Interview with David Lloyd by Ramón García
October 6, 2024
RG: You are both a prolific scholar and a very productive poet. Do you see the two as complementary practices or two distinct activities?
DL: Well, they’re certainly distinct activities, though not essentially so. The way I generally talk about the distinction is that when I write an academic essay, I know there’s an existing, more or less generic form that I can follow (I haven’t tried to write experimental academic essays, though some people do that very well). There’s an established form for the essay, however you vary it. But within that form, you know basically what your job is and what the vessel is into which you’re going to pour your ideas, so to speak. Whereas with poetry, every time I begin a poem I am determining the form of it as I do it. Even if I choose to write a given form like a sonnet, at some point I’m going to dismantle it. Play with it, you know. I’m going to make the form new, so to speak. And, since I tend to write in sequences, rather than occasional stand-alone poems, coming up with a provisional form that will determine the shape of the elements of the sequence is usually important for me. So I think that just in terms of the approach to writing, they are very distinct activities.
In fact, for a long time I tried also to keep my poetry (and I’m also a playwright, so I should say my poetry and playwriting) separate from my academic writing. Because I never wanted the poetry to become something that was adjudicated in relation to my academic work. I didn’t want the academic work to overtake the poetry. I wanted it to be something outside my academic work. And then, at a certain point, I began to feel, Well, you know I’m not actually integrating my full intelligence into my poetry–a kind of T. S. Eliot scruple, I suppose! But then someone in Ireland wrote an essay about my work, the Irish critic Alex Davis, who has written the best work about contemporary Irish poetry. And somewhat to my surprise, he actually drew all the connections between my academic work, and not just my writing on Ireland, and the poetry, and I suddenly I began to see that, behind my own back, so to speak, the concerns of my research and my scholarly production had long ago entered into the poetry. For example, the sequence Change of State, which was a chapbook I published back in 1993, already has a lot in it about questions of imprisonment, questions that were relevant at the time to the research I was doing on the Irish Troubles and things like that, though that thinking didn’t come in as a statement about political imprisonment. But when I look back on it now, I see it was there, and that what I was thinking about was actually very much becoming part of the poetry. That’s just one example.
So, although the poetry and the scholarship are definitely distinct, and demand different kinds of concentration and of formal shaping, I think that they feed into one another in different ways, and that’s not a one-way street: sometimes I’ll find that something I’ve written in a poem suddenly raises questions for me that I want to resolve in a scholarly way also. I’ve spent a lot of time as a scholar working on cultural phenomena very unrelated to poetry: I used to joke that I worked on potatoes and pubs, politics and prisons, all those Ps, and it was time to get back to the poetry. But it’s also true that I have written a lot about poetry and poetics, especially in Counterpoetics of Modernity, which I think you have read some of. That is me seeking ways to try to establish a line of thinking about poetry that helps me distinguish what I do from what’s going on in other places, for other poets, a question I think we’ll come back to.
And the last thing I’ll say on this topic is just that I often warn students who are interested in being writers, in any genre, really, and plan on graduate work to get a PhD, is that it’s important to recognize that the two activities take very similar energy. You know, if you’re writing an essay, or if you’re teaching a class and have to prepare it, or lecturing, that all takes as much creative energy as so-called creative work, and that takes not only from the time you have to write, but also from the reserves of energy you have for creativity in any form. I speak from experience: you know there was a long period in which I was not at all productive as a poet, and maybe we’ll talk about that, maybe later. But it was definitely due in part to having to focus the academic work, which at the time was also a mode of political work, given what was going on both in Ireland and here in California. All that drew on the energy I had to make poetry and, perhaps even more, from the idle time that’s essential to the emergence of a poem. To invoke Eliot again, he has a great, unexpected phrase somewhere about the necessary idleness of the poet that I think is spot on. And unfortunately that idleness is something we get very little of these days in the academic world, and it’s to the detriment of our creativity in all spheres, indeed, to thinking itself. So a warning to people……
RG: I completely agree.
DL: Yeah.
RG: Well, you’re Irish. You’re originally from Dublin. You have lived in the US now for many years. Has living in the US changed your poetry?
