Interview with Gary Cummiskey in Bengali literary journal Boier Duniya (The Book World)

An interview with Gary Cummiskey in the Kolkata-based Bengali literary journal Boier Duniya (The Book World) by poet and publisher Subhankar Das. Subhankar is currently publishing my latest collection of poetry, Somewhere else.

An English translation of the interview is below:

When did you start writing poetry?

I was about fourteen when I started. One day in school our English teacher set us an exercise. He played the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac track 'Albatross' and told us to listen carefully. Then he told us to write a poem about an albatross for homework. I think I was the only kid in the class who liked the idea! That night I wrote a poem about a dying albatross and realised I wanted to write more poems … and so it started.

 

Tell us about your magazine Green Dragon.

Green Dragon was a literary journal that I published from 2002 to 2009. It ran to six issues and featured both poetry and prose, as well as interviews and reviews. The first two issues were staple bound, while the others were perfect bound. I printed about 300 copies of each issue. I published mainly South African writers but also some overseas ones, mainly from the US, but also from the Netherlands and the UK. The seventh issue was scheduled to be a short-fiction special, with material selected by South African writer and poet Arja Salafranca. But the amount of material we received was so big that it turned out to be a huge anthology in its own right, called The Edge of Things, which appeared in 2011 and was highly acclaimed. Green Dragon did not continue after that. I got tired of it, it was a huge amount of work.

 

Your favourite poets and how do they move you?

I have so many favourite poets and my preferences change. But my main influences have been the US beat poets and the modern French poets. Among the US beats my favourites are Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman, as well as more borderline beats such as Marty Matz and Philip Lamantia. Among the French, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Prévert, Joyce Mansour and Claude Pélieu. Also the Spanish-language modernists, such as Neruda, Vallejo and Lorca. Among South African poets definitely Wopko Jensma, Sinclair Beiles and Seitlhamo Motsapi. A feature that that they all share is a willingness to experiment with language, to use language in new ways, often in a subversive manner. I am both intrigued and inspired by poetry that aims to challenge the norms in which language is presented or used.

You know about the Hungryalist writer movement here in the 60s, you were a friend of Pradip Choudhury. Do you think there is a common theme of independence or something worth mentioning about their work? Falguni Roy was also an important poet and Sharmy made a short film Eebang Falguni aka The lost lines of a beauty monster, which you have seen.

From the few Hungryalist writers whom I have read, there are certainly common voices of independence, of breaking away from conventional literary forms, a willingness to experiment, to take risks. There is definitely a countercultural stance. I have often seen the Hungryalists referred to as ‘the hungry generation’, which sounds similar to ‘the beat generation’. I don’t know where that phrase originated from, and while, yes, the Hungryalists and the beats shared a lot of common concerns and there was interaction between them – eg Ginsberg in India, and Ferlinghetti publishing some of the writers in the City Lights Journal, plus corresponding with Malay Roy Choudhury – the scenes were quite different, and in no way do I see the Hungryalists as ‘India’s version of the beats’ – the Hungryalists had emerged quite independently of the beats.

Falguni Roy is an interesting poet and I would really love to read more of his work – has there been a complete volume published in India? A tragic figure, publishing one collection in his lifetime and dying of drug abuse, and certainly influenced by the Hungryalists.

I sent you a book by Subimal Misra who was an antiestablishment exponent here, any comments. 

I haven’t read The Golden Gandhi Statue from America for a while, but I have it set aside for a reread. That book had a big influence on me as it encouraged me to continue writing short fiction, short fiction that didn’t have to follow conventional lines, or even have a narrative in the traditional sense. I liked what Misra said about his work not appearing in bookstores because bookstores sold products called books. That resonated with me deeply, as independent voices rarely find themselves stocked in bookstores here in SA. And I love that Misra dedicated the book to Jean-Luc Godard, whom, Misra says, taught him language.

Sky Dreaming, a chapbook of poems by you was published by Graffiti Arts Collective in 2011. I still remember Pravasan [Pillay] handing over the cover design of this book to me in Sweden in the venue where I was doing my poetry reading. Mouni Mondal did a  small chapbook translating a few poems from this book in Bengali and she did a good job.  Now this year we will be doing another poetry chap of yours, Somewhere else. Tell us about this new project and how you usually compose a poem?

Somewhere else is a collection of 26 poems, composed over the past four or five years. Some of them were inspired by a trip I took to Turkey in 2019. As usual with me, some of them are prose poems. And most of them quite surreal. Poems come to me – usually when I least expect it, not when I am thinking of writing. I can’t force poems out. I can’t sit down and decide to write a poem. The poem comes or it doesn’t. And while the initial inspiration may see the poem written down spontaneously, I do spend a lot of time on revision. I believe in craft in poetry.

