Writers at Work is an occasional series in which contemporary published authors selected by Humanities majors for closer study agree to respond candidly to anonymous student questions. Student and author never meet and never contact each other directly. This promotes the maximum amount of frankness by the students, and one hopes, helps the author get some genuinely valuable, unbiased responses. In turn, the students get questions answered that they may have been unwilling to ask an author face to face, in the complicated social situation of a reading.
The students read one work by the author and then submit detailed questions. The questions should probe not only what the author was trying to do in a specific work, but more importantly, why the author writes, and what the author believes his or her role is, and what art’s role is, in American society at this moment. The writer may choose to answer questions individually, or choose to group the many questions he or she receives and respond to currents within them.
Finally, the San Francisco Humanities Review publishes the exchange online, permanently, as a resource for the wider Humanities audience trying to understand contemporary art.
–The Editors
Chris O. Cook
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Chris O. Cook was the first poet that the Humanities majors voted to study. The exchange took place during the Spring of 2009. The book they chose was his poetry collection, To Lose & to Pretend. Brooklyn Arts Press (October 15, 2008). 66pp. paperback $15.00 ISBN 9780978825720 |
Thank you for your poetry. It is just abstract enough to keep me engaged. It slows the mile a minute thought train that generally runs through my brain while still forcing me to feel and think. I enjoy the experience. I have two questions for you concerning your work. It seems many young writers experience a shift in their writing style. The change usually occurs somewhere between adolescence and adulthood (which can take several decades these days.) Many abstract writers begin to write more directly while concrete writers begin to adopt a more implicit style. Has your poetry always been a random series of thoughts and ideas or did you adopt this style over time. If a change did occur what was the cause? My second question addresses your writing style as well. Are your elusive series of ideas the result of stream-of-consciousness writing, or do you piece them together painstakingly? Regardless, you address our MTV generation perfectly. These days when you spell something out for someone their interest is lost immediately — you must flash through concepts like a film montage or a brilliant set of song lyrics.
That’s a great question. To be able to look at a poet you’re seeing for the first time and think, well, obviously he didn’t always write like this, so what came before? That’s really sharp. I guess the first thing I want to say is that nothing is “random” — at least, nothing in my work is. People your age use that word to mean a lot of things, but I think here you’re using it to mean “unpredictable,” which I guess is true and something I’m going for. I realize it wasn’t the meat of your question, but I would be doing a disservice to young writers reading this if I let the word “random” slip by without correcting it a little.
But no, I didn’t always write this way. For the first few years that I was into poetry — late high school and early college — I was writing almost exclusively in form. I didn’t read any contemporary poets yet and I was reading mainly the Romantics — which is still my favorite stuff to read — so I sounded more than a bit archaic, because I was just copying them. Obviously it would be laughable now, but I’m glad I started off like that, because then by the time I got more contemporary I had all this training with metrics and sound and (I think most importantly) economy of phrase, that a lot of the other students didn’t have. I certainly think it put me in a better position than what happens with most boys who get into poetry at that age, which is you start off by imitating the Beats, which is just a death sentence if you haven’t yet developed a sense of control from somewhere else.
But then when I got more contemporary I didn’t know how to make it dynamic. I was trying to do this kind of Frank O’Hara thing where I just plainly stated who was there and what happened, but when I did it, it didn’t work like it did for O’Hara, because I didn’t have all his little subtleties yet (and still don’t). It was just flat. So I wanted to figure out how to do something that was musical and trippy and tightly-packed like the Romantics, but sounded more arch and contemporary, and without any of that academic nonsense that no-one likes unless you’ve been to school for it. Sylvia Plath, for example, pulled off what I just described, but confessionalism and that much explicit narrative self right up front, it just seemed… well, over. I wanted something very personal but without actually telling stories about myself. And the final piece in the puzzle at that point was realizing that this was how Kurt Cobain felt to me, and I remembered reading he used a technique called “notebook writing” where you write down good lines individually as they come to you and then later pick out the ones that seem to go together, and then maybe sort of fill in the blank spaces to cement it all.
And the end result feels like a definitely non-random poem about a specific thing, but it’s like you were writing a poem about that thing all along without noticing, so it surprises you, which is in line with Keats’s ideas right there. And that’s more or less how I arrived at my method for this book. It’s a good point about comparing it to MTV editing, the jump-cut as the modern state of mind. Others have brought up web surfing, that it’s evocative of clicking around on the internet. Anyway, I may do the next book a different way. I definitely don’t want it to be just the same thing, part two. The other day I wrote a historical poem, and I quite enjoyed that.
What are the benefits from writing and publishing poetry makes it worth making the significantly less money than writing lyrics?
Well, that question assumes it was a choice. Like I was trying to decide between being a songwriter and poet, and made lists of pros and cons, and picked poet. And it didn’t really go that way. First of all, they’re not the same thing. A lot of people think of a song versus a book of poems as just two different delivery systems for the same stuff, but it’s not the same stuff. It doesn’t do the same thing, and you don’t make it the same way. Sure, poetry and song lyrics are similar, the same way painting and photography are similar, but they’re not the same. You wouldn’t ask a painter, why don’t you just do the same thing but with a camera instead and make more money?
When you’re writing song lyrics, which I’ve also done, your duty is to the music. The words are subordinated to the music, and the delivery is that someone hears them, so you’re thinking about how they sound, not how they’re laid out on a page. The little tricks you can do on a page, those are all gone, and different concerns are there, like which vowel sound works the best with the note you’re hitting on that word. And there’s a simplicity of phrase that’s demanded by the fact that you’re hearing most of the emotion in the singer’s voice, not the words. Conversely, in a poem you have to answer every question with just the words, and then if you try to throw all that on top of music it’s too busy and you just sort of choke on it. Listen to a poet read and you’ll hear it isn’t this regular rhythm that the words demand — even if the poem is strict metrics, there are pause and breath patterns that are too irregular for music, at least if you want to do justice to the words. If you don’t believe me, try setting “The Waste Land” to music sometime and see how it goes. Yes, there are some poets who you can set to music and it doesn’t lose anything — William Butler Yeats is a good example — but they’re the exception. And it doesn’t even work with every Yeats poem.
People always think poets are insulting songwriters when we say that, but we’re not. Songwriting isn’t necessarily worse or easier, just different. Even when I was the songwriter in a band, people would say, Oh I guess you just set your poems to music then, and I’d be like No, that’s not how it works. Even then my poems were my poems and my songs were my songs. I guess there are some songwriters who write it as a poem first and then set it — I think that’s what Leonard Cohen does, who I love — but it wasn’t that way for me. And at the end of the day, my songs weren’t as good. Could I have stuck with that? I don’t know, I guess. I’m sure I could write a bunch of rock songs that are, you know, about as good as what’s on the radio, but would they be anything terribly original or special that the world really needs? I don’t think so. I think my poems do something that isn’t what anyone else is doing — although there are other people coming up now who I think are coming from a lot of the same places, and they’ll probably start calling us something soon — whereas my songs were just, you know, a bunch of okay rock songs, which the world already has plenty of. No-one needs more of them from me.
In the poem “One! One Poem! Ah, Ah, Ah!” when you say “‘I love you’ just means ‘I forgive you for not being perfect,’ / & you should never forgive anyone for not being perfect” are you also saying that you should never love anyone? Why do you believe that?
That’s the joke in the way the lines hit you at first, yes, but of course that’s not literally what I’m saying. It would be pretty pointless if I were, since we love people whether we want to or not. It would be like saying people should never get hungry or sick or never fall down. What I’m addressing there — or what I think I’m addressing, since I should remind you that the poet doesn’t always 100% know — is the paradox of how we say everyone should love everyone, which sounds great, but on the other hand love means overlooking or forgiving a lot of stuff, and so many people have huge things wrong with them that need to change, and how is this going to happen if no-one gets after them about it? That’s really what civilization and art — and yes, obviously religion, although I’m not religious myself — have been tripping over all along. So what those lines do — the way I set it, anyway — is take that big, that very big idea, and set it up like a little algebra problem or truth table where the logical conclusion is self-evidently absurd, but then when you think about what it’s a distillation of it’s this all-encompassing paradox. And of course it comes at the conclusion of this poem that’s all about relativity and arbitrary systems — you know, is one numerical value by itself “a lot” or not? And the bit about discovering a new number, which was an actual trick I played on a kid, but I got the idea from an old George Carlin routine. Obviously distinct things that can be counted exist, but the names of the numbers we use for them are made up. Just like love exists, but we can only analyze it or even acknowledge it using made-up words. And of course the idea that there’s such a thing as “perfect” is something I play with throughout the book.
What stimulates your thought process when you go to write a poem? It seems like the majority of your writings are just random thoughts grouped together and titled. Like you went off on some sort of tangent when one obscure thought led to another. Is that how you envisioned the poems in you head before they took shape on paper or is that just how they turned out? Just curious.
Well, like I said in another response, I don’t like the word “random,” at least not in this context. I guess what you mean is that the turns in the poems are unexpected or surprising, which I suppose is a good thing. Art is supposed to be unpredictable. But “random” could imply that the turns are unplanned, or at least that not a lot of effort went into them, which of course would be a bad thing. “Unplanned” could be good in the sense that the poem, the process of writing it, is also supposed to surprise the poet. So you’re right that I don’t plan out exactly what I want the poem to say before I sit down — I try to let the poem show me what it wants to say. But that’s not the same thing as just putting down whatever pops into your head and then leaving it that way. For me, it’s a process of training yourself to develop some metaphysical sense of what the “real” next line is. You haven’t planned it out, but it’s not just the first thing that pops into your head either — you can sit there for an hour inbetween lines and reject a thousand thoughts, and then when the right next line comes along it just feels right. But that’s not to say you don’t revise the poem later on. All the poems in the book were worked on over a period of years. I don’t think there’s a single one in there that’s just the way it was in the first draft. Maybe one or two are basically the same, with just a word changed here and there, or some punctuation, but those are the exception not the rule. And what makes a thought “obscure,” anyway? What would be an un-obscure thought? Something you’ve already heard a million times? Poetry’s not supposed to have any of those.
A general question about the state of poetry in today’s society: Do you think that poetry is still an art form that has value within the artistic marketplace? Do you think that poetry — in light of how information and media have transformed our culture — could have a big resurgence in popularity? Do you think that people still read poetry to find meaning and beauty in their own lives, or has poetry become a purely scholarly genre?
I think poetry has definitely been going through a period where it is mainly read by academics, but it’s gone through those before. Mainstream readers weren’t exactly rioting in the streets over the neoclassical satirists, but then the Romantics, who are much more accessible, came after. Byron, who set sales records for poetry that have yet to be broken, was a huge admirer of Pope and Dryden, who most people can barely understand, so the two things aren’t even necessarily in as much opposition as people like to think. The Modernism of the period between the World Wars must have seemed at the time like the final break between poetry and a general readership, but then in the ’50s and ’60s we had Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, who are very widely read and loved to this day, especially among young people. Every generation thinks it’s the end of poetry, and is always wrong. As for how much money it makes, well how much money do paintings make, or plays, or any serious art? Somehow, it all gets by. As for “media,” I don’t see why the invention of the internet should mean the death or poetry or something. There are people writing poetry all over the internet. Sure, most of it isn’t very good, but it still proves that there are people who are interested in the existence of the genre. Most people’s bands aren’t very good either.
Do you think that writing using incredibly popular, colloquial language is a way to relate to readers, or do you think it works to specifically isolate yourself (and the way that you use language) from others who may be looking for something specific in your poetry? How do you think that usage and form functions differently in poetry like yours in comparison to the stuff you have to read in traditional poetry classes?
First of all, I’m wondering what you mean by “traditional poetry classes.” I’ve certainly been in a lot of poetry classes, but I don’t know how “traditional” they were. If you mean classes where you read poets from the past, well of course that’s what you read in a class. But that doesn’t necessarily place it in opposition to what’s going on now. Poets have always used contemporary language. Shakespeare was making up words right and left, and if making up words isn’t contemporary I don’t know what is. It’s tough to get more contemporary than a word that didn’t exist before you used it. Things don’t stay contemporary of course, but it’s not like that’s their fault. As far as inhabiting what you could call “common” speech, sure that’s one technique I use, at least for right now. And if that makes me more accessible to certain people, that’s great, but I wouldn’t want people to take it to mean that I’m writing in opposition to what came before. If my poetry successfully imitates MTV, fine, but I still learned how to do that from reading poetry, not from watching MTV. The only way to learn to write poetry is by reading poetry, period. And the great poets are the best ones to read. Whether or not something is “traditional” is an illusion. Just forget about it. Every genius is an original forever. “Traditional” is just something people call geniuses because they’re jealous.
I was especially drawn to the poem “Weneht” on page 21 in To Lose or To Pretend. I’m curious to know what is “Weneht?” And what does it mean when its said “I’ve a stitch from booking after fake boy pain”? Are these slangs? Is it meant to be understood? Even though I strained to wrap my head around most of the poems, I found myself enjoying reading them.
That title is a bit of a riddle, and I don’t want to spoil the fun for people who’d rather figure it out on their own, sorry. It’s really not that tough. As for the line, I suppose it’s a big slangy, but nothing so obscure I don’t think. Stitch is just a side stitch — the pain you get in your side from running too long if you’re not used to it. As for booking, that’s Long Island slang — at least, I’ve only ever heard it on Long Island, so if they say it other places too I’m unaware — from when I was growing up. It just means running. You know, “we’d better book,” like “we’d better motor” or “we’d better haul ass.” I have no idea of the origin. I think that’s one of the most important things — and one of my personal favorite things — that poetry does, is preserve little words and usages like that, that otherwise might have just vanished. Language is being born all the time, but it’s also dying all the time, and one of the grand tragic impossible missions of poetry — it’s got a lot of those — is to try and keep all of it alive. It can’t, of course, but whenever you get the chance to do that for even one silly word it’s something special.
I had to read “Freeze All the Candy” several times before I could find any meaning in it. This was partially due to the seemingly random nature of the words and subject matters. My question is about complacency: I believe the poem to be a comment on feeling complacent, perhaps in a romantic relationship. There are references to love, romance, and pleasure as well as a woman who could be the reason for the feelings. You also speak about many everyday actions: taking a bath, taking out the trash, surfing the internet, and others, these also seem like feelings of comfort. Is the poem about feeling complacent in a relationship? If not where did I go wrong in my analysis and what comment are you making?
You didn’t go wrong anywhere, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re right. I think everything you said about the poem is true, but it’s not a puzzle with a specific key. It means exactly what it says, and if it meant something else, then I would have said that instead. That’s what critics mean when they talk about “the heresy of paraphrase.” As for “complacent,” well, that has a negative connotation, and I will say that I don’t read the poem as being negative about the relationship in it. And the entire poem isn’t just about the relationship anyway. Words for emotions are oversimplifications of the emotions themselves. I think the right word for the emotion involved in the poem is the whole poem. Every poem invents its own new emotion, just like every new way of combining paint is its own color.
After reading your poems I noticed that several of them contain repeated references to the Christian religion. Your use of the words Hell, Church, Bible, Cross, and God gave me the approximation that you have a hatred for God and the Christian religion. Are you Christian? The poem “God As a Thing, or Whatever It Is” reveals you once believed in God when you say, “Ever since I stopped believing in God.” In that same poem, you tell God to “Suck it” in the last stanza which hints towards a hatred for God. He is also mentioned in the poem “Hallowe’en 2004.” It reads, “The Genius invented God to restrain the Powerful.” Then, “The Idiot embraced God to humble the Genius,” implying that God is just a fictional creation and used as a means to control. Another example is in “One! One Poem! Ah, Ah, Ah!” — “People think stuff’s in the Iliad that’s actually in the Odyssey, / & that stuff’s in the Bible that’s not in anything.” “The pizza guy turned out to be semi-retarded / & asked if we could talk about the Bible / when he arrived in the rain” are the first few lines of “The Trees Are Just Fine.” They show the idea that God is false and accepted by the dense. In the same poem, you mention “God is either perfect or looking for an excuse to kill.” In many of your poems the references to the Christian religion are used in a negative connotation. Was there an occurrence that enlightened you, causing you to abandon your belief in God? How has the religion, losing your religion, or perhaps growing up Christian and coming to a realization and deciding you no longer believed in God influenced your poetry? Also, I’m interested in knowing if you have adopted a new religion?
No, I don’t believe in God. As for what I was raised, my mother was Christian, but I didn’t really have any religious instruction or training. I guess I was sort of default Christian, in the sense that we celebrated Christmas as opposed to anything else, but it never had anything to do with religion, at least not as I perceived it. To say I “hate” God would be silly, since I simply don’t think there is such a thing as God, so to me that would be like saying I “hate” Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but it is my honest answer to your question. As far as an “occurrence” that caused me to stop believing in God, that’s a common misconception about atheists. There wasn’t some traumatic event that caused me to renounce religion — I simply grew up and figured out that there is no God. To me, God was just the last figure in the progression of the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. There wasn’t a specific event that caused me to stop believing in the Easter Bunny either. And some of the lines you cited are true regardless of whether I believe in God or not. The line about people being wrong about the what the Bible actually says, that’s simply a fact, and one that could have been pointed out just as easily by a religious person.
It has truly been an honor to read your poetry. It is a breath of fresh air to be able to read such free-form work and I have thoroughly enjoyed the time spend delving into your words. While most poetry is personal yours seems to go deeper than the average poet. Some even feel as though you are speaking directly to an individual. Poems such as “Relatively Small Destroyer” could be a personal letter written to someone. Are any of your poems written to particular people or with particular people or moments in mind? Throughout many of your poems you remind the person that they are reading a poem. Why is this? Is it because they might forget, get lost in the words you wrote and not realize what it is they are reading? Or are the reminders more for you the writer? Many of your titles seem abstract and separate from the actual theme within the poem. Did the titles come to you as easily as the poems did or were the poems a struggle to name? For instance how does the title “A Blond hair on a Black Shirt” relate a poem that talks about leaves and people making wrong judgments about themselves?
I’m wondering who these “average” poets are you’re comparing me to, but thank you. I don’t know how much sense it makes to talk about what is more “deep” than what, but as far as more personal, I do agree that I buy into the idea of the self a bit more than has been fashionable in some circles in the last few decades — although like a lot of stuff with poetry, that’s been changing recently, thanks to a lot more people besides me. The way that what people call the “poetry of experience” has gotten wrapped up with identity politics — yet another lamentable consequence of poetry’s alignment with academia and with professional advancement within English departments — I think has made a lot of people reluctant to put their real-world self into the poems, because they’re afraid of getting “busted” on not having had a hard enough life or whatever. I sympathize with where that came from originally, but once it turns into a game of “gotcha” it’s counterproductive — at least for the art form, if not necessarily for certain people’s careers. As for the fact that I frequently make reference in the poems to the fact that they are poems, I guess that’s one of the ways I try to address the concerns I was just talking about. Marvin Bell used to tell us — and he was right — that the act of sitting down to right a poem is inherently silly, one of the silliest things you can do. And I think it’s been beneficial for me to remember that. I realize that I’m not saving anyone’s life. All I’m doing is trying to spin meaning into pleasure, and so I just announce that. You know, a “we hope you will enjoy the show” type of thing. Regarding the title you asked about, that’s another one I don’t want to just come right out and answer. There’s a definite meaning — at least, a definite intention — but I don’t like answering things that directly. But you’re right that the theme is people being wrong about themselves and then being wrong about others because of that. That’s rather a clue about the title, I think. And all poems are written with specific people in mind.
Congratulations for getting where you are, the essence poetry is underrated, and people don’t buy anything these days (latter statement — exaggeration). I hope that you succeed in your dreams, and thank you for the inspiration. I have a question for you. John Cage is a composer who demonstrated that everything can be art — from several radios at varying volumes in a crowd of people, to playing the piano inside out, to silence — he and others proved that virtually anything (and nothing) could be considered art by society. I was reminded of them when you write “which means you’re a poet too if you got this far” on the first page of your book. Are you familiar with Cage, and if so, to what extent did he influence your art?
I hate to disappoint you, but as far as I know I am not influenced by John Cage in the slightest. I am aware of him, but to me he was just one of those guys that people would bring up in school to try and look smart who I just thought was complete bullshit. I already know I’m smart, so I don’t have to pretend to like stupid bullshit. I hate that “sucking on purpose to make a point” shit. Hate it. You’re right that “anything can be considered art,” in the sense that you can always trick insecure suckups into pretending they think it is, but that doesn’t make it so. With the line you referenced, I was just lamenting the state of poetry — you know, you might as well count as a poet yourself if you got all the way through the first half of the first poem in the book. If you’re going to talk about that avant-garde stuff, though, then you should have been reminded of it by the first two lines of the sixth poem in the book: “It’s not that I don’t ‘get’ your untouched canvas — / I get it, but it sucks.” I’m glad you asked me this, though, because I’m glad for the opportunity to clarify. Thank you.
Hi there, I enjoyed reading To Lose & to Pretend. I recently saw a documentary about the poet/musician Patti Smith. During an interview, she talks about how she views poetry as an ongoing dialog between poets of the past, present, and future, and that she herself is carrying on a tradition of poetry. From this perspective, poetry is both timeless and living — passed down through generations of poets. She pays homage to Whitman, Rimbaud, and T.S. Eliot. My question to you is about this. Do you consider your work to be a part of this ongoing dialog — or is it more personal than that? Do you address anyone in specific as you compose your poetry? Are there any writers who you feel a special kinship with? And how do you view yourself in relation to future poets/poetry?
Your question is a false dilemma. A huge one, and a mistake that a lot of beginning poets make. Of course I see my work as indebted to the poets who’ve come before. It couldn’t exist without them any more than it could exist without the English language itself. But to say, is it that, or is it personal — well, to me that’s what personal means. That it’s my shot to try and make something out of all this, and to be grateful for the opportunity, and to be motivated maybe more than anything else by the fact that I don’t want to let those people down. And anyone who doesn’t see it that way is not only not making art, but is probably also a huge asshole. And it’s something you really only see in poetry. I’ve taught poetry classes, and had people who go on about how much they write and what they’re trying to do, and you ask them who they read and they say — proudly, mind you — that they don’t read anybody. I can’t imagine anything more obnoxious. Can you imagine someone in a band who brags about never listening to music? Yet with poetry — with what stupid people think poetry is — you hear people bragging about not being influenced, as if influence meant they were just copying someone. It’s because people only see poetry in school, is what it is. They see the great poets as authority figures, as extensions of their teachers in high school, so they think not reading them makes them cool. To answer your last two questions, the poet I feel the most intense kinship with, by an order of magnitude, is Byron. What he did with the self in his long poems — controlling the world and being created by it, something so cruel and beautiful, and so, so honest. When your center is Byron, it’s a unique line to be in, because you come to regard so many other poets just as liars. I think it’s essential to poetry that there continue to be people who come to it that way, to it from him, but I also know that a lot of the other lines fear us, because of what we can see about them, and are preemptively dismissive of us for that reason. And I like that. I think it’s fun. It amuses me, and poetry would probably bore me otherwise. For your last question, I won’t presume to view myself in relation to future poets. That’s up to them. All I ask is that they give me a fair chance.
I have a few questions about your poem “It Has to Be Keeks So It Will Rhyme with Cheeks.” My first question is why did you pick this title? Not a very exciting question I suppose but I am honestly curious about how/why you came to Keeks and Cheeks. My second question is about the second stanza of your poem, which suggests poetry can’t accomplish more than it does because the audience for poetry is rather homogenous. You also mention Bob Dylan’s vague/specific style. Does this mean that you think poetry can accomplish the most by being concrete and abstract at the same time? How would you propose expanding the audience for poetry so that it can accomplish more; does it need to be expanded or to accomplish more?
Well, that title question I guess I’ll answer. The poem mentions the Ramones song “Rock and Roll High School,” and the title comes from a private joke my friends and I had in college, making fun of Joey Ramone’s pronunciation. He changes the pronunciation of both words, but they would have rhymed anyway pronounced the normal way. That just struck us as funny one night, and we riffed on it. And it’s true that the audience for poetry, at least at first, is homogenous, but it fans outward from there. And besides, I never said that what poetry accomplishes is small — just that it only accomplishes as much as it does. That’s a tautology. It equals itself on its own terms. Like the rhyme I was referencing. There’s nothing anyone can do about how much poetry accomplishes. It is what it is. It wouldn’t be poetry otherwise.
So I don’t have one specific question to ask, rather a few building questions that I curious about in one of your poems I most enjoyed reading. In the poem “One! One Poem! Ah, ah, ah!” when I first looked at the poem I was confused by the title, after reading the poem three or four times I felt as if the title might be a joke, not necessarily mocking but playing around with the idea that many people read a poem to understand it as something cut and dry. What were your thoughts behind naming this poem? Secondly, I was curious about your constant theme of perfection, when you say “you should never forgive anyone for being perfect” do you yourself believe in perfection? Or what would your definition of perfection be? Finally, in the line “people want there to be beginnings and endings, and want numbers to mean things all by themselves” I really find this interesting, is this why your poetry is so unpredictable? Do you not think there are beginnings and endings? Meanings to numbers?
I’m starting to think you all think I’m a lot weirder than I actually am. Of course numbers refer to concrete concepts. What I meant was, they don’t mean something alone. As in, if you just say “sixteen.” Sixteen what? Sixteen squirrels in your kitchen would be a lot of squirrels to have in your kitchen, but sixteen raindrops would not get you very wet. Among other things, the poem says that people want more significance from real life that real life is actually capable of giving us, or should be expected to give us. Wanting a number to be “a lot” or “a little” without knowing what noun it’s governing is the same impulse that made people have to go and make up God. Whether other people realize this or not is not my problem. And I think I also just answered your question about perfection.
What is the reason for bringing attention to yourself as the poet, and poetry itself, in your work? Since we’re thinking about your work in relation to song lyrics, I’m wondering if this referencing of yourself in your poems is influenced by popular music and, in particular, rap music? Or is it a way of breaking down the “mystique” of poetry?
I’m glad you brought up rap, because the “self” of the rap song did in fact influence my book. I don’t listen to much rap personally, but I think what it’s done with the speaker — how very “me, me, me” it is to this explosively self-parodic extent — is something that poetry can’t just ignore. I don’t think poetry should do that same thing — a poem about how you’ll shoot anyone who messes with you would be pretty ridiculous, since poetry is written for the future, and threats aren’t worth much once the speaker isn’t around anymore to carry them out — but I see that aggressive selfhood as a glove that’s been thrown down, and I think that poetry needs to address it if it wants to stay competitive as something that young people are going to come to in the new century. Rap has proven that this is what the people want. And while I certainly don’t think poetry should ever simply just give the people what they want, I do think poets have to be aware of what it is, the same way they have to be aware of every other possible thing about the human race as it exists in their time.
“Wait, what?” Considering the particular form and diction you chose to work with, how did you expect “To Lose & to Pretend” to be received/understood by critics and audience when you set out to get this published? I ask because you chose to use an organized stream-of-consciousness-type form and plenty of clichéd colloquial terms such as “It’s gonna be so cool,” “Suck it,” and “hot chick,” also “God” and “Jesus” as mild expletives. (Your poem “Lots of People Are Round” is a good example of the form and diction I’m referring to.) My understanding is that you’re doing so ironically, in order to comment on a certain youth culture, but please correct me if I’m wrong. However, I can see how the irony can be easily overlooked, and the diction completely mistaken.
Yeah, a lot of people, even in reviews, have assumed that I inhabit the level of speech I do in order to criticize it — you know, that I “comment” on youth culture because I’m “against” it or something — and that’s not really the deal. I mean, I was in junior high, high school, and college in the ’90s, and that’s how I talk. What should I be saying besides “hot chick?” That’s what people say. I am putting those terms together in an artistic order, which is what makes it poetry, but most of the time it’s not actually a “joke” or whatever that I’m using them. There’s no such thing as being “for” or “against” the culture that made you — you necessarily exist in its terms. There’s no “Oh, well now I’m going to write poetry, so I suddenly have to somehow be from a different place and time.” You can’t do that. The time has come for your journey westward, dude. Sure, sometimes it’s a joke, but sometimes anything is. As far as what reception I expected, you’re right, I knew that the momentum of the poetry scene now was against me on this. I always knew that I had a very real chance to turn on people who weren’t typically readers of poetry — bright and all, but not necessarily specifically educated in it — but that in order to do that I would have to get past the “gatekeepers” of poetry somehow; get out there enough so that people had a chance of finding me. And that was hard, and it still is hard.
In your poem “Lots of People are Round” is there one main idea? Is the idea that reality is just a series of events? It seems to me there is a tone that no matter the kind of events, life is flat? The lines “My face hurts. Or it did when I was writing this, / but doesn’t because now it’s the next day, / or does because I’m old now and it always hurts, / or doesn’t because I’m dead.” Are these lines a sample of contradictions in life? A mix of contradictory feelings? Pain or not pain, either way doesn’t matter? What does the poem intend to say?
You know, a lot of the stuff you’re asking about isn’t exactly up to me. I mean, life is a series of events. Isn’t it? What does whether I say so change about anything? With the lines you asked about, they are simply all literally true. The first one was literally true when I wrote it, and the rest are out of my hands but literally true also. I don’t get how they’re “contradictions.” Sure, they can’t all be true at the same time, but different people don’t all see a given poem for the first time at the same time. So I guess the “contradictions” are in Art, not life — if they’re even contradictions at all. As for whether it “matters,” well I can’t say. I’m not the one reading it.
I notice how sex is an undercurrent in quite a few of your poems. For example, in “About the Flower” you state “did you give me no flesh-colored flower & I give you no lovely evening?”, you even dedicate a poem to Camille Paglia (which, by the way, was one of my favorites). How did she influence you, along with other writers in the nature and aesthetics of writing about sexuality and gender relations? I hear so many times about male poets being misogynists. In my opinion poetry can be such a raw expression, that in the case of straight male poets’ concepts can be misconstrued as misogyny. How do you respond to this?
That last part is an important question about my stuff, I think. Thanks for bringing it up. The idea that male poets are misogynists is ridiculous, of course. Some are, just like statistically some would be in any profession, but if you’re going to pick a stereotype for us then probably the exact opposite is true. It’s almost hilarious: male poets are so frequently the guys who grow up getting picked on all those years for being the least macho, and then we get to grad school and all of a sudden people act like we’re Andrew Dice Clay. It’s yet another unfortunate consequence of poetry’s absorption into academia. As English majors, poets get pumped so full of the most outlandish stuff that’s ever been written about the evils of hetero male desire — and on top of it, since it’s all this French post-modernism stuff, the idea is always that these evils are perpetuated through language above all — so then at the end of that education, who looks like the root of all evil? A straight man who’s good with language. Obviously, there are het male evils, but I think they’re usually actions, and actions committed by men who are the most clueless with language, not the best with it. It really is insulting. On a college campus you’ve got the frat guys running around acting who knows how with women, but who’s getting yelled at? The male English majors, even though they’re probably the least objectionable guys around, simply because they’re the ones who are in the same room with the female English majors, making themselves available to be yelled at. But to be fair, because of the state of the culture, the fact remains that when a woman writes about fucking it’s political, when a gay guy writes about fucking it’s political, and when I write about fucking it’s at worst oppressive and at best a cliché. And I’m not going to complain about the cliché part, because I get it, I really do. It’s not 200 years ago, so simply advocating fucking doesn’t make me a hero, not as a straight man. All I ask is that it not be used against me by people who are supposed to be my fellow liberals, supposed to be on my side. There’s nothing I can do about who I am other than speak honestly about it, which is what everyone should do. I didn’t pick up on Camille Paglia until later, after college — I think my instructors deliberately kept her a secret from me, actually, which I’m pissed about — and loved her instantly because she was the first one I found who admitted any of this, all the stuff I was just saying. I have been disappointed in a lot of what she’s had to say recently, but no matter what I will always be indebted to her for her earlier work, because it really did save me.
I have noticed that when I read one of your poems it get an odd sense of nostalgia, especially “Driving around on the Roof.” Is this the reaction that you thought you would get? Was it your original intention to relate to your audience through all the lost half memories that we all have? Who did you think your audience would be when you were writing these poems? When I read my mom the aforementioned poem she didn’t really have any reaction to it besides saying that there was some “truth to it.” I think it’s because she was born in 1948 and I was born in 1987.
That’s weird, considering the pop song I reference in it came out when she was in college and nearly two decades before you were born. Maybe she just didn’t want to say she liked it because she was afraid it was about drugs or something. Moms are always afraid that poems are about drugs. As for whether nostalgia is my intention, I think it’s more accurate to say that nostalgia is the intention of poetry itself. Wordsworth defined poetics as powerful emotions recollected in tranquility. Everyone is writing a poem over the course of their life by elevating certain memories above other ones — not necessarily because they’re the most important for some identifiable reason, but just because, for whatever reason, they work. That’s the intellectual and emotional home you spend your life building — nostalgia is related to nostoi, homecoming, the poems about the returns home of the Greek warriors… Someone who writes poetry just makes lots of little ones for other people, instead of only the one big one for himself.
While reading To Lose and Pretend, the word that came to mind the most was “random.” My generation seems to find humor in “randomness.” With the popularity of shows like Family Guy or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, it seems as if we like unpredictable ideas popping into the storyline. I think that’s why I found myself laughing so often while reading your work. Sometimes I think I’m following a certain idea, but then you jump to a completely different topic in a humorous way. You bring forth very philosophical ideas mixed in with STDs and eating donuts, but maybe that’s just the way I read it. I’d like to know why you use this component in your writing, does it have a name and what are you trying to get across by using it? Thanks.
I’ve addressed the “random” thing more than once already, but it’s astute that you link it up specifically to comedy. I think poems and jokes have a lot in common — and reference that one or twice in the book, actually — and yes, comedy has been catching up to this element-of-surprise thing that poetry has been onto for a while… Both poetry and jokes are always supposed to be surprising, unpredictable — that’s nothing new — but different poets or comedy writers can choose to accentuate that more; to put the “unexpected” element way up in the mix instead of far back in it, to use music engineering terms. And we’re going through a period where it’s up front in the mix. And now it’s bouncing back and forth, and you have poets coming up now who are young enough to have been influenced by things like the cartoons you name, and maybe more specifically the internet comedy culture that initially influenced those cartoons. It actually relates to that last question about memories, about nostalgia. Look how many of those “random” jokes on something like Family Guy are just about remembering things: stupid stuff from the ’80s or whatever. You don’t even need to do anything with it — the memory itself is the joke. And that’s pleasurable because it’s reassuring. Deep down we actually fear the process of the world being lost bit by bit; we’re aware that there’s just too much world for it all to be remembered, for it all to be loved. That’s what Eliot meant by “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” And the more media stuff a generation is raised on, the more of that fear there is. So for a generation like ours, we can’t get enough of those references. The more trivial — in your word, “random” — the memory is, the more reassuring and pleasurable it is, because it’s a greater degree of mercy being shown to a thing that didn’t necessarily deserve to be remembered, which is what we all hope for ourselves after we’re gone.
Your poems, at least to me, all seem to move pretty fast and sporadically within themselves compared to other poetry I’ve read. I admire this because it has caused me, and probably other readers too, to really slow down and absorb each line, and often read them twice or three times to better understand the outcome (something that feels all too foreign in this day and age). I tried to think the cause of this and couldn’t really figure it out. So I have concluded something on the lines that your writing is a reflection of your mind at work; like a gun on burst fire, shooting out stanzas in random surges. It seems like most art forms adopt this characteristic of the moment, and the actual happening, but that’s just my interpretation. And now here’s my question. If any, how much of your poetry is premeditated and developed before it sees the paper or is it laid down as it comes? And what advantages/disadvantages do you see with the works that are planned out? Or vice-versa?
Well, as for your question as phrased, it’s neither. No, I don’t sit down to write about a specific thing — or rarely; yes sometimes I will design to write a poem about a specific event, or for a certain person. Generally I don’t, and I don’t think one should except on special occasions. But “laid down as it comes” would imply that I don’t revise, and I am very pro-revision. I’m past this “inspiration” stuff that people talk about as kids — I write as a discipline, so I write regularly, and then I keep what’s good, and combine it, and keep working on it. That’s what you’re supposed to do. The stuff that comes out the first time is like jamming, all the different players in your head are just jamming. And the difference between that and a finished poem is like the difference between a jam session and a finished record. Never confuse one with the other.
Your poems all seem to encompass some element or reference to something pop culture, mentioning everything from Mickey Mouse, the movie Jaws, and even ending with a quote from a Victoria’s Secret Catalogue. There is an obvious distaste for the acceptance and popularity of such figures and kitschy icons or memorabilia. Considering that pop culture has obviously inspired you and given you a subject to express your creativity, do you consider it to have a completely negative impact on society? Do you think it restrains society or people in anyway, creating a basis of artificial ideals? What do you hope to express to your audience through your poetry, considering the domination of pop culture in younger generations and the seemingly growing demise of poetry?
I addressed this earlier I think, but I’m glad to address it again, because it’s an important point for me. The answer is no. No, no, no. I love pop culture. Jaws is a brilliant film. I love all the pop songs I mention. And so on. Why on earth would I be “against” the Victoria’s Secret catalogue? Is that even possible? Granted, it’s not up to the level of Agent Provocateur, but let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good here. I can’t get over the fact that you read me as having an “obvious distaste” for things that make me happy, things that I am genuinely celebrating. I’m sorry, but I think you are projecting onto me some idea you have of what a Real Author of Real Books probably thinks about “society.” And that’s a stereotype about intellectuals that is as unfair as any other stereotype you care to name. We’re not the ones who are “against” all this stuff. Cartoons and pop songs don’t have a “negative impact on society,” religion and war do.
You reference two pop groups, the Beach Boys and the Ramones, in two separate poems. Both of these groups write lyrics praising, “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “getting kicks” (or keeks as the title suggests). You also remind the reader that these forms of fun are really forms of fear. What do you make of the lyrics to these pop songs and others like them? What is it that you think poetry can accomplish that lyrics like these cannot?
Wow, that’s two in a row. So let’s be clear again: I really, really like both the Beach Boys and the Ramones. I love them. I swear. Why won’t you believe me? I don’t say those forms of fun are forms of fear — I say many forms of fun are forms of fear. And that’s true. People can use pop music to avoid dealing with things, but it’s a misuse of pop music. Poetry could be used the same wrong way, and is, by lots of shitty poets. Anything can. Everyone is on their honor to examine their own fun and make sure it passes muster. There are no easy answers here. That’s why I just say “many forms” — because I can’t tell you which ones, because it’s different for everyone and I’m not you. If I thought it was the same for everyone, and there were specific forms I meant, I would have named them. I am not afraid to do such bitter business, you know.
The ability to command words and language is an important skill. We are in the same generation; ours and the following generations have developed an aversion to “classic” ideas of art and often avoid studying it all together… The inability to control our words, though we have a lot to express, hinders our artistic and emotional outputs. You seem to be in command of your words… Are you writing for an audience or yourself? Are you aiming to connect with and set an example for a generation that seems to be losing touch with literature, art, language, and themselves?
First of all, thanks for saying that we are in the same generation. Just between you and me, I’m not sure how old some of these other people think I am. Anyway, I think the aversion to classics is overstated — at least it’s overstated that this is a new thing. There have always been anti-intellectuals, resenters, people who hated the good stuff… It’s just that lately it has been the fashion for these people to get more attention than they normally do. But that will pass. And in fact, more people are literate now than at any point in the past — it’s just that now everyone goes to college instead of only the brightest kids, so people who are standing on the lower rungs are in the mix, in the spotlight more than before. It’s not like there weren’t stupid people before — there were actually more stupid people before — it’s just that you wouldn’t ever have met them before. Now you can see them every day, leaving racist comments at the bottoms of stories on internet news sites. But the people who are shitty writers now, 100 years ago they might not have known how to write at all, and being shitty is an improvement over being illiterate. It’s more of a pain in everyone else’s ass, because now we have to deal with them, but dealing with them is the first step to fixing them. I’m trying to set an example by being an honest person. My audience is whoever gets that.
I enjoyed your work; the poems were not what I expected! They seemed like a streamline of thoughts running through your head, which you captured on paper. Was this done on purpose or did you pick a topic and then make a poem around that? Also, who is your target audience? Because of the randomness of your poems, I assume your work attracts late teens to early twenties. But I could be wrong. Lastly, in “Admirable Fooling,” who is Rufus? Is he real? And do you actually believe that good will overcome evil, or is this sarcasm? And one last thing! Sarcasm seems to play a major role in your work, why? Did you grow up with parents with a sense of humor, is it a defense mechanism, or is that just you?
In that last question, it’s funny that you think it has to be one of the three, when obviously all three can be true at the same time. Anyway, I do think — contrary, it seems, to most people’s impressions — that my poems have distinct topics from one another. But no, I don’t pick them first. They pick me. And as far as I know, I don’t write with a target audience in mind. If you think it’s possible that younger people would be attracted to my work, that’s wonderful to hear, but I’m certainly not doing anything deliberately to effect this. As far as my intentions go, my audience is the normal audience for contemporary American poetry — it’s just that with my work, they can actually like it instead of just pretending to, like they have to with almost everything else. I don’t think any poet really writes with an age group in mind. Poetry is written for the human race, period. There’s no thought about who to pitch it to, or at least there shouldn’t be. It’s not a clothing line or a summer movie. In order to believe that good will overcome evil, I would have to believe that good and evil actually exist. I am talking there specifically about good nerds vs. evil nerds, so I guess I believe that there is such a thing as good and evil to the same extent that I believe there’s such a thing as nerds. And Rufus isn’t real, but his real record player is.
Writers often reveal, in their criticism of other works, the values by which they themselves hope to be judged. It is therefore confusing to find a poet like Mr. Cook writing about, of all things, Studs Lonigan. Studs is almost anti-poetic. What was the attraction? I haven’t read the essay, of course, and if it could be pasted in, I’m sure I’d find it enlightening. Though it may surprise Mr. Cook to hear it, Mr. Cook’s poetry seems, like Tennyson’s, to be religious poetry — poetry in which “the conflict is still in progress.” Who bothers, in contemporary poetry, to say, “Suck it, God?” And that’s not an isolated attack. In contemporary literature, God’s a dead issue. Yet matters of religion are very much a live issue in Mr. Cook’s poetry. And in the book Studs Lonigan, for that matter. (Anger at a Catholic god?) I don’t know if my question is any more specific than, “What’s going on? Studs Lonigan? Anger at God?” These are anomalies in contemporary poetry. Perhaps Mr. Cook is unaware of that himself?
Well, that depends on how you’re defining “religious.” I mean, if you have a poetics that’s concerned with questions of right vs. wrong, and that gives off the vibe of passionately seeking something, then there are going to be people who call that poetics “religious” in a metaphoric sense. But that to me seems like a disingenuous way of defining religious. To me, “religious” necessitates a belief in something that is on some level supernatural, so to me it’s very cut and dry: I don’t believe in anything supernatural, and therefore I am not religious — and nether do my poems, so they’re not either. And I think you’re mistaken about the extent to which religion is a settled question within modern art. Believe me, I would love to be able to say that no academics or no contemporary artists believe in God, but in my experience this is far from true. Within academia, I think that to a great extent P.C. crippled atheism, because atheism requires not only scoffing at the majority religion, but the minority ones as well. So the thing became to criticize Christianity specifically from an ideological or political perspective, but not so much to criticize religion in general from a scientific or logical one, which I think is sad. And within poetry, there are way more contemporary poets who believe in God than you appear to think. Just among my teachers at Iowa, there was James Galvin, who believes, and of course Donald Revell, who believes rather relentlessly. And the others were sort of ambiguous about it. I didn’t have one instructor who openly identified as an atheist, at least not when I was in the room. And among the students, I don’t think even a majority were atheists. Now that I think about it, in fact, of my four closest friends from my class at Iowa, all of them were quite unambiguously Christian. Not conservative ones obviously, but they believed in the divinity of Jesus. And then there were also many Jewish poets who were quite into being Jewish, and a smattering of non-denominational people who believed in something-or-other spiritual. The most popular of the Romantics with the students when I was there was William Blake by a mile, so you had a lot of people trying to inhabit this Blakean kind of Christian thought. And even among poets who are atheists today, there don’t seem to be many others for whom atheism itself is a priority within the work in the same way that it was for, say, Percy Shelley or Wallace Stevens. I think that’s because atheism vs. religion is a “Big Question,” and to a great extent big questions themselves are passé, no matter which side you’re on. When you’re supposed to believe everything is an illusion created by language, it becomes uncool to tackle objective truth one way or the other. But I was at Iowa slightly before all George Bush’s Christian mumbo-jumbo reached its peak, so it may be different now. There may be more poets five or so years younger than I am for whom atheism is an avowed priority the way it is for me. You certainly see on the web the extent to which atheists are organizing and forming a consciousness as a sort of new minority. I don’t know how many of these people are also writing poetry. And Studs Lonigan is just a great novel that happened to have been out of academic favor when I was growing up, like a lot of great novels about any number of things — although it’s been getting taught more and more recently. I don’t see what the big mystery is there. There’s just as much rejection of Catholicism in Joyce, and no-one would be surprised if I said my favorite novel was Ulysses.
When I first started reading your poetry I instantly noticed the obvious that your poems are very modern. However, with a more close inspection of certain aspects and constructions of various poems, I was much more reminded of older poets, poets like Plath or even Eliot. Particularly a portion of the poem “Pretending You’ve Got a Sliver” that reads, “Some night just now I danced ironically / with a female friend. She let me free / her shoulders in the laxness; trace her hair — / she let me band it to reveal her ears” in its beauty and simplicity reminds me of Anne Sexton. I guess what I am attempting to say is that your poems express so much about the world now, but also reflect this beautiful classic sensibility. Do you ever think about this dichotomy between old and new when you are writing? If so, is it challenging to find a modern voice as a poet? Finally, do you believe that this can help a generation like my own appreciate and understand poetry? Your poetry reminds me a lot of the way a painter, especially an abstract painter, wants the viewer to grasp their artwork. Your ideas flow from thought to thought much in the same way that an expressionist painter feels and expresses different emotion in subsequent strokes of the brush. Yet, despite the free flowing ideas there are moments that I find absolutely clear in your poems in the same sense that clear patterns, lines, colors or an idea can be found in a painting. For example, in “The World with the Ghost Lake” you say, “Women define yelling by movement, not by volume,” which is very clear to me, maybe because I am a woman or maybe because it is true. It seems you have hidden these moments of clarity, whether humorous or frighteningly true in each of your poems, much in the same way I believe an abstract painter hides moments of clarity in a painting. Do paintings inspire your poetry? Have certain artists been important to your career as a poet?
I think “very modern” is a humorous phrase. No-one even knows what’s “modern,” so to say “very modern”… It’s like when people say “true love.” We have enough trouble defining the word itself, and then we go and modify it with something. But your analysis itself was right on the money. The effect of lush musicality without sing-songiness in a way that recalls classic poetry but still sounds new is something I’ve quite deliberately sought, and the passage you cited is one of the places where I’m going after it hard, and both Plath and Eliot are at the very top of the list of poets I looked to in an effort to learn this power. I’m very impressed by your question, so much so that I’m almost embarrassed answering it, as if I were a magician and you figured out how I do some trick. But yes, of course I think this can help people appreciate and understand poetry — and that is the right order, appreciate first and understand later — not just your generation, but anyone. This “generation” of yours, you know, is probably not so different. In five thousand years of poetry I’m sure you’ve happened once or twice, and yet there is still poetry. Musicality is one of the things that makes poetry pleasurable, and poetry is absolutely supposed to be pleasurable. That is one of its primary duties, not an afterthought or a happy side-effect when you can manage to work it in. People only encountering poetry in school, and poets all automatically becoming teachers, has caused a lot of people to start writing poetry as if they are assigning homework. Poetry isn’t homework, or at least it isn’t supposed to feel like homework. Of course, anything can feel like homework to someone who is determined not to like it, but a poem should be intensely pleasurable to someone who is willing to give it half a chance. If someone thinks that this is less important than some theory about the politics of language, then I don’t know what that person should be doing, but it isn’t writing poetry. Anyway, thanks for your question, and for being a woman reader who actually agrees with something that a male poet has to say about women — speaking as a male poet, I can tell you that is a very rare thing. The one thing you got wrong is all the stuff about painting. I do not know thing one about painting. I don’t even have any favorite artists, unless you count Gil Elvgren.
The first question I have is dealing with “Admirable Fooling.” In the first sentence, you mention that there are more good nerds in the world than evil nerds. What does this phrase mean? Is it just a comparison of good and bad generally? I think that you use many comparisons in this poem — that, for example, the last stanza is just another way to express the first stanza. My second question is from “The Trees Are Just Fine.” I want to know what is the relationship between God and pizza? In the god explanation part, there are two aspects of god, so do you want to say that the rainy day is related to both aspects of God?
Good question. No, it is not a comparison of good and bad generally. I definitely do not think there are more good people than bad people — I think there are hands-down more bad people. But specifically among “nerds” — which I suppose you could define as people who are obsessed with being smart — I think that among obsessively smart people there are more good than bad. And if anything could ever mean that there will eventually not be evil, then this does. So it is not hopeful exactly, but neither it is wholly cynical. As for the first and last stanzas, I do try to have different parts of the same poem inform one another, but I also try to be careful not to just say the same thing twice. I will say that if the first stanza is a joke, then so is the last stanza, but if the first stanza is serious then they’re both serious. In the other poem, I am not saying anything about God, because I don’t think there is such a thing. So those — and any of my lines about “God” — can be taken as being about people’s idea of God, or what that idea does in the world. Rainy days are wholly unrelated to this. Rain happens when moisture in the air condenses into drops heavier than air. This would happen whether people had decided to make up God or not, or whether or not there were even people, or life at all. And the relationship between God and pizza is that they are both emotionally satisfying in the short term but ultimately bad for your heart.
When you are writing poetry or lyrics does it just flow and you can sit down and write one in a matter of minutes or do they take you weeks to complete with a collection of different thoughts and feelings? I ask because your poetry flows together really well but a lot of them have moments in the past and future. Because they flow I would imagine it was written in one sitting and just came out like that. But because of the choppy thoughts I thought maybe lines were put together at different moments in your life.
Well, it is both, like I suppose it is for most poets. I write a first draft in an hour or so, and then work on it for however long it takes for me to be satisfied with the poem. For some of the poems in the book this was a period of weeks, and for others it was years. It is always supposed to seem as if it “just came out like that,” of course — a fact most famously testified to by Yeats in a poem called “Adam’s Curse.” I don’t know what kind of poem would be supposed to make someone go “wow, this was clearly meticulously revised over a matter of years.” Maybe The Waste Land or something, but The Waste Land is over and done with. Eliot did it once, and we certainly don’t need someone to do it again. In any case, remember there’s no prize for writing a poem off the top of your head. This isn’t 8 Mile. When I was a teenager, I had some poems that I remember being proud of having written quickly, but of course by my standards now those poems are nothing. You have to learn to make yourself take longer to write a poem, even a first draft. You have to ignore the thousand thoughts that are 90% the next line and wait for the one that is 100% the next line. And then in the morning you realize even that one wasn’t, or five years later.
This question is a follow up to another question asked by one of my classmates, who asked about the manner in which you construct your poems and their apparent “stream of consciousness” or “notebook writing” quality. In your response, you described how you arrived at the style used in To Lose & to Pretend and how this particular style was “personal without telling stories about myself” and “dynamic.” Are there any technical qualities inherent in this style of writing that allow a poet to express ideas or emotions more accurately and/or more effectively than traditional, formal poetry or is it simply a matter of this style working for you?
Be careful of distinctions. My poetry is “formal.” Every poem is “formal” — it’s just that some poems are in a form that no other poems are also in. Although you could theoretically take any free-verse poem and then write a poem based on its structure and call it something, and then if it catches on — presto! the former free-verse poem is now in a fixed form. Actually, I think I will start doing that now. Thanks. And as for “traditional,” well, give it some time and it will be traditional eventually. Anyway, I can’t answer the bulk of your question, because I’ve only ever been me and not any other poets, so I don’t know how accurately they are expressing their emotions. Now that I think about it, I am not even sure how accurately I am expressing mine. Partly, I write poems to find out what my emotions are in the first place. But maybe I’m wrong. And if I am, who then would be in a position to correct me? Anyway, no, there’s not a right way. I do it this way. At least, for now. It’s like saying, which way of making music is more accurate, an electric 12-string picking chords over an acoustic rhythm guitar, or having only one guitarist who plays fifth chords in dropped-D tuning, or having a keyboardist instead of a bass player, etc. I think there are definitely certain ways of writing poetry that are bad, and I’ve talked about some of them in this interview, but among the good ways, the good ways are all equal.
I usually don’t read much poetry, but I found your work very interesting and unconventional, which I really enjoyed! The use of vernacular language and the “stream of thoughts” style is really refreshing compared to that of traditional poetry. I really like some of your poems’ eccentric titles (”One! One Poem! Ah, Ah, Ah!,” “Weneht,” “Non, Je Ne Joue Pas au Tennis”). How do you come up with the names? Do you usually have a title in mind when you write a poem, or does the title come after the creation of the poem? You often talk about “poems/poetry” in your poems. What is the reason behind this theme?
Name a poet who doesn’t use vernacular language. I mean, you kind of have to, now and then. And I make reference to poetry itself so often because — I’m not sure; I suppose because it’s silly to pretend that a poem is something other than a poem. And just because it’s something most of my favorites do, I would imagine. The Romantics all make reference to the poems as being poems. Yeats does too. And Dickinson always feels like she’s making reference to the poem as a poem, even when she isn’t explicitly. But I like the title question. It’s a good one to close on, because one of the things I am confident in saying I do well is titles. I think it’s hilarious that the most common complaint I hear when I’m teaching poetry is that titles are hard. People ask whether they “have to” title their poems, and then if you say they don’t have to then they never do. And that’s hilarious to me, because I think it’s so easy. All you have to do is consider the title to be just another line in the poem, and then think of it the same way you think of any other line. So, how do you think of a title, it’s like, well how do you think of a first line? Or a seventh line? Or where to break a stanza? What is so special about titles that makes them any harder than thinking of anything else? Probably someone who is that worried about titles should be a little more worried about the lines in the poem itself. It’s just that the title is up at the top there, in the spotlight, so a bad title can’t hide like a bad line in the poem itself, safe down there in the middle of all those other lines. Learn to make those good, instead of hiding them, and then the titles will fix themselves. You know, when my father was a kid, he was the fastest kid in school. And people used to ask him how he ran so fast. And he had an explanation — it was “move your legs faster than everyone else is moving theirs.” But he never told anyone, because he thought it was a secret.