Tony Towlein conversation with Leo Edelstein |
Leo Edelstein is an editor at Pataphysics (www.pataphysicsjournal.net) magazine & co-author of Pig Machine, book I (1999) & book II (2002). In NYC in 2000 Tony Towle gave him his ten business cards, and they were subsequently published in the Pirate issue of Pataphysics (May 2001). This interview was first published in Pataphysics, and is republished here with permission. |
¶ Pataphysics: What made you decide to write Memoir 1960–1963 and how did you go about assembling it?
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¶ Has the architecture of New York City influenced the spatiality of your poems?
New York (Manhattan) has certainly affected my poetry, and it’s ongoing! And although I take an interest in architecture, past and present, and am always looking at buildings wherever I am, I don’t think I can answer this question. I’ve lived in Manhattan since 1961 and the environment and its architecture is so much a part of my sensibility that I can’t really separate it. I’m sure if I had lived on the coast of Maine all my life, say, my poems would certainly be different! It may be worth mentioning that a poem I wrote in the mid-’70s, ‘Works on Paper,’ in which the architectural theme seems partly about Renaissance Italy and partly irreal, is of course subtextually about Manhattan as well (and there is one line in the poem that refers to this). I should also say that, although I lived in Manhattan for the first two years of my life, as well as the last 41, I grew up (from ages two to thirteen) on the sixth floor of a modest six-story brick building on Queens Boulevard — but it had a million dollar view: the Manhattan skyline. I could and did see it every day (including, at times, spectacular sunsets behind it). So it was like seeing the Emerald City from afar rather than living in it. That kind of perspective pops up in my poems, I think. Also, in 1968, I had the occasion to read Ada Louise Huxtable’s little book, Classical New York, which gave me an overview on dating the 19th-century buildings I saw around me every day (I was living in SoHo’s cast-iron area by then). ¶ You describe sharing an apartment with Joe Brainard and his experimentation with collage. Would you see the humor in your poems as relating to his work?
Well, it was actually my apartment, 441 East 9th Street, that Frank Lima and I had taken over from Frank O’Hara and Joe LeSueur in April of 1963. When Frank Lima moved out to get married that fall, I had the place to myself and rather liked it that way. The second bedroom was my storage room. It was Ted Berrigan who prevailed on me to let his friend, ‘an artist living in Boston right now, a real nice guy’ move in. No, Joe had nothing to do with my sense of humor, per se; that was fixed long before, and I think my dark ironies are different from the spirit of Joe’s work. However, he was very responsible for my ‘pop collage’ period because, although his collages didn’t affect my work (although I certainly liked them a lot), some of the materials for them that he scavenged and brought into the apartment did. |
¶ Was Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ influential on the development of your work?
The short answer is no. That is, certainly not when I first read it, back in 1961, in Don Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 — I wouldn’t have known how to be influenced by it; I wasn’t accomplished enough! From late 1962 on, Frank’s poetry had an influence on me but ‘Personism’ itself, Frank’s soi-disant ‘manifesto,’ which I have read many times over the years, initially baffled me somewhat — especially the rather outrageous: As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. I read ‘Personism’ yet once more just now, and it strikes me that perhaps the real essence of the ‘message’ is in the very first phrase: Everything is in the poems... In other words, the rest of the text is extraneous! What is truly remarkable is that here is a statement on poetics that is not an exposition or discussion but an exemplification of the poet’s sensibility as it appears in his poems. The well-known fact that Frank didn’t take this assignment seriously, that he just sat down one day and knocked it out because Allen asked him to write a statement for the anthology, is part and parcel of the exemplification. ¶ How have your poems changed since the ’60s?
I think I have to talk about the very profound changes in my work that took place in the ‘60s. First was the ‘juvenilia’ I wrote (in my early twenties!) between 1960 and the end of ‘62, which I characterized as ‘jejune little ironies’ in a poem from a couple of years ago. As soon as I began Kenneth Koch’s and Frank O’Hara’s workshops at the New School in January of ‘63, I quickly realized that none of those poems were any good and that I had to begin again. A few months later, It became clear to me that the earliest presentable poem was the first one I wrote in Kenneth’s workshop, for a ‘dream’ assignment that February (called ‘Sequence’). This has remained true ever since. |
Jacket 25 — February 2004
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