my gorgeous conversations: david biespiel
David Biespiel’s books of poetry include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars and Wild Civility. A new book of poems, The Book of Men and Women, is due out in this year. Among his honors are a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a Lannan Fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature. He currently divides his teaching among several universities and is founding director and writer-in-residence of The Attic in Portland, Ore.
David is a contributor to American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Slate, The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic. Since 2002, he has been the columnist on poetry for The Oregonian. He was named editor of Poetry Northwest in 2005. And in 2008 — in line with his belief that poets should be fully engaged with political and civic life — he became a contributor to Politico’s Arena, a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than 100 current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.
My conversation with David began after I read one of his columns in The Oregonian, in which he discussed the ways “into” a poem. He graciously agreed to this interview, whose topics include collaborative poetry, print and online literary publications, and the state of poetry in the United States today.
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Do the instructors at The Attic ever teach classes on collaborative poetry?
We have not formally offered a class in collaborative writing, though students — we’ve had several thousand over nearly 10 years — have from time to time developed collaborative projects. For instance, a memoir class took on the same subject and turned that into a print-on-demand anthology published by Lulu Books.
Have you ever taught collaborative poetry or have you written collaborative poetry with others? If so, could you talk about that experience.
I’m embarrassed to say that, well … um, I prefer to work alone. That’s what always frightened me about “putting on a play.” All that collaboration! Not sure it’s selfishness so much as temperament: I like some solitude to create poems. That said, and to contradict myself, I’m about to embark on my first collaboration, but not strictly literary. The choreographer Mary Oslund and I are going to collaborate on a dance/poetry or poetry/dance performance. We’re only in the “Yes, let’s try it” stage so not much to report, I’m sorry. For me, collaborating with a nonliterary, nonverbal art form such as dance is probably not much different than writing alone … but we’ll see. It’s exciting, and definitely will take me out of my comfort zone.
I am interested in your mention of being frightened by collaboration. I know you’re (at least mostly) joking about being afraid to collaborate, but you do touch on something that seems to hold true for the majority of poets: We are afraid to work together.
This position intrigues me because so many other artistic endeavors — including the performance art, as you mention above — rely on collaboration. As another example, take classical music, which entails anywhere from two to dozens and dozens of people working together.
Many forms of art are, by definition, a team effort, even if it is the vision of one person that’s being carried out. Why is poetry so different. Why the fear of even trying to work together, or of taking collaboration seriously — as opposed to writing one-offs while drunk or as a prelude to making out? (I do not speak from personal experience in this regard, mind you.)
Do you think it comes down to temperament for most poets? Do you think it’s simply something that’s fallen out of fashion? Could it have something to do with ambition, which you’ve said in other interviews is one of the two most important things a poet should possess besides talent?
These are great questions with more answers than I could summon. I think, for starters, that, yes, it has to do with temperament. And: the nature of the art form. It’s not just romantic to think of the artist scribbling away; it’s also a matter of practicality. A poet, each poet, has just one take on the language. Compare a line of blank verse by Wallace Stevens to a line of blank verse by Robert Frost, and you will hear two distinctly different sounds. Pound and Eliot — who worked together closely — sound nothing like each other. Every time a poet takes the suggestion of an editor, that’s a collaboration. But, at heart, the solitary writer is something a reader expects — a solitary imagination, a solitary sense of meaning and sense of sound. A sole sense.
Same for novels. Same for drama. (I don’t think it’s a fair comparison between performance and composition — one is interpretive, the other generative.)
This is not to negate collaborative work by poets. By all means, collaborate! But one of the things, in my view, that we look for in assessing the overall trajectory of a poet’s career in writing is the imprint of the mind of the poet. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were dear, close friends. Their letters — which are about to be published in full and which Poetry Northwest is running an excerpt in our next issue — are the manifestation of their literary and private collaboration. But, the poems … no. Both Bishop and Lowell have distinct and individuated sounds and art — and there’s just no way that they could have made a single piece together. Advised each other, yes. Edited, yes. Encouraged and challenged each other, yes. But compose together? Impossible. In the urgency of creation, in the internalized ambition to make something, a poet must work alone. That’s the job description of a poet.
