Interviews

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Jonathan Lethem has called Aimee Bender’s work “visionary, but close to home.” Her short fiction has appeared in such places as GQ, The Paris Review, and Harper’s. Her first story collection, The Girl In The Flammable Skirt (Doubleday, 1998) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and spent seven weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. An Entertainment Weekly review of her second story collection, Willful Creatures (Doubleday, 2005), claimed that “to curl up with an Aimee Bender story is to thank heaven you ever learned to read in the first place.”

Bender’s work is widely known and imitated for its tendencies toward magical realism, but she doesn’t like to see her work—which is also steeped in the realist tradition—chained to any particular style: “It doesn’t matter if something is realistic or non-realistic,” she says. “How someone phrases something is more important to me, if something is said in a new way.” Some of that penchant for realism is evident in her novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (Doubleday, 2004), a book the New York Times Book Review called “intelligent and engaging.”

A native of Southern California, Ms. Bender received her BA from the University of California at San Diego, and her MFA from the University of California at Irvine. She now teaches at the University of Southern California. We met over lunch at Finn & Porter restaurant in Missoula, across the street from the University of Montana, where she was visiting the MFA program.

Bender accepts as many interview requests as any writer working today—a Google search for “Aimee Bender interview” yields almost 100,000 hits, from magazines to newspapers to individual bloggers.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You must be a nice person to do so many interviews—

AIMEE BENDER

Writing is so weird. I like doing interviews because we talk about this thing that’s impossible to talk about. We can’t address it directly, but it’s fun to talk around it.

SARAH FLYNN

In “The Meeting,” you describe a man changed by the experience of moving his fingers down a woman’s spine, writing, “It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what’s happened.” Can you remember a time in your life when you felt an empty space fill with feeling in this way?

BENDER

I think it happens a lot. But it’s hard to pinpoint. Sometimes I’m slow trying to think of a response to questions directly from my life. What I would say first is: that kind of empty space that feeling floods into can be available to any feeling, but it’s important to make the empty space available. Let’s come back to that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The way you dodged that question recalls your answers to a lot of personal questions in interviews—do you avoid personal questions?

BENDER

It’s not like I shroud anything exactly—I like direct questions. But it’s harder for me to know how to talk about my own life specifically—I blank out and think, What is a moment I feel comfortable sharing that will both answer the question and not give away something too close to me? There’s a back and forth, because of that withholding, that makes me feel a blankness of not being able to remember anything. I am cautious about what I share. I don’t always like to know that much about people I read.

A genuine connection happens when someone reads, an intimacy occurs, and I don’t want to flood that with, “Well, that character was actually a conglomeration of one boyfriend plus my mom plus my sister plus someone I liked in third grade.” Instead—by deliberately avoiding sharing everything about my life—I’m saying that it doesn’t matter. I don’t want reading my work to become an exercise in parsing out my biography. That act can invade what is actually a slightly stranger connection, when you don’t have tidbits of information on an author’s life. I like that when I read and when I write. I tend to be a private person anyway, so it should come as no surprise that what I write about isn’t autobiographical, directly—though of course it is in some way—but I include those elements deliberately, too, as much as I protect myself, because I can be more honest about what I felt or what I experienced three times removed from the actual experience.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Did you hate literature classes in college?

BENDER

I struggled with lit classes, though sometimes I loved them. I struggled more when they leaned too heavily on biography. I don’t get why it matters that we can say, “That was written when he was going through a dark period.” Isn’t the pain in the book? Isn’t that the most beautiful way we can get that sense of pain?

FLYNN

The narrator of “Call My Name” and “Off” says that most people never see the hidden menace in her paintings. What do readers of your fiction miss?

BENDER

I’m not subtle. The violent impulses in my fiction are pretty much laid out on the table. I crave the opportunity to let out in the fiction some of the darker thoughts that are not as accessible in a regular conversation. An earlier version of me would have wanted to tuck the gun or the knife behind the cornhusk, as if to say, Is it okay? And then something in me burst forward and said, The gun should be in front of the cornhusk, the gun is more important.

A student asked me yesterday about some of the pitfalls of writing in a magical vein, and I told him that a potential pitfall is that it can seem too light or too whimsical and darling. Violence can ground magical fiction, make readers feel there are consequences. Flannery O’Connor said that violence can push a character to reveal him or herself within the frame of a story. Which makes it very different than violence in real life. Even though I feel like a protective person in my interactions with actual people, I like not protecting my characters.

It feels especially important as a female writer to be able to use violence, because—in both men and women, but especially in women writers—there can be an urge to protect characters. I had a student once who wrote a story about a hundred-foot woman romping through a city, and no one got hurt. She had this great violent image of strength and messy, harmful things happening, but you could see her inhibitions. Maybe some cars got squished and someone had a broken wrist or something really benign. We had a long discussion about it, that you have to allow there to be consequences, and that doesn’t mean anything bad. It’s freeing to the reader.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Did some of that impulse come directly from O’Connor?

BENDER

I love her, so yes. She’s a huge influence in that way. She was so wise about how to articulate the importance of violence and also about the grotesque, and writing, and writing magically.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Many writers considered non-realists seem to love her. Though it’s hard to categorize your work as strictly non-realist, especially your novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own. Do you feel that book was a departure for you?

BENDER

Sometimes I write realistically, though I always feel free to write non- realistically. I’m not more comfortable with one than the other. Writing something longer was the big step, learning how to sustain that length. And I did find it more difficult to stay completely realistic. There were magical parts of the book that got cut, because I found it hard to sustain them for the length of a novel. It’s much easier in a story.

FLYNN

So often, people ask you questions about the non-realistic elements of your fiction. What of the realist tradition do you see in your work?

BENDER

I started to write not long after everyone was trying to be Carver. I am still influenced by Carver; I admire his writing a lot. And I love Hemingway. I lean toward language the most. It doesn’t matter if something is realistic or non-realistic. How someone phrases something is more important to me, if something is said in a new way. That freshness is all over Carver, every sentence a new invention.

FLYNN

You’ve said American readers tend to be more accepting of fiction with magical elements when it comes from other countries. Why do you think your writing has been so successful in the United States?

BENDER

I was lucky. The tide was shifting a little at that time. Judy Budnitz’ book, Flying Leap, had come out the same year as The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and there are a lot of similarities in the tone and the interest in magic. Then Julia Slavin’s book, The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club came out. Stacey Richter’s book, My Date with Satan, came out. So there were these few collections by women who pushed away from realism a little bit. And it wasn’t like we were going back and forth; the timing was just good; there was a cluster.

Right now I don’t feel like there’s a set mood in American fiction, and the MFA field seems like it has a lot of space for different kinds of work. But at that time, there was movement away from the intense minimalist realism that dominated the 1980s and 1990s, the Richard Ford era. Everything was ready to be shook up. Then came the David Foster Wallaces and the Dave Eggers and there was a lot of space to try to look at things in different ways. There was an appetite for it in readers and in writers.

FLYNN

You once suggested that American fiction has been hijacked by the “quiet epiphany.” Could you explain in more detail what you meant by that?

BENDER

I was quoting Michael Chabon, who wrote about that in the introduction to Thrilling Tales, where he talks about the quiet epiphany being the dominant form in fiction right now and asks: What if every story in American fiction were a story about a nurse? Wouldn’t that be the same thing as a quiet epiphany? I think he’s right. We’ve all ingested through radio and TV and film a certain narrative way of thinking.

Here’s an example: I have a friend who threw out her bed because she wanted a good relationship. She reached the point where she said to herself, I’m taking my bed and putting it out on the curb, and I’m going to buy a new bed and get a new man. She had the symbol set in her mind. But the internal stuff hadn’t gone through her at all. She just decided one day what her life’s short story would read like or what her film would look like—what the external representation of her quiet epiphany would look like. Throwing out the bed wasn’t that quiet. But it wasn’t a bomb, either. Maybe putting the pillow on the curb would be the story version of it.

It feels to me that there is a push toward that kind of epiphantic—is that a word?—moment. But it can be unearned, because those moments in life are big and rare and very meaningful. And I think it’s a mistake to push those on all stories, the moment the character realizes something. I don’t think all stories have to do that. The danger is that the stories start to feel like they plug into a system, where they put the bed out on the curb and feel like it means something, when it just means that you’re watching the movie of your life that looks good. And that’s different than something internal that can’t be expressed with words.

FLYNN

What can a narrative that doesn’t use the quiet epiphany do?

BENDER

I think there just has to be interesting movement in the story. Something has to change, but I don’t think it has to be the character. There has to be some feeling that you as the reader have been moved, that something has shifted inside you based on what happens in the story. The story-reader experience doesn’t have to exist inside the character. I so resist dictums about what a story needs to do.

There’s a great writer in L.A. named Jim Krusoe who is not very well known, but he’s wonderful. He has a book called Blood Lake that doesn’t follow the quiet epiphany pattern. It’s odd the way his characters change; the change follows more of a messy emotional pattern, so I have a much more emotional response to it, and that’s enough. Or I think of stories in Jesus’ Son. In some of them, somebody kind of changes but in some, they don’t. I love that book. When I read “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” I remember thinking literally, in the clearest thoughts, My socks are knocked off. This is fucking unbelievable.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

During a podcast interview with you and David Wilson, founder of The Museum of Jurassic Technology—

BENDER

That museum is fantastic! Anyone who visits Los Angeles should go. It’s the most curious museum—you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t real. You investigate ideas, discover things. They have this trailer park room. That was my favorite. There’s a room with superstitious cures, some in beautifully lit little boxes. One’s a strange dead bee on someone’s wound. It’s half researched, half imagined. Incredible. They displayed things like a piece of linen you place over your doorstep in order to have a healthy day.
If an artist has authority over the invention, I’m susceptible to believing in those things. I start to feel like, Maybe it’s true—maybe all I’ve been missing when I have the flu is a piece of linen.

FLYNN

You mentioned once that an Alexander Calder mobile or a PJ Harvey song can be as inspiring to you as a book. What other art inspires you?

BENDER

Lately I’ve been listening to Beethoven, because people have been telling me, Hey, that guy’s good. Turns out to be true. That Beethoven guy, he knew some stuff. [Laughs.] When I read a book, it’s more of an immediate inspiration, but it’s also more loaded, because it’s what I want to try to do. If I listen to something, it comes with no desire to try to do that, I’m free to feel amazed.

I go to museums a lot. There was an art exhibit in L.A. by an artist named Vija Celmins, who takes photographs of the ocean, just waves, then draws them with pencil. She does the same thing with the night sky. So there are these incredibly detailed graphite drawings of water and sky, and they are just beautiful, really simple yet incredibly complex. I just saw Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a great play. Bill Irwin, who used to be a clown, played the husband, so he’s got this great punch for physicality, and Kathleen Turner was also intense.

All of that stuff helps my work. But a specific example might be that a couple stories in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt feel particularly PJ Harvey-influenced in the way they handle the “edge” to the female characters. Sometimes, conversations with people inspire stories. A conversation inspired the “Job’s Jobs” story in Willful Creatures and also the “Motherfucker” story.

FLYNN

An Invisible Sign of My Own and several of your stories deal with illness. Has illness shaped your life?

BENDER

In certain ways. I have watched relatives here and there struggle with illness or with worrying about illness. I feel pretty tuned in to worry and concern. Parts of it relate to my particular life, parts to other generations, to what’s inside a family at large. Grandmothers’ stories, stuff like that. Illness is interesting to me literally and also metaphorically. The idea of sickness and pain and how people deal with it is interesting to me the same way that, for instance, in some of my stories, deformity, something externalized, can be used to reveal something internal to the character. That’s tricky, though, because I don’t want to blur the line between the two too much, as it can be hollow when the literal becomes merely a metaphor.

I never know when I start on a particular story which deformities a character might have. And when one comes up, I try to hold back on being sure why, because that can get in the way. What I like about writing that sort of thing is that it’s all really physical. It gives me a lot of space as a writer to explore the physical, by giving it limitations and not worrying about what they mean.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Are you an atheist?

BENDER

I’m not an atheist, because atheism feels like the far far end, saying there’s nothing. But I don’t believe in any organizing principle or any kind of god figure. I grew up Jewish, but not religious. No God-believers in the house—very much just cultural. I went through the whole education, though, got bat mitzvahed and confirmed, and went to Jewish camp and sang the songs. I loved all that. And I’ve been learning more in the past few years about the tradition. I like reading religious writing, a lot, because I think it’s beautiful. When people get on the anti-organized religion bandwagon and say it’s all crap, it seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There have been so many smart people writing through the centuries about the complexities of thinking and ideas and meaning, and that’s interesting even if you don’t believe in God.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Who would you like to see be the next U.S. president?

BENDER

People never ask me about politics. Stephen Elliott’s book, Looking Forward to It, about him tracking the 2004 election, is a fun book that’s completely heart-wrenching, because it sucks the glamour out of the process, and all of the presidential contenders seem kind of nutty. But right now, I’m in the Barack Obama camp, because he’s the man of the moment, the exciting one. Maybe that makes him seem more electable to me. I keep debating with people whether Hillary Clinton can get elected or not. I feel hopeful that the president will be a much more thoughtful person than the present one. It seems likely that, whoever it is, the person will be more thoughtful. This is a huge election.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What have you been reading?

BENDER

Michael Pollan, a nonfiction writer who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s a fantastically interesting thinker. He wrote a book about evolution through gardening, Second Nature, that I really got into, about weeds and humans having an interaction, because weeds usually grow specifically around human structures. There’s a weed that’s biologically programmed to multiply when hit by a hoe. It will not multiply in nature; a human has to be present.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Another prominent UC–Irvine graduate told me: “Now everyone applying to MFA programs tries to write like Aimee Bender.” Why do you think your work inspires widespread imitation?

BENDER

When I started writing, I felt that writing in any magical style was forbidden, bad, non-literary. So when I got good responses to my work and felt encouraged to go toward that style, I felt invigorated, like I had permission; I was on a rampage of freedom. I hope that feeling of freedom is contagious, that you can write whatever you want. It makes me feel good to think I may contribute to that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Could that freedom become a prison?

BENDER

Yes. Whenever I try to imitate other writers, it can be fun for a while, then it can take me away from what I really want to do. There is so much to sort through while looking for one’s own voice and interests as a writer. But I’m flattered that people are imitating me, and it’s also a surprise, because I don’t run into it very often in my teaching—although I mostly teach undergrads, and many don’t know who the hell writes in America anyway. Some do. But many haven’t read a book in a while and are just coming to writing, so I’m trying to usher them into the idea of contemporary writers. I like teaching undergrads. They’re lively and have strong opinions that aren’t always careful opinions, which is nice.

FLYNN

Do any of your experiences as an elementary school teacher or as a college professor find their way into your writing?

BENDER

Teaching kids influenced An Invisible Sign of My Own a lot. I was missing the little kids, so it was fun to make up a new crop and hang out with them. Kids are a huge influence on how I teach writing. They are so creative in such a loose way, in contrast to a room of twenty- year-olds—there’s something about adolescence that messes with raw creativity. Adolescents often write poems called “Time and Life” or “Life is Truth.” I know I did. Somehow, as a kid, you know specificity, you know to show not tell, you know leaps of thought and spontaneity. Then you kind of lose it for a while in the great weight and gravitas of being fifteen, then by twenty, you try to get back to that seven-year-old without losing the growth.

FLYNN

How do you try to get back to that original creativity?

BENDER

I occasionally do writing exercises, but mostly I just sit, trying to find something I’m interested in writing about. Some days I’ll sit for hours, floating from style to style, really really bored. But I’m getting more convinced that boredom is a crucial intermediary stage, that if you sit through boredom, you get to something. It’s proven true for me. There’s this great essay called “On Being Bored” by a British psychoanalyst named Adam Phillips. He says that when a kid tells a parent, “I’m bored,” the urge for the parent is to fill the space and say, “Go play with your trains, Honey,” but if the parent could just say, “Oh, you’re bored,” it would help people. I love the idea that you don’t have to cure boredom, that it’s transitional, it gets you to the next step, that on the other side of the boredom, imagination kicks in. I think it’s very smart, and contradictory to the enormous amount of input we’re getting all the time to distract us. I actually assigned my students recently, “Go be bored for an hour,” and a couple of them practically had panic attacks. They said, “How can I do that? I have MySpace, I have Facebook, I have the Internet. No way.” But some of them took it seriously. One guy said he just lay on his bed, and his roommate walked by and asked him what he was doing lying on his bed. The kid said, “Being bored, dude. It’s my assignment.”

FLYNN

Your stories aren’t driven by character or plot alone. What drives them?

BENDER

This came up in my workshop yesterday, because it’s a big part of my teaching and my writing in general. I always tell students to skip over character and plot. The way I read and teach is to look at language. I look for places the language is working, because to me the story is where the language is working. Where the language is not working, sometimes you can tweak that language and nail it and make it work, but mostly I’ve found that it’s actually filler, distracted writing, or forced writing. Only in places where the sentences have a certain natural flow do you find the story or characters. So I think language is the driving force of my work, because it’s what I follow. When I’m teaching, it feels like there’s this pressure to conform stories to a certain given plot that the writer thinks the story is about, when that’s not often true. The language is the clue to where the story is. In my own work, I look for places that still interest me, that I enjoy rereading. But the best indication is when how something’s phrased pleases me in a way that feels like more than tricky phrasing.

In that workshop yesterday I read a student’s story about writing, and there was a line in the middle that read something like, “The writer and the white woman sat.” That line felt really good where it was. It was so good, in the context of the story, because it said something about the character, about how uncomfortable she was sitting. It was this very plain, almost awkward sentence, but it had something in it. So the language doesn’t have to be pretty at all—in fact, the pretty ones often feel too written—it’s more about movement and rhythm and context.

FLYNN

You said once that words have tunnels inside of them, and you don’t know how deep each tunnel will go, but a certain noun might be a tunnel that could last the length of a novel. How do you decide which tunnels to explore?

BENDER

Since writing is this weird, uncertain process, I don’t know which nouns will become one of those tunnels that will last for a novel. I have to bumble around. In my way of working—and there are certainly more efficient ways than mine—a lot of pages get cut. I think, “Ooh, I want to write about this,” then I write thirty pages on a character and it goes nowhere. I have nothing else to say about that character. But then I have lots to write about a minor character on the side. The word “haystack” went eighty pages, but a tangent about the railroad made something. Certain words sort of carry questions with them. Others don’t, they’re duds. You can’t know which words are packed with enough feelings and associations and ideas until you bumble around for a while, which is frustrating. But it’s also thrilling to explore the unknown.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Which noun spurred An Invisible Sign of My Own?

BENDER

Numbers. I was a year into the book when I started writing about numbers. I liked the idea of seeing the “50” sign on the lawn, which marked the death. I liked that scene, but it didn’t fit with anything I was writing, so I figured I should just cut the scene, but I ended up cutting the other hundred pages and keeping the scene. Then numbers exploded on the pages, and they helped shape the book. But I couldn’t have predicted that, I couldn’t have started the book knowing that; I needed to spend enough time with it. You need to spend time to find the word that has weight.

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If there is a Frank Lloyd Wright of contemporary poetry, it may be Robert Wrigley. Just as each of Wright’s buildings is a unique expression of an organic aesthetic vision, Wrigley’s poems are constructed from the material of their moment. And just as Wright’s architecture depends on unity of site and structure, Wrigley’s books present a marriage between a whole and its components.

But no matter how integrally Wrigley’s poems balance music and meaning, he is no iconoclast in the Wright mold. “Poetry,” Wrigley says, “can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make a kind of sense of the smallest part of it.” From his earliest efforts to the mature work that has earned him an international reputation, Wrigley has consistently sought the redemptive in his poetry. His poems demonstrate the unity of generations divided by national crisis as adroitly as they survey humankind in the natural world. And throughout, Wrigley’s vision is sculpted from music and image pressed to their limits.

