I’ll Remind You That All Books Are Made Out of Light: An Interview With Martin Rock

Karl Zuehlke (KZ): Dear Martin, there is something I cannot quite quantify about how you put words together into such solid lines. I don't know that I want to know. Your lines and sentences justify themselves somehow in my mind; as a reader I love the precise cuts through the flesh and fabric and time and being. Would you please talk about how your voice evolved, how it solidified into Dear Mark?

Martin Rock (MR): I feel like each poem dictates its own voice, and as a poet I hope to be always evolving rather than evolved. But I’m glad you think of “flesh and fabric and time and being.” A more direct way to answer your question might be to give a list of poets who have influenced me, but I know I’ll inevitably leave too many out. I try to read across schools and time-periods and cultures. I don’t pretend that reading a work in translation is equivalent to reading the original, but the collaboration between translator and poet can provide invaluable whispers, and helps me break away from familiar tropes. And of course the ‘real world’ also exerts its influence. I like Stevens’s idea that “the poet is the priest of the invisible” & I think the invisible carries its own voice. 

KZ: The act of translating is an interesting model. As I read Dear Mark, it is all thriller and no filler, and Rothko's paintings are settings, symbolic environments your imagination populates or explores, plays with and expands. At the same time, though, I think the paintings become surfaces between the reader and the poems, yourself and Rothko. In “Serigraph, Acrylic on Paper, 1968" you write:

“There are two of us in the room.

                Or there is one

& we are cut in half

        by the bending of light

                in gallons of paint.”

Standing in front of a painting divides the viewer from the artist by a stretch of canvas, the nails holding the canvas to the frame, and time. The painter was there, and there are traces of that presence in the paint. Similarly perhaps, we could view these poems as a record of that interaction? There is a record of Martin Rock in the poems, that we can find in the words?

MR: That’s an interesting thing to think about -- the conversation that happens between artist and viewer. You call the paintings “symbolic environments” but I try to be mindful of their physical nature when I’m in front of a canvas. To look at brushstrokes up close and see the materiality of paint or the texture of the canvas beneath it evokes the artist’s physical presence as well, absent only by time. In the same way I’ve convinced myself of the presence of ghosts in shadow, I’ve felt the artist standing behind me when looking at a painting. I imagine these poems contain something of me in the same way a canvas contains its artist, but I don’t think they’re complete until they’re read and assimilated. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot suggests that a new work of art modifies all the “existing monuments” that came before it. I hope these poems enter into the kind of genuine communion of which Eliot speaks.

The poem you’ve quoted here was the first poem of the project. In 2010 my friend Brian Trimboli put an image of “Serigraph, Acrylic on Paper, 1968” on the TV we’d set up as a computer monitor. Though I don’t often smoke pot, that night I had. I remember feeling as though I was reeling in psychic matter from another dimension and trapping it, ghostbuster-style, in my poem. It upsets me that our culture allows the acknowledged use of psychoactive substances to deny verity to a perceived experience. But it’s important that I mention I came to this project while in an altered state, and that Rothko’s work has a quality that returns me to that state without the need to alter my brain chemistry exogenously.

I think Rothko is one of Longfellow’s Promethean bards who travel outside the realm of typical human experience and bring back a piece of that world for the rest of us; this is one reason his paintings are sometimes referred to as portals or doorways. The chapbook was written with this kind of psychonautic questing in mind. If Rothko has mined some spiritual quarry in the creation of his art, my work is an attempt to seek out those echoes and filter them through the lens of another consciousness (my own) and another medium (poetry).

KZ: You might have created an echo chamber of your very own. Also, I am fascinated that Dear Mark developed as an aftereffect of a collaboration between yourself and Brian, whereas your first chapbook Fish, You Bird was a more direct collaboration between yourself and Phillip Ischy. In some respects Dear Mark is also collaborative: the book's title suggests apostrophe as the heading of a letter addressed to Rothko. While you do draw on any number of sources, the poems you write retain their own integrity. They compose a surface that intersects with the work of another but that is not dependent on it. Perhaps you could talk a little about your process: how much of your work is inspired by collaboration? How do you maintain that balance between your own work and your inspirations?

MR: I wouldn’t say Brian and I were collaborators except in the way that friendship is an act of collaboration. He did provide the prompt, and without that I never would have written the book. That said, Dear Mark is collaborative in that it is ekphrastic. On the other hand, Fish You Bird was a collaboration with Phil completely. We wrote those poems between Texas and Japan and New York over the course of about 6 years, each as a response to the previous in an approximation of the renga-jo, an ancient Japanese form. For more info about that project, here is a link to our interview with Traci Brimhall at her collaboration blog, We Are Homer. I hope to someday see all 100 of them published, as Pilot published a selection of 18 to fit the form of the accordion-fold chapbook. I also want to acknowledge the work of Betsy Wheeler and Meghan Dewar who put beautiful and important books into the world with their press, though it is now defunct.

Fish, You Bird by Martin Rock and Phillip Ischy

With allusive and ekphrastic writing, as soon as a poem relies too heavily on its source it becomes like skin that isn’t wrapped around anything. This project is an attempt at a representational recording of the mind engaged in nonrepresentational art. That said, I hope the paintings are not necessary to the function of the poems. Because many of Rothko’s titles are repeated, I’ve provided a visual diagram as well; anyone so inclined would be able to unite each poem to its corresponding painting. The line drawings are there to add some aesthetic variation and to act as a kind of scavenger-hunt guide. Seeing the images represented in the poems may be achieved with a simple focusing and unfocusing of the eyes, or it might require a subtle change in the way you perceive the world. With the diagrams I tried to create an image that is devoid of color, as is text, though they signify paintings that are almost pure color.

