Victoria Chang

Coffee Chat #7: Shane McCrae

2011-06-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

While I was at AWP this year, a book was recommended to me more than once and that book was Shane McCrae's Mule, published by Cleveland State University Press. I, like many readers, can be a bit skeptical about recommendations. However, I loved this book and highly recommend it. I also recommended it at Ron Slate's blog here.

What I loved most about this book was the originality of the voice. I just haven't read a book that sounds quite like McCrae's book. After I read his book, I had so many questions about how this book was formed, as well as questions about McCrae as a person and a poet. I sought him out to interview and he was gracious enough to answer my questions. I hope you'll read his interview below and buy the book. Not only is McCrae a great poet, but he also seems like a darn nice guy too.

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VC: As someone with four degrees myself in various different areas, I noticed in your bio that you have an MFA from Iowa, a JD from Harvard, and are now pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Iowa, and I assume you have a BA as well. Tell me about your interest in the pursuit of education?

SM: You know, it’s hard for me to think of myself as someone interested in the pursuit of education, although I imagine I am—I couldn’t stand school when I was younger, and I still have some trouble with it. In fact, the main reason I dropped out of high school was that I was so hopelessly behind in my work—because I skipped school most days—that I had no chance of graduating in the foreseeable future. Since I had already repeated the 10th grade, I felt like maybe I had been in school long enough.

So I had a bad time in school, and didn’t start college until I was 21, about to turn 22. By this time I had decided that I wanted to be a poet—in fact, I had pretty much decided that at 15, based upon nothing—and I thought school might be good for my writing. However, I hadn’t ever known anyone who had actually gone to college, and, in part because of this, had a very distorted notion of what college would be like. Fearing my own inadequacy, and having no common sense, I prepped myself for community college by reading the complete works of Chaucer, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, all the poetry of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, all the Greek and Roman epics, and a bunch of other crap I can’t remember at the moment. It was a dumbass thing to do. But I got used to the hectic pace necessary to get all that reading done—not a very good reader, me—and have been riding that momentum ever since, really.

That said, I am so thankful I did that dumbass thing. I loved writing long before I loved reading, and if I had hadn’t forced all that stuff down my words-gullet I don’t know that I could have ever grown to love reading as I do. And reading has become one of the few things in life I can’t imagine being happy without.

Also, I like to think my education has made me a more useful person—more compassionate, more open-minded, more willing to put the needs and desires of others before my own. And if it has, then I am even more thankful for that.

VC: You once said that you want “accessibility and the avant-garde to duke it out” in your poems (or something like that) and that “accessibility” is actually very important to you. This intrigued me because it seems like we've been so polarized and have had an “either/or” mentality (although have you read the anthology, American Hybrid by David St. John and Cole Swensen?). But you don't see it that way--can you talk more about this and where this mentality came from?

SM: I’m not sure exactly where this polarization came from, though I would say there is (or used to be) an incentive for writers who are consciously “accessible” and those who are consciously “avant-garde” not to allow too many hints of any other inclination—if a writer has created audience expectations, it can be dangerous for that writer to produce work that occupies a space too far outside those expectations. But I sometimes think those distinctions are only practically meaningful when a reader is in a mood for a particular kind of poem or book, and doesn’t want to bewildered by too many options. And nowadays—and I think this has something to do with the increasing accessibility of information—readers seem not to be bewildered by their many options, and instead embrace them. And this makes such distinctions less and less meaningful. For my part, I just like a lot of different poems and poets—Sandra Doller, yes, but also William Dunbar. I’m suspicious of people who say they like poetry, but not certain “kinds” of poetry—I think what they really mean is that they like some poems, but not poetry in general. This is a perfectly understandable, even laudable, position, but it’s not mine.

But that’s only half an answer to your question. I do want my poems to be accessible to the average reader (although, of course, no such reader exists), but I don’t think this means the poems have to be straightforward. Although the fragmentation of American culture (and I refer to “American culture” here not because I think it’s primary, but only because I write as an American, and could not choose to do otherwise; obviously, many other cultures have been fragmenting as well) has been apparent for at least 100 years, I think the sped-up process of fragmentation that the internet has encouraged over the past 20 years or so has made it easier for readers to understand syntax that has itself been beaten up a little. And this, in combination with other factors, has expanded the boundaries of accessibility so far that the accessible and the avant-garde now overlap considerably. This is perhaps more readily visible at the intersection of music and popular culture.

Well, now we’ve got less than half an answer.

I like all kinds of poetry. When I write I want to write all kinds of poetry. I also want to write poems people might find enjoyable and/or helpful in some way—which is probably overly ambitious of me.

I haven’t read American Hybrid yet, but I’m gonna.

VC: Your first book, MULE, is so unique in its voice--I don't think you sound like anyone else. Tell me how you started writing those poems and where your inspiration came from?

SM: Aww, thanks! I started writing those poems in 2005 after several years of struggling to write traditionally punctuated free verse poems, none of which really felt like me—I was writing the way I had been taught to write, not by any particular person or even a particular school, but by my own (fairly shallow, I think) reading of contemporary poetry. Eventually, I got tired of writing these poems—I could see how bad they were, and was depressed—and decided that the only way for me to make a clean break from them was to basically do the opposite of everything I had been doing. So I ditched the punctuation and started using meter and rhyme. And I began to feel like I was writing the way I was meant to write, and poems came quickly and considerably more easily than they had come before. The very first of these poems were devotional, and for a while I couldn’t figure out how to write anything but devotional poems. I managed it eventually, but when I did the devotional poems left, and I’ve been trying to get them back ever since.

VC: I read in an interview with No Tell Motel that you don’t write free verse poems because you can't. Your poems to me at least, seem like a combination between free verse poems and formal poems. How do you construct your poems and how does formalism play into the writing of your poems?

SM: My poems are all very strictly metrical, and all of them employ rhyme. That said, I do make use of elision, etc. to keep my iambs from sounding too regular—nothing fancy, all tricks poets writing in meter have used for hundreds of years—and most of my rhymes are very slant. I also use a lot of sight rhymes and even a sort of rhyme I guess I’ll call a slant sight rhyme, which is basically something that looks like a slant rhyme, but isn’t (just as sight rhymes, like “near” and “bear” look like they should rhyme, but don’t). Admittedly, that’s not a trick that has been commonly used for hundreds of years. But often what I’m doing with the rhyme and meter is building a home for the poem, and what I’m interested in is ticking off the boxes on the formal checklist—that is, making sure it has walls and a roof. This may be a terrible thing to say, but I’m not necessary interested in the sound of the rhyme—I try to write the poems in such a way that the rhymes aren’t obvious anyway—but am instead interested in having something that satisfies some aspect of what a rhyme does. So as long as two words look like they might sort of rhyme (like, say, “cough” and “trash”), that’s enough for me.

VC: One of my friends always says to me to “make it new” if I am treading on subject matter that others have treaded on (which is basically everything). Your subject matter is wide and varied, from race, to family, to divorce, to religion. Do you think consciously about making it new?

SM: While I definitely think it’s valuable to approach subjects in new ways, a poem is about so much more than its subject matter—it’s about its sound, its images, the shapes of the words, its visual field, etc.—and if these other things are handled well, the newness of the approach to subject matter becomes less important. But I don’t want to suggest that I think I handle these other things well—still, those are the things I tend to think about. I think it helps to not think too much about subject matter until a poem is almost done, if at all.

VC: Does subject matter come first for you as inspiration or does form come first? Or something else? The reason I ask this is because I found all of your poems, no matter on which subject, to have a similar form to them. I was intrigued by the fact that you could probably write about anything and make it interesting and new.

SM: Well, most of the poems in Mule are sonnets or sonnet-based, and that’s probably the biggest reason that many of them look formally similar. But the only time I ever have my subject matter in mind before I start writing a poem is when I’m writing a sequence, and even then I only have a broad sense of what the sequence is supposed to be about—I have very little or no sense of what the individual poem is about. I’ve found that when I have my subject matter in mind before I start a poem, that poem usually ends up stilted.

But do I ever wish I could write poems with the subject matter in mind beforehand! I imagine that would be freeing.

VC: Why the sonnet?

SM: I think it was something a professor—his name was Kenneth Ericksen—once said in a class I took on Milton as an undergraduate. He said that back in the day, poets used to do their apprenticeships, so to speak, by writing sonnets, and once they felt they had those down, they moved on. Since then, I’ve always felt it was an appropriate form for me to write in.

But as a form, the sonnet troubles me, albeit for entirely personal reasons. I worry that I’m too used to it. After I had been writing exclusively in meter for a few years, free verse lines stopped occurring to me—nowadays, whenever a line plops into my head, it’s always iambic, and usually in tetrameter, pentameter, or hexameter. In much the same way, I tend to think of any as-yet-unfinished poem as a sonnet waiting to happen. Obviously, this is a terrible, terrible thing. I’m working on it.

VC: Repetition seems to be something you use often in your poems in a very masterful way. How are you constructing the repetition in your poems so that you achieve that right balance? And why is repetition so important to you in your work?

SM: Repetition is important to me, I think, mostly because so much of the music I love is repetitive. So often my use of it is based on the sound of it—if I try repeat something in a poem and it doesn’t sound right to do so, then that instance of repetition just doesn’t work. But the sense of it is important, too, and I like to think that a repeated thing won’t sound right if it doesn’t make sense, independent of how it sounds (if that’s possible), to repeat it.

I think repetition can give a reader the sense that he or she knows where he or she is in a poem, that he or she is not lost. As a person who is often unproductively lost in poems (I wouldn’t want to eliminate the sense of being lost entirely; it can be really useful), I know how helpful this can be.

VC: Instead of punctuation, you use slashes, spaces, etc. Tell me why you decided to use no conventional punctuation?

SM: To be honest, it just sort of happened—mostly, it really was because I had been using punctuation in all those poems I didn’t like, and I wanted a change.

To begin with, I only used the caesurae; the slashes didn’t come until 2007 (I remember because it was the year I graduated from law school). Eventually, I got a little tired of what I was doing and wanted to experiment a bit. It occurred to me that if I were to introduce slashes, I would have far more control over rhythm. Here’s how I use them: Traditionally, a sonnet has fourteen lines, each of with has five iambic feet. Here’s the sestet of a famous sonnet by Hopkins:

Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

I realized that if I were to introduce slashes, then I could keep the form in the “checklist” sense I mentioned above, but have more control over the sound of the lines, and, in a way, write both traditionally metrical verse and free verse at the same time (part of my impetus for introducing the slash was to see if it would possible to do such a seemingly paradoxical thing). I’ll demonstrate what I mean by introducing caesurae, slashes and new line breaks to the Hopkins (blasphemous, I know):

Yet God (that hews

mountain and continent, / Earth,

all, out; who, with trickling increment, / Veins violets and tall trees makes

more and more) / Could crowd career with conquest while there went

Those years and years by of world

without event / That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

Now, of course, I didn’t improve the Hopkins thereby, but you can see what I mean—the slash indicates where a line ends metrically and makes the form apparent. This allows me to break lines wherever I want—and so to write traditionally metrical verse and free verse simultaneously.

