Check out this podcast of Kim Addonizio interviewing a number of Henry Miller aficionados about Henry’s life in Big Sur, California. Featuring interviews with Miller’s son Tony, as well as yours truly.
Listen Here:
Playing Ping Pong with Henry Miller – an illuminating BBC podcast on how Big Sur transformed Miller.
In May of 2014 I participated in Aller Retour Paris: a week of art, poetry, film, and music in the heart of Paris, celebrating the city’s role in shaping Henry Miller as a writer and raconteur. Ping-Pong literary journal hosted the opening night party at Shakespeare and Company. Reading poetry while looking at Notre Dame Cathedral is kind of wondrous. I hope I never get to that place where I think that isn’t the coolest thing on earth, cuz it kinda is. I figured since I was in Paris I’d see about interviewing one of my favorite poets, Alice Notley, who kindly agreed. J. Hope Stein, my friend and newest poetry editor at Ping-Pong also came along, and together we had tea and conversation with a woman who makes life itself an art, like Henry says is the trick of the whole thing. What follows is a shortened version (you have to buy the print copy of Ping-Pong to read it in its entirety).
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
the (partial) interview with Alice Notley
by: Maria Garcia Teutsch and J. Hope Stein
May 2014 at a café in Paris, France
MGT
I find a playfulness with language and punctuation in your writing with the things that bind our language and in some ways release them. And I’m wondering if in English you find there are more boundaries on the language than you do in the French?
Alice
No (laughs). No, because English is my first language and for me it has no boundaries. But I don’t think one has more or fewer boundaries than the other.
MGT
In French everything is gender, and I know in German everything is gendered.
Alice
In English a lot is gender and nobody notices it. And if you speak a language you don’t notice it. I don’t notice it so much in French. Mostly I strive to master it so I can speak the language. The words you expect to be feminine are never feminine. It never works the way it’s supposed to. It all comes from Latin. I took Latin in high school and I know that gender is always unexpected. (Laughs) Read More >
Here’s a sneak peak at the interview I conducted with Anne Waldman forthcoming in this issue of Ping-Pong! I am also apoplectic with joy that she will be performing and giving a workshop at our 2 Day Speech is Not Free event!
ARTIST ON THE PULSE: Interview with Anne Waldman
by: MARIA GARCIA TEUTSCH
MGT: What is the role of the artist in the 21st century? Read More >
Skyscrapers in Full Bloom
An interview with Thurston Moore
By: Maria Garcia Teutsch
Henry Miller Memorial Library
I met Thurston Moore at the Henry Miller Memorial library the day of his concert. My friend, the poet Eleni Sikelianos had worked with him at Naropa and suggested I talk to him about poetry. His knowledge of 20th Century poetry is vast. He also publishes up and coming poets and is a collector of rare books. Like most people, I only really knew about him through his group, Sonic Youth. When I began to do research on him I became more and more interested in talking to him. As an interviewer, I make a great poet. So when we sat down in the redwood grove that is the Henry Miller library, he helped me figure out how to use the tape recorder on my Ipad, and then we sat back and began to talk about poetry, art, and the creative urge. Read More >
