INTERVIEW WITH JESSE GLASS --(JUNE-JULY, 2003)
BY AUGUST HIGHLAND
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1. How do you characterize the difference between your previously published work and your new poetry?
That's an interesting question because I see all of my work as part of the same continuum. It all falls under the rubric of attempting to think about the world in one mode or another using language as gesture or by imposing visual/gestural effects on language. Yet another point of interest is the assumption that I have new "experimental" work and old "not-so-experimental" work, when in fact I've been doing similar things (i.e. moving along the same arc) since the 1970's. Some of the "new" work you see is at least twenty years old. It's just that this material did not find publication until after my coming to the Internet in 1998.
Sidebar: (The Internet has been a great life-line. I'd had a career in the U.S. before deciding to come to Japan in 1992. I'd read and toured around and won some prizes, but when I first came to teach in Nagasaki Prefecture I found myself pretty much cut off from just about everything that was happening. I had to rely on the overseas postal system and this slowed the submission process down. In Japan I was in touch with Cid Corman, Edith Shiffert, Jon Silkin and a few other writers, but on the whole it was a rather lonely existence. Things began to pick up a bit when I connected with Laurel Sicks and attempted to fashion a silk purse out of the Abiko Literary Rag and succeed somewhat. At least I got the name changed to the Abiko Quarterly, for what that was worth. Then I met Jack Kimball, who was at that time teaching in Miyazaki, and he turned me on to the 'net. That was in 1998. Things speeded up exponentially after that.
Now my family and I have moved to the Tokyo area, which is crawling with "native speaker" poets and writers, but frankly, what they do holds little interest for me. Through it all the Internet still provides a sense of community and challenge. I do get the feeling, however, that things happen a little too quickly on the 'net, and sometimes (like now) I need to take a break and go back to pen and notebook to feel connected with whatever it is that drives me to produce what I do.)
But to return to that question again, Augie. Some of my work is language "right-side out" (narrative, whole language, polished tropes), while some is language gutted and hung on the rack (fractured words, injection of interstitial static, splintered narratives, muddied tropes). The uncut tissue connecting both categories is "song." That is, my ear remains beyond dissection and is still inviolate as of 6/20/2003. In fact, when I think of experimental poetry, I guess I primarily think of sound, sonic effects, and placement of words in musical "breaths" on the page.. Milton's Samson Agonistes, Coleridge and his "Christabel," and Gerard Manly Hopkins are all first-rate "experimentalists" in my book.
A new visual element has also entered my writing. I'm not particularly speaking of my forays into "vispo" here (which also date back to the '70s), but in my formal poetry there is a new sense of what it appears like on the page, and how it should be performed as per that appearance. I think the word-processing ability of computers has made this sort of tinkering easier than it was in the old days. I recall sitting for hours at the type-writer producing the mesostics for my long poem The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe. Now I could probably do the same thing in minutes thanks to WordPerfect.
2. Was there a context or turning-point that you consider to have been the catalyst for the new direction?
As you know, I've lived on the frontiers of English for 11 years now. This has caused me to view my language in a different way than when it was an integral part of my daily ecology.. In addition, I've been caught up in an attempt to learn Japanese-and to a lesser extent Korean and Cherokee. This focus on the slippery "bodies" of language, I believe, has charged some of my more recent experiments.
(As an interesting addendum to the above: I had several long discussions with Jon Silkin about his fears of losing the requisite sensitivity to language that a poet requires due to his living in a non-English speaking context. We both came to the conclusion that since we'd arrived in Japan in our 30's and late 60's respectively, that English was so solidly hard-wired into our cerebral chassis that we were safe. However, I wonder what an extended period in a foreign country might do to an aspiring English language poet in his or her earlier years of development-say late teens-early twenties-when that portion of the brain is still a bit malleable? Would their "ear" be off? )
And yes, Augie, I guess I could point to several turning points in my recent history. One was the Poli-Poetry Festival that I attended in Maastricht, Holland in 2001. I met up with my old friend Rod Summers there and I had a chance to see people like Jaap Blonk, Michael Lentz and Valerie Scherstjanoi perform, as well as performing myself. These people gave me a new feeling of freedom concerning my own work.. Blonk created sounds that I'd imagined only Artaud could have forced from the inner depths of the body. Scherstjanoi hissing and clicking like an old radio set and the depths of a limestone accreting cave, respectively, drew symbols on an 0ver-head projector and at the same time sounded them out. It was a remarkable performance-at once infantile and avant-garde. In fact, watching these "classic" sound poets perform using few technical aids besides microphones and overhead projectors reminded me of Poggioli's take on the avant-garde as being child's work as well as future work, and of course Smithson's caveman/spaceman idea.
