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Irving Weiss (Wice), Poet
Weiss lives at 319 Rosin Drive, Chestertown, MD 21620; his e.mail address is iw@washcoll.edu, his phone number 410-778-2951.
(birthdate) 9/11/21
(place of birth) NYC
(height) 5/7
(weight) 143
(hair color and eye color) blackandgrey/brown
(sex) m
(sexual orientation) toward women
(ethnic background) jewish w/some cossack rape
(pets) dog
(spouse) yes
(number of children) 4
(occupation) pension& ss
(yearly earnings) 30k
(schools and degrees)
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U of Michigan BA
Columbia U. MA
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(vocations) writer/teacher
(hobbies) gardening, surfing tv and net
(publication credits) 50+ but most recently, RIO online, Scratchpad online, Spilled Ink online,
Score, wordimage, Caliban, koja, Archae
(list of works) Collections of poetry, apart from other books: Visual Voices: The Poem As Print
Object (1994) and Number Poems (1997)and I consider my translation of Chazal's Sens-
Plastique (1972, 1980) "poetry" even if I say in the preface it's science.
(where written up) Taproots, Meat Epoch, NY Times Book Review for Chazal
Saul Steinberg and Cy Twombly are important to Weiss as "poets." As for artists more conventionally classified as contemporary poets he says, "Alive: not important, I just like to read them,
Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Vozhnesensky, Clark Coolidge, Jackson McLow, Bob Grumman, Padin,
Doktorovich, Kostelanetz, Tom Johnson, Arakawa, Ginsberg (let him still be alive for this
mention), Saul Steinberg, Cy Twombly, Karl Kempton, too many to mention but few word
poets in English
(critics important to respondent) Roland Barthes
(poets of yesteryear important to respondent) Ten, in no particular order, Homer, Catullus, Dante, Basho, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Auden, Shakespeare and Milton
(critics important to respondent) Ten, in no particular order, Frye, Samuel Johnson, Auerbach, Empson, Coleridge, Auden, Pound, Kenneth Burke, Robert Graves and Longinus
(tastes in poetry)
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I read word poetry by chance, rarely get hold of a modern book of anyone's poetry or want to. Slight amendment: I've just bought Celan and, some time back, Nicanor Parra and Clark Coolidge. Light verse always attracts me if it's done with technical mastery and, of course, wit. Since free verse is never light, I rarely try to read a poem I come across if it has an irregular shape on the page. Alas, Ginsburg's dead--I always read him. I'm inconsistent. But I consider visual (and concrete) poetry light (can't really be called verse) mainly because it strikes by impact, as even the mere appearance on the page of rhyme and meter light verse strikes by impact. of page presence and seduces you to peruse it. Reason I switched from word to image in doing poems is that I envy visual artists because they don't need subject matter, they make things, they are makers in the Greek sense of poesis. Subject matter not important except that I'd much rather read a foreign poet in translation writing about the realities and surrealities of Non-American life than an American or English poet writing about his own heart or mind,scenery, domesticity, sensual love, etc. I like poetry of tragedy and suffering executed with hypnotic deftness and technical wizardry (heavy verse as light verse), e.g., Milosz, Akhmatova, Montale, Celan, Seferis . It's a rare American word poet who attracts me because his subject matter is likely to be self-indulgent. Real prejudice here on my part. I'm drawn to black poets by the slang and blacktalk but I feel too excluded to continue my interest for long.
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(impression of contemporary poetry)
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Haven't been interested in contemporary poetry for decades. I'm the only living poet who matters. However, when a new poem enters my presence and I like it, I'm very happy. I don't need contemporary poetry to live. I find "poetry" wherever my attention happens to point, in movie scenes, tv ads, technical print, cartoons. Past poetry I still go for and look for, especially those poets I neglected to get my teeth into before, and sometimes that included moderns, like Hugh McDiarmid or Larkin. Put differently, I subscribe to no poetry magazines except those I publish in, and that I do because I like to help out. But I am a faithful subscriber to Art in America because artists don't need words and can therefore tell us what's going on in inner space and time before they become outer space and time. I'm glad I'm doing this, since I never bothered to say out loud, so to speak, what I already do concerning Contemporary Poetry. I have always thought that any poem I read is an excuse to compose one of my own and frequently stop reading a poem because it makes me want to compose a poem, and I may never go back to the other poem. My artistic selfishness is my greatest pleasure and the ultimate meaning for me of work.
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(zines, etc., that ought to be listed in the dictionary) Concerned with, I don't know. But MTV, Peanuts, some fashion magazine ads, dictionary and telephone book pages are all poetic.
. .
About his religious leanings, Weiss says, "No spiritual leanings, never felt any, but I assume transcendental order in the
humanized universe. God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Anyone can become a Buddha.
There's no discontinuity between man and Deity or The Inscrutable. But as for wanting to
actively participate, never had the desire, though I may pray before the last agony out of
desperation . I read much in theology, because the scriptures of all kinds and of all Ways of
Liberation, including the I Ching, confront the most essential elements of being and non-being.
Love reading theologians. But all this is different from participating. My conception of a religious
person is one who either practices rituals or goes to a house of worship regularly. What he does
there or privately is irrelevant. Commitment to regular duties is the essence of belief but that's all
an observer can tell about another's belief: that he performs the acts concerning what that he's
supposed to believe in. Never trust a person who SAYS he believes.
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Click here for a sample of Weiss's poetry, or here to see a poem by Christopher Smart that Weiss admires.
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