I first spoke with Todd Boss during the spring/summer of 2010, around the time his first full-length collection, YELLOWROCKET (2008, Norton) was about to come out in paperback. Previously, I’d come upon an article he’d written in Poets & Writers (“The Audio Revolution: How to Amplify Your Poems,” Sept/Oct 2009) where Todd shared his thoughts on poetry as a spoken/auditory experience. (Unfortunately, this article is no longer available online, or else I’d link to it here.) 

I enjoyed the humor and musicality Todd infused into his work, in addition to his thoughts on the spoken aspect of poetry, not to mention his willingness to self-promote and live life as a “working poet.” Needless to say, I was stoked to talk with him. And, for any number of reasons, his interview fell into a hole I’ve come to refer to as “the lost interview series”, and took two years to make it to the site. BUT – it’s here, and I’m grateful to be sharing Todd’s words below. 

Special thanks to friend and fellow poet Mirand Parker for her excellent transcription work. 

DJ: I’d like to ask you about the idea of “being available” as a poet and as a professional, and what it all means to you. Just from what I found on the web, you’re definitely taking a very open and different approach than what I see a lot of professional poets take. What does it mean for you to be “out there?”

TB: That’s a really good question. I think it has multiple components. I think part of it is not being risk adverse, being what the opposite of risk adverse is—risk available?

One time I had a lousy job on the fourth floor of an office building. Everyday I’d go by the third floor and look out to this cool looking office through the window glass where people were having fun. I liked the atmosphere of the place, which was called something or other Communications. I was like, “Well, I can communicate, so maybe that’s the place for me.”

One day they were out to lunch and I slipped my resume under the door. It happened to be at the same moment when they were taking a co-worker out for a farewell lunch. I was putting myself out there. I was taking a risk. I wasn’t waiting for the job to be posted. I was saying this looks cool and I want to be here. There wasn’t much risk in slipping my resume under the door, so this might not be the right example of that component, but maybe that illustrates something else.

DJ: It seems like you have a sort of lightness toward the ability to say “Why not?” vs. just sitting back on your heels and waiting.

TB: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think it had a little something to do with visualization. Like being able to say, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to work with a composer.” Well then, put that out there. If you want to do commissions and have people pay you money to work on private projects, then get into people’s minds by putting that out there. Maybe that sounds like some kind of Seven Habits for Highly Effective People kind of thing, and maybe it is one, I don’t know.

DJ: I live in Portland, so I’m more than familiar with the language you’re using. So, did you get the job?

TB: I did get the job, and just about every job I’ve ever had has come to me through something like that. If I lived on the West Coast, I might say something like “the universe takes care of people.” Maybe I’m a little too Midwestern to go there, but I do think you make your own luck.

DJ: That’s how a Minnesotan would say it?

TB: Maybe so.

DJ: Tell me about your commissioned work, which you promote on your site. When did the idea strike you as viable, or something that was similar to, “What if I started commissioning my poetry the same way people commission art?”

TB: I was working full time at the Playwright Center, in Minneapolis. I was the development director there, so my job was to raise money for the organization, write all the grants, marketing, etc. I noticed that playwrights were getting commissions. We started a program where we would actually auction them off at our fundraisers. People would get a short, short play commissioned for fun, usually something silly. I noticed how much fun it was for the writers and for the commissioners, and how much more engaged commissioners became in the work of their writers.

I thought, why not engage the art directly with the consumer of the art, the reader, in a way that obligates them to one another? I just hung the shingle out on my website. That interface was one of the first things I built. I think within about 17 days after I launched my website, I got an email from a woman in Berkeley who wanted to commission a poem, asking me how much it would be and what it would entail. Because I already worked at the Playwright Center, I already had a contract agreement that we had used for playwrights, so I was able to walk her through what the expectations would be. She was comfortable with it, signed on, and we embarked.

Since then, I’ve done six or seven commissioned projects, ranging from sort of small projects to the most recent where I wrote a poem for the mother of five children. I had to interview all five children, who were scattered in different parts of the country…trying to write a tribute to someone I’ve never met through five people I’ve never met.

In the end, I think it puts poetry into the service of my community, into the service of people. It illustrates to those people what poetry is capable of doing. They may know it already since they’re coming to me, so they’re clearly aware of poetry’s power. It’s interesting to me that poetry can do things for people that no other therapy, no other medicine, no other religion can do. Bringing closure to situations, healing relationships, celebrating really powerful people in their lives—I haven’t even tapped the range of possibilities. That thrills me that poetry has a direct role to play that’s bigger than just being a great art form.

DJ: Do you think that is an opinion that is shared by many poets?

TB: I sure would suspect so. I feel like that’s probably why we’re writing anyway. To heal the world, to open the world, to bring power and excitement to the world in different ways. I think that’s why we’re all writing. We just don’t have a client who needs it specifically for some reason. We hope that the reader will find it. It’s kind of like we’re doing this already, we’re just doing it from the other end of the pipeline.

DJ: So this is almost allowing you to come directly into contact with those people who may be seeking it out.

TB: It’s an interesting thing because you meet the reader before the poem. That’s really unusual, I think, in any art form. What I always try to explain to people who commission me is that ultimately the poem is mine. They can go through the work of helping me create it, and they can pay for being able to use it the way they want to use it, but ultimately, no matter much I learn about their lives, or whatever it is they want me to write about, I can only write from what I know. I can only bring my gloss on it. It’s interesting, because a commissioned poem is destined to simultaneously thrill and disappoint.

My first experiences with commissions taught me some of this stuff, and I am still learning the nuances. The poem they get back doesn’t sound like them talking to me over the telephone. It doesn’t sound like their thoughts of their loved one. It doesn’t sound like what they had in their heads. It may have an image that came completely out of my own experience, and may have metaphors that aren’t theirs. So, there’s something jarring about seeing your ideas and thoughts in someone else’s poem. Ultimately, that’s a good thing. That’s why they come to me.

I’m a little bit like a shaman in that I tell them what their dream means, or I give them the deeper meaning of the things they’re telling me about. It’s not necessarily going to jive right away with what they think it means. Speaking from a completely selfish standpoint, these commissions help me think about the things I might write about anyway.

DJ: How do you charge?

TB: It depends on how much research and legwork is required. It’s pretty modest, but it’s significant enough that people have walked away from the idea. I’m very flexible with the costs.

DJ: I’m sure you earn about $2 an hour once it’s all said and done.

TB: Probably less. But you know, the work that it inspires—that’s the thing. At the end of this, the commissioner thinks I come out with one poem and I present them with one poem, but in truth, there’s pre-writing, all kinds of ideas, sketches, drafts and stuff they never see. In terms of it being a great creative workout for me, it pays all kinds of creative dividends.

If poetry is partly about seeing things from a different perspective, changing your perspective and trying to see something in a new way, then what could you want better than to have a client relationship with someone who is telling you their most intimate thoughts about something so that you can totally, hopefully, see it from their perspective. It’s a really amazing workout.

DJ: You mentioned how commissioned work will simultaneously disappoint and excite. What’s the disappointment about?

TB: There are lots of different ways a poem can disappoint. One way a poem can disappoint a client has to do with the fact that people aren’t always ready to hear their ideas in metaphor, or hear their ideas reduced or expanded with the use of an image that wasn’t theirs. These can be seen almost as authorial intrusions into their consciousness, and they’re not ready for that.

There are also practical things. The first commission I did turned out to be a birthday present a woman was giving to a lifelong friend. She wanted it to be a surprise for her, so we worked in secret, and it probably ranged over about nine months and three or four hour-long phone conversations. When it was done, it brought tears to the eyes of the commissioner, the person who paid and worked with me on it. When she turned around to give it to the beloved, it backfired. And the backfire happened for a number of reasons. One was that the poem came loaded with very personal, private information. The recipient felt betrayed at the fact her friend had shared this information with a third party. Who would have ever foreseen that situation?

DJ: What about times when the commissioner has to yield creative control, knowing that in the end, though the memories and images belong to them, they’ll come through in your voice?

TB: Some of it is intuitive. I’ve had really good luck and really good experiences with everyone who has commissioned a poem from me. At the same time, and maybe it’s creative self-doubt, I feel a little uncertain as to whether my imposition serves them well. It’s a risky thing. In several cases, I’ve written for folks who were on the brink of death. Not only are these tribute poems, but they’re also farewells.

DJ: You mentioned earlier that you’ve never been averse to taking risks. What do you think the potential is for a poet to really get out there and connect with as many people, in as many ways, as possible? When you try to balance the scales between time allotted to sitting down with the craft, and time allotted to promoting and trying something new, how do things balance out for you?

TB: There are times when I curse myself for how deep I’ve gotten into collaborative projects and other things I have to promote. No doubt about that. For the last few years, I was working full time and I would curse that too. I think there’s a degree to which we will curse anything that isn’t the art, but we have to do those things. It’s just the way it goes. I think the more public you become, the more you have a responsibility to that public, and to tending to that public presence in some way—unless it scares the shit out of you, which I can respect. If you want to be a public poet, it can be a funny thing. Just sending your work to a magazine is an act of publicity, and yet, wanting publicity is somehow frowned upon as selling out or something. I don’t think we can have it both ways. I see it as an occupation and I’m willing to take the inartistic work along with the artistic work.

DJ: Did you ever think that you would step away from full-time employment and just focus on your own life as a solo artist?

TB: I did. When the first book deal came through with Norton, I told the folks at the Playwright Center that I wanted to go half time or part time and we tried to work that out, but in the end, I ended up leaving. Up until the last few years, I’ve been running solo. I’m just trying to do my own thing. I’ve gotten a few grants and just enough paying gigs. I’m not making a living with my poetry, by any means. I did have to step away from my sort of full-time job because the book deal was too big. If it had happened with a university press or something smaller, I probably would have been able to take it in stride. This was too public too soon, and I had to take measures to get it out.

DJ: You also do a great job of making your poems available via audio on your website. Do you have any interest in putting out an album of poetry?

TB: I do. When I sold the book to Norton, one of our first conversations was about whether we could include a CD with the book. Norton has done that in the past. We didn’t do it with the first book, which would have been sort of my ultimate dream come true. I’ll keep pushing for that with each book I do.

When I do a reading a lot of my audiences ask me if I have a CD, and I think they would be interested in buying a CD sometimes before buying a book, which is interesting to me.

DJ: What do you think it that prompts people to buy a CD before a book?

TB: So much of what we are doing in poetry is music. People relate to that. I also think it might be that people are pressed for time, and they want to be able to take things in their cars with them or to the gym. Not that I make great workout music.

DJ: Do you think poets overlook the audio and performing aspect of their work?

TB: I have strong feelings about that. I think the truth of the matter is that the literary arts are the storytelling arts. Poetry’s heritage is in storytelling and song. That impulse slowly diverged over time. When the printing press came along, it changed everything. I think the printing press turned poetry from an oral art into a printed art.

Music is on the other side. It has maintained the performing and musical aspect. Theatre also maintains that original impulse. I think what we have now are these different pockets of the same impulse that are governed by experts. Experts only know what they’re expert at. I think we have an expert community of expert poets who are very good, but are too expert at creating this printed art form. They would do well to remember their roots. They would do well to reclaim the primary impulse.

DJ: People can be spellbound by the words and the music, but also by the individual performer. A lot of poets in performances seem so focused on the words that they tend to overlook the fact that people want to see them as well. Do you get this sense?

TB: I do, and I think it’s a tricky subject. When I perform, I think audiences respond to me and to the work. Whether I can prescribe that for other poets, I’m not sure. What works for me may not work for other poets.

 

–

What’s Todd Boss up to these days? Check out his site, and also check out Motionpoems, a collaborative project with animator/producer Angella Kassube that combines the creative gifts of video artists and poets for an amazing multi-sensory experience around images, sounds and words.

Entering the world of Mari L’Esperance’s first full-length collection, The Darkened Temple (© 2008, University of Nebraska Press), feels akin to slipping into the dark matter that engulfs our dream state. There’s a summoning taking place: images come into full resolution; memories dangle off hooks just beyond our grasp. While many of the poems arrive from a place of deep personal meaning to the poet herself, they nevertheless evoke our own senses of longing, memory and loss. I was fortunate to speak with L’Esperance a short time ago, to discuss the collection — winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry — her process, and the source of her work. We began by talking about her thoughts around building the collection and preparing her manuscript for publication.

