NIKITA SUNBURN.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED by JOHN FELL, MOOSE FACTORY, ONTARIO
APRIL 1, 1972

JF: When did you begin writing?

NS: You’re looking for a turning point aren’t you?

JF: The first thing you took seriously as a writer,

NS: I began writing seriously during the period directly following my realization that I was really a heterosexual. This experience was devastating for me & I began writing... or I used writing in a bad way... I mean as a type of therapy. My first book came out of that three year period.

JF: Was it prose or poetry, I mean, just before Symbolic Plumbing?

NS: It was-poetry. I was interested in music as a kind of pacifier, and the symbols, well, it was; pretty regular sort of stuff. After a while I lost the need for being soothed and shed off the restrictions that I had taken on myself. I was filled with anger about being born a heterosexual.., you know, this kind of ‘why me’ question kept running through my head, and I- was upset, and angry, very angry. I wanted to express my anger, get it off my chest... so I again used writing as a kind of therapy, of course by this time I had found it necessary to begin writing free verse. I wags filled with anger and resentment and I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. The symbolism I was using was more complex.... I wanted to capture the way man had built things that closely resembled hats own body, and I wanted to laugh at man, ridicule him for it. Even today anger still plays a prominent part in all that I write.

JF: How did this type of therapy-writing develop into the weird mechanisms of Symbolic Plumbing?

NS: I began by listing all the rituals I could find on a calendar, I extensively researched to find the correct day for each ritual... I then devised a ritual for myself.. Each day I would go to the plumbing store on the corner and choose randomly some plumbing fixture or piece of pipe, using the personae of Little Jack Horner In the book is a reflection of the random selection. I would take this piece of plumbing supply and venture to the Metropolitan library, to their record collection. I would randomly choose a record and listen to the first sons, this supplied my titles and mosaic, so to speak, for the poems...

JF’: I guess that accounts for the great variance of structures throughout the book?

NS: Yes it does. I would journey to the reference section after having listened to the music and the tune would become jumbled or vague on the way, this would further obscure the piece in my mind. Once in the reference section I would lay my hands on a Random House Medical Dictionary and leaf through it until I came to the first word that explained a part of the digestive system, this was the end or my for the poem. I would begin drawing analogies between the piece of plumbing and the part of the digestive tract using the completely blurred melody which lay in my head.. To complete each poem I would make some satirically incisive comments about the first person that came into the reference section after me, of course I continued to use the same symbolism. These people were generally seen as a microcosm of a macrocosm and my comments would the centre on comments about the entire human race.

JF: Do you know of Robert Duncan’s work?

NS: Who?

JF: I think it is possible to detect a continuity in your poetry & your criticism, at least, in tone. What is the relationship between Symbolic Plumbing  and Against Indigestion?

NS: Well, the most obvious connection is my use of digestive symbolism, which forms an integral part of the poetics behind both works. Proper digestion is the proper consumption of a work of art. There must be substance in the form of nutrition, but I believed then & still do believe that works of art must be completely digestible, that is they must be transformed into energy & I mean this literally, to be used for other works of art. This is central to Against Indigestion where I attack the ‘enduring value theory of art “ which I refer to alternatively as constipation or gas, depending on the seriousness of the disease. This is the central sickness of western culture as far as I’m concerned. That something food-like as Art is should be valued in such a childish fashion that it either is kept under glass causing certain kinds of starvation or held within or away from it’s proper decomposition is a curse ...may be the doom of our race. This is simply a metaphor & it is not my intention for people to believe that I think or... that I’m naturalizing Art, as it were, I simply believe art should completely ephemeral, since it is totally unnecessary. It is when art is preserved that you get idiots running around sucking metaphors, that is taking them literally.

JF: Gee: That sounds a lot like Levi-Strauss, have you ever read The Raw & The Cooked?

NS: WHO? What?

JF: You obviously have little respect for museums, I have heard that you often burn copies of your books that you find in second-hand book stores, is that true?

NS: That’s true, but I was very young, and taking metaphors very literally, Even at that point I saw art as a sort of dreamy, ephemeral thing, and I wanted to see it go up in smoke, Those act* really reflect that period in my life, I was dreaming and breathing art.

JF: In the prefatory notes of What Fellatio Means to Me you said, “ I have an insatiable urge to write, I’m really cookin’ now... “, In the short space of two years you wrote five books, four years later you published a book of some 800 pages. Why is it that it was 6 years after One Bald Girl before your next work Piss on Modernism and Shit on Post-Modernism, which is only an essay of some forty pages, was published?

NS: I thought you were going to ask me that: Well I was really cooking then, by the time I wrote One Bald Girl, I was boiling. It was at this time that I first saw myself as an artist, and I saw just how undigestible something boiling was, how I had rushed the process of becoming an artist with something to say.

JF: Does this mean you saw your first books as being flawed?

NS: Oh no, not at all, it’s just that I was so angry I was; coming on too strong, rejecting the people who; understood what I was saying. During the six year lay-off‘ from writing I: took a long holiday and ideas began to simmer in my head. I was still angry but I was cooking now carefully formulating intelligent views and blending my criticism with a broader more energised way of writing.

JF: Rodion Raskilnikov says that you were trying to blow up the old avenues of critical thought..

NS: No, I was trying to melt them down into a concise anti-bondage, anti-historical form of criticism....

JF : Create a new standard?

NS: That’s it!