The following interview with poet and performer Nola Gignere was conducted by Carol Muske-Dukes on May 1, 2014 with a follow-up interview on July 14, 2014 at an undisclosed location in New York City. These conversations took place in tribute to the original “Inside Circuit” lecture and interview series established by Art Without Walls on Riker’s Island and in most New York state prisons.

Carol Muske-Dukes: First, a few facts, Nola. You were born in North Africa in 1965, of Algerian, Chilean, and Russian descent. You describe yourself as a Conceptualist poet, aligned with the School of Post-Terminal Poetics. You’ve said little about your childhood (or upbringing) beyond noting that your parents were “in the arts” and “quasi-lupine,” “feral poets” as well as political activists?

Nola Gignere: Like having Romulus and Remus as parents: they were both artistic and political, with no sense of contradiction therein. I felt both overcome and empowered by their commitment to a worldview that was both Rousseauian and simultaneously infused with a longing to annihilate the Social Contract. If one can imagine Maurice Blanchot and his literature of terrorism hybridizing with Luce Irigaray, you’d get close to the identities by which I knew them. I like to keep their identities confidential, as they do. (Think Bataille or Artaud in drag at the Battle of Algiers.) Of course, this left pure self-invention, then self-erasure, as the only options for me, their offspring. I leapt fully armed from their combined totemic brow, like Athena from Zeus’s temple: a creative migraine.

CMD:  But as you were leaping “fully armed,” you managed to graduate from, then teach briefly, at a French university. Your thesis, on Eugen Gomringer and Spirale, the magazine he founded with Dieter Roth and Marcel Wyss, gained attention in European academic circles. You’ve published extensively under another name by which you no longer identify yourself. You traveled to the United States, “started over,” became a naturalized citizen. You’ve been employed at Starbucks and at a now defunct literary magazine, then somehow ended up incarcerated at the Rose M. Singer Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island in New York City (you state) on suspicion of identity theft and piracy of intellectual property. So the facts you’ve been most forthcoming about are those related to your prison experience, with unmistakable allusions in your poems, though you’re less forthcoming about the specifics of your criminal charges. Anyway, you’ve agreed that I may reveal that you and I met about a year ago while you were incarcerated on Riker’s Island and a student in a creative writing workshop at the Women’s House. That workshop bore close resemblance to the ones I used to teach in a prison arts program called Art Without Walls/Free Space at the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island many years ago. Strange for me to return—and to recognize that while a few things have changed, most remain very much the same. Surprise is in determinedly short supply in most penal institutions. You’ve agreed to discuss being incarcerated from the point of view of a Conceptualist poet. How did your affiliation with this movement provide a differing perspective of jail, if indeed it did?

NG: Maybe best not to go all Orange is the New Black here, OK? I’m who I am. But let me point out that I was exonerated, found innocent on both counts. Also remember that I was detained in prison, not sentenced. The Women’s House and the other nine institutions on Riker’s Island, as you know, are primarily detention facilities, warehouse limbos where inmates wait to “get on the calendar” to come before a judge for sentencing, trial, or release, either on bail or at dismissal of charges. My charges were dismissed, but I lost months of my life. Though I did find, like many before me, that prison is, ironically, a weirdly nourishing writing environment. There is solitude among other solitudes (even with the constant noise!), ongoing violence, boredom, and an unvarying daily routine. A standard model, I’d say, of nearly every creative writing workshop anywhere.

CMD: Though you didn’t write like the others in the workshop, to put in mildly!

NG: Right. I practice “uncreative writing”—or “non-expressive” poetry, in which metaphor’s displacements and the image’s reference to things outside the text are traded in for “the direct presentation of language itself.” So the question asked by a conventional workshop is radically changed: rather than asking how can this be improved, one asks, could it have been done otherwise? Considering that my inmate-classmates were writing dreadful imitations of familiar lyric effusions or grinding “political” rhetoric or—self-enshrining memoir—all of this identified as  “poetry”—I felt like Prometheus. I stole the fire, blazed the path into new language. OK, granted that my peers were living, as we all were, in extremity. To try to find a path to expression in those circumstances can be, as always, a formidable challenge. But this is why Conceptualist writing opened the path for me— it’s not outmoded, never irrelevant, and always new. These other attempts at expressing the self are all draped in the moth-eaten brocade of the Romantic literary past—the past of the subject, the constructed self. I’m sure you remember the hoary battle cry: “The art of the future is collage!” And, of course, in this techno age, the broad Conceptualist definition of collage intersects with other terms like citation, appropriation, allegory, flarf, Oulipo, mashup, mistranslation, erasure, recycling, reframing, constraint, identity theft, pastiche, performance, piracy—shall I go on?

CMD: Go on, Prometheus! Got a match, god of mash-ups?

NG: Match? Ash of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with my flaming ass? Think Gerard de Nerval’s “Le Prince d’Aquitane à la tour abolie.” This jail is the broken tower—and I’m the Queen of Breakage. I am a Bricoleuse Bigfoot though I can write lyrical whiffery with the best of them. And I’ve read just about everything there is to read. But you know, it isn’t fashionable to be well read these days. One might say that some prison inmates are more literary than a few professors and their grad students, from what I hear.

CMD: On the other side of this, as a poet who’s also a professor, I find myself termed “academic” by non-academics, simply because I’m a writer tenured at a major research university. Once, long ago, Charlie Simic shared his belief with me that all poets are crazy people, made mad by the gods, and he predicted that universities would eventually wake up and throw us out. This has not happened. Instead there’s another strategy to dismiss us, a strategic coup—the Promethean fire you mention has been reduced to a flicker in the grudging assessment of in-house academic critics who often don’t read poetry or “get it,” yet fear the assault on intellectual inquiry that “dumb” writers represent, although this doesn’t stop more than a few of them from furtively writing their own poems and fiction on the side! Some of these écrit-tourists (as I call them) generate écriture themselves in an attempt to further let the air out of the tires of real poets in the university. And we poets are afraid to defend the imagination and its aesthetic anarchy.

NG: You’re biased. Maybe because you are afraid of the very anarchy you say you embrace?

CMD: I’m always on the barricades about something. Though one can spend a lot of time searching for a place to erect the barricades in academia. When students try to “sit in” for political causes, they’re threatened with expulsion and professors (and even writers!) kiss administrative ass these days. Something you’ve never done. Let’s go back to your thoughts about prison and literature. Would you comment on members of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist-punk-activist group, and their recent visit to Riker’s Island? They were attempting to show solidarity with Cecily McMillan of Occupy Wall Street, arrested in Zucotti Park and incarcerated at the Women’s House, like you. Pussy Riot also spoke out in strong support of literature—and of good old-fashioned reading— during that visit. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the Pussy Riot members, repeated what she said when she was released from a Gulag prison, that “Books are the one thing you have in prison—books and hope.”

NG: Reading may impart a sense of hope. Reading for years in a prison cell will change hope to . . . “the thing with plucked feathers”?

CMD: Plucked featherless now. These days the news is full of shocking reports coming out of Riker’s Island about ongoing abuse of inmates by guards. Cecily McMillan has been providing her own inside information about the horror. But getting back to Pussy Riot, Cecily McMillan also impressed her visitors with her knowledge of Russian history and poetry. In particular, she spoke of the Soviet poet Daniil Karms, who died in a prison cell himself, in 1942.

NG: Yes, but you must not claim him as a Modern, an Akhmatova or Mandelstam! He was an absurdist poet, a surrealist. He was, in effect, a Conceptualist, a performance artist like Vanessa Place. He wrote performance-oriented surreal poems, plays, fiction, pseudo-philosophical “treatises,” satires.

CMD: Interesting, though, that McMillan, a radical activist, would identify with an absurdist writer.

NG: Why? Do you see no connection between absurdist philosophy and politics?

CMD: Camus, yes. Place, no.

NG: But Ms. Place speaks of “de-capitalizing” the commodification and collusive culture of poetry. Despite being charged with writing “terminal poetry,” that sounds pretty revolutionary, doesn’t it?

CMD: Sounds more like agitprop theatre to me. Also sounds like she’s reframing Adorno’s statement “Thought does not decapitate itself.” It seems Place disagrees. She claims that by draining language of any special property, including the property of authorship or authority, conceptual writing de-capitalizes literature. And as a side matter, decapitates the poet. Those are “her” words exactly, I think. And delivered at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, no less! Since Adorno’s thinking formed a moral philosophy which was a meta-critique, etc., Place’s disinterest in “moral or political thinking” ends up “decapitating” Adorno, along with the many poets she might like to see separated from their “heads.” But you are right to call Place a performance artist. She’s straight out of the Conceptualist art movement, which itself might seem, at least to some, “snug in a moth-eaten pantsuit,” to echo what you say of the lyric poem, echoing Larkin’s “Aubade,” I notice. Anyway, she’s a “brand”—and has commodified the idea of anti-commodification. Wickedly clever promo: her drumbeating about “terminal” poetry and relegating all that has been written before to the “ash-heap” of history!

NG: And to you, that is not  “activism”? I would submit that the way you think of  “Literature” is a version of commodity, no?

CMD: Depends on the dance steps. One observes the death of the Cult of the Author, and its resurrection as the Cult of the Cult.Vanessa Place has also observed (about herself) that she “is no fool” when it comes to the rewards of academia. She states with confidence that she fully expects to “be offered a tenured position” within ten years. She has written approvingly and even apologetically regarding her associate Kenneth Goldsmith’s White House appearance. Sounds like a bid on the Big Condo to me.

NG: She is a symptom, I agree—and not a cause. But I think the symptoms are positive. Maybe she can carry her news to the White House. Or academics. Or Riker’s Island— she’s yet to be prosecuted for tweeting Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind!

CMD: Her relationship to the academy would be like Abbie Hoffman’s to cultural nationalism—ticket seller to the Revolution! Prison vs. the Academy (both corporate behavior-modification facilities) suggests a theme here. But full disclaimer: I’ve known Vanessa Place a long time. I met her several years ago when she was shadowing Michael Silverblatt and crashing Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities luncheons. She was intent on launching herself as an “avant gardist.” She had written a book, Dies: A Sentence, and called it “prose” back then when she asked me to read it, but now I see it’s referred to as a poem. At any rate, I suggested she write about her work as a criminal appellate lawyer, since she represented serial murderers and rapists, which is of unarguable interest, but she scoffed at the idea then. I’m glad she changed her mind about this—though her book The Guilt Project functions more as contrarian or neo-con rhetoric, more like Camille Paglia Lite than a serious analysis of the justice system or “rape culture,” in my opinion.

NG: Don’t forget, I know the world of academia, I was part of it before I came to the U.S. and ended up matriculating at Riker’s Island U. Little difference between the two “campuses,” I agree—both now owned by Corporations. Place, if hired, would re-program the burgeoning pale-imitation “hybridizers” and ideological flaks (especially the ones who purport to be poets) and enlighten all as to the true nature of manqué! So much of what passes for innovative thought is sightless re-hashing of the idea of “meaning” vs. every major artistic and intellectual movement in the last twenty years. Punk, post-structuralism, Marxist critical theory, New Historicism, cyberpunk, meta-fiction, “trauma theory,” feminist theory, etc. A snore-fest!

CMD: Plus intertextuality and hypertext, mucho po-mo thinking. Borges, a truly original thinker, modestly spoke of the  “impossibility of originality”—and the term “imagination as plagiarism” belongs to Raymond Federman. These ain’t new ideas.

NG: Nor is the deferred, provisional nature of all textual meaning—thanks, Old Boys Barthes and Derrida! By the way, did I tell you that my correctional institution I.D. # was XAOH, 7141789? What goes around, comes around, does it not?

CMD: So genius for you insists on real fakes who know how to out-fake perceived ideas of fakery? There are truly performative creations, there’s lightning forgeries that are serious art, in your view?

NG: Yes, but we’d agree on this. It isn’t enough to just quack on about the performative text. Hello!It has to be brilliant performance! It has to be John Cage or Laurie Anderson. The rest is flushable—like this little ditty I wrote in imitation of bad performance poetry! Here it goes:

Dido Has a Dildo
Sing backup, o toad kaoroke! At last,
Dido takes the mic: Carthago delenda est.
Turmoil at the urinal or within the pedestal
head of the professor trying to piss on
a plinth & pound in that it’s poetry, what he
writ? Slushy at the pump, all comers. Dryads
fleeing his clammy grasp at the laff-last learnery
where he gets that regular echo-font going—
“zero at the boner”! Tonsured head full of
Tortured fauns, limping Finns, backlit
gilt quivers. Jump back, Dido, he might re-
Pent & feign all over himself, stat. Delenda
Doo. He can sing backup, no soul. Sips
a controlled sub. No moly-weed, no wonder.

CMD: That’s a conceptualist poem? Music and lineation?

NG: Well I just write down what the Muse grants me . . . by which I mean “accidentally click” on the keyboard. . . .

CMD: Which brings us to the “concept” of  “Unoriginal Genius” (the title of the critic Marjorie Perloff’s latest book)?

NG: Oxymoronic, babe. Let me “unoriginally” erase and re-make a poem like, say, Louis Aragon’s “Elsa, je t’aime,” writ in nostalgie de la boue-style. Here’s Aragon (in English):

Beveled by every kiss
The years wear down too fast
Beware, beware of this
Sad breakage of the past.

Now try this:

Beveled  years   beware  (the  kiss)  be ware   be where   (the)     too fast   past    wears  her sad break age Break Age be-deviled

Ça suffit?

CMD: Maybe not in Stevens’s terms, in re “what will.”

NG: You sound as if you think I couldn’t pass the Turing test. “Death is the mother of beauty.” Ya think? “Appropriation” is called for here. I’d like to cite the correctional institution’s “domestic” rules, speaking of “what will soufflé.” They state that each inmate’s bed must have two sheets—not to be used for hanging oneself.

CMD: Marjorie Perloff invented the phrase “unoriginal genius,” and she’s an undeniably gifted critic, but if you ask me, the term leaves too much room for lazy interpretation—mostly by student writers. I do share her impatience with the “hybridization lite” movement which amounts to a lame attempt to redefine contemporary composition. But in her quarrel with Rita Dove’s Penguin anthology, she seemed to be forgetting that the etymology of anthology is a “gathering of flowers.” It’s a bouquet chosen by one selecting editor representing her singular taste. Wake me up when the “anthology wars” are finally over.

NG: Anthologies are meant to skim the surface. Perloff’s deeper treatise on “genius” has to do with defining creativity in a digital age, a global world of hyper-information. The old concept of  “originality” is superseded by framing, citing, mediating . . . that’s the point. Perloff has given us perspective on the concretists and all “poetry by other means,” poetry of the belated age. Her erudition is unassailable. But let’s both agree—there is a tsunami of mediocrity (writing and thinking) that trails in her wake. There is much to be misunderstood in the blow-up of the dominant paradigm—the dust settles and good and bad anarchies ensue.

CMD: Perloff laid the cornerstone with Benjamin’s Arcades Project, of course. And lines up the usual suspects: John Cage, Pound, and contemporaries like Caroline Bergvall. She adds Susan Howe, who actually doesn’t define herself as a conceptualist poet. I’d agree that a couple of these folks may be geniuses—appropriately elusive term!—some even adequately “unoriginal.” But how many of our genius wannabes out there can reach those heights? And who’s going to decide who’s a real genius? A real unoriginal? And how to teach in the absence of the enduring aesthetic—or any original or unoriginal re-invention of it?

NG: Take it or leave it, she’s beckoning it in. She cites outward, of course—proving that citational, constraint-based poetry is more accessible and even more personal than the hermetic poetry of the recent past. Perhaps you’ve seen my sonnet in honor of Cage’s composition 4’33”, made up entirely of punctuation marks? Check it out:

Silent Sonnet
                       after John Cage’s 4’33”
a
b                 ,                                                ,
a                        .
b            —            —                                    .
c
d                                   .                        ;
c
d                        .                                    —
e                                                            .
f                        “            “                        !
e                                      ,                        ,
f
                                                            .
g (            ‘                                                —
g                                                            …

Cage makes the argument that the work is a frame for adventitious sounds in the performing environment; rather than silence, it is a work of sound. By analogy, I frame a sonnet with punctuation marks (about the average number for a sonnet), some revealing the “sounds” within, and ending with a quotation unclosed.

CMD: If you are an unoriginal genius, and I believe you are, then this is accessible and personal—especially if one is a grammar book! Certainly punctuation is meant to reveal and organize the “sounds within.” But to return to Perloff, in an essay published in Boston Review, she puts poet Rita Dove on notice for choosing some undistinguished poems, noting that one can randomly dip into Dove’s Penguin and open to the Same Old lyric strategies. She reaches in and pulls out an “unidentified” poem, quotes a line or two and determines that it lacks music, given its “prose-like” qualities. Further, she inquires, given this obvious “prosiness,” why did the poet even “bother to lineate” at all? It happens that the unidentified lines she chose to examine are from a much-admired poem by the late Larry Levis.

NG: Who has now attained a kind of cult figure status among certain groupie poets, I believe?

CMD: Call it Levis-tation or not, Perloff randomly “extracted” lines from a poem by a poet who embodies, for many, a bridge, stylistically, from Merwin’s “deep image” to a later surrealism on the order of Nicanor Parra and Vasko Popa— then even onward to Plath. A poet who grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, working for a while in the fields of his family ranch, harvesting grapes with the migrant workers, in “a California no one will ever see again.” Here are the lines:

  My father once broke a man’s hand
  Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
  Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
  With a sharpened fruit knife.

NG: You hear music here, a kind of metric? Are you a Levis-head?

CMD: They call it a “reader.” May I demonstrate? Listen to the first line: “My father once broke a man’s hand.” Scan it: it’s dactylic, or near enough. Levis chose to invoke that meter because it is a time-honored way to begin, imparting the familiar authoritative emotional thrust of the narrative: “My FA-ther once BROKE a man’s HAND.” Note also (in the full poem) the use of half and assonantal rhyme (“man/hand”, “father/tractor”, “pipe/knife”) and the way the long largely trochaic line in the wake of the dactylic provides musical contour and force. This sets up the narrative itself, the story of the just father who restores peace, but through shocking violence; he reinforces his status as jefe, the boss. This “natural” narrative progression continues to be undercut and disrupted just as the act of patricide, a son’s desire to kill his father, is disrupted along with the wondering fluidity of the narrator-son’s witnessing consciousness. This is a son who loves and admires but is alienated from his father. The initial unmistakable opening music becomes fractured. The patriarchal cadence is broken. (The powerful accuse-music of “wanted to kill his own father” radiates in all Oedipal directions.) The second line ends (or juts, isolated, out of the line, a phallic “sight gag”) with the fragment, “The man.” This is macho slang for big shot, boss—backed up with the phallic exhaust pipe and knife. What these three lines embody is an ironic critique of a male hierarchy that reinforces class and race divisions. My question is—how is it that this knife-bright choreography, this packed instructive music seems neither to be seen nor heard by some readers? How can we “re-calibrate” how we see and hear a poem?

NG: I submit that we see and hear differently now. I’m glad you’re bringing up the sentimental stasis of the constructed self. We poets of the new age “raid” many info-vocabularies in the digital ether then our brains absorb and alter them. Thus we have, let’s say, the appropriation of scientific diction—the notorious example of Irigaray’s purportedly exposing E=mcas a “sexed equation” is widely ridiculed, but you see where the impetus to revise a “male” universe, to re-write the “genesis code” in new codification, is radically revolutionary, and leaves a poem like Levis’s far behind in the dust of the “mythic” San Joaquin valley—except in its “hot dog hidalgo” appropriation of the lives of migrant workers?

CMD: On the contrary. I think that Levis’s poem is a model of what you say the “new” thinking seeks. The revelation is integrated and moving through each line. It cites so subtly that certain écrit-tourists seem to have missed the last bus out of Fresno. What my brain can’t admire is the superficial imposition of “buzz words” (the recent “fake science”) in appropriative and citational technique—as if mere reference could replace imaginative insight! Just because I can use the term “event horizon” somewhat correctly doesn’t mean that I’m a cosmologist. Of course when citation is used imaginatively it is powerful and effective. But much of the pale constraint self-elevated by the dimmer practitioners to the level of “genius” ends up the reduction of a profound art to a craft  (snip, snip!)—as in most “erasures.” My concern is that not just that we seem to have lost the capacity to read with an empathetic educated ear, but that we’ve gone tone deaf, that our poetic sensibility has been deadened. How can we talk about a future in poetry, if exegesis misses the point on a grand scale?

NG: This is where we part ways. What you call “deadening” is the transfer of the imagination to a different mode of apprehension, to a kind of artificial, mechanical kind of intelligence. Susan Howe has seen this—that our brains are closer to that collage-technology.

CMD: Susan Howe is individually innovative, but not the point. We offer ourselves up now to “The Singularity Is Here” (I’m sure you’ve read your Kurzweil). We allow ourselves to be superseded by the technology we worship. I don’t have much interest in, or patience for, this kind of fetishization of technology.

NG:  Don’t be so sure. If we cooperate in our own irrelevance, and if technology is our new frontier, then we have to wait and see what kind of machines we become. Perhaps aesthetics and emotional music, etc., all are passé. Artifacts of the Once-Art. You see where I’m going?

CMD: Sadly, I do. We do part ways here. Yours is indeed the thinking that undergirds the idea of appropriation, of constraint and erasure. When it’s misapplied, such thinking is not, to me, inspiration or inspired exegesis—it’s more like exsanguination. Vampired verse.

NG:  Then allow me to resuscitate you with some quick whiffs of oxygen from Old Ez’s Cantos: “And some grandees formed an academy / and the eunuchs disliked the academy. . . Téou-Chi brought back the scholars / and the books were incised in stone.”  But that’s not the real amyl nitrate! Here’s your insight-wise popper: “Thought is to body as is its edge to a sword.”

CMD: Surely one must have a brain in a body for thought to sharpen edge? Still thanks for your thought process, Nola, and your processed thoughts. And your poems. Plus the sword. I know we haven’t heard the last of you!

NG: Or the burgeoning “firsts,” for that matter! I’m full of Prime Re-movers. I’m the future, clearly. Come on, isn’t my “zero at the boner” an improvement on the original? Admit it!

CMD: Where’s that sword? Stuck in a stone?

NG: Remember my inmate number. The rest is silence.

Note: It has been brought to my attention that “Silent Sonnet” is in fact the work of UK poet Norbert Hirschhorn. —CMD