interview: Lissa Wolsak/Tom Beckett, November 2002
 
 

~TB
I'm interested in the ways in which lyricism, spirituality, sensuality
and social analysis collide, elide and just plain jam in your work.
You end An Heuristic Prolusion with "For me, the urgent question
is.. do we have a prayer?" Do we?

~LW
Nunc stans, yes. Of course, there is more going on here than pattern
matching, circular/elliptical polarizing, my faux objectivity and
blindspot. Personally and civically my hope is that we shift toward
the dignity of mutual understanding rather than the chimera,
agreement, to think causally about what diffusely and exactly is
the concrescense of hatred and love, appearing to pace themselves
within the depths of primordial matter. The world seethes on
germane brinks, so too the instincts, courage, élan vital, open-
heartedness and resilient free deeds of the polis. All things present
at once, we are illuminable, the genius of all persons. In
the deepening, taut, involvement of the species with matter beheld,
illumination as opposed to limelight, is not a ruse, it is salient, actual,
and has the beauty of Being, a consummate tool ~not needing
sanction from hegemony and sophism. We do not wonder upon our
oneness, so much as this meaninglessness amongst the usual "Fates"
who foment our ends, when in pernicious degradation of trust
murderous to our natures, totalitarian, hierarchic, echoic, inane; we
are joined to the crawling.

Late 70's, volunteering inside a maximum-security prison, I
witnessed the inmates enact Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy"
revealing the line "Every man has his Jew." So from within, and
within our midst, chilling, horrific, and too often the case. Fascism
can be just as refined as we are. It is not subject to satiric blasts.
The 'family' manifests everything possible, is a stage of eternal
recurrence, appressed to Augustine's "I wish that you were."

Forgiveness and emancipation are not one-act wheels. There is
the whirr of it which is in motion with the isness of our suffering.
The message far outweighs the medium. We seem to be awakening
to our duplicity, complicity, multiplicity, not to be replaced
anytime soon with the brilliantly active wonder, radiant amplitude,
anarchic, naked ease.

~TB
"All things present at once," bassline doubling baseline. I think
allegory is at the heart of your work. Am I on the right track?

~LW
The works are stochastic meltdowns, entelechies in provision of
a frontier for my sake, to accelerate my looking, divvied in imaginal,
partial pre-verbal milieux, necessarily outside agreed-upon motif-
value. In contraction, syncope, they are sometime scherzi, jumpy
surrealisms, bricoleurity et al, directed toward synesthesia. I tell
myself I don't impose a musculature and that one of the time-release
fascinations of writing, indeed, all art, is what shows up in the after-
grass. I do embed. I push at psychic containment. From here, your
question causes me to realize the work contains allegory in
reexamination of sanctity and fictitiousness, as in our deeply
fictitious money systems, and influence of qualities supervenient on
personhoods.

I think the heart of my work is the evisceration of being/its
antithesis, and that which is inalienable.

~TB
Pretty heady stuff. Can we slow this down though, loosen at least
a little the knots of your epistemo-ontological concerns, and tease
out some strands of your thinking about poetry? I'm wondering if
you could speak to your process of composition — perhaps with
reference to the genesis of your first book, The Garcia Family Co-
Mercy?

~LW
Experientially, it was chromatic sifting and fusing little hills of use,
then sculpting in the sense of re-moving or eliminating all that was
extraneous in that moment of making, nonce, letting myself tend
toward inner explosive processes, metaphysical trespass and what
was for me, remote sensing a full tremor of being, on its spindle of
necessity. I wanted to loosehold it there, the contents..not trapped,
and simultaneously open out spatial terms, to keep it alive.
The material came from accrued notebooks of reclusive experiment,
'la perruque' (stealing time) over some ten years.

I had six weeks to write the manuscript. Also it came from
a trenchant urge to view all the material at once, so that no part
would really be refused from its entirety, I hovered and worked on
the floor, hands and knees, where I could at least see the 36 pages
or so, in one continuous ribbon, to begin the primitive flow,
the guess-ropes.. I still like the floor as my main work surface when
it is time to compose. The long-axis fix on the raw material gyrated
from doing, learning and saying at the same time, while interpellating
an over-lapping timelessness. I see writing as a wind-sock, which
reveals to itself, ~consciousness. I truly never thought that the work
would travel through but a handful of close friends. The words I
now use to describe my writing, I did not know then.

~TB
What instigated those early writing experiments? And what were
they like?

