Julie Carr’s unit of composition has tended toward the book, allowing her a wide, elastic format for thinking—and feeling—her way through an array of intertwined issues. Ranging in form from prose poetry to couplets, bi-columnar lyrics to concrete poems, Mead: An Epithalamion (University of Georgia Press, 2004) is divided into sixty-four numbered sections that address marriage, the maternal, and relations between inside and out, even as they tellingly misquote the language of earlier writers such as Arnold, Hopkins, and Spenser. Equivocal (Alice James Books, 2007) is convened in quartets—“Wrought,” “Letter Box,” “Eleven Odes,” and the title section—furthering Carr’s investigation of the signifying potential of a language alternately fractured and recomposed.

That book’s tripartite prose piece “Iliadic Familias (with insertions from Homer)”—with its loaded accusation “We do not want to listen to our children fighting because it will distract us from the war, which is making us cry”—heralds Carr’s follow-up, 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2009), a book-length meditation on our so-called culture of incarceration and infanticide, Internet stalking and hate speech blogs, guns and rape and behind-the-scenes terror. Its commitment to citation, as a means of deriving consolation or provoking a response, takes the work into the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the Brady Campaign, the Phobia List, and the writings of Arendt, Sontag, Scarry, and Shakespeare. The urgency, risk, and discomfort of 100 Notes’s topics push the limits of representation, on ethical and phenomenological levels alike, and threaten the borders of “the book” as such.

Carr’s new volume of poetry, Sarah—of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, $16), is almost an aftermath—or afterlife—to these pressing, oppressive encounters. Weaving like wind among echoes and abstracts, monodies and metaphors, becoming a mother again and losing a mom, Sarah— selected by Eileen Myles for the National Poetry Series—manages to sound like a paean of grief, delivered by a singer suspended between two sides. One is the past, with its ghosts and unkept promises, its desires fulfilled or else gone astray; the other is the future’s promise of moving on—and of purifying return.

Andrew Zawacki: “I’m ready to cannibalize my own past,” you write in “Lines for the New Year,” inSarah—Of Fragments and Lines. Is that true in this new book—or is it a resolution of sorts?

Julie Carr: In this book I am interested in writing about a personal story through an overriding metaphor. When we write autobiographically we are, in a sense, cannibalizing ourselves—taking apart our own lives for the sake of this thing that we are making. Especially when one is writing about tragic or difficult events in one’s life, this process can feel like a kind of violence. We take something very sad, very painful, and turn it into this other thing—the poem or the book. This can be, and often is, a powerful and positive transformation, but it can also feel like an invasion of the life.

AZ: Much of Sarah seems poised between, on one hand, “Conception” and “Pregnancy,” the “Birthday,” even “Futurity” itself, as several of your Abstracts and Fragments are titled, and on the other, “Death,” “Exhaustion,” and “Motherless”ness. I’m intrigued by this difference—or continuum?—especially as it’s governed by the idea, “if she’s pregnant the baby will keep her mother alive.” Could you say something about the relationship between birth and death, origin and end, the rapport between “To enter or inter,” throughout the book?

JC: I wrote this book while pregnant with my third child, Lucy. During this time, my mother was moving into the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease. So I was losing her, I was creating another; as one part of my psyche and body were directed toward the future, another very enormous part of my emotional life was directed backward toward my mother (and I was physically separated from her too, living for a few months in France). This double movement or split kept me up most nights and kept me writing.

There are a number of poems in the book titled “waiting,” because I was doing these very different kinds of waiting: waiting for my daughter to be born, waiting for my mother to die (though she is still alive now). So I felt myself to be intensely close to the edges of being, felt I was existing right on those edges—or is it one edge? Is there a difference between the unborn and the dead, or do they somehow exist in the same space? In what sense do they exist at all?

In the poem you just quoted, “Inward Abstracts,” I became interested in the fact that the words “enter” and “inter” are etymologically linked to “terra,” or earth. In fact, our word “enter” comes from the Latin for “inter.” So as bodies enter the earth from within the body of the mother, others are interred back into the body of the earth. It’s very simple, this movement of bodies in and out. Where do they go and where do they come from? These are the questions that children ask.

AZ: Following close on the publication of 100 Notes on Violence, this will be your fourth full-length collection. Was it the fourth manuscript you wrote? How do you see Sarah participating in 100 Notes, in terms of their respective—or overlapping—projects?

JC: I wrote Sarah mostly before writing 100 Notes on Violence, though I say “mostly” because the two projects did overlap quite a bit. 100 Notes is an attempt to turn my lens outward, to focus on my larger community rather than so intently on my familial or intimate surroundings. It was not that I wanted to “get away” from the self or from autobiography, for I agree with the truism that “all writing is autobiography.” However, our community, by which we might mean our neighborhood, our city, our country, our planet, is not distinct from our family-life, not divorced from our personal narratives. I wanted to broaden my reach to write from a larger sense of that community. But the two books differ quite a bit formally and tonally. While Sarah is a lyrical book, a sonorous book in many ways, 100 Notesis a bit cooler, is less involved in sound (though every bit as invested in rhythm). I think the sound-play in Sarah is very much rooted in an emotional state, or a series of emotional states. Vowel sounds are driven, I think, by emotion, they have emotional resonance and emotional roots.

AZ: You claim in “Grief Abstracts” that, “The doubled woman is a common thing.” What exactly do you mean by that? I can’t help but notice a whole battery of doublings occurring across the book, whether in explicit statements—“I rise and am two,” “walked one shoe on one shoe off”—or in your formal penchant for staging bifurcated “Fragments.” What is the role of duality in this work?

JC: Very simply I meant that when a woman is pregnant, she is double—she is two people. And as odd as this is, it’s entirely common. However, even the Microsoft Word, with which I am writing, reads the phrase “she is two people” as a grammatical error. As common as it is, we have not fully incorporated this fact into our understanding of subjectivity.

Throughout the book there is a doubling of persons: a sense that one’s singularity is entirely fictional. I am my daughter and she is me. It follows logically, then, that I am my mother and she is me. Once you realize this—I mean viscerally feel it—doubling is no longer an idea, it’s a reality, it’s the reality.

AZ: The poems sometimes investigate the etymologies of words, or else create a sort of sonic declension or conjugation, frequently in triplicate: “Of Bibles . . . and bile and bills,” for example, or “sweet cake, wet ache, weak hate.” What do you think attracts you to these recursions and verbal glissandos?

