oracles by Edward Smallfield

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One of the greatest things about being married to my favorite writer is getting to have an ongoing, daily symposium with him about writing, reading, politics, culture and art. It’s a pleasure for me to share his new chapbook, oracles, and our conversation about it.

How did you come to write oracles?

I hope I can give a long answer to a short question. To paraphrase one of Borges’ characters, the writing of oracles came from a long way off.

I love the erasure process, and I will talk far too long about that. Before anything, though, I want to acknowledge my debt to several truly wonderful erasure projects. I’m thinking of Barbara Tomash’s book Her Scant State (an erasure of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady) and Laura Walker’s Follow-Haswed (an erasure of a volume of the OED) and of Stephen Hemenway’s erasures of Wittgenstein in Fold Books and of Alexandra Mattraw’s erasures of Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf in Raw Anyone. I was also emboldened by John Cage’s erasure of Finnegan’s Wake (which I haven’t read). There are many, many wonderful erasure projects, but these are the ones that I’ve read and reread and which have mattered to me.

oracles is an erasure of some pages of John Cage’s Silence. I had erased some pages of Silence before, and those erases became the “to whom it may concern” section of the book to whom it may concern. I didn’t want to repeat what I had done before. The main impetus for beginning was that I love doing erasure so much and that I especially enjoy erasing Cage, and that Silence is a book that I particularly love. I did not have particular thoughts about the result of the project. I just wanted to follow the process.

When I erased pages of Silence before, I moved through the book intuitively, choosing pages without knowing why. This time I decided to proceed more rigorously by picking a starting point and erasing each page, regardless of whether I felt “inspired” by a page or attracted to it. I also tried to pay attention to my own process. I noticed that I tended to pay more attention to the left side of the page. To compensate, I did some erasures where I tasked myself with beginning with the right side of the page. This seemed to result in a more complex or confusing result in which the page presented multiple possibilities for reading. I hope that’s true of more than a few of the pages in oracles.

I stuck with the original plan of erasing pages in order for a quite a while, but then I realized that I had come to a section which I didn’t particularly enjoy erasing, and that the results didn’t seem to me to be particularly interesting. I reverted to my older method of simply deciding intuitively which pages to erase. oracles is a mixture of both processes.

I also didn’t have any plan for stopping. (Like America at war, I had no “exit strategy.”) When I had between 80 and 90 pages, I decided that it would be interesting to look at the pieces and see whether anything that might interest a reader could be made of them. I decided that I work toward a final of about 35 pages, more or less. What I ended up with were the 26 pages of oracles (not counting the title page and the process note). The order of the pieces isn’t the original order in which the pieces were written. The order is simply my intuitive sense of an order that might work. And I would also be very happy if the reader threw the pages into the air and let them fall and read them in that order.

Throw these pages into the air and read them in the order they land in would be a wonderful, and very Cage-like instruction to the reader. Are there any other invitations that you could imagine making to readers of this work? 

Thank you for this wonderful question, which allows me to talk about the way I think about the erasure process (and also perhaps about poetry in general). I’ve had listeners at readings tell me that they like erasures, but that they wish they knew the erased text better. I love Silence, just as I love Cage’s music and his visual art. I think it would be wonderful if more people read Silence and listened to Cage’s music (and if that music were performed in concert much more!) and looked at Cage’s visual pieces. But I don’t think the connection of the erasure with Silence is particularly important (except in so far as Silence was an inspiration to me, especially in terms of process). If anything, in erasure, I want to set the language free, both from Cage’s intentions and from my intentions. My hope is that all the language has been thrown up in the air and has landed wherever it has landed, so that both Cage and I have been erased from the picture, and that the interaction will be between the reader and the language. In trying to set the language free, I would also like to set the reader free.

In this second encounter with Silence, what felt different to you from your work on “to whom it may concern”?

