Podcast
Rumpus Events
Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
Rumpus: Do you think subject matter, as such, is more or less considered an anachronism, at least in particular “schools” of poetry (e.g. language poetry?)
RW: I hate to do this but I want to refer you to a recent discussion on Harriet about what a language poet is (or more to the point, was), as I seem to have a very nitpicky but perhaps fruitful kind of literalism about the term (warning, there is a very long comment stream on this one). So I would argue that no one born after say 1950 is a language poet.
For a long time I went happily with the general trend away from “aboutness,” and resented or simply mocked any kind of questions about what this or that poem might be about, or questions that crossed that boundary into talking “about” something that was mentioned in the poem rather than the poem in its wholeness, form and content and everything. I don’t mean that I was simply being trendy, but I had been drinking the same water as other poets in my vague circles. My mockery of and disdain for subject matter had to do with the fact that my compositional process included everything but a desire to write “about” something. I’m often really surprised when I go back to earlier books and see how actually quite cohesive the poems, are, thematically. They are, most of them, “about” this or that, however little I tried to make them so. So I would never say go so far as to say that language has been my subject but rather that my subject has resisted my intelligence with great success. It’s hard to be alive in America right now without some subject matter creeping into your inner psychic discourse.
Rumpus: Fence Books, according to its listing on Poets & Writers, has a mission to publish “challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques”; your many notable authors include Chelsey Minnis, Joyelle McSweeney, Laura Sims, Christopher Janke, and Jibade Khalil Huffman. What trends in literary publishing (for other indie or mainstream publishers) do you see as an impediment to the future of innovative writing?
RW: Here I have to send you over to the Omnivoracious blog for this bit more about how Fence is not a proponent of innovation, per se. I really don’t place any inherent value in innovation in poetry, and the promotion of innovation as a value has never been part of Fence’s mission. So I guess I can’t really answer this question properly without replacing the word “innovative” in it with something more like “idiosyncratic.” And once that’s done I think my answer would be an unfortunately hackneyed one, which is that I don’t really think that publishing is presenting any obstacles right now—there’s tons of adventurous and able small-press publishers; it’s more the trend toward ever more ratification of various modes of writing by the academy. Many many poets make their homes in universities, and this does create a certain kind of same-y-ness of at least vocabularies and referents and objects in the work.
Rumpus: Do you think that any identification with a larger practice is helpful in any way to a poet, particular when he or she begins to seek readership?
RW: The only identification I trust in aesthetic determinations is self-identification, and I haven’t come across any self-identifying poets lately, with the possible exception of “Flarf” poets. Have you? There again I’m fruitfully literal: it’s really hard to accept that any poets besides those who are playing around with script-generated language are being actually “experimental,” given how long Gertrude Stein’s been dead now, lo these many years. The term “innovative” is generally hugely uninteresting to me although, like many subject matters, like a recipe for cookies, I’m sure I would enjoy being inside of it. I taught a poetry workshop last night, the first class meeting, and actually did that dopey thing of mistaking one student’s innovative practice for a corrupted Word doc. Many of his words were interrupted by what looked to me like misplaced letters from other words. It caused me to think for a few seconds about how deeply that student must be reading in the historical material of poetic experiment to come to feel ready to make a go at working up something “new.”
Read the whole article on one page
October 7th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Rebecca, This is such a great interview! I’d been looking for it ever since you mentioned it was forthcoming. Really excited, too, about The Beginners…