Considering the Tenacious Donato Mancini

Poems from Vancouver poet and critic Donato Mancini's newest book, Loitersack (New Star Books 2014), are up at Lemon Hound! "'Loitersack' is 17th century slang for a lay–abed, a lazybones," if you didn't know (we didn't).

Mancini is currently traveling the States and will be gracing us New Yorkers with his presence at The Poetry Project this coming Monday, May 11, with Steven Zultanski. In the wait, we've landed on a fantastic conversation with Mancini about this project, conjured as akin to the "commonplace book." At Puritan Magazine, he tells E Martin Nolan: "As a commonplace book, much of Loitersack is collaged, paraphrased, quoted, distorted, or refracted through other sources. It pulls together many important questions asked by cultural theory that are still in circulation—but often in an inert, safely bracketed way." Read on:

[E Martin Nolan]: Such as?

[Donato Mancini]: Questions about the social constitution of language and of the literary field. Questions about the materiality of language. Questions about how aesthetic value and the idea of art-as-value function socially. Questions about taste, power, and symbolic and material economies. Questions about how, where, and by whom meaning is made. And more and more. And more. There seems to be a danger nowadays of abandoning all this restless inquiry in favour of a cozy return to reifying (and now corporatist) discourses of aesthetic excellence and quality. There is such a strong push in that direction from outside of poetry. Seriously—super-luxury condominiums are now being advertised (like at Main and Broadway in Vancouver, the vortex of gentrification where I live) in almost precisely the same language too often used to “celebrate” art and poetry. A lot of poets will agree with me that poetry should try to interrupt those kinds of cultural narratives, if only to create other room in which to breathe, think, and feel.

EMN: How do you account for the tenacity of that way of thinking about poetry? Is it simply because it’s convenient, and there’s a certainty to it, and it makes it easier to think about it if you have goal-oriented thinking?

DM:It gives the consoling illusion that a scary, complicated problem has been reduced to parameters that are readily measurable. I don’t think art functions in any way that is consistent or containable enough to actually measure art’s value. This is not a negative versus positive question: part of what makes art valuable is that it’s finally impossible to know why people make art at all. This reminds me, among other things, that it’s important to keep in view the fact that poetry has been by no means a good thing in many contexts. When countering sentimental ideas about art and creativity, it’s all too easy to point out poetry’s nefarious role in projects of language centralization, nationalism, racism, colonization, empire-building, disenfranchisement, psychological abuse, etc.

Counter away. Mancini also discusses humor and "Dr. Stern Reviewer," the musical architecture of his work, quotation, conceptual practice, his compositional process, "risk" as a term that might destroy itself, reading as punishment, and much more. And Nolan is thorough, the ideal interlocuter.

EMN: One of the motivations behind Why Poetry Sucks was to confront that punishment-based model of reading. Like if you don’t read “well,” you’re a bad person.

DM: Fervently adjudicative reviewers might be the most extreme victims of that feeling. A lot of that work reads as if the reviewers are trying to abolish that sensation by gaining a sense of superiority over the work under review.

EMN: And behind it all is a moral imperative. What if we replaced that moral framework with a humorous initiative?

DM: I’m not sure I want to think about it that way. But maybe in laughter some of the weight of the poem-as-test can be eased. Take someone like the visual artist Maurizio Cattelan. A lot of people have legitimate, serious problems with his practice, but it’s pertinent here because it’s funny in a way that people might call “disarming.” It feels disarming because it’s stripping you of the very tools you have brought to deal with the anxiety of meeting this cultural test—“Okay, I’m going to see this art object, and I’m ready: I’ve brought all my intelligence; I’ve had some coffee; I’m going to understand this thing.” Then you see Cattelan’s sculpture, and it’s so sublimely goofy the bottom just drops out—your weapons are useless. Maybe humorous poetry can work in a similar way, and maybe that can be liberatory in the long run.

Read it all at Puritan Magazine, f'real. And see you Monday.