ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Patrick Durgin
General Questions
1) Where were you born and what was your formation?
I was born January 9, 1971, in Midway Hospital, directly between the “Twin Cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. I left the Twin Cities in 1996 and have since lived in Iowa, New York, California, and Michigan. I come from modest, Irish-German-Austrian, blue collar stock. At 13, I found a ten cent paperback—William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—which changed my life. It was never expected that I be a reader, so it was really a transgression to hide away with the Beats and soon after the Transcendentalists. Their influence wouldn’t last long, but I remember Burroughs’ novel was itself transgressive enough to become an occasion to learn to read. In fact, reading and writing have always been fundamentally strange for me, which I attribute, to some degree, to my ne’er do well childhood. Something had to make reading cool, and that was it for me. But it was post-punk music that held my attention. I was a musician and songwriter for several years. People like The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, later John Cage, Kraftwerk, Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, pre-war blues, Thelonious Monk, etc. continue to be formative. When I turned to writing in a serious way, authors and critics like Adalaide Morris, Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, Gertrude Stein, Nate Mackey, Clark Coolidge, Amiri Baraka, Eileen Myles, James Schuyler, Ron Silliman, Jackson Mac Low, and Hannah Weiner were central in finding a form and process. I found them in my public library. Contemporaries who have been especially important include Jen Hofer, Jesse Seldess, Sawako Nakayasu, Laura Moriarty, K. Silem Mohammad, Juliana Spahr, Rod Smith, Andrew Levy, Brent Cunningham, Mark Nowak, and Pam Lu (some of them are probably unaware of how important their work has been for me). I studied literature and philosophy / “critical theory” at University of Iowa and SUNY-Buffalo. Academia is probably my best bet for a paycheck (and I do love teaching, which is too rarely a priority in “the profession”), but I will always feel like something of an interloper. When I was a musician, my day job was in building operations and security at a major contemporary arts center. I met Ben Vautier and Kara Walker guarding galleries on the night shift. I was then and am today a professional interloper: in it, but not of it.
2) What are your poetic influences?
Probably the single most influential moment for me as a writer was recognizing that poetry and poetics rely, for their relevance, on grassroots publishing communities. (I think most people believe that poetry’s relevance stems from its privileged access to eternal verities; but, I don’t believe in the “privilege” or the “eternal” in that notion.) Taking “publication” to encompass anything that makes the work public, I came to see the tradition of USAmerican radical modernism as a kind of circuitry that, by definition, fused form and function. To that end, I started the little magazine Kenning in 1998. Anyone and everyone with whom I came in contact through the alternative publishing scenes Kenning tapped me into has fed into my writing process. I don’t see writing as self-edifying or therapeutic, nor as a means of producing petty commodities (i.e., objects of beauty to accouter the contemplative life). My poetic influences are less figures from the past and more present circumstances, instigating and participating in building ways to be together more ethically, that is meaningfully.
3) When did you realize you were a poet?
I realize this when I write poems, and I hope to keep doing so. It’s been thankfully rare that I’ve had to identify myself as such professionally. I usually shy away from situations in which I’d be introduced as a poet since it’s either in place of another “career field” or it connotes a kind of self-aggrandizement that I find damaging. The degree to which the bourgeois lyric tradition has confused the meaning of the terms poet, poem, and poetry cannot be underestimated. I want no part of the phony populism of the laureates, nor the dodgy mysticism of the M.F.A. industry. So, “poet” is always a provisional tag for me. I forget a lot, but I likely did not first hold this view. I do remember being persuaded by colleagues in my music days that my songs had exceptional lyrical content. So, ironically, “lyricist” was probably the right term at first. I continue to make music, as “Da Crouton” (www.da-crouton.com). And the music I make now is self-consciously instrumental. But maybe it’s interviews like this that really allow me to imagine myself as a poet outside of the act of writing poems. The only other such interview I’ve done was for Time Out Chicago, who printed my photograph on the occasion of my Discrete Event Series reading in 2005. How many Chicago poets get their mug in that rag?
Their piece was an attempt to sell the show, and I was a bit baffled by the assumption that I, an out-of-towner, should be lent the authority to speak to their single line of questioning: “What makes Discrete Series unique?” I admire that TOC was, at least then (I haven’t seen it much since), eager to look outside institutionally sanctioned venues. And part of the beauty of a series like that is its ability to bring the local community into conversation with outsiders. And the article itself smartly focused on Jesse and Kerri. But, anyway, the interview itself left me a bit baffled as to the role a poet plays in our cultural ethos. “Poet” means “maker,” not entertainer. But what does that practical basis for the epithet generate by way of cultural capital? It’s funny that often those who fight to claim the title most fiercely do so in the name of cultural capital rather than poems, per se. I’m thinking here of the Dana Gioa, Ted Kooser crowd.
4) What type of class has proven most useful for your development as a poet / writer?
Working class. As for academic work, I formulated quite a few independent studies, and each usually centered on a single author. Reading Oppen with Hejinian, Hejinian with Morris, and Mac Low with Creeley: these were some highlights. I also conducted three or four years of correspondence with Mac Low, and I learned a great deal from him.
5) Favorite team or sport?
I never miss Olympic gymnastics and figure skating, a fact my wife finds pretty comical.
6) Food?
Jamaican, especially callalloo and saltfish. Try Jake’s in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth Parish.
7) Vacation spot?
See above.
8) Swear word?
Did you see the vice presidential press conference from 2005 in which a voice rises above the drone to say (two or three times) “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney”?
9) Are you working on a book?
I’ve finished and then demolished three full-length manuscripts of poetry. The only title to survive was lent to a chapbook, Sorter. My current project is a series of “Imitation Poems,” also known as “Litmus Redact.” It’s an ongoing attempt to formalize encounters with language figured as imitations of authors (rather than the reverse). It began by thinking through bodies of work with a significant blank period (Oppen or Rakosi, both of whom stopped writing for many years early in their lives, but after having produced work that was serious and fluidly related to their later works). In other words, the point is to respond in figures to figures—not personalities or “literary figures” but language units or linguistic figures. But it developed later to consider poets’ theater (Platonic imitation, Artaud, Carla Harryman, etc.) and especially Robert Duncan’s “Stein Imitations” (a little-known chapbook of his, about which I’ve written an essay on poetic historiography). The first of the series of imitation poems was published as a broadside by Cuneiform Press, “After Rakosi.” Most others haven’t really been seen much. Although, I did read one, “Facial Expression,” on the audio weblog Weird Deer. I also read from the series, including excerpts from source texts, when I opened the Minneapolis show for Damon and Naomi on their last U.S. tour. That audience seemed to pick up on the joke that all poems are not quite “poems” in the sense of autonomous creations—they’re just short of being poems. I always said I wanted a poetry reading that moved me like The Stooges’ “Death Trip,” but this wasn’t it. Nonetheless, it was copiously different from, say, reading at Beyond Baroque. I’m learning that fashioning a self in language is really a kind of death trip, and that’s a dramatic situation to exploit (as does Iggy Pop in the Stooges’ recording, not that I do much shouting). Laura Moriarty’s book Self-Destruction deals with a similar scenario. Right now I’m trying to figure out how the initial set of concerns under the rubric of “imitation” fits in with Laura’s idea of A Tonalist poetics. For me, it’s now hovering around the search for viable alternatives to USAmerican exceptionalism. Who knows where or when it will end? And given the amount of material I’ve fed into the mix from previous manuscripts, the book will be at least ten years in the making.
10) Tell me about your collaboration with Jen Hofer?
Jen and I have been collaborating on a project for eight years. Based on these collaborations, Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz commissioned a book for their Atelos series. We met to work on forming the book this summer in Chicago, and we expect to finalize the manuscript very soon. The four days and five nights we spent working in Chicago were fascinating—we fell into a routine right away and worked constantly (maybe twelve hours a day). The project centers around a trope, “synaesthesia,” which, among other things, describes a potential social ethic, modeled on a poetics. The dissolution of the singular writing “voice” is key to a synaesthetic poetics, and we have written numerous poems together which aim at this sort of dissolution. The book will also contain a healthy slab of our correspondence, as well as open letters to friends, authors, and artists whose work taps into this strain in one way or another. In the end, I’ve come to see that the book is really about friendship.
Craft Questions
1) How do you write a poem?
At this point, my poetry is always written as part of a project whose parameters are at least partially fixed. So I’ll typically find, in the course of working on a poem, tactics or constraints which seem hypothetical to the concerns of the project. In this sense, my process is “experimental” (whether or not readers would label the results as such). Revision has become something else for me. Although I do deliberately employ estranging devices for effect, they are always motivated. In a procedural mode, the motivation is to disown the language. Revision is, at best, an encounter with language that seems to come from elsewhere. I try never to revise my sentiments. And hopefully what I write never becomes sentimental. Listening is crucial. Somehow the tonic registers remove the selfish instincts and let me do the work.
2) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
I know others on your site have grappled with what, exactly, the terms “synthetic” and “organic” imply here. I’m more interested in the assumption that poetry is a “process.” It makes me want to insist on the processural nature of reading (as opposed to writing, which is at least as variously processural). But, anyway, when I write I don’t consider what I’m doing organic in the way that I’d consider certain physical processes organic. That is, I don’t make any arbitrary distinctions between procedure (which is by definition premeditated and forced, thus synthetic) and process. As with biological processes of mutation and elasticity, process is always definitive, while procedures simply get you there without characterizing that temporary destination of “meaning.” This is something I learned from my long engagement with Mac Low, both the man and his work. A major misconception about his work is that his notations for reading and performance mirror the constraints of his compositional procedures, making the works vaguely fascistic in the demands they make on the reader—and these demands are stringent and uniform. But every self-situating, wandering thought process is always-already cued. I just try to be as conscious of how I’m being cued when I write as I am when I read. It’s a matter of being responsible for your prosody.
3) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?
I don’t need any special circumstance to write, although I wouldn’t characterize my process as extemporaneous. For years, I would jot down notes on scraps of paper and bring them home at the end of the day, staying up (often very late) to work these fragments into some kind of structure. I would have said the ambience I created in my home was important for achieving this structural unity, if that unity were itself unified as such. Again, the project is already in place, even if that’s not always evident to me in the course of my day. I like writing on trains. When travelling, my work “works” a little better than in the controlled atmosphere of my home office. Writing is often a way of placing myself meaningfully within my culture and the ever-shifting world around me (even the idea of “the world” being “around” me doesn’t capture it—I’m always existing as a part of that world and writing becomes a part of it). So if the ambience is “wrong,” so much the better. This permits my project to address that and grow to include it. But in the end what matters is the degree to which the world sees fit to include the project. The work I most admire suggests more practical uses than any author could possibly foresee. So, it will at least seem to be constructed anywhere it could be usefully consumed.
