my gorgeous conversations: paul nelson
October 13, 2008
Many of you know that I am a poet-stalker. That I am. If you are a poet, you know firsthand because I have most likely stalked you. (Yes, that was me crouching in your bushes the other night, trying to take a peek at what you’re reading and writing.)
Knowing what you know about me, it should also come as no surprise that I poet-stalk folks right here n my neck of the woods. Take Paul Nelson. He’s extremely active in the poetry community here in the Seattle area. He’s known for his incredibly high-energy readings, for his ability to create and engage an audience, and for his all-around awesomeness.
Paul is the co-founder of Northwest SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!) and holds a Master of Arts in Organic Poetry. He’s had poems and essays published in numerous journals, including Golden Handcuffs Review, Jacket Magazine, Fulcrum, OlsonNow Blog, The Argotist and Raven Chronicles. He has interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Robin Blaser, Sam Hamill, Wanda Coleman, Eileen Myles, Jerome Rothenberg and George Bowering, among others. His serial poem that reenacts Auburn, Washington, history — A Time Before Slaughter — is slated for publication April 2009 (Apprentice House).
Paul generously allowed me to stalk interview him a few weeks ago. My robot, Feldman, was actually going to conduct the interview, but he chickened out at the last minute, so I had to step in and take over. We met at a Starbucks, not because we like or support Starbucks but because the independent coffee shop down the way didn’t have enough outlets and we needed access to a laptop.
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Hey, Paul: I don’t like to sit on this side of the table because I am not aligned with whatever I am supposed to be aligned with. You’ve heard about the cows, right?
I have. I think that cows are aligned, as all animals are, with different fields. And we being animals, we’re aligned with certain fields. I mean Rupert Sheldrake has done really interesting work about dogs — you know, when their owners are coming home. He was also doing a lot of work with studying the connection between mothers and daughters.
But don’t people say animals only know things because of smell or other senses?
Sheldrake’s heard all those arguments: Is it about scent; is it about the way the wind’s blowing; is it about this; is it about that? But he disproved all that through his research. I think the problem here is that, if you google morphic resonance or even go to Wikipedia, you find that the official definition says Sheldrake’s theories are considered faulty by the scientific community due to the inability of his assertions to be falsified or because they make predictions that contradict current models. For this reason, the morphic field concept lies outside the scope of mainstream science and falls into the realm of pseudoscience. And that’s accepted as fact by Wikipedia. But you know, the truth is that Wikipedia is coming from a very Newtonian perspective. Sheldrake is not. He’s coming from a perceptive that transcends Newtonian thought.
Did you know that Wikipedia’s editors go through entries every day and delete those they deem irrelevant?
Yeah. They deleted one on American Sentences. The Wikipedia editor said I didn’t have the right to quote myself.
Do you want me to write an entry for you and quote you?
[laughs] If you want to do that, you’re more than welcome.
I think the American Sentence is an important form and people should know about it. A lot of people go to Wikipedia to learn things, so I think it’s important for your entry to be included.
I thought it was important. I spent a lot of time on it, but then they deleted it.
I can’t believe that you write American Sentences every day. I mean … I believe it. What I’m trying to say is that I’m impressed.
It’s a very simple thing to do. For example, I got up last night and I wrote something. It probably won’t be something that’s on my American Sentences website, but at least you keep your hand in it, which is a good thing: “Midnight love under the harvest moon, we may have a few good years left.”
Here are two more. “Crow completely black except for remnants on his beak of Cheez-Its.” And, “What I thought was Sam’s Zen golf concentration was actually his hearing aid turned off.”
That’s like with Feldman! We took his sound sensors off and he is completely Zen now. He doesn’t have his touch sensors on, either. He just has his visual sensors on. It’s a different world for him.
I can imagine. [pauses]
If you write 365 American Sentences in a year, there are probably 12 of them that are worth saving. I like them because they remind me of certain places and times. Here’s another: “In Lakehead, California, the old mannequin in the bathtub trick.”
That’s a trick? I’ve never seen … that. Where are you hanging out?
It is kind of a trick because they’re putting it in there as a way to startle people.
I’ve never had anything weird happen to me in bathrooms. [pauses] You know, that wasn’t my own doing.
I see.
