An Interview with Curtis Bauer

Justin Bigos: The poems in your new collection, The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013), create forms for suspense, suddenness, danger. The poems often give the immediate sense (to paraphrase Frost) that something is not exactly right—and now the speaker must open his eyes fully, and respond. I wonder if we can begin by discussing this delicious disorientation you create: in each poem the sense that “[y]ou are suddenly in a life.”

Curtis Bauer: I’m glad that you find it delicious. I am in a state of disorientation often, so it’s a bit like the daily bread . . . I wouldn’t call it delicious, but part of life, that sustenance you need to survive but don’t really think about. I find that I’m often surprised by what is going on around me, or to be more precise . . . what I think is going on or being said. I’ve always been that way, understanding things that people aren’t saying, or seeing something odd in how someone is dressed, but it’s just how the light is falling on them. Even when I was a kid growing up on a farm in Iowa--I asked a lot of questions because I didn’t want to get in trouble, but I seemed to get in trouble anyway--and now as I maneuver between two languages and different cultures, I think I’m even more disoriented. I suppose it’s some kind of dyslexia . . . But to respond to your question more directly, that sudden shifting to which you refer comes out of seeing the literal and figurative in the world. We make associations all the time, and from each association we have others, and on and on. I think many of my poems are preoccupied with that kind of association, and the coming back to the literal, although the literal isn’t always the most interesting.

JB: I do see that associative quality very much in your work, and I’m interested in this idea of “coming back to the literal.” Gerald Stern has called you “a sane realist with a vivid imagination.” I love how he captures the tension you’ve described--between the literal and the figurative--but I suppose I wonder if in some way you privilege or feel a kind of loyalty to the “real” world. And I wonder if perhaps the answer has something to do with the darker, more political notes that emerge later in The Real Cause for Your Absence. Huge question, I know.

CB: This idea of the “real” world is a bit foggy. I won’t get into a discussion of what is real or not, but that questions is something that concerns me. I think I take my understanding of “real” from my father, who is a painter. Some call him a realist, but he prefers the term “representational,” which I think is a more precise illustration of what we do as writers, what I attempt to do as a poet: represent the world I see and understand. The title of the book, for example, demonstrates for me the difficulty of identifying or pinning down one thing, but it represents questions and concerns that surround a relationship, both internal and external. Regarding my preoccupation with some of those darker social and political ideas you mention... we have to start somewhere that is familiar with all of us, or that can be. And that’s what the “real” or “literal” is, a kind of common ground that allows us to start a conversation. The joy for me, and one of the things that interests me the most in poetry, is how that conversation can lead to other conversations that I couldn’t have imagined when I started.

JB: You mention painting and representation. I wonder if we can talk a bit about what Sebastian Matthews, in regards to his own work, has called "the ekphrastic impulse." You have more than a few poems titled "drawings," "still lives," "sketches," etc., and also a poem titled, "While Reading I Think About Drawing." I sense almost a competition between the literary and the visual arts in your poems. One thing the ekphrastic poem allows you to do is signal a purely visual space, while immediately disrupting it by animating the poem.  For example, the poem "To a Woman Standing in a Doorway" creates a purposefully static image in its title, and then the poem begins, "Rush out with me to where the lawns are wide," which moves the poem into the urgent, the happening-right-now, whose frame--at least in the imagination--is widened well beyond a doorway.

CB: I like the idea of animating a poem. I hadn’t really thought about it that way. I am a visual thinker; I see objects, movement, even words on a page sometimes, so for me to include “sketch,” “drawing,” or “still lives” in a poem seems like a natural thing to do, and perhaps it is less meaningful than it appears. At the same time, however, “sketch” and “drawing” have for me the connotation of something quick, something one can do without thinking much, as a kind of exercise that helps you understand a subject or process. I don’t mean to say that I wrote those poems quickly, but there is a certain approach to composition I’m trying to achieve. I spend a lot of time looking at drawings and paintings of artists like Alberto Giacometti, Eduardo Chillida, and Giorgio Morandi, to name only a few; I’m always surprised by how easy they make the process look, how unimportant drawing seems to be for the artist . . . they’ve got sketchbook after sketchbook filled with them . . . in fact I have a Giacometti book that reproduces drawings on napkins, theater programs, and newspapers he did while waiting in coffee shops and bars. Behind that act is something extraordinarily important--why else would they spend so much time doing it?--and I think it has to do with practice: the practice of looking at something and attempting to represent its essence; the practice of craft. So really, there’s no competition between the literary and visual, but a fusion of the two . . . or a walking hand in hand with one and the other.

You mention the poem, “To A Woman Standing in a Doorway,” and I think that’s a fine example of how a still life can lead to other ideas and images. This poem and many of the others are really about how I look, about how I learn to see beyond the literal and consider textures and tones, light and shadows, which is very much the way a painter or visual artist looks, I guess. At the same time, I’m giving myself an opening to experiment, to see where the piece goes without the self-imposed restrictions of say, “this is going to be a poem; I’m going to publish this eventually.” I guess what I’m getting at is that I feel a certain sense of relief and informality with the word “sketch” and that allows me to explore ideas I might not have explored to begin with. I can follow a line I put down and continue to make the sketch bigger, as if expanding the frame of the picture.

JB: There is definitely a really refreshing informality in your work, even at the level of the line—but of course this informality is a kind of form. In your recent interview with 32 Poems, Emilia Phillips gave a wonderful close-reading of your use of line, especially enjambment, in “Looking at 12 White Things,” showing how each line enacted what she called a “dynamism of emotion, space, and experience.” I also notice this dynamism in your length of line and stanza. For example, in your poem “Colony Collapse Disorder,” these lines:

            Like a horse

            ridden so hard for home it gets you there but its wind is broken, which means

            its breath can’t fill its lungs, even walking to the water tank exhausts it;

            it’s alive,

            but there is no beauty there

            but the beauty of the dying.

The poem alternates between the monostich, couplet, and tercet, and it is the monostiches that are the very short lines in the poem. If you compose poems according to a sonic kind of “sketching,” what it is that drives a very short, self-contained monostich versus, say, a long-lined, enjambed couplet or tercet? And how many drafts does it typically take you to find out?

CB: Let me start with the number of drafts. I wonder if there is a poet who knows how many drafts it takes to discover the form of a poem. I suppose there are many, but it makes me think of that lollipop commercial with the owl . . . “how many licks does it take . . ? One, two, three, crunch!”

It’s hard for me to know, to be honest. I suppose it depends on the poem, what I understand it to be about. Sometimes I think I know and then I realize I was mistaken and the poem turns in a different direction. In one of the poems in The Real Cause For Your Absence, I discovered the blank verse lines when I was revising it for the final manuscript submission.

“Colony Collapse Disorder” came about fairly quickly, in maybe ten drafts. And what you call the “sonic sketching”—I love this idea and I will steal it from you—is a consequence of the quickly turned ideas. This poem fixes its attention on at least three different subjects—bees, the neighbors, the speaker’s father—and it is a result of my preoccupation with the interconnectedness of things, which means another subject in the poem is relationships: our relationship with nature, with the people in our community, with our loved ones, even though they might be far away. This poem fuses these subjects together; the collage of these different subjects into lines of diverse lengths causes both a physical and intellectual response for me . . . and I hope for the reader. I want the varying line and stanza lengths to demonstrate how quickly our minds can move from one idea to another; how I look for links or threads that are common between seemingly uncommon subjects. It’s jarring and surprising, but greatly rewarding.

