The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Charles Bernstein "An Interview with David Antin"

The following is taken from a conversation between Charles Bernstein and David Antin that took place by way of E-mail over a period of several months in late 1999 and early 2000. This excerpt comprises roughly half of the conversation, the entirety of which will be published as a special edition by Granary Books.

Charles Bernstein: Last year, I had the opportunity to tour Brooklyn Technical High School with my daughter Emma, who was just going into ninth grade. I was enormously impressed with the place: it reminded me of Bronx Science, where I went to high school, but was far more imposing and I would say more severe, or anyway focussed, directed. It seemed a place that would really turn out engineers, technicians, and scientists, more than the lawyers and doctors that Science seemed to produce in my day. Yet Brooklyn Tech graduated two of my favorite wandering poets, you and Nick Piombino. I wonder if you could say how you came to go to Brooklyn Tech?

David Antin: Growing up in Brooklyn in the forties and following the war in the papers and on the radio every day, tracing the paths of my cousins, one a bomber pilot whose military career took him through bases in North Africa and Italy, the other an engineer who wound up at the Remagen Bridge, and my next door neighbor, who survived Okinawa, the world looked very different to us then. Because there was always the war until suddenly it wasn’t. And I had to pick a high school. There were only three—Bronx Science—that was too far away—Stuyvesant and Tech. Tech was closer, even though it was a train ride away, and somehow more tangible. I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton. I had read all about his optical discoveries and I had managed to figure out how the steam engine worked from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I had played around with radios and dynamos and I figured I’d have to study engineering to invent anything electrical or mechanical. The great thing was they had all those shopsa foundry, sheet metal shops, machine shops. I loved making tool bits in the machine shop and working on the bench lathe. They also had a year-long course called Industrial Processes that taught us how everything that was manufactured up to then was made. And we had to make drawings of open-hearth furnaces and Bessemer converters. And everything in the world around me became more tangible and solid. So there I was, taking the F-train every morning, that started underground and came out into the light at 7th Avenue, where it turned into an elevated and stayed above ground till Smith-9th Street, where I always changed for the GG, even in bad weather, although I could have changed at Carroll Street or Bergen, where it was back underground. Because from the Smith-9th station that was poised high over the Gowanus Canal, I could look out to the Statue of Liberty. In spite of everything that’s happened in America since the end of that war, I’ve always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty. The great green statue appearing at the center of the train trip out of my childhood neighborhood, that started in the dark and came out into the light, taking me to the first school I had ever chosen, became the mark of my personal liberation—from life with my mother, from the mythology of childhood and family and even the war—liberation from everything but a future I was going to be free to discover or invent.

CB: I want to get back to invention in a minute, but before that I want to know about what you received. What was the family mythology? What were your parents’ designs for you? And what were their designs for themselves—their backgrounds and aspirations, their realities and their destinies. In other words: some family history.

DA: Most of that material is scattered throughout my earlier talk pieces. But to simplify—You have to understand, the world I entered into was the 1930s. My family were European émigrés. They came to this country at the beginning of the century and they had just gotten themselves situated, when there was a Great War. Then came a short period of flush times that went bust, and I arrived just at the beginning of the Great Depression. After which there was an even Bigger War. Nobody had any designs or expectations—only hopes for survival.

My father died when I was two. He got a strep throat before there was penicillin or sulfa. That was his second mistake. His first was marrying my mother, who was apparently quite beautiful, but so what. My mother was a social climber heading downward. She started with a high-school education, a high degree of literacy and a Pennsylvania accent acquired by arriving in Scranton at age seven. In those days the family had expectations. In the twenties they were successful business people and figured she would go to college. They figured wrong. She took a job as a bookkeeper in the family business, spent her money on looking pretty and married my father as soon as she could. When he died a couple of years later, she turned into a professional widow. By the forties she was already a marginally competent examiner in the dress business. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer in Lakewood.

None of my other relatives had any expectations—either for me or for themselves. All their expectations seemed to turn out wrong. My mother’s older brother Sam was a great chess player. At the age of fourteen he held Lasker to a draw in a game he could have won. Lasker was then the national champion. Sam was fourteen. It was one of those matches where the champion takes on twenty or thirty players at one time, usually finishing off the weaker ones as quickly as possible so he has more time for the tougher ones. My uncle had the advantage, but he was only fourteen. The champion, seeing he might lose, offered him a draw. My uncle thought about it hard but accepted, and I don’t think he ever recovered from it.

He was sixteen when the U.S. entered the First World War. He was so big, people thought he was much older. Instead of going to college, he took a job in the coal mines and spent his leisure time beating up miners who called him a slacker. Her younger brother was a charming bohemian drifter—a labor organizer, a steward on cruise ships, a mountain climber. He fell off a cliff in Yosemite. Nobody paid that much attention to the girls. Three of my mother’s older sisters married. One of them, my Aunt Sarah, married my father’s older half-brother. An interesting man, he’d been a revolutionary in Russia in 1905, but became a successful dress manufacturer in the United States. A man who loved materials, wore dark tweed suits in winter and seersuckers in summer, and always wore hats to work. A judicious and generous man, he was the family arbiter. When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval. I got my first job working for him after school, and I used to practice my German with my Aunt Sarah when I lived with them. Nobody noticed when the youngest sister, a gorgeous and independent redhead, without saying a word to anyone, got herself accepted into nursing school and became a registered nurse. Nobody expected that either.