JC: As I said, I was living in France during much of the writing of this book. I don’t speak French, but was attempting to read in French (mostly magazines). Therefore I was constantly looking up words, reading their etymologies, seeking out the connections between French words and their English equivalents or approximations. This might link back to your question about doubling too—two languages were driving the writing. I became interested in pulling English apart, in seeking etymologies and false etymologies. I am also a reader of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his journals you find him tracing words, or chasing words, looking for roots and homophones, and making up etymologies that are entirely wrong but somehow plausible. Many of his false etymologies are based on sound-associations. I played a similar game in the making of many of these poems. As I said above, vowels are emotional, and babies speak first in vowel sounds. So assonance played an important part in my investigations of my subjects.

Nathaniel Mackey’s essay “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” has had a powerful effect on how I think about sound in poetry. Mackey explains that for the Kaluli of Papua, New Guinea, poetry and music are associated with birds and with weeping, weeping that arises out of some kind of breach in kinship, a death or a loss. The musical aspect of poetry, writes Mackey, allows us access to that which is beyond the tangible, beyond the empirically experienced. Mackey borrows the following from Octavio Paz: “Thanks to poetry, language reconquers its original state. First, its plastic and sonorous values, generally disdained by thought; next, the affective values; and, finally, the expressive ones.” My hope is that this book explores the plastic and sonorous values of language in order to give access to the affective realm.

AZ: One of the most poignant, painful dynamics recurring in the book, under various guises, is that of enclosure or claustrophobia: the sense of “can’t get out,” of the word “home” as “sickening,” of being, as you put it so economically, “Bound bound.” What might have been driving the writing toward such felt constriction?

JC: That summer my mother was placed in a nursing home. After that, she basically never went outside again, except for a few walks at first. She had long since been unable to go anywhere by herself. She who loved the outdoors, cold air, wind, gardening, boats, was now contained within a few rooms and halls. But we are all bound within our families, which is to say, within the family of the human. The poem you are referring to is “Leapt,” which is a rewriting of Blake’s “Infant Sorrow.” Blake, speaking from the voice of the infant, writes “bound and weary I thought best / to sulk upon my mother’s breast.” I’ve always loved that poem. The newborn is immediately bound, swaddled of course, and bound into the drama of the family, and yet she is also bound in a few other senses: bound as in committed, bound as in ready and intentional, and we also hear bound as a verb—the baby bounds or leaps into the world. Blake’s infant might be the French Revolution, or democracy itself, sulking and weary after The Terror (actually, Blake printed Songs of Experience in 1794, the year of The Terror, so perhaps the poem is prescient). With that “sulking” we get the sense that the infant revolution is simply waiting for its next move, waiting for a more realized freedom. In my poem, constriction might lead to further freedom too. Constrained within language the new person will nonetheless make use of language to find her freedom. I write of the baby “diagnosed by air: out and triggered,” which is to say we are defined by our environment, by the social environment as much as by the air we breathe, but we are also ready to go, ready, maybe, to explode, to find some kind of freedom at any cost. The tragedy for my mother is that she lost language first. And without language she is truly bound, isolated and inactive.

AZ: I’m very interested in how, at some points in the poems, whether eerily or joyously, people are said to pass through one another, like ghosts, and how other moments are “dressed in the silence of being never another,” the speaker claiming of this exclusivity, “I tire of I.” What’s at work in this inquiry into singularity and plurality? Is it a metaphysical concern, a phenomenological gambit, a concern with community maybe?

JC: As I write this I am watching a man holding his newborn. The mother is sitting nearby. Again, a common sight, nothing unusual. But at this point this little family appears as a single body. I’m not sure I’d call this blending of selves “metaphysical.” I think it is entirely physical. We do pass through each other, bodily.

AZ: I wonder about your relationship to citation. Sarah closes with a series of notes, as 100 Notes does, and “(Hölderlin)” appears in one of these recent poems, just as myriad writers showed up parenthetically throughout your previous book. Also, the last words of Sarahcomprise a quotation from the Book of Daniel. Could you speak about your practice of quotation? I suppose I’m asking, in a way, about your reading practices . . .

JC: All writers quote—some acknowledge it, some don’t. Sometimes, or often, we quote without knowing it, or we feel another writer guiding us, but we are not sure how. I’d be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge how much my reading informs my writing. Always I read with a pen in my hand and I write with books open. It’s a fluid process of exchange.

100 Notes was very much a research project: I read constantly in order to think about a topic that was otherwise too difficult to face. But when writing Sarah I read only a few very important books. Foremost among them were the works of Paul Auster. I had read Auster before, but being in Paris it seemed to make sense to reread what I’d read and read whatever I hadn’t. I don’t quote from Auster anywhere in the book, but his work is there anyway, especially his first book, The Invention of Solitude, which is about his father, an absent presence. Auster opens that book with a passage about the shocking permeability of “the invisible boundary between life and death.” He ends the section about his father’s death with an image of his infant son, “his sweet and ferocious little body, as he lies upstairs in his crib sleeping.”

AZ: Reading “Death Fragment 1,” in which two “messages” arrive—one (“your mother is dead”) contradicting the other (“your mother is not dead”)—I couldn’t help but be reminded of Robert Duncan’s “Two Presentations,” where his dead mother returns in a dream. Moreover, “It was she, I thought,” Duncan writes, “but the sign / was of another,” and of course he’s speaking of his pair of mothers, since his biological mother died at childbirth and he was raised by another woman. I don’t presume you’re writing ‘after’ Duncan, but whoever Sarah is, she’s certainly a surrogate mother, foremost among “all women who were not my mother but who I imagined as my mother,” and seems to occupy a place somewhere beyond life or death. At the risk of asking you to clarify or explain what, out of mystery, you’ve committed to the alternative logic of poetry: who is Sarah?

JC: Sarah in the Torah is the first matriarch of the Jewish people, the mother of all mothers. I was writing for and about my own mother, but not exactly about her personally, about something more general—her belonging to the family of mothers. So I replaced her name with the name of Sarah. Also, Sarah was the name of her nanny when she was growing up. Her own mother was not very nurturing. Whenever my mother told stories about being loved as a child, the stories were about Sarah. I wanted to honor this woman I’d never meet but who was, in a way, my grandmother. She’s the one who ironed my mother’s dresses, packed her lunches, combed her hair. At least that’s how it was told to me. Anyone can “mother” another person if to mother is to care for and protect, and I wanted to speak to the mothering that is ubiquitous, abstract, and potentially (hopefully) present in anyone’s life.

The Biblical Sarah does exist in a place beyond life and death, or outside of linear time. For the Jews, now-time is the time of fulfillment, the time of God’s promise. The contractual relationship between the person and God is not delayed into a future-time, or existing in some historical past, it is now. Levinas wrote, “When man truly approaches the Other, he is uprooted from history.” As children, we are taught that what happened to the Jews in Egypt happens to us every year. This is an enormous subject, so I’ll leave it there for now.

AZ: How and when did the discrete forms of these poems arrive? At what point did the “Fragments,” the “Abstracts,” and “Lines” declare themselves as the right conduits for what the poems wanted to say? And why did the “Abstracts” not make their way into the book’s title, while the other two structures have?

JC: Everything I’ve written has started from form. I try to do the obvious—whatever seems obvious to me to do next. We talk all the time about “abstraction” in poetry; often it’s considered a “bad” thing. But as much as I agree with Stein that poetry is about the “using, abusing, and desiring” of nouns, and as much as I feel I’ve been raised on “no ideas but in things,” I also know that Stein’s nouns are not just the things they refer to, but themselves as well, words are nouns—and it is for the love of these words that we write. William’s “ideas,” though perhaps grounded in “things”—waterfalls, stones, hospitals, plums—soar far away from those things into a realm of almost pure abstraction (especially in Paterson). It seemed to make sense to attempt to embrace the “abstract” while staying close to something we can call subject-matter. The poems called “fragments” and “lines” were similarly attempts to explore more directly and singularly the component parts of poems. The other form, unnamed, is that of the epistolary poem, the poems addressed to “Sarah.” These were the first poems written for the book, and they grew out of a desire to do something like what Mark McMorris manages in his “Dear Michael” poems, now published in Entrepot. I first heard him read these in 2003 in Berkeley, and they have truly haunted me ever since. I didn’t care who Michael was; it didn’t seem to matter. The address gave the poems urgency and intimacy, and just an edge of narrative. I wanted to create that too.

As for the subtitle, it feels to me that my mother is now a fragment, and I had written “lines” to commemorate her, or address her. I didn’t include “abstracts” in the title only because it seemed to push the book toward something more “formal” than felt. It’s always a struggle to balance the competing pulls of emotion and cognition, form and content, surface and depth. I wanted the title to have all of these qualities, but not to lean too heavily toward one or the other. A name, one could say, is already an abstraction. A rose is a rose is a rose.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

by Rob Couteau

Jeffrey H. Jackson is associate professor of history and director of environmental studies at Rhodes College. After spending over a decade researching material in the Paris archives, in 2007 he was named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network and received an international fellowship that enabled him to continue his archival research in Paris. His first major work, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar France (Duke University Press, 2003), considered the best book on the subject, explores the complex reactions to jazz in France and its ultimate integration into the national tradition. This was followed by the widely acclaimed Paris Under Water (Palgrave Macmillan, $16), a history of the nearly forgotten deluge of 1910 that almost devastated the City of Light.

As a child, Jackson attended an elementary school that happened to require French lessons, beginning in the first grade. It was the combination of this early training and the influence of his globe-trotting grandparents—who brought back exotic tales about Europe—that first piqued his interest in French culture: “When I was a kid they started doing their world travels. They traveled everywhere, mostly going on package tours, and returned with stories and photographs and souvenirs. They went to Paris and to Europe many times. So it was a combination of hearing them talk about Europe and studying French in school. All of that came together in my background, and it pointed me in the direction of being interested in European history and of French history in particular.”

Rob Couteau: A notable figure in your account of the Paris flood of 1910 is the almost animate statue of Zouave, a uniformed colonial soldier who stood with a solemn expression along with the other statues on the Pont de l’Alma. When I lived in Paris, there were many times that I passed Zouave, often accompanied by a Parisian who might point to the high-water mark of 1910, near Zouave’s neck, but other than that I never heard anyone discuss the flood in any detail. You say: “the story of the 1910 flood is largely forgotten.” “It is oddly absent from the written history of the city. Somehow Parisians have erased much of this moment from their past.” Why did that happen? Was it the fact that World War I occurred just a few years later, and it eclipsed this big event?

Jeffrey H. Jackson: It’s a question I thought a lot about in working on this project. Because people often ask, “Why haven’t I heard of this before?” There are probably a number of reasons. Part of it is timing. With the war, which comes only four years later, when people look back to that moment at the turn of the century, 1910 becomes part of the prewar era.

When we think back, and when we create a historical periodization, we talk about that as the run up to the war. All the things that are happening are related to what we now know, looking backward, will be the outbreak of war. So when people think about the big cataclysm of that moment, it’s not flood, but it’s war.

Then, if you think about the anniversary dates of the flood, the fifth anniversary would have been in the middle of the war. The tenth anniversary, 1920, would be just after the war. People are rebuilding; they’ve got other things on their mind. In 1930, it’s the beginnings of the Depression. In 1940, there’s another war. So, even if you’re thinking about commemorating this flood, there were a lot of other events that were pushing it down and out of people’s active memory.

I had a few people who knew about it, certainly, and they would say, “Oh, my grandmother told me a story about it, from when she was young.” So it’s not totally forgotten. But when I would look in histories of the city—even in some of those large, multivolumed histories of Paris—it might show up in a paragraph maybe, or a footnote, but in many cases not at all.

RC: At the time of the flood, many of the Métro tunnels were still being constructed, and this further aggravated the situation, allowing water to rise up from below and to enter parts of the city that were quite a distance away from the Seine. As you know, Paris is riddled with catacombs. This also must have contributed to the swelling up of water from beneath the city streets, yes?

JJ: Yeah, definitely. There were the natural caverns and caves, as well as the human-made ones. Paris is like a Swiss cheese. There are all these caves and catacombs, and then you add the tunnels, you add the sewers. You’ve got Roman-era wells and crypts that have been built over. You’ve got this porous soil, but there had been so much water that that was all saturated. So, it’s got to go somewhere. And it seeks out these caves, and caverns, and then people’s basements.

There’s no way of knowing what the volume of water in the ground was. But if it could fill up those natural caverns, and then the human-made caverns, too, that’s an awful lot of water. Then for it to push up and come into the streets—the volume is just overwhelming.

RC: What’s your estimate of the number of homeless in Paris during this crisis? About 200,000?