This is a great question, and I hadn’t thought about it before. My personal circumstances were quite different when I worked on the poems in “to whom it may concern” and when I worked on the poems in oracles. When I had started the work on “to whom it may concern,” I had just had a second melanoma removed and was getting ready to start a course of immunotherapy to try to prevent a recurrence of the melanoma. I had quite a few medical appointments, and I was open to the poems that came directly out of those, but it was also refreshing to work on the Cage erasures that had nothing to do with my personal situation. I also recognize that mortality was very present because of the melanoma, and that the silence inherent in Silence can connect with mortality (among other things). The subject of all poems is the clock… When I started working on oracles, we were in summer in Barcelona and the sky was full of light. I worked on most of the erasures on the balcony. I was much more conscious of experimenting with erasure as a process while I was working on oracles, but now I realize that the memory of my first work with Silence was very present. For me the results of the two processes were very different, but that is something that a reader has ownership of much more than I do.

My methodology was the same in both projects (and the same in any erasure that I’ve done). I’m only allowed to erase. I can’t add anything, and I can’t move anything. All of the spaces are either part of the original text or the result of erasures. I haven’t brought words or phrases closer to each other, or pushed them farther apart. All of the changes in font are Cage’s changes, not mine. (I’m very happy about Cage’s changes: I think they add interesting textures to his text and to “mine.”) I want to be as restrictive with myself as possible to make sure that there is little of me in the final result as there can be.

What’s important about that for you? 

That’s a great question, and I think it has multiple answers. Obviously, Cage experimented with different methods to keep himself out of the music: the use of the I-Ching and other chance operations, composition based on imperfections in the paper, and many other methods that I’m not aware of. Cage is a great sponsor for making works of art that are not direct expressions of the self. But there are examples on the poetry side too. One way of thinking about poetry is that it is the expression of the deepest self, and highly personal. This is an idea that we associate with the romantics, and is very popular in our tradition. On the other hand, the oldest poems in western literature begin with an evocation of the muse, of something outside the self that brings the poem. (I realize that inspiration by the muse can be part of the romantic idea, and I don’t necessarily want to disagree with that, only to point out that it can also mean something quite different.) If the concept of muse seems too old-fashioned, we can use Jack Spicer’s idea of the Martians. Spicer makes clear that the Martians are an open-ended concept, a way of talking about something which is not the self that brings the poetry. But perhaps what is most important to me is that I want the interaction to be between the reader and the language of the poem, and I want to intrude on that interaction as little as possible.

How did working on oracles impact/inflect/inspire other writing you were doing? 

While I was working on oracles, I was also working on a long project called odd year diary, and probably also on one or two other projects that I can’t remember now. odd year diary is mainly made up of the “daily” poems that I like to write, so the problem with that project is the usual poet’s problem: seeing the poem that might be there, and finding a way to enter into that poem. Working on oracles was refreshingly different. If I felt like working on oracles, I would take Silence and my notebook onto the balcony and begin working. I usually did two or three pages at a time. One of the joys of erasure is that the project is always there when the poet wants to work on it. For me the projects seemed to proceed on separate tracks. If I looked at the odd year diary poems that were written while I was writing oracles, perhaps I would find that some of the language of oracles found its way into odd year diary.

Could you talk a bit about your relationship to Cage’s various art forms? 

I’m humbled to admit that I came to Cage’s writing before I came to his music. I didn’t know anyone who was listening to Cage or to his kind of music, and I wasn’t aware of opportunities to hear his work in performance. That was a long time ago, in the days of records, and when records were expensive. (Perhaps composers are more generous than poets. Morton Feldman wrote some beautiful music for Frank O’Hara, but O’Hara never mentions Feldman or Cage in his poems.) My first engagement with Cage was through his book A Year from Monday. A lot of things drew me to that book: the interest in Zen, the adventurous use of the page (no so dissimilar from what some poets were doing), and Cage’s openness and freedom. When I did discover Cage’s music, I fell in love with it. Cage is one of my favorite composers to listen to, and especially to listen to while I’m writing. John Ashbery tells a wonderful story about Cage’s music as inspiration. Ashbery was a young man living in New York and had decided to stop writing poetry because absolutely no one was interested in the poetry that he wanted to write. Then he attended the first performance of Cage’s The Music of Changes. After the performance, Ashbury decided, “if Cage can do this, I can write whatever we want.” Many of us need permission to take the freedom that we want to have. Cage’s work can certainly be one of the great sources for that permission.

I was involved with A Year from Monday for quite a long time, and I discovered Silence much later. I feel very fortunate about that, because I didn’t know Silence all that well when I started erasing it. I love both books, but I now prefer Silence because it is much more explicit about Cage’s artistic process.