My earliest family memories were living with my grandmother and my aunts—all beautiful women—living in a great old house in Boro Park. It was the depression and everybody was poor but you’d never have known it. People kept coming from all over the world to visit, to play cards or chess and to tell stories and argue in a handful of European languages about people and facts and politics. My Aunt Bessie always took the upside. A noble white-haired widow with two grown daughers she almost never saw, she used to say she was an optimist because something good could always happen, and if it turned out bad, you didn’t have to waste your time worrying about it till it did. When her beloved husband suddenly died, she gave up her beautiful brownstone near the Navy Yard and took up a career as a dietitian. When she wasn’t working, she’d take the Culver Line down to Coney Island, find a seat on one of the benches on the boardwalk and take pleasure in simply breathing in the clear salty air. My Aunt Bette usually took the dark view and on principle refused to suffer stupidity. Of one comfortable relative she said once as she was leaving, "We have a perfect relationship. She thinks I’m a horse and I think she’s a cow." And my grandmother presided over the entire household in a droll, mischievous manner. This is the household I most remember. It was noisy, cheerful, and gay, and a world away from the austere prison of living with my mother, which happened only once in a while. And I was on my own from the age of sixteen anyway.

CB: Of course, I know well that you have told some stories about this before—but a story is always a little bit different every time you tell it, no? Speaking of stories, what was the oral culture—the telling culture—like in your immediate environment when you grew up? You speak of being surrounded by stories at your grandmother’s house. Was it books or talk that made the most impact on you? Or the arguing in different languages? I’m interested in the difference among argument and conversation and stories, but also the fact that you were surrounded by languages other than English and how this affected your approaches to English, to "the American," as the French say, in your writing. And indeed how writing, how books, came into play for you.

DA: Yeah, stories are different every time you tell them—because they allow so many possible narratives. For years I’ve been thinking of stories and narratives as two related but different things—the inside and the outside of the human engagement with transformation. For me, story’s the shell, a kind of logical structure, a sequence of events and parts of events that shape a significant transformation, while a narrative is the core, the representation of a desiring subject, somebody’s confrontation with a significant transformation that he or she works to bring about or avoid. So any time you tell a story from a different point of view, you get a different narrative. The same events look different because their parts look different and combine differently. So the events are also different, and they become a new story that may have the same beginning and ending or different ones, or no ending and no real beginning. But you want to know about my experience, not my theory.

The people I grew up with told stories almost all the time, and the stories always seemed to go together with arguments, in which they functioned as examples, evidence and counterevidence, testimony, mostly from experience—direct or overheard—though they could have been read about in a newspaper or a book or maybe only imagined, or dreamed—but always internalized in the language and experience of the speaker. They also functioned as models, metaphors, parables, or as paradoxes, as jokes that exploded other arguments—or their own. But they always functioned. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimlet has an essay somewhere on Jewish storytelling, where she talks about the way stories usually seem to be woven into discourse to such an extent that in Yiddish speaking circles, when the story’s function becomes unclear, the speaker is usually confronted with the question, "Nu, voss i de sof?" (So, what’s the point?) And while the stories I heard were told in lots of other languages and many of them may have been told for the sheer hell of it, the artistry of the telling always left you with a strong sense of their consequentiality and meaning.

Which raises the question of language. When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience. Reading Elias Canetti’s "History of a Youth," which I happened to read in French because it was lent to me by my friend, the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, though it was written in German, I remember Canetti wondering over the fact that he remembered every frightening detail of the stories of vampires and werewolves that his little Bulgarian girl playmates terrified themselves with. But he remembered them in German not Bulgarian, which he had forgotten completely. So I hardly ever remember what language I first heard a story in. But I started reading pretty early. And that introduced the kind of opacity of language you experience when you see a word and don’t know how to pronounce it or what it means. Looking at newspapers, when I was about four, the Sunday editions were illustrated with brown photographs and I would try to figure out the captions, trying to sound out words like negotiations or typhoon. My mother taught me some spelling. Then she bought a candy store in Astoria with my Uncle Irving, and I really learned to read from comic books. "Ach, you kicked me in the stomach!" When I was seven, I was once again living with my mother—this time in the attic apartment of an old wood-frame house in Kensington on the block where my Uncle Dave and my Aunt Sarah shared a solid, two-family, brick house with his business partner. We rented the attic apartment from two Kentuckians, Jeanie and Lucille, who were married to a pair of truck drivers. When the guys were home and weren’t fighting with their wives, they’d be listening to country music. So there was radio again. The guys weren’t much for storytelling, but they talked lots of baseball over beer, and sometime I would sit with them and listen to Red Barber broadcast Dodger games. My mother always had a few books around, remnants of some earlier reading. Point Counter Point, The Sound and the Fury, and Immortal Marriage—Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Atherton. I was seven or eight and I read them all, but the one that got to me was Immortal Marriage. I don’t know how I read it, because I never paid any attention to the central romance of Pericles and Aspasia. But the Greeks, the Agora, Pericles’ philosophical court, Anaxagoras, Socrates and Alcibiades and the image of the Parthenon and Phidias’ gold and ivory statue of Athena, that’s what got me. On the strength of the book I snuck into the adult section of the local library to read the poems of Pindar. But they were disappointing.

CB: I often get a sense of poetry being disappointing to you, that the failure of poetry to do something it could be doing or doing better was a kind of inspiration for writing poetry (well you know that’s my current theory, speaking of theories, and I do see you as a particularly good model for it). What do you or did you think poetry should be doing? Were you looking to make improvements? Then I also want to ask whether you consider your early work as a kind of invention or innovation (it certainly looks that way to me). But I know you wrote poetry before the work that you collected in definitions in 1967, and I suppose there is a big narrative bridge that you may want to make from Brooklyn Tech in the forties to CCNY in the fifties to the earliest work I know of yours from the late sixties.