JJ: I think so; I don’t have it right in front of me. I know there were at least 50,000 people who were put into hospitals. Something like 20,000 households.

RC: Many of those were recent arrivals from outside the city, right?

JJ: Some of them would have been. A lot of them would also have been people in the immediate suburban towns, just outside the city: Alfortville, Charenton, Gennevilliers, and others. Working in factories, working in other occupations that were tied very much to what was going on in Paris.

RC: I feel as if there are two principal heroes in your account of the flood. One is Louis Lépine, who served as the prefect of police. The other is the average citizen of Paris, with his system of débrouillard or—as it’s commonly known—système d. It was wonderful to finally read an account ofsystème d in an English-language book on Paris. I lived in Paris for twelve years, and I constantly heard references to it. In your book, I suppose the prime example ofsystème d would be the wooden walkways orpasserelles that were constructed throughout the city. I believe you said this was copied from the Venetians.

JJ: I think the Venetians have been doing that for quite a long time, just because they always have that high water every year. It probably is a combination of people knowing that Venice had done that, but also just that kind of extemporaneous insight, “What are we going to do? We need to get around the neighborhood, and we’ve got some planks, and let’s put them together.” That’s why I talk about it as a prime example of système d.

And it’s funny you say it’s nice to finally read a description of that in English. Because I knew whatsystème d was, and talked to people about it, but when I went looking to maybe put a footnote in about it, I couldn’t find anything in print. It’s one of those things that people know about but don’t really feel the need to write about.

RC: The Larousse defines débrouiller as: to sort out, to disentangle, and to manage. But when I lived in Paris in the ’90s, I often heard it used in a sense similar to what we would call finagle. That is, to achieve by devious, crooked, or crafty means. The first time I heard of it was when one of my French English-language students showed me her method of secretly turning back the dial on her electric meter, in order to lower her utility bill! You don’t really touch upon that in your book, but the more common usage often indicates something a little underhanded.

JJ: Yeah, I can see that. Obviously, I was trying to emphasize the positive spin on that. But I can certainly see how it would cut both ways, depending on the circumstance. Getting yourself out of a scrape could be turning back your electric meter, just as much as putting up a wooden walkway. It depends on what you’re trying to get out of. [Laughs]

But to go back to your initial statement, I think you’re right. I try to talk about both sides of that story. I try to focus on leadership and people who are in charge, and Louis Lépine is of course the one who really pops out. Because the police oversaw so much of the city, even beyond what we think about as crime and punishment: all the management of the urban space.

But at the same time, this management went hand-in-hand with bottom-up efforts. With the people in the streets, working together, to save themselves and to save the city and their neighbors. You can’t really have one without the other. You could’ve had the police doing all that they could do, but that wouldn’t have been enough. It never is, really. And you could have people responding locally, but without somebody working to try to coordinate it all, you’d have just sporadic, scattered efforts.

The social ties were so strong in 1910 Paris, including across class lines. Clearly, there were many ways in which Parisians were divided against one another. Class, neighborhood, religion, politics: there were many ways in which people could easily have fractured and pulled apart. Instead, they pulled together. Could that happen today, in the same way? Hard to know. I hope we never find out. But that’s what was in the back of my mind. Because there’s so much tension there today. There are so many ways in which people who live in those suburban, banlieue areas feel so detached from Paris. And feel so excluded from much of French society, and of Parisian society, that I wondered what might happen along those lines.

RC: You made that point very well in the book, as well as tying it to other disasters around the world. You write: “What the flood provided was a moment in which Parisians, who were normally divided by class and politics, could act out a different kind of relationship. The solidarity they created out of necessity during the flood would again prove useful during World War I.” You talk about how “the flood also served as a kind of dress rehearsal for the war. It gave Red Cross administrators additional experience in coordinating relief efforts.” That was an interesting insight. Probably, no one’s made that connection before.

JJ: Well, thanks. It was something that occurred to me as I was thinking about the way people acted during the flood. I was looking at photographs of Paris during the war and how similar they are, in some ways, to photographs of Paris during the flood. I was thinking: what are those connections; what are those links? And the flood experience could have been a moment that allowed people to do it again, just a few years later. To do all the things they had done: to find ways to work together, communally. To find ways to save their city.

RC: Louis Lépine served as prefect of police from 1899 until his retirement in 1913. What special qualities did he bring to his position that helped him to become an effective leader during the flood?

JJ: He definitely saw himself as a man of law and order. He wanted to be someone who could tame the city. And that has both positive and negative connotations. For him, that meant good public health; regulated traffic in the streets; public safety: all the good things. But it also meant his vision of what order was. I refer in the book to him raiding bookshops and taking out what he thought were inappropriate books or photographs.

But in a disaster situation like the flood, that desire for orderliness certainly was something he brought to the table that really did help. I talk about how he called himself “the prefect of the streets”: somebody who wanted to be out in the streets, wanted to be visible. Part of that, I’m sure, was a way for him to say “I’m in charge.” [Laughs] But it also allowed him to say, you know, “I feel some sense of connection to, or commonality with, the man on the street.” He could sympathize with that suffering in a moment like the flood.

There are numerous accounts of him leading the charge. It’s hard to tell exactly how accurate some of these depictions are: leading the firefighters and others into a vinegar factory that had exploded. Or coordinating the evacuation of the Boucicaut Hospital. Whether he was really the one barking out orders, or whether he was overseeing, it’s hard to know. But he was definitely there, and bringing that sense of orderliness to the situation.

RC: Perhaps the unsung hero of your account is Eugène Belgrand, Baron Haussmann’s chief of water services, who originally proposed increasing the height of the quay walls to prevent flooding. But the engineers refused to do so, for aesthetic reasons. Perhaps you could speak about Haussmann, Belgrand, their role in designing modern Paris and, in particular, the creation of the Hydrometric Service.

JJ: One of the things I tried to emphasize was that, when Haussmann and Belgrand worked to renovate the city in the 1850s and the 1860s, not only do they make it beautiful, they make it modern. They widen the streets, they re-do the sewers and do all these other things that make Paris cleaner, newer, brighter. But what that also does is, it reinforces that idea—which was very much a nineteenth- century idea—that we can control our environment. We can shape the city to our human needs. That we really are in charge of nature and our surroundings. That was one of Haussmann’s operating principles, that belief in technology and engineering.

You see that as well in the Hydrometric Service. Part of what Belgrand was trying to do was to study the river. To understand how it worked so that he could figure out how to engineer it better: engineer the sewers, engineer the water system to prevent flooding. Manage that water for the better use of people living there.

