a Perimeter 4

aP

In your work I've noticed that there's a great emphasis put on names, or on the act of naming. In the four published volumes thus far of From a Broken Bottle the group currently known as Molimo M'Atet has gone through repeated iterations of name changing as their journey and membership of the group has progressed. It's also found in your poems, for example, in the poem in the issue, "Song of the Andoumboulou: 152," there's statements like, "So it was we learned of dark dilation, / Ah- / dja's nether name Eleanoir. The book of / Eleanoir we called it". What is the significance of naming in your work, or, how does the act of naming a person, group, or object change it, or the way you can write about it?

NM

What you've noticed is me, in the writing, calling attention to the act of naming, making it present in a way that it might not be if we left it as an assumedly transparent operation in which the name and the thing are identified with each other in a way that raises no questions. I've been thinking about this for quite a while and it has a lot to do with being an African American, the situation of having been named in slavery through a process that made one a thing, a commodity. One took the name of one's owner. And the non-fit or the incongruency between one's human being and one's given name has been a point of meditation and preoccupation in African American thought. Certainly in the writing that has come out of African Americans that's been a large point of emphasis. And there've been a lot of name changes—the Black Muslims, the Nation of Islam, for example, referring to the names that they were born with as their "slave names" and replacing that name with an X, which is to suggest that one's real name, one's ancestral African name, is unknown and is best represented by an X.

I've actually talked a bit, in some of the criticism I've written, about how that tradition of a certain unease with names comes up in things like Toni Morrison's work, where a kind of discrepant relationship between the name of a thing or a person and that thing or person becomes a hallmark, a signature kind of motif or preoccupation from novel to novel, relating it to things like something that would seem as offhand as Archie Shepp naming a piece "Call Me By My Rightful Name."

So that's part of it. But it's also that as a young person beginning to listen to non-verbal music, instrumental music, one of the things that always intrigued me was titles. I mean, in what way does a piece of instrumental music signify and live up to the title that it's given? Even something as simple as a title like "Sea Breeze," where the piece is not necessarily trying to sound like a sea breeze or doesn't at any point sound like a sea breeze, why is it called "Sea Breeze"? The distance between a name and the named thing, person, quality, place or whatever, is something that interests me and intrigues me. I find myself coming back to it again and again and again. It's an interesting place or space of play, maneuver, operation, and that's what you find me doing.

Plus there's the joy of names, the beauty of names. I like to be able to name people in my work, to name bands, to name pieces of music, to name the poems themselves, and to refer to pieces of writing within the poems that are entirely the creation of the poem itself. It's all of those things. It's the problem of naming, it's the pleasure of naming, it's the kind of satisfaction we get when names fit. But also a certain satisfaction we can get when names don't fit, or, as often happens in somebody like Morrison, they fit by not fitting. The variety of relationships that are involved in the act of naming is one of the things I'm participating in and interested in and that I find rather inexhaustible. So that's why you get me going back to it again and again. [Laughs]

aP

I'm really interested in this idea of "non-fit," essentially, that there's an underlying sense of the thing. In order to recognize a non-fit, you have to recognize that there's an underlying sense of the thing that the name somehow doesn't match. Are you ever trying to, in your work, give something a name that is a non-fit in order to create that experience of distance between the essence of the thing and the name?

NM

Yes, I think that early on in—it's probably not the typical thing I do—but, early on, the band in From a Broken Bottle call themselves the Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus and they change it rather quickly to the East Bay Dread Ensemble when they go to play a gig up in the Bay Area. That non-fit was quite conscious and kind of a joke. A band based in L.A., late 70s, early 80s, taking on this name that makes them a band of what? Post-structuralist musicians? [Laughter]

But it was also—since Discrepant Engagement is the title of my first book of criticism and I had an idea that was coming onto me then—it was an instance of discrepant engagement that had to do to some extent with my own situation, which is that I was in the academy. I've always had this great love of black music, from the pop forms up to the experimental stuff, you know, Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, that kind of thing, and the academy is a world in which those things might be experienced as disparate or discrepant, although I don't experience them that way. So I'm not sure it's always a non-fit. For me, it's kind of a fit. I can see something, I can definitely see things in black music that are deconstructive, before the fact, or—what do they call it?—avant la lettre, before the day came 'round. So again, you get something like that and it's kind of jarring, it does require you to think, "Well, in what way does this fit and in what way does it not fit?"