DJ: The entire collection follows a narrative thread throughout. Was that always your intent when building this collection, or did that come more organically?

ML: I wrote poems that appear in the book over a pretty broad span of time — maybe a 12 or 13 year period. When I was writing the poems I wasn’t thinking in terms of structure or a manuscript, but when I reached the point where I thought I had enough for a manuscript, I started thinking very consciously about having something of a narrative arc, or a shape to the manuscript. I wanted the book to move in a particular direction, but I didn’t write the poems themselves with that in mind.

DJ: So it came about after you’d been in the process of writing?

ML: That’s right.

DJ: Did you have to return to any poems after arriving at that conclusion? Fill in any blanks where you wanted to build up the arc?

ML: After I submitted the manuscript to contests and Prairie Schooner picked it up, their editor, Hilda Raz, asked me to write, or at least add several more poems to the manuscript. I didn’t have any existing poems that I felt were appropriate or would fit the book, so I did have to write four or five new poems after the book was accepted. Then I placed them in the sequence where I thought they would fit.

DJ: Did the editor offer any insight into why she wanted the additional poems?

ML: I think it was more about length, and not that the manuscript felt lacking. She wanted to fill it out a little more. I was happy to do that.

DJ: Where did those poems slot in?

ML: Mostly in the second section. “Beyond It,” “To Her Body,” and “The Book of Ash” are three poems I added. They’re near the middle.

DJ: As I was reading the collection, there were four poems specifically that felt to me to be a part of a sequence — as it happens, “Beyond It” and “To Her Body” bookend this sequence, with “Finding My Mother” and “Forgetting” in between. In looking at your arc, they do sit right at that peak, if you will — if this were a novel, these poems would be the middle chapters. Were you trying to build the feeling of a pinnacle moment with these poems?

ML: I don’t think I was consciously trying to build or amplify what you refer to as a pinnacle moment. It’s possible I was attached in some way to that section of the book. There’s a lot of energy concentrated there. But I don’t think there was anything conscious about why I decided to add the poems there.

When I was looking at the manuscript, that area looked like the best place where they would fit in. It’s interesting that you saw them as a sequence. I think there’s something to your observation, though I wasn’t thinking about that at all.

DJ: So you were just writing them without thinking about where they’d go?

ML: Yes. I wasn’t thinking about the sequence at all.

DJ: What is your process, then, when you compare the art and craft of writing an individual poem vs. the art of compiling 30 or 50 poems into what you’d like to be an intentional sequence? I think that for a lot of poets, especially as it relates to first books, the idea of putting together a manuscript is foreign, or at least it’s not discussed all that much.

ML: My experience with first books, when I look at others, is that the books tend to be more of a general amalgam of poems written over time. Then the poet may arrange them so they read like more of a self-contained project.

I think it’s important for poets to just write poems, then figure out the sequencing after the poems are written. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad to have something of a book-length project or entity in mind before writing the poems. Then again, that can be somewhat suffocating to the writing process.

Looking at this book, there’s a central theme and/or central themes that reoccur. I think a lot of poets . . . we tend to be obsessive types. From book to book, we tend to write the same poem over and over — meaning those same obsessive themes show up in our poems again and again. With that in mind, it felt like an organic process to have isolated poems, then put them together in a book. I do agree, though, that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of attention on or talk around how to arrange first books in a shape that carries the reader through from beginning to end.

DJ: Do you expect that the reader would or even should read this collection in a cover-to-cover manner?

ML: I think that’s the best way to read it. I like to read anyone’s collection, unless it’s an anthology, from beginning to end in a linear fashion, because I do think that a lot of poets are holding that ideal in various degrees of consciousness, sensing the book’s movement from beginning to end. I think reading the poems in the order they’re arranged gives more meaning to the reading experience. Of course there are specific poems you go back to because you’re compelled by them for whatever reason, but I think with the first read, it’s important to read from beginning to end. But that’s just me.

DJ: In your collection, we know there’s this very intense middle section, where things really build up to it. There are some of the poems toward the back of the third section — “The Night Garden,” “How It Happens,” and especially “As Told By Three Rivers” — my reading is that they’re coming from a different voice. “As Told By Three Rivers” — and maybe this is just my sensibility from having grown up in Pennsylvania and having lived for a time in southeastern Ohio — something about the language has an iron ore quality to it, as if you’ve gotten the land from that part of the country into this poem. Do you feel this shift in voice might be related to when you wrote certain poems?

ML: I think that’s true. “As Told By Three Rivers” is probably one of the oldest poems in the collection. The other ones you mentioned, those are all a little more recent. Again, I was just going by my intuition and my ear, and when I was arranging the poems, I wasn’t thinking about which were older, which were newer — I just wanted the manuscript to work as a coherent whole.

There’s a more relaxed tone . . . a tone of release to the poems in the last section. This might lend itself to the voice you’re referring to.

DJ: I do want to share that the book, as a whole, was difficult for me at first. I kept coming back to it then putting it down, then coming back to it. The poem that really first pulled me in — and one that I think is both difficult yet inviting — is “White Hydrangeas as a Way Back to Self.”

ML: I can still remember sitting in my old office back in Oakland and really struggling with it, wanting to make it right.

I tend to write about experiences that have happened in the past, or states of mind that I’m more removed from in the present day, and are therefore a little easier to approach from the distance of art. And I do warn people that some of the poems can be hard to read. I swear — and I don’t say this in a self-aggrandizing sense — that at almost every reading, there is at least one person crying in the audience. I have a mixture of, “Oh my goodness, I really traumatized this listener,” while another part of me is grateful that they’re being touched in such a deep way.

DJ: Ideally, you recognize your role in providing them an opportunity to release something.

Could you tell me a little more about the process of writing “White Hydrangeas”? It’s this lovely poem broken up in small segments — does this reflect the way you wrote it, with parts coming here and there?

ML: I started writing it with the intention of having it be a sequence of sections. I was initially inspired by Jane Mead, a wonderful poet who was also a teacher of mine. In her second book, she has at least one or two long poems written in these short fragments or sections that are then strung together to form the long poem.

Then I just started writing it. I had a vague image in my mind of a Wallace Stevens poem — I can’t remember the title, but it starts out with him envisioning white flowers in a bowl or vase. (Editor’s note: my guess is it’s “The Poems of Our Climate.”) It was such a meditative, pure image, and I knew that I wanted that to be the central theme.

These two things — the idea of the short, strung-together sections, and the white flowers — are really how it started.

Then I played with it for quite a while. I started out with four or five then kept adding, then started thinking it was too long . . . ultimately it became what it is. In the end, I think the poem is a journey in itself.

DJ: It definitely has that quality, especially beginning with the line, “To enter the mind is a dangerous act.” Then you come back to that thought with, “To begin is a dangerous act.”

Structurally, how the entire book is built, it shows up right at the end of Act Two, if you will, which is the perfect place for what you wanted it to be.

ML: There’s this quality when you start to write something — you have an idea of what you want, but you really aren’t sure. Often, a poem sort of says, “I want to go this way,” or, “No, I don’t want to go that way no matter what you do.” And that happens with almost every poem.

I’ve had different responses to the first section, the line “To enter the mind . . .” Some people have said they found it gutsy to only have one line on a page. Hilda, when we first started talking about the manuscript, felt there was too much white space on the page. She was wondering if we could just take it out. I gave it some thought and told her I really felt I needed to have just that standalone line. She was fine with it. And other people have had a whole range of responses.

I think it’s necessary for a writer to heed those inner voices that say, “This is really important” — as long as it’s helping and not hindering the work.

DJ: And as long as the inner debate is healthy, and isn’t just being driven from a place that says, “No, I want to do it my way just because.” And I don’t get the sense you have that challenge.

ML: Just lots of other problems. (Laughter)

DJ: The book has a lot of Jungian qualities to it . . . the shadow self, and deep unconscious. Do dreams often weave their way into your work, whether in a literal sense or as an exercise of delving into the unconscious?

ML: There’s one example in the book, “Finding My Mother,” where the images of a dream actually made their way into the book. The mother’s body lying in a field, for instance. Of course I had associations as I was writing the poem, but the dream material is woven in.

Dreams are a rich source not just for writing but for teaching us things about our lives and selves. I think the unconscious is always with us, even in our waking life, and especially when we sit down to write. I feel an important aspect to the writing process is getting into that sort of dream space, the in-between reverie space where one has access to both conscious thought as well as whatever might be coming up from the subconscious. Then we mix them together in that middle realm. Obviously, I have no idea how any of this happens, but I believe it’s an important part of the process for me and a lot of other poets and writers as well.

DJ: I feel that being connected to the dream life is to yield a conscious construct of the subconscious images that come, and to actually step away from as much as we can from the conscious world when trying to translate the subconscious message.

I’d like to talk a little about the autobiographical component to the book, especially with the work delving into the mother relationship. Is that something you’re comfortable discussing?

ML: What I’m willing to say is that my mother did go missing in 1995, and it’s an unresolved disappearance. The rest I’d like to leave to art and whatever associations readers would like to make.

One of my concerns with discussing a particular poem’s theme is to be sure not to collapse the space that exists between the reader and the poem. If we give too much information about a poem, then it collapses that mystical, alchemical process that happens in the in-between.

DJ: To stay there for another minute, when entering into these types of deeply personal poems, do you find it difficult to give so much to the poems, then turn them over and put them in the world? Is it a process of healing for you?

ML: I think psychic distance is important, especially when writing about difficult or painful material. By the time I started getting into writing about certain things, I’d had enough distance and the necessary psychic detachment. Of course, grief has its own agenda and its own timetable. Feelings can come up at any time.

Putting the poems out into the world was not as hard as sometimes reading the poems to an audience, depending on my state of mind. I will consciously not read certain poems because they feel too difficult to read. And that seems to have dissipated as time goes by, especially as the book begins to feel more and more like its own entity, and not so much a part of me.

I think there was a time — not so much now — where I really feared that unleashing the book onto the world would be like committing a trauma onto my readers. “Oh no, here’s this dark, heavy, painful material . . .” There was a part of me that almost felt guilty or responsible for the reader’s experience in a way. I don’t feel that so much now. It’s art. People can take from it whatever they need to, including nothing if that’s the case.

–

Read five poems from The Darkened Temple on the Guest Writer page. Visit L’Esperance’s site for links to reviews and interviews, and to learn more about her work.

–

I first met Penelope Schott in November of 2008, shortly after her collection, A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, won the Oregon Book Award for poetry. Schott has two new collections out: a chapbook, Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tia, (© 2009, Rain Mountain Press, winner of the 2009 Ronald Wardall Poetry Prize), and a full-length collection, Six Lips, (© 2009, Mayapple Press). Together, the two collections illustrate Schott’s range as a poet and storyteller — from the playfully dark interchange between the narrator and magpie in Under Taos Mountain, to the deep reflections and ghost-like images found in Six Lips. She’s constantly working, and leaves herself open and available to the world of poetry around her. We started our conversation on the topic of work, and eventually wove our way around to process.

PS: I really think I work too much. I would like to have my dog Lily be my guru and teach me to lie around and steal.

DJ: Have your written Lily poems?

PS: In her voice? No.

DJ: When you say “working too much,” is it a balance thing? Too much mental work? Because I know you’re a walker and a swimmer.

PS: I’ve always had too much to do, and have always been organized enough to get everything done. Going to graduate school while working while raising kids . . . I was just always doing everything at once.

DJ: Coming out with two books . . . was it accidental that they both came out?

PS: Yes. I would not have chosen that. I actually wrote Under Taos Mountain quite a while ago. It kept being a finalist in chapbook contests. It was always the one where they’d print the other guy but wish they could print me. Finally it just won one. The poems are from about four or five years ago.

DJ: And what about Six Lips?

PS: They’re since, May the Generations Die in the Right Order, probably in the last three years.

