagged point on the line which was the cat. Then spiff! He erased it out. Visually he took the sound away.

So I'm considering that approach to poetry, or writing. It's a picture of sound—always was—so it's as moving as a film, as canvasy as a painting. I'm getting kind of manic. What if "Poetry" had patterning pieces that had freestanding implications? I guess I am talking John Cage again.

TD: Maybe Cage melded with Bjork—when you listen to her you feel like you're listening to something first-hand, like Monk picking out a chord high up on the keyboard, or even O'Hara's epic realism in the odes.

EM: Yes, something is happening here. You were talking earlier about a reading you did where people were laughing while you were reading. Immediately that became a sonic event for me. I just thought how fun it would be to go into the studio and record your poems with people laughing occasionally. You could retool your poems with laughter in them. What if the laughter was a line? I never think about composing a poem with real sounds, or actually sampling, but obviously I could.

TD: Once I was writing and getting hungry and thought it would be great if I could get a pizza delivered into my poem. I also remember writing and outside my window I could see someone taking out the trash and I thought what if all these trash bags started getting piled up in my poem? That's not a sonic thing, but it is the kind of thinking that keeps you to open to possibilities.

EM: So the poem could accommodate a pizza or trash, yes! I was at the Northwest Book Fair with the poet Tony Hoagland. It was a weird situation because there were all these readings going on at the same time, and in between each reading there was a big curtain, like a sound stage with something on the other side. Tony got up to read and people on the other side were going crazy and laughing uproariously, and you could distantly hear some other man's voice—turns out it was Dan Savage. But Tony Hoagland is reading these poems that were intimate, touching, felt poems. He was really being disrupted. You could see he was tortured because he would read a sad poem and then laughter; it was hell, hell. And of course I was the lucky one since I went second. It was so fun to get up knowing exactly what was going to happen and reading into it. Also I guess the message was: never be that intimate!

TD: How do you read into it? Acknowledge what's going on?

EM: In a way, yes, you can hear the laughter and not let it stop the poem. If you allow the laughter--whenever it happens—you can weirdly join it. Once you know a crashing sound is coming from upstairs and you're reading downstairs, you can deal with it. It's what's standup comedians know. You can join it so every one hears it together and then you all stop hearing together. You have to create the sheen.

TD: "The working class speech is so embedded in the sound structure of language." Tonight when you were reading I heard your Boston accent so distinctively, and you said it is important for you to say certain words. It has something to do with writing poetry in your own language no matter what that language is. Whether the content of the poetry is personal or not, there is something supremely idiomatic about your work.

EM: I think everyone is writing in their own class. I think a lot of the pleasure we've been talking about in many ways the poetry world discourages; I know if someone called me a performance poet I would just roll my eyes because they are stripping something away by that description. It implies the poem is less. But the poems are good. I am not being a clown to get over some basic weakness in my work. The physical aspect of the poem, i.e., the voice reading, is as important to me as the printed aspect. The poetry world is a middle-class world; there's an almost non-regional, non-visceral language that we're implicitly encouraged to read and write in. It's like we're a bunch of bourgeoisie newscasters. Same with dips in scale. If it's funny, it should stay funny. If you are speaking as a member of this caste, you should stay in this caste. Otherwise it's not exactly a poem, which for all our protestations is still a kind of commodity, a calling card, at least. Here, reach me here in the Language school, the New York school, the gay school, the Iowa school. Most of us are mixed class-wise. I've always contended that George Bush is probably the only guy in America who is always at home. Most of us have to do something, accommodate somehow to be heard. Take a step. He's so at home, he gets down-home to get across, and folks say "he's people." I don't know if he's stupider than his father, or prouder of his stupidity, which explains his great success. And his great success is minor. He's just on top.

TD: You seem to have found a way to be comfortable with yourself and in your work. It's curious to think how many experiences one has to have to be able to speak in a way, or in a voice (if that's what you're after) that is your own—the rigor of comfort.

EM: That's good, the rigor of comfort. My god. When I first came to town, I decided to present myself as working class, as I was, because Bruce Springsteen existed at that moment. There seemed to be a way in the music world to be from a lower-class background and I thought maybe I shouldn't pretend to be like everyone else, because I would be stumbling around anyway—maybe I shouldn't accommodate this thing, whereas I could certainly be a working class Irish female from Boston because that's who I am.

TD: So how did you become yourself?

EM: The world we live in encourages us to become less of ourselves all of the time. I hadn't been in the Boston poetry scene, I hadn't been to private school, I was capable of anything because I hadn't really learned what I was suppose to like.

When I came to New York to become a poet I thought about all this stuff; all through my education and growing up there were many different pronunciations of the same word, what do those pronunciations indicate, what do they say about me, what do they say about what I want to say? My parents had different accents. They dressed their thoughts in different R's. It's interesting to think that every piece of that meant desire. They desired differently.

TD: How is desire connected to dialect, as you describe it?

EM: Literally which language you pick is where you'll go. As soon as you open your mouth people decide where to put you. Growing up of course we were pushed to speak better English, and yet the people living next door to me seemed to live more excitingly than us, so I began to aspire to speak worse. Language brings you someplace. There's this little desiring thing in between, an aesthetic survival. Bjork pushing the buttons.

TD: It totally informs your language, but don't you think about your writing as something larger than that too?

EM: Larger than which? I'm interested in breaking it down even further. Every kind of new monster you create in a poem makes your writing more privately yours and more publicly anonymous. The pleasure is to keep changing the locks—which is easy because I'm not constant—some other word node always comes down and you start importing that body of information from some whole other place. The pleasure of being.

TD: As you say in "The End of New England," who you are is coming in and going out in different directions.

EM: The work is something bigger, but I feel passionately about continuing to make a stance in this class, or I would say that the bowl that holds everything else is working class, which means I can also be comfortable wherever I go. George Bush isn't the only one who has the perfect language. I have it too, every time I make a poem.

TD: Part of what we've been talking about seems related to what you've called "tone moments." How is that connected to our conversation?

EM: There are all these Zen moments in language. You know the Zen master wants to make some point and they thump the table hard or they hit the floor with a stick and—POW—all moments collapse—it makes you pay attention. Likewise, as you go along writing a poem or reading a poem.

There are readings of vowels that just have different emotional meanings. In his diaries Jimmy [Schuyler] talks about emphasis in poetry and it made me crazy because his poems are so full of that.

TD: Are "tone moments" the moments when the poetry happens?

EM: Nobody talks in that reassuring newscaster tone or even in the latest poetry tone: "The night / it was / impor-tant," or all the very precious ways we have of talking or making poetry, which has no sound. It puts you to sleep. The English language—American language—when I think about America I think about violence. One reason we need to write fragmented poems is because we are in a dangerous violent country; we always have been and here we are again. If we heard our president's actual speeches we would know what he meant. They are hiding the violence. In fact if we listen to anybody talk—all those weird pauses and staccato moments and flurries—poetry is like a sound check. The technician needs to know how high you go, how low. Then they can accommodate the speaker and the audience. But the poet's doing that naked and alone.

TD: You have a distinctive tone and attitude that comes through in the work on the page and when you read, but are there things that you still continue to learn from poets like Schuyler?

EM: Every time I do a two or three-beat stop at the end of a poem I think of Jimmy. In the poem "This Dark Apartment" he does this two-beat thing, "They were / not my lovers, though. / You were. You said so." That ending is so complete: da da da—"You said so." But it's more than that too, when you look at the way the meaning moves: "They / were not / my lovers / you were"; push "you said so." Suddenly the reader becomes the lover and takes the brunt of those three beats: "You said so." The direction of the poem absolutely flips right there. Who can not feel that as an emotional moment? It's made emotional by the beats. He does that shit all the time, he'll just turn it short.

TD: You didn't do that exact cadence, but you did something similar tonight in a poem.

EM: Yes, "Scribner's"—it goes:

Rosie just
wants to
put her belly
on some cool
cement. Does.

I do this.
Appear to
be a bum
in my hiking
boots & hairy
legs I'm no
longer a dyke
just a man.

hello little
bird.

The thing that sets it up is the "Does" —that's a real Jimmy moment here. But I think Ashbery does that too. I was riding in a car with Ashbery and Creeley after Creeley's 50th birthday party in Buffalo, and Ashbery and Creeley were talking about all the people they went to college with at Harvard, and Creeley says to Ashbery, "And what of old Applebee who was lately dying?" And Ashbery goes: "Did."

It's also very upper class.

TD: But that exchange also sounds self-consciously, or knowingly so. There's a line from "The End of New England" where you write, "Class is utterly without content"—but then go on to give content.

