language poetry, and as I was
saying earlier I do not understand what that
activity is all about and it's again my ... I no
longer have this--I no longer think it's some moral
battle I'm fighting. I simply don't understand it.
I don't fault them for doing it except in a way
both Brian Fawcett and I were talking about this--I
kind of have a resentment or a disappointment that
so many of these--the very bright and talented and
sensitive poets in the language poetry movement
didn't deal in some realistic discursive way with
the events that are changing people's lives and
consciousness in the 1980's, but instead went after
what Fawcett calls, quite rightly, virtuosity. But
even that feeling--I don't fault them for it. I
mean why should I say that Jeff Derksen or Dorothy
Trujillo Lusk or Peter Culley should do something
with their lives and their minds other than what
they're doing (laugh). Only, oh I wish I understood
it, I wish I understood what the principle is by
which they get from one word to another.
B: And hoping that the explanation of
that wouldn't be more difficult than the poem
itself [laugh]
G: Well, yes, I read articles about
Derrida. I just read recently an article by the
writer Kate Soper in the New York Review about deconstruction and about the
metaphysical justification for Derrida's theory of
differance.
I just bring that up
to indicate that I'm able to understand things at
that level. So why is it that I have never found
any comprehensible explanation of language poetry?
I just don't know how to understand language
poetry, but every so often I read something like
Dan Farrell's review of Jeff Derksen's book in the
Frontmagazine that suggests that
I'm not--that no one is intended to understand
it--that my expectation should not be understanding
it, but rather participating with Jeff Derksen in
the production of the poem, and on an abstract
level I understand what that means--I understand
what the words participate in the production of the
poem "means", but I don't know what it is I should
do with my mind to participate in the production of
one of those poems and how will I get from this
word to that? Something's missing.
B: So your experience of reading and
thinking has been disrupted by a form or an
approach.
G: That's right ... disruptive, that's
true and if it's intended to be disruptive that's
fine. I admit to being disrupted. Disrupt. That's
what Whitman would say.
B: When a poem does that to you is it
almost the opposite of what T.S. Eliot would
do?
G: Well, Eliot, or Ashbery or any of the
other poets. I read Ashbery because there is, I'm
sure that's the word--interanimation of minds going
on so that it is a kind of telepathy like Benjamin
says--that I can feel Ashbery's mind dealing with
this human situation we're in and at the same time
dealing with New York and art and landscape and
other features of our beautiful world. Then, of
course, there are other poets who want to make us
squirm and scream with horror like Sharon Olds. She
has a poem about her father dying of cancer that is
so horrifying that it almost ... well, you wonder
at--but then if it's necessary for her to do that,
it's necessary for me to read it. It's in an
anthology. A lot of university students are
reading it. It's necessary for them to read that
and know. And it's funny that there would be no
question raised if this were in a novel, say,but the fact that this particular
piece of horrific description of a man's agony is
put in lines as a poem, it's framed in a way and I
want to question the reason for the
framing, but I don't question it.
B: I'm not quite clear about what you're
saying. How does her poem relate to Nowlan's poem
about the moose?
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