Ocean and Teat

LB You’ve been called a scatological poet; how do you respond to that? Were you ever inspired by Salvador Dalí, who was charged with being a scatological painter?

I guess I respond with a sermon.

The world, being full of waste, leavings, scat, is itself scatological. Each of us is trailed by a truckload of leavings. This entire life is fueled by, warmed by, punctuated by our waste. Dung is merely a metaphor for precisely that which we ignore. I could be referring to anything that is, culturally or psychologically, ignored. We are a debtor society and a debtor nation yet we drive cars—wasteful SUVs, cars with leather interiors—that say we have everything under control. Modern American culture is unusual in that we refuse to allow ourselves to see how we are anchored by waste and denial. Because of this refusal to see the world as it is, we have strung our future with an infinitude of anchors.

We should pay calm and balanced attention to the bare facts of what and where we are, including, most particularly, that which we ignore, shun, push down and aside. We don’t pay this requisite attention. We ignore what we are. We go on hanging anchors on our ears.

The talismanic is often considered only something we seek. There is also a talisman we ignore. The talismanic denial. Dung is just such a primordially dismissed talisman. All other talismans (sacred, magical objects) are sought because they’ll give power (rings, guns, bombs, apples). But not dung: it is the one magical object that we reject. My point:

We live connected to an extrusion device between our legs that expels odorous paste—a pretty weird thing, yet we talk little about what this means. Not facing the fact of corruption, decay, waste—that entire side of life and the pains associated with it—is a habit of spirit afforded in only the very wealthy and emotionally corrupt. This habit of spirit that becomes a political habit (imperialism), an aesthetic habit (new formalism), a financial habit (credit culture), a psychological habit (dependence on mood stabilizers), etc. My first book was in part about that very real part of who we are: this world of waste, the incarnate, this bodily world subject to decay and death—one far removed from the official world and official verse culture. My friend Linh Dinh puts it this way, “One cannot think seriously about life without contemplating the destruction of the body.” My second book addresses those same concerns but not in the same way. My third book, which I’m currently working on, has similar concerns, but again without being scatological.

LB One obviously has to be quite learned in order to embrace the absurdity of language in the way you do in A Defense of Poetry—how much “research” goes into the crafting of your poems? This, I suppose, poses the question, how much, would you say, of writing poems is “intellect,” how much, and I know I’m setting myself up again to be slapped again, but how much of writing a poem is “spirit”? Is writing poetry a matter of head or heart, both, or neither?

I see your point, but I disagree that a reader has to be really learned to read that first book. Most of its poems are not heavily allusive. In fact I play against the reality of intellectualism, via parody and satire, throughout much of that book. There are some poems, like “Dear Housefly” that are heavily allusive; that poem alludes to a German version of St. Augustine’s catechism, to the razing of Carthage by the Romans, etc, but—to use your painting analogy—it plays at the idea of learning by employing preposterous footnotes, etc. I don’t know much about the fall of Phaeton, say, by Peter Paul Rubens, but I can still enjoy the painting. In fact that painting can goad me to learn about the fall of Phaeton, learn who Phaeton was and is, what he did (dared to drive, illegally, the sun across the sky). How learned do you have to be to understand “The greatest of your sister’s facial pimples did outweigh a Turkey,” or whatever the line is from that long first poem in my book: that poem is a 1,500 word insult to the reader employing catachrestic metaphor, anastrophe (incorrect syntax), and anaphora. Despite this, audiences invariably get it.

The point being that if we approach the world or a book thinking we are deficient, we’ll miss out. If we approach the world with a sense of sufficiency, our natural curiosity will come to the fore. We won’t take our own ignorance personally, but come to realize that ignorance is an ordinary phenomenological state that naturally calls forth curiosity.

To think that one must be prepared (like the Boy Scouts) is well and good if I’m going into a canyon full of wildcats in the 15th century. But if I’m going to sit down to read a goofy book of poetry, I think it’s okay to have Wikipedia handy. Plus, the book has endnotes.

That said, I do research a lot. I’m reading several books right now about the history of clock manufacture, and am writing a long poem in praise of clocks. I’m also reading about the history of bicycles for pretty much the same reason: to write a poem.

LB What in god’s name do you see in the poetry of Richard Wilbur? You essentially praise him in A Defense of Poetry. This surprises me greatly, you seem 10,000,000 serpentine molecules different from Wilbur, yet, after reading this poem it becomes apparent that you feel a deep kinship with this poet. Explain yourself please. And if I’m utterly wrong about this, explain yourself anyway.