When I was looking for cover art for to whom it may concern, I spent a lot of time looking at Cage’s visual art on the internet. What a joy! I wanted to find a piece that was really right, but I also kept looking just for profound experience of seeing Cage’s visual art. I’ve already said that I wish I had a lot more opportunities to hear Cage’s music in performance. I also wish that I had more opportunities to see exhibitions of his visual art.

The idea of permission is an important one. Could you talk about your own experience of finding the way to artistic freedom? 

I may be the wrong person to ask. I feel that it took me a long time to understand how to do my own work in my own way. Perhaps, in a healthier world, we wouldn’t feel the need for permission. Before we begin to try to make any work of art, what is there but a state of absolute freedom in which we can do whatever we want. We aren’t surgeons—a “mistake” will not kill anyone. If anything, an interesting mistake can lead to even more interesting mistakes, partly because the whole idea of “mistake” is misleading if we are trying to do something new and original.

I suppose the problem arises from thinking there must be right ways and wrong ways of doing things, and sets of rules. I am in general for obeying traffic laws, especially when those laws make sense. In writing a poem, or a novel, or composing a piece of music, the point must be to do something new. And that requires a different kind of thinking.

Probably I learned more about writing from my students when I was teaching creative writing than from anyone else. The most important thing for me was that I didn’t learn how to have the freedom to do my own work in solitude. I learned from being in conversation with other poets and working with them, and learning from their work. I also learned from other writers whom I thought had found their own original work, and from composers and painters.

I have to say that the word “freedom” has to be one of the most abused words in American English at this moment. We are all aware that a group called “Moms for Freedom” exists solely to prevent other people from reading the “wrong” books. I spoke earlier of Cage’s use of the I-Ching in writing The Music of Changes to free himself from his own subjectivity in composing music. I’m well aware—and so was Cage—that from another point of view the use of chance operations or my rather rigid rules for erasure are limitations on the artist’s subjectivity and artistic freedom. In the arts, I think we’re empowered to arrive at our own idea of what our freedom consists of. In politics, I think we need to arrive at some sort of consensus, and I have no idea of how to get there in this moment.

What are you working on right now?

I mentioned earlier that I was working on a project called odd year diary while I was working on oracles. I’m still working on that. As I said, the project is an opportunity to try to find the poem that might be available in day and enter into it. Obviously, a project called odd year diary has a defined end date. If I want to continue after December 31, I’ll have to choose a new title or begin a similar project with a new title.

I’m also continuing to work on an ongoing project that involves making poems of my dreams as honestly as I can. The project is called night void messages and you very generously published some of the poems in an earlier palabrosa.

I’m also working on a collaboration with you based on sharing poems about the concept of the Witches Sabbath. I love collaboration, and I love collaborating with you, so that project is a great joy.

What are you reading? 

Usually I’m reading several books, but right now I’m reading (actually rereading) just one, Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen. I don’t know a single living person other than me who has read this book, so it is hardly on anyone’s reading list. I’m intrigued by Ford’s very peculiar methods of novel making, his disjunctive storytelling and use of odd points of view at strategic moments in the narrative. In this case, The Fifth Queen is Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth queen. Historical novels often romanticize the period in which the books are set, but Ford’s view of English history in that moment could not be darker or more cynical. If possible, the work is almost as dark and as bleak as Shakespeare’s Henry VI series (also not on many reading lists). All of the women in the novel, both the commoners and the royals, recognize that they are tools of the patriarchy and survive by accommodating the brutal world that men have made. Catherine Howard tries to wield power like a man, and loses her head following that brave impulse.

Is there anything else that you want to say?

Yes! I want to thank you for publishing oracles on palabrosa. palabrosa is the perfect place for the poems, and I would rather have them on palabrosa that anywhere else.

I also went to point out that oracles is very much a work in progress, and that any thoughts that your readers are willing to share with me would be deeply appreciated. Readers, if you were inclined to take a few minutes and share your thoughts about the piece with me, I would be extremely grateful.

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You can purchase Edward’s books here, at Small Press Distribution, and his chapbook sargasso at Dancing Girl Press and Studio.

And read him online here, at periodicities, at talking about strawberries all of the time, and at your impossible voice.