Tim Kahl
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Tim Kahl’s work has been published or is forthcoming in
Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley
Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review,
Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth
Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The
Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review,
and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated Austrian
avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poet, Lêdo Ivo;
and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel
Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor
Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great
American Pinup. His first collection “Possessing Yourself” is
forthcoming from Word Tech Press.
Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley
Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review,
Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth
Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The
Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review,
and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated Austrian
avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poet, Lêdo Ivo;
and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel
Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor
Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great
American Pinup. His first collection “Possessing Yourself” is
forthcoming from Word Tech Press.
INTERVIEW WITH TIM KAHL
1. So you attended the AWP? Can you tell us a bit about your experience there?
It was my first time attending such a conference, and I felt a bit ambivalent about it. All the people I
had ever studied with warned me that attending was a kind of Faustian bargain, but I felt that I was
beyond the point where I needed to feel pristine. The experience actually surprised me because my
expectation of it was turned on its head. I had anticipated the daily presentations as what I would be
most interested in and the schmoozefest of the book fair to be the most brutal and repugnant;
however, talking to people at the book fair and learning what other people were interested in and
what they were up to was often a whole lot more interesting than the canned presentations that
people had prepared (some just read their papers out loud in a a droning academic monotone — those
were the ones I walked out of).
However, at the end of the whole affair, after my battery had worn down, I felt both exhilarated that
there were so many people out there whose passion for the literary arts would bring them to
congregate and display their wares, and I felt dispirited about the fact that there were so many others
out there in the country who were dedicated and talented and deserving of recognition. The
competition for eyeballs to pay attention to what you are doing is steep. This feeling was an
affirmation of the ageless feeling for a poet who writes in a culture which seems to undervalue
his/her efforts, even to ignore him/her, then when he/she penetrates the inner sanctum of those who
have similar interests, there are so many distractions within that small audience as well.
Overall, though, the big advantages were talking to a lot of interesting, dedicated, and passionate
people. Russell Edson was absolutely terrific, and Mark Strand’s reading of “The Delirium Waltz”
was magical.
2. You have contributed significantly to the Sacramento Poetry scene. What are your
thoughts about Sacramento as a writing environment? Can something more be done to
tap into the local talent? What can you say has been the Sacramento Poetry Center's
contribution to the local poetry scene?
I don’t know what I have contributed yet. I am learning that there have been a lot more people in the
Sacramento literary scene before me who have offered more blood, sweat and tears. I’ve only
ratcheted up my level of participation in the last several years. Prior to that I was a bit reluctant to get
involved. I had studied with people who were hard core avant-gardists (surrealists, LANGUAGE
poets, Situationists, absurdists, Dada, etc.), and there really isn’t that much of that type of thing
going on in Sacramento. (With a few exceptions) it certainly is not institutionalized at the academic
level. So I opted out for many years, seven or eight. I was just writing for some audience that wasn’
t terribly immediate, writing into the abyss, one might say. Publishing in literary mags throughout the
U.S. was rewarding in its own way, but over time it rang a little hollow. I think it was the imprint of
Sacramento’s hardscrabble agrarian past that made me work on being more immediately understood,
saying things more straightforwardly and relating my immediate experience more than my bedeviled
thoughts. I think I had been fighting with what I wanted Sacramento to be instead of accepting what
it is/was.
Teaching helped me loosen up a lot too. It is amazing how over the years being responsible for
conveying information to a group of individuals makes one appreciate lucidity.
And it is lucidity that much of the local scene relies on. At times I wish for a Romantic flight of
fancy, but these moments being actualized are few and far between. It is probably just as well that
Sacramento’s literary culture doesn’t try to emulate San Francisco’s culture of abstraction and
experimentation. Sacramentans want more blood and guts and experience. They are less impressed
with strange machines of thought or glimpses at the architecture of the subconscious. The poetry
center contributes to this culture with its aesthetic. It dabbles in the Beat influences that highly
inform Luna’s, and it tends to shy away from mimeograph revolution influences that are present in
less institutionalized venues around town. Occasionally a performance poet will show up, but more
often than not, it focuses on the poetry of the middle class, its concerns about beauty and family. It
isn’t overly academic, but it isn’t ordinarily of the street either.
As for the exposure it is bringing to local talent, it has done that pretty well over the years. Other
venues around town do pretty well in promoting local talent also. However, it is my great hope to
continue pairing up local talent with poets and writers from outside of Sacramento in order to
provide cross-fertilization. Also, I’d like to see the out-of-towners remark to their hometown poets
and writers that we have a vibrant scene. I think in the past the Sacramento Poetry Center has too
often had a rather insular programming. The foreign has a hard time in Sacramento, but I am certain
that as the impetus to be more cosmopolitan grows in Sacramento, then the embrace of the foreign
will grow as well. But “the new” in any form in Sacramento is often a long time coming, particularly
in a town that guards and treasures its past so much. Nostalgia governs the Sacramento aesthetic as
much as anything. That might sound hurtful to some who are invested in that aesthetic (though it
need not be seen that way), but I think it is a public service to pursue truth in labeling, and I really do
understand this inclination. I’m a National League guy, and I still have not accepted the designated
hitter.
So I have tried to start a translation reading series at SPC, and I am endeavoring to start my own
small literary press (Bald Trickster Press) dedicated to publishing works in translation. Hopefully, I
can continue to find projects and readers that will acknowledge this sense of the foreign.
