Mike Basinski: A poet. A curator. A dishwasher.

Mike Basinski: A poet. A curator. A dishwasher.

As an editor of the small press, I find myself spending much of my time pushing my journal and the chapbooks we produce to (for the most part) an apathetic public. So it was a pleasure when I received a letter from Mike Basinski, poet and assistant curator at the University At Buffalo Poetry/Rare Books Collection, requesting the complete line of Ibbetson St. Press books and journals. I can't tell you the thrill it was for me and my group of poets to see our work archived and on their on-line catalogue. Basinski and the library seem to have an insatiable appetite for the small press. At a poetry conference in Boston he told me, "Send us more, whatever you have." That's the first time I ever heard that line, and probably the last.
The Poetry/Rare Books Collection at Buffalo is as rare as the poetry it includes in its diverse archives. Rivaled only by Brown University, it contains 90,000 volumes by every major and more importantly (to this editor), minor poets working in English. The collection includes recordings of poets reading their work, notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and a huge assortment of literary magazines.
About 60 years ago, Charles Abbot, the head of the Library, began collecting "little" magazines. He knew, (and scholarship has proven this), that poets start in the minor leagues of the small press and sometimes advance to bigger and better things. Currently the Library has 3,500 titles of magazines, 1,100 subscriptions, and about 6,000 broadsides.
When I asked Basinski what he considers himself, a poet/curator or a curator/poet, he answered in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner, "Labels, again. I am a dishwasher." Basinski probably was at one time and I can only assume he used the experience in his poetry. He is a poet from a working class background, in the once-thriving industrial city of Buffalo, NY. In 1973 he was a night student at the University of Buffalo, working a shift job at Buffalo China, a factory that made cups. Indifferent to his poetry, his imagination was jump-started by a reading with Robert Creeley. He writes that he now viewed the cups that he made as being sipped all over the world, participants in conversations, dramas that make up the theater of life. In other words the banal took on a lyrical, transcendent quality. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. He involved himself in the poetry scene, made religious pilgrimages to the poetic holyland of North Beach and Charles Olson's Gloucester, MA. He wrote poetry that stretched the boundaries , full of fragmentary word play, odd topography of text, poetry for music or music for poetry, a host of innovative offbeat styles and modes. I arranged to do an interview with him, via the internet. I found the answers were often unconventional, and as irreverent as his poetry.


Q: Mike, you are not only a curator, but a poet in your own right. I must say I find your work as a poet, "challenging". That is, it does not follow a traditional narrative format. Do you define the body of your work as "experimental"? What is "experimental poetry"?

A: I don't think my poems are experimental at all. I know what I'm doing and am not screwing around at all. My notion has been to expand the material a poet can use in a poem. The alphabet limits. The dictionary limits (Webster is the anti-christ). TV limits. Above all these: other poets limit the potential of poetry. I hear a lot about my "new" work, and then I look and it is not new at all. Is that sad? My fear is that I am setting limits. Poetry is a revolutionary tool if it breaks the mundane of its own existence. Of course, if you make something new, most poets won't like it. We are all, after all, in the business of FAME. My favorite poems are those that come back rejected. I have a picnic basket full of these. Each is an apple that will cause poetry to be flung from the sofa of Eden. It is great to be uncomfortable. This entire notion of poems meaning something or even having meaning of any form is suspect, isn't it? If all writing/words etc. in any form is poetry then there is not experimental poetry--all is and has been and will be already invented. Utilize.

Q: You have written that domesticity is important for a poet to be "centered". This runs counter to the popular notion of the poet as the free living Bohemian, footloose and fancy free. If the poet has the "ball and chain" of family responsibility around his neck, is his work bound to suffer?

A: No, the free-living, Bohemian, footloose and fancy free poets are the most mundane. Did you ever watch hamsters on exercise wheels? Like all immaturity, dressing in personality is a limit. Domesticity, I say, is Nature. Capital N.

Q: You mention Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski as seminal influences on you. You write you didn't want to write like Jack, but that you wanted to be him. Bukowski made you feel that your experience as a working class kid was valid and worthy material for poetry. Can you expand on this?

A: I think social class is important to recognize. Both K and B are not rich kids. Therefore, they represent voices other than those in control of everything. I wouldn't want to be anything like these two writers.. I liked Kerouac . I like Kerouac. I don't hitchhike or etc. He is very romantic. Me-not. He did have a purity. I think this is the Zen of it. Bukowski also. Essentially it makes me tired. Like thinking about the impact of the WEB. Does this have meaning in my life?

Q: Please talk about how you became Assistant Curator at the University Of Buffalo Poetry/Rare Books Collection?

A: I know something about the poem. I come to work on time. I have the form of my mind that remembers where certain objects are. In the middle of all the poetry published in English, even if it is catalogued, alphabetized etc. a lot of things still have a place in mind. All of this is pretty much like a warehouse. I worked in warehouses before I got here. This isn't a lot different than Walmart or Goodyear Tire. It's a warehouse of the imagination. Any imaginary spice you need--we got!

Q: What is your personal mission, and or the mission of the archive?

A: The collection is above the personal. Our charge is: To collect first editions of all poetry published in English. That simple.

Q: What is the criteria for accepting a book, chapbook, or journal into the collection?

A: A book/chapbook has to be a first edition in English. A magazine has to be more than fifty percent poetry. We don't generally collect University, English Department published magazines. Wisconsin does that. They are great at it.

Q: What projects are you working on?

A: I am working on more collage mailing tubes so I can do more instrumental poems with scores. I am making this poetry cartoon called Tarzan Movie. I am fully involved in the performance and propagation of early FLUXUX and new FLUXUS with ensemble called THE BUFF/FLUXUS PROJECT. I'm working on multi-voiced and choral poems, visual and score poems. I am attempting at times to stay away, but working on not being dead. Also I am going to paint the bathroom and insulate the attic. I am also shopping for new rugs. Can't decide if we want green or beige. What do you think? This week I was deciding to get some concord grapes. They are in season and my daughter likes them.

Q: Any parting shots?

A: In the end, I deal with the horrible beauty of poetry. I always was reminded of Acteon sneaking a peak at Diana. He of course was transformed by that act and was torn to shards because of it. This then is the tension of poetry. Can you get a peek without killing yourself? Can you get a way from the dogs or will they tear you up? What will you see? Not what is given on a plate. What do you see when you peer into the pine grotto? And why is Diana so pissed off? Why does Acteon want to peek? Essentially then, this is my poem. All of them. It is a moment when both Diana and Acteon realize the future of their situation. Romance and sorrow. Beauty and destruction. Love and yearning. Lust and fury. Well, it seems the poem is not beauty and the beast, but beauty is the creature. It is so marvelous.


* Mike Basinski is now the Curator of the Rare Books and Poetry Collection at Buffalo University