So: year’s end, and with it itemization of gratitude and wonder we were lucky enough to experience this past year. We’ve all got lists, but here’s one of the ways this year was made for me: in April I got Matt Hart’s Wolf Face, which blew then and continues to blow my mind—a book of somehow ferocious tenderness, or tender ferocity, I’m not sure. Since that book Hart’s also released Light-Headed, plus he (you know this, of course) edits Forklift, OH, and they released their latest issue this summer, so there was that as well.
I met Matt in November and the following questions were emailed back and forth through November’s end and December’s start and mid-point. He is, if you haven’t figured it, one of a handful of exceptional, necessary, endlessly vivid writers, his work a fireworking glory which will almost automatically tune you closer to whatever signal you’ve been dialing for this whole time. Enjoy the interview, but get into Hart’s work, if you haven’t already dug it: there’s some massive offering in it, a generosity you’ll have to read to believe.
WC: I’m curious about aesthetics in your work, specifically with regard to your graduate work on Wittgenstein. In the Bookslut interview you talk about how Duchamp collapsed the distinction between art and idea (or you didn’t credit/blame Duchamp, just used him as a time marker); you also talk lots about wanting your poems to have real human meaning for people–which again was really good to read; I know we just talked and I mentioned how it’s (/poetry’s) seemingly a game, but it’s refreshing to see someone treat it as real, or ground it in something other than the jockeying that, for me, from here, feels to be the Full Situation, at least moderately, at least at present. Back to Wittgenstein, though: can you articulate what/if any of his work’s done numbers in the work of your work? The slipperiness of language? The idea of not living ‘in’ language? That language is not ultimately representational (I have a cheap undergrad’s understanding of the man; correct away, at will). If this is a good start, go for it. If not, let me know and I’ll noodle something else up instead.
MH: Man, there’s a lot of really great stuff here to talk about… I don’t want to get too bogged down in Wittgenstein, but two ways I think he’s been important to me as a poet are as follows. First, he gave me permission (and believe me I needed permission from a philosopher—Breton would not have done the trick at that point in my life) to be irrational (and get the hell out of philosophy) as a way to get to something substantially meaningful. Of course, this needs some explaining. And therein lies the problem, since anything that needs explaining is out beyond the ordinary/obvious—which is what Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is all about: ordinary language and its limits.
Anyway, Wittgenstein thought of philosophy (the activity and the arguments it produced) as a sort of mental illness, resulting from a failure by philosophers to understand how language evolves and functions, thus leading to them asking, for example, questions like “How do you know you know you know” (which sounds amazingly Gertrude Stein) in an inane attempt at getting to capital K, irrefutable knowledge (Of course, such syntactical oddities worked for Stein, because she wasn’t trying to PROVE anything). “Reasons end somewhere,” Wittgenstein writes in the Philosophical Investigations, pointing out that the concept of, and language around, “knowledge” (what he would call the “language game” of knowledge) didn’t come into being from someone sitting around and THINKING about it. It arose as a necessity dictated by the contexts of our lives (what he calls “forms of life”). Thus, its limits are those contexts, which are themselves slippery and shifty, because human life is messy (no two contexts are exactly the same, and then you throw people into the mix!). Trying to make language do more than it was “built” to do (the way philosophers do, in terms of hyper-rationality/certainty/indisputable truth) is like trying to make a tiny computer fan motor run a dragster. It just doesn’t work. The only people, Wittgenstein notes, who play these endless games of questions and answers (How do you know you know you know) are children who don’t know the ins and outs of using language yet, schizophrenics who’ve lost touch with reality, and philosophers. Wittgenstein believed that if you understand his philosophy, philosophical problems aren’t solved; they dissolve, because we cease to being “bewitched” by language and our own neurotic tendency toward wanting EVERYTHING to have a logical reasonable EXPLANATION. And to be clear, he’s not only critical of epistemology, but metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics—you name it. For example, he blows the whole idea of “essential definitions”—what makes art ART? etc—totally apart, leaving us instead with “family resemblances” between all the things we call art rather than one ESSENTIAL (philosophically rigid) quality common to all of them…
The second way he’s influenced me—and it’s absolutely related to the first—is in his pointing to the fact that rational argument can never get to the meat and meaning of human existence and experience the way that poetry and music (for example) can. He wrote somewhere, and please don’t ask me to look it up and tell us where (I really don’t give a shit about being a scholar) (though I think it was in Culture and Value—which is a collection of uncollected aphorisms published long after his death), that “all philosophy ought really be done as a form of poetry.” Without getting too weird here, what this remark points too for me, is Wittgenstein’s understanding in his later philosophy that poetry doesn’t depend for its life (to function) on logic and the facts. A poem can be totally syntactically discombobulated, surreal, deliberately strange, made entirely of lies and yet still hit the truth on the head and MOVE us, in the process telling us (or demonstrating or pointing to) something crucial about what it is to be alive and awake and human in this world. Poetry doesn’t have to explain anything. In a significant way poetry is always the misuse, mismanagement and the reckless abuse of language to create aesthetic effects/affects. Poets have the upper hand on philosophers, because they don’t need the facts, traditional logic, the scientific for their poems to function. Poetry is always a matter of reveling in the atmosphere of language at its most delimited, its denotative and connotative possibilities all swirling together to say (and to sing) multiple things at once. John Keats anyone? Enter: Negative Capability… (Which is just as important as Wittgenstein, but I came to it later).
