INTERVIEWS

Trevor Root: I’m curious about the expectations you set for both pickles & jams and fukc all the king’s men: the tower and a few beasts living in its rubble. In the acknowledgements for each you lay out a terminology for the poems: “occasional poems” for p&j and “speculative poems” for fatkm. In doing so, you seem to both lay out and unsettle an authoritative process for reading (“there is a way to read these poems, but it’s a process of reading tied to and only present in the poems themselves”). To what extent are you interested in using your work to challenge the understanding of reading (and perhaps understanding itself) as a universal process, and what affordances do you think such a challengegenerates and works with?

Upton: Dear cris, I take it for the moment that we are mostly talking about human – human collaboration. happy to broaden that thinking if you really want to go there. Although that could get very weird very quickly it could also be momentarily of interest.

You take it correctly; but I too am prepared to broaden. And now, cris cheek and Lawrence Upton interview a group of bonobos on just why they collect Peter Gabriel recordings; and the bonobos discuss their belief that he is trying to communicate with them, even if the content is a little confused.

I’ll leave that with you in case you know any collaborative non-humans, and await the rest of your response jive long and potter

Lauren Miles: How did you get started with writing poetry? Tell me about the people/institutions/etc. that supported you.

cc: I have thought for some while that my interest began at bedtime through hearing my dad read what were called nonsense poems to me in the voice of Noel Coward. An amazing act of ventriloquism to burnish a respirator’s class. I’m not sure whether he sought to lull me to sleep or excite me and entertain me with recitations of The Jabberwocky and The Jumblies, The Owl and the Pussycat that kind of thing. I don’t think I’m making it up. I have memories.

…I go sometimes to see – in Cincinatti there’s a Shakespeare…, it’s a kind of indie Shakespeare… There’s a bunch of us that go down and see Shakespeare productions every now and again. And since I was a kid I’ve seen Shakespeare productions so I’m revisiting some of these things. And I go with a bunch of early modernists, early modern scholars, and most of them are way over-excited about Shakespeare in every possible way. Although I can understand why they’re interested historically, as literary critics and so forth.

Um, I have, and always have, with very very few exceptions, had real trouble with the conventional pros arch play. …Now, why don’t I like it?

Yeah, why don’t you?

Because if I go to the Barbican for example, and I go and I walk and I sit in a seat and then those gates close at the end of the aisles, there’s… To me it symbolizes that I’ve just been trapped.

Yeah.

So that’s one reason why I don’t like it, is because I feel, er, trapped into… a communal experience of artifice. Which I suppose will be another way of talking about all the stuff that gets into The Society of the Spectacle.

Yeah, OK.

I do have that problem and I particularly don’t like, generally, seeing people pretending to be other people on stage. I would really rather watch the cleaner sweeping the stage, or the stagehands changing the set.