SR: “The Mechanism of Pleasure” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring 2009 issue. Would you mind telling us a little more “about” the poem, something of its genesis perhaps?

I was visiting with my friend in her summer camp at the tip-top of New York State, near Plattsburgh, when she gave me the idea for the poem. I hadn’t seen her for a number of years and, in the intervening time, she had had to undergo brain surgery to remove a tumor. We were having an epic ...MORE]]> KC TROMMER is a poet and collage artist based out of New York City. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Poetry East, MARGIE and The Antioch Review, among other journals, and more recently in Sycamore Review. KC was kind enough to answer a few questions about her poetry and work with other visual arts. — Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: “The Mechanism of Pleasure” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring 2009 issue. Would you mind telling us a little more “about” the poem, something of its genesis perhaps?

I was visiting with my friend in her summer camp at the tip-top of New York State, near Plattsburgh, when she gave me the idea for the poem. I hadn’t seen her for a number of years and, in the intervening time, she had had to undergo brain surgery to remove a tumor. We were having an epic talk, during which she told me about her surgery, the description of which is the substance of the poem.

When patients undergo certain kinds of brain surgery, they are kept awake, as there are no nerve endings in the brain. This is also as a means of ensuring that the patient is doing well when the surgeons are working in a particularly sensitive area. My friend’s doctors knew that they would be removing a tumor that was located in the pleasure center of the brain, and that she would likely have an orgasm while she was on the table while they worked, but they had not warned her about this. She would have had to have undergone the surgery anyway, but they ought to have given her that information and let her make some attempt to prepare herself. She described to me how the atmosphere in the room changed as they worked, with the doctors huddling in a ring above her to see when she would orgasm. After she noticed them inching closer to her, she experienced through her whole body a completely stunning orgasm, over which she had no control, and for which she had many witnesses.

What she described was so unusual that I kept thinking about it, but the idea to write a poem about it came much later than when she initially related the story to me. At the time, I was just happy that she was alive and well, and I was upset that her doctors had denied her this critical piece of information. Of particular interest to me was the juxtaposition of the clinical setting with what ought to have been a private experience; I was also interested in issue of control—that she had had no control over the situation nor over herself, that she was in every way at the mercy of her doctors, who themselves failed to maintain a clinical distance during such a sensitive moment.

My attempt to write about what she had described to me from outside the experience—from the standpoint of an observer—came out flat. When I’m having trouble with a poem, I try to write from more than one perspective, to see which one feels true to what I am describing or which allows me to evoke the emotion I want to convey. I tried writing the poem from the table, and it seemed to work. I also had helpful editorial input from the poet and editor Ellen Wehle in order to arrive at final draft. I think of this poem as my friend’s and not mine, and sent the poem to her to make sure that it was acceptable to her that I send it out, which she said it was.

SR:  What would you say divides or unites your role as both a poet and collage artist? Is it difficult to move between one or the other? In the creation of your art, how do you determine which medium to use?

Poetry and collage are inexplicably linked: poets take seemingly irreconcilable images, ideas, and experiences and try to yoke them together to enact on the page a work that makes sense of them. The collage artist does the same, albeit with different materials. In my experience, the same process applies to the making of poetry as does to the making of collage: good poems, like good works of art, are the end result of many failed attempts, which themselves are usually the result of the effort to impose the maker’s will on the thing made.

Since I was just talking about the brain and pleasure, I feel compelled to mention that I find the process of making collages almost always immensely pleasurable and the process of writing poems both alternately pleasurable—I’m thinking of the beautiful moment when I write a poem that has been simmering in me for a while, just before I show it to anyone, when I’m still in love with it—and brutal. (I’ll spare you my ready litany of self-criticism.) I think it’s worth mentioning that I probably feel this way because the visual art occupies the right hemisphere of the brain, while writing involves the left, the area that governs language and critical thought. I probably just need to hang out on the right side of my brain more.

The fact that collage is more enjoyable to me makes me suspicious of it, and I can’t help but wonder if I find it so because I just don’t have the same standards for collage as I do for poetry, since I have not been making visual art with the same dedication that I’ve been applying to the making of poems—and my crusty, old New Englandy-self thinks that things that are hard are more worthy of my time. I find that I’m happier with the collages that I’ve done than with many of my poems, which I often return to and rough up and pare down and just generally bully around. Poor things.  Maybe I should stop writing this now and go make a collage.

SR: What is the significance of being “New York City-based”? Is a notion of “place” important to your poetry?

I mostly put New York in the title to scare people. (Maybe a little.) And to sound cool. (O yeah.) If anything, I likely wrote NYC-based as a reflex, having created the site once I moved back after a few dismal years in Michigan where I felt dismally about any number of things.

There’s a cachet to saying New York City-based, as if I had to elbow a bunch of other poets and collage artists out of my way to make my mark. But the truth is that most of us in New York are in Brooklyn or Queens, mucking around and making things. It’s a big people soup here, so I reached up out of the broth to pin my name on the map.

When I was younger I used to reject the idea of place, the way that some younger poets think that, by being general, they appeal to everyone, but I’ve gotten far away from that idea and enjoy dropping the names of subway stops and other landmarks in poems, as little offerings. A long while ago, I remember reading the poem “Gaspé” from the collection Rain, which was written by my first teacher, the excellent poet William Carpenter, and feeling then that the poem was less effective for being about a place, which was silly of me. That just reflected my own discomfort with where I was at the time. Now I find that there is something wonderful when I come across a poem that mentions a place I know or which I’ve visited; it gives me a little thrill. The poem should work on other levels, of course, but I have started wanting to be connected with where I am, and that’s reflected in the poems I’ve been writing lately.

SR: Do you view the Internet, and in particular its capacity for the promotion and proliferation of one’s art, as something beneficial to poets today?

When I was in Michigan, I had the chance to work with superstar proto-Forker Thylias Moss (creator of the theory of Limited Fork Poetics) as she elucidated the benefits of moving text and combining text with image and sound—work that is best realized on the Web. I began working on videopoems, which, despite their clunky name, are interesting ways of realizing a poem in a new space. Writing in this way, a process which involves taking the text and considering how to bring new sounds and images to inform the poem, rather than offering a didactic interpretation of it, allowed me to directly use my visual arts background and to consider new ways in which a poem can be written, transmitted, and understood.

The Web offers such amazing possibilities for poetry, not only in terms of redefining poetry—since I love to sit with a book of poems and experience poetry in a traditional way—but also to expand our understanding of what constitutes a poem and the audience for poetry. And I love that hyperlinks work like secular advent calendars, opening into other worlds, ideas, and images.

I also love how easy it is for work to be shared online, and I almost prefer when my poetry appears online instead of in print, since the work has a better chance of being read and because writing is, in my view, about communication—a notion that is not always in vogue in some poetic quarters. While the poem may lose some sense of legitimacy for not being in print, though that notion is abating, it gains readership. It’s wonderful to have work in print journals like Sycamore Review, of course, but I love when people tell me that they’ve read my work online where I know it’s accessible for quite a long time to anyone who is interested. (Editor’s Note: KC’s poem, “Mechanism of Pleasure,” is available online here.)

The site is a virtual collection of publications and images. Setting up the site has had nothing but a positive effect on my writing, and has given me a small (if completely artificial) sense of legitimacy as a poet and an artist. These identities are always somewhat fragile, particularly when the rejections roll in or when I met yet another person who says that they don’t read poetry, or see that someone would rather buy earrings than a print or a photograph. (I love earrings just as much as the next girl, but I love art more.)

As much as I love the Web and its dizzying pile of possibilities, I still like to approach poetry in the traditional way: to go to readings, to read collections, and to memorize and recite poems. The traditionalist and the progressivist in me have been getting along well, each offering the other a little space, and accepting the other’s terms. Because I’m not a digital native, I am able to enjoy both possibilities and don’t really feel the need to chose one over the other. I just move from house to house.

SR: Finally, you mention you have completed or are working on two collections of poetry–the first of these titled The Hasp Tongue. To which does “The Mechanism of Pleasure” belong? Is there any kind of theme or “arc” (perhaps some aspect found in “The Mechanism of Pleasure”) that runs through the collection?

The structure of The Hasp Tongue was bedeviling me for a long while. A nice-sounding bit of wisdom is that a poet should organize a collection along an emotional arc, but the dirty truth is that the poetry publishing world (contests, contests, contests) almost demands that the first ten to twenty pages of a collection be a cluster of a poet’s strongest poems, regardless of how they fit into the manuscript as a whole, in order to maintain the screener’s good will.

For a while, I just kept frontloading the book with the poems I thought were best, to no happy end. This spring, when I managed the final shuffle, I shaped the collection thematically, with an emphasis on the variety of the kinds of poems I write. For good or for ill, there’s a lot of sex (though not necessarily sexy sex) in The Hasp Tongue. “The Mechanism of Pleasure” is in that collection and possibly falls under the “for ill” heading.

The collection’s title is taken from a poem of the same name, which describes the lamprey eel, a creature that uses its tongue to affix itself to the side of its prey in order to feed. It seemed such an ugly and gruesome image, one that expresses desperation and tenacity, and it fit with many of the poems which deal in some way or another with the idea of the act of speaking, either in order to make sense of the world or as a means of articulating emotion. It’s also intended as a play on being a sharp wit with an even sharper tongue. (Guilty.)

SR: You only write a few times a month—keeping away from distractions— and you write almost the entire day. My question is, then, do you ...MORE]]> CARL PHILLIPS is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low, a new collection of work, and Quiver of Arrows, selected poems from 1986 to 2006. His many awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was elected a chancellor in 2006. Phillips currently teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month. –Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: You only write a few times a month—keeping away from distractions— and you write almost the entire day. My question is, then, do you still feel like you’re being a “poet” the rest of that time you’re not writing? In that you’re observing the world?

Phillips: Yeah, I feel it all counts. I think one of the most important things I do every day is walk two dogs. I never feel as if, oh something’s wrong, I haven’t written this month. Because I figure I lived. I left the house. Usually I can trace back from a poem I’ve written and think, huh, that never would have happened had I not gone on that drive and down that road and run into so and so.

SR: That you’re not just a poet when you write, but it’s a part of your life.

Phillips: Right. I have a friend who hadn’t written for a few years and she said she was no longer a poet, and I just thought that was ridiculous, told her so. Eventually she did write again. I think she needed that time, that sense of despair about writing. Somehow she had to get through all that to get to those new poems.

That’s the other thing that’s wrong—or at least artificial—when it comes to writing programs: this illusion that writing happens in a timed manner outside the realm of real life. You produce a thesis in two or three years. But real life isn’t like that. In real life relationships fall apart, or you start a relationship, or someone dies, your life gets affected.

SR: It takes some time to sort some things out, living while you’re writing…in that vein, I’ve noticed the use of questions in your poetry. Are these questions you’re asking yourself, an interior self?

Phillips: Yes, I always seem to be asking questions in a world of uncertainty and doubt. There was a review that talked about how my sentences are constantly self-questioning and doubting, as if that were something weird. But that’s simply how I am in real life, whether on the page or in a supermarket.

It’s not as if I sit there and think, oh I’m going to form a certain question here or there—it’s instinctive. That may be what people forget: that poetry is a reflection of the sensibility of a particular mind. We think that these things are a certain strategy—why is this poet doing this or that? Well maybe it’s just because that’s who he or she is. It’s like walking. That’s just the particular person’s gait.

To read the full interview, order Issue 22.1 now!

RITA DOVE served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and has served as Poet Laureate to the Commonwealth of Virginia. From her first collection of poetry The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980, Dove has gone on to publish short stories, a novel, essays, and a number of poetry collections, the most recent of which is Sonata Mulattica, released only the week before this interview. She sat down to talk with David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review’s poetry editor at the time, in front of an audience at Purdue University. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month.

DB: You return so often to musical themes in your work. Music seems to be a real constant, ...MORE]]>

RITA DOVE served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and has served as Poet Laureate to the Commonwealth of Virginia. From her first collection of poetry The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980, Dove has gone on to publish short stories, a novel, essays, and a number of poetry collections, the most recent of which is Sonata Mulattica, released only the week before this interview. She sat down to talk with David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review’s poetry editor at the time, in front of an audience at Purdue University. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month.

DB: You return so often to musical themes in your work. Music seems to be a real constant, even to a point of where you had a live reading with John Williams’ music as well as a song cycle of vocal music. What is it for you that makes music such fertile ground for writing?

RD: I grew up playing the cello. Later, as an adult, I switched to the viola de gamba, which is an early string instrument. I’ve always had music in my life. My grandparents played mandolin and guitar, my parents made sure all of us kids learned an instrument. After grad school, when my schedule made it impossible to practice regularly, I began studying opera — the voice is portable. I don’t know what it is about music; I love listening to it, but more than that, I need to be in it.

There came a point, when I was an undergraduate, when I had to decide whether I wanted to go into music or something else. But I didn’t know what that something else was — even though I loved to write more than anything, really, I didn’t think it was something you could do professionally. You know, creative writing in the academy was not what it is today; there weren’t as many programs, so the prospect of pursuing an MFA was an adventure. It turns out I didn’t have the nerves to be a concert performer. I thought, well if I can’t get up on the stage and play cello without my knees shaking, this is bad. Little did I know that I was going to end up on stage anyway!

DB: You also seem to be drawn in certain ways to the drama or play format—your play The Darker Face of the Earth, as well as that pivotal central section in Sonata Mulattica. Why those formats as opposed to like a Derek Walcott book-length poem?

RD: Let’s put it this way: I love plays, I love their structure. To my mind, it’s the genre closest to poetry, interestingly enough, but I don’t know why that is. People can argue with me about this but I’ll stick to my guns. Maybe it’s because with poetry you really get down to the bones of the language, and yet there’s still so much that must be conveyed in those few words — through etymologies, or the way a word feels in your mouth, the cadence of its syllables. You can’t dither around with exposition, descriptions that go on for paragraphs; you have to get it all in a couple of words. I love that rhetorical cage.

DB: I noticed that your works often have also sort of a dual time frame where you’ve got a past and a present going simultaneously, such as with Darker Face of the Earth, and Mother Love. In Sonata Mulattica, there’s that surprising scene where you have a famous song from the 1960’s showing up in a pivotal scene between Bridgewater and Beethoven. Can you tell me about that? It seems to be a thread that runs through some of your more recent works.

RD: I was definitely aware of it while writing Sonata Mulattica. I felt I could not approach this subject burdened by a sense of the hallowed past. To really enter into a time frame other than your own, you first have to realize that your subjects don’t know what you know: They’re living in the moment, with no knowledge of the future. What do any of us know, living in our own present moment? In his time, Beethoven was considered a wild slovenly man — and a genius, yes . . . but not much of a dinner companion. These “classical” musicians were the rock stars of the day,. I wanted to inject that flavor into the book, lest readers be tempted to treat it as an artifact from the 19^th century. Hence the witty asides, the rhetorical interjections, the non-sequiturs and deliberate anachronisms. Interestingly enough it’s only in the prologues and epilogues of the book where the authorial presence inserts itself, although a certain level of contemporary self-reflexiveness lurks in the background.

To read the full interview, order a copy of Issue 22.1.

SR: Let’s start with your story. I must say that as a guy in his twenties I did not expect to be as captivated as I was by a story featuring embroidery and physics.  But I once ...MORE]]> Lauren Alwan’s short story, “Report from an Independent Chapter of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America,” appears in the current issue (Summer/Fall 2009) of Sycamore Review. In the story,  which is told from the perspective of a sharp 14-year-old narrator named Gillian, she and her grandmother attend the meetings of a local embroiderers’ guild. We’re big fans of the story, as evidenced by our nominating it for a Pushcart Prize last month. Sycamore’s Fiction Editor James Xiao recently interviewed Alwan, who lives in San Leandro, California, and teaches craft and fiction workshops in San Francisco. It was Sycamore’s first instant message interview.

SR: Let’s start with your story. I must say that as a guy in his twenties I did not expect to be as captivated as I was by a story featuring embroidery and physics.  But I once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down.  So tell me about the writing of this story.  What was the driving force behind it?

LA: That’s great to hear. I love the way this story occurred. It started with a flyer I picked up at the library. There is in fact an Embroiderers’ Guild of America, and when I saw it, I immediately thought of my grandmother who, as part of her wedding, included embroidery work in her trousseau.

At the time, I’d been grappling with how to incorporate aspects of personal experience into my fiction, and this seemed like a good opportunity. The physics element was unexpected. I am not in any way a mathematics or physics person, but the character of Cooper, by way of opposition to Gillian, seemed to insist on it, so there you go.

The other force that triggered the story was Gillian’s voice. Luckily, I heard those first couple of sentences, which had a “Robert’s Rules of Order” formality, and knew right away I had the voice and the structural device for the story. The element of emotional distance was also crucial as it allowed me to portray her character with what seemed the right amount of tension.

And, Gillian’s words spawned the device of the story, the frame of the meeting minutes.

SR: That leads me to my next question.  You handled time very carefully here.  Why did you decide to use the frame and the retrospective narration?

LA: The frame allowed me to state the present time circumstance and then move backward to show how she got to where she is, a pretty straightforward convention. But this is always a minefield for me, as I can get carried away with backstory—to the detriment of a story’s progress. So, this seemed like an organic solution to explain her circumstances, and it also set boundaries for the backstory.

SR: I think that it certainly did feel organic.  The big pitfall of frame stories that I’ve seen is the difficulty of getting over the fact of the frame, that it adds an extra layer of contrivance to the telling of the story.  So kudos to you.

LA: The challenge of the frame, for me, was the back half; justifying it by returning to it and producing some kind of resolve.

SR: I might also add that I’ve been going through a retrospective narration phase myself.  I love authors who can move backwards in time with that “storyteller’s voice”.  John Irving does it well.  I think that was one of the big elements of the story that captivated me.

LA: That’s interesting. As I wrote Gillian, I understood that the “retrospective” aspect of her voice was not great in terms of time. The time lapse between the backstory and the present is very close. In some ways, that made it easier.

SR: That and the embroidery of course.  I’ll be keeping an eye out for that embroidery flyer next time I go to the library.

LA: I’m sure the Embroiderers’ Guild is always looking for new members. Working embroidery into a story was very gratifying. The detail was important for me in two ways. It allowed me to portray what I consider to be a very specialized setting; that is, a highly specific context. The detail also provided a personal link, growing up with a grandmother who entered into an arranged marriage at a young age.

SR: If I may delve into chatspeak for a moment: OMG. The scenic detail was incredibly rich in the story.

LA: LOL. Thank you. Setting is an aspect of fiction I think about a lot.

SR: Absolutely luscious with description.  How did you approach the setting in the story?

LA: Setting has been an obsession for awhile now, especially what I think of as “specialized settings,” places that are generally unknown to a mainstream readership and therefore challenging to portray. Detail is crucial to conveying a milieu that is either highly obscure, unprecedented in fiction, or that requires specialized terms to describe, poker, or sailing, for instance, and of course embroidery.

Still, it was difficult at first to portray Gillian’s town, which is based on a place where I grew up.  Altadena, near downtown Los Angeles, is quite separate from LA, geographically and culturally. For me, the setting includes the community of Syrian, Lebanese and Armenian families who’ve been there over fifty years. For most readers that’s going to be an unfamiliar context, so the detail had to be what V.S. Naipaul calls “ground level”; that is, no explanation, but conveying the essentials through intimate detail. Gillian’s narrative distance also turned out to be an advantage-—there is much she doesn’t know. That helped me, the author, since I’m at generational remove and there is much I don’t know also.

SR: So the burning question then:  Do you embroider? Or if you prefer a question with more Red Menace: are you or have you ever been a member of an Embroidery Club?

LA: I’ll only admit that back in the day, I stitched patches on more than one pair of boyfriends’ jeans, and that I have a few unfinished projects stowed away—but that’s all.

SR: In regards to the specialized settings.  This story seemed quite personal to you in terms of drawing from your life experiences.  Was there a lot of research involved?  Are there any projects that you’re working on right now that include a lot of research?

LA: The primary research I did was for the physics terminology, cribbed straight from an old set of encyclopedia. That, and research for local detail, the names of things particular to the locale. For me, research usually centers on that level of specificity. It’s a challenge to get inside a setting in order to effectively convey it; for me that means knowing a place better through specialized terms for things like flora and fauna, details of geology, history, etc. So in that respect I’m always engaged in research.

SR: Okay, standard writer interview question: Who are some writers who have influenced you?

LA: One of the writers who made me want write was Gina Berriault. Her stories have a quality I find hard to put into words, but I responded strongly to her portrayal of what might be called outsiders, along with her prose style, which is extremely precise, high in its diction and at the same time plainspoken. And her characters have no pretensions, or if they do, in the course of events they are stripped away.

I tend to be drawn to writers for subject also. The subject of a disappeared world, which could be a kind of subgenre of fiction, is fascinating to me, so I gravitate to stories that center on places that have somehow been lost or no longer exist. Nabokov’s memoir Speak Memory might be my favorite in this regard.

SR: Anyone amazing that you are reading right now?

LA: Right now, I’m reading a book that you led me to, though indirectly. Robert Olen Butler’s book of lectures, From Where You Dream. When we were working on the edits for “Embroiderers’” you mentioned Butler’s idea of a character’s yearning, so I sought out his book and the essays are excellent. So thank you.

SR: Ah yes.  That was Patricia Henley’s influence.  She teaches here in Purdue’s MFA program and if you get the chance you should check out some of her stuff.  They’re top-notch.

LA: That particular chapter, I think it’s entitled “Yearning,” was so insightful. I’ll definitely look up her work.

SR: I think I’ve got yearning permanently engraved in my brain thanks to R. O. B.

LA: It’s fundamental, I think, to character-driven fiction.

SR: Speaking of MFA’s, in your bio you said you recently completed an MFA. Can you talk about that a little bit?

LA: I finished the program at Warren Wilson in 2008. When I decided to pursue an MFA, a low-residency program was my only option, since my husband and I have a young daughter. The residencies were twice yearly, and it was a challenge to leave her, since she was only four at the time, but we got through it. And the program was amazing. It’s a wonderful thing to work one-on-one with an advisor and to correspond in writing. I regularly received these wonderfully detailed, lengthy letters on the creative and critical work of the semester project. I still refer to those letters, as I’m sure I will the future.

SR: I admire the fact that you can find the time to write with so many demands on your time.  I believe you also teach creative writing?

LA: Thanks James, but managing time is certainly not my strong suit. I remember an essay by Jane Smiley, am forgetting the title, but in it she wrote that given four hours to write while her daughters were at school, she would sometimes fritter away three of them. I do the same, but luckily, there is coffee and if enough is consumed, my focus kicks in. As to teaching, for the past few years I’ve taught creative writing in private workshops. I feel  lucky to be able to work with teacher and poet Leslie Kirk Campbell. Her workshop, Ripe Fruit in San Francisco, has been going for over twenty years now. I teach short fiction and craft seminars.

SR: Well  I won’t take any more of your valuable time.  Let’s end on a SR interview tradition.  Which do you prefer: Curtains or Blinds?

LA: I’m old school, so unless the blinds are venetian, I’d have to say curtains, preferably ones made of bark cloth and printed with some variation on the tropical theme . . .

SR: Thank you Lauren for finding the time to speak with me.

LA: It has been a pleasure James. Thank you.

Clip 1: On writing and working at a paper mill

Clip 2: On first lines

Clip 3: On the reputation of his hometown of Knockemstiff

Clip 4: On learning to sit

Clip 5: On hearing voices

DONALD RAY POLLOCK was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio before leaving to enroll in the MFA program at Ohio ...MORE]]> Donald Ray Pollock, author of the linked short story collection, Knockemstiff, sat down to talk with Sycamore Review’s Christopher Feliciano Arnold during a visit to Purdue University in September. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation. A transcript of the interview follows.

Clip 1: On writing and working at a paper mill

Clip 2: On first lines

Clip 3: On the reputation of his hometown of Knockemstiff

Clip 4: On learning to sit

Clip 5: On hearing voices

DONALD RAY POLLOCK was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio before leaving to enroll in the MFA program at Ohio State University.  There he honed his debut short story collection, Knockemstiff, released last year to widespread acclaim.  The Los Angeles times wrote that “Knockemstiff is a powerful, remarkable, exceptional book.”  The New York Times wrote that “Pollock’s voice is fresh and full-throated, and the best of [his stories] leave an indelible smear.”  A front page profile in the Wall Street Journal speculated that Pollock might just be “the next important voice in American fiction.”  Pollock still lives in Chillicothe with his wife, Patsy, a high school English teacher. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Third Coast, The Journal, Sou’wester, Chiron Review, River Styx, Boulevard, Folio, and The Berkeley Fiction Review.   More recently, Knockemstiff was awarded the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from the University of Southern Illinois Carbondale, and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, which honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. He is currently at work on a novel set in 1965, about a serial killer named Arvin Eugene Russell.  Pollock visited Purdue University in September of 2009 for a reading sponsored by Sycamore Review.  Featured here are audio clips from the conversation, followed by a transcript of the interview. -Christopher Feliciano Arnold

SR: People speak so often of creative writing programs as giving writers time to write. In your case you began writing stories and working on your craft while you were working full time. Tell us a little bit about how these stories came to mind, what voices you started hearing? How did you begin putting them to paper in those early years?

DRP: Well, I worked at the paper mill and my job was I was the ash hauler. So I worked in the power department. We brought coal, and the ash, what’s left over, goes into these silos, and I was the guy who took care of all that stuff. It was by far the dirtiest job in the paper mill, but it was a good job because I was my own boss. I could work my own hours. Mostly what it consisted of, besides getting really, really dirty, was driving an enormous dump truck, just back and forth you know, and I’d dump this ash out. So I’m by myself all the time and once I started thinking about trying to learn how to write, I had the perfect job for that. I could talk to myself, you know, and I could think about characters, all that sort of thing. I had lots of time to do that. So it was the perfect job for that.

In my case, the MFA program at OSU was a life saver because when I got accepted to the program I had been at the paper mill for almost thirty two years and the only way that I was going to be able to get out of the paper mill was for something like this program to happen. Which it did and it gave me this opportunity. It gave me three years of funding. And so it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was used to working six days a week, nine to ten hours a day. As I said, it was a good job. I made great money. I had great benefits, but I was tired of doing that. I had been working nine or ten hours a day and then coming home and writing for a couple of hours. Now I would have  whole blocks of time, two or three or four days in a row where I could just write as much as I could stand.

SR: Michelle Herman, one of your professors at Ohio State and editor of The Journal, where you submitted some of your first stories, says you initially had some reservations about coming to a program. Ultimately what you think you gained from going to the program despite those reservations?

DRP: Maybe about two years before I applied I had published a story with The Journal, maybe two, and she had me come up there and do a reading with some other writers. It was like an anniversary party for The Journal. At that time she said, “You know you should really think about coming up here.” But I’d already been writing for about three years, it was like there was no way, you know. I wasn’t confident enough to think that that would pay off. I probably worked for another year and a half maybe and by that time I guess she planted the seed of course. Maybe I could get out of the mill. And then the longer I kept at it the more I thought that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, and so it came down to making that decision — staying at the mill or going to grad school.

SR: Some of your earliest influences were these noir films of the 40’s and 50’s, and a program called Chiller Theater that was out in the 1970’s. How did those influence your aesthetic and how do you think about those noir elements in relation to your stories? Is that something you’re conscious of or are these more silent influences?

DRP: Well… that’s a hard question. I guess for one thing, with Chiller Theater, it was in the 60’s when I was a little kid. We lived out in the sticks. We could get two channels most of the time, but we could get channel 10 all the time, and that was Columbus, Ohio, and there was this program that went on Friday nights at 11:30, called Chiller Theater, and this guy showed two old horror movies. You know, it might be ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’ and ‘The Little Dark House,’ something like that. So, I mean we’re talking the 60’s. We’re not talking internet, cell phones, and all this stuff, so that was big entertainment for a kid. And I watched that show religiously. On that same channel they had Armchair Theater on at 11:30. Now my parents were really pretty liberal in that sense in that you could pretty much stay up as long as you wanted as long as you made it to school the next day. So I watched a lot of noir on Armchair Theater. You know the thing about noir is, what fascinates me about it more than anything, because really a lot of times the story lines, they’re pretty simple and everything. But some of those directors, they had such great use of shadows.  That’s what fascinates me about that type of film.  The subject matter of course, but just the shadows, and really just that whole period.  I think I was born a little bit too late. I probably should have been doing my thing back in the 40’s and the 50’s. [Laughs]

SR: One of the most impressive aspects of your work is how you draw your characters so economically. I’m thinking here of the narrator, Hank, in the title story “Knockemstiff.” He works in a convenience store all day and he tells us about his job working at the deli. He says, “I’ve been slicing meat so many years now I don’t even bother with the scales anymore. I can hit it within a penny or two every time.” That tells me everything I need to know about Hank.  It captures both his boredom with his job but his pride in his job at the same time.  When you think about these characters, where do they begin?  Is it a line of dialogue? An image?  A memory?

DRP: I really like having a nice, a really good first line, and part of that… it’s not an aesthetic thing or whatever, it’s that if I had a really nice, say first paragraph, then when I sent the story out there was a greater chance that maybe someone would look at it.  If that first paragraph was good enough, maybe they would stick it out. I would really work hard on the first lines, and a lot of my stories developed real slow, and I would start with a first line.  I have this really terrible habit of not writing out a first draft. It would go just line, by line, by line, by line. That’s how I wrote almost all those stories. And I think that that’s a harmful thing, I really do, and my professor would be on me about it, but that was the only way I could do it at the time. I think it was because when I just started, I was on my own. I didn’t know how to start, so that’s the way I began and I just kept doing it and it became a habit. So, yeah… it was mostly a first line sort of thing. And once I allowed it to be a character I would either have an image of what the character looked like or I might be standing in the grocery store line and hear somebody say something, and just that one little sentence or, you know, whatever remark that they maybe said to somebody on their cell phone, and I could take that and start working with it.

SR: I’m really interested in your use of violence in these stories, because so many of the stories really turn or hinge on these moments of violence. So many of the people in your Knockemstiff are really using violence almost as a way in times to cure boredom or as a way sometimes to teach their children and in some cases it’s this really intense pleasure. Thinking about the story, “I Start Over,” there’s a moment when Big Bernie describes, “happiness ripping through him like a sword,” as he’s just finished with this brawl. How does violence play in the lives of your characters? What is it about their lives in Knockemstiff that makes violence such a present part of their stories?

DRP: Well, you know when I was growing up in Knockemstiff, and now today it’s pretty much a ghost town. There’s really not much there at all. There’s people that live there, and there’s some nice houses there, all that sort of thing, but when I was growing up there it was this really small tight knit community and there was about 500 people living there, and there was three little general stores, a bar, a church… as I said earlier, I was probably related to half the people that lived in that place. I really was. And this place had this reputation for being violent. Some of it was true, some of it was just exaggerated, some of it was myth, whatever, but then when I figured out that the book was going to be centered in Knockemstiff– and the book is as much about Knockemstiff as it is about the individual characters–I decided what I was going to do was take what I remembered of the reputation.   I went to school a few miles away, and it’s funny really, but kids would make fun of you for living in Knockemstiff.  The sheriff wouldn’t come out there half the time.   I decided, I’m going to crank this up as far as I can without it getting really cartoonish, and just go with that.

SR: So thinking about that idea of cranking up the stories, there are many scenes, often near the climax of your stories that are just absolutely chilling.  It’s clear that you have peered into some dark corner that a lot of writers would probably shy away from. The ending of “Hare’s Tail” comes to mind in this case.  Is there a point that you reach where you tell yourself, yeah, I’m going to go there, or do you reach a point as you’re writing where you think, OK, should I go there?, and then deliberately make that leap, or is it just an inevitable flow for you?

DRP: Well, for one thing, there was a lot of stuff that I took out of the book, that went a lot further than what it does in the book. [Laughter] And that was when it was to the point where, I mean maybe we just better pull back a little bit here. But then again, it just felt natural that these were the things that these people would do.

I’ve had a lot of bad reactions.  I mean, a lot of people will read… they’ll get to the second story, and they’ll put the book down. They won’t read anymore. But, as I said earlier, I can go out here and pick up the local newspaper, and bring it in here, and I can show you things that are just as bad or worse, probably worse, than anything that’s in my book. So what’s the big deal? I mean, I am maybe exploring something that a lot of people don’t want to think about, but people do live like this. And I don’t want to make excuses, but that is the way I think about it, is that it just seemed natural at the time when I was writing it. Say, the boy in “Pills” would take the dead chicken out of the trunk of the car and start cooking it, that sort of thing. I mean, I just did. I don’t know why. I just did. A lot of my stuff, when I’m writing it, I’m either hearing a voice or I’m seeing it.

SR:  This book has been so widely and almost unanimously acclaimed, and I know it makes you uncomfortable to talk about it, but some of the most glowing reviews of the book have appeared in these city newspapers, where they’re flabbergasted at small town America. I come from a very small town in Oregon and when I read these reviews I chuckle to myself because it seems that, as you mentioned, a lot of these same things are happening in the suburbs and in the cities, and it just seems as though in the suburbs and the cities people have more ways to hide their secrets from each other as opposed to in small towns. Do you notice any difference in the reactions from more rural audiences versus the reaction you get from more urban audiences?

DRP: Sure. Yeah, even the reactions just from people in Chillicothe, in Knockemstiff. My mom read this book and she thought it was so funny. You know, it was not horrible or it was no biggie, but it was just funny to her. And then I have people from big cities who review the book and I know that there’s stuff going on where they live that is just as bad. So, you know, I’ll be in Chillicothe and someone will be saying to me, I know somebody just like that. So yeah, there is a difference.

SR: I want to just get to one more question and then I will turn it over to our audience. Thinking about the idea of Knockemstiff as a linked collection, on top of it being linked geographically, we also have a really satisfying arc between the opening story, “Real Life”, and the final story, “Fights” when we get a sense of Bobby Lowe returning to his home.  Could you speak to that process of linking these stories together?  At what point did you say to yourself, “Yeah, maybe these are all connecting”?  Was that something that occurred to you over time or was there one story that you wrote and it all just sort of clicked together? Because I know that a lot of the fiction writers here are working with short stories and ask themselves, “How can these fit together? How can this make a book?” Can you speak to how you did that?

DRP: Well, pretty much, by the time I got to OSU, I had published like I said, maybe four or five stories, and had written maybe eight that were… I mean I took like three with me to start work-shopping when I went to grad school. So I had maybe eight, and then when I got there, one of the first things I heard was, “You’re going to have a lot better chance at finding a job once you get out of here if you have a book.” At that point, I know this sounds really crazy, but at that point I had not even considered ever writing a book, I was just really… I had told my wife, “If I can write one really good short story I’ll be satisfied. That’s all I’ve got to do.” And I was still thinking that way until I heard this professor say, “Well, if you’ve got a book, you’ve got a better chance at getting a job.” Well, you know, here I’d quit my job. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got out, even though I was just starting. I had three years but I was still worried about it. So, I really worked… I worked this so hard for like the next… It was about… I think it was about 15 months. I said 16 months earlier but it was actually about 15 months I wrote the other… I wrote 10 more stories and I workshopped… Gee, I want to say, one, two, three… I work-shopped about probably 12 stories in that time. Anytime they would let me workshop one I was doing it.

So, I read this linked collection, The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter.   It’s about this little place in Pennsylvania, that I thought, “You know, I could do that with Knockemstiff. I could do that.” So with the next ten stories that I wrote, the aim was to try to link everything up, as I did it. Well, I say the aim was, but I think really it was just to get the stories down, and then I thought after I get the stories down I can figure out ways of making them fit. And that’s pretty much how I did that.

SR: Well I want to make sure we have some time to field some questions from the audience.

Audience: I’m just curious to know what’s next. What are you working on right now? Can you tell us in 25 words or less? I don’t want you to give away stuff that you don’t want to give away.

DRP: Well, on my website it says I’m working on a novel about a serial killer, but it has changed so many times. The whole book has changed a lot. So I’m working on that one, and I’m also working on another novel. I started another novel because I hit this dead spot with the one I was working on, and I got this idea for one that’s really… it’s pretty simple. It’s six or seven months in the life of this guy in the early 80’s, and he’s kind of weird and got a drinking problem, that sort of thing. But I started writing it when I hit this dead spot with the other one, and it actually feels better than the one that I’ve been struggling with for so long, so I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Audience: When you got to graduate school, what was the thing that you learned that helped you the most with your writing and what was the thing maybe you learned that inhibited your writing.

DRP: You know, before I got to grad school I had been writing for five years, and I had read interviews with other writers, all that sort of thing. So I had learned that, OK the hardest thing about this deal is sitting at the desk, every day, that’s the hardest thing. So if I can learn how to do that, you know, I’ve got that part of it whipped. Really to me, it’s sitting at the desk, trying to put words down, and then reading. And so, I pretty much had learned how to sit. I could sit, and I still can, I can sit for a good five hours easy and not write anything. I just look at the screen.

[Laughter]

DRP: I can do that.

Audience: And you don’t feel guilty, like you’re wasting time.

DRP: No, no, no, not as long as I’m sitting there.

[Laughter]

DRP: I feel guilty if I get up and leave. Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like in so many people… I’ve heard this time and time and time again is, “Well, what if you’re not sitting there when the inspiration comes or the idea or whatever?” It’s lost. So that was to me the most important thing. And that was what was preached to us when we went to grad school but fortunately I had pretty much already learned that.

Audience: It was all those hours going back and forth in that truck.

DRP: Yeah, that was another thing. Talking to myself and I had a notebook with me and I’d write stuff down. You know, the wonderful thing about grad school was, well there were several wonderful things, but for one I had more time to write. Another thing is, I had never been around any writers, never. I mean I had an English degree from Ohio University, but I didn’t take any writing classes or anything like that. I just took the literature classes, and I was working full-time and I was going to school part-time. I wasn’t hanging around the school or anything like that. So, like I said, I hadn’t been around any writers. That was the other big thing that it gave me. I was around people who were interested in the same thing that I was. You know, the guys that I worked with were really nice guys, but they weren’t interested in trying to learn how to write, or William Faulkner, or anything like that. I mean, so, those were probably the two biggest things, just being around that community of people and the time.

Audience: When you’re working on a character, you said you had a lot of time where you were talking to yourself… when you’re thinking about a character do you embody the character almost like you would as a dramatic piece, embody that voice, or do you always kind of keep yourself removed like a narrator? How do you… When you come up with a character, does it take over or is it always separate?

DRP: That has happened to me, and it’s a great thing when it does, because it makes it all so much easier. I mean I think it does, but it doesn’t happen all the time. I mean, when I wrote the story “Dynamite Hole” which is a really… a lot of people get really upset about that story, but I can remember it. I was sitting there just staring at the screen and I wrote that first sentence, which is still the first sentence. And it was like I started hearing his voice in my head. And I wrote that story in like two days. It was a gift. Believe me, I never write a story in two days. It takes me weeks and weeks and weeks to write a story, but that story just… It was an amazing experience, and so even though most people hate that story, I love that story, because I still remember that experience of having that flutter. And you know, it’s happened a couple other times once I had done maybe seven or eight revisions, something like that, were it just… then it just kind of clicks and everything works. You know this stuff is really hard to explain.

[Laughter]

Audience: Your work has been compared a lot to Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, I think partially because of the small town Ohio angle, but also the idea of the grotesque and how that works in your collection and his collection. Is that something you read prior to writing these stories were you conscious of writing in a certain tradition?

DRP: Well, I had read Winesburg. I have to say that Winesburg– I know people compare my book to that book that sort of thing, but I think really it’s just that both towns are in Ohio.   I wasn’t thinking about Winesburg at all when I was writing my book. If anything, probably the biggest influence on me when I was first starting out was Jesus’ Son, by Dennis Johnson, that was a really big influence on me. You know, Winesburg, when it came out, it was… wow, a lot of people were scandalized by that book. I mean if you read it today it’s like, what the hell were they thinking? But they were, you know and for its time it was a great book. But with me I could identify more with the Dennis Johnson character in Jesus’ Son.

Audience: I was wondering, when you first start hearing the voice of your characters when you start writing them, do you ever change position between first person and third person, because I noticed a lot of your stories are from male perspective, so how does that change?

DRP: OK, there are 18 stories in the book and probably, I’m going to say at least a dozen of them I tried both ways. I tried it first person. I tried it third person. Usually I tried it second person. You know I’ve never been able to write a really good second person story. I’d love to be able to do that, but I haven’t been able to do it yet. I might not write the whole story that way but I would try a couple pages, see how it sounded. It just became what felt most comfortable and most real.

Audience: When you’re writing about a place that you know and that personally knows you, do find that there are a lot of challenges? Like you were saying about scandalizing… do you worry that someone is going to call you up one day, say that this story hit a little too close to home?

DRP: You know I didn’t because first of all I didn’t for a long time because I didn’t think I would ever publish a book. So it was like I can write whatever I want.

But then when Double Day bought the book, and then when the lawyer called me from Double Day and we started talking. Then I started worrying about it a little bit. I started thinking, was there anything in there. And I had to change it, mostly I had to change names, because I used a lot of names that were people that I had known that were dead now, and they still had family members around. So I changed a few names. One thing that was really strange is, in a couple of the stories there is a VISTA man, and a lot of younger people don’t know but VISTA, well I think it’s still around, but back in the 60’s they would send people in to help poor people out, give them a little culture, that sort of thing. So I had this guy in there, and they were really worried about this guy. And their reasoning was they were saying because there actually was a VISTA man, came to Knockemstiff and helped us build a ball diamond. Now he wasn’t a pedophile. He was a really nice guy. But they were really worried about this because they said, you know, “What if this guy is on the Supreme Court now, and he’s been going around telling people that he was a VISTA volunteer in Knockemstiff, Ohio, back in the 60’s.” Now, I thought they were stretching things a little bit, but what I had to do was put two VISTA men in the story. So that way they can say, it’s the other guy. It was weird.

[Laughter]

SR: Well I have one final question for you, if we don’t have any others from the audience. So, I think really often, and you mentioned the Winesburg, Ohio comparison earlier, but I think a lot of people mention your work in the same breath as Denis Johnson, William Gay, and Breece Pancake, and even Raymond Carver as the sort of writers that are representing the working class in a literary arts world that often times doesn’t have a lot of that voice in its authentic form.  Is that something that you’re conscious of?  For example some of your writing for the New York Times and Huffington Post, some of these publications are eager to sort of say, well here’s a voice from working class Ohio. Do you feel any pressure to carry the sort of Breece Pancake, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson torch, or is that something that you just try to ignore and do your thing?

DRP: Well with the New York Times and The Huffington Post, that kind of stuff, of course I was really honored that they wanted me to write anything for them, and I think probably I was mostly nervous about doing a good job, and trying to put across in an honest way what these people were thinking about, say, the election or, you know, the campaign. I mean you’ve got to figure with me it was like, so they asked me to write about politics… Obama, Hilary, this sort of thing. Well, I’m a guy who sits at home almost all the time by myself. You know, I talk to my wife and my dog until she died here a couple of months ago. And so I wasn’t out and about much, let’s put it that way. And so I would see like, OK they’re having a farmer’s market on Saturday. I’ll go down there and talk to people.   And so I got really nervous about… man, I don’t want to mess this up, you know, because I want this to be true, and I don’t know if I’m capable of doing that anymore because I’m not at the mill and I’m not talking to all my old working buddies, that sort of thing. That’s probably… I wasn’t thinking about any of that other Carver stuff, or any of that.

SR: Well, thank you very much for being here.

DRP: It was nice that you could have me.

[Applause]

SR: “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring issue of 2009. What strikes me as peculiar about this poem, as opposed to much of your other work, ...MORE]]> Seth Abramson is the author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and co-author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). He was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry in 2008, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, AGNI, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. His poem “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in Issue 21.1 of Sycamore Review. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. — Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring issue of 2009. What strikes me as peculiar about this poem, as opposed to much of your other work, is its focus on a particular event (whether real or imagined) that leads to a conclusion with significant political underpinnings. Would you mind telling us, then, a little more “about” the poem, maybe something of its genesis, but especially where it fits in your upcoming poetry collections. Is this poem part of a series that will address certain “political” issues? Or do you feel that all you work bears a certain social resonance?

Abramson: It’s true that little of my work is inspired by real-world events, a constant surprise to me given the series of (to me) both disturbing and comment-worthy situations I found myself in during my years as a public defender. And I’ve always been a close observer of American politics, which would make ongoing political concerns a natural point of emphasis for my poems, I suppose. But somehow it hasn’t turned out that way. Usually I find myself approaching charged topics thematically or conceptually rather than viscerally–that is, in an acontextual and atemporal fashion, rather than a literal or time-sensitive one.

While “Angolans” was precipitated (for me, unusually) by a single newspaper article, I think a more generative focal point for the writing of the poem was the image of a flag hung upside-down, which wasn’t a part of the original news story but for me has long been a sort of visual fetish for notions of rebellion, individualism, fracture, anarchy, and so on. I don’t like my poems to be overmuch burdened with the sometimes dead weight of referentiality; I don’t mean “dead weight” as some kind of aesthetic/political pronouncement, I just mean that my own creative processes tend to be stifled by the feeling I’m merely writing words to fill some pre-existing vessel, rather than trying to break an existing vessel or shaping words in a way no vessel could properly hold them. Hopefully the referential nature of “Angolans” acts as a jumping-off point, rather than an end-point, as it really has been my aim of late to write poems in which everything seems to be happening for the first time–in which one could suppose the sun is only just now rising on the world of language–rather than poems which “describe” (and therefore circumscribe) specific events, as though these were merely exemplary instances of a cyclical history’s recurring phenomena.

As to where this particular poem fits into future collections, I don’t think I’ll discover that until I sit down with my work from the past year or two and see what I’ve done. I like the form my collections ultimately take to be a surprise to me. My hope is that if a series of poems can surprise and delight me, especially as intimately as I know the poems–having lived with them for such a long time–perhaps it can have a similar effect on others. My first collection, The Suburban Ecstasies, was definitely an attempt to treat individual parts first as individual parts, and then to somehow visualize a sum greater than (and also a progression/divergence from) those parts.

SR: For many young poets, especially those in MFA programs throughout the country, the idea of completing and organizing their first collection of work seems rather daunting. Now that you’ve had your first collection published, with the suggestion on your blog and elsewhere that you have one or two other collections currently under consideration for publication, how do you determine where and when to end one collection and begin another? I suppose the heart of this question concerns your personal experience with revision. How do you know when a poem is finished, and especially, how do you know when a collection of poetry is finished? Are you ever tempted to return and revise?

Abramson: I think advice to younger writers is only as useful as its application–what seems natural and productive to me may not seem so to others, and so the most I could do is to offer one perspective for others to, if they like, “try on” and see if it fits.

My own inclination is to write poems, not collections. I think that’s a better way of honoring both the individual pieces and also the single impetus–fully understood by the writer or not–which will often be propelling all of them (say, over the course of a year or two). For me, it’s not possible, given my animistic writing process, to divorce my poems from whatever essentially-inarticulable psychic turmoil I’m pushing my way through at the moment. That can be a problem (if it lends itself to sameness in the work) or an asset (if it simultaneously brings rawness and cohesion to a series of poems written over a period of time).

As to when a poem is finished, I really do think that’s a matter of an individual poet’s writing process–of which I’m certain there are countless hundreds (or more) entirely valid and ingenious examples–and therefore almost entirely subjective. For me the calculus is this: a poem is complete when it is true, and not before. I don’t mean “true” in some slavishly realism-dependent sense, but true in the sense of being the natural endpoint of whatever a poem’s germination process happened to be. While I don’t like a poem to perfectly mirror or mimic its origin-point–poems aren’t “natural” in the sense roses are natural, inasmuch as we expect a particular type of seed to produce a particular variety of bloom–I’ve tried, over time, to determine whether or not I’ve corrupted a poem’s chosen path during the course of its development (usually through over-determination) or rather if I have been, as I hope to be, merely the alternately attentive and aloof gardener. I find a lot of poetry–oddly, both conceptual/experimental poetry and traditional lyric poetry–to be overworked, the evident product of a series of rules devised by the poet-as-craftsman or even poet-as-self-conscious-innovator. That feels like a sort of violence to me, somehow unnatural, and so while I do talk at great length about editing strategies with my students, at base I think whatever editing happens, the wildness of the work must be maintained. In my more recent poems, this sense of things is probably fairly evident.

SR: Now, perhaps a less convoluted question. What poets are you reading right now? What new poetry do you consider exciting or significant at the moment?

Abramson: The flurry of movements now pressing in on the American poetry community is bewildering, no doubt: flarf, conceptual poetry, Stephen Burt’s “The New Thing,” elliptical poetics, the notion of the American Hybrid put forward (coherently or not, depending upon whom you ask) in the recent anthology of that title, new attempts at minimalism and neo-imagism (closely aligned with The New Thing, in my mind), the ongoing efforts of neo-formalists, the gurlesque, visual poetics (Vispo), fourth-wave New York School, etcetera. I find myself drawn most toward a poetics of timelessness–in the most literal sense of that word, i.e. atemporality. A number of French poets (Rimbaud, Appollinaire, Follain) and German ones (Trakl, Arp, Brecht, Celan, Grass) have had special appeal to me lately, as have younger Americans who I see treading along somewhat similar ground with (paradoxically) a greater sense of intimacy and vulnerability: Joshua Beckman and Jesse Ball are two examples, though I continually read Catherine Wagner’s two books with much profit, as well as poems here and there from Sabrina Orah Mark, Julianna Spahr, Matthea Harvey, and many others roughly of my generation or a little older. And then there are the postwar “avant-garde” poets I keep returning to: Michael Palmer, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, David Shapiro, Rae Armantrout, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Keith Waldrop. Of the more “mainstream” writers, I find myself spending the most time with James Wright, Franz Wright, Alan Dugan, W.S. Merwin, and Frederick Seidel. I’ve also been trying to tackle Charles Olson–his genius feels so evident and yet so elusive to me–and think I might be on the cusp of a basic understanding, but gathering in some semblance of the larger picture will surely take years and years. There are many others, I’m sure, but whenever someone asks what I’m reading I find myself stopped in my tracks; then, hours or days later, I think of all the poets who were intriguing me at the moment whose names I might have said. As a teenager I was the same way whenever anyone would ask me for driving directions, even in my own little neighborhood; somehow, for me, it was the sort of question which was both foreseeable and instantly unnerving.

SR: Finally, as you may have noticed, I’ve been able to glean some further information for this interview from your blog. Do you view the advent of the Internet, and in particular its capacity for the promotion and proliferation of one’s art, as something beneficial to poets today?

Abramson: I do think it’s beneficial. Finding the poems and poets by which we will be most inspired is a years-long task at best; at least, with the internet, we as regular readers of contemporary poetry have been given a fighting chance. Growing up in suburban Massachusetts in the 1980s–so, before the popularization of the internet–my exposure to poetry was entirely circumscribed by whatever poets and poems my high school teachers had deemed worthy of dissemination, and the consequence of that fact was that I didn’t become seriously involved with poetry until my mid-twenties (not having taken to the notion of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan as proper “poets,” or Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge as being particularly relevant to my life at the time). Now the only limitation is my stomach for research; if I read a poem that intrigues me, I can read dozens more by that same author within minutes. If I come across a fellow writer with similar interests, or whose aesthetic inclinations I find new and exciting, it’s a sure bet he or she has a blog on which countless other poets as yet unknown to me are discussed. The possible sub-set of confrontations with poetry which a non-urban-dwelling boy might have is now exponentially greater than it was twenty years ago, which can’t help but bring repercussions for contemporary aesthetics, too. In other words, the internet has changed not merely what we read but also–necessarily–what influences our own writing. While my MFA experience at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was definitely a major factor in my “discovery” of some poets whose work I might not have come across otherwise, and who are now vital to me, I think the same could be said of writers I’ve learned about through the poet-blogger “blogosphere.”

All of the above effects of the internet are borne out, I think, by the vast scope and sharp intelligence of the discourse on poetics we find online, and the ingenuity and dynamicism of the poetry now being published virtually. Not to mention the possibility the internet offers for the creation of virtual artists’ colonies, something which has already happened many times over in the blogosphere–though that’s not to say that poets are, generally speaking, either by temperament or inclination, ideal community-builders. Again, the internet is simply giving a disparate and often contentious band of persons a fighting chance at finding one another and becoming fellow-travellers. What we do with that chance is entirely up to us.

SR: First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.  You recently became the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas after spending several years teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  What has been the most surprising adjustment you’ve had to make between Iowa ...MORE]]> Dean Young is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Primitive Mentor and Embryoyo. His 2005 collection Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Young has received numerous awards, including the Colorado Prize for Poetry, a Stegner Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  His work has been anthologized numerous times in The Best American Poetry.  Currently, he teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. –Josh Wild, Poetry Editor

SR: First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.  You recently became the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas after spending several years teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  What has been the most surprising adjustment you’ve had to make between Iowa City and Austin?

Young: The airport is closer in Austin than it was in Iowa City.  Everything nearly dies in Austin in the summer, not in the winter as it does in Iowa City.  You can’t slip on a banana peel without landing on a poet in Iowa City; in Austin you land on someone who’s in a band.

SR: In “Half-life,” a poem from the Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book project, you write, “Nothing breaks down quicker than Dean/ Youngium, the last atom before/ the first layer of devils.”  What is the atomic weight of Dean Youngium?

Young: It’s impossible to say what the atomic wait of Dean Youngium is because it’s so unstable.

SR: Your next book, The Art of Recklessness, is a book on poetics.  Has writing this book, putting those ideas concretely on the page and offering them to the public, had any discernable impact on the subsequent poetry you’ve written?

Young: Recklessness is the sort of drunken distillation of twenty years of my thinking (I guess we can call it that) about reading, teaching and writing poetry.  Its impact was either simultaneous with what I was writing or in response to what I had already written.  Poetry is always in advance of any sort of criticism about it.

SR: Have you discovered any poets in the last few years whose work you particularly admire or that has challenged your notion of a successful poem?

Young: As a teacher, I’m running across poets all the time who challenge and delight me; if I started listing them, it’d go on for a while and I’d feel a lot of anxiety about leaving someone out.

SR: When Rita Dove recently visited Purdue University, she stressed the importance of keeping a notebook and writing down any and ever bit of life, culture, or anything else that gives you pause.  Taking into account the associative quality of so much of your work, do you often see the potential for your surreal connections during the sort of prewriting Dove describes?  Or is it more like carbo-loading before a race, filling yourself up with information and discovering the leaps at the moment of the poem?

Young: Pre-writing, what an awful term.  All language has the possibility of being poetic language.  I write, and what I write I try to turn into poems; I don’t have any golden journal marked ideas for poems or scrapbooks or journals.  Just grubby notebooks and tablets.

SR: Hypothetical situation: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia decides to hold a Dean Young Triathlon.  The three participants are Dean Young, the cartoonist for Blondie; Dean Young, the Australian rugby player; and Dean Young, the poet.  The three events are javelin, Dagwood sandwich construction, and having Tomaž Šalamun write a poem that explicitly mentions you in the first line.  As identified by his vocation, who wins?

Young: It’s been a long time since I was on the track team so I think I’d cede the javelin to the rugby Dean.  (The Blondie Dean I think is rather old now.)  I’m confident that I could throw down a Dagwood sandwich as good as anyone (fried egg and all) so at best I’m willing to let that be a tie.  I thought Tomaž was talking about me but now I’m not so sure, and neither am I sure who that makes the winner.