DJ: Then with regards to A is for Anne, were you writing any of these around the same time that you were going in and out of the Hutchinson persona?

PS: Rarely. When I start doing the historical narratives, it’s like writing a novel. As you can imagine, it’s totally engrossing.

Sometimes I feel funny being interviewed, because I feel everything I have to say I put into the poems.

DJ: Well, let me ask you the following, and maybe you can get an idea of where I’m coming from. Regarding the poem, “Heart Failure” — and I’ve seen a number of poems about your relationship with your mother — was there ever a point where the poem ended at the end of part one?

PS: Yes. They were two separate poems. I put them together.

DJ: What changed?

PS: I didn’t want to be as harsh a person as I sounded. That’s the honest answer. And if my sister ever read it and it ended at the end of part one, she would have never spoken to me again.

DJ: Is that a challenge for you, or a concern?

PS: As it happens in many families, my sister got along better with my mother, I got along better with my father. My mother died last April, and my sister is still in heavy mourning.

I talked to my sister this morning, and she just found out her son and his wife are having a baby girl. She said, “Mother would have been so happy.”

DJ: And that thought doesn’t cross your mind?

PS: The only time I think “my mother would have liked this” is when I go shopping. She loved to shop. I was always busy working and had no money. She would approve of me if I ever spent money.

DJ: I have two brothers. My mother used to say when we were kids that she was glad she had sons. Her relationship with my grandmother was always distant.

PS: I think there’s not enough separation between mothers and daughters. My mother was kind of anorexic, and also insufficiently separated from me. In her mind, I was obese.

DJ: Did she communicate that type of language to you?

PS: Absolutely. When I’d visit she’d come up and do the calipers, pinch my side, that sort of thing. I would say, “Gee, thanks Mom.”

DJ: Does your sister write?

PS: She’s a lawyer. We’re completely different.

DJ: Do you think being a poet helps you in the grieving process?

PS: I think people like you and me, because we’re attuned to different things, we’re just thinner skinned, and everything gets to us easier.

When something hits you, it hits you more intensely. When they start talking about torture on the radio, for instance, I have to turn the radio off.

Were you ever told as a child that you were over-sensitive?

DJ: Yes. I was told to stop being so sensitive, and to stop talking so much.

PS: When I was a little kid and started learning about history, I was overwhelmed about how much history there was. I thought about how it becomes harder and harder to know about the past because you keep getting further away from it.

My sister was never struck by history until she went to Israel. Suddenly it was in her face. I just think writers and people of the ilk are more imaginative. You can get into something completely. And writing is a way to deal with stuff.

I grew up having poetry read to me. My grandmother would sit on the porch and read poems to us, have us memorize different things. I started writing when I was very young, and for years wrote very skillful — albeit bad — imitations of other people.

DJ: I only read box scores. And I would read them over and over and over.

PS: And visualize the game?

DJ: Remember the game from the night before, or imagine the games I didn’t see.

PS: When I was a kid I thought baseball was a show. It was always on the radio. Like a serial.

I worried about how you could have the top-half of an inning before you could have the bottom-half. When you built blocks, you know, you’d start from the bottom and go up. Finally someone took me to the Polo Grounds and pointed it out on the scoreboard.

DJ: Going back to the books, there are instances when you come upon the topic of death from a place of starting over or rebirth, rather than a place of ending. Having watched what your mother went through, was there anything that spurred these types of thoughts or poems?

PS: My mother spent three years dying hard. She lived in New York. I flew from Portland to New York once a month. That was my life for three years.

Somebody asked me recently if my work has changed. I said, “I think so. I’ve raised my children, paid for my house and buried my parents.” Those are major life chores. Anything can happen now.

DJ: Is that a topic, death, that’s become more immediate for you now?

PS: I have time to think, catch my breath.

My mother had a live-in aide. She couldn’t take care of herself. Whenever I would come, the aide would take a vacation.

It was hard work and a hard death. At the end they gave her morphine, but they weren’t allowed to do it so I had to give it to her.

DJ: Are there certain parts of it you don’t care to access in the realm of writing? A compartmentalization where certain things are memory, and that’s where they’ll stay?

PS: I worked for five years as a home health aide. When it became necessary, I could be quite clinical.

My sister couldn’t deal with anything about my mother’s body. At one point, I was licensed to do that stuff. In a sense, there was something I could do in the room, whether it was wash her, give her medicine, or whatever.

DJ: Were you able to approach it from a place where you said, “This is a body, this isn’t my mother, it’s just a body”?

PS: When I worked as a home health aide, whomever I was taking care of, I had to love them for the time I was with them. Although I had tremendous resentments and grudges against my mother, I felt that I could love her at least as much as I could love a stranger.

DJ: Did that possibly open up more compassion?

PS: It was generalized compassion. And my sister, in a way, is having specific grief, where for me, the only way I could be nice to her was to generalize.

But there was one point where I think I’d just come back from my mother’s, and I had to go back sooner than in a month. I was lying in bed with my husband, and I was just shaken by the whole thing. I said to him, “If she lives another six-months, I’m going to die.” I felt like a plane I’d be on would fall out of the sky . . . something was going to happen. I couldn’t keep doing it. And eventually she died.

I have a poem that’s going to be in my next book that quotes her as saying, “If I ever die.” That was her attitude. If. She was a character-and-a-half. She died with a perfect manicure, of course. Absolutely perfect.

DJ: My grandmother, when she was dying, would ask my mother how her lipstick looked. It’s interesting what we hold onto at the end.

PS: All women are vain. And also, when you go back to that generation, women were seen more as objects than they are now. They spent more time on their looks than on their educations.

DJ: So your writing of Under Taos Mountain started before your mother began dying?

PS: It started with a residency through the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. When I arrived I had some sort of minor tooth issue. I’d recently had a root canal. It eventually turned out that I had an infection deep in my jawbone. I didn’t get it taken care of until I got home. In Taos, everyone was treating it like a toothache.

I was in pretty severe pain, and I managed to get some Vicodin. I was sort of just living on the Vicodin. I’m not a real druggy person, but I needed the Vicadin to the point where I’d wake up in the middle of the night because I needed more.

