Under A Warm Green Linden

Interview with Kazim Ali on The Far Mosque

2011-06-22T20:21:00.001-07:00

Kazim Ali is the author of three books of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, and the cross-genre Bright Felon; two novels, Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and two books of nonfiction, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry and Art and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. His translation of Water’s Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri recently appeared. He is a founding editor of Nightboat Books and teaches at Oberlin College.

Christopher Nelson: I think of these poems as mystical; i.e., they pulse with longing for things beyond reason, things in the domain of the spirit, and they question the validity of linear time and space. Do you think of them as mystical? And is our hyper-scientific age receptive to mysticism?

Kazim Ali: I like the way you define “mystical” as beyond reason and questioning “validity of linear time and space.” Yes, in that case they are. But hard science—the harder the science the more clearly they agree—tells us that neither time nor space is “linear.” So I don't like to think of “mystical” as opposite of material or immediate. Space bends. So does time. We haven’t half the perceptual abilities our actual biological brain affords, so once you start talking intangibles like “mind” or “psyche” or “soul” then the sky (material, small, actually quite contained thing that it is) couldn’t even be the limit.

Nelson: In some of your poems, such as “Prayer” and “The Studio,” there’s a sense that it is something within ourselves that we seek in the external world—a haunting feeling I’ve experienced. Can you expound on that paradox?

Ali: In “Prayer” I mourned the passing of a poet, Agha Shahid Ali, whom I desperately wanted to show my first book to. In the end—is it sentimental?—I realized I had to be him. For myself and others. In “The Studio” I wondered where Paul Cezanne went. How sad I was that we didn’t live in the same place and time and couldn’t know each other. I felt that way when Agnes Martin died as well. And Alice Coltrane. Then I made a vow I had to meet my heroes, that I had to love every person in my life so I would never regret lost time. Luckily last year I met Yoko Ono. Now I have to meet David Lang. He did guest teach at Oberlin last year but somehow my path didn’t cross with his. Someday soon.

Nelson: Your own painting is on the cover of the book, and music recurs throughout. These other arts, how do they inform your work?

Ali: Yes, art and music feed me in great ways. But the art that really went in the background of that book was dance. I was dancing with a company and rehearsing hours and hours a week, trying to find time to write, and so of course the actual experience of the physical body came into my lines—they’re long, they’re couplets answering each other; the syntax torques out of synch the way a body does, or at least mine was doing at the time. The choreographers I was working with had been dancers for Alwin Nikolais, so I was always under duress: once tied up and suspended from the ceiling, another time caked and covered with dry mud and so on.

Nelson: The couplet, the sentence, and a refined awareness of the musicality of language—in my reading, these are dominant features of your style in The Far Mosque. Why the couplet? How does that form affect your language acts?

Ali: I was on the train with a friend, on the way home from a poetry workshop we were taking at the 92nd Street Y with Jean Valentine. And my friend, Kythe Heller, also a poet, said something offhand about the Oracles at Delphi speaking in disjunctive couplets. And that seemed to really hit home for me. A couplet could hold a thing and its opposite or a question and its answer or a call and a response. Even in my later book The Fortieth Day when I made a conscious and concerted effort to leave the couplet behind and move into new forms, it was pointed out to me (at a reading where in answer to a question I was declaring myself free of bondage to the couplet) that only three or four of the poems in that book weren’t couplets!

Nelson: Do you see poets helping us to overcome the many challenges of our time—ideological strife, climatic changes, economic upheavals, food and water issues?

Ali: Well, I think they have to in a way. I wrote about this in a short essay called “Why We Need Poetry Now” that was published on The Millions. Poetry changes us. We have to change our ways, restitch the fabric of society, retrain ourselves and our children. It’s not a question anymore; our way of life—by “our” I mean “first-world” way of life with its attendant consumption, nonsustainability, greed, and commitment to pan-global military and economic hegemony—is over. We have to go another way.

Interview with Randall Mann on Breakfast with Thom Gunn

2011-04-11T20:07:00.003-07:00

Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and California Book Award, and Complaint in the Garden, winner of the Kenyon Review Prize; and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Poetry, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Kenyon Review. He lives in San Francisco.

Christopher Nelson: Why did you title the book as you did?

Randall Mann: “Breakfast with Thom Gunn” is an elegy that appears in the book. Gunn has been vitally important to me, a model of sorts: he’s as conversant with traditional forms as he is with free verse; he’s as comfortable writing about the literary as he is the louche. And the setting of much of his work is San Francisco, as is my work. Frankly, I am not interested in being cagey about my influences in hopes of being seen as some wild original. I’m not, I come out of a tradition, and Thom Gunn is an important part of that tradition.

Nelson: Most of these poems are in traditional forms or employ formal constraints. I enjoy how the often casual voice and the gay subjects make friction against that tradition. Why did you choose to work in the sonnet, sestina, pantoum, rhymed quatrains, etc.?

Mann: Well, free verse frightens me a little, so I always feel the need to rein things in. Each poem is different. For the pantoum “Politics,” the sestina “The Mortician in San Francisco,” and the sonnet “Queen Christina,” and a few others, I knew the form before I started the poem. But in most of the poems, the forms—or approaches to free verse, which is a form of form—declared themselves. I don’t usually have the luxury, if that’s the word, of knowing where I’m going when I sit down to write.

Nelson: Do you consider these poems confessional? If so, what’s being confessed?

Mann: I don’t feel as if I have confessed a thing in my poems. Many of the poems have moments of truth, or “truth,” but such details have been distorted; if the poems are not exercises in obfuscation, i.e., metaphor, then I’m not much of a poet.

Nelson: I read the love poems as pessimistic. Have we elevated love into something it can’t be?

Mann: I prefer the word disabused, or realistic. I don’t know what other people think, but I think that anyone who believes love “is forever” is perilously naive; love isn’t static; “love” is just a shorthand metaphor, a lame translation. But I don’t know. And I don’t know if one can glean anything from the glittering ruins of my relationships.

Nelson: There’s a tension between the romantic and unromantic in these poems, a sense that they inhabit each other, as in “wildflowers bloom in the streetcar tracks; / a syringe lies in the grass.” Do these poems strive for a balance?

Mann: Here I think about a jolting sentence in Michael Henry Heim’s translation of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Physical love is unthinkable without violence.” The romantic is unthinkable without the unromantic: the wildflowers need those syringes; or, in the first poem in the book, “Early Morning on Market Street,” the “line of transplanted trees” truly inhabits the scene because they are “thin and bloodless.” The poems don’t strive for balance; the poems strive for, if they strive for anything, clarity and complication.

Nelson: Is there a connection between beauty and sadness?

Mann: Well, disappointment, perhaps sadness, sometimes starts the moment one begins to describe, and thereby reduce, beauty.

Nelson: Does the purely romantic have a place in today’s poetry?

Mann: If you mean mild poetry (almost always in free verse) that praises, for example, landscape and has a middlebrow problem—often a question about How Best to Write about Said Landscape—which is resolved with an epiphany that is the poetic equivalent of a wind chime on a back porch, then yes, not only does it have a place, but it’s taking up a whole lot of places on the bestseller list. Whether it’s any good is, of course, another matter.

Nelson: Your poems often present gay culture—or an experience of gay culture—as being closely connected to heartache and shadow-life: bars, drugs, desperate sex. Can you speak about this atmosphere?

Mann: I like that, shadow-life; I also like desperate sex. I mean, who wants to hear about—meaning I don’t want to write about—snoozy sex or the bright lights of the Castro Theatre that I see when I walk out my door? I don’t really have much to say about gay culture, but I have seen some things over the past twenty years, experienced some things, that asked to be distilled into, or embellished in, poems.

Blue House

2011-04-11T20:06:00.004-07:00

Blue House was selected by Mary Jo Bang for publication by the Poetry Society of America in 2009 as part of the New American Poets Chapbook Series. In her introduction Bang writes, "Christopher Nelson's poems brilliantly enact the Dickinsonian maxim (the maxim that this poetic age has taken to heart and writ large against the backdrop of postmodernism) to tell the truth but tell it slant. In that, he is little different from many of us. However (and it is a significant 'however'), what sets his poems apart and makes them inimitably his is that he invites the reader into a brazenly Freudian psychological landscape. And in we go—in horror, in fascination, in amusement, in respect, and in realization that Nelson has gotten it right. And moreover gotten it very right. And moreover yet, has gotten it very right with a minimum of words and with a great deal of white space. He renders moot all automatic contemporary readerly resistances: to high lyric notes (the lark), to poems about childhood (poetic childhood has rarely been represented so darkly), to words that have come to seem empty ('remember,' 'tender'). His is an intrepid imagination full of uncanny derring-do."

To read a poem from Blue House, click here. To read a review, click here.

Interview with Cynthia Cruz on Ruin

2011-01-26T16:27:00.002-07:00

Cynthia Cruz’s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Guernica and others. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Books, and her second collection, The Glimmering Room, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She is currently the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton.

Christopher Nelson: I read Ruin as being in the Gothic Romantic tradition because of its persistent exploration of dark aspects of human nature—drug use, despair, death—while championing the emotional life of the individual and validating the realness of an apparently hallucinatory childhood. Does that resonate with you? What tradition, movement, or poets do you see Ruin in dialog with?

Cynthia Cruz: Yes, this analysis does resonate with me. The poets and/or movement I’d say Ruin might be in dialogue with are the German Expressionists, such as Günter Eich and Georg Trakl, as well as the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.

Nelson: I’m fascinated by all the doubling in Ruin. Nearly half of the poems have a part two (e.g., “The Report on Horses” and “The Report on Horses II”), and many of the images double or recur (e.g., the tethered goat, the brother’s clothes, the falcon, blondness). Talk about the aesthetic decision to redo, to re-say.

Cruz: I love the idea of doubling, how it creates a refrain, an Other, but also how doubling works as erasure. The twinning that occurs in Ruin is another doubling: the brother and I, for example, but also male and female. I love that a double can do all of this; I love how one thing can work in so many ways. Finally, I am always afraid I’ve not been heard, and this may also be a piece of this, albeit a smaller piece.

Nelson: Can you say more about doubling as erasure?

Cruz: When a word or image is repeated in a poem twice it has an erasing effect (while something repeating many times has a building effect). If for example, I have an ice box cake at the start of my poem and introduce the ice box cake later in the same poem it may seem as though it has been erased or taken away. What I love about this, using something in this way is that it both doubles and erases—it does both.

Nelson: Ruin is in four parts, In the Kingdom (I and II) and Praying (I and II). For me, the titles of these parts place the poems in a mythic context—childhood as the paradise we all lose, and the connection we try to regain through spiritual questing or prayer. To whom or to what are the prayers directed?

Cruz: The prayers are directed at God.

Nelson: There’s something ineffable and evocative in the relationship between the speaker and the brother, and I marvel at how you’ve wrestled with that crisis in these poems—a crisis of identity, heartache, love, and letting go. Is it accurate to say that the speaker has deified the brother?

Cruz: Yes, I think that is entirely true. The brother is the better I and also stands in for a kind of Christ-like figure. The brother dies so that the sister can survive, but though the brother is gone, he remains, a kind of shadow, halo, or doppelganger.

Nelson: I love the cover art, Journey by Mike Cockrill. I sense the atmospheric connection to the poems—the allure, whimsy, and terror of the fantastic. Why was this image chosen?

Cruz: In all truth, this image was probably the hundredth or so image I chose. I had presented many others in the year leading up to the day I submitted this image, but none of the others made it. Either the press turned them down, the artist said no, or the cost was too high. I gave up many times, but funnily enough, when I came across Cockrill’s work, and this piece in particular, it resonates in a way none of the others did. It seemed almost as though the image had been made with my book in mind. In fact, many people have asked just that: whether the painting was made with my book in mind. It wasn’t, of course. I love the painting and am so grateful I came across it and that Mike graciously allowed me to use it.

Nelson: Your next book, Glimmering Room, which is forthcoming from Four Way Books—what can we expect thematically and stylistically? What direction has your poetry taken since Ruin?

Cruz: The poems in Ruin are razor sharp, anorexic in style (not subject, of course—but the immense compression). I deliberately chose the least amount of words I could to say what needed saying. In Glimmering Room, I sugar it up a bit: there is more beauty, or relief, in the poems. Some of the poems are longer as a result of this. I have now completed my third collection, and these poems are even more elaborate, more words, more beauty. I am working my way away from Morse and moving toward a richer, more layered, kind of poem.

Nelson: That’s exciting. I look forward to reading them very much.

Interview with Dan Beachy-Quick on Overtakelessness

2010-11-20T23:18:00.002-07:00

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of four books of poetry, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine; and three chapbooks, Apology for the Book of Creatures, Mobius Crowns (with Srikanth Reddy), and The Offending Adam (with Srikanth Reddy); and A Whaler's Dictionary, a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick. He has taught at Grinnell College and the School of the Art Intstitute of Chicago, and he currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in spring 2010. Overtakelessness was published by Spork Press.

Christopher Nelson: Bees, pansies, sun, field—in Overtakelessness the external world is pastoral. There are no objects of modernity, and there’s a tone of innocence that is beautifully enhanced by the speaker being conflated with the flowers and fields and bees. I’m interested in hearing about this world in which a plow is the most overt human influence on the landscape, while covertly it seems to be a landscape dependent on the human mind.