On the one hand, the Hydrometric Service served the city very well. But in 1910 it didn’t quite match up to what Belgrand and Haussmann had hoped. For me, that’s one of the great ironies of the story, one that fascinated me as I was working on the book. This unending belief in science and technology had a moment of crisis, where people were asking, “Does it really work, the way we’ve always been taught?”

The British journalist Jerrold even wonders: will Paris die? Is this the death of Paris? It was such a shock to read those words, in which someone was musing openly about whether this might, in fact, be the end of civilization in this place.

RC: You write: “The growing mountains of garbage, collapsed sidewalks, clogged sewers, and dislodged paving stones transported the city backward in time to the era before Haussmann’s renovations.” It’s incredible to imagine that Paris, which we conceive of as a kind of eternal city—one that even survived quite intact after the last two World Wars—might be so vulnerable to a natural disaster. Especially one in which the water came largely from beneath the ground, and through the city’s own infrastructure, rather than over the embankments of the Seine. The image you paint of concierges pulling the drain plugs in the basements of buildings throughout the city, only to incur worse flooding, is quite striking

JJ: That’s another perfect example of people putting their faith in the engineering of the sewer system, then it actually backfiring. That’s, again, irony at work.

I think you’re right. The idea that Paris could be this vulnerable is really something that drew me to this project. And it’s probably another reason why many have found the book to be striking and why it’s gotten a number of reviews. San Francisco, New Orleans, places that are in high-risk zones: we think about those kinds of cities as going under. Or Venice, which is slowly sinking. But as you say, we have this image of Paris as an eternal city, and to see it in this moment of vulnerability—both through the descriptions and also through the amazing photographs, in which you see the streets ripped up, and the water everywhere—is shocking, because it’s so unexpected. It certainly was that way, too, for people at the time. Especially with the city having been rebuilt, and having the sewers expanded and modernized, they didn’t expect this to happen.

RC: You say: “the flood challenged many of the era’s most basic assumptions about the inevitable force of progress. Railroads, telegraphs, steam engines, electricity, sewers, and hundreds more inventions had promised a better life. . . . In one week, the flood made that promise seem false, and their faith in an ever-brighter future seem so fragile.” The French in general have long been known to resist change. I wonder if this only increased their fear of the new.

JJ: Well, I think it cuts both ways. Because for all the French interest in the past, and resisting change, as you say, there have also been moments when they have not only embraced it but have been at the forefront of it. Some of that engineering stuff is part of that. That’s why I start with that image, in the first chapter, of the 1900 World’s Fair. Because that was one of those moments. The whole purpose of these world’s fairs or expositions was to celebrate the new; the modern; the newest, coolest invention. To think about how that might make your life better.

The flood was one of those moments that’s both forward-looking and backward-looking. Some people said, look at what technology has brought. It’s destroyed our city. These sewers, which were supposed to keep us safe, have in fact made things worse. The subway, all this new stuff, has made our life worse. And yeah, maybe we should go back. But other people said, the city’s been destroyed, but we can rebuild it.

That’s why, when they form a commission to study the flood, and they write this enormous tome that is their study of what happened and what went wrong, much of the book is about how they will fix it for the next time. It’s very much an engineering document about, or blueprint for, rebuilding the city and getting back to where they were, getting back on track.

RC: At least since the Enlightenment, the French have had a rather paternalistic attitude toward nature, and you even write that, although a few regarded the flood as the “natural result of environmental degradation,” such as “deforestation upstream from Paris,” most regarded it “as a freak event that people had failed to manage but could control the next time around.” You add: “In France, people talk about saving nature through technology rather than giving up on the kind of urban industrial society that harms nature in the first place.”

JJ: Actually, that’s probably something that is not unique to France. That’s probably typical of Western society generally, that we believe we can mitigate environmental degradation through additional technological means. Rather than saying, “Gee, the technology we’re using is messing things up, so maybe we should stop using that technology.”

RC: But isn’t it worse in France because, since the Enlightenment, there’s been this attitude that nature is just another colony that we have to teach civilization to in some way?

JJ: That’s definitely true. It’s like: We can be green, but without giving up the modernistic vision. In some ways, the best example is France’s reliance on nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is of course much greener in the sense that it doesn’t produce greenhouse gas. But what do you do with the waste? [Laughs]

RC: In your book, you remark upon the motto of Paris: “She is tossed about by the waves, but she does not sink.” This is also the visual symbol for the ancient city of Lutetia: the boat tossed on a stormy sea. You’re probably familiar with the large mosaic of this image in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville.

JJ: Yes.

RC: The meaning of the word Lutetia is not known with certainty, but many historians interpret it to be a Celtic word for mud. I thought that was interesting in terms of the long history of floods in Paris, and the original name for Paris itself meaning mud.

JJ: Yeah, I tried to evoke a little of that in the first chapter. I didn’t do extensive research into the many floods that have happened in Paris. I did a little bit, of course, to build a context. But I think that could be a whole other book: the history of floods in Paris.

And the book is very much about the city’s relationship to the river. Today people don’t think about that very much. The Seine is beautiful; it’s picturesque. But that motto and that symbol of the ship tell us something of a much longer story: how the city has relied on the river for centuries for commerce, for trade, for industry. For life itself. Another one of the ironies is that, when the river floods, it brings so much destruction and devastation. The river brings life, but the river is also a threat, too, at times.

In that brief section at the beginning, where I talk about some of the other floods, you can get a sense of some of the moments in the city’s history when the river really did wreak havoc. Of course, the modern infrastructure wasn’t there in 1658, when a worse flood, higher than the 1910 flood, occurred. It would have had a very different effect. But you at least get a feel for the fact that the river is always there, lurking in the background, possibly creating havoc.

RC: For me, the most dramatic moment in your account was certainly your portrayal of the near-disaster at the Louvre, when the Seine would have gone over the embankment if the workmen hadn’t been piling all those bags of sand and cement. You quote a British journalist, who said: “A few hours later, and the river would have won. All the basements of the Louvre would have been flooded.” In fact, “water had already breached the basement of the Louvre.” But fortunately, “the barricade held fast.” It’s amazing this isn’t more widely known in France today. It’s such a significant moment in French history—that the treasures of the Louvre could have been destroyed!