3. I have enjoyed your poetry submissions. What inspired "Jenipapo"?
Before I arrived in Sacramento I had been teaching English in Brazil. I thought I could be Brasileiro,
but then I jumped on a plane at Santos DuMont Airport (then the international airport) in Rio and
landed at Sacramento International. The cultural difference slapped me upside the head. I longed for
a hint of Rio and São Paulo, and as I did this, I began to recount many of the things I had learned
about Brazil. One of these things was the myth of the jenipapo (sometimes spelled genipapo). It is a
fruit from the northern part of Brazil, the poorer and less European-influenced part of Brazil, whose
juice was used in colonial times to paint the skin black, in effect, to render black face. It was a literal
marking of whites as black, but over time that practice took on metaphorical weight.
In Gilberto Freyre’s great book Casa Grande E Senzala (translated in this country as The Masters
and the Slaves but is better translated as The Big House and the Slave’s Quarters): A Study in the
Development of Brazilian Civilization, Freyre describes how in the north, dark birthmarks on people
(seen as resembling the jenipapo fruit) were looked upon as the mongrel-mark, the mark of
miscegenation in that part of Brazil where interracial mixing was very frequent, if not the norm.
Beyond this, however, Freyre also points out how much of African culture has been taken up as part
of the dominant Brazilian culture. Samba is the infusion of African polyrhythms into European
musical structures. [In this way it is similar to American jazz, yet it differs in that samba is the
Brazilian national musical identity in a way that jazz is not]. Feijoada (black beans and sausage) is the
national dish, a slave dish. When I was in Brazil, I played cards with a bunch of European-derived
steel executives. We played the national game called “pontinho,” a game as popular as poker is in the
US, I was told. However, the game was played with all the eights missing. This was derived from
the slave culture where the game was made up. Slaves would receive a deck of cards from their
masters only when they had been damaged or a card had been lost, thus they had to adopt rules to
accommodate this slightly altered standard deck. [It is interesting to note that a similar game exists in
the US, which is known as “Coon-Can” (perhaps among other variants); however, I have never
heard of anyone outside of prison who has ever played this game.] In any case, all of this is to make
the point that African culture has had a huge impact on the national Brazilian culture so that the
mongrel-mark of jenipapo is not just a literal mark but also a mark on the soul of every Brazilian.
The above explains the first part of the poem, but the last three lines are also taken from Freyre.
Sleep, sleep, my little one,
In the jungle is a mythical animal
Whose name still frightens everyone.
They are an adaptation of an English translation of a Brazilian cradle song, a lullaby. The original
cradle song invokes a mythical animal, the carrapatú, a hybrid mythical animal whose presence out in
the forest scares small children.
I came to this point at the end of the poem after thinking about the history of miscegenation (a term I
don’t really like but it suits the discussion) in Brazil. In a country that has come to symbolize the
dissolution of racial boundaries by virtue of its generations of mixing, I noticed that there were still a
lot of racial markers and racial terms that were used beyond the simple “black” and “white” of the U.
S. In fact, the term “Baiano” (a person from Bahia) was often used instead of other kinds of
distinctive racial slurs. However, the name was pejorative and the effect would be the same as any
pejorative term used in the U. S. It was not a term used for flattery and it did not necessarily
distinguish a person’s regional heritage. The fact that most people from Bahia have much of their
African heritage intact (due in large part to the presence of the quilombos during colonial times) made
the term a de facto racial marker in my mind. This on top of the commonly used terms claro (clear),
preto (black), negro (dark) and azulão (big blue) [and presumably others I did not learn] suggested to
me that there were a lot more skin tone language markers in Brazilian society than I had previously
been aware of, and they were apparently commonly accepted, not used as terms of disparagement
like “high yellow.”
The undertow of this whole discussion is that in Brazil, a country where people pride themselves on
being Brazilian first, not part of some racialized identity, people are still assiduously keeping track of
skin tone. The fact that a large percentage of the wealth in Brazil is still concentrated in the whiter
parts of Brazil whereas the favelas are undoubtedly predominantly darker, suggests that even in Brazil
race is that mythical animal which everyone is frightened of. Despite centuries of miscegenation, it
exists and people are still marking racial boundaries of a sort.
4. The Sacramento Poetry Center promises to bring a cocktail of rich poetry events in
the near future. What should we expect as the time draws near?
I mentioned the translation reading series that I would like to continue. In April William O’ Daly from
Auburn will be reading. He is one of the country’s foremost translators of Neruda, having translated
some seven books of Neruda’s work on Copper Canyon Press since 1984. It has become his life’s
work. He has translated The Separate Rose, The Yellow Heart, Winter Garden, Still another Day, The
Sea and the Bells, The Book of Questions.
Readings featuring well-known poets Julia Levine, Josh McKinney, Chad Sweeney and F. D. Reeve
are slated to apear before summer arrives. Also, the SPC Conference in April will feature an all-star
lineup of Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Josh McKinney, Camille Norton, Quinton Duval, and Al Young.
Also, I’d like to move from just recording the audio at poetry events to doing video of SPC events
and loading them up on YouTube. This, however, takes time and energy and hard drive space on my
laptop, all of which are in short supply these days. And I’m somewhat reluctant to do this because
when I listen at readings, I tend to close my eyes so I can concentrate on the sound of the words.
Sometimes the visual is distracting. A video of a poet might be counterproductive for a listener to
hear a poem. But I think it is merely a matter of time before poets have their own poem-videos on the
web the way musicians have created music videos. Some poets have already ventured into this
territory; however, often these early results have been fairly uninteresting.
And next year we are embarking on running a nationwide poetry manuscript contest with book
publication and a monetary prize going to the winner. This will hopefully establish the Sacramento
Poetry Center and a press associated with its name as yet one more purveyor of national literary
talent throughout the US, and establish means by which other publishing projects can be looked at
which will benefit our local community.
One of the wackiest ideas I’ve had for an event would be for poets in the Sacramento area to read a
poem while manipulating a puppet and simultaneously throwing one’s voice. I like the idea of a
puppeteer’s inflection and changing of the voice coming to the art of poetry reading. Too many poets
read in a dead monotone, thinking they are hypnotic or something when they read that way. I keep
dropping hints about this, but no one seems to think I’m serious about it. Seriously, how does one
read Auden as a Tyrannosaurus Rex puppet?
5. I have observed at poetry readings that your computer notebook is really your
notebook-- you read directly from it. You also record readings for Podcasts. In what
ways can technology help poets produce their art. What are the limitations of
technology? Anything you can say about poetry and the internet?
Yes, it feels that at times I am clothed in data and only the skimpiest streams of it at that. Actually,
your observations are only partly accurate. While I have often read from my computer screen at SPC
readings, I more often read from paper. It’s a lot easier to track as you are shifting your gaze from
page to audience (and you don’t have to worry about scrolling). I also mostly compose and write on
paper. The presence of marginalia is too comforting. I don’t get the same effect by squirreling
marginalia away on another part of the screen. It is not immediately present. For an easily distracted
little chipmunk such as myself, I can quickly lose sight of what I might want to include if it is
outside my immediate field of vision.
The internet and poetry is such a vast topic I don’t know where to begin. The internet allows one to
meet others who you might not have had access to them any other way. It’s also good for fostering
distant relationships from the past. You put your wares out like a street hustler and see who wanders
by. It is nightmare and godsend. It makes it so easy to push out your work so that eyeballs might
capture it; however, the down side is that there is so much competition in the way of noise.
Through The Great American Pinup (where I appear as Victor Schnickelfritz) [http:
//greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com] I have had text exchanges that I have found informative, but just
like an online classroom, the give and take was limited. Some of the exchanges have been thoughtful.
Some have not. In any case, the real value of online communication is to glance at what people are
doing around the country/around the world and see how their textual strategies might be reflected in
my own. It’s a device for exploring when the same old same old has you down. Perhaps that means
we will be perpetually addicted to the new.
As we explore and build up new nodes and new connections in the system we have created, we take
on complexity. I enjoy the richness in a complex system more than I do simple, direct, linear kinds
of relationships. I think it is complexity that the greatest poems, the ones with real staying power,
embody. And to stretch this metaphor of the system even further, perhaps the most complicated
system of all is the one of self. Possessing a sense of self just might be a kind of attractor to which a
complex system gravitates. Poetry and the kind of personas it allows us to “try on” through the kinds
of language games we play permit us to navigate the system of self and discover moments of
stability as a “self.” But the same thing can probably be done with puppeteering, though admittedly
harder to do online. Unless one considers the avatars in an online game like “Second Life” to be
nothing more than electronic puppets.
I digress into abstraction. A dangerous occupation these days. Too much of that and someone will
sneak up on you, hit you on the head with a lead pipe and steal your mojo.
In short, the internet is a metaphor for how we might come to view ourselves, and if poetry is the
workshop where, among other things, one works on the self, then the internet is the master
document for all we might write.
6. Anything you would like to add?
It seems to me we are at an odd and precious cultural moment. Just as the age of mechanical
reproduction changed the relationship of people to the artifacts they produced, so too may we be
undergoing another similar kind of revolution in our relationship to the artifact, the things we have
made. Mechanical reproduction of goods dramatically changed the shape of markets. Mass
production allowed people to market their goods far beyond what they might have done before. It
changed the relative ease of accessing goods, and it made for a certain kind of standardization of
goods that we enjoy today but also simultaneously plagues us. Any trip to a mass retail store can
leave the impression that the vast quantity of similar goods is reassuring for their quality control but
deadening in the uniformity of look and feel of the objects in our lives.
With the internet, cultural items like music and poetry have become so easily reproducible en masse
(how long does it take to copy-and-paste a poem? how long does it take to duplicate an .mp3 file?)
that some have speculated the artifact has lost its meaning. The poem itself on the page/screen can
be read and duplicated so easily and quickly that one almost forgets the difficult history of the written
word. Producing something like a book was a painstaking procedure. Now a person can literally
produce one in an afternoon. We are awash in printed matter. It is ubiquitous. And don’t even get me
started on the proliferation of images.
When the importance of an artifact is drained out of it because its specialness as a unique item in the
world has been eliminated, there is still the experience of that item that one can cherish.
What I am driving at here is that the poem on the page/screen is in the process of becoming
drastically devalued. Poetry as a spoken form may be on its way back. After all one can read 100
poems this afternoon on the internet and tomorrow do the same with a different 100 poems. And so
on and so on. However, to hear a poem articulated live is a fairly rare phenomenon. I can think of
only a few times in my life where someone has spoken a poem in a social setting in the US. And the
context can make you fall in love with a poem the way one falls in love with a song.
Already we see movements in Brazil like Tecnobrega where the music is reproduced en masse onto
CDs and given away as promotional items on the street corners and at concerts. Or free streaming
sites are set up and the music can be downloaded. The artifact is free, but what the person pays for
is the experience of going to the gig. It is hard to imagine how this will stop as so many under 25
around the globe have come to expect this free and easy appropriation of cultural items. I can’t
imagine how new streams of revenue are going to be realized from producing cultural artifacts.