DL: I think inevitably so, though it’s hard for me to determine exactly how. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. And it’s hard for me to identify exactly how it’s changed. And I’d add that the things that have changed have had to do with more than just my being present here.
So I came here from Ireland very indirectly. I did all my university work in England, and not just in England, but in Cambridge, where there was a very strong school of experimental poetics that centered on the English poet J. H. Prynne, who is by now probably one of the most recognized poets of his generation, of the 60s, 70s, 80 s and beyond, in other words, just at the time when I was there in Cambridge as an undergraduate in the mid- to late 1970s. Prynne was one of my teachers and an absolutely brilliant reader of poetry. As you probably know, he nurtured a whole generation of poets, including people like Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who was actually American and unfortunately died very young, through to people like John Wilkinson, who taught in Chicago here for quite a long time, and a younger generation still. But what I was getting around to saying is that Prynne had actually known Charles Olson and Ed Dorn very well. He spent some time in America as a younger scholar and he started out doing a PhD on Thomas Hardy that I don’t think he ever finished, since he devoted himself to poetry instead. But Prynne’s teaching there meant that the atmosphere in Cambridge had already introduced me to the Black Mountain School, to Olson in particular, long before I even thought of coming to the United States. I remember Creeley coming to read there at one of their poetry festivals and listening to tapes of Dorn reading Gunslinger late one night in Prynne’s college office with a group of other students and poets. So that I was already quite aware of American poetics. Of course, we were all reading Pound, whose sound values I’ve always admired intensely, despite the dismal politics. Donald Davie had taught there, and was actually Prynne’s dissertation supervisor, so Davie’s quite pioneering book on Pound was very important to us. And I should add that it wasn’t only Prynne’s influence: for instance, the feminist poet Denise Riley was also there, as a graduate student at the time, and she was probably more influenced by the New York poets and her work, especially Marxism for Infants, impacted me very strongly as I recall.
In any case, for me the kind of confluence of Pound and Olson I encountered there was quite liberating, because what I had mostly been influenced by in my late teens, inevitably, I suppose, was in large part the Irish poetics of the time, which was quite conservative and traditional, and we can maybe come back to that. And that would have been the model: very closed forms, very standard lyric poems, with nicely rounded conclusions and consistent metaphors, and so forth. So to read the poetic sequences and the open forms of projective verse was a huge influence on me and on my early work. But then also I was introduced to Wallace Stevens and Stevens impacted me in a very different way. The playfulness of his language, the kind of cacophonies and sonorities that he’s willing to dare, almost like nursery rhymes at some point, influenced ways that I wanted to play with language also.
But then actually as a schoolboy, many of the first poems that I wrote were written in French because I was very influenced by Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Verlaine, whom I was reading in my school French classes. And I just wanted to emulate them, so I tried writing in French, and then also tried writing similar poems in English. Awful poems, but a good exercise that I certainly don’t regret. So, you know, on the one hand, there was the quite early impact of American poetics, but there’s also a European side that counterbalances it. And I’m not quite sure how, in my own work that balance ultimately worked out.
When I came to the United States, after three years living in Antwerp (a whole other poetry story), it was of course to the Bay Area. And at the moment that I arrived, in 1983, the dominant thing was no longer the Beat poets. It was really the Language school. And, largely through Stephen Rodefer and Ben Friedlander, whom I met early on, I ended up meeting quite a large number of the Language poets themselves, including Carla Harryman and Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, and others who came through, like Charles Bernstein and Steve McCaffery. You know it seemed to me at the time that that the work they were doing was not identical with by any means, but did counterpoint what the Cambridge poets that I had grown up with were doing. In neither case did I feel this was the vein that I was going to be writing (and I wrote a quite critical review of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book when it came out) and it’s not the vein I’ve really attempted in any way. But it was opening possibilities for me that I think were very fruitful, because, even if you define yourself against something, to have a set of possibilities that different poetics and different traditions offer you is an incredibly important thing. I was still learning to write, as it were, when I first came over to the States, and changing a lot, transforming a lot. So that was an important experience at the time. You know, this might lead directly to the next question.
RG: Yes, how do you situate yourself in terms of Ireland’s contemporary poetry?
DL: Well, that’s a somewhat difficult question. For a long time I was out of the country, so I did not have much of a poetic community in Ireland. When I was a student, I did have a small community in Dublin that was really with two poets, Trevor Joyce and Michael Smith, who founded the New Writers Press together. And they were trying to open Irish poetry to a broader range of poetic modes, and published quite a few people who were doing very different things than what was going on around them. Michael Smith was a wonderful translator from the Spanish and introduced me then to Antonio Machado and, in particular, Miguel Hernandez, whose early poems were very important to me at the time. Later he produced his great translations of all César Vallejo’s poems. Once again, Vallejo became huge for me, especially Trilce, so I owe Michael a lot.
One of the poets whom they later became associated with, and who edited several journals across the same period, Maurice Scully, talks sardonically about what he calls “the Gem School” where the impetus is to produce beautiful lyric poems, which I would describe as basically being built on some moving experience that you have, which produces for you a metaphor that then in turn rounds up the sentiment of the poem at the end. And, secondly, the materials of that poetry tended to be the kind of reflections on rural life that has become the hallmark of Irish poetry: the most celebrated poet, whose work really took off at that moment, Seamus Heaney, largely fitted into that mode. Indeed, you could say he was the consummate master of that mode and perfected it. On the other hand, the Irish contemporary poetics that I’m closest to is much more open to the experimental work that was going on in Europe and in England, in particular. I’m thinking of Trevor’s work, where eventually he turns against what he calls the well-made lyric mode and begins to write procedurally or through pre-established constraints in ways very important to the development of his work. Of his own departure from that lyric mode, Maurice Scully, whom I just mentioned, often said, “You know I don’t write poems, I write books”. He always wrote with a sense of making what he calls a “fabric” or “lattice” of intersecting poems that repeat one another, that pick up on each other and unfold in a tissue of echoes.
And then there’s a wonderful poet, Catherine Walsh, who works in a quite different and constantly innovative mode that’s very open-formed, usually. And then again Billy Mills, who is much more minimalist in his forms. So what I would say is that the poets that I admire in Ireland I got to know mostly after I had been in the United States, like Maurice, Billy, or Catherine, though I had heard of them from a wonderful critic, J.C.C. Mays, who along with Alex Davis has written some of the best work on this loose grouping of Irish poets. Actually, it was Billy and Catherine who published my first chapbook in Ireland, Coupures, with their hardPressed imprint in 1987, after I was in Berkeley. They had heard about my work from Jim Mays who happened to be talking to them in Dublin.
So I would situate myself in terms of contemporary Irish poetry with those poets and others like Randolph Healy and Fergal Gaynor. They would be the poets with whom I’m in dialogue, but they don’t form any kind of school. Though some of them had known each other earlier, they actually first all came together here in a conference in New England, Assembling Alternatives. Their presence “out there” was really important for me to situate myself as an Irish poet, in relation to what is going on in Ireland despite being away. As I mentioned earlier, for a while I really wasn’t writing much poetry. It was partly, as I said, to do with being busy with academic work and administration and that sort of stuff. But it was also that I’d lost a sense of a context into which I was writing rather than of knowing the audience for whom I wrote, a question which never seems to me germane to the actual writing as it happens. Because, as I said, although I was fascinated by the Language poetry, and reviewed some of the work, I knew it wasn’t my mode. And it was also a poetic culture that I didn’t ultimately belong to. My poetic culture, in the end, is formed more around reading French, Flemish, German and Spanish than around US poetries, however much that may have freed me up initially.
RG: Did you feel like an outsider?
DL: Well, it was an outsiderliness. But not a particularly productive outsiderliness. It was a sense of being my own echo chamber, rather than actually having a community into which I was sending out, as they say, messages in a bottle, and that can certainly be productive at times. But at certain points in a poet’s development, I think, it’s actually not very helpful.
