ISSUE 7
Last Updated: 15 April 2005

Into Form: A Conversation
Kathleen Fraser & Lauren Shufran

Lauren Shufran: I suppose we'll begin the conversation with beginnings. One thing I find fascinating about your work is its perpetual re-presencing / re-presenting of these palpable images, and yet beneath them / coupled with them are these clearly very personal emotional undertones. In the essay "How did Emma Slide," you said the structure of your Emma Slide poem had discovered itself out of necessity, and in "The Uncontainable," you say "you are compelled to escape the predictable as it has come to limit your movement." Do you find most of your work begins this way, with the emotive? Are those emotions, or their catalysts, internal or external? And how does thinking about the poem as a social space help you make that movement from the emotive, a "springboard" for the poem, into something that will eventually be socially situated?

Kathleen Fraser: It's more complex than an "emotive" undertone, or a choice between "internal and external" . . . more like an undertow composed of visual or word cues that I find to be pulling at me - a subtle drag of attention towards an exterior image / word / subject that clearly flags ongoing internal questions of urgency that may have been brooding without conscious attention for some time. Learning to recognize that slightest tug of curiosity or urge is my workout - to make note of the tug and bring it consciously into the field of my attention . . . and then to return to it, to give it a body in language.

For example, WING - well, it's really complicated how it was written but the narrative of how it came together is perhaps worth describing. I'd been looking at these paintings by Mel Bochner, who was working at the American Academy while I was in Rome one spring. I'd met him and talked with him briefly a few years earlier in NYC, so when I went up to the AAR to hear him lecture, he invited me to come to his studio and see what he was working on. As it turned out, the paintings were variations on abstract cubes hurtling through space - white against black, or black against white . . . and there were some colored ones, too. I thought his paintings were interesting but I wasn't really compelled by them. Still, they made me curious and I admired them, intellectually.

Then a couple years later Mel did an installation in an apartment in Rome that had been used during WW II to house Gypsies, Jews and Communists - anyone the Facist regime saw as being an "outsider" or threatening to their political goals. Such people were imprisoned in this apartment for months, then eventually sent off to the death camps. Mel did an installation in this space - transformed after WW II into the Museo Storico della Liberazione di Roma - where he spread rumpled army blankets, like "canvasses," over the floors of three rooms and on each blanket constructed a six-pointed Jewish star of burnt match sticks. One was a mass of burnt matches piled within the outline of the star's six points; another was composed of triangles made from 365 burnt matches to mark the days of one year in the life of the prisoners held there. These pieces - ingenious geometric patterns - were, at the same time, carriers of grief, loss and fear. Their impact was extraordinary.

At that point, I had the two sets of images together in my mind - the cubes and the stars - and I really wanted to write about them, but I couldn't imagine how I was going to write about cubes? Then Norma Cole's book arrived in the mail. It was called MARS and in the middle of the cover was this very finely collaged piece by Jess - Robert Duncan's companion - and in the middle of that collage there was a griffin with a highly etched wing. When I saw that wing, it suddenly gave me my starting place and I began to write. But also in the background was the fact that Joe Brainard was dying of AIDS in NYC. Joe had been a friend of mine in the early Sixties whose collages and paintings I found intriguing - I still have a "flag & oranges" painting in my study that I bought from him in 1964. For many years, Joe's companion was Kenward Elmslie, whose wacky poems and libretti I loved, so when I went through NYC the next spring on my way to Rome I visited Kenward and we talked a lot about Joe, who was very ill in the hospital. So I had them both on my mind during the time I was writing WING - Joe was dying and Kenward was living and suffering. They both appear in this poem . . . they are the two men walking, their bodies & spirits changing form.

But what interests me, in retrospect, is that Mel Bochner's paintings and subsequent installation didn't come together for this serial poem until five years later. The abstract cubes were not, when first encountered, an obvious "emotive springboard" for me, yet they compelled my attention again after seeing the second work of his - the installation. Once I found my point of entry into this material, I was completely riveted . . . and all that I'd been carrying in me, that touched on living and dying, entered into it. Was I thinking about how my words would be socially situated? No. I worked in a kind of trance in which "out there" had no existence. Yet the poem, when finished, was clearly addressing the shared human situation of death, the breaking-down of matter and its concomitant rebuilding of the New. Was the double visual / political impact of these seemingly unrelated sets of images - their emotional unfolding in me over years - external or internal? Both, I think.

LS: So the page became a literal space and not one that was an abstract concept - a space as background for the printed poem?

