David Buuck is a writer
who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics (tripwirejournal.com). Recent
publications include SITE CITE CITY
(Futurepoem, 2015) and An Army of Lovers,
co-written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013). A Swarming, A Wolfing appeared from Roof Books in 2016.
His
poem “FIRE ON FIRE” appears in the twelfth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q:
Tell me about the poem “FIRE ON FIRE.”
A:
William Rowe wrote a review of Joshua Clover’s The Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015) for issue #10 of Tripwire, and in it he hones in on JClo’s
line “how to set fire to fire?”, seeing it as a central question about the
hazards of how insurrection can become spectacle. Rowe references a line from
Hegel — “Fire is materialized time” — that then became the first line of the
poem. I’d been thinking a lot about the relation between insurrection and lived
time, how certain moments can flare up in a way that feel outside of
clock-time. In the poem I try to get at how capitalist clock-time — necessary
for the regimentation of the wage-hour — ‘resides’ in commodities, commodities
that, like Marx’s exemplary table, can burn. All that is (seemingly) immaterial
congeals into solids. And in fire, all that is solid (commodities, carrying
within them labor-time) melts into air, free — if only for a brief moment — in
the ‘pure present' of combustion. That’s the gambit, anyway.
Q:
How does this poem fit in with the other work you’ve been doing lately? Is this
piece an occasional, or is it part of something potentially much larger?
A:
It is definitely part of a line of inquiry over the last several years,
beginning with the work that will be coming out this fall from Roof Books (A Swarming, a Wolfing) and continuing on
into what seems to be a new MS. Whereas A
Swarming could be summarized as trying to finds new or at least non-cliché/nostalgic
modes of representing militant social movement, upsurges of revolt & their
affective dimensions (from Occupy Oakland on through its offshoots and
aftermaths) the new work is more concerned with languaging ‘insurrection’ as a
form of both irruptive praxis and discursive energies: while this particular poem
is more meditative and/or ‘philosophical’ on the subject, it certainly extends
my trying to think through the (lived/non-capitalist) time of revolt as well as
how poetics can articulate such contingent but collective experiences from the
perspective and hazards of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’.
Q:
Do you see all of your writing as existing on a particular kind of continuum?
How are your books usually constructed? How do poems begin?
A:
I feel like my interests and concerns, both thematically and formally, are
related across books & projects, or at least I imagine readers could trace
such continuities, even as/if they develop and change (as I hope they do!).
Certainly the performance works, fiction, and hybrid prose-works differ
considerably from the more straight-ahead poetry – especially regarding prosody
as well as method – but that may more be about testing different compositional
methods to engage and interrogate political questions from different sites and
modes. I guess that’s where I might like to hang on to the adjective “experimental”
to describe kinds of non-conventional writing even though that term seems to
have become merely a branding term for niche marketing, at least within the US
poetry worlds.
The
construction of the books varies. The
Shunt and Site Cite City were
largely written over the same period (2001-08, 1999-2012) and though the
difference between the two might appear to be simply poems/prose, they were in
many ways different projects. An Army of
Lovers was co-written with Juliana Spahr, and evolved into a ‘book’ over
time, driven less by narrative plot (as pseudo-realist fiction) as much as a
shared sense of appropriate scale and reach for its interrogations of poets,
poetry, and the possibilities for political action. The forthcoming book is
work ‘coming out of’ Occupy Oakland and its more militant offshoots, and the
questions of radical movements and representation, so that thematically that
came together as a book-length MS more organically. As you know, it’s often
more about what one leaves out that helps constitute a book’s form and I dunno,
identity? – and each of the books involved a ton of stuff left-out.
Q:
With three books (including collaboration) and a small stack of
chapbooks/pamphlets over nearly two decades, how do you feel your work has developed?
Where do you see your work headed?
A:
Yikes, two decades! Where has the time gone?
