Fig. 1. Craig Dworkin
© Ricky Adam
1Craig Dworkin is an American conceptual poet and researcher who shuttles between language experiment, scholarly exploration and editorial engagement. He is interested in materiality, form, scale, paper, ink, constraint, experiment, pataphysics, Oulipo, appropriation, collage, land art, text technics, trees, (to name a few), and in the simultaneously expanding and retracting middle point of the hour glass where minimalist becomes extreme expansion and immensity becomes minute attention. His inscriptions of ink on paper and movements of pixels in light and voltages deconstruct the notion of authorship to such a point where “originally authored” and “assembled” or “collated” hum in a bee dance of concrete and fluid.
2In the debate between concept for concept’s sake, and the necessity to apply the concept of conceptual art, Dworkin falls on the side of application to the extreme. He has translated the entirety of Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principle of Scholarship to English Grammar into the language of its own grammar in Parse. He has applied Raymond Queneau’s “definitional literature” constraint to the extreme in DEF, replacing each word in a one-sentence passage from Gottlob Frege with its dictionary definition, and then replacing each word in those definitions with their dictionary definitions and each of those words with their dictionary definitions and so on, five times with the OED and five times with Webster’s. In Helicography he reproduces a to-scale reproduction of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, transcribing passages from Google books selected based on their chance mentions of measurements proportional to the dimensions of Spiral Jetty. This writing to scale is also spelled out in the book itself where 1 word = ½ inch, and where the time it takes to read the whole text out loud is equal to the time it takes to drive to Spiral Jetty from Dworkin’s house.
3This is just to enumerate a few of his most insane experiments—he has also written small poems at the edge of language as material (Motes, Remotes) and written in English as a dead language (The Pine-Woods Notebook) (fig. 1), and carried out many other experiments that you can discover by scrolling all the way down and looking in the right-hand corner of the homepage of the Eclipse Archive.
4These poetic experiments are always deeply entrenched and in dialogue with Dworkin’s reading practice, a literary erudition that is as stunning as it is discrete—though we see this spelled out in “transparent” language in academic monographs such as Radium of the Word: A Poetics (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (Fordham University Press, 2020), No Medium (MIT, 2013) and Reading the Illegible (Northwestern University Press, 1998). These last works I have used selfishly as a reading guide on my own walk through Dworkin’s work, the map of which is sketched out incompletely in the interview that follows.
5Craig Dworkin was the third poet invited as part of the Poetry Talks series run by Karim Daanoune, Fiona McMahon and myself at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. The series focuses on the materiality of language and document as well as translation and multilingualism, with a special strand devoted to Arab-American poetry.1
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Lily Robert-Foley: In your work, among many tendencies, I find two that keep coming back that I think are related: the tendency to use constraint and the tendency toward a lexicon and an aesthetic that I identify as being related to the hard sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, etc.). I know you studied physics before turning to literature, and I wonder if you might talk about that influence of the hard sciences but also how it relates to constraint (if I am right that it does)?
Craig Dworkin: For me, constraints and science come together in writing by way of the “experimental.”
I know some writers eschew the term, but I like it for the very reasons many reject it: it suggests that writing does something new, teaches us something new, and can fail.
On the one hand, while it's not really the same as in a scientific experiment, there is a way in which constraint can act as a control. It's one thing that holds steady against the boundless, unpredictable directions writing might go.
On the other hand, and more importantly, the constraint is often the very thing that is being tested. My current project, for instance, has the constraint of a pre-determined grammatical structure (that of a nineteenth-century grammar book parsed into its own system of analysis): the experiment is to see whether a new narrative, in a new style, can be crafted with the underlying grammar of a textbook. In this new project, tentatively titled Pares, I take the syntax of that grammar book as a template and rewrite it as a novel; so the new book has the same underlying grammatical structure as the source, even though the surface is experimental fiction rather than textbook.