KF: Exactly . . . "no ideas but in things" - the materiality of the page. When I came to writing the sonnet sequence "when new time folds up," its urgent and disintegrating form was dictated by the particular historic moment and the physical place in which I was living - Rome, May 1992. To begin with, the outside walls of our 19th-century apartment building were being blasted off and replastered every weekday from 8 am to 5 pm during the entire time we were there, from February through June. Also, these violently loud car sirens - remember that new toy? - seemed to be going off almost continuously, especially in the early morning hours. During this same interval, there'd been a major confrontation between Mafia forces controlling Sicily and the Italian judiciary determined to convict and imprison the most vicious bosses. Two major Italian judges and their wives were blown up by Mafia thugs and these murders took place near the Palermo airport the same day that I flew back into Rome from a poetry conference in Berlin. This seemingly unrelated cultural event carried a cross-current of violence, for we later learned that our conference had taken place in the very same lodge on Lake Wansee (outside Berlin) where, "the final solution" had been deliberated. It was not strange, then, that those terrifying forces began to enter my dreams.

I suddenly knew how I wanted to construct those sonnets - to have the exploded matter of our literal building, as well as pieces of European history, falling outside of the poem's body. It felt as if my entire life were breaking into little pieces. I could no longer avoid violence in my work. I decided to work on fourteen "sonnets" of 13 & 1/2 lines each, figuratively using the last half of the fourteenth line as material falling into the right margin of the poem. I wanted to embody the chaos, disintegration and fragility that marked my life all that spring and to focus on the visual shattering in the right margin as leftover language and fragmented response to the solid sonnet's more substantial historic claims.

When I came to the problem of titling them, I decided to pull a line from the 13 lines to act as both title and repeating musical phrase inside the poem's body so that the repetition of sound would be contained and repeated within that particular unit. This repetition helps to nail down the swift wall of sound, even as the lines themselves are moved along by peculiar syntactic hinges. I think that line repetition helps to create what you have called "the silence that moves," for it gives the reader a moment of pause and recognition in which to hold the line - already taken-in as both familiar and de-familiarized in its new context.

LS: Many of your poems end with a sudden distention of time: "The decision" ends: "She watched them closely during the following year and was able to make several startling decisions with split-second timing;" "this. notes. new year." ends "Next year, it's snowing;" "One of the Chapters" ends "as her velvet dress becomes smaller and smaller and her father forgets her." It is as if the poem is actually trying to spring itself into the world / the future upon completion. There exists also, in some works, a pushing back into the past: "Etruscan Pages" ends "Before that / dancers;" "A Little Background: the Sisters" ends "you may have known me. Once. / Once could." ) This does not arrive for you as a question of how the poem will move into and situate itself in the world?

KF: The question arrives as a personal grammar, a way of locating skepticism towards aspects of the social world via peculiar diction. That particular poem, "A Little Background: the Sisters," is related to a very early poem called "Change of Address" which refuses a simplified, socially constructed identity, not wanting to be pinned down too easily to a neatly defined - i.e. static - set of personality traits . . . you know, this is who you are, this is how you are. Well, I may have been there once, I might pass through there again sometime, but don't pin me down (laughter).

It’s primarily an evasion of temporal constraint assumed from the outside; in this sense, my poetry has always been - in part - a resisting response to the social world as rule-giver and value enforcer, at least in my refusal to be limited by particular codes proposed as the current norm. This detour has made its way through my poetry since the mid-Sixties . . . you might say that syntax and ideas of construction have provided me with tools to evade the consolation of the over-simple . . . and have helped to locate my skeptical reading of the givens by way of an erratic diction that speaks for that perspective.

My poems have often given me a way of evading any social space that threatens to be groggy or overly-prescriptive. There has clearly been some satisfaction in moving out-of-sync - i.e. sinking below the horizon of an organized past, present, or future tense within a particular sentence. The imagination is pulling one’s sense of time forward, or backward, but the poet must disrupt words’ relations to locate the new reality of that shift.

LS: I know I’ve found for myself that there is often a shift in focus, or expectancy, when nearing the end of a piece, and how will this finalize itself - and I saw that here - that there’s this temporal shift, so quick, and then it’s over.

KF: So it happens without your having planned that.

LS: Yes, well not consciously, I suppose.

KF: It’s what happens with mine, for sure. Because when you think of a plan - as when one thinks of a Shakespearian sonnet, where the last two lines take a turn and reflect back on the poem - a change of time or perception does take place, but that shift is built into the convention. Adhering to a conventional formal model can be an interesting device, however, because it captures or initiates a changing perspective that is clearly useful to move one’s expectations around at the end of a seemingly completed investigation, a sort of opening-the-door so that you don’t get stuck in an oversimplified place.

