Interviews
Am I a poet? I haven't written many poems lately, so perhaps I'm not actually a poet but rather an arts admin bureaucrat who had some possibly worthwhile daydreaming episodes years ago and now talks about those episodes as if he knows what he's talking about. Am I a novelist? I probably need to publish another one to be considered as such. Oh well.
While arranging the shelves for the current configuration of the store, I decided that Cormac McCarthy's books would always appear in the same place. That is to say, regardless of where the alphabet would situate them, they will always appear at eye level, on one particular shelf. Other authors' names may appear before or after McCarthy's in the common order, but because of where we are, the popularity of his titles, and the laws of marketing, McCarthy has trumped the alphabet.
Here is the scene. Mother is sitting at her end of the sofa in the study, a place she calls her "nest." I am directly across in dad's reading chair. I cannot manage to recite the verbal obfuscation of that answer to what sin is, try as I might. Mother gets so fed up with the whole exercise she throws the catechism against the wall above my head and above the big Philco we all listened to the 2nd World War on. It slaps against the paneling, slides down behind the radio, and there it stays
Despite the way mainstream books are sold, genres are, of course, porous and I'm not invested in defining or sustaining them as either writer or reader. I wanted to write in a way I had not written before: to begin with characters modeled on people, to begin with a story. I think those aims can be accommodated in poetry, but I am mostly a lyric poet and my poems aren't driven by stories or characters.
God was all around but not everywhere. My parents were not Born Again people or heavy-handed Christians. We were United Methodists. We went to Church once a week, at the standard time, and on the traditional holy day of Sunday but not in between. We were not a family who stayed in church all day, as some families in our small town did. We were in at 11 a.m. and out by 1 or 1:30 p.m.
The containing of multitudes can be ecstatic and, at times, painful. The discussion of race that emerges here illuminates distances and barriers that sadden me with (what I experience as) their familiarity. But the discussion is also deeply affirming of the fact that these poets need to be more widely read, heard, and discussed so that Eduardo encounters fewer of the narrow expectations he's writing against, and so that Aracelis' work is met with less silence or fear, and so that Rosa's work continues to dismantle the walls of "unacceptability" that keep parts of our lives hidden from each other.
--from the afterword by Maria Melendez
I began writing this novel when I was granted a long (8 week) residency at a colony. I just knew I wouldn't be able to fill my days with poems—I'm not that kind of poet—and I'd had a strong idea for the novel a few months before, and taken lots of notes, and the ideas just kept on coming, and so I thought it would be the perfect time for it. I wrote about 150 pages of what was then called Unspeakable Evil (yes!) during those weeks (and also wrote poems, and revised some, etc).
Well, I was brought up as a member of the Episcopal Church, and I attended Sunday school and church with fair regularity. We lived about seven miles from Montclair, New Jersey, where there was a very good Episcopal Church of which my mother was particularly fond. And we got there when we could. One frequent pleasant obstacle was Sunday morning tennis. I have the game of tennis all mixed up with religion. In those days it was played with great formality, and you said things like "Ready, partner? Ready?" and so on. And I can remember that on the estate where we lived, people sat in a pagoda to watch the tennis, and often there was a prayer book lying on the table next to the tennis racquets.
Poetry is pretty good at talking about the medium of poetry, can't not talk about it on some level, so I don't think I generally feel one has to leave the genre to criticize or celebrate it, but I did become interested in the novel as a vehicle for meditations on poetry, what the specific opportunities afforded by that distance might be. A major theme of the novel is the gap between Poetry with a capital "P"—the virtual possibilities of the art, the immense claims traditionally made for those possibilities—and actual poems, which to a certain extent must always betray the abstract potential of the medium the second they become merely real.
The New Salon brings writers into an intimate setting to discuss the implications of their work and craft.
What follows is a transcription of the conversation between Adam Zagajewski and Alice Quinn, on September 25, 2008 at New York University Lillian Vernon Creative Writer's House.
The New Salon brings writers into an intimate setting to discuss the implications of their work and craft.
What follows is a transcription of the conversation between Dan Chiasson and Alice Quinn, at the inaugural salon that took place on Thursday, October 18, 2007, at New York University Lillian Vernon Creative Writer's House.
When I first met Shirley Kaufman in her home in Jerusalem in the winter of 2002 we began a conversation about her move to Israel over thirty years ago in the midst of a promising poetry career. We picked up our conversation during her visit to New York this spring (2004) where she spoke about topics ranging from translation to politics, from San Francisco in the 1960s to Israeli poetry and George Oppen in Jerusalem.
I suppose, as an Indian living in the U.S., I'm used to crossing real and imaginary boundaries, and have, in fact, enjoyed a richer and crazier and more magical life precisely because I have fearlessly and fearfully crossed all sorts of those barriers. I guess I approach my poetry the same way I have approached every other thing in my life. I just don't like being told what to do. I write whatever feels and sounds right to me. At the beginning of my career, I wrote free verse with some formal influences, but I have lately been writing more formal verse with free verse influences. I don't feel the need to spend all my time living on either the free verse or the formal reservation. I want it all; hunger is my crime.
I just think about the poem. Sometimes in the past it has helped me to think about writing a letter to a close friend or an imaginary friend just to get myself into that kind of talk, into the confiding and intimate nature of that kind of talk. But I have not done that for years. I think about how the poem is communicating later when I am revising it. I might have been writing about a certain relationship, for instance, and not realized that at the time. That wouldn't be to somebody, though. I don't think consciously very much at all when I am first writing. Consciousness comes later.
The History of Literature! Ha ha! How about that! I'm interested in lyric poems. I have ways of imagining— probably all inaccurate, but all based on something that somebody with an authoritative attitude has taught me—the Origins of Language, the Origins of Poetry. I think poetry is one of the primitive forms of language. I like Suzanne Langer's idea that the original union of language is not, as poets sometimes think, with song, not with music at all, but with dance.