This trend/movement begins to turn artists into slaves of experience, not of craft. The hyped
spectacle is more valuable than the handmade book with custom endpapers.
I would like to think that the rare and sparsely attended poetry reading of today might be tomorrow’s
legitimate experience of a cultural item that simply can’t be completely reproduced [however, I might
be fooling myself . . . The future might correspond to all of us routinely perusing our cultural
artifacts we so easily reproduced (in other words, we might stay home all day and listen to records
in our rooms)].
Whatever the final outcome may be, it seems that the value of a poem as a thing on paper/screen is
rapidly deteriorating. I look forward, through the Sacramento Poetry Center, to a renaissance of the
poem as spoken charm.
POETRY BY TIM KAHL
Jenipapo
The new world in the tropics
is a marriage of fetishes—
there is a dark stain on the lower back
of children, these children ranging along
the seaboard from Maranhão to Rio Grande do Sul.
They carry the mongrel-mark with them,
a lullabye for the past’s morality play
. . . everywhere shadows.
They audition for their parts
with the quantum of their blood.
All are subject to
some recognizable percentage,
even the light-skinned, fair-haired one
who bears the jenipapo,
if not on the body,
then on the soul.
The jenipapo is used for wine
that tricks the soul into believing
it is free to move among its blemishes.
By day it is the mole on the Redeemer
overlooking the city.
At night it is a freckle on a dancing orixá.
The eyes can be tricked into
fusing these images together;
they are vigorously rubbed against each other
and then the juice of the jenipapo can be used
to make the skin darker.
The skin can lighten again during winter
and skin can wear off altogether
after a night of love in Pernambuco
where the slave girls brought
manioc cakes and cinnamon leaves
to the plantation owner’s son.
Oh, the new world in the tropics
is a marriage of fetishes.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, my little one
In the jungle is a mythical animal
Whose name still frightens everyone.
Crucible
My friends who are still determined
to explore the crucible of the soul
would rather live a life of jazz than a life of God.
They can see themselves at The Blue Note
in New York City, becoming one with
the saxophone’s essence, but they cannot see themselves
as God, traveling like rays of purified light
bent around objects in the ether.
Yet if a monkey could grasp the notion of God,
it would surely see God as swinging from tall trees
by the tail. I’m sure my friends would be amused by
such a monkey. They’d want to discuss
redemption over coffee. My neighbors would even go
as far as supporting the monkey in an election.
This side of the street would put up signs in
their yard. The other side would pass out
buttons at the rally. And I would stay at home and
listen to Cannonball in the morning, Sonny Rollins
after noon, Ben Webster in the evening,
Paul Desmond late at night when
the buttery moon is waking over New York City.
How the stars can seem like salvation.
They exist to save us from thinking we are
the plot of some grandiose story. This little planet
sleeps and coughs a bit to make sure all of
its religions still pay attention to it.
This little planet burps and hiccups,
and it is a fantastic sign of cataclysm.
God is coming here to finally put an end to all of
this monkey business, to smite all of this jazz
circling in the air around my friends
who stop and pause to wonder
what the world would be like
without syncopation everywhere.
Minions
Who dares to call the continents out by name? Europe and the
Americas. . . . in a game of Twister with Asia to see whose movies will
prevail. Only in the movies is the world bound with duct tape to keep
the continents from shifting. Suddenly, the movie ends with the leading
lady working two jobs to support her family in Kuala Lumpur. What she
earns is sent back home to her father, electronically. Tomorrow’s heroes
race to stay ahead of the currency exchange.
The dawn is the head of a man with the desire to keep moving;
he is the spoils of trade gone wild. He sees the footprints of two herds of
cattle diverging on the boardwalk. It is a gamble to walk there. It is a
gamble to walk on the sand below and see what drifts in to shore with
the trademark facing up. These things are borne of dust and filigree, on
the path to outreach: metal rings, rubber grommets, plastic fittings,
semiconductors.
At nightfall when all the cargo has been logged and entered into
the computer, the urge to hibernate forces audiences to theaters. Those of
us crowded in the dark watching the screen for the outcome are the gray
minions that flourish. In the spring we reproduce so that we may watch
more stories unfold. We look on and whisper, go back out into the
daylight to inspect our shadows where we ask ourselves: what future is
the bright dawn bringing . . . . who would dare to give a continent a
sponsor’s name?
Orion
The large and small dogs click upon the heels
of Orion. They are his companions as his thoughts
lost in love turn to gas and dust. The large dog
appearing before sunrise on the day of the summer
solstice. The ensuing rise of the Nile. Its appearance
marked the onset of drought, disease, and evil omens.
Mixing its light with the sun, the large dog points to
the small dog with a gesture meaning "paw-cut-on-glass."
The sky shifts to red. The charts of the astronomers
are drawn in blood. Rain washes the blood into
the river and the dust settles in the shapes of faces,
each face different without dogs or Romans
or specimens of herbs. The journey continues
for Orion, masked lover en route to the questar.
He is not looking for the nets cast at his feet. His hunt
is the fiction of orbits. If you look closely at his sword,
you will notice the breath of the large dog,
its tongue lapping at the glowing cluster where Orion
tips his arrows with the distillate of light.
As he shoots his arrows, the astronomers
consult geomancers studying metal filings
and ink blots. The Navajo chant for rain from
the sky. The sky answers with a small dog
being chased by a large dog, Over the horizon
they step in the fresh tracks of Orion
whose love lies at the end of the mountains
where the Berber dust flies up to catch the sun.
His black arteries move the lips of the charts.
Circles are drawn on the charts to separate
night from day, Etruscan from Roman.
All spattered like rain on a target. Orion sleeps
on top of the cushions where cultures test crash.
The clean up at the fringe of their territory
turns up collisions of outlines, merged figures in
the contested night, the amphibious Nommo
sent to tell humans how the end of the sky advances.
1. So you attended the AWP? Can you tell us a bit about your experience there?
It was my first time attending such a conference, and I felt a bit ambivalent about it. All the people I
had ever studied with warned me that attending was a kind of Faustian bargain, but I felt that I was
beyond the point where I needed to feel pristine. The experience actually surprised me because my
expectation of it was turned on its head. I had anticipated the daily presentations as what I would be
most interested in and the schmoozefest of the book fair to be the most brutal and repugnant;
however, talking to people at the book fair and learning what other people were interested in and
what they were up to was often a whole lot more interesting than the canned presentations that
people had prepared (some just read their papers out loud in a a droning academic monotone — those
were the ones I walked out of).
However, at the end of the whole affair, after my battery had worn down, I felt both exhilarated that
there were so many people out there whose passion for the literary arts would bring them to
congregate and display their wares, and I felt dispirited about the fact that there were so many others
out there in the country who were dedicated and talented and deserving of recognition. The
competition for eyeballs to pay attention to what you are doing is steep. This feeling was an
affirmation of the ageless feeling for a poet who writes in a culture which seems to undervalue
his/her efforts, even to ignore him/her, then when he/she penetrates the inner sanctum of those who
have similar interests, there are so many distractions within that small audience as well.
Overall, though, the big advantages were talking to a lot of interesting, dedicated, and passionate
people. Russell Edson was absolutely terrific, and Mark Strand’s reading of “The Delirium Waltz”
was magical.
2. You have contributed significantly to the Sacramento Poetry scene. What are your
thoughts about Sacramento as a writing environment? Can something more be done to
tap into the local talent? What can you say has been the Sacramento Poetry Center's
contribution to the local poetry scene?
I don’t know what I have contributed yet. I am learning that there have been a lot more people in the
Sacramento literary scene before me who have offered more blood, sweat and tears. I’ve only
ratcheted up my level of participation in the last several years. Prior to that I was a bit reluctant to get
involved. I had studied with people who were hard core avant-gardists (surrealists, LANGUAGE
poets, Situationists, absurdists, Dada, etc.), and there really isn’t that much of that type of thing
going on in Sacramento. (With a few exceptions) it certainly is not institutionalized at the academic
level. So I opted out for many years, seven or eight. I was just writing for some audience that wasn’
t terribly immediate, writing into the abyss, one might say. Publishing in literary mags throughout the
U.S. was rewarding in its own way, but over time it rang a little hollow. I think it was the imprint of
Sacramento’s hardscrabble agrarian past that made me work on being more immediately understood,
saying things more straightforwardly and relating my immediate experience more than my bedeviled
thoughts. I think I had been fighting with what I wanted Sacramento to be instead of accepting what
it is/was.
Teaching helped me loosen up a lot too. It is amazing how over the years being responsible for
conveying information to a group of individuals makes one appreciate lucidity.
And it is lucidity that much of the local scene relies on. At times I wish for a Romantic flight of
fancy, but these moments being actualized are few and far between. It is probably just as well that
Sacramento’s literary culture doesn’t try to emulate San Francisco’s culture of abstraction and
experimentation. Sacramentans want more blood and guts and experience. They are less impressed
with strange machines of thought or glimpses at the architecture of the subconscious. The poetry
center contributes to this culture with its aesthetic. It dabbles in the Beat influences that highly
inform Luna’s, and it tends to shy away from mimeograph revolution influences that are present in
less institutionalized venues around town. Occasionally a performance poet will show up, but more
often than not, it focuses on the poetry of the middle class, its concerns about beauty and family. It
isn’t overly academic, but it isn’t ordinarily of the street either.
As for the exposure it is bringing to local talent, it has done that pretty well over the years. Other
venues around town do pretty well in promoting local talent also. However, it is my great hope to
continue pairing up local talent with poets and writers from outside of Sacramento in order to
provide cross-fertilization. Also, I’d like to see the out-of-towners remark to their hometown poets
and writers that we have a vibrant scene. I think in the past the Sacramento Poetry Center has too
often had a rather insular programming. The foreign has a hard time in Sacramento, but I am certain
that as the impetus to be more cosmopolitan grows in Sacramento, then the embrace of the foreign
will grow as well. But “the new” in any form in Sacramento is often a long time coming, particularly
in a town that guards and treasures its past so much. Nostalgia governs the Sacramento aesthetic as
much as anything. That might sound hurtful to some who are invested in that aesthetic (though it
need not be seen that way), but I think it is a public service to pursue truth in labeling, and I really do
understand this inclination. I’m a National League guy, and I still have not accepted the designated
hitter.
So I have tried to start a translation reading series at SPC, and I am endeavoring to start my own
small literary press (Bald Trickster Press) dedicated to publishing works in translation. Hopefully, I
can continue to find projects and readers that will acknowledge this sense of the foreign.
3. I have enjoyed your poetry submissions. What inspired "Jenipapo"?
Before I arrived in Sacramento I had been teaching English in Brazil. I thought I could be Brasileiro,
but then I jumped on a plane at Santos DuMont Airport (then the international airport) in Rio and
landed at Sacramento International. The cultural difference slapped me upside the head. I longed for
a hint of Rio and São Paulo, and as I did this, I began to recount many of the things I had learned
about Brazil. One of these things was the myth of the jenipapo (sometimes spelled genipapo). It is a
fruit from the northern part of Brazil, the poorer and less European-influenced part of Brazil, whose
juice was used in colonial times to paint the skin black, in effect, to render black face. It was a literal
marking of whites as black, but over time that practice took on metaphorical weight.
In Gilberto Freyre’s great book Casa Grande E Senzala (translated in this country as The Masters
and the Slaves but is better translated as The Big House and the Slave’s Quarters): A Study in the
Development of Brazilian Civilization, Freyre describes how in the north, dark birthmarks on people
(seen as resembling the jenipapo fruit) were looked upon as the mongrel-mark, the mark of
miscegenation in that part of Brazil where interracial mixing was very frequent, if not the norm.
Beyond this, however, Freyre also points out how much of African culture has been taken up as part
of the dominant Brazilian culture. Samba is the infusion of African polyrhythms into European
musical structures. [In this way it is similar to American jazz, yet it differs in that samba is the
Brazilian national musical identity in a way that jazz is not]. Feijoada (black beans and sausage) is the
national dish, a slave dish. When I was in Brazil, I played cards with a bunch of European-derived
steel executives. We played the national game called “pontinho,” a game as popular as poker is in the
US, I was told. However, the game was played with all the eights missing. This was derived from
the slave culture where the game was made up. Slaves would receive a deck of cards from their
masters only when they had been damaged or a card had been lost, thus they had to adopt rules to
accommodate this slightly altered standard deck. [It is interesting to note that a similar game exists in
the US, which is known as “Coon-Can” (perhaps among other variants); however, I have never
heard of anyone outside of prison who has ever played this game.] In any case, all of this is to make
the point that African culture has had a huge impact on the national Brazilian culture so that the
mongrel-mark of jenipapo is not just a literal mark but also a mark on the soul of every Brazilian.
The above explains the first part of the poem, but the last three lines are also taken from Freyre.
Sleep, sleep, my little one,
In the jungle is a mythical animal
Whose name still frightens everyone.
They are an adaptation of an English translation of a Brazilian cradle song, a lullaby. The original
cradle song invokes a mythical animal, the carrapatú, a hybrid mythical animal whose presence out in
the forest scares small children.
I came to this point at the end of the poem after thinking about the history of miscegenation (a term I
don’t really like but it suits the discussion) in Brazil. In a country that has come to symbolize the
dissolution of racial boundaries by virtue of its generations of mixing, I noticed that there were still a
lot of racial markers and racial terms that were used beyond the simple “black” and “white” of the U.
S. In fact, the term “Baiano” (a person from Bahia) was often used instead of other kinds of
distinctive racial slurs. However, the name was pejorative and the effect would be the same as any
pejorative term used in the U. S. It was not a term used for flattery and it did not necessarily
distinguish a person’s regional heritage. The fact that most people from Bahia have much of their
African heritage intact (due in large part to the presence of the quilombos during colonial times) made
the term a de facto racial marker in my mind. This on top of the commonly used terms claro (clear),
preto (black), negro (dark) and azulão (big blue) [and presumably others I did not learn] suggested to
me that there were a lot more skin tone language markers in Brazilian society than I had previously
been aware of, and they were apparently commonly accepted, not used as terms of disparagement
like “high yellow.”
The undertow of this whole discussion is that in Brazil, a country where people pride themselves on
being Brazilian first, not part of some racialized identity, people are still assiduously keeping track of
skin tone. The fact that a large percentage of the wealth in Brazil is still concentrated in the whiter
parts of Brazil whereas the favelas are undoubtedly predominantly darker, suggests that even in Brazil
race is that mythical animal which everyone is frightened of. Despite centuries of miscegenation, it
exists and people are still marking racial boundaries of a sort.
4. The Sacramento Poetry Center promises to bring a cocktail of rich poetry events in
the near future. What should we expect as the time draws near?
I mentioned the translation reading series that I would like to continue. In April William O’ Daly from
Auburn will be reading. He is one of the country’s foremost translators of Neruda, having translated
some seven books of Neruda’s work on Copper Canyon Press since 1984. It has become his life’s
work. He has translated The Separate Rose, The Yellow Heart, Winter Garden, Still another Day, The
Sea and the Bells, The Book of Questions.
Readings featuring well-known poets Julia Levine, Josh McKinney, Chad Sweeney and F. D. Reeve
are slated to apear before summer arrives. Also, the SPC Conference in April will feature an all-star
lineup of Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Josh McKinney, Camille Norton, Quinton Duval, and Al Young.
Also, I’d like to move from just recording the audio at poetry events to doing video of SPC events
and loading them up on YouTube. This, however, takes time and energy and hard drive space on my
laptop, all of which are in short supply these days. And I’m somewhat reluctant to do this because
when I listen at readings, I tend to close my eyes so I can concentrate on the sound of the words.
Sometimes the visual is distracting. A video of a poet might be counterproductive for a listener to
hear a poem. But I think it is merely a matter of time before poets have their own poem-videos on the
web the way musicians have created music videos. Some poets have already ventured into this
territory; however, often these early results have been fairly uninteresting.
And next year we are embarking on running a nationwide poetry manuscript contest with book
publication and a monetary prize going to the winner. This will hopefully establish the Sacramento
Poetry Center and a press associated with its name as yet one more purveyor of national literary
talent throughout the US, and establish means by which other publishing projects can be looked at
which will benefit our local community.
One of the wackiest ideas I’ve had for an event would be for poets in the Sacramento area to read a
poem while manipulating a puppet and simultaneously throwing one’s voice. I like the idea of a
puppeteer’s inflection and changing of the voice coming to the art of poetry reading. Too many poets
read in a dead monotone, thinking they are hypnotic or something when they read that way. I keep
dropping hints about this, but no one seems to think I’m serious about it. Seriously, how does one
read Auden as a Tyrannosaurus Rex puppet?
5. I have observed at poetry readings that your computer notebook is really your
notebook-- you read directly from it. You also record readings for Podcasts. In what
ways can technology help poets produce their art. What are the limitations of
technology? Anything you can say about poetry and the internet?
Yes, it feels that at times I am clothed in data and only the skimpiest streams of it at that. Actually,
your observations are only partly accurate. While I have often read from my computer screen at SPC
readings, I more often read from paper. It’s a lot easier to track as you are shifting your gaze from
page to audience (and you don’t have to worry about scrolling). I also mostly compose and write on
paper. The presence of marginalia is too comforting. I don’t get the same effect by squirreling
marginalia away on another part of the screen. It is not immediately present. For an easily distracted
little chipmunk such as myself, I can quickly lose sight of what I might want to include if it is
outside my immediate field of vision.
The internet and poetry is such a vast topic I don’t know where to begin. The internet allows one to
meet others who you might not have had access to them any other way. It’s also good for fostering
distant relationships from the past. You put your wares out like a street hustler and see who wanders
by. It is nightmare and godsend. It makes it so easy to push out your work so that eyeballs might
capture it; however, the down side is that there is so much competition in the way of noise.
Through The Great American Pinup (where I appear as Victor Schnickelfritz) [http:
//greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com] I have had text exchanges that I have found informative, but just
like an online classroom, the give and take was limited. Some of the exchanges have been thoughtful.
Some have not. In any case, the real value of online communication is to glance at what people are
doing around the country/around the world and see how their textual strategies might be reflected in
my own. It’s a device for exploring when the same old same old has you down. Perhaps that means
we will be perpetually addicted to the new.
As we explore and build up new nodes and new connections in the system we have created, we take
on complexity. I enjoy the richness in a complex system more than I do simple, direct, linear kinds
of relationships. I think it is complexity that the greatest poems, the ones with real staying power,
embody. And to stretch this metaphor of the system even further, perhaps the most complicated
system of all is the one of self. Possessing a sense of self just might be a kind of attractor to which a
complex system gravitates. Poetry and the kind of personas it allows us to “try on” through the kinds
of language games we play permit us to navigate the system of self and discover moments of
stability as a “self.” But the same thing can probably be done with puppeteering, though admittedly
harder to do online. Unless one considers the avatars in an online game like “Second Life” to be
nothing more than electronic puppets.
I digress into abstraction. A dangerous occupation these days. Too much of that and someone will
sneak up on you, hit you on the head with a lead pipe and steal your mojo.
In short, the internet is a metaphor for how we might come to view ourselves, and if poetry is the
workshop where, among other things, one works on the self, then the internet is the master
document for all we might write.
6. Anything you would like to add?
It seems to me we are at an odd and precious cultural moment. Just as the age of mechanical
reproduction changed the relationship of people to the artifacts they produced, so too may we be
undergoing another similar kind of revolution in our relationship to the artifact, the things we have
made. Mechanical reproduction of goods dramatically changed the shape of markets. Mass
production allowed people to market their goods far beyond what they might have done before. It
changed the relative ease of accessing goods, and it made for a certain kind of standardization of
goods that we enjoy today but also simultaneously plagues us. Any trip to a mass retail store can
leave the impression that the vast quantity of similar goods is reassuring for their quality control but
deadening in the uniformity of look and feel of the objects in our lives.
With the internet, cultural items like music and poetry have become so easily reproducible en masse
(how long does it take to copy-and-paste a poem? how long does it take to duplicate an .mp3 file?)
that some have speculated the artifact has lost its meaning. The poem itself on the page/screen can
be read and duplicated so easily and quickly that one almost forgets the difficult history of the written
word. Producing something like a book was a painstaking procedure. Now a person can literally
produce one in an afternoon. We are awash in printed matter. It is ubiquitous. And don’t even get me
started on the proliferation of images.
When the importance of an artifact is drained out of it because its specialness as a unique item in the
world has been eliminated, there is still the experience of that item that one can cherish.
What I am driving at here is that the poem on the page/screen is in the process of becoming
drastically devalued. Poetry as a spoken form may be on its way back. After all one can read 100
poems this afternoon on the internet and tomorrow do the same with a different 100 poems. And so
on and so on. However, to hear a poem articulated live is a fairly rare phenomenon. I can think of
only a few times in my life where someone has spoken a poem in a social setting in the US. And the
context can make you fall in love with a poem the way one falls in love with a song.
Already we see movements in Brazil like Tecnobrega where the music is reproduced en masse onto
CDs and given away as promotional items on the street corners and at concerts. Or free streaming
sites are set up and the music can be downloaded. The artifact is free, but what the person pays for
is the experience of going to the gig. It is hard to imagine how this will stop as so many under 25
around the globe have come to expect this free and easy appropriation of cultural items. I can’t
imagine how new streams of revenue are going to be realized from producing cultural artifacts.
This trend/movement begins to turn artists into slaves of experience, not of craft. The hyped
spectacle is more valuable than the handmade book with custom endpapers.
I would like to think that the rare and sparsely attended poetry reading of today might be tomorrow’s
legitimate experience of a cultural item that simply can’t be completely reproduced [however, I might
be fooling myself . . . The future might correspond to all of us routinely perusing our cultural
artifacts we so easily reproduced (in other words, we might stay home all day and listen to records
in our rooms)].
