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TDR Interview: Jason Camlot
Jason Camlot's latest book of poems is
Attention All Typewriters (DC Books, 2005). His previous poetry collections include,
The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000), and a limited edition chapbook with illustrations by Canadian artist Betty Goodwin, entitled,
Lines Crossed Out (Delirium Press, 2005). His poems and articles have appeared in such journals and anthologies as
New American Writing, Court Green, Queen Street
Quarterly, Rampike, Matrix, Poetry Nation (Véhicule),
Book History, English Literary History, and Postmodern
Culture. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and teaches Victorian literature and culture at Concordia University in Montreal.
Interview by Alessandro Porco
*
 ALESSANDRO PORCO: An
introduction is in order, Jason — the floor is yours…
JASON CAMLOT: I was
born in Montreal, studied in Boston and California, and now I’m a
professor at a University back in Montreal, where I teach Victorian
Literature and Culture, among other things — and where I learn things,
too. I’m a published poet, songwriter, scholar and occasional critic.
I’m a husband of one and father of two amazing people (three amazing
people in all, two little, one full grown). I’m a centerman (ice
hockey), a bassist (in the garage band Puggy Hammer), and, for
the past two years, the director of a graduate program in English. In
the 1990s I released three compilations of songs in quick succession, O
Glee (1994), Mr. Fedora (1995), and Letterbomb (1996).
Then I got the teaching job. Some kind of reissue of songs from these
compilations is slated for release with Urban Myth Records, but
they’re having money problems at the moment, so that could take a
while. My first collection of poems, The Animal Library (DC
Books, 2000) was nominated for a Quebec Writer’s Federation poetry
prize. I’ve published a chapbook that I’m proud of called Lines
Crossed Out (Delirium Press, 2005) with illustrations by Canadian
artist, Betty Goodwin. And my new book, Attention All Typewriters
(DC Books, 2005) just hit the shelves.
AP: I would like to
start with a discussion of the long poems in your new collection —
particularly, "Bewildered" and "Daddy Lazarus."
"Bewildered" might best be described as a drug-induced Safari
through the last days of John Crowe Ransom’s mind circa 1974 at Kenyon
College. There is in "Bewildered" — as there is in
"Daddy Lazarus" — an "essayistic impulse," to
borrow a phrase from critic David Herd (perhaps more practiced in the
American tradition, from Pinsky to Ammons to Bernstein), woven into each
respective poetic narrative: in the former, Ransom’s "Kantian
formalism" is considered in relation to "the long poems, / the
philosophical ones, / the epic ones, / the goofy poetic dramas, / the
crass poetic narratives." In the latter, "Daddy Lazarus,"
the American confessional mode is considered, but again the
"essayistic impulse," or the "philosophical" element
is woven into a "goofy poetic drama" or "crass poetic
narrative." Could you speak to your interest in the long poem as
such, as well as in general?
JC: While I ‘love’
(meaning I have visceral, emotional/aesthetic affection for) short lyric
poems and long poems, both, recently I have found I love long poems
more, in part because I find they are less emotionally arrogant (from L.
arrogāntem, assuming), and more exciting to me as a means of
organizing complex fields of discourse and experience. The long poem
(including the long poem as approached by the American poets you
mention) is less satisfied with omission than a certain kind of short
lyric poem (a short, epiphanic poem) is, and thus the long poem is less self
satisfied. It is less satisfied with the idea that the self, or a
significant experience attributed to the self, can be expressed in a
successful way, and sometimes is skeptical that such an idea of self
should be expressed at all. While a long (say, epic) poem may seem more
ambitious (more arrogant, less modest) an endeavor than the short lyric
poem — Paradise Lost was not a project born of a humble nature
— the long poems I really love are the more recent ones, poems of
significant length from, say, Wordsworth’s The Prelude
(self-satisfied, yes, but positively messy) and Coleridge’s Rhyme
and Christabel, through Schwartz’s Corliolanus and His
Mother, Bishop’s Geography III (which I read as a long
poem), Ammons’s Garbage, and Bernstein’s "Artifice as
Absorption", etc., etc. The fact that the long poem is long may
allow it to have greater shifts in tonal register, a wider range of
intellectual and emotional association, the juxtaposition of radically
diverse thematic elements in a manner that is still aesthetically
interesting, and in a broader sense, to luxuriate more in the variegated
(say, pied) possibilities of formal organization, rather than require
the poet to approach form as a more singular solution to a predetermined
emotional, intellectual, (even pedagogical) problem.
