Interviews

---

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

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

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

Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

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

Stuart Dybek

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

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

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

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

Samuel Ligon

Can you talk more about the tyranny of chronology?

Dybek

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

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

Ligon

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

Dybek

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

Ligon

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

Dybek

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

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

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

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

O’Connor Rodriguez

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

Dybek

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

Dan J. Vice

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

Dybek

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

Ligon

What’s the difference between memoir and fiction?

Dybek

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

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

Zachary Vineyard

How do these ideas of allegiance apply to poetry?

Dybek

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

Ligon

What do you mean by a grand fiction?

Dybek

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

Dybek

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

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

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

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

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

Vineyard

How do you see place applying to poetry?

Dybek

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

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

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

Vice

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

Dybek

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

Ligon

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

Dybek

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

O’Connor Rodriguez

What’s a good example of that?

Dybek

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

Vice

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

Dybek

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

Vice

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

Dybek

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

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

O’Connor Rodriguez

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

Dybek

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

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

Vice

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

Dybek

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

Vice

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

Dybek

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

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

Vineyard

Are you influenced by the surrealists at all?

Dybek

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

Ligon

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

Dybek

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

BRETT ORTLER

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

MARVIN BELL

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

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

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

ZACHARY VINEYARD

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

BELL

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

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

VINEYARD

How did you end up focusing on sentences in poems?

BELL

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

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

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

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

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

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

VINEYARD

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

BELL

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

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

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

ORTLER

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

BELL

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

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

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

ORTLER

How has the current political situation affected your work?

BELL

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

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

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

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

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

ORTLER

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

BELL

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

VINEYARD

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

BELL

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

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

VINEYARD

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

BELL

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

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

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

ORTLER

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

BELL

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

CONTRIBUTING TO A ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION celebrating The American Poetry Review’s 25th anniversary, Yusef Komunyakaa described a vision of American poetry: “Ezra Pound beside Amiri Baraka and H.D. flanking Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo back-to-back with Frank O’Hara and Garrett Hongo alongside William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens—a continuum of impulses and possibilities that creates a map…” While modesty might prevent Komunyakaa from placing himself in this vision, abreast Mina Loy, say, or Theodore Roethke, the fact remains that his is one of the most intriguing voices in contemporary American letters.

The “impulses and possibilities” of Komunyakaa’s poetry depend upon precise imagery that points toward an essential experience, while reminding us that this experience must be grounded in external context. In his recent poem “Tree Ghost,” the speaker moves swiftly from a discovery of “three untouched mice dead / along the afternoon footpath” to an embrace of connection: “I can almost feel / how the owl’s beauty scared the mice / to death, how the shadow of her wings / was a god passing over the grass.” How many gods shadow us daily, scaring us nearly to death with their beauty?

The provocation of such questions is a major strength of Komunyakaa’s work, achieved through mastery of image, rhythm, and diction marshaled on behalf of a conviction that “poetry in our complex society connects us to lyrical tension that has everything to do with discovery and the act of becoming.” Poetry is not mere experimentation. That view, he says, “is a kind of selling out—to remain in that landscape of the abstract, when there’s so much happening around us. Not that the politics of observation should be on the surface of the poem. But we want human voices that are believable.”

Komunyakaa has achieved this humanity in more than a dozen collections of poetry, of which Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 is the most recent. He has been honored as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He recently joined the faculty at New York University, taking the position vacated by Galway Kinnell. After giving a public reading for Get Lit!, the annual literary festival sponsored by Eastern Washington University Press, Komunyakaa met with us at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

JESSICA MOLL

The slightly elongated lines in a poem you read from last night, “Requiem,” allow for a flooding sensation that you can hear when the poem is read aloud. What might tip you off to a formal necessity?

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

For “Requiem,” I think the subject matter dictated the poem’s structure. I had been asked to consider writing a poem about Hurricane Katrina, and after thinking about it for a while, I said yes to the editor of Oxford American. I said to myself, Well, I’ll write the first part for the magazine and then continue, because now I see this as a book-length poem. I knew I wanted “Requiem” to have long and short lines. I wanted movement on the page, because that happens with water, that happens with chaos. And also I remembered Richard Hugo saying that the poem needs a combination of long and short lines. Years ago when I was wrestling with this concept, it took me some time to understand what Hugo meant. But he’d also mentioned that he loved swing music, that he was influenced by swing. Long and short lines—swing music—it now made sense to me. He was talking about a kind of modulation that takes place, a movement that happens in music and language. I knew that “Requiem” was a long poem, its changes and ebbs held together by ellipses. So it’s one sentence, basically, with a one-word refrain. And that one word is “already.”

JEFFREY DODD

Does the role of the refrain in your work—in a poem like “The Same Beat,” for example—find its roots in the musical tradition and diction and speech patterns of where you grew up, or in a broader Western poetic tradition?

KOMUNYAKAA

I think it is associated with storytelling. How I began hearing stories. Having grown up in rural Louisiana, I remember people telling lengthy stories, and such verbal escapades were mainly paced through repetition. One can view the refrain as a call seeking a response. But also, I use the refrain, sometimes, as part of the process in composing the poem. And then I may extract the refrain from the poem. So, in this sense, one could say that the finished poem has been driven by a false engine. Unless a refrain functions as an integral part of a poem, as an element of its natural pace and breath, it can be viewed as merely a formal gesture, as an unnecessary stroke on the emotional canvas. Of course, I’m also thinking of music. After being asked to consider reading on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, I wrote “The Same Beat,” and it began with this: “I don’t want the same beat.” There’s an insistence tangled in this voice, and I think it gave me permission to pursue the poem.

MOLL

So the refrain was just a way to get you into the subject matter of the poem?

KOMUNYAKAA

Yes. And, in that sense, that’s what I mean by a false engine. However, it doesn’t falsify. It helps us to get to a basic truth.

MOLL

I suppose there are refrains in visual art, too.

KOMUNYAKAA

That’s right. Colors don’t remain static on the canvas. There’s movement. The images and the hues force the eye into the rhythm of reason. Colors create a dialogue. It depends on how we’re willing to dance with a painting. How many places we’re willing to stand and view it. I love visual art. Often I daydream about it, not necessarily about putting paint on canvas, but maybe about creating sculpture.

DODD

In earlier interviews, you’ve mentioned Romare Bearden and Giacometti and a whole list of artists who push against representational images. How does that anti-representational move work in your poetry, when your images seem uniquely representational—so striking, so precise. Is there a complementary understanding between your view of visual art and written images?

KOMUNYAKAA

I think where the abstraction exists is actually in that space between images. And that space helps to create tension in a work of art. In writing or music this space often equals silence. I suppose, what we’re really talking about here is a way of thinking and seeing, a way of dreaming and embracing possibility. For instance, in thinking about Picasso, it is important to note that he started out as a representational artist.

Probably because his father was a representational artist, who stopped painting after seeing early paintings by his son. Then, of course, as we know, Picasso’s work takes on an abstracted dimension clearly influenced by West African sculpture. It’s what we now call cubism. There’s that story about Picasso and Apollinaire stealing a few small African statues from the Louvre. Supposedly, Apollinaire was arrested, but he refused to incriminate Picasso. The poet takes all the blame. That says something about Picasso, I suppose.

MOLL

I’m curious about your interest in Bearden—does the idea of finding things in the world and placing them side by side to create art come into play in your writing?

KOMUNYAKAA

Bearden studied mathematics when he attended NYU. When he uses collage technique, it seems mathematical. So many beginning painters have attempted imitating Bearden, and it doesn’t work. But if you look at his more impressionistic paintings, especially the ones painted in France—if you look at those paintings beside his collages, they’re very different. And yet, they possess an aspect of the collage, and I think that has something to do with movement. How colors are juxtaposed against each other. He’s one of my favorite American painters. Along with many others, such as Norman Lewis, an African American painting around the time of Jackson Pollock. He’s rather political as well. There’s a photograph of him with some other artists, protesting the lack of work by black artists exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To get back to the heart of your question, I have to say this: I like how ideas and images fit into a single frame of reference to create tension, how things can be taken from the natural world and placed in the world of the imagination.

MOLL

Listening to you read “The Same Beat” last night, some of the lines that stood out referred to people in the music industry “selling out.” There was the line about a guy with a mouth full of gold—

KOMUNYAKAA

The one already bought and sold.

MOLL

Do writers confront that phenomenon at all?

KOMUNYAKAA

Writers do confront that phenomenon. I’ve written about the erasure that takes place in some contemporary poetry through over-experimentation. That’s a kind of selling out—to remain in that landscape of the abstract, when there’s so much happening to us and around us. Not that the politics of observation should be on the surface of the poem. But we want human voices that are believable, and that’s why Walt Whitman is so interesting to me. Whitman addresses everything, and is clearly influenced by Italian opera, so everything reaches for a crescendo—but he didn’t dodge anything. He really confronts the essence of being an American. Even though there’s fetishism, or, I should say, there are certain characters on his poetic canvas that become eroticized. I do think that contemporary poetry confronts a lot. If you think about the importance of someone like Ginsberg, and “Howl”—if “Howl” hadn’t appeared, in 1958, I hate to think where American poetry would now be. There were some brave souls to come along and confront the Fugitives.

DODD

Ransom and Tate?

KOMUNYAKAA

Ransom and Tate. Was it Tate, who, at Vanderbilt, campaigned against Langston Hughes and his poetry? I think so. Look, we have come so far, in a way, within the last thirty or forty years. There’s Tate pleading to academia, “Don’t recognize Hughes.”
These were the Agrarians, the Southern Agrarians, but this wasn’t the only camp of poetic expression that was stuck in the mud in America.

DODD

Do you think the Fugitives got “stuck in the mud” because they confused politics for art, or confused the function of politics in art? It seems they made so many statements trying to maintain their southern regionalism in the midst of the Depression, trying to make these economic arguments for which they weren’t trained at all.

KOMUNYAKAA

And also, they weren’t farmers either. They were removed from the realities of farm life. But they were presenting themselves as the voice of the agrarians, though they didn’t understand the machinery of economics. They did, however, understand the politics of culture and race in America, as well as the divide and conquer stratagem. The Fugitives had to know that language is political.

DODD

They seemed to underestimate the power of capitalism, even during the Depression, when nobody had anything. They seemed to misunderstand how powerful the popular response to capitalism would be.

KOMUNYAKAA

They didn’t want to deal with a critique of the social realities of the time. And Hughes’s work attempted to criticize the hierarchies of power. The Agrarians didn’t want to face themselves in the mirror, basically, because they were a part of the structure that had systematically benefited from privilege. So it’s interesting that we would have poets who refused to give voice to an individual because of the color of his skin, and also because of his politics, his audacity to confront the beast that hurled hardship onto the backs of his brothers and sisters.

DODD

It seems that Robert Penn Warren was the only one who even made an effort to re-evaluate his position in that social reality, moving into the 1950s and 1960s.

KOMUNYAKAA

Robert Penn Warren was different. I was probably nineteen or twenty when I first read Promises. Penn Warren seems to have had an ongoing dialogue with Ralph Ellison, and I don’t know if the bulk of that has been published or recorded.

DODD

There were a couple of interviews, one in which Ellison interviewed Warren for The Paris Review, and one in which Warren interviewed Ellison for Warren’s 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro? But they’re ambivalent interactions, as though Ellison doesn’t quite trust that

Warren isn’t simply an unreconstructed southerner, a suspicion that he’s making these efforts to rehabilitate his reputation. And it seems as though there’s no way to prove the sincerity of his re-evaluation of his early views. He spent his whole life writing against his segregationist essay, “The Briar Patch.”

KOMUNYAKAA

How did he even enter that dialogue—because he’s younger than Tate and Ransom. And, of course, after being beckoned to the Fugitives, he tried to distance himself from that movement and its agenda. But he’d already been implicated. He couldn’t outrun “Here we take our stand,” that line from “Dixie.” I would’ve loved overhearing those discussions between Warren and Ellison.

DODD

Last night you talked about how you see silence as part of the emotional music of Samuel Beckett’s work. Does the silence in music and drama work the same way in poetry?

KOMUNYAKAA

Maybe it works slightly differently in poetry, because the silence begs for an abbreviated meditation to take place. And I don’t know if that happens, especially, in music. It definitely occurs in drama, where silence is an intricate part of the narrative. In that sense, silence is dramatic. In poetry, since the reader is sitting there with the page, and even in a reading by the poet it can take place—a silence—because of stanza breaks. So, I view silence in the poem as a moment of meditation. I think someone said that there should be space enough to fit one’s heart into. That resonates with me.

DODD

Enough space for the reader to become fully invested in the action on the page?

KOMUNYAKAA

Poetry is an action. It relies on the image, on the music in each line. Perhaps that’s why the reader usually refuses to embrace statement in poetry as readily as in prose. There’s an active investment, and that’s why a poem can have multiple meanings. The meaning is shaped by what an individual brings to the poem. A poem isn’t an ad for an emotion.

MOLL

When you’re composing, and you decide how to put the words on the page visually, do you hear the silence as much as you hear the music of the words?

KOMUNYAKAA

I hear the silence because I read everything aloud as I compose the poem. The ear is a great editor. I hear the silence in the music of language. Not exaggerated, but as a part of the natural continuity of process.

DODD

Who was the first poet you learned that from, to hear the music as well as the silence?

KOMUNYAKAA

I suppose when I first began to think about it, I was reading Emily Dickinson. There’s so much silence in her work. But I don’t believe it is a silence that erases content. In fact, in her poetry, it seems to inform content. I was interested in what wasn’t being said as much as in what was being said. Her poetry always makes my mind very active, as if I’m attempting to seek a dialogue with the unknown or the unknowable. This is entirely different from Whitman, although as a poet I embrace Whitman more, with his long lines. And again, the length of the lines, the long lines, seems to beg meditation as opposed to the vertical trajectory of short lines. For the most part, I embrace the short line, and maybe that has something to do with contemporary time, the way everything seems sped up. There’s a kind of vertical plunge of the poem.

MOLL

How does writing plays, with its importance on setting up a dramatic scene and moving the narrative forward, inform your poetry? Are you learning new things from working in another genre?

KOMUNYAKAA

Not really. I think maybe I’m bringing something from poetry over to drama. I realized that poetry could be an ally in my first play, Gilgamesh, which is an adaptation I wrote for the stage. It is primarily a verse play, with limited moments of silence. Of course, it would depend on the director, whether he or she wishes to introduce certain silences. In the play I’m working on now, called The Deacons, there are numerous places for silence—matter of fact, I express it there in the notes: “Pause” or “Silence.” Each piece, whether poem or play, is propelled by its own language and music because the speakers are different in their unique physical and emotional landscapes.

DODD

How does the process of collaboration enliven a project, open new doors, or ask you to look at your work in new ways?

KOMUNYAKAA

I welcome the perspective, the energy. In that way, it’s almost like an ensemble. We begin, and from the outset, we are trying to visualize where the process is going to take us. But it’s always most interesting to see what happens in between, in that space where surprises occur. I trust my collaborators. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I’m hoping that these kinds of collaborations are going to happen again and again, that poets are going to start writing for the theater, where language is going to again inform plot. Because the stage seems to have been adversely influenced by television and the movie industry.

MOLL

By focusing on plot at the expense of the work?

KOMUNYAKAA

And usually it’s a sped-up plot: one collision after another, one mindless chase after another, one bloody scene after another.

MOLL

Every time you come out with a book or project, it feels as if you’ve found something new. How do you keep challenging yourself?

KOMUNYAKAA

Maybe it has to do with growing up in a small town, Bogalusa, Louisiana, where there was always an embracing of something, and in that same moment a moving away. Whatever it was—dealing with it, going through it, attempting to move past it, and then realizing that everything’s connected. We humans possess this great capacity. The human brain is amazing. But it is also gluttonous. That is, it seems willing to almost embrace anything and everything. Perhaps that has a lot to do with how we have evolved and survived as a species.

MOLL

That’s a pretty optimistic view. A lot of people talk about the narrowing of the human mind, with TV and media.

KOMUNYAKAA

The problem with turning on the TV is that one has too many simplified choices. A glut of ball games, comedy shows, soap operas, whatever distraction is on at the moment. The typical American city is a universe of cultivated distractions. But at the same time, there are probably a couple poetry readings in session in the vicinity. Also, maybe a few individuals are trying to write that first line of poetry, or that refrain as a false engine. And not only in America, though I do think the United States is a healthy place for poetry and other artistic pursuits.

DODD

Has it gotten better? In your interview with Vince Gotera back in 1990, you said that the U.S. is a healthy place for poetry, but at the same time—

KOMUNYAKAA

There is a similarity. But also there are some unique voices that pop out. However, I was thinking this morning about the phrase, “between then and now,” and I wanted to place certain poets beneath that phrase. Certain voices. Tonally, each of these voices seems to exist in his or her own world, and yet there’s a shared personality. They’re later than the Modernists. There were a number of names floating around in my head. This thought came to me early this morning. I was thinking of W.S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Alan Dugan, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Etheridge Knight, and Donald Hall. These voices. I think this body of work forms a collective voice that’s uniquely North American.