DA: I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It was somewhere in the middle of high school. The English classes we took at Tech were in some ways very good, but the poems they showed us, especially in early high school, were things like Alfred Noyes’s "The Highwayman" with lines like "the road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor" or "the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas." It’s the only English poem I know with an Aztec horse. The hooves go "Tlot, Tlot!" There was Kipling’s supremely silly "Gunga Din," there were poems by the two Benets, by Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, bowdlerized Emily Dickinson, and Nathalia Crane’s "I’m in love with the janitor’s boy / and the janitor’s boy loves me." Confronted by this trivia, it’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

But I also had a memory of driving one summer day with my Uncle Julius, my father’s twin brother, up toward his family’s bungalow on Sackett Lake; and as we were cruising through the green summer landscape, he suddenly burst into this poem by Pushkin, producing a cascade of cadenced Russian I barely understood that brought tears to his eyes. For just a moment. Then he corrected himself, laughed and said "What nonsense!" Maybe I remembered this. Maybe I heard of it somewhere else, but I thought somewhere there must be something called modern poetry that meant something to us living now at the end of the Second World War. So I started to look.

I found an anthology by Conrad Aiken. It had a lot of imagist stuff—John Gould Fletcher’s "Symphonies," some early Pound. There was one very short poem by Pound with a Greek title—the one that begins with a bleak wind and gray waters. Somehow it got to me—the Greek title, maybe because of Gertrude Atherton, or maybe its severity. It felt like New York in winter. It felt modern. Its cadences were nothing like the tiresome metrics of Noyes or Millay, but it also felt old, and I thought I could try to bring it up to date. So I did. With the confidence of a sixteen-year-old, I composed a "poem in a minor key," an image piece that got in the bleak wind, the gray sky. I replaced Pound’s cliffs with a deserted el, left out the gods and the underworld, and I thought it was okay but a little too descriptive for my taste. So thinking of Fletcher, I did some poems that were more abstract or maybe more concrete—verbal toccatas or fantasias without any apparent subject matter. But they didn’t seem to go anywhere.

The Tech library was helpful. I discovered Three Lives and was blown away by the flattened blues music of "Melanctha." These were stories, but it never occurred that these were not poetry. So from there on, it got easier. I found the Dubliners in the same library, but I had to buy Ulysses. I found Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1935 in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village. I had an Irish drinking buddy and we spent late night hours in Fourth Avenue bars fantasizing making a movie out of Finnegans Wake.

By the time I got to City College, I learned that the literary world was in a conservative mode. Poets were supposed to be picking up the meters again. Novelists were writing novels of manners. I wasn’t interested. I met Jerry Rothenberg and we were both struggling to find a way out, but it was 1950 or so and it was not a good time as we saw it. We listened to jazz. It was the age of McCarthy. The Korean War was on. Jerry got drafted and went off to Germany to write for Stars and Stripes. I met a kid painter, Gene Kates; he introduced me to Heidegger, to abstract expressionism, took me downtown to people’s studios. I was into physiological psychology, reading Norbert Weiner on negative feedback systems, Cannon on the Wisdom of the Body. Hebb on neural functioning. Kurt Goldstein. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Hölderlin. Anything but Richard Wilbur or Delmore Schwartz. Still, I edited the school’s literary magazine and wrote mostly stories, looking back to Stein, and through her, further back—to Flaubert. Hearing the sound of the great French sentences in my head, I started working under the spell of the Trois Contes. Each word worked into place as in a kind of mosaic. It was a disaster. I shifted gears, wrote a faux folktale, drawing on an imagined Yiddish tradition.

Suddenly I was graduated, after over five years and three majors at City College. I got a job with a scientific translation outfit, where I edited the translation of the Soviet Journal of Automation. My faux folktale got published in a Jewish magazine. I wrote a Flaubertian parable set in Brooklyn. I got a rejection slip with an apology from the editor of Esquire, who said the publisher wouldn’t let them print it because it was too dark. A couple of years and ten rejections later, it got published by John Crowe Ransom in the Kenyon Review after he cut out the word Sex, describing the behavior of a pair of tropical fish. Jerry had come back from the army and was translating Eric Kaestner. We helped found the Chelsea Review with Ursule Molinaro and Venable Herndon and Robert Kelly, a poet and friend I had known from City College. Jerry started putting out Poems from the Floating World and was translating postwar German poetry and I was looking back at Breton, Apollinaire, and Cendrars. I was also translating books on physics and mathematics for Dover Press. Jerry started Hawk’s Well Press and the two of us translated Martin Buber’s Tales of Angels Spirits and Demons. We met Paul Blackburn, who dragged us around to every poetry reading in sight. Bob and Joby Kelly started Trobar with the poet and translator George Economou.

It was within this space that Jerry came up with the notion of a "deep image" poetry, out of a certain sense, I think, that an image core had to be at the center of a truly exploratory expressive poetry. About as soon as he came up with the term—around 1960—almost everybody we knew had some disagreement with it, or parts of it. I had a Wittgensteinian distrust of the word deep, though I could imagine a system of communicative or expressive gestures relying on the metonymic function of images to take a poem around the systematized clichés of the language. Bob Kelly, following what seemed a kind of Olson-like argument, thought the emphasis on image understated the issues of musicality and the line. Rochelle Owens hated it. Jackson Mac Low claimed not to understand it. Armand Schwerner had his doubts about it. Only Diane Wakoski seemed more or less content with it. But the one thing that should have told us to kill the term was that Robert Bly was enthused by it. His promotion of it in his magazines, the Sixties and the Seventies, eventually eviscerated any intellectual significance it had. But I didn’t pay so much attention to all this, because I was working on a novel. Ever since the Kenyon Review published my much-rejected story, I’d been getting letters from publishers wanting to get a first crack at my novel. What novel? Everybody supposed then that if you wrote a short story, you were working on a novel. Elly and I moved out of the city to North Branch, a small town in the western corner of Sullivan County, so that I could write my novel and she could work at her paintings—she was making paintings then—in quiet. But I was a little too
Steinian—or too Flaubertian—to write a novel, and she didn’t need quiet, she needed the art scene.