I
tend to follow various lines of inquiry, be they thematic or formal questions, but
have tended to be a bit ADHD in terms of following such lines all the way to
actualized ‘products.’ However, one could probably fairly easily trace some through-lines
in my work so far. Certainly the question of politics and how social/cultural issues
and one's own politics work themselves out in writing and art has been a primary
driver in my work, both in my own writing as well as with BARGE, editing Tripwire,
organizing events, and other efforts in the cultural spheres of the poetry
world. Increasing skepticism as to the power and/or ‘efficacy’ of overtly
political poetries can certainly be seen in The
Shunt, as the book moves from more forthright (if embarrassingly so) ‘anti-war’
poems to a self-questioning of such genres and platitudinous pronouncements of
certain received ideas and political platitudes. An Army of Lovers certainly pursues this skepticism, if not
outright doubt and frustration, in my and Juliana’s fictions about the roles
and possibilities for political poetry and art in its (pre-Occupy) historical
context. Occupy Oakland and its related irruptions certainly have informed my
own thinking about representation (in poetry and performance) and its relation
to ‘lived’ (off-the-page) political movements, and such rethinking is (I hope)
evident in A Swarming, a Wolfing.
Current
projects include a novel about military simulations set in the Californian
desert, as well as a cross-genre book confronting the question of (and relation
between) ‘insurrection’ and writing. I hope to do more off-page BARGE and performance work, as well. I'm
also increasingly committed to the editorial project of Tripwire, which feels like a space for critical thinking and
interrogation (if only for myself!), as well as a mode of constellatory mapping
of potential alternatives to what can often seem like a stolid, insular, nationalist,
and Manichean approach to poetics in the US.
It’s
hard to say ‘where my work’s headed’ given that I can’t predict the social and
political landscapes that we will be confronting over the next years and
decades, and how they might (re)shape my own aesthetics and politics. I hope to
remain open to a continued self-critical engagement with such questions,
however they manifest in practice.
Q:
I’ve long been fascinated by those who engage more overtly in engaging the
political in their poetry, something so easily done poorly, but managed
brilliantly by a small handful over the years, from Spahr to Stephen Collis,
Rita Wong and others. And yet, ‘political poetry’ has often been accused of
pushing a message over the art. Why do you think the form is so easily
dismissed?
A:
Well, at least in the US, it’s easy to dismiss or roll one’s eyes at a lot of
self-described ‘political poetry’ for a couple of reasons: it can be
self-congratulatory, moralistic, and platitudinous; and/or it can seem to
relegate formal and aesthetic concerns to the background in order to emphasize
more overt/‘legible’ social content. (Though of course content and form are
always mutually imbricated; I’m just suggesting a false separation for
argument’s sake here.)
That
said, I’d argue that the same could be said of much poetry that is not overtly
political: it’s tired, cliché, and formally not very interesting. It’s not
clear to me, for example, why overtly political content or intent in and of itself makes for worse art. Rather, bad
art is ‘bad’ because it's bad art, no?
Or,
a thought experiment: what would one rather have — an OK poem with radical
politics, a good poem about the poet’s personal feelings, or a Great Poem that
upholds Western cultural values. How do we enter this question without
interrogating what we mean by OK, good, and great? Can we possibly divorce
content from aesthetic judgment? How are these not political questions? (I’m
not saying I know the answers to these questions — I prefer good poetry to OK
poetry, but what I mean by good is very likely different from what others mean,
and not just as a matter of personal ‘taste’...)
The
other charges — pushing a message, preaching to the converted, sacrificing
aesthetics, the limited efficacy of poetry (‘if you wanna change the world, why
don’t you just go march’) etc etc, are perhaps more complicated, especially if
we again think of ‘non-political’ art. I mean, love poems ‘push a message’ and
are imbricated with questions of efficacy (i.e. they aim to convert, even if
only the object of desire). Most lyrical poems preach to the converted in terms
of shared aesthetic values (look, I’m writing that way that we all have agreed
is good!). Few contemporary ‘political’ poets in the US actually claim their
work has some broad efficacy in what we conventionally think of as ‘actual’
politics, but some critics level this charge regardless, choosing to ignore the
multiple ways in which the political can work within art and cultural practice,
not to mention poetry’s relation to radical social movements, ecological
disaster, history, etc., or simply to press potent affective charges in readers
(anger, inspiration, etc). I also don’t think it’s coincidental that the
poet-activists most active in challenging institutional forms of exclusion and
hierarchy within Poetry-World-Inc are also poets we'd generally think of as
‘political’ in their writing.
