Duende and Open Form:
An Interview with Paul E. Nelson

interview by Michael Dylan Welch

For Seattle poet Paul E. Nelson, who recently finished his master’s thesis (“Open Form in North American Poetry: A Path to Liberation”) through Lesley University, organic form and open field poetry is a way of life. If you search for “open form poetry” on Google or Yahoo, an essay of Paul’s is one of the highest-ranked links (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/What_is_Open_Form_poetry.htm [now https://paulenelson.com/organic-poetry/what-is-open-form-poetry/]). This is an example of how Paul is on the forefront of open form criticism and exploration. For Global Voices Radio, he has also interviewed many poets who have taken a similar path, including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Wanda Coleman, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Jerome Rothenberg, Ed Sanders, Eileen Myles, Robin Blaser, George Bowering, Victor Hernandez Cruz, and Adrian Castro. He uses these recordings to spice up the many workshops he gives in open and organic form. Paul is also currently finishing an epic poem titled “A Time Before Slaughter” with these principles in mind, and all of his poetry is receptive not just to verbal spelunking but psychological and spiritual exploration as well. Not everyone is wired this way—being bent, MFA-style, toward the shiny publishable product. In contrast, Paul’s approach is one of process and flow.

1. Poetry. What is it?

Who said it was “language charged with meaning”? I agree, but it is also a mode of perception and a contribution to the field of human thought and creativity. Robert Duncan said in his August 19, 1964 letter to Denise Levertov that he wanted to “open my work up to material that lies just beyond my recognition of use as I work.” This resonates deeply with me, as does the notion of having a poetry practice (praxis). The practice of writing a 17-syllable sentence every day, a form Allen Ginsberg created as a way of Americanizing haiku, called “American Sentences,” has been rewarding for me. It keeps me involved in writing poetry every day. After a few weeks of that practice, I started seeing positive results in the work, and in my own life. It deepened my perception and was a record that I had some fun, or had some pithy snapshots of the moments of my life, or of my perspective of life in the larger culture. One last thought Anne Waldman infers in her poem “Outrider” that poetry is . . .

Energy made of language with its attendant properties—

speech, song, ideas, music, image, skills of dicing, cutting,

arrangement, gesture.

2. Why write poetry? I don’t mean why write organically or formally, but why write poetry at all? What does it do for you, or what does your poetry do for anyone else?

Michael McClure said some very interesting things when I interviewed him in 1995. He’s my prime poetry source, so I am liable to quote him 18 times in this interview, but he saw (and still sees) poetry as an act of soul-building, believing that we are not given a soul at birth, but the opportunity to make one. It’s a Keatsian notion, that of earth as a veil of soul-making. It seems to me the organic (as Duncan in dialog with Denise Levertov once called the spontaneous practice) or projective, as McClure prefers, is a better mode for that effort because you do want to go beyond your conscious recognition as you compose. You want to see things, or come to realize thoughts and perceptions as you write, rather than staying within yourself. You want to tap into those fields, resonances, and perhaps even entities that are available only when you can get beyond what you know (or think you know). The practice aids individuation. In Jungian terms this is the integration of the self through the resolution of successive layers of psychological conflict. If poetry is not used for this purpose, it seems as if it is a waste of my time, though I agree with Sam Hamill who says that “poetry is a big house.” I just may not want to visit the Slam room or the Confessional Narrative closet as often as I’ll be in the Organic Lounge.

As for what my poetry does for others, I hope it creates a field of resonance, of consciousness, that helps liberate them beyond a cosmology of competition/domination/reductionism. Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the fundamental elements of the universe being seen as occasions of experience rather than concrete objects is very much consistent with the organic or projective poem. I felt that I understood this the first moment I laid eyes on McClure’s poem “Dolphin Skull” and also get this from the best of the other organic poets I’ve been studying. So hopefully my poems can be used as a way in, an opening for others to recognize the universe in this manner. This paradigm shift from the mechanistic to the organismic is something I studied quite extensively through the syndicated radio show I did for over a decade, and I feel is enacted best through the organic poetry composition process.

3. People who write poetry are “wired” in different ways and may be drawn more to one style of poetry than the other, or perhaps their attractions change over time as they explore different ways of writing. What would you say someone could get out of studying or practicing organic form no matter what style of poetry they usually write?

Well, I thought more people would understand the implications of the organic when I first started to delve into it after interviewing Ginsberg in 1994 and McClure in 1995, but the more I get into it, the more I realize I am a little further out on this than I had thought. It takes a different kind of person to resonate with the organic and the organismic, but I think the presidency of George W. Bush is creating an opening for people who see what is going on and do not resonate with his (or more like Chaney’s) competition/ domination model. One can get angry at Bush or his policies, or one can begin to understand and implement in one’s own life a different mode of being than this competition model, which I believe humans have outgrown. Bush is only the latest and perhaps most virulent symptom of the model that is often called the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm—materialism. Here’s another line from “Outrider”:

The nature guardians are not happy about global warming.

Messages from the phenomenal world.)

