The internet suddenly seems different. A little sublime. Everything and nothing. I don’t know if this is an epiphany– if it is it’s certainly half baked. Nor do I know if it was necessarily incited by my exposure to Catherine Daly’s work, or if it’s merely a thought that arose simultaneously during the course of the conversation we had. Her work is not expressly technological in nature, but I think there is something in the way she seems to find dual uses for everything that makes it feel that way. In To Delite and Instruct, for example, she creates poetry from source materials such as Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments and other writing workbooks from 1950s and 60s, and suggests a more engaged approach to crafting poetry than expecting it to be “gifted” from an exercise (look for this piece to soon appear in the new Bernadette Mayer Folio section at Drunken Boat). It’s didactic (in a sly way), but it’s also a critique at the same time as art. Her collection Paper Craft is also at least two things: it’s poetry; it’s also an object. Which leads me to my original tangent on the internet: there was a time— maybe fifteen years ago?— when the internet was more of a mysterious thing, a cloud, and less of a marketplace. It was a kind of arcane poetry unto itself. Today, it would be easy to dismiss as a shiny advertising colossus or a passive repository for information. But Catherine makes it seem like a tool in the rawest sense. Her work weaves and is woven. It evokes that old, missed adventure in me of exploring new places. The familiar is new.

Catherine’s poetry is online and in print. An Illinois Scholar at Trinity University and Merit Fellow at Columbia, she has been a Wall Street bank officer; she has been a software developer; she has been an engineer; she has been a teacher. She is the author of numerous poetry collections— Locket, Secret Kitty, To Delite and Instruct, and DaDaDa to name a few, the latter described by one reviewer as “Cavernous and electric…DaDaDa unfolds as a hypnotically twisted love tome investigating the r/elation between language systems and the erotics of communication.”Comprised of games of language, tradition and tradition breaking, coding and decoding, often done simultaneously, her work is finely layered. Secret Kitty— available as eBook— is a self-described “flarfy critique of flarf.” In it, poetry is sent into the internet, changed, and reclaimed.

She is at work on a long project entitled CONFITEOR, a 1,000 page poem. In addition to writing, Catherine’s i.e. Press focuses on writing and art that engages the eye and ear.

Her blog, and several of her eBooks, can be found here: DREAMER IN THE WAKE

The phrase “strategies beyond….postmodern ventriloquism” is used in the description of “DaDaDa.” Does this refer to what you view as a kind of rampant recycling of postmodern approach in writing?

Because one of the strategies in DaDaDa is to turn the writings of others into my writings, there is this sense that historical writings are puppets — excavated, hollowed out and then filled with me.  So in that sense, “strategies beyond… postmodern ventriloquism” is a sneaky gesture towards critics: look, this isn’t the only thing happening here, just because this is happening. For example, doing this always results in a critique of the poem.  In another respect, though, yes, there’s way too much postmodern writing — variations of project and found poetry (which I do a lot of, but a little peculiarly) — which rests at the source without doing anything beyond re-performing the source text.  I find Cole Swensen’s work to be particularly thin.  Then there’s the case of flarf, although it is more constructed.

Concerning flarf poetry, it seems a bit like postmodernism having reached a critical mass. Some don’t take it seriously– it’s sincere, maybe, but it can also seem sort of headless. What distinguishes a valuable construction from one that is simply off the rails? In other words, how much micromanagement can a flarf poem withstand before the spirit of the endeavor is lost?

Flarfeurs want to have it both ways:  they are seriously critically constructed, and most have earned their theory chops (hence their being taken seriously by the langpos), but they want to dance away from every sort of criticism at the same time they engage it.  This is why they flog the apparent meaninglessness of the poems.  It is apparently a sexy dance for some.  Hence my first Hello Kitty book, where the indeces of various search engines acted more like languages (as far as yielding significantly different search results, depending on index focus), as well as that searches in [one] language and then translation [into another language] had a quite different result from babelfishing.  The book is one poem through three different search engines, and then translated to Japanese and back three different ways.

The brilliant thing about flarf is it forms a text field where all is criticism, and anything can be said.