An apparent non-fit, when you look at it more closely, may be only apparent. You begin to see ways in which, well, no, this—one can speak of the kind of re-visionary process and re-situating of chord changes in bebop, one can see that as a kind of deconstructive process. The name perhaps is not so outlandish when applied to a jazz group, after all. So that kind of thing goes on. And there actually was, I remember—it didn't, they never got recorded—but I remember when I lived in the Bay Area in the 70s, early 70s, when I was in grad school, and listened to KPFA a lot, especially the music programs, I remember hearing a live, in-studio performance by a group that called themselves the East Bay—no, it wasn't the East Bay, but they were from the East Bay, I think, they were sort of from the back of the East Bay, like the Concord/Martinez area. Their name was the Dialectical Sound Ensemble. [Laughs] And that caught my attention.

aP

Yes, it's a good name!

NM

Yes, it's a great name! And the music was happening, too. So, yes, that word "dialectical" obviously suggests another discourse, a discourse that is not normally associated with black improvisatory music, but, as I've said, it makes you think about why that might fit and the ways in which it might fit. The apparent or, some would say, obvious shock of non-fit, when you look at it a little bit closer, that shock kind of goes away and you see some other things there. So that would be an example of—it's the one example right now that comes to mind of a naming which does that.

I'm sure it happens in other ways, I know it happens in other ways, because when I make up a word, so that "ensemble" turns into "nonsemble," then I'm doing that kind of discrepant—I'm dealing in discrepancy and, in some ways, trying to make discrepancy substantive. That would be an example, that whole business of making discrepancy substantive, trying to make it into a concrete noun, make it into a quality or an entity that can have a proper name, referring to a group as a "nextet," that sort of thing.

So a lot of the playing with words, in both the prose and the poetry, has to do with investigating the fluidity of names and the fluidity of the kinds of fit that naming and language more generally allow us. I've related the word "discrepant," in the title Discrepant Engagement, to the Dogon figure of the "creaking of the word." The creaking suggests ricketiness and dryness, it's kind of crying out for something to lubricate it. One way to think of what I've been doing or trying to do or that I found interesting is the play between a kind of desiccate, discrepant apprehension and some kind of fluid lubricant mentality that might be brought to bear on it. But, you know, it's also a field of play to be inhabited and moved around in.

Discrepancy opens up certain kinds of possibilities, certain kinds of spaces, so there's a lot of—for example, in Bedouin Hornbook, there are passages where there's a lot of attention to gaps and disconnection, punning on "mist" and "missed." Gaps can be—and often are—mourned and lamented, but they can also be seen as spaces of opportunity. A lot of creative possibility and creative production takes place in the space of the gap, where you're trying to turn mourning into something else, trying to turn lament into something else.

aP

Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to ask about the role of spirituality in your work. The initial epigraph to the first instances of the Song of the Andoumboulou say that "The song of the Andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits", and it invokes an idea that there's an audience for the work beyond the readers or listeners. There's also this element in From a Broken Bottle that a lot of the events that happen to N. for me take on an element of fatedness, that there are things that happen fortuitously, or coincidentally. And they feel significant instantly, but in ways that reveal themselves over time. Do you see spirituality as playing a strong role in your writing, or in determining how those events may occur? Or as a way of understanding how those events may occur?

NM

Yes. It's long been an inclination of mine to experience and to see the world, to see things, in that way. Spirituality, among other things, suggests that the significance of something isn't always obvious, that it isn't always evident or self-evident that one is involved in a process of finding out, that the importance or the significance of an act or an incident may not be immediately available. The whole prospect of discovery, revelation, seems to me to be a very spiritual thing. To use a distinction that we use all the time, between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, the distinction between the literal and the figurative, we're very much involved in the figurative. It's worth remembering that the word "figurative" goes back to figura. Erich Auerbach's famous essay talks about that term and the history of the Christian church's processes of exegesis, where a figure was not simply a trope in the way that we understand figurative speech today, the way we regard a figure of speech. Figure was predictive, it was prophetic. A figure was a foreshadowing of something to come, so that the Old Testament is the figure of the New Testament, Moses as prophet is the figure of Jesus Christ the future prophet, that kind of thing. The kind of displacement that figuration involves—talking about one thing in terms of another—that displacement has a spatial dimension: the rose over there is actually the lover's heart over here, in that figurative equation. But there's also a temporal displacement that's happening or that can be seen to be happening, where the figure is actually harking back to a previous time or projecting ahead to another time. So when it comes to fortuitous events and other forms of serendipity, one is involved in the process of bringing out what's under the letter, bringing out the spirit, finding out what's under the letter.