So back we came to the city. I’d ditched the novel and was writing poems again. With a difference. When we first came back to the city around September of 1963, we were staying in a house in a corner of the Bronx not far from the Whitestone Bridge that we were subletting from a dentist who was traveling in Asia collecting Buddhist art, and the local library was specially rich in philosophical Catholic works and books on business. So in the afternoons, when I wasn’t translating, I’d go down to the library past the teenagers who were busy "beatling" every adult who walked by—the Beatles were about to come to America then—to get in several hours of reading before Elly finished painting. Reading through Simone Weil’s journals and an insurance manual, there were lots of sentences whose meaning I didn’t really understand. They weren’t unusually difficult sentences. They often contained words that were cultural commonplaces or clichés, ordinary abstract terms that everybody seems to understand. "Loss." "Value." "Power." But as I looked at them I found out I didn’t understand them at all. So I started to write them down, thinking that by writing them down, I could concentrate on them, ask them questions and find out what meanings they might conceal. And I saw that my not-understanding could be a way to go on. And as I went on with this writing down I didn’t think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn’t understand. The first part of "definitions for mendy" with its questions about "loss" and "value" and "power" and "brightness" were written this way and temporarily stopped on the day Jack Kennedy was killed in the fall of 1963. My two first books—definitions and Code of Flag Behavior—were written this way, bringing not-understanding as a set of questions to puzzling commonplaces and clichés—linguistic and cultural acceptances of every kind. So I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stub born and hard-won lack of understanding. Of course my lack of understanding kept expanding. To the image of personal knowledge represented by autobiography, to the nature of the represention of human experiential knowledge in the novels of "novel poem," to the meaning of meditation in an environment of power and violence provided by the war in Vietnam in "the separation meditations." Finally this extended to my attack on the idea of "understanding" altogether in "tuning." Though the "talk pieces" are obviously very different in certain ways from the earlier poems through "The November Exercises."

CB: I read in the paper just a few days ago that Lita Hornick died last weekend. And of course Kulchur published your 1972 book Talking, which marked your second break with previous work. Certainly, the poems from 1963-1973 gave you less opportunity for the kind of discursive and philosophical writing in your essays; the poems and the essays remained quite distinct genres. But with the talks, your poems and essays came into close proximity, if not identity. Talking—the practice and the book—was a more expansive way to work allowing you to go wherever you wanted to go and say whatever you wanted to say, which was perhaps not the case with the earlier poems. But Talking also suggests a more decisive break from most ideas about the form of poetry. Why did you give up the way you had been working around 1971?

DA: There were two reasons that I remember. One was my experience of poetry readings. I remember giving a reading at SUNY-Binghamton around that time, and I was there to read these "process poems." And I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker. But when I got to the reading all the work was done, and I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I’d already written. And I didn’t want to be an actor. I didn’t want to illustrate the way I had worked. I wanted to work. At being a poet. In the present. So at this reading I started revising poems while I was reading them. Changing poems that were already written. It was a disaster. I tried to invent a poem, my kind of poem—an interrogation of a sort. I started thinking out loud and that was somewhat better. I was committed to a poetry of thinking—not of thought but of thinking. And now it seemed possible.But my way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn’t follow a continuous path. When I come up against an obstacle, some kind of resistance, I often find myself looking for some concrete example—a story that could throw light on it or interfere with it, kick it into a different space. So I found myself telling stories or, to use my term, constructing narratives, as part of my thinking. I had resorted to narrative before, my kind of fragmented narrative—in my comically titled "autobiography" back in 1967, which was probably closer to the "Aztec Definitions" that Jerome and I published in some/thing back in 1965 than to conventional stories. So the two notions—of improvisation, of doing it there, thinking while talking, and thinking by any means I could, which meant thinking by telling—stories—came to me at pretty much the same time.

CB: You didn’t want to be an actor, you wanted to act. And yet in grounding your work in performance you are brought inevitably into some relation to the performing arts, to theater. But I take the essential part of this move is related to the unscripted or improvised nature of the performance. There is certainly some connection here with the happenings and related performance art: art coming off the walls into an unplanned action. And yet saying that, I am struck more by dissimilarities than by the similarities. The apparently chaotic or dadaistic quality to happenings is not reflected in your talks. The visual dimension is kept to a minimum: if you were not an actor you wouldn’t wear makeup or costumes or have sets. In some ways the talks most suggest the stand-up comic; Lenny Bruce’s late talk pieces (as I’ve noted elsewhere) in terms of their extended improvisations. In other ways, I think especially of the poet’s talk and the interest there in thinking out loud. And in still other ways, I think of the Socratic tradition of philosophy as a form of thinking out loud rather than written compositionand there are still some philosophers who continue to work that way, who don’t write essays or articles but who do their philosophy out loud, either in monologue or dialogue (Wittgenstein’s Cambridge talks would be a good example but there are many others). Of course, I am not even mentioning in any detail the unscripted "speech"—whether political or—let’s say—civic? And finally, there is the sermon, and many kinds of those. How do you see your talks in relation to these related types of performance?