There I am with this throbbing pain in something of a Vicodin cloud, and outside the casita I was in, there sat a three-trunked Aspen in the front yard, opposite where you’d put a writing desk. And the tree was full of magpies.

I don’t know if it was because of the Vicodin, or because the magpies were slightly weird, but I felt like they had an attitude about me. I would say that’s total paranoia, except other people have told me they’ve had this happen with magpies as well.

I had gone to work on something else, which I brought with me and did some work on. I was also working on the Hutchinson book, but I kept getting interrupted by the magpies. I’d have to stop and write a magpie poem. I wrote them all during my first six weeks.

DJ: So you were already in a place where you were transmuting, almost . . . connecting with the Hutchinson consciousness and allowing other voices to come in.

PS: That’s true. I was channeling Anne.

DJ: Perhaps the magpies saw an open channel.

PS: I like that theory.

DJ: And when you came home with this book of conversational magpie poems, what was your crafting process?

PS: The book was basically done. I sequenced them mostly in the order I wrote them — I swapped a couple here and there, because it seemed to flow better that way. I condensed a couple of them, especially where the conversation seemed repetitive. I didn’t write any new ones.

DJ: No “unused magpie poems” lying around anywhere?

PS: I think I threw one or two away. It was just a very strange experience. I sort of felt like Poe with the raven.

DJ: Did you think at any point you might have been going crazy?

PS: No more so than usual. Is that a good answer?

DJ: That’s a great answer.

PS: I think most writers are manic depressive. As we get older we learn how to manage it. If you get too depressive, you do something to get yourself under control.

DJ: Tell me about the voice you use when you read these poems aloud.

PS: Magpie has more authority than I do. Outside the casita, Magpie knew it all.

DJ: And she knows she knew it all.

PS : Magpie was mean.

DJ: What about the idea of Magpie as muse?

PS: I hate to blow your analogy, but almost everything I write is quite literal. I was writing to the magpie.

DJ: So when you write of rebirth, which shows up often, is that aligned with your beliefs?

PS: I was raised as a strict atheist. I’ve been very faithful.

The way I write . . . I guess there’s something about keeping keeping yourself half-asleep so you can access things.

DJ: It doesn’t sound like something you can “try to do” as much as it sounds like something that is.

PS: You can arrange your life if you want. I know all these people who say, “I go to the gym first thing in the morning.” I would never do that, because it’s such precious time. To some extent, you can make it possible to access certain things.

DJ: There’s also the idea of simply being available to seeing things.

PS: Taking Lily out first thing every morning works for both of us. I usually find myself reciting lines on the way home so as not to forget them.

When I get home, I grab my yellow pad and a pen, and jot down the stuff I thought about when I was walking, and try to get out everything I had in my head so that, even if I have to make calls or grade papers, I’ll have it when I sit down later.

–

Read our interview from January 2009 here.

–

David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and an expert in teaching writing. He currently divides his teaching among three universities: in the fall as the Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the spring as an Adjunct Professor at Oregon State University, and n the summer on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

In 1999, looking to create an independent writing studio, Biespiel founded the Attic in Portland, Oregon’s historic Hawthorne district.

His publications include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, and most recently, The Book of Men and Women, which was among the Poetry Foundation’s selections of top poetry of 2009. In addition, he has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

We met recently to discuss his latest collection, his method, and a little baseball for good measure.

DJ: You mentioned at a reading that the first half of the book was based off the Old Testament, or that the Bible informed some of the writing?

DB: Some poems in the book are riffs on Old Testament verses. The poem that introduces the book, “Evening Watch,” sets the tone for the agitation. The first poem of the book is “Genesis 12.” The word I use is “covering.” I “cover” Genesis: 12, the way a band on the corner covers “House of the Rising Sun.” There’s also one on Genesis: 27.

DJ: There are a few that feel like they’re from that same historical period, or at least feel tied to an older world. The poem, “The Husband’s Tale,” for instance.

DB: Yes. That’s a play on Chaucer.

DJ: What is it like to “cover” something like Genesis?

DB: With “Genesis 12,” I was trying to write my own version and interpretive dramatization of the chapter. There’s another poem later that fits the same category, “Old Adam Outside the Wall of Eden.”

The Biblical Genesis: 12 is the point where Abraham leaves his homeland and heads to Canaan. It’s a transitional chapter. If he doesn’t leave Ur, or wherever, and go to Canaan, a lot of things don’t happen. He’s a fanatic, and his leaving is tied to his fanaticism.

My take on fanatics is, they’re so far around the bend in their fanaticism, that they come right around to the edge of doubt. If you could flip them, you could flip them easily, and they would not know what they’re doing. People who come out of fanaticism are often like, “Wow, it was like a bad dream.” Or an addiction.

I wanted to tell the story from this awareness. The poem ends with the sentence, “I’m certain I’ve lost my mind.” Of course that’s what the fanatic has done: he’s lost his old mind to take on a new mind.

It’s trying to look at Abraham as a prophet, but one who’s just not sure. It’s just not that pleasurable for him.

DJ: Was it something about the crucial aspect of that chapter that attracted you to it or was it more casual than that?

DB: The poem doesn’t address that larger, transitional moment in Biblical history, or whether it’s even factual. It addresses the emotional state. That’s what’s interesting to me. Being both lost and found — and that’s not a Jewish tradition, per se. It’s a more Evangelical tradition.

Abraham knows what he’s doing, but he also knows that by doing it, he’s wandering. It initiates this type of wandering motif throughout the book.

DJ: Your book?

DB: Yeah.

DJ: Because the Bible has something of a wandering motif as well.

DB: Which has been misplayed through the centuries.

The book begins in the scorching desert with the certainty of being lost. It’s a paradox. I’ve tried to give a contemporary take on the whole tale.

DJ: Do you think someone needs to be knowledgeable of this particular chapter to appreciate the poem? There’s a lot at stake in doing that.

DB: It’s written under the assumption that you’ve googled “Genesis 12.”

DJ: A spot that really jumps out is at the end of the second line, “I settled in and slept like a seed.” What does it mean to sleep like a seed?

DB: I pinched language from Genesis: 12 to create something of a foundation of diction for the poem. I think “seed” is a word that shows up in the King James version. For me, that word is resonant because Abraham plants the seed for the Jews, and the covenant he makes with Yahweh is, “Go here and I will make a great nation out of your seed.” This is the post-covenant chapter. That’s where the word “seed” comes from in the poem.

DJ: There’s also the notion that a seed knows, in its own way, what it will become. The information’s imbedded in the seed. You can literally envision a seed in the ground. The story of that seed is already in the kernel.

Overall, the language in the book is at times evocative, and at times elusive. Coming from these two places, what are you going for? You seem to be asking the reader to dig a little.

DB: My way of making poems begins with words . . . literally creating a word palette. This is especially true in the first two-thirds of this book, except for a poem here and there. To go off your word “evocative,” I might create a different framework for it, which is “expressionistic,” or “impressionistic,” as opposed to “representational.”

I’m willing to go with a lot of color, a lot of drip — Jackson Pollockish — a lot of texture, excess and exuberance, even if it gives up a little in the narrative, or you have to find the narrative inside the texture.

I try to accentuate the dramatic voice. To me, these poems really feel like spoken, staged monologues. A lot of them are flat-out dramatic monologues, such as “Genesis 12.”

I conceived them as more Kandinsky-esc, rather than Norman Rockwell-esc.

DJ: A reader has to get through the texture first to arrive at the narrative.

DB: Yes. And I think once you get the last part of the book, it’s a matter of weights and measures. Let’s stay with “Genesis 12.” You asked, “Do you have to know Genesis?” Yes. You’ve got to know the narrative to access the monologue. But later on in the book, the narrative becomes more overt, and you don’t need to have any other apparatus to follow the poems.

DJ: I’ve read very few poetry books from cover to cover, starting with the first poem and continuing through to the last. Your book seems to call out for a reader to do so. I’m not sure if this is from how you structured the book, or that I simply found a narrative . . .

DB: What did you see the narrative as?

DJ: There’s a steamroll to it that kept calling me back. Like a snowball gaining speed on a downhill. Was this a conscious thing?

DB: The book begins in that sort of scorching desert. The representation for that is the prophet Abraham. But the poems in the first section are also self-portraits, in a way, ones in which my face doesn’t appear. Emblematic self-portraits. I’m not sure they’re symbolic — I think that might require too much strategizing — but they’re definitely emblematic.

Then the second-half expands into a larger historical context for this consciousness . . . the anxiety and pressure of being lost. There’s a bit of self-laceration thrown in. It’s a post-September 11th world in the second section.

The third section turns back, starting with the poem “Bad Marriages,” at the end of part two, to the relationship things being hinted at in the beginning.

By the end of the book, it’s all about relationships. It ends with a couple sitting on a porch, not in the scorching sunlight, but just a mild sun. They’re warmed by it, instead of turning to madness. It’s a large arc that exists in a context. At the reading you mentioned earlier, I started with a couple of political poems. These were all written with our current air hovering over.

DJ: They don’t stretch back earlier than 2002?

DB: That’s about right. “Old Adam” is one of the oldest poems in the collection, and next to it, “Overcast” is another old one.

DJ: In “The Husband’s Tale,” returning to your mention of these being emblematic, are you the husband?

DB: I could be the husband. But again, it’s an emblem. I’m the conduit. When you write dramatic monologues, it’s hard to know which mask goes on whom.

Say you write a dramatic monologue in the voice of the husband. Is the husband holding the mask of the self, or the self holding the mask of the husband? I don’t know the answer to that. That’s depth psychology right there. But it is a veiling.

In Wild Civility, I wrote some poems in the voice of poets . . . William Stafford, Robinson Jeffers, Xerxes. Xerxes is a warrior. I’m not a warrior. If I could speak like a warrior, or if Xerxes could speak through me as a conduit, what would he say? So if the husband can tell his tale through me as the facilitator for the husband to speak, at that point, by my reckoning, that’s what he would say.

DJ: Do you go looking for poems? Did you come looking for Xerxes?

DB: It usually comes out of the word palettes I mentioned earlier.

DJ: Tell me more about them.

DB: I should show you this book I’m writing. It’s my method — I call it the Attic method, since it happens here.

So, let’s say I need to start working on something. I start writing down words. They might be words in my view, they might be words I’ve run into. And I begin thinking, “I’m going to start collecting some words.” Words, phrases, pieces of writing, snap things, etc.

Just to do one in the room here, I might do “lampshade,” “Eskimo,” “tundra,” “little cowboy,” “windowsill,” “interview.” And I’ll just put them in a list. There’s nothing special about it. And from there I’ll just start making associations. I tend to do it by sound.

With “Eskimo,” I might do, “skidoo,” “snow cone,” “moccasin,” “sycamore.” I’ll get anagrammatic, or perhaps echo-grammatical is a better word for it.

Also, I love proverbs. I’m always looking for them. I might hear some scrap of old stuff or something obscure. “Kills bugs dead.” That sort of thing. So I’ll put that on a list.

DJ: Do you know who wrote that?

DB: Kenneth Koch.

DJ: I thought it was Lew Welch.

DB: Was it Lew Welch? I think it was Kenneth Koch.

DJ: I think Welch wrote it.

DB: You might be right. I think it was Kenneth Koch. Who knows why it popped in my head, but “Kills bugs dead,” would go with “eskimo.” It has the echo thing.

Then I just put them on a line and begin making these things. From this I’ll develop a title. I might have “carcass,” and out of that I might have gotten to “Xerxes.” It’s an associative thing.

DJ: So “Xerxes” would have come from a different word?

DB: Oh yeah. It’s the echoing.

DJ: It’s this process of riffing. Like a palette.

DB: Sort of like a palette. Or like tuning up, or stretching before you work out. When I go to compose, I have a title, and I have these words that have begun to well up. Or perhaps an experience might have happened.

My latest poems are in the form of letters. I want to write one to a friend about his mother dying. I already wrote one to him that anticipates his mother dying. I wrote it about a year ago. This is a companion piece. So now I’m starting to think about language that associates — where he’s from, things others may not know about him. It all starts with words.

