Julien Poirier: Wet Noodles & Songs

I met Julien only a few years ago through mutual friends who rightfully assumed we’d hit it off. One day, we took a stroll around the UC Berkeley campus as Julien pointed out the entries to tunnels he’d explore while a teen growing up in Berkeley. He spent a lot of caffeinated time writing furiously in and around upper Telegraph Avenue, something I wanted to do as a seventeen-year-old living in Podunk, California.  I immediately felt a kindship with him, as there were so many coming-of-age-as-poets parallels, mostly inner necessities and the hankering for discovering new poets and new methods of writing. So there’s this…

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Julien Poirier's Bay Area Poetry (public floggings with wet noodle language!) 1988/1989/1990

 

Brian Lucas: We talked a lot about our early poetry influences and experiences and there were several commonalities. We both read a ton of Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, and went to open mic readings in cafes. Bizarre fellows in trench coats reading Finnegans Wake-type glossolalia, or proto-slam poets dissing one another, "street" poets, et al. Very, very different than the poetry scene(s) we found ourselves in only two or three years later. Were you aware of what was going on at New College of California or the Poetry Center at San Francisco State when you first started getting into poetry?

Julien Poirier: I had no concept of what was going on in San Francisco, except for a bit of the Beats. I only really knew stuff I was seeing at Café Babar and at the Chameleon. Bucky Sinister was hosting the open mic there. It was like early spoken word. There was a guy dressed like a businessman and he'd come and read these very strange, intense stop 'n' go poems as if he were wringing them out of his body. So one night before an open mic reading in Berkeley, I decided to smear my hands on a car tire—I was trying to do something really theatrical. A friend of mine once did a reading where he plugged in a toaster and read a poem about toast and when the poem ended the toast popped up. People loved it.

The Babar was a great place, with a bar in front and a back room with aluminum foil on the ceiling. It was very small—everyone smoked. It was a scary, but exhilarating place to read. It felt like the center of the world.

BL: I'm curious about poetry readings like at the Babar where the audiences were more vocal towards the poet—showing approval or disapproval toward what's being read.

JP: Maybe at open mics there's still the possibility of that happening.

BL: Why does that type of exchange not exist in the so-called "experimental" poetry world?

JP: I don't really know. There's a conservative dynamic where the audience is expected to just sit on its hands and listen, which actually gets pretty exhausting. The open mics I remember could sometimes become a one-way road like that, too, but when they did you could really feel the energy leaving the room. It made a squeaking sound like a balloon letting out air. People came expecting to be lit up and, if they were lucky, to have their lives changed. Things went wrong for me more than once. I read at the Chameleon once and it was terrible. I got these hecklers and I tried to heckle back, but I made the mistake of saying if you have a problem then you come up and do it, which totally backfired.

You had to be entertaining and have an act/persona that you were exhibiting. That became a dead end, and the academic reading seems a dead end. It's hard for people to break out of that because there's that separation between reader and audience. It is up to the reader to make the room come alive.

BL: It seems like musicality was something "experimental" poets wanted to get away from (an exception would be Clark Coolidge). For some time, having this resonant or musical cadence or flow in one's poetry was something looked down on.  Language poetry seemed really critical of poetry having a musical aspect.

JP: I never could understand it, and I don't care about it because it doesn't interest me. There was this simplistic idea that language that falls into rhythmic patterns is an inherited language much like we, for example, inherited capitalism on a slippery slope from agriculture. This idea that poetry needed to break away from, say, the ballad form, or Mother Goose, in order to make a fundamental critique of language becomes an interrogation of poetry as an idea—and that could be useful, in a kind of theory-heavy way, but it's not something I wanted to enter as a practicing poet. It became a concern rather than an experiment.

BL: We briefly touched on this recent-ish phenomenon of poets singing their poems at poetry readings when you were last at my house. I wondered about its gimmickiness. Maybe this song and dance routine is a harkening back to the bygone days of poetry? What are your thoughts on song and poetry?

