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Funding Fuels a Dynamic Society by Mark Robbins |
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| Mario Petrucci: poetteacherperformerscientistecologistwarpoet | |
JAZZ to JACK DANIELS - And The VOICE in-between... Renée Sigel, Literati Magazine’s Publishing Editor interviews TODD SWIFT… My
father, 'my way' ……An old joke tells of some schmuck who lost the rights to Sinatra's hit. That schmuck was my dad. About five years ago, in a Montreal nightclub, I bought an old jazz pianist from Vegas a Jack Daniels. We got to chatting, about the touring circuit he was on, about the legendary bad old days of Sinatra and the Rat Pack. After a few more drinks, he proceeded to tell me a joke, something of a classic in his trade. It's one I've heard before -- more of a lounge-lizard legend, really -- about some schmuck who had the rights to the song My Way and let them slip through his fingers. Although it was a very funny story, I didn't laugh. You see, it's actually mostly true, and it's about my father. Todd Swift This was the very first piece of writing I read by Todd Swift. The article is as much homage as it is a tale of remorse of a son for dreams his father lost. Beneath the raconteur one encounters in his writings, be it prose or poetry, the inner voice of Todd Swift is one of a deeply intuitive artistic defiance. The lesson learnt is painful and permanent. Born of a lineage that dates back in direct descendence to Jonathan Swift, the emergence of Todd Swift from a psychological milieu of ….Almost Were… to being far, far more than …a Maybe…comes with an inherent sense of creative dissidence. It isn’t often that a poet gets to review, profile and interview a peer. Literati affords me this rather unique opportunity and in this instance, writing about Swift fills me with a certain excitement and trepidation of the illicit: the challenge is undeniable. It is almost as if he wears subversiveness like a scent; it precedes him and lingers in the room after he has left it. The bitter irony of that old bar joke is that Swift Snr is not the only musician to have been bereft of ‘My Way’: David Bowie sulked and pouted in rage for a year when he learned his translation was not what “they” wanted and went to look elsewhere. He even told the story to dearest old Parkie, on that favourite of favourite British TV chat shows. So how many other singers share this tale is hard to tell. Bowie chose to prove to the world he could write something equally good and came with the now legendary Life on Mars?.. The rest as they say is history. As for the impact on history the flair and charm Swift will yield, in this day and age, is hard to tell. Poets seem to suffer seasonal tastes as much as fiction writers and predictions are generally wasted. As seems too common these days, the best poem always loses. Having spent virtual-time with Swift recently, I am taken by the subtle, yet tactile sensuality of his verse, especially in Café Alibi. Listening to him reading I was expecting more performance in the readings than there was: perhaps this came from knowing how much he has committed to poetry performance and how he had tried to get poetry cabaret off the ground in Budapest with not much success, which he put down to the “natural failure to smuggle cultural movements across borders”. I find the notion interesting, as much as it feels historically at odds with the vicarious disposition held by both Dadaism in Europe and the States as well as Surrealism across the same two continents soon after. I am not sure it is a natural failure. In respect of the oral tradition, which is based on repetition and endless variations in interpretation, at least on the African continent, which my cultural backdrop, I still am not any the wiser as to the true relationship between slam dunk oratory rants and raves to true poetic expression. I figure it is time to find out. It would seem easy to profile success but getting to the man beyond the list of his achievements is easier said than done. It feels much like shopping for a gift for someone who has virtually everything: where do you start? Reading through his pedigree, from having been a reluctant “pornographer” for Penthouse to being the 2004 Summer Oxfam Poet in Residence, with a multitude of achievements in between, it seems hidden talents lie, out of sight in the shadow of the spotlights, in an abundant pile. What does one ask a critic, editor and cultural organizer based in the West End of London: who authored or edited a total of eight collections of poetry: whose work can be read in Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Korean; whose poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Agenda, Books In Canada, Geist, Matrix, New American Writing, Orbis, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Shop and Stand and has been featured in some of the leading literary Internet sites such as 3AM, The Drunken Boat, hutt, Jacket, Retort, Salon, Shampoo, Sidereality and Snakeskin and who is no less, poetry editor of voicesagainstwar and the award-winning site http://www.nthposition.com/? Well one question certainly comes to my mind, dear Mr Swift, LITERATI: Do you ever sleep? (All teasing aside) When and how did your interest in a literary career, especially the precarious one of a poet originate? I do work rather relentlessly, I suppose, these days. I feel time's wings at my back. I also wasted much of my twenties living life, rather than writing of it. But I sleep a good seven hours every night, though with nightmares. I began writing at the age of three. I dictated a novel to my parents called "Mac and Marc the Heavenly" which was based on Dante but involved the slightly older francophone toddlers across the hall from us - we lived in an apartment. My uncle Jack, my (recently deceased) beloved aunt Bev, and my Mother, particularly encouraged my early writing, and bought me many books. By the age of fourteen, I knew I wanted to be a poet. I think it was Ezra Pound