December 3, 2013

CONVERSATION BETWEEN ELLEN BASS AND ALAN FOX

Santa Cruz, California, December 26th, 2012

Ellen Bass has published several poetry collections, including Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), a Lambda Literary Award winner; and The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book. She coedited with Florence Howe one of the first anthologies to highlight feminist poetry, the groundbreaking No More Masks! Her nonfiction books include the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. She has published poems in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun, Ploughshares, and of course, Rattle. Among her many awards is a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Larry Levis Prize from Missouri Review, and the New Letters Prize. Bass teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University. Her new collection of poetry, Like a Beggar, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in early 2014. (ellenbass.com)

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FOX: Daveen and I just had dinner with a very good mutual friend, Jack Kornfield—

BASS: I haven’t met Jack, but I’d like to.

FOX: You don’t know Jack? Well, he loves your poetry!

BASS: He’s made such an impact with his work and I admire it very much. Someone told me recently that he read one of my poems at a talk or a workshop and I was pleased and flattered.

FOX: Oh, absolutely, you should meet him. Well, we’re with Ellen Bass on the day after Christmas. What I’ll do—we’ll talk and then I’ll have the entire talk transcribed, typed up. I will smooth it out, but I want it to be a conversation.

BASS: I like that; that’s a good word, conversation.

FOX: Yeah, that’s the way I think of it. I studied psychology hoping to get more intimate with people, but the people who are most intimate are poets, period, because your job is to observe keenly and report articulately and accurately, and I find that most compelling. I notice you’ve done workshops since 1974 and, recently, on truth and beauty? What turns you on about teaching?

BASS: I like to make an opportunity for people to accomplish something meaningful, to practice something they’re passionate about. With a safe environment and support and some tools of the craft that students may not have been exposed to before, they can start to work, and I’m always amazed at how hard my students work. Often when people come to my workshops, they love poetry, but don’t really have an idea of how to work at it. Then they start to pay attention to the craft and begin to see how much there is to learn. Sometimes it feels overwhelming. Sometimes they come into class discouraged, saying, “Oh, I used to love to write and it was so easy. Now it’s hard.” And I say, “Okay, that’s good! Now you’ve passed from just spilling words onto the page and you’re aware of what you’re trying to do. You can see what’s possible and you’re trying to achieve that.” Maybe it’s a little like a relationship when you fall in love, but you don’t know that person very well yet.

FOX: Yes.

BASS: And then you see more of who this person is and what it’s like to be together—you’re not naïve anymore. You begin to see what’s really going to be asked of you, that it will be challenging, it won’t all be easy—and you love them anyway. You love them more deeply. My students often go through that process with poetry. Some of them become quite accomplished. The last few years have been especially exciting for me as a teacher, because I’ve got students who are just taking off and writing fine poems and seeing them published in wonderful journals—including Rattle. One of my students, Catherine Freeling, was nominated for the Rattle Poetry Prize this year.

There’s no end to learning more about how to teach. People often come to study with me during times in their life where there’s a big transition or there’s something challenging. That often is what brings us to poetry—on the one hand, poetry is, as you know, not popular. Right? I mean most people would rather go to a movie or read a novel …

FOX: Yes.

BASS: But as we have all observed, in times of crisis, what do people turn to? Poetry. So there’s a paradox—do we love poetry as a culture, or don’t we? After 9/11, what did you see everywhere? Poems, poems, poems. It wasn’t like, “Oh, you’ve got to read this novel” or, “Oh, you’ve got to see this movie.” No, it was, “Read this poem.” Somebody dies and we want a poem. When the most dire things happen, people turn to poetry, and then the rest of the time—except for those of us who love poetry all the time!—the majority of people don’t think so much about it. But my students all think a lot about poetry. And they all become great readers.

FOX: Ah!

BASS: And what is better than sitting around with a bunch of people who want to look at a poem in detail and discover together what’s going on in that poem, and how did the poet do it, and how does it work—like taking apart a machine, you know, what’s happening there? So that’s one of my favorite parts, being with people who are going to get excited about syntax—you know, not the whole world does!

FOX: Absolutely.

BASS: Sometimes we’re just so passionate in there, and I’ll look up at everybody and we’ll just all be so happy to be with our tribe, excited about poetry. I have one student now who is dealing with a life-threatening illness. She started writing poetry when she was first diagnosed, about six years ago. At that time she joined a group with Sharon Bray who leads writing workshops for people with cancer. And Sharon emailed me and said, “I’ve got one for you. She’s a real poet.” Her name is Ann Emerson and she had never written before. Ann is a remarkable person. She said, “I’m glad that I got cancer, because I’m a lazy person and I never would have done anything otherwise.”

FOX: Wow.

BASS: What a thing to be able to say. And she just started working really hard. Several of her poems were published in American Poetry Review, and they are incredible. She is incredible. She’s just trying to live to get a few more poems—you know, just poem by poem. And I’ve worked with other people who were dying, and very often what they say is not “I want to live to see some more sunsets” or even “I want to live to be with my loved ones longer.” But “I want to live to write more poems. I still have some more poems inside; I want to be able to write them.” And that just gives me chills, that I get to participate with them in that process of doing this thing that so much of the world doesn’t care about, but that we care about immensely. Although we know that in other countries, poetry is revered.

FOX: Yes. I think in the United States, like your observation, when we learn poetry, it’s kind of the junior high teacher who is the expert, and she knows what it is and nobody else can really understand it. And then also I think people have the idea that, if I read a book of poems—I used to have the idea that I should like every poem; if I don’t, then I don’t like poetry. Well, normally in a book I like three or four poems. But I don’t think we’re exposed to it in a way that really invites us in.

BASS: I think many teachers are intimidated by poetry themselves. And it’s difficult, if you are not familiar with contemporary poets, to find the ones who speak to you. If you’re looking for a good novel and you walk into a bookstore, you could look around, scan the back covers, read around a little bit, and you’d have good odds of finding a novel you’d enjoy. It’s harder to do that with poetry. There’s so much poetry that is admired by other poets, but doesn’t interest the general population. That’s why I think it’s great if poets and people who are knowledgeable about poetry give their less-informed friends the gift of poetry, like, “Here is a book I think you would like.”

FOX: Yes.

BASS: When I give someone a book of poetry that I think they will resonate with, people almost always love it. Or I’ll call somebody up and say, “Listen to this; I’m going to read you this poem.” I just did an interview with Frank Gaspar about his new book Late Rapturous. My wife has become very sophisticated about poetry over the years even though she’s not a writer and I read her one of the new poems. Are you familiar with Frank’s poetry?

FOX: No, I’m not.

BASS: It’s really dense on the page. It almost looks like a block of prose. It’s rich and gorgeous and human and vulnerable, but you can’t just skim it, you have to take your time. And I said to Janet, “Just sit there and I’m going to read this to you.” I began to read and she closed her eyes. By the end she was just about in tears. I called up another friend and said, “Let me read this to you.” And I said, “But do you have time?”—you know, “Sit down, don’t be doing the dishes while I’m reading it to you.” She said, “Okay, I’m sitting.” And the same thing. She could hardly breathe. But they would not have found that book on their own.

How did I get on this subject? I’m not sure … oh, the way it’s taught in school. I was very, very fortunate in that in college one of my teachers was Florence Howe. Are you familiar with The Feminist Press?

FOX: No.

BASS: The Feminist Press is the oldest women’s press in the country. Florence co-founded the press in 1970. They started out by rescuing “lost” works by writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and went on to bring out women’s writing from around the world. Florence was my teacher back in college and she started a pilot project where college students taught poetry to students in vocational high school. So we had to look for poems we thought these kids would relate to. We taught Gwendolyn Brooks—“We Real Cool,” and Karl Shapiro’s “Buick.” That was my first experience of, “Okay, you have to select so that your reader is going to be able to relate to this.” Later, Florence invited me to co-edit No More Masks with her, which was one of the first anthologies of women’s poetry. Doubleday published it in 1973. This was the first time a lot of us had access to women’s poetry. And at that time it was actually possible to read just about every poem published by a woman in the 20th century in the U.S.—and I did.

FOX: Whoa.

BASS: I lived in Cambridge and I’d go to the Radcliffe Library. I’d take big cardboard boxes and I’d just fill them up. I’d go home and read and put bookmarks at the poems I thought we should consider further and then I’d take them to Kinko’s and photocopy all those poems—Xerox had just been invented. In fact, the first Kinko’s was in Cambridge, and the guy who started Kinko’s worked there—he was the one who photocopied. [Fox laughs] That was how we had no typos. It was Florence’s idea—you know, “If you don’t type, you can’t get typos.” [laughs] So I just collected from all these books then we would go through and go through and go through the poems together. That was kind of my in-depth education. I was in heaven. Florence was my first teacher who taught me how to teach in a way that made it possible for students to have agency and for the classroom or the workshop to be a conversation.

FOX: It sounds like she was empowering students.

BASS: Oh, incredibly. I am so fortunate to have had her as my mentor.

FOX: Well, Wikipedia says you also studied with Anne Sexton.

BASS: I did.

FOX: What was that like?

BASS: A dream come true. Anne Sexton was a wonderful teacher. I am very fortunate to have been her student. You know that she was so flamboyant, so self-centered in many ways, but as a teacher, she was thoughtful, respectful, insightful. She was a great teacher and all her drama was gone in the classroom. We got to have an experience of her that perhaps was not so available in other contexts. I was in the—then it was called MA in creative writing or MA in poetry, what now is called an MFA at Boston University. And the first semester was kind of a disaster for me. My work was not very good, but what my teachers did with it just made it worse. [laughs] All they seemed to know how to do was chop—chop chop chop. I was discouraged and maybe I would have just given up. It seemed so unlikely I could learn anything, but the second semester I was in Anne Sexton’s class and she said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, don’t do these kind of cramped little things; write more, write longer, spread out, say what you have to say.” And it wasn’t that I was getting to be any good, but she gave me a sense of hope: “You do have a voice, you can try to discover it, and you don’t have to constrict yourself in this way that’s just going to strangle you.” She gave me enough confidence to be able to keep going.

FOX: You’re known for your metaphor—when I read your poetry I look at the metaphor and say, “Yes!” Often I will say with other poems by other authors, “Yeah, okay, I can figure it out,” or, “That’s real close, it’s okay,” but yours seem to be just right on. How does that happen?

BASS: Thank you. Well, I know that I think in metaphor as well as write in it. That’s the first thing my mind is always doing, and even if I’m in a conversation, especially if I’m trying to convince somebody of something, I’m always saying, “Well it’s like …” And metaphor is very convincing if you can get it right. It can even convince you of things you don’t really think. Also, for me, part of it came from this intense desire to be understood and then in later years a desire to understand. Finally, you give up on being understood and you realize—speaking for myself—that no one will ever really understand you or anyone else, and that if you can even understand anything yourself, that’s going to be great.

Metaphor is an aspect of poetry that is, I think, spiritual. Our society has become very sophisticated in its ability to discriminate. We can discern differences more and more finely. In metaphor you are doing what might be the opposite; you’re looking for what is similar in disparate things, and when you find it there’s a kind of oneness, a recognition that everything is a part of everything else. In science, we are also discovering how this is like that. I don’t understand much—I love to read science but I’m not smart in that way so I struggle through it because there’s so much in science and in poetry that is similar.

FOX: Really? Say more.

BASS: Well, it’s that awe of reality. When I was college, when I was in school, I thought, “Why would anyone want to study physics?” And now I think, “Oh God, if only I could understand these things better,” because this is the actual world we live in, and that’s what poetry tries to do in its way, to say, “This is the world we live in. This is the world; this is what it is; this is the experience of being on the earth.” And that’s what science tries to do, too, to describe the world. And the Buddhist teachings or meditations say something similar too—you’re trying to have a direct experience with reality. While we’re here for this brief visit to this planet, we want to see what it is that’s going on: “What’s here?”

FOX: Yes.

BASS: And to actually take a look. Maybe we can see this thing, whatever it is, better, if we try to describe it. And one way to describe it is through metaphor. I think it’s Ed Hirsch who said poetry is the most intimate form of communication. When I read that, I thought, well, oh, that’s why I like it so much, because I am an intimacy junkie.

FOX: Yes. Well, Jack Kornfield feels he knows you. So you know, here we are. [all laugh]

BASS: And in a way he does!

FOX: Yes, exactly.

BASS: In a way he knows me better than a lot of people who know me. It is intimate to read or to write a poem, and when a poem is read—even across the centuries, across the continents—the poet and the reader have met. And metaphor is a part of that. I think metaphor is also like a joke, in that you either get it or you don’t get it. If you get it, you respond in a way that’s very immediate. You laugh. You don’t just intellectually appreciate that the joke is a good joke. And with a metaphor you don’t just appreciate—“Oh okay, I see that they’ve put that together and there’s some sense in that”—it does something to you on a more visceral emotional level that you can’t resist.

FOX: There you go using metaphor to explain metaphor! [Bass laughs] That’s good, I like it.

BASS: I love that about metaphor, that it’s so physical and emotional and revealing. Sometimes people will ask, “Well, don’t you feel exposed writing about your life?” But once it’s made into a poem, it’s a thing on its own, and it’s not about me anymore. If it succeeds, it’s about all of us. The poem lives or dies according to how well it describes something that the reader recognizes as part of his or her own experience, the human experience. Also, what am I exposing really? Everything I write about is so common—it’s not a big surprise that people love and get angry and have sex and worry about their children, have joy from their children, do stupid things and feel regret. But what does feel exposed is how my mind works. That’s where I think the risk is. And maybe that’s why people often feel so scared when they share their poetry—because you’re exposing what it’s like to be in your mind. That’s intimate. I think that’s the intimacy of poetry.

FOX: Would it feel different to make your journals public?

BASS: Very! I’d never do that. Also they’re not very interesting. [laughs] I mean, some people write journals that are art in themselves. But mine are just raw materials. It’d be as if somebody had to listen to your thoughts and your fretting all day long, like reality TV.

FOX: Sometimes we get a submission—I often read the bios, because we do bios differently, and a few times I’ve said, “Take the bio. That’s a great poem.” The poem is okay, but the bio is terrific.

BASS: Wow. What fun.

FOX: Absolutely. As we’re talking, I’m remembering, I have one firm rule: If I read a poem and I either laugh or I have tears at the end, it’s in.

BASS: Take it!

FOX: Absolutely.

BASS: I’ve been thinking recently that one way for me to judge a poem is if it stays with me, if I read it and a day later, a week, a month later if it keeps coming back to me. Even if the poem is flawed, if there’s even a line or an image in that poem that I keep thinking about, then that poem has succeeded.

DAVEEN: How often do you find that happens to you, that it sticks that way?

BASS: Well, it happens fairly often because I try to spend time reading poets that I love. But as teachers, many of us get out of whack, out of balance, because we’re just reading so much student poetry, worthy as it may be, and we don’t have enough time to sink deeply into the poetry that inspires us.

FOX: Well, think of poor Tim and Megan Green, they read—we have 70,000 poems submitted a year.

BASS: Oh my God. Exactly.

FOX: At this point in your life, what’s your truest truth?

BASS: Well, that’s a big question! I think the thing I’m most aware of now is how briefly we’re here. Janet’s mother lives near us in Santa Cruz and she’s 91, and I’m watching the process of being in old, old age, and thinking about how briefly we’re here, how much there is to notice in every minute that I don’t notice, and then being so grateful for the bits that I can catch, that I don’t miss, and how much gets wasted, just sleepwalking. That connects to poetry for me, because poetry is a way for me to wake up and not let it just flow by so fast or with such inattention that I’m missing it. I’m 65, and I’m thinking, if I’m fortunate, I’ll have ten or fifteen years where I can still write poetry—maybe longer, you never know. There are people who go full-strength into their eighties, but you can’t count on it. You can’t count on even tomorrow, of course.

FOX: Well, that depends partly on genetics. My father, who I will drive back to Los Angeles with today, is 98 years old. He is the finest brass instrument teacher in the world bar none. I took him to the University of Arizona a few months ago and he spent twelve hours teaching.

BASS: Oh my God.

FOX: The guy is absurd.

BASS: You made my day! [laughs]

FOX: So don’t …

BASS: So don’t worry, you never know!

FOX: I was thinking as you were talking, “This woman’s a really great poet,” in terms of your outlook. A woman I love very much who committed suicide in 1971 wrote to me and said, “Suppose they gave a life and nobody came.” That I remember. And to me that’s what you’re talking about.

BASS: The older you get, the more you’re aware that we really are mortal. I think about it a lot—time; that we live in time. So that’s a big truth, just plain old mortality. And another big truth is of course the state of the planet. I was reading an article by Charles Mann in Orion this week about the fact that we’re such a successful species, and that all species, if they’re successful enough, up until now, have done themselves in, because that’s the nature of overachievement, of success. Bacteria in a Petri dish will multiply on a curve that goes up up up until it hits the place where it has to collapse. The article went on to say that humans also have more brain plasticity than any other species, and that is where the hope lies: Is it possible that we have enough brain plasticity that we could actually confront this and consciously change our behavior? Mann used some examples of our plasticity that I thought were interesting—the change in the status of women, the change in our thinking about slavery, the overall decrease in violence from the beginning of history.

FOX: Yes, there was a very good book out recently on that.

BASS: If we, as a species, could undergo change of that order, might we also have the capacity to recognize what we must do in order to not kill off all humans and bring down most of the other mammals and animals with us? So that’s another huge question for all of us, poets or not: How will we change to sustain life on the planet.

FOX: I’ve thought for a long time that whether it’s ten years from now or a hundred years from now or ten million years from now, I don’t think human beings will exist. But you’ve got to do it anyway.

BASS: Yes. We’re here. I recently read Orham Pamuk’s Nobel Prize lecture from 1996 and he says that writers are doing the most important work on the planet. I would not have the audacity to say that myself, but I love that he did. He said in order to make changes we first must be able to conceive them.

FOX: Yes. Well, if you took away everything you’ve ever read, who would we be? I agree with you; I feel very strongly we have an absolute obligation to help each other, period, in whatever way we can. I’m 72 and I have been writing a book for twenty years—I finished it last week.

BASS: Congratulations!

FOX: I feel a sense of … for some reason I say I’m 72, and I’ve got twenty good years—

BASS: Well, we’re on the same wavelength!

FOX: And I need to write now. Now, not ten years from now. Now.

BASS: Wonderful. That’s great.

FOX: When we talked early on, you started talking about insecurity—tell me about that.

BASS: Well, writing is difficult for me. It does not come easily. I think that’s part of what has made me a good teacher. I have to write so many bad poems for every good one; I have to struggle for each one. A few come easily, but most I have to work at. It helps me as a teacher, but I never feel real confidence. I never sit down to write a poem and think, “Oh wow, I can do this.” When I teach, I feel competent. Sometimes I joke with my students that I have to teach or I would have nowhere in my life where I feel competent. [Fox laughs] I never feel confident as a poet. I do feel competent as a non-fiction writer—it takes a long time, takes a lot of work, but I know that if I put in an eight hour day at writing what I call “functional non-fiction,” I will get eight hours worth of writing. Creative non-fiction of course is not straightforward like that either. And as a poet, no. I just know that if I stick with it, eventually I am likely to get another poem. In his book, Walking Light, Stephen Dunn wrote about playing basketball with great ball players and said it’s similar with poets: “The poets who keep writing do so in the face of such greatness; if they were reasonable, they’d stop.” Or as Joe Millar says, “We’re always writing in the shadow of the greats.” So how could I ever feel secure?

FOX: How do you know when a poem is finished?

BASS: Well, I know when a poem is finished, but I don’t always know when a poem is good. [Fox laughs] It’s finished when I’ve made it as good as it can be, and sometimes that’s good enough and sometimes it’s not, but there’s just no more I can do. But many of my better poems are written on the backs of the poems that didn’t do so well. And when I look back I see, “Oh, here’s half a dozen poems that, in hindsight, were trying to do this in some way, were trying to grapple with this in some way, and none of those ever quite came together, but I was working up to this.” Maybe it’s like an artist making sketches toward a painting, only the artist is aware she’s making preliminary sketches and I’m not. Each time I think I’m writing the poem, or I hope I’m writing the poem, but I can see in retrospect that I was working my way up to it.

FOX: I often find that in submissions, sometimes an eight stanza poem has two really good lines, but the rest of it just doesn’t make it, and sometimes we’ll suggest to the poet to kind of build on those. But you need somebody else …

BASS: Yes. And I was very lucky—the amazing poet, Dorianne Laux, has been my mentor for many years. You know her poetry—it’s stunning, stellar. And I was very, very fortunate to find her at a time when I was returning to poetry after a long hiatus. I had been working in the field of trauma and healing for a long time. I had written The Courage toHeal and was working with survivors of child sexual abuse for ten, twelve years, and not writing poetry at all. I wanted—and needed—to return to poetry, but I was just writing in circles. I didn’t know how to work; I didn’t know how to learn. Some people intuitively can teach themselves; they read great poetry, they can see what’s happening, but I couldn’t. I was just hopelessly and horribly stuck. And I wanted to do this more than anything but I didn’t know how. And I was very persistent and persuasive with Dorianne and she finally agreed to mentor me. She worked with me intensively for a few years and it’s one of those “without whom …” There’s no way I would have been able to learn what she taught me on my own. I think a lot about the nature of the teaching relationship—both from the perspective of a teacher and the perspective of a student who so desperately needed a teacher, and the right teacher. When Dorianne first started working with me she would say, “Do this,” or, “Do that,” and I’d think to myself, “Well, how do I know that’s true?” you know, “How do I know that’s what I should do?” But very soon I saw that it really didn’t matter. And that’s what I tell students, if you’re working with a teacher whose poetry you admire, just take their advice. If at the end of a year you’re writing poems you couldn’t have been writing a year ago, that means she’s a good teacher for you. And so very quickly I stopped questioning, and I just did everything she told me to do. Really, she’s taught me everything I know.

FOX: Isn’t that unusual for a well-known poet to take a student on intensively?

BASS: Yes. It was like a tale of going up the mountain to the guru. I sent her a manuscript of poems and she said she’d be willing to work with me but she was too busy, and if I could wait then she’d be glad to read it. So I waited three months and I called her again and she said, “Yes, it’s at the top of the pile, but …” you know, “I’m getting married, and I’m moving,” and all these things. [Fox and Daveen laugh] So I waited three more months. You go up the mountain the third time—it’s mythic, it’s wonderful—now it’s nine months, and I called her up. And this is a little insight into me: I thought about what is the best time of the week to call someone. And I decided it was Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. because you’ve begun the week but you’re not too far into it. It’s morning but it’s not too early. I decided that would be my best bet. I said, “Dorianne, I’m a grown-up, and I can wait as long as need be. All I need to hear from you is ‘A time will come’ and if you tell me ‘A time will come,’ then I’m happy.” And she cracked up of course and said, “Hang up and I’ll start reading, and call me back in half an hour and we’ll just talk about whatever I could read in half an hour.” So I called her back and we talked for a long time. We may have talked for an hour or two hours about what she read in that half hour. And I was a pig in mud. I knew this was what I needed. And we had to hang up eventually, and she said, “Okay call me back next Tuesday at ten.”

FOX: Whoa.

BASS: And so I called her back next Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. And of course I had said, “I want to pay you,” you know, “your time is valuable,” etc., etc. So I was trying—I would’ve done anything. I would’ve flown up to Oregon and mopped her floors and cleaned her closets if she wanted me to, because I was hopeless, and I knew what I needed. I had known her a bit before. She had come many years earlier to a weekend workshop that I had facilitated for survivors of child sexual abuse. This was before she had published much, and Laura Davis and I, when we were putting together The Courage to Heal, recognized that she was a terrific poet, and we asked her if we could use some poems, so we had some connection. But in truth I didn’t remember her from that workshop and it was so many years before, but we did have this knowledge of each other. So then I called her back the next week at ten and she said, “I haven’t had a chance to read anything; hang up and call me back in half an hour.” So for probably the first six months I’d call her at 10:00 and we’d hang up and then I’d call her back at 10:30. [all laugh] And it worked great. Eventually it got a little looser, but I talked to her almost every week for a year or two. And then I asked her to come down and teach a workshop for my students and that was the first time I had seen her since way back but her voice was so familiar to me and there she was sitting in the room and all day long I’m looking at her and looking away—I’ve never had this experience with anyone, where the voice was so familiar, I knew the voice so well, and the visual, the physicality, was so foreign. And to get the voice and the person’s visage, to put them together, took all day of back and forth, back and forth. By the next day, it came together: “Okay, this is the same person, they’re integrated now in my mind.” And then over the years we became very good friends and started teaching together, and then I also became good friends with her husband, the wonderful poet Joe Millar, and they became good friends with my wife, Janet.

FOX: Daveen, do you have anything you’d like to inquire of your new favorite poet?

DAVEEN: [laughs] Yeah … I was taking notes, not checking email, just so you know. Sometimes I’ll do that during the interview; I’ll generally take notes for questions, but I found that I was also taking notes for me for later, which I hadn’t done before. The word “resonates” keeps coming back and I think it’s cliché-ish but that is what keeps coming up to my heart when you speak or when your words speak as it were. But a couple technical things: When you were learning poetry when you were growing up and you talked about that for a minute, was that

rhyming poetry?

BASS: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I just loved all poetry, rhyming poetry, too—I think it was something in the magic of it. “Blessings on thee, little man,/ Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan! … Ah! that thou coudst know thy joy,/ Ere it passes, barefoot boy!” John Greenleaf Whittier. It sounds so archaic. What did I find so compelling? But I think I was getting something that was vibrating below the literal meaning of these poems. Because I loved all of the poems; there wasn’t anything I didn’t love. Because there’s something deeper in poetry—poetry is magic. Originally, poets were the priests. The word mattered. Even today in Judaism when the person reading the Torah portion reads aloud, someone stands next to him looking at the text so if he makes an error they correct it, because it can’t go into the air with a mistake, because the sound of the words changes the world. It has an actual impact. And so if the person makes an error—it’s like a spell over a cauldron—the spell won’t work unless it’s correct.

And then you think, “in the beginning was the word”—why the word? Isn’t that wild? Why wasn’t it, “In the beginning was water,” or “In the beginning was …” something more physical, more elemental, but evidently the word was the most powerful to the writers of the Old Testament, and I think whatever that was was what got to me.

When I was a kid, my brother taught me to type so that I could type his papers. [Fox laughs] He was in college. So I had his old typewriter;I would type out lines of poetry that I loved on index cards—Kahlil Gibran: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,/ Moves on: no rall thy Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” And I look back and think, what in my eleven-year-old experience did this speak to? I had a pretty good childhood. What did I know of regret? Was I prescient? Or was it something deeper than the literal meaning of the words that made me want to type these lines out, to have them, to bring them into my body and know them in my heart?

DAVEEN: Did you talk about it with anybody, a teacher or a friend or …?

BASS: Very little. But I was soon writing poems and I’d send them to my brother who was away at college, so he was my first reader. And he was wonderful. He would give me feedback. He’d write “trite” or “cliché” and I’d go into the dictionary, “What does ‘trite’ mean?” I didn’t even know. And I’d think, “Oh, okay,” and then I’d try to improve that line or image. But no matter what he wrote he would always say, “I just want you to know that whatever I’m criticizing, I could never even do this, so this is great …” He always built me up, telling me he was impressed that I was even writing poems and that he was humbly offering what he could from his somewhat greater years.

DAVEEN: That sounds like it leads into my next question, because several times one of the things that I’ve heard through the session is that you talk about working hard with your writing and your students working hard. But is that depth, is that changing words, is that looking things up in the dictionary—what is working hard for you?

BASS: It’s all of it. It’s on the level of just hammer and nails and saw. Working hard for the metaphor—like I say to my students, “Okay, you’ve got a metaphor there. Maybe it’s not your best metaphor. Why don’t you make a list of twenty metaphors that might describe this.” If I say to myself, “Okay, I need a metaphor here and it’s got to be the exact right metaphor,” I feel like I might as well kill myself. But if I brainstorm 20 metaphors or 40 metaphors that don’t have to be good, I may loosen up my mind enough and then I can look at that list and the right one might be in there. That’s one way of learning how to work. Or rewriting a line over and over until you get the cadence right, until the syntax feels natural. Even ordinary sentences are hard to write gracefully.

DAVEEN: Alan says often that when you read a work it’s a finished product; you can’t expect your first try or maybe even your tenth to be comparable …

BASS: That’s right. And to be willing to sit down and start from that embryonic place of not-knowing each time. Because you get sophisticated enough to be aware that your first lines may not be any good—I see this in my students too after a while—in the beginning you’re writing and you just think it’s so great. [Fox and Daveen laugh] “It sounds so good!” But now I sit down, I start to write and I’m hyper-aware of how bad it sounds, and how do I keep going anyway?

DAVEEN: Several times you’ve said “sounds.” Do you read your work out loud?

BASS: I do. I can also hear it—even if I’m not actually saying it out loud, I’m hearing what it sounds like, and I’m hearing how clumsy and tired it sounds; I’m hearing how the language is not catching. There’s a certain point sometimes where you feel like it catches, and you’re in language in a different way. So part of the challenge for me always is to keep going, to keep going even though it isn’t going so well, to keep going even though it hasn’t caught. I keep thinking of the word catch; it’s almost like sometimes there’s this little catch where—

DAVEEN: It hooks you in.

BASS: Yes, exactly … You start writing and if you’re lucky, you come to a point where the poem starts talking back to you. I have to write a lot when it’s not talking back to me, and for me that’s part of the hard work. And then there is the emotional part—what is the essential truth of this experience? Because there’s so much you could write that is the easier-to-get-to truth. That’s another thing that I try to teach my students. For example, I had a difficult marriage. I was married to somebody who was a difficult person. He was meshugenah, and anyone, even his neighbors, would agree with that. So if I write a poem about how crazy my ex-husband was, that’s like shooting ducks in the bathtub. It’s just too easy. Okay, fine, but where is the story underneath that story?

FOX: Yes.

BASS: Where is the harder story? Where is my complicity? Why did I marry that guy? Why did I stay with him? I already know he’s crazy and so does everybody else who’s ever met him. There’s no poem there; there’s no discovery. And so it’s the hard work of trying to find the discovery. If you write a poem and from beginning to end and it’s what you already knew before you sat down to write, you’re still on the diving board; you haven’t jumped off. And so that’s what I’m always pushing for with my students, and what I’m trying to do for myself. What is the discovery? And sometimes it’s an intellectual or emotional discovery, something I didn’t know before. Sometimes it’s a more subtle discovery in the language itself, how you see it or how you say it. But I’m constantly asking myself and asking my students, “What do you still not understand about this experience? What do you still struggle with?”

Part of the work is emotional. People talk about writing as healing and of course I believe that—I’ve taught that; I’ve championed that. But writing is not only healing. I think you also pay a price to go to that place, and you have to be willing to do that. Some poems just about kill you in the process. But ultimately I do think it’s healing for me, or maybe simply necessary. Gregory Orr writes about it in Poetry as Survival, taking the chaos of our experience and trying to make order of it. Poetry allows us to survive the suffering by shaping it. We become makers, not just victims who are acted upon. And that is part of what makes it bearable. Writing … it’s like the two faces of comedy and tragedy. We write to notice and praise the moments of our lives—that’s prayer. And then we write to make the pain bearable, to be able to hold it as bearable. And what makes it bearable I think is that it’s part of the human condition. There’s a time in suffering where I say to myself, “I don’t want this to be happening to me.” Right? “I don’t want this.”Right?

DAVEEN: Of course.

BASS: But if I can make a poem, then I can see, “Well, of course this is happening; this is part of the human experience,” and although my regular self says, “I don’t want this,” the poet self says, “I am willing to be a human being living a human experience.”

FOX: I glommed on very early to my favorite quote which I live by, which is from Hamlet: “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” To me that’s true. That’s what you’re talking about—you’re using yourself, your experience in service of your communication.

BASS: It’s a willingness to go further than my regular self wants to go. There’s a Buddhist prayer that says, “I am a human being and anything that can happen to human beings can happen to me today and I accept that.” Well, I don’t. [Fox laughs] I recognize that this is true, but I’m not so evolved that I say, “That’s okay.” But it’s this acceptance that is what I try to open to in poetry—in poetry I try to accept whatever has happened in some way. And even if I am railing against it, I accept that railing as part of it.

DAVEEN: Well there’s a difference with past tense as it were—you know, happened, has happened …

BASS: Or what’s happening. I try to accept what’s happening in poetry.

DAVEEN: Right. But I don’t want to accept that I might be hit by a truck today. If it happens then I’ll deal with it—I’m not looking for it.

BASS: No, we’re definitely not looking for it, and if I’m hit by a truck today, I am definitely not evolved enough to say, “Okay, I accept that this happened.” I’m going to fight it; I’m going to suffer; I’m going to resist. It would take me a long time to accept that “what is, is.” But I think that’s what I’m struggling to do in poetry—to accept it all. And if I can make a poem that does that, then it works on me. I made the poem but then the poem works on me and helps me to accept it.

from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

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October 7, 2013

A CONVERSATION  WITH DAVID BOTTOMS

Atlanta, Georgia, September 21st, 2012

David Bottoms by Rachael Bottoms
Photo by Rachael Bottoms

David Bottoms’ first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump (William Morrow, 1980), was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The AtlanticThe New YorkerHarper’sPoetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of seven other books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His most recent book of poems, We Almost Disappear (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), was released last fall. Among his other awards are both the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has served as the Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, and the Chaffee Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. A book of essays on his work, David Bottoms: Critical Essays and Interviews, edited by William Walsh , was published in 2010 (McFarland). He is the recipient of a 2011 Governor’s Award in the Humanities and served for twelve years as Poet Laureate of Georgia.

FOX: We’re doing an issue next year on Southern poets, so that’s where this conversation is going.

BOTTOMS: Oh, that’s cool. That’s good. Nobody pays much attention to Southern poets anymore. [laughs]

FOX: Tell me about Southern poets. What’s your take?

BOTTOMS: Oh, I don’t know; I’m so out of things. And I suppose there are about a million different takes on Southern poetry these days. But when I was a young man, 200 years ago, it was a big thing. Narrative was still the main focus. Of course, Robert Penn Warren was still around, and the big guns for me were Warren and Dickey and then Dave Smith. Dave’s still with us. He’s in Baltimore … Johns Hopkins, he’s at Hopkins now. The Southern Review was a big deal, and still is, I suppose, though they’ve gone through several changes of editors. Dave did a lot with The Southern Review when he was an editor there. Then you had someone like Charles Wright, also still with us, who’s much more lyrical and because of that is not often thought of as a Southern poet. But he is, of course. He’s from Tennessee. I doubt that anyone writing in English can match his pure talent for language.

FOX: Yes.

BOTTOMS: Well, that was sort of my vision of Southern poetry. Of course, there were a lot of fine Southern poets and a lot of other visions, but that was mine. I really don’t know what’s going on in Southern poetry right now. So many young poets coming up, and I’m guessing you’ll have a bunch of them in this issue. For that sort of thing I have to rely on my grad students. They keep up with the poets and the magazines. I mentioned this interview one day in workshop, and one guy said, “Oh, right, I just got rejected there!” [Fox laughs loudly] So they know what’s going on, but I wouldn’t even be able to tell you really who the new young Southern writers are. Still, literature’s always been a vibrant force in the South, as you well know, and there are things, I suppose, that distinguish Southern writing from the rest of the country. Well it used to—we were saying “I’m a town boy and you’re a city guy.” But I was over in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago where they do the Birmingham Poetry Review, and somebody asked me about the relationship between Southern writing and the land, and I tried to explain that the South was always basically agricultural, a place where families tended to hit a patch of ground and stay there for a while. And after a few generations on the same piece of ground that landscape tends to mean more. Southerners didn’t move around so much, we couldn’t go places. And I guess that’s one of my big regrets, that the landscape where I grew up is gone now. I grew up in a little town in Cherokee County, Georgia, called Canton. My grandpa had this little country store that sat on the side of the highway for 51 or 52 years. He had about half a dozen acres. He had a barn that was slightly run down by the time I came along, all the windows pretty much busted out. He used to raise Tennessee Walking Horses and so he had a riding ring and all that stuff, and a couple of lots for hunting dogs and two or three chicken houses, and an empty field my dad turned into a regulation Little League baseball field. I’m sure it was once a really nice place, but by the time I got there it was kind of on a downhill slide. Then back when I was in my twenties my family sold out and developers plowed all that under and put up a K-Mart shopping center. I’ve always regretted that. Now on the spot where my house sat there’s a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the K-Mart parking lot is covering the place where my grandfather’s house and store were. When my daughter was a kid we’d drive by and I’d say, “This is where we lived, right here,” and she’d say, “Kentucky Fried Chicken?” [Fox laughs] But you know, a lot of times at night when I try to go to sleep that old landscape plays over in my mind and it’s just sad, in a way, to have lost that, to have lost that connection and know that I’m one of the few people left who has any sense of that place, what it was and what it meant to folks. Maybe it didn’t mean so much then, but right now it means a lot. It means a whole lot.

FOX: Tell me about the sheriff and your sixteenth birthday.

BOTTOMS: Oh, well, you’re talking about that poem “Homage to Buck Cline.” That’s pretty much a true story. I usually do that poem at readings. That poem falls in … what book is that … Waltzing Through the Endtime, those longer poems. Like a lot of poets I guess I got to a point in my life where I decided I just wasn’t getting enough ink on the page, so I sort of spread the poems out and let them start to think a little bit more. Anyway, when I was a kid—I guess I was about sixteen years old—going to Cherokee High School, I had a girlfriend—“hometown honeys,” we called them. And we’d been dating a couple years. I lived on the south side of town; she lived on the east side of town. But in order to get from her house to my house, you had to go through Canton and through the only two traffic lights in the county. Anyway, we had dates pretty much every Friday and Saturday night. And this was a time when everyone thought the way to a young man’s heart was through his stomach, I suppose, so her mother was trying to teach her to cook. Well, about once every couple of months, we’d have a big spaghetti dinner, and her mother would drive down to the county line—we lived in a dry county—and buy us a bottle of Mateus Rose. [laughs] That was very adult, you know. So one evening—I’ll never forget this—one evening about twelve midnight or one o’clock in the morning, I was driving home, and I made it through that first traffic light, which was in the middle of downtown Canton, and got to north Canton and the traffic light there. Well, I got caught by the red light, and while I was stopped there I looked over in the shadows of the North Canton store and I saw Buck Cline, the chief of police, sitting in the Canton patrol car. He usually sat there on weekends because our one burger joint in the county—the Burger Chief—sat about a hundred yards down the highway. And from the North Canton Store he could keep an eye on the place. You know, it was the spot all the young toughs would circle in their hot rods on Saturday night. Anyway Buck Cline would sit about a hundred or so yards away in the shadows of the store and keep an eye peeled for trouble. Well, something about Buck. He was literally 6’5”, and must have weighed close to 300, without an ounce of fat on him, and he considered himself a bad son of a bitch. He’d made his reputation the hard way, by beating people up, and all the high school folks just feared him like the devil. Now my old man was something of a—I don’t know if you’d call him a war hero, but he went down on the USS Atlanta at the Battle of Guadalcanal, and he was severely wounded. He was two years in the hospital, he had terrible head wounds—they had to put a metal plate in his head—side wounds and leg wounds. So he was well known around the county. And those guys in that generation sort of stuck together, I guess. Anyway, I never heard my dad talk about Buck Cline. I didn’t even know he knew him. But Buck Cline was also a veteran and—well, those guys just looked out for each other. Anyway, I got this weird notion sitting there at that traffic light—after a couple of glasses of Mateus Rose—that I could pull through the light, hang a left, and when I got in front of the Burger Chief, I could bark off some tires, you know, floor it, and beat Buck Cline to my house, which was only about two and a half miles away. [Fox and Daveen laugh loudly] So I don’t know what you call that except stupid. [Fox laughs] But that’s what I did, and I made it about a mile, to the top of the hill, maybe a mile and a half, and then I saw these flashing blue lights behind me. Buck Cline pulled me over just across the river bridge, maybe a half mile from my house. I remember getting out of the car and saying, “Is something wrong?” And he said, “Shut up, I’ll ask the questions.”

FOX: Ooh. [laughs]

BOTTOMS: And so he got my driver’s license and he looked at it and saw my name. Well, I’m just a junior; my old man was the real David Bottoms. So Buck looked at it a couple of times and looked back at me and he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “You reckon your daddy’d like to come get you out of jail?” And I said, “No sir.” And he said, “You been drinkin’? You didn’t see me back there?” And I said, “No, sir, I didn’t.” And I was just scared about half to death. Anyway, he studied that for a little while and then he—he actually asked me this; this is in the poem—after he studied the situation he looked at me, and then he said, “You think you can whup my ass?”

FOX: Whoa!

BOTTOMS: Here I am 5’8” and he’s like 6’5”, 300 pounds. I said, “No, no, sir.” And then he looked at me again and said, “You think you can whup your daddy’s ass?” He actually said that. And I said, “No, sir.” And he gave me the license back—I’d only had it for about a month—he gave it back to me and he said, “Then you better get your ass on home.”

FOX: Whoa.

BOTTOMS: And that’s the story, and that’s a true story. And I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, because evidently … it’s like my daughter says: we live in the present but there’s a world that happened before we came along and we don’t often understand that. As the poem says, these are things we used to “attribute to the stars.” And there was a connection between these men that I knew nothing about and probably a connection all veterans share at one time or another. And so, he let me go, not for my sake, I’m sure, but because of my old man.

FOX: Yes, yes.

BOTTOMS: So thank you, Buck. He’s long dead now, I’m sure. He was a tough guy. Yeah, I don’t ever want to live that night again.

FOX: You’re talking about the past—what kind of feelings, relationship do you have to the past?

BOTTOMS: That’s a very interesting question. I was talking about that over in Birmingham a couple weeks ago. The way you look at the world changes and it affects the way you write. Someone asked me if my poetry had changed or something, and people still have a hard time believing I wrote a book of poems called Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. But, you know, when you’re young, you’re usually thinking only about the present moment. Hell, you don’t even have that much of a past. All those poems are kind of “young man, hunting and fishing and raising hell” sorts of poems. I remember when that book came out somebody called me the “laureate of the rednecks” [Fox laughs], some review. But as you get older, some things sort of come into focus and your perspective changes. I remember my old friend James Dickey telling me one time at a party—this must have been only a few months before he died—we were over at Emory, I think, and they were giving a party for him, and he had poured himself a large glass of chocolate milk—he’d given up whiskey entirely—and he just turned to me and looked over that glass of chocolate milk and said, “David, there’s nothing more important than family.” Right out of the blue.

FOX: Wow.

BOTTOMS: And I thought that was pretty strange, given the fact that he’d spent most of his life trying to destroy his own family. I don’t know if you’ve read that beautiful book by Chris Dickey called Summer of Deliverance. There’ve been a number of books and articles about Jim. The big one is Henry Hart’s, James Dickey: The World as a Lie, which is vicious. But this book by Chris is a very beautiful book and it really gives a lot of insight into his father and the sort of reconciliation they had at the end of his father’s life. Anyhow, this last book I wrote (We Almost Disappear)—I don’t know if you have a copy of it; there’s one right there you can have if you like.

FOX: Thank you, I don’t.

BOTTOMS: It’s mostly about family. Much quieter—a lot of the poems at the end of the book are about my dad and his death. But as you know, eventually the past starts to mean more to you and family starts to mean more. The things that are really significant rise to the surface and things like shooting rats fall away. I guess it’s inevitable, the sort of change you go through, but certainly—I don’t know if the past is any different for a Southerner than it is for someone from the west or the northeast or whatever but certainly the past is always—what was that Faulkner said about the past in the South … I can’t remember; it’s a great quote. We’ll have to look it up. [Editor’s note: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”] But yeah, I think a lot about the past. I was telling my wife yesterday that I have to do this thing down at Florida State and they wanted a bunch of pictures or something to put together a …

FOX: Collage?

BOTTOMS: Yeah, a video of some kind. So I was going through some old pictures and I said, “Wow, this is just a heartbreak.” And she said, “Yeah, because most of it’s behind us.” But it’s twofold, because when you see these pictures, you see what a really good life you’ve had and how blessed you’ve been, and you think what more could you hope for? But the sad thing is that it’s back there. Still I think it still enriches your life when you think about it.

FOX: Yes. I was thinking about something this morning; I was thinking, “Those were the days.” Last night we had a little celebration, our eighth grandchild, and my father was there. He is 98 years old—

BOTTOMS: Wow, wonderful!

FOX: There’s a photo of my mother when she was sixteen and her father was a professional photographer, and it was a photo of her at sixteen which would have been 1930—80 years ago.

BOTTOMS: Wow, that’s amazing. Your father’s 98—is he all right; is he in good health?

FOX: Yes! He drives, he …

BOTTOMS: He drives?

FOX: Yes!

BOTTOMS: Wow!

FOX: It’s amazing. But family stays. Most friends come and go. College buddies, high school …

BOTTOMS: You’re exactly right. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re exactly right. Family stays. And place stays, or the idea of place.

FOX: Yes, yes.

BOTTOMS: And your relationship to place. I’ve often wished I could go back to that old house again. We lived in this little post-World War II two bedroom, one bathroom house. It just sat on the side of the highway, and seemed like the greatest place in the world.

FOX: Tell us a little about James Dickey. Were you close to him?

BOTTOMS: For about sixteen years. We were pretty good friends. I met Jim after Warren had chosen Shooting Rats for the Whitman Award. This would’ve been like in ’79. I’d always wanted to meet Dickey. I went to Mercer University in Macon, and the first time I saw Jim Dickey was in 1971 when he gave the commencement address at Wesleyan College where my girlfriend went. He had just published Deliverance, and I read that and I thought, “That’s a great book.” Well, I wanted to meet him but I didn’t want to meet him under those circumstances so when Warren chose my book and it came out I sent a copy to him. He wrote me back a really nice letter and said that Warren had already sent him the book—probably not true [laughs]; I don’t think that’s true. But he thanked me for it and said that he really liked it, and invited me up to Columbia, South Carolina, to see him. He was very much into Southern country music, Appalachian music, bluegrass music, and I had played guitar in a couple of little bands, so that gave us something besides poetry to talk about. He loved the guitar, but wasn’t much of a musician. He had no sense of rhythm. Intellectually he knew the guitar, but he couldn’t play much. Anyway, I took a friend of mine who was sort of a semi-professional blues musician, and we went up there and spent the whole day with him, just shooting the bull, and went out in the backyard and shot arrows—Jim was an archery dude—and all this kind of stuff. He took us out to lunch, and when it came time to order, he ordered a couple drinks. Now this sounds like a real jerky thing for him to do, but it was actually a pretty kind gesture. He meant it in a generous way. He leaned over the table at us and said, “Now you boys don’t try to keep up with me.” And he ordered two vodka martinis—not one and then another but he just went ahead and ordered two. We swapped a bunch of letters then and got to know each other. He was very kind to me. I don’t know if you’ve heard all the stories about him … well, he was supposed to have been a real asshole to a number of people. If you read Henry Hart’s book you’ll see that. A real womanizer and a very abusive kind of character to other people, but he never showed me that side of himself. He liked me for some reason; I don’t know why. So he was always very kind to me and when he would come to Atlanta he would stay at our house—this was back in the mid-’80s. I remember the first time he came I said, “Oh shit, James Dickey—he’s going to stay at my house; what am I going to do.” His wife, Maxine, had died and he’d remarried; he’d married a student of his, Deborah Dodson, and she called me on the phone before his plane landed and she said, “Now, David, don’t take Jim to a liquor store.” And I thought, “Now how am I going to tell Jim Dickey that I’m not going to stop at a liquor store?” Sure enough, he got off the plane and we got in the truck. First thing he says is, “David, let’s stop at a liquor store.” And I just sort of hemmed and hawed and didn’t know what to do, and he turned and said to me, “Debba called you, didn’t she?”

FOX: Whoa.

BOTTOMS: I said, “Well, yes, she did.” And he said, “Then here’s what we’ll do; we’ll make a bargain”—he was an alcoholic; he had to have booze—“We’ll just drink beer. We’ll stop and get beer and we won’t drink anything else,” and that was the pact we made. Whenever he came to my house we went out and bought Colt 45 malt liquor. I guess it has a little higher alcoholic content or something. And he would get a six-pack of those tall Colts and take them to bed with him. And that’s all he ever drank at my house, so he was never really drunk; it was just maintenance. And we’d get up in the morning and he’d have a Colt 45 malt liquor. But I really didn’t see him much during those last couple of years. He was sick a lot. He was really sick and he was having terrible problems with his marriage. We talked on the phone, and I talked to him maybe two days before he died. He said he’d gone back into the hospital and he said he felt like he was going to die. But I didn’t think much of it because he’d said that to me several times over those last two years, but sure enough that time he left us.

FOX: It’s kind of ironic that someone who didn’t have a feel for music liked “Dueling Banjos” …

BOTTOMS: Yeah, he got in a lot of trouble over that song, you know. He was sued.

FOX: Really?

BOTTOMS: Yeah, he always claimed to have written that song. He did not write that song; that song was written by Arthur Smith and Don Reno—Arthur Smith from North Carolina and I forget where Reno was from—he was a very famous bluegrass banjo player. And Arthur Smith sued Dickey and won. I don’t know how much money it cost him, but a lot. A whole lot of money. I think Henry Hart talks about that in his book but Dickey was, as we say in the South, “bad to exaggerate things.” And I always wondered about that—this is a revelation Hart makes in the biography. If you look at his collected poems, the ’57 to ’67 book—or maybe it was Deliverance, I can’t remember—anyway, it says on the back that he flew a hundred combat missions over Japan. Well, he didn’t. He flew 38. But my whole question is this: why would a man who had actually flown 38 combat missions need to lie and say it was a hundred? I mean 38 times flying over Japan—

FOX: That’s a lot!

BOTTOMS: Having people shoot at you—

FOX: Absolutely.

BOTTOMS: And also he always sort of pretended he was a pilot. He wasn’t a pilot. He was a radar observer. He flunked out of flight school. Not a lot of people know that. He flunked out of that but he was always sort of, “When I flew that, when I flew this.” But he was an interesting guy. He was, quite frankly, the most intelligent man I’ve ever talked with, and it made me nervous to be around him very long, because he was so smart. You’d be sitting like we’re talking here, and he’d be talking about Joe Frazier and in the next sentence he was talking about Heraclitus and the pre-Socratic philosophers, and he expected you to follow along and keep up with all his arguments, and if you didn’t, he did not suffer fools. [Fox laughs]

FOX: That can be scary.

BOTTOMS: Yeah, it was a little scary. I was always nervous around him. But he was very good to me. So that’s about all I know about James Dickey.

FOX: You were talking about how “it cost him a lot of money”—talk about poets and money. You’re not going to make any great living as a poet.

BOTTOMS: He was a wealthy guy, I think, but he also spent a lot of money, and I can remember one time at a reading he was giving—I don’t remember where it was, might have been Kennesaw College, some place I was with him; I think he’d asked me to read a poem with him or something. He had these poems that were in two voices. Anyway, we went into the men’s room, and we were standing at the urinals and he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a check and says, “Do you make five grand for readings yet?” [laughs] He was proud of that, proud of making that kind of money.

FOX: Whoa, whoa.

BOTTOMS: And I said, “No, not yet.” But he was very conscious of his status in the literary world. A few days before he died we talked on the phone and he asked me what I thought of his poems. We never really talked about poems much. We always talked about music or boxing or football. He wanted to talk about poems that day, and he asked me what I thought of his poems, first time he’d ever done that. And I said to him on the phone, “Well, Jim, you’re still the champ”—he liked those sports metaphors and so he thought about that and he liked that: “Jim, you’re still the champ.” His big rival was Robert Lowell. He and Lowell were—well, rivals. So I reminded him—I may have said this somewhere else—I reminded him of a lunch we’d had about fifteen years earlier, mid-’80s I’m guessing, with the fiction writer Peter Taylor who was a good friend of Lowell’s. I think this was over in Athens, Georgia. Taylor and Lowell had been roommates in college and they’d stayed close. Anyway, Taylor was telling a story about how jealous Robert Lowell was of other poets, terrifically jealous. Then he turned to Dickey and said, “And he was jealous of no one as much as he was jealous of you.”

FOX: Whoa.

BOTTOMS: Dickey loved that. He just beamed. He lit up like a hundred-watt bulb; he just loved the notion that Robert Lowell was jealous of him. [Fox laughs] That was sort of his personality. He had to be the best. He grew up like that … I think Roethke was a big influence on him. I remember he said that he liked Roethke’s work, and he did meet him once. They both swapped a bunch of lies, I think. Dickey wrote about this in a good little essay called “Theodore Roethke: The Greatest American Poet.” He said somewhere in there that he wasn’t disappointed that Roethke lied so much, only disappointed that he hadn’t done a better job of it. [laughs] Roethke was always playing the tough guy, you know. Claimed to have known gangsters in Chicago. Claimed to have sparred with famous prize fighters, that sort of stuff. That was back in the day when macho was the thing for a male poet—you know, all that silly stuff. But Dickey lived that.

FOX: How do you like teaching?

BOTTOMS: Teaching has been … well, sometimes I like it a lot and other times I don’t like it very much. But it’s been pretty good. This place (Georgia State University) has been pretty good. We’ve had our problems over the years and you don’t make much money. Still, I call it pretty good. I’m trying to tell my daughter this. She’s over at Emory and she’s an English major but she’s double majoring in women’s studies. She’s fascinating, really. She has—I say this totally objectively—she has the best critical mind I’ve ever seen in a human being. She’s just bright as they come, but it’s not that she’s smart—she is smart—but she just has a gift, a feel for literature, and she could have a great career in academics if she chooses to go in that direction, but she told me one time, “I don’t want to make the same mistakes you made.” [laughs]

FOX: A professor being one of them?

BOTTOMS: Yeah, I’m sure it is; she wants to find her own way. But teaching has been good. We have a good graduate program here. I usually teach two courses in the fall and one in the spring. Right now I’m teaching a grad workshop and an undergrad workshop. This spring I’ll teach a grad course on Roethke and Dickey. Both of my classes right now are dynamite. So you could hardly ask for a better job for a poet. I’ve tried to tell my daughter this—the free time you have, and also the exchange of ideas. Teaching keeps me reading and thinking. I wish I wrote more, sure, but occasionally I’ll see someone with some real talent and that makes it all worthwhile. Basically I’ve been pretty lucky. I came here in 1982 after I got my doctorate from Florida State. I applied for three jobs, there weren’t many more in the whole country. Dave Smith got one—I think it was Virginia Commonwealth—and David Wojahn got one in Arkansas, and I got this one.

FOX: Wow.

BOTTOMS: And I said to myself, “I don’t want to go to Atlanta because I don’t want to go back home,” but as it turned out this was the best job by far. So I’m grateful. And the people here and the administration have been super. So I’m just grateful for the years of being able to do this and make a decent living. I wish I were a millionaire, but I’m not, and that’s okay.

FOX: What are some of the more important things you feel you can leave your students with?

BOTTOMS: That’s a very good question and we talk about this a little bit at the graduate level because at the graduate level I try to teach these folks what I think they should be teaching other folks. And the first thing I say to people who come into my introductory class, which is a 3150, a poetry workshop, is something like this: “You know, it’s nice if you know what a dactyl is, or an anapest, or if you know what a sonnet is. That’s nice, but that’s not the most important thing. Not by a long shot. If you only learn one thing in this class, I want you to learn how to use language to get at what’s important to you in your life.” That’s what I’m about. Learn how to use language to get at what’s important to you in your life. [cell phone rings] Excuse me, this could be my daughter. It is. [Bottoms reads a text message] You know, I was giving a reading one time in New York—I forget where it was—and she called my cell right in the middle of the reading. [both laugh] And I answered the phone. I said, “Excuse me, people, this is my daughter, and I don’t know what’s going on here, so I’m going to answer the phone.” And I did. And I tell my classes this: “I don’t turn my cell phone off. I have a mother who’s 87 and she’s sick, and I have a daughter in school. And if your phone rings and it’s family, you answer it. You just go on out in the hall. You just feel free to answer it, because I’m answering mine.” But yeah, I think the most significant thing is to learn how to use language to get at what’s important to you in your life.

FOX: Yes.

BOTTOMS: And I teach a whole course on—what do I call it … the poet’s search for a soul. I believe very much in poetry as a search for significance. Warren, I think, felt the same way. The poem, of course, is a way of exploring the outer world, but as it goes out it also turns inward and looks inward. It becomes a sort of self-exploration, a search for meaning in your life, a search for consequence. So we talk a lot about that stuff. I rarely talk about any mechanics, and I’ve been criticized for that, because we have people on our faculty who—well, that’s what they do. That’s all right, that’s their thing, but I don’t do that.

FOX: You want to get at the heart of it.

BOTTOMS: That’s what I’m after. And for that reason I don’t really make writing assignments. Well, occasionally I might if a kid can’t get a grasp on what it means to be concrete, or needs some direction. Very occasionally I’ll do that, but mostly I tell people, “I don’t tell you what to write about because I want you to explore something important to you, something essential, and I don’t know what that is; I can’t give you a clue there.” I want their poems to have a sense of necessity about them, and that’s what’s missing in most American poetry these days, a sense that the poem had to be written. But sure, that’s a very good question and I wish more teachers would focus on that, on teaching poetry as a search for meaning, but it’s become kind of an embarrassment in the university to talk about such stuff. Well, also in the culture, I suppose. Adam Zagajewski has that poem called “The Soul.” The first lines goes, “We know we’re not allowed to use your name.” You know that poem?

FOX: Mhm, yeah.

BOTTOMS: It’s a good little poem. Anyway, so that’s where I’m coming from—poetry as a search for significance, for consequence in our lives.

FOX: Talk about music. Do you still play?

BOTTOMS: I do. But I don’t play guitar anymore. I gave that up, because mostly what I play is bluegrass, and I gave up guitar because so many people were playing that and I wasn’t getting any better. So about a dozen years ago I started trying to learn how to play mandolin. And I got to a stage I call “not bad.” We play every Tuesday in a little town called Marietta, and I’ll come home and my wife will say, “How was it?” And I’ll say, “It was okay; all the big boys were there,” meaning the really good musicians. One guy who plays with us was fiddle champion of West Virginia.

FOX: Wow.

BOTTOMS: But there are usually a handful of some really top notch semi-professional pickers. And I’ve sort of gotten to a place where I can play along with them and nobody’ll chase me off. But now I’m getting arthritis in my hand really bad. So I tape it up like an athlete. I get some of that Olympic tape, that stretch tape, and I wrap it all up, and it does help some, but I still can’t do what I want to. But I love it. They tease me about it, but I still love the music. I don’t know, music is a strange thing. But I also love serious music—not that that isn’t serious—but I mean I also love classical music, and I’m a big fan of vocal music.

FOX: I think really good music is like a really good poem, it kind of hits you on an emotional …

BOTTOMS: It hits you, it really does, at sort of a pre-verbal level. I really love the cello. My daughter studied cello for years. She’s given it up. She never practiced.

FOX: [laughs] Well, I didn’t practice piano either, so …

BOTTOMS: She didn’t practice piano, either. [all laugh] My wife has a piano degree.

FOX: Whoa.

BOTTOMS: Yeah, she always wanted to be a pianist, but she came from Montana and came from a very poor family that couldn’t afford to give lessons to all four kids—they could only afford to give the oldest girl piano lessons. So when Kelly went to college she could take piano lessons for free, so she did. Then she won a scholarship in France to study for a year. She didn’t start playing piano until she was eighteen years old. She’s very talented, though, and she has a great feel for the piano.

FOX: Wow.

BOTTOMS: But at eighteen, I guess, it’s a little late to become a performer. So then she messed around for a while and went to law school. Dynamite lawyer, but she never really liked the law very much.

FOX: Yeah. Well, I went to law school—I think law school teaches you how to think, analyze and think. It’s very good for that.

BOTTOMS: All the smart people go to law school.

FOX: I really enjoyed your poem “Under the Vulture-Tree.” When Daveen and I were in Africa, we came across a giraffe that had been dead I’d say two days and three lions. And the vultures were in the trees, and it was at the point where the lions had eaten so much they were sleeping … the vultures come close and the lions wake up and chase them away and go back to sleep and then the vultures—it was like a dance.

BOTTOMS: Wow. Yeah. Sure, I still like that old poem. I don’t like a lot of those early poems, but I like that poem a good deal. I usually read that one at readings. That’s a Florida poem. After my first book came out I went back to grad school in Tallahassee. They were very good to me down there and paid my way through that place. Bill Sessions, who was a professor here, had actually told me, “You go down there and get a PhD; we’ll have a job waiting on you when you come back here.” I said, “Well, that’s cool.” I don’t know if you know that area, but there are a lot of little rivers down there, and it’s a very beautiful place. It’s about as close to jungle as you can get in Florida, unless you go to the Everglades. Back in the early forties, two of those old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies were filmed on a little river called the Wakulla, along with a movie called Creature From the Black Lagoon. And I used to fish that river all the time. Never caught anything though.

[Bottoms’ cell phone rings again]

FOX: If you want to talk to your daughter, go ahead.

BOTTOMS: No, she doesn’t talk on the telephone. She texts. Everything’s cool.

FOX: Oh, okay.

BOTTOMS: So I was out there—you may have read this story somewhere, I don’t know—in a little boat on the Wakulla. I had a little aluminum jon boat and I was out there one morning very early and the jungle just sort of opened up in the middle of a bend, and there was just this bare place and in the center of it this huge black tree. It looked like someone had taken a giant piece of black construction paper and snipped out the silhouette of an oak tree and just sort of pasted it there. Anyway, it gave me a weird feeling, and I cut the motor and drifted up under it, and the closer I got, the stranger I felt because I could see that this was some kind of odd fruit tree. It was all speckled with little pink fruit, and then I got right up under it and I saw that these things weren’t fruit at all, but heads. They were the heads of vultures. I’d come on a buzzard roost, the first one I’d ever seen. These birds, these vultures, were packed into that tree shoulder to shoulder so tight you could hardly see the light through the tree—seriously. Years later I remembered that. It must have been ten years later at least. I was reading something about vultures in another culture, how they’re revered in Asia or something, I don’t remember. And I recalled that tree on the Wakulla, and I said to myself, “Well, here you got these vultures and you got the river and the tree. If you can’t make a poem out of that, you better just quit.” [Fox and Daveen laugh] And it came to me that these birds were sort of like strange angels, then a line came: “With mercy enough to consume us all.” That was the sort of play, the pun, the device I needed, and after that, the poem was easy. So I wrote the poem out and sent it to Peter Davison at The Atlantic, and he wrote back that he thought it was a super poem but the first stanza stank. He wanted to cut the first stanza. So I said, “Cut it off!” [Fox laughs] And the first stanza went. I don’t even have a record of what that stanza was. But that’s the story of how that poem came to be. But thank you, I’m glad you like that poem. I still like it too.

FOX: I find at Rattle, sometimes we get a really good poem but it goes on too long—cut off the last two stanzas and it’s fine.

BOTTOMS: Sure. That’s what I tell my students. If an editor wants to do that, fine, go ahead, it’s no problem. Then if you print it again, print it your way. But Davison was right about that poem.

FOX: So how did you get to be Poet Laureate of Georgia?

BOTTOMS: I was standing in the kitchen one day [all laugh] and the phone rang—this was back in 2000—and this familiar voice that I couldn’t quite place said, “Hello, is this David Bottoms?” and I said, “Yes it is.” “This is Governor Roy Barnes.”

FOX: Whoa.

BOTTOMS: And I said, “Hello, Governor.” And the next thing he said was, “Would you like to be Poet Laureate of Georgia?” And I said, “Well, I haven’t thought much about it, but yeah, I guess so … does it cost anything?” [Fox laughs] And he was very nice. It was a good trip, lasted about twelve years. It was only supposed to last his term but the next governor just let it slide and then the next governor let it slide a little bit more. And I didn’t have to do any really heavy lifting. Well, I did have to write a book one time, or at least write the text to a book of photographs about Georgia, which I didn’t want to do, but I was told the governor was mad and that I should do it.

FOX: Photographs?

BOTTOMS: The Chamber of Commerce had put together a big book of Georgia photographs and had a professional photographer do it all. And they were nice enough, but they were just about what you’d expect from a Chamber of Commerce, and they’d written a text over there to go with it, and University of Georgia Press was going to publish it. Well, the press got the whole thing, the manuscript and the text, and they said they wouldn’t do the text. And so Jamil Zainaldin, who was president of the Humanities Council, suggested that I do it, and he approached me about it. I said I didn’t want to do it, and I turned down the request twice. Then I got a call from him one morning, the governor was irate, and would I please … ? So I said, “Okay.” You know, I didn’t want to make anybody mad; I was very grateful to them both. So I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” It took six months to finish because I had to travel all around Georgia and take pictures and stuff like that, but it was okay. I called the book Oglethorpe’s Dream. And then Governor Barnes gets defeated the next election and new governor tries to get rid of all the copies because it has Barnes’ photo on the jacket flap. But it was all okay, and it led to other good things. And I do think that it called a little attention, at least in this immediate area, to poetry, because I became involved with the Humanities Council, and Jamil Zainaldin, the president, has done a lot for literature in Georgia. It’s a very good organization, the Georgia Humanities Council.

FOX: Do you do many readings?

BOTTOMS: I’m doing more this year than I have in a while. There was a time, like 200 years ago, when I did a lot every year. Then, I guess, the time came when I’d gone to just about every place anybody was willing to have me. Just like Warren said one time, “You better go when they ask you, because they might not want you later.” This year I’ll do around ten, I guess. Mostly in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, though I do go to New York in the spring. But there’ve been years recently when I did only one or two.

FOX: Oh, really?

BOTTOMS: Oh sure, one or two. But more since this new book has come out; I don’t know why. Like I said, I’ve been about everywhere anybody wants to have me. I guess I’ve read in just about every part of the country except the west coast.

FOX: Oh, really? Well, we’ll talk to some people, see if we can … Do you find that some of the poems you’ve written that you really love, the public doesn’t like as much, and some things …

BOTTOMS: Oh, sure. Of course. And some of the poems that you really like and you think are really good poems just don’t read well. There are poems, especially in that book Waltzing Through the Endtime where the poems are longer, that are better if you just sit in a chair and read them and mull them over, I think. So I find when I’m doing a public reading, I’m trying to read something that is going to appeal to people, something short that has strong imagery in it, and something that people can follow. I can’t really … quite frankly, I can’t bear poetry readings. I hate to sit through a poetry reading.

FOX: Yes?

BOTTOMS: I can’t follow it! Are you the same way?

FOX: Absolutely.

BOTTOMS: I can’t bear it. So I just try not to go to them. And you hope people are better when you’re giving one [laughs], but I’m just not a good audience at a poetry reading. Music’s a different thing though. I can sit and listen to music all day. But my mind wanders off at a reading.

FOX: When you look over your career, your life, are you happy or disappointed?

Bottoms: That’s a really good question, but I have to take a quick bathroom break before I answer it.

FOX: All right we’ll just pause …

[…]

FOX: While you were gone I was looking at “My Daughter Works the Heavy Bag.”

BOTTOMS: Oh, yeah, I like that poem too. I usually do that one at readings too. Yeah, I wish I had a picture to show you but I don’t. She took karate lessons. My wife, Kelly, has a friend who emigrated from Serbia and her husband is a martial artist. Wow, really, I mean this guy is like a 300th degree black belt.

FOX: Ooh.

BOTTOMS: He was a professional bodyguard for one of the big political guys over there. And he was also on some Olympic team, so when he got over here he started a karate studio. And so in order to help them out my wife said that we should let our daughter take karate lessons, which was cool, you know. She was around ten years old. And so I said, “Fine.” So I’m over there watching one day. She’s in a class with about twelve kids and she’s the only girl in the class. Well, all the boys hate this, they just hate it, because she’s really very good. She’s had five years of ballet and she’s very agile. Of course, she’s also a family friend and she’s a girl, so she’s probably getting a little extra attention. They would go through this routine where they had individual lessons. A kid would come up for about five minutes and hit this big punching bag while the instructor would bark out instructions, “Jab, kick, jab.” So she’s doing that and I’m watching all the boys in the back of the room who are watching her. About halfway through her routine they start to giggle and jeer, but she’s not paying any attention; she’s just going on with her own business. Then that line came to me, about … I don’t remember how it goes exactly, something about having learned the first lesson of self-defense … oh yeah, in the last stanza she’s glaring at the bag, not at the boys—“alone, in herself,/ in her own time, to her own rhythm, honing her blocks/ and feints, her solitary dance,/ having mastered already the first move of self-defense.” I like that.

FOX: Absolutely. To me that captures the essence of what she’s doing.

BOTTOMS: Yeah, she’s just inside herself there, paying absolutely no attention to what else is going on in the world.

FOX: I think your poems tend to do that; they tend to go to the essence.

BOTTOMS: Well, you’re very kind. I appreciate that. That’s what you hope for, but I could show you a drawer full of things that just didn’t get to the essence. [laughs] But you know, that’s one thing about … I was telling somebody just the other day, I think you can publish too much. Don’t you feel that way?

FOX: Yes.

BOTTOMS: My wife’s reading Joyce Carol Oates and God bless her, who could read everything she’s written? She’s a great writer, but who could read everything?

FOX: Well, when I write, I’m always very critical and I’m always comparing it with published work. Well, you’ve published your best stuff, you’ve worked on it, you’ve edited it, you’ve mulled it over, and a writer shouldn’t worry about the first draft.

BOTTOMS: No, you’re absolutely right. I don’t know how long it took me to write that last book—it’s a very thin little book—but probably five years at least. And since it was published, close to a year ago, I’ve probably written three good poems. I was talking about this last year at John Hopkins with Dave Smith. Some kid asked me if I write every day, and I said, “Well, no. I just write when an idea comes.” And Dave got all upset. He said, “Oh, no, a writer has to write every day. You have to practice your licks, like a musician.” I said, “Well, being a poet is not really like being a musician. At least not for me.” I can’t write poems every day, or even very often. I have to wait for the idea, that “come hither” as Seamus Heaney puts it. Now writing fiction is different. I published two novels about 300 years ago, and writing fiction is completely different. You can spend a couple of weeks plotting out a novel, and you’ve got something to work on for years. Nine to five, every day.

FOX: Yes, yes.

BOTTOMS: Poems are not like that. Every poem is a different idea. And where do those ideas come from, and how do you get them? You have to make yourself available to the world and hope that they hit you. We don’t go around inventing ideas; we wait for them to strike us. And so I say to my classes, “I don’t beat myself up trying to write poems anymore. When they happen I’m grateful for them, but I don’t beat myself up trying to write every day.”

FOX: I heard recently that Stephen King, the novelist, writes every day, ten thousand words.

BOTTOMS: I don’t doubt it. Dickey used to keep three or four typewriters around in different places of his house, with different projects on each one, and when he would burn out on, say, typewriter “A,” he would get up, fix himself something to eat or drink, wander around, mess with the guitar or something for a little while, then go over to typewriter “B” and sit down. His key was “Never finish anything.” Always leave something for the next day. So he had worked out psychologically a little program for himself. But I don’t know, I’m sort of at a stage in my life where publishing is not as important to me as it once was. I’m not in any hurry to just turn something out. It just doesn’t mean the same thing.

FOX: Well, talk about that—I asked you, when you look back, what are you happy about, what … ?

BOTTOMS: Well, as I said, I just got through looking back, because I’m going down to FSU for this alumni thing. I’m supposed to be a distinguished alumnus in writing or something like that, and so they asked me to put together these pictures for some kind of video. Well, I didn’t think I had very many, because I don’t take a lot of photographs, but I had more than I thought. So I’m looking back over all of this stuff, and it hits me that I published my first poem in 1973. You know how long [ago] that is? I can’t even figure that up! In 1973 I published my first two poems at about the same time, one in a little journal called The Bastian Review and another in a little magazine called Wind, neither of them are around any longer. Over the years, though, I’ve been very fortunate, very fortunate. I’ve cranked out a few poems some people were willing to read. And I’ve been fortunate to find a place at Copper Canyon Press, an extremely fine and caring publisher.

FOX: Well, I think in life our job is to find our niche and occupy it.

BOTTOMS: Well said, yes. Find it and occupy it. And contribute in some way.

FOX: Absolutely.

BOTTOMS­­: I figure if you can get to my age, maybe our age, and say you’ve contributed something, you’ve done all right. That’s about the most you can hope for. Nothing’s going to last, but if you’ve contributed during your time, that’s about all you can hope for.

FOX: Absolutely. Thank you.

from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
Tribute to Southern Poets

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August 24, 2013

A CONVERSATION WITH TIMOTHY STEELE

Studio City, California, March 3rd, 2012

Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele is the author of four collections of poems: Uncertainties and Rest (1979),Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (1986), The Color Wheel (1994), and Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). The first two were reprinted in 1995 as a joint volume, Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986. He has also published two books of scholarship and literary criticism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (1990) and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (1999); and he has edited The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997). Steele’s honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Literary Award for Poetry, a California Arts Council Grant, a Commonwealth Club Medal for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1948, he has lived in Los Angeles since 1977. He is an emeritus professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, where he taught from 1987 to 2012.

FOX: Well, I was reading, based on your poem, “Beethoven’s Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl”—apparently at the premiere in 1824, Beethoven insisted on co-conducting, and he was deaf, so he was off. And when it was over, Beethoven was still conducting. So when it ended somebody had to turn him to the audience to accept the accolades because the performance was over.

STEELE: Yeah. You may know this, but according to something I read, they realized—I think in 1814—when there was a revival of Fidelio and Beethoven was initially slated to conduct, that it would be a complete catastrophe. Nobody could follow him. Beethoven’s friend and fellow composer Michael Umlauf had to do the actual conducting, as he did later at the premiere of the Ninth Symphony. Everyone treated Beethoven like the master he was, but, as you say, he evidently stood off to the conductor’s side, off to Umlauf’s side, beating time and following the score.

FOX: The conductor told the orchestra, “Don’t pay any attention to him!” [both laugh] Okay, well, I’m here on March 3rd, 2012, with Timothy Steele. Your poem “Beethoven’s Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl” caught my eye. Did you write that when you were right there, or afterwards, or did you just make the whole thing up?

STEELE: No, I wrote it, if memory serves, the day after. I was newly arrived in Los Angeles and a friend gave me a ticket to the Hollywood Bowl, to the choral symphony, and I thought, “How wonderful; this will be a wonderful initiation to Los Angeles.” And I had no idea that the Hollywood Bowl is roughly the size of Yellowstone Park [Fox laughs], and I was seated way toward the back, and as the epigram indi-cates, it wasn’t a very satisfactory experience.

FOX: I totally agree. But since that’s about music, and you’re very big on rhythm and meter, talk about the relationship between music and poetry.

STEELE: Well, both, of course, involve rhythm, and organize rhythm. There are obvious differences between the two, but there’s something to the old Greek view that they are very much sister arts. And my own interest in metrical poetry was in part influenced by growing up and loving music, all kinds of music, like Beethoven and Mozart, but also the Beatles and Bob Dylan and things of that nature. So clearly rhythm and the organization of rhythm are essential to both poetry and music, and I think if you have a love for one, it’s likely that you might develop a love for the other.

FOX: Yes, I would agree. How do your students react to emphasis on meter and rhythm, which is not, I would imagine, the modern concept?

STEELE: They’re curious about it. Most of the courses I teach at Cal State are literature courses. For instance, at the moment I’m teaching a course on New England poets that focuses on Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur, so I do talk about rhythm and meter. And the students do seem interested in it. It takes them a while to hear it, but they’re certainly receptive to it. Maybe they’re just being nice to me, but a number of students have come up, who have had my classes in earlier years, and said, “Gee, the stuff you taught me about meter and versification has helped me in my course in Chaucer or Milton or Shakespeare.” So it’s knowledge that is easily portable and transferrable to other contexts, and they seem to appreciate that.

FOX: Have students changed over the years, since you’ve been teaching?

STEELE: That’s a good question. The only change—and this is, I fear, a very predictable answer—the only great change that I’ve noticed is that in the last ten to fifteen years they have become more and more connected with the personal computer, with the World Wide Web, and tend to read online texts rather than print texts. I was unnerved recently when I heard one of my students use the phrase “back in the print era.” [Fox laughs] And as a teacher, I’ve had to be very nuanced in my own response to the new technology. On the one hand, I myself use it. One course I teach regularly is the Classical and Medieval Tradition, and when we’re discussing, for instance, Plato’s dialogues about the trial of Socrates, I go to Google Art Project, where you can take virtual tours of various museums in the world, and can bring up, and project on a screen in the front of the classroom, a nice online reproduction of Jacques Louis David’s Death of Socratesat the Met in New York City. Or if we’re reading Homer’s Iliad or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we can see Ruben’s Judgment of Paris in the National Gallery in London or Caravaggio’s Bacchus in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Also, I now say on the syllabus, under the list of required texts, that if you want to get these books as e-books and bring e-readers to class, that’s fine. On the other hand, I’ve tried to stay firm about saying that students are not to bring personal computers to class. The key prerequisite of effective teaching is engaging and holding the students’ attention, and I found very early that when they come in and open up their computers, there’s a barrier between you and them—the immediate physical barrier of that screen. Also, inevitably in a large class someone is playing a game or looking at something else unrelated to the class. You’ll see a fellow toward the rear of the classroom, peering at his computer screen, and then the guys to his left and right are leaning over to look, too. [Fox laughs]

FOX: Well, I used to amuse myself in high school by writing poetry in class because I was bored. Now I guess it’s playing games on the computer.

STEELE: Yeah, yeah. One thing one does have to do, or I feel I try to do in teaching, is make sure—particularly for a class that is, say, two hours long—that it’s not text-based the entire way through, that we look at some works of art, or, if we’re doing Apollo and Daphne, hear Handel’s cantata about the myth, or Henry Purcell’s opera about Dido and Aeneas.

FOX: So if that’s true, would you decry the end of the age of print?

STEELE: I would myself feel very sad, but I don’t know if this is just a personal sadness from someone who grew up with books. And growing up in a cold climate, growing up in Burlington, Vermont, what a comfort books were, just the physical objects; what a pleasure it was to hold them and to read them and to be able to retreat to one’s room in the early evening and be with Charles Dickens or The Wind in the Willows. So I would miss it, but I don’t know if I could universalize that experience. There may be all sorts of gifted and talented young people who will never feel remotely what I feel for the book, and that may not necessarily be their loss at all.

FOX: Well, to me, it might be similar to 1480. Before Gutenberg things were done orally and people memorized the Iliad and the Odyssey line for line.

STEELE: Yeah, maybe so. The Internet and the Web are partly just exten-sions of the long and ongoing development of telecommunications. And some of the things that are said today about computers, you can go back to Clarence Day’s Life with Father and his comments about the telephone and how that completely changed social life. But at the same time, so far as I can judge, this particular recent phase involving personal computers and the Web really is game-changing. As you say, it’s like Gutenberg’s revolution. I wish I could be around a hundred years from now to see how it plays out.

FOX: I’m with you. Someone famous, I forget who, the mayor of New York, I think, when confronted with the telephone for the first time, said, “This is a wonderful invention. I predict that eventually every city will have one.”

STEELE: [laughs] That’s great.

FOX: So, you can’t tell.

STEELE: You can’t, yeah.

FOX: In terms of writing poetry with rhyme and meter, is that more difficult than writing free verse?

STEELE: Well, it’s hard to say. On the one hand, at least as the concept of non-metrical forms was articulated by Baudelaire in the little preface he did to his Little Poems in Prose, and in certain of the early statements about free verse by Pound and others, there’s nothing more difficult than writing a poem in free verse. You’re trying to write something without meter that nevertheless suggests or achieves the rhythmical organization and focus of a metrical poem. On the other hand, writing toward the end of the twentieth century in an interview I believe withAntaeus magazine, Stanley Kunitz did say the almost total triumph free verse over meter had made poetry easier to write and harder to remember. And because of the widespread adoption of free verse in the twentieth century, it probably became, practically speaking, easier than metered verse, though this doesn’t diminish the theoretical possibilities of the medium. To develop a facility with meter—not just to write in a “rimey-dimey” way, to use Robert Frost’s term—requires time and patience and practice, and in that sense it is a challenge, though it has all sorts of compensatory pleasures, too.

FOX: What are the pleasures?

STEELE: One is the sense of shaping an experience in a way that indi-vidually satisfies you. Again, I don’t mean to universalize from my experience. Other people may find other ways of doing this. Also, in writing in meter, I find myself exploring ideas and images from different angles and learning more about them than I probably would otherwise, learning things I didn’t know, or didn’t know I knew. When you’re trying to meet the exigency of ten syllables per line or secure a rhyme, you’re obliged to try different kinds of phrasings to see what fits best, to see what is most interesting rhythmically and truest in meaning and yet suits the meter. And so you often find the form, the metrical form, disturbing or unsettling your subconscious in various ways and bringing up different images and ideas from the depths. That can be a lot of fun, and it sometimes is very illuminating, too. I can give you an example. Very early on, I was coming towards the end of a poem about friendship. This was when I was trying, in real life, to make sense of a relationship. And I needed an iambic tetrameter that rhymed on a short “e” and a “d,” and I ended up coming up with a line—it just sort of came to me: “Tact is at once acquired and shed.” And I realized, yeah, that’s what friendship is about. You have to be tactful all the time but tact isn’t something that’s constant. It modulates as you get to know a person better. It would be silly to stand on ceremony with a good friend in a way that you might, say, with someone you’ve just met, yet at the same time you’ve got to always remember that they’re their own person, and if you barge ahead even with the very closest friend, you can hurt them badly if you’re not careful. But somehow, dummkopf that I am, I hadn’t come to that revelation on my own. It was the metrical form that helped me come to it.

FOX: It seems to me that friendship is a progression from tact to truth. Tact, I guess, is in part withholding things and in part putting it in a friendly way. Is that something you would agree with?

STEELE: Well, yes. I think tact, for me, is more just consideration for the other person. It involves always remembering that the other person really is “other.” I think most of us are, to some extent, solipsists, and that’s because we’re in our own minds so much. It’s really hard to imagine being in another person’s shoes, let alone in another person’s mind. And it’s impossible, too, to entirely know another person’s history or psychic history, even with people you’re closest to, even your spouse. For instance, in my case, I didn’t know my wife for the first 24, 25 years of her life, and even though over time I’ve learned about those years, I just can’t know completely what it felt to her to have her expe-riences—some of them traumatic; her parents divorced when she was only five or six. And so tact is partly just being considerate and partly remembering that there are limits to intimacy—that you can never fully understand anyone else and that it’s probably right or necessary that everybody should be allowed a little distance or privacy from the rest of humanity.

FOX: True. What role, if any, does your wife play in your writing?

STEELE: She’s a wonderfully intelligent person. I’m in awe of her unfailing resourcefulness and imagination, of her ability to meet any and all problems that come up—and of her sympathy for other people. She has a gift for bringing together people who might like and help each other and who might collaborate happily and successfully. She’s a rare books librarian by training, and now she’s Director for Collections Strategy for the New York Public Library system. It is to her that I first show my poems. I count on her to tell me if something’s working or not. Quite often she’ll zero in on the very line or words I’m concerned about myself. I don’t usually share poems with others until I believe the poems are finished, so Vicki’s early readings are important to me.

FOX: Do you ever censor yourself for fear of revealing too much or talking about someone else in a way they might not like?

STEELE: The only times I’ve done that, that I’ve been aware of doing it, is writing at times about my family’s past. I have a great family and a remarkable mother—she’s 87 and still going strong and living on a farm in Vermont. She was a nurse and later helped develop—and still volunteers at—one of the main animal shelters in northeastern Vermont—the Pope Memorial Frontier Animal Shelter. She read my brother, sister and me poems when we were little, and my brother and sister and I are very close. My late father was a bright, good-natured fellow, who taught political science for some years at the University of Vermont and who loved us children very much. But my parents divorced when we were growing up. I was in junior high school, and my brother and sister were a little younger. And a couple of times I’ve written things about that situation and then thought, “Wait, there are four other people involved here.” I worried I was being presumptuous. Did I really know what everyone was thinking or how they were affected by things? And I’ve sort of backed off and said, “Maybe I should set this aside.”

FOX: Does the poem you’re writing ever say to you, “Don’t wanna rhyme”? Just “don’t wanna rhyme”?

STEELE: Yeah, it does. Certainly, some kinds of narrative poems do, though there I go into blank verse; I tend, as you know, to write poetry in meter pretty much all the time. I did, I should say, as a younger poet, write in all sorts of forms, and in the first couple of books, there are a couple of free verse poems and some poems in syllabics. But—I was thinking of this this morning—it seemed to me at a certain point that it might be useful to just do meter because so few other people of my generation were doing it.

FOX: That’s true.

STEELE: So it might be useful to just do that.

FOX: How does the poetry world respond to your writing and your style?

STEELE: It’s been mixed. I think responses to one’s work are, to use John Updike’s wonderful phrase, “inexorably mixed.” You’re always going to get some good response, some favorable response, and some unfavorable response. There have been, I think, at times, certain responses that have been dogmatic, in terms of being against the metrical element in my poetry. Some people just feel that this is some-thing old-fashioned, that one shouldn’t do it. And one canard, as you may know, that’s circulated against metered verse—and is terribly misleading, I think—is that there’s something socially or politically conservative about metered poetry.

FOX: I wouldn’t think so.

STEELE: No, particularly when you think about some of the great pioneers of free verse like Pound and T.S. Eliot and Percy Wyndham Lewis and even D. H. Lawrence. They were quite conservative—and in the case of Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Mussolini-Hitler conservative.

FOX: At Rattle, we get a number of rhymed poems, most of which are awful. Just awful. Although, to my surprise, we took a … nineteen-page rhymed poem?

GREEN: Several—I don’t know which one you’re talking about. The sonnet sequence from Patricia Smith? Or Tony Barnstone’s crime noir? Both of those are about fifteen pages. Also Don Williams’ “Wolf.”

FOX: Well, it seems to me that it’s a more difficult skill to master, and not make it singsong, or …

STEELE: Yeah, absolutely. And the trick is—I think Frost says some-where, maybe in a letter to his friend John Bartlett—you need for the verse to break the singsong, to break the doggerel, but not break with it or away from it. You want to maintain the meter, the general metrical pattern, but you also want to modulate it internally in particular and different ways so that it has life. The trick of writing metered verse is that you have on the one hand this analytic abstraction, this meter, and on the other hand you have the living rhythms of actual speech. And you want them to harmonize so that the living rhythms of speech bring the meter, the analytic abstraction, to life, while, at the same time, the analytic abstraction, the meter, gives the fluid natural speech a memo-rable shape and form. You want to get those things working together.

FOX: Do you ever feel that you sacrifice a little accuracy and the exact right word because you have to go for the rhyme?

STEELE: I don’t feel that. Usually in my case I feel, as I indicated earlier, that the form helps me to get to le mot juste. When I feel that the form and what I want to express are at loggerheads, I usually step back and try a different approach—say, try to write in a different meter, or set the poem aside for a while. I feel if I’m patient enough I will be able to find just the right word within the form, but I need to be patient. When expression and form aren’t harmonizing, I’ve often found that it’s not so much a technical problem, it’s that I haven’t intellectually, emotion-ally, come to grips with the subject as fully or accurately as I could have.

FOX: Have you used a thesaurus to find the right word?

STEELE: No, I haven’t, and, perhaps more to the point, I tend to avoid also rhyming dictionaries. I do sometimes go through, when I need a rhyme for, I don’t know what … say, “floor” … I go through, “bore, door, galore …” But I try to keep as close as I can to the process and to testing sounds and to making sure the sounds are suggestions from my ear rather than from an outside source. Because it’s your poem that you’re writing, the more you can keep it in your idiom, I think the better off you generally are. If you start to graft outside things on, it tends not to work.

FOX: What’s the normal life of a poem that you write? In other words, do you sit down one morning, write the poem and it’s done, or do you sit and write and put it aside—how does it work?

STEELE: When I was younger sometimes poems would come to me at a sitting. There’s one from my first book with, I fear, a rather pretentious title, “Profils Perdus,” that came to me in about twenty minutes. I’d been thinking about the theme of the poem for some time, but the actual writing came quickly. And there were several other poems early on that were written that way. Now I tend to write slowly, stanza by stanza. Sometimes I’ll write a poem continuously over a week or so, getting up early in the morning—I tend to be a morning person in terms of writing. And I’ll write for an hour or two each morning for a week or two and then have the poem. But other times, and particularly for longer poems, I may write over it a long period of time, write part of it and set it aside, or write it and then decide there’s something that’s not very good and try to write it again from another angle—sort of knock it apart and put it back together in a different way.

FOX: Do you write very many poems that after a while you decide, “This isn’t particularly good and I don’t know how to fix it and I’ll just call in something else”?

STEELE: Yeah, yeah, that certainly happens. I think that probably happens to all of us. It’s a sad moment [both laugh] to realize that. But there are moments, some of the most disheartening moments as a writer, when you’re too close to something to realize it isn’t very good, and then one day the scales fall from your eyes. [both laugh]

FOX: Well, I think less experienced writers—we read the finished product, we read the poems that you’ve worked on, that you liked the best, that you’re willing to put in a book, and we think that, you know, when I write a poem it’s going to be that good, first draft, which is not possible generally.

STEELE: Yeah, it’s not. I think in this regard sometimes studying a favorite poet is fun and beneficial. You learn, for instance, that Thomas Hardy—he seemed to me, at least as a student, a very natural, musical, free-flowing, inventive poet—worked incredibly hard on his poems. Even after he published them, from one volume of Collected Poems to another, he would keep revising. And he made them better; with each revision they did get better, and they were good to begin with. There are other cases—I don’t know if it’s in Jon Stallworthy’s biography, but it’s one of the most heartfelt poems I ever encountered—it may have been in a Louis Untermeyer anthology when I was in high school—I remember being struck by Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for the Doomed Youth.” The poem seems like a pure, spontaneous outpouring of grief for the slaughter of all the young men in the trenches in World War I. But then you look at the drafts—and the poem went through multiple drafts—and you see how much Owen changed the poem in the course of writing it. The general sonnet form is suggested from the beginning, though the poem is mostly unrhymed in the early going. And then partly with the encouragement and suggestions of his friend and fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, he changes the wording and the images from draft to draft, improving things bit by bit, until the great poem we have emerges.

FOX: How important is the title to you?

STEELE: The title is very important because the title is a free line; it doesn’t have to rhyme or be metrical. [both laugh] Though there are fine poems that don’t have titles, I think a good title really arrests one. Not to go off on a tangent here, but I’m not sure how long I would’ve hung in with Wallace Stevens if it hadn’t been for his wonderful titles: “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—I had no idea what the poems were about, but I loved the titles. [Fox laughs]

FOX: That’s a good point. What do you enjoy most about being a poet?

STEELE: I suppose writing. That might seem a redundant or obvious answer, but I enjoy writing. I enjoy the process of trying to give some-thing that has arrested me, or something that I love, stability and, I hope, lasting shape. Much of what I write about is written out of a desire to preserve something that seems important, an idea or an image or an experience.

FOX: So, growing up in New England, how did you end up in Los Angeles?

STEELE: Well, I went to elementary school and high school in Burlington, Vermont, but there was a friend of my mom and dad’s in Middlebury, a fellow named Walter Bogart, who taught in the Political Science Department at Middlebury College. One afternoon while my mother and I were visiting him—this was sometime when I was in high school—he asked, “Where are you going to college?” And I said I didn’t know, and Walter had taught for a time at Stanford, and thought highly of the school, and recommended it. I remember he said very seriously, “You know, you should get out of New England for a while.” He wasn’t putting New England down, but he thought that the region could be a little insular. I already knew about Stanford since my mother, brother, sister, and I had visited Palo Alto during a cross-country camping trip in the summer of 1964. So I ended up going there. Then between my junior and senior year, my mother remarried a wonderful fellow, a biochemist, and they went down to Cali, Colombia, where he taught at the medical school at the state university. He was on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, I think, and they stayed there for about seven years. My brother, sister, and I were glad for our mother. She had guided us as a single working parent through our early years and off to college, and she deserved a chance for personal happiness and new experiences for herself. However, during that period, when she and her husband were in South America, and when the family center had been displaced out of Vermont, California sort of became my home. I started putting down roots out here. My friends were increasingly out here. Then when I came to Los Angeles in 1977, I met my wife-to-be, Vicki, and she’s an Angelino, so I ended up staying here.

FOX: Does she have to spend much time in New York?

STEELE: It’s a high-level position she has at the New York Public Library, and she’s living there. But she comes home as often as possible, and I go to New York. We’re in touch by phone and email every day. We’ve been happily married for more than 30 years, so we’ve been able to manage the situation pretty well, though I miss her when we’re apart.

FOX: What part of your education, formal or not formal, do you feel is the most important to you in your life?

STEELE: Well, I think the early education. Poetry has become what’s most important to me in my life other than my family and friends. I think a big reason for this was encountering—and I didn’t know this at the time—encountering good literature, good poetry, at an early age. In this sense, probably the seminal experience was being read to by my mother as a little boy—Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes, Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat, things of this nature. And being fortunate—again, I didn’t appreciate this at the time—in being exposed in elementary school to the poetry of Frost, who was at that time still living down Route 7 from Burlington in Ripton. And every summer the University of Vermont in Burlington had an excellent Shakespeare Festival. Those early experiences were the formative ones.

FOX: Did you ever meet Frost or see him in person?

STEELE: I did not. I’ve met friends of his and his granddaughter, Lesley, but I was too young and too naïve to think of that at the time. I have some dim memory that he gave a reading when I was in sixth or seventh grade at Ira Allen Chapel, up on the hill overlooking Burlington, at the University of Vermont, and I have a vague memory that my mother said something to the effect of, “Well, we’ve gone up and heard Harry Belafonte there and Pete Seeger there, would you like to go hear Robert Frost?” But I think my friends and I were doing something then. I don’t know, but if this opportunity really occurred, if this really happened—memory is the mother of mythology, as J. V Cunningham says—I blew it.

FOX: How many readings do you do in a normal year?

STEELE: Maybe five or six. I read last Sunday at the public library out in Claremont and there’s a convention of critics and literary scholars, oddly enough, also out at Claremont/Pomona this coming week, and I’ll be reading there on Friday evening with Pete Fairchild and Bob Mezey. And I’ll do a reading at a conference in Philadelphia in June.

FOX: What do you enjoy most about readings?

STEELE: I most enjoy reading new work and finding out how it sounds. I try to read poems aloud as I’m writing them. I don’t want to end up writing poems that are rhetorically impeded or clotted; I want to write poems that I can speak normally and comfortably, and to try to do that before an audience is a good test.

FOX: What have you written that’s given you the biggest surprise?

STEELE: That’s a good question. There are so many surprises and so many things that I would never have anticipated writing. Sometimes when I write—I don’t know if this is a case of being surprised—I’ll say, “Is there a kind of poem that people aren’t writing that I could write?” I have a great colleague and friend at Cal State, Ruben Quintero, and he asked me to write an essay for an anthology of essays he was doing on satire—he asked me to cover twentieth century verse satire—and writing the essay, I thought, “You know, poets in my generation have written lots of poems that address political issues, but there’s not been much political poetry of the Jonathan Swift, John Dryden sort—not much poetry that is political in the extra-personal sense.” And I ended up writing a poem about something that I felt strongly about—that many of us feel strongly about—this idea that in modern warfare collat-eral damage is okay or inevitable. But I tried to remove myself and my feelings from the poem in hopes that a more comprehensive voice of history would speak through me. I had in the back of my mind that blood-curdling book on “total war” by Erich von Ludendorff. As you know, von Ludendorff had been one of the leading German generals in World War I. He was an early supporter of Hitler, and his ideas influ-enced Hitler’s strategy of bombing civilian centers at the end of the Spanish Civil War and in the early years of World War II. And the poem took as its beginning the bombing of the Basques in 1937 and looked at the way that event prefigured policies that both sides adopted in World War II and that were carried through to the saturation bombing of Dresden and the atomic bomb. That was a poem that wasn’t in my normal wheelhouse, but I thought, “Well, let’s see if I can do it.” So I did that. I don’t know if the poem is successful or not.

FOX: No, I liked it. I also just take it for granted that in war you kill civilians—I mean bombs and blah blah; I assume that that’s always been the case. Your poem is telling me it started in 1937.

STEELE: You make a good point because, yeah, there have always been atrocities in war and civilians have always suffered, but the twentieth century was the first century in which civilian casualties in war far outnumbered military casualties. Some authorities believe that over 50 million non-combatants perished during World War II alone. One reason for this was the development of modern military aircraft, which could project power in unprecedented ways. If you were Xerxes or Napoleon and wanted to sock it to Greece or Russia, you had to muster huge armies and slog over long stretches of difficult terrain with heavy equipment. But with modern planes and explosives, you could wreak terrifying devastation deep behind enemy lines in a matter of hours. Even though people now apply the term “total war” to earlier wars or campaigns like Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea, von Ludendorff was the guy who coined the term for his book in 1935. He was the one who argued that modern warfare not only requires the total mobilization of societies, but also demands utter ruthlessness in deploying air power against the civilian population of the enemy and submarine power against its shipping. He explicitly dismisses as “a pious wish” proscriptions against bombing civilian populations and sinking non-military vessels. Once this idea is established, a six-month-old baby from a belligerent nation is as fair game as the guy with a rifle on the front lines.

FOX: Where do you find beauty in your life?

STEELE: In nature, in concerts. I recently went, last Friday, to Disney hall and saw Charles Dutoit conduct Stravinsky and Debussy and Prokofiev. Life can be heartbreaking, but there is so much beauty. I have a stocking feeder outside the kitchen window and can watch the goldfinches come and eat in the morning. And I can turn on KUSC and can hear Angela Hewitt playing Bach.

FOX: Yeah, pretty good. Tim?

GREEN: I’m just wondering what you think about the future of poetry. It seems to me like recently there’s been kind of a counter-revolution of metrical verse that’s taken hold a little bit—maybe Poetry magazine is one of the reasons for that, publishing a lot more meter lately, but if you look at a lot of journals you see more metrical verse than a few years ago. Where do you think poetry’s headed? Do you think metrical verse is fighting back and will become the more popular or do you think free verse is going to hold on?

STEELE: I think free verse will hold on. My own feeling is—I’ve tried to say this in my critical work—I have no objection on principle to free verse. What I have been concerned about is the notion that free verse has somehow supplanted metrical poetry. I think free verse is a form additional to metrical poetry, and my sense is that free verse will continue. But I hope metrical verse will continue, too. They’re just different forms of poetry. Free verse by now certainly has its own tradi-tion, and of course it’s particularly strong in the United States, with one of our founding poets being Walt Whitman, though it’s hard to know exactly how he would’ve characterized his poetry, since “free verse” as a term comes later. But looking at Whitman and Pound and Eliot and Williams and Olson and so forth, it’s a tradition that’s now at least 150 years old. So I think both free verse and metered verse will continue, and I hope both do continue.

from Rattle #38, Winter 2012

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June 17, 2013

A CONVERSATION WITH RHINA P. ESPAILLAT

Brentwood, California, February 6th, 2012

Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat has published poems, essays, short stories and translations in numerous magazines and over sixty anthologies, in both English and her native Spanish, as well as three chapbooks and eight full-length books, including three in bilingual format. Her most recent are a poetry collection in English, Her Place in These Designs (Truman State University Press, Kirksville, 2008), and a bilingual collection of her short stories, El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (Ediciones CEDIBIL, Santo Domingo, DR, 2007). Her honors include the Wilbur Award, the Nemerov Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Award for Translation, the May Sarton Award, a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Salem State College, and several prizes from the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture. Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her sculptor husband, Alfred Moskowitz; there she is active with the Powow River Poets, a well known literary group she co-founded some twenty years ago. She also performs with a group known as Melopoeia, comprised of poet Alfred Nicol, guitarist and composer John Tavano, and vocalist Ann Tucker, which has presented numerous and varied programs that combine poetry and music, most recently at West Chester University and the House of the Seven Gables.

FOX: You wrote something that I really like: “Desire is all there is to keep us here.”

ESPAILLAT: Well, that was about a man who works around Newburyport—or did; I haven’t seen him lately—but when we first moved up to Newburyport from New York, we saw this man who was terribly disabled. And we could see that he was dragging one foot and that he had to work very hard just to walk. I used to see him taking walks every blessed day, no matter what the weather, and I thought, “How wonderful to have that kind of spirit, to have so much desire for the world and for life that you will not just settle down and let yourself die quietly.” So that’s what that came from.

FOX: Well, apparently you had a desire very early to write poetry.

ESPAILLAT: Oh, yes. I fell in love with poetry at the age of four or five in my grandmother’s house in the Dominican Republic. She was a poet. She never published anything; she used to write mostly for family events, birthdays and things like that. But she was good. She had real grace with language, and she used to have a lot of friends who would come to the house and tell stories, and play the guitar and the piano, and recite poetry. Poetry is very popular where I come from; everybody loves it. So I heard it before I understood it. I didn’t know what the grown-ups were doing, but I knew I wanted to do it, because it looked like so much fun.

FOX: Ah.

ESPAILLAT: And it was not until I came to this country at the age of seven that I realized poetry had a dark side. It wasn’t just music and play. I thought of it as a form of singing and almost dancing and it looked perfectly pure because it was a physical pleasure but when I started reading it in English at the age of seven or eight is when I realized, “This is about life. This is about grief and losses.” And I’d had several losses since then; I had lost an entire family, so I knew that it had a job in addition to the singing and the dancing, and I loved it even more.

FOX: You talk about sorrow and expressing sorrow through poetry.

ESPAILLAT: Well, I think that anytime you can thumb your nose at sorrow you’re ahead of the game. It doesn’t change anything; it doesn’t fix whatever it is that’s broken in your life, but at least you’ve done something with it. You haven’t just suffered it passively; you’ve kind of made it an artifact. And I think of poems—like statues, like songs, like dances, like every art—I think of a poem as an artifact. So if you take this terrible loss you endured, how all the people you love were left somewhere else, and you make something out of it, it’s as if you could say to life, “That’s for you, because I can do something; I can make lemonade out of this.”

FOX: Absolutely. That’s a very constructive approach.

ESPAILLAT: It helped a lot. It also helped to establish contact with other people, something I’ve always loved to do. I don’t like the solitary life. I love to communicate. My poems reveal that, I think, because they’re made to be understood.

FOX: Yes, yes.

ESPAILLAT: I don’t like mystery. [laughs]

FOX: So do you like poetry readings then?

ESPAILLAT: Oh, I love poetry readings. And much of what you hear there is not good, but I don’t care, because you pick out the grains. As with everything.

FOX: Yes. That’s true.

ESPAILLAT: So I do my poetry readings, and I like concerts and plays and art exhibits and all of that.

FOX: Why do you think people in the Dominican Republic love poetry and people in the United States don’t seem to be as enthusiastic?

ESPAILLAT: Well, all I know is that even field hands, laborers, in the Dominican Republic—people who barely read—if you start talking about poetry they’ll put down what they’re doing and they’ll start reciting from memory. They all know something by heart. It may not be the most wonderful stuff that they know, but it’s poetry and they’re passionate about it. So it’s engrained. I think it’s an inheritance from Spain, because in Spain of course poetry was always popular. And it was not a class thing. It was not just the upper crust, the academics, or the elites who knew this; it went all the way through the culture. It was supposed to belong to everybody, and that’s a feeling that I’ve kept. I do believe that poetry is innate in human beings. I think that we are wired to sing and dance—and you can see that in children; they all do it. At some point they all start doing this and they move to music. I think poetry is nothing but a kind of music made out of words. I have dragged so many poets out of the closet, because they all deny it. In this country there’s something a little bit embarrassing about it, especially with guys. If you drag them out, and you say, “Oh, come on, in elementary school at some point you wrote a poem!” “Well, yes, I did, I did, because I was in love with Sally.” So out it comes! And it’s a shame to lose that layer of your childhood, to lose that layer of your being. But somehow in Hispanic countries it’s been preserved.

FOX: Do you think the language has anything to do with it, or just the culture?

ESPAILLAT: No, I don’t think so. I really don’t know what it is. I think maybe it’s the notion that everything should be useful. There is a notion in this country that things have to be utilitarian, that they have to work, to change something, to make something happen—poetry doesn’t make something happen. Poetry just is. And I think in Hispanic countries they have more patience with useless things.

FOX: That’s interesting. I heard that Pablo Neruda was once giving a reading for ten thousand people and they asked him to recite a particular poem and he said, “Well, I don’t remember it well enough and I don’t have it with me,” and four hundred people in the audience started reciting the poem.

ESPAILLAT: [laughing] That’s right. Yes.

FOX: I don’t think that would happen in the United States.

ESPAILLAT: No, that’s true. Which is a shame, because I think once you get to people, especially when you catch them young, in school—I love to get to school kids, especially high school; I used to teach high school English—if you get them young, and if you get them past that feeling that everything has to push a button, everything has to be actively useful, and if you get them past the fear of doing something wrong, then they find invariably that they like poetry. Because it speaks for them, it speaks from them, and it speaks to them. And I’ve had this experience in classroom after classroom. And even older people, if you get them to trust you and you say, “Just go with me, bear with me, have patience and I’ll show you this,” you can pull them in and then they say, “Oh, yeah, this does belong to me.”

FOX: Many teachers of poetry in junior high and high school kind of give the message that “I’m the expert, I know how to do this, you don’t, and I have to interpret it for you,” which is—

ESPAILLAT: All wrong. It’s all wrong.

FOX: How do you do it?

ESPAILLAT: Well, I do it by attacking it the same way poetry attacked me, through the ear. I think too many times throughout the twentieth century poetry was tackled—with other people and especially with children, which was very destructive—it was tackled through the idea, through the theme: “Here’s what this poem is trying to tell you.” Wrong. What you should do is: “Here’s what this poet is doing with syllables. Here’s where he is repeating. Here’s where he is almost repeating, creating echoes that are not exactly the same but close enough so that you hear it as music.” If the teacher tackles the poem from the outside, from the sound of it, eventually she’s going to be able to say, “Why is he repeating this? Why is he rhyming this with this?” And through the “whys” you get to that in the child—or in the adult, the person—that does understand this. There is something in the human being that understands the uses of language. And then you get it from the kid. It’s much better that way. I started out the way everyone does, with a philosophy of the poem, with a Big Idea—capital B, capital I—and I came to realize very soon that that’s what kills poetry, that the Big Idea is the enemy of the music. If you get to the music first, the reader himself will get to the Big Idea. But you have to tackle first the music and then the imagery: “Why is this bird on this branch? Why does it turn this way and that way?” So you get the student to answer questions about what he can see in the poem. Don’t tell him what he can’t see in the poem yet; let him see it himself.

FOX: Do you think there’s a gender difference with high school students? Do girls like poetry better than boys?

ESPAILLAT: I think it’s easier to get to the girls, because I think women are more in touch with their feelings. They’re not ashamed of them; they’re not afraid to share them with other people or admit that they have them. The guys are defensive about feeling anything, and also the guys are active and they want the more athletic kind of thing. But no, I don’t think it’s that important; I don’t think the sex of the listener is that important. I’ve had grown men come up to me at the ending of a reading—this has happened more than once—and they say, “My wife dragged me here.” “Oh, good, I’m glad she did.” “But I didn’t think I would enjoy it.” “Oh?” “But yes, I did.” “Well, thank you for telling me that.” [laughs] Which is very gratifying.

FOX: Absolutely.

ESPAILLAT: Because it is for everybody.

FOX: That’s what we try to do at Rattle; we try to publish poems that can engage anyone—and when someone writes to us or calls and says, “I really don’t like poetry but, you know, I like these; this is good,” that’s the best compliment for us.

ESPAILLAT: Oh, sure. When people tell me, “I don’t like poetry,” I say, “Of course you do; you just don’t know it yet.” [laughs]

FOX: Yes, yes. You talk a lot about music in poetry. Say more about their relationship.

ESPAILLAT: Oh, well, I think they’re twins. I think they’re arts that started out together, and they separated at some point, but they both kept traces of one another, because music can also suggest a story—not tell a story, but suggest it; suggest motion, suggest activity, and so on. We all know that; we sort of make our own film listening to music. But poetry also depends quite literally on music. It doesn’t have notation but it has syllables, and the syllables are nothing but notes. And this is why meter works, not because some expert a long time back said, “You have to write it this way; you have to have this foot and that foot, and so many of them per line”—the rules don’t do anything; it’s the ear that works it. Poetry works metrically because the ear likes being teased, and I think the way the poet teases the ear is by making him a promise in the first line, saying “I’m going to do this from now on,” and then in line two he does pretty much the same thing but by line three he’s taken it back and done something else, so then you’ve got your reader a little bit nervous, or your listener, and then he’s listening: “How am I going to be fooled here; what is this trickster doing?” And I think there’s an element of trickery involved that is present in music too, as in themes and variations—the variations are nothing but trickery. So the hearer is saying, “Am I going to get back to what he started with? What’s going to happen here? Or is this going to strand me in a strange place?” And then when everything comes back to some other place or maybe to the same place, then the reader goes “ah.” But you have to make him nervous before he goes “ah.”

FOX: Well, in terms of that, of trickery, it seems to me that we all like to be happily surprised and we like variety. If you think you know the end of the story you’re not too interested in reading it.

ESPAILLAT: There has to be surprise. Was it Frost who said, “No surprise for the poet, no surprise for the reader”?

FOX: Ah. And yet, you’ve said you want to have a full poem in your mind before you write it down.

ESPAILLAT: Yeah, I do.

FOX: So where does the surprise come for you?

ESPAILLAT: It comes from me in my head. I haven’t put it on paper yet, but it makes itself in my head and I am always surprised at where it takes me. The reason I don’t write it down—I write short poetry for the most part so it doesn’t matter. And I tend not to forget poems while I’m making them. But when I’ve tried writing down different pieces—the opening, for instance—I find that I become so tied to it that the poem has no freedom anymore. So I leave it in my head untouched and it makes itself and by the time I have the first draft the way I think it’s going to be, but whole, then I put it down. And after that the poet steps away and the critic steps in, and the critic is the one who revises. So the poem will stand revision but it won’t stand an early birth. If you deliver the poem in the fourth or fifth month it’s not going to live, at least not for me. And I know lots of people who do it differently because this is a very private art; everybody works his own way. But that’s how I do it. I can’t keep a notebook; I can’t have little bits of ideas because then when I go back, I say, “What was I thinking? What was this about? What on earth spurred this?” because by then the bird is gone.

FOX: When you’re revising, does the critic in you ever say, “Can’t make this one work?”

ESPAILLAT: Yeah. I throw out more than I actually type up. I throw out a lot. And sometimes I come back years later, months or years later, to what I threw out. But it has to be up here, not on the paper. I come back to it because the germ of the poem returns all on its own—I don’t know why it sometimes does that—and says, “Here’s what you were thinking”; “Oh, is that the way I was thinking it?” and then the poem is back. But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes if it goes away too early it doesn’t come back.

FOX: You’ve said that when you were young, there was a 1942 anthology that your family gave you and you still have it?

ESPAILLAT: Oh, I still have it. That’s that big fat book—you know, the Louis Untermeyer big blue cover thing. It’s wonderful. There are poems in there that are now embarrassing, because they use language that we wouldn’t use today. Some of it is not “PC.” Some of it is downright aged, and hasn’t aged well. But for the most part—with very few pages or exceptions—that anthology still holds up. It’s wonderful. And it has introductions that give you the biographies of the poets, so I learned very early as a teenager that it wasn’t gods who made up these things, it was human beings. They had bad marriages, they committed suicide, they drank, they did this, they did that. So I realized, “It’s not just for everybody, it’s from everybody.” Even very damaged people.

FOX: That’s true. I got the impression when I was young that most writers have unhappy lives. That’s probably because, you know, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald—

ALFRED MOSKOWITZ: I do my best. [Fox and Espaillat laugh]

ESPAILLAT: I told you he was bad.

FOX: But, I mean, I would say that’s probably not true.

ESPAILLAT: I don’t think it’s true. I think what is true is that poets, like people in any one of the arts, are more attuned to the nuances of things, and more attuned to what’s behind the surface or under the floor or over the ceiling, and so they notice not just their own feelings but the feelings of others. I think that poets tend to be good face readers; they can look at faces and intuit things. And I think that poetry’s made out of those intuitions, and those … it’s a degree of sensitivity.

FOX: I agree. It seems to me that as I get older I have less and less patience for superficiality.

ESPAILLAT: Yeah, right. I agree perfectly. I really have no time for it.

FOX: Yeah. I mean, why bother?

ESPAILLAT: There is so little time in which to communicate fully; why waste a minute of it telling lies? You can’t get those moments back.

FOX: That’s why I tend to like poets, because it’s a poet’s job to observe yourself and the world and then tell it as truthfully and accurately and interestingly as you can.

ESPAILLAT: As Emily Dickinson said, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”

FOX: Yes. You translated Robert Frost into Spanish. Tell me about that.

ESPAILLAT: Oh, that was a labor of love. I adore Robert Frost. Who doesn’t? And it struck me that whenever I speak to Hispanics about American literature, it’s always the same name that comes up: it’s Walt Whitman. When they think America, Hispanics tend to think Walt, because he’s so iconic; he’s like the Statue of Liberty. And I admire him greatly myself, but there are so many other faces of this complex and wonderful country: There’s Emily Dickinson, who is another face entirely; there is Robinson Jeffers; and of course there is Richard Wilbur, whom I’ve also translated; and Robert Frost. I mean, who speaks for this country the way Robert Frost does? I had a feeling that there was not enough attention being paid to a great many people who deserve at least as much as Whitman and probably more. So that’s the justification. The real reason I translated him is that I adore the work. I adore the poems and I just wanted to be able to share them with the other half of my family, with my non-English-speaking family. I started to work on it and discovered that I was not really translating from English but from “New-Hampshire-ese,” which is another language. I’ve had to call friends from the Powow River Poets—you know that group—and I had to call Bob Crawford, for instance, who is in New Hampshire, and I said, “Bob, what does this mean?”—farm implements or the processes in a field, all sorts of things—and then he would explain and I’d say, “Oh, that is such-and-such in Spanish.” But I have no idea, really; I don’t know farm life in English. So that was a challenge, and it was a challenge getting that folksy, colloquial quality into Spanish, which tends to sound very formal. It was just a delight to do. It took me maybe five or six years.

FOX: Whoa.

ESPAILLAT: I am not getting anywhere with it. I am having tremendous trouble getting Henry Holt and Company to give me permission to use the originals because I want them on facing pages, of course, and they haven’t told my publisher in Mexico yet how much they want for the rights. So I’m dying, because I really, really want to see this in print, and it is so hard to wait and wait. And I’m 80 years old already, you know; I want to see this out. So it’s just a matter of having a lot of patience. But I did do 40 poems, 40 of the best known poems, of Robert Frost, in Spanish. I’ve shown them around to a lot of people who write—many of them are bilingual—and they say, “Oh, it’s wonderful, it’s fine, it’s this, it’s that,” so I’m hoping that a fraction of what they’re saying is true. But I really think they’re good translations, because I’ve got them metrical, I’ve got them rhymed, I’ve used the same imagery wherever possible. I’ve stuck as close to the original as possible without destroying the music, because for me the most important thing is that, so I’ve kept the Frostian sound. And I’m excited about those. And then after I finished with Frost, I moved on to Richard Wilbur and did 42 of his poems, and the same Mexican publisher has that manuscript, and the rights for that are now being considered by the people in Barcelona who handle that particular publisher—so I’m a little more hopeful about that one. A little more hopeful, and very happy, because Richard Wilbur is now in his 90s. He loves my translations, absolutely loves them. I’ve sent them to him—every time I do two or three, a batch, I’ve sent them off to him. He’s never had one word of complaint, so I’m thrilled over that, and I want very much to see this come out while he can enjoy it.

FOX: Well, translation is, to me, really its own art. One of my favorite Rilke—in one translation, he defines love as when “two solitudes know and touch and protect each other,” which I love. And I’ve read other translations which are pedestrian.

ESPAILLAT: Yeah. They may capture the meaning of the poem the way a dictionary does, but with about as much poetry in it as a dictionary. I don’t like those translations, and I don’t like translations that betray the form of the original. I cannot stand free verse translations of metrical poetry. [Fox laughs] Cannot stand them. However, I also prefer free verse translations of free verse poetry. I think everything has to be true to what the author wanted.

FOX: Yes. But you can’t do it all; obviously you have to change the words, because that’s the translation, but what is most important to retain from the original?

ESPAILLAT: Well, for me, it’s the relationship between the sound, the imagery, and the thought. I think that has to work the same. You can’t be seen in a translation; you have to be as transparent as possible. I think the translator should disappear. The translator should be glass. But of course it’s hard to do that, because you do have a personality and a series of habits and so on, and you just have to very carefully erase them. And when I finish a poem that is by somebody else, I say, “Now, is there any of me that has sneaked into this?” and you have to watch for that. And I know translators who get into every word they do. I’m not naming any. [all laugh]

FOX: You write mostly formally, in rhyme and meter …

ESPAILLAT: Not always. Mostly yes, because that’s the way I think; that’s what I heard early in life, so it stuck and I love it. But when a poem comes to me in syllabics, which happens very often, I’m very happy, because I love syllabics. And free verse, also, which doesn’t visit me often, but every once in a while surprises me, and then it’s nice because it tells me that the gray cells have not given up yet, that I’m still playing with language, attempting new things. But I’m not as secure with free verse as I am with formal verse, because I like dancing inside the box. If I have to build the box myself and then dance in it, I don’t feel as safe. But that’s what you do with free verse, you make the box as you go along.

FOX: Well, it seems to me, as you were alluding to, for every writer it’s personal: different habits, different experiences.

ESPAILLAT: That’s right. One of my top favorites in any language is Stanley Kunitz, who very deliberately moved from incredibly perfect and wonderful formal verse into equally excellent free verse. He made the move on purpose and it was glorious. But what he did was to retain, in his free verse, the music that had been with him all the way. Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s just wonderful when you see that happen. But when I teach classes in creative writing, I encourage the kids to learn the rules first. Learn the box, and once you have mastered it very well, then you can kick the hell out of it. And you can either write very loose formal verse the way Frost does with his loose iambics, or you can kick the box altogether and do free verse, but that’s harder. So I always make them learn the box first, and then what you do after that is up to you. And so many people tell me, “Oh, but aren’t you keeping them from being spontaneous and free?” I always tell them, “That’s like telling a carpenter, ‘Don’t bother learning how to use the hammer, or the plane, or the different kinds of screw and nail; let it just come to you.’” Well, that doesn’t work. You have to learn all these things, and then once you’re a very, very good carpenter and you know all of this by heart, then you can go construct as you like; you don’t have to think about it. That works. That works, and it doesn’t limit anybody’s freedom one iota, because if that were the case, there would have been no Stanley Kunitz. Late Kunitz is solid gold.

FOX: How much do you think it’s possible to teach poets to be better poets, how to write poetry?

ESPAILLAT: I can teach them two-thirds of it. I tell them the poem consists of three parts. One part is the music. Another part is the imagery. I tell them metaphor—that’s the second part—I tell them, “Music, metaphor, and meaning. I can teach you music. I can teach you metaphor, how to construct figures of speech. I cannot teach you meaning, but you don’t need anybody to do that, because life gives it to you free, whether you want it or not.” I tell them, “You start collecting that third ‘M’ of the circle right from the cradle, because experience gives it to you, and no teacher can give you that, but you don’t need it. What you need is the other two-thirds because they give you the materials for the box. And once you’ve built it, the other stuff comes in and fills it. It just comes, by itself.”

FOX: Do you find that students are defensive when their work is talked about?

ESPAILLAT: It depends on the quality of the relationships that you establish in the classroom. It’s just like any workshop. Like any workshop—there are terrible workshops, workshops that feel like boxing rings, where everybody gets injured; and there are workshops that feel like coffee klatches, where you don’t do anything but say, “Oh, that’s great,” “Oh, how nice,” “Oh, how pretty”—it’s useless, absolutely. So it’s either useless or destructive. But you can have a workshop that is business-like, that is serious about improving the work, that is sensitive to people’s feelings but that does not lie. And those are wonderful; those are worth everything. And if you establish that atmosphere in the classroom, then people are not defensive. The only time the students are defensive generally is the very beginning of the poetry unit, when they whine: “I don’t do that!” [Fox laughs] I tell them, “Yes you do; sure you do.” So it’s a matter of being very receptive to whatever they give you. I tell them, “Look, when you do exercises, finger exercises on the piano, you’re not going to end up with a symphony, and that’s all right. And that’s all right, it doesn’t matter; these are finger exercises you’re going to do for homework for me, and if they’re terrible, so what? Most of what I produce is terrible, and I throw it out. So you have the right to throw it out. But if you do enough of them, you’ll get better.” So you have to tell them two things: Number one, don’t plan on keeping anything, because chances are, you’ll get rid of it, with good reason. Don’t expect anything to give you a big idea; it may not, probably won’t. And also, you’re the boss. You’re the boss; I’m not the boss. So if you empower them that way, if you give them control over what they write, they really come to love it. I have had so many students at the end of a semester say, “The whole term was fun, but the best part was the poetry.” And that feels like a Nobel Prize.

FOX: It seems to me that many children enjoy writing poetry and write it well until they’re about nine or ten years old, fourth grade, and then they just turn off. Is that …

ESPAILLAT: I think that happens because they have begun to confuse it with philosophy, which it isn’t, with sociology and politics, which it isn’t, because they’re given this—”Whole class, write a poem about freedom, write a poem about brotherhood, or the anti-war movement,” but this is not what they’re living. I tell them—what I like to do is bring in something of mine, bring in an ancient sweater with holes in it or one of my mother’s—a compact or something like that, and I say, “This is an object that means something to me, because it reminds me of XYZ. What do you have lying around the house? Pick an object that reminds you of something or that means something to you, that has connections. A pair of dirty sneakers is wonderful. Write me eight lines about those sneakers.” And that will work, because they’ll be using their five senses, they’ll be using their imaginations, they won’t be parroting back clichés that they know the teacher expects: “War is bad, peace is good”—they won’t be pleasing you; they’ll be finding themselves. And through those sneakers, who knows what they’ll get to? They’ll get to summers they spent camping with their fathers. They’ll get to the grand canyon. So you guide them toward the physical object that gives them something to hang onto, that anchors the poem in reality, in the real world, and then you let them go.

FOX: You won the T.S. Eliot award. Has that changed your life? [both laugh]

MOSKOWITZ: Changed mine!

ESPAILLAT: No, but it made me very happy.

FOX: Ah.

ESPAILLAT: That was Where Horizons Go. That was my second book. And it was wonderful because it validated the work; it said, “Ah, people may actually even get to read this stuff, and some of them may actually enjoy and think something because of it,” which is great. You know how it is; you’re a poet too, so you know that you’re never really sure whether you’re any good.

FOX: Yes.

ESPAILLAT: If you’re sure you’re good, you’re in trouble. So it was good. And I won the Richard Wilbur Award; that was another real joy and blessing.

MOSKOWITZ: And the Nemerov.

ESPAILLAT: And the Nemerov, for an individual sonnet and so on. The awards pat you on the back and that’s wonderful, but what really feels great is having live people speak to you and tell you that you’ve reached at least one person at a time. That’s the important thing.

FOX: What’s your greatest pleasure in writing poetry and being a poet?

ESPAILLAT: Sharing it with other people. What I’m going to do this evening, for example. I’m going to touch upon translation, read something from Wilbur and something from Frost, and all sorts of things. I like that, because I like looking at the human face out there. Print is great. Print is great, but then when you count on the work in print, what you’re really writing for is the future or distance, touching somebody that you can’t see, but it’s so much more fun when you see them.

FOX: It seems that you’ve been very lucky in finding something that you love very young and just doing it.

ESPAILLAT: Oh, absolutely. I’ve been lucky all my life.

MOSKOWITZ: Especially in marriage. [all laugh]

FOX: Obviously! No, marriage is not all that easy …

MOSKOWITZ : [mutters something, all laugh]

ESPAILLAT: Behave yourself! [laughing] I’m going to read a poem tonight about Alfred interfering with me in the kitchen. He loves to cook and he’s a good cook so sometimes he throws me out of the kitchen: “I will cook tonight!” And then he calls me 92 times from the kitchen when I’m out in some other room trying to work on stanza three: “Where is the measuring cup? Where is the spoon?” [Fox laughs] So that’s what my poem is about. It’s called “The Poet’s Husband Engages in Gourmet Cooking.” [Fox laughs]

FOX: Do you ever not present something you write out of concern about hurting someone’s feelings, getting them angry with you?

ESPAILLAT: No, because if I think something is going to hurt, I keep that poem to myself. I have written things about people I love very much who are now gone, but never anything painful really, just truthful. My mother died of Alzheimer’s, and I’ve written a number of poems about her condition, yet I would never have read them while she was living, because I would not want her to see herself reflected this way. But I think it’s important to share that kind of painful experience with other people, because they’ve had it too. And I’ve had so many people say to me after readings, especially one poem called “Song,” which is about my mother’s loss of language—I think it may be the most painful poem I have ever written—and so many people say, “That’s my grandmother.” “That’s my father.”

MOSKOWITZ: Your father, too.

ESPAILLAT: Yes, poems about my father. That kind of thing, I have saved until later.

FOX: It seems to me that we all are attracted to depth and important experiences of others, but we also are fearful of expressing it or talking about it.

ESPAILLAT: Sure, because you don’t like to tread on the territory that is so private in somebody else’s life, or your own either, for that matter. But I tend to be more open about my own feelings and experiences than about those of other people, because, you know, other people have a right to their own privacy.

FOX: How does it feel being out there, and having people know more about you than you know about them, if they come up to you at a reading or whatever?

ESPAILLAT: Well, whenever I go into a literary situation that way—in fact, social situations, too—I always assume that I’m among friends. I just make that assumption arbitrarily. I came to this country at the age of seven, couldn’t speak to anybody except my parents, and was very lonesome. So I guess I just decided to jump into it with both feet and do the best I could, with broken English. And I was not afraid to be more open than other people were with me, because they couldn’t speak my language, but I was learning to speak theirs, and I just got into that habit, that way of doing things. And I think it helps to grow up in New York, too, because you’re so surrounded by “other.” Whatever “other” is, it’s there, and it’s wonderful, because you grow up feeling “we’re all in the same boat.” We had neighbors who were Hungarian, a lot of Greeks, a lot of Irish and Germans and Armenians, and the first Jews I ever met in my life, Chinese, Japanese people, and so on. And I was struck first, of course, superficially, by the differences, but then once you take a second look, it’s the similarities that strike you. It’s the fact that when you visit their houses, even though their eating is different and may look peculiar, the family dynamics are the same. The people are the same. So I got to thinking that we’re really one huge family, all over the world. And I’m at home, and if I do something really stupid at a poetry reading, I will probably be forgiven, and if I’m not, I’ll survive anyway. [laughs]

FOX: A friend of mine went to a workshop one weekend and she came back with the idea of “reverse paranoia”—assume that people are out to do you good [Espaillat laughs], which sounds like what you’re talking about.

ESPAILLAT: I guess so! I guess so, and so far so good, really. My suspicion of everybody’s good intentions has been fulfilled so far. I really haven’t encountered too many SOBs.

FOX: Do your audiences like the same poems of yours best that you like the best? Because very often writers say, “This is my favorite, but …”

ESPAILLAT: Yeah, well, that’s true, because you have different associations. What I try to do at every reading is to do a variety. I try to do as much as possible; not everything in form, not everything in syllabics, and also the themes—I like to jump from idea to idea, because it kind of expresses the breadth of what you think and feel.

FOX: As a poet, what do you look forward to? You’re 80; you’ll probably be here another twenty years—

ESPAILLAT: Oh, I’ve gotta get even with him!

FOX: Absolutely, that’s for damn sure.

ESPAILLAT: Yes, I’m hoping to live long, and to keep this man company and keep him straight, and we’ll see what happens. We take it one day at a time. And we have wonderful children and grandchildren, and I want to go to weddings in the worst way, so we’ve got to live long. We moved up to Newburyport, Massachusetts, from New York, and we had been told, “Oh, New Englanders; they’re very tight-lipped, closemouthed,” and so on, and I thought, “Gee, maybe they’ll be different from New Yorkers,” who are very open, and we’ve had such a pleasant surprise, because they tell you their life story whether you want to hear it or not. They’re just as open as anybody else. So we’re at home up there. Alfred has joined the art association and is now running the world up there.

FOX: Well, I suspect that’s partly because you’re interested in people and you’re not scary or threatening or judgmental …

ESPAILLAT: Well, they’re also very open. Our next door neighbors, as a matter of fact—when we moved in, they had never set eyes on us, but they knew that Alfred’s name is Moskowitz, and we moved in in November, so they knew that the Jewish holidays come at that time, and the first inkling we had of their existence was a “Happy Hanukkah” card. And that was very moving, even though we’re not religious people and don’t observe anything—we’re a mixed marriage, altogether—but I was moved by that gesture, because what it said was, “We’re your neighbors.” That’s what we’ve encountered in most places. And it’s painful now to see what’s going on in some parts of the country with immigrants, to see that in some places the attitude has changed from “welcome” to something else, because when I was a child in New York, it was immigrants all, Americans all. The whole educational system was geared to be this set of embracing arms. And I grew up that way, believing in and loving this country passionately as I do, but it’s sad, and I hope that this is temporary.

FOX: Yes.

ESPAILLAT: I hope it’s temporary, because if it’s not, it will change the nature of this country.

FOX: I think those who have that point of view have forgotten this is a nation of immigrants.

ESPAILLAT: That’s who we are, exactly.

FOX: That’s the strength of it; that’s the …

ESPAILLAT: Unless you’re a Sioux or a Cherokee.

FOX: Well, yes!

MOSKOWITZ: Many of the immigrant groups here were despised; they were on the low end of the social—

ESPAILLAT: Oh, sure, they’ve all had to go through rough patches. But that was a long time ago, and it has changed, really. So to see any vestige of that come back elsewhere, it was a shame.

FOX: It seems to me a hopeful sign is communication, because now people in Africa, Asia—we see them, we talk to them, we can email or Twitter them …

MOSKOWITZ: Globalization.

FOX: Absolutely.

ESPAILLAT: Will you run out screaming if I read you a poem?

FOX: No, not at all. We’d love it.

ESPAILLAT: Talking about immigration and assimilation … this is called

TRANSLATION

Cousins from home are practicing their English,
picking out what they can, slippery vowels
queasy in their ears, stiff consonants
bristling like Saxon spears too tightly massed
for the leisurely tongues of my home town.
They frame laborious greetings to our neighbors;
try learning names, fail, try again, give up,
hug then and laugh instead, with slow blushes.
Their gestures shed echoes of morning bells,
unfold narrow streets around them like gossip.
They watch us, gleaning with expert kindness
every crumb of good will dropped in our haste
from ritual to ritual; they like the pancakes,
smile at strangers, poke country fingers
between the toes of our city roses.
Their eyes want to know if I think in this
difficult noise, how well I remember
the quiet music our grandmother spoke
in her tin-roofed kitchen, how love can work
in a language without diminutives.
What words in any language but the wind’s
could name this land as I’ve learned it by campfire?
I want to feed them the dusty sweetness
of American roads cleaving huge spaces,
wheatfield clean and smooth as a mother’s apron.
I want to tell them the goodness of people
who seldom touch, who bring covered dishes
to the bereaved in embarrassed silence,
who teach me daily that all dialogue
is reverie, is hearsay, is translation.

—from The Shadow I Dress In
(David Robert Books, 2004)

So that’s my take on the whole assimilation thing. I think that those of us who have more than one identity, who have multiple languages and multiple loyalties, are not really divided people; they’re multiplied. I tell my Spanish language students, immigrant students from all over—because I see Asian students also—I tell them, “You’re not less, you’re more. You’re more because you have more points with which to touch other people.” So you don’t have to be divided.

FOX: Well, I love your outlook. The quotation which I live by is from Hamlet: “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” You have a very sunny outlook and it makes it so.

ESPAILLAT: Well, yeah, it does for me. It works, works for me.

from Rattle #38, Winter 2012

Rattle Logo

May 8, 2013

A CONVERSATION WITH LI-YOUNG LEE

March 10, 2003, in Los Angeles, California

FOX:  Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?

LEE:  Yeah, I guess I do. It was, “Here is a fish, make nice dish,” or something like that. I caught a little fish for my mother and I wrote that, I was just learning English, and I was just so amazed that words rhymed.

FOX:  So your first poem was in English!

LEE:  Right.

FOX:  And how do you find writing in English? I assume it’s not your first language.

LEE:  No, it isn’t. It’s like my third language. But I keep forgetting languages. My first language is Bahasa Indonesian and I learned that from my nursemaid. My mother was absent a lot in the beginning because she was trying to get my father out of jail, and so after we left Indonesia I started learning Chinese and I lost all the Bahasa. Then I began to lose a lot of my Chinese when I was about fourteen so English became much more comfortable. I guess it’s buried under there, I don’t know. I don’t know how that works, Alan, I don’t know if you forget it, or is it a buried language?

FOX:  It’s probably different for different people. I assume you don’t use the other languages now, or do you?

LEE:  Oh, I do. My mother only speaks Chinese, so I only speak Chinese with her. And I had a brother who recently died and he didn’t speak any English, so I used Chinese with him. But after he died, it dawned on me that the people that I use Chinese with, there’s less and less of them. So I feel as if that language, my use of it, is getting less and less.

FOX:  Have you written poetry in Chinese?

LEE:  No, no, I used to write letters in Chinese to my mother. Up until college, I was still writing letters, but they got more and more elementary and so I don’t even write, I can’t even read, Chinese any more. But I was back in China about ten years ago and within a week I was dreaming in Chinese. I was answering, my wife is Italian-American, and I was answering her in Chinese, so it must have been just natural for me. And I was suddenly able to read a little bit more every day, signs and things, so I think it’s under there somewhere probably.

FOX:  How is the process of writing poetry for you? Do you write every day, or when you feel like it, or what?

LEE:  I don’t know, Alan. I feel like I actually am on the job, I feel like I’m on 24 hours a day. I’m always listening for or trying to feel, just to get a sense of that field of mind that you’re in when you write, when a poem happens, so I’m always feeling around for that. I’m doing that 24 hours a day, and I’m ready to put everything down to write the poem. I got up this morning about 4 because I thought there was something happening. I wanted to sleep in because I went to bed late last night, but I thought no, no, no, ’cause it doesn’t always happen. So I got up and started writing—nothing came of it, a couple of lines. It’s so haphazard for me. I don’t have a system. I just feel like I’m doing it all the time. It’s really inefficient, you know. I’ve tried to sit down and do it but it doesn’t always work.

FOX:  Do you have an idea of what tends to inspire you or the spark that starts the process?

LEE:  I don’t know, Alan. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Lately I’ve been noticing that any situation I’m in, for instance, this interview—I’m aware, I’m more and more aware of the fact that so many things had to happen in order to make this meeting possible. Not only the phone calls and the invitation to the interview and my flying here in the airplane, so I think, well, somebody had to invent the airplane, right? And then I think, well, RATTLE  had to have happened for this interview to happen which means, Stellasue, your life had to have a certain trajectory. Alan, your life had to have a certain trajectory to make all of this happen, right? And I think about the cab driver who took me to the airport and somebody—I just think it’s almost too much to disentangle, the myriad things that have to happen to make any situation occur. So I came to the conclusion that everything makes everything happen and it dawned on me that that’s the way a poem happens. So I don’t know if there’s a particular cause. But a poem somehow is a version of that condition. And I think that’s part of the joy of reading poems. We read a poem, we start to notice how words refer to each other from the beginning of the poem to the end of the poem. There’s this kind of manifold or myriad field of reference going on, of connections. So I don’t know what it is that ever makes me write a poem, you know, the sound of a bird or the smell of leaf mold, my hand, the coffee I had or the coffee I didn’t have or the ache in my left knee. There’s just so much, so I suppose for me I can hardly tell what it is. That’s part of the frustration for me too because I feel as if at any moment a poem could occur because that condition of allness, of everythingness, is occurring all the time. And so what is so special about when it yields itself or manifests itself in language? I don’t know what that is, but I’ve been thinking about that. So I guess I don’t know what inspires me, would be the answer.

FOX:  Do you ever have an idea or a wish for what will happen to a poem, how it will be received, or what impact it might have?

LEE:  I do, [pause] I suppose that something in me—I wish the poem would last, would last forever, but I don’t know what I mean by that. I hope that it contributes to the, I don’t know, the evolution of humanity, I hope it contributes to that. That sounds arrogant or claiming too much, doesn’t it?

FOX:  No, I wouldn’t think so, if that’s a wish. For me, I would have an idea of where I want it to go, what I want to have happen, perhaps unconsciously.

LEE:  And I guess it’s happened to me, Alan. You know, I feel as if reading poetry has helped me in my own evolving as a human being, so I want to return the favor?

FOX:  When you read poetry, what touches you the most, what has the greatest impact on you?

LEE:  I guess the doorway for me is the emotional doorway, if there’s emotion in the poem, if it’s authentic or authentic feeling. If there isn’t that, the poem can be I think intellectually really wonderful, but I’m not interested. I can appreciate it, I can respect it, I can stand in awe of it even, but if I’m not stirred, I don’t take it to my heart.

FOX:  And what emotions do you like the best when you find them in a poem?

LEE:  I don’t know. Maybe, maybe it’s not even emotions. Now I’m thinking a little more, a little harder about that. Maybe what it is, what I really love when I read a poem is the visceral experience of a sense of wholeness, that somehow the poem I’ve encountered is a reflection of a psychic wholeness, that when I’m reading the poem the poem is—it dawns on me, Alan, that every poem is a portrait of a speaker, right? So if my experience of that speaker is a kind of integrated, a deeply integrated but at the same time a highly differentiated psyche—I’ll use that word, I’m not sure what I mean by that—but then I get a real sense of satisfaction, a sense somehow that in the poem the emotional function is well informed of the intellectual function and the intellectual function is informed of the emotional function and they are both informed of the erotic function and the erotic function is informed of the spiritual function. Sometimes I have a problem when I read a poem that’s just the mental function, it seems uninformed of the physical functions or the emotional functions or the spiritual functions. Or even a poem that is just the spiritual function working overtime but uninformed of the other functions. So what I love is a poem that somehow posits, proposes, a condition of wholeness.

FOX:  When you read poetry, do you find the emotional part often when you read, or is it rare?

LEE:  I think it’s very rare. I would say, I can’t tell, Alan, if it’s rare because it’s really difficult, right? It’s difficult. Or whether for the most part it’s disallowed, because we don’t allow it, won’t allow it into our lives. I don’t know, it may be disallowed in the culture at large, and I feel maybe it’s not allowed in poetry, either, or we don’t trust it or something like that. But maybe we haven’t evolved enough. Maybe our emotional function is retarded.

FOX:  Maybe poetry is an acceptable way of conveying emotions.

LEE:  Yeah, but then you think about all the poets who we consider great, Eliot or Pound, I don’t think they’re particularly emotional poets. I see on your shelf there, Yehuda Amichai. I love him because there’s a lot of emotion in those poems, it seems to me. And so I think that’s really rare, and it’s emotion that feels to me that it’s not uninformed, that it’s of his intellect, but the intellect is very informed of the emotions, and they’re both informed of their temporality and their eternity. Amachai, I would say, is a poet that really gives me that. But I think that’s rare in the English language.

FOX:  I tend to agree with you because when we read submissions to Rattle, one rule I have is if when I read the poem if I’m almost in tears [Lee agrees] or if I’m laughing, it’s in. And that doesn’t happen too often, either one.

LEE:  Right, right. Why do think that is, Alan?

FOX:  I think we look for emotional connection and I think poetry is a way of doing that …

LEE:  But then why are the people who are writing not doing that?

