Doug Manson Interview: On Having Fallen In

This week something a little different: I had a chance to publish this interview conducted between two friends of mine who are also terrific writers and people I've met in the great Poetry City of Buffalo, NY, where Starcherone Books is located as well. In fact, the interviewee here, Doug Manson, recently signed on as our new Development Director. He is also the publisher of Celery Flute, a Kenneth Patchen newsletter, and of Little Scratch Pad Books, a micro-press publisher of poetry, and he's the author of several chapbooks as well as of Roofing and Siding (BlazeVox Books). He is interviewed below by Jonathan Skinner, publisher of the wonderful litmag, Ecopoetics.

Jonathan Skinner: So how did you fall into poetry in the first place?

Douglas Manson: This assumes a kind of direction—a relatively useful place to start—the notion of a "fall", rather than a start to a writing practice, or the beginning of a dialog with poetry, which is what it was. My mother used to read to me each night when I was a small child, a “Shakespearefor kids" book, European myth stories, and the Bible. I started writing when I was eight or so: adventure stories, science fiction epics and scripts for my dolls to act out (called "action figures" so boys could play with them). When I was nine or ten, I began writing songs like Roger Waters, after buying Pink Floyd's The Wall. I used to spend my after school hours playing records and lying on the floor with my head between these two plastic clamshell speakers from Sears. I wrote obnoxious and pornographic stories in seventh grade study hall and handed them around to my friends. Then, when I was thirteen, I re-wrote Poe's "Annabel Lee" as "Tony the Tree," which was a real ecological manifesto. I was asked to read it for the entire class. Until high school I was rarely asked to read poetry, or saw very much of it. It was never really a presence in our house. Music seemed much more important to me, and I studied Bob Dylan's lyrics more intensely than Walt Whitman's poems. I started learning guitar when I was twelve. Dylan and Whitman: these seemed to be the two poets of my adolescence who stand out. I started reading and writing much more when I turned fourteen, and I also began smoking a lot of pot.

Just after a really difficult time in my senior year of high school, I became very close to another poet named Jennifer. After an illness that put me in the hospital for three weeks, she took me out to a quarry to go swimming one day and we sat there and talked until I could make sense of what had happened to me—and it was a magical experience. Poet helping poet—profoundly uncomfortable experiences worked through together, made sense of in a way that was real to the way my consciousness had been affected. She taught me what a "paradigm" and a "paradigm shift" were, and so there was a shift in my own realization of what I had gone through. She made a collage out of that conversation I still own. So, I have been writing poetry and song lyrics since I was ten. I don't like to think of them as separate in any great degree. I never fell into poetry, its always been one of those components in my life that has lifted me up, no matter what.

Jonathan: Can you say a bit about what Ohio, or the midwest/ Great Lakes region more generally, has contributed to your formation as a poet?

Douglas: I grew up in a relatively stereotypical whitebre(a)d suburb. Ohio. Flat, with humid summers and cold grey winters. Strict parenting with high expectations, of education and (mechanical/civil/railway) engineering stock, milling and farming ancestors. I often felt myself drawn to Polish moods and Central European authors as a young man. But these facts say as little as they do taxonomize--and seem more mythic to me than real. After living in Buffalo for ten years, all the similarities of experience from Ohio to New York seem simulacral, and being "from" a place only seems to reinforce my need to recognize a distance: cognitively, philosophically, emotionally. Geographically there is something to be found there--forest, river and lake--though "suburban" really trumps all these considerations--cars, TVs, church and school. Garrison Keillor's recent visit to my hometown (aired 6/21/08) featured an author from the same place, and I'm assuming he's near my age, but the prose was so "flat" I wasn't invested in remembering his name [his name is Ian Frazier]--his memoirs reminded me of my childhood, but in a very simplistic way. I felt no nostalgia hearing his words, just a kind of claustrophobia, really. I was one of the "kids in the woods" he describes. And then there's the infamous Cuyahoga River. As a family, we spent a lot of our free time walking in the second- and third-growth trees, or drifting in a sailboat on a wakeless, man-made lake. A lot of stillness, come to think of it. Being without a car for the majority of the last four years has returned me to that kind of stillness. I've obsessed for some time with relative speed differentials and consciousness, the way automobiles have (had?) such a determining quality on our experience.

Hindsight shows this as a very privileged upbringing, especially since I consider myself a poet fully invested in the term. This means economic sacrifice and openness far beyond what my childhood ever encouraged me to expect. In the Midwest there isn't an oceanic/desert existential line of vastness on the horizon. The land seems a bit more generous, nurturing, but also consuming. It’s an intimate space--embowered. Character ranks pretty highly, too. Since I wasn't interested in staying within the neatly drawn lines mapped out for me as a child, I acquired a fair degree of shame for my endless questioning of limits and rules, for my experiments with living. But the truth is I don't like to define my work in regional/geographic terms, though my work may announce this more than I'm aware of.

So, given this, people from quite different circumstances may find my poetry saturated with a Midwestern mind--and I do write about my place a great deal. I like to write as much about the rich human universe here in the city of Buffalo as I do its geographic specificity. This region and my specific background may account for the inward, reflecting, syncretic attempts at meaning in my poems, or show up in the broader activity of writing, editing and mentoring. When you are fully engaged with basic human questions like love, living, dying, time and speed, its a little harder to account directly for place. If I am nothing more than an elaborate infolding of my environment, then all ideas I work with will show it. It is an idea worth pursuing consciously and descriptively, as well. But as you've noted before, I am obsessed with language, with the "conversational implicature of our words". The language I most know (or only know?) is the one spoken in the Midwest, however much it is used as a model in the larger, national society. Likewise, there are a lot of economic, social and technological pressures that ask us to forget about our place and how well our neighbors are doing--just as we know the Eisenhower/Robert Moses epoch effectively divorced Buffalonians from their waterfront with the building of a highway system and suburban rings. It is encouraging to know that the much-needed reconnection of communities and the reconstruction of waterfront access is just now getting underway.

One joy of living in Buffalo, among others, is the quality of the light. Light. period. I agree with Penelope Creeley, the light here is pure magic. It always teaches, it opens the senses. It doesn't mean I bathe in it all day, but its beauty forces me to step outside my own writing obsessions just as emphatically as do the basic pressures and invitations of living in the culture, being open, approachable, and responsible to others. I write my poetry in a room that catches the morning light, my "room of light"; my emails and business writing take place in back, in the windy "night room". I am blessed with ample space to work in.

To sum up these diverse thoughts: the question of “region” is one that I examine in my essay "What is a Regional Poet?" (In Celery Flute issue 3), which does include some of my own personal views on the issue. To compare my work with Charles Olson's enormous and articulate concern for geography, and for the many who follow his example, I have to say that I do not consider my poetry "regional". I am not trying to work on the same issues in my poetry. Because I live on a major ornithology fly-way, I hear a complex, varied & continental music when the birds return or the weather permits. On the street I hear hip-hop, country, rock and Latin music, too. I play my Beethoven records very quietly at 3 a.m.

Jonathan: Are there particular mentors, communities of writing, publications, major figures you might identify with the "Great Lakes" region, who have been vital to your development as a poet?