that truly excited me, made me want this life. Not his poems so much as his passion for poetry, including others. I also loved his name. It seemed so unlikely and yet just-right. LITERATI: What drew you to create the duo Swiftly Laszarus? Tom Walsh - a very hip jazz musician, composer and muscial promoter in Montreal, "discovered" me in the early 90s. I was doing a lot of readings in bistros, and cafes, after working a double-shift as a photocopy-guy (I had dropped out of college for awhile). Tom invited me to collobaroate with his eclectic posse of rappers, DJs and other musicians at some late night clubs. I'd rap/recited poems while the jet set danced to the mix. In time, this developed into our duo, Swifty Lazarus. I enjoyed fusing poetry to music, but it has never been my main attraction. Tom and I created one CD (The Enevlope, Please), a sixty-minute soundscape, which is out on Wired on Words, a Montreal label. We recorded it in Budapest and Canada. Some critics say it is one of the best spoken word albums ever. We were trying to pay homage to our sound-word heroes like Gould and Welles. LITERATI: The extracts I have heard from The Envelope Please brings two related questions to mind: a) what made you decide to co-compose poetry with music being such a major component of each of the 16 pieces? b) listening to extracts brings personally, the vocal landscapes of 20th century composer Micheal Nyman to mind. I can’t help wondering how familiar both you and Tom Walsh are of Nyman’s output, if at all? I wanted the words and music to interweave, without the words or the alphabetic elements (the text and spoken collages) to take priority. I feel these sorts of projects are usally vanity events for either the word or music person. We tried to blend the egos in a new sort of mix, that was almost Brechtian in its audience-defiance. We challenge the easy-listening ironies of the spoken word scene, up the ante, in a way. Nyman would not have been a clear predecessor here, but Burroughs and The Residents, Hermann, and Anderson, they would be, more. LITERATI: Do the two of you have any further plans for new work together? Tom and I continue to discuss future projects. If someone wants to fund us, we'll happily make a new record. Our interests in conspiracy theory, the news, and the Bush cabal seem more relevant now than even when we started in the mid 90s. LITERATI: You poetry has been described as many things and the one which caught my attention was ‘media-savvy’: having read your work and noticing too the evidentiary aspects of your play on words, toying with the rhythms and double meanings that are central to hype and advertising copy, I am fascinated by your approach to incorporating it in your poetry. The effect created is an expression which hinges on that borderline of tracing traditional poetic orthodoxies and tossing them out the window, with an almost conscious sense of carelessness. How much of it has always been there? Or would you regard it as a natural evolution of your style and technique? "Conscious sense of carelessness" - well, that might be going too far, but yeah, to an extent. I used to think of myself as a punk-poet. But the problem is, my main heores, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Auden, Larkin and so on, are a little more elevated than that would suggest. The major UK poet George Szirtes once kindly noted how my work negotiated Bishop and Ginsberg. I think that's about right as an aim, though I doubt I have achieved such a balance. I want the energy and daring of the alternative worlds of performance, music, even the art world, with the grace, control and sense of tradition that the "orthodox canon" provides. A sense of thrilling new beauty can emerge from technical mastery, or an allusion to such an ideal, cutting across a libertine looser risk-taking. I do find ad copy a kind of poetry, but I don't like prose per se. I love to verve language up, keep it guessing as it unfolds. I am currently reading a lot of poetics: Plato, Sydney, Heidegger, Bernstein. I think poetry needs to constantly write to poetry and other poets, and poetic theory - language paying homage to Pater's gems, in ever-shifting light. LITERATI: You have been outspoken about the isolation of Canadian writers and poets from the larger international literary framework. Has your experiences in Budapest, Paris and now London revealed any different kinds of insights as to why your fellow writers and poets are kept at such a distance? Canadian writers and poets are not entirely excluded from the world stage. Atwood, Carson and a few other very acclaimed Canadian poets just finished a tour of the UK. However, when a major UK critic like Caracent publisher Michael Schmidt can say Candian poetry is "a short street not worth going down" there is a problem. What has happened is that the world of poetry has split into that part which is fostered and maintained by the mainstream publishing world, and those part which are emerging from the global alternative scenes of performance, the small presses and the Internet. The global Internet-driven poetry scene is actually more vibrant, but it lacks the canonicity, the authority, confered by major prizes and publications. The mainstream presses are clearly uncomfortable (as are their equivalents, the large music labels) with copyleft (free) distribution of works on the net. So they do their best to carry on business as usual. That business is a game, and a very competitive one. It tends to favour British and American poets based in the major cities, or who write out of a certain tradition, and to be less interested in writers from other countries, who are more avant-garde or margibal. Canada, unlike, say, Ireland, fails to receive its proportionate share of critical and scholarly attention - bluntly, without the reviews, the anthologized poems, and a Nobel (say, for a poet) Canada punches below its weight. Atwood should have won the Nobel this year, arguably. LITERATI: Could you please elaborate on your anti