That poem “Richard Wilbur” could be read two ways. As a parody or as a praise poem. I intended it to be ambiguous as to whether I was praising him or making fun of him. It at once makes fun of him and praises him. Fact is, I think Wilbur’s an amazing writer, and an interesting study. I urge you to read a really learned book by Ed Brunner (one of several from him) called Cold War Poetry, an examination of the social text of the 1950s poem. Brunner has a chapter on Wilbur. He was a product of his time. Jed Rasula’s book The American Poetry Wax Museum might also be helpful. It’s a polemical history of poetry culture from 1940 to 1990. Wilbur’s touched on a few times. I admire Wilbur’s writing, in one sense, and I read him as someone who wrote well out of what he was and out of what he’d been made by his time. But the poem you refer to is both a praise poem and a parody.

LB Surprisingly, somehow, it is only in “Orchard” that I begin to see the Russell Edson coming out in you—would you please talk about Edson in any direction you’d like, and while you’re at it, please convey your feelings about the prose poem in general (since Russell will no longer do so, I’ve heard).

In that and other poems I was playing around with short narratives about unusual situations containing violence and dialogue. In that sense it resembles Edson. But it’s not so much Edson as it is Daniil Kharms who really influenced me. The Russian writer Kharms was killed by Stalin. Wikipedia Kharms and you’ll see a writer who preceded Edson and who wrote much like Edson—or, more correctly, whom Edson wrote like.

LB There aren’t any clichés in your poems—how do you manage that?

I didn’t know there were no clichés in them. In 1917 Viktor Shklovsky (note the spelling) published (in Russian) an essay whose title is often rendered “Art as Technique.” In that essay he says that all effective writing employs “enstrangement” (note the spelling, not “estrangement”), a word also often translated as “defamiliarization.” The idea is that writers will put strangeness into their works, doing so not to be clever or trippy. Rather, they do it for a very practical reason: writing strangely (not using clichés, in this instance) slows down, in Shklovsky’s formulation, the perceptions of the reader. It wrests the reader from habitual perceptual responses—in order, he said, to “make the stone stony again.” Automatic language (his term for cliché and other like modes) does precisely the opposite. It makes the stone literary. Or it lets the stone remain literary. If we set out to write literature (as most writers do), our stones are going to be literary. If we set out to write for our friends, neighbors, partners, boyfriends, we’ll want that stone to be rock hard.

LB What do you think of political poetry? Reading A Defense of Poetry, I can’t decide if the poems are completely absent of the political or in fact I’m reading some of the most political poems of the 21st century.

That book is what one might call Menippean satire. Satire is a political mode. There are two kinds of satire: chaotic (menippean) and conservative. In the latter, something definite is being attacked so that something known and defined can be conserved. In the former, it’s difficult to tell what’s being attacked, just that everything that comes before the writer’s attention is being devalued—and things that are not normally valued are being embraced and lauded.

So, hopefully, when reading such chaotic satire, the reader gets the sense that the order of valuation is being upset, if not reversed, causing one to either (a) consider why that is, or (b) feel relieved (relief usually expressed as laughter).

Menippean satire in this sense is a method of renunciation.

Following Mikhail Bakhtin, I would say that any and all laughter is political. Bakhtin says in Rabelais and His World that medieval laughter, especially at the Church during carnival, prefigured the Reformation and in fact the Enlightenment. Laughter did that, not stump speeches, not wars alone, not the brute physical force of a revolution, but laughter. Barry Sanders, in his great history, Sudden Glory, says that the history of laughter is the history of subversion. Freud says in “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” that jokes burst hierarchies, and that nobody in the hierarchy, least of all those at the top, is immune from jokes. The political and the comical have always and will always go hand in hand. The comical is political. People in power, and those invested in official culture, and indeed often those invested in official literary culture have been trying to effect the separation of the comical and the political. Light verse is the comical devoid of the political. That is why it’s so often a part of official literary culture.

According to Sanders, laughter was so suspect that in the 15th Century the Church began to institute prescriptions on how much a person could laugh, burp, fart, or talk. The idea was that each of these things wasted the breath of God, the Spiritus. Laughter was a distinctive waste of the spirit, according to the Church—the very church which Bakhtin notes as being, in a sense, utterly destroyed by laughter. No wonder proscriptions were cast against laughing.

So in Menippean satire the very ground of culture is being attacked; the very way a culture thinks and emotes is being attacked. Maybe that sounds like an overly generous reading of what I tried to do in that book. I think a really great example of Menippean satire in action are the poems and books (has just come out with her second book) of Jennifer Knox.

