TELLS US NOTHING: A Quick Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli
This has happened before, but every time it happens I still love it: someone I've never read writes and asks if I'd be willing to take a look at some recently published thing, and I almost always say yes, and then sometimes, if I'm very lucky, the thing I'm looking at ends up being one of the more interesting and lovely books of the year—in this case, Jeff Alessandrelli's Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound, a book about which I've been struggling for a few days thinking how to talk about. The book is beautifully lyric and is—in ways I don't think I'll be much good trying to articulate—a quiet book. I read it off and on three times in a bit over a week and I don't think I once played music while listening to it. The weirdness of this fact has to do of course with the fact that Erik Satie was a musician, and there are poems in this book which are on the page as musical scores. But stick with it: ultimately the book doesn't urge one toward some (boring, or at least foregone) appreciation for the music of poetry or some such; what the book does, I think, and very very well, is it ends up proposing questions about limits and silence and music and self. That's a fairly vague and broad way to talk about this book, but it holds, for me: the (according to Alessandrelli) little book packs quite a punch in terms of ideas. It's just a fantastic thing—you should get and read this book as soon as possible. For real. Here are five questions with JA re his book:
In however you can address this, how did this book come together? It's got a cohesive elegance that doesn't at all feel forced–doesn't feel like it was engineered or anything, yet clearly it's been put together with care. However you want to address this, go for it. Also: extra points for how the f you found your way to watusies, which is maybe the perfect whimsy word for the whole endeavor.
Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound had a fairly long gestation. In brief, though, I started listening to Satie in the winter of 2006 when I lived in Portland, Oregon at a 2 story house that had no heat; when I woke up one morning I could see my breath. Every day before I went to work I put on a Satie mix cd that my friend Dylan had made me, one that had on it Satie's "hits," as it were—the "Gymnopédies" and "Gnossienne" pieces, as well as a four minute version of his 18 hour long "Vexations." At the time I didn't know anything about Satie's life and simply liked the music because I didn't have to listen to it; it was soothing background music, music that asked absolutely nothing out of me as its listener. For about 8 months I listened to that Satie mix cd nearly every morning. Then I lost it, forgot about it and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska in August of 2008. No Satie at all for a year. But in Lincoln I began reading (sometimes rereading) a lot of serial/ longer poems–John Berryman's The Dream Songs and Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn," Anne Carson's Short Talks, a hefty amount of Jack Spicer's work, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, Louis Zukosky's All: The Collected Short Poems,1923-1958, Mathias Svalina's serial-poem-chapbook Creation Myth–and also began listening to a lot of instrumental/ vaguely electronic music, particularly Boards of Canada, Tortoise, Brian Eno and John Cage's "Ryoanji." One day—it's a bit murky, as these things often are—I thought of Satie again and on a whim bought a box Satie set (6 cds) online for something like $25. It came in the mail, I listened to it a lot and one day I Googled Erik Satie and found out how much of a weirdo he was; I had not known this before. I became intrigued and interlibrary loaned (it's out of print, costs $89.75 used, $373.60 new and I'm way too cheap) his A Mammal's Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie. It's a great, odd book, and after flipping through it for a week I checked out a couple of (often musty) biographies of Satie from the library also. I kept listening to his music and one day the phrase/title Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound popped into my head. Do I know how or why this occurred? I do not, although the word "watusies" is one that I've always liked because it's 50's era old and disused and not-so-faintly antiquated. I wrote a poem called "Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound" and liked it, but I liked the title of the poem as much if not more than the actual poem, so I decided to write another poem called "Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound." Then a bunch of poems with that title. From there the 5 sections of the book came together somewhat "organically" in the sense that I was reading a lot of serial poems in tandem with my listening to Satie and at one point it occurred to me that I myself was writing a serial-poem also. Initially every poem in the book was going to be entitled "Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound" but at a certain point I grew tired of such insistence, and came up with the other primary titles/sections in the book. The title of each section was arrived at in different ways—various quotes by Satie played a large role—with the exception of the "Gnossienne" sheet music pieces—for those I wrote to each particular "Gnossienne" composition while listening to it (hence my inclusion of the sheet music for each). All told I started working on the collection in late 2009 and was done by March of 2011.
I'd imagine someone somewhere's asked you about this, but I'm real interested in how repetition works for you, in this book or in your work in general. You've got lots of poems in here with the same title, so that the reader reads one and then the next and feels (at least I felt) like it was this sort of stereo experience, two things making sound together. Plus then there are the poems which are written along with music notation. Again: I hate to be so general and vague, but however you want to tackle that, I'm all in.
