Reed Bye
Interview conducted by Olatundji Akpo-Sani
Pulp Language and its interaction with poetry: How choosing between Plastic Man and Magilla Gorilla can save the world.
On a Sunday afternoon I sat down with Reed Bye professor and poet at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University to talk about poetics, pop culture, and how words are created and used in new ways in poetic creation.
I have noticed a particular trend emanating from the poetic community that I am surrounded by here in Boulder. The poets and musicians I am hearing and reading seem to reference a certain pop or pulp language. For example, recently a dialogue around references from the movie 300 took place, which created new meaning for the language involved in both the movie and the poetry. The artists were taking that pop reference and reworking and retransforming it to create new meaning for other expressions and other contexts. Is that something that you see happening more in the work you read from your students?
Yeah I do see it. I think that it has probably always been the case in poetry that the current colloquial language as it is developing sprouts new words and new, sometimes reversed senses of words, in slang and other uses. It has probably always been a part of poetry making but maybe more so now than at other times because of the massive amounts of language from the internet to movies to songs to street discourse and generational discourse, which is so amplified in its usages now. So they get picked up on much sooner and broadcast and then become, sometimes disturbingly for some people, appropriated from local usage to media usage overnight almost. I think it is always interesting how these new types of language find their way into intentional poems as well as just dialogue. You find yourself using a term that you have never used before. I’ve done that, been surprised that I said this word because I didn’t really know what it meant, but now it has sort of gotten its way into the framework of my vocabulary whether it’s correct or not. I mean there are so many technological terms now that are arriving almost daily, literally, with the different techno-resources that come up and the verbs that have to be made up to imply the using of these new resources. I don’t find myself theoretically aligned with that as an intention necessarily but I am happy when it pops in.
You mentioned that some people may think that it is disturbingly appropriated. Can you give me an example of that?
Within the hip hop scene as it developed over the years there is that questioning of the way that advertisers snatch it so quickly for its commercial purposes. That is one area where it was registering a little bit of outrage, that their language was nabbed for unsympathetic purposes in order to exploit the jazz and the energy of it. So it happened, that’s inevitable I guess in this world, where any kind of exciting gestures are going to be reproduced very quickly to a broad plain of national and international experience through all these mediums of informational transfer. It’s inevitable from there that anything that has that sort of buzz will get seen as good advertising copy, galvanizing, so maybe there is nothing wrong with it at all. I can also see that the feeling that something was generated out of this particular milieu and environment and it was particular to this place here, but now you see it reproduced in this more crass commercial way. Whose was that originally? You know. Questions like that pop up because it takes a while for things to generate and kind of come up the side, and when it gets to the surface it’s lost in a way - lost to its original speakers.
Can you speak a little bit about intentionally appropriating this language versus not intentionally appropriating it?
Well there are different layers because from the artist’s point of view intention is a complex issue. In my view anyway, to be too self consciously intentional in art is a death to art because it doesn’t allow for things to come through in an unexpected and fresh way. That in my experience is where the magic happens. So there are people making what they view as art and what may pass as art, and they work hard at it. That basic attitude at the bottom, where this work comes from and to what extent I want to be in control of what gets in and what goes out, that’s a touchy area for me. There is the intention of being open to whatever comes in as well. That I am not going to restrict my field of perception or receptivity when I am writing to what I decided before hand is acceptable for that medium. So I am going to be open to allowing things to pop up in surprising ways. Maybe there is some question at the moment of doing it, but you just do it without stopping to view the ethical issues at that point. Maybe later but you don’t want to inhibit that process. And then you could also, at that level bring in the intention of whether or not you are doing this to sell something, on any level, not just business appropriating it for commercials, but as a poet doing this to sell something, cause that gets in there.
You gotta eat.
And that’s there too. Do we really know in poetry what will generate income and what won’t? That’s a tricky road to go down too because we think that this is what people seem to like but would they buy it or could I exploit this, not in a negative sense, for that type of thing. So those are all areas I feel a little wary about. I think what you are talking about is just language in its always evolving and developing nature. And that’s where poetry is always going to be paying attention. The attention there draws those usages out and then sometimes creates them.
Do you think that poetry schools, not universities or colleges but schools of thought within poetry, funnel that intention that we were talking about as far as creating a work where the intention is secondary in any way?
Yeah I think that they would because all those labels come after the fact anyway. Maybe one thing about instant media attention is that you could invent a school over night with certain loose aesthetics that go along with it. Then you would sort of sign up for that aesthetic. That sounds suspicious to me to work that way because mostly those, I think helpful, categorizing labels like Harlem renaissance or Berkley renaissance or Black Mountain, weren’t something that the people involved at the time were thinking of. Just looking back you can see a kind of configuration there that is helpful to group because you can then name it, but it’s got its limits obviously. Always naming something that is, because when you look at the individual representatives it’s not like they are all writing the same way. The variety is often much more striking than the similarities, but there is a certain historical place in time and spirit that makes it legitimate to categorize and name. To do it in the present or in the future is more questionable. You could do it, but you would be signing up for a certain kind of thinking and maybe there would be an interesting moment there. Throwing yourself into a certain constriction can be very interesting though. When using forms in writing that preexist what you’re doing, for example, because that does allow for surprising things to happen a lot of the time. So there would be a way to do that with intentionality that might work. It wouldn’t work forever I would think, but it doesn’t have to. That’s often interesting, the choices that poets make, because there are certain subject matter in poetry that seem like you just can’t do that now. It just won’t work. Say, writing formal odes or something or maybe the sonnet. I don’t know how the sonnet is doing. That seems to spring up in new generations in amazing ways. I remember William Carlos Williams declared it dead at one point, but it wasn’t. It came back. Things like maybe the “I”. The intensive emphasis on the “I” which is ego or the speaker referring to him or herself as “I” in the poem seems to have been marked these days as hard to get away with, but you could set your intention to do that kind of ironically or just take it on because of the challenge of the thing not being acceptable these days. That often does bring through things. We have these ideas of fashion or what actually works or doesn’t work, and those categories don’t last forever so there can be sort of break through ways of approaching restrictions. So you could invent a school on the spot with certain descriptive aesthetics and then adhere to those and maybe you could do it collectively but you couldn’t take it too seriously.
Do you think that aspiring poets conceive of their poetry as a part of a school because of what they have been reading and thus label themselves prematurely?
It’s hard to say. It’s hard to judge other people beyond just a reactive judgment, but there are generational spirits that are real that somehow determine the aesthetics of the time. They can be, from one generation to the next, pretty radically different or not so. Even within a generation there can be different branches or avenues that people are going down all of which are generationally inspired but different from each other. One school could look on another and say “that’s sort of retro” and “that’s kind of limited in this way or that way” and we do. On the whole though, I would say it’s important to not get too caught up in that or take that too seriously as far as people being able to understand it because a lot of this is ahead of us. It’s almost better I would say, individually, to submit to go with whatever labels are thrown at you rather than analyze it all too much at the time because it gets a little too rationalized and politicized possibly when you get caught up in the “this not this one” mentality.
Do you find the idea of not taking ourselves too seriously as a very important aspect of how you write and how you teach writing?
I think it is but it’s hard when it becomes a concept. It becomes problematic in itself. Not taking yourself too seriously sounds like you want to be cracking jokes all the time or ironic all the time or undercutting everything that was just said. That can become its own stylistic fixation limitation. What it seems to indicate is a sign of getting stuck somewhere and not allowing what could be said to be said in the way that it might so feel inclined to be said. I think on a sort of an existential level not taking things too seriously is good advice though. So there is this whole idea we have been dancing around of getting in the way of the writing with an attitude or a judgment. The moment where you make a decision of which words you write or which thoughts one follows at this juncture or that is a very important moment to be awake. I think that the idea that you are going to make that decision at that point based on a certain ideological stance or an aesthetic stance is a killer. When you make the decision on that basis you can hear it. It’s transparent when somebody’s done that. It can work. It can get a laugh or it can get a reaction, but there is something there that is a little too contrived or at that moment you could tell the person went with the prefabricated possibility rather than what could have been openly generative in that moment. It’s not wrong it’s just noticeable when you are listening closely.
This brings us back to that magic moment where you are choosing “that word”. Well, with this inundation of media, is it possible that there will be too much information to really pick from and that moment when something unique is chosen over something that is planted in our psyche through the myriad of images and ideas we get on a daily basis will begin to occur less frequently?
Yeah I think so. There is some kind of balance, in general, between breadth and depth or the root and the surface. The surface can be so alive and popping, the energy so intense there, and then it’s kind of legitimate and you want to kind of play on that surface and bring things in there. Then it can shift quickly to the same thing that seemed to be popping has not got that energy anymore. Then to play on that surface gets tedious fairly quickly. So it seems to me that you want to feel your heart or body. There’s a ground and a surface that knows or has a sense of not knowing ahead of time but knowing internally how to choose. There is some confidence that isn’t based upon ideology or a particular aesthetic but comes from language itself. The same issues apply there. There are always developing shifting knocking around permutating surfaces of language, but then there are amazing root intensities when you look at words and phrases. There is an historical aspect that is powerful, and it’s still alive. It’s not like it just was this way one time. It’s still there it just has this other connotation now, maybe 180 degrees from what it was but that’s still a relation. So there is something in these roots of words that is unbelievably informed. Staying somehow in touch with that, when you are encountering or allowing that newness in that pulp or pop word is almost magical. It’s still a word that has an ancestry or a lineage that is alive in it. Not just that it makes you respect it because it was around somewhere else as something else but because that “something else” is in it still and that’s why the newness is there because that oldness is there simultaneously. So to have both those general principals of the root and the surface is kind of an insurance that the treating of the word will be more than just a flash in a pan, which it may be anyway.
Do you see work that is being published and produced now in the poetic field as a returning cycle of something else?
You use the term pop and pulp. So those two words have resurfaced themselves. The word pop in the early 60’s came up in a big way, pop culture and pop art with Andy Warhol and that kind of importing of immediate media and cultural images. Media appropriation started taking people by surprise. Like this was a can of tomato soup and now it is in the museum of modern art, and how does that work? I think it is the same principal. I remember Allen Ginsberg, I can’t remember which poem it was, but he used some pharmaceutical inhaler or some sort of over the counter allergy medication that had a sort of long catchy multi-syllabic title and it was striking to see that in a poem. So that impulse at that time seems to be cycling again.
What’s your pop moment? Where or when is your pop moment?
I have pop moments. I wrote a fairly longish poem on an airplane 2 years ago that was that way - based on this and that going on. It was the contemporary world in a little space and I was in it so I went with that. So, the environment where one is writing in. Maybe that’s a good reason to place oneself in the public environment to do some writing at times. Then it’s not a matter of having to conjure it up its right there and like writing collaborative poems, mostly I do it with Jack Collum like everybody else does, but those are moments when a lot of pop reference comes in and sometimes its moments from the 40s or 50s too. I think it is a question of delight really. You take delight in certain words appearing and often they come from a new source of words that is part of an ongoing and unfolding colloquial world.
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