The other thing I wanted in Hello Kitty was an open form — at least at the time — and I have stopped reading a lot of flarf, because it seemed to me some of the best flarf had a formal intent, and all of it was looking and feeling like closed form, left justified, stanzas, lines.

You’ve said that creative writing exercises or prompts are rarely of true value “unless assignments come from the writer, or are accepted by the writer in order to pull or push one’s practice a certain way.” (an interview w/ Thomas Fink). Your poem “Andragogy” seems especially leveled at eschewing traditional instructor/student prompts. How does one train for the intimate engagement of a poem?

The fast answer is by reading, reading your own work, reading other work.  But it is a good question:  I think the exercise — and because the “experiments” of experimental poets converge on the prosodic practice of the formalists, and somewhere in between are the “poetry exercises” — leads to a too-formulaic idea of what poetry is about.  Broadening this, I think there’s a sense that conceptual poetry, or what Kenneth Goldsmith calls “uncreative writing,” is performance of the idea, i.e., the formula.  His background is in performance art.  Much found poetry as well as super-cohesive book length poetry projects also seem to be performance — but there, I think, performance of the idea of what a poet is.  Take this text and ring my poet-changes on it.  Not that I haven’t done all of this myself.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve done it, not for the heck of it, or just to churn out stuff, but to learn by doing.  And when I teach, I do try to work with the students who want prompts — many adult students go from teacher to teacher, gathering different prompts — and say, read this sort of poem. What is making it tick?  Can you try that?

Can you give me some insight into your interest in Hello Kitty as a vessel for your work? At times it seems like the pop identity of the character appeals to you, but also the mélange of cultures with which Hello Kitty is associated (this fits with the idea of garbling of your own words, translated into foreign tongues and then back again). Why have you filled this particular entity with “you”?

I try to make the character’s mouthlessness important in the books, because there’s a lack of opening, a complete closure, and no speech, no tongue — [no] language?  The books are based on Hello Kitty coloring books, so they are these insipid fields of mostly non-verbal information — a lot different for me (when I started) than what I had been doing.

CALICO CAT has been in progress for about three years because it involves music and color, and I just haven’t taken the opportunity to deal with it.  I started some color, note mapping with the text, and realized that what’s really required is a sort of Glenn Gouldish color – note mapping of the spoken/imagined text.

in KITTENHOOD, it is more the success or failure of language to be located — the poems are mostly titled from Olson’s Dogtown — the carvings on rocks there.  Which in turn, relates to [Bernadette] Mayer bringing bricks w/ words on them into workshops (I have heard, I never went to the poetry project until I read there — from Secret Kitty).  I think in general, the MS Word Art in the text was probably less pushed than the writing in the first book.

I’m not sure what the last book will be about yet.  But I think you can see:  Hello Kitty is the opposite of a mouthpiece.

Hello Kitty’s mouthlessness; locationless language; the idea of sound speaking for itself (“Phonograph“); the use of modern technology to alter and disguise your work; it all seems to lean in the direction of taking human beings (or at least their interpretations) out of the equation, or at least banishing them for a moment in time. There’s a haunting purity to those Dogtown rocks. Do you feel that your work in this vein seizes on an innate rift between artist and audience, or are you instead inviting your audience to experience something beneath the surface of immediate understanding?

Fast answer: as opposed to post-humanism, I’m looking at what people have made and do (products, techne) FOR the human. In the work of mine that look most closely at the problems of authorship, the speaker, voice, the “I” –does our culture merely make these things?  I don’t think so. People make them, and they become “touchstones.” But those people are readers, spectators, observed, participants. There is of course a barrier thrown up here, in the process of trying to read/write more of the world and approach it in a perhaps less tiresome (more irksome, though?) manner. I was reading an interview with Jean Renoir last night, and he mentioned that in his opinion, including the audience, giving them room for interpretation, was merely that:  considering them.

Can you talk a bit about your long project, Confiteor? It sounds like your work on Confiteor often spawns other projects; I’ve read that it is to be a survey of 20th century poetics, but can you elaborate on what you envision the scope of Confiteor ultimately to be?

The long project is named after the confessional in the Roman Catholic church — I confess… that I have sinned in my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do, and I ask all the angels and saints and you my brothers and sisters to pray for me, etc. Except in the Latin, the relationship between pray and sing/speak is a little clearer.

