James Hannaham interviewed by Lonely Christopher

James Hannaham (Culture Guy)

Gary Gray has a problem. The narrator of James Hannaham’s debut novel, God Says No, newly released from McSweeney’s Rectangulars, loves God and Disney World. The story opens in the late eighties --- Gary is a married, black, overweight Floridian student at a Christian college. Mostly, he gets on normally (even boringly), but, as his long-suffering wife tells him, “Sometimes one problem’s all you need, honey.” The book is defined by this central defect that plagues the protagonist: same sex attraction. Hannaham eschews the blasé implicitness of homosexual desire popularly demonstrated in contemporary media --- invoking something of the erstwhile pathology that characterized works like The Boys in the Band and City of Night --- and in doing so exposes something important about our present national perspectives on sexual identity: being gay remains a struggle. This is especially so for Gary, who is inundated by a fundamentalist Christian morality that portrays queerness as a hell-worthy trespass. The novel describes Gary’s tortured efforts to suppress his attractions, his failures, his desperate schemes to simultaneously maintain a secret sexual life and a family existence, his complete lapse into the “gay lifestyle,” and his complicated admittance into a religious recovery and reform program. As a paradigmatic shift disrupts our national value systems (possibly in ways as upturning as the post-Stonewall development of the gay rights movement) and a postmodern identity politics creeps into the general discourse --- sexuality is fluid and not totalizingly definitional --- Hannaham reminds us of the climate we are growing out of and how much complication we still face. God Says No provides likely one of the most vivid engagements, in recent fiction, with the personal turmoil experienced by subjects with sexual identities and/or attractions incongruous within a heteronormative patriarchy of lingering puritanical mores. As Jim Lewis (The King is Dead, &c.) suggests: Gary isn’t just gay, he’s “profoundly gay.” Withal, the book entertainingly introduces a narratorial voice so strikingly crafted the reader might feel she’s made an unlikely friend in Gary Gray. God Says No is perhaps a surprising release for the twee McSweeney’s brand; it’s a welcome one. Some more front-flap blurb copy, from Jennifer Egan: “God Says No is everything a person could ask of a first novel --- and twice that much.” James Hannaham has written for the likes of Salon.com and The Village Voice; he was a founding member of the downtown theater company Elevator Repair Service, he’s also collaborated with artists such as David Levine (recently in the show Venice Saved: a Seminar at PS 122); he lives in Brooklyn where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute. He was my thesis advisor during my senior year in the writing program, guiding me through my first novel, which subsequently won the annual thesis award for fiction. Busied by the release of God Says No and the requisite national book tour, he nevertheless agreed to let me record him in conversation.
--- Lonely Christopher



Lonely Christopher: I went to a bar on Gay Day, after the parade, and made some friends; eventually this Hasidic Jew, in full regalia, waddled in. He sat down alone and was looking really nervous. Immediately my night was ruined, he was giving off such terrible vibes. He seemed so full of fear, shame, self-disgust, and desire --- he was leering at the boys. And somehow he ended up very close to us. I don’t know, he just kept moving closer until he was sitting with us. And we were talking about literature. I felt bad.

James Hannaham: He was obviously religious.

LC: Yeah --- and he seemed so repressed. You could tell it took him a really long time to work up the nerve to come into a gay bar; now he didn’t know what to do. So I felt like I should try to include him in the conversation. We were talking about Shakespeare; I turned to him and asked if he liked Shakespeare. He looked as if I had just insulted him or something. So I asked if he had ever read Shakespeare. He mumbled he didn’t know --- and he pointed to my drink and asked if I was talking about the name of my beer. It was weird. I left around three am and he was still there. I don’t know if he picked up a boy that night or not.

JH: Maybe he was working his way up to that.

LC: It reminded me of your novel.

JH: Uh… thanks?

LC: Let’s start broad. What is your novel?

JH: I think this book is a little bit 19th Century. It’s just that --- when the major plot point happens --- that, to me, is the moment when, in a 19th Century novel or an early 20th Century novel, everybody goes to Europe. I’m thinking of maybe The Custom of the Country. I was in graduate school when I started this and I was reading a lot of late 19th and early 20th Century books. One could make the argument that my book is like a 19th Century novel about a 21st Century person.

LC: How does being a novelist relate to your role as a creative writing instructor?

