The Piper Begins with This
A Conversation with Will Daddario and Matthew Goulish
When Will Daddario reached out to me in 2021 about a book on the work of poet and playwright Jay Wright he and Matthew Goulish were working on, I didn’t know what journey I would continue taking with a writer whose work I found myself reading more and more every day. I immediately began rereading Wright’s Transfigurations: Collected Poems (LSU Press 2000) while soaking in the arguments and analytical theories Daddario and Goulish postulated in such a logical and understandable manner in Pitch and Revelation: Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy Through the Work of Jay Wright (Punctum Books 2022). With one hand in the jar of clarity, and the other in the scholarly realm that Wright’s work demands, Daddario and Goulish’s work allowed me to gain a greater perspective of Wright’s work within the context of not only American letters, but world history and literature. And that’s precisely the intention of Pitch and Revelation, to provide readers the opportunity to place themselves alongside Wright’s poetry, plays, and philosophy, to see themselves in the poetic nuances of every speaker and character rendered so meaningfully on the page. Even as I write this, I can’t help but return to the last section of Wright’s “Desire’s Persistence” and ponder what it means to reach the end of a journey:
I shall go away, I shall disappear,
I shall be stretched on a bed of yellow roses
and the old women will cry for me.
So the Toltecas wrote: their books are finished,
but your heart has become perfect.
Wright’s work isn’t yet finished, but already his words are nudging our hearts toward perfection.
Esteban Rodriguez: Will and Matthew, thank you so much for your time. It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that Jay Wright is a contradictory figure in American literature. While Wright has been the recipient of a number of important awards in American poetry (Bollington Prize in Poetry; American Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship), his work is not taught or discussed in the same light as some of his contemporaries (during my MFA program, I unfortunately didn’t see his name come across any of my readings). But one of the great things about literature is that great literature is timeless, and it is refreshing to see a new generation of readers and writers champion Wright’s poetry, plays, and determination to bridge the gap between cultural and personal histories. Before we dive into Pitch and Revelation: Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright (Punctum Books, 2022), what drew you to Wright’s work?
Will Daddario: Matthew, Lin Hixson, and their company, Every house has a door, was invited to present a keynote address at the 2015 Performance Philosophy conference in Chicago, which I helped to organize. For this “keynote,” they presented a work-in-progress showing of a performance titled, The Three Matadores Play. This work was a verbatim reading and staging of a microplay embedded within Wright’s The Presentable Art of Reading Absence (2008). As I watched the performance, I thought to myself, “I need to read everything Jay Wright has ever written.” I couldn’t really explain the compulsion at the time. I was moved intuitively. And from there I just jumped in and got lost. Looking back, though, I think it is important that I was introduced to Wright by a performance company who recognized the dramatic-poetic undercurrent of his writing. While not all “theatrical” to the same degree, Wright’s poetry, as well as his prose, desires to be read aloud in community, and I’m sure I was fascinated by that aspect of his work even before I could recognize it formally.
Matthew Goulish: I can trace the genesis of The Three Matadores back to 2013 when Flood Editions published Jay’s book of poetry Disorientations: Groundings. The paragraph description in the publicity email I received immediately alerted me to the necessity of reading the book and gave me the feeling so many of us have shared of wondering why we had not heard of this writer before. I am fortunate to live in Chicago where I came in contact with the editors of important small presses based here such as Flood and Kenning and Dalkey Archive before it relocated. I note that you mention your time as a student, Esteban, because as I read Disorientations: Groundings I immediately resolved to include the long poem BANÃ NGOLO as a reading in the MFA Writing course I teach Systems of Writing. The writing appealed to the teacher in me. I have continued to include the poem for the past ten years. I introduce it by presenting to the students much of what I have learned about Jay’s writing over the past decade, and then I tell them that I still need their help in understanding this poem. I value the so-called difficult for the aspiration it draws out of me, for its faith in me, a reader, for the invitation it extends. The majority of students have valued the complexity of Jay’s work and been inspired by the permission it grants them regarding their own work. This poem also made Africa a necessary part of the conversation, an experience I had missed in my corner of academia since my undergraduate years at Kalamazoo College in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
After Disorientations: Groundings, I began to work backward and soon encountered The Presentable Art of Reading Absence published in 2008 by Dalkey Archive Press. When that book-length poem mode-shifted in the middle and became a play, I knew we, our company Every house has a door, had to attempt a performance. I presented the idea to Lin, the director. Will and I devoted most of a chapter of Pitch and Revelation to this production, of which Will saw an early presentation. The editors of Flood provided me with a mailing address, and I wrote a letter requesting permission to attempt this performance. That began a correspondence and a relation that has continued. Soon after that Lin and I met Jay and Lois at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Jay gave a public reading of The Geometry of Rhythm, the play later published in The Prime Anniversary. Hearing the writer’s voice in your mind when you read always enriches the experience for me. I try to impress on students the tenor of delight, of always being on the verge of laughter, that Jay conveys, a quality we do not expect for some reason when encountering work of such profound complexity. Regarding our performance and prolonged dedication to Jay’s work, the confidence and trust in us that we received was and is very humbling. Jay and Lois took a bus from Vermont to New York to attend the finished performance in 2017 at The Knockdown Center in Queens. They arrived with three requests: to sit in the back row (there were only three rows), for Jay to come onto the stage and bow with us at the end (we absolutely relished that), and to depart at that point before the post-show Q-and-A.
ER: At what point in reading Wright’s books did you realize you had to write one of your own? How did the genesis of Pitch and Revelation come about?
WD: As I started reading Wright’s work I also started writing. At some point, Matthew and Lin shared something I wrote with Jay and Lois. I was terrified by this. (It is important to note that my previous research had focused on 16th-century Venetian theatre and performance. All the figures who appear in that book had been dead for some time. The idea that a person about whom I was writing could actually read and respond to my work was daunting. The fact that the respondent is Jay Wright is, well, you know, astonishing.) But on the other side of the fear a door opened and led to a letter exchange with Jay. One day, maybe in 2016, an envelope arrived in the mail containing a typewritten manuscript titled, The tuning of grammar and syntax, which has now been published with other prose treatises in Soul and Substance (Princeton University Press, 2023). Again, I was somehow sort of stunned and invigorated by the text, which was like a poetic philosophical essay written in prose stanzas. Matthew had received a copy as well, and we started talking about it. We decided to think collaboratively about Tuning and present our ideas at the 2017 Performance Philosophy conference in Prague. That may have been the beginning of the thinking that would eventually become Pitch and Revelation.
MG: I’m writing this on Sunday May 28th. Yesterday I received my copy of Soul and Substance, an incredibly beautiful volume. It does indeed include The Tuning of Grammar and Syntax as well as five other “examination papers” that Jay has written over the years. When Every house set out to complete the performance of The Three Matadores we included Will in the process, inviting him to write alongside the rehearsals. We published his essay “Time, Space, and Matter in Jay Wright’s The Presentable Art of Reading Absence” in a pamphlet edition and sent a copy to Jay, who soon requested more copies to share with friends. I think at that point Will and I both began to experience two distinct and intertwined motivations to continue writing and to formulate a longer project dedicated to Jay’s work. First we felt tremendous encouragement from the source. Jay’s enthusiasm had a way of muting the voices of any critics in my mind. Second, I believe we could observe very clearly what was missing, which is a way to say we could apprehend the need as it existed, the form of the absence, and we could write into that form. Nobody else seemed to want to take on the task. Why? Who knows, when it constituted such joyful work, particularly in dialogue, like a relay between the two of us. Collaboration keeps you accountable to the other person in whom you have nothing but faith and confidence. I don’t think the reasons for this book not already existing before we set out to write it are particular only to Jay’s poetry, its challenging nature. One can look around and not find many books dedicated to the work of single poets, and those that do exist tend to avoid the contemporary and tread the well-tended furrows, the musty established greatness of a narrow spectrum of classics. We started on it without a sense of where it would land, and it all fell together quickly as if it pre-existed our writing of it. We followed the outline of the book that would fill in the missing contours of discourse around Jay’s work, like taking dictation. I personally felt grateful for the years of conversations I had had with students, the guiding hands of their responses and insights. At some point I spoke about our book project to the gifted pair of philosophers Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. I am fortunate to count them as friends. They wanted the book for their 3Ecologies imprint at Punctum Press. Their editorial team affirmed their choice. Everything seemed to move very quickly after that. In many ways the book was a product of the lockdown, written out of the silence and deep immersion that those grim quarantine times afforded. We knew it would not be, could not be, definitive in regards to the immensity of Jay’s contributions. It could only gather those threads about which we could convincingly write something, in order to initiate a broader and longer conversation.
ER: I’m glad you mentioned The Presentable Art of Reading Absence because there are lines in that collection that have really stayed with me since I first read them years ago. Wright writes: “Someone begins a relevant narrative. / Gradually, I awaken.” If writers have the ability to awaken, then critics no doubt ground a reader’s newfound consciousness. To what extent do you hope Pitch and Revelation grounds readers to Wright’s work?
WD: “...if I may rearrange some bones for a moment…”
I’m tripping over the words “awaken,” “critics,” and “ground.”
Perhaps we are all already awake and the certainty smuggled into thought by the binary of awake/asleep is spurious. Rather than awaking, we are perpetually turning. We turn our attention to certain things, people, places. We turn our attention away from other things, peoples, places. Sometimes we turn and sometimes we are turned. Sometimes we spin and spin. Amidst the noise of the grand spectacle, there are signals. We attune to these signals through mysterious gravitational waves. I believe readers never awaken. Rather, readers turn toward and are turned by signals that attract them and draw them in. Oftentimes, slowing down helps us to feel the pull and allure of these signals. Perhaps “difficulty” is another word for “slowing down.”
Critics.
Estragon and Vladimir:
“Moron!”
“Vermin!”
“Abortion!”
“Curate!”
“Cretin!”
“Critic!”
Adorno: criticism is the place where the mind tears at its bonds.
Ground.
Another illusory binary lurks in the paradigm authorized through the verb “to ground.” What happens when we allow for the possibility that we are all of the ground? In this case, we are already grounded. In this case, there is no need for grounding. Rather, there is a benefit in remembering that we are grounded. We look around. We notice that ground and sky embrace at the horizon. We walk toward the horizon.
Given all of this tripping, I would say that Matthew and I hope for Pitch and Revelation to invite slowness into each reader’s practice so as to emphasize the play of signal and noise alive within Wright’s work, for in that play dwell rhythms and harmonies to which Wright has been attuned for many years and through which Wright has conducted a memory of Oneness that is often (selectively? violently?) forgotten in the present due to artificial boundaries, such as those that separate art from science, religion from eros, comedy from tragedy, poetry from prose, poetry from matter, poetry from erudition, poetry from the quasar, poetry from Mexico, poetry from poetry, and, once those boundaries are artfully dodged, as Art Tatum might dodge a standard, the mind tears at its bonds and reorientates itself to itself.
MG: There’s little I can add to Will’s tremendous response. I will say thanks for the quotation. It sent me back to that beautiful passage in The Presentable Art of Reading Absence, Jay’s book-length poem that Dalkey Archive published in 2008. The repeated incursions of “someone,” three times on that page (19), intrigue me, in particular since I read this work as a tracing of, and narration of, an extended attempt at meditation and stillness and pilgrimage. The nameless someone who provokes the solitude of this poem’s voice seems by turns trustworthy and unreliable, like an interior voice asserting itself, as interior voices will, to interrupt a meditative state, small eruptions of the self, reminders, anxieties, insights, back-seat drivers, all as suspect as they are welcome. It even becomes a gravedigger: “Someone has said, congratulations, you know the hour of your death.” Toward the end of this passage, the poem says, “This flagellant mind will argue with itself…” (20) Once again in the voice of Jay’s poetry, “The many become one and are increased by one,” (as Alfred North Whitehead wrote), by which I mean the mind reveals itself to be many minds. I will risk saying that in this case poetry constitutes the force that increases by one this many-become-one.
ER: I love that phrase, Will, “perpetually turning,” that idea that there’s a healthy restlessness when discovering meaning. And I love that a single page of Wright’s poetry can resonate with us years later. For decades now, Wright’s verse has left a lasting impression on readers, but his plays haven’t quite had the same opportunity. To shift gears slightly, the work that you are doing with the Selected Plays of Jay Wright (Volume I: The Dramatic Radiance of Number; Volume II: Figurations and Dedications; (forthcoming) Volume III: Glimmerings and Constellations: Creative and Critical Responses) aims to change that public narrative. Can you discuss how these projects came about and what the process has been to illuminate Wright’s important work in this medium.
WD: Somewhere back around 2016, thanks to Matthew and Lin Hixson, Jay and I started writing letters back and forth. In one of those letters, Jay inserted a sentence along the lines of, “by the way, I’ve written over 50 plays.” There was no context for the comment. I think it was actually slipped into the middle of a paragraph. I remember thinking, “What???” That was the beginning of the quest to read those plays and help get them published.
That turned into a long project. Jay sent me a few by mail. Lemma might have been the first one. Aria came after that, I think. As soon as I read them, I knew they had to be published. I contacted some notable publishers of contemporary plays and made the case for an anthology of Wright’s dramatic works. But I was always met with the same frustrating response, which was basically, “Can you prove that these books will sell?” In one case, I even got a couple of scholars to write letters explaining the interest in and need for publishing Wright’s plays, but they didn’t make the publishers budge.
It’s probably important to mention that Jay has smuggled plays into his poetic works for years. Matthew and I write about this in Pitch and Revelation. There are explicit plays, like The Geometry of Rhythm, which appears as the second half of The Prime Anniversary and acts like a dramatic mobilization of many concepts, affects, and percepts that arise in the poetic stanzas that precede it in that text. Then there’s the dialogue between M1, M2, and M3 in The Presentable Art of Reading Absence that eventually formed the text of Every house has a door’s performance The Three Matadores Play. But there are other dramatic dialogues like this one in earlier volumes of poetry. The dramatic potential of play scripts seem to have always attracted Wright’s attention.
Of course, this fact could easily go unnoticed, and that would be a shame, not least of which because the dramatic and theatrical aspect of Wright’s work and thought might get left out of scholarly commentary. So I really wanted to get the plays published but kept hitting dead-ends. I eventually turned to Matthew.
MG: By that time the pandemic had taken hold of us. Every house, the performance group that Will mentioned that Lin directs and for which I am dramaturg, had several projects canceled, as did so many others. We could not perform live. We felt co-publishing the plays fit within our mission. We had established a relationship with Jay’s work, and the strange and threatening lockdown times lent themselves to the work of publication, a more secluded type of activity than our usual highly social practices, but no less valuable and essential to the life of performance. We proposed co-publishing because we could help facilitate the project in every way, but we did not have the expertise of contracting, editing, designing, printing, and distributing a volume. We needed a real publisher for that. I live in the world of small presses, as I mentioned, and I rarely feel the desire for writing to exceed that scale. I immediately thought of Patrick Durgin and the work he had done with Kenning Editions. When I contacted him, Patrick expressed interest in co-publishing the plays with Every house, so we secured the blessing of Flood Editions who publish Jay’s poetry and moved forward quickly.
However, the initial enthusiasm hit a speed bump when the word came back from Jay and Lois that they imagined the project as three volumes. I believe Will helped to formulate those volumes clearly into one of six plays selected by Jay, one of six plays selected by Lois, and one of essays about the plays from invited responders. He also suggested the important timing aspect of publishing volume three one year later than volumes one and two. Still Patrick hesitated when he heard the vast scope of the project. Who would do all this work? I told him Will would be project editor, and I set up a Saturday morning zoom meeting. I remember that meeting this way. Patrick heard Will talk for about three minutes about his experience and his plan for the project and then more or less said, ok great, it’s stopped raining, I need to take my daughter to softball practice, you’ll get a contract from me next week, thanks goodbye. Soon after that he brought in Jeff Clark to design the books. Jeff worked beautifully with the images of the upper crests of Bambara antelope dance masks that Jay had selected for the covers. I will add that while Jay stuck to the rules and selected his six plays, Lois’s volume came in as seven, and one of them was a cycle of five one-acts, so twelve plays grew into sixteen. Will also convinced Lois to accept a credit in print in the volume, the first time that has ever happened in all the years of her vital work in relation to the immeasurable treasure of Jay’s writing.
ER: The Geometry of Rhythm is so phenomenal. As you indicated, Wright is incorporating plays within his poems, but he is also formulating a mathematical philosophy that seeks to understand the past, present, and future more insightfully. How did you approach the mathematical components behind his work? What was required on your end to immerse yourselves in such deep analysis?
MG: Math was always my worst subject, from the earliest grades through high school and even into college when I struggled with trigonometry. Because of that I became very attached to it. I knew I would never master it. It humbled me and called to me not to give up on it. I had the good fortune of meeting Brian Rotman some years ago and carrying on several very detailed conversations with him that took mathematics, specifically Euclidean geometry, as their foundation. This prepared me for the math in Jay’s poetry in two distinct ways. First, Professor Rotman helped me to understand the continual parallel life of mathematics as both calculation and metaphor. Jay understands mathematics with this double inflection. In fact Brian Rotman appears as a central reference in The Tuning of Grammar and Syntax, starting with Jay quoting him (on page 359 of the new volume from Princeton): that numbers “are things in potentia…theoretical availabilities of sign production.” When I say math as metaphor, Professor Rotman might say math as semiotics, and this statement, about numbers as availabilities of sign production, I think may guide an interpretation of the equations that Jay includes in The Prime Anniversary. They reflect and recapitulate the poems that they follow, elucidating the individual forms of the poems by line count as well as the clustering of the poems into mini-cycles. This use of math speaks to number as potentiality, a language of pure abstraction that we may imagine as an x-ray of the pattern life of some material entity, in this case the words of a cycle of poems. But why include the equation in the work, except to make explicit something about the implicit relation between mathematics and poetry, to give it a degree of equivalence, as if the poems issued from the equations as much as the equations from the poems? Of course this must always be true for any poet working with form reducible to number. The second preparation for approaching mathematics that I gained from these fortuitous conversations was the retroactive realization that the classes in which I had tried to learn mathematics had never engaged creativity in either applying or understanding algebra or geometry or number theory or trigonometry, that that was both a great tragedy and a reason for my incomprehension. By this I mean they never entertained the possibilities of math as a practice for knowledge formation. Keeping it in its purely abstract form, as classes routinely do, relegates it to a fortress mathematica as Professor Rotman would say, a way to escape the world rather than to understand it. It was a revelation to me when I learned that Ramanujan, the great mathematician from India, regarded each of the first one hundred integers as a close personal friend. Numbers as quantity and pattern have distinct personalities. Understanding this prepared me for one telephone conversation with Jay in which he unexpectedly began telling me about his study of and work with prime numbers. The primes are solitary figures, singularities with no factors. They are unpredictable. Of course they would be of interest to him. I do not want to suggest that Jay engages mathematics only as metaphor, but in order to understand how he engages it directly as calculation one needs to triangulate with his knowledge of music. We attempt that in detail in the book, in ways an accurate description of which would be too involved and technical for this interview. It’s true we needed some sustained research for this, and the isolation of the pandemic facilitated the necessary uninterrupted time and lent the undertaking a degree of urgency. All of this is to say I have not really gotten any better at math. I have perhaps enlarged my understanding of it “in potentia.”
WD: Yes! And, I will underscore the importance of “math as a practice for knowledge formation.” As Matthew points out, students have been done a great disservice through the removal of mathematics from the liberal arts, as if it were somehow separate from the creative minds we see at work in literature, visual art, or the performance of daily life. By separating math as its own distinct discipline, we lost track of some key textures in the weave of the world. I had to rediscover these textures in order to write Pitch and Revelation. In particular, I turned to David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More, which brings playful enthusiasm to the historical development of the concept of infinity in mathematics, thereby revivifying the thought practices that were required overtime to grapple with something always beyond the reach of empirical knowing. I think DFW’s book set me on the right path to encounter Rotman, and then I had courage to go back to Spinoza and then the Ancient Greeks…and then the African μαθηματικοι and ακουσματικοι (as Wright might call them).
ER: In The Tuning of Grammar and Syntax, the last line states, “The piper begins with this: he knows his body, as with all mathematical objects, incomplete.” I could help but think about Wright’s place in American and world letters as I reread this sentence. I hope it is safe to say that the scholarship behind Wright’s work is still in its infancy, and that Pitch and Revelation has laid a solid foundation for more scholarly endeavors into his poetry, plays, and essays. What do you hope future scholarship of Wright’s work takes into account and/or expands upon?
WD: Good question. My first hope is that “research” takes place through creative engagement with the texts. The clearest example of this I can currently imagine is with the plays. I would love, absolutely love, to get the plays staged by groups who can dedicate time to them and endeavor to produce their performance as a hybrid work of art scholarship, perhaps intersplicing talks, workshops, and dialogues into or around the performance of the play itself. This might happen most readily in MFA programs where adventurous schools (Where, O Where Art Thou?) could dedicate a semester to the exploration of one play and its universe of dramaturgical valances. But it could also happen in completely different environments. Jay and Lois, for example, think the plays would be approached generously and inventively by inmates. Arts and Philosophy teachers who provide coursework to prisoners could bring along these plays and see what kinds of discussions they provoke.
MG: In addition to Will’s proposals, which I wholeheartedly affirm, regarding the dramaturgical and theatrical possibilities after the plays, I hope future scholarship will isolate and explicate strands of resonance between Jay’s prose and twentieth-century, even twenty-first century, philosophical practice in Africa. Soul and Substance — A Poet’s Examination Papers, which Princeton just published collecting Jay’s six prose works, reproduces on its cover and title page a squarish symbol that also appears on the cover of, and inside of, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought—The Akan Conceptual Scheme by Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye, published by Temple University Press in 1987. That book defines the ideogram as “Ofamfa, symbol of critical examination.” This quickly sketched lineage already gives some background to the word “examination” in the subtitle of Soul and Substance. The symbol’s recurrence and specificity suggest more connections waiting to be made and a direction for future research. I’m thinking about Vera Kutzinski’s book, also from 1987, Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén, and the importance of relational scholarship of this sort, constellating poets, thinkers, or subjects around concepts and concerns that they share although they operate differently in their respective works. She accomplished this so well in particular regarding Wright and Guillén. I would like to see a return to a similar approach with African philosophical thought at its center.
ER: A few years ago, I took a road trip to Colorado during the summer, and the one book I took with me was Jay Wright’s Transfigurations: Collected Poems. If you were leaving home for an extended period of time and could only take one of Wright's books with you, which one would it be and why?
WD: I recently led a group therapy session on the topic of “apperception.” We might define “perception” as “understanding, a taking cognizance" (etymologically) or “the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses” (more commonly). By distinction, “apperception” is our perception tinted by our lived experience. Apperception is the history of our perception, which is to say it is a reminder that our perception is produced through our history as a living being functioning within society taking place at a certain time and in a certain place.
One of my hopes with Pitch and Revelation is that people engage with Wright’s work to the point where their apperception carries hues generated through their experience of his poetry, plays, and prose. That is to say, I’d like to think that I could leave home for an extended period of time without any of Wright’s books because, due to my intensive grappling with this thought, I would already be seeing the world in a Wrighteous way.
But if that answer seems like evasion, then I’d say The Prime Anniversary. I keep re-reading it and also find myself lingering on a new passage.
MG: Like Will, I am inclined to respond to that question in a relational way. I would always, and in fact do always, travel with the most recent of Jay’s poetry books at that particular moment. They demonstrate such clear cumulative properties, each one building on everything that has come before, that reading the most recent work always to some degree reviews and even recapitulates pertinent aspects of previous works. This nesting doll characteristic holds true I believe not just for Wright but for many poets whom I revere. It seems to indicate a perfect and facile memory, a nearly inconceivable thing to me. I forget everything and seem to write the same few essays over and over all my life. I have probably even repeated myself a few times without realizing it in this interview. This is another reason why collaborative writing, or generally contending with some other writer’s work, has become so important. One needs rescuing from one’s own cycles of repetition. We cannot accomplish that without other people, without the infinite rupture of the other, so to speak. For those reasons, I travel with the newest book, whatever it is.
