ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Gabriel Gudding
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I am writing this in my office at school in Normal Illinois and there are
some caucasian girls outside my door greeting each other by saying “What up
girlfriend?” “What up girl?”
I grew up among Lutherans in a Norwegian-American part of Minnesota. Both sides
of my family emigrated from Norway in the 1860s and have farmed in northwestern
Minnesota since. My mother’s side is from a farm outside a hamlet called Flom
and my biological father’s side is from a slightly larger town twenty miles away
called Ulen. So I grew up in a part of the world where the accordion-n-polka
rhythms of Norwegian were still fused to Minnesota English. My mom’s nickname
for me when we lived in Fargo (I was a boy) was “Sparky,” which I knew
categorically to be the name of a dog. She would lovingly call me Sparky. And I
would answer. I grew up in Fargo-Moorhead, the "Twin Cities of the North":
Fargo, ND and Moorhead, MN.
Poetry and writing were not at all part of my childhood. Books were not really a
part of our household – or at least the kind of book I think you mean: there was
one 4 foot tall bookshelf in the sump-pump-needing basement and in it were
nonfiction books about Eisenhower and stuff or the 1970s equivalent of Danielle
Steele and lots of Readers Digests anthologies. My mom mostly read the bible, my
biological father only had an 8th grade education, but my stepdad,
Julian Gudding, an executive accountant for a regional dairy corporation, was
however (and still is) a genius at the New York Times crossword puzzle. He can
do the Sunday edition in a matter of 20 or 30 minutes. He just gave me Kitty
Kelley’s book about the Bush dynasty. It looks pretty good. Julian is my dad and
has been since I was seven.
Being suburban sprawl, Fargo-Moorhead was like the cartoon of a community.
Contrary to what you might think, it's bland inside a cartoon. The blandness of
my surroundings was of such pervasive quality that Jimmy Carter, upon his
inauguration, looked like a rebel; he was an icon of rationalism and generosity
of spirit in my youth. As such he was a great influence upon my psychology, but
so was Lutheranism. In Mrs. Flag’s 3rd grade class in Edison
Elementary in Moorhead I rhymed “ocean” with “motion.” In 5th grade I
wrote a poem about Christ exploding on the cross and my teacher said I had a way
with words. So I grew up in a 1970s rambler in a North Dakota suburb with no Urb
near it: In circumstances like that, you either counter it or you succumb. I
countered. Anyway we left Fargo-Moorhead when I was 15 and we went briefly to
Iowa and then to Washington state where everything got lots better.
Aside from a poem addressed to and personifying a dinette chair written while
living in my grandmother Lien’s basement in Moorhead at the age of 22 (after
returning briefly to Minnesota from Washington state to live and work in her
diner after dropping out of college), I did not begin writing poetry until I was
29 ½.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other
things that inform your work?
The Russian writer Daniel Kharms. Hans Arp. Lots of stuff. When I was 21 I spent
a night in the King County jail in Seattle for driving without a license (and
for having really dilated pupils because of the LSD I was on but the sheriff
couldn’t prove it). And when I was 22 I saw Henry Rollins and Black Flag play in
a little drop-ceilinged bar in LA. Rollins was naked except for blue shiny
running shorts, and he was sweaty and seemed to have a lot of tendons. Then my
friend Molly Ryan (now Vitorte) and I and Christian Krogstad went to a Circle
Jerks show in Seattle and the fire department closed down the show so everybody
spilled out into the parking lot and rioted, they overturned a police car,
people were throwing bricks. Then Christian shaved my head and we went to see
the Suicidal Tendencies in the Balboa Theater in LA when my parents lived in
Chico and we were almost beaten up for locking elbows in the moshpit. There were
police outside the doors again. I woke up from my Fargo youth and realized there
are people whose job it is to wait and wait and then lock people up when they
get the chance to. Not saying rioting is good. But this realization shocked me
and has never left me: there is a kind of person and a kind of bureaucratic
force whose sole purpose is to suppress fun and joy in the name of safety and
security – and I understand the occasional need for that – but what shocked me
was the realization that this force is constantly creeping outward toward the
more benign features of life and it bleeds into this desire to protect
“decency,” such that everybody’s at some level a potential rioter. The osmotic
pressure of this force is ever constant, and it must be opposed with a
disciplined joy. Daniel Kharms was murdered by Stalin’s state apparatus. That’s
one reason I work in prisons. Sure there are a lot of people in prisons who
murdered and raped. But you can’t do bad unless it’s been done to you first. So
all that Lutheranism rubbed off on me: I believe in the political force of love
and forgiveness. There are three things, said Henry James, of importance: the
first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. I
believe in the efficacy of rebellious joy and kindness in the face of pastors
and police. This is not a wussy belief. “I have reason doubt the sword,” said
Gandhi. Gandhi was not a wussy.
Willard Bascom's _Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface_ (Anchor
Books, 1964). First read this in 1990. This classic book, with utmost patience
and order, via a progression of what must be the clearest paragraphs written by
an oceanographer, describes the formal and formulaic aspects of waves, berms,
sand pit domes, rip channels and other features common to waves and beaches. But
it is the clarity with which complex and seemingly chaotic phenomena are
explained, diagrammed, and ordered that gave me hope that it is possible to
think about my own poetics and to describe and teach something as complex as
poetry. I have read this book several times.
Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica: An Enquiry into Common and Vulgar
Errors_ (Robin Robbins, editor, Oxford UP, 1996). This is an encyclopedia of
commonly held ancient fallacies about the natural and anthropological worlds--
fallacies held and propagated by what Browne calls "shallow pates." The book's
content is mad and Browne's syntax and prose rhythms are at times and by turns
so jarring and delightful, with Robbins keeping Browne's original spelling,
punctuation and capitalization, that the overall texture of the writing, from
content to appearance on the page, is profoundly cacographical and stimulating.
Robert Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. What I have enjoyed about this large
and undisciplined book since I first read it in 1993 is its marriage of
intellectual worlds, worlds that are now separated -- namely the medical,
psychological, historical, the philological and classical. The book helps me
remember literature’s true possibilities, which are to melt, meld, mix and make
new understandings and question old understandings for the purpose of helping us
live better, happier, and more fulfilling lives. The book’s seeming indiscipline
and encyclopedic comprehensiveness are at once an antidote to melancholy and a
reminder of the palliative powers of writing. Too, I love (and I suppose this
really is a simple-minded thing to love) but I love the way the book, a common
feature of books of this time, interlards prose with poetry throughout. It
reminds me that great art, like great medicine, is about mixing often disparate
ingredients.
Flann O'Brien's _At Swim-Two-Birds_ (Dalkey Archive Press). The characters in
this book mutiny against its narrator and author.
3) When did you 'become' a poet when did poetry become part of your everyday
life?
I don’t think anyone can 'become' anything. But I began writing it in a
disciplined way January 19, 1996.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
Undergrad: The Evergreen State College: B.A. Yes, very important. Evergreen
is an experimental school. No grades. We were expected to argue with our
teachers. So going from Evergreen to grad school at Purdue University, where I
got an MA in American Studies, was like stepping into the 1950s or at least back
to elementary school: Indiana IS the 1950s, first, and the teachers there were
really really unadventurous and conservative. I went to such an unusual
undergraduate institution and then to this almost McCarthyistic English
Department where I was told by Wendy Flory, a professor there, that “Grad
students don’t publish.” So I left there and wanted out of the 1950s midwest and
applied to east coast schools and went to Cornell University to get an MFA.
(Illinois, where I now am, is not part of the midwest but a part of Canada). I
was admitted to other places with full stipends (like UMass Amherst) but I had a
daughter and liked the fact that Cornell gave us 2 extra years of good pay to
teach creative writing and composition while we looked for a job. Cornell gave a
great community. I met Karl Parker there. Karl’s work you see around some. He’s
a brilliant writer. CU was primarily important insofar as it gave me some
interesting and smart writers in my cohort to write against. I never had any
famous teachers. But I studied with Reginald Shepherd, and I love him but I
think he hates me now.
5) Some of your writing has graphic sexual/physical acts within it where is
the line between shock value and art in poetry?
I don’t know. When someone figures it out they should tell someone who might
find the information useful.
6) What is your favorite food?
Grapefruit and coffee.
7) Favorite Sports Team?
Professional sports are an abomination of the idea of play. All games should be
pick-up games.
8) Favorite Vacation Spot?
I drive to Providence, Rhode Island to see my daughter Clio a lot. I don’t have
the money to vacation.
9) Curse Word?
I oppose the curse word. The idea of packaging a curse into one word is evidence
of the modern disintegration of the sacred. When curses once again become things
fitted to the person, the moment, and the situation, we’ll know that the sacred
has returned to our communities. I think there is a connection between the
advent of the curse word and petroleum-based cultures.
10) What is your opinion of Avant-garde American writing in comparison to
other avant gardes from other places in the world? Does the Avant Garde exist?
This sounds like a really fancy question. Maybe you better ask Ron Silliman
this. He could probably write you a book about this by tomorrow morning.
I don’t know much about avant-garde writing from other parts of the world. I
mean, I’ve read a lot of translations from the French and Russian and Spanish
and German and Polish, but I really don’t know, even after reading up on stuff
like the history of surrealism or Russian absurdism or having writer friends
from Poland, enough about other writing cultures to answer the first question.
Does the avant-garde exist? Yeah I bet it does. I bet it’s called the comic
novel.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a
poem?
It’s different every time. I write a lot in notebooks. I have 24 or so now
Avery Dennison 97-page quadruled lab books that I’ve used in 1996. I also am
writing a book in my car as I drive between Normal Illinois and Providence Rhode
Island. Because I can’t think of anything else to call it I call it rhode island
notebook. I put a large-format notebook on the passenger seat of my Toyota Echo
and I drive at 70 mph writing down whatever I’m thinking and seeing and hearing.
2) Do you use collage, parataxis cut ups or other tools?
I misread my handwriting a lot.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
I don’t get this question. I really wonder what you mean by this.
4) Where do you write? Is ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits
when you write?
Warm bed. Must be lying down. The bed shouldn’t be too cool. If the bed cools
down, it gets tough to concentrate.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your
work fall? Do you use many sources?
It’s sort of mostly all found. I’ve tried to “create” language and always end up
feeling icky. I wrote an essay on the history of the notion of "finding"
language versus creating it, by the way, which is coming out in the New Review
of Literature.
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