12 Questions with Paul Hanson Clark
1. Hey Paul, who’s the coolest looking poet from the past?
A young Joseph Stalin.
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2. Hey Paul, got a favorite lyricist
Too many to list. I’ll just say Andre Nickatina cuz he uses words words in ways that feel completely unique to me. What he says is only part of what he is saying. How he says it, the way the words sound. It’s this rich mosaic that taps into all the aspects of language really fully. He’s one the best writers and performers on the planet and he’s been active most of my life. I don’t hear people in the poetry world talking about him much. His discography is well worth digging around in and getting lost.
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3. Hey Paul, got a favorite quote about poetry?
“To be a poet is to be a failure forever.”-Brendan Lorber*
*from an essay originally published in LUNGFULL! Magazine #16
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4. Hey Paul, where’s your ideal place to write?
Wherever. I write in the car, I write in my bedroom, I write in my office, I write at the laundromat. I like to write in public places where social or creative things are happening so I can kind of process the world through the creative act of scribbling shit down. I’m a fan of Bernadette Mayer, and she’s certainly not the only person who does this, but how in certain books the things her
children are saying/doing become a part of the poetry. That’s why I like writing in public so I can bring my life into poetry instead of allowing poetry to become this wholly separate endeavor. I’m not into that. So I try to write in the world as much as I write in my palace of solitude and concentration. I will add that for editing and “working” my writing into something that I feel strongly about, I always do that in solitude.
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5. Hey Paul, any artwork that inspires you to write?
Pretty much all of it. I like looking at paintings and writing shit down. I like writing about movies I see. I like writing poems that respond to poems I’ve read. I like stealing lines from musicians. I love seeing people perform and that always gets my creative juices flowing. Most recently I wrote a lot while I was in Colorado looking at this exhibition of woman abstract expressionist painters [at the Denver Art Museum]. The only problem is it was a busy day at the museum. There was this group nearby, a group of chatterers. They kept saying kind of mundane shit, they had a bigwig who had that self-appointed docent vibe. At one point she told this anecdote about a painting called The King Is Dead…
She said the artist was really inspired by Jackson Pollock but didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a Pollock imitator, so she didn’t say much about her affinity with Pollock’s work. But when Pollock died she painted The King Is Dead as an homage to him. The story seemed off to me. Later I watched this short documentary about the exhibition and it turned out The King Is Dead was like a fuck-you painting to Picasso. From some book: “The king was Picasso, whose succession of strikingly innovative styles had ensured that Paris remained the center of the painting universe. But now, Grace said, ‘there was this tremendous feeling with everyone that painting had come to America, and that Paris [was] dead.'”*
*from Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter. By Cathy Curtis. (2015, Oxford University Press.) p69.
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6. Hey Paul, any poets you think should be household names in poetry households?
I always try to talk about Bill Cassidy. He’s a great poet who passed away at a young age. He inspired me when he was alive, and the poetry world is small enough you figure you’ll probably get a chance to meet some awesome poet you admire, at some point down the line. When I heard he died it was this weird moment. His death impacted those who were close to him really deeply, and a number of excellent poets have written about him beautifully: Heather Christle; Matthew Zapruder; and Mathias Svalina. I’ve only read like 20 of his poems but his work has been as important to me as anyone. One of his favorite poems of mine was on Octopus and I was able to dig it up using the internet archive.
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7. Hey Paul, if you could insert yourself as a member into any historical art/literary “scene” what would it be?
I guess like a California rock musician in the 60s and 70s? Being a fucked up rock and roller when money was flowing during the dark buildup to the Reagan Era seems up my alley.
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8. Hey Paul, got any go-to revision techniques?
My original drafts are usually pretty wild and messy. I try to delete 30-80%, depending on how messy the draft is. So my technique is just delete as much as possible. Only hang on to the lines that glow.
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9. Hey Paul, what’s the best piece of writing advice you ever got?
My friend Justin Fyfe used to stress that it’s fuckin’ dumb to labor over perfecting a poem when you can just write a new poem. I don’t know if it works for everyone but it has suited me well. A teacher I had named Anthony Hawley changed my life once. I was taking an avant-garde poetry class and the stuff we were reading was unlike anything I had read. So I had this shitty attitude about it, thought it was pretentious. He took me aside and told me not to worry about judging what I was reading qualitatively, to just focus on experiencing it fully, without worrying about how “good” I thought it was. I’ve talked about this many times but it was a big turning point. I try to take in all art as openheartedly as I can. The last thing I’ll say is my friend Amanda Huckins, when we got to corresponding about poems, I said that I didn’t feel very confident sharing my thoughts about a poem of her’s, cuz what the fuck do I know, you know? I wish I had the exact quote but it got lost in the belly of Facebook before they started archiving chat messages. Anyways she told me something to the effect of, I’m a human being, and my perspective may just be my own, but it’s still worth something, and I owe it to myself and others to try and share it as fully as I can, no bad can come from that, only good. I guess that’s my holy trinity of advice, one to do with being a creative person, one to do with being a person who relates to all the creativity out there in the world, and one to do with being in a community with other creative people.