Douglas: The mentors in Kent I learned the most from were Maj Ragain, Alice Cone, Ted Lyons, and Tom Hines, but many other writers were influential, including Maggie Anderson and Zee Edgell. In Buffalo, I learned from Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Michael Basinski and William Sylvester; though the younger poetics scholars were often my more direct mentors (see below). In Kent, my community was made up of the open-mike readers I met from 1996-98. There was no "formation" label other than place, Brady's Café. My friends were Jayce Renner, Kathy Korcheck, David Snodgrass, Jim Burris, R.J. Wilson, Steve Skovensky, Katie Daley, Ben Pershey among many others. And this led to friendships with Cleveland poets like Ben Gulyas, Adam Brodsky, Christopher Franke, Jim Lang and Daniel Thompson.
At UB in Buffalo, I was lucky to spend time and work with a lot of amazing poets--Loren Goodman, Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, Kristen Gallagher, Alicia Cohen, Tim Shaner, Chris Alexander, Rosa Alcala, Michael Kelleher--the list goes on and on, especially factoring in the 10-15 poets visiting every semester to give talks and readings. The head spins to think of it now.

In the past 3-5 years, I've witnessed the dispersion of this temporary community, and made good friends with poets, artists, writers in Buffalo like Aaron Lowinger, Kristi Meal, Damian Weber, Celia White, Ted Pelton, Ethan Paquin.
The major "Great Lakes" precedents for me are Kenneth Patchen, d.a. levy and bpNichol, and with a little shake'n'stir-up of my "regional" reading in the 1990s: the midwest deep imagist James Wright. The question of publications that are important to me pretty much mirrors the sense of my University at Buffalo communities—there are many temporary coalescences of energies—though Jim Lang's "Split/W*sky" bag-o-zine has been holding steady for the past decade or so. Frank Davey's "Open Letter", certainly. The House Press magazines, though often temporary, have showcased amazing work--Drill, or String of Small Machines. As a starting point, then, in terms of my own publishing, I have to credit Cheryl Townsend's Impetus press for being my first publisher, which was a longstanding magazine in the 80s and 90s, and the soul-child of d.a.levy's renegade and 7 Flowers presses. I’m also interested in whatever Basinski is up to at the moment, and the Slack Buddha series from William and Lisa Howe. After saying all this, to indicate the influence these have had on my development on a personal level would take another day or two to give adequate acknowledgment—if I could do it at all.

Jonathan: I zoomed to Great Lakes contexts in my first two questions, given, yes, your interest in and extensive writing on d.a. levy, bpNichol and Kenneth Patchen. Not that you've focused on and conceived of this as a "regional" project, but I'm wondering if you see yourself carrying forward a certain tradition of "midwest poetics." (Are you a Lake Poet!? And if so, who is your Edinburgh Review?) Whether in the positive sense, as identifying with the geography and its holdouts (including, yeah, James Wright), or negatively in terms of a resistance to the bicoastal polarities that have so dominated the narrative of New American Poetics. Or in terms of something that unites these three important figures . . . ?

Douglas: Well, it’s a seemingly odd formation—Patchen, levy and Nichol—but they really are closely connected, aesthetically. And with the major league poetry teams so sharply divided into the Americans and the Nationals, they may forever be thought of as the Batavian Muckdogs of Modernism. I see my own writing project as less one of carrying any tradition forward, but rather paying it forward, in the time-honored practice of a generalized reciprocity. I hope all my creditors, spiritual or otherwise, can recognize my commitment to this. The amazing scholar Gordon Brotherston had me shaking in my seat one day when he described how the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures initiate novices into the scholars' caste. I felt it such an apt analogy for my own experiences as a graduate student, however buffeted I was by the corporate comforts of the campus lifestyle. It involves the ritual bleeding of the novitiate’s ears for something like four straight days without food. I’m not exaggerating too much to say that it felt like I went through this once every 6 months for 10 years, though after each bleeding we’d all go get starbucks and play kickball with the media studies grads! The problem today is that, after all this, our unspoken model for new scholars is: any non-trust-funded humanities graduate in the 21st century must either slavishly obey dogma for their kibble, or go preach to birds! Or “move to Brooklyn.”