So even though we may not want to be told that we must follow a certain model of writing, the choice to adhere to prescribed rules has, in fact, produced various brilliant works. The point is to invent one’s own snaggy compositional ideas - allowing them to be suggested by the material being investigated. So the rules of organization are often part of how you find your poem.

LS: Back to your sonnets from WHEN NEW TIME FOLDS UP, that adhered to the parameters of the traditional sonnet only in that they had approximately fourteen lines, with words that seemed pushed or thrown out forcefully at the margins of each. They seem related in their concerns to Barbara Guest’s “novel” or something like Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets, an extension of those “fixed” parameters, undercutting the expected to reveal the capability of altering / renewing boundaries. Do they begin, for you, as such? A “generic link” to the lyric poem, but its movements from such parameters showing the urban life of interruption, such as that in Berlin . . . maybe the spirit of interruption into form?

KF: Yes, I like your phrase "interruption into form" . . . it is, in part, the recognition that the existing conventions of "formal" beauty will no longer do for the war-torn psychological continuum in which we have lived since the late Sixties. The old containers can only represent a kind of safe tedium and exhaustion and are without convincing energy. It is interesting to find ways of expressing the break-down of a city - its nervous system, its rooted assaults, the disintegration of the exteriors of buildings . . . surfaces peeling and cracking and shedding . . . graffiti winning over nobility of architectural forms and the violation of cities by greed.

Living in Rome has put a speed and pressure behind the lines of those urban sonnets, probably more violent than what one finds in Guest's more reflective tones. I needed to let the assault of the contemporary world come through me and into the sound and piling-up of this particular sequence. Murder was in the air, and it was palpable.

LS:But what about process? This breaking down, the interruption, the assault - there are ways of both working it into and wresting it out from the text - yes, beginning with a blank page and writing "in" the interruption, but also using methods of extraction, "un-writing," or taking the writing itself as is and breaking it up from there.

KF: Last spring, a different "interruption into form" happened in the process of writing/constructing my recent book, HI DDE VIOLETH I DDE VIOLET (Nomados Press, Vancouver, 2003). The outbreak began from a text I wrote while trying to amass a somewhat detailed record of what was going on during an Easter/Passover holiday in the Roman countryside, within the ambience of an Italian family I've known very well and have spent Easter weekends with for years. I kept working and revising this text until finally I had to put it aside. It was too "good," you know, so finished and tucked-in that it erased the sense of violation and loss that had flooded my psyche the entire spring. The war was going on, four of my friends had died in the last three months, another was recovering from a stroke, and it just felt as though everything was breaking apart and had holes in it. You couldn't count on anything, everything was being pulled out from under . . .

LS: And here you were, holding this finished thing . . .

KF: Yeah, there I was, trying to hold everything together in the poem and make it cohere. Meanwhile, my artist friends in Rome had been preparing for a group show at an architectural school in a big old palazzo near-by. I was excited about what was going on, but I was also a bit envious because I wanted to be making something visual, too. But all I had was my words. One morning I suddenly decided to "blow-up" my text into such large type that it could only be viewed as material - alphabet, letters, words. Then I cut apart the enlarged poem text and, over the next week, made wall-pieces more like objects - individual visual moments I could find inside the rejected text. I composed against the backdrop of this white throw rug on the floor of my study, using it as if it were my canvas, and started making what I thought of as word objects. Pages.

LS: Do you find that having an emotional place to touch down on in your work allows for a different sense of - I guess I'll call it "ownership" - than, say, MacLow's or Cage's chance-generated compositions? This question about whom the poem 'belongs' to once it's arrived into the world in printed form (or even simply vocalized). Does it belong solely to itself? Or do you find it varies in your work, depending on the way in which it arrived for you, the process of the piece, how effort-ed/less it felt while in the works...or any number of things, really?

KF: The emotional trace of writing is more evident in my work than what goes on in chance-generated composition because there is a different level and method of investigation going on vis ‡ vis one's on-going history in argument with one's current level of perception.

Claims of ownership re. one's own "made thing" are often fairly unexamined, felt more strongly perhaps in earlier stages of one's writing career. At that point, "ownership" is a fairly naive position. As you become a more sophisticated, less easily-satisfied writer, deeply committed to the stunning possibilities of both the revision process and the reconstruction of received ideas for making the poem, you begin to understand this writing work as part of a larger conversation in which you are attempting to contribute the clearest yet most unexpected results of your private writing practice.

