Tzara Untangled: The Interview

[Tzara]

But I do have one more question and it's about your relationship with visual art. You know art the way I know jazz (at least it appears that way to me). Can you talk a bit about the influence of it in your poems and whether your knowledge of it affects the way you write? I know you've written poems about artists (the homage to Rauschenberg being one example), but does it effect your writing in poems that aren't specifically about an artist or work of art? (I believe there's a corollary to this in music, so I'm trying to understand how it might work with visual art).

I don't think I have quite the relationship to visual art that you do to jazz. I love art and (classical) music, but I don't have the same obsessive yearn for my arts that you do for jazz. Your focus is something I am envious of.

Perhaps I just don't know enough about them (i.e., the arts that motivate me). Bogus, for example, knows way, way more about visual art than I ever will. Because he is an artist, and I am just some guy vaguely interested in art.

I think for poems, what little I understand, or am inspired by, is what influences my work. That I don't understand things at the level of the originating artist, be it Monet or Judd or Schoenberg or Daugherty, doesn't matter. They have helped me to think about things, about life. If I have thought about life (and written poems about this) in a simplistic way, then perhaps I just have a simplistic, and not artistic, view of the world.

I mean, one writes the art that one is capable of, however weak an art that is.

 

[Tzara]

Geez. I want to thank everyone who posted to this thread. That you all take me and my poems even a little bit seriously is super flattering. That leaves me a bit flustered as to how to respond to y'all.

My particular thanks to Angie for starting the thread.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

OK. Here goes:

Thank you - and thank you for so generously replying to all the other poets too.

 

[Angeline]

Geez. I want to thank everyone who posted to this thread. That you all take me and my poems even a little bit seriously is super flattering. That leaves me a bit flustered as to how to respond to y'all.

My particular thanks to Angie for starting the thread.

I think we like you.

Tomorrow a new interview will start, but I'll be reading and thinking about this one for a while. Like Tess said, thank you for being so generous with us.

 

[bogusagain]

Bogus, for example, knows way, way more about visual art than I ever will. Because he is an artist, and I am just some guy vaguely interested in art.

I don't know about that Tzara. I've been making art for nearly forty years (longer really) and three times I've literally thrown out everything I had made and still had, and started again. Why is a story in itself and not for here but I think I would prefer to appreciate art than to be compelled to make it because making it is a curse.

Anyway, you are a modest and self deprecating bloke but you can't hide your talents because you rightfully enjoy them and so do we. It really has been a delightful thread. I could imagine you being a bit of a raconteur when you have a glass of lubricant in your hand and maybe you don't even need that.

 

[theognis]

I guess my point would be that it doesn't matter who I am. (If that even means anything.)

What matters is Is this poem any good?

I can't resist commenting here. I understand what you're saying, and, in a twist, that's usually my excuse for commenting anonymously most of the time on Lit. But now that I think about it, I do this knowing I like getting comments from identifiable sources on my own stuff, at least if they're good comments, which are pretty much the only kind I ever make. I excuse the double standard by thinking it's not difficult to figure out, if anyone cares to, which anonymous comments are mine, considering the way I make them. Sort of defeats the purpose, I guess.

By the way, substitute 'painting' for 'poem' and you have the reason, basically, why I bailed as a beginning participant in the fine arts world long ago. In that world, it's almost all about who you are, rather than about the work itself, and that grated on me, to say the least.

 

[Desejo]

7 word autobiography

I've asked Darkmaas and Butters to reply, so you have to as well.

7 words that define you. See link for examples and more info.

7 word Bios

 

[Tzara]

I've asked Darkmaas and Butters to reply, so you have to as well.

7 words that define you. See link for examples and more info.

7 word Bios

Nearsighted Seattleite, curious about damn near everything.


You forgot Tess.