new poetry and poetics edited by brian kim stefans - Arras.net

thumbnail sketch of “sore models” that I’ve probably unnerved you with, how do
you see this project in relation to politicized opacities of language writing? Do
you see the poems as an attempt to rearticulate the lyrical, or even the pastoral?
Considering the various moves into and then out of a domestic space, from the
personal to the social (each corrupting the other) how do you see the work in
relation to Foucauldian notions of power, ie. as coming from that which escapes
the panoptic gaze, and is more disparate rather than consolidated? Maybe you
could discuss your poetic development —what were you reading before this
work, what have you given up as dead ends in your past —as well as your decision
to work with a repeated form.
MC: Golly! Well, I remember the origins of and lead-up to Sore Models quite
clearly, altho I’m probably less able to explain why certain pieces (it’s a sequence
of 28 12-line poems) contain the elements they do. I spent much of ‘94 reading
everything I could get my hands on by, among others, Bernadette Mayer, Clark
Coolidge, Michael Gottlieb, Ted Greenwald, Ray DiPalma—by the end of the
summer of that year I’d fallen so under the sway of Coolidge’s works in particular
that, while I thought of my concerns as being, broadly, “what happens to
word 1 when word 2 is put down beside it”, I just wasn’t producing interesting
results—I certainly wasn’t able to make such a reductive syntax crackle with the
electricity Coolidge does in his earlier books (also thinking about CC’s “Larry
Eigner Notes”, I suppose—”a nounal/prepositional universe”...). I’d finished the
manuscript of “Compositional Bonbons Placate” & was wondering what to
write next, & I knew in some vague sense that I wanted it to be “different”.
Then, in October, I made my first trip to the States &, while staying in
Providence with Peter Gizzi & Elizabeth Willis, decided that, on my return, I
would start work on a sequence. Sore Models owes its shape &, in a distorted way,
its tone to my continuing admiration of Kit Robinson’s works, & to the fact that
I was reading him on the plane back to the UK, so the feel of some of his works
was uppermost in my mind when next I sat down to write. Also I wanted to see
whether I could stick with something (a repeated form) for a few months without
tiring of it.
I’m not very knowledgeable about Robert Duncan’s works—the opening poem
in Sore Models lifts phrases more or less verbatim from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s
Pendulum, while “6/1/95” opens with the beginning of a Donald Davidson essay
on the role of adverbs as modifiers of semantic sense, before closing with a search
for fuel which appears there, I think, as a result of dipping into Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow. The poems were just built out of whatever was on my desk at
the time. Pastoral elements? Hmmm—probably arose from a certain glumness at
that time, the humour ditto (an attempt to rouse myself) while also, of course,
relating to the occasional New Yorkiness of tone in Robinson’s work, which