We might need a subgenre: the Bathroom Sentences. I have one about a guy who was urinating while talking on his cell phone.
How many arms did he have? Standard issue?
Yes. He just had two.
So what you said about the pieces reminding you of where you were and your past. I think it is interesting because that’s a lot of why I write. But people tend to balk at writers who say they write for themselves: as a record of what they’ve done, of who they are at any given moment, and as a way of remembering the details of their lives.
What you point out is one of the key things about the stance toward reality that underlies, as I call it, the Organic process. People who are skeptical regarding that process are very much in the competition/domination mode. Life to them is competition and domination. It is getting ahead. It’s a he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins kind of thing.
Then there are those who come from a more organismic perspective, which is why I decided Organic was a good term for it because it reflects an organismic cosmology. Alfred North Whitehead’s writing resonates with this. Hua Yen Buddhists understand this perhaps better than anyone ever has.
And I think it’s the notion of indigenous people all over the world that life is more of a process, so to write down exactly what your mind is at the time where you’re at — you may be embarrassed by it five years later, but that’s essentially who we are as human beings. So if you’re not doing that, if you’ve learned writing in another way, it’s likely more of a construct. And I’m not interested in writing that’s a construct. I’m interested in writing that’s a reflection of the whole person.
There are many fine writers who write poetry or prose in this way, in a way that’s a construct. But I find that there’s something lacking in it, and I find that writing organically is more difficult because it really exposes the play of the mind. And if there’s not much of a mind there, you’re going to get some real shit.
I think people misunderstand that there’s a difference between writing organically and writing just whatever shit comes to mind.
It’s writing mindfully, right?
Yeah. There has to be a poetics that are alive and conscious. That’s what Michael McClure said in his introduction to Three Poems, the book in which he points out that writing from this stance is very difficult. And people say “That’s easy.” Well, it’s easy to do poorly. That’s like saying playing jazz is easy. But how many Coltranes were there, how many Miles Davises were there? And they were improvising on the bandstand. That’s part of the beauty of it. In fact, not just on the bandstand. Kind of Blue was all done in first takes, with the exception of “Flamenco Sketches.”
What about when people talk about their muse? What do you think about that language and concept?
That particular phrase is clichéd, but there is inspiration that does come from outside you. And what’s not clichéd is what Robin Blaser who wrote “The Practice of Outside,” which appeared in the collective poems of Jack Spicer. Blaser is one of the most-accomplished practitioners of writing in this way that I would call organically. I don’t know if he’d go for that label but if I explained it to him, I think he’d agree with me. But he’s never used that language.
I guess what I don’t like when people talk about their muse is that it seems to envision the muse as a possession, as in ‘This is my personal muse, one that exists only for me.’ Similar to the way people want to have their own personal Jesus.
Well, I think one of your previous interviews that I read before coming here — as well as Sam Hamill’s and Lewis Hyde’s notion — all resonate with the notion that the poem is a gift, that the poem is part of the gift economy. And I think that’s a really healthy way of looking at it: that the poem isn’t yours per se but is a gift to you. You happen to be the one who’s channeling it through your particular flavor, but its source is outside of you and its ownership is outside of you.
You said something in your essay about mind being nonlocal.
That’s a physics concept, and of course that’s quantum physics as opposed to Newtonian physics, the notion of nonlocality. We’re very materialistic in this society. It has seemed to pay off because this is a very wealthy society. But we are starting to see the limits of that, especially in how we’re affecting the planet’s ecosystems with our lifestyle. Mind is larger than just the individual brain. It extends beyond that.
I feel like when I read a lot of the work of poets — emerging as well as established — a sort of “ownership” concept permeates their work, their approach to writing, their views about writing: selfishness, stinginess, fear of someone taking it, fear that they won’t be able to keep writing, that sort of thing. It’s kind of a politics of scarcity: “I only have this many poems and thoughts about poems. They might be the only poems I ever write and the only thoughts I ever think. I need to keep my poems and thoughts safe and not let anyone have access to them or they’ll take my essence as a poet.”
That’s not really a question.
No, I agree. I don’t care for that approach at all. I was like that. But also, since I started being serious about writing poetry, I’ve always resonated with an organismic approach. When I read Projective Verse, it occurred to me that I was already writing in a sense like that. I wondered, “Is this projective,” and I wanted to ask Michael [McClure]. It seemed that he was being very obtuse about it, but as it turns out it’s not really easy to identify and discuss. It’s not easy to elaborate on. It seems as if one is sort of purposefully going around the subject.