I don’t necessarily compose a poem outright thinking of sounds; as I said before, I am attracted to images . . . but the sonic quality grows out of the refinement of the line as I discover where the poem is going. That sonic sketching helps give me a clearer, fuller representation of what the poem is about. How many drafts does it take? Four? Twelve? Thirty-five? Crunch!

JB: Let’s turn our discussion toward translation. You translate into English from the Spanish, including the poetry of José de María Romero Barea, Juan Antonio González Iglesias, and Luis Muñoz. On the flip side, you have had your own poems translated into Spanish, by Romero Barea and Diãna Vigule, in the volume Spanish Sketchbook (Ediciones en Huida, 2012). Please forgive my semi-literacy in Spanish, but I find some interesting translations in Spanish Sketchbook. Here is an example, the final lines from the opening poem, “Three Spain Sketches”:

            or the people on the platform

            have said goodbye and started to walk away.

is translated into . . .

            o es la multitud

            que ha dicho adios y vuelve a casa.

I’m struck by the difference between “people” and a multitude, a crowd; and also by the difference between walking away and returning home. These seem like huge differences! So, I have a few questions here. Can you talk about the experience of seeing your words translated so creatively into another language? Were you involved collaboratively? And on the other side of it: how do you balance—or do you?—the obligation to remain loyal to words (and syntax and lines and music) in another language, with the desire to create something your own, in your native tongue? (The conflict just reared its head when, above, I wasn’t sure whether to type “translated as,” or “translated into” . . .)

CB: It’s a real honor to have my poems translated into another language; it means that someone appreciates the work enough that he wants to dedicate hours and hours to the hard work of making your poems into poems in another language. My poems have been translated into French and Portuguese as well, and another Spanish poet is working on translating my first book into Spanish. I feel extremely lucky. That said, I have a feeling I must be a difficult poet to translate since I understand Spanish fairly well, and I know what my poems sound like in English, and what their sonic approximation would be in Spanish. I ask a lot of questions and make comments, and I worry that my translators might get annoyed, so I try to pull back and let them do their work, their way.

There are several poems in Spanish Sketchbook I would have translated differently, but I also think it’s important for the translator to convey her own interpretation of the poem. However, I also think it’s important to maintain a musicality that parallels the original. I think José de María and Diàna did a good job with the book. José would send me drafts he had already vetted with Diàna, and I’d tell him what I thought; initially, he took many more liberties than he did later on. We discussed this, mainly because I thought he was making the poems into something that I hadn’t written, more of a kind of summary than an actual poem. In the end, even with the little departures you identified, this book allowed me to reach readers I wouldn’t have otherwise had the opportunity to speak to. Maybe the translations aren’t perfect, but I’m not sure any translation ever is. I’m grateful to José and Diàna, as well as to the editors at Ediciones en Huida, for their kindness and attention.

The second part of your question is one I think about all the time, especially when I’m translating more than one author at a time. I’m always worried about my translations of different poets sounding the same in English, perhaps sounding too much like Curtis Bauer, or too much like poems that are translated literally, just words carried across that chasm between languages. At the same time, this is something writers think about often, right? We worry about doing the same thing over and over, being repetitive. Okay, I won’t speak for everyone. I worry about sounding too much like myself all the time. I want to be challenged by the complexity of language, as well as challenge it. When I translate poetry I find an extra challenge that opens my ears and vision more than if I were only thinking in English. But back to your question: I think about meaning, of course, and I’d say I’m loyal to the meaning of the poem, but meaning is murky in poetry. I can identify a literal meaning for the words, but there is metaphoric and sonic meaning as well. English and Spanish syntax is different, so there are times when I bend typical Spanish syntax into typical English syntax; when a poem uses uncommon syntax, however, I make sure that I also carry that across. There is a risk of the poem sounding unnatural in English, but if the poet wrote the poem a particular way in Spanish, I have to make sure that decision is evident in my English version.

My approach to translation? I read the poem as I would a poem in English. Then I read it again, and then again, thinking about what is happening in the poem, which means identifying its complexities, and then I read it again and consider the best way to transfer those nuances into English. Most often, it’s not the literal poem that comes across, but a combination of sound, music, and sense. I don’t feel like I’m making my own poem, because I have material to work with. But, the translation is my understanding of the most significant elements in the  poem, which I guess makes it my own poem in a way. Am I contradicting myself? I suppose so. Every translator will approach the same poem differently . . . because of our different tastes, how we hear words and rhythms, how we understand metaphors, and how we balance all of that with our own language use.  

JB: I love the moments in your poems in which we can see issues of language and translation embodied, animated—often with an erotic, even violent, charge. For example, your poem, “Still Life with a Bed in the Middle,” begins, “While I sleep my wife writes on my back.” In the poem, “Recital,” the speaker is seduced by the voice of a Polish poet reading her work, a voice that “undresses” the speaker. In the opening poem of The Real Cause for Your Absence (and, interestingly, the closing poem of Spanish Sketchbook), “If This is What It Takes,” the speaker says, “A blade, I understand its language.” In each case, you have somehow mingled the pleasures of the flesh with the pleasures of language—especially language at a remove, the seductive foreign tongue. Have you thought about this erotic/linguistic tension in your work? What do you make of it?

CB: I have thought a lot about this tension, as well as about the erotics of language. We often think of the erotic as related to something we see or feel, but I think speaking another language, or even speaking our first languages well, can be extremely pleasurable. At the same time we have to remember that all objects communicate something, and we need to be more astute linguists, perhaps, in order to understand and be able to translate what a knife, for example, has to say to the hand, or what the leaf says to the shoulder it falls upon. Maybe these aren’t the most interesting conversations, but I think there are times when objects have more to say than we realize. And to be able to read someone’s touch on your skin . . . that just feels good, plain and simple.

To return to the core of your question, I do see a relationship between the linguistic and the physical. Part of what I think you’re identifying in my work comes from my constant engagement with two different languages. I’m blessed (and cursed, I suppose) to have acquired easy access to both English and Spanish, and I move from one to another without thinking too much about it. Although I may not confuse words too often, there are times when I do use Spanish syntactical structures when I’m speaking in English, and I think that mistake, and the awareness of its consequences, makes my writing in English more complex. I don’t mean to say that I think I’m a difficult writer, but I think my phrases contain fairly complex structures and odd juxtapositions of nouns and adjectives, and this can result in something surprising and pleasurable.

One more thing I want to add, which is extremely important for me, and this comes from my graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College, studying under Thomas Lux among many other amazing poets, and with poets like Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal to name only a few . . . and that is the spoken word. There I learned how to read poetry out loud and to think about how the utterance, the spoken word, requires that breath moves within us, creating an energy that is unmatched. When words fill your mouth, you have a physical reaction you don’t have if you’re only listening to that voice in your head. When you add to this experience words and/or structures that are uncommon or foreign I think there’s something even more striking about how our bodies and intellect interpret this, something I’d like to think makes the poem, in my case, more memorable.

JB: That’s an interesting point you make about bilingual syntax. I remember when Aleksandar Hemon published his first books critics marveled at his prose style, in particular the strange syntax and diction of it. Hemon was writing in a new language to him, English, and the challenge produced some dazzling writing. You talk about breath, and about listening. Another kind of poem you write is the persona poem--for example, your poem “Aviary.” And I love that I don’t realize it’s a persona poem until the speaker’s “brothers,” toward the end of this short lyric, “fly, digesting over acres.” Is there also a kind of listening required to write persona poems? And is there any difference between this kind of listening and the listening required of poems in a human voice?

