[re:con]versations :: OF SOUND MIND :: Process and Practice with Everybody’s Automat’s Mark Gurarie
By: The Operating System
Tags: Poetry, Music, Interview, Art, Writing

Who are you?

I’m a poet, writer, teacher, editor and rock “musician.”

Why are you a poet?

I’m a poet because I enjoy exploring what is possible in language, and the multifarious ways in which it can work. I like sort of chewing on words and collections of words; I savor the often disordered progression of thought that comes from an active mind, or is imprinted in it from the surrounding environment, or might suddenly appear as a means to memory. Especially in this day and age, we live surrounded by a constant influx of language — be it from reading books, from broadcasts, from the endless texts of the internet or just the chaos of the every day — so poetry becomes a way of tuning into specific frequencies within this array. It might also be a means to come into dialogue with disorder, while speaking to those parts of the psyche that create order; it’s something that is always in that liminal zone between sense and nonsense. I’m a poet because I appreciate the musical qualities of language as much as I appreciate the ways in which language might be able to convey ideas that do not fit into prose. In a sense, then, poetry is what I feel to be the most natural expression of my thoughts; I feel comfortable within its simultaneously freeing and restrictive idiom.

When did you decide you were a poet (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?

I know that by the time I was in late high school, perhaps around the age of 17, I knew that I wanted to be a writer of some sort; up to that point, I focused primarily on visual art while playing bass in a band. It was not until I was 20 that I realized that poetry was to be my focus; I can’t quite pinpoint it, but I began writing stream-of-consciousness inflected prose poems in the manner of the beats, whom, of course, as a young white dude in college, I came to admire. I appreciated the lawlessness of it all — the radical spirit in the poems and the way that their form challenged convention — so I decided at that time to take it on by, well, writing poems.

What’s a “poet”, anyway? What is the role of the poet today?

This is a tough question because in the US, poetry is relegated to the margins of cultural and social production; whereas in many

other countries and cultures, poetry is more central. Here, outside of exciting popular developments like the emergence of slam and spoken word — and I actually think you might be able to include the vibrancy of hip-hop here — poetry is famously ignored by non-poets. That said, American poets have a special position as being the voice of the exterior, the underbelly, even if their exhile from whatever the “mainstream” might largely be self-imposed. In this sense, then, poets are able to use their craft to move in a freeer way than many of their artistic peers who are more closely attuned to the market, and furthermore, the relationship between poet and broader American society is always evolving.

As much as can be said about the disengagement of say, modernist poets in the early 20th century, from political or social discourse, you have strains that speak for under-represented voices, that lift the mirror to society at large, like those of the Harlem Rennaissance, for instance. In a similar way, the poet today has the opportunity to employ the craft to explore and challenge the status quo, and in that, to bear witness. To me, it’s incredibly exciting that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was actually on the NYT’s best-sellers list (two different times, I believe), or that Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” went viral.

In its own way, and occasionally, the culture at large looks to the poets and lets them in; the onus is on the poets to use their craft and their perspective to make work that is meaningful, challenging and makes a genuine attempt to capture an underlying truth.

What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the poetry community and beyond)?

The poetry community is a sprawling and often dysfunctional family, but at the core of it, anyone that reads it or that goes to a reading becomes a member. As much as there are genuine and heated debates about how it functions, what it does and what it should do, it’s important to remember that poetry can only live when it is written and when it is read and when it is loved. In this sense, I view my position as a poet as one of a facilitator and champion for the voices I see as doing good work. This is why I was for a long time involved in curating a reading series, and it’s why I write reviews and work (well, volunteer) as an editor of them. In this, I like to think that I am helping create some more space for the art in the wider sphere, while letting it continue to grow and develop. Furthermore, every poem out there is in dialogue with the poetry that preceded it; in this sense, too, my own work serves the function of furthuring this important conversation.

Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?

While the manuscript as a whole wasn’t in my mind, as such, when these poems were written, it should be noted that the sections within it represent discrete, if in many ways related, entities. The first and last sections — the two most directly concerned with exploring music — existed previously as a chapbook, Pop :: Song and were conceived to sort of counterbalance each other. The first is an exploration of experiment in musical forms through an ekphrastic response to 20th Century composer/troublemakers, Erik Satie and John Cage, and the latter is composed in the form of a pop song and looks at the ways popular music can be equal parts provocative, evocative and sentimental. The other two sections also hang together tightly. One is a series of poems in the voice of an alien who has mislearned the language through broken 20th century broadcasts, and in the other the urban contemporary and the natural is exposed as a mutually idealizing false binary.

I found, though, in looking at the poems over the years that they resonated with each other; they had similar investment in musical approaches, fractured lexicons and indirect approaches to shared, cultural memory as well as the personal. It should be noted, too, that these come from a two to three year historical period for me; though not my original intention to have them be some sort of “recording” of my life and my art, they became just that. Over the course of piecing together the manuscript, I did encounter struggles and doubts; particularly, it took me a while to accept that the sections really should be in their own “rooms.” It was jarring for me that this was not looking like a more traditional collection of poems, but a kind of nesting doll or some sort of toy composed of differently shaped pieces. Eventually, though, I relaxed, and, as the old trope goes, let the work guide me. I had to have faith in the original vision(s).

Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written? How or how not?

As mentioned above, it was easier to conceptualize each of the sections as thier own “collections,” and I think that it was really in retrospect that I realized that they broached similar thematic territory, if from different angles and approaches. Ultimately, these poems reflect the concerns I had at the time — and probably to a great extent still do — and the types of things I was doing in them mirrored each other. If anything really binds them, come to think of it, it is that they are all sort of top-down in construction. I developed a concept or idea, most likely after a few were written, and used that to guide the generation of the rest of them. It is very often a way that I work; I’ll land on an idiom, structure or form, and try to work it out in as many ways as I can without losing my mind.

Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (poems, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.

A big “theme” that I hope to convey in Everybody’s Automat is that of the strange utopianism, the resoluteness and ultimate failure of the 20th century; the book both idealizes and reels in horror of the cold war, capitalism and industrial process, as well as the ways in which the monochromatic aesthetic of the previous century — its hopes and dreams — fell to pieces and brought us here. Since the work is composed of discrete entities, I imagined them as sort of like slots in an abandoned automat lunch joint. The machinery is rusty and far removed from its original glossy and futuristic facade, but the plastic-wrapped Wonderbread sandwiches, chock-full of preservatives, might still be edible 60 some years on. Each section costs approximately 5 cents.

I do love titles, and, since, as mentioned above, many of these poems were generated with a ruling concept in mind, the titles have a massive influence on the works themselves. This isn’t always how I work, but what is nice about working in this way is that it allows the poems in question to develop a life of their own and to surprise me. When that is happening, in my view, you are doing something right.

Of course, also, the title Everybody’s Automat is a riff off of Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, and must therefore be in dialogue with her fractured, self-conscious-without-a-self approach to memoir. As much as, at the time, I would’ve told you that these poems are not autobiographical in any sense, there was indeed a “there there” because my own history as the child of Ukrainian immigrants, as a kid invested in punk music and modern art, as an urbanite in fake deer skin, as a budding artist, is in there. It took some years for me realize that; as much as I tried not to be a self-referential, self-absorbed artist, I of course was.

What does this particular collection of poems represent to you

…as indicative of your method/creative practice?

…as indicative of your history?

…as indicative of your mission/intentions/hopes/plans?

These poems certainly encapsulate a particular period in my creative practice, one during which I was invested in formal experiment as a means to indirectly present autobiography, history, social critique and linguistic play. I was excited, at the time, by the possibilities that collage, translation, mistranslation and a focus on the musical aspects of language can bring to the lyric form. This is perhaps best seen in the “Resistant Is Futile” section, in which, in keeping with the imagined lexicon of an alien and how it might develop a concept of Earthly life through broadcasts, lines repeat or are slightly distorted. To create this effect, I sometimes used translation engines to fracture the meaning of some phrases, and I got to pun with abandon. Eventually, the persona of this possibly malignant being overtook, though it is likely also, in many respects, a reflection of the russian accented English of my parents. In crafting them, as well as the other sections, I became excited by the possibilities of experimental approaches to writing practice, and I exhuberantly took these on. I learned a great deal in working with these poems, especially in the editing process, and many of the methodologies still crop up in my current practice.

What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings of other creative people (poets or others) informed the way you work/write?

The poems here are certainly indebted to both received and invented forms and practices. At the core of it, they, and I think much of my work, play with notions of translation as this concept is taken on by writers like Anne Carson and Caroline Bergvall. Carson’s Nox, in particular, was influential; I was struck by the way that the act of translating a Catullus poem became her means of coping with the loss of her estranged brother to create a book that, in many respects, is so much more than “just” poetry. I got enamored with the idea that every creative act is, in essence, a form of translation; the translation of feeling and thoughts into certain forms; the translation of real-time musical moments into texts, and the extent to which mistranslations and mistakes are as integral as anything else. Everyone, it might be said, has their own personal language; therefore, every piece of writing or music is an attempt to translate this to something for the broader world.

The first and last sections are in direct dialogue with musical approaches; I was reading a great deal of John Cage, for instance, and became invested in his ideas about aleotoric and experimental practice. In some sections of “Pop : Poem Manufactured in the Furniture Music,” Cage’s lines intermingle with mine and provide shape to the poems. It should be noted, too, that the concept of “Furniture Music,” comes from Satie, who invisaged some of his pieces as being more ambient, something specifically to be background music. I tried to echo the sense of experiment that guided these composers, translating what I learned from them into the serial poem. Similarly, in the final section, “: Song: Poem to be read in 3:18,” I adopted the rigid structure of the pop song: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, coda. Here I was essentially translating the panoply of emotional and visceral reactions to the rock and punk songs I love (and hate).

The second section, “Sentimental Animals,” I view as musical in its approach; there is no rigid form to speak of, but I wanted it to have its own lexicon, and, in particular, to play off the ways that meaning and “sentiment” can be influenced by context. Certainly, also, these poems are intended to interrogate notions of urbanity and contemporary existence, at least in certain circles, as both separate from and idealizing the natural. Because of a variety of factors, we live in an era in which urban spaces like Brooklyn have been colonized by those enamored with a close connection to the land — you know, “farm-to-table,” and “rustic” in aesthetic looks — while being part of a demographic ecology that preys on and pushes out what the borough traditionally was. The nostalgia for authenticity, in the end, is what both drives development and preys on the local.

Perhaps most conspicuously, the “Resistant Is Futile” section is indebted to the exploded notion of the sonnet a la Ted Berrigan. Here texts are mixed and remixed: starting from material that comes from corporate speech, advertising and popular entertainment, I freely distorted, collaged and ran lines through translation engines to give it all that “extra-terrestrial” feel. I like the notion that all of our telecasts and broadcasts radiate endlessly into space and are being received by others that are out there, and further, that these frequencies are how extraterrestrials might form an understanding of the human race. The work certainly has roots in my reading of LANGUAGE poetry; they play with the inherently ideological and political sense of language as seen in corporate speech and pop culture. They are also my approach to both persona, a la David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and the kind of surrealistic cosmology you find in Sun Ra or Parliament Funkadelic albums.