'here are some possible resonances of these colors': An Interview w/ Paul Ebenkamp, Part II

John:

can we talk a little about the section "Four Colors for the Based God?" these poems are all caps, and through that they seem to mirror your handwriting poems pretty directly, there's also a correlative color spectrum (the text is literally rendered in 4 colors), there's a gnomic vibe to the poems, a kind sloganeering that's easy to imagine spray painted on a wall "LONG LIFE SLOW/ GROWTH AND PERFECT/ COURAGE," (also thinking of Joseph Mosconi's recent full color glossy Fright Catalog, Basquiat's art gallery tags, Karl Holmqvist's text installations) do you see these poems as an extension of the marker/ handwritten poems? and what about Lil B anyway (The Based God)?

Paul:

oh yes, the Based God heart-spray rainbow poem. here are a few general observations, all of them pertinent to the poem in conception and execution.

1) Four Colors for the Based God is a pretty long poem, about 200 stanzas of varying length and questionable line breaks, in this weird all-caps offset stanza form i made up, plus another weird poem called Accuracy, also longish, in the middle of it, as a sort of B side to the single "Four Colors," except it is heard only from the inside of the A side.

2) there is a term in circa-1650 haiku writing and commentary (discovered in Makoto Ueda's excellent Basho and His Commentators), "nioi," which i will now quote Ueda for the glossary entry: "A term used in the Basho school of haikai to indicate the subtle way in which two sequential verses are linked. literally meaning "fragrance," it refers to the sentiment or mood of one verse imperceptibly drifting into that of the next verse, like the fragrance of a flower drifting in the wind."

with emphasis on imperceptibly drifting! i think of this term a lot when reading and writing poems, i mean in language speech and writing "the connections" (metaphor) that obtain are not just mysterious, they are actually Not Perceptible. this is an incredible freedom. completely incredible. the space between the stanzas in Four Colors is chronologically and generally related to my study of nioi (the larger sphere of which is shunyata, emptiness. scholars of japanese kill me now.

3) so Four Colors started—i don't much operate, personally, in poetry qua "project" but i do believe absolutely in the value of SIDE PROJECTS—started as a sort of poetry side project that i undertook in order to, as mentioned, change my handwriting. it was a big white blank square book and i used four highlighters in a set sequence to write whatever came to me and i'd try to stick with it for say ten pages at a time, cycle through all four colors at least once, etc. and the process was sorta disinhibiting for me, i mean i've been writing and posting on walls loony gnomic things all my life but i'd never set to it with such a point before, the handwriting thing, which ended up being a pretext for writing this poem while at the time i was so sure the change of handwriting was super important important important.

3.1) yes, the poem is very related to my visual poems; a number of these stanzas were in fact once autonomous visual poems. that means that the momentum behind the visual poems had eventually reversed: whereas at first i was taking small pieces of lyric and enlarging and aerating and enriching them, in Four Colors i was taking those same pieces and re-reducing them, like a coulis.

4) i know that all-caps are hated and so i thought to try and pull it off. i really did want to offer that ultimate lame element in a way that might be compelling. or, in a way that might be very much hated.

5) i would love to spraypaint stanzas from this poem in places. how about "I USED TO BE A FIGURINE ON CAKES"?

"THE WORLD BELIEVES WHAT I TELL IT THE EARTH AND SEAS NOT SO MUCH"?

"A TRANCE BETWEEN EXTRACTS"?

"LOST IN THE MOVES"?

5.1) language (writing) is space; speech (speaking) is time. i love poetry for the way it collapses both, black-hole-style. and this is also an aspect or affect of tagging/graffiti art, with an eye to the tangled knots of a socius in which we speak yet cannot hear ourselves, so we gotta write it out for all the strangers of the world to see instead. this is, i think, a key to the astounding power of basquiat's work (see "pegasus" especially, a late and not widely observed largescale work).

5.2) many poems could be modulated together from this poem, no doubt.

6) Lil B. he's got some good ideas and a good practice, the based god; he is among the muses of this poem and the dedication is not ironic. a friend of mine told me he'd heard a fair amount of Lil B on youtube and couldn't fathom why anyone would listen to any of his tunes more than once, and i thought to myself, yes but isn't that part of what's so right about it? the no-footed dry ephemerality of his work is not convincing artistically, but the manner of his doing what he does right now, out in Concord you might be amused to know, in his own calm cockeyed light, with his conviction and the disarming care he has for his audience, can be a really a beautiful thing to plug into. some of his tracks are absolutely fantastic, and there might be a 1-to-7-or-15 ratio between it and the ones where he's mainly just keeping things going basedly. is this excusable? of course it is.

7) so i'm sort of circling, nioi and handwriting exercise and gangly stanzas and black holes and based styles, around the fact that Four Colors is pretty out of whack. but it's levitating in its own shoes all the same, i think its vision of reality, or scent of reality, and the trace that it leaves in the mental air (and i quote, "of freedom in noise / as l'ange passe") are absolutely what i wanted to achieve when i wrote it, in that year. a weird year.

7.1) i feel like Four Colors for the Based God b/w Accuracy is neither one poem nor many poems.

8) the colors were my doing. i spent a good while getting them right, though intuitively, not deductive or specifically expressive (like with a flag, no), combinations of four aura'd around until i got the right combination to cut through the veil and access immortal dimensions. here are some possible resonances of these colors. cerulean because until the middle ages it signified satan and after the middle ages it signified god, turquoise because it's both my parents' favorite color, purple b/c royalty (+ immortality overtones), and ochre-gold because it's the color of california light at, for example exactly this moment, floating in through the window, 7:17pm.