Conversations

June 19, 2012

from A Conversation with Chase TwichellPosted by


from A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CHASE TWICHELL AND ALAN FOX, IN STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA, APRIL 30TH, 2011

[Note: The following excerpt is from a 20-page conversation, which appears in full in Rattle #36.]

FOX: When you talk about “not two,” that reminds me, I read Alan Watts years ago and he had the concept that everything in the universe is part of God and God is deliberately forgotten, so you and I and Daveen and the gumballs are all part of the same thing. And I went around for three weeks remembering that.

TWICHELL: That’s kind of the essence of Zen, in a way, what they call the Diamond Net of Indra, which is that everything is connected to everything as if we’re a giant web or net of mesh. So whatever I do affects everything else, maybe just in a tiny, tiny little way, or maybe in a way that reverberates for quite a while. I’ve also been thinking a lot about karma and what that really means. People—in fact I’m going to be studying it in a couple of months with one of the teachers at my monastery, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, who is a wonderful teacher. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what karma means, and I always grew up thinking it was a kind of fatalism—if you had bad karma that meant that in one of your past lives you did something bad and now you’re paying for it. And I think a lot of people misunderstand it in that same way, but I don’t see that now at all. I think of it more as a moment-to-moment kind of a thing, that everything you do creates karma, and therefore everything you do affects the future in ways you can’t even anticipate; it affects you, it affects those that you affect and it affects those that they affect, and it spreads out. And very often the karma that’s operating right now may be from something that’s historical in your own life, like being pissed off at your mother since you were one, whatever it is, that has built and you built on it and it’s become more and more fixed as part of your bedrock. Or it might be something like a momentary flicker of irritation, which is a form of anger, one of the three big no-nos. [laughs] And if you see it in that way, it’s a kind of continuous metaphor; it’s about taking responsibility for everything that’s brought you to this point right here right now and everything you do right here right now that affects everything that’s going to happen in the future. And so it’s basically the responsibility of being one cell in a multi-celled organism. What you do may not affect the thing that’s on the other side of the room in any way that you can perceive at the moment but in some subtle way it does affect it. And you also are being affected by everybody else’s karma.

FOX: Absolutely. I agree with that. To me, the one thing in Buddhism which really appeals to me is letting go of an investment in outcome.

TWICHELL: Yes.

FOX: And paying attention to process, because what is life but process?

TWICHELL: Yeah, exactly. One of the things my teacher said—so many things my teacher—who is Konrad Ryushin Marchaj; he’s the Abbott of Zen Mountain Monastery, and Shugen Sensei is the other Abbott—more on the history of that in a minute if you want to hear it—but some of the things he says seem to me so obvious when he says them but I’ve never articulated them for myself before. And one of them is the whole idea about what it means to be wholly present, to be fully awake. He basically said “You can’t live in the past.” That’s obvious, of course, but most of us try to do exactly that. I mean, you can pretend to and reenact it by going back into memory and spending time there, berating yourself for things you should have done, pumping yourself up for things you did that you’re glad you did. And you can’t live in the future either because that’s still Fantasy Land; it’s not here yet. So the only chance we actually have—the only life we actually have that we can reach and be present in is the present. And so whatever time we spend in the past or the future, we are not spending in the only place where we can actually be fully awake, and that’s why it’s so important to be fully awake right now.

FOX: You bet.

TWICHELL: But most people distract themselves all the time. If you’ve ever sat, as you clearly have, and done any form of meditation, the idea of bringing your attention back to your breath all the time—you see how difficult it is to do that, to simply place your concentration on what’s happening in your chest, in your body, the immediate sensations. I’ve been sitting fairly seriously for 15 years and I still sit down and, “Oops, I’m making the shopping list,” “Oops, I’m still mad about something my sister said yesterday on the phone, back to the breath.” And constantly the mind just wants to get away, wants to go off in another direction, and to keep pulling it back is a way of developing what we call in Zen, joriki, which is a kind of profound, concentrated attention. It’s all about learning to concentrate your attention so you can place it where you want instead of just having it be diffracted all over the place like having six radio stations on. So that has taught me a huge amount just about how my own consciousness works, which is something that poets of course have to think about, in a very practical way.

FOX: How do you use that in your writing?

TWICHELL: Well, for one thing I’m less and less interested in narrative. Not that I was ever a narrative poet but when I read poems now that want to tell a story I get impatient with them because it seems to me that a story in something that takes place in time. It’s linear, it has to do with a sequence of things, it has to do with cause and effect, so in that way it has to do with karma. A poem that tells a story seems to be an organization imposed on the material by the mind in a way that tidies it up and makes sense of it in a way that takes me away from the immediacy of noticing first one thing and noticing another and trusting what you might call—I don’t know how to describe it but the imagination or the capacity that we have to make a leap from Point A to Point B without a literal explanation for it. And it seems to me that narrative sometimes makes a fence and says, “Don’t look over there, just hold my hand and I’m going to take you through it.” And your mind no longer has to make those sidelong movements in order to experience the whole thing. So I’ve always been much more drawn to lyric poetry than to narrative, but on the other hand I’m really interested in meditation, poems that are meditations, because it seems to me that what meditation does is track the way the mind moves and if a meditation is really genuine it allows in a poem for moments when you say, “Oh, no, wait, that’s not quite right, it’s really more like this.” And I’m much more interested in a poem that has that kind of motion in it, that kind of, “Oh, wait, that could be an error, let me try this path instead,” because it shows how the mind moves, not just from logical point to logical point to logical point but in a kind of three dimensional world in which things are held together by different kinds of glue than just logic. And so a meditation that sets out to convince me of something I’m much less likely to be moved by than one that thinks its way along and makes a discovery. And the point of the poem, or the point of arrival of a poem, is a discovery that gets made almost by mistake—somebody left a door open and an animal came in. Wow, that’s exciting when that happens in a poem.

