Interview with Poet Joe Weil

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 6^th).  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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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.

 

 

http://www.amazon.com/The-Plumbers-Apprentice-Joe-Weil/dp/1935520105/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381967063&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Plumber%27s+Apprentice

Interview with Poet Gary J. Whitehead

Michael T. Young:  Thank you, Gary, for agreeing to an interview. 

Your latest collection is called, A Glossary of Chickens.  This is a funny title.  Would you mind commenting on where it came from and what the general inspiration was?  

Gary J. Whitehead:  The book is titled after one of the poems in the collection. That poem came about several years ago while I was at an artists’ colony in the Adirondacks. There were hens there, and each evening another poet and I would make sure the hens got back in their coop before dark. One day, this poet handed me some photocopied pages from a book on poultry raising. It was a glossary of terms having to do with chickens. He gave no explanation. He must have known I’d enjoy it. I wrote the poem as a thank you to him and left it tacked to the swinging kitchen door on the day I left, knowing he’d find it. I’d raised chickens myself for a few years, so the poem was meaningful to me, as well. It seems to have struck a chord with chicken enthusiasts all over. It was the first poem of mine to appear in The New Yorker. When my book manuscript was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton University Press Contemporary Poets Series, he suggested I change the title to A Glossary of Chickens. I liked the suggestion, especially because it sets a whimsical tone.


Michael T. Young:   The collection suggests an opposition between the movement of nature toward some kind of intention and man’s artificial plans.  For instance, the poem “Pastoral” says at one point, “no theme/but the old/chance/of seeding again/a better world.”  Yet the poem “Drosophila Melanogaster” concludes by saying “Why overprioritize long-term plans//at the expense of our present enjoyment?”  I’m curious if you could talk about this opposition and what it means in the context of the collection. 

Gary J. Whitehead:  For me, nature has always been a refuge from the more oppressive aspects of civilization. As a young boy, I spent a great deal of time in the woods. My family got into camping when I was seven, and I loved everything about it. I’d always feel a profound sense of peace getting away from suburban New England and lying out under the stars, listening to a lake lap at the shore and loons making their haunted calls. Several years ago, I had the good fortune of being selected for a writing residency in the wilderness of Oregon, where I spent six months living off the grid in a cabin tucked along the wild and scenic Rogue River. There, I felt that opposition between nature and man’s artificial plans, between the need for solitude and the pangs of loneliness. I remember making the two-hour drive to stock up on provisions and being shocked and disgusted walking the aisles of a Walmart; I couldn’t wait to return to the peace of my canyon. Then, a few days later, I’d be pining for human contact, for mail, for Thai food, for the society of a café. These conflicting impulses are expressed often in my poems. In the lines from “Drosophila Melanogaster,” a poem about aging, there’s a kind of cross-over between nature and suburban domesticity; fruit flies have invaded the house, and the speaker, delighting in watching them do their thing, has a carpe diem moment. As a nature lover, I can’t help but have such moments, which occur between nature running its course and man running his.


Michael T. Young:  The title poem “A Glossary of Chickens” concludes by saying “We think/that by naming we can understand,/as if the tongue were more than muscle.”  This is, of course, a very interesting thing for a poet to say.  Could you discuss the importance of this insight and its relationship to the arc of the collection?

Gary J. Whitehead:  Words are symbolic and so can never fully convey what we want them to, so I see writing¾and poetry especially¾as a striving toward something that can’t be achieved, yet, in the attempt one can create another kind of truth, which is the essence of art. The title poem expresses this idea:  we want the right words to describe the quirky behavior of a chicken, but those words, as delightful as they may be, fall short.


Michael T. Young: A poem in the same section as the title poem, “Tied Dog,” clearly suggests the struggle of the writer to break out of the language that constrains him and grasping or articulating something that is “just out of reach/of whatever’s worth snapping at” just like a dog tied to a leash.  Could you elaborate on how this relates to the limits of understanding suggested by “A Glossary of Chickens”?  What is the relationship between these poems and the overall theme?

Gary J. Whitehead:  The “Tied Dog” poem is perhaps more overt in expressing the idea that writing poetry is an exercise in failure. The poet is restrained by the limited language he has, and there is always this feeling of the right words being just out of reach. I think this is true of all art. Perhaps great art, as subjective as that may be, is the art that for a majority of people comes closest to a “true” expression of emotion or experience. I think that what keeps the artist going is that carrot he can never quite eat.


Michael T. Young:  The poem “Trap Door” says, ‘It is not the disappearance of the dead I grieve/but the way the living abscond/into the past.”  The poem, especially when it evokes your mother “sitting across from me, chews chicken with rice/but tastes the dish her mother made,” recalls Proust’s famous madeleine moment.  What do you see in these excursions into the past and what makes it an object for grief?  Do you feel the present moment is enriched by or impoverished by these times when we abscond into the past?  

Gary J. Whitehead:  The remembrance of things past is always a little tragic, because memory too is flawed, is expurgated by the limited power of the brain, and it reminds us of the inexorable nature of time and our own mortality. Of course, memories can also be beautiful and profound, even the witnessing of one remembering in grief. In “Trap Door” I tried to communicate how it felt to see my mother grieving her own mother’s passing. I didn’t consciously refer to Proust’s madeleine moment. The chicken with rice moment was real. Smell and taste can be powerful stimuli for remembrance.


Michael T. Young: Is there any significance to the collection starting with Lot’s Wife and ending with Noah contemplating the dilapidated ark?  

Gary J. Whitehead:  A poet friend recently wrote me asking why we poets agonize over the arrangement of poems in a book when so often a reader doesn’t read from beginning to end but rather just flips through randomly. I had to laugh, because it’s often true. Are reviewers the exception? Arranging a collection of miscellaneously written poems (i.e., not on one idea or theme) must be a bit like curating a gallery or museum exhibit; one is forced to think about coherent flow, larger themes, an arc. In arranging A Glossary of Chickens, I tried to do my best to achieve these elements, and the placement of the biblical poems was intentional. Both bible stories are about destruction and human depravity and resilience, though in my recasting of the latter I’m interested more in creation, in art, than I am in destruction. Noah is the stand-in for the poet, and I see his looking down on the civilization he’s made as my looking down on the poems I’d written. In retrospect, I should have included a biblical poem in the second section, as well.


Michael T. Young:  The collection opens with a poem called “Oyster,” ends with Noah contemplating the rotting remains of the ark and in between is Melville, a slaveship and a character from a Melville story.  What do you see as the significance of sea imagery in the collection? 

Gary J. Whitehead:  As the manuscript was coming together, its first title was Salt Variations, because of the preponderance of sea imagery, not to mention poems like “Spice Rack” and “Lot’s Wife.” As the poems piled up, I liked the idea of Melville as a recurring character in the collection. About ten years ago, I had the good fortune of being chosen for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute focused on Melville and Multiculturalism. Along with fourteen other teachers from around the country, I studied Melville with some of the leading scholars. I teach two of his shorter works every year in AP English. Herman floats into my mind often. Much of the sea imagery comes in the Melville-inspired poems; “Luminescent Jellyfish,” for instance, arose from the NEH institute and a field trip we took to Mystic, during which we spent a night on the Charles W. Morgan whaleship. But my love of the sea is older. I grew up in the Ocean State. When A Glossary of Chickens was suggested as a title, I let the sea poems become a sort of thread, just as the chicken poems are, and the insect poems, the slavery poems. I liked that there were many woven subjects 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?  

Gary J. Whitehead:  I always have a hard time picking favorites of anything, because I change my mind so often, but if I had to pick one, it would be the title poem. I admire that poem for its rhetorical set up (I saw in The New Yorker just last week that Charles Simic used a similar approach in a poem called “Dictionary,” and I was glad I did it first!). I also like this poem for its tone and for the character it suggests as speaker, a character I see as true to myself.


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?  

Gary J. Whitehead:  I don’t think there are any specific prose works that have influenced me as a poet, but there are prose writers I admire for their uses of language:  Melville, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and McCarthy come to mind. I’m a big fan of Kent Haruf, too, though there’s nothing poetic about his writing at all. I admire his understated, simple, descriptive style and the way he can communicate human emotion. I recommend him to everybody. Some poems in my book were sparked by novels: “Lot’s Wife” by Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and “Babo Speaks from Lima” by Melville’s Benito Cereno.


Michael T. Young:  What do you like to do that has nothing to do with poetry or writing?  

Gary J. Whitehead:  I enjoy gardening, painting, cooking, making and solving crossword puzzles, walking my dog, and noodling around on the guitar. Almost all of these activities, not surprisingly, are solitary and meditative, so maybe they do have something to do with poetry or writing.


Michael T. Young:  Thanks for your time and thoughtful responses, Gary.  Let’s close with your favorite poem from A Glossary of Chickens. 

There should be a word for the way
they look with just one eye, neck bent,
for beetle or worm or strewn grain.
“Gleaning,”maybe, between “gizzard”
and “grit.” And for the way they run
toward someone they trust, their skirts
hiked, their plump bodies wobbling:
“bobbling,” let’s call it, inserted
after “blowout” and before “brood.”
There should be terms, too, for things
they do not do¾like urinate or chew¾
but perhaps there already are.
I’d want a word for the way they drink,
head thrown back, throat wriggling,
like an old woman swallowing
a pill; a word beginning with S,
coming after “sex feather” and before “shank.”
And one for the sweetness of hens
but not roosters. We think
that by naming we can understand,
as if the tongue were more than muscle.


Please visit Gary J. Whitehead at his website and learn more about his work: http://www.garyjwhitehead.com/.

Review of A Glossary of Chickens




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A Glossary of Chickens.
Gary J. Whitehead. 

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, March 11, 2013. 72 pages, ISBN: 978-0691157467

 

The first thing to strike one about Whitehead’s poetry is the simple beauty of its language.  He clearly knows language as a tool to create art, to create beautiful objects.  Beyond the meaning of what is said, there is a profound pleasure in reading something like,

. . . . . . . . . . flecks of pepper atop the soap dish soup

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (“Drosophila Melanogaster”)

or, with a more delicate touch, something like

 

. . . . . . . . . . Autumn, with its globes, the gold and silver saved,

. . . . . . . . . . hanging here and there like something to reach for,

. . . . . . . . . . has become this time to walk through

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (“Warren”)

These are the kinds of linguistic graces that feed the more rarified elements in the sensibility, the depths that only a handful of prose writers ever reach, and even when they do, do so only as they approach the province of poetry.  

 

The second thing to strike a reader of Whitehead’s poetry is the simple pleasure of following his mind through its connections, both serious and humorous.  For instance, his latest collection (his third), A Glossary of Chickens, opens its first section with a poem called, “The Wimp.”  But this “chicken” is such, as the poem says, because “I lack wherewithal.”  And so, one of the primary thematic threads is established and probed, which is the question of purpose or intention and how it threads or thwarts true living.  This motif is introduced along with others in the opening proem of the collection, “Oyster.”  

 

The negative image of the oyster as “all abductor-muscled,” filtering the world, the “as-yet/with now instead/of then,” leads into questions of the past and present crisscrossing as they do with the attempt to understand life.  But the poem ends with advice to this tightly closed animal,

 

. . . . . . . . . . Better to be rent apart,

. . . . . . . . . . all jiggly and liberated,

. . . . . . . . . . than to fret an irk until it’s pearled.

 

And here we have the seed of thematic contention: how what appeared to be a needed vessel – like a shell – can come into conflict with inspired living.  Such vessels can be in many shapes, they could be people we once cherished or plans as simple as naming things that mislead us into thinking “that by naming we can understand,” or certain desires that are part of “the unrealizable certainty/of the way things should be.”  What often shocks us out of these ruts is death, or the threat of death, the various kinds of loss.  All the shapes of that threat wake us to living as it is meant to be, or to the simple pleasure of being alive.

 

. . . . . . . . . . Why overprioritize long-term plans

 

. . . . . . . . . . at the expense of our present enjoyment?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (“Drosophila Melanogaster”)

But it is not a simple insight to live by, about as easy as making a flower bloom by yelling at it to do so.  The root problem is “we are pinioned by whatever we are.”  The tragedy that often shocks us back into inspired living becomes nothing but a season to the quotidian, as the salt pile of “Lot’s Wife,” by the end of that poem, and after people have moved on from the tragedy of the city’s destruction, becomes nothing more than “salt with which//to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.”  

 

From beginning to end, the collection is a transformation of the idea of death, from a tragedy that we try to elude or which makes us cherish life, to a shedding in the form of all loss necessary to life as it moves forward.  The why of living gives way to the what as life is embraced in the moment.  Or, as it says in “Death Watches,” “Not why, then, but when to bite/and what like.”  This transformation is also reinforced by succeeding poems.  Thus, in the final section, the poem “Death Watches” is followed by “In the Butterfly Conservatory.”  Apart from the butterfly being a timeworn image of transformation and renewal, the poem concludes

 

. . . . . . . . . . There must be room for joy,

. . . . . . . . . . a door to the other side.

This transformation is mirrored in the full arc of the final section, which opens with a poem called “Slaveship” and ends with a poem called “Ararat” where Noah contemplates the remains of the ark years after it served its purpose.  The slaveship becomes that discarded ark that carried the needed cargo for the world to survive.  Now that its purpose is served, it is not needed.  Any plan that has served its purpose, if we continue to follow it, becomes a prison, a trap, a slaveship.  It would be as if Noah had kept his family and the animals on the ship after the waters receded.  Wisdom and this collection teach us to abandon the plans that have served their purpose, the various stratagems that enslave us, just as the poem “Ararat” concludes with the observation

 

. . . . . . . . . . Above the green plateau there is always grief,

. . . . . . . . . . which, inspired, becomes the breath of life.

 

Throughout, this collection is a pleasure to read.  Only one puzzle piece did not fit: its section breaks.  The coherence of the collection is so clear and the progression from one poem to the next so strong, even when crossing from section to section, the section breaks seemed rather forced to frame the thematic development unnecessarily.  Thankfully these section breaks don’t do any harm to the collection.  

 

A Glossary of Chickens is one of the more beautiful and subtle collections I’ve read in some time.  In fact I haven’t even touched on the nuanced distinction the collection makes between memory and the past or explored the significance of how the collection’s third poem is about Lot’s Wife and the concluding poem about Noah and the seeming bridge between them is Melville. But I will leave these for readers to search out themselves since there are simply too many connections to explore in a brief review.

 

Though it is never said, A Glossary of Chickens suggests that life is truly lived when it is lived like good jazz rather than as an agenda.  In fact, we need to break free of agendas, free of the plans that have served their purpose, in order to truly live.  This may be the reason for the underlying sea imagery throughout the collection.  Perhaps that connection to the sea suggests the importance of flowing, of letting go and moving on, like a river, like water.  The collection is a quiet carpe diem, not shouting it, as so many literary works do, as if seizing the day were only possible to the loudmouthed and frantic.  Instead, it seems to say that enjoying our daily bread with full awareness is the profoundest form of seizing the day.

Enrique Lihn: Charting the Voids

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One of the great pleasures in reading is discovering writers one never read.  A good friend sent me an article on the richness of Chile’s poetic landscape and based on that article I purchased Figures of Speech, a selection of poems by poet Enrique Lihn.  Lihn was born in Santiago in 1929.  Though he was very prolific as a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist and short story writer, and I read that several volumes of his work have been translated into English, those translations seem very scarce.  Scanning through an Amazon search, only 2 of the 4 English translations that came up were readily available.

To say anything about a poet one reads in translation is sketchy.  But there are things one can say and things worth saying.  The overall arc of his style still carries through, I’m sure, and what marks it out is how it builds on voids and absences.  The significance of his topics emerges from the accumulation of what remains unsaid about them, or rather what he says around them.  It may be a consequence of his persistent concern for the limitations of language.  Like other poets who take up language and it limitations as a subject, a poet like George Oppen, Lihn is somewhat experimental in his approach, though not so syntactically complex as Oppen.  For Lihn “style sure isn’t the man/but a summary of all his uncertainties.”  Uncertainties accumulate in Lihn’s sparsely punctuated poems in an attempt, it seems, to create a context for those uncertainties, a kind of linguistic net.

When he traveled the United States and Canada, his observations always picked out the odd and alienated, the homeless who were rendered otherworldly by the extremity of their destitute living.  The genderless “Brooklyn Monster,” the woman in Toronto who stared at the dying youth with her eyes of snow.  Lihn sees these homeless people not as mere figures of economic failure but as something of the repressed specters of our society’s apparent success.  As he says elsewhere, “we’re overrun by inhuman times.” 

In another place he says, “all our ways of meaning things are contaminated.”  Thus the darker sides of our society are closest to purity, or at least, to accuracy in depicting the soul of our society.  In the poem “The Age of Data,” he puts his finger on the spiritual failure of mid-to-late 20^th century thinking: the failure of pure analysis, our god of information, for

Instead of joining, we separate

Separation and information are confounded
and data is just the opposite of God.

It’s no wonder that his poems have the force of a Prokofiev sonata and the power of a Turner painting.  Their ability to suggest or conjure an impression are what stir the deepest response and engage the harshest emotions, much as the way Robert Lowell’s best poems do with their images and tone.  This is a rather strange thing considering that Lihn first attempted to be a painter in college, but after turning to writing he produced, instead of a poetry of dense meticulous imagery, a poetry of limpid images that disclose a depth of subtler thematic implications.  So his poem on Turner concludes with something that might describe his poetics,

the moment that consumes the substance

and leaves only the embers of Being
that conflagration that comes from clouds and wind
and burns—spread out on the waters—its image.

 

Lihn is always at the end of the world, always looking over the cliff into what is not possible and defining the edge of that cliff.  “Life, beauty, is like this; or to put it a better way is unthinkable/a mirage one cannot stop thinking of.”  This is a dangerous terrain to chart, for at the linguistic edge all other edges converge—historical, philosophical, religious—and so even if he doesn’t occasionally fall into a cliché, he does sometimes dance around a truism.  But it is worth exploring the boundaries between “Art and Life,” old world and new world, nature and art, life and death. 

In the last weeks of Lihn’s life, he composed poems confronting the impossible enigma of death in the most personal terms.  These are possibly the least interesting poems of the collection as they court those truisms more often than elsewhere.  But they have their moments.  Certainly, facing the end, he is looking farther into those dark places, those voids to discover the defining spaces around them.  For him, his poetry had become

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .death,

the dream of writing where all discomfort has its place

the prison of your being that deprived you of the other name of love

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written silently upon the wall.

In his final weeks—dying just months shy of his 60^th birthday in 1988—Lihn writing, revising, even correcting proofs of his final collection the night before his death, he was connecting the limitations of the self with the limitations of language and life.  These final poems seem less elaborate, sometimes pointed and powerful, at others not fully engaged.  Yet they mark the closer of a life devoted to poetry.  If art imitates life and we are “works of art momentarily alive,” there is in connecting the limitations of life and language an insight into the nature of the self, the constructed ego and how its grammar breaks down at the edges or in the face of what is hard or impossible to define.  Perhaps lying in bed he realized

Facing death he resists the giving in

even though touched by it he’s a shadow
but a shadow of something, clinging
to the imitation of life.

His life had become a work of art, a painted representation of the patterns he had followed, sketched into his poems and other writings.  Of course, this calls to mind Wallace Stevens who traced a similar trajectory in the imagination.  Certainly, Lihn stakes as much in the imagination as Stevens, though with less insistence.  Lihn also had the grit of the quotidian in his poetry, the hard, troubled reality that life in a politically volatile place as Chile would produce in others of his generation.  His voice never stops insisting on the negative spaces that define the apparent truth; much like a Taoist insists there is no mountain without a valley.