ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Daniel Borzutzky
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in Pittsburgh. The neighborhood I grew up in was named Squirrel Hill. My parents are Chilean Jews who emigrated first to New York City and then to Pittsburgh.
Poetry was not necessarily part
of the mix, though reading certainly was. My parents spent and still spend much
of their free time reading. The writers they read are very diverse. Many
writers who are important to me now I first discovered because my parents owned
their books. In this sense, I am very lucky.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork,
other things that inform your work?
My favorite writers are Beckett, Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. The books of
W.G. Sebald have been very important to me in the last few years. I like
novelists who write devastating, winding, elliptical sentences and whose work
is driven by a pulsing rhythm and energy. It is impossible to define this
energy, which I think often manifests itself through sound. I put down any book
which does not sound good to me. But I could in no way tell you what I mean by
“sound good.”
The writings of Daniil Kharms are really important to me. The Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, whose work is now being published by New Directions. Manuel Puig. Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec and others from Old Europe. The essays of Fanny Howe, Maurice Blanchot and E.M. Cioran.
A very diverse group of poets are important to me. Lately, Emily Dickinson. Wallace Stevens. Kenneth Koch's poems and avant-garde plays got me writing. Of the many great Chilean poets, I am most drawn to Nicanor Parra. I've been hooked on Lewis Warsh's writing since seeing him read last spring. Paul Celan, Araki Yasusada, John Ashbery. Rosmarie Waldrop and some of the writers she translates, especially Oscar Pastior. The collage and found text poems of Harry Mathews, Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman. The hybrid animals of Franz Kafka and the hybrid animals of my friend, painter and writer, Mark Booth.
Recent joys have been the plays of Christopher Durang and Caryl Churchill, of Ionesco and Albee.
I like to read and rewrite political speeches. I like to read and rewrite the bible. I like to read American magazines from the early twentieth century.
Also, I have been translating the poems of Chilean poet Jaime-Luis Huenun.
3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poetry become part of your everyday
life?
As Anne Carson said in the New York Times, 'I'm not a poet, Homer's a poet; I
make things with words.'
I came to making things with words that look like poems after a few years of writing only prose. I have written a lot of prose and at some point I will probably resume writing prose. But when I became more aware of what was possible, when I began to read more, I found myself losing interest in writing prolonged narratives. Slowly, my fictions turned into prose poems and then the prose poems turned into things with words that look like poems.
This will sound facile, but one of the things that kept me locked into prose was that I was intimidated by the line break. I never understood how contemporary poets used the line break. Line breaks seemed arbitrary to me. So when I finally started using them, I used (and often still use) arbitrary rules about how many syllables could be in each line. 16 is a number I use a lot, and which has historically been used a lot, though I am not so rigorous. The rule is that the line cannot exceed 16 syllables. If the line doesn't end on the 16th syllable, let's say it ends on the 14th syllable, and I want to use a 3 syllable word, then I must use that 3 syllable word on the next line. It was something as arbitrarily old-fashioned as this that got me writing in verse.
4) Where were you educated?
Was this important?
My nursery school was called Mother Goose. One day at Mother Goose, I got my
foot stuck in a radiator, at which point, I bit my tongue so hard that it almost
came off. To this day I have a small scar from the two stitches they put in my
tongue. So we can literally say that my time at Mother Goose scarred me.
From kindergarten through the seventh grade, I went to the Shady Side Academy School for Boys. This was an awful place. It wasn't religious (secular WASPY) , but we had to say the Lord's Prayer every morning. In fact, I did not actually know that the Lord's Prayer was a Christian thing until I left Shady Side Academy School for Boys. I thought it was just something you said every morning. When I was in the sixth grade, I didn't make the soccer team because the coach didn't like me. This put an end to the glory days of my youth. Later I got into trouble for stealing my art teacher's (Mrs. G) eyeglasses and roll book. Mrs. G. was supposedly the mother of professional wrestler Brutus Beefcake. My friend, photographer Michael Rhoades, got in trouble for stealing the Reading final exam from the desk of Dr. Peebles... Although I was an extremely skilled underachiever, I loved math class. In the seventh grade, I memorized the answer to every two digit number multiplied by a one digit number. On the bus, or in the cafeteria, my friends would test me. 46 X 7, they would say, and in less than a second I would say, 182. This began a life long obsession with the hidden and imaginary meanings in numbers.
After the seventh grade, I decided to leave private school. I then went to public school. My high school was called Taylor Allderdice, which was considered to be the best public school in Pittsburgh because of its renowned Honors Program. This school had a combination of middle-upper class white kids, working class white kids and African Americans. In the bathroom of my school I saw kids of all colors buying guns and crack. Also, several of the middle-upper class white kids, some of the top students in the class, including the Valedictorian, were featured in a very long investigative article in the Wall Street Journal which detailed how they had cheated on the SAT's. I could not even begin to summarize the education I received in these years, though I will say that since then I've consistently had insomnia, paranoia, a healthy dose of low expectations and low self-esteem and a preoccupation with numbers. My senior year in high school, my friend Michael Rhoades and I would go on Saturday morning to volunteer as escorts at an abortion clinic. This was a fascinating educational experience. Bus loads of students from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, where you can minor in Pro-Life studies, would come to Pittsburgh to try to block the doors of the clinic. We would jostle with them to make sure the patients could enter. Now Mike is a documentary photographer who is often travelling the world. Another friend of mine from high school, Miranda Kennedy, reports on NPR from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. So though high school was a predictably awful time, I was lucky enough to have been surrounded by smart, fascinating people who to this day are my closest friends.
