J-T Kelly : A Conversation with Poet Aaron Poochigian

 

 

J-T Kelly and Aaron Poochigian connected on The-App-Formerly-Known-as-Twitter shortly after Poochigian’s American Divine hit the shelves in 2021. Kelly in Italics.

Aaron, I want to start by looking at one of your poems: "American Osiris". Here's one striking stanza:

I sense dejection in the vegetation.
I get how red a sun is going down.
And there they go, the dogs all over town,
howling like widows. Ambush, mutilation,
dumpsites across state lines—the deed is done.
Streetlights will keep on burning all night long
in memory of you, the youth, the strong
seed-giver, the delight, the vital one.

You're working here in rhymed pentameter, patterned like the octet of a Petrarchian sonnet, yet your vocabulary and your syntax are straightforward and even plain. (Although that last line, "seed-giver, the delight, the vital one," lifts its everyday words almost into an incantation.) Would you talk a bit about this poem, its magic and method? How do you approach choosing a poem's vocabulary? You work primarily (exclusively?) in meter and rhyme—how do you match form to subject?

Higher-level diction, rarer diction, calls attention to itself. There are poetic situations in which you want that. “American Osiris” is “high concept,” though, (inventing an American god). My instinct was to ground the poem in humble diction as much as possible to keep the reader focused more on the idea than the language. What’s more, mythological poetry in poetic language might well have come off as an outré exercise in an outworn mode. Larkin famously mocks resorting to what he called “the myth-kitty.” I think straightforward language helped me maybe get away with myth in “American Osiris.”

W. H. Auden said that, to write a poem, all he needed was a theme and the form. I rarely work like that. Sometimes the form for an embryonic poem is obvious. More often, though, I swirl the relevant words around with each other inside a word doc the way an oil-painter mixes colors on a palette. Once the words come together into a stanza I want to keep, I then know better what form the rest of the poem will take.

“American Osiris” is in my book American Divine. The linking idea behind the poems in it is the existence of an American mythology. Yes, we do have our own. I wanted to add to it by writing poems (and prayers) to American powers, as if they could be present in our lives like the Greco-Roman gods were assumed to be present. Though not religious (and perhaps because I have not been able to bring myself to be religious), I am fascinated by religious rituals and have often incorporated them into my work. I guess I want to make sure I’m not missing out on religion.

There’s religious ritual and religious language, and then there’s religious experience. In “56th and Lexington” you describe an experience that Ignatius of Loyola would call a “consolation without cause” which he says comes directly from God.

Dozens of random ugsome humans… suddenly each turned whimsical and strange
and gorgeous to me… The rapture lasted for about an hour, // and then those radiant beautifuls became / haggard again and pushy…

You’re not religious, but your poetry leads me to think of you as a kind of ecstatic. I wonder if you can talk a bit about the moving powers behind your poetry, behind your life as a poet. What do you think poetry’s power is? Do you think of the choice of a life of poetry as a vocation?

When I was eighteen, I had a religious experience that made clear to me that I was to be a poet. I never thought about doing anything else. The experience was non-denominational, and I have thus far not been able to adhere to any of the world’s religions. I would say I am not religious, not even “spiritual” in the sense of having a reliable connection to the divine. I do feel I have a susceptibility to the numinous—that is, to the feeling that something supernatural is present (as in divine epiphanies). I try to describe that feeling in my forthcoming Four Walks in Central Park. The lines appear in a passage about the Hallett Nature Sanctuary:

When I walk here alone, I get that funny
frisson that sneaks up in an empty church.
You know, like something science just can’t square
has breached the boundary and is in the air.

Much of my work (especially the poems in American Divine) has consisted of my attempts to capture experiences similar to the one I had and present them in an accessible way for readers. I think poetry and the numinous work well together because they both involve recognizing special significance in one’s experiences. One of poetry’s powers is in just that: revealing the meaning behind our shared human encounters with the world.

I have been working full-time as a poet for a year now. Yes, it’s been financially precarious. I do some ghostwriting work to make ends meet. Still, I feel I am lucky in that I can focus on poetry at least eight hours a day. Being a poet certainly is a possible human vocation, though, financially speaking, it is more viable if you have a trust fund or something. Also, now that I’m doing poetry full-time in my apartment, I have started pushing myself to get out and look at the city with an eye toward writing about it. I do intentional, mindful flaneuring. I always want more, more, more experiences because I dread poetic sterility. I need fresh stuff to write about.

Let’s talk about the breadth of your work a bit, then. You mentioned your upcoming Central Park long poem—I think you call it a guide? You have two novels in verse, Mr. Either/Or and its sequel All the Rage. You’ve translated Sappho, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Baudelaire. (Find them all on aaronpoochigian.com!) What do you see ahead? An epic, maybe? Essays in verse? I’m reminded of Mark Knopfler’s song “Boom Like That” which is a blues ballad that tells the story of Ray Kroc and the founding of McDonald’s. There’s certainly room to work out there. What do you have your sights on at the moment? What are you reading? What has your attention?

I try to stay busy. I used always to have a translation project as well as original poems to work on. Now I am exclusively doing original work. I am shaping the lyric poems I have written over the last five years into a new collection. Some will make the cut; others won’t. The criterion of inclusion in the book isn’t just quality but relevance. I think a poetry collection should be more than just a bunch of poems between two covers. I try to make my collections Gestalts, so that each book, as a book, is more than the sum of its poems.

I have also gotten a gig to write an opera libretto about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. My favorite collaborations have been with musicians and theater people, and this project involves both. I’m very excited about it. My poetry skillset is right, I would like to think, for libretto-writing. Writing words to be sung, though, is harder than writing words to be recited because there are more restrictions. Italian is an ideal language for singing because nearly all the words in it end in a nice big singable vowel. When writing English for singers, one has always to think about vowels, especially at the end of words. Many English words don’t sing well. I have started some bits of the songs for it, but I am more focused right now on the plot. It has to be dynamic and move toward a climax. In this opera Sylvia’s suicide will be the climax, but she will appear as a ghost haunting Ted after her demise. The other big challenge is making sure the libretto is sympathetic to all the characters involved, even though Ted did physically and emotionally abuse Sylvia.

In my experience, there is no greater pleasure than hearing performers recite (and sing) the words one has written.

Lately I have been reading collections of nursery rhymes because I started feeling an urge to write nursery rhymes for adults. I’m also listening to Byron’s “Don Juan” as an audiobook. The prose I have been reading is fiction—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Also, in preparation for the libretto, I have been reading biographies of Plath and Hughes. I have been trying to find the right balance between reading and writing. I used to spend almost all of my days writing, but lately I have been intentionally setting aside time to read. I think it’s been good for me and my work.

Aaron, thank you for being so forthcoming. I’ve really been enjoying our conversation. Would you bring us to a close by talking about a poem that’s been particularly meaningful to you? It could be something you read at a formative time. Or maybe a poem you initially found difficult. Something that marked a change for you. Share with us a poem that really got under your skin.

I remember exactly where I was sitting in the library of my undergraduate school when I first read Li Bai's “On Visiting an Absent Taoist Master.” The translator was Arthur Cooper, a British WWII codebreaker and almost mad aficionado of Chinese lit. I went on to read the poem in as many translations as I could find, including that of Arthur Waley. The poem is its own version of a stock Tang-poetry situation: visiting a wise hermit who turns out to be absent. The speaker then receives the hermit’s instruction by observing what is going on around the hermitage. After spending some years studying Classical Chinese, I tried to make my own translation. Forgive me for giving my own rendition here:

On Visiting an Absent Taoist Master

The sound of dogs barking and droplets falling.
Peach blossoms batten on the bits of rain.
Deer surface from the deep woods now and then.
A little stream drowns out the noon bell tolling.
Above bamboo-spears aimed at pure-white cloud
meltwater dangles from a jasper cliff … 

and no one here knows which way you went off!
How many pine tree trunks I’ve leaned on, sad.

The images in the first six lines are so vivid as to be almost surreal. This poem taught me that, in confessional poetry, there can be a separation between the author as the artist in control and the author as a character who is oblivious, in the world of the poem, of the power of what he is witnessing. Li Bai the character ends up being a kind of patsy in the last two lines. He has remained wholly (and quite humanly) caught up in his frustration over the hermit's absence despite the imagistic revelations with which Li Bai the poet has crammed the first six lines.

“On Visiting an Absent Taoist Master” also exhorts us to look more deeply at what we see. I have tried to make deep-looking a daily practice. Sometimes I can pull it off. It's harder than one might think.

 

 

 

 

 

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.

 

 

 

  

 

J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, his brother, and a dog. Poems in The Denver Quarterly, Bad Lilies, elsewhere. New chapbook More of How to Read the Bible just out from above/ground.