FOX: Is what you’re talking about essence, rather than peripheral stuff?

TWICHELL: I think it is dealing with essence, but how do you get to essence? I mean, how do you write essence? You have to use language, which is the only thing that we poets have—of course, music, we have to include music, and timing, and all that stuff; that’s all part of language. But I think— I was at Claremont Graduate University the other day and Robert Pinsky was talking about poetry, and in a way he was talking about what makes poems immortal and how a lot of what we read is not immortal but somehow there’s a way you recognize it. When you come across something that’s a great poem, you recognize it, and it’s not because it has a tag on its ear that says, “I’m a great poem.” There’s something we recognize. So I was thinking about that and thinking about, what is it that we recognize? And I would call it essence, or something like that, that is identifiable across the centuries, so that when you read a poem that was written on a cave wall, let’s say, or see an antelope with a spear in its side that was on a cave wall, you recognize that as something that is essentially human; it’s of the essence of being human. And the same thing can happen nowadays, in a world that has space travel and nuclear reactors and all this crazy stuff—there will be art that comes directly out of our time where we also recognize that. And it’s not because that thing, that place…if I could make the metaphor that the essence is a kind of space or place, it’s not that it persists and is immortal; it’s that humans can visit that place and revisit it and revisit it across centuries that makes it immortal. It’s not the human being that’s immortal, it’s the human experience that is.

FOX: Yes. When I studied poetry writing with Jack Grapes—local poet, very fine teacher—he insisted that simple language was important—not the 15 syllable words.

TWICHELL: I agree with him—

FOX: —and I questioned him; I said, “Well, come on, the poetry written a thousand years ago that we still read, is it simple?” He said, “Absolutely.”

TWICHELL: It is. It is. The poems that, to me, are the most important—I love the ancient Chinese and Japanese work. Those poems are so lean and with nothing extraneous about them. They’re like arrows; there’s nothing attached to them to get in the way of their flight. One of the things I’ve had to deal with in my own work is my early love of language and all the flourishes and beauties of description. It was very seductive to spend five lines describing the snowy woods because I thought they were so beautiful and if I could just get that right in the poem…and I look at those poems now and I think, “Okay, there’s a dozen beautiful lines of description, but what are they there for? What are they doing in the poem?” And sometimes they are doing something other than just being window dressing but sometimes they’re not. And so I have a very low tolerance for decoration in poems. And some people love it; they want to read pages and pages of how the everglades look in a storm and so on and so forth. But I increasingly am of the school or the belief that we don’t have very much time and poems should do their work fast and get out.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011

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February 26, 2012

from A Conversation with Brian TurnerPosted by

from A CONVERSATION WITH BRIAN TURNER

[…]

FOX: What were some highlights of your military career?

TURNER: Um…well, there’s funny things, and there are difficult things, but…highlights. One thing is very difficult to explain but was very fun. I just don’t know if I can describe it as fun as it was, make it as exciting as it was. We were training in Fort Louis, Washington, and it was force on force. We have blanks, we’re not shooting real bullets at each other, and there’s about 3,000 soldiers in the woods all around. Helicopters flying over. It’s in a large area of the base, it’s a big base, and so I know there are troops off in the distance, as when I was seven and I thought about the war from a distance, where people are. You can hear parts of little battles off in the distance, some skirmishes, that kind of thing. I know there’s a city, a fake mock city, that we’re working our way down to. It’ll take three or four hours; we’ll probably hit it by dawn. We’re one of the main assault forces. It’s raining because it’s Fort Lewis and it’s near Seattle. With the night vision goggles, and there’s a lot of ambient light in there anyway, the trees looked amazing. There was just a beauty to the trees in the rain in the predawn darkness. And I could see a long line of soldiers in front of me and whenever I turned around I could see the same long line behind me, hundreds of us just sort of slowly spaced out, fifteen feet apart, walking towards this city we’re going to attack.

And then there was a first sergeant up ahead on the side of the—there was a dirt road we were on, and then there was a slope to our left that pitched dramatically down to where the city was down below, hundreds and hundreds of feet. It’s not a cliff but it’s this bank, and because of the rain it’s very muddy and slippery, which is exactly what I found, because so many people had gone before me—the first sergeant would say, he would point to people to go, this was the path that you had to take, and because so many had done it, they’d worn basically a mudslide into the ground. So as soon as you walked off the edge where you were and went down the slope, then, within ten feet, you couldn’t continue to walk, you had to basically lean back on your backside and just put your feet up in the air and hold your weapon up high and then slide down this mountainside. And it seemed to go forever. I was enjoying it but then it kept going and it was like, wow, this is even more fun than I thought it would be. So I had about 15 seconds of just childish joy.

So that’s one of the highlights. Other highlights were getting promoted from a soldier to a sergeant, that was a highlight, because there’s a thing they do where they put your rank on your shoulder and collar, and they’re not supposed to do this, though most soldiers wouldn’t want to get promoted the way you’re supposed to. Basically what they do is, the metal insignia has two—it’s like an earring kind of thing that has two posts with points and there’s a little metal clasp backing on them which you take off and you just put them in and then the person who comes up to promote you takes two fists and just slams them into your chest to basically scar you with your rank. And then there’s a line of people that come up to do the same thing and you’re supposed to not fall back. They’ll come up and hit you really hard and it’s this rite of passage. That was a highlight. I know it’s odd, but it was a highlight, because there’s a certain pride in becoming part of that group.

FOX: How was the experience of being a sergeant?

TURNER: It was good and bad. Mostly because I was good and bad. I was okay as a sergeant, I wasn’t great. I did my best, but there were guys around me I saw and thought “Wow, that guy’s really good at being a sergeant.” We had one in our squad that was my colleague. He had great natural instincts and he could react very quickly so I just learned to pay attention to what he was doing and try to follow suit.

FOX: Were you afraid of getting killed?

TURNER: Yeah, pretty much every day. Or maimed or something. And I was also afraid that one of my guys would be. Because my whole goal wasn’t about freedom or democracy or anything, my actual stated goal in my mind—I don’t think I ever told them this—was to bring them back home safe in body and mind as much as possible. I was able to do the first, I’m not sure about the second.

FOX: That’s one of the later costs of war, people who fought and come back maimed or mentally disturbed.

TURNER: But if they don’t come back with some baggage, they’re probably sociopaths to begin with. I mean, to go to war and come back normal…I don’t know, there’s some kind of psychic disconnect; that just doesn’t make sense.

FOX: It seems to me that with rare exception there must be a war going on in this world all the time. Why do we do that?

TURNER: I don’t know. I heard some story, and I forget who this story was by, but that he calculated in recorded history that there were 29 years of recorded peace. I dispute that—I doubt there’s been a complete year of peace. We are a tribe, and we seem to send one part of the tribe off—the warrior class—once every generation. And then other times, because it’s a big business here in America, and we have our hands in so many pockets around the world, but in a large-scale way, it seems like once in every generation we have to send them off. Maybe I’m going too far off course, but it just seems like it’s connected for me in a commercial way—business. You can look at our budget and see how much is involved with the Pentagon, and know that in order to stay healthy in terms of budget we have to continually feed that. You can’t just have a car sitting in the garage for 40 years and never drive it; that’s what the car is for, to be driven. And then psychologically it goes back to what we first started talking about, that when I was a little seven-year-old kid, in order to be part of the tribe that I knew and that I revered—my grandfather, my uncles, my dad—I would have to do something like them; I would have to go off to a difficult place and come back, to have that rite of passage, to be part of the tribe. I think it’s some deep psychological thing that’s really hard to articulate or even to recognize but I think that’s in there. Because on the surface, when people ask me, “Why’d you join the army?” I’ll say, “Oh, to help pay back my college loans; my wife and I were recently married so we needed a house and stuff,” and all these practical things are true, but there are other jobs I could’ve got. I didn’t have to join the army; there was a deeper reason for doing that.

FOX: In that experience, what did you learn in terms of your poetry?

TURNER: Well, I didn’t expect to write poems while I was there. So I wrote here and a little bit while I was there, but the poems I’d written before were very—the ones before were more musical and longer lines, very lush music. I was concentrating on the music, and whatever subject I had in front of me I would impose the musical line that I wanted or that I was trying to learn how to write on top of it. So I might be writing about labor, I might be writing about love, or history, and then you’d see a similar line with each. And then when I went to Iraq I didn’t expect to write poems because it goes back to the fear—I was afraid of getting killed or wounded, so I was thinking more about that. But I did have notebooks I took with me, just college-ruled, 70-, 100-page notebooks, and I was writing diary entries, and then eventually—I think very quickly; I have to go back and look at my diaries, maybe 30 days in, 3 weeks, a month, I started writing poems. And now—and I think this gets to the heart of your question—if I look at those poems, what I see are poems that are very different, even in the lineation of the line itself and the way they look at the subject. It’s as if the subject is speaking more on the page rather than the author superimposing music over the subject. So I was learning to listen more to where I was rather than just using where I was as a vehicle to get to something else that I want to get to.

[…]

—from Rattle #35 Summer 2011

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December 29, 2011

from A Conversation with B.H. FairchildPosted by

from A CONVERSATION WITH B.H. FAIRCHILD

[…]

FOX: What would you say is the difference between poetry and prose? Many of your poems look like prose…

FAIRCHILD: Well, I hope they don’t sound like prose. It is true that I have written prose poems. I wouldn’t like to think that my poem poems are prose, although there’s a big difference between fictional prose and expository prose. Poetry does overlap with fictional prose. For instance, in Melville’s Moby Dick, there are large swatches of Shakespearian blank verse and you find when prose is raised to a certain level that it takes on the quality of poetry. There’s a great novel by James Agee called A Death in the Family which has a preface to it which is about as close as ordinary prose can get to poetry and if you wanted to call it poetry it would be fine. But the distinction is not between poetry and creative fictional prose, because they do overlap. The distinction is between poetry and expository prose. And expository prose is 99.999 percent of our lives; that’s the prose of magazines, of newspapers, and certainly if you’ve read legal prose, that’s one of the purest examples of completely referential expository prose.

FOX: Good point.

FAIRCHILD: The mode, the function, of that kind of prose—and again this dominates our life almost completely—is aboutness. In all of it, the function is to explain about something. And if we didn’t have that means of communication, in fact, we’d still be living in caves, but still, a lot of people are just surprised to think that language could have any function other than being about something. But sometimes—well, like me; when I was a boy, I began to think that there was something missing there. You could read Scientific American and it would explain String Theory but it was talking about it. And what poetry is engaged in, the kind of language it’s engaged in, is not the language of aboutness, it’s engaged in the language of isness. You’re not trying to point to something out there, and talk about it, you’re trying to actually put it right on the reader’s fingertips. The prose in a biology textbook is trying to tell you about the frog; the poem is trying to turn you into a frog. It’s trying to do the very difficult thing of trying to give you a sense of frogness. When you’re using referential prose, the ontological—excuse me for using that word, but the ontological experience and meaning of the thing is always dead to you if you’re just talking about it. There’s a big difference between telling somebody how much their investment has made over the year and putting them in the seat of a new Ferrari and letting them touch the leather and smell the new car and put it in first and feel that rush of power as they go out of the parking lot. I’m sorry, I don’t usually talk about Ferraris because I couldn’t afford one myself. [Fox laughs] I was talking with a friend the other day who owns one. But referential prose, expository prose, which dominates our minds, not only dominates our minds but actually brainwashes us into believing that’s all language can ever do. It can only point to things; they’re dead to you but you know about them. So poetry actually has to compete with that and it’s very hard to do because people whose minds are trained to process expository prose then are stymied when they come to a poem. And it’s not that the poem doesn’t want you to learn something but it wants you to learn it by seeing it and smelling it and tasting it and knowing the weight of the thing or whatever the ontological physical reality of the thing happens to be. So that’s a huge difference. And I think the word ontology is important there because it’s a radically different mode of being. Poetry’s job is to produce in the reader an order of being utterly different from the order of being that he is possessed by with ordinary explanatory prose. It’s a huge difference and it’s an important difference too because if you try to write a poem and you write it entirely in explanatory referential language, you’re going to get an absolutely dead poem. But if you’ve had legal experience you would know the value then of the kind of prose, meaning referential expository prose, that doesn’t bother you with the physical, concrete, perhaps emotionally distracting elements of the thing. As a lawyer you want language that is absolutely efficient, that will produce a clear picture of the interrelations of this particular case, this set of events, and the legal principles that undergird it, right?

FOX: Yes.

FAIRCHILD: You’ve got to have it fast, you’ve got to have it clearly and in an explanatory way. This is not a mode in which the reader gets to lie about, experiencing the excitement of somebody who broke the law in a particularly curious and exciting fashion, something that could be= turned into a drama. You don’t want the drama right now, you want to get to the point. And poetry, or prose within poetry which would be like fictional prose, wants to slow you down. It wants to give you that whole world. It doesn’t want you just knowing that somebody broke the law by shooting somebody else, it wants you to smell the gunpowder. [laughs] It wants you to see the powder burns on the garment, it wants you to see the rage on the person’s face, etc.

FOX: Part of what you’re saying is that poetry is a much richer experience; it’s more all-encompassing.

FAIRCHILD: It’s supposed to be more than rich, it’s supposed to transform you. Here’s one way that I try to make this really elusive point—in other words, you’ve asked the question. You’ll go out into the world and you’ll have some really incredibly exciting experience. Maybe you’ve been in a car wreck or maybe you went to Vegas and you lost $50,000 in one evening or whatever it was, or maybe you won $50,000. And you come back to your house or apartment and immediately you’re overcome with the need to tell somebody this. Of course you will be telling them about it, though. So you’ll rush into the house and you’ll sit them down and you’ll say, “The most exciting thing happened to me,” and you’ll begin telling them about it, and pretty soon their eyes will begin to glaze over and then one of you will say, “Well, I guess you need to have been there.”

FOX: Ah.

FAIRCHILD: Poetry is the being there. That’s about as abbreviated as I can make that.

[…]

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

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August 23, 2011

from A Conversation with William O’DalyPosted by

from A CONVERSATION BETWEEN WILLIAM O’DALY AND ALAN FOX

…

FOX: You pay a lot of attention to the musicality of the poem. Can you say more about that?

O’DALY: Well, some people—in fact I’m reading a book right now on the line, the poetic line—believe that what poetry is is the sound of poetry. I mean, the first line of this book—it’s a very nice book—that’s the definition. I’ve always thought, well, what does separate poetry from prose? As poets and editors we think about these things. But so much really isn’t in the literal or denotative meanings of the words, it’s in the relationship between the sounds of the words and the connotations. Once you get beyond the surface, it’s that interplay. And with Neruda, who had one of the best ears of any Spanish-language poet ever, it’s an important element in his work and so I had to pay extra attention to that. It also serves as a good guide when you can’t stay as close as you’d like to what you’re reading in the original—the music will help steer you in a direction that will maintain faithfulness to the original while leaving part of that literal surface behind in order to capture the poem.

But I think the work that I do, the late and posthumous work, Neruda very consciously chose a less—in the words of Robert Pring-Mill, one of his best critics—a less pyrotechnical surface. There’s no pyrotechnics in those works. They’re more straightforward to a degree, in terms of the language as well, but there’s still his musicality, but he’s not pushing it; it’s become so natural to him at this point, toward the end of his 50-year career, that what I had to do is make sure that I was able to maintain the musicality but also not try and pump it up to match the exuberance of the early work. And I think people who translate the late work, where they go wrong in terms of the musicality is that they hear one Neruda. The great Neruda is the exuberant Neruda, even though he repudiated that himself. I mean, one way he was able to keep changing as a poet, morphing and refreshing himself, becoming new, was to say, “Okay, I did that, that was a product of my isolated life as a Chilean consul in the Far East, that’s what I needed to do at the time.” But the Residencias now—the poems are so melancholy, they’re so obscure. I don’t want to be obscure, I don’t want to be programmatically melancholy or isolated, I don’t want to be the poet who feels only his own pain, and so I’m going to write out of the struggles of my people, of the South American continent.

Actually, his experience of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War informed the third and final book of the Residencias, and it was then he began to write as a socially committed poet. Out of that same commitment, he completed a personal transformation by writing the book-length Canto General. After the Canto and one other more programmatically political book, he wrote a gorgeous book of love poems, The Captain’s Verses, for his mistress and third wife-to-be, And then the elemental odes, which in nearly every way are the absolute opposite of the Residencias and in their apparent simplicity repudiate the grandeur of Canto. And Extravagario is probably the book that may be most pivotal for him because everything that had come before came to a focal point and there’s this huge scope of expression within that book; he’s humorous, he’s sad, he’s sincere, he’s exuberant; it all came out, it all focused there. Out of that book came all these other voices. Well, when he gets to the end of his life he’s singing simply, beautifully, and that’s the music I try to recreate. Exuberant Neruda I love, but I love the mature Neruda all the more because the poetry is endowed with much greater wisdom and personal honesty than his exuberant work, generally, and I look to poetry for those, too.

FOX: As you speak, it’s pretty clear to me that you have a very intimate relationship with Neruda, because you’ve lived with this intimately for a long time. Isn’t that one of the bigger rewards of being a poet or being an avid reader of poetry?

O’DALY: That may be my favorite question yet. Yes. It’s definitely a reward. Poetry is a pretty isolating act as I’m sure everyone in this room knows—it can be, at least initially—and when I’m translating him or preparing I feel that there’s this intimate dialogue going on. And I think I’m really clear about what translation is, but I love how from the moment I sit down—and this is how translation differs from poetry—the dialogue is just there. And actually it might be more of a triangulation, how we navigate: there’s Neruda, there’s me, and then there’s the translation, this third entity. So we talk to each other, his poem, his voice, as I hear him. I know his work pretty well, most of those 3,000 plus pages, and I know about his life—I’m not a scholar, don’t want to be, I think that might be detrimental—but I’m almost a scholar. And so all of that information is there and must be to translate effectively, I feel, especially over a long period of time and a number of books. But I began to realize—I really didn’t think about it a lot, Alan, but then when I was in Chile absolutely everything was going so beautifully and I’d walk into a bus station and say, “I want to go to Temuco” and they’d say, “Oh, well we have a bus leaving in seven minutes for Temuco,” and they’d pick up my bags—and they don’t do that in Chile—and take them to the bus for me. I mean, they didn’t know my role with Neruda at all. And I would tell Chilean friends this and they’d go, “Well, of course, Pablo’s looking out for you.” [laughs] And they would say this in such a way that the first couple of times it sent a chill up my spine. “Of course things are going well,” they’d say. [laughs] That’s when I seriously started thinking about the question you just asked me. But I thought, “Well, will I miss this?” And I don’t know how long I’d have to live for it to dissipate to the point where I wouldn’t feel I had a relationship where Neruda wasn’t with me…

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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August 8, 2011

from A Conversation with Ted KooserPosted by

from A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TED KOOSER AND ALAN FOX

…

FOX: Absolutely. How has the notoriety which comes with being Poet Laureate affected you?

KOOSER: Well, again, basically I’m kind of an introvert. It was very difficult for me to do all that public stuff, but I felt like I was being called to do it and that I better show that someone from Nebraska could do that kind of thing. I was the first one ever chosen from this part of the country at all. So I really worked at it 7 days a week and I made 200 appearances in the 20 months when I was actually in office and did a lot of interviews. And now that I’m getting away from it I can remember what it was like before. One thing that’s dangerous about the notoriety, I think, for a writer, is that I could write a poem right now, right while we’re sitting here, and send itsomewhere and somebody would pick it up and publish it and I don’t want that to happen. So I send out less and less of my work. I don’t send out anything unless I am absolutely sure that it is as good as anything I’ve ever done before. There are poets who haven’t been that cautious, who are publishing on the virtue of their notoriety, people who have achieved some celebrity. Or to publish too much—you publish book after book. It’s not a good idea.

FOX: I would think, at least for me, that better work comes from inside and from the joy of writing rather than “I want to be known, I want to be in twenty different journals” or whatever.

KOOSER: Yes, it’s a field in which you cannot will yourself into success. It just doesn’t happen. You have to accept what happens and do it as best as you can and hope something good will happen. My career as a writer is sort of a serendipitous thing in which I have had little bits of good luck here and there along the way. One of the examples I think that’s so typical of what’s happened to me is that in 2001, the University of Nebraska Press published this book of mine, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, which is a book about living in Nebraska, rural Nebraska, and the assistant director at the time told me before it came out, he said, “You know, you’re well-known in this state, it’ll probably have a pretty good local readership, but we certainly don’t have any hopes for national distribution of this by much.” This was long before Pulitzer and Poet Laureate and all that. So the University of Nebraska Press and all the other publishers go to this New York book expo that year, I think it was in the spring, and here is this huge, I guess, convention center with tables and tables of books from all the publishers. University of Nebraska Press probably does 100 titles a year maybe, so they’re all out there, mine is among them, and here’s University of Pittsburgh and here’s Harper & Row and Random House and all these people are in this room. A woman comes walking along the University Press table and she sees my book and she cracks it open at random to a passage about a cowboy shirt that my mother made for me when I was fourteen that I can still wear and she was touched by this passage. Well it turns out, her name is Jill Lamar, and she’s the woman who picks the books for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers program.

FOX: Whoa.

KOOSER: So there I went. And then Barnes & Noble picks it, it comes in third in their national non-fiction contest, and I’m up and running with that book. And, you know, there have been other things like that where I’ve just been standing—there are so many good writers in this country and lots of them have not had the breaks I’ve had. And who’s to account for that? I mean, I did have to write the poems and I had to write fairly well to do this, it wasn’t as if that was all luck, but to be noticed and so on. And the Pulitzer—Copper Canyon, a very small operation, at that time I think they had nine people on the whole staff and they don’t have a lot of money and it costs $50 to submit a book to the Pulitzers and they weren’t going to submit my book, it’s another $50. And then at the last minute they decided that they’d do it. And they sent it in and [snaps fingers].

FOX: That is real serendipity. I’ve always felt you do the work and what comes of it comes of it.

KOOSER: And that would be true whether you were a poet or an artist or somebody selling neckties at a ready-to-wear store….

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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September 8, 2010

from a Conversation with Molly PeacockPosted by


from CONVERSATION WITH MOLLY PEACOCK ON OCTOBER 27TH, 2008, AT THE LUXE HOTEL IN BRENTWOOD, CA

FOX: Many poets have talked about music or jazz as being akin to poetry. It seems to me in terms of expressing emotion, maybe it’s easier in music, or painting, than it is in words.

PEACOCK: Well, music is perhaps the most purely emotional art in that it doesn’t have to “articulate” anything. And painting creates the image. And those are two arts that I feel are tucked inside poetry. When we talk about the vision of the poet, we can liken that to painting, and that’s where we get ideas of word-painting. The music of the poem is—well, there are two musics in the poem: there’s the music of the line, which I think of as like a baseline—if we’re still in the jazz mode—so there’s that baseline going; and then there’s the music of the sentence, quite separate, it’s prose music. People who only pay attention to the music of the sentence get accused of writing chopped-up prose, but there is a distinct sentence music that unfolds over the lines. Those rhythms—the base-line rhythm beneath each line as well as the rhythm of the sentence wrapping around the lines—combine to create deep emotional states. And sometimes, as poets, we’re not even aware of what those emotional states really are. And the imagery—when we talk about the vision of a poet, I think actually we’re talking about a poet’s imagery. When we say, “Wallace Stevens’ vision” or “William Carlos Williams’ vision” or “Elizabeth Bishop’s vision” or “Sonia Sanchez’s vision,” I think we’re largely talking about what they envision in their imagery.

FOX: You’re known as a new formalist—

PEACOCK: Yeah…[laughs]

FOX: [laughing] Why do you laugh at that?

PEACOCK: [laughing] At this point I feel a little bit like an old formalist! But, yes.

FOX: Well, how does formalism enter into your writing for you, in terms of the vision, the imagery, all that?

PEACOCK: I’m a psychological formalist, how’s that? My interest in formal poetry started because I began with too-hot-to-handle subject matter. I was in psychological states that were just flooding me with feeling and language, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t want just to vomit something out on a page, yet I wanted to write deeply personally. I wasn’t interested in abstraction at all when I started off writing. I just was too consumed by feeling. So that’s what drew me to formal boundaries. Because I thought, if I knew how to use formal devices, then I could infuse them with what I was feeling and thinking, and I would be making art at the same time. I wanted to make art, and for me, a formal poem is an art object, just because of the level of precision. And when I see a sculpture, say, a brass sculpture that is highly polished, or a sanded wood sculpture that someone sanded again and again and again, hundreds of times returning to it to get that surface—that’s the kind of art object that I’m talking about.

And I should tell you that my sensibility is extremely visual, as you’ve no doubt figured out by my analogies—I’m starting off with a paint chip, for crying out loud! As a child I drew and painted, but words, I suppose, the articulation of something, became more important to me. But I’ve always had a lust for the visual, and my thinking tends toward the image.

Another aspect of formal poetry that drew me to it is that it ensured a kind of musicality. And formal poetry also addressed the inadequacies I felt about class. I’m a working-class girl from Buffalo, New York. I’m the first person in my family to go to college. I wanted to write “real poetry” and someone from a more sophisticated background would’ve understood that they could’ve broken all kinds of boundaries in poetry, but I wanted to be certified as a real poet and to me that meant the poets that you read in school—where else did I read them? They certainly weren’t at home; no one there was talking about them. So, that meant Keats. John Donne. It meant—it’s bizarre to call Keats a formalist; he did what he did as a poet, not a so-called formalist. But I thought I needed to be able to do that. Then I’d be real. And then if I wanted to throw verse structures away, of course I could do it later, when I’d become grand and sophisticated and educated and I could through it all away. But I felt like I had to learn it first.

FOX: Isn’t that kind of like an artist learning the classical-style perspective, then they can go to abstract if they want to—

PEACOCK: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s just like studying figuration—all that Renaissance gray under-painting before they put the color on, stuff like that. We’re always connecting with the past, and one of the ways we connect with the past is through technique. And this is also psychological for me as well. You cannot choose your family. You’re given your family. But as you become an artist, specifically a poet, you choose your poetic family. You get to discover your literary aunts and uncles and the writers you’re related to. And it can be a very disparate family. The older you get, the larger the family becomes, and the more you read, the more poets you encounter from around the world, or poets you rediscover and discover that they were part of your family after all—the interconnectedness is part of what draws me to formal technique.

FOX: Wouldn’t it be fair to say also that you find you can better communicate that flood of emotion through more formal imagery than another way?

PEACOCK: Well, it’s not exactly that the imagery is formal. It’s that the rhythms of the language and the sound system is formal. That’s really what it is. And then the imagery can be bizarre. I have a poem called “Anger Sweetened” in which there’s a bizarre image of a candied grasshopper (like chocolate ants only this is a grasshopper dripping with sweet). It’s a terrifying image, and when it came into my head, I thought, Ugh, this horrifies me. But it horrified me so much that I had to go for it. And I realized that it was an image of holding back your anger and kind of candying your words, and I ended up writing a sonnet about that called “Anger Sweetened.” That’s an example—I mean the image is bizarre, it’s not a “formal image,” it’s almost like a film image or something inside the formal poem.

FOX: Is what you’re trying to get at a deeper communication than we normally would have in a social setting?

PEACOCK: I’m interested in the surfaces of things, but I’m not interested in the superficial. [laughs]

FOX: Ah, what’s the distinction?

PEACOCK: By surfaces I might mean I’m interested in—how can I say—the textures of life. The glass texture, or the texture of fabric, and that’s social fabric as well, but I’m not so interested in being— There’s a wonderful kind of art that comes from a chattiness that makes an art of superficiality—that I adore—but it’s not me. Even though I’m a hearty laugher and my poems can be quite funny, at root they’re about some bell that resounds deep inside me that’s serious.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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March 2, 2010

First Book Interview with Michelle BittingPosted by

FIRST BOOK INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE BITTINGGood Friday Kiss by Michelle Bitting
by
Timothy Green

Note: The following interview was conducted by
email through January and February of 2009.

GREEN: Let’s start with you. Was there a moment you realized that poetry was something you’d pursue seriously? That you’d actually be a poet with a book? My own first book just kind of gradually materialized, but there was a specific poem I wrote in an undergraduate workshop where something clicked—for the first time I really accessed that inner creativity, and I graduated from writing lines to really chasing poetry. Not that it was good, but something was different. Did you ever have an experience like that, or is poetry something you always knew would be a part of you?

BITTING: You know I’ve always felt like I was supposed to do something in the arts, but it wasn’t so clear which medium was mine for the long run, which one I’d like to take to the grave, until a few years ago. I sang in church in elementary school and in junior high and, just to embarrass and freak myself out, asked if I could sing “What I Did For Love” from A Chorus Line at the all school assembly. I acted in college and had a career as a dancer in my twenties. Yes, I wrote poetry, I had the poetic haunting when I was younger, but it really hit me, and I mean in the old cliché “by lightning” way, just after I had my first kid. Everything I’ve done in the arts and even my time as a chef led me to taking up the pen for real. The big epiphany in terms of believing I might have a book someday came as I passed the twenty-poem “keeper pile” benchmark, and began to see the stirrings of a bona fide compilation. Of course, most of those poems were eventually thrown out by the time I got to Good Friday Kiss. Getting acceptance letters from Stellasue (Rattle) and Hilda Raz (Prairie Schooner) in the beginning stoked my fires, big time, and I certainly won’t forget the day I was dropping my son off at his therapeutic preschool and got a call from the folks at Glimmer Train saying my poem “Trees” had won first place in their contest. Publishing isn’t everything, but it does incite a desire to carry on.

GREEN: That’s something a lot of people try to deny, I think—that there are rewards beyond the writing itself that matter. Looking at the back of the book, several poems have won individual awards; I believe your chapbook, Blue Laws, won a contest by Finishing Line Press. And Good Friday Kiss, itself, of course, was published as winner of C&R Press’s first annual De Novo Award. Obviously you must be happy with the contest experience, having had so much success, but would you recommend that route for other young poets? Were there times that you doubted whether or not it was worth the investment? And now that you have a book under your belt, are you going to continue entering them with new work?

BITTING: Sure, I’ll keep submitting to contests—why not join in the fun? I don’t send as much as I used to, mainly because I wait for prizes offered by journals where I’d really like to see my work published, places that like to print some or all of their finalists. The entry fees really add up, yes, this is another factor, so I’m pickier about when and where I throw my money and words into the big spin. I think it’s great that Rattle is able to offer such a hefty purse for its annual prize. I mean, you could actually live off that money for a couple months and write! How dreamy is that? And I’ll bet you receive a ton of spectacular poems, people saving their best stuff to submit in hopes of winning five grand. The poem that took first place this year, Joseph Fasano’s “Mahler in New York,” was breathtaking.

GREEN: Ha, I asked that question and completely forgot that we have our own contest! Let me ask one more thing before we dive inside the book itself—had the manuscript Good Friday Kiss that won C&R’s prize changed significantly from the first time you submitted it to a press? In other words, do you feel like the original manuscript was different from the book you have now? And if so, does that mean the contest process itself was constructive, in forcing you to self-edit?

BITTING: Yes! That’s one of the huge benefits of entering book contests, the hardcore editing eye it encourages. Every time you submit you ask the questions all over again, and anything that doesn’t fly can eventually no longer be ignored. The baby lived through two different titles before finding its name, Good Friday Kiss, and shed half the poems along the way. It took a few years to get it right, and frankly, I could have waited longer than I did to start sending the manuscript around, but them’s the hazards of being new and over eager. On the other hand, the earlier versions did place in several contests, so I was encouraged to keep at it and improve the material.

GREEN: This is a nice segue into what I’m most interested in—the evolution of the book, how it went from, as you said, a twenty-poem “keeper-pile” to a full-fledged and strongly themed book. As it’s published, there are five sections, each dealing with a different one of your relationships: brother, son, daughter, lovers, and finally yourself. When and how did that organizational structure emerge?

BITTING: Most of my early poems were about motherhood and dealing with my brother’s death. The psychological compression of suddenly being “confined” with a baby, and in the wake of a sibling’s suicide, triggered a survival-instinct need to write, I mean, it really was a lightening to the skull kind of phenomenon. The release and freedom and wisdom that I gleaned through the journey inside made life bearable, and miraculously, my little world of triumphs and trials became relevant to more than just me. So my subjects presented themselves like saints on burning stakes, their hair of smoke and flame—you know, I couldn’t ignore them! And then over time it became clear which one of these poems belonged with the other. For a while I wasn’t sure about putting the heavy brother and childhood poems in the front and then moving away from that to the domestic and sexual poems, or about placing all the poems about my son in one section. I tried mixing them all up, but it felt weird and disjointed, and I liked the idea of moving from the darker, intensely personal, childhood-related stuff to sections that contain more poems of awareness and connection with the world beyond my sticky cocoon.

GREEN: Well, if I might say, I think the arrangement really works. The darker content at the beginning haunts and informs the brighter world you’re walking into. How long after your brother’s death did you begin writing about it? Did you show those poems to anyone at first, or were they just for you?

BITTING: I’m glad you think so! The breakthrough poem on the subject of my brother was my poem “Trees” and I wrote that in 2001, about six years after his suicide. That one brewed for a good long time and then was triggered, released from its dormancy, when we were having some tree-trimming work done at my house, when our kids were babies. It came down with the overgrown limbs, you could say. I’ve written other poems about my brother, some shared, some not, but that was the ringer and I could never have written it immediately after his death. Some people can do that, maybe as you become more of a master, but I know I need eye- and heart- adjustment time when the really big shit hits the fan.

GREEN: Tell me more about that wisdom you gleaned from writing. Is there a specific a poem that was particularly revelatory for you? Particularly cathartic?

BITTING: You know, again, I have to name “Trees” as a pivotal poem as far as acknowledging the redemptive and cathartic power of writing poetry. There are numerous poems, well, the whole book Good Friday Kiss, really, is a huge purge and hopefully artfully executed enough to be meaningful to others, beyond my personal experience. But that poem, which won the Glimmer Train Poetry Open (the last year the contest existed) made something lovely and transcendent out of a truly ugly, terrifying and bleak occurrence. At that moment, I understood what could happen, and the more I write, the better I become at writing through the storms, to gain insight and connect with a greater self when the immediate nail-biting, cigarette-lusting one is overwhelmed by life. When I fall to pieces and need art to re-assemble my scattered self. I love how Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah puts it: “Writing is our best opportunity to understand ourselves clearly. Therefore, the secret of writing resides in the fact that we become whole in the act of writing, unlike any other moment in life.” I think that’s so right on! And he should know, writing such soaring, beautiful verse under the worst of circumstances.

GREEN: One of my favorite books on writing is actually a children’s book, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The metaphor is that the mind is a sea—your consciousness is all you can know from the surface; you can read the currents, feel the waves knocking your boat around, glimpse the occasional fin of a shark… But writers are fisherman, throwing out lines and pulling up all the mysteries of the deep. Maybe even slaying some of the beasts that stalk us. I can’t help but think of how that metaphor works in another way, with poems like “The Sacrifice,” which we originally published in Rattle #27. When you sent us the poem, about a mother staying up late to sew her daughter’s Isadora Duncan costume for a school play, it was a powerful and emotionally charged piece, but without knowing the context, it seemed the subject was simply domesticity. The parent’s affect muzzled out of necessity. Obviously the mother was struggling through something, but we didn’t know what. Given the context of your brother’s death, the reference to Duncan’s drowned children is suddenly no longer figurative—and that final line, which we always loved, becomes brutal: The mother watching the daughter on stage doing “the hard, privileged work of feeling for both us.” Here you are, pulling this beautiful beast out of the inky sea, and we didn’t even know what we were really looking at. Which again demonstrates that this is a book, rather than just a collection of poems. This is a long build-up to what might be a very short question: How did your mother respond to “The Sacrifice,” which in the end is really a heartfelt “thank you”? And how has the rest of your family reacted to the subject matter of book?

BITTING: I’m glad you see it as a thank you—how great! I’m reminded of that signature poem by Sharon Olds: “Station” where she says: “We spent a long moment/ in the truth of our situation, the poems/ heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.” I certainly had that moment of recognition when I was writing “The Sacrifice.” I was looking at, and discovering, in retrospect, what my job or function or duty as a family member was, even from an early age and via a number of mediums, as a channel for what others could not express. There’s your beast, your shark fin, your “mysteries of the deep” or what Olds refers to as “poached game,” I guess. When it’s accurate it’s always deadly beautiful, a little dangerous—isn’t it? In a family of extreme and often wildly fluctuating emotional energy, you choose your armor: a costume, a box of paints, a guitar, etc… For my family still living, I hope they can accept this bringing forth of the darkness as a good, positive, redemptive thing. A rough song strung with barbed-wire notes, but one of grace, nonetheless. That may be too much to ask. I believe my mother is proud and, understandably, a little freaked out. I hope to write more poems of blatant praise, in time.

GREEN: Megan pointed out that the broadest theme of the book might be the inability to escape one’s physical body, for better or worse. All of the characters, yourself included, seem to be dealing in various ways with the biological cards they’ve been given, some trying to escape, others trying to accept. Were you conscious of that theme as the book was coming together, or was it something that only emerged later? And what do you think draws you to that subject?

BITTING: Yes, to escape the body by diving deeply into it, right? In this country, we do not love, I mean, truly love, the body enough. Hopefully, it’s going to turn around, this un-Whitmanesque loathing slash obsession and profound irreverence for and inability to accept the flesh. I know a progressive Episcopalian priest who acknowledges what spiritual damage is being done and the need for a more joyful, embraced sexuality among his congregants. The extreme exploitation and demonization of the body, the projection of what’s taboo and sacred in the most backward, repressed ways, is the source of some pretty twisted behavior and legislation in this country. I suppose I’m writing through the body to become one with it, and at the end of that is freedom, release. Ultimately, there’s no denying the terrors and beauty of the body.

GREEN: Last question—what’s next? That might be harder to answer than it seems; I’ve talked with a lot of poets about the sophomore slump—birthing your first baby is such a momentous process, that you’re left with a kind of post-partum depression. Or maybe just a sense of being lost, overwhelmed by all the possible directions you could go. Are you feeling that, or is the path ahead already clear for you?

BITTING: No, it’s not so clear at all, though I’m not feeling the debilitating post-partum effect so severely because I had a semester of an MFA to finish up when the book came out, so my energy was focused there. Now that I’ve completed it I’m a bit at sea, yes, but not exclusively due to the after book-birth let-down. I’m so caught up at the moment with sheer survival and figuring out how to take care of my family, I guess you could say I’ve got some hardcore distractions. It is becoming arrestingly clear that I have more than enough material for a new book, so I will have to spend some time puzzling together a manuscript in the not too distant future, and I look forward to doing that. My head and heart are so full at the moment, and I’m really looking at other artist’s work, trying to figure out ways to write that are true for me but not necessarily in the same, comfortable vein I’m accustomed to. Right now, it’s crucial I just find time to write and that the lines surprise and move me in ways I didn’t expect.

GREEN: Thanks, Michelle, this has been a pleasure.

BITTING: The pleasure is mine. All good things to you and Rattle!

—from Rattle e.6, Spring 2009 (PDF)

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