JP: I don't think songs are poems. First of all, songs connect physically with whoever is listening. Poems don't connect in that way (unless they are chanted). Songs are thrilling and they liquefy distance. Poems can't do that, but in recompense poems get to be telepathic and subtle. Poems can vibrate on a level of refinement that can literally pick up fragrances from closets hundreds of years in the past—broom closets, costume closets, water closets. Poems can time travel—poems are actually (or can be) time machines. Songs can't fit into these grey-hair, cosmic fiber optics that poems zoom through at the speed of sound, smashing into each other like ginger ale bottles in Aztec gutters. A song is just too big, even when it's the smallest song in the world. So poems get to do all of these things that songs can't do—but the whole power of a song is based on its being kind of trapped in this superstar world of RIVERS of light and VELVET blackness and echoes. Song is all surface—total cohesion. Poems take the song deep into the background, where it's just "there" (somewhere below the surface). 

A poem is free to be absent of song, but a song can't be absent of song. What I mean is that a song has a BODY and a poem doesn't. There's no such thing as a "poetic" song, although there are poetic garbage men and print brokers. A song uses everything at its disposal for its body, to be physical. Words, breath, in surprising and/or clichéd combinations. A song has a beautiful desperation to exist! The only place a poem exists is in a poem. A poem has no need of a body. Poetry came out of song and then realized it didn't need a body anymore, but that took a long time to happen. In a poem, a song is represented by different types of repetition. When a poem uses repetition, it doesn't do this to be more like a song, or to harken back to the days of song—it does it to flex its soul, to stride and to exert a sexual gravitational attraction despite its bodilessness.

BL: How did your sense of poetry shift from early interest in Dylan Thomas, discovering Kenneth Patchen... going to Columbia University and meeting "real" poets. Did you reject your early open mic poet life in favor of the sophisticated (ha!) New York poet life, which of course had a "spoken word" scene, but did you go to any open mics in NYC?

JP: I didn't really meet any poets in New York City that I would have considered more refined than the Café Babar crowd. The difference was that the young poets I met in New York were really precocious—they all were supersmart kids and they already knew a lot about poetry, had read a lot more than I had, while the SF poets were either older or foggy youths. The poets I met in and around Columbia knew all about the New York poets that I had never heard of. When I was in New York I started imitating new poets like Hart Crane and E.E. Cummings and Lorca and put away Dylan Thomas, not because I ever outgrew his poems but because they weren't resonating with my new neighborhood. My best friend, Filip Marinovich, didn't like Patchen and I couldn't figure out why—but I did see that as a sign that the kind of poetry that echoed through the West wouldn't ring in the East. The Babar poets never had much of an effect on how I wrote, but I admired their stage presence and their ability to cross big physical distances quickly with metaphors. Like when Julia Vinograd compared a young woman's heart to a glass doorknob. The line that I wrote that got me a high-five was about a guy who could hit a falling star with a stream of tobacco juice—they liked that kind of thing, and if anything, NYC arrested my development of that kind of West-Coast imagery by inspiring me to write in a this-is-happening-now flow, in tune with latenite diner door swing. I did check out ABC No Rio, though only for music... never made the mic there. Eventually the New York poet that most influenced me was Ashbery. It took a while to get away from that influence. The problem was that I had started to write in an Ashbery-like way even before reading him, so when I did read him it was like some kind of infusion of steroids in my lines. I had to kick it and learn how to hit my own line drives all over again!

Je Suis Henri Grenouille: A short spoof by Kzinizk of Jean Luc Goddard's 1960 French New Wave hit Breathless (À bout de souffle) shot in Super 8 and starring Julien Poirier (1988).

She Thinks Mussolini is a Pasta Dish

BL: Julien, I am totally digging your Soundcloud albums. This most recent collection, CALIFORNIA II, recorded in your car while either commuting to your teaching job at San Quentin Prison or hustling print jobs around the Bay, is something I can relate to, having done my own mumble blabber jibber jabber on long solo drives up and down Highway 5. Can you comment on a couple?

JP:

Fascist Girl. 

This song came up at night on Highway 80, down by the Golden Gate race track. All this song is saying is: You can't argue with someone who has never heard of what you're talking about. "Give Trump a Chance" is going to be the B-side.

Dollars Data Dreams.

This is a Bay Bridge song (in between spots). It's a billboard song. A song that comes from looking out the window at flashing electric billboards and the ugliest buildings you can build going up in the prettiest city on earth. Data is supposed to save the world, but all it does is devour time.

Just Stop Reacting. 

I realized that I actually never think—all I do is react. I think writing is a special way of thinking, so I guess I think when I write. But mostly I react to whatever is coming in. What would it mean to stop reacting, and how would one even go about this? The first step might be to try phrasing some lines in the manner of Frank Sinatra.