Language
in Action
An
Interview with Douglas Messerli
Interviewed
by Gretchen Johnsen and Richard Peabody Born in Iowa, Douglas Messerli is currently Assistant Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has written extensively on modern poetry and fiction, and is the author of Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography and editor of Barnes' Smoke and Other Early Stories. His poetry has been published in many magazines including Doc (k) s, Roof, Shuttle, Washington Review, Interstate, The World, The Difficulties, Credences, The Bad Henry Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry in Motion, Gargoyle, and many others. His poetry has been collected in River to Rivet: A Poetic Trilogy which includes his two earlier volumes Dinner on the Lawn and Some Distance. Douglas lives in College Park, Maryland (he taught for a while at the University of Maryland) and co-publishes Sun & Moon Press books with Howard N. Fox. They ran Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature and Art from 1976 to 1982. Douglas also guided Là-bas through twelve issues between 1976 and 1978. This past summer he edited the special "Manifestos" issue of the Washington Review and Contemporary American Fiction. He is currently completing a novel, Letters from Hanusse, and is working on Several Revolutions, a political opera.
Interviewers: Let's begin with the history of
your journal, Sun & Moon. Why did you start a literary
magazine? What made you bring it to a close?
Messerli: I began Sun & Moon: A
Journal of Literature & Art in 1976, although I actually conceived of
the magazine on May 30th, 1975 — my 27th birthday. I had planned to publish Sun
& Moon
as an
inexpensive mimeographed journal in the tradition of the little magazines I had
been reading: The Floating Bear, The Nice Series, etc. But, as is true
of most beginning editors, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I asked
for work from an extraordinarily eclectic group of writers and artists (the first issue
contains work by people as radically different as Gilbert Sorrentino, Fielding
Dawson, Leonard Michaels, Lewis Turco, Marge Piercy, Daphne Athas, and Anne
Truitt) which diverted me from following my models. So, even before Howard Fox
and I had published the first issue, we decided to change our notions of format
and audience, changes that were to affect the magazine for the rest of its
issues, and have influenced what I'm currently doing as a publisher of books.
Instead
of publishing a magazine expressing the ideas and writings of a particular
group of poets and artists, we decided to open it up to a somewhat broader base
of contributors and readers; rather than publishing only that work to which, as
a poet, I was most committed (as, say, James Sherry was doing in Roof), I
attempted to create in the magazine a sense of a forum for advanced poetry,
fiction, and art. My model shifted, accordingly, from The Floating Bear to
John Ashbery's Art and Literature; hence, the subtitle: A journal of
Literature & Art. That decision certainly has had its advantages. I think over the years we have served as a kind of forum, as a connecting link, of sorts, between younger writers and artists and those who have established careers. And that has meant that even a beginning writer whose work appeared in the pages of Sun & Moon has had a broad base of readers. If individuals and libraries bought the magazine in order to read the works of writers such as Paul Bowles or Walter Abish or a critic such as Charles Altieri, they also had set before them new poems by Charles Bernstein or Bruce Andrews or -- to use examples of poets first published in our pages -- Jim Wine or Rafael Lorenzo. Its handsome, almost "academic" format also meant that Sun & Moon could generally count on NEA and CCLM grants.
Interviewers: How did you come to publish a
second magazine, Là-bas, at
the same time?
Messerli: Well, those very successes of Sun
& Moon
presented
problems as well. I quickly began to feel a bit impatient with the waits
between expensive issues and with the enormous outlay of time and money it took
to produce each number of the journal. And for those reasons, I guess, I published
12 issues of Là-bas
during 1976 and
1977. Là-bas
was almost the
polar opposite of Sun & Moon. It was mimeographed, and
it took a much more advertly radical stance. But, most importantly, it was
mailed out with great regularity (at first monthly and then, bi-monthly) to
about 350 poets for free. That meant that almost any "interesting"
poet of the period would likely see the work of those in Là-bas'
pages. It was a wonderful
idea -- and it worked. There's a limit, however, even to my energies;
and as I began work on my PhD dissertation, I realized that I would have to
give up one of the journals. Là-bas was the
obvious choice; for, despite its success, I simply couldn't find in it the kind
of balance of audience and contributors in which I was -- and still am -- most
interested. I mean, I can never understand why anyone would want to publish poetry
or fiction to be read by a few friends or even by poets and fiction writers
only. It seems to me it would be easier just to
send around the work in manuscript or to read it aloud to friends when they
stop by for a drink.
An
artist wants to affect someone other than his fellow artists, friends, or lover.
It is the possibility of emotionally and intellectually moving someone you've
never met that seems to be of most importance to me.
In
fact, it was for that reason, in part, that I stopped the publication of Sun & Moon
in
1982 (although, I'm publishing a few books as issues of the journal to finish
up subscriptions). As important as magazines are to the survival of
contemporary writing, it is the book which, in the end, defines or reveals what
a particular writer is doing in his or her art. In saying that, I'm not really
fetishizing the book as an object; I'm just stating the obvious -- that, until
writers are an everyday occurrence on television, telephone, radio, and stages,
we must rely on the object to transmit our art.
It
is that understanding of books, along with two other important factors, which
has led me to move away from the journal. It was inevitable
perhaps that, as I was publishing contemporary authors, the "younger"
poets
were also amassing enough material for book publication; and I wanted to help
make some of those books happen. So, even while I was active with the journal,
I published books by Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Peter Inman, and others.
And then, it began to be increasingly
apparent that commercial publishing was moving in an entirely different
direction from that of contemporary fiction and poetry. There will always be a
few exceptions -- like the fact that Walter Abish has been
signed by Random House -- but, for the most part, it is clear that as
far as advanced literature is concerned, the big publishing houses are deaf.
You can't sell books in supermarket quantities without sacrificing something;
and the corporation godheads behind the publishing industry have chosen as
their lambs poetry and fiction. Combine that with
the
fact that, by and large, the most adventurously-minded university professors have shifted in their habits
from reading contemporary literature to immersing themselves in critical and
philosophical theory, and
you
realize that one or two generations of authors have been ignored into near-extinction.
Being a
missionary at heart, I vowed that I would do everything possible -- puny as my
attempts might be -- to keep publishing books during what may someday be seen
as the Dark Ages of American Literary History. One keeps hearing from
reviewers, critics, and readers that contemporary poetry and fiction are dead;
but I think it's the opposite:
contemporary poetry and fiction are wonderfully alive, but the reviewers, critics, and readers
have died. However, the books that prove this are just not getting out to a
wide enough audience for anyone to see the truth. That's where I'm trying to
move -- into that ignorant gap.
Interviewers: The success of Sun & Moon
Press' publication of the Djuna Barnes collection of stories has been
phenomenal. When and how did you first become interested in Djuna Barnes?
Messerli: Djuna Barnes' uncollected short
stories seemed a perfect place for the press to begin its serious publishing --
that is, to begin printing books in a recognizably standard format and to
publish clothbound editions. I love Barnes' work, and I've taught Nightwood
for years in the
university. But, it's more than that; almost every experience I have had with
Barnes and her work has been serendipitous.
In
graduate school I did a bibliography of Barnes' work (later published by David
Lewis in New York) for a bibliography and methods course; and the very day that
I was planning to complete my months of research, a librarian at the University
of Maryland Library asked me why I was looking at The
Little Review. I
told her I was working on an obscure writer of the 20s and 30s.
"Who?" she demanded. I named Barnes, and she said, "I thought
so. You know, the Rare Book Collection upstairs has just purchased all of Miss
Barnes' letters, books, and papers." Obviously, I did not know; so I went
charging up to the Rare Book Collection, where I came upon Robert Beare,
rummaging through chests of Barnes' letters, clippings, books, and memorabilia.
It took
me four more months of working every day in the Rare Book Room to describe and
annotate the· clippings.
Then,
later I actually did get to have an hour's conversation with Djuna Barnes. But
I've written about that incredible visit elsewhere (in The New
York Native), so
I won't repeat it here.