CB: I don’t know if it is another kind, or a more precise listening, one that captures the different modes of communication of the non-human. Rocks, for example, must speak a language—you can hear them shouting as you walk over them, or as they plunge into a river. Or is that the water speaking? Or the conversation between the two? I suppose you could say I am imposing the human voice upon the non-human, or the other, but one of my preoccupations in life—and this is probably a shortcoming of mine—is that I’m thinking about and trying to inhabit the other, sometimes more than I think about myself, what I’m actually doing. I wonder if this comes from my early wish of wanting to be someone else, or that interest in the foreign cousin speaking another language who had come to visit, and then trying to mimic the sounds of his German or Welsh or whatever when I was alone. In linguistics they talk about playing with language, how we are good at that when we are kids, but then we tend to stop playing and mimicking as we grow older. I guess I didn’t know that I was supposed to stop that mimicking. Maybe that’s how I learned to speak Spanish with a lesser accent than most American speakers—I didn’t mind losing myself. And I think that’s what it takes to write a good poem: less self and more other. That’s what I aspire to, anyway.

JB: Earlier you mentioned how objects have a life, how they speak to us. This sounds wonderfully Swedenborgian to me! One of my favorite poems in The Real Cause for Your Absence is “Jacaranda Love Song.” I would like you to talk about how this poem transforms from a sad poem centering on a lyric “I” who sings the synesthesia of “lungs hungry for a different color,” to a poem focused on the wood of the jacaranda as it is cut into a flamenco guitar and “knows it can no longer push out flowers/ and perfume,” and finally to a poem focused on the guitarist who picks up his instrument and takes agency over the poem. I’m particularly struck by the seeming disappearance of the speaker of the poem’s beginning.

CB: Thanks for your generous reading of this poem. Maybe this is what I’m getting at when I say I’m willing to give up my self, remove myself from the poem. In the end, the “I,” the tree, and the music are all connected. It’s important for the speaker in this poem to identify a need, recognize it, and then listen to what the landscape has to say in response. There are answers to our queries in the world surrounding us, don’t you think? The answers in this poem build upon each other, are connected to one another. You note the lyric “I” moving to the wood, but between those two there’s a slightly smaller transformation, movement from the individual to the communal: “my lungs are hungry . . .” to “our breath/ is heavy, green, and the jacaranda is the tree/ these people peel . . .” The “I” comes back to praise the passive voice, and it is here that the poem departs from the individual and dwells in the “other,” just as the passive voice allows for the individual to be removed from the action. Our actions and observations are inside the actions, of course, just as the figure is inside the piece of marble the sculptor takes from the quarry, just as the music is inside the tree that becomes the guitar. As I work toward this uncovering, perhaps revealing is a better word for it; I better understand how closely connected the things of this world are.

JB: Let’s end our discussion with birds. There are a lot of birds in your poems, and one poem I particularly admire is “Rant.” It’s a poem that celebrates the grackle, which is a bird that does not seem to be appreciated much—at least by Texans—perhaps because there are so many of them. Is it weird to think something less beautiful because there is so much of it? A less ponderous question: why so many birds in your poems?

CB: Ha! I think a lot of wine and a lot of books are really beautiful things, as well as a lot of birds, whether they are grackles, crows, sparrows, or hummingbirds. I like the grackle because it’s the closest bird to the crow in the part of Texas where I live. Believe it or not, there are no crows there, and the crow is one of my favorite birds: they’re so smart, so observant I feel like an ignorant child when I’m around them. I’ve learned a lot from watching them over the years, and now from grackles; both seem to know how stupid we are, even laughing at our odd habits of watering lawns so we can then mow them, stretching on ladders to paint some invisible corner soffit piece or clear a gutter.

Why so many birds? The short answer: they can fly and I can’t. That’s amazing. I can’t help but see the bird as a metaphor most of the time. I know it’s real and literal, but when I watch swallows flit around at dusk, for example, they remind me of thoughts, ideas that circle around some central conversation in search of some kind of logic—most likely that’s because my thoughts are usually scattered. Other times I see them as punctuation marks on the page the sky is. I hope not to sound too corny, but I really wish I could have been a bird. Writing some of these poems helps me understand what I think it must be like to be one.

A native of Iowa, Curtis Bauer was raised a son of farmers and artists and has lived in England, Mexico, Spain, and the Eastern and Southwest United States. He is the author of three poetry collections: his first, Fence Line (2004), won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize; Spanish Sketchbook (2012) is a bilingual English/Spanish collection published in Spain; and The Real Cause for Your Absence (2013) is his most recent. Bauer is also a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish, his publications including Talisman (Editorial Anantes, 2012), by José de María Romero Barea; Eros Is More (Alice James Books, 2014), by Juan Antonio González Iglesias; as well as individual poems and prose from numerous Spanish and South American writers in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Indiana Review, and The American Poetry Review, among others. He is the publisher and editor of Q Ave Press Chapbooks, the Spanish Translations Editor for From the Fishouse, Assistant Editor, and “Emerging Spanish Poets” Series Editor for Vaso Roto Ediciones. He teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

An Interview with Kara Candito

Justin Bigos: In the poem “Notes for a Novice Flâneur,” from your debut collection, Taste of Cherry, the speaker says, “Try to think of all this as a seduction.” This imperative captures both the adventurousness and vulnerability of the voices in the book, who are often aware of the distanced, cinematic qualities of lust and loss, as well as the immediate bluntness of the stuff itself. Can you talk a bit about this tension in the book?

Kara Candito: First of all, life in New York City, where I wrote or started to write many of the poems in Taste of Cherry, forced me to develop a self-preserving strategy of distancing myself from daily experience. Until I lived there, I was one of those people who shamelessly absorbed the energy of those around her. After a few months of crying or getting worked up over dumb quotidian stuff, because some guy on the street called me a “dumb bitch,” or hit me with his bicycle and then demanded that I pay for the cable that broke when he collided with my arm (true story), or shouted “get the fuck out of the way,” then pushed me out of the subway door, I had to make an unofficial decision to do my best to move through daily life without getting too attached to the permeable me of it. Enter the flâneur. In most places in the U.S., people who enjoy a certain amount of privilege or material comfort spend time in public space when they want to, not because the bedroom that they share with a roommate is smaller than most suburban bathrooms. So, whether it’s Paris or New York and regardless of the weather or the hour, the city becomes an extension of one’s private space, which is shared with millions of others. Once I was able to, for the most part, disassociate myself from the self that had to take up space and therefore piss off others, I became a kind of professional observer, constantly cropping and mediating the scene, and applying artificial lighting until I achieved the desired affect.

This psychic distancing mirrored the kind of double-consciousness that I developed as a woman in her mid-to-late twenties, grappling with the adventurousness/vulnerability binary that comes along with consciously breaking the rules (of social, sexual, cultural, and familial decorum) and living with the consequences. What people have seen as the cinematic performativity or, at times, sensationalism of the poems was, for me, an enactment of the ways in which women at this life stage can perform power, through graphic myth-making or the quest for pleasure-for-pleasure’s sake, without its gendered consequences. Naturally, none of these fantasies can sustain itself in the real world, for men or women, but especially not for women. But these quests, both experiential and literary, seem to me as authentic as their inevitable failures.

The collection’s latent focus might be described as an obsession with strategies of representing how women acquire or perform power, and how to poetically represent self, other, and context in ways that honor their complexity.

JB: That’s a fascinating answer, and I like that you unabashedly connect the poems to your own life. While many of your poems do have an autobiographical feel, especially as they accumulate, the poems in the middle section of Taste of Cherry, titled “Portraits,” are written in various personae, including a burlesque dancer inspired by the short-lived HBO show Carnivale, two characters from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and the main character of Margaret Atwood’s The Hand Maid’s Tale. Can you talk a bit about the persona poem, and why you are drawn to it? 

