avant / garde / under / net / conditions (vormals: perspektive | issue 43 | 2002 )

code.poetry.loop | dada.lodge | < experimental.bungees > | mail.art.ocular | post.dogmatism | surreal.sheets | theory.proxy | visual.tray
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interview

[/] interview (deutsch)
[/] interview (english)

source

[/] from IMPRESSIVE (BIG) INSTANT (BANG)



- - - - - - - -< data holders >- - - - - - - - |
> ivan arguelles - [USA]
> louis armand - [Czechia]
> john m. bennett - [USA]
> blankgroup - [USA]
> jenny boully - [USA]
> edward s. hans - [www]
> david ender - [austria]
> infiltration.org - [canada]
> intermittent poetry - [france]
> literaturinferno - [germany]
> camille martin - [USA]
> a. di michele - [USA]
> stanislaw mutz - [poland]
> ron palmer - [USA]
> malia pangilinan - [hawaii]
> hans christian petersen - [australia]
> jörg piringer - [austria]
> kai pohl - [germany]
> kenji siratori - [japan]
> hartmut sörgel - [germany]
> rodrigo toscano - [USA]
> mirko wenig - [germany]
| - - -< ivan arguelles >- - - |


/->/ Madonna Septet. Poets Press 2000 // 'THAT' GODESS. Pantograph Press 1992 // Looking for Mary Lou : Illegal Syntax. Rock Steady Press 1989


>> a constant state of rapture
>> / interview /
[question-1] :v: [question-2] :v: [question-3]


> [question-1//perspektive]
eric kluitenberg defines for avant garde today the purpose to smash the hegemonial surface/s and de(con)struct its crude output. john noto describes your text as "signal-matrices" which overloads the reader and are overloaded with lang uage<s>. do you want to overheat the reader and is density a kind of decontruction and/or reconstruction of established codes?

>> [question-1//response]=[ivan arguelles]

My intention with respect to the reader is not to "overload" as much as to disinform him/her of the predicted boundaries of syntax. A lot is going on, and on purpose. But what is going on first of all emanates from a "mind", mine in this case, and the mind's fluidity may well be its (own) discourse. Density is or may be a necessary byproduct of this "charged" mental atmosphere. As for languages (in the Plural), this is an inescapable aspect of my own matrix. Chomsky said (to paraphrase) that to an extraterrestrial visitor all the world's languages would seem the same! Indeed, for me any language I have at my own disposal be it English, Hindi, Spanish Greek or whatever are not separate linguistic entities but part and parcel one and the same to me, and hence I have no problem in "tossing" them out to mingle together on the same page of discourse. Just as all human beings, whatever era or epoch they might have lived in, are truly all "mental" contemporaries, so all languages spoken or used in whatever period of history are free game for the mind that can apprehend them. It's up to the reader to pick and choose in such a text what may seem referentially intelligible. In a word I consider my texts as both examples of deconstruction and reconstruction. I also consider them to be an extension of other texts of repetitive discourse (i.e. the "traditional" works of poetry that preceded them, such as the Iliad, the Aeneid, or the Canterbury Tales etc).

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> [question-2//perspektive]
the nineties are - again with john noto - the age of writing and rapture. to disrupt the code means often to work with an own language area - a kind of virtual language. maybe something like hakim beys "chaos linguistics" a linguistic between or behind the established code. your working seems like a comp liment to such "illegal syntax" operations. are you a syntax pirate? :-)

>> [question-2//response]=[ivan arguelles]

"Chaos linguistics", that's an interesting term. I consider my work to be a form (if that is not a contradiction in terms ) of chaos. I once remarked to an acquaintance, who was comparing in a disparaging manner the work of a contemporary of mine, commenting on how derivative it was of my work and yet how much more "unintelligible", to which I rejoined that I Understand my chaos, that is I understand it is chaos that I am creating when I "write". I don't know what a syntax pirate is, but I do know that when undertaking my large 2 vol. Poem MADONNA SEPTET, I was very very conscious of deliberately breaking up syntax. I wanted to destroy the conventional English syntax while at the same rendering a text that respected the continuum of texts of repetitive discourse alluded to above. As for rapture, the language I employ is in a constant state of rapture. It is not a simulation of madness, but the very process of orgasmic madness at work.



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> [question-3//perspektive]
mostly your work is compared and connected to surrealism and "soul geography". what is your connex to "(neo-)surrealism"? is ivan arguelles a lost (situationistic) flaneur through the residuum of language passages?

>> [question-3//response]=[ivan arguelles]

Yes, my work in fact was considered the very embodiment of "a madder, darker, and more mystical surrealism" [A. Codrescu]. My surrealism however drew more from the Hispanic poets such as Va lejo and Lorca, whose content is marked with a profound emotion value, rather than from the more "formal" dogmatic French poets, Breton and company. About 1990 I "quit" writing poems as such, which meant I also "quit" considering myself a "surrealist". With the publication of my pseudo-vergilian epic "THAT" GODDESS I embarked on the passage that leads to MADONNA SEPTET. That is to say I was more concerned with how my "writing" was in fact a manifestation of my mental state, obsessive as that may be. I may have had more or less consciously as a model the late works of the German poet Holderlin, whom I consider the first really modern poet, principally for his abandonment of traditional poetics and his abrupt syntactic breaks, perhaps themselves merely manifestations of his so called mental illness. I don't believe I have any connections with "(neo-)surrealism", and in fact I don't really know what is meant by that term, or who its representatives might be. I should emphasize here that I consider my self somewhat of a naif primitif, a wholly intuitive "artist". I do not read much poetry nowadays, especially contemporary works, But I do know that what I have read in the past, those texts of repetitive discourse, remain as a kind of tremendous and intangible nostalgic baggage which I will not do without until I die.



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