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Paisley Rekdal’s work is urban, the poetry an explosion of language, the ranging cast of mind in the spirit of Albert Goldbarth or Linda Gregerson. Like these poets her lines are made of long hypotactic sentences, linking image and language on a string of wondrous beads, leaping in and through those long lines like C. K. Williams. Rekdal infuses them with a vibrant grace, a cultured smoothness, a voracious reading. She grew up in Seattle, studied medieval literature in the prestigious University of Toronto program, abandoned those studies to give herself over to writing poetry, carrying through all of it, meanwhile, an abiding interest in nonfiction, and an interest in writing about things you weren’t supposed to write about, like bad sex. She carried also an interest, always, in unclassifiable media. So there’s a fundamental genre-restlessness to Rekdal’s passions, but she doesn’t equate esoteric with experiment. Her memoir, Intimate, is part ekphrasis, part lyric essay, part poetry sequence, part collage as it tells the story of her parents’ mixed-race marriage—her father’s lineage is Norwegian, her mother’s Chinese—by way of Edward Curtis photographs and the story of his Native American guide Alexander Upshaw. She’s written a book on cultural appropriation—the most thoughtful, complicated, lyrical account I’ve read—and even in her collections, such as Six Girls without Pants—she can shift, page by page, poem by poem, from the disjunctive to the Horatian, mixing modes like a chef.
This is partly what makes her latest book, which began life as a hypertext—a website, an experience of poetry, image, video—not only a natural emergence from her oeuvre, but also a daring and serious attempt to move from a work of online art to a book, pushing at the inherited limitations of both. West: A Translation takes its starting point from one of the poems carved into the wooden barracks at Angel Island, the place where immigrants, particularly Chinese immigrants, endured the horror of being stateless, wondering if they’d be allowed entry into new life. Some killed themselves. Some tore poems into the walls that held them. Rekdal has taken one of these, a little elegy for a suicide, and translates each character of it by way of a new poem—or image. It’s as if she’s taken each character and perspective and turned it into a separate study of the railroad, and the collection of these railroads, radiant expansions of their original source, is the book. In the process, Rekdal gives an account of the history of the western part of the United States as a history of the transcontinental railroad—built by poor Chinese immigrants, mostly from Guangdong Province. The book, which began life as a website, was commissioned by the Spike 150 Foundation to “commemorate” the 150th anniversary of the installment of the final spike of the railroad. That happened in Salt Lake City, a city—and in a state—that Rekdal has, a little bit to her own surprise, become rooted in, made home. Rekdal’s life, with its blend of commitments and inheritances and meanderings, seems in many ways to embody well the life of a twenty-first-century western American. Which makes her voice the perfect voice for a moment in which we’re grappling more directly than ever with the fallout, the damage and trauma, left in the wake of that railroad’s completion. The true costs of “westward expansion.” And though the transcontinental railroad’s last spike was driven in in Utah, it’s true end was what it pointed toward, and what its opening up opened up: California. Where an anonymous Chinese migrant wrote this poem on the wall at Angel Island, rendered in Rekdal’s English, and from which she makes her book:
Sorrowful news indeed has passed to me.
On what day will your wrapped body return?
Unable to close your eyes, to whom can you tell your story?
Had you known, you never would have made this journey.
Eternity contains the sorrow of a thousand bitter regrets.
Missing home, you face in vain Home-Facing Terrace,
Your ambitions, unfulfilled, buried under earth.
Yet I know death can’t turn your great heart to ashes.
JESSE NATHAN: You did graduate work in medieval studies. Would you say you have a medieval sensibility in some way? What does that mean, and how does it manifest in your poems? (What does it mean in terms of your genre-blending books like Intimate or West?) What kind of lines or tones or forms does it lead you to in your poetry?
PAISLEY REKDAL: I have been thinking about your question for several weeks now, because I feel that the “medieval” strain in my work is a sensibility I share with and can immediately intuit in other modern and contemporary writers, but haven’t articulated for myself. I think there are two ways that my medieval studies training has influenced me. The first way is that I’m drawn to interdisciplinary work, whether it’s multimodal or digital writing projects or whether it’s writing that crosses different disciplinary lines, which medieval studies as a field forces its scholars to do. There are—relatively speaking—few surviving intact texts from the medieval world, and there was also a very limited literate audience that could have gotten hold of them, so you have to be creative in how you approach both cultural and textual interpretation. You don’t just read the primary sources, you also turn to art that was produced at the same period of time, and theological arguments circulating at the moment, you consider the political climate in question, and maybe also look into whatever martial or public health crises were brewing.
Taking one question and looking at it from myriad positions allows for a kaleidoscopic or fractal understanding of a literary text and how art itself gets created. It’s certainly helped me in works like The Broken Country, where I think not just about a single violent crime committed by a Vietnamese refugee that took place at a grocery store near my house, but how this crime might speak to larger questions of Southeast Asian immigration and assimilation into the American West, the legacy of war, medical and sociological understandings of trauma, the metaphors we use to depict violence, etc. With West, my medieval training probably influenced my desire to research all the different ways the train altered American cultural life. Obviously, that’s an impossible task to accomplish, but one thing really stuck out to me about the railroad’s history as I studied it: how little we know about the daily life, thoughts, and feelings of the workers. We tend to collect the cultural products of the owners of capital, not its producers—especially if the producers of capital aren’t functionally literate in the owners’ language. When you study medieval literature and culture, of course, you are also looking into an absence: you know what the aristocracy believed, and you know what the literate wanted. But those that don’t fit into these categories? That’s an entire world that’s effectively been rendered silent, and I think that question of silence has always haunted me as a writer.
(Side note: This is perhaps the only thing that saddens me about the possible demise of Twitter, because the wealth of information produced by “average” humans about what they eat, read, watch, think, feel, like, and hate about their moment of time is a medievalist’s wet dream.)
But the second way that my medievalist background has influenced me is more intangible. The “medieval sensibility,” as you call it, really speaks to what I was drawn to in medieval literature as a whole, which is its sense of—for lack of a better term—genre-lessness or maybe genre-explosiveness. You would clearly call most medieval poems “poetry,” of course, but what drew me to work like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was the sense of English itself—the language and its prosody—staggering to its feet, trying to figure out its own poetic rhythms as a newly evolving language.
I also love the way that so many medieval texts call back to classical ones, but then alter/pervert/estrange them from their original sources, like you see with Marie de France’s take on Ovid in Le Laustic, or the fact that Gawain actually opens with a call back to the fall of Troy and then becomes a fundamentally foundational narrative about England. There’s a wildness to Middle English poetry that comes—I believe—from the fact that it’s in a liminal place—neither strictly French nor wholly Anglo Saxon, not part of the classical world even as Rome has its political and cultural tentacles throughout Europe. These are poems that are invested in vision—actual religious vision!—as much as myth and art and history, and all of this combines in the most heady ways. These are poems that feel as if they are inventing their own forms, even as they are reinventing inherited subject matters.
It’s funny to think about writing with and against “risk” now, because I think workshops and the publishing industry and social media have all created such powerful, if occasionally obscure, “norms” for what literature is and looks like. When I read something like “The Land of Cokaygne,” I’m actually filled with jealousy. It’s not that these writers didn’t understand limitation or “rules” (that’s actually the point of the humor in “The Land of Cokaygne”), but that there seemed to be a more porous boundary between types of experience and knowledge, thus types of writing and perception. That’s what I aspire to be as a writer: someone who pushes through and beyond accepted genres or forms. I want my conscious to be more permeable. I want to be always at the beginning of things, without knowing what my writing—or my own self in the world—is supposed to become.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster is a book of poems that feels like it got written not because the poet thought he should write it, but because he had to. There’s a breathless, headlong quality here:
the lips thick
with a familiar slang
flooding the tongue
get me to the curve
of lover’s neck
while I am still alive enough
for my nose
to resist disappearing
And elsewhere, the long lines—the book is wide, necessarily—seem to sweep on as if the poet disbelieves in margins. Here’s how a poem with a long-line for a title—“If Life Is as Short as Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already at My Feet”—starts off:
if I make it to heaven, I will ask for all of the small pleasures I could have had on earth.
And I’m sure this will upset the divine order. I am a simple man.
Abdurraqib is a music critic, too, and he has no formal training in poetry, which means he writes about song with the richness of a connoisseur and with the wildness of a person free of the weight of American poetry’s various schools and centers of devotion. The poet has one other book of poems to his name, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, but he writes them all the time and for years has gathered them in chapbooks or publishes them individually. His books of essays are They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, and most recently A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance. One thing that this means, in terms of the poems Abdurraqib writes, is that they are not just objects of music, but make music an object. Here are a few lines from “The Ghost of Marvin Gaye Mistakes a Record Store for a Graveyard”:
they burned the disco records
and from the smoke I heard
my mother’s voice or was it
that my father once wore
my mother’s dresses spun in front of a mirror
the music he tried to pray out of himself
memory is as fleeting as any other high
Dazzling and open-hearted, the book is also full of poems about flowers, inspired in part by overhearing someone asking “How can Black people write about flowers at a time like this,” to which Abdurraqib responds with lyric fire in “How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This,” a poem in which his long lines are fragmented by a gesture toward enjambment, a gesture that renders the poem almost like a musical score with bars dividing not notes but words:
but if you’ll indulge / my worst impulses / isn’t it funny / how the white / petals of the oleander / do not render the crow / flightless
JESSE NATHAN: How does the work of music criticism weave together with the work of poetry? Did you write about music before you wrote poems?
HANIF ABDURRAQIB: I think that I’m coming to terms with the fact that I have always been a music critic, which is to say that I grew up hearing the world differently. I was often asked, “What do you hear?” but not “What do you think?”—which, surely, was a function of the fact that I grew up the youngest child in a house of six. Which meant that I was a curiosity, at times, but never an authority. And in this way, I had to come to the understanding that what I heard was lighting a path towards what I might think, or what I might feel. Even the acknowledgment of that, applied to the action of writing, or obsession, is poetic. Not in a way I understood as a child, or even a teenager, or even a person in my early twenties. But I can deconstruct a song. I know I can do that, very well. Though, I have to ask myself the question of who that might serve beyond myself. I get gleeful about getting under the hood of a tune, but if I believe in writing about songs, partially, as an act of service, that alone doesn’t serve someone as much as translating what I hear into what I feel, and asking a reader if it’s possible that they might feel something. It doesn’t have to be even adjacent to what I’m feeling, but even inviting the reality that the song is a site for emotion is kind of a starting point. Which, I believe, is also poetic. And so to come to poems later in my life, I feel like I had a slight head start, because I came to poems through slam, through performance poetry. Through hearing the way language would interact with other language, sonically, and knowing that I wanted to be a writer who made choices with sound in mind. That I could play with language to create these small symphonies, but do it also while being realistic about the fact that it isn’t important to me if people hear what I hear. I am, once again, inviting an opportunity for feeling, and hoping people will take it.
Roger Reeves is an ecstatic poet, a poet of suffering transmuted into higher-order sound. Best Barbarian has the structure of a jazz number. The melody is the first twenty poems—starting with a whirling riff on Grendel and James Baldwin—then “Children Listen,” “Sovereign Silence, or The City,” “Echo: From the Mountain,” “So, Ecstasy” and others, each concerned with the nature of a kind of repeated or formal sound. Then comes the improvisation, the loosening spontaneity, which is section two, made up of two long poems as enriched by the Aeneid, Chaucer, and Dante as they are by the idea of a solo that tells a story. “Domestic Violence” is fierce but inquiring, in its seeing, in its sense of the hell that is a state that shoots down unarmed Black men. Then comes “Something About John Coltrane,” a wonder of a poem that makes sense of a feeling, that moves against normative sensemaking: that is, as the poet described it to me, “me blowing my horn.” It’s a poem that plays historical characters, that takes as its starting point Alice Coltrane’s song by that same name, an infusion of Gospel, Black vernacular, blues, and dirge—and this, maybe, is what we mean when we talk about an ecstatic poetry, a poetry that rolls the suffering and the style into a radical love song:
Something about a tree in shallow sleep
Listening for what it wants to remember:
The note of a seed, its neck sliding through
Dirt and its confusion—nothing cleansed
Of struggle. The weight lost after death,
A confrontation of death. John Coltrane
Even in death is a perfect instrument
Of water and working the day past its zero—
The fires in the trees, a legless rabbit
Drifting across the sky—dream of a mule
Covered in crows opened in front of a mule
Covered in crows, their wings beating against him
Like skin. An autumned tree in autumn
Watching fire autumn the other trees.
It doesn’t have to make sense now; it can
Make sense later on. A mule covered in crows—
The poem keeps coming back to a refrain, with different names—“Something About John Coltrane,” “Something About Marion Brown,” “Something About Aretha Franklin”—and as it builds it moves us through the crescendo of grief. Reeves is a poet of ornament, because he is a poet of layering, of great linguistic flourish, of repetition—“an autumned tree in autumn”—of a language wrought and gorgeous like the King James Bible, and so—most important—his work abides in a richness of language and artifice like few writing today. His work is gourmand. Delicious. As tragic as it is textured.
JESSE NATHAN: How do you think about poetic artifice? Some people think of that as a bad word. I think of it as neutral, myself. How do you find yourself relating to the idea of artifice? How do your poems find their forms, their individual styles? I’d be curious especially to hear about “Domestic Violence” or “Something About John Coltrane.” (It seems to be connected, in part, to the question of “why poetry?”) What is artifice, to you — and how do you use it?
ROGER REEVES: To ask a poet about artifice is to ask the poet to explain the whole world—the whole world of the poem. I will try to do my best. I think about artifice as a catalyst for poetic meditation. But what do I mean by artifice? Artifice is the frame, the props by which the poem enacts its poem-ness. Now that might seem tautological or opaque, but I don’t mean to be. Artifice is not just the form (i.e., sonnet, free verse, couplets, etc.), it’s also diction, syntax, metaphor-system (or lack thereof). Artifice is the skeleton upon which the saying-something-of-the-poem lays itself. Artifice animates the saying-something. Artifice is often felt but not always seen. In this way, I think of it as material—very real—and a bit ephemeral, something like spirit. Artifice can be described. Take for instance a one-sentence description of the artifice of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”: “Here’s a one-sentence poem that deploys couplets as its formal container while using the rhetorical veneer of a thesis statement to give its emotional heft.” That description leaves out something ephemeral like tone (though it’s there a bit in the phrase “emotional heft”). Williams’s poem deploys artifice in the nature of its line breaks, in the rhythmic deployment of one-word lines. So much has been written about this poem that I will stop here, but I believe I’m beginning to make my point.
When I’m looking for a poem’s form or artifice, I’m looking for something that both breaks open the poem for me, hurtling me through the poem, and simultaneously slows me down. I’m looking for the artifice to reveal to me something I did not know I knew. That’s when the artifice is working—when I come upon a thought, a turn of phrase, a metaphor, an insight that I did not know I knew until the writing of that poem. In this way, I am both sped up and slowed down, because I’m looking to see, to feel, to hear a new sound—even if it’s just new to me.
Now, how do poems find their form? Well, sometimes by luck, but mostly by trial and error, reading around looking for forms, experimenting, constantly shaping the sound, sometimes revising the sound through different line arrangements and stanzaic forms. I’m constantly reading others—Zbigniew Herbert, Nathaniel Mackey, H.D., Solmaz Sharif, Homer, David Ferry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aimé Césaire, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey—for formal ideas; how do poets announce or renounce poetry, power; how might their attention to the line, to odd music, to metaphor create feeling, catalyze thinking? I’m also looking for form and artifice in other places, in other ideas of composition. For instance, during the pandemic, I read around Ornette Coleman and his notion of harmolodics and his notion of free jazz—improvisation from time signature and melodic territory to create feeling, sound. Alice Coltrane, her mixing the blues with Indian ragas was completely useful in terms of how I came to building “Something About John Coltrane.” I’m interested in forms, notions of composition, that weave together diverse and diffuse traditions and materials. I’m composed of so many different sounds, traditions of music, and spirituality; composed of various notions of what it means to be present and alive—and I always hope to sit with these sources in some sort of conversation, not an argument. I’m interested in speaking from, writing with the many tongues in my head.
An Eros Encyclopedia by Rachel James sometimes feels like an autobiography of an eros. Sometimes it feels like a set of dream reports or a chorus of voices or a set of transmissions from a lost diary somewhere on earth. There are snippets from a play, too—voices in a psychedelic choir that pop up with the minimalism and verve of Aram Saroyan. It is, without a doubt, one of the most moving debut collections of poetry I’ve read in years. Stunning, electric, shimmering, unclassifiable. “Collection” might not be the right word. The individual pieces—fragments, I would say, if they weren’t in their individual ways so radiant and contained, so each complete—all without titles, cascading across 150 pages moving from prose to song to sardonic but sweet aphoristic quotes that turn the whole idea on its head, like:
Now I am a rock far away from the shadow of an idea
—exiled piece of mountain
The poet, who was born in Toronto to parents with a profound interest in what might be called alternative spiritualities, has rendered an account of a life that tells the story without getting bogged down in narrative—it is a book of and about representation, about the body as an instrument for knowing, seeing, perceiving, and the record that body might leave. So, Eros, in this context, is not only sex but the pulse of being, the creativity that is power. The book is composed under the sign of Audre Lorde and her classic Uses of the Erotic. Sex here is one thing among the many ways of sensual understanding, it is not the foregrounded obsession we see everywhere in our culture of shame, but rather part of—an essential part of—living, of intense being. So there’s this, for instance, that shows some of the disjunctive movement that energizes the book, lines that are equal parts earnest and sarcastic and funny and intimate and wise:
Volcanoes erupt on the ocean floor and the Ring of Fire. When I learned about Pompeii I remember noting the poor dentistry. 500 of the 1,500 active volcanoes have already erupted.
Rim the Pacific,
The first time a dirty talk request came in I didn’t know what to say so I laughed. Said everything without saying it out loud. He fingered my 16-year-old ass and I felt instant regret my ass hadn’t been fingered for the past three years. Ever since then my ass was like a wiggling pastry under my school skirt. I thought: it must take another person to show me things I’ve already got.
Which is followed, on the next page, by only this:
CHORUS: What she came here to talk about is
knowledge and faith and faith knowledge.
The book begins with a lyric that seems like a child—or something—being born:
An lo! Then I awoke
perceived the surroundings
first with skin then ears
it was dark
the walls dripped
the walls created a space
I could not see anything
for a long time. I heard a stirring,
scraping. I searched the shadows
and found a mound, it moved
I cannot be sure. It seemed to move
but very slowly, or not at once. I spoke:
“Lo! Am I alone here?”
“No”
A chorus speaks to me.
And what follows is a text that unfolds a “growing up” in flashes of awareness, in a context in which the adults seem often to be looking for the magic of religion or ideology as a way out of the uncertainty and the burden of being lonely humans in a physical universe. Late in the book comes this, with its lyric variation from plain to song, sentences enfolded with rhyme:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p things have just begun, go easy. Caress your own selves pay no heed to the others, with their fabulous push carts filled with grade A fish and drink, with their tall hair and freshly washed feet. Torment not! The grace lingering on the church roof is just the sun. The church has done nothing but stand in place to reflect the colors of the glorious dusk.