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10. Hey Paul, what do you do when you’re not reading poetry?
Write poetry, lol. Hang out with my wonderful girlfriend. I work as a Web Editor for Prairie Schooner. I’ve been trying to get a lot more organized and careful with my time. I’m fucking around on the Internet less. This is a big deal for me cuz shit like that has been a big part of my life ever since digital information started moving around in large volumes at rapid speeds in the 90s. It’s been nice actually getting out of that loop a bit. That’s been my big thing lately. I’ve been writing down shit to do on little index cards, I have a few stacks based on how soon I want to do whatever it is I wrote down. Doing little shit instead of putting it off, it frees up a ton of headspace, and I’m feeling more capable of doing big shit. This is the stuff that excites me, ha. I also like to draw and write songs. And I like to socialize with people. Eat food. See movies. I want to start spending more time with my family. During my 20s it became pretty easy for me to just drift into my own world, lose touch with the world I grew up in. I don’t want that to keep happening, so I’m trying to be more proactive about doing shit that matters to me.
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11. Hey Paul, are there are any metaphysical or spiritual ideas that inform your approach to poetry?
When I’m with people at a poetry reading, everyone just kind of sitting around in some dingy basement or whatever, saying the weird shit that matters to them, in the weird way they’ve come up with, to a group of people who is mostly interested, who actually give a shit, even though it can be tough for humans to give a shit about each other, I feel like I’m part of some ancient thing that is beautiful and strange, a thing that has existed through all manifestations of human culture. Here’s a quote from Zurita that says what I’m trying to get at only much more beautifully and much more intensely:
We live in the age of the agony of languages and the absolute triumph of the language of advertising. It’s the end of that journey that begins from the plentitude of the great ancient poems where the word and what it names are one sole thing, to ‘Nike; Just do it,’ where no word names what it names and no phrase says what it says. And faced with that agony, poetry is the most fragile art because it depends on those words that die. But at the same time, it’s the most powerful because it is the only one that can give an account of that ferocious loss and raise up new meanings. The poem as we have known it since Homer is dying, and hopefully does so with grandeur, hopefully still delivers us some poems that make us cry. But, although all the words are drying up and all the great poems are dying beneath the infinite ocean of advertisements, poetry will not die. Poetry was born with the human, it is older than writing, older than the book, older than the Internet, and it will continue taking on millions of new forms until it dies when the last person contemplates the last sunset.
Wow, haven’t read that for awhile, and I’m tearing up a bit. Modernity is very strange to me. I feel as though it cuts us off from these essential parts of ourselves. So I view poetry as like an ointment, in a sense, that can help us to access spiritual shit that is shut way down by the world all of us are conspiring to perpetuate. But I’m not all fuck the world, either. Sometimes I’m just in awe of the human beauty that modernity has allowed us to create together. After all, the Zurita quote, and his incredible body of work, would I be able to access it without modernity? Probably not. But Zurita was arrested when he was 22, after a military coup in Chile ended the socialist government there, and imprisoned with a thousand people in the hold of a ship. These sort of frightening disruptions feel very modern to me. I don’t think I can wrap up this thought cleanly. Poetry has been very important to me, and it informs every aspect of my life, from the most mundane day-to-day choices, to how I socialize, to how I see myself in the world as a spiritual creature, and on and on.
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12. Hey Paul, do you have a website?
website: https://www.paulhansonclark.com
podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-763520353
movie reviews: https://mubi.com/users/8039584
bandcamp: https://paulhansonclark.bandcamp.com
twitter: https://twitter.com/paulhansonclark
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulhansonclark/
ko-fi shop: https://ko-fi.com/gasdance/shop
merrily: https://merrilymerrilymerrilymerrily.org
merrily shop: https://merrilymerrilymerrilymerrily.bigcartel.com
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[This Q&A was conducted in September 2016 and first published, via Facebook and Twitter, in October 2016]
A Dozen Nothing 