Interesting interview with an angry writer

[blp]

I'm posting this here because of the thoughts it might provoke about authors and their relations to their critics and interviewers in general. The subject of this particular interview, Richard Hell, (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_03_004703.php) is interesting to me, but this thread isn't supposed to be about him.

Somewhat as an aside: Hell is disparaging about Poetry Magazine (http://www.poetrymagazine.org/), for whom the author of the piece works, and says none of the established poetry mags were ever places he wanted to publish his own work. This reminds me a bit of some of Rilke's advice to a young poet (in Letters to a Young Poet (http://www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter1.html)): he tells him he knows he's sending his work to publications and advises him to stop, saying something to the effect that the work should be a personal matter for the author and not about winning approbation. He goes on to mention, in passing, however, that he himself has published fourteen books. Hmmmm. Whatever the contradictions of this, I feel somewhat in sympathy with it. I've combed every poetry mag I can find and I don't relate to a blessed one of 'em.

[Zippy]

That interview with Richard Hell is priceless. He is entirely correct about the judgmental, editorialising attitude of the interviewer. Really, what has she ever done to warrant taking the high ground, as though she was the final word on excellence?

That's why I prefer criticism written by other, established, authors. At least you know that they've experienced the act of writing something other than a newspaper article or magazine piece.

I’ve nothing against criticism per se, but most of it tries to adopt an exalted viewpoint, looking down their noses at what they’re criticising. Maybe it’s the influence of ‘new’ and ‘gonzo’ journalism, but these days journalists seem to get in the way of their stories. Very few of them remember that objectivity is the touchstone of good reporting.

[blp]

I don't know, Zippy. A well spun bit of looking down the nose can be pretty priceless too, vis this rather fab dissection of a currently au courant young NY artist (http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/banks_violette/). It's probably just a matter of having a fully functional BS detector. It's just that, in Hell's case, the BS was all on the side of the interviewer. At least said interviewer had the good sense to know when he was beat and run the piece as he did.

[jon1jt]

I agree with you, blp. These magazines consist of little clicks that rally around a single style. They deify two or three poets in the bunch, paving the way for the interviews and critical essays on their books.

Anyway, the Rilke letters look really interesting, I printed some and the interview to read later. Thanks for posting them.

[blp]

Pleasure's all mine. Hope you enjoy them.

[jon1jt]

I was just organizing some of my magazines and came across the autumn 2007 copy of the The American Scholar. And who else's name is on the cover than Louise Gluck. "Four New Poems." Wow. This Gluck is the queen bee of the literary establishment, every magazine kisses her ***. I read somewhere that she teaches at Yale and her classes are filled to standing room with tomorrow's poets! You'll find five of her poems in this month's Paris Review. Here is an excerpt from the Scholar of Gluck's poem, Hunters. Consider that the establishment would have us believe that this is the best of the best that contemporary poetry has to offer. I noticed that she recently introduced the dash into her poems with great frequency, a signal no doubt to her devotees to get with it.


Hunters

A dark night---the streets belong to the cats.
The cats and whatever small thing they find to kill---
The cats are fast like their ancestors in the hills
and hungry like their ancestors.

Hardly any moon. So the night's cool---
no moon to heat it up. Summer's on the way out
but for now there's still plenty to hunt
though the mice are quiet, watchful like the cats.

Smell the air---a still night, a night for love.
And every once in a while a scream
rising from the street below...

[blp]

Golly. I don't want to rush to judgment, but it does seem quite pooh doesn't it? Do you think this kind of autistic amateurishness is some kind of strategy?

The thing is, I've just been involved with a row over in the comment section of frieze magazine. Here (http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/con_man/), have a read if you like. I'll let you guess which contributor I am. Or figure it out based on the fact that I say I have no professional involvement with the art world. Poetry's different because I've made a couple of abortive attempts to get published lately. Two failures is maybe a bit soon to start feeling bitter, but I guess I do a bit since I enjoyed Hell's contempt for Poetry Magazine so much. Yes, they're one of the two who ignored me. I don't want to feel like this though. Know what I mean?

[blp]

Had a quick look at some other Lousie Gluck stuff, sorry, Louise. Just kidding about the Lousie thing. She seems OK. Not sure I'd take an unseated place just to attend one of her lectures, but, like, yeah. I get the impression she's doing something that might well, at a point like this, be taken for being the height of literary cutting edgeness, which is writing sort of banal stuff, but with a lot of formal underpinning, repetition certainly and, perhaps, attention to the metre, as a way of approaching abstraction without having to write nonsense, which would always end up, paradoxically, too meaningful. That's all I can make of it. In theory, I'm not mad about ideas like this, but, if I'm right about what she's doing, in fairness, it seems to be paying off fairly well, in a hypnotic sort of way here (http://www.theparisreview.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5821) in the only one of the Paris Review poems available online.