DA: Back around the spring or summer of 1971, I got a call from Dore Ashton inviting me to be part of a series of talks she was organizing for a group of philosophers, historians, and critics at Cooper Union. It sounded interesting so I agreed. "What’s the title of your piece?" she asked. Without having a minute to think, I said,"The Metaphysics of Expectation," and hearing the silence on the other end of line, I added, ". . . or the Real Meaning of Genre." "Great," she said and gave me a date in December. I had given myself a title that left me a lot of working space. But how to prepare for this talk. I figured I would prepare a variety of related issues, and I began researching and taking notes . . . on the diagnosis of disease, on the history of molecular theory, on a particular turn in nineteenth-century French painting—from Manet to Monet—on contemporary sculpture in relation to performance. And I took all these notes on little index cards that I planned to bring with me to use for the talk. When December came around and I got to Cooper Union, they put me in one of those theater-like lecture halls in back of a stone-topped table. I felt like I was back at Brooklyn Tech. All I needed was a glass retort and Bunsen burner. I put my tape recorder on the table, I looked up at the audience and started to speak. I forgot about my index cards and talked for about ninety minutes and took questions for about another thirty. The talk seemed to work, but the transcription of the tape took forever, and the whole thing was so long I never sent Dore a text, and she had to publish the volume without me. This piece was a turning point. I wasn’t thinking of poetry, I was thinking of giving myself more room, freeing my mind to work in a wider space than the critical essays at whose boundaries I was already pushing. But it took a second piece at Pomona College to let me see what I was doing. Guy Williams had read the rather violent critical essay I had written about the LA County’s "Art and Technology" show and invited me to talk at Pomona, where I think he was running the art department. I agreed. But at Cooper Union I knew I’d be talking to the art world and maybe some of the poetry world, and I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know. So I arranged to go up there early, do some studio visits, and generally hang out with them during the afternoon. That evening I did the talk and the next morning Elly, who had come up with me, suggested I play the tape on the drive home. So on the long drive from Pomona to Solana Beach on old 395 we listened to the tape. "That’s a poem," Elly said. And she was right.

I hadn’t been consciously aware of it myself, but what I’d apparently been doing was working to bring together my critical thinking and my poetry into a kind of blend that took place on the ground of improvisation. "talking at pomona" got published in 1972 in my Kulchur book Talking, along with the written improvisation "November Exercises," and the two collaborative but controlled and taped improvisations, "three musics for two voices" and "the london march," that I completed in 1968. I played both tape pieces at St. Mark’s that year, but I still hadn’t put my way of working into action "live" in front of a "poetry" audience. But in the spring of 1973 Kathy Fraser invited me to give a joint poetry reading with Jerome at the San Francisco Poetry Center. This time I told Elly I wasn’t going to bring any of my books with me to read from. The place was filled with poets and Jerry led off with a great reading. Then I went up there without any poems to read and asked the question "what am i doing here" and proposed to answer my own question by talking. The talk was successful enough in my terms. But it seemed to make everybody nervous, because parts of the talk engaged directly with George Oppen and Robert Duncan, who were in the audience; and, because there was no telling what I might say, everybody else seemed worried about what I might say about them. It’s hard being a hostage in somebody else’s mouth—or a character in somebody else’s novel.

So this is roughly how the talks started—but it’s not the whole story. "The November Exercises" was a kind of improvisatory composition with found material somewhat like "the separation meditations"—but the mode of composition and quickness of the choices of both emphasized improvisation in private for me. "three musics for two voices" started as a commissioned work. I was a curator at the I.C.A. in Boston in 1967, and when I went to California in 1968, Sue Thurman, the director, asked me to do some new kind of recording for gallery visitors to listen to when they came into the exhibition hall. I started working on it, but it very quickly radicalized far away from its original intention. Sue Thurman left the I.C.A. And Dan Graham asked me to do a piece for the "Information Theory" issue of Aspen Magazine he was editing. The piece I finally did was the controlled improvisation with Eleanor as the second actor—"three musics for two voices"—and it was originally published in that issue of Aspen in a little pamphlet designed by George Maciunas to look like a Fluxus score on pages about 1.5 inches high and 6 inches long. "the london march" was a second "theatrical" dialogue between Elly and me that we did in one unedited shot with a news radio background. So those two were audio performances accomplished through improvisation. And these were not my first entries into some form of theater. During the period of antiwar protests in 1967, Bob Nichols organized a long reading in a Methodist church not far from Judson and asked me to read from one of the pieces in definitions. I designed a special performance in which I was to read the "pain" section of "the black plague"—the Wittgenstein section—but in a peculiar setting. I recorded two AM radio collages putting one on each channel of my old reel-to-reel stereo recorder and enlisted Elly to play randomly with the volume controls and the switching while I was reading, alternately overriding my meditation on pain and letting fragments of it through. While I was reading and Elly was cutting into my reading, I had intended to tear apart a wooden chair with my bare hands, breaking it down to the smallest parts. Bob vetoed the chair breaking, but got me to perform the piece twice to punctuate the other readings. Elly did a great job with the tape recorder, and the piece in some way was a performance transformation of some of the issues of my procedural poems, in that my speech—already distanced through the screen of Wittgenstein screened through Anscombe—was situated in rising and falling tides of noise—talk shows, news fragments, d.j. chatter, commercials, Spanish-language baseball broadcasts. That piece should throw some light on my acceptance of agency in the procedural poems of Code, Meditations, and Talking. In a way I suppose I was dramatizing our human situation by situating "myself as poet" in a textual sea filled with the sea wrack of language and the flotsam and jetsam of wrecked human intentions.

But in going this long narrative way around your questions about situating my talk pieces, I think the mix of backgrounds can give you some idea of the variety of impulses leading to the work and the way in which it came about. Still, I would like to add a cautionary note on your comment about the chaos of Happenings. I didn’t see Happenings as chaotic. Almost every Happening I saw or took part in was carefully scripted. There is certainly in the sixties work a kind of baroque painterly quality to the surfaces. But Robert Whitman’s work, Ken Dewey’s, Allan Kaprow’s work in particular, were tightly scripted. Allan’s performers usually received very precise instructions and had specific jobs to carry out. The chaotic appearance resulted from the collision of many precise tasks. Allan’s later work is absolutely pristine. And in the clarity of his work, he’s somewhat typical of Fluxus, and has a lot in common, in this sense, with George Brecht. And while I don’t script and I don’t use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision—precision of mind—gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht. And this taste for precision, not of surface, but of underlying procedure, is what brings me closer to the philosophical tradition—from Wittgenstein to Socrates. And in some way to Emerson, who belongs in that tradition as well. My connections to performers like Lenny Bruce are a little more oblique. First I never accepted for myself the genre of "entertainment." And Bruce’s beginnings are situated at a particular moment within that arena. He gradually pushes its envelope to the breaking point, but there is always at least the ghost of that genre haunting him in the memory of the audience that came to hear him. I always had the feeling I should put up a sign over the entrance to any of my performances "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" because I don’t feel obligated to "entertain"—though I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I’m doing. But I also don’t give a damn if half the audience walks out. This separates me not only from Bruce, but from other entertainers like Spaulding Gray or Garrison Keillor, all of whom I enjoy. I’m standing up on my feet thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I’m happy to see them go.

