Tzara Untangled: The Interview

[Angeline]

So who is this Tzara guy anyway? Is he like his namesake, Tristan Tzara, a master of avant-garde poetry and performance art? Is he the forum's best defense for form poetry, even as he applies his own modern twists to those old chestnuts? How free is his free verse? How does his musicianship influence his writing? What drew him to poetry in the first place? Did his parents know he's one hell of a quick study? Is there any subject he can't soak up like a sponge and then rain back into his poems? Where are the seams?

Whether you think of him as polymath, Robo Poet or just another denizen of the forum, Tzara is--at least to me--a wonder to behold. Since he arrived here in 2005 he has been learning and growing and often leading the forum into new territory. He seems to me to be always pushing himself in new directions (and we, his readers, have benefited and been inspired by that). He has been nominated for Lit's Most Influential Poet multiple times, has won various poem of the year awards, editor's choice awards, all well deserved. If you don't read him, you should--and not just his poems either. He most always has interesting things to say.

Tzara is prolific and his current 68 poetry submissions here at Lit are but a fraction of what he has produced over the years, some of the best stuff having been moved off (I presume) to greener pastures. Of what has remained though is such marvelous stuff as~

Still, I thank the ghosts

of Stalin and of Tito
for ordering all Zastavas bled
To the Glory of the Revolution.
So much so that I am well comforted

to see how my sweet vessel trails fluid even now.
Hang on, Franz and Sophie!
Let's hope some wise, judicial brake
don't fail us,
don't fail us,
don't fail us, any. Anyhow.

(excerpted from Driving to Sarajevo)

~

well, I felt I could not fumble

my any careful movement.
Although you rode hard
through the serene Straussian reverie,

I knew my haunches would prevail,
for I am the larger animal
and the audience always watches me.

(excepted from Spanish Riding School)

~

She glides, naked and piscine,
through a green sea of dreams,
my body towed behind as if hypnotized
by her undulant wake. How can I
trust these wet promises, given
with such alien ease?

(excepted from Mock Ulysses and the Siren)

~

I will remember you, Tex,
dancing in a cardboard box
on roller skates with an umbrella
or some such odd thing, always
after something new: Drapery. Postcards.
Russian literature. You were

a fucking demigod
down there in Florida, playing
with ink and stones and shells and things.
And, Bob, now that you're dead,
I hope you've brought along a camera

(excepted from Combine)

~

Now let's get this party started! Read his poems and bring your questions and comments here. Tzara I'll start off by asking you a few questions. First, what was your relationship with poetry before you found the forum and how has it changed since then? How has it changed you since then? I'm also interested to know if you would consider yourself a Dadaist poet or some derivative thereof and, if so, what does that mean for the way you write?

 

[bflagsst]

One of the first poems of Tzara's I remember involved Romeo only thinking about J's cunt, which made me laugh and didn't repulse me. He comes across as fully educated in his poetry, as in having brushed past most of Western literature. The only person I've ever come across opening slim volumes of Cixous(which I view as an accomplishment having lived in the same town as Cixous for a couple years.)

My interview question resemble's Angeline's, I guess:

Have you grown as a poet from your time spent here?

 

[HarryHill]

Quickly marking this thread, don't want to miss a thing; also want to know about Dadaist influences, personal philosophy.

 

[todski28]

You posted this in the ask a poet thread earlier this week

"I was a psychology major in college, though I did take a couple of literature courses that included some poetry."

Do you feel that having a major in psychology has helped you to shape your poems in a way that is both thought invoking and connective to the reader? If so how?

 

[bogusagain]

I am sure you once said your poems are word plays and puzzles. They are more often than not, intelligent, creative, witty and amusing but often I feel you use your intellect to keep the poems at arms length and happy for them to be intellectual exercises. My question is, do you ever allow a poem to get near you, in the sense that you invest a lot of emotion into it, as opposed to intellectual effort. I suppose I’m asking, do you ever write confessional poems and if so, do you think you are successful at it? I can’t say I can find any of your poems that seem confessional to me, though I’m aware, like me, you have wistful yearnings and memories evoked by the youthful fairer sex.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

My question is directed at your feminine side. Don't panic.

I know, but perhaps it is not common knowledge so just in case I won't name names, that you have at least one alternative voice who writes well from the distaff point of view. Where does this come from, how do you tap into her and why did you decide to attempt it? Have you written prose in that vein?

 

[Tzara]

Yikes! This looks like work.

It should be fun, though. Like most people, I like to talk about myself. Thanks to Angie for giving me the opportunity.

Here goes.

Now let's get this party started! Read his poems and bring your questions and comments here. Tzara I'll start off by asking you a few questions. First, what was your relationship with poetry before you found the forum and how has it changed since then? How has it changed you since then? I'm also interested to know if you would consider yourself a Dadaist poet or some derivative thereof and, if so, what does that mean for the way you write?

When I was in high school, it was briefly fashionable to carry round a poetry book--if I remember correctly, Rod McKuen's Listen to the Warm. (I know, I know.) If I actually read that, I can't remember anything about it. But a bit later I picked up a copy of E.E. Cummings' Is 5 and read that cover to cover, then went on to read several of his other books (Liveright had a series of his books available at the time). This led to me writing some excruciatingly bad poetry with odd capitalizations and words crammed together. As an undergraduate, I took a couple literature courses that included poetry--a survey course of the English Romantics (liked Coleridge, disliked Wordsworth, couldn't follow Blake) and an honors course on the Irish Renaissance in which we read quite a bit of Yeats (really liked the early poems, not so much some of the later ones). I dabbled at writing during this time, but mostly tried to write fiction. Really sucky fiction.

Every once in a while I would try to write poems, usually some kind of Surrealist influenced free verse with bizarre similes and odd syntax or "haikus" (meaning poems of five/seven/five syllables--this was way before I knew anything about what haikus really were). I still have some of these latter, like

Sky like an old road--
crumbled asphalt, trash, cracks filled
with tar, and potholes.​

or

Parrot camouflaged
in the sumi wash of sky--
where is he going?​

Over time I began to realize that I didn't really have it in me to write fiction, but that I might be better at poetry, if for no other reason than it is a much more concentrated form and something I might have better control over. I was also trying to read more poetry--poets like Auden, Eliot, Kenneth Koch (a particular favorite), Plath, Sexton--and thought that if I tried more seriously to write poetry, it might help me understand reading it.

But I actually found Lit because I was still trying to write fiction. I thought it might be fairly easy to write erotic fiction (it's not) and that I could use that as a learning experience for other genres. Looking for erotic stories as examples, I found Lit and the New Poems, which led to the PF&D. I thought Hey, there's some pretty good poets writing here and I think I could write something like this myself.

And, boy, did it help. I got (at least in my opinion) a hell of a lot better very quickly. Partly because I was simply writing a lot of poetry, but mainly because there were a lot of people to read and learn from--both about their own poems and their discussion of poems (their own, others' poems, even mine) but also just general discussions of poetry and form and metaphor and all the elements of craft that go into poems. It also gave me a place to experiment with form, style, different voices or techniques, and get at least some feedback on what sort of worked, what didn't work, or what might have worked with changes.

As for the question about whether I consider myself a Dadaist poet, I'd mostly say no. I'm not usually trying to be shocking or anti-rational, nor do I usually use any kind of random elements of technique. I have, though, always enjoyed serendipitous errors--elements where I've made a typo and end up with a different phrase than what I intended. Sometimes those lead to interesting, if a bit confusing, metaphors or images.

 

[bflagsst]

Tzara's best form writing is under his Russian name. It's been a few years, I don't want to reveal the name if it wasn't really him, but I think he started it specifically for the contest of forms.

 

[Tzara]

One of the first poems of Tzara's I remember involved Romeo only thinking about J's cunt, which made me laugh and didn't repulse me. He comes across as fully educated in his poetry, as in having brushed past most of Western literature. The only person I've ever come across opening slim volumes of Cixous(which I view as an accomplishment having lived in the same town as Cixous for a couple years.)

My interview question resemble's Angeline's, I guess:

Have you grown as a poet from your time spent here?

Hi, bflagsst. Thanks for the flattery.

To expand on my response to Angie's question, I think that, yes, I have definitely grown as a poet during my time here. Part of this is due to things that would have been common to any poetry forum: you write a lot, people comment on your work, you read other poet's work and comment on that, etc. I have tried other forums, sometimes for significant periods of time, and I always come back here. Now, that could just be because Angie looks a lot like Louise Brooks, but it's really because there are some elements about this forum that are different enough, and valuable enough to me, to always bring me back.

Your question made me think about that. About what is it about the PF&D that I like so much. Here's some initial thoughts:

• It's embedded in a porn site, so there are no restrictions (or at least not many--I have no desire to write bestiality poems, for example) on what one writes about and, at least, fewer inhibitions about what one writes about. This frees one to explore thoughts and themes that one would be at the very least reluctant to post in another forum, let alone submit as an assignment in ENGL 151 (the Creative Writing course I just finished). The poem you referenced is an example of that.

• The "anonymity" factor. This is related to the previous point. This frees me to write about things I wouldn't write about in a more public or more traditional forum. The fact that most of you who've been here very long could probably remind me of my Social Security Number is not the point. I feel like I can write about things without judgment.

• It's more social than other forums (fora?) I've tried. This makes it more fun. Or perhaps I just like imagining Tess's calves,
  framed by a snug skirt
  and spiked shoes,
  flicking back/forth, back/forth,
  hypnotic as a metronome
  clocking my thought.​
  In other words, I kind of like to flirt. It's a boy thing.

• The challenge threads. They are (almost) always interesting and give one a chance to work on craft. Writing a poem to a theme or prompt that you would not normally have chosen makes one think.
  
  I like to think.

Of course, there is also the wealth of knowledge about the history of poetry, poetic technique, poets of interest, and such that I wouldn't know about otherwise. (Thanks, Senna Jawa, for telling me what a diagonal kenning is. I'm sorry that I forgot the precise definition, but at least I remembered the term and can look it up again. You'd think I would remember this, being of Nordic heritage.)

I guess one of the things that please me about this thread is that it means you like me. Right now, you like me.

 

[Tzara]

Quickly marking this thread, don't want to miss a thing; also want to know about Dadaist influences, personal philosophy.

Hi, Harry. Thanks for posting to this thread.

As I indicated in my response to Angie, there aren't any real Dadaist influences in my poems, at least none I'm really aware of. The name choice was meant to be a kind of joke. Like "Teased Aura" or, abbreviated (as TZ), "teased" or "teasy."

As to personal philosophy, I'm assuming you mean artistic philosophy rather than religious or spiritual philosophy.

It's more complex than this, but the short form of What I Think About Art is kind of the clash between the thought of two major twentieth century thinkers: John Cage and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

They're very different. They don't address the same questions. (Cage was an composer; Wittgenstein was a philosopher. Both did interesting and excellent work in other fields. Both were stone geniuses and very weird guys. Both were also generally assumed to be gay, though I think neither was forward about that, perhaps because of the time.)

Cage is kind of the poster boy for letting the random nature of the world be a part of art. His most famous (or notorious) composition is 4'33" for, as I recall, any instrument. There are three movements, each of which are tacet, which is a musical term which means the instrument is silent. The point of the piece, which is much interpreted, of course, is that the sounds that occur during the "performance" (e.g. coughs, people shifting in chairs, the sough of the air conditioning) themselves comprise the "music" of the piece.

Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was almost obsessively logical. He strove to solve all of the problems of philosophy through logical analysis. I tend to be most influenced by his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he later repudiated. But it is such a beautiful thing, reducing the world to seven statements (and his notations on those, of course, which are what give the book its slim bulk):

• 1. The world is all that is the case.

• 2. What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs.

• 3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.

• 4. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

• 5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
  
  (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)

• 6. The general form of a truth function is: [p-, ξ-, N(ξ-)].
  
  This is the general form of a proposition.

• 7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Well, OK, then. Any questions?

 

[Tzara]

You posted this in the ask a poet thread earlier this week

"I was a psychology major in college, though I did take a couple of literature courses that included some poetry."

Do you feel that having a major in psychology has helped you to shape your poems in a way that is both thought invoking and connective to the reader? If so how?

Hey, todski. Thank you for the question and welcome to the forum.

Yours is actually a pretty easy question for me to answer. "Do you feel that having a major in psychology has helped you to shape your poems in a way that is both thought invoking and connective to the reader?"

Um, no.

But that's because my degree was focused on animal psychology. I was running rats in T-mazes or placing them in Skinner boxes, pumping them with drugs and measuring their dietary patterns.

The most I might have learned about human reactions is that I probably can't drink Scotch because I overindulged one night on Laphroiag, which resulted in a quite pronounced conditioned taste aversion. The details of that conditioning experience are best left to the reader's imagination.

I certainly don't want to revisit them. Why the aversion.

 

[Tzara]

Hey, all. Placing the transmission in Park for the night. It's hot, I'm sleepy, and sleepiness makes me even more stupid than usual.

Looking forward to responding to bogus and Tess's queries tomorrow.

Be well, all.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Sleep well, you've earned some solid zzzzz's.

 

[todski28]

Explains why you connect with me then since more than half the stuff discussed on here has been so far above my understanding that I Feel like a rat in a maze, that has had its nose blocked and is blind.

I have the same taste aversion to Cointreau, or anything orange liquor flavoured.

 

[Tzara]

I am sure you once said your poems are word plays and puzzles. They are more often than not, intelligent, creative, witty and amusing but often I feel you use your intellect to keep the poems at arms length and happy for them to be intellectual exercises. My question is, do you ever allow a poem to get near you, in the sense that you invest a lot of emotion into it, as opposed to intellectual effort. I suppose I’m asking, do you ever write confessional poems and if so, do you think you are successful at it? I can’t say I can find any of your poems that seem confessional to me, though I’m aware, like me, you have wistful yearnings and memories evoked by the youthful fairer sex.

Hi, bogus!

I think what I said was something like I think of poems as being puzzles to be solved or, more accurately, constructed. They aren't quite intellectual games, but a great deal of care should go into how they are built, and they are built to solve a particular problem (convey a feeling or emotion or idea, etc.). I've also compared poetry to carpentry and golf (another game, of course).

I'll come back to your question of "[D]o you ever allow a poem to get near you, in the sense that you invest a lot of emotion in it..." But I first want to say some things about confessional poetry.

I assume by "confessional poetry" you mean the kind of poem associated with poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and, especially, Anne Sexton. Here at Lit, I might label annaswirls as a poet with elements of what I think of as confessional tendencies. I think of confessional poetry as being thematically intimate, where the poet is discussing very personal issues (often issues that would not be discussed by most people in public) from a self-centric viewpoint using highly emotional language. At an extreme (Ms. Sexton, I am thinking of you) confessional poems can feel as if the reader is a spectator in a particularly intense psychiatric session.

No, I don't do that. For several reasons. First off, I do think of a poem as an intellectual creation--something that really needs to be crafted--and that is, while not something that would be unheard of in confessional poetry (certainly all of the poets I mentioned above were good, even great, craftspeople), I think the general perception of confessional poetry has led to a lot of people spewing their bad love affairs onto paper in broken lines and calling that poetry.

Secondly, and this is a little bit of a joke, but not that much of one, my main ethnic heritage is Norwegian, and Scandinavians don't overshare. Ever. I skate on that by being half-American.

One of the bigger problems with me writing confessional poetry is that I have an uninteresting life. I've been happily married for 31 years. My parents were loving and good to me. I don't use drugs, other than alcohol, and while I probably overindulge in that, it's never interfered with said marriage nor with my employment. I just don't have a lot to confess about.

Now I know that problem, if it is a problem, is partly due to my observation skills. Anna wrote a quite affecting poem about a breast cancer screening, which is not an unusual event for a woman. But I guess I'm not much oriented to write poems like that.

But, to get back to "[D]o you ever allow a poem to get near you, in the sense that you invest a lot of emotion in it..." I think I do, at least a bit. Perhaps not in the way you mean.

• This poem, "Epiphany" documents my surprise at the physical reaction I experienced when my wife's cousin turned a certain way in my mother-in-law's garden. I was kind of thrilled and dismayed by my reaction.
• "Driving to Sarajevo," which Angie cited in her intro, is a poem about depression. My tendency to depression, though it may not be obvious.
• "Offhand, a Red Car "is about sexual impotence. My occasional problem with it, my father's (implied--he had a prostatectomy that caused other problems as well; we did not discuss this topic in detail).
• "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," which is the poem bflagsst cited, which is about my confession that I am, while not exactly anguished, disturbed about how sexuality controls my life.
• "binge" is not quite confessional, but I wrote it when I was feeling very lonely for my wife. Does that count?

That's probably enough.

Perhaps none of that qualifies as confessional. Which is OK. I am not, and do not want to be, a universal poet.

I would offer this correction to your assessment of me: I have wistful yearnings and memories evoked by the [elided word] fairer sex.

 

[Tzara]

My question is directed at your feminine side. Don't panic.

I'm actually kind of happier with my feminine side than my masculine side. She's more polite, has better taste in literature (Austen and the Brontë sisters as opposed to Cain and Chandler), and she dresses way better.

I suspect she also made more money. She was VP material, whereas I'm more some technical slug.

I know, but perhaps it is not common knowledge so just in case I won't name names, that you have at least one alternative voice who writes well from the distaff point of view. Where does this come from, how do you tap into her and why did you decide to attempt it? Have you written prose in that vein?

You can blame WickedEve for Minervous, and specifically this thread. To quote her, "I suppose it's possible to write a good ball sac poem, but normally, I don't find the word ball sac to be that much of a turn on."

That sounded like a challenge, so I tried to write one. Being heterosexual, the natural voice for that was female, so this poem.

Is it good? No idea, but it is quite different from how "I" (i.e. Tzara) would attack a poem.

Which introduced me to the concept of heteronyms in literature, which links, through Pessoa, to Lauren, and well... everything is connected.

Or something like that.

I'll try to answer the other questions in a bit. Dinnertime.

 

[Angeline]

I knew it!

Just as I expected your interview is informative and entertaining. And thank you for the link to Eve's ball sac thread. Any hint of Eve puts a smile on my face.

I'm fascinated by the insights into your poems that I never would have caught on my own. I reread, for example, Driving to Sarajevo and gained a new appreciation for it, detected a poignancy in it I hadn't caught before. (You also make me feel a little more personally validated because I bury my emotions in poems all the time.) And for the record, I was always astonished that the Minervous poems feel so female to me. Still. Even the ones like Wow and Flutter, where a woman is describing a man and her reaction to him, ring true. Yes, everything is connected.

And I think all this says a lot about your control as a writer, which leads me to your relationship with form poetry. I see you wrote bad haiku at one point (I still do--or would if I did again), but from whence came the interest in traditional forms? Did that blossom here at Lit or before then? What does writing in those forms do for you and how does it affect the way you write overall? Do you set rules or create methods for your so-called "free verse"? Do you just write and let it flow out and then apply a method as you edit?

I have often wondered about this in regard to your poems because I see you as a very careful writer (not cautious, but one who takes care with every word).

Take your time and answer when you can. I know you've been bombarded these last few days.

 

[Desejo]

I have a question, and a comment.

The question is: do you ever share poems you have written here on Lit with the people that inspired them? Or is this part of your life a silent part of your life?

And the comment:

I think it's completely ridiculous that you think your life is uninteresting. Lives are not interesting based on travels, affairs or visible drama alone. I do not think you could write poetry in the way you do if your life were uninteresting. Just sayin'. I'd love to meet someone as uninteresting as you

 

[Tzara]

Response to Tessie's question, part two

Where does this [female persona] come from, how do you tap into her and why did you decide to attempt it? Have you written prose in that vein?