Dan Beachy-Quick: I began Overtakelessness while immersed in Thoreau’s Journals, noting and questioning his repeated concern early on that “the corn grows at night” and that the etymology of the flower pansy comes from the French pensee. For the past few years, I’ve found myself more and more concerned with the way in which a poem uncovers a formal ground, and in that formal ground demonstrates (in ways irrevocable) a thinking about the world it itself has opened up to consideration. In order to see what it is to think, or think in what it is to see, I’ve felt an urge to return to ancient forms, to conduct my thinking in a poem not as myself thinking, but as a poet who cannot help but be anonymous in writing in a world inherited—a world of pastoral, filled with bees, flowers, sun, and field. It is, for me, this most basic of worlds in which the objects that fill it, by virtue of their referential simplicity, open more readily their symbolic complexity. Overtakelessness is, to some degree, a poem that follows the increasing difficulty of thinking about that which the poem offers to be thought about, and so the motion of the poem is to draw self closer to object and to see, or to find, that to think is both to near and to distance oneself from that which is thought of—and to speak, or to sing, is to put to that world a technology it doesn’t possess for itself, even if that technology is only language. Here, in this poem, language is the plow, and each poem an instance of a basic agricultural work that can’t be told apart from a poetic one.

Nelson: Overtakelessness is such a musical book: frequent rhyme, assonance, and alliteration in primarily two-, three-, and four-beat lines. And there’s a delightful tension between sound and sense. Can you talk about that tension? And do you regard a poem’s sounds as a kind of meaning?

Beachy-Quick: I felt compelled in Overtakelessness, and more generally in the past year or two, back toward tradition, and traditional elements, as inclusive of genuine experiment. All the qualities you mention about the poem—the sonic and rhythmic life—became for me a kind of knowledge the poem accomplishes outside the brunt of referential meaning. In some basic (if vague) way I have my doubts about the way in which a poem goes about making meaning through the denotative and connotative quality of words. At times I think our desire to make “meaning” is some allergic reaction of the brain to the way in which words point at the things they name—that ambiguous flourish. But that referential capacity within words also carries within it other material—the material of the word itself, the words themselves, where syntax becomes not simply an order of words into linguistic sense, but a complication of, because a gathering of, music. I like this sense that underneath the terrain of the poem’s referential life lurks an underground spring that marks its inexpressible life—a life only made available by the work of the words on the surface. There is a kind of noise in the effort of “meaning-making” that music as meaning resolves—or, as Thoreau has it, one can’t “hear music and noise at the same time.” Or, as Oppen has it, that “the ear knows, and I don’t why.” And with Oppen, I also feel that music in verse is another rigor, one which threatens the poem above it with sensation that overwhelms sense, or at least, pushes sense to a limit in which a word no longer gets to mean merely what is “says.” The word as such complicates its nature, no longer a vehicle of reference merely, but one of sense as in sensation, as in perception, and makes of the poem not only a system of language, but a nervous system.

Nelson: At a colloquium at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in spring of 2010 you spoke about reading as an experiment in being influenced and of the importance of reading and re-reading to your work. In Overtakelessness you’ve brought in William Carlos Williams. Is this allusion, homage, re-writing, a challenging of his dicta, or something else?

Beachy-Quick: The work of writing poems for me, not always but most often, feels almost like a sort of offering back to those poems, and their writers, that I most love. Sometimes I think I write a poem only as a way to join in to a conversation that has been going on, and is ongoing, without me, and doesn’t need me to continue. The poem as offering is this hope to enter a thinking others have already managed—that the poem, I guess, allows one in. The inclusion of the famous William’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” came actually from the pointed realization of the general doubt I have always felt toward that poem. I guess I’ve never been convinced by the way in which others talk about that poem, either in praise or in critique. And I never knew if I wanted to praise it or critique it. In Overtakelessness the poem is re-written, but re-written backwards: last line first, first line last. What I began to doubt about Williams’s poem is the nature of the first line as he has it: “So much depends upon.” I began to doubt the poem that knows ahead of its own work what is to be valued and what isn’t to be valued. In some sense, we are denied the encounter with the “red wheelbarrow / glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens” because we have been told of their importance in advance of our needing to make that meaning for ourselves. I fear the poem denies the reader her or his own creative work within the reading, and so the genuine coming to value of what images occur in the poem. And so, to rectify that problem for myself, I re-wrote the poem in a way that comes to an understanding of value only after encounter, the result of the world in the poem, rather than a value that prescribes the world to follow.

Nelson: We’re both admirers of Buckminster Fuller and his concept of tensegrity, a term he coined to describe an architectural structure’s integrity that results from a balance between tension and compression components; his geodesic domes are examples of this. You’ve applied this concept to the poem on the page. What is the tensegrity of the poem, and how is this principle at work in Overtakelessness?

Beachy-Quick: I first read about Fuller in Art History courses. But a few years ago, the MCA in Chicago had a large retrospective on him, and that was truly eye-opening to me. There was of course the sheer brilliance and whimsy of the man’s mind, the visionary wit. But I also began to feel deep overlaps with ideas I’d been struggling to articulate to myself in regards to poetry. It is that word, “tensegrity,” that dovetailed many things for me. I had long felt that a poem operated by the creation of a kind of tension—not a single tension. Each poem, I suspect, has to find the nature of its own tension. At some level, this idea of tension is a deeply formal concern, the tension being the key ingredient to a poem’s ability to cohere as a shape in which thought dwells, in which emotion can occur. That word “tensegrity” spoke to me of the tension as a form of poetic integrity, and a way to consider form as a balance of energies in the poem, any one of which being out of balance would cause the whole structure to collapse. In Overtakelessness, the tensegrity (at least as I see it when I read it) is in the counter-pressure of the traditional formal elements—rhyme, meter, image, form—and the deep skepticism the poem cannot keep itself from. The sensuality of the poem, and its simplicity, stand in needed opposition to the fear of the ideal the poem finds itself realizing as it continues—the fear of the poem always putting the world into the head, of internalizing, and of finding no way back out to the world as actual and existing outside of the self singing of it a considerate song.

The University of Arizona Poetry Center Audio-Video Library

2010-11-20T10:00:00.004-07:00

It's with delight that I point out, if you are unaware, that the University of Arizona Poetry Center now has some of their vast audio-video library available online! It is a wonderful archive of readings that dates back nearly fifty years and includes many of the cherished poets of our time. (Click here to visit the Poetry Center's website.)

Interview with Stephanie Balzer on faster, faster

2010-09-28T11:24:00.018-07:00

Stephanie Balzer is a poet, journalist and nonprofit professional who leads VOICES, Inc., a Tucson-based youth development agency that mentors young people age fourteen to twenty-one in the documentary arts. She earned an MFA from the University of Arizona in poetry in 2004 and has published two chapbooks: Revenant (Kore Press) and faster, faster (CUE Editions). In 2008 she was the University of Arizona Poetry Center Mary Ann Campau Fellow, and she will be a featured poet at the Tucson Festival of Books in March 2011. A poem from faster, faster can be read here.

Christopher Nelson: faster, faster is one of your two recent chapbooks of prose poems. I’m curious: what draws you to that form?

Stephanie Balzer: When I was an undergraduate English major at the University of Hawaii, I started taking poetry classes mainly because I had to fulfill a creative writing requirement, and I figured that poetry would be the easiest genre because poems were the shortest. I never set out to be a poet, and at that time I didn’t feel inspired to write. But one day I just decided to write a poem in a paragraph—maybe I had been reading Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts. I brought the poem into workshop, and my teacher called it a prose poem; I didn’t even know the form had a name. I think it was my most successful poem at the time. I felt that the sentence and the paragraph made me freer than the line and the line break and the fragment and the phrase, but I’m not sure why. There’s something about the prose poem’s juxtaposition of poetic language with the quotidian that leads to playfulness. After my undergraduate work, I went on to become a journalist for about eight years, so I was reading and writing more prose than poetry. With time the form has come to feel like the clothes that fit me best.

Nelson: And what are the form’s unique challenges?

Balzer: It feels heavy. You lose the opportunities of the line break. Some of the formal decision making is taken away. Some of the visual possibilities are taken away. I block off my margins, justify them both; I don’t even think about that edge. And how to make up for losing the richness of the line break—I worry about that. To me, what makes up for it is breaking the mold of what we think a paragraph is. We think it has to be a unified whole. We think it needs a topic sentence. We think of it as being solidified. But visually you do lose something. All my poems look the same, and that eats at me a little. I’m interested in making something that looks different, but I fear that now I default to the prose poem form.

Nelson: What’s the old maxim about our shortcomings being our strengths?

Balzer: I think of that.

Nelson: I delight in the associations you make in the poems of faster, faster. In one we travel from Aristotle’s notion of history to a hairspray ad to the nature of mind to Chinese water torture to aging to the Gulf Coast hurricanes to the anthropomorphizing of defunct computers—and yet it all coheres, and the pathways between those associations seem almost logical. The prose poem has been described as the ideal form for mapping one’s thinking. And yet, a polished prose poem probably has only the appearance of being a map of one’s thinking, as it is a made thing, a revised thing, a contrivance. I’m interested in the tension between the original associative thinking from which a poem comes and the final, made thing.

Balzer: My first prose poem project, Revenant, was very contained; those poems are all linked by a dramatic arc, and they are focused on a particular theme and a specific geographic space. In Revenant I pushed a lot out. So in faster, faster I wanted to throw everything in. And I did want them to be a map of my thinking; that was an underlying presupposition of the intent. But I found that it was more like a crossword puzzle. I would consciously collect ideas—things I’d read, things I’d seen and heard and experienced. Then I tried to fit these together. Like in a crossword puzzle, I was filling in gaps and looking for connections and associations and themes. Writing the poems was like a game. There was definitely a sense of surprise and wonder that came about from some of these juxtapositions. When I eventually had a general cohesive architecture it became more of what we might expect of a poetic process: ordering ideas and creating internal movement with syntax and flow and pacing. And it’s funny that I’ve been writing these prose poems because I struggle with syntax and flow and pacing, and these are some of the main aesthetic values of the prose poem.

Nelson: I’ve also read your prose-poem chapbook Revenant. There are, of course, formal and stylistic similarities between the two, but the voices in them are quite distinct. I think that perhaps the greatest achievement of faster, faster is the voice, which effectively amalgamates several styles of thinking: pop-culture immersion, a self-conscious irony, confession, comedy, friendly anecdote, and an ethos that results from information inundation.

Balzer: I loved working on Revenant and being consumed by it, but with faster, faster I wanted to break from my idea of the poetic. I wanted my own anti-poetic voice. … I know poets who seem to have this ability to access something inside themselves, a depth of emotion or a sense of devastation. I don’t feel like I have that ability. I’m the kind of person who, if I broke my arm in a crowded room, I’d say I’m fine, and I’d smile. I don’t know how to access something that I know a lot of poets can. So in faster, faster I was trying to invite a lack of control because I wasn’t going to be able to find that emotion internally. I set out with a sort of reckless ambition to bring in as much as possible as a way to access something that I had only been able to circle around.

Nelson: I’m curious about your notion of the anti-poetic. What does that look like for you? Is that the everyday diction, the pop-culture allusions, the sense of it being so very much of the contemporary world?

Balzer: Yes. And I worry about those things because, I guess, it’s an evaluation of my own life, which does contain a lot of the pop-culture material and detritus that piles up onto everyday experience. And what’s poetic in that? I feel like I lead a very anti-poetic life. I have to work. I’m not a teacher of poetry. Poetry doesn’t have a day-to-day resonance in my life. Poetry is often very absent from my life. So I was trying to figure out how to marry day-to-day life with the poetic. I was trying to bring poetry back in. So the anti-poetic is my attempt to access what was really poetic for me. And it involves a lot from pop culture. I had to figure out how pop culture separates, or doesn’t, from my existence. I had to figure out how it diminishes my existence while I have a craving for it.

Nelson: I imagine that for many readers faster, faster will be more engaging than a lot of poetry because it is so deliberately of this time, and in it there are numerous references to people and things from contemporary pop culture. I’m interested in hearing about how you see faster, faster in relation to time. My assumption is that a poem that alludes to pop culture is one aligned to ephemera.

Balzer: I think that the poems are obsessed with time. I guess everything I write tends to be about time, maybe because I attach so deeply, and because the passage of time and the impermanence of things makes me very sad. This plays out in odd, obsessive ways, like I’m always thinking about buying timeless things. If I buy a purse I think, “This is the timeless handbag; I’ll never need to buy another one ever again.” And then I’m really disappointed a year later when I want to buy a new one. So attaching to people or ideas or things, then discovering that that attachment is unimportant—that’s really painful. Maybe there’s an attempt in these poems to immortalize or to bring in these concerns. But I’ve worked hard to write about this material in such a way that pop-culture references aren’t obscure, regardless of whether the reader has, say, seen the same reality TV program as I have.

Nelson: I’d like to go back to the topic of voice. We writers frequently invent voices for our different projects. Some of those voices, from my experience, feel more distant from the idea of self I identify with, and some feel very close to it. It is tempting to say that these close voices are more me and therefore more authentic, but I think that is less and less true for me. I wonder if there is actually something very much me in the more remote voices.

Balzer: faster, faster is the project where I began inventing more voices. … There’s great devastation right now. And there’s a lot of richness within that devastation—sadness and joy and all the rest. I started with the idea of America. I wanted it to be very American. Of course there are thousands of ideas that are American, but for me there needed to be a sense of tone driving it. faster, faster is totally driven by tone, and, overall, I feel that tonally it represents me. And because it is driven by tone, I was able to manipulate things that previously I might not have. “That didn’t happen” or “that’s not how it was” or “that’s not real”—I felt the freedom to manipulate these experiences and things I’d seen and heard. Tone is driving, and that allowed me to invent more, and to use the fake to get at the real.

And I struggled with the pronouns, the I and you, and how to fit them in so that they would form a cohesive sub-narrative. And I think about a reader’s perspective and how those pronouns play into that. I didn’t want it to be cerebral or abstract or an entirely mental experience.

It’s interesting how you’re living two lives when you’re writing. In Revenant, the arc of discovery was driving. I was building this arc, and I thought, “I need to get out of this somehow.” I wanted it to end; I wanted it to have closure. I wanted a beginning and middle and end—or a kind of homage to that idea. And I really did live in a house in which I lived a lot of experiences in the poems, and at one point I decided I had to move, actually physically move, because I wanted to end the manuscript.

Nelson: That’s a dramatic way to get closure.

Balzer: [laughter] Yeah.

Nelson: I read faster, faster as brilliant satire, as a sort of critique of a culture in which we are inundated with often trivial information. You write: “I confess: my state of mind is America.” From the beginning of this project, did you set out to write a satiric book?

Balzer: I probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way at the beginning. It began from a sense that I was going crazy and the world was going crazy, and from a sense there was an inability for us as a culture to define ourselves differently, and for me personally to define myself differently. It was like we were all caught in a stream that was going to a not-good place, but there was no way to shift it, especially as one person. It was a sense of powerlessness, of being disempowered—and maybe satire is related to that.

Some of the reflections are very personal: about an addiction to (or a fascination with) pop culture and ephemera that results from the media—and I was a part of the media. There’s a sense of spectacle, and an individual and cultural addiction to that spectacle. How do we even go about changing that?

But there are things that I wrote that I edited out. I had to learn to write satirically. I had to use a different set of muscles. I didn’t want to move into a vein that was too personally critical of individuals in my life. What would resonate culturally—what would indict us culturally but not be an indictment of a specific individual? There’s definitely a sense of an anonymous or a cultural you that I’m writing about, but finding that was a challenge. And, you know, where’s that line of being inappropriate? And are people going to know that this is satire? And because I’m still writing in this project, maybe I’m not far enough away from the poems to say.

One of the intended audiences is definitely fellow poets and fellow writers who I feel are not addressing something within me that wanted to be extracted. Why are we not talking about what is political and important?

Nelson: And what about the characters that appear throughout—Danny, Mark, Barbara, Boyer, Morgan, and others? I love their presence. They make the poems pleasantly personal and the tone conversational, inviting, and intimate.

Balzer: They’re different from characters because they don’t have back-stories or identities. They’re sort of disembodied, but often what they say in the poems they really did say. I’ll have people in my life who’ll say, “Don’t put that in a poem.” They’ll see me writing something down—especially Morgan, who’s a close collaborator and friend. He’ll see something in my expression, or he knows my aesthetic well enough to know that that might be something I’d include in a poem, and he’ll say, “You can’t use that in a poem!” But they’re all people who push me to different levels of thinking. Often what they say has struck me as very wise and germane to the project, and I see how it could lend an idea a greater resonance. I didn’t ask for permission, really. I just put them in there.

Nelson: One effective thing that their presence does is broaden the vocal range. And I see them as having an important role in the satire. There are moments when the poems become dialogic, when the speaker says one thing and then Boyer or Morgan or Barbara comments on that. It’s an effective rhetorical device that allows you to sort of veil a satiric statement behind what appears to be an innocent informal exchange between two close friends.

Balzer: Each poem has a lot of phrases—“I read,” “I heard,” “I saw”—and I’ve edited some of those out, and I’ve left some of them in. But I wanted a sense of the individual almost at the mercy of an environment. I wanted more of a bombardment, rather than coming out and directly saying what I know or think. I didn’t want that poetic stance of omniscience. I wanted the opposite of that. So rather than me appropriate their ideas, which I could have done, I used direct quotes. Plus I wanted to convey a sense of learning, or being unsure of knowledge, and including these direct quotes, these other voices, was a way to enrich or contradict or strengthen some of the ideas. And I wanted to undercut what I had thought of as my position as a poet.

Nelson: Which takes us back to what you previously said, your intention to do something deliberately anti-poetic. This has a wonderfully ironic consequence: in doing something anti-poetic you created such a poetic thing.

Balzer: I’m always wondering, “Where is that boundary?” How can I use language in an unpoetic way and still have an emotional resonance in the poem? That’s the direction I’ve been pushing, and I’m still working it out. Right now that’s my personal journey as a writer.

But there’s a difference between a personal development and a development of the genre. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make poems travel as far as I can. I don’t know if advancing is the right word because it might not be linear, but making new, doing something new in the genre, versus doing something new as an artist. I admire poets like Charles Bernstein and Bernadette Mayer and Ron Silliman; their work has traveled so far.

Nelson: Writers talk about playing traditions forward. Your poems do this in how they are so clearly of the contemporary moment, and that’s not easy to capture; it’s a fleeting thing. And also the complicated, delicate, and successful amalgamation of voices—or qualities of voice—plays the tradition forward. And then of course we should acknowledge that the modernist dictum to make it new has been tyrannical in some ways.

Balzer: I just went to the Cézanne exhibit at the Phoenix Museum of Art. It was such an interesting exhibit because it was so much about process. It wasn’t only interested in the finished works of the master Cézanne. The idea that the entire canvas doesn’t have to be painted was something that Cézanne introduced, and I feel like I want to move further in that direction. If I have anxiety about my poems now it’s that I feel the entire canvas is painted, and in a sense I want to leave more of the edges showing; I want to let the pencil lines and brush strokes be more visible.

Nelson: So faster, faster as a chapbook is not the terminus of the project. You’re intention is for it to grow into a book-length collection.

Balzer: I want it to. I probably have seven or eight poems in the project beyond the chapbook. And I don’t feel that they’re becoming overwrought or that I’m writing in a formula. So we’ll see.

Interview with Geraldine Connolly on Hand of the Wind

2010-08-09T12:22:00.009-07:00

Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1947. Her chapbook, The Red Room, was published in 1988, and a full length collection, Food for the Winter (Purdue University Press), appeared in 1990. Her second book of poetry, Province of Fire, was published by Iris Press in December of 1998, and Hand of the Wind appeared in June 2009. She has won many prizes for her work, including two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, the Carolyn Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship to Breadloaf, and the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition Prize. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including Poetry, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Shenandoah. WPFW’s Writers Almanac broadcast her poem, “The Summer I was Sixteen.” Visit her website.

Christopher Nelson: Often landscape, a natural setting, is the stage for your poems, the atmosphere in which insight is found—a motif foreshadowed by the book’s cover. I marvel at how your images of the natural world are keys for accessing internal states. How would you describe the role of landscapes, natural settings, in your creative process?

Geraldine Connolly: Landscape functions as a door to the unconscious for me. I’ve always gone to nature for solace and discovery and adventure. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking or feeling until I meditate upon an object in the natural world which can access an intense reaction or an unexpected thought. I love being outdoors and spent much of my childhood roaming the hills and woods of western Pennsylvania. I felt there was no barrier between my body and those of the trees and creeks and leaves. The scenery of that Appalachian landscape is embedded in my psyche. I still spend as much time as I can outside. And I keep notebooks where I record what I see on my walks. I use them as a compost heap for my poetry. Many of my first drafts are heaps of images on a page, and then I go back and try to find the argument or attitude embedded in the imagery.

The three major landscapes of my life are rural Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Washington D.C. and lastly, northwest Montana where we have lived the past ten years. They serve as backdrop for the emotional dramas of my life. I’m someone who begins in the outward to go inward. Now that I live in the Sonoran Desert, in Tucson, for half of the year, I am drawn by the minimalist quality of the desert. I love its strange, unique beauty.

Nelson: You have a penchant for the image; your book is like a photo album made of words. What does a successful image do? And which poets do you return to for their strong images?

Connolly: I have a visual mind and imagination. I would have like to have been a painter. I think of an image as a word picture, an intense electric connection between the eyes of the writer and the mind of the reader. Sir Philip Sidney called imagery “the very height and life of poetry.”

Sometimes I think my penchant for imagery has something to do with growing up Catholic. In church we were surrounded by paintings and statues: Jesus with his crown of thorns, the Stations of the Cross, statues of Mary crushing the head of the serpent, the purple shrouds of Advent, the lilies of Easter and the Resurrection, etc.

I have always been mesmerized by Charles Simic’s haunting and unique imagery. Some of the other great image makers are Dickinson: “frost, a blonde assassin—”; T.S. Eliot’s singing mermaids who do not sing to him; Wallace Stevens’s “downward to darkness, on extended wings.” I love the way that image of pigeons’ wings descends and expands simultaneously. All of these images that come to mind include paradox. There’s something about contradiction that feels honest and true to me.

Nelson: Could you talk about the formal variety we see in Hand of the Wind—long lines, short lines, stanza patterns, occasionally no patterns, pantoums, a villanelle, a poem in numbered parts, poems in fragments—and how a poem arrives at its shape, which unerringly feels like the inevitable shape the poem must take?

Connolly: I like moving back and forth between formal poems and unpatterned poems within a book. Books that do this seem surprising and risky to me. It feels respectful to the Individual poem. Each poem is deserving of its own special structure.

I think there’s an inevitability about a great poem, and it can achieve its nature through any number of patterns. There’s no right or wrong. Sometimes this inevitability that you mention in a good poem occurs through free verse, sometimes in formal verse. The structure and the message of the poem should be working together. If I have a poem that’s not working in free verse, I try imposing syllabics upon it to see if I can find an opening, an expansion. Sometimes taking material that is not working and trying to rewrite it within a traditional form can underscore a theme, help open it up, make a discovery, result in a better poem.

Nelson: In these times, when turning away from the traditional lyric is common, you’ve chosen a relatively traditional lyric mode. What draws you to the lyric, and why is it the best vehicle for your voice?

Connolly: The house of poetry has many rooms. I think all of us have the capabilities within us for various modes but are drawn by our temperaments toward writing that is structure or unstructured, musical or not musical, telling a story or making a meditation.

I think life is chaotic and I love the order imposed by working inside a structure. Writing poems that 99 percent of the world can’t understand or doesn’t care about seems to defeat the purpose of being a writer. Using the “little I” in one’s work does not necessarily mean self-obsession. Naming the “I” can be liberating and powerful. Describing one’s life, if done well, can produce memorable, moving poems, like Seamus Heaneys’, that combine political and cultural themes.

The poems that I find personally memorable and meaningful are often the traditional lyrics. This is not to say that they might not have fractured syntax or unusual imagery or odd points of view—some trademark quality that imprints the stamp of the original voice—and makes them new, as Dickinson did or Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens.

Nelson: How have your stylistic and thematic concerns changed from Province of Fire to Hand of the Wind? What has remained constant?

Connolly: My first two books, Food for the Winter and Province of Fire, have many poems that record childhood and family stories, pay tribute to immigrant ancestors and my working class background. Other poems incorporate a dream-like consciousness or have a surreal twist.

In my new collection, Hand of the Wind, there are more meditative poems, a little more experimentation. An example is the poem “Palisade,” about my troubled relationship with my mother. It’s loosely structured, with uneven lines and ragged stanzas to mirror the unresolved relationship.

My interest in the image has remained constant. I went to an art opening last night and I found that when an artist painted a landscape then changed the perspective or changed the colors of the trees to some bright strange hue and distorted their shapes I found the painting more appealing. A work of art that has an attitude and an original way of looking at the world always appeals to me.

Interview with Andrew Joron on The Sound Mirror

2010-04-29T16:40:00.008-07:00

Andrew Joron has been called “the metaphysician-elect of contemporary American poetry” (Cal Bedient, Boston Review). Joron’s work shows the influence of surrealism, science fiction, and German Romanticism. Joron attended the University of California at Berkeley to study with the anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend, graduating with a degree in the philosophy of science. After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). Joron’s latest poetry collection is Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems, published by City Lights in 2010.

Christopher Nelson: The sonic acrobatics and musical agility in The Sound Mirror are hypnotic and fun, but there’s more to it than that. Can you talk about the relationship between sound and the cosmos?

Andrew Joron: Sound pre-existed light in the early cosmos. I make this point in the title essay of my book The Cry at Zero. Following the Big Bang, it’s theorized that the density of matter/energy was so great that light could not propagate without being immediately re-absorbed into the surrounding medium. Sound, however, could and did travel far in this primordial medium, creating density waves that structured the cosmos long before the medium cooled and attenuated sufficiently for light to break free. So the first pattern ever imprinted on the universe came from a kind of infinitely loud sound, a kind of Logos or Word transcending meaning. Poetry, for me, perpetuates this transmission from the abyss.

Nelson: By foregrounding sound in your poems, do you aim at making perception equal to subject, theme, idea, and object?

Joron: Social communication depends on linguistic transparency; poetic perception, however, reminds us that language is inherently opaque—that language has a material body as mysterious and meaningless as any other natural object. You could define ordinary language as a socially domesticated cry; poetry alone is capable of rediscovering a wilderness, a cosmic bewilderment, in the sound of words. At the same time, I don’t suggest abandoning the entire history of consciousness that evolved in consequence of the first cry; I only want to assert that the poem in some way recapitulates the emergence of meaning, or light, from the opacity of sound.

Nelson: Your title, The Sound Mirror—can you elaborate on that synesthetic paradox? Or would that be to explain away the pleasant mystery?

Joron: In one sense, the idea of a “sound mirror” is not a paradox. Part of the science of acoustics is concerned with the way sound is reflected from surfaces such as the walls of a concert hall. And before the invention of radar, England constructed huge hemispherical “sound mirrors” out of concrete and placed them in open fields as listening devices that would amplify the sound of approaching bombers from Germany. In my case, I appropriated the title from an old Sun Ra LP, which has never been reissued on CD. Sun Ra himself got the title from the first commercially available recording device, released in the forties, which was called The Sound Mirror. But you’re right to note my intent to complicate the sound/light relation in presenting this title. Writing that uses the phonetic alphabet becomes a “sound mirror”; I want to emphasize that, while sound may be exiled from the written word, it continues to haunt the scene—the seen—of writing.

Nelson: The Sound Mirror, so invested in sound and music, concludes with a long meditation on silence. What is silence’s role in your music-making and meaning-making?

Joron: Louis Zukofsky famously defined the range of poetic language as “upper limit music, lower limit speech.” Yet it’s obvious that both ends of this spectrum are delimited by silence. Sound only “makes sense” against silence. Or to put it differently, all sound is relative to silence, while the reverse is not the case. Sound varies, whereas silence is a constant. Or maybe sound, understood metaphysically, is variable silence. Ever since the shamans invented it, actual poetic practice has been based on the recognition that words speak directly to silence, and only indirectly to us, their human keepers.

Nelson: Stylistically, how does The Sound Mirror “fit” with your other books? Is it part of a larger trajectory?

Joron: If there is a trajectory, it’s toward silence by way of sound. But my development as a poet has been somewhat nonlinear. A fascination with sound, with syntax, and other properties of language defeated my earliest ambition, which was to become a science-fiction writer. I realized I was more interested in language as a speculative substance, and not as a platform for building plot and character. So I became a poet almost against my will. The cosmic perspectives afforded by science fiction continued to hold my attention, however; so for the first half of my career I wrote science-fiction poetry. Eventually I felt constrained by the conventions of the genre and, in my late thirties, left “home,” as it were. I migrated from one writing community—science fiction—to another, namely the experimental poetry scene. My latest book, Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems from City Lights, covers this trajectory.

Nelson: We met at a tribute to Gustaf Sobin at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. He is mentioned twice in your book, The Sound Mirror. For readers unfamiliar, who was Gustaf Sobin, and how did he influence your poetry?

Joron: I’ve always been drawn to poets whose work implies that the mystery of language and the mystery of Being are one and the same. There’s a complex philosophical argument behind this notion, which I can’t rehearse here, but it turns on the proposition that Being, like the system of language itself, can never be fully present to itself, except in an absolute sense. Yet, our everyday life and our language present only relative conditions; the poet’s task is to search for signs of the absolute, or the infinite, among finite things. And Sobin’s work accomplishes this with a grace and an intensity unparalleled in recent American writing. I sought him out at this home in the south of France and he visited me in San Francisco as well. He taught me a lot about the relation between sound and silence in poetry.

Interview with Sherwin Bitsui on Flood Song

2010-02-11T19:22:00.007-07:00

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Tódích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tłizíłaaní (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and a BFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. He also works for literacy programs that bring poets and writers into public schools where there are Native American student populations. Bitsui has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), LIT, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. His first book of poems, Shapeshift, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2003.

Christopher Nelson: First, let me say congratulations; Flood Song is a beautiful book, not only the poetry but the design and cover art, which is a painting of yours. I’m a painter who has come to favor the word over the brush, for my own expressions. Tell me about your visual art and its relation to your poetry.

Sherwin Bitsui: Over a decade ago when I was still living on Northern Arizona, I was given an acrylic paint set from a friend who saw some potential, I’m assuming, in my pursuit of visual art. I’m not a trained artist, but I took a liking to brushing paint onto canvas. At the time, I was, and still am, in love with the skies and landscape of my area that I grew up in. I wanted to capture some feeling of the place that I spent my early life in. When I attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, I started painting again. I was there as a creative writing major, and didn’t think that I was in any way worthy of showing my paintings to people. I did it because I liked the release it gave me. A fellow classmate who was a visual arts major walked by my dorm room once and saw a painting that I had just completed leaning against the wall. He expressed his interest in the piece. He was excited by what he saw and later showed up with a few large, blank canvases that he had stretched on recycled wood frames and told me to keep painting.

A year later, I entered a creative peak, which lasted for several months. It was also during this time that I wrote many of the poems that are now in Shapeshift. I took many photographs at this time as well. I wasn’t in a very good social space, often disheveled, and crazed by the need to express something beyond all I could express in words and image, and found myself in a place where the unspoken spoke loudest. I had stopped coming to class, hence one day my creative writing professor Jon Davis knocked on the door to my apartment after I’d been missing for a week. He found art work everywhere in my living room. Each piece I showed him was very much like showing him pages of a long poem that took on different incarnations. They were and still are a singular expression for me: the poems, the paintings and the photographs. They come from the same source.

Eventually, I used up all my creative energy and painted my last painting for the 20th century in that apartment at 4 a.m. one morning, basically having some sort of personal breakthrough. It was terrible, like an intense love that was leaving me, and I could not hold onto it anymore. The painting was an abstract/figurative piece (if there can be such a thing), its head, triangular, was tilted up, white shards were leaping out of its belly. Poetry remained afterwards. I think poetry was leaving that body and spilling to the floor to stay with me while the paintings moved onward, away from me.

Nelson: What thematic and stylistic concerns did you carry over from Shapeshift into Flood Song? Was there anything you deliberately did differently?

Bitsui: There weren’t many stylistic concerns on my part when I began writing Flood Song. I was aware that a poem was being birthed, and I knew somehow that this project would take several years to complete. I knew, perhaps mostly by intuition, that the poem would be complete when it felt “completed.”

Shapeshift’s success gave me time to work on Flood Song in various corners of the continent and also afforded me audience during the reading tours that would hear this new poem. Their reactions were certainly necessary for the development of the book, but the most important detail is that I had time to create a piece that was largely a call-and-response between a poet and the poem. Eventually, I merged with the poem and the poem/song called out to audience, and they responded with excitement and anticipation for the new body of work.

Some of the poems in Shapeshift were written in a writing workshop, either at the Institute of American Indian Arts or the University of Arizona. Flood Song is, for the most part, written in parking lots, waiting rooms, airplane terminals, and in the early mornings when I couldn’t sleep. I carried drafts of it with me wherever I went and looked at it daily, obsessively.

Nelson: The book starts with dripping water, but very quickly the reader is swept into the flood. There’s a Whitman-like, image-rich rush to Flood Song. Is your creative process more like harnessing a wild horse or building an edifice brick by brick? I think of the Dionysian impulse of expression and the Apollonian impulse to order.

Bitsui: The Apollonian impulse to order probably occurs in the book’s revisions. The poems spilled forth in stages. There wasn’t a moment when the poem’s sections remained within any one house. They were always appearing in different parts of an invisible map, like sonar, and all I had to do was hold a bucket out and catch what few drops I could get. The process at times was much like attempting to control my dad’s roping horse during my childhood when I’d ride out alone to the valley behind the mesa north of our family’s settlement. The horse didn’t much see me as an authority figure and would hoof the dry earth thunderously, with his ears flicking crazily after several miles. Eventually, it broke for home and bolted back at high speed toward my family’s settlement. During these moments all I could do was release and trust that this horse knew what it was doing. It did, however, a few times, menacingly duck underneath low lying juniper branches, I believe, to scratch off some itchy spot of a young boy clinging onto its back for dear life.

Nelson: Flood Song has a lot of indigenous iconography juxtaposed with contemporary urban imagery: corn, drum, and bird wing paired with gasoline, television, and alarm clock. Is it overly dramatic to say that Flood Song is about surviving in the aftermath of the collision of two worlds?

Bitsui: The book is one collision in a long history of collisions. Certainly, as I get older, I’m more aware of how perspectives are shaped by environments. I am also aware of how I’ve been imprinted and/or mapped by my own cultural perspective, and how quickly that perspective has also changed in my lifetime. This experience is not solely my own, we all have to face such breakthroughs as living beings; I just happen to be going through this experience with a pen and/or laptop in hand. As a poet, I can only hope that I’m just writing poems that appear to witness such things.

The iconographies in the book all share a type of symbiotic relationship with each other. This activity is very much akin to the way I perceive the world to be. There isn’t much space for things to exist in secular environments. Everything is tunneling toward one big globular exposition, but even that destination is unknowable for now. It appears to me that the poem, as apparatus, adjusts such climates in its zone of sight to give the reader a more condensed sense of knowing, or an entrance to what knowledge is being revealed within its framing.

Nelson: Are you optimistic about the continuation of your cultural heritage?

Bitsui: Yes, quite so. At times I feel a sense of urgency to maintain it in its “traditional” form, but then I realize that what I view as traditional Navajo culture is somehow framed within an early twentieth-century context. The core of Navajo philosophy and culture continues to be practiced today in many communities on the Navajo Reservation. Our language is perhaps in danger of being lost with every new generation, but I feel there is a collective sense of awareness among many in my community that language is becoming increasingly important. In my family, the youth, beginning with the generation born in 80’s, are seemingly more communicative in English than in Navajo; though they understand the words and may have a base vocabulary, Navajo perhaps doesn’t seem to be as necessary because the majority of people within the family home are bilingual speakers.

I sometimes wonder if others in their generation have ever had one-on-one conversations with people like my ninety-year old paternal grandmother, who doesn’t speak any English at all. I’ve been lucky to have such moments with her. She gives me the local news when I go home, or asks about places I’ve traveled, new things that I might have seen. Lately, her stories are tinged with a kind of sadness, only because many people of her generation have and are passing on. Other times, I’m able to ask her about the history of my family, of how we came be in that corner of Dine’tah. She has an incredible sense of humor, and I love to tease her and see her smile.

As my generation moves forward, I hope we are able to honor the legacy of our grandparents and continue their stories for future generations. It is easy to Americanize one’s identity because it’s all around us all the time. It’s probably less easy to maintain a language—in any true form—that is slowly being replaced by another one, but I am hopeful that we’ll be able to create new opportunities for our language to continue to be practiced on a daily level and in all aspects of Navajo and North American Indigenous life. Personally, as a poet, I certainly could write more poems or stories in Navajo. It’s an obvious direction for me, and a way to see into new dimensions of Navajo worldview and thought. It will happen with time.

Nelson: “I map a shrinking map”—can this be taken as a sort of artist’s statement?

Bitsui: The vastness of place is certainly interrupted by the collisions of paradoxes, so I would probably say that it’s safe to render that line as an artistic statement for this book.

Interview with James Allen Hall on Now You're the Enemy

2009-09-18T10:26:00.006-07:00

James Allen Hall's debut collection of poems, Now You're the Enemy, was published in 2008 by the University of Arkansas Poetry Series; it won the Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry. He was the 2009 Fieries and Snuffies Poet-in-Residence at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A sample of poems and comments on his work can be read here.

Christopher Nelson: I’d like to hear about the title of the book and the epigraphs by Louise Glück and John Donne. They seem to be part of a motif of love and destruction being wed.

James Allen Hall: My younger brother and I were talking one night while we cooked dinner. Dustin had met this beautiful man, they dated briefly, and we were analyzing the demise of the relationship over dinner. Dustin said to me, “Whenever a man says I love you, the first thing I think is, Great. Now you’re the enemy.” It was the saddest and most lacerating statement; it nailed exactly the feeling of the poems I’d been fashioning—this book about loving a self-destructive mother figure, how that shapes subjectivity, and what happens when we find ourselves shipwrecked on the shores of Love Always Fails Us.

The epigraphs are blueprints to a narrative arc. They provide an entryway into the work and a resting place for the reader after the first section. An original incarnation of the book had no sections, and it felt perhaps too claustrophobic, too violent a reading experience. Glück’s poem, “Witchgrass” (from The Wild Iris) sprang immediately to mind as a way to frame the emotional and philosophical considerations of Now You’re the Enemy. I hesitated including the Donne: it seems maybe a little self-consciously poet-y. But his words form the exact doorframe through which the speaker moves. This speaker has loved a self-destructive mother figure in the first section, and that fascination and love shape the ways in which he experiences adult romantic relationships.

Nelson: When considering the collection, discussing the mother seems inevitable. My experience was that through a sustained engagement with the mother—who accrues into an archetype—, we see ourselves through her.

Hall: I excavate archetype because of its power to enlarge specific and individual experience into a shared history. The speaker’s history, too, is indelibly watermarked with his mother’s. He sees her everywhere: at the all-night cafes, in King Lear, at the movies. It’s an obsessive book, one that seeks to understand how bonds both oppress and free us.

Nelson: In “Song,” from the moment of birth, the speaker wants to heal his mother. At the risk of conflating speaker and poet, are these poems part of a healing process for you? These poems feel to me like an act of bravery. What was it like to write them?

Hall: I don’t mind the conflation, though of course the speaker is and is not me in very important ways. Autobiography is an airport runway: it allows me to lift off into my imagination.

Composing these poems was probably healing. I found taking experience and putting it in a different form—the forms first of language, then the line, the stanza—very satisfying. As all artists do when they discover shape and color and revision. The very nature of art is to make a controlled, beautiful pattern out of chaos, to order.

When Now You're the Enemy was finally published, I felt relief. I could move out of the dark town I'd lived in for years and into a new house whose rooms constricted less, had more light.

I don't know that I have courage. In addition to courage, I also lack shame.

Nelson: Many of the poems are portraits—several titled “Family Portrait” and several variations on portraits of the mother. I love the device, but can you talk about why you chose it? And I’m thinking about what that does to the reader, positioning him or her as a viewer in a home or gallery. It’s a sort of intimate and uncomfortable voyeurism.

Hall: Thanks to Susan Sontag, I once ran across this quote from Breton: “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be.” I employ convulsive imagery and deploy intimate subject matter. I know that the book isn't easy to read, but I wanted to create a portrait of love that was emotionally true to me. Here I go again, using that word: portrait.

The portrait is kind of a quotation, itself. It represents something or someone that existed. In that way, it's also undeniably elegiac: the moment has passed, and this is all that's left. Let us make art in the ruins that time makes.

I like your description, Chris, of the “intimate and uncomfortable voyeurism.” The speaker tells stories about adultery and betrayal, sexual abuse, coming out, s&m sex, and a host of other discomfiting intimacies. The poem “The Enemy” comes closest, I think, to capitalizing on this dynamic, by employing several versions of “you”: first, a “you” who is a beloved, then the generalized “you” of the law, and then you, the reader.

If I am implicated in this story—if James Hall is both poet and speaker—then so too are you implicated in this story. You, Chris. You, blog. You, reader in your comfortable home with your sadness and your joy.

Nelson: Several of the poems are ekphrastic; for example, the longest poem in the collection is a poem in six parts, each a response to a Manet painting. Why Manet? And do you have an ekphrastic process?

Hall: Manet just really turns me on. Several paintings—dejuener sur l’herbe and Olympia immediately spring to mind—concern the politics of observer and observed. Manet ruptures the idea that the represented figure is turned into a thing. He gives the model agency; she is the viewer and the viewed. We are at Victorine Meurent’s mercy.

I don’t have an ekphrastic process, but I would die without art.

Nelson: The cover of the book is beautiful and haunting. How and why was it chosen?

Hall: I’m pleased you like it. I found it in the Getty archives as I was obsessing about cover art. I thought it perfectly captured that dangerous intimacy you described before. The cover shows a woman behind a blue screen in the middle of what looks like a hurricane. Behind her, a palm tree threatens to uproot. She is forbidding you; she is protecting you. You must save her; she will never let you.

Interview with Morgan Schuldt on CUE

2009-08-10T18:16:00.015-07:00

Christopher Nelson: For those who may be unfamiliar with CUE: A Journal of Prose Poetry, what is its history?

Morgan Schuldt: CUE was conceived while my friend Mark Horosky and I were making our way through the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Mark had edited a small journal, Elm, back in New Haven, Connecticut, and it was his enthusiasm for that project that got me interested in doing something here in Tucson. We kicked around the idea of starting an indie journal dedicated to the prose poem, a form we were both enamored with and writing in at the time. We graduated in 2002 from Arizona, but I believe it wasn’t until 2004 that we put out our first issue, which featured Tucson poets almost exclusively. It was small (around 40 pages, as all of our issues would be), but the design and production qualities were high. Mark moved to Brooklyn about a year after the first issue came out, and I took full control over the journal, running it for six more issues. While it lasted in print we received nothing but positive feedback. In fact two years in a row work from CUE appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, a coup for such a small journal, but one that I think speaks to the quality of the writers we’ve chosen to publish over the years—John Ashbery, James Tate, Michael Palmer, Karen Volkman, Lisa Jarnot, Ron Silliman, Matthea Harvey, among many, many others.

Nelson: Now you have transitioned to an exclusively online journal. Why the shift? And where do you see online publishing taking CUE?

Schuldt: One word—costs. Outsourced production, professional printing (at a run of 500), mailing and distribution. The project was unsustainable, and I think we knew that after the first few issues. Even after grant money, subscriptions, and private donations, the costs became just too prohibitive. To be honest, I’m surprised we lasted even seven issues. After a year of ambivalence on my part, considering if I wanted to take CUE online, the journal finally made the shift to the web, doing so knowing that our readers would miss the physical aspects of the journal much like we would. One thing that was great about the print version was its size and brevity; each issue was designed specifically to be read in one sitting, like a chapbook. That intimacy and the physical satisfaction that went with it have been sacrificed, but I hope for the right reasons, namely a much wider audience. Subscriptions to the print journal topped out around 100 which, when you compare it to the reach of the Internet, is a pittance. Within a week of the new CUE website going up we reached over 400 unique visitors online. I know that doesn’t compare to more established online journals like Octopus or Coconut or Diagram (also based here in Tucson) but I take comfort in knowing there’s a huge audience for poetry out there that we now have the opportunity to reach.

Nelson: Will CUE remain focused on the prose poem, or have you broadened its scope?

Schuldt: Though the inaugural online issue might suggest otherwise (it’s all prose poems), we are moving away from the exclusive publication of prose poetry. The bulk of the work in the first online issue was solicited by Mark as part of a special guest-edited issue for what was to be Issue 8 of the print journal. Thankfully, when we decided to shift our operation online, everyone who had already contributed work to the print issue (including Mark, who put together a terrific line up and who I was thrilled to include as part of a second launch) was cool about having it appear online. But to get back to your question, yes, the journal is widening its scope. As my own writing has evolved, I’ve become less convinced that there’s a need for a journal dedicated specifically to the form. When Mark and I started CUE, I think our feeling at the time was that the “prose poem” was under-represented in the journals we were reading. This was clearly a proprietary concern on our part; we were, after all, in graduate school, writing prose poems almost exclusively. I think we both felt excited by and protective of the form. I was writing in prose what felt like real breakthrough poems for me, and if memory serves, Mark even took his entire MFA manuscript of lined poems and made it over into a book of prose poems. Looking back now, such protectionism seems limiting to me, if not completely silly. Most journals worth reading make room for prose poems. Even Poetry has started publishing them. And that’s why CUE is revamping. The shift to a new format offers us the chance to re-set the aesthetic mission of the journal, which now is to showcase work concerned with the more material aspects of language in whatever form or function that may take. Prose poems will continue to appear, yes, but so will lineated work, so long as it skews toward the linguistically playful. To back ourselves out of the niche we’ve existed in for the past several years and to join the larger conversation that’s going on as to what poetry should be—that’s the new mission.

Nelson: Over the years you’ve been joined by a few contributing editors—namely Barbara Cully, Boyer Rickel, and Stephanie Balzer. How has their presence shaped CUE? Will they continue to be part of the project now that you’re online?

Schuldt: I think it’s my personality to want to recruit others into my enthusiasms, to share them with friends and poets whose work I believe in, and that’s what bringing someone on as a contributing editor means. It’s a way to build and grow community, something every writer needs, or at least needs to feel. It’s also a great way to set oneself up for future favors. All of the contributing editors are first and foremost dear friends. I like to think of Boyer as my consigliere; there’s no decision big or small I make with the journal that I don’t run by him first. As anyone who’s ever been Boyer’s friend or student knows, there’s a shrewdness to his thinking that’s always dead-on, and I’m not above harnessing that in the name of the journal’s continued growth and success. Stephanie has been fantastic with managing the more practical aspects of running a journal, the stuff I’ve never been very good at and have little patience for—applying for grants, filing paperwork, acting as a liaison between the journal and more bureaucratic circles. CUE wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has if it weren’t for her dedication and her patience with my own shortcomings. Barbara? She is perhaps the wisest person I know; she keeps me focused on the big picture, asking the big questions.

Nelson: In addition to the journal CUE, you also created and edit CUE Editions. Tell us about that project and some of the works you’ve published.

Schuldt: When I was considering either shutting the magazine down or moving it online, Boyer had the idea that we adopt a more hybrid model. We always wanted CUE to showcase a large number of poems by a relatively small number of writers, so the side step to chapbooking seemed like a natural development in the growth of CUE. The idea is to save overhead by moving online, use a fraction of the previous print budget to publish one-of-a-kind chapbooks, and then to turn around and use our wider web presence to create a readership for the chapbooks, which, hopefully, will begin to pay for their own production. It’s not an original model for expansion, but it’s one that I think allows us to keep one foot in the print world. While we haven’t gotten production completely off the ground, when we do the hope is to put out 3–4 chapbooks a year.

Nelson: Mark Horosky’s Let It Be Nearby is a recent chapbook you’ve designed and published. I love not only the poems but the presentation of them: it comes packaged like a vinyl forty-five record, and the poems are printed on unbound cards—an innovative design that encourages a variety of reading experiences. Talk about your aspirations as a designer and publisher.

Schuldt: That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought of myself as having aspirations as a designer. What I want most from the chapbook series is the chance to collaborate with writers on what they imagine and what design I think will best highlight the strengths of their particular work and then realize that together. Let It Be Nearby is an example of that kind of collaboration, but it’s also a special case. Mark’s one of my closest friends, so Boyer and I spared no expense in putting together his chap. And it took long enough—nearly a year and a half, I think, from conception to production. We were riding the subway in Brooklyn when I described to Mark an idea I had for a series of his prose poems on A and B-sided cards that would slide inside the paper sleeve of a forty-five record. He was totally blown away by the concept and had the idea to include the work of his friend, the Brooklyn-based artist Aime Robinson, on the cover(s). Mark’s one of those music savants who knows more about bands than I’ll ever know about anything, and that shows in his work too, so it made sense to me to honor that aspect of his poetry. Mark’s also into more avant-garde work, especially the work of Language and Post-Language poets, and so I think the design appealed to him on that level as well. I didn’t realize it until after the fact, but his chapbook, while not exactly the same in design, is related to Robert Grenier’s project Sentences, which is a series of 500 poems on 5x8 index cards in a box. That participatory aspect of LIBN’s design was something we both liked, I think.

Nelson: What exciting things are in the works at CUE Editions that we should watch for?

Schuldt: For now, CUE Editions will be publishing only solicited manuscripts from friends, though I’m hoping to expand the press and open up submissions in the next year or two. Next up is Stephanie Balzer’s chapbook, faster, faster. As I did with Mark, I’ve wanted to be able to help Stephanie find a wider audience for her work. The print journal served that purpose for a while, but when she read for the Poetry Center last February, the audience (which was huge) alternated between enraptured silence and outright laughter. I’ve been to a lot of poetry readings, but I’ve rarely experienced anything like that. I also know that people left disappointed for not having her work to take home with them, which is why I think it’s about time there’s something of hers out in the world. I’m hoping we can get faster, faster out by October, in time for several readings she’ll be doing around town in the fall. As for the more distant future, I’m still getting the hang of chapbook publishing, so it may be slow going for some time. After Steph’s chap I have a few projects tentatively lined up, including something by the inimitable Sommer Browning.

Nelson: And what about your own poetry? Parlor Press published your collection Verge in 2007. What directions are you exploring in your poems now?

Schuldt: God, I wish I knew. It’s been slow going, this next book. I recently published a second chapbook online with Scantily Class Press called L=u=N=G==U=A=G=E, which includes about 20 poems that seem to be extending the work I started in Verge (though I hope more ambitiously) and which I hope will become the core of a new manuscript, erros. I’m not a “project” poet. I’ve never had some over-arching concept I wanted to work out in the pages of a book. For now I’m content writing one poem at a time and just hoping for the best.

Nelson: Thank you, Morgan, not only for the interview but for the wonderful contributions you’ve made to the literary community.

Schuldt: Thank you, Chris.

Interview with Carolyn Forché

2009-04-25T20:07:00.019-07:00

Carolyn Forché is the author of four award-winning books of poetry; the most recent is Blue Hour. She is also the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegria, Robert Desnos, and Mahmoud Darwish. She teaches at Georgetown University. In February, 2009, we spoke at Arizona State University's annual Desert Nights writers' conference. (Photo © Emma Dodge Hanson)

Christopher Nelson: When you consider your four books of poetry, what has remained constant and what has changed?

Carolyn Forché: My obsessions have remained constant and my formal investigations have changed. Certain readers tell me that they discern in each book the seeds of the next one. They see a trajectory in ways that I don’t; it isn’t as obvious to me. I experience each book as a departure from past work. If I consider the four of them—(and there are only four; I publish one book every decade)—I think there are obsessions that drift from book to book and that are amplified over time. Probably those have to do with the problem of good and evil [laughter], the experience of extremity and how language is marked by extremity, history, legibility, and in recent years, an exploration of the elegiac. When I look back I see that elegy has always interested me because of the circumstances of my life and perhaps my cast of mind and the leanings of my imagination—I don’t think we really know why: that’s a personal puzzle that needs assembled over the course of a lifetime.

If there are poets who perfect the poem over the course of many books, and they are recognizably themselves in ways that are grounded in formal concerns—I’m not that. I’m not of that family. If there are poets for whom each book is an individual event or investigation—that’s what I think I do. I haven’t been comfortable remaining in a particular poetic mode. It’s not interesting to me to write a certain kind of poem over and over. For example, while I admire, and am interested in, many first-person, lyric-narrative, free-verse poems that have an arc of disclosure and a building of rhythmic momentum toward an epiphanic resolution, I don’t want to write that poem over and over; I’ve found in my current manuscript, however, that poem has recurred. I feel that I made a journey away from it with The Angel of History. The departure had to do with entering into a kind of polyphonic meditation. I wanted to see what I could do beyond creating a first-person speaker who was herself a figure in the work. So my tendency in the ten years while I was working on The Angel of History was to remove myself, to absent myself, from that figure whom I had been in the previous two books, and that got interesting for me.

And I had other influences: Edmond Jabès; Claude Lanzmann (the filmmaker), particularly the subtitles for his Shoah; French philosophy and the Frankfurt School, principally Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin; Gershom Scholem; and Hannah Arendt. I was also reading Emmanuel Levinas (by way of Martin Buber) and Jean-Franҫois Lyotard, whose philosophical concerns arose out of contemplations of twentieth-century history. And I had for years been studying Holocaust literature, documentary, and memoir. So particular events of twentieth-century history—the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—became central to the The Angel of History.

Then during the period of Blue Hour there was again a departure. I had an interest in different theologies, and certain poets—what in America they call “experimental poetics,” which I think is an unfortunate term: “experimental” is too scientific, “avant-garde” is too military. I’m interested in poets that a lot of people don’t seem to think much about—and maybe wouldn’t associate with my work: George Oppen, for instance, is very important to me, and Saint-John Perse, Paul Celan, Yannis Ritsos, Odysseas Elytis (particulary in Olga Broumas’s translation), Joseph Zobel, and certain French aphorists. I was inspired by poets who were sort of fooling around with genre and line, and I was studying the play of line stops against syntactical continuations. There’s a wonderful little book called The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach; in it he articulates very well what fascinates me about the play of line and syntax—and I love his abandonment of the term “line break.” … Blue Hour was also a very personal book. It might not be obvious, but for me it was much more personally revealing than my previous books; there’s much more autobiographical material in Blue Hour.

Nelson: You said that you publish a book a decade. Is that because you write less than many poets, or are you more selective in what you publish? Many poets publish a book every two or three years.

Forché: I’m not against publishing more frequently. It’s just that I don’t have something that I consider worth the paper of the trees and the time of the reader as often. And I don’t really enjoy publishing. I think that’s part of it. I find it a very difficult experience. I try to avoid it if I can, which is why I don’t send poems out to magazines often. If I happen to have a poem and someone happens to ask me, or persuade me, to give it to them—that’s how my poems are published in magazines. Otherwise, I don’t send work out. I think that comes from an aversion to publishing, and that comes from personal experience. I think the reason is that I published too young in book form. I was twenty-five when my first book, Gathering the Tribes, appeared, and I was a young twenty-five. I’d had a fairly difficult life in my early twenties, so I wasn’t very strong when it was published. I wasn’t ready to be a public person. After it was published, I retreated into a kind of silence and into an agonizing struggle with my work.

Then I went to El Salvador and my life changed utterly, and because my life changed my poetry changed. El Salvador was a country that no one could really find on a map; it wasn’t a country anyone thought much about. And I wrote poems that I wasn’t even intending to publish. (I write a lot for myself, for the page, for the drawer; if I ever started a literary magazine I’d call it The Drawer.) But then you see what happened: the publication of my second book, The Country Between Us, was delayed because it was rejected by a publisher I respected very much. So I thought maybe it wasn’t ready; maybe it was something I shouldn’t publish. So I put it in the drawer. That delay meant that when it was published El Salvador was prominent in the news, which led that book to reach a wider audience than most poetry books. Had it been published when I actually finished, that might not have happened; a few years earlier, a few years later—the situation would have been different.

The experience of publication with the second book was worse for me than the first book, because of the added difficulty of extra-literary concerns: the controversy surrounding the book and the controversy surrounding who I was and why I had done this, and the accusation that the work was political. I was very committed to speaking and working against the Intervention, so I plowed myself into that and into human rights work. I tried to ignore the poetry world and that controversy. But when I had come out of El Salvador, I was not in very good shape, and I was not strong enough for what transpired. So once again, a decade long retreat and the project of the anthology, Against Forgetting, which was really a beautiful experience for me. I was so engaged, and it was such a pleasure to do the research and the reading and editing. I didn’t have to worry about anyone else. It was a labor of love. My friend Daniel Simko encouraged me and made it possible for me to start writing my own work again because he came and took care of my son everyday for a few hours, on the condition that I would write while they were gone. So I started The Angel of History really because of Daniel.

It takes me quite a few years to write and revise and write a book. I suppose if I could do it more quickly and publish more frequently I would, but it doesn’t seem to be the case with me. It’s already been six years since Blue Hour. I’m halfway through a new manuscript—halfway!—at the six year mark; it might even be longer than a decade this time. Everyone has their own rhythm—their own imaginative, intellectual, spiritual rhythm—with regard to these matters. And I suppose some people enjoy publishing—some people crave it, possibly. I can’t answer for them, but I can say that my situation is otherwise. And I’ve learned that I’m not the only poet who feels, or has felt, that way. There’s quite a tradition of people who don’t like to publish. People who do it, but don’t enjoy it. I’m not alone. I’m even in some good company, so I don’t worry about it anymore.

Nelson: I love that your poems are very much of the world—its physical things and an acute observation of its emotional circumstances—while also moving beyond it, reaching toward the ineffable. I think of “On Earth,” in Blue Hour, and the sort of un-reality of the war poems in The Angel of History. It makes me wonder what compels you to write poems?

Forché: I have different experiences of this at different times. In writing certain poems I know where I am, but I don’t know what the poem is going to be. I’m in a moment imaginatively—which usually begins with an image, or a glimpse of something, or something fires off from the past, or something flashes before me—and I start writing toward someone. Then I find out what it’s going to be. Other times I actually meditate through the poem. In some of those polyphonic poems in The Angel of History I allowed myself great leaps in time and space between the different sections. I let myself move from Beirut back to the place along the sea shore: maybe I felt the spray, the salt foam, that was lifted out of the Mediterranean by the helicopters in Beirut, and I was writing through that, and then I was back at a window facing the sea. When I was in Beirut it was a very difficult time. It was the winter of ’83–’84. We came under shell fire. One night I was in the basement listening to all the explosions. After that night, for awhile I felt that my mind was behaving as a kaleidoscope: I couldn’t sustain a thought the same way, and when I wrote, I couldn’t sustain the speaker on the page. It was a kind of staccato rapid firing of images, perceptions, and memories in my consciousness—all the time. I thought, to my horror, that it was going to last forever, and that’s how I was going to be. It didn’t last forever, but while it was happening, I decided that since I couldn’t stop it, I would set it to paper, that I would work with it, rather than against it—write my way out of it. The breaking up of the language in The Angel of History started because I was writing in that mental state. Everything was kind of swirling around, so I thought I will make something with this broken glass; I will glue it together, because if I don’t do that I won’t be able to do anything.

I think what saved me was that I became a mother, and I spent a year in Paris, which was, unfortunately, the year of the Paris bombings, 1986. There were a lot of bombings of department stores and metros, but otherwise Paris was quite peaceful, as Paris can be. It calmed me down. And I had my son; I was a young new mother. I think that in creating a safe, lovely environment for my son, I accidentally created one for myself. There were lots of peaceful walks in cemeteries—because cemeteries are safe places; no one would set off a bomb there. And cemeteries are beautiful: filled with flowers and gardens and pigeons and stones and cats and old women sweeping. I lived facing Montparnasse, a beautiful small cemetery, and I visited interesting people there, like Julio Cortázar and Jean-Paul Sartre. That spring Simone de Beauvoir died, and she was buried next to Sartre. I’d just make my rounds and visit different people. I started—without knowing it—writing The Angel of History there. So I had my baby and I went to school, because I was also translating Robert Desnos and I needed more French. It was a beautiful year. Now that I think of it, it was one of the best years of my life. I lived as an ordinary French housewife lives: shopping the market, cooking, taking care of the baby, going to the post office, getting flowers from the market. Life was like that, and it was heavenly. If I could choose a way to live now, I would live like that again.

I think that how and where I’ve lived have effected my work. With The Country Between Us, I had been in Central America, and that had been horrifically difficult, dangerous, intense, emotional; it got worse and worse and worse while I was there, and that didn’t let up during a twelve-year civil war. The Country Between Us has an intensity about it that reflects that. And maybe The Angel of History is quieter, more meditative. I was raising a child, so there’s a child in the meditation. By the time I wrote Blue Hour, I was older. Interestingly there are things in Blue Hour that didn’t come true for a few years. Three years after it was published I got diagnosed with cancer—which was a transformative experience, terrifying and illuminating. Some of what I wrote in Blue Hour seems to portend that; I see things there now—and my friends see them too—phrases and images that are uncanny, that have to do with—maybe—the fact that while I was writing it I had cancer, but I didn’t know it. And now the new poems are almost a return to an earlier mode, first-person, largely lyric poems, not particularly polyphonic, not particularly experimental. So I have to think about how and where I was living and what were the pressures on my psyche. Who was I reading and what was my life like? My life has changed so radically so many times. Before Paris I was in South Africa during the last days of apartheid, which was also very intense. I haven’t written much about South Africa, which surprises me. Not all of my lived experiences come into the poems. There are whole countries of lived experience that have never visited me on the page. Maybe someday; I don’t know. Beirut: very little. South Africa: very little.

Nelson: And in these many different places that you’ve been, how do you see poets’ and poetry’s roles in those cultures? Is it different than in America?

Forché: Absolutely. American poetic culture is very lively: there are many more readings and publications and magazines and festivals and conferences in the United States than anywhere else in the world, as far as I know. It’s very dynamic. A Salvadoran was visiting with me a few months ago, and he picked up Poets & Writers and said, “My goodness, we have nothing like this. This is amazing! Look at all of these things you have!” And I thought, “Yes, he’s right.” But poetry and poets are regarded differently in other countries, and I’m somewhat more comfortable in other places in that respect. For example, in France if you say you’re a poet, the first you’re asked is not “Have you published?” It’s enough to be an artist or a writer; you don’t have to be recognized; you don’t have to be known. People are just interested in what you are doing. I find that really refreshing and lovely.

Also the poets are more expected to be intellectuals and to have an active interest in history and politics and everything going on. They’re not expected to be sequestered in a literary culture. They’re not expected to have no opinions about events in the world. They’re expected to have more seriously considered opinions because they’re poets—and not necessarily predictable opinions. It’s not bad to be an intellectual in certain other countries if you’re a poet. And there’s less commercialization there. And there’s less opportunity, but there’s a quieter, more serious experience in some ways.

Poets in the rest of the world are very much interested in other poets in other countries. Many countries host an annual or bi-annual and invite people from all over the world to come, and their poets all come. There are three or four days of fireworks and torches lighted and gala dinners and celebrations. Often in America the poetry festivals tend to be more staid and academic and decidedly American, rather than international. I could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve experienced it. If I go to a conference here, most of the poets I meet will be Americans; we’ll have panels and readings, but it won’t be this sort of festive, jubilant, celebratory thing I’ve seen in other countries. Also, in other places I’ve been, there is more of an inter-arts connection: there will be a film show or a jazz band that plays before the reading, and there will be a photo exhibit out in the gallery—lots of things going on. The other artists drift toward the poets and want to present their work and play and make exchanges. In America it seems that when people come together to share literary culture, there’s less involvement with the other arts, especially in academic venues.

And for all of our interest in poetry from other countries—and I think we do have that—we translate very few poets from other languages, relatively speaking; we publish very few; we review almost none of the books that do make it into print. Sometimes poets we regard highly are poets from other countries—Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Wisława Szymborska, Seamus Heany, Derek Walcott—but we don’t know much about the younger poets and poets who haven’t won Nobel prizes. We don’t know much about poets who have never lived for a time in the United States.

Nelson: One of the beautiful things about your anthology, Against Forgetting, is that it introduced many American readers to poets we hadn’t encountered before, and who knows if we would have encountered them if not for your work.

Forché: It was terrible to realize that the poets I was not able to include might never be anthologized in English. I felt in some ways that I was abandoning certain poets or poems to an oblivion of sorts—that they would be sleeping in the library for another decade, or maybe forever. And the anthology is twice as long as [the publisher] W.W. Norton wanted it to be. I was to have 400 pages maximum, and too late I showed up in their offices with 700-plus pages. They let it go through, but that’s not the length they wanted it to be. You know, a thicker book has a bigger price tag. How much you can charge for the book really matters. The person who can pay $19.95 is not the same person who can pay thirty or forty dollars. Sales drop off precipitously. … Publishing may have a difficult time in this economic decline. For example, hard-covers may not sell as many copies as before; certain kinds of books may not do as well, and that will change literary culture, and that will affect what is published in the future.

…. But in terms of the experience of being a poet in certain countries—I would say Nicaragua, El Salvador, among them—people know about their poets more than Americans know theirs. They can tell you about poets, they’ve memorized poems, they know the poets who are alive in their time. In America I think if you walk down a street and randomly ask people to name a living poet, they might have a hard time. For many Americans poetry isn’t part of the shared culture.

The one thing that I do feel more comfortable with when I’m in other countries is that no one “gets on my case” for my other interests. My work is never dismissed because I wrote about some colonel in El Salvador; that doesn’t happen. I don’t suffer from that.

Nelson: “Suffer”—that’s interesting. In America, I imagine that many people who know your work associate your name with “The Colonel.”

Forché: Yes. And in America that poem is controversial, but in other countries it isn’t. No one questions writing about something like that. Or at least, no one thus far has.

Nelson: What do you think is behind that questioning, that being critical of political subject matter?

Forché: I think it’s complicated, and I think the criticism of my own work wasn’t really about politics in the largest sense. Some people have suggested to me that I had done an unexpected thing, that I had written an unexpected book that had unexpectedly gotten unexpected attention, and that this was resented by some people. There’s that. And I’m a woman, which may have had something to do with it. Also we humans have a tendency to project our own feelings and motivations and concerns onto others, so people who focus very seriously on their literary careers might imagine that other people focus also very seriously on their literary careers. To give you an example, in print someone said that my working in El Salvador had basically been a career move, which is absurd. In the beginning I thought that the resentment was a vestige of Cold War American government propaganda: the narrative was that there was a Communist uprising in El Salvador and Cuba was behind it. But as years go by I think it had to do with much pettier reasons. I was a young woman who went to another country. Things had gotten bad. I had done something else with my life for a little while, and I wrote about it.

There was one other factor that contributed to that book receiving more attention, a kind of resented attention: two newspaper columnists, Nicholas von Hoffman and Pete Hamill—neither of whom had been in El Salvador—, wanted to write about El Salvador around the time my book was published. Both began columns with The Country Between Us as a “hook,” and both columns suggested that it was peculiar that we were getting our news from a book of poems. Those columns were syndicated in several hundred American newspapers right around the time my book was published. I was soon invited everywhere—synagogues, churches, universities, chambers of commerce. Everyone wanted to know about El Salvador. I was happy about that because I could fulfill a promise I made to Monsignor Romero to speak about those events in the United States. But it was exhausting too. I had no governor on my schedule. I went everywhere and did everything anyone wanted me to do. I was on the road almost all the time, and I was doing that because we had several movements we were trying to build: an anti-intervention network, a solidarity network, Witness for Peace, and the Sanctuary movement. These were begun locally, by community activists working in concert with people moving around the United States—in little towns and cities—and talking, making appeals. The network was built overnight, partly because the people who had organized the antiwar movement during the American war in Southeast Asia were still around and were willing to give their energy to this, and because it needed to be built overnight. It happened phenomenally fast, and I was taken up with that and obsessed with it. … Now we’re all philosophical. When Salvadorans come to my house we talk about the old days, about what happened and what didn’t happen, what was achieved, what wasn’t achieved—I feel like an old lady. I still honor those years and feel committed to the same things; but I was a poet before I went to El Salvador, and I’m a poet many years after El Salvador. It’s just that there was a moment, and that moment blessed me with the curse of being better known than I would have otherwise been.

Nelson: I hear that you’re working on a memoir. Is that something you can talk about?

Forché: I taught the poet Ilya Kaminsky for seven years. When I met him he was nineteen—a profoundly deaf émigré from Ukraine. I met him at a workshop in the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute. We became friends. We had very interesting conversations over the years. I began writing—for the drawer—my little prose account of our conversations. Then in January 2003 my house was destroyed by water, right at the time Blue Hour was published, and we had to rebuild, which took us four years. The insurance was a mess—it was terrible. So I took these pages out of the drawer and sent them to New York because I needed money for plumbing, and I knew the only thing I could sell was prose. The unfinished manuscript was shown to a publisher, and they bought the book unfinished and gave me an advance. I then became committed—having spent the money on plumbing—to actually write the thing, and I’ve been working on it ever since. I finished a first draft, and now I’m going to do a second draft. It’s called The Horse on Our Balcony, and it’s a memoir that accounts for all those years and things, prompted by Ilya’s questions: How did you become the poet that you are? What happened to you? Why the differences between the books? Why did you go to these countries? All of those questions. And I decided after I was diagnosed with cancer that I had better make an accounting for myself before someone else interpreted my life. I wanted to tell my story from my own point of view and say things I hadn’t said; shed some light on things that maybe people have wondered about. It’s just that. I’m hoping to finish it soon. I like prose, I like sentences; I’ve enjoyed the writing.

Interview with Frances Sjoberg on outcrop

2009-01-30T17:20:00.005-07:00

Frances Sjoberg received her MFA from Warren Wilson College and her BA from the University of Arizona. She worked for the UA Poetry Center for just shy of a decade, and is now a JD candidate at the UA College of Law. In addition to her chapbook, outcrop, published by Chax Press in 2008, her poems have been published in Barrow Street; Alaska Quarterly Review; River City Review; Forklift, Ohio; Spork Magazine; and other fine places. Her love of poetry is outpaced only by her love of new and uncomfortable situations, like pigeon pose and law school. With practice, she hopes that her physical and mental selves will both become more pliant. (She has also stopped correcting split auxiliary verbs.)

Christopher Nelson: The language of outcrop is impressively compressed. Is that unique to this collection, or is that a feature of your other poems as well? And what attracts you to such compression?

Frances Sjoberg: Thank you for saying so. I hope that it is a feature in all of my work, though the poems in the first section of outcrop seem to me like an actual study of compression. To use the internal combustion engine as an analogy, the limited intake of those poems allows me to more closely experience how their mixtures combust. Deflagration, or subsonic combustion, is a thermal conductor, in which energy passes from one thing to another. Detonation, or supersonic combustion, creates shock waves. If I were an engineer (and I wish that I were) I would better know how all of this works, but it seems to me, looking at words that describe the thing rather than looking at the thing itself, that deflagration burns up its fuel, and detonation ignites and propels it outward from behind a shock. I think that my poems are deflagrationist.

On a non-analogical note, I find compression to be one of the poetry’s two great aims. Compression enables us to fully experience and appreciate a poet’s mastery of word choice, grammar, syntax, figure of speech, and musical control. The other great aim is clarity.

On a side note, one or two of the poems in outcrop may be, technically, more “whittled” than “compressed.”

Nelson: Which poets do you most admire for their abilities to compress language? (Having taken your class on the wee poem, I know you'll have some reading suggestions.)

Sjoberg: Well, Emily Dickinson is the definitive compressor. And Paul Celan, of course. One could spend a lifetime expanding and expending the language in their bodies of work.

Of contemporary poets, Heather McHugh is a master of semantic compression. In a different vein, Morgan Lucas Schuldt is doing incredible compressionistic work.

Others, in no apparent order and in very different ways, are Frank Bidart, Cesar Vallejo, Ann Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Tedi Lopez Mills, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorie Graham, John Donne, Josephine Jacobson, William Carlos Williams!, Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Dan Beachy-Quick, Robin Robertson, Robert Creeley, Andrew Marvell, Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Treadwell, Marianne Moore, Jack Gilbert, and Thomas Ken, who wrote the doxology in 1674.

Nelson: I marvel at your syntactic acrobatics in “Self My With Is.” Will you let us behind the curtain? What was your process? In earlier drafts was the syntax normal?

Sjoberg: Really? Behind the curtain? I've never done this before but okay. The first draft wasn't a poem at all. It was a short, fraught email that, when sent, continued to agitate in my ear and in my mind. Language sometimes haunts me, as it did in this instance, and when it does I remember it, hear it, see it all verbatim. “Self My With Is” is a distortion of the words of that email, the result of an extended reconfiguration until the words landed in a sonic and syntactic pattern that settled down in my head. I guess you could call it an exorcising exercise. I think that I changed a verb tense or two, and I may have substituted a homonym for an original word, so I’m not sure it can be refitted perfectly to the original email.

The Poetry Center has an LP of Gertrude Stein reading some poems. If you listen closely, you can hear a clock strike one o'clock behind her while she’s reading a portrait of Picasso. It's not orchestrated. It’s just a moment in time that has attached itself to the silence behind her poem. There’s some sort of temporal wormhole, at least for me, in “Self My With Is” too.

Nelson: The second part of the book is “Rays,” a longer poem that contains a couple of fragments from an essay by the artist Man Ray. There are also allusions to St. Augustine and Igor Stravinsky. These presences, did they inform, haunt, inspire—or something else—the poem? And your images are so precise and yet extended; I wonder, is the poem also ekphrastic?

Sjoberg: Man Ray informed the poem. St. Augustine haunted it. Igor Stravinsky inspired it. The poem is ekphrastic. Each section describes a particular Man Ray photograph. (A friend of mine has a single handmade chapbook of “Rays” that has the informing photo on facing pages … or maybe on the page preceding the poem. She doesn’t like poetry very much, so I gave it to her with the visual cues to keep her interested.)

Nelson: You're studying law at the University of Arizona. How does your poetic intelligence inform those studies? Or what have you noticed about those two realms of language?

Sjoberg: There are five demands in the study of law that may bear strong relation to the demands of poetry: first, an understanding that language is an imperfect tool to adequately close the gap between what you mean and what I understand; second, an understanding that justice/art demands both absolute precision and also an aura of indefinition in order to accommodate that which we cannot anticipate; third, an ability to argue, with one’s whole heart, that a three-wheeled vehicle should be deemed either a two-wheeled vehicle or a four-wheeled vehicle for the purpose of a law whose drafter did not anticipate the possibility of three-wheels; fourth, a robust appreciation of paradox; and finally, an ability to take both roads in a yellow wood, and both roads that diverge from each of those roads, and to follow (or lead) each possible road to an intended destination because that makes all of difference. In sum, for one who loves the triumphs and failures of language, who believes that there is moral imperative to our mastery of and submission to it, the impulse toward law and poetry may turn out to be one and the same.

The flip way to answer this question is that I am, indeed, a first year law student. Ergo, that I have any intelligence at all is debatable.

Nelson: Lastly, why is the wren lovely and the hawk gorgeous?

Sjoberg: I'm not sure I can say why exactly. But maybe I can explain it by talking around it.

The silent w before a liquid r … lovely isn't it?

And the silent w before the hard k … it's gorgeous.

The hawk, riding currents in a canyon (a gorge?): the very thought of it stops my breath.

And there's more to gorge. Have you ever seen a hawk catch and eat its prey? It’ll tear another bird to bits, the seed falling out of the prey’s gullet to the ground. Wild, harsh, and gorgeous.

And wren, with its frequent modifier “house” … it evokes for me yellow curtains pulled back in the kitchen with tomatoes ripening on the windowsill. Domestic and lovely.

“Lovely” may seem diminutive next to “gorgeous,” especially when the word gorgeous drops a reader (or writer) off of the linguistic conveyor belt of this poem. But diminution may ultimately dominate.

For the hawk, I'm awe-filled, offalled, ultimately awful.

And finally, love is in the word lovely, which is itself awe-inspiring. And in-spyering (where a spy learns one’s secrets) and in-spiring (where a spire reaches up toward god). A spire is also the slender shoot of a plant. The oak cometh up a little spire, wrote Chaucer. I could eat that slender shoot of a plant, says the wren.

Interview with Jordan Stempleman on String Parade

2008-12-30T15:53:00.019-07:00

Jordan Stempleman is the author of Their Fields (Moria, 2005), What's the Matter (Otoliths, 2007), Facings (Otoliths, 2007), and The Travels (Otoliths, 2008). String Parade is available here from BlazeVOX. Visit Jordan's blog, Growing Nation.

Christopher Nelson: Each poem in String Parade is dedicated to someone—at times I felt that the dedications were like invocations. Tell us about the dedications.

Jordan Stempleman: I knew I wanted to have a book of poems that already had a number of readers, that they were written to be read, handed off you could say. I modified O'Hara's notion of "Personism" a bit, since some of the poems were to people I will never meet, while others were to friends, acquaintances, those I deeply admire, that all share the same name. Others were of course for those people I know oh so well and that often saw their poems well before the book came out.

I like how you call them invocations, since I was often sending waves to a reader who might not otherwise be found. Dorothea Lasky gets it, really gets it, when she writes in her reaction to the book: "Here in these poems, Stempleman creates a spectacle of dedication for the everyday people he loves, which by the end of the book, we realize is all of us." I was hoping that someone who read this book would see that if the book were to go on indefinitely, their name would most assuredly appear with a poem dedicated to them.

Nelson: There are a variety of forms here: prose poems, poems in fragments, poems in parts, single- and double-spaced poems. How do you determine the shape a poem will take?

Stempleman: I just realized the other day that String Parade was the final book in a trilogy, which includes two earlier collections (What's the Matter and Facings), where I allowed for any and all influences of form to be allowable, usable, and ready. As a younger poet I was often so uneasy about the "what had happened," so much so that I often ended up not writing much of anything. I thought it had to look new. Sounding new is sounding like oneself. But looking new─I just didn't know how formally that would ever come about. So with What’s the Matter and ending with String Parade, I finally erased the notion of formal inventiveness and concentrated more on content─search for what I couldn't say, what was often ungraspable otherwise, etc. It made for poems! It allowed for the unreachable, just out of sight speech that makes up my poems to find a place to live. Often the first line would dictate the form of the entire poem. So that I like to think that the language of the thought built the space only it could comfortably occupy to come out and take the poem as its form of preference. Does that make sense? The song found in that first line then said "I need more space to breathe, give me a double spaced line" or "Keep me at a clipped, W.C.W/Creeley line" or whatever. I never would come to the time to write a poem and, before the first line was what it became, determine the form of the poem.

In the last two collections I've written, the complete opposite is true, which in a strange way is actually less hectic than the old way I composed a poem. I now either write in a boxed, even line-length form, or in a half-kidding Projective Verse. I guess I might say I can hear myself better now than I ever thought possible. Somehow all the voices that were once so numerous have meshed into something much more singular and consistent.

Nelson: The cover is so evocative: an elegant, headless mannequin on a heap of rubbish. Why was it chosen, or how do you consider its relation to the poems?

Stempleman: I love that photo. Geoffrey Gatza, the wondrous editor of BlazeVOX sent me a number of photos he had taken to choose from. I was immediately drawn to its headlessness, its posture, and the glow it commanded from all the glass junk. Because as we all know, glass junk is nothing like other kinds of junk. It tends to respond to a cleansing so much better than other garbage.

As it relates to the poems, well, I like thinking that where the head belongs, we all belong─each of our faces belong for however long, giving room to the next person in that line. It reminded me a lot of the earlier sonnets from Shakespeare, where the beauty seemed intact above the decay through remembrance, through the presence of another or the active mind of one thinking of that someone else.

Nelson: How do you see String Parade when compared to your previous books—formal developments, thematic interests, motifs, etc.?

Stempleman: I think I pretty much did what I could do with this question in my earlier response, but in regards to motifs, well, all the poems were written with that which was near. Which of course means in the room, or on my mind, or in the foreseeable future. I am at my worst and sometimes at my best, devoted and attentive to my surroundings.

Nelson: There’s a comical tone in some of these poems. What about humor in your poetry?

Stempleman: When it happens, I'm relieved. I think it's easy to become overly serious in what Williams went into poetry for─the warmth and the loneliness. But with Williams, especially the earlier work from Al Que Quirre, Sour Grapes, Spring and All, etc., there's so often this wry sense of availability he displays. It's as if faced with the vastness of possible outcomes and reactions to single events, he is able to often find the best reaction and temperament to ease us all. What a good doctor! I in no way look for humor in the same way that I believe Williams does, since I know that mine is cut from a more grotesque cloth. It is more of an end of the night humor. Everyone's tired, open, and forgetful enough that whatever's said be understood as not that uncouth upon reflection on the following day.

Nelson: Are there any traditions or aesthetics that you’re deliberately playing forward? When reading these poems I thought of the Objectivists from time to time.

Stempleman: I wouldn't say I'm playing any particular aesthetic forward in these poems, but rather navigating existing aesthetics, mining preexisting aesthetics that I thought could aide in my acceptance of the vast number that are currently available for our consumption, er, communication. In my book The Travels I was very much attempting to have a go at an imagined history with an Objectivist weight of words, rather than of experienced experience. I was definitely after the experienced word. The poems in String Parade felt much more like the cacophonous 20th century of postmodern occupancy. We're all(right) and we're all speaking up and over ourselves at once. Since to go silent is a complete waste of precious resources. String Parade, along with the other two books, were a room full of different perspectives asked to see through to some other side.

Interview with Ofelia Zepeda on Where Clouds Are Formed

2008-11-30T22:12:00.010-07:00

Ofelia Zepeda is the author of two previous books of poetry, including Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert, and the first grammar textbook of the Tohono O'odham language: A Tohono O'odham Grammar. She is a Regents' Professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education.

Christopher Nelson: Your book is so richly textured in its subjects and tones. When people ask you what your book is about, how do you respond?

Ofelia Zepeda: My sense is that the book is about a range of experiences, events that I, or others I know, have gone through. The experiences are always in connection with the environment, both on a large scale and otherwise—that is, simple, basic settings. Environment to me includes a large number of things, and not just place, it includes time as well. So, the book is about poems that always have a connection to a place and time. These are very important, I think, in the writing I do. It helps me begin.

Nelson: While some of the poems weave together English and O’odham, the book is written almost entirely in English. Will you comment on that?

Zepeda: I find there are themes that work very well in O’odham, and so I take the process through for the piece in that language. Once the piece is completed in O’odham I have another decision and that is whether to have the piece in English. I don’t necessarily translate it but actually create a new piece that resonates the same theme. I know I also consciously decide to manipulate text by weaving O’odham and English in a single piece, and those are decisions I make and play with the language to see if it works. The few that are included obviously worked.

Nelson: I’m fond of the poem “The Other World,” which has multiple other worlds in it. What are the “others”—and the tensions or polarities—you are examining here?

Zepeda: I think the tension I am pointing to here is one that is part of my experience as an O’odham person. Although others who have similar life experiences may have these same types of tensions. The tension is simply that of being aware of the different spaces one must negotiate for the things one must get done, whether it is work, family, politics and so on. The dichotomy of two landscapes or multiple landscapes helps me to understand and better negotiate all the spaces I must walk around in.

Nelson: The motif of interconnectedness interests me; for example, in “An O’odham in Yosemite” and “Proclamation” we read of people connected to the earth and of people disconnected from it, but the poems don’t simply praise the connection and condemn the disconnection. And there’s an implication in “Traces” that the interconnectedness “leads nowhere.”

Zepeda: Yes, interconnectedness is sort of one of those big things that is really not that important after all—maybe because it is just so big, so important. I definitely think that being connected is important whether it is with people or the land. These are all important and big things on various levels, and when it is all there and working well for us we don’t notice it, we take it for granted. I think the ending of the piece “Traces” is a summary of all the connections made throughout the piece, but at the end of it, all those connections, connections made through a journey—a lifelong journey for that matter—sometimes don’t mean much to anyone else except the one who took it.

Nelson: At your recent reading at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, you mentioned that the U.S.-Mexico border, which cuts across the Tohono O’odham nation, has become more impervious since September 11, 2001. “Ocotillo Memorial” is a poem set in this context. It is a heavily understated poem—so much not said.

Zepeda: Actually, there are three pieces in this collection that are directly related to the border issues—as they relate to O’odham people. One is “Birth Witness,” another is “Lost Prayers,” and the third is one that one wouldn’t normally think of in that way, “Crossing Mountains.” “Crossing Mountains” is a reflection of the prayers and other forms of protection I thought we should have when traveling after the disasters. “Ocotillo Memorial” was not necessarily in the context of the border situation. I think this person was someone special to some person who decided to create this little memorial out there in the desert. It was a simple thing under an ocotillo plant that many may have walked by and never noticed. Various airlines know exactly where she is though—at least that is my version.

Nelson: In “The Other World” and “How to End a Season,” you gracefully take the reader from the mundane to the cosmic, to Mars and beyond: “the Milky Way in its dense gray majesty / resting quietly on a massive carpet of black.” I sense in your poems the silence and mystery of infinity. Does that resonate with you?

Zepeda: I love the closeness of something so distant. I have thought about the mystery of stars for a long time. I have been intrigued and fascinated by the Milky Way all my life. Again it has a great deal to do with spending much of my early childhood outdoors. My family used to sleep outdoors at home in the summertime because it was cooler outdoors than indoors. We spent many nights looking up at the sky and talking about things. As we watched we saw falling stars, meteor showers, the rare satellite (back then) go by right on schedule. The Milky Way was right above us it seemed, and as we slept it was our blanket. I remember clearly what the night sky looked like back then and never realized how much of a long lasting impression it made on me.

Certainly the moon and sun have always been important in our lives as contemporary O’odham, and of course our ancestors depended on their understanding of the moon phases for instance. We knew things like anticipating changes in the weather and season because of positions of the moon or the sun. Still today I rely more on the slant of shadows to provide hints about the changes in seasons than the weather channel. It is important for me to acknowledge the changes something as distant as the sun can have on how I see and understand the quiet and subtle changes of light.

Interview with Boyer Rickel on remanence

2008-10-11T22:09:00.036-07:00

Boyer Rickel's previous books include arreboles (Wesleyan) and Taboo, essays (Wisconsin). Recipient of poetry fellowships from the NEA and Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poems and nonfiction have appeared in more than sixty print and online journals and anthologies. Since 1991 he has taught in the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program. Visit his website: www.boyerrickel.com

Christopher Nelson: Can you talk about the structure of remanence and the constraints you set for yourself?

Boyer Rickel: There’s a bit of history to this set of constraints. About five or six years ago I felt weary of my own mind and imagination, and I was searching for a way to work with the blank page in directions that didn’t always create the same shape. In my experience, working with constraints does not limit, especially when you work within a sequence, such as a sequence of villanelles or sonnets. When you write in a form repeatedly and get comfortable with the nature of that structure, things happen that you don’t expect: you get forced into re-imagining, and you take your material in surprising directions. I find that constraints can liberate — not the old metaphor of pouring the poem into a vessel that’s already shaped; that’s not my experience of how forms work. So I started giving myself constraints five or six years ago for poem sequences in which my command was that poem to poem I would try to do something different, or if I found myself falling into patterns then I would break those patterns. The first one that really went on at book-length I wrote before remanence, a manuscript titled forty-five figures; all of its poems are fifteen lines because I wanted something sort of sonnet length but not a sonnet. And I wanted poems that were unbroken, that were continuous, that were seamless, but that traveled distances — imaginatively and intellectually — within that short space. And they weren’t to be titled; I didn’t want a reader entering the poem with any direction. I wanted the poems to travel a long way, but I didn’t want to predict anything for a reader. I worked on that sequence for a little over a year, and when I was done with it I felt a need to do the opposite, which is pretty common for me. I’ll work intensely in a particular way for a period of time, and then I need to write poems that argue with what I’ve just done. In this case, I aimed to write poems that were broken, that were discontinuous, that had gaps, that had ellipses. Line break was critical to momentum in forty-five figures, so for the new poems I wanted the sentence to be the line. And because I wanted the material to collect, to accrue, to accumulate, not to move rapidly and be connected, I needed a space between each of the poem sentences. Then titles became extremely important. I had to have titles because the individual sentences, I had decided, would be as different as they could be from one another: some would be very abstract; some concrete in detail; some might have a personal pronoun; some would not; there wouldn’t be a story or argument offered. Each sentence was to work off the title and have some resonance internally. So then I found myself in patterns: for example, I reached a point where I would write second sentences that answered ironically, or even in some direct way, first sentences. But I gave myself the right to revise, and I simply moved the sentences around. Sometimes I would have my five sentences, but it would take me a very long time to determine their order. Some of this comes from loving a very great sonnet from the seventeenth century called “Prayer” by George Herbert, who is one of my favorite poets. As I read it the poem is simply a catalog or list of definitions of the word prayer. The first stanza:

Prayer, the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

It’s a gorgeous poem. In each of its stanzas is a certain realm or notion of prayer. The second quatrain opens: “Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tower, / Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear.” It offers more threatening, more dangerous notions of prayer than the first stanza. Then the third quatrain is quite ethereal: “Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, / Exalted manna, gladness of the best, / Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed.” Herbert breaks a lot of his lines in two: “The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”: each of those is its own item in one line. Every single element stands somewhat in isolation, and yet as they accumulate over the whole of the poem, you are forced to shift and hold in your mind the complications of these notions of prayer. I wanted something like that, only my poems are simpler: five lines, not fourteen. I’ve ruminated on Herbert’s poem for over thirty years, and it’s really become the center of what I’ve been doing for the last two or three years as a means of not writing poems that arrive but that force readers to collect and hold and accumulate and simultaneously consider discrete elements.

Nelson: One of the pleasures of the poems comes from simultaneously holding two often startlingly different images, such as “Listening to the musical passage, no words for what I thought I understood. / / Steam off the lake.”; “But his eyes moved, conducting the silence. / / The ocean in the distance.” This is something that permeates the book.

Rickel: I think it’s possible for the imagination — and the heart — to make meaningful connections out of more far-ranging material than we often challenge it to do. And I’m excited when I’m forced to do that. I’ve never stopped loving that George Herbert poem. For well over thirty years, daily it goes through me because it continues to offer me new possibilities. Those selections that you mentioned, they’re not arbitrary. I felt resonances. I could talk through some of my ways of making connections, although I won’t. My intention isn’t that we all have those same connections and same resonances. I’m not trying to write that kind of poem anymore, after having written a lot of them. Not that that kind of poem is a bad poem; I don’t deny the power and the beauty of a whole lot of poetry of the sort that I am no longer writing at this point in my career.

Nelson: Often your images remind me of Robert Bly’s notion of the Deep Image — the idea that the image can have a sort of psychic energy that comes from somewhere other than the reasonable mind. For example, “The fox who hears the water running under ice.” And: “Through the trees it might have been a pond, though we were in a hurry to return before darkness.” Powerful images.

Rickel: One thing that gives them power is their isolation. In isolation, images gain largeness from the attention they demand of us. I’m interested in letting something stand so that its full set of resonances can come out. Another poet who is foundational for me esthetically is George Oppen. His poems often have gaps, and I read those gaps — and the impossibility of filling them any one way — as compelling the reader to do what I think of as “the good work,” of being a partner in the making of this thing. I want to be in partnership with the imagination of my reader. The poems in remanence require more work than certain kinds of poems — I’m aware of that. But I am increasingly interested in that work, and I’m looking for readers who are interested in doing it with me.

Nelson: I felt a connection between those strong images and the title of the book. Those images gave me the sense of remanence: they stayed inside of me.

Rickel: That notion of what’s left behind; what endures; that notion of the ghost; the thing remaining after the event — that’s what memory is, this thing left behind. I was so glad to find that word, remanence, because it spoke to me a great deal about the conduct of the poems.

Nelson: Some of the titles seem to be straightforward indicators of subject or theme — “Vestige.” “Childhood.” — but other times the connection between title and content is less apparent, as in “Blood tracer.” and “Face to the wall.”

Rickel: Another thing that I tried to do as the poems were evolving was to make the distances between sentences, and the distances between each sentence and title, different. I was interested in how variations might work. At the time of composition, I had notions about connections and relationships, but some of those slip away, and I don’t care. I know that some of the titles are more direct than others, and again that’s an aim of mine to create differences within formal similarities. In the writing of forty-five figures, I found myself with a kind of crisis at the seventh line, then at the eleventh or thirteenth: Isn’t that interesting that a mind makes a turn or thinks it needs to make a turn here, and then there? Similar things happened with the prose poems, but it had more to do with those distances. So I can only say that I agree with you; that’s the case for me as well as a reader of the poems, and that is okay for me.

Nelson: In the note at the end of the book you write that “the material of remanence in part derives from quoted, paraphrased, alchemized, or misprisioned language” from a wide range of sources. What is your process with these sources?

Rickel: It’s different for different lines. It’s hard to talk about the range of mangling and the degrees of theft or borrowing. And a lot of lines are simply from my own imagination and experience. There’s probably more autobiographical material in there than you might know because of the way that it’s imbedded in the context of other kinds of thinking and expressing. …I was directed once by a poet in a workshop to collect in a notebook what I overhear, the chance phrase, words that jump out at me from a page, misreadings (which are wonderful free material), an image from a film that stays with me, an image from sitting on the beach, a dream. I collect everything I possibly can, and then, who knows? A lot of autobiographical poems by me and by others that I know are filled with material that has been shaped to look as if it were a part of a historical moment, when in fact it comes out of many sources and moves toward a larger truth in that poem. remanence is not that different, but there’s a wide range of ways in which I worked with material. In my notebook I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll make a note after an entry, like “terrible paraphrase of” or “rearrangement of.” If it’s a direct quote, it’s in quotes. In fact all the things that are in quotes in the book are things that people said, often artists. I read all kinds of things, so my material can come from anywhere. There’s a detail about a flaw in Michelangelo’s David: I was sitting in my vet’s office reading Newsweek — maybe it was Time — and in one of the caption boxes I read this amazing thing, and it went in the notebook.

Nelson: What about the final nine poems of the book? Are they an accrual of the previous, smaller poems?

Rickel: After working for a year or more on the smaller poems, I had to break the pattern. It was so important to do something else if this was to become a manuscript. The smaller poems by themselves didn’t speak enough to my interests as a writer and a reader; I had to shake it up. It occurred to me to read all the poems without the titles, just as a collection of sentences. In doing that, the themes of the final poems came to me. I found a set of sentences about consciousness, a set of sentences about he and she, and so on — I came up with nine. Then I went through and numbered all of the sentences of the smaller poems, each number corresponding to a theme, and I gathered them — absolutely in order, so that there was an element of chance in their relation to one another. The smaller thirty-nine poems were constructed very carefully: I was working with distances, rhythms, and sounds; sentences were moved around a lot — I was really constructing very carefully. Then I wanted something that incorporated chance, something that was out of my hands. So I didn’t change any of the sentences, except maybe a verb tense here and there, maybe a little syntax for rhythm, then I blocked them into paragraphs. In eight of the nine, you’ll find that a poem’s first sentence is the earliest to occur on that theme in the short-poem sequence, the second sentence can be found in a poem farther along, and so on. (I actually found ten themes initially, but blended two in final revision.) It was an attempt to take the same material and throw another procedure at it and see what came out. I think that most readers will hear that the sentences have come from the previous material. I don’t know how many people will discover that there’s an actual order that’s determined.

Nelson: I’ve heard other poets say that when they set up a structure to work within, they eventually feel compelled to break it.

Rickel: I’m such a person in love with balance that it just seemed so right to create a manuscript that was unbalanced. It seemed right to create what I think of as a necessary imbalance.