But, okay, Jonathan, I'll try to tease this out: Patchen registered the shock of Fordist capitalism in a poetry of spiritual disjunction. I'm not certain he resolved the contradictions he witnessed the 1930s, because his Furies are still tormenting the landscape—no deal was made with them. He got stuck in the non-cathartic tragedy that is the twentieth-century, and got his back smashed in the heroic rescue of a Hollywood starlet. Riding as we are on Minerva's wings, we should see him as the perfect example of postmodernism before Warhol. You know, Pittsburgh and Youngstown are both on the Baltimore & Ohio railway. For his part, d.a. levy discovered that the midwest wanted nothing to do with modernism, or with any of the deep level remedies to the military-industrial complex proposed by the antiwar generation. So he disappeared into the vortex of his solar plexus. He was the Buddhist precursor to Devo and Pere Ubu. Devo-founder Mark Mothersbaugh was a part of the poetry scene in Kent/Cleveland in the mid-70s, before he realized that music and film were a lot easier to make money from. And both you and I have met Charlotte Pressler, Peter Laughner's widow, who donated a huge underground literature collection to UB. Nichol was able to transcend a lot of this heavy historical baggage, perhaps because he was Canadian. Though it’s more likely that, as he stated, he had to replay the phylogeny of modernism in the ontogeny of his work. Most serious poets in Cleveland understand what levy was doing, though one of the Flarf Popes has recently told me he's still shit. So he still gets under the skin of some of the heavy hitters in the National league, which is, to my mind, a productive relationship—as useful to defining a "midwest" poetics as anything else. The history of this kind of poetry and ethics is like the history of salt—you know? How American expansion was in many ways held back for a century or more by the need for salt, and that most settlements beyond Appalachia depended first on finding salt deposits. So, when the Americans and the Nationals come roaming around the provinces for kicks, they might discover these salt mines. Otherwise, they get chicken wings, or as in your fillip, "holdouts".

What connects these three poets is their maintenance throughout their careers of a serious concern for poetry that materializes across artistic practices. They demonstrated an ethics just as much as a poetics—so that, when you read a visual poem, the effect is poetic: its called kenosis, kind of like a good samadhi kick in the ass. A visual poem is not an example of visual art or design, though laborers in these fields do a good amount of poaching from each other. All the rest of the talk about the subject is rhetorical foreplay. But my idea of it, in this offhand definition, might just be a masculine way of seeing things (because it’s only concerned with the blank). So, if I fetishize the “spasm” of the poem, I also know that the trick is to maintain this state for longer and longer periods of time. Great poets know how to do this. It’s like tantra. And it is a lifelong study.
But Ginsberg was right, d.a. levy got too caught up in the fight, and he let anger take over. Patchen, perhaps because of his disability, knew how to keep the teakettle at just the right temperature. Myself, I'm fully, thoroughly, invested in sustainable and renewable resources. The best example I can give for this poetics is the experience I had when I realized, while studying bpNichol's archive in Vancouver, that he had fucked with his own archiving system for his work, and got me to scramble around for an hour looking for "missing" poems that didn't exist—AHA!

Put the reader into the context, put the context into the poem. Be a good whore, love your clients.

You playfully compare me to the Lake Poets, and ask me what “My Edinburgh Review" is. It sounds like a good title for an self-mythologizing literary study. “Call Me Endymion”. Pretty much any of the beautifully allusive non-recognizing recognitions that spurt out of the bloggosphere these days make up the dismissals I come across. I can't say I taken two across the bow lately. It feels more like the "death by a thousand cuts" process (see Aztec reference above). There must be a decent book out there on the case of Lyrical Ballads v. Edinburgh Review. The most I know about the Edinburgh Review comes from John Brewer's book The Pleasures of the Imagination. As I was trying to tell Dale Smith in his blog—I'm just the guy making the sammiches in the kitchen. They want lunch, I give them lunch. Its very, very difficult for me to get invested in ideas of "formations" and canon-this and canon-that, because it’s such a drain of useful energy. Nor am I very interested in pulling oars on a polytechnic research and development trireme. Midwest poetics: get up in the morning, eat your eggs and drink your coffee, and get to fucking work. Everything else is love-love-love (play La Marseillaise here).