war stance through poetry: what started it and how did the various projects you got involved with evolve? I think I would prefer to ask interested readers to go to www.nthposition.com and download the free e-books "100 Poets against the war" or actually purchase the Salt edition, to read my Introductions. The poems mostly speak for themselves. I will say that I believe it is very important for poets to bear witness to injustice, and to oppose war crimes when they see them coming. I think political poetry is one of the key roles for poetry, but not by any means the only one. LITERATI: What kind of relevance do you believe poets can have in our tumultuous age, given the immense pressure on a culture of grab & swallow, where even magazines will highlight in a little box on a given page, how long the said article will take to read ( averaging from 2 and half to eight minutes)? Poetry is the highest linguistic art form, and poets are its practitioners. As such, as long as there is language, there will be poets. Poetry is less "publicly" relevant today (in The West) simply because we have a capitalist system in place, which is unable to properly exploit - hence successfully commodify and disseminate - "poetry as product". Poetry exceeds capital. The velocity of a poem is more than money. Poets are known, and loved, and have a power, an influence. Poetry continues to inspire millions every day. One of the ironies of our age is that the "media" has severely underestimated the interest in - and potential of - poetry. On London's Underground, they present poems beside ads. The poems compete well - they are brief and moving - like ads mean to be - but a poem is an ad that never stops giving, becuase it isn't trying to sell you something - or maybe what it sells is worth buying. Poems give freely of their time. I have a utopian belief that poetry will one day be one of the tools we use to defeat or transform our current prisonhouse of a world-system. You don't have to write politically - just well, which is political in simply defying this culture of idiocy. LITERATI: In respect of the oral tradition, which is based on repetition and endless variations in interpretation, at least on the African continent, which my cultural backdrop, I still am not any the wiser as to the true relationship between slam dunk oratory rants and raves to true poetic expression. I figure it is time to find out. Just where and how do you find the vanishing point where these two extreme versions of expression meet and how do you reconcile the two experiences, having experienced a session yourself as something of a meat market as you put it, and losing a particularly humiliating experience? I am less and less interested in the direction that competitive slam poetry is going, but the expression of poetry via oral, performative or multimedia means is one aspect of poetry that should and will continue to thrive. The formal, written basis of poetry has always been structural (and linguistic) in some sense: whether metrical or just rythymic, and with, of course, sound patterns, like ryhme - this sort of pattern is very conducive to oral presentation - is, in fact, where the written and the spoken poem intersect best (say in the ballad or nursery ryme form). I think the problem of a disjunction arises when poetry becomes (on the page as they say) something that "sounds" prosaic or, due to the textual aspects involved (perhaps lay-out or complex play with meaning) cannot be easily communicated to a listener - so that the "music" isn't there. This breakdown usually leads to either performance or text getting the blame. The truth is, it is neither that is at fault: the mistake is in attempting a translation from silent word to spoken when one is neither intended, or best suited. It is silly to accuse a well-performed poem of doing damage to a text. Performance poetry does not render the original forms, the craft, invalid, but may enhance one side of its appreciation. Of course, when performance is used simply to market something other than the poetry (i.e. sex appeal or comedy), as if ashamed of the poetry itself (which can of course also be sexy or comedic in part), we usually are dealing with a very mediocre "product" indeed. LITERATI: Where do you see yourself and your role as an author and poet twenty years from now? What kinds of achievements would you best liked to have attained during that time? If I am still alive in twenty years I would be 58. That would be a thrill. I would hope to have a good Selected poems out then, and perhaps some wider recognition from my peers. I would be pleased to have received a major reward, simply because I could use the platform that would give me, to continue to work towards greater tolerance among the various and warring schools of contemporary poets - basically, mainstream and experimental. I truly think we need to rise above such small-minded divisions and work towards varieties of poetry. Poets lead a tough life, and they don't need all the bitter rivalry. My work as editor, activist, promoter and critic tends to focus on celebrating a broad-church view of poetry. My main goal is to leave behind a small collection of poems - maybe a few hundred - that will continue to inspire, delight, and intrigue poetry readers for centuries to come. I'd love to be a minor poet like Coventry Patmore. This isn't meant to be grandiose, but honest. All these poetic ambitions derive from my sense, gained as a child, that nothing in life was more special than a poem; thus, it is because I love poetry so much, that I seek to work always in her service, and court her ghastly, enticing favours. I would also hope to have become a better husband, and a father. LITERATI: Most poets NEVER get an agent!! What was your secret box of chocolates? My agent is for my work as writer of screen fiction. Poetry agents are fabled beasts unlikely to appear to most mortals. *** Todd Swift's books are for sale at Amazon.com To find out more about Todd and his work visit his website. |