Anyway,
I believe Barnes to be one of the major writers of this century; but like
Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, and later, Jane Bowles, she wrote something
outside the context Of "high
Modernism," something more akin to what contemporary writers are doing -- and
that made her a sort of pariah. I'm extremely gratified to have any role in the
wider recognition of her work. Of course, Barnes' death has had a great deal to
do with the success of Smoke and Other Early Stories. It's unfortunate
that the literary establishment seems intent upon recognizing only the dead -- and
near dead.
Interviewers: What does Sun & Moon
Press plan in the future?
Messerli: Oh, we're doing some great
books! Djuna Barnes' Interviews, for one -- incredibly funny and witty
interviews she did with celebrities such as Flo Ziegfeld, Mother Jones, Diamond
Jim Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Frank Harris, Coco Channel, and dozens of others;
a marvelous book. And then, we're printing new fiction by Russell Banks, The
Relation of My Imprisonment; a
long, indescribably moody and moral-toned novel by Steve Katz, Weir & Pouce; and a brilliant and stylish book
of stories by Tom Ahern, Hecatombs of Lake; Charles Bernstein's collected critical writings, Content's
Dream; a beautiful
novel about American Indians in the 18th century, by Johnny Stanton, Mangled
Hands; and other
good books by Hannah Weiner, Fiona Templeton, Gil Ott, Ted Greenwald, Len
Jenkin -- oh! and an anthology of new American drama, edited by John Wellman.
I'm running out of adjectives; but I get enthusiastic just by remembering my
reading of the books in manuscript.
We're
also beginning a new series, The Contemporary Critical Series, devoted to
critical books on contemporary authors and a few modern ones (like Djuna
Barnes) who have had an impact on today's writing.
Interviewers: To turn to your own criticism,
in your essay, "Experiment and Traditional Forms in Contemporary
Literature," reprinted in the sixth Pushcart
collection, you
discuss the influence of Pound on constructionist theories of poetics, the
emerging conviction that "poetry should be a thing of linguistic process
as opposed to representing a set of preconceived ideas and images bound to
convention." What is at the heart of this curiosity
about "linguistic process"?
Messerli: That's a near impossible
question to answer. I mean, it all depends upon of whose heart you're asking.
For Pound, it had, perhaps, something to do with his damnable egotism, which
kept him at arm's length from most of the people he encountered, and forced
him, early on in
life one suspects, to center everything upon that unsuccessful -- and therefore
fascinating -- tool of communication, language. But then, of course, he had
read most of the world's "great" poets, and he recognized in the best
of them that language was what it (poetry) was all about.
I
have the sensation, however, that your question is not about Pound, but about
contemporary writing, about the focus of poets such as those connected with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E on "linguistic
process." That too has to do, in part, with (as Pound might write it)
Edecaysion, with reading poets like Pound, William Carlos Williams, Emily
Dickinson, the Russian Futurists, Gertrude Stein, and even those against whom
the "Language" poets seem most to react, John Ashbery and Frank
O'Hara. I remember Gilbert Sorrentino saying somewhere, something to the effect
that it eventually becomes apparent to any writer worth his salt that language
is what it (again, writing) is all about.
But,
obviously, there's more at stake than that. For me -- and from my conversations
with poets like Bernstein and Andrews, I surmise they would support some of my
sentiments -- language is just
everything. It is the way -- the only way -- we have of
making reality, the act others describe as "comprehending
experience." But for me, it is truly a "making." Every day,
every moment we speak
and,
through language, think
the
world into existence. Therefore, it's of the utmost importance that a few of us
-- even if we're seen as a bunch of myopic babblers -- spend some time
contemplating, playing with, challenging, and delighting in the ways in which
the society uses it. Hopefully, we can affect a few people, who can -- to use
the jargon of an advertisement currently shaping our collective consciousness
-- affect two more, who can affect two more and so on ... and so on ... until
we have the whole country reevaluating, listening to, and reinventing language
-- not as an intellectual exercise, but as a matter of life and death (and I do
not speak metaphorically).