It’s like language is faulty. And so how do we get at something that’s beyond language?
It’s inexact, absolutely. Bowering says:
I do not compose poetry to show you what I have seen, but rather because I have seen … this poet’s job is not to tell you what it is like, but to make a poem … Not trying to use your poems to prove a point, or address an argument. Not to try to control what they’re [the poems] are doing … but rather to be a kind of audience listening to where the poem is going to go … the practice of outside … Try to forget your own voice … and listen hard for what the language is saying… you yourself are the audience, hearing a voice you’ve trained your ear to receive … .
One thought that occurred to me as I was reading it — “I don’t tell you what it is like” — see, that’s what people who are creating constructs are doing: They’re reconstructing this experience of “Here’s what it’s like … ” but they’re already once removed when they do that.
You say you don’t like poems that are constructs. How can you identify those poems?
You often just get a sense of it, like there’s something lacking. It’s not the same thing. When you hear something like George Bowering’s poems or José Kozer’s poems or Eileen Miles’ or Wanda Coleman’s — you can hear that these people all write with different degrees of organicity, if you want to make up a word like that.
I think the Organic is a continuum. McClure talks about the poem being a spiritual experiment, where you’re just going to write it however it comes out. That’s the way it’s going to be. That’s one pole. The other pole is the Formalists who maybe even know what the final rhyming couplet is of a sonnet they’re about to write. So I think that’s probably about as closed as you’re going to get.
So I think it’s a continuum and you can get a sense of how much a true reflection of the whole person is in a poem or the feeling that it’s a construct and you’re not getting the same kick from it. You know? You could use a food analogy. You could use any kind of analogy. You could use a drug analogy. Boy, the first time you take a hit of tobacco, it just knocks you on your ass. You’re like, “Wow, this is great.” Then you take another hit, and it’s not the same. You can use many different analogies for looking at it, but you get a bigger kick — at least I do — from stuff that’s not a construct.
Comments
28 Responses to “my gorgeous conversations: paul nelson”
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This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Get as close as possible to who and what you are, and you will become original. — Kevin Clark
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This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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Fun! Thanks.
I went to a lecture about crows by a crow expert from Penn State last month, and you know what? Crows *love* Cheez-Its. That’s what they baited their crow traps with, she said. So it sounds like Mr. Nelson does know something about crows.
Great interview. This idea of an organic continuum seems like a good way to understand poetry. This also reminds me that I have to read “Projective Verse” which I’ve never read. Thanks.
Nathan, your reading list is getting really long. Read the Rexroth first, k? Or whatever.
Dave, crow traps? No!
Dale, just wait until I stalk you. We’ll see how fun you think it is then.
P.S. Did I mention that there’s a dirty bakery right across the street from our all-poetry bookstore?
Well, you have to trap them if you want to attach radio transmitters, or do other sciencey things. Crows aren’t very good at volunteering. Self-centered bastards, really.
Dana: humph. Promises, promises. When does the real stalking start?
(Dirty bakery?)
Hey, Dave, those are my friends you’re talking about!
So, what does a dirty bakery sell? Naked gingerbread men?
That’s a cool interview, I’ll be looking forward to the rest of it.
[...] go to My Gorgeous Somewhere where Dana Guthrie Martin has just posted an interview with Paul Nelson. They have things to [...]
Nice interview. When you gave me that assignment to write an American Sentence on my blog, I got so much positive feedback and interest in that form. Wikipedia doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
Dave, how would you feel if someone trapped you to stick a radio transmitter on you? I bet you wouldn’t like that so much, and I bet you wouldn’t be very cooperative.
Dale, yes. They make titty muffins and cake that are, in a word, hung. Doesn’t that sound fantastic!
This is the real stalking, Dale. This is me, doing it. Right now.
Catherine, here’s what they sell:
http://www.theeroticbakery.com/about_us.asp
Churlita, people really like the American Sentence. Too bad Wikipedia doesn’t see the value.
These comments are almost as fun as the interview. I’m glad Feldman made a brief appearance, even if he didn’t get to ask any questions.