As I read that I am reminded of Father Matthew Fox and his great chart from “The Reinvention of Work” (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Paradigm_Shift_at_a_Glance.html [now https://globalvoicesradio.cascadiapoeticslab.org/Paradigm_Shift_at_a_Glance.html]), which contrasted the fundamental tenets of the mechanistic paradigm with those of the organismic one. He pointed out that it’s a mechanistic notion to think of the planet as dead. If he is correct, that the planet is a live, sentient being, then the war on terrorism will look like a fist-fight compared to what Gaia has in store for humans. It’d be an interesting narrative if natural events (disasters, etc.) were seen as literal attacks: Mother Nature just attacked Florida in the middle of the night, claiming 14 casualties in a series of winter tornadoes. Humans can’t fight back in this battle. We have to move to acceptance and learn to live in harmony with the planet’s systems. Of course, acceptance is a higher energy construct. (Some people suggest that humans have been through this before and lost when the planet did a pole shift, but I digress.)

“Open” also suggests boundless. An old teacher I studied with ten years ago called everything in us beside the ego the “unbound self.” Of course, in “Projective Verse” Charles Olson believed he was documenting a process one could use to get beyond ego, and get not only to the unbound self but to a notion of inherent interconnection. Or, in the Hua Yen Buddhist sense, you get to the experience of the interdependent origination of the universe.

4. In the realm of organic poetry, one hears the terms “projective verse,” “open form,” “field poetry,” “free verse,” “language poetry,” “organic form,” “postmodernism,” and so on. What’s the difference between these terms, and to what degree do they overlap?

“Projective verse” (or “organic poetry,” as Robert Duncan once referred to it in a letter to Denise Levertov), was also called “composition by field” in the seminal 1950 Olson essay. Olson is also credited with the first use of “Postmodern,” but there are a whole range of stances toward poem-making beyond the organic, which is the term I use because of the underlying cosmology that can be described as organismic. Duncan was also clear about how organic verse and free verse differ, suggesting that, in free verse, the poet already knows what he or she is going to say, whereas the poet writing organically discovers what the content is as he or she goes along. Duncan said Howl is an example of a free verse poem. Levertov, in a friendly amendment to Robert Creeley’s quote from “Projective Verse,” said “Form is never more than a revelation of content.” I have not studied Language poetry, but do not see it as being part of the organic/projective arena, although aleatory methods are one form of open poetry. I have employed them on occasion.

5. Regarding Denise Levertov, who we’ve talked about before, do you think she may have lost her nerve in her poetry? What do you do with your poetry that helps you keep your own nerve?

Her disagreement with Duncan, so clearly laid out in their letters for anyone interested in plowing through twenty years of correspondence, was about her move to something less organic than what Duncan was creating in his own work and preferring in the work of others, especially those he loved and respected. He did not see poetry as a mode to persuade others to one’s point of view, nor did he think it was the poet’s job to oppose evil, but to imagine it, so he first worried about her mental well-being and then made his thoughts public in a way that Levertov did not appreciate and their friendship was over. An essay of mine, “Evolving the Organic: The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov,” at http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Evolving_The_Organic.html [now https://paulenelson.com/organic-poetry/letters-of-duncan-levertov/ and https://globalvoicesradio.cascadiapoeticslab.org/Evolving_The_Organic.html], elaborates on my thoughts about this.) Of course, her popularity increased after her break with Duncan. And her poetry reached more people and perhaps helped sway public opinion away from support of the Vietnam War. Duncan was able to hone his ideas in dialog with her. “Some Notes on Organic Form” (available at http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/levertov.html) is one of the seminal essays in this branch of poetics, but I am not sure how much faith she had in the organic after 1970.

Olson called “Projective Verse” the use of “language at its least careless and least logical.” We live in a mechanistic world, so it is understandable that most folks in it want the linear, want the easy payoff, and that does not happen with that which is more difficult. Olson’s and Duncan’s respective oeuvres are rather difficult and Levertov’s work after 1970 was described by Ron Silliman on his blog as “polite scolding.” That seems harsh, but I prefer her earlier work, which was more towards the organic in the continuum.

I think nerve can be seen as being in opposition to commercial considerations, or egotistical ones. When one gives in to either of those, one has either lost one’s nerve, or has ceased making it new, which I think is deadly for any artist. Look at nerve as embodied by Miles Davis or Pablo Picasso. Miles almost never went back to the old sessions—one shot at The Birth of the Cool I think being the only exception. Once he did “Kind of Blue,” it was over, though his music lives on as a document of that time and as a timeless work of art.

6. Speaking of jazz, what commonalities do you feel it has with open form poetry?

The organic has much in common with jazz. In some organic poems the form and content start from nothing and emerge as one goes along like the free jazz of someone like Fred Anderson, the old Chicago tenor player who for decades has been part of the AACM [Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians]. A performance Fred did with Hamid Drake and William Parker during the Earshot Festival in Seattle in 2001 was mesmerizing. They did two sets totally improvising from the first notes. It was transcendent. I asked the drummer, Hamid, where that power comes from and he said: “Not me. It’s the Holy Ghost!” (This is consistent with Jack Spicer’s “The Practice of Outside.”)