Wittgenstein reminded me when I needed it the most that art is often a more powerful way, a more affecting, surprising and human (life-like) way, to proceed, to get at the stuff that really matters person to person, day in and day out —than philosophy or even science—the whole range of explanation—ever will. “To the man who is lost in love, what will help him? An explanation?” (Wittgenstein)—Hell no, but a poem might. Music might. A friend who actually cares to listen might…
I have to say I always feel like a bonehead when I start talking about Wittgenstein, so let’s stop. The long and the short of all of this is that, whether or not I understand him rightly or wrongly, his philosophy convinced me that there are more convincing ways of using language than the ones based on traditional forms of argumentation, premises to conclusion, logic, etc. Poetry can change people in ways that philosophy rarely does, because it goes straight past the head to the heart. It obliterates knowing and explaining and defining things and leaves us with feeling and faith and belief and most importantly VALUE.
WC: The above’s awesome–this does a lot of great, great things. Thank you. Here’s another 2 qs or possible conversational directions—either/both are fine with me; I’m interested in where you’re interested in going with this stuff:
1. Without making this a too pat question: the majority of your stuff’s written in present tense, which seems to jibe with the above and what you’ve said elsewhere in terms of wanting yr poetry to include the reader (Bookslut). I guess my big question (and I’m asking this as both a writer and reader) is: why so little past tense? Why’s an MH poem so rarely got bones dug from the backyard of self, at least in the sense of you pulling up a past personal experience and using it? Maybe I’m off on all that.
MH: You’re totally right on about the present moment being central (and dominant) in my work, and I don’t think anyone else has ever mentioned it (not even me). It’s definitely deliberate. Poetry, for me, isn’t usually about “recollecting” anything in tranquility (or otherwise), though sometimes it leads me to the past or the future. It’s an all engines/senses go (and go!) activity, an exploration of right now, a survey of the present in the present as a way to see what’s happening (and what has happened) and what it points to.
Maybe it’s because I’m not at this time in my life as interested in re/counting experience as I am in “counting” it. I never know what’s on my mind until I stumble around in it, and poetry is the best way I have (I wish I could paint or draw, but I can’t) of falling headlong into the significance of being alive in this world and also the thing that’s on my mind, that I have no idea about—am unaware of… Of course, the present if we let it always points back to the past and forward to the future, but in the latter case we can only imagine (but don’t know) it, and in the former case memory is so slippery and shifty that it’s sometimes hard to know the true character of the things one remembers… I like that actually.
The problem with the way memory often gets used, not just in poetry, but in all kinds of writing, is that people want the memories to add up, to stand the test time, to assert something critical and universal about the present and presence. I don’t need, or really want, certainty and the facts from poems. I need reality. And reality, to recontextualize Mr. Whitman, contains “multitudes.”
It strikes me now, in thinking about tenses, that I almost never take photographs (of the vacation snapshot variety) when I travel, nor do I take them of the people and events in life that are important to me. And, when I do take photographs, or even write in my journals, I almost never look at or read them again. I don’t want to capture experience; I want to experience it. Life isn’t a vicious wild animal that needs to be trapped in a visual cage (To be clear: I’m not speaking here of the ART of Photography, which doesn’t trap or capture images; it makes them—sometimes literally—ecstatic/manifold); it’s more fun, more dangerous, more potentially life changing to engage the wildness/wilderness/bewilderment as it comes. However, it is a wild/life, the meaning of which ebbs and flows as things change and I have new experiences (and change), as time passes, and my interests shift (of course, it would do that if I took a picture too, but poetry to my mind has more room to diverge from the facts and to wander far far away). It isn’t that I don’t reflect on the past, I think I do, but poetry is such a present tense experience for me. One that requires paying attention to right now. It allows me to take stock of life again and again and to do it in a way that demonstrates the ambiguity, vagueness and slipshod/sloppy qualities of experience. It isn’t a matter of remembering. It’s a matter of creating new memories and then allowing them to radiate rather than delineate meaning. It isn’t about making sense of anything; it’s about being attentive, awake, and alive at every instant. As a result, I guess, most of my poems are meditative in one way or another. Most of them are love poems. They reflect (on/in) the present as a way to continue. They’re not the summation or the end of something. If they’re successful, they point in different directions, chronologically and otherwise. In any case, I hope they aren’t static, but on the move, constantly slipping on the thin ice of meaning/being/singing.