This is not to disparage collaboration. Mary Oslund and I have had a couple of meetings and are beginning to read/watch each other’s previous work. I’m going to write something, she’s going to choreograph something, I’m going to respond, she’s going to respond to that, and sometime in the next year we’ll have a joint effort. Poetry and dance. For me, working with a nonliterary collaboration is daunting and exciting. For her, it’s the opposite: exciting and daunting. And, for both of us, the cross-fertilization is intended to open our generative process within our own art form. Her medium is the human body; mine is language. She’ll need dancers to x-number of dancers to perform her piece; I’ll need 26 letters to perform mine.
All that said, if collaborating between poets leads to making out, well, then … by all means.
As a classically trained flutist, I don’t agree with you about my comparison to musical performance being unfair. I see performance — both classical and jazz — as being re-creative rather than interpretive, as an invocation as opposed to an imitation. Those I studied with at the conservatory of music I attended felt the same way. That when you create music with others, you are bring forth something larger than self, you are creating another entity in a sense, one that fills the space and happens to move through sound.
Perhaps we need to define collaboration better. I’m defining it very broadly, including what you’ve pointed to here about editing being a collaboration. I think, in fact, all writing is a collaboration. As is all living, thinking and feeling.
I agree somewhat with your characterization. (I used to be married to a classical flutist, conservatory-trained, as well, so have some vicarious sense of that art. My point is a dull one: There’s composer, there’s musician(s). The solitary creation, the act of creating, begins with the former. The latter “play” it.) I think we could take collaboration to a more sedentary level, too: The other day someone handed me a fresh fig. I ate it. I’ve been thinking about it, and have started some notes for a poem called “The Fig.” Isn’t that collaboration, too? Yes, but … therefore all experience is collaborative. Gestation invites collaboration. But composition … well, for me and my methods, that happens in solitude. Though perhaps not “alone.”
You mentioned Poetry Northwest in your last answer. As the editor of that publication, I’d like to know your opinion of print publishing as opposed to online publishing of poetry. What changes, if any, have you seen in both print and online mediums for sharing poetry? What do you see as the strengths of each type of publication, and the weaknesses?
I think we’re in a period of flux regarding the publishing of poetry in magazines. There’s no argument from me that the brick and mortar magazines, little magazines, literary magazines, carry with them grand legacies and histories that we will continue to honor and support as long as people read. At the same time, online publishing will create the same kind of important “periodicals,” too, given the right combination of editor, talent and reader. We often ask ourselves whether or not we should adopt a “Slate” approach — it’s more economical, certainly, and more fluid, with multimedia that a print landscape can’t incorporate. We continue to debate it.
The one strength of print publishing is the solitude of reading it. Nothing, nothing, comes close to that in reading text on the Internet. A strength of online publishing is flexibility. The presentation is not locked into the “book” format. Otherwise, you can only hope that an editor will be a good editor — whether print only or online only.
Speaking of Slate, in a recent Slate discussion thread, Robert Pinsky stated that Poetry Northwest has been doing an outstanding job since its reincarnation. You are central to that reincarnation, having been appointed editor in 2005 after a three-year publishing hiatus. Could you describe the circumstances you came into as the publication’s new editor and how the publication has changed under your direction, both in terms of management and content?
The University of Washington was looking for ways to revive the publication but not entirely certain that it wanted to continue being the publisher. My name was thrown in the hat and after some negotiation — chiefly, agreeing to move the magazine to Portland from Seattle and establishing it as a more independent publication — I accepted the offer and was named editor in July 2005. The first issue of the New Series came out the next year.
How are we different? The original series, founded by Errol Pritchard, Carolyn Kizer and Richard Hugo in 1959 and under the exclusive editorship of David Wagoner from 1966 through 2002 was a poetry-only quarterly in an 8.5 x 11 folded, stapled, matte cover format. The New Series is a large format — think the old Rolling Stone — and includes prose and interviews. The mission of the new Poetry Northwest is to produce a nationally and internationally recognized magazine that features major poets and writers alongside unknown and emerging ones, and to curate a dialogue between poetry, the other arts and civic life. To the end of that last part we’ve had two special issues: “The Music Issue” and “The Political Issue.” Highlights of both can be read at Poetry Northwest Online. We have an upcoming issue where we’ve asked poets to write a small piece highlighting a poem they love and tell why they love it and why readers should, too.
