Issue 85: A Conversation With D. Nurkse

THE POETRY OF D. NURKSE is hauntingly honest. It’s resonant with generosity, vulnerability, and love for the world while being rooted in unflinching observations of reality and justice. He makes magic of myths, nature, family, and the gritty stoops of Brooklyn. In a review of A Night in Brooklyn, Philip Levine writes, “He should be the laureate of the Western Hemisphere. He possesses the ability to employ the language of our American streets, shops, bars, factories, and any place else and construct truly lyrical poems, sometimes of love, sometimes of anger . . . No one is writing more potently than this.”

Nurkse is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult, A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, and The Fall, all from Alfred Knopf. He’s the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. Nurkse served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages. In 2011, a third edition of Voices Over Water was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best book of poetry published in the UK. His poems have been anthologized in six editions of the Best American Poetry series.

Nurkse has also written on human rights and was elected to the board of Amnesty International USA for a 2007-2010 term. He was a program officer for the Defense for Children International-USA from 1988 to 1992 and worked as a consultant for UNICEF. His study, At Special Risk: The Impact of Political Violence on Minors in Haiti, was commissioned by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Currently, Nurkse is a long-term member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He has taught poetry at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and in inner-city literacy programs, as well as at MFA programs at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Stonecoast.

We met with the gracious and humorous D. Nurkse in Spokane where over coffee we discussed the role of the MFA, external standards and the internet, riddles and parables, war and religion, and the joy of playing the flute.

JOSH ANTHONY

In A Little Book on Form, Robert Hass says that the form of the poem is often a reflection of the gesture of its energy. In Rules of Paradise, you start out with a lot of single-stanza poems. But as you’re developing in your writing, your poems take on a more organic form in terms of stanzas and breaking. Was this in any way a conscious decision or was it unconscious—did it just develop as you wrote?

NURKSE

I think it’s both. These things really go through millions of drafts; any poem is like a snail that crawled out of the sea and eventually became an accountant. There are many variations. I think all poets write these things down and test them. At any stage, the raw words go through a process of interrogation, and at different stages the process is different. If you look at Elizabeth Bishop’s early drafts of the poem “One Art”—that extraordinary poem about losing her lover—the original really is, “I lost my house keys, rats!” But there was a process that not only made that poem a villanelle, but also made that poem a unified expression of emotion.

I had earlier poems that were broken up. I was experimenting with a poem as a kind of rush of emotions. I think all poems are dialogic. There’s a theory that every line of Shakespeare’s creates a statement and an opposition. Some lines, like “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May / And summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” perceive there’s an opposition between an instant and the flow of time. There’s a theory that there’s an opposition quality in every haiku; in Japanese, there’s even a word for it. Poems want to be dialogic—they don’t want to be monologue. Prose might want to be a monologue, but a poem might be an intuitive or inherent dialogue.

I’ve been working a lot recently on prose poems. It’s kind of cool because it allows you to let some air out of the poetry balloon. Prose poems may be the bar where the poetic author is less of an issue. It alludes to the anonymous parable, the anecdote, the newspaper article; it feels a little bit more insidious. And the voice has to develop; it can be more like a guerilla, random speaker.

ANTHONY

Do you think a prose poem would be more approachable to somebody who isn’t familiar with poetry, or do you think it would be more thwarting?

NURKSE

It’s possible it might be more thwarting. You know, a prose poem is in tension between being prose and poetry. It’s claiming that heightened quality, and you read it wondering why it might be hard to start with a prose poem and work towards the sonnet. It might make more sense to start with the sonnet.

KIMBERLY SHERIDAN

Shadow Wars was published when you were thirty-nine years old. You had many different careers beforehand. Were you writing the whole time or did you put writing on pause?

NURKSE

I was writing the whole time. I’ve been writing since I was a kid. It took me a long time in terms of the poetry industry to publish that first book. I was telling Chris Howell how many times my first book was rejected. He said, “Yeah, you already told me that . . . .” I had the feeling that I should stop telling people how hard it was. I used to tell people I cut my own hair—some people would say, “Obviously.” I ought to be more like other poets and lead with the triumphs.

I didn’t get an MFA, and it helps me as a teacher to realize that there’s an inside and an outside to this thing. I’m sensitive to people who are on the outside. Like when I was a judge in a contest and saw somebody write rhyming, religious poetry—really good—but I knew they weren’t going to win the contest. I want to have an open mind. Maybe I’m over-answering this question but some of the work I did helps me in terms of seeing poetry as it exists outside academia. I did work at a lot of jobs that put me in contact with a lot of people and that’s an advantage. It scares me a little sometimes when I have colleagues who went to college, wondered what to do, got an MFA. They’re teaching poetry, and they see poetry as something that is articulated by an MFA program. It sort of cheered me up psychologically that I taught in inner city programs and taught in prisons, and I did see people not only responding to poetry, but taking it damn seriously. There were people at Rikers Island who told me, “The purpose of my life was to be here and study poetry with you.” It was more valuable to them, rather than less, because it hadn’t been given to them.

HANNAH COBB

Do you think those experiences have given you a different perspective than the traditional MFA professor on what the task of poetry is—what it means to be accomplished and successful?

NURKSE

I don’t mean to put down the traditional MFA professor . . . . I think it’s become a little bit of an industry, but also in my lifetime, I think it’s become more feminist and democratic. Part of the reason I didn’t want to get an MFA was I grew up in that time of poetry gurus and you would admire, typically, a well-published male poet and go to his program. And you would probably see him three times over two years while you studied with underpaid adjuncts. I think that’s changed a bit. There are more diverse people who are MFA faculty members. The converse of that is there’s a bit more of a correlation between being a poet and having an MFA. Yes, I do feel it’s beneficial to me to see myself as outside that.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

And you had a real variety of jobs, too . . . .

NURKSE

I did have a lot of jobs. I worked in human rights professionally for about six years and there were a lot of very emotionally interesting things at work. I wrote grant proposals for anti-apartheid organizations in South Africa, under apartheid, and that felt more tied into the world than someone writing a protest letter to The New York Times. I did get to, at least in that period of my life, know people who were in the third world.

BUCKINGHAM

That shows up in The Border Kingdom. It seems like your Rikers Island experiences show up there, too.

NURKSE

Yeah, there’s also Leaving Xaia. It reflects a trip I took to El Salvador, as a journalist, during the height of the war. Incidentally, I used my initial [D. instead of Dennis] because when I was writing as a young writer, there were times when I was working for UNICEF or various organizations and was a consultant for refugee services. I wanted to keep the poetic response separate from the journalistic response, which was supposed to be objective.

BUCKINGHAM

Leaving Xaia is really interesting because it feels a little closer to reality, but there’s a surreal feel to some of those poems. Could you speak to the creation of imaginary places that are more real than real?

NURKSE

That’s something that’s always fascinated me. I was born here, but I tend to say my parents were refugees and that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. They weren’t like people leaving Syria, but they did leave Europe on one of the last boats out of Portugal and came here to escape fascism, which is to say, I grew up in America with language around me that reflected huge events. As a kid, I knew there were really important things happening in these distant countries, knew they had really influenced my parents, and my parents didn’t want to talk about it because it was traumatic for them. So I had the sense of a hidden reality taking place in countries that were literally inaccessible.

My father was Estonian. He probably didn’t have US nationality when I was born. My mother had dual French and British citizenship, but Estonia was a place I couldn’t go back to because it was communist at that time. So I grew up with my father having come from a place I could only imagine. There was a lot of traveling in my family. A lot of people had been displaced. Some of them were affluent. Some were dirt poor.

Also, in my reading I was very influenced by Henri Michaux, the French poet. I think, actually, he’s influenced a lot of American poets, though he doesn’t get star billing. It’s very interesting to me now because he was writing in the late ’30s and early ’40s in Europe, so he was seeing how discourse was changing in a society with totalitarian leanings. It was something he really responded to as a poet, and not in an ideological way, but in a poetic way. He’s also the author of a book about an imaginary travel arc where he visits imaginary countries and looks at their strange customs. Technically, that’s called defamiliarization.

It’s something that interests me a lot in poetry—you invent a completely imaginary world. The reader approaches a completely imaginary world, and they’re dealing with things, like the midterms in Florida, that are not in the imaginary world, and people start to see them for their strangeness. We’re an infinitely adaptable species. Warm the water a little bit and we’re happy to be boiled alive. The role of literature in general is to restore the strangeness of being.

COBB

In a lot of poems dealing with wars it’s not clear what war it is, and it’s really far away. The closeness we do get is when the speaker is in the draft office, but they’re not usually on the battlefield. I’m curious about your use of distance to evaluate war and what you’re doing through that distance.

NURKSE

Some of that has to do with my own experience in the war I actually did see, the war in El Salvador. It was, frankly, for about ten days that I was in the war zone and saw people shooting at each other—but it wasn’t for very long. The rest of my life has been, and very much in America has been, that issue of distance. I think as a poet you may be trying to critique or supplement the media.

Certainly, a lot in my youth was determined by the Vietnam War. It was interesting that in the Vietnam War there were far more images of war than there are now. An efficient job has been done of suppressing those images, though some are becoming available over the internet. But TV news used to show massacres. And you would wonder if they were desensitizing people or whether they were informing people.

I’ve had the same wonder about the videos you see of people of color being shot by the police. To see somebody being shot seems like a radical infringement on their privacy. At the same time, it feels very necessary that people should know. That seems like a deep ambiguity. Not to be glib, but those are the kind of ambiguities that poetry exists for, because poetry isn’t claiming to tell you the truth. It’s claiming to give you both the reaction and the critique of that reaction, or a reaction that you could critique as a reader.

BUCKINGHAM

You have a poem where a guy is digging his own grave, “Ben Adan.” Kimberly and I were just talking about this and trying to figure out where the origin of this might have been.

NURKSE

That’s probably one of the few questions I can answer that has a very specific origin. It’s Bagram air base around 2003, the beginning of US involvement in wars in Muslim countries and how those wars were carried out. It was a very specific example of an interrogation technique where people were being interrogated by a mock execution. It’s a complex thing because the mock execution is a little bit of an appropriation of the person’s death, as well as their life, saying, I have the power to kill you but not kill you. You survive the mock execution entirely because of somebody else’s choice, so it trivializes your stoicism and your willingness to die. It’s based on an actual case of a guy who was, I think, a taxi driver, and I think he was interrogated for taking somebody who our military was after to their destination.

That poem is trying to get into ambiguities of power relationships, and even ambiguities of what you might call colonial relationships. There’s a kind of hope for a resolution, too. It’s trying to look at the power relationship and then give it the possibility of changing in any amount of ways—that the person who’s being interrogated is able to see the humanity of the person who’s interrogating—it’s possible that it’ll work both ways.

SHERIDAN

One of the things that was closer to home for us was 9/11. I think you and I were both in New York when it happened. It shifted the atmosphere for a long while. It seems like distance helps in writing about an event. I’m wondering if you were able to write about it immediately or if it took time.

NURKSE

All of those things took time. For Leaving Xaia, I was a poet who’d gone down and seen this war zone and thought I’d write about it—forget about the revisions, it was about a year before I started writing about it. And certainly it took a lot of time to just write about 9/11— also, a lot of drafts, a lot of false starts. I probably have a thousand pages of notes and files, and there’s no book I wrote about 9/11—it might be a total of ten poems—and I fictionalized it or dreamt about it in lots of different ways.

BUCKINGHAM

You write a lot about famine. I’m curious about your experience of it, your witness of it, or the interplay between what you write about and the reality of it for you.

NURKSE

I idolized my father, but people did tell me that growing up in Estonia, he didn’t have enough to eat. Somebody in my family told me they would send him to the store to buy food on credit, and he would be hungry, so he would buy extra food and eat it without telling his parents. Then the bill came due at the end of the month, and there were all these other charges, and they beat the shit out of him. That really got to me as a little kid. So that might be where it’s from because otherwise I’ve been in one war zone but haven’t been in famine zones, so I don’t have any direct experience with it. Then again, my father was also very interested in poverty. He was an economist, but he was not a Wall Street economist. He was interested in poor countries and third world countries. When he was still alive, I remember him going to India and seeing poverty in India, and my mother was worried: would he be able to handle what he saw?

BUCKINGHAM

There are a few poems where there’s a couple and there’s a war in the backdrop. In an interview about Love in the Last Days you said that maybe love isn’t about obedience, but it’s the opposite of obedience. And then, in some ways Love in the Last Days is apocalyptic. I wondered what role you see love playing as an opposition or as a part of our healing.

NURKSE

That is a huge issue in my work, the couple. I think, Well, maybe that’s my parents. Because they were both uprooted by war, left their lives, came to this country, and had memories of war they didn’t talk about. Maybe as a writer I’m trying to just enter that silence and imagine what’s in there. But it’s also a huge issue in my own life. I’ve written a lot of poems about marriage and war, weaving together contrary moments. Obviously, there’s a way marriage gets infiltrated by war, can replicate some of the things of war, and then there’s another way where maybe I’m seeing the couple as an emblem of humanity—they don’t offer a solution to war, but it’s a humane situation in contrast to war. In Judaism, from the very late 18th century, there’s Rabbi Nachman’s proverb: every relationship is infiltrated by the struggles of nations.

SHERIDAN

How did you get involved with teaching at Rikers Island?

NURKSE

It’s something I always wanted to do. I wanted to teach in prison. When I was a kid, I would read Etheridge [Knight’s] poem, “The Idea of Ancestry,” and it’s a poem I still teach. It’s very much a poem by a prisoner about being in prison, a combination of strong emotion, repression, fear, time on your hands. I thought poetry would be a useful tool for prisoners or would be something I could do that would be useful, rather than just try to help some middle-class kid get into college, or some middle-class kid get into grad school, or help a middle-class kid get a job in the local community college. And it was. It was like anything else. I had five prisoners there, and maybe one was a real poet, three “got” poetry, and one wanted none of it. But that was fine. I mean, that’s also true of one in five poets.

But yours is a logistics question. For a while I had a really good hook-up. I became friends with people who were in a nonprofit that had a subcontract with the Board of Ed to provide GED instruction to minors on Rikers Island. I was the enrichment section teaching poetry so there was no subterfuge in what I was doing. I could just call up the librarian at Rikers anytime and say, “I’d like to do a three-day residency this week,” and he would say, “Fine.”

The problem was the guards. Not all of them—even among the prison guards, there’d be one guard who really got poetry and would come to workshops and be like, I want to be a poet, not a prison guard. But mostly, the guards were very obviously opposed to the kids being able to articulate what happened to them. It was very instructive to the political climate because you saw how totalitarian situations need to create chaos. You know, one day I would go to Rikers Island and they would say, “Dennis, you said those Giants were gonna win and they won. Just walk right on in.” And I would walk right on in. And the next day they would say, “You don’t have form 342, we’re gonna have to strip search you.” And it would be the same people. Whether they were doing it deliberately or out of an unconscious playbook, it was to keep everybody permanently destabilized: The truth is what I say it is. Which means I have to say something radically different today from what I said yesterday because otherwise truth is just precedent. And I’m no more powerful than a judge or a lawyer or a parent whose being consistent, so if yesterday I had to say, “You need Form 342,” today my demonstration of power will be, “Walk in and help yourself to coffee.” But it always has to be what I’m saying in this moment.

It helped me to understand the situation we’re in now.

COBB

In an environment that’s consistently destabilizing, can poetry be a force that offers stabilization?

NURKSE

I think it can. It can at least be a force where people can understand their own humanity and have a little space outside the endless conflict. I was moved by some of the prisoners at Rikers Island. I remember a conversation with four kids—and I wonder if I’m slightly romanticizing it as I say it—but I remember these four prisoners. One said, “Last night I woke up in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m., and had a poem in my mind. I really wanted to write it down. But the guard would have jumped on me, so I just had to stay there and try to memorize it until now.” And another prisoner says, “Oh you did? I did, too!” And the third person says, “Wow, you guys, you woke up . . . ? Me too!” The fourth guy says, “Two of you, the three of you . . . I woke up with a poem at 3 a.m.!” James Baldwin said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Through books I learned that the things that most tormented me were actually the things that most connected me to all the people in the world who were alive or had ever been alive.” Which is just beautiful. Each of these kids thought his little subjective, imaginary thing was a thing that cut him off from all the other macho kids. They maybe weren’t writing the same poem, but each was writing a poem.

ANTHONY

Was there a poet or writer you taught to folks in prison who was a catalyst point or was it different for every student?

NURKSE

To be honest, this tended to not be a course in literature. The nonprofit was able to publish the best work by students. They created anthologies of work by young poets who were remarkable. I would, of course, teach people like Langston Hughes, but I would also largely give them examples of these kids who write excellent poems. It’s not about grammar and syntax. It’s about imagination, and that tended to be what we worked with. As part of going to the Crusades in the Middle Ages, Richard the Lionhearted was briefly imprisoned in what now would probably be Germany. He wrote a poem about the experience which begins, “Never trust a poem written by a prisoner.” I thought these kids would be like Yes! because it was really a poem about having to speak in code in situations of power. And they were taken by the name Richard the Lionhearted, and the idea that he was a King and also in prison.

François Villon, in my opinion, may be one of the greatest poets ever. This guy was a petty thief sentenced to death. He wrote about his pending execution and about being raped by a prison guard. He talks about “being penetrated by the dark love” but it’s in a very, very bitter poem. He wrote about being hanged: “My neck is about to find out how much my ass weighs.” Whoa, pretty powerful. You know, it could be hip-hop, too. The kids could relate to some of that. It’s probably less useful to read these kids poems about the coming of spring in a small New England village. We had this nice liberal social worker who gave these kids an uplifting talk about Nelson Mandela. One of the kids said, “Why is she talking about all that? Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner, but we’re just petty thieves.”

The kids told me, “Dennis, promise us you won’t go to prison. You couldn’t handle it.” That’s pretty sweet, isn’t it? Also, the racism of it is just inconceivable. They would say to me, “Dennis, do you also teach in any of the white prisons?” And I would have to tell them, “There aren’t any white prisons in New York. There’s just this. There are white schools, white hospitals, white social clubs, but they don’t have white prisons in New York.” In New York it’s going to be all people of color.

And, believe me, I saw my privileged kids at Sarah Lawrence who felt it was their constitutional right to smoke a joint while there were kids in Rikers Island who had been busted for that. There was a kid there who had been busted off parole for riding a bicycle without a headlight at night. There was a kid, who was a child, who shot a gun into the air on a roof on New Year’s Eve. Nobody said he was shooting at anybody, and he did maybe a year and a half in Rikers Island. Then there were all the kids who were facing trial. Some of them hadn’t committed a crime. They get brought in and they get put in jail for years, and then the DA says, “Well, if you plead guilty, you can go home. If you want a juried trial, you’re gonna be in here for another X months.” And they deal with it, but some, like 93 percent of the cases, do not actually go to trial. They get plea bargained—which is true throughout the country.

BUCKINGHAM

You write about ambiguity and imaginary places. I’m thinking about the spaces you talked about in Voices Over Water and Love in the Last Days. There’s a magical space where love happens and it’s in the forest. It’s like history allows you into a more magical space, and I wonder about what that relationship is: how do you enter that space and why is it the forest?

NURKSE

My book is very different from the original myth, Tristan & Iseult, but I’m still trusting the wisdom of the original myth. In the original myth, there are these forests that stand for psychological states—that part I didn’t make up. In the original myth, there’s a forest of love and a forest of enchantment. I love those ideas. As a poet, I don’t want to be just a pure materialist; I want some room for things that are transformative or profoundly unexpected. Love in the Last Days is kind of an anti-heroic treatment of the myth, and the hero is delusional. He wants to be—and I think there’s a certain psychological truth to this—he wants to be close to his lover, so he must impress her. And by continually trying to impress her, rather than being himself, he drives her nuts. He’s just constantly overcoming trials that are more and more imaginary. She’s like, “Why can’t he just catch a rabbit? I’d like him just fine.”

ANTHONY

With Love in the Last Days, and other books as well, I’m sure there’s an amount of research that goes into drafts. Some writers like to saturate themselves with the research and others are like Richard Hugo, who said in an interview he intentionally halts himself at a certain point in research so he has more space to play with it. Where do you fall on that research spectrum and how you go about researching?

NURKSE

It’s a very important question because I think there are a lot of real world issues that poets could really benefit from researching. I was once sitting next to Mark Strand at a bar, and he said to me, “Dennis—I should be writing more about the real world!” and um, no one believes that. I think there are a lot of poets who do research, but poetry could up its claim by doing scientific and naturalistic research. Obviously, we’ve moved into a world that’s really unknown to all of us, and some of the language that will make it decodable is scientific, and some of it is psychological; I really think the culture could enter those worlds more. But, then, I did a lot of research for Burnt Island, which ends in the voice of sea creatures, marine creatures. At the time, I was writing in response to 9/11, and it seemed like the options were really creepy fundamentalism and consumerism, which was really joyless also. Then, I started to read about nature and realized there are spiders that live miles above the earth on winged currents. They just blow on the wind and mate in the wind.

Lynn Margulis wrote a book called Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth about life on earth, maybe four or five hundred pages long: mammals take up about a paragraph, humans take up about a pause. The largest creatures on earth are fungal networks. You have bacteria that have survived from the origins of the planet, when the sky was sulfur, and they still can only breathe sulfur. They’ll die in oxygen, and they’re living creatures that live in sulfur springs because they’re so ancient. All of those things are really fascinating, and they’re more interesting than a bunch of terrorists or a bunch of advertising executives. All of that is very spiritual to me. I don’t see any contradiction between the astonishing ways life imagines itself and the idea of a spiritual existence.

Let me say a little bit more about that question of research: poems do wander from a dreamlike part of the mind. I have felt that contradiction, and I did feel that very much in writing Love in the Last Days. You intuit that there’s an obstacle between the research and the poetry. There were poems drafted at 3 a.m. that woke me up. And then I worked and worked. And there were other places in the narrative where I needed a poem, but I wasn’t feeling it. And yet, the research structure meant I had to write that poem. It took me forever to write the poem the narrative called for. It would just feel so lame. It took me forever to get the volitional poem to feel as if it was a spontaneous poem.

BUCKINGHAM

I can’t help but think about Márquez’s Nobel Peace Prize speech where he goes into this litany of all the real things in the world that are so bizarre that they seem not real—because he’s a journalist and a magical realist at the same time—and I was thinking about how hyperreal your work is in terms of its context, and yet, how deep image and mythical it is, that you go further in both directions. Maybe you’ve already spoken to this, but is there anything else you might add?

NURKSE

This is just an aside, but when I was a kid, I was in Colombia, and traveling makes you realize how genuine these things are, because Colombia was a magical realism country. It was full of things that boggle the mind. A Japanese tourist who was a dentist got the idea of leading a guerilla band and organized a guerilla band and fled into the mountains. It just seemed so unpredictable; they seemed like they came out of a novel. It’s interesting—and this has to do with something entirely different—the concepts of experiments and classicism: in a way Gabriel García Márquez is a classicist. He was writing at a time when people thought the future of the novel was in French experimentalists. You read these really dense novels that are frankly really hard to read and Márquez is saying, “Let me write a fascinating love story that’s going to be experimental,” and it worked. The experimental label is so often given to more cerebral work.

COBB

I’m interested in your use of religious language, and particularly I’m thinking of The Fall as a book title, and then within The Fall there’s the poem “Born Again.” You’re taking these terms that are defined in one particular way by religious institutions and you’re re-imagining them into something else and defining them in a different way. Can you talk more about that?

NURKSE

I think that’s absolutely true of my work, and it doesn’t stop being true. Some of it is personal. I grew up reading the Bible, and it influenced me. My dad was definitely an agnostic, but these things were important to me. I remember being a little kid and reading about the sacrifice of Abraham. I marched into my dad’s study—he was in the middle of important work—and I said, “Dad—explain this! Are you gonna fucking kill me?” He really wanted to say, “It’s all okay,” but at the same time he wanted me find out for myself, so his explanation seemed really unconvincing to me.

Anyway, there is something that fascinates me in Christianity, in Judaism, and in Buddhism. I’m not Jewish, but I studied these texts with a Rabbi for maybe eight years, an Orthodox Rabbi in a small group of Rabbis. They fascinated me and it fascinated me as textual analysis—they had such a wide range of analysis they were allowed in that culture. Adam named the animals—does that mean he had sexual relationship with the animals? They consider everything in ways that were really very free but that get to some questions about the sacred and narrative that are at the root of being human. I think my dog must live way more than I do, but my dog is probably not as obsessed with putting it into story. To humans, stories and metaphor are really ways of knowing things.

COBB

So then, is poetry for you, at least sometimes, a participation in that Jewish tradition of Midrash and imagining stories in different ways?

NURKSE

Yeah, at times, and I’m also influenced by the Christian tradition. When I was a kid I did read the gospels, and I was told “this is literature that has importance to your life.” It’s not necessarily that I agreed with all of it, but it was an example of literature that was supposed to change my life in some way. Not that I was going to go to church. My dad died when I was eight, but I was super close to my dad, and he definitely was kind of an anti-Christian. Maybe this is an overshare, but when he was a kid, his family would go to church, get very riled up by the idea of sin, and they’d come home and put the poker in the fire and beat him with the poker because he was a sinner. He was like, “This is a crock.”

My mom was a Hindu for a while. This was before the New Age thing was fashionable. She was interested in Hinduism, in the idea of the Bhagavad Gita, of the action that expects no reward. In the Mahabharata, the hero has fought the evil enemy all his life, and he’s fighting for good. The evil enemy has been fighting for evil and everyone is being decimated—both sides are being decimated. The worst of it is the hero had to do horrible things fighting evil. He’s had to kill innocent people and burn their houses. Everything is over, and he’s finally won at a terrible cost. He’s going to Paradise, and all he has left is his little dog. And he goes to the gates of Paradise, and he hears all this feasting and carousing, and he’s really turned off. Why are all these people just feasting and carousing in paradise? You know, they’re supposed to be playing harps—and they’re singing dirty songs. The guard at Paradise says, “Well, those are all your enemies. They’re in paradise, too.” The hero says, “But they were evil, they were terrible!” And the guardian of Paradise says, “Yeah, but God made them. It was their nature to be evil—they were just acting in accordance with their evil. So they’re in Paradise.” And the hero says, “Oh my God—sigh—I guess I better go in. There’s nothing left, but I have to go into Paradise.” The guard of Paradise says, “Wait a minute. No dogs in paradise. That little mangy dog can’t come with you.” And that’s the last straw. The hero says, “OK, I give up, I’m not going to Paradise—I’m just going to wander off into the desert.” He wanders off into the desert, and the little dog says, “That was a good call because I am Krishna, Lord of the Universe. And this story is to tell you that there is no Paradise!” That was why my mom was interested in Hinduism. You do the good deed, but you expect no reward. Once you expect—I’m going to go to Paradise, the other person’s going to go to Hell—that just gets you into objectification. You can’t help but start to objectify the people around you . . . who, say, voted Republican.

BUCKINGHAM

Your father died when you were eight, and those poems run from the first book to the last book. Can you address the way loss shapes your poems?

NURKSE

Actually, there’s future work that goes back and revisits that, too. I think it’s just what makes poetry important rather than something you would do for recognition or validation. Maybe you’ve been talking to somebody all your life, and then from one moment to the next they’re absent, and you have to recreate that. Maybe all of poetry is just imagining another voice that answers you when nobody answers you. I had wanted to be a poet before his death, but I think it was a rupture in my life. I don’t want to overdo it, but my father waved goodbye to me and I was this little too-cool-for-school eight-year-old, and I didn’t wave back. I thought, Tonight I’ll hug him. I didn’t wave back because my little eight-year-old friends were there, and one of them was the star of the soccer team, and I didn’t want to seem lame waving at my shabbily dressed old father. And there was no tonight. And I didn’t see him again. He’d never been sick, but he died. That gave me a sense of the cost of not saying something.

I think everybody has an experience like that in their lives. That’s just the nature of love. I think a lot of poetry is, by definition, the things you would say if you weren’t really a real person living a real life. They’re the things you would say to your partner, which romantically is “I love you” but might feel a lot more complicated than “I love you.” And the things you would say instead of “Honey, have you seen my toothbrush?” The things we just postpone saying to each other.

BUCKINGHAM

The little dog . . . your work has so many inanimate objects speaking and characters that we don’t expect to speak speaking. Can you talk about that?

NURKSE

I’m interested in poetry as the creation of a decoy self. Even if you’re writing a poem about your first marriage and how strange your first wife seemed—if you have to write that kind of poem, you’re still creating a decoy self who is not a real self. For me, it’s the self that people see from a distance. I get into this research that allows more subjects in poems, allows different speakers, and allows more freedom to the poet. This is something I think I’ve benefited from by being a teacher. I would find students who were very inhibited. They didn’t want to hurt a family member. There were students who were able to write about things that were taboo by writing, This is a poem in the voice of a pencil sharpener. I gave the assignment to the students to help them, and then I learned from what they were doing with the assignments. But I’ve also been interested in poems that use inanimate objects. One example is the riddle. It’s an old, human form. An old Anglo-Saxon riddle is: twenty white horses on a red hill—who am I? And the answer will be the teeth in the mouth. While they seem like puzzles, and they are, they’re also projections of the self into some really unlikely area and having that unlikely area speak.

ANTHONY

That reminds me of an activity we did with Laura Kasischke. She said, “Write about a white room. You’re in a white room and it’s silent.” Then, later on in the activity she says, “What you wrote about is your death.” So you could apply that afterwards because you were able to say all these things about the white room and then—I’m sure you can apply anything—but that’s your death. That’s what’s going on with the inanimate objects, right?

NURKSE

It definitely is. Since a coffee cup by definition has no unconscious, when you’re writing from the point of view of a coffee cup, you’re probably liberating your own unconscious. I’m interested in animals, too—maybe personally I just had a closer relationship with animals than I expected to. I’m not Buddhist, I don’t question killing a fly. But if there’s a little fly on me, I’m thinking, “Hmm, could be my Grandma.”

ANTHONY

You’ve been talking about ambiguity within poems, or in narratives, and intuition within the writing and reading. I noticed when you use a lot of narrative within your work, it often seems to push beyond and into the realm of parable. Was that conscious? Or what do you think are some elements of parable? I’m thinking allegory more as X equals Y, so this story has this lesson, and it can’t be looked at differently, whereas parable has a larger ambiguity to it.

NURKSE

The whole question of parable is interesting because there’s a meaning but also withholding. Within the Christian tradition, there’s a very simple story, but half the people are not supposed to get it, so there is a question of meaning becoming volatile. Meaning is not something that’s static. In this sentence I’m going to withhold it; in this sentence I’m going to give you some of it. So it’s almost like meaning becomes a fire, like a volatile, spiritual quality rather than something definable. In the Jewish tradition, a story will be a paragraph long, and there will be volumes written about what it contains. That’s because the meaning is correlated with time, and the meaning is correlated with the person who reads it.

Kafka has this quote about parables where he says, “If you really studied the parables, then you would become a parable, and you wouldn’t have any more problems.” Kafka’s approach to it was really very simple and very complicated at the same time. I think that’s a very hip differentiation—that allegories do seem kind of like, this is just me dressing up as a pirate when I am dressing up as pirate. You know it’s meant to be solved, whereas a parable has that kind of volatility where at different times in your life, it’s going to have very different meanings to you.

COBB

Do you see a connection between parable and riddle and the inhabiting of inanimate objects?

NURKSE

Definitely. Not to be cheesy, but a lot of this has to do with the subject-object relationship. It fascinates me that our basic syntax in our language—and not necessarily in other languages—is either I or Me. In Vietnamese, I can be neither I nor Me. I would be “aging poet” or “Grandfather.” I’d speak of myself in the third person. We can kind of never be both. Once you consider yourself, you’re either the subject or the object of consciousness. If you’re the object of consciousness, you can’t be the subject of consciousness. And if it’s your own consciousness, if you’re the subject, you can’t be the object.

I do think parables are the riddles. It’s not that I think somebody who doesn’t understand writing would say, “They’re being unnecessarily obscure or deliberately obscure.” I think it’s more that they’re inhabiting the tension between “I’m being seen or I’m seeing.” The parable is somewhere in between.

In a way, the riddle really takes place between the riddle and the answer. There’s a change in the frame, a change in the psychological frame, and the point isn’t really the answer. The point is that the frame has changed. You had a chance to see yourself from a distance. This is something that I’ve quoted a lot in my life, but Ralph Waldo Emerson says in an essay on poetry, “When we’re in one thought, we’re stuck in that thought, we’re infinitely far from the next thought; therefore, we love the poet.” That’s kind of a simplification. I don’t know exactly what he means, but I’m extrapolating: poetry is our way of escaping the monologue of consciousness since we’re trapped in associations of ideas. And that is the importance of revision, too, because you’re writing poems not written by you on Friday morning. They’re written by all the different yous over the three months or years and become something different, even if it’s just a very simple sentence.

SHERIDAN

In an interview, you answered the question, “What do you like least about being a writer?” Part of what you said was, “I can’t free myself of the temptation to measure myself by external standards especially in the parkade of the internet.” Can you speak to those external standards?

NURKSE

It’s almost as if part of being a writer now is having a Facebook page, and I don’t do that. The internet throws back at you a lot of reflections of yourself. I’m human like everybody else. I’ll google my reviews and they will come back to me. If it’s a good review, I’ll feel great, and if it’s a bad review, I’ll feel horrible. That is more of a constant pressure than twenty years ago. My publisher might say to me, “Well, Dennis, here’s a new review.” Now it’s like I’m expected to google it.

I do think technology is changing people’s brains. Even to me, I find it’s slowly mulling holes in my brain; just after this interview, I’ll go up to my room and I’ll turn on my cell phone. It’s not just a world with no privacy from the government, but it’s a world where we have no privacy from ourselves, where if you’re walking in the magic forest of love, it’s like the trees aren’t saying anything, but if you turn on your cell phone, it’s speaking to you directly. This is nothing new that I’m saying, but it’s like a chemical hit you get every time that happens, and it’s like being addicted to your own saliva; you’re addicted to that little adrenaline charge. I find the whole thing totally scary. It’s something that I’ve tried to write about a little bit more in forthcoming prose work, but, yeah, I do find it terrifying and it’s scary to my life. It’s like creating a world without absence in it. You realize how important it is to have things like absence and death and distance because this world that we’ve created is kind of hell.

I believe there’s a story of Saint Theresa of Lisieux, and she prays all her life for the conversion of Satan because she can’t stand the idea that Satan doesn’t know the love of God. You aren’t supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to spend your whole life empathetic with Satan; in fact, in Dante it says that the saints have no pity for the damned. Well here’s this little girl—because she died when she was about eighteen—who feels terrible pity for Satan, and they ask her about hell and she says, we know hell exists because human beings created it and for all we know, it [hell] is empty, which seems like a radical answer. And all they can do is kick her upstairs and make her a saint. She visits with the poor and the people with tuberculosis, and she exposes herself and dies at a young age and is obviously all her life enraptured with love, so they’ve got to make her a saint. But you know I do think they, and we, are doing this good job of creating a hell for ourselves, a hell where we more and more see ourselves being punished and tormented, just like how all the worst parts of ourselves are externalized forever on the internet. I’m just assuming the human race will rebel against that, but I’m not going to live to see it.

SHERIDAN

At one point you were a street musician and I was wondering what instrument you played.

NURKSE

I played the flute. And I still play the flute. I played the flute last night trying not to be too loud in my hotel room. I try not to play too loud. Along with studying with a Rabbi, I played gospel with a bunch of black inner-city musicians in Brooklyn. We did a little CD. A couple of the tracks are still pretty nice. I’m trying not to exploit that and write my self-deprecating but warm memoir about the experience, you know? Just let it be. But it is important to me. Poetry is amazing, music is pretty amazing, too: meaning that people from a thousand different cultures hear. Dah duh dah duh, dah duh dah duh, I think it means something to all of them.