Interviewers: In
that same essay, you cite Ron Silliman's claims for a new genre of prose poetry
in which "actual elements of poetic structures" enter "into the
interiors of sentence structure itself." Could this sort of integrated
activity represent a possible fusion of non-analytic, co-figurational
perceptions/"structures"
with more traditional processes of language, the conventional patterns of
"making a statement"?
Messerli: Well,
I don't know, of course, what you mean by "conventional patterns." If you're talking late Nineteenth century
to mid-Twentieth century "conventional patterns," I'd say
"no," I don't think that's the direction any really challenging
contemporary poet or fiction writer is moving. There's no real fusion possible
once you have allowed the Romantic
dichotomy between world and self to become your "conventional pattern"
of thinking. In fact, I don't believe that any writer in whom I'm most
interested is seeking a "fusion," that third element in the Structuralist
trinity of the fodder, sun and holly growth. I don't really know if what
I'm saying is applicable to Silliman, however, or not. He seems often at odds
to what I'm concerned with. I mean, he is
a
sort of structuralist, and his sentences are composed according to structural principles
which appear to be at the opposite end of the tunnel we may (or may not) both
have entered. I'm not really interested in overall or "preconceived"
structures -- just in discovered
or
uncovered ones. What delights me is the fact that most of the structures I
"uncover" -- no matter how radically I push the language -- already
exist. Now, that makes me believe in Northrup Frye, if not in
myth. And that's a kind of structuralism. But I'm not at all interested in
"applying" structures to poetry, which, it appears, Silliman is.
If, by the term "making a
statement" you mean "having a meaning," I'd say "Yes, I'm
interested in that." But the whole Modernist notion of making a statement
apart from the experience of encountering the language of the poem or fiction
itself is alien to my way of thinking. I have ideas; my language is them.
Interviewers: You
also discuss several other examples of this kind of approach -- what might be called
a language dialectic in Postmodern writing. There's Eleanor Antin, who talks
about the space between herself and her name, a space which "has to be
filled with credit"; Norma Jean Deak's two-tiered performance dialogues;
various experimental "autobiographers" who seem to pursue some kind
of authentic self-in-language. Can we assume that an accommodation can be made between
language, its structural conventions, and some more immediate "quality of
experience?"
Messerli: Again,
you seem to speak of "accommodation" as a kind of mediating device,
as something which can bring what you perceive as discordant or contrary
concerns into the same arena. But what if I said, "This is a baseball
field," when it was set up for football, or "This is a football field,"
when I had clearly outlined three bases and a homeplate. I suppose you could
attempt to resolve my confusion by playing rugby or cricket, but that wouldn't be to
deal with the contradictions I've created. For, I didn't ask you to
"compromise," but asked you to work in the arena with the contradiction
itself. That, it seems to me, is what Eleanor Antin -- and David Antin, in a
radically different way -- Norma Jean Deak, and fictional autobiographists such
as Walter Abish, Toby Olson, and Raymond Federman ask. They seek not for an
"accommodation," but for an "engagement" with both
realities simultaneously. Theirs is an art that asks for the "I" of
the self and the "eye" of the character to perceive the unequivocal differences
of experience occurring at the same time and place.
Interviewers: Do you see any connections
between these examples and what is currently being discussed as the contrast
between Right- and Left-brain patterns of perception and response?
Messerli: Of course, that is behind the
dialectic most authors presume, which results in their desire for
accommodation, a synthesis. But, in my own work -- and I think this can be
applied to the works of most of the writers I've mentioned -- there is an
outright rejection of the dialectical structure. I'm not interested in writing
a poetry that employs or activates Right- or Left-brain thinking, or even in
creating a work that lies somewhere in the middle. I want to create a
literature that is constantly slipping between one and the other -- or that is
using them both simultaneously -- that would be best.
