Back in June, 2020, Lisa Fishman sent along a series of
fourteen interview questions she’d crafted for me to answer, focusing on my
collection How the alphabet was made (2018). I responded within a matter
of days, as I tend to do for such things, but simultaneously thought it would
be interesting to rework her original questions and return for her to respond
to, focusing around her newly-released Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition.
If anyone is interested, Fishman’s interview with me will run in the fall 2021
issue of Chicago journal Court Green. Here are her responses to my reworked
questions, which landed in my in-box two nights ago.
1. How were you able to determine the structure of your Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition? Given it is a collection built out of sixteen years’ worth of notebooks, how did the project first present itself to you?
I always seem to have a kind of amnesia after writing or publishing a book, and that seems to be especially the case with this one. I never thought of it as a project. Most of what I do is not project-based in the sense of having a preconceived idea about what one is doing or how. If poetry is living—I want to emphasize this—then it’s just what is being written, what one is writing, over time, in time. Still, I’ll try to notice or remember some things related to your question.
I saw that there was writing I had left out of, possibly [self-]suppressed from, the several books that were published in that 16-year period. Some of what had been left out was deeply imprinted by early motherhood. If that material had been included in my books then, starting in the mid-2000s, it (the experience of early motherhood) would have been a different reading and publishing experience. It was interesting to me to see it freshly (as I gathered pieces and scraps of paper that had writing on them over 16 years) in the context of all of the other life and living going on during that time and afterward too.
Also, it’s important that the book is haunted by, and wrestling with, Laura (Riding) Jackson’s renunciation of poetry in 1941. I saw that some of her concerns, about poetry as a rarefied zone of truth (which, for her, implied that the rest of culture could get away with being based on lies and untruthful speech) were also mine. As you can see, the book is questioning what lines are drawn around artefacts called poems (on the one hand) and (on the other hand) the initiating energy and substrata of poeisis: the poem-in-the-making, the active process or activity of a poem coming to be.
2. You include images of handwritten drafts in this book. Why is the
unpolished draft important to you? What do you feel it offers or allows that
the polished final version can’t
As I was answering #1, I saw that my answer veers
into your second question here, so I’ll refer back up to the end of my answer
to #1, handily. And to add to it: The “working on” or “working over” or
over-working of poems is often (not always) what begins to give them the patina
of fakeness and/or calcification. I feel this as a writer and as a reader. A
dramatic example is Francis Ponge’s notebook in preparation for writing “The Pré.”
Most people recognize that the notebook itself, published as The Making
of the Pré, is alive in ways that the poem he eventually constructed and
crafted is not. (I refer to Lee Fahenstock’s translation.) bpNichols’s work is another
vivid example of what I’m getting at. Donald Revell’s book on craft (which notion,
that of “craft,” he brilliantly turns on its head) speaks concisely to what I’m
getting at with good examples, such as from Ronald Johnson. See Revell, The
Art of Attention.
3. How do you feel at the moment about solitude? Has that been a
part of your writing practice in overt or covert ways?
I find periods of solitude very important because
solitude usually happens to dovetail with longer expanses of time. So, is it
the long, open-ended periods of time that are really helpful, and/or the
solitude that’s periodically helpful? Either way, I feel more freedom to write
and to read when I’m apart from a
domestic structure/schedule and without even one other person to navigate the
day with.
It’s not something I reify as a long-term ideal
state (at least for myself)—but I have been finding it nourishing to go away by
myself for short periods of time over the past couple of years. Whether that’s
for three weeks alone in a cabin in Northern Ontario, or three months alone in
Nova Scotia, those recent instances have been extremely generative for me.
And then I get to go home and be again with
people I love, and be fully present to other people wherever I am at that time.
I’m not a good multi-tasker, and I don’t work efficiently, so periodic solitude
is super helpful.
4. What is reading another person’s poems like, for you? How would
you describe what you’re hearing when you’re reading a poet whose work absorbs
you? Would you describe it as hearing? And/or as something else?
Of course it depends on whose poems; what happens when I read
Wallace Stevens is a different experience from what happens when I read Robert
Duncan. But yes, I have to be able to hear the work, either the music of
it and/or the talking of it. What happens when I’m reading poetry that absorbs
me is that I’m hearing it “out loud” inside my head, and the poetry is very
present. Also, it is usually a reading of more than one poem or poet at a time,
because of the echo chamber that poetry is: reading is allusive. A cadence or
phrase or figure in a poem will get the bell of allusion ringing, and so it
could be said that poems, at least those that are most capable of continuing to
change and be alive over time, are all polyphonic/polyvocal in secret ways.
[After I wrote that sentence, I saw that Michal Palmer said something very
similar in an interview about his new book, The Laughter of the Sphinx.]
Poems have memories, and are made of other poems, and to really
read poetry is to hear that—that being the synchrony and polyvocality that poiesis
makes of time and voice.
5. When you write, how do you know what word comes next?
I think that this answer, too, is related to the one above (#4).
By listening. By letting the word that just got written down listen, and allow
the next one to emerge. You can think of the phrase, “It’s not about me,” and
add: “It’s not about what I thought this poem would be about, or what I wanted
it to be about,” and envision how that might apply to the compositional
process. Often we need to get out of the way of the poem and let it emerge,
since another way of saying that poems have memories is that poems have ears.
Let them do the listening, and see what word comes next.
I just read a marvelous sentence by Robert Walser (trans. Tom
Whalen): “Music is essentially something irresponsible, rocking,
life-assertive.” That is one of the secrets of poetry.
I don’t revise extensively, but I take a lot away and play with
arrangement: these few lines from one poem with those few lines from a
different poem, and so on. And, the
question of when there should be no words is just as active a question as what the
next word might be.
6. What or how are you hearing when you write? (And/or, would you
describe other sensory or cognitive functions as being most present when you
write? Such as seeing, thinking, memory, guessing, etc.)
Egads, who thought of these questions so far? Okay, a taste of my
own medicine . . .
The mystery of what one is hearing that brings one to write
something down is definitely that: a mystery. Phrases or a word or two that
“pop into your head” or that you find yourself writing – that’s an uncanny kind
of hearing, and for me it’s how I know that a poem is emerging of its own
internal necessity, or at least that what’s emerging might be a poem.
When I write, I am also often thinking. One shouldn’t be afraid to
inhabit the page as a space for thinking (actual, unresolved thinking), as long
as thinking isn’t mistaken for knowing ahead of time what one wishes to say, as
in: “I have a thesis or argument or point or message and must ‘think’ about how
to present it, or ‘figure out’ how to craft it.” That is not thinking in the
sense of poeisis. One of the most liberating things about poetry is that
recognition.
I like the notion of “guessing” as something that’s going on in writing
– I think that verb is quite charged when Keats uses it in “Ode on Melancholy”
(“and guess each sweet”), and that it’s connected to the negative capability
necessary for writing a poem if the poem is to have its own innate life and necessity
apart from your will and intentions.
Memory, yes, but not in the sense of sitting down to report on
something one remembers— memory is always involved in any single word one
writes down, if you track it, but I’m not interested in serving up memories as
important in themselves or using them as a means toward an epiphany. Hoa Nguyen
quoted Jack Spicer the other night: “the poet is a time-mechanic, not an
embalmer.”
Remembering is an inevitable part of the aura or substrata of a
poem, but what is remembered (the content) is too often mistaken—whether by the
writer or a reader—as the subject of the poem or its raison d’etre. I’m
much more interested in the processes and layerings, shiftings, secrecies,
movement and resistance of memory (not to mention the processes, shiftings,
etc. of present-moment phenomenae). I want to read poems that embody
unpredictability and unknowing in those ways, even when grounded in actual
seeing and felt experience.
7. If you were to write the biography of one body part of your
own, which would it be and why?
When I asked you that, rob, I was thinking of a book I love by
bpNichol, Organ Music, which consists of discrete prose biographies of
various parts of his body. You can imagine! They’re wonderful. Inspired by him,
at one point in my new book this poem appears:
The
Fingers
are what
seem to be both part of the body and potentially not.
The part
that has the most life apart from the rest of the body.
In a way, that was my two-sentence biography of my fingers, so I
suppose if I had to write a full-on biography of a body part, I would pick up
where I left off, with the fingers.
8. How does the process of constructing Mad World, Mad
Kings, Mad Composition relate to how you structured your previous
collections? What prompted your more recent shift into writing stories? Are
these related?
I was going through earlier books the other night looking for
poems to include in a reading, and I realized how extremely different Mad
World is from all of the others. It’s much easier, for example, to read out
loud from 24 Pages and other poems or from Current or F L O W
E R C A R T than from the Mad book. The latter was constructed in
such an unusual and particular way for me that there isn’t much overlap between
how it came to be and how the earlier books came to be.
I think you’ve hit on something with the second part of your
question. The prose that appears in the new book was probably related to my
growing desire to write fiction. I’m not sure how, exactly, but I suspect that
is the case.
9. What is a particular memory you have of any of the following:
A. A bicycle
B. An
elementary school classroom
C. A door
D. The color blue
Yep, I remember asking you that. I have a feeling it was more fun
to pose the question than (for me at least) to answer it! This has been a
useful exercise in table-turning. But, to the question:
What if memory could encompass all of them at once? As if I could
tell you that I once rode a blue bike through the doors of Webster Elementary
and into the third-grade classroom of Mrs. Stevens. But I didn’t.
Or, that the green chalkboard in a classroom turned into a blue
door if you stared at it in a certain way, but as soon as you rode home on your
banana seat bike you forgot about it until the next time it happened?
There is a fact that includes two of the above, A and D: I
had a royal blue Raleigh 10-speed from when we lived in the city, but in eighth
grade we moved up north to the top of a hill on a gravel road up with almost no
other houses on it. It was really hard to ride up the hill, it was so steep,
long, and gravelly. Once I gave up and hid my bike in the field on the side of
the road—this was after my shift cleaning motel rooms at the Dune Valley Motel
(summer)—intending to retrieve it later with my mother in the car. When we
drove down the road to get it from the field where I thought I’d hidden it
safely, it was gone. The bike was not replaced, and I had to give up the
housekeeping job at the motel, which I “shared” with my best friend (we split
the shifts), and she was aggrieved, understandably. So much for a happy ending.
10. Is there
an area of knowledge you enjoy spending time in or are curious about besides
writing and literature? (History, science, philosophy, nutrition, other
specific arts, etc.)
Yes, quite a few. During
the time of my first several books, I was also spending a lot of time reading
psychoanalytic and literary theory, and to some degree philosophy. Now I
gravitate toward natural history and geology. I like to read about painting and
painters too. And I’ll confess that I have an inordinate interest in health and
nutrition, so I read more than I should about such.
11. How would you
describe your relationship to the pastoral? How does your interest in the
pastoral inform your work, and how does that interest present itself in your
writing?
I’m going to copy the TTD
answer to that question here, rob, since it gives a pretty solid overview of my
thoughts about this:
The
term “pastoral” is almost always misused and/or misunderstood, so forgive me
for wanting to contextualize that term first. Even 2500 years ago when
Theocritus sang about shepherds at rest in the countryside, he was not
sentimentalizing them or being nostalgic. The Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetics handily says: “The predominating tone of Theocritus is one of
ironic detachment and allusive cleverness; the country setting figures mainly
as an element of coarse realism and occasional barnyard vulgarity, never
as an ideal of lost innocence” (emphasis added). I’ve always been much more
interested in “coarse realism” and even “barnyard vulgarity” than in idealizing
the rural, and nostalgia has no place in poetry. I happen to live on a farm, so
when people know that part of my biography, they assume I write about the
countryside, which they assume = pastoral. The point is that even what has
become associated with the pastoral long after Theocritus’s Idylls and
Virgil’s Ecologues can only be (and probably always was) an active questioning,
interrogation, revision, contestation with whatever is signified by, or
mistaken as, “pastoral.” Shepherds resting in pastures in the 3rd century BCE
don’t exist anymore, so pasture-poetry doesn’t exist anymore—but even then, the
work was never hearts-and-flowers “nature” poetry.
All
of that said, the “coarse realism” of my work is grounded in paying attention,
and if what’s around me is a rural place, there will be things in it I’m paying
attention to, such as what an apple looks like frozen on a tree from which you
can still suck out the juice. If I’m riding the Red Line in Chicago, I pay (or
rather, give) attention to that. Ditto wherever. I do live in different
places, primarily the farm and Madison, but also downtown Chicago. Prior to the
farm, New York City, Utah, Los Angeles. And now Nova Scotia in part. Any
environment that has shaped one by being present in one’s thinking and
attentiveness may inform (in-form) a poem at any time. Not predictable, not
unitary, never a matter of intention.
12. Do you
frequently spend most of the day writing? How has your teaching impacted the
ways in which you approach writing? How long does it take for you to put a
collection together?
I frequently spend no part of the day writing. It’s more unusual
for me to be writing than to not be writing, except when I have long spans of
time with at least some of that long span alone. The exception is when I write
with my students in the classroom, since why should anyone be able to walk into
a creative writing classroom and not see any writing happening? To an extent,
my classes are like studio classes (as an art class would be), where the
drawing—I mean writing—is actually happening. That’s a new development over the
past five years, and it’s helped foster spontaneity, improvisation,
collaboration, play, and has deepened my belief in the poem in its undoctored
state, or as a process/practice/way of being present.
It’s hard to answer the last question in #12, how long it takes
to put a collection together. I don’t know.
It seems different for each book, and it always just depends on
the book and its particular way of forming.
13. Your author biography describes you as being simultaneously
an American and Canadian writer. What would you consider your relationship to
Canada, specifically Canadian writing, and how is that different from your
relationship to American writing?
A welcome question. Canada in a way houses or is the site of
half my childhood, and more than half of my early literary sensibility, given
all of the time we spent traipsing across the border from Detroit to Montreal
where my entire family on my dad’s side lived and continues to live—although my
dad (born in 1930) and his sisters were the first generation born in North
America. Their parents immigrated from Russia and Romania around 1918.
How my relationship to Canadian literature is different from my
relationship to American [U. S.] writing is that it’s far less
“schooled.” It’s a relationship to story-telling, polyphony and
multi-lingualism, Jewishness, Yiddishness, Quebec-Frenchness, music, feminism
(my aunts), argument, analysis, interpretation, but all in the realm of
intimacy, familiality, and the fracturedness of identity and connection to
people and place(s).
For all of those reasons, perhaps, Canada happens to be the
place where I first felt the strange and wonderful desire/obsession to write
fiction. Numerous short stories of mine have origins in Montreal and Nova
Scotia; the latter is where I went for four months recently in order to bring a
collection of short stories to completion. Which has just happened. The fiction
collection, World Naked Bike Ride, will be published by Gaspereau Press
in Fall 2022.
14. Last question, choose A or B:
A.
What can you see if you look around you right now?
B.
What is a recent dream you can remember?
I’ll pretty much always go with A over B. Red maple leaves
outside the east-facing window. Small dog with large black ears on orange chair
next to south-facing window. James’s guitar, Henry’s chair, my reading glasses,
a pencil, and a tea cup—the last three items on a table my dad made, with also
a raggedy crocheted pot-holder thing under the cup. The dandelions out front
and the laundry basket beside the couch. Red maple leaves.
