ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

John Beer

General Questions

 

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

After nine years of military brat knocking around, I was settled in Auburn, NY, my parents’ hometown.  When I was in high school, the city council put up a sign coming into town:  “Home of the First Electric Chair.”  They eventually took it down.  You’re guaranteed to hear Stevie Ray Vaughan in any bar you enter.  I love the place without reservation.  I wrote stories, and cofounded an underground humor magazine (with Dan Adams and Steve Fennessy), but no poetry.  Though in high school I read “The Waste Land” and “Howl,” and they felt important, if less important than “Naked Lunch.”

 

2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

Stevens and Ashbery have been central for a long time, and in the last few years Jack Spicer has been a major presence.  Other people I read with great admiration:  Marianne Moore, Jay Wright, Yannis Ritsos, Fernando Pessoa, Laura (Riding) Jackson, the long poems of Evan S. Connell, Edward Lear, Chelsey Minnis.  Other artists:  John Cage, Bob Dylan, Andy Kaufman.  The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Peter Greenaway, and Orson Welles.  Muhammed Ali.

 

3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of youreveryday life?

I don’t think I’ve become a poet yet.  Milestones on my particular journey:  seeing Michael Snow’s film “The Central Region” in college (one of six to stay the whole three hours), reading the Cantos and the Maximus Poems in my parents’ spare room at 23, Greece (which is where the distinction between something called poetry and something called everyday life began to get seriously blurry), and the last few years in Chicago, more interesting and vital as a community every day.
 

4) Where were you educated? Was this important?

See below, but here I’ll shout out for Barbara Buxbaum, who in her purple sneakers taught me how to put sentences together, and Paul Ferrari, who took my high school English class to see the poet Antler.
 

5) You are ivy league and Iowa educated and now you live in Chicago how have these locales effected your work?

The most significant locale for me remains upstate New York, at least in terms of climate/landscape.  Bear in mind that it snowed literally almost every day of the winter, pretty much guaranteed to produce either psychosis or interiority, to the extent those can be distinguished.  Princeton, NJ is swampy, not just physically so, but it gave me an excellent intellectual foundation from which to flee.  & its libraries had enormous personality, my favorites being the Quentin Crispian Near Eastern studies (all mahogany and leather) and the austere math/physics.  Princeton also provided an solid lesson in the emptiness of wealth and power in themselves (though they can be put to interesting, as well as horrific, ends).  Iowa was the first place since Auburn to feel like home, and introduced me to a fascinating group of contemporaries and friends:  I’d start listing them, but I’m sure I’d leave someone important out.  At Iowa, like at Princeton, I was also left alone enough to get educated.   I can’t begin to say how much I like Chicago, a city I ended up in somewhat accidentally.  It’s a bargain to live in,  & as more people realize this, and realize the scene that’s coming together here, more and more exciting work is going to come out of Chicago.  Now that we’ve got great magazines and reading series, though, we need more small presses!

5.1) What do you hope to do with the Danny's Series and the Bridge Magazine going forward?

Re:  Danny’s, Joel Craig and Greg Purcell have set up, & Joel & I maintained, what seems like a winning pattern, so my main feeling is, I’d like to continue with as much success as we’ve enjoyed so far.  I think we’ve managed to strike a solid balance between emerging writers and marquee names, and between locals and out-of-towners, so I hope those dimensions remain well-proportioned.  I expect we will continue to do special programs in December, along the lines of last year’s visual arts night.  I do have a wish list of who I’d like to see read, but I’ll keep that mostly under wraps.  I will say that I’ve been reading Eric Baus’s “The To Sound” with great pleasure lately.

As for Bridge, the big project is moving to our new bimonthly schedule this summer.  We will begin publishing reviews of poetry books.  Also, we’ll feature a few upcoming events each issue, so if people have ideas, shoot them to me at jbeer@bridgemagazine.org.  I’d also like to publish more poets’ prose:  three ideas I’m toying with are portfolios of poetry chosen by artists in other disciplines (and vice versa), semi-regular letters by poets surveying the contemporary scene, and appreciations of poetic influences (especially pre-1900 and non-English influences).

6) You worked with Robert Lax for a time what was that like?

Just as background, Bob Lax (1915-2000) was a poet, screenwriter, New Yorker editorial assistant, circus clown, boxing and tennis instructor, and mendicant contemplative.  His work is not available enough, but collections include Grove’s Love Had a Compass and Overlook Press’s A Thing that Is.  Bob strikes me as a poet who, in fifty years, could well be recognized as a major, underappreciated artist:  his work has scale, ambition, formal innovation, deep spirituality, humor, and absolute assurance.  He was close friends with Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt for over thirty years.  He spent the last thirty-five years of his life living on Greek islands, including Patmos, which is where I worked for him from 1996 to 1998.

Bob advised me once that the most important thing for a young writer to learn is a taste for sardines.  He was a tremendous model as a writer and as a person.  Kindness is the most important thing.  Listen to what you’re trying to tell yourself.  The way to write is to write.  If people want to give you advice, let them.  Feed stray cats.  Whatever you’re practicing doing is what you’re going to get good at (this is a variation on Ted Berrigan’s “Whatever is going to happen is already happening.”)