It sounds like the new direction of the publication fosters a conversation about poetry and an appreciation for it in a way that some publications might not, which leads to my next question: What is the role of poetry in America today? Some argue that it’s more popular and accessible than ever, that it permeates our culture. Others that it’s on the wane, that the number of people writing poetry is too great to support the number of people reading it, that poetry is insulated, detached from the larger community.
As a poet, editor and poetry educator, what’s your perspective?
Poetry’s role in the United States is probably no greater or less than ever before. Most people who seriously read poetry are predisposed to anyway. Poets — and the infrastructure that supports poetry — are not great at audience-building. It’s not just poetry: The symphonies and museums and ballets and jazz and operas all have trouble, too. America is about television.
The other day I heard that 100,000 people listened to the latest podcast from Poetry magazine. That’s, without debate, more people than ever that picked up the most recent print issue of the magazine. But here’s the thing: Studies show that they’re not the same people. Meaning, those that access poetry online are not the same as the ones who read it in journals and periodicals. I have no idea why that’s so — but it’s probably self-evident to someone more internet-wired and more literary journal-wired than I am.
The thing about so many people writing poetry, is that it’s always been like that. As much as poetry is a plaything for elitists, it’s a guild art, a craft art, an art for amateurs. Anyone who uses a language believes he can write a poem in that language. And anyone who wants to say something with a heightened sense of meaning will write a poem. Poetry is not insulated or detached from anything. Well, I should say that “this poem” or “that poem” isn’t insulated or detached; the Art of Poetry might be. But so what? It’s not a popular art form. It’s not mass entertainment. So what? It remains essential to human culture and human existence anyway.
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I like the conversational style here – conversations are always so much more fun to read than interviews. Thanks to both of you for taking the time.
“In the urgency of creation, in the internalized ambition to make something, a poet must work alone. That’s the job description of a poet.”
That is a job description of a poet. Probably the dominant definition in contemporary Anglo-American letters. But it is far from the only one, and it’s not hard to think of examples of literary and oral cultures where most poetry originates in collaborative or other highly social circumstances.
Here’s an interesting article on the writing relationship between Lowell and Bishop:
‘I Write Entirely for You’
Did you know that Bishop fell in love during a stopover on a freighter cruise, while being nursed through an allergic reaction to a cashew fruit?
Excellent article, Dana! I really enjoyed it.
Thanks, Kristen.
Dana, thanks to David for his candid responses and thanks to you for you for your ear, your questions that rise from listening to his answers.
David’s answers bring up many interesting points. He states that the poets provides “something a reader expects — a solitary imagination, a solitary sense of meaning and sense of sound. A sole sense.” And I wonder if this is true. He reinforces the idea in his discussion of print versus online publication, that “the one strength of print publishing is the solitude of reading it.” I wonder about that, too. I wonder if the value placed on solitude is not misplaced. If the power of this conception of the poet and the literary magazine isn’t rooted in nostalgia. A longing by a very small part of the population for romantic ideals that never in truth existed in reality. Certainly there would be no Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as we know them without their intercourse, whether or not we can “prove” they ever wrote together. If this were not true, we would not see the interest in their correspondence. I think this solitude does not exist in reality. Collaboration of one kind or another is always happening. If we discount writers writing together, we do so out of fear of losing our “value” as objects. We fear losing what we have to sell — that is, our labor.
If our commodity is not “pure,” if it is adulterated by the labor of others, we lose the focal point of our ambition and we, as both producer and product are lost.
As a side note, I find it interesting that we share the status of being both producer and product with the prostitute. This lends a whole new perspective on Dana and Jacob’s poetry brothel project!
A couple things sparked in my mind while reading this interview.
If one thinks about it, most if not all poetry is collaborative — in that the poet receives input from others he’s read, watched and heard. The poet then ‘works’ with this input, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously — and incorporates it into the creative writing process.
The collaboration I describe is not proactive, but rather reactive — but at its essence, I feel it still qualifies as collaboration. Damn few, if any poets, exist in a vacuum — without interaction with the world and its peoples. Therefore, they are influenced by others, and work with this influence as a part of their writing — they ‘collaborate’ in this way.