KC: In a sense, I see every voice-driven poem as a kind of persona poem, a linguistic performance that privileges certain things and minimalizes or conceals others. While the premises of many of the poems in Taste of Cherry stemmed from autobiography, I don’t see the poems as autobiographical, as much as psychologically or emotionally mimetic. In terms of voice, the “Portraits” section of Taste of Cherry helped me to expand the affective aperture of the collection by masquerading in costumes that let me speak to its concerns or obsessions of different voices.

I think that I was drawn to the voices of Atwood’s handmaid, Cady Compson, a burlesque dancer, and a subversive teenage boy because they enabled me to project my interests onto a new screen.  How do women deal with the consequences of sex, desire, and repression/oppression? How does male desire get translated into violence? Of course, the danger of inhabiting a voice that’s dramatically other is that you might under-imagine or over-simplify. The payoff seems to me worth the risk, however. I remember writing “Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis” (in which I revisited early adolescence from the perspective of a boy) in the course of a few days, and inhabiting the voice to such an extent that I knew how he sounded, what he thought, hoped, and feared. I’m proud of that poem because, like most of the poems I write that I think are worthwhile, it was a process of exploration. Writing it meant breaking down imaginative and psychic barriers.

The persona poem form, when it’s working, permits this radical restructuring of the world and the self’s role in it. In some of the poems in my second collection, Spectator, I inhabit the voice of Lorca. These persona poems are like conversations with Lorca that allow me to explore obsessions with death and violence in a “safe way,” and to silence the voice of the workshop, which equates emotion in poetry with sentimentality or melodrama. Speaking through Lorca, inhabiting a different language, I can fess up to caring about shit, to fantasizing about my own annihilation and/or non-existence. I haven’t yet been able to write into that as a naked first-person speaker, although the Lorca persona poems have given me an entry point.

JB: It’s interesting that you have experienced the poetry workshop as unfairly suspicious of emotion in poems. I have experienced that too, but also the workshop that seems to demand that poems reveal some emotional or vulnerable quality. As someone who teaches poetry workshops, are you able to maneuver between those two extremes in the classroom?

KC: That’s a great question. First of all, I think that “the workshop” (by which I mean “the workshop” in general, while simultaneously acknowledging that there is no one “workshop”) mentality has evolved since my MFA years in the early 2000s, when postmodernism was still very much suspicious of subjectivity and, by default, specific emotional engagement. I remember being blasted for writing what was, in retrospect, a melodramatic poem, by someone who was amped up on a particular reading of Perloff. I think that “the workshop” pendulum has since swung back towards more emotional engagement. I do, however, see “the workshop’s” attitude towards emotion, especially within the context of a lyric poem or a lyric-narrative, as being either simplifying or limited. Whether it’s a image-driven descriptive meditation, or a dialectical argument, or a lyric/narrative hybrid, I think that “the workshop” wants to see a neat relationship between image, context, and emotional response. When emotional response gets too messy, plural, or urgent, “the workshop” can pull back and call foul. It’s probably best to explain via example. I remember reading Lynda Hull’s “Aubade” during a summer workshop with Tracy K. Smith. The premise of the poem is an aubade without a lover; an insomniac speaker surveying her surroundings and experiencing an alone-in-the-early-morning ache for human connection. At some point, Tracy said that “the workshop” would have been adamant about cutting the poem’s final line: “Answer me. What am I to make of these signs?” I couldn’t agree more. The final line leaps from image to rhetorical urgency. It insists, rather than backs off at the last minute. In doing so, it raises the temperature of the poem just enough to make some readers uncomfortable or resistant.

As an instructor, I see this dynamic quite frequently. I try to direct “the workshop” conversation towards what a poem seems to be doing, what it seems to want to do or be capable of, and the possible gaps between the two. Sometimes poems want to make the reader uncomfortable in a way that corresponds to context or emotional response. Often, in an undergraduate workshop, I think that poems want to move right for the emotional vulnerability moment without first establishing a contract with the reader, and creating a connection between speaker and reader. So, I use the universal/specific binary during workshop discussions, and ask students to describe which of the two they see in a poem and where. I think that strong poems have to strike a balance between the two, but that sometimes, as in the case of Lynda Hull, a poet who is dear to my poetry heart, the reader arrives at the universal by investing her/himself in the speakers’ subjective realities. And sometimes the inverse is the case.

JB: The title of Taste of Cherry is inspired by the film of the same name by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and there are many references to film throughout the book. As I said earlier, the book’s speakers often see themselves from a kind of cinematic distance, as if their lives are a kind of performance. If cinema was indeed the art form of the 20th century, is it still? Either way, what can poetry offer that film cannot?

KC: I want to defer to O’Hara here: “Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.”

But seriously, I’m going to sound like a child of the ‘80s, but all of the new (or newish) technology, be it Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, personal blogging, Instagram, Pinterest (someone explain this one to me, please), etc, has made each of us the stars of our own heavily edited and hyperreal movies. I think that poetry has, in one way or another, begun to respond to the life-as-movie phenomenon of the 21st century. I think poetry can function to expose the absurdity of contemporary life in all of its voyeurism and constructedness, while still acknowledging and affirming a kind of integrity or authenticity that an Instagram filter clouds. 

JB: But how does poetry do this, and why is it more “authentic” than Instagram? I know I’m pushing you a bit here, so feel free to tell me I’m a jerk.

KC: You’re a big, tall jerk, Justin. You’re a huge jerk. No, seriously, what I mean to say is probably really simple and obvious: poetry is language. Language requires more active engagement than most film. Often, students say that reading is boring. But what I think they mean is it’s tiring. It doesn’t let you just turn on and receive. You have to parse and participate and make your own connections between signifier and signified and all of that stuff. In this sense, I especially admire contemporary poetry that harnesses language in cinematic ways. For example, I’ve been reading Lynn Melnick’s If I Say I Should Have Hope, and one thing that these poems do is level the cinematic montage into a few compact sentences. For example, the opening lines of “Blackout”:

What’s left but booze and pin-up,

a generator humming that called your car to park.

We’re finished with beauty:

inner beauty, sloppy beauty, my beauty.

Once upon a time you fashioned a collapse

and called it us, what we would have called living

had there been less cocaine.

The speaker fashions “a collapse” of image, time and cultural referent, and then attaches this collapse to the language of fairy tales. The reader has to parse the images and the different linguistic registers. It’s an active process of revelation for me, one that isn’t accessible via cinema, or the internet. This is language doing what it can do, and the reader responding to what it does actively, drawing connections between the different registers. I think that experimental cinema can definitely access this thought-patterning, but like poetry, it’s an underappreciated art form.

JB: We’ve talked about persona, specifically as a voice, a lyrical self. In your poem “Postcard,” the speaker says, “I write;/ it’s called memory, then story.” How important is narrative to you as a poet?  Do you see Taste of Cherry as a kind of story?

KC: Narrative is crucial to me as a poet. My recent work uses a lot more fragmentation and disjunction, but narrative is still the primary force that’s getting scrambled. I see Taste of Cherry as having a narrative arc, but not in the linear narrative sense. In fact, I see many books of poems as having been constructed with a narrative sensibility, whether the evolution or movement is experiential, geographic, psychic, rhetorical, emotional, or all of the above. Does this make sense? Do you agree?

