On Diary Projects: Andy Fitch Talks to Edmund Berrigan

The May issue of The Conversant is up, and as per usual, there's heaps of great conversations to behold. One that we beholden (ohboy) is Andy Fitch talking with Edmund Berrigan, author of, most recently, Can It! from Letter Machine Editions. But is it a book of poems? Fitch asks: "Does Can It!’s fusion of nonfiction memoir, fictional story, poetic cut-up provide, in this regard, a logical means of constructing autobiography?" Following up:

Edmund Berrigan: I prefer to think of Can It! as a book of poems. Maybe the question is what can you really relate about a person’s perception of life. A memoir, autobiography or whatever a person presents about their lives can only ever be an incredible reduction of the total experience. Can It! is an attempt to express multiple levels of experience. It made sense to use multiple forms and modes, all of which I think I had worked in previously. In my view of the book all of the forms blend together, poetry turning into prose, cut-up turning into biography, with a recasting of impulses in a couple of the cross-out pieces. I usually don’t predetermine content, but rather make an account of whatever is accumulating. So I could pick a form, pick a different form, let some time pass, and a set of experiences would develop.

Andy Fitch: Even this foreword itself seems possibly to partake in the fictional, certainly the lyrical. Did you only arrive at its elegant formulation of diffusive book-length structure after the fact? Did the foreword, in fact, come last? What prompted it? And could you describe a bit how the book did come together? Have some pieces (diaries, for example, with 1998 dates) existed for 15 years? Have those time-signatures themselves ever been falsified, through fictionalizing processes?

EB: The forward did come last and is nonfiction. Josh and Noah asked for it, actually, and it seemed like a reasonable request. The trajectory of the book has a lot of turns, and several directions seemed like a good idea. I grew up in New York City, and went to Purchase College in Westchester. From there I moved to San Francisco in the mid-to-late ’90s, and eventually returned to New York after three years, in 1999, where I’ve continued to live. When I moved back to New York, Disarming Matter had just come out, and I needed a new writing project. I came up with two: to edit a selected poems for the late Steve Carey, and to write a novel. I put together a manuscript of Steve’s work pretty quickly, and it finally was published by Subpress in 2009. I decided the novel would be more like a collection of chapters. It would not be restricted to prose, and one should be able to be read it in any order, like a book of poems. The bulk of the writing happened in early 1999 and finished sometime in 2000, coinciding with the death of my stepfather, Douglas Oliver. The structure allowed me a lot of freedom. I could include pieces I had already written, such as a diary I had kept in San Francisco in 1998. I expected the book to be done after the chapter called “2001,” but I started hitting some walls with it. I wasn’t much of an editor yet. I didn’t quite understand how the book should work. I had the manuscript, but I didn’t think it was good enough, and it was also very personal. I had to put it down for a while. During that time I started making “The Blood Barn” and “The Ball-Hallelujah Connection”—they were separate projects. Ultimately the novel seemed like a failure. Towards the end of 1999 I also broke into copy editing with the help of a friend, the poet David Kirschenbaum. Fast-forward to 2010. I’d been a copy editor for over a decade. I had another book of poems come out in 2008, Glad Stone Children. Noah and Joshua had started their press, and published a book by my brother, and were looking for experimental genre manuscripts. Anselm [Berrigan] mentioned that I had one, which by then had been called “Woods” for a long time. Their interest was strong enough for me to try to put the manuscript together. I did a lot of editing, excised several chapters and wrote some new ones. I also re-edited and added “The Blood Barn” and “The Ball-Hallelujah Connection.” The new content was still connected to the basic story of the book, and gave it further depth. None of the dates are fictionalized, although there is an error regarding one of them.

Fitch also finds diary projects in common with Berrigan's, noting that "...I couldn’t help but recall my all-time-favorite diary project, Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal. Lyn Hejinian’s cycling musical motifs in My Life seemed to get echoed by Can It!’s repetitive structures. Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls and James Schulyer’s diaries and John Wieners’ 707 Scott Street all came to mind."

EB: The repetitive-structure pieces were influenced by Lisa Jarnot’s Some Other Kind of Mission, which was along the lines of the kind of book structure I was interested in, and by Dan Farrell’s Last Instance, which I reviewed for [T]he Poetry Project Newsletter. Dan gave a particularly brilliant reading from it at the Poetry Project around that time. One piece that stood out particularly for me seemed to be based on a questionnaire about mental health.

As far as other diary projects, there are two by my dad that come to mind: Yo-Yo’s with Money, made with Harris Schiff, which is actually their commentary during a baseball game; and Train Ride, which I once heard Joanne Kyger read the entirety of in a journal workshop at Naropa. I’ve also spent some time with her journal about India, Strange Big Moon. The Yage Letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg also stand out.

So I had read those, but the books I mentioned in the forward are the books that influenced my thought process regarding Can It!’s structure. Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles was an influence on mixing genres. The compilation of Lester Bangs pieces, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, was equally important as a book composed of rock reviews and articles that also function brilliantly as comic, autobiographical and revelatory exclamations. There’s also a book called A Field Guide to Desert Holes, which my mother discovered in Needles I think. It is exactly what it purports to be, but the generalized description of the kinds of holes, and who shares them, seems to have mythological qualities. I wanted to write a book that wouldn’t be held back by pre-classification, and that would relate to that “other” mode that those books seemed capable of rising into. That is also the place poetry can take you to.

Read the full interview at The Conversant.