Other organic poems have the slightest restraint, such as a phrase acrostic, in which you write a phrase down the left margin

one

word

at

a

time and then fill in the lines, composing as you go along, keeping in mind that you have to somehow get back to the word beginning the next line. It is sort of like the melody to which jazz musicians must return, or riff from. A less experienced musician can get lost and the solo never seems to end. A poet working in the organic faces the same pitfall, one that Olson referred to as sprawl (which preceded the notion of suburban sprawl rather prophetically).

The great musicians practiced every day and prepared for the moment when they performed. The best organic poets write every day as well and when the inspiration, setting, and attention all click, the chances of the successful organic poem are increased.

7. When you read or listen to a poem, can you “tell” whether it was written in an organic way, and if so, how? Is it spotting a sort of “groove” or “zone” that the poet gets into that tells you it’s organic?

I think sometimes you can. I am not sure how, but I think a field of energy affects you if you are open to it. I was open for “Dolphin Skull” when I first read it, even though its references were way over my head. I could always get something out of it, almost like it was some kind of drug. Yes, it is an altering of consciousness that happens. I’ll never forget reading the first half of that poem at Red Sky Poetry Theater, the 25-year open-mic reading series that I attended regularly from 1995 until its end in 2004. I read it in five hunks and when I would start, old Seattle poet Charlie Burks would be there in the audience with his eyes closed, taking it all in as I think it was designed, a voyage into another realm of being that is within our grasp, that we crave and that is our birthright. I often feel a deadness, a lack of energy, when something is not organic. I tend to shut down quite often when a poem is trying to convince me of something, even if I have a mind to agree with it. Perhaps this is like the effects of a sermon or other religious proselytizing.

8. Earlier you mentioned Levertov’s essay, “Some Notes on Organic Form.” She spoke of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ notions of inscape and instress from a hundred years ago, when the contemporary concepts of organic form first began to emerge, and we have seen it also in the prairie architecture of Louis Sullivan and his famous student, Frank Lloyd Wright. Have you studied Hopkins much yet? And can poets learn from architects, or others with similar affinities?

I’ve not studied Hopkins. I do agree there are nonliterary sources into which a poet from any school can tap. Wright is a quintessential choice as he understood the relationship between form and function. He was an original American and created a uniquely American school of architecture. I am surprised there aren’t more Wright houses around the continent. For anyone visiting Chicago, I highly recommend the tour of his home and office, as well as the walking tour of Oak Park. I am particularly fond of jazz and have found it to be a vast source. Of course, many people writing jazz poems, Wanda Coleman points out, are inspired by jazz but don’t swing. She says they “honor jazz but don’t emulate it.” It is pretty obvious to anyone who can swing when these kinds of poems arise. There is a whole jazz poetry magazine, in fact, that rarely has jazz poems that swing, but life goes on. McClure was inspired by Jackson Pollack and Clyfford Still. Robert Duncan lived with his partner, the painter Jess. The potential openings for organic poets are everywhere, but I don’t think that’s exclusive to the organic. I just think the organic enables someone to tap into those fields more readily, whereas, with poetry further to the closed end of the continuum, the inspiration usually has to fit in with a preordained intellectual concept, limiting what can be a source of energy.

9. There’s a trend towards buying organic produce at the grocery store. Do you think that trend provides hope for “organic” poetry and “stances toward reality”? Or is there a divide occurring, where some folks are going organic, and some folks either don’t care or will never get it? Is the comparison to organic produce a reasonable metaphor in relationship to poetry?

I think the term does mean something to a lot of people, relating to what Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson called “Cultural Creatives.” I think there is an inherent link to something more conscious, natural, more healthy, live, and more tasty. It is part of why I settled on the term “organic” when I saw Duncan explain it so clearly in that early letter to Levertov. The term has become even more useful since then to connote a paradigm shift from the way things had been done in the produce department and elsewhere.

10. Do you have any favourite poems that you would say are not organic? Do any formal poems come to mind as possible favourites? How do you feel when you read a poem such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?

Some poems work in a more conventional sense, which make me laugh, or state something to which I have an emotional attachment. Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” is one, though free verse rather than formal. Neruda comes across to me as free verse, yet he’s an important poet, albeit free verse and not organic, as are many others. I think one of my problems in appreciating poems such as the one you mention is my Cuban heritage. My mother was born in Cuba and the inherent rhythms Cubanos pulse with are a great deal more complicated than the plodding of iambic pentameter and other metered forms that have a European heritage. To me, the metered forms are more suitable to a period and place to which I do not have a strong connection. There is a deadness to me in formal verse that makes me want to skip past them to that which I feel has the duende.

11. I once read a description of sumo wrestling, where the dohyo or ring in which they wrestle is described as both confining and liberating—confining because it limits their space, yet also liberating because the wrestlers must be endlessly creative and effective even within that limited space. Would you agree? How would you think this might apply to questions of open and closed forms in poetry?

