| Forge
Interview
On Forge: Ted Mathys in conversation with Fred Schmalz
Q. Describe how the opening poem, "Built that They May Find Their Tongues," is or is not an ars poetica, and how it lays out the purpose of Forge .
It's an ars poetica to the very basic degree that it is concerned with making. But it is more concerned with what is being made. In this case, the "they" of the poem are building a lamb, which has obvious undertones of the creation myth. As they build the lamb it begins to acquire speech. It dies, it's reborn, dies again, and the first word it eventually speaks is "make," doubling back on them. I'm interested in how worldviews and philosophies, rooted in language, are constructed. In this case there's an ambiguity as to who, really, is in charge, the builder or the built, or if the idea of "in charge" has any real relevance. The idea of poetry itself as functioning in the same manner as other, more codified religions has been around forever, but it is an idea that interests me, having once myself subscribed to the programmatic nature of the contemporary Christian church. Some of the ideas of the book—faith, artistic creation, myth, sexuality, and a struggle with the materiality of language—are present in the poem.
Q. You use memory extensively in the Factories section and in A Little Religion of Sledgehammers and Mandarins; not as a way to describe past events or as a way of creating autobiography, but as the underpinning to the contemporary, as witnesses in a metaphysical argument. A few examples include the arcade games and rolls of quarters in "The Factory in the Factory of Simultaneity," the science fair, and the many Ohio and family images in A Little Religion.
I know you're driving at memory, but to get to it, I have to say something about "metaphysical argument." I usually balk at the term metaphysical, because with its heightened mobility in criticism, I'm often not sure what the heck is being discussed. Metaphysical Poetry as an historically unique phenomenon does appeal to me though, especially in terms of the metaphysical conceit. These extended parallels between seemingly disconnected objects or concepts, parallels that require the mediation of the writer's and/or reader's intellect, do figure prominently (though differently) in the Factories and in A Little Religion of Sledgehammers and Mandarins. Though I was not acutely aware of it at the time of writing them, the Factories operate roughly by the idea of "universal analogy" that has been used to describe metaphysical poetry. The Factories could be criticized for a sort of violence on the part of the writer that is required to make the parallels that run through them work; it's a violence of forcing together, for example, an apple eaten ten years ago in Ohio, the balled up shirt on my floor that looks like an apple, and an apple I'll eat next year. It's all over the place in art and in contemporary discourse, this idea of everything affecting everything or having a connection to everything else (we talk about the "butterfly effect," etc.), which can sound pop-mystical, I know, but I was really just shooting for a polyvalence that is in fact rooted, not simply juxtaposition or arbitrariness. So current experiences, images, overheard snippets of speech, and so on, found cousins in experiences, images, speech patterns and ideas from other times and places, one of them being imagination, another one memory. Levertov has the idea in the book of essays you gave me (thanks) that a poet of organic form, when she sits down to write a poem, always has a constellation of perceptions (radio on, bird at window, taste in mouth from dinner) as well as bits of historical information she knows, anxiety about an upcoming event, etc., and it is her charge to be aware of this, to embrace this apperception until she is brought to speech. So, for me, memory in the Factories was sort of on equal footing with what was physically in front of me, what I'd heard, how I speak, what I imagine, and so forth. In the Little Religion I somewhat retained fidelity to memory in terms of basic settings and occurrences, but also bastardized it in terms of not finding the affinities of objects as such through conceit within poems, but building or projecting affinities between rotten mandarins and sledgehammers between poems.
Q. Many simple tools (saws, hatchets, hammer) are used to build the book. Discuss.
My father is one of eleven children, and he and a number of his brothers do construction work. Most of them have small businesses of their own and often work together. One does drop-ceilings, one frames, and two, including my father, are masons. I grew up working for them in the summers until I was a sophomore in college. The tools themselves are everywhere and the metaphor of tools interests me. Most of them have a dialectic embedded in their very nature. A saw must destroy, cut, in order that something be built. A hammer pulls nails as well as pounds them. A sledge is a demolition tool as well as something that can pound stakes. A chalk box's result is always temporary. The parallels with poetry are obvious. I'm also interested in an assembly of discourses, as many poets are. Writers often cull language from scientific texts, etc. Marjorie Welish manages to make the diction of something as seemingly dry as academic discourse sing. And I found the words my family slung around, that particular construction vernacular, to be fascinating. Gusset plate, seven-penny, gable, rip, joist. I have a weakness for poetry in which all words and sounds are given a look, where arch and crude, concrete and abstract, all get a look, where the poet becomes something of a screen door or sieve through which worlds internal and external blow, accruing gnats and voices, being a part of, and thus altering and being altered by, the as is.
Q. "The Hole in the Fog" deals with a world obscured: riddles with imbedded answers, narcotic fog, fog as shroud, as riddle itself, the battle between pulse and death, how travel strains the mind's ability to make sense of surroundings, including "when nothing external enters to distort // the reality of experience, the reality of experience // distorts itself." Describe how the poem moves through shrouds to the relative focus of "the hole."
I wrote the section after several weeks in Budapest during which the fog rarely lifted. I was interested in the co-dependent relationship between perception, specifically sight, and knowledge. The pod of clarity one has in fog moves with the subject, and I was interested in where the mind turns in such circumstances. For me, as one who is generally blasted by the very ability to perceive, it turned inward, questioning most of my assumptions about sight, and sight in art, in landscape, in properties of liquid, and in the invisible/intangible (death). There is a friend in the poem in another part of Europe whose life is in danger and with whom the speaker is unable to effectively communicate. The poem struggles with framing—both how the eye culls useful, if arbitrary, correlations between objects and motions to create a temporal models of understanding, and how, similarly, intent and effect frustrate each other in language itself, even when the stakes of clarity (in this case clear/transparent communication) are frighteningly high.
Q. The rhythms and images of "Ash Wednesday" are very (for lack of a better word) hard, evoking destruction ("we run our fingers through the knots / looking for a way to unravel it"). The title is a nod to T.S. Eliot and the poem incorporates an index of first lines. Discuss how using the work of the past contains an imbedded dialectic similar to that of tools—interestingly enough, here you are incorporating the old in making something new about the destruction of what is around us.
Several people have brought up the Eliot poem, but if there is a nod, it was an unintentional one. It was written just after Ash Wednesday and has to do, again, with perception, time, and the nature of displacement. There was a starfish in one of my mussel shells at a bar, and it seemed such an "entry ribbon" into a process (of distribution, of capitalism, of oversight) about which one can only surmise. The story of the starfish can't be known, but recognizing this impossibility and still ruminating about its path to my plate is a form of hope, or naivete, or both. Similarly with the poem, or poetry in general—the index of first lines is a group of fits and starts into poems unseen and (in this case) non-existent, but the impulse to navigate them is a similar embrace of hope, whose value is precisely that it has no use-value. The dialectic you mention is contained therein, but I don't think it is using "the past" in terms of previously written poetry to make something new about the destruction around us as much as it is dissolving, or trying to dissolve, expectations about the poem's ability to achieve what it sets out to achieve, focusing instead on the ability of the starfish, the painting, the friend, to set forth a series of intuitive leaps that screw with the idea of a universal "now."
Q. Discuss your use of archetypes (from the generic "figure," to "soldier," to "carpenter") and biblical language (several "our fathers," "the soldier bleeds twice" echoing Jesus falling a second time) and images (nail, fish, carpenter) to forge an allegorical foundation in the book's final section, Quandaries.
Most major Western monotheistic religions have at their core a frustration with, as a friend recently put it in a poem, "the physical impossibility of understanding death." For better or worse, I share this frustration. And if, rigidly defined, knowledge is a belief that is justified and also happens to be objectively true, the frustration stems mostly from this last part—the impossibility of fulfilling the requirement of truth beyond the living, breathing, sensual body. The archetypes in the Quandaries sequence are all placed in more or less the same position—abandoned, either by their own doing, by accident, or by external circumstances. With this sequence I was interested in the idea of control and choice when put in this position. Each archetype—figure, soldier, grandmother, carpenter—does have the ability to face death immediately or to prolong the situation. Whether the intractable "other" is a transcendent thing called "god" or simply a composite, non-transcendent outwardness unknowable by the subject, is less important than the fact that in this situation, the subject still has the ability to, and must, make choices. At points in the sequence the subjects create, befriend, reject, love, remember, question, and so on, and in the end they do make choices different from each other. I think I had to be intentionally unspecific (a restricted diction, vertical lines supplanting punctuation, a lack of situating adjectives, place names, times, etc.) because the situation seems so elemental, so simple, yet tragically important. I wasn't shooting for a back door discussion of religion here, nor was I advocating some sort of Suprematist faith in elemental "universals," but simply trying to deal with, in a world shorn of specificity, what I, and we, deal with daily in our particular historical moment but might not recognize.
Q. Talk about how myth is an element of your poetics. In what ways does this underpin the book?
Myths are related to the archetypes you mentioned in the last question, unique as they may seem. In terms of poetics, they have a pretty specific function for me. I'm not all that interested in getting into a discussion of postmodern or post-avant terminology here, so I guess I'll try to answer this anecdotally. I knew a sculptor in Indiana, and he was a man "of faith." We had a discussion about the idea that art today has to deal with the concept that what can be said, or thought, or painted, or performed, has probably been done before. On one hand, refusing to recognize this can lead to a severe naivete in the work, which is unacceptable to me, and other the other hand, submitting to the idea fully can lead to a belabored self-reflexivity in the work, tacitly approving of an end to history, or an end to the history of art, also unacceptable to me. The sculptor said that, for him, the very idea that he could do nothing new was liberating, in that he was forced, in the religious sense, to rely on "faith." Though I reject his particular notion of faith, I think it turns the question of originality on its head. The very act of finding the way in which I am necessarily unoriginal, finding the myth or archetype that resonates with a personal relationship or experience, is an important part of the creative process for me. I don't use many, if any, direct references to particular myths in the book, but the search for resonances often leads to a fuller concept of community. I think all of our lives are legends, and if we're artists, part of the charge is to find out how, and to declare them so.
Fred Schmalz is a poet and publisher of the literature and art journal swerve . Schmalz's chapbook Ticket was published by Fuori Editions in 2002. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Divide , ACM , Forklift Ohio, Spout and other magazines. His music writing appears in The Fader . He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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