 The
long poems in Attention All Typewriters are conceived (as you
suggest) within an American tradition of this kind of poem. Like
the eight new sections introduced by Lewis Lapham in Harper’s
Magazine during the 1980s (Index—essentially an
argumentative list of statistics, Readings, Forum, Essay,
Report, Annotations, Criticism, and Revision),
"each of them," as Lapham put it, "given over not only to
different forms of writing but also to different orders of
information," the use of form in the contemporary American long
poem, I think, is employed with a mind to finding useful ways to
organize very disparate orders of experience that cannot really be
contained in an inherently discrete, shorter, lyric mode. While
"the list" — a genre that is found at the core of both
political economy (as double-entry bookkeeping, see Mary Poovey’s The
History of the Modern Fact) and history (as annals, see Hayden
White’s The Content of the Form) — informs much of the
experimentation that appeals to me in recent American poetry (and in
this sense, a text like the "Harper's Index" can be
understood as a modernist poem that seems to have been revitalized,
reengaged, democratized by statistics), probably the most significant
‘non-poetic genre’ that informs the contemporary (American) long
poem, and that has influenced my own work with this form (as you point
out), is the essay. There’s something approaching a fusion of the non-sequiter
list and the factual essay in David Trinidad’s long prose poem from Plasticville,
"Essay with Movable Parts." And much of Charles Bernstein’s
poetry enacts characteristics of certain kinds of expository (and other
modes of) discourse in order to reveal their artifice, usually because
they have been too readily absorbed as natural. Throughout Bernstein’s
oeuvre (both his poems and his essays) we find guerilla attacks upon the
implicit conspiracy of the offices (i.e. The Office of the Registrar,
The Ad Office) that push artifice as reality.
As for the specific
poems from Attention All Typewriters that you mention,
"Daddy Lazarus" is obviously trying to move through the
possibilities of a certain (rather self-contained, and somewhat
monological) mode of confessional lyric that I associate with Plath,
towards a more historically inclusive, dialogical, essayistic, yet still
formally integrated confessional mode that I associate with Whitman and,
especially, Ginsberg. I do love both modes, but I’m exploring the
possibilities of the latter in this poem. "Bewildered"
represents my attempt to capture the pleasurable complexity of a young,
aspiring poet who finds himself ‘under the influence’ of many
convergent agents that would have existed in the mid 1970s at the
poem’s locale, Kenyon College. The organizing speaker of the poem is
under the influence of drugs, yes, but also of 1970s television
programming, late 60s liberation politics, his goofy and intellectually
distinct roommates, an energetic creative writing professor (modeled
after REN Allen, who was teaching at Kenyon that year, having just come
from Cornell where he studied with A.R. Ammons), and, of course, John
Crowe Ransom, who died at Kenyon in that same year. The poem, as I meant
it to work, at least, isn’t a reproof of Ransom’s Kantian formalism
(so influential upon the new critical method of teaching poetry in
America from the 1940s to the late 70s), so much as a heartfelt
exploration of the status of his understanding of poetry as a formally
contained moment of illumination, in the context of such wide and rich
sources of influence. By representing Ransom, in his final months, alone
in a room, watching television day and night (a biographical fact
corroborated to me by two people who ‘looked in upon him’ that
year), I have tried to get across Jack Spicer’s moving idea that a
poem can’t live alone, any more than a person can. And, further, that
not living alone, entails being okay with a heavy dose of chronic
bewilderment.
