ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
E. Tracy Grinnell
This Profile was Submitted by Chicago Poet Mark Tardi
General Questions:
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. But I tend to qualify that with having been born in Homestead, Florida, and my first memories being of Ogden, Utah. My father, a fighter pilot, moved us around a lot, until my parents’ divorce. Somehow those moves, reconfigurations, are important. My (step-) grandfather is a composer and has always been a strong presence for me. Music, much more than poetry, was part of the mix. We, my four siblings and I, had to choose an instrument to study. I tried clarinet, violin, piano, flute and cello. Sunday mornings were saturated with the piano music that my step-father listened to while he worked. Both my step-sisters have beautiful, classical voices. The practice of listening was ingrained through music.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
I loved Juliana Spahr’s response to this question…my tendency is to be reading several books at any given time—jumping around—also, I am constantly reading submissions, new work, my peers’ work, these things are difficult to diagram. As for broad strokes—Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Paul Celan, Italo Calvino, Djuna Barnes, H.D., George Sand, St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen, Erik Satie, requiems (Mozart & Brahms), Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Beethoven’s sonatas, Messaien, Cage, Leslie Scalapino has had a very holistic influence on me as a writer, editor, and human being, Lyn Hejinian, Haryette Mullen, Nicole Brossard, Danielle Collobert, Norma Cole, Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, Liz Willis, Lorine Neidecker, CD Wright, Alice Notley, Joan Retallack, Craig Watson, Jean Daive, the first painting I remember contemplating is Picasso’s Blue Nude, Calder, da Vinci’s notebooks, El Lissitsky, Claude Cahoun, William James…astronomy, physics, other scientific texts, studies of birds, color theory, quirky museums—like the whaling museum in New Bedford, Buddhism, psychology…the ‘natural’ world…etc.
3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
The first time I made a connection between the writing I was doing for myself and the outside world was in high school—I had a wonderful English teacher my sophomore year…he was also the football coach, Cappy (short for Capidalupo). I wrote entirely confessional poetry, mostly about my father, and was very depressed, and Cappy just kept encouraging me. It wasn’t until my second year in college, though, that I understood that a poet was something that I could be in the real world. When I transferred from UC Santa Cruz to Mills (the Bay Area was very important in this regard) was, I think, when I decided that that was what I would commit myself to.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
Of course—perhaps the question should be ‘in what way…’—after high school I was set on getting out of the northeast—it was a very reactionary decision. I chose University of California at Santa Cruz. Though I ultimately transferred because I decided on writing but felt at sea as a writer there (I hadn’t connected with Nate Mackey and just missed Peter Gizzi), it was the best decision I ever made. It was very difficult to leave Santa Cruz, but I heard Mills College had a good writing program and it was small. I went there very specifically for writing—I spent little time on campus and I never really meshed with the other students, except for Emily Grossman, who was my writing co-conspirator. My first semester there I had a class with Liz Willis. Stephen Ratcliffe was my advisor, Leslie Scalapino was a visiting professor, and for a while I worked as her assistant at O Books. This was the heart of my college experience. I may have eventually gotten to where I am now without having made the switch to Mills, but it was an open door to the Bay Area writing world. I was meeting all these amazing writers and going to readings all the time.
5) What is your favorite food?
Anything Italian…tomatoes, basil, cheese, red wine…so simple. But I’ve recently developed a fondness for Norwegian—everything on a slice of bread—it’s all cured meats, weird fish concoctions and cheese.
6) Sports Team?
Boston Red Sox.
6.1) Is it possible for the Cubs to play the Red Sox in the World Series without the universe imploding?
No. It would have to be the end of baseball. For now, I’ll just try to figure out what life means now that the Red Sox have won the World Series. It’s very confusing.
7) Vacation Spot?
Anywhere but the U.S. However, the place I’ve gone most regularly is a family place on Lake Michigan, northern tip of the lower peninsula, and the quality of light, the air, the water…it’s so expansive and quiet.
8) Curse Word?
I like some of the harsher ones related to women: cunt, whore…But then, there’s always Asshead. That’s a good one.
9) Guilty pleasure?
People Magazine—it’s one of the reasons why I like waiting rooms.
10) For decades, it has appeared that the bulk of contemporary literature in America exists and is created in two places: the East Coast (primarily New York) and the West Coast (primarily San Francisco). Yet with your press, Litmus, you seem to have single-handedly become the patron saint of the Midwest, a key instigator of the Great Plain Renaissance. Per the parlance of our times, are your coastal colleagues "hating" on you?
