Kirpal Gordon: Since 15 March '09, I have been reading with great fascination your poetry posts at Facebook. Are these poems new?
Eric Basso: They're from Barbarous Radiates, the book I completed in the fall of '09. You've been reading the "Petroglyphs" section. Poems about, or inspired by, stones.
KG: The poems are written in deceptively-simple language yet, at the same time, the images you invoke are mysterious, enigmatic, often magical.
EB: I try to avoid simile, except in rare instances for musical effect, steering clear of philosophizing and metaphor, and keeping myself in the background. When I say "I" in a poem, I'm almost never speaking of myself. That "I" is the anonymous voice of the poem. I don't want to "talk at" the reader. It's not about me. It's about opening the door, letting the reader in.
KG: What is the meaning of the sentence, "Eric Basso no longer writes"? I read that in Rattle, a poetry journal. The quote not only contradicts the many posts, but these new poems feel like classic Basso, and already seem so entirely connected from one to the next.
EB: "The Nets," a poem from Earthworks, was published in Rattle during those five years the book's progress was interrupted. I was convinced I would never write again. But, I struggled back. It was almost like starting from scratch. As to the continuity you find in the Barbarous poems with the earlier books, I'm glad to hear it, but can't account for it. I'd to make clearer something I said earlier. My burn-out began two years before my mother fell ill. I was writing less and less. Her illness may, or may not, have prolonged my silence, but wasn't the cause.
KG: A few years ago, Asylum Arts Press published Revagations, the first volume of your book of dreams.
EB: The book begins in 1966. In other words, at the very beginning, when I was nineteen.
KG: And the book itself begins with a preface that begins with an exploration of the very nature of consciousness.
EB: That's right. The preface, or "Prolegomenon," is the result of a decade of research and experimentation on the mecanism of passing from the conscious to the unconscious state. Some excellent work was done on this around the turn of the last century by Henri Poincaré and Paul Valéry. I've recorded thousands of my dreams, over the last forty-four years. The first volume takes me from the age of nineteen to twenty-seven. All the dreams of that time are included. I held nothing back, no matter how insalubrious. What surprised me, in transcribing the dreams from my journal into book form, was how well the writing had held up. The dreams were scribbled out in haste each day, before I got down to my regular work. The depressing part was in discovering the need to add brief explanations, in brackets, to explain to younger readers who celebrities like Milton Berle were, and political figures who have faded from public memory.
KG: Many of the dreams are incredibly detailed.
EB: And outrageously indecorous. Some are farcical, others lyrical, almost poetic, still others are menacing or mysterious.
KG: There's a unifying quality to your work, a sense that every book is another look into an intriguing world, starting with the first recorded entry, in the dream book, "Flight":
This island-city of rain, where a shower of drops constantly falls; not from the sky, but up from the surrounding sea — a fountain in reverse.
As the drops hit the windows, people look around from making hybernative love. People of the indoor air, who see me through the clear circle on their ground-glass windows.
I fly in the rain.
December 6, 1966
KG: In the preface you record how writers have shaped dreams into literature, and how messages from dreams have instructed Paul Valéry, Victor Hugo, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, Rilke, Coleridge, Stevenson, de Quincy and, most centrally, Gérard de Nerval, for whom you tell us, "the dream became a process of growth toward an occult knowledge."
EB: With tragic results. They all took what they regarded as significant dreams seriously — composers, painters and scientists, as well. It's amazing how many writers have kept a journal of their dreams, and later published them. Recording your dreams in detail is excellent training for a young writer.
KG: You were born in 1947 and although many American writers of your generation have had extensive training in grad school, you've avoided such an approach. You don't have an MFA degree.
EB: My training as a writer is unaffiliated with any academic institution.
KG: I tend to think of the MFA-ication of English departments — also music, dance, visual art, etc. — as part of a larger social breakdown. The under-enrolled university abuses its alleged value as a vocational training advancement but actually compromises talent and the training of artists in a world in which there is little performance feedback from an audience, or actual support of the art in the community, but advertises instant success for all. That's sick, and preys upon our hopes, and turns everything to shit.
EB: In my estimation, the best course in creative writing consists of voracious transglobal reading, disrespect for authority, not paying any attention to your teachers, experiencing everything you can to the point of mental and physical damage, and drinking. That's how most of the greats did it, and how it was meant to be done.
KG: My experience of the MFA degree, except some of it, was doing kundalini and tantric yoga instead of booze or smack. Same result, perhaps, and with a better liver maybe. Who knows?
EB: At this late stage, I'd be the last to vouch for my liver.