Wrigley has published seven collections of poems, including Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006), Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003), and Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), which was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His book In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Pengu in, 1995) earned the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wrigley directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. He met with us over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

JEREMIAH WEBSTER

I am continually caught off guard by our capacity for violence has humans, and yet, in the natural world we see this inherent violence, as you’ve mentioned, in animals. Is violence and inherent part of our nature, and if so, why are we surprised, appalled, and horrified of what we are capable of?

ROBERT WRIGLEY

I suppose it’s got to do with free will. When the snake in the trough bites the horse, it’s because the snake feels threatened by this enormous head coming straight at it. When the man in the opening section of “Earthly Meditations,” by implication, finishes off the beaver that’s been hit by a car, it’s because of compassion; on the other hand, he also wants the beaver’s teeth as a kind of souvenir. I think the difference for me is that human beings have a certain moral responsibility because we know why we’re doing it. It turns out to be much less elemental than it is for animals. The animal kills because it thinks, You’re threatening me—I’m going to bite you—you’re a snake. I’m going to bring you down, deer, ‘cause I’m a cougar and I’m hungry. That’s what I do. And the actions we take in regard to those violent acts we commit as so much more fraught—with guilt, say, though also with a whole range of other emotional responses including probably satisfaction for some of us, in some situations.

I got out of the army in 1971, discharged on the basis of conscious objection, but I didn’t not believe in violence. I was not a pacifist. I think war is sometimes unavoidable, and yet we have had this propensity to get into wars in the last half of the 20th century that are wholly misguided.

WEBSTER

How is your morality informed? Is it inherent; do we find it in nature?

WRIGLEY

There’s a Heisenbergian thing that goes on here. The problem with observing morality is that it starts moving. I don’t want to posit any sort of theory that what people need to do is study animals in order to get some sort of refined, more useful, more correct, moral code. I think that’s baloney. We get out moral sense—or perhaps I should say, I believe I’ve got mine—for simply accepting responsibility for my actions and my words. It’s not easy to do, frankly. So much of human existence on earth is about the absolute opposite of harmony. Of course, that’s why I can’t really support a poetry that seeks to merely duplicate the disharmony we see in the world. I’ll just watch CNN, thanks. Why would I want to read poetry that wants to respond to a fragmented and chaotic world by reproducing the world’s fragmentation and chaos? Poetry can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make sense of the smallest part of it. That’s one of the reasons people read poetry at all. After 9/11, poetry sales skyrocketed. What were people looking from in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”? That poem makes so much sense; you could not write a clearer poem. But what in the world does it really mean? Well, it means just what it says, that’s what it means. And yet everybody understands how enormous it is. It gives us a sense of the depth of how we might feel and think. That’s the kind of solace I think poetry-that art of any kind, but poetry in particular-can offer. And the idea that what we’re going to do is generate a kind of art that doesn’t make sense, when the rest of the world doesn’t make sense, seems intuitively wrongheaded to me. Let’s see if poetry can’t cure something.

JEFFREY DODD

You seem optimistic about what poetry might be capable of. Maybe not Shelley’s unacknowledged-legislators-of-the-world optimistic, bur pretty hopeful-

WRIGLEY

Well, part of me wants to go immediately to Auden’s “Elegy for Yeats” and say, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” But of course, that line is a lot richer and more complex in the context of the poem, so it would be dishonest of me to say that. My cynical self is aware that the world would just as soon believe that poets didn’t exist sometimes. It’s not really concerned. But there’s another voice in my head that says, Oh, they’re actually very interested, they need poets, they value poets, and most of them understand they could never possibly do-or say anything like that, so please continue to bring poets into the world and have poets continue to tell us what we need to hear.

Surely every poet would love to write a poem that would make something happen. But how many poems have? There’s a lot of talk these days about “Howl” and how it was a poem that changed the world. That’s hype. The poem didn’t change the world. It did change the world of poetry and it did change poetry’s relationship with the world and it was enormously important and continues to be so. I think poetry is capable of a lot of great things that will not have a lot of immediate impact but that, long term, can begin to move culture into the direction that might allow us to survive. I guess I am optimistic. And I do think, too, it’s probably possible for poetry to be a larger force in the mass culture of this country. Of course, there’s a reason everybody loves the poet everybody loves—Bill Collins. Billy is a friend of mine, and I value his work, and yet there are people who think his work trivial, schtick, a joke, and they’re missing the point. Billy has an opening, sort of a prefatory poem in every book, and I was looking at the first poem in his new book The Trouble with Poetry, and it’s so much more complex than it seems. It’s an edgy and strange and wonderful poem. And most of that level in Billy’s best poems is not dawning on the vast majority of people who are reading him; most of it is not being recognized by literary people because they’ re too pissed off about all those other “unwashed” folks reading him. I like being in the middle. I like giving these poems their due and seeing what’s there. They’re not all masterpieces. Can you imagine being the poet everybody likes? It would be a fate worse than death. But just as bad, being a poet that only those with advanced degrees and tenure can read.

ZACHARY VINEYARD

So do you think this optimistic view of poetry, of poetry that can cure something in a predominantly secular age, can actually affect humanity?

WRIGLEY

I don’t know if there’s a conscious impulse on anybody’s behalf to reach in and take the place of religion per se. I think it was Steven’s who said somewhere, maybe in The Necessary Angel, “When a man has lost his faith in God, He’s got to find something to believe in. I believe in poetry.” And I have always said that, for me, poetry is as close as I come to prayer. I’m a believer in prayer, I’m not a believer in organized religion, which seems to have been co-opted by political interests and brings its adherents to no more than a kind of agenda that ultimately seems destructive, a kind of terrible exclusivity: I’m going to heaven, you’re going to hell. Poetry aims to be as inclusive as it can be. All you have to do is read and it can take something away. At least I hope that’s the case. If you read lots of great poetry, you’ll be a better person for it, though if you’re shit, you’ll probably still be shit. Albeit a well read one, a more interesting one at literary soirees.

VINEYARD

What have you been working on lately?

WRIGLEY

I’ve got a new book coming out in October—new and selected poems—which has been interesting to assemble. I tried to take the whole body of my work published in books so far, and tried to make a bigger book out of it, a book that includes the sort of trajectory of my own life in poetry, which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. It’s not like a greatest hits. It just isn’t. There have got to be other poems in there holding a sort of particular thematic or structural place in that book just as there are in other books.

But then, books of poetry don’t get canonized; poems get canon­ized. All the difficulties of making a book of poetry that has a kind of unity and integrity are going to be lost one way or the other. A group of poems is such a tremendously ephemeral thing. If you’re a lucky poet, maybe one of those poems from that book might last; someone might be reading it in 50, 100, 150 years. Maybe. But certainly the book will not. Or only among certain aficionados. That’s sort of the curse of being a poet. We wear it well though. We’re married to our art, by God! And we understand we’re the glory boys and girls of literature. We just are. I mean poetry is poetry-there is no other word like “poet” in the language. You’re a novelist, I’m not a poemist. I’m a poet. You’re an essayist, you’re a playwright? Playwright sort of comes close. There’ s just no other word like it, and we all know what’s in a name.

WEBSTER

I just finished Marvin Bell’s Book of the Dead Man, and I can’t imagine reading one of those poems without the cohesion of progression, or Sharon Old’s The Father and the unity of grief and loss in those poems.

WRIGLEY

That’s the beauty of the book of poems. And that’s what poets have to do—make the book. You have to be willing to go ahead and do that project, knowing the project is going to be more ephemeral than its individual parts. Whereas a novelist always, or a playwright, gets to aim for the whole of the work being something that might last, even a short story writer, but poems are different.

DODD

You were a conscious objector a few years before you made the decision to go to school and pursue poetry, but—thinking about that idea of poetry as a kind of solace, or a sort of salve—was that idea related to the decision you made to be a conscious objector?

WRIGLEY

You know, it might be. What I’m trying to think about here is, What do I think poetry is capable of? What do I want poetry to do? I am really suspicious of poetry being proffered as a kind of therapeutic device. But on the other hand, I do think poetry is about a kind of sustained and absolutely focused attention, the sort of attention one has to being to those big decisions. I didn’t know if my father would speak to me again after I filed for conscientious objection. It turns out he did; by then he had come around and was convinced of the stupidity of the war in Vietnam. We were brought close by that. We’ve been tremendously close ever since. He’s old now, and frail, but he and I have been closer since that time than we were before. But I had to think long and hard about that soft of decision, because it wasn’t just my father; it was the whole country. You don’t just walk away from a commitment, from a punitive “duty,” and yet, in some cases, you have to. You have to stand up for, well, I guess I want to say, what you believe. That requires the same attentiveness as writing a poem does. You really don’t know that so much when you do it. I didn’t know when I made that decision if I was doing the right thing. And I say in one poem, “I don’t know if I was a coward, or a man of conviction.” I was a little bit of both at the time, quite honestly. I was scared to death to go to Vietnam; why wouldn’t I have been? There again, I knew exactly that this was not the right thing I should do. It was not in my interest. It was not in anybody’s interest. But it might just be that kind of—for a lack of a better phrase—“soul searching” I did before pleading conscious objection in the army was a kind of training for what I do in poems.

WEBSTER

You’ve already mentioned several poets from the Western tradition. Do you see yourself as part of a contemporary tradition that is responding to modernism and what came before it, or do you see yourself more as a Lone Ranger? Or is it impossible to say when one is right in the middle of it?

WRIGLEY

It’s not impossible to say. It may be that anything I say is absolutely of this moment and twenty minutes later I’m going think to myself, Well, that was complete horseshit. That didn’t make any sense at all. But quite honestly, I think the tradition is enormously important. I have graduate students who bitch and moan when I come in and say, “Okay, next week, turn in a poem, and it needs to be at least twenty lines long, and it’s got to be iambic pentameter, real iambic pentameter. If you’re going to substitute, I want to know why, and you’ve got to be able to argue on behalf of your substitution.” And they all say, “No, I don’t want to do that,” you know, “my creativity is stifled.” I forget who it was, a French poet, who said—and this is a paraphrase—”Anyone who finds the difficulties of his art too much of a challenge is not a poet. Anybody who finds real potential for creative possibility in those difficulties is a poet.”

When students defend their thesis, I frequently ask them, “Where would you place yourself in the tradition? If you could extend the tradition of English poetry on a kind of continuum, where would you fit?” A lot of them use that as an opportunity to talk about who influences them, which is interesting, but not that interesting. I mean, I don’t know that we know who we’ve been influenced by, other than everything we’ve ever read, everything we’ve ever heard, the Bible, holy texts of any faith. I think I have a deep and profound connection to the romantic tradition. I feel my connection to Wordsworth every now and then, but I really don’t enjoy his poems much. Some of his work I love, but Keats is my guy. I also adore Byron, who doesn’t seem to be a romantic in the same way those other people are. At the same time, I’m clearly and deeply influenced by modernism. Modernism has not gone away. The problem I have with the idea of postmodernism is that it really just seems like warmed over modernism but not written as well. It’s like the problem I have with poets who believe that discontinuity all by itself or disjunc­tion—whatever you want to call it—is somehow a virtue. It is not that it can’t be a virtue or that a good poet can’t make it into a virtue, but it’s no more a virtue than any other kind of quality of apprehension. Eliot may have proved it as well as anybody else; modernism pretty well nailed that disjunctive-ness that we feel in modern and contemporary culture. The idea that we have to keep flogging that notion of discontinuity and disjunction strikes me as a worn out notion. I’m more interested, among the modernists, in Wallace Stevens, who seems to bring to the table a kind of rhetoric that’s a lot more closely connected to classical, to neoclassical poetry, than it is to Eliot. I love the long meditations at the end of Stevens’ “The Credences of Summer,” “Poetry is the Supreme Fiction.” I mean I don’t know what is going on eighty percent of the time, but I don’t care that I don’t know. I’m lost in that language and in a very important place.

DODD

Some creative writing programs have tried to divorce themselves from traditional literature programs. How do you view the relationship between creative writing and literary criticism and literary theory?

WRIGLEY

Well, for the most part the English department is a perfectly good place for a creative writing program to live. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be. There are some creative writing programs that are lumped in with expository writing and English composition; there are others that are sort of placed in a department that includes theatrical studies and so forth. That just seems odd to me, strange marriages indeed. Other creative writing programs exist separately as departments and don’t have any connection to the traditional study of literature. In the program in which I teach, I’m aiming to provide students with the kinds of tools they need to enter into that larger tradition, the tradition Eliot speaks of in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” We’re all writing one big poem and you’re writing your line on the end in a sense.
That being said, I also believe that creative writing programs have been the salvation of English departments, some of which got so wrapped up in theory and post-structuralist stuff that they nearly killed off any interest anybody had in being an English major—I mean, in the beginning there was words and I loved words and because I loved words I loved sentences, and lines, and narratives. It’s fine that literary theory existed at Hopkins, or Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Berkley even, but there’s a way in which academic people quit reading literature. They were just reading criticisms. Theory. I’ve heard of professors offering classes in contemporary American poetry in which there were no primary texts, only theory and criticism. What the hell is that? It’s like studying cubism but refusing to look at the paintings. But I also think those days are gone. I think we’ve turned the corner, and we’re going to come back to English departments being populated with people who adore literature, who live it and breathe it, and understand it. It may be one of the things that helps save us as a culture. I think a lot of responsibility for that kind of salvation is due to creative writing classes and creative writing programs where that sort of love of literature was kept alive, while the study of literature got crazy and then got un-crazy again. It’s now in recovery, shall we say.

WEBSTER

How does teaching assist your work as a writer?

WRIGLEY

Everybody who writes knows that universities have provided a kind of refuge to writers. You work within a certain flexible time schedule; you arrange classes to meet on certain days and not on other days. In so doing you make it possible to have time to write. But teaching, like any job, expands to fill empty space, so my sense of it has always been that I have to keep my life compartmentalized: These days are for writing and they shall not be for anything else, and the rest of the time I have to be absolutely devoted to the classroom, which is the other “work.” Also, as people have long observed, if you really want to learn something, teach somebody else to do it. If you are a graduate student, in English you know that as soon as you teach a freshman composition class. How do you make a paragraph? How do you make a sentence? And to that extent there’s a way in which teaching composition might be one of the best instructive procedures a student can go through in order to become a writer of any kind, because you have to find a way to articulate what it is that makes a sentence interesting, or a paragraph interesting, and in creative writing classes, a scene, a stanza. On the other hand, it can wear you out. Teaching writing is remarkably demanding. And sometimes after a particularly grueling week in which you’ve got to read an awful lot of student work, you come home and you might have a free evening or the next day might be free but you’ve got a language hangover. And, of course, writing is the easiest thing in the world not to do. I sometimes find myself on an avoidance schedule, and not writing; that’s why I have to keep my life compartmentalized. Time when I write is time when I write. I can’t balance the checkbook, I can’t grade papers, I can’t read anybody else’s poems. I can read books and generate ideas, but I have to stay focused so I can teach. Teaching here. Writing there. Where they meet is where the sparks happen. If I’m writing well, I’m a better teacher. If I’m teaching well, it’s because I’m writing. And when I’m not writing, I’m probably not teaching well because I’m unhappy. Something’s not there.

VINEYARD

You broke Reign of Snakes into sections. The section headers of that book, which are really intense lyrics, were originally in a poem called “Earthly Meditations.” Why did you organize the book that way?

WRIGLEY

I don’t know that there was any reasoning behind it; it’s just what I did. Though how it happened interests me still. I may be the only poet in America who has been selling books on the basis of an occasional word. I mean, my relationship with Penguin has always been such that I have a contract for a book that I haven’t written yet. I usually have a title for the book and maybe a few poems, and I have poet friends who think I must be insane for that, but it works well for me.

I knew I was going to deliver this book called Reign of Snakes in the spring of 1998. I had a long sequence of poems called “Reign of Snakes” in the middle of it, but the book wasn’t done. Something was missing. So I started going through my journal, looking for something. Anything. An idea, possibly. And I came across this strange poem where the language was torqued way, way up there, where I had just turned myself loose and let the ear dominate, let the sound of the language take the poem wherever it needed to go. And yet something about it jelled; there was a narrative motion in it, a kind of arc, what I would call lateral movement—the real lyrical structure—which is all of those meditations and pure descriptions.

So anyways, this poem was handwritten in my journal. I typed it up, stared at it for, I don’t know, an hour, then showed it to my wife, who’s my first reader, and who’s mean to me because I need somebody to be mean. She said, “Huh, this isn’t like anything you’ve ever written before. Cut the last stanza—it sucks tremendously—but then do some more of this.” So I cut the last stanza, she was right. I think it was a Monday. I was on a Guggenheim, so I wasn’t teaching. Tuesday I wrote part two. Wednesday I wrote part three. Thursday I wrote part four. And then I looked at it thinking, This is insane, I’m going too fast. Friday I kept reading it and reading it and the next Monday I wrote the last part, part five. But then, every place I put this new sequence in the book—I put it, for example, at the end and the book sank tail first—then my wife hit on the idea of dividing it in the book—her example was Hemingway’s In Our Time, how the little italicized stories—interchapters—go between the other stories in that book. I tried it, and it fit. I had to move a few poems here and there, but it actually worked.

I had to go back into the journal for a week or so of examination to see it, but what made that poem possible was an obsession with the late meditations of Theodore Roethke, particularly the “North American Sequence,” which I think is a magnificent poem. It’s an autobiographical, Rorschach kind of poetry, astonishing, it’s so language-and image­centered. So there I was, obsessively rereading Roethke. Every morning before I worked on the new sequence—I knew I was gearing up to finish this big poem—I’d’ pour a cup of coffee, and I’d sit. I lived in the Clearwater Canyon, and I’d watch the river go by. I’d put Dylan Thomson on the tape player, and he would be reciting these poems which frankly don’t make a whole lot of sense, but they’re gorgeous. I listened to one called, “The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait,” which seems to be about sex and fishing and being lost at sea, but I’m not sure. And I don’t care. It’s a glorious poem. The language is tightened so significantly that you can feel the syllables as you read and listen to the poem. That’s what got me going and that’s what I kept doing.

VINEYWARD

Are your lyrics influenced by your time at Montana with Richard Hugo?

WRIGLEY

It is to the extent that Dick Hugo made me understand that you don’t ever quit listening to the poem. You’ve got to make it sing. He used to tell us what Roethke would say: “If you cannot mean, then at least sing.” Which seems to privilege meaning—ironically, because I don’t think Roethke ever privileges meaning in his poems. But it does set up the formula by which I think I’ve lived my life as a poet, which is to tell all the truth, but make it sing. And I think, in the kind of writing culture we live in—where so many of us have gone through the academy and apprenticed ourselves to teachers, poets—that we’ve become aware of the lineage. I’m aware of Roethke being a grandfather to me poetically, but I’ve always struggled with his poems, to understand them, and in some cases to try and get past them in a way. “Earthly Meditations ” is a kind of exorcism. I have friends who think that poem is the best thing I’ve ever done, by far. And I’ve got others who just don’t see the point. I’ve even tried to get back into that voice once or twice, but I can’t. It’s just not there. It’s not really somewhere I need to go again. Been there. It’s also an enormously self-indulgent poem; I mean, I had a great time with it, but it is what it is—a meditation.

DODD

No more self-indulgent than what all of us do every time we sit down to write.

WRIGLEY

This is true. The world ‘s coming apart, the country’s run by morons, and here I am writing a poem? But it is important to be here. Poetry will not only survive but triumph. And it’s in great shape these days, strangely enough, and it’s got a lot to do with the academy, with people coming to poetry and developing the goal, not to be poets, but to actually write. There are a lot of people who want to be poets, but you’ve got to get past that the only time you are a poet is when you’re engaged in the process, when you’re making a poem.

WEBSTER

Do you see yourself writing the same poems if you’d lived in an urban center? How connected is what you write about to the place you living and teaching?

WRIGLEY

It’s absolutely connected. When I applied to graduate school in 1974, there were only a dozen MFA programs in the country. I wanted to go most of all to Columbia, because Stanley Kunitz and Galway Kinnell were teaching there, and I wanted to go because I loved and I still love New York City. It’s one of the great places on earth. But if I had gone there, I might have well wound up being as in love with that environment as I wound up being in love with the northern Rockies of Montana. I think I would have been more or less the same poet. But the theater of my concerns would have altered enormously. The store of images, my conscious set of images, would have been so completely different that there’s no telling what effect that ultimately would have had on me. So I would have been the same and different. How’s that for an equivocation answer? I think I could make the case that my concerns as a poet would probably be more or less the same and those concerns—and I think I can say what they are: I’m a poet who is always fascinated by the fragility of life, the mutability of it all, how little time finally there is—and I could have done that as an urban poet. No doubt much of the imagery would have been different, and when your images are different, everything else changes. I mean, it might have even affected my rhythms.

DODD

Somewhere in the middle of In the Bank of Beautiful Sins there’s a shift from the Mid-western domestic type of setting that characterizes Moon in a Mason Jar and What My Father Believed to a more nature-oriented focus in terms of your images. Is that something you consciously feel that in your work, or do you have concerns that drive you as a poet that supersede the range of images in your theater?

WRIGLEY

Probably both. There is a way in which, in those books, up through What My Father Believed, I had demons to exorcise. I had to contend with how I came to be the man I came to be, and a lot of that is simply a function of self-knowledge. You get to know yourself as you age, as you watch yourself. But on the other hand, once I got past My Father Believed, it’s like I shifted gears. It’s a complicated book because I was trying to get closer to what I was stalking, which was a deeply disturbing part of my life where I was arguing relentlessly with my father on matters that had to do with politics and war and my own faith, especially in contrast to his. All these things had larger implications to the nation, I thought. Once I sort of exorcised that demon, I didn’t quit looking inside in the poems, but there was a way in which I could be more welcoming to what was outside.

And when I did that I was living in an extremely rural place and have lived in rural places ever since. So that sort of stuff rushed in to fill those places, that bank of imagery, that bank of experiences that I draw on when I make poems. And yet I think I’m working the same thematic veins in these poems. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a man now, not so much in the culture and in terms of history, but in terms of the natural world? What I’ve come to admire so much about animals is that they’re unfettered with all these cultural things, so absolutely alive in the moment. Wouldn’t our world be a lot better, and I don’ t know if it is true, actually—I would like to think it might be—but wouldn’t things be a lot less destructive if we were more like animals? But then I think, Naw, probably not; they’re always hunting one another down and killing one another and eating one another.

DODD

Who are the poets you think deserve more attention?

WRIGLEY

The recently dead. It’s a bad career move to die. It used to be a pretty good move if you could just die right away. It’s no longer an option. Every third semester I teach a class called “Techniques of Poetry.” The idea is to generate ideas from a batch of texts. I’m teaching Jack Gilbert next week. I’ve taught Lucia Perillo, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, what I call “plain speaking” poets. Last time I did some really fancy people, and these are the people I think right now are being ignored. These are all graduate students, and none of them had read more than a few anthology pieces. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell. You know, everyone had read “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” which is a great anti-war poem, but nobody had read “The Woman at the Washington Zoo;” no one had read “Two Children;” nobody had read any of those amazing Jarrell poems; and especially, nobody had read any of Jerrell’s criticism. Oh, man. The best, the best critic of modern poetry and mid-century American poetry. But then Berryman, most folks have no idea how to contend with The Dream Songs, you can’t get 77 Dream Songs anymore you have to get the whole Dream Songs and that’s one big pile o’ dream songs. And it’s hard to read that many of them—you start to develop dream song calluses. They had two weeks to get ready for Berryman, but reading 270-plus of the damn things just wore them out, so they had a hard time and Berryman’s book turned out to be the book that did them in. They loved Bishop. And Lowell, who’s problematic, but you’ve got to read Lowell, at least Life Studies and For the Union Dead, but I like the stuff before that. I like The Mills of the Kavanaughts; I like that longish poem in rhymed couplets and iambic pentameter, almost lock-step iambic pentameter, “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid”—just some of the sentences in that poem are to die for.

And even my own teacher, Robert Hugo, who you’d think people would want to go to—especially, in my case, my own studies—because they’re sort of plugged into that lineage, but not really. That’s too bad. I don’t think his poems are going to go away. They’re going to stay with us. If you go to his selected or collected, the first poem, “Trout,” is amazing. It’s actually almost perfectly syncopated, almost like the tail of the trout is slow water. The rhymes are there and then not there, there again. It’s a poem about identity. That’s why the speaker screams at the end and sends that trout off to oblivion, because it’s like suddenly beholding your own self. That poem’s about poetry, about recognition, about where you get to digging deeply in language and your own imagination. And you can gob to some terrifying and miraculous places when you do. His whole aesthetic is summed up in that poem.

DODD

And he’s a poet who never lost it, either, seemingly no matter what he tried.

WRIGLEY

He never tried to lose it. He spent most of his life unhappy, then got happy the last eight or nine years and died. It’s a bittersweet irony that his detective novel has been translated into French but his poems haven’t. The Triggering Town sold way more copies than his collected poems has. As he used to say, he always thought of himself as a wrong thing in a right world. That’s the weird—in some ways beautiful, in some ways happenstance—fact of the academic pursuit of poetry, of apprenticing yourself to a poet or poets in graduate programs and how it turns out. I mean, Roethke was perfect, absolutely perfect for Hugo, and I didn’t know how well-suited Hugo was for me for the longest tine. I got out of that program in 1976, got my first tenure-track job in Idaho because I desperately wanted to be back in this part of the world. I had taught at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, for twenty-two years, with a couple of years off for good behavior. I went back to Montana a couple times and taught. I taught in Oregon for a year. I took a year off for a Guggenheim, but it was like five or six years after I left the Montana program that I started hearing… it wasn’t really Dick’s voice, but it was… his ideas that he’d offer in workshops or just when he was talking about other people’s poems. And I remember thinking, Oh, I learned that. I didn’t just think it, and I remember now where I learned that. He still thrills me. And the poems, my heavens. The poems of Richard Hugo: they are the real thing.

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Marvin Bell is the author of nineteen books of poetry and essays, the most recent of which, Mars Being Red, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. “What sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s,” according to Publisher’s Weekly, “also brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily and almost despairingly against the current administration and the war in Iraq. There are ‘too many body bags to bury in the mind.’ Unlike many poets of protest, though, Bell ties his antiwar sentiment to an awareness that, even in peacetime, we all must die: ‘We need to think of what might grow in the field / from our ashes, from the rot of our remains.’”

Born in New York City in 1937, Marvin Bell grew up on rural Long Island. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Alfred University, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and served two terms as the state of Iowa’s first Poet Laureate. He has also taught at Goddard College, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington, Wichita State University, and Portland State University.

“Poetry doesn’t easily reveal itself,” Bell said during his opening remarks at the International Camouflage Conference at the University of Northern Iowa in 2006. “At first glance, it looks and sounds like the utilitarian language we use every day, but it isn’t. It can be the lie that tells the truth. It can follow an indirect path that reveals more than a straight line would… In other words, to see it, one sometimes has to take a second look. And, indeed, one can be looking directly at it and not see it until it moves.” Bell’s many honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia.

His books of poetry include Rampant (2004); Nightworks: Poems, 1962–2000; Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2 (1997); A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1994); The Book of the Dead Man (1994); New and Selected Poems (1987); Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See (1977), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Probable Volume of Dreams (1969), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Things We Dreamt We Died For (1966).
“Art is a way of life, not a career,” Marvin Bell wrote in “32 Statements About Writing Poetry.” We met with him at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, where he talked about teaching, poetry, the personal sublime, and political engagement.

BRETT ORTLER

Do you think there’s too much emphasis on writing perfect poems?

MARVIN BELL

Depends who you are. I don’t think Charles Bukowski worried about it. What is “perfection”? And how does one attain it? Some think it requires writing slowly, laboring through revision after revision. Yet some excellent poets have written fast in an improvisational manner. There’s no one way to write. I believe that, I don’t just say it. Don Justice is an example of someone who wrote very slowly, even though he believed poets should write a lot. I once took over an office of his in Iowa City and in a drawer were a few sheets of paper on which he was working out three lines in a poem called “For the Suicides of Two Years Ago”—three lines about the black keys on a piano, and he’d typed them over and over, making tiny changes. I think people make art in many different ways, and genius in the arts consists of getting in touch with one’s own wiring. It’s not a question of good and bad.

Bill Stafford’s attitude toward writing was something else. He used to say that writing is a natural human activity, and he would allow an audience to think whatever they wanted to about him. He was tough inside. I saw him, in a sense, diminish readings where the event seemed too important, where people seemed to be making a fuss. He would read fewer poems than usual and mainly small poems—it’d still be a wonderful reading—but it’d be short, as if he were taking a position against making it too important. When he went to a party after a reading, if there were important people in the room, and people in the corner who seemed to feel as if they weren’t sure they belonged, he would head right for those people. I never saw a man who could pay better attention. When he was talking to you, he was right there talking to you.

We were up at the Midnight Sun Writer’s Conference in Alaska— both teaching—and I said to him, “Let’s write some poems back and forth sometime.” And he agreed. So I got home and I was thinking, Whoa, I’ve got to write a poem and I’ve got to send it to Bill Stafford. It’s got to be a good poem. And while I’m thinking that, here comes Bill’s first poem. We didn’t have e-mail in those days, so we’d write back and forth, and we published a couple of books of that work, but we hadn’t intended to publish—it was just something we started to do. Sometimes Bill would send three or four poems, one of which would be the official poem. It didn’t matter whether the poetry was good—whatever that means—it mattered that anybody could do this, that there was a community about it and that it was fun. Someone told me that Merwin may have suggested the same thing to James Merrill years ago. I used to do it in classes. We’d draw names out of a hat and people would pair up and write six pairs of poems, going back and forth.

ZACHARY VINEYARD

There’s a small press trying to recreate that in Idaho—Blue Scarab Press. They print chapbooks with five poems each from two authors.

BELL

Blessings on small presses. There was a fellow in Idaho who printed pamphlets of Stafford poems, Donnell Hunter—he’d do a pamphlet of Stafford’s work every year. And he also did a pamphlet of poems Bill and I wrote during the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, where we decided to write poems back and forth each night about the conference. On the nights when it was my turn I couldn’t sleep because I had to write my poem, while Bill was up at five in the morning writing, who knows, six poems. Bill knew that judgments were beside the point, and he wrote a lot, published thousands of poems. I asked him, decades ago, whether he’d written hundreds of poems or thousands. He said, “Thousands.”

And I said, “If you say thousands, that means you’ve written at least two thousand poems.” I hardly knew him yet. And he said, “Well, last summer, someone lent us a cabin in Oregon, and I had a little desk and whenever I finished a poem, I’d put it over here on the right side with a stone on it. And at the end of the month I had about…” and he held up his hands to indicate a ream’s worth of paper. I understand that for years he only wrote for about an hour and a half in the morning. He’d start with a little something and just go with it. I’ve written in his style, but I don’t generally write that way. The line that I cherish by William Carlos Williams, that shows up in Paterson, applies to Bill: “Only one solution: to write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.” That’s a very different attitude than trying to write perfect poems.

VINEYARD

How did you end up focusing on sentences in poems?

BELL

Some years ago I wrote a poem that sounded like—I don’t want to be too fancy about this—but it had the feeling of having been taken from a book lost to antiquity. So I called it, “From the Book of the Dead Man.” And there were some other unusual things about it. Every poetic line was a sentence. That is, the sentence was also the poetic line. And the sentence was elastic. You know, it’s syntax that provides opportunities for an enjambment, or an end-stop, changes in pitch, pace, timbre… It’s syntax that’s the real secret to free verse. So I got away from the obsession with free verse lines in that poem. In effect, I did away with the ongoing arguments about the poetic line. And the poem had two parts with titles. It’s one thing to have stanzas or sections, but two separate parts with titles—what is that? But of course the implication is, Oh yeah, you thought the poem was over. But it doesn’t have to be over. And the truth is, I don’t believe any poem has to end where it ends.

People talk about terminal pleasure—which sounds like something in a Greyhound station—but a great ending doesn’t have to be the only ending. You can keep going and make another great ending. That’s how the brain works anyway—things coming from different directions all at one time. And everything connects, but it doesn’t necessarily connect right now. So things in the second part of a dead man poem might connect to the first part or they might not. You know how in workshops, if you repeat something, you’re told to get rid of it? But the goal of poems isn’t to be as efficient as possible. If it bears saying again, say it again. So I did that.

Jane Yolen, who’s published and edited over a hundred children’s books and writes poetry now and then, was doing an anthology—“about adult fantasy,” she said. I wasn’t sure what she meant. She said, “That dead man poem of yours would fit, but they have to be unpublished poems, so send me some new work.” I forgot about it and didn’t do it. Next year I saw her again and she said, “You never sent me a poem, but I’m doing a second volume.” I sent her some unpublished poems that might be adult fantasy, and she sent them all back and said, “Well, these are nice, but, you know, that dead man poem, that would’ve worked.” So I said to myself, Okay, she wants a dead man poem. I wrote a new one, imitating the first one, and after I wrote that one, I got even more interested in the form. I wrote another one and another and pretty soon I was off and running. I loved the form of the dead man poem because I found that I could put anything in it. Also, it fits my philosophical leanings and the way my brain operates.

When I’m teaching, I like to say it doesn’t matter what you start with, it’s the quality of attention you pay to it afterward. You can put anything in a poem so long as you make use of it later. You may not even have to make direct use of it. You might just make use of things that fit with it. You want to be alert to where it leads.

I kept writing dead man poems and published two books of them, but the truth is there are a lot more dead man poems than that. I’m considering writing another book of them. There are five in the new book. Some reviewers are likely to say, “What the hell? You have these poems and then these poems? They don’t look or read anything like each other.” If so, they should look again.

A few years ago, I was writing a friend and I said, “I’ve written the last dead man poem and goodbye to the man of my dreams.” It turned out to be the next-to-last. I had to write one more to finish that book. But I got an e-mail the next day and my friend said, “I know other peoples’ dreams are boring, but listen to this: You were seated at a table in Brussels. You had a red pen in your pocket. A red drink on the table. And a big pile of paper on the table. You looked like you didn’t want to be bothered but I felt I had to greet you. When I did, you looked sad and perplexed and you handed me the pile of papers and you said to me, ‘I’ve written all these poems called Following the Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps and I can’t put them in my book because I wrote the last poem for it last week.’” So I started writing poems called Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps, which look like dead man poems but have a different point of view. And that was that. When workshop members want assignments at conferences, the last assignment I give is to write a dead man or a dead woman poem. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes not. It’s a form anybody can use, as far as I’m concerned. Poets and critics develop these ideas about what a poem should be, but it’s limiting to do that if you’re a poet.

VINEYARD

The dead man poems remind me of the surrealist poets, the spontaneous association. Do you identify with that aesthetic?

BELL

I don’t think we have had real surrealism in American poetry, but that’s what our quasi-surrealism was called because poets weren’t known to be doing anything like it before that. Real surrealism—pure surrealism—wouldn’t make any sense. We have certain episodes of surrealism in poetry. Bill Knott wrote a couple of books that were real tours de force. Jim Tate has what people call a surreal element—I don’t really think it’s surreal, I think it’s dark comedy or something else. Russell Edson, people will apply it to him, but again, it’s not really surrealism. He’s a fabulist.

I suppose the so-called Deep Image School thought of themselves, in a way, as surrealists but it seemed as if the images they were supposed to have brought up from the subconscious were too convenient. They weren’t exactly Breton—he brought up images from the subconscious that convinced you that you didn’t want to know him. [Laughs]

There are surrealist moments in the dead man poems, but the dead man poems are not surrealist. That’s the thing about the dead man form, it accommodates everything—the fantastic, sentimentality, abstract thinking, water, dirt and air. I think Ashbery’s poems, which can themselves contain all sorts of things, are sentimental, actually, but he also has this, you know, raise-your-mind concept. It accommodates surrealism, socio-political poetry, the Absurd (with a big A), and I like that. The other thing is, most people think of the dead man as a persona, but I don’t—I think of it as an overarching sensibility. There are certain truths that you could say underlie such a project. One of them is mortality. But the dead man is alive and dead at the same time, which allows him to say and do things that another speaker wouldn’t be able to.

ORTLER

Do you think it’s harmful to have a distinct view of what poetry should be?

BELL

It’s natural for young poets to have an idea of what poetry should be, to be creating aesthetics, because how do you start writing? It’s hard at the start to just feel that anything goes. You naturally have feelings about what’s good—and there are many ways to try to say what’s good and what’s better. But many of our institutions define poetry by dumbing it down. They’re supposed to be spreading it, and they are, but it’s often a watered-down version. Well, it’s not up to me to say every chocolate manufacturer should make great chocolate, but I can choose which one I eat.

At the other extreme, the poetry that gets the most attention from critics is poetry that needs unpacking, that has some difficulty about it that the professor has to explain to the class. I think that’s one of the reasons Stevens is taught a different way than Williams is, and probably more often, because he invites explanation, commentary on the work, and Williams often writes in a way that excludes commentary or makes it unnecessary. The work that gets promoted in literary circles is work that has stylistic eccentricities, imaginative eccentricities, needs to be unpacked, is difficult or obscure. I don’t have any position against that at all, but I think it’s only part of the scene. A great deal can be seen in good poems that do not require classroom unpacking, but it takes a special kind of reader. There can be layers in what appears to be direct expression. To me, that is more interesting than beautiful words in the ether.

Robert Lowell, many years ago, said in an interview something like, “American poets do a very difficult thing very well.” And it’s true—I think American poets attempt to create individual styles by making the language difficult, by putting a pressure on the language that makes it, as Williams said about poetry, “a less well-made or better-made machine.” When Bly was publishing The Fifties and then The Sixties, he published an essay called, “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry.” He said American poetry is like a pinball machine, full of levers and buttons and lights and razzle-dazzle, while poetry in other countries is a different thing, based more on the quality of imagination and the quality of emotion, and often with a socio-political stance to boot. That’s neither good nor bad, it just is, even still. And I think Ashbery will be taught more than Neruda. I mean, Neruda will be taught as a socio-political, cultural figure more than his poetry will be closely read because most of Neruda’s poetry doesn’t require unpacking. He’s a little surreal in his second book, Residencia en la tierra, but the poems don’t require a critical unpacking, not really. To me, analysis is worth more than judgment—by analysis, I mean description—you know, what is the poem doing?

ORTLER

How has the current political situation affected your work?

BELL

The new book, Mars Being Red, is largely wartime. The New Yorker just took four wartime poems. One of them is set in Bagram and concerns the torture of a taxicab driver who was arrested even though they knew he was innocent. For The New Yorker to run something like that seems to me indicative. It’s hard for me not to be engaged by the news, not to be concerned about socio-political matters, but I can’t say that everybody should be.