And then on the next page, only this:
Old texts coming through again and again,
Two friends and I discuss the importance of explaining things. I think explaining things has no importance. They disagree.
Old texts mix with new: the Bible and Japanese TV shows and Marxist call-outs like “The Uprising,” Franco Berardi’s brilliant essay. These aren’t poems that render judgment or rant or try to sell themselves. These lines learn with us, and so we see with them, see a world, and an eros, recording and alive on “the post-fire soil of a collapsed economy.”
JESSE NATHAN: The book has so many modes—sometimes documentary or descriptive prose, dream reports, mythmaking, short-lined lyrics, a child-like voice, a song-voice—and it covers so much ground in the culture, has such range of reference and knowledge. Can you say something about why you called the book an “encyclopedia”?
RACHEL JAMES: So much of my experience, as a poet and a person, is of not understanding. I mean literally, not in a mystical sense. I experience this book as a document of an activity and the activity is not understanding. I have the distinct impulse not to explain or describe what I (think I) know. I prefer to describe what I don’t know. Maybe the only way to do that is to describe how I, or an object, or an environment, a concept, fauna, try to know. The entries in the book follow a set of idiosyncratic categories, yet the book fails to function appropriately, encyclopedically. Maybe this is its form; failure itself and the pleasure of not continuing. The pleasure of change.
Encyclopedias are objects with a psychic history, they trace who holds the power to name the world. Calling the book an encyclopedia hauls the heavy weight of knowledge production within reified structures into poetry, the great disruptor.
I was educated before the mass use of the internet. I would go to the library and pull a big dusty book down from the shelf, turn its pages looking for, say, “E” for “Eros,” and undoubtedly get distracted by “Encratite” or “echoic memory” and mind travel. Something felt off about the definitions, even the categories themselves. Natural history, geometry, architecture, medicine, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy—these were two-thousand-year-old categorical systems. To go further back, the earliest records of written language were born from the desire to notate financial records. It is not insignificant to me that written poetry bears a history with debt. Experimental ethnography and autoethnography offered me a lens to read the historical record as a performance, a way to seek out dissident connections. If I had known about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Muriel Rukeyser at the time, I might have become a poet much sooner. This is just coming to me now, but volcanoes factor heavily into the book. Pliny the Elder burned up when Mount Vesuvius erupted!
I can confidently say I don’t know how to make anything other than what I make. If I weren’t so introverted, I would have been a clown. In spiritual communities, there is also a lot of performance. I was raised in multiple faith practices, from the Armenian philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff to the syncretic religion Santo Daime, and I experienced ideological systems as containers with permeable boundaries. The adults around me believed heterogeneously, fervently, transiently. In many of these communities, the audience is not separate from the performer, and could at any moment become the performer themselves. Poetry is a bit like this. Maybe the genre of An Eros Encyclopedia is epistemological performance.
Matthew Goulish’s 39 Microlectures is a longstanding influence: “Consider this book like an interrupted performance.” The writer has left the stage and will not return. “I have been asked to stand in.” Part of the sentiment is: that other book, the one that will never be written, that was the necessary one. It’s a way of pointing toward that which is not yet known. Audre Lorde is another longstanding guide: “What are the words you do not yet have?”
I love performance and entertainment—and action. I love three-act structures, satisfying endings, and like you mentioned, I pull from many places. I don’t approach writing as utilitarian, a vehicle for transformation. I often wish the literary quest for understanding weren’t so saccharine. I love the work of Octavia Butler, Christopher Guest, and Bernadette Mayer. I don’t ultimately know how the book knows what it knows, or if I’ve answered your excellent question. Since I cannot physically be in front of an audience in a big way, meaning I can only diverge a step or two from the performance of Rachel James, I had to trap my performance in this book.
Maggie Millner’s debut, Couplets, is a novel in couplets, but also a lyric in lithe but taut paired lines. Better maybe to say that it gestures at the novel, particularly the great love stories—and misadventures—of the nineteenth-century novel. It’s not so much a narrative as the remains of a narrative, as if the set-up and emplotting have been removed, as if the sentences had been stretched sometimes, or compressed, working their way into a long-lined rhythm that suits the rhyming couplets well. The rhymes are often muted, made so by their off-kilter relationships, like “sex” and “transgress” or “husband” and “Casaubon.” There are occasional prose poems, too, but mostly what unfolds unfolds—and disintegrates—across this book-length sequence of two-lined stanzas: a voice detailing its own undoing. The voice tells of a relationship with a man that falls apart as the speaker falls in love with a woman, first with the man’s encouragement, then despite his resistance. It is, then, the voice of coming out, a set of poems—or is it one long poem?—that finds a form for that life-altering moment of emergence, that particular pain, that astonishment, that retrospective confusion, not to mention the fierce lusts and splintered histories that carry it forward. The woman who opens up the speaker’s desire “found me in the winter at a bar”:
one of those places in Bed-Stuy not far
from Clinton Hill—a platonic meeting
set up by a friend who worked in media
and thought we’d get along. I got there first and snatched
a booth and started reading Middlemarch,
a novel I’ve been halfway through for more
than half my life. When she strode through the door,
Oh shit, I love that book, I’ve read it fifteen
times, she said, and asked my favorite scene …
The writing that follows is as hot as it is devastating, as searingly analytical—and literary analysis, too—as it is direct, neither arch nor innocent. This book is the announcement of a major talent, another younger poet for whom inherited forms—rhymes, formal meters—are compelling, offering a sturdiness—or a steadiness—that might be a slowing and a bulwark against not only the firehose of language so many of us spend our days absorbing, but also a counterpoint to the blessèd idiom of our times, the ubiquitous free verse line, casual and talky. Millner can write that way, to be sure, but the necessity in this book is a more disciplined music. And what is music, if not the urgent groping attempt at making sense out of the chaos of the noise of our lives? In Millner’s you can hear echoes of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton. And when the lines draw together in an especially taut and almost riddling catechism, you might hear Emily Dickinson, who of course presides in other ways. Speaking of her new lover, the voice of these poems writes:
I lived in fear she’d finally see
my fetish and discrepancy, and flee.
JESSE NATHAN: A book in rhyming couplets! Mostly. That form seems to me especially relational, one thing bound to another in shape and sound. And also maybe relentless, since a couplet has no interrupting music, no B rhymed-line. Would you say something about how the rhyming aspect of these poems emerged? Did it sometimes almost seem to generate the narrative? I’m curious about what rhyme has allowed or disallowed you. Especially interested in all the off-rhyme—bad rhyme? slant rhyme? incidental rhyme?—which is my favorite sort.
MAGGIE MILLNER: I think of rhyme as a way of organizing language according to likeness. Conversationally, we often use the word to mean “perfect rhyme,” or a pair of words that end with exactly the same sounds. But, of course, there are actually dozens of different kinds of rhyme: eye rhyme, for example, as in love and move, or amphisbaenic rhyme, which entails reversing the sounds of a word, as in gulls and slug. Most rhyming in English poetry—and in my book—is “imperfect”; two words might share a vowel sound but not a terminal consonant (assonant rhyme!) or might share all their consonants but no vowels (pararhyme!), and so on.
Like most American students these days, I didn’t receive much training in prosody; most of what I know about formal verse derives from my own reading. But I did learn that almost all English poetry was written according to fairly prescriptive rules until something like a century and a half ago, and that the following generations of poets largely experienced this shift to “free verse”—which aligned itself with liberal notions of progressivism and self-expression—as a welcome carte blanche: a democratization of the genre. Yet in my experience as a Trump-era MFA graduate in an increasingly professionalized and often presentist literary culture, it seemed that a different kind of poem—the free-verse lyric—had long since taken hold as poetry’s default form. By the end of graduate school, the conventions of this form (relative brevity, individual subjective narration, epiphanic imagery, etc.) had begun to feel, to me, actually more institutional and intellectually restrictive than, say, those of the heroic couplet.
This was also around the time I began living as a queer person—which is another way, I think, of organizing one’s life according to likeness. Until that point, I had spent most of my existence trying to excel at what was expected of me: writing competent free verse, dating cis men, preparing for a monogamous marriage. As I gave up the familiar trappings of my straight life, I found myself casting about for other structures by which to orient my thinking. Yet by then I was also painfully aware that any kind of imposed, seemingly compulsory structure might eventually arouse my resentment—might come to seem, however irrationally, like an infringement on my autonomy. What kind of life could I build that was both capacious and stable, bonded and unbounded?
I began writing in rhyme, I realize now, partly as a means of answering these questions. At the time, I found it immensely comforting to hew to a rule, and to attend not only to the meanings of words but also to their sounds and shapes: what I sometimes think of as their bodies. (A quote I love by Yoko Tawada: “My solution was not to find a solution, but rather to enter into the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes.”) It was only after I had written several pages of rhyming couplets that I became aware of the form’s innate connection to romance and homoeroticism in particular: the very subjects that the poem explores. This made sense too; rhyme is at least in part about tapping into the unconscious—about foregrounding those hidden correspondences that already exist all around us. (In this way, it is not unlike some drugs, or certain kinds of sex.) So the rhyme, as it were, between form and subject was partly how I knew the poem was cohering.
The roominess of imperfect rhyme was another revelation. That I could rhyme “skewered” with “sword,” or “Loretta Lynn” with “redolent,” meant I never felt too queasily beholden to the dictates of the form. These rhymes were also the most satisfying ones to write—both because they allowed for a greater sense of surprise and because they enacted something true, perhaps, about the imperfectness of any pairing. The mind in love is a dialectical thing, pitching always between liberation and constraint, sameness and otherness, safety and fear. So is the mind of the rhymer, I think. I’m reminded of this great line Emerson wrote in his notebook in 1839: “I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”
Urgent, descriptive, plainspoken, hard-edged—a glasswork of facts—the poetry of John Freeman seems to come from a place of intense inner weather, and his latest book, Wind, Trees, is a gust from that interior world, which is a version of your world or mine. I mean to say his style is subtle, but sharp as corners. The poems have a tough quality, a perspective that seems watchful, but always from the edge of things, looking in. They are nervy and aware—Freeman has worked as an editor, books and magazines, and as an essayist, a critic—but the poems at times have the airy lightness of W. S. Merwin. Wind, Trees was written, initially, without any punctuation, as if Freeman were writing out of his own version of the moment when Merwin’s punctuation—after The Lice—dissolved away, but in this case Freeman has added some of it back in, locally, case by case, where he needs it to slow down or regulate what would otherwise turn too breathless for a book trying to catch its own soul, so to speak, trying to stay the confusion. Freeman is a traveler and many of his poems have the traveler’s quick, defamiliarized eye, but many in this collection are London poems from his years living in that city when he edited Granta. One of the finest poems in the book is, as these things so often are, a way of reading Freeman’s poetics. It’s called “Boxing,” and it goes like this:
In the waning days
of those years in London
I took up boxing. I didn’t
want to unload on some
unsuspecting soul so I
found a sparring partner.
She turned up, neck
tatted, face pierced, dread-
locked and strong as hell.
A Turkish woman with
East London stenciled
on her left forearm. Before
boxing she trained horses
in dressage and before
that was trying to
drown herself in drink
After an hour I was losing
my breakfast and last night’s
dinner. See you Wednesday
she said not discussing
whether there’d be an if. Thus
my living room turned into a
boxing gym. Couch the cut
corner. Not once did she knock
me down, but she could have.
I did that all on my own, using
my shoulder for the cross
rather than my hips, leaping
at the uppercut. Thinking it was
about power rather than grace …
The poem unspools in this unexpected way, each line’s assumption undone by the next line, like in a Denis Johnson short story or a long poem by Elizabeth Bishop. The sentences, already flinty, get sheared off by the buzzsaw of the line break, left to fall in place as the poem falls down the page. And it ends, several pages later, like this, on the question of power and grace, an existential for boxers but also for poets:
I’d learned by then most power
came from my ass. But I’d forget.
Throw with my arm. A chill
spring morning I was hitting
one two, one two three, and a
voice comes over the wind
light as a falling leaf—
nah mate, just flick it, like this
and we both look up.
There’s a builder across the
way, footwork loose, dancing
on the scaffolding he’s
tethered to, floating
nonetheless, arms faster than
air. Like this.
If his first book, Maps, recorded a poetry trying to understand and make legible—to itself—the scope of its range, and if The Park, Freeman’s second collection, sought a lyric on the commons, or a lyric commons, this third book shows a poet emerging into a work that does both a mapping and a lyric in a kind of common—plain—speech. But in this case, the map is a map of the interior, and a record of that country’s patterns and obsessions.
JESSE NATHAN: What is your relation to, or relationship with, solitude? There’s a poem in this new book called “Loneliness,” and I’m curious how you think about that word, but also words like “lonesome,” “alone,” “solitary,” “solitude.” Does solitude ever terrify you?
JOHN FREEMAN: I’ve always thought that solitude and loneliness, and lonesomeness, are three very different states, all conducive to making poetry—which to me is, fundamentally, a way to connect. You can be alone without ever being lonely—that to me is solitude. You can have solitude and start to wish for others: that to me is lonesomeness. So many songs, blues lyrics, emerge from that stage. I wish you were here. That sort of thing. Loneliness is hard, it’s a night watch with one’s self, if you will, to see if a state of solitude can be survived. Ever read those Jack Gilbert poems from Monolithos? He cycles through all these states—sometimes overlapping—through a great love, only to arrive at this hard-won peace with himself. I adore that poem, “Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan,” from late in the book, because it expresses a part of alone-ness we don’t often read about, but I suspect we have all experienced at one time or another: that moment you become a comfort to yourself in loneliness. “Holding myself tenderly in this marred body,” he writes—what a line!—he begins to wonder if the peace he feels is happiness, or if it’s a kind of precursor to giving in to death.
Big questions! They begin to creep up on you in deep silences, no? Solitude is a necessary oxygen for me. I need it to read, to think, to experience the quieter trance states that sustain me: being outdoors, disappearing into a book, daydreaming. Out of solitude I often return clarified by how I belong, or I wish to connect—to people, a larger group, a place. I can see the forest from above, or the city lights twinkling, metaphorically, and think, ah, I belong there. A lot of the time alone which went into writing Wind, Trees, unfolded in that kind of solitude. And that includes the lucky solitude of two of a long relationship, the ways that you can exist together and apart, yet connected. And also the exquisite other form of solitude of two you can experience with an animal, where you can walk or be for hours and of course not say a word. Just the sound of your breath.
I found such a comfort in my smallness in these solitudes. If you spend any time outside, where the mulching of life is so essential to life, there’s a harmony, always in the background, of our connectedness, but also, our smallness. Wind, Trees moves along that uneasy axis between hopefulness and despair, between seeing or feeling that smallness and wondering what is an extinction psalm, and worrying that what I am seeing is simply a natural process. Which is to say, if you use only one tool—say, the news—you’re only going to get one part of that axis, I believe. Terror. Alarm. Doom. So I went outside, mostly alone, happily, though sometimes lonesome, and found these small items of another kind of news.
Maya C. Popa’s Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is a radiant fabric of images and meditations, fragments of stories, bits of music that go together with a grace and lyricism that belie the ruptures and leaps between the lines. This is a haunted book. The poems of a wanderer and a wonderer. The first two sections apostrophize: the poems address some unknown or changing “you.” “Those evenings I was sure I’d die, / you were teaching me to live; I see that now.” There is a river of almost didactic pleasure flowing beneath the rhythms of these lines. And when I say fragments of stories I mean that the poet gives us just enough for the metonymies to work, and nonetheless it’s clear that, for her, feeling is the event. How to record it, acknowledge it, find an approximate shape for it in words—this is both the response to the wonder and the method for anthologizing it in the soul. Not so much the circumstances. “I swam in perpetual / end of spring knowing no summer could come of it …” By the end, by the book’s third and final section, that same inward-turned intimacy turns to face outward, to face directly—as directly as any sequence of poems I’ve seen—the chaos and trauma of life in pandemic-era New York City. So we get this, in the title poem, a vision of the metropolis at one of its worst moments:
A cross-breeze between this life
and the imagined one.
I am stuck in an almost life,
in an almost time. If I could say,
but I cannot, and so on. Sunlight
dizzies through the barren trees,
the skyline, a blue fog against
a yellow light, and on the highway
every Westward car blinds me.
Every surface reflects …
Or this, in “Duress,” a few lines that show Popa’s profound skill at limpid, elegant description melded with an almost philosophical wisdom, thought infused with feeling, feeling illuminated by thought:
An old habit by now this new life bleaching lemons,
careful to remove, first gloves, then mask,
careful not to rush the work
of being careful. For this, we live
a little uninjured through our hours. We live—
what greater mercy is admissible?
And then, in the noise of plague, a rejection of all that is not steadfast and quiet and resistant, a resistance itself to the immensity of nihilistic change, a longing for something that stays, that doesn’t keep dissolving in its own storm:
by night, the last of winter’s winds,
so you might believe the sirens
were not a single siren. Often, I’ve wanted,
not death, but disappearance,
evaporation, a bloodless
self-banishment. But the times call for patience,
not terror or time travel, not Eros
or negative capability.
If the steadfast is part and parcel with attention, here is a poetry that articulates—as all poetry must, finally, if it is to have any use, at least to this reader—a poetics of alertness. Alertness in the soul, the soul being our best metaphor for the dream-shapes of our being. And the soul, after all, was made for wonder.
JESSE NATHAN: What is the relationship between poetry and wonder? I mean in your poems, but then also more generally, in poetry as an art form.
MAYA C. POPA: St. Thomas Aquinas argued that poets and philosophers “are alike in being big with wonder.” Lucille Clifton aptly remarked that “poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” Part of what drives me to the page is the pleasure of capturing in language what seems bent on eluding it. When we experience wonder, we experience an instinctive recognition that what is being wondered at matters in some profound way, which has the power to drive us to the blank page, drive us to want to say something, to reply. But, as I’ve said elsewhere, I believe that we would fail to recognize this feeling, or that it would differ vastly from our understanding as it stands, were the eventual end of all feeling not guaranteed. Our mortality lies at the heart of our wonder and wondering. My collection speaks as much to the feelings of awe and renewal that wonder invites as to feelings of loss and grief. “Wonder,” after all, is thought to be a cognate for the old German wunde, or “wound.”
I do believe that wonder is an essential human emotion and a chief effect of poetry. Recollecting wonder on the page presents an inherent generative challenge for poets who must, in a sense, narrate the conditions for wonder (its circumstances) while accommodating wonder’s inherent disorientation, its sense of surpassing or breaching usual language and life. A poem that too conclusively tries to explain its wonder risks forfeiting the feeling. As Keats said, “We hate poetry that has too palpable of a design upon us.” Delivering wonder alive requires a very finely tuned balance between knowing and not knowing.
It may seem rather dramatic to suggest that our survival depends on our ability to wonder, but I suspect it is more right than not. A lens of wonder, that is, an approach to the world that acknowledges and values its preciousness, its onceness, and that seeks to safeguard its longevity and prevent its squandering is inherently valuable. As Thomas Ewens writes on education in the arts, “One should be attentive to situate one’s concerns in the experience of wonder which reveals itself as the heart of our living.” Wonder (noun) can make us wonder (verb), deepening our curiosity at the world that lies before us, and our relationship to our inner selves. Wonder deepens our cognitive compassion and our empathy for each other through the recognition of the unlikeliness, that wild chance of existence. And I think it is time we recognize poetry as one of the chief vehicles for its edifying purpose, which is what my PhD looked at, and what I continue to research and hope to generate wider interest in going forward.
If writers write about what puzzles them, Ross Gay is puzzled by joy. His oeuvre is a gorgeous, open-hearted, lyrical response to that puzzlement. Joy, by the way, that’s always in the context of suffering, in the context of pain. His style is a kind of restless exuberant unfolding, a thinking and feeling that feels like it’s happening as you read it, like an ice cube melting on a stovetop. You can hear it in his debut collection, Bringing the Shovel Down, which comes with an epigraph from Audre Lorde, all the way through his most recent book-length poem on and around and about the late great Dr. J, who conducted on basketball courts around the country “his extended course of study / on gravity and grace, / which has so enthralled the throngs.” That book is called Be Holding, probably the best long poem on sports since Kenneth Koch’s Ko, or a Season on Earth. Many people are familiar with Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. That book of poems, published in 2015, includes such wonders as “Feet”:
Friends, mine are ugly feet:
the body’s common wreckage
stuffed into boots. The second toe
on the left foot’s crooked
enough that when a child
asks what’s that? of it,
I can without flinch or fear of doubt lie
that a cow stepped on it
which maybe makes them fear cows
for which I repent
in love as I am with those philosophical beasts
who would never smash my feet
nor sneer at them
the way my mother does:
“We always bought you good shoes, honey,”
she says, “You can’t blame us
for those things,” …
And it unspools, the poem does, for dozens more lines, mixing humor with pathos, a light touch with the gravity of longing, the gravity of anybody in a body. Gay, who was raised in north Philadelphia, grew up skateboarding and playing football—all the way through college, in fact, until he found the poetry of Amiri Baraka, maybe an unlikely influence in some ways, but one who proved a catalyst, unlocking for him the thrill and the power of words put together in lyric ways. Gay’s dad worked in fast-food restaurants, and his mom worked at an insurance company, and Gay saw up close what capitalism means for workers, saw his parents having to work very hard and very long hours to make ends meet. These days he teaches at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, and he runs a community orchard—gardening is a constant theme in his work, and a source of joy. Some of his most recent books, though, aren’t poetry but prose. One is The Book of Delights, and the more recent is Inciting Joy. Like all of Gay’s writing, there is so much more to talk about than the good feelings he’s plumbing. That these books are maps into the weirdness and buoyancy of possible forms of happiness should not suggest, reader, that they are not also pictures of pain and survival. Joy is the hardest thing to write about—hard not to make its manifestations into some form of trite candy—and Ross Gay shows us how: by way of careful description, lighthearted but deep-seeing analysis, and a hunger for honesty.
JESSE NATHAN: Writing a poem seems like a joyful act, or an act that has some joy in it, at some level, even if it’s painful or tormented or miserable at other levels. At least it seems like that for the writers whose work I tend to admire. You said something on the phone about how you don’t write a poem every day or even every week; I think you said you don’t have that kind of relationship to poetry. Suggesting, if I’m hearing you right, that a lot of time passes between composing poems. I’m curious: How do poems tend to come to you? All at once? Do you practice forms of delay? I imagine it’s different poem by poem. They feel so spontaneous to this reader, your poems. To what degree is that a reflection of the actual process of making them?
ROSS GAY: I love that phrase “forms of delay.” It sounds like the title of a very interesting book, and I’m going to come back to it. But per the first part of your question: mostly poems do not come to me all at once. I was actually talking to my partner about it this morning over coffee, and she thought of one, and I thought of a couple—by the way, all at once to me means the draft of a thing, kind of a ballpark thing pushed out or pulled out all at once; all at once to me has little to do with how long or intense the revising is, which it usually is, long and intense and, while if it’s good and useful it’s difficult, it’s almost never anymore what I would call tormented or miserable or painful or, as I once said out loud in the presence of the poet (and solid basketball player) Alan Shapiro, torture, who very kindly asked me if I’d ever been waterboarded—but not often. It usually takes some time, and this is how I think of it these days most often, listening for what I don’t yet know how to listen for. Not sure why the auditory metaphor, but that’s what it is right now. And I look into corners when I say it, which makes it a little bit of a visual metaphor too, I guess.
Anyway, those “forms of delay” are so interesting as a concept, like formalizing the slowness or the patience or longer listening, or the deeper. I guess those forms could be things like making yourself some popcorn (which I do, with nooch, garlic salt, smoked paprika), or tooling around in the garden, or working out, or getting trapped on the alienation machine. But I guess too it could be something like getting to the edge of what you know how to listen to, what you know how to hear, and through practice or friends or something realizing well, you already know how to listen to that, there’s something else you don’t yet know how to listen to that you’re waiting on. Like my buddy Chris, when I was about to go in this familiar direction in this long poem I wrote called “Be Holding” said, what would happen if you didn’t do that? I was trying to listen in ways I know how, and he was wondering, as I want to be trying to do, maybe there’s something else? If you’re working on your dribbling, by the way, and you never dribble off your foot or your knee, you’re not actually practicing. I’m sort of paraphrasing not only the coaches I’ve been around (and been), but Patrick Rosal who’s paraphrasing a famous percussionist. There’s another word for doing what you know how to do, but it’s not practicing, which we’re always talking about. For the record, I don’t think of this as acquisitive listening (I’m listening to it as I type it), like acquiring more skill or something, I think of it as more fathomy, like dropping something deeper (oh, is that also called sounding?), which makes it now an auditory, visual and spatial metaphor (which might give some indication of how this is not exactly nuts and bolts). Anyway, I’m often trying to do it good like I know how, but I don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to want to do it like that. I wanna do it in ways I don’t know how and see what that is. Which we might call forms of delay. (Shit, seriously, this might be a book about teaching, though it sounds like it could be about sex and sex-adjacent stuff too. TMI?). Some other forms of delay might be anything that interrupts our capacity for mastery or knowledge, which I do try to give myself—you know, in this last book, Inciting Joy, I have all these long-ass essay-ish footnotes which feel like a poetic gesture, a formal gesture, that kind of disrupted how I sort of know how to make an essay. I mean if you ever “know how to” make an essay probably you should just make a muffin or an egg, or stretch a canvas, or darn a sock or something that day instead. (Essays are not for “knowing how to” do). But I mean they worked as forms of delay because they actually made the things take longer, they required I spend time in the basement working on them, and they made me rearrange what was up in the living room and the kitchen. Asking people for their impressions or what questions they have for something I’m working on is a form of delay. Reading and research is maybe a form of delay. Starting over, which I find myself doing more of the older I get, is a form of delay. Digging up old drafts is a form of delay. Fiddling with syntax is a form of delay. Drawing something in order to describe it better is a form of delay, as is watching it in a movie or out the window, etc. Digression is a form of delay. Losing it is a form of delay. Answering interview questions, especially provocative ones, with provocative phrases like forms of delay is a form of delay. Revision is a form of delay. And, as it turns out, I kind of love—not kind of, like really—love them. The many forms, I mean. Of, you know what I’m saying, delay.
The poetry of Alex Dimitrov stays in the present. It’s the essence of contemporary. A living voice, an urbane voice, overstimulated and sweet and stylish and aware. To say it’s talkative is only to highlight the point, and point to its tradition, which is very old, older than the New York poets who embodied it, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara and others: it’s as old as the intimate cutting voice of Catullus or the troubadours of Galicia. New York is not so much the subject of Dimitrov’s work—particularly true in his latest collection, Love and Other Poems—so much as its raison d’être. Even a poem like “New York,” a catalog of places in New York the speaker has cried in, is a love poem to “the best city to cry in.” Dimitrov’s voice is casual, open aesthete, open-hearted in a way that doesn’t forgo acid worldliness. No one could call his lines naïve, and yet they record—almost can’t help themselves—moments of awe, happiness, painful clarity, or, the beauty of true feeling, up or down. In that sense, Dimitrov is a first-class artist of the art of feeling, of giving a mood a shape in language. And here is a poet who understands the stakes of that, infuses his art with that understanding, whose art-for-art’s-sake is built not on an evasion or denial of the harsh everyday politics of the world, but in a rebuke to its dominion over things, a revenge on it, a claiming of what’s vibrant in the moments of our lives. And it’s a claiming, I want to say a claimency, designed to implicitly answer the ugliness of things with a record of charm. Listen to the voice of it in a poem called “May”:
What can I tell you?
I’m a young man in Central Park.
A cherry blossom falls in my hair
like small cruelty.
I listen to a couple speak Dutch
knowing as little about them
as I do of my past.
Why go home at all?
Or this, from “More”:
How again after months there is awe.
The most personal moment of the day
appears unannounced. People wear leather.
People refuse to die. There are strangers
who look like they could know your name.
And the smell of a bar on a cold night,
or the sound of traffic as it follows you home.
Sirens. Parties …
Dimitrov doesn’t write from memory. His typical tense is the present. The formal shapes of his poems aim to seem unaffected, spontaneous, neither underworked nor overworked—he writes in verse paragraphs more so than stanzas. Dimitrov was born in a distant country and grew up in the distances of the Midwest, but he writes of New York and New York only, which is to say he writes about the America of America, a place ravaged by the catastrophe of money and a place where you can dream of being your own invention.
JESSE NATHAN: You’ve mentioned that you write single poems, rather than books—poem by poem, rather than larger conceptions or sequences. Curious about why that is, and about your process more generally.
ALEX DIMITROV: As soon as I said that on the phone with you, I changed my mind. Or rather, I realized both were true. Do I contradict myself? You know what line comes after that, of course … since we talked about how important Whitman is to me (and Ginsberg, and that big American spirit).
My creative brain is very conceptually oriented. My poem “Love,” which is a list of all the things I love about the world, is endless. I add a line to it each day on Twitter (I’m also doing this with a poem called “Loneliness”). When I had the idea for writing it, that “endless” concept came to me and was the catalyst for both the poem and the entire book it ended up being part of. I wanted to write a book about looking at the world. About being alive in the world and in New York and also being alive in time, through the seasons and the months and the joy and despair of it all.
Writing the single poem often leads me to concepts. I have a drug poem in every book (except for the first one). In Together and by Ourselves it’s “Cocaine,” in Love and Other Poems it’s “LSD,” and in this next one it’s “Ketamine,” but it also might be “Ecstasy.” I’m not sure! I’ve written both. I’m fairly certain I’m going to have a drug poem in every book that follows.
Conceptually that interests me, like say a crown of sonnets might interest someone. The same thing happened with my character study poems (and this time starting with the first book). “James Franco,” is the poem in Begging for It, “Lindsay Lohan,” in the second book, “River Phoenix” in this last one. Maybe “Alex Dimitrov” will be next, or “Jesse Nathan.”
But yes, in both of these cases, endless poem or character study poem, I have been led to a concept I’d like to explore over time and through many books. Obviously, I’m thinking of Warhol and am indebted to Warhol, as much as Whitman. Not that contemporary poetry has ever found me legible (or maybe they have and are pretending), so I always have to sort of reveal my references. Which is boring, but at this point I’m like, you know they’re not going to catch on unless you say it.
I don’t like the phrase “project” or “concept” too much, because I do think a lot of the work that gets labeled that way lacks heart. And I don’t think my work lacks heart. I hope not. If it does, what the fuck am I doing… but I’m not too worried.
On the other hand, “Poem Written in a Cab” is another poem born out of concept, or probably guilt. I was taking too many cabs and I was also broke and felt like I couldn’t rationalize it. So I decided to work during the cab rides. And write as much as I could, in my phone’s Notes app. The rule was that I could write and edit only during the cab rides. Which was challenging because I was often drunk or drained or sad or… you know, all the things you are in New York on a regular basis. So that poem took me two years, if not a little more. I think from September 2017 to August 2019. But then I took some additional cab rides after August 2019 too. In order to get some more edits in. Once I find a concept that interests me, I’m committed to it.
I’ve been going back and forth between New York and Miami a lot this past year, for various reasons, one of them being that a prose project I’m working on takes place there. So I was thinking that I should write “Poem Written on a Plane.” The same way I’m also writing “Loneliness,” after “Love.” That’s the new endless poem. So these concepts extend into how I see my work as a whole, as a poet. My subject matter and my form are born out of my aesthetic obsessions. And I’m probably also not very legible to contemporary poetry because everything out there has been so tied to biography, in terms of what’s in vogue. Well, you’re not going to get the biography poems from me. I’m not that interested in Alex Dimitrov. I’m interested in the imagination. I’m interested in the poem and the art form itself.
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