CB: By "chaotic" I really meant busy or multiplicitous, not unstructured: lots of stuff going on, lots of, as you say, scripted action and its attendant distraction, all of which made these events so particular and memorable. In the case of the talk pieces, as they evolved, though, we have a much more minimal direction (to use another loaded term), a person standing up alone in street clothes talking with modulated performance gestures (thinking in terms of vocal dynamics and rhythms and physical movements). Yet the work is hardly minimal in terms of content, quite the opposite. That is, contrasted with muchperformance art of the sixties and early seventies, including the ones of your own that you describe in such a tantalizing way (I am sorry not to have been able to see them), you are foregrounding one thing—the verbal
production—with few distractions or disruptions. In this context, I’d like to pursue your remark about "entertainment"—in an age of cultural studies I think the meaning of the distinction you are making is being eroded, so I’d welcomefurther thoughts on this. But I would also note that, in contrast to some of my favorite poetry of the time, your "talks" might well be experienced as entertaining, and I suspect that your move to storytelling is not completely divorced from the dynamics of sustainingan audience’s attention over a period of time, avoiding distraction (I won’t mention "absorption"). But it’s apparent that you are not working in the same genre as monologists such as Gray and Keillor, which is why I think of your work—but not theirs—as poetry (which is not an evaluative comment but a comment on genre). Yet I don’t know the criteria I would use to make the distinction, though I agree that it would have to do with improvisation as a way of "doing" thinking, thinking as act, as activity, in contrast to a more narrative-driven storytelling. But storytelling threads through both. So that brings me round to another comparison (I know: comparisons are the hobgoblin of the ardent conversationalist): the many "telling" traditions in analphabetic cultures. Certainly your close proximity to "ethnopoetics" would suggest that this was another frame of reference for your all-talking poetry performances.

DA: Look, the Sophists’ paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were "entertainment" in fifth-century Greece. And in that world Socrates was an "entertainer." The rhetorical performances, the show speeches of Lysias or Gorgias, were also entertainments. So were the performances of the troubadours and their jongleurs in twelfth-century Europe. And the performances of the Commedia dell Arte, and Shakespeare’s plays and Donne’s sermons or Emerson’s sermons and his lectures; and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy films are also entertainments I feel close to. Still, something has happened to the idea of entertainment that brings it into the corporate embrace of Disneyland and Time-Warner. From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us. I have nothing against seeing my work having affinities with Lenny Bruce, and Maria Damon wrote a whole essay on our relationship. But the nightclub audiences he started from were expecting diversions from the tedium of their lives as they experienced it. They went to the nightclub to get a little drunk, hear some aggressive dirty talk, have fun, and forget the business of the day. Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman’s idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman’s idea of the real. So Bruce had to insult and slug his audience back into some connection with the real. The ones who didn’t stay insulted, shook off the slugging and enjoyed hearing everybody else get insulted and slugged. In the course of this kind of performance he was able to introduce serious and broad-ranging social criticism that was only incidentally funny. He’s a special case because he pushed the aggressive stand-up comic genre beyond its "entertainment" envelope. But all you have to do is go to your local comedy club to see the generic stand-up form in all its numbed emptiness. It’s not that these are simply poor or mediocre comics. They may be funnier than Bruce, because they’re doing their job, and he wasn’t. He was inventing a new job. Now, I don’t have his audience and I don’t want it. My rejection of the idea of "entertainment" in its current form is essentially based on the audience that comes with it. I don’t want Keillor’s audience either. And when I say audience, I mean the specific group membership created by the performance form they’re involved with. I’m sure there are people who come to hear my talks who’ve listened with pleasure to Garrison Keillor. So have I. But I have no intention of engaging with the sentimental, mock-nostalgia expectations of that audience, and if they come to hear me they’ll have to reorient themselves or let me reorient them. So yes, I’m aware of my audience in a way and I do try to engage with them while I’m trying to go about my business of thinking, and I believe they help me with it by providing a focus and a sense of urgency for a process that could otherwise go on forever. But in its present form, I absolutely reject the idea of entertainment.

