Failure Virtue and Risky Poetry: Kyle Schlesinger with Paul Mazier

Artcritical: the online magazine of art and ideas, Friday, June 17th, 2016.

PAUL MAZIAR: Take us back to Buffalo in 2001 when Cuneiform Press began. As I understand it Robert Creeley, a key influence on your work, was there.

KYLE SCHLESINGER: Wow, that’s a blast from the past, and what a blast it was. Sure, Bob was and continues to be a huge influence on me on so many levels: the art of collaboration; poetry; poetics; grace; generosity; and a general ease of movement and insistent curiosity towards the world that is absolutely singular. He was the busiest guy in town, but when you sat down to talk he didn’t miss a beat, remembered everything, which taught me a lot about presence, giving your attention to whatever’s happening on a particular occasion. Just before I left for Buffalo I had a stint teaching high school English in a mill town in northern Rhode Island, French Canadian Blackstone River, those times. I was fine with the work, but a terrible disciplinarian, having a run-with-scissors spirit myself, so he suggested that I come up to Buffalo, get an advanced degree, and try teaching college, which is exactly what I’m doing now, fifteen years later and a little bit grayer.

I started Cuneiform Press with the intention of publishing experimental work by emerging poets. Very simple chapbooks by people like Patrick Durgin, whose Color Music has, to my mind, totally held up over the years. His wife’s brother made some punk collages on a photocopier and we printed the images on a Print Gocco, a little silkscreen kit that was big in Japan for a minute. I bought Fabriano paper and set it a page at a time with the very limited supply of Palatino monotype in the printshop. I’d throw a proof in Patrick’s mailbox at night, he’d make any corrections after dinner, then I’d go back to the press, print the page, redistribute the type, set the next page, and hit repeat.

PM: I love the low-fi action that still comes out of your printshop. The punk show posters you recently did look great. I’ve also seen that phenomenal Will Sheff (Okkervil River) book you made, your call for musicians’ manuscripts for Cuneiform, and heard tell of your upcoming stint. Are you really moving into a camper on a California beach, to surf and write a book about Bill Callahan?

KS: The Will Sheff book is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done with Cuneiform. I sent him an email, saying that I think his essays on (mostly) music are the best since the heyday of Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and that I’d like to put them together as a book, sort of a collected or selected essays. His publicist wrote back to me saying that Will was busy working on a movie, and would it be possible to check back in a year. I did, and he was still busy…

Then it occurred to me that books don’t always have to be published in large editions, that, taking a cue from book artists, sometimes just a copy or two can do the trick, that sometimes you make a book just because you want it to exist, and nothing more. So I tracked down every

essay I could find, started copy-editing and fact-checking just like I would any other Cuneiform book, did the typesetting and design, got it printed and bound by hand up in Colorado, two-color throughout, marbled endpapers, the whole nine yards, sent him a copy, and kept one for myself. Took about a year, a ridiculous amount of work for a book with no social significance, but it turned out kind of perfect since so many Okkervil River songs are about keeping it real, bands imploding when they make it commercially, and the virtues of failing in a world with a conservative notion of ‘success.’ That’s the first in this music series and others will follow, though they’ll be printed in standard editions, distributed properly, etc.

PM: I appreciate that you too turn to music for failure. This failure virtue is part of what charms me about poets like Alfred Starr Hamilton. It seems to be something that we don’t find so often these days, do you agree? You took me to that Katherine Bradford exhibition in Portland; we were both pretty tickled (for me it was the paintings’ ‘outsider’ look in such a hip gallery) by the show.

KS: I often think of ‘Love Minus Zero No Limit’: ‘She knows there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all.’ There’s a guilty irony in quoting Bob Dylan, a face-shifter of many types, and the archetype of the music industry’s coded, coveted, prescription for ‘success’ with a million imitators. Every artist I talk to is in the same boat: how to make a living and make the art they want to make. Not just in the United States, but Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and so on. Everyone’s wondering, maybe even a little nervous, how life can be more meaningful, but no one can say why… Or can they?

The MFA and the NEA killed art in America, which is why I can say that I feel a strong sense of connection to various artists of the last forty years or so, but there’s no discernable movement that resonates with me — including so-called ‘outsider art,’ which has become a branded commodity, subject for a syllabus, theme for an exhibition, etc. The real outsider artists don’t know what that term even means.

Lou Reed said something like, ‘There’s a door, and behind that door, is everyone you’ve ever wanted to meet. Then the door opens, and you stand there wondering, knowing that once the door closes, you can’t get out again.’ And that’s the danger of ‘success,’ to my mind. Once you write a ‘Paul Maziar poem’ you can’t write that poem again. Goodbye, Paul. We’re living through a very conservative time, and the dreamlike simplicity of moving to London, Berlin, Prague, Los Angeles, New York, etc., getting a part-time job waiting tables in pursuit of an illustrious ‘career’ as an artist is a perverted fallacy, a pimping of the past, and every dealer and producer knows that. The surplus of art versus the demand for art is at an all-time low, which leads us to an interesting question: Why do you want to do what you do when there’s really no social need or viable economic gain to be had? Is it personal happiness? I’m on board with that; I want everyone to do exactly what they want to do every day, all the time, but I also think that’s the real question we all must ask of ourselves, not specifically related to the day-in, day-out, fact of our lives, but taking ourselves, as such, out of the equation.

I know that could sound pessimistic or jaded, but I don’t mean it to come across that way at all; it’s actually quite the opposite. George Herms said, in a recent lecture I attended, ‘The single most important fact of my existence is that the population of the earth has doubled since my

birth.’ I haven’t fact-checked him on that, but I take the sentiment seriously, or as William Carlos Williams once remarked, ‘an empty space is the sign of a poor economy.’ So the long and short of it is, we’ve got a revolution going on, one with more talent and underutilized artistic resources than ever before, so let’s storm the fucking gates and build a world we want to live in, with history close to the heart.

PM: I was charmed by that Creeley anecdote in The Art of Collaboration, where he, after having seen your letterpress printshop digs, asks you why you haven’t gone all digital, adding “if we had the internet in the fifties when we were editing the Black Mountain Review, we would never have done things this way.” It’s worth pointing out that you’re no extreme acolyte of a model (you didn’t follow his line of thinking comme ça). Do you look at art online or strictly in museums and galleries?

KS: That’s a great question Paul. I keep a foot in both worlds. I teach classes on New Media Theory for a living, so I’m always reading up on the latest so-called ‘advances’ in technology. I think it’s something artists need to be aware of on multiple levels, but in terms of my personal practice, the more unplugged I am, the happier I am. It would never occur to me to look at art that has been reproduced digitally, nor am I partial to computer-generated art. On a recent trip to New York, I was happy to see a return to painting in the galleries I visited; no more projectors and flat-screen installations, and that’s something of a relief to me. I feel fortunate to have grown up with a typewriter and records, moved to CDs and Word Processors, and now I have a computer I use as strategically as possible. Mostly you’ll find me reading books, listening to records, and visiting as many artists in their studios and galleries as possible. The all-consuming pendulum of the digital age has hit its apex, at least in the art world, and for people younger than myself in particular. I have the idea that the tangible, sensual, real-time experience of creation is making a major comeback. The desire to get one’s hands dirty is an inexplicable fact of being.

PM: How does your digital music listening experience stack up to your vinyl collection?

KS: Being very much aware of the havoc corporations like Spotify have inflicted on the music industry, I’m quite adamant about the listener’s responsibility to support musicians because their livelihood is at risk, if not already ruined. Needless to say, were so many musicians any less committed to their practice, we would live in a world of silence, barring only the most mainstream pop celebrities. That said, I have a Spotify account and use it regularly to hear sounds I’ve never heard before, and in that sense, it’s a practical tool to have, but the next step is, if I happen to like something, I’ll buy a ticket to the show, scoop up a record or two at my local independent shop, or better yet, buy it directly from the musician. It’s actually rather shocking, and saddening, to realize how popular one has to be to make a sustainable wage as a musician. When the tip jar comes around at the end of the night, skip that nightcap (you’ll feel better the next morning anyway) and pitch in. If everyone threw in a ten-spot, then that musician you love who just entertained you for a few hours might not have to get up the next morning to mow someone’s lawn or mop the floor of a brewery. Sorry, I know I’m preaching to the choir here!

PM: What’s your idea of a good time?

KS: Exactly.