I wrote an American Sentence about crows eating discarded McDonald’s. I remember seeing them pick away at the same cardboard box over two days while I was taking my dogs for a walk.
I like that Dave went to a crow lecture. I like that you have an erotic bakery near your house.
Are these comments organic? Please ask Feldman to rate them for me.
Hi, Paul Nelson.
Dana - Point taken. But actually the information gleaned from this study was enough to convince local authorities that lethal methods were ineffective in moving or disrupting a large urban crow roost, and they were able to come up with non-lethal methods that did work. Figuring out daily and seasonal movements of crows was crucial - hence the transmitters.
Christine, Feldman is getting as many comments on his blog as I am on this post. He’s very excited about that. He’s doing a little robot happy dance.
Sadly, these comments are not organic. They’re actually highly carcinogenic.
Dave, I want someone to figure out my daily and seasonal movements. Today, I was in bed most of the day. So not much in the way of movement. Shall I blame the season?
hi dana! i love this interview — especially the part in the bathroom. i’m also delighted about discovering american sentences. it’s a riot. thanks so much for sharing paul nelson with us.
love your blog, too. and have added it to my links list. now we’ll see who’s stalking who. **witchy laugh**
a.
p.s. laughed myself silly over the soul patch.
Arleeeene! Please let me be the one to stalk you, k? I like to do it.
That bathtub American Sentence of Paul’s is fantastic, isn’t it? Too, too funny.
Oh, and everyone: A conversation about American Sentences has erupted over at Dale’s joint. You should check it out. I managed to bring handcuffs and rope into the equation: American Sentences.
I’d like to know more about the Organic Process. Is it anything like Natalie Goldberg’s process (Writing Down the Bones), in which the writer comes to a place of silence, and then writes whatever he or she knows to be the truth at that moment? And what part does revision play in the Organic Process? I meant to ask these questions the other day, but I got sidetracked with the whole image of crows eating cheetos. And then there was Feldman, getting all cute on me.
# christine on October 16th, 2008 7:09 am said…
I’d like to know more about the Organic Process. Is it anything like Natalie Goldberg’s process (Writing Down the Bones), in which the writer comes to a place of silence, and then writes whatever he or she knows to be the truth at that moment? And what part does revision play in the Organic Process?…
I have not read Natalie’s work and I would hesitate to label anything as serious as TRUTH. I do think slowing down, or approaching a near-meditative state, a hyper-aware state is a facet. Rather than truth, I think the Kerouac dictum “Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better” makes sense.
(See JK’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty “essentials.”)
Of course the main statement on the organic, though he did not use that word, is Olson’s Projective Verse:
http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Projective_Verse.html
“ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!”
As for editing, one of the best statements I have ever seen is by Gary Snyder in his craft interview given to the New York Quarterly in 1973. He was asked, “Do you re-write” and said…
No. I tune, I make adjustments, I tamper with it just a little bit -
NYQ: So that once you have the poem down and you put your name at the end of it, that’s it?
Snyder: Well, once in a while a poem will come out half-formed, and what I’ll do with that is put it aside totally for several months and then refer back to it again and then revisualize it all. I’ll replay the whole experience again in my mind. I’ll forget all about what’s on the page and get in touch with the preverbal level behind it, and then by an effort of re-experiencing, recall, visualization, revisualization, I’ll live through the whole thing again and see more clearly…
Snyder, Gary. “Look Out: a selection of Writings,” New York: New Directions, pp 130-131
I hope this helps…
Thanks for the additional information, Paul!
Thanks for speaking to my question. I think I understand a little better now. It reminds me of entering a dream. I think that’s the place from where I do my best writing, although I wouldn’t say I reach that place every time I write. Thanks for the links too.
Christine, I see that you changed your avatar. It doesn’t show up here but it does show up in my admin panel. Funny!
Christine,
A dream state is a good analogy. This is why dreams are such rich fields of potential energy for the poem. They work at a deeper level of unconscious, are perfectly tailored to one’s Personal Mythology (a deeper level of consciousness itself), are non-linear and imagistic.
Link to mp3 here: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Olson/08-16-63/Olson-Charles_49_As-the-Dead-Prey-Upon-Us_Vancouver_8-16-63.mp3
Good luck,
Paul