JJ: And if they had been, people would remember the flood. [Laughs] People forget the near misses. Even though those are probably the things you should remember, because you never know what’s going to happen next time around. But I think if the Louvre had been flooded, and the Mona Lisa had been destroyed, everybody would know the flood of 1910.

RC: I listened to a BBC interview with the administrateur générale of the Louvre, in which he said that not only were they expecting another flood, but that, when it comes, they’ll have just 72 hours to remove over 100,000 works of art from the basement of the museum. In a culture that doesn’t treasure spontaneity and rapid decision-making, such a quick move sounds to me like wishful thinking.

JJ: Again, I hope we never have to find out. The police have a flood plan that is at least in part based on the experience of 1910. It’s a touchstone for thinking about what they would do today.

There’s a movie called Paris 2011: La grande inundation. There is an English version of it that, for some reason, is called Paris 2010. It’s a fictional documentary whose premise is that the city has just lived through a flood. They use the Paris police flood-emergency plan as the basis for the film.

The way they depict what happens at this moment of crisis is that everything works smoothly. You know, the museums pack up their artworks. They actually show it in the film: people in the Musée d'Orsay, packing away [laughs]. They go through this whole ordeal, and, of course, it’s a happy ending. Everybody survives, and everything’s fine.

I’ve always interpreted this film, which I think was produced by the same people who did March of the Penguins, as a way to say to people: Don’t worry. Everything will be OK. We have a plan; we have an administrative structure in place. You know, the French love administrative structures. We have experts. We have all these things that are in place, and everybody knows what to do. That’s the film version of it. [Laughs] The actual, real-life version? That could be another story.

RC: When I taught English in Paris, many of my students would say, “You know, we French are reallyindividuel,” meaning individualistic. But, in fact, my experience was that there is a real respect for authority, which they’re unconscious of: a sense of not sticking out, and blending in, and having faith in this logical, rational, Cartesian approach, which doesn’t account for acts of God. But God doesn’t exist since the Enlightenment. [Laughs] So, that’s the problem.

JJ: I think you’re right. There is a weird paradox in French culture: this kind of individualism, but, at the same time, that respect for authority. That there is a standard procedure for how things need to be done.

RC: And système d, débrouillard: it’s wonderful that it exists. But often, it’s sparked by a crisis; it’s not a natural French tendency to respect spontaneity. They have to turn to it when they can’t turn to anything else.

JJ: Yeah, and of course, système d, that’s one of those myths. I don’t mean myth in the sense that it’s false. But myth in the sense that it’s a story they tell to make sense out of the world. We all have this ability; it’s our natural, French-born ability to get out of a crisis. It’s a bizarre comparison, but the only similar thing in the American context I can think of is “Yankee ingenuity.” Because that’s a myth we tell ourselves, too: a story about how we’re a resourceful people. And there’s truth to that; there’s truth tosystème d, too. But at the same time, it’s a way that people craft their identity. Every culture has a similar sort of thing.

RC: It’s quite shocking that it took them until 1969 to finally do something to prevent another flood. I’m referring to the construction of the Grands Lacs de Seine. Perhaps you could briefly describe what that system is.

JJ: I haven’t read extensively about it, and I’m not an engineer, but my understanding is that, basically, it’s a series of reservoirs upstream: three or four lakes. The idea is that, if a large volume of water came down the Seine, they would open up locks and allow the excess water to flow into these reservoirs. And fill those up, as basins that would take the pressure off the rising Seine.

They’ve used it several times. It has proven to work, up to a point, for smaller floods. The big question is: would it work if it were a 1910-level flood? I hope it’s one of those things we never have to find out.

RC: For me, the Seine is really the soul of Paris. It’s the most beautiful and powerful thing in the city. To sit along the quay near Pont de la Tournelle, near Notre-Dame—it’s an experience that goes beyond any words.

JJ: It really is. The city itself is always changing. It’s always being built, torn down, whatever. But the river has that kind of feel because it has been there for centuries and centuries. That’s where, I feel, the eternal part of Paris is.

RC: I thought we could touch a little on your jazz book. A large part of your first work is devoted to the efforts of Hughes Panassié, a jazz aficionado who took it upon himself to publicize “le hot jazz,” and to educate his fellow Frenchmen about the intricacies of this new musical form. He even formed the Hot Club de France. I found this to be a typically French reaction: the need to bring art and artists into institutional frameworks and organizations. In France, artists are often part of a “collective.” Even members of the avant-garde feel compelled to form groups.

JJ: I hadn’t thought about it in quite that way, but I think you’re right. There is something very French about that sort of response, to form a club. Of course, there were similar kinds of jazz clubs in this country, too, and they were trying to connect up a bit. I talked about that International Federation of Hot Clubs that they tried to get going: this trans-Atlantic association. Which, as far as I could tell, never came to anything. They talked about it; there was some discussion in the magazine Jazz-Hot. And Marshall Stearns, who was a big jazz critic in this country, and who founded the Institute for Jazz Studies, was the American connection.

RC: Regarding the Hot Club, I thought it was typically French that he not only tried to create an institution to preserve and promulgate hot jazz, but that, in addition, there was a pedagogical aspect to his work: trying to show people how to think about this particular form and how to assimilate it psychologically.

JJ: That’s definitely true. Some of that may have been because there were still so many who just didn’t get it: didn’t understand what this was supposed to be. I tried to talk about it in the first part of the book: the response to jazz. For some, it’s brilliant and amazing, and they love it. It’s dance music, and it’s fun. And others are like, this is the end of the world [laughs], this weird sound is from the primitive jungles of Africa, or it’s some weird thing from outer space, or we just don’t know what to make of it.

That was the case, to some extent, in this country, too. Jazz was very controversial in the 20s. A lot of people said, this is devil music. There were all kinds of weird associations that people brought to it.

In the French context, it was even more outlandish because it was coming from another country. It was seen as something that was doubly foreign, both black and American. So, there was no frame of reference to understand what it was about. I think Panassié, Delaunay, and others in the Hot Club felt they had to do some teaching, early on. To say: “No, we French can appreciate this too; we can perform this music too.”

RC: They were successful to some extent.

JJ: I think they were. As far as one can measure, the number of jazz fans was still relatively small until after World War II. That’s really when you see the big explosion. But you couldn’t have gotten to that point without those guys in the ’20s and ’30s, like Panassié and Delaunay, who were building the groundwork for jazz, and making it OK to listen to and to play. So, in that sense, they were successful in their teaching.