In any case, for me it is a good rubric for wiggling out from under something like the Divine Comedy; the project is where women’s writing of all times and places (and sorts) crosses with the ideas of 20th century poetry (DaDa, Objectivism, etc.), and philosophy, particularly philosophy of identity, confession, language, theory itself, and math — the boolean algebra of the computer chip, the modern algebra (in vol 2) developed at the same time as revolution-era ideas of freedom and cosmology.

it is 1000 pages, four volumes, the first three each a trilogy and the last one an “addendum.”  There are not 10 or twelve poems in each book of each trilogy:  they are essentially independent books with some similarities to the others. Volume one’s device was an etymological “cloud” or “cross” of older to younger synonyms of mystical keywords surrounding a keyword of mysticism (like “light” or “mirror”).  They are a sort of neo-baroque embedded game — there are others, truth tables, etc.  Volume two’s device is reducing to binaries:  0 or 1, x or y, x or o. These binaries relate text which sometimes only has a narrative relationship through breakdown to binary, and sometimes reads in a normal-ish syntactical way through [those binaries].  These are some of the ways there are “objects” underlying the poems.

All my work spawns other works, but what’s happened is that , by the time DaDaDa was published, I had about 10 full length manuscripts, as I’d been writing for nearly 15 years.  So, I put one preliminary[manuscript] together with one primary one, and added in an ongoing series which had some thematic similarities.  Object-Oriented Design was accepted for publication two years ago, but like everyone, I think we’re just getting back to a normal publication schedule… I hope… anyway, that had started with Enheduanna, moved through some Sappho — the history of women’s poetry — moved through the development of the device, and ended with the modern algebra poems — the words “she’s a series” — then I realized maybe the order should be reversed, and begin with “she’s a series” and move back to identity/Enheduanna ([this was] itself already a dusie chapbook).

But then, some other poems which were closely related got written after publication, like a poem which rolled up the Da3 device into a rotating four point star, and so that became PAPER CRAFT.  Then, Paper Craft has its own on-hold sequel, called Craft + Work.  More is projected in the paper vein; as pointed out by blurbing Kenny Goldsmith, “in the domain of the digital, here is paper…”

The work isn’t coming out in any sort of order.  But some of the work in To Delite and Instruct was originally intended for the big project, too.

Locket was definitely intended to be the precursor to Vauxhall, but Vauxhall has as much visual poetry and embedded gaming as Da3.

This is just a jumble of facts, though — I think the more serious thought is, why?  And the idea is to have a long poem which is not “the world” and not a “life work” and not a single story but does cohere.  And so that work must query history and speech and reading; technology and how technology vs. art and gender aren’t truly binaries, but can use them…and the idea of writing and forgetfulness and versioning.

You mention that Confiteor serves as a rubric for getting out from under something like “The Divine Comedy”; in what way does it free you? Have you specifically felt the weight of Dante in some way– a structured voyage through religion, literature, science, etc.– when approaching the material for this project, or did you mean in a broader (or perhaps more personal) sense?

The project is a melding; The Divine Comedy is a special document, in my opinion, in the history of the Roman Catholic Church and in the history of poetry. The Divine Comedy is at the root of Pound to Andrews, but there’s very little that is relatable or philosophically relevant in it any longer. But also, since Catholic High School omitted Milton and all the protestants, Dante…loomed a bit larger.

What (and who) do you read for fun– poetry, prose fiction, flash fiction…?

I read a lot of nonfiction.  I also read a lot of flash fiction and new fiction that my husband hunts down and I steal from him.  I’ve been following flash fiction over the past 20 years or so.  I read “junk books” and “falling asleep books” as well.  Mussolini’s definitive biography, that sort of thing, is a falling asleep book; the first one was Don Quixote.  Couldn’t read more than a page a night.  The “junk books” are usually art/design from the library, and there’s usually one decent idea to glean from each one.

How to be a writer, how and what to write, how to someday be a great writer…. when one makes things, one spends a great deal of time — more time than building it, surely — doing it all “on paper” or as a draft or prototype or even in stages before actually making the thing.  One of the newer things is “wireframing.”