Marianne Moore said, “freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline we impose on ourselves.” Part of the discovery of each individual organic poem’s form, as it is being revealed, lies in discovering which restrictions one is going to use. When I wrote a series of poems in response to the late Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar (http://www.kaurab.com/poetry_peripherals/binoy.html [see https://web.archive.org/web/20251008005549/http://www.kaurab.com/poetry_peripherals/binoy.html]), I decided to make each response poem (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Responses_to_Binoy_Majumdar.html [now https://globalvoicesradio.cascadiapoeticslab.org/Responses_to_Binoy_Majumdar.html]) the same number of lines as each poem in the series of eight that were translated in part by Aryanil Mukherjee and posted on his Bengali poetry website Kaurab. When I was composing the “Tuscan Sonnet Ring” (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Tuscan_Sonnet_Ring.html [now https://globalvoicesradio.cascadiapoeticslab.org/Tuscan_Sonnet_Ring.html]), I decided that I would make the lines short, with the notion that they could be individual units and that I’d use Ted Berrigan’s cut-up method from his poem in The Sonnets (http://www.petermanson.com/Sonnets.htm [see https://web.archive.org/web/20120313214955/http://www.petermanson.com/Sonnets.htm]) that refers to the “hungry dead doctor.” So two were chopped up that way and also included in their original versions. In the organic poem one gets a sense of what the restriction might be as part of the creative process. I guess one could get them from traditional forms, but, for the most part, they have not interested me too much. I did write something approximating a traditional sonnet, but it was not a perfect sonnet. I ended up calling it “Something Approximating a Traditional Sonnet” (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Something_Approximating_a_T.html [now https://globalvoicesradio.cascadiapoeticslab.org/Something_Approximating_a_T.html]).

12. You said at the beginning that you try to write at least one “American Sentence” every day. What is this, and why does the form attract you? Have you written one today yet, and could you share it? The confinement of the form seems a lot like the sumo wrestling ring. Do you consider it an “open” form? Why or why not?

2.3.07: He asks if I’ve written today’s Sentence yet but the clock’s still ticking. Ginsberg created the form, based on haiku, but in a linear motif like everything else in North America. Because the form is short, it allows me to use it as a discipline. If I see something cool happening, I can take a break from just about anything I’m doing to capture the shadow of the moment. Because it does not have the requirements a traditional haiku has, it is more open than haiku, though the prescribed syllable count, which I usually adhere to, makes it less open than other forms. More on this appears on www.americansentences.com [see https://web.archive.org/web/20151121134858/http://americansentences.com/ and https://paulenelson.com/american-sentences-2/].

13. You teach classes on organic poetry that are designed to help unlock the doors for people who may not be aware of the organic. Or would you characterize your purpose in some other way? What motivates you to offer your classes on organic form?

I learn more about the organic with each class I teach (http://splab.org/workshop.html [see https://paulenelson.com/workshops/ and https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/workshops/]). I see people light up when they get, at some level, what the organic is, and I get satisfaction from that. I do see the organic poetry discipline as one that aids individuation, so it is a way of helping to liberate fellow suffering humans. The workshops are a tiny ripple in the giant pond, each wave making a note in our divine number. It beats drinking. And it is a combination of theory and practice, so the experiential part is quite satisfying. And people, when liberated, come up with the most magical lines and images.

14. What you’ve just said makes it seem that only the “liberated” can come up with magical lines and images, or that magical lines and images are possible only if one is “liberated.” Do you really believe that? That seems to deny other approaches to successful poetry.

I think the state of consciousness that accompanies liberation is what results in magic and we all experience that sometime in our lives. William Carlos Williams in “Spring and All” noted that, “most of my life has been lived in hell—a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear.” The nonmagical is that hell. Now that is not to say washing dishes, painting a barn, or some other task we might label “drudgery” is also hell. I think it depends on the intent and the consciousness of the person doing the task. What I strive for in writing organically is a balance of left- and right-brain modes of consciousness. Too much writing fears the kinds of quirks that have a right-brain nonlinearity. Too often, people delete those quirks, or avoid considering them. I think this fear, rampant in much of what Ron Silliman calls “The School of Quietude” in North American poetry, prevents more magic than it allows.

15. I know that there’s a spiritual aspect in your approach to poetry. For some people, spirituality is highly personal. Please talk about that component relative to your work and to the classes you teach.

We are put on this planet to heal the bloodline and liberate ourselves from the endless cycle of birth and death. We are the point man (or woman) for our ancestors. It is our birthright to be truly free human beings. I have a huge drive toward this goal, what McClure calls a “hunger for liberation.” God, when I first read that I was so inspired, like “HE GETS IT!” We are in the midst of what Jean Houston calls Jump Time, an era in which we are called to evolve or dissolve. The velocity of life is unprecedented. As poets in North America, I think we have a responsibility to follow in Whitman’s boot-prints. The path he laid out was as a person who had a tremendous spiritual experience, an experience of one-ness. He was then able to translate that into verse, into an original kind of poetry that some see as the beginning of the organic tradition in North America. If people can learn anything from what seems to have worked on some level for me, then I have been of some use—and that’s the biggest gift of all, to be of use.

16. In Theory and Play of the Duende, Lorca wrote that “The arrival of the duende presupposes a radical change to all the old kinds of form, brings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm.” Is the radical change he talks about necessary, or is it merely welcome? I speak not just of your own work, but of all poetry today.

In the postmodern age and whatever era we’re in now, humans have had the capacity to blow up the planet many hundreds of times. In this context, it doesn’t seem like the time to keep going around the same tired path, does it? William Carlos Williams said there is “no poetry of distinction without formal invention” and that idea resonates deeply for me, otherwise, what’s the point? Book sales? Fellowships? Gigs? Sure, we have to make a living, but these considerations seem trivial to me compared with the urge to make it new. Perhaps the fear of death in our culture has been relegated to the Jungian shadow forcing us to act out in violent ways. Look at the size of the U.S. defense budget. Duende is present when there is the possibility of death, but in North American culture we tend to sanitize death and try to pretend it does not exist. So far, it does not seem like a healthy strategy.

17. Do you see duende as being related to the “shadow” that Robert Bly speaks of in poetry? What influence is Lorca on your work, and can duende be “manufactured” in one’s poetry, or must it arise spontaneously, from within? Is that possible if a poet happens to live a charmed life?

Duende is present when there is the possibility of death, so someone who has lived a charmed life, but who also understands that it can be taken away in one quick moment, could potentially have the duende. I have a poem on the subject, written as part of the 3:15 series I did for several years.

September’s Search for Duende

(After Lorca, For Peter Ludwin)

The search ends when the

duende is encountered as the reason why a bit of bile

is stuck @ the base of the throat clearly

not

a muse or angel   but a

power says Lorca

and

not an angel of protection   or  a latent antepasado

a lost ancestor to shape

behavior for the preservation of the strain ((the strand))

it

is not madness per se  but

a   reason  why the ear-slicing madness exists   the

struggle what makes it so.  What makes it so deadly

& fierce the push toward homicide re-directed   yet

not  a  path  per se

a   notion  or

concept   concept what triggers the itch no skin-scratching will cure.

It is the fire Artaud knew

burns   the   cells  like  a  memory  of  crucifixion

the  muscle  memory  of  a  spike

blood w/ no avenue to splurt implodes  &  marks a soul

like a nuclear tattoo  or

powdered

glass in the jar we thot was sugar-filled.

That freshness wholly unknown

it requires a living body as interpreter

exhausts all intellect

that ultimate metallic quality of death

it coulda been an aneurysm it

rejects measured rhythm the wild river pours its own path

all the cows stranded on the last patch of higher ground.

The duende is what creates the subtle grimace as

sweet as prolonged uncertain childbirth   the

geometry of destruction

one force of nature mother didn’t tell you about

has pushed men to madness & Lorca

learned duende scares the muse it may be

that sound behind you when the forest is on fire

it is the force what compromises your grip on the cliff    a rock

breaks off from under your foot & duende

w/ the taste of your heart in your throat  duende is

all smiles that you never see  the

styles you break from the moon on a moonless night’s incessant tug into the blood-filled dawn.

8:15A - 9.1.01

18. Speaking of charmed lives, if you could snap your fingers and do what you wanted with poetry or teaching, what would you do? How would you answer that question if I throw in the requirement of also needing to make your living at it? What would be your dream job?

My dream job would be to have a weekly poetry radio show that would allow me to travel all over the world and interview poets about poetry, culture, and contemporary world events, while at the same time creating and living in a village, protected by a land trust, that maintains quality, sustainable, affordable housing for other artists. Talk to and live amongst artists who are making contributions to the understanding of this unique time in human history, Jump Time, and their strategies for negotiating the leap.

19. In a recent email message, you said that “one of the most critical things about organic poetry is the stance toward reality which brings such verse into being.” How is one’s stance toward reality different if you write projectively, as Olson put it?

As mentioned previously, it is an organismic paradigm, rather than a mechanistic one. For example, if you have a headache, a mechanistic doctor would say: “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” The symptom would be treated. As I said on my syndicated radio show, the unofficial motto of allopathic (symptom-oriented) medicine could be “Find the bad part and kill it.” Come to think of it, that also sounds like American foreign policy since 1776.

A holistic doctor would ask a series of questions to rule out dehydration, food allergies, spinal alignment issues, and so on until she found out what might be at the source of headaches. And then she would help you resolve it in a way that honors and supports the system’s ability to maintain homeostasis. Father Matthew Fox’s chart mentioned previously (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Paradigm_Shift_at_a_Glance.html [now https://globalvoicesradio.cascadiapoeticslab.org/Paradigm_Shift_at_a_Glance.html]) is one good illustration and I have handouts from Dr. Larry Dossey and Riane Eisler as well that I often pass out at workshops. The relationship of your body to the factors that result in headaches would be explored, the roots and the branches of the issue. This is one aspect of the holistic or organismic world view. It can be applied to anything. This is not to say the mechanistic has no role in our society. If I get hit by a car, please airlift me to Harborview [Medical Center], don’t send the shaman to say some prayers and smudge me!

20. There’s a website you may know called “Expansive Poetry Online.” On it, Joseph S. Salemi published a paper titled “Why Poetry Is Dying” (http://www.n2hos.com/acm/cult122001.html [now http://www.expansivepoetryonline.com/journal/cult122001.html]). I have two questions for you relating to it. First, do you think poetry is dying? Some people say we’re in the midst of a poetry renaissance, but Salemi asserts that we’re merely in the midst of increased quantity without a matching increase in quality. It’s an explosion, but not a renaissance. Would you agree?