There was a Bugs Bunny cartoon which was pedagogically quite important. It's the one where there are two animals, work colleagues, whose names (I think) are George and Sam. "Morning George," says Sam, as the work day begins. They chit-chat for a few moments and then Sam pushes George off a cliff. Then the scene shifts again, more friendly chit-chat, they drink coffee, talk about their families, and then George hands Sam a stick of dynamite. In classical terms, the theme here is the philos-aphilos (the hate in love). I think a lot about George and Sam. I think I'm not exaggerating when I say that their relationship is a powerful metaphor for many of the relationships that define our lives.
Backtracking in time, from the ages of about 10-15 I went to Tree of Life Hebrew School. As I went to an all boys grammar school, Tree of Life provided me my first adolescent access to girls, whom I was mostly too shy to talk to. More interesting than this was a song I learned called HAD GADYA, which is sung at Passover. The song tells of a father who buys a goat for two zuzim. A cat eats the goat, a dog eats the cat, a stick beats the dog, a fire burns the stick, water quenches the fire, an ox drinks the water, a butcher slaughters the ox and the angel of death kills the butcher. It's a very dark song about the interconnectedness of life and I have always remembered it.
I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute. A few of my professors at the Art Institute---in particular Matthew Goulish, Beth Nugent and Elizabeth Cross--- were wonderfully helpful to me. Each of them exposed me to a great mix of writers and each approached writing and the teaching of writing from really unique perspectives. I took from graduate school the idea that one can and should consciously write in response to other writings and other writers--not just to writers whose books you read, but to those writers who form your community. I took from graduate school the idea that you should read as widely as possible. I learned the joys of research, collage and combinatorial writing. In graduate school I formed close friendships with the writers Adam Novy, Amina Cain, Mark Booth and Steven Hendricks. These relationships have been more important to my writing than any classes.
In September of this year, I took a full-time position in the English Department at Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago. In the seventh week of the semester, we went on strike. As of today, November 2nd, 2004, we are still on strike. We have been walking the picket lines for over two weeks. This has undoubtedly been a rich educational experience.
A summary of just some of the many places where I was educated....
5) Some of your work is Sexually charged, how can this be done in poetry without becoming cliched?
I don't know if I would say that my poems are sexually charged. They certainly are not erotic, pornographic, theoretical, titillating or explicit. There are a series of poems I wrote which took as research/collage materials some strange American sex magazines from the 1930's and combined them with contemporary sex articles from Cosmo and Real Simple.
....Everything that understands itself is distorted, and in
The complementary world of our imagination we may
often see our lovers as goats with human heads, as human
bodies with fish heads, as winged monsters with hooked beaks, as vultures
and crabs and griffons.....
I guess I think sex is scary. But really, such a line is ultimately poking fun at a certain type of discourse about sex.
Another poem combines Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall with an article on flagellation.
I guess there are a lot of orgasms in my writing. (I cook your mushroom omelet this morning and ponder why, for example, as you orgasmed last night, you cried: “Divine law is just!").
In both of the above cases, I assume that the sexual references are only palatable because of their juxtapositions with the non-sexual.
6) What is your favorite food ?
Avocado, mango, pastel de choclo, taco and many others.
7) Sports Team? or Activity?
Sadly, I'm a Cubs fan. I really liked the 1994 Brazilian World Cup Soccer
Team. The 2002 Brazilian World Cup Team was also fun to watch. I will some
times watch Manchester United matches with my friend Adam Novy, though unlike
Adam I cannot claim a strong affiliation.
8) Vacation spot?
Mexico City; Buenos Aires; Murs, France, a village of 200 in the Pyrenees.
9) Curse word?
Abso-fuckin-lutely. Is fuckin' the only word in the English language that can
be placed in the middle of another word to form a new word?
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
I write very inconsistently. I often write series of poems, but after about the third in a series the intrigue disappears. I often pull out about ten books, spread them on my desk and begin to write. I do use collage, found texts, etc. My favorite recipe is this: Write something that goes nowhere. Set it aside, let it cool for 6 months. Rediscover it 6 months later and combine it with something you are presently working on, which has also been going nowhere. It's impossible to plan for this kind of thing. But sometimes it works.
Many of my own favorite writings have been created accidentally. Nevertheless, I like to consider revision in the literal sense of the word (to see again). I have very little attachment to my own work. For me this helps a lot.
2) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
Both, though with time the synthetic part is becoming more and more organic.
3) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
I usually write at home; sometimes
in notebooks, sometimes on loose sheets of typing paper, sometimes on the
computer. I write haphazardly.
4) In the balance between found language and created language where does your
work fall?
I use both. I try to approach my own created language as found language.
Links to online work: