interview :: Jon Leon interview :: Scott Pierce/Effing Press & Tony Tost interview :: Gustave Morin interview :: Buck Downs! review :: Amy King Antidotes for an Alibi interview :: david baptiste-chirot review :: Rupert Wondolowski The Whispering of Ice Cubes: New and Selected Pieces narrow house home double.wide: is an addition to our narrow house reviews and interviews by Kevin Thurston if you would like to have your publication/recording reviewed by double-wide please query first, kevin dot thurston at gmail dot com interview with Jon Leon KT: tell me about how this book was written JL: I wrote the first draft of the first poem of TRACT the summer of 2005. The title was "The Pay Phone Outside of Happy Donuts," now "Hacienda." Happy Donuts is a rather squalid coffee shop off Moreland Avenue in East Atlanta. The pay phone outside doesn't work, probably hasn't for years. Some people go there to extend a crack or meth high, some go for Indian hookers. The degeneration of that scene which I had stumbled by so many times walking around the neighborhood was an aesthetic jumping off point for TRACT. The '82 Coda article I mention in the postscript to the book was another major influence as to exactly how the book would be written. I would sit down at the computer and type straight out the pornographic scenes I worked to compose in my head. Essentially I played the role of a wage-working porno book writer. Their job was to write something like a book a week, so accordingly I spent little time on revisions. My room I designed like a sweatshop for writers, constant finger on the hardcore play dial. I thought it would make good poetry. Many times I wondered if there wasn't more of myself in the book than I was aware of. So, I wrote it then, with the intention of exposing my perversity. No, in some exaggerated way it is a serious critique (mirror) of social relations, the brutality of capitalism revealed through gluttonous sex? It is a reaction definitely to the quietest, flakiest aspects of contemporary avant poetry, and a dissenting take on the mannered approach. On the whole TRACT is quite possibly more aesthetically driven than socially, and perhaps this is why its social impact is so great. I wanted to combine vintage Scandinavian porn with contemporary American porn. de Sade with Dos Passos, the original Olympia Press with current electronic music like Laco$te, Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, product 01, vive la fete, nid and sancy, Crossover, and old groups like Telex. I liked suits and Jaguars, the stock market when it was hot, a junk spoon when its hot, pussy when its hot, dick hotter. I had previously in Diphasic Rumors experimented with jagged rhythms, charged syntax, noun as verb, action noise, repetitious beat. At that time I thought "I'm a human/machine." With TRACT I became the machine completely. I didn't think much about it until after it was finished so its hard to say how I wrote the book. A transgressive intuition I guess. A further note on composition: My thinking is that poetry has been hyperventilating for hundreds of years. In TRACT I wanted to eliminate the concept of breath. Like a punch in the gut, it takes your breath away, rather than placing emphasis on it. This may seem obvious considering it is prose poems. But I think I was successful in going a step further and removing all space to create something so dense that time disappears. Some of the best movies, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle for example, are so riveting because one gets lost in them, time and the self are obliterated. The idea of breathlessness further illustrates the inhuman machinic outcome of the poems. KT: can you expand on the performing the creation of the text and how the speed with which it occurred may have 'let in' more psychic sludge than you originally thought? JL: Well, it's hard to speculate since it was unconscious. And really I was half-joking about the perversity. Is that perverse? Half-joking I say, because I think the semi-automatic writing approach will allow almost anything. Marquis de Sade got it almost perfect in Philosophy of the Boudoir. Everything is permissible. Poets write themselves out of their work sometimes, or we catch ourselves before something revealing pops up. Self-censorship is what makes for all the slick books out there. I'm interested in individuals and how they relate to themselves and each other. Oft times that is incredibly messy and off-putting. The short story is that I allowed myself to be carried away. I think put in some of the situations in the book one would forget the outside world and disappear as one would disappear inside the situation. One could be carried away and not understand why. Simply, it goes back to my feeling of timelessness. That is what pornography does: it removes time. Pornographic videos are often over 3 hours long. I have seen some that are 6. You don't know until you look at the clock you've disappeared. I tried to do that with TRACT. Fabricate a world. The best way to do that is to perform the creation. Perhaps it isn't psychic sludge, but a subconscious fetish for each and every scenario. KT: that's interesting and i want to take it in two parts which you can discuss in any order & to any length you wish. first, this insistence on throwing you into the book, is it a reaction to LangPo? or at least how the avant-garde has interpreted LangPo in the past 20 or so years? or is that (LangPo) something you were never interested in and ran across so it is less of a reaction? i suppose what i'm driving at is what is your background? TRACT seems to me based in--as you mentioned--de Sade but also burroughs of course so i'm wondering if you approached this from more of a prose stand-point. second, about speed. when you typed about porn videos that remove you from time, the one thing i got out of TRACT was how fast everything occurs. it struck me like MTV's 'My Super Sweet 16' with its techno-decadence which leads to a degree of boredom (linking up with de Sade again) but also to the speed of replacement. i mean you just figure out the sexual configuration(s) before someone switches it all up and does a bump of drugs to boot. JL: I didn't come from a prose-standpoint but I did come from a standpoint that had less to do with poetry. I only started writing poetry because I hated all the poetry I read anyway -- to make poetry I would read. Except Baudelaire. Who practically invented prose poetry in Paris Spleen, one of my favorite books of all time. My standpoint was like okay, why does nobody read poetry? Why is every other art form consumed by persons other than the practitioners of that art form? Why is everything so electric, so sensual BUT poetry? And then I set out to destroy poetry and rebuild it. I think anybody could read and enjoy TRACT. de Sade leads to boredom yes. I was avoiding that. I had begun 120 Days of Sodom and abandoned it, begun Juliette, abandoned it, the same with Philosophy in the Boudoir. It seemed predictable. Almost too much at times. Boredom is primary influence with TRACT though. It is a reaction not to Language Poetry so much as it is to poetry right now. Not to devalue contemporary work, much of it is wonderful, but a larger percentage bores me, and if they were to answer truthfully I'm sure others would agree. I hate to say that it seems safe, but it does. I didn't know if a book like TRACT would ever see light. I have Susana Gardner and the Dusie Kollektiv to thank for it. I was certain it would be dismissed. Returning to LangPo, I wasn't interested but to understand its importance and influence. I read Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and others. To me that was intolerable, but not in any reactionary way like I was afraid of it or didn't get it. I just didn't care. I never got hung up on liking or disliking Langpo. It didn't seem very stylish to me. I think you can combine dissent, politics, intellectual content, and style. To be reductionist, basically, when it comes to Langpo I'm just like "who cares," -- ”it's just not cool. I'm 24 not 64. Tjanting is a slow book. Very slow. So you see there are those who write the experimental prose poem and it isn't fluid, continuous. I wanted that. Which brings us up to speed. Techno-decadence is a good description and could describe some of the musical palette that influenced TRACT. It does lead to boredom, which explains why the book is only 19 poems. It's like cocaine or speed, you can't concentrate too long. But even without that, replacement is very satisfying. We live in a culture of replacement. Now, I'm not completely immersed in the world of pornography, nor am I a connoisseur, though I may be moving in that direction. While we are speaking of LangPo I'd like to propose a striking example which may relate to the reactionary hypothesis regarding TRACT. It seems to me pornography was a lot sexier, a lot more artistic, up until around the late 80's? perhaps. It seemed more authentic then. Now it is like a career and very slick, cold, and I think that the same thing happened to poetry around the same time. The number of poets, magazines, presses, etc have multiplied exponentially and parallel with the pornography industry. Anyone can do it, just like anyone can become a realtor or an insurance salesman. So, with that I am connecting TRACT to the present and criticizing the present through mimic and hyper-cultural replacement while simultaneously utilizing an avant-retro aesthetic. It is like here is how careerism ruined porn and poetry. Here is how the future could look. The speed of TRACT merely mimics the hyperactivity typical of how many of us consume art and culture in our time. I only read 3 books by William Burroughs. Junky, Naked Lunch, and The Electronic Revolution which was read to me by a painter friend at a young age. I remember this book marking me with a lasting impression. The Electronic Revolution (1970) which I think was published in Germany before here, and is obscure? I know the edition I saw had the German translation in it. It describes going out into the city with a tape recorder and then, if I remember correctly, mashing it up. I think that's the basic idea. Its been years. I know it was an experimental process using sound and collage. A cinematic trailer is like that, and that method is exploited in TRACT. Instead of the city I invented a world and created a trailer to advertise it. Much like the film trailer will take the most alluring scenes and connect them into a loose narrative to seduce the viewer to the box office. I did deliberately want a similar aeffect in TRACT. Often the trailers are more interesting than the film. That is speed. Speed thrills, baby. And poetry needs more thrills. At the same time we are all complaining the old maxim that nobody listens to poetry we are continuously inventing reasons for them not to. I explore this idea further in a new series of vignettes called RIGHT NOW THE MUSIC AND THE LIFE RULE. I don't even call it poetry anymore, what does that mean poetry? TRACT is what the smart ones are doing while everyone else is in line at the concessions stand. They're getting a glimpse of the future. KT: Can you give us a further glimpse into this 'glimpse of the future'? what is the next place this non-poetry poetry that you write going? JL: I'm writing vignettes now. I no longer break a line because I've found that breaking a line is a very serious and self-destructive action. It immediately relegates one to the margins of society. The working and underclass is always there on the margins anyway and I don't want to further that alienation through line breaks. Plus poetry wastes. It wastes a lot of space which reveals its roots as conspicuous consumption. And the intellectual rigor required to create also reveals the privilege of time and study. To me, the whole artform is very bourgeois. What I plan to do in the future is minimize the waste on the page, minimize the waste of public space by publishing small collections say once or twice a year, and to incorporate more low art. It seems to me the most forward gesture one can make in poetry right now is to be simple, because we have reached the height of decadence and obsession in poetry, so I will work to find a simplicity that is edging toward vapidity. post script: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- On 9/6/06, kevin thurston wrote: my turn for taking a few days. any links or snippets of the new vignettes you'd like to add at the end? let me know. will review the interview then send a copy to you for your edits, if any On 9/3/06, Jon Leon wrote: Kevin, simpatico. I'm on spotty wireless so this will be quick. Here's a link to the book, I thought lulu, what some would consider an illegitimate venue, would be perfect for the "lower" aesthetic of this book. Though of course it's not. LULU. Download TRACT :: here!.
interview :: Jon Leon interview :: Scott Pierce/Effing Press & Tony Tost interview :: Gustave Morin interview :: Buck Downs! review :: Amy King Antidotes for an Alibi interview :: david baptiste-chirot review :: Rupert Wondolowski The Whispering of Ice Cubes: New and Selected Pieces narrow house home
double.wide: is an addition to our narrow house reviews and interviews by Kevin Thurston if you would like to have your publication/recording reviewed by double-wide please query first, kevin dot thurston at gmail dot com interview with Jon Leon KT: tell me about how this book was written JL: I wrote the first draft of the first poem of TRACT the summer of 2005. The title was "The Pay Phone Outside of Happy Donuts," now "Hacienda." Happy Donuts is a rather squalid coffee shop off Moreland Avenue in East Atlanta. The pay phone outside doesn't work, probably hasn't for years. Some people go there to extend a crack or meth high, some go for Indian hookers. The degeneration of that scene which I had stumbled by so many times walking around the neighborhood was an aesthetic jumping off point for TRACT. The '82 Coda article I mention in the postscript to the book was another major influence as to exactly how the book would be written. I would sit down at the computer and type straight out the pornographic scenes I worked to compose in my head. Essentially I played the role of a wage-working porno book writer. Their job was to write something like a book a week, so accordingly I spent little time on revisions. My room I designed like a sweatshop for writers, constant finger on the hardcore play dial. I thought it would make good poetry. Many times I wondered if there wasn't more of myself in the book than I was aware of. So, I wrote it then, with the intention of exposing my perversity. No, in some exaggerated way it is a serious critique (mirror) of social relations, the brutality of capitalism revealed through gluttonous sex? It is a reaction definitely to the quietest, flakiest aspects of contemporary avant poetry, and a dissenting take on the mannered approach. On the whole TRACT is quite possibly more aesthetically driven than socially, and perhaps this is why its social impact is so great. I wanted to combine vintage Scandinavian porn with contemporary American porn. de Sade with Dos Passos, the original Olympia Press with current electronic music like Laco$te, Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, product 01, vive la fete, nid and sancy, Crossover, and old groups like Telex. I liked suits and Jaguars, the stock market when it was hot, a