EM: Class is more the elimination of content. That act. Again and again. The cliché is working-class people drinking the beer, eating the starches, burping and fucking and just kind of "making our country work." Or sentimentally so. But it's much more gestural than that. It's not a commodity culture, it's a doing culture.

TD: There's certainly a lot to say about gesture and non-verbal articulation in connection to content.

EM: It's a whole web of things said and unsaid, more unsaid, really. I think it's a working-class condition to be proudly redundant.

TD: Using the same words to say many different things?

EM: Exactly.

TD: Or the multiple things silence says and doesn't say—which seems to get more complicated in relation to class.

EM: It's a relationship to power because you are so often not controlling the situation, but are commenting on it, or furthering it. Facilitating it. So your relationship to language is different—you don't bother to create the whole room because the room is not yours.

TD: I think you negotiate some of the complexities we've been talking about in the way you write—especially your essay style, which tends to be an accumulation of thoughts that helps to put across some larger ideas.

EM: Often what's tricky is that the one sentence by itself is more like a traffic signal. You can pay attention to it, but the traffic signal is not about the traffic signal; it's about the traffic. So a sentence that sounds like it's about to say so much is really marking a place where so much has already been said that it has to stop. A lot of what I do in prose is to try to keep a sea of things moving. Sometimes I feel that's the point.

TD: It's like a great conversation. Sometimes what I am responding to in your work is the immediacy of talking to a great friend. It's a give and a take, and you may lose some logical connectors from idea to idea, but what you get is immediacy, a sense of how things really go.

I gave a reading at a high school and one of the students asked me, "Who is your audience? and I said, "You are my audience!" They laughed, but really it's a good question. I know Stein said, "Everybody's a real one to me, everybody's like someone else too to me...so I write for myself and strangers." The perceptive thing about that is the problem of how familiar you can be naming things or people, given who you think your audience might be.

EM: It's so weird. When you name things specifically you can do it for a number of different reasons—it could be for a historic sense. The thing that makes it work or not is whether you do it in an intimate way or a felt way—or else what does it mean? It's got to be that—that would be the name that you would call your dog. A familiar world is filled with specifics. If they're delivered with some consciousness of the intimacy and distance that make communication—then you wind up with something more inviting than off-putting.

TD: When you think about how and what you write, do you think it has changed drastically over the years?

EM: There might be sea changes in people's lives or writing lives where suddenly everything gets thrown out and everything that comes in is new. But I feel like you have one good idea and you have another idea and then you add it on. When I think about the stuff I've written since the '70s I feel like that's kept happening—I've started with certain things and I've never seemed to abandon them, and one is to write in a very personal style because I am really comfortable doing that. When I started I wanted to turn the tap on and give myself permission to write in a way that would keep me writing. I wanted to get playing.

TD: Did you also get that permission from other writers?

EM: I knew when I read Henry Miller, this kind of American guy complaining, or when I read the New York School poets, I knew that the door was open for me and I could do that. Many things have changed since then, but I've never lost the desire to write autobiographically. It's interesting to me. You can do so much with it. You drop so much and you can hold so much and you can say so much.

TD: I feel artists and writers have magnets in them, or at least I hone in on certain concerns repeatedly. Are there things that you've noticed yourself attracted to over time?

EM: No, what I really think... I think I'm probably not supposed to say. I am a female obsessed with the death of the father, completely obsessed about it. Around the time I published my novel I thought, are you just going to write about this forever? Yes, sure, absolutely. In some ways it's all I am ever going to write about. I think of language as something that comes out of some condition of loss. In my case, I can name mine: it's about being a child who lost a beloved parent, and it was the male parent, the dad. I keep thinking about that in different ways. And I suspect this story covers something else, but that's not my job to figure out. I just mark the spot.

TD: How do you see the absence of your father in relation to other male figures in your life?

EM: My teachers for the most part were men. And they are not going to replace my father or be my father; I also keep looking at myself as a female writer in a line of male writers. Though I'd like to talk to women about that. It's what we're all doing.

TD: I love the ending of Cool for You. It's so deliberate—so lyrically unstable—it feels honest. I follow the lines wherever you go because you put them across. In a way you can feel your lineage, but you can also see that you are not your lineage. For one thing, as you say, your lineage hasn't had a female life.

EM: I feel like I'm a female writing man. Where does that put me? In a week I'm on a panel at Poets House about feminism—with me and all these women, because they think I am a woman, but I am a woman! That's my mystery—that's my work.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003