Donato Mancini - interview with Adam Seelig

Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini

reprinted from:

Seelig, Adam and Mancini, Donato. “Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini.” West Coast Line. no.60. 2009 Winter Vol. 42.4: 24 – 35.

DONATO MANCINI is author of two books of poetry, Æthel (2007) and Ligatures (2005), both from New Star Books and both nominated for the ReLit Award. A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective since June, 2003, Mancini is an English Literature MA student at Simon Fraser University, where e has recently completed a study of the ideolect and ideology of poetry reviewing in Canada since 1961

ADAM SEELIG is a poet, playwright, stage director, and the founder of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto. His plays include Antigone : Insurgency (Walmer Centre Theatre, Toronto 2007), All Is Almost Still (78th Street Theatre Lab, New York 2004) and Talking Masks (forthcoming from BookThug). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Every Day in the Morning, and his writings appear in various publications, including The Walrus, Filling Station, jwcurry #381 and Poetry.

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Our interview-by-email about Mancini's new book, Æthel, began in January, 2008, and concluded four months later.

AS: Ingenious, Donato! I only hope we can reprint some of the poems we discuss since their concrete, visual nature makes them hard—titles aside—to 'quote.' I'm starting with the final poem in Æthel, "Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Smash Hands?" I dig how this challenges and confounds—among other things—the tidiness of Marx's dialectical materialism, or Hegel's strictly one-way march toward the end of history; no clean thesis-antithesis-synthesis trajectory here, but rather a dynamic, multi-directional assembly of intertwining hands virtually dancing their way about (the curved arrow at the top brings to mind those do-it-yourself dance steps). The poem does throw the teleologists a bone with the "Z" at bottom, as if to say "you want an end, I'll give you an end!", but it doesn't prescribe strictly one way to go, from the "beginning arrow" above to the "concluding arrow" at bottom. Where are you headed within this — which 'way' do you read it?

DM: The title of that piece hijacks the title of Rene Vienet's hilarious situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? Vienet took ab/w karate movie and overdubbed new dialogue that turned it into an essay-in-fisticuffs about class-struggle and the analytical power of Marxist dialectics. It's pertinent, because I've discovered that my writing is premised on a post-Marxist position, in the vein of Ernesto Laclau. The idea here is that human experience and cognition are comprehensively discursive, that for acculturated humans there's nothing before or after symbolisation. Laclau, however, doesn't mistakenly see this as incompatible with rigorous material analysis. It in no way entails flaky world-as-text textualism that trivialises the horrors of history and the horrors of being as mere discourse or mere spectacle. The bricks must punch back against the fist. The dual analysis (symbolic and material) makes possible a far punchier, non-synthetic, street-wise dialectical process. I was working this out for myself when I was introduced to Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's great essay "Post-Marxism without Apologies", which is effectively an argument for the deep social / material importance of written language (and its consequences in symbolisation) in all its forms.

Given that, it's hard for me to write about these pieces directly because I've wired them to make my brain explode. As an artist I think it's extremely important to learn as much about as much as I possibly can, and equally important, when working, to confound any mastery I've gained. Miles Davis said something to the effect that you always have to work not from within what you know, but (at very least) just beyond what you know. He was also implying that as long as you're learning, the conditions in which this artistically crucial self-outwitting operates will always have to change. I find pushing this principle unreasonably far is a good basis for making things. At the limits, artists can achieve something almost sublime - mind you it's a junked-up, jaded, urine-stained post-sublime without romance. Sianne Ngai has called it "stuplimity". Somewhat misappropriating her term, I think of stuplimity as a great blue arc volting between a nearly sublime complexity and something very ashen stupid indeed.

To me, concrete poetry is often ravishingly stuplime, which is what keeps me involved with it. The works I care about most give me a set of macro and micro sensations that arise from dense disharmony of cultural frequencies. Listen to Miles Davis' Pangæa, look at Steve McCaffery's Carnival, see Althea Thauberger's Songstress or Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, read Robert Fitterman's This Window Makes Me Feel or Kevin Davies' The Golden Age of Paraphernalia or read the incredibly campy Titus Andronicus for that matter. I find it somewhere between nearly impossible and totally impossible to know what to do with the torrent of dissonant signals these works send out. As an imaginary audience member, I wouldn't even know where to sit. Remember The Exorcist when Regan, possessed by Mr Howdy, turns her head around 360° to address her mother in the voice of the murdered British film director? That is the address of the stuplime.

So it's hard for me to write about "Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Smash Hands?" in isolation from the rest of Æthel or from the dialogue Æthel has about concrete poetry with my first book Ligatures. I see the relationship between the titles / captions / footnotes and the vispoems as emblematic of the highly material and discursive mode of analysis sketched above, in the sense that we're confronted in each piece with two very different types of reading that highlight each other in contradiction rather than resolution. In this context, I can point to several of the associative paths that stream off in my head (Lettrism, Vienet, Situationism, détournement, materiality, Marxist materialism, ruin of the body by labour, the artist's hand, the concept poet as maker) without, I think, enjoying all the possible entrances and exits.

AS: It's an intriguing and dizzying piece to interpret, and, I imagine, a no less challenging one to create. Would you mind describing the mechanics that went into making it?

DM: I'm not sure if it was challenging or difficult to create. Certainly, a lot of the poems in Æthel were time-consuming to make. "Wheatbixy" took about 40 hours (35 in France). But I'm mostly interested in such a question partly because I don't know what challenging or difficult really mean anymore, given how varied the tasks that we can call making art or writing poetry now can be, and given poetry culture's barely diminished fixation on notions of skill, mastery, and work. In other terms, say: lifting a cow is difficult, but so is designing a functional space suit.

Toronto poet Mark Truscott asked me what constraints were involved in making the vispoems in Æthel. Conceptually, there weren't any. Æthel is not a procedural book. However, as with Ligatures, there's little invention; there's inventive recombination. The only constraint was that I wasn't allowed to draw new lines. All of the lines come from lines already present in the letterforms. This meant that my control over the final shapes was very limited. I couldn't really design them, in the sense of deliberately using the resources of positive / negative page space to create calculated effects. Intentionality, yes, was severely frustrated. Yet when I didn't like the results I just deleted them. Click.

The active process was fairly simple. I imported free fonts into Adobe Illustrator, and converted them to outlines. Then I started butchering them with the virtual razorblade tool, and Frankensteining them back together them until the shapes on my screen looking back at me were unrecogniseable as products of my own imagination. The constraints, then, were material, not conceptual, as if I'd decided to paint only with ketchup and mustard using cotton balls. In this sense, I certainly had a problematic of difficulty in mind the whole time I wrote Æthel. Imagine, for example, trying to make any of the pieces in Æthel using a photocopier or a real calligrapher's pen. Or imagine how differently they might have turned out if I had exercised any real expertise in my use of the computer program.

Some of the germs of Æthel are isolated, illustrative gestures in Ligatures, in the "Classified Alphabet" poem (pages 7 and 8). There I stretched the descenders and ascenders of some letters, and the front-legs of a K and an R. I saw the possibility of developing this into elaborate, syrupy forms in a painting by my friend Marie-Hélène Tessier that still hangs in her kitchen. A seed further back in memory is the cover of the Bantam Books edition of Jay Anson's pulp novel The Amityville Horror. It has a beautiful, kitsch capital H[orror], with one leg grown down into a fabulously long devil's tail. That H is, to me, a mini parable of the concretist poetics active in Æthel. Haunted letter, possessed text.

AS: It sounds like a process of watchful abandonment, a methodical madness. If to write is to go (impossibly) beyond yourself, then to make—as concrete poetry can show—is to (try to) set material free. Repetition is essential in that liberating attempt and is by no means the ‘cut-and-paste’ for which it is sometimes mistaken. It’s a furthering, deepening and widening of, and (with your ligatures coming to mind) a way to connect, unify and flow. Again may be a gain, as Lyn Hejinian has suggested. Morton Feldman occasionally refused to label repetitions in his music, eschewing the repeat sign, and found that writing out a whole section ‘again’ brought a kind of “watching and letting go,” as he put it, to his process. In Æthel, images of hands and fingers may abound, but they don’t repeat — they respond and relate to each other, perhaps, and link and conjoin, for sure, without ever appearing to be ‘more of the same.’

Those hands, like Æthel’s many morphing letters... they speak without saying a word, achieve a form that can’t be defined (“So-Called So-Called,” as one caption puts it), sign without signifying, or better yet, they sign in/significance (“We Were Signifying Like Crazy”). That’s what’s so eye-opening about reading these works: they can’t be ‘read’ at all, at least not conventionally (“What Are You, Reading?”). I don’t read Æthel so much as sense its language, a language that gives shape to a dynamic sub- or super-verbal instinct, as if it’s emerging from or sinking back into an elemental alphabet soup (I know, I know, you prefer “Alphagetti”!). The title itself takes us back in time: Æthel. Have you gone Anglo-Saxon on us, Donato?! Both etymologically and historically there’s a sense of origin and ancestry in that word, which begins with an early English ligature (Æ, the ash)… I’d love to hear your thoughts on the title.

DM: Although I considered calling it You Mean So Much To Me, Æthel seems to me the right title for many reasons. For one thing, it immediately creates a perceptual link between the system of footnotes / captions / titles and the text-images. But let me take a few steps backwards to set up my answer.

Speaking of the primordial Alphagetti, when I was a much younger person I read Joseph Campbell's Jungian explications of mythological texts. It was life-changing to watch him perform those readings, tracing the lines of details, symbols, figures — often from very trivial, almost atomic clinamen and transmission errors — through other texts, finding everywhere a saturation of significance. Up to that point in my schooling intertextuality was subsumed to the desultory framework of allusion; with Campbell that was banished, and good riddance. I'm not at all interested in using mythas an interpretative code, but I think that as a cognitive technology, a relational mode of reading, Campbell offers a powerful model for a young poet. (His first book was A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake. What better place to begin?) As a subversive reading 'technology' rather than a specific code, my more recent readings in poststructuralism, poetry, Marxist thought, social history and economics consistently vindicate that way of reading. Approaching from a different angle, Umberto Eco uses the term "unlimited semiosis", which he illustrates in his essay "Joyce, Semiosis, and Semiotics" in The Limits of Interpretation. Here, after a few pages of explication that includes a wonderful diagramatic breakdown of Joyce's pun "meandertale", Eco writes that "the most recent studies in artificial intelligence show that the model of unlimited semiosis … is the only one which can explain how language is produced and understood." Language is a meandertale.

One way of abstracting / simplifying the method is as a theory of categories, or as a theory of listing. The question to ask at every turn is: how many categories could any given object fall into? (Wait, maybe I got this from Sesame Street…) You quickly discover that the degrees of categorical separation between things are few. Within a short series of punning moves almost any object can be grouped with any other, in a completely rational way. Taken far enough to become the basis of a poetics, this can be a hyper-rationality that bursts the pipes of everyday reason. When you activate the links, the connective networks, the associative paths, the example in your mouths is no longer mis-perceived as just a grape. It's also fully: a complex religious symbol, an item of secular economic exchange, something harvested under conditions of exploitation, something that puts vitamins into bodies, a carrier of seed to propagate a species, something that may have travelled 2000, a delicious fruit base of an intoxicant that stains like blood, and many other things besides. Each of the categories opens a set of associative paths that determine multiple of potential readings. 'Free', maybe, but finite.

Within that model of reading, which the "Index" at the back makes thematically available, the title Æthel becomes a fascinatingly chimerical form that activates a specific (but large) set of contradictory associations. Many of the my thoughts about visual poetry vs. poetry-at-large, represented in the "Index", can organise themselves around the word Æthel, as iron filings around a magnet.

I'll demonstrate. First, the title ties Æthel, by ligature, to my first book Ligatures, to which it's a companion, critique, reply, extension, correction, retort. Also evoked is the tradition of naming books with neologisms or with unfamiliar words (i.e. Allophanes, Eunoia, Evoba, A Humument, Ketjak, Ow's Waif, radi os, Tjanting, Tráma, Vel, Xeclogue, Zygal…) that, like names in horror and fantasy genres, mark the books as, something foreign, possibly invasive or dangerous, but also as promising unique experience. The name began as a spin on the name of the other vowel ligature œ (œthel), which, when changed to æthel, immediately pulled into its magnesis a pair of tonally dissonant, alphabetically proximate words: æther, as in æthereal, and Ethel, as in the feminine name.

The uncertain pronunciation is attractive. I'm tempted to pronounce the name as eeee-thel as in Æthiopia although the correct pronunciation is probably with æ said as it is in æsthetic, or the a in cat. I expect it will usually be pronounced as in the names Ethel Merman or Ethel Rosenberg.

So in the performative context of speaking Æthel, a split / punned concept of character opens, as it applies to both literary fiction and its constitutive matter, the alphabet. As a character's name, Ethel for some reason smacks of the semi-imaginary television world of the 1950s U.S.A., social conservatism, sexual repression, tight sweaters, bad breath, bad coffee, conspicuous consumption and all. I've read that the actual name Æthel is a male, Anglo Saxon name that means resplendent, illustrious and noble, and also that in its early use Æthel was the root of compound names, such as Æthelbald or Æthelstan.

Within the very split between the drab Ethel and the resplendent Æthel, another split opens, a fission that is a fusion: androgeneity. The ligature itself is a fascinating figure of formal androgeneity (bearing both characters but being neither), that it evokes the ambivalent other in arts: interdisciplinarity. Visual poetry is framed (by its very name) as cross-categorical, disciplinarily androgynous.

Further, while I couldn't reasonably expect that choosing a title with the letter o in it would evoke for a reader the entire category of words containing the letter o, the increasing rarity of æ / ash means that its use does evoke the category of words with 'æ'. Of interest, then, are the words called up in that list: i.e.: æsthetic, æolian, dæmon, encyclopædia, fæces, formulæ, mediæval, personæ, primæval, synæsthesia., etc.

You ask if I've gone Anglo Saxon, and I can say yes: but strictly as filtered through Dungeons and Dragons. (Gary Gygax R.I.P.) I'll bet you $5 that most of the concrete poets under 40 in North America once loved D&D. I sometimes think that concrete poetry must seem to non-practitioners as D&D must seem to academic mediævalists. It's an association I cultivate. You should see what I get everyday through my Google Alert for the name Æthel: wizards, chess players, Society for Creative Anachronisms., trolls, Warcraft, Warhammer, goth blogs…

Further, whatever pronunciation difficulties people have with the name are minor compared to how the web mishandles it. I have a growing collection of web misarticulations of the title. So far I have:

Aethel

AEthel

Ǽthel

Ãthel

Ãƒthel

Ã†hel

Ã†thel

Ethel

?thel

__thel

Aethec

Ãڤthel

Of course I knew this would happen and of course it pleases me so much. Each is in its way as attractive as the form on the book's cover. (Maybe one of these is the true secret name of my book?) Here the title itself in moments seems to me alive, or possessed and radically unstable like the vispoems. Evoking æ / ash in the title, then, already gives a flashing hint of the secret life of letters, the alphabetic animism that is one of concrete poetry's perverse infatuations. Reading Æthel erotically in this sense is something I encourage.

So the book's title Æthel is made to carry too great burden, made to drag along too many of its possible cultural associations. Æthel as a title in this sense is textually or relationally monstrous, a mythical beast.

AS: “Alive” and “radically unstable” — they’re closely linked. Volatility makes us aware of the multiple directions a poem could take. So what you’ve touched on is essential to the book, and most effective for the reader, because when the poems keep moving, as they appear to in Æthel, we can’t help but wonder how their multivalence might eventually settle. This is what makes your book not only elemental, but forming; less linguistic periodic table than the making of.

The very title, as you describe, invites several paths, but ultimately, in speaking it, we must choose one to the exclusion of the others, all the while being aware that we could potentially pronounce it differently. Possibilities emerge. What comes to mind is Bertolt Brecht boasting about poems of his that could be scanned in many ways, thus confounding the notion of a so-called definitive reading. I’m also remembering Robert Motherwell’s “Every picture one paints involves not painting others.” The captions you’ve chosen and shapes you’ve made have others resonating within them; and if they’ve excluded some potential paths, we’re still aware that those paths were once possible. “Also” was a word you used; I’d also like to add “otherwise.”

Your captions are clearly chosen in both the sense of being “lucidly composed” and “obviously invented.” In some cases the look of a piece carries strong associations, as with “Riders on the Storm,” whose font is reminiscent of The Doors and calls out the Jim Morrison song. But with many titles we’re immediately aware that they could have been any of a number, and that the captions are deliberately drawing our attention to the poetics of the visuals, beyond and within those lush surfaces. You just as easily could have settled on a completely “untitled” series, making it endlessly associative à la Rorschach, but time and again Æthel engages the art of language (and there’s plenty of ars poetica here, from “Recollected in Tranquility” to “Form as the Excision of Content,” not to mention the occasional poetic arse: “Was It Eliot’s Toilet I Saw?”).

I think of some of these titles—a little oddly, I’ll admit—as an inversion of “Whistler’s Mother.” Whistler’s most famous painting mentions the artist’s mother only secondarily: “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist's Mother.” When we look at the painting, a seated woman is what initially strikes us; when reading the title, however, it’s the aesthetic context that’s foremost. As with traditional portraits, we expect to read the sitter’s name immediately, but get an “arrangement” instead. Æthel sometimes flips this experience: what strikes us first is its aesthetic surface (its “Arrangement in Black and White” if you will), only to have the caption announce a matter we wouldn’t have intuitively considered (e.g. “Writing Degree Kleenex,” “Blood of a Concrete Poet,” “I Eat Words / Ate Speech”). Where Whistler’s painting approaches the material world aesthetically, Æthel seems to ask if aesthetics can be material. As one caption puts it with tongue—I think—only somewhat in cheek, “Can Poetry Be Matter?” (And now that I’ve mentioned comedic inflections, though this is little off topic, I have to tell you that “The Jazzercise Dance of Hope” consistently cracks me up!) The very thingness of these poems leads me to a question… What is your relation to Æthel as it's now in book form? You note in the acknowledgements, for example, that “Wheatabixy” was produced as a series of T-shirts a few years ago.

DM: Your question reminds me that one of the main sources of tension (or power) in visual poetry is in its disciplinary ambiguity, the tensions resident in the terminological hesitation itself: inter-disciplinary (or trans-disciplinary, or post-disciplinary, or para-disciplinary, or meta-disciplinary, or cross-disciplinary, or [ ]-disciplinary). You might have caught on by now that I love overstuffed (overdetermined?) terminologies (Thanksgiving turkeys), and that I'm especially interested in works so culturally slippery I get a stomach ache — the critic's proprioceptive bad conscience — when I settle, even for practical reasons, on a single vocabulary. There must be a parable or a joke somewhere about an indecisive man who starves to death before a menu because he can't decide what to order. So to "volatile" and "unstable", "alive", we could of course add a lot more, each suggesting a significantly different interpretive framework: mobile, ambiguous, liminal, borderblur. As a poet I'd rather swim in this medium than freeze it into manageable blocks.

This fascination is not just an eccentricity of mine. To return to questions of category, literary culture seems to me still observant of strict generic categories. Look at how literary magazines are, delineated into departments: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, missives, letters to the editor, classifieds, advertisements. The familiar daily transgressions of these categories are often made in a spirit of calculated misbehaviour, a naughtiness that should only remind us how determinate the categories remain. It's important to remember that those categories are products of the university English Department, itself an institution less than 100 years old. I can only see them as contingent, impermanent, if convenient, sociological fictions. Fictions totally unrelated to the essential structuralist / formalist character of writing. [ ]-disciplinary writing jettisons that institutional baggage, suitcases full of lead and feathers. John Cage's mother heard one of his compositions and asked him exactly the right question: It's beautiful, but where are you going to put it? And so with visual poetry. People (often themselves self-identified interdisciplinarians) ask me: how can you call this poetry? What makes it poetry? It's not a stupid question, but I must ask in retort: : what except habit could make it not poetry? English 101? Sootcases.

Yet let me look at this more directly. There's a notion that vispoets are visual artists who have taken a vow of poverty, Franciscans of the art world. This is misguided, and inadvertently demeans poetry. (On that note, my title "Can Poetry Be Matter?" mutates Dana Gioia's fatuous question "Can Poetry Matter?") Although if, as I have said, the strength of concrete poetry is partly in its positional / disciplinary ambiguity, it shouldn't be surprising that the notion persists. (Maybe I should take it as a sign of visual poetry's efficacy that it does?) Æthel circulates as poetry and inside Poetry Pond, and therefore is poetry, because that's the context it addresses, the extended community it emerges from, the public that, in addressing, it produces. That's all there really is; framing is everything. True, some vispoets could make better money as graphic designers or artists if they cared to, but I think that a lot of us couldn't. I don't say this to demean anyone's talents in any way. It's that I think visual poets' sense of the visual is often completely tied to the textual - the perceptual context of reading. It's that I think visual poets' sense of the perceptual context of reading is totally unhooked from the instrumentality of design or the discursive histories of contemporary art. Most visual poets, to my mind's eye, aren't making images, they're making visually over-coded texts.

Concrete poetry in North America briefly caught the art world's eye, but nowadays the few Canadian curators I know who are interested in concrete poetry are only interested in it as a historical phenomenon, as if it stopped being produced in 1972. (I see some signs that this is changing, but today I think you're still more likely to hear from curators disavowals of influence, precedence or even kinship.) I must say, I do like participating in something that has been declared dead so many times. It gives me a taste of Draculaic immortality, a perpetual Goth Night of the Soul. Of course, now that concrete poetry has been rising from the grave for decades, there is some of it that sits very well in a home turf of codex publishing. But a lot of it is effective partly because it doesn't sit well anywhere at all. Once we (if ever, if ever we should) give up our highly departmentalised concept of writing, the nature / meaning of visual poetry will change dramatically. Once we (if ever, if ever we should) give up our highly departmentalised concept of writing, the meaning of visual poetry will change dramatically. It could join the mainstream. For now, however, the categorical tension of the [ ]-disciplinarity a delight, a force of criticality. Is it a laugh? Is it a cry? Flour? Cocaine? Icing sugar? Are you f**king with me? I like it all. Oh Lord, please don't let me be understood.

I can tell you that Æthel was composed in a fairly straight line, as a book. Everything in it was intended for the book, with the specific foreknowledge that the pieces would scream printmaking, scream calligraphy, scream graffiti, scream visual art. However, I think only a few of them would (for now) have any serious uptake in those other economies in North America. For example, I think "The Jazzercise Dance of Hope" (also one of my favourites) could translate into other media without becoming mere design. Most of them wouldn't translate. Framed / experienced as poems in the tense, contested, oblique context of the book-object and poetry culture, they are creepily effective.

Nevertheless, yes I do hope to see more of the pieces in Æthel recreated elsewhere. Liz Bachinsky is printing a luxury portfolio of four of the pieces.

I'm going to make at least one circa 24" x 30" of "Wheatabixy" for the Sackner Archive in Florida. The same person who produced shirts of "Wheatabixy" just pirated a second run (the first, he says, was a hit, sold out). In the future, I hope a few tattoos come out of Æthel, and I'd like to put copies into the hands of graffiti and skateboard folk. I've always thought of "Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Smash Hands?" on its own as good surf or skate art.

AS: Dick Higgins, who was instrumental in bringing visual poetry to the US (and whose remarkable “snowflakes”, with their lyrical tenor and appearance opened the field for my current work-in-progress), covers an extraordinary international and historical swath of visual poetry in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (SUNY, 1987). Evidently we—poets, artists—have been at this for ages, and ubiquitously so, just as we’re at it now, though not always in the expected categories. Wherever letters are involved (leaving aside strictly oral forms of literature) the visual sense of a piece is vital. There’s not a single poet/artist or editor/curator who doesn’t care about how their pieces look, from the most left-aligned practitioners to the highly aestheticized (like, say, Sylvia Ptak, a Toronto-based artist I just discovered who literally weaves text-like pages into pre-existing illuminated manuscripts). What’s essential to me and, I think, fundamental to the art of language, is how what’s seen on the page is heard or imagined (“heard” if it can be spoken; “imagined,” as with much visual poetry, if only the mind’s ear can tune in — both, ultimately, are a form of listening), and how that sound or imagined frequency matters. “Matter” as a transitive verb, so it “makes” or brings into the world. It “mothers.” The shape forms. In this sense, thinking about how a work matters is a great alternative to how it “means” or “signifies.”.

So, if you’ll forgive the synaesthesia: the lyric image matters. And I’d like to add a dimension to this: time, which is not used nearly enough by poets. The lyric image matters (in time).

DM: I think what we're raising here could also be approached through the concept of translation. In my mind processes of translation are always operating in writing and publishing, and in art-making generally. Most importantly, translation underlies language generally, and as such provides a useful model to talk about the very concepts of mimesis, representation, truth, etc, that dominated literary discourse for so long. Writers have seriously debated the questions of primacy — whether writing or speech was the primary (as in original) medium (or field) of language. (I happen to think that writing came first, but discussions of origin are circular and unproductive.) Here again rises translation: writing is often figured as a (debased) translation of (authentic, original) speech — like a 4th generation VHS copy of Videodrome. But we should keep in mind that translation itself is a metaphor, and there lies the deeper point about language. To return to my first answer: our language is completely entirely and utterly infused with (possibly inseparable from) metaphor. Metaphor, like other modes of representation, is nothing if not the translation of certain concepts or terms into other concepts or terms. Be like a gazelle or a young hart on the mountains of spices. Eat the grapes of wrath. Understanding emerges dialectically, in the gap between terms. But in these gaps even as understanding emerges, even as communication occurs, an inevitable loss is staged, as Steve McCaffery observed. In "Writing As A General Economy" he writes of "The errant nature of metaphor." "What seems incontrovertible in this 'improper' displacement of metaphor is the loss of both heterogeneity and identity. The move toward the annexation of the difference occurs as much because two things are not the same as because of any similarity between them. The movement to resemblance effects an escape of difference, yet there is always an irreducible, unmasterable remnant in the figure that is neither resemblance nor difference but the indeterminacy of both." If loss is characteristic of all metaphorical operations, the losses in/of translation are a basic characteristic of language, not only a particular effect that occurs when someone tries, for example, to render Rabelais in Creole. The disciplinary questions raised above are then seen to have substantial basis in our contingent, strange, miscarried experience of writing, which is too often, I think, an effort to plug up the linguistic memory leaks. How should a poet reimagine poetic practice in light of this knowledge? It doesn't ask for a return to a kind of disciplinary boundary, or generic specificity, or purity of medium, instead it opens poetry to basic questions that affect all communication, and all art-making. What Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1979, in her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", remains pertinent, especially in publishing where there's a complex, cultural lag with contemporary art: "… what appears as eclectic from one point of view can be seen as rigorously logical from another… practice is not defined in relation to a given medium … but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium — photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself — might be used."

reprinted from

Seelig, Adam and Mancini, Donato. “Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini.” West Coast Line. no.60. 2009 Winter Vol. 42.4: 24 – 35.


	DONATO MANCINI
	Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini reprinted from: Seelig, Adam and Mancini, Donato. “Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini.” West Coast Line. no.60. 2009 Winter Vol. 42.4: 24 – 35. DONATO MANCINI is author of two books of poetry, Æthel (2007) and Ligatures (2005), both from New Star Books and both nominated for the ReLit Award. A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective since June, 2003, Mancini is an English Literature MA student at Simon Fraser University, where e has recently completed a study of the ideolect and ideology of poetry reviewing in Canada since 1961 ADAM SEELIG is a poet, playwright, stage director, and the founder of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto. His plays include Antigone : Insurgency (Walmer Centre Theatre, Toronto 2007), All Is Almost Still (78th Street Theatre Lab, New York 2004) and Talking Masks (forthcoming from BookThug). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Every Day in the Morning, and his writings appear in various publications, including The Walrus, Filling Station, jwcurry #381 and Poetry. ................................ Our interview-by-email about Mancini's new book, Æthel, began in January, 2008, and concluded four months later. AS: Ingenious, Donato! I only hope we can reprint some of the poems we discuss since their concrete, visual nature makes them hard—titles aside—to 'quote.' I'm starting with the final poem in Æthel, "Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Smash Hands?" I dig how this challenges and confounds—among other things—the tidiness of Marx's dialectical materialism, or Hegel's strictly one-way march toward the end of history; no clean thesis-antithesis-synthesis trajectory here, but rather a dynamic, multi-directional assembly of intertwining hands virtually dancing their way about (the curved arrow at the top brings to mind those do-it-yourself dance steps). The poem does throw the teleologists a bone with the "Z" at bottom, as if to say "you want an end, I'll give you an end!", but it doesn't prescribe strictly one way to go, from the "beginning arrow" above to the "concluding arrow" at bottom. Where are you headed within this — which 'way' do you read it? DM: The title of that piece hijacks the title of Rene Vienet's hilarious situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? Vienet took ab/w karate movie and overdubbed new dialogue that turned it into an essay-in-fisticuffs about class-struggle and the analytical power of Marxist dialectics. It's pertinent, because I've discovered that my writing is premised on a post-Marxist position, in the vein of Ernesto Laclau. The idea here is that human experience and cognition are comprehensively discursive, that for acculturated humans there's nothing before or after symbolisation. Laclau, however, doesn't mistakenly see this as incompatible with rigorous material analysis. It in no way entails flaky world-as-text textualism that trivialises the horrors of history and the horrors of being as mere discourse or mere spectacle. The bricks must punch back against the fist. The dual analysis (symbolic and material) makes possible a far punchier, non-synthetic, street-wise dialectical process. I was working this out for myself when I was introduced to Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's great essay "Post-Marxism without Apologies", which is effectively an argument for the deep social / material importance of written language (and its consequences in symbolisation) in all its forms. Given that, it's hard for me to write about these pieces directly because I've wired them to make my brain explode. As an artist I think it's extremely important to learn as much about as much as I possibly can, and equally important, when working, to confound any mastery I've gained. Miles Davis said something to the effect that you always have to work not from within what you know, but (at very least) just beyond what you know. He was also implying that as long as you're learning, the conditions in which this artistically crucial self-outwitting operates will always have to change. I find pushing this principle unreasonably far is a good basis for making things. At the limits, artists can achieve something almost sublime - mind you it's a junked-up, jaded, urine-stained post-sublime without romance. Sianne Ngai has called it "stuplimity". Somewhat misappropriating her term, I think of stuplimity as a great blue arc volting between a nearly sublime complexity and something very ashen stupid indeed. To me, concrete poetry is often ravishingly stuplime, which is what keeps me involved with it. The works I care about most give me a set of macro and micro sensations that arise from dense disharmony of cultural frequencies. Listen to Miles Davis' Pangæa, look at Steve McCaffery's Carnival, see Althea Thauberger's Songstress or Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, read Robert Fitterman's This Window Makes Me Feel or Kevin Davies' The Golden Age of Paraphernalia or read the incredibly campy Titus Andronicus for that matter. I find it somewhere between nearly impossible and totally impossible to know what to do with the torrent of dissonant signals these works send out. As an imaginary audience member, I wouldn't even know where to sit. Remember The Exorcist when Regan, possessed by Mr Howdy, turns her head around 360° to address her mother in the voice of the murdered British film director? That is the address of the stuplime. So it's hard for me to write about "Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Smash Hands?" in isolation from the rest of Æthel or from the dialogue Æthel has about concrete poetry with my first book Ligatures. I see the relationship between the titles / captions / footnotes and the vispoems as emblematic of the highly material and discursive mode of analysis sketched above, in the sense that we're confronted in each piece with two very different types of reading that highlight each other in contradiction rather than resolution. In this context, I can point to several of the associative paths that stream off in my head (Lettrism, Vienet, Situationism, détournement, materiality, Marxist materialism, ruin of the body by labour, the artist's hand, the concept poet as maker) without, I think, enjoying all the possible entrances and exits. AS: It's an intriguing and dizzying piece to interpret, and, I imagine, a no less challenging one to create. Would you mind describing the mechanics that went into making it? DM: I'm not sure if it was challenging or difficult to create. Certainly, a lot of the poems in Æthel were time-consuming to make. "Wheatbixy" took about 40 hours (35 in France). But I'm mostly interested in such a question partly because I don't know what challenging or difficult really mean anymore, given how varied the tasks that we can call making art or writing poetry now can be, and given poetry culture's barely diminished fixation on notions of skill, mastery, and work. In other terms, say: lifting a cow is difficult, but so is designing a functional space suit. Toronto poet Mark Truscott asked me what constraints were involved in making the vispoems in Æthel. Conceptually, there weren't any. Æthel is not a procedural book. However, as with Ligatures, there's little invention; there's inventive recombination. The only constraint was that I wasn't allowed to draw new lines. All of the lines come from lines already present in the letterforms. This meant that my control over the final shapes was very limited. I couldn't really design them, in the sense of deliberately using the resources of positive / negative page space to create calculated effects. Intentionality, yes, was severely frustrated. Yet when I didn't like the results I just deleted them. Click. The active process was fairly simple. I imported free fonts into Adobe Illustrator, and converted them to outlines. Then I started butchering them with the virtual razorblade tool, and Frankensteining them back together them until the shapes on my screen looking back at me were unrecogniseable as products of my own imagination. The constraints, then, were material, not conceptual, as if I'd decided to paint only with ketchup and mustard using cotton balls. In this sense, I certainly had a problematic of difficulty in mind the whole time I wrote Æthel. Imagine, for example, trying to make any of the pieces in Æthel using a photocopier or a real calligrapher's pen. Or imagine how differently they might have turned out if I had exercised any real expertise in my use of the computer program. Some of the germs of Æthel are isolated, illustrative gestures in Ligatures, in the "Classified Alphabet" poem (pages 7 and 8). There I stretched the descenders and ascenders of some letters, and the front-legs of a K and an R. I saw the possibility of developing this into elaborate, syrupy forms in a painting by my friend Marie-Hélène Tessier that still hangs in her kitchen. A seed further back in memory is the cover of the Bantam Books edition of Jay Anson's pulp novel The Amityville Horror. It has a beautiful, kitsch capital H[orror], with one leg grown down into a fabulously long devil's tail. That H is, to me, a mini parable of the concretist poetics active in Æthel. Haunted letter, possessed text. AS: It sounds like a process of watchful abandonment, a methodical madness. If to write is to go (impossibly) beyond yourself, then to make—as concrete poetry can show—is to (try to) set material free. Repetition is essential in that liberating attempt and is by no means the ‘cut-and-paste’ for which it is sometimes mistaken. It’s a furthering, deepening and widening of, and (with your ligatures coming to mind) a way to connect, unify and flow. Again may be a gain, as Lyn Hejinian has suggested. Morton Feldman occasionally refused to label repetitions in his music, eschewing the repeat sign, and found that writing out a whole section ‘again’ brought a kind of “watching and letting go,” as he put it, to his process. In Æthel, images of hands and fingers may abound, but they don’t repeat — they respond and relate to each other, perhaps, and link and conjoin, for sure, without ever appearing to be ‘more of the same.’ Those hands, like Æthel’s many morphing letters... they speak without saying a word, achieve a form that can’t be defined (“So-Called So-Called,” as one caption puts it), sign without signifying, or better yet, they sign in/significance (“We Were Signifying Like Crazy”). That’s what’s so eye-opening about reading these works: they can’t be ‘read’ at all, at least not conventionally (“What Are You, Reading?”). I don’t read Æthel so much as sense its language, a language that gives shape to a dynamic sub- or super-verbal instinct, as if it’s emerging from or sinking back into an elemental alphabet soup (I know, I know, you prefer “Alphagetti”!). The title itself takes us back in time: Æthel. Have you gone Anglo-Saxon on us, Donato?! Both etymologically and historically there’s a sense of origin and ancestry in that word, which begins with an early English ligature (Æ, the ash)… I’d love to hear your thoughts on the title. DM: Although I considered calling it You Mean So Much To Me, Æthel seems to me the right title for many reasons. For one thing, it immediately creates a perceptual link between the system of footnotes / captions / titles and the text-images. But let me take a few steps backwards to set up my answer. Speaking of the primordial Alphagetti, when I was a much younger person I read Joseph Campbell's Jungian explications of mythological texts. It was life-changing to watch him perform those readings, tracing the lines of details, symbols, figures — often from very trivial, almost atomic clinamen and transmission errors — through other texts, finding everywhere a saturation of significance. Up to that point in my schooling intertextuality was subsumed to the desultory framework of allusion; with Campbell that was banished, and good riddance. I'm not at all interested in using mythas an interpretative code, but I think that as a cognitive technology, a relational mode of reading, Campbell offers a powerful model for a young poet. (His first book was A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake. What better place to begin?) As a subversive reading 'technology' rather than a specific code, my more recent readings in poststructuralism, poetry, Marxist thought, social history and economics consistently vindicate that way of reading. Approaching from a different angle, Umberto Eco uses the term "unlimited semiosis", which he illustrates in his essay "Joyce, Semiosis, and Semiotics" in The Limits of Interpretation. Here, after a few pages of explication that includes a wonderful diagramatic breakdown of Joyce's pun "meandertale", Eco writes that "the most recent studies in artificial intelligence show that the model of unlimited semiosis … is the only one which can explain how language is produced and understood." Language is a meandertale. One way of abstracting / simplifying the method is as a theory of categories, or as a theory of listing. The question to ask at every turn is: how many categories could any given object fall into? (Wait, maybe I got this from Sesame Street…) You quickly discover that the degrees of categorical separation between things are few. Within a short series of punning moves almost any object can be grouped with any other, in a completely rational way. Taken far enough to become the basis of a poetics, this can be a hyper-rationality that bursts the pipes of everyday reason. When you activate the links, the connective networks, the associative paths, the example in your mouths is no longer mis-perceived as just a grape. It's also fully: a complex religious symbol, an item of secular economic exchange, something harvested under conditions of exploitation, something that puts vitamins into bodies, a carrier of seed to propagate a species, something that may have travelled 2000, a delicious fruit base of an intoxicant that stains like blood, and many other things besides. Each of the categories opens a set of associative paths that determine multiple of potential readings. 'Free', maybe, but finite. Within that model of reading, which the "Index" at the back makes thematically available, the title Æthel becomes a fascinatingly chimerical form that activates a specific (but large) set of contradictory associations. Many of the my thoughts about visual poetry vs. poetry-at-large, represented in the "Index", can organise themselves around the word Æthel, as iron filings around a magnet. I'll demonstrate. First, the title ties Æthel, by ligature, to my first book Ligatures, to which it's a companion, critique, reply, extension, correction, retort. Also evoked is the tradition of naming books with neologisms or with unfamiliar words (i.e. Allophanes, Eunoia, Evoba, A Humument, Ketjak, Ow's Waif, radi os, Tjanting, Tráma, Vel, Xeclogue, Zygal…) that, like names in horror and fantasy genres, mark the books as, something foreign, possibly invasive or dangerous, but also as promising unique experience. The name began as a spin on the name of the other vowel ligature œ (œthel), which, when changed to æthel, immediately pulled into its magnesis a pair of tonally dissonant, alphabetically proximate words: æther, as in æthereal, and Ethel, as in the feminine name. The uncertain pronunciation is attractive. I'm tempted to pronounce the name as eeee-thel as in Æthiopia although the correct pronunciation is probably with æ said as it is in æsthetic, or the a in cat. I expect it will usually be pronounced as in the names Ethel Merman or Ethel Rosenberg. So in the performative context of speaking Æthel, a split / punned concept of character opens, as it applies to both literary fiction and its constitutive matter, the alphabet. As a character's name, Ethel for some reason smacks of the semi-imaginary television world of the 1950s U.S.A., social conservatism, sexual repression, tight sweaters, bad breath, bad coffee, conspicuous consumption and all. I've read that the actual name Æthel is a male, Anglo Saxon name that means resplendent, illustrious and noble, and also that in its early use Æthel was the root of compound names, such as Æthelbald or Æthelstan. Within the very split between the drab Ethel and the resplendent Æthel, another split opens, a fission that is a fusion: androgeneity. The ligature itself is a fascinating figure of formal androgeneity (bearing both characters but being neither), that it evokes the ambivalent other in arts: interdisciplinarity. Visual poetry is framed (by its very name) as cross-categorical, disciplinarily androgynous. Further, while I couldn't reasonably expect that choosing a title with the letter o in it would evoke for a reader the entire category of words containing the letter o, the increasing rarity of æ / ash means that its use does evoke the category of words with 'æ'. Of interest, then, are the words called up in that list: i.e.: æsthetic, æolian, dæmon, encyclopædia, fæces, formulæ, mediæval, personæ, primæval, synæsthesia., etc. You ask if I've gone Anglo Saxon, and I can say yes: but strictly as filtered through Dungeons and Dragons. (Gary Gygax R.I.P.) I'll bet you $5 that most of the concrete poets under 40 in North America once loved D&D. I sometimes think that concrete poetry must seem to non-practitioners as D&D must seem to academic mediævalists. It's an association I cultivate. You should see what I get everyday through my Google Alert for the name Æthel: wizards, chess players, Society for Creative Anachronisms., trolls, Warcraft, Warhammer, goth blogs… Further, whatever pronunciation difficulties people have with the name are minor compared to how the web mishandles it. I have a growing collection of web misarticulations of the title. So far I have: Aethel AEthel Ǽthel Ãthel Ãƒthel Ã†hel Ã†thel Ethel ?thel __thel Aethec Ãڤthel Of course I knew this would happen and of course it pleases me so much. Each is in its way as attractive as the form on the book's cover. (Maybe one of these is the true secret name of my book?) Here the title itself in moments seems to me alive, or possessed and radically unstable like the vispoems. Evoking æ / ash in the title, then, already gives a flashing hint of the secret life of letters, the alphabetic animism that is one of concrete poetry's perverse infatuations. Reading Æthel erotically in this sense is something I encourage. So the book's title Æthel is made to carry too great burden, made to drag along too many of its possible cultural associations. Æthel as a title in this sense is textually or relationally monstrous, a mythical beast. AS: “Alive” and “radically unstable” — they’re closely linked. Volatility makes us aware of the multiple directions a poem could take. So what you’ve touched on is essential to the book, and most effective for the reader, because when the poems keep moving, as they appear to in Æthel, we can’t help but wonder how their multivalence might eventually settle. This is what makes your book not only elemental, but forming; less linguistic periodic table than the making of. The very title, as you describe, invites several paths, but ultimately, in speaking it, we must choose one to the exclusion of the others, all the while being aware that we could potentially pronounce it differently. Possibilities emerge. What comes to mind is Bertolt Brecht boasting about poems of his that could be scanned in many ways, thus confounding the notion of a so-called definitive reading. I’m also remembering Robert Motherwell’s “Every picture one paints involves not painting others.” The captions you’ve chosen and shapes you’ve made have others resonating within them; and if they’ve excluded some potential paths, we’re still aware that those paths were once possible. “Also” was a word you used; I’d also like to add “otherwise.” Your captions are clearly chosen in both the sense of being “lucidly composed” and “obviously invented.” In some cases the look of a piece carries strong associations, as with “Riders on the Storm,” whose font is reminiscent of The Doors and calls out the Jim Morrison song. But with many titles we’re immediately aware that they could have been any of a number, and that the captions are deliberately drawing our attention to the poetics of the visuals, beyond and within those lush surfaces. You just as easily could have settled on a completely “untitled” series, making it endlessly associative à la Rorschach, but time and again Æthel engages the art of language (and there’s plenty of ars poetica here, from “Recollected in Tranquility” to “Form as the Excision of Content,” not to mention the occasional poetic arse: “Was It Eliot’s Toilet I Saw?”). I think of some of these titles—a little oddly, I’ll admit—as an inversion of “Whistler’s Mother.” Whistler’s most famous painting mentions the artist’s mother only secondarily: “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist's Mother.” When we look at the painting, a seated woman is what initially strikes us; when reading the title, however, it’s the aesthetic context that’s foremost. As with traditional portraits, we expect to read the sitter’s name immediately, but get an “arrangement” instead. Æthel sometimes flips this experience: what strikes us first is its aesthetic surface (its “Arrangement in Black and White” if you will), only to have the caption announce a matter we wouldn’t have intuitively considered (e.g. “Writing Degree Kleenex,” “Blood of a Concrete Poet,” “I Eat Words / Ate Speech”). Where Whistler’s painting approaches the material world aesthetically, Æthel seems to ask if aesthetics can be material. As one caption puts it with tongue—I think—only somewhat in cheek, “Can Poetry Be Matter?” (And now that I’ve mentioned comedic inflections, though this is little off topic, I have to tell you that “The Jazzercise Dance of Hope” consistently cracks me up!) The very thingness of these poems leads me to a question… What is your relation to Æthel as it's now in book form? You note in the acknowledgements, for example, that “Wheatabixy” was produced as a series of T-shirts a few years ago. DM: Your question reminds me that one of the main sources of tension (or power) in visual poetry is in its disciplinary ambiguity, the tensions resident in the terminological hesitation itself: inter-disciplinary (or trans-disciplinary, or post-disciplinary, or para-disciplinary, or meta-disciplinary, or cross-disciplinary, or [ ]-disciplinary). You might have caught on by now that I love overstuffed (overdetermined?) terminologies (Thanksgiving turkeys), and that I'm especially interested in works so culturally slippery I get a stomach ache — the critic's proprioceptive bad conscience — when I settle, even for practical reasons, on a single vocabulary. There must be a parable or a joke somewhere about an indecisive man who starves to death before a menu because he can't decide what to order. So to "volatile" and "unstable", "alive", we could of course add a lot more, each suggesting a significantly different interpretive framework: mobile, ambiguous, liminal, borderblur. As a poet I'd rather swim in this medium than freeze it into manageable blocks. This fascination is not just an eccentricity of mine. To return to questions of category, literary culture seems to me still observant of strict generic categories. Look at how literary magazines are, delineated into departments: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, missives, letters to the editor, classifieds, advertisements. The familiar daily transgressions of these categories are often made in a spirit of calculated misbehaviour, a naughtiness that should only remind us how determinate the categories remain. It's important to remember that those categories are products of the university English Department, itself an institution less than 100 years old. I can only see them as contingent, impermanent, if convenient, sociological fictions. Fictions totally unrelated to the essential structuralist / formalist character of writing. [ ]-disciplinary writing jettisons that institutional baggage, suitcases full of lead and feathers. John Cage's mother heard one of his compositions and asked him exactly the right question: It's beautiful, but where are you going to put it? And so with visual poetry. People (often themselves self-identified interdisciplinarians) ask me: how can you call this poetry? What makes it poetry? It's not a stupid question, but I must ask in retort: : what except habit could make it not poetry? English 101? Sootcases. Yet let me look at this more directly. There's a notion that vispoets are visual artists who have taken a vow of poverty, Franciscans of the art world. This is misguided, and inadvertently demeans poetry. (On that note, my title "Can Poetry Be Matter?" mutates Dana Gioia's fatuous question "Can Poetry Matter?") Although if, as I have said, the strength of concrete poetry is partly in its positional / disciplinary ambiguity, it shouldn't be surprising that the notion persists. (Maybe I should take it as a sign of visual poetry's efficacy that it does?) Æthel circulates as poetry and inside Poetry Pond, and therefore is poetry, because that's the context it addresses, the extended community it emerges from, the public that, in addressing, it produces. That's all there really is; framing is everything. True, some vispoets could make better money as graphic designers or artists if they cared to, but I think that a lot of us couldn't. I don't say this to demean anyone's talents in any way. It's that I think visual poets' sense of the visual is often completely tied to the textual - the perceptual context of reading. It's that I think visual poets' sense of the perceptual context of reading is totally unhooked from the instrumentality of design or the discursive histories of contemporary art. Most visual poets, to my mind's eye, aren't making images, they're making visually over-coded texts. Concrete poetry in North America briefly caught the art world's eye, but nowadays the few Canadian curators I know who are interested in concrete poetry are only interested in it as a historical phenomenon, as if it stopped being produced in 1972. (I see some signs that this is changing, but today I think you're still more likely to hear from curators disavowals of influence, precedence or even kinship.) I must say, I do like participating in something that has been declared dead so many times. It gives me a taste of Draculaic immortality, a perpetual Goth Night of the Soul. Of course, now that concrete poetry has been rising from the grave for decades, there is some of it that sits very well in a home turf of codex publishing. But a lot of it is effective partly because it doesn't sit well anywhere at all. Once we (if ever, if ever we should) give up our highly departmentalised concept of writing, the nature / meaning of visual poetry will change dramatically. Once we (if ever, if ever we should) give up our highly departmentalised concept of writing, the meaning of visual poetry will change dramatically. It could join the mainstream. For now, however, the categorical tension of the [ ]-disciplinarity a delight, a force of criticality. Is it a laugh? Is it a cry? Flour? Cocaine? Icing sugar? Are you f*king with me? I like it all. Oh Lord, please don't let me be understood. I can tell you that Æthel* was composed in a fairly straight line, as a book. Everything in it was intended for the book, with the specific foreknowledge that the pieces would scream printmaking, scream calligraphy, scream graffiti, scream visual art. However, I think only a few of them would (for now) have any serious uptake in those other economies in North America. For example, I think "The Jazzercise Dance of Hope" (also one of my favourites) could translate into other media without becoming mere design. Most of them wouldn't translate. Framed / experienced as poems in the tense, contested, oblique context of the book-object and poetry culture, they are creepily effective. Nevertheless, yes I do hope to see more of the pieces in Æthel recreated elsewhere. Liz Bachinsky is printing a luxury portfolio of four of the pieces. I'm going to make at least one circa 24" x 30" of "Wheatabixy" for the Sackner Archive in Florida. The same person who produced shirts of "Wheatabixy" just pirated a second run (the first, he says, was a hit, sold out). In the future, I hope a few tattoos come out of Æthel, and I'd like to put copies into the hands of graffiti and skateboard folk. I've always thought of "Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Smash Hands?" on its own as good surf or skate art. AS: Dick Higgins, who was instrumental in bringing visual poetry to the US (and whose remarkable “snowflakes”, with their lyrical tenor and appearance opened the field for my current work-in-progress), covers an extraordinary international and historical swath of visual poetry in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (SUNY, 1987). Evidently we—poets, artists—have been at this for ages, and ubiquitously so, just as we’re at it now, though not always in the expected categories. Wherever letters are involved (leaving aside strictly oral forms of literature) the visual sense of a piece is vital. There’s not a single poet/artist or editor/curator who doesn’t care about how their pieces look, from the most left-aligned practitioners to the highly aestheticized (like, say, Sylvia Ptak, a Toronto-based artist I just discovered who literally weaves text-like pages into pre-existing illuminated manuscripts). What’s essential to me and, I think, fundamental to the art of language, is how what’s seen on the page is heard or imagined (“heard” if it can be spoken; “imagined,” as with much visual poetry, if only the mind’s ear can tune in — both, ultimately, are a form of listening), and how that sound or imagined frequency matters. “Matter” as a transitive verb, so it “makes” or brings into the world. It “mothers.” The shape forms. In this sense, thinking about how a work matters is a great alternative to how it “means” or “signifies.”. So, if you’ll forgive the synaesthesia: the lyric image matters. And I’d like to add a dimension to this: time, which is not used nearly enough by poets. The lyric image matters (in time). DM: I think what we're raising here could also be approached through the concept of translation. In my mind processes of translation are always operating in writing and publishing, and in art-making generally. Most importantly, translation underlies language generally, and as such provides a useful model to talk about the very concepts of mimesis, representation, truth, etc, that dominated literary discourse for so long. Writers have seriously debated the questions of primacy — whether writing or speech was the primary (as in original) medium (or field) of language. (I happen to think that writing came first, but discussions of origin are circular and unproductive.) Here again rises translation: writing is often figured as a (debased) translation of (authentic, original) speech — like a 4th generation VHS copy of Videodrome. But we should keep in mind that translation itself is a metaphor, and there lies the deeper point about language. To return to my first answer: our language is completely entirely and utterly infused with (possibly inseparable from) metaphor. Metaphor, like other modes of representation, is nothing if not the translation of certain concepts or terms into other concepts or terms. Be like a gazelle or a young hart on the mountains of spices. Eat the grapes of wrath. Understanding emerges dialectically, in the gap between terms. But in these gaps even as understanding emerges, even as communication occurs, an inevitable loss is staged, as Steve McCaffery observed. In "Writing As A General Economy" he writes of "The errant nature of metaphor." "What seems incontrovertible in this 'improper' displacement of metaphor is the loss of both heterogeneity and identity. The move toward the annexation of the difference occurs as much because two things are not the same as because of any similarity between them. The movement to resemblance effects an escape of difference, yet there is always an irreducible, unmasterable remnant in the figure that is neither resemblance nor difference but the indeterminacy of both." If loss is characteristic of all metaphorical operations, the losses in/of translation are a basic characteristic of language, not only a particular effect that occurs when someone tries, for example, to render Rabelais in Creole. The disciplinary questions raised above are then seen to have substantial basis in our contingent, strange, miscarried experience of writing, which is too often, I think, an effort to plug up the linguistic memory leaks. How should a poet reimagine poetic practice in light of this knowledge? It doesn't ask for a return to a kind of disciplinary boundary, or generic specificity, or purity of medium, instead it opens poetry to basic questions that affect all communication, and all art-making. What Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1979, in her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", remains pertinent, especially in publishing where there's a complex, cultural lag with contemporary art: "… what appears as eclectic from one point of view can be seen as rigorously logical from another… practice is not defined in relation to a given medium … but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium — photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself — might be used." - reprinted from Seelig, Adam and Mancini, Donato. “Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini.” West Coast Line. no.60. 2009 Winter Vol. 42.4: 24 – 35.		Donato Mancini : Test reading series, TO Donato Mancini at SUNY EPC Donato Mancini at KSW Donato Mancini on New Star Books Donato Mancini inteview with Rob McLennan
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