[jon1jt]

I read the Hell interview and was surprised that the interviewer took Hell's advice and ran the interview with his scathing reply, which is rare for a publication, and quite commendable at that. Reading this along with the Rilke letters convinced me that literary criticism isn't worth a hoot, or if it is (okay, maybe it is) it ought to at least come from an established writer. I think Hell implies just that in his criticism. How can anyone not like a writer like Hell who tells a critic to 'F' off? :lol: I equally enjoyed the Rilke letters, and can now see why you coupled the two pieces. Rilke's advice is honest as is his faith in the self as a bulwark against the 'noise' of life he sees as potentially debilitative. He designates the poet to be final arbiter of his own work, which makes sense to me because what is criticism of another's poetry other than the competing values of what qualifies as good writing. At the same time, I'm not sure that Rilke sees the flaw in his own advice, or perhaps it's not so much a flaw as it is a limitation of how far one can actually turn inward. He encourages the poet to read books and journals that he finds to be rich in superb writing and ideas. I suppose there's a self-discovery in that process, which was his point in making the offering. But can't the same be said about criticism? That is, can't the critic inform the writer as much as a book inspires and teaches? Rilke acknowledges this to some extent.


Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. - Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

It's a nice idea to 'trust oneself' when writing, but I don't know how true this is actually. I mean, in some sense, it's the artist who questions himself, who never quite reaches the summit of verbal expression, or if he does never realizes it, only recognizes what he has achieved to be a mere but yet vital sliver of the whole, while at the same time believing in the possibility of piercing a poetic center. At one point, Rilke explains that once you have made the conscious decision 'to be a poet' it is a principal matter of organizing your life around it. That comes with dipping into the wellspring of solitude and not being afraid of its silence because what becomes possible in that engagement is self discovery. I don't take this to mean a complete withdrawal from the living, but rather a purposeful aim to clear the clutter of one's mind, requiring a brute self-criticism and awareness. I was left at the end of his letters uncertain about how realistic it is for us as writers to rely almost purely on our instincts (?) to develop a voice that we can confidently call our own.


If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place...

My hat off to you, blp. Thank you for posting this tiny treasure trove that offers some enriching ideas which otherwise I likely would have never encountered.

[blp]

I love that last bit you quoted. It stood out for me when I read those letters too.

All I can say, with regard to the 'trusting your instincts' question, is that I've come to do so more and more over the years. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing - and if it does, I tend to be thankful and go with it. I've only got my own example to go on, so I'll gas on about myself for a bit. Feel free to ignore it.

I went to art school and picked up an idea there that 'self expression' was a pretty gauche and old fashioned idea, at the same time as I was absorbing the idea whole that sophisticated art types always knew their theory and criticism back to front and made all their work in a way that somehow chimed with some marble chiseled critical criteria. All total bollocks, of course. It's not about rejecting all this stuff, it's just, where's the love? I think Rilke's recommendation to avoid a lot of this kind of writing is good advice for a young poet because the impulse to read it at a young age is really like the impulse to read an instruction manual – a sort of low-grade desire to be dominated! :D But there can be love in it. Rosalind Krauss on Donald Judd or Giacometti in The Originality of the Avante Garde and other Modernist Myths springs to mind. Also Joseph M. Conte's eminently lovely book on poets like Creeley and Duncan, Unending Design – The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. To give just two of many examples. Derrida's pretty full of it (love ;)) too in my view.

Funnily enough, though I've spent a lot of time going quiet and dipping into the wellspring of solitude, the thing that got me back into something like self expression wasn't shutting out the noise of the world, but writing (very low level) advertising copy. Copywriters, writing under the gun, have to pull out the ideas and bon mots fast. The secret, I've found, is to bash it out and ask questions (and weed out the grammar f***ups and the more egregious repetitions) later. I had to and I soon realised from this that I was censoring myself, avant la lettre, too much in my own work, because I kept coming up with things that I didn't know I had in me. I'd read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and been wowed by the effect of judicious pruning on my sentences and I really thought this painstaking verbal topiary was going to be my writing life for the rest of my life. Now it just looks like a phase I needed to go through.

Hey, it's probably just a case of, dance, but first learn the steps, except nobody knows what the steps are for sure.

[jon1jt]

I love that last bit you quoted. It stood out for me when I read those letters too.

All I can say, with regard to the 'trusting your instincts' question, is that I've come to do so more and more over the years. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing - and if it does, I tend to be thankful and go with it. I've only got my own example to go on, so I'll gas on about myself for a bit. Feel free to ignore it.

I went to art school and picked up an idea there that 'self expression' was a pretty gauche and old fashioned idea, at the same time as I was absorbing the idea whole that sophisticated art types always knew their theory and criticism back to front and made all their work in a way that somehow chimed with some marble chiseled critical criteria. All total bollocks, of course. It's not about rejecting all this stuff, it's just, where's the love? I think Rilke's recommendation to avoid a lot of this kind of writing is good advice for a young poet because the impulse to read it at a young age is really like the impulse to read an instruction manual – a sort of low-grade desire to be dominated! :D But there can be love in it. Rosalind Krauss on Donald Judd or Giacometti in The Originality of the Avante Garde and other Modernist Myths springs to mind. Also Joseph M. Conte's eminently lovely book on poets like Creeley and Duncan, Unending Design – The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. To give just two of many examples. Derrida's pretty full of it (love ;)) too in my view.

Funnily enough, though I've spent a lot of time going quiet and dipping into the wellspring of solitude, the thing that got me back into something like self expression wasn't shutting out the noise of the world, but writing (very low level) advertising copy. Copywriters, writing under the gun, have to pull out the ideas and bon mots fast. The secret, I've found, is to bash it out and ask questions (and weed out the grammar f***ups and the more egregious repetitions) later. I had to and I soon realised from this that I was censoring myself, avant la lettre, too much in my own work, because I kept coming up with things that I didn't know I had in me. I'd read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and been wowed by the effect of judicious pruning on my sentences and I really thought this painstaking verbal topiary was going to be my writing life for the rest of my life. Now it just looks like a phase I needed to go through.

Hey, it's probably just a case of, dance, but first learn the steps, except nobody knows what the steps are for sure.


So what you're saying is that this desire or tendency to be dominated by young writers becomes less so with experience? Hmm. I sometimes wonder if all writers are just copycats, and what's taken to be original in their writing is more a circumstance of pure luck. :lol: Great reflection, thanks.

[blp]

Well, the desire to be dominated by criticism is different from the desire to be just like the poets or other artists you love. I think when I was younger, I had some notion that criticism and theory might unlock the secrets of how the artists had done it – so I could too.

I don't know how original or not I am, but I always feel that luck you talk about that there aren't any poets I want to be just like. I wish I'd written If You by Robert Creeley and about three of the poems in George Oppen's Discrete Series, but that's it. I have a sense that there are all kinds of gaps in poetry and I have just the right degree of dissatisfaction to keep wanting to add things. I'd have much much more trouble being a filmmaker because, basically, I don't believe it's possible to make any films that are more perfect than Godard's Weekend, John Cassavetes' Opening Night and Faces or Antonioni's Deserto Rosso.

[blp]

Hey, also on the subject of luck, you do realise that's what Glück means in German don't you?

[AuntShecky]

I gave this thread a 4-star rating, but you know what?
Perhaps instead of devoting so much time to literary debate-- which is interesting as all get out!-- maybe we
ought to spend more time reading the original works themselves. Just a thought.

[blp]

Which original works? The Rilke Letters? Well, we read 'em. I guess the thing was, interesting and beautiful as they were, they seemed to throw up some contradictions that we were trying to understand. Derrida would probably have said that we've been engaged in an act of reading througout this thread. ;)

[jon1jt]

Hey, also on the subject of luck, you do realise that's what Glück means in German don't you?

I studied German, it was required for that insane subject ontology I studied too much of and learned so little. Sein und Zeit. :eek: Like taking LSD. But that was long ago and I didn't keep up with it. Shame on me. I'm not going to bull**** you, I don't recall. It probably means something like, a poet who writes bad poetry most of the time. :lol: But if I had to guess it means luck from what you said. Fill me in.

And by the way, I wrote down those three flicks you mentioned, I'll see if I can get them.

Sheck, now why are you lowering our rating from four stars? We've read our share of good books, too. :p

I think Derrida might have told us that the meaning of the Rilke letters slithered away, we only swallowed the trace. And what the hell is the trace?!?! GOD?!?!!! Oh no, I think that was Levinas. :eek:

[blp]

We lost our rating?! Was it because I mentioned Derrida, Aunty?

jon, read the sentence you quoted again. The answer's in it. Another thing to look again at: I mentioned four films.

Sein und Zeit is like taking LSD? Sounds good, even if actually taking LSD doesn't anymore. I keep running into Dasein and it seems like an essential, if slightly trippy, idea.

I don't know whether it would have been Derrida or Levinas, but Derrida's 'nothing outside the text' suggests the latter.

Oh no, we're never going to get that rating back now.

[jon1jt]

We lost our rating?! Was it because I mentioned Derrida, Aunty?

jon, read the sentence you quoted again. The answer's in it. Another thing to look again at: I mentioned four films.

Sein und Zeit is like taking LSD? Sounds good, even if actually taking LSD doesn't anymore. I keep running into Dasein and it seems like an essential, if slightly trippy, idea.

I don't know whether it would have been Derrida or Levinas, but Derrida's 'nothing outside the text' suggests the latter.

Oh no, we're never going to get that rating back now.

Okay, I did what you said and scoured the quote, and this is what I came up with for the Gluck translation: "a partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life." :)

The mere mention of Jacque Derrida elicits strange gasps, almost as if choking on long stem broccoli. :p

Da-sein: there being. Um, being there. Being in a world. Who-cares about being there. :lol: Now for your LSD shot, blp. :p

[blp]

But jon, if you're not there you're like, nowhere, man. Dig?