AP: If the long-poem
is, as you describe it, "less self-satisfied" and
"more skeptical" of the self and experience than the
lyric, this interestingly points to a drama I detect unfolding in your
lyric poetry — especially, the section titled "Office
Machines," which, in light of our discussion, however, I may need
to rethink as a long-poem now too. But the paragrammatic punning in
"The Wind Divider," or the anagrams in "Office
Credo," or the typographic errors in "Lunch Receptionist
Poems" and "Announcements From the Offices…" — such
eruptive things (eruptive — that is, the language as
"activity" bubbling over) are, I think, a linguistic
dramatization of said skepticism, calling attention to "the very
space of work" as one "filled like cryptic / crosswords, with
interruption" and "cruel, passive- / aggression"; calling
attention to "the conspiracy of the offices." This
"drama," as I’ve called it, also locates itself on a larger
thematic level too. Do you consider that a (somewhat) fair assessment?
Andor could further discuss the original conception of "Office
Machines"?
JC: I think you’re
right to identify "Office Machines" as a section of short
lyric poems, rather than as a long poem. If it is a long poem,
it’s one that treats the impossibility of sustaining itself while
under the constraints of institutional expectations and interruptions.
These poems were begun a very long time ago, when I was actually working
as an office assistant, and substitute lunchtime-receptionist. Unlike
Frank O’Hara, who would leave the office to write his poems on his
lunch break, I found myself writing poems while filling in at the
reception desk for the official receptionist as she went for her
lunch break. I had a big IBM Selectric typewriter (very fast) at my
disposal, hidden from public view, and I decided, whenever I had a free
moment, to attempt a short poem on the back side of the memo pad pages I
was using to take messages. The rules: (a) no poem may be longer than a
memo page, (b) if my train of thought is interrupted (as it often was,
by the phone, by someone asking if I had a paper clip, if I had a
stapler, if I had a garbage can) I must integrate the effects of
interruption into the poem’s logic or procedure, (c) do not get
‘caught’ typing poems while on reception duty. I averaged about a
poem a day, over the three-month period that I worked this job. Only a
few of the original memo pad poems have made it into the collection, but
they were certainly the basis of "Office Machines." Often, the
original typewriter poems were about people I did not know, but observed
from behind my desk day after day, and who became exotic, petty,
ambitious, comical, lonely, lovely characters in my interim-receptionist
fantasy world.
As an office
receptionist, you are centrally placed, yet mostly invisible, because
you are of no consequence to the world of work that surrounds you. So
you are well positioned to observe. In between interruptions, I imagined
the eruptions of the characters whose psychologies I was constructing,
with the ultimate purpose of feeling like I was doing something
worthwhile, for myself, as the saying goes. I was an anonymous
character making anonymous characters of them. The office poems are in
this sense ‘poems nearly anonymous.’ That is, while ‘expression’
is the staged occasion for these short poems, it is the conceit of the
expressive self, the ‘fictitious personality’ that is being
dramatized in the poems, not me. This may be understood as a
dramatization of skepticism about self and experience, but I don’t
really think of these poems as skeptical. They are to some extent
satirical, and thus perhaps skeptical of a certain romantic conception
of self-expressive lyric that approaches language as having a
transparent correspondence with thought and feeling. Puns, anagrams,
typos, imagined dyslexia, repressive linguistic gaffes and displacements
are all fun ways of contesting such assumed transparency, but they also
help the poems bubble over, as you put it, into what I hope becomes a
new order of expressivity. The characters in these poems, speaking from
controlling and oppressive institutional contexts, are attempting to
express their anger and bewilderment about their situations (and thus
gain some control for themselves), but find their language often takes
control of them, and leads them to say more than they have intended. The
"Office Machines" section is meant to celebrate the humorous,
sometimes beautiful, and often profoundly meaningful corruptions of our
most personal and precious intended meanings.
AP: Your closing
comments above are reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s
"remainder theory" — that which returns "to haunt the
scientific object [langue] that excludes it." One of its defining
principles, according to Lecercle, is that of disfunctionality,
"when it is language, not me, that speaks, when language speaks
through me, reducing me to the role of a mouthpiece. The consequence of
this is that language is not necessarily, not even centrally, meant to
allow the exchange of information." (This is all very interesting
too, if one recalls John Crowe Ransom’s theory, as quoted in
"Bewildered," that " ‘there is no / remainder’. No
otoise surplussage.") With all that in mind, we fittingly arrive at
one of my favourite poems in Attention All Typewriters, the
playful "Language Monster," with its harrowing final lines of
"I’ll dispossess the Language Monster / of his fertile tongue, //
until an utter silence prospers / and all speaking is undone."