KG: The term avant-garde suggests something elitist, military, forward moving and ahead of its time. Your work, by contrast, strikes me as universal, something we already know but don't know that we do until we read your words, an eye that moves forward as well as back in time but unites rather than divides our consciousness. In other words any human who can read imaginatively is your reader.
EB: I think of writers like us as the next stage in the long tradition, running from Homer to Beckett and beyond.
KG: A quality you have in common with those European writers is a more elastic sense of literature, one not so driven by the narrow categories of our mega-book stores. Your work makes me think of a remark Yusef Lateef, who was inducted into the NEA Jazz Masters last month, made when asked about musical genres, "It's segregation and has nothing to do with the music." Stephen-Paul Martin remarked in "Bashing the Mainstream," "[Eric Basso] remains one of the most interesting writers in the country, someone whose work does not fit conveniently into categories like metafiction or language-centered po?etry, but whose poetry, fiction and dramatic writing extend our sense of what terms like modernism and postmodernism mean." Blessing or a curse?
EB: Both. You know, I'm only first-and-a half generation American, and grew up around older relatives who were bilingual, so I've always felt at home with the European tradition in literature. I realize that sounds a little crazy, but it's the only way I can explain how I took to it when I was young while a great part of the Anglo-American tradition left me cold. I found its relative insularity and parochialism of little interest. Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about the great works — like The Waste Land, Nightwood, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, Under the Volcano and others like them, speaking of the 20th century alone. But England, and particularly America, has had a long tradition of insularity, of the narrow focus, that has isolated it from the broader tradition.
KG: Very few independent presses in American publishing remain standing after thirty years. You've been there from when Greg Boyd started it and since Jordan Jones has taken it over. What's the ride been like? What's the future look like?
EB: Greg Boyd began publishing Asylum magazine in the spring of 1985. I was a regular contributor from the first issue. A few years later, he branched out into book publishing. The first of my books he published was the big drama trilogy, The Golem Triptych. Over the next seven years, nine more of my books came out under the Asylum Arts imprint. As we both know, small press publishing is seldom a money-making proposition. Greg's integrity, as both a publisher and author, resided in his his willingness to take chances by publishing, and creating, literary works that were, shall we say, not "the usual." He kept things going as long as he could. When Greg was no longer financially able to continue, Asylum Arts passed to Jordan Jones who, for years, had been publishing a fine magazine of his own, Bakunin, from 1989 through 1996, and who had started Leaping Dog Press in 1999. What I've said about Greg's integrity can also be said of Jordan. He had already begun Leaping Dog Press when he took over Asylum Arts' backlist, and has kept those books in print. Jordan has added three of my books to the Asylum Arts' list: Revagations, Decompositions and, most recently, Umbra. As a way to limit expenses and expand markets in creative ways, Jordan is in the process of shifting from reliance on the standard distribution channels, to newer "long tail" publishing strategies such as print-on-demand and eBooks. The fact is that independent publishers have many challenges fitting into the increasingly commoditized world of publishing. But the problem is not new. New Directions publisher, James Laughlin, carried many of his authors for years until their books finally began to connect. Our generation cut its teeth on those paperbacks published by New Directions and Grove Press in the '50s and '60s.
KG: Those books were indispensable. But Laughlin had inherited a fortune. It was a lot easier for him to keep his backlist in print.
EB: Which makes Greg and Jordan's accomplishment more admirable.
KG: Back to your poems on Facebook. Regarding your time away from the lit scene, if I'd gone Rip Van Winkle for twenty years and saw those poetry posts for the first time, I think I'd be amazed at how the technology has put reader and writer together with no middle player controlling the means of production and distribution of your literature.
EB: I didn't think Facebook would be for me. Social networking isn't really my style. My publisher urged me to join and post my poems to as many people as possible. Soon I was posting to multiple lists. The number of lists grew. After a year and a half, I found myself posting poems to around three hundred people. Jordan [the publisher] realized that I'd blundered onto something more effective than a personal Web site. I'll paraphrase his words: "You're bring it to them instead of waiting for them to come to you."
KG: Many poems posted on Facebook receive little more than a generic thumbs-up or a word of wow, but your respondents are quite articulate in their praise. What do you make of the technology? As to your posts, am I right that you've only chosen poems from the "Petroglyphs" section of Barbarous Radiates? These are poems about, or inspired by, stones?
EB: For years I wanted to write a cycle of poems about stones. "Petroglyphs" is the second section of Barbarous Radiates. The response on Facebook has been incredible, detailed responses from all over the world. I was surprised. They get it. They really get it. Many have told me they've become obsessed by my poems. I've also posted poems from Earthworks, which was published by Six Gallery Press in 2008.
KG: And the technology?
EB: That's a different story. Anyone who's on Facebook knows that the interface can be very clunky.
