An Interview with Landon Godfrey

Justin Bigos: Rereading your book, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown, I’m struck again by your formal inventiveness. There are poems in monostiches, couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc; poems in prose; drop-lines and indented stanzas; and poems (the Eva Hesse series) that use columns, boxes, and white space for strong visual effect. How long does it take to recognize the emerging form of your poems?

Landon Godfrey: Minutes, years. I’m looking for ways to combine or layer or isolate verbal elements, and different forms can do that work different ways. Sometimes I start out with the idea of a form and a poem’s innards already mixed together. For a long time the grid structures for two of the Eva Hesse poems sat in a notebook, empty except for the grids themselves; then I filled them in. And I’m a ruthless reviser, so many poems start with formal ideas that change along the way--minutes, years.

JB: The title poem is written in seven stanzas of prose. Without line, you use anaphora and an increasingly elaborate syntax and wordplay to create a commanding voice. When did you know this was your title poem?

LG: It took me a long time. I found the process of ordering poems for a manuscript very difficult. The title poem became the title poem only at the very end of a five-year process, after I scrapped that manuscript and started over completely. I was dejected, and the poem’s strong voice sounded like a beginning, of both the manuscript and of a way to assemble it.

JB: You often use italics (or, say, a title like “Interview: Antique Iron Bed”) to emphasize words as dramatic speech. You are also an actor, and I’m curious if you feel drawn to the idea of persona, or at least the potentially performative qualities of poetry, even just on the page.

LG: I think you’re right about a link between the speech of acting and the speech of some of these poems. And the link certainly has to do with the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of being onstage and those same feelings one might incur saying a poem aloud. It’s scary doing so, but I love to. I love the sensation of having a body and being in the company of other bodies. I even like thinking about it!--which some of my poems work on. It can be sexy, but the feeling can also be similar to how we understand Keats’s negative capability. I crave the frisson of inhabiting someone else’s--or something else’s--feelings and sensations. His or her or its experience of touch or intellect, and emotions, moods, affections.

JB: Your diction is so wonderfully specific and sensuous, and many of your images truly sound unique, in a Joycean kind of way. Some of my favorites: “cementy New York,” “whiskeyish arias,” “tinfoil stars taped to a mirror.” Do you get as delicious a thrill writing this as I do reading it?

LG: Thank you. I do get a delicious thrill sometimes when writing; sometimes things come together in ways both mouthy and ethereal, and I love it when that happens. There’s a bunch of joy in Joycean stuff. (And I often hear Joyce in my head saying things like “pussy pussy plunder pussy.” That’s some joy right there.)

JB: That is some joy! Reminds me of the end of that Amy Hempel short-short, “Housewife,” about a woman who habitually sleeps with her husband and another man on the same day, and ends each day “incanting, ‘French film, French film.’” I’ve usually thought of Hempel, and Lydia Davis, too, as poets rather than storytellers. Are you interested much in the blurring of prose and poetry? Why is your poem “Le Rire”—certainly narrative on the surface—written as prose?

LG: “French film, French film.” I’m going to incant that all day today! I love the strange idea of exploitation in that story, that the housewife is “exploiting” the rest of the day with the act of incantation. We don’t know if she’s exploiting the men per se or if they’re exploiting her; but watch out, Day, you’re being exploited.

“Le Rire” (the title makes me laugh because it sounds like “Le Rear”) is a prose poem because I was reading Henri Bergson’s philosophical essay about the comic, which includes among other things some thoughts on the formal elements of the comic, and I wanted my poem to be a very small essay-ish something on the same subject, a bit of a response to the essay, in which Bergson asks, “Que signifie le rire?” He wonders how so many diverse comedy products generate some kind of essential funny. The essay starts in a lovely way, with his declaration that the small but impertinently defiant problem shies away from philosophical speculation. Something about that beginning, for me, transforms the problem from a thought into a clown, anthropomorphizing it. And then the problem escapes from Bergson’s essay and hides out in my poem for a while. It’s the “impertinent defiance” that really does it for me; it’s so human.

JB: One of the epigraphs to your book is by Walter Benjamin: “The eternal is more like lace trimmings on a dress than an idea.” This reminded me of a Mark Doty poem titled “Regarding Some Recent Criticism of His Work.” His poem ends, “—No such thing,/ the queen said/ as too many sequins.” Then I noticed Doty had blurbed your book. Is Doty a big influence on your work? Are there a couple others you’d like to mention?

LG: I studied with Mark at University of Houston, and I liked very much that he took sequins seriously. But one of the biggest influences Mark had on my work when I had just started writing poems was in his consideration of the poetic line. He answered an interview question about how he figured out some of the line lengths in his work by talking about the number of strong stresses per line, and I found that idea very helpful, the idea of organizing meaning against or with internal stresses. Informed by Marianne Moore in a way, but more opened up and out (Moore opened up and out…).

I’ll also claim Zbigniew Herbert. I love him. His sensibility, his intelligence, his exactingness. It’s good to have unachievable goals, and his whole world is that for me. I’m inspired by the seriousness of many Polish poets. And also the light touch of what sounds to my English&French-speaking ear like a heavy language (I know only a little Polish, enough to order a glass of milk or extra butter or kremowka papieska, which is a brilliant pastry both heavy and light simultaneously).

Ultimately there are too many poets to mention who’ve influenced my work. And artists, playwrights, singers, designers, farmers, physicists, bicycle-riding dogs…

JB: Were you able to visit Poland while at Houston? What was it like? Did you order the bigos?

LG: Yes, during two summers I went to Kraków with Adam Zagajewski, Ed Hirsch, and students in the Creative Writing program. Fabulous. Kraków is wonderful--old and so Polish!--with beautiful spaces. And very lonely, sad spaces, too. I was thrilled to be there, because that’s where many great Polish poets are/were.

Alas, I did not order the bigos. You, sir, are the only Bigos.

JB: One of my favorite poems in the book is “Self-Portrait as Lucian Freud’s Girl with a White Dog.” What do you make of the oddly umbilical sash in that painting? Also, how much money would it take to commission you to write a poem inspired by one of the Leigh Bowery portraits?

LG: Wait, one can make money as a poet?

Justin, what do you make of the oddly umbilical sash in that painting?

JB: I don’t know, but the eye goes right to it after the face, the breast, and the dog face. But the whole time I’m aware it’s there. It doesn’t need to symbolize anything, but it is menacing. Sort of noose-like in its limpness. Kind of gross, really.

LG: I think some of its import in the painting is the geometrical sectioning it does. A number of grid-like structures exist in the painting, depending on which lines one perceives as dominant. So it amuses me that this organic, somewhat disgusting, perhaps even enticing shape/line dangles an inexact map for entering the painting, even as it suggests an exiting of the body and a pairing of two bodies. Like a terrifying version of the “you are here” map at a mall. The sash also takes the place of one of the dog’s signature features, the tail, which is occluded in the painting. The dog’s still a dog, of course, but tailless and sexless, whereas the woman has both sex and tail. But what all this means, I’ve no idea. It’s all very visceral, and I like that.

JB: Your poems make me want to eat a melting candy apple, give my wife a gin-and-tonic kiss, and run in sparkling drag through the Louvre. Am I your ideal reader?

LG: Oh honey, yes you are.

JB: A million thanks, Landon.

LG: A million thanks to you, Justin. French film, French film….

Landon Godfrey was born and raised in Washington, DC, and now lives in Black Mountain, NC. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including The Southeast Review, Lyric, Chelsea, POOL, and Best New Poets 2008. Landon was recently awarded a North Carolina Arts Council 2011-2012 Artist Fellowship. Her work has been featured as a collaborative project at Broadsided and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown was published in February 2011. In selecting Landon’s book for the Cider Press Review Book Award, David St. John writes, “Never has the sumptuous materiality of language felt more seductive than in Landon Godfrey’s remarkable debut collection, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown. These exquisite poems are both sensually compelling and intellectually rigorous—a rare feat indeed. The iridescence of this marvelous volume continues to glow long after one has turned out the lights.”

More information about Landon is at www.landongodfrey.com.