Richard Capener : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

It’s helpful for poets to find working definitions. These don’t need to bear the weight of academic scrutiny, but act as a personal point of orientation. I tend to believe fiction offers tools to think about, and through, narrative. Furthermore, theatre can provide a grammar for space and movement. Poetry articulates language itself. 

I’m very attached to Charles Bernstein’s distinction between the physical and social materiality of language, that poets don’t just engage with the sight and sound of words but have the opportunity to resonate its social and ideological aspects. I’d argue this is the purview of all poetry, not just experimental writing. What is rhyme and metre, assonance and alliteration, if not to sound language’s physicality in relation to a social imperative, even if that imperative is as personal as, “I’m recently bereaved”? Poetry’s ability to solely revel in the artifice of language, while simultaneously highlighting that artifice as a social construction, sets it apart from other literary practices. 

Richard Capener : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

I can’t overstate it’s importance enough. My first chapbook, Dance! The Statue Has Fallen! Now His Head is Beneath Our Feet! began as an exercise in which I sought to construct a text the same way the Canadian experimental rock ensemble, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, constructed their older albums. That is, through a montage of emotional passages, social documentary and drones, the last of which were explored though timestamps within my text (of course, following the exercise, I needed a ridiculously long title too). My forthcoming chapbook, The Voice Without, began as a response to the early experimental radio of Swiss-Canadian artist Christof Migone, especially his project, Hole in the Head, which originated from a broadcast series called Danger in Paradise. 

It isn’t unusual for poets to emphasise the sonic dimensions of text, well known examples being Pound referring to “cadence” and “rhythmic structures”. My primary interest, however, has been contemporary aural practices, originating from my love of free improvisation and extreme noise. What are the poetic equivalents? I’m by no means the first to raise this question, or note that comparisons can be drawn between, say, bebop and the Beats (who were themselves aware of this) or postwar composition and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

Richard Capener : part one

Richard Capener's pamphlets are KL7 (The Red Ceilings, forthcoming 2022) and Dance! The Statue has Fallen! Now His Head is Beneath Our Feet! (Broken Sleep Books, 2021). The Voice Without will be released by Beir Bua Press in August 2022. He is launching a press in May 2022. 

How did you first engage with poetry?

It was somewhat spontaneous. I grew up in a house which had books, and my sister was an avid reader, but I took to films and TV more readily. These fed into how I viewed literature, in that BBC adaptations of famous novels felt underwhelming to me. As I entered my teenage years, I became more and more obsessive about music. At this time, download culture was still illegal and it wasn’t unusual to buy CDs, which contained inlay cards with lyrics. I felt a tremendous emotional resonance towards the visual arrangement of text, and the space between lines, and began writing what I considered song lyrics. Eventually, probably compounded by the fact I can’t play an instrument, I became comfortable with the idea of poetry and accepted that these “lyrics” could be a creative expression in and of themselves. This led me to go to a chain bookstore and pick the two poetry books with the best covers (I was a teenager) which happened to be an edition of collected poems by AE Houseman and an edition of Lewis Carrol’s poetry, neither of which had any influence on me. I’m still fond of them, though, as an introduction. 

My love of visual media and music had already led to a precocious interest in the historical narratives and creative practices bannered under “avant-garde”. My passion for literature took off when I found its literary equivalents. Foremost were poets such as Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer, novelists such as Kathy Acker and Burroughs, as well as that seeming golden era of concrete poetry exemplified by Henri Chopin, Brion Gysin and Bob Cobbing, who I found a little later.