DODD

You’ve written several articles about Hayden and Etheridge Knight. I don’t think Knight’s poetry is celebrated as much as it ought to be, and I don’t know if it’s the politics of his personal life or what’s there on the page.

KOMUNYAKAA

For young poets who aren’t acquainted with Etheridge’s poetry, it is always an engaging surprise for them. He speaks directly to their concerns, without any embellishment or façades. It’s also interesting to think about some of the abovementioned poets who directly embraced Etheridge in friendship, such as Brooks, Bly, Kinnell, and Wright.

DODD

All of whom were doing interesting things on their own.

KOMUNYAKAA

Right. So they felt safe, I think, embracing this man, this poet whose work was different, his personal life entirely different from theirs. They seem not to have been threatened by him. In that sense, this reflects the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, because that movement was truly an American experience accelerated mainly by blacks and whites. Of course, many from different minority groups, especially ones who arrived after those turbulent years, have benefited directly and indirectly from the movement. For many, this is a bone of contention. We only have to look at those thousands of photographs as a reminder of recent history. Just think about those eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds boarding those buses in the Midwest, heading for the Deep South on a freedom ride.

When I was teaching at Indiana University, I used to ask students to look at the photographs of those nineteen-year-olds going south. I said, “Where do you place yourself in this equation? Can you visualize yourself doing this?” Many couldn’t, you know, coming from very safe situations. They couldn’t see themselves stepping forward to help implement change in America. And that sense of change influenced the rest of the world, really. In Australia, I was talking with some aboriginal writers about a decade ago, and they said, “Yes, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s influenced the idea of change in Australia.” This is true throughout the world.

And at the same time, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, there was a concerted effort to undermine what happened during the movement. That should be analyzed, our need to turn back the clock to the so-called good old days. Do we need to hold a national séance to raise the dead in order to know the meaning of the good old days? I know I don’t.

But many helped to prompt some change, and we as Americans should embrace that recent moment in our history instead of agonizing about it. Because I hate to think about our situation here if the Civil Rights movement had not happened. Indeed, many of those post-Modernist poets were in the bloody mire and sway of the movement.

I remember assigning students to write about the photographs depicting those nineteen-year-olds getting on those buses, you know. Some of those protesters are still in our towns and cities. The Civil Rights monument in Birmingham is dedicated to their heroic efforts. But I think our poetry is also robust enough to embrace that moment in our history.

DODD

Since we began by asking you about “Requiem,” how do you envision New Orleans ten years from now?

KOMUNYAKAA

I hate to think of that tragedy being parlayed into a real estate project, but given that it’s in the United States, most likely the Ninth Ward is going to become a boom area for developers. However, we have to keep the horror of Katrina in our conscience, in our psyche, and we have to make decisions based on that awareness. For years, whenever I went back to New Orleans, I thought, “I’m going to move back here. I’m going to have an apartment here.” That’s the furthest thing from my mind at this moment, because I don’t want to participate in that evil at all.

Also, let’s face it, New Orleans is really a composite of cultures. Of course, that is its uniqueness. The Crescent City was where suburbanites would venture to escape from themselves and do things they wouldn’t do in their own neighborhoods and hometowns. New Orleans was Saturnalia, a place of ancient rituals of harvest and feast. It was one of those places where people probably scared themselves: “My gosh, I’m alive.” We can’t stretch a suburban attitude like gauze over the Big Easy and expect to have the same place. Why did this happen to our most African-influenced city, our Double Scorpio?

---

MARILYNNE ROBINSON WAS BORN and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho. After graduating from Brown University in 1966, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Washington. While writing her dissertation, Robinson began work on her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), which received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Robinson’s essays and book reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other places. An essay published in Harper’s, titled “Bad News from Britain,” formed the basis of her controversial book, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), a finalist for the National Book Award.

In 1998, Robinson published a critically acclaimed collection of essays called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. The New York Times Book Review observed that “one of Robinson’s great merits as an essayist is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity.”

Her novel, Gilead, an epistolary tale of a dying Iowa preacher writing to his young son, earned her the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award.

To consider Robinson only a creative writer is a mistake. She is a serious thinker, demanding of herself and her audience. During this interview, Robinson commented on a wide range of issues, from Darwinism to current political issues. About fiction’s ability to capture any meaningful truth, Robinson said, “I feel there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity in terms of that writer’s understanding.”

Robinson was interviewed in front of an audience at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: During your talk at The Met the other night, you said that all your characters within a book are actually part of one character. Can you expand on that statement?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: It seems that fiction rarely achieves a sense of anything approximating, anything suggesting, the actual complexity or dimensionality of the human being. That was a problem when I was writing Housekeeping. I felt inadequate. I felt flatness. So my solution was to create what felt like one personality arrayed across a range of possible expressions of that personality. It seemed true from my own observations that a great deal of anyone’s character, of the experience anyone is formed by, their interior, is made up of things chosen against, things that do not fade, things one is attracted to but does not pursue—hopes or expectations or fears that are never realized but are nevertheless an important part of the interior weather any human being lives with.

Behavior you see in other people is the lingua franca behavior through which, normally speaking, we can be adequately intelligible to one another. We cannot alarm or puzzle one another excessively. And this is something that you learn, sort of like manners or the shorthand language of please and thank you. It is not intended to be a revelation of one’s character; it’s intended to allow you to pass through the world without exposing yourself, without damaging other people in ways you don’t want to. There’s inevitable role-playing that is a huge part of anybody’s behavior in life. This is not a negative statement. This is just the way we create a sort of uniform currency to make ourselves understandable, to be able to be adequate in circumstances that are perhaps casual, perhaps formal, perhaps very brief, and so on. If that level of anyone’s personality or character is taken to be a sufficient description of them, then obviously you’ve missed the whole human mystery, as far as that person is concerned. Being accepted at that level of self-revelation trivializes people.

And though it’s rare to see behind conventionalized behavior, you know as a matter of simply being able to extrapolate from experiencing yourself, that in every individual case, there’s infinitely more in the experience of another person. So my solution for the problem was to array characters in ways to show the impulses that might be particularly powerful, for example, and therefore least visible. I used to think of quantum physics, the idea that all possibilities remain until one is observed. I think that established a principle for me I’ve always clung to, which is that apparent oppositions are always oversimplifications. And to set up conflict, especially conflict of values, is something that very much simplifies the actual way experience and value exist in the world. For example, in Gilead, John Ames is not Edward because he has chosen not to be Edward; but nevertheless, because he defines himself against that impulse, he in a certain sense gets suffused with the impulse. He knows all the arguments, he knows his brother’s mind and understands the impulse away from the life he has chosen. And no doubt, if one were to think of Edward, one would think exactly the same way, that he has chosen against John, but in the fact of knowing everything about John, there is self-denial in self-definition of that kind.

THOMAS KING: The opening chapter of Housekeeping is written in Ruth’s point of view, yet it covers events for which she was not present. Can you tell us about the challenges of using an omniscient first-person as an entry point for the novel?

ROBINSON: I always tell my students you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you’re doing, you’re not doing it well enough. You have to circumvent plausibility sometimes, the normal ways people have of understanding or documenting things in a journalistic model that supposedly applies. I think—and this is relevant to my family and their settling in the Pacific Northwest—that a lot of what I knew and a lot of what seemed important in my early life were descriptions of things I had not seen that had a profound reality in my imagination, because they were told among people whose importance to me is mythic, in the way that grandparents and aunts and uncles are to children. So I think there’s a huge psychological latitude with the first-person because we have a much greater store of experience than what we actually witness. The sort of I-am-the-camera approach to point of view is not psychologically rich enough to be adequate in any circumstance. In any case, the description of things one has not seen is something most people are capable of, partly because their minds can’t help embroidering and enriching whatever they’ve been told to attach importance to.

SARAH FLYNN: In your essay, “Facing Reality,” you wrote that the art of writing fiction lies outside the collective fiction we call “reality.” How do you grapple with our society’s collective fiction in your novels?

ROBINSON: I don’t grapple when I can avoid it, but I do feel that there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity in terms of that writer’s understanding. We’re in a very special period of time now—I suppose we have been for the last fifty or one hundred years, maybe since the telegraph—where there’s an enormous amount of rapid-fire information. There are huge, groaning burdens of what looks like scholarship lying around. These are things that people typically don’t have time to be skeptical of. But the accumulation of misinformation addles the mind, restricts the imagination. It makes it terribly difficult to think with the necessary degree of rigor. I have spent a great part of my life going to the sources, reading the original material. I learned this in graduate school, when I found out the great and revered scholars did not do that. And it makes many things fall apart, as you realize that things you’ve been told are true are not true. I think people can feel the falseness in the narrative they’re being given, but they don’t know where to begin doubting. My advice is to begin wherever you find a loose thread. The more you pull, the more you will find to pull.

Inside a recent Harper’s magazine, there was an article in which the writer asked, Why do Americans talk about the mentality of the country, the spirit of the country, being anything other than capitalist? He claimed that it was never anything but capitalist. And that’s not true. Capitalism was a bad word in this country for a long time. Banks were illegal in Iowa because they caused accumulations of capital. This writer said that, you know, The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Well, yes it was, but the book by Adam Smith that influenced the founding fathers was actually another book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a series of ethical lectures that he delivered to classes of Presbyterian ministers in preparation. The Wealth of Nations is about corn laws and how it should not be possible to constrict the flow of products, which caused starvation in England and Ireland. This is the basis of his theory, that there has to be a human economic order that does not starve the working class. The man writing this article, who was being so blustering, so authoritative, in Harper’s, had all kinds of information wrong. He probably learned it when he was a sophomore in college and never checked it or thought about it. The fact that somebody publishes something in Scotland in 1776 doesn’t mean it has any influence on something written in America in 1776. Probably not.

KING: What can be done about the wealth of misinformation people ingest? How does this misinformation affect society at large?

ROBINSON: A lot of people would have to make an epic of criticism, by which I do not mean theory. I mean criticism. I’ve done a lot of difficult study; that’s probably not my best-kept secret. And there is so much junk scholarship around. In the airport, I picked up this little book by Karen Armstrong called A Short History of Myth. It’s a terrible book. The two sources she uses over and over are Mircea Eliade, who was a disaster, and Ibid., which is another name for Mircea Eliade. I pretend it’s one of those medieval Islamic scholars.

I don’t know if any of you know anything about how biblical scholarship is done, but if you take some introductory course, you will discover there’s J, P, E, and D. These are the names for the major traditions that contribute to the Old Testament, supposedly. Now, I gave a lecture at a symposium of biblical scholars—serious people, right? And I said this is a completely ridiculous idea—that you can break these traditions down into these streams. And I made my case. And of course it threatened everybody in the room. There was a kind of silence until one venerable man raised his hand and said, “What does it matter what we write? Nobody reads it anyway.”

It matters. It matters. It matters. It matters. Add the fact that this was what you would call a conservative theological setting; these people were not Karen Armstrong. How in the world can you toil your life away, saying, What does it matter? How can you do that? People trust each other. That’s the whole thing, the reason why people have engulfed themselves in false models of learning about all kinds of things; it’s because they trust. They think if this is in print and this person has an M.Div., this means something. The cynicism of saying, What does it matter? is just unbelievable to me, and I don’t think that this is by any means a problem isolated in theology departments. It’s everywhere.

Indifference has done nothing but drain content out of the collective experience. We have these huge libraries. There’s nothing in the world like the American library system, nothing to compare. You can go to a library or get on your computer and find amazing stuff. I’ve done research on English Renaissance writers, books that were printed in the 17th century, and I had to cut the pages, because no one had read them since the 17th century, in that library, at any rate. But there it was. I could find what I needed.

We have this huge brain sitting there, waiting to be used. The way out of the problem, for most people, is to head down the street, if it’s not in their laptops. The amount of early literature you can call up online from universities is astonishing. But in many, many instances, it might as well have uncut pages.

FLYNN: Why don’t people utilize those resources?

ROBINSON: The idea of individual learning has been subordinated to the idea of getting degrees. Most people are anxious about employment, and the culture continuously reinforces the fact that you go to college to get the diploma because that’s your ticket to economic life. The idea that built the universities, which is that simply knowing is wonderful, seems to have all but disappeared. I visited a university that particularly emphasized theory. The graduate students said, We take theory because we can’t get hired without taking theory because universities need people to teach theory. So there’s this perpetual motion machine. Whether or not you think this is a fruitful way to approach literature is put to one side, because it’s like a driver’s license—you simply have to have it. This is not the life of the mind. This is not what Thomas Jefferson hoped for.

FLYNN: At times, you express doubts about the likelihood that your essays will change public discourse in a significant way. What motivates you to write nonfiction?

ROBINSON: I would worry about myself if I had serious expectations of changing public discourse. That is a large and rather immobile thing: public discourse. Nevertheless, some things strike me as important in a way that makes me have to work through them myself. I have always found that people were interested in these essays. I’ve never had any trouble publishing them. I’ve never had any significant rebuttal to what I write. I got sued by Greenpeace once, but I don’t count that as a rebuttal. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine people will actually read what you write when you’re writing about the French Reformation or something. On the other hand, the impulse is certainly there, and there are people who read these things and to whom what I say is important. And God help us if everybody stopped trying to at least participate in public discourse. You have to try to say what you think is true.

KING: I’ve read that you believe society moves both forward and backward. What gains have we won in our nation’s or our planet’s history that are currently at risk?

ROBINSON: Well, there is the planet. There are obvious sorts of tradeoffs that I worry about. Many people in this country are quite scrupulous about environmental things. There are many laws and customs, national or local, that to some extent control what we do to our own immediate environment, but that has meant that what can’t be done within the limit of those norms here is done elsewhere, so that you get a relatively clean America and a completely poisoned China. I don’t consider that to be a desirable tradeoff. If your loyalty is to the human species, there are more Chinese than there are Americans, and on the most simple utilitarian basis, we have to worry about what happens to the Chinese and the Indians and so on.

The way the world economy has developed, every population has a certain percentage of bright, highly motivated people. The countries that have been slower in developing have huge, avid populations of people thrilled to be part of this cool, global economy, and at the same time, they have governments perfectly willing to make economic hay out of impoverished workers with low expectations. So we have children picking over dumps of discarded computers, pulling out both valuable and toxic things. If you read about China at the present time, they have riots in the countryside because of this hideous, no-holds-barred economic development they have gotten into, if economic development is the right word. There is, for example, a factory that makes a cancer treatment with byproducts so toxic that everybody around the plant for a good distance is sick. And, of course, the drugs are shipped to Europe and the United States.

This is one of those things where you can say, “Yes, we wouldn’t let that happen here,” but that only makes it worse where it does happen. There are tradeoffs as far as progress goes that are very vivid indeed. When people don’t have any control in a country like China or India because they are so poor that anything seems better than nothing, then the constraints that might make a moderate disaster of something that happened in Minnesota, make it an absolute disaster by their absence in China. It’s not something we want to talk or think about. A lot of the warfare in Africa is apparently about a mineral necessary for cell phones. We all have our nifty cell phones and we do not look into the economic consequences, which become warfare and starvation in another setting. I wish it were harder to come up with examples, but that’s just technology. And there’s also war.

One of the things most interesting to me about doing research into the history of the Middle West was learning about colleges created there before the Civil War, in the 1830s and 1840s. They were already racially integrated, gender-integrated. They created a system for making everybody at a college work, including the faculty, so there would be no economic barriers to education, and, they said, to make a more useful educated class. These are things I think we would consider very advanced. A lot of schools, like Mount Holyoke, Grinnell, Oberlin, Amherst, that are now elite institutions, were intended as places where no economic barrier to education existed, where it wouldn’t cost you anything to attend. There’s been a huge sort of turning over, like an iceberg. There has been not only the loss of the ideals that went into the creation of the colleges and the society they influence, but also a complete and absolute amnesia that these things were ever done or intended. And if it can happen once, it can happen again, which is something we must be aware of.

FLYNN: In “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,” you wrote that, as a liberal, you were disappointed with liberalism as a movement. Have your views intensified or changed over recent years?

ROBINSON: I have certain vivid touch points. When major issues come up like whether we should invade Iraq, I’m very sympathetic to the side that says no, because that seems really smart, and it was smart before the whole enterprise ever began. If questions arise about whether resources should be spent on creating the kind of social equality that will prevent us from stigmatizing or disabling subsequent generations because their parents happen to have been poor, I’m very much in favor of people who support such an idea. Now, these kinds of convictions make me a completely committed liberal. At the same time, there is so much nonsense and flaccidity and uncritical thought on the side of liberalism that it is not a good servant of its own cause.

