Interview: Eric Baus (Philly, USA, author of The To Sound), Adam Fieled (Philly, USA, Editor)
AF: We’re both PhD candidates. How do you think academia has ramifications for leading a life in poetry and the arts? Do you think that it’s feasible to balance a life in academia with being a poet and an artist?
EB: Yeah. People do. As far as me, I’m still sort of figuring that out. I did notice that I often found it difficult to write while I was in a creative writing program, more so than when I was an undergrad and I was studying linguistics and I just had all this raw material that was more peripheral.
AF: Do you find yourself inhibited by art being brought into an academic situation?
EB: Not so much. There’s an initial resistance, then I get comfortable with it. I don’t have any ethical problems with it or qualms like a lot of people do. I know that a lot of people are insistent on a community outside academia, but for me a certain version of academia has been really helpful. I’m from Indiana, and there’s not a lot of experimental poetry that comes through there, so when I left Indiana to join an MFA program it was really great because I was exposed to a lot of things. I could’ve cobbled something together in Indiana, but it wouldn’t have focused my life in a really specific way.
AF: At the PhD level, though, it’s not really about creating works of art, it’s more about analyzing or deconstructing works of art. How do you feel about doing both, creating and analyzing? Do you think that’s helpful to an artist or do you think it’s irrelevant?
EB: I think it really depends on the person. I think it’s difficult logistically in some ways, because if you’re absorbed in language in a specific way in which you’re sort of reading for transparency, like reading theory because you have to give a presentation on it rather than reading theory because you’re interested in the materiality of it. I think that both can help if you’re writing in certain ways, like before I would read philosophical texts and look at the syntax, or think about collaging it, or sort of appropriating it, I feel that the program I’m in now has been good discipline for me because it’s forced me to take myself out of it, and be able to articulate those ideas. Then, those ideas come back to inform the work, sounds and forms and ways the language sort of plays against itself.
AF: Do you have any fear of becoming an “academic” poet?
EB: I think my personality is such that I wouldn’t become absorbed in that. For me, the reasons that I’m doing this are to investigate things that I’m really interested in and things that I want to promote, and it doesn't seems so separate to me. When I think of models of people who have done that, like Nathaniel Mackey or Rachel (Blau DuPlessis), it seems possible. They’ve done it without letting it kill the writing.
AF: About your book (The To Sound)—to me, a lot of it seems Surrealist-tinged. I was wondering if you’d care to talk about the Surrealists as an influence on your work?
EB: The Surrealists were the first writers I read that I felt a really strong connection to. I think a lot of people, when they’re younger, have a strong connection to the Beats, and that was a big part of things when I was a teenager, and that was true for me. When I was a bit older, I got more interested in the way images could be made interesting, and a kind of “occult sensibility” that appealed to my twenty-year-old consciousness, the fact that using language could actually have an effect on reality, a sort of mystical thinking that’s kind of appealing and problematic.
AF: Do you find that the Surrealists have continuing relevance for you, even now?
EB: I do. The initial person who was important to me was Andre Breton, reading his novels, like Mad Love. It’s a perfect book to read when you’re twenty-one.
AF: Did you go back to the Symbolists that came before them, Baudelaire and Rimbaud?
EB: I did eventually, yeah. Lately I’ve been going back to Surrealism that’s written in Spanish, like Lorca, and Vallejo. Vallejo is huge for me. He’s totally astounding. He’s got a kind of enduring weirdness that I’m still fascinated by. I feel like I more or less “get” the French stuff now, like I understand the context for it, but the Vallejo still seems to come out of nowhere, this kind of unique consciousness.
AF: How do you feel about prose poems? The To Sound is mostly prose poetry and the prose poem is kind of a hybrid form, some people find it subversive, some people don’t like it. Do prose poems qualify as “real poems” to you, or is the distinction between prose poetry and “real poetry” irrelevant?
EB: I don’t have any anxiety about it, just because I haven’t felt the resistance that maybe someone twenty years ago would’ve felt.
AF: So prose poems have been accepted into the mainstream of poetry…
EB: Yeah. The people I’m interested in, like Rosemarie Waldrop, are accepted. I’m much more interested in Waldrop than I am in, say, Russell Edson. He’s more useful to me in terms of his influence on other people, than going back to his work directly. I just never really got into him in the way that a lot of people who write prose poems do. Even going back to Breton’s novels, there’s a narrative and a degree of linearity but the language is really interesting too. Or something else that was huge for me was reading The Magnetic Fields by Soupault and Breton, it was this collaborative project at the dawn of Surrealism…
AF: “Jaded jumps of joy”…
EB: Yeah, exactly. I have a lot of that stuff burned into my consciousness. This stuff interests me more than the sort of orthodox history of what the prose poem is. I don’t really write anything but prose poems at this point.
