At the Intersection: Aaron Shurin & Brian Teare in Conversation

We dipped back into the latest installment of The Conversant and found this fantastic conversation between long-time San Francisco poet Aaron Shurin and Brian Teare, himself no stranger to the Bay Area. It's a probing and expansive piece, beginning with a look at Shurin's involvement with the New College of California's poetics program and his unique position among the New College community (including the likes of Robert Grenier, Susan Thackrey, David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, Robert Duncan), the Language poets, and Gay Liberation. We'll take it from the top and encourage you to head to The Conversant for whole piece:

Brian Teare: Here on my writing table I have a beautifully produced little magazine, Convivio: A Journal of Poetics, published at New College of California in 1983. A document of the minds then at work in the Poetics Program, it collects a wonderful array of poetics writing – interviews, talks, essays, journal fragments, etc. – from Bay Area poets like Robert Grenier, Susan Thackrey, David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, and Robert Duncan himself. It also includes a still uncollected essay of yours, “Emily Dickinson and Stop Time.” So I’d like to begin with your initiation into the practice of writing poetics, which came, it seems, some time after your initiation into writing poetry. In this little invented narrative of mine, I’m imagining that Duncan and the community in and around the Poetics Program had a lot to do not only with the shift in your poetic practice between Giving up the Ghost (1980) and The Graces (1983), but also with your first forays into poetics. Is that at all accurate? It doesn’t seem incidental that the earliest essays collected in The Skin of Meaning all date from 1983.

Aaron Shurin: Well, if I can co-invent the narrative a little: Yes, certainly, New College was a poetics program, determinedly, not an MFA “writing” one, so the challenge and study was to articulate one’s interests, process, practice, and “place.” But for me there are two giant threads or vectors that coincide. First, and especially in the Bay Area, this was exactly the period of the “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” revolution, and poetics (or theory) were being proposed at furious decibels. I, certainly, felt compelled to bring forward the underpinnings of my own work at the risk of being erased. That historical push or rush is pretty much concurrent with New College poetics. And then, it occurs to me now, that though my earlier work did not yet have an explicit poetics, it did have an explicit politics. Gay Liberation meetings, radical faerie circles, a gay anarchist study group: all of these fed my work as a wide literature of influence. My early poetry, whatever its formal differences, was supported by an explicit (and collective) politics that I now see as a poetics — perhaps I can say it was acted out rather than written down. But what I want to say here is that it really was theory, studied as theory, and when New College arrived on its historical wave I was ready to bring that (as a beginning) into a more formal, more writerly, form. And NC was the site to bring it all together. The Dickinson piece you mention was actually a coursework paper for the poetics program. And of course, the influence of Duncan, and his major work of poetics The H.D. Book, was omnipresent.

BT: From my generational vantage point, you’ve always seemed uniquely placed in the history of Bay Area and US poetics because of the exact narrative you’ve mapped out for us. Not a lot of other poets stood with you at the intersection of Gay Liberation, Black Mountain, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics, and there are far fewer, in the wake of AIDS, who are alive and publishing today. Your crucial 1983 essay “A Thing Unto Myself: The unRomantic Self and Gender in the Third Person” creates a prescient and singular archive of predecessor and companion texts – Dickinson, Genet, Glück, Grahn, Rimbaud, Whitman – that, taken together, show gender to be discursive and performative in ways that prefigure Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. In fact, taken together, the essays before Unbound: A Book of AIDS articulate a queer poetics that critiques subjectivity in ways that seem largely absent from both Gay Liberation and Black Mountain poetics, but its critique comes with a generous embrace of “multi-subjectivity” largely absent from the arguments of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. I’m wondering if you could tell us a bit more about how it felt at the time to articulate this radical queer poetics, to become “A Thing Unto Myself” in the context of the infamous poetry wars?

AS: It was a complicated trajectory. I was flummoxed by much of the theory (I’m not a theory head, I’m a skin head, if you know what I mean) but I took it as duty to try and meet the issues. I read through all the issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as they appeared, simultaneously stimulated and befuddled. It wasn’t black or white for me: I took what I needed, and for the rest rather than rejecting it I tried to propose an alternative (or plural) — really Language Poetry drove me deeper into my own poetics, sharpening my positions and counter-positions. I wanted to do everything in my poetry. I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to use all the powers of poetry — let’s say, from the period, referentiality and non-referentiality. I think this confused a lot of people, but it didn’t confuse me. And really, though a congenial cat, I was also a ferocious queen, by which I mean some of my positions around gender and subjectivity and person, let’s say, were so directly linked to the battles around homophobia and misogyny and shame — and I had literally been on the barricades — and were forged by so much collective strength — that I knew I wasn’t going to let my little gay body be disappeared by “text” for example. Bob Grenier’s famous “I hate speech” comment (used to privilege writing/text over person/voice) was not for me: I love speech, which is to say the speaking subject. The language paradigm that uses pronouns to raise an image of experience in time and place was central to me. I wanted the speaking subject, but I also wanted to explode the singular point of view. I wanted the subject to be varied, multiplicitous, social, and even contradictory. And that included gender fluidity. I took it as a given that some formal restructuring was necessary — you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle after semiotics and deconstruction, but really why would you want to? You just had to grab the genie and perform your own dance. My dance included a resolute interest in the first person as the pilot of “body” — the site of desire and shame and ecstasy; at the same time a cautionary view of language’s binary structure in relation to person and gender, the prison of “he” and “she”; a dogged belief in poetry’s transcendental powers as non-normative language… oh, I could spin out a long list. I had some comrades. Bob Glück for sure: we started publishing in the gay press at the same time, and if our interests diverged to some degree we had mutual recognition always. And, too, I am pretty much the same age as the original Language poets, and I wasn’t easily bullied (not that they tried.) In fact, my work was included in a number of Language-centered publications: Silliman’s issue of Socialist Review, Bernstein’s gathering for Tyuonyi, and several issues of Hejinian and Watten’s Poetics Journal. I learned a lot from the ongoing dialogues (and not so much from the monologues). If I shivered in the back rows of some talk that was commandeered by theory and what I call citationism — referring to someone’s idea by mentioning the person but not the idea: What Lacan says about x — I took myself lovingly but purposefully in hand and urged, “Stand up queen!” So I stood up.