The Interview September 2, 2007

F-P: What’s your history as a writer ?

David Minkin: I never had the idea that I was ‘going to be a writer’. I loved literature as a child and grew up in a household where people read with intensity. My father’s mom was a published poet and he encouraged me to experience poetry. When I was eight, I said a little poem out loud, and he pulled the truck over and wrote it down. It gave me a template: that voice gets written down. I was an early reader and always did well in writing at school, but my ambitious thoughts were towards science or baseball. In the early Sixties I dropped out of college & found myself writing a lot of poetry… along with everyone else in San Francisco...but again, never thought it was a ‘profession’. For the next thirty-five years I made my living as a carpenter, had children, divorce, hard times, political embroilments...and kept writing and studying literature in the late nights or during periods of unemployment. It was only since I retired that I’ve had time to think of writing as a primary work. F-P: But didn’t you publish a poetry book? DM: Yeah, in the Nineties. Definitely not a “book release”...more a typical small-press muddle. Only my friends read it. It was a harvesting from all those brief periods of writing in years past.

F-P: During those decades of construction work, what was your reading like? Did you keep up with the literary world?

DM: I had some self-disciplines. One was to continue my education in world literature. I made up different kinds of goals, according to what had lately interested me. Back in the Seventies I decided to read 19th C. French novels. Then it was to read the world’s most ancient sagas and novels. Or I’d take on a classic like the “Divine Comedy” and read auxiliary texts too, really saturate in the times etc. Then there have been obsessions with authors, trying to read everything by them. George Eliot, Henry Miller, the Brontes. This happened later in my life, a kind of saturating love affair. The other kind of reading was more contemporary. This was much less planful. Mostly word-of-mouth, about, say, Cormac McCarthy or Saramago. Many zigzags and contrary esthetics.

F-P: Were you ever passionate about schools of writing?

DM: Yeah. I was very loyal to the Beats early on. I saw Ferlinghetti read from the steps of the Tides Bookstore in Sausalito in 1959 and when he said we’d have to ‘wear lead BVDs’ because of all the Atomic testing, a light went on in my head. That you could write poetry that was lancing the culture wittily and imaginatively. Gary Snyder affected me deeply in the Sixties. I was very interested in Asian philosophy; but also because of his esthetics. Reading “Riprap” I saw a way to perceive the roughness in the worklife that I was already indentured to. When I got active in the radical movement in the mid-Sixties, I was much influenced by the idols of the Left. Brecht, Neruda, Mayakovsky. It fit with “The Revolution will Not Be Televised’ –you know? But an interesting problem was that I had always loved the most mystical poets and writers, and particularly those with intensely musical language. So I was missing something in all that declamatory rhetoric and even in the vernacular riffing of the Beats. I was raised on Poe and Stevens and Hopkins. When I quit politics in the Seventies, that all came back to me. I went back to William Blake. And surreal or imaginative writing.

F-P: But did you read criticism and journal debates? Did you take sides with the LANGUAGE poets for example? Deconstruction?

DM: I did go through some periods of trying to see what was being published in contemporary journals and reading critical theory. But to tell the truth, the dryness of it all killed my interest. The LANGUAGE poets really turned me off. It seemed like the end of the line of the Left. Layers upon layers of abstraction; I mean I enjoy the experience of meta-poetry and fiction, – I loved it in “Tristram Shandy”. But I think the imagination is, like dreaming, very quick to leave the room if no one is paying attention. I decided in the Eighties that there no longer was a ‘progression’ of theories...maybe there never was? Marxism gives one this template of steadily overthrowing thought that fetters liberty. Polemics and sectarian battles in poetry always seem similar to the Left’s political battles…or those in religion as well. Maybe that mindset itself is the conservative force. But then, how can one set up a ‘freedom’ theory in opposition to that? Inventive mind can’t play that way. Imagination does dialectics as one does with any other board game. Uh-oh. Is this letting me open for really conservative thinking…? I’m ‘dropping my guard’… See how the Church-militant lurks there? In the Left they call this ‘revisionism”. I think we should be interested in visionism. Heresy and Pantheism. There is a deity in every word, every sentence, every fable. Deities of sonnets & rhymed couplets, and a deity of the parable. Isn’t that why we say there are Muses?