Which brings up one other aspect of the scientific veneer of experimental writing: a certain damping of subjectivity. I'm usually interested in testing what language can do—what we can learn about the limits of language—rather than expressing myself (what we can learn about my thoughts or feelings). There is something external to the experimental impulse.
L.R.F.: I love that answer. I especially feel that the divide between science and literature is sort of collapsing with all this new AI stuff in a way that it never has before (and I think that is always collapsing in on itself in one way or another at different points in history). Your answer is making my mind go in a lot of different directions, especially regarding the question of subjectivity and language, but I think I'll stay simple for now and just ask a more practical question as a follow-up (and weave in some of my meandering reflections on language and subjectivity later on): it sounds like your new project is a kind of rewriting of Parse, and I know that you are also turning toward experimental fiction these days. Do you consider this new project a fictional adaptation of Parse (although I wonder if you would object to that vocabulary of 'fictional adaptation'). Can you tell us more about this turn to fiction?
C.D.: In general, I take genre to be a way of reading, rather than any ontological aspect of a text. So what's most interesting for me is what kinds of reading are encouraged or thwarted by the approach announced by a genre. Duchamp's Fountain, for instance, obviously challenged the category of “Art” and its policing institutions, but the challenge to the audience was slightly different: can you look at this in the way you're accustomed to looking at sculpture? And of course it permits all sorts of formalist readings, involving the play of light and shadow on glazed curved surfaces, various readings involving gender, structural analyses of reversals and rotational planes, linguistic play, iconographic lineages to Buddhas and Madonnas, and so on and so on.
The question of genre around Parse, late in the twentieth Century, was easy for me, from a reader's standpoint: it used language oriented away from the communicative function (as the Slavic Formalists defined “poetic language”) and it involved measure of some sort (in its case, counting every word equally as a grammatical subject), which combined is my general definition of “poetry”.
From an institutional perspective, I thought it was interesting that poetry was initially willing to accept conceptual works like Parse at a time when experimental fiction, or the gallery arts didn't move to embrace it. With such unusual writing, it might have been otherwise (I can imagine considering a book like Parse as sculpture in which the medium is words, for instance). That poetry later turned out to be fatally allergic to conceptual writing—which challenged the idea that poets were special people, and that the gold standard of poetry was “one's own words”—was equally telling. Which is part of the explanation for my turn toward other genres; in the States, the discourse around poetry is less interesting and accepting than it used to be. There's still plenty of great poetry, to be sure, but the poetics lags behind.
But even Experimental Fiction is an imperfect fit for something like the sequel to Parse (or Helicography), in the sense of how much that genre is committed to narrative and character. I'm always struck by the acrobatics critics have to go through to make Finnegans Wake, say, into a “novel.” It shows the limits of our comfort with long prose works of “diminished narrative” (in the way Language Poets used to speak of a poetry of “diminished reference”). I wish we had a more robust sense of another genre—maybe something like Radical Prose—that would encompass Beckett's short late texts (like Ping and Lessness), J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition, Gertrude Stein's writing, and so on. A place where we could put Ron Silliman's new-sentence works and Allison Parrish's Articulations. You can see the tension with something like the way Tom Comitta's brilliant Nature Book protests too much with its subtitle, “a novel,” which is echoed by reviewers' recourse to object-oriented ontology—why do we have to work so hard to make things into novels?
If you look at books from FC2 and Dalkey Archive, Experimental Fiction seems open to almost any deformation or experiment so long as there is a novel behind it—characters (dead, impossible, or otherwise) and a narrative (shuffled, impossible, or otherwise).
All to say that the sequel to Parse still feels like poetry to me (language oriented away from the communicative function and a system of counting—every word from the original in its grammatical case), but Poetry no longer feels like the category where risks are taken and Experimental Fiction feels like it's weighted more to fiction than experiment.
L.R.F.: I’m also really struck by the obsession with the novel form. I always say it is the dream of every poet to write a novel, but I never really asked myself why. I’ve been trying to write the same novel for the past twenty years. At a certain point shouldn’t I ask myself, why bother? But there is something I find really compelling about traditional narrative (even though I can’t seem to do it myself). Before I had kids I had a really intense love-hate obsession with teen romance TV serials for example (like, I’ve seen every episode of the O.C., Beverly Hills 90210, One Tree Hill etc.). I was really comforted by the fact of my expectations being consistently met, and by the repetition of it. It’s like a lull. All while feeling abhorred by the politics, the stereotypes and aesthetic clichés being repeated. But also, I think my obsession with writing an at least sort of accessible novel (which would be contrary to most of everything else I have written) has to do with an underlying hunger to actually be read by people.
Continuing on that note of what gets read and why (and what doesn’t get read and why), and by whom, I would be curious to hear you expand on why poetry turned out to be fatally allergic to conceptual writing. And about the role of expression in that.
I also wonder if we might think about radical prose/poetic experimentation or whatever we want to call it as a form of research—which would strengthen the connection with the moniker experimental, I think, and also asks the question of readership and reception in a different way. You mentioned to me once that when you write you treat English as a dead language, which I thought was a totally amazing way to study and reflect on language, as well as being a fascinating poetic motor. I mean, I can read it with equal aesthetic and linguistic interest, and maybe it could be interesting to both readers of poetry and linguists?
C.D.: It's too simplified to explain everything, but certainly part of the hostility to conceptual work from poets was that it was not just a style, but a fundamentally different poetics that hit at the heart of a central Creative Writing ideology: poets are special people who are specially creative.
So back at the turn of the millennium, for instance, there was a rapprochement between soi-disant “Language” and “Lyric”, with the poetry establishment's distrustful, grudging, inclusion of more experimental styles (disjunction, quotation, fragmentation, discursive tone, etc.) if not the radically different poetics that led to those epiphenomena. They could still say, “well, I don't like this style, but I suppose they are especially creative in their weird avant-garde way.” That was harder when the activity of the writer was alphabetizing, or retyping.
But I also think it's telling to see what has happened to other genres in the meantime. The rise of autofiction and memoir suggests that a similar logic is at work beyond poetry.
There's obviously lots more to say about those cultural transformations. I haven't read it yet, but Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy looks like it addresses the topic.
But (to turn toward the autobiographical!) an observation that might be relevant for linking several points in your comments. When I started the sequel to Parse, my plan was to write an accessible, traditional narrative. I was aiming at the frisson between the formal constraint and the smooth surface that would not betray it (examples would include things like David Shield's Reality Hunger, Rick Whitaker's An Honest Ghost, Paul Griffiths' Let Me Tell You, etc.). But then once I started writing, I realized that I don't actually really want to read accessible traditional narratives. And if I wanted to write one, I should just do it. Whereas I do in fact like to wrestle with restive, experimental narratives. So rather than use an experimental process to get to a conventional product, I tried to embrace the difficulty on both sides.
That's not really an answer, but it might point us towards your smart point about research. Do you think it's helpful to keep a process/product perspective in mind when thinking about experimental writing? That is: does it help (as readers, or writers) to distinguish between a text that is the result of an experiment and a text that creates the conditions for an experiment?
L.R.F.: As a transition to my question, would it be rude for me to ask what you were planning to do with the traditional accessible narrative of Parse, and also, what on EARTH possessed you to think that was a good idea!? I mean, it's not a bad idea—at all, but I have a really really really hard time imagining you doing that.
I’ll answer your question before moving on to my own.
I think there is something that I like about the moniker conceptual insofar as it does sort of allow for a widening of the location (if I can use that word) of where a work of art takes place. In fact, I like John Cayley's way of thinking of “procedurally induced local dissonance”.2
Something that comes up a lot in discussions about translating texts written under constraint: do you translate the text or the constraint or both? I haven't done a sociological survey but I think the response is almost never the former, and almost always the latter if possible, but that the most interesting thing is when it's the middle term that gets translated: constraint.
