ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Robert Archambeau
General Questions
1) Where were you Born and what was your Formation?
I was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where I lived until the ripe old age of six days. My father was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, but left to be an art professor in Canada, so I grew up in Winnipeg. My Canadian friends always thought of me as American, but when the family would spend summers at our place in Maine or with family in Ohio, everyone thought of me as Canadian.
My formation? Good Lord. I think I’d have to try to rewrite The Prelude to give anything like a real answer to that, not that anyone would be interested enough to wade through several thousand lines. If I had to single out a few things as formative, though, I’d go with these two:
A. Being utterly entranced with a fairly old-school view of history – Western Civ – from an early age. I remember sitting on the floor of our weekend place in Bissett, Manitoba, a real edge-of-the-wilderness place, and pouring for hours over an art-deco illustrated book of European history. If I were an Ed Dorn kind of guy, I’d have been chasing around the woods surrounding Rice Lake, or poking around the abandoned gold mine there. I did a bit of that, too, but European history seemed so exotic to me then. Babylon, the Spartans at Thermopylae, the fall of Rome, all that. It seemed like another world, and it took me a long time to realize that it is the world we’re living in, that the past is in some real sense going on now. You can’t say ten words in English, for example, without the consequences of 1066 making themselves manifest – all that Norman French echoing around in the ruins of an Anglo-Saxon language.
B. Being my father’s son. He’s a ceramic artist with an international reputation. I think this immunized me against a lot of myths about how artists and writers should behave, and it gave me a sense of the artist as craftsman, that being very much the tradition my father comes from. And I learned to love form for form’s sake, for better and perhaps for worse.
2) What are your Poetic Influences?
When I was an undergraduate there were some local poets – Dennis Cooley, Robert Kroetsch, and a poet/fiction writer named David Arneson – who meant a lot to me. They knew that being in western Canada kept them out of the loop, ignored by the usual institutions, and they vowed to create their own institutions instead. They did it, too, with a bunch of little journals and a press or two. One of my father’s friends was a printmaker who had a silk-screening studio in Winnipeg, and I remember him being interviewed, and saying that he and his peers felt that the east coast art establishment was all bullshit, so they got together and decided to make their own bullshit. I liked that – both the entrepreneurship and the irony. I’ve been interested in the margins ever since, and suspicious of any wind blowing from Harvard, New York, or the mouth of Helen Vendler ever since.
Later, I went to graduate school to study with John Matthias, one of the greatest poets of his generation. He’s almost too good to get the recognition he deserves. The attraction had a lot to do with his interest in history and found text, his openness to odd and out-of-the way writers, and his uncanny ability to find the rhymes between past and present.
3) When did you realize you wanted to be a poet?
I’m still not comfortable with the label. Much of my writing is critical prose, and I enjoy that part of what I do as much as I enjoy writing poetry. And many of my poems are really lit-crit carried on by other means. I don’t like the pigeonholing that our institutions seem to demand of us. I’d be attracted to the old-school term “man of letters” if it weren’t A. implicitly sexist and B. laden with images of tweedy, pipe-smoking conservative middlebrowism. It always makes me think of G.K. Chesterton, and one of my fears in life is that I’ll end up looking like him.
4)What do you think is the font of innovative poetry today?
I think we’re at an odd moment in innovative poetry. Language poetry has cross-bred with Iowa-MFA writing, and given us a whole lot of poets who sound like Jorie Graham. We’ve got a kind of language poetry fundamentalism out there, too: read Ron Silliman, and you see a Manichean struggle of pure good against pure evil, which is a ridiculous warping of the true state of things.
The poetry that excites me the most, lately, is a poetry that takes on facts and texts outside of the poet’s immediate experience, and treats them in some way other than syntactic disjunction. Ammiel Alcalay, John Matthias, Kristin Prevallet – I like these poets. I think it is time to give Charles Olson another look too, warts and all. I mean, I remember looking over the paper topics for all those Orono conferences on poetry of the fifties and sixties, and the ratio of Duncan to Olson was way out of whack. Much as I admire Duncan, there’s something to be said for the kind of historical and textual investigations for which Olson cared deeply.
5) Favorite Team or Sport?
I’ve got to go with the Notre Dame Fightin’ Irish. Football is a nail-biting, intense experience (unlike baseball, which is just a good excuse to sit in the sun drinking beer). When you add the lore and mystique that Notre Dame has so carefully manufactured and cultivated, it’s a hell of a package.
6) Food?
Satay Shrimp Chow Fun, from an unpromising sounding little joint called Hong Kong Chop Suey in an unpromising strip mall in the unlikely Chicago suburb of Libertyville. It’s quite a schlep from my house, but they don’t deliver, and there’s nothing quite like their Chow Fun.
7) Vacation Spot?
Amsterdam. Paris is cool, too. I’m also keen on Rome and Venice. I’m pretty Eurocentric, I suppose, though I’d like to see India sometime, too.
8) Swear Word?
There aren’t a lot of truly obscene words left. I mean, almost anything can go into a Hollywood movie now, and I use these in such abundance I don’t really experience them as transgressive. When I’m really angry at someone or something, I tend use the slightly quaint term “dogshit.” As in “Jesus Christ on a goddamn pogo stick, what fucking dogshit this president is.”
9) Are you working on a book? Topic? Or Theme.
There are two I’m trying to get off the ground, one a book of poetry where I rewrite the poems on my nineteenth century British lit survey syllabus. My version of Blake’s “Book of Urizen,” my version of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” my version of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” I suppose some of the impulse here is to do literary criticism using the tools of poetry, to really understand the poems and make them my own. Also, some of impulse comes from the desire to interpret the contemporary world in terms derived from another time – to let two very different worlds meet each other and see what comes of it. Old poems can take the familiar world and make it strange.
The other book is prose, and started out way too ambitiously, as a history of the idea of good taste from the eighteenth century until the present. I’ve pared it down, though it is still years and years away from coming together. Right now I’m calling it The Aesthetic Anxiety. The big claim is that the idea of an autonomous aesthetic – an art for art’s sake, or an art that doesn’t serve any religious or utilitarian end – haunts us; and that it has caused all kinds of mental gymnastics among poets and writers who want to have all of the freedoms of aesthetic autonomy, but to be somehow efficacious in the world, too. They want the total freedom of aesthetic autonomy, but they want things to happen in the world because of their art, too. You get a lot of false consciousness on the part of writers, and I want to understand how it works, and how we got to this place.
10) How do international poetries and forms affect your work?
I’ve translated from French poetry, and that really opened up surrealism for me, and put the New York School in context. I’ve been keen on British poetry for a while, too. Outside of a very limited range (say, Larkin and Ted Hughes) it doesn’t get read very much in America, which is a shame. There’s a lot of vital experimental writing over there, much of it having to do with place or geography in a way that is alien to the dominant experimental tradition in America.
Craft Questions
1) How do you write a poem?
You know, it’s funny. I like to think of myself as someone who plans things out very deliberately, but my favorite poems have always surprised me. They come out of some part of myself that’s been thinking about them any worrying over them for some time, but that was invisible to my conscious self at the time.
2) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
Of those two terms, I’d have to pick “synthetic,” in that I tend to see my own poems as fields in which I can combine other kinds of writing. I love to riff on other people’s poems, the way musicians reinterpret other people’s songs. Even when the poem isn’t a pastiche or some kind of cento, I tend to think of it as a mixing of existing kinds of writing. Roland Barthes was on to something when he said that the author, in the romantic sense of the isolated visionary, is dead. What we have now is the scriptor, whose sole power is to mingle writing. I like this notion, and see it as a sign of vigor in our literary culture, complaints from pessimists like Frederic Jameson notwithstanding.
3) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?
It’s all terribly bourgeois. I need a pile of books, and decent Internet access. Music helps, too, something without words. That, and getting jacked up on caffeine. So I generally write in my study, at a big pine table that can hold a lot of books and papers and still give me some elbowroom.
Ideal conditions involve a lot of time, too: up at, say, six, drinking coffee, reading aimlessly, and listening to music until about eleven. Lunch, a walk, and the writing from one until five. I don’t get this all the time, but one of the perks of the academic world is that I get these conditions for a few months every year, when I can hardly believe my good fortune.
4) How do you use sources in your poetry?
I think it was Paul de Man who said “I can do nothing without a text.” It’s like that.