F-P: Oh, you’re like that American historian who wrote “The End Of History” ?

DM: No, see that’s what I mean. He’s no pagan. He’s saying “The battle is over, we won” It’s imperial: now they proclaim that , say, “Neo-post-modernism is the perfected end of literary theory” Bull. I knew there was a deep sickness there when someone coined “post-modernism” anyway. I mean, “Modern” was arrogant enough don’t you think? ‘Modern’ assumes nothing comes after it. Supersonic, streamlined, skyscraping. Top that! But post-modern, sheesh.

F-P: Are you saying we should ignore our Times?

DM: No of course not. But....I’d like to see writing that is so immersed in its times that it enters the All Times. Like Rabelais and Cervantes. I also think you have to thoroughly get that we live inside a harsh military empire that is listing like the Titanic and may very well crash down on all of us. Its language, its thought-stream, is all tainted in the same way Late Rome was. You have to break free, sure, but not with their word Freedom. I think we need to break up the dullness of our language, and not just by turning to the vernacular. I want to recapture a taste of the Elizabethan spirit, when even the spelling wasn’t rigid. There’s millions of words we don’t have yet, we need Coiners. How come we have to borrow from the French in order to describe the nuances of liaisons? Or from the Sanskrit or Japanese to describe the karma of satori? Mass media has throttled the inventiveness of American speech. I mean think how rich it was when people like Sandburg felt compelled to write down folk stories or diction. Or when the Beats tried to reinvigorate from the road? I don’t know, I’m really not a theorist. But I feel constricted by the English that has crystallized in the Latter-day USA. It drives me nuts. I liked the way men talked on construction crews in 1966…but we can’t get back to that twang.

F-P: Well, the prose work you have in this magazine is in a pretty straight-forward diction. There’s little that would be thought surreal...?

DM: Yeah. That’s the fissure in my life. The tradesman – and the poet. I’ve written stories from my work life in a simple voice and stayed faithful to the real events. I’ve thought a lot about this. It seemed dishonorable somehow to use my experiences in that tribe as raw material for an experiment. I don’t believe in kissing & telling. Rushing off to let the intelligentsia know how exotic it is; or to so distort that life that my fellow carpenters wouldn’t be able to read it. I wrote as if talking to my best friend on a jobsite. But is this a betrayal of the fierce poetic ‘theory’ I just stated five minutes ago? See there it is again – polemics & ‘selling-out’. I think one needs to be loyal to the faceting of one’s own self. I am this and that too. Maybe I should have made up heteronyms like Pessoa did. But it’s an internal lifelong alchemy, to keep these selves in one magnetic field. When I wrote the pieces from my childhood, I felt pleased by the voicing, it was in good spirit of the sort of kid I was. Kind of lyrical but … distinctly Californian. I feel a hills & creeks rhythm in me when I recall my youth.

F-P: So, all that about coining the language, being imaginative...?

DM: It comes out in the poetry and that collection of prose riffs. When I published my first book of poems, my friends and family were non-plussed. I felt sorry for everyone, it just confused people and gave them that familiar feeling about poetry “what the hell did he mean?” I’d say, ‘just let the sounds play with your mind, like listening to jazz. Music doesn’t mean anything does it?’ Or I’d point out the leaps and made-up words often did have a meaning-drift. But I can’t help it. That side of me figures…‘too bad’. I don’t believe poems are sermons. Or poignant diary entries. I want something to happen, something truly unexpected. The only way to do that is in the writing moment, being really open and unpremeditated in your murder. Sterne said in ‘Tristram Shandy’ that he was the most religious of writers because he’d write a first sentence and then trust to Almighty God for the second one. But sometimes I’m surprised that what comes up freely in me is a sing-song rhymed quatrain. Rather than strangle it, I just do them. I have hundreds of doggerel pages, ditties I guess. Even jingles.

F-P: Are you embarrassed by rhymes?

DM: Well, yeah… rhymed poetic form is outré a hundred years now. Of course songwriters & rap artists don’t pay attention to the ban. Maybe that’s where I really belonged. I think it’s a bad symptom, the banning of forms. But if you’ve ever read Swinburne, you know why there was a revolution. The upper-class twits just strangled it all into rocococo lunacy. Maybe someday we’ll see a period of discovery where lively forms are again enjoyable. Poets each inventing ones for their particular gifts. Awareness of meter is just a musical art, it’s wonderful in the great English poetry. I was recently reading Creeley again and was amused by how much he was playing with nearly Elizabethan lilts… and sometimes rhyming. This from an acknowledged master of modernist theory. When I took ‘Poetry Writing” at San Francisco State in 1962, we had to write sonnets and villanelles and other old forms. It was like an apprenticeship. ‘Learn these skills then jump off with Theodore Roethke or Corso.’ Iowa was the only other school that would teach ‘poetry writing’ at that time. There were no ‘workshops’ or ‘retreats’. No careers made that way.

F-P: Listen to the old man now, are you a curmudgeon?

DM: A little. I mean, half a century goes by, there really are vanished ways. I guess the perennial thing is to see the old way, the way you had to learn, as superior, deeper. Just because that’s how memory works. You’re certifying your own wisdom ? ‘We learned it right, that’s why I’m so great?’ But we also know that societies decline. Things go rancid, work gets shoddy, people forget their roots. In my carpentry life, I could see it as a drift away from hand tools. Young guys now are accustomed to pulling a trigger when they want to nail wood, saw it, drill it, screw it. There’s a military feel to the trade now. Is that not related to the way the USA has developed in fifty years? I’ve looked at ancient Egyptian or Chinese furniture in a museum and wondered if any carpenter I ever knew could make one as well. It gets back to this idea of human culture as a constant progress. Do you really think that we are writing better poems than those guys with the ink and brush in the Tang Dynasty? Is there a novelist with a laptop surpassing ‘The Canterbury Tales’? I know there are ‘breakthroughs’, sure, like Dante escaping Latin. But the way the USA proscribes us mentally now is choking off invention and the deep part of tradition as well. I don’t trust the new waves for that reason, not because I’m a fogey. Well, OK…I am too. I’m a Fogey. Not a Curmudgeon though… maybe just a mudgeon.

FP: Well, a shocking admission!… that’s a good place to stop. Hey, maybe I can get one more here. I’ve been wondering if you still had that poem your dad wrote down in the truck?

DM: Yeah it’s in my head all right. F-P: Want to let it out finally after 57 years? I won’t laugh, promise. DM: Okay. Well, you have to know first that my dad had been reading me Moby Dick selections at night and I was obsessed with whales. We had turned up a road and had the illusion of Mt Tamalpais rising into view as we drove. So: “There she blows! There she rose, out of the wilderness of the forest. Oh! Mt. Tamalpais.”

F-P: Mmmm. I think I’d like to have known your dad. Well, on that note…thanks for your time.

DM: And thank you for not laughing.

Part 2 June 27, 2008

F-P: So, let’s focus more on the work itself, all right?

David Minkin: Fine. ‘Itself ’ being the key. It has its own self. F-P: You seem to have played with many such selves. DM: Well. Played is right – for a good deal of it. But there are keys I play that are sober as well. Kenneth Patchen’s work was the exemplar for me, the idea that poets can experiment with art and sound prolifically. It made me aware that there were expressive states I held secret, and imaginative triggers in unlikely elements. One of my favorite of his books is ‘Because It Is’, an album of poems and art that concern the doings of a little green blackbird. Green blackbird is a hard nut to crack, it’s a beautiful paradox seed. Anyway, he also wrote deadly serious works and much love poetry. So, I had the idea that all these conditions of art might reside in one person, and that one had to explore. I always felt that his ‘Poetry’ was his weakest work. But he did acres of it anyway. The part of me that measures where I stand in the canon of literature – that wants recognition – has always felt that it had to be won in ‘Poetry’. But maybe I’m wasting my time too. (and yours) Maybe my truly great work is in paragraphs of my journal or the simplest drawings.

F-P: Isn’t there a danger of never going deeply enough into a medium? Of never simply deciding: “I write naturalist short stories”. At the end of that life you’ve got two hundred gems.

DM: Yeah, I may have already danced around too much. But I do have threads of consistent work. There is a pure poet’s-voice in me, a simple lyric response to the world that wells up like tears unbidden. I’ve always written like that, and it’s not particularly ‘of my time’ nor inventive. For years now I have a practice of writing out in the woods or along the coast. . . wherever I can find solitude and a place to sit. En plein air. That’s not Patchen or Blake. It’s the influence of Asian poetry and buddhism. To let the muse of the air enter and hope that the moment unfurls with my own tongue-twists. Sometimes a beetle lands on the page and starts the poem.

F-P: Were you influenced by Ginsberg’s application of ‘first-thought-best-thought’ ?

DM: Yeah. It fit right in with something I admired in Fats Domino. The ability to see a simple vernacular phrase as beautiful and poetically unique. He said once that he would turn a phrase like “heart of stone” over for days until melodies came to it. Chuck Berry too. You ever listen to the words of “Too Much Monkey Business” ? I used to have that pinned to my wall over my desk. So when I read Ginsberg I saw the buddhist sense of it, that this moment right here what you just said & exactly how you said draws as much perfection as a moment generated out of a twenty year tai-chi practice. I’d start with a line out of thin air and then improvise. I called it Thin Air Music. Sometimes I called it fusic. But the trouble with it and with Ginsberg’s work too, is it isn’t always imaginative in a literary sense, nor does that first American phrase necessarily have much to work from. So, you start up the discriminative mind again, you dart for a better phrase, you say no, not you, nope, scram. Then it just devolved and lost spontaneity for me.

F-P: Did you practice or study Buddhism?

D.M: Yes, but not as an initiate. I practiced with a Korean sangha and worked at the Zen Center at Green Gulch as a carpenter. I quit eating meat and meditated and for awhile even did 108 genuflections every morning. But each time I ventured close to a Zen master I felt something amiss and veered off. In 1983 it was the big scandal with Dick Baker…I was working there at the time and was trying to decide whether to just move in and take the vows. Then that thing blew up and I slipped away. During those years I noticed some things about the effect buddhist study was having on other artists, particularly poets. It seemed to evaporate the imagination. You were trying not to have a mind diverted with the dream dimension. That was all illusion. Sit, get clear, notice. Poems mimicking the Asian tradition were rife. (Of course, few had any notion of the musicality of what the Chinese were writing) People just taking a good earthy insight on the world. To me it all read like prose, little stories or little homilies. Pithy stuff, sure, but my writing mind is too weird to buckle into that seatbelt. Not saying I didn’t love the originals. I still read the old Chan masterworks and Japanese poetry with profound respect. But. I’m only authorized to say this: for me? It was desiccating. When I was at Green Gulch, one of their priestly fellows who was publishing verse in this style told me –when I indicated a little of this –that his work benefited from his deep practice and that someday I might understand that path. It was breathtakingly condescending. His robes and shaved head were always perfect too. A priest. That may have been the moment I left. Another time like that for me was at a reading in Berkeley in the early Eighties. Everyone was paying attention to Nhat Hanh then, my wife and I included. The reading was Snyder, Robt. Creeley and Thich Nhat Hanh himself. It was a highly charged event. Every Zenbo in the Bay Area was there it seemed. First there was Snyder, who began with a priestly solemnity and mentioned that Thich Nhat Hanh had greatly influenced him with a moment of saying ‘enjoy your breath’. Thich Nhat Hanh followed and gently rebuked him by turning it upside down , repulsing the reverence. But then his reading was ethereal and both of them had made a point of telling us buddhism is not about thinking. Then Creeley got up and said in his peculiar one-eyed halting diction that he understood the wisdom of his two friends and of Buddhism in general but that personally, he had always enjoyed thinking. He grinned sheepishly and started his reading. I loved that. He was always a favorite of mine, but that was a great thing. And it underlined the problem I was having with it all too. For him it was thinking – for me it was surrealism, invention and experiment. Same thing. Free mind. No mind might always be misinterpreted – isn’t that what religions are about anyway? To misinterpret? To stuff your mind with theirs?

F-P: Hunh. Yeah, I see it like that too but I hadn’t really classified buddhism as a religion per se.

D.M: Well, once you own property in the name of a deity or practice you’re what then? Once you have a priesthood, hierarchy, laws and tax collection, what the hell is that? Then there was the scandal of WS Merwin being pressured to take his clothes off with Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa. He turned around in his tracks and made a beeline away from that crap. I mean, maybe it isn’t the opiate of the people, or , maybe marxism too was an opiate, or maybe these are all just expressions of tribal and village social life that has to take some form. But I sure as hell hope I come back a thousand years from now and they are measuring time from some point “After the gods” , like….637 P.D. ?

F-P: So how did this accumulated feeling back in the Eighties affect your art?

D.M: Oh, derailed it for awhile. When you spend some years tracking or grooving the hand and mind to an esthetic school, it leaves you at sea when you kick it. I realized I really wanted to be in 9th Century China with Huang Po. In some ways it was the terminus of the Sixties for me. The last strand of the uprising and discovery of liberating new ideas. Not surprisingly this was the advent of the Reagan counterrevolution. What I tend to do periodically anyway is to go back into my own writing and work my way forward seeing what I had done that now seemed original and worth saving as seeds. I used my own past work as my mentor. As a way of getting high.

F-P: Getting high? Stoned?

D.M: Yes. I read through hundreds of pages and something pierces me, a line or even a whole poem or journal entry. Sometimes its just a marginal doodle glyph. Hits me like a peyote button just coming on. Oh, That! The other way of being, not just angry at this one or being crafty around this one. Slipped the knots and flying over the freeway. I’ll pull that page out and read it over and over. I’m lit up, I feel this is it, this is greatness, it’s the elixir. Then I try to see what the art of it is, how I got there, the lead-in, the improv, the subjected matter matrix medium materia. You know, alchemy. I guess that’s when I started doing a lot more ‘drawing-poems’ and trying to fuse the calligraphic current with images coming to me like hypnagogia. I studied seal-writing and did some cuttings in soapstone, spent a year studying Egyptian glyphs and Mayan too. Took brush-painting classes to try to get the feel of a calligraphic union of poem and picture in the Asian tradition. I went pretty far with all that, and in each investigation there came a point where I’d have to decide; do I want to apprentice to this Chinese painter and really go through the Mustard Seed practice book? Or, go back to college and do Egyptology? And each time it was like my experience with buddhism, I’d pull away. I had this feeling that I never want to be like those Englishmen who decided to be great blues singers in the Sixties. No matter how great a technician I might get to be with the brush and cherry blossoms, I’d always be a white soulsinger. So, I’d see how these ancient systems could be whisked forward and allowed to influence my hand while I still made pages as a present-day American. It was interesting. Is interesting.

F-P: Anything like that now for you? Ideas that you’re pulling from other cultures into your writing?

D.M: Well, Renaissance book-making has had me buzzing the last couple of years. I mean, early printing and typography. The way the first fonts were growing out of the great calligraphy work of the Renaissance, and the esthetics of the page – man, it’s as inspired as their other arts were. You look at a book printed by Aldus Manutius in 1498 and it’s just wonderful, better than most anything we do today. Studying typography has led me to see my handwriting differently. I make letterforms now that are more like type. More my type? It’s almost the opposite influence from brush-painting. There, you’re stroking expressively. Now my hand is moving deliberately and sort of carving these words. But it seems to be more native to me because my line drawings came about with that kind of slow incised shaping. I’ve done many many drawings which felt almost pre-ordained, or transmitted. I see the blank surface begin to writhe and form areas of detail somewhat like Mayan icons, crowded and rounded – or like Roualt paintings. Then my pen follows the area that looked like a face, then seeing the ink triggers a new form and the pen just – goes. But, it’s not scribbling to keep up with mind, in a beat-buddhist way, it’s …well, it’s my particular gift.

F-P: Well, let’s talk about the ‘glyphs’ or as Patchen called them “drawing-poems”. Any other influences?

D.M: Paul Klee. I always loved his work, particularly the more cartoon-like things. A great experience for me was ten years ago in NY at the Met – there was a room of his smaller drawings, and I loved having the time to stare, and to appreciate his titles. They were like tiny poems, the calligraphy absolutely etched and the words strangely poetic. Bada Shanren, the great Chinese painter. His calligraphy alongside the paintings, it’s unbelievable. I have a book of his seals…he was known as a master seal-cutter, and had gone through an evolution of names for himself, with variants in the seal imagery. Absolutely great. Talk about altering your state ?– I can always go to Bada Shanren, and just fly off the page. Mark Stamaty, his “MacDoodle Street” comic strip. For awhile I considered that the new bible. I gave copies to all my sons admonishing them to read it several times over the years with deepest humility and mirth. Hieronymous Bosch. I’d always been entranced by images from the Garden of Earthly Delights – but in 1963 I was in Madrid and went to the Prado museum to look at the Goyas. I didn’t know they had the “Garden”. It absolutely knocked me down. I spent five or six hours gazing at it over a couple of days. For relief I’d go through the Goya again and again – they had all the etchings of the Caprichos, & the War series. There’s another influence, right there in the same place! Pure black ink expressions, poems.

F-P: Is there any way that your obsession with word/image fusions is analogous to the kinds of prose you write? We touched on this a little earlier but I’m wondering if when you write fiction you are engaging the same faculty?

D.M: Good question – and complicated with feelings of not carrying through a principle at all times. OR that the principle maybe isn’t one. There is one clear analogy. I respond to novels and stories in which I can tell the author has been seeing the scene or character. For example, with Dickens, there’s no question about it. You hear him talking about the daughter of the scavenger by the Thames sitting looking at the coal embers and longing for a different life – that is as vivid as the most powerful dream. And conversely, there are books that lose interest for me because I think the scenario is conceptual and then filled-in. But in my own prose I think I fall short of that, often. I don’t know how to cure myself. I think there are curbs in my head – from writing short poems– that short-circuit me when I’m imagining a scene. I try to wrap everything up by the bottom of a page. Someone years ago influenced me to use word-processors for that reason – that there is no page bottom, you can just keep going. It does help. So, the similarity is that I hope to be seeing the story, and hope that my language ignites in a poetical way the imagery. The other thing is, I love the whole range of fiction called magical realism or surrealism and fantasy. I wish before dying to really carry off a work like that. So far, only in shorter pieces.

F-P: Does that mean you are against social realism, naturalism?

D.M: No, not at all. Well, yes at all, the socialist realism of the Soviet era was just awful shit, and people I was around in the Sixties in the New Left were trying to find a way to throw it off and yet still write rebellious work. But all the sociological novels and the great realist works, I love too. I’ve found that there is a distinction between what you love to receive and what you might be most gifted to send. I can count “Red & The Black” as one of my favorite novels, but I know I never want to write one like that. Or never could, that’s more to the point. Two kinds of love. Complementary… and fusic. With Gerard Manley Hopkins or Rabelais, I’m loving it as if it were me. With Chekhov, I’m loving it because it completes the world for me.

F.P: I’m running out of time, but something I’ve wanted to ask . . .do you think you’re frozen in the Sixties?

D.M: Ow! What a question. No. I don’t think if you’re really living by that spirit you can be frozen, right? But, yeah, it formed me, no doubt, and there are times when I regret that. The way we ennobled youth. It has made for some grotesque personas, like the aging rockstar problem. A friend told me once about fifteen years ago that she was interested to see how I would be as I got closer to sixty – “since I always associate you with youthfulness…” That had a double edge for me, still does. I know what she meant. It helped me to hear that, you know – how a few words sometimes are huge in your life? I’ve turned that over & over. She wondered how I would cope as my body withered, and how long I would keep that style up, the mooncalf always ‘on’. It woke up another part of me that is longing for repose and no pose. There are real problems as a writer too. For one thing, I may not have but a few years left alive. For another, I’ve slowed down, mentally and bioenergetically. I don’t really want to be intensely busy in that way.

F-P: Well, if your particular Sixties experience is bathwater, what is your baby?

D.M: Hmmm. . . I feel loyal to a couple of things, maybe that were nascent in me and could thrive in that time. One being the certainty that the world is profoundly, wondrously, not what it seems. Another that one’s own identity is not the various masked-men nor the crustaceans, but a tiniest point, before childhood, before before. And the discovery that one can make News. Or History. The fiery leap. But I guess that’s the quality that seems inappropriate in old age. I don’t know. There are subtler ways to make things new. I think I’m still mercurial. And this is a good point to stop – if I say another word I’ll be frozen in my sixties.

F.P: Okay, we’re out of here. Thanks. . .

D.M: Later.