RC: Often there’s a fear of anything spontaneous in France, and the dominant cultural consciousness is that of a logical, rational, Cartesianism. And it occurred to me today that the whole notion of jazz improvisation flies directly in the face of that. As you say, for many, it must have been viewed as something almost satanic. And you talk about how the same adjectives that were used to attack jazz were also used to extol it. For example, the “brutal force” and the dancers who were “elevated,” “hypnotized, driven mad.” I found this quite interesting and ironic. It suggests there are two fundamentally different temperaments at work here, each experiencing the same thing in a completely different manner.

JJ: Yeah, I think that’s right. It really does come down to which side you are coming at it from. Some of this is generational, perhaps. The people who were open—and there were, of course, plenty of people in Paris in the ’20s who were open to avant-garde kinds of things—were looking at this and saying, Wow, this is amazing stuff.

Then there were those who were not open to looking at any kind of avant-garde thing. You know, people who were listening to Stravinsky and saying this is horrible and walking out. They were the same people who were walking out of jazz, or not going to jazz performances, because it was not traditional music. So, it depends which side of that divide you’re on.

RC: It epitomizes two diametrically opposed tendencies in France. On the one hand, “Why do something differently if we’ve always done it this way before?” And on the other, an enduring need to be at the service of culture, which necessitates an openness to innovation and change.

JJ: You’re right, there’s always this tension in France, and in Paris in particular. Paris wants to be the capital of art, innovation, culture. And so much of that is about the new, right? Something that’s shocking, even. But at the same time, there is that deep-seated desire to link back with tradition, to see how this fits into the broader, deeper flow of tradition.

That may not be uniquely French. You find expressions of that in other cultures, as well, including this country. But the tension between those two things really comes to the fore in a place like Paris, because there were so many people who were doing shocking and avant-garde things in the ’20s. And so many who, at that same moment, were pushing back against that. There’s a culture war in the ’20s in Paris, and jazz becomes a touchstone because it’s one of the many things that shocks people. If you want to be shocked, you’re drawn to it. And if you don’t want to be shocked, you push back against it with all your might.

Some of that has to do with the postwar period. You’re coming out of the trenches; you’re coming out of the experience of war. And the culture has undergone this tremendous upheaval anyway. For a lot of people, they want nothing more than a return to sanity. There’s this whole artistic movement, le rappel à ordre: the return to orderly things. [Laughs] There are a lot of people, even in the artistic community, who say we need to get back to basics and forget all this craziness. But there are plenty of others who say, No, no, let’s push forward. The old culture is dead. The war proves it. Now, let’s try something new. We have to reinvent ourselves in this moment.

RC: The ironic thing is that the great avant-garde artist is always working through tradition, forging a new link to a long chain in tradition. But very few people can actually see that, particularly when the new form is first manifesting.

JJ: Right. I think that’s true. And there were people who were trying to understand jazz within that tradition.

There were many who said, “Jazz has its own tradition. That is a tradition that is linked back to Africa.” They saw it explicitly in racial terms: that it was the expression of “blackness” in musical form. But others were trying to say, “OK, but this is also music. And we can understand it in the context of musical tradition even though it’s coming from outside.

Because, for instance, syncopation is not something that jazz invents. It’s an older, traditional musical technique. There were composers and other people who were trying to think about that. And to connect jazz—this avant-garde form—to the deeper tradition. Just as you were saying.

RC: After jazz gained greater acceptance in France, it became a “symbol for what it meant to be French in the interwar years.” Maybe you could expand on that.

JJ: One of the things I was interested in was not writing about jazz per se but writing about the reception of jazz. I was more interested in audiences than in performers, to some extent. What I wanted to know was, what happened when people heard this music? What did they say; what did they do; what did they think about it?

That’s where this plugs into the question of French identity, and tradition, and culture. Jazz provides an opportunity for people to debate what it means to be French. Is it French to accept an artistic musical form that comes from some other part of the world? And to bring it into our tradition, and to have French musicians perform it as well as the people who created it? Or is it more French to see this as an outside thing, and push it away? Is Frenchness openness to new things? Or is it this kind of conservative, traditionalist vision? We’re talking about jazz, but really we’re taking about these other issues.

RC: How would you define “hot jazz”? Is it synonymous with jazz improvisation?

JJ: Hot jazz refers to that kind of ’20s-era jazz, sometimes referred to as Dixieland, jazz. It’s that early jazz that is very much about improvisation and spontaneity. Often, it was a collective improvisation, early on.

RC: Where each guy in the band takes a turn on his instrument?

JJ: That’s part of it. Or just the sense that the group, as a whole, is improvising on a theme. And out of that come the big name people, like Louis Armstrong, who do that kind of improvisation as soloists. It’s all the same thing; it’s all related. For Panassié the crucial thing you had to have was that spontaneous improvisation.

RC: Otherwise, you were banned by Panassié! [Laughs]

JJ: Yeah, exactly. The way he put it, he has this quote—I don’t know why it always sticks in my brain—he says something like: “Where there is no swing, there is no authentic jazz.” The music has to swing. For him, that means it has to be rooted in this improvisational expression. Here, he was talking about what he referred to as “real jazz,” which is the music of the New Orleans players—Armstrong and others—versus orchestral jazz: the stuff of Paul Whiteman, Jack Hylton, and others, who orchestrated and scored it, so there was really no need or room for improvisation. For Panassié, there has to be something live and in the moment. That’s where the hotness comes from.

RC: What led to the creation of your book? Are you a jazz aficionado? Or was it coming out of what you were previously talking about: jazz as a sort of Rorschach test to define other aspects of French culture?

JJ: A little of both. I’m not an aficionado; I’m an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to jazz. I’m not a musician myself, or anything like that.

I started with the time period. I wanted to do something on the interwar period. I’d always found that to be a fascinating era. I remember saying to myself in graduate school, I know I’ve heard something about jazz and Paris, and maybe I could look into that and see what was there. It started out as a seminar paper in one of my classes. I found very little had been written, and the light bulb went on over my head. And, as someone who appreciated jazz, I was attracted to it for that reason, too.

The other reason it made sense to pursue it was that I went to graduate school at the University of Rochester, and one part of the University of Rochester is the Eastman School of Music. Eastman and Juilliard are the two preeminent music schools in this country. I knew I would have access to an amazing music library, as well as the faculty at Eastman, who could give me their insights. I thought that even though I’m not a musician, I’m surrounded by musicians, and I have access to those kinds of resources. So, it just kind of made sense to work on that.

And I felt like it really came together, too. I was very proud of that book.