I agree with David’s point that America is about television, although I would say that America is about multi-media — moving images, sound, music, dialog, special effects. That is essentially television/movies/videos — things that actively project toward us to engage our attention, and wrap us in their essence.
I feel strongly that the leading-edge future of poetry is multimedia. The difference being that the images need to support and elevate the featured verse (dialog) without detracting, as opposed the dialog supporting the dominant images.
These are just a couple random thoughts that arose in the reading of this engaging interview. Well done Dana.
Nathan, thanks for bringing up that point about what the reader expects. This goes back to Dave’s point about Anglo-American letters defining poetry as primarily a solitary endeavor. It’s interesting to see how a reader’s reaction to a poem can change simply by knowing whether it was authored by one person or more than one person. You and I have seen that shift in people firsthand. Those who might otherwise love a poem are thrown by the notion that more than one person wrote it — that it contains the imprint of more than one mind.
I would also like to speak to the idea that you can’t see an individual’s imprint if they write collaboratively. Perhaps not if they exclusively write collaboratively — which is in my book still a valid way to write if that’s what someone is drawn to do. But if a poet combines collaborative and individual writing, I actually think you can begin to see the individual imprints more clearly — both in the individually authored and collaborative authored work. Take our writing, for example. I believe we’ve both been able to heighten what we do when we write alone since we started writing together. I believe you can look at our collaborative work and, for the most part, see who contributed what and who was pushing the piece in this or that direction. Certainly there’s some blending, but there’s still distinction.
It’s like a ballet. You don’t lost sight of the individual dancers even when they are dancing together.
Nice point about the poet as both producer and product. That makes me think of Walter Benjamin, who sees the function of poetry in a very different way than the way we tend to talk about it today. When faced with a question about individual or collective authorship, I bet he’d say that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is if the poetry struggles, if it actively intervenes in society.
Rob, very good points about collaboration being at the core of how poets work. I think you and David are on the same page. He acknowledges the generative role of collaboration. As he says, he gets input from all over the place, but when it comes down to the actual writing, he does that in solitude.
We do like our special effects, don’t we. Too bad we can’t get some computer-generated graphics into poems. Then we’d be all set!
[...] Read Dana Guthrie Martin’s conversation with poet and Poetry Northwest editor, David Biespiel, here. [...]
Yes, Dana, and to what extent does society intervene in poetry? Technology has this potential to empower writers across the board, to spread authority out to be shared by many. We see this online as people self publish and start periodicals themselves. In “The Author as Producer” Benjamin talks about a cultural climate in which each person is author, photographer, publisher. There is a breakdown in the traditional division of labor.
But there’s another great Benjamin essay called “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in which he talks about the simultaneous mass distribution of images and the loss of the orginal works’ “aura.”
Isn’t this what we talk about when we talk about the book or the little magazine with such reverence? The book, the print journal, they share an aura that is disintegrating right in front of us. Even when we talk about the “author” aren’t we having the same discussion? One in which reverence is compensating for a slow loss that we know we can’t stop? I think we can approach this in various ways, one is essentially conservative in which we lament the loss of an original Edenic state. Another way is to see this degradation of the aura, as a potentially revolutionary moment, one that requires us to change our perception of traditional categories.
As Benjamin puts it , “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. …the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”
This is what faces us — the potential for an art that is by its very form engaged with the world around it, shaping our perceptions to practice this engagement.
Nathan, I love it when we have these semi-intense discussions that are tucked away in the comments sections of our sites, like Easter eggs hidden in video games.
What concerns me about Benjamin — and what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about — is his stance that writing and art should serve political purposes and only political purposes. Of course, this stems from his own politics. But as I was reading “The Author as Producer,” I couldn’t help but feel my own poetry wouldn’t be something Benjamin would support, since it’s “personal” and not overtly political in a strict sense. And I do think there’s a role for poetry beyond a strictly political one.
What are your thoughts about that? Am I reading him incorrectly?
Dana you always have the best discussions here.
As usual you get right to the key question: should poetry be overtly political? This is the very problem Benjamin addresses in the beginning of his essay when he says something like this: (I’m paraphrasing) On one hand you have the leftist poets dedicating their work to political ends and on the other you have the poet who declares that his or her work is concerned only with quality.