I’m going to teach some classes at Grinnell when I’m back in Iowa City, and I’m thinking of telling the students that all the poems have to be about the news. I don’t care where they go with it. They can write about the shoes on a dictator, but I want the poems to come out of real events. The poems might be crap, but I feel as if it might be interesting to try it instead of everybody writing another love poem or another nature poem or another father poem or another there-wasn’t-enough-beer-at- the-party poem. Maybe it’s a stupid idea and won’t work, but I just think my own generation has been a little deficient in dealing with things that are not about the personal sublime—and that topic is to be honored. There was a time when I thought that was the highest achievement in poetry, but I haven’t for a long, long time. And I could be completely off-track and maybe that’s what poetry is and that’s what it always has to be and always will and should be—the personal sublime—but I think you can write about the personal sublime, which is a term I just made up, and still be in the socio-political world. I would prefer to be able to do that myself. I’d like American poets to be more involved.

When the Iron Curtain came down, the poets in Eastern Europe were beside themselves because their work had mattered so much. You could be put in jail for your poem, and people were, all the time. The poems were important. But America loves everything, co-opts everything—even if there’s a club against baseball and apple pie, there’ll be a website up in a week, you know? And I used to joke that the general drift of governments in the last twenty years was to the right, so one day we might find our poems meaning more and we’ll be put in jail. [Laughs]

In America, we don’t have a recognizable force of political poets. I think my generation are stylists of the imagination, most of them, and they’re good at it. But one could do something else if one wanted to. It’s a truism—but I don’t know if it’s true—that most political poetry is bad. I’m partial to philosophy, certain kinds of abstract thinking, but I think you can write that and still set it on the battlefield or in governmental chambers or in alleyways with the homeless.

I don’t make a rule for anyone. It’s hard enough to write anything worth rereading. Why should you have to do this or that? But I’ve been a poet for a long time and, in a lot of ways, it’s easier to be a poet at twenty than a poet at sixty, because, at sixty, you’ve done a lot and you don’t want to do it again, and you know some things too well. For it to be surprising or worthwhile to yourself, you have to take a new path through the woods, and get lost deliberately, to find a new approach. A new style leads to new content.

ORTLER

Do you think our country is going in a direction where poetry might matter more?

BELL

Bly said, I think in a poem, that the country is breaking up into tribes of the saved. That was a long time ago, twenty years probably. I think that’s what’s happening. Critics try to come up with the top five or ten American poets but it’s been nonsense for a long, long time. You can’t have Milton without Anglican England. You can’t have Shakespeare without Anglican England. You can’t have Dante without Catholic Italy. You have to have a kind of agreed-upon myth and belief structure to have “The Great Writer.” You can’t have that in this country, because it’s too diverse, too big, and there are too many tribes—and it’s becoming more so, not less.

VINEYARD

Do you think that’s why we haven’t seen the American epic poem?

BELL

I think that’s probably one of the biggest reasons you don’t get many poets trying to write the great American poem. The other thing about long poems is that nobody will sit still for them. How many crawls and promos can CNN run at once? How many ads can pop up while you’re trying to read the weather? It’s insane. But we’re very sophisticated. When I was a kid, when we’d go to the movies, we weren’t looking at what time it was. We’d wait for the next show if there were only ten minutes left, but if there was an hour left, we’d walk in. And you’d turn to the guy behind you and say, “What’s going on?” In about three sentences he’d fill you in. Because the films were so slow and there were no jump cuts. If the cowboys were out on the range, and all of a sudden there was a jump cut and they were in the kitchen, half the audience would turn to the person next to them and say, “What happened?” You don’t realize how incredibly sophisticated you are. People won’t sit still for a long poem. Poets do write longer poems at times. It would’ve been the normal taste once, but now it’s an acquired taste.

A few years ago, there was a group of younger poets who were making a big noise about being the new formalists. And they wrote long poems and poems that seemed long even when they were short. I thought they were rather dull, myself. One day, I asked Don Justice, who was a very good formalist, if they were any good, and he said, “Oh, no.” [Laughs] There’s a wonderful story of a young poet going to see Williams. He hands him a sonnet and Williams hands it back and says, “In this mode, perfection is basic.” In other words, you have to be able to write a perfect sonnet before you can write a good one. You know who the young poet is? Ginsberg. Of course he goes out and writes Howl and Williams writes the introduction to it. Williams also cracked later that, “All sonnets say the same thing.” You know he’s speaking metaphorically. But in this mode, perfection is basic.

VINEYARD

What is “Line Disease”? You’ve mentioned it before—writers focusing so much on line that they lose focus of the poem as a whole.

BELL

Hmm. I don’t know what I meant. Sounds good. [Laughs] People did talk for so long about free verse—actually people have stopped talking about free verse—but what’s happened is, line should make a difference. On the other hand, free verse is free, so you are free to have the lines not make a difference, because something else is going on in the poem. That’s what happens with prose poetry, you no longer have the lines, so maybe you have something else. Nobody knows. We think Keats is a great poet. A hundred years from now people might say, “Can you believe they thought Keats was good?” We’re so tied up in our own subjectivity, we have no way of knowing what people will like a hundred, two hundred years from now. One thing I know for sure is that I don’t know anything for sure and I tend to distrust critics and poets who think they do. Some work demands more of itself, it may not be obscure, it may not be allusive, but it demands imagination of itself, it demands socio-political engagement of itself, it demands pressure of language on itself, it pushes the envelope in some way—imaginatively, intellectually, verbally. Is this progress? I don’t know, but it’s change.

Most poetry books end up under dormitory beds, and nobody reads them. The person who gets the most out of a poem is the poet. Same with a painter and his or her painting. The great thing about art is that it’s the big yes, the one place in the world where you have permission to do anything and be anyone and go anywhere and transcend time and space, which you absolutely do not have in your daily life. One in the morning, you’re writing a poem, next thing you know it’s five in the morning and you have no idea where the four hours went. It just takes you over.

On one hand it’s Poetry with a big P, on the other hand it’s just poetry and it’s a symptom of other things. I know a lot of poets who have had great success, but have not been made happy by it. They wanted something from writing that writing wasn’t going to give them. The writing was symptomatic. It was a manifestation of deeper things. And if you make it something else, if you make it the goal itself, then that’s no different than deciding that your life should be devoted to bowling. I think that philosophy and art as a survival skill are more important today because there’s bad news in your face every day. I think for young people, philosophy and the arts are important survival skills.

ORTLER

In an interview, you said that much harsh criticism of young writers and MFA programs is self-hatred or hatred-beyond-disguise—

BELL

Arguments about MFA writing programs are truly academic. People who criticize MFA programs have a point, but the point isn’t worth making. Do we really think MFA programs were designed to produce the greatest writers of the century? Did we ever believe that the teaching of creative writing is the same as the teaching of geometry? Writers tend to protect their turf. They want to say everything is lousy ever since them, and MFA programs make an easy target. If you want to put down a general group of people in the poetry world, that’s how to do it. It’s a version of the old argument that you can’t learn anything in school—you know, get out and see the real world. But people in MFA programs don’t live in the classroom, and they’re only in the program for two or three years. And some of the people who’ve been putting down MFA programs were themselves part of writing classes at, say, Harvard or Yale. You should only criticize what you’ve been part of, I think, because that’s what you know, but even then you may not know much.

Most people who go through writing programs aren’t going to be writers ten years later, but they’ll carry something from that time, some sense of creativity, of what writing is, what poetry is. The only reason to go to an MFA program is to hang around with other writers for two or three years and write like crazy. The truth is, you learn to write by reading. There is no other way. You model your writing after what you’ve read. If you read good poets, then your poetry will contain similar characteristics and maybe you’ll write a good poem. If you read boring poets, your poetry will probably be boring. You don’t learn how to hit a baseball by watching somebody strike out. You learn from watching someone hit a home run—a single is better, actually—and even then you can’t learn just by watching, you have to have a lot of pitches thrown to you, and then maybe somebody can give some advice.

There’s very little to say about writing poetry that isn’t obvious. I thought about writing a book about writing poetry, but then I decided it’d be pretty thin. You’d think that after teaching workshops for over forty years, I’d have a lot of ideas about it. And I do have a lot of ideas, but mostly about rules to break. When I started teaching in the ’60s, I used to tell students that the publication of poetry by big houses in New York was going to turn out to be a blip on the literary map. The future was like the past: small editions, small presses. I didn’t know I was going to be right, but that’s what I thought. Because originally what you had was a bunch of editors in New York who were willing to publish a cookbook so they could publish literature. Now you have editors who only want to publish cookbooks or romance novels, and they publish a book of poetry or a good book of fiction every once in a while so people won’t yell at them. It’s just a business for them.

The last few years before I stopped teaching, a certain kind of student in the Workshop had a different notion of all this. They didn’t want to be known by a lot of people. They believed that if a lot of people liked your work and you were getting published a lot, you were no good, that it was a specialized thing for a specialized audience and that’s all the audience you wanted. They tended to be language-poetry-influenced or theory-influenced, and people like them founded magazines or presses and they just wanted to be part of their specialized group. Their work was often happily obscure.

Language poetry started out like surrealism in that the poets said to themselves, What has the use of conventional language got us? War, poverty, hatred—you know. Surrealists wanted to shake up expectations. So the new avant-garde got rid of lines and wrote in paragraphs, they broke the syntax of sentences, they wrote poetry that eschewed linear sense. They wanted to defy expectations so people could experience language and consciousness freshly. Much of the criticism supporting language poetry is elegant b.s.

A lot of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory in the academic scene seems to be based on two things: language is relative and language is subjective. So there’s cultural slippage. That’s basically what a baby knows—from the first time Mom says No in a different way. Language is impure. Nonetheless, what we say overlaps what other people understand it to mean. This is how language works: if you look up a word in the dictionary, the second definition doesn’t mean exactly what the first one meant. Promote this to the phrase and it gets worse, promote it to the sentence, the line, the stanza, the poem, and it gets worse. Nothing is synonymous with anything else, but what one person says or writes and what another hears or reads overlaps. Writers are people who work in the overlaps. They accept the impurity of language. They just get on with it. Language is impure, so what.

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On September 25, 2007, the MacArthur Foundation named Stuart Dybek a 2007 fellow, noting that his work “dramatizes how a new storytelling tradition takes shape; his writing borrows from the literature and iconography of the Old World yet emerges from the New World—from the speech and streets and music and movies that feed the imaginations of contemporary American communities.” The very next day, he received the Rea Award for the Short Story. “The beauty of these two awards,” said Andre Dubus III, who served on the Rea Award jury, “is that it gives Stuart well-deserved time to create. And that benefits all of us.”

In his work, Dybek explores the memories and legends of his upbringing in the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. He grounds the reader in the physicality of those places, while at the same time daring to blur the boundary between the real and the dream-like. Time does not often move in a straight line, but seems to spiral outward, and to double-back on itself, in ways that feel fluid and organic rather than planned. “The state you want to get to,” he says, “is surrender. When you’re controlling … you’re never going to find the accidents, which is what art is all about.”

He is the author of three books of fiction: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) The Coast of Chicago (1990), and I Sailed with Magellan (2003), and two collections of poetry, Brass Knuckles (1979) and Streets in Their Own Ink (2004). His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Poetry, among many others. In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship and the Rea Award, Dybek has received honors including a PEN/Malamud Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Stuart Dybek holds a B.S. and an M.A. from Loyola University, and received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. In 2006, after over 30 years teaching at Western Michigan University, he had a homecoming of sorts, becoming Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He spoke with us over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

I Sailed with Magellan, while considered a novel in stories, seems linked less by narrative than by something else. How do you see these stories as connected?

Stuart Dybek

One reason to work with linked stories or a novel in stories is to escape a certain tyranny of chronology, without losing the power of narrative in the process. Each story, of course, has its own narrative design, and each story, with the exception of something like “Qué Quieres” and maybe “Blue Boy” is chronological enough. But the arrangement of the stories departs some from linear narrative. Still, there’s a kind of chronology. That is, the stories begin with the narrator as a child and end with a funeral. But the reader participates in constructing a timeline.

I always look for something to counterpoint narrative with: image, mood, thematic motifs, etc. And that counterpoint is often as important to linking the stories as a narrative line can be. The metaphorical dimension of a book can be as powerful a unifying force as story or characterization. What one is ideally trying to do is to generate a dynamic interaction between the various elements.

Of course novels that put their pieces together in ways other than straight linear narrative can accomplish the same reassembling of fragmented reality.

In Magellan, besides the centrality of place around which the stories gravitate, there are other connections, such as the repeated motif of music. Music figures heavily in the characterizations and I wanted each character to have his or her own song. And place is, for me, one gigantic, infinitely complicated image. So when somebody says that Eudora Welty is a writer of place, Joyce is a writer of place, or, as they should say, Kafka is a writer of place—you can talk about geography and so on and so forth, but really, for me, what each of these writers has created is this infinitely multi-layered, gigantic image that encompasses character. Place is metaphorical context.

Samuel Ligon

Can you talk more about the tyranny of chronology?

Dybek

In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust talks about the tyranny of rhyme forcing writers into their greatest lines. But I think the tyranny of chronology is not as benevolent a tyranny as poetic musical patterns that lead to the invention of form, which is what Proust is talking about. One can fall into a forced singsong pattern with rhyme—that’s a danger. And chronology too can invite you to fall into this numbing pattern of first this happened, then next this happened, then next that happened. When I taught sixth grade and asked the kids to write a story, many of the stories would begin with, “Briiiiiinnggg! The alarm clock rang.” They wanted to start a story at the beginning, waking up—then next you brush your teeth and eat your Wheaties, and by the time you get to the part about how you killed your brother, you’ve got five pages invested in just doing your toilette. Obviously there’s a valence that is necessary as to what moments in our lives or imaginations are important enough to get written about that has nothing to do with chronology.

At the same time, fiction is a temporal art. Its main subject is time. Its great power is chronology, because chronology has an inescapable way of translating into cause and effect. It’s deceptive and illusory, but that’s the power of linear narrative. If we write that such and such happened at ten and such and such happened at eleven, we assume they are connected and that what happened at ten caused what happened at eleven. It’s how fiction makes the chaotic world understandable. That’s why people require stories—one great reason, anyway. Stories make the chaos understandable by arranging it along a timeline. But linear narration is only one way to perceive reality, and one of the things I like about a novel in stories is that it offers other ways to look at reality. Stories can be beads on a string but the form of linked stories can also offer a more crystalline, gemlike, faceted form.

Ligon

Are you consciously trying to break chronology? In I Sailed with Magellan, it seems that “We Didn’t” comes chronologically before “Lunch at the Loyola Arms.”

Dybek

Yeah, it does. Jerzy Kosinski, when he was at his best as a writer, wrote a book called Steps, which was called a novel, but is a novel in stories. It works on that counterpoint principle—it counterpoints unidentified dialogues, which I love, with narrative sections. Kosinski called such counterpoint “anti-rhythms.” They break up the pattern of “first this happened and then that happened;” the writer has established another pattern. First a narrative passage, then a more dramatic dialogue, then back to narration, etcetera. If you disrupt linear narrative, you have to replace it with some other form. That arrangement of fictional elements into form can also include a rearrangement of time, so that one isn’t breaking chronology so much as allowing fictional form precedence over it.

Ligon

On my first read of I Sailed with Magellan, I read “Breasts” out of order. And because I read it out of order, when I got to the end, I didn’t understand the shift in point of view—

Dybek

When “Breasts” was published in Tin House and later in Best American, the departure the ending takes was lopped off; the story ends with the guys arm wrestling in the bar. And I like that freeze frame ending, too. But I always knew that in the book the story was going to make a leap and circle back to what actually happened to my brother—which seems outside the frame of the story.

The murder in “Breasts” is based on something that happened in my neighborhood. A small time hood was found with his balls blown off. In writing the story, I tried to research the actual murder in newspaper files, but I couldn’t find any record of it. After a while, I began to think I’d made the whole thing up. Not only that, but my brother, Tom, told me two different versions of the ending. The first version is the one I used in the story. I asked him to tell me his version of the story again, years later. I said, “Hey, tell me again what happened about sticking that rifle through the curtain and everything.” He said, “Oh, no, I never did that.” I said, “You told me you stuck a gun in the curtain.” “No, I couldn’t have done a thing like that.” Damn, I thought, maybe I made everything up.

The story is a composite. Grafted to the story of the mob guy’s murder was an unrelated image I saw once as I walked by a bar in my old neighborhood: two guys sitting there. One guy was in an undershirt and clearly had a case of—what’s that called—you know, when men get breasts? It’s a hormone problem. Anyway, the other guy was feeling him up.

And the image stuck in my mind. Then I was with Paul D’Amato—the photographer whose lovely photo is also the cover photo for I Sailed with Magellan—in Chicago on Cinco de Mayo, and we saw these masked wrestlers in wrestling matches in the middle of the street. They had a ring set up. And it suddenly came to me that one of those guys in the bar was a Luchador, a Mexican masked wrestler. Part of what was pleasurable about the process of writing that story was that once I failed in researching it, I never knew exactly what departures it might take

O’Connor Rodriguez

Do you usually know where you’re going, or what’s going to happen in a story?

Dybek

A lot start out that way; I think I know what they are. But then a digression occurs, and I’ll think, Oh shit, if I do this, I’ve just ruined a perfectly straightforward story and doomed myself to three more months of writing something I could have finished in a week. Because I had it all nice and thought out, and now what am I doing? And those are real risks. It’d be nice to say that every time you make a digression you get a good story out of it, but, in fact, I’ve ruined any number of stories that I think would have been pretty nice stories by chasing after digressions I could never find my way back out of.

Dan J. Vice

The story “Blue Boy” digresses a lot, but the timeline is really tight, like you know exactly what the chronology is and then you can play with it. Is that still a result of muddling around?

Dybek

Yeah, it was a mess. I never knew if that story was going to come together. The other thing is, I didn’t know if it was a story or a memoir. When I decided finally to call it a story, that’s when I knew I had the Magellan book. That was the pivotal story. I realized the characters in it and the place, Little Village, were at one with several other stories I had already written, but now, with Blue Boy, I saw how they were all related, fragments of the same whole.

Ligon

What’s the difference between memoir and fiction?

Dybek

For me the difference is what your allegiance is to. In fiction, my allegiance is always to imagination. And in memoir, it’s to memory. Which isn’t to say that memory isn’t hugely imagined. But it means in fiction that it’s any crazy thing that occurs to you that’s going to make the story better. The more lies, the more you can invent, the better the story. I think even the mechanism is different.

Mary Karr has a wonderful essay she wrote about the James Frey flap, when he admitted to faking his memoir—I’m not going to quote her as elegantly as she said it, unfortunately—but Mary said that because your allegiance is to memory in memoir, you have to stick to that. It drives you to do research that you might not have done if you didn’t feel about it so strongly. And again and again that research leads you to surprises, things you would have never, with your own imaginative powers, concocted. And I think she’s right, that that’s one of the ways memoir works. Now, that doesn’t mean a fiction writer can’t do that; fiction writers do it all the time. But it’s a choice in fiction, whereas in memoir, according to Mary, it’s obligation.

Zachary Vineyard

How do these ideas of allegiance apply to poetry?

Dybek

Nancy Eimers, a poet whose work I admire, was talking to a group of students who asked if she ever wrote fiction, and Nancy, who’s very modest, said something like, “No, I don’t have the imagination to do it. I need to stick closer to my own life. I couldn’t make up stories.” And it suddenly occurred to me that when the whole creative nonfiction and memoir publishing blitz came along, many poets—Li-Young Lee, Garrett Hongo, Michael Ryan, Debra Diggs, Mark Doty, etcetera—wrote memoirs. It seems poets saw the memoir as a form carried over from poetry. Perhaps it was a post-confessional evolution. Yet I think of poetry as a grand fiction. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong vision of it, it’s just how you’re wired.

Ligon

What do you mean by a grand fiction?

Dybek

I mean, to my mind, Eliot and Pound would both be grand fiction writers. Wallace Stevens, as well.
Vineyard. When you mention Wallace Stevens, I think of the “supreme fiction.” He was kind of under this influence that everything was imagined, even the reality that we have, this place, this world, that anything physical is just this imaginative power—

Dybek

Yet you have poets moving naturally into memoir. There’s a connection there, an implicit notion that poetry is autobiography. For me, even though I often work with autobiographical material, whether I’m working with poetry or fiction, I’m thinking of it as invention—an invented reality. I don’t feel Mary’s obligation to root memory in fact.

I remember Toby Wolff saying something along the lines that the subject of a memoir, as he saw it, was memory itself, including memory’s fallibility. Memory’s subjective truth. So there’ differing emphasis, different degrees of objective or factual reality. Rather than walled cells there’s a kind of fluid continuum along which different writers locate themselves. The same writer within the same book can locate him or herself at different places on the continuum in different chapters and sentences, so long as signals to the reader are clear.

And then there are hybrids, the nonfiction novel, or, in the novel itself, you have the roman à clef, a form that predates the whole current fascination with memoir—The Sun Also Rises is one of many examples. Supposedly, people who knew that exile crowd were able to identify exactly who those characters were despite the fictional disclaimer. And that notion of hybrids makes me think of your earlier question about the novel in stories, as that’s a hybrid form too. It shocks me when I think back to the lists that appeared when the century turned—lists like “The Hundred Best Books of the 20th Century” —and left off those lists was Winesburg, Ohio. Such a seminal book. It gives you some notion of this unexamined allegiance to the novel. There are so many novels on those lists that are inferior to that brilliant, still haunting, ever-haunting book by Sherwood Anderson. Or Hemingway’s In Our Time, or Cane by Jean Toomer, which is way underrated. Dos Passos pissed old supporters off later in life when he turned into a conservative, and his writing went to crap too, I guess. But if you look at some of his early books, like Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., that great trilogy—those are really novels in stories. Mosaics. Crazy quilts.

A novel in stories is a hybrid form. One of the problems with hybrid forms is that they lack good names. The prose poem—what the hell is that? I mean, creative nonfiction—that is such a lame term. You know what Grace Paley said to me about the short-short once? She said, “Stuart, that sounds like a stutter.” No—stammer. She said, “It sounds like a stammer.”

But the novel in stories equates with the most fertile period in American literature, which to me is the 1920s, when everybody was experimenting like crazy and great works were coming out of it. The Waste Land has about it the scale of a novel. Its fragmentation makes one think of a novel in stories.

Vineyard

How do you see place applying to poetry?

Dybek

I wrote an essay on that subject, in which I argued for place being an underrated element in poetry for several reasons. It’s fashionable right now to flee from narrative elements in poetry—and that’s not limited to poetry; that’s through all the arts. Artists don’t want to paint decorative paintings and they don’t want to paint paintings that have narrative. And classical music, which at one time was programmatic, no longer wants to suggest narrative elements. So it’s not strictly poetry that takes that stance.

But if you look at a poet like Frost or a minor poet like Masters—when you start getting into that notion of place, narrative isn’t far behind. And then major/minor gets thrown around quite a lot. Place gets confused with local color. A fine poet like John Haines, for instance, is assigned by some critics a local color, or minor status, because Alaska figures so repeatedly in all his work, whereas that’s not true of fiction. In fiction, being a writer of place is joining a grand tradition, whether it’s Bellow, Farrell, Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner.

No matter what genre, place is image and also a formative element for me, and in that it transcends genre. And I’m interested in what transcends genre. Different genres all have their signature modes. The narrative mode would be the signature mode of fiction. But if you look at Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Babel, these are great lyricists. In the 20th Century, certainly the signature mode, at least of American poetry—probably Western poetry—would be the lyrical mode. And yet Phil Levine is a great storyteller on the page, and so was James Welch, as was Hugo, who I also admire. That whole Montana bunch liked story.

Vice

We hear about the death of the story, that no one reads stories, and yet every few years we hear that the story is back. Why do you think that cycle occurs?

Dybek

I’m hoping that it is a cycle—that stories will come back. I’m not so optimistic they’ll return as a commercial form. John Cheever was one of my teachers at Iowa and he actually made a living writing stories, but today it’s nearly unthinkable for any writer, with the possible exception of Alice Munro, to support themselves writing stories. And yet overlapping my life are writers who actually did that. I don’t see that happening again. A novel is just a much more commercially viable form. One thing the novel really offers is getting to know a character that you can identify with, and it’s hard to do that kind of characterization in a single story. We have great short story characters, but you don’t get to spend the face time with them as in a novel.

Ligon

Your books of fiction have a similar shape, yet they don’t feel redundant. Do you look back on them and think—

Dybek

If I think about them at all, I think of the accidents that happened.

O’Connor Rodriguez

What’s a good example of that?

Dybek

Once at Case Western Reserve before I read we went out and really drank. Instead of reading, I self-indulgently and drunkenly started telling stories onstage. I felt ashamed as I began to sober up. And the guy who invited me said, “You know, you did go on a bit, but those were really great stories. You ought to write them.” At that time, I was going to tons of comedy clubs and listening to people like Lenny Bruce. I thought, What a neat trick it would be to try to write a poem like a comic monologue—I was never able to pull this off—but poets are doing it now, you know, Billy Collins does it. So I tried to do that with these stories I told on stage, and the piece turned into the story “Blight.” That story was so digressive I needed a principle by which I could digress and come back to the linear narrative that’s kind of threaded through the story. So an accident of sorts generated a literary strategy.

Vice

That style of digression comes up in Magellan, too; it seems like the kind of thing a writing workshop would immediately tell you to remove.

Dybek

Bad advice sometimes, especially when one’s voice is in a formative stage.

Vice

How do you decide when to leave something in, even though it’s unlikely to please a committee?

Dybek

What the workshop’s trying to teach you—and what you’re trying to learn—is control. And I think it’s right that you have to be able to control a story before you can surrender. But control is only a temporary state. The state you want to get to is surrender. When you’re controlling something like that, you’re never going to find the accidents, which is what art is all about. And when you begin to digress, then you’ve opened yourself up to accidents. I was just talking about “Blight,” and one of the accidents that I found in “Blight” was the line, “Back to blight.” As soon as I had that neighborhood phrase—the kids always said “Back to blight”—I had this mechanism in the story from which I could digress and always come back, a transition, and for me the art of the short story is the art of transition. Also a little chorus. And I thought, This is a move I’d like to repeat in another story.

I love Latin American music, how they get into these ecstatic choruses that are totally different than the chorus that appears in a pop song. And they’ll just riff on the same chorus. So, when it came to “Qué Quieres,” I had that chorus/transition again. It was a different version of “Back to blight,” and once I had that chorus, I could keep digressing and coming back. The thing is, the chorus has to be interesting. I couldn’t sit down and make one up. They have to come to you out of the material.

O’Connor Rodriguez

In “Qué Quieres,” you change modes in the end in a different way. Did something intuitive bring you to that?

Dybek

Yes and no. When I listen to Latin music, it’s all based on riffs that are rooted in chant; it’s like rock and roll and the blues—if you go way back, you’re back in church. Those Hispanic singers go back to Santeria, Voodoo, West African forms that became hybrid religions. And Conga players, you know Conga is all about chant. As a kid watching I Love Lucy, Ricky Ricardo would beat this conga drum like a clown, running around yelling. “Babaloo.” We just thought it was a funny word, “Babaloo,” but he was actually chanting the name of a great god.

And so when you’re trying to set up this chorus, behind it all is a kind of chant, and at the end of the story what I wanted to happen was that suddenly you break into this kind of prayer, this litany intended to have that chant quality.

Vice

Growing up in a tradition like Catholicism, do you find that it’s impossible to get away from it?

Dybek

Well, I think it depends on the writer. And even if you define yourself against it, you’re not getting away from it.

Vice

What you’re describing, and the way it seems to function in your stories, is more cultural than spiritual.

Dybek

It is, I think. However, it puts the possibility of the spiritual in the story, and a lot of the vocabulary—I mean, we all do this for whatever reason—the vocabulary of awe and mystery, the lexicon of all that stuff, the religions kind of own it. And so, even when you’re writing about the profane, a lot of times you’re borrowing from religion the vocabulary to express profane moments of mystery and awe. Just as our government reaches into pro football and football reaches into war. I bring it up only because—where do you go to get your metaphors, your figurative languages?

In a lot of cases, these stories that explore the cultural side of religion are about perception—perception changed through intense, sometimes ecstatic moments. There are a variety of rabbit holes through which you can fall down into another dimension. Once you’ve done that, you might not reemerge as a believer, but you come out with your perception changed. And religion is just one of them. So you enter that church, and you’re in medieval times suddenly, and there are all these suffering icons and so on. Or you enter a bar, and everything changes. Or you get on a motorcycle and go a zillion miles an hour. Or you have an intense sexual experience, or you play music and it changes your life. In all those cases, there’s some emotional experience that’s changed your perception.

Vineyard

Are you influenced by the surrealists at all?

Dybek

I’m interested in most all categories of the fantastical, for lack of a better word. I taught a course once that tried to involve it all. Speculative fiction, ghost stories, the grotesque, surrealism. It was an anti-realism class. I know that a real, bona fide surrealist would insist he had a political agenda as well. I’m interested in people who have harnessed dreams—Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Yeats, when he worked with folkloric material later in his career. It’s all one broad category to me. Borges and speculative fiction writers, Calvino.

Ligon

In “Pet Milk,” you’re able to move in many directions with time, and the story seems to be about time and memory. But echoing Dan’s earlier point, a workshop might say about that story, “What does Pet milk have to do with anything? What does the grandmother have to do with anything? We need to get to that train.” Why does that story begin with the coffee and then move to the grandmother?

Dybek

When I wrote it, it started as a poem, and all I was trying to do was write a still life. I love still life’s. And of course, you know, so many poets are influenced by paintings. But I couldn’t bring the objects I placed on the table alive. I don’t know why my still life was a can of Pet milk but it was. Actually, I finally asked myself that question and I had the association with my grandmother. The story is based on an image. You have to create the image, and then the narrative is a way of exploring the image. And so it opens with the can of Pet milk—you begin creating the image and layering emotion through anecdote.

There’s this line in Cole Porter’s “Every time We Say Goodbye”—“Ain’t no love song finer but how strange the change from major to minor.” And he’s right. That change from major to minor, which is at the heart of Gershwin and at the heart of Cole Porter, you can’t wear it out. There’s a move like that in writing when an image opens into narrative, or conversely, when narrative closes into image, it’s like the change from major to minor. It’s so beautiful to watch that little motion.

I mentioned transitions earlier and the most important line in “Pet Milk,” is the line in which he looks from the milky coffee and sees the sky doing the same swirls above the railroad yard across the street. Because that’s the central transition in the story. Once you’ve established for the reader that you can make a transition like that, then you can do anything. You have permission to use the image to go anywhere you want. Total major to minor freedom.

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David Shields is one of today’s most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: “While on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know—Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geoff Dyer— in another sense he’s accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.”

In addition to his new book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader; he’s written reviews for The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shields has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has also been a member of the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Farsi. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel.

We interviewed Mr. Shields on two occasions, and this printed version is a combination of those interviews. The first meeting was over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, on May 19, 2006. We met again at Hsu’s restaurant in downtown Atlanta, during AWP’s annual conference, on March 1, 2007.

SAMUEL LIGON

Your two upcoming books, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, have similar structures. Were you working on them simultaneously?

DAVID SHIELDS

I see the connection between those two books. So much of them is trying to argue my view for a kind of nakedness or a kind of rawness. In each case, I’m trying to get either to the primitive body or to the primary text. I’m trying to strip the body of defenses or the text of fictional apparatus. I see them as corollary texts in this interest in what I would call nakedness, stripping the body of false spiritual consolations. They have similar opinions toward what I’ve come to regard as the groaning contrivance of the fictional apparatus. There’s a drive for what I would call the raw or the naked in both books.

LIGON

You talk in these upcoming books about becoming conscious of taking risks. When you mention rawness and nakedness, you’re talking about a kind of risk-taking. Can you address artistic risk-taking?

SHIELDS

My first novel, Heroes, is probably my least risk-taking book. The book is back in print and I’m proud of it, but it’s not my favorite, because the whole idea of embarrassment matters a lot to me, the idea of nervous discomfort, nervous-making. To me, the best way of doing that is some level of psychic risk on the writer’s part. Obviously not literal risk; compared with actual physical risk, it’s certainly different. But I guess part of my drive from fiction to nonfiction, if you want to call it that, is that the temperature of the room seems to go up in my nonfiction. The nervousness goes up when there’s a sense that things you’re talking about aren’t under the guise of fictional apparatus, because you can’t hide behind that.

For instance, in Black Planet, the narrator/author, who I call myself— but who to me is a fictional projection or exaggeration of my real self—says that while having sex with his wife, he basically imagines that he’s Gary Payton, the basketball star. There’s a review in The Washington Post by Jonathan Yardley that suggests my wife should divorce me. To me, that’s just the highest praise. The book got under his skin that bad. It made him that nervous. So many books bore people to death. In reality, I never felt exactly what I wrote, but I said I did because I wanted the book to channel white guilt, white insanity. All these things. Have I ever felt that? I don’t know. Maybe I thought it. I must have thought it on some level because I wrote it down.
All these ideas are so interconnected—embarrassment, nervousness, risk-taking, rawness, primitiveness, nakedness. These are my watchwords as a writer and reader.

LIGON

But to get to what? You’re talking about creating this emotional state in the reader and writer—to get where?

SHIELDS

To what it feels like to be alive. I can’t know what it’s like inside you and you can’t know what it’s like inside me. We’re existentially alone. One of the great values of art, especially writing, is that it actually allows conversation. The loneliness that we feel as human beings is bridged through extremely serious literature. It definitely doesn’t get bridged, in my view, through well-made stories. I watch you create narratives, like I’m watching you build bridges, and I applaud that bridge-making. But I don’t get to know you in a thrillingly intimate way. And when someone writes about how his father used to beat him and that’s how he came to become a heroin addict at twenty-one, I’m not interested, even if it’s not done in some boring, bloodletting way. I’m interested in knowing the deepest secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets really are the same.

We all have demons within us that we project as fears of insanity. And that’s what creates the moment when the narrator of Black Planet projects a Gary Payton-esque sex doppelganger. Some guy from a magazine happened to interview me a couple days ago about that book, then he sent me links to his blog. During the interview, he seemed to like the book, but in his blog, he criticized it. All these other readers were typing in, saying, Yeah, you go man! or whatever. One guy wrote that he expected, at some point in Black Planet, for me to ask Gary Payton to “Do my wife.” That was so interesting because it told me that my book made this guy so uncomfortable he had to fight off the insight by projecting those insights onto me. In those moments, you’re actually getting to something. So he thinks he’s trying to fight off my insights with a kind of, It’s your problem man, not mine, whereas a more serious reader, a more adult reader, would wrestle with it.

There’s also an opposite example from that same book, another line people talk about a lot. In the book, I say sort of embarrassingly that I’m not the type of person who, out of politeness, opens the door for people. But if the person behind me happens to be black, I tend to open the door, I tend to not want to be racist, and I also tend to open the door for women, playing like, you know, the polite usher. I definitely debated a thousand times whether to put the line in or take it out.

In an indirect way, that line is more embarrassing than the other line, and so many people have come up to me, a lot of black people, saying, Thank you for writing that. And white people say they’ve felt that all the time. I didn’t think anyone else was as crazy as I am. Black people told me, You have no idea how many times I’ve felt that. And in those moments, human beings are actually connecting in a really interesting way. Conversation gets deeper. Human beings get to know each other slightly better. The loneliness of the human condition, to put it grandly, is slightly dislodged. And writing is no longer some time-killing activity, it’s actually connecting human beings. That’s what I’m about.

LIGON

I see that in fiction, as well. I’m thinking of “A Small, Good Thing” by Carver, where we see that connection occur. We also feel it in Carver’s “Cathedral.” The end of “The Dead.” Chekhov’s story, “Gusev,” in which readers see and feel that connection. Are you saying nonfiction creates more opportunity for connection than fiction?

SHIELDS

Yes. But obviously it’s subjective. It would be absurd to say that Black Planet matters, but “The Dead” doesn’t. I’m not going to put myself in a totally ridiculous position. Who knows why, after writing three novels, but fiction has gone slightly flat for me. I find Carver hopelessly sentimental. “A Small, Good Thing” is terrible and “Cathedral” is really bad. Those are just very sentimental works. He’s a hack. He wants you to love him for loving humanity. Talk to Tess Gallagher about how Carver appropriated “Cathedral” from her. You know that was her story, her visitor. I’m interested in that story. Carver, this loving guy. He stole that story. But in the fiction, he presents himself as Mr. Enlightened—Look at how I love humanity.

LIGON

Although that protagonist does not come off as somebody who loves humanity. He comes off as a misanthrope.

SHIELDS

At the end, he does. And everyone talks about the Chekhov story, “Gusev.” I almost always love fiction writers’ nonfiction more. For instance, Chekhov’s diaries interest me far more than any Chekhov story. Cheever’s journals are by far the best book Cheever wrote. Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up interests me more than any Fitzgerald novel. J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is to me Coetzee’s best book, an amazing mix of lecture and confession and quasi-novel. “The Custom House,” the preface to The Scarlet Letter, is better than The Scarlet Letter.

LIGON

Are you more interested in those works because they provide insight or connection to artistic process?

SHIELDS

I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just saying this is what interests me. For instance, the other day I was teaching Stephen Frears, the British director. He directed The Queen and was doing promotional interviews hoping to get the Academy Award. The interviewer was talking to him about his previous movies, and High Fidelity came up, which Frears directed, and they were talking about the Nick Hornby novel on which the film is based, the voiceover work in the film, and how Frears worked to try to translate the best moments from the book into the film. Frears found, to his surprise, that the best moments were the voiceovers, and especially the direct speeches of John Cusack to the camera, not just voiceover, but actual direct address. He said something very interesting, something like, “What we realized was that the novel was this machine to sort of get to these twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and masculinity and art and music and list-making, and masculine distance, and masculine drive for art, masculine trouble with intimacy, blah, blah, blah.” And I realized that is the way I experience almost all novels. You have to read seven hundred pages and then you get these insights that were the whole point the book was written for and the apparatus of the novel is there as this elaborate, huge, overbuilt scaffolding.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think fiction should go away?

SHIELDS

For me, I mean obviously everyone should write and read what they write and read. If you want to be Bell and write these huge novels about Haiti, more power to you. You probably have far more readers than I have. I’m just trying to stay alive as a writer and reader. Ninety-nine percent of stuff, I cannot get a toehold on—so many books that people praise, endless books, books that win prizes. If you put a gun to my head, I could not read Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections.

LIGON

What about his nonfiction?

SHIELDS

It’s not good either. I’m just trying to read stuff I actually love. Most readers are bored. I don’t want to read out of duty, I want to read out of love. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. They form a tradition which D’Agata calls the lyric essay. And I just want to go to the mat for those books because I really love them. They sustain me and nourish me, and some of them happen to be quasi-novels, like Tristram Shandy or Proust. Or V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World, which is published as fiction in the U.K. and as nonfiction here, which is interesting. Or Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, the only bad parts of which are the novelistic moments; the parts which are pure, gorgeous meditation about Flaubert I really love. I’m trying to stay alive and awake and not bored and not rote. I don’t know if you know the new, young nonfiction writer, Eula Biss. She’s at Northwestern.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The Balloonists.

SHIELDS

I love that book; it’s beautiful. I’m meeting with her because she has friends publishing short, book-length works of poetic nonfiction. It’s a wonderful crowd. I think The Balloonists is really strong work.

To answer your question, Adam, about what I want to do with fiction: There are a lot of works of fiction which I love, primarily because they retard the narrative impulse. Their motor is not “Guess what happens next.” Their motor is “Watch me think deeply about human existence, watch me take you as the reader deeper into the human predicament.” And maybe they have a very slight novelistic frame, very slight, like Camus’s The Fall, say. I feel like, Why are we here on the planet—to tell each other stories? For me, no. For many people, yes. I want to try to understand slightly better who we are as a species. The energy of storytelling is, “Guess who is behind the closet?” I don’t care who’s behind the closet.

LIGON

Yet there is a lot of narrative in your work. Not anecdotes, but narratives from your own life—

SHIELDS

But it’s subservient to a larger investigation. There’s a wonderful line which I probably appropriated in Reality Hunger. It’s a line from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He says something like, “The anecdote is not dead. The innocence of the anecdote is dead, that we can no longer tell stories naïvely.” Stories are still told. And I definitely still tell stories, but I would say I tell stories not naïvely, like I’m aware of who is telling them. I try to undermine them. I try to ironize them. I try to put them in triplicate quotations marks. I try to marry them to the larger investigation. There’s a story in A Handbook for Drowning called “A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire,” which to me is sort of the crucial break in my work. And my sister books, Heroes and Dead Languages, are to varying degrees relatively traditional novels. A Handbook for Drowning mixes the essay and story and brings a collage from the pieces some read as quasi-confessional, personal essay, some read as relatively traditional story. And the pieces that interest me the most kind of blur forms. “Brief Survey” is the first time I did that. There’s a critical reading of Joyce’s “The Dead.” There’s a third person account of obsessive basketball playing. There’s a discussion of looking at pornography. There’s a discussion of the protagonist visiting a massage parlor. It’s like six or eight different little things, and you’re supposed to figure out how they’re all connected. I think it is a short story. There’s a character named Walter in it. It felt like something popped open for me in that story, where the loyalty of the fiction is not “Guess what happens to Walter next,” but “Watch me investigate how platonic desire works. Watch how fucked up you can be when you’re always projecting desire out—some absolute outside yourself—rather than some desire you actually feel for real.” In ten short pages, I’m actually investigating something about desire—and the stories are part of that investigation, as opposed to the other way around.

LIGON

Would the statements or ideas have weight without the narrative?

SHIELDS

That’s the objection most people raise, and I think it’s legitimate. When you just want the insights—where Nick Hornby stands, his essay on the male animal. And that’s not probably what we want. I’m not interested in psychobabble either. Or street philosophy. I’ve talked about the war without and the war within. People have different aesthetics. And for me, the way that a novel works, say, the war is generally without. Which is to say that characters do battle with each other. King Lear has an argument with Cordelia and they are sort of butting heads, then at the end, there is some resolution. The essay form, the lyric essay, the personal essay, is just as full of conflict, and the conflict goes inside—the writer at war with himself. I find the intimacy of that discussion takes me to a deeper psychic place. I find the intimacy of that more naked- making, more strip-mining, more primitive, raw, embarrassing, et cetera. Someone else—say you or Jess Walter or whoever—would find the form I espouse solipsistic, narcissistic, navel-gazing, or whatever. And that’s okay. But I prefer the war within. I find the level of discussion, potentially—not by any means always—but potentially thrillingly higher. When that’s good, nothing’s better. A lot of it is horrible, memoir or journalism, or woe is me stuff, but when it really is at the highest level, it is really important to me. Maybe the war within is my own self-enclosure.

LIGON

Do you want to consciously articulate these truths or realities in a way that a painting might not let you? We have a response to painting or music that might be emotional, that might be just as true but difficult to articulate. Are you interested in clear, conscious articulation of truth?

SHIELDS

That’s a very good point. I think I am. There’s this line by Yeats that I disagree with, which is, “You can’t articulate the truth, you can only embody it.” That’s wrong. You can articulate the truth. I really believe in language above all else. It goes back, as so many of my tropes do, to stuttering. I grew up with a stutter, still stutter slightly sometimes. I wrote a novel about it. In a way, it’s sort of the core of my being. So many of my theories unconsciously draw from it. I love articulation. I love saying—telling, not showing, that workshop bromide. Bromide of bromides: Show don’t tell. I so adore telling. Showing bores me to tears. It always has. When I think about my favorite moments from Huck Finn, they aren’t like, Oh look at this plot turn or this dialogue. It’s just Huck saying something. Those are the moments that I live for. I am drawn toward articulation as revenge on stuttering.

LIGON

I’m guessing that you don’t care for Flannery O’Connor’s stories—

SHIELDS

I did a brutal thing to Flannery O’Connor once. I was trapped in some cabin for a long weekend and I read the collected O’Connor front to back. That is one formulaic writer, I promise you. Every single story is exactly the same story. Obviously she was a master crafter of stories. I went through a phase where I very much admired O’Connor. I think “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” an awfully well-made story. But she doesn’t interest me. I couldn’t imagine reading her. She is a religious writer. I think so much of my work is founded on a godless meaninglessness. There is no meaning. We are lost. We are existentially alone. How do we get through the next hundred years of our lives, or the next fifty? If, finally, your vision is underwritten by religious salvation, we’re on very different sides of the path to hell. But who am I to criticize O’Connor? She is a quintessential example of someone who is by all accounts a great writer who holds zero interest for me. Especially the third person. I’m just allergic to the third person. To the degree I can read fiction, almost by definition it has to be first person, because at least we’re pushing toward some authorial “I.” The moment that we’re in the storytelling mode, I tend to be not interested. But who am I to end the world of fiction? Obviously a fiction writer and a poet and a nonfiction writer are all trying to get to the same stuff.

LIGON

I see Reality Hunger as an artist struggling to be vital, to be born, in effect. And this is an artist who is already alive, who has already been an artist for some time—

SHIELDS

And this artist is me? This is me struggling to be born?

LIGON

Yes.

SHIELDS

How so?

LIGON

I see you creating systems of belief about art in the entire book and then examining them, arguing with these beliefs, building them up, tearing them down, looking to other artists for insight.

SHIELDS

That’s exactly right. This friend of mine read it and he said that it’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. But obviously my friend was being sort of coy. By most accounts it will not be thought of as my most personal book.
Is he—I mean, am I—born or am I dead?

LIGON

The conversation is ongoing, I think. When you talked before about Cheever’s journals, it seems that you’re interested in how that artist exists. For me, Reality Hunger shows an artist struggling with who he is, struggling to create meaning in his life and out of his life.

SHIELDS

I was listening to this show on public radio recently. It’s basically three or four stories read aloud by actors on a Broadway stage called “Stories on Stage,” something like that. Again, I’m sort of making an easy case. Some guy was reading a Cheever story. It wasn’t “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” but it was very close. Basically a story about a guy who is somewhat estranged from his wife. He’s living in Rome, and he writes a sort of fantasy version about how they’ll actually connect. It was a beautiful story and fun to listen to when I was driving around. So beautiful that when I got home, I ran to my radio so I could hear the end. But it pales compared to the journals. I probably sound like I’m kidding, but they are far and away Cheever’s best book. They’re basically journals he kept from 1940 until he died. They’re very consciously written—written for publication, it’s obvious. They’re so sculpted. There are scenes that come in and out and leitmotifs. It’s an amazing work of art. But hearing the fiction story, as well done as it was, was the sketchiest investigation. You’re comparing a twenty-page story to a 300,000-word journal, but still, the fiction felt like gossamer compared to the depth of the journal. The journal let him get away with absolutely nothing. He was relentless toward himself, and in so doing, connects himself with us. The fiction is full of grandiosity of logic, and he gets away with murder. I was constantly listening, going You lying sack of shit, I read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings. Not that the fiction by any means has to have a sweet ending. The groaning contrivance of the story compared to the electrifying rawness of the journals, there was no comparison. To me it was a really instructive example.

LIGON

Reality Hunger contains dozens of unattributed quotes from various writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and other people. Are you getting any noise from Knopf on the legal end?

SHIELDS

They’re publishing The Thing About Life first, to my shock and dismay because to me, Reality Hunger is a more timely book. I was pushing for a Vintage Paperback Original published maybe in September—just go. Forget the galleys, forget everything. But for some reason, they insisted that The Thing About Life come out first. And Reality Hunger will follow in September of 2009. So in a way that book is, frankly, not really on their radar yet. They bought both books together, a two-book thing. So I’m just developing all my legal arguments.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What if they ask you to include an acknowledgements page?

SHIELDS

At one point in the book, I say, “You get a brownie point for every different quote you identify.” That pretty much tells it. They’ll either deal with it later, or—I don’t know.

Jonathan Lethem is a good friend and we have a sort of pact that when it comes time to make that argument, we’re going to go in and just argue the case to the hilt. And I’m probably going to lose the debate, to be honest.

There are quite a few quotes from John D’Agata in there. And John said, “Promise me you won’t ruin the book by putting a bunch of sources in the back.” Everyone has been amazingly generous in the spirit of the book. I have quite a few quotes from my friend Michael Logan. From a former student, James Nugent. Paul Bravermann. Friends are the main quotes. A lot of them, I’ve remade. Some are my own. So much of the argument of the book depends on learning those boundaries. The moment you’ve said page twenty-one is from Vivian Gornick and page twenty-nine is from Coleridge, the book is over. It’s not over, but it’s considering domestication.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Remote has an acknowledgments page—

SHIELDS

The paperback does, and it’s kind of cool because all those footnotes are in the back.

LIGON

What about a page that simply says, “The following works were considered or used as part of this collage.” In effect, the acknowledgements page. That’s it.

SHIELDS

I’ll probably be thrilled if I can get away with putting something like that in the back. I’m talking brave now, but we’ll see how far I get when it comes down to it. I would love it if there was something elegant about silence. You remember in the end of The Wasteland when Eliot tells you where every quote was from? I hate that whole idea. If you recognize the quote, fine. If you don’t, fine. But the idea of turning it into this kind of snarly apparatus—

LIGON

Why do you think Eliot did that?

SHIELDS

I think he was trying to raise the mystery of the work. People went into Eliot’s library. What was that book of his called, by that lady? Jessie Weston? From Ritual to Romance? Something like that. They went into Eliot’s library and it still had the cellophane wrapped around it, a book he was supposed to have been quoting from. The point being that so many contemporary poets will give you every line. Like, “Line twelve is a translation of…” That’s such a dead gesture of quasi-scholarship, of good citizenship. I feel strongly—as do so many friends who are quoted in the book—that citing everything would hurt the book’s intent. I feel strongly about it. I’m going to argue strong. Obviously I’m not going to say, Well, forget it. I’m not going to rip up the contract. I’ll deal with it as I deal with it. Why do we need all these citations of sources that pretty much anyone can find on the web? The biology of acne or something like that? Why do we need that snarly apparatus?

LIGON

When is it appropriate to attribute credit?

SHIELDS

I think John D’Agata is really good about this issue. It’s almost like an art form struggling to be reborn itself. John has this feeling that if we’re going to look at nonfiction as art, we’ve got to stop sourcing it. And if you’re writing a work that has no aspirations to be art, let’s say a biography about Thomas Jefferson or something—it’s a work of history. I don’t read that; I don’t write it; I’m not interested in it. You’re going to source the fact that someone else found a document about Jefferson as a slave owner or something like that. And you’re writing this history of Thomas Jefferson. In that kind of work, you have the whole snarly apparatus. But in the kind of work that I’m trying to champion, that I’m trying to write and read and love, you find a feeling that if a work has any chance of existing as a work of art, as a liberating thought experiment, we have to get away from the idea of sourcing things. It establishes a pedestrian or journalistic and/or scholarly context. It takes away the whole aura of a work of art which is crucial to the planet. Look at painters, the way they approach art. Look at Rauschenberg and Warhol. Do they say, This comes from the Campbell Soup Company? They just go and do it. Until all the lawyers got involved. Look at how musicians and hip-hop artists come in and just slash and burn. And turntablists go in and remake stuff. The moment you get lawyers involved, the moment you get journalistic and scholarly good citizenship involved, you’re dead. If anyone wants to take my work and remake it, they’re more than welcome. If anyone wants to take Black Planet and make it into, whatever, an opera—it’d make a great opera; if they want to take Remote and turn it inside out—they’re welcome to it. If it’s aspiring to be art, it’s crucial we remove the rubric of non-art in my view.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Why is Reality Hunger structured the way it is, in 563 sections?

SHIELDS

The fact that we all teach, that I’m not up on some Vermont mountaintop with twelve hours to write every day of the week, that I’m checking the Web every five minutes for gossip of some kind. We live in an attention deficit age. I’m influenced by collage artists from the last hundred years. I think it’s totally congruent with what I argue. It’d be absurd for me to have a three-hundred-page essay that’s smoothly lucid and coherent. It’s the way I think. There are twenty-six categories from A–Z. That’s a sort of funny idea of the alphabet. There’s a pretext of being thorough. We’ve got the A–Z, the explanation that explains nothing. The categories mean relatively little except you’re supposed to realize how much turnstile jumping there is in the categories. Sometimes something’s in the wrong category. The A–Z stuff feels fairly arbitrary at times. The quotation. You can’t tell what the “I” espouses. You ask, Who is saying this? David Shields? Robert Lowell? George Orwell? Who is saying this? Categories are break-downable. I even argue for the virtue of brevity in the book. Drawn to collage, aphorism, sound bite.

LIGON

Many of your books are broken into similar short sections—

SHIELDS

A friend of mine called it “Aphorism sent through radiation.” I just love that idea. Remote is not quite as fragmented, but it’s pretty montage- like. Enough About You is somewhat. Body Politic is somewhat. But this pushes it further. Collage—to piss off some more people—collage is the evolution beyond narrative. It’s the next step. I’ve written ten books and there’s almost a direct movement from very grounded, well-made, linear, realistic novels. The first is a four-hundred-page book and each chapter’s forty pages, and boy is it grounded in the real, in narrative. Now I’m onto a book like Reality Hunger, where there’s no section longer than a page. I don’t know what to say other than that’s how my mind thinks. The books I seem to love the most are often what I would call speedy and they cut to the chase. There’s very little furniture moving. There’s very little table setting, just bursts of language and of insight. A fiction writer might ask, “Okay, we’ve got a bunch of insight, but where’s the context?” There is a context. The book is nothing but 563 insights, but they keep building upon one another. The context needn’t be narrative. The context could be contemplative. That’s what I’m drawn toward now.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Should people still read your fiction?

SHIELDS

That’s a great question. I’m doing this sort of easy thing where I’m like nah-nah-ing at fiction as a way to boost the assignment of nonfiction, but I’ve got three books of fiction out there that on some sort of trivial level, I want people to read.

LIGON

Is it a trivial level?

SHIELDS

I’m just saying trivial level of, Let’s go out and buy those books or something, as if those book sales will change my life in some substantial way. I still love those books. Those books still matter to me, especially Dead Languages and Handbook for Drowning. Heroes to me, less so because it’s so traditional and so conventional. There’s very little of my aesthetic driving it. It was influenced by a University of Iowa aesthetic. I was trying to write in a realistic way, a traditional way, a conventional way that probably doesn’t play to my strengths.

But Dead Languages is so clearly the forerunner of what I’m doing now. The reason it is ten times a better book than Heroes is that I’m making all the gestures I’m making now, but further still. Dead Languages talks about stuttering. It talks about masochism to a certain degree, it talks about self-destruction, my love-hate affair with language. It’s phrased in fictional context, but it’s the evolution of my artistic aesthetic. I think that book holds up really well. And I really like Handbook for Drowning quite a lot, too. The pieces I love the most are the most collage like—“The War on Poverty,” “Brief Survey of Ideal Desire.” Those books are not very far from my current work. I’m encouraged by the idea that you’re supposed to change as an artist. Part of me is stupidly nostalgic for my early fictional writer self. Somehow calling yourself a novelist still has a slight glamour to it. I mean, it doesn’t really have any glamour in the culture, but in literary culture it somehow still seems slightly more respectable. Whereas the stuff I do doesn’t even have a goddamned name.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you have a name for it?

SHIELDS

I like John D’Agata’s term, “lyric essay.” It’s sort of a mouthful, but I despise this “creative nonfiction” term. It’s absolutely meaningless. I don’t mind “personal essay.” But a book-length essay, what do you call it? What do you think of it as?

LIGON

You call Reality Hunger a manifesto.

SHIELDS

Manifesto is a very specific-book word. The Thing About Life—what would you call that? A collage?

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

It’s less a collage than even Enough About You. It seems like a struggle between the personal story and scientific research, those two things playing against each other.

SHIELDS

But then there are the quotations from all the sources. I hope there’s a relatively complex play. Tolstoy weighing in, quotes from Lucretius to Coetzee, me and my dad. Somehow those play off each other in what I hope is an interesting way. Do you have a term for those kind of works? I think lyric essay seems to be catching on. Someone will be crowned a genius if they can come up with a term for this. I don’t know. It’s such a shame, though, to be working in a form. Literary nonfiction sounds sort of self-congratulatory and self-marginalizing, as if somehow you’re writing an essay on Shakespeare or something. And creative nonfiction? Creative as opposed to what? Destructive? Destructive nonfiction? Maybe that’s what I write. Destructive nonfiction. That would be good. I swear that’s it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

If you have one book coming out that’s a meditation on death and one that’s a manifesto, what could you possibly do after that?

SHIELDS

I’m starting a book about sex. Part of me feels like that’s sort of the goal. I’m deeply middle-aged, so I want to make sure to cover a lot of big topics.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Sex, death, and life.

SHIELDS

Exactly. Sometimes I’ll get an idea for some book, like from the guy who runs the mailing place around the corner, who’s from Iraq, and we always talk about the war. Part of me wants to do a book with him about Iraq or something. I have all these ideas, dozens of ideas for books. You want to make sure that they are essential topics. You kind of want to get down what life feels like to you. It’s a good question. I feel like writing The Thing About Life changed my outlook. It made me both very morbid and completely free from morbidity. On the one hand, I feel like, My God, we’re just animals and there’s no point to anything. Okay, if there’s no point to anything, you might as well try to enjoy life on some level. Dark fluid entered my body through that book in some really serious way. Though I think the book is not heavy. It feels sort of light.

We are just nerve endings. And that book does feel like some end game on some level. The manifesto’s saying, Here’s what I believe about art. So I agree, I’m at a weird impasse. After I finished those two books, I couldn’t do anything for a couple months. I just sort of reorganized my files. I threw a bunch of stuff out. It was like some weird death thing. I threw out all these old clothes. I cleaned up my computer files. This weird cleansing. I had really gone through these two crucial discourses which I’d been dying to write for my whole life, death and art. Destructive nonfiction.

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“How I would love to be the speaker of my poems!” declares Cate Marvin in an article published in the Los Angeles Times. “For then I should know such liberation.” This liberation is exactly what draws us into Marvin’s poems. Her speakers are free to love, to seek vengeance, to exert authority.

Marvin grew up in Washington, D.C., the only child of a military intelligence analyst. Although she admits she was often unhappy as a junior high and high school student, she found salvation in poetry. Marvin defines poetry as “sacred space.” Her poems are constructed with surprising images, insistent music, and textured language, as illustrated in the following lines from “Landscape with Hungry Girls:” “There is blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds / raw and rain’s course streams a million umbilical / cords down windows and walls. Everything gnaws…” The images are surreal, but the poem’s experience remains tangible, and each line break creates a raw, stunning musicality.

Marvin is the author of three books of poetry, including Oracle, forthcoming from Norton in 2015. Her debut collection, World’s Tallest Disaster, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, and her poem “An Etiquette for Eyes,” which first appeared in Willow Springs 72, was chosen for Best American Poetry 2014. Critics often compare Marvin’s work to Sylvia Plath’s, but as Jay Robinson points out in his review of her second collection, “It’s difficult to classify the poems of Cate Marvin’s Fragment of the Head of a Queen. Of course, comparisons are handy, but inadequate, and claiming Marvin akin to Plath is off the mark. For one thing, Marvin’s poems are more narrative than Plath’s. And also, Marvin goes places not even Plath would dare.” Marvin’s poems are often bold, but her purpose is never solely to shock; rather, she aims to portray a complex range of human emotion.

Cate Marvin holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati. She serves as Director of Operations for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and teaches English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. We met with her in her room at the Hotel Max in Seattle during last year’s AWP Conference, where we drank wine from coffee mugs and talked about motherhood, risking sentimentality, and “lying like the truth.”

KRISTIN GOTCH

One of my favorite poems from your first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, is “The Whistling Song from Snow White.” I love the speaker’s sense of confidence in lines such as “I command. Make yourself look like you want to get fucked / because in my land, nobody gets fucked over…”

CATE MARVIN

I wrote that when I was twenty-five, so it’s nineteen years old. I was writing pared-down poems at the University of Houston, and my instructor, an amazing poet, Adam Zagajewski, said to me, “Your poems are anemic.” That was part of a series of poems where I was letting myself swagger a bit. I remember writing that poem and knowing it was a moment of change for me.

That was a good summer for writing. I was working with a lack of self-consciousness and a better idea of who my reader might be, maybe someone like me. That poem is very much a statement of poetics; I was claiming my turf. Poetry has always been a sacred space for me. It saved me. I was a miserable high school student. I started writing when I was eleven, didn’t fit in, like most poets, and poetry was the thing— I realized when I was seventeen—that I was going to do. So when I went to a graduate program, I had a very high notion of the importance of poetry. In some ways, I had to reclaim what poetry meant for me. When you’re in that situation and you’re duking it out, you have to be strong. That whole change was like, I’ve got my own motherfucking country. This poem is my land and I make the rules.

I was talking to a friend of mine and asked if she recognized Free To Be You and Me as a reference in that poem, and she said, “I’ve heard of it.” But if you were born in the late sixties or early seventies, and you had progressive parents, you would have known that record, Free To Be You and Me, by Marlo Thomas. It’s like, we are all equal and everything’s cool. The notion of equality we know now is problematic. But at the time, you were raised to believe you could be anything, the American dream. The irony of that is thinking you can be president, and then realizing that, well, no. And then, there’s this assumption: Oh, well, I’ll get married. And that becomes your worth—someday someone will marry you! That’s why romantic comedies trigger such sentiment in us. Because they provide catharsis. We’re taught that this is what to hope for, and if we don’t get it, then we did something wrong as a woman.

KATE PETERSON

Are you going to let your daughter watch romantic comedies?

MARVIN

I’m going to let her watch anything. My parents let me read what I wanted. They were very open-minded. I was reading adult books, explicit books, at a young age, and I don’t think it messed me up. I don’t think we can prevent our children from seeing things today, with access to the internet. I don’t want my daughter to find porn sites online and I intend to figure that out as I go, but parenting is something I try to compartmentalize. I try not to worry too much about what’s going to happen five years down the road, because I have tomorrow to handle. My kid asks a lot of questions, and a lot of them are about death. We’re dealing with mortality now. A good friend of mine died last summer and several of my daughter’s fish died, so she’s curious. I get nervous when she’s crossing the street, because she’s like, “Oh, well, and then we’ll die.” Most parents will tell you their kids have predilections to certain things, often gendered. There’s not a lot you can do about that, and if your kid likes princess stuff, you’re going to let her dig princess stuff, because that’s what makes her happy. Of course, later on you can talk about the larger issues. My daughter’s not interested in princess stuff. She’s interested in dinosaurs and unicorns and animals. But she asks me every day if she looks pretty. A lot of that comes from people telling her she’s cute, and her girlfriends evaluating each other’s outfits every day. One day she came home from school—she was four—in a very bad mood because no one liked her outfit. This has been disconcerting for me. I was not a cute kid. I was skinny, with buck teeth because I sucked my thumb till I was eleven, and I had not the greatest haircut and was a total tomboy. My daughter is blonde—she’s not blonde anymore, but she was when she was a baby—and she has gray eyes, so it’s weird, because I have brown hair, brown eyes. I never thought I would have a kid that was fair. It was interesting to watch people dote over her when she was a little blonde girl. It felt like something that separated us.

STEPHANIE McCAULEY

In past interviews you’ve mentioned that earlier in your career you were too busy with school and writing to be in a successful relationship. But now you have a daughter and you’re finishing a third book—how do you manage everything? What’s changed?

MARVIN

I made the decision to have a kid when I was thirty-seven. I found out I was infertile, so I had to do IVF. I had to make a decision pretty much then and there whether or not I wanted to have a child. I wasn’t prepared to make that decision because I thought, like all of us think, that we can wait until we’re fifty to have a kid. That’s not really true. It’s actually quite difficult. And I still haven’t found a relationship that will work for me. I got frustrated thinking I would have to settle for a relationship in order to have a child. When I found out I had to start undergoing fertility treatments, I was told that most clinics would probably show me the door. I had to make a decision, and I decided that it would be for my work and my life. I had spent so much time by myself, smoking cigarettes and holed up reading books and writing poems, I felt like that could come to a very poor end in terms of my life—not the persona of my poems, but me. So I got pregnant. It took three tries.

Having a child changes everything and changes nothing. My life improved by having a kid. But you’re really much the same person. In some ways, you’re almost more who you are. But you have to kind of fall out of love with yourself. Narcissism has to go out the window. That’s painful, to break up with yourself. Juggling it all has definitely slowed my progress, but a couple of things have happened. First of all, I write differently now, and because I was writing so much for so long, I can work on a lot of stuff in my head. I also work on things over a very long time. I was working on a poem last night that I started in 2008, when I was pregnant. I’m finishing that up, and rewriting it again. The process is different now. You don’t actually get the time to sit and write, but you write differently, and if you’re a writer, you have to write and you end up writing things in spite of yourself.

So what happened to me is that I discovered I had a book. I didn’t think I had a book, but when I pulled together my poems I realized I had a manuscript. It was not the third book I’d planned to write, which was some dense, elegiac, almost philosophical thing. This book is more irreverent than my previous books, weirder in a lot of ways, because I had to do away with some filters in my life.

I recognized that having a daughter was ordinary, and before that I had lived comfortably with a sort of special woman’s status. I almost thought of myself as a guy in some ways, and you can’t think of yourself as a guy when you’re so obviously not. Then you have this kid with you and people are criticizing you or blessing you, and you’re pushing the stroller around and you can’t be at the house. When I found out I was going to have a daughter, it scared the shit out of me. I thought, Oh, my God, this person who I already love—it’s really weird when you get pregnant, you’re just like, I love this kid already; I don’t even know this kid. I was convinced I was having a boy. When it was a girl, I was like, Oh, my God. No.

Having a kid has made me figure out I have to say no to a lot of things. But it’s also forced me to take some downtime I might not have otherwise taken, because if your kid wants to go to the park and play, that’s all you’re doing. And it’s nice. I’ve met a lot of people as a result of having a kid. I used a sperm donor to get pregnant and I know a lesbian couple who used the same donor. They’re part of my extended family and our daughters know each other as sisters. As an only child coming from a small family—just me and my parents—it’s nice to have that extension and to sort of move in other parts of the world. My kid is like a living poem. She says stuff that blows me away. It’s wonderful to have that kind of love in your life. It puts everything into perspective. But I don’t worry about what my daughter is going to think about my poems. My writer’s office is separate from me running around day to day.

McCAULEY

You mentioned realizing you had a book. How does it compare to the first two?

MARVIN

I don’t know yet. Wallace Stevens has a great quote from the essay “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” and I’m just going to paraphrase it, here. He says: I don’t know what the poem is going to be, except it is what I want it to be once I make it.

The sense is that you have to accept the poem on its own terms. You have to feel it and dress it and allow it to create its own shape. It’s almost like I picture an invisible form I’m putting clothes on so people can see it. This new book came out of nowhere. In a lot of my projects, I’m interested in the post-confessional mode, taking it further. It’s a good rhetorical mode for talking about some things people aren’t necessarily ready to read—what I call stealth poems. I don’t know if I can speak to that yet. I also haven’t gotten to the point in the press kit and stuff where I get asked a bunch of questions and I look at my book and say this is what it’s about. Right now I can say that it’s about death in a big way and, in some ways, it ends on a rebirth. It’s full of elegies, and while I wouldn’t say it’s slapstick, there’s a lot of whacked-out humor in it.

PETERSON

Can you expand on what you mean by the stealth poem?

MARVIN

The stealth poem is something I was doing unconsciously when I was at the University of Houston, where they like you to have nice, neat, quatrain poems, a tight, shapely stanza. You can have chaotic and unseemly content in a poem, but visually, when it’s crafted really well, it impresses; you can imply any number of political opinions or agendas in this poem that are not necessarily picked up by the reader, because the reader is like, Oh, well, this is a very well-made poem. It’s what literature does all the time—makes the reader empathize with someone they may not have previously empathized with, whether they know it or not, because they can see themselves in the speaker. It’s a kind of code; women have been writing that way for a long time. As have queer people, as have people of color. It’s something I do a lot less of in my third book.

PETERSON

You mentioned that your daughter is talking a lot about death and that your third collection is about death. Do you think your daughter influenced your third collection?

MARVIN

No. My book was done before my friend died of liver failure. She was my age. It was very unexpected. A good friend died in 2005 and that was hard, because he represented to me the most awesome way to be in the world, a very funny, offbeat person who connected with a lot of people in a way that was contagious. He enjoyed life. One of the problems with our culture is there’s no proper way to grieve. Poetry can be one place to explore that.

GOTCH

I want to go back to what you said about “The Whistling Song from Snow White.” You said that up until that point your poems were “anemic…”

MARVIN

My undergrad poems—people would get appalled at what I wrote about. I’m tame compared to how I was then. I’ve learned over time to have a better understanding of how I’m coming across, how I might be affecting my audience. One of my flaws is that I can be oblivious. That’s a bit of a gift, because it means I’ll say things and not think too much about them and not realize people are taking me seriously and are like, What the hell is she saying? Maybe some of that comes from not being heard for a long time. When I was in junior high and high school I was unhappy, and that particular generation, the parents were like, Okay, you’re unhappy, deal with it; we’re going to work now. When I first asked to see a shrink, it was like, No, you can deal with your problems yourself. It was a typical suburban upbringing, but it was existential for me, the way I think it is for a lot of kids, and even more painful because you can’t put a finger on what’s wrong. Or it doesn’t seem legitimate to be in psychic pain. I went to college and was among people I had a lot in common with, but when I was in high school, I was a bad student. My self-esteem was for shit. I think some of that comes out of not actually thinking anyone will care.

McCAULEY

In your essay “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant,” you say you’re pleased to discover that you “tricked someone into believing the world of [your] poems is true.”

MARVIN

I don’t want to waste my reader’s time. We’re not on this planet for long, and I get frustrated with indulgent writers. I know I’ve been indulgent at times and I apologize for wasting anybody’s time, but I really do try, first of all, to be entertaining. I write a lot of poems no one ever sees that are boring, self-indulgent—no one wants to hear about my cats. But you want to write about everything. So anything that comes to fruition, the stakes have to be high, there has to be an emotional input on my part, I have to feel convinced in the poem. All of that has to do with language, with creating something unique with language, so that every line or phrase is something no one has encountered before, something actually changing someone’s experience of reading, something visually and viscerally communicating, giving someone a scene or an atmosphere or an experience. You want your poem to be interesting, you want to know that there’s trouble, great trouble, that something is going to happen. As far as tricking someone into believing the world of the poem is true, all the best writing is trickery. It’s lying like the truth.

McCAULEY

So, trickery is actually good for your readers?

MARVIN

Absolutely.

McCAULEY

It’s not manipulative?

MARVIN

Manipulative has a bad rap. Rhetoric is manipulative; all language is manipulative. When we use language we are moving to get something we want. We’re always making arguments for something, always trying to negotiate a space. If you know your way around words and are good at manipulating them, that’s good. On the other hand, if it’s a formula you’re using over and over to manipulate someone, that’s a lie. But if you’re writing something that you can’t even believe you wrote, and you yourself are convinced of the truth of it—I mean, sometimes I write something and the experience of the poem becomes that experience itself in some ways. I think it’s naive to think that any writer who’s good is not manipulative.

GOTCH

In that same essay, you mention how Sylvia Plath’s work was criticized based on facts from her personal life. People are still reading Plath and other poets that way. I had a professor tell me never to read Plath. He had reduced her poetry to a cry for help. Why do you think readers mistake intense emotion for autobiography or a cry for help?

MARVIN

It seems like a reductive way to approach a craft that is endlessly changing itself, endlessly complicated and fascinating. That view of Plath is conservative, old school, pretty much over. It was supposedly “uncool” to like Plath when I was an undergrad, but I loved her anyway—I wrote a seventy-page paper on her. I also think that to dismiss the personal in poetry—that kind of dismissal almost always takes place when it’s women’s poetry. People are sympathetic toward Lowell’s plights or John Berryman’s plights. In those cases, within the confessional mode, the transgression is to display weakness. For female confessional poets, the transgression is to display strength. Your professor said Plath’s work was a cry for help. This individual was probably not Plath’s intended reader, probably didn’t grasp the irony of her work. You have a poem like “Daddy” and it works on multiple levels. It employs the second person, it seems like a dialogue, but it’s not. It seems sincere, but it’s not. It’s mercilessly artificial. It winks at women with irony. Every woman loves a fascist. Plath knows every woman loves a fascist and, of course, in life, no woman loves a fascist—she’s working off of that fifties advertising jargon. There’s a lot packed into that. Also, one of the primary things you learn from Plath is craft. From her syntax to her punctuation, she’s a master. She keeps a poem moving.

PETERSON

In the conversation “Your Silence Will Not Protect You” between you and Erin Belieu, you mention that you have born the brunt of the “angry poet persona.” How do you feel about readers inventing a Cate Marvin from what’s on the page?

MARVIN

You’re probably doing your job pretty well if someone thinks they know you. I can’t take issue with that, but I would hope my poetry is challenging enough that people don’t come to it with a reductive interpretation that my life is on the page. I get frustrated with that because it’s silly, though it happens to pretty much every writer. People make assumptions. I make my students swear not to show their work to anyone outside the workshop for the semester because I don’t want a boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, reading their work. They need to understand that their poems will be written for people they’ve never met and never will meet. Those are the people they’re going to move. If you’re really ambitious as a writer, those are the people you’re writing for. If you’re worried about someone reading you, you don’t experience the liberty of writing whatever you want and shapeshifting, being whoever you want to be. Poems that are fun to write are fun to read.

A student once said to me, “Aren’t you scared to put these things out there?” I don’t have a sense of people paying a whole lot of attention to me. I go through life pretty oblivious. I’m not especially paranoid, I’m not especially self-conscious. I spend a lot of time by myself and I am just like, you know, poetry is this other world, so I can’t really worry about it.

PETERSON

We listened to one of your poems on YouTube, “Yellow Rubber Gloves—”

MARVIN

I had no idea that had been unleashed onto the world. That’s fucked up. And that poem’s very Plathian. I was totally thinking of her. I hope you laughed.

PETERSON

It’s so powerful. I didn’t really laugh, I just felt like, Yeah, this is it.

MARVIN

The thing about the speaker in the third book…she’s getting old. She’s aware of herself in relationship to younger women. She’s not nice about other women. There’s a poem called “Poem for an Awful Girl” that’s about competition with other women and jealousy. It sucks to get old, to realize you’re not in the running anymore. With “Poem for an Awful Girl,” I’m plotting this woman’s demise. She has the guy I want. But then the speaker realizes that this woman she’s wishing horrible things upon isn’t even aware that the speaker’s alive. The speaker’s talking about needlepointing, and she’s at a needle point. It’s like this focus for women, that there’s this division in some ways which is funny, because I love my students and the age they are, and I hang out with them all the time and they’re my favorite people in the world to talk to, but I’m always registering the fact that I’m older than them and worried about that, freaked out that I even got this old. There’s also this thing like, Don’t be so carefree, don’t think it’s all so good because look at where I am now.

GOTCH

The speaker in “Yellow Rubber Gloves” seems to have a direct purpose when it comes to relationships—could you talk about the impulse behind that poem?

MARVIN

That poem has an autobiographical impulse. In fact, there are a lot of autobiographical impulses in my third book. It’s more personal in a lot of ways, more connected to my actual life. I’m not ashamed to say that, because the poems, I hope, completely transform that, and I don’t think anybody should be ashamed about the personal. I think women are often made to feel bad, that their writing is inferior because it is not “objective,” because they are writing inside their experience—but that attitude directly invalidates female experience, or anybody’s experience. It’s like, We don’t want to hear your complaints. You’re just whining. So in “Yellow Rubber Gloves,” I was married and always washing the dishes. I was the dishwasher and I used yellow rubber gloves because my hands would get fucked up if I didn’t use them. There’s a disaster to the situation, being in servitude and washing someone’s dishes all the time. I was a PhD student and writing. I decided I wanted to reclaim the term “confessional.” I was like, If you’re going to damn me as being confessional, then I will be confessional in a way that will scare the shit out of you. That’s been really fun, because I think it scares people who should be scared.

The poem started back in 2000. I started with the image of the centaur. But the mop and stuff, the whole idea was that the end would be like, Oh, my paramour—. But how do I confess this, how do you tell the new lover where you’ve been in a past relationship, that you’ve been denigrated? At the time, I had this new lover who’s mythologized in the poem as Pan. But how do you explain that you’ve been defiled and still seem whole to someone? I always wanted that poem to work. I’d show it to my friend, my main reader, and he was like, No, no, no, and I would rework it. And then I finally just finished it one day, not too long ago, one of the last poems to go in the book. I was doing this big run, writing poems all day and night to finish the book, and I just wrote it. It’s a general address to women. It’s also like this huge, you know—I’ve cashed it in. I’m ready, I’m done with it, I’m going be that old woman with cats.

It’s meant to be awful in that way. It names it, like, Yeah, I’m the fucking cunt who should have shut her hole long ago. I was laughing the whole time writing it. And I think you should use rubber gloves when you wash dishes, because I am a huge proponent of skin creams and lotions and I’m like, Use gloves!

So it’s supposed to be funny and awful, but the thing is—be careful out there, just be fucking careful. Because you could spend a lot of time negotiating relationships where your time to write is being taken away maybe by someone who is not a writer who thinks maybe, Oh, you’re not spending enough time with me, and if you live in New York or anyplace you can take public transportation, you know the ease with which men take up space on a subway. And there is a whole tumblr or tweeting thing of photographs of men taking up space. All women writers—it’s like we’re here, tucking into ourselves because we’re afraid. And that’s no way to live.

PETERSON

A lot of your poems go to uncomfortable places. Do you ever think to yourself, I shouldn’t write this?

MARVIN

No. I’m kind of compulsive and revealing. My father was a military intelligence analyst and his whole life was about keeping secrets. Whenever I feel like I shouldn’t say something, that means I’m about to blurt it out. For me, typos or coming across as sentimental are far more embarrassing than saying something unseemly. I’m working on a poem right now that has patches of sentimentality that I really need to work out of it. I’m rewriting it line by line, to wring that out.

GOTCH

What is sentimentality in poetry?