As for the "ethnopoetics discourse," I could hardly deny a connection to it. I was a contributing editor to Alcheringa, and I was probably what you might call "a member of the Central Committee" along with Jerome and Diane Rothenberg and Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, since I was there from the beginning. Like my close friends, I was interested in the widest range of poetries in the broadest sense of the term poetry. So I was one of the readers in the reading of "primitive poetries" Jerome organized for Jerry Bloedow’s "Hardware Poets Theater" in the early sixties and part of the Folkways recording. When we started some/thing in 1964, Jerome was quick to see affinities between my "definitions for mendy" and the "Aztec Definitions" collected by Sahagun, and we deliberately juxtaposed them alongside Jerry’s "Sightings" in the first issue. Alcheringa published a part of "talking at pomona" in 1972, "the sociology of art" in 1976 and "talking to discover" in 1976, and "tuning" in 1977. So we were all involved in the question of the relations between poetry and art of so-called "primitive cultures" or "oral cultures" and the work of contemporary experimental poets and artists in the "technically advanced" cultures. Coming from linguistics, I was probably the one among the group most committed to the secular, the colloquial and the vernacular. I was studying Black Vernacular English and the marginal grammar of Gertrude Stein, so it was only reasonable for me to attack the ancient anthropological idea of primitivity with its cloud of secondary associations of the originary, the natural and the simple, and the romantic emphasis on myth and ritual. "the sociology of art" began as a talk I gave to a seminar in "primitive art," in which I tried to lay out what I thought was a more reasoned and less romanticized idea of the difference between what I preferred to call oral and literal societies. It might have seemed a little shocking for a journal dedicated to ethnopoetics to publish a talk that argued that "a myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars." But once we could get past the noble savage and quasi-religious ideas of surrounding myth, we could get back to the idea of myth as just one kind of storytelling and discuss more concrete issues of how people went about the business of living, making things and using and enjoying and talking about them. In the course of that piece I tried to replace the theory of the primitive by offering a theory of the difference between "oral societies" and "literal societies" based on a more general notion than the simple and obvious question of "writing" versus "no-writing"—a distinction between a society that was committed to processes and a society committed to objects. It went on to make the case that innovation probably proceeded more fluidly, casually and regularly in oral societies, where you learned how to make a pot or a canoe or a spear thrower by learning the right way to make it rather than by copying an idealized standardized object. So in a traditional "oral culture," a pot ter might make several pots that looked to an outsider very different from each other, all of which counted for the potter as the same. While in what I called "literal societies," the artist was always consulting a standard model from which the least deviation looked like a revolution. In the ethnopoetics discourse I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred, a view I shared probably mainly with Diane Rothenberg, whose doctoral thesis on the history of Seneca relations with the Quakers I still regard as one of the most important ethnopoetic works because of the way it documented the pragmatic reasonableness of both groups in a history of dreadful misunderstandings. But I was strongly affected by Dennis Tedlock’s versions of Zuni storytelling, most particularly by the way his translations placed the tale in the mouth of a speaker and situated the telling in an occasion in a way similar to Labov’s transcriptions of the stories told by young black teenagers in the New York ghetto. And by Jerry’s translations of the songs of contemporary Seneca songmen. So yes, I also saw my talking within the wider framework that Jerome’s great collage anthologies Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin suggest.

CB: Your talk poems raise a number of issues about the relation of orality to textuality and I wanted to get your thoughts on a few of these. For one thing, is the term orality useful for you to describe the compositional practice involved in your talk poems? My own sense would be to call this work postalphabetic just as I think we are now entering an age of postliterary: one that assumes alphabetic literacy but in which that is only one form of textuality. That is, I would take your work as textual practice even though it is composed in improvised speaking, since it exists in the context, and is "read" against, alphabetically composed poetry (your own and others) and relies on a range of writing technologies (if not to say modalities) for its realization. I realize the fundamental ambiguity of all these terms. But there are some significant distinctions here, amid the terminological morass. One stream of thinking from Walter Ong’s Presence of the Word to David Abraham’s Spell of the Sensuous has suggested that alphabetic literacy, compared to what preceded it, puts its users in a fundamentally more alienated relationship to language and the body. Such thinking suggests the value of a return to "orality," which often strikes me as nostalgic, in the sentimental sense of the word, although I find the idea of "return" (nostos) that allows a reimagining of where we are quite resonant. That may be close to Olson’s sense of such things, and again his idea of composition by "breath" in "Projective Verse" is another possible frame for your talk poems. Do you find that terms of "Projective Verse" valorize speech over writing? An alternative is, I think, provided by Olson’s articulation of a poetics of embodiment in "Proprioception": a person speaking their mind through their body (can you say "speaking their body"?). OK—then there is the relation between your performances and the writing that comes out of them. These are not, it seems to me, "documentation" in the conceptual art sense of that term, but literary works on their own terms. They are not "transcriptions" in the sense that Dennis Tedlock talks about in The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Nor are they, in my interpretation, "secondary" (and I say this as an extension of the argument I make in the introduction of Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word that the performance of a poem at a reading is also not "secondary" but a distinct realization or version of the work—this is where I propose the idea of "anoriginality"). Finally, there is the insistence on the vernacular in your work—vernacular essays, vernacular poems—vernacular thinking, which is not just a matter of vocabulary or syntax but of composition. This insistence on the vernacular is, as you suggest, in Stein, and also Williams, and is, in that sense, fundamental to radical modernist writing. Here again the relation of "speech" to "writing" is complex and productive.