Benjamin’s answer to this is that this formulation of the problem is off the mark. The revolutionary potential of a work is not to be found in its “atttitude” toward the society of its time but in its “literary technique,” in its function in the “literary relations of production of its time.” In other words
Does a work change perception? Does it offer some sense of alienation from the status quo? Or does it reinforce the dominant ideas of its time? Certainly your work changes perception and takes us out of our everyday trance Dana.
It’s important to remember that the very way in which we ask these questions is determined by our historical context. We’re not talking about eternal truths here (because there’s no such thing).
It’s interesting to note that of the material conditions of literary production the best apparatus will do two things: encourage authors to produce in news ways and turn “consumers” into “producers — that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.”
This is what we’re experiencing, the breaking down of traditional literary categories. It’s up to us to make this break down live up to its potential.
Nathan, you said that Benjamin does not see the potential of a work in its attitude toward the society of its time (paragraph two), but that seems to be precisely what he is arguing — as well as what you go on to argue later in your comment.
I read Benjamin’s work and my take-away is that there has to be craft in art, yes, but also a stance against the norms of the capitalistic society, one that — as you say — breaks us out of our trance. The sole reason Benjamin cites for breaking the trance is to cast light on class struggles. As a Marxist, of course, class struggles are his focus — his “thang.”
Again, I find myself agreeing with him to some degree but disagreeing as well. Class struggles are not the only struggles. Others in which art can and has played a strong role in terms of shaping society include struggles related to race, gender, and sexual orientation and identity.
Sorry about the confusion in my response. I think it’s my confusion more than Benjamin’s. He’s arguing that we shouldn’t have a litmus test for works of art to determine the amount of political tendency that they espouse. Instead we should look at how works function. So, not so much what they say as what they do.
What are they participating in? What is this revolutionary momentum they can be part of? One example is that we are “in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force.”
His example is the newspaper but it’s really as if he’s looking into the future and talking about the internet. He talks about the breakdown of the “specialization” of authorship, of “the literarization of the conditions of living” that turns readers into collaborators instead of passive audiences.
Doesn’t this sound like an address to all the high art critics of internet publishing: “it is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word…that its salvation is being prepared”?
So does a work participate in this democratization of the word or does it stand above the “masses” as some rarified object to be enjoyed by a few elite? So you can have a work whose attitude is in league with the interests of the oppressed but whose existence will never be known by all but a few connoisseurs.
One might argue that this is the place of all poetry in our culture but when we take poetry into the community; when we write from where we are, from the conditions of our lives; when we use technology to take our work into the world (however far that may be); we are participating in the potential of our art.
Oh, I forgot to answer your last point. I would never discount these struggles you mention. These struggles continue in their intention and their reality to improve the lives of everyone.
I would only argue that ultimately there can be no real freedom without fixing the material conditions in which we live. The economic is, “in the last instance” the key factor.
[...] Poetry Northwest, about a lot of poetry things: collaboration, the state of poetry and publishing. Here. Go read it. It’s [...]
[...] Panelists David Biespiel’s books of poetry include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars and Wild Civility. A new book of poems, The Book of Men and Women, is due out in this year. Among his honors are a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a Lannan Fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature. He currently divides his teaching among several universities and is founding director and writer-in-residence of The Attic in Portland, Ore. He was named editor of Poetry Northwest in 2005. (Also, check out my recent interview with David here.) [...]
thanks to everyone for there insight and to dana and david for the delightful conversation.
i write words in solitude. however, i think we all agree that without the collaboration and inspiration of our environment, other poets, and people that give away figs, our work and our art would suffer if not be completely obsolete.
secondly, i believe that film or multi-media contains the POTENTIAL of being the ultimate art form… if such a thing could exist. the potential is a seamless coming together of visual art, music, and literature. this is hardly being fulfilled but there are strides being made that we should be aware of. i would encourage everyone to watch a short film by portland based poet zachary schomburg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc78O89ozck
[...] finishing the interview below I would highly recommend you also check out his recent interview with Dana Guthrie Martin on her excellent blog My Gorgeous [...]