JC: You’re right,
what I said above about meaningful corruptions of intended meaning is
reminiscent of Lecercle, although I hadn’t thought of the connection
until you brought it up. With his neat idea of "the remainder"
Lecercle sees language as something fluid, opaque, and always subject to
a kind of ‘intentional fallout’ that radiates from a hopeful
communicator’s mouth. Language leaks other meaning, is inherently
double (or treble, or…), playful, mis-communicative, wonderfully out
of control. With language there is always the remainder promising (or
threatening, depending on your disposition) to speak and mean on its
own, despite you — You, supposed language-controller. Language
thus also troubles any coherent sense of speaker or self that might be
asserted by language, and literature (which is granted special
status within Lecercle’s thinking) is a rich field through which the
disfunctionality of language is explored, and the others contributing to
oneself are discovered: "La vraie littérature n’est pas le lieu
de revendication d’identité mais plutôt le lieu de contact faste
avec l’altérité…" ("True literature isn’t the place
where identity is reinforced, but rather the place of a happy encounter
with alterity…"), he says in a recent interview. While I’m
somewhat interested in how language (by disfunction) can reduce me to a
mouthpiece, I’m especially interested in finding ways to communicate
(with language and what I’m calling ‘language fallout’) the
feelings coincident with this experience of being mouth-pieced,
trump(et)ed, and muzzled (by language).
"Language
Monster" and "In the Anger’s Chamber," a poem in my
first book, The Animal Library, present speakers who have spoken
their intimate, beloved interlocutors to death. They sing, and try to
make sense of the effect of "the remainder" in the presence of
their lovers’ remains. In such an imagined discursive context,
language is a monster, conveniently rendered external to the speaking
self — It wasn’t me, language did it. Fatalities are the
inevitable consequence of an attempt to communicate with it (language),
and the only way to peace is silence (i.e. remove the monster’s
tongue). Of course, who knows what the speaker will do once he has that
fertile tongue in his own possession. It’s as hard to shut up as it is
to say what you mean. I should probably mention that both "Language
Monster" and "Anger’s Chamber" are also songs that I
sing. When performed, the affective content of the remainder’s
violence is communicated not just by the words, but also by chords,
melody, and other non-verbal vocalizations that communicate coincident
anguish without words.
But that’s just one
approach to the remainder. My poetry often explores intentional fallout
in more playful, less dire ways. The remainder, in one sense, reveals
our need for language to make simple sense, and the lengths we’ll go
to have our sense, even where there is none (or, non). As Alice says
upon hearing stanzas of the poem, "Jabberwocky": "Somehow
it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what
they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s
clear, at any rate." In The Philosophy of Nonsense, Lecercle
quotes this passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass,
pointing out that "Jabberwocky" makes perfect (English)
phonetic, morphological and syntactical, but not semantic sense.
Sometimes, the first three are enough to make a moving or beautiful or
intriguing or hilarious or disturbing poem. But soon the pragmatic
reader, wanting to understand, to ‘get’ it, will look for more. In
my opinion, that’s when the real fun begins; when the fact of
language’s disfunctionality can be felt in relation to our common
desire to make language work as a simple messenger of basic meaning. Or
even as a rich (but ultimately successful) messenger of complex meaning.
Ransom’s theory of
the Concrete Universal that you quote from above, is an example of the
latter desire to have complex, sensuous details coincide so perfectly
with a poem’s abstract logic that the Concrete (language) is used up
completely in the service of the Universal or logical plan of the poem;
used up so completely, in fact that that there is no remainder once
language has put the poem’s plan into action. Where "there is no
/ remainder" comes from Ransom, "no otiose surplussage"
is an unattributed quote from Walter Pater’s essay, "Style"
(1888), in which he develops a theory that gives the stylist (writer)
agency to assimilate language’s "foreignness" and its
dangerous accidents of ulterior meaning, through a Flaubert-inspired
concept of "ascêsis" or "refined usage,"
that is, by his ability to perform "the exclusions, or rejections,
which nature demands." I guess one of the strange pleasures pursued
in a poem like "Bewildered," and most of the shorter poem’s
we’ve talked about, is that of hearing the excluded and rejected
resonance make its own (unnatural, erroneous, yet also divine and true)
demands upon nature.
AP: You alluded to the
double-life of "Language Monster" as both poem (printed
material; on the page) and "song" (an oral material; off the
page). This double-life is, I imagine, of particular interest to you, as
your current research interests include developing a critical-listening
practice that foregrounds the "aural qualities of literature, but
also […] the technologies by which the sounds of literature are made
manifest." Could you discuss your current research further, and its
connection to your poetry.
JC: This research
project — working title, Documenting the Phonotext: Victorian Sound
Recording and Its Legacy — comes out of my interest in eighteenth
and nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and recitation. I begin by
thinking about the rhetorical, reading, elocutionary and recitation
culture that was in place at the time the phonograph was introduced (tin
foil phonograph in 1877, Edison’s ‘perfected’ phonograph — the
first commercially viable machine — in 1888). I then sketch out the
range of imagined and actualized uses of this new technology vis-à-vis
oral performance. The earliest spoken recordings — not for commercial
use, but often made for promotional use — were in the genre of the
testimonial, praising Edison for his great invention, and the technology
for its powers of granting immortality to the speaker.
Another interesting
(promotional) genre of early recordings is what I call the
"phonograph poem" — poems written to be recited from the
perspective of the phonograph, the talking machine speaking not just any
self, in this case, but itself, and in its own voice. In
these kinds of promotional recordings— as in all early talking records
— we can hear a preserved performance of a generic and elocutionary
model that already existed in nineteenth-century recitation book
anthologies. The goal of recitation is often figured in these books as
the act of removing "bad, artificial habits, and supplanting them
by better." High literary works and dialect pieces were presented
as equally necessary for the expansion of one’s range as a cultured
elocutionist, the dialect exercises highlighting the potential purity of
their opposite just as skips and unwanted noise sometimes acknowledged
by early phonograph listeners ultimately (as Jonathan Sterne in his
excellent book The Audible Past, notes) "indexed the
possibility of perfect fidelity in reproduction."
All of the above
comprises just a small part of the first chapter of a book that thinks
about literary recordings in this vein from the late Victorian period to
T.S. Eliot’s various recordings of The Waste Land, made in the
1930s and 40s (the 1946 Library of Congress recording being the best
known). This research has had a huge influence on my poetry-writing.
Some of what I’ve found in my research is present in my poetry at a
thematic level — it has opened up a whole imagined world in which
different (mostly archaic) technologies exist. In that world I imagine
bodies engaged with these devices, and attempting to communicate with
them, to project themselves through these analog acoustic machines.
Placing a person in that world leads me to imagine different voices both
at the level of ‘genre’ (i.e. what are the formal elements on the
page of a wax cylinder recording made in 1888, what were the rhetorical
rules that developed around early spoken recordings, public address
announcements, telephone talk, etc.), and at the level of ‘grain’
(what is the voice of the phonograph, circa 1888, how did it sound, and
how can that be delivered from the page). Poems from The
Animal Library like "Phono Kit", "Kit Discovers
Sound", "Family Kit" (a dialect-recording poem of sorts),
and "…Crypto Kit…", are engaging with these kinds of
imaginary scenarios.
AP: You are also
currently co-editing English Poetry in Quebec / Quebec Poetry in
English, an anthology which includes essays on such notable Montreal
writers such as Louis Dudek, Peter Van Toorn, and David McGimpsey. Also
included is David Solway’s polemic "Double Exile and Montreal
English-Language Poetry," which claims for Montreal poets and
poetry a "concentration of virtuosity." Such a correspondence,
however, between place and poetic-value is impossible to prove. Such
claims are suspect because there’s nothing native to, or inherent in,
Montreal to account for such a "concentration" — that is to
say, "double exile" is not a geo-political subject position
unique to Montreal. (Solway’s claim is even more suspect upon
consideration of those poets he identifies as composing such a
"concentration of virtuosity.") What, then, is is the function
of such an anthology?
JC: While there are a
few previously published, polemical pieces along the lines of David
Solway’s essay that you mention above, the original essays in this
collection, Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976-2006, are, for the most
part, less interested in making a priori propositions about a
correspondence between place and poetic value, than in exploring
possible interpretive connections between place (or conceptions of
place) and poetic practice, and in generating readings of actual poems
in light of an array of linguistic and geo-political realities that
inform life in Quebec. There has not been a collection of essays taking
account of English language poetry in Quebec since John Glassco edited English
Poetry in Quebec (1965), forty years ago. A lot has happened since
then. In the mid-1950s, Louis Dudek could write with confidence about
"the dominant role of Montreal as a center of activity and a source
of new poetry" in Canada. From the vantage point of the early 21st
century, the idea of a coherent post-1970s Anglo-Québec poetry
community and tradition is blurred, or, rather, mediated by a series of
public language events that include the tabling of several ‘official
language’ bills (like Bill 22 and Bill 101) and their amendments, and
two referenda (1980 and 1995) concerning the place of Quebec within (or
without) the rest of Canada. It is mediated further by the loaded
terminology used to characterize Quebec society, and even further by
issues surrounding the status of English-speakers in Quebec. These are
some of the broader, geo-political specificities that might be thought
of in relation to particular poets, poetry activities, and poems.
For example, while a
poem like Louis Dudek’s Atlantis enacts an anti-parochial,
internationalist stance that may be attributed, in great part, to what
he learned from Ezra Pound, and from European modernism in general, it
is also interesting, I think, to read Dudek’s anti-provincialism in
that poem, and his pragmatic conception of culture as an activity of
small presses and aesthetic constellations alive in relation to each
other, and in conflict, within the frame of the emergent francophone
activism that was coincident with his fifty-year literary career in
Quebec. One kind of reading does not preclude the other. Peter Van
Toorn’s eighty-six "translation" poems in Mountain Tea
(1984), and his approach to creative translation in general, can be
considered in relation to politically-charged, Québecois conceptions of
language as culturally constitutive. Erín Moure’s O Cidadán
(2002), which intersects a word (citizen) with an othered semblance of
itself so that it becomes "[a] word we recognize though we know not
its language," creates an unsettled, "semantic
pandemonium" out of a concept that official discourse (whether
Canadian or Québecois political discourse) wants to settle, to mean
harmoniously and quietly. And a poem like David McGimpsey’s "Où
Est Queen Street?" (one of my favorites from Hamburger Valley,
California [2001]) can be read as a piece that figures Grade-Nine
detention time spent in the library as a late 1970s Anglo-Québec Bildung
story. Such a local reading of a poem in a book like Hamburger
Valley, California, that will more obviously be seen as a book about
a "Canadian" (whatever that means) poet abroad, in
"America" (whatever that means), is worth pursuing.
AP: Attention All
Typewriters is by far the best book of poetry I’ve read thus far
in 2005. Are you yourself pleased with the final product, both as it
stands on its own and as a follow-up to The Animal Library? What
are your hopes as it enters contemporary Canadian poetic culture?
JC: Thanks, Alex.
Thanks so much. I am pleased with Attention All Typewriters,
and I’m a bit surprised at the kind of book it turned out to be. I’m
proud of this book because I think it hits a wide range of emotional
registers, it works purposefully and playfully in a variety of poetic
forms, and experiments even more than The Animal Library did with
different kinds of narrative verse. This last fact probably makes my new
book more obviously accessible to readers who don’t normally read a
lot of poetry. As for my hopes for Attention All Typewriters: I
hope that it is read, and enjoyed, and judged according to its own
aspirations and merits. I hope it lives a fulfilling life, with much
health and happiness, and the pleasures of many children and
grandchildren. I wish it lots of mazel. Health is everything. I hope
that it is read. I hope that some readers will love a poem here
or there from the book the way I loved certain Beatles songs when I was
twelve years old, and certain Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Smiths
songs when I was twenty-two. That would be really cool. But that’s
asking a lot, I know.
AP: Any final thoughts?
JC: Hopefully not final
ones. I’ve already said more than I intended.
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