Edmund Hardy Interviews Vanessa Place
Intercapillary Space, a "continually unrolling poetry magazine and press," curated mostly by UK poet Edmund Hardy, has rolled out a new interview with Vanessa Place, who talks in this moment about the triology ("[t]he three or triology is a typology common to multiple forms of rhetoric, not the least of which are evidenced in Christianity, psychoanalytic theory, and legal argument"); The Guilt Project (also recently reviewed by Anna Moschovakis at American Book Review); and her Futurepoem book contest entry:
EH: So it follows that your 'futurepoem' entry, which is I think a copy of the Wikipedia definition of poetry circa April 2010, is for you literally "poetry" as well as a gesture of humanism?
VP: I submitted a Wikipedia entry on Poetry to the futurepoem book contest because it is the poetry of tomorrow today (the day of its web-gleaning), because it is the poetry of the people, the true channelling of the modernist meld of quote and quotidian, hi and lo Kunstwerk, the postmodern polyvocality and attempted post-colonial consciousness, but mostly because it is entirely poetry, nothing but. The history and purpose of the entire medium, complete with pictures. In fact, it is the greatest book of poetry ever written. Containing, as it does, all poetry and all poetic possibility. For isn't poetry the universal art of the mind, the true mirror of the real nature of the world and life, nearer to vital truth than history, the most powerful of all the arts. One should always be a poet, even in prose.
She also discusses what she means by "radically evil poetics":
EH: I hear you're busy at the moment with some kind of mammoth project circling around certain keywords? Care to expand?
VP: Let's suppose art could be divided into metaphor, metonymy and mimesis. Let's suppose we could subdivide these categories into certain imperatives. The rest is a matter of search, save, and sculpt. Which is simply the contraction and dilation (or exaggeration and negation) of subject matter. Like a combine.
EH: We must talk about evil – as far as I follow your idea of a poetics of 'radical evil', this is developed from a 'slicing' of Kant's moral arguments, that is, without the sin at one end and the transcendence at the other. Kant argues that when motivations are corrupted away from good ends, this perversion is in itself evil. But I think I've flattened this out – how does radical evil work as a poetics?
VP: Radical evil as a moral thesis is the intentional will to do evil, despite the option/imperative of the good. Radically evil poetics is a poetics that wilfully does evil to poetry as a poetics. Whereas Kant saw radical evil as irrational and essentially (or rather existentially) individualistic, radically evil poetics is a logical group aesthetical and ethical progression. In this sense, it is also Duchampian, though without the redemptive possibility—or conversion factor— of the artist/saviour. In this sense, it is also strictly Kantian, insofar as it hones to the Kantian imperative of duty as the only good, and the duty of poetry to dumbly churn out something called poetry.
What is poetry? Poetry is that which is not not poetry.
Poetry sans signifier, poetry after the end of poetry.
EH: Kant's insistence that we only know appearances also seems to underlie your arguments based around the ratiocination of a moral calculus, a faith grounded in practical reason – to pretend to pierce this faith, to experience essences directly is dangerous. Am I getting morally a little warmer?
VP: If it was a snake, it would bite you.
EH: Not not poetry. If an art form dies, its ghost emerges or just becomes more visible. If not impurities then what do you find in the archives of historical rhyme, lyric, pastoral, epic, geographic song?
VP: Pure pleasure.
And isn't that the point? What does art have to commend itself if not its fitted pleasures?
Read the full interview here.