Cool Cleveland People
Terry Provost

He has been called a “language technician” and “the scourge of corporate arrogance.” One thing is certain: experiencing Terry Provost deliver his work is like sitting inside an active Cleveland furnace stack on an August night. You can’t escape the inferno and his images can make you smile as they scorch your soul.

Provost’s first book of poetry and prose is entitled Compassionate Imperialism (and its Links to Terror), published by deep cleveland press. It is a peppery, 64-page indictment of George W. Bush and the assault on freedom and democracy mounted during his tenure. If Rome burned and Nero played a fiddle, well then Bush is surely dragging his bow across a diamond-encrusted Stradivarius.

Cool Cleveland recently spoke to Provost about a myriad of topics – from semantics and the core of where his artistry comes from, to the Cleveland poetry scene and a second Bush term. He radiates as much heat as he does light; it’s hard not to be captivated by his contemplative nature, or his tendency to reach deep for the answers that even he doesn’t like hearing.'''

Cool Cleveland: I was going to start with the apolitical, but I can’t help myself. How do you feel today, post election? How do the election results frame Compassionate Imperialism for you today?

Terry Provost: For a long time now I have referred to the Republicans and Democrats as twin cheeks of the same butt. Think of the election as “good cheek, bad cheek.” Bush and company have merely been committing war crimes on a grander scale than any president since Nixon.

An English friend of mine once told me that the attitude of the old Imperial Foreign Office was “when we want your opinion, we’ll give it to you.” This is what American elections amount to. The level of propaganda vastly transcends the potential of factual description. As a writer you try to raise your voice against “the horror,” but try not to pretend your isolated voice amounts to anything more than what Woody Allen called bringing marshmallows to the cremation.

Parts of your book have a real Masters of War feel. Very Dylanesque.
What an amazing compliment. Do you remember Dylan being presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys back in the early '90s? He was apparently in a chemically altered state that was positively Hunter Thompson-esque...

In preference to Positively 4th Street...
Yes… the reportage at the time lingered on the literal impenetrability of his slurred speech and singing. People didn’t even know what song he had performed. It was “Masters of War.” As the glitterati vogued for the paparazzi, the First Gulf War was under way. The masters of war now owned the TV networks that were broadcasting the proceedings; they built the satellites that bounced the signals around the globe. Hell, they even owned the copyrights to the war resistance songs themselves.

What sober troubadour is ever gonna figure that one out?

Compassionate Imperialism also got me revisiting 1984: thinking about the DHS, the Total Information Awareness database, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, government-sanctioned corporate spying on consumers, GPS-capable black boxes installed in all new cars… these are pretty scary times for freedom and truth, wouldn’t you say?
It out-Orwells Orwell… Remember that scene in Sideways, where Miles soliloquizes on how his whole life amounts to less than a piece of excrement on a sheet of used toilet paper flooding out to sea? It is amazing how people can simultaneously feel completely ignored and insignificant, and completely surveilled. You have Big Brother counting your nose hairs [and] meanwhile your best friend can’t seem to remember your birthday. When it comes to gathering information, technology is overwhelming.

It’s like the Power-That-Be is in the middle of a cross between a Jackson Pollock painting and a measles epidemic. It’s the sort of thing where you thank your lucky stars that the kleptocrats are so epically inept... As far as the digital millennium goes, let’s just say that if property is theft, intellectual property is theft gone to double-blind. And GPS? Well, maybe everybody ought to hang on to their old beaters for as long as humanly possible.

Were you reading poetry at a young age? If so, who did you read and what type of lasting influence did those poets and poems have on you?
Let me just say that I think it is too easy to turn poetry into just another form of idolatry. I once heard idolatry defined as “the literal interpretation of symbol,” [which is] a beautiful definition. It reveals at once the fact that far from being the defenders of the faith, fundamentalists are the worst idolaters in existence.

Actually, I think one of the things that most scares people off of religion is the belief that the fundamentalists somehow own the religion, which is of course a bunch of... equine feces.

(laughs) Very good! Which leads us to interpreting art...
One of the most important lessons sentient people should take away from Wittgenstein is that every essentialism is a form of idolatry.

A lot of people spent a large part of the twentieth century arguing over what poetry “is”, or what art “is”, or what “is” or “isn’t” poetry or art...This is by way of saying that I prefer not to separate out the poets and poetry I’ve read from the rest of universe of my reading, or my reading from my hearing, or the hearing of words from the hearing of music.

With all that said, yeah, there are a lot of people who influenced me including, in no particular order, Noam Chomsky, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Robert Service, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Dylan, T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson, Wittgenstein, Einstein, Jackson Brown, Howard Zinn, William Blake, Ginsberg, Chuang Tzu, and Henry Miller. Lasting influences? It’s sort of like pinball caroms: a manifolding concatenation of all of them.

Science and meaning of language is something we have talked about before, and linking relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent is just so strong in your work. Is semantics a passion for you?
For a long time, I was obsessed with epistemology. In college, every test I ever took in any literature class would have me rewriting the question to focus it on epistemology. This led me into philosophy of language, which, largely in disgust, I abandoned for history. Ultimately I’ve settled on something like Rorty’s epistemology of “final vocabulary”, but retranscribed into an etymological framework, but with the further recognition that if you trace etymology far enough back it vanishes into a small handful of self-evident metaphors.

If you think of it in terms of evolution, you might say that new things come to be only when they replace all or part of previously existing ecological functions. Ecologically speaking, everything we achieve with words must once have been possible without them. When you do a grand summation of everything everyone has ever said, it must amount to nothing more than what existed when there were no language-using species on earth.

Why write poetry then? And who or what do you read for inspiration?
I write to try both to embody and to understand the possibilities of diversity within language, which amount to the possibilities of diversity within life – which is to say, that I write in order to live better. [Regarding inspiration] Be catholic and keep the doors as wide open as you can.

Describe the importance poetry plays in your life. What importance do you think poetry plays – or should play – in society?
Poets have always refused to put up with arbitrary rules. There have always been people who said you can’t write on these topics in those ways and poets have always refused to go along. Twentieth century poetry was radically anarchic in that way… Anarchy and democracy are kissing cousins if they aren’t twins, and I think that society needs poetry – broadly, not idolatrously conceived – in order to become democratic.

How often do you write and do you have a certain process for writing?
All over the lot, as you might expect. At times I write every day. Other times, I may go weeks without writing much at all. As to process, it usually depends what I’m writing for...I recently wrote something aimed at school-age kids, something I’ve never done, and never come close to doing before. The “what” I had to say intersected with a “who” I wanted to say it to that necessitated a different “how” of saying.

In general, when I go a long time without writing it’s because I am waiting for a new “for”, and its attendant what, who, and how.

Having written and published poetry, what have you learned that could be helpful to someone just starting out?
New writers are generally in such a hurry to be great they’ve got no time to be decent. I mean that in both senses. A few guidelines: 1) Try being decent, or you may never be great. 2) Be promiscuous and voracious, when you read. 3) If you want to make money, try Wall Street. 4) Workshops are good for knowing which rules you are ignoring and should continue to ignore. 5) Be honest with yourself. Avoid both self flagellation and narcissism. And, 6) Ignore all rules that do not prove themselves on your own soul.

This year has started with a bit of bad news: the “Classic Cleveland Poetry Slam” at the Beachland Ballroom has ended. What happens now?
Michael Salinger is a wonderful writer and an impresario of enviable vigor. The loss of CCPS, well, it’s like an urban renewal project without the renewal.

Poetry as spoken word will live on, if nothing else, as termites live on in the gallows of our local economy. There is vast talent and energy in the hip-hop community as evidenced by Q-Nice and the scene at Kamikaze. Vince Robinson and Cav Faithwalker have an interesting collision of jazz and verse at CMA’s Nia coffeehouse. Jim Lang and the Split Whisky circle have created something so anti-commercial and subterranean at the bookstore on West 25th street, that it’s knee high to a bookworm. Maj Ragain’s series at the Water Street Gallery in Kent is generally so “SRO,” I hesitate to mention it.

Finally, Mark Kuhar and all of his Deep Cleveland ventures… the reading series at Borders, the small press, rumors of a CD, this is [also] a great new channel for the energy that once went into the slams.

So, whether or not someone follows in Salinger’s footsteps, the energy of spoken word artists will continue to destabilize our language and the foundations of our not-so-civil society of preemptive terror.

What do you think is necessary for Cleveland’s poetry scene to stay together and vibrant, in light of this development?
The same thing it will take for Cleveland to “stay together” which, come to think of it, is a not-so-certain proposition these days. There’s an old saying, perhaps from Orwell, that if you want to liberate someone – an admittedly complicated undertaking – you could start by taking your boot heal off of their jugulars.

Our economy is under attack. Our Constitution is under attack. Our educational system is under attack. Cuts to school budgets amount to whacking the dog. Cuts to the Bill of Rights – a.k.a. the PATRIOT Act – amount to whacking the dog. Job cuts, benefit cuts, medical cuts, they are just so many more whacks at the dog. There is a $300 billion dollar [bubble] in a pipeline between Baghdad and the Oval Office. Everybody knows this. To that end, we have much bigger problems than keeping the [Cleveland] poetry scene together.

But the solution is pretty much the same in both cases: Stop whacking the dog.

Do you have any thoughts on the city of Cleveland recently renaming part of West 2nd Street, "Daniel’s Way" to honor the memory of the late Cuyahoga County poet laureate Daniel Thompson?
Walt Whitman once said that you should “stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,” and “argue not concerning God.” To me it always seemed Daniel was channeling Whitman on this point, even if he was just channeling himself. If I recall correctly, that section of West 2nd is a narrow seam between two hulking concrete monstrosities. The choice was appropriate. Daniel sought human solutions in a world where economies of scale seem to dictate an ever-escalating and menacing gigantism. And I think it’s particularly fitting that the poorest city in the nation should honor its champion of the poor. But it’s also very important to remember how fundamentally mischievous and defiant Daniel was, and not to retire his memory to some tranquil Florida of good intentions. That’s something we should all keep in mind as [Governor] Taft and company’s flagrant defiance of DeRolph threatens to turn Cleveland’s schools into conveyor belts for the manufacture of poverty.

Interview by Cool Cleveland correspondent Pete Chakerian PeterATCoolCleveland.com

Photo by Jim Lang

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