David Axelrod |
eInterview
with David Axelrod by Will Bowman
9/10/14
WB: There’s an enlightened pessimism in your poetry in regards to the world and humanity: our world is full of pain, suffering, brokenness, death, and human hypocrisy. You’ve learned this through experience, practice, and observation. And yet, you discover so much beauty in this common mussel pearl of a world, moments of beauty and tenderness in this “Kingdom at Hand,” washing the hair of a homeless woman, watching a rainbow with a broken friend. Could you discuss this juxtaposition between brokenness, compassion and beauty? How do you capture it through your poetry? Is reading and writing poetry a way of developing compassion for the world, things, and people?
DA: The poems you cite are all, to a degree anyway, forms of journalism, scenes from the ordinary life of a small, rural, Oregon town in the early 21st century. Sure, “experience, practice, and observation are key,” but there is no “and yet” as regards “beauty.” All the elements are present in the moment, a kind of constellation one glimpses, that, despite the brevity, makes a powerful impression.
As for “juxtapositions between brokenness, compassion and beauty,” I’m assuming that you attach pessimism to brokenness and enlightenment to compassion and beauty. Perhaps these are exclusive categories. I don’t know. There isn’t much deliberate effort on my part anyway to poise elements from apparently contrasting categories into some kind of meaningful relationship within a poem, nor do I “capture” anything.
Rather, it is my attention and perhaps intuition that is captured by the world around me, and the moment at which that happens is, as I said, brief and ambiguous but also powerful. In many cases, it’s overwhelming, sometimes to the point of tears. It’s a feeling, a mood that allows just a peek into the depth of any moment and how it resonates here and now, but also in “the night of time.”
What it boils down to really is just unguardedness, when our defenses are down and we can love anything, as Spinoza says, but are also aware that the love won’t necessarily be recognized, much less reciprocated. I suppose that is what you call ‘enlightened pessimism.”
As for your question about self-improvement, the honest answer is no, but with a caveat. Reading and writing in and of themselves in no way are going to help us learn compassion.
Ideally, what reading and writing over a long period of time accomplishes, say over a lifetime, and if done in a kind of ritualized manner, that is, making a point of routine studying older writers and practice of writing can be tremendously satisfying. That satisfaction can lead to a profound sense of gratitude for life, despite its brokenness. Perhaps this has some connection to what you call compassion.
One more thing: satisfaction such as I’m describing here has very little to do with “success,” or “fame.” Yes, it is wonderful to get a poem published, or even a book, or win an award, or have someone write to say how much something you wrote meant to them. Praise for one’s efforts is even more problematic. All that is fine, high calorie, low nutrition ego-food, but it passes through the system quickly.
Gratitude, however, for that vast, attentive moment I described above, can carry you from day to day for years, perhaps even a lifetime.
WB: Much of your poetry concerns itself with social neglect and oppression in the world, oftentimes taking the form of poems of representation in which you draw our attention to the victims or enactors of injustice. In “Spirit of Place,” you take on the persona of an officer just having slaughtered Native Americans by the “logic of superior force.” In “After,” you draw our attention to the eagles, teals, pintails, mallards and myriad other bird species devastated by the Exxon Valdez crash. In “From A Forest Soon to be Logged,” you rake your knuckles across the bark of a tree soon to be logged by “men in cities, in guarded / offices, who will never walk here.” Talk about your technique of representative poetry. How do you get your mind inside the persona of the oppressed or--even harder!--the oppressor?What hopes do you have for readers’ response after they read your representative poems?
DA: Let’s start by defining what we mean by representative, as it is a broad term, and virtually anything one creates is representative. I don’t think you mean what Merriam-Webster has in mind, namely, “the doctrine that the immediate object of knowledge is an idea in the mind distinct from the external object which is the occasion of perception.” So perhaps we are talking here about topical issues, such as, “referring to the topics of the day or place: of local or temporary interest <a topical novel> <topical references>”?
Let’s discuss this in both senses. How does one represent in a poem something as distorted and disfiguring to the soul as an executive office, a shipping disaster, or a massacre, and without seeming artless, partisan, crass or naive? How does one take an event from a particular time and place, and present it in such a way that it endures beyond the moment of its local fame? Is there a technique for accomplishing this?
