![]() ![]() The language of social protest is very sure of itself, which is one reason that my protestor self and my poet self were somewhat separate for some years. But how does language deal with that? I recently went to a Black Lives Matters protest, and couldn’t help but analyze some of the slogans. One pull is that the world we live in is very important to me, including what is wrong with it, what its injustices are. ![]() I think that is true, yet we can’t fall into apathy. We can’t assume that anything will survive. Sometimes when I’m teaching Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” I note that the assumption about art as that which will survive no longer applies. We’re faced with the destructiveness of wars, of our climate. MC: Our world is full of terrible uncertainty. There’s tension between respecting and loving language at its very best, and suspicion of what drives it.ĭLG: Is this tension a function of our times, this postpostpost modern (or wherever we are) moment? ![]() MC: I have problem with the authorial voice. Racial labels are shifty terms.ĭLG: What about the authorial voice as a concept? In White Papers there’s a section that discusses which people have historically been white the Greeks, for instance, weren’t white. To talk about race, for example, is to talk about language. ![]() the awareness that the story is a story that language made happen in a particular way makes language problematic.īut beyond that is language in general. I should add I had been doing a certain amount of fragmentation before I wrote Blue Front, but it became central in that book.ĭLG: There’s the story and the metastory taking place. I am not unconscious of this, but the techniques grow out of the material. The other side of omission in Blue Front is a lot of repetition. Sometimes, too, it’s coming up against what I don’t need to say, something everybody knows but nobody quite says. I often cut myself off in the middle of something-not a deliberate cutting off, but a reflection of an inability to say what I meant or felt. Another layer of this was the insufficiency of language to understand my own reaction to the material. I started writing Blue Front before I had all the information, and there was a sort of stammering to get to what I didn’t know. On the other hand, I was wondering about my father, trying to figure out what he might have experienced. On the one hand, I was dealing with facts that would not budge I did a lot of reading, gathered a lot of accounts of what took place. The point of view in that book is that of my father, who witnessed a lynching as a five year old. In a review of Blue Front in the New York Times, Dana Goodyear referenced me as a language poet, which seemed odd because I would never have thought of myself that way. MC: I think it’s often insufficiency that leads to what people call the innovative or experimental. There seems in your work a tension between a desired control over language-and utterance, the insufficiency of language. When they say you can’t do that, they often point me in the direction I should go.ĭLG: You’ve recently done a lot of work dealing with what is difficult to say, to write. One of the best lessons I have ever learned is to listen to my internal censors. Though the permission isn’t always easy to come by. What I got from that slow reading experience was license, permission. One important turn, though, was doing an independent study with a student on John Ashbury. But I have never identified with a school of experimental writing or any other school. Of course that’s not true: I’m as influenced as anyone else. MC: I have never thought about myself one way or the other, though it’s true that I’ve never particularly wanted to write like anybody else, and don’t think of myself as being influenced by others. Excerpts of this conversation appear below.ĭLG: Do you consider your work experimental? How might you label your work if asked to do so? She was interviewed by Danielle Legros Georges for SolLit-Diverse Voices in February 2015. ![]()
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