ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Mark Tardi
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, about a mile away from Midway Airport and a block away from some freight train tracks. The neighborhood consisted mostly of policemen, firemen, city workers, and Polish immigrants.
Neither poetry nor writing were in the fold growing up, though I read constantly. For years I had this habit of not allowing myself to go to sleep until I had read 50 pages of a book. But most of my interests were in sports (baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis), drawing, watching Woody Woodpecker (who introduced me to Chopin), and dancing to Neil Diamond and Lionel Ritchie whenever they came on the now defunct 103.5 WFYR in Chicago (aka “The Fire”).
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
My first influences were probably visual artists. I remember one weekend my parents took me to the Art Institute twice—I kept looking at Cezanne’s Basket of Apples. And I went to the old MCA in Chicago fairly often, where they had a copy of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, which I first saw when I was maybe 12. I’m usually drawn to specific works: Gerhard Richter’s
paintings of toilet paper are amazing. William Blake’s painting of Newton. The room of Sean Scully’s paintings at the Fort Worth Modern levels me.
As far as other influences, all sorts of people come to mind: Viktor Shklovsky, Witold Gombrowicz, Michael Palmer, Emily Dickinson, Euclid, the Beatles, Paul Celan, Susan Howe, Kafka, Thalia Field, Mayakovsky, Edmond Jabes, Italo Calvino, Arvo Part, Blake, Georges
Perec, Virginia Woolf, Errol Flynn, Nathaniel Mackey, Wallace Stevens, Anne-Marie Albiach, Stefan Themerson, G.H. Hardy, Witkacy, Craig Watson, Jennifer Moxley, and so many more. And it’s all unimaginable without my friends and family.
3) When did you ‘become’ a poet? When did poet become part of your everyday life?
Probably around college. I hadn’t really thought of myself as a poet until one day after class I was talking to Lauri Ramey—truly one of the most brilliant teachers I’ve ever known—about writing, art, various things, and she simply said, “Mark, you’re doing it.”
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
As an undergraduate I went to Benedictine University, a small quasi-liberal arts school outside of Chicago, where I studied English and dove into whatever other arts and humanities classes I could find. I was fortunate enough to study under Jeffrey DeShell, Ashley Cross and John Lowney, who spun me around often and necessarily; and I had a wonderful art professor, William Scarlato, who was extremely generous in discussions ranging from Rembrandt to Jacques-Louis David to Rothko.
For graduate school, I attended Brown University. Was it important? Of course it was. The friends I made, difficulties I encountered, exposure to so many things...it was priceless. It never ceases to amaze me how people can want so badly to attend a particular university, only to pretend as if it doesn’t matter once they graduate from there. Or to even go so far as to hide where they studied out of some kind of guilt. Whenever I read about some Ivy grad/poet opining on how, say, going to Harvard is irrelevant it offends me. What a luxury that going to Harvard is immaterial! Almost any parent in my neighborhood would walk on their hands, blindfolded, in a minefield so their child could have the chance to go to a top college.
5) You are a Chicagoan who was educated at Brown: how do you bridge the gap between the Southwest side and the Ivy League?
I don’t think I ever bridged the gap. Maybe it’s more like I was slapped into it off of Tony Gwynn’s bat or something. I remember once carpooling with students to an art museum in Boston—the cars some of them drove easily cost more than what I’d made in the past two years. I mean, Infiniti SUVs, Audi TTs, at 19 years old?
My time at Brown had its difficulties, sure, but on balance, I feel extremely fortunate. C.D. Wright was immeasurably helpful to me as a writer: perhaps the most honest critic I’ve ever known, and I respect her immensely. Of course Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop are legendary for their generosity and a healthy antidote to petty Poetryland melodramas, and it’s impossible not to be touched by knowing them.
Peter Gizzi once told me that any time two people that know the Waldrops get together, all they can do is talk about how amazing the Waldrops are. Which naturally prompted reminisces immediately.
5.1) You write often about Math and Music: how do these things inform your poetry?
When I was young, math came easily to me, which prompted me to pay little attention to it. As I got older, it just crept back into my life: in college I’d have a craving to work on some trignometry or pick up a biography of a mathematician in the bookstore. I initially tried to just compress all of my mathematical interests or inclinations into Euclid Shudders, which was doomed, and only opened up more questions.
