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Gerard Malanga

© Gerard Malanga

Gerard Malanga, "Tennessee Williams w/Coke" (1975)

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For nearly seven years now I’ve been working steadily on this book of poems I call Who’s there? I had this epiphany that I could take my poems a step further… into another dimension. I had a memory of a brief incident that I’d carried around in my head for 30 years or so and hadn’t given any thought to as to what I was going to do with it. In fact, I wasn’t going to do anything with it. As Bob Creeley, a dear friend, once said, “We live as we can. Each day another. There’s no use in counting.” Suddenly, one day I found myself recounting this one incident in a kind of stream-of-consciousness outpouring and realized I’d hit on something: a new way of telling a story as a prose poem. The experience was like being in the starting gate, and suddenly I broke out and didn’t look back. Then everything came to a halt. I hadn’t seen it coming but now I had to deal with this apparent emptiness. So I knew instinctively it was time to step back and see what I’d done and give shape to the manuscript.

Now I’m on to a new project, an exhibit I’m calling “The Cats in My Life.”

Have you used studio assistants in producing your own work? If so, what has the relationship been like? What sorts of projects lend themselves to collaboration and which don’t for you?

I’ve never had opportunity to work with an assistant on my photography, and I don’t want to. It would be a distraction for me. Taking someone’s portrait is a private moment for me, shared with whomever I’m photographing. As a poet, I don’t have a secretary, nor do I need one. I enjoy typing up my manuscripts. It gives me a sense that I’m accomplishing something of my very own twice over. It helps me to reflect. Don’t get me wrong: I think the artist/assistant relationship can be a good thing. But I, personally, don’t find it useful for me.

Where do you produce the majority of your work? Do you keep a studio here in New York?

I produce my work on the run, so to speak. I nearly always have a camera with me, whether at home or walking the neighborhood or when I’m traveling. So if it’s not a person I’m photographing, then I’m taking pictures of cats or empty streets or lonely buildings. I love architectural details. I love ambience. So I don’t work out of a “studio.” The studio is in my brain. I do my most concentrated work in poetry at the start of the day. The mind is empty. My one luxury is to go out for my morning cappuccino and the New York Times and this helps with allowing those stories to pass through me. I’m in a psychic trance when this happens, so I lose all sense of time. There’s no way to explain it.

You had already established yourself as a poet before you met Andy Warhol in the early ’60s and became widely known as his most influential assistant. How did the time at the Factory affect your own work? How much ownership did you feel for the work you helped produce there?

I had already decided I was going to become a poet long before I met Warhol. I was 16 at the time. That sounds a bit peculiar. You don’t really “become” a poet. Something inside you instinctively recognizes the magic of what poetry is about. Ezra Pound once said about poets: “Without curiosity you’re dead.” Curiosity is still the mainstay for everything I do.

My work with Andy was very stimulating in what I could contribute to his art. I never felt a sense of ownership for the work I was helping him produce. It was the spirit in what we were doing together that enabled me to remain faithful to my own work. It was a long time ago now, but it was a time of nurturing for me.

And lastly, what’s on the horizon for you?

The Beinecke Library at Yale University recently acquired my papers, so I’m right in there with some of my heroes, like Charles Ives, Marcel Duchamp, Josephine Herbst, the Futurists. There might be some spin-offs, like an exhibit and catalogue, some kind of substantial involvement. I do want to get Who’s there? published. That’s uppermost in my mind. It may be my last book, who knows? And, of course, I’m still taking photographs, and there’s a huge backlog of material there. Huge. It’s always fun for me to make enlargements of negatives never printed before. It tells me something about how much of this work nearly didn’t happen. There’s a whole range of projects I’ve yet to explore. The fun is to keep moving on and to have fun doing it.