Light Glyphs 4: Redell
Olsen
It is
impossible to discuss the intersections between contemporary poetry and film in
Britain without mentioning Redell Olsen. Olsen has continually turned to the
extensions and echoes of poetry in the art world in service of broadening and
complicating the possibilities of her work. Avant-garde history, feminist
theory, modernist poetics, and the temporal and spatial politics of everything
therein, all are dissected and redirected in Olsen’s traversals across art,
text and visuals. Her readings have explored
site-specific performance and blurring the parameters of academic and artistic
presentation; confusing and pushing form to bear the trace of its dialogues and
multiplicity. In addition to her poetry, Olsen has edited the influential How2 journal that has explored,
showcased and archived experimental writing by women for over three decades
(since 1983). She is also Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway. What
remains so important and inspiring about Olsen’s multi-disciplinary poetics is
its intelligent and unflinching commitment to the tensions that complicate and
constitute moving between forms.
I wanted to
begin by asking you about your experimentation with narrative in ‘Corrupted by
Showgirls’ (in Secure Portable Space, Reality Street Editions, 2004). You seem
to transpose filmic jump-cuts into syntax, questioning both language and film
in the collapsing and condensing of narrative – or, as Drew Milne phrases it,
the poem ‘re-animates the narrative grammar of noir femininity’. What were the
main inspirations behind this? At times, I felt as though Abigail Child’s film
sequence Is This What You Were Born For (1981-89) was being evoked, especially
through the poem’s use of genre and its interrogation of gender – was this a point of reference for you?
I
think that these are interesting ways of describing what I was doing in this
particular sequence of poems…In terms of how they were written some were based
on notes taken while writing through various Noir films in real time and others in response to existing critical
writing on these films – including synopses. I do indeed admire Abigail Child’s
films and writing although she wasn’t a direct influence at the time -- some
years after I wrote ‘Corrupted by Showgirls’ I wrote an essay about her films (see here). Joan Retallack’s ‘Memnoir’ which I reviewed
when it came out – again after the fact of writing my poem - could also be
compared to them in terms of related ideas (“Joan
Retallack’s Memnoir,” Poetry Project Newsletter # 201, December/January, 2004-2005)). I was also interested in Cindy
Sherman’s early ‘Untitled Film Stills’
(see here). An
on a very different tack, Barbara Guest’s work was very instructive for its
shaping and refracted sense of lines and she has also written some wonderful
prose poems that relate very directly to film. Another influence over ‘Secure
Portable Space’ as a whole book is the poet Charles Olson.
Throughout
‘Corrupted by Showgirls’ you twist language into the cinematographic (via its
sense of editing techniques of cuts or montage, in addition to its content)
only to veer out and bare its mechanisms –inviting a parallel in the formalist materiality
behind the composition of film and of language; no longer simply ‘narrative
film’ or ‘poetry’ but the materiality of such constructs at work. Do you feel
this to be a poetics interacting with legacies of Language poetry, or some of
the Structuralist or formalist work in the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op?
These
are all important reference points for this poem. However, I see this as being
work that is primarily influenced and in tension with possibilities of Language
writing (which was the subject of the Phd that I was writing at the time - Scripto-Visualities: Visual Arts and
Contemporary Writing by Women).
There is a great quote by Carla Harryman
where she says, “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than to deny it…” (“Toy Boats,” Poets Journal 6, 1986) that
was productively on my mind when I was writing. I am also very interested in
the film and live performances of Carolee Schneeman who I know was associated
with the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op - also the traditions of the Nouveau Roman as
it developed in relation to film through writing by Marguerite Duras and Alain
Robbe-Grillet.
Did you begin to
work in film after writing poetry – or did the two always exist in tandem for
you? I feel as though one is always scored through with the other in your work,
as though never entirely present as film or poetry in a confined sense. The poetry often acts like a trace left by
the, now absent, visual happening or film (like ‘Era of Heroes’ or the
collected works in Film Poems) and therefore the work seems to always play with
incomplete-ness? Or what cannot be contained? This is really exciting as it
certainly feels closer to the permeable dialogue or ‘hybridized form’ that many
other works purport to exercise…but that, unlike your work, instead become
ekphrastic or like short-sighted asides in representation.
That is very astute, thank you. My
parents are both painters so I grew up with a strong commitment and
understanding of the visual - that was the given that I could move out from and
choose to return to. I am deeply indebted to my parents for an understanding of
process in the making of work. Various contexts have obviously been important
since: I studied English Literature for my first degree at the University of Cambridge
and J.H. Prynne supervised my dissertations. I also attended Rod Mengham’s
lectures that made links between contemporary writing, theory and American
poetics. I was interested in the poetry that I read and heard at Cambridge at
CCCP events in the early 1990s: a mixture of British, French and American
influences. I subsequently studied for a foundation in Art and Design and then
a Masters in Fine Art – where I worked mainly with photography, performance and
installed texts. Later on I completed an academic PhD at the University of London
(with Prof. Robert Hampson)….
This is all a round about way of saying
that I work with various forms of text: both image and language and have done
for most of my life. The balance changes in relation to the contexts of
production, distribution. In terms of the recent film poems that I have made it
varies in terms of what comes first. I wrote ‘Bucolic Picnic’ as one draft and
then cut the found footage together and wrote more with the knowledge that it
would be performed live in relation to that footage. For ‘Sprigs and Spots’ I
slowed the film down and then had to cut down the text that I had. I was also
very concerned with that film poem that it should also make reference and be
considered visually in relation to the page of the book itself. So, the text is
mediating a sense of its possibility in the space of film and live performance
but also the performance of the work on the page – something that conventional
script work even of the experimental kind doesn’t usually tend to do.
I
am actually really interested in the possibilities of ekphrastic writing and have a sequence that I wrote in 2012 called,
‘Performances for Paintings’ that responded to particular paintings with
directions for a parallel performance or action that might actually never be
fully realised. Their deliberate ‘incompleteness’ (somewhere between documentation and score)
was in part triggered by a sense of frustration with some of the limitations of
a tradition that often seemed to offer very literal ‘translations’ of paintings
- rather than what I wanted to write which were conceptual provocations in
dialogue with existing works of art.
Do you think
that the notion of ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘hybridized’ forms are often valued
more in theory than in practice or execution? I’m thinking here of the
discourse surrounding funding bodies and academia in which the
‘interdisciplinary’ is conceptually worshipped…but its actual existence often
seems fairly rare…as though there are polite and accepted forms of
‘interdisciplinary’ practice that do little else than safely confirm a division
between mediums: e.g. here are some poems-about or in response to [insert
non-specific art project]…whereby poetry or text is reduced to an ornamental or
meditative reflection, as opposed to embodying any active interaction.
Yes
that is a problem. I suppose that you have to make the work that you are
interested in making and hope that the culture around you likes it enough to
want to support its development.
What writers or
artists do you think are currently doing interesting work actively crossing
between film and poetry?
There
are a number of very good recent graduates from the MA in Poetic Practice and
subsequent practice based PhD programme at Royal Holloway such as Nisha Ramayya
and John Sparrow who are making interesting work that crosses film / performance
and the digital. I am also interested in the current film and text work being
made by my friend, the artist Gillian Wylde who had a show at the Arnolfini in
2016. The live version of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Drift’ is an impressive
collaboration between her and a musician and artist that involves music, poetry
and film.
Could you say a
little bit about the context or inspiration behind Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel
(Subpress, 2012)? The book’s blurb entangles its synopsis with: a commission by
Isabelle d’Este; the art book ‘THEY CALLED HER STYRENE’ by Ed Ruscha; a
screening of Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremastser’; the installations of Max Neuhaus; a
mutation of the pastoral, at once mythic and modern; an experience in a karaoke
bar; and the ‘plight of deer on the roads of Europe and North America…would it
be fair to say, that in busy disorientation the book finds its (non-locatable)
point of departure, ‘in which even the title was against itself’?
These
are indeed some of the points of reference and certainly to me very locatable points of departure! I wanted
to write a kind of baroque vision (hence the bar rock obviously) through which
to think about the contemporary. And yes, everything is in contradiction or
against itself: the faun/fawn (a colour, a deer, a gesture of subservience) and
the day-glo of punk possibilities set in impossible relation to the
Renaissance.
I imagined the whole as a series of texts
to be streamed on a wall, partly in reference to Isabella D’Este’s ‘studiolo’ -
which is a domestic and secular space for which she commissioned artists to
make work on the walls and ceilings of her rooms - and more mundane
considerations of public spaces of contemplation such as the arcade, the mall… The
book’s starting point is a reimagining of this studiolo as book – the poems as
possible texts to be installed that make reference to recent art,
contemplation, performance, life, gender, power…
In the use of
repetition and rhythm, especially in ‘variants marked points of’ and ‘snares
for silence in required voice’, the poetry seems to find a real mischievous
enjoyment through introducing formal codes from the pastoral into a realm of
avant-garde instability. Does this element of time, moving between an arcane or
outmoded form or work (I’m thinking here too of ‘A Newe Booke of Copies’), and
a more contemporary poetics, also inform your film work?
That
is very interesting, yes – although I don’t see these as arcane or outmoded
forms but forms that can be called upon, utilised and brought into dialogue
with more contemporary rhythms and sounds – hopefully to make new forms of
poetic practice that acknowledge their relationship to a variety of forms and
existing traditions. The film work often uses found material from different
periods also. I suppose in each I am interested in establishing and expanding
on connections and threads that might link apparently disparate or at first
glance redundant images and ideas.
How does
engaging versions of the historical (whatever that might be…!), or
destabilising its narrative, influence your practice?
Certainly
in Punk Faun I was interested in
engaging with alternative time frames and multiple possibilities of reference
and juxtaposition – often in fluid simultaneity. It is a way of working that
certainly has implications for the possible destabilisation of the various
histories, source materials or forms that it draws on. Hopefully the work
begins to stand in relation to these borrowings rather than become one with
them. I hope that in juxtaposition new relationships and possible connections
are established that might go some way to returning the found, the historical,
the past, the overlooked to a having a direct relevance to the contemporary
moment of production not to stand in place of this. I am not interested in the
work being nostalgically ‘about’ any of these sources - they are materials /
forms with which to engage in the contemporary.
Who have been
important artists for influencing your approach? As your work spans and draws
from film, poetry, academia and the visual arts – is there a particular medium,
field or figure that ever takes precedence?
It is
true my work - as I do, draws on practices from different genres. Allen
Fisher’s work in all its visual and verbal crossing is exciting to me and I am
always excited to encounter new work by writers such as Lisa Robertson, Juliana
Spahr, Judith Goldman and Jena Osman. Each of them is making (very different) work
with reference points that continually step outside conventional frames and all
engage with what I feel is a highly constructive and relevant poetics for the
contemporary.
Are you working
on any new projects? What is currently interesting you?
I
have a bookwork in an exhibition that is currently in London (curated by Susan
Johanknecht and Finlay Taylor). The book is called ‘Mox Nox’ and amongst other
things it borrows from mottoes for sundials as a starting point for some of the
writing. It uses images from 19th Century sources detailing Arctic
exploration. It also involves a different kind of the filmic than the one that
we have mostly been discussing here – in the case of this book a film of
photosensitive adhesive paper that has been applied to various parts of the page
so that it changes colour temporarily in daylight, so in theory the text should
alter as you read it. I suppose that is also an important sense of what film is for me – the almost
imperceptible and often porous surface between entities, ideas, images, words –
different forms of practice.