And my idea of patriotism, given the completely arbitrary nature of our national identity, is that patriotism matters. I consider myself patriotic because I don’t want American people to go hungry. I don’t want American people to spend their lives unemployed when they want to make a creative contribution to the culture. I don’t want women to be forced into abortion because they can’t possibly stop working, supporting their families on a minimum wage that is not adequate to support their family. As far as I’m concerned, patriotism is, first of all, an obligation to create humane circumstances within our country. I don’t think that should be a hard case to make, but I think that when people on the other side say, “We’re the patriotic people,” the impulse of liberals is to say, “Well, we don’t think patriotism is such a terrifically good idea.” They give up their vocabulary. They give up the concepts. They allow people to define patriotism as putting the army, without proper equipment or support, in a circumstance it should never have been in. This is supposedly patriotism. The surrender of the major categories, like family values: I think the minimum wage is probably the greatest family value anybody could articulate, because it allows people to provide for their families. What more, you know? So there are clear liberal issues being very badly articulated.

FLYNN: Why do you think we fail in those areas?

ROBINSON: I just cannot imagine. In my cynical moments, I think it’s because a lot of the leading members of the liberal population actually flourish under administrations like the present one, partially because a lot of them are highly educated people whose income is high enough that tax cuts benefit them. Some people are pretty glad that the government can recruit troops from an economically disadvantaged class disproportionately so as to not draft their children. I’m afraid it’s true, to a certain extent, that unacknowledged self-interest makes them hesitant to actually champion what ought to be their cause.

FLYNN: You’ve said that obsessions drive you and that those obsessions are not often fiction. What are some of your present obsessions, and do they develop into nonfiction more often than fiction?

ROBINSON: Well, my current obsession is with literature of the ancient Near East. I’ve been reading Hittites and Canaanites and Babylonians and Greeks and Egyptians. I’m going to be teaching a course in the fall on Greek tragedy, and I was thinking about the importance of scene and dialogue, then the next thing I knew, it was Euripides, Sophocles. But it seems to me that there’s a narrow view of what Greek tragedy was or what the settings of Greek ancient writing were, so I’m reading all this stuff that would have been culturally contiguous, that they probably would have had some acquaintance with. I want to have a fuller ancient sense of what I’m looking at when I look at these plays, which tend, today, to be read through Nietzsche or somebody. That’s also working its way into my nonfiction, but I don’t want to talk about that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: Running through both your work and published interviews is a sense of your romance with the simplicity—and even adversity—of the past. How does that romance affect your view of contemporary life?

ROBINSON: I don’t know if I believe in a simplicity of the past. Actually, I don’t like the idea of nostalgia. I don’t like the idea that once everything made sense and now it doesn’t, and once everything was easy and now it isn’t. You know, Oh, to have lived before the age of the antibiotic! What are we talking about? But I think that prejudice against the modern period has actually created a lot of trouble in the modern world, the idea that somehow or another we’ve stepped off a cliff and it used to be better and we have to hack our way back to a more meaningful, primal life. That’s basically fascism, which I think we should avoid.

KING: You’ve also said that though your reading informs your writing, you almost never read for that specific purpose. What motivates your study, and how does it develop into a writing project?

ROBINSON: That is so mysterious. I get something on my mind or I pick up a book that seems to call my name, and I read something I didn’t know before or something that makes a better text, a better fabric of something I had known for some other reason. And it just feels good. It’s an enormous pleasure to me. If I could, I would just read and read and read. All kinds of strange things. Difficult things that make me feel that my perspective is richer than it was before. As far as writing goes, every once in a while I feel like I have to write something. I am the driven slave of these two impulses. It’s a nice life.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: Your laughing at your own work while reading aloud the other night fascinated me. Why did you laugh—do you see the worlds you create in your novels as real?

ROBINSON: It’s like remembering a dream; because when you write, you visualize, then when you read, the visualization returns. Also, I remembered what I was doing when I wrote that scene. I had modeled Gilead on a town in southwest Iowa called Tabor, which was founded by people from Oberlin College. They had founded a college, and they had a station on the Underground Railroad. There was a Congregational minister there who had 200 rifles in his cellar and a cannon in his barn. But, in any case, there were tunnels under the green in Tabor. Apparently, you can still see where they were. But I was thinking, If New Englanders were on the frontier of Iowa, how would they get in trouble? I wanted people to have some idea of what they were doing, but not to idealize them, not make them feel like stuffed wax museum figures or something. So I thought, Well, they would dig a tunnel. Tabor is in the sand hills; there’s nothing there but dunes, so even as you drive there’s sand blowing across the road. Obviously they would be delighted that it was so easy to dig in the soil. I started writing this scene and more and more kept happening. I remember thinking, Where did that come from? You create the occasion for your imagination, then all kinds of things come into play and surprise you. The best part of writing.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: The few negative reviews of Gilead imply that John Ames is a one-dimensional character, with faith being his only noticeable trait. How do you see John Ames?

ROBINSON: I get all my reviews from my publisher, and my publisher clearly censors them, so I’ve never heard that criticism. I have a very strong imagination of John Ames that was generated by the fact that I thought of him as a voice in my head. I was surprised to have a male narrator. I trusted this voice. I felt as if someone were speaking. I’ve been very kindly treated by the reviewers. I have no complaints, but there are hordes of millions of readers, and it’s just unbelievable to imagine you could please them all. And, especially at this particular moment in time, there are a lot of people that find a lot of religious thought, and so on, irritating, which only makes it clearer to me how kindly I have been treated, because that is not the most universally acceptable subject at the moment. But, in any case, whoever the reviewer was, bless his heart. I hope he finds books he likes better.

FLYNN: Do people make judgments about you because of how open you are about your religious beliefs?

ROBINSON: I’ve had people say, “Aren’t you afraid to be identified with religion?” and so on. If people said to me, “Marilynne, go home. We don’t want to hear from you anymore,” I would think, Whew! It’s not like I have a big stake in this, and if people reject what I say on the basis of its having a strong religious cast, that wouldn’t surprise me and it wouldn’t be an issue for me. I’m not writing for anyone. From what I see, from what I read, I wouldn’t be surprised if I encountered friction, but I can’t report any. So here I am.

FLYNN: In The Death of Adam, you said that belief in Darwinism is like belief in the existence of God, and that it’s based on faith. And you defined faith as “a loyalty to a vision of nature, of the nature of things despite its inaccessibility to demonstration.” Do you believe that all of science is ultimately based on faith?

ROBINSON: No. And, also in that essay, and in general, a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between evolution and Darwinism. Darwinism has its specific history, and a specific ethos; the idea behind Darwinism is that there is a continuous sort of attrition among the varieties of organisms that is the consequence of competition for survival. If you read the 19th century literature that surrounds the popularization of Darwinism, it leads directly to eugenics; it makes people regret that anyone ever invented the smallpox vaccination. And even before Darwin wrote, when it was Malthus and earlier people, Townsend and so on, who were writing in these terms, it rationalized the death by starvation of the lower classes of European civilization. So it was the you-have- to-be-cruel-to-be-kind thing where the human species became better and better by the fact of the deaths of people unworthy to survive.

This had enormous practical consequences in European and American society and history from before Darwin. “The survival of the fittest” was not his phrase. He got it from the British, Herbert Spencer, whose idea of this was of the progressive attrition of the unworthy or the unfit. And so with Malthus. It goes way, way back into British thought. But what Darwin did was interpret it into a scientific theory that explains, as it were, the origin of species, although he himself said he never did explain the origin of species. Because there are all sorts of things about the phenomenon of speciation that his theory couldn’t address. But, in any case, I believe that it is still true that Darwinism is contaminated with racial theory, eugenic theory, and all kinds of other things. It had a huge surge in Britain while I was living there under the reign of Mrs. Thatcher, who famously said, “God prefers the rich to the poor and nature proves it.”

People have known since antiquity that there were fossils of creatures that no longer existed, so the idea that life forms have changed over time is not a novel idea. If evolution means the change of life forms over time, then I think that it’s not difficult to affirm the plausibility of evolution, but if it means that the changes in life forms over time were the result of an inevitable competition in which the strong destroy the weak or whatever, this is something that is not describable, because we know that, for example, species go right along until they disappear. So if that were true, you would have the continuous modification of a species that would continuously enhance its survival virtues, but instead you have a much more disrupted evolutionary history. In other words, Darwinism ought to be considered as a moment in the scientific-social-military history of the West that does not conclusively, for all time, define the idea of evolution, and the defense of evolution as a theory ought to be disentangled from the defense of Darwin or the ideas attributed to Darwin.

If you read the literature around the First World War, there were all sorts of people in favor of it. If you read a book of Tolstoy’s written just at the turn of the century—The Kingdom of God Is Within You—you’ll notice that he was a pacifist, and he got letters from every significant person in Europe about why he shouldn’t be a pacifist, and many of them made arguments that war clears out the undesirables from society. It is genocide directed against one’s own population. I guess that’s not uncommon, but it’s absolutely horrendous, and it accounts for a great deal of what was horrible about the First World War, which is that nobody really seemed to want it to end. This is the kind of thing where you have to go back and read what people were saying about these things. If you just take it that Darwin is the force of light and William Jennings Bryan is the source of darkness, you have no idea what the issues are. Jennings Bryan himself was a pacifist when there was a huge issue of war addressed precisely in terms of its alleged Darwinist merit.

FLYNN: How do we disentangle abhorrent forms of faith from forms that have value to us as a culture?

ROBINSON: A lot of things can’t be dealt with on a cultural level. One thing interesting about being human is that you are responsible to a great degree for your own sanity, your own ethicalism, your own moral solvency, your own intellectual seriousness. It would be nice if these things could be dealt with at a social level, but whenever human behavior is controlled at a social level, even with the most benign intentions, it goes wrong. I think there is no point in history where people have not used valuable things for destructive purposes. Perhaps what we have to do is make people feel more deeply that they are responsible as individuals for their moral consequences. For example, I think a lot of religious excesses don’t come from religions themselves; they come from passionate identification, the eagerness to say I am X and not Y, and those Y people have always irritated me and it would be much better if the world were entirely X. We’ve gone through this little dance over and over. If we could think beyond those categories, it would be great, but that’s something people are individually responsible for doing.

FLYNN: In your essay on the family, you say that the attempt to impose definition on indeterminacy is about the straightest road to mischief that you know of, yet you define the word “family” in the next sentence—

ROBINSON: I think that my definition is very broad indeed. It has to do with loyalty and affection more than anything else. I think that you know who your family is, in that sense, because you know where your loyalties are and what your fondnesses are, or you probably are in the course of learning. That’s something that you know because it’s created out of your own circumstance, out of your own emotional life. So it’s accessible to definition in that sense, but whether that means there’s a sociological definition that could apply, I don’t think that’s true. I think what I’m saying is that we have to respect the fact that people’s lives constellate themselves in terms of loyalty and in terms of love and that this is something that other people should be sensitive to and acknowledge rather than trying to enforce a definition.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: You said at your reading that you wrote the sinking horse episode in Gilead in one sitting. That section works as a story. Do you often write short fiction?

ROBINSON: No, never. When I was in college, I tried, because I took two workshops, and it’s so nice to workshop a short story. So I would hack and hew at something that always had fifteen characters and three generations. I just cannot think at that scale. I wish I could, but I can’t.

KING: You work a great deal with young writers; are there any emerging voices that challenge your concept of what a poem, novel, or short story can be?

ROBINSON: I don’t know that I have particularly settled notions. I hope not. What you’re always trying to do is help somebody write in a way that is distinctive for their purposes. The idea of trying to conform anybody to pre-existing notions of what should happen—that would curtail their potential, which is not what we want to do. You always hope to be surprised. When I’m teaching a workshop, I ask people to name the best paragraphs in a story, and the degree of unanimity is impressive, which is something that helps break you out of the constraints of subjectivism. Because we all know some writing is better than other writing. Still, it’s hard to make people accept the legitimacy of the distinctions. The most important thing, as far as the teaching of writing is concerned, is to sensitize the writer to what he or she does well. There’s a certain sense of experience or concentration, something that goes into writing well that you learn how to return to. You begin to be a good reader of your own writing because you know what part of your consciousness it’s coming from.

KING: You’ve mentioned a thinness or flatness in contemporary fiction. What do you consider the root causes of that?

ROBINSON: I think there’s thinness in all literature that is not of the highest order of successfulness. I’m not saying there’s anything about this particular moment, or people writing now—I wouldn’t want to generalize by saying it’s more true now than it has been historically. If you go down the wrong row in a library, you find a lot of bad old novels. But I think it’s a major problem of the art, because it is about, as much as anything, human inwardness and how someone who has a profound experience of the self also interacts with other people. That’s where human complexity lies. That’s a hard thing to accomplish in fiction.

KING: Is that part of the reason your two novels are narrated in first-person?

ROBINSON: In both cases, I felt as if I knew a voice. I don’t know where the voice comes from. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I will ever write other than in first-person. But I feel like I’m being faithful to a voice that is not mine and that’s where the first-person comes in.

KING: How can a third-person narrator be handled successfully?

ROBINSON: The most successful third-person writers break all the rules. When you read Dickens, he just plunges in. You get these great panoramic scenes of London or something, and then, zoom, you’re so close in a consciousness. And if you read The Brothers Karamazov, you think, How did I get here? Chekhov does it all the time. The idea that there are these chaste, objective third-person narratives is really a cross that writers ought not to bear. Basically, you can do what you can get away with, and if you look at the great classic third-person narratives, they’re all over the place and they just make it so you don’t care.

KING: You have a lot of stories within stories, encapsulated episodes within your novels. Do you access your own life for that material or is most of it pure imagination?

ROBINSON: They are mostly imaginations. There are things in Housekeeping, because it was set in a very stylized version of the town I spent a lot of my childhood in, that reflect my own life, like the layout of the house with the bedroom that opens into an orchard—that was my grandparents’ house. All these crazy details like that. But when I wrote Housekeeping, I thought it would never be published. I knew my mother and my brother would read this book and would get all these little allusions, so that was part of the fun of it. But I was very struck by hearing stories in my family, little parables in a certain sense. And I think that way of putting a coherent sense of things together probably influenced the fact that I do receive imagined anecdotes for those purposes.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: Speaking of place, what you said the other night about how people love the place they live and think everywhere else is going to hell—do you think that statement is true globally as well as nationally?

ROBINSON: I think that’s fair to say. There are strange things, like that our press covers every crime and that sort of thing. I lived in France for a while, and they have a good handful of newspapers that don’t really cover crime or anything like that. If they do cover crime, it tends to be something that happened in California. And it’s strange, because whenever something bad happened locally, they’d say, “The Arabs.” Because all the sociopathic stuff that happened was passed around by word of mouth and that leaves no public reality for it ninety-nine percent of the time. So they have this really sinister attitude toward whoever are the disfavored people, typically the Arabs, and then they also get this stuff that comes from the American press, which looks incredibly weird and gothic if you’re not used to having that type of information about yourself. There’s a way in which, by virtue of our beloved and forever-to-be-revered First Amendment, we strike most of the world as being a completely crazy place.

When I was leaving France, a little delegation of my neighbors came over and said, “You do not have to go back.” And I said, “Well, actually, I’m happy to go back.” And they said, “It is her country, all the same.” So we’re the dumping grounds for the darker part of world opinion, in many cases, as a sort of accident of cultural history. At the same time, I think it is true that people typically love the place they are and fear the world they don’t know. And, especially at this moment in this country, when there’s such regional polarization, people have categorical hostilities against people because of the color their state turned on election day, and that really fuels this very unhappy habit we have of imagining that if we step outside our own county or our own state, we are in some wasteland.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: What value do you think writing or art has in transcending that regionalism?

ROBINSON: I think anything that transcends it has value by virtue of transcending it. I’m very glad that dear old Gilead has been warmly received in disparate places, and I’m traveling around partly because I think it would be nice if we were all talking to each other. I wrote an essay that got printed in The American Scholar, and it’s actually kind of an attack on religious fundamentalism from the perspective of a religious liberal, and I startled certain of my fans, who thought I was a different person. They say things like, “It’s so nice of you to write something that puts a fundamentalist minister in a positive light.” And then I say, “He’s not a fundamentalist.” And they say, “Well, he quotes the Bible.” But, in any case, I certainly wish we could all talk to each other. The country needs to have a deliberating population at this time and not just a lot of line drawing.

KING: What gives you hope, if you believe hope is possible?

ROBINSON: I have hope. That’s part of the reason I sometimes think I do a lot more traveling than I ought to. You know, you come to Spokane, which I happen to know from my childhood, but most of the country has no conception of Spokane—and believe me, they do not even pronounce the name right. And I come here. People are happy to be here. They have this beautiful park. They have a nice literary series. There’s a great deal in the city that obviously has been assigned an appropriate value, restored, enjoyed. I went to North Dakota in March for a literary festival and, from an outsider’s point of view, North Dakota in March is a pretty forbidding landscape, but the people there love it and they think, How can I possibly eke out a livelihood that will allow me to stay in North Dakota? Otherwise I might end up in South Dakota! But they have their literature, they have their painters, they have folklore that goes with the Native American population there, and so on. Even though I’d have to train my eye for a while to see what they loved so much about that environment, there is no question that they do and that in the fact of loving it, they are creating value in and around it all the time. And, again, this is not just North Dakota. It’s a phenomenon you find over and over again.

---

Jean Valentine has characterized Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s work as a “fierce homage to the body and to the spirit.” Landscape may have influenced the intensity of this homage; Goldberg grew up in the harsh Arizona desert, where she currently resides.

“Death is the eternal problem,” Goldberg says. “I can’t write without that awareness—to me it’s constant…. How can you love something and not mourn the fact that it’s going to disappear?” Even when not overtly dealing with death, Goldberg’s work concerns itself with the mortality of humans and the natural environments that shape them.

Goldberg is the author of The Book of Accident (2006) and Lie Awake Lake (2005). Her collection of prose poems, Egypt from Space, is forthcoming. Other titles include Body Betrayer (1991), In the Badlands of Desire (1993), Never Be the Horse (1999), and Twentieth Century Children (1999), a limited edition chapbook. She has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Award, The University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and her work has also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry series. Goldberg holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MA from Arizona State University, where she was mentored by Norman Dubie. Presently, she directs the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

Goldberg was interviewed over lunch at Europa Restaurant in Spokane.

ZACHARY VINEYARD: What kind of progression do you see from your earlier work to your later?

BECKIAN FRITZ GOLDBERG: I think that’s always a hard question for a writer, because you don’t think about your past work that much; at least I don’t. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and some things hold up for you. Some things, you can only see what’s wrong with them—like, Why did I write that line? What was I thinking? Or sometimes you look back and go, Wow, how did I do that? It looks like I have a brain!

I try to take more risks, push it, because I have a low boredom threshold. And so I always like to try things I haven’t tried before, try to get away with things I haven’t gotten away with before. I trained very early to use narrative in my work because it didn’t come naturally. So I think my earlier work—I could be wrong—has a little more narrative in it, because I worked so hard at doing that. But my natural bent is lyric, and I’ve felt more freedom, I suppose, as I’ve gone along, to go with that.

SARAH HUDGENS: Can you identify certain risks in the new volumes, The Book of Accident and Lie Awake Lake?

GOLDBERG: The Book of Accident had been kind of bounced around, because it had a contract with another publisher, and that didn’t work. So I went back to Akron because they published Never Be the Horse. It’s just now coming out, but it’s been there for probably three or four years. I feel lucky because I suppose if I still had it, I’d just—I get sick of things real quick. So The Book of Accident is very different. I remember being pissed off I couldn’t write short poems. Or I didn’t think I could write short poems. I’d look at people who could write a twelve-line poem and it was a complete thing—it wasn’t a fragment—and I was thinking, Why can’t I do that?

Lie Awake Lake was written shortly after my father’s death. I was staying in Jean Valentine’s apartment in New York. It was winter and I was sick as a dog. But she had an old typewriter and I was so tired that I would just write these short things, and I didn’t have the heart to edit them so I put them away. Then I took them out later and decided to keep them.

In terms of the language and things—there is a “purple scrotum” in The Book of Accident that I’m very proud of. I get some flack for that, but, you know, it had to be. I don’t know exactly if it’s purple—I don’t know, there’s some image in there. I like to surprise myself. You write and stuff comes out and the first thing your little editor head says is, You can’t say that, and as soon as my editor says that, I go, Oh, yeah, I’m ready. Yeah, it’s on!

GRACE DANBORN: Your work can be characterized by those surprising images. Not just the scrotum but other uncommon comparisons, like in Never Be the Horse when you compare a nebula to the steam of a rabbit’s breath on a cracked cellar window. How do you allow yourself such free imagistic range of the imagination, but still maintain a tone of intimacy with the reader?

GOLDBERG: The imagery itself is probably something I’ve always been able to do, because it’s the way I think. Anywhere but poetry it would probably get me into trouble. But that’s the first natural poetic impulse I had. It took me a while to learn how to control images and not just throw them at the reader, but pace them and have the image come at the right time.

HUDGENS: And the voice and tone are still so intimate.

GOLDBERG: Poetry should be intimate. I have to believe I’m talking to someone who’s listening, and who’s like me. It is partly historical. When I read poems and feel like they’re talking to me—that’s what I want to do. I get bored with over-intellectualized stuff. Yeah, sure, we all have a mind. Big deal. Wow, so you’re brilliant. I don’t have a lot of patience for that. Not that stuff like that isn’t any good, or isn’t valid. I’m just not interested.

HUDGENS: In an online interview, you said that writers have to know the audience doesn’t care about their feelings. Do you still hold that to be true? How does that work?

GOLDBERG: You have to make them care. I don’t know how you do that. I think you have to give them enough of your sensibility, touch some sort of common ground first. Part of that is voice. If you read Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet, his voice—of course I’ve only read him in translation because I can’t read Turkish, but who the hell can? Turks can—his voice is very immediate. I think you have to surrender to what you’re writing. It really has to—I hate to use this phrase because it makes me want to retch—come from the heart. But it really does.

DANBORN: Are you risking sentimentality, then? If it “comes from the heart,” are you afraid of being characterized that way by readers?

GOLDBERG: No, I’m too weird. [Laughs.] Sentimentality is usually bad because it’s unearned emotion. You know, people writing about how bummed they are that they broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. So what? If you tell them about the relationship to the point where you share the history a little, then they start to care. That’s the balance you have to strike to make that intimate connection with the reader. And sometimes you just don’t know; you have to try to be as true to the poem as you can and hope it works.

HUDGENS: Do you, then, equate the writer with the speaker? Or do you see your speakers as separated one degree?

GOLDBERG: It’s one degree removed, because it’s artifice. It’s not like me talking to you now. It’s art, sculpted and formed and thought about. It’s not spontaneous. Even though an occasional verse will be. But you always have the option to go back and tweak it.

VINEYARD: You’re starting to work in the prose poem, and you’ve previously published other formal poetry, such as the crown of sonnets in Never Be the Horse. Has form in your poetry changed as you further trust your poetic instincts?

GOLDBERG: I always trust what I’m trying to do. Form is nothing I think about in advance. I work a lot on the basis of sound. Sound will tell me its form. The crown of sonnets was sort of an exception. I didn’t plan it. I had serious writer’s block and was trying to write my way out of it. I’d had this idea that connected the devil and the sonnet form for a long time. I was writing it down and I was thinking, That’s kind of iambic, okay. And it turned out to be a sonnet and a half, and I thought, I can’t have a sonnet and a half. So I said, Okay, I’ll go for two. Well, then I had a line left over. I remembered my old forms class, from way back, and thought, Yeah, there’s something where you just keep going with it. So I did, and it was miserable. I would be up nights working on two lines.

But I don’t consciously approach something thinking it’s going to be in a certain form. I do go through phases, though. I had a desire to write short poems for a while, which usually means I end up writing long ones, since that’s the way things work. When I wrote Never Be the Horse, I went for longer, more raggedy-ass lines, because I was like, Why do lines have to be all tight? So I thought I’d just let it roll, and wherever the line breaks, screw it. The two books that followed that are shorter-lined, more lyric, with more space in the poems. I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing.

HUDGENS: So if sound dictates form for you, would you also say that sound dictates meaning or content?

GOLDBERG: A lot of the time, yes. When I’m looking for the rest of the line that’s not there yet, I know exactly how it’s supposed to sound. I know, DUM da da DUM dum dum. So I have to find the words to fit that. Obviously, it has to make some kind of sense. But I will actually hear vowel sounds and things that need to be there. That has every bit as much to do with it as what I’m saying.

I think sound is the hypnotic force in a poem. If that’s broken, things fly apart. I’m much more aware of it now. My poems usually start with hearing the line. Or I hear a certain tone, or something I can’t even articulate until the poem acquires its body. If I can’t hear it, I can’t write it. I can’t think it. And that’s frustrating. Because I will, when I’m writing, try to think it. You want to finish the goddamn poem, so you can go have your coffee and your cigarette, you know? And I’m not allowed to smoke in the house.

HUDGENS: When you’re reading poetry in which the main thrust isn’t sound, do you value it less?

GOLDBERG: Probably. I suppose that if I look at the poets I’m most attracted to, that I return to, probably they have that quality. It’s not that I can’t appreciate the craft of something that’s not quite as musical, but it doesn’t hold my interest. I think sound is an important quality in poems, and I think all great poems have it. It’s an issue with language poetry: some of it’s just—you know, I’ve got TV to watch. Hey, Law and Order’s on, man, don’t waste my fucking time!

DANBORN: You said that trusting sound allows you to play with more surreal images. But are the images themselves ever the genesis of a poem, before being shaped by sound? Do you ever see a rabbit or an olive and say, “I want to write that image”?

GOLDBERG: Usually one thing’s there first, like maybe the rabbit. And then my mind goes off to, what was it? An olive. I like that. Martinis, yeah. My mind will leap to that association. If I’m really on, I’ll hear it and do the association at the same time. Those are the good poet days, where you’re just on, just rocking. Sometimes it’s just a little scribble off to the side of the margin: “Get to the olive.” But if I can’t find the sound for it, I probably won’t do it. The challenge is to make the image make sense to the reader. An associative sense, not a logical one.

My thought process is in image. So the sound will determine how the image is played out. Or sometimes, I’ll go with the sound and that’s where the surprises come from.

DANBORN: Like a horse suddenly starts talking—

GOLDBERG: Yeah, that was kind of a shock. That was one of those moments: A talking horse? Man, you can’t do that!

VINEYARD: In your work there’s so much repetition and recurring image—I think of the last poem in Lie Awake Lake. How does repetition function for you?

GOLDBERG: I suppose the honest answer is I don’t know. Part of it is, again, sound, because the right amount of repetition is musical and gives weight to certain moments. I think it’s a natural impulse of language, too—kids repeat things all the time, obsessively, until you want to slap them. And I like it when I read things that have repetition. I guess it’s one way of keeping the reader in the poem, keeping me in the poem, but it can be overdone. Somebody pointed out to me once that in one book I tended to repeat things in threes, so I was like, I’m not going to do that anymore. You don’t want to fall into a mannerism.

DANBORN: Gertrude Stein suggests that repetition without change is death, but repetition with modulation is insistency, is life. Does your repetition work in a similar way?

GOLDBERG: I am conscious of what Stein said. I don’t want to repeat just to repeat. And even throughout the course of a book, it’s not entirely conscious. Like this last book, there’s a lot of water in it. I didn’t start out thinking, I’m going to do water stuff. When I became conscious of it, I didn’t want to do it every other line or anything, but I became aware there was a lot of water in the book. It seemed right. But that was unique to that book. Never Be the Horse was drier, more desert.

VINEYARD: The desert figures prominently in your work, often as an adversarial character infused with intention—

GOLDBERG: Well, it is. I mean, the desert hates you. It doesn’t want you to live there. It is not a hospitable environment, and you feel that. Especially in Arizona. The summers there, which are six months long, are like living in an oven. And you get used to it in a way, but you’re aware of how much it hurts to go outside. Though I do have moments of tenderness toward the desert. It’s like when you have a worthy enemy—there’s a close relationship even though it’s not a friendship.

I think a lot of people in Arizona feel that adversity. What bothers me is the people who—it’s all becoming gated communities and cement, so the desert is disappearing—get pissed off when javelina, which aren’t really pigs but more like big rats, eat their flowers. They were there first. I have coyotes running all over my property. They run across the driveway and look at me like, What the fuck are you doing? And I’m fine with that as long as they don’t eat my cats. We had a bobcat for a while, that liked to sun on our roof. And that was kind of freaky. I called him Bobby because I am so original with names. And you know, if you leave them alone they’ll leave you alone. Javelina, too. They’re blind as bats but they can smell you. They like cigarettes, too. I was out on the balcony smoking one night—two in the morning, whatever—and a big one came up. I really think he was attracted to the smoke.

I have also noticed that there is some sort of geographical thing happening in Egypt from Space. I don’t know exactly why yet. Well, the book is titled that because I saw a satellite photo. You know how they can take photos now of the earth, and there’s some picture that’s supposedly Egypt, but it looks like shadow and scar? And I suppose that got me thinking about view of places and how only in recent generations have we had that ability.

I saw an art program where they talked about the Eiffel Tower being built, how people were able to go up high and look at stuff for the first time. You know, people weren’t flying in airplanes and they didn’t have skyscrapers, and that changed their perspective in more ways than one—in art and also in their ways of thinking.

HUDGENS: You’ve characterized The Book of Accident as a meta-narrative. How does meta-narrative work in that book, and how has your approach to narrative changed throughout your work?

GOLDBERG: I don’t think about narrative much anymore. I just had fun in that book. It’s not really narrative, and my editor told me it should maybe have more narrative. It’s a series of lyrics and recurrent characters that form a narrative arc. But there’s not a story, no action that leads to an event and then drops off. It’s little glimpses into characters in a particular time and place, which is not quite real—fictional. I like that because I guess I got tired of ending with a pile of shit that I knew was connected. But trying to figure out how to order a manuscript is so awful. It was nice to work with something that took care of that for me, at least to a degree. Not that I didn’t shuffle and change, but at least there was some impetus there. In Lie Awake Lake there is obviously a central event that generated the meditations and the lyrics but there is no narrative as far as I can tell. There are glimpses of things that happened to my father, but it is almost all interior space.

HUDGENS: And you said earlier that in your first couple of volumes, you forced the narrative because you thought you should be writing in a narrative form—

GOLDBERG: Well, I knew it was a weak point with me. You start with your strengths—I could give you an image every line, but that doesn’t make a poem. So, I had to find some other stuff to put in there. It was a good grounding. Now, I use narrative tools all the time. I don’t like poems that have no time, no place, nothing. Narrative also freed me up to take the lyric further; and ultimately, given my bent, that’s where I wanted to go. I was not going to become the narrative poet. I think there is great power in a really good story, but I don’t think in stories. I think that’s the difference between poets and fiction writers. We look at something and think, That would be a great poem. They look at it and think, Great story. I don’t see the story.

HUDGENS: I don’t know that all poets think only in images—some of us also think in stories—

GOLDBERG: Yes, there are great narrative poets. A lot of Larry Levis is narrative. Things happen, he goes places. He screws her, she screws him. And that’s terrific. It’s just a matter of how you see and what you’re comfortable with. I tend to think in images and that’s probably why I’m a lyric poet. But I wanted to be able to tell a story if I needed to. It just didn’t come naturally to me, though it’s easier now. I’m more comfortable with what constitutes a story. I think I was inhibited by my initial idea of what narrative was. And I had to learn that it’s more flexible than I thought.

A lot of times when you first write, I think you’re afraid to have a line that’s not beautiful. And that was me. I had to do fireworks every line or it wasn’t working. People had to slap me around and say, “That’s not going to work, that’s just masturbation.”

HUDGENS: Who are some of your favorite contemporary poets?

GOLDBERG: Jean Valentine. I just adore her work. I love Michael Burkard. Those are the people who, as soon as I find a new poem by them, I’m on it. It’s like I want to suck their brains out. I love Charles Wright. I’d like to have his children. Actually, I want to have Marvin Gaye’s children, but it’s too late. I love a lot of poets. I’m a big Gerald Stern fan, a Philip Levine fan.

HUDGENS: Are there specific poets you look to for inspiration to start writing?

GOLDBERG: Sometimes I have to read my way into writing again because my brain just flat-lines. I read a lot of European poets. I love Rilke but he doesn’t help me write because he’s just too fucking good. After I read him I want to off myself. I like Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak. A translation of his poems called, My Sister-Life, is just a knock-out book.

I don’t think Michael Burkard is getting any props. They’re all writing about Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, or John Ashbery—which is fine. Larry Levis—goddamn, I think he is phenomenal. I’m in the pits that he died, but so is he: damn man, all that cocaine fucked me up. I think he was the great poet of this generation. Poets won’t forget him. I have yet to see a critic write anything, which is an odd dichotomy in this culture. The poets who become well known are the critically acclaimed but not necessarily the ones who inspire poets. Ultimately, both types of poets will survive and their work will survive, because the critics decide who gets into the Norton Anthology, and because the rest of us keep reading really cool poems. I think Levis’ work will continue to be read.

DANBORN: Has your treatment of death changed as your books have changed?

GOLDBERG: I don’t know if it’s changed. I mean, death is the eternal problem. I don’t want to do it, I don’t want other people to do it, I don’t like it. So I suppose I’m trying to find a way out or an answer to why it happens.

I don’t know if I’ve come to any conclusions, but I can’t write without that awareness—to me it’s constant. Poems that don’t acknowledge that seem dishonest to me. How can you love something and not mourn the fact that it’s going to disappear? To me that’s the essential question of the human condition, and if you avoid it, I don’t think you can write an honest poem. I think that’s the reason that essay—I think by Donald Hall—says, “There’s no great poem that is simply happy.” It doesn’t mean there isn’t joy or celebration in poems, but it’s always in the face of the fact of loss.

HUDGENS: But there seems to be a tension between that sentiment and a desire to transcend the body—there are instances where you refer to the body as the “hell of form” or write “somebody has to stay behind and be the body.” So there seems also to be a yearning for death.

GOLDBERG: No, it’s a yearning for the opposite. I’d like to wipe out death altogether. I’m not buying it. And I can’t arrive at a theological belief that allows me to be okay with it. I wish I could—it’d be nice to believe we die and go to heaven and float around happy all the time, but I suspect not. So I fight it and it informs just about everything I do. I don’t think it would be that way if I didn’t love so many things. There’s so much beauty and wonderful stuff. As Woody Allen would say, Death just spoils the whole party.

---

According to psychologist Robert Moore, “When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution.” As a groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called “the expressive men’s movement,” Bly remains one of the significant American artists of the past half-century. In the following interview, Mr. Bly speaks about everything from poetics to politics, grief to greed, history to human nature. He ponders the death of culture and the redeeming nature of art, asking people to “develop the insanity of art, which is a positive insanity.”

Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian descent. After time in the Navy, he studied at Harvard and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alongside classmates that included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, W.D. Snodgrass, and Donald Justice. In 1956, he received a Fulbright to translate Norwegian poetry and discovered a number of major poets—among them Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, and Harry Martinson. He soon started The Fifties, a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States, which eventually became The Sixties then The Seventies and introduced a new international aesthetic to American Poetry. He co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War in 1966, and when The Light Around the Body (1968) won the National Book Award, Bly contributed the prize money to the resistance.

While Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) was an international bestseller, Bly has published many books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently Eating the Honey of Words: Selected Poems (1999), The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2002), The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (2004), and The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War (2004). His most recent book of poems is My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy.

We met Mr. Bly in his room at the Montvale Hotel in Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Why did you decide to publish The Insanity of Empire yourself?

ROBERT BLY

Well, I have a publisher—HarperCollins—and one or two others that help, but I thought they’d take a year or more. And I decided, no, too important, try to get it out. And besides, I can do anything I want with it, like give them away if I want to. And I’ve printed a lot of books myself. It was just good expedience to get it out. A friend of mine designed the cover and the whole deal. It was done in two weeks.

KALEEN MCCANDLESS

In the first part of that book, the poems are really direct. Did you notice a change in the voice?

BLY

The first poems are the newest ones: “Call and Answer,” “Advice from the Geese,” and “Let Sympathy Pass.” [Reads from “Let Sympathy Pass.”]

People vote for what will harm them; everywhere

Borks and thieves, Bushes hung with union men.

Things are not well with us.

Well that’s true. It’s quite direct here. I had intended to do an entire book of eight line stanzas. But I couldn’t sustain it. So I went back to old notebooks and arranged them three at a time.

What was it we wanted the holy mountains,

The Black Hills, what did we want them for?

The two Bushes come. They say clearly they will

Make the rich richer, starve the homeless,

Tear down the schools, short-change the children,

And they are elected. Millions go to vote,

Vote to lose their houses, their pensions,

Lower their wages, bring themselves to dust.

All for the sake of whom? Oh you know—

That Secret Being, the old rapacious soul.

That “Secret Being” comes out of the Muslim world. The amazing idea they have contributed is the idea that inside you there’s a nafs—despite the “s”, it’s a singular noun—which is the greedy soul. I have a teacher in London, a Sufi from Iran, and he describes all that in The Psychology of Sufism. That whole little book is about the greedy soul. He says the greedy soul will eat up everything. It’ll destroy a hundred universes for the sake of a little attention—the flutter of an eyelash. It’s willing to destroy everything. When people become Sufis, they are thought that their primary enemy is the nafs. Occasionally the teacher checks to see how much progress they’ve made. I like the concept very much because it doesn’t put evil outside of us, with Satan. It doesn’t imply that a few little things are wrong with us, [in a gruff voice] “What do you mean a little thing? Are you insane?”

MCCANDLESS

Is that the same idea in Light Around the Body of the “inward self ” and the “outward self?”

BLY

That’s said more in the European way. The inward and the outward. I didn’t know about the nafs then.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Is our nafs voting right now?

BLY

Everyone’s nafs together—they tend to be Republican.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Automatically?

BLY

The Republicans, aren’t they the ones who stand and say, “Well, I want what’s mine. And I want what’s yours.” I’ve heard that voice before. In 19th century, the farmers of Kansas were fighters against lobbyists, the big grain companies, etc. Now Kansans vote Republican, even if that means they will lose their houses or businesses. The Republican Party does not represent the people, but the nafs. Forget about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Forget about Social Security. The greedy soul hates Social Security. “God, you’re doing something for someone else? Are you crazy?”

One of the things that drove Whitman crazy was to see the greedy soul at work after the Civil War. So many men died in that war. So many sacrifices were made. As soon as the war was over, the big companies moved in. The corruption was unbelievable. The lobbyists literally bought Congressmen. A positive vote in the House of Representatives cost $100. A Senator’s vote cost $500. That’s how visible the nafs was. Despair over that drove Mark Twain nuts. What we have now is a repetition of the situation after the Civil War, but on an international scale.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Just add zeros to those numbers.

BLY

Exactly. [Reads from “The Stew of Discontents”]

What will you say of our recent adventure?

Some element, Dresdenized,

coated with Somme

Mud and flesh, entered, and all prayer was vain.

The Anglo-Saxon poets hear the whistle of the wild

Gander as it glides to the madman’s hand.

Spent uranium floats into children’s lungs.

All for the sake of whom? For him or her

Or it, the greedy one, the rapacious soul.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

There it is again. That same phrase at the end just like the poem before.

BLY

A few years ago I published a book of poems called Meditations on the Insatiable Soul. My father was dying at that time. I visited him and in two poems I describe my own rapacious soul. I called it then the insatiable soul, but I decided later that the phrase was too pretty—Meditations on the Insatiable Soul. The reality is not pretty. The word “greedy” is better. Anyway, the concept of the nafs is the main thing I’ve learned in the last ten years. The danger of giving poetry readings is that many people—as they did last night—stand up and clap. The greedy soul loves that. It’s great. And if it feels like it, the greedy soul will betray God, your children. You understand? Betray your wife. Betray your parents. It betrays anyone for the flutter of an eyelash.

MCCANDLESS

Is there a way to get away from the greedy soul?

BLY

The consciousness that there is such a thing helps. That awareness is what the greedy soul doesn’t want. You see? There are many references in the New Testament to the nafs. Jesus says, “When you pray, don’t pray in public.” Go into your closet and pray. If you pray in public, the greedy soul will eat the prayer. The Muslim holy books tell a story very like that: a community leader was so faithful as to prayer sessions, he always stood up praying in the front, and everyone thought that was so wonderful. He had done that for years. One day he came in late and had to stand in back. At that moment his nafs was irritated and complained to him. After that he never prayed in public again.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think the nafs is everyone’s primary motivation?

BLY

Ninety-nine percent of the time.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Has that changed, do you think, over the years in America? I hate to be too focused on our country, but—

BLY

I think we are witnessing capitalism substituting itself for democracy. Democracy was always a touchy thing for the nafs because it offers something to black people, offers money to poor people. “Well, what do you mean you’re giving money to them!” When capitalism speaks, it says, “Everything is for the nafs. Period. We don’t care about the poor people in the world. We don’t care about anything but us.” Your nafs might advise you to give to the tsunami relief, because you might get a little flutter of the eyelash there. But you noticed how much was promised and how little delivered. The nafs says, “No, we’ll keep it for ourselves.”

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The presidents on TV, they want some eyelid flutter, right?

BLY

Yes. Exactly. Being democratic would never do it for them now. Do you have my Abraham book here? Oh, here’s a good one. [Reads from “Noah Watching the Rain.”]

I never understood that abundance leads to war.

Nor that manyness is gasoline on the fire.

I never knew that the horseshoe longs for night.

In another poem I use the word “faithful”: [Reads from “The Storyteller’s Way.”]

It’s because the storytellers have been so faithful

That all these tales of infidelity come to light.

It’s the job of the faithful to evoke the unfaithful.

Our task is to eat sand, our task is to be sad—

Being sad is your task if you are fighting the nafs.

Our task is to eat sand, our task is to be sad,

Our task is to cook ashes, our task is to die.

The grasshopper’s way is the way of the faithful.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You also said “our task is to be sad” last night, when you were talking about grief.

BLY

Several people noticed that. I did say that, yes, but the poem also says the reason I am not bitter is because I keep holding the grief pipe between my teeth. A friend says, “Everyone I know is trying to keep themselves from feeling grief.”

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

General grief? Personal grief? Both?

BLY

We were down looking at the river in Spokane. It’s polluted. The Russians come—there are, what, thousands of Russians in town, now—they fish there. They eat it. They’re not willing to accept the grief that we’ve polluted that damn river and the fish are inedible. That’s a kind of a grief we have to accept. More and more, we have to accept the grief not only about our history as a race of human beings, but also the grief of our race as Americans. And then at home you know, you see a little child and you are actually looking at a king of the nafs. “I want this! I want that!” You can’t do anything about it exactly, except to remember that you were like that when you were small and to feel a little grief for that. I think grief is the most valuable emotion we can have right now.

MCCANDLESS

You mentioned at the end of The Insanity of Empire that we have to process the grief, and if we don’t, we will be blind to our truth. You quoted Martín Prechtel—

BLY

He has a brilliant mind. We’ve been good friends. Maybe twenty years ago, a person from Santa Fe said to me: “There’s a strange man living in a teepee two miles out of town.” And I said, “Let’s go.” So we went, and there was Martín, just come from Guatemala, with his wife and two small sons. Later, I invited Martín to join a group of teachers at a men’s week in California. The teachers all got together and asked Martín what he would do with the men. Martín said, “Well, I think I would take the guys out into the woods and get them lost. They wouldn’t have any food for seventy-two hours.” Everyone’s eyes got big because they had been thinking about one hour sessions. Martín was talking about serious stuff—getting them lost in the woods! Alone for seventy-two hours! He is a great teacher and writer.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

I heard he recently started a school.

BLY

He’s always wanted a school. And he finally got it. And he loves to teach. He’s found an old Native American church building down there and every three months people come and spend maybe ten days to two weeks and he teaches them. He likes to start with Mongolia. There hasn’t been any teacher like Martín in this country for a long time. I’ll quote you one phrase of his. [Reads from The Insanity of Empire.] “Many observers have noticed that even though the United States and Canada have many resemblances, we have so many more murders per capita than Canada does. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because we kept slaves and later fought a vicious civil war to free or keep them. We know from Vietnam that the violence men witness or perform remains trapped in their bodies. Martín Prechtel has called that suffering ‘unmetabolized grief.’ To metabolize such grief would mean bringing the body slowly and gradually to absorb the grief into its own system, as it might some sort of poison.”

But this is like the people in the Civil War who did all that killing and the nafs approved of it. Very much. And then what did we do with them? We sent them away to kill the Indians. No one said to these soldiers at that time: “You’ve been in war, you’ve got to have three years of treatment before we let you look at one Native American.” [pauses, reads again] “Once the Civil War was over, soldiers on both sides simply took off their uniforms. Some went west and became the Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing in war can do to a human being.” That’s the same thing the President doesn’t understand today. [resumes reading] “When the violent grief is unmetabolized, it demands to be repeated. One could say that we now have a compulsion to repeat the killing.”

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

So what do soldiers do now?

BLY

You come home and beat up your wife, that’s the first thing you do. Then you start at your children. You cause an immense amount of damage. Unmetabolized grief is like an unmetabolized poison. Well, that’s a new idea. Psychologists have to take that in.

MCCANDLESS

Did we not have any kind of treatment in previous wars, like in World War II?

BLY

No. The ones who got treatment were the ones who had their legs blown off and stuff. And they’d be in the hospital. Otherwise, we’d turn them right back into the main culture. That’s hard to believe, but we did.

Researchers have identified a part of the brain called the amygdala. Apparently, horrible events get stored there. We know that for centuries people lived in groups of fifty or seventy-five. You might wake up at 4:00 in the morning and realize that strangers have come and killed twenty of your people. The dead are all lying around. Human beings cannot thrive then. It’s too much. The speculation is that the memories of what you just saw, all those dead people, your relatives and friends, are stored in the amygdala. Within two days everyone is back to normal and thinking, “I don’t really remember what happened.”

We could say that Civil War soldiers stored violence they had done and seen in the amygdala. Then when they went West, and fought Indians, it came out of the amygdala.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Is there anything to be hopeful for?

BLY

I don’t know, that’s your problem. [everyone laughs] But I have a friend out here who works a lot helping farmers. He also built up this section of Spokane, about five years ago. And now he does all kinds of things, but he says that he has a hopeful place in him that he always keeps and he won’t allow it to be disturbed. At the same time, to be able to feel all the grief. Not to have it—the whole mind stuns, you don’t feel anything, it’s not that. You feel the grief that you have, and then you make sure that you have hopeful places. And that’s one thing that poetry does. If you get through a poem, I don’t care how much grief there is in a poem, at the end you’ll feel some hope. And that’s what poetry is. It’s a form of dance. And oftentimes—because you start dancing in a poem, I mean the vowels dance and the rhythm dances—by the end, your body receives an infusion of hope. More than it does from prose.

MCCANDLESS

Why’s that?

BLY

Because it’s a compressed form, so in order to make it lively, it has to have dance. The difference between poetry and prose, I think, is that in poetry, there are old, old ways of dancing with the vowels, consonants. And if you can’t dance, you can’t write poetry. Every time one reads Rilke, we see that he talks about the most serious things, but there’s always a feeling of great delight at the end. He’s a genius. So’s Kabir. We should put one of his poems in here.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Did you translate his book?

BLY

Yes. [Reads from “The Great Communion of Being” by Kabir.]

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains

and the maker of canyons

and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

Whew! That should be enough, huh? [Reads from “The Meeting” by Kabir.]

When my friend is away from me, I am depressed;

nothing in the daylight delights me,

sleep at night gives no rest,

who can I tell about this?

The night is dark, and long hours go by

because I am alone, I sit up suddenly,

fear goes through me

Kabir says: Listen, my friend,

there is one thing in the world that satisfies,

and that is a meeting with the Guest.

So, you can say that this exhilaration is the very opposite of the mood around the nafs. Kabir says that inside you there is an energy which is never cruel and always luminous. That’s the source of hope, and that’s why a saint will go out in the desert and spend twenty years, because sooner or later, that Guest will come along.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What did you say at the reading, about “The poet who really writes, standing there after you die?” I believe the poet’s last name was Jiménez—

BLY

Oh, yes. “I am not I.” That’s right. That’s the mood. [Quotes “I am not I” by Juan Ramón Jiménez]

I am not I. I am this one

Walking beside me whom I do not see,

Whom at times I manage to visit,

And at other times I forget.

The one who remains silent when I talk,

The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,

The one who will remain standing when I die.

It’s a great poem. He puts all he knows of “The Visitor” in one poem. “The one who remains silent while I talk.” So, as long as we talk so much, we can’t feel “The Visitor” to be present. “The Visitor” is the one who “forgives, sweet, when I hate.” The one “who takes a walk when I am indoors.” He’s pointing out the association of that secret one with nature. “The one who takes a walk when I am indoors. The one who will remain standing when I die.” I love this poem.

MCCANDLESS

Yesterday, you said something about the transparency of nature. Can you talk about that a little?

BLY

Maybe I could read you “Watering the Horse.”

How strange to think of giving up all ambition.

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!

There is something here that reminds us of some old Chinese poets. Once they had given up the idea of joining the Chinese Social Service, they’d drop out of ordinary life and become hobos. That was an aim of the sixties, too. Gary Snyder, for example, did that deliberately, knowing well that whole Chinese background. The idea is: “I’m not going to be a part of this. I’m just going to go out and build a little shack instead.” Then a strange thing sometimes happened: you would be able to see things in nature much more clearly. It was as if nature became transparent.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Did it actually work that way?

BLY

Yes.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Your poems that EWU Press just published: were these written in that Chinese mode, too?

BLY

Exactly. I wrote them in the late fifties and early sixties. It happened that I didn’t publish them at the time. So I went back one day and found them. I love that kind of poem. They aim somehow to catch the transparency of nature.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What do you mean by “the transparency?”

BLY

Okay. [Reads from “After Working”]

After many strange thoughts,

Thoughts of distant harbors, and new life,

I came in and found the moonlight lying in the room.

Outside it covers the trees like pure sound,

The sound of tower bells, or of water moving under the ice,

The sound of the deaf hearing through the bones of their heads.

We know the road; as the moonlight

Lifts everything, so in a night like this

The road goes on ahead, it is all clear.

The transparency suggests that we know the road. You long for something? You can do it. We know the road. I like that. You almost never feel that certainty in the city, but you feel it out in the country. I’m a very coarse person in many ways. You can see all these greedinesses in me and my passions. And my body is heavy. And yet, because I try to hold on to that transparency, my body has to put up with it.

One time, St. Francis and his friends were coming back from Rome, and they didn’t have much money. They walked and walked, and it was cold and raining. Finally they got to the house of friends. They knocked on the door, “Let us in!” “What are you robbers doing down there?” And someone threw hot water on them. “No, it’s Francis. It’s Francis and his friends! Let us in!” “Go away you robbers!” They dropped stones on them and trash. “Come on, let us in! It’s Francis!” And the people keep throwing stuff on them. And the people with Francis say, “This is terrible!” “No,” Francis said, “This is perfect joy.” You understand? Because all of that was good for defeating their nafs. They think they’re really something and these guys are throwing stuff on them.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Sometimes when you read, you come back to a poem that maybe you haven’t read in a while, and you seem genuinely surprised by something you said?

BLY

Maybe it’s good I have a bad memory. I was surprised last night when the man who introduced me asked me to read “The Hockey Poem.” “The Hockey Poem” isn’t transparent at all, it’s just funny. It’s about greed of various kinds. But I was surprised at how many jokes there were in it. I enjoyed that. And here is a nafs sentence about the goalie: [Reads from “The Hockey Poem.”]

This goalie with his mask is a woman weeping over the children

of men, who are cut down like grass, gulls standing with cold

feet on ice. And at the end, she is still waiting, brushing away

the leaves, waiting for the new children, developed by speed,

by war….

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What about madness—that’s something from the reading. You said we have to double the madness. You were talking about television and children—

BLY

The insanity of television is really ugly insanity. It’s shameless nafs insanity. We have children, and we let the television teach them? That’s insane. As a parent, it’s important to develop the insanity of art, which is a positive insanity, to meet that negative insanity. Because we had many kinds of art in the house, the positive insanity of art, the children were not quite as caught up with the other stuff. What I’m trying to say here is that parents have a new responsibility now. We used to be able to trust what was coming in. You can’t trust it anymore.

MCCANDLESS

Do you think kids are turning away from books?

BLY

Yes, of course. The figures of the percentage of children who read dropped from 60% in the last decade down to 50%, and now it’s down to 42%. And that’s in only about five or ten years. [pauses] Do you read to your children?

MCCANDLESS

I read to them every night.

BLY

That’s because you’re intelligent. Kids know there’s fun in that. My kids did, too. But we’re talking about developing “throw-aways.” We’re developing a culture that accepts the idea that three-quarters of children will be throw-aways, only good for buying cars and houses. And we’re not going to educate them, and we’re not going to tell them about God. We’re going to use them as throw-aways, to buy the things people manufacture. That’s ugly.

MCCANDLESS

The ultimate nafs civilization, isn’t it?

BLY

Yes, it is. This nafs-life is not what the United States was created for. So, we’re in some kind of trance in which we see these hideous things happening to our children and we don’t do anything about it. The nafs in television has a big hold on adults too.

MCCANDLESS

Is that a recent development, or was it apparent in other media before television?

BLY

You had to go out to see movies. Now, it’s right in the house. It’s sort of like having whores in the living room. Why not make the kitchen into a whorehouse—how would that be? We used to leave the house to see something really shoddy.

I don’t understand how we’re going to solve this, because we’ve trained human beings to be passive. Don’t walk, drive a car. Don’t make your food, buy it. That works for capitalism. Most Senators and Representatives have been bought by the corporations.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Then why even keep a place of hope?

BLY

Hope is what combats it. If you have hope, you pick up the book, turn off the TV. You’ve got to have hope for your children. Because that’s what it’s for. It’s feeding, you’ve got to feed them that hope. And that’s a divine thing that parents do.

MCCANDLESS

And cry when they don’t. Is it a primal thing in everyone, that has always been, or do we traditionally have a “counter-nafs?”

BLY

Joe Campbell told a story about that. He was living in Hawaii, and one day policemen saw a man who was about to jump over a cliff. The two policemen got out of their car. One policeman stepped over—it was very risky—and when the man jumped, he reached and caught him. And Joe said, “He risked his life to save the life of that other man. That’s what culture is.” The willingness to die for another is the opposite of the nafs.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You said at the reading that as you become more interested in culture, America moves away from it—

BLY

That fits along with the way we are becoming a nafs culture. If you really took on the obligation to help every human being in the serious way a Catholic nun takes her vow, you would be much more resistant to the wholesale lowering of human standards through television and buying presidents. I think it is built into the human being—this anti-nafs willingness to sacrifice oneself for another human being. Women do that whenever they give birth. I think that’s one reason men are more nafsish—women sacrifice every time they have a child. The nafs culture doesn’t support good motherhood.

MCCANDLESS

Do you think we’re exporting that to other countries?

BLY

I do, and that’s horrifying. Norway and Sweden, for instance, resist our ways. Sweden has wonderful laws for the protection of pregnant women, whether they’re married or not. They put a lot of money into that. Of course, here that would be knocked down by Tom DeLay. It’s interesting to think that since The United States has become the world leader in encouraging nafsish behavior and selfishness in all forms, we can’t expect a culture of serious book reading to continue, because it’s hard work. Students now are primarily visual; people graduate high school and college and they don’t read. Something infinitely important is being lost. Reading requires great effort. Observers tell the story of a grown man, an illiterate who decided to learn to read. It turned out he had to put blanket over himself eventually when he was reading because his body temperature actually fell two degrees from the effort. In the West, children start early, so we don’t recognize it, but it shows how much energy is required to take these little squiggles and turn them into thoughts and ideas. Reading requires a lot from the body. When kids don’t read, they’re losing something infinitely important. It isn’t only that we’ve become visual. We’re losing what we’ve spent a thousand years, two thousand years learning how to do.

---

Amy Tan has said that Louis B. Jones possesses, “one of the best minds of our generation.” This is high praise, but Jones is certainly a writer of uncommon skill and care, for whom the importance of writing lies in the everyday practice of art rather than the relentless pursuit of fame. He states that he wants “to write well, and as a consequence of having a readership, go through the publishing machine—which is not very good for human nature.” As the following conversation makes clear, for Mr. Jones writing fiction is the best way to discover truth in our lives. Despite his gimlet focus on healthy writing communities, he has published three acclaimed novels: Ordinary Money (1990), Particles and Luck (1995), and the 1997 Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, California’s Over.

Mr. Jones lives with his wife and family in Nevada City, California, where he serves as co-director of the Writers Workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, during which notable poets and writers from around the country gather to teach and write. He was kind enough to spend an afternoon with us at the Palm Court Grill in downtown Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you write exclusively in the novel form?

LOUIS B. JONES

I want to develop my short story skills. Look at what writers do with just a little tableau of events. What you can make out of circumstances is beautiful. I’m writing short stories right now, but even those go long, Alice Munro-length. I’m disinclined toward such an extremely concentrated artistic form that’s so crystalline. I’m just too used to getting below the surface of things. My narrative point of view is always deep, close, inside the complexity of people’s minds. Once I get into that point of view, it’s hard for me to pull back.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What about a book like California’s Over, which goes into many points of view?

JONES

I’m inside Wendy Farmican’s head, way close, for so much of that book—how she feels fat, what she wants, etc. I love being inside people’s heads; that’s where I’m comfortable. I’m especially fascinated by how we know things we don’t know, that we’re driven by motives; there are layers to our personalities, we actually have awarenesses we’re not aware we have on a conscious level. To be able to portray that in fiction is really hard. To be able to show “This is what’s driving the character,” that’s the aspect of psychology I’m interested in.

THOMAS KING

And in California’s Over, you do that with a variety of characters—

JONES

I hope I do it with all the work. I remember loving it—as an example—that Holden Caulfield was sweeter and more trusting than he thought. He wasn’t as cynical as he’d hoped; there was more forgiveness in the world. And that was a first-person unreliable narrator, so while he would be bragging about his sensibilities, complaining about how malicious the world is—about how there are no authentic human beings out there—behind that you can see that the world is warmer, and he is a warmer person than he realizes, so when he goes back home, the resolution of that conflict is that we know him better than he knows himself. I guess that’s a model for me. I use third person, but it’s a third that’s so close, so adaptive to the delusions and quirks of my characters, that it works almost like first person. When you’re inside of Wendy as a child, her misapprehensions about her world are as if she’s a first-person narrator.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel you do a similar thing with the adult Baelthon in California’s Over?

JONES

Yes. He’s a first-person narrator. The book starts out in his perspective, then suddenly develops an omniscient narrator. When we reach Wendy in the basement, looking for her father’s ashes, the first-person narrator, Baelthon, is floored by how attractive she is to him, then the narration follows her up the corridor and moves into her third-person point of view. It’s a little like walking through the wall or into the fifth dimension. Most people don’t notice that. The first-person switches to third.

KING

As a reader, it is hard to notice the shift. How did you achieve that seamlessness?

JONES

I think I was fortunate in two ways. One is that I was able to have the main character confess, on the page before, that this was going to be the woman of his life, that this was his obsession. That licenses him to follow her, gives him enough knowledge to almost know what she did in the minutes after she met him. In practical terms, because she might have told him a year later, it becomes part of their myth. I also did it with enough force that it’s like hitting warp speed in your spaceship. If you don’t ask permission, just do it without any fuss, it can work. But it was interesting to me technically, too. I was writing a book, fishing around.

KING

Did that come naturally to you, or was it the product of revision?

JONES

It came naturally. It just happened, so I let it continue to happen. What I thought was the big experiment in that book was the flash-forwards. I thought, Can I have a story where readers will know how things will turn out in thirty years, then flash back and forth and back and forth, where some times you’re in 1970 and sometimes you’re in 2000? Will foreknowledge ruin or enhance the narration of a present-time moment or a past-time moment? I hate flashbacks; I think you should avoid them at all costs, unless there is an urgent appetite to find out something from the past that will directly affect the present narration. But I used flashbacks anyway, devising that every time I went back into a flashback the reader would think, “Oh, good—we can finally see what happened,” and not, “Okay, I guess I’ll keep reading.” I think plot is a huge, important technical aspect.

KING

To what extent do you structure your plot beforehand?

JONES

About half and half. I have a general idea of where the arc is going to land. But it’s much better waking up not knowing. That’s what gets me out of bed at 3:00 in the morning—knowing I have to jump up and figure out what to say instead of following some outline.

KING

Any examples of fortunate surprise?

JONES

My first novel, Ordinary Money, is about not just counterfeit money, but a perfect counterfeit that creates a kind of metaphysical and moral dilemma. I have these teenage girls who are my main characters in a suburban mall, and on about page twenty, they go to Shakey’s Pizza and they’re talking about some boy, and giving each other fashion advice, and one says to the other, “You need new earrings.” And the other girl says, “Yeah, but this ear is latex.” She had birth defects. That was a case where I was tired of myself by page twenty, and I wanted to make something bizarre happen. So I thought, I’m going to give her a rubber ear, implanted by cosmetic surgery, because she was missing an ear at birth. It turned out to be really useful and interesting, because it gave her emotional and psychological trouble that pertained to what was going on in the book. It was a big, ninety degree turn that paid off. I discovered it on the page and it tied the whole book together in a way.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel your work is character driven, even though your plots are so intricate?

JONES

Characters decide the story. You know those books about how to write, with the chapters on plot, setting, language—all the elements. I think character is the one that drives all the others. You can think it’s about language or think it’s about theme, but each element has to consult character to find out what happens next. Even down to how a sentence is put together. It’s an old-fashioned point of view to believe that; I’m completely saturated with the postmoderns, moderns, with declarations like “The character is dead” and so on. I take a great deal of interest in such attitudes, but I can’t use them upon my own workbench. I’m kind of a fuddy-duddy.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You have said in other interviews that you don’t care if your work is discovered until after you’re dead—

JONES

That’s a nice, cute way to think about it. But the whole business of writing is death-oriented. You put words on the page, and then you’re absent. Your true reader, your soulmate, your true love finds you, and you’re absent. They’ll be in some armchair in Florida or Texas or New Jersey, crack your book at some bookstore, and they’re your person.

KING

Did you start writing with that ideal?

JONES

No, I think it’s grown on me. Any time writers are in a situation where they’re talking about their book, they should just say “Read the book.” I hope it doesn’t sound affected to say this—but I truly believe that I don’t need to meet Jane Austen, but, boy did she make my life better. I learned how to live by reading dead authors. I don’t need to meet Marcel Proust, either. He might turn out to disappoint me. But his books are great.

KING

I know you’re working on a novel right now. What do you hope for the future of your publishing career?

JONES

I don’t know. I’m so hypocritical. Where does my hypocrisy lie? I want to have a great career, but I don’t want a great career. I want to write well, and as a consequence of having a readership, go through the publishing machine—which however is not very good for human nature. Fortunately, unlike actors and musicians, we don’t necessarily have to go through it. Actors and musicians have to suffer the exultations and degradations of that completely phony world to practice their art, and they have to personally be there. It helps if you’re like Charles Dickens, always going along pumping yourself. That’s probably good for your career. But you can also be like Franz Kafka. Or Jane Austen: she didn’t need a great public life.

KING

You’ve said part of the allure of writing for you is the ability to join the conversation of literature, to add to the body of life-changing fiction. At this point in your career, with several acclaimed novels and many years of writing experience, where do you see yourself in that ongoing conversation?

JONES

I think where I got that idea is from Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books of the Western World” series, published by University of Chicago Press. It’s like the canon of all the great books, with uniform bindings—Plato and Aristotle, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, you know. And the introduction that Adler made to the series was titled “The Great Conversation.” I grew up with these volumes in my middle-class, middle-western house, with the gold foil letters on their spines. Plato. Dante. The great conversation. That’s where the metaphor comes from. I don’t know if my books have a place in that conversation.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think MFA programs help writers get there?

JONES

Yes, I think so. They provide somewhere for writers to be for a couple years. They shake them up. So I think they’re great. I was thirty-something when I went to one, and I had written three unpublished novels. Because I was always outside the publishing mainstream, always taking terrible risks. Walking straight off the trail.

KING

Do you want to find a readership for those earlier novels?

JONES

I suppose so. I sure don’t make judgments as to whether a book is good or bad based on publication. That doesn’t make sense. Some of the greatest books in the world are really bad books. Like Moby-Dick. Ulysses. Remembrance of Things Past. They’re obsessed, peculiar books.

On the other hand, a bunch of really mediocre books are sleek pieces of craft. It’s not even the interesting question to me, whether a book is good or bad. Just whether it’s necessary.

KING

You say there’s a strong presence of the author in your books; what do you think is the role of a writer’s morality in his or her work?

JONES

Morality? I’m so morally decrepit myself, I hope that doesn’t get into my books. [Laughs.] I think I’m very present. You know when you look at a Vincent van Gogh painting, the first thing you’re looking at is some mad guy’s brush strokes, his color choices, but there’s more than that. You look through that, and you see how it feels to be on the Paris street or out in the farmlands on a cloudy day. The brushstrokes are there, so you have to pay attention to them, but I hope that in my writing you can look through them. I’m a little bit of a “lay it on heavy” writer, so there are a lot of brush strokes, a lot of language. Sometimes the metaphor, or the long sentence that has a lot of grammatical stuff going on, might be hard to follow if your momentum is not there. So that’s the sense in which I’m present in my writing. Customarily you want the writing to be a clear window that the reader can look right through, but when you read one of my books, there’s all of this “writing.” It is my hope, that like the work of an impressionist painter, you can see through the brush strokes, and you can actually get the feeling for Wendy, and Peter, and Baelthon, and that whole bunch of people. It’s back to the character. Character, character, character.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

But it seems like you tightly edit your lines—

JONES

There is a lot happening in those sentences. Something I’ve been told is that my writing tends to slow the eye. I write assuming people will read each word. To me that’s what the medium is.

KING

In Particles and Luck, the protagonist is a fortunate young physicist—fortunate being a word you use to describe him on the first page—whose early success thrusts him into the vanguard of his field.

How comfortable were you entering the field of physics in the novel? How much research did the book require?

JONES

I remember liking a book called Cosmic Code by Heinz R. Pagels, but just go to any bookstore and look on the physics shelf. They have all these wonderful, attractive titles, and they explain how bizarre the world we live in is, what it’s made of, these little clouds of thought. Physicists are truly having to become religious—or at least metaphysical—because it’s so bizarre, what they’re getting down to. You know, the question, “What are things made of?” is kind of an emergency for some people. So, I just read a lot on that subject. And I had taken a lot of calculus when I was in the university, so I was able to follow certain parts of it. There’s a crucial thing called Bell’s Theorem that depends upon an equation that I was—rather closely—able to follow mathematically.

KING

After you finish a draft of a novel, do you check it against sources?

JONES

I guess it varies from book to book. Ordinary Money had a good amount of research in it, because I had to find out how both counterfeit and real money were made. So I went to the mint in Washington, DC. I also researched the Secret Service, which is the law enforcement branch assigned to protecting the image and value of paper money. And I made up a lot. You can make up research. I simply sketched the world according to a whim, then found something out in the world that corroborated—isn’t that the purpose of research anyway? Particles and Luck was incredibly research-oriented; in fact, it’s an interesting book because it tries to be about something other than fiction. It’s trying to be about what things are made of and I think it’s one of the reasons some critics, whom I agree with, think of it as a failure as a novel; or, not a failure, but it’s trying to do something novels shouldn’t do. The Washington Post guy said that, Jonathan Yardley, who has loved everything else I wrote. And he’s right. It’s an odd book.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What do you mean, “What a novel shouldn’t do?”

JONES

Well, in the end, Particles and Luck is partly about what things are made of, instead of whether Mark Perdue’s marriage will return to solid ground. I mean, it’s a book about marriage and fidelity, but it’s also a book about atoms and electrons. You have to pay attention to the science if you read it. I think that disagreed with Yardley. And I understand. But as I said, a book’s defects—as with Proust, or Walt Whitman, or name anybody—you have to use your defects. And Particles and Luck was a book that was born the way it was born.

KING

The narration of Particles and Luck is so different from the more sprawling California’s Over because the action takes place during the course of one twenty-four hour period. What were the benefits and limitations of that structure?

JONES

I think readers enjoy the cozy sense of being inside a set time. It makes the reader feel very much at home. But perhaps the limitation—the danger that it creates for its author—is that I thought I had a plot structure because I had the day. But I really didn’t. What’s at stake is Mark Perdue’s fidelity. He’s been married for three weeks, his secretary kisses him, and he has this kind of longing. You know he’s not going to act on the longing; he’s kind of like Holden Caulfield in that way. You know he’s not going to do it, but you can play with the expectation. And also what’s at stake is his relationship with his neighbor, Roger Hoberman. He’s kind of a hapless character. Maybe the book is about two men, two different approaches. Roger is not as pretentious as Mark Perdue; he’s a more grateful guy. In a way, you’d want Roger for a friend, and not my main character, Mark Perdue. Anyway, so the book does have a plot, in the sense that those problems are resolved, but I might have fallen into the trap of thinking that I had a plot because I had a time structure. A single day. Time structure is not a plot. To have a bunch of things happen in a series is not a plot; there has to be moral cause and resolve.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think California’s Over comes to a resolution at the end?

JONES

I like novels that end in sleep. So, when Wendy is able to roll over and go to sleep, and Steve is pleased with that, it seems to mean that after all these years they have something like a marriage. That after all the betrayal and disloyalty and remorse, she’s come to see him again and she’s gone to sleep. That means that, after thirty years, they’ll still be married. Sleep is a form of faith.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Does California’s Over mirror how life still is in some of those northern California towns?

JONES

It’s kind of a novel about the bohemian trip, which kind of ends in suicide. In fact, I just started thinking about how I began writing this book right when Kurt Cobain shot himself. There was something about his suicide that really made me mad, got under my skin. I took it personally when Cobain shot himself. And that’s what is really behind California’s Over. There’s this old house where Dad was the beatnik, it’s holy to commit suicide, and the novel is about the children who have to continue living after that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Some critics suggested you were condemning 1960s culture, but I didn’t read the book that way.

JONES

There was a lot of narcissism then. But what I thought was wonderful was what they called the Beat movement. Hippies and that other crowd came later, but some of the original impulse behind that counterculture was to overcome pretentiousness. It became interested in Asian philosophy in a way that did not exist before. It embraced pacifism. It made friends with African-American culture and Latino culture, making the country a million times more interesting. It defied the social-class barriers that had been set up over time. But I think we are a better country now because of what they achieved. Now we go around with our backpacks and our Birkenstocks. There’s a moment in The Dharma Bums where the Gary Snyder character goes into a bar and the Ginsberg character says, You’ve got to meet my friend Jaffy Ryder, he’s great, he’s a Buddhist, man, and look: he wears sandals and carries a rucksack. Fifty years later, everybody is wearing sandals, carrying a backpack, and studying Buddhism. Snyder walked into a North Beach bar in 1945 or 1947 and met Kerouac, but he was the first, he was like the spore. On the whole, I think those are wonderful changes. The book California’s Over is about a later, cracked-up period.

KING

Your novels take place in a very specific region, in Terra Linda, California—how do you avoid the limitations of regionalism? How do you make sure that the book is about more than Terra Linda?

JONES

I guess it’s a publishing business question, whether the book is going to be of interest to anybody in one region or another. In that little town of Terra Linda that I always write about, I think very few people read. So if I were just going to be The Terra Linda Writer I wouldn’t sell any books. It’s interesting, I’m not as big in California and the West as I am in New York and Chicago and Washington, DC. I am a Midwestern person who went out to California with a Midwesterner’s stubborn skepticism, so I’ll always be a little alien to that place. I think there are ironies in my books that most Californians don’t get. For example, the movie business keeps working on Ordinary Money. Ordinary Money will always be under option, because everybody thought, “Oh, it’s about counterfeit money, we could make a movie out of it.” But Hollywood producers and directors really don’t get the book. I think Californians don’t see the irony of California civilization, whereas in New York they know. A lot of people want their books to be made into movies. That’s a vanity fair, there. But it’s a happy thing to just keep getting option checks every year and never have the movie made. You know who really did well with that? Evan S. Connell wrote Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. There was a movie made of those, I think it was called Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, with Paul Newman. The books are masterpieces of what is not said. The books are made up of all these short scenes, and what’s partly great about the books is everything he doesn’t say about the characters’ lives. The author is so angry with the bourgeois civilization of Kansas City, where he grew up, and he knows it so well: the country clubs and the cars packed into garages. They’re among the greatest books of our time. Those books went in and out of option for years. He got checks and checks and checks and finally Paul Newman made a not-very-good movie out of them. The movie was forgettable, but then he got a big pot of gold at the end, which is nice. The kind of guy I feel bad for is Thomas Berger, who wrote Little Big Man, a wonderful novel. They made a very good movie out of it. So if they’re going to make a movie out of your book, either they’ll make a bad movie, so you’ll have that kind of trouble, or they’ll make a really good movie, and that will be a different kind of trouble: it somehow covers up what you did. Little Big Man was his best book, and it was a medium-sized hit in its time, but the movie was so good that it exploded the old book. I’m ambivalent about the movie business. I want to stay away from it. I’d like to get money from it, you know, but not ever have to work inside. It’s a different world. It’s all showbiz.

KING

You mentioned last night that you’re reading a little less fiction these days. So I wonder: if you were starting your career today, would you still be drawn to being a novelist, or would you tend toward non-fiction?

JONES

I was drawn to writing because I wanted to study everything and know everything. I know it sounds naïve, but that’s what I wanted to do. I think my instincts led me to believe that what truth there is, is in fiction. In psychology and sociology and even physics, which presumes so much objectivity, they run smack into subjectivity. The assumption of objectivity is one of the first things I dispensed with in my life. Somehow fiction, with its useful versions of reality, is the right risk to take. Whenever you read history you quickly realize that it’s fiction. If you care, and look closely, it’s all fiction. There’s something about the world of writing novels that acknowledges subjectivity as an existential fact, and then transforms it into some truth about our lives. So in a way, I think fiction is the only thing.

---

Lawence Sutin grew up in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. His parents, whose oral history he chronicled in Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance (1995), were Jewish partisan fighters during the Holocaust. “Given that I was raised in a family where there was a legacy of pain,” he says, “there was a middle time in my life where I simply needed to be on my own and find out who I was.” A Postcard Memoir (2000), his collection of lyric essays in dialogue with samples from his postcard collection, reflects a self-awareness that is gentle, affable, and dark. He is also the author of Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (2000) and Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989).

Though he knew from a young age that he wanted to write, he early on pursued a degree in law from Harvard University, he says, “out of fear of the world.” Currently he teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul and the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College.
Mr. Sutin was interviewed over lunch at the Silver City Grill, in Spokane, Washington.

BRIAN O’GRADY

What is a typical day or week of writing like for you?

LAWRENCE SUTIN

I write, say, four or five days a week for roughly three to four hours. I like to work steadily. I have come to a point in my life where if I don’t write for a few days I actually miss it. I’m not one of these writers that has to drag themselves to the desk, feeling a great sorrow about the difficulty of the task at hand. Writing is a tremendous joy and I’m fortunate to get to do it.

O’GRADY

How long did it take you to get to that point?

SUTIN

That’s a good question, because I had always wanted to be a writer, but by virtue of always wanting to be a writer I became very frightened of it because it meant so much to me. What happened was, as an undergraduate I wrote something that a writing instructor really liked that was almost published in the Antioch Review, and when it was not I went through a kind of despair and a few years of writer’s block. So in my later twenties I had to fight through a kind of anxiety about the writing process, which I did with might and main and ever since then I’ve been very careful to like it very much. So, yes, I went through some difficult years getting on my feet as a writer, believing it was something I could be, overcoming the sense that it was exalted and unapproachable, which I think is a tremendous mistake for writers. Obviously, what you have to do is write a great deal and achieve more and more comfort and intimacy in the process.

JOAL LEE

Did a specific incident change that for you?

SUTIN

I wouldn’t say there was a specific incident, no. I think it was my own realization that the only way to develop as a writer was to put aside all those self-critical and anxious reasons that would deflect one from doing so. Those were barriers to my realization and happiness—you just train your mind to stop doing that, and trust far more in the process rather than get all anxious about what the process might be like.

LEE

In A Postcard Memoir and Jack and Rochelle, you mention your father’s desire to write. How much did that desire influence you?

SUTIN

I don’t think it influenced me a great deal because as I grew up he did not manifest his desire to write. He was already engaged in making a living and supporting a family and it came up very rarely. His desire to write was more closely associated to journalistic writing than mine was—I did some journalism along the way but I was never that drawn to it. I can’t say it was a huge influence other than sort of a recognition that life’s circumstances had impelled him away from writing and that I wished to remain certain that life’s circumstances did not do the same to me. But his life was very different than mine—far different pressures than mine.

O’GRADY

The pieces in A Postcard Memoir are mostly short, under a few hundred words. Do you work in the longer-form essay or memoir?

SUTIN

Oddly enough, I don’t do that much in the way of essays. Over the years I’ve published book reviews and essays here and there, but I tend to be oriented towards books. My longer-form essays have been biographies, and I’ve just completed a history of relations between Buddhism and the West from roughly 500 BCE to the present day. When I wish to go long, I go very long. Right now I’m working on a novel, in the form of a series of interconnected short forms. I am drawn to shorter forms in creative writing, drawn to trying to write a prose that blurs the distinctions between poetry and prose. But I also feel that my own natural inclination when telling stories or recalling memoir is to focus on distinct, vivid scenes rather than lacing in a great deal of connective tissue which doesn’t seem—at least in my case—to be the essence of my narrative. And I suppose to some extent—I don’t know if I was directly influenced by it but I agree strongly with it—the preface to Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones—I wish I could quote him verbatim; I can’t—where he talks about the possibility for writers to get to the heart, the essence, of a situation without the four- or five-hundred-page novel that seems to explore a situation. It is getting to the heart of a situation, and yet having sufficient depth so it isn’t a skimming, that is my aesthetic, that’s guiding me in my writing. So I’m very drawn to short forms.

On the other hand, when I work in other kinds of nonfiction—biography or history—I tend to go more in the direction of exhaustive exploration in the writing, so there’s kind of a systole-diastole in my aesthetic. In certain nonfiction forms, I just write and write and write, and hundreds of pages, even thousands, are fine, at least in draft. Whereas, for something like A Postcard Memoir, I was concerned with having very precise, distilled pieces that conveyed a great deal.

LEE

In A Postcard Memoir you bend a lot of rules. Do you find the conventions of literary nonfiction to be constraining?

SUTIN

Well, not to be naïve or self-effacing, but I’m not sure which rules I bend. I’m saying, frankly, that my goal was not so much to bend rules. My sense in wanting to write this memoir was not, is not, that my life is interesting as a series of consecutive events—I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. That was not interesting to me, and hence I concluded it would not be interesting to my readers. The other thing I concluded was that my life, to the extent that it had meaning in a memoir context, was largely a series of what you might call inner realizations and emotional states, rather than great events. Unlike my parents in Jack and Rochelle, which is very much a historical memoir concerned with events, time, place, my memoir is not. My memoir is very much an exploration, you might say, of consciousness, emotion, realization, development. So in that sense I guess if there were any tradition of creative nonfiction that I felt that I was bending, I do often feel in reading memoir as though the inner life of the writer or the characters of the memoir are scantily portrayed in comparison to external events upon which the writer may reflect for a time. I wanted to write a memoir that was directed toward inner experience because that was what I had to offer. So in that sense I was aware that I was writing a relatively eventless memoir. There is no great scene in it where X happens and the reader goes, “Oh, my gosh! Really?” At least not to my knowledge. But then again, maybe that was fortunate in terms of my life.

LEE

It seems A Postcard Memoir follows a loose chronological order. If it were roughly broken into thirds, which it isn’t, it seems like the first third, before you went to college, involved more narrative; in the middle portion, kind of the college, post-college years, it seemed to have more engagement with your interiority; and again, after you got married and became a parent, it seemed to kind of pull the two together with a little more narrative. The first third and the last third seemed to involve more family. How does family interact with writing?

SUTIN

I have never thought of my memoir as divided into thirds, but, as you mention it, I can’t say that you’re wrong. I get what you’re saying. It wasn’t part of my conscious methodology but I think it’s a good point and I would say this: you might say that the early years of my life and the later years of my life and the present are certainly far more concerned with living within a family context and the attempt to make sense of one’s own evolution coupled with the demands, the heartache and the passions involved in being, to use the old Buddhist and Hindu term, a “householder.” In the middle years of my life I think I was engaged in an escape from family and social structures altogether, as I was in the midst of trying to discover myself as a writer. And particularly those years of my life when I was redefining myself in that sense, I was engaged in a great deal of inner reflection, doubt, uncertainty. My own identity seemed blurry to me, and that may account for the more introspective, fantastical, psychological orientation of the middle section of the book.

If your question also refers to the process of writing while living within family, I think for many writers there seems to be kind of a dissonance there. They wish to be engaged in family and yet feel that the demands of, let’s say, marriage or parenting or maintaining a household, are detrimental to their writing. I don’t feel that. As a matter of fact I feel quite inspired by the circumstances of family life now to work even harder as a writer, and I love the admixture of working alone in my office for several hours at a stretch and then popping back upstairs and rejoining this social entity which is family. That immersion into solitude and then re-emergence into family is a lovely thing to have in my life.

O’GRADY

Was that ever a problem for you, something you had to work at?

SUTIN

Yes, very much. Given that I was raised in a family where there were parents whose love for me was clear but whose emotional needs were also very strong, I think there was a middle time in my life where I simply needed to be on my own and find out who I was. It took me years of effort to find out that I could write and respect who I was, as opposed to write and pretend to be someone else.

LEE

I’m curious about that. Your parents’ story is very different from your own. Historically, it’s very important; there’s a lot of emotion, a lot of difficult, horrible experiences. You wrote their story before you wrote your own memoir. Did the shadow of the bigness of that intimidate you in writing your own memoir?

SUTIN

No. When I teach memoir, I try not to be self-referential, but once in a while people ask the question, “Well, what is creative nonfiction and is that an oxymoron? If it’s creative and it’s nonfiction, what’s going on?” You’ve heard these paradoxes and dilemmas about the genre. What I try to tell people is there are many different types of memoir just as there are many different types of visual portraiture. My parents’ memoir, in which I served the function, essentially, of a documentary filmmaker, sort of taking their words, giving them the native English they didn’t have, and arranging the narrative, was very much a historical memoir in the sense that I wanted it to stand as history, as fact, as events that could be trusted and believed as such. I’ve been gratified to see that historians have quoted the book and that it’s formed part of the teaching materials of the United States Holocaust Museum. So that’s all very good. In that sense, the type of memoir I produced about my parents was very much like an official portrait you might see hanging in a capitol building or the like, where the goal of the portrait is to portray something of the actual person, exactly how they looked, how they dressed, the context of their public lives.

In the case of A Postcard Memoir, as I’ve indicated, the portrayal of events was not the heart of it. Nobody’s going to read A Postcard Memoir to find out where I went to school or what I did after school. Presumably they’ll be reading it for other reasons pertaining to style, emotional portrayal, artistic portrayal and the like. I was released from the bonds of facticity. I could employ fantasy; I could employ dreams, reverie, contradictory emotional states and the like with complete freedom because my life, blessedly, has no historical significance. In that sense my own memoir is much more like an expressionist painting or a cubist painting, where the goal is not that kind of precise rendering of what this person looked like, but rather trying to convey the essence of a life by whatever artistic means you feel are necessary. When you look at a German expressionist painting and you see a purple stripe drawn across a forehead or a cheek, you don’t conclude that the person actually had that purple stripe. You conclude that there is an emotional or aesthetic aim involved. There are many different types of memoir. I didn’t feel any shadow from the memoirs on my parents. I actually felt a sense of relief and freedom, quite honestly.

O’GRADY

You did the biographies of Phillip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley. What was it that turned you on to them?

SUTIN

I tend to write books without knowing why I’m writing them, and that seems to be a comfortable place for me as a writer. I don’t begin with a lot of preconceptions or goals. I just begin with a sense of, “Wow, this really interests me, I want to do it.” But looking back I can see that what attracted me both to Phillip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley was that both of them worked in despised genres: science fiction, which, at least among literary folks, is still considered trash, and what you might call the Western esoteric tradition or, more brutally, the occult, which is even trashier than science fiction in the minds of most educated people. But both Phillip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley are absolutely brilliant writers, in very different ways.

O’GRADY

In a craft sense?

SUTIN

Crowley very much in a craft sense. He was a marvelous stylist and a very fine writer by the most traditional standards of style. Phillip K. Dick wrote his books at white heat, very quickly, to make a living. I don’t know that most of his books stand up as things of purely stylistic beauty, but in terms of imaginative and visionary quality they’re as fine as any novels an American has produced in the last few decades. Both Dick and Crowley had a fascination with spiritual and philosophical issues and sought to understand the universe, see it whole, explain it whole—which is impossible, in my view—and yet both of them were passionate about trying to do so. I do not myself seek to do so but I am fascinated by people who do. So really, then, they’re like siblings in my head. I had this sort of rescuing complex, thinking that if I wrote insightful biographies of them they would be revalued and seen as worthy of serious consideration. Now, I think that has happened with Phillip K. Dick. It’s not solely, or even mainly, because of my biography, but from the time I worked on that biography to the present day, fifteen years later, I think his reputation and esteem has quadrupled, if I may make up a pointless and inaccurate statistic. Aleister Crowley is still where I found him in a despised genre, but I would simply say to listeners and readers of this interview, particularly to writers, that if they want to read a book that reveals an intersection between creative nonfiction, poetry, and metaphysical speculation, The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley is a damn good book. And Magic in Theory and Practice is a brilliant examination of human psychology, philosophy, and the use of the mind for creative endeavors.

LEE

In your writings, you often bring up religion—Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity. Maybe you could talk some about the intersection between religion and writing.

SUTIN

It’s very difficult, to my taste, anyway, to discuss spiritual issues in writing. I’m not a formal religionist of any kind, and yet the questions that religion asks are very important and I would imagine that most people, whether they are religious or not, ask the same sorts of questions as they go through their lives. I am fascinated by the types of questions that are raised in religious contexts, and yet I’m unsatisfied with the solutions that any religion has propounded. So I am amongst those writers who draw from time to time from spiritual traditions and sometimes play with them and distort them deliberately without accepting any one of them as the absolute truth that they wish to be. To me, it seems that one of the things that writing can do is carve out a reality of spiritual explorations outside the confines of religion while not ignoring the religious history of humankind. That’s, I think, where I place myself: that I get to ask spiritual questions and even occasionally hint at spiritual nostrums of my own without accepting any dogma or doctrine whatsoever. So it’s really a fascination with the questions rather than an acceptance of any doctrine.

I suppose I should make clear that even though I have just completed a history of relations between Buddhism and the West, and I’m deeply drawn to Buddhist texts and I actually read them for enjoyment, I would be loathe to call myself a Buddhist or an “-ist” of any sort. But asking spiritual questions is part of what interests me about writing. And even as I say that, the word “spiritual” has so many layers of affectation and sugarcoatedness to it that I wish there were another word that could be used as a shorthand for what I’m talking about, but I’ve searched around for it and I haven’t found it.

LEE

Do you find as you’re examining these questions that the religious stereotypes or the conclusions that are already there get in your way?

SUTIN

They used to. Part of what happens in my writing—I’m not sure if it comes out in the actual contact but in the process of it—is liberating myself as best I can from the preconceptions, stereotypes, dogmatic-truth claims that I grew up with from the Jewish and Christian traditions. One of the most exciting things to me about writing is the feeling that writers can ask questions and be true to their own experience without needing to adhere or kowtow to any doctrine whatsoever. But I think it’s difficult to grow up in the world as we now know it and be utterly blank in terms of knowledge of what religions have had to say, or, in my case, to avoid some fascination with what religions have had to say. So, sometimes I use it as material, but I use it as material in the same way that I might use an embarrassing experience at a high school dance as material—it’s all the same sort of material.

LEE

In Jack and Rochelle, your father admits that he doesn’t have the desire to ever return to Poland. Do you have that desire yourself? Have you been to Poland?

SUTIN

No, I have not been to Poland. I don’t have the desire, and the reason is really the same as that of my parents: nothing, essentially, is left of the world in which they lived. The people were killed, for the most part. If they weren’t killed, they left Poland after the war. The buildings, the towns that my parents grew up in were largely decimated by the war. So there’s nothing for me to go back and look at. I grew up being imbued so strongly by the stories my parents told. The reality of that is sufficiently within me. I think going back to Poland would be hunting for something that no longer existed; it would be, at best, a hope of coming upon some archive with perhaps a few photographs. But if I want archives or photographs, I can go to New York. There are archives and photographs there.

What happened in Poland was so ghastly—what happened in Europe during the Holocaust was so ghastly—that my desire to go see it, at least for myself, I’d compare to, let’s say, a woman who had been raped wanting to go back to the scene of her rape. Perhaps some would, perhaps some wouldn’t. I’m in the second category. It’s not any hatred of Poland, per se; there’s just nothing there for me to go back to.

LEE

Do you find that, as a child of Holocaust survivors, when you write, the awareness of the horrible side of humanity separates you from people who have a hard time conceiving of that?

SUTIN

Yes. And when I say it separates me, there’s a lot of misery in the world and I don’t wish to claim a lion’s share of it, or even my parents’ share. The Holocaust was horrible but there are many other horrible events in history. Let’s make it clear that I think many people are very fully aware of the more unfortunate aspects of human nature. But it certainly separates me from people who have a sort of blithe optimism of human nature. I remember a Crosby, Stills and Nash song that came out when I was in college—“Teach Your Children Well,” I think is the name of the song—but it was this very optimistic song that proclaimed if we could just teach everybody peace, love, and understanding what a wonderful world it would be. I remember listening to it back then and thinking, “This is a beautiful song. And it’s complete crap.” And I would say I felt a sense of separation at that time and I continue to feel sometimes a sense of separation from people who are blithely cheery about human endeavors, human ambitions, human aspirations as though we are not capable of a great deal of good and a great deal of evil. I’m always aware that history is difficult and heartbreaking, with a great deal of suffering, and I expect it to remain so and that does definitely inform my vision, yes. But that doesn’t make me a misanthrope. I still feel there is something good in human nature. But there is also something very foul in human nature, and I don’t suppose it’s news to anyone that each one of us has to struggle with that. I’m not a utopianist by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t believe in a progress of humanity to a better and better future. I think we will have peaks and valleys and struggles and misery and perhaps some light as well.

O’GRADY

Would you talk about your current project?

SUTIN

I’m working on a novel composed of interlocking shorts, something in the style of A Postcard Memoir, and the working title of it is When to Go Into the Water. It is an entirely fictional account of a strange man growing up in the east of France who leaves his family and his culture behind and travels around the world and experiences a great many things. Oddly enough many of them have to do with water and when to go into it. I think I’ve whetted the future reader’s appetite enough by saying that much. I’m interested in working in fictional forms more and more since I don’t know that I have another memoir to write.

O’GRADY

What is the time period of the novel?

SUTIN

Late 19th century through early 20th century, far removed from our reality.

O’GRADY

Have you thought about working more in biography?

SUTIN

No, I will never do biography again. I’m announcing that to the world. And the reason for that is, as I was working on the Crowley biography, the second one, I thought, “Why on earth have I done the same thing twice?” Having written two biographies I can say that, even though I think biographies are interesting books and worth writing and all that, for me they’re extraordinarily confining. That is because there’s sort of this set of iron manacles—you extend your arm, and then you are handcuffed to your subject and you have to cover their entire life. As a biographer you don’t get to say, “You know, these ten years here, not a whole lot happened that was really that interesting. I think I’ll just fast-forward.” You have to talk about those damn ten years, unless you’re going to write a very kind of episodic form of biography which doesn’t fulfill most readers’ desires. I ultimately found biography to be an extraordinarily restrictive genre. The first time through it, with Philip K. Dick, I had a great deal of fun, but the second time through, with Aleister Crowley, I thought, “I’m doing the same damn thing over again. I’m stuck with this guy’s life and I have to talk about every year of it.” That doesn’t mean that I think I wrote a bad book, just that I was compelled to retain a certain form. No, I will never, ever go back to it.

Now, I’ve just completed a history and that was way more fun because, since I was dealing with 2,500 years of relations between Buddhism and the West, and no one could possibly expect me to cover every day and every month of 2,500 years, there was a great deal of freedom in deciding upon what I felt was important. So I would say that, for me, that’s a far more appealing genre. I should add that I find history to be as creative as other forms of creative nonfiction. I think it’s a shame that writers of creative nonfiction sometimes feel that memoir is it, or memoir and travel books are it, and the fact is you can write about anything as a nonfiction writer and make it creative if you bring your voice and vision to it.

O’GRADY

You wrote the history as a creative writer and not as an historian?

SUTIN

Well, since I don’t have a Ph.D. in history, I suppose I’m a creative writer. I’m a megalomaniac in terms of what writers can do in the field of nonfiction. If I have one thing to say to the nonfiction writers of the world, it’s that you can write about anything you want if you bring your intellect and your passion to it. I think one of the things that writers can do better than historians, for the most part, is write. They know how to create a narrative with interest and depth, they know how to discern between significant material, and because of their training, which is different from that of the typical academic historian, they have a greater freedom of allowing their voice to come in and interpret. All those things seem to me to be strengths in historical narrative. So I would claim that I’ve written a work of history, but I have written it as a highly informed, fanatically researching creative writer. And I feel that I can write about anything I care to. Which doesn’t mean I’m excused from knowing the facts, just that I can combine my writing skills with the facts and produce a book that I think has a creative voice. Creative nonfiction as a genre has restricted itself to some degree in recent years. If you go back to, say, the beginning of the century, it was frequently the case that writers would write history, biography, essays, memoir, travel, and poetry. That’s what a man or a woman of letters was—someone who wrote about subjects that interested them. We seem to have narrower categories now—poets can write poetry and maybe some essays on the side, and fiction writers, of course, can write novels or short stories. Creative nonfiction writers can write memoir, travel, or essays of a certain type. But I’m rather fond of seizing the entire world as subject matter and any type of book as potential subject. So that’s my outlook and I’ve managed to deceive enough people to enable me to go on doing it.

LEE

You got your law degree at Harvard. Are you still practicing?

SUTIN

I’ve not practiced law in over twenty years.

LEE

Why did you go to law school?

SUTIN

Well, I went to law school because, having grown up in a Holocaust family, where a great deal of fear and anxiety about the nature of the world was conveyed to me, law seemed to be a security blanket. The world is a frightening place, it’s difficult to survive in it. How writers make a living, when I was in my teens and early twenties, I had no clue. And the idea of an MFA track, frankly, had never crossed my mind. It was not a prominent option at the time. I was frightened of the world and I thought, “Well, I’m smart, I can deal with words, I can be a lawyer.” But I found very quickly that I was not a lawyer in any way, shape, or form, that there was nothing about the profession that satisfied my heart and soul. And after a few years of making myself miserable as a lawyer, I decided that I’d better do that which I could do rather than that which I felt I ought to do. And so I quit. I suppose legal training was useful to some degree in my writing, at least in recognizing intricacies of argument, intricacies of point of view, how to parse things so that everything can be debated, refuted, looked at from different angles. But I simply was a very unhappy law student and lawyer. And I went to law school out of fear of the world. That’s all it was.

LEE

A Postcard Memoir reminded me of some of William Blake’s work, the way the visual representation and the literature had a conversation.

SUTIN

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

LEE

Was he one of your literary influences?

SUTIN

Oh, definitely. William Blake is—gosh, how do I put this without sounding ridiculous?—one of the most stunning, remarkable, gifted, and stirring writers in the history of human civilizations. If in A Postcard Memoir, I tiptoe in the direction of Blake just a bit, only in terms of word and image informing each other, it was because if there’s one writer in the history of the world I envy it is William Blake, because he was able to create images of such surpassing power and beauty to go with his text, and I don’t have that skill, so I was forced to paw through a postcard collection to find my visual components. Oh, if only I could create the images Blake did. But yes, the interplay between text and image is a remarkable component of Blake, and I would urge people who know the poetry of Blake only as text to try to find—these days it’s not so hard—reproductions of Blake’s art along with the poems. So, yes, he was definitely an inspiration to me in that regard. I have always, always been fascinated by the interplay of image and text. I have felt that writers can do that and don’t do it enough. And I did it the way I could.

LEE

Who were some of your other literary influences?

SUTIN

In that sort of formative era of teens and twenties, the works of Henry Miller and Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Cowper Powys, the English novelist who is not very well known in America but is still quite well regarded in England, those three were powerful voices. And the French writer Blaise Cendrars was another writer who opened things up for me. Walt Whitman is someone to whom I still turn with a great deal of reverence and joy. Obviously Philip K. Dick has some appeal to me since I wrote a book about him. Way back in the mid-eighties, and I’m a little proud of this because the film American Splendor has just come out and now he’s much more well known, but I actually bought issue two of American Splendor on the newsstands and was reading Harvey Pekar way back when, and I did an interview with him, speaking of interviews, that was published in what was then the Hungry Mind Review in 1990. I remember talking with him about the fact that he could not draw so he did these sort of stick-figure comic-book storyboards as he would call them and then got artists to work with him, which I think to some extent I did in A Postcard Memoir—using dead, anonymous postcard photographers as my artists. The example of Harvey Pekar was always very fascinating to me, someone who took these sort of non-exceptional facts of life and turned them into stories with meaning. I don’t think Harvey Pekar and I write alike or have the same sensibility but his basic approach to the possibilities of word and image is something that I feel some kinship with. These days I read a great deal of poetry. There’s a contemporary American poet working today, Mary Ruefle, who I think is astonishing. I loved Homer’s Odyssey. How’s that? I had a crush on Virginia Woolf in college. I had her picture up on my wall, a little postcard picture. I thought the young Virginia Woolf was just hot. I don’t think we would have had much of a future. But, my gosh, I’ve been swimming in books all my life, so it’s a very difficult question to answer.

O’GRADY

Some people suggest that there’s sort of a divide between West Coast and East Coast writers in their approach and themes. Do you agree with that, and, if so, do you think there’s also a Midwestern aesthetic, and would you fall into that category?

SUTIN

I think sometimes there is a noticeable divide between East and West, and sometimes not. It depends on the writer. There are many writers—don’t ask me to name names—but I know there are many prose writers living on the West Coast who are seriously regarded in the East and the like. I think it shows up more in poetry, where there seem to be East Coast schools and West Coast schools of poetry, sort of New Yorker magazine schools and more free, open schools. If there is a Midwestern aesthetic, it means nothing to me. I guess readers would have to judge whether I fall into it or not. I certainly am affected by the places that I am, and I’m very particular about where I wish to be, but I’ve never felt that I’ve participated in or took on a specific Midwestern aesthetic. And to the extent that there are East Coast and West Coast differences, I tend to think they are more in terms of clashes of ambition and job searches and control of publications than actual differences in the writing. So maybe my fundamental answer to the question is those sorts of distinctions don’t mean a great deal to me as a reader or as a writer. I don’t deny that they do mean something to other people, but for me I don’t care that much where a writer is from, and frankly if I didn’t have the little dust-jacket bio of a writer and you asked me, “Is this person an East or West Coast writer or a Midwest writer?” I bet I’d be wrong eight out of ten times. But there’s a lot of Midwestern writers who are experimental, edgy, strange people. Take the Twin Cities, for example. I guess they have this sort of candy-coated Midwest flyover image for the rest of the world, but just look at the music that has come out of Minneapolis. You wouldn’t expect Hüsker Dü, Soul Asylum, the Replacements, and Prince to be coming out of there, and yet they do. Paul Westerberg lives six blocks from me. So is he a Midwestern musician? I don’t know him very well but I doubt he would nod his head yes to that. To me regional labels have more to do with social preconceptions than with the actual impact and realities of writers.

O’GRADY

How would you like to be remembered as a writer?

SUTIN

I would like to be remembered as a writer. How’s that? I’ll settle for being remembered as a writer. As to how, I have no idea. I think most writers would like their books to continue to be read, and I would be content with that. There’s no particular image or label that I crave in that regard. That the books themselves would continue to have life would be sufficient.