It says on the jacket of my first book that the poems are addressing war, violence, religion. In that gross sense, they’re political. The thing with literature, as you know, is all of it is always already political. There never was such a thing as art for the sake of art, or poetry devoid of the political. Read on this point especially Rasula’s above mentioned book for a believable sense of how the political functioned in the quietude of the 1950s poem. Or Brunner, for that matter.

LB I was going to say that the poems in A Defense of Poetry are anti-narrative, but looking over them again, I realize that’s a ridiculous thing to say, for these poems are full of narrative, but then one is fooled by the quickness of the language leading one to think there’s no storyline…just the same, I have to ask, do you see your poems as mini-stories of a sort, do you attempt to tell stories in your poems, do you concern yourself with narrative at all?

Sometimes I write narratives. Sometimes lyrics. Sometimes lyrical narratives. Sometimes things that are neither lyrical nor narrative. “Hair” is a narrative. “Coalman” is a narrative. In fact, a lot of pieces in that first book are narratives. Yes, some of them in that book were mini-stories.

I just finished a second book, which is being published by Dalkey Archive Press. It’s one long giant poem telling the story of a divorce, of a father’s separation from his daughter. It’s in one sense a long narrative buried beneath a ton of collage, and inside that huge poem are several smaller lyric poems that were actually published in journals separately.

More and more I’ve been writing more “theory poems,” which are poems talking about the theory of, say, the sun, or of, say, cockroaches. I just published two poems in Jacket 33 about both those things: “A Theory about Cockroaches,” and “To the Sun at Anchor.” I’ve been much influenced by Lucretius in this regard, specifically De Rerum Natura.

LB I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with writing about buttocks, but why buttocks as opposed to other more obscure or controversial members of the body, like the elbow, the penis, the nose, an eyeball or the tongue?

I write about the penis and the eyeball too. Not so much the tongue. All these things are very fine subject matter. I’ve been writing about trees, bicycles, wrist watches, and the sun of late.

LB Do you have any interest in Surrealism of the original school, Breton, etc.

Not really. I know really very little about surrealism. Not to say that I’ve not read and studied it, because I have, but just never found it that useful enough to delve deeply into. Maybe it’s this: there is something off-putting about the history of surrealism. I think it’s the machismo culture, the “manifesto culture,” the culture of pronouncement and declaration, not to mention the reactive excitation that I think it is better to avoid.

LB Can you explain your disdain for Faulkner? In fact, I can barely distinguish Gabriel Gudding from William Faulkner (you both tend to release the deadliest poisons latent in the English language) but Gabe Gudding has no love for Bill Faulkner?

Oh, here we go.

I wouldn’t call it disdain. More like weariness.

The reverence for the white male southern writer is akin to the mid-twentieth century reverence for the white male macho writer. I find Faulkner long-winded and tedious. Never one much for long-winded and self-aggrandizing masculinity. In fact I see the entire enterprise of Faulkner studies as just part of the effort toward re-gentrification of the south.

Can you really tell me, living in Oxford, Mississippi, that the culture of white southern fiction is not heavily invested with guy culture? Wry, alcohol-loving, and full of a falsely modest bravado? I’m sure it looks cute from the inside, but to an outsider like me I have to wonder what real cultural work it’s doing. The south, and Oxford in particular, and in fact U Miss as a whole, especially its footballism, has managed to make a tiny cultural mini-industry out of machismo. Even the stupid mascot of the school: a rebel colonel? Come on.

Not to fault it for that. That’s what it does. That’s what it’s for. Just not my cup of tea.

So it’s not just Faulkner qua Faulkner, but the scholars and writers who were influenced by his writing, his person, and his world. Without such scholars, and without such a school sucking his memory dry and sucking nostalgically on the south, there would be no Faulkner in the same sense. He might even be interesting to read.

Look, Faulkner described an evil world. A local world suffering from great evil.

When I lived in Oxford, I lived 100 yards from Faulkner’s grave. Nearly every weekend, a bunch of frat boys or tourists would stagger drunk through the neighborhood, sit singing and drinking at his grave, piss on a nearby headstone, kill a cat, and leave their trash behind, condoms, guitar picks. Not a pretty thing. Not a useful thing. Not a reverential thing. Just a disappointing and pathetic and useless thing.

The pathology is no secret: southern culture and its investment in class; its investment in machismo; its investment in a pretty damaging inversion of femininity. Even white liberal southern culture has made its peace with race. But it’s still all messed up regarding class and gender. It’s a world of bizarre gender and class performance.

I did not find it a nice culture. It’s not an open culture, not a hospitable culture. It’s a culture that strangely seems to yearn to be a stronger part of the national culture of display and extravagance and debt.

Good for people who can thrive down there.

LB Why write in an era of no readers?