Recent
physiological and psychological experiments seem to indicate that each half of
the brain can take over the activities of the other half. So, I'd like to move
randomly between them, asking the so-called "analytical" faculties to
hear music and requiring that "part" of the brain that activates
reverie to count pistons. But here, I am speaking metaphorically, because I
really don't think you can separate pistons from music. As I
keep saying, I'm interested in using all the faculties, at full gear, in the
very same instant. Most writers, I'm afraid, have never heard anything but
contrapuntal music -- at least, it seems that way if you study the ways in which they
use language. I want a symphony in words -- maybe two or three symphonies going
at the same time as in some of Charles Ives' compositions.
Interviewers: Can we compare Postmodern poetry
with indeterminate music, which, unlike serial music, depends on the process to
create meaning, to create a situation in which music and extra-musical
activities occur, with no predictable or desired
outcome?
Messerli: Sure;
why not? Only, I've given up on the word "Postmodern." Everybody
means something different by it -- and that's okay, but not when it's the very
opposite of what others mean to say. A lot of people have begun to use that
word to mean nearly any kind of writing since 1960 or to mean
"experimental" writing or to describe something they don't
understand. To me, Postmodernism, as applied to literature, has nothing to do
with moving forward from Modernism (if you can define Modernism), but has to do
with going back and rediscovering and revising traditions the Modernists -- in
their damnable search for unity and purity -- rejected or refused to
acknowledge.
But
yes, I'd agree with your comparison. Only, the goal, in my case, isn't the
indeterminacy. It's only because I employ so many levels of language -- the
private, the formal, the archaic, jargon, clichés, unfinished phrases -- simultaneously
that any particular poem doesn't have closure. To "close" such a poem
would mean making a choice, picking the oboe, say, over the bassoon and the
tuba, or -- at the very least -- asking everybody to play from the same score
in the same room. And then, I'd never find out if can
make a whole new language, if I can uncover a whole new way to make meaning.
The indeterminacy, in other words, is not a goal but a result.
Interviewers: I was
surprised to learn that Dinner on the Lawn and Some
Distance, your
first two books of poetry, were parts of a larger trilogy. They strike me as
different in terms of line length and style. What are you up to in the third
section and how does each segment function as part of the whole?
Messerli: If you're speaking in formal terms, the
books don't function as a whole. It's just that I write in series -- which
(this may surprise some of my readers) are thematically, as opposed to
stylistically and linguistically, linked. And suddenly, I had written three
such series of almost the same length. The first, Dinner
on the Lawn, was a very personal book about language
and
love; the second, Some Distance, was a book that attempted through
language to explore my childhood in the Midwest with my present life; the
third, River
to Rivet, was
a manifesto explaining why I wrote the other two the way I did. So I decided they were all really of one
piece, each growing out of the other -- except that I put the manifesto smack
in the middle to explain the poetic and thematic principles of those at each
end. I suspect, however, that you might see these three volumes as an attempt
to say similar things in different voices; perhaps I should have a simultaneous
performance of the three volumes -- but then it would be hard to sort out the
emotional lyrical intensity of each. I guess it would be better to remember
each volume as you go along, letting the words and phrases of the first wash
over the second and those of the first two, in turn, over the third. Then there
would be formal connections.
Interviewers: What
is the importance of chance, or the accidental, in your work?
Messerli: It's
quite important in the early stages of writing. I mean, I use everything -- my
imaginary dyslexia, misheard phrases of conversation, wild associations,
sometimes (but very seldom) even dream-induced connections -- in the early
processes of writing. But, I think the fact that I revise each poem about 30
times or more reduces the significance of chance and accident in the final
draft. In short, my poetry is always ready to take advantage of accident and
chance, but it doesn't treat them as if they were sacrosanct. Sometimes the most
incredible leaps of the imagination -- the ones that really create a whole new
way of seeing and saying something -- are extraordinarily contrived. Chance
most often results in the predictable, in the same old patterns of perceiving.
Interviewers: Have
you been influenced by any particular theory of linguistics, any particular
line of etymological research? Whorf, Chomsky, "deep structures" vs.
models of language as a product of cultural adaptation, etc.?
Messerli: I'd
have to say, none of the above. I certainly do appreciate the fact that some
semioticians, and linguists, have theories that support the notions I've come
to through poetry, but it really hasn't been a source for my work at all. Of
course, I've been trained in the university, and I'd have to be a dunce in
these days not to know about the Prague school, Saussure, and the Russian
Formalists and Futurist poets. But as I've been hinting, I'm incredibly
anti-formalist -- for all my interest in genres. I think everyone should read
the linguists, semioticians, and deconstructionists. But I don't at all
advocate one using them as a basis for poetry or fiction -- or even criticism.
Interviewers: Do you
see form, as used in Postmodern writing, as a protection
against artistic or psychological "chaos," -- or as a means, an instrument,
for investigating that apprehension of potential chaos?
Messerli: Yes, I
think for many contemporary writers form is a sort of shield from what they
perceive as "chaos." I think you could see a lot of the parodists -- Kenneth
Koch, John Barth, sometimes even Sorrentino in that
context. Those writers of the front-line of the war against Modernism. Others,
perhaps, have used forms more as a way to encounter chaos; they've had more
time to psych-out the enemy, so to speak. And I find them to be more
interesting. I'd say that's true, in part, of Sorrentino at his best, Walter
Abish. Maybe my generation has been at the front for such a long time that we
don't even see the same things as "chaos." I mean, I find chaos to be
pretty rare in the world; I might even say that it's only in my poetry, in my
use of language that I really have encountered it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not
saying that things in the world don't create difficulties for me and confuse
me. But, I don't understand that as chaos really. I invite chaos -- "Come
to me," I call out. But, sure enough, I find another form underneath what
I thought might be meaningless. In fact, I find more meaning in it than in what
most people point out to me as having meaning. So I don't know if I can even say that I'm using poetry to
encounter chaos; it's just a desire to experience it. I should add, that I
don't see war as issuing from chaos, but from an insistence upon order -- the
preference of one order over another. A nuclear holocaust is not chaos -- it is
death. My poetry is centered in life, whether structured or chaotic.
Interviewers: Does
contemporary poetry (and prose) participate in a framework which investigates
its own origins? Psychological/epistemological as well as technical? Or is this
a matter of degree which varies with different practitioners?
Messerli: A
great deal of it does. Some writers, quite obviously, are more self-conscious
than others. I am very
interested in showing what I'm doing while I'm doing it. Of course, someone
like Harold Bloom might argue that this is a sort of self-reflexiveness
brought about by our hyperconsciousness of the traditions before us, our
anxiety of influence. But I don't buy that. I'm not interested in exploring
where I'm coming from out of some intellectual desire to purge or revel in my
spiritual antecedents, but because I want everybody to join in my performance
of the poem, to participate in the process of my writing it. I think, in the
end, that lends the
poem a kind of honesty. And it's that kind of honesty which allows me to put
myself on the line (perhaps I should say in the line), to let my stomach hang
out, so to speak. So, when I want to use a corn-porn pun or a ridiculously archaic
word or I want to rhyme, I don't have to worry about what the reader might
think. I let the reader in on the game at the very beginning: this isn't a poem
about me, or let's say, this isn't a poem about me alone, but about you and me
working with words. That isn't to say that I don't manipulate the reader or
make fun of him or her when they refuse to keep up. But I am fair to them in
asking for their participation. I keep them abreast of what I know as we move along
together in language.
Interviewers: Can language itself provide a
kind of modern "mythology," as an authentic source and context of
meaning?
Messerli: Yes, that's exactly what I'm
saying. Language is truth. Language makes meaning. Language is meaning. And
that signifies that to write a poem is to shoulder immense responsibility. As a
poet, can one afford to accept the world as it is? Mustn't one work with the
reader to try to recomprehend it, to reshape it?
Interviewers: Is there something to which
language -- or language artifacts -- should be faithful, responsive? Language
itself?
Messerli: To language in action, which is
life.
Interviewers: Where on earth do you find the time or energy to commute, teach, edit, publish, and write poetry, fiction, and critical essays?
Messerli: From an unearthly source,
obviously.
Reprinted
from Gargoyle No. 24 (1984)
