Yes.
JR: The gaps, and unfilled line space on either side of the centered text. That is one way I experience silence in this text. I wondered if you—
JC: No, I didn’t do that. And, because of that, I put in these apostrophes.
JR: You often say that the principle you operate by in composing is to not make choices, but to ask questions. This work has involved both, more so perhaps than in your musical compositions? In your decisions about the wing words it has been—
JC: Both choice and asking questions. Yes, I think that’s probably true. As you may have noticed, the people at Harvard were very puzzled over my saying “And then I take out the words I don’t want.” They didn’t see how a person using chance operations could afford to do that. (laughter)
JR: And remain pure of heart? Does it have something to do with the fact that this is language and not sounds, not noise? Is there a kind of—
JC: Yes, you see, if it were sounds, I would have been working in a different way. I would have been paying much more attention to time, hmm? I mean when the sound was being heard, arranging for its freedom to be in what I call time brackets—spaces of time, hmm? Here, I was paying attention to what I thought was the nature of language.
JR: Which is?
JC: Well it’s full of all sorts of things, like we said—sounds and meanings. The sound sometimes becomes so powerful that one can put meaning aside. And vice versa.
JR: Can you imagine doing something now—with your mesostic poetry—like the work of Jackson Mac Low, in which the intentional semantic dimension gets entirely suppressed in the compositional methods? In some of his work—
JC: Yes, it’s quite amazing and marvelous what he does. And I think he’s able to go on a richer exploration than I.
JR: Why do you call it richer?
JC: More differences. More kinds of differences. And you can tell that very much from the difference between my writing through Ezra Pound’s Cantos [“Writing through the Cantos,” X] and his; his one about endings and so forth. [Words nd Ends from Ez] And I still don’t understand what he did, but I admire it deeply, what he did, and what happens as he does it. The thing that gives me courage to continue in spite of the fact that he’s working is that he tends to use a more restricted source, a more limited source, a more defined source. And I tend toward a multiplicity I think. And—well, I don’t really know that I have much to say about that difference. His work … but, I love his work, and somehow I think that I’m doing something sufficiently different so that I have a right to do it.
JR: Last night Jackson was showing me a procedure in which he uses language from some of his intuitively written poetry as source text for new poems subject to chance operations. He’s running the source poems through two consecutive computer programs—DIASTEXT and TRAVESTY.
JC: It’s the nature of the program …
JR: It’s the nature of the program to rearrange the language and make selections.
JC: And it’s with respect to something he’s already written, hmm?
JR: Yes. Once it goes into the programs, he gives up choice except to select out clumps of lines pretty much, if not entirely, intact. In other words he notices and separates out poems in the continuous readout that the second program gives him. Last night as I was looking over his shoulder he said, Ah, there’s a short one! He took out five successive lines and used the first two words of the first line as the title, so he had that poem. The kind and degree of choosing in this particular procedure21 seems very different from the kinds of choices you’re making now in your mesostics. This particular procedure, as I understand it, appears to have no semantic relation to the source text.
JC: “No semantic” means the connections of one are different from the connections of the other?
JR: Yes, there’s no attempt to “be true to” the spirit or the meaning of the source text in the way you are trying to be. It strikes me as very interesting that you are exploring similar territory and yet—
JC: Working differently. I think we’re very fortunate to be living in a period when poetry is more interesting, more useful than it has been. I’m astonished at the number of things I receive in the mail that are actually readable, (laughter) And enjoyable. There’s a little magazine—have you run into it?—called Lynx. It comes from the Northwest and it’s a journal of renga. And, there’s another field where the kind of poetry has been, I would say, inferior [as] practiced in the United States. That is, haiku and renga and things like that have been taken over by the sort of artsy and craftsy people, hmm? It’s a very difficult thing to do. I suspect that in the use of those [Japanese] characters there’s more ambiguity than there is in the use of English words. Apparently you can take a few characters of Japanese, or Chinese, and not know for sure what’s being said.
JR: I learned that from you in the introduction to Themes & Variations, where you say there isn’t the same mono-directional syntactic order in Japanese.
JC: Right. And we need to change our language if we’re going to have that experience.
JR: I agree that this is an exciting time for poetry, and particularly in this country.
JC: Yes, you can actually read what you find.
JR: And I think a lot of what is good and readable is related to your work.
JC: Don’t you think the idea of working with language in an exploratory way is in the air? And many, many people are doing it, and, as you said, in different ways. That’s what’s so refreshing about it. It’s not as though it were a tic on the part of one person.
JR: I see links with the turn-of-the-century Vienna that spawned Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s fascination with language, and Karl Kraus too, who was doing analyses of public uses of language. It was a time when public usage had become frighteningly detached from a sense of reality—was no longer helpful in trying to figure out what to think and how to live in the world situation that was developing—very much in the way our language appeared, from Vietnam on, to become increasingly detached and skewed in the public arena. There seems to be some sort of dialectic between public use of language and what poets begin to feel they need to do—those who feel the need to explore the medium of language itself…. Poets often feel that audiences are much more resistant to experimentation with language than they are to experimentation with any other medium. Part of that seems to have to do with an almost biological conservatism about language—because of the sense that you have to use it in practical ways, for survival.
JC: To make sense.
JR: To make sense. I wonder how you feel about that?
JC: I think this actually benefits poetry now, that conservatism. Because it enriches the field in which one can work. You don’t have to search for things to do. You can do so many different things … to bring about change. It’s because of the fixity of convention, that the unfixity of experimentation is increased, (laughs) It’s … it’s a rather silly idea to express, but it makes the field of possibility greater.
JR: Do you have a sense that the medium [language] itself is somehow resistant in any way? Does that ever feel like a limitation to you?
JC: Not now. It probably did to begin with. It’s actually through Jackson’s work that I was stimulated