RC: I’m glad we had a chance to talk about the jazz book. Thanks so much for your time.

JJ: Thank you.

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A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, $29.95) is a meaty anthology of interviews with twelve poets all deeply rooted in place. Editor Sarah Rosenthal conducted in-depth interviews over a span of many years with Kathleen Fraser, Robert Glück, Barbara Guest, Brenda Hillman, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, Stephen Ratcliffe, Elizabeth Robinson, Camille Roy, Leslie Scalapino, Juliana Spahr, and Truong Tran. Rosenthal does an amazing job digging into the poets’ work and asking them questions about how the Bay Area literary scene has influenced their writing. Besides the interviews, the book contains Rosenthal’s sharp and informative introduction, which sketches the Bay Area’s long history of avant-garde poetics and community formations.

Craig Santos Perez: In the introduction to A Community Writing Itself, you mention that you began working on this anthology after four and half years of writing a monthly, online column featuring Bay Area poets. Can you tell us a little bit about this column?

Sarah Rosenthal: It was called “Local Howlers.” I wrote it for CitySearch, an online city guide which, during the dot-com boom, had a full team of writers and editors producing extensive local coverage of culture, politics, nightlife, and so forth. I wrote more than 50 features on Bay Area poets of all stripes. Most of these combined a biographical sketch with a close analysis of a single poem; I also did special features, like “Poetry in the Margins,” where I interviewed people teaching poetry to prison inmates, at-risk youth, and the elderly, and featured poems by their students. It was a lot of fun but eventually I got frustrated by the fact that I was putting in long hours of research for pieces that were limited to 1,000 words or so. It just wasn’t allowing me to convey the richness of the work or the depth of my own engagement. I sought a different form.

A collection of interviews made sense because in addition to the lengthy interviews I conducted as research for the column, I’d done quite a bit of interviewing in other settings. For example, I’d interviewed Bay Area Holocaust survivors for the Holocaust Media Project; I’d interviewed the entire teaching staff at a nursery school in Berkeley where I taught in my twenties, and I’d published an interview with poet Aaron Shurin in the literary magazine at San Francisco State, where I was getting my MFA. So I was already enamored of the form—the intimate, collaborative, improvisational nature of it.

CSP: Your experience conducting interviews really shines in this anthology; your interview style initiates a deeply personal and poetic response from your interviewees. How did you prepare for these particular interviews? What do you do during the interviews to foster intimacy, collaboration, and improvisation?

SR: I think a couple things helped foster deeper responses. One is that I took a few months to immerse myself in each writer’s work before an interview. My approach was akin to the way I enter someone’s home, absorbing the interior in order to make contact with the particular consciousness it manifests. I took copious notes, in which I gave myself room to speculate, free-associate, and in a variety of ways develop my own relationship with the work. I tried to avoid reading critical work by others until late in the game; I wanted to make sure I’d developed my own response before bringing in other opinions.

In addition I attended to other works, artists, and thinkers pointed to by each writer. Preparing for Barbara Guest’s interview I read an exhibition catalog about Hans Hoffman, a painter evoked in her bookThe Red Gaze. Reading Michael Palmer’s work I found a reference to the composer Giatino Scelsi, and acquired some of Scelsi’s music. And so on. These were pleasurable excuses to expand my own knowledge of various artists within a meaningful context, and gave me an additional lens through which to view the writer’s work.

A pattern developed, where I’d chip away steadily for a couple months, and then in the 48 hours or so before the interview I’d go into high gear—the impending conversation triggering a new level of clarity about what I felt the particular artist was trying to do—what her vision was and how she was executing it formally. It was really a high, and made all the preparation feel worth it. I’d slide right into the interview with this charged-up feeling.

I think that combination of preparedness and keen interest was evident to the interviewees, and I believe it helped foster rich responses. In addition, during the interview itself I often offered my own reading before asking a question. I think this builds trust on the interviewee’s part because he sees that you’re taking risks, making yourself vulnerable as you extend your own attentive, imperfect supposition. That approach creates an atmosphere of mutual exploration, and it also gives your interlocutor more to respond to.

What I was attempting to enact in the interviews is a poetics of witness, a poetics of attention that, in my experience, creates an opening, some kind of flowering. I find it’s a similar process whether I’m, say, writing poetry or teaching creative writing or, in the case of this book, interviewing other writers.

CSP: In the introduction to your anthology, you provide one of the most detailed literary histories of Bay Area poetry I've ever read. For those who haven't yet read the anthology, can you briefly describe the major Bay Area literary movements. In your opinion, what makes the Bay Area scene so unique and vibrant?

SR: I hesitate to try to encapsulate—or even list major features of—the history of Bay Area writing in so short a space; it was already in some senses an impossible task within the space of a book introduction. The Bay Area writing scene has so much going on that it’s troublesomely easy to overemphasize some features at the expense of others, and to leave people and groups out altogether. In the book introduction I point to a number of 19th- and early 20th-century writers who lived in the Bay Area or spent time here; then briefly trace some key movements including Kenneth Rexroth and his circle, the Berkeley Renaissance, the Beats, the Dharma Committee, the “New American” poets, the Language poets, the New Narrative writers, the feminist experimental poets who started outlets like the magazine How(ever) and Kelsey Street Press, the Black Arts movement, Kearney Street Workshop, the Third World Communications Collective, and the Bolinas poets, as well as a number of individuals who aren’t identified with any single school or movement. Excellent histories covering some facets of the scene include Michael Davidson’s The San Francisco Renaissance; Eleana Kim’s “Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Makings of a Movement”; Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian’s Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance; Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry; and Robert Glück’s “Long Note on New Narrative.” Much more could, and should, be written about the area’s literary history, teasing out the complex relationships between groups, and striving for greater inclusion, for example of nonaffiliated writers and of more recently emerging writers and groups.

The literary scene here is in part so vibrant because the Bay Area has for centuries been a place of invention and discovery, a haven for people who don’t fit the mold of traditional expectations, a zone of permission where people can try out new identities, new lifestyles, new aesthetic forms. The Bay Area is also a phenomenal cultural stew, and cross-cultural fertilization is always a good thing for artists, magpies that we are, stealing good ideas from wherever we can find them. I’ve no doubt that our unique geography—this cosmopolitan city with its dozens of stunning views, perched at the brink of the ocean, and an easy ride to some of the most gorgeous nature anywhere—also gets under our skin as writers, affecting what and how we create.

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