Category: Interview

Interview: Ana Castillo

        
        

 

Ana Castillo is a much-celebrated voice in Chicana literature and feminism, or, as she puts it, “xicanisma,” a term she coined to describe a non-binary approach to the issues of gender, class, and race. Her publications include eight novels, one collection of short stories, five collections of poetry, a two-play volume, and a children’s book, and, as well as two books of nonfiction, the latest of which, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (Feminist Press, 2016), was recently out when this interview was conducted in November of 2016. She has also edited three collections of Latina/o literature and translated a Spanish-language adaptation of Cherrie Moraga’s The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, one of the touchstones of efforts to challenge the lack of women of color in the feminist movement. Her novel Sapogonia was named a New York Times Notable Book, and she has received numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a Carl Sandburg Award, a Sor Juana Achievement Award, and the American Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldúa Prize. She holds a B.A. in art from Northwestern Illinois University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany, and was appointed the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University, as well has having taught at numerous other colleges and universities.

 

An excerpt from Black Dove appears in 41.2 of the print Florida Review, and the book is reviewed here in Aquifer.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I’ve admired your work for a long time, and the first thing I wanted to say was what a gripping read Black Dove is. Tell me about this book and about how it evolved for you.

 

Ana Castillo:

It’s a compilation of personal essays and memoir, and I distinguish the two things—the essays were written for a more general audience and with a theme in mind, and the memoir comes from a very much more personal place. The earliest one, which is also the leading one, is called “My Mother’s México,” and I wrote and published it in the early nineties—’94, I think it first came out. I always thought that I would do a collection of essays eventually called “My Mother’s México,” and it would be along the lines of being a daughter and having been my mother’s daughter and so forth, but as time went on my role in life became more as mother than as daughter. My mother passed on over twenty years ago, and I raised my son almost all his life as a single mother.

 

That’s a really important part of this book—being a single mother, being a brown woman in this country with a brown young man that was growing up. Whether or not a single mother can successfully raise a man is always in question. I think I did a good job as long as he was on my watch. He did well in school, he went straight through university, got his degree, he became a dad and was supporting his family during the recession, but then became very depressed and began to spiral. I didn’t really know what was going on—he’s already an adult at this point, in his mid-twenties, and has his own little family to take care of, so as a mother I’m a little bit more on the outside—and when he hit bottom he committed a senseless robbery—of an institution, unarmed. It felt like he was ejecting himself from the world of society, and that was really the catalyst eventually for much of what I wrote.

 

His voice is also included in the book from some of the letters we exchanged. We decided to share the story. We are in a country that that supports a multibillion-dollar prison industry. We find all kinds of people becoming felons at the time that my son was arrested—in Chicago, two governors of Illinois were in federal prison at the time!—but whereas those guys will come out and have their friends and their connections and they will have work and will have homes and places to go, many of our incarcerated, when they’re felons, they come out and then they have to face the challenge of not being given jobs that they’re qualified for. They have children, families to support and to house. They are not rented to, they can’t get a home, they can’t get loans. So, we are perpetuating a society in which we continue to castigate individuals, but sort of encourage them some in some cases to continue that cycle.

 

My story turns out to be a good one. My son came out, he was well, he was ready to take on his life, and he’s an awesome dad with a growing little girl, but he has had those challenges. It was because we wanted to share that story that that I decided to put this collection together.

 

TFR:

And there are ways in which that content and theme is supported even from the first word. I found the structure of the of the book quite moving because you set it up as it is a family saga, so right away you acknowledge it goes beyond you individually. There was this sense of family and people and community and the way they all work together.

 

I want to ask about to what extent that trauma of having your son incarcerated turned you toward the book-length memoir. You’ve been writing these pieces for some time about your mother and so on, but do you think that there was a way that this was a point where you felt, I have to speak as myself, not as a fictional character, about this kind of situation? Was it related to a different type of activism for you than fiction or poetry?

 

Castillo:

Yes, indeed. I think that it was. A big, big part of my life is having been a mother. It was something I chose to do. When I chose to become a mother, it was just before the precipice of when we begin to get U.S. Latinas recognized in this country as writers, as part of a generation of writers. So, I had to have a vision of myself being a mother—What does that mean? How does that change my life?—but, also, I’m not going to give up this vision of being a writer and being published in a country that has no history of that. Those things have been really important for me—being vocal and being part of this large community of Latinos and people of color in this country. My writing has been my form of activism. But my heart was so broken with my son being broken that ironically initially I couldn’t even write in my journal. I was that broken-hearted. I knew that the gods had given him and given me a second chance because he at least had not been killed and had not killed himself—and there were many opportunities in the society that I’m talking about in which that could happen to a young man of color, not only during his senseless criminal act, but he also as a teenager had been involved in graffiti and lost a lot of friends on the streets of Chicago. There’s “stop and search,” and my son had been beaten up by the police for no reason except getting off at the train station with a couple of guys, and maybe, maybe, if you acted up or responded, that’s what happened. So, this was building up, but I thought by the time he was a young family man in his late twenties, Well, we’re home free, and yet he had become this very angry man, as many males of color have a right to be.

 

This is where I was losing my voice, so to speak, as far as writing so that initially I couldn’t write at all about it. We came together—and we have some of that in this book—my son and I came together, interestingly enough, through our love of books and writing. There’s an exchange of excerpts of our letters in the book, how I began to reach out to him and bring him back. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance beforehand, no connection. He played cello in high school, but he didn’t talk about music and he didn’t know how or want to play music anymore—just gone. So, how do we begin to have conversations and discussions? We did that through books. He would ask for books, and I sent them to him, and I would read them.

 

In the process of this we shared Charles Bukowski—he wanted to read Bukowski’s poetry, and I read his prose. It kind of inspired me, and, in the process of this moment, I actually whipped out a novel called Give It to Me, which was published by the Feminist Press, and it was so far away from what I was experiencing—this sort of (I hope) funny, really quirky story where she [the main character] was having a lot of sex in the midst of this crazy, old politics. It was just like, Let me escape. So, I did that. I got the writing going again, the fiction.

 

Eventually, we decided to share our story because we do have a lot of communities across the board—racially, because of gender or religion, or otherwise demographically—that are made ashamed and are being punished by this culture.

 

TFR:

Even often there is that sense of Well, if you’re a well-behaved person of color, this isn’t gonna happen to you. I was very glad and moved that you went out on the limb and said, No, I did everything right, and it didn’t matter. My son was still subject to these forces, and he did everything right—he went to college, he was taking care of his family, and yet there was still this justifiable anger that had to come out somehow.

 

Castillo:

And at no time does he or do I excuse his behavior. He went out and he committed a senseless robbery, though he did not threaten anybody. It was the accumulation of anger that he had felt toward the system and what was going on—this was during the fallout with the banks and everything else that was happening. It’s not to excuse breaking the law.

 

By the same token, I talk about the fact that I know that he smoked weed, which I don’t have a moral objection to or anything, and some of this was self-medicating. Again, I’m not making excuses, I’m not saying it’s okay. I had taken him to Amsterdam when he was in college—I did a reading in Germany, and we went off to Amsterdam—so, it’s okay if you’re in Colorado, it’s okay now in California, but if it’s not okay don’t get caught with it. Once again, it’s no excuse if you get caught with it, and that was part of what was going on with him at that time, a resentment over the hypocrisy.

 

Nevertheless, [as a society] we’re not looking at the constant harassment of people of color. In this case, as a mother of a son, I’m looking at men being harassed and what happens. Again, it’s not to justify some reaction that’s illegal, but this is who you’re forming. I grew up as a brown girl in Chicago, and I had a lot of anger throughout my twenties. I actually went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, so I was a bright, self-motivated woman, but was always getting stopped, even then, by police, with your standard excuse about the taillight to ask you about your papers. It builds up in people.

 

TFR:

It does, absolutely. I’ll come back to the social commentary aspects, but I wanted to ask about how, even though there is anger and tragedy woven through this book, and also a kind and also a mystical tone that is quite beautiful and poetic, there’s also the sassy in it as well and little moments of humor. Could you comment about the role of humor in the book and how you see that? Was it something that you worked on or was it just something that came out of you naturally as a sort of antidote or complement to the other emotions that this book so strongly brings?

 

Castillo:

You know, writing funny is very hard. Writing humor is difficult, and when I when I knocked out Give It to Me, I really needed some levity my life. It was tragic—I was comparing my son in my head to, like, Odysseus, though he’s not a king and not a hero, but the mother ends up in Hell. I often come up with these connections in my head, and so I twist that and find irony—more than funny, I look for irony. That’s important, when you’re telling a story, whether it’s a quote-unquote true story, nonfiction, or you’re making up a story, and you’re giving it to the reader, you’ve got to have some moments of levity to give the reader a respite, a little island, an oasis. I’m happy that the book has some of that, not necessarily always together in the same essay but in other places.

 

My aunt, my mother’s sister, was always and remains a very colorful character, and certainly because of her joie de vivre, which she was born with, I was able to get a little levity to balance my mother’s somber personality. In the book, I talk about the influence of my aunt in my life and the things that I saw with her—the flirtation, her love of cooking, her flair for dressing, and so on—and all despite her very humble lifestyle. I think that there’s part of that in my personality, and this is how I can get through life—by thinking of the irony of certain situations.

 

At the same time, as a writer, even as a poet, you have to give your reader a break. If it’s pretty relentless but it has to be told, you have to have a host a little way-station for people so that they can catch their breath and then go on

 

TFR:

And maybe for yourself as a writer, too.

 

Castillo:

Absolutely.

 

TFR:

Speaking of your Tía Flora’s personality, there is a video of you online, in which you talk about how important Germaine Greer was to you in bringing up for you that challenge of being happy as a woman in our society, and I thought that the portraits of your somber grandmothers and mother contrasted really with the indomitable, lively portrait of Flora. What do you think about the balance of those different influences on you?

 

Castillo:

Just let me say that my Tía Flora is eighty-six. She’s outliving everybody. This just made me think about it. Maybe there’s something to that ability to laugh through all kinds of hardships. She had by no means an easy childhood in México City. She was orphaned, she married young, her husband was killed, she had two children at that time. She came to Chicago, became a seamstress in a little kind of quasi-sweatshop factory in the Mexican neighborhood there, her second husband became an alcoholic, and by then she had five children. All this time, this lovely person has a flair, as I said, for carrying herself like Queen Nefertiti down the street.

 

How she influenced me—since I knew her from when I was very small when she came from México City—was having that contrast in her personality. I like clothes and I like fashion, but it wasn’t necessarily encouraged anywhere around me. Dance music. Having a nice margarita. I learned about a margarita from my aunt. [Laughs.] Back in her in her kitchen, she used to make them in martini glasses when I was a kid. While she’s cooking for everybody, she’s happy with the radio on.

 

I think it’s really important for all of us, but particularly, I would say, for girls to have that balance and to be able know that they are not just lovable but they can embrace all of who they are. That means it’s great to have a brain, which I am happy that I celebrate, and I work at that, but it’s okay to be lovely and enjoy all the other things that I am as a woman.

 

TFR:

You mentioned Clarice Lispector, a writer whose works Near to the Wild Heart and Apple in the Dark I’m fond of. My writing teacher Paul West introduced me to her work.

 

Castillo:

Hour of the Star is my favorite. They made a wonderful movie of it, too, some years ago. It’s really beautiful.

 

TFR:

Paul was a great teacher, and he was insistent that we needed to read beyond the borders of the traditional U.S. territory. He inspired us to read widely and internationally. You’ve often spoken about a lack of Chicana role models in your education. I was wondering to what extent you see your work connected to the Latin American literary tradition—the strong tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado, Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa—or has it been more about building a new tradition here in the U.S.?

 

Castillo:

I can only speak for myself—I was a self-taught writer. I didn’t go through an English department program or Spanish department program or literature or MFA program. At the University of Chicago for graduate school, I got into their very new, at that time, Latin American Studies program, but it was seen as political science, so I saw myself doing something else other than writing, even though I was writing. Aside from the political interests that I had, I also did visual art, so I thought, if anything in the arts, I was going to be a painter. I started looking at poetry and literature sort of visually.

 

The [Spanish-language] literature that was being translated and brought to this country at that time was from the Latin American boom. Before I really saw myself as ever becoming a fiction writer—although on the side I liked to write little stories and wrote my poems—I was reading Jorge Amado, I was reading Cortázar. My first novel is dedicated to Julio Cortázar, so people think that he was my big influence, when actually I was reading everybody, all these guys, and I had this idea to do something like Julio Cortázar had already done [laughs]—because they’re very innovative. They were doing all kinds of things, not just what was later called magical realism, but playing with structure and so on. So, yes, indeed, we, by all means, have that connection—I think of Carlos Fuentes, too. I looked to them also because of the Catholicism, with the history of our families and legacies, there were a lot of connections along those lines.

 

I do believe, also, that, in time, as U.S.-Latino/a literature start to rise up—and certainly by now it’s made its claim in the world—there was also a reciprocation. By the mid-nineteen-eighties, Chicana feminists were having conversations with Mexican feminists, and so there was initially a very strong, deliberate contact and communication and encouragement going both ways, even though we wrote in English and even though we were considered privileged Yankees. [Laughs.] The irony was that most of us came from working-class backgrounds. We were dark-skinned, dark-haired girls, and these women writers [in México] had European last names, privileged backgrounds and education, and were multi-lingual. They wrote in French and in English [as well as Spanish], and we were just writing our English that we knew from our Chicago Public School System. But there was that connection that we have a history of colonialism, through the history of the conquest of México and South America, so, yes, I do see that. I’m very happy that to some degree at least, even though very few of my books are available in Latin America, that I am seen as having that connection with Latin America and the Caribbean, too.

 

TFR:

You’ve also spoken in the past a bit about living life “on the hyphen,” a term, I believe that was coined to describe Cuban-American experience, but that has been used in a variety of ways since then to describe positions that combine nationalities, but also being multi-lingual, bi-sexual, and so on. My sense is that in the literary world this has come, more and more, to be seen as a positive quality that also has influenced our literature with the mixing of boundaries of genre and form and so on, as in the inclusion of the letters you exchanged with your son in Black Dove. Have you experienced any change in attitude, an acknowledgement of the positive nature of hybrid spaces and forms?

 

Castillo:

It’s a reality. But it depends on who you’re talking to. I’m feeling today [November 20, 2016] a little less optimistic about those views. Particularly with the idea that if there is going to be a tone in this country about people who have quote-unquote immigrated here—whether or not they actually have immigrated—and we begin to do racial profiling, then, no, it will definitely not be seen as a positive. If we’re going to start questioning women’s rights, some of the progress that’s been made for women and our roles as women, and if we’re going to start questioning same-sex rights, then, no, it’s not going to be seen as a positive. Indeed, I think a lot of that negativity is as being brought forth, and if it’s viewed as validated and affirmed by our leaders, then, of course, those people who are in disagreement with our rights are going to feel happy—they are feeling happy—to come to the forefront.

 

Prior to that feeling, to some degree, yes, I did feel that we have made enormous amount of strides, thankfully, and not just in this country, but in the world, especially when we’re talking about women’s rights and the rights of transgendered, queer-identified individuals, moving away from the binary view, after so long of a very skewed view of what it was to be American. I think that I look as American as anybody can look, since I look very indigenous, and yet, of course, I’m always asked, Where you from? Where you from? Where? I was just asked

here by a writer in the authors’ lounge who came up and introduced himself, and the first or second thing he said to me was, “What country are you from?” I told him, “Chicago.” [Laughs.] He had a Bernie T-shirt on, so I was really surprised.

 

TFR:

You are a writer who’s had a long-term activist consciousness, so what can you tell me about our current moment and the role of writers in it? Not that I want to burden you with having all the answers, but I’ve been asking everyone this—what does this time imply for writers? Has the current climate affected your writing?

 

Castillo:

I’ve been writing and publishing for four decades, and I remember the night that Reagan was elected—I wanted to leave the country then, but I didn’t. Someone brought this up recently and said, “Well, you went through Reagan,” and I said, “Yes but this has been a progression with the Republican party, and Reagan wasn’t an overt misogynist. We all know he adored Nancy, and his son was gay. He was an old-school gentleman, although he was a major imperialist. That speaks for itself, but this is moving in an unprecedented direction.

 

I feel devastated emotionally, morally. I know that Trump did not win the popular vote. But, it’s all very unbelievable. Some of the Republicans are also in shock that that’s their new leader, so there’s a dream that some people have that this term cannot last. Let’s see how much damage he’ll do before that might happen. With all of that in mind, I’m trying my very best personally to, as Obama said, get over my moodiness, to stop feeling sorry for myself, to get up and do something.

 

This moment is shocking. It’s shocking when you’re a woman walking around, catching a bus, or your children are in school being harassed. If you’re being protected by the Secret Service or leading a very protected life, maybe you’re not realizing what happens to people in their everyday experience. So, I’m in these past ten days trying to move from that shock, that sucker-punch that the electoral vote gave us and telling myself that I have to remember who I’ve been, why I’ve been writing all these years, and that I cannot be afraid to speak out. If that’s all I do—if I just speak out, if I respond to some of the invitations I get to write for people’s blogs or their zines—I have a zine myself—La Tolteca: Promoting the Advancement of a World without Borders & Censorship—I’ve been doing it for about six, seven years now. I feel like I have to do that. I can’t be afraid, and that’s all I can do. I can do other things—you donate money to organizations you believe in, if you can go march you can go do that, anything at all, including lighting candles and incense and praying to whomever you pray to. Whatever it takes for you to lift yourself up to do it—that’s what I think each of us has to do. And be there for each other.

 

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Interview: Robert Pinsky

Photo by Eric Antoniou.

 

 

Robert Pinsky’s works of poetry include Sadness and Happiness (Princeton University Press, 1975), The Want Bone, (Ecco Press, 1990), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus, 1996), and Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus 2007). He has also published prose, including the books Poetry and the World (Ecco Press, 1988), The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Farrar, Straus ,1998), Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Life of David (Schoken, 2005). He has edited many anthologies, among them Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology (Norton, 2000), co-edited with Maggie Dietz, which grew out of the project he directed as US Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. This project invited Americans from all walks of life to name their favorite poems and to both record those poems for the audio archives of the Library of Congress and to capture their own reflections on why a particular poem called to them. Few contemporary poets have had as visible a presence as Robert Pinsky—he has appeared on both The Colbert Report and on an episode of The Simpsons. Yet, though his work and presence in popular culture have often had exalted status, his most recent book of poetry, At the Foundling Hospital, manages to delicately balance the universal and the personal, taking the reader from civilization’s battles to the side of a friend’s hospital bed. The poems reach out and take in both humanity’s sweep and what it means to be, simply, an individual human. Please also see our review of At the Foundling Hospital.

 

          

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:
One of the things that struck me on reading At the Foundling Hospital is how often you took elements that didn’t have obvious links and connected them. For example, in your poem “Cunning and Greed,” you have David Copperfield and the collapse of bee colonies. Do you find these combinations come to you organically or do you find yourself gathering them together before you put pen to paper?

 

Robert Pinsky:
One of the nicest compliments I ever received from my wife was about something I made with my hands. She said, “I love your patshke imagination.”  Patshke is a Yiddish word that sort of means patting something together. I’ve never been good at learning everything about anything. I don’t have a scholarly mind, but I do have a kind of oddball mind. I enjoy finding similarities in things that aren’t similar. For me poetry, compared to a long, naturalistic novel, is very good at making lightning moves. I sometimes say prose is like wading. You move through the medium slowly. You see things down at your toes. Poetry is like ice skating. So, you can move through a lot of territory very quickly. I get bored very, very easily, much more easily than most people, which is why I like poetry.

 

TFR:
You’ve also presented your poetry in non-traditional ways beyond simply on the page or read aloud. You often perform with musicians.

 

Pinsky:
I love working with jazz musicians, yes.

 

TFR:
When you’ve worked with jazz musicians, were you usually choosing the poem you wanted to read based on the piece of music or was the piece of music pared with the poem as the starting point?

 

Pinsky:
None of the above. We improvise, and it’s based on sound. I hope it’s not me reciting to music. I try to make my voice like a horn. The pianist I’ve done a couple CDs with, Laurence Hobgood keeps the poem text on the desk of the piano and looks at it like you’d look at a musical score, and I try hard to listen to him, and he listens to me. Sometimes we might have a rough plan, a set of chord changes. I started out as a musician. I don’t speak musician fluently, but I know enough of it to be able to discuss with Lawrence what we’re doing. It isn’t basing music on the words. It’s not songwriting. It isn’t basing songs on words, or words on music. It’s making music together.

 

TFR:
How do you find the audience reacts to that collaboration?

 

Pinsky:
It works so much in our favor because people are assuming they’re going to be embarrassed or bored. They are thinking, This guy is going to say poetry with music, and you can almost see the nervous panic in their faces. [Laughs.]

 

TFR:
As US Poet Laurette when you were working on the Favorite Poem Project [see web links below]—which invited Americans to name and record their favorite poem—you found readers that represented a diverse group of Americans. What did you find that was common among the readers, even if what they picked was unexpected?

 

Pinsky:
It was really the readers that were unexpected. It is very important to go to favoritepoem.org and to see that there are no poets, no literary critics, and no professors of poetry. You see a construction worker read lines of Walt Whitman and then talk about those lines very cogently. You see a Cambodian-American high school student in San Jose read a Langston Hughes poem, and she doesn’t mention that Langston Hughes was a black man. She relates the Langston Hughes poem to the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s regime. A US Marine with a Hispanic surname recites [William Butler] Yeats’ “Politics.”

 

It’s the only website I know that is actually about poetry in the sense that it’s not about poets, or smart things people say about poems. It’s about poetry in people’s lives.

 

TFR:
How do you think poetry is important to people’s lives, not just the act of writing it, but the act of reading and reciting it?

 

Pinsky:
It’s like answering the same question about cuisine as distinct from nutrition or lovemaking as distinct from procreation. I don’t know what the importance is. I don’t know why people like these things, but we seem to be an art-consuming animal. We don’t just walk around, we also dance. We don’t just talk, we also like to recite. If you have a tiny child, when you cradle it, it likes to be sung to. I’ve discovered an infant curls up in exactly the same way when you recite poetry as when you sing. It’s fundamental. It’s there. It’s a very basic part of human nature.

 

TFR:
Having published your first book of poetry in 1975 and your most recent book of poetry in 2016, do you think that your approach to assembling your pieces into a larger work has changed over time?

 

Pinsky:
Each book demands waiting for the physical materials to tell you what each poem is about and what the book is about. In the course of writing that book, At the Foundling Hospital, I had two or three friends die. That affected the subject of the foundling and culture. The foundling is taken into a culture it doesn’t particularly choose. It’s told you’re going to be a woman, you’re going to be Korean, you’re going to speak English, you’re going to be gay, you’re going to be subject to these diseases and have these immunities. The little child is just a squirmy little thing. It doesn’t know all that.

 

One of my friends was in a coma before he died. People sing to you when you are in a coma, they read, tell stories, tell jokes, and I found myself in the poem “In a Coma” trying to assemble the music, the news stories, the sports teams that he and I experienced when we were young. The sort of funerary or memorial aspect of the poem changed and was changed by the book’s project of talking about the foundling hospital and the infant foundlings and their growing up.

 

Identity is not the kind of fixed category that political discourse sometimes tries to make out of it. Culture is always mixed and fluid.

 

Favorite Poem Project Links:

http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_FromSongofMyself.html

http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_MinstrelMan.html

http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_Politics.html

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Interview: Brenda Miller

         

 

Brenda Miller is the author of five collections of essays: An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016), Who You Will Become (Shebooks Press, 2015), Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays (Skinner House Books, 2011), and Blessing of the Animals (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009), and Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002). She has also co-authored two craft books—The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World (Skinner House Books, 2012), with Holly J. Hughes, and the wildly popular Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2012), with Suzanne Paola.

 

An Earlier Life received the 2017 Washington State Book Award in Memoir, and Miller has received numerous other awards for her writing, including six Pushcart Prizes. Her short work has been published in numerous journals and literary magazines. She is on the faculty of Western Washington University.

 

Please see “Balance,” new collaborative work by Brenda Miller and Lee Gulyas, as well as our review of An Earlier Life, also in Aquifer.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that was so much fun about reading An Earlier Life was re-seeing some of the pieces that had been published before in literary magazines and how now they hold together so tightly as a book.

 

Brenda Miller:
I’ve worked so hard on that part.

 

TFR:
How did you make that happen?

 

Miller:
As with many of my books of essays I’m never really writing my individual pieces with a book in mind. Every time I have tried to do that I get very inhibited and I start censoring myself and I go blank, so I’ve learned over the years to just write my stuff, and then when I’ve reached a critical mass I start putting it together and seeing what organically is arising that holds these essays together. This is something I tell my students all the time—you have what I call your perennial questions, perennial issues that will come up naturally on their own, so you don’t need to deliberately be trying to write a particular story. So in this one I had a lot of shorter pieces—especially the middle section of the book is about a particular time as a young adult that was very difficult for me (I have tried to write an entire memoir about it, but it didn’t work)—so then I had all these little snatches that to me seemed to be making a story, but I wasn’t sure, so I started putting those together and just playing with that, and they ended up being the exact center of the book and creating their own little narrative in there.

 

The first part of the book had what I call more of a spiral chronology where it’s pretty much going even from pre-birth, with the prologue, which is called “An Earlier Life” and is kind of a fantasy imagining of what an earlier life for me might have been. And then going through childhood, but always referencing the future and what’s going to happen in the future. Then we have that second section about the time in my early twenties when I was living in the desert. Then the third section is more about being an adult and aging and watching my parents age. Then—I really didn’t do this deliberately—but the last real piece of the book is about the afterlife. It really came together.

 

TFR:
It’s amazing. Not that many collections of essays work so strongly as a whole.

 

Miller:
Even though I was doing a lot of hard work trying to put it together, a lot of these things were very fluid as I was doing it. It was only after I had that last draft I thought, Okay now this works.

But I still have that epilogue. [Laughs.]

 

The epilogue is that piece called “We Regret to Inform You,” which is in the form of rejection notes, and I love the piece, and many people love the piece, and I kept trying to put it in different places in the book and it just didn’t work because it’s such an odd voice. I finally just stuck it on the end just to see, and it actually works, I think, because it kind of goes from the beginning to the end in one piece. It’s almost like a review of all we have gone through, but in a very different voice. It’s kind of fun, but it’s also very serious and it ends on a positive note so I was pretty pleased with it. You never really know until the book’s in production and you see it as a book-book. Then you say, Is this really going to work? I’m very pleased that it does.

 

TFR:
It really does. In your recent Rumpus interview with Julie Marie Wade, you commented that you thought at some point your early life would run dry as a subject matter, but you have approached it this time with a sense of forgiveness for yourself, something you said was new for you. How do you think that writing about the same events or subjects changes over time and what’s the relationship between revisiting our histories and writing and deepening our understanding of them?

 

Miller:
That’s a great question because we do kind of tell our same stories. The beauty of it for both the writer and the reader is this coming at it from different perspectives, different angles. I think it was Virginia Woolf who wrote about how the present is a platform for viewing the past [“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” 18 March 1925 entry, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, v. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980.] That present moment keeps shifting every minute as you get older and have different perspectives on things. Even just content-wise or point-of-view-wise as you get older—I hope—you do see those early selves with a bit more compassion or understanding of what went on. You have a bit more distance in order to explore it.

 

I really didn’t think I would go back to that early young adulthood life in my writing again because a lot of my first book was about that. It comes up occasionally, but this time what’s been going on for me is that as a writer as I progress or evolve—and I hope I keep evolving for the rest of my life—otherwise I’m gonna get pretty bored—I’ve been trying new forms. That form of the rejection note, for instance, is what I call a hermit crab essay, which is a term I use in Tell It Slant, where you appropriate a whole different form or voice to tell your story. In this case, rejection notes. When you’re using a form like that you’re starting with the form to suggest the content rather than the other way around, different from how we traditionally approach it—I have an idea, what form am I going to put it in? When you do it the other way, it opens up the door for unexpected writing. I’d say [I can find new ideas in the same material because of] trying new forms, trying different things. When you do that the essay itself, the writing itself will show you a different perspective.

 

Another example in this book is the one called “Pantoum for 1979,” and that’s the most recent essay. It got put in at the very last minute because when I wrote it, I thought, This one has to go in! It was part of a project I’ve been doing for years now, which is appropriating the poetic forms like a sonnet or a villanelle in order to explore how tell a story in prose without it being just a poem without line breaks. It’s been fun, and anytime you can engage that more technical part of your mind for writing that gives your brain something to do and then your subconscious comes forward. In the case of the “Pantoum for 1979,” it gets at that time frame using the very specific repetitive pattern of a pantoum. The pantoum tends to be perfect for topics that are rather obsessive, and I’m like Okay this is good. I’m always thinking about this time [of my life], but never quite get at it. I realized too that in that section comprised of the shorter works, there was never a real explanation about who this person was, how I got to know him, what was going on. The pantoum, even though it’s such a restrictive form, allowed for all this narrative. Every one of my [pre-publication] readers said, “Yes, this is what we were missing.” I’d say really experimenting with form and having fun is the way to keep your writing evolving.

 

TFR:
It must be great that you demonstrate that so clearly in your own work for your students. You know, students sometimes are very resistant—”I just want to write what I want to write.” But if you show them the excellence that can come out of that, it must be very inspirational for them.

 

Miller:
It is interesting that one of the biggest challenges of writing is getting students (or anyone) to loosen up and have some fun. This year, I’m teaching an 8:00 a.m. class, and I think because they’re so tired their guard is down, so they’ve been willing to try a lot of things. At least up until this moment actually—as soon as it’s final projects time then suddenly it’s very serious and they don’t want to use anything that they’ve tried. With graduate students, they’re understandably so focused on their thesis projects, and everything they write has to go in their thesis. It was only when I brought in a collage artist, and we cut up magazines and created this huge mess in the classroom—magazines torn up and glue sticks out and coloring pens—and they were having so much fun. We created these things, and they weren’t for the purpose of doing anything with them. I ignited that little playful spirit, and ever since then they’ve been very game to just try stuff and see what’s gonna happen.

 

TFR:
In last couple years in a graduate literature course I’ve taught, we read a book every week and wrote pastiches of some kind or another, and they were the greatest thing. We had so much fun, writing satires and a whole variety of stuff. Some of their best work came out of it. One student said she’d always wanted to write about her experiences going to music festivals but she never felt like the stakes were low enough to try it out, and she ended up changing her entire thesis and wrote an entirely new thesis in about six months that was just terrific.

 

Miller:
Nice. I find that kind of thing happens all the time with thesis students that if I get them onto a new form, then all of a sudden they just switch gears and the writing’s fresh and original.

 

TFR:
One of the other things that’s striking about An Earlier Life is your use of not just the first person but the collective “we.” You do that quite frequently, and I just wanted to ask why you’re drawn to that unusual point of view in your work. Do you think it’s related to the collaborative writing projects that I know you’re also participating in, or is it something different?

 

Miller:
I had never thought of it that way, but it could be. Right now, I do a lot of my work in writing groups, either with my students or with my own writing group, where it’s generative writing. We have certain timed writing exercises and rules and all that stuff, and so sometimes it just comes out in the “we” voice. I think when I’m writing in that mode it comes naturally. I never set out to say, Okay, now I’m going to write a piece in the “we” voice. I think that happens when I feel like I’m not just talking about my experience but the experience of my cohort growing up in Southern California. I’m trying to think of exactly which pieces use the “we”—I know there’s the one about the lifeguard [“Dark Angel”].

 

TFR:
There’s “Dark Angel,” but also “L’Chaim,” “Change,” “Sweat Lodge,” and maybe a couple of others where the “we” is your family [“In Orbit”].

 

Miller:
I just love it when people see stuff in my work that I had no idea about. [Laughs.]

 

With those pieces, I’m not talking about a particular experience of mine, but about a particular experience of a generation of people. “Dark Angel” is this piece about the lifeguard and just going to the beach in Santa Monica and just us girls and how we were in those awkward teenage bodies and connecting to our bodies. That particular piece was supposed to be three separate essays, but they weren’t really saying anything on their own, so I put them together and saw this theme of distress and that kind of growing-up angst and undiagnosed depression—all things that a lot of girls go through. That piece uses three different points of view—the first section is in the “I,” the second in the “you,” and the third in the “we.” They show different phases or aspects of growing up.

 

TFR:
It’s a strategy that can work to make readers feel included, and I certainly felt very much that way, but I think writing with the “we” is tricky because sometimes people can say, Oh why are you speaking for me? I felt like you handled it in a very gentle way, so it never got overwhelming or bossy. It never became a royal “we.”

 

Miller:
You find it in fiction, too, and it is tricky because, for one thing, it doesn’t have a gendered pronoun, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Yet when it works, it works. Oftentimes, I’m organically writing in a particular form like a “you” or “we” point of view and it’s actually not working, but it is getting the material out. So I always look at that in revision and often change the point of view. I really want to encourage people, like I encourage my students, to just try it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep it in that form, but you probably will get to some lines and material that you wouldn’t get to any other way.

 

TFR:
Would you speak about the ways in which genre boundaries seem to be in flux these days?

 

Miller:
They are totally in flux. I love it. I love it so much.

 

TFR:
We used to get that advice—there was that sort of classic advice—that you should choose one genre and stick to that. Obviously, we make something else of that advice now. [Laughs.]

 

Miller:
People are doing such amazing work out there. This particular book is probably the book of mine that does that more than my other books. I’m using poetic forms. I’m using a lot of
hermit crab–type things. Even the use of the “we” voice is a fictionalization of experience. I feel like this book is really in flux between poetry and nonfiction and fiction and other
things, too. [Laughs.]

 

I think it’s very exciting not to be couched in these very distinctive genre boxes. When I was editor of Bellingham Review, I kept seeing more and more that people are really trying to break those boundaries. I’m all for it.

 

The collaborative work really does that because, like, What is this? There’s no one speaker, a lot of them are in short sections, and some of them were responding to art, some were responding to a particular topic. It’s a very exciting back and forth that doesn’t really fit anywhere, which makes it hard to find a place for them. We get rejected a lot because people just don’t know what to do with them.

 

TFR:
Send one to me. One thing about The Florida Review is that there’s a history of engaging with new forms or forms being newly accepted as of artistic merit. The previous two editors did this over the years with creative nonfiction and then graphic narrative, and I’m looking to stay in that tradition. We’re starting to accept some digital storytelling, to recognize that as an art form, and we’re open to all kinds of things.

 

One more major question—your writing is characterized by an intense interiority and often somberness, but you also sometimes exhibit what I might characterize as insouciance. “Swerve,” in particular. And you’ve already talked about “We Regret to Inform You.” It’s not a light humor, but it’s funny. How does humor work for you and your writing, and how do you decide when it’s right to be funny?

 

Miller:
I never set out to be humorous because once you do then you’re not. [Laughs.] I mean, some writers are. Some writers are very good at that, but I find if I’m not having a good time then I might get bored with it. It comes out of playing with form. Often the hermit crab pieces have what I’d call an inadvertent humor to them because you’re usually taking a very objective form like the rejection note—in this book I also have a dress code piece, and that kind of thing is usually pretty authoritarian and rigid—then combining that with really intense personal stories and confessions. The humor arises naturally [from the contrast] and then the key is whether it gets gimmicky. In the revision process, I have to find out what this piece is really about.

 

In the case of the rejection notes, I had probably twice as many as ended up in the final piece because once you start writing about rejection you have so much material on your hands. I was having a grand old time just writing them. I gave a first draft to some readers, and they said, “Yeah, it’s good but it gets a little repetitive and gimmicky,” so I had to think about what this piece was really about. I heard in several of the letters this idea of finding the role that suits you, so I cut out all the letters that didn’t have that and highlighted that theme in the others. Then it started to take on more of a cohesiveness and a sense of being a complete piece. Then it takes that turn in the middle—it’s kind of humorous at the very beginning with being rejected in my art class—not having my drawing displayed—or being rejected as a tenth-grader—not going to the dance. You know, normal things that people can relate to. Once you start working in that way, people let their guards down. They’re laughing and saying, “I can relate to that,” and then it gets more intensely personal as it goes along until I get a letter about my miscarriage as a young woman, and it’s actually from the miscarried baby, which is not something I was expecting to happen, but again it was like the form demanded it. I was just going along chronologically and I’m like,  Okay what happened next in college?Oh yeah, and I said, Do I skip that? Well, no. So, I wrote it and then just went on. I didn’t spend a lot of time with it, but in the revision process I found, Oh there’s that real turning point in the essay. Whenever I read that piece aloud—and I love to read it because it’s an audience-pleaser—they’re laughing and laughing, then I get to that turn. There’s like the “Ohhhh,” and then people get subdued. Then there’s laughter again, but with a different feeling.

 

Though it happens a lot in more traditional essay forms, it’s more difficult. By using these other forms you automatically create what I call a shared space between the reader and the writer using a form people relate to—especially, in this case, if you’re reading to writers who are all familiar with the standard rejection note, so they’re already with you. That’s one way I go about thinking about humor.

 

TFR:
What else would you like readers to know about An Earlier Life? And where you going next?

 

Miller:
I’d like them to know that these essays were written over a period of time—probably five or six years—and that I did spend a lot of time getting them into the order that they are. Sometimes
readers of essays will pick it up and just read at random, and I’m thinking, I spent so much time putting it in this order, so read it in order! [Laughs.]

 

I’d say that the collaborative work is really intriguing to me. I also have been doing some writing challenges over the summer. I wrote from a prompt a day with a writing group—me and two other writers—and we did the prompts in different ways. The first month was from a literary magazine that had it as a part of their way of getting people to their website, but they put out a prompt a day, and my two friends and I wrote to that. We’d send each other work and we liked it so much we continued in July and made our own prompts and just rotated who gave the prompt. Then in August there was a photography blog doing a prompt a day so we would take a photograph a day and then write to that. By the end of the summer I had probably more than 220 pages of new work.

 

This was also while my father was dying, and I thought there’s no way I can write, but it’s the summer and I need to write. By having the community and by having the external prompts, I was able to record everything that was happening that summer as well as memories that were coming in. I have not looked at work yet, but I plan to next month and to see what’s there. That
might turn into its own little book, but would never have been written without community. The type of community we need changes as we develop as writers, and I don’t need a feedback community so much as I need a generative writing community now. But I still need community. I guess that would be the last word—I think we all need our communities.

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Interview: Sandra Simonds

         

 

Sandra Simonds is a prolific poet, critic, mother, and professor. She is the author of five poetry collections: Orlando (Wave Books, forthcoming), Further Problems with Pleasure (University of Akron, 2016, and winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize), Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). She is also author of a free electronic PDF collection,  Untitled Collage Poems (Bloof Books, 2016). A sixth print volume, Orlando (Wave Books), is forthcoming in 2018, and Simonds is working on another collection, Atopia. Please see five poems from Atopia and a review of Further Problems with Pleasure elsewhere in Aquifer.

 

Reading Simonds’ work is not unlike plugging into high-voltage poetica, fused with the hard metal of keen intellect, unmistakable humor, the reality of ourselves as sexual beings, and charged with political and social thematic waves. Nothing is at rest in these poems; they shout and taunt, but mostly they invite an engagement to language throbbing with 21st-century life.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:
I’m thinking I was first introduced to your poetry when I received my May/June [2017] issue of The American Poetry Review, and was intrigued by your poem, “Dear Chris,” which is the first of three poems featured in the issue. It’s a hardworking poem, “long,” and of an eclectic construction that gives it restless energy.

 

Contemporary epic, or “long” poems, are my latest poetry-drug, so when I read an excerpt from Orlando in The Brooklyn Rail’s e-journal, I was smitten with its forty-eight flowing tercets, where the speaker seems to address the city of Orlando, but soon we’re accompanying the speaker in a kind of kinetic stream-of-consciousness journey, passing through the land of the body as if were a fantasy theme park like Disney World, which is referred to several times in the poem.

 

The form works fabulously against the energy, creating marvelous tension. Thoughts echo in my reader’s mind of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, yet I sense you, the poet, clearly enter at multiple points. For example, we see the speaker at their desk, trying to compose on a laptop, but they are interrupted, first by the action of another, then technology fails, and the work is lost. A hard-copy diary is remembered: “. . . and that is precisely the moment you fell out of love with me, / abandoning me to the very diaries and bookshelves of my consciousness, both as a teenage/girl and now as a middle aged woman, so I tried to figure out what I could have done back then, / what confession, what moment of weakness, what apology had driven you out of my life, / so abruptly . . .”

 

You have a collection soon to be published (2018) from Wave Books called Orlando. I’m excited about this as both a poet, and as a university instructor in Orlando; is the entire collection an epic poem, or is Orlando a long poem contained therein? Where did this spring forth from?

 

Sandra Simonds:
First, thank you for this question because I’m really excited to talk about Orlando, which I think of as an epic feminist poem that reads like fiction or memoir. In terms of structure, Orlando is composed of two sections. The first section is forty pages and each page is four very long-lined tercets; the second part of the epic is written in a kind of spiraling open form. The second part of the book, in fact, was initially forty or so discreet poems with titles that I, upon revision, transformed into one long second section called “Demon Spring.”

 

I chose the long poem form because I wanted to work in the tradition of the epic which is historically so heavily inflected with masculine energy. The “epic” has been coded “male” and I was interested in the challenges of writing an epic poem given the gender history. Who is allowed to write our history? Of course, I’m not the first woman to do this. Several feminist long poems that influenced me in this project come to mind including Alice Notely’s The Descent of Alette, Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, and Loba by Diane di Prima.

 

You are right to note that “Orlando” in the poem is an unstable character—sometimes Orlando is a city, other times, Orlando is a lover, and other times Orlando is an idea or set of ideas. When I wrote the book, this instability wasn’t intentional but it turned out to be an effective way that I could talk about both love and relationships using this figure as well as broader cultural concerns, like materialism, entertainment, the surface and what lies beneath the surface and so on. So the instability of the figure creates a kind of creative and philosophical opening that worked for me and relates to the traditional concerns of epic poetry—telling a historical, social and political story about our times but through a distinctly feminist voice.

 

TFR:
As a poet, and poetry reader for The Florida Review, I find it increasingly rare that a poem both challenges and dazzles me. I find the poems of Further Problems with Pleasure just brilliant. How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?

 

Simonds:
I wanted to explore a number of themes at the same time: sexuality, sexual violence, sexual liberation, gender shame, the body, perversity, fantasy and how these things are constructed and defined in late-capitalist society. What are the norms? What is taboo? Lacan says, “Do not give up on your desire,” and I think that’s a sort of jumping off point of this book. Okay, well what does that mean for a single working mother living in the Deep South at this particular point in history? What part of our desire is “ours” and what part of it is manufactured?

 

TFR:
In this collection, is there one poem that worked as the spark for the rest of the pieces? If not, which poem do you feel best anchors the collection for you?

 

Simonds:
I think the “Further Problems with Pleasure” poems that are positioned throughout the book anchor it because these poems bring the book back to the central questions surrounding the nature of desire and, when the book veers away a little bit from these questions, they are brought back to the forefront of the reader’s mind. I also have a lot of affection for the last poem in the book, “Dear Chris,” which I wrote in response to a poem sent to me by the poet Chris Nealon. I was thinking about all of the leftists who stand up in society against hatred and violence against the oppressed. I wanted to both acknowledge the struggles that we have encountered both personally and more broadly as leftists, what we are up against, what we will be up against, but also to say that what we do every day, our actions matter. That what we did here, right now, matters, to each other and to our children and that even though we all come from different backgrounds, my hope for the future, is that our children will not have to face what we have faced and if they do, that they will be comrades, that they will be on the right side of history fighting for the same things.

 

TFR:
I’m always curious what literary fields a poet mines; what are you reading now?

 

Simonds:
I just finished Matthew Rohrer’s The Others, which I thought was great. His storytelling and the way he works with narrative is fascinating. I also just finished Rapture by Sjohnna McCray. I had the pleasure of reading with Sjohnna a few months ago and he gave me the reading copy of his book with all of his notes and directions to himself (Thank you, Sjohnna!). I love the way Rapture tells the complicated story of his relationship to his mother.

 

TFR:
I think I’d go as far as calling your poetry “combustible” and timely for what’s occurring in the both the political and social arena right now. It’s like the lines are “plugged in” and feel energized, so I must ask, any writing rituals you’d like to share? That is, where do you write best, what time of day, tea, coffee, wine or a bag of chips?

 

Simonds:
My only trick is to write when you are so desperate that you can’t not write what you need to write—when you read things in the news, write, when you feel a sense of justice, write. That usually puts a bit of urgency into the writing and makes the poems more resonant, so that when you’re drinking a cup of tea, revising those passionate poems, you don’t take out the passion, but you have some passion to work with and frame. I guess that Wordsworth covered this area long before I did, though.

 

TFR:
As a parent and an academic, a working professor, how do you find or make time to write? Is it easy for you or always a struggle, as in some sort of “compromise”?

 

Simonds:
It’s always a struggle to find time for me because I’m just a very busy person with two young children, but I think because I’ve been writing since I was a child, it’s like second nature to me. I think I’m probably a person who would write in any circumstances—in a jail or in a castle, in a factory or in an office. I can’t imagine not being a writer and writers write.

 

TFR:
Who (or what) acts as your muse? Or, perhaps there’s a particular subject you find you keep coming back to again and again?

 

Simonds:
The dead, the people who have struggled before us for social justice, the unborn, the people who will need our writing when we are dead. My themes usually center around the political—I want to make poems that are both political and creative, that are political but not obvious rants or propaganda, that touch people, that make people think.

 

TFR:
In your writing process, would you say you write more by logic (doing research, creating notes, etc.) or intuition, or some combination of the two?

 

Simonds:
I go on intuition and sound always. I have an idea or an impulse and I just follow my gut. Sometimes it’s wrong but more often than not it isn’t. I think that this kind of leap of faith is what you have to really develop and nurture.

 

TFR:
Anything that people THINK they know about your poetry, that isn’t so?

 

Simonds:
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what people think about my poetry so, honestly, I have no idea.

 

TFR:
What projects are you working on at the present, and what subjects do you feel are calling you for future projects?

 

Simonds:
I’m working on an epic political poem called “Atopia.”

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Interview: Rita Dove

              

Rita Dove’s works include the poetry collection The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie-Mellon Press, 1980);  the verse-novel Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon Press, 1980), winner of  the Pulitzer Prize; Museum (Carnegie-Mellon University Press 1983); the short story collection Fifth Sunday (University of Kentucky Press, 1990); the novel Through the Ivory Gate (Pantheon, 1992); the poetry collection On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems (Norton, 1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;  the poetry collection American Smooth (Norton, 2004); and Sonata Mulattica: Poems (Norton, 2009). Dove has also written lyrics for composers including Tania León and John Williams, and her work Thomas and Beulah was staged as an opera by Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2001.

 

Dove’s numerous honors and awards include a Heinz Award in the Arts and a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal. She is the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Rita Dove was the youngest person to ever serve as US Poet Laureate when she was elected to the position in 1993.

 

Rita Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was released by Norton in 2016 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Over three decades of work, Dove maintains a lovely tension, dwelling in the everyday beauties of a person, a day, a single moment while also commenting on that moment’s place in the broader world. To read Dove’s work is to range far afield while always coming home.

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

Reading your poems, I was in awe of your consistency of style throughout the years. I was trying to come up with a brilliant opening question, but the first thing I came up with was what is it like having a Collected Poems the size of the doorstop, something with such heft?

 

Rita Dove: 

It is a mixed kind of joy. It’s very interesting, because when I agreed to do this my wonderful editor said, “We can put together the whole collection, and it would be great to have the poems under one roof.” I thought, oh yeah, that would be wonderful, but as I started putting it together it felt like I was building a tombstone. It is strange because you feel like I’m not done. I’m not done. I’m just in the middle of things.

 

It was wonderful in the end, especially going to copyediting when I didn’t expect to actually read the poems together at that point. To go back and see them almost as a stranger would see them and say, “Oh, wow, did you write that?” It’s still kind of amazing to me to look at the book itself, as you said, something with that heft, and say, I did this, really?

 

TFR:

You mentioned copyediting, and I wondered if you had done much editing of the previously published poems, if you’d given in to the compulsion to tweak.

 

Dove:

I did not give into the compulsion to tweak. I made a vow to myself years ago that I would not go back and edit poems once they were published. It just seemed to me that if I believed in them enough to put them out there not only for magazine publication—because I did obviously tweak things between publication in a journal and collected in a book—but in a book, I thought well, that was how I felt at that time. I would be falsifying that particular stage of my life, you know, the eye of the poet, if I changed them. So, I didn’t tweak anything, but when copyediting I was looking for typos and things like that. I’m a terrible reader, so I read it backwards.

 

TFR: 

You literally read it backwards?

 

Dove:

Well, not word for word backwards, though sometimes I would read word for word. A lot of times I would read backwards line by line. I wanted to shake myself out of the sense of the book because you can be lulled by the narrative.

 

TFR:

As you were going through some of the pieces did you find that you encountered things that you wanted to explore more that led to new work?

 

Dove:

I think I’m still in the process of sorting that out. I do know that there are some of the poems, particularly in the very first volume that I published, The Yellow House on the Corner, where I feel like I want to explore a certain almost dreamlike landscape that I abandoned after the first book. With every book I tried to go off in a different direction in the sense of where the eye goes, where the vision goes, what the vision is.  I know that from the first book to the second book, I remember turning my gaze more outward instead of inward and looking at the world. The way the world stamps things is important hence the name of that volume—Museum.

 

I’d love to go back now after all these years and after all these other books and look at that interior more. In fact, I have started writing a poem which is a counter to one of the poems in the first book. So, it has inspired me.

 

TFR:

I noticed that, from the first one, “In the Old Neighborhood,” many of your poems describe gardens—gardens and flowers are a consistently repeated image. Did you ever take up gardening?

 

Dove:

[laughs] It’s really crazy because both my parents were excellent gardeners. My father had a vegetable garden and all these roses that you see a lot in the poems. And my mother was also really, really good with flowers, and I have a little black thumb. Things will die if I touch them. I do love flowers and gardens, but I’m truly hopeless, which is probably why they appear so much in my work. If I can’t grow one, I might as well write one.

 

TFR: 

In many of your poems, and certain books in particular, you explore history. Do you feel that the poet has a responsibility to history as much as being in the moment or that one infuses the other?

 

Dove:

I think that every poet has their own things that they cannot deny when they’re writing. I would say that every poet has a responsibility to be absolutely honest and true to whatever is compelling them to write, whatever emotions are compelling them to write. That may result in poems that have historical connections or not. For me, growing up as I did as a young black girl, the connection between history and the lives that I saw was so apparent that I would have been false if that had not entered the work. It seems to be a part of life. So, for me, I considered it absolutely imperative and necessary to always have that balance of history there in the work.

 

TFR:

Do you find that sometimes it’s harder to spend time in the present in your work than at others?

 

Dove: 

That’s a really fascinating question because after I started to work on the Collected Poems I did give myself an assignment. I often will do that after one book, to go off in different direction.  My assignment this time was to stay in the moment, so you really nailed it on the head. To just stay in the moment is something that I’ve been pushing myself to try to do. I think the last poems in the volume, the poems that appear in American Smooth, are about trying to capture that moment, the moment where you’re absolutely in the present and everything else falls away.

 

TFR:

When you go through people’s bios they always like to mention firsts, and you have a number of firsts such as the youngest poet laureate at the time. Did you ever feel that was an undue burden being qualified as the first and somehow having to break new ground?

 

Dove:

The burden comes from, first of all, feeling like I didn’t do anything but be myself and be there at the right time. Then there is also the burden of the attention which can sound a little bit facetious to people who say, “Oh, come on, the burden of getting this or that?” But what happens, especially for a poet, is that your work happens in a very intimate space, a very introspective sphere, and suddenly the lights are turned on and everyone’s looking at you. And you’re going, “No, I can’t write if you’re looking at me.” I would have young people write and say, “You’re my role model. I want you to mentor me.” Mentoring is really finding someone who is living near you in life so you can figure out how to shape your life in the world that you exist in. Me being your mentor makes no sense, because I don’t know you. There’s also that feeling that, as a role model, someone would take everything I said as gospel. I don’t take everything I say as gospel, so that was an undue burden. I felt like I would have to think three times before I said something for fear someone would just write it down and think that was the end-all and be-all, and it certainly isn’t.

 

TFR:

For a poet you have a very and broad readership, broader than a lot of poets, but do you have an ideal reader? If someone could airdrop a case of your Collected Poems, where would you want it to go?

 

Dove:

Oh my gosh. I can’t predict that ideal reader. When I write a poem, I don’t think this is for this kind of reader. I’ve been constantly and pleasantly surprised by the responses to the work from people that I would not have imagined could be moved by it. I remember in England once, a young black guy with lots of braids came up to me and he said he really loved this poem “Daystar,” which is a poem about a mother who was looking for a moment’s peace from her children. He said he just really connected to it. To this day I do not know why he connected, but I would not have predicted that. So, the ideal reader would, in the abstract, be someone who would take each poem as it is, without any preconceived ideas of what kind of poet I am.

 

TFR:

Because you are such a well-known poet, have you ever had people shy away from the idea that they might appear in one of your works or people who were trying to put themselves  in a piece?

 

Dove:

I think that happens probably more with novelists than it does with poets. Among family members, there was a time when I felt that some wanted to get their story told. They would tell me a really good story and say, “You oughta write a poem about that.” Sometimes people didn’t want things told. I have never published a poem about anyone that I knew or a family member without showing it to them first. I feel that I can’t stop myself from writing it, but I can certainly stop myself from publishing it. More than people trying to get into the poems, people have suggestions for poems.

 

TFR:

Have you ever taken one of those suggestions for a poem?

 

Dove:

My husband is a novelist and journalist, and often, when we’re driving and such, we give each other ideas. He says, “I’ll give you that one,” and I say, “I’ll give you this one, I’ll give you this line.” Then we kind of sort them out. But, yes, I have taken some. Sometimes, I’m like yeah, that is a good idea.

 

TFR:

Being married to writer, do you find yourselves exploring the same territory or do you stake your claims to different territories?

 

Dove:

I don’t think we’ve ever had a dispute over territory in any way. Maybe it’s because we’re from different disciplines. Fred sees things with the novelist’s eye and a journalist’s eye, and I see it from a poetic eye. As far as I’m concerned, a novelist and poet can write about the very same incident and it will come out remarkably different.

 

TFR:

Do you find that your process has changed at all through the years, not just how you approach the beginning of poems but how they come to completion?

 

Dove:

I think in terms of how they come to completion, it has stayed the same. I’ve never known how they come to completion. Usually there’s a moment of great despair where I think this is going nowhere, and it’s a process that remains mysterious to me that at some point things begin to click and come together.

 

How I approach the beginning of the poem has changed slightly in terms of the editing. I always write first by hand. I need the physical thing. Of course, I’ve graduated from manual typewriters, to Selectrics, to the computer. I do miss the old banging, that physical punctuation. Now I print things out instead of having a typed sheet, and I still mess it up by hand.

 

TFR:

Do you keep all of those drafts?

 

Dove: 

I do.  It’s a mess. [laughs] You know, sometimes I will actually find a line that I’ve discarded in a poem that’s long completed, but it really belonged somewhere else. I am also experimenting more with dictating certain portions, mainly because I’m traveling so much.

 

TFR:

I was compiling these questions some time ago, and a lot has happened since then.  Earlier, I was asking about writing about the present and writing about the past. In moments when you feel you’re caught in the midst of history, does it change how you feel about what needs to be said, or people’s expectations about what needs to be said?

 

Dove:

I think that people are looking for someone to articulate what is happening to us and how we can move through it, not only practically—which is more the politicians’ role, or more the activists’ role—but also emotionally how we can handle this. That’s really the task or the challenge that we want our writers, our poets to do. That’s the age-old call that one has. I wouldn’t consider it a burden. I really consider it a kind of a clarion call. I know that I and many of the writers that I know—because we’ve been communicating—we feel compelled to keep working even more vigorously than ever, but also to articulate this. Now that can come out in many ways. It can come out in overtly political poems. It can come out in poems that remind us who we are as human beings. That is exceedingly important in this time. So much of the beauty of being a distinct individual in a tribe of individuals has been battered and obliterated. We need to take the language back and claim it. That’s what poets do.

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Interview: Derek Palacio

     

 

Derek Palacio’s first novel, The Mortifications, was published in 2016 by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Crown. The story of Soledad and her two children, Ulises and Isabel, immigrants to Connecticut from Cuba, and the revolutionary father who haunts their lives, Uxbal, has been called “extraordinary” by The New York Times and a “gorgeous and challenging debut” by Kirkus Reviews.

 

Palacio earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. He is co-director of the Mojave School, a free creative writing program for teens in Nebraska, and is a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program. His previous work includes the novella How to Shake the Other Man (Novella Books, 2013) and the story “Sugar,” which was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013.

 

We are delighted to also share his story “Kisses” in the 41.1 print edition of The Florida Review. “Kisses” was chosen as our 2016 Editors’ Award in Fiction by final judge Mark Wisniewski.

 

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I wanted to start off by asking a little bit more about something you said in your Kenyon Review interview. You said, “I am not writing about Cuba so much as I am writing about my idea of Cuba, my abstraction of the island.” Can you talk a little more about the difference and, perhaps, how you think this idea of Cuba as opposed to the reality of Cuba—if we admit that there is such a thing—influenced you growing up and becoming a writer?

 

Derek Palacio:

It really begins with my father who’s from Cuba. He left when he was five years old in 1956, so he left the island a very young age. What he remembers of the place are just some fragments, these sort of brief, visual snippets of the house he grew up in, some of the gardens out back. He has an image of his father on horseback that he remembers, but, even for him, it’s all sort of ethereal.

 

So, growing up with that—I feel like that was probably the foundation of my understanding of Cuba, which was inherently and innately a little bit dreamlike.

 

Then just having to learn about Cuba through books and TV and from such a long distance. We didn’t even grow up in Miami with other Cubans. We were up in New Hampshire, pretty far away. There were a lot of intermediaries between me and the island, and I think that contributed to this idea of I’m trying to write towards Cuba and get an understanding of Cuba but admittedly until I go it’s always going to be a little bit cloudy, a little bit murky, a little bit intangible.

 

TFR:

Of course, it would have been a different time then anyway. Things do change, and so there’s always that aspect of it as well. It’s almost like we have a new generation of Cuban-American authors. In some ways we might see a parallel with Jewish holocaust–related literature, where we had the survivors and their generation, the Elie Wiesel generation, and now we have Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Daniel Mendelsohn, and others, who are much younger, second- or third-generation, but still writing with reference to that. For Cuban-Americans of your generation, how do you see the Cuban migration mythology working in new ways?

 

Palacio:

It’s interesting you bring up sort of that Jewish literary tradition because I’m a big fan of Eva Hoffman’s, and she writes [in After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust] about the way the children of survivors or a couple of generations down from the Holocaust, the first thing they learned about the Holocaust is the myth itself, and they have to move from the myth to the reality. I remember reading that and thinking to myself, That explains exactly sort of the trajectory I’m on in my own writing.

 

I’m dealing with Cuba from a distance, and I’m hoping to get closer to the reality and piece it together. So you start with the feelings you have about the island, feelings you’ve been taught about the island from your parents, and then you move from that to the place itself or at least other sources about it. It was wonderful to read Hoffman and see that other people have written from this sort of weird, amorphous emotional center and then found the place later in different forms, in different versions. That’s not to say I think that one is more true than the other, but I found that really heartening and interesting.

 

TFR:

Do you have plans to visit Cuba?

 

Palacio:

So, two weeks ago I made my first trip to Cuba. The Mortifications came out at the end of October and then I left for Cuba on October 28 and got to experience it first-hand, which was just wonderful. [This interview was conducted on 19 November 2016.]

 

TFR:

How did that work in relationship to your book? Were there things that you were thinking, I wish I had known that, I wish I had captured that? Did it feel like these two things are part of each other?

 

Palacio:

I would never claim I got it all right, but I don’t think I got it wrong. When I was writing the book, I was very conscious of the fact that I was writing without a certain layer of expertise that we assume or hope for from our writers in a lot of ways. I knew I was going to make mistakes, but I did my best to err without abusing the material. What I saw there was interesting because the book takes place in the nineteen-eighties, but now we’re thirty years away from that, so I knew it would be hard to compare. But there were enduring elements to the island.

 

The journey began in the center of the island, then we moved to Havana, and it was wonderful to see the way the landscape looked and worked, and that seemed to fit closely with my ideas about it. I felt at least in that that regard some element of my writing felt true.

 

TFR:

Do you feel as though you were reliant on the previous generation of Cuban-American authors? Did you read a lot before you pursued your own mythical approach?

 

Palacio:

Very much so. The book that really got me started writing about Cuba was Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls.

 

I’d read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, I’d read Christina Garcia. But there’s something about that book—it was in Cuba. It wasn’t about people coming to America or assimilating to a new culture. But it was also just so expansive. I think of that book and the way it begins in the countryside and him growing up in a very rural area and then moving toward the man and the city. That book for me showed me how Cuba is so big and there’s so much going on there and I have these connections I’ve been thinking about for a long time and maybe now is the time to start exploring them in a little bit more deliberate way.

 

TFR:

I loved your evocation of the landscape.

 

Palacio:

Thank you.

 

TFR:

One of the things that interested me about your book was that I thought that your use of the third-person limited point of view was really masterful. The way that you could get very close to one character and then back away a little bit—that’s the great thing that third-person gives you is that flexibility. But I was also interested in how that affected the characterization. I was fascinated by Isabel because I found her repellent but riveting.

 

Palacio:

[laughs]

 

TFR:

So, I wanted to know if you had a favorite character and whether the decisions that you made about your characters influenced the point of view choice that you made. How did that work for you?

 

Palacio:

When I first sat down to write the book, I had just finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s “The Insufferable Gaucho,” which is a wonderful story about a guy who returns to a home he’s basically forgotten about. I got fascinated with that idea, which seemed to mirror some of the things that we’re going on in my dad’s experience and maybe for Cubans in general. I thought the book was mostly going to focus on Ulises and in the early drafts it does. Even still it narrows down at some points and we sort of we forget some of the other characters. However, getting them back to the island in that first half of the novel required that everybody’s pieces were moving in line with each other or affecting each other. The Isabel storyline became so much fun to write and so much fun to think about. Originally, he was going to be an older brother and Isabel was going to be a younger sister, and then I realized there’s some balance that needs to happen here, and so that’s when I decided that they would be better if they were twins. Neither one of them can make it back to Cuba without the other or to that reckoning that happens at the end without the assistance of the other.

 

TFR:

Because in some ways they are so different. You can imagine that there might be a break between them except that being twins really bonds them.

 

Palacio:

Yeah.

 

TFR:

Are you a writer who extends love to all your characters? What’s your relationship with the character of Isabel, this odd Catholic visionary? Is she a character you love?

 

Palacio:

I think so. I grew up Catholic and went to a Catholic school even all through college so I can relate to a lot of the Catholic systems that she’s trying to discover herself in and through and as a part of. Writing her was fun because she has a sort of wild spectrum of experience compared to some of the other characters. But it was also very difficult writing her. The scene where she has her vision and then her experience at the hospital where she doubts whether or not she actually had that vision—those were difficult to write. I have those same questions about faith, and I think about what role it does and does not play in my life anymore. I think even through our twenties—which is where she gets to by the end of the novel—that’s a period of thinking about rejecting your old self and wondering How do I reject parts of myself and keep other parts? It can be hard to stomach.

 

TFR:

Isabel reminded me of those mystics like Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen, those visionaries of previous centuries, or Dorothea of Montau, as depicted by Günter Grass in The Flounder.

 

I don’t mean to give Ulises short shrift—he is a great character. It felt to me like Ulises was the more obvious you character, but you channeled yourself into both of them in a really interesting way. Can you talk about the ways in which you draw yourself out through your characters? Is that something that you do consciously?

 

Palacio:

I’m becoming more conscious of it. I’m married to the writer Claire Vaye Watkins, and she and I talk a lot about our differences. I tend not to write about biographical stuff very often, and she tends to make good use of that in her work. Or at least that’s the way we used to think about it. Right after I published this book and started re-reading it and understanding it in the ways that you can only after you get some distance, I was Oh, there’s a lot of me in this novel, or at least a lot of the things I worry about.

 

The inspiration for Isabel was the female lead from Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. What I loved about her was seeing a character so driven to get a want and to feel and experience a want and then just drive drive, drive, drive for it. That’s something that Isabel has, that persistence, that just moving forward. But it’s also something I think I have a bit of myself. With Ulises in terms relationship to me, he can sit back and see things, and there are times when I pull back, too. It was a nice dynamic to have in terms of working out the plot.

 

TFR:

It works beautifully. I wanted to ask you a more general question about the evolution of The Mortifications and the process of writing. You have been working on a collection of short stories about Cuba for quite some time. Is the story that we’re publishing in 41.1, “Kisses,” part of that collection that you’ve been working on for a while? What relationship does The Mortifications have to that short fiction? Did it come out of one of the stories or was it something separate?

 

Palacio:

It was originally part of that collection, and I thought when I sat down to write it that it would just be a novella, around 60 or 80 pages, but by the time I got a solid first draft done, it was around 200, 220 pages. I was like, well, I guess am writing a novel. I was lucky that I got to share it with my [MFA] advisor. I was fearful that she’d say, “This is good, but we could cut a hundred pages and it would be a lot better,” but instead she said, “This is good, but we could add a hundred pages and it would be a lot better.”

 

Once I knew that, I sort of devoted most of my time to work on the novel for the last few years, and only now I’m trying to return to the collection and filling out the gap that taking the intended novella out of that collection left behind.

 

TFR:

So, “Kisses,” the story that we’re publishing this spring’s print Florida Review [41.1, 2017] is a futuristic story. In The Mortifications, there’s certainly religious mysticism, if not the fantastic. Can you comment upon the element of fabulism and futurism in your own writing? That tradition has been so different in Latin American as compared with the U.S. How do you see all of that working in your writing and the way that attitudes toward the non-realist is changing in the U.S.?

 

Palacio:

I saw an article that was up online at LitHub about how having Bolaño published and do so well in America really opened things up nicely for more translations of Latin American literature, and this switch has been beautiful. I love Valeria Luiselli. I just read Mauro Javier Cardenas’s The Revolutionaries Try Again. There are all these wonderful books that are coming out of that tradition, and I think the other thing is that sense that behind the magical is also the political.

 

When I was thinking about writing this future Cuba story, I had just also seen that documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop about Banksy and graffiti artists, and I was like Oh man, what an interesting guy, and I was thinking What would that would look like in Cuba, people sort of marauding around in a futuristic Cuba tagging things? You know, what if the state grows a little bit and there’s a little bit less control in some areas but greater control in others? Once I got into it, it seemed possible to imagine some of the ways the politics would expand. If we’re going to open up relations with Cuba, then why not put a tunnel under the Florida Straits that will take you straight from one place to the other? Similarly, the idea of the World Cup happening in Cuba I think is actually a really good prediction—I feel like we’re gonna do that soon [laughs] because every Third World country that is trying to come onto the stage as having developed and grown—that seems to be now a hallmark of that process, right? You get the World Cup. So I was interested in trying to figure out how those elements might converge and what they might look like.

 

TFR:

I want to ask a little more about the science fiction aspect. I ask because there seems now to be a lot of ground being staked where, rightly, I believe, writers want to tear down the wall between science fiction and literary writing, but sometimes it feels forced. Obviously, we didn’t think so in your story. But how conscious was that decision for you?

 

Palacio:

For me, especially in this particular story, the draw of the future, of a futuristic setting was not so much about just having that element. I had been reading something about the Confederate flag issues going on in this country, and thinking about how in the future, in the way that we have Confederate apologists now, depending on what happens, we may have these hangers-on to the Cuban revolution, people who look back on it with extreme nostalgia and are willing to overlook things like the Special Period and all the hardships put on those people. That was really the doorway into it—trying to imagine, Wow if I can go this far ahead and explore that element, it would be in service to grounding out what a believable future would look like in Cuba. But also all in the service of exploring that story’s main character. If the future is tied to those sorts of character elements, then I think there will always be a place for it.

 

TFR:

I think that’s particularly relevant right now because we’re in a moment when the future feels more immediate, and many of us have been projecting into the near political future, rather grimly sometimes, about what’s going to happen next.

 

What else can you tell us about The Mortifications or about what you’re working on now, where you’re going, what’s next?

 

Palacio:

I think that writing The Mortifications was sort of a mythic experience, but now that I’ve been to Cuba I’m trying to work on new projects that move me more toward a realism that explores what I now better understand. Of course, I’m still coming to understand more about the island. I’m trying to finish that short story collection that we talked about, but I’m also in the process of starting a novel series about a Cuban-American Olympic swimmer who fails to make the U.S. team and so he defects to Cuba to swim in the Olympics. Looking back on The Mortifications, I noticed many times it was not engaging with my own anxieties about calling myself Cuban and trying to understand what it means to be Cuban—you know, I don’t speak Spanish. In the novel I was trying to reconcile some of that through all of these weird trappings, and now I’m more aware that the best course of action for me is to run right at it [through the Olympic swimmer character].

 

TFR:

It’s interesting how there’s this draw toward it for you, like you never felt at home in New Hampshire. Did you not feel at home in New Hampshire or is it just a tension?

 

Palacio:

I love New Hampshire, and I love the friends and family I still have there, but I don’t know if I would call it home in the way we all mean when we say home. It doesn’t satisfy maybe all the needs that I would look for in a home. It’s a wonderful place, and it served me very well, but, yeah, there’s something about my Cuban identity and discovering that, engaging that once I got into writing that seemed important.

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Interview: Denise Duhamel

    

Denise Duhamel is the author of How the Sky Fell (1996), Girl Soldier (1996), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999), Kinky (1997), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2001), Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), and SCALD (University of Pittsburg Press), out in early 2017 after this interview was conducted. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013.

 

In this interview, we focus on Blowout, that rare poetic collection that expertly bridges the distance between the earthbound and the abstract.  The pieces are utterly approachable but still manage to surprise in their perception.  Duhamel distills decades into the moments that most inform the path from childhood love to the adult dismantling of those early aspirations, sparing no one, least of all herself, along the way. We are also happy to share three new poems by Denise Duhamel here on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

 

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

I just want to say that I enjoyed this book so much. I identified so much with what you said, which is so rare. Reading, you may think, that’s beautiful, but you don’t necessarily see yourself in other people’s work. But with so much of what you wrote, I thought, I have had that experience. When you were writing, did you have an idea that you would speak to that feeling, make those connections with readers?

 

Denise Duhamel:

No, in fact I thought, like anybody who goes through a divorce or bad breakup, that my situation was so particularly weird and worse than anyone else’s, kind of over-dramatic about it. I thought it was such like a midlife story, but love is love and being betrayed is being betrayed whether you’re seventeen or ninety-nine.

 

TFR:

I also wondered if you made a conscious choice to talk about things that were a little bit more every day, down to earth.

 

Duhamel:

I had a friend say “When you write, you have God and a banana, and then there’s a whole world in between.” So, for me, the god, the abstractions, I’m not really interested in that much. I’m really more interested in the day to day and how we get through these things, and using pop culture or using our friends, or reading bad self-help books, whatever it is that get us through. I was more interested in that than a big statement.

 

TFR:

Given the times we suddenly find ourselves living in, is there even more pressure to write in the moment?

 

Duhamel:

Yes, absolutely.  I was thinking so much about how my next book, which is not out yet, is going to be called Scald. [The book came out in February 2017, after this interview.] It’s about feminism and it’s dedicated to three different great feminists. I was so in the zeitgeist of a Hillary Clinton presidency and women, and now I feel so unmoored. But I’m so glad I wrote it when I wrote it because, while I wasn’t thinking of Hillary necessarily when I was writing it, I felt this movement towards women and the feminization of power and saving the planet. Now, we really have to stay in the moment and not stick our heads in the sand. I mean you may have to stick your head in the sand for a week to survive, but then we have to come out strong.

 

TFR:

I felt like I often heard people say, “We are having more conversations about race during Barak Obama’s presidency and we will talk more about gender with a female president.” Do you feel like we will talk more or less about gender given the president we ended up with?

 

Duhamel:

He’ll talk a lot less about gender and even his wife will say less. I was reading something just this morning about how she wants to be more like Jackie O. It’s so retro and cultural regression to the max, right? She really wants to go back to the 1960s pillbox hat and not even say anything.  We are in big trouble, but I also think because this election is so egregious and Clinton didn’t lose to a man who was moderate or even a Mitt Romney or John McCain, she lost to a misogynist who calls women the worst possible names, I think women are not going to give him a pass. We are going to come back strong, especially since we had a taste of what could have been. I can’t imagine women going, Oh well, we’ll let it go. 

 

TFR:

No.

 

Duhamel:

I think we’ve been letting it go for decades and centuries and I don’t think we can let it go anymore.

 

TFR:

I think that’s also what I admired about your book. You didn’t let it go. You talked about it.

 

Duhamel:

I gave a reading this morning with Catherine Bowman who had this wonderful poem about going through a divorce and then going back to etiquette books and Emily Post. Emily Post had this weird quote about how when a woman is going through  a difficult time, like her husband leaves, the worst thing she can do is mention it because that’s not ladylike. But the realities of our everyday lives can be powerful and help us connect even if we think we’re the only ones going through it. If you put it out there it’s very possible that a lot of people will be nodding, oh yes, me too.

 

TFR:

I had wondered–since you had a poem talking about a new friend who wonders if you steal stories from people–whether you found that people are more concerned they will end up in your poetry, or more interested in ending up in your poetry.

 

Duhamel:

It’s very funny. Even though Blowout is very memoir-esqe, I think every time you try to write a poem you’re going towards a bigger truth than the truth of what happened on this day. You have to always be fabricating. In some ways people like to think they’re in the poems when they’re not or think, I can’t believe you wrote about me. And I think, no I wasn’t writing about you or vice versa. 

 

TFR:

Are there certain poems you run by people prior to publication?

 

Duhamel:

Yes.

 

TFR:

Have you ever then not ended up publishing something based on someone’s reaction?

 

Duhamel:

No. It’s only if I’m afraid I’m going to hurt someone, which is so female. I don’t think men think like this, but maybe they do. I would never want to intentionally hurt an innocent party.  It’s my reaction to what happened. The people or villains in the poems have their own side of the story.

 

TFR:

You have a couple of poems in this collection where the speaker is much younger. What do you think it is about pre-adolescent love that lingers?

 

Duhamel:

Especially when you go through a divorce or a really bad breakup, you kind of have to ask yourself, it’s got to be me on some level. It feels like you have to at least investigate that, so I found myself going back to a boyfriend I had in kindergarten who I wanted to do things that he wouldn’t, or a painter that I knew on the lower East Side, and these patterns of disappointment. That was really fun to do actually.

 

TFR:

The fourth-grade boyfriend was good.

 

Duhamel:

Right? You finally get someone who really likes you and you just miss him for whatever reason.

 

TFR:

The book isn’t completely chronological but there does seem to be a lot of forward movement.  Did you work in some purposeful chronology to the book?

 

Duhamel:

I did. I tried really hard because I didn’t write the poems in order. When you put a book together you’re just kind of culling from poems you’ve written over a span a time. “How It Will End” is the first poem, so you think it’s going to give away the ending, which it both does and doesn’t.

 

TFR:

You had mentioned in one of your poems becoming a Reverend of the Universal Life Church, which I did as well.

 

Duhamel:

All right. [Exchange of high fives.]

 

TFR:

You talk about it being appropriate, having been divorced, but I wondered if you thought being a poet also gave you a special ability as an officiant, someone who could produce ceremony.

 

Duhamel:

I didn’t think of it like that at the time. I was just doing it to help my niece who didn’t want a traditional religious wedding, so I said I would do it. I had another friend who had done this, and you did it. It seems like a poet thing to do. I have to say, it’s almost like you put on the cloak of that official and you get all this wisdom. One of the women at the wedding had just lost her sister and she was my age and her sister died of cancer and she was crying in the bathroom with her daughter and then the daughter said, “Talk to her, she’s a reverend.” And I thought, oh no, oh no, oh no, but I rose to the challenge, and I said your sister is with us now. Don’t ask me how I said that, but she was comforted. So, I think there are these roles that we can play. I don’t know if her sister was there or not, but I felt like I’m going to comfort her and I did since I’d taken on that role

 

TFR:

You have to wonder the reaction if the daughter had said, “Don’t worry, there’s a poet here.”

 

Duhamel:

That would be the best, if they said, “Go talk to a poet. They see the big picture.”

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Interview: Paul Lisicky

        

Paul Lisicky is the author of Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012), The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011), Famous Builder (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Lawnboy (Turtle Point Press, 1999, reissued by Graywolf Press, 2006). His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Fence, The New York Times, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Fellow. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn where he is also the editor of StoryQuarterly. In Fall 2018, he will be the visiting writer at University of Texas-Austin. We are also happy to share his story “Refrigerator Girl” this week on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

 

His most recent book, The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf Press, 2016), has been named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Rumpus Book Club Selection, and one of Buzzfeed’s Most Exciting Books of 2016.

 

The Narrow Door tells the story of Lisicky’s long-term friendship with fellow writer Denise, alongside that of his relationship and marriage to a poet that ultimately unravels as his friend’s life is also ending from cancer. Lisicky unflinchingly, yet poetically, examines the ways in which both love and other emotional states—jealousy, competition, boredom, disaffection, distance—weave through our complicated personal lives within a fraught larger world. By including contemplative accounts of various world events from earthquakes and volcano eruptions to rocket experiments and oil spills, the book points out that both our relationships and our larger world are fragile and unpredictable.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I was so moved by this book. One of the things that has always impressed me about your work is its range and scope, and I enjoy seeing that your range and scope continues to enlarge. I still remember reading Famous Builder and just laughing out loud. In both Unbuilt Projects and now The Narrow Door, though there is still humor there, you have shifted to more somber tones. Do you think that’s just part of what happens as we mature and suffer losses in our lives, or might it also have to do with a growing acceptance of the complexity of gay authors?

 

Paul Lisicky:

I never wanted to be the funny gay guy, even though there’s a place for the funny gay guy. I think I can play that role around the dinner table when the occasion feels right, but I’ve always tried to work toward broadening the scope of my own sensibility in hopes that it encourages any reader, regardless of identity, to broaden his or her scope.

 

I might, however, be a little less afraid about putting darkness on the page than when I was first starting out. Maybe I felt some impulse or externally imposed directive to be charming, to be cheerful, to lure the reader in. I had to write harder to maintain a bright surface. I think there just came a point where I felt I don’t really have to do that anymore.

 

All that said I do miss a certain strain of humor in my work. Especially now in these dark times, I feel like dark gallows humor is really what we need. It can give a certain kind of dimension that that straight-ahead despair doesn’t. I’m hoping the next book, honestly, will be funnier. I want it to be sillier, but also really, really, really grave.

 

TFR:

Do you think we need a new era of satire right now?

 

Lisicky:

Yes. A kind of satire that is more personally directed. Sometimes when we think of satire we think of forms and shapes and voices that exist “out there,” but there are so many tones of satire that we might not have even explored. What is my satire? What is your satire? I don’t think my satire sounds like Jonathan Swift or George Saunders, even though those models are important to take in.

 

I don’t quite know what my own satire is yet, and I want to build that voice.

 

TFR:

The Narrow Door tells the story of a friendship and the death of that friend alongside the story of your long-term romantic relationship breaking up. One might expect a memoir about one or the other, but what made you also decide in this book to commit to telling them both at once?

 

Lisicky:

I started the book about six weeks after Denise died simply as a way to keep her in the world. I had very few artifacts of our friendship together—maybe three photographs, no written letters, just a handful of emails. Initially it was simply a project to keep her in the world, and I thought, well maybe this could be a book, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my consciousness. I had just finished reading Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb, which is a book that is about trying to be lost as a way toward new meaning, and the structure of that book gave me lots of permission to wander on the page. There was something about the associations holding that book together that I took direction from. I had just finished writing another book—Unbuilt Projects—at the time I started, so there wasn’t any internal or external pressure to start something new [for publication]. It just started in emotional necessity. I needed some kind of a vehicle to keep going, and it was something that I kept coming back to until it became a book.

 

TFR:

One of the things I really loved about it was this idea that it would weave together the story of a friendship with the story of a marriage. Very seldom do we see how they interact and how they affect each other. Was it a struggle to overcome the usual separation of those two kinds of subjects? Was anyone skeptical that you could combine them effectively? How did that dual focus, those perhaps opposing energies, work as the project developed?

 

Lisicky:

Honestly, I had two-thirds of the first draft of the book done and my relationship was in trouble. I literally folded that into the book, not knowing it was going to be there at first. I had written this kind of artifact of ongoing-ness so there was no way to keep it out even though I did not want to write that at all. It would have destroyed the book to keep it out. I was terrified. It still makes me nervous, but I learned so much from comparing, from holding those two relationships up against one another. It wasn’t a deliberate act—I couldn’t be so smart if I were trying to engineer something. It just made itself available to me and I kept with it. I just listened to what I needed to write.

 

TFR:

There were so many reverberations, like in the scene where Denise kind of loses it, and your partner is there. There’s this witnessing of something bad happening in the friendship, and he had more hostility toward it than you even had. I felt like it was insightful about how these relationships that we don’t usually think of as influencing each other in some ways actually do.

 

Lisicky:

I didn’t know it until I was writing the book. I was paying attention to repetitions, to patterns, to images, and those patterns and those repetitions were teaching me something. I didn’t know the echoes were there, so if the book has an energy it’s because discoveries were being made in the writing. I became aware that I was writing something that was much smarter emotionally than I was. We all, I think, want to write toward that place where our work knows more than we do.

 

I still feel—I hope this doesn’t sound grandiose—but I still feel that I’m learning things from this book. And maybe I always will be learning things from it. I think about that moment up against this other moment, and what instruction there is.

 

TFR:

One of the other brilliant strokes here is the use of world events to give both the texture of the times and to provide metaphors for the personal events going on. One of my favorites was the space dog.

 

Lisicky:

I’m so glad to hear that. People don’t talk about that space dog section much. Maybe it’s too painful—that dear dog.

 

TFR:

I was in tears. She never came back from space.

 

Lisicky:

She never came back, and nobody ever talks about that.

 

TFR:

And also the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Those are just two examples but how did that method arise and develop for you, and how is it perhaps different from the way you work in fiction, in which you say that you always work from an image or metaphor rather than character? There is that kind of method here, but obviously you were working from Denise’s death, so you started with the subject matter and character, yet that technique of having these images and these social metaphors still continued in this work. Was it different working with it this time around or did it evolve pretty similarly to how that works in your fiction?

 

Lisicky:

I knew that there was some solace in dredging up particular memories, but that I could only be inside those memories for so long before it felt unbearable. I thought, well, maybe there’s a way to channel this energy in other directions and we can go back and forth. I ended up metabolizing the structure of Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge, years after finishing it. I took permission from that. I became more attuned to all those disasters. I’ve said this before, but disasters are happening all the time, all around us, and I think that in that fresh scrubbed, raw state my antennae were out.

 

I felt them personally, so if I put one in I started feeling others. There is a progression in the book. The first image is of the volcano, and then we move to an earthquake. I think humans are increasingly culpable if we think of the progression, of moving from volcanoes to the oil spill. In the latter disasters humans are clearly culpable.

 

TFR:

It felt very much to me that there was this kind of acceptance that there are things beyond our individual control even when they are human-created things, and yet there’s always this question of our responsibility, and how we can engage with the larger sense of human culpability.

 

Lisicky:

Yes. How do we have sane and safe relationships when the world just outside the window is in chaos?

 

That’s a conversation stopper!

 

TFR:

Or an endless starter. So, change of subject—Joni Mitchell makes her way into yet another Paul Lisicky book. Can you tell me more about your psychic relationship to her and her music?

 

Lisicky:

I love the seventies. I love Blue, and I love The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and even Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.

 

I first came upon that work when I was ten or eleven or twelve. I was really young, and she wasn’t the music that my peers were listening to. She was the music, the musician of people in the generation just a little ahead, and so she felt like she was mine, she felt private, she felt really idiosyncratic. I was aware on an intuitive level that those songs did not move like other songs in their deep structure, that she was making something new. She was making something her own. I’ve always been taught by and grateful for that example out there. One thing I’ve mentioned in the past is that her guitar re-tunings are based on the fact that she doesn’t have strength in her left hand. So because she couldn’t play the standard shapes, she decided to re-tune the guitar, and she ended up turning what some would consider a liability or limitation to an asset. That’s not a new or fresh idea, but I try to be attuned to my own limitations and turn them in my work into something that works.

 

TFR:

You were already talking about yourself as someone who wanted to continually expand your own horizons as a writer, and she’s a great model.

 

Lisicky:

Exactly. She’s so restless, never stayed static, was always reinventing herself, and probably not afraid to be an amateur in any form. I think that’s crucial to the ongoing life of any artist. You have to tear it down for the next project or else you’re repeating your old moves and it’s not terribly interesting.

 

TFR:

Speaking of different approaches, how do you balance your writing with the role of being editor of StoryQuarterly?

 

Lisicky:

The struggle balancing that with my other projects is a day-to-day thing. The exciting part of it is getting to publish work that’s risky and weird, to publish the kind of work that that I think others need to see. I grew up in a world at a literary time when it felt like everything had to conform. It didn’t feel like we could shake people up structurally or in terms of thinking.

 

It’s great to be able to get fun, weird, dark, rich work out there. That’s my favorite part of it, but I think it’s hard as hell yet people assume that it’s a sidelight. It’s hard as hell.

 

TFR:

You referred earlier to new directions your work is going in especially in light of recent political developments? What can we do as writers? What is our responsibility and how are you working with that?  You talked about developing a different kind of humor in your own writing, but are there other things that you think about, other challenges that you want to put out to other writers and readers?

 

Lisicky:

I do think it is possible to write political work that is experienced by the body, that’s interior, that feels cellular, that that gives a reader an experience that’s different from the experience one gets in journalism. I’m devoted, and I feel that we should all be devoted to getting rid of that dualism. Politics isn’t “out there”; it’s pointing right at my chest. We have to continue to break across those lines.

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Interview: Julie Marie Wade

Julie Marie Wade is the author of the books Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Bywater Books, 2014; Colgate University Press, 2010), the winner of the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010); Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2010), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014); and Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016). She is assistant professor of English at Florida International University. Her poem “Katabasis” appears in TFR 40.2 (Fall 2016).

 

Her most recent book, SIX: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), was selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the Lighthouse Prize in Poetry.

 

SIX: Poems is a surprising book, comprised of six interlinked yet solitary long poems.  The poems themselves fill the entirety of the page, not confined by traditional wide margins or a single form, in one stanza seeming to be prose-like in structure and in another a single line surrounded by whitespace.  A conversation about SIX lends itself to a discussion of craft, not just the ideas and evolution that built the poems, but their form and structure, and a poet grappling with the duality of poetry, the spoken and written form.

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

We are here to talk about your new book SIX, and I thought we could start by discussing the format and structure which is related to the title of the work.

 

Julie Marie Wade:

The book began in my mind before it really began. About fifteen years ago, when I was taking one of my early poetry classes in grad school, there was a wonderful poet at Western Washington University, Bruce Beasley, and he made this declaration in class one day, “You’ll only write about six things in your life.” It seemed really profound and really scary, like will I have enough to write about, and he said “don’t worry, that’s not a curse that you won’t have enough, it’s more of a challenge.” You have to figure out how are you going to take the six things, which are really clusters of many things, how are you going to take those six big things, resident themes, resident questions that drive your whole life and figure out how you’re going to be formally innovative so you don’t get stuck writing the same poem over and over. Then he said, “Well in a way, every poem is the same poem over and over, but find a new way to get into that poem.”

 

So, I really mulled on that for a long time and a few years later I thought, I’ve got to try to write the six things. But I can’t just name six things, I don’t just know what those six things are.  So, the reason that this book is full of poems that are twenty-plus pages each is because I was trying to write through the poems to find the six things. I had ineffable feelings. I knew the kind of clusters of what those six things were, but I didn’t have any way to just name them, and, I guess, if I did I probably wouldn’t be a poet anyway. But they were the longest poems I ever wrote and some of them have embedded prose or have embedded other adopted forms so they are really, maybe, the most experimental work I’ve done in poetry. I hope I’m living up to Bruce’s mandate to do something bold and innovative with your resident six things, and it did help me clarify more about my six things.

 

TFR:

Did you go back to your previous work? I assume you were not conscious of those things as you were writing. Did you go back and see what keeps coming up over and over again to try and explore what those six things might be?

 

Wade:

I did do that, though, weirdly, with this book, though it just came out in September of 2016, there was this strange lag time. I didn’t know if this book would ever find a home. So, I finished it in the Fall of 2006 and it was circulating for eight years before it finally won a prize. The greatest honor of the prize was the person who picked it—C. D. Wright, who is someone I’ve admired for years as a practitioner of long experimental poems. So, during that eight-year period, I didn’t re-read the book, and when I was writing it I was thinking about What have I written so far? I hadn’t really written that much before SIX that I felt was world-worthy. I did an MA thesis [at Western Washington], but I didn’t send that out into the world. It didn’t feel quite ready. Then I went into an MFA program [at the University of Pittsburgh], and I started sending the poems of my MFA thesis out into the world, but this is the project that I was doing undercover. What is strange now is that re-reading the book a decade after I finished it, I’m finding that I better understand myself. Because this took so long to come into the world it’s like getting a letter from your old self, and then finding out your old self has a lot in common with your current self, and then it shines a light on everything else that I’ve been doing in the last decade.

 

TFR:

Did you make many changes? I would think that after eight years it must almost feel like someone else wrote it.

 

Wade:

It calcified in a certain way, for better or for worse. It’s like my students sometimes say, “Well, how long do you revise something?” You can take it as a sign from the universe, that the book isn’t getting taken, so you’ve got to go back and change something. I basically decided with this book that I wanted to leave it as an artifact, a record of me between 2004 and 2006 reckoning with those six things. But when I got everything exactly how I thought it should be on the page, one of the biggest challenges was the order of the six things. Once I had those six poems in place, I knew that there would be an obsessive impulse to keep refining it and another year would go by and, I was lucky that I sometimes got these really loving rejections or finalists’ nods, but I just didn’t get the big prize. So the temptation is to go back in and go, What is this book not doing that I could do to it to make it world worthy? but I realized that I had other work I wanted to do and other work might be easier in some ways for readers or might be somehow more on market or on point. So, I just kept writing that other work and leaving this alone and then, when it finally went into the world and I finally read it again in galleys, I actually didn’t change anything. The editor, the long-suffering very hard working editor at Red Hen Press, only went through and asked questions about spacing and little typos that I couldn’t believe were still there that I hadn’t caught. We didn’t actually overhaul any of the book and maybe part of that is because it was the book as C. D. Wright had seen it, so we didn’t change the order, we didn’t change any of the essential content of any of the poems. It really is a time capsule of something that was me then.

 

TFR:

That’s a very interesting journey from composition to publication.

 

Wade:

It’s a strange way for a book to evolve, but it evolved and then stopped and was frozen in time.

 

TFR:

Reading through it, I was wondering about the use of the whole page and the white space. I found myself wondering if, when you originally submitted it, you had the lines spaced so they went all the way to the margins.

 

Wade:

That is the amazing thing about Red Hen Press—this came in through A Room of Her Own Foundation through the To the Lighthouse Prize—that they honored the integrity of how it looked. That can also be part of the challenge. A press or a judge or reader could potentially like something but then they might think, How would we ever? We can’t make a book that would accommodate this work. That could also be a barrier to getting that work into the world. So, I knew that this was really risky because all my pages even in the 8½ by 11 form were completely folded this way. Then I was picturing how exciting it would be to have the double-sidedness of the book and have the pages so full, but I also knew it would have to be a press that would be willing to do that. I had actually seen Red Hen Press, a press I’ve loved for a long time–and they published Celeste Gainey’s book–and I noticed it was her debut and it was a really wide book, The Gaffer, and I love this book and I thought, okay, maybe then that’s what they’ll do for mine, and they told me that they would preserve the integrity of the lines.

 

TFR:

I actually found myself wondering if, when you had first written them, if they started out condensed and then you spread them out, or if you started out with that use of space as you were first composing.

 

Wade:

I did use all the space. I was using all the space because in that first MA program, Bruce Beasley plants the seed which to me was kind of like a riddle and a challenge What are your six things? Find them. Then I move on to my next grad program, and the first class I took in MFA school, this was the beginning of 2003, was this just amazing special topics class on the Black Mountain College Art Movement and the Projective Verse poets. I had never read Charles Olson, and I had never read Robert Duncan. I’d never read Hilda Morley. I had this class where I was completely immersed in writers who were using the whole page. Robert Creeley is part of that movement, but his poems have these much shorter lines, but there’s a lot of white space on the side like a cliff dropping off. I started reading these poets and I was This might be the form, that invitation to get really wide. And the projective verse poets also really believed in writing your way through the poem and letting what’s happening outside your window enter your writing, what’s happening if something falls off the shelf as you’re writing, let that be in the poem, don’t treat things that intrude on the poem as intrusions, but let them in and welcome them.

 

I had never read any poetical philosophy that was like that, and so I thought if I’m going to figure out the six things I’m going to need to have a lot of room to do that, and I’m going to need all the power of silence and all the power of How can prose be in here how can poems be in here, how can adopted speech be in here? How can all of my world, everything that’s going on in my head, how can it be here?  I thought the Projected Verse poets knew how to do that. They’re the poets that I was really reading when I started to write this, and I thought if they say that you can have pages, a prairie, I’m going in. So that that is how I composed it, with their permission. I guess that speaks to how many people are influencing everything we do as writers.

 

TFR:

It looks beautiful, but I was also then wondering if, when you read aloud, if you wish everyone had a copy to follow along.

 

Wade:

You understand. I just met you and you understand completely! This is the first time When I gave readings before, I never read any of these poems aloud because this book wasn’t out. I’m really new to reading it for an audience, and it feels like this is such an on-the-page kind of book. I’ve had to figure out, okay, there’s definitely a sonic quality and there are places, maybe, that are more conducive to listening than others, but how do you convey the sense of that space when you’re reading a poem aloud. You can put in pauses in your speech and then in the parts that are more prosey and condensed into blocks you can accelerate the reading and make it clear that they are more condensed.  If I were a technologically savvy person, I would somehow have a display or something behind me, because it feels like I can’t really do justice to it out loud. I’m still grappling with whether there are parts of this book that I just won’t ever read out loud because it will lose something if you can’t see it, or will I figure out a way to render those? I’ve only done a few readings so far, so we’ll see

 

TFR:

It’s very interesting, that duality of poetry that I think folks don’t always think of. One, that it’s very much an art form of the page and the visual but then also of the spoken. It must be very interesting to try to reconcile those two sides.

 

Wade:

Yes, yes. For so long, this book didn’t have a home so I didn’t have to think about those questions. Now this is going to be a new kind of experiment. How do I make it visual and verbal at the same time

 

TFR:

It’s a lovely exploration. I was having so much fun reading that I was Post-it noting lines I really like, but then I was putting them on every other page. So, I over post-it noted it. You had so many meaningful lines, particularly in the beginning when talking about poetry itself such as “I think a poem is a thought” and “the statement a dart, the mind a board.” and “I think a word is a room with a skylight.” I just loved all of these. I particularly wanted to ask about “I think a poem is pre-meditated like a crime.” Do you let the poems really simmer in the background for a long time before you put them on the page?

 

Wade:

I’m so glad that you mentioned that line. I was surprised by that line because obviously I hadn’t been with the book up close for so many years and that line jumped out at me and then I had to ask, Do I think that now? That first poem in the book, “Latchkey,” it is the ars poetica. I kept getting the assignment over and over when I was an MFA student: write an ars poetica. I never wrote one that I submitted to a class. But I kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and I think this is actually the last or the second-to-last of the poems that I wrote. It had been brewing so long–If I wrote an ars poetica, what would it look like?–and then I realized that poetry is probably one of my six things anyway, so I should probably try to write one.

 

But I think that the trick with that premeditation is that there’s a part of me that took a year to think on the idea of the six things, what might those six things be, and, a year later taking this class on projective verse for the first time and thinking, oh that might be a method that I could use to get the six things. On the one hand, it’s super premeditated and moves at a glacial rate because I’m always adding another thing–this is what I might want to do and then this is the form I might want to use. And I have that process going on with lots of different projects. I have to have a lot of different pots on the stove. If I were only working on one project, all the way through from start to finish and then picking up a new project, I probably wouldn’t get anything done, and it’s kind of counterintuitive. I have to be able to jump around and say, Okay I’m going to go over here and see what’s happening with this one, but there is a lot of brewing.

 

And, then, when I actually sit down to write, the thing with projective verse, the gift is that invitation to just sit down and say, I’m setting aside x amount of time to start this poem, or maybe even set aside a whole day to do this, but then like I’m going to let things into the poem that are in no way premeditated. That’s the tricky part, the moment when I was reading the book and I feel like Surprise!, or I forgot that happened. Those are the things that were not premeditated at all so even setting up the time to write was premeditated but then wide open. In the poem “Layover”, the second part, there’s even a moment where there’s a streak of Qs and As and that happened because my cat jumped on the keyboard when I was writing that poem and hit those letters exactly in that place. I left it because that’s what a Projected Verse poet would do. Now, of course, I would not necessarily have left it if it hadn’t been as wonderful as Qs and As but I was like, This is fate. I don’t know, though, will they think I’m asleep?  Of course, you reserve the right to go in and take it out if it doesn’t work, but I realized, Oh maybe this has happened because I’ve allowed myself to get all the way to the premeditated day and hour, and now I’m writing and here’s typing on the keyboard. And so I just let it stay, and it works.

 

TFR:

I love that.  I would not have thought that was the origin.

 

Wade:

It feels organic and the Projective Verse poets would say it was because you were there and your cat was there and it was supposed to happen.

 

TFR:

I also wondered, because these pieces are longer and you also have shorter pieces, as poets we are so often used to having the whole piece there, and it’s on the page and we can play with it. How different was this as an editing process? When you were dealing with multiple pages, how did that impact your approach to the editing?

 

Wade:

It wasn’t like I sat down and worked on a draft of one and then immediately worked on a draft of the next one, because there was actually something really wonderful about that time of two years where I had a thesis and I had other responsibilities in grad school that were being examined by everyone, and this was my secret life where I would set aside these very particular hours. I mean, yes, they’re very long poems, but I would zero in on a poem and think This is an investigation of another one of those things, and I’m going to set aside some time, and I would sort of go down the rabbit hole of that poem and try not to edit anything while I was writing it. So just keep going and find a natural end, again all about the Projective Verse method and always the idea of writing through. Let anything into your poem, you can always take things out, but you can’t recreate the moment of writing the poem, and say like, Oh wait in the middle I think there was that bus that went by my window. You have to let the bus be there as it’s going by your window. And so I wrote all the way through what were really a lot of pages in a quick amount of time, and then I would print them out and really look at them and some of the poems didn’t feel like they needed as much tinkering, whereas other poems did feel like they needed more of that. But, I really kind of wrote them in isolation from each other. Then maybe two more months would go by working on the somewhat more traditional poems that comprise my thesis.

 

I would be doing these other activities and then come back and do another poem and what I didn’t really realize until the very end of assembling the whole book, when I had these six poems, was that they actually did speak to each other. I didn’t know that when I was writing them. It wasn’t a conscious thing. Then, I thought, Bruce, of course it’s the six things, so of course the six things are linked. I’m the one who’s linking them, and I’m not even conscious of it. Suddenly, something would turn up, an image or a word would be here and be there and I realized, I wrote those poems two years apart but they’re still speaking to each other and I’m the intermediary for them, and it was so cool.

 

Then it was just the challenge of, What’s the order in which I’m going to group these? I had not realized until I saw all six of them together all printed out and marked up by hand that I had two that started with L, two that started with M, and two that started with N, and it’s really strange that it’s three letters in order and two of each and that wasn’t planned. So then I decided L M N, okay I’m going to put them in that order and see what happens. And when I read them in that order I really liked it the best. It’s also weird, and I didn’t plan that, but the middle of the alphabet song, like LMNOP, you speed up there, so suddenly I felt like, Oh my goodness, that’s the order.

 

TFR:

It’s meant to be. It just naturally happened.

 

Wade:

It just came together at the end.

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