His point is that there is a glut of poetry and he’s right. Of course, now our access to poetry of all kinds is easier, so that is a factor. He ends his essay by saying “if we realize that we are not in this business to make friends and promote our personal careers, then the art of poetry might just have a chance,” which is what I was saying before when you asked about nerve. It takes about fifty years for the shit to fall away and allow the best work to rise. Look at William Carlos Williams, a prime example. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry just after he died. Great timing, eh?

21. And now my second question. Salemi decries not only the confessional lyric, but also the expectation that most people have of poetry that they will receive great truths or revelations from it. He refers to this attitude as a “Portentous Hush,” which he defines as follows:

“Portentous Hush is an atmosphere, a tonality, an attitude. It is the tendency of contemporary verse to generate an air of highfalutin sanctity about itself, to pose before the reader as Something Of Great Importance, with capital letters. A poem in the grip of Portentous Hush has all the hieratic resonance of a prayer or an incantation. When you read such a poem you can hear the poet whispering to you, in a tone of hushed awe, something like the following: ‘This is a high and holy moment of deep significance, and you must pay reverent attention!’ It doesn’t matter what the poem is about. The real subject of such a poem is the celebration of its own heightened sensitivity.”

Do you think this is a problem with poetry today? How do you agree or disagree with Salemi’s viewpoint? And finally, how does this issue connect with your approach to open form and organic poetry? I am reminded of the title of your current master’s thesis: “Open Form in North American Poetry: A Path to Liberation.” Is it necessary for people to be liberated by or through poetry?

At first glance I would tend to agree with this. A tone of arrogance limits the poem, certainly. Arrogance is a weak attractor field. I think poetry’s great gift is to liberate, but people can also be liberated from the tedium of daily life through something that makes them laugh, or through a poem that allows them to see in a new way something they’ve seen many times. Too much poetry fails because it is trivial. That’s a problem with much North American verse, yet poetry is a big house and many styles and genres can coexist. The moment of epiphany is poetry’s highest calling, and I think the organic is a more sure version of getting to that point, as pointed out earlier by Duncan’s notion that the poem should go beyond one’s immediate understanding. When we understand the ramifications of this time in history, some call it the time after the death of the old Gods, before the birth of the new, we can begin to understand the need to create poetry as huge as the era in which we find ourselves. Perhaps that would resonate with Salemi.

22. Harold Bloom, in The Art of Reading Poetry, talked about the value of “weirdness” in poetry, that it challenges us because it lies beyond the threshold of where we’re comfortable—beyond one’s immediate understanding. You would obviously seem to agree with this concept. But does Harold Bloom have anything to say to you?

Yes, weirdness is important and I would say anyone as intelligent as Harold Bloom, who has spent so much time in the poetry vineyard, would have something to say to me. However, I’ve not been drawn to his work and feel there are much better sources for Harold Bloom than me.

23. Could you expand on this? Bloom is not exactly in the “organic” camp, yet here he is saying something that clearly agrees with Duncan. Or perhaps it could be said that they’ve both been to the same mountaintop? Let me put it this way: The virtue of going beyond one’s immediate understanding, into that realm of strangeness or doubt, seems not to be exclusive to the organic or projective approach to poetry. You just said that “the organic is a more sure version of getting to that point,” to poetry’s highest calling, yet what makes you confident that it’s more sure? Or is it just more sure for you?

I go back to Olson calling for the use of speech at its least logical and least careless. The notion, or part of it, is to get to a place where you are valuing the intelligence of the poem, under hand, as it is being written. McClure has noted that the poem has brighter thoughts than he was aware of in the act of composing and that idea has always resonated with me since I read it in 1995. Again, these are not concepts exclusive to the organic and the organic itself is just one pole on the poetry continuum, but have you ever heard a School of Quietude poet say he or she doesn’t understand something they’ve written? I don’t know what that means! Not I. I think the inability to trust the intelligence of the language and its direction is a symptom of the anthropomorphic impulse. The organic poem understands the source of the poem to be outside the self, to be beyond. As I mentioned earlier, Jack Spicer called it “The Practice of Outside.” I don’t see much in the School of Quietude that takes that stance.

24. If you were to describe them together, would you say “open versus closed forms” or “open and closed forms”? Do you see them at odds with each other, or not?

I don’t see them in competition, I see them as a continuum. I prefer the open. There are others, those who run the NEA, the Poetry Foundation, and most poets laureate who tend to veer toward the closed side of the spectrum. I think all poets can benefit from what Spicer called “the quick take” and that’s what I try to get across in the workshops I facilitate.

The competition mode seems very stupid when it comes to poets and poetry. It reminds me of that Emo Phillips bit:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! Don’t do it!” “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!” He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well . . . are you religious or atheist?” He said, “Religious.” I said, “Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?” He said, “Christian.” I said, “Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?” He said, “Baptist!” I said, “Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” He said, “Baptist Church of God!” I said, “Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?” He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God!” I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?” He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!” I said, “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

25. If you could meet Charles Olson, what would you ask him? What about William Carlos Williams? What other poets, dead or alive, would you most like to know personally, and what would you want to say to them?