JH: As an instructor, I tried to stay out of everybody’s projects to some degree, right? I feel like the way to get it done is to get it done. Whatever process you use to get from nothing to a novel --- that is your thing. All I can do is really tell you, “Well this is what has worked for me.” And sometimes I can look at somebody’s work, and hear about their process, and say, “Well, this seems to be what works for you, so why don’t you do X, Y, or Z?” But I really don’t believe in trying to teach fiction as a craft. I’m really suspicious of this sort of drift toward turning fiction into something that’s more like screenwriting. One of the things that I kept beating myself up about, while I was writing this book, was: “Well, it doesn’t really have a hook.” There’s nothing, in the conception of it, that I can describe to somebody who would immediately say it sounds like a great story that they want to read or it sounds like a great thing to make a movie out of. I think I kept resisting that because I was chaffing against the idea that it would have to be this packaged thing, this thing I would have to sell to people. I was much more of the opinion, when I started writing and thinking about what novels are good for, that they were just about people’s lives.

LC: God Says No is very well structured. I’d like to describe it as a triptych because its three parts are separate but very balanced, in a painterly way. How did that develop?

JH: Gosh! That is such a formalist question. I haven’t thought about it so much in terms of form. The form develops very slowly --- what I try to do is write the whole thing and then figure out what I’ve done and what it’s telling me. I think at a certain moment I realized it could be divided into these three sections pretty neatly. And then I was messing around with the chapters a lot: by the very end, the chapters changed. What I ended up with, I felt pretty good about.

LC: Can you talk about the voice of Gary Gray? It’s so successful to me --- maybe the most important aspect in committing the reader to the story. I am reminded of the ingenuous and unwittingly euphemistic voice of the narrator from Lydia Millet’s novel My Happy Life, which you taught in class.

JH: Oh, yeah!

LC: The idiomatic US plain-speak of Gary’s tone was, I suspect, crafted with a lot of intention to particulars of ordinary communication.

JH: Yeah. And My Happy Life was a pretty big influence on me. I wasn’t really trying to copy it, but I wanted something of that sense of cluelessness. I think at a certain point I thought that, because I’ve written so much nonfiction and I have all this specialized knowledge in cultural stuff, I thought that as a fiction writer I would be the sort who would write from a position of profound knowledge of the way the world works --- but I realized that it was more fun for me, and it felt more organic (I used the word “organic,” didn’t I?), more natural to me to write from a sense of complete confusion and wonder. I feel like I still don’t know what any of this is: life, why anything happens, why people behave the way they do. I mean, that’s a big one. There are some things you can know empirically, but you can only just guess at other people’s emotional states. My Happy Life was pretty important. I mean, the voice developed out of that feeling. Also, I wrote this book which made the rounds and never got published; several people commented that they really didn’t like the narrator. So I decided to invent this narrator whose big flaw, or one of his big flaws, is that he’s pretty desperate to be liked. And then I started noticing people that I felt fit that description. There is a poet, who will remain nameless, who I met at a residency --- he was just very sweet and obviously wanted to be liked, really friendly, but he was friendly to the point of being a little repulsive. I found that fascinating and tragic.

LC: Jim Lewis compares your protagonist to Candide. I agree, in the way that Gary Gray is propelled through social misadventure in an uncomprehending manner that, for the reader, ironically critiques the circumstances of the character’s plight.

JH: That’s a great observation. You learned well.

LC: You’ve stated that you didn’t have a religious childhood. The book is so drenched in a specific Christian culture that I guessed you had history with some churchy mores. I’m the opposite, actually --- brought up socialized religiously, but totally uninterested in addressing related themes as a writer.

JH: Yeah. Actually, the thing is: a lot of people in my family were reverends and teachers. My generation shifted to writers, artists, journalists. Because of that there’s been this sort of veil over the religious part of it. My parents were not religious. Although both of my parents, in very different ways, came to something that I would call Christian mysticism. My mother thought we were all telepathic; my father joined this science of mind group (kind of like Christian Science, with some eastern thought).

LC: Why were you drawn to centralizing a particular fundamentalist perspective?

JH: Do you mean why did I make Gary Gray religious?

LC: It’s such an important part of the novel.