KZ: I was lucky enough to once read all 100, and I would love to see them bound and stitched into a volume. You succeeded I think also with your most recent project. Good ekphrastic poetry expands the world of the image, but great poems written about art take over that world. I am consistently impressed by the capacity of your poems to exist independent of Rothko's paintings and yet originate from them, to activate a surface and yet imagine it completely in your own mind. How might you respond to those that fear collaboration might stifle their creativity?

MR: I guess I’d suggest they don’t collaborate. I’m not flying any banners here. But artists concerned about guarding their creativity as though it’s some kind of rare and delicate animal might find that it actually prefers to be part of a phalanx, or colony, or swarm. I’m all about inclusion rather than exclusion. If something works for you, great. If not, don’t do it.

KZ: This question is about your poem “No. 9, Dark over light Earth, 1954,” which appeared in The Bakery, and in which you write, “It seems you view daytime as heavier / than night.” It seems to me that much of your collaborative approach is based on empathy: the record of your thoughts about the art someone else produced. Is it your capacity for empathy that allows you to create something of your own from this process, or do you find yourself conflicted?

MR: That line owes a lot of its existence to the poems of Shuntaro Tanikawa, a living Japanese poet I admire who has written about the density of daylight that blocks our view of the rest of the universe, or at least that is my interpretation of his words. I really think all poets and lovers of poetry should seek out his work. There are a few out-of-print books of his in translation. He’s amazing.

I also think it’s interesting what you’re saying here about empathy. I certainly try to be empathetic in my dealings with other living beings and in my approach to art—and I attempted to tread lightly when dealing with Rothko’s life in this chapbook because I wanted the book to be more about his art than about his terrible death—but I wouldn’t have thought that recording one’s own reaction to art or revealing one’s visions could be an act of empathy, though I suppose it can. I also think it is important to distinguish between what I consider to be ekphrastic writing, which can be, as you describe, a record of thoughts based on the art of someone else, and what I typically think of as “collaboration” which is created when two or more people join together intentionally to create a new work. It is impossible for me to know what Rothko would think about Dear Mark, for instance, or if he’d even have wanted the book to exist.

KZ: I think sustained reading, whatever the medium or genre, is at its most reducible an act of empathy. Sure, you can stripmine a poet’s style, or read for any number of other reasons. I guess I just can’t imagine any motive besides empathy fueling me to read the complete works of any given author. And for me that spills over into my reading of any book that sustains me, as yours does.

You do treat Rothko’s work fairly: that is what I love about these poems, and what I was aiming at with the word "empathy"-- a sort of respectful distance and equilibrium. I do not think empathy and altruism are the same.

Could you address the appearance in several of your poems of the “golem?”

MR: It’s funny that you ask about the golem. You’re definitely not the first to ask about that obsession of these poems.

It’s like this: some of Rothko’s paintings look to me a bit like large rectangular faces, or even robots. I found that the word robot derives from the Czech word for “forced labor.” The intersection of my interest in folklore, Judaism, and the history of robots led me to the golem, a being formed of mud in Jewish folklore and also a particularly apt metaphor for the spiritual nature of art. The fable is that a Rabbi molds mud into the shape of a man and writes the word “truth” on its forehead to bring the golem to life and do his bidding (golem in Hebrew means “unshaped form” or “uncultivated person”). When the Rabbi is through with him, he can cross out the aleph in the Hebrew word for “truth” to change that word to “death” and the golem returns to lifeless mud. I love this capacity of language to create and end life. It harkens back to a time when it wasn’t preposterous to suggest that words carry mystical power. A lot more people on earth than you might think still believe this. After all, in the beginning was the word, if that’s your jam.

In many of the stories the golem grows a bit too big for his britches and becomes incredibly destructive. I started to think of Rothko’s paintings in this way. They were created and given life in that they were brought into existence. They continue to exist, though their creator is no longer present (and thus cannot end them). They consumed him, to the extent that he ended up serving the paintings in some ways rather than the other way around (though of course they continue to serve him). They also have a quality of beckoning, and of sentience. I decided to give voice to that in the poems. I started to get a sense of an intelligence behind the paintings that shapeshifts from one to the next. I also found that thinking of the paintings as sentient opened up a lot of possibilities for interpretation, and allowed the poems to wallow in that same ambiguity between the painter, the wall, and the viewer.

As a side note, the story of the golem fits closely with the story of the origin of the second race of man in Greek mythology (the first made too much of a mess of the earth and were dashed from existence by the gods). In the myth of Prometheus and Pandora the remaining two humans after the flood are told by the oracle to "depart from the temple with head veiled and garments unbound, and cast behind [them] the bones of [their] mother" (from Bullfinch’s Mythology). Not wanting to defile their family members who’d just died in the flood, they picked up stones instead and threw them, and from each stone grew a new human. I love the thought that modern humans are descended of the earth, but also that we were planted here (as in the notion of panspermia). I also get a kick out of all the correlations between myth and contemporary religious dogma and our culture’s ability to see one as absolute truth and the other as mere storytelling. So much of truth is context. Sorry for the digression.

KZ: I love digressions.The painter, the wall, and the viewer: that too is spot on. In “No. 1, Black Form, 1964” you consider color theory, and in particular the use of black and Kandinsky's approach. You take this theory as a subject. In what way has visual art affected your poetry?

MR: I don’t even remember how I first came across it, but at some point I read the line “Black is like the silence of the body after death.” Of course it had to end up in a poem about one of the black paintings, and I began that poem with it. I’m glad I didn’t fully discover Kandinsky’s color theory until after the chapbook had gone to print (not that it is possible to fully discover it ever) because it would have been a very different book, and I might have had to title it Dear Mark and Wassily, which doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The poem you mention attempts to look at the relationship between the nature of the color black and the nature of language. Black is the non-color and the every-color; it is made of all others, and thus consumes them, hides them, contains them. Language, I think, does the same thing with matter. We name a thing and trap it in between corporeality and theory. The naming of an object hides it from us in our attempt to acquire it. At some point in the project, I began to imagine that the paintings were snapshots of post-apocalyptic (or more accurately, post-material) futures -- yes, as well as sentient robot-golems -- and this poem was an attempt at imagining a future in which the “false objective” of immateriality (possibly Buddhist in nature) had been reached, though, what then is to be done with language, or rather what is it to do? Kandinsky’s color theory separates color from the objects it adheres to, which is a beautiful way of thinking about a post-materialist world.