Whatever the final outcome may be, it seems that the value of a poem as a thing on paper/screen is
rapidly deteriorating. I look forward, through the Sacramento Poetry Center, to a renaissance of the
poem as spoken charm.
POETRY BY TIM KAHL
Jenipapo
The new world in the tropics
is a marriage of fetishes—
there is a dark stain on the lower back
of children, these children ranging along
the seaboard from Maranhão to Rio Grande do Sul.
They carry the mongrel-mark with them,
a lullabye for the past’s morality play
. . . everywhere shadows.
They audition for their parts
with the quantum of their blood.
All are subject to
some recognizable percentage,
even the light-skinned, fair-haired one
who bears the jenipapo,
if not on the body,
then on the soul.
The jenipapo is used for wine
that tricks the soul into believing
it is free to move among its blemishes.
By day it is the mole on the Redeemer
overlooking the city.
At night it is a freckle on a dancing orixá.
The eyes can be tricked into
fusing these images together;
they are vigorously rubbed against each other
and then the juice of the jenipapo can be used
to make the skin darker.
The skin can lighten again during winter
and skin can wear off altogether
after a night of love in Pernambuco
where the slave girls brought
manioc cakes and cinnamon leaves
to the plantation owner’s son.
Oh, the new world in the tropics
is a marriage of fetishes.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, my little one
In the jungle is a mythical animal
Whose name still frightens everyone.
Crucible
My friends who are still determined
to explore the crucible of the soul
would rather live a life of jazz than a life of God.
They can see themselves at The Blue Note
in New York City, becoming one with
the saxophone’s essence, but they cannot see themselves
as God, traveling like rays of purified light
bent around objects in the ether.
Yet if a monkey could grasp the notion of God,
it would surely see God as swinging from tall trees
by the tail. I’m sure my friends would be amused by
such a monkey. They’d want to discuss
redemption over coffee. My neighbors would even go
as far as supporting the monkey in an election.
This side of the street would put up signs in
their yard. The other side would pass out
buttons at the rally. And I would stay at home and
listen to Cannonball in the morning, Sonny Rollins
after noon, Ben Webster in the evening,
Paul Desmond late at night when
the buttery moon is waking over New York City.
How the stars can seem like salvation.
They exist to save us from thinking we are
the plot of some grandiose story. This little planet
sleeps and coughs a bit to make sure all of
its religions still pay attention to it.
This little planet burps and hiccups,
and it is a fantastic sign of cataclysm.
God is coming here to finally put an end to all of
this monkey business, to smite all of this jazz
circling in the air around my friends
who stop and pause to wonder
what the world would be like
without syncopation everywhere.
Minions
Who dares to call the continents out by name? Europe and the
Americas. . . . in a game of Twister with Asia to see whose movies will
prevail. Only in the movies is the world bound with duct tape to keep
the continents from shifting. Suddenly, the movie ends with the leading
lady working two jobs to support her family in Kuala Lumpur. What she
earns is sent back home to her father, electronically. Tomorrow’s heroes
race to stay ahead of the currency exchange.
The dawn is the head of a man with the desire to keep moving;
he is the spoils of trade gone wild. He sees the footprints of two herds of
cattle diverging on the boardwalk. It is a gamble to walk there. It is a
gamble to walk on the sand below and see what drifts in to shore with
the trademark facing up. These things are borne of dust and filigree, on
the path to outreach: metal rings, rubber grommets, plastic fittings,
semiconductors.
At nightfall when all the cargo has been logged and entered into
the computer, the urge to hibernate forces audiences to theaters. Those of
us crowded in the dark watching the screen for the outcome are the gray
minions that flourish. In the spring we reproduce so that we may watch
more stories unfold. We look on and whisper, go back out into the
daylight to inspect our shadows where we ask ourselves: what future is
the bright dawn bringing . . . . who would dare to give a continent a
sponsor’s name?
Orion
The large and small dogs click upon the heels
of Orion. They are his companions as his thoughts
lost in love turn to gas and dust. The large dog
appearing before sunrise on the day of the summer
solstice. The ensuing rise of the Nile. Its appearance
marked the onset of drought, disease, and evil omens.
Mixing its light with the sun, the large dog points to
the small dog with a gesture meaning "paw-cut-on-glass."
The sky shifts to red. The charts of the astronomers
are drawn in blood. Rain washes the blood into
the river and the dust settles in the shapes of faces,
each face different without dogs or Romans
or specimens of herbs. The journey continues
for Orion, masked lover en route to the questar.
He is not looking for the nets cast at his feet. His hunt
is the fiction of orbits. If you look closely at his sword,
you will notice the breath of the large dog,
its tongue lapping at the glowing cluster where Orion
tips his arrows with the distillate of light.
As he shoots his arrows, the astronomers
consult geomancers studying metal filings
and ink blots. The Navajo chant for rain from
the sky. The sky answers with a small dog
being chased by a large dog, Over the horizon
they step in the fresh tracks of Orion
whose love lies at the end of the mountains
where the Berber dust flies up to catch the sun.
His black arteries move the lips of the charts.
Circles are drawn on the charts to separate
night from day, Etruscan from Roman.
All spattered like rain on a target. Orion sleeps
on top of the cushions where cultures test crash.
The clean up at the fringe of their territory
turns up collisions of outlines, merged figures in
the contested night, the amphibious Nommo
sent to tell humans how the end of the sky advances.