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Text/Interviews |
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I'm
like a sniffing dog
An interview with Nicole Blackman
Mojca Kumerdej
Delo,
Kultura, 21 September 2005 |
The New York poet Nicole Blackman is a spoken word artist.
She maintains the tradition of the Beat Poets and at the same
time belongs to the generation of contemporary slam poetry.
But what makes her special is that she presents her poetry
in the form of music and theater performances. For five years
now, she has been touring festivals and art centers around
the world with Courtesan Tales, a performance she
presented last December in Ljubljana as part of the Visions
of Excess art event, organized by Aksioma
and Galerija
kapelica. Apart from her book of poetry Blood
Sugar which was reprinted several times, she has recorded
twenty albums in collaboration with various artists, including
Alan
Wilder, Diamanda
Galas and Lydia
Lunch.
MK. The authors who influenced
you most are probably the poets of the Beat Generation?
NB. I was lucky to have met the right and my only
creative writing teacher at the right time, William Packard,
a poet, novelist and founder of The New York Quarterly literary
review who in the 50s and 60s hung out with the Beat circle
of Alan Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth. During
my studies I attended his evening classes on literature and
after two weeks of the program something clicked in me and
the poems simply burst out. A year after that I went to one
of the New York clubs that organized slam poetry matches (and
spoken word). I never had any intention of performing but
did it anyway and won.
MK. How did you form your
style of writing which is very direct, has no metaphors and
offers a powerful identification for the reader?
NB. Maybe it was influenced by my wish to become
a journalist, but I later decided to pursue communication
and public relations studies instead. Although there is no
description in my poetry and little account of my characters
since I am more interested in what they do, feel or say, it
sometimes happens that someone walks up to me and starts telling
me, for instance, of the poem about the woman in the green
dress. That is when I smile to myself because there is no
such description in my poetry and the reader alone constructs
the image by making associative connections. I meet the reader
or listener halfway, and the way a certain individual reads
or listens to the poem cannot be repeated by anyone else.
Similarly, children create their own worlds when they are
listening to fairytales.
MK. Rather than presenting
your poetry in book form you are more interested in other
forms; your poems are available on the internet, but you mostly
perform them in music and theater pieces. How did you develop
your format of theater performances?
NB. I did theater when I was young and later I channeled
the pleasure of being on stage into poetry. Apart from doing
other things I performed at a spoken word and music festival,
De Nachten, in 1998, just before Nick Cave. Although I was
not afraid of the crowd of three thousand people, it is always
good to feel some anxiety before you go on because then I
know the performance will be good. Actually, anxiety is what
keeps me going, things always have to be a little bit out
of my control.
MK. You collaborated with
some of the top contemporary artists, including Diamanda Galas,
Lydia Lunch, Scanner and Alan Wilder. Who sticks out the most
for you?
NB. Alan Wilder, definitely, the former band member
of Depeche Mode, because with him the creative process was
so close and open at the same time. Alan saw one of my performances
and sent me some piano and percussion demos which I wrote
the text for. The result was the album Liquid, released in
2000 by Mute Records which featured Diamanda Galas.
MK. Do you usually write
the text for existing pieces?
NB. With music and text projects I normally get the
music in advance, but sometimes it is the other way round
and the musician relates to my poetry. That is why the twenty
CDs that I collaborated on are so different. How did Courtesan
Tales, the performance you presented last December in Ljubljana,
come about? Although I feel very good performing in front
of a big audience, I was more intrigued by an intimate format
rather than engaging in a massive show as Laurie Anderson
does with text, music and video. And intimacy can be most
consistently played out in a pair; that is in a relationship
between me and a single visitor, which is, after all, not
that different from everyday situations like a confession,
a visit to a prostitute, therapist or hairdresser. The seven
courtesan tales are like a bar in which everyone can pick
a drink to their liking, but everyone will react to it differently.
MK. This means you do this
less than 10-minute long performance for a single visitor
differently every time?
NB. The structure is similar but the delivery depends
on the way an individual reacts. When my assistant helps you
pick a theme in the waiting room and you enter the space,
close the door, sit down on a chair and put a blindfold, you
have made a decision to hand over the control of the situation
for that short time to me. I do not want the visitor to feel
threatened, so there is music and the scent of incense in
the dim space. This should open them up and relax them as
much as possible. Depending on the theme the visitor has picked,
I start a story which I whisper in the visitor's ear - they
cannot see me because of the blindfold - and while doing that
I touch them with my hands, different objects and materials,
according to the story... But you do not slip into a tautology;
you present the relation between the words and the physical
contact through associative connections which generate a new
message... That's true. I avoid making direct connections
between physical contact and words. I also watch the visitor
closely from behind the curtain as they are entering, and
while I am narrating I pay attention to the way they breathe,
to their physicality, if their hands are trembling, if their
facial muscles are twitching and so on. And from that I can
tell how they feel, many things, for instance, their social
status also from what kind of clothes, watch, jewelry, perfume
or cologne they wear. When I'm telling the story I'm like
a sniffing dog.
MK. Do women react differently
than men during the performance?
NB. Generally, yes. Unlike with men I have never
had any complications with women. A gentle touch on the face
can make even those women who don't react to touch when I
am narrating cry. Maybe that is because, older women, especially,
they simply forgot about the possibility of accepting tenderness.
The visitors on the BDSM scene, of course, expect a tougher
"approach", which I do not always fulfill because
during the performance I want them to discover layers within
them they are not really aware of. One of my most avid fans
works for the US army, in the Pentagon. He drives five hours
from Washington to New York every week to hear two stories
of mine. He is one of those people who understand my work
best and after every session he emails his comments to me.
MK. Where in New York do
you perform Courtesan Tales? Like in theater your 10-minute
story probably has its price?
NB. Most frequently I perform at the New York Center
for Contemporary Art P.S. 122. The entrance fee is 20 to 30
dollars. The fact that the visitor pays to take part in the
performance has an important psychological effect because,
bearing in mind how intimate the event is, they don't feel
they owe me anything. A frequent motif in your poetry is the
mother-daughter relationship, the mother in some cases being
good, in other cases evil such as in the poem Dark Daughter:
"Don't you churn at night and wish you had the choice again?
Don't you dream of laying a pillow on my face and throwing
me out with the trash in the morning?"
I have no children, I'm a mother to a cat, and I'm, of course,
also a daughter. I dedicated some of the poems to my mother
and her partner who she took care of in the final stages of
his disease. When my mother read it, she cried without actually
realizing the poem had been dedicated to her because she identified
with it. But the poem Dark Daughter where these lines are
from is about a relationship in which the mother sees her
daughter as a rival. I deal with the image of the woman a
lot, I have very different characters, all of these women
might or might not live in the same city but they are all
parts of me. And that's why I want the readers to be careful
with my poetry.
MK. Careful in what way?
NB. Everyone is free to interpret my work in their
own way but I don't want it taken out of context as was the
case when a group of anorexic girls published one of my poems
that talks about this illness as their manifesto on their
webpage.
MK. Has Blood Sugar been
translated into other languages?
NB. Individual poems have been translated into different
languages, including Flemish and also Hungarian because my
poetry was included in the curriculum of the Contemporary
American Poetry Studies at the University of Budapest. Plus
I'm contacted by students who are doing assignments about
my work, and artists who approach my literature in their performances.
MK. So you also live off
of your art projects?
NB. I earn a living with my voice, recording radio
and TV commercials, which I live off of very well, but at
the same time it gives me a lot of freedom. Wherever I travel
I let my producers know beforehand, so that wherever I go
I organize my studio recording time in advance. Then the producer
sends me the text that I need less than two hours to record,
and the time I have left is for my own projects. I can't believe
I'm that lucky!
Translated by Dražen Dragojević
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