There are a lot of readers. Is this the kind of question that serves as a cue if I want to play the curmudgeon? I think dissing white male southern fiction culture and the bizarre performances of white femininity in Mississippi is as far as I’ll go on that account.

LB How would you describe the type of poems you write? Do you feel as if you’re writing within a literary tradition, or against it? Perhaps the literary tradition they tried to tell us was real in school is just another one of their lies like Santa Claus, Jesus Christ Superstar, or the Virgin Mary and the ill-fated Tooth Fairy—your comments please?

I write a variety of poems. If you’re just talking about the poems in the first book, A Defense of Poetry, there are a few different kinds there. The second book was written in my car.

Here’s what Dalkey has on the book jacket to my second book, Rhode Island Notebook, maybe this will serve as an answer?: “Not since On the Road has a book been so thoroughly of the road. Rhode Island Notebook—written in Gudding’s Toyota during twenty-six round trips between Illinois and Rhode Island—chronicles the breakup of a marriage and the separation of a father and daughter. At turns angry, comic, kitschy, and lyrical, this book-length poem is an exorcism of violence both historical and personal. Ultimately intended as a gift for the driver’s daughter, the book also includes essays on literary narcissism and dung; radio broadcasts; a surreal attack on Nancy Reagan; much about Iraq; and the story of one man’s friendship with the Shenango River.”

LB Do you see a fundamental difference between poetry and prose?

Yes. But a very tiny one.

LB Do you think writing in formal meter is dead once and for all? Do you think people should know their meters perfectly before setting out to write poems themselves?

No, formal meter is not dead.

People already innately know meter and rhythm. Schooling works its best to cause us to believe we don’t already know meter and rhythm. If you can walk and speak and laugh, you know rhythm.

Further, it is not necessary to worry about rhythm when writing poetry. It will take care of itself if one really pays attention to the language one is writing, rather than the ideas one is trying to render. The ideas should take care of themselves, just as the rhythm will—once one begins writing instead of copying automatic language.

There are a variety of rhythmic modes, just as there are a variety of harmonic modes and scales. Based on my experience in schools, most people who teach rhythm as a monolithic thing have not properly understood the connections between sentence periodicity, rhythm, meter, rhyme, and silence.

LB Do you think “experimental” is a useless word for describing a certain style of poetry? What about the word “avant-garde”? is even it a bit hollow at this point in literary history? I’m curious to hear Gabriel Gudding respond to this: do you see any new frontiers in the world of poetry in the 21st century?

That’s why Ron Silliman invented the term “post avant.” See Ron on this point.

LB What do you think of your contemporaries?

I like them.

LB Are MFA programs as bad as most of us seem to think?

To be frank, I’ve never met anyone who told me that MFA programs are bad. Your use of the word “most” is not warranted, in my experience.

LB Your forthcoming book, Rhode Island Notebook, attempts to be larger than Ezra Pound—for me, it’s four hundred thirty-six pages of industrial concrete and cobalt steel—I’ve never read a road trip poem that was so utterly complicated, it’s like reading an exploded map of somewhere close to one’s backyard. Impressive. Were you at all afraid that a book of this density would overwhelm would-be publishers? This poses another question, do you lose sleep about getting published or not?

I beg to differ, Louis: the book doesn’t attempt “to be larger than Ezra Pound,” but it does have a kinship with the Pisan Cantos, as both books chronicle a time of elemental pain and loneliness. I wrote it as a gift for my daughter when she’s grown. It was written in a moving car. It might resemble Pound’s Pisan Cantos slightly, but only insofar as Pound was writing those cantos while enduring a very hard series of misfortunes. My book was written in the middle of a hard series of misfortunes.

After a certain point getting published becomes relatively easy. It’s ensuring that one’s work stays refreshing to oneself and others—that becomes the issue.

LB Can you describe the genesis of your new book Rhode Island Notebook?

Sure. I’ll first back up and say that this was a very sharp departure from my first book. That first book was a normal manuscript of poems designed for, first, journal publication, and then book publication. It was also designed to win a book prize, in fact, and it was designed to be reviewed. It was in turn designed to get me a job in a university. It did all these things. So, the first book, A Defense of Poetry, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett first book prize and was published soon after my arrival at Illinois State University by the University of Pittsburgh Press in their Pitt Poetry Series. It was reviewed in I think 17 or 18 different periodicals, including The Boston Review, Jacket, Rain Taxi, American Book Review, The Constant Critic, MiPoesias. Nine poems from that book appeared in American Poetry Review, one was reprinted in the Scribner anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and in some other anthologies. And the book allowed me to get three job offers from universities in 2001. The book is more or less a collection of Menippean (chaotic) satire, evincing my interest in the traditions of flyting, denigrative wit, as well as in the virtue of comedy as both a means of cultural critique and a method of disciplined joy in the face of utterly unwelcome situations. As mentioned, the title poem is a long insult to the reader—and is, more or less, a send-up, on the one hand, of the inherent violence in poetry culture (in reviews, say), as well as an exercise of malediction as a means of negative re-enchantment.

The second book, Rhode Island Notebook, marks a very sharp departure from my normal modes of writing. I found myself for familial reasons making many, many car journeys between Normal, Illinois and Providence, Rhode Island after my hire here at ISU. As each journey to and from Rhode Island was a 36 hour drive, I decided to use the time to write. I placed a large format sketch pad on the passenger seat of my then new Toyota Echo and would write as I drove. As far as I know, it is the first book written without voice recording machinery entirely inside a moving car.

I liked the physical and situational constraint of writing in the car—and I think it freed me, in an almost physical or mechanically oulipian manner, to write combinatorically in a variety of ways, allowing me to ignore common aesthetic habits I had developed. In this sense the road provided an interruptive matrix that abrogated the I-making and “self”-making nature of so much writing from grief—allowing me, I think, to touch more deeply in the work something besides “Me,” “My Life,” and “My grief.” At least that’s the way it seems to me; the readers (if there are any) will be the final judge about all that.

The book is as a result “notebooky.” It is truly in great part a notebook: a collage, often turgid and kitschy, containing a mixture of genres and subgenres: essays (on literary narcissism, dung, Whitman, the comic, sorrow, hamartia, etc), dictation from radio broadcasts (songs, talk shows, newscasts), first-draft kitsch mixed with plain and spare lyricism. Working against its “notebookiness,” however, is a narrative and emotional arc—a story, of divorce, of personal salvation, of, I guess, a weird kind of triumph in the face of considerable, and indelible-seeming, sorrow.

My daughter Clio was five when I began writing the book. She is ten now. The book is a transcription, much edited throughout, of 26 of those round trips, 52 individual one-way eleven-hundred-mile journeys. The book contains several essays (e.g., “Literary Narcissism and the Manufacture of Scandal,” and “Dung in an Age of Empire,” which was a defense of my first book and was written on the highways of Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut), as well as several individuated lyric poems, some creative non-fiction, memoir—and is in general one large long poem with a distinct narrative and emotional arc, showing a well-defined, clear-cut and noticeable change of mind and heart in the driver—from profoundly negative and angry states of mind, to more positive and wholesome states as the book progresses. This arc is fairly well outlined in the book’s prologue.

In short, Rhode Island Notebook is a long poem literally written in my car during twenty-six round trips between Normal, Illinois and Providence, Rhode Island, logging a total of fifty-two separate 1,100 mile journeys. Each round trip is divided into two sections. The journey east is called the Anabasis, a title taken from Xenophon’s book by that name about the disastrous march of ten thousand Greek mercenaries into Persia. The word is translated loosely as “the march up country.” As the drive east meant driving toward my partner (and eventual ex-wife) and daughter and family, it was a march of anticipation, optative and buoyant. Each journey west back to Illinois is entitled “Katabasis,” a word often literally rendered “retreat,” though it also has a technical literary valence meaning “a descent into hell,” a harrowing. Christ, Aeneas, Virgil, Dante, Perseus: these all made katabatic journeys into the netherworld. The entire book is in fact a katabatic journey through divorce and the realization that I will not be able to live with my daughter as she grows up. The book is dedicated to her. It is a history written for her. Aptly so, as she was named after the muse of history.

LB Is teaching writing incompatible with actually writing?

No. It’s a great help. I know there is that academic myth out there that says that one can’t teach and write at the same time. That was something male writers started saying in the 1960s. My sense is that they were saying this generally because they weren’t good teachers.

LB What is your attraction to teaching in prisons?

It’s complicated.

First, we have all thought things that would get us incarcerated. The difference between me and an inmate is that they did that thing. They crossed the Rubicon of action. So, I feel a kinship with them.

Too, I find it despicable how we treat the incarcerated. They are people who genuinely are in need of love. If there is any person in need of love, it’s incumbent upon others to love them.

On the other hand, I have had some students who have committed brutal rapes and murders and who were obviously disturbed and violent and who needed to be somehow secluded from normal social interaction. And my fascination as a teacher in that case stems mostly from wanting to learn from them about, well, redemption.

LB If you were sentenced to be alone forever, which book would you bring with you into eternal loneliness?

The Visuddhimagga.

But in a sense, we’re all imprisoned by our own minds anyway.