The poet H.L. Hix, whom I was lucky to work with briefly at the beginning of my MFA work at Fairleigh Dickinson, has been engaged in a wonderful project that uses the interview to do more than generate information.
In a series of dialogues — and that is what these interviews are, dialogues as rhetoric, as conversations and discussion starters — he is exploring the place of poetry in America and the place that America (its reality and mythology) have in the art.
In this interview, conducted three years ago with Mark Nowak, the questions of activism, politics and working-class consciousness get intertwined with formal concerns and questions of the place that the political might have in art.
Nowak, whom I focused on in the theoretical essay portion of my MFA thesis, crafts very nontraditional poems. Shut Up, Shut Down and, more recently the brilliant Coal Mountain Elementary, use documentary techniques — i.e., the use of documents and outside sources cut up and re-presented new with new meanings within the poem and as he poem, and a larger effort to create a work that can be said to mirror documentary film — to tell the stories of the victims of late capitalism.
Nowak does not shy away from the implications for the art, either.
HH: The frequency of numbers in these poems (in titles, etc.) might be construed in relation to the presence (actual and referential) of photography, as ways of signaling that these poems are not enclosed within an internal, alternate world, but in active congress with the “real” world. Is it apt to say that this book is not aimed at reflection as an end in itself, but at reflection as a call to action?
MN: “[I]n active congress with the ‘real’ world”: what a fabulous way to phrase it. Yes, and yes, definitely “reflection as a call to action” as well. I go back a good deal to Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and his comment that “[a] sign that has been withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle—which, so to speak, crosses beyond the pale of the class struggle—inevitably loses force, degenerating into allegory and becoming the object not of live social intelligibility [aka, the “real” world] but of philological comprehension.” In “Hoyt Lakes/Shut Down,” for example, I was experimenting with rendering Marx’s superstructure/base through poetic form—an expansion of the haibun, really—where the “superstructure” above is grounded in a very precise economic number, i.e., the exact number of people who lost their jobs in each and every Iron Range town when the LTV mine closed. In Coal Mountain I started with a similar question/problematic: how could I render what I think is a significant new development in labor organizing, transnational social movement unionism, in poetic form.
As both Hix and Nowak point out, this overt interaction with activism often is met with sneers in the art world, though it is an important emotional and intellectual strand that must be represented in the work we produce.
This is something I’ve long struggled with: What is the proper way to integrate my writing selves, to allow — no, require — the poet and journalist in me to become one? As a journalist, how do I bring in the poet part of my writing self to bear without violating the basic rules and conventions of the trade? And, perhaps more difficult, how do I use and integrate the journalist’s tools into my art?
One might argue that they are separate spheres, that it would be best to maintain the separation, but I find that disingenuous. I am a journalist, columnist and editorial writer. My days are consumed with these efforts. To keep them from my art would be the same as asking Joe Montana not to roll out of the pocket because of some narrow definition of what makes a good quarterback.
What Nowak talks about, and what Hix’s project makes clear, is that the poet must engage his or her world. That world can be inward-looking or externally focused, but there has to be engagement for the art to mean anything.
Jennifer Moxley, in another of Hix’s interviews, offers one of the best explanations of this that I’ve come across, so I’ll close with her words on the subject:
For me, poetry is a conversation back through history, forward into the future (Whitman: “I consider’d you long and seriously before you were born”), and with the present as well. I am influenced by Creeley’s sense of “company,” and Duncan’s “responsibility is to keep the ability to respond.” In this isolated and isolating art, I am comforted by the belief that a “conversation” can take place through literature, across time, as it were. I feel this is a foundational aspect of the art. Dante revivifies Virgil so they may talk. Clearly the poet would not have bothered if Virgil had not spoken to him first. Our works are invitations, often rejected, despite which fact they send their signals still. I cannot accept that I must “make do” with what my historical moment has on offer, nor that I should be moved by something I read and not manifest that feeling in a response, and a wish to so move others.
Another aspect of “poetry as conversation” emerges through my definition of lyric poetry. I have written on this, so will only summarize here: lyric makes real the response to the social conversation for which there is no space or permission, it is the voice of the silenced interlocutor, formally framed and decorated so as to escape censor. Thus conversation in poetry need not be wanted, or shared. It can be, and often is, a provocation.
Hank Kalet 