An Interview with Stephen Rodefer

Chicago Review, Winter 2009 by Kindellan, Michael, Kotin, Joshua, Adams, V Joshua

You were a student of Charles Olson's in the mid-1960s at SUNY, Buffalo. What was that like?

Well, at the start it was altogether uncertain. I mean, at registration in the gym in the fall of '63, I didn't exactly know what to sign up for as an elective. Someone next to me said, "Myth and Literature, that guy's a poet." Well, I'd never heard of him, but I liked poets, especially living ones. William Carlos Williams had just died, and we were never shown a poem of his as students.

On the way to the first class, in Cook basement I remember, I ducked in to use the men's room, and there was a guy at the other end of a row of sinks having a Marine bath, shirt off, suspenders hanging from the waistband at both sides, just going at it with a bar of soap. Five minutes later, sitting in the seminar room, we all looked up and a big clean guy in a water-stained shirt walked in, sat at the desk, unpacked a Wollensack, put on a tape and hit the button. Well, for the next half hour, perhaps longer, we were treated to, more like deluged by, a complex harangue having to do with archaeology, the Sumerians, someone named Havelock, Frobenius, or Merleau-Ponty, the pre-Socratics, the whole question of Enkidu, and all other manner of esoteric reference. I was twenty-two, it was all Greek to me, and I rather thought as well it surely had to be to the other students. Then he punched off the tape and carried on in the same voice much the same confounding discourse.

One learned years later via George Butterick, the director of the Olson Archive at Connecticut, who was in the class like me, that it was a tape of Olson's lecture given earlier that summer at the Vancouver Poetry Festival. And that Olson felt just too nervous to plunge in on his own, and so leant on his own voice and previous delivery to break the ice at this new job. And we were off.

Is it fair to say that you share Olsons concerns about the polis and his attitudes toward poetic composition? In the "Pretext" of Four Lectures you wrote, "My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation. To read it and in reading, order it to read itself. Not a doctrine, but a public notice."

Not so really quite. Well, of course, part of me likes the comparison with the original master imago mundi librarian and archaeologist of morning, Who wldnt? But, some other parts quibble or nag, "yet not exactly." My own world I guess is perhaps less imagined directly from the CITY as indirectly from its quotidian marginalia, meridians, latitudes, or the airwaves all around and over it. I mean, it's internal as well. Just to cop Spicer's scarred radio idea of it. Though I suppose you could posit the world now as a metropolitan, with the countryside being many vast suburbs. The globe is the polis now, though that could be seen as exceptionally insensitive, say, to the suffering in the countryside, in countries all over the earth.

Olson kept saying re WCW's Paterson, for example, that Williams didn't have the first idea of a city. He would say such, wouldn't he? But me, I instinctively felt that to be wrong. The address in Paterson was citizenly, a metropolitainerie interior and exterior. It was shape of mind as such. The city was a mode of thought for the local-present, suburban, and metropolitan all at once. He could flip up his typewriterstand in his office, just as fast as he could his unit, and he did both.

For Olson, it was the whole deal-heaven and earth and all human history. That was a difference in their ratio and scale. You could propose Williams won the ratio bout, but the historical nut of Olson's o'er finessed him on the historical scalene, which was galactic. (Olson drove a Ford Galaxy Station Wagon in Buffalo, the only car he considered up to his size.) Well of course Wms naturally cldnt be bothered with such fol der ol, for he was a local boy. A Passaican New Yorker, chasing about his office a poetic clientele. Though at the historical edge of the locale, he could absolutely nail it-as with In The American Grain - just as he perhaps hippocratically and hermeneutically re-examined the Catholicism of his patient Polish- American mothers on the table.

Olson's hippo camp upped the ante on Williams. He was the requisite, the s elf- elected stand-in. He wld be his own imago mundi. It was his mind, or perhaps better the mind, though it seems he apparently thought there were no others equal to the job. There were just reference desks, like Frances Bolderoff in DC. He even used Jeremy Prynne as one. Of course he wld never reference Pound. Pound was better-read, smarter, if less righteous, though I think more rigorous. But that's certainly arguable. Pound captured the world city historically - and it was an assault and an ultimate victory, though of course with severe cultural loss - via Idaho, Philadelphia, then arrowed and hid by Swarthmore, then corrupted and seduced and rejected by London, Paris, and finally Venice and the U.S. Attorney General's Office. And all his story was the historical metropolis.