Gabriel Ricard: There's a certain kind of musical quality to the book. In terms of the way the poem expresses itself, there almost seems to be more of a sonic background to the material, different instruments working together to create a single voice, more than anything to do with literature, although that influence is certainly felt throughout as well. Does it feel like that to you? Are poems like this one meant to be viewed that way?
Vernon Frazer: Definitely. My intention is to make a kind of verbal music. I refer to it as "orchestrated text" because I hear the lines flowing into one another from different sections of the page, or the dissonances and harmonies of sound when passages designed for multiple voices are read simultaneously. The last time I read at St. Mark's Poetry Project, sections from Improvisations, I wasn't satisfied with the performance because the mikes didn't pick up all the voices—but what I was able to hear on playback told me that I'd transcribed the voices the way I wanted them to sound. Emblematic Moon tries to achieve the same thing in terms of verbal musicality but it also moves into more visual areas. Certain things I do, such as cover part of a block of text with a graphic shape, are intended to make the reader understand that certain things, in life or literature, are unknowable or can't be expressed fully.
Orchestrating text came about because I missed the sound of instruments I had around me during the five years that I had a poetry band. "Tourettic Possession Rant/Dance" uses orchestrated text in a context that had a clear, intended meaning—that is, before I threw out the rule book.
GR: What would you say to anyone who simply dismisses a work like this as gibberish or weirdness for its own sake?
VF: That I asked myself the same question many times when I first started writing like this (Laughs). And that I had to explain it to people who'd been following my work for years. The aesthetic I'm working from hasn't infiltrated our English departments very deeply, so not many people will hear about it in the classroom. Many jazz aficionados accept the abstract music that surrounded my "referential work"with the poetry band and my duo with Thomas Chapin, but have difficulty accepting that language can be just as abstract as the music.
I resolved my own doubts, partly through my own literary background and above all through writing. In a very short time I found myself revising some of my shorter poems because I wanted the sound of the language to flow in a certain way. And I found that certain twists and turns occurring throughout an otherwise" nonsensical" poem had a "meaning" of sorts at the end, although it wasn't as simple as, say, the "moral of the story."
The more I read in the field, works such as Imagining Language, by Steve McCaffery and Jed Rasula, I discovered a centuries-old tradition of writing without conventional meaning. As my work turned increasingly visual, I found that a fair amount of my thinking tended toward concrete and visual poetry, which has a tradition that goes back at least a millennium in China, if not in Western civilization. It also has a mystical component. So, I can say to people who question what I do that, as original as I try to be, I'm far from the first person to work in this vein.
GR: If there is indeed that musical quality to the book, that certainly wouldn't surprise me. You've had quite a career in music, particularly in the act of putting spoken-word poetry to a background of jazz or even bebop. Tell us a little bit about your career in music.
VF: First of all, I don't claim to be a great musician. I can hear a lot more than I'm able to play, which is probably one strong reason for the music coming out in the writing. I started playing bass —the bass violin—when I was seventeen. I started taking lessons in college and sitting in at jam sessions , but didn't really know what I was doing as far as trying to play chord changes. During my studies with Turetzky in those years, I was probably his worst student, but we discussed things like the relationship between the free jazz I enjoyed and the contemporary concert music he was playing. I learned a tremendous amount just by watching him work with scores that were pioneering at that time.
When I dropped out of graduate school late in 1969, I experienced a year-long depression. When I tried to write, my words just felt flat on the page. Lifeless. So I stopped writing and joined a jazz workshop in Hartford led by pianist Emery Smith, who became my mentor. He taught me jazz from the ground up and, much more importantly, that becoming a good writer or musician or artist in any medium required more than the half-hour or hour a day that your teachers tell you to practice. If you're serious, you probably need to spend a good five or six hours a day. Once I started putting in the time, my playing improved tremendously. I became at least a passable bassist.
But frustration with the music business led me back to writing. After being away from it for nearly three years, I felt like I was learning how to walk again. But I spent 4 ½ years writing a novel. It never got published, but writing it pulled my craft together more tightly than it had ever been. I stopped playing bass and concentrated on writing. I touched the bass only once between 1974 and 1985, and didn't miss it.
In 1982 I started writing poetry seriously. In late 1984, I told someone that I was interested in putting my poetry to music. Since he edited a cassette magazine, he told me he'd put whatever I did in that vein on his magazine. A complicated set of circumstances led me to pull my bass out of mothballs and record a sound track, over which I recited "A Slick Set of Wheels." The positive responses I received led me to compose other pieces, pre-recording baselines and overdubbing recitations. I created two home-produced cassettes that way, Beatnik Poetry and Haight Street, 1985 and read in various venues with a cassette player backing me. After two years, I had enough material for a vinyl recording.
GR: Of the albums of yours that I've heard, I was particularly interested in Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike. Could you tell me a little bit about that? "Haight Street, 1985" was an especially compelling track to me.