~LW
It was instigated by my experience of the complete breakdown of
flow, of resonance in my everyday speech-life. Ordinary speech
became such automatonic noise that I became deaf. Horribly, I could
not hear what someone said to me a few feet away. I badly needed
to accelerate breakthrough states and so..went looking, became
deliberate. The first experiments were ideas and perceptual
excursions, risky thick-pallet sound-visions, opening up for me
conditions for simultaneity and individuality.. placed so abstractly
that each particulate could remain also, a frontier to itself. I needed
to see an emotional/perceptual free-will at work, noticeably against
ideologies of perfection. The page read an infinite number of ways,
much more a dynamic faltering of one's eyes over the depth-space
of a canvas, from pigment to shade though even that was non-
deliberate. From the first..I saw writing as a gypsy via closely
related to the activity of trust, love, agape, and its counter-
intelligence; deepening out one's time/perception, every which way
to approach the face. It is the capacity to act.

I came to make the work I did through sheer cultural necessity, as
an uncertain but imaginative ascetic returning to words after having
been shaped by the aero-curves of visual arts and music. My Italian
mother profoundly influenced my aesthetics. Childhood contained
very little money but a wealth of stimulating people, ideas, music,
literature, visual arts of all ilks, gardens, arboreta, food, and too,
she made palpable that culture is what happens ~here, made, in
everyday life, ignited in various reciprocal moves.

Ralph Maud, the Charles Olson/Dylan Thomas scholar, in '88
became a friend and was the first to read my hitherto unseen
notebooks. He urged me to do something about them. He was
pivotal because I trusted him not to flatter the writing. Just after
the publication of "Co-mercy," the Robin Blaser Conference in
Vancouver '95, tore open my reading of poetry per se, which had
been minute. I met David Bromige at that time whose immense and
contagious freedoms I felt summoned forth by, in the making of
some of "Pen Chants." He later exposed me to Allen Fisher's work
for which I am eternally grateful, as I might have gone years more,
without knowing. Nate Dorward and Pete Smith most recently have
influenced my reading, a difficult task as I always have my own
compunctions, nevertheless, they generously provided difficult to
acquire small press material and turned me toward the absolutely
astonishing, compelling, contemporary poets in England and Ireland.

~TB
Could you speak a bit of what you see in Fisher's work?

~LW
I should only address this question in a poem, but I admire it
~because Fisher's work escapes all, even manifold definition. Idea
upon idea, for me it sustains Being, wrestles Becoming, there, in
the holomovement, in omnipresence of the very wildness and artistic
civility of the cosmoses. I experience it as imaginatively achieved,
and while magnetic, redolent with meaning, innocence, gentility and
charm, in deepest personal/social critique. A threshold-free poet,
knowing, pataphysical, but inclusive and further, an inutterably
learned release from meaninglessness through causally fine-grained
emotional IQ. There is no failure of nerve. The work demonstrates
implicate and explicate orders in savvy motion, that light can and
does exceed its own speed, ex animo. He is on to it.

~TB
What are you working on now?

~LW
A long poem entitled A Defence of Being, the first ana of which has
been published by Spanner, UK and this further ana will be included
in a forthcoming Selected, or Collected, from Station Hill Press, NY,
and will also be a book from Wild Honey Press, Ireland. In addition,
I am writing an essay on Madeline Gins and Arakawa's oeuvre.

~TB
What, in particular, interests you about the work of Arakawa and
Gins?

~LW
In Architectural Body (The University of Alabama Press, 2002),
a philosophical treatise, Gins and Arakawa's visionary social
imagination factures a promontory from which even the most odious
social-urban jeopardies may be negotiated. This truly is a tool for
the people. These are psycho-strategies to restore a sense of self,
transforming through our experience of space and heightened
sensitivity to the liquidity of surface, with ideas that engage theses
of the celestial meridian to espouse a new society, still somewhat of
a mirage perhaps, but an audacious shimmering bridge between wave
and particle. One might say that a noun is a verb in repose. In fact,
they describe the necessary path, an activity of Being, the goodness
of it and what it is, to not forget. The world may not be ready for
this, but these propitious blueprints are absolutely vital.

~TB
"To restore a sense of self," "To not forget," "Blueprints." Identity,
loss, restoration, documentation of a project. One becomes, in
the words of St. Augustine, "a question to myself"?

~LW
I see questioning as the activation of soul, of love having eyes of
its own, esprit fort which wonderfully brings about apperception,
uniting the contents of our intuitions. Questioning is free-will
opening out an amplitude of kairological time, proceeding windward
of perception; it is a new beginning, re-creative, prehensive and
outstretching, an engaged antidote for static and entropy.

As I understand it, St. Augustine became a question to himself when
he suffered the unfathomable death of an intimate friend and was
thus able to move from isolation of cupiditas, to fathoming caritas,
or, from the belief in appearances, to an inalterable love of all being.
 
 

            (to be continued . . . )

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