Politically, Europe and the US have bifurcated. In word, image, thought and action, however, an energy continues to bounce back and forth, an energy that we can only hope undermines the rightward movement towards ultranationalism. “Europe” figures in many American discourses as either a point of origin to push back against, or a post-colonial skein to completely overcome. But the idea of the European Union is also now one of the best wedges against ultra-nationalism, especially as it allows for multiple languages and arts to thrive.
LS: This piece is the second part of an interview writer Allen Weiss did with me. Weiss may be the interviewer, but he is the one that has been a central go-between French and American writing and thought for many years.
Because we should only examine
The confused, combinatory state
In a confused, combinatory state.
Because there will be a next conversation...
— “Poetry as Explanation 10," Leonard Schwartz
ASW: One would need the space of an entire book to analyze a single poem, a lifetime to analyze an oeuvre.
If there is no summary that can contain
The indecipherable sign
- If, p. 65
Thus at best I can hope to create a patchwork of cutouts to elicit some responses.
Geneology
ASW: Perhaps the only way to escape the anxiety of influence is through the foreclosure of the symbolic, which was the case of Antonin Artaud during his years of madness. Fully conscious of his poetic genealogy – Poe, Baudelaire, Nerval, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, all poètes maudits like himself – he found his poetic voice by suffering a gnostic curse, first losing not just poetry but all language in year upon year of madness, delirium, aphasia, during the death-in-life he suffered incarcerated in the psychiatric asylum at Rodez. There, in a theological struggle to the death, he renounced all human genealogy – as when in the funereal Ci-gît he proclaims that he has no papa-mama – and all theological transcendence, replacing a malevolent god by a pathological self as the source of creativity, thus becoming the origin of his own self and his own poetry. In doing so he transformed French poetry. Short of that, I do not believe that a poet can escape influence or would even want to. For what is reading but influence!? I will grant you that “impenetrable self-reference” which, as you say, “locks the only door,” referred to in your poem “Meditation” (in Objects of Thought, Attempts at Speech), but this hardly precludes the fact that there must be locked in that room with you the phantoms of many poets, living and dead. I may be projecting, but I hear echoes throughout your work, whether in homage or pastiche, of Artaud, of course, and Lautréamont, Jarry, Rimbaud, Breton, Desnos, Fondane, Pound, Eliot, Olson, Duncan, Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg... But perhaps it can be said that every poet is somehow influenced by all poetry, whether read or unread, for there certainly exists, as Merleau-Ponty insisted, an “underground trading of the metaphor.” Might I ask for your own reflections on poetic influence, anxious or joyful, and for a hint at how you sense your own genealogy?
LS: I feel in many ways I’ve been following for years on the trail of the poet Joseph Donahue, an unsung master of what I’ve called “transcendental lyric”. His first book, Before Creation, means so much to me, as do later works like Terra Lucida and Dark Church, for their pared down lyric effulgence, informed by formal innovation but not beholden to any kind of Group Think, including the potential Group Think of certain avant-gardes. Robert Duncan was an early teacher of mine who was very influential, as was Robert Kelly; I feel lucky to have studied with them when so young. E.M. Cioran was an intellectual hero of mine, and then I kind of befriended him in Paris, when I was 22 and he was in his 70’s, (he was of course more mentor than friend but had a very light touch). He asked me to co-translate a few of his texts together, that was huge for me. Edouard Roditi was an early influence and impressed upon me the need for the cross-cultural. I read and enjoy the poet Michael Palmer, in person and on the page. Never met Homer, but I try to read Fagles’ translation of The Iliad once every two years. Christopher Logue’s War Music is great too! A poet who is I think important to you, Clayton Eshelman, once wrote an essay that called for a poetry that would navigate between Artaud and Wallace Stevens, and certainly those two poets have meant a lot for me to keep in mind and in play simultaneously. And everything, obviously, leads back to Pound, of whom we are all smaller versions. It is a certain blackness of the page from which we write.