In my writing, there's a lot of transit or transportation among the various registers of terms like "letter" and "spirit" and "word" and so forth. I mean, just the word "letter," when you start looking at my work, so much of which is epistolary, letters in that sense, there's also a lot of work with and operation on the letters of the alphabet, things of that sort, and that's recalling various world traditions of exegesis—Kabbalah, for example, that kind of thing—so that being involved in a text is, I mean—this is not just secular, this is not just profane, there's something more than that that's going on. One of the books that I refer to obsessively in my work is Marcel Griaule's book on the Dogon, Conversations with Ogotemmêli, and Ogotemmêli, the Dogon wise man who's laying all this Dogon cosmology on Griaule, talks about the advent of blacksmithing, agriculture and things of that sort—various technologies—and he says at one point that the revelation of a new technological process or technical process is a spiritual matter. Sometimes we forget, because it's so familiar to us, that writing wasn't always around. Writing was one of those technologies that came into being and it was seen as sacred or spiritual in many societies, as Ogotemmêli says. Among the ancient Egyptians, it was the priests who knew how to do hieroglyphics and that stuff.

So I'm influenced by that. I'm also influenced by the interest in analogies between the writer and a kind of shamanistic experience that was around in the 60s and 70s when I was starting to look at writing and see it as something that I might pursue. These ideas that writing was involved in a kind of quasi-religious or spiritual or mystical adventure, these ideas were quite current, definitely circulating, and I was very interested in them. It spoke to something that I think I had experienced on a more visceral level going back to childhood. I was fascinated with writing when I was a little kid. We live the childhood of the species when we're kids. It just seemed to me an unbelievable thing that people could make marks on paper and make some sense of them. You know? [Laughter]

So I was trying to write, before I could write. I was trying to write when I was two or three, you know. I'd scribble, because that's what I thought it was, but I was fascinated with it. It was magic. Magic is very close to the sacred. In some ways that never left me. Then when I was nine or ten or so, my older sister got a typewriter and, man—[Laughter]—I was on that thing more than she was! By then of course I knew what the letters meant, I was beginning to learn, but, man, you had this regular-looking—you had the dignity of regularity in the type. It was almost like you typed a page and it looked like something out of a book, that technology. So all these things, you know, have a resonance, a long resonance, and an aura, even, that I think writers especially stay alive to. I think at some level, whatever art or industry or technology you practice, there's some kind of visceral connection. It's deeply psychic, too, but you don't know all the dimensions of that. But there's some visceral, psychic attraction to the medium. It never goes away. For all the other layers that come to accrue on it, there's still that base of a kind of fascination and a kind of—the word we often use for what we can't understand is the word "mystical"—mystical relationship to paint, in the case of a painter; a mystical relationship to stone, in the case of a sculptor; a mystical relationship to words, in the case of a writer; or just sound itself, in the case of a musician. And "mystical," for me, is a rough equivalent of "spiritual." There's something about all the dimensions of the adventure of writing that has that visceral pull and that deep psychical pull, to the point where the way the words are put on the page will have a determinative pull on me. "No, that's not right yet." "Oh, that's it." And you know it when you know it, without being able to get real analytic about it. No, you don't need to.

aP

To ask about some of the sequencing of the various forms of your writing, because there's a number of sequences that you work with, both in poetry and in prose—these sequences, a lot of them have gone on now for so long that it's interesting to me to see how they have or haven't changed. Some of the early instances of Song of the Andoumboulou in Eroding Witness—I can see some differences that have developed over more than a hundred iterations, but it's also somewhat surprising to me to see how similar they look to some of the more current poems in that series. And I think it's notable also that in those initial instances of Song of the Andoumboulou are the first two of N.'s letters to the Angel of Dust. So, have your sequences, even though they are now more or less discrete, continued to weave into one another, or are they just separate now? Beyond that, have they shifted over time, or have certain forms crystallized over so many iterations?

NM

Well, they're definitely intertwined. I consider them to be three series, the prose series and the two poem series, and all three of them rub off on each other. There's a kind of contagion that runs through them. Certain references are made in all three. Gassire's lute will come up, does come up, in the prose, in the two poem series, and there are other things I could point to. In the two poem series, over time one thing that did happen is that—and I think it began to happen toward the end of School of Udhra—the fact and figure of movement and migration, a kind of exile, a kind of unrest, a kind of ongoingness, that happens at various levels, came to declare itself. So the "we" becomes more decidedly a band of travelers in Whatsaid Serif, then Song of the Andoumboulou joins up with "Mu" again in Splay Anthem and still that fact and figure of transit is prime. The fact that it's a band of travelers carries the suggestion at times that they're a band of musicians and that's something that those series have in common with From a Broken Bottle, which is about a band of musicians, though they don't travel as much as the band in the poems do. They rarely get out of southern California. [Laughs]

aP

Yes. [Laughs] They made it to Seattle once.

NM

They made it to Seattle, they made it to New York. In the volume that's coming out in a few months, Late Arcade, they make it to Detroit. They've made it to Santa Cruz a couple times—[Laughs]—Berkeley, Richmond. Mostly, if they get out of L.A., it's up to northern California, so that's an interesting counterpoint. But they're not big-time enough. They haven't really gone to New York. If they go to New York, live in New York, then they're all over the world, if they make it there. I don't know if that's ever going to happen. I can't even get out of the early 80s! [Laughter] I don't know if they'll have enough time to make it big. But they're struggling and scuffling in southern California.

The band in the poems, they're all over the place. They're even in some places that the reader might question the existence of. So the series are different in some ways. You have that difference, for example. And you have the difference that, the whole traveling thing—nervous travel, I refer to it as—becomes more definitive over the course of both of those series, but whether the people in the poems are a band of musicians or simply a band of travelers, a group of people to whom music is very important, is a question that I don't think most people, most readers, would be really all that interested in answering in any kind of definitive way. There are bands that come into that series, the Overghost Ourkestra for example, with I guess a suggestion that the band of travelers is that band, is that Ourkestra, or that some of their group have formed the Ourkestra. How large this band is, this band of travelers is, is not clear. It seems like it could be an entire society or an entire nation at certain points and that's kind of reminiscent of the band that N. sits in with in Bedouin Hornbook. He calls it something like a band of indeterminate constitution. [Laughs] At one point they seem to be a trio and at one point they seem to be, like, four orchestras! That kind of quantitative indeterminacy is a feature that runs through all of these works.

I'm probably not the best person to talk about how they've changed. For one thing, I make a conscious act of recursion, of bringing things from the past into them. "The dead are dying of thirst" comes into Song of the Andoumboulou early on, that Dogon business that Ogotemmêli talks about. "The dead are dying of thirst"—it just grabbed hold of me. How can the dead be dying? For one thing, they're already dead. And they're dying of thirst. In the context of Dogon cosmology you find out what that means. It's spoken by elders who are drinking, who are drunk, because apparently they're thirsty, although they're no longer thirsty because they've been drinking. But the dead are thirsty and what this is saying is, well, a lot of stuff, but it's saying that certain forms of respect have not been shown to some of the dead. This is usually in the form of an insult to someone who has perhaps not gone through the burial rites for a grandfather that should have been gone through, something like that.

But it's taken on all kinds of other meanings for me. It resonated with the fact that I grew up in a community in which there was a lot of drinking, where drinking was a problem. I've resituated it, at some points, in that context. "The dead are dying of thirst"—drunken elders. That expression, then, is retooled to speak to an occasion that the Dogon probably never imagined. So that kind of thing goes on. Even just recently, in a poem I was working on, it came up again. Some discord, some dysfunction, some indiscretion, some social or larger impropriety, is what it's getting at. It's a kind of—the elders as conscience, the dead as a kind of agency of conscience as well. I find myself writing in a poem—last week?—this week?—something about drinking water from the melting polar ice cap and saying, "The dead are dying of thirst." The predicament of global warming—certainly a dysfunction, certainly an impropriety, certainly a harbinger of disrepair—gets spoken to by "The dead are dying of thirst," which situates it as an affront to ancestral succession because it threatens future generations of which we will be the ancestors. Phrases and things like that, certain figures, certain images, I find myself drawn to using again and again. It's one of the ways of saying that the poem is still the same poem. We're still in that same poem that is back in Eroding Witness. But so much has happened between Eroding Witness and now that is the same but different.

aP

It resonates differently.

NM

Yes, it resonates differently. It's come to apply in different contexts, different situations. The ongoingness of such a signifier and its ability to signify interests me, a certain kind of—not just resonance but resilience, that it can still be there. But also it's become a part of my mental furniture. It's in the room! It's not like I'm going to sit on that chair just one time. I'm probably going to sit on it more than once. So you'll find me going back to certain things again and again, it's like stitching. But I know that the work changes because the situation out of which it comes changes. I can still talk about Lone Coast, even though I don't live on the coast anymore, but you don't see reference to Low Forest until six years ago, when I moved here to Durham.