Thankfully, no one has told me so (at the risk of eliciting a deluge of hate email). Patron Saint? Instigator? I don’t know about that. For one thing, it was all already happening. I happened to have a few ‘ins’. And there is so much that goes on in New York and San Francisco, it would be too easy to limit oneself to looking in those places for new work, and how our poetic culture would suffer—collapse in on itself really—if writers in those cities neglected to pick their heads up and look around. And honestly, my sense is that people crave something outside of those frames of reference. The wonderful thing about editing Aufgabe is that I can present an array of writers from across the country—I get to disregard any regional boundaries, and then focus in where I’m inclined to do so. I think the Great Plains Renaissance is very exciting, and I have been feeding off the energy there. And certainly, being such a young press, Litmus still has the luxury of defining itself amid the fray of presses.
11) Your periodical, Aufgabe, is a space for contemporary American writing to converge with foreign work in translation. And inviting the contributors to write essays, reviews, and gene-splice in other areas is both extremely unique and a productive way to encourage poets to get off their, ahem, asses. How did this project begin?
I met Peter Neufeld in 1997 or so, when I lived in San Francisco. He was working on Melodeon Poetry Systems with Eric Frost, so we started talking about journals and what kind of journal project might possibly contribute something ‘necessary’ to the current playing field. Peter came up with “Aufgabe” as the title for our new venture—he had been reading Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers)—I was taken with Benjamin’s statement that the translator should allow her language to be “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” From the very beginning we wanted to use guest editors (Issue #1 has two guest edited sections) as a way to keep the project energized, to allow other editors to shape the journal in different ways each time—and we thought we would invite a translator and a small press editor for each issue. After the first issue, for logistical reasons, I became the sole editor. I decided to only work with one guest editor, in the interest of space, and that each guest editor would be a translator able to present new, exciting, and often unknown (in this country, at least) work from another country. The “Feature” section of each issue has been incredibly exciting for me as both an editor and a writer, and I think it has contributed to my focus on keeping the “Main” section as unlimited as possible as well.
11.1) Many journals have a difficult time circulating for more than five issues, but if they do the tendency is to be around for many years to come -- what's on the horizon for Aufgabe?
I recently said (to myself) that I would do 10 issues. Some days that feels like a lot, especially in the midst of production. Some days I feel that I never want to stop. There is nothing like getting a new issue back from the printer. And so far, as soon as I’ve finished one issue, I’m already working on the next, or at least overwhelmed with the possibilities.
Craft Questions:
1) How do you form a poem?
I usually start with a phrase, or a couple words that have been rolling around in my head. Once I’ve written a page or so, I tend to focus on the form. Recently, I have begun to feel that I rely too heavily on serial devices—that I’m afraid of letting a poem stand alone. Having just finished two manuscripts, I’m thinking of where to start with something new, and I keep thinking I might just write some discrete poems. But I like the feeling of ellipsis when I finish a poem—that it is finished, but I could also write another poem, and together they do something more. I think that sense of proliferation is very important to me, and process—that poems develop around ideas, that they learn from themselves and then move forward, that they are modes of synthesis.
2) Do you use collage, parataxis, cut ups or other tools?
Easy answer: yes. Those kinds of tools are useful for me for dislodging my thinking, breaking habits, jumping tracks, etc.
3) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
I write at home. I wish I were more flexible, but I am very rarely able to write anything somewhere else—notes and revisions I can do anywhere, but not new work. Ambiance…I like days and times of day that seem somehow suspended—afternoons, heavy downpours, snow, but any stretch of a few hours will do. Rituals and habits…I drink a lot of tea, and sometimes I lay on the floor for a while before starting. I need a way to get out of routine or the ‘task’ mindset.
4) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
Yes, everything, or most things I read or look at or listen to are sources. Sometimes more explicitly than others. I can hit a wall if I’m too close to a source—especially a theoretical text. I need time after reading for the language of whatever I’m reading to adjust, to reform in my own mind/language. I don’t like the feeling of regurgitation, unless it’s my own writing. So, it shifts.
5) One of the most often used terms to positively describe a given poetry is to call it "musical." But in your book *music or forgetting* (and the work I have read since then), it seems that, simply put, you ARE writing music. How do you view poetry's relationship to music(s)?
Inextricable.
I think I have always employed music—in different capacities—to read and to write poetry—and would like to dive even further into that relationship. In Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, he says, “all music…establishes a particular relationship, a sort of counterpoint between the passing of time, the music’s own duration, and the material and technical means through which the music is made manifest” and I immediately translate this to poetry—or there is Satie in A Mammal’s Notebook, “Which do you prefer: Music or Ham?”
My grandfather, Richard Winslow, has always set poems to music, including Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights (performed at Wesleyan in 1967), and I’ve always been curious about the process by which he does that—I know he hears poems differently than I do, so that process of transcription/translation is very interesting to me. It functions very differently when you go the other way around (and I am not writing poetry to accompany music)—so there is plenty to explore.