Charles, what were the things that forced you to write “Projective Verse”? What did you like best about your Black Mountain experience? Did the world miss out by not understanding the beauty of Black Mountain’s educational methods? What year will American education look more like Black Mountain? What would you have put in The Maximus Poems if you had been able to finish it? Is it McClure who has best expanded the notion of “Projective Verse”? If not, who? In your poem “As the Dead Prey Upon Us,” what inspired the image of the blue deer?

Dr. Williams, what do you think made Ezra do those broadcasts for the fascists in WWII? Do you think American poetry would have been better off if he would have been executed? Did T. S. Eliot set back American poetry 100 years, or was it 200? Did Ginsberg live up to your expectations of him? How’s Flossie?

26. I’m glad you mentioned Olson’s Maximus Poems. They have been described as “organized by the physiology of speech and treating words as things in themselves, not simple referents.” How does that description strike you? What appeals to you most about this projective or open form approach to poetry? And how would you differentiate it from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry?

Yes, organized by the physiology of speech is a concept from “Projective Verse” that Olson made about as clear as he could make something. As far as treating words as objects rather than referents, this seems to come out of the Fenellosa essay that influenced Pound, and Olson as well, and seems to be a basic tenet of the LangPo school, but I don’t sense as much heart in the little LangPo I’ve read, nor do I think the source in Marxism, which was a source for many of the Language poets, amounts to much, Marxism being another form of reductionism. That said, some interesting work is associated with the LangPo school. Rosemary Waldrop, Barrett Watten, Thalia Field, and in Seattle, Nico Vassilakis and John Olson, who are influenced by LangPo techniques, are some poets who immediately come to mind. In general, though, I see LangPo as being a little too intellectual, a little out of balance on that side of the heart/intellect continuum.

27. You obviously have your favourite poets, and are drawn to many Latin American poets, among others. Talk about some of these inspirations, and what makes the difference in their poetry compared with Anglo American poetry? Is it duende or something more?

A lot of it is duende. Of course, duende is a concept from Spanish culture, so you can understand how it would resonate with Latinos and how they have an aversion to the trivial. I think someone wanting to do one of those cheesy “word game” poetry workshops in Venezuela or Argentina could end up floating face down in the river. Jose Kozer is a Cubano-Americano poet who writes in a style Neo-Barroco, which in South America is referred to as Neo-Barroso. Jose Lezama Lima is an important predecessor in this movement. Gloria Gervitz’s poem “Migrations” is a masterwork. Mexico’s Coral Bracho and Maria Baranda are important poets. Victor Hernandez Cruz has some wonderful work, as does the Miami poet Adrian Castro. These are just a few off the top of my head. I expect to do more research into this in the coming years and would love to study in Cuba.

One of the interesting things that Sam Hamill and I have talked about in our chats on the golf course, or over bottles of Otokoyama sake, is the notion that South American poets inherently understand the role of the poet and they wonder what the fuck American poets are thinking with some of the trivial shit they turn out. They realize the horrible effect the academy has had on North American poetry and they know that poets, real chance-taking poets, are needed here now more than ever. It’s why Sam was honored in Venezuela recently, because of his strong stand against the American war in Iraq and his response of organizing poets around the world through Poets Against War (http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/ [see https://web.archive.org/web/20190815000000*/http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/]). The main difference between Norte and Sur Americanos is they understand and strive for duende. The average Norte Americano poet strives for an NEA grant. Do you read the average American poet’s bio? It’s about what contests they’ve won or were finalists for. It’s dreadful and says so much about the priorities of American poets.

28. Or do people cite prizes and accomplishments because that’s what they think editors or audiences are impressed by? What can be done to fix that situation? Is it just the poets who need fixing, or the audiences, too, as well as the entire poetry business?

No fixing is needed. Someone will read this and it will resonate with them and they’ll focus on deepening their gesture rather than applying for a contest. Most poets will read this and say I’m full of shit and slap three poems and ten bucks into an envelope and hope they win, but there will always be people who need outside validation for their work. Look how popular the Slam has been. There will always be people who measure success through contests and sales. Ours is still a very materialistic culture and I suspect the numbers of poets who put their energy into positioning rather than the work will always be larger than the poets who put their priorities on perfecting their personal gesture. With each organic poem being an experiment in consciousness, that is reason enough to continue.

29. Now talk about some contemporary American or Canadian poets, other than those who you know to write projectively. Does Ted Kooser hold any interest for you? Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forché, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Jane Hirshfield, Carol Muske-Dukes, Donald Hall? I don’t mean to single out just these names. Rather, which poets have you encountered and felt, “that’s not for me”—and why?

There are so many poets practicing closer to the organic side of the spectrum that I feel no need to cover the well-trod poetry ground these poets seem to represent. There are local poets whose work is less than organic, so I guess I get my dose that way and have some connection with them being in the same, large Puget Sound literary community. Paul Hunter, Felicia Gonzalez, and David Horowitz are nonorganic Seattle-area poets who come to mind and I can see the beauty in their work. But if I am not connected with these others you mention, I’d prefer to spend my time reading the folks from whom I know I can derive pleasure.

