The Language of Inquiry

Comments for Manuel Brito

Comments for Manuel Brito I wrote the “Comments for Manuel Brito” in response to a set of fourteen questions that I received from Manuel Brito, a scholar and editor based in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. With the intention of conducting interviews with several American poets, Brito had been doing research in the library at the University of California, San Diego, whose Archive for New Poetry in the Mandeville Special Collections contains materials relating to the work of numerous contemporary American poets. In the end, Brito interviewed twelve poets: Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Norma Cole, Michael Davidson, Carla Harryman, Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer, Jerome Rothenberg , Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, and myself. The interviews , including this one, were published in Spain as A Suite of Poetic Voices.1 As the editor and publisher of Zasterle Press, Brito has published books by a number of contemporary American poets, including books by most of the people whom he interviewed. Thus he was already deeply involved with American poetry. This gave him considerable credibility, and it explains the seriousness and candor with which his questions were considered. 177 My own set of questions arrived in late 1990, and several weeks later, in January 1991, I left for the Canadian Rockies. My plan was to spend a month in relative isolation at the Banff Centre for the Arts working on the book that became The Cell. I did work on that book, but the Gulf War was underway and isolation (if by that one means a turning away from the immediacies of the world) was impossible. In fact, as I was answering Manuel Brito’s questions, I came to the realization that “a turning away from the immediacies of the world” is antithetical to the worldly undertaking that writing in my view entails. On this occasion, solitude increased the intensity of my involvement with the world. The fourteen questions seemed quite independent from each other, and so I chose to respond to them in disorder. I cut the pages into fourteen strips and, drawing them blindly from an envelope, I answered one every other day for the month I was in Canada. After living in the mountains and without the modern utilities you integrated yourself in the urban life of the city; how was that process? Urban life requires numerous and various acts of integration and reintegration, more than country life as I experienced it required , not because that country life was uneventful but because events in the quite remote area where my husband, two children , and I were living were themselves integrated—they con- firmed each other. There were plenty of adventures—rattlesnakes , bears, forest fires, a range war, an escaped prisoner and a cowboy posse pursuing him—but it took very little analysis to respond to them. Urban life, on the other hand, at least in the U.S., where the milieu of the city includes elements from so many and such diverse cultures, is radically self-conscious. One 178 / The Language of Inquiry is confronted with perceptual and even with ethical situations that require one to question one’s position, quite literally. The intensification of self-consciousness that our move back to the city occasioned was difficult, as I remember it, and to some extent oppressive. But it resulted, at the same time, in an intensi- fication of the epistemological conditions and investigations from which my poetics and my literary life continue to evolve. It was in the context of this move—away from the landscape of mountains and ranch lands (what is called chaparral) to that of city streets and social space—that I wrote Writing Is an Aid to Memory. I posited a language landscape, regarding words and phrases with as much specificity as one grants particular rocks, trees, and conditions of sky. I could say then, too, that it was in the context of this work that I made the move to the city. Of course I didn’t simply move generally to the city, but rather I moved at a particular time, July of 1977, to a particular place, the San Francisco Bay Area, and into a situation where writing and writing-related activities of such poets as Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and I were coinciding. It was a startling situation, and it has deeply informed the process by...