Mutual Interview with Marianne Shaneen, Part II

[[Note: We did not have time to actually deliver this exchange at the Zinc Bar. Marianne is in bold below, Nada in plain text. Marianne please post your stuff on your blog…!]]

Q: you emphasize poetry as a form of bodily excrescence, bodily discharge- the role of ‘the body’, your body, etc.- (relates of course to the above ‘hermaphroditism’ and ‘feminine’)- the body as erotic, the source of pleasure and discomfort, your body as site of perception/sensation, conceptualizing and linguistic filtering and creation, the relationship between sexuality and language.

Q: talk about ‘irritation as a form of pleasure’ (i’m probably misquoting you here) and to what extent and how that is one of the hubs of your work- the role of discomfort, disturbance, agitation, fury, kicking the podium, risk, contraryness, defiance, rule-breaking

(this is related to your ways of being and not being ‘procedural’ and ‘formal’, the langpo ‘tradition’, etc- but that’s only one aspect of what I’m talking about)

and /or…to what extent is poetry, or what fuels and generates your writing, reactive, a defiance. and, how within the writing process itself, it is a defiance, podium-kicking, in the sense of what you’ve said:

“Writing demands limits (do you know who am paraphrasing?) but that doesn’t mean that I don’t always perceive them as something to push against, needle, expand, stand up on (if they are walls), dismantle, prod, kick at, or huddle up against, sobbing inconsolably. What’s interesting to me about poetic language is the way it naturally fights, insofar as it gets irrational, its own limits.”

To address “body” and “sexuality” and writing, I’m going to read from an interview Tom Beckett did with me that was just published online in Jacket 24. That interview answers the question about limits more fully than I have here.

I have said in other contexts that the definite article preceding “body” [the body] strikes me as quite Cartesianly distancing and non-particularizing. It seems to me more accurate to say “my body” as in my individual Nada-casing, Nada-matter & Nada-sensorium or to simply say “body” as in “the feeling of body-ness.” Maybe what you mean is “sensation” or even… “sensationalism”? Because that’s what a body is in relation to what is not that body — a means of sensing, a great fleshy antenna, a corporeal mind. In carnation — a big red one, smelling slightly cloyingly of cinnamon. The seas incarnadine — of wasted bodies, punctured by ideology. How could body not be present in anyone’s work? Even an ectomorph has a body — and is defined, in some sense, by his body. There are some writers, it is true, who seem to be cut off at the neck, whose oeuvre hatches mainly from the part of their body that is between the temples — is “the” body a temple? — but that nevertheless is body.

Body in relation to writing. Writing in relation to body. Not such a huge difference to me — organic metaphors, poems as “birth canals, negative vaginal space” or as what is born, coming out coated with meconium — (can you detect my fondness for a certain brand of highly gynecological “chick art” — still totally necessary to combat the centuries’ vestiges of men’s supercilious suppression, condemnation, and envy of women’s “bodiment”?). Bisexual — poem is also phallus springing up out of nowhere very excited, aroused by what’s around. Or let’s get away from the genitals, shall we? Poem is legs, moving around, exploring. Arms & hands, embracing, feeling up, or just working, getting things done. Little navel void hollow, remembrance of connection. That too. Poem is oversensitive nose, limpid eye, tongue for probing and tasting. Poem is labyrinthine ear — duh. Like a body, a body of work — poems — is *in essence* free — of the market system, I mean. Except both of these you have to pay to maintain. Free health care!

87 billion dollars. How to be other than angry? 87 billion. The clenched body in a state of embattledness: clenched energies. Menstrual blood leaks out… shit… urban environment… guy spreading legs too wide on train… touching my leg… ecch… guy talks to himself, bangs umbrella on floor… it’s sweaty… having to coexist among all these other bodies… poets… with their clenchings and muscular memories, all the pain and rage and fear and lasciviousness each of these beings carries at any moment. The body in dreams: dreamed the other night I wanted to have a baby but had to do it covertly, couldn’t ask Gary, so I needed to seek alternative methods — thought to use another poet guy as a donor, someone I’ve been arguing with in “real life”, who recently accused me, not entirely incorrectly, of using him “as a buttress for your own self-identity, as neo-romantic, humanist,”eroticist,” feminist, identifier with “younger writers,” spontaneously creative, whatever suits your fancy because it’s all so terribly inconsistent….” [yeah, well…] then considered a new cloning method that involved implanting whole or partial babies into the uterus… these babies were frozen. I went to get one but it turned out the frozen baby was only a head — someone asked me, after I had tried unsuccessfully to “implant” it, “did you warm it up first?” oh, I thought, and put it in the oven, but left it in too long — the baby head — it came out yellow, dried, with gnarled teeth (teeth?) grotesque as a mummy.

I apologize in advance for the neo-surrealist truism, but indeed, isn’t it true that the more you explore language, bodies, or dreams, the stranger and more complex they become? You begin to realize the connections between language, bodies, and dreams. All or nearly all people dream, and the site of their dreams is their bodies, which twitch in their dreams and even convulse in orgasms because their bodies and dreams and minds are filled with language (and problems), which in their dreams slips around in the murkiest kinds of ways. Only poetry can formally approximate (I say approximate because even though my poems are freaky and filled with wild imagery and combinations they are nowhere near as vivid and disturbing as my dreams) that slippery problematic dream language.

Language is cream.

Language is crisis.