I've already explained the origin of the Minervous persona and, by implication, why I at least initially tried to attempt it. So let me comment on how I tap into it (or her).

This may sound too obvious, but I try to think about how a woman would react to things. Think about things. While I am not female (and, yes, this is the Internet--Impersonation Central--but I'm very guy), I really like women. To talk to, not just ogle. Though I am a major fan of ogling, as well.

It's kind of a curious question to me as I wonder if the same question would be asked of a fiction writer. I've thought about starting a thread on "The Meaning of 'I' in Poetry," as it seems to me that first person narrative in poetry is taken by most readers at face value--you write a poem about something like your child having died and you'll get a slew of condolence messages--whereas you write a story in first person about a child dying, you'd be at least less likely to be smothered in condolence. Readers seem to be (in my experience, anyway) more likely to read fiction as, well, fiction, but poetry as diary.

I guess I "tap into her" by trying to write something that the Minervous character as I conceive of her would write.

She isn't me. She is, by far, the purest example of a heteronym (refer to the link I posted previously) that I use. Most of my other alternate post names are primarily organizational in purpose. But Min is a bit older than me, as I said earlier, nicer, more polite, better suited for management. She looks a bit like this, though usually clothed.

She basically is a character who writes poems. If I was a fiction writer, this would not be unusual. It would be backstory.

As for "Have written prose in that vein?" well, Min has, unfortunately, written one, quite bad, story. In the Creative Writing class I just finished, the story I wrote was written first person female, though there really is nothing particularly female about the narrative.

The best thing about Min is that I get to flirt with myself. I mean, what's more perfect than that?

 

[Tzara]

Tzara's best form writing is under his Russian name. It's been a few years, I don't want to reveal the name if it wasn't really him, but I think he started it specifically for the contest of forms.

Yes, pushkine is me as well. The name is actually a bad pun: push · kine, crossed with the obvious reference to Alexander Pushkin.

Me being pretentiously jokey, as per usual.

And you are correct. I started that to "wall off" my Poetry Survivor contest entries.

 

[Tzara]

Explains why you connect with me then since more than half the stuff discussed on here has been so far above my understanding that I Feel like a rat in a maze, that has had its nose blocked and is blind.

I have the same taste aversion to Cointreau, or anything orange liquor flavoured.

That you are interested in learning about poetry is what matters, todski.

The taste aversion thing is interesting, isn't it? I can't eat cauliflower, for example, because I was ill as a child when my mother was cooking it. But I really like broccoli.

They're not quite the same thing, but very close.

 

[todski28]

"The best thing about Min is that I get to flirt with myself. I mean, what's more perfect than that?"

Solves all issues on infidelity and no rejection hmmmm, I might have to try this hahaha

What was the intended purpose of walling off the contest side of your writing?

taste aversion is really wierd anything choc orange for me...just thinking about it is enough to make me have unpleasant thoughts.

 

[Tzara]

I'm fascinated by the insights into your poems that I never would have caught on my own.

Which says they are not well constructed poems.

Not that a poem should be obvious about what it's about. But it should be something that a reader should be able to discern the meaning of.

And, lest you think this a negative reaction, Ange, I like you saying this. Love you saying this.

The point of commentary is to guide the writer, and I need a lot of guiding.

As do we all.

There's a lot more in your post to comment on. Which I will, probably tomorrow.

 

[theognis]

Wow

You're a lot more prolific than I realized, Tzara. And as for being confessional, you obviously are, but in a clever way. I suppose that's to be expected. With you. Clever, I mean.

I'll be damned. As I've said before, cheers.

 

[greenmountaineer]

"Why We Don't" is one of my favorites. You have a knack for using whimsical language, that's also very musical IMO, and layering a poem with deeper truths.

You also know how to note the effort of writers and provide constructive criticism without demeaning the effort.

I don't have a question right now, Tzara. Maybe I will later when I re-read more of your work. I just wanted to acknowledge the contributions you've made here that have been helpful, certainly to me.