WALLPAPER

<p><strong>Bruce Boone in Conversation with Evan Kennedy</strong><br /> May 17, 2019; Bruce’s Apartment in San Francisco</p> <p><strong>EK:</strong> What would you like readers to know about WALLPAPER? What was your method of composition?</p> <p><strong>BB:</strong> In the olden days while we were fighting the Language poets, I decided I would be the ideologue and pit-bull against Ron Silliman. I called his writing “wallpaper.” I did apologize a few years ago, and he said something a bit nasty in return because I didn’t expand upon it. But since then, I’ve been doing all this other stuff built around mess at all levels. It also goes along with the linguistic streamlining or minimalizing of American language that’s going on very noticeably now, especially if you have the ears to compare it with the slowness of linguistic change of the past.</p> <p>The Persians are the great example of this minimalizing from classical antiquity. It started out as just a tiny sliver of Iran, then they went to India, then Afghanistan, then west — Greece, Macedonia, the Middle East. The language before the empire was syntactically complex and inflected, but if you’re the Persians, you’re the masters. If you’re going to say “Tote that barge, lift that bale” to fifty-eight different nationalities, they have to understand you. By the end, they came out with no inflections, no syntax…</p>