WC: That makes loads of sense, yes. So then: 2. Is there a limit to language for you? I read Light-Headed yesterday off and on all day, and I love it, and I hear and feel the thing but, but I also teach poetry, and I was thinking of my students after I read it, thinking that they’d have a hard hard time with the freewheel of it, the nerved associations, the leaps. Of course this question’s eight sorts of fucked because essentially I’m trying to ask you if you can feel or sense what very well might be a limit you choose or intentionally try *not* to feel or pay attention to. I’m curious, though, given the overt empathic and generative bent of yr first answer, how you balance verbal electrics w/ human connection, and how aware you are of it, etc.
Well, there’s no limit to language, anymore than there’s a limit to paint (are there limits to what a painter can get down on a canvas?), but there is a limit to what one can say sensibly (rationally, EXACTLY) with language. Wittgenstein (and I’m sorry to bring him up again) would’ve called everything said beyond that limit mystical in his early philosophy, and in his later philosophy he would’ve called it “nonsense”—though important nonsense. However, the things that get said out beyond the limits that I’m most interested in we call poetry. When poetry works it’s exactly inexact. It demonstrates, dances around, and sometimes collides beautifully with all the things one can’t put one’s finger on. It’s nonsense as serious business. This would’ve been better to mention in our first exchange.
Anyway, I totally get the “hard hard time with the freewheel” of Light-Headed that your students and a lot of people might have, especially in a poem like “All the Hours We’re Awake” which is pretty much all fireworks. I mean, I’m really working hard in that poem to make music, not sense, as a way to describe—and get lost in—the overwhelming plethora and flash of experience, which is both terrifying and exuberant. When I was writing it we had a new baby in the house, and I was sort of walking around in, and sleeping through, my life (in a daze, in a trance), feeling totally out of my element, exhausted—but also overjoyed at the strangeness of the new routines in our lives and the sounds in the house. That said, the way into the poem isn’t the story of the new baby (which isn’t a part of the poem). The poem is a response to that new newness and the feeling that everything had changed radically in an instant with the birth of my daughter. I had no words, or I had only words. Thus, by my lights, the way into the poem—which is a demonstration, a response in and to the world—has to be first and foremost through music—sound ordered in time. Form, then, is really important.
I admit it. I’m a formalist. Sort of…
In addition to the disruptions in, and distortions of, the poem’s syntax, its willful obliteration of the sentence as a way to compose a line, and the repetition of the chorus, “All the hours we’re awake,” between each section, the poem consists of sixteen sections of sixteen lines each—one line, one section corresponding to all the hours we’re awake each day. Its companion poem, “All the Hours We’re Asleep,” which also appears in the book, is eight sections of eight lines each, corresponding to the eight hours of sleep we’re supposed to get (which I never get and probably don’t want). Funny enough, my inspiration for the poem’s formal parameters was the sonnet, its compactness and logic and love. I’d been writing these sonnets, which instead of having fourteen lines had fourteen sections of (usually) fourteen lines each. The poems “Sonnet,” “Simply Rocket” and “Minerva System” in the book all use this form. At the same time I was reading Kenneth Koch’s brilliant long poem “When the Sun Tries to Go On” which consists of one hundred twenty-four line sections. I love how in that poem he manages to avoid a subject and to make something so indecorously luminous that it actually becomes sort of decorative… One of my favorite things to do is to take the parameters of a received form and try to stretch them almost beyond recognition. For instance there’s a poem in Wolf Face called “In Darkness Light-Headed,” which I think of as a kind of blown-up (as in both inflated and destroyed), decaying sonnet. It’s a poem in fourteen sections, but the sections decay as they go. So section one contains fourteen lines, section two contains thirteen, section three contains twelve and so on, down to section fourteen, which is one line long. The poem is full of repetitions. The lines cycle through the sections, changing with each recontextualization/iteration. It winds up being a pledge of allegiance to a friend, a beloved, even as we’re all sort of swirling down the drain…
So, yeah, sorry to go on like this, the point is that in Light-Headed my hope is to connect with readers on a musical level first as a way to really get them to listen in to all the headphone tricks inherent in the soundtrack of existence. I think all of that is in the poems themselves, but it requires a different kind of reading in the same way that one can’t listen to Free Jazz with the same expectations and attention that one uses to process Bon Iver or La Dispute or a Violin Sonata by Bach. And yet, everybody gets music on some level. They get it in the body fisrt, and sometimes later in the head. I’d love it if I could connect with people’s bodies with my poems. Wow, that sounds weird… Ah, well.
Weston, I don’t think this is a satisfactory answer to your question. It’s messy. Do you see me standing here in the volcano? I see you. Do you see you?
WC: I see you. Oh hell man, I’ve had this back-and-forth now in my head (and printed out and near my person) for this whole week, and I wanted to wait to get anything back to you till after the flurry of grading had finished for both of us, but also there’s the fact that I don’t know quite what to ask next in the q+a thing. Here’s thoughts:
*That’s hilarious that you don’t take pictures either. I haven’t ever been one of those folks, and it’s the same—the snaps I do take are never ones I set out and around to recollect fondly on, and even those pictures I *do* have around have now become more like relics or fossils somehow. It was cool to read someone else’s like this.
**I love what you wrote. I see you in the volcano. Everything you’re saying makes sense. I ended up thinking lots this week about your ideas of how poems hit, and the lack of past tense—the omnipresence of present in yr stuff, and how that means, plus the fact that there’s seemingly little narrative in your stuff, or not overt linear narrative, issues of (literal) consequence—this happened then this then this. The absence of something like causality. And I thought: I’ll ask more about that, what that lack portends for you, but I *know* and get the answer already—it’s wrapped up there among what you’ve already said, you know? So that’s out.
***Ultimately what I’m most interested in in your stuff is this inherent faith in things holding. This is one of the big ways I’ve been picking up nutrition from your work lately—I’ve had something like a crisis of faith in terms of work hanging together and meaning—or, I guess, I’ve somehow not been able to believe/care in stuff that doesn’t hang together in this exquisite little horological style I (have in the past) like(d). I’m 100% unclear about how to even address this other than just outright stating it, yet I imagine the answer’s basically gonna be along the lines of what you’ve already said.
MH: Man, I love all of these prompts, but I agree: we’re probably nearly done here, so let me try and be brief.
*Photographs and journals as fossils: Yes! I love that. Presents (but not presence) for the archaeologists of the future!
**Narrative! I love narrative. Really I do. But I can’t tell a story to save my life. If I could, I would. I promise. I think. No, I probably wouldn’t. Not in that causal, linear “this leads to that” and “it all makes sense” way. But of course, that’s a particular kind of narrative.
To me, nothing (that’s interesting) ever occurs in terms of clear cut cause and effect, which is why all the novels I really love are a mess: Moby Dick, Frankenstein, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, Eileen Myles’ Inferno, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. I just don’t believe that reality or even fiction is simplistic enough to understand. Stories—the ones worth telling, and certainly the ones worth reading—are messy, containing multiple points of view and different soundtracks and a variety of starting points and finish lines, no fixed message. In one version the protagonist is another version’s antagonist, and in yet another the character with only one line is the most critical of all. I want all of these at once. It’s more convincing to me. Thus, I often work to achieve something like a narrative scaffolding that a reader can, if he or she wants to (it’s part of my job to make ‘em want to!) impose many different (fragments of) narratives upon, “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason” (Keats, of course). Poetry, because it’s music and language delimited, is the best way for me to un-narrate experience, as a way to let it be as weird as it actually is.
***Faith is bar none the most important, most crucial, most necessary tool in the artist’s toolbox. Why? Because art requires that most of the time we have no idea what we’re doing. There’s no rule to follow. We revere the great artists of the past primarily for the ways they established the rules, not for the ways they followed them—which is why someone can learn all the craft in the world and still not make any real art. But this also necessitates being lost a lot of the time, or at least floating in the dark in a storm without a rudder or a sail or a paddle. No one can tell us anything, and (paradoxically) that’s why it’s so important to learn craft, to read everything, to be alive and excited and passionate no matter what. That way one has a foundation, something to leap from and scramble back to—but faith is what takes us out into outer space to find both ourselves and the people we love (and also the people who may love us back). Without faith, the artist is relegated to rote imitation and/or writer’s block—which is essentially somebody waiting around to be inspired. Art is not about waiting. It’s about doing and making and seeing where that takes us. And seeing is about Vision, and faith is always at the root of what’s visionary. It’s being willing, as Wittgenstein put it, “to descend into the chaos and feel at home there.”