VC: What poets inspired you in the writing of MULE? When I was reading it, I oddly heard a little of Brigit Pegeen Kelly and her book SONG, probably due to your use of repetition. Your repetition feels more urgent, though.

SM: Stein, Beckett, Yeats, Finale—it feels strange mentioning one’s influences; I wouldn’t want to give anyone the impression that I think I live up to them. But those three, and Plath (always), and (always) Keats, Herbert, Berryman—I think Aiken, too, and Kevin Shields, and Andrew Prinz. And I had Rābiʻa al-Basrī’s famous prayer in mind a lot of the time, also:

O my Lord, if I worship you in fear of hell, burn me in hell.

If I worship you in desire of heaven, deprive me of it.

But if I worship you for your own sake,

then do no not deprive me of your eternal beauty.

I would say that the prose of William Tyndale, including his translations of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, was often rumbling through my head as well—his prose is wonderful, and wonderfully forceful.

But I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read Kelly. But I will. There’s just so much out there, you know? And I miss so many necessary things. I haven’t read a single novel by Faulkner, for instance. Sigh. Now I’m embarrassed.

VC: How long did you send your manuscript out before it was picked up by Cleveland State University Press? Would you describe yourself as anxious about the process or patient?

SM: Probably I was anxious. But anxiety requires hope, and since I don’t win contests, I didn’t have a lot of hope when I was sending the manuscript around. So maybe I wasn’t so much anxious as I was resigned to defeat?

I had been sending it around, in one form or another, for about two years. But I hadn’t sent it to many contests because I couldn’t afford them. So I was really very lucky when Michael Dumanis expressed interest in the book, and I will be forever grateful to him.

VC: Why don’t you win contests? What do you think about the contest and prize system in poetry?

SM: The contest and prize system makes a lot of sense to me, actually—not a lot of people buy poetry, and contest fees help to fund books and all kinds of other necessary things. And, in a weird way, they help to create a community—whenever I enter a contest, I feel like I have a stake in the winning book (which, you know, isn’t gonna be mine), and it feels good to help in that small way.

But I don’t win contests, no. And it’s not as if my work is particularly and incomprehensibly revolutionary, which I imagine can be a bar to victory. This may be a mundane answer, but so many stars have to align for one’s manuscript to win—the right readers have to read it in the first place, and they have to pass it on to the right judge who has to be in the right mood. I just haven’t had the right stars.

VC: Michael Dumanis seems to be doing some really interesting work at Cleveland State in terms of the poetry books he and his team are publishing. Do you think he is trying to push the envelope in terms of the types of work he is publishing? And if so, how?

What I love about what Michael and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center are doing is that they’re publishing work they believe in, and that’s their foremost criteria. And I think Michael is trying to put work out there that occupies that space where the avant-garde and the accessible overlap—or, rather, and what I think means more, I think he’s not especially worried about that space, but instead his own sensibilities guide him there. But since the CSUPC is a respected press, this in itself helps to move poetry in America forward. It doesn’t hurt that he’s an amazing poet himself.

But, as much as Michael does—and he does a lot—everyone else at the CSUPC works hard toward the same goal, and the books wouldn’t be possible without them. When Mule was being produced, I was especially lucky to be able to work with Krysia Orlowski and Chris Smith, who seemed to be doing everything for everybody all the time, and Amy Freels, who made the cover and made it more beautiful than I could have imagined it.

VC: What is it that you are trying to achieve when you write your poems?

SM: I’m worried this will sound square, as well as questionable from a theoretical perspective, but I really hope that the poems I write will move somebody in a way that is positive. But I would be just as happy if somebody who was terrified of spiders used Mule to squish one.

VC: Is there anything about the poetry world that frustrates you?

SM: I’m frustrated by practical difficulties sometimes—like, I wish it were easier for me to travel so that I could do more readings, and I wish poets were all masters of social interaction so that my own inadequacies wouldn’t hamper conversations. And I wish it were easier to get a teaching job! But I still feel like I’m fairly new to the poetry world, and haven’t yet really begun to be frustrated by it.

VC: How would you say ethnicity fits into your identity as a poet? Would you want to be labeled an African American poet, why or why not?

SM: Lately, my struggles with my own ethnic identity have been my only subject—they have been rumbling beneath the surface of things that would seem to have nothing to do with them. And so I think it would be in a way an honest thing for me to be labeled as an African American poet, at least right now—I do write about race and my own experience of signifying racially. But I don’t think such labels are really necessary, and I worry people use them so as to know what not to read. It’s too easy for, say, a white reader to think, “Oh, she’s a black poet—her work has nothing to do with me.” But the point, I think, is not that the black poet, when writing about race, is writing only about some aspect of blackness—he or she is writing also about an aspect of being human, and that work has to do with everybody.

VC: You have 3 kids, I understand. How does being a father affect your poems or the writing of your poems?

SM: Lately, it has had more of a practical effect than it used to—I just haven’t had much time to write. But overall I think being a father has been an immeasurably positive thing. And, really, I wouldn’t know what being a writer who doesn’t have kids is like, anyway—my first daughter was born when I was 18, and I can’t remember what writing was like before her. She was the beginning of me, and the beginning of me writing.

In general, I would say that having children helps one to understand how unimportant one’s own desires are, and it helps one to get a real sense of one’s one beliefs and politics—I am not the sort of parent I imagined I would be, at all. This might not be true for everyone, but I didn’t know who I really was before I had kids.

VC: At AWP this year, I became obsessed with asking this question--do you feel joy when you write? “Joy” was another poet's word, not mine!

SM: Yes! Thank God, yes.

VC: Since I haven’t met you in person, how would your friends describe you? How would you describe yourself?

SM: Boring and boring plus (plus what? nothing good), respectively.

VC: You seem so humble in the interactions I’ve had with you so far--that you can’t believe anyone has read your book, yet your book was the one book everyone told me to buy at AWP. How does that make you feel?

SM: I don’t know, I really don’t know. If anybody likes Mule (if, yes, anybody has in fact read it), then I’m happy, so happy. It doesn’t matter to me that the book is being talked about, except insofar as that brings it to the attention of a reader who finds some pleasure and/or good in it.

VC: I can't wait to read your next book--what are you working on now?

SM: Right this very moment now, I’m not working on anything—well, I’m researching the history of lynching in the U. S. for a sequence of poems I hope to write. But I haven’t been successfully writing. However, I did just finish my second full-length manuscript this past February. It’s called Colored Would and I’m really excited about it—it’s more unified, I think (in a good way, I hope) than Mule. As it turns out, I seem to be interested in writing books with fairly unifying themes—I hadn’t known this until I started work on the poems that became In Canaan, which is also the first part of Colored Would, and which I started writing a few months after Mule was taken. The poems in In Canaan try to tell a version of the story of Margaret Garner, and writing them was unlike any writing experience I had ever had before—having a theme focused my attention and helped me to dig a little deeper, hopefully, than I could have done otherwise.

That said, it would be nice to write a book of disparate lyrics, if I could ever manage it. But I need all the help I can get.

VC: What should I have asked you but didn’t?

SM: What’s my favorite band? My Bloody Valentine. But you asked everything you should have—I’m just throwing that in. Plus I love Melissa.

Remiss and Two Memoirs (O'Rourke and Chua)

2011-05-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

Remiss seems like a common title for my blog posts. My life is kind of busy. I've still had time to read and just finished Meghan O'Rourke's "The Long Goodbye." I thought it was very strong. There was a string of sadness throughout the book and it made me realize how ultimately alone we all are in our private struggles. Although the book was sad, at the end of the day, I think it was a celebration of a relationship, that relationship of a mother and child. I felt so happy that Meghan had seemingly had such an incredible mom and she had such great experiences with her when she was alive. That's what I tried to keep in my head while I read the book. As well as remembering to try to be as good of a mom as Meghan's so that my own daughters will remember me so warmly and fondly.

There's no need for me to talk much about it anymore (it's been reviewed everywhere), but I wanted to note how much I did enjoy it: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Goodbye-memoir-Meghan-ORourke/dp/1594487987/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306444009&sr=8-1

In truth, however, the book did make me realize how different my upbringing was from Meghan's upbringing, being a child of immigrants, which leads me to the next book I read, or "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom" by Amy Chua. Even though Chua is an extremist, I could definitely relate to that sort of upbringing a little more. So in some sense, reading O'Rourke's memoir was like watching a show on television, but reading Tiger Mom was a bit too familiar. Tim Yu writes an incredibly smart and accurate critique of the book: http://tympan.blogspot.com/2011/02/paper-tiger-mother-on-amy-chua.html

The biggest problem I had with Chua's book was her blanket black and white statements. "Chinese people are like this..." and "Westerners are like this..." Those statements were sprinkled throughout the book and despite some familiarity with her style of parenting, I disagreed with many of her blanket statements. In truth, however, once in a while, I found myself looking at myself and asking myself how many times have I said to my husband: "Those moms are so 'American' in how they raise their kids.'" So I guess we can all be guilty of stereotyping. At the end of the day, though, I would have expected someone educated as well as she has been to be more open-minded about her views.

I also think that Chua's book seemed so extreme because she didn't show many moments of tenderness towards her children. She seems so intelligent, yet so unaware at the same time. I do find it odd too that she wouldn't have anticipated this type of response to her memoir. Only a person living on an island would have had her supposed surprised response.

I've got a new stack of poetry books on my desk so hopefully I'll get a chance to reflect on those soon. Also, I've got a few outstanding Coffee Chats I've been hounding people about lately. One is by the author of MULE, Shane McCrae, so hopefully I can get those responses from him soon.

Ron Slate's Spring Poetry Feature

2011-03-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

I recommend 2 poetry books for Ron Slate's Spring Poetry Feature (Mule by Shane McCrae and Death Obscura by Rick Bursky). Click below if your'e interested:

http://www.ronslate.com/nineteen_poets_recommend_new_recent_titles

Coffee Chat #6: Rachel Zucker

2011-03-21T18:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know Rachel Zucker personally, but I sought her out at the recent AWP because I am very intrigued by her work and the voice behind her work. My first entry into Zucker's world was through Museum of Accidents, which I admit, I initially didn't love, but then I went back to read her other books (particularly The Bad Wife Handbook) and loved so many things about her writing that I went back to Museum of Accidents and changed my mind wholeheartedly. What I love about Zucker's work is her voice, her boldness, her openness. Her voice just feels very real, very complicated, very complex, very unsettling. And behind that openness and boldness is a deep focus on craft. Her voice is all her own and I love that about her work. Whether you have had children or not; whether you have children or not, Zucker is a poet everyone in this world must read.

She was kind of enough to indulge in my endless curiosity with her usual zest and openness, despite the fact that she is widely interviewed already. I tried to ask questions that were different or were uniquely my own. I think in all of my interviews, I try to demystify people or poets so that they become more tangible to me. I guess my own discovery that there is no "path" in poetry or no "destination" is something I like to investigate further in my interviews. In many ways, writers seem so different from one another, but on so many levels, we are very much the same. I put a few of my responses to her comments in bold.

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VC: Tell me about your latest project, the book-length lyrical essay with Arielle Greenberg, on homebirth.

RZ: Home/Birth: a poemic is a collaborative, hybrid genre book about homebirth, birth, feminism, and friendship.

VC: You seem to do a lot of collaborative work with the poet Arielle Greenberg. What makes your relationship work so well? Have you ever had any problems working together or has it been smooth sailing?

RZ: Our relationship works well because we work on it. We care about it and about each other and put the time in. Sometimes it’s a lovely, easy friendship and sometimes it’s hard. I don’t have sisters (or brothers) but Arielle is like a sister to me. I love her in complicated ways. The relationship is deeply sustaining and inspiring on so many levels, even sometimes because it provokes self-awareness which can be unsettling.

VC: After reading your books, I feel like I know you or at least the speaker in your poems well. Very well. Sometimes in your poems, I think to myself, "I can't believe she said that" and then I read the next line and the next and think the same thing. Coming from a modest Chinese American (more Chinese than American) family culture, I am in awe of your honesty and frankness. Where does this come from and do you ever have second thoughts about putting certain things in your poems?

RZ: You brought up culture and I think that’s heavily at play: lot of it has to do with being Jewish. Think about it, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen.. speaking up isn’t our problem. We have other problems for sure! [VC: I grew up in an all Jewish community, so I understand!]

VC: Where do your poems come from? Do they come from a thematic idea? Do they come from an image? Do you know where they come from?

RZ: Good question! I have no idea.

VC: Once you said in an interview: "I don't like rejection, but I have an even harder time dealing with people's jealousy." I've noticed that some poets can, and I emphasize can, be very jealous of other peoples' successes. How do you deal with that? Do you ever get jealous of other poets, their poems, etc.?

RZ: I am so uncomfortable with other people’s jealousy that I tend to completely sublimate my knowledge of it. I don’t tend to be so jealous of others although every once in a while I have a full out temper tantrum about rejections. I have a very high tolerance for rejection but after last fall when I was on the job market and had applied for grants (and didn’t get either), I think I might have reached my limit for a while.

VC: You've obviously experienced a great deal of "success" in the poetry world. Do you agree with that and if so, why? If not, why not?

RZ: Are you jealous? If so, I can’t hear you. Just kidding. I have experienced success in the sense that I’ve had my books published and have had editors who believe in me and lately, with the Home/Birth book, I’ve had people write to me and Arielle and tell us that the book has changed their lives. That’s incredible. I’m profoundly grateful to these things. [VC: Jealous of you? Yes, yes, yes! Well, I am not "jealous", but have deep admiration for you and your work--like you, I probably don't have time to be jealous].

VC: You've had quite a few books of poetry published. Was it hard to find a publisher for your first book? Was it hard to get the subsequent books picked up (I know you had the same publisher, Wesleyan, for a while).

RZ: It was extremely difficult to find a publisher for all of my books except for the books published by Wave and 1913 press.

VC: Your most recent book, Museum of Accidents, is out from Wave Books. Your prior from Wesleyan. What made you change presses?

RZ: I can’t answer that online.

VC: At the most recent AWP in D.C., I asked you, Laurel Snyder, and Matthew Zapruder, whether you feel "joy" or "tortured" when you write poetry and all three of you sighed and said: "tortured" or some form of torture. Something about your poems and the way they flow on the page in terms of syntax seems "easy" for you. The poems almost feel as if they cannot not come out, that they are busting at the seams. But oddly, I read that you write slowly. Can you talk more about how you feel when you write and how you write?

RZ: I think I felt a little bit of peer pressure at that moment. This is going to sound cheesey but I’ll go for it: lately I’ve made the decision that if I am doing something (like writing or spending time with my kids) then it means that is what I WANT to do. This is a weird logic, I know, but I’m sick of the whole “I have to write but it makes me miserable” thing. I can’t really say that I feel joy when I write, but I’m trying to take responsibility for my choices, for my life. I write because I want to. There is a difference, as I know from childrbirth, between pain and suffering. I think there is a difference between torture and discomfort. I don’t think writing is torture. I think it’s intense and that can be uncomfortable.

VC: In your recent books you seem to have some common themes. Do you ever fear what a lot of poets seem to fear, which is writing the same poem over and over or writing the same series of poems over and over?

RZ: I don’t know that I have a choice in the matter.

VC: Do you think the poetry community is New York-centric? Why or why not?

RZ: I guess the New York poetry community is. Is there a poetry community? I feel like I’m always missing everything.

VC: I'm amazed at how you have such a large range across all of your books, meaning, you have long lines, you have short lines, you have conventional syntax, then not. I first thought that subject matter informs the structure and format of your poems. Then I began to doubt my theory when I looked back at The Bad Wife Handbook where there are these short compressed lyrics and then the longish work in the middle of the book. How do your poems arrive at their structure?

RZ: The subject matter absolutely informs the form; they are inextricable.

VC: You seem to have a lot of poet friends who are your trusted readers. Does your husband read your poems? If so, does he read them as a critic or not? And if he does read them, when do you let him into that process?

RZ: My husband doesn’t like poetry. Luckily he likes poets.

VC: Would you consider yourself an "ambitious" poet? If so, what does this mean to you?

RZ: I’m a hard worker. Work has often been an escape for me. I’m trying to redefine that, to move closer to joy as the reason I work and the feeling I get when I work.

VC: I read an amazing conversation you had with the "nonmother" poet Sarah Manguso in Candor Magazine. I loved the honest conversation between the nonmother and the mother poet. Are you surprised when "nonmothers", both male or female read your work with interest or noninterest?

RZ: Yes. But I’m surprised when mothers read it too--how do they have time? [VC: That is funny. I have lots of small minutes, but not lots of large blocks of minutes, but I'm working on that]

VC: Are your parents proud of you? Said another way, how do your parents react to your life and writing? What were they like when you were growing up trying to figure out what you wanted to do in this world?

RZ: Yes, I think they are very proud of me. I have my issues with my parents, certainly, but one thing they gave me was the sense that I could do anything. They thought I was smart and capable and talented. That was a gift, to be seen that way.

VC: A friend who just had a baby said that it is "relentless." I agree. As a mother, I feel like the highs are higher and the lows lower. Do you ever feel this way?

RZ: EVERY FUCKING DAY.

VC: I got goosebumps reading Stephen Burt's review of your work in the Boston Review--I found it to be one of the best reviews I've read in a while simply in terms of the writing itself, not to mention the dead on interpretation of your work and how he contextualized it. How did you feel when you read this review and how do you feel when you read reviews of your work in general?

RZ: I got hives. I’m not kidding. It was very strange and wonderful and upsetting to be “seen” so clearly by a totally stranger. That was incredibly scary and meaningful to me.

VC: When you got the National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, I've read you were busy dealing with kids and putting a movie on, etc. How did getting that nomination make you feel after you had time to actually reflect on it? Did it change anything? Do any of your conventional "successes" in poetry change anything in your life?

RZ: It made me think I had a real shot for getting a grant or fellowship --but that turned out to be a bad investment of energy.

VC: Why do you write poetry? What does poetry mean to you?

RZ: Writing connects me to the world. Helps me pay attention. Sometimes my poetry can get very internalized (I’m often describing my interior world). That’s part why started doing this daily blog www.thehereinwhere.blogpost.com

VC: What is or are your biggest fear (or fears) related to poetry?

RZ: That by spending my time writing I’m doing frivolous and should be helping other human beings in a tangible, concrete way.

Coffee Chat #5: Meghan O'Rourke

2011-03-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

I first met Meghan O'Rourke over 5 years ago when we were both at Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. I didn't know who she was but sensed there was something really special about her. Five years later, I, and the rest of the world have had the good fortune of reading her wonderful work in all genres. With each passing word, I really love her work more and more. She has a new book coming out called The Long Goodbye about grief and her mother's passing. I've talked with her many times before but really wanted to dig deeper and find out more about her, demystify her and her work in a way. I think our culture has a weird way of elevating people, then putting them down because of their "success". There's always so much more to the story and the person. She was gracious enough to indulge in my curiosity.

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VC: I feel like I've known you for years, yet I don't feel like I really know you that well. Interestingly, I get this same feeling when I read your poetry--there's a sort of combination of openness and hiddenness. Do you agree with me and if so, is this a conscious decision? If not, why not?

MO: I was a pathologically shy child, and I always think that is embedded in the work in some way. From a non-biographical, aesthetic point of view, I’m drawn to the mysterious way cadence is such a powerful too for making us feel things we can’t name. Cadence works on our limbic system in ways that nothing else does. I love poetry for the way it creates a language for what can’t be accessed through the rational alone. I’m interested in what can’t be said straight, or “the hum of thoughts evaded by the mind,” as Stevens put it. I think many of our deepest feelings or intuitions feel like this to us.

Is it conscious? God, who knows. I’m not sure any of it fully is. I think it starts unconscious, and becomes conscious. You learn to work with what you have, your own predilections and tics.

VC: You have always seemed to me to be so incredibly ambitious. Where does this ambition come from? And do you ever get tired of it (I ask this, because I do of my own ambitions)?

MO: Hmm. People do sometimes tell me I am “ambitious.” I confess I don't quite know what it means, and I often wonder whether this would even come up if I were a man. In other words, I always hear embedded in that word a kind of critique. Do you? Maybe I’m crazy.

I don’t exactly think of myself as ambitious, per se. I think of myself as “driven” or perhaps more accurately “hounded.” Writing and reading help me keep anxiety and dread away. I work hard, but I do so because I’m calmest when I’m working. And yes: I tire of this reality!

I was very lucky in my career and I think that’s part of why some may think I’m ambitious. I stumbled into a lot of good jobs. and to be sure I’m really invested in our writing about our culture, in critiquing certain elements of the media discourse about culture, and so on. But it’s not very strategic.

VC: You seem so incredibly skilled at so many different genres. Was poetry your first love? What attracts you to the genre?

MO: Novels were my first love, actually. When I was very young I wrote novels and stories--mostly bad science fiction about unicorns in space, that kind of thing.

Then, when I was 16, I read Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop and fell hard in love with poetry. The two poems that did it were “This Solitude of Cataracts” and “In the Waiting Room.” What I love about it – again – is that sense of mystery, the way poetry can crystallize a hard-to-identify intuition. These were the lines of Stevens’ that sealed the deal—the way the poem invokes the illusoriness of a mind finding “rest / in a permanent realization” yet also seems to crystallize it, to make monumental the sensuousness of a minute moment:

He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest
In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,
Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,
Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.

VC: Why did you decide to bypass the contest route when you published your first book and go with Norton? Or did you actually send your manuscript out to contests prior to working with Norton?

MO: I didn't actually make a conscious decision. I liked some of Norton’s poets so I put my manuscript in an envelope and sent it to them. I liked that they did criticism and poetry and I wanted to be published by a house that did both. I got lucky –Jill Bialosky read my manuscript and liked it.

VC: A long time ago, I read an article on the Gawker titled: "Why People Hate Meghan O'Rourke" and it talked about you being the symbol of "privilege". How did that make you feel and how in general do you deal with that kind of open criticism of you and your background? And how do you deal with peoples' envy and jealousy of you, your background, or accomplishments?

MO: The only way to deal with such things is by focusing on your work, I suppose, as it’s the only thing you have control over – someone will always dislike you, no matter what you do, and we all do stupid things or rub someone the wrong way at times.

That particular post was upsetting because it suggested things about my life that weren’t true, which bothered me. I have been educationally privileged, but I was not financially or socially privileged in the sense that the post suggested; my parents were poorly paid teachers. (Of course, it’s hard to talk about not being privileged without sounding extremely privileged –by comparison with most of the world, I certainly am.) I spent my childhood in a kind of wonderland my parents invented for us because we didn’t have much money. I felt like an outsider, a feeling I think most writers need to experience in their lives.

VC: Related to that question, things seem to come so easily for you from an outside perspective. Do you feel this way?

MO: No, it doesn’t feel that way, except when it comes to editing. I do feel that I am a good editor; it’s a way of being useful to the world (and to the word, which I originally typed by accident). Everything else feels very hard.

VC: Because you live in New York, how much weight do you put on the "po-biz" work that goes along with promoting your book, meeting the right people, getting the right reviews, etc? And how do you separate the creative process from that po-biz work that seems to be increasingly necessary to have any readers at all?

MO: I think that all that is pretty poisonous when you’re trying to work. But I can see that it certainly helps, and that it likely helped me to be in New York, and I guess it is important for writers to think about such issues in this day and age. But like a lot of writers I find that all this stuff creates a kind of noise in my head which gets in the way of writing. A friend of mine keeps telling me to leave the “fetid cesspool” that is New York in his mind. Since I left Slate a few years ago I’ve spent about half of every year in small towns or places outside NY, because I need to get away from that noise, into the private reality of conjecture, imagination, discovery that has nothing to do with the “professionalized” world.

I don’t think it’s useful to stress getting the “right” reviews because so much of reviewing is accidental. It’s kind of pheromonal – like dating.

VC: Sound seems important to you as a poet, as does imagery, what else is important to you in your poetry?

MO: What else is there? Just kidding. I’d say syntax. Syntax can make or break a poem. and wisdom. That matters to me, hokey though it may sound.

VC: What is your writing process like for your poems?

MO: I start with a kernel, a line, an intuition. The poem gets drafted. Then I revise the draft obsessively over a period of weeks, months, sometimes years. Mostly I expand and contract, expand and contract. like an accordion. Hopefully, it gets more precise, more sonorous, more complex, even if it begins to look simpler. Usually the poems need a few months in order to take shape. And I do mean “take shape.” They’re blobs of language at first.

VC: Did you have trouble putting together your first book? I somehow remember talking to you about how you felt you had to write additional poems to complete the manuscript once you started putting it together. Is that true?

MO: I wanted Halflife to develop thematically as you read it from front to back. And yea, I felt some things were missing from Halflife in my first draft - elements of feeling and perception that somehow weren’t there. It was an intuitive sense of something being missing, rather than a really describable one.

VC: What kind of poems are you working on now and do you have a second book coming out soon? How do those poems differ from your poems in your first book?

MO: I just finished a second book, called Once. It’s different: sparer, a little more disillusioned, and more direct. But I imagine if you read it you’d also see a lot of continuity. It tries to weave together different kinds of loss – loss of childhood, loss of civic innocence, loss of love – into one tapestry. I began writing it when Bush was in office. I was thinking about forms of complicity – the guilt of surviving, of being a citizen, when atrocities like Guantanamo were going on. I was thinking about the guilt of being healthy as your mother is dying. And so on. It’s both more allegorical and autobiographical than Halfife, whose first-person poems were based less on my life than it might have seemed. It’s not the book I would have “chosen” to write but life forces itself on you sometimes. I think it is much balder. The poems kind of insisted on their methods.

VC: Many poets I know are poets and they teach, occasionally writing a review here and there. You write poetry, criticism, culture pieces (on all kinds of topics), and now a memoir. I am grateful you do all of the above, but do you ever feel like you are doing too much and not focusing enough?

MO: Of course I worry. But I have to make a living. Then, too, the idea that we should focus on one genre is a historically recent one, borne partly out of the professionalization of something that used to be a vocation. Everything both takes away from and feeds your work, whether it’s teaching, or writing journalism, or baking bread.

VC: I've read some of your pieces on the passing of your mother and her illness. Even as I write this, I still don't know what to say to you. Is that kind of unsayable relationship our culture has with death and grief part of why you wanted to write this memoir?

MO: Yes. I wrote THE LONG GOODBYE because I became interested in the fact that grief is a space of embarrassment and silence today. I felt very alone with my sorrow after my mother died, craving rituals or communal space in which to observe my loss. We can talk about loss in art or memoir safely but alone in a room with each other we often find ourselves ill at ease.

Then, too, writing is how I make sense of the world. And in this case I think I wanted to carve out an insistent place to mourn and feel and think and reflect – rather than merely move on.

VC: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this memoir?

MO: Writing the memoir was one of the rare times in my adult life when writing felt easy, natural, and right. It was remarkably fluid. I think this is because I had to write the book in order to survive, in order to stay intact; the pressure of necessity obliterated my normal self-consciousness.

Revising was hard. There were a few scenes I’d described where I hadn’t put enough down the first time around, when it felt natural to reflect on a scene, necessary. So a yaer and a half later I had to go in and try to make myself remember how painful a certain afternoon was. That was very hard.

But perhaps the hardest part was writing about other real people, and dealing in my heart with that, and what it meant.

VC: Does anything make you uncomfortable as you anticipate the publication of your memoir?

MO: I am a private person so it was hard to expose certain sides of myself, certain feelings or things that happen. But it was necessary if I was going to do justice to the real experience of grief – and how identity-shaking it can be. And because I knew there were others out there like me I felt the imperative to tell it like it was, so to speak.

VC: Prose seems to just flow out of you so easily. Is that how you write prose or is it a painstaking process? How about poetry?

MO: No; it’s painstaking. I revise obsessively. Sontag said that she was an ordinary thinker and writer; what was extraordinary was that she was willing to revise. If anything seems fluent, it’s because of how much I revise. The same is true of poetry. I find poetry much harder, though, perhaps because I revere it so.

VC: I remember being very excited that you were married to a business journalist, Jim Surowiecki, who wrote this really really great book, called "The Wisdom of Crowds" because I have a business background and write business things too. I was saddened to hear that the marriage had ended. How did all of this coupled with the passing of your mother affect you as a writer, a person?

MO: That’s a question it will take a lifetime to answer. Both things have utterly changed my life, and me. He and I remain very close. I guess I can say for now that I’m much less interested in the noise of professionalism or on making “plans.” And I am much more interested in living each day in whatever way I choose. I daydream a lot more and spend more time walking and with my friends. I feel deeply aware of the smallness and futility – what Ecclesiastes would call the vanity – of human venture! So life seems to be more about love, and work, and kindness. Also, existence seems much funnier and more preposterous. (Jim is happy to hear his book called “really really great,” by the way.)

VC: As I'm sure you know a lot of poets, how do you separate the reading of their work to knowing them on a personal basis? Was that a strange position to be in when you edited poetry for the Paris Review? Why aren't you editing poetry for them anymore?

MO: Great question. It was very strange, and often painful, when I was at the Paris Review. I had practice in it, having worked as a fiction editor at the New Yorker. There is a kind of way in which you are suborning your personal feelings to the magazine and its needs . I never loved that element of it. But on the other hand you feel a sense of fidelity to the work. And you really do want to publish the poems that move you most, and you only have sixty -some slots per year. So that makes the separation of the friend-self and the editor-self possible.

VC: As you envision yourself at the age of 60, and look back at your life, what does that picture look like? Or said another way, what do you want to achieve in your life, professional and personal?

MO: I would feel extremely lucky if I were able to keep making a living by writing and reading. When my mother got sick, at the age of 52, it changed the way I deal with the world in that I don’t envision anything beyond the next day, and haven’t been able to for two years now. To the frustration of friends and colleagues, I suspect. That’s changing a bit. But at this point what I want is just to feel that I was present, every day, not planning or worrying or missing out on the utter intensity of being alive - the natural world all around us, the joy our friends bring us, and so on.

AWP Summary: A BLAST!

2011-02-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

I rarely go to AWP, mostly because my life doesn't allow it, and also partly because I've always liked a bit of space from writers and large writer-oriented events. But something was different this year in that I felt that I wanted to go and reconnect with writers, something I hadn't fully realized until I was there, right in the middle of a monstrosity of a book fair. I loved seeing people and meeting new people, of course, but what I really valued were the intimate conversations about writing that I had with so many friends. Because AWP was so much fun this year, every night I wrote down who I talked to and who I met. My list grew to over 75 writers by the time I left the conference! Some highlights were:

-Lunch with an old friend, Louise Mathias, and realizing that we have grown-up together as poets
-Our Blackbird/Diode offsite reading and meeting Bob Hicok!
-Laughing at the bookfair with Randy Mann and Miguel Murphy
-Meeting Patty Paine from Diode who gave us these gift bags filled with camel keychains and camel magnets
-Talking with the Blackbird people like ever gracious Mary Flinn and Jeff Lodge
-Dinner with an always amazing mind, G.C. Waldrep
-Chatting with Ed Skoog and Joshua Rivkin in the lounge while we skipped all the panels and had our own "panel"
-Meeting Sarah Vap who reeks of goodness and beautiful hair
-Trolling the bookfair with an old friend, Rick Bursky, who had me laughing for hours
-Lunch with old friend, Jennifer Chang who I often get mixed up with (lately more than ever since her amazing poems are everywhere)

I can think of 10 more highlights, but I'm beginning to feel like I am simply dropping names so I'll stop now. The short conversations with people at the bookfair were great, but the one-on-one coffees, lunches, dinners, etc. that I had were the most enlightening. Friends helped me to bring forth out of my sub-consciousness my relationship with poetry and writing, some things I have thought loosely about in the past, but not fully.

The biggest thing that I realized is that I don't aspire to much in poetry, really, especially compared to others that I spoke with. But what I aspire to do is to write the best poems that I can (I think every poet does anyway), and to be moderately well-received critically, kind of like an unknown Indie actor or a low-budget Indie film. I also want to live a life with the poems of others. I want to live with art and poetry in my mind as much as I can. And every day, I want to push myself to be better than I was yesterday, either as a writer or as a thinker.

The other thing I learned while polling friends throughout the conference is that many poets actually feel "joy" when they write poetry. I hadn't ever thought about this before until two poets told me that they felt this way (and then many more when asked later), which made me think about how I feel, which is the opposite--completely "tortured". But then again so does Matthew Zapruder, which doesn't make me feel so horrible.

All in all, it was a great AWP for me on so many levels and I feel so fortunate to have been able to participate this year. Maybe I will head to Chicago next year?

AWP Off-Site Poetry Reading Thursday 2/3/11, 8pm Avalon Theater

2011-01-11T14:21:00.000-08:00

If you are in DC for AWP this year, please come by and support Blackbird and Diode at our offsite poetry reading:

Coffee Chat #4: Allison Benis White

2011-01-05T14:58:00.000-08:00

My favorite book of poetry over the last year has been Allison Benis White's Self-Portrait With Crayon. It's published by Cleveland State University Press. I know I've written about this book before, but I have had the pleasure of getting to know Allison a little bit because she also lives in Southern California. Only in poetry can a fan get to know an author so readily and so easily. I have asked her a series of questions, partly based on conversations I have had with her in the past, so I may have been a bit too blunt here, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time self-editing my thoughts. If you don't know this book, it's worth reading for sure.

There are so many things I love about this book, but what I think I love about this book the most is it's simultaneous deep emotional heartfelt feeling combined with intellectual and philosophical thinking about disappearance and the self in a surprising way (the surprise in these poems truly delights me, not in a sort of "I'm so smart and clever" way, but in a "Wow, that's an amazing idea or image"). There are so many contemporary poets that are writing intellectually interesting work (and a lot is not even interesting to me in truth), but there's no heart. This book is bursting with heart and sadness. Here's a link to her website: www.allisonbeniswhite.com.

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VC: I still remember my friend at Open Books saying to me: "This book is interesting...worth reading and buying" and when I read the first poem, I instantly felt connected with the work...and then the rest of the world found out. Your book has been a great "success" in so many ways for a first book. Do you feel that way? And how does that make you feel?

ABW: First, I really love that you put the word “success” in quotes because it reflects how strange and elusive that concept is, especially when one has written a book of poetry. I’ve always liked Sophie Cabot Black’s definition: success is writing well. Anyway, I don’t know if I feel Self-Portrait with Crayon has been a “success” in measurable ways, but I do know that it was reviewed quite a bit, and that people, such as yourself, have connected with the work. Mainly, I feel very grateful that the book has been read and responded to.

VC: Assuming #1 is true, do you have any challenges following up your first book? Or is it the case that book #2 was already done before book #1 came out?

ABW: My second manuscript, “Small Porcelain Head”, was halfway done when Self-Portrait with Crayon came out. As far as challenges go, I was conscious of not wanting to simply repeat myself in a second book. There is that T.S. Eliot quote that says something to the effect of ‘I’m only capable of saying what I’ve already said.’ I guess the main challenge in writing a second manuscript, in avoiding the patterns of the first book, was that I had to relearn how to speak. It was really awkward at first, but eventually I learned how to say what was in front of me.

VC: I had never heard of you as a poet prior to reading your book (perhaps due more to my lack than yours!--I know this is a bit of a blunt question) and I had never read any of your poetry in journals. Was that a conscious decision to stay hidden, for lack of a better word?

ABW: I know it’s not meant to be, but that is a hilarious question! No, no, I didn’t make a conscious decision to stay hidden. I think that most writers stay hidden rather effortlessly. A number of the poems in Self-Portrait with Crayon were published in journals over the years, and I won a few prizes, etc., but the idea that you had never read my work prior to my book makes perfect sense to me. I was shocked when I went to the AWP conference, when my book came out, and people said they were familiar with my work. I thought that was amazing, almost ludicrous.

VC: Do you think you would have been a poet if you didn't have the subject matter of abandonment that called you? Said another way, how important is subject matter?

ABW: It’s hard to say who I’d be, or what compulsions I would have, if my mother hadn’t disappeared when I was a baby. For me, the depth of the loneliness and bewilderment that shaped my life certainly triggered the obsession to articulate. Of course, subject matter without language, without music, doesn’t result in poetry. So I think I have some facility in those areas, but being abandoned when I was so young is what gave me the compulsion to replace—to make something.

VC: And if you weren't a poet, what would you be otherwise?

ABW: I like what Louise Gluck says about being a poet—that it’s an aspiration, not an occupation. She argues that one is only a “poet” when one is in the act of making, when you’re kind of lost to yourself. Anyway, to answer your question, if I couldn’t write, hopefully (instead of going slowly insane) I’d try to lose myself in whatever other art form, or act of empathy, I could.

VC: What about the prose poem do you find so appealing (as I know your second book project consists entirely of prose poems too).

ABW: Initially, when I read Killarney Clary’s book of prose poems, Who Whispered Near Me, I was impressed with their avoidance of quick, lyric conclusions, and the kind of casual intimacy they fostered. There seemed to be more space to explore, more space to get closer to the speaker’s mind in her poems. I’m not saying that traditional verse causes writers to come to quick conclusions or stay distant, but at the time, that’s what I was doing, and I was really frustrated. So writing prose poems initially gave me a way to shift out of my bad habits, and then gave me the space to slow down and to work with sentences in a new way that was vital to the material I was exploring at the time.

VC: You had mentioned to me once that your second book is about your friend's suicide...also a bit of a dark subject like your first book. Are you drawn to these subjects and if so, why?

ABW: I don’t think I’m necessarily drawn to dark subjects, but rather these are the subjects that compel me to write—to make a new, internal world. I remember when I was first writing “Small Porcelain Head,” circling around my friend’s suicide, another friend said to me, “Don’t write about that,” as if it would make me sick or suicidal too. I remember thinking, I have to. There’s nothing else to write about, nothing that would make me work that hard besides remaking this terrible emptiness.

VC: I recall that your mother came back into your life at some point. Did your mother ever read your book? If so, did you have any reservations writing about your mother in your first book?

ABW: After I knew the book would be published, I called her and was very upfront about what the book was about. Mainly, I wanted her to know that I didn’t disparage her. After it was published, she did read it, and she actually sent me a letter soon after that said something like she was able to understand that this was my experience and my vision as a writer, not hers, so she could feel proud (of me) as opposed to ashamed (of herself).

VC: What's your writing process like? Do you have any rituals?

ABW: I like to write in bed at night, in a spiral notebook, before I go to sleep. What I write is fairly stream of consciousness—I don’t worry about making sense or writing what anyone would consider poetry (actually I’d be pretty horrified if anyone ever read these notebooks—they’d think I was sentimental and deranged). Anyway, when I gather up enough material, I look for interesting phrases, sentences, images, relationships, etc., and then I work on the computer from there.

VC: Does anything frustrate you about the poetry world? If so, what?

ABW: I think the things that frustrate me about the poetry world are simply the things that frustrate me about the world in general: limited thinking, prejudice, cruelty, nepotism, egomania—the usual suspects.

VC: Is there anything you love about the poetry world? If so, what?

ABW: There are a lot of things to love about the world, the poetry world included: generosity, humility, kindness, integrity—many of the writers and editors I’ve come to know or work with possess these qualities.

VC: What, if anything, are you trying to achieve when you write a poem?

ABW: I want to see differently (to be surprised, as Frost says). I want to be changed, to learn something—to clarify something that haunts or bewilders me. More than anything, I want to respond to the poems I’ve read that make me feel less alone and allow me to know another obsessed or luminous or grieving mind intimately.

VC: Any favorite poets that inspired you while writing your first book?

ABW: The books of poetry I read and re-read while writing Self-Portrait with Crayon were Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, Killarney Clary’s Who Whispered Near Me, John Berryman’s Dreamsongs, Charles Simic’s The World Does Not End, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (not technically poetry, but I think it counts).

VC: Is there something people don't know about you that you want to tell them?

ABW: Hmmm. I think whatever is interesting about me as a person, biographically or perceptually, is in my first book, and hopefully in my second manuscript as well.

I did just start working on a third project called “Please Bury Me in This” that meditates on this question to some degree. So I guess I’m still figuring out what I want to tell others, or what’s important or valuable to say, while I’m here.

A Plethora of Poetry Books

2010-12-30T12:09:00.000-08:00

I found this list of Spring 2010 poetry books and was both heartened to see the sheer number of books published (and this is not a complete list), but simultaneously horrified at how many of these books I had never heard of and had never read. I wonder if we poets create too much work or too much work is published and there are simply not enough people (or people with time) to read all of these books! I read a lot of books but still cannot keep up. Here's the list:

http://www.poets.org/npmbooks.php

Craig Morgan Teicher's Cradle Book Micro Review

2010-12-28T14:27:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Craig Morgan Teicher's Cradle Book, and so far it's really enjoyable. The author is married to the superb poet, Brenda Shaughnessy, so I learned just recently. I know Shaughnessy's work better than Morgan Teicher's in truth, but I was curious about this little book of fables that are part poems, part little stories and now am interested to go back and read his other book, Brenda is in the Room, now that I know who he is referring to in the title.

