ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

Joshua Clover

General Questions

1) Where were you born?  Where did you grow up?  What was your  formation?
 

I was born in Berkeley, and grew up there and around Boston. Formations aren't summarizable, but one sort of complex that seems significant to me is that I've spent a lot of my life with access to the the splendors of the cultural elite, but not the money that so often comes with it. I went to this fantastic high school designed for wealthy whiz kids -- however, like a couple token kids in each class (often African-American), I was there on scholarship. I got a great education, both in poetry and class politics.
 
 

2)What are your poetic influences?
 
Daily life and daily life only. As it happens, my daily life involves a lot of talking with smart people, reading, music, movies, discussing ideas, walking around, television, and aimless thinking.

3) When did you become a poet?
 
I'm not a poet. I write poems.
 
 

4) Your book Madonna Anno Domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997) has profound religious/spiritual overtones is this for irony's  sake? or how are you using this material? Why choose these sources and images?
 
There is no god and never was. But religion is a human thing; "I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me," sez Terence Publius.  Dostoevsky has the devil say "I am Satan, therefore nothing human is alien to me" in Brothers K: that too.
 

5) Favorite team or sport? Activity?
 
When I go to bars, I find it hard to hold conversations, and much prefer playing pool and the jukebox.
 
 

6) Favorite food?
 
Over the course of my life, the burrito. Over the last week, mango prawns. If coffee is a food, coffee.
 
 

7) Vacation spot?
 
I like Paris, where I used to live, but I worked there about as much as I work anywhere: some, every day. Sometimes I take a Vicodin and listen to Joni Mitchell.

8) Swear word?
 
In Boston, we spoke of "the Somerville alphabet": fuckin A, fuckin B, fuckin C...
 
 

9) The Totality for Kids (2006 U California Press) has been called many things but I kept coming back as I read it to the fusion of history (In the Pound sense) with an after Postmodernism sense of a new poetic, what was your goal in the work? did you want to create a new poetic with this work?

10) Is there  a poet writing today that you admire and read with interest?
 
Can I answer 9 & 10 together? I admire many poets, even just among those roughly of my generation; given that you're Chicago-based, I would be a cad not to give respect to Simone Muench and Chris Glomski, among others. Being alive in the same world with them makes me happy. As far as thinking through directions related to my own poetics, there are several poets I follow carefully: some of these would include Ange Mlinko, Chris Nealon, Lisa Robertson, Kevin Davies, Juliana Spahr.
 
I think Juliana has presented the problem that concerns me most clearly: that we're past the moment of choosing between the lyric tradition and the discursive, langpo tradition and that, rather than acceding to this calcified binary, we have to outmaneuver it. However, this does NOT mean simply synthesizing the two, or groovily accepting them both as human activities: the incorporation of vivid, oppositional traditions into a capacious, can't-we-all-just-get-along aesthetic IS the practice of the dominant lyric tradition, and to play it that way is in fact to choose sides.
 
The matter of it all is in how we let these traditions be part of the historical totality as it appears (and hides itself) in the present moment, without draining them of their convulsive beauty, their oppositionality and political grasp, their force and delight. Finding an adequate form for the present moment is the only thing that "poetics" could possibly mean.
 
That's a systemic answer. At the same time, we're all figuring immediate problems. Real poetry thinks both globally and locally at once, takes as its material both history and daily life.
 

Craft Questions
 

11) How do you begin to write a poem?
 
By forgetting. There are numerous ways to access a promising phrase:  reading, thinking, running your mouth. I tend to run my mind over such a phrase for a minute...and then it slips away. A while later, sometimes much later, something else -- an  experience, a sensation, another phrase -- calls up that first bit of language, and now there are two things that seem to be somehow part of a complex. That's often when I get the sense that a poem might be beginning. You get past the beginning and into the poem when you find the rhythm that lets you extend substance into space.
 
 

12) Many poets don't seem to be deep readers of poetry today.  Is there any work, poetry or otherwise, that you think is essential?
 
I'm not big on essence. But I think that, as I suggested above, poetry is a way of finding a form for the present. If I had to choose one document, it would probably be "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," by Frederic Jameson. Or In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, by Guy Debord, maybe Exile in Guyville, or Godard's Band of Outsiders, or Celebrity Skin, by Hole, or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, or Apollinaire's "Zone," or Sign O' The Times. There are lots of ways to know the present, and I recommend all of them, more or less blindly.
 

13) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
 
Is your razor electric or acoustic?
 
 

14) Where do you write?  Is ambience important for you?
 
The vast majority of both my books were written in public or semipublic -- markets, benches, cafes, churches, libraries -- with coffee at my side and
music loud in my ears. I like the feeling of life around me toward which I don't feel responsible.
 
 

15) In the space between created language and found language where do you fall?
 
That's a good question, because it requires a theory of language to answer. All language is found, of course -- you make up, what, five or tens words in your life? But at the same time, if someone argued that finding a new context for a word, or making a phrase with unfamiliar relations among its parts, was CREATING language, I wouldn't dispute that. "I wanted to speak in the beautiful language of my century" -- that language's provenance is a matter of description, not of fact.
 
 

16) In your process of writing, is it more like sculpture or painting or something else?
 
I wish the answer were, "a movie." The sense of dialogue and soundtrack and image all happening in an ongoing stream, that seems like something to which one ought aspire. More often, it's probably "like" painting: a sense of impasto, of scraping layers over layers in differing thicknesses, sometimes something showing through from behind, sometimes the surface shattering toward abstraction. Except that I think painters often have a sense of the overall shape -- of what they're painting -- when they start. They rough it out, and then work on parts, make changes, leave gaps, go back, fill in, finish. I never know the shape when I start; never know the third step until I take the second. It's more like walking without a destination. I drift. Mainly I drift.