This is what we did when I proposed to translate DEF with the interns in the DU d'animateurs d'ateliers d'écriture at Université Paul Valéry when you came for your Poetry Talks visit in October 2023. Of course, one could translate DEF literally—and I actually think this would be a really interesting experiment. Perhaps someday I'll do this. Translate DEF literally. And actually in terms of your poetics (especially in terms of process), this probably makes the most sense. You're probably the only person on the planet I could see actually doing this: translating DEF literally, by hand (in the age of Machine Translation this becomes especially eccentric).
But of course it actually makes more sense to translate the constraint: to begin with the French translation of the Frege quote that you use in DEF and then look up each word in a dictionary and copy out its definition, then look up each word in each of those definitions and copy out those definitions and so on and so forth...
And that's what we did for the “translation” that we presented at the reading of the Maison de la Poésie (although we only did it one time instead of the ten times that you do it in DEF).
The interns in the program thought this was really, quite strange, which was quite enjoyable for me. But they also got really into it and made it their own. A lot of them just copied down the definitions. But some of them started tinkering with the definitions, and writing their own poems by rearranging the definitions and rewriting them. They couldn't handle not being creative.
I think this says something about the “language”/“lyric” divide you mention above. About how hard it is for people to stay uncreative.
But to take this back to your question about process/product: my particular interest in what happened with the translation of DEF was also connected to my work as a writing workshop leader. Marie Bourjea, in her opening speech at the DU's study day on workshops, Au Vif de l'atelier de l'écriture on May 31, 2024, called creative writing workshops aesthetic objects in their own right. There's yet another “genre” (well, form) for you. I think this is really interesting for thinking about writing as a process of research, especially in terms of getting away from a process/result divide.
Next time I translated DEF (and one of these days, I'll come out with a book of all the translations of DEF I've done and led collaboratively) in a workshop setting it was with the Master's students in the Master Exerce. This time I kept it in English and wrote each word down on a card and told them to take it home and look up definitions in unilingual or bilingual (or bilingual, then unilingual, or unilingual then bilingual) dictionaries and copy down or appropriate, cut up, whatever, the definitions and write them on the back of the cards and bring them back the next day.
They did that. And then I collected them and threw them up in the air. We then walked around the room and read them where they lay (fig. 2).
Fig. 2. DEF translation workshop
That was the translation. The Exerce students are choreographers and I wanted to translate DEF in a way you could walk through.
I could relate this back to Immediacy insofar as I feel like on the one hand, I really would like to get behind a critique that says we’re not talking time to think through and mediate phenomena, and that everything exists in a state of in-presence flux that makes it hard to foster real political resistance. On the other hand, Kornbluh’s book, in my reading of it, completely evacuates several very important theoretical traditions of the 20th century: feminist, decolonial and critical race theory as well as the avant-garde, all of which proposed different kinds of deconstructions of the subject/object binary not only as a way of reconnecting lived experience with reflection, but as a political unraveling of the relationship of dominator to dominated that is reproduced in that binary. I have to read it more carefully perhaps, but it seems that those critques are simply “forgotten” in Kornbluh’s book.
And on that front: One critique that could be made of evacuating subjectivity from text is perhaps that it risks attaching itself on to some kind of neutral objectivity that is in fact a cover for subjectivities unspoken. Irène Assiba d’Almeida pointed out in 1995 in her piece for Moving Beyond Boundaries, Volume 2: Black Women’s Diasporas, and Lauren Fournier discusses this at length as well in Authotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, that the “death of the author” paradigm coincided with women of color from post or decolonised populations starting to gain visibility (though it was scant at the time) in literary and publishing spheres. Isn't that odd, she remarked (I'm paraphrasing), that right as “we” begin to speak up suddenly the author doesn't exist and can't say anything anymore?