I admire that work of yours on Sinclair Beiles, what a book. His books of poems are hard to find here. I wish I had a few so that I can translate his poems in Bengali. A beat poet who never got any recognition. What was the reason behind that?

There are a few reasons behind Beiles’s lack of recognition as a poet. First, from a South African literary perspective, he spent much of life outside the country. He wasn’t an active participant in the local literary scene until about the 1980s, but by his own admittance he didn’t want to fit in, anyway. Most of his publications were very small, limited editions – one chapbook in the 1970s was only 20 copies – another collection, in the 1990s, was only four copies. This has made access to his work very difficult. In fact, after the publication of the first edition of Who was Sinclair Beiles? in 2009, I found a chapbook of his I had not been previously aware of. Even the University of South Africa, which has most of his titles, neither had it nor had heard of it.

How is the independent writers' scene in SA? Here I count on the young guns. 

The independent writing scene is still around, and always will be, hopefully. South Africa has always had independent voices. One of the greatest threats to independent voices, in South Africa and elsewhere, is self-censorship: giving in and producing what is politically, culturally or commercially acceptable – and marketable. The temptation to produce what will generate applause and accolades – market success. The main challenge for independent writers, however, is the lack of publishing outlets and the ability to find readers. We need more small, independent presses in South Africa that publish quality, innovative work. We could do with more journals, and certainly more online journals.

What is surrealist poetry? An introductory talk by Gary Cummiskey

The following is the English version of an introductory talk I gave at a surrealist poetry event I participated in the Dai Art Gallery, Zamalek, in Cairo, on 14 December, 2022. The event was hosted by Mohsen L Belasy and Ghadah Kamal Ahmed.

An Arabic translation of the talk appears in Sulfur 'Surrealist Jungle'.

What is surrealist poetry?

It was about a month ago that Mohsen asked me to give a talk for this evening on ‘What is surrealist poetry?’ My reply at the time was that this was an almost impossible question to answer comprehensively, and that I was not sure if I could answer it. Now it is a month later, and I still do not have a comprehensive answer. And besides, I am suspicious of answers, and much prefer questions.

What is surrealist poetry? Well, among the French-language poets, we may have read Breton, Éluard, Péret and the great post-Second World War poet Joyce Mansour, who was Egyptian. 

Joyce Mansour

When we read their work we should get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry. And among the English poets, if we read the early work of David Gascoyne or Philip O’Connor, or that of Roger Roughton or Roland Penrose, we may get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry to the English. And then in the US, there is the work of the great Philip Lamantia – ‘the voice that rises once in a hundred years’ – as Breton said about him, or the work of the contemporary surrealist poet Will Alexander, and also the late Ronnie Burk. Unfortunately I cannot speak about surrealist poetry in Latin America, other European countries such as Spain, Portugal or Romania, or even countries such as Egypt, because I am not knowledgeable enough.

Philip Lamantia

But to get back to the question. For me, a problem with trying to explain something, to define it, is to risk limiting and restricting it – and that is the exact opposite of what surrealism has always been about.  If we say, for example, as is usually said, that surrealist poetry is characterised by dream imagery, then we are saying that surrealist poetry should contain dream imagery.  But is that true? And if we say that surrealist poetry is the result of automatic writing, then we are saying that surrealist poetry must have been written quickly and without conscious intervention or revision. But we know that is not true – Breton himself rejected automatic writing as far back as 1930. And neither Aragon, Char, nor Éluard – the great poets of surrealism –  ever practised automatic writing.

For myself, as much as I admire Breton, Éluard and Péret among the French-language surrealist poets, I much prefer the work of the more borderline or renegade surrealists – poets such as Artaud, Prévert, and some of the members of Le Grand Jeu, such as René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. None of these poets produced poetry that can be immediately recognised or labelled as surrealist. That is because their poems do not have the outward characteristics of what is considered surrealist poetry.

René Daumal

And in the post-Second World War period, moving into the 1950s and 1960s, I admire the work of the PANic movement – Arrabal, Jodorowsky, and Topor. There is the story of how Jodorowsky travelled from Chile to France determined to rescue surrealism, and when he finally met Breton, he was dismayed to find that the great leader of surrealism did not like rock music (actually Breton did not like any music!), science fiction, or comics. And so Jodo decided to form PANic.

 And among the American poets, much as I admire Lamantia, I also have tremendous admiration for the work of Bob Kaufman and Marty Matz, who are more usually associated with the beats than with surrealism. Then there is the psychedelic work of the poet, photographer, and film maker Ira Cohen, who would rigorously shake off any label, whether  ‘surrealist’ or ‘beat’.

Bob Kaufman

Ira Cohen

And then what do we make of the poetry of the US surrealist Ted Joans, who declared ‘Jazz is my religion, and surrealism my point of view’? As much as many of his poems are dedicated to surrealists, such as Joyce Mansour, with whom he collaborated, or reference surrealism or surrealists – a fairly famous one is about Breton – they generally do not have the characteristics of what we would expect from ‘surrealist poetry’. They are closer to jazz poetry, and indeed, Joans’s poetry seems more influenced by jazz than by surrealism. He is as frequently referred to as a jazz poet as he is referred to as a surrealist poet. He is seen by some as one of the fathers of spoken-word poetry. Yet Breton called him ‘the only authentic African-American surrealist of the hippie generation in America’.

 I have also been asked about surrealism in South Africa. Well, there is not much happening with regard to surrealism in South Africa, and certainly not amongst poets. One notable figure, however, was Sinclair Beiles, about whom I compiled a book, titled Who was Sinclair Beiles? Sinclair is better known for being a collaborator on the book of cut-ups called Minutes to Go, with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. He also helped with the editing and publication of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. But he was also tremendously influenced by dada and surrealism, and while he was in Paris, in the 1950s, he met Breton and Tzara. He also later became very close friends with the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis, who edited Sinclair’s selected poems, titled A South African Abroad. There is a long poem of Sinclair’s called Illuminations in White Tobacco Smoke, which is based on a poem by Tzara and dedicated to Artaud. In a documentary in the mid-1990s, Sinclair dismissed much South African poetry as ‘social realism’ and said he regarded his own work as surrealist. 

Sinclair Beiles

Incidentally, Sinclair once gave a poetry reading here in Egypt, at a Grateful Dead concert, when they performed at the pyramids in Giza in 1978.

 Well, I realise this talk has been rather meandering and so I want to return to the beginning, to the question ‘What is surrealist poetry’? Because, as I have already said,  I am aware of the dangers of definition, and I am even more aware of the danger of confusing outward characteristics with substance. In my opinion there is much contemporary, or near-contemporary, surrealist poetry that too often reads like a translation from the 1920s French. Such surrealist poetry is hardly innovative, but rather imitative, and if you want to bring a political slant into it, you could say that such poetry is more reactionary than revolutionary. It is such poetry that tucks surrealism safely away in museums and on to the walls of corporate boardrooms. It also reminds me of something that Sinclair Beiles wrote, that in its quest for unusual images, much (not all) surrealist poetry had become ‘mannered’, producing ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’.

Ted Joans

In closing, I would like the quote the words of Ted Joans – words he uttered when I met him in Johannesburg in early 1994. Those words were: ‘The fantasy fades, but the surrealism remains’. He did not explain what he meant by that, but for me it is a matter of pointing out that the outward characteristics of ‘typical’ surrealist poems  – with images of oranges eating horses and eyebrows climbing over bannisters  (and those are my images, by the way, so you can’t use them!) –– will perhaps not fade as such, but become, in the words of Sinclair, ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’. But the substance of surrealist poetry –– the spirit of surrealism – will remain.

 

 

 

 

 

'Anything can happen ..' An interview with French poet and collagist Bruno Sourdin by Gary Cummiskey

GC: You were born in 1950, so I am curious about what it was like being a young man in the late 1960s and and early 1970s. It was the end of the idealism of the 1960s and the beginning of something new in the 1970s, though maybe people did not yet know what the 1970s would be like.

BS: We cannot refer to this period without mentioning the impact of the May Revolution of 1968 in France and how liberating it was for a whole generation I grew up with. I was barely 18 years old. It was both a rejection of the consumer society, a protest against knowledge, a revolutionary moment of illusion and a much-needed change of life. I can remember in those days the academic poets spoke like mandarins. We were on the brink of asphyxia. It was a pitiful old film, pathetic and especially very annoying. Poetry had lost its luminous glow. We lived those May 1968 events as emancipation — many slogans which seemed to come straight from a surrealist poetry book could be seen anywhere: “Under cobblestones is the beach”, “It is forbidden to forbid”, “Run away my friend, this old world is behind you”… Read more plus view collages and read poems by Bruno Sourdin, followed by poems by Gary Cummiskey