DA: I don’t really think the distinction between "alphabetic" and "analphabetic" is a good one. There are many forms of writing down that are not "alphabetic," that are not based on graphemic analyses of phonological distinctions. Chinese writing is only the most obvious example. But my main objection to the term is that the distinction is not fundamental enough. I am also quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the "oral" and "literate" laid out by Ong and Havelock, brilliant as their pioneering work in this area has been. The two fundamentally different ways of proceeding still seem to me the ones I laid out twenty-five years ago in "the sociology of art": the differences between an "oral" and a "literal" culture—the "oral" conceived as embracing all the ways of organizing behavior relying upon the wide range of mental and physical procedures (including body learning) we can call remembering; and the "literal," which includes the whole range of procedures laying access to some form of "recording" or spatialization of memory, including drawing and mark-making of any sort, and perhaps also nonspatialized but ritualized repetitional, recitational memorizing. You can see the most extreme form of this spatialization in the ancient "art of memory," whose invention is usually attributed to the sixth-century Greek poet Simonides but was apparently handed down in the classic rhetorical tradition to the Greek and Roman rhetoricians and from them to their successors in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. This tradition is described in great detail by Frances Yates in her marvelous book The Art of Memory. The idea was to call to mind a familiar and complicated building and stage a mental walking tour of all of its rooms, imagining precisely and in their places all of its decorative details, and then to place each of the images of a projected speech in a particular detail of the building in the sequential order that it would have to be recalled in the speech. It’s a kind of mental road map with illustrated "view points" or "rest areas." This isn’t writing, but it is a way of spatializing memory, especially if you bear in mind that the "images" that the rhetoricians intended to place were visual images either of "arguments" or of "words." So what they placed were like emblems or rebuses that could evoke a chain of logical connections or particular phrases that they wanted to make use of. Now the Greeks already had writing in the sixth century. Simonides’ lyrics were written down and were memorized. So they could place texts on columns or niches, physically as well as mentally. But memorization of texts, the mode of the rhapsode who recited a poem that had a completely accomplished verbal form, is very different from remembering. Memorizing isn’t remembering, and recording isn’t remembering. But I don’t want to be pious about the oral. The literal recording has distinct advantages. The tape recorder that recovers my talk pieces distinctly belongs to "literal" culture. I couldn’t be having this E-mail dialogue with you and I certainly couldn’t go back and reread Frances Yates or "the sociology of art" without it. The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember. The invocation of the Muses may have been a purely formal element by the time we encounter it, but it very likely reflected a real sense of the anxiety that the memory of forgetting could induce in a sensitive artist of an "oral society." But the situation, as I tried to describe it in "the sociology of art," is more complicated. There probably never were any purely "oral" societies, as there are no purely "literal" ones. Because the self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin. So we’re really dealing with two different cognitive modalities. The oral in my sense is present in the most literal societies, though it may be underground. There is good reason to consider how readers in "literal" societies actually read. Any reader will find that the act of reading evokes uncontrolled and uncontrollable memories, and these haven’t been stored in building niches, and they may or may not be similar to the memories out of which the author created the text. On the other hand there is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be for bilaterally symmetrical animals, and all societies I know of make the easier distinction between front and back, that is supported so clearly by the difference between our own front and back. And once they have this settled, they all seem to be able to orient themselves by facing in the fairly constant direction of the rising sun and distinguishing the four directions of frontal east and dorsal west, sinistral north and dextral south in the real world. This is the beginning of a literal mapping strategy. I suppose the whole "sociology of art" piece is an elaborate enactment of this argument, which it makes at great length. But that’s not the whole story. The epistemological argument I make against the notion of "understanding" in the twin pieces "tuning" and "gambling" is a direct consequence of my argument about the "oral." Understanding is a literal idea based on a geometrical notion of congruence, and tuning is a notion of a negotiated concord or agreement based on vernacular physical actions with visible outcomes like walking together or making love. So here we are back at the vernacular again. That being said, I am not pious about the idea of the "oral" and my written pieces draw on all the aspects of "literal" culture I find useful for my purposes. In a way, I suppose my works—the "talk performances" and the written "talks"—run a kind of dialogue with each other. I wasn’t always aware of this, and it may have been pointed out to me by others—Fred Garber and Henry Sayre. But I’ve come to believe it’s true, because there’s no other way I can account for my persistent attachment to both ways of working.

CB: I agree with you that the alphabet is one among a number of modalities or technologies for inscribing, recording, mapping, and remembering and should not be taken to stand for all forms of textuality, as it sometimes does. When we awaken to the specific potentialities of different media, we can use each according to its possibility without feeling that the one obliterates the other, as in some progressivist and binary models. When you refer to The Art of Memory, it sounds as if you are speaking from a practical engagement with the spatialization of memory, but also that you see your talk pieces as "literal" as much as "oral." Can you apply what you have just been saying (I mean writing) to your talk pieces: What forms of memory and what structural principles do you employ and how do these kinds of choices change the results? This also relates to improvisation in your work. Improvisation is never starting from scratch but rather moving around in material brought to an occasion (or at least I recall your saying something like that to me not long ago). The most common model for improvisation is jazz: How does this relate to your own use of improvisation—but also are there other forms of improvisation that seem relevant to you for contextualizing your talks? (You see I can’t ask even this question without saying text.) I’m also thinking of improvisation as a writing practice—your own earlier work, for one thing, but also someone like Clark Coolidge, thinking of his frequent invocation of "spontaneous bop prosody" in Jack Kerouac. To what degree are your improvisations spontaneous and, if to some degree (it’s a leading question), what is the equivalent of editing? (Isn’t repetition with slight variation a form of temporal editing?) It seems to me that one could map out one of your pieces in terms of its structure, perhaps as one might a musical composition — development, digression, theme, repetition; anecdote, commentary, allusion; variation in length of segments. I’m interested to know about the compositional or architectonic decisions for the piece, what are ground plans, what’s made in the process, or is it impossible to say because they are so intertwined? And as you say, here we are, engaged in a conversation by E-mail, that is fundamentally different from taping it (as we had considered). But then, with all your experience (I’m not suggesting it could be done if you didn’t have extensive experience doing talks), couldn’t you write one of your talks? Who would know the difference besides you? What would be the telltale signs?

DA: Taking your last question first, I used to think it was the speed at which it had to be done. In a talk piece I usually have between half an hour and an hour and a half to do whatever I have to do. I can’t walk away to check sources for quotations. If I am trying to analyze something, I have to live with whatever abilities and resources I bring to the occasion. I have to have complete confidence in my abilities for the occasion. If they turn out to be not completely adequate, I have to find a way to turn my momentary inadequacy to dramatic advantage. I once gave a talk that hinged on an elaborate story about the difference in character between two salesmen in my uncle’s dress business and while building up the characterization of one of them, I realized I couldn’t remember his name. So I turned my inability to name him into the dramatic conclusion of the piece. Readiness is all. If I make a slip of the tongue, I can’t erase it, though I can correct it publicly if I catch it. But then the audience may not catch it either.