Composition by field was one of the early ideas that resonated for me—Charles Olson's writings, as well as the way it gets taken up by Robert Duncan in The Opening of the Field and other work. The field is your life. It's potentially everything that comes into your life, so a change of venue like that is going to introduce material to the poem that wasn't there before. And Lone Coast wasn't always there. The idea of a life's work made a big impression on me. I remember reading, as I've pointed out before, I remember Robert Creeley writing about Louis Zukofsky. He kept quoting Zukofsky's statement that one writes one poem all one's life. That was a very exciting idea to me. I was seeing painters using larger canvases, series of canvases; I was hearing musicians, especially jazz musicians, who had come from being confined to a three minute phonographic recording to being able to cover the whole side of an LP or both sides—their compositions were getting longer—stuff like that. So part of what field composition meant for me was that you could step onto a bigger canvas, so to speak. In fact, it might be a canvas that was growing as you painted on it. That's a way of going about it that's been of great appeal to me. The notion that you shut down, you write a poem and, okay, that's done, now you start at the beginning again and write the next poem—that's a brutal idea to me! That scares me. I don't know if I have that much in me—[Laughs]—you know, to keep starting over again. It's easier for me to feel like I've got this thing going, these three things going that may just be one thing going. It makes it easier for me to think about it, just to think that I've got this thing going—the car's already started, I don't have to worry about whether the battery died, I just can get in and keep driving.

Like I said, the way in which it has changed is hard for me to talk about because so much of my experience of it and so much of my desire for it is that there be a certain ongoingness and continuity to it. I feel that strongly, although I also feel that what I'm doing now is very different, in many ways, in the same way that my life is different, I'm different—some of that just takes care of itself. One is simply recording those changes, sometimes without necessarily thinking about it, not writing for it to be a change in and of itself, not writing for the sake of "Well, I have to change this up because people are tired of hearing about Ogotemmêli." [Laughs] You change it up because somebody comes in and sits down next to Ogotemmêli and they have a conversation. This person could be, I don't know, somebody I used in a—it could be Jean-Luc Nancy, who comes in because you've read a book of his and it resonated, spoke to this ongoing conversation. So it comes in. It doesn't replace Ogotemmêli, it's just another feature, another figure, another presence in the work.

aP

Well, in that way it seems maybe more similar to our experience, where things that are in the past of our experience don't pass out of our experience. Is that fair to say?

NM

Yes. I think poets, writers, whoever, who are not announcedly writing serial work, work that's all of a piece, that's a life work, are often doing that. You can read the body of work of a particular author and get the sense that it all adds up to a single work, where you see certain kinds of things, certain kinds of moves, certain kinds of preoccupations that were there in the first novel and are there in the twelfth novel in a different form. I think that in calling the work serial, announcing its seriality, one is recognizing and accenting something that is probably an inevitable feature of a lifelong engagement. It is true that life is short! When was that—1980?—the 80s, the 70s and 80s with Eroding Witness, that's really not that long ago.

aP

Oh yes, I think it was… I just looked at this, it was mid-80s, maybe? '82?

NM

Eroding Witness came out in '85. The poems were written in the 70s and early 80s. It's not really that long ago, you know? The course of a life, a human life, is really quite compact. It should be no surprise that there are strains of concern and attention that carry through the decades, whether one is announcedly doing serial work or not. Certainly, writers or artists can make changes and deliberately try not to repeat themselves. That can be done with some success, but even in that you can tell it's the same person trying not to repeat him or herself. [Laughs.] Even the avoidance of the repetition brings to mind what is being avoided, so it's kind of there anyway, it's just there as a negation of itself. It's like that line of Olson's, which always seemed to me to pertain to this: "Limits are what we find ourselves inside." As I said about the gap, that can be—and is—a source of lament, but it can also be the source of a kind of opportunity and a felicity where you feel like, well, that's what you can work with. You're given limits to work with and there's a certain fecundity that comes of that. You're going to wake up pretty much the same person tomorrow morning and that's not necessarily a bad thing. When people start waking up and don't know who they were the day before, we take them to institutions! [Laughs] That kind of dislocation has produced some interesting art as well, but it's not a prerequisite certainly. And I'm not sure it's even desirable. The people who suffer from those states don't necessarily feel that it's a happy place to be.

aP

The scope and perspective of the poetic sequences in particular seems to suggest sometimes the epic mode. Is that a fair comparison, or do you think of your projects in that mode? Does considering them in that way, if it's a valid way to consider them, pose narrative challenges for the work because of the expectations of narrative within an epic?

NM

Well, traditional notions of epic don't apply. The word "epic" almost inevitably comes up when you have a work that has been going on for as long as my series have been going on, a work that comprises a number of books. Just the quantitative accumulation of something that is nominally the same thing is going to summon the word "epic." I've had various relationships to that term over the years. It's not the first one that came to mind when I had some idea of what I was doing. "Long poem" was enough for me.