And
of course, most importantly, we have to remember that all poetry has a politics — its values, histories, forms, and
relationship to institutions and power are all deeply political, whether or not
poets choose to directly engage those issues. So really when folks talk about “political
poetry” they mean poems or poets that are more overt or explicit about politics
(either in the work itself or in extra-poetic claims about poetry or authorial
intent/posturing), almost as if the complaint is something like, “please go
away and be an IRL activist or whatever so I don’t have to think about these
difficult questions and can just concentrate on art,” as if what we call art or
good art or art-not-sullied-by-politics isn’t at its core a political question,
given the history of Western poetry and its values (craft, a focus on the
individual, relegation of anything by or about marginalized peoples into the
sub-category of “[identity category]-poetry,” etc etc).
I
don’t, however, want to make any claims about overtly political poetry as some
kind of privileged form or ‘better’ poetry. There is, as with any kind of
poetry, a ton of dreck and clichéd political poetry out there (and believe me,
my own work is certainly open to that charge!). But we don’t dismiss the great
lyrical poets based on the millions of shit lyrical poems produced over the
years, do we. I just find that the questions investigated by certain modes of
political art — which are always
formal and aesthetic questions as well as questions of content or an author’s
beliefs or opinions — are more compelling and challenging to me these days,
especially given our historical moment. I'm just not sure how much the world needs
more USAmerican MFA’d poems about bourgeois ‘personal experience’ or perfectly
crafted lyrical poems or risk-free award-winning poems, etc etc. I want poetry
that challenges the way I see the world (which includes art, of course),
whether or not it’s “good” as defined by the gatekeepers of convention. Down
with ‘good’ poems!
Q:
Should poetry that overtly engages the political be tied to action? As Peter
Gizzi wrote of Jack Spicer: “He is not against political action; on the
contrary, he suggests that instead of writing a bad political poem one should
write a letter to one’s congressman.”
A:
I try to
resist ‘shoulds’ when it comes to making art, and we’d need to unpack what we
mean by ‘action’ and even ‘tied to’ to begin to get at this one. Generally,
though, my answer is no — or at least, I’m not sure how exactly one would begin to make some direct connection between
art and action, or how one would then judge such poems. If my love poem doesn’t
get me any action, does it fail? If my lovely lyrical poem doesn’t get me
awards, does it fail? Why would we only value ‘action’ in relation to ‘political’
poems?
At
the same time, if “tied to” means something like “in relation to” we could
certainly begin to trace various traditions and histories where poetry emerges
from and alongside political action/movements/events/etc., whether through
historical, witness, documentary, movement poetries, etc. And obviously “action”
in general — aka “life itself” — seems to be a pretty broad ground from which
poetry might ‘overtly engage the political,’ since our responses are always
going to be mediated through ideology and aesthetics.
On
the whole, though, as much as I do believe poems can be and make action in and
of themselves, I’m generally cautious about making any claims for poetry's
efficacy or “shoulds.” I would ask Gizzi’s Spicer, however, what about a good political poem? Why isn’t that a
possibility? I certainly think (good) poems can do more than letters to one’s
congressman.
Q:
Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works
can’t you help but return to?
A:
Well it’s a pretty long list, and it depends on what I’m struggling with at any
given moment. There are often different kinds
of works that provide different kinds of charges for me — writers that inspire
me as models of what an engaged writer can be and do in the world even if I
don’t write anything like them (for instance, a few off the top of my head this
week: Baldwin, Cesaire, Brecht, Woolf, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg, Dario Fo,
Raul Zurita, CAConrad, Eileen Myles, Amilcar Cabral, Said, Fanon, a million
others), or writers whose work reignites certain aspects of my creativity, even
if I just pick up a book and read a couple pages (Gombrowicz, Acker, Leslie
Scalapino, Cesaire again, a million others), or writers who I read at some
important time in my early years and so re-reading them tickles some hopefully
not-nostalgic moment of Wow-you-can-do-this? (Nietzsche, Genet, Stein, Beckett,
Dambudzo Marechera, Jean Toomer, the New Narrative writers, a million others).
And my friends and contemporaries! And artists and scholars and musicians and
and and!