FOX:  Ah! I think you’ve put your finger on it. I think it’s tough to do.

LEE:  Yeah, it’s tough to do.

FOX:  Do you find that you’re inhibited in what you write? Do you ever censor, because you might reveal too much of yourself? Is that an issue for you?

LEE:  No. Maybe it is an issue, but it’s kind of a backward issue because what I’m trying to do is reveal more and more. And I do recognize that there’s something inside of me that resists it. For instance, Stellasue has given me this new strategy into a poem. But I do find that there’s something that resists being revealed, so for me the problem isn’t that I’m revealing too much and I’m trying not to—no, the problem for me is that I’m trying to know myself, to self-reveal, to uncover. In this way I think I feel poetry is apocalyptic, uncovering, as opposed to ecliptic which is covering, right? And in the same way I find that poetry is disillusioning in the best way—it frees us of our illusions. But there must be something inside of me that resists disillusionment, that wants to hold onto all my illusions, all my narrow definitions of what myself might be.

FOX:  What have you written which is successful in conveying emotion in your own work?

LEE:  I wrote something just recently I feel as if that has a lot of emotion in it, but I can’t tell, I haven’t shown it to anybody yet, but I feel like it has a lot of emotion.

FOX:  Do you typically show your work to anybody before you send it off for publication?

LEE:  Well, my editor, but no, I don’t have much of a, which is a real problem, I think, for me, and a handicap, maybe. I wish I had some readers—I show it to my wife when I’m ready to show it to her …

FOX:  Is she helpful?

LEE:  She’s very helpful because she has a really good bullshit detector. I just read something to her over the phone. She said, “No, no, no, no, Li-Young, you don’t mean that.” [Fox laughs loudly] And I tried to convince her, you know, I’m so defensive. [more laughter from Fox] I tried to convince her, “I did mean it.” And she said, “Now think about that. Did you really mean that?” I thought, all right, I didn’t mean it. It was just, it was a device or something. So, yes, she’s tough, she doesn’t mince any words, she doesn’t pull any punches, [laughs] so that’s tough.

FOX:  Is that a good thing for you as a writer?

LEE:  I think it’s good. I think it is good to have somebody who’s not a writer. She comes from a coal mining background, and she doesn’t particularly value literature. She values a hundred other things, but not literature. But I think it’s also valuable to have fellow poets reading which at the moment I don’t have.

FOX:  It’s an interesting issue, the impulse to reveal and yet the contrary impulse to protect.

LEE:  I don’t know what that’s about. I thought about this a little bit and it dawns on me that it’s part of the whole difficulty in writing. I feel when I’m sitting in front of an empty page, part of my problem is I feel like the poem could start anywhere. So there I am sitting in front of an empty page and I feel like the page is almost a symbol of pure potential. I could start with the window or the bird or my feet or my shoes or my socks or my nose, my thumb, anywhere, I could start anywhere. But the minute I put the pencil down on the paper, the minute I start it, then the potential closes down. Then it starts to be about this particular poem. And even though you try to move that poem into a kind of spaciousness, you try to say as much as possible, but even so, it does feel as you’re closing down into this particular poem. And so for me, the experience of writing one poem is saying goodbye to the 999 other poems that want to get written. So sometimes I do have the sense as if I’m like a little doorway and there are 10,000 poems that want to get through. So for me to pick one poem is to say goodbye to 9,999 other poems and that grief just makes me crazy, because I have to pick one. And so sometimes, it doesn’t make sense, because what I do is end up closing the door and saying “no” to all of them. It’s weird, right? I don’t know. So it’s a kind of neurosis. I’m probably talking about my own neurosis here, you know [laughs]. But I don’t know. There’s a kind of loss. The whole thing about revealing is so interesting to me because I do believe that the practice of poetry is a viable path to self-knowledge. If we study the things that human beings have made, it’s a way to study human beings, right? So then a poem is a product of the psyche, and it’s a way to study the psyche. So it seems to me that it’s a way that we can know ourselves better, right? When we write the poem, we can say, well, here’s where I am today. So it’s a form of divination. So we don’t even need to do the I Ching to find out what’s going on, we can just write a poem and say, this is where I am.

FOX:  What reward do you get from writing poetry?

LEE:  For me it would be the experience of the all, which is so strange to me because it seems to me that that’s our perennial condition, that’s we’re always in the all. I don’t know why we need a piece of art or the writing of poem to remind us. Because when you’re in that state, if you’re writing the poem, that trance state, it’s almost as you’re omniscient, you know things you didn’t know you knew, and you see connections you didn’t think were there. And that condition of seeing all those myriad connections at once, I guess it’s just that experience of the all.

FOX:  How would you compare poetry as an art form with other art forms, music or sculpture or painting?

LEE:  I think of poetry as a score for the human voice, so I guess the voice is ultimately the thing you’re scoring. How does it differ? I’m not sure it’s different. I think all art forms are revelatory. All art forms reveal us to ourselves so all art forms are viable paths to self-knowledge, to knowledge of our, well, I’ll use this word—primordial condition—our original condition which is our interconnectedness and interpenetratingness with everything else. So I guess all art forms lead us to that.

FOX:  Do you do many poetry readings?

LEE:  I’ve been doing a lot lately, well, for the last ten years I guess I’ve been doing a lot.

FOX:  Is that something you enjoy?

LEE:  I do, I do enjoy it when I remember what it is I’m trying, or what I would like to do. Because it seems to me that the most a poetry reading can be is the imparting of a kind of inner richness. I think the worst, the least it can be, and I hate it when it becomes that, is when—I guess this is what I feel—if I do a reading and the audience feels, boy, he’s really smart, or he’s really deep, or he’s really interesting, I feel like I’ve failed. But if I do a reading and the audience goes home and thinks, wow, human inner life is really rich, my inner solitude is really spacious, and maybe a second or even a third or fourth thought, they think, hey, he’s pretty good, then I succeeded. If that’s the first thought, that they are rich or that the quality of their listening is really spacious and rich, then I feel that it’s a successful reading. Again, I’m just returning the favor, because I’ve gone to readings where that’s exactly what I felt after hearing the reading I feel like, wow, I felt an inner richness or richness about life, or just being alive, and only almost as an afterthought I think, wow, that person gave that feeling to me. God bless him, or her. But a lot of times when I’m listening, and I can’t tell whether this is my problem as a listener or the poet’s problem when I’m listening, and I feel, boy, that person’s really smart, or that person really knows how to use language. I feel as if psychic energy has been drained from me but not given back. Then I feel that’s not different from TV. I mean, the TV just drains your psychic energy and doesn’t give you anything back. I think real art, somehow, the more psychic energy you put into it the more you get back. It’s weird. You get it back tenfold.

FOX:  Well, that is interesting because to me you’re saying that showing off is not helpful but self-revelation on a deep level, true level, is.

LEE:  That’s exactly how I would say it. That something else is going on. It’s not about a bunch of people listening to somebody else or looking at somebody else. I think something deeper is going on. If the poet is a great poet, I don’t know, I never heard Frost read but I would suppose, or Emily Dickinson, but I would suppose if I heard them read that they would reveal me to me, as opposed to revealing themselves to me. Somehow by revealing themselves to me I have been revealed to myself.

FOX:  I would think that’s one of the most important benefits of poetry, to allow the reader to reveal him or herself to him or herself.

LEE:  Right, yeah, so it’s a real mysterious and wonderful thing that happens between the reader and the poem. Yeah.

FOX:  Do you find that audiences differ a great deal at your readings?

LEE:  They do, in terms of age or gender or class or race, but ultimately I’m trying to hit something that is the same. We’re all mortal human beings, part spirit, part matter, dying and eternal, male and female, dark and light, good and bad, so I guess I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the surface quality of the audience. I’m just trying to pay attention to the heart that’s afraid, that’s jubilant, sad, happy, clapping, singing, grieving. It seems to me that it’s all the same heart. It’s inflected differently with races and gender, but I never try to tailor the reading, and that could be my downfall, too.

FOX:  How do you mean?

LEE:  I don’t know, I just read to a high school audience and maybe, I walked in there thinking, well, I don’t care, they’re eighteen or seventeen or sixteen, they’re human beings and I’m a human being, so there must be some common ground here, but maybe I was wrong. They were so quiet I thought maybe, did they all go to sleep, man, or what? So I can’t tell whether, or maybe they were just listening well. I don’t know. But maybe I should have tailored it a little more to like a seventeen-year-old, eighteen-year-old audience instead of trying to …  I don’t know, Alan, I really don’t know, but that doesn’t seem fruitful to me. That seems like a bankrupt thing to do, to try to guess your audience. I believe in a universal, or in a common ground.

FOX:  Do you ever teach writing?

LEE:  I tried that. I tried it a number of times, just enough times to come to the conclusion I can’t do it. It’s like sainthood. I don’t even have a little bit of a saint in me. [Fox laughs] You go in, you open a vein and sometimes the student catches it in a bucket or a cup or a thimble or they don’t catch it at all and you’re bleeding all over the floor. But that’s what it felt like to me. It felt like, I don’t know, it is an incredible service that one is doing and I wasn’t, what am I admitting? That I’m too stingy of spirit to do it? But that’s can’t be true, because not everybody is meant to be a teacher, right?

FOX:  Absolutely, but look at it from the other point of view. What has helped you the most in terms of learning from others?

LEE:  I think being around poets helped me a lot. Being around them, seeing how they function in the world. For the most part, I would say how they somehow embody the condition of that all in a world that isn’t completely friendly to that condition. So the poets that I have always loved, who are living poets that I’ve loved and been around their presence, their presence has taught me so much about poetry. They way they react to things, the way they see things, they way they are.

FOX:  Who are some of your favorite poets?

LEE:  I guess ones that come to mind, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, John Logan, Hayden Carruth, there are so many of them. Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly, Robert Frost, Lee Bai, Du Fu, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Michael Palmer, Allen Grossman, boy, we’re living in a such good time. There are so many great poets. I think we’re living in a really special time. There are more and more poets. Somebody told that there are more poets now in North America than there ever has been in the whole world. And I thought, wow, that’s a lot. That’s really wonderful.

FOX:  Do you find that there are cultural differences in the writing or response to poetry in the United States in comparison with other cultures, other countries?

LEE:  I was in Indonesia and I saw this crazy poet. Boy, their idea of a poetry reading was very different than our idea. He had an ax hanging from the ceiling of this place we were in and the ax was swinging back and forth, just missing him. He was ducking and he was chanting and shouting these poems. And I thought, wow, that is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was an ax head, it wasn’t the ax, and it would sometimes stop and he would swing it again and it was just swinging around. He was drinking, had a bottle of beer that he broke, and he was lacerating himself with the broken bottle, and chanting poems, and he was in some sort of weird trance. I couldn’t tell whether it was theatrics or real, but the other people seemed to me like they were in this trance with him, they were really into it, and shouting, and clapping, and responding gutturally, grunting when he was, and so I thought that was kind of interesting. But there must be some sort of cultural background for that, right? If we did that in this country, it would be just…sensationalism?

FOX:  Probably.

LEE:  So I guess it’s just different, and I’ve noticed in Indonesia the kind of possessed quality of poetry had not gone out of favor yet. I think maybe in North America or in Eurocentric countries we are suspicious of that, if somebody believes that poetry is a form of possession by higher powers. I happen to believe that it’s the all speaking through the singular one so I’m all into that.

FOX:  Do you think that over the past 20 or 30 or 40 years poetry in the United States has become more popular, less popular?

LEE:  I think it’s more popular. There are more poets writing, more books published, more magazines, more MFA programs. I guess there might be a downside, and I sometimes think the downside could be when we forget that it’s ultimately about spirit, or it’s ultimately about soul, and we think it’s about other things. The upside would be it’s a sign of our evolution as human beings. In my most hopeful moments, I think it could be that it’s ultimately a sign of our evolving.

FOX:  Do you think that writing of poetry can be taught?

LEE:  Taught? I suppose. I hope so. I feel as if I’m teaching myself. Can it be taught? Maybe, not taught from the outside. It can be taught, I think, as a road to the interior. I think it can be taught that way, but I don’t think it can be taught like this writing scheme or this meter, or something like that.

FOX:  What suggestions do you have for a new poetry writer?

LEE:  Boy, I feel like a new poetry writer, Alan, so I don’t know. I guess, just keep doing it, believe in yourself, remind yourself. It’s the deepest thing you’re probably doing. Well, that’s not true. I mean, there are deeper things, such as raising children. Just remind yourself of that and keep believing in what you’re doing.

FOX:  Do you like to hang out with poets?

LEE:  I do. Some of the poets I mentioned, I love being in their presence. They always teach me to be more expansive, more welcoming, more accepting, compassionate. Maybe I’ve been lucky because I’ve heard the other thing, too. I’ve heard poets are terrible, they’re stingy and they’re self-aggrandizing, but that hasn’t been my experience. The poets I’ve known have all been extremely capacious in their emotional range, in their acceptance, in what they love and what they’ll tolerate. Now those are the poets I’ve known, maybe I’m just lucky. So I love being around them, but I don’t get to be around them all the time because of my conditions of work and family and where I’m at. There aren’t that many in Chicago.

FOX:  You mentioned compassion. What’s the role of compassion in poetry?

LEE:  I’m almost embarrassed to talk about this stuff because it’s so murky. So I can’t even account for it. I feel as if it weren’t for poetry I would be a worse human being than I am even right now. I know I’m pretty bad in so many ways, but I can remember the day when I discovered not just reading poetry, the idea of writing it—reading it I appreciated it and this and that—but the moment I started writing it I started to think, well, wait a minute, I have to change. In order to write these poems that I love so much, in order to write like, for instance, Emily Dickinson, I thought I’d have to change, because I don’t think what she’s doing is a technical issue at all, I think it’s about her being. [Fox murmurs agreement] And for me to write like that, I would have to get to that place, that complete openness and self-acceptance and self-forgiveness that’s going on. I know there’s a lot of pain in those poems but she’s willing to forgive what she’s doing in those poems, that is, be irrational, to defy probability, all that stuff. I never thought for a second it was some sort of technical device she was doing. I thought, well, okay, I’d have to be that, how do I be that, how do I get there? Or when I read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, I would think, that sort of appreciation for existence? I don’t think that’s a technical device. I think, how do I reach that place in order to write like that? In order to earn the authority to say that? So I thought, I have to change.

FOX:  Wonderful insight. So what did you do when you had this realization?

LEE:  I don’t know. I just started thinking about why. It made me more self-reflective, noticing how I’m not consistent with what it is I’m saying or whether somehow my saying, the poems somehow live ahead of me because they’re a paradigm for what I want to be, they’re a paradigm for the consciousness or the love or the compassion or the tenderness that I want to embody. If I read a Roethke poem, the tenderness he has for the natural world, I feel like I would have to ask myself, well, how do I get to that place, to be that tender? Unless I believe, which would really just feel nauseating to me to think, well, how do I effect that device? I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in how do I make my heart like that. But see, and I know Roethke was a real asshole, that’s what I’ve heard, I don’t know. Or John Logan, I was just reading his poems, and I know a lot of people think he’s sentimental and overwrought—I don’t. I feel he’s tender and I think he’s a master of the line. I just ask myself, how do I get to that place, to be able to say those things with authority. And I don’t know how. So I guess maybe making the poem is self-making. But I think Yeats said that. He said, “I’m not making the poem only, I’m making myself.”

FOX:  That’s a very interesting way of looking at it. I think that, for myself, when I was young I wanted to fake it better, have something—I remember a speech in high school and my instructor said, “Why’d you write this speech? It’s not to entertain, it’s not to educate, it seems to me you wrote something just to impress people, and it’s hollow.” I think that to be a really good writer you have to access yourself in a true way.

LEE:  Yes. I think ultimately, Alan, what I’ve been trying to say so clumsily for this past hour is I don’t think the poem or the poetry is the final opus. I don’t think the work is the poem or book of poems or the novel or the painting. I think it’s the self and that the making of the art is a way toward that total presence that one is trying to achieve. And how do you do that? You can’t just go through the world and try to be. I think art is a viable path toward total presence.

FOX:  Yes.

LEE:  That took, what, three seconds to say. I should have said it in the beginning. I guess that’s what I feel, so that the total presence is the grail. The poem is not the grail. The poem is a kind of divination. You write a poem and you look it and you go, wow, I’m really dark today. And you say, why? And you look and you go, that’s a really incomplete unfair view of existence. And then you realize, oh, well then, you have to work through something. So I look at the poem as a kind of looking into the mirror. How do I look today? How does my soul look today? But then, of course, you have to have some sort of ideal as to what a total poem that manifests total presence, what that would look like. And I think we do have models of that.

FOX:  Such as?

LEE:  I would say certain great poems by Robert Frost, like “Directive,” “West Running Brook”—boy, that poem just breaks my heart every time I read it. That poem, “West Running Brook,” is just amazing. The need of being versed in country things, poems like that, that give you feeling of, an experience of total presence. Or even in Neruda’s poems, in “Residence on Earth,” even in their translations, somehow the presence gets translated. So for me it’s about presence. And so the work is not even the poem, the work is the self, without making too many claims on poetry.

FOX:  I think, poetry is—you used a good word—the mysterious.

LEE:  It really is.

FOX:  The process, the result, it’s very mysterious. I think it calls upon the poet to really look at himself or herself.

LEE:  Yes, and I think it’s ultimately a kind of alchemy, Alan, because I’ve been thinking that, even a metaphor, we could think of it as a literary device—that’s just so bankrupt to me, when I think about it that way. I literally feel when I think of it as a literary device, it just feels nauseating to me. But when I realize that ultimately what a metaphor does is it marries two seemingly incompatible psychic contents. It marries them in an image that’s a metaphor, so it’s alchemical, right? You’re trying to happily integrate parts of your psyche that resist integration, maybe it’s feeling and thinking, but then you find an image and image is like a perfect marriage of thinking and feeling, right? Whereas a statement would be all thinking. Do you know what I mean? But an image or a metaphor is that composite of thinking, feeling, everything married together. So it’s ultimately alchemical and I think that it’s good for us to do that with our own psychic energies, to marry them, to make them admit each other, to encounter each other, to integrate each other.

FOX:  Why do you write poetry instead of novels or short stories or something else?

LEE:  I have this theory, Alan. I notice, for instance, a poem is the scored human voice. Voice is speech and all speech is done with the exhaled breath. You can’t inhale and speak so you have to breathe out. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the exhaled breath is the dying breath. When we breathe in, our bodies are full of life, our muscles have real tone, our blood is full of oxygen, our bones actually get very compacted, they actually get harder. There’s some proof for this, and we feel full of life and very comfortable. And when we exhale, our bones get softer, our muscles lose their tone and it’s the dying breath. Now when we speak, we’re using that dying breath, so I think that gives writing a particularly tragic undertone, overtone, what’s the difference? What is undertone and overtone? Let me just use tragic color. Because what you’re doing is you’re using the dying breath, you’re inflecting or figuring your dying breath. The interesting part, though, is meaning gets born. The more you speak, the more meaning gets revealed so that meaning grows in opposite ratio to the vitality of the dying breath. So as meaning gets bigger, the breath gets less and less. Which seems to me a paradigm of life—that as we die the meaning of our lives gets born, and that seems tragic to me. There’s something melancholy about that thought, that meaning can’t even get made unless I expend the breath, right?

FOX:  Unless you die.

LEE:  Right. And so part of that is, I think, because one feels so sharply that one is engaging in one’s own death, one’s own dying, when you’re scoring the human speech, you try to ransom that breath, you try to make it count as much as possible by packing it with as much psychic content as possible. The language that most approaches that state is poetry. A sentence of poetry is more packed than any other form of speech, I think, with psychic content, emotional content, intellectual content, spiritual content, visceral content, because I think more than with any other form of speech, you’re more aware of the fact that I have to spend this breath to give birth to meaning. Robert Frost knew that. He said, “Well spent is kept.” Right? So you get to keep the meaning, but you have to spend the breath. Did that make any sense, Alan?

FOX:  I think so.

LEE:  I’ve been thinking about it and trying to find a clear way to articulate that.

FOX:  I think what you’re doing now is like the process of writing a poem.

LEE:  I’m also thinking there’s all these weird trajectories of force that go on when we write a line of speech or a sentence of speech because while vitality decreases meaning gets born and yet potential decreases, right? Because we go from a state of, the beginning of the line is pure potential, before you even put a word down you’re in a state of pure potential, but as the line proceeds, you close down, the potential is closed down. But then the poem keeps bringing your hand or your thinking back to the beginning of the line so it enacts this desire to return to pure potential all the time. Does this make sense, Stellasue, to you? You’re actually enacting in the writing of a poem the deepest laws that govern the universe. I don’t know why that should be a surprise, because ultimately if a poem is a paradigm of psyche and if psyche is a paradigm of cosmos, well then, it’s obvious, it would be that a poem would be a paradigm of the all, that seems obvious—so why is every time I think about it, it seems surprising or novel? I don’t know why that would be. So I think one writes poems because of that. You’re trying to ransom that dying breath. You just can’t stand the thought of death, so you try to pack everything in as much as possible.

FOX:  Would that have anything to do with the reason why many people have an aversion to poetry …

LEE:  Yes! Of course! They can’t stand that density, the total presence. It is too much. Why is it too much?

FOX:  Ah.

LEE:  I think this is a weird time we’re living in, Alan, because I’ve noticed, for instance, people’s reactions to certain words. We’re living in a time where the word “sincere” and I didn’t know this, is suddenly a bad thing. I don’t get it. I heard a poet say to me, “Oh, I hate sincerity.” And I thought, oh, what do you like? Insincerity? I don’t get it. [Fox laughs] What do they mean by that? And then I was talking to a poet and I said to her, “Well, for me, poetry is a form is disillusionment, right? It frees you of your illusions in order to uncover the condition of the all which we are constantly in the midst of.” And she said, “Well, I don’t like to be disillusioned.” Why? You want to be illusioned?” [Fox laughs loudly] I mean, Hollywood gives us illusions. People Magazine gives us illusions. TV gives us illusions. But I think art gives us reality. And the reality that’s uncovered is so rich. Maybe that’s what it is—it’s not only rich and beautiful but it’s terrifying, too. Because it’s so vast, it’s so limitless and so overwhelming, it’s overwhelming. So maybe we can’t stand abundance. We can’t stand abundance and so we keep making models of scarcity. I feel as if we keep living by models of scarcity. And I feel like somehow horizontal models are all based on scarcity. But I think vertical models are based on abundance. And maybe we can’t stand abundance. We can’t stand the fact that ultimately this condition of the allness is what is our real condition. And so we’d rather live, we don’t want to be disillusioned. I want to be disillusioned. When I first read the poets that I love, I thought, wow, you mean, this is real existence, this is somebody speaking truthfully about my own experience of the all. And I just don’t want to live in illusion. And yet I’m my own worst enemy. I do recognize that I keep creating little illusions I can function inside of.

FOX:  How would you say your work has evolved in the past ten or twenty years?

LEE:  Well, I hope it’s gotten better, deeper, truer.

FOX:  What would you consider to be better?

LEE:  [pausing] Fuller, fuller, more, the word that comes to mind is “naked,” less, less dressing, more the thing, the true speaking directly, what it is, is exactly my experience, less dressing, fuller, more differentiated and at the same time integrating more psychic contents. I hope the presence of the poems, the presence that those poems impart is fuller, deeper.

FOX:  And what would you like your work to be remembered for?

LEE:  Oh, man, I don’t know, just, I don’t know. I just want to write a good poem.

FOX:  Well, I think that’s a good spot to end at.

LEE:  I think I was rambling a lot, Alan, all over the place. I don’t know what I was …

FOX:  It was very interesting.

LEE:  Okay. I hope it wasn’t too weird, too [lost in Fox’s laughter] …

from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

Rattle Logo

March 1, 2013

INTERVIEW WITH PAUL DICKEYThey Say This Is How Death... by Paul Dickey
ON
THEY SAY THIS IS HOW DEATH CAME INTO THE WORLD

Mayapple Press
362 Chestnut Hill Rd
Woodstock, NY 12498
ISBN: 978-0932412-997
2011, 78 pp., $14.95

mayapplepress.com

The following interview was conducted over email by Rattle editor Timothy Green and Paul Dickey, author of They Say This Is How Death Came into the World.

Paul DickeyIn the 1970s, Paul Dickey published poetry in Kansas Quarterly, Karamu, Quartet, and Nimrod. After taking a hiatus while concentrating on family and a career in data processing, Dickey started to publish again in 2003. Since then, he has published poetry and fiction in about 100 literary journals, both print and online. His first poetry chapbook What Wisconsin Took was published by the Parallel Press in 2006. His poetry has been anthologized in An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2009) and Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry (Backwaters Press, 2007).

Dickey has an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University, Bloomington, and he studied writing poetry and fiction at Wichita State University in the 1970s, primarily with Bienvenido Santos. He is married and has three adult children, one grandson, and one granddaughter. Retired from his data processing career, he now teaches philosophy in Omaha, Nebraska at Metropolitan Community College.

They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in January, 2011. Diceky’s new book, Wires Over the Homeplace, will be published by Pinyon Publishing this fall.

__________

GREEN: They Say This Is How Death Came Into the World is broken into three sections—the first and third are prose poems, while the middle section is lineated and (mostly) free verse. Several of the prose poems seem to know they’re prose poems, including one built around a lesson plan on the subject. This question is obvious, but it’s something I’ve never fully worked out for myself: Why do some poems end up written in lines while others appear as verse? What’s the difference to you, and at what point do you realize whatever you’re working on is going to become one or the other?

DICKEY: Besides the usual things one says about verse vs. prose, my prose poems and lineated poems have fundamentally different psychological profiles. Although they both are primarily driven by metaphor, the prose poems are more comic, political even, absurdist, edgier. The lineated poems are more imagistic, “softer,” controlled, more inclined to stay close to home. The prose poems are more self-assured, will brazenly walk up to the mic and tell the reader, “You better listen up.” They are perhaps more educated, more interested in such things as philosophy and literature, but perhaps less so in the day-to-day life wherein we are merely human. The lineated poems are shyer, may be slow to speak up in the crowd. They tend to believe the reader will come to them eventually—if they are good. They just live their lives: take walks, do their jobs, take vacations, put together jigsaw puzzles. The most important thing to them is being human. Within the family, the prose poems and the others don’t really like each other that much. So most of my poems have to know pretty early who they are and on which side of the family feud they will be.

But of course some poems have trouble deciding who they want to grow up to be. Some try both lifestyles for a while, but eventually they will have to choose. Occasionally a rather maverick poem appears that threatens to challenge the binary bounds of Dickeyville and that can be an interesting time. The Einstein poem you rejected for Rattle recently is one that in many respects plays better in the sandbox with the lineated poems but demanded to shoot some baskets with his big brothers on the blacktop. So I let him to do that. At least for now. He may still change his mind though. And I fret myself that he is not street tough enough ultimately to be a prose poem.

Tim, I may not have answered your question. I suspect I am beginning to sound like a prose poem itself.

GREEN: It’s interesting that you mention that your prose and verse poems have different psychological profiles. I hadn’t noticed until you put it that way, but it fits very well with what I perceive as the central theme of the book—portrayed most starkly on the cover, where Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” is collaged with an image of the human heart in one corner, and Schrodinger’s wave equation in the other. Much of the book is a tug-of-war between reason and emotion, and as you write memorably in the title poem, “Everyone has their own salvation.” But I get the sense that in the end, reason wins for you. Is that how death came into the world? Or am I reading too much into the title?

DICKEY: That is quite perceptive of you, Tim. Yes, I think I wear that paradox on my sleeve all the time: reason vs. emotion. I am both a niggling, analytical thinker and probably a sentimental wimp. For the past few years, I have been trying to write a full-length play that I call John Stuart Mill’s Got the Blues with that as the central irony. In the history of science and philosophy, J. S. Mill was a dramatic embodiment of the conflict. If you ask my logic students, with the stringent (they of course call it “picky”) logical requirements I require of them, they cannot imagine that I am a poet in another life. O.K, yes, I believe, in its place, reason has to rule. I think Plato got that right. But that doesn’t mean it owns every place in our lives. So the trick is that every minute you have to know where you are.

As for the book, I don’t know if reason or emotion wins in most of the poems. I suspect emotion does. And that is probably the way it should end up in a book of poetry. Of course, poems are meant more to be doors to experience than logical arguments.

You asked about the title of the book. In the traditional Christian view, as I understand it, death “came into the world” because Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge which distracted them from the perfect and divine awareness and worship of God. Consequently, Adam and Eve become reasoning and emotional beings, but ones that would die. They began to live in the world that art and science occupy and where my poetry too is trying to exist. Poetry is knowledge. Perhaps as the knowledge that Galileo and Schrodinger were seeking with their reason and science. But how do we make sense of that? The title is saying that both human reason and human desire are bites from Eve’s apple and alas, we have been sentenced to death. But keep in mind, the title says this is only the Christian tradition, that is, “They Say.” Actually, who knows?

GREEN: Let’s talk about a specific poem. One of my favorite in the book is—not surprisingly— one of the ones that we published in Rattle, “A Man and a Flag Are One.” It’s always been one of those poems, though, that I’m never sure wheher or not I’m interpreting in the same way as the poet. To me, it’s one of the best “9/11” poems I’ve read—capturing the fear and paranoia and self-examination of that period in U.S. history for several years after the attack. And present still … I was driving home from the office a few weeks ago, and a tire on a cement truck exploded at 75 miles per hour in a shower of dust and debris. My immediate thought was, absurdly: Terrorists! That type of anxiety is perfectly captured in the shifting meaning of the figure on the roof described in that poem. And the fact that he’s “wrapped in a flag” has important implications, too. Did you intend for this poem to be about our psychological reaction to 9/11? And does your intention matter anyway? You have a few poems in the book that address that question, at least obliquely (“The Poem Doesn’t Even Know Where They Live” and “A Note to the Reader Who Has Come This Far” for two). Does a poem have to mean anything at all?

DICKEY: That’s an interesting take on the poem, Tim, but I can’t take credit for “intending” that. Actually, the poem was written before 9/11, but I am sure that the Oklahoma City bombing and the aftermath of that had something to do with it, although even that was unconscious. And so, yes, this brings up the intriguing paradox of meaning in poems. The meaning of a poem is no more the intention of the author as is the meaning of the constitution is the intentions of the framers (with all due respect to Mr. Scalia). Meaning definitely grows and changes over time in a text.

But I do think ultimately a poem has to mean something, or at least I would say, meaning has to be somewhere “in there” messing about. Bottom line, it is an invaluable tool to help us engage a poem if we don’t confuse ourselves and think it is something it isn’t. It is just that what we naively think usually as what must count for meaning is not always absolutely necessary to have meaning. In the philosophy of literature, of course, this is the domain of Hermeneutics. I love it when I can discuss this in my Intro to Philosophy class. Oh, the glorious problem of what constitutes the truth of a text.

Suffice it to say, I don’t write poems or read poems for some independent sense of “meaning” and I often don’t trust poets who do. That is typically a recipe for an over-written poem or a boorish discussion when explicating a poem. I am willing to let meaning float above the poem as in the case of the first poem you mentioned or, in the case of the second, be a character in the poem if that works. I do not want ever for (capital M) Meaning to be the defining embodiment of the poem. By the way, I am not afraid of writing nonsense, since I probably believe it is impossible to write nonsense if you are fully engaged with the poem, so often meaning takes care of itself if you write the right poem. Don’t ask me what is it to write the “right” poem though.

GREEN: Maybe because I’ve found that writing creatively came much more easily before I started working as an editor, I’m always interested in people who have made their careers outside of literature. I couldn’t help but notice that your publishing history includes a two decade gap where you worked in data processing. What exactly did you do in that field, and how do you find that it affects the way you engage in reading and writing poetry?

DICKEY: It was a pretty hum-drum data processing professional career. I started out as a programmer but evolved into what were more analytical roles. At times, I did various stints at various levels of management, but management was never really my interest or ambition. At other times, I functioned as a non-managerial “technical expert” on “emerging” technologies, such as microcomputers in the early 1980s, “expert systems” in the late 80s, and internet stock trading in the mid-90s. Eventually I functioned as a business/technical strategy advisor to executives at the Ameritrade Corporation.

Most of the impact of this career on my poetry was negative and not worth discussing. I wrote very little for twenty years. Even today, I feel that I have missed many opportunities over the years to enrich my writing through contacts with other writers and literary experiences. The only positive that I can imagine is that it gave me a liberty from a concern with career in the business world of poetry. I suspect there is some advantage not to be burdened to make decisions in regard to your writing based on practical concerns of making a living. That is, I may be a less conventional writer now since I didn’t have the opportunity to become conventional.

GREEN: Did you find it difficult to break back into writing and publishing after those 25 years? Your biographical note says that you resumed in 2003, and then the chapbook What Wisconsin Took appeared in 2006, and this full-length in 2011. That seems like a pretty good pace. Do you have any advice for those hoping to follow in your footsteps? How did They Say This find its way into Mayapple Press?

DICKEY: Is that fast? It seemed slow to me. But I had started writing all the time in 2003. I had retired and I started writing at such a frantic pace that soon it was natural again. As for publishing, it is much easier with all the online resources these days to find the places to publish. I probably started to send stuff out a little too early (as do most writers I think), but soon I started to get some acceptances and the quality of the magazines gradually improved. By the way, I started sending poems to you at Rattle in 2003 and you took one in my second batch the next year. This was my first “good” publication since 1980. I soon got an acceptance at Sentence and I was beginning to feel validated.

There’s no great guiding light in my publishing story. When I thought I had a chapbook manuscript, I entered some contests, actually was a finalist in some, but then I found Parallel Press, a project of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Library. I blindly sent them a manuscript and they took it. By the time that was published, I was nearing a full-length manuscript and so entered more contests but then found Mayapple Press online. I sent They Say to Judith Kerman as a blind submission during her advertised reading period. She liked it and offered to publish it.

Advice? Oh, I’m not sure. Actually, I’m a bit cantankerous and not all that sure I think it is ethically warranted always to encourage beginning or many wannabe writers. In many ways, we might be better off if we turned some of our wannabe writers into serious and committed readers. Tim, you’ve done research on this. Do we really now have more writers of poetry than poetry readers?  What if there were more people making pizzas than eating pizza? That couldn’t be a good thing, could it? In the end though, I know that writers will write and no one should tell them not to.

Did you say “follow in my footsteps?” God forbid. I guess the only thing I might say now to myself of 40 years ago would be to make sure you are doing what you love and are making your best choices for yourself and for those you love. Do what you do, but if you are a poet, don’t hide and run away from it, fess up and be a poet, regardless whatever else you are or need to be. You can work full-time at an insurance company, for example, and be a poet. For too much of my life, I wouldn’t give myself permission to be a poet.

GREEN: I don’t think it’s actually true that more people write than read poetry. It’s certainly closer to being true than it would be for any other form of art—far more people listen to music than play music; far more people enjoy paintings or movies or novels than make them. Poetry is a conversation, and it’s easy to be drawn in to a conversation—but in almost every case, I think, it’s reading first that drew them. Anyway, it’s interesting that you say you weren’t giving yourself permission to be a poet. There was a moment for me, as a senior molecular biology major reading Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance of all things, when I realized that a career in poetry was worth pursuing. It’s not going to cure cancer, but all art is a bulwark against something much more insidious. Was there a moment like that for you?

DICKEY: Actually, it wasn’t for me coming to realize that poetry was a worthy objective, but more that I personally could have the gall to call myself a poet. Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet. Wallace Stevens was a poet. Dylan Thomas was a poet. Paul Dickey? As an undergraduate, I had totally absorbed Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and had bought into that grandiose and romantic notion of a poet as being someone nearly divine. And that, ironically perhaps, may be what kept me intimidated and away from poetry for so long but then ultimately compelled me to come back almost as if I had never left it.

GREEN: Now that you do have permission to be a poet, I see that you have a second book forthcoming in the fall (they say the second’s always the hardest). Tell us a little about Wires Over the Homeplace.

DICKEY: After the publication of They Say, I inventoried what poems I had lying about and found that what I had seemed to backtrack some from the dominant prose poems of They Say. They were lineated poems mostly like we discussed before. They are poems that are heavily saturated with place—both in terms of heritage and physical geography. They are mostly located in the Midwest Plains region—Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

At about this time, I became acquainted with a Brooklyn visual artist, Mr. Ira Joel Haber, when we collaborated on a broadside for Elizabeth Bradfield at Broadsided.org. Studying Mr. Haber’s portfolio convinced me that a collaboration of my poetry and his art could work together (with some engaging conflict due to our different geographical homes) and create a stronger unit than perhaps the batch of poems achieved on their own. Thus, I asked Mr. Haber if he would be interested in a collaboration. He agreed enthusiastically and I set to work putting together Wires—selecting a drawing, collage, or photo of Mr. Haber’s that enlightened or meaningfully (did I say meaning?) contrasted with each of my poems.

Some of our work together was published online and we submitted the manuscript to Gary Entsminger at Pinyon Publishing. Ultimately Gary decided that a book including that much art would be too expensive to print but he offered to publish the book as a volume of poems. I have to thank Mr. Haber for encouraging me to take advantage of Gary’s offer to publish with the poetry only, although we both would have preferred to see the poetry and art together.

GREEN: Thanks, Paul, this has been fun.

 

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February 12, 2013

Diesel City by Stefan

INTERVIEW WITH STEFAN
ON
DIESEL CITY

Louisiane Editions
ISBN: 978-2-918995-12-8
2012, 200 pp., $40.00
www.dieselcity.fr/en/

The following interview was conducted over email by Rattle editor Timothy Green and Stefan, artist and author of Diesel City, an artist’s guidebook through hundreds of his original illustrations. We were excited to feature six images from Diesel City in Rattle #38, including the cover and background image now featured on this website, and wanted to learn more about Stefan and his work.

Stefan is a professional artist and author living in Paris, France. Heavily inspired by the pop culture of the 1930s and 1940s, Stefan has created several books and countless illustrations in his unique dieselpunk style. By combining motifs ranging from Film Noir and Art Deco to classic advertising and Totalitarian art, his groundbreaking work in the retrofuturist community bridges the gap between history and fantasy. This impressive portfolio is finally available for the first time in Diesel City, a tale years in the making. Stefan is also the art director of various films. He is currently working on HEMERAPOLIS, a short movie by French director Jean Dellac, based on a novel by Jules Verne.

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GREEN:  When I first stumbled across your work, what drew me in was the grittiness of its irreality. So much of science fiction art seems filled with “stainless enthusiasm,” as you put it in the book. It feels too clean to be real. But Diesel City is a tangibly dirty place. In the notes to the book, you write that the motto of the genre is: “Dieselpunk, because Steampunk wasn’t dirty enough.” Can you explain how the Dieselpunk movement arose, and what drew your art in that direction?

STEFAN: Paris by StefanWell, some say Dieselpunk stemmed from Steampunk, which supposedly branched off Goth style itself, which derived from… All this is, in my opinion, just local quarrels. It’s true, indeed, that there is some chronology to this, since Steampunk draws its inspiration from the Victorian-Edwardian era, the late 19th-early 20th century, when Dieselpunk finds its own sources of inspiration in the Interbellum era  (1918 – 1939) technology, aesthetic, arts—even politics and sociology. In other words, Dieselpunk is the chronologically following genre. Except that we’re not talking “real” history here, but alternate history.

This most convenient classification is probably part of the reason why the ironic motto links the two genres to each other. Both “subcultures”—to use the official term—have their own aficionados, but many of them have an interest in both genres. Both Steampunk and Dieselpunk, along with some other sub-genres, belong to the Retrofuturist movement, anyway. As for me, just as Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was speaking in prose unbeknownst to himself, I found out someday I was “doing Dieselpunk stuff” for many years and didn’t even know it. The Interbellum era has always been very inspirational to me, to say the least and most of my graphic work is related to the mid-century styles in one way or another. Imagine how delighted I was when I realized there was a whole community around with the same interests, very active and creative.

GREEN: You also refer to that motto as “self-derisive,” and I get the impression throughout that Diesel City is balancing on a line between the serious and the tongue-in-cheek. This is a world where “Celestial Palaces, Ltd.” builds resort hotels on asteroids, only to have them become lost in space, and where global warming is seen as “a beautiful special effect.” But there’s also plenty of commentary on war and illusion and consumerism in our own contemporary dystopia. How can a work be somber and playful at the same time, and what do you gain by creating a world that is both?

STEFAN: These are the two faces of the same coin, the key to understanding these complex, immensely rich and productive two decades from which our whole modern world is derived. The main characteristic of the Interbellum era—and probably what makes it so dense and inspirational—is this ambivalence, the simultaneous joie de vivre, the faith in progress and future, and the dark perspectives on its horizon. The ’20s and the ’30s were the time for Art Deco and Streamline, for modern art and women’s liberation; they’ve seen the jazz age and the birth of consumerism, but these same decades were also heavily darkened by the Great Depression in the U.S., subsequent financial crises everywhere, the raising of nationalism, totalitarism, and dictature in all major European countries and, of course, the terrible threat of another world war ahead—something the whole Western civilization had so hoped not to ever see again after WWI. From an intellectual, artistic point of view, I’ve always thought this previously unseen, weird association of such opposite moods, with its crescendo spanning over these two decades to finally reach a dramatic, tragic climax, generated a thrilling combination that can be endlessly translated in many ways in literature, visual arts, etc. It actually never ceases to be used as a  background in films, books, video games, etc. up to nowadays, for the best or for the worse.

GREEN: Diesel City is an art book, but it’s also full of poetry. Each page includes what might be described as a prose poem that helps to guide us through this alternate reality. And it’s full of great lines. Of the Megalopolis you write: “You can visit the big city, but you can never approach it.”  On a propaganda campaign: “…war is human nature, they’re killing you to say.” Did you write all of this yourself, both in French and in English? I imagine all of the illustrations were created first—what were you trying to accomplish with the prose?

STEFAN: I’m by no means a writer, I hasten to say—and that makes the honor of being featured in Rattle even greater to me—but yes, I wrote these prose poems myself , as you are kind enough to call them. I first wrote them in French and did the best translation I could. And that is when I’ve been very lucky. Tome Wilson, one of the leading voices of the Dieselpunk genre and the owner of the Dieselpunks website (www.dieselpunks.org), the epicenter of everything Dieselpunk on the Internet, kindly agreed to adapt my own very awkward text for the English version of Diesel City. What more could I ask for, really? If someone could ever grab the feel of Diesel City, that was certainly Tome. Tome faithfully stuck to the original dark mood of the book, but brought in it his own sensitivity, too. He also did a wonderful job about the notes of the books, bringing into them his extensive knowledge of the Dieselpunk culture, thus turning something that usually nobody reads into a precious resource about the art and technology of the Interbellum. The illustrations were created first indeed, but I wanted these short prose poems to somehow bring the pictures to life and link them together into some sort of narration, although not a linear one, guiding the viewer/reader throughout this hypnotic dive into the dystopian universe of Diesel City.

GREEN: Is there anything you can tell us about your creative process?  Where do you find inspiration? Do you view this world as a real place in your mind, with a history and full storylines, or does each image come to you as a snapshot? There must be well over 100 illustrations in the book. Do you draw from any source material?

STEFAN: Like I said, most of my graphic work, if not all, is inspired by and/or related to the Interbellum. I’m lucky enough to live in Paris, where many places still retain that pre-WWII flavor but, most of all, where countless exhibitions, museums, libraries are available, offering virtually endless resources about what these two decades were made of: architecture, furniture, painting, sculpture, fashion and much more.

With such a monolithic, narrowly focused source of inspiration, quite naturally, all my pictures have a lot in common. They somehow can be seen as a whole. This gave birth to the idea of some imaginary universe stuck in what I’m used to calling my own personal “twisted forties,” a place in some alternate timeline, a city encapsulating and exacerbating all the ambivalence of the era, its aesthetic, political, technological specificities, as complete as possible. Diesel City includes a rather huge amount of images, indeed, some from a few years ago, some more recent. It was a challenge to gather all this material in just one book and that is where the texts helped a lot. It was also a challenge—it always is for a graphic designer, a writer, a musician, I guess—to get back to some work done a few years ago but, all in all, I’ve been happy to realize all this; the recent work and the not so recent, was quite consistent. I believe we’ve achieved something coherent.

From a technical point of view, all my work is computer generated for several years, now. Over the past years, I’ve become more and more reluctant to use traditional media anymore—shame on me—and also, computers and graphic software offer such endless possibilities nowadays, thus gaining the status of a “real,” respectable media, that it’s almost impossible for a graphic designer not to be tempted. My images are a combination in varying proportions of vintage photographic elements, “traditional” digital graphism, if such a thing exists and 3D. I’ve found that the digital media, thank to this combination, is best offering to me the ability to almost tangibly bridge the gap between past, present and future inside one graphic work.

That is also the idea the quite sophisticated layout of the pages in Diesel City tries to visually convey, to materialize. In each page, illustrations blend with original vintage photographs in the background and the short texts, each of them overlapping the other, thus blurring the line between reality and fiction and somehow forcing the reader to go through a first evident level of reality to access a different timeline behind. Things hidden behind things. I guess this is the idea in my entire graphic creation process and, since Diesel City, in my modest attempt at writing, too. That is also the manifesto the subtitle of the book pretends to express. “Fiction Reveals Truths That Reality Obscures.”

GREEN: What’s next for Diesel City? I noticed on the back flap that we should be on the lookout for a sequel, Silent Empire. Is there anything you can tell us about the next book?

STEFAN: Silent Empire is definitely more of a prequel to Diesel City than a sequel. It is the heart and foundation of this above-mentioned concept of a city-universe trapped in some alternate reality Diesel City gives a visual representation of, captioned with the prose poems.

Both the aimed goal and the creation process of Silent Empire and Diesel City are completely different. Silent Empire will—hopefully—be an illustrated book, some sort of graphic novel including many illustrations but also a “real” plot, whereas Diesel City is mostly an art book. As for the writing, a very talented writer, Bard Constantine (bardconstantine.jimdo.com) is currently busy putting the finishing touches to the story in Silent Empire. I’ll have to translate it in French then, thus inverting the creation process of Diesel City. It will be my turn to be faithful to Bard’s very dense story. A new, very exciting experience to me. Finally, of course, will come the illustrations step, something I’m definitely much more comfortable with. Bard Constantine is a published author himself and also a poet, which gives a special tone to his writing. Not to mention that it’s a tough task to give words to a Silent Empire… I can’t wait to see the final result, really.

Voyage by Stefan

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For more information:

Take a trip to Diesel City yourself, and view the video trailer, browse the gallery, and read excerpts at the book’s official website (www.dieselcity.fr). More of Stefan’s work, including recent illustrations, can be viewed at his Deviant Art page (stefanparis.deviantart.com).

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