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The Huffington Post Interviews Geoffrey Gatza
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The Art of Conceptual Poetry: Interview With Geoffrey Gatza
by Loren Klienman
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Geoffrey Gatza is an award-winning poet and editor. He is the author many books
of poetry, including Secrets of my Prison House (BlazeVOX 2010), Kenmore: Poem Unlimited
(Casa Menendez 2009), and HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children (Meritage
Press 2008). He is also the author of the yearly Thanksgiving Menu-Poem Series,
a book-length poetic tribute for prominent poets, now in it's tenth year. His visual
art poems have been displayed in the gallery showing Occupy the Walls: A Poster
Show, AC Gallery (NYC) 2011 occupy wall street N15 For Ernst Jandl - Minimal Poems
with photography from the fall of Liberty Square; and in Language to Cover a Wall:
Visual Poetry through its changing media, UB Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY) 2011/12 Language
for the Birds. Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and publisher of the small press BlazeVOX.
The fundamental mission of BlazeVOX is to disseminate poetry, through print and
digital media, both within academic spheres and to society at large. He lives in
Kenmore, NY with his girlfriend and two beloved cats.
Loren Kleinman (LK): Why write Apollo? Talk about its premise? What's the goal of
the book? What are the main conversations?
Geoffrey Gatza (GG): I was drawn to write Apollo after falling in love with chess.
While studying the game, I realized Marcel Duchamp, arguably one of the 20th century's
most important and influential artists, was an intriguing figure in the chess world.
Apollo traces the central strategies and themes of Duchamp's work. Movement, displacement,
doubling, isolation, pun, and metamorphosis are the tactics used by Duchamp to estrange
the ordinary. More than just a collection of poems, this book is a readymade, taking
the form of a souvenir ballet program detailing a one-night-only performance of
Apollo by Igor Stravinsky to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Armory
Show in New York, in which Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a sensation
during its exhibition. At its heart, this book is about Marcel Duchamp but it is
also about chess. It was thought for a long while that Marcel Duchamp gave up art
to play professional chess. However, this was found to be not true with the revelation
of his last major artwork, Étant donnés.
Using the form of a ballet, this work calls attention to the acts of performance,
movement and choreography as well as the rhythms and balance of dance. These ideas
are also found in chess. The conversation between dance and chess runs through this
work. Each character is represented by a chess piece and their movements are conveyed
and correlated as dance, thus the reason this book takes the form of a ballet. Marcel
Duchamp, his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, Dorothea Tanning, Leornona Carrington,
and Gertrude Abercrombie perform the ballet. Max Ernst leads the orchestra and Dizzy
Gillespie performs a special solo.
The ten sequences in Apollo are performed in poem sections unfolding with specific
functions towards the production and appreciation of the creative act. Duchamp famously
said, "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings
the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its
inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." This book
establishes a more active role for the reader, who is asked to participate in creating
meaning from the text. The work becomes collaboration between the audience, the
poet, and the tradition that they've all inherited. The diversity of these works
echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific,
the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.
LK: Is Apollo a conceptual poetry collection?
GG: Indeed, this is a conceptual collection; conceptual with a lower case 'c.' I
say this to distinguish this book from some of the Conceptual poetry being written
by Kenny Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and Divya Victor.
The whole book is an art object, taking the form of a souvenir program of a ballet
performance that never took place. In the proper spirit of the performance, I sent
out invitations to the ballet, giving an address and performance space that did
not exist. The text of the book needed to move beyond the ordinary form of poetry,
so a Stravinsky ballet was chosen to act as the template/stage for the work to happen.
Opening with an introduction narrated by Duchamp's female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy
sets the stage for the evening's performance and as hostess for the evening, tells
the story of Tiresias. The first tableau details the birth of Apollo and how Apollo
created the game of chess for Caissa in an Ovidian style of mythic writing. This
is followed in turn by the myth of how Duchamp gave up painting for other forms
of more engaging art.
A dada chess poem and a photo ballet of a chess game are used to illustrate the
moving perceptions of chess. Highlighting Duchamp's work, forms a relationship with
it, and gives relative weight to the subject.
Three long poems look at the work of three prominent female surrealist painters.
Dorothea Tanning's painting, Birthday, is contemplated in "The Twelve Hour Transformation
of Clare," a story of a woman who disappears into words. Leonora Carrington's work
is thought through in "Recipe for Water," a poem of time and contemplation of relationships
within a mystical space. The Ivory Tower by Gertrude Abercrombie is enacted in a
retelling of the Lady of Shallot.
Duchamp Draws Rrose Sélavy is a three-act play that sets up an imaginary scene between
Marcel Duchamp and his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy. They play a game of chess
in the final moments before Duchamp completes his last major piece, Étant donnés.
At the end of the play, the audience is trapped in the tableau of Étant donnés,
left in a museum. To complete the book, the ballet takes the form of a complaint
letter to the director of the Albright Knox. Detailing the true story of how I
was kicked out of the museum for carrying an umbrella, the ballet ends on the outside
steps with the author anticipating the redundancy of death.
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Read the Whole interview at the Huffington Post [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=00167EhSfB2UEvnHSfuntwZbGaTop7zA19GYwF0ZRVQeatbFLcVJQRvAbuYDAjZIJ6bmQ4jCpvF9VnvIfFZfOZ8UHOMG5k3Wxnp3AfKFI3kB--copdqb2W8u1IV9-_zWqdKd0lwSkK6MY80TnQ6KfGm-hvyZa5vWdwh9R7-hBRnFSTLM4EpC-UaEngw3m_3VUMcV4YIyEOTlN0SvesOiykrnwiOPbOqn1GaLqjXAVZ59GFc7XIjxRDWFT0jHluVHcJN8i_U_nSw-Gc=&c=MbXhhbenvo_LHT1doowTQbCpiSJ24Ja5WkOfHchD9EXeANjnWgieHw==&ch=cQyb1ix7mjaQ5strP9F70vWUICpewBkaJX0xR6PRPvEWrBo-S9MdIQ==]
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Apollo by Geoffrey Gatza
It has often been said that Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess. Geoffrey Gatza
has reversed the process, and produced a sumptuous "souvenir program" of a performance
of Stravinsky's ballet Apollo, framed by an elaborately-plotted chess game between
Duchamp and his female alter-ego, Rose Selavy. The results are stunning.
-John Ashbery
Apollo is available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon and the BlazeVOX [books]
webpage.
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