As for technique, well, no, there is no technique beyond tireless drafting and revision. Certainly that was the only answer to the question I could ever discover as a younger writer. Repetition. Often mind-numbing, stuck in a rut repetition. I would do a hundred drafts or more until the line and sentence broke free of my stranglehold and sounded suddenly fresh, like something genuine a human being might actually feel and say. That the accumulation of failures far outnumber successes probably goes without saying. In this respect, 35-40 years later, it’s sometimes a bit easier or more efficient than that, but not always. Maybe I just recognize a problem sooner and recognize, too, the likely solution. Give the horse the reins, it knows better than I the direction it wishes to go.
“From a Forest Soon to Be Logged,” is written in a loose meter and rhymes, so obviously I was diverting my attention there toward formal matters, those imposed limitations allowing the imagination the freedom to find its own solutions, which was always my teacher’s, Richard Hugo’s, advice, whenever the poem gets stuck in a low gear.
“After,” went through so many drafts it’s really ridiculous. I’m guessing hundreds. One of the things I think I learned doing that many drafts, and in addition to whatever else I might have learned besides, is that after a point one draft may be just as finished as another, and it’s time to just give up and move on. The tenacity to keep on going, though, comes from the obligation I felt toward the silent subjects of the poem, which required me to try to find a voice that genuinely expresses the demands they were making of me. I mean that we sometimes lack the skills and must learn those skills to complete the poem.
“Spirit of Place,” maybe gets at the dilemma you cite, “How do you get your mind inside the persona of the oppressed or--even harder!--the oppressor?” The point to make here is that one can speak the truth without necessarily taking the side of the angels. We are under no obligation to imagine truth as the sole possession of the ethical actor. One of the poets who is most dear to me is Robert Hayden. He has a poem in The Ballad of Remembrance, which is one of the best books ever written about America, “Night, Death, Mississippi.” Hayden is an African-American poet, and so maybe it would seem counter-intuitive, even offensive, to some readers that in a poem about a lynching, he would speak in the voice of a white southerner, a participant in the lynching. But that is precisely how Hayden, rejecting the co-called “decent thing,” wrote such a powerful poem. I make so such claims for “Spirit of Place,” except that by allowing the Devil his due, the legacy of injustice and cruelty makes the case for the poverty of the future in which we now live.
WB: You’ve lived much of your life in the Northwest, and its natural beauty sings through your poetry, especially in the particulars! Your poems are speckled with mallards and mergansers, moss and earthstars, amber, tannins, lupine, larkspur and paintbrush, swallows, fescue and sedge, “dam-bears”, dogs, bears, and so much more! Places too. Through your poetry, we visit (if I’m not mistaken) Matterhorn and Crystal Lake, Marco Flats, and the Bitterroot Range. How do you imbue your poems with so many particulars? Do you keep lists? Physical? Mental? Or do you just pay attention to the world around and try to bring those names and designations into your poems?
DA: There is a poem by Arthur Sze, “The String Diamond,” whose third section is a list of common names of threatened or extinct species. The names are lovely and vivid; that is, they embody the living presence of what they name. In a very profound way, the poem challenges the theory of language’s inadequacy to represent or embody reality. It is in this sense, making an indirect argument similar to the one Robert Hass makes in “Meditations at Lagunitas”: “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.” Language and the life it embodies is, in this sense, scared as the world it names. We are called upon to guarantee a future in our words. We now live in an era, the Anthropocene, where the future seems terrifying and bleak, and that may suggest something to us about our relationship to language and the world it names.
I have an essay coming out soon in the High Desert Journal, in part of which I discuss this topic in a series of conversations with a childhood friend named Moritz:
His [Moritz’s] memory of a time before his own consciousness of time reminded me of another conversation we had, in which he explained
Leopardi’s argument concerning the resonant depths of collective memory, the “beauty and pleasure” of that memory accumulating inside of words. Such memories, Moritz explained, as are perhaps aroused whenever we use a common name for a plant or animal...the memory of the living thing’s “beauty and pleasure” lives on in the uttered name. In the Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison summarizes Leopardi’s argument: “the worlds our words once inhabited re-inhabit in turn the words that outlive them.”
Again, I make no claims about my own poems in comparison to these others, but I take their arguments seriously. The long choral poem at the end of What Next, Old Knife? revisits this topic, too. I recognize that these claims can be easily dismantled, and as an intellectual parlor game it’s kind of fun, but really without faith in the stability of language, what do we possess as a stay against barbarism and chaos?
WB: You are really emotionally affected by your family, and I can feel your care, your sorrow, and your longing for them in your poetry. In “After a Fever,” you lament your inability to protect your son from “the same catastrophes / that will bear you away toward / oblivion.” In “A Strange, Seldom Seen Calm,”you muse on the innocence of his “olive skin and heart-shaped face.” In “Song of a Dead Man’s Air,” you recreate the moment of washing your dead father. And that’s just a few. Talk to me about your family in your poetry. How does your family affect your poems? How do you capture your care, longing, regret, and sadness for them? Do you let your family read the poems you include them in? Do you write for them, or is your poetry simply a way of capturing your feelings for them, feelings many of us share for our own respective families? Something else?
DA: With the exception of “A Strange, Seldom Seen Calm,” the poems you cite are entirely fictional or are poems based on stories told to me by others. “After a Fever” describes a close friend’s experiences in Vietnam, for example. The “personal” thing is, I wrote that poem as my own sons were coming of age, and my friend’s son, too. So who is the poem about or for or addressed to? It’s provoked by a moment of overwhelming emotion, my friend’s sorrows, something just barely glimpse really. But those sorrows are revisited on every generation.
The poem is what comes in the aftermath when one tries to find a language that doesn’t exist yet. The fact of the poem is an expression of my gratitude for life, the lives of others, and the desire for a future beyond the little world and horizons of my own life. Imagination and its adjunct, empathy, exist for some reason, right?
WB: You said once in class that weird stuff often happens in prose poems, and that’s certainly the case in many of yours! In “Song of the Magic Head,” you sew your son’s decapitated head on your own body. In “Song of Remembrance,” the dead pop out of their graves for a reunion, though it doesn’t turn out to be the liveliest of parties! I really enjoy the oddity of many of these weird events and moments! Do you purposefully go a little nuts in prose poems versus a lined poem? Do you have an idea of the structure of a poem before you write? Or do you just allow the poem to suggest its form as you begin to write?
DA: Yes, those prose poems. I wrote three decapitation prose poems over about 10 years during my early mid-age. What would Jung or Freud say about this? “Song of Remembrance,” though absurd as my dreams of headlessness, is about a serious subject, a concentration camp near where I live in Germany. A train station was built over it, but then a younger generation attempted to own the history of it. Not an easy task for them...one might compare their effort to memorialize this concentration camp and its victims with the memorial in “Spirit of Place.” But yes, there is a photograph of the mayor standing over the exhumed mass grave and the nightmare image of those corpses laying at his feet. He was being publicly shamed. It was a ghastly thing.
This subject of the prose poem though causes me a great deal of trouble. I really don’t know what to say about prose poems, which is why I’ll be teaching a workshop soon on the topic. To make a fool of myself. They asked me for a paragraph describing the workshop:
Charles Baudelaire, arguably the inventor of the modern prose poem, predicted that the prose poem would become the dominate poetic form of the future. As that very hedged-bet of a sentence suggests, the prose poem is a disputed form. Nor has Baudelaire’s future quite arrived, but certainly the form has flourished throughout Europe and the Americas, and even has entire journals dedicated to publishing prose poems and essays about the prose poem. But what is a prose poem? An intermediary form? A lyric form? A poem without line breaks? A paragraph? A fable or a parable? A prank? The logical extension of the formal relaxations of lazy bones free verse? A subversive political statement, a kind of literary getting over on the soulless bureaucrat in the censor’s office? Or a Post-Modern joke on humorless pedants? Well...sure it is. And a good deal more, besides.
That pretty much sums up the extent of my knowledge of the prose poem.
On the nuts and bolts level, I’m just practical: what works? That is, how can I best get at the genuine thing that has seized my attention? Whether the poem is lined or a paragraph of prose isn’t usually something I decide before hand. Individual poems often exist in drafts that are both in prose and lines. Years ago, when I was a student, I remember Robert Hass visiting our class and saying something to the effect that wherever a lined poem loses its clarity and momentum, write a prose passage that explicates everything that is in operation in the poem, excluding nothing as too eccentric, tangential or irrelevant. And as another teacher, Peter Matthiessen, once said to us, it’s better to write more than less, as too much on the page is easier to deal with than too little. I wonder if these two pieces of advice account for both the excess that I am often whittling away at in subsequent drafts and why lined poems sometimes morph into prose poems? The line puts a lot of pressure on the poem and that forces certain choices that prose doesn’t necessarily force. Hence, perhaps the “weird stuff” of your question. But I can point to many examples of prose poems whose elegance and clarity are anything but “weird.”
Better yet: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
WB: One of the biggest themes of your poetry, especially your later work, is human finitude and folly. In the end, we are “nothing very remarkable. / Just dying. Just dead”, and one of our only certainties is that every “fat, clumsy body... / must gradually decay into earth.” But there’s life and wonder in this mortality! And those who are dead live on through the words and memories of those who are living! “Here we are, Lord, here we are, / half-emerged, full of / aspiration and errancy!” Could you say that poetry--more than some of the more systematic disciplines of science, philosophy, theology, etc--embraces this human temporality and mortality, seeking not to systematize or objectify but rather to capture human experience in all its wonderful, terrible subjectivity?
DA: In a word, yes.
I will always reach for Wisława Szymborska before Marx, Heidegger, Freud or Simone Weil.
There’s a joke Groucho Marx told about getting onto an elevator with a priest who recognizes him, and maybe he’s making a point about “systematic disciplines.” “Groucho,” the priest says, shaking his hand, “I just want to thank you for all the joy you have brought to the world.” “And I’d like to thank you, too,” Groucho says, “for all the joy you’ve taken out of it.”
WB: What then is the purpose of poetry in light of this inescapable folly and mortality?
DA: To make life bearable. And I don’t mean that to sound grim, quite the contrary. There is true solace in poetry, and not because there is anything anodyne about poetry. The jazz singer Jon Hendricks once introduced a song saying he was going to “tell it like it T-I-is.” That’s how I feel about poetry. And though there are many kinds of poetry, much of it cooler, self-consciously smarter, and less plainspoken than what I am typically drawn to, poetry as a category dependably tells it like it T-I-is.
One of my favorite books of poetry is Devil’s Lunch by Aleksandar Ristović. An entire section is devoted to poems about privies, you know, latrines. Is there is really anything in ordinary life quite so humbling as sitting in a latrine with your pants around your ankles, snuffing up the essence of everyone’s humanity who preceded you there? Is there any position quite so universally vulnerable?
Through a crack on the right
you can see the red rooster,
and through the one on the left,
with a bit of effort,
you can see the table,
the white cloth
and a bottle of wine.
Behind your back, if you turn,
you’ll make out the sheep
trying to fly with their woolen wings.
And through the heart-shaped
hole in the door,
someone’s cheerful face
watching you shit.
Poetry is always reminding us of who and what we are. And that makes it indispensable.
WB: What is the biggest suggestion you would make to up and coming, aspiring poets like myself?
DA: That is the hardest question.
The great radio comedians Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding used to do interviews with coach Sturdley that always included that question, and inevitably coach Sturdley’s answer resorted to the usual: “Ahhh, start young, becoming ahhh familiar with ahhh the tools the game ahhh...etc., etc.,” which hilariously parodied the cliches of sports that endure to this day like a pox on ESPN.
So here are coach Sturdley’s points of advice: Be honest, though it will cause you nothing but grief. Be at least as silly as you are serious, please. Study the old until you are old, and then keep on studying until you “take the dregs.” Do no violence to language. Clarity is a moral category. Always nurture the young. Avoid positions of power and authority over others, rank and file all the way. And never lose hope, though it is a fool’s errand to hope.
WB: Anything else you’d like to add?
DA: Sure. Hold these lines by the master close to your heart:
Doubletake
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky,
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
from The Cure at Troy, Sophocles, translated from the Greek by Seamus Heaney
9/10/14
WB: There’s an enlightened pessimism in your poetry in regards to the world and humanity: our world is full of pain, suffering, brokenness, death, and human hypocrisy. You’ve learned this through experience, practice, and observation. And yet, you discover so much beauty in this common mussel pearl of a world, moments of beauty and tenderness in this “Kingdom at Hand,” washing the hair of a homeless woman, watching a rainbow with a broken friend. Could you discuss this juxtaposition between brokenness, compassion and beauty? How do you capture it through your poetry? Is reading and writing poetry a way of developing compassion for the world, things, and people?
DA: The poems you cite are all, to a degree anyway, forms of journalism, scenes from the ordinary life of a small, rural, Oregon town in the early 21st century. Sure, “experience, practice, and observation are key,” but there is no “and yet” as regards “beauty.” All the elements are present in the moment, a kind of constellation one glimpses, that, despite the brevity, makes a powerful impression.
As for “juxtapositions between brokenness, compassion and beauty,” I’m assuming that you attach pessimism to brokenness and enlightenment to compassion and beauty. Perhaps these are exclusive categories. I don’t know. There isn’t much deliberate effort on my part anyway to poise elements from apparently contrasting categories into some kind of meaningful relationship within a poem, nor do I “capture” anything.
Rather, it is my attention and perhaps intuition that is captured by the world around me, and the moment at which that happens is, as I said, brief and ambiguous but also powerful. In many cases, it’s overwhelming, sometimes to the point of tears. It’s a feeling, a mood that allows just a peek into the depth of any moment and how it resonates here and now, but also in “the night of time.”
What it boils down to really is just unguardedness, when our defenses are down and we can love anything, as Spinoza says, but are also aware that the love won’t necessarily be recognized, much less reciprocated. I suppose that is what you call ‘enlightened pessimism.”
As for your question about self-improvement, the honest answer is no, but with a caveat. Reading and writing in and of themselves in no way are going to help us learn compassion.
Ideally, what reading and writing over a long period of time accomplishes, say over a lifetime, and if done in a kind of ritualized manner, that is, making a point of routine studying older writers and practice of writing can be tremendously satisfying. That satisfaction can lead to a profound sense of gratitude for life, despite its brokenness. Perhaps this has some connection to what you call compassion.
One more thing: satisfaction such as I’m describing here has very little to do with “success,” or “fame.” Yes, it is wonderful to get a poem published, or even a book, or win an award, or have someone write to say how much something you wrote meant to them. Praise for one’s efforts is even more problematic. All that is fine, high calorie, low nutrition ego-food, but it passes through the system quickly.
Gratitude, however, for that vast, attentive moment I described above, can carry you from day to day for years, perhaps even a lifetime.
WB: Much of your poetry concerns itself with social neglect and oppression in the world, oftentimes taking the form of poems of representation in which you draw our attention to the victims or enactors of injustice. In “Spirit of Place,” you take on the persona of an officer just having slaughtered Native Americans by the “logic of superior force.” In “After,” you draw our attention to the eagles, teals, pintails, mallards and myriad other bird species devastated by the Exxon Valdez crash. In “From A Forest Soon to be Logged,” you rake your knuckles across the bark of a tree soon to be logged by “men in cities, in guarded / offices, who will never walk here.” Talk about your technique of representative poetry. How do you get your mind inside the persona of the oppressed or--even harder!--the oppressor?What hopes do you have for readers’ response after they read your representative poems?
DA: Let’s start by defining what we mean by representative, as it is a broad term, and virtually anything one creates is representative. I don’t think you mean what Merriam-Webster has in mind, namely, “the doctrine that the immediate object of knowledge is an idea in the mind distinct from the external object which is the occasion of perception.” So perhaps we are talking here about topical issues, such as, “referring to the topics of the day or place: of local or temporary interest <a topical novel> <topical references>”?
Let’s discuss this in both senses. How does one represent in a poem something as distorted and disfiguring to the soul as an executive office, a shipping disaster, or a massacre, and without seeming artless, partisan, crass or naive? How does one take an event from a particular time and place, and present it in such a way that it endures beyond the moment of its local fame? Is there a technique for accomplishing this?
As for technique, well, no, there is no technique beyond tireless drafting and revision. Certainly that was the only answer to the question I could ever discover as a younger writer. Repetition. Often mind-numbing, stuck in a rut repetition. I would do a hundred drafts or more until the line and sentence broke free of my stranglehold and sounded suddenly fresh, like something genuine a human being might actually feel and say. That the accumulation of failures far outnumber successes probably goes without saying. In this respect, 35-40 years later, it’s sometimes a bit easier or more efficient than that, but not always. Maybe I just recognize a problem sooner and recognize, too, the likely solution. Give the horse the reins, it knows better than I the direction it wishes to go.
“From a Forest Soon to Be Logged,” is written in a loose meter and rhymes, so obviously I was diverting my attention there toward formal matters, those imposed limitations allowing the imagination the freedom to find its own solutions, which was always my teacher’s, Richard Hugo’s, advice, whenever the poem gets stuck in a low gear.
“After,” went through so many drafts it’s really ridiculous. I’m guessing hundreds. One of the things I think I learned doing that many drafts, and in addition to whatever else I might have learned besides, is that after a point one draft may be just as finished as another, and it’s time to just give up and move on. The tenacity to keep on going, though, comes from the obligation I felt toward the silent subjects of the poem, which required me to try to find a voice that genuinely expresses the demands they were making of me. I mean that we sometimes lack the skills and must learn those skills to complete the poem.
“Spirit of Place,” maybe gets at the dilemma you cite, “How do you get your mind inside the persona of the oppressed or--even harder!--the oppressor?” The point to make here is that one can speak the truth without necessarily taking the side of the angels. We are under no obligation to imagine truth as the sole possession of the ethical actor. One of the poets who is most dear to me is Robert Hayden. He has a poem in The Ballad of Remembrance, which is one of the best books ever written about America, “Night, Death, Mississippi.” Hayden is an African-American poet, and so maybe it would seem counter-intuitive, even offensive, to some readers that in a poem about a lynching, he would speak in the voice of a white southerner, a participant in the lynching. But that is precisely how Hayden, rejecting the co-called “decent thing,” wrote such a powerful poem. I make so such claims for “Spirit of Place,” except that by allowing the Devil his due, the legacy of injustice and cruelty makes the case for the poverty of the future in which we now live.
WB: You’ve lived much of your life in the Northwest, and its natural beauty sings through your poetry, especially in the particulars! Your poems are speckled with mallards and mergansers, moss and earthstars, amber, tannins, lupine, larkspur and paintbrush, swallows, fescue and sedge, “dam-bears”, dogs, bears, and so much more! Places too. Through your poetry, we visit (if I’m not mistaken) Matterhorn and Crystal Lake, Marco Flats, and the Bitterroot Range. How do you imbue your poems with so many particulars? Do you keep lists? Physical? Mental? Or do you just pay attention to the world around and try to bring those names and designations into your poems?
DA: There is a poem by Arthur Sze, “The String Diamond,” whose third section is a list of common names of threatened or extinct species. The names are lovely and vivid; that is, they embody the living presence of what they name. In a very profound way, the poem challenges the theory of language’s inadequacy to represent or embody reality. It is in this sense, making an indirect argument similar to the one Robert Hass makes in “Meditations at Lagunitas”: “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.” Language and the life it embodies is, in this sense, scared as the world it names. We are called upon to guarantee a future in our words. We now live in an era, the Anthropocene, where the future seems terrifying and bleak, and that may suggest something to us about our relationship to language and the world it names.
I have an essay coming out soon in the High Desert Journal, in part of which I discuss this topic in a series of conversations with a childhood friend named Moritz:
His [Moritz’s] memory of a time before his own consciousness of time reminded me of another conversation we had, in which he explained
Leopardi’s argument concerning the resonant depths of collective memory, the “beauty and pleasure” of that memory accumulating inside of words. Such memories, Moritz explained, as are perhaps aroused whenever we use a common name for a plant or animal...the memory of the living thing’s “beauty and pleasure” lives on in the uttered name. In the Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison summarizes Leopardi’s argument: “the worlds our words once inhabited re-inhabit in turn the words that outlive them.”
Again, I make no claims about my own poems in comparison to these others, but I take their arguments seriously. The long choral poem at the end of What Next, Old Knife? revisits this topic, too. I recognize that these claims can be easily dismantled, and as an intellectual parlor game it’s kind of fun, but really without faith in the stability of language, what do we possess as a stay against barbarism and chaos?
WB: You are really emotionally affected by your family, and I can feel your care, your sorrow, and your longing for them in your poetry. In “After a Fever,” you lament your inability to protect your son from “the same catastrophes / that will bear you away toward / oblivion.” In “A Strange, Seldom Seen Calm,”you muse on the innocence of his “olive skin and heart-shaped face.” In “Song of a Dead Man’s Air,” you recreate the moment of washing your dead father. And that’s just a few. Talk to me about your family in your poetry. How does your family affect your poems? How do you capture your care, longing, regret, and sadness for them? Do you let your family read the poems you include them in? Do you write for them, or is your poetry simply a way of capturing your feelings for them, feelings many of us share for our own respective families? Something else?
DA: With the exception of “A Strange, Seldom Seen Calm,” the poems you cite are entirely fictional or are poems based on stories told to me by others. “After a Fever” describes a close friend’s experiences in Vietnam, for example. The “personal” thing is, I wrote that poem as my own sons were coming of age, and my friend’s son, too. So who is the poem about or for or addressed to? It’s provoked by a moment of overwhelming emotion, my friend’s sorrows, something just barely glimpse really. But those sorrows are revisited on every generation.
The poem is what comes in the aftermath when one tries to find a language that doesn’t exist yet. The fact of the poem is an expression of my gratitude for life, the lives of others, and the desire for a future beyond the little world and horizons of my own life. Imagination and its adjunct, empathy, exist for some reason, right?
WB: You said once in class that weird stuff often happens in prose poems, and that’s certainly the case in many of yours! In “Song of the Magic Head,” you sew your son’s decapitated head on your own body. In “Song of Remembrance,” the dead pop out of their graves for a reunion, though it doesn’t turn out to be the liveliest of parties! I really enjoy the oddity of many of these weird events and moments! Do you purposefully go a little nuts in prose poems versus a lined poem? Do you have an idea of the structure of a poem before you write? Or do you just allow the poem to suggest its form as you begin to write?
DA: Yes, those prose poems. I wrote three decapitation prose poems over about 10 years during my early mid-age. What would Jung or Freud say about this? “Song of Remembrance,” though absurd as my dreams of headlessness, is about a serious subject, a concentration camp near where I live in Germany. A train station was built over it, but then a younger generation attempted to own the history of it. Not an easy task for them...one might compare their effort to memorialize this concentration camp and its victims with the memorial in “Spirit of Place.” But yes, there is a photograph of the mayor standing over the exhumed mass grave and the nightmare image of those corpses laying at his feet. He was being publicly shamed. It was a ghastly thing.
This subject of the prose poem though causes me a great deal of trouble. I really don’t know what to say about prose poems, which is why I’ll be teaching a workshop soon on the topic. To make a fool of myself. They asked me for a paragraph describing the workshop:
Charles Baudelaire, arguably the inventor of the modern prose poem, predicted that the prose poem would become the dominate poetic form of the future. As that very hedged-bet of a sentence suggests, the prose poem is a disputed form. Nor has Baudelaire’s future quite arrived, but certainly the form has flourished throughout Europe and the Americas, and even has entire journals dedicated to publishing prose poems and essays about the prose poem. But what is a prose poem? An intermediary form? A lyric form? A poem without line breaks? A paragraph? A fable or a parable? A prank? The logical extension of the formal relaxations of lazy bones free verse? A subversive political statement, a kind of literary getting over on the soulless bureaucrat in the censor’s office? Or a Post-Modern joke on humorless pedants? Well...sure it is. And a good deal more, besides.
That pretty much sums up the extent of my knowledge of the prose poem.
On the nuts and bolts level, I’m just practical: what works? That is, how can I best get at the genuine thing that has seized my attention? Whether the poem is lined or a paragraph of prose isn’t usually something I decide before hand. Individual poems often exist in drafts that are both in prose and lines. Years ago, when I was a student, I remember Robert Hass visiting our class and saying something to the effect that wherever a lined poem loses its clarity and momentum, write a prose passage that explicates everything that is in operation in the poem, excluding nothing as too eccentric, tangential or irrelevant. And as another teacher, Peter Matthiessen, once said to us, it’s better to write more than less, as too much on the page is easier to deal with than too little. I wonder if these two pieces of advice account for both the excess that I am often whittling away at in subsequent drafts and why lined poems sometimes morph into prose poems? The line puts a lot of pressure on the poem and that forces certain choices that prose doesn’t necessarily force. Hence, perhaps the “weird stuff” of your question. But I can point to many examples of prose poems whose elegance and clarity are anything but “weird.”
Better yet: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
WB: One of the biggest themes of your poetry, especially your later work, is human finitude and folly. In the end, we are “nothing very remarkable. / Just dying. Just dead”, and one of our only certainties is that every “fat, clumsy body... / must gradually decay into earth.” But there’s life and wonder in this mortality! And those who are dead live on through the words and memories of those who are living! “Here we are, Lord, here we are, / half-emerged, full of / aspiration and errancy!” Could you say that poetry--more than some of the more systematic disciplines of science, philosophy, theology, etc--embraces this human temporality and mortality, seeking not to systematize or objectify but rather to capture human experience in all its wonderful, terrible subjectivity?
DA: In a word, yes.
I will always reach for Wisława Szymborska before Marx, Heidegger, Freud or Simone Weil.
There’s a joke Groucho Marx told about getting onto an elevator with a priest who recognizes him, and maybe he’s making a point about “systematic disciplines.” “Groucho,” the priest says, shaking his hand, “I just want to thank you for all the joy you have brought to the world.” “And I’d like to thank you, too,” Groucho says, “for all the joy you’ve taken out of it.”
WB: What then is the purpose of poetry in light of this inescapable folly and mortality?
DA: To make life bearable. And I don’t mean that to sound grim, quite the contrary. There is true solace in poetry, and not because there is anything anodyne about poetry. The jazz singer Jon Hendricks once introduced a song saying he was going to “tell it like it T-I-is.” That’s how I feel about poetry. And though there are many kinds of poetry, much of it cooler, self-consciously smarter, and less plainspoken than what I am typically drawn to, poetry as a category dependably tells it like it T-I-is.
One of my favorite books of poetry is Devil’s Lunch by Aleksandar Ristović. An entire section is devoted to poems about privies, you know, latrines. Is there is really anything in ordinary life quite so humbling as sitting in a latrine with your pants around your ankles, snuffing up the essence of everyone’s humanity who preceded you there? Is there any position quite so universally vulnerable?
Through a crack on the right
you can see the red rooster,
and through the one on the left,
with a bit of effort,
you can see the table,
the white cloth
and a bottle of wine.
Behind your back, if you turn,
you’ll make out the sheep
trying to fly with their woolen wings.
And through the heart-shaped
hole in the door,
someone’s cheerful face
watching you shit.
Poetry is always reminding us of who and what we are. And that makes it indispensable.
WB: What is the biggest suggestion you would make to up and coming, aspiring poets like myself?
DA: That is the hardest question.
The great radio comedians Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding used to do interviews with coach Sturdley that always included that question, and inevitably coach Sturdley’s answer resorted to the usual: “Ahhh, start young, becoming ahhh familiar with ahhh the tools the game ahhh...etc., etc.,” which hilariously parodied the cliches of sports that endure to this day like a pox on ESPN.
So here are coach Sturdley’s points of advice: Be honest, though it will cause you nothing but grief. Be at least as silly as you are serious, please. Study the old until you are old, and then keep on studying until you “take the dregs.” Do no violence to language. Clarity is a moral category. Always nurture the young. Avoid positions of power and authority over others, rank and file all the way. And never lose hope, though it is a fool’s errand to hope.
WB: Anything else you’d like to add?
DA: Sure. Hold these lines by the master close to your heart:
Doubletake
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky,
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
from The Cure at Troy, Sophocles, translated from the Greek by Seamus Heaney