As it happened, it was as a result of that Assembling Alternatives conference that I just mentioned that Trevor Joyce decided to hold some poetry festivals in the city he’s now living in, Cork on the south of Ireland, and he started up a poetry festival that eventually became known as The Sound Poetry Festival. It ran for twenty years and is something of a legend, in addition to giving its name to the grouping of poets I’ve been talking about, “The Soundeye Poets”, though it was far from being a festival for only Irish writers.
Unfortunately I was unable to go for several years just because of other commitments. But when I eventually went I was really impressed. In the Irish context, it’s probably funny to say, the community that he brought together was catholic, but in the strict sense of catholic. It was very catholic in its taste, embracing people from all over Europe, I mean from Poland, from Holland, from England and Scotland, as well as Australia, China, and also from the United States. Tom Raworth was nearly always there, as was Geoffrey Squires, a very fine Irish poet who spent most of his life away and whom I only ever met because of Soundeye. And it made me suddenly realize how many possibilities that were out there. And that really gave me a kind of spurt. Coming back to my own Irish context, but finding it now to be a context in which poets from all over the world congregated on equal terms, was, I think, a great stimulus to writing again. So at this point I now situate myself, in terms of Ireland’s contemporary poetry, in relation to the Soundeye Festival, which for 20 years was doing extraordinary things on a very shoestring budget, and in a very small city. But still, you know, just opening possibilities for all kinds of people.
RG: Does the festival still exist?
DL: It has closed down for now because running a conference, a festival like that, on a shoestring budget for 20 years in a row is enough to sap anybody’s energy, I think. I mean, I salute Trevor and the people who helped him, and eventually took over running the festival for a while, for an extraordinary endeavor. I think of it as just one of those events in literary history that make a difference to so many of us. There may be other events. Trevor and Fergal are running a little poetry book series, and things like that under the imprimatur of Soundeye. There may be other iterations internationally—and, indeed, I organized a Soundeye West at USC in 2007 when I taught there. But it’s not going to be an annual thing anymore, I suspect.
RG: I assume you see yourself as part of the US poetry community of your generation. Is that so?
DL: Well, I certainly I feel myself to be part of a vital poetry community here in Los Angeles.
I’m not sure how much my own work would circulate among other poetic communities in the United States. So that’s just an open question. But I would say that here in Los Angeles, we have an extraordinarily rich and supportive poetry community. And I say that because in every place I’ve lived, at least in every Anglophone place, in Dublin, in Cambridge, even to some extent in in Belfast, where I went to school, and in the Bay Area, the poetry communities were all quite contentious and polemical, and at odds with one another, and glowering across the bar at one another, so to speak.
RG: Yes, I see.
DL: Whereas in LA, maybe it’s because we all exist in the shadow of a huge cultural industry here, the cinematic and now, of course, the streaming industries. In that multi-billion dollar context, who the hell cares about poetry? In a way, I mean, the stakes are not high for poets, in relation to that culture, the culture industry, and so the staking of claims to territory or to critical priority is much less significant. It carries much less weight and that’s in the end quite freeing.
RG: But then, do you think it allows more freedom to experiment and be independent?
DL: Exactly. And there’s more acceptance of different kinds of poetry. There’s not such a big investment.
RG: Yes I think so.
DL: I think it is partly due to its subsidiary nature I mean. I think it’s the same with theater. One would think that under the shadow of Hollywood, theater would not thrive. But actually, there’s a tremendous theatre culture.
RG: Yes, there is great theater in LA.
DL: I mean, the other thing that I would want to say is that there’s also a tremendously racially diverse and, more importantly, fluidly intersecting poetic community here. Much more so, in my experience—I’m going limit it to that, my experience of the Bay Area’s poetry communities back in the day, which then felt quite segregated. As you know, and perhaps we’ll talk about that in a second, I was very close to a Chicano poet in the Bay Area, Alfred Arteaga. But here there is much greater fluidity. And maybe it’s generational. Maybe it’s a whole new generation of poets and poetries that people like Alfred helped to shape. But I think it is also something to do with the fluidity and wider economic and cultural energies that interchange in the Los Angeles area, and that has probably been enormously productive. I can’t say directly how it would have influenced my own writing and my own poetry. But I have found the poetry community here in LA extremely generative and generous.
RG: Yeah, I agree. And as you touched upon, you have been instrumental in the increasing interest in the experimental Chicano poet Alfred Arteaga, who was a friend of yours, and who’s Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems you edited and wrote an excellent introduction to. With Ricky Rodríguez you edited the current issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies focused on Arteaga’s work. Arteaga was both a scholar and an accomplished poet at the time of his untimely death. He was lauded by the likes of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and yet he has remained underrecognized. What do you think makes Arteaga’s poetry so distinct? And important?
DL: There’s so much to be said about Alfred. I got to know his work before he published his first book, Cantos. He sent me the drafts of it, and it was just so exciting to read it, and to know that he was about to come to Berkeley and take up a position in the same department as me. The thing with Alfred was that he was really rooted in the Chicano cultural movement. For example, we’re publishing, or republishing, I should say, an essay that he wrote on Fanon for the Chicano movement journal of the time, La Raza. So it was an essay written for a politically mobilizing journal. But one of the things that he says is really interesting. He says in that essay that one of the contributions that Fanon makes to the analysis of national culture, I’m paraphrasing here, is to show the way in which national cultures and national movements tend to fetishize, and, in a sense, to freeze the national culture around a certain fixed identity. And, Alfred says, it’s time now for Chicano Poetics and Chicano culture in general to move beyond that phase. I think that’s really so much about what his Collected Poems shows, the trajectory through which he moved. His cantos were influenced, of course, by Pound’s cantos, but they’re also influenced by Neruda’s Canto General. And what they are doing is collage, full of quotations and orchestrations. Certainly, in the first 4 of the cantos, he is doing that very, very elegantly and brilliantly. So he’s drawing on a range of different poetic traditions, bringing the European together with the American traditions, and this is what he did his whole life. He brings together, in ways that both clash and combine, a Chicano and a European poetics, because he studied French poetry, and, as you said, he was he was interested in French theory or philosophy, and he studied the work of a Belgian semiotics group and all kinds of things. He was a very brilliant intellectual who was no less a poet. And this is, I think, the thing that I really connect with him around. He always had the most tremendous ear and it was very important for him that poetry should continue to sing, however complex and challenging it might be. And the sound values of his poetry always continue to amaze me, and I think that was something that we agreed on. You know he was introducing a poet who was reading in a poetry series that he ran at Berkeley, and said, this person writes intelligent song. That seems to me to be a very good description of Alfred’s own work.
RG: Yeah.
DL: And I think that that junction, the idea that one can use one’s full intellect while also really valuing the music of the language, the lyrical music, is where the values of lyric persist beyond the demise of the subject and the identity structures that the “well-made poem” cleaves to. But also I would say it doesn’t exclude or preclude the more experimental and the use of complex language.
RG: And this is what I think excited me at the time, and excites me still. That it was such a new thing in terms of Chicano Poetics, that it freed up the language and broke from, as you mentioned, the monolithic identity of the national.
DL: And that was expressed in his poetry: it was, as you know, really needed. The thing is that he makes the language sing across several languages. The title of the volume comes from one of the cantos, where he actually introduces it as the last compound word in the poem, xicancuicatl, which means “Chicano song.” Cuicatl is the Nahuatl word for song. And xican is a Nahuatl-ized spelling of Chicano. But the word actually comes at the end of a sequence in which he’s been writing in English, Nahuatl and Russian, and, if I remember right, Spanish. So he’s playing across four different languages in just a few verse paragraphs, and making each of them sing to one another. That capacity is extraordinary, and his ear never fails. I mean, he’s constantly creating new sound combinations. And it’s a way to get, as it were, beyond traditional forms and language unities. But in a way that uses all kinds of resources, that plays with assonance and consonance, internal rhymes, and so forth. And I think that just formally what Alfred was doing, and always in in new forms, was changing the way we hear the language.
For me, that was also personally very important, because at the time we were really getting to know each other I was writing poems that came out in a Change of State (which actually was a chap book that he designed and put together) in which I was secreting into my own poetic language the European languages through which that poem’s “circuit” passes, from Dutch to Italian and French, so that they infuse the English. So I was very interested in what he was doing, in a way more openly, and that he was theorizing in terms of hybridity and polyglossia, in Chicano Poetics, as you mentioned. Using polyglot language phenomena, not as something that he was going to mimic, but something that gave him a way of thinking about language mixing, hybridization, and mingling, all as ways language is structured at its root.
RG: And do you think it was also using irony? I read a sort of irony there, in the juxtapositions of different languages and lyric modes. It’s also playful, as intellectual as it is. And fun to a certain extent.
DL: Yes, it’s profoundly playful. And it was part of his way of really speaking back to a moment in which, if you remember they were trying to impose English only. The irony is often at the expense of those who assume their intellectual or cultural superiority but are profoundly ignorant—of other languages, of other histories, of other cultures…..
RG: Yes, in the 1990’s.
DL: Yeah, I mean, mostly he was performing a language. But there are a few poems, in the volume Red (which is itself a multilingual pun!), in which he just goes straight at it given the racist, white supremacist cultural politics of the time.
RG: But in the poetry he was performing, so to speak.
DL: What polyvocality is like, what a multiplicity of languages can sound like, and how liberating that can be! And hence the playfulness is part of that sense of being liberated. He was very funny. He has these wonderful prose poem, some of the best contemporary prose poems, I think, in House with the Blue Bed. which are really witty. And in all kinds of ways. Even though in many cases they’re talking about things like his daughter having the police hold a gun to her head, somehow this sense of comedy comes out of out of his work all the way.
RG: As you state in the Introduction to Arteaga’s Collected Poems, in his poetry there is a “synthesis of two gravitational pulls, contemporary US experimental poetics and the more lyrical traditions of Latin American verse.” He remains a distinct poet, it seems to me, even more interesting to read now than when I first read him in the late 90s and early 2000s. How does his poetry speak to today’s decolonial world, and what has he contributed to contemporary North American poetry?
DL: What he has contributed, we can first say, is exactly that kind of synthesis. I mean, he’s able to bring together very different traditions of writing. And he does so with a real consciousness that this is a decolonial action that he’s undertaking. When I think of what he did in his later poetry, I think that his absolute masterpiece is his volume Frozen Accident, which has three sequences in it, which are really reimagining San Francisco as the site of a cultural confluence in which the Chicano element and the indigenous element are no longer understood to be subordinate but are actually a shaping force. And for me the central poem in that volume is the sequence “Nezahualcoyotl in Mictlan.” It’s an extraordinary work. It brings together the European tradition that goes back to Homer, Virgil, Dante, of the visit to the underworld, with a Nahuatl conception of the underworld and of a Nahuatl conception of geomancy and the framing of the world in terms of its coordinates. And it’s such an extraordinary achievement in some of the purest lyric verse that I think he ever managed to write.
And that operation of simply bringing Nahuatl poetics in through Nezahualcoyotl, one of the last princely poets in the pre-Colombian Aztec tradition and bringing him into absolutely equivalent conversation with the European classics, is crucial. And, again I think very wittily, he found his Virgil, Dante’s guide to the afterworld, in the figure of Xeritzin, who actually turns out to be the Nahuatl-ized name of Cherríe Moraga, who is his guide to the Aztec underworld, Mictlan. So he’s also giving Moraga the status of his poetic guide and forebear in the way that Virgil represented for Dante, in that same position. It’s very deft, how a playful form of cleverness is embedded in that poem. I think he offers a model for precisely what he was seeking, in that early essay I cited before, the capacity for poetry to model a being together of difference. That I would call justice, but we can also call it a decolonial form of justice where no longer is there subordination, but actually a kind of playfulness bringing together difference in ways which create the new. And the new is not something fixed. You know, it’s not something identified. It’s actually something that continues to shift and change each time you look at it.
RG: And there’s, as you know, a playfulness in all these very innovative, interesting kinds of ideas in which he structures the poems, that I think have aged well. In other words, perhaps in the nineties it was just very new, and perhaps an audience was not ready for it.