junk spoon when its hot, pussy when its hot, dick hotter. I had previously in Diphasic Rumors experimented with jagged rhythms, charged syntax, noun as verb, action noise, repetitious beat. At that time I thought "I'm a human/machine." With TRACT I became the machine completely. I didn't think much about it until after it was finished so its hard to say how I wrote the book. A transgressive intuition I guess. A further note on composition: My thinking is that poetry has been hyperventilating for hundreds of years. In TRACT I wanted to eliminate the concept of breath. Like a punch in the gut, it takes your breath away, rather than placing emphasis on it. This may seem obvious considering it is prose poems. But I think I was successful in going a step further and removing all space to create something so dense that time disappears. Some of the best movies, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle for example, are so riveting because one gets lost in them, time and the self are obliterated. The idea of breathlessness further illustrates the inhuman machinic outcome of the poems. KT: can you expand on the performing the creation of the text and how the speed with which it occurred may have 'let in' more psychic sludge than you originally thought? JL: Well, it's hard to speculate since it was unconscious. And really I was half-joking about the perversity. Is that perverse? Half-joking I say, because I think the semi-automatic writing approach will allow almost anything. Marquis de Sade got it almost perfect in Philosophy of the Boudoir. Everything is permissible. Poets write themselves out of their work sometimes, or we catch ourselves before something revealing pops up. Self-censorship is what makes for all the slick books out there. I'm interested in individuals and how they relate to themselves and each other. Oft times that is incredibly messy and off-putting. The short story is that I allowed myself to be carried away. I think put in some of the situations in the book one would forget the outside world and disappear as one would disappear inside the situation. One could be carried away and not understand why. Simply, it goes back to my feeling of timelessness. That is what pornography does: it removes time. Pornographic videos are often over 3 hours long. I have seen some that are 6. You don't know until you look at the clock you've disappeared. I tried to do that with TRACT. Fabricate a world. The best way to do that is to perform the creation. Perhaps it isn't psychic sludge, but a subconscious fetish for each and every scenario. KT: that's interesting and i want to take it in two parts which you can discuss in any order & to any length you wish. first, this insistence on throwing you into the book, is it a reaction to LangPo? or at least how the avant-garde has interpreted LangPo in the past 20 or so years? or is that (LangPo) something you were never interested in and ran across so it is less of a reaction? i suppose what i'm driving at is what is your background? TRACT seems to me based in--as you mentioned--de Sade but also burroughs of course so i'm wondering if you approached this from more of a prose stand-point. second, about speed. when you typed about porn videos that remove you from time, the one thing i got out of TRACT was how fast everything occurs. it struck me like MTV's 'My Super Sweet 16' with its techno-decadence which leads to a degree of boredom (linking up with de Sade again) but also to the speed of replacement. i mean you just figure out the sexual configuration(s) before someone switches it all up and does a bump of drugs to boot. JL: I didn't come from a prose-standpoint but I did come from a standpoint that had less to do with poetry. I only started writing poetry because I hated all the poetry I read anyway -- to make poetry I would read. Except Baudelaire. Who practically invented prose poetry in Paris Spleen, one of my favorite books of all time. My standpoint was like okay, why does nobody read poetry? Why is every other art form consumed by persons other than the practitioners of that art form? Why is everything so electric, so sensual BUT poetry? And then I set out to destroy poetry and rebuild it. I think anybody could read and enjoy TRACT. de Sade leads to boredom yes. I was avoiding that. I had begun 120 Days of Sodom and abandoned it, begun Juliette, abandoned it, the same with Philosophy in the Boudoir. It seemed predictable. Almost too much at times. Boredom is primary influence with TRACT though. It is a reaction not to Language Poetry so much as it is to poetry right now. Not to devalue contemporary work, much of it is wonderful, but a larger percentage bores me, and if they were to answer truthfully I'm sure others would agree. I hate to say that it seems safe, but it does. I didn't know if a book like TRACT would ever see light. I have Susana Gardner and the Dusie Kollektiv to thank for it. I was certain it would be dismissed. Returning to LangPo, I wasn't interested but to understand its importance and influence. I read Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and others. To me that was intolerable, but not in any