JH: Yeah. Well, it’s because I’ve been fascinated with religious people --- it’s kind of in my blood. When I was on tour, just now, I was paying a visit to a church where my great grandfather was an itinerant minister in 1911. They were telling me that I might actually have to lead a prayer and that they would ask me what church I was with. I was asked, “Is it in your blood?” And I said, “Well, when I think about it, it kind of is.” I mean, there are a lot of transferable skills between doing a book tour and being an itinerant minister --- and also teaching and being in an experimental theater company. I feel like I’ve preached the gospel of art. The other thing is that I wanted to understand people who were that religious. Although, I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that there’s not all that much to understand. I’ve had a correspondence with this sort of odd Christian woman who got in touch with me through a listserv. She would send me these four-thousand-word emails. I couldn’t respond to all her points. I stopped responding to her because there was just too much and I got too busy. I couldn’t devote half my day to responding to her. I wanted to have a rational discussion, but at a certain point the discussion does not become rational for people who have that much faith. They are convinced. She wanted me to read some book that proved that Christianity was the only way. I was like: “No.” There isn’t a book that’s going to do that for me. This is the way that Muslim fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists end up killing each other. There is just no common ground. They refuse to admit any common ground. So the only thing you can do, short of reforming somebody, is just kill them.

LC: The anti-gay and/or homophobic stances inundating the world Gary has to negotiate left me really nonplussed. I’m relatively unfamiliar with examples of foundational guilt, shame, fear, and furtiveness that terrorize your protagonist.

JH: You found them surprising?

LC: Yeah!

JH: Have you seen that video from that Connecticut church?

LC: Oh, you know, I did.

JH: Oh my god! Who dramatized a portion of my book?



LC: I don’t have a lot of experience with that kind of anti-gay ideology. Although a lot of weird stuff has been going down during pride month this year. You know, even on the day of the parade and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall: gay bashings in Manhattan and that bar raid with police brutality in Texas. For me, such things have been kind of fictionalized. I’m exposed to those situations mostly through art. At the same time I realize, maybe a little too abstractly, that these problems remain unresolved for queer individuals.

JH: That’s the reason why I wanted to write the book. I thought, “Jesus!” I kept hearing things like that. A lot of the events that happen in the book are sort of based on things that I heard or experiences that friends of mine, or ex-boyfriends, or my current boyfriend have told me about. I said to myself, “Aren’t we done with this? Didn’t we do this already? Why are we still dealing with these kinds of things?” I felt like it was a little unfashionable and therefore perhaps a little interesting. Sometimes unfashionable just means we haven’t dealt with it properly (not just that it’s tacky).

LC: I read an interview where you were asked if you did any research for the novel --- you replied saying you didn’t do any research and then you began to immediately describe doing a bunch of research. Anyway, your portrayal of the whole ex-gay ministry was very vivid; the creepy illogic of the recovery model that suppresses instead of curing, and the way the men struggle with that, was very convincing and pathetic. Maybe do you think a lobotomy would be more effectual to make ex-gays?

JH: Um… actually, I don’t know. Doesn’t a lobotomy sort of remove your ability to control your emotions? That would make you gayer, wouldn’t it? You’d be totally a needy homo all the time. I mean, I don’t advocate lobotomies. I don’t advocate pathologizing sexuality. That’s what I think is the bigger danger. “Let’s get everything that’s unusual about human beings and turn it into an illness.” I think that’s a larger problem than people trying to get rid of homosexuality through these ex-gay things. You know, anything that seems a little wrong with somebody --- like restless leg syndrome --- let’s turn that into a disease so that someone can make a pill. Isn’t that kind of where things always seem to be going with these people who want to know, “How does sexuality happen? What causes it?” As if, because it happens to only the lucky few, it is something to be gotten rid of --- because it’s not the norm. If you’re looking at somebody who’s different and saying because they’re different they’re inferior and how do we get rid of them --- it seems like there are all these steps that will lead you down a genocidal path.

LC: Can you talk about your use of the physical act of sex in the book? You don’t write terribly explicit sex scenes --- but the episodes are important and completely devastating in their stilted desperation.

JH: Well there are a couple of good sex scenes, scenes of good sex, in the book. But I think I kind of added those to balance out some of the awkward scenes. I feel to avoid writing pornography --- it always sounded more interesting to write about bad sex. Which is not to say that I think it’s better to have bad sex; it’s just more interesting to write about. It becomes dramatic in a way that good sex doesn’t always.

LC: About the only mistake I think you made in the novel is giving your protagonist a few religious epiphanies, including a vision of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, the story is very distinctly characterized by a giant lack of God. The novel is more defined by God’s silence or absence than by his judgment. You write about the subject’s conflict with a social system that upholds specific values, not about a direct struggle with God. It’s like in Angels in America, how God just up and left. What were your intentions here?