DL: That seems to me quite probable. That they seemed quite impenetrable to some people. And they’re not. They’re not easy, by any means. I mean, you really do have to do some work on them to figure out what he’s doing. But, as you say, they’re playful and very rewarding. They’re also deeply moving. I mean “Nezahualcoyotl in Mictlan” ends with a beautiful tribute, and I’ve never figured out why, to a French-Canadian poet called Marie Uguay. I’ve not established what relation to Arteaga this French-Canadian poet from Quebec had. She turns up in several of his sequences, all through his career, and it virtually ends with her. She’s his Beatrice and the last, utterly simple lines of that poem, which I’ll leave people to seek out for themselves, are just incredibly moving. So he has a deeper sense of the elegiac as well as everything else, that I’m pretty sure had to do with his own brushes with mortality at the time. That capacity to bring together genuine regrets and sorrow with a playful sense of the language and of form. A really magnificent achievement, actually.
RG: Yeah, I mean, and there’s so many angles from which to approach his poetry. When you mentioned LA, which I had not thought as much in relation to Arteaga’s poetry, but certainly he writes also from his own social geography, in a sense, in California, in Los Angeles, and I find that very interesting, because there’s no one, especially at that time, who represented Los Angeles and California in such an imaginative, new way. And the language was challenging, but in a seductive way. It wasn’t oppressive. It wasn’t challenging your intelligence. It was inviting you to think differently about the Mexican presence, or the imaginary Mexican Indigenous presence in the land of California. But it was a very different poetry because it expressed a sense of place described in such a distinct way.
DL: And that’s been very meaningful to people. It’s interesting you bring this up because many of the essayists who are in the volume of Aztlán that you mentioned, the one I edited with Ricky Rodríguez, start their essays by saying how they came across Arteaga, and were stunned to discover a poet who was born in Whittier. “Oh, there can be poets coming out of Whittier, you know?” I don’t find that astonishing at all, given that I came from a tiny little village outside Dublin, but I think that for people who have been constantly told that they have no culture, that was very important for me to hear. Coming here to California, I came from being an Irish person in Cambridge. You can imagine what it was like then, at the height of the IRA campaign, to be in England in the 1970s and early 80s. Irishness was not actually something that was always welcomed and you know there was a lot of casually anti-Irish racism at the time. But knowing that you came out of a culture with which the English had to reckon (even if they usually claimed “major” irish writers to be British!) was actually really important in that context. Yeats and Beckett were on my side! So when I came here I had absolutely no problem understanding why we needed to diversify the curriculum, why we need to consider not just dropping in the one or two symbolic writers at the end of a syllabus, as a mere tokenism, but to engage fully with the alternatives so called “underrepresented” writers offer in terms of a range of forms of creativity and of relations to the world.
So personally speaking, here in the United States, my encounters with Black and Chicano writing have been among the most important parts of my own formation as a poet. I mean, reading Nate Mackey, reading Fred Moten, reading Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge or, quite differently, June Jordan’s writing as well as her work with Poetry for the People. Reading Cherríe’s work, you know, when I first came across Loving in the War Years in the early eighties, just blew me away. Curiously, one of the first books I bought when I came to the US, totally on spec, as I had no idea who this person was, was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. It was so important for me to find someone writing in the way that she did, and I think the connection for me was made immediately because of my interest in French poets and French experimental poetry. I graduated from Baudelaire and Rimbaud onto some of the later French poets like Denis Roche, Anne-Marie Albiach, Michel Deguy and others who were writing more open-ended, very paratactic, collage-form and allusive poems that influenced my early work. So that was interesting to find similar things going on in someone like Theresa Cha.
RG: Yeah. I see that also. I read Dictée around the same time when I was in in graduate school, at the same time as Arteaga’s scholarly work. Also, if I remember correctly, this idea of hybridity was interesting at the time, and the fact that he was a Shakespeare scholar, that for me was very exciting, because it embodied a sense of what is referred to in Latin America as cosmopolitan. But I think it was just an openness to language and to a kind of international worldview that perhaps was not favored, if you happened to be Chicano. He had, it seems to me, an international global outlook that is more acceptable now, but I don’t know if at the time it was something that didn’t work in his favor.