Epic, in the traditional sense, has a certain historical meaning. It's usually the tale of a society, generally a pretty discrete and homogeneous society or at least a society that's reaching for homogeneity. In fact, the epic becomes a kind of national tale that helps achieve the putative homogeneity of nationhood or whatever. I think the society and the times we live in are just too various and heterogeneous to be attempting to do that, so I certainly am not doing that. But if the term "epic" can be wrenched from those particular and specific historical moorings and brought to bear on our contemporary situation, then maybe it can apply to a poem in which there is an indeterminate and fluid "we," a collectivity of indeterminate constitution, which I think speaks to the variousness of senses of belonging that many people experience today, the fact of transit and transportation being what it is, the shrunken planet that we live on. People can go to faraway places very quickly. Information from faraway places are right here in our living rooms, that kind of thing where we can feel like we are simultaneously inhabiting multiple places. That is a mode of being that has in some ways replaced senses of nationhood and that in some way go beyond or at least complicate those feelings, those senses of location and identification. So maybe a poem such as Song of the Andoumboulou or "Mu," that is so emphatic about movement and indeterminacy of place, the ongoingness of movement, the changeability of residence—maybe in that sense it's registering some kind of collective experience or apprehension that might qualify it as the epic of a certain kind of feeling in our time. That looser sense of the word "epic" I'm not only comfortable with but happy with.

As I've said before, I like the way that "epic" has become colloquialized, become a term of approval. Things can be "epic," just meaning that they're good, fantastic. You can have an "epic meal" that didn't necessarily last long. That sense of epic has kind of changed how we think about it, too. But even steering clear of that, I think that the modernist history of the epic is pertinent. Among my precursors and influences on what I'm doing, the modernist poets—Pound, etc.—try to write a modern epic. Some of the ways in which they've found the modern condition to be resistant to that kind of project has taught subsequent generations of poets that maybe that's not what the epic project or ambition would end up being like or looking like now. We in some ways make more modest claims for ourselves. Duncan doesn't call "Passages" an epic, he calls them passages. That's going back at least to T. S. Eliot's "these fragments I have shored against my ruin." Fragmentary form is in some ways antithetical to the epic, which has a totalizing ambition. We're wary of totalizing ambitions now and, as I said, the homogeneity that the song of the nation wants to bring into being by singing is often riddled with exclusions that we're more aware of now. Those exclusions creak for us. The discrepancy between that ambition and the realities that it's covering up are more evident and more salient to us now, so if you can have a discrepant epic, sign me up for that.

aP

I'm going to shift registers a bit to a different zone of your work, and ask about Hambone. In the past you've discussed how the influence of the post-WWII "little magazines," often the product of one editor, has been an influence for you for that. You've mentioned also that because these editors were often writers, the editorial work was an extension of their writing as well. I was curious both how that might be true for you, in terms of your editorial work with Hambone, how that's been an extension of your writing, but then the inverse, how perhaps if it's affected your writing, as well. The transfer instead back from the editorial work to the writing.

NM

To begin with, it put me in touch with people that I wanted to be in touch with. I wanted to be in touch with them because I had seen enough of their writing that I knew that I liked it. It engaged me, intrigued me sometimes, and I sought them out. The issue of Hambone that really starts the iteration of it that we're now in is Hambone 2, from fall of 1982, and all of that material was solicited. There was a range of folks that I asked for work from and that particular mélange didn't exist anywhere else. In a way, I was already learning from the contributors to Hambone. They were already an influence on my writing.

There have been subsequent writers that I didn't particularly know about, that I came to know about through them sending me work and it striking a chord, me wanting and needing to know more and more about their work. Your work exists in some kind of dialogue with a lot of stuff that you read, so when new writers come into your reading habits it's probably going to have an informing impact on your work in some way. I started off with people I knew my work was in some way touched by and that I wanted to be in conversation with. That continues to have an effect on my work. That was the start of some correspondences. I think my correspondence with Susan Howe, for example, started with me writing her and asking her for work for Hambone. My engagement with Susan's work furthered and deepened my awareness and apprehension of the way in which one could engage history in this fragmentary way, a way that was not invested in the kind of totalizing that the epic would have you be engaged in. Seeing her work with fragments, which were most often archival vestiges of the past, deepened and furthered my sense that it's the mediation of the past that we have access to. Susan was one of the writers that I wrote to for work for Hambone 2. Jay Wright was another, Wilson Harris another. As I said, I was already learning things from these writers.

I've also come into contact with other writers, who have become what we call "Hambonistas," that I didn't know then. Ed Roberson, probably most notably, is someone whose work I encountered in the—when would that have been, the 90s, maybe late 80s—and he's become a Hambone staple. We've come to be pretty close friends as well. I can see ways in which our work speaks to one another, especially since we've gotten to know each other. One of the things I've felt about seeing his work, when I first did—it was the sequence Lucid Interval as Integral Music, which was published as a chapbook—that nobody saw—by Harmattan Press in the mid-80s. Charles Rowell at Callaloo magazine sent me a copy, said he wanted to publish it in the Callaloo Poetry Series that was going then but needed some support for it, stuff like that. So I was one of the people he sent a copy to and I was blown away by it, because I didn't know Ed Roberson's work. He had published a couple of books with University of Pittsburgh Press but they had escaped my attention. A lot of the things he was doing in Lucid Interval just seemed like we were in this unconscious conversation. Then I actually got his contact information and called him up. [Laughs] Ever since then it's been a conscious conversation.

So one of the things I was doing with Hambone was trying to create a place where that kind of thing could happen, where there could be the possibility of conversation, community, communication of that sort. Joseph Donahue, who's one of my colleagues now here at Duke, was a grad student in the 80s when he sent me a poem that I really, really liked. I published it and he became a Hambonista, his work became a staple of Hambone, him sending more poems. There was an engagement with—the spiritualist impulse that you talked about earlier was there, in full recognition of the profane. He's a New York guy. [Laughs] The way he gives both their due was something that spoke to me and resonated with some of my aims and ambitions, so I've had an ongoing conversation with him and his work. We met as a consequence of me editing Hambone. We met in the flesh, as they say, when I was in New York to give a reading and we spent some time together. Then it turned out that his wife had a post-doc at Stanford, so they were in Palo Alto for a while. I was nearby in Santa Cruz, so we got to see more of each other. Anyway, these things develop into friendships. The work is furthered and impacted by that. This book [holds up Charles M. Stang's Our Divine Double] I read earlier this summer. Joe recommended it. Some of the stuff in there has come into some of the poems I've written. We talk about stuff we're into. This has been going on for ages. People do this. The sculpture downstairs in my living room is by Thaddeus Mosley, a sculptor from Pittsburgh who's a friend of Ed Roberson. Ed turned me on to his work. I've since written a poem dedicated to Thad and Thad's work was featured in an issue of Hambone with an accompanying essay by Ed. His work has been on the cover of several issues of Hambone. These things kind of circulate that way.

Everyday life, your artistic, intellectual life, your social life, they circulate. They flow into one another, they keep moving. Hambone has fulfilled its mission for me, whatever it's done for anyone else! [Laughs] I wanted to be in touch with writers whose work meant something to me. I realized that you're not going to be fortunate enough to have the writers and other artists whose work is important to you just happen to live where you live, especially if you live in a small town, like Santa Cruz. Living in New York, you can kind of get to a lot of folks that way, but even then it's not going to be everybody. So one of the things that Hambone was a vehicle for was me being in touch with people whose work I felt some affinity with or felt that I was having some kind of conversation with.

aP

One final question for you: it's a question about teaching. Because you've taught for decades at a number of institutions, I wanted to ask how your work as a teacher has impacted your writing, and if your teaching has changed how you see your work, or how you see others' work, as a reader.

NM

Early on, I set out to have my ambitions as a writer, my desire to be a writer, work with my academic life, so when I graduated from college it never occurred to me to just go live in North Beach and eat graham crackers and drink lapsang souchong tea and drive a cab, just go out there nakedly as a writer. I was interested in the study of literature, I was interested in the study of other things, I was interested in study. I saw myself as potentially a writer for whom study would be important, not necessarily a writer of certain kinds of experience, as the previous generation in some ways had been, running off to Morocco and that sort of thing, not a writer of lifestyle. Those folks had been outside the academy.

This was a hard decision to make because a lot of the writers that I loved and was influenced by were anti-academic. But, coming from a working-class family that had scuffled, I was hesitant not to think in some practical terms about making a living and that kind of thing. I was a good student and I enjoyed study. I had always done that. I had at that point taken only one creative writing class, so going to an MFA program wasn't something that I wanted to do. I found that for me, when it came to workshopping, a little went a long way. I took one creative writing class in my junior year and it was good for me, because I had been writing for a few years and not showing stuff to anybody. It was a way to clear that hurdle of what other people who are interested in writing think of your writing but I didn't necessarily want to do it every semester. There were other electives I wanted to take. I ended up not taking creative writing in graduate school. I didn't go to an MFA program, I went to a PhD program, but I went to graduate school to study the stuff that I was interested in, both to eventually teach, have a job, and to continue to read the kind of stuff that was feeding my writing. That meant reading writers whom I was influenced by and whom I hoped to emulate and, eventually, move beyond or outgrow and just become myself. I was studying to be able to teach certain stuff but also studying to learn what I could learn about writing and poetics from that stuff.