JH: One of the larger conceptual ideas was --- I was inspired by the testimonials of ex-gays. Have you ever gone to one of those ex-gay websites and read anything there? They’re like two-page biographies, basically, that are written in an incredibly plain, clumsy, layperson language. And you get the sense also that they have had the crap edited out of them --- by somebody who has an agenda. I found them really fascinating because these really odd things would happen in them: visions of Christ. There’s this really great moment in one of them where this woman was in a dance club, and everybody’s faces melted, and Jesus came off the dance floor and was like, “My child, I don’t want you to be a lesbian.” I thought, well, what if you took these two-page biographies and tried to connect all the dots and fill in the emotional interiority you would need in order to turn it into a novel? That was one of the major conceptual ideas I had when I was starting it. So I felt like the vision of Christ is kind of a nod to that, but it’s also sort of an odd vision of Christ --- and Gary interprets Christ’s message in a really bizarre way. “Yes, you should be gay. Go out and have a year of having sex and relationships with men.” I mean, it’s pretty odd that he sees it that way. I also thought it was kind of funny that he doesn’t recognize Christ when he sees him. So, I don’t know if that justifies it to you, but it’s ambiguous even though it’s a vision of Christ. It’s not like your average vision of Christ. He also kind of qualifies it right after it happens. He says some skeptical person later told him he was having a vision of Christ because of head trauma.

LC: God Says No is pretty newly out in the world. Do you have any sense of how it’s been received, critically or by a general readership, already?

JH: The reviews have largely been positive, which is great. Of course, as I think it was actually Sarah Manguso reportedly said, “It’s never enough!” I’m feeling that right now. What I would really like (and I think this is what a lot of authors want) is some high profile good review or something that will save the book from falling into obscurity too fast. But I’m pretty happy. As I was saying to you, it seems like people are interviewing me more often than reviewing the book --- but when it’s been reviewed it’s been pretty positive. There was one guy recently who gave us the option of not having him run a negative review, which was interesting because I thought: “Hell yeah! I don’t want you to run it.” I mean, when does that ever happen? It’s certainly not my way of doing things.

LC: You were talking to me earlier about the queer response and the religious response to your book.

JH: Right. I think that people who hate the book fall into several categories. One is extremely religious Christians and on the other extreme are gay people who have no sense of humor and believe that there should be lots and lots of positive images, whatever that means, of gay people in whatever one does. As a gay person you’re politically obligated to show the wonderful side of being homosexual and none of the angst. I feel like those are the two poles. I was trying to figure out if maybe this person who wrote the negative review was a crazy Christian with an agenda, because that would be fun to read, but instead I think he was of the opposite… camp.

LC: Finally, can you relate to me the story of how you were briefly a cast member on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Do you think you’d still have written this debut novel if you were busy giving style and culture tips to straight fashion victims?

JH: At the time, I had already started the novel. Queer Eye filmed in the summer of 2002 and I had started working on the book in 2001. Whether or not it would have gotten finished is a little bit up for grabs. But I was pretty determined this was something I wanted to do so I would have probably found the time --- and I wouldn’t have had to find the money if I was doing Queer Eye. Of course, I was a little worried that the show was going to be a hit, and that it would suddenly become my life, and that I wouldn’t be able to get away from being defined by it. Occasionally I would see posters of all the guys, sitting around in white suits on a set, and I would think: “There but for the grace of god go I!” I mean it was kind of a fun time. I took the job mostly because I needed some money and I thought it would be kind of a fun thing. It kind of fit a lot of my job skills, frankly. What they wanted from the “culture guy,” which was my role, was somebody who told the straight guy what to read and what music to listen to. But it’s hard to give somebody a CD and say they “have” culture. So they were having trouble with that idea. I also think it’s a little bit troublesome for television executives, except for Oprah, to tell people to go read books. There may have been a little bit of an issue with that. So they totally revamped the role after the pilot and I didn’t make it.

LC: Did you have a slogan?

JH: They all had slogans?

LC: I’ve never actually seen the show.

JH: It was sort of fun --- and I’m glad I’m not doing it.