LS: Apropos of this notion of the "I," I'm thinking of the differences between your older works (namely NEW SHOES, published 25 years ago) and your newer works (namely WHEN NEW TIME FOLDS UP (1993) and WING (1995)). There seems to be a distinct movement from the emotive "I," which is very often present in NEW SHOES, and a different kind of "I" (or no "I" at all) in the latter pages of IL CUORE - at one more remove from the poem itself. Do you find that the "I" has changed for you over the course of your career - the psychological pull it has for you, or the way you feel it works as speaker / subject?

KF: NEW SHOES, from the mid-Seventies, intended to open away from the simple subjective or "emotive I," yet often used that pronoun. After years in NYC during the Sixties, in the company of so many innovative thinkers, I began to feel bored by, and increasingly wary of, "I" as a one-shot narrating identity position. I began to see how swiftly a pronoun's presence changed with the demand of its context. When "I" appears now, it's simply a location, from which a work may begin to unfold, but it inevitably translates into multiple and shifting voices.

LS: Back to this question of resistance, in your essay "On the Line," you ask "What if the subject, itself, is resistance?" Also it's the first word in Peter Quartermain's introduction to IL CUORE . Are there any specific works in which this is true for you and - I guess this goes back to the question of necessity - that were written purely from the need to resist?

KF: I think quite a few were begun from a position of refusal of the status quo - certainly a kind of resistance to being told how one ought to be writing or what current "hip" thing was now replacing all others - a phenomenon I've lived through various versions of since the Sixties. I've always been interested in "the new," but if I begin to feel pushed-on by a codified version of it, I tend to revert to a skeptical mode - often, in a somewhat playful guise. I suppose that skepticism has been my way of giving myself some space in which to question an idea that, while potentially interesting, is not going to automatically wow me.

One piece I wrote around the winter holidays (1979) - "this. notes. new year." - was intended as an exploration of this kind of quizzicality, speaking from several voices trying to work through a private struggle within a community ethos . . . or, my resistance to a certain programmatic conception of writing that had appeared to commandeer my writing community at that moment. There was a strong territorial claim in the air and with it came an implied message to (re)conform.

Writing "this.notes. new year." in shifting prose-time - in sentence fragments that stretched to left and right margins - gave my psyche the freedom to locate my own questions and to note the condition of ambivalence I felt was so central to my survival. I needed to claim provisionality as a "good" and to put the hex sign on any prohibition. Thus, the mocking line: "I sentence you."

LS: So it's not so much resistance as it is skepticism? Because resistance exists on the spectrum in a space much more radical than questioning or skepticism. It becomes a question of direct opposition versus a rupture - a coming from within versus a coming up against.

KF: Yes, well during the serious struggles of the Seventies and Eighties, I was trying to sort out the troubled relation between my feminist perceptions re power relations and my intense interest in innovative writing. I mean, both were actively present, forming and informing my questioning of everything . . . .except that I didn't want to get into any sort of prescriptive language or attitude in my poetry. I've never liked prescriptive poetry of any kind. It usually results in a lot of repetitive phrase-making where the "I" is positioning itself as hero/ine . . . too much melodrama and not enough of being able to separate that from what's being questioned.

LS: In your introduction to TRANSLATING THE UNSPEAKABLE, you talk about the "perception of non-presence," a "non-presence" which later becomes the pre-established precedent - the "world of the already claimed." I'm reminded of H.D.'s "returning Eve" [from? clarify] - coming back to re-claim / re-make her identity. Did you feel this was one of the goals of HOW(EVER) - to allow women to move past this perception of non-presence?

KF: Yes . . . you could call that a primary force moving the project. This "non-presence" was always palpable and evident, increasingly so as I became a conscious and questioning person working inside of social structures, i.e. classroom gender behaviour, meetings manipulated to deny significance to particular equity issues, and the overwhelming awareness of the erasure of major modernist women writers in anthologies and textbooks from curricula and reading lists - that all-pervasive, dismissive and authoritative attitude coming from many of the more powerful editors and poets (usually male, before the Seventies), who denied women a serious place in the conversation about writing.

It became glaringly real and took - takes - a lot of thinking and sorting through to understand what's going on, and not to let it undermine you completely. Men historically have enjoyed an intellectual battleground of arguing and taking theoretical positions - they've had a built-in social permission to do this. There's no anguish involved at a subconscious level, no checking out "am I allowed to speak?"

