Viva Las Vegas is many things at once. She’s Liv (pronounced “leave”) Osthus, a 35-year-old Minnesotan and graduate of Williams College, a prestigious liberal arts college in Williamstown, Mass. She’s Coco Cobra, the sexually charged lead singer for Portland rockers Coco Cobra and the Killers. She’s a writer, an actress, a dancer, a spokesperson for the Portland stripping industry, a breast cancer survivor, and most recently, a published author – her first book, a memoir entitled MAGIC GARDENS, from Dame Rocket Press, has just been released. I first saw her perform — fully clothed — as part of a Back Fence PDX storytellers event. We met a few weeks before the book’s publishing date to talk about performing, writing, and dancing to Dylan.

DJ: How are you spending your days?

VL: Frantically juggling a lot of freelance writing. Plus I just started dancing again. And I tend bar two-days a week in a rock ‘n roll bar. That’s my passion. Rock ‘n roll.

DJ: You’re in a band.

VL: If I could quit everything else and just write music, I think I’d be more successful and happier.

DJ: Where are you dancing? Magic Gardens?

VL: Mary’s Club. I don’t really get along with the management at Magic Gardens.

DJ: Because of the book?

VL: No. When the book comes out maybe they’ll try to kill me. When you read the book, the manager is kind of the villain.

DJ: And now you’re doing the run-up on the press end?

VL: We’re planning a couple of parties, one here, one in Seattle. Then we’re doing a four-date tour out East. It’s a small press.

DJ: Do you write as Viva?

VL: Viva is my public character, so I do a lot of writing as Viva Las Vegas.

DJ: When I was looking for stuff, I found Liv , I found Liv Osthus, I found this New York Times piece…

VL: Ahh…

DJ: The name connects with Viva somehow.

VL: It’s Norwegian for Viva, but people always screw it up. By default I’ve become Viva everywhere.

DJ: Do you ever feel there’s a time when it all has to be packaged as, ‘Here’s me…here’s what I do’?

VL: I do. And I struggle with that. We all think about our careers. I think that Viva Las Vegas has been good for my career, but the only way to take it further is with more notoriety. I don’t know if I want that, per say. I certainly don’t like how you pursue it. I’m very happy with the friends and notoriety and fame right now. The writing that Viva gets is a lot more interesting than the writing that Liv Osthus gets.

Right now, my extra energy is going into my book, which won’t earn that money. And my band is a hobby.

DJ: The book won’t earn money?

VL: Yeah, I mean, it’s a book. Books don’t earn money.

DJ: Do you think that’s the legacy of the book, just being a book. Do you think it could become a screenplay?

VL: A lot of people have been interested in screenplay rights. We actually wrote one for Sundance in February. It got through the first round of competition. It didn’t get accepted for the final. My friend and I were commissioned to turn it into a screenplay in five days. No one expected to get it through the first round.

DJ: Did you get commissioned to do the book around the time you found out about your cancer?

VL: I found a publisher around the time it was diagnosed, but the book has nothing to do with the cancer. It’s interesting…there’s more money in that industry for writing, if you can call writing about cancer an industry.

DJ: So you’d written it before you found a publisher.

VL: I’d been writing it for four or five years.

DJ: And the cancer’s become more of a back story thing?

VL: That’s my publicist’s idea, that you need five words, or whatever, that will come up on Google search. “Ah, the girl with breast cancer who has a book…how do I find her?” Breast cancer. Stripper. Book. Search..

I wrote an article for Portland Monthly about the cancer. It had a lot of readership.

DJ: What about dancing now?

VL: Well, I’ve been doing it for three weeks again. The first week was terrifying. I haven’t come out, put out a press release and said, “Look, I’m back.”

I’m still feeling it out. I find myself watching the customers thinking, “OK, what do you see? Are you noticing anything different?” Some of my old customers come in…they’re thrilled that I’m back. They know what’s happened. They think it’s great. But most of these guys have never seen me before. They don’t bring that to Mary’s Club with them. I certainly don’t bring it with me. This is my body now. It’s been through stuff. Bodies always go through stuff. There are scars here. The first time, last week, I heard somebody whispering to his friend, “Look, those are fake.”

I wasn’t about to be like, “Yeah, fuck you, I had surgery ’cause I had cancer.” You know? But it’s interesting.

(more…)

Joseph Millar’s poetry spoke to me the instant I opened his first collection, Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), a book that spans across the great American landscape and touches upon everything from fathers and sons to the telephone lines. As Millar mentioned when we spoke, the poems in Overtime seem to possess the sense of “good faith” despite struggle. While the poems exist on the page as if they were happening in the moment, his recent collection, Fortune (EWU Press, 2007), expresses a deeply reflective voice, and demonstrates Millar’s connection to music and the musicality of his verse.

After living in the Bay Area in many years, then briefly in Oregon, Millar and his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux, currently reside in North Carolina. I caught up with Millar during the winter 2009 Pacific University MFA gathering in Seaside, Oregon. The first part of our interview is from a talk he gave with the poet Marvin Bell.

(JM): We all have to confront the blank page. In a poem – and I suppose stories and novels are like this too – it’s like a song. I was reading Dylan’s Chronicles the other day, and he says that writing a song is like entering a strange country. I thought that was profound. You’re not exactly sure what the language is or where anything is. You’re wandering a little bit. You’re looking around.

Maybe something’s pushing on you. Maybe you want to go north, or you know that it’s starting to be a poem about someone who’s left you, or someone who’s just been born. Maybe you don’t know what it’s about. So you write down something that’s happening right in front of you. Maybe it’s the rain on the grass. Then you can’t think of anything else, and you start to make a song out of it.

Chances are you’ve developed certain patterns and habits of conducting yourself in this strange land. The poem may tend to follow off in your way of doing things. If you’ve been at it long enough and have developed these habits, one of them may take over.

One of the things we should do in our poems is to “go there, beyond the woods.” And one of the ways to do that is to try to avoid these patterns of entry into the strange land. Lately I’ve been doing little rhymers, almost as a kind of joke. Some of us were writing together and I couldn’t think of anything. Marvin (Bell) likes to say, “Music always wins” – if there’s a competition between sense and sound, between the message of the words and the music of the words, the music wins every time. So one possibility is that you become childlike and start to goof around. Instead of telling a story, you sing a song.

Some part of this passes our understanding. We’re not going to completely understand it when we’re writing, and this needs to be OK with us. We don’t need to be that smart to be writers. It’s a different part of the human that makes both song and story. It’s not the same as the smart part that gets you to be the valedictorian. That’s good. In fact, a lot of times, the element that makes you a poet or a writer is the part that’s held out of the “A” group, the advanced group, the “in-crowd” of whatever world you’re in. The part of you that wasn’t the best looking, wasn’t the best athlete, didn’t have enough money. The part of you that was held out is the part that makes you able to hear the song inside yourself. The part that can play by itself a little bit, make up little songs, move the chairs around.

You’ve seen it happen in prose, poetry, fiction…the writing just lifts up off the page. The journey stops, freezes up, and the writing lifts up into song, sound and lyric.

It’s a huge thing when you sit down with your little self, you open the page and you say, “OK, look here, the rain on the grass….or whatever. It’s this huge, vast thing. We go there not in the spirit of confrontation but in the spirit of humility and the hope that something good happens. And we go there even if we’re afraid nothing good will happen and we’re tired. We just go there. That’s the way you get something. By going there, opening the page and making marks on it.

You’re trying to put a spell on yourself, to hypnotize yourself, to go under a little bit. You don’t want to be sitting there in the same frame of mind as if you were reading directions on how to put something together. It’s a different way of being, and a different way of thinking. You’re trying to lower your conscious restrictor. And some people are better at this, naturally. It’s a knack that can be practiced, and like most practice, it works best if you get a regularity or rhythm going with it. The unconscious relates to rhythm the same way a kids goes, ‘Oh, it’s 10 o’clock. Time for milk and cookies. Then we go out in the yard. Then we come in and lie down.’ For us, it’s like, ‘I’m going to open my notebook now. This is my chair. This is my light. Now I’m going to practice.’

After you’ve been doing this for a while, something takes over besides just your thinking. A lot of times, when you lower (the thinking) part of you down a bit, surprising things happen. Strange sounds come out. Strange cries arise from the back. That’s where you’re trying to get to. It’s something you learn by practicing.

(DJ): Your subjects are often deeply humanistic, of the earth, blue collar. The poems in Overtime especially feel like they have a lot of history to them.

(JM): Those poems go back to the 80s, and the experiences are even older than that. I didn’t have much time to really sit down and write poems every day, or work on them every day. Or I didn’t make the time. By ’97 I had a bunch of the poems already, but it took about four-years after that.

In Fortune, my chops are a little better, but another thing is that, a lot of the poems in the first book were written during an intense period of disorientation, single-fatherhood, craziness and big changes in my life. Mainly being suddenly single with an eight-year-old to raise and his big sister who was in high school, and all of us being in this weird place. I was exposed in a strange way, and the poems in Overtime came out of that. With Fortune, I had more time and my chops became a little better. I learned more technical stuff. It’s not covering as long a period of time. And my life wasn’t so (messed) up. That’s the difference in the two books.

I was less pleased with the poems in Fortune for a long time. Then I said, ‘Well, you know, they’re pretty good.’

(DJ): What was it you found less pleasing?

(JM): I felt like I was complaining a lot in that book. Here I have this great life and all I could do is piss and moan. I was thinking, ‘What’s up with that?’ And I’d talk with people about that, and they’d say, ‘Well, look Joe, you take what they’re giving you. Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’re pissing and moaning because you couldn’t do it before.’ I couldn’t afford to, sort of. Maybe that was it. It just seemed like the outlook was more bleak, stripped out and existential. The first book seemed like it had more good faith in it. More struggling good faith. Later I kind of forgave myself and thought, ‘That’s what I got. That’s the way it is.’

To some extent you take what they’re giving you, make poems out of it and try not to judge yourself. You can judge your technique in the poem and try to improve that. And you can judge the poem on whether it’s good or bad. But for the mode of expression, the thing that’s driving the poem…you know, we all have different parts and that’s it.

(DJ): In Overtime, there’s a deep tenderness between the characters in these poems – you and the father, you and the son. When you were living in this time, what was your process of getting things out. Were you stealing time? Or did you find yourself in the moment with something triggering you?

(JM): Both. I’d write at night. I’d write in the truck at work.

(DJ): You were working in a crew?

(JM): I was foreman by the time I quit. Sometimes I’d put my guys to work somewhere and park a mile and a half away, sit near the Bay and go back in an hour and a half to see how they were doing.

(DJ): Did people know you were writing?

(JM): No. I hid it from them. If they came up to my truck and I was writing I’d cover it up in a newspaper or something else.

(DJ): Why?

(JM): I didn’t want to hear anything about it. I didn’t want to give that part of myself away.

(DJ): It doesn’t really fit…

(JM): The blue collar, macho…you know, the whole deal. And then later my guys went and bought Overtime and were like, ‘Hey man you were writing those poems about us!’

(DJ): Who were you reading?

(JM): I was reading Merwin, Phil Levine. He’s a national treasure. He’s the one who gave permission to so many of us to write these poems. Of course I feel it’s a privilege to be able to write poems at all.

(DJ): As a younger man, when did you start going toward writing?

(JM): I wanted to be a novelist in college. I went to Penn State for a couple of years.

(DJ): When?

(JM): Back in ’63 and ’64. There were all these great novels about personal freedom. Novels like Henderson the Rain King, A Fan’s Notes, The Ginger Man. They were all about personal freedom. I could never…it’s such a different way of imagining things. I joke with fiction writers about it all the time because I love that.

I didn’t start writing poems until I graduated, came out west to California in ’67. Then I started writing poems. I knew I couldn’t write fiction. I couldn’t think of a plot. So I started writing personal impressions that turned into poems.

(DJ): Some writers either don’t want to or don’t know if they can access certain things. Do you feel that the narrator of a poem is always necessarily the writer?

(JM): It is for me. There’s a big part of me in all my poems. I don’t think that’s true for everyone. For me it is. All these things about the unstable “I” and the fractionalized first person…to me, I write poems because I’m alive and I like how it makes me feel to do it. Maybe I’ll change. Occasionally I’ll do a persona poem, or I’ve been writing these bestiary poems, but they all have some big part of me in them. I’m imbedded in the much maligned “I”.

Paulann Petersen’s work is deeply rooted in music and presence. Even her musings and reflections remain wrapped in the moment, which guides the reader through the navigable terrain of each poem. As the poet Vern Rutsala notes in the introduction to Kindle, Petersen’s latest collection:

Petersen is an extremely active member of Oregon’s literary community, a frequent workshop instructor, the recipient of the 2006 Literary Arts Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life, and a board member of Friends of William Stafford. She was kind enough to invite me to her home, where our conversation started off on the topic of another Oregon writer, Ray Carver.

(PP): There was an incredible resonance in Carver’s work, especially for anyone who’s experienced hard times in their life. He was almost improbably sympathetic and generous. Very few people who achieve the type of status and acclaim he received are as unpretentious and generous as he was, and IS in his stories. It’s really there. His profound sympathy for, as Grace Paley may have said, the little disturbances of man. Paley is superb too. “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” are short stories…she was an enormously influential writer for people just beginning as writers. Right during Ray’s time. She might still be, though I don’t know how many people are still reading her.

Ray always thought of himself of a poet, which is incredible when someone who is credited with having changed the landscape of fiction would consider himself primarily a poet. A lot of writers cross over into different genres of course. Ursula Le Guin is a great example.

(DJ): And you?

(PP): Just poetry. I’ve written a few prose pieces. Essays, stories.

(DJ): And what about your start?

(PP): I wrote poetry as a young girl. I was in high school in SE Portland won a prize of some kind. I didn’t even know how to pursue anything with it. We had no creative writing classes, and I came from a decidedly non-literary family. Very blue collar. I never thought of this before but there was not a single book of poetry in the house, and just a handful of books in general. I can remember exactly where they were on the bookshelf.

My parents weren’t ill-educated. My mom had done nurse’s training at St. Mary’s in San Francisco. She had a sound background in biology and science. My father wanted to go to college. He was in school for a year, then the Depression started and his family needed him.

They read, but it just wasn’t a family atmosphere where books or literature were a big part of our lives. I think I had some children’s books and nursery rhyme type things.

When I went to Pomona, I took my poems to my English professor, who referred me to someone else who was sort of the resident poet. I remember him saying in effect, ‘Oh, I don’t think so’ (laughter). Something about being ‘lovely images’ but not the cohesion of a poem. And I set it aside.

As a young adult in Klamath Falls, and by now I had young children, I started reading the Saturday Review, which had poems in every issue. I also stumbled onto Philip Larkin’s poetry and began to see that there was a wonderful world of contemporary poetry out there. I started to seek it out.

(DJ): Were you teaching by now?

(PP): No. I was essentially a house wife. We had very little money, not impoverished, but not much money. My husband at that time – we later divorced – was a high school English teacher. His salary was barely above the level where you qualify for food stamps. We didn’t have much extra money, and I spent my time doing things like baking all the bread, canning, cooking from scratch and the things you do to economize. We lived on an acre and a quarter that was surrounded by farmland. It was a busy life.

When my son was in second grade I went back to school and got my teaching degree. I drove back and forth to Southern Oregon University across the mountains. It was wonderful to be in school, even those infamous method courses and the things you take to be a teacher.

Lawson Inada (Oregon’s Poet Laureate) was on the faculty. I met with him to see if I could be in his creative writing class. We talked for a while. He said, “I can’t think of a better position for a writer to be in than to be driving up those mountains and down into the valley, doing that two times a day. All that time to think. That’s perfect! You come on in.”

It was wonderful being in his classes while I was finishing my degree. I wound up getting a Masters there, and Lawson paved the way for me to do a manuscript of poems as my thesis, which was quite unusual at Southern Oregon at the time.

(DJ): Coming from this place as a child without many books on the shelf, what bubbled up within you and to steer you toward wanting to write?

(PP): Through high school and college I was a good writer. I remember just knowing where transitions belonged, where new paragraphs should start, those sorts of things.

(DJ): From when you left school to when you went back, how were you finding time to write between raising family and living the rustic lifestyle?

(PP): I was stealing time, plus reading some wonderful contemporary poems in the Saturday Review. The Atlantic was another one. The county library was wonderful as well. That’s where I discovered Grace Paley. I was reading lots of contemporary poetry, plus following my own threads of language and imagery to learn to write.

(DJ): Where did those come from? Or maybe it’s the same now? What are those triggers for you?

(PP): Usually for me it’s a piece of language that floats in from somewhere. Sound…the sonic qualities of a poem is very important.

I believe a poem is a creature of sound…a creature of heartbeat and breath. If a poem doesn’t have that sound then it doesn’t resonate with me. There are lots of poets who work in very narrative, cerebral styles. I appreciate and recognize how fine their work is, but the poems and the poets I return to are the ones where, again and again, I find an almost phonic-type music.

So I follow bits of language that have sound forms I can hear and feel pushing from them and with them. Often I’ll just start writing. I call it riffing, as a musician might riff. I let the sounds carry me from one thing to another, just pushing and pushing and carrying onto the page. Later I’ll go back and see something that looks like the kernel of a poem, or maybe somewhere in there I’ll find a whole poem in the riff.

Very seldom do I have an idea for a poem, and then write it. Idea poems don’t turn out that well for me. People like to ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ That to me is more like, ‘writing a poem about…’ and then having a topic for a poem. That doesn’t work for me.

(DJ): So you follow the sound and music, and then the idea is there…

(PP): The idea emerges, or I can see what in that particular riff – which might be two, three or four pages – coheres.

(DJ): Is it script across the page? Are you already starting to build line breaks in?

(PP): Sometimes the line breaks are there. Once I take something out of the notebook, and start to put it on single sheets, I write long-hand a number of drafts before I ever put it on a word processor.

(DJ): Have you always worked this way?

(PP): Some French theorists have the notion that style is learned through the wrist. I’m not saying it applies to me, but I like the idea of it.

When my first full-length book came out, Confluence Press had me fill out a fairly lengthy questionnaire so they could use information in a press release. of their questions was – and I’m going to ask you this first: To which school of poetics do you belong?

(DJ): My school? I don’t know if it’s a school (laughter). Lots of tragic hero stuff. Human weirdness (laughter).

(PP): The first thing that popped into my mind was the school of Disembodied Poetics, from Naropa. I was trying to think about what schools of poetics there were. If could figure that out then maybe I could figure out where I was. Then I knew. I belonged to the school of Embodied Poetics, because I believe in poems of the body. And I don’t mean poems about the body, but poems that are embodied, almost as if they are part of your very flesh. Poems from the body.

(DJ): There’s a great sense of presence in your poems. The reader doesn’t get lost.

(PP): That’s important to me. We choose at some point what we’re going to do. I’ve been working on a few poems that are quite surreal. I like to work like that, and I can do it, but quite a while ago I made a conscious decision – and it was something I came to over a period of time, that if I was going to err in one direction or the other, I wanted to err in the direction of being accessible to people. I love the idea of a shared voice, an almost archetypal voice that could be coming from any of us.

I was fortunate to meet with Penelope Scambly Schott shortly after her most recent book, the historical narrative A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth (Turning Point Books) won the 2008 Oregon Book Award for poetry. Schott is widely published, and her credits include a novel, four chapbooks and six full-length books poetry. She’s also worked as a donut maker in a cider mill, a home health aide, an artist’s model, and a college professor. After talking baseball – she grew up a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and as a girl used to stay up with her family to listen to games in Los Angeles – we launched into various ways her inquisitive spirit informs her work. Of course her inquisitive nature prompted Penelope to interview me at the onset. Part 2 of our interview will appear later in 2009.

(DJ): It’s a joy to have these conversations. I’m starting to see that I’m seeking as much as wanting to communicate answers to other people.

(PS): I did that for a while. I have in a folder in my filing cabinet called “Friendship Project”. I was trying to understand other people, partly to see if I was weird. Sometimes you look at the furniture in your head and you think, “Hmm, I wonder if anyone else is living with this?”

I went around and asked a whole lot of people two things. One, what do you think about when you’re not thinking about something else? Is there something you return to? And the other thing was, what connects you to your friends. People were completely dumbfounded by these questions. I never got good answers to what’s in your head.

(DJ): Really?

(PS): Well, what’s in your head?

(DJ): Well, as soon as you said that…

(PS): You did a snapshot of the moment…

(DJ): I think about baseball. I don’t know why I come back to this because I was a pitcher, but I see myself in the batter’s box, trying to drive the ball to right-center field. After about age 12, hitting wasn’t my strong point. Sometimes I work on it in my head. Sometimes I swing and miss. Sometimes I connect. It plays like a four-second loop. Swing, drive, start to run, head back…swing, drive, head back.

(PS): Once you hit it you know it’s going to go…

(DJ): Yes and no. I don’t know what happens to the ball. What I should really do is stay on the ball for a while.

As for what connects me to my friends…I just had an old friend out here, a guy I’ve known since I was eight. No matter how much you change, there’s always that thing that calls you back. These old friends who share the old town stories, I feel connected through a deeply embedded emotion like a rock holding water. The water is safe inside the rock. It’s still but it’s fluid, even with an encasement around it. The water doesn’t know anything outside of the rock. But it’s OK in there. It’s not missing anything. I’m over here chasing poets around. My friend’s in Philadelphia living his life. We’re held together by the water inside the rock.

(PS): That’s nice.

(DJ): So this inquisitiveness within you…between your historical and lyric books, how does does it affect and guide you down different paths, one toward research, the other toward self discovery?

(PS): Why should I answer? You gave a wonderful answer. (laughter)

I was a history major as an undergraduate. If I’d come along a little later, once history broadened out from wars and statistics and into peoples’ lives, I would have gone on in history. I look at everything in a kind of chronological way. When I’m looking out at the street here and I see what’s driving by, there’s this sort of film in my mind that runs the buildings backwards, changes cars to horse drawn and so forth. What I see doesn’t just exist as itself in the moment. It’s all in a process of change, as if everything is on a continuum. We’re all on this continuum.

I’m fascinated to take a story that has been squelched or lost and try to move backwards into understanding what it might really have been like. When I’m writing about somebody, my mind’s in a room that’s filled with the furniture of that era, the food of that era, the ambient sound of that era. That’s the kind of research I do until I feel I can hear the person.

(DJ): You delve in.

(PS): All three of my narrative books have bibliographies. I immerse myself in everything I can find. The book about Anne Hutchinson for instance…

(DJ): Congratulations by the way.

(PS): Thank you. I’m pleased for two reasons. One, I believe she deserves attention. And I’m pleased because it proves I’m now an Oregonian, after having come from elsewhere. (Laughter)

It was only when I started reading the transcripts of her trial that I felt I could hear her voice. And the word that I hate to use, because it sounds too “new agey,” is channeling. But I really felt that I knew her the way you would know a friend, and would be able to guess what the friend would think or say or do. My curiosity took me there.

In terms of standard lyric poetry…among other things, I’ve never been bored. If you look at anything, and you REALLY look at it, it gets very interesting. Sit here and look at these chairs. They were in someone’s house. Who knows what the deal was with these chairs? They all have lives. Sometimes, when I look at the world…it’s very interesting to me.

I’m a woman who’s getting on in age. You’re a young man. Isn’t it interesting that people are different ages? Different genders? I’m sitting here having this conversation with you. You’re younger than my son, but it’s the kind of conversation I may have with him. So every constellation of the moment astonishes me. If I had to use one word to describe my attitude in life, it would be “amazed.”

Look at these three trees (motions out the window). That one still has its leaves. That one has places with leaves. And that one on the corner, it has licorice fern growing on it. Right in town!

(DJ): Most people would just walk by.

(PS): Everything stops me dead in my tracks. That’s what happens. And…you know this as a writer, it’s a blessing and a curse.

I’m not going to go see the new James Bond movie. Even though it’s James Bond, and the violence is cartoonish of sorts, I really can’t stand it. It’s like I don’t have thick enough skin. When I was a kid, people used to tell me, “Well, you’re too sensitive!” And I think most writers are “too” sensitive – put “too” in quotes.

(DJ): I think you’re right. A lot of writers are “too” sensitive. And I mean that in a positive sense. It allows us to channel the emotion that’s out there, that people are walking underneath. And it makes me wonder – there are more and more writers and less and less readers…

(PS): We have to read each other.

(DJ): How do you feel about that? You’re going through life as you. You’re summoning whatever it is you’re summoning, which you then direct into your work. In the end you’re writing for yourself – we have to be writing for ourselves…

(PS): If I was on a desert island with paper and pencil I’d be alright. And I love language. I love words.

(DJ): Do you think about the masses or majority walking by? Whether these things you’ve pointed out go under their radar, and what does that say about their interest, their curiosity…

(PS): Well, I think there’s a tribe of us who do see those things. Those are the people I’m speaking to. A lot of people are so busy having stimulus come in at them, that are not the natural world. Going around with earbuds…or the television is always “at” them. It doesn’t leave quite enough room for your own thoughts to grow. I think that people who are out “being entertained” by something all the time – you need to see a movie a day, make sure to see your favorite shows, whatever it is – then what you are connecting with are the thoughts of the people who created those shows. And there’s a certain amount of stillness that you have carry within you to notice what’s in your immediate world as opposed to your media world.

I met Bruce Weigl in 1997. I was in a writing workshop that followed the class he taught, and he used to sit with our group for a few minutes before the professor showed up and talk about anything from Bob Dylan to writing to baseball. Later, as a student in one of his poetry workshops, I came to admire his approach and ability in working with a room full of novice writers. Today, Bruce is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County Community College in Ohio. He was very gracious in agreeing to this interview, which we conducted through email. We discussed poems from his most recent book,Declension in the Village of Chung Luong.

DJ: Bruce, I’m moved by your willingness to peel back layers of your psyche as a means of self discovery while also serving as a mirror for the reader. Rather than making peace with the past, in “Declension” you seem to have negotiated an uneasy ceasefire where the occasional midnight shot still rings out. At the same time, the poems force the reader to examine a very unsettling present reality and future vision.

I’d like to frame my questions around a few of the pieces within “Declension” if you don’t mind.

The first poem I read was, “The Stakes as Hands”. I was struck by the following:

“Yet it’s only snow. The stakes are stakes, not hands that reach/ to strangers who may pass my house or not.”

This seems to be a comment on the nature of metaphor in our lives. Have you, or we, for that matter, gotten to the point where metaphor no longer serves us, or can be seen as providing too much of a blanket under which we hide from the truth just on the other side of the veil?

BW: I like to fight for the literal in poetry, at the very least as a starting point for the reader and for the writer, but it’s a literal in my mind that’s layered and that offers up deeper and more abiding meaning the more you lean on it. Metaphor is beautiful of course and we couldn’t live without them, but at the same time, it becomes too easy sometimes to hide behind the ambiguity of metaphor. I wanted to bring into those poems the beauty of a thing said straight if I could.

DJ: What is the place of metaphor, especially as we attempt to dig deeper toward the absolute truth of things (assuming an “absolute truth” exists)?

BW: I’m not sure poetry is capable of “absolute truth,” if there is such a thing. The only absolute truth I have any faith in is from the dharma and that’s called “ultimate truth,” although more faithful Buddhists would say that any talk of the dharma is simply another kind of conventional truth, like the truth about the names of things. It also has to do with a regard for emptiness (non-nature) as a reality that’s ultimately incapable of being narrowly defined by concepts. Metaphor is a useful and sometimes powerful figure of speech but like anything else in poetry, it needs to emerge naturally from the drama of the poem, whatever kind of poem it may happen to be.

DJ: In the poem, “In Love with Easeful Death”, you distill the scene down to this tragically beautiful image of the white rabbit hopping through your midnight vision:

“I don’t ask anymore what’s real, and I told no one/ about the absolutely white rabbit/…I told no one,/ but I caught myself wondering,/ and then I stopped.”

Here you seem to be asking your readers to choose between the truth of a vision and the metaphor behind it. I’m curious of your thoughts on this.

BW: That’s an interesting take on those lines, and thank you for asking me about this poem. English, largely because of our Anglo-Saxon roots, is an inherently metaphorical language. It’s practically impossible to say something in English without it also being a metaphor for something else. This is not always a good thing. ometimes when you write “shite,” you want it to mean “shit,” and so on and so forth. It’s not true that I don’t see metaphors at work regarding the white rabbit, how could I not, and I welcomed them, but for me the choices had to do more with the literal sound and sense of the poem. Of course what’s behind all of this is the fact that anything examined closely reveals more and more about itself.

DJ: Staying with this theme, there’s the following line in “The Head of the Company”:

“I still had faith in those days that the truth mattered…”

What do you see is our ultimate relation to truth, and what is the poet’s role in opening truth up for us?

BW: It’s a slippery slope until all parties agree upon terms, but for me, truth in poetry has to do with a particular quality of voice – which may or may not be entirely artifice – but which has the power to draw me into itself and force me to see the world as I should have seen it all along; it’s that, and the sense too that when you read the poem, you feel the weight of a whole life there, projected back into time from that single sustained moment of the poem.

DJ: I recall you once said that a poet should never ask questions in a poem. (You said this a decade ago during an undergrad lecture.) As much as I wonder if you still feel this way, or adhere to this “rule” yourself, how does this notion relay back to the poet’s role in guiding us closer to truth?

BW: I’m sure I said that, and I’m also sure that there are countless examples of the appropriate use of questions in poetry (Homer comes to mind), but when I teach writing poetry, and when I write poetry myself, I want all of the questions to be answered by the writer; I want the writer to take responsibility for answering any questions that may come up, otherwise who else is there to answer them. It’s that simple for me.

DJ: Finally, I’d like to talk just a moment about two poems, “This No Where” and “Portal”.

“This No Where” opens with the following: “This is just a picture that we live inside,/ white house, black shutters/ frozen snow on the roof and on the ground./ This is just a movie we imagine is our lives…”

Balance this opening against the opening of “Portal”:

“In our hallucination, the children are instructed/ in the ways of finding shelter/ when the rain of our bombs comes down/ on their small villages and schools.”

In both cases, it seems as if one could apply words such as “wishful thinking” to replace an uncomfortable or unfortunate reality, whether the notion that there’s nothing more to strive for than three bedrooms and a two-car garage, or that children are safe in the war zones we create. Or, as you say toward the end of “Portal”:

“We try to possess beauty with our lying eyes/ and think we know what beauty is or does/”

These lines seem to have been written by someone who, upon digging to what he felt was as far down as he could go, (or climbing to the top, if you will), discovered that he’d merely worked his way to the start of an entirely new layer, “With miles to go” as Frost put it. I’d like to get your feelings about this. And, in serving as a mirror, what are these lines reflecting back to the person for whom wishful thinking has replaced the grimmer reality that’s waiting to be exposed and expressed?

BW: That’s difficult, especially since I’ve just spent two years finishing another book and haven’t thought about this one very much in awhile, but I’m certain that what you’re reacting to there is the idea that I tried to build the book around: the image and the landscape, and the language of literal and figurative decline. These are images for me of what could be the end of days, or at the very least, images of an enormous moral collapse. “Portal” is about what it says it’s about: openings between this world and other worlds, which sounds outrageous to talk about literally but which have deep meaning for many people. It comes from my Stephen Hawkins/George Jetson theories about time travel. In terms of the lines being “reflected back” as you say, I think that works too because the words are meant to be like incantations in those poems; like testimony that the speaker has to be accountable for, has to stand up for when the time comes.