In a poem called “Essay” in Swoon I describe “the gleeful intensity of opening to crisis”. Crisis, in addition to meaning “life-changing difficulty” is one of those weird French euphemisms for “orgasm,” like “petit mort.” When I write, I feel like I am opening to crisis, exactly as I do if I have fallen in love. Suddenly, there’s this whole new territory — terrifying, gleeful, and intense, as the words open out to and attract other words and I find myself somewhere totally unexpected, aiming for a hypnotic state of hilarious abandon.

more from “Essay”… “love is experienced/as among other things/ rubbing”

This is an echo of my poem “Nothing” in Foriegnn Bodie (p. 32), where

I originally said “Irritation is a form of pleasure.”

It’s true of course — think of irritation as simply friction, without which sex as we know it would not exist.

It’s just one step from friction (or conflict, which I say in Swoon is essential to romantic love) to fury. Here’s the whole poem:

Nothing

Nothing is as it was said —

not the man who I was so

beautiful and I said so what

Not the wing just out of the

chrysalis (gold dot), not the plastic

chonmage wig, not even the web

Only love has the fury to make peace

in all the layers of the onion

sprouting in a black palstic box

Cats yowling together make the sun rise

and dogs bark, irritation

is a form of pleasure

Like strong from a yogi’s nose, devotion

doesn’t pour from your ears — or throat —

diamond shapes from a revolving lamp

I’m not really here

except for the glowing red light

under my arm…

Even the quiet little poems I wrote in Japan tend to be furious:

an inky smell

feistiness

feeds on

banging my feet

on mother’s cold stained glass

thinking to break it.

I’m sure the fury is more primal than anything I can address here without having to pay you $85 for 50 minutes, but it comes from feeling

worthless trivial abandoned unappreciated powerless gratuitous unnecessary disposable ineffectual unappreciated unsupported and betrayed, not to mention in pain

on micro and macro levels. Is there anyone in here who can’t empathize with this? be honest. Sometimes I think my entire oeuvre can be summed up in the howl, “IT’S NOT FAIR>>>>” I don’t mean that in any “merely” personal way.

How to cope with those defeatist emotions? Rage is a survival mechanism, screaming infant big noise red in the face with protest: FEED ME. PAY ATTENTION TO ME. Here’s a poem from 1978, the middle of my adolescence (I was fourteen) which I apparently have not outgrown:

KICKS II

I just quit school

I scarred up my arm

Got too drunk

Lost that charm

The other night we trashed some cars

Set a bin on fire

I ripped up my bellbottoms

And sewed them up with wire

I smoked a cigarette today

Got burnt out on speed

So sick of safety pins

What the hell do I need

No solution

No solution

Here’s a concrete poem also from 1978 that attempts a formal diagramming of extreme forces, positive and negative, positing a kind of equivalence. [sorry folks, I misplaced this one — if I find it I’ll put it up here.] Neither of these poems is very interesting to me, but not because of their concerns, which obviously reverberate throughout my work 25 years later, but because I hadn’t yet learned enough chops. An XBXB rhyme scheme fails to thrill. Now I hope I’ve learned how to make my writing seethe with the tension between its artificed plasticity, its repertoire of disguises, and its primal GRRR (if you’ll permit me a momentary McLurid voicing).

A kind of fury and defiance move through my first collection, “Lip” (1988) as in “Don’t give me none of your lip” — but with much more formal (and therefore emotional) complexity

What life the world hath still

Deliberate verandas, swimming feels

Delight to douse the splendor of the heat

And in the umbrage of your sexuality

I sing a tone, in some sense howl it.

Worst, a small passionate self.

Best, a thinking flower who is a virgin

but a favorite of hell

Delicate viands, swimming feet

Delight to rouse the speaker from his seat

And in the umbrella of your eyelashes

A thing or two can, in some sense, be howled.

Firstly, a cold class-in-itself.

Second, an infant voyeur who is a version

of the sadist as well

I’ll read a little from Vicious Etudes (the angriest poem in V. Imp) and then I’ll stop answering this question.

VICIOUS ETUDES

I have an exaggerated sense of my own unimportance.

–Nada Gordon

i HATE the avuncles

and their stinging

when the fiery concrete tower

rises in the head and

i’m appropo of nothing

standing at the edge

of the hissing stage

and missing far apart

from spiritual dignity.

the narcissi in my arms

smell like rotten breath,

nervous sweat, underwire

undercutting the man in me

with cheap, cloying, adolescent

powder. come here, i want

to alienate you. dyssemia

the volatile prosody i auto-eroticize

with (chick art ) in full view of the panel

of droning authorities in their

“moderation”: they (pea-green)

reduce awareness. stand clear

of the closing mind

of the eternally jerking emotional knee.

the hairshirt pink, frilly, jagged,

dissonant as lava flying up

“more sensitively”

from the dead moon

kissing the white wall

leaving a white (red) stain

and howling inarticulate

into “fabulous opera.”

the “sweetie-pie” flaps

in the detritus (of literature)

like a disjointed secretary

on angeldust.

a deafening chorus

of CLUCKING is heard.

MOON, SWANN, ANGELS,

ROSES – pulverized. ultimately

it doesn’t nausea because

i’m not nausea not a mother

self-effulgent of my own

misguided mother of intention.

the writing falls apart (again…)

when the beautiful boy (me)

gazes into the water

and his phallus becomes

all of him, giant stalk

takes root blooms waxy

veins bursting out and then

there’s me! (again) bursting out and then

again bursting out! my head

the WRITING as two horned

phalluses.

come, come, lunge

at my dungheap.

this is the summer of dissonant

content again, when

all education is

“special” and euphoric

(pulverize) natural (pulverize)

(pulverize)

(pulverize)