Jonathan: We met in the context of the SUNY at Buffalo Poetics Program. Did that program change you in any fundamental way as a poet?

Douglas: Undoubtably. Oddly enough, I had to carry whatever scholarly ability I had with me to Buffalo, because the point of the program wasn't to refine scholars, it was to keep up the pace. And I wasn't ready for the social stratification. We likes it flat in the midwest!! *yawn* "Buildins goin' up to the sky/ people goin' down to the ground" as some crazy folksinger put it. But, honestly, it was an amazing, intense experience. They brought in just about every important writer you can name. And you don't just learn poetics, you learn parlimentary culture. So there was a year or two of feeling, as Linda Russo once said, "crushed by knowledge." And then I became comfortable to mostly watch the goings-on, as I learned my "place". Lots of maps and retorts, diagrams and genetic sequencing lists. Aaron Kunin has a beautiful book in the works called The Mandarin (excerpted in Fence 11:1) which dramatises perfectly how this kind of artistic incubation works. It was collaborative, anarchic, exhilirating, and enormously disillusioning—all useful experiences in the end.

Jonathan: We came in the wake (backwash?) of a vanguard that had hit Buffalo (from the late 'sixties through the early 'nineties, say) but were ultimately interested in making waves of our own. Where do you see the edge, for language arts in these early (yet accelerating) years of the 21st-century?

Douglas: I hate to shift this question away from a survey of the state of the art, but I honestly feel my view is far too limited to pick out any particular names or obligations for the moment. It seems to depend on what any particular writer, or group of writers, feel they have to do, and how well they stay committed to that activity. I am drawn towards poets and writers who understand that they have the incredibly difficult task to work and gain the continuance of their efforts. Careful consideration of the history of literature shows us that much of the discourse around the work is a kind of shuffling of terms, a chess-game, and an attempt at self-invention. Nick Piombino spoke into the virtual air recently—"I don't give a flying fuck how my personhood is doing!" (on the Poetics list, I think). That's the case for the best work going on—and it may seem selfish, and it may seem indifferent, but when you know that what you can provide in the work depends on a way nobody else may understand, or even dislike, you gain a better and better grasp on its meaning, better and better company, and better and better work. Great works are written by Martians, waitresses, martini-drinkers, dishwashers, subway cellists, and ski bums in their chalets out in Aspen. What should accelerate right now is a diversity of means for the work of art that doesn't wreck the ecology. Any work that pursues its question honestly is one that isn't getting caught up in the schizophrenia of trying to be what it already is. And we all benefit from that. But more often than not, we don't know what it is sufficiently to give it a name—so any names provided for this "edge" are already retrospective. But the comfort of working in retrospection and on familiar tropes may also provide for a career and two-car garage. Right now there is an enormous set of means for writers to discover what has been written, and to narrow that enormous potential into a single list of twenty book that will point the way through is ludicrous—I mean, we're no longer interested in just "buy[ting] a goddam big car and driv[ing]" anymore, are we? The landscape may have been vast, but we know now that it really isn't, because everything is connected. And we have to take care to understand when the frame of our potential literature shifts dimensions/shifts planes of reference. It’s important to recognize when some soils are exhausted, and it seems to me, the best writers know how to get continual harvest, even if only on a subsistence level.

Jonathan: You are the founder, editor and publisher of a unique, ambitious and thoughtfully composed 'zine, Celery Flute: the Kenneth Patchen Newsletter. I am interested in how you manage to serve Patchen's (underappreciated) legacy, while directing many of the contents of the newsletter to the present moment. How do you see Kenneth Patchen functioning as a vortex (or insert metaphor of your choice) for present concerns in poetics?

Douglas: I'm not much into the rehabilitation game for great figures—but I am working on an essay about Melville and Patchen right now. As much as I expend a lot of energy trying to figure him out, Patchen remains an anomaly to me. And there still seems to be no explanation for how or where he would fit into American literature, or Modernism more generally. I suppose resolving this question and making an elegant case for him would have gotten me a nice book contract. But the question is still with me, and though it no longer feels as personally determining as it once did—I get an enormous amount of satisfaction and pleasure in working on the questions he poses, one of which, to unfairly minimize (and hopefully not to cheapen it) seems to be: "Damn, you human beings are so nasty, but why do I love you so much?"

Jonathan: In "The Guts & Mechanisms" (Roofing and Siding) you quote a mentor we shared at SUNY Buffalo:

"Words are amphibious, says Bunn,
combining a materially transmitted signifier
supplanted by a superstructural signified."

Elsewhere (in At Any Point), you state that "it is irresponsible to make the world seem less complex than it really is."

I'm drawn to how you hold onto both ends of the amphibian. Your poems often address lyric situations they refuse to clarify. And they mobilize language without resorting to chess moves.

Some readers, I fear, have not the depth to hear your hearing. While others may not care to touch "the little green blackbird hiding in pleine sight." (The context you put your reader in.) Who, then, do you feel you are writing for?

Douglas: James H. Bunn's book Wave Forms is blindingly complex on its own terms, but thanks for bringing that into view. His thesis is that wave-forms in language form a material consistency (a constant) that can be followed from the cognitive and the sonic into the basic rhythms of nature. This proposes an empirically verifiable connection that may get us past the sceptical philosopher's "problem of other minds". A radio signal carries the "superstructural" information of language, and we transpose, or translate, the basic wave (electromagnetic) to the sonic (human speech as sound), into our particular language (English, perhaps) and then into the particular message ("Sonic Youth is playing tonight at the Hollywood Bowl"). The resonance doesn't end, and we can find a meaning at every level. But in our experience this doesn't happen sequentially—what we hear is the message, instantaneously—that part we can use. Love, language, and message pass through the most complex entity in the universe—us. But they also pass through a very complex world and its ten thousand things. Love, language, and the message bring traces of all the other waystations they visited along the way. The poet has to learn all the ways, all the transformations that take place to get from HERE (the lover) to THERE (the beloved): "Come here, tired one, and let me love you, soothe you, and make you whole again." OR: "Lover, I am tired and in pain, please touch me and heal me." I guess that clarifies what the message is—but you can find clarity at any level you would like: "here's what I know about how to love" or "here's how I didn't know, I'm sorry. I'll remember."

The "little green blackbird" image I use in "Sines-poem" is from a seven-part sequence in Kenneth Patchen's book Because It Is—which is included in the new compendium We Meet, coming out this week from New Directions!

Who do I write for? I sometimes write for specific people, I write for communities, my society. I write for my lover, and I write for the one who doesn't, or can’t love. I write when I'm out of my own depths and I don't even know what it is I'm writing or who I'm writing for—etc., etc. I've written for you, Jonathan. My parents. For anybody at any point. But I have recently changed, or have maintained a particular direction in my work, in the poem To Becoming Normal. I constantly "revise for clarity" in the same way I ask my composition students to. Being ambiguous or amphibious can be seen as generous if you realize you are not trying to direct or determine what the reader will experience. But sometimes you want to be direct. I often write to someone. To YOU. Everybody wants a big mac, right? A flavor-blast. If you streamline the process and give the reader the product the same way every time, and they don't have to worry about it, they will go there to find what they were looking for. But maybe some readers will find something in my work. I can’t stop to worry about this too much. And then again, there are some people you don't want touching you. Take it or leave it. Isn't that the baseline function of our capacity for judgment? These pills don't work!! or That shit was superfly.

