Keeping / the window open: Interviews, Statements, Alarms, Excursions (Wave Interview Series) - Softcover

Waldrop, Keith; Waldrop, Rosemarie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696690 ISBN 13: 9781940696690

Publisher: Wave Books, 2019

Synopsis

A rich array of materials coalesce here into a vibrant portrait, in text and image, of two extraordinary artists and collaborators. For nearly sixty years, the Waldrops have influenced multiple generations of writers through their own poetry and fiction, translations, teaching, and their press, Burning Deck, which published some of the most influential authors of late-twentieth-century avant-garde literature. This collection seeks to illustrate the many ways in which the Waldrops have expanded the possibilities of bookcraft, art, community, and literature.

About this title

About the Author

Rosmarie Waldrop is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including Gap Gardening: Selected Poems and the trilogy Curves to the Apple. She has translated many works by writers such as Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, and others. She has taught at universities such as Wesleyan, Tufts, and Brown, and she is the recipient of many awards and fellowships from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry. In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Keith Waldrop is the author of many books, including Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, which won a 2009 National Book Award in Poetry. He has also translated many works by writers such as Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Charles Baudelaire. He taught at Brown University from 1968 until his retirement and is the recipient of many awards and fellowships from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry. Together, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop are the founders and editors of Burning Deck Press, which operated for fifty-six years, from 1961 to 2017. Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path), two novels (Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04) and a work of criticism (The Hatred of Poetry). The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from "Ceci N'est Pas Keith"

 

To marry Rosmarie, I was first required to send her astrologer father exact coordinates of my birth: day, hour, latitude, longitude.

For something so momentous, and so personal, he did not trust himself to cast the horoscope, but sent the appropriate details—of my birth and of hers—to a master astrologer whom he revered.

We never learned what revelations he received.

Except the lucky conclusion. It is all right, said Herr Sebald, after consulting the documents.

We might marry.

Rosmarie's ship was a day late because of storms on the Atlantic. When she did arrive, it was with three large wooden crates. The customs officials glanced at her, at the crates, began to stamp them without ceremony.

Then I became visible.

They reconsidered, made her open everything, went over it all with a geiger counter.

That evening, we went to the City Center, where Balanchine was giving his new Stravinsky ballet Agon, along with the Brecht-Weill Seven Deadly Sins.

Allegra Kent. Lotte Lenya. For a long time after—in the wilderness of Michigan—Rosmarie would point out that she was given a misleading idea of what, in the way of culture, would be available to her in America.

We lived in the last house on a dead end street called Turner Park Court, the street named, not for a person, but from a long-disbanded Turnverein (Ann Arbor having a large German population). It was an extremely small house.

The walls of every room we lined with books, all but kitchen and bathroom—for fear of grease and steam.

Between grease and steam, steam seemed the less dangerous and, when the volumes reached too great an overflow, we decided to put shelves in the bathroom.

So what books should go there?

Books, we decided, with something in title or author to suggest that locus. We began. Ubu Roi, of course.

The Golden Pot.

Anything by Adelaide Crapsey.

The search gained momentum. The Sitwells. The Brownings. The Golden Ass. Privy Seal. Free Fall.

Let It Come Down.

Finally it was hopeless, any word at all doubling its meaning with an excremental shadow.

Howards's End.

Gone with the Wind.

 

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from the Introduction

 

They are somewhat skeptical of the idea of imagination in a primary creative sense. They are drawn to collage and to translation, kinds of writing where, at the start of the process, some text already exists and the writer's job is to make a different text out of it.

Keith says that writing is more congenial when he is working with received material, something already written down, even if the theme of the writing is his own life. Rosmarie says that we can't entirely invent anything. "We don't ever quite invent a wholly new world." We can't make a world out of imagination, but this limit on human creative power does not feel like a limit since there are more unexplored possibilities in "the forest of language" than we can imagine.

At the same time they are the most creative people I know. Robert Creeley called them "the wonderful, regenerating Waldrops." That word regenerating is good. Look at the masterpieces of collage they have generated—or regenerated, if you think of collage as a process of turning books into other books. Look at the books in other languages that they have regenerated by translating them into English.

Part of what's inspiring about them is their sheer productivity. They have written a lot, translated a lot. They also publish Burning Deck books; Keith makes visual art. They are always reinventing themselves, always trying something new, always writing, always curious about what other people are writing.

Isn't that the best way of being an artist? When you hear them talking in the interviews collected in this book, you notice that they generate still more than they manage to get on paper. There seems to be no time when they are not proposing solutions to some technical problem of writing poetry. Everything they say could be a poem.

Rosmarie:

The French poet Claude Royet-Journoud once told me that his book La notion d'obstacle did not contain a single instance of the word "I." He was immensely proud of this.

This made me think. But I found I did not share his attitude. On the simplest level, saying "I" seems more modest and manageable than the claim to objectivity that is inherent in avoiding it.

Keith:

Collage is not a form of translation, or vice versa, but they're related. Translation and collage are both movements from one surface to another. In translation, one takes a poem, subtracts all its words—and refills it with other words, words of a different language.

There is, you'll notice, a hole in the middle of that statement. If the words are removed, there is no longer a poem there... . If you think about that too long or too deeply, you tend to give it up.

Nevertheless, this is what happens.

What is their secret? The materials gathered in this book suggest the tantalizing possibility of an instruction manual for becoming the Waldrops. Here are some of the instructions that have been especially meaningful to me. . .

Aaron Kunin
2017|

from "Ceci N'est Pas Rosmarie"

 

THE PAST, UPON SCRUTINY.

Not green mountains embedded in strong feeling. More an exaggeration of fog than German poetry. Interval eclipsed.

I had no grandparents. My mother told me, a few months before she died. Then burst into tears.

LOOKING AT A PICTURE OF THE
LANDSCAPE IS EASIER THAN
LOOKING AT THE LANDSCAPE.

Sepia as an aid to memory. On a lap, chair, tricycle, sled, slope, skis. Next to a christmas tree, bicycle, pool, bridge, potted cactus, father's motorbike, a wheelbarrow, my sisters. I wash (drown?) dolls in the tub, pet a black-and-white cat, throw snowballs. I hold up my kulleraugenpuppe, a Raggedy-Ann doll, but male, with big, rolling eyes. The photo does not show the doll was named Ulli (my name had I been a boy).

I WAS AN ONLY CHILD

even though I wore hand-me-downs from my sisters. Most were Hängerchen, without waist. A source of mortification. I envied boys because they had pockets in their pants.

Snow drifted onto the balcony. The iron stove glowed red.
Father said, I raise daughters and cactuses.
Coupling curiosity with upright for speed.
I learned to tie my shoes, to swim, to ride a bike.
Wildflowers up to my waist. A whir of cicadas. Swallows perched on telephone lines. Adding up cobble stones against more unguessable events.
Father told stories of poisoned apples while mother's shadow grew longer.
Years after waking, words from the dream invade my long childhood.
Could a child be born from something not a mother?
Each slap revealed a face I had not suspected.

FOR REFERENCE

I was born on August 24, 1935, in Kitzingen am Main, Germany, the daughter of Josef Sebald, a highschool teacher, and Friederike, nee Wohlgemuth. My twin sisters Annelie and Dorle were born 9 years earlier, in 1926.

HITLER ON THE RADIO, FOLLOWED BY LEHAR.

I remember the voice. I heard it again years later, heard its hysterical pitch in the voice of an American evangelist. This was in 1959, at a camp meeting in Illinois that my new mother-in-law had taken me to. To disinfect me of Catholicism. The voice freaked me out. I began to see the tent as a Nazi rally, the people ready to do the evangelist's bidding no matter what. Keith brought me out of my panic: the collection basked held nothing higher than a 1-dollar-bill!

WAR CAME OUT OF THE RADIO BEFORE I HAD TIME TO SCRATCH ON A SLATE.

I see us sitting around the wicker table with the radio on it, father, mother with me on her lap. She says, "This war is going to be over in four weeks. Our leader will take care of it." But maybe that was said back to her later, as a taunt. The phrase die kochende Volksseele, "the soul of the people boiling over," I read later. It was 1939. I was four and looking forward to going to school. Playing at it with my sisters' satchel and discarded books. Another photo.

MY FIRST SCHOOLDAY, SEPTEMBER 1941, A COOL DAY.

I was taught. The Nazi salute, the flute. How firmly entrenched, the old theories. Already using paper, pen and ink. Yes, I said, I'm here. Even though the principal was a brüllendes Ungeheuer who struck children across the palms with a cane, wheezing, his face redder and redder with almost an asthma attack. Even so, anxious suspense was converted into the tongue as home. The calendar changed from moon to sun.

WAR, A SURFACE TO LIVE ON.

All men were old. Shoes always too small. Cold oozed up through the holes. Uniforms moved with great speed. Mother thrust her chin forward with a new violence. Examined ration cards and missed coffee. At night the town gave in to the dark as if electricity had never been invented. So many things I did not understand. War as sufficient explanation. Balked in my simulation of childhood. Mother, I cried, extremely. At home in winter, wool pulled over my eyes. At the sound of the siren everybody ran into the cellar.

IN FEBRUARY 1943,

I burrowed into a heap of potatoes as the ground shook. People prayed. When we climbed out of the cellar there were no streets, no rows of houses. Instead: craters, heaps of rubble, mortar, stones, walls broken off, a craggy desert, air thick with dust. A few houses were left standing. They seemed out of place, incongruous with their insistence on boundaries, definite lines.

Mother hurried me up to our apartment and tried to patch the shattered windows. Father came back late from digging up bodies.

It was the first drastic change of my world. A second followed in 1945, a not exactly Nietzschean revaluation of all values. "Our leader" turned into "the criminal," "the enemy" into "Amis," "surrender" into "liberation." This went deeper. And took years to understand.

I have always thought of poetry as a way of building a world. The world is certainly not a given, even if it occupies more and more of the sky. Building a counter-world, not better, but other.

After this bombing, nobody would consider taking shelter in a cellar. Rather catch it in the open and a quick death. Rather jump on bicycles at the first alert and make for the woods. Or flat in the ditches as the planes came roaring.

School stopped. We kids ran wild. The ruins became our castles. With an undercurrent of terror that we might find real bodies in our imagined dungeons.

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from Peter Gizzi and Keith Waldrop, Real Shadows: Interview (1993–1997)

New question. You use the word "overtakelessness" which is a Dickinson word. Do you care to extrapolate on that word, what you think that word means?

"The overtakelessness of those /who have accomplished death" is her line. She's involved with her dead, and they can't be overtaken, because there is nobody there. I'm not sure that's how she would have justified the term. She uses the word twice. Those two lines I quote as an epigraph for Light While There Is Light, along with the old hymn, "Work for the Night Is Coming." As I've put it somewhere, my way of thinking of the ideal poem would simply be one's last words. Art in general seems to me a kind of tombstone, which doesn't last forever, but can stand for a while.

That's nice, seeing the ruin as ruin. If I had to pick a piece of music that might represent how your poems work for me, it's a very small song by Charles Ives called "Serenity."

It sounds familiar, but I can't bring it to mind. I like Ives's songs.

This one in particular. It's like dying—a sense of leaving the body and flying out over an open body of water.

I think a work should have the most effect, with the least possible to-do. John Cowper Powys has a motto—energy without agitation—and I think that's a worthy ideal. I think the worst fault a poem can have is striving for effect.

Who is Wolgamot? What is the Wolgamot Society? How did it begin?

It was when I came back from Aix. So it was the summer of '57. My brother Julian was out of prison and had started another car lot.

Based on the success of the earlier one.

Not in Champagne, this time, but in Danville. Danville was mainly famous for its whorehouses, but there was a bookstore run by a friend of my brother. This friend had just bought the bookstore, thinking he would make money—I think he probably went broke very soon, but he was still there then. I went through the store and found, well, a couple things I wanted. But there was this strange book. I looked at it, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I put it back but I kept thinking about it—it was an odd shape, and I went back and looked at it again, you know, and I asked the guy who owned the shop, where did this come from? He didn't know anything about it. He had bought it, with the rest of the stock, from somebody who owned the store before him.

What was the title of this book?

In Sara, Mencken, Christ, and Beethoven There Were Men and Women. [long silence]

Could you repeat that?

Published in 1944, it said. And the publisher's name was given as John Barton Wolgamot, same as the author's. And I think I didn't even buy it the second time. But then I ran back and got it. It was 50 cents. I became absolutely fascinated by it, and have carried it with me from then on everywhere. I never let go of it.

How old were you at the time?

I must have been twenty-four. And that fall I went to Michigan, so I had it with me. I used to show it to people but, you know, very special people—if I really liked them I would show them this book. And when we needed a name for a society, I think I suggested—it might have been Kennedy—but I think I said: "This is my culture hero." So we named it after him. For a while, everybody who was assumed to be a member of the Wolgamot Society, which was all our circle, was obliged to use Wolgamot's name in whatever they wrote. There were some in a particular bibliography class, for instance, and they were writing papers on everything, but always Wolgamot got into it somewhere. Everybody was quite amused that the teacher never seemed to notice. Dallas Wiebe dedicated his dissertation to Wolgamot.

Was his dissertation on the Cantos?

Wiebe's? No, he wanted to write on Pound, but he was told he couldn't, because Pound was still alive. (The next year, someone wrote on Eliot, and nobody objected, so it was obviously a trumped-up reason.) Anyway, they told him he couldn't do that, but Wyndham Lewis had died recently, and so Dallas wrote on Lewis. (James...

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1940696690
• ISBN 13: 9781940696690
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 392
• Editor: Lerner Ben