Women writers, on the other hand, began entering the critical community focused on modernist practice only since the Seventies. HOW(EVER) editors saw the gap and built the bridge - initiating a direct conversation between new scholars and the women poets writing a more investigative, more innovative work. A number of other women-edited journals and book projects followed suit and helped to introduce the work of women writers into contemporary "critical discourse." I remain convinced that this effort needs regular tending, thus the emergence in 1998 of an evolved electronic version, HOW2, currently being edited by a revolving group of younger women writer/scholars. This was definitely a move beyond non-presence.

[ED. NOTE: for more on HOW(EVER) as a remedy to androcentric experiences such as that of Fraser in the late 1960s and 1970s, see Fraser's "The tradition of marginality . . . and the emergence of HOW(EVER)," in TRANSLATING THE UNSPEAKABLE, pp. 26-38 - in particular, her witness of Barbara Guest's exclusion from the 1970 map of New York School poetry presented in the collection edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW YORK POETS (New York: Vintage); see also "Barbara Guest: The location of her (A memoir)" in the same book, pp. 124-30.]

LS: Well it's not just about non-presence due to being overlooked; it's a reality, imposed by others rather than self-imposed, somebody expending the energy to make sure you are not present.

KF: One reinforces the other. The phenomenon of neglect was definitely real, in this case erasing a poetry that didn't quite suit the reigning court agreement. It was privately acknowleged by several of the younger men around Kenneth Koch that he had asserted his influence in this particular choice.

In the mid-Seventies, SEEKING AIR (Black Sparrow, 1978) finally got its first and only review by Jim Brodey, published in the POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER. He basically didn't get it. He said poets shouldn't write novels. That was it. I disagreed and began teaching Guest's innovative novel with a vengeance - together with her poetry - in any seminar where I could comfortably fit it in and my students became very interested in it. Guest's "postcards" and an essay on "The Mysterious" appeared in HOW(EVER) (v.III. n. 3., 1986). Soon after, I was invited to write an essay for an anthology on women's experimental fiction, called BREAKING THE SEQUENCE (Princeton UP, 1989). They suggested that I write on the well-known, rather mainstream book HOUSEKEEPING, but I asked if I might substitute Guest's SEEKING AIR as my choice. The academically-oriented editors hadn't heard of it and were, at first, upset that there were no citations or footnotes. But they finally agreed to let me try a version when I explained that there were no critical sources from which to quote. In the period that followed, a few young women scholars began to pay attention to SEEKING AIR and other poetry collections by Guest. In 1997, Sun and Moon did a reprint of the novel. Now Guest is on the map . . . and will remain there.

So yes, that's what HOW(EVER) was about - not just about bringing attention to contemporary women writing outside of the box, but also attending to the lost modernist figures from the Twenties through the Fifties, women poets and experimental prose writers who just weren't part of the official reading picture during that period.

LS: So just as this writing about Guest needed to happen to reaffirm her place, HOW(EVER) was not just about women writing poetry, but focused as much on women writing about writing.

KF: Correct . . . about re-presencing.

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LS: Do you think error is one of the major risks one takes in becoming present?

KF: It's not the error as such, but the inclusion and the investigation - or acceptance - of error as part of being human, part of the material of what one can write about as interesting evidence of the imagination's willfulness and randomness.

What I've been interested in is working towards a recognition and inclusion of imperfection as interesting data - the "typos" and interstices between nuggets of brilliantly-spun argument, the unplanned doubt breaking step and blurting itself out between one correct grammatical construction and the next. What about hesitancy when you can't quite get to what you want to say because you're so conditioned to being judged as beside-the-point? You remember that moment in the classroom or after a public event where everyone is invited to talk or ask questions when the speaker or the poet has finished their presentation, and you are filled with response and want to say something but are caught in hesitation, wondering if you'll be able to get the words up and out in a reasonable way? It's that conflict, that uncertainty that I find so interesting and so difficult.

LS: In "Five letters from one window," I was particularly interested in a section from a letter to Andrea: "I'm trying to find a way to include these states of uncertainty, the shifting reality we've often talked about, fragments of perception that rise to the surface . . . Why deny this partialness as part of our writing?"and later, "We need to be able to map how it is for us, as it changes." In your essay "Line. On the Line.," you begin by considering the line as the "(visible notation of) the moving path of a poet's discovering intelligence." Of course error is a part of this: the poem as an entity parallel to the life / mind of the poet in that place. How do you find your poems have been able to situate themselves, knowing they've been a part of this "discovering intelligence," in a specific space of time? Are they difficult to come back to, to keep alive?

KF: For me, returning to them is not a problem, since I continue to be interested in the moving path . . . rather than any conclusion / resolution tentatively arrived at.

LS: