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QUAN BARRY Parlor Games Recently I sat on a critical panel titled "How/Should We Study Lyric." After I got over the fact that there was no modifier in said title, I began to think about the lyric in more critical terms. For example, what exactly is the lyric? Is it an ahistorical set of reading conventions one projects on the text (i.e. we as readers bring certain expectations—e.g. sound, compression, a heightened state of voice, emotiveness—to poems we consider lyric), or is it something else? Also, what is now meant by the term high lyric? And finally, what is the role of language poetry in expanding the lyric's domain? Needless to say, these are just some preliminary questions (others currently stuck in my craw include, What is the role of the irrational in the lyric and does the image function differently?) Sadly I don't have too many answers to these questions (as my silence on said panel indicated), but as someone who's been described as a lyric poet I'm tremendously interested in such discussions on the state of the contemporary lyric and its fantastical sister the high lyric (the latter which the poet Rick Barot wondrously described in an email to me as, "A beautiful voice unmoored from the ground."). True, I often think the lyric is like pornography— something one recognizes when one sees it, but more and more I've been discussing with other poets just what they consider a lyric poem, and I've found their answers to be as fascinating as they are varied. So. Maybe give it a go. Ask your friends what they consider the lyric to be—e.g. is "The Waste Land" a lyric? Why or why not? Discuss! (Personally, I'm completely taken with lines like, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" and could, despite its length, be convinced). And finally, if you figure that one out satisfactorily, maybe move onto the lyric and its emanation in movies —e.g. Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line and David Gordon Green's George Washington. Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire Listen w/o distraction.
we were there, the Miami night
that room w/o walls, the fire banked & ageless.
would represent human existence?
churning toward a pre-determined end.
on the other side & holds out his hands.
through my eyes, see the path through the luminosity.
on the clock & the disbeliever.
nor there.
If you could commission any poet, living or dead, to write a poem about a subject of your choice, who would you choose and what would you have them write about? I'd take Wallace Stevens out of the depopulated regions where his poems are set and send him into the infield at the Kentucky Derby or Talladega and force him to show his hand. After all if he'd placed a bowl instead of a jar in Tennessee, he could have been the architect of Bristol International Speedway. When did you set your foot on the path of poetry? Did you feel a sudden bolt? Or did you grow gradually more passionate about poetry? I tried to write high-toned love poetry in high school for my girlfriends. It was dreadful. One day, dazed between classes, I wrote "A cartoon lake. Wolf on skates" in my notebook. Those were my first real lines. Is there a collaborative element to your writing process and what do you think it is? I try to make sure everything I write originates within myself. The only exception is this: I have poor hearing. The process of misunderstanding what others say to me and then using the misheard has been a fairly fruitful writing technique for me. Do you think that poetry can have an effect on everyday speech? How? It could and it should, but it doesn't. Are there poems, poets, or anthologies that have opened up or radically altered your ideas of what can be done in poetry? How did they do that? I always thought that the corollary to "make it new" should be "make it not boring." Stephen Crane and Kenneth Koch both inspired me. One with his clarity, the other with his obfuscation. Did you start off with an idea that your book grew around? Did you move away from that idea as the book progressed? I tried to write the most interesting poems I could, frontloaded the book with my favorites and then played 52- card-pickup with the rest. Snow Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
If you could commission any poet, living or dead, to write a poem about a subject of your choice, who would you choose and what would you have them write about? Arthur Symons on Boards of Canada. When did you set your foot on the path of poetry? Did you feel a sudden bolt? Or did you grow gradually more passionate about poetry? There is no path of poetry. Is there a collaborative element to your writing process and what do you think it is? I rely on my work (job) to provide a necessary feeling of permission to create. Do you think that poetry can have an effect on everyday speech? Rap does. Are there poems, poets, or anthologies that have opened up or radically altered your ideas of what can be done in poetry? How did they do that? Early on, a Victor Hugo poem entitled "Demain, dès l'aube." Are there aspects of painting or photography or dance or video art or music or architecture or theater or film or any other art form that you learn from or put to use in your own poems? Anything I encounter. Probably everything. Did you start off with an idea that your book grew around? Did you move away from that idea as the book progressed? No in both cases. Are you interested in the relationship between poetry and politics? Do you believe that your own poetry has political implications? As far as the first question is concerned, I'm interested in politics. My own poetry has no political implications. I like to think that how I lead my life does, though. Do you think that your poetry or poetry in general speaks to spiritual or religious yearnings and struggles? If so, how? For certain people it must. For me, writing poetry is release, discipline, erotic, a shunt. I would say, in fact, "exorcism," but that word's connotations aren't precisely fitting. Sun on 6 Nurse of terminal birds of blistered lily No black sun aristocrat 
I once toured a tennis ball factory and a retired prostitute asked me, "Is there a collaborative element to your writing process, and if so what do you think it is?" My initial response was "No, not that I'm aware of," and yet the more I've thought about it I'd say that yes, there is a kind of collaboration that goes on, that is constantly going on, between me and various people who are important to me, who have somehow spoken to me along the way. I say "a kind of collaboration" because these people may be dead; that, or they've never met me. And yet I still take from them certain moods, directions, cues. These cues are often where poems originate, or they're places toward which poems travel. I'm thinking of a large bureau, built a bit recklessly but with many drawers, some of them wide, some narrow, all of them neighboring, orderly; so that Joel-Peter Witkin's embroidered briefs can be said to rest near a single starched headband that belonged to Björn Borg, which in turn rests near Lou Reed's tube socks and isn't far from Angelo Badalamenti's breath mints, or Werner Herzog's ammo. belt, or the favorite smoked sausages of Julio Cortázar. In closing I'd like to say that I don't think you get to choose the direction you go in. Not really. You interpret lumps in the sandbox the same way now as you did when you were five. All one can do is drift—or gravitate, if that's easier—back toward—or go, one could simply go—back toward the very inner self, which was there, intact, at the outset. I don't think you can become another person. Do you? Why Have I Returned to New England It seems there's always an icicle
As a child I found it difficult to fall asleep. I couldn't put an end to the saying of things. More obedient by day, the current of inwardly articulated thoughts—or half-verbalized, half-felt imaginings—only amplified its whirring in the solitude and silence of the night, increasing its insistence, muscling its rhythm to an almost hypnotic hold. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith claims that all of us are "almost continuously" addressing "that most intimate, congenial and attentive listener whom we carry within our own skins." I assume she's right; at any rate, this has been my experience for as long as I can remember, and as a child—unschooled in the stilling of the mind—the unstoppable, exuberant flow of "interior speech" held for me as much interest and fascination as the realm of ordinary objects and sensible people. Habit asks that I oppose the "interior" and "exterior" realms, but I won't. All thinking is made possible by the material world. Yet our perception and evaluation of that world is, of course, determined by our thinking, determined by our language, and that condition of language which seems to me to hint at the fullest possibility of what it might mean to be, that seems most capable of expressing what Wittgenstein calls "the miracle of the existence of the world," is poetry. When I began reading poetry in earnest, the poems that mattered to me most were those that generated, to my mind, the same kind of excitement and propulsion that kept me awake as a child; poems that exhibited what I felt to be the power residing in the imagined heart of words, that reveled in the wonder of them beating there to begin with. Poems like "Ode to a Nightingale," "Sunday Morning," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—poems that presented speakers in readily identifiable dramatic situations, scenarios that served as verbal terra firma from which sudden torrents of aspiring, 'full-throated' and gorgeous utterance sprang. Keats, Stevens, and Eliot were my necessary models. Their influence was perhaps too apparent, or more likely, I mishandled it; in any case, my poems were criticized for being too literary, too artificial, too unreasonable; too gaudy, ambitious, pretentious, strange. ("That's not how people speak," I remember being told.) I was prescribed Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. (They didn't take.) I was asked to write from experience, as if I hadn't already. When I write, what I want is to remember what it felt like beforehand, that early reluctance to relinquish consciousness, that thrilling immersion in an aliveness to language that kept me keeping awake. I want to do justice to the joy and the fright and the wonder of living in language, and to experience as fully as I can what it might mean to be here. As a child, I couldn't put an end to the saying of things, and as an adult, I refuse to. Her Palm, Her Apotheosis There—past the ghost of the carpet,
Hanging on the wall above my desk is a large black and white photograph of an old figurine of President McKinley, taken by photographer Alex Forman. Because the little president has been magnified from one inch to three feet, his bow tie is just a blur, his hands mere mittens. I think he's wearing spectacles—so he's magnifying while being magnified. He looks nervous but also determined—his right fist is clenched, his left is holding a top hat. Thus we sally forth into poetry, or at least I do. If I believed in muses, he'd be my muse. The poems in my first book, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, investigate vision. Some speak in the voice of people attempting to explain what they see: an illuminator of manuscripts, a lion hunter, artist Max Beckmann. Others describe a painting or the process of painting, and others invent worlds that skew the seen. For example, in "The Gem Is On Page Sixty-Four," beauty is outlawed. In "One Filament Against the Firmament," people go blind attempting to see beyond what their eyes perceive. A number of the poems in my first book employ what I call "swivel lines" or "hinges"—i.e., the last word of a sentence is also the first word of the next phrase. These lines are like simple machines, creating a magnetic enjambment which holds the poems together (or keeps them from flying apart). My second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, (forthcoming from Graywolf in 2004) involves more complex machinations, examining the various systems we live amongst, under, and in-between. "Introduction" poems divide the book into sections. In these poems, the world, or Eden, for example, is imagined as a system literally in dialogue with humans. The system begins speaking, and the human voice (a collective "we") tries to engage with and understand the terms of the conversation. The book's engine poems are themselves systems—they often have what I call an "engine" in the epigraph position beneath the title. These can be visual diagrams (as in "Engine: @ or Engine:—><—!) or phrases, and sometimes hide in the title. In effect, the engines "run" the poems, mysterious except to their mechanic. By contrast, the book's prose poems make their theories and thinking explicit. Each poem creates a world out of one idea—in one, a king lives according to his theory of Baked Alaska, in another sadness is carried away by miniature ponies. My McKinley is only a short gallop away. He looms in my room and in my imagination. With him in mind, I'd like to request that Wallace Stevens write a poem called "Tea in the Lens of Zoom" and one called "Anecdote of a Kaleidoscope." Sad Little Breathing Machine Engine:@ Under its glass lid, the square
Response to: "Do you think that poetry can have an effect on everyday speech? How?"
Houseflies have not been domesticated by humans; rather, they have domesticated themselves in order to live with us. Their devotion is evolutionary—flies are hard-wired to sound like company. And anyone who's ever been trapped in a room with a fly knows: it both always and never seems to be flying toward you; that simultaneous direction and indirection is a poetic triumph. Montaigne complains that the fly's hissing is enough to murder his mind. A fly knows how to throw sounds around the room, addressing us restlessly, intrepidly, as it swerves and transforms its flightline. The fly catches in our bonnets, ruffling the surface of meaning. It whispers harebrained a-has!, naked nonsequiturs, paralogical postula—showing us a way out of our habitual givens of sound and sense. The fly lures us into an echo chamber of a world outside, becoming the ghost of language's agitations, an audible ghost clanking about in the attic. The sure, insistent rhythm and buzz that often kicks a poem into being, also helps it build its own order, its "metermaking argument." Poetry shows us how to keep the sound going, to see how many sounds can open up possibilities beyond first impulses and snap certainties. The accrual of design (sonic, imagistic, rhetorical) also allows for electrified mistakes that shake down our dictions, make us dangerous to the predictable. The poem's sensual speculations excite new knowledges, multiple landings: "And hit a World, at every plunge / and Finished knowing—then—" (Dickinson). Various Readings of an Illegible Postcard Horny or Harm seems an ordinary home.
Or Having seen the orchard and hives,
When did you set your foot on the path of poetry? Did you feel a sudden bolt? Or did you grow gradually more passionate about poetry? Encountering poetry at the nascent and impressionable age of eleven, the year I launched into all of my brooding, was the result of pillaging my grandparent's second floor library. Among that Golconda of books stacked floor to ceiling, I picked up a Robert Frost paperback edited by Louis Untermeyer and turned to a little ditty: "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I still have its rhythm in my head. Langston Hughes I dug up next, and then an anthology edited by Mark Strand, Contemporary American Poetry, with that cool Jasper Johns flag on the cover. Reading poetry back then was a private pleasure. I carried a few of those books with me for their intimacy. At that adolescent hour, I needed their companionship. Is there a collaborative element to your writing process and what do you think it is? Writing poetry is collaborative for me in that often in my work I consciously respond to life happenings, present ideologies, and concerns rightly identified by critics as related to urban decay and regeneration, but when I compose I am most aware of that palimpsest of writings we have inherited over the millennia. I am fed and led by this continuing and illustrious conversation. My sense of what is possible in poetry, what can be done with language, grows daily and normally through exposure, that is, wide reading. I am embarrassed to name all of my touchstones; you'd think me a bona fide thief. Right now, I am re-reading Auden's "Letter to Byron." What power and play! I haven't achieved his brand of comfort with the conversational mode. So afraid I am of not making music and lapsing into prose rhythms. Are there aspects of other arts that you've put to use in your work? I first began to feed off poetry's sister arts and cousins while working at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, which featured nightly the wide family of living and breathing artists in performance art, avart-garde jazz and New Music, dance, etc. As an intern, I catwalked, hung lights, miked the stage, threw around monitors for the likes of Diamanda Galas, Karen Finley, David Murray, Harryette Mullen & Ted Pearson, Philadanco. We had a fantastic Dada Fest, and Philadelphia would eventually develop its own Fringe Festival. What was positively persuasive about the artists that came through the Bride was their willingness to experiment, to worry the precincts of expression, form, structure and time. But as classical as this may sound, my work gains power and seeks to develop from the groundwork and collective value we have imbued in the vessel of poetry, in the tradition. Are you interested in the relationship between poetry and politics? I have a fear of willful rhetoric overwhelming the poems I write, and I know a delicate balance must be struck when any writer attempts to confront reality, the here and now. A poet must also avoid self-righteousness, which distracts from the poem. But the dichotomy of politics and poetry is an illusion, and the lives of many American poets tell us this: Muriel Rukeyser, Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka. Language is political and implicates human consciousness. How to Listen I am going to cock my head tonight like a dog
Are you interested in the relationship between poetry and politics? Do you believe that your own poetry has political implications? I almost joined the Army once. Amazing but true. I took the intelligence test and everything. This was actually not all that long ago. After basic training, I was going to enter officer school and work in some kind of legal area. I had or was given the impression that it would be like A Few Good Men. Luckily I backed out before signing anything serious. These days, I pass the Army recruitment office every morning on the way to work, and I've gotten to be chat-level friendly with the recruiters. One guy in particular, the commanding officer I think, still asks me when I'm going to come in and sign up. "I can't today," I usually tell him. "My boss would kill me." He chuckles and throws me a little shrug. When I was considering joining up I thought that being a poet, or anyway identifying myself as one, might be one of the many alienating experiences I'd have in the armed forces. This made me tense because I don't like the idea that poetry, rather than making space for communion, only puts us deeper into our own little worlds. It's difficult because poetry so often seems like a very insular, even provincial, concern, and its connection to politics is tenuous at best, often no more than a kind of color commentary—like a verse equivalent to Michael Moore or Rush Limbaugh—for a situation from which it's increasingly dissociated. But I didn't stay out of the Army because of poetry. In truth, things just got very intense and frightening, and I bailed. I don't know if it was a good decision or not, but the whole experience has, for whatever reason, led me to believe that writing political poems is really important. While I'm sure any political poems I write will be no more relevant than my vote, I hope they'll be a little ballsier than I am and somewhat more willing to carry a gun. from Forget Rita With the same slow tackle of seasons touching,
I came to the states in 1975, when I was five, after the political upheaval in Saigon. That was the first bolt, I think, in terms of my personal being and security. I began to think differently of the world: it was no longer a safe place; we had to leave for our safety, and were fortunate enough to have been able to come to the U.S. I grew into poetry, slowly, from being a visual artist. I didn't speak much as a child in school in the States, but I drew and painted a lot. I started to write after reading a lot of literature. I had very good literature teachers in high school and college, and writing was an extension. My mom initiated me into Vietnamese poetry. She and I would read Vietnamese poems together when she had time late at night. There are so many poets who have opened up my idea of poetry—to name a few: Wallace Stevens, for his distinctive usage of image and voice; e.e. cummings, for his playfulness on the page and with words; Ann Lauterbach for her bold inventiveness; Lyn Hejinian, for her playful, irreverent use of language; Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman, for their expansiveness and their treatment of the long poem. And the haiku form—the succinctness and momentary quality of the haiku move me. The slice/cut to, storytelling ability of images in film, the latent still images of painting and photography, the voice and drama of theatre, the grace of dance, the complicated sounds inherent in music: all of the above, I think, seep into my poems. My first book, Song of the Cicadas, is a collection grouped largely around experience of place and experimentation with various forms—experiences from Vietnam, the San Francisco bay area, Mexico, the American Southwest, and vibrations from those places. My second book, why is the edge always windy, is a deeper meditation on that same thought, with more varied experiments. My insights as a visual artist and my experience in dance have helped form my poems as well. I've written a whole book of poems around Argentine tango, called The Tango Book, unraveling the experience of dancing the tango and the gender issues involved in the dance. Recently poets have protested against the war with Iraq, submitting poems to Sam Hamill's website and staging anti-war poetry readings across the country. It would be hopeful to think that poetry can affect policy in and of itself. Many people in a country can affect politics, and in the same way, a poet, many poets, may do the same. I hope that in some small measure, it has helped the Iraq anti-war movement. from why is the edge always windy? at Phromthep Cape, the edge of the world, my dress unloosened— wind ripped along the coast drove along until it lifted & we drove on jeep around the roar's extremities
sweet mint sauces hung to our clothes as did rain lawless waves clinging to cliff
the Andaman sea with their unmuffled motors soggy newspapers sopped up night's moisture clothes don't dry here & matches don't catch only you were willing
"love shacks" "up to you" cafes another life gained
on glass door walking toward me through garden archway— never such a beautiful sight!
 [...]1
I. "I can't do it, poetry. I don't know what it is." — Danielle Collobert I am trying to write the story of my father's impending death. Its largeness. I step into the breach (or is it a presence?), pull it, seeping, through the skin. It opens—the body—fractures, becomes less a body. He is small. Like a child. The skin sags off the bones; the bones retreat. It is in the eyes, I think. They are soft. They are for the first time gentle—I cannot write it. Poetry fails. The fact that there is a page. The fact that the whiteness of the page is presence. Is already. Is Is-ness. I turn to Myung Mi Kim's attempted utterance in Commons: "[when my father died and left me nothing]" a long space on the page, and then, "[this is how I speak]." I, too, want to speak this silence. The hardness of silence, its tremendous matter, the nothing that is some thing, and of its coming. II. "Speech that placed death in my mouth." — Jean Daive I capture a witness/reader in order to say, in order to be able to say, that I cannot say. See. In an old photograph, my father is a man. Broad shouldered. He poses behind the bar, smiling. A cigarette casual between the fingers. The image is seamless, finished, a literal white border encloses it. I think, he has never told me about the war. I am trying to write the story of my father's life. A poem that strains in huffs toward unmaking. Incessantly. Poem in pieces. The poem as object to be desired but never achieved. It is an effort in desire. A clamoring courtship. Fumbling hands. A schizophrenic circular poetics. Multi-voiced. Breath invoked. Forced inhale. Hot iron poking the same black spot. Quantities of sore. See? Dogs circle a whining prey. Indescribable prey. III. "An unleashed tongue is an unmoored beauty." —Beth Coleman When I began this essay, I had intended to enter the space of my own poetic through the difficulty of writing about my father. To show how death is its own voice but cannot be spoken. [This reality informs my approach to writing both the personal and the political—when] Speaking can become a literal psychic breaking—breaking into. I wanted to ask questions about utterance (how does one say anything at all?), about the body that attempts speech but flounders and the body that makes no attempt but speaks, and about the consequence of this very moment—a poetic engagement in the now. I turn to a recent journal entry: It is the day before the first day of spring. It is the day after the first bombing of Iraq. It is the day that I confront my father as he speaks the body's last word. But I also wanted to write about liberation, about how the struggle to speak is the thing itself. How we fall taciturn or stammering or gurgling and how those utterances— those relations to speaking— feed the work, the poem, and despite their awkwardness, are beautiful. 1The Impossibility of Poetry Bone They say, recovering, lips suffering the glass. And they say, dig, dig, rise from tough root.
"Poetry," writes Stevens "is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words," and in a related apothegm: "Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life." What Stevens states baldly, Randall Jarrell, whom Robert Lowell described as the most heartbreaking poet of his generation, brilliantly enacts. In one of his dramatic monologues a woman comes to the realization of the terror at the heart of existence while considering her aging face in a mirror. In another, a man surveys life's prospects from the vantage point of middle age: Here where North, the night, the berg of death flung me— Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain. —from "90 North"
This is where it starts for me, not only poetry but any hope of a reasonable and humane adult existence and of our continuance, as a species, on this planet: in the acknowledgment of the hard facts that condition any life and their acute magnification through the singular gift of human consciousness. To acknowledge pain as pain, let alone the poverty of life, let alone that this poverty—that anything—is irremediable is a powerful antidote to our much-cherished doctrines of the imminent perfectibility of our species and our world, doctrines we continue to cling to despite their destructiveness having been proven again and again. While politics of whatever stripe pursues remedies for real and perceived ills through shifts in the balance of power, poetry eschews power, cultivates vulnerability instead, traces social problems back to psychic roots, does not so much seek to heal divisions inherent in the human heart as to effect provisional re-integrations, peaceable coexistence, and peaceful conflicts. "The mind is the most terrible force in the world," Stevens writes, "principally in this that it is the only force that can defend us against itself. The modern world is based on this pensée." And then one day, if we are lucky, acknowledgment takes a subtle turn, becomes acceptance, becomes celebration: a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life. In one reading, poetry is a little island adrift in the ocean of life's irremediable poverty, but in another, life, its irremediable poverty notwithstanding, becomes the source of one's satisfaction, as the world is subtly altered by our imagination and our words. To teach men how to love their lives— this life, this world, the only one there is—and passionately, this, this seems to me the most radical end of poetry. . . . The Mind in the Act of Finding What Will Suffice Seizes summer, an evening in late summer Where cicadas choired and the company fell away As darkness settled round us like a shawl And our voices found another register Below the pitch and roll of social chatter. . . . And life in that new place seemed possible
"For more than 40 years I've been speaking prose without knowing it." —Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
We use the mathematical notation Thomas Hariot proposed in the 17th century without experiencing ourselves as working within a tradition, though we are. We say "hello" without experiencing ourselves as citing the history of greeting, though we are. While < and > symbols don't capture sense data and mental states very well, they are without question expressive and ruled, as is "hello." Poetry's greetings and equal signs are slightly vaguer than logical notation, appear different from different subjective angles or centers, and change over time. These facts make such functions and signs (their history of use) no less susceptible to study. Why do most MFA programs emphasize the voice-driven workshop [sic] while mostly ignoring disciplines such as rhetoric and prosody from which the significant sounds of poetry derive? The history of poetry is that of a vast and disagreeable coterie with no people in it, only usages, expressive and ruled. Yet precisely because of these disagreements about it, many poets don't feel obligated to acquire traditional knowledge, practicing poetry's large language without a sense of its historical lack of consensus. So what? Do the latest flowers need to be self-conscious about their ground or learn floral code? Yes, and yes and no. In poetry, deploying rhythms is inescapable; a reliance on rhetorical figures, from the simplicity of chiasmus to the knottiness of gradatio, is built-in. These are functions so intimately related to all other genres of speaking that everyone's both an expert and a natural; if you scan material from a recent genre such as rap (especially that of a graybeard like Rakim) you'll find at worst balladic measures and rhetorical competence and often much more: "you're gettin' me / so upset that I'm wet / cuz you're sweatin' me." But this is not intuition at work. These effects surely appear because of a DIY technical mastery, a relentlessly inherited, practiced, and challenged common language. If such practices pass into everyday speech over time with happy results, ballads to boasts, if praxis is the afterlife of prior theories, if all one has to do is upset the present, then why run after a departing sense of the past? To be happier. What knowledge does to its subject or object, what techne does to the practice of poetry, these are trivial questions—poetry is that techne, techne is that subject. When Rakim asks the non-trivial question "How can I move the crowd?" he's accessing the origin of rhetoric (property disputes), its inventio, but as he asks this he's already speaking, rhetorically, to a crowd; and it isn't a crowd of people, it's the words themselves, "I" and "crowd" and every other word in the radiant chain. How does one do things with words? By knowing (that and how) words have been doing things with one, by being the latest ways of old sentences. Then the most difficult thing is to use everything, so that Tradition and the Individual Talent can become what they are, synonyms. To describe tradition as a "crowd" rather than a crowd, as a set of recombinant practices rather than the roster of a Freudian drama is also to move away from two other policed concepts, that of the "New" and the "American." Absence of the Archbishop You meet at most four archbishops
If you could commission any poet, living or dead, to write a poem about a subject of your choice, who would you choose and what would you have them write about? I would ask Thomas Hardy to write a poem about the urban landscape of New York in 2003. Hardy was able to mesh, in his time, the pastoral and the philosophical with exquisite lyricism. Even his pastoral gave way to the industrial revolution and World War I (I am thinking of "Channel Firing" and the stanza: "The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, 'No; / It's gunnery practice out at sea / Just as before you went below; / The world as it used to be: / All nations striving strong to make / red war yet redderÉ.'") To have him witness how red our wars have become would allow him to produce (hopefully) a powerful and despairing poem. Is there a collaborative element to your writing process and what do you think it is? I do like using activities such as football or baseball metaphorically as a way of exploring themes of desire and longing. A few poems have lifted nautical terms and football statistics. I also like collaborating with other poets and with visual artists and sound artists, but when I work on that kind of collaboration, something with poetic elements gets created, but not necessarily a poem. Are there aspects of other arts you have put to use in your own poems? I am learning final-cut pro (video editing) right now and definitely like the idea that writing is similar to stock footage—that you have to edit the moments down and think of the line as a frame. Poetry has also helped me link the audio to the visual so that editing becomes more about the musicality of images. Did you start off with an idea that your book grew around? Did you move away from that idea as the book progressed? I started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling it in with a hopeful lyrical edge. Are you interested in the relationship between poetry and politics? Do you believe that your own poetry has political implications? I definitely am. I want to enact a certain kind of stance rather than speak about it. If I want to talk about South Asian women and their culture or personality, I would much rather introduce philosophical or psychological concepts or themes that are mouthed in the narrative of the poem. Do you think that your poetry or poetry in general speaks to spiritual or religious yearnings and struggles? If so, how? I like to think of clarity as a spiritual moment. Not a defined clarity but by the end, the poem should have gained a necessary momentum to speak out suggestively and generously to an idea or truth or a combination of ideas. Being raised as a Hindu, I was taught to honor knowledge and books like a religion and so for me poetry keeps this relationship close, true, and active. Underpants My sweetie's underpants have argyles on them and grip his thighs.
Poets are always asked, "Why do you write?" This question is tiresome only because we ask it of ourselves so often, usually at times of despair or block, and because the answers never feel satisfactory and true for long. One must continually revise one's own reasons for writing, avoid thinking about it altogether, or have one two-ton granite slab of a dogged methodology. Do we write to "give back," to be a part of the literature we love and that most likely saved us? The askers really believe, secretly or loudly, however, that we write for love. The idea is clichéd for a reason: it's a serviceable passive-aggressive answer to the question, with added charm, implying an endearing, artsy blend of pathos, loneliness and honesty. Writing for love is a fine place to start, but a strange place to end, if one accepts this cliché at its basest implication. In practice, it can retard the movement of a writer's mind, allowing a poet to languish in the same imaginary dirty sheets for months on end. This can be wonderful, intense, but does it yield wonderfully intense poems? Sometimes not, especially if the writer is unable to see through her own theater curtains. I've certainly blinded myself this way, and love is the only thing that has ever motivated me to write at all. Writing love poems cannot simply be what it seems: begging that the "you" understand the infinite mysteries of "me" and forgiving them for still loving "me." This headlock, this dyad, can uncover endless variations of performances, supplication, desire. The trick is for the poet not to actually believe for too long that she is writing to or about a real person. What cracks it open for me lately is expanding my notion of a beloved. From whom can one ask total, endless, unconditional love? If, in a poem, I am making outrageous and often unreasonable requests for love of a particular kind, that outsized entitlement positing otherworldly capacity and a bottomless pit, who but an imagined lover, a projection, could fulfill it? This endless, often mercurial desire is looking to be mirrored, and in that, transmogrified by the light produced. My poems are in search of lovers, the other half of themselves. The longing is not for completion but for harmony, symmetry, and an equal and opposite reaction. Longing for the sign that one is not alone in the world. Life, in its everyday forms, looks for a match: the particular sweetness of a macaroon or a certain friend in a certain mood. The "match" or the soulmate of the poem may not be a person, or another poem. It may be a twig or the wake of a tugboat. And the merging, the union, is not important. It's the beauty of the state of longing with its hope and discomfort, the idea that one's words correspond with some other form of love out there yet unfound. This is why poets write, or at least why I do. I'm Perfect at Feelings so I have no problem telling you
When did you set your foot on the path of poetry? Did you feel a sudden bolt? When I was 17 and a senior in high school I fell (for "falling" read: ritualistic driving of a ragged-out evergreen 4-door Renault up and down the street nearest her window) enamored of a girl who, though a year younger, so outclassed me that to this day my mother cringes at the memory of my increasingly unhinged behavior during the short, brutal months of my failed courtship. Still, it was in her bedroom (my intended's, not my mother's), at the end of a cul-de-sac in her mother's yellow-sided and faux-brick two-story, sitting on her bed, that I think poetry became for me something more than the anthological. She pulled the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound off a shelf—with his severe, weather-beaten profile on the cover—and leaned against the door jam, radiating that twin-powered teenage wattage of aloofness and attention, and offered to read me her favorite poem. I'm sure I nodded yes. I nodded yes to everything back then. And she read to me "The Garden": Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall Kensington Gardens. And she is dying piece-meal
the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.
I think that my understanding of how a poem works began at that moment. The image ("skein of loose silk"); the distancing abstraction ("They shall inherit the earth"); the music ("And round about there is the rabble")— all seemed clearly delineated and at the same time wound inextricably together. Most importantly, though, what struck me was the poem's drama, the way I wanted that moment of suspension, that almost-act that hangs between the "I" and the "indiscretion," to last forever. Even then, before I knew subject from object, before I knew of The Pisan Cantos, usury, or Archie MacLeish, I identified with the poet's need to gather cleverness, loneliness, intelligence, and, finally, empathy (traits I was convinced I possessed in abundance) into that futile, crucial moment before desire crumbles into the impossibility of transcendence. There's more than a little truth in the idea that every poem I've written since is a formal reenactment of that scene: a boy on a bed in a nothing town, an unattainable girl across an unbridgeable room, and a world of literature hanging in the air between. In the end, this is hardly a compliment and almost surely a limitation. But poetry is at least partly about limitations. And without that initial experience, I probably wouldn't have poetry. I Am Cinematographer A.
Asked to identify the origins of my desire to write poetry, I mostly come up with a sense of nostalgia, flagged by a few odd landmarks. Some of them were established when I was sixteen and lived in Berkeley, and a wiry man named Mr. Valtz was my junior year English teacher. He was 26, with wild hair and veiny arms. He dedicated Mondays to silent reading and Fridays to storytelling because, as he put it, "It was important for us to learn good oral skills." He told most of the stories. In between, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we read Henry IV, Dracula, the Bröntes and Ntozake Shange. Mr. Valtz taught poetry in a similarly mixed up way, by combining things he liked on photocopied sheets I still have. We read a mixture of 17th century sonnets, Theodore Roethke's "Prayer for a Young Wife" and D.H. Lawrence on little fish. We read that plum poem by William Carlos Williams, and many of its irreverent spoofs, like, "This is just to say, I have burned down the house that you were building for your retirement, and were probably hoping to live in. Forgive me, the flaming beams were so clear, and so orange." Later there would be more disciplined beginnings. But that was the year we read Robert Hass' "Meditation at Lagunitas," and learned that Robert Hass himself was up the street and teaching at the University of California. This was my first experience picturing a real, living poet wandering through my landscape, crafting poems out of it. It was very exciting to think that such good poems might be made so nearby: I myself was very fond of Lagunitas. It is hard to trace why things resonate. Mr. Valtz did not explain the poem for us, but just read it, pronouncing the words blackberry and pumpkinseed with great feeling, so that even now, repeating them, I feel as if I connect to much more than their names. That same year, on the terrace of a café on Hopkins Street, my friend Jasmine and I sat together, decoding those poems. Something momentous might be happening, we felt. "The word is elegy to what it signifies," we repeated. It began to rain, and the air smelled like eucalyptus. We sat just inside the line of falling rain, next to a flower stand, watching the droplets bead inside some scarlet tulips. Explanation Because the snow eclipsed the woods and formed the definite wet gravel and the lumber pilings into rounded banks and slate diagonals. Because across blank snow, dark cherry boughs cast intricate, protracted hieroglyphs, and the falling downs spun in the light. All this new hidden-ness lay spread around us hinting, as at some forgotten word. Because, as if in offering you said chrysanthemum. O I adored the sudden world you made with your red lips: I wanted some, and plundered it.
At the heart of the Civil War, Mary Todd Lincoln shopped relentlessly for luxury items, milliners' frill & lace. What she coveted with a ferocity of intention & action—no matter how stricken the national coffers—were gloves, jacquard, brocade, skin of a slaughtered calf. Addled by grief, she hoarded hundreds, many pairs never removed from their slim papered boxes. I'm interested in the idea of the poem as fetish, with all the sexual & spiritual implications that the word implies. Stevens wrote of the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice. What does it mean to hold language like a worry stone, knowing full well this fetish is frail as the human hair braided into a Victorian mourning brooch? I think of Rothko's canvases, dimestore ingredients sometimes stirred into the paint so that the works contain their own degradation, decomposition. In my work as a writer-in-theschools, one student wrote: "My father calls me Nickel because he says I'm not worth a dime." How strange to teach this girl metaphor when she's already absorbed it like whiplash. What a string of pearls signifies in Vermeer's lexicon is not what it means in pornography, & if both renderings are equally true, how can the made thing, failing at fixity, ever suffice? In the lapse between sign & signified, my poems often place the body as ampersand. Or try to. Keats: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To witness frailty & damage, the world a garlanded calf going down on its knees? We all are, I think, & thus far language is all I have to leave at the altar. Ferry Boat Wreck I have spent all day with the silver disc of the barn owl's face
The title of my first book, Manderley, was suggested to me, long after the manuscript had achieved its final form, by a friend in my writing group. It was an inspired suggestion, and I took it immediately. The truth of the matter is that the book, Manderley, is only related to Daphne DuMaurier's novel Rebecca (and Hitchcock's film of the same name) by this incident. I am not sure why I am willing—eager?—to admit this, but I am. Rebecca, briefly, is the dead wife of the protaganist's new husband. She haunts said nameless protaganist—as well as the novel itself—as a spectre of all that the heroine is not, and can never be: well-bred, glamorous, beautiful—loved. And, perhaps most significantly, to the manor born. The manor in question is Manderley—a gothic manse in the best tradition, set to end up in flames and ruin. My book happens to have lots of houses in it, as well as lots of dreams, failed love, morbid longing, insecurity, and, of course, lots of Rebecca. I am, after all, indisputably, Rebecca—and perhaps the best joke of the title's random application is that many of the poems in Manderley are consumed, if not concerned, with evading, distending, even exploiting the sort of confessional referentiality that the connection would imply, were it given the chance. Several critics, most notably the nameless critic in Publisher's Weekly, have taken at least a bite of the bait and made much of Manderley's gothic home. "Rebecca Wolff's Manderley tears mosses off the old manse of Du Maurier's haunted classic Rebecca, tosses them with a heady late 90s bravura . . . Wolff here sets the house afire." Late 90s indeed! Most of these poems were written between 1990 and 1995. Formally speaking, I look back with not a little awe at my own late tendencies toward density and irony, and my rather exaggerated command of the English language. Recent work has tended toward a simplicity of texture and affect and a sort of open-weave structure, looser to let the light in. The King Alone at last with my feelings, (a secret)
 Two Synonyms for Body: Corpse and Form
"So strange an accident has happened to us, that I cannot forbear recording it" —Mary Shelley
I think too much and know too little, believe my witness though, of course, see slant. When imagination overtakes me (remember the wave Coleridge tried to sell us, the ocean that stood in for passion?), my body can't fail to notice and gasp for the 21% oxygen atmosphere above sea-level. In this giving-notice the almost-corpse pinches fiercely at the mind's eye, the eye's horizon, and reminds me that for better or worse we measure quarks and trees and galaxies in relation to human figures. I make a shape and shadow. And with these made two boys and a cool space for them to sleep. When no one is watching I carve out pieces of the world, with my sharp body lie down on life and make a me-shaped map, human continent. I press what once looked real, a Vermeer-like landscape, through my tiniest pores, into some salty unmade mound of golem. And with everything I have seen and felt and wondered attempt to render likeness. Some changeling covered in half-visible fingerprints—if I am lucky it will cry so pleadingly your milk will let down though you know I made it. One suspect among a herd of the anthropocentric criers, I confess: with slight evidence or without proof at all I have imagined and imagine I am guilty of daily suspicions. I have looked about with awe and suspected the real world to be so frightening and beautiful that I could not help but make these forms and corpses. Despite Reports Curious George Not A Monkey, Has No Tail "What things know no one knows" —Lyn Hejinian
a human in neon biosuit that corner of your eye reserved for
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