Like, it is so important to ask who is speaking and also who is not. I guess the question I'm asking is, is it really possible to empty a text of its subjectivity? Of its positionnality? Are these the same things?
C.D.: I’ll first answer your question about Parse before moving on to the rest. My initial impulse to have the Parse sequel be conventional—mundane even—was a version or inversion of Sianne Ngai’s sense of the gimmick: all this effort to produce an unexceptional result. I feel like experiments often go halfway: a more or less conventional text, but one that still has a procedural aftertaste. A lot of the Oulipo is like this for me, or homophonic texts: they all have a certain sound, a certain stiltedness, even as they’re trying to write a policier (or whatever). I usually wish they would go all the way, or lean into the weirdness more.
I surely need to think through Immediacy more carefully. On the one hand, I’m distrustful of representation and the removes of abstraction. On the other hand, I’m wary of the way that the material, literal, physical directness that attracts me (my current book on the significance of paper as a literary substrate, say) slips easily into the role of metaphysical presence and transcendental signified... Some similar third position or renegotiation is probably also my response to the questions around evacuated subjectivity.
You’re certainly exactly right that the danger of claims for avoiding subjectivity are that they covertly entrench certain subjects as privileged or natural and erase or silence others. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean critiques of the politics of subjectivity weren’t on to something, and it might be worth getting at what that is.
Decades ago, Ron Silliman was taken to task for writing, “writers and readers—women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the 'marginal'—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience.” It was seen as policing—why should certain groups be excluded from the avant-garde because they hadn’t yet “told their story”?—and also an implicit progress narrative. As if you had to learn to drawn realistic, perspectival pictures before you could paint abstractly.
It's not that the position is right or wrong, but for me its terms are already too broad. Things get complicated quickly. Foregoing immediacy and authenticity for artifice and piracy might be the very means by which Kathy Acker, say, tells her (own, unique, genuine, authentic, confessional) story.
Maybe another way to say it is that I’d personally rather ask how a particular text is working and what it’s doing, rather than say what it ought to be doing. Because it’s always going to be contingent, and partial, and contradictory, and complicated, and historicizeable, and dynamic.
Am I way off target?
Needless to say, I can’t wait for the collected DEF(ormations) ! (Maybe Ormations would be a good title?)
L.R.F.: I don't think you're off target at all—unless hitting the target was precisely what we didn't want to do!
I think your answer is terrific and I have also wondered about the injunction to translate “faithfully” marginalised authors whereas, in experimental translation for example, we seem to be “allowed” to do whatever we want to canonical authors. Sophie Collins’s book Currently & Emotion for example, which I adore, groups together experimental translation (so translations that deform or transgress an original) and faithful translations of marginalized authors, presumably for the way they both subvert the dominant paradigm of what is read and how. There was something that always bothered me about that: like, isn’t this on some level instrumentalising marginalized voices for avant-garde aims that are somehow presumed to be innately belonging to imperial, privileged centers?
Likewise, there is a sense in which this injunction to translate “faithfully,” like the injunction to “write conventionally,” applies a politics/ethics of translation to texts that don't maybe even belong to the way that text is really working or the textual/political/translational context in which it sits? For example, taking a text that emerged out a context of textual fluidity and then adversely applying a Eurocentric notion of fidelity in translation as a way of somehow preserving an imposed-by-the-coloniser sancrosanct integrity of a marginalised voice. I am thinking of Shalamee Palekar citing Sujit Mukherjee:
The act of translation has long been an inherent practice in India—the Hindi/Marathi terms ‘anuvad’ (‘speaking after or following’) and ‘rupantar’ (‘change in form’), as Sujit Mukherjee reminds us, ‘are the commonly understood sense of translation in India, and neither term demands fidelity to the original’ (1994: 80)... Translation is the Indian context. (Palekar 17)
Doesn't this actually invite experimental translation? Doesn't this invite a displacement of the logos of “voice” (and from there, lyric... but more on that in my next question I think)?