Right now he looks sort of Hemingway-esc. So “Hemingway” is on the list. He has a little place on the Yucatan, so some of that language is there. Then I associate. “Hemingway,” “whale hunter,” “hawk eye,” and so on. I’m just making this stuff up as we talk. Then I try to find combinations that this voice would say. Once I start getting a riff, I begin to cross-reference. I don’t have to use all the words, nor do I try to. Instead, I try to write myself into a place where new words arrive. That’s when I discover what it all is. Then I make my draft, which usually comes very fast.

I just did an interview, and the girl asked, “Does a poem ever just come on you and you have to sit down and write it?” And I said, “No, I don’t work that way anymore. I start building it from a list.”

Think of an architect. If a building idea comes on to them, they don’t run out and start building it. They plan it out.

I get to live with the emotion longer. As I begin developing it, I also develop the emotion. By the time I start to compose, a draft will come really quickly. It’s different than how I used to work, and different than how a lot of people work, which is to sit down and start, “On the bus today…” You kind of chicken scratch it out until you find the thing, then you start editing, drafting and revising.

DJ: You’re building from the other way around.

DB: Totally from the other way around. I’ll try to nail it.

DJ: Your first drafts are often close?

DB: Yeah. Or if I don’t like it after a few weeks or months, I have my list. I just go back and make something else out of it.

I call them versions. I might make multiple versions out of a single list. And I don’t care which one I decide to keep. There are no consequences to which one matters or doesn’t matter. My parents won’t come out of the sky and judge me if I don’t have version or the other (laughter). I won’t explode.

In my method, I’m not just working on one draft. They’re multiple drafts and multiple lists. I might take the words I didn’t use and use them for something else.

When I’m really working, then I’m building all the time. It begins with language, but the language comes right into me and my experiences. And I have to have a title first. I need to know who’s speaking.

DJ: And the title comes from the list?

DB: At some point I’ll commit. I’ll go, “I can do it out of this voice or that consciousness.”

I was more slavish to this in Wild Civility. Almost all of those are one-word titles, except for the ones that are people. I would pick a word, “mushrooms,” for instance, and speak from the experience of taking hallucinogens.

DJ: And “The Attic Method,” as you call it, is a book in process?

DB: I’m almost done. The draft of it is called, The Writer Has a Thousand Faces. It’s really about how I write, or, more precisely, how I avoid writing. With this method, I’m not writing anything. I’m living with the language as a way to figure out what I might discover.

I have full faith that whatever someone writes down on paper, as soon as you begin to draft and revise it, the doors and windows of perception begin opening and shutting faster than you can perceive them. The writing, then, begins steering you in a direction.

Revision is about trying going back where you can get other thresholds to open and close. Almost like, “Oh, I’m trying to say this,” or, “I missed that exit two miles back. I want to go there.”

DJ: In talking about how you used to write vs. how you write now, you mentioned that now you get to live with the experience longer.

DB: Yes, before I make a first draft.

DJ: Taking this architectural idea, do you think that the desire to run and write down an idea the moment it happens comes from fear of losing the idea? And perhaps overtime you’ve grown patient and gained the awareness that there is no fear of losing it?

DB: I can accept that interpretation. I also believe . . . have you ever seen the movie called, The Gumball Rally? It’s about a cross-country race. The scene I remember — and this may be my own version of the scene at this point — the two Italian guys get in the car, the young Italian who’s super excited to do the cross-country race, and the old aging veteran. The young guy has modeled his whole look after the old guy. They’re about to drive out of the lot when the old guy reaches up to the rearview mirror and snaps it off. The young guy looks and asks, “Why did you do that?” And the old guy says, “What’s behind us is in the past.”

I don’t worry about what gets lost. Once you start going, you find things anyway. For me, what insists on being retained is going to continue to insist. I don’t keep journals . . . for starters, I don’t have the organizational capacity to do so. If something doesn’t want to stick around, you fill up with a new thing.

DJ: Do you keep your lists?

DB: I’ve not been very good at keeping them. I just threw a ton away. But I have a few around, and I’m going to reproduce some for the book.

DJ: How do you envision the book?

DB: I see it as very slender, probably Letter to Young Poet size. I think the manuscript right now is about 50-60 pages.

I had started a similar book earlier. It was more of a, “Here’s the mindset you need to have as a writer,” sort of thing. I lost interest. It was exciting for a while, but it just stopped yielding. You know a thing is done when it stops yielding the same excitement it once did for the person who’s creating it.

Then I gave a talk on this method, and it was really well received. Do you follow baseball?

DJ: I was a pitcher in college.

DB: My talk was like Pujols’ home run off Brad Lidge. The one that’s still flying around up there from the Astros-Cardinals series. The speech was like that — I got a pitch to hit.

And I don’t know why they pitched to Pujols in that situation. Do you remember this?

DJ: It was 3-2 in the series, right? Houston won the series anyway.

DB: It was phenomenal. I was watching it with my son. We were both saying, “Why are you pitching to this guy?” We were pulling for Houston. Who pitches to Albert Pujols in the ninth inning with two runners on and a one-run lead?

DJ: He tanked for a couple of years after that. It took him a while to come back from that.

DB: The funniest part of it was, they had a shot of Andy Pettite in the dugout, and you can see his mouth go, “Oh My God!” It was a rocket.

DJ: How did we get onto baseball?

DB: I gave a craft talk about my method, and even the prose writers came up to me afterwards and said, “That makes so much sense, I’ve never thought about it this way.” For me, it was a light bulb flipping on.

Last month, I got a long letter from someone on how the talk affected him to the point where he changed everything in his novel, and then his novel got accepted.

I went back, reframed the book I’d started and made the lecture the core of it. I pinched a few things from the other manuscript to flesh it out. There are still some parts to fill in.

One thing that’s missing in the book is that I don’t really address other genres clearly. I’m going to circulate it to other people and ask them what comes to mind for their genres. Fiction, non-fiction, so on. Right now it’s written as, “You do this with poems, you do that with poems.” I want it to be a bit broader.

DJ: Otherwise it would be called The Poet has a Thousand Faces.

DB: That’s what everyone already believes.

–


An excerpt of our conversation previously appeared on Read Write Poem.


–