Ray Hsu
Poetry Is Dead is an ongoing sponsor of The Cross-Border Pollination reading series, started by poet Rachel Rose. The next reading will feature Ray Hsu, Marguarite Pigeon, Camille T. Dungy, Mary Cornish, and David Zieroth. The reading will be May 4th in Vancouver and you can find more information on the Facebook event page. For future readings you can join the fan page. Poetry Is Dead recently caught up with Ray Hsu to discuss his unique approach to readings and the future of poetry.
Poetry Is Dead: You use a lot of technology during your readings. What compels you to technology when so many poets refuse to move forward with it?
Ray Hsu: When you mention that I use technology during readings, I assume that you mean this? http://thewayofray.com/
I'm interested in a number of terms you mention, "readings" being one of them, "poets" being another. "Technology," whatever that is, has a chance to transform both.
But let me start with the first two. When organizers find out I'm a poet, I'm often asked to do readings, as if readings were the default thing poets could be expected to do. But I'm not sure readings are enough, especially when many folks hear "reading" and automatically think they're in for a snore.
I used to be hard on other poets (and university lecturers, for that matter) who didn't seem too concerned about keeping their audiences interested. I still appreciate very much a speaker who respects her or his audience enough to look into their eyes. It's not enough to glance up from the page and quickly over audience members' heads as a sign of eye contact. I appreciate those who go to poetry readings and university lectures and politely listen despite powerful boredom. It takes tremendous discipline and a strong set of social conventions to keep one's butt in a seat during a "reading."
"Technology" is a handy label to describe what I use during my events, but it's only one. Standing up at the microphone is a tremendous privilege that is tempting to take for granted. There's tremendous authority in it. I can shake this authority up a little by pulling out my iPhone and playing a radio show excerpt that features an incarcerated writer I worked with. Obviously he can't be there to read it himself. When I play the clip, using technology isn't the goal; hearing another writer's voice is.
University lectures can be very boring. I think lecturers have a lot to learn from a good poetry reading. But I also think that a poet can also learn from a good lecture. When many undergraduate writers in a class of 180 students ask me to deliver my lectures in Powerpoint, I also use it as an opportunity to test how it might work in a reading. Lectures can learn from good readings, readings from good lectures.
PID: How does your poetry interact with technology?
RH: I'd like to replace "poetry" with "human beings" in your question, which is to suggest that it'd be just as difficult to answer how my poetry interacts with technology as it is to answer how human beings interact with technology. There's no single way because both poetry and human beings (and animals and plants and the planet) are already intertwined. To not interact with technology takes a little effort, as evidenced by people who pride themselves by not having cell phones or not being on a social media network all their friends are on.
PID: Considering the reinvention of the book through iPads, Iphone, Ebooks and the sort, do you see poetry adapting for dying?
RH: "The book" will continue to exist. It was never a timeless thing, was never even the book. Some books will still have big print runs, some will become Print-On-Demand. Reading won't stop. TVs never finished books off. Poetry won't die. New ways to find books, innovative kinds of poetry that will explore new media. Nothing will be replaced for good. All things in the dumpster of the present are subject to dumpster divers who will repurpose what was once obsolete for the present.
PID: What format do you believe poetry will find itself within in 20 years?
RH:All formats, including books. Except for Microsoft .DOC format: in my vision of the future, proprietary file formats that force folks to purchase new expensive software will be incinerated. They will be replaced by open source file formats. Or plain text files, which I've heard have been around for forty years. But as much as I'd love to save trees, I've heard archivists say that the only way to ensure that a document survives is to print it out.
PID: Do you see poetry in the future being dispersed more successfully to readers than today?
RH: I'm not sure that poetry will be dispersed in the future more successfully to readers than today. Distribution and circulation are often economic questions, which means that we're talking about poetry's relation to different economies. How does poetry relate to economic exchange and the flow of capital, whether financial or social? I think, for example, about various student and faculty exchanges between different Creative Writing programs I'm helping to set up across the Pacific: if my current university has made Asia (and perhaps especially China) a strategic priority, it's partly because university strategists see a tremendous amount of money flowing across the Pacific and, like the field that a magnet makes among iron filings, aligns every academic unit on campus towards this goal. So financial exchange means that the door is more open than ever to cultural exchange, which means more financial exchange in turn.
All we have to do is think about UNESCO's statement about "creativity":
The notion of creativity must be broadly used, not just to refer to the
production of a new artistic object or form, but to problem solving in every
imaginable field. Far from being germane to the arts alone, creativity is
vital to industry and business, to education and to social and community
development.
— The World Commission on Culture and Development, UNESCO
... to see that the circulation of "creativity" means that poets have a stake in what counts as "globalization."
PID: Can you see this way of obtaining poetry in the future affecting the styles of poetry?
RH: Yes. I don't think poetry (or any other kind of writing) can help but respond to the form of its circulation. What counted as "poetry" seemed quite different written in illuminated manuscripts than when it was circulated in printed form. Scholar Michael Warner talks about how, in the 18th century with the mass circulation of literary periodicals, writers began to play with the very notion of an anonymous public that they'd never meet. This new kind of "reading public" certainly changed the way writers wrote and thought about their writing. I expect that new ways of circulating poetry will change the way many of us write.
tags Technology Ray Hsu poetry iPads Ebooks
