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Michael Lassell by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg © 2000 Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
Gerry Gomez Pearlberg: Let's begin with your poem "Bandito Ditto." First off, this is a sonnet - 14 lines, 10 syllables per line. Yet you don't notice that formality right away because the phrasing is so conversational and the material - on the surface, at least - does not initially (at least for me) invoke thoughts of sonnets. Why did you choose this form? Michael Lassell: My immediate reaction is that there is no "proper subject" for poetic forms, just as I do not think that there is a "proper language" or peculiar diction uniquely appropriate to certain forms (elevated for sonnets vs. conversational for free verse, for example). I think a sonnet can be about anything, not just love or death, the two predominate historical themes as reflected in Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Petrarch, etc. This poem, however, is about love and death. For me, the sonnet is, in part, about ritual, discipline and poetic tradition. And sonnets are about capturing fleeting observations, feelings - what Henri Cartier-Bresson called "critical moments," which was what he was trying to capture in his photographs. So, for me, sonnets represent (and seem appropriate to) moments of epiphany rather than [what Wordsworth referred to as] "emotions recollected in tranquility." Pearlberg: It's interesting how, even while meditating on the disappointments of "empty decades/at the stub end of a millennium," and the ostensible loss of belief in "eyes or hurricanes or even boys," the poem winds up being a love poem in the end, with the "black umbrella in early autumn rain" being more than a sheltering, but a kind of heart. It's as if the poem - or the poet - can't help but incline toward romance. Lassell: I think the poem is not so much about romantic love as about that primal, underlying life-affirming force that just never leaves those of us who chose to have it, or acknowledge it, or live in it - what the early Greeks called Eros, which meant a lot more than sexual or romantic attachment. My life has not involved conflicts between an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other (the so-called Christian dilemma), so much as one between a self-destructive, self-abnegating death wish and one that just thrills to every expression of the magnificence of life, from crocuses in snow to the arc of certain bridges as you come upon them from around a curve. Pearlberg: So is there an inescapable relationship between romance and poetry? Lassell: Is the love of beauty and the life of things romance? If so, then poetry - like every other creative (hence "erotic") enterprise - is inextricably bound to it. Pearlberg: Returning to "Bandito Ditto," besides being the name of a restaurant, what else is going on with the title of this poem? 
Lassell: Well, as you say, it's the actual name of a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue [in New York City]. Certainly I love the sounds of the name, the lovely repeated consonants and vowels, the idea that something (like the words themselves) is on the tip of my tongue, and the suggestion in the sounds themselves that things keep going on. Bandito suggests "stolen" - as in stolen hearts, stolen youth, stolen viability as a love/sex partner. "Ditto" connotes a kind of cheekiness, maybe, a kind of "blah blah blah," as if to say, "there is SO nothing new about this, but it's my life, so what can I do?" I mean, poems for me are about commonality of experience not uniqueness. Pearlberg: I love the appearance of Hurricane Gloria right smack in the middle - or "eye" - of this poem. Of course, I read it as the actual hurricane, but then, since this is the West Village, I also see a drag queen - arriving, raging, subsiding - and her "eye of/large impending things." It's like this transgoddess figure - Hurricane Gloria - showing up in the guise of the hurricane with all its glory, drama and danger as well as, ultimately, its dissipation or disappearance. At least that's how the image played out in my mind. Lassell: I think this is a perfect example of how poetry speaks to people. The idea that a poet (or any artist) has a thing to say and that the artifact is the means to expressing that same thing to others, is a largely discredited critical notion, as it should be. I love your reading of the hurricane as a "transgoddess" or drag queen, though none of that crossed my mind. A word about poetry and biography - sometimes knowing a poet's life is germane to understanding his writing. Sometimes a poet's life is only relevant to certain readings or subtleties or shades of meaning. Now, I have a lifelong love/hate relationship with food. So food is always symbolic for me of something that I need for nourishment but also manipulate to punish myself. My first lover was a Mexican-American, and so Mexican is always associated for me with Roberto - love and sex - and also loss, because our relationship did not last very long, and he subsequently died of AIDS without ever letting me know he was ill, which I have not gotten over in the 10 years I've known. We were lovers when there was barely such a thing as Mexican food in New York City, and my sense of loss in all matters related to Roberto is enormous. Pearlberg: I sense the spirit of the Greek poet Cavafy floating around this poem. I've felt that way about other poems of yours as well. Do you feel a special fellowship with Cavafy? Lassell: I have a very, very close affinity to his work for several reasons. The first time I studied poetry was in a month-long independent study project in my freshman year in college (which was in the Pleistocene Era, 1965-66). There was no Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time in those days, and although I had felt intimations of homosexuality from the age of 10, I certainly was not openly gay or gay-identified in 1965. My teacher was a young Greek-American woman named Jane Lagoudis, who was on a one-year appointment to Colgate, where I was ensconced. She was doing her dissertation on Cavafy and she pointed me in the direction of his poems, either from professional pride or because she knew a tortured gay boy when she saw one. It was the work of Cavafy that really gave me permission to write directly about homosexual experiences instead of writing about tormented Catholic priests - to write openly rather than covertly. Most gay/lesbian writing in our history has been "coded," as they say. Jane opened a world for me. Cavafy's ability to write about his homosexuality at the turn of the last century also made it easier for me to accept my sexuality as ambivalent or ambiguous at best. 
Flash forward: California Institute of the Arts, 1972. I am studying poetry as a grad student with Paul Roche, a classical scholar known for stunning translations from the Greek tragedies. Roche assigned some Cavafy and I wrote a poem called "Unlike Cavafy," which said, in effect, I was NOT going to find myself at 50 sitting in cafes looking at beautiful boys and wishing time had not passed me by. At 50-plus, however, I find myself sitting in cafes all over the world, observing people in love and being myself in a perpetual state only of envy. So I find myself to be precisely the lonely elder I meant never to be. All my early poetry teachers said I leaned too heavily on irony, but there you are: If you have an ironic take on life, irony seeks you out. So perhaps I am, as Cavafy was a hundred years ago, just past my expiration date. I mean, I'm not depressed every day; there is a certain acceptance that comes about the waning of sexual experience or even appetite. Usually, I'm much more detached, bemused, wistful (like Cavafy). Pearlberg: Let's move on to your poem "Going to Europe." Tell me about the use of repetition in this poem. Lassell: Repetitions are certainly not unknown in the realm of poetry, but I credit Paul Roche in particular with offering repetition as one of the ways to invoke the incantatory origins of poetry. And I remember writing a poem in his workshop in which there was a repeated line: "a pink miasma, a dodecahedron of dreams." So, we will be happy that I have at least moved on to friendlier phrases to repeat! Pearlberg: The poem is full of interesting frictions on a number of levels. First off, it opens on an anticipatory note, "I am going to England. And France./I'm going to England and France tomorrow with/my father" Although it's set up as a "pre-travelogue" - we are going here and there - the poem is actually an occasion for looking back and reconciling that with the present, is it not? Lassell: [à la Groucho Marx:] It certainly is. I began the poem before my father and I left and finished it after we returned, so I already knew what kind of experience the trip was - thus the notions of time are complex. In the present of the poem, we are going and we have gone, which means there is a beginning and a middle, but no end. And there is something of the nursery rhyme about the repetitions ("As I was going to St. Ives") which is appropriate to the child/father "friction," as you so beautifully describe it, and also points backward to a relationship that has been infantile rather than adult. I mean, the fact is, that when I was 50 and my father was 80, we went to Europe together for two weeks that changed our lives together in places where our lives had earlier been changed each on our own. Now, that last sentence would make as good a first sentence to a story as any. But it's not quite as mysterious as "I am going to England." Pearlberg: You wrote a beautiful travel piece - an essay, right? - about this trip with your father after the fact. And won an award for it. 
Lassell: Yes. I won a gold medal from the American Society of Travel Journalists Foundation - because the travel piece was written not in journalese, but as slightly poetic fiction in the first person. I took notes on the trip that may well become poems in the next book (called, by the way, "Battlefields," and one of the poems is about being with my father, who is a veteran of the D-Day invasion, at the cemetery that now covers the bluff over Omaha Beach). Pearlberg: How did writing the poem serve to prepare you for this journey? Because the poem is many things at once - a review, an attempt at reconciling and containing (or organizing) the past, and then, at the very end, almost a prayer or incantation - at the very least, a tentative hope: "Maybe now that we're both old, we can love each other/for two full weeks without hating each other at all." Lassell: Well, poems are journeys, too, so what could be more appropriate? I was as terrified of taking this trip with my father (even though it was my idea) as I was of my father when I was a kid. Writing a poem imposes a grid of a sort on unexamined experience, plotting the evidence of our senses on vectors of emotion and language. And it helped me to look very closely at the truth of our relationship on the eve of this trip, to record it as exactly as I could, so that whatever happened on the trip, I would know from what dock I departed. 
Now, I did not impose the order on the poem as you see it until after the fact. It was at the suggestion of [poet] Elena Georgiou that I divided the poem into stanzas. It had been unbroken. Elena thought, and I agreed, that there was so much factual and emotional "information" in the exposition of the poem, that she, as a reader (and a brilliant one at that) needed more time to digest it. And having passed on to the next emotion, I found it relatively easy to do that very sensible thing, and I really thank her for her insight. Pearlberg: You also do lots of other kinds of writing - fiction and memoir as well as journalism. I'm curious to know why and when you choose poetry as your vehicle, as opposed to opting for an essay, or journalism, or memoir. What different needs or effects are, for you personally, fulfilled by these forms as compared to the poem? Lassell: Yes, it's true. I'm a genre outlaw. I think I write essays to record, stories to imagine, and poems to discover. So, nonfiction meets a primarily political or at least social agenda; stories are about emotions ("Fiction was invented because there is no justice," I have written); and poems are about spirit - poetry derives, after all, from religiosity. Which is not to say that essays can't be spiritual, or stories political. But that's approximately how it works out for me, I think. A lot of that is intuitive by now, or at least unconscious. I almost always know what form a piece will take. Tennessee Williams has been an influence on my writing, too (both of my graduate degrees are in theater), and one of the things he did was to write poems, stories, and even plays, about the same things. I've done that. Often, as poems, these writings take the form of prose, of solid blocks of type without articulated lineation. Often as prose they seem far too artfully inflected in their language (too arcane), while as poetry they may seem very conversational. I mean, my fiction writing is usually very heavily enprosed, to coin a word. I guess I'm not really wedded to any one form, any more than I have been over my life to any one sexuality. I mean, sure I'm a gay man. But I was a fully functioning bisexual when I was younger; then it became politically incorrect. I find myself now absolutely attracted sexually to certain women. In therapy, I deal a lot with issues of boundary and transgression. I mean, as the only child of traditional Protestant Republicans of Anglo-Teutonic extraction, I have a real love of order and of absolutes. But I love the liberation of anarchy, too. I'm sure there is something to be said about the traditional phyla of poetry (Apollonian vs. Dionysian), but I am either afraid of commitment or averse to limits, I'm not sure. I definitely love freedom and hate slavery of all kinds. My essays read like fiction, my fiction reads like confession...what can I say? |
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