Another turning point has to be my re-discovery of Tom Raworth's writing during a trip to Edinburgh with some students in 1997. I had time to actually sit down with his collected poems. I'd met Raworth personally at Woodland Pattern (Milwaukee, U.S.A.) in the 1980's, but I recall being struck more by the tension he projected in his performance, than by the work itself. During the same trip I picked up the Penguin collection that includes Ian Sinclair, Peter Riley, and Denise Riley as well as the great anthology Conductors of Chaos, edited by Ian Sinclair himself. These books were revelations to me.
Then there was the trip I took with my wife Maya during the Christmas holidays of 1996. We stayed and played in San Francisco, met playwright and poet James Scheville and his wife and spent some time with Spencer Selby who was hepped up on designer coffee when I cornered him and asked him to teach me about this "new stuff." Remarkably, he agreed, and generously presented me with his own books as well as publications from Burning Press and Generator Press.
Lastly, but firstly, one of the earliest steps in the progression to what "I" am turning out to be in this interview was meeting Skip Fox at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1991. I'd won the Deep South Poetry Award for two years running and Burton Raffel, scholar, poet, translator and gentlemen, arranged for me to travel down from winter-bound Milwaukee to hang out with students and faculty in sultry Lafayette for a week. Skip and I spent hours in non-stop talk. When we finished and I was on the way back to the airport with a stack of books balanced on my lap, Skip agreed to co-edit Die Young Magazine with me. Skip was in touch with a whole group of writers I knew nothing about and would probably not have cared about at all had it not been for his patiently telling me what made/makes their work significant. The big move to Japan and the cultural adjustments I went through in the early stages took their toll on both my pocket book and my editing time and gradually Skip took over the lion's share of the magazine. In addition, he dug into his own resources to finance the whole thing. Skip, if you're reading this, just know that you're in my "hall of saints." Eventually Die Young faded away in a coma of sorts and Skip moved on. (Peter Russel, who also recently faded away, told me he had a girlfriend named Di. ((pronounced die)) Young.)
So, taking one rung at a time in backward fashion, I've traced, in shorthand fashion, just a few of the encounters that might be of importance when considering my work and my method. Of course I could have come up with an entirely different set of influences that would have been equally valid. I did not mention my early correspondence with and readings of the critical writings of the remarkable Richard Kostelanetz, the championing of certain strains of my work by Robert Peters, the time I spent at the remarkable Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, or before then at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, or the Maryland Writers Council on Franklin Street in Baltimore City before that, or the dept I owe to my great friend Del Palmer, professor emeritus at Western Maryland College. There are just so many threads that one could pull together in a discussion like this. Someday, when I have more time, perhaps...
3. How would you introduce a new reader to the work you are presently working on?
You know, I find all of the new theories of reading and writing of interest, because they give me permission to do things with language, and poetry, I think, above all, is an expression of freedom; but at a certain point, I'd like that babble to cease so that the reader can approach the writing on its own terms. I think the old dictum still applies to poetry--that it must as the bottom line--give delight. Does it interest the reader? If not; if it bores an intelligent, informed reader, then one can trundle out a railroad car of books and essays written by specialists in gender studies, Marxist criticism, reader response etc. etc., to teach the reader just exactly what the significance of one's work is, and one would still be failing to do the job of a poet. I've marveled at so many beautiful books published by university and small presses-subsidized by enormous grants-puffed by savants and scholars and award winning this and that-that simply bore the socks off one. And of course, the Internet is full of it too. In fact, whole new realms of interactive boredom are opening up because of it.. So, Augie, I guess my greatest wish, this side of renewing the language, and all of the other noble things we hope poetry will do-- is simply not to bore. If I do, then he or she is welcome to read or watch or listen to something that doesn't. And instead of crating up my work wrapped in the bubble packing of Derrida & Co before delivering it, I'd much rather turn it loose in the reader's darkened bedroom and hope that it bites the right place.
4. What do you deem your most significant work to date, or, to put the question another way, to which work do you attribute the most personal value?
I made a Faustian pact with poetry when I was 19 years old. If I could write one "real" poem in my lifetime-that is, one poem that perhaps people would still be talking about in 100 years-I would be satisfied. The results are still pending, but I'm feeling happier and happier about my quest the older I get. I guess this is one of the reasons I like to rediscover forgotten, or overlooked voices. Back in the 1980's I dug through the old Maryland newspapers and found two significant writers-P.M. Deshong, a wonderful poet, and apparently a mathematician from the 1840's and Emma Alice Browne-an exact contemporary of Emily Dickinson, and quite a fine poet. Thomas Holley Chivers, a real eccentric and an early experimenter with musical effects in poetry has also been a great favorite of mine.
5. What are your thoughts about poetry?
Poetry is absolute freedom and absolute cruelty. There must also be something uncanny about it, and not quite understood, that will bring us back again and again. Like a sighting of a silent, black triangular airship that covers half the night sky while everyone is asleep in your part of the world, or an encounter with Dionysus in a Kansas wheatfield, a great poem gives us that chill, that feeling of threat, and of Otherness.
In my poetry I always attempt to provide a union of opposites--from the very highest to the very lowest,-- and I allow the poem literally to give body to itself through evoking the human body in all of its manifestations-but particularly the erotic. The body of the poem must be unpredictable, linguistically violent and assert itself through cries, blasphemies, and deliberate under-cuttings and perversities. This is the music of its birth. A poem should not be bland or pleasant, but should assault the reader's sensibilities in any way it can before it picks up its teacup and limps across the room. (Emily Dickinson knew this.) In this way the poem claws its way out of its (s)hell and lies in its own miasma beneath the lowering sky. A poem should also threaten subtle physical harm as a Roman curse written on a small sheet of lead and struck through by 19 nails before being buried at a crossroads, might.
Finally, poetry should make us laugh. So many "experimental" poets seem to have lost that ability to laugh at themselves, and to pack the fine volcanic grit of laughter between the gaps of the poem's savage teeth, before spitting in Nobodaddy's face, and that's a sad thing, don't you agree, Augie? Of course, all of these points constitute an ideal for me, but I feel that some of my work might approach it.
6. You've obviously been influenced by the Surrealists....
Yes, and by alchemical texts as well. You know I'm quite taken with the idea of the poem being somehow "alive" in that third space between matter and mind that Popper talks about. The idea of poem as homunculus is somehow in back of lots of what I do. Gnostic texts and references to them also inform my work.
The pre-surrealist Lautreamont and his "oceanic" text is remarkable. It's interesting to me that Melville's Pierre-which has many similarities to Maldoror-was penned at about the same time. Melville and Ducasse would have had much to say to each other, I think.
Breton doesn't interest me outside his first and second manifestos. Artaud and Bataille fascinate me. You know I actually met Franklin and Penelope Rosemont in Chicago once. Franklin was remarkable-a kind of walking encyclopedia of Surrealism, and he and his group continued to try to keep Surrealism-at least his American brand of it-alive. He introduced me to a whole group of new names, including Benjamin Paul Blood, the bard of nitrous oxide. Both of us shared enthusiasm for the works of Charles Fort, who is really quite a good prose poet and should be included in anthologies of American literature.
7. Do you really believe in the theory of poetry you mention above?
It depends on my mood. [Laughter.] Usually I just think of poetry as doing certain operations with language and letting the language find its own voice.
8. Have you been influenced at all by Japanese writers since your stay?
Not so much by the poets as by the visual artists. I've always been a big fan of Robert Smithson's earth sculptures, and I've been particularly struck by the (now defunct) Mono Ha school of sculpture-at least by what I've read and seen in pictures. It seems like they took Smithson to another level. I like to write poetry about those stark kinds of relocations of objects in relation to other things in the world. Or at least many of my poems begin that way. Oh yes, Kitasono Katue's work, as translated and explicated by John Solt in his excellent book Shredding The Tapestry of Meaning, has also been an influence. Katue was a visual artist-collagist/photographer and painter too.
And yes, I've done part of Basho's Oku No Hosomichi trip with a bus load of other "foreigners" and it was fun, but from my readings of Basho, he appears to have been something of a shit-head. I mean, in one of his poetic diaries he writes of abandoning a weeping toddler to her fate along some river. Doing something like that in the Edo period of Japan was to abandon the baby to wolves and other horrible deaths. Issa is more to my liking. He would never have done that, having been an orphan himself.
9. Do you know any contemporary Japanese poets?
Yes, I've been a long-term member of Sei-en (Blue Flame) Magazine now edited by the poet Yufuco Shima. This magazine was founded by my first Japanese friend, the poet Kawamura Yoichi. Kawamura's work is a bit "old-fashioned." He was a kind of latter-day symbolist, and his work is very religious in the T.S. Eliot sense, as his mother and father were Japanese missionaries proselytizing for Christianity in the days before and during W.W.II., and very dark.
Before his death of stomach cancer in 1995, Kawamura-san arranged a big reading at the Japanese Literature Museum in Yokohama. That's where I had the opportunity to read my own poetry, along with probably the most popular contemporary Japanese poet-Tanikawa Shintaro, as well as other national poets of note.
Sei-en continues to hold annual memorials for Kawamura. Yusuke Keida, editor of Blue Jacket magazine and devotee of the beats sometimes shows up. Also Shiraishi Kazuko will make an appearance to hold forth on politics or other topics.
On a different level, I've gotten to know one excellent haiku poet by the name of Akashi Ryokuya, who lives in my old stomping grounds of Ijiri, Fukuoka. He competes in and wins myriads of contests with his work and publishes annually in the important haiku almanacs so respected by Japan's haijin. My wife and I have translated his haiku into English and it is really quite crazy and quite excellent.
And yes, I went through my own English language haiku fever for awhile, but I've been cured of it, at least temporarily..
10. What about Zen?
I have no desire to sit zazen. I'm very interested in crazy monks like Yumen and crazy koans that are like tiny absurdist poems. I genuinely enjoy stories of Yumen's encounters with his pupils, but I think up close and personal I would have despised him. Chuang Tzu's take on Taoism is one of my all-time favorite books. I enjoy looking at rock and sand gardens and I meditate in my own way, I guess. My wife and family are all Pure Land Buddhists and believers in Shinran's easy way of enlightenment. All one has to do is say the name of Amida Buddha as often as you can and everything will be ok. I like that. There's dancing Buddhism too. All you have to do is get the right steps down and you're on your way to Paradise! I think that's even better.
11. Do you regularly correspond with other writers and if so on what basis did your relationship evolve-was it on affinity of your aesthetic approaches or on your personal compatibility or a combination of both?
"Yes" (though I'm often a lousy correspondent because of periods of depression) and "both" to your question. My correspondence stretches back to the 1970's. I've been fortunate enough to have corresponded with poets as diverse as Howard Nemerov, Guy Davenport, Lewis Turco Armand Schwerner, Helen Adams, Cid Corman, Robert Lax and Rod Summers. That's a pretty wide spectrum.
Since connecting with the Internet, and the gradual flowering of Ahadada Books, my correspondence has increased to include many talented new poets. Do I feel affinity with the poets with whom I correspond at length? Yes, in the sense that we are all engaged in the same pursuit. Not all of them interest me in the same way, however.
12. Do you enjoy presenting public readings of your work?
Absolutely. I enjoy meeting new people, making new contacts, and traveling. I rarely read in bars or coffee houses, though, because they remind me that I was once 19.
13. Are you a disciplined writer with a regular work schedule?
Yes, I try to spend at least 20 minutes a day writing, no matter how busy I am. I've kept to this plan since I was 17 years old. Even if I can only correct one poem, or send a batch out in the mail, or over the Internet, I feel that the rest of the day hasn't been a waste.
14. Did you or do you still have literary mentors whom you admire and who have supported your literary development?
I guess I'd have to say that I have secret heroes that I'm always revisiting.. William Blake would have to be among my greatest teachers, along with Moses de Leon, Milton, Chuang Tzu, Kleist, Coleridge, Whitman, Nerval, Emily Dickinson, Lautreamont, and Rimbaud. Moderns would include Antonin Artaud, Wallace Stevens, David Jones, Basil Bunting, H.D., Stein, Duncan, Spicer and Eigner. Among contemporaries I'd add Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, Maria Sabina, Burton Raffel and Robert Lax among others.. I've also had "formal" teachers like Richard Howard and Cynthia Macdonald, both of whom showed me forms of poetry that I did not want to emulate, though I admired the wit and the gesture. (I recall Howard explaining Oppens' winning the Pulitzer not so much on the strength of his work, but because of his being a kind of father figure. I thought that was amusing.)
15. Conversely, do you have any close associations with younger writers whose development as a writer you are supporting and nurturing?
I used to be a nurturer, but now leave that to the darling swifts that have been building their nests in our stairwell for the past week. It's considered "bad luck" to get ride of them, so the Japanese leave them alone. I've been monitoring their progress and it's just incredible to see what they do.
Before I left the U.S. I had a "Die Young" poetry group that would meet regularly to workshop poems. We even had visiting poets and a grand reading someplace in downtown Milwaukee as well as a publishing collective through which we did a series of tiny chapbooks that later became one issue of the larger venture Skip and I were doing. One writer of note that visited us occasionally was Marton Koppany, the Hungarian conceptual poet. Another was Antler, whose apartment was just next to my own, through a case of startling serendipity, not design. The third writer of note, and Die Young regular, was Bob Harrison, but he had achieved his own style of writing before he met up with us and was well on his way to wherever he's going. I can't take any credit for helping him. Bob decided to begin his own publishing activities at about that time and started "Croton Bug."
My most recent connection with a younger poet has also resulted in a publishing venture. Dan Sendecki, a Canadian, met me over the winter holidays a couple of years ago in Tokyo. From that meeting Ahadada Books was born. Not only is Dan a writer of talent, but he's also a book designer, cover artist, publicist-the real deal. Coach House Press does our printing and our books are beautiful. Our latest offering is Marton Koppany's Investigations & Other Sequences. We've also done on-line volumes of John Solt's and Rick Peabody's.
16. What is your connection with the small press?
Richard Kostelanetz convinced me of the importance of the small press early on. I began my own efforts in 1974 with a homely little mimeo magazine called Goethe's Notes. The remarkable thing about it was that this tiny publication attracted so many accomplished writers. It was learning about contemporary literature truly by the seat of my pants, and having fun while doing it. I went on to establish Goethe's Press and published a few nice chapbooks after that.
On a recent trip back to the U.S. I opened an old foot-locker I'd stacked away in a closet and found signed copies of books by William Matthews and Daniel Mark Epstein, as well as scads of little magazines in which I had published in the 1970's. Aleph, edited by Mel Raff, was a fine one. And the elegant Gargoyle. I found back numbers of Guardino's Gazette, edited by Len Guardino, a friend of Langston Hughes, and a former editor of Hughes' Poetry World. Who has ever heard of him? He was a generous editor, though, a nice guy and his magazine is still a good read. I'm sure he's publishing it in Heaven.
17. By the way, where did that name ahadada come from?
Many folks see a deep significance in it, but actually my son Yoichi used to call me that when he was just beginning to talk. I thought it was cute and used it for my Internet name. There's no real connection with urinals or Hugo Ball or hobby horses, though Dan uses Duchamp's urinal as our logo.
18. Every writer wants immortality and to make an historically significant contribution to the Western literary tradition-what do you feel your principle contribution has been up to this point in your professional literary career?
See answer 5.
19. To what activity do your enjoy most devoting your time to when you are not working?
Hanging out with Maya, Yoichi and Tennessee Glass-my favorite people! We live close by Tokyo Disney Land and we spend a lot of time there. Main Street USA reminds me a bit of downtown Westminster, so I repair there with my Kanji textbook and practice away sitting on a bench near the old-time cinema while Maya and the kids visit Toon Town. Yes, it's great to listen to the rag time music while puzzling my way through the problems and then to look up once in a while and see all those Japanese families looking back! I love it! I wonder if they think I'm real or one of the animatronic foreigners they have positioned here and there.
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