MARVIN

Well, with women it’s often a rhetorical device employed at a point when the reader’s not expecting it, and it gets them. It’s like in the movies, a technique. I guess we should look at the definition of sentiment; is sentiment less than love? What is it about sentiment that makes it bad? Is sentimental not beautiful? You know, hell, we’re all sentimental at some point, aren’t we? Because love leaks into sentiment. People are worried about sentiment, worried that people will be sappy or something and write love poems. I don’t know. I actually think sentimentality can be used as a rhetorical weapon in some ways. Like very ironic sentiment.

GOTCH

I think there are people who confuse sentimentality with love, like in a love poem—as if, just because it’s about love means it’s sentimental…

MARVIN

What would Pablo Neruda say about that? What would Garcia Lorca say? It’s easy to make someone feel bad about expressing a feeling when we pretty much go around feeling things all the time—that’s part of being human. I don’t like poetry that doesn’t have feeling in it. And you know who also didn’t write poetry that doesn’t have feeling in it? Robert Frost. A lot of people looked to him as the model for neo-formalism, but Frost was a tormented person, suffering a lot of the time. So it’s interesting to see what’s happening in his poems. He says, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” Okay, so let’s see. Sentiment. Exaggerated or self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia. Exaggerated or self-indulgent. I guess that’s the problem with sentiment, or that’s the criticism, but I think if you didn’t have some sentiment in a poem, you might not have the whole pallet of human emotion. I want to create an emotional atmosphere in my poems.

PETERSON

Jonathan Johnson says poets should risk sentimentality. Why does it have to be a risk?

MARVIN

Because it’s always a risk. It’s a risk when you’re in love with someone, a risk to reveal your feelings; it shouldn’t be but it is. In a poem, if you’re sentimental in the beginning, you’ve already given it away. It’s the writer’s job to seduce. You’re not just going to walk in buck naked and be like, Here I am. You have to lure them in from the title on.

McCAULEY

That goes along with T.S. Eliot and the New Critics and the idea that personality shouldn’t factor into reader response.

MARVIN

T.S. Eliot is always saying the opposite of what he means. When he says there’s an absence of personality, he means that in some ways you can be anything, but it’s clear that absence actually allows your real self to be present. The way he states these things, it’s always sort of wonderfully complicated, like the objective correlative, which is where he’s just making an argument that you should employ figurative language, that you should show, don’t tell. It’s Ezra Pound all over again. Eliot is interesting because you can mold him in a way to make many of his statements advocates for just reading a poem on its own terms, reading a poem by its own rules.

McCAULEY

So the self-sacrifice and the extinction of personality can actually allow for the personal?

MARVIN

Personality is, in some ways, almost a process, because what he’s talking about is like body odor. He’s talking about the state of personality. Where it’s like with poetry, you can’t be that person, you can’t be the daily person—in some ways it’s like getting rid of personality to allow a voice in.

PETERSON

On the back of your latest collection, Rodney Jones says that, “The work bristles with the intellectual and emotional contradictions that face single women of this time.”

MARVIN

I asked him to take out “single” and it didn’t end up getting taken out. I didn’t think it was fair. First of all, sometimes I’m single, sometimes I’m not. In fact, when a lot of that book was written, I had a serious boyfriend who helped me with a ton of those poems—Matthew Yeager, who is now a good friend, a brilliant poet, who totally understands my poetics and helped me get through this book. “Muckraker” is a poem he saved. I’d thrown my hands up and was done with it. It’s probably the best poem in the book. So, sure the speaker is not having such a great time with relationships, but she’s having a lot of relationships. She’s not single. She’s maybe kind of getting around a little bit.

McCAULEY

So a woman has to be either single or married.

MARVIN

I guess facebook gives us those options, right? I mean, what if you’re married to a fucking idea? You know, I’m married to poetry. It’s like what Adélia Prado, the Brazilian poet, says in her poem “With Poetic License.” She says, “I’m not so ugly I can’t get married.” She says, “When I was born, one of those svelte angels…/ proclaimed / this one will carry a flag.” She says, “It’s man’s curse to be lame in life, / woman’s to unfold. I do.” And that’s sort of like saying, “I’m married to poetry.” Rodney is one of my favorite people in this entire world and it was important to me that he blurbed the book, because he’s an exquisite poet and one of my mentors. I also wanted to show that someone who is a male, Southern poet gets it.

PETERSON

What are the emotional contradictions he was talking about?

MARVIN

Contradictions women face all the time regarding what they’re told by media, what they’re told they should and shouldn’t be. We’re told we’re on the brink of death every moment we leave the house at night; if we wear skimpy clothes, we’re probably not only going to be raped but probably deserve it. That’s what culture tells us, what media tells us. And women are adaptable, we kind of go along, we’re going to be friendly and kind and shit like that. But what we’re doing is accommodating a vocal and almost banal expression of violence toward us all the time. It’s not just women who see this—plenty of men see it and find it repugnant too.

GOTCH

In Fragment of the Head of a Queen, you have poems that seem to be written from a male perspective, such as “All My Wives” and “A Brief Attachment—”

MARVIN

That’s a female speaker in “A Brief Attachment,” a female speaker in a relationship with a woman. I tried to make that explicit. There’s something ironic about that poem, because the speaker is a poet, and has this attachment, this affair, with a younger poet who is really driving her crazy, but who is also someone to admire. There’s a lot of arrogance on behalf of the speaker. That’s what the poem is about. Both of the characters are problematic. That poem riffs off Thomas Wyatt’s “Noli Me Tangere.” Do not touch. It’s trying to work off of Wyatt, a sixteenth-century poet, but it has a lesbian spin, even though people expect the speaker of this book to be heterosexual. I thought that would be amusing. Twisted. That poem deals with a great unease regarding sexual ambiguity—bisexuality or homosexuality. With “All My Wives,” I was reading a Michael Burkard poem that had that line, “All my wives,” and it just clicked for me. That poem is strange. And ominous. There was a reading series in New York where actors read your poems, and this actress read that one and scared the fucking shit out of me. Basically, that speaker is the figure in “Muckraker,” a silly, arrogant man. But I also like him. You know how fiction writers say they like all their characters? When I read that poem, I am so him in that. But of course, he’s totally evil. He’s also pathetic, because he’s just this high-dictioned combination of two of my ex-boyfriends, someone I dated when I was twenty and then someone I was married to. I assumed that attitude. It’s kind of like, Oh, I see how he sees women. And the whole thing is like, Why would I desire to look in your eyes when I could pick up a book? “It’s like buying a book I’d never want to read,” he says. But also, you see in the end, he’s scared because he knows there’s this animal sense, that there are women waiting for him and he’s talking about his inheritance as a man.

PETERSON

You dedicated your second collection to boys and their mothers. What boys in particular are you hoping to reach and why?

MARVIN

That’s a cynical dedication meant to operate as a technique in the book. And the book, there’s a lot of criticism in there inherently about gender norms and stuff like that. At the time, I was frustrated with mothers who hadn’t let their boys grow up, because there are a lot of boys out there who need to be men. But I’ll also say that that was a dedication to my ex-boyfriend, who I love still. He’s a brilliant poet, Matthew Yeager, and the book was originally dedicated to him, and I probably should have kept it dedicated to him, but I was bitter about our breakup and I was sad and lonely. I felt like his mom was overprotective and had sort of been the one that came between us, and I think that was probably a miscalculation on my part. I was talking to a colleague of mine, a guy, and I said “Maybe I’ll dedicate it to Catholic boys and their mothers,” and he said, “Why don’t you just dedicate it to boys and their mothers.” It was a last minute change that went through. I think it’s funny as hell.

McCAULEY

What’s the difference between boys and men, or a factor that makes boys men?

MARVIN

Basically, just taking responsibility for your actions, taking responsibility for yourself, something a lot of people quite far along in age don’t feel obligated to do. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to be like, Hey, maybe I didn’t do that right, maybe I wasn’t very nice to that person, maybe I need to actually step up and mentor someone, instead of criticize them. That’s something I’ve come to realize, especially since having a kid, but also just because now I’m in the middle of my life. I work with college students and I don’t want to fuck it up for them. I remember the people who helped me and the people who did not, and how much it meant to me. So, I take that role seriously, and while I’m certainly not, like, a noble person, I’m sure as shit going to try to be the best person I can be. I have a lot of good examples in my life, friends with exceptional character, who I’ve learned a lot from. I’ve met a lot of these people through VIDA. This is a long way of saying I think everybody should try to be their best selves. It’s hard. I mean, God knows, wisdom comes too late.

PETERSON

Regarding VIDA, in what ways are women still underrepresented?

MARVIN

It’s fascinating that underrepresentation can still be so blatant, especially in so many progressive magazines. It’s always been obvious, but people would get angry if anyone brought it up. I was very lucky to see Francine Prose read from her essay “The Scent of a Woman’s Ink” way back, maybe in 1998, when I was at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. I had read that article in Harper’s examining the question of whether or not women write a certain way. Does a woman have a certain voice? Can you tell it’s a woman writer? I have a lot of male friends, and I have a lot more female friends now that I am involved in VIDA. But a guy I was good friends with didn’t really see what she was getting at. He just dismissed it. That stuck in my craw.

I have a lot of dialogue with male poets. I’m interested in what it means to be a man in a poem or to express masculinity in any way, because the activity of literature is learning what it’s like to be someone else. So, at the time that VIDA came about, I saw the essay by Juliana Spahr called “Numbers Trouble” in which she looks at an avant-garde anthology and sees how skewed the representation is. And I thought, I am always counting the authors. I go down the table of contents and I count, and I’m like, Oh, look, there’s three women and seven men. I know other women do that, too. When I started VIDA I had a lot of conversations with a lot of female writers, and I was like, We should count everything, which struck me as funny because I’m bad at math, but we started what is now known at the VIDA count.

There’s a disconnect between what some magazines produce and their readership. The majority of readers are women. Women can read men, women can read across the board, we’re trained to read both genders from a very early age, because we’re forced to read stuff that’s male focused. Then we read stuff on our own, books that are more about women. And we are the biggest consumers of literature. So it seems misguided. There’s a learning curve for these magazines to actually serve their readership; it’s important that they look at the numbers. It’s not a blame game. That’s too easy. We all have our biases. I’ve had to question a lot of my own since starting VIDA. Both Erin Belieu and I were schooled in the male canon. We have both had to look at what we’re teaching, look at our reading lists and ‘fess up. We can’t blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we are not representing a diverse enough group of people in our classes. And that’s about growing, about not being reactionary and defensive, but saying, Okay, we’re all part of this. Why is it happening? There are going to be a million reasons. A lot of it’s shaped by capitalism and what
people want to sell.

GOTCH

We did an interview with Joyce Carol Oates in which the VIDA count came up. One of the interviewers mentioned that after the count in 2012, Tin House started digging into their own numbers and noticed an equal number of men and women submitting to the journal, but men being five times more likely than women to resubmit.

MARVIN

Women, for a myriad of reasons, are not willing to come back to the table right away. I can speak as a mother—maybe I don’t have time to submit like I used to. I used to submit like a man, but now I can’t be bothered. I think women need to put themselves out there more. We all have to, and it’s scary. But one of the great things about being a writer is that it’s kind of not you, except when you publish and people know who you are. When you’re starting out, though, no one knows who you are. You could be a ninety-two-year-old grandmother. That’s the liberty of poetry. I don’t have my body dragging along behind the poem. You know what it’s like to walk around being in a body—it’s what W. E. B. Du Bois calls Double Consciousness, being aware of having this identity, but also being aware of your identity as a person. That’s a conundrum.

GOTCH

Joyce Carol Oates mentioned a woman she’d published, the first submission this woman had sent in forty years. Because she’d gotten a rejection, she stopped writing. Joyce Carol Oates was like, You’re a really amazing writer. Where have you been all this time?

MARVIN

In our forums for VIDA we hope women of different generations will be conversant with one another. In the older generation there are a few very prominent women and a ton of women who are fine writers ushered into this invisible realm. They feel out of touch with younger female writers. And the fact is, we all are dealing with the same obstacles. Whatever genre we write in, whatever aesthetic group we call our camp, if we have a camp, we’re all facing that difficulty. Our work is not only not fairly represented, given that we’re half the population, the production of our art is being hindered by the fact that our work is not represented in these venues. Because the cold fact is that publications that are anointed are often gateways. If someone has a poem or short story or essay in something or they produce a play or publish a book with a good press, they’re going to sell books, a library is going to adopt that book, reading clubs might adopt that book. Maybe an award will give them a foot up to a better job. If they’re teachers, they might get a lighter teaching load. Maybe they’re applying for grants and the publication will provide a better chance of getting that grant. All of these things are going to give them more time to write. That’s why the VIDA count is important.

Everyone involved in VIDA has their own particular reason they’re involved. Mine is because I’m interested in women’s literature and not just the literature I produce. I don’t even know half of what’s out there because all these voices are being vetted for me as a reader. It makes it difficult to access people I could really enjoy. For me, reading fiction is a pleasure, like eating chocolate. I have much more access to poetry because I’m in that world. But some of these boundaries between genres and between aesthetics have harmed women writers. We’ve felt isolate and haven’t seen how connected we are to one another. We’re all disenfranchised, all struggling to find time to write, all struggling for validation. And the conversation is really going public now. I hope what VIDA can do on its website and when we have a conference (I hope in a few years), is create a space where you can learn about women’s literature. That seems to me like a totally intellectual undertaking, just wanting to know that stuff. Part of this is my education and educating my students. And also keeping literature alive.

VIDA focuses on literary arts. We can’t focus on everything. But there are a lot of organizations for women in different disciplines doing similar things. There’s a woman who writes about women in Hollywood. Women are forming organizations in every single discipline, and it’s not just women who are disenfranchised. I opened the Missouri Review the other day, because we received it as part of our count, and there were pictures of the authors on the front page. They were all white. Not a single writer of color in the whole issue. As we work to diversify VIDA, that’s something increasingly problematic.

PETERSON

I saw your Twitter conversation with Roxane Gay regarding that and was wondering how you might move forward to solve that problem.

MARVIN

I don’t know about the word “solve.” One person’s solution might not be another’s. “Solution” is actually sort of a scary word. But I think, first of all, we have to make space for the conversation and work practically. That’s what happens in a nonprofit—you think about what you can do. You start with ideas, with what you want to change, but then you have to think about action. You have to do it as a group, an incredibly collaborative project. I’ve never worked like this in my life. We’re having our first board of directors meeting on Friday—we have a larger board now—and a women of color initiative is going to be a big topic. We need to look at what it means to diversify the count. That’s difficult because the whole identification issue is tricky. What I would like to do is seek the assistance of like-minded organizations representing underrepresented people. It’s also an issue of class, which is the most invisible thing. Regarding solutions or strategies, you have to work with the help of so many people to get something that is really effective.

McCAULEY

When young writers look at the data, how should they use it? How do you consider it in your own writing?

MARVIN

As a poet, I don’t have to worry about this so much. I did the first count with a few people in the summer of 2010. I would use the public library and I didn’t have any daycare because I was too broke. I teach sometimes at Columbia, so I’d end up using their library or the New York Public Library, and it was hard work, in the trenches, and depressing when you’re doing it, because you find that some information can be presented in such a way graphically that you think there are more women being represented than there are. Then you look at the numbers, and you’re like, Oh. You’ll think, This is a really good issue, with a lot of women, but you look and there are only four. You start to realize that “a lot” of women to you is actually not a lot of women. It’s just what you’re used to. So what do young writers, what do old writers, what does any writer do with that data? Well, no one is going to look at those charts and feel good. But it also depends on what your aspirations are. You write because you have to write. And if you’re letting that tell you your writing is not important, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. It’s a long, tough, gratifying life, but you already have been doing something that nobody wants you to do, if you’re doing something interesting.

In some ways, women writers have an advantage because we write a “minor” literature, and so we’re not so much heard. In some ways, our literature is extremely provocative, is some of the most exciting literature being produced. It’s an advantage. Not having time to write, that sucks, but fighting for it and knowing it’s important, that’s good. And a lot of people will say, “Oh, you won’t have time to write. If you have this job, you’re not going to have time. If you have a kid, you’re not going to have time.” But if writing is a priority for you, you make time, whether it means you have to say no to a bunch of things or slack off in a bunch of things.

When I was trying to figure out whether or not I was going to have a kid, a friend of mine said to me, “I promise you this, you won’t ever write again.” So I decided I wasn’t going to have a kid. Then I started to think about it, and it’s one of those things where you’re doing that squirrely thinking at the back of your mind, mulling it over, and I thought about her photography and how she had not pursued it. No shame in that. That’s her business. But I would rather be dead than not write. If I couldn’t write, there’s no point in anything. So I thought about it and I was like, I’m conditioned to work really hard. Having a child is a lot of work—in some ways it’s not work, but it is work, too, you’re caring for your child. You love your kid. But it’s not like you’re going to some fucking horrible office where you don’t like the people and you have to make photocopies when you’d rather be doing something better with your time. You’re hanging out with a human being you love. So I was like, I think my friend’s version is not my version.

PETERSON

Some male characters in your poems come across as not so great, and some people ask, “What’s the deal with these men?” But are men ever asked this question regarding women in their work? Is it a double standard that people ask you about the men in your poems?

MARVIN

A reviewer of my second book said that he imagined several ex-boyfriends had nosebleeds as my book went to press, a very uncool thing to say. You know from that book that there are a ton of poems that aren’t about men. In fact, that assumption might have been more applicable to my first book, a book with a woman’s voice in the tradition of a love poem, in the tradition of the troubadours, of Petrarch, a book about unrequited love. It’s a young book, the viewpoint of a young woman. People will take those poems and use them as a mirror, and say, “Where are you in this?” But it’s not supposed to be a mirror. It’s not supposed to look back at the woman, though that’s what we’re accustomed to, because typically the woman is the muse or the object in a poem. The woman is not the object in those poems in my first book. That’s why she’s a little unnerving, because she’s strategizing. She has issues of control.

PETERSON

She’s thinking a lot, too, about her situation. There’s one poem, “Me and Men,” in which the speaker says, “I can’t blame them for owning what I wanted back when what I wanted was had only by men.”

MARVIN

What’s really funny about that poem is that whole play with language at the end, where she’s like, I would rather think about animals that I’ve had, the idea being that men are the animals she’s had. And what’s really funny—and this is how utterly guileless I can be as a writer—when I was writing that, I literally meant, I would rather think about my pets. And then I was like, Oh, genius! I trumped myself— language did its work for me. That poem deals with what we do when we’re thinking about marriage or being with someone. We see a pool of people—and I don’t care what you’re orientation is, you think, Okay, who am I going to be with, because I’m supposed to be with someone. Maybe this one or maybe that one will work. It’s such a fucked-up way to go about connecting with people. The speaker’s making a gross generalization. That poem is really about one person, though it shouldn’t be interesting, being only about one person. But one person in a relationship can represent a lot of people. We all know this, I think. We return to archetypes in our lives. It has a lot to do with the mythology we create within our poems if we’re writing personal poetry. It’s recognizing patterns.

You ask about the men in my poems. The thing is, I’m kind of obsessed with men. It’s always been a struggle for me. I’m heterosexual. I often wish I wasn’t, but I am interested in men, and interested in how I will get a man to see me. Maybe it’s a desire to be validated, but it’s also a desire to communicate. I’m also confused by betrayal and dishonesty, and in the landscape of relationships, that’s where a lot of that shit goes down.

PETERSON

When you say you’re confused by betrayal and dishonesty, do you mean you’re confused that it happens or confused about how to react?

MARVIN

I’m confused that it happens. I know that sounds naive. That mummy poem by Thomas James has a speaker who blacks out in her father’s garden and her body is being prepared to be mummified. She says out of the blue that she’s going to come back to her life, back to the garden; she’s going to meet her young groom. His eyes will be like black bruises. And she’s like, Why do people lie to each other? It’s a really good question. It’s something my poems work hard against.

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