ASW: The whiteness that most inspires me is that of fine Japanese handmade paper on which we see that mix of drawing and calligraphy typical of Japanese and Chinese art, where the empty white expanses may be sea or sky, snow or fog, mist or mountain, and where the calligraphic traces are at times indistinguishable from the drawn figures. I am fascinated by the threshold between abstraction and figuration, as well as by the ambiguities of visual perception, and these most often occur in white ... or black. Though I lost touch with Clayton in later years, we were quite close through the 1990s, during which time I served on the editorial board of Sulfur, to which I regularly contributed. We were bound by several shared interests beyond poetry and literature, notably cuisine and wine (about which Clayton was extraordinarily knowledgeable), as well as the parietal art of paleolithic caves in the Dordogne. But what was most important to me was that Clayton – along with Annette Michelson, my thesis director in Cinema Studies and editor of October – was among the first people who took my writing seriously. I have always liked his Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship, which taught me, among much else, that a suggested reading list is not necessarily a canon, but rather an inspiration. Concerning Allen Ginsberg, he made the best portrait of me ever done, a photo taken at the opening of a Simon Carr exhibition in 1989. I met Ginsberg several times, through Simon, with whom I was very close: mythic encounters, however brief.
Lists
ASW: I love lists, of all sorts. As a writer I certainly enjoy a periodic reworking of my Hundred Favorite Books. This needs to be done yearly, though it probably changes daily. (Such a list is not a canon but an autobiographical statement, and it absolutely must not be confused with the “Desert Island” list, which would be foolish not to include, for example, the U.S. Army Survival Manual!)
O those statues of Hindu goddesses with many, many arms
Are no false infinite, in fact one could be the reader
Holding her many books...
- If, p. 5
There is probably not enough space here to ask for your list of 100, much less to compare our lists, but could I ask for at least a short one of the many books that are reflected in your writings, or in your soul?
LS: Yes, that is a terrific question. Thanks for that quote back to me from If. You know, it was Hegel in the Aesthetics who stated that art is the pursuit of the Infinite, and that Hindu sculpture was a primitive version of that pursuit, in which the artist simply adds pairs of arms to the sculpture to suggest the idea of infinite addition. Those lines of mine from If are a refutation of Hegel, a suggestion that such sculpture embodies the Infinite to the extent the reader needs many, many arms all at once in order to hold all the necessary books in play all at once. Some titles to hold in those many hands, to pass before one’s eyes in a kind of dance: Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph. Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye. Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress and Other Essays. Robert Duncan’s Groundwork II. Bloom and Rosenberg’s The Book of J. Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and The Invisible. Raul Zurita’s Inri astonishes me every time I read it: do you know this great Chilean poet? The Mexican poet Coral Bracho’s Firefly Under The Tongue, translated by Forrest Gander, is a fairly recent discovery, a new love. Paul Celan’s Speech Grille, Martin Buber’s I and Thou, passages in Levinas. Amiri Baraka is the poet I think the culture misses most now, so his SOS: Poems 1961-2013 needs to be on the list. Gregor Von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. Stifter’s Rock Crystal. Ibn’ Arabi!
ASW: Just a note to mention that I did my first doctoral thesis on Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and The Invisible, and that very early on, through the 1980s, I was deeply involved with Artaud, Klossowski, Bataille, et alia, in a sense in opposition to the Surrealism which was my first aesthetic love. Of all that, Merleau-Ponty remains as my fundamental epistemological underpinning (for I still believe in the primacy of the body as the source of forms, as well as in the exigencies and liberties of eros), while Artaud is the one who continues to push me beyond my limits (with all the violence of his iconoclasm). As an aside, Rock Crystal is one of the most perfect books I have ever read!
LS: Yes, the primacy of the body, in both its visible and invisible forms.
Rhetoric
ASW: For two decades I have taught a course on, “The Hybridization of Genres,” which over the years evolved into a seminar on “Monsters and Monstrosity.” It struck me at one point, reading the chapter of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things on classification at the beginning of the modern era, that poetry is a form of monstrosity, and that dictionaries and encyclopedias of rhetoric are in fact means of generating linguistic monsters, e.g., the “arm” of a table or the “foot” of a chair, such catachresis being akin to the visual transmutations of the Surrealists (not to mention of your own poetic iconography). However, I am appalled that rhetoric is no longer taught, other than as an esoteric specialization in some English departments. May I ask for your thoughts on this?
LS: I think Poetics is connected to Rhetoric, even if Aristotle treats them under two different titles, so I guess in my teaching I’m addressing this shortcoming you have pinpointed. Without a study of rhetoric young and old alike are more easily manipulated, obviously, but also end up taking things way too seriously, particularly their own rhetoric. Because if one doesn’t recognize one’s own rhetoric as such one becomes fundamentalist about one’s persuasions. Zizek likes to quote a line of Groucho Marx’s, which I’ve borrowed and altered the pronoun for, taking it on myself: “I may look like an idiot, and I may sound like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you, I really am an idiot.” Sometimes I forget that. At which times I sound idiotic.
ASW: The more I read the more I realize how little I know. If I still believed in philosophy as a discipline, it would be expressed by the indiscipline of a docta ignorantia.
LS: The writer Fanny Howe evokes the idea of “Bewilderment” so beautifully in her essay of that same title. “Lord, increase my bewilderment”, according to a Muslim Sufi prayer…
Transposition
ASW: I had long claimed that I would wait until my French was good enough in order to read Proust’s Recherche. I have now read it three times. I also always said that I would wait until my English was good enough to read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I now realize that I shall never do so. Just as languages enrich each other over time, working between languages enriches the writer. Never have I learned so much about the English language as when I translated from French the essays of Valère Novarina (Theater of the Ears). Might it be said that translating is a form of poetizing? Might you speak to this in regard to your work on Fondane?
LS: The poet Charles Bernstein opines that he has not mastered English, does not even know English. (He is American, English is his first language). But he is right, a language is too oceanic and too uncanny to ever be mastered or known. So we are always someplace in the midst of Finnegan’s Wake, and our foose won’t moose. As to translation, I think really good translators are masochists, submitting to the will of the author or the text. As such I’m a really bad translator. But I made a promise to E.M. Cioran I would see through a book or a book of translations about his friend, the Romanian born French language poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane. I lived up to my word in 2016, with Cine-Poems and Others, from the New York Review Books. I wish the book had received more attention. Fondane was killed at Birkenau-Auschwitz towards the very end of the war. His work came back into print in the 80’s in France, and now recently in book form for the first time in English. Some of his lines figure very heavily at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial. There was a point in graduate school in which reading Fondane saved me. And I did work on some of those translations for many years. The one I like best is the one I did with Cioran:
Oh, what had I come to do in this crowded forest?
I’d searched for a little silence,
a little sun less exhausting than snow;
the woman with the heavy womb crossed my blood,
life, life burst out everywhere with greater vigor,
Born in Jassy, what was I searching for in Oran
(in the windows of beauty parlors, beautiful women?)
my voyage finished, my past abolished,
where will my steps carry me? to what climes?
What human faces will call to me?
What super-human exhaustions?- from Ulysses VII Cine-Poems and other, NYRB Books, translated from the French by Leonard Schwartz and E. M. Cioran
Transposition
ASW: I am fascinated by transpositions (of both form and content) from one art to another: Satie’s Entr’acte, perhaps the first musical composition structured like cinematographic montage; Fondane’s poetry, likewise written according to filmic structure; Iannis Xenakis’ use of mathematical forms (both stochastics and the geometry of hyperbolic paraboloids) in Metastasis and other early works; Morton Feldman’s passion for Middle Eastern carpets, which informed certain of his compositions such as Crippled Symmetry. Going beyond the obvious transpositions from poet to poet and poem to poem, could you speak to the effects of other art forms on your poetry?
LS: That is great. When I was working on “The Sleep Talkers” and thinking about the aesthetics of sleep – sleep, not dream – Wagner’s Ring Cycle helped a lot. There is a lot of sleep there: Brunnhilde on her rock, Erda’s sleep, Alberich’s dream. So music drama helped me into the territory of sleep thought. And the language of philosophy has always been an important rhetoric for me in poetry, as if hidden in abstract concepts were nearly figurative forms, consciousness as the new name for Odysseus, and so on. I’m not able to articulate the ways Bresson’s film Au Hasard Balthazar has shaped my sensibility, but I know it has. Certainly I was a different person after seeing it.
Place
ASW: I take citations from your work out of context. Such is literally a metaphor, a transfer.
One is always stopped just as one starts finding out where it is that the messages are written.
-“Monuments to the Not Yet Lived,” in Words Before the Articulate, p. 38
One might even claim that in our times, the genius loci is nomadic. We know through Marx and so many others how an object – and a statement, for that matter – is a nexus of human relations; this implies that it is also the sign of a trajectory of events and voyages. The clearest example I know of this is in Neil MacGregor’s remarkable A History of the World in 100 Objects, where the spatio-temporal site of each object consists of the conjunction of trade routes and happenstance, personal histories and circumstance, political change and coincidence.
Familiar ground is a foreign land.
- A Message Back and Other Furors, p. 18
And yet there is transcendence. So one needs to ask whether every poem comes from a place. And of course, one place can hide – or reveal – another, as when we read:
I seized it and opened it, and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell.
- “As You Run Up the Stairs,” in Objects of Thought, Attempts at Speech, p. 10
This epigraph is from Saint Augustine’s Confessions – that primal source not only for a certain oecumenical theology, but also for all Western autobiography – and yet it is impossible to read this passage without also remembering the crucial moment of Petrarch’s “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,” when the poet atop the mountain forgets the sublime view of the world as he opens to this very same page in Saint Augustine to experience his own revelation. I should add that this reference and this mountain were also at the origin of one of my books: The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux.
LS: I vividly remember talking with you about The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux for my radio program Cross Cultural Poetics. It is a beautiful book, and immediately calls to my mind a poet we had in common as a friend and as a writer: Gustaf Sobin. If Mont Ventoux is a stunning mountain that is almost never named, as your book explains, then this is true of Gustaf Sobin as a poet too. I should have mentioned him earlier, in that list of books, both Luminous Debris and the Collected Poems. But yes, psychogeography is important to me, and NYC and the Pacific Northwest have provided many micro-environments from which poems flow. So do other places: Beijing, Cusco, Kathmandu. One is thrown.
ASW: I truly miss Gustaf, a wonderful poet and person. So much of his poetry was so minimal that it was about almost nothing – a gust of wind, a ray of light – and though one immediately thinks of the poetry of René Char (whose grave Gustaf helped tend), it rather beings me back to Mallarmé. Luminous Debris – beautiful title! – is among my favorite books on landscape, and I was thrilled to have been able to walk the paths of the Lubéron with him.
LS: I think I made some of those same walks with him. As you say, the psychogeography he wrote from radiated out from the Valley of the Lubéron, that particular locale in Provence. His sense of the layers of culture sedimentation he was living amidst and writing from, from the Neolithic to the Celtic, to the Roman, to the Gothic, and his refusal to permit nuance and distinction to be lost to generalization, in spite of the world’s insistence that they must, is something we need to keep in mind now.
Note: All quotes from IF, A Message Back and other Furors, Cine-Poems and Other, Objects of Thought, Attempts at Speech and Words Before the Articulate refer to Schwartz’s books of those titles.