A typical day with Bob Lax:  come up for lunch after walking around, swimming, writing.  Lunch is fish soup from his neighbor.  Go through the correspondence—a writer from India is working on an article about Thomas Merton and wants to know, “What is Grand Central Station?”  During the afternoon, I work on current projects—editing collections, or typing up manuscripts, or putting together performance pieces (one’s going to be presented at Discrete Series in August).  Bob writes, and listens to the BBC, and looks out at the ocean, and walks into town for fish to feed the cats.  Dinner’s pasta from the grocer’s wife, and rice pudding.  Maybe Gary, an American who’s lived on the island as long as Bob, joins us, or Ulf the Austrian painter.  After dinner, Gary starts an argument about the Tao. 

7) What is your favorite food?

Fish soup.  No, but I do like seafood a lot:  calamari, tilapia, scallops.
 

8) Sports Team?

The Washington Senators.

 

9) Vacation Spot?

The most beautiful place I know is Bodrum, which used to be Halicarnassos, on the Turkish coast.  These days, I like Wicker Park, the actual park.  & I used to be fond of New Orleans, until I got pickpocketed.

 

10) Curse Word?

Criminy.

 

Craft Questions

 

1) How do you form a poem?

I wish I knew.  It’s usually a matter of working on it until my fear of ruining what I’ve got outweighs my sense of the poem’s inadequacies.  & then, if there are places that I cringe at when I reread it, I go back & work on them some more.  I do occasionally work with received forms:  sonnets (I spent a year writing rhyming, iambic pentameter sonnets, & now I’m writing unrhymed free verse ones), list poems, pantoums, sestinas. 

2) Do you always use Images from pop culture, music and other outside stimuli?

I do frequently have pop culture references, not for any programmatic reason, but because that’s a big part of my own mental world.  But lots of my poems are free of them.  I guess I do think pop culture provides a kind of measure of aspiration, as in, I want my poems to be as exciting and mysterious and fun and sexy as the Pixies, because if they’re not, then why not just listen to “Surfer Rosa”?

I also like mashing up high and low—for instance, this current project, the Sonnets to Morpheus, is drawing on both Rilke and “The Matrix.”  Again, not because I’m committed to the erasure of the high/low distinction as a liberatory project—I don’t really think it is one.  It’s more a matter of indexing how living at this particular moment feels, at least to me in my peculiarly positioned subjectivity & skin.

3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

This is tricky, because a lot hinges on what the organic or the synthetic means, and not just in the “what the meaning of “is” is” sense.  Which is to say, I tilt decidedly for indoors over outdoors.  Victor Shklovsky kicks Robert Bly’s ass.  I value inordinately the kind of self-consciousness which signals the madeness of the poem, the human activity involved, which seems to put me on the synthetic pole.

On the other hand, what I object to in organicism, if I’m understanding this term right, & it means people who natter on about “finding a form,” is its windy bad faith.  To the extent that organic poetic form is conceived of as oppositional to a constructive or possibly aleatory poetics (& I’d include within this extent not just wooly-headed workshoppists and the shallower reaches of the “deep image,” but even Black Mountaineers for whose poetry I have the utmost regard, even I take their poetics with salt), I think it’s ultimately going to be mystificatory, renaming as natural what’s simply riding below the radar of conscious self-detection, as the familiar analyses reveal.  BUT I also believe whole-heartedly in the fact of OUTSIDE, that artistic practices do put us in touch with something (gestured at by phrases like the world-ness of the world) the characteristics (or non-characteristics) of which are simply not reducible to the deliverances of human activity, conceptual or otherwise.  To put it in Eckhartian terms, it’s by working with the construct of God (the named God), and in part by coming to see how the constructedness of God functions, that one can break through to the Unnameable whose relation to the Named can be called grounding because “grounding” is amorphous enough.  But of course that breakthrough cannot be willed, or predicted on the basis of any knowable regularity. 

So I guess the short answer here is that I’m on the surface very much a synthetic poet, but in the deep service of a freaked-out conception of the organic.
 

4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habitswhen you write?

I almost invariably write at my desk, in a notebook, by hand.  I flip back and forth on thinking whether legal pads count as proper notebooks, and I suppose in the furthest reaches of my mind I still hold out hopes of coming across the Notebook and the Pen which will render all future composition effortless.  I destroy all my drafts (cf. organicism). 

Invariably, I think, my best writing is done at night, after 8 PM or so.  I try very hard to get a draft I’m pretty happy with at one sitting, even if I’ll then go back later and change things around (this applies to shorter poems, up to two or three pages.  When I’m working on a longer project, though, it’s usually built up out of shorter sections with this same characteristic.)  If it doesn’t come together in the first sitting, I can almost never make it work later on, though maybe a few phrases will make their way into something else.

As for habits, see the next entry.

5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?

I find lately that I at least start out with source material—for the past couple of years, I’ve been signaling to myself that I’m working on a poem by stacking up a big bunch of books and flipping through them to find something that sets me off (this may have something to do with my doing heavy-duty scholarship recently).  The provenance of language is not particularly important to me, though, and if I do start out with source material, it frequently winds up pretty heavily transformed—the metrical and sonic properties of the language in my poems is vastly more important than any surface sense.

I do like to write down bizarre overheard phrases, take notes on things I see in the newspaper, etc.  But this stuff almost never actually goes into poems.  Last night, for instance, I was at the Regenstein Library and they were giving away old books from the collection.  So I picked up a huge stack of pamphlets about juvenile delinquency, thinking that I’d collage them together into some kind of poetic project.  But they’ll just as likely stay stacked up in a corner of my apartment.  On the other hand, a couple years ago, I checked out a ton of books on psychological testing, and that material ended up forming the spine of a poem called “The Daughters of Minyas,” which I’m pretty happy with.