VF: Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike was the recording that emerged from those years of home-producing cassettes. Early in 1987, Thomas Chapin, Mario Pavone and I went in to a recording studio for a test run. The music sounded good, but my recitation high-pitched and frantic. About four months later, I had the material prepared and scheduled a record date. About two weeks before the date, though, I heard Thomas Chapin and Brian Johnson performing poetry with music. Their approach, much more freewheeling than my original boppish themes, sent me back to the drawing board. Why didn't I think of it before? They came out of a very talented jazz scene that has existed for at least fifty years in Connecticut. The musicians I'd selected were masters of sound texture as well as orthodox improvisation. They could play bop or free improvisation equally well. At the time, Thomas, Mario, Joe Fonda and Brian weren't well known, despite their substantial performing credentials. In the decades since the recording, they've become prominent figures on the international jazz scene. At the recording, I slowed my recitation and the resulting work sounded much better because of it.
Sex Queen had an ironic fate. At the time, vinyl and CDs were both available in record stores. I chose to save a few hundred dollars by recording it on vinyl. In the five weeks it took to produce the record, almost every record stores had stopped carrying vinyl and only sold CDs. As a result, it never received distribution. I gave away most of the thousand copies I'd made.
"Haight Street, 1985" was a poem inspired by an experience I saw on Haight Street during a visit to San Francisco. The Summer of Love was long gone and hard-core street people had replaced the Peace and Love contingent. A punker's dog got into a fight with a street person's and they traded some ugly threats before going their separate ways. As a college student in the sixties, I shared the hope of many people in my generation that we could create a better world. We didn't know back then that you can't change human nature, but we had a chance to at least humanize the institutions to some degree. Unfortunately, the people in power and the young radicals both blew the opportunity. So, the poem became a clash between the ideals of the sixties and realities of the eighties.
GR: A lot of your career seems to be pretty centered around Hartford, Connecticut. At least, I'm gathering from the fact that two of your albums, Sex Queen and Songs of Baobab. I wouldn't immediately assume Hartford to have an interesting music and literary scene, but it certainly seems like it was at one point. Tell us about a little bit about it? Was the audience for your kind of work better than it is now?
VF: Hartford has its share of good writers, such as Peter Ganick and Dennis Barone, but its literary scene never received a lot of attention, so I never really knew about it. The writers I encountered in my first years there made me feel more comfortable on the jazz scene. Hartford has always been a tremendous source of jazz musicians. Horace Silver lived there when he first started out, to name just one of many. The jazz programs at Wesleyan and the University of Hartford brought in a number of prominent jazz musicians and attracted equally gifted students such as trombonist Steve Davis and Rummer Winard Harper who joined the local musicians to play some very exciting music. For a number of years, I could hear the same musicians who played in New York for half the price—or for free because I had a press pass and a column in Coda Magazine. But the area couldn't shake its provincial character. The jazz fans were still fighting over free jazz versus bebop, a debate that should have been settled by 1973. And my contacts on the literary scene before I met Peter Ganick made even my Post-Beat poetry seem radical.
At the time, I had a small but intense following. When my writing turned toward Language and Visual poetry, I lost some of them. I'm thankful that Jim Gardiner, a close friend who understands my artistic thinking, has found a way of his own to present my poetry at public events in the multi-voiced approach I use.
GR: It seems like it's been quite a while since you've done anything music-related. Any reason behind that?
VF: In summer of 1991, I crashed and burned. My life became more than I could handle: a full-time job, writing, practicing bass, trying to find work for my Poetry Band and having a serious relationship led to a life of boilerplate 16-hour days. At age 45, I couldn't sustain it. In late May I woke up and felt exhausted within two hours. I made mental mistakes at work that I never made before, in number as well as nature. By July I was so tired I could barely stand up. So I took a three-month leave of absence from my day job and lay flat on my back for the first two months—no writing, no serious reading, and standing up only to play scales on bass 40 minutes a day.
That summer, I got my first chance to play in New York, at the Knitting Factory's Knot Room. Two members of the Poetry Band didn't want to do the gig, but Brian Johnson, the percussionist, came down from Vermont and to play a duo. He drove me to the gig. I don't think I could have done the drive myself at the time.
A few months later, running on severely diminished energy, I started performing in Manhattan every few months, most often at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in a duo with Thomas Chapin. I also played with my poetry band in Connecticut and performed as a solo poet-bassist as a featured act at Poetry slams in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York. By spring 1993 I realized I was about to crash and burn again. Since I never fully recovered from the first time, I knew the second would be worse, maybe even fatal. So I stopped performing.
Within a few years, the orchestrated text found its way into my work. It replaced the instruments that used to weave around my recitations and vice-versa.
A part of me still thinks about performing, but I know my body can't handle it.
I believe that my recordings will hold up, if enough of the public gets to them. I have the means to make quality home recordings, but haven't rushed to do it.
I'm happiest as a writer.
As far as my audience, I probably have more readers now than I did in the poetry band. But not performing live means I don't sell many books or recordings. My audience online, though, appears to be larger than what I had when I performed with music. But i have no idea how much larger it really is.