AF: Would you be dissatisfied if you became a Russell Edson-like figure…
EB: I’m just happy to keep writing and if people want to read it.
AF: Many of your poems have appeared in online journals. Would you like to weigh in on the “print vs. Net” debate that’s rampant these days?
EB: It’s not really a problem for me. There are some Net journals I find exciting, in the way that some print journals excite me. I feel like there is a subtle hierarchy right now, like “would I rather be in the print version of Conjunctions..” or something like that. I really like this magazine Fascicle, I think that’s a really really good Web journal. I have a few other friends who have an e-zine called Glitter Pony which I think is really good. Jacket’s really good. I really like How-2, as well.
I’m really excited about that.
AF: You don’t shy away from using the first person singular in your poems. It seems like many younger poets are “going back to the I”, though “I” poetry was devalued by the Lang-Po people. How do you regard the I in poetry?
EB: I came into writing poetry around the time the “I” was coming back. Some of the stuff that was exciting me when I first started publishing was Lisa Jarnot’s. I was also reading Juliana Spahr. It seems like they were working through the “I” issue. Right now I’m actually trying to consciously avoid “I”, just trying not to get caught up in the patterns of stuff I’ve done before. Now, I have “made up animals” that substitute for “I”.
AF: What’s your feeling about being a “younger poet”?
EB: I had very modest ambitions to begin with. I feel like I’ve been very lucky in how people have responded to my work. I’m actually really happy being a sort of “younger writer”. The thing that excites me about writing is that it’s not like you’re an Olympic athlete and you do everything before you’re sixteen! The work that I do that’s most interesting could be five years from now.
AF: Do you feel competitive with other poets?
EB: Not really. I feel tinges every once in a while. Because my friends who are poets are friends first, I’m mostly happy for them when good things happen for them. I think part of that is the luxury of having a book out, which makes for less anxiety. Now, it’s just sort of me and the work, and if I’m doing work that I like, it’ll eventually find a home.
© Eric Baus and Adam Fieled 2007
EB: Yeah. People do. As far as me, I’m still sort of figuring that out. I did notice that I often found it difficult to write while I was in a creative writing program, more so than when I was an undergrad and I was studying linguistics and I just had all this raw material that was more peripheral.
AF: Do you find yourself inhibited by art being brought into an academic situation?
EB: Not so much. There’s an initial resistance, then I get comfortable with it. I don’t have any ethical problems with it or qualms like a lot of people do. I know that a lot of people are insistent on a community outside academia, but for me a certain version of academia has been really helpful. I’m from Indiana, and there’s not a lot of experimental poetry that comes through there, so when I left Indiana to join an MFA program it was really great because I was exposed to a lot of things. I could’ve cobbled something together in Indiana, but it wouldn’t have focused my life in a really specific way.
AF: At the PhD level, though, it’s not really about creating works of art, it’s more about analyzing or deconstructing works of art. How do you feel about doing both, creating and analyzing? Do you think that’s helpful to an artist or do you think it’s irrelevant?
EB: I think it really depends on the person. I think it’s difficult logistically in some ways, because if you’re absorbed in language in a specific way in which you’re sort of reading for transparency, like reading theory because you have to give a presentation on it rather than reading theory because you’re interested in the materiality of it. I think that both can help if you’re writing in certain ways, like before I would read philosophical texts and look at the syntax, or think about collaging it, or sort of appropriating it, I feel that the program I’m in now has been good discipline for me because it’s forced me to take myself out of it, and be able to articulate those ideas. Then, those ideas come back to inform the work, sounds and forms and ways the language sort of plays against itself.
AF: Do you have any fear of becoming an “academic” poet?
EB: I think my personality is such that I wouldn’t become absorbed in that. For me, the reasons that I’m doing this are to investigate things that I’m really interested in and things that I want to promote, and it doesn't seems so separate to me. When I think of models of people who have done that, like Nathaniel Mackey or Rachel (Blau DuPlessis), it seems possible. They’ve done it without letting it kill the writing.
AF: About your book (The To Sound)—to me, a lot of it seems Surrealist-tinged. I was wondering if you’d care to talk about the Surrealists as an influence on your work?
EB: The Surrealists were the first writers I read that I felt a really strong connection to. I think a lot of people, when they’re younger, have a strong connection to the Beats, and that was a big part of things when I was a teenager, and that was true for me. When I was a bit older, I got more interested in the way images could be made interesting, and a kind of “occult sensibility” that appealed to my twenty-year-old consciousness, the fact that using language could actually have an effect on reality, a sort of mystical thinking that’s kind of appealing and problematic.
AF: Do you find that the Surrealists have continuing relevance for you, even now?
EB: I do. The initial person who was important to me was Andre Breton, reading his novels, like Mad Love. It’s a perfect book to read when you’re twenty-one.
AF: Did you go back to the Symbolists that came before them, Baudelaire and Rimbaud?
EB: I did eventually, yeah. Lately I’ve been going back to Surrealism that’s written in Spanish, like Lorca, and Vallejo. Vallejo is huge for me. He’s totally astounding. He’s got a kind of enduring weirdness that I’m still fascinated by. I feel like I more or less “get” the French stuff now, like I understand the context for it, but the Vallejo still seems to come out of nowhere, this kind of unique consciousness.
AF: How do you feel about prose poems? The To Sound is mostly prose poetry and the prose poem is kind of a hybrid form, some people find it subversive, some people don’t like it. Do prose poems qualify as “real poems” to you, or is the distinction between prose poetry and “real poetry” irrelevant?
EB: I don’t have any anxiety about it, just because I haven’t felt the resistance that maybe someone twenty years ago would’ve felt.
AF: So prose poems have been accepted into the mainstream of poetry…
EB: Yeah. The people I’m interested in, like Rosemarie Waldrop, are accepted. I’m much more interested in Waldrop than I am in, say, Russell Edson. He’s more useful to me in terms of his influence on other people, than going back to his work directly. I just never really got into him in the way that a lot of people who write prose poems do. Even going back to Breton’s novels, there’s a narrative and a degree of linearity but the language is really interesting too. Or something else that was huge for me was reading The Magnetic Fields by Soupault and Breton, it was this collaborative project at the dawn of Surrealism…
AF: “Jaded jumps of joy”…
EB: Yeah, exactly. I have a lot of that stuff burned into my consciousness. This stuff interests me more than the sort of orthodox history of what the prose poem is. I don’t really write anything but prose poems at this point.
AF: Would you be dissatisfied if you became a Russell Edson-like figure…
EB: I’m just happy to keep writing and if people want to read it.
AF: Many of your poems have appeared in online journals. Would you like to weigh in on the “print vs. Net” debate that’s rampant these days?
EB: It’s not really a problem for me. There are some Net journals I find exciting, in the way that some print journals excite me. I feel like there is a subtle hierarchy right now, like “would I rather be in the print version of Conjunctions..” or something like that. I really like this magazine Fascicle, I think that’s a really really good Web journal. I have a few other friends who have an e-zine called Glitter Pony which I think is really good. Jacket’s really good. I really like How-2, as well.
I’m really excited about that.
AF: You don’t shy away from using the first person singular in your poems. It seems like many younger poets are “going back to the I”, though “I” poetry was devalued by the Lang-Po people. How do you regard the I in poetry?
EB: I came into writing poetry around the time the “I” was coming back. Some of the stuff that was exciting me when I first started publishing was Lisa Jarnot’s. I was also reading Juliana Spahr. It seems like they were working through the “I” issue. Right now I’m actually trying to consciously avoid “I”, just trying not to get caught up in the patterns of stuff I’ve done before. Now, I have “made up animals” that substitute for “I”.
AF: What’s your feeling about being a “younger poet”?
EB: I had very modest ambitions to begin with. I feel like I’ve been very lucky in how people have responded to my work. I’m actually really happy being a sort of “younger writer”. The thing that excites me about writing is that it’s not like you’re an Olympic athlete and you do everything before you’re sixteen! The work that I do that’s most interesting could be five years from now.
AF: Do you feel competitive with other poets?
EB: Not really. I feel tinges every once in a while. Because my friends who are poets are friends first, I’m mostly happy for them when good things happen for them. I think part of that is the luxury of having a book out, which makes for less anxiety. Now, it’s just sort of me and the work, and if I’m doing work that I like, it’ll eventually find a home.
© Eric Baus and Adam Fieled 2007
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