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Poetic Profile

Lisa Jarnot

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, New York-- a little town on Lake Erie called Derby about an hour from the Pennsylvania border. I can’t say that poetry or writing were an inherent part of the mix there. Mostly there were tractors and cows and a few strips of suburban housing along the highway. My parents really weren’t book readers, so I came into literature on my own. I’m not sure how it happened really. I think I was anxious to discover whatever existed beyond the perimeters of my immediate experience. When I was fairly young I started reading voraciously — not poetry, but typical suburban American stuff– Stephen King novels were my favorite. I wanted to write horror stories.

2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

My first influences were musicians– the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Dylan was really the key because it was through his work that I discovered the Beat poets. So my first influences were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. When I started college at the University of Buffalo I studied literature with two poets– Bob Creeley and Jack Clarke. Creeley turned me on to Robert Duncan’s work. Jack was a Blake scholar with a wicked intuition about the emotional and intellectual world. He was the first one to encourage me to become a poet. So, I tend to be loyal to first sources. My two pole stars are Ginsberg and Duncan. In between there are a lot of other writers and artists-– Bernadette Mayer, Christopher Smart, Frank O’Hara, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol.

3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poet become part of your everyday life?

I became a poet when I realized that I wasn’t a very good songwriter. That was probably my first year of college, 1985, in Buffalo. I’d been writing ballads and folk songs and also had tried to write an On The Road type novel. But after I discovered Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” I knew that I wanted to be a poet. I had some recognition that poets could really dig in and make an immediate connection to other human beings. Ginsberg’s candid adolescent doubts and fears and excitements knocked me out.

4) Your books are very complex- do you come at the work trying to create complexity? or does the complexity come out of your process?

I think that the complexity comes out of the process. I like puzzles and mystery and history. That’s what I get from Robert Duncan’s work– the wild growth of “field theory” where anything is possible in the poem. My first book Some Other Kind of Mission is very much influenced by Duncan and also Jack Spicer. There’s a bunch of Malory in there as well (I was reading The Death of Arthur) and also Stan Brakhage’s sense of the visual/collage/open field composition. I remember wanting to capture somehow the complexity of the universe. I was collecting scraps of paper that I found on the street—trying to document the physical world. I ended up weaving in a bunch of visual collages, trying to get a three dimensional texture. In that sense the biggest influence may have been Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, which was created with a dense weave of themes and outside sources. I always find Duncan’s work remarkable in the way it can be read on multi-levels. There is the surface beauty in the lyric, but also if you pick it apart, you find layers of reference to Duncan’s reading of history, linguistics, Gnosticism, etc. I like getting lost in poetry and film—being able to wander in many directions.

5) What is your favorite food?

Anything with garlic, ginger and lime. Maybe a little bit of cilantro. Also I like M&Ms (plain).

6) Sports Team? or Activity?

Horse racing. When I’m in New York I go to Belmont Park. I’ve been intrigued by horses since I was a kid. Over the last couple years I’ve found out that I’m also pretty good at handicapping horse races. So it’s a double thrill-- watching these amazing horse run and making a few bucks. Newfoundland and Pico Central are my favorite horses this year. Also I saw Dimitrova run a couple times and she is intense.

7) Vacation spot?

I don’t usually have time or money to go on vacations, but San Francisco is definitely high on the list of favorite places.

8) Curse word?

My friends in England say “bloody fucking hell” or maybe it's "fucking bloody hell". I enjoy that.

Craft Questions

1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry and organic or synthetic process for you?

It’s usually an organic process with a few tweaks of the synthetic. I mean I hear a melody in my head and I dig into it and write it down and let it sprawl across the page. In the background of that process there is my awareness of synthetic form and metrical structures.

2) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

I write wherever I can — when a poem arrives I write it down. I don’t sit down to write unless a poem is forming in my head. No rituals, no habits. I just try to grab the poems when they are there. I tend not to revise much. So the poems are really one shot deals. When I was in grad school I did labor over poems in a different way — working in form and learning my way around sonnets and sestinas and stuff like that. I sometimes go back to that kind of structure, but usually I am busy doing other things— working on prose and translations (right now I’m leisurely and amateurishly working through a translation of the Iliad). Poems are often a by-product of reading and translating and walking around town looking at people and wildlife.

3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?

It’s pretty rare for me to work entirely with found text, but often I get a start into a poem with a bit of found information-– sometimes an image (chinchilla) or a series of sounds (“o snow, terrific snow you are”). But mostly I’d say I create compositions made up of interlocking sounds-- the sounds might be called “found texts” but the arrangement is my own.

4) Final Question From Ray

You are currently working on Duncan's biography, it has been said that allot of the current 'experimental' work is really out of the Pound-Williams-Stein line and that the poets like Duncan and Spicer were really grafted onto the Black Mountain/Pound tree but that they really are different than this traditions what do you think?

This is a hard question to answer. I'd say that Spicer is a very different kind of poet than Duncan. It feels like it would also be hard to group Pound/Williams/Stein as one type of writing. They all have such different projects. Duncan certainly draws from Pound and Williams in his sense of the use of the page and clustering of syllables. He was influenced by Stein early in his career, but maybe that's not so evident in his later work. I think of Duncan as some sort of 17th Century Metaphysical poet. His later works, especially in Groundwork I and II are simply otherworldly in the beauty and complexity of the lyric. I wouldn't think of him as quite fitting in anywhere-- he is a modernist, romantic, metaphysical, avant-garde poet. And Spicer might have some foundation in Williams in terms of the terseness of the line, but his influences are likewise tricky. I mean you could say that Spicer gets his wit out of comic books and Oz books. There is of course something peculiar about the Berkeley Renaissance/San Francisco Renaissance scene-- the Wild West creeps in -- alongside Medieval Europe (via Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser's work with historian Ernst Kantorowicz). So perhaps this question has no simple answer. I think that both Duncan and Spicer would bristle at being pinned down to any fixed lineage or allegiance. Their work is too big for that, too complex and unique.

Links

Blog:

www.angelfire.com/poetry/lisajarnot/

The hat Memorial Site: