{"id":73634,"date":"2014-07-08T12:12:28","date_gmt":"2014-07-08T16:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73634"},"modified":"2014-07-10T11:07:51","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T15:07:51","slug":"those-who-hope-not-to-be-erased-an-interview-with-carol-muske-dukes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/08\/those-who-hope-not-to-be-erased-an-interview-with-carol-muske-dukes\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Who Hope Not to Be Erased: An Interview with Carol Muske-Dukes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Carlos Puma.<\/p><\/div>\n

A writer and poet whose verse recently appeared in the Spring issue<\/a> of <\/em>The Paris Review\u2013Carol Muske-Dukes<\/a> has long been interested and active in presenting a public face of poetry. A former poet laureate of California and a teacher for many years, she founded the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and began a writing program, in 1972, at the Women\u2019s House of Detention on Rikers Island in New York. On the heels of National Poetry Month, I spoke with\u00a0Muske-Dukes at her home in Southern California about the many contemporary approaches to reading, writing, and thinking about the art of poetry, from hip-hop to \u201cunoriginal genius\u201d and how language matters.<\/em><\/p>\n

What do you think the public face of poetry looks like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that \u201cthere is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,\u201d but we need education, because \u201cwe have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music\u2014that you can\u2019t expect to read it like a novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years ago, the New York Times<\/em> published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry.<\/p>\n

Is there a particular critical ideology you have in mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of the idea of \u201cunoriginal genius,\u201d though no one outside of the academy much cares about how some academic critics are now promoting it. \u201cUnoriginal genius,\u201d oxymoronic as it sounds, means simply that you can call yourself a genius in this age of technology if you\u2019re savvy at editing, deleting, and erasing certain words from canonical poems and calling what remains proof of your genius. You also use collage and citation, \u00e0 la Benjamin\u2019s Arcade Project<\/em>, and appropriation\u2014as in borrowing the words of others\u2014to promote your ability to use scissors and the delete key.<\/p>\n

What do you think people are trying to accomplish by approaching poetry in that manner?<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a time when people appear to want poetry to make some sense, or maybe offer a bit of beauty and wisdom shaped from the chaos in which we live, or at least offer insight into the contradictory realities in which we live, it is particularly unfortunate that this retreat into obscurity and critical narcissism is the response by those who study poetry and think about it. Proponents of unoriginal genius would say that they are putting forward a version of interpretation and illumination of a technological age. But the fact is, this mirroring of disjunction represents no real speaking or reading or thinking population. Ironically, citational, appropriative, and erasure configurations often create a far more manipulative and self-conscious \u201cself\u201d than the \u201cconstructed self\u201d that \u201canti-cult-of-the-author\u201d proponents condemn. What is being conflated is a salvation notion of technology as popularity\u2014which ultimately, it is not. The struggle here, as it is with overly accessible, catchy poetry, is a struggle to be both popular and enlightening.<\/p>\n

We live in a time when language matters. Not only because of the constant threat of misunderstanding in translation\u2014in diplomacy, in wartime, in the university and literary life\u2014but, as always, in individual human relations. So the abdication of accessible rhetoric and a turn toward so-called scholarship is an abdication of the human. The academy has opted for pointless experimentation in language compared to my mother\u2019s generation\u2014she\u2019s ninety-eight\u2014of well schooled, publicly educated students of poetry who know pages and pages of poetry by heart. Should anyone who believes in sense be ostracized from the ongoing conversation of literature?<\/p>\n

What was this sense of poetry that your mother had, which she passed down to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Long ago, on a cold, snowy Minnesota afternoon, standing in line at the post office with my mother, I sighed in boredom and heard the quote, \u201cThey also serve, who only stand and wait.\u201d This famous line would probably not be recognized now, not only because so few passionately read poetry, including those who write it. Few might recognize the author, fewer still that the observation is timeless\u2014lightning outside of century or culture.<\/p>\n

The line asks the listener or reader to consider something mysterious, profound, and marginalized\u2014those who hope not to be erased! Readers still engaging with Milton know how to think aesthetically, how to feel tone. Do I find this ultimate line of Milton\u2019s \u201cOn His Blindness\u201d\u2014or in fact, the entire sonnet\u2014far more moving and challenging intellectually than a collage poem by conceptualists? Well, yes. I have nothing against the incorporation of great lines into ongoing contemporary poems, in the style of Susan Howe\u2019s or Susan Wheeler\u2019s successful poems. I\u2019m not attacking unconventional inventiveness or types of homage or citation. I\u2019m talking about the deadening of poetic sensibility\u2014a version, I guess, of tone deafness.<\/p>\n

So if the public face of poetry is a bit shadowed, it\u2019s still visible. For every genius celebrating his or her unoriginality, there are those who still read and think, connected to the force of original thought\u2014the art of consciousness.<\/p>\n