DL: I don’t know. Cherríe Moraga talks about that in her foreword to the to the Collected Poems, and she admits how daunted she felt by him, turning up at parties for poets, and Arteaga having just come back from Italy or Spain, you know. But Alfred was just like a kind of adventurer. And I know, because he spent a lot of time in Ireland, which was another way that that we connected, I know from the people that he hung out with there that his interests were not, you know, a cultural climbing kind of interest. He wasn’t hanging out necessarily with the poets who would have helped to make a reputation, that that sort of thing. He was just meeting people, getting involved with whatever the scene was locally and hanging out with them and enjoying himself. I always admired that in him, he traveled as a cosmopolitan, sure, but also with just a genuine curiosity about the world. An intellectual curiosity too, I mean. You know he read French philosophy, but he also read an awful lot of Latin American poetry, much of which I’m not sufficiently familiar with. His cantos are citing Joyce. There’s a way in which he must have been a voracious reader. And I think for any writer that’s perhaps the most important thing is to read widely and read deeply. And let it let it permeate you.
RG: Yeah, I, I think so. It comes across in his language and in his poetry…Now to end.
I wanted to ask you what you are currently working on.
DL: Oh, gosh! I have several ongoing projects that will take me a lot of time to complete. I’m actually working with one of the earliest forms that I played with when I was learning to break out of that rather narrow Irish tradition, which is collage writing, partly learnt from Denis Roche back then. So I’m currently putting together a collection of prose collages that turn on weaving and on textiles. It was inspired by reading Annie Albers’s book on weaving. She was one of the women in the Bauhaus group and her preface ends just with this little phrase that “whatever this is, it is the event of a thread.” And I thought, I just had one of those moments when you’ll read a phrase, and it will click, and something will start coming. I grew up in a country where, of course, textiles were really important. I mean, it was what we produced, Irish wool. And linen. Then, as I was putting a variety of texts together with Albers’s book, my mother walked in because she was actually a very good seamstress. She made clothes for my sister and herself, and I still have little articles of clothing that she knitted. To my great surprise, in she walked. And it’s not an autobiographical poem, by any means, and I’m spinning fictions around memories of her, the sewing machine she used and things. Right now, I’m also having to do research on British colonialism in Ireland, and the destruction of the wool industry there as part of this, because I’m thinking about textiles as a site of colonial devastation. It was true for the Egyptians, for the Indians, you know how the English also destroyed their industries, local weaving industries, and so forth. In a way, this is my attempt to integrate something of my own longstanding fascination with textiles and almost fetishization of textile and texture with a larger colonial history.
While doing that I’ve also been writing a sequence that came to me by surprise, a series of poems that are actually in their shape quite formal, each one is three quatrains. And they started as just little phenomenological poems, just thinking about how poetry comes to one in moments of silence, or moments just when some little unanticipated perception takes place. The way I think about poetry is not that you try to crystallize an experience, but that you allow some impulse, whether it’s a phrase or whether it’s a moment of sensation on the skin, you allow that to become the site from which language takes off and follows its on direction of flight. And in this case, I think, the poems started taking off and then became infused with the violence that’s going on in our world right now, which I hadn’t been expecting would be where it would go. But inevitably that’s where it’s been going. So I don’t know where it’s going take me. But the poems keep coming, so we’ll see where that goes.
RG: Great, two very different kinds of projects, it seems.
DL: Yes, two very different kinds of project. I’m also working on a couple of plays, at least doing the first planning of them, but that’s a whole other business…..
from The Bone Wine
VIII
Bent words flared to embers
in the mouth, they weigh
on the tongue, laden
like meat on the slab.
Ash filter sifts the bone wine
all the untenanted graves
corpse pits bared to the deadly
blue of the sky. All round
a white song chirps
out of the clinker, ware
ware, war we are
wages on. And on. And on.
IX
August. The saturated air
screwed down on the skull,
bone dry, every pine needle
etched in relentless blue.
This spiral writing in stone
unread still. In every death
a world dies, they say, their cries
drift up to glut an immobile sun.
Not touched, not mourned, not seared
into the hide of the earth, only
this scorched sand trickling down
to the mute hollow of the hand