You mention the lyric situations that my poems refuse to clarify. There is some reticence in the poetic "lover's voice" in my poems, yes—uncertaintly about that use of language, and uncertainty about who, specifically, is looking back at me. Language is the same way. But since I trust myself and other people more and more these days, I invite this "other" insofar as I trust myself, and am able to anticipate, to look forward to, what I can't predict. I've made a lifelong commitment to love, and to express that love in what I write. Consciousness is divine suffering, and consciousness is bliss. Some people may find presumption, patronizing attitudes, or a bit too much self-satisfied pride in my work. Yes, I have heard this from others. And I'm sorry. I really am. Pay it forward.

Jonathan: Sound. I love the extravagance of your word-choice, as much when heavy-handed as when deft. Like the actual bolt screwed through the chapbook version of Love Sounds (Like Perfidy).

Indeed, sound is perfidy in this counter-reformation. (I typed the parentheses wrong in that title, but I like it better now.)

Or sound nowadays is used only modestly, or severely, or systematically, or unrestrictedly, or ironically, or between parentheses. But what about sweet nuzzling sounds. Unleashed sounds. Thrushes that make the woods ring. When we use them we lose our hall pass. Yet anyone will listen in, peeping Dimmesdales.

In "That One Thing (on sublimation)," you rap on the feminine endings—expectation, transformation, realization, compunction, duration, anticipation, location—bringing back certain words like a sestina teaser. Or like a quenine. You flirt with oulipian sounds (for instance), but won't grid your poems. (Or did you write one for Stalling's Grid?)

You bring into poetry the non-meaning sounds of your life in music. At the same time, and interestingly enough, your critical rap focuses on visual poetry.

Douglas: Putting a bolt through a book was a heavy-handed thing to do. It left a hole in the center of the text. It split the book into "above" and "below". It seemed at that time that what I had loved betrayed me, and the poem got included in that feeling. I was also feeling that the conversational implicature of the words "I love you" could be heard as a kind of command to do something very harmful to oneself. Of course, one may come home unexpectedly and overhear their beloved having sex with someone else. Or, in turn, you open the door and find a Dimmesdale in the hallway. Its really sad. Yes, I lost my hallpass, but they didn’t tell me until three years later.

I do have a poem in Jonathan Stalling's grid book. I used the idea of the "shell game" for that one: I / You / We –under which shell do we come together?

Jonathan: Where does your emphasis on sound come from, then, and where do you think it is headed?

Douglas: Well, my emphasis on sound isn't from anything I can specifically name. I guess I'm vedic in that way—sound is both source and destination. As for my writing on visual poetry: Visual works vibrate. Great visual works vibrate greatly. Same thing—wave forms.

Jonathan: I won't ask you about America, or the sinking carbon economy, since we know your answers (though I can't wait to read the Melville essay), but do you think now that the future has gone South (God help them), or in the North we can look forward to the benefits of a future in reverse? Will you watch the olympic games?

Douglas: Well, I do love the South! Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas—I've met more generous and genuine people in these states than I can tell you about here. And these are beautiful, beautiful geographies. Read William Bartram's Travels. I guess any "regional" predictions about the future would have more to do with making good rather than bad economic, emotional and environmental choices, and with giving up on the terrible idea that we can't stop doing something wrong once we've started doing it. Any rhetoric of "us vs. them" is exploitative—is used to push buttons and collect $200—it is offensive to the conscience, and offensive to what we really know about ourselves as human beings. Our culture, if American, is a fluid one, it changes. I can't define that identity in any other way. If there is a hope for a "static" American culture, well, then, hand over the embalming fluid, and we will mourn. I like to recite Mr. Rogers’ poem about "what do you do with the mad in you" which he read at a Senate appropriations hearing for PBS back in 1968. If my poetic project is the consistent examination of the components of identity, one of the first to be deconstructed are the false binaries. Hey, I played my first games for the American league! Jonathan, don't paint in such broad swathes: I plan on writing a series of Pindaric odes to the olympians.

But I really have no idea what you mean by a "future in reverse.” And a "carbon economy” is just a buzzword, isn't it? Aren't we made of carbon? Isn't this our house??