I had no idea what to expect when I opened the book, and gradually discovered, I really like this little book. I have a problem with fiction--I simply have no patience to read it and have no patience to write it. If I do read it, I read it in one sitting at a rapid fire pace literally reading entire pages at one glance. But the Cradle Book is perfect for me. I can read these 1 to 2 page stories in a few minutes and then move onto another box of suprises. These actually read like little prose poems. The language isn't necessarily poetic, though. Neither is the rhythm of the language. I guess the frame of thinking, the philosophical mindset is clearly the mind of a poet, however. Occasionally, especially toward the end of these pieces, some of the poet in Morgan Teicher did come out, though as in "The Virtue of Birds" which ends: "The clamor closed in like a gloved hand slowly tightening its fingers." And the "The Line" which ends: "I will follow that line until there is no next thing."

The cover of the book says: "Stories & Fables" and fables are meant to make a moral point through animals, nature, etc. Morgan Teicher has sort of modernized the fables and these have become more poetic and more sophisticated, as well as more modern and philosophical. The lessons themselves are even more sophisticated. In the end, I liked this book because it's a little different from the other work that I've been reading lately. I also admired the author's desire and conviction to write what comes to him, versus creating some sort of packaged product that some publisher might like or some product that he knows the readers might be interested in. Here are two poems I found online, but there are much more involved and interesting ones in the book. Definitely worth picking up and reading.

The Wolves

Wolves rule these woods. They have overthrown the old rulers, conquered all the creatures, and now these woods belong to them. But do not be afraid if you pass this way. There is nothing here that can harm you, because, of course, the wolves are made of something less than air. Their bite is like a breeze. When they run a few leaves shake. Perhaps a flower bends when they howl. Pass through the woods whenever you like. What you have to fear is not in the woods.

The Prisoner

I am telling the truth, though that is of little consequence to my captors. It is not the truth that they hope to force from my lips. And they will get what they want—certainly they will, for I can only endure so much, like anyone—but not yet. For now, I still have the will to withhold it from them. First, I will make them abandon all dignity, pride and restraint as they torture me. By remaining silent, I will make them do the unthinkable, even if the price to pay is that I must suffer it. For I have already told them the truth: that we are all capable of anything, any merciless act. They did not believe me. Once they prove I am right, I will tell them the lie they want to hear: that there are some things we will not do.

Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty Micro Review

2010-12-23T16:39:00.000-08:00

I've been unable to put down Hoagland's latest book, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty and I've been trying to figure out why. I think the things I don't like about the book, in the end, are also what I love about the book. And it's precisely this sort of ambivalence that makes me respect Hoagland not so much as a poet, but as a human being. What I mean by this is that I find Hoagland's speakers to be so honest, unabashed, unafraid of expressing how they feel that the speakers make me feel very uncomfortable and it is this teetering on the edge of something, or risk-taking that I ultimately respect and admire.

I very much disliked the first poem in the book called "Food Court", which talks about (presumably) a Chinese American owner of a food court establishment called "Jimmy's Wok" who has "practical black eyes." Of course Chinese people are stereotypically described as being "practical", but I found the word "practical" to be a bit unfair. It's like describing every Caucasian man from the Midwest as having a red neck. On the other hand, I gave Hoagland credit for saying what he feels or what his speaker feels and observes. Hoagland pushes the envelope between what is often said in private and what is said in public. And if I think about the people I like most in real life, it's those exact types of people, not the staid, professional, or political people, but I'm attracted to those unafraid to rock the boat, to cause trouble, to say something important.

Many of the poems have a very powerful tone, a very masculine tone. I visualize an orator, standing on a podium, speaking his mind about any topic, whether that being love, Britney Spears, or "small rectangles of food" they serve at parties (I could be biased because I've seen him deliver lectures, read his poetry, and banter strongly back and forth with poets like Dean Young and Reginald Shepard at Warren Wilson many many times). I almost saw all the poems as actually being prose commentaries or prose Letter to the Editors. I felt like they could actually benefit from such a construct, almost in the way Wenderoth's Letter to Wendy's used the fast food comment cards as a sort of overarching structure.

I found many of the poems simultaneously tragic and funny, and I liked the tragic honest self-reflective poems best. Like the poem "Hostess", which talks about the speaker attending some event that starts with the description of the black dress of the hostess, that gradually moves into the dress as a trope for failure and ends like this: "And that, by the end of the evening,/I had found my disappointment,/which I hoped no one else had seen." It's moments like these, where the speaker dares to let himself be human and real, vulnerable, that I really liked.

What would be great to see in the future from Hoagland is more of a play on form, or formlessness, like the prose poem because I did wonder why his poems needed line breaks at all. It'd also be great to see him work with the longer poem, even a book-length sequence on some subject he feels strongly about. Or to reverse what he does so well--that oration-type of poem, to write poems that don't try to express any opinions, poems that almost seem to exist without a speaker behind them. But then again, who am I to give Tony Hoagland opinions on what he should be working on!

At the end of the day, one of my poetry teachers once emphasized the need for poems (and books) to be "memorable" and I can't get this book out of my head, which tells me that Hoagland has succeeded.

Male vs. Female

2010-12-21T14:22:00.000-08:00

I've been reading some books of poetry lately, just started to, at least. I've been so busy lately. One thing that struck me is that some poets feel, smell, sound so, well, "Male". And other poets so "Female". Just like stereotypically, certain men like watching certain television shows and certain females like watching certain television shows, I wondered whether I prefer certain styles or certain tones that skew a certain gender? There are so many poets that break these conventions of course. But if I were to scale certain poetry books certain ways, would that be deathly sexist? For example, I think Ben Lerner feels very "Male" to me, but then again, so does Mary Jo Bang. So does Dean Young and Tony Hoagland and Matt Hart and one of the Dickman brothers, I can't remember which one. I feel slightly uncomfortable with these arbitrary labels, but this is how I feel when I read certain poets. Then there are others like Alison Benis White (my favorite) and Rick Barot (also my favorite) who feel more Female. Some of Haas' early work feels more female to me too and I love his early work. This is strange and dangerous stereotypical territory to tread in, but in truth, I am not implying that Male poetry is more cerebral or intellectual at all. It has something to do with tone.

I'm reading:

Terrance Hayes Lighthead
Timothy Donnelly The Cloud Corporation
Rachel Zucker The Bad Wife Handbook (again)
Tony Hoagland Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
John Gallaher Map of the Folded World
Craig Morgan Teicher Cradle Book
Ange Minko Shoulder Season

Back soon with some micro reviews, hopefully.

Back from Fishing

2010-11-09T20:55:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted here but I'm back from fishing and didn't catch any fish. I do have some empty hooks and a beaten up boat, though. I plan to get all of my coffee chats back online here soon and plan to do more. And to keep these posts short since I am time-starved.

Been thinking about creativity and originality (again). My thoughts are this--to have a truly extraordinary book, a manuscript needs to

1) Write about the same subject matter (that other people have) in a truly different way
2) Write about different subject matter (that other people have) in a truly different way
3) Write about different subject matter (that other people have) in the same way, but that same way must be really really good

I was thinking about my favorite books and why I liked them so much and found that a lot of them, at least superficially, fit into one of these categories.

Gone Fishing--Be Back Soon!

2010-06-14T14:52:00.001-07:00

Coffee Chat #3: Ben Lerner

2010-04-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of Ben Lerner's work. I think this is because he appeals to another side of my brain--the philosophical and thinking part of my brain. Yet Lerner also is a lyric poet in some ways too. I love his humor, his aphorisms. I think also his work resists the personal or approaches the personal in different ways. His work is ultimately very refreshing to me in many ways. I've been thinking a lot about poets and suffering and whether poets need to suffer (at least in the way that I've seen a lot of books focus on a loss or a death) and I'll post more on this later, but Lerner proves that you don't, at least for me. I really think reading his books is essential for any poet. His books are The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. I would recommend going backwards in order to support his latest book, Mean Free Path. And Angle of Yaw was a finalist for the National Book Award. My interview with him is below, but what a fascinating set of responses.

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VC: I'm interested to learn about your writing process. Can you talk about that? Do you approach poems as part of larger projects-your books seem to be thematic in focus, do you approach your work that way?

BL: I don’t really understand the process. And I’m not sure if I’m stuck with the process I have or if might change. I suppose I have a territory of thematic concern in advance of finding a form, but it’s pretty inchoate. For instance “night vision green” was a phrase/phenomenon I was interested in working with as a motif—the militarization of vision, of a color, and not just any color: the “green world” of pastoral. And I knew I wanted to write something for Ariana, to include her in the poems. But I don’t know how I get from those desires to the specific form in question. I play around with language until some kind of pattern emerges that I feel like I can elaborate, that isn’t exhausted in its first iteration. Eventually I feel like a form has emerged, and then I often re-describe the form I’ve discovered as a rule, so that then I have something to struggle with, a generative restraint. That sense that Wittgenstein describes in the Philosophical Investigations—that sense of sequence characterized by the expression “Now I can go on”—that’s an important compositional intuition for me. As I go I discover what’s sayable in a particular form. And discover what the procedures have to say.

Actually, maybe this is only an accurate description of the last book.

VC: How do you feel about writing--is it an easy process for you or is it tortuous or none of the above?

BL: If you polled the people closest to me and my writing—the people who observe and are involved in the process—I’m guessing they would say tortuous.

VC: You don't seem to be a "personal" poet in the traditional sense (writing about childhood, death of people around you, etc.); you seem more of a macro poet, someone who is a larger thinker, philosophical thinker, a cultural observer. Would you agree with that? And if so, why? If not, why not?

BL: I sometimes write specifically about childhood, death, etc., but I don’t think of “aboutness” in the sense of narrating experience as the primary way in which poetry communicates. Poems are objects to be experienced, not just accounts of experience, and, say, the formal disposition of text on a page is as important a component of expression as its paraphrasable content.

How could one not write about childhood and death? What don’t those forces shape, I mean. Rosmarie Waldrop in “Thinking as Follows”: “I turned to collage early, to get away from writing poems about my overwhelming mother. I felt I needed to do something ‘objective’ that would get me out of myself. I took books off the shelf, selected maybe one word from every page or a phrase every tenth page, and tried to work these into structures. Some worked, some didn't. But when I looked at them a while later: they were still about my mother.”

