We're a little late announcing it here, but Mary O'Donnell's poem "Sea Life in St. Mark's Square" was just yesterday the featured poem on Poetry Daily. You can still find the piece, which is from our current issue, of course, at this link.
It is a great poem from a deserving poet, and one we're proud to have it recognized like this.
in which Prairie Schooner contributors give us a glimpse into their writing spaces and sensibilities.
Micheal O’Siadhail's thirteen collections of poetry include Tongues, Globe, Love Life, The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust, and Poems 1975-1995. He has been awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute Prize and a Toonder Prize, and he was shortlisted for the Wingate Jewish Quarterly Prize. He has been a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His poem "Conversation with Goethe" appears in our current issue.
Name three things of particular significance on your writing desk at the moment.
I have on my desk a book which traces the origin of Japanese characters and how pictographs combine in various ways to form complex ideographs. These signs fascinate me and in my latest book Tongues I devoted a whole section to meditating on them.
I also have here a lead pencil and a pencil sharpener. I have written all my books in pencil. I know the playwright Brian Friel wrote all his work with a ‘2B’ pencil. When we exchange postcards, I like to ask him if he is still pushing his 2B!
A third item is a picture of my wife Bríd, who has Parkinson’s disease, and sadly had to go into care early this year. I need to sense her presence here.
Name one classic you've long been wanting to read.
For years I’ve wanted to read Thomas Mann’s great four part novel Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and His Brothers). I know that Mann regarded this placing of these great biblical stories against the background of Egyptian history as his best work. I so want to steep myself in it.
Why haven't you read it?
I have tried to put the time aside but have never succeeded.
Is there any particular music or musician that puts you in the mood to write?
I find I can’t listen to music either while working or before I work. Music affects me deeply and could change the dominant mood of the piece I’m working on. Yet music is immensely significant for me. I love classical music and jazz. Looking back on my poetry over the years, I realise how much jazz has been a core metaphor for me.
Name a favorite book in your possession: a favorite not just for content but for its actual physical qualities.
One of the great delights of working with my publishers Bloodaxe Books is how they serve their authors so well with eye-catching covers, often with a striking painting suggesting a book’s theme. I took particular pleasure in the beautiful painting Blue Dusk by Christopher Gilvan-Cartwright on the cover of This Great Unknowing: Last Poems by Denise Levertov. This is book where both the visual impact and feel of the book add to those superb poems.
Learn more about Micheal O'Siadhail at his web site.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir, as interviewed by Theodore Wheeler.
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Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway county. Her début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009)) was shortlisted for the UK’s Edge Hill Prize. Her second short story collection To The World of Men, Welcome has just been re-issued by Arlen House in an expanded paperback edition. Nuala’s third full poetry collection The Juno Charm was published by Salmon Poetry in November 2011. Her story "Peach" in the current Prairie Schooner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
You can find more about Nuala on her web site and her blog.
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“Peach” begins with such a powerful and irresistible hook—“A pregnant woman was getting drunk in the back lounge; I could see her through the hatch, from where I sat at the bar. She was drinking and crying, sitting on the red velveteen couch alone.” Did you have these lines when you started writing, or did they come later?
I had those lines at the start. My stories usually begin with a collision of a first line, a vague feeling about a character or two, and an even vaguer notion of a situation. Originally the story was about stillbirth. That morphed into surrogacy and damaged lovers and, the classic short story theme, loneliness and what it makes people do.
Do you think having the lines at the start made the story easier or more difficult to write? That is, during the process of orchestrating a story, do you feel like strong images like this one can overpower the rest of the setting and tone, or are they instrumental in opening up the rest of the story?
I find all stories difficult to write in the sense that I don’t have a clue what’s going on for a while and I just push on to see. I write, essentially, to tell stories to myself. So I never know what is coming next until it happens. I love that point in the writing when it all becomes clear and I can forge ahead with confidence. Every story I write feels like a complete dud at the start, then some go well and some don’t.
I love a good strong opening sentence as both reader and writer. Too much preamble bores me – I like to get a sense of the characters very early on. The opening is so important – it has to set everything up and give the reader the impetus to continue on. I find openings come to me readily, it’s the rest of it I have to work hard on.
“Peach” seems to be about Dominic’s state of mind more than anything. He’s a character who sees himself as “a slow-walker on ice.” The tone and setting play perfectly into his internal sense of apprehension too. I’m wondering, then, do you think it’s something about the city that makes Dominic this way, or is it just his character, essentially?
There’s a place in Dublin called the North Circular Road – a street of Georgian houses that are mostly converted into flats. When I lived near there I used to see a lot of single men on that road (separated men, ex-prisoners, men estranged from their families) and they just reeked with loneliness. Dominic is one of those men – his wife is gone, he doesn’t have close friends, he doesn’t drink because it messes with his head. There are enclaves in every city, I’m sure, where men are a forgotten tribe.
So Dominic is a combination of circumstances, his own downbeat personality – he says in the story that dread is his ‘default position’ – and the fairly grim place he is living in. He loves Dublin but nowhere is kind if you are lonely.
What external environmental factors influence your work and writing process the most? Are you a person who likes to be out in the world while writing? Is writing more of a pure reflective task? Do you find yourself being more productive in one season more than the others?
Cities influence me; I am crazy about cities: Dublin, London, Berlin, Paris, New York; smaller cities too like Bremen in Germany and Nantes in France. I have a very low boredom threshold so I find the buzz of city life exciting. I love buildings; I love all the people teeming around and the art galleries stuffed with mad and great artworks. I also love trees, the sea, birds.
I like to go out into the world to soak it up but I retreat to my peaceful house in the small market town I live in to write. If there are too many distractions, it’s hard to write, so it suits me to live in a quiet place.
It’s challenging to write when the three kids are off school in the summer – they keep interrupting me, demanding food etc. Autumn is a good time to start a new project – the children back at school gives me that fresh feeling of wanting to begin something.
The most unproductive time is when a new book comes out because I spend so much time tearing up and down the country doing promotional stuff. It’s fun but maddening too because my desk calls to me.
Also, as a multi-form author, do you find that outside factors influence your poetry different than your prose? Is there a difference in how you process information between your long- and short-form prose too? Do you find that you experience life with a different mind when writing in one form or the other, or is it all just writing/creating in the end?
Like all writers I have my obsessions so I tend to cover a lot of the same ground in poetry, novels and short stories: sex, the breakdown of love, art, strong women, troubled children. I’m a feminist and that will always come through too.
I’ve written both poems and stories on the exact same topics – Joan of Arc, for example; and also pregnancy loss and fertility issues; marriage breakdown. My poetry tends to be more personal while the fiction is generally not based on my life but on situations that interest me.
I love the long haul of the novel because it takes over your head and you start to process the world through the eyes of the novel, if that makes sense. Because you spend a long time writing it (in my case about a year per novel) it soaks into your life and your life also soaks into it. It’s a very joyous thing, to be in the thick of a long piece of work.
What is one book written in the past five years that you wish you had written? Why?
Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan. It is a fabulous, understated, strange story of revenge, beautifully written. It’s set in Maine in winter and I felt perished reading it. Honestly – this is top notch literary fiction by an under-praised Irish writer, so if you haven’t read it, do!
Who are some of the young talented writers in Ireland that most people haven’t heard of yet? Who is an older writer that doesn’t get enough recognition for their body of work?
There’s a young writer called Eimear Ryan who is winning lots of literary prizes and whom I published in Horizon Review when I was fiction editor there. Eimear has it: she is not only talented, she has oomph.
I am also a big fan of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, who writes wonderful short fiction. She is recognised here, to an extent, but she is on a par with any of our so-called top writers and I don’t understand why everyone is not raving about her work.
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Nuala Ní Chonchúir will be on campus in Lincoln on February 9 & 10, 2012, for a public performance of her work at the Sheldon Museum of Art, among other events promoting the launch of our current Ireland themed issue. More specific information will be posted on this blog as it becomes available.
in which Prairie Schooner contributors give us a glimpse into their writing spaces and sensibilities.
Mary O’Donnell has published six collections of poetry, most recently The Ark Builders (Arc Publications). She has also written three novels and two short-story collections, has won prizes in the V.S. Pritchett Competition and was the overall winner of the 2010 Fish International Short Story Competition. She is guest poet in the National University of Ireland-Maynooth in the creative writing program. Her poems "Sea Life in St. Mark's Square" and "Baby Boy, Quaryat al Beri" appear in the forthcoming Winter 2011 issue of Prairie Schooner, aka the Ireland Issue. (Subscribers should see the issue in their mailboxes soon!)
Name three things on your writing desk at the moment.
Right now? "On Love and Barley - Haiku of Basho", Penguin Classics; the second thing is an emery board (nail-file); finally, a CD of "The Best of Rachmaninov".
Name one classic you've long been wanting to read.
Tolstoi's "War and Peace".
Why haven't you read it?
Basic laziness about its length. Perhaps if I had an edition in four separate volumes (I believe they exist), I'd read it. I just hate handling very thick and heavy literature.
Is there any particular music or musician that puts you in the mood to write?
Schubert used to, but not any more. Mostly now, the music of Hildegard von Bingen would do it, insofar as such spiritual music opens an aperture into the stream of reflection and meditation needed for making new writing. I suppose I'm talking about detachment.
Name a favorite book in your possession: a favorite not just for content but for its actual physical qualities.
"The Land of Spices" by Kate O'Brien ranks among my favourite books for several reasons: 1. the story, which is set in a convent boarding school, and which features nuns as major characters, is all about the need for love and freedom. 2. It questions heterosexuality through the use of one, simple sentence which at the time of original publication (1941) got this novel banned. 3. it was published by Arlen House, prefaced by the wonderful Irish academic Lorna Reynolds. Arlen was an adventurous publishing house in Ireland during the nineteen eighties which brought to light near-forgotten but important writings by women. But I also love this book also because it is signed and dated by me - 1983 - an important year for me as a writer, when I was just beginning to exercise my writing wings and feathers, win a competition here and there, have bits and pieces published. It was an exciting time. Importantly, I read this work very closely and its slightly battered appearance is a testimony to my need to gobble up the brilliant and the beautiful in language and literature - a need that has never deserted me but always sustained me. Incidentally, although that Arlen House is now defunct, a new and exciting Arlen, run by Alan Hayes, is now publishing both poetry and fiction from men and women in Ireland, so the logo has survived as one of quality.
Learn more about Mary O'Donnell at her web site.
This poem, by Kelli Russell Agodon, appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of Prairie Schooner.
How Like a Winter
She spent the days of December reading
Shakespeare's sonnets. Sleepy icicles dripped
from her eyelashes, but she kept reading.
Her family decorated the tree
while she sat in the leather chair reading,
opening Vendler's book when ideas failed.
She wore a discolored sweatshirt that read
Shakespeare's Muse, carried a Mont Blanc pen
behind her ear. You could see her reading
in midnight mass near the back of the church.
While the believers knelt and prayed, she read
and worried about forgetting to shop.
The city was Christmas ghosts, lights of red.
She was buried in the snow of sonnets.
(You can learn more about the work of Kelli Russell Agodon at her web site.)
So the Best American Series released their 2011 versions last month, and there are several Prairie Schooner connections to note.
-Eric Barnes' story "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" (Winter 2010) was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. Way to go, Eric!
-Floyd Skloot's essay "Something to Marvel At" (Fall 2010, read it here) was a notable in Best American Nonrequired Reading.
-Katie Chase's "The Sea that Leads to All Seas" (Winter 2010, read it here) and R.T. Smith's "The Red Jar" (Spring 2010, read it here) were notables in Best American Short Stories.
-Janet Abbott Dutton's "Old Enough" (Winter 2010), Josip Novakovich's "Cat Named Sobaka" (Spring 2010), and Tracy Seeley's "Cartographies of Change" (Summer 2010) were notables in Best American Essays.
It was a pretty good year for us, we thought. This bears this feeling out to a degree, I suppose.
In addition, congrats to some other UNL/Prairie Schooner connected folks, namely, Carrie Shipers ("Ghost Traffic", from Zone 3), Joy Castro ("Grip", from Fourth Genre), and Sarah Fawn Montgomery ("Ekphrasis: What My Grandfather Saw", from Fugue) for earning notable status in Best American Essays. Excellent work all around!
Interview with Michael Boccardo, by Marianne Kunkel
[Note: Back issues of Prairie Schooner—from the current issue back to 2003—can be accessed via Project Muse and its subscribing institutions.]
Michael Boccardo's work has been published in or is forthcoming from Hayden's Ferry Review, Rattle, Kakalak, and Poet Lore, among others. He is a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and received an honorable mention in the 2009 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition. He also serves as an editorial assistant for Cave Wall.
MK: You wrote your haunting poem “Close to Home” (PS, Winter 2010) from a second-person point-of-view. Some writers say that by doing this, you risk readers seeing the pronouns “you” and “your” and thinking, “This isn’t me or how I feel.” But my experience of your poem was extremely positive. What’s behind your decision to write this poem from a second-person point-of-view? More generally, what advantages does writing from this point-of-view lend a poet?
MB: Until you asked this question, I hadn’t realized how many of my poems were written in second person. For this particular piece, however, I felt it was imperative for the reader to relate to the poem. We live in a world where crime hits us from many different directions thanks to the media: newspapers, television, internet. It’s a part of our everyday lives, and so I feel that, as a whole, no one is immune from it. If you ask almost anyone on the street I’m sure many will admit that they or someone they know was a victim of some type of crime, regardless of the severity that I’ve touched on in my poem. The advantage here is that I show people a reality no one likes to face, but everyone can, in some way, relate to. On the other hand you also have that community of people who believe that violence will not touch their lives, that they are, in fact, immune from the horrors we hear about on a daily basis. So you could almost say the “you” in the poem refers to those who distance themselves from that other world, those who insist it’s “you” these atrocities happen to and not them.
In this poem you describe a small community—an impressive feat for a 38-line poem! You refer to a man and his mother, a teenage girl, a grandmother, a father and his daughters, and others. I sense that the poem’s list of criminals and victims could go on and on; what were your reasons for describing particular people and how did you manage to write just enough on a seemingly infinitely large subject?
The idea for this particular poem was sparked from a murder that took place in the area where I live. In fact, the man who was arrested for the crime was picked up in a restaurant parking lot beside my place of employment. Hearing about this the next day, I couldn’t help wondering if this same man, who only hours ago took the life of another, had walked past me as I was assisting customers. A simple man who was dressed like everyone else, spoke in a normal tone. Just your ordinary, average guy. Crime writer, Ann Rule, worked next to the serial killer Ted Bundy for years and never knew he ended the lives of so many women. It just goes to show that even the most nondescript, normal looking man or woman can be capable of something unspeakable. The ones that I write about in “Close to Home” are, to me, some of the most horrific, those committed by relatives or a spouse, the people we trust with our lives.
“Close to Home” may make readers anxious to the point that they, in your words, “exhaust in fear.” Do such images as “afterbirth slicking her thighs like garters” and “the frail stems of three girls swaying / like sunflowers” that, on a purely poetic level, are gorgeous help to strengthen or complicate this fear?
Fear, like most emotions, has its complexities. It can make us behave in unpredictable ways, react to situations in a manner that may startle others, as well as ourselves. But I also believe that fear is an emotion steeped in curiosity. Think of how an audience responds during a horror film. Their instinct is to bury their face in their hands, and yet, they still risk a peek at what’s playing out on the screen. For many, there exists a morbid attraction to the cruelty that happens in our world. We want to know why and how and who. On 9/11 we sat riveted to our televisions during one of the most terrifying moments in history. As much as we wanted to, it was impossible to look away. Our fear prevented us from flipping off that switch.
I doubt that a home like the one depicted in “Close to Home” could hold your ideal writing space. What is your current writing space and how is it different from your ideal writing space?
I’m definitely one of those writers who needs quiet surroundings, so I usually stick to my own home. Since I acquired a laptop three years ago it’s given me the freedom to write anywhere I want, but regardless of the room, I have a fondness for sitting on the floor. It’s one of those writer’s quirks that I can’t supply a sound explanation for. Ideally, I imagine a nice, quaint cottage near the coast with a decadent view of the ocean and a cat curled up on my desk.
A lot of a writer’s success is based on luck. What great poet can you recommend that Prairie Schooner readers have probably never heard of?
I can’t say that most readers aren’t already acquainted with the work of Dorianne Laux, but I would kick myself if I didn’t mention how much she has influenced the way I look at my own poems. She unveils a unique beauty in many of the everyday events we often take for granted, and the result never ceases to amaze me. A name that some readers may not recognize, but should seek out promptly, is Rhett Iseman Trull. Her book, The Real Warnings, is a collection I return to many times when my own poetry gears become corroded. She is a rock star poet whose imagery gets beneath the skin and lingers. If you haven’t heard of her yet, you will.
Interview with Michael Hettich, by Marianne Kunkel
[Note: Back issues of Prairie Schooner—from the current issue back to 2003—can be accessed via Project Muse and its subscribing institutions.]
Michael Hettich's most recent book of poems, Like Happiness, was published by Anhinga Press. A new book of poems, The Animals Beyond Us, which contains the work appearing in the winter issue of PS, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. He lives in Miami and teaches at Miami Dade College.
MK: Part of the charm of your four poems “Widow,” “The Ghost,” “The Mother,” and “Doubles” (PS, Winter 2010) is their reliance on understatement. In “The Ghost,” for example, you segue from one subject to the next using the casual word “Anyway” and you conclude “The Mother” with the sentence, “And that was all.” These add a light, playful quality to intensely serious and sometimes dark poems. How do you go about crafting this balance?
MH: The poems that were published in Prairie Schooner are all part of a manuscript entitled The Animals Beyond Us, which will be published by New Rivers Press [in October, 2011]. All the poems in that book were written as quickly as possible; in fact I set myself the goal of writing 150 poems before I turned back to any one of them to revise. I did this to try to break into a new voice (of sorts) and to try to discover new material. I had just had my most recent book, Like Happiness, accepted for publication and I felt that I'd ended a period in my writing and life and needed to try to find new ways of discovering what I needed to say. So, as I said, I wrote fast and didn't look back. This was liberating and fun—easy—and when I reached 150 poems I found that almost half of them were interesting enough (to me) to warrant revision. But I tried not to revise too much, since I had come to feel that my revision process had become stale, resulting in poems that felt overly familiar in their strategies and content. They weren't wild enough to hold what I was after (without knowing it yet).
Also, in composing those poems (in their first drafts) I set myself a few rules: move quickly, think by association, avoid stanza breaks, and use a loose four-beat line.
I like your sense that the poems rely on understatement, though I wouldn't have used that word. I think of them as avoiding the kinds of transitions we often (or I often) rely on to build the rhetoric of meaning (so called) a poem articulates. Without the connections such transitions impose, the poems seemed able to find their own music, and whatever meanings that music implied, in ways that felt satisfying and true to me. Perhaps this lighter rhetorical scaffolding allows the poems to achieve that sense of understatement.
I also think I allowed these poems to retain a kind of awkwardness (for lack of a better word) I would probably have worked into more conventional music in my earlier work.
Dogs, cats, and birds play central roles in your poem “Widow” and cats reappear in “The Ghost.” What unique quality do animals lend to poetry? What poems about animals do you love and inspire you to include animals in your poems?
This is a hard one to answer. It's an interesting observation, but I can't say I've actually thought about it. Birds have always inhabited my poems, but come to think of it, not that many animals—until now—have done so. And as I said, this new book is called The Animals Beyond Us. The obvious answer would be that animals other than humans seem to be (and are) so much less afflicted with the kind of self-consciousness that keeps us from being truly present in the world. But then again, as Edwin Muir pointed out, without that kind of consciousness we would hardly be in the world at all, or at least not the world as we know it, as humans. So maybe it's just the mystery of their being in the world with us, sharing that world with us and being so strange to us and full of their own wild life (even when they're domesticated). And what is "the wild mind," anyway? Can we find a way to bring it into our poetry? Might poetry itself be a kind of "wild mind" on the page? And I love the way we glimpse a wild creature sometimes—with a fleeting sense of its presence that immediately vanishes into its own world. The effect is like poetry itself, sometimes.
I see from your website that in addition to writing poetry, you write prose and sing. Of musical performance, spoken poetry or prose, or written poetry or prose, do you consider one more powerful than the others or are they powerful in different ways?
I think they are all powerful in their own unique ways—and I think that their power is unique and specific to their form(s). Having said that, my goal as a writer would be to create poems that are able to fully realize their power as artifacts on the page and as spoken (or read) aloud. That is, I want my poems to be scored on the page in such a way that the reader will hear them much the way he/she would if I were to read them aloud. My problem with a good deal of spoken-word poetry is that it feels dead and slack on the page and requires performance. Since I like to ponder, reread, and revel in nuance, this kind of poetry holds less interest for me. It doesn't feel fully realized to me.
I also love collaboration and have worked a lot with musicians (my son in particular) and visual artists. I do believe, though, that the "products" of these cross-genre collaborations are often more interesting for the artists than for the viewer/listener!
You have lived in New York, Colorado, northern Florida, Vermont, and Miami. Must a writer be well-traveled to touch a wide range of readers through his or her creative writing, or can imagination make up for a lack of traveling experience?
I don't at all believe that a writer must be well-travelled to speak to readers. I think it much more important that a writer bring a unique and specific focus of attention to his/her place and situation. In fact, perhaps we all travel too much; perhaps there's not enough deep knowledge of place in our writings—a result of too much travel, too little careful observation/knowledge. As Gary Snyder says, "know the trees." And who does know them, these days? I mean with a depth of understanding. Something that may be a bit interesting in response to that question, though, at least as it relates to my work: I "locate" myself very much as a person from the north—New York and Colorado and New England. That's the landscape I most identify with. But the images and hauntings that enter my poems more often come from the landscapes of northern and southern Florida—perhaps because, even after many years, these landscapes seem unfamiliar and surprising to me.
In your lifetime you have published 12 books and chapbooks of poetry; congratulations! What projects are you currently working on?
Thanks for your congratulations. The fact is, I work on writing for a few hours almost every day, so it's sort of a natural accomplishment. As far as projects, as I said my most recent book, Like Happiness, was published last fall, and I've just finished editing my new book with the New Rivers editors. Last summer I started a new manuscript, tentatively entitled Listening to Owls, since I love to do that—since they always seem to be saying something urgent but just beyond our understanding. I started the book just as the oil spill disaster unfolded last spring/summer, so I think the poems are deeply influenced by that grief, though that may not be apparent in their subject matter. My goal at the outset was to write long poems—20 pages in some cases. And some of them are still long, but at least one of them broke apart a month or so ago, into about 15 smaller poems, an odd experience, and I suspect some of the others might do that, too. So that's the poetry book I'm working on right now. I'm also gathering my energy to finally write the book of essays that have been in the back of my mind for years—about poetry, hearing, wilderness, walking, music—a huge jumble of things I want to try to get at. So I'm taking notes, filling a big box with articles and ideas—for something that may well never happen! And, as a smaller project a visual artist and I are getting ready to start a collaboration. Mainly, though, I'm working on the Owls.
Poet Grace Bauer, who served as guest editor of Prairie Schooner for the “Baby Boomer” issue (Fall 2009), interviews David Wojahn. Wojahn’s Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 was published in the Pitt Poetry Series and named a finalist for the Pulitzer. He is a professor in the English Department of Virginia Commonwealth University.
Grace Bauer: First of all, congratulations on having your poem, “Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab,” chosen for this year’s Best American Poetry. I was happy to include it in the “Baby Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner and am happier still that it will be included in the anthology.
The poem addresses a serious, one might say tragic, situation, and the mix tape of songs seems to be a kind of offering – of comfort? Connection? Maybe hope? Perhaps a reminder of shared, and happier, experiences? Can you talk a bit about the genesis of the poem – and the process of composing it?
David Wojahn: Well, rehab facilities and psych wards are pretty cheerless places, and in the 1980s especially I made a lot of visits to people who were staying in them. So the poem recalls some of those excursions, as well as the peculiar culture of that era—hence the Reagan and Miami Vice references. It was a pretty cheerless era, in my experience…
At the end of the poem, when the “you” gives the woman the mix tape, you’re right in thinking it is meant as an offering, a consoling gesture, however inadequate. You have to remember that mix tapes had a home-grown/hand-made quality about them that isn’t replicated in the digital era. Unlike playlists on i-Tunes, you made them in real time; you thought about the sequencing of the list on both the A and the B side of the cassette; you hand-printed the song list; and cassettes were fragile and temperamental things; the acetate would snarl or break, the case would melt if you left it in a hot car.
And if you played a cassette on a tape deck or on a Walkman, you could always see how the acetate spooled, getting smaller or larger and circling madly when you fast-forwarded or rewound. Somehow that sense of endless circling became a kind of commentary on the content of the poem and a guide for helping me to structure it. The “you” and the woman of the poem have gone through this hospital routine again and again, it’s a tiresomely circular ritual.
And I also intersperse the narrative structure of the poem with song titles, names of music groups, and song lyrics, and it’s all music I could conceivably have put on a mix-tape in 1980-something. The music references—and it’s a lot of them, Robert Johnson, The Smiths, James Brown, Richard Thompson and a great but forgotten group from the period called the Screaming Blue Messiahs—become a sort of counterpoint to the narrative. But at the same time they act as a skewed sort of chorus: another kind of circularity. My model for this, oddly enough, was Thomas Hardy, who tends in many of his poems to include refrains which are a biting commentary on the poem’s action. So one line of the poem, “the years the years” is there because it echoes a refrain in Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.”
Mind you, I don’t always think about all this when a poem gets started, but in the revision process it’s something I’m very mindful of.
From the “Buddy Holly” poem in your first book, Ice House Lights, to the “Homage to Blind Willie Johnson” in the “Poltergeists” section of your New and Selected Poems (Interrogation Palace), music and musicians have made regular appearances in your poetry. The list of musicians you’ve “covered,” over the years is an eclectic kind of who’s who. And Mystery Train puts musical icons – and iconic moments in the history of American music -- front and center. Can you talk about your passion for/interest in music and musicians? Are you a musician yourself? What has music given you as a poet? Why do you think you keep returning to that subject matter?
Well, as Lou Reed puts it in a Velvet Underground song, my life’s been saved by rock and roll. It’s been saved by poetry as well. And I say this without hyperbole. Writing poetry is such a pleasure, a consolation, a challenge. And popular music offers me a similar pleasure and consolation. I love rock and roll and subgenres of it such as punk, rockabilly, ’60s soul. And I’m especially drawn to music that for want of better terms gets called roots or Americana: the old ’78s collected in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Hank Williams and the Louvin Brothers, delta and urban blues, brooding singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Jon Dee Graham, and those deliciously feral figures like the late Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu. They’re the dead and the living representatives of what Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America” and they all just enthrall me.
I reference these artists mainly because I feel someone needs to pay homage to them. And because their songs are always playing in my head, they help to shape the poems I write as well. The title poem of my new collection, World Tree, juxtaposes material that comes from Siberian shamanism and popular music; it’s really a sort of autobiography in the form of dead formats—my 45 years, my 33 & 1/3 years, my cassette era, my digital years. The poem is mainly comprised of sonnets, but the songs that get referenced in it seem as important a structural device as the choice to cast the poem in the form of sonnets.
I wish I were a musician, but aside from playing in teenage garage bands, I’m really just a fan.
Poems about music and musicians are well represented in the “Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner. Part of that was my choice, of course, but my choices were influenced by the work people sent me – and when I solicited “boomer generation work” – a lot of music-related stuff came pouring in. So, it seems like a fair number of “the best minds of our generation” share your/my fascination with the subject. In her essay on boomer poets included in the issue, Dorothy Barresi suggests that sometimes references to music, and other pop culture phenomenon, are part of what she calls an “iconic nostalgia” and “are merely passwords, the magic argot that opens the doors to a club baby boomers already belong to.” She has a point, yet I might argue that for many poets – you included – exploring the history of popular music becomes an exploration of history itself – a lens to explore the larger culture. Can you talk about how you see that exploration working in your own poems? In the work of other poets?
I thought Barresi made some very astute points in her essay, and it’s true that we sometimes have a kind of Pavlovian response when we hear iconic songs from the Boomer era: we may not immediately salivate and wag our tails when we hear a guy in a labcoat ring a bell, but we do all nod and tap our feet when a Stones song comes on the Muzak while we’re grocery shopping. And since pop music is often designed first to be a commodity and only incidentally to be art, Boomers are fertile ground for crass manipulation by advertisers. But I for one feel positively violated when someone uses an Iggy Pop song as the soundtrack of a car commercial.
But pop music has always reflected the coursings of history. The Childe Ballads were often the newspapers of their time, the latest information about topical stories and scandals. But they’ve somehow alchemized over the centuries into documents that are haunting and timeless. Many of Bob Dylan’s early songs of political protest (some, not all) will surely stand that same test of time. That function—to begin in the topical and end in the timeless—is often the function of poetry as well. Homer is, after all, basically a war correspondent; and Hopkins’ “Wreck of the Deutschland” is, as they say, based on material “ripped from the headlines.”
I don’t think I’m unusual in the ways that I let music inform my poems and their sense of public history. I think of the way poets such as William Matthews, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Michael S. Harper have written on jazz, and of the similar way in which younger poets like Dorothy Barresi, Lucia Perillo, David Rivard, Mark Halliday and especially Kevin Young have used references to blues and rock and roll.
Let’s turn from “subject matter” to questions about form and structure. Much of Mystery Train is written in fixed forms – especially the sonnet – a choice some might find odd for a series of poems about rock and roll. Can you talk about that choice?
I wrote the title sequence of Mystery Train (which has 33 sonnets, a villanelle, and a bad sestina) during a year when I lived in Spain. Instead of writing poems about bullfights and going to the Prado, I found myself getting very nostalgic about American culture, and so the poems of the sequence started to emerge. I’d been writing longish narratives and getting tired of that mode, so I resolved to write in a shorter form, and the strictness of the sonnet was especially appealing in that respect. And I thought there was an interesting irony to writing about pop culture in a form as venerable as the sonnet. And the sonnet is just such a delightful, comforting and always-fascinating form to play around with. It’s so flexible, capacious, sly.
Can you talk about poets who have used musical forms/structures in their poems – I’m thinking of blues poems, jazz poetry (written for the page) as well as rap/hip hop and more performance-oriented work.
Well, some performance work doesn’t translate to the written page. Blues lyrics and hip hop lyrics have a better chance of making the leap, since they’re forms that follow some pretty strict prosodic conventions, but there’s not a lot of that material that can stand on its own as poetry. But the blues, jazz, and (increasingly) hip hop definitely have influenced the subject matter and certain of the strategies of modern and contemporary poetry. The blues influence you see early on in poems by Langston Hughes like “The Weary Blues” and “Too Blue” and still see today in poets like Terrance Hayes. And there are countless poets who have written about jazz. Poets who try to write poetry reflecting jazz composition are slightly rarer, but there were some terrific poems of the latter sort written in the fifties and sixties by figures such as Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. Hip hop’s not my area of expertise, but I recently read a terrific book by the young poet Kyle Dargan called Logorrhea Dementia—it’s about alienation, cultural collapse, and urban madness and hip hop’s the secret soundtrack of that book.
Final – and undoubtedly silly – question : if you could be any musician in history for a day, or night, who would you be? And why?
You mean, besides Bob Dylan?
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