I will, however, contend that poets with interests in innovation and experimentation and post-whatever should spend some quality time with non-Euclidean geometry. Makes Lacan look like milk toast.
As for music, most of us are enveloped with rhythms and sounds. Mine growing up were planes overhead or trains tapping their tracks. There’s a brief moment after a plane has flown by which borders on pristine silence. Those moments sit in my chest somewhere.
6) What is your favorite food?
My family’s kolacky and pierogi. Also, sushi and broiled salmon are delicious. And chocolate is its own food group, a vitamin really.
7) Sports Team?
Chicago Cubs, for all of its pain.
8) Vacation Spot?
Krakow, Poland is a magical place for me.
9) Curse Word?
Fucker
10) Slavic and Polish writing have really affected your work: how do these traditions differ in your opinion from others? What have you chosen to absorb? What have you chosen to discard?
I don’t pretend to be an expert, but Russian and Polish writing has been important to me, yes. A number of Russian writers were quite literally erased from existence. Poland struggled with centuries of invasions and suppressed nationhood, and dozens of Polish artists were exiled, even killed. I suppose what resonates so strongly for me about these literatures is the sense that something is at stake: lives, ideas, access to information. The writing has grit and the intensity bleeds off the page. There are no safety nets.
American poetry, by contrast, is littered with dabblers, people who have a hankering to write some poems, but if it doesn’t work out, no worries. And American writers often seem far too convinced of their own cleverness, are dazzled by their own reflections in the mirror. Which isn’t a stab against ambition, I just feel like too many American writers have a tiny sense of context.
What I don’t care for in, say, Polish literature, is the still persistent exalting of Romanticism. And Poland has this obsession with “greatness”: the greatness of Poland; the greatness of Polish artists or people with Polish heritage. It’s too much. Also, it seems that poets who were politically brave but are bland writers are praised without enough attention being put on the quality of their writing.
11) You seem so intelligent, but did someone drop you on your head as a child and that is how you became a Cubs fan?
Funny. My father, a diehard Sox fan, inexplicably took me to my first Cubs’ game when I was seven and I was hooked. I still remember walking up the tunnel to Wrigley Field and when I saw the diamond I just froze, awestruck.
In point of fact, the National League plays baseball the way it was invented. The strategy and rhythms are subtle. Do you take out a pitcher in the 7th inning if he is throwing a great game but is down by one run? The American League plays Homerun Derby and most American League managers or fans don’t even know what a double-switch is.
As for the Cubs, I do confess unbridled disdain for the various blondes named Bitsy from Northbrook that frequent Wrigley and shout things like “Sammy, get a hit!” The real Cubs’ fans are the ones that know Mark Grace’s career batting average with the bases loaded was a nearly 400.
12) In your book Euclid Shudders you use a lot of white space, a lot of written lines tell me why you do this?
Space and architecture grounds much of Euclid Shudders. I like to ask seemingly simple questions, and see how much pressure can be applied to them. In this case, how do parallels mark us? How do we make them converge? My hope is that visual elements in the book interrogate those questions.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
Usually I begin with a visual image: I can picture how the poem looks on the page before I’m able to fill in the language. With longer sequences the visual images work together to create a larger, three-dimensional “building” or composition of some kind. If I can’t “see” the poem first then the language never seems to work.
2) Do you use collage, parataxis, cut ups or other tools?
Collage and parataxis seem to be part of almost any writing, it just a question of how visibly, right? As for cutups, not really.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
In winter, you can occasionally smell the offerings from the nearby cornstarch factory. And anyone in my neighborhood can tell you that we use the times an airplane is flying overhead as “natural” pauses in our phone conversations. All this is to say, I can’t begin to sort out what’s organic or synthetic.
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
When writing, I prefer privacy, and clam up if I feel like someone is looking over my shoulder. So I tend to write either by myself at my desk or at a cafe with lots of people around, which is like being alone, right? And normally I’ll read things aloud a number of times.
I also like to have some music playing, and it can be anything from Chopin nocturnes to Neil Diamond to Radiohead or the Flaming Lips. A few months ago I wrote a poem about the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos while listening to Neil Diamond.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
Heaps of sources. And while it may be more or less at play in particular poems or sequences, I’d say the majority of language is found, in some sense. I will confess a fondness for making up words and terms that sound like they might have already existed though, are strangely familiar.