Is \u201cunoriginal genius\u201d something that, in your experience, is confined to the academy, or have you encountered it in your time teaching?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I founded a Ph.D. program in creative writing\/literature in a university setting, but I also established, years ago, a prison program at the Women\u2019s House of Detention on Rikers Island, and we ended up offering writing workshops in poetry, fiction, and playwriting throughout all prisons in New York State. The writing was student-ish\u2014often bad political verse or excessively romantic rhetoric or familiar memoir self-pity. If the inmates\u2019 poetry struggled to breathe, so does the poetry of academia, so does the imprisoned spirit of misogynist rap. Writers \u201cinside\u201d responded to the prompt all poets need to hear\u2014your voice still matters, but you must read everything, you must enter into the great conversation of literature and listen to the voices of the dead and honor them, talk to them, and then, and only then, write. Not one of the inmates\u2014though they became great readers of literature\u2014cared about erasures. Their whole lives were erasures. They would have said that those who erase memory, the past, an enduring aesthetic, only erase themselves as writers. <\/p>\n

There is the idea that poetry is essential but that it\u2019s divorced from ordinary life and ordinary experience.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you took a survey of the U.S. population, it would seem that poetry is irrelevant. I\u2019ve found that students and citizens of other countries have a stronger connection to poetry. If American poets still seek to reach a public or community\u2014apart from poem excerpts on the subway\u2014they have to return to what makes poetry both powerfully solo and yet connected to all living things.<\/p>\n

In recent years, you\u2019ve written novels and nonfiction, and those forms get more attention than poetry does.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Poetry is like mailing a letter to the void. But maybe this is as it should be. \u201cI\u2019m nobody \/ who are you?\u201d But \u201cthe soul selects her own society\u201d all the same. I write about this in a collection of essays of mine, Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood<\/em>, which was just republished as an e-book. I haven\u2019t given up on technology.<\/p>\n

Why did you recently do a book signing at a Hudson News in the Los Angeles International Airport?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A USC colleague of mine, the splendid David Roman, was in the United Terminal at LAX, and as he was walking by Hudson News, he saw my name emblazoned on the bookstore marquee. He saw Melville and then this nobody, Carol Muske-Dukes, so he took a picture and sent it to me. Then I heard from somebody at that bookstore asking if I would come out and sign books. I signed both novels and poetry, but the novels were the ones people were most interested in.<\/p>\n

Was there a good crowd?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Actually, it was pretty good. I mean talk about a captive audience! They\u2019ve never heard of me but they\u2019d buy a book because I was there. I had this idea\u2014what if we had something called Air Poets? Give readings and sign books at various terminals all over the world. Now there\u2019s a terrible idea!<\/p>\n

You run the writing program at USC, and I\u2019m curious if you think that writing programs specialize too much.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t run it anymore, though I advise and participate. But I did found and launch the thing, on my own. I had to overcome resistance on the part of English department. Former friends, colleagues tried to deep-six the program, which they thought would be a threat to the status quo, plus it would \u201cspecialize too much\u201d\u2014a studio art in academia. I fought hard for it and won. Now the program is very successful and the naysayers adore it. I chose to start a Ph.D. program, rather than an M.F.A., partly because I felt that many M.F.A. programs weren\u2019t emphasizing reading enough. It was all about writing aimlessly, that is to say, specializing\u2014like majoring in shop without making a birdhouse\u2014caught up in literary trends specific to a genre ghetto. You enter most programs as a poet or a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer and you stay in that club.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fascinated by how many writers are uninterested in poetry.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writers think there\u2019s nothing in the art of poetry for them. They\u2019re wrong. I\u2019m a genre leaper. I don\u2019t see much difference among types of writing, prose or poetry. Most writing students haven\u2019t read poetry extensively, broadly, wildly. If poetry students don\u2019t read broadly, why should anyone else? They read only their contemporaries, no interest in the past as present. Every writing program or conference should offer refresher zones\u2014reading without writing for a brief or long while. Fill up the well if you want to be a writer. We live in an age where you can celebrify yourself instantly. You can pimp yourself in poetry or fiction overnight\u2014anybody can publish anything now because of the Internet. With no critical standards and little reading, we aren\u2019t talking about imaginative writing anymore. We\u2019re talking about a cottage industry and the creation of artifacts and trinkets. The solitude of the writing experience\u2014solitude that reads and converses with the great dead\u2014seems an enemy of technology. Though, finally, I don\u2019t believe this is true. There are poets of all ages who are not threatened by technology but do not have to use it as a club\u2014in both senses of the word.<\/p>\n

And just to bring it back to where we started, we\u2019re talking about the public face of something that is largely created and experienced in solitude.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wordsworth was right. That\u2019s how he defined poetry\u2014emotion recollected in solitude. Does that sound like a clich\u00e9? The reality is that we live in an age that works against poetry. Poetry is an act of attention and we\u2019re in a time where having an attention deficit is the norm. We\u2019re bombarded with images and information, but images and information are not knowledge\u2014and they\u2019re certainly not poetry.<\/p>\n

Alex Dueben has written for <\/em>The Poetry Foundation, <\/em>The Daily Beast,<\/em> the<\/em> Los Angeles Times,<\/em> Suicidegirls,<\/em> and others. His interview with William Gibson was included in <\/em>Conversations with William Gibson<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A writer and poet whose verse recently appeared in the Spring issue of The Paris Review\u2013Carol Muske-Dukes has long been interested and active in presenting a public face of poetry. 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