Photo: Nina Subin Alan Gilbert’s writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety of publications, including Artforum, Bomb, and Rain Taxi. Recent poems have appeared in The Baffler, Chicago Review, and First Intensity. A collection of critical writings entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight will be published in the fall of 2005 by Wesleyan University Press. He is the editor of NYFA Quarterly, an arts and culture magazine published by the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City. To see some poetry, go here. To read an essay on art, poetry, and politics after 9/11, go here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I imagine that for many writers song lyrics constitute their initial encounter with what might be called “poetry.” For myself, the first poetry I connected with were rap songs released as 12” records on the Sugar Hill label in the early ’80s. I was in 6th/7th grade and living in Washington, DC, and whenever my parents took me to the local Montgomery Ward I knew from experience to buy any rap single packaged with the distinctive sky blue record cover and candy-striped Sugar Hill logo, regardless of whether I’d heard of the song or the group (which 80% of the time I hadn’t). Because these were 12” records, they were only a few dollars: perfect for someone whose allowance was something like 50¢ a week. More so than, say, “Rapper’s Delight,” my favorite rap song back then was the Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder”—one of the pinnacles of the genre’s formative years, at least until Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” came out and changed the rules. I wasn’t writing poetry at the time, but “8th Wonder” was an idea of language that fascinated me. Along with being the year “8th Wonder” dropped, 1981 was when Gil Scott-Heron unleashed the steely rage of “B Movie” (try listening to it now, and you’ll see what I mean, especially in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s recent post-mortem beatification). Montgomery Ward didn’t have the 7” record of this song, so I had to convince my mom to drive me to an independent record store in the District to get a hold of it. Simply put, “B Movie” taught me that poetry can be infused with direct political content. Later, in high school, during one phase of my alternative music listening days, the song lyrics that felt closest to my idea of poetry were those written by Rozz Williams of the über-goth band Christian Death, particularly the lyrics on the album Catastrophe Ballet (an album Williams dedicated to André Breton). This coincided with my first real immersion in the reading and writing of poetry. My Cheyenne, WY, public high school library had somehow purchased a beautiful burgundy hardbound copy of Paul Auster’s Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, which I carried around with me like a personal bible literally everywhere I went; I was also deep into the poetry and prose poems of Charles Baudelaire (the first book of poetry I ever bought—perhaps the first book I ever bought—was a selected Baudelaire). For a year or so, Christian Death complimented this aesthetic sensibility nicely. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Within a more strictly poetry context, there seem to be two opposing models of literary/non-literary reading. The first is Charles Olson’s notion of the “saturation job,” as defined in “A Bibliography on American for Ed Dorn”: “Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever.” The second model I heard Bernadette Mayer mention in conversation (and also read bell hooks describe in an interview): which is to read as widely as possible, to read everything. Of course both models could be adapted to more or less exclusively literary or non-literary texts. I’ve moved more from a saturation job approach to a kitchen sink approach. I also have a tendency to read more secondary materials than primary texts. As a result, I’m not sure if I read a lot of “literary” materials. Is the internet literary? Because I constantly skim the internet. Are magazines literary? At least half of my reading each week is devoted to magazines: Artforum, London Review of Books, The Nation, Time Out New York, and The Wire are currently the staples, with various supplements: from Adbusters to Z Magazine and poetry/poetics journals such as Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics and Tripwire. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Poetry and art that don’t exhibit at least some form of criticality—which is how I would define “philosophy” here—usually end up being the equivalent of fading wallpaper. That said, it’s imperative that no person or group be allowed to dictate a correct form of criticality, in terms of either the production or reception of poetry and art. That would be very uncritical/unphilosophical, i.e., it would be dogmatism. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I’d have to say that the majority of the material I seriously read, look at, or listen to is produced by “non-Anglo-American” artists. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Less and less, though this doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much I think about poetry. Rather, in my critical writings I’ve used art and music to talk about poetry, and poetry to talk about art and music, so reading and writing about poetry may possibly be in inverse proportion to my thinking about poetry. Ultimately, however, I’m disinclined to conceive of poetry as a category separate from a broad range of cultural products. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? When I was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I had the opportunity based on the course work I had completed during my first three years to become an English major if I took a few British lit survey courses and a canonical author class. At the time, I could think of nothing more tedious than having to read 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century classic British novels, and so opted to become a Humanities major instead, which had a less concentrated focus. Consequently (and this is a comment on my aforementioned public high school education, as well as my graduate studies in English literature at SUNY Buffalo), I’ve never read Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, A Tale of Two Cities, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers, Brave New World, Animal Farm or 1984, etc. I’ve never read Paradise Lost, and I’ve read only three or four Shakespeare plays. Shameful! And while I’m certainly not proud of my ignorance of these books, and would like to have been able to read them at some point, another part of me doesn’t consider it a huge loss. Not learning to speak Spanish when I was younger is a much bigger regret. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A poem exposes the mechanisms whereby common sense is used to make ruling ideologies seem natural and eternal, and your seven year old has a fresher—though no less precarious—understanding of this mechanism than most adults and many poets. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? When I turned 20 (that it coincided with this particular birthday was arbitrary), I made a personal vow to write poetry for one hour every day. 14 years later, I’m still trying to stick to this schedule. You can get a relatively substantial amount of writing done by working one hour a day every day. I once read somewhere that Gertrude Stein made a commitment to writing at least 15 minutes every day, although I don’t write with a notebook open on my lap while holding conversations with other people, and I don’t have someone else typing up my manuscripts for me, so that’s another story. Needless to say, during the past 14 years I’ve rarely been able to write for an hour each and every day. Not even close. I have, however, done a lot of dishes during those 14 years. In fact, if all my time was tallied up, I’d sadly be forced to admit that I’ve probably spent as much time washing the dishes during the past 14 years as I’ve spent writing poetry. My point is that just as I don’t walk around calling myself a dishwasher, despite a relatively serious commitment of overall time and energy to the task, I don’t consider myself a poet, either. It may only be when the experience of art is no longer a separate category from everyday life that it has a chance to make a difference, to have a “role.” This doesn’t have to be literal, in the same way that I’m not literally a dishwasher or literally a poet. After all, conceptual art is a serious effort to collapse art into the everyday (as is commodity capitalism, though in a different way: the former fetishizes the intangible, the latter the how-can-I-get-my-hands-on-it?). 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**wax Chiseled**ape I**owes Of**off, on, onto Form**morph 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? The relationship between texts and material conditions is something I try to stay aware of as much as possible. I don’t regard the body as separate from these material conditions: it, too, is a construction; or at least our understanding of it is. Wasn’t it Althusser who said art occupies the space between science and ideology? He was wrong: art occupies the space between ideology and social formations. In this sense, all art is about the body, because ideology leaves its marks on the body, and the more “othered” the body (by ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, war, geography, age, etc.), the more deeply inscribed—which isn’t the same as legible—the marks. Whiteness aims to be the invisibility of marks. If language (discourse) is the tool of this inscription, then poetry is the writing of scars.