Repetition of titles, phrases, etc.—for the most part while working on the collection I tried to mirror Satie's notion of repetition, one that he, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, placed a premium on. I mean, although a lot of people believe he was just screwing around, Satie's "Vexations" takes 18-20 hours to play and consists of the same series of chords over and over and over and over and over and over and over. One dude played it for 15 hours and then had to stop because he was experiencing intense hallucinations. While writing Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound I decided pretty early on that I wanted the book to have a minimum of titles, ones that the reader kept seeing over and over, layered, ones that hopefully accrued more meaning as the collection progressed. "Tells us nothing" is one phrase that I repeat several times in the book because if Satie was one thing it was contrary, and he was adamant that who he was as a person had absolutely nothing to do with who he was as a musician (he claimed to not even be a musician) and vice-versa. This is total crap, of course, but I wanted to express this belief of his in some of the poems in the book, and repeatedly using the phrase "Tells us nothing" seemed to be the most direct way of doing so. And my use of repetition in the book is also, of course, a way of reflecting my own poetic laziness—coming up with good titles is hard work and simply using some of the same ones left me off the hook to a certain extent.
Are you big into music? This might end up being a retread of the first one, but how/why Satie? And, for those of us whose understanding of Satie is almost entirely academic/through free-jazz friends, does Satie *as* Satie in here really matter? I mean that with kindness and generosity: I guess maybe I'm curious how it's Satie in here *for you*—I read the thing without knowing thing #1 about the man other than the barest bio crap, yet I feel like I ultimately got the book, felt it. Was your intention maybe to introduce Satie?
Music—I'm definitely into music, always have been and probably always will. I don't have a readymade quote or sentence about the fairly hefty role it plays in my life, but music (of all kinds; certainly not just Satie or jazz/classical related stuff) plays a fairly hefty role in my life. I like the Notorious B.I.G. a lot. I like Nina Simone and David Bowie and the Fiery Furnaces and Silver Jews and Marianne Faithfull and Stan Getz and Will Oldham and The Grouch and Sleater-Kinney and the album "Ascension" by John Coltrane and the album "Aftermath" by The Rolling Stones. I don't really like Tupac, Morrissey or The Smiths—I know, I know, sorry. But other than that I'm open and often game.
As for Satie "as" Satie in the book—you're right. In some of the poems he's staunchly a historical figure and in other poems he barely appears or when he does appear it's only to highlight a dog's overly long snout. All the Satie quotes in the book are accurate and I did go to some length to use historical information—the aforementioned A Mammal's Notebook, of course, as well as, by the end, 4 biographies on Satie and some online info also—but I hope that even if someone doesn't know Satie or his music in at least a few of the poems it's a moot point; in those poems "Erik Satie" isn't the historical version of "Erik Satie." I did this for a number of reasons, the most pertinent probably being that I'm not a historian, I'm a poet, and I didn't want to only use historical info in the book—this probably sounds cliché, but I wanted to utilize my imagination also. In an ideal world my intention with Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound was to introduce my personal version of Erik Satie to the world, one that no doubt also has a healthy dose of Jeff Alessandrelli in it. I'm not sure if I succeeded in this, but that was/is definitely my end goal with the book.
What writers do you like? Are there folks with whom you feel something like aesthetic allegiance? In other words: is this book arriving (or did you intend it to arrive) in some aesthetic context alongside other stuff (not that it'd *have* to be read with other stuff, of course, but you know)?
Writers I like: I like Jules Renard a lot. I like Plutarch. I like Graham Foust and Michael Earl Craig and Sarah Manguso and Benjamin Péret. I like all of the aforementioned writers I mentioned in question #1 quite a bit and Chris Adrian and David Markson and Blake Butler and Lyn Hejinian and Marjorie Perloff and Frank O'Hara. Satie's prose in A Mammal's Notebook is caustic and sarcastic and often cynical and thoroughly enjoyable on the whole. My favorite writer of all time is Samuel Beckett—I named my dog Beckett Long Snout after him. I really like Mary Ruefle's poetry.
As for particular aesthetic allegiances/contexts, I'm not entirely sure—it's a book of poetry that was inspired—both directly and indirectly—by a half-obscure 19th and 20th century French avant-garde composer. Certainly while writing it I worried about this fact, mostly because the audience for contemporary books of poetry is small as it is, and it's made even smaller (in this case at least) by my insistence on using Erik Satie as both an oblique and direct subject matter/ point of reference/inspiration. I would hope that the serial-poem aspect shines through for people and I read and re-read farcical serial-poem works of Jack Spicer's like "A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud" while writing Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound. But I feel influenced by so many different writers, thinkers, musicians, etc. that it'd be hard for me to explicitly state the definitive aesthetic context the book groups in with. I'd like to be more well-read, I can say that for sure.
What's the view out your window?
Right now the view out my window is snowy. In the neighborhood where I live in Lincoln the houses are grouped too tightly together and sometimes I feel encroached upon by garage doors and whitewash. I can see an old urn in my backyard that has 4 inches or so of snow blossoming out of it. It's washed-over today but I often have a great view of the Nebraskan sky—and at night I can sometimes hear the clouds moving above me.