One thing I think poetry can do is dramatize how the “personal” crystallizes out of and dissolves back into larger systems. I don’t mean that it tracks these processes with ironic detachment. The sense that my “I” is constructed/polyvocal/complicit/imperial and so on can be an intensely felt first person state. So you’re right I’m interested in the macro, but largely because that forms and deforms persons.

VC: How did the project of your latest book, Mean Free Path come about? There's more love in this poem than in your previous books, it seems. Can you talk about that?

BL: I think to a certain extent I construct the genesis of a book retrospectively, as a fiction, so I probably shouldn’t be trusted, but I believe the project arose out of my wanting to stage failures of expression that were themselves expressive—to make hesitation and fragmentation and recombination communicate an emotion that exceeds description. I mean this is the set of concerns I discovered as I went. In this sense Creeley’s “For Love” was an important poem for me, a poem I learned to read while writing this book. And “Mean Free Path” is largely a love poem, and a chronicle of the difficulty of writing such a poem with such a language.

I suppose I was reacting against a kind of self-congratulatory diagnostic tendency in my work and in the work of some of the poets I read—a kind of stylized despair at the state of the culture. Because that’s just as easy and ultimately boring as the prefab lyric it ostensibly opposes, right? I wanted direct modal statements of affection and the murderous absurdity of our empire to interact in the poem as they interact in the world.

VC: How did you compose that book? How does punctuation play (or not play into this work)?

BL: The absence of end line punctuation (excepting the dedicatory poem) is crucial in the book because it helps create the sense that there is more than one possible order of lines within a particular stanza—that a given right margin can link up with a variety of previous or subsequent left margins. In the “Doppler Elegies,” sentences often restart or change directions at left margin, an effect that also requires that the nature of the syntactic unit isn’t resolved at the right margin. The second suite of “Doppler Elegies” very much depends upon the comma as a mark internal to the line—especially the way it can be difficult or impossible to decide if a comma indicates series or apposition, what’s sequential and what’s qualification, etc. So the absence of punctuation at end line and the use of ambiguous punctuation internal to the line are part of the re-combinatory machinery of the poems, part of what keeps them from stabilizing into a definitive, exclusive order.

VC: What are some poets that you are interested in these days?

BL: Great books on my desk this instant by: Alice Notley, Aaron Kunin, James Schuyler, Graham Foust, Erin Moure, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Rae Armantrout, Tan Lin, Cyrus Console.

VC: What are your biggest concerns about the state of poetry in contemporary life? Or are you not concerned?

BL: It’s not necessarily a problem for me that poetry is comparatively marginalized in contemporary life—most (but by no means all) of the people and practices I love are marginal relative to the dominant economic forces of the day. I can’t imagine the poetry I care about being popular in the sense that a pop star or sitcom is popular (which is not to say I hate all pop stars and sitcoms). I mean, to imagine a substantial poetry that can compete in the so-called “cultural marketplace” is to imagine an entirely different world, maybe a world without such markets. But I think that’s part of the appeal of the lament—when we say poetry is dead or dying, when we scold the masses for not caring about poetry, or poets for not caring about the masses, it’s an expression, often unconscious, of a desire for alterity, some other organization of societal forces. So sometimes worrying about the state of poetry in contemporary life is just one of many ways of expressing our worries about contemporary life in general. I’m certainly concerned about the state of contemporary life.

Part of what’s interesting about “the state of poetry,” about the word “poetry,” is how—without anybody having any stable idea about what it is (does it need to rhyme or scan? or have lines? express feelings? be beautiful? etc)—it provokes so many strong responses. Did you see that George Packer thing on the New Yorker blog about Obama’s decision to have a poem read at his inauguration? Packer says it’s a mistake to include a poem because: “For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings.” One could say a lot about Packer’s post, but in a way the most interesting thing about it is that he felt compelled to write it at all. I mean, let’s say poetry is dead, empty, etc.—you think it’s the only empty ritual attending a presidential inauguration? Strange to even have time to be pissed off about such a thing when you have Rick Warren delivering the invocation. And who is the poet Packer’s nostalgic for—who had the language, rhythm. etc., to move large numbers of people in large public settings? And move them to what? A poetic ideal, however vague, is being posited negatively, as if he’s trying to protect Poetry from actual poems. This hatred of contemporary poetry—which apparently does not require actually knowing anything about contemporary poetry—is quite mainstream. I can’t help feeling it’s a sign of the art’s nagging relevance.

Coffee Chat #2: G.C. Waldrep

2009-12-14T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'm really enjoying the "conversations" I'm having with old poetry friends and new. In many ways this blog is a way for me to feel like I have an imaginary poetry friend to talk to whenever I want, a way to combat what I call "poetic loneliness". So in this spirit, I have interviewed a dear old friend and exceptionally talented poet and thinker named G.C. Waldrep. I ask him some questions that we have mulled over for years in wonderfully long and thoughtful emails or in person at various spots around the country. All the bold are my questions or follow-up questions. If you were to get a quick peek into his brain, it might blind you.

His latest book is Archicembalo, other books are Goldbeater's Skin and Disclamor.
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1. Tell me about your creative process if you have one.

My poems typically start with a fragment of language--from my own head, or overheard. (Even, sometimes, misread: I have an eye condition that causes some distortion; I get some of my best ideas or starts from misreading.) It's a little bit like finding a stray thread on a sweater, and pulling--only what you want is for the entire sweater to unravel.

I'm a night writer, by nature--8 p.m. to midnight are my best hours. I keep paper and pens by my bed. I've said elsewhere that I often lie down to sleep, turn off the light, and then have to turn it back on 2-20 minutes later, to work something out.

Typically, I have to make it through a complete draft of a poem in one sitting, if I'm to move forward with it at all. It doesn't matter whether it's a short lyric or a long sequence: if something interrupts that initial drafting, I find it much, much easier to start something new rather than return to the interrupted draft. In fact, I can only think of two poems, from the past 14 years of writing, that I broke off in that crucial initial stage and then returned to successfully at a later date.

Every now and then I try something that's consciously intended to shake up my process. The battery poems (from Disclamor) were one such project--I had writers' block, and so I assigned myself a specific set of operations in a specific landscape that I hoped would shake the muse loose. (It worked.)

2. You seem like a poet that really pushes the boundaries of your prior work and of poetry in general. Do you agree with that statement and if so, do you do that consciously? And how do you do that?

There is always boredom. I assume that if I am boring myself with my poems, I am likely boring others. So I try new things.

But--what boundaries are you talking about, specifically?

I am thinking about how you seem to have a consciousness about what kind of work that you have written in the past (or your most recent project) and a desire to sort of move away from whatever project you just did. By boundaries, I mean what you have just recently done or have done in the past. This could mean short lyrics to longer sequences, or a book-length work to accessible short lyrics, etc.

Well, there is the aforementioned boredom. But there is also, for me, a sense of the enormous possibility that exists within language--within the sum total of human literature, of which we are, moment to moment, beneficiaries.

One can always keep writing the same poem. (Many poets do.) I find it much more challenging--exciting, even--to keep trying new things, new forms, new approaches. One can always return to what one already knows how to do.

3. You have been called a "prolific" writer, as has other poets like Carl Phillips. How do you feel about the use of this term to describe you and your work?

For a long time, I not only disliked it--I rejected it. I certainly didn't feel like I was "prolific."

But the truth is that I'm one of those writers who only feels like a "real writer" when he is actually writing. I have poet-friends who can write nary a line for months at a time and feel perfectly fine about it. For me it feels like an amputation. All the time spent not writing weighs against the actual time I spend writing....

I do view writing as a spiritual vocation, in the sense that Flannery O'Connor used the term. A form of discipline, a practice. And so the pages accumulate, as artifacts of that practice if nothing else. Some seem worth sharing.

Did you reject that notion of prolific because there's almost a negative connotation associated with it? Or did you reject that notion because you don't feel prolific?

There is a negative connotation associated with it, as I've sensed when the word is applied to others, from Carl Phillips to Noah Eli Gordon. In fact, I proposed an AWP panel on this very question a year ago that would have examined "economies of scarcity and abundance in contemporary American poetry." Steve Burt was going to be on it, and Alice Quinn was going to talk about Elizabeth Bishop; I'd also been in touch with Marjorie Perloff. Alas, AWP did not find it a seductive topic.

I do think we should talk more about what it means, in our cultural moment, to "produce" a lot. Are we still mired in the romantic sensibility that since every poem must be extracted as blood from the body of the poet's experience, "prolific" is tantamount to "shallow," "facile," "inauthentic"? Less is, necessarily, more? I've also heard it said that it is "unethical" to publish so much--that in doing so one is "taking space (or opportunities) away" from other poets. Is this true?

And I once heard a close friend say "Oh, Carl Phillips, he writes so much, I couldn't keep up with a book every year, so I just quit reading him altogether." Is it about the finitude of our attention spans? What, exactly?

4. It seems like we live in a culture that is enamored with "backgrounds," for example, a writer who lost all of his/her parents; a writer who is blind; etc. etc. As someone who also has an interesting background as someone who converted to the Amish faith, what do you think about this?

Of course we're all interested in the private or semi-private details of other human beings' lives. The problem is when "background" becomes a substitute for actually reading the work. You feel you have some grasp of a poet's "background," so the work itself recedes in importance. It's the same whether one is an African American poet, Amish poet, ex-Gulag poet, etc.

What is different is how one engages, or chooses or tries not to engage, on that level. The recent brouhaha over the Dickman twins' debuts was instructive.

I'm often asked when I am going to write directly from my experience(s) as a conservative Anabaptist Christian, currently of the Old Order River Brethren persuasion. My usual response is "What makes you think I haven't?"

5. As a poet who seems equally comfortable transversing the "accessible" and the "less accessible", how aware of this are you when you are writing? Or do you not think about such things until your work is published?

Not so much, oddly enough. I'm very aware of it when I am reading--I read and enjoy quite a variety of contemporary poetry. When I am in the midst of a poem, I let the poem find its own form, its own level of "accessibility."

6. What is your view of the current poetry landscape?

I find it invigorating that there is no hegemonic style or practice or school of verse right now, at least in the USA and Canada. What others sometimes view as balkanization, I tend to see as possibility. And I am heartened indeed by the broad recent interest in poetry in translation.

I suppose if I'm weary of anything, it would be the critical/popular tendency to reduce a poet's work to an easily paraphrasable, preferably autobiographical soundbite. That some poets seem complicit with this approach makes me sad.

7. You seem like a poet who values equally the writing process and the publishing process. Do you think that is true? And can you speak more to this?
I don't value "the publishing process." What I do value is the ongoing conversation that for me constitutes "literature." Being an active part of this conversation--the ongoing, public aspect of this conversation--requires that one publish one's work.

8. Tell me about your latest project and how that came about. And what sorts of artistic challenges are you facing currently?

In 2008 and early 2009 I worked on a collaborative manuscript with John Gallaher. This involved stepping away from the increasingly dense, even impacted work I had been producing and trying to open my style--myself--up to what John was doing, on a generative level. Together we wrote 400-odd poems over 16 months. (So much for "prolific.") BOA Editions has the book that resulted, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, under contract for an April 2011 release.

Since then I've mostly been working on shorter lyrics, as impacted as anything I've written but more slender and, I hope, more elegant--more approachable, if not more "accessible." The first of these are coming out soon in Denver Quarterly.

When I was in Scotland this past summer I also drafted a book-length long poem. I've never even attempted such a thing before. I'm more than a little afraid of it. For now I keep it under heavy wraps.

Why haven't you worked on a book-length poem in the past?

Hmmm. Because I never felt drawn to it? Because most of the examples I can think of from the Modernist heyday--from Pound's Cantos to WCW's Paterson--I regard as failures? (Splendid failures, to be sure.) Maybe because I distrusted the idea of a long argument, at least in terms of the lyric....But of course there are very good contemporary long poems too.

I guess the upshot is that I never much attempted it before because I never had anything I wanted to say--to explore--in verse that would take up space. This time I found that something--or it found me--and so.

Coffee Chat #1: Dan Beachy-Quick

2009-11-27T15:13:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things as a poet is to talk to other poets in person. And another favorite thing about my day job is interviewing people. Since I don't get to talk to poets in person much these days, I thought I'd interview by email some poets that I've been reading for years, those poets that have provided me with stimulation and inspiration in so many ways. This is the first of my "Coffee Chats" minus the loud music and distracting espresso noises in the background.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet I have loved and admired for years. What I love about his work is how it challenges me with each subsequent book. I also love his music--all of his books are exceptionally lyrical and I've learned a lot from his language. He was gracious enough to indulge my curiosities.

One of my favorite of his books is Spell and he is the author of several other wonderful books, North True South Bright, Mulberry, and his newest book, This Nest, Swift Passerine, and A Whaler's Dictionary (prose pieces, admittedly, I haven't read this though).

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1. Do you have a writing process? If so, how would you characterize it? How does risking failure fit into that writing process?

I wouldn’t say that I have any writing process in particular. I should also say that whatever that process is it has also changed fairly radically over time. It also differs based on what genre I’m writing—poems and essays seem to require something different from me. For the past year or so, maybe even two years, my writing of poems has become a very slow process, but slow in the strangest of ways. I’ve forced myself not to write simply to write, and so instead wait until I hear a line—for me, almost every poem begins with a line in which I hear a kind of music inside the language. I have the archaic sense that once a line is found, once it is written down, that a certain kind of fate has begun, and that the entire poem is somehow located within the line, and my work as a writer is to be patient enough to see how that line can unfold into a poem outside the mere compulsion of my intent or will or desire for it to do so. I find myself meditating on the line at odd times until, in some unbidden sort of way, I can see a way forward, usually no more than 2 or 3 lines, and the active patience of the process begins again.

Essays seem more a full immersion into the work, a daily writing for fear I might lose the connective threads that seem to hold the thinking together. I suppose I trust a poem more to discover itself, to do its work in me rather than my doing work on it. I don’t quite have the same trust when working in prose.

As to risking failure, I think for me it is a continual resistance to working out of habit, or to return to an activity (writing) that I find pleasurable simply for the pleasure’s sake. Of course, I don’t know if “pleasurable” is how I would qualify how the work makes me feel—but it does make me feel a certain way, and rather than give in to that feeling, the compulsion toward that feeling, I tend to be skeptical of it, to resist the allure of the page, to reach that point where writing seems the inevitable outcome of whatever process endures itself through the distracted days, and then I sit down and write. I don’t know how that risks failure, save that a poem to me is never certain, that a poem undoes certainty, and in thinking about what it knows undoes what it knows. This is also to say I suspect that one cannot risk failure by intending to risk failure—it cannot be “poetic” in any normal sense of that word. Failure is something else. The possibility of giving into the gravity the poem tries to resist—save here gravity is different than the gravity we know, but is, nonetheless, a force that runs counter to the poem’s dearest trajectory, whatever that direction might be.

2. How did your latest book project (This Nest, Swift Passerine) come to be?

It’s only in hindsight that I can see This Nest, Swift Passerine as a fairly recognizable extension from the book previous, Mulberry. At the time I was writing it—some four or five years ago—it felt wholly new to me, a kind of departure and arrival at once. What concerned me was what I observed—that birds make their nests not only of some inherited innate pattern, but also that they use material not of their own making: grass, mud, spider-webs, holiday tinsel, grocery lists, and so on. I found it very moving, somehow, that their place of dwelling, and their place of song, was not in any typical way “original.”

The link that started me writing was that my own relation to language felt the same to me. I began to think of the work of the poem as the creation of place of dwelling from which it was possible to sing—the barest notion of dwelling though, one open still to the world (the world of which it is made). It also made me feel not only that language is not in the poet any sort of original work, but that my voice was formed by other voices—more, that perhaps the importance for me of being a poet isn’t in saying that which I alone can say, but to speak or sing in such a way that other voices can be heard again in the voice—my voice—they make possible. It is, in its way, a kind of Aeolian Harp, save that the lines are poetic lines rather than wires. I wanted to find a way to extend a metaphor over the course of a book, not as a cleverness, but as the essential work of mimicking in language the very thing I was trying to consider—the nest, and language as a nest. I wanted to include as honestly as I could everything that made possible the thinking I was trying to do, to interweave notions of self and other, to give as simply as possible the full difficulty.

3. Your work has evolved and taken leaps from book to book, yet you seem to retain your distinctive voice. Do you try to do this? And if so, how?

I don’t think I try to do this—maintain a consistency of voice through projects that have always felt to me to be departures from one another. But I suppose that any actual departure—a term by which I mean a willing abandonment of the ground a previous project has uncovered, and having uncovered, makes available for further use—forces one to rely more necessarily on basic resources. Voice may be one of the primary resources, not as a style, but as reduction to some fundamental need to express what one experiences in the world, a kind of witness or evidence or humble claim to existence.

4. Do you think about your audience while you write, and if so, how? And if not, why not?

I don’t. For me, the idea of an audience feels very theoretical. I am deeply grateful that anyone would read the books I write, and so, I guess, also surprised. To be read—it’s a gift. But while I’m writing I feel primarily in connection or conversation with what I’m writing, and what by writing opens up to be thought about, to be attended to. There is a compensatory nature to such work I find thrilling—a kind of reciprocity in which to think about something other than myself opens myself up in unexpected ways. (I suppose this also has something to do with the question above.) To think too much about audience risks severing the basic relation between the writer and what’s being written about. The reader, the audience, that is in this equation some unaccountable for grace, some impossible to predict gift, and I worry that to write for an audience breaks that trust or sullies that hope—that is, the hope that someone will find the work, and do so unbidden.

5. You are a very lyrical poet. Where does that sensibility come from? Do you have to work at achieving a lyrical sense in your writing?

I think I’ve always been impelled toward music in verse, and through music, toward a particular kind of lyric sensibility. Lyric, here, for me, referring quite directly back to the instrument Hermes constructed out of a turtle shell and gave to Apollo to appease the sun-god’s anger at the theft of his sacred cattle—that is, the song that results from audacious trespass and a sense of needing to offer a gift to balance out a wrong. There is in lyric tradition a sense of breaking a rule, or even an order of being, and then through the gift of song repairing that damage while not simply re-asserting the broken order. But it’s also reading Hopkins who taught me how deeply music can be thought to be the primary mode of meaning in a poem (if not in the world entire), a sense which reading Zukofsky and Ronald Johnson furthered. I finished reading those authors’ works feeling as if I could let go of easier hearkening after fact or accuracy and trust the music inside the language to reveal itself, and so to reveal what the music itself is “about,” more than I could ever manage. There is a lovely and strange place in Valery’s essay “Poetry and Abstract Thought” where he says, as he’s walking down the street, that he hears an entire symphony orchestrate itself in his head, but as he didn’t know how to write down the music, didn’t know how to record the astonishing gift, that the “sequence amazed my ignorance and reduced it to despair.” Somehow, though the thought is not fully formed in my head, I think that lyric tradition offers a way in which both language and music may co-exist, opposites that nonetheless do not destroy each other, but continually reduce the other’s dominance as a representative mode. It is work, but a strange kind of work—one that lets the notion of work subside into listening.

6. At the same time, you've been described as "experimental." Do you agree?

Well, I’d like to think so—that is, if the etymological source of the word can be the fuller meaning of it: the danger of being in actual experience. I’d like to think—though maybe it’s naïve—that all writing aims at being experimental in this way. My fears about the word, and the designation (both it being applied by some, and hearkened after by others) is that it has come to designate a gesture of style and little else. I certainly do not see Tradition and Experiment at odds with one another, nor being traditional as a refusal to being experimental. I think ideally they are opposed directions that merge helplessly in the poet.

7. What do you think about the current state of poetry?

It is too large a question for me to answer responsibly. There are contemporary poets, at many different stages of their poetry careers, that I love, and without whose work I’d be a lesser person and lesser poet. One thing I do notice, maybe worth mentioning, is that it seems to me that we are in a poetic climate now not as filled with particular “camps” as 20-30 years ago. It seems to me that many of the discoveries made by, say in particular the Language poets, have somehow trickled down into a more general usage—as if the so-called experimental push has through whatever mechanism been somewhat subsumed into a more “typical” practice. I suppose I feel that there is a kind of poetry given to a particular style or sound or gesture that signals to a reader of poetry “experimental” but without the undergirding risk in thought and perception that makes it actually so. There are many surfaces, dizzying surfaces (there are also false depths). Of course, I suppose this somewhat jaded view is true of every age. Nor do I think it indicative of this one—just a tendency that I take note of, to little end other than the noting of it.

8. Tell me something your readers don't know about you or your writing.

This question is hard to answer, as I don’t know what my readers do know about me or my writing. As for the writing, I hope that in it there are the answers to the questions someone may ask. As for me—I don’t know. I’d like to take a year off and learn classical Greek.

9. What do you want to do with your work going forward?

I want to work. I might reverse the terms of your question. I want to find out what my writing wants to do with me.