Lonely Christopher in Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith studied sculpture at RISD but has become the foremost practitioner of Conceptual Writing. He curates the invaluable archive of avant-garde material called Ubuweb, hosts a radio show on WFMU, and acts as a spokesperson for his contemporary poetics online, in print, and at academic conferences. His books are expressions of what he calls “uncreative writing”: renegotiations of the value systems upon which literature rests. The work ranges from entertaining (Soliloquy transcribes every word he said over the course of one week), to hypnotic (The Weather, a short volume, is a year’s worth of radio forecasts), to presumably readable only by madmen (the thick Day contains every character printed in one copy of The New York Times). Although he frequently suggests the idea of the texts should substitute for the experience of reading them, when somebody is inclined to make the effort she confronts a vacuum in which, paradoxically, everything is breathing with meaning. Kenneth is the subject of the 2007 documentary Sucking on Words, which is available to view online. Though I’ve heard his peers accuse him of being a confidence man, the implications of his work have been addressed extensively by poets and academicians. (Ron Silliman recalls, “I knew people were taking him seriously when, over five years ago, the MacArthur Foundation called to ask me if I thought he was a genius.”) Goldsmith teaches at the University of Pennsylvania; he edited I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera that premiered in March 2007. When I first met him four years ago he wasn’t wearing any shoes. The following is a transcript of a recording from last January when I sat down with him at his Manhattan home and asked him some questions (originally published in an undated issue of The Prattler circa February 2008).

Lonely Christopher: Why do you think writing is such a conservative form?

Kenneth Goldsmith: Because language is the means through which we communicate with each other. If we disrupt that communication flow then chances are, according to the conservative idea, we can never understand each other. And if we can never understand each other, in the type of way we’re speaking right now, we can’t get anywhere. Most likely we can’t do anything. We can’t make business together, for example, if we don’t have a common language. It’s very sacred to a lot of people so they get very threatened by rupture in language.

LC: You have said you no longer think of yourself as a poet or writer but as a word processor. You have also said that creativity is bankrupt. I can’t really decide whether those are pessimistic or optimistic statements, or both, but they sort of scare and excite me. Yet maybe there’s also something restrictive or tyrannical in declaring the death of creativity. What do you think about these reactions?

KG: It’s not really meant to be a provocation; it’s simply an explanation of where we happen to be at this particular time. We spend our time processing language these days. We spend our time processing everything these days. Writing needs to respond to the new environment of the web, which is all about information management. If it’s not responding to that particular situation it cannot be called contemporary.

LC: So do you think that responding to situations presented by the Internet is one of the main concerns of your work?

KG: Very much so, yeah. It’s changed the whole game, hasn’t it? Most writers, of course, don’t want to deal with it. They pretend the Internet never happened.

LC: What does sculpture mean to you and why did you quit it?

KG: I’m not sure how to answer the first part of that question.

LC: That’s the part of the question I’m more interested in.

KG: Oh, is it? Okay. In a city like this, sculpture is impractical. I came to New York as a sculptor. In a city where space and transport is at a premium I couldn’t function the way I could when I was in school when I had unlimited studio space and I could make these enormous things and show them in these big spaces and store them in another place. You come to New York and everything has to change. I think writing is the perfect solution. A sculptural approach to writing is really great. You can actually carve words, be very physical with words, and you can do it all on a laptop in a studio apartment. I think the best way to be a sculptor is to work on the computer.

LC: How do you address the materiality of the word?

KG: Words are really great. They can take any form you pour them into. If you want to make it material you can output it in a thousand different ways. You could make those words into cast iron, you could paint them, you could make dresses out of them... it never ends. On the web you can realize it materially in all other ways, the ways we were talking about with Flash or with programming. That’s the beauty of language. You can’t do that with paint. It’s much more malleable than paint. It’s a great medium.

LC: What is it about Andy Warhol that you admire?

KG: There’s nothing about Andy Warhol that I don’t admire. I think in terms of a writer the thing that struck me the most was Warhol’s sense of the contemporary; he really embraced the contemporary. And it wasn’t always pretty, but he knew he had to be of his moment. As a result, because of being such a part of his moment, he became a part of the culture and now he’s as relevant or maybe even more relevant than he was when he was alive. So I must admire his contemporariness.

LC: How does that work? When I first started thinking about Warhol I was thinking about him actually in relation to the Situationists because I was studying the Situationists and I saw that they wanted to affect change but they designed their movement in a way where all their ideas were easily colonized and they really quickly failed. That failure made me think of Warhol because he seemed to have designed his work and life in a way where whatever the position it was put in it still retained its integrity.

KG: You’re very astute; that’s a great point. But the real thing is that the secret of Warhol was he never intended resistance and therefore something that could never offer resistance could never be co-opted. That’s fucking brilliant. He was completely complicit and by being complicit he was subversive. It was a very brilliant strategy of his. He took a lot of shit for it, too. People didn’t understand.

LC: Can you tell me about the Warhol opera? I know very little about it.

KG: I did an opera based on the book of Andy Warhol interviews I edited that was performed in Geneva by a troupe of six dancers, a dozen musicians, and a bunch of opera singers. It was all chopped up text from the words of Andy Warhol.

LC: What’s the purpose of turning Warhol’s interviews into a libretto? That seems like a “creative” act in contradistinction to both your own ideas about writing and maybe even certain perceptions about the intentions of Warhol’s work.

KG: But this book was a very different type of a book: it was an art historical book, it was a different type of a project. Had this been my project I would have gathered the Andy Warhol interviews and put my name on them (simply retype them and not attribute them to Andy Warhol).

LC: What do you think about the interview as a form?

KG: That’s why that interview book with Warhol was so interesting. Because, like everything Warhol touched, it became a new way of making art for him. Warhol would do a completely untraditional interview and he would end up asking the interviewer more questions than the interviewer could ask him so by the end of the interview you found out nothing about Warhol but you found everything out about the guy who was interviewing him. He was a mirror: you just see yourself in it. He would never show you what he was.

LC: What does plagiarism mean to you?

KG: It’s a fabulous way to write. It’s a writing technique to me.

LC: What do you teach your students?

KG: I teach them plagiarism. I teach them uncreative writing. I teach them how to steal, how to appropriate, how to falsify papers, how to buy papers and call them their own. Anything that’s not allowed. We explore in the classroom and my students are penalized for showing creativity or originality.

LC: What do you think of creative writing workshops and of formalism?

KG: I think they are shit. I mean they’re bullshit. It’s fine for another time but it’s not contemporary. It has absolutely nothing to do with the world we live in right now. It’s high school stuff.

LC: Why do you think creative writing programs have become so popular?

KG: I have no idea. I have no idea why anybody would be interested in that approach. Maybe they want to go to Hollywood and write screenplays, but if you write screenplays all you’re doing is plagiarizing other screenplays and other stories anyway. They’re doing what I’m saying writing should be doing, but they’re not admitting it. Nothing’s original in Hollywood. If you made something original in Hollywood it would never get made. You have to remake the same story over and over again. But of course they can’t admit it.

LC: Can you talk about your ideas of process in relation to art and writing?

KG: Unlike painting (where the artist has to stretch a canvas, prime it, make the thing stand up) writing is a different process but I think it’s an equally intense and important process. Like you were talking about with your work: sort of building a structure, hanging the language onto it, and then letting the structure fall away. I’m a bit of a Structuralist. I’m interested in Oulipian constraints, but then in the end kind of kicking the thing away and letting it stand, like you. Very interesting.

LC: You say that people don’t have to read your books as long as they understand the ideas -- but to me, thinking about a concept of one of your books and engaging with one of them in practice (by actually reading it) are different experiences. To me the effort of reading your books, which are boring texts in a way, provides a fuller experience and a sharper understanding of what it is you are accomplishing. Why do you often suggest that reading your books is unnecessary?

KG: We let them off the hook. Text works on so many levels. There’s the level of language that we’re speaking right now, which is transparent: the language doesn’t exist; only the ideas are jumping from my mouth to your mind and from your mouth to my mind. Or else we could have a you know we could start ehh blep ek app whhwhat am I try um ep uh ahh you juhh ah start to uh hhhheh wait, you know, then suddenly we begin to think of language not as transparent but actually as physical matter. That’s the beauty of language: there’s no one way to understand it, there’s no one way to engage with it. I say you don’t have to engage with it, but I don’t say you’re not permitted to either. I think there’s another experience to be had; it’s not one many people are going to want to do, and that’s okay, that doesn’t really bother me. But I like the multi-tonality of these books. They provide a different experience to think about it and a difference experience to read it. Most books, if you don’t read it you don’t get it.

LC: I’ve heard you sometimes use languages you are not familiar with. Can you talk about that?

KG: When I first started writing I was extremely formal and I realized that by inventing a formal system you could subvert the normative uses of your native language. I was at Whole Foods yesterday and I was talking to the bagger and I had all these groceries and I said, “I’d like you to bag everything by shape or color this time, so put everything that’s red in one bag and everything that’s round in another bag.” So you have an extremely different interaction with what’s most familiar if you begin to apply a different type of structural system to it. So in that way I was able to de-familiarize my own language. I was able to actually work with English in a way where I didn’t understand English even though I understood every word. It was really interesting, organizing things by shape and color instead of by what goes in a bag together naturally. And so I figured if I could do that with my own language then I could do it with any language. And so I began using languages that weren’t mine and organizing them formally (creating a formal device by which the language would fall into place). And I was able to write in any language I wanted.

LC: How do you see groups of artists being configured now compared to earlier when New York had seemingly more vital communities predicated on geography? I feel like, to some extent, student communities that form around schools are incidental and the artistic environment of the city thirty or forty years ago that I tend to idealize has basically been erased or mostly paved over. What does the Internet have to do with this paradigmatic change?

KG: The Internet has rendered geography basically obsolete. Everybody’s scattered everywhere. Thank god there’s the Internet; without it then we’d really have a problem finding each other. I think communities are really, really thriving all over the web and all over the world, but it’s a very different configuration from being in SoHo and going out at night and everybody having a beer together. It’s completely different, but very strong. My best peers are scattered around Europe and all over Canada. And I go there, I’m invited to read and to teach there, and we see each other, and it’s great to meet these people and be in touch, and then they come through New York, and we do see each other, there’s a lot of physical contact, but oftentimes some of the closest people I’m involved with I’ve never ever met. I think that the whole thing has been completely realigned. I think it’s better, though. I think we have tighter communities now than we did before when it was geographically based.

Related Resources

•Ubuweb
•Kenneth’s page at The Electronic Poetry Center
•Audio and video from the Conceptual Poetry Conference on the Poetry Foundation website
•The documentary Sucking on Words
•The Anthology of Conceptual Writing edited by Craig Dworkin
•Traffic on the The Eclipse Archive
•Interview with Andy Warhol

In Conversation with Sweeney

Christopher Sweeney, the reclusive director of The Corresponding Society (and editor-in-chief of the journal), was recently caught on tape in a conversation, with this blog’s web editor, which addressed specific issues related to our press and journal as well as broader considerations of contemporary poetics and the processes of younger writers. Characteristically he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

Lonely Christopher: How would you define The Corresponding Society?

Sweeney: It’s a project that was conceived in, probably, November 2007 amongst a group of writers⎯six of us, I would say, who’ve been living in Brooklyn now for a long time. The group itself began before that with a reading series we started called The Gates Salon (which is basically an open mic for friends, associates, and really anyone who wants to come). I think, to some extent at least, it’s an attempt to begin more concretely developing a community of writers⎯not necessarily along any specific aesthetic lines or particular approaches to craft, but a young group that’s Brooklyn-based (although we don’t exclude people from other locations).

LC: What are the purposes or functions of Correspondence?

Sw: I think the hope is probably, on one hand, that it’s intended to be an outlet for publication for young writers (that’s how it is mostly right now, but we also feature older, more established writers) that we know and are excited about; the second thing is to begin to encourage a journal that is really focused on an advanced development of craft and formal ability.

LC: What makes our establishment of a group (a press) relevant or appropriate considering that the ideologies and formal directions of all the members are so dissimilar?

Sw: I think that it’s obvious looking at The New American Poetry anthology, which published a lot of work at the time focusing on many different journals, and throughout much of the last half century’s work, that oftentimes literary groups don’t form along specific aesthetic lines; often it’s just a lot of talented individuals that grow out of an engagement that does not necessarily translate into congruent ideas. I think it’s often the conflict of ideas, opinions, and styles that leads to better work and better engagement than a sort of unanimous consent or congruence.

LC: How do you feel literary journals function in the landscape of contemporary writing as you understand it and, considering possible paradigmatic shifts that have occurred over the past century (especially re the Internet’s influence), do they function as vitally as possible in our contemporary context?

Sw: I don’t know for sure; I’ve actually had trouble with this question for other journals⎯and our own. In general my experience with literary journals coming out recently is that it’s been pretty bland. Poetry in general has not excited me much in the last fifteen years of work that I’ve seen. I think most of the time literary journals have no effect or no meaning. It’s difficult to maintain a literary journal for its own sake⎯more or less, anyone publishing in a journal, particularly anyone of note, is also publishing elsewhere; so there’s little to distinguish one journal from another. I think one possible use of a journal, one of the better uses that I can currently think of, is as a formal documentation of a literary community through time. I don’t think there is any journal or that there’s going to be any journal that necessarily stands out. I think, in a lot of ways, that a simple documentation of a group is a worthwhile goal for a journal.

LC: What are your expectations and hopes for The Corresponding Society?

Sw: I certainly would like to continue publishing. Our schedule for the journal right now is biannual; I think the ultimate goal is for it to be quarterly. Also the press wants to begin publishing novels and book-length poems or collections soon. Furthermore, the hope would be to increase circulation.

LC: How would you describe an ideal reader of Correspondence?

Sw: I think in some ways the best readers so far have been the people involved. It’s been rewarding and interesting to hear the responses of contributors. While I know just about every contributor, not all of them know each other; it’s been interesting to introduce writers to each other.

LC: Isn’t that a little hermetic?

Sw: Yeah, certainly. I guess I don’t know what expectations to have for a wider reception of the journal.

LC: How does geography relate to the Corresponding Society⎯that is to say are we mostly localized or do we represent work being produced in various locations and coming together through a medium of communication such as the Internet?

Sw: It’s certainly based in Brooklyn⎯but in the first issue we published work by a handful of people from Connecticut, from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Denver, San Francisco, Scotland, and Paris. In a lot of ways it extends beyond Brooklyn; for some involved we communicate primarily through the Internet and the press. The hope for the future is that it will extend even further.

LC: How do you perceive the state of the arts in Brooklyn (especially concerning the writing community, which is so often marketed as strong and important here)?

Sw: It is often marketed that there are strong writing communities here⎯I personally have no idea what those people are talking about. There certainly are writers in Brooklyn, there are many, but I don’t think many of them are interesting. For me, and there’s certainly something I could seriously be missing, but the two dominant trends that I see from where I stand include a style of work which⎯I know you won’t like this⎯harps on experimentalism and novelty for its own sake (as far as I understand it), and then there’s confessional or memoir-based writing that’s more about telling and sharing personal stories than it is about direct engagement with craft (and I don’t find that interesting either).

LC: How do you see your peers developing as writers in contradistinction to your ideas about writing?

Sw: There are actually few people developing along the same lines as myself. I think Dave Swensen (a contributing editor) is someone often working in a similar vein, but that’s pretty much it. I mean, you are someone whose work is very obviously developing in a different direction than mine⎯it’s work that’s really engaged with innovative formal elements. Chanelle Bergeron (a writer in the first issue) is going in another direction still⎯whereas I often take Pound, Eliot, and Crane as my models I see a lot of cummings in her work. I see a sort of wordplay and imagination that I don’t feel I currently have. Then there are certain writers, Matthew Daniel and Robert Snyderman, who I think are⎯certainly not disengaged, but maybe I don’t even understand fully the formal direction by which they’re approaching their work. Robert’s work is somewhat similar to mine in that he takes dialogues from Persephone, Hades, and Demeter⎯but he’s pushing it in a more experimental direction. I’m not really sure.

LC: As somebody who is deeply invested in the model of high modernism, do you think contemporary poetics are problematic and if so, how⎯and what must young writers do to engage with poetics in a more important/relevant way?

Sw: Well, I have spent a lot of time studying, working, writing through the high modernists. I think I’m trying to begin to step out of that⎯not that it’s gone too far but one poet I’ve been reading a lot of recently is John Berryman, who has traces of high modernism but begins moving it in a much less romantic, much more colloquial direction. I think the fact that I’ve been so obstinate with the high modernists has been a fault in some ways, yet in some ways I do get the impression that a lot of the time young poets are not making the necessary commitment to discovering and studying the poetic tradition that precedes them; they sort of skim through, or skip over entirely, Eliot and Pound simply because at first glance it’s difficult. Often it’s those same writers who don’t do much reading of earlier poets. One person I began reading a lot of in the last year is John Donne. So I think there needs to be a more effective engagement with the historical tradition of poetry, and I think there’s just a fundamental danger with attempting to found your poetics solely on the current decade or two of work. The danger with reading contemporary work is always the fact that it’s easy to get caught up in trends and fads and to not be able to discern what’s enduring about any given poet. Unless you can begin to do that you don’t really even have a grounds on which you can judge contemporary work.