KZ: Let us take a look at “Black on Maroon, 1958.” This poem is one of my favorites because, to me, it exemplifies the collection. Here is a link, just for fun, to Rothko’s painting as reference. And Martin's poem follows:

“Made real / by their reconciliation to flatness” is in some respects a good way to think about the development of your poems in response to Rothko. I also admire the development of this poem, in that it confronts and transgresses borders and surfaces, and in so doing, evokes an emotion common to our time of navigating images as a mode of being. In capturing the movements of your mind in these poems, you act out in its complexity a state of being pervasive due to the internet.

How much trimming and revision did this poem take, relative to others in the collection? And by extension, how much of your process is revision?

MR: First I want to say that I regret having engendered the body “between the lines” in that poem. In many ways that move is exclusive and inaccurate. To answer your question though, the poems went through a number of lives before they found the form they’re in. I don’t know which poems changed more or which less, as I tend to make changes to the original and discard the drafts. I think that if a revision is false it will eventually reveal itself as such, and if what I had before was right, it will ask to come back into the poem. Initially all these poems were informal sonnets, so they changed a lot in their appearance on the page. This chapbook went through at least 100 revisions, meaning that I read it through at least that many times and made changes here and there with each reading. It’s a bit obsessive, and even now that it’s published I read some poems and think about a word that maybe shouldn’t have been changed, or music that was lost to gain an alternative meaning in a line. I was talking with my friend Michael about this at the launch party, and he said that he thought poetry has made him a worse person. Being one of the best people I know, I doubt that to be true, but we talked about the kind of obsession poetry requires, and the effects that has on a person. I’m reminded of the famous Lowell line from “Skunk Hour”: “My mind’s not right.”

KZ: Lowell really captures that emotion. I am curious how you orient yourself in terms of another tradition, the one set by the New York School, a great number of whom were established art critics?

MR: That’s a good question, and one I’d rather not give a direct answer to. I don’t like to think I am oriented toward any one school or another. I feel equally influenced by ancient Japanese poetry (or at least the translations I’ve read) as I do by any one school in America. I love the work of Whitman as well as that of Robert Hayden & Sylvia Plath; I feel equally attracted to and influenced by translations of Rilke as those of Borges. I am fascinated by both surrealism and transcendentalism, formalism and “experimental” writing. To claim allegiance to any one school feels false to me, so I won’t do it. That said, I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with John Ashbery on multiple occasions at NYU, and grappling with his work and hearing him talk about it has influenced my own. From the New York School I celebrate the use and manipulation of form as generative, and the immense amount of cross-media collaboration. Poets and artists and musicians all breathe the same air (and so do bankers and business-owners and security advisors). But I also feel that too much influence from the New York School can lead to poetry that turns to irony as a way of avoiding sincerity, and while I appreciate the tradition I don’t tend to choose that for my own work.

KZ: I was hoping you could comment on chapbooks as a form of publication. With so much poetry going digital, your chapbook is an example of just how great it is to have a paper book. I know I am a dinosaur. I like books made out of trees rather than light. I get the sense that paper books have now become a more marginalized medium, but as a result, some smaller presses have been able to publish some gorgeous, understated books. Perhaps I am only inflecting my own bias for the aesthetic object of a book? Perhaps I have not embraced the future of publication?  

MR: I feel incredibly lucky to have a chapbook out with Brooklyn Arts Press. Joe and Wendy put beautiful books into the world that are meticulously edited and distributed. I’ve read all their chapbooks and many of their full-length books and am really honored to be in such fine company. There are also plenty of other small presses fighting the good fight. As long as bibliophiles are out there (and most poets probably fall under this category), physical books will continue to be made, read, traded, and collected. Chapbooks allow poets to get work into the world without “coming out” in the Victorian sense. They allow a poet who hopes to win a big prize or sign with a big press the opportunity to gain experience in producing a finished product. They also put meaningful art-objects into the world. I’ve been building a pretty great small library of handmade books from presses like Ugly Duckling Presse, Argos Books, Monk Books, Bateau Press, Flying Guillotine, Small Fires Press, No Dear, Organic Weapon Arts, to name just a few. I learned a lot about making books and binding from volunteering at UDP while I lived in New York. I also met a lot of bookmakers at the CUNY chapbook festival. For the past few years I’ve been acting as the editor of Epiphany Editions, where I’ve designed and edited letterpress as well as traditionally printed chapbooks. The most recent series features work by Kimiko Hahn, Darin Strauss, Laurel Nakanishi, and William Kelley Woolfitt. We’ll have them available at AWP and are about to hold another reading period in the next year, so check out the website for more info. 

Also, I’ll remind you that all books are made out of light. I think there are benefits to both online and print. I like to hold a book in my hands, but I also edit an online literary magazine, Loaded Bicycle and I know that work online tends to get more views than work in print, and it is generally free to read. Whether people are reading the work as attentively I can’t know. I think Lilly Ladewig and Anne Cecelia Holmes did a great job of using the online format to create a project that could not have been done otherwise with their I Am a Natural Wonder blog and chapbook. I guess the way I see it, we should absolutely be pushing poetry in any way we can. If we can begin to edge meaningful language into a landscape otherwise comprised of advertising jingles and politically charged soundbites, mindless pop lyrics and doublespeak, we will have done something worthwhile.

KZ: Martin, thank you so much for your time answering my questions and for your poetry. I have enjoyed both. What projects are you currently working on?

MR: Thank you Karl. It is always a pleasure speaking (and writing) with you. I’m working with some friends here in Houston on beginning a press collaborative based on the UDP model. I can’t say too much about it yet, but aside from Arte Público, Houston doesn’t really have an independent press and we intend to change that by publishing poetry, translation, text-based art and scores of performance art. Stay tuned for more. We’ll probably start publishing in 2015. I’m also working with Kevin Prufer on editing a book for the Pleiades Unsung Masters series and doing my coursework for a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at UH. As part of that, I’m working on translating a book of poems by Japanese poet Masato Tomobe. Also, I’m getting married this summer to the woman I love, which will be my best work yet.

Martin Rock is a poet, editor, and translator pursuing his PhD in creative writing and literature at University of Houston. He is the author of Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press 2013) and co-author with Phillip D. Ischy of Fish, You Bird (Pilot 2010). His poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Salamander, Best New Poets, and other journals. He lived in Japan for four years and is poet in residence at Texas Children’s Hospital, where he assists children in the writing of poems and stories. His website is martinrockpoetry.com.

Sitting Radar: Sidney Thompson's Interview with Kirk Nesset

Kirk Nesset is the author of two books of short stories, Paradise Road and Mr. Agreeable, as well as a book of translations, Alphabet of the World, a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver, and, his latest, a book of poems, Saint X. His stories, poems, translations, and essays have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Witness, and Prairie Schooner. His flash fiction has been widely anthologized: most recently in Flash Fiction Funny, but also The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXIII, Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, Sudden Stories, and New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, among others. Nesset teaches at Allegheny College and is writer in residence at Black Forest Writing Seminars in Freiburg, Germany.

On November 21, 2013, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kirk Nesset and his well-behaved Pomeranian at Oak Street Drafthouse in Denton, Texas. My interest in meeting him stemmed primarily from my interest in his flash fiction. I frankly declare that “I Want You to Kill Me,” from Mr. Agreeable, is one of the best short stories ever written, short-short or not. Like many of the other stories in the collection, it’s as provocative and visceral in its abstract expressionism as any painting by Chaïm Soutine, with unsettling intimacy, absurd joy and heartbreak. After a couple of IPAs, we proceeded around the corner to Andaman Thai Restaurant, with Ryan the Pomeranian quiet as a mouse at Kirk’s feet in his portable carrier (with the exception of one brief escape).

The first thing about Kirk that struck me was his precision. With great deliberation, he minces his words, and I don’t mean he “weakens” or “softens” them, and neither is there an over-wrought pause between. There’s a vigorous delicacy to his manner and an exactness, a cleaving, to his word choice—a sheerness. A navigation. He’s one who will tell on himself wryly but not for the cheapness of a laugh, though I laughed plenty. He’s simply an honest poet. I found the jazz of him somewhat reminiscent of Barry Hannah, my mentor and friend, so it came as little surprise to learn that Barry was his friend, his hero, for many years, too. We discussed, among other things, Barry’s “Even Greenland,” one of the classics in the genre of sudden fiction. Here is my account, albeit polished, of those other things.

Sidney Thompson (ST): What were your sources of inspiration as an aspiring fiction writer, and what are they now?

Kirk Nesset (KN): I read a great deal as a child, so I was inspired early. Aesop and Grimm and the Nancy Drew books had the most impact, I think, early on. Then Louis Carroll and Poe, Zane Grey and Jack London. London’s autobiographical portrait of an artist, Martin Eden, pretty much knocked me to pieces. By the time I hit high school I’d read all of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mansfield, O’Connor, Thomas Wolf, Lawrence Durrell and Hesse, and had dipped into many others. Mainly this was because of a wonderful thing my parents had done. In 1969, relocating to California from Seattle, they “killed the television,” as the phrase went then. After that all I did at home was read and sing and play guitar, stack wood and play board games. As an English major later at college and grad school, I was still a voracious reader, most voracious during the summer. The books I loved then made me the writer I am, I believe. They not only taught me craft but taught me how to perceive. Don Quixote. Tom Jones. Middlemarch. The Brothers Karamazov. Lolita. Beckett’s Malone Dies. Atwood’s Surfacing. DeLillo’s White Noise. I’m still completely TV-illiterate, and not nearly as informed as some about film. I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Bookish is good.

(ST): Are there more recent writers?

(KN): Most inspiring to me have been Barry Hannah, Jeanette Winterson, Alice Munro, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders and of course Carver, along with DeLillo and Atwood. I used to read around a lot more. These last years I’ve read less widely and comprehensively. I was relieved years ago when Barry Hannah told me how he had been reading. He was presenting that evening at Allegheny College and I’d gone to the hotel to pick him up. He was sitting reading in the lobby and tucked the book in his bag when he saw me. In the car I asked who he favored these days, expecting to hear names and titles one heard on the breeze then. I may have mentioned those titles and names. Barry said he had heard of those authors but hadn’t read them. Rather than reading around, he told me, he was rereading the books he loved. Some of them he’d read, he said, twenty or twenty-five times. The book he’d slid in his bag, by the way, was Beckett’s Molloy. 

 

I didn’t study writing in a writing program, I should say. I’m truly “old school.” I studied literature. I didn’t know I was aspiring to write until I was well into grad school. I’d never presumed to think that writing was a thing people did. I began at UCSB as a Renaissance scholar and wound up writing on Carver. Lit crit and theory drove me to creative writing, it seems. But the books I had read and was reading were key. Aside from a pair of writer’s conferences, and aside from the help of some generous mentors—Barry Spacks, Steven Allaback, Christopher Buckley—the literary models were crucial. The books I had read were my teachers.

(ST): In hindsight, as author of The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study, what about Carver’s writing (or Gordon Lish’s editing) do you believe is possibly the least understood or appreciated?

(KN): The inexplicable thing about Ray, what we don’t talk about when we talk about Carver, is atmosphere and tone. The eerie moods he creates. For sure, Gordon Lish helped to cultivate this. Mainly it comes from compression, constriction, verbal omission, a ruthless bareness, not to mention the awkward, almost extraterrestrial voices Carver finds. It’s a poetics of silence in prose, you could say. Everywhere in Carver are hints about what can’t be represented, or written, or said. People tend to see social drama—the catastrophe of the plight of the lower middle class, poor prospects, alcoholism, et cetera—and don’t notice the nuances. Carver’s work is richer and stranger than that. The prose is sometimes so blank, so terribly “real,” it borders on expressionism. He hyperextends realism, such that an oppressive, inhospitable world seems that much less full, less hospitable. The stories make you “feel the force of the paradox,” as Claude Richard writes, “that ensures that the deepest anxiety is, precisely, that which does not let itself speak.”

(ST): While primarily a fiction writer, you also publish poetry and translation. Are there discernible differences in style, subject matter, or mood when you approach one genre or another?

(KN): Actually, when you weigh the numbers of pieces appearing over the years, you’ll see I publish more poems and translations than fictions. They’re shorter, easier to place and more manageable, given space considerations. But you’re right, I do consider myself a fiction writer first and foremost. Lately I have also been publishing essays—on Carver, and on writing, fiction pedagogy especially. Issues related to genre do arise, yes, each time I sit down to write. Above all when I begin something new. “Approach” is the key word here. When I’m working from a prompt, or a solicitation from an editor, I tend to move fairly straightforwardly into the genre in question. It’s always a challenge, of course, starting a piece. With nonfiction I tend to outline and plan ahead, even if I wind up discarding those plans. The writing is intuitive, certainly, but it’s nice to line up your ducks, even if you don’t shoot them all down. With fiction, I locate a character and setting and try to discover what’s lurking. What’s intriguing, disturbing. And then sniff out motivation, causality, tap into the mystery, hoping the story will grow or unfold, revealing its secrets. With poetry, typically, it’s the exhilaration of language itself that draws me in, that incites the poem. Some of my verse is narrative, and much of it makes sense. But it doesn’t have to—which is incredibly freeing, since nonfiction and fiction only rarely allow for such freedom. Margaret Atwood believes different parts of the brain are at work in what she calls ambidextrous writers, depending on genre. When you write fiction you’re methodical, organized. And poetry is “a state of free float.”

What’s complicated, though, I find, is that sometimes you write and look what you have and don’t know what you’ve written. I’ll write what I think is a poem, and take out the line breaks and see it’s a story, a compact micro tale. Or vise versa. I have pieces in the mail now, I hesitate to admit, that are submitted in both genres. As stories and poems. Which genre will win? 

 

Translation on the other hand is something else altogether. I like it and do it a lot, maybe because as a way of writing it feels less intimidating. It’s like sitting down to work out a puzzle. It’s not my soul or vertiginous inner abyss on the line, seemingly, but somebody else’s. The matter is already there on the page. There’s more to it, though, as we know. A translation isn’t a puzzle, finally. It isn’t just transposition, substitution, clever maneuvers with dactyls and dictionaries. It’s its own creature. It’s an enacted, unfolding thing, an experience in a new tongue that approximates the original. It may be easy to start, but the piece in English must live and breathe as a poem or story. It needs a beating heart. It needs musical and emotional coherence, as well as semantic finesse.

(ST): Of your short-short story collection Mr. Agreeable, Barry Hannah declared, “Nesset is attuned to the fine-edged songs of the mundane,” while Bret Lott said that you have “given us a beautiful bouquet of crystal shards, each one of which, when held to the light, refracts and amplifies and makes new the entire notion of light.” How conscious are you of technique—of discovering and refining that fine edge, that crystal shard—when inside the writing process of your first draft?

(KN): I’d like to say that I just draft when I draft—write like an ape, go to town, let the gate down. But that’s very rarely the case. Which is why the process of drafting is often so awful to me. I write slowly. Excruciatingly. I’m lucky to get a page a day, if that. And while I’m aware of the fact that polish comes later—attention to the fine edges and shards—I can’t just madly excrete, idiot savant that I am, that we all are, or should be, initially. For me, voice must click from the very first sentence and keep clicking from there, or come close to clicking. Otherwise, I won’t believe the voice, or the piece, enough to go on. So yes, there is attention to technique from the start, but not the intense attention that comes later. The early sensitivity is about getting voice right. Which necessarily includes sentence rhythm, diction, cadence and sound. 

 

Other writers work or worked this way, too, obviously. Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, DeLillo and Hannah, among others. I worked with Ford, in fact, late in the 80s, at the Squaw Valley Writers Center in California. I remember asking him what he did in a draft when he got stuck. He backtracked, he told me. He returned to where the voice of the prose sounded true, and looked to see where it diverged, or derailed. He’d work to fix that, he said, and proceed from there.

I love revision, as a lot of us do. There’s very little suffering there, unlike with drafting. And I’m a ruthless reviser. If I’m lucky I’m done after sixty or seventy drafts. Usually it’s more like a hundred, one hundred fifty. Two hundred drafts isn’t unusual, depending.

(ST): Depending on what?

(KN): Depending on how the story complies, unfolds, aligns energetically. On the way voice, rhythm, urgency, tension and pace comply or fail to comply. Fail to arrive. Or arrive. Become manifest on the page.

(ST): About your collection Paradise Road, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Ann Beattie said, “These stories are melodious when they need to be, jangle when we need to hear what's discordant.” I understand that you have a background in music. How coincidental are Beattie’s instincts?

(KN): I’m less conscious than some, I think, about what sings or clacks in my work. Crafting sound is an intuitive process, at least for me. Even a sharp listener, a musically-illiterate writer at some point senses the orchestral nature of narrative, the melody and harmony and rests and refrains in every story or poem, the rise to crescendo. Still, my writing wouldn’t sound the way it does, I suppose, if music hadn’t preceded. I was a musician long before I was a writer. Musicians think in sounds, express and emote in nonverbal ways. Language is rhythmic and sonic, obviously. And if your ear is trained, writing is music as well. I’m as interested in the way something sounds on the page when I write, or revise, as I am in what the thing says, or conveys. It’s hard to say, though, how exactly I know what I know, or how influence works. I’d like to say that the way I manage and measure my stories or poems arises from song. That my modulations in voice, rhythm, or awareness of such, arise likewise. But no. It’s a thing you can’t nail down, since what we absorb is internal. Is internalized. And what’s internal is mysterious, finally.

 

What’s not mysterious is the fact that music is fun. Much of it for me, all of this singing and playing on stage, is about not writing. I’m in two bands now, with three rehearsals a week, 5 or 6 shows per month and daily music homework. That’s a lot of time away from writing, or from preparing to write. Nabokov had his butterflies, so I can have this, I guess. For me, we could say, music is creativity minus the agony, unease and worry, the incinerating self-conscious flames. It’s not lonely or solitary. And there’s free beer.

(ST): What do you love or hate most about writing or publishing, and what do you intend to do about it?

(KN): I love hearing that something I wrote mattered to someone. Especially when whatever it was mattered to someone for reasons I could never have imagined beforehand, much less intended. I got a letter years ago from a high school teacher saying he liked my book on Carver so much he wanted to apply to grad school in English. And he did. And got in. I still get fan mail for Mr. Agreeable and Paradise Road, some of it strange, some vaguely frightening, but most of it very uplifting. 

 

I love, too, the rare affirmation that comes in the form of acceptances. Stories, poems, essays, translations, pieces slated for press. Book manuscripts, especially, which can be exhausting to the point of nightmarish to peddle. There’s a glow, you know, that remains, after the news comes, which can last days. Wow, look, you think, I’m not only not getting kicked or beaten today, but somebody likes what I wrote. And wants to promote it. 

 

Best of all I love the feeling of completing a draft. The glow of that lasts quite a bit longer.

(ST): What do you hate?

(KN): That nothing’s consistent. The process and progress of writing, I mean. I thought early on that there were lessons you learned that eventually made it all easier. On one level that’s true, maybe. Mostly it’s not the case. Each project is like building Rome again from the ground up. The process is laborious, tedious, fraught with doubt and misgiving.

I also don’t like the fact, speaking of which, that writing turns you so inward at times you think you’re moving completely over the edge, which isn’t pleasant. But even more I despise the alternative—not writing. Sometimes you need to lay off awhile to refill. A day or two is okay, but after that things get tricky. How did Kafka put it? “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

More and more these days, though, I don’t hate much. I try to be grateful for what I’ve accomplished or earned and resent less and less. Because if you’re in this for good you can’t expect much. You write and write and take what you get and feel thankful. The rewards usually aren’t very visible. When I was fresh out of grad school, rejection was a palpable, personal thing. An agent would respond with cutting remarks—less than charitable, cruel, but also helpful and true—and I’d feel disemboweled for weeks. Which doesn’t help. You eventually stop taking things personally. Your skin thickens. It has to, or you won’t last in this business. I read a review weeks ago of Saint X, for example, my new book of poems. The reviewer destroyed it. Did I hate her? Yes, momentarily. Then I reread the review and thought, how sad. Here is a woman who seems to take the craft seriously and has a degree but hasn’t yet learned to read, can’t tune in to the way poetic language evokes. How sad, when journals give reviews to reviewers unprepared to review.

What to do, you ask, about the diminishing hating, and loving? Keep writing. If we’re here for the long haul there’s not much else to do. The best meditation practice, we know, comes in part from not attaching to notions of outcome. The same goes for writing. “The point of sitting is to sit,” my teacher Sasaki Roshi told me, once upon a time at the L.A. Zen Center.  The point of writing, likewise, I think, is to write.

(ST): What can we expect to see from you in the near future?

(KN): My sixth book, a book of translations, is due out this summer at Calypso Editions, a fine arts press in New York. Disappearances, the new book will be called. A selected anthology of micro fictions by a wonderful, highly visible Bolivian writer, Edmundo Paz Soldán. His enigmatic, mellifluous fictions, translated pour moi, have gotten some attention in this country already. They’ve appeared in the Boston Review, Chicago Review, Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, PANK and Arroyo, among others, including two of Norton’s anthologies—Flash Fiction International and Sudden Fiction Latino.

At the moment I am finishing a manuscript of flash fiction, a bizarre, inspired book-to-be I’m calling Burn. I am also at work on a historical novel, set in northern California in the 1880s. And a travel book involving the Philippines and Filipino cuisine. And I am banging together what seems to be a novella, an eighty or ninety page something-or-other that may join a small constellation of old and new stories, all of which I hope to call the next book-to-be.

Sidney Thompson is the author of the short story collection Sideshow, recipient of Foreword Magazine’s Silver Award for the Best Short Story Collection of 2006. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such literary journals as The Southern Review, Carolina Quarterly, Prick of the Spindle, Danse Macabre, Ostrich Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Clapboard House, Ragazine.CC, NANO Fiction, TheNewerYork’s Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, The Story Shack, Beetroot Journal, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, while his poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, A capella Zoo, IthacaLit, The Fertile Source, The Fat City Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Paste Magazine, The Human, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Texas.

Glad You Enjoyed Your Biscuits: Clint Peters' Interview with Poe Ballantine

Clint Peters (CP): Visiting writer Poe Ballantine stopped by Denton in early November this year, where he read at the University of North Texas and we rustled up breakfast at the Old West Cafe. I had the Cowboy and a plateful of homemade biscuits and gravy, and Poe had the Train Robber with cheese. While our bloated stomachs squeezed blood back into our brains, I quizzed Ballantine on the finer points of self-expression, parenthood, Amazon one-star reviews, Jack Kerouac, marriage and fame. We talked mostly in context of his new memoir, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. The book is centered around the unsolved murder of math professor Steven Haataja in Chadron, Nebraska where Ballantine lives, and is also, seamlessly, about Ballantine’s bilingual marriage, his autistic son and wondering where the true heart of America is buried. During Love and Terror’s writing, Poe took part in a documentary about the murder case. The film shares the same names as Poe’s memoir, and a link to filmmaker Dave Jannetta’s kick-starter page is listed below. The book itself is ridiculously funny as it is strangely tragic and page-turning. Somehow, Ballantine has made the Nebraskan panhandle feel both terrible and exotic. I should say too that Poe was kind enough to wait on me at the Old West while I finished my biscuits. 

CP: Your book condenses some material down from about five years to a space of about a year, and you modified a couple of other things for narrative flow. Why do you think some readers get routinely miffed, underwear bunched in a knot by a writer who shapes material openly? Do they think artists don't write nonfiction anymore? 

 

Poe Ballantine (PB). It often depends on the type of underwear, you know, tight underwear bunches more readily, but there’s definitely confusion between creative nonfiction and journalism, and I don’t think there should be. Journalism reports an event from the field objectively and factually as it happened. Its intent is to inform. Creative nonfiction unzips the skin of journalism and reaches down into the penetralia for emotions, meaning, beauty, ideas, and if you’re lucky, art. When you set my account side by side with the so-called factual account of Steven Haataja, the newspaper articles, police reports, autopsy report, etc. there’s really no comparison between which illuminates the record best, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

CP: Tell me about the decision to broach a murder investigation. How did you get the, um, excuse the expression, balls? 

 

PB: I only entered the whale’s mouth on this because Steven lived right around the corner from me and I had spent some time with him and knew many of his colleagues, neighbors, and friends. His death felt personal. I knew that his story could’ve well been mine. I had never written true crime, so it took me a while to get my feet. For a year this was strictly a timeline, a list of suspects, a few press releases, some interviews, a handful of theories and scenarios, and several hundred unanswered questions. Gradually, I enfolded other elements. Early on I realized that Steven’s tragedy needed humanizing, which gave me an opportunity to depict my town and its residents. There might be a debate about whether or not I should’ve undertaken the investigation, but when that whale’s mouth opened, I don’t really think I had any other choice but to walk in. 

 

CP: How would you be as a writer today if you'd graduated from an Ivy League college at 22, entered an MFA program (or MA program like UNT's) and been newly minted at 25?

 

PB: I’m guessing before I fizzled out completely I would’ve written four literary novels, “literary” in this sense meaning plotless, convoluted, ambiguous, and at least three hundred pages too long. My first novel would’ve been about an eccentric and talented but deeply troubled Civil War family, the second a dense and irritating study of political power during the Hoover Administration, the third an examination of race with keen insight and sympathy written in the comfort of my all-white neighborhood. The last novel, right before my suicide, would’ve been about a man strongly resembling myself who struggles with alcoholism and depression from writing literary novels. 

 

CP: Which books would you burn and which would you surreptitiously stick on a shelf at a bro party house if you could? 

 

PB: I’d burn all four of those literary novels I just mentioned. I don’t know what a bro party house is, but in its bookshelf I’d stick this book I just heard of about a 1950’s atomic scientist, who after a bad experiment comes home one evening from the lab disfigured and double in size, eats his wife, children, and two poodles, then has a sex change operation. I can’t remember the name of it.

CP: Does that book exist? That's the kind of thing I remember being tossed around my MFA program. It's certainly no weirder than Pynchon. 

PB: That book is a product of my imagination, Clint, as far as I know. 

CP: Why this writing thing? Is it, like, a calling? Is it therapeutic? You can tell me. 

 

PB: Among my limited talents, writing is what I do best. And though I don’t write for therapy, I often start out with a question I don’t know the answer to. I suspect most readers are refreshed by authors who don’t pretend to know, even after they’ve examined a subject exhaustively. The important thing is to invite the reader along for the ride, and that should include beer and sandwiches as the sun sets over the river. 

 

CP: What's next for you, Arctic exploration? What if, indeed, the killer is caught (officially)? A sequel? 

 

PB: If the killer is caught, a revised edition, perhaps a sequel, would be required, especially in light of the fact that Phoebe Krakatoa has now disappeared and many suspect that she did not meet a good fate. I’d hate to get trapped writing about crime in my own small town, though, so maybe I’ll get the chance to escape to a foreign country.

CP: How do you write and have a family? 

 

PB: The two were incompatible for a long time. I couldn’t have a dog either. I was traveling by bus, staying in small rooms, etc. When I hit my mid forties and had begun to publish regularly and had enough material to last a lifetime, I married and settled down. It’s possible to compose under any kind of circumstances, but I have to assert a daily claim to three or four hours of uninterrupted time. My wife and son understand this. It’s just work, after all.

CP: When you make sentences, do you edit each one or do your pour them out as if gasoline onto a fire that your soul is making? 

 

PB: I pour them out on fire and then go back later and forge them.

CP: Ok, one weird thing I have to ask, did you help decide to put your picture on the cover of your new memoir and did that add another level to the already inherent exhibitionism of writing?

 

PB: I vowed from the beginning that I would never have a photo on a book jacket. Author faces by and large are not meant to be seen, or at least they’re a deterrent to book sales, and I’m no exception. But my publisher wanted a jacket photo for all my books and I went along in the moronic delirium that comes from someone wanting to publish your work. When she saw some of the stills from the documentary about me and my book she decided to plaster my butt ugly mug across the cover. Can’t say I’m crazy about it, but sales and design and all that stuff are her department. 

 

CP: How much does that one no-name, one-star review for your memoir on Amazon rub you?

 

PB: That review, which doesn’t bother me because it barely makes sense, was written by Maria “Susie” Zimmerman who runs a portable burrito wagon in our small town. Maria is married to the criminology professor who took over the investigation of the missing math professor after the local police had fallen into a doze. At first she LOVED my book, then she got to the part where I told about her husband’s campaign to steal my wife. Then she HATED my book and promptly got on Amazon to tell the world. I have heard that she rails to many of her customers about her dislike for my book and how she plans to burn it. She is so obsessed with my book that she often forgets the sour cream or puts on too much sour cream or too many jalapenos or she pours green salsa instead of red. Maria insists I should’ve titled my book The Revenge of Poe. She believes I wrote Love and Terror not to paint my small town or discuss my bi-cultural marriage or my son red-flagged for autism, or to address in detail the mystery of the murdered professor, but to get revenge on her husband for trying to jump my wife’s bones. I kind of like that title, The Revenge of Poe. It brings to mind a gothic tale of a 1950’s atomic scientist, who after a bad experiment comes home one evening from the lab disfigured and double in size, eats his wife, poodles, has a sex change operation and opens a burrito stand. I think I’d LOVE that book and put it on the shelves of bro party houses across the land. Maria’s burritos, by the way, I’ll give four stars.

CP: Does your growing popularity freak you out or does it feel deserved or something else? 

 

PB: I think Pfizer is about to unveil a drug that increases the size of your popularity, but until then, I don’t sense any popularity, growing or otherwise. If it happens I’ll let you know. 

 

CP: Wait, you've had two essays in the Best American series and one in Best American Short Stories, Sy Sanfransky recently put your butter-smeared pin-up in The Sun and Cheryl Strayed drools over your pages. I'd say you've got some momentum. 

 

PB: As far as popularity is concerned, I'm still regularly described as "obscure." Most people in the small town where I've lived for almost twelve years were not aware I was a writer until Love and Terror. A kid at the reading there made a point to say that he'd never heard of me. This is pretty typical, and I like it fine that way, I'd just like to sell a few more books.

CP: Why do people compare you to Kerouac when you read nothing like him? 

 

PB: I don’t get to pick the writers I’m compared to. Kerouac, for a beat writer, is pretty clunky, and the idea of composing without revision off a roll of butcher paper or whatever is absurd to me. But people are attracted to gimmicks and icons and pre-digested stories: oh this is the guy who killed himself because no one would publish him, or this is the woman who put her head in an oven because her boyfriend’s dick looked like a turkey neck, or this is the guy who tried to shoot an apple off his wife’s head and killed her instead, or this is the guy who traveled aimlessly and antiheroically and used a psychopath for his central character. So I need a handle, I suppose, a place where readers can grab on and jump aboard. And since I traveled aimlessly and antiheroically, like Kerouac, I’m kind of stuck with this roll of butcher paper fed into my typewriter.

CP: How did you manage to survive without health insurance, and how did you manage to not slip into television bunkerdom? How did you manage to write as a short order cook? Damn it, how do you have that enviable tenacity? 

 

PB: It was all or nothing for me. I was going to be a writer or wrapped up in the roots of an apple tree, so I wasn’t thinking about insurance or retirement or dental care. My tenacity as you call it, which came from leaving myself no alternatives, often felt more like drowning. I was never asked by anyone to do television, besides there’s too much money in that.

CP: No, I mean, how did you stay away from the perpetual defecation that spews from TV? The average American spends four hours a day gorging on pixel juice.

PB: I’ve logged several thousand hours in front of the telly, but there were years at a time when I didn't have a television or if I did, it was part of the rental — only two or three networks with nothing on. Most of the time there's still nothing on. TV, I notice, especially the news "shows," make me more cynical and inclined to melancholia, and I don't think that's an accidental correlation.

CP: Is there a certain amount of time that has to pass after an event for you to write about it, and if you wait too long will you lose it all? Where, for Goldilocks, is the middle way? 

 

PB: I fill notebooks with detailed notes. If something happens that I recognize as a potential story, I’ll put it down whole as I can as soon as I can. I have written pieces as they happened or as they were happening, but this is unusual. To find the idea or the problem underneath, to explore the penetralia, takes time. The notebooks full of details and sketches that you save will not only jog your memory but help, when the piece is ripe, to bring it to life.

CP: Given your keen sense of place and landscape, have you ever thought that in another dimension you would be a nature writer? Or, are you a nature writer? 

 

PB: Nature writers generally have a well-trained eye, sometimes even two eyes. They’re more visual than aural, is my point, and though I wouldn’t gainsay their powers of imagination, they’re more confined than I like to be to the environments they observe. I paint mostly urban pictures because I’m more interested in people than poppy fields. I’m also more aural than visual, and I spend more time in my mind than outdoors.

CP: Thanks Poe!

PB: Glad you enjoyed your biscuits. 

Links:
-Love and Terror - The Documentary
-Poe Ballantine Making Pizza
-Poe Ballantine Reading at UNT with Introduction by Ryan Flanagan 
-Hawthorne Books


Poe Ballantine has held 75 jobs in thirty states including janitorial work, truck driving, ship riveting, pizza delivery and pest control. He is the author of nine books including the novels God Clobbers Us All and Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, and the essay collections Things I Like about America and 501 Minutes to Christ. Earlier this year he published his first memoir, Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, which takes place in Chadron, Nebraska, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He has had work appear in Best American Short Stories and twice in Best American Essays, including the 2013 collection edited by Cheryl Strayed. He regularly appears in The Sun.

 

Clinton Crockett Peters: A PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas, Clint has an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. He has been published in Upstreet, The Next One, Antimuse, The Grassroots Journal and other literaryish venues. Prior to writing, he was an English language teacher in Kosuge Village, Japan (population 900) and a backpacking, canoeing, and caving wilderness guide in Western America. He lives with his wife in Denton, and they want a dog.