So I went into a PhD program really to be hired as a scholar-teacher and that's the path I've been on. I was not hired as a writer, although, as I began to publish poetry, that became part of my teaching repertoire. I was asked to teach creative writing by the time I had my second job, at USC, and I tried it. I was kind of starting from scratch, other than the experience I had from taking an undergraduate writing workshop, but I knew a number of people at Stanford who had come there as students in the Graduate Writing Program—Stegner fellows and the like—so I had kind of gotten to know or I thought I knew a bit about creative writing culture. I'd heard about some of the stuff that happens. [Laughs.] I kind of had to figure out how to teach creative writing, with all my reservations about whether that's really possible. Over the years, I've tried various things, done various things, and I've arrived at a way of doing it that feels right for me. But that wasn't what I was being hired in, primarily. Usually I would teach one creative writing class a year and, depending on the course load, the other three or four classes would be classes in literature, which is what I had my doctorate in. That was the case at University of Wisconsin, USC and UC Santa Cruz. This job at Duke is really the first time that I've been hired as a writer. That's what's different, one of the things that's different about this.

I was able to get those things to work together, the academic and the creative. I feel very fortunate. I feel that, in many ways, it was the right time. It may also have to do with me having a particular kind of sensibility that could put those things together, but I came through graduate school before certain things happened that I think might've been more of an impediment to me braiding that mix in the way that I've been able to do it. There was a kind of opening there because of some of the culture wars and some of the questionings of and about the curriculum, "What exactly is this project?" There was an opening up, a kind of permission, and a kind of questioning that I think allowed one to do some work that wasn't simply conforming, fitting oneself into a mold that had been established as to what being "professionalized" is. Not too many years after that, I think, that mold got built. I heard them talking about it as I was leaving. [Laughs] And a lot of it had to do with European continental theory becoming de rigueur, a lot more sense of "You have to know this" or "You have to do this" to be accredited. I think there was less freedom to do the kind of balancing act that I was trying to do and that I saw a few others trying to do. So I feel fortunate in that way, to have been able to make it work, to be a writer in academia. As to how it's impacted my teaching…

aP

Or your writing.

NM

Or my writing. Well, you know, you get a band called the Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus, a quick example like that. I was bent on making a kind of economy that would make as much use of as much stuff as I could. As one of my students pointed out, he said, "You know, your band, sometimes they sound like students in a seminar." [Laughter]

aP

It's a good observation!

NM

I said, "Yes, I wonder where that comes from?" [Laughter] I wasn't off, you know, smoking hashish in Morocco for long periods of time, so I didn't have that to write about. [Laughs.] You write from where you are. I think that my being in academia, my academic bearing, is something about me—I've been a student all my life—that comes out in the writing. It gives the writing a certain cast. I haven't fought that.

I guess what I felt was the risk I was taking was that there'd be any kind of audience for it, given that, again, so many of the writers I learned from and admired were anti-academic in a lot of their pronouncements. But I put that together with the fact that most of them ended up in teaching situations. [Laughs] I noticed that! So I said, okay, if that's the day job for writers, then maybe I should put myself in the best situation to do that. That was one of the factors that went into deciding to go into a PhD program.

It's funny that years later when I met Allen Ginsberg, one of the writers whose anti-academicism had given me pause, when I really got a chance to sit down and hang out with him—I guess it would've been the first year I went to teach at Naropa for a week in the summer, so that would've been 1991, something like that—a lot of what he talked to me about—maybe it was because he saw me as this guy who'd been in academia all those years and was looking for a common place of connection—a lot of what he talked about was teaching at Brooklyn College. He was proudly announcing that he'd gotten tenure. [Laughter] I was trying to get him to tell me stories about the people I was interested in. "What was Duncan like? What was Ferlinghetti like back in those days?" That kind of stuff. "Who were the musicians you were hanging out with? I hear you're a friend of Don Cherry." He'd talk about that too, but he was quite proud of his syllabi. He was telling me about what he was teaching, the reading series he ran, who he was inviting and stuff like that. He seemed to be genuinely delighted with the whole teaching project, both at Naropa and at Brooklyn College.

There is a way in which pedagogy and teaching call to poets, especially to poets it seems. What I had heard as a kind of split, a kind of dichotomy, in my younger years increasingly turned out not to be that. I guess that's been, over the years, the most crucial development in my approach to teaching. At the beginning I saw being a writer and teaching as two different things. I saw being a teacher more as being an academic. I think that over the years I've come to let being a writer play a larger role in my teaching. I think it's been a very happy revelation to find that out. I've had people tell me, fiction writers among them, that, much more than with fiction, the calling to poetry is copacetic with teaching in a very integral, almost organic way. I think over the years I've come to know what that means.