JB: It does, and I do agree. I’m shamelessly attracted to narrative in poems, and I’ve been thinking of other poets whose work reminds me of yours, in terms of intensely lyrical narrative. One is Ai, a poet I have loved for a long time and whose Collected I am just starting to read. Her poems are voices, but they often seem to contain an entire life.  Another poet I was thinking of is Joe Bolton, a poet who still seems unrecognized by most poets. In your poem “La Bufera: Our Last Trip to Sicily,” I find this: “already half in love/ with the ruined picture.” At the end of Bolton’s poem “The Parthenon at Nashville,” another great love poem, the two lovers are “amazed/ At the distance from which they see themselves:/ Luminous, hardly human,/ And already half in love with the beautiful ruins.”  I love the uncanny parallel between his poem and “La Bufera.” Are you familiar with Bolton’s work?

KC:  Weird! No, I don’t know his work. I do, of course, know Ai’s, but not as well as I’d like to. Like Hayden Carruth, whose Collected sits on my desk at this very moment (thanks for the recommendation in Denton), Ai is a poet I want to read more of. And I want to know Bolton’s work, but based on this line from “The Parthenon at Nashville,” I feel like that’s saying I want to masturbate more, which can be a healthy urge. 

JB: I recently heard an intellectual claim that writers in the year 2013 need to be cosmopolitan in their art – with the implication that to be otherwise is to be obsolete. While I strongly disagree with him, I do find myself attracted to the transnational/cosmopolitan/multilingual settings and insights of many of the poems in Taste of Cherry. Here are some of my favorite lines, from “Egypt Journal: Christmas at the Great Pyramid”: “I want to remember you with your ankles crossed/ around the hump of a camel, explaining that the Bedouin call them/ ships of the desert, even as you send text messages/ in three languages to your friends in Brooklyn.” Can you weigh in on what the intellectual said? Do you feel a pressure or duty to be a cosmopolitan poet?

KC:  I’m glad you enjoyed “Egypt Journal,” Justin. I think that the definition of cosmopolitanism is becoming more and more slippery these days. I can’t say that I believe it’s a necessary trait for contemporary writers, but I acknowledge that many of the poems I enjoy treat the poetic self and the surrounding world as plural and multiple. Oftentimes, this multiplicity is expressed through variety and inconsistency. Personally, I find my selves by getting lost. Getting lost can mean thinking and writing in other languages and inhabiting new psychic and emotional geographies.

JB: Can we end our discussion with a hint of what’s in your next book? Can you talk a bit more about the “fragmentation and disjunction” you’re becoming drawn to?

           

KC: The poems in my second collection, Spectator, deal with the different valences of immigrant experience, from the literal narratives that I’ve inherited from my father’s family who came to the US from southern Italy, to my marriage to a Mexican citizen and our subsequent navigation of the US immigration system, to more lyric poems that approach the displacement and strangeness of the immigrant psyche in conceptual ways. As with anything newish, I do better with examples, so I’ll conclude with an excerpt from “Ars Amatoria: So You Want to Marry a Foreign National,” a ten-page sequence from the collection, written in fragments that suggest a shattered narrative:

XIV.

In the coming months you will feel like a traitor,

a tragic character and a humanitarian.

XV.

The American sensibility betrays an ignorance of scale.

XVI.

From an airplane landing at dusk, taillights tourniquet

the Angel of Independence monument,

XVII.

like the lit wagons of pilgrims,

XVIII.

or strands of Christmas lights

strung by political prisoners in a laogai.

XIX.

It has been said that suffering makes free.

XX.

Already you are abandoning the idea of audience.

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has been published in such journals and anthologies as Blackbird, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Best New Poets 2007, The Rumpus Original Poetry Anthology, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012). A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute, Candito is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville. She lives in Madison, WI, where she co-curates the Monsters of Poetry reading series (www.karacandito.com).

An Interview with Dana Levin

Justin Bigos: First, I’d like to thank you for visiting UNT last week as part of our Visiting Writers Series, and reading poems from your tremendous book, Sky Burial, as well as some new work.  Before the reading, you gave a Q&A session, and one thing you said is that all poetry needs to become “fictive.”  If Sky Burial was inspired by the deaths of your mother, father, and sister—all in a period of four years—how did you manage to move these poems beyond the realm of biography, and into the “fictive”?

Dana Levin: It’s not that I think that poetry “needs” to be fictive—it’s that it is fictive: it’s a form of art, which is not life, no matter how closely an artist may feel compelled to adhere to fact. The minute you’re moved to turn life into art, you enter a fictive space—which is to say a space for making, inventing, which demands flexibility, in terms of seeing and following where composition may be directing you. And the drive to bend, blur, or ignore factual truth was crucial to me personally, in terms of writing myself out from under the crush of grief.

I always think of Ted Hughes saying about Sylvia Plath, “If she couldn’t get a table out of it, she was quite happy to get a chair.” Abandoning the table for the developing chair often involves two primary things: listening to the poem (it only converses in what the poet receives as hunches, obsessions, epiphanies, and all other manner of telepathic communiques from the Muse) and (thus) relinquishing initial intent or spark for a poem, autobiographically, structurally. Plath’s famous poem, ‘Tulips,’ is often read as a poem about being carted off to the psych ward, but in fact she was on the verge of a burst appendix! I like the psych ward narrative: it’s so dramatic! It’s so Plath! Factual truth can be very deflating.

JB: You have a poem in the anthology, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral.  Can you tell us a bit about this project, and what attracts you to it?

DL: The editors―GC Waldrep and Joshua Corey―have curated a significant anthology. The state of the pastoral poem, the poem located in nature, is now a changed poem: climate-changed. For myself, I had the realization a few years ago that my meditative encounters with nature―whether amongst flowers in a container garden, or on a rock above the sea, or walking among trees―were tinged with melancholy and worry; that I was having an elegiac experience of nature any time I was focused on it.

I found this disturbing, true, and fascinating. I knew I could not be the only poet having the experience of the natural field being a suddenly changed field―the most significantly changed field since industrialization drove the Romantics towards their nostalgic evocations of meadows and bowers―which the literal heft of The Arcadia Project confirms. The poem published in the anthology, “Spring,” from Sky Burial, is in a section the editors call Necropastoral: the dead field, the field of the dead. That we can even have such a section in an anthology dedicated to “nature poems” is telling.

JB: In your Q&A, you said “the gift of Sky Burial” is that you will now include significant research as a part of each book you write from now on.  What research have you been doing lately, and what kinds of poems have you been writing?

DL: Appetite, mutation, oracles, End Times, nature, technology, the future and the ravings of the mad seem to be driving my current poems. Chernobyl post-meltdown and the way viruses “read” our DNA beckon―but all that research has to get wrung through the lyric washing machine, or I may as well write a series of reports. I spent a lot of time recently seeking and reading journalistic accounts of the birth of Telegraphic Age in the early 1900’s―perusing facsimiles of long defunct magazines with their tiny Edwardian script.

JB: Thanks again for your visit, Dana.  And for this conversation.

DL: I had a great time visiting UNT! Thanks so much for hosting me, and talking to me here.

 Dana Levin is the author of In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, Agni, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her honors include  fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and in the Warren Wilson College MFA program.

An Interview with Kyle McCord

Justin Bigos: Reading your latest book, Sympathy from the Devil, I feel like I’m under the spell of a young poet who is drunk on words, who revels in the sheer delight of making shit up, combined with an older poet who is acutely aware that the poems being uttered are artifice, and ultimately surrender themselves in language (“We don’t stand a chance in our own vocabulary”).  It’s a tension I admire very much.  Can you talk about the voice in this book – if you do indeed hear it as one speaker – and how this voice got in your head?

Kyle McCord:  Man, this is a difficult question.  I think the most honest answer is that all of the voices are different, and all of them are some exaggeration of me.  I’m the befuddled director, the dog lost in space, the broken-hearted dilettante being comforted by Satan.  I’m hesitant to make that statement because there’s obviously always a limit to the type of self the poem can capture.  Because poetry demands abbreviation, there’s a weight on the poet to distill the images, people into discrete perceptions.  The self is no exception, which is one reason why it’s often erroneous to associate the speaker with the self.  It’s too limiting.

I wouldn’t make the same argument—that the speaker was some permutation of me—with my previous two books.  They weren’t personal in the way that Sympathy from the Devil is.  The voice and some of the balance between the surrender to language and the poem’s self-consciousness that you’re hearing probably finds its source in two competing impulses:

After my first book came out, I went on tour for three weeks with Keith Montesano.  Keith’s book Ghost Lights, which I highly recommend, bloomed from a completely different universe than mine.  Keith’s tutelage had been under Christopher Bakken then David Wojahn.  In all his poems, you could hear these small echoes of Larry Levis, who he loves.  During my MFA, I read Ashbery, Lorca, Ruefle.  There was always someone who wanted to talk about post-modernism or the New York School.  I really fed on a type of poem that I now sort of imagine had itself as an audience.  That’s the best way I can describe it.  And that’s a type of poetry that I still love. 

Anyway, at the end of every reading, Keith would read two poems he’d written for his wife Jess, who he’d married the year before.  They were these incredibly lovely, short poems, and, beyond the fact that they were hard as hell to follow, they were the kind of poems I began to feel I desperately wished I’d written.

The backstory on Sympathy from the Devil is awful, and if you know me, you’ve probably heard it.  I traveled to a residency in Australia that ended up being a scam.  The owner of the residency wouldn’t let the residents leave, so I eventually bribed a bus driver to drive me and another poet back to a bus stop in the middle of New South Wales where we were eventually rescued by another bus traveling to Sydney.  I was writing the book in hostels in Sydney and Melbourne for a month.  These were the kind of places where the police would break into one’s room in the middle of the night looking for guys who’d assaulted someone down at the pub. 

At that point, I felt like I needed the kind of emotional crux that I heard in Keith’s poems, but I still wanted my poems to be playful and ironic.  The voice in Sympathy from the Devil is often trying to convey an outlandish experience with a shadow of sincerity that is quite genuine.  James Tate once told me that the best poems make you laugh and cry.  He failed to mention that it’s nearly impossible to write them.  It’s hard to write a poem where the speaker can discuss both making a silly hat for Sparkles and the idea that people you know might really be in hell right now and that you might be one of them.  Resolving, dissolving, and intertwining this desire for play and pleasure with the demand that a poem has to mean something to me and arise from some lived experience decides so many issues in terms of voice.

JB: I like that you refer to yourself as the “director” of the poems.  There is something theatrical at work in most of these poems, and although there is much observed absurdity, we sense a mind putting it all together, rearranging it, stepping back and reconsidering the rearrangement, all while the camera is rolling.  Very French New Wave of you, Sir!  Do you find film an inspiration for your writing?  The film Love Liza, which is one of the strangest and most beautiful films I have ever seen, shows up in one of your poems, which declares, “I think it’s impossible to remain alive/ without idolizing beauty even a little. Even if there comes a day you can’t/ even detect the smell of gas on your own fingertips.”

KM: I’m so glad you’re a fan of that movie too.  If anyone you know questions Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s genius as an actor, tell them to go see that movie.  I don’t think Hoffman’s character’s friendship with Jack Kehler’s character is something I would have believed if I saw it on the page, but on screen it’s perfect.  It’s such a weird and dour premise, but the movie evolves into this study on how broadly and quietly tragedy can evolve amidst the backdrop of a film.   

Film is huge for me.  During college, I took a class in documentary film from a filmmaker for Frontline.  A few years later, I took this class on Soviet film.  If you can imagine this: 30-40 students huddled in a drafty student lounge in Wisconsin each Thursday, watching Eisenstein, Vertov, or Mikhalov.  It was one of the most popular classes at Beloit.

Mostly, what I learned from studying film in that context was how and why and when to bump perceptions against one another.  For example, I love the opening to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but the Coen brothers found a way to make me love it more by contrasting and connecting it with this incredible montage of shots from West Texas.  The Coen brothers don’t need to pop on screen to say, “There’s dangerous people out here, ya’ll.  And there are more kinds of death than you can imagine,” because they know how to capitalize on the associative power of montage, something Eisenstein really pioneered.  I think that’s a big part of poetry’s capability too.

While I was revising the book, I got exposed to a whole different set of films that migrated into the work.  Antichrist, The White Ribbon, and Monster’s Ball all get a shout-out.  “Childhood with Hypnopompic Overture” is based on Lars Von Trier’s opening to the movie Europa.  I wrote “Portrait of Satan in Southern Arkansas” after watching Winter’s Bone, which if you haven’t seen, you must go rent.  A good movie can teach the possibilities of structure and how and when to violate expectations in a way that I think would be difficult to learn from any other medium. 

JB: At the risk of turning this into an interview about film – which would be so easy for me – I will second the praise of Winter’s Bone, though I’ve struggled to get into Haneke.  And, yes, I can certainly imagine a class in Wisconsin huddled together watching Russian cinema – I had a similar experience in Pittsburgh when I took a German cinema class, and where I fell in love with the New German Cinema, especially Fassbinder.  I like that you bring up montage, and I wonder if we can also think of your poems in terms of collage.  I was reading Lynda Hull this morning, and came across a poem titled “Utopia Parkway”  There is an epigraph connecting the poem to an art work by Joseph Cornell called Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall), 1945-46.  Heard of him?  I looked him up online and his stuff looks fascinating.  Something he once said is, “Collage = truth.”  What do you make of that?  Is collage something you’re interested in as a poet?

KM:  I saw you had that poem about Fassbinder in Ploughshares, which I still need to check out! 

I have a poem based on a Joseph Cornell piece in Informal Invitation to a Traveler.  I wrote much of that book in the Des Moines Art Center, and that season, the museum had the box on loan from Chicago.  I was fascinated, so I checked out his collection the next time I was at the Art Institute.  It’s incredible the range of feelings each of his boxes produce, but all of them have this nod toward a type of order that’s being reimagined by the box’s contents.  I’m very much a fan.  So, you’re spot-on about the line of influence.    

I’m not sure I could weigh in on truth (that’s a tough word to wrestle with), but I can say that I think there’s a well-meaning falsehood to linear representation.  For example, I often feel like poems that try to capture a particular time and place—a White Sox game with one’s dad in 1988 or the street where one fell in love for the first time—often bend more quickly than they imagine toward a type of coherence that likely didn’t exist.  Good elegy doesn’t really do that.  I’m thinking here of James Wright’s “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave” or any of Levis’s elegies.  Collage resists expected methods of ordering, which perhaps is more true to lived experience.  That much I certainly believe.

I am into collage, and I think that’s begun to morph into bricolage.  I’m digging deep into my French history courses here.  As a writer, I’m consistently balancing between the urge to revise and consider and the impulse to do something reckless.  Dean Young has a terrific book on the subject.  To me, collage involves a considered arrangement, which is the large majority of what we do as writers, but bricolage demands writers take from what’s at hand, what’s immediate.  It’s even better if that object or event doesn’t seem to want to belong in a poem.  When I find a poem gets so big that it can’t accept a mechanical bull or a flower pot falling on someone’s head or the abrupt appearance of Michael Bay, I try to add those things.  I think it’s that kind of egalitarianism that often keeps me honest.           

JB: Who is Michael Bay?  (And please don’t tell me to “Google it” – you will hurt my feelings.)  My question does betray a fundamental ignorance of popular culture, one my students and younger friends often tease me about.  And I suppose I simply don’t care.  But based on what you’re saying about bricolage, I wonder if my poems may be missing out on the opportunity to be more engaged with the world as experienced by those around me.  Do you have any advice for me?  What happens to a poet who only watches movies from 1983?

KM:  I would never demand you Google Michael Bay, Justin.  That’s a promise you can bank on.

The good news is that I would never suggest that viewing Transformers 2 is a prerequisite for good poetry.  In fact, it may be antithetical.  I feel like I may be singing a similar refrain throughout this, but knowledge of pop culture is just another tool in the box for me.  I would make a similar argument for versatility with Greek and Roman mythologies, familiarity with historical events, and knowledge of foreign languages.  You don’t need any one or all of them to write a good poem, but it certainly helps to have a little of all of them.

I actually suspect that I might be of the minority opinion in considering pop culture a valid form of reference.  At dinner one night with Dara Wier, James Tate, and my fellow UMass students, I remember debating the merits of Daffy Duck in Hollywood.  I can’t say any one at the table was fully sold.  I still get a little leery of inserting Lost or Denny’s in a way that I don’t when addressing the Pegasus or adding in Ancient Greek.  So, I’m not wholly without skepticism either, but pop culture can be good fuel for a poem, especially when the work is tongue-and-cheek enough (as often it is in Sympathy from the Devil) to explore that type of material.  Anyway, even if Return of the Jedi is the final movie you made it to the cinema for (and I know it isn’t), I wouldn’t count it as a handicap.  I’d much rather read a sonnet on Tchaikovsky than Justin Bieber; though, I admit, I might be tempted to read both.                  

JB: You alluded to Dean Young’s poetics book The Art of Recklessness, a book I also greatly admire.  And toward the end of Sympathy from the Devil there is a poem dedicated to Young, titled “The Poem is Not the Anatomical Heart.”  It’s one of my favorite poems in the book, and I can hear some homage in its tensions between daily, ordinary crap and what seethes unruliest inside us.  Is this homage?  What has Young’s work meant to you?

KM:  One of the poems that means the most to me is Young’s “Poem Without Forgiveness.”  While I was in seminary studying ancient languages in Richmond, Wendy sent me that poem.  I’d read Embryoyo and Skid while I was at UMass, but those books didn’t really unfold for me until I read that poem.  Maybe I read that line in the poem “Some piece of you/ stays in me and I’ll never give it back” as ars poetica.  It was like bits of the world were embedded in Young, and they jutted out into the poems—the hilarious, the juvenile, the heartbreaking, the unspeakable.  And he was letting you have all of it as the reader.  That had never occurred to me until that moment.

Perhaps I’m waxing a bit sentimental here, but when I read that line, I was just glad someone had the heart to write it.  When Young got ill, Wendy and I read that poem at a reading we held where the proceeds went to his health fund.  We also wrote and dedicated two poems to the event.  “Poem for the Anatomical Heart” was my dedication; Wendy’s poem “Ruptured Heart Theory,” which is so wrenchingly good, is over at Drunken Boat if anyone feels like having their breath taken way.  Anyway, when I think about how to generate energy and authority in a poem which includes such a swarm of tones and everything from crucibles to cannibals, Dean Young is one of those voices I consistently return to.

JB: You seem to have a real attraction to the epistolary poem.  Your previous book, Informal Invitation to a Traveler (co-written with Jeannie Hoag), is a series of epistolary poems written between two fictional personae.  In Sympathy from the Devil, the speaker is often addressing someone, named or unnamed.  Sometimes you use a delayed tag to reveal that another person is speaking in conversation.  For example, one poem ends, “A city is hopelessly lodged in the girl’s eye, and every branch/ which does not bear fruit surely burns, her father tells her and returns to his paper.”  Can you talk about your attraction to dialogue inside poems, or poems that are entirely epistolary?

KM: You’ve stumbled upon a dark secret here, Justin, which is that I actually wrote Sympathy from the Devil as an epistolary book.  When I first wrote the poems, I wrote each of them as a letter to someone I knew.  After writing in the epistolary form for two years, it felt strange to be just a voice in space shouting down at whoever was passing on their way to The Dress Barn or Costco.  It helped to imagine someone different reading the poem each time.  I always knew I’d pull out the names as soon as I revised the poems, but it helped to envision friends, family, sometimes total strangers who I’d shared some brief connection with.

I think what I really love about epistolary writing is its interiority.  It’s an issue that I don’t think gets enough page space in poetry.  I’ve been a reader and/or editor now for four different magazines, and as I read, I find myself more and more attracted to poems where there’s a sort of orderly mystery that emerges.  You can find it in “Walking through Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Whose woods are they, Bob?  Why are you stopping?) or “Blueberrying” (What’s turned the world so desolate?).  I once read a poem for The Beloit Poetry Journal where the first part of the poem was a series of dull landscape images—birds doing whatever, some rocks, a fairly ordinary simile about the sea.  But the last line of the poem was “I was wrong about you.  I was wrong about so many things.”  Suddenly, I was involved in the poem (Why were you wrong? What were you wrong about?).  What was said was so mysteriously broad and dangerous that I felt compelled to reexamine the poem.  Epistolary poems give the writer more of an excuse to access this kind of interiority because they are seemingly only responsible to their correspondent.  The reader is obliged to accept that they are glimpsing inside another world (which is what poetry is anyway) where completeness may not be a possibility.

I love dialogue because it allows me to vary syntax and, like you pointed out, do some handy tricks with tagging.  I’m not big into leaving out punctuation, though I admire poets like Merwin or David St. John.  I often find a writer can only do some many double-meanings or deflations of expectations with linebreaks before the trick becomes a little hollow.  But dialogue!  It’s pretty easy to pull the tagging one way or another and still make it sound like natural speech, which is a goal.  Because the syntax is variable, I can augment or weaken that iambic echo that’s often behind the poem.  In the case of “The Soft Machinery of the Dark,” dialogue let me echo the ghazal form a bit by bringing in that self-critical voice at the end.  There’s so much dialogue can do in a poem, and I love any effect that I can multi-purpose.     

JB: Funny you mention the ghazal.  The last poem in the book announces a “Kyle McCord” as the speaker, and I thought in that moment how the announcement sounded like the makhta, the final, signature couplet of the ghazal form.  And so I thought the whole book, in a sense, was being authored by a single, multi-faceted self.  How did you ultimately decide on the structure of Sympathy from the Devil?  And when did you know you had your title, which I think is perfect for this collection?

KM:  You’re too kind about the title.  After nearly a decade of working as a poet, I do have a confession and an accusation that I’ll voice here: I don’t think I fully understand how to structure a book, and I’m nearly certain that most other poets I’ve met don’t either.  I get the general principles: strong poems in the front, strong poems in the back, weaker poems excised (preferably) or in the back third (if one must).  But what about when you get beyond page ten?  What does one do then?  I get the feeling that so much beyond that point is intuition or guess-and-check.

Most of the advice I’ve heard about structure seems wholly contradictory or certainly not hard-and-fast.  For example, Tessa Rumsey once told me that the first poem should teach the reader how to read your poems, or at least get them started.  If you read her books, it’s clear she loves a gentle entry into a book.  I’d always adhered to this ideal when arranging a book.  Then about a month ago, I interviewed David St. John about his new book The Auroras.  It’s a terrific book. However, contrary to my expectations the first poem is syntactically jagged and shocking.  It gives the first section a unique feel.  When I brought up what Tessa had said, David’s response was more or less “Sure, but I didn’t want to do that.”         

I think it’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue.  Should pieces that have content or rhythmic similarities go together?  Should one poem go before another for chronological reasons?  Should the last word of the book be one word or another?  The answer I often hear is, “Well, it depends on how you envision the book.”  But I can’t envision the book until I’ve put it together!  And then it might not sound the way it should.  Anyway, this is a real bane for me as a writer, but it’s a bane I enjoy struggling with.

So, I always turn to other writers for advice when it comes to final determinations about arrangement.  I owe big thanks to Wendy Xu and Ezekiel Black, who were so generous and thoughtful in picking through my suggested order.  Wendy suggested some particularly bold moves—putting together the two poems that begin “To Me at Twenty-Six…”, closing the book with the current final poem, keeping the title of the book—that I think pay off in the manuscript as a whole.  Corey Marks helped me refine what I took from her suggestions.    

Titles, on the other hand, are much more my speed.  I nearly always create titles for poems after writing them.  When I came up with “Sympathy from the Devil” as the title for its poem, it seemed like such a perfect fit that I was pretty sure that it would fit the manuscript as a whole.  My dad, who’s a big Rolling Stones fan, objected when I showed him the manuscript because the book didn’t have enough Mick Jagger in it, and I played with the idea of titling it “Lycanthropy and You.”  But I pretty quickly assessed that the first title was better since it showed more of that balance of playfulness and surrender that you pointed out earlier.  It’s the shortest title I’ve ever come up with, and it feels like the right one. 

JB: We were briefly chatting the other day about the responsibilities of the poet versus the responsibilities of the reader, and how your views on this may be a bit unorthodox.  Can you share your thoughts on this?  Are these responsibilities actually in opposition?

KM: I’m glad you brought that up.  I have a short essay on the topic that we may yet run at LitBridge—I throw in an essay now and then when we have room in the weekly feed.  But I will do my best not to repeat any of that here!

To give a little background on this topic, I was responding to a discussion about how we as writers balance the effort we expect the reader to put in to make the poem cohere and the effort we expect the poet to put in.  At the heart of the argument was the idea that if one puts too much weight on the reader that the poem doesn’t cohere into meaning, which was a high priority for the writers in the discussion, while poems that are too spelled-out indicate an insufficient burden on the reader. 

My disagreement on the topic is two-fold.  First, I disagree with the word “meaning” as it was understood in the discussion.  Basically, I think the term “meaning” is too limited.  It often signifies an idea or feeling or contradiction that a writer is struggling through on the page.  The definition rewards poems like “Psalm and Lament” by Donald Justice but spurns poems like “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher” by John Ashbery.  However, as a reader, I have the capability to love both poems.  I think meaning is one element which needs to be on the poet’s mind, but it’s one factor among many.  I enjoy meaning in a poem, but I think more about “emotional crux,” a moment where forces in the poem converge to offer some sort of emotional invitation or disclosure or opposition or explosion that the poet can’t hold on to.  I need that in a poem. However, the idea of meaning carries a bias toward a type of poem that is overly normative in the interest of perceived access; that’s not on my must-have list.   

Second, I have a different definition of what a writer’s responsibility is.  I mentioned earlier that I’m often trying to write the kind of poem that can make a reader laugh and cry.  I’m also trying to shock, reward, thwart, and enthrall the reader at different points in the writing.  I think a poet is responsible for all of those things throughout the poem, which means no poem will do it all.  The question is: what can I make you reimagine, and how can I do it?  As an editor, I see a slew of poets struggling to “make it new,” but maybe Pound would have been better off saying “remake new.”  A good poem will make something I haven’t seen before, but a great poem makes me reimagine the face of novelty.  I’m of the opinion that poets should strive for that with the same effort they apply toward making meaning.    

JB: You just mentioned your position as co-editor of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry.  I imagine this job allows you to come across quite a swatch of contemporary American poetry, especially the work of younger writers.  There’s a lot of pissing and moaning about younger writers not being vulnerable enough, avoiding narrative at all costs, and basically trying to be too cool for school, and though those poems are certainly out there, there is a lot to like.  What do you find exciting about this moment in American poetry, especially the work written by younger poets?

KM: Your list of complaints is pretty accurate.  I would say a big part of the grumpiness toward contemporary poetry also has to do with distrust by older poets of the changes in the way poetry does business.  In particular, I hear plenty of complaints about the proliferation of journals and the rise of independent publishers, especially when that means less people are reading whatever it is that they “should” be reading, which is usually someone about a half a century their senior.  I sympathize with writers who worry about the way publishing is changing and what poets are forfeiting from the past, but I think a lot of that criticism is tied in with the expected disconnection between different generations of poets.   

I feel like I have so much I can say about this.  Wendy and I swore off  the idea of having other readers for iO when we started, so when someone sends poems to iO, they’re talking directly to us.  We publish about 1% of our submissions, and I’ve noticed that writers tend to fall into one of two ruts.  Either they’re too orthodox and attached to a type of reality that doesn’t feel honest because it’s too sentimental or nostalgic or formally committed, or they’re writing poems that are so disconnected that they don’t pack an emotional punch.  I’m not sure which of those two types are too cool for school, haha, but I don’t want to publish either of them.

Poets who we do publish usually walk between those two worlds, and I find that exciting.  They’re writing poems with titles like “The Insomniac’s Guide to Oblivion” (Jeffrey Morgan) or “But When I Get to Heaven I Will Have Sex with Clouds” (Laurie Saurborn Young).  They’re connecting a broken relationship with a house floating down a river (Wayne Miller), or they’re writing an ode to Blood Feast (Glenn Shaheen).  They’re closing their poems with lines like “. . . and this is what happens/ to meek things when there is no future” (Rebecca Hazelton) or “If only it would snow and there/ were time to catalog everything/ that stayed the same” (Sarah Bartlett).  There are such an array of ways that writers are walking over and around and between these ways of approaching poetry.  That’s what’s most exciting to me.

JB: What have you been working on since Sympathy?  What do we readers have to look forward to?

KM: I’ve got a new manuscript that I wrote while on residency in Latvia that’s making the rounds now.  I decided to go for broke with the lengthy titling, so it’s called You Are Indeed an Elk, and This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze.  You can check out some of the poems online at Linebreak, New Orleans Review, and Verse.  Others will be coming out in print journals in the next few months.  I took some cues from younger contemporary poets like Chris Deweese, Heather Christle, and Nick Sturm, but I also looked over work from Bob Hicok, Peter Richards, and Mary Ruefle.  I’m particularly proud of some of the titles like “[Put down that pint of human blood and tell me you need me]” or “[When you’ve been scoutmaster as long as I have]” which is forthcoming in Jellyfish.   If you were a fan of the linguistic and syntactic play of Sympathy, I think this new one will be right up your alley.

JB: Thanks for this conversation, Kyle.  I look forward to many more.

KM: And thanks so much to you, Justin.  I can’t wait.

Kyle McCord is the author of three books of poetry including Sympathy from the Devil (Gold Wake Press 2013).  He has work featured in Barrow Street, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Third Coast, and elsewhere.  He’s the co-founder of LitBridge and, along with Wendy Xu, co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry.  He teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton.