Waxing Hot, a poetics dialogue: Bob Perelman (Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, USA), Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA)

AF: I was very touched by the intimacy and playfulness of the poems in Playing Bodies. The poems are all written in a unique, spare, lyrical voice. Could you talk a little bit about how this voice developed?

BP: I feel like I did something I hadn't done before in that book, and I was really very knocked out by Francie [Shaw]'s paintings. For a couple of years before I wrote the poems, I'd been thinking of trying to do a collaboration with her based on those paintings. We had collaborated in the past. I was very involved in the production of the paintings, in that I would see each one that she was doing, we would talk about which postures worked best. For a few of them I made suggestions (like, turn this guy upside down, etc.) I'm not claiming much credit for the paintings, just to say that I was engrossed, as she was making them. So I'd been thinking about, how would I write poems of or for those paintings, and I tried quite a bit. At first I tried to imitate them formally in some way. The canvases are square, so I tried to write square poems— four quatrains of four word lines, and I think I even (one or two times) arranged them in two columns, really trying to make them square like the paintings. I wasn't terribly happy with the result. Then I concentrated on a more emotional level, and the paintings made me feel all sorts of things— scenarios, moods, tones of voice. I would show my attempts to Francie, and she often told me I was seeing only half of the painting. She was clear that the two figures were one gesture or mood or state of mind. She wanted to make sure I tried to get those complexities into the poems, and that helped me turn the corner. At some point, I really started to allow myself to say emotionally complicated, contradictory things. I opened up to the spirit of the paintings. Once I got onto that frequency, things went much faster, and I'd often write a couple a day, after working for more than a year on trying to approach them. Once they were written, I tried to cut things way down. That was getting back to the original impulse— to imitate the paintings' formality. The paintings are incredibly compact, so I had to make the poems as compact as I could. That was something new for me— writing short poems.

AF: Talking about models— as I was reading Playing Bodies, I often thought of e.e. cummings. Was he in there somewhere?

BP: It may not be fair, but cummings has been on my shit list for decades. I liked him a lot when I was young. He was one of the first poets I ever liked, so I suppose possibly he's influenced me subconsciously. I have problems with his sentimentality and his anti-Semitism. I cut Pound incredible slack because I understand the mechanics of his anti-Semitism. For some reason I don't cut cummings any slack at all. He rubs me the wrong way.

AF: You write, "Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for/ decades..." It seems that in many poems, "Confession" here quoted being the most obvious example, you try and balance the post-modernist's rejection of confession and the Romantic's penchant for same. Do you think this is relevant or applicable? If so, would you like to talk a little bit about this binary and the tensions it creates in your writing? Is there, perhaps, a kinship with John Ashbery lurking around this territory for you?

BP: I know that I was being (on the surface) sarcastic, transgressive, contrary in writing that poem. It was the sly thought of adopting a so-called alien perspective, naive alienation. The "slimier-than-thou-aestheticians" are the indirect result of my having taken my boys to see Independence Day, where the aliens are decidedly slimy. 

AF: You've made it clear that, as a poet, you try and avoid "elemental words." Could you discuss elemental words? Does elemental merely mean overused or trite, or is there something more subtle being denoted?

BP: Elemental words are essentializing words, words that are meant to be deeper than language— often geo-political racial stuff, i.e. "American," etc. "I am American and you're not." It's transcendental tags that get used all the time. For me, making poetry lively and healthy involves teasing and tweaking, challenging the notion of the poetic, not being worshipful. So "elemental" in unchangeable— you're not allowed to change it. I didn't think of that way of saying it— "elemental"— until I was writing the introduction to Ten to One. "Elemental" isn't an elemental word for me. 

AF: You're quoted as saying, "poets most usefully exist in hearing the variety of society's speech and responding to that variety." I was wondering if you could explore this a little bit— what, for you, is the richest societal domain a poet can mine— streets, bars, universities?

BP: All of the above, I suppose. As many as possible, although you have to do a lot of translating sometimes. Putting different language universes in touch with each is a basic necessity these days. There has to be the barest hint of a hinge between one side of a language universe and another. The world of books is not unpoetic and the street is not unpoetic, and if I use bookish words, I try to make a hinge or an articulation so that you know what I'm talking about. If it's too explanatory then it gets very cumbersome, but I think there's a value in doing it if you can do it deftly, and it can be a real source of strength. 

AF: In your poem "Days," you write, "Some days you skip/ Come back to them/ Later, others never occur." In a compressed way, these lines seem to posit a sort of Proustian view of time. I often get that feeling from your poems— of time being essentially elusive, untraceable. The poems, then, are an attempt at tracing how time-parts fit together. Is there any truth is this reading?

BP: That seems like a good description. It is something I think about all the time— the present moment of writing. It strikes me that poetry, though not ephemeral, is thrown into the present more so than other activities. It's the most old-fashioned art. Again, it's a tricky balance, a question of deftness. I have a prejudice against "poetic piety."

AF: I noticed that the Ezra Pound segment of The Trouble With Genius seemed very deeply felt. Is there a sense of deep affinity with Pound? Does this affinity make it difficult to face his sketchy-at-best politics?

BP: Pound was one of the crucial poets in the dawning of my interest in poetry. Somehow, I got hold of ABC of Reading when I was a kid. It made poetry seem very doable and fascinating, like, "what could be more interesting than this?" I came to poetic consciousness at the tail end of the New American Poetry world, and that's a "New Directions" world, all of Pound's work coming out of New Directions. It's a sanitary presentation of Pound. It was possible to read him and not get that he's a Fascist or an anti-Semite. You can read right past it and you can see he's being irascible, and you're never quite sure what or who he's irascible at, and the systematic nature of his prejudices doesn't show up. I realized at a certain point that it organized his thinking, anti-Semitism. When Pound came to London— Ezra is a very Jewish name, and he had red hair—he was always telling people, "I'm not Jewish, I'm not Jewish." It became very important to me to figure out what was going on with Pound, because he instigated (that's his word, ultimately) much of what was important to me personally and to most American poetry.

AF: Do you ever suffer spasms of doubt about the importance of poetry and art in general? Is the Samuel Beckett syndrome ("I can't go on, I'll go on") once that you can empathize with?

BP: Yes, I certainly suffer spasms of doubt. I don't have spasms of doubt about the importance of poetry: there, I am a true believer. I suffer spasms of doubt about my own poetry. I'm not a happy camper when a poem isn't finished. I remind myself that I have written stuff that I like. 

AF: Lately I've been messing around with the concept rhetopoeia. This, for me, is the rhetorical impact of any given poem, how it convinces us of its own substantiality. Do you think poems need this sort of justification? Does a poem need to convince us, on a rhetorical level, that it is somehow necessary or justified in its existence?

BP: I'm suspicious of generalizations. I've used the word "rhetoric" a bunch— rhetoric as a source of poetic power. But it's one of the easiest words to misunderstand. Rhetoric is also a synonym of "bullshit!" But rhetoric in the old sense— structures used in addressing a single person, or a group of people, or a situation, when that's what rhetoric means— remains crucial. The environments in which poems exist are so complicated and fast moving that sometimes when every poem is "convincing us of its own substantiality," it feels like endless playings of the authenticity card. Like in "Confession": "Come on and read me for the inner you I've locked onto with my cultural capital sensing-device looks...") Sometimes the best rhetoric (in the sense that I think you're using it) is not worrying about rhetoric. But poems never escape the environment of reading and writing. So, no final answer to the question.

originally published in Rain Taxi, Vol. 10 No. 3, 2005