reactionary way like I was afraid of it or didn't get it. I just didn't care. I never got hung up on liking or disliking Langpo. It didn't seem very stylish to me. I think you can combine dissent, politics, intellectual content, and style. To be reductionist, basically, when it comes to Langpo I'm just like "who cares," -- ”it's just not cool. I'm 24 not 64. Tjanting is a slow book. Very slow. So you see there are those who write the experimental prose poem and it isn't fluid, continuous. I wanted that. Which brings us up to speed. Techno-decadence is a good description and could describe some of the musical palette that influenced TRACT. It does lead to boredom, which explains why the book is only 19 poems. It's like cocaine or speed, you can't concentrate too long. But even without that, replacement is very satisfying. We live in a culture of replacement. Now, I'm not completely immersed in the world of pornography, nor am I a connoisseur, though I may be moving in that direction. While we are speaking of LangPo I'd like to propose a striking example which may relate to the reactionary hypothesis regarding TRACT. It seems to me pornography was a lot sexier, a lot more artistic, up until around the late 80's? perhaps. It seemed more authentic then. Now it is like a career and very slick, cold, and I think that the same thing happened to poetry around the same time. The number of poets, magazines, presses, etc have multiplied exponentially and parallel with the pornography industry. Anyone can do it, just like anyone can become a realtor or an insurance salesman. So, with that I am connecting TRACT to the present and criticizing the present through mimic and hyper-cultural replacement while simultaneously utilizing an avant-retro aesthetic. It is like here is how careerism ruined porn and poetry. Here is how the future could look. The speed of TRACT merely mimics the hyperactivity typical of how many of us consume art and culture in our time. I only read 3 books by William Burroughs. Junky, Naked Lunch, and The Electronic Revolution which was read to me by a painter friend at a young age. I remember this book marking me with a lasting impression. The Electronic Revolution (1970) which I think was published in Germany before here, and is obscure? I know the edition I saw had the German translation in it. It describes going out into the city with a tape recorder and then, if I remember correctly, mashing it up. I think that's the basic idea. Its been years. I know it was an experimental process using sound and collage. A cinematic trailer is like that, and that method is exploited in TRACT. Instead of the city I invented a world and created a trailer to advertise it. Much like the film trailer will take the most alluring scenes and connect them into a loose narrative to seduce the viewer to the box office. I did deliberately want a similar aeffect in TRACT. Often the trailers are more interesting than the film. That is speed. Speed thrills, baby. And poetry needs more thrills. At the same time we are all complaining the old maxim that nobody listens to poetry we are continuously inventing reasons for them not to. I explore this idea further in a new series of vignettes called RIGHT NOW THE MUSIC AND THE LIFE RULE. I don't even call it poetry anymore, what does that mean poetry? TRACT is what the smart ones are doing while everyone else is in line at the concessions stand. They're getting a glimpse of the future. KT: Can you give us a further glimpse into this 'glimpse of the future'? what is the next place this non-poetry poetry that you write going? JL: I'm writing vignettes now. I no longer break a line because I've found that breaking a line is a very serious and self-destructive action. It immediately relegates one to the margins of society. The working and underclass is always there on the margins anyway and I don't want to further that alienation through line breaks. Plus poetry wastes. It wastes a lot of space which reveals its roots as conspicuous consumption. And the intellectual rigor required to create also reveals the privilege of time and study. To me, the whole artform is very bourgeois. What I plan to do in the future is minimize the waste on the page, minimize the waste of public space by publishing small collections say once or twice a year, and to incorporate more low art. It seems to me the most forward gesture one can make in poetry right now is to be simple, because we have reached the height of decadence and obsession in poetry, so I will work to find a simplicity that is edging toward vapidity. post script: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- On 9/6/06, kevin thurston wrote: my turn for taking a few days. any links or snippets of the new vignettes you'd like to add at the end? let me know. will review the interview then send a copy to you for your edits, if any On 9/3/06, Jon Leon wrote: Kevin, simpatico. I'm on spotty wireless so this will be quick. Here's a link to the book, I thought lulu, what some would consider an illegitimate venue, would be perfect for the "lower" aesthetic of this book. Though of course it's not. LULU. Download TRACT :: here!.
