plato(eau)16:B_L'Antitete
Reel to Reel tape 43 Interviews from 1997?
Reel to Reel tape 43 Interviews from 1997?
CP_ what happened then as you were going to Italy? Do you recollect that period? Is there a connection between the poems you wrote in that first book and what you were reading in Artaud, or was it not more Tzara? I have in mind L'Antitete _ you 've talked about that before.
CDuffy: yes because those works gave me the frame to make others, a sort of backdrop even a working model..of course you mean the first book in the 80s ... yes yes... well ...there were about 4 in there that were along the lines of prose poems... I called them Displayed Spaces..... and much later it led to bigger pieces but that series, or a half-dozen like them continue ... and and the fiction blogs are a lineage along those lines... too...As for Italy that was just wild and hopeful and even gleeful! it was crazy with the Metropolitan Indians going all over the place.. you know they were free and intense, it was a great time of strikes and not working and my girlfriend the Croatian she too became more in that milieu. She never saw herself as crazy unlike me and it hit her differently... she was not a militant sort of person.. and after a while I felt and she did too that our lives had to take a different direction... we thought we ought to go and study more formally... and she did! Not me! I was not interested in that.. she went to study history and Art.. she wanted to paint and she did she was very good... intensive... and years later she made some illustrations for one of the books.. I published over there. You asked me about Artaud ... yes, well like I said I thought I was crazy and even schizophrenic for a long long time, and maybe I was crazy.. but I had all this art and busyness to keep me going... You know after a time of disagreement she began to come along to the Tuesdays, everyone called Les Mardis de philosophe et les fous... It was strange you see when we were in Italy we didn't go of course,and when we came back to France some people who had gone there from the start, god knows when that really began it's a bit of a legend, no? I mean he had been teaching this electrical style since a long time! ... people said he had been doing this kind of lecturing since he began! .. I mean back in Canada. you went to lectures.. and you were bored and sleeping some professors very very few were exciting, but going to the lectures in France and London well you know, it was more like a show... but yet it was not one, it was how can I say it was as if you were having an intensive and far reaching an ongoing conversation with ideas even more it's as if you lived it momentarily they became beings, you know what I see ... they were beings before me at least in my eyes, things I could almost really it sounds spooky but I could almost swallow them.... Yes yes how does one swallow a being-idea? ... And so yes ... that never ended... it was part of the poetry of life in that time... one went to these events and not everyone surely not me can say I understood it... but inside one understand that a change was happening and in the 80's there was a big key shift one can say.... well, what can say, the music changed key... it went to another and newer level and we , I mean I and everyone was older too... and there was less carnival and craziness and less hope for the world... it was not bad or depressing but it was another atmosphere...
CP_ and you had a son along the way isn't that right?
(Duffy's kid lives in Europe_where he was conceived & born)
CP ___yes yes, okay not this time. Alright so tell me about that first book and how it connected to Antitete and the poetry and collages you were doing. And what happened to those monstrous events and collages....
CDuffy _ well you know the name of Tristan Tzara's book the full name
is Antitete Monsieur Aa antiphilosophe... well we were not antiphilosophe but we were doing somemthing we learned another way to think .. everyone was calling that alternative . .. alternative this and that and so on and you see things had not been sunk yet into the shit of calling things by labels and putting preconceived ideas on them
And when you know you could go to a demonstration and there was Sartre and go to the cafe the next day you read about it in real terms.l.. that changed your sense of the world.. the thing was really happening ... we thought the government was goin to change that it had no choice... so poetry too was changing and it was kind of in reflection of that.. that it made its new way... and at the day after I mean say if we read about it it was not for an image it was to see how it was playing it and where it would or might go at the next level of politics.... and the poetry was a great big part of that it was not at all isolate and ripped out from its milieus ... like it is now .. now these poetry makers cannot really stand each other...
CP__ what makes you say that now it's not like that style with poets. Are not poets in a becoming with one another?
CDuffy _____ That's a fair and good question... yes okay what I say is , I mean that the ones who are called poets now --- say not them but ones who are indeed in a real becoming their poetry of the sort I speak of they are natural born to the left so they cannot enter by virtue of that into these other rigid classifying and categorizing and the economics that goes with it...
I mean is it really about good poetry? No not to me its about real poetry that is a collective in its nature it moves forward to bring everyone into it and bring everyone along... that does not mean poets go around waving flags and shouting slogans and joining parries... No no just the opposite...
they go away and hide and make their work, the poems they create do that job the poems are the collective they are the party the movement of the people in their desire for more and more of themselves and to bring the earth and its wealth to its all and its all is everyone in it ...
It's not so simple as it appear s at first eh? it looks so simple become a poet write verses become published get some grants and awards write again become a teacher and the rest and win prizes and then get old and retire and you a re a part of the dead government owned by other people...
it's not to myself and the self I hope its collecting its becomings over the throughness of what I write and 've written its almost like its not mine anymore than its anyone else's
Yes one signs a name a name yes, okay a name goes there... but so? is that less or more ...?
it can be more but the publishing business and the rest wants it less they prefer the idea I said a few moments ago..they'd like retired poets wild or not however it happens to suit a certain consumption at this time and then they too can retire and go home sleep fuck and die , yes, thats' it
__________________ Tape stops
_________________yet another unedited reel -to-reel.
Cp is compiling the boxes gathering old tapes.. slow but sure she'll pull the unedited tapes into one vast kosmos of whitmanian proportion.
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