So I wrote it down so I wouldn't mess it up.
But to what extent do you think it is a poet's obligation
to write something that can be understood or felt?
For example, what do you make of a Cummings poem composed
entirely of gibberish of letters and punctuation,
which when asked about it, William Carlos Williams deemed
to be not a poem?
You mentioned earlier today anxiety
of influence, which you translated to anxiety of joy.
Is there an anxiety of understanding, and if so, how
do you navigate it personally?
I translated it into the joy of influence.
Joy of influence.
Sorry I missed that.
I still messed up.
The desire to be part of a historical and present
community of--
not just of poets, a historical and present community
of poets and others.
So I'm surprised that--
I don't know the context of what Cummings poem
we're talking about or what Williams had to say about it.
Williams was in general quite open to a whole range of
poetry and experimental poetry.
That didn't throw him at all.
He writes very beautifully in favor
of Gertrude Stein, who was also taken
as a troublemaker of language.
And I tend to favor that also, so I sometimes
have been very attracted to gibberish.
Yeah, so just look further into gibberish sometimes.
When I performed with the--
this instrument, the poem by Hugo Ball,
[SPEAKING GIBBERISH].
It would also qualify as gibberish,
but there's something behind a lot of the gibberish, this--
very often poets playing the role
of clowns who like the traditional clowns
in traditional societies are really
doing very serious business in that way.
So I don't know--
I would like to know the context of Carlos Williams
speaking of it as something of Cummings as gibberish.
Cummings after his death fell into some disrepute
with academics during--
it's a long time ago-- during the period
of the new criticism.
I don't think it's ever really gotten away from that.
I think, in a way, he was an experimentalist who
was too popular but had an impact around the world
on other people.
So I've come to be a defender of Cummings.
And, of course, again, I don't know
what Williams was looking at.
It's maybe to a fault much of what Cummings writes is
perfectly understandable.
We can do one more. [? Teddy ?] [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm just out for my daily walk.
[INAUDIBLE]
Just a thank you followed by a question.
So the first time I ever heard you read
was at St. Adrian's Bar in New York
a million years ago where you read the Horse Songs.
It's fabulous, and I heard that.
Yeah, I've been doing that for a long time.
Followed up by the other question.
Can you say something maybe about the relations
among gibberish and the sacred and total translation?
Yeah.
I'm aware that there is an area of--
what's a good term for non-lexical poetry, sound
poetry, poetry without words?
And this-- the most immediate thing
that one can compare it to is speaking
in tongues and particularly in Christian sects,
but it turns up in other places as well.
So a sense of being inhabited by languages that one
doesn't understand.
That's a very serious matter.
And certainly for some of the early sound
poets like Hugo Ball whom I was citing before, another German,
Kurt Schwitters.
They were after something, and in its own way, although they--
Schwitters is probably more of a secularist than Hugo Ball, who
went bonkers on religion later in his life when
he fled from Dada.
And today we're looking--
they were concerned with returning
to the roots of language.
It was a particular, maybe wacky, idea of that time,
but it was a serious idea.
And I began to-- when I was doing Technicians of the Sacred
and then Shaking the Pumpkin, became aware of so many
in the culture that I was looking at.
So much use being made of non-lexical non-translatable
sound, which was also being ignored in--
The early translators would give a line in rough English--
translated rough English-- and let's
say nonsense syllables follow or untranslatable sounds follow
and don't even bother to record them a good part at the time.
And I said, no, no, this is part of the poetry,
and sometimes it becomes the entire song.
In the horse songs, of course, I'm not singing.
As I think all of you know, I'm not singing Navajo music there.
I've translated the music as well as
the words and the untranslatable sounds and all the rest of it.
But the Navajo horse songs are infused with sounds
that can't be translated.
And some of the songs don't have any recognizable words.
So, yeah, there's a lot to be said about that.