And indeed in Fournier’s book that I mention above, following the “death of the author,” came “the death of the avant-garde,” “at the very time when more kinds of people were able to access avant-garde spaces and ways of working (or to be recognized as such)” (Fournier 54). So the same critique can be applied either way, and probably has more to do with entrenched histories of oppressions occuring anywhere and everywhere than with some kind of aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) formula or prerequisite, as you rightly point out.
I actually have a pretty foucauldian vision of subjectivity, that it is deeply historical, and constructed, and that when we “remove” it or “insert” it that that operation is coming into dialogue with some specific moment in a transnational dialogue about (inter)subjectivity. And that's where it gets interesting. And as you say, we get more from seeing how things are working than in prescribing how they ought to work.
And here I also love what you say about experimental works only going halfway. I was thinking back to your talk on Helicography when you were in Montpellier for Poetry Talks, where you mentioned an ongoing debate with Kenneth Goldsmith, whereby he believes the concept is enough, whereas you think it has to be carried out, all the way through. I'll admit, I'm on your side here. How can we know what will happen until we carry it out, and then also, read and receive that full carrying out? That's where it gets interesting!
I am very curious about your current work on paper, which I might link back to one of the major thematics of the Poetry Talks series, which is materialities. I wonder if you could talk a little more about this and perhaps even relate it to the work you did in Helicographies. I'm thinking here about the poet as editor, and as the editor as someone who is always having to contend with the material realities of text: its technics and logistics. Helicographies seems to me really entrenched in this thinking about the logistics and technics of the book (in its expanding, fractalizing form) for example, and then also conceiving of the poet as an editor, which is a way of both evacuating, but then not entirely, rethinking, repositioning, the subject of poetry.
C.D.: I really love the thought of translation as “change in form”—it avoids so many traps and opens so many avenues. Modality rather than communication, necessarily, even.
This is the kind of vocabulary that I wish we had for materiality as well. One of the things I’ve been wrestling with in the book on paper is how to talk about signification. There’s the tendency to contrast something like the sheer materiality of inscription (ink, paper) with the semantic, thematic, symbolic aspects of language. But if one looks at the material and finds it meaningful, then it doesn’t really make sense to speak of it as non-semantic…
One concept that has helped me is Victoria Mitchell’s discussion of “textility”: “a supple gathering and overlapping pleating of techné, textile structure, and linguistic text that articulate subtle physical sensations between substance and surface.”
We talk about writing on paper, but legible text depends on a partial absorption of ink into the fibres of the sheet—we actually write with ink in paper.
And although “thinking through a textile process does not necessarily mean working with textiles in the literal sense,” as Briony Fer argues, in the case of paper it has been interesting to realize that for many centuries, paper was one stage of the textile (in the way we might say a sweater is one stage of wool), since it was made from rags. And moreover, even with the move to wood, the screens that make paper—and that made for smooth modern paper, were the result of weaving wires into mesh—a direct result of loom technologies, and where weaving is an interesting discipline because it’s about structure and technique, rather than material (as with paint, say). You weave with wire or wool or flax or reeds.
L.R.F.: Wow, what synchronicity! I just sent out a description for a workshop I’ll be leading in Angers in June at the Tissage, langage, écriture: penser et pratiquer la recherche création (organized by Elise Angioi, Ludivine Bouton Kelly, Vincent Broqua and Anne-Lise Solanilla), which is all about thinking about text as textile, in its fully technical processes.3 You’re not going to be in France in June by any chance? I wish I had had the foresight to send you the call! But of course we can’t be everywhere…
I guess I would like to end now, although there are a lot of loose threads, by quoting the blurb for a chapbook of yours that came out not long ago, Lagniappes, because I think it brings together a lot of the different strings we’ve pulled in a way that I am struggling to do:
The micropoetics of Lagniappes calibrates the distance between minimalist and minimal, slighted and slight, quoted and quotidian. If poetry is often the site for powerful emotions, urgent politics, or intimate confession, here it seeks to register and recreate the ephemeral tremors of the everyday. The language effects are minor, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re not significant. Like finding a quarter in the vending machine, just when you’re short: it’s not a big deal (only a few cents), but it might change your mood for the rest of the afternoon. Against the current tendency to subsume all verse to “lyric,” these poems recall some of the many non-lyrical forms that once flourished: epigram, riddle, epistle, graffiti, fratrasie, salut . . . .