A lot of these poets are writing, as T. S. Eliot did, with a notion of closure. A friend called it “the poetics of forensics.” Always seeking an outcome. Afraid of being. The organic is closer to the side of Negative Capability, to mystery, away from closure, to an opening. This appeals to me more than the poets you bring up, or what little I have seen of their work, but I understand intuitively that these folks won’t be sources for me, so I go on my nerve with that also, though I would be open to the possibility that they would have something for me if I were in a situation where I could hear them, though I won’t go out of my way to hear any of the poets you mention.

30. I’d like to share a quotation from an essay of Donald Hall’s. It’s from “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: Infantile Origins of Poetic Form,” collected in his book Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003):

“Meter is no more seriously binding than the frame we put around a picture. But the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau. Free verse is simply less predictable. Yeats said that the finished poem makes a sound like the click of the lid on a perfectly made box. One-hundred-and-forty syllables, organized into a sonnet, do not necessarily make a click; the same number of syllables, dispersed in asymmetric lines of free verse, will click like a lid if the poem is good enough. In the sonnet and in the free verse poem, the poet improvises toward that click.”

Elsewhere, Hall has written that “the best Creeley is as tightly formal as the best Wilbur,” and that “The form of a poem is the flesh of its art, and all good poems are formal.” What say you? I can imagine Hall asserting that the organic is a type of formalism, even while it remains open to the unprescribed. If all approaches of poetry improvise toward that click, does the organic approach really have advantages over other approaches? The value of improvisation wouldn’t seem to be limited to the organic. Your thoughts?

I don’t find predictability an asset in poetry, nor is free verse the same as organic, as Duncan has best enunciated. If there ever were a clue as to someone seeking a closed verse, it would be the image of a box closing, as Yeats articulates. I seek the open. When writing to allow each poem to find its form in the moment of composition, each occasion of experience becomes an experiment in consciousness. McClure said of writing this way that the act of composition becomes “a very sweet possibility of taking a trip through experience I’ve never taken before.” So, as for perfection, I would define it in a different way than these poets and the poetics they represent. Now, having said that, there is a sloppiness to much—perhaps most—of what Duncan would call free verse. Olson called it sprawl, as mentioned earlier. If the emerging content has not incubated enough, or the poet has no sense of notation, no sense of the line, if attention to the moment wanes, bad free verse doesn’t have the rhyme scheme, meter, or other aspects of formal verse to give it any sense of shape and so unskillful free verse is worse than bad formal verse. This is partly why McClure says writing spontaneously does not mean to write carelessly or without thought and deep experience. He says there must be a vision and a poetics that are alive and conscious. He also says he does not know of a more adventurous gesture than to write spontaneously.

Poets have been trained to tinker with everything they write after they have written it. But we can train ourselves to get the quick take, which Spicer said is a good sign when using “The Practice of Outside.” It requires attention to the moment, trust in the language and in one’s ability to hear the voice inside—a voice that the practitioner has trained his or her ear to receive (in the words of George Bowering). It requires an individuation strong enough to not really care what most people think about one’s poetry. Having two or three close readers of one’s work is a gift and that means you trust them if they have good bullshit detectors. All this I mention here prevents the flabbiness to which Hall, Wilbur, and Yeats refer, I think.

31. One of the topics you discussed when interviewing Robin Blaser (http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Tracking_Fire.html [see https://web.archive.org/web/20071012022836/http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Tracking_Fire.html]) is cosmology, and you asked him about the cosmology behind his work. He has said, quite pointedly, that “the real business of poetry is cosmology.” What is the cosmology behind your own poetry?

We are all connected and the universe is made up of occasions of experience. And the relationships between these occasions and the people having them are most interesting and memorable for me. The organic poem allows the practitioner (and reader) connection to one of these occasions (the moment) in a more visceral way than most other poetic forms. We move closer toward the source of all poetry the more we embody compassion.

32. Leave us with one comment you’d like readers to know about organic poetry, or the difference it might make in their lives.

Back to Anne Waldman, with a notion that Sam Hamill has mentioned to me on many occasions. Sam said, “What poem would you write if you knew you were dying tomorrow?” And Anne said, “How much backward from your own death do you write?” These are questions designed to get you in touch with your duende. Most Americans relate to poetry only in times of death. Thousands of people are dying around the world due to the policies U.S. tax dollars support. Poets have a responsibility to “cheer up slaves and horrify despots,” as Whitman said. If we don’t, we become slaves ourselves. This is especially true with poets, as they are a special breed, seeking sincerity more than anything else, but is true with all people, because they still have a poetics, a stance toward the making of whatever it is they make with their life-force. We are what we do. Avoid the death-bed ache by giving it all we have. And as my Pop says, it is later than we think. Or as Emo Phillips said: “I’ll never forget my Grandpa’s last words—‘a truck!’”

1:37A – 2.4, 2.5 3.6, 3.7.07, 3.30.07

Slaughter, WA