Michael T. Young: Thank you, Joe,
for agreeing to an interview.
Your
most recent collection is called A
Plumber’s Apprentice. Unlike many
collections out there, the title doesn’t have a title poem from which it
comes. The phrase doesn’t even appear in
the collection. I wondered if you could
comment on it: why you chose it, what it’s meant to draw our attention to as we
enter the collection and read through it.
Joe Weil: Well, there
was a poem, “The Plumber's Apprentice,” published in Lips Magazine. The story is
rather involved but the friend who chose the poems for The Plumber's Apprentice decided “Plumber's Apprentice” the poem
should not be in the manuscript. It will
be appearing in my New and Selected due out soon. I never argue with editors. I look at it this way: if they're wrong,
they'll look wrong in retrospect and poor innocent me will look terrific. If they're right, they just saved me a world
of hurt.
Michael T. Young: If you don’t mind my saying, I feel the
descriptor on the back of the book doesn’t do it justice. It reduces the voice to that of one that
tells the hard truths as a mere bargaining ploy but it seems to be much more
profound than that, more genuine. That
is, without a governing purpose for the honesty, collections that tell hard
truths are themselves a kind of false stance like any other. This collection seems to suggest poetry and
beauty really have the power to redeem and save us. As one poem early on says, “each beautiful
thing is reprieve,/and stay of execution.”
The final section reasserts this, especially the final poem, “Filthy
River,” which concludes “Sing in the river/until only the song remains”—certainly
a kind of redemption. Could you comment
on this theme within the collection, i.e. the redeeming power of beauty and
poetry?
Joe Weil: I was homeless
for a while. I was young and healthy and
not rip-roaringly mentally ill (I was depressed as you might suppose). No one talks about the sense of endless
drudgery involved in poverty. In my
case, I was taking long walks to nowhere—just walking for miles. One day, I found a ten dollar bill on the
ground which in 1978 was worth far more than it is now. Cigs were 75 cents. I could get pork fried rice. I could eat well that day, and I sat in
thickets by the railroad tracks, smoking a cig, and seeing this bird I didn't
know climbing down the trunk of a tree. It
bothered me that I didn't know the bird, so I went to the library and looked it
up: Nut Hatch! And then I started looking
up birds, and trees, and weeds, and my long walks became a sort of ongoing
urban nature lesson plan. One day, I'm
sitting there and I think: “Does anyone know I am a guy who knows the names of
the weeds?” And I cried. I couldn't stop crying. I thought only God knows me, and a few other
nobodies. I thought the real God is a
nobody and the one people think they worship is just their social world. When you leave that place where you know and
are known, that social God disappears. The
weeds have names and nothing is without its history, but the world is all about
pretending most things don't exist. All
you have is that God I think Emily Dickinson addressed when she said: “I'm
nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?” I felt I had this God as my companion—this God
of weeds, of things that are considered ugly, of no consequence. It became a persistent theme of my work: not
the beauty that is agreed upon and mass produced—but the beauty that ambushes
us, that shows up in unlikely circumstances. When my poems are good, they are exactly
someone who is smoking a cig and sees a bird, and goes to find out its name. Everything proceeds from there. That's the seeking, the quest we deny exists
in some horrible conditions. This is why
the communal sin of how we treat the poor is so egregious. We are not just shunning people. We are destroying consciousness itself. The most revolutionary thing I ever did was
cling to my right to look up a bird.
Michael T. Young: There is a very
complex view of lies and falsehood within the collection. There are lies we need against the horrid
fact of death, all “the loving falsity Cordelia could not manage,” but then
there are those “bogus spiritual comforts” that make one grateful to those who
don’t mind appearing callous when trying to avoid touch. Do you feel there are certain lies that are
helpful or justified and others that are not?
What distinguishes them?
Joe Weil: It is arrogant
to think we are capable of the truth. We
are capable of seeking it, hoping for it, and welcoming it as a possibility in
our lives, but an old Persian saying submits that truth told without compassion
and without fully understanding its consequences is not truth at all. Compassion and the wisdom to know how to “tell
it slant” are important. Cordelia loved
her father, and, in the end, reconciles with him, but her lack of tact and
guile sets a shit storm into motion. If
Cordelia had had just a dose of her sisters’ poison—just a touch of the illness
they suffered—enough to inoculate her against their worst tendencies—she may
have been capable of realizing her father was old and wanted to make a grand
gesture and hear, “well done,” before he died. This is a play written during the Elizabethan
era in which virtue in its pure form, its most extreme form, is considered a
form of madness (See Henry the 6th).
To Elizabethan thinking, the saint is as much a cause of calamity as
Satan. That play, that wonderful play,
should warn us that the extremes make civil life impossible, but then, there
are times when civil life ought to be made impossible: storms clear the air. When the civility of mere seeming, of fake
goodness has grown too all pervasive, the saint, the mystic, the poet, the
great comic, must expose such lies. It
is a balancing act, and my Grandmother was right: Life is a king sized bed with
twin sized sheets. You'll never cover it all—with lies or truths.
Michael T. Young: There is an
amazing layering of desire, want and lust within the collection. I
was especially interested in the couplet that closes “Clap Out Love’s
Syllables.”
Stocks
fall, leaves fall, we fall, yet, falling, praise
the
fields of lust on which our bodies graze.
It
is such an unusual stance to take with lust.
I wondered where you place lust as a manifestation of our basic needs or
how you relate it to spiritual needs, if at all.
Joe Weil: That poem was written right after the
economic crisis of 2008. I wanted to
take some of the words of banking and trading and apply them to desire—to lust,
not as a moral precautionary tale, but to find some meaningful coordinate for
how different terminologies (banking, trading, lusting/loving) could share a
new dynamic. It was an experiment with
the metaphor and with what I suppose is called “the trans-valuation” of values.
We don't see lust as sacred, but it is. It drives the life force. What I was saying was that desire in its
sacred context trumps the market—transcends stocks, and bonds and all that. Every complicated thing we do is done very
often just to win some moments of abandon. I also am interested in the courtly poets, and
in word play. That poem had a lot of
word play since both the courtship of lust and that of the market is learning
the art of play—of smoke and mirrors.
Michael T. Young: The poem “Dead
Things” says “perhaps misremembering/is a form of prayer.” Another poem in the collection is called “I
Am What I Remember” and includes the line “Memory lies.” I’m curious: what do you see as the
relationship between who we are and the weave of false and accurate
memories? Additionally, since the
tradition is that memory is the mother of the Muses, what do you see as the
relationship of false memories to poetry and its creation?
Joe Weil: I tell my
students that their day begins with a selection from existence (what they give
their attention to) and then the part of the brain that puts these perceptions
into a coherent pattern of being is activated. In dream states, that part of the brain that
gives coherence is shut down. The
memories of the waking mind and the sleeping mind are privileged by different
structuring strategies. These different
strategies do not live in isolation one from the other but meet, and merge, or
almost merge, or almost resist each other. That dynamic is part of our being, and so
memory is never truly loyal to our selected narrative of what actually happened
or to our un-selected narratives. The
snow you did not notice melting into your Navy blue coat might become a former
lover melting into the oblivion of a blue landscape, or you might dream you
melt like a snow flake on her tongue. But
memory, waking memory, might exclude all these possibilities, and all you
remember is that you went to the store and bought a six pack of beer. The procedural: just the facts sort of writing
we consider closest to the plain truth of things, is little more than a series
of lies by omission. As Kafka said, the
minute you write that she opened a window, you have already begun to lie. Miss-remembering is a form of prayer. It is supplicant prayer. It represents our desire and our “Way” of
wanting things to be—being towards a hoped for meaning to our lives. “Memory lies” is also true, but the lies carry
their own emotional truths. You can
learn a lot about a person by knowing what they lie about—and not just
intentional lies, but what I call the lies of the adamant—that which they would
swear is the truth upon pain of death, but which is really only a resolving
of their cognitive dissonance. People lie to stay in their comfort zones.
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| Click image to purchase The Plumber's Apprentice |
Michael T. Young: In such lines as
“I obey//only to annihilate you” or “a newness/in the east!/a vermillioned
somethingness/of which we are too/distantly a part/in 'I quit,' 'That’s
it,'/'fuck you!'” there is a startling meld of amor fati and carpe diem, ways of
refusing and embracing simultaneously to assert the self in a hostile
situation. Do you relate this stance to
anything philosophical or do you see it as purely a psychological reaction to
an oppressive situation? Do you see this
stance in any relation to the questions of memory and failures of memory which
the collection addresses?
Joe Weil: First, I was
having fun with Wallace Stevens in that poem. Instead of vermillioned
nothingness of which we are too distantly a part, I changed it up. Second, to me all philosophy helps make life more
portable—to be carried in this or that conjecture, in this or that situation. In so far as it is situational, true
philosophy is not consistent, but it speaks in emphatic ways toward the moment
of a verity with the hope that something in it is eternal, or universal, or
final. If one truly obeys, the system is
no longer necessary for one has embodied the whole of the law; so true
obedience destroys the law. We are
incapable of true obedience. In that
poem the speaker seeks to “annihilate” God by absolute obedience. There's a term for that in psychology where
one sublimates and expresses aggression by being extremely compliant and even
slavish. In this poem though, I believe
this is the high and mysterious hurt of the true lover. In the most extreme situations of being, the
contradictions are unavoidable. To be in
such cognitive dissonance and to not resolve it is the true advent, the true
faith. It is agon, birth pain: I will
not solve, I will wait in this place where waiting is impossible. I can't go on and so I will go on. This is not a space that is easy for human
beings to accept. It is absurd. We resolve the cognitive dissonance—almost always
with a lie, a compromise. In that poem,
the speaker is telling God he will absolutely not resolve the dissonance. His love and hatred for God are both unstable,
both absolute in their instability, and the greatest integrity is to remain in
that awful state until God speaks from the maelstrom or the speaker of the poem
dies. It is someone saying that even his
no is a yes, and even his resistance is an act of obedience. It is absurd, and contradictory. Memory can either reconcile contradictions
(lie) or it can hold them steadfast (suffering towards truth). Keats’ negative capability gets at it, except
I don't believe one remains serene in that negative capability (except with
writing) as Keats himself showed in his life.
Michael T. Young: In the first
section there is the poem “When I Was Twelve,” and in the closing section there
is the poem “Poet as a Young Voyeur.”
What do you see as the significance of your younger self in the
collection?
Joe Weil: A lot of my younger “self” in these poems watches—witnesses,
getting it wrong and right at the same time. “Poet as a Young Voyeur” is all about noticing
what the world might consider pedestrian (a bald man watering his lawn at dusk)
and making the pedestrian into a thing of wonder. What I call the wonder-making “sympathy of the
detached.” It is a comical, almost
cartoon rendering of how we are never or seldom in our lives. We are always above or below them, but seldom
in them—for a brief moment the 8 year old notices Venus, the evening star, and it
seems the man he has been watching notices it, too. He thinks the man looks up at the sky as if
his real life were there where the dark “swallows them whole.” “When I was 12,” is about the narrator's
first crush and how it expands his sense of the significance of all that
surrounds him. The girl, rather than
being the focal point, is more the catalyst in the speaker experiencing an
intuition of the enormity of life. Both
poems represent an expansion of being. This
is important in the book.
Michael T. Young: Do you have a
favorite poem in this collection? Which
one is it and what is significant about it for you?
Joe Weil: “Poem for Advent” is my favorite. When the speaker insists he is both “Con and
evangelist” that pretty much sums up the strategies of contradiction these
poems are fascinated with. Con means
“with” in Latin and Spanish, but in English and American English it connotes a
situation in which you are conjuring someone, creating a false expectation with
someone to your advantage. The
confidence man is a great figure in the American mythos: he sells hope of
riches. He gains your confidence. We don't consider him a creature of grace, but
he can be. I am playing with how close
true spiritual belief is to the con. The
angel says “fear not.” The angel draws
us in. It's a sales pitch. Grace is getting something for nothing,
gratis, and the greatest cons, including one who shares my name, Joseph yellow
kid Weil, say all cons are perpetrated on someone thinking they are going to get
something for nothing (usually money). This
poem “For Advent” is my most complex poem in terms of meaning. In it we “despair” more deeply into joy, this
dark thing that comes to save us from our “truths,” meaning those that are
grounded in false epiphanies, in their own self-deceit.
Michael T. Young: You are very
conscious of social and political issues and inequalities. I’m curious, what do you see as the poet’s
role in society? How should our poets
rise to that role and take part in shaping our culture both socially and
politically?
Joe Weil: The role of the
poet is to write well. That is, his
mitsvah (love of neighbor), his shema (love of God or ontological truth) is to
somehow believe that writing well has worth beyond what he can deliberately institute
or know. I don't think political issues
are at the heart of my poems, but the sermon on the mount, the reversal of
values, and the idea of Eucharistic reality in which the king and the beggar
are one certainly is at the heart of my poetry. When you insist there is infinite value in
what is sacred and what is Grace under the appearance of the thrown away and
the broken, this makes your poems political without trying. Ferocity is too often avoided in our spiritual
poems. I hate that. The poets of serenity are too often selling a
noxious brand of “feel good.” Serenity
junkies mistake serenity for God. They
seek the understood peace of nice things, and happy silences, rather than the
peace that surpasses all understanding—peace in the maelstrom and without
rejecting those who have no peace. They
refuse to admit their serenity and spirituality is built on the exploitation,
starving, and oppression of millions. It
is a spirituality privileged by affluence. It costs a lot of money to be serene like
that. How many slaves did it take so
that we could sit in the garden at evening listening to the fountain, drinking
good wine, having lofty thoughts, and talking about how awful slavery is? How often do we make our heaven from someone's
Misery? I am political in the way Simone
Weil was political: one should choose to give one's will freely and without
reservation to God and to surrender the self into God, but that is not a free
choice for the poor. The poor are
compelled by affliction. They suffer most
by having necessity become so overwhelming. A monk makes a choice to be impoverished, and
that is a world of difference from someone who is forced into slavery or
prostitution or injustice at an early age and is robbed of the right to choose
the poverty to which they are condemned. A poet must return or give true value where it
has been taken away. This the poet must
do by writing well. Bad writing kills
truth deader than a lie. The poet must
write well. That's the imperative—the
whole of his or her mission. That is the
first and last. Then, the shemah of a
writer is the hope that good writing has an effect and a usefulness he or she
will never be able to manipulate or foresee.
Michael T. Young: Are there any
prose works that have noticeably influenced your work as a poet? What are they?
Can you say in what way you feel this work or works influenced your
poetry?
Joe Weil: My favorite
form is the short story. “Gimple the
Fool,” “For Esme with Love and Squalor,”—just about every story by Flannery
O’Connor. All the stories of Chekhov, and
Gogal. Nabokov's “That in Allepo Once,”
Joyce's “The Dead,” The Death of Ivan Illyich, Williams Carlos Williams' zany and
wonderful, In the American Grain, the
stories in the Bible, Bernard Malamud's amazing and forgotten collection The Magic Barrel. Winesburg,
Ohio. You Know me, Al, by Lardner; The
Great Gatsby; Day of the Locust—Eudora
Welty's stories. Grace Paley, Philip
Roth, James Baldwin, Buber, Kenneth Burke, Susan Sontag. All of these works or writers have reflected a
sense of hard earned empathy and compassion, but best of all, a mastery of
style and enchantment—a sense of humor and double-consciousness. George Bernanos had a profound effect on me. I am a comic poet. My music is broken to a purpose of comic
consciousness—what my dear Kenneth Burke called perspectives by incongruity. I never worried about categories too much. I found paragraph structure limiting, and so I
put stories into lines, but I don't think having prosaic elements in a poetic
context is an aesthetic blight. I hate
purist sensibilities. These works have
given me a strong sense of a speaking voice, and of using different registers
of speech.
Michael T. Young: What do you
like to do that has nothing to do with poetry or writing?
Joe Weil: I like to play
the piano. I like to google things like
the history of White Castle, or the life of Jack Benny. I love youtube, and fishing. I enjoy digging, and carting as long as I
don't have to do it for a living and a foreman isn't standing over me. Love walks, eating oysters—but, hey,
everything has to do with writing. I
like to misuse face book. Love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Love to sit around a kitchen table and yack
until I am sleepy with good talk and I have to go to bed, leaving the
conversation to continue somewhere else in the world.
Michael T. Young: Thank you, Joe, for such an amazing wonderful interview. Let’s close with your favorite poem from The Plumber’s Apprentice.
Poem
for Advent
The
world takes us at its leisure
slowly,
by increments of infamy
or
“virtue”
and
beyond that taking
we
wager freedom
against
our corpses,
trick
ourselves into living
fully—whatever
fully means.
I
am writing this in the dust
of
an old Chrysler,
its
lascivious grill, its chrome
freckled
with rust,
its
front end grinning
like
Burt Lancaster
in
Elmer Gantry.
What
do you mean?
A
million dollar grin,
the
atavistic power of healthy teeth
might
convert a nation (see Joel Osteen),
might
make us believe
in
the power of “abundance.”
But
suppose I write:
“Lack
is the necessity of being.”
The
nation will turn against me.
The
sun is a used car salesman.
To
get something for almost nothing
is
the pitch of grifters and of angels.
And
I have been both
con
and evangelist.
“Fear
not” says Gabriel,
the
usual line
(See
Britannica, 1962: how an angel gets one foot in the door)
“For
the Lord of Lords has chosen you.”
And
the little girl inside us nods her head.
“Yes.”
The
birds cheep.
Bird
twitter and angelic hosts are all around us.
I
am postponing the inevitable
until
further notice.
Pregnant
with God,
I
write in the dust of an old Chrysler,
all
the sins of the ones with stones.
Slowly
they turn away,
and
I am left with the woman
taken
in adultery,
and
I am left with my own
trembling
girl, who kneels
in
the deepest part of my sarcasm,
beyond
all cons, who cries
Maranatha!
Who waits
that
the spirit might shadow her,
that
the womb might not be empty,
that,
even in despair, the soul might
feel
its worth, and, feeling it,
despair
more deeply into joy—this dark thing
that
comes to save us from our “truths”
this
dark season where poverty is blessed.