I’m going to ask my final question—and as I’m writing this I don’t know what it is going to be—in a very roundabout way. I have a colleage, Adriana Şerban, who told me a few years ago she was writing a book about Translation and Detail. As far as I know she didn’t end up finishing that book and is now writing a book called Translation and Beauty.
And now I’m seeing the design of the question I want to ask which is about reader response. So often when I have asked you some dumb question about poetics or text, you have responded: well what is that text actually doing? How are we reading it? I also have this profound sense when reading you that, actually, one could pretty much “read” anything by applying the right kind of attention to it?
I am also thinking about the introduction I wrote to read to present you at the various Poetry Talks events you participated in during your stay in Montpellier:
I first encountered Craig Dworkin at my very first ever academic conference, on the “poet critic” if I remember correctly, at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. He read a piece called “fact”, that listed the chemical components of ink and paper: in other words, the chemical components of the physical material that the poem was made of. I had never yet encountered anything like it and it awoke my imagination of what was possible in poetry, the limits that one could push and cross. From that moment I began to discover the universe of Dworkin’s poetry and scholarly work, which is somehow both eclectic but also entirely coherent, displaying a mastery and erudition that is quite often, frankly virtuosic. Whether he is embodying the visceral, sonic and geographical landscape of the Great Salt Lake, remotivating the stuff of language in the sound of a pine, translating a book of grammar into its own grammar, exploring the labyrinthine poetry in a dictionary, performing Oulipian constraints beyond the scope of reason, reading a drawing, or land art, or a supposedly unreadable text, or curating them, I am always stunned by his rigorous attention and his capacity to bring lyric into the scientific and conceptual, to tap into fluid beauty by way of the concrete signifying happenstance of language.
I think in retrospect that you might have been both touched but also a little bit annoyed or embarrassed by this introduction. Our poetics converge in many ways, but I have a tendency to stray toward the personal, the autobiographical or autotheoretical, that is antithetical in many ways to what you do. And not only do I write and think poetry and other kinds of text in a different way from you, but I also read them in a different way from you. And very often, when I read your work, I stumble across these sites of beauty in the most romantic sense of the term: in terms of the effect evoked in me, my vibrations, fluids, tissues and bones. It’s a visceral response to lyric beauty in your texts.
I guess my question is: is it alright for me to read you in this way? And what does that do to your work?
C.D.: Touched and delighted! Here is where two strands of my poetics come together and get put to the test. On the one hand, I believe in “experimental” poetry that is experimental at two stages, or doubly hinged at the site of the text: the result of an experiment in writing, and the occasion for experiments in reading. So I definitely think some ways of reading might be more or less successful, but we don’t know what those are until we try (this is another version of actually carrying out a conceptual proposal and not just contemplating it). On the other hand, since I don’t think of poetry as communicating anything in particular, I don’t think there is a message to miss or get wrong, or a feeling that is right or wrong. Since my interest, as I mentioned, lies more in what the text does, rather than what it means, then if a poem permits a reading, it can’t really be the wrong way to read.
And to be honest, I’m looking for moments of beauty too. I would say that if anything my sense of linguistic beauty leads to baroque, lush, overly dense, writing. I’m thinking of the impacted internal rhymes in Pine-Woods, say, where the sentences feel like they have a density and mass that doesn’t leave much room to breathe. I suppose I’m happiest when an austere, anti-expressive, post-modernist procedure leads to a decadent, twilight-of-romanticism result. Constructivist poetics and a Swinburne poem!
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