Interview with Mary Jo Bang

(Originally published in Verse Magazine, November 2005)

Mary Jo Bang is the author of four books of poetry: The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Grove, 2004), Louise in Love (Grove, 2001), The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (Georgia, 2001), and Apology for Want (Middlebury, 1997). She is poetry coeditor of Boston Review and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer K. Dick conducted this interview in Paris in April 2003.

Who are some of your current or past influences, and how have they changed how you see your work in relationship to the people you’re reading or things you’re thinking about?

My influences go back a long way, because I think that whomever you read initially becomes your received idea of what a poem is. And because I read on my own—my family didn’t read—there wasn’t any kind of master plan, any kind of historical overview. I would just go to the library and pick up books off the shelves. We didn’t read very much poetry in school—I don’t think people really ever have—we read Robert Frost and maybe Whittier, and a few people like that. The poets I initially found on my own, and this was when I was a high school student, were e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth. It was such an odd mix, and I am really glad that e.e. cummings existed alongside Wordsworth, because I think that I would have been in danger of having too narrow an idea of what a poem is if I had just read Wordsworth. And then at some point— in fact, I even remember the day—when I was in high school, some friends of mine and I skipped school and somebody had a car and we drove from St. Louis to the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri—and this shows what good bad girls we were, since we skipped school but went to the University of Missouri!—and we went to the campus bookstore, and a friend of mine bought a book, and when we walked out of the store she handed it to me. It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind. She said, “It’s your half-birthday today,” which would have been April 22nd, 1965. And so with that, a new voice got into the mix. A new idea about how poems were being written now. Back then, I was a reader of poetry, but I didn’t really write except for those kinds of adolescent poems one writes, the “dark night of the soul” kind of thing. Then I went on and did a lot of different things in terms of career, and they weren’t at all related to writing; they had to do with medicine and, later, photography.

You were also a pre-med student?

I was a Physician’s Assistant. I practiced for nine years in gynecology. After that I lived in England and did a B.A. in fine art photography at the Polytechnic of Central London. That’s when I really began writing. After that, when I went back to the states in 1990, I didn’t want to go back to medicine. I didn’t think it was very likely that I could earn a living writing, but I thought I might be able to do something with photography. I began to do freelance photography for advertising agencies and designers in Chicago and found that I didn’t like it at all, that commercial photography was a far cry from fine art photography, and I really didn’t care for many of the people who were involved in the business side of things. Someone said, “Well, why don’t you teach writing?” but I didn’t have any credentials: I had a master’s and a bachelor’s in sociology, I had the degree in photography, and I had the training in medicine. But that person reminded me that in order to teach in adult settings you often didn’t have to have degrees, and I thought, yes, people are gardeners and they teach a course on gardening. So I put together a proposal to teach a general creative writing course—general, not specifically in poetry—and it was accepted at the New Trier Extension Program in a suburb of Chicago, where they actually have some very good courses. So I began teaching and I absolutely loved it. I had taught before, in sociology and in medicine, but teaching writing was like nothing I had ever done before. It was very satisfying. But I also realized that in order to teach writing in a way that I could support myself financially, I was going to have to go back to school and get an M.F.A. I was a little reluctant to get yet another degree, but finally I decided I would . . .

You’d been working for a while at this time, so it must have seemed strange.

It felt like a backwards step, but one which I’m now really happy I took. I was 47 when I actually went, in 1993, to Columbia for the M.F.A. program.

So you started working seriously in poetry at that point, or had you started devoting yourself solidly to writing before that?

I went to England in 1986. I think in the year before I went I had written perhaps three poems. I had taken a course in creative writing in 1980 at Northwestern University. It was a course of all women, and afterward a group of us continued to meet together as a workshop. I had been writing short stories, but I found that when I wrote short stories I didn’t know how to solve the problems that were inevitably in a first draft. I would write the story and then discover there were flaws—someone in the workshop would point it out, or I would realize it on my own—but I didn’t know how to re-enter the story and come up with a solution. Whatever I had written, that was it. With poems, however, I could somehow entertain multiple possibilities for any problem that the poem created for me, and that felt a lot more comfortable. So I started writing these poems probably because of having written the fiction, and the fact that some of the people in that workshop were writing poems.

When I went to England, I had a lot of time. It was the first time in my adult life I didn’t have a job. I couldn’t work as a physician’s assistant over there because there wasn’t a comparable role. A few years earlier, I had begun taking photography courses at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. When I got to London, I looked around for a place to continue to study photography and found a B.A. program at the Polytechnic of Central London, where, by the way, Ezra Pound once taught briefly! The program was very involved with semiotics theory. We were all reading Barthes, and Victor Burgin was still there (he later went on UC-Santa Cruz), and so a lot of people were using image-text. I resisted the notion of actually putting text into the photograph; I thought that was very reductive, that it made the photograph redundant in some way.

Why? For you, were they mutually exclusive arts? I ask this because there is a lot of collage being done and a lot of visual influences and gestures in poetry now, so I wonder what it was that made you have that reaction.

I think that what I was seeing then, the models that I had then, didn’t inspire me. I wanted to do something with image and text, but not to actually have the words inside the photograph. So I started writing poems that would somehow cooperate with an image. Sometimes I would make the image and afterward write the poem, and sometimes I would write the poem first and afterward try to make an image that I thought would evoke something similar, but without using any of the same narrative elements. I published a few of those poems in small journals in England and Wales. When I came back to the States, I used photography as a way to make a living, but I continued to write. After I began teaching writing, the idea of doing an M.F.A. seemed a practical necessity, to get the credentials I needed if I were to teach full-time; ultimately, I realized that I also needed it as an artist. I’d been really quite isolated, and I didn’t know other poets, and I hadn’t read widely in poetry. When I went to Columbia it really was an immersion experience: I had a lot of reading to do, in terms of both the past and contemporary poetry, in order to catch up to where I thought I should be. To where I wanted to be. I had read very little poetry since those immediate influences. Which reminds me that what I am supposed to be talking about are influences, but I guess what I am saying is that in between those early writers there were a lot of various kinds of knowledge—medicine, photography, art (I had actually begun as an art history major when I was an undergraduate)—and all those things got into the mix.

Did you read novels as well?

When I was younger I did, but I had pretty much stopped reading novels and mainly read science and a lot of other nonfiction, and biography. So I continued to read, but not necessarily fiction. When I came back to—or came to—poetry, I began to read a lot of novels, as well, and began to reread novels I’d read earlier. I think that novels have influenced my poetry in significant ways, because I am very interested in narrative.

The photographs I made were often narratives as well, I would make photographs that played with various notions of narrative. I had one project where I took photographs that already existed, the photographs from the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, where you have people like Dorothy Lange and James Agee and Walker Evans going out and taking these so-called documentary photographs that have come to represent the “reality” of a particular era in a well-defined geographical region in America, and I would make changes in them and re-photograph them. Those FSA photographs are really stories that have an element of invention behind them. The U.S. government literally solicited these photographs from photographers. They sent the photographers out with scripts that are still available in the government archives and they said, “We want photographs to go with these scripts.” That’s where the Walker Evans photographs in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came from. Bad agricultural practices had created the “dustbowl” conditions in the Midwest and the South and had given rise to great poverty. You had tenant farmers who had no money at all and who were working for the rich landowners. They lived in deplorable conditions. At some point those in the government realized they had to do something about it, but they were concerned because the greatest part of the tax base in this country at the time came from the North, where the industry owners lived. A lot of tax money was going to have to be spent on the South, and they were afraid the northerners were going to make an outcry about this. So they sent people out to document the poverty and systematically release them to newspapers and magazines, so that there would be a kind of sympathy and people wouldn’t object to the money being spent there. But what happened was a kind of backlash, because when people saw these images they were outraged that the government had allowed these conditions to develop. They’d always been taught that this kind of poverty was only found in “India” or “China,” somewhere far away and very different from here. Children had been told to finish their dinners because people were starving in these distant, exotic places. When they saw that these conditions had been allowed to exist in their own country, they were somehow offended. Because of that, the government sent out new scripts, and we again have these documents in the archives, instructing the photographers to stop recording evidence of poverty and deprivation, but instead to take photographs of middle class people engaged in leisure time or wholesome activities. The scripts tell them explicitly to “stop taking pictures of poor people, instead this is what we want—we want people sitting by their radios. We want people going in and out of churches. We want people going to the movies.” And you can look at this enormous body of photographic images and date the images in terms of their responses to the changing scripts.

So one of the projects I did when I was working on my B.A. in photography in London was to take those images and reenter them and tell a different story in each, an obviously constructed story. The new narrative elements would be in color, so the narratives were layered, one over the other. I would have Mickey Mouse, for instance, running across one of these barren landscapes where you had immigrant workers picking lettuce, and above the scene, John Tenniel’s Cheshire cat would be looking down. Which, of course, is also a story of hunger, the cat looking down on the mouse, but told from an ironic perspective. So I’ve always been interested in taking existing stories and then reinventing them in order to demonstrate that they really are just stories and that, in fact, a story is a way of telling about a particular kind of reality, one which may or may not be represented in the image itself.

This photographic work reminds me of your new book, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, where some of these same images layer: Minnie Mouse and a potentially American country landscape with a marriage and three trees, or various myths and other references, like the many from Alice in Wonderland. Do you see in this book parallels to the photographic collage work you did in London?

I’ve never thought about it in quite those terms before, but you may be right. In the ekphrastic poems I am taking an existing work of art and rewriting over it. I’m imposing a new narrative on it, one that is partially suggested by the artwork itself and partially by something that comes from within. Sometimes that thing is an autobiographical moment, sometimes it’s a larger concern, social or political or intellectual.

What’s interesting is that when you’re talking about photographs you’re talking about an image that’s a stop image, not a whole film. That single image sets up a whole story but doesn’t tell the whole story—and it seems to me in your poems that you often do the same thing. You don’t tell the whole story, you stack a series of intrigues one atop the other, as in many of the poems in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon and especially in that long poem at the end of Downstream Extremity.

That’s right.

And there also seems to be the question of witnessing, of feeling good because you see this other, as in “when she sat close to her then did I feel safe,” and that’s a feeling that you’re seeing this other person sit close to another sort of person, and then the “I,” or eye, says they feel safe. Seeing the other “her” in some sort of situation is a doubling, possibly of you, or of you that is an “I” as writer or narrator.

That’s exactly right. By distancing itself, the “eye” establishes a degree of remove that allows me as poet, as the “I,” to appreciate the world anew, with a degree of objectivity, and to comment back on that world.

But it also reminds me of how one looks at photos: there is the framing of seeing something, versus the seeing.

Well, I am very interested in that, what you’re mentioning, and I think of it as the point of view. I think there is a certain degree of fatigue with the poetic invention of an I, a pronoun I, a person who is going to tell you exactly what the world looks like, with the underlying assumption that the poet and his or her reader share an identical world, but, in fact, it turns out that the world is a fiction from the point of view of an any written “I” or “you” or “she.” It’s a fiction because it’s selective, and depending on what’s selected, that becomes the “story.”

But this “I” in the poem seems also to select multiple possible stories or threats, like that long stanza with the “sore throat” episode, the “rat in the house” episode, all these episodes laden with a possible disaster, the not waking up from the nap, the bees.

The other element is time. And time is episodic. It’s only afterward that there is a story, but in fact the so-called story dissolves when you’re living it; it’s just what’s happening. And somebody else later relates it and gives it some sort of cohesion, gives it a selected point of view. But time is always undermining the story because it’s still unreeling.

Does that relate back to photography? Because photography is sort of a stop-time, a stop-moment, and yet you’ve spent a lot of time telling me how these photos relate to time and relate to a whole story.

Yes, the photographic moment is a myth. It’s a myth that we can stop time. Yes, we can, but no, we can’t, because the image continues to exist, it directs itself forward into the present, and so it really hasn’t stopped at all. There’s that wonderful book by Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, probably one of my favorite books of all time, where he talks about the two possible reactions one can have to a photograph. One is studium, which is a more intellectual response to a photograph, and the other is punctum, which comes from the Latin “to puncture.” Punctum is that pain that a photograph can create and inflict on a viewer. It’s sometimes so intense that it’s perceived as physical. This is the last book that Barthes wrote, and he wrote it right after the death of his mother, as you probably know; he lived his entire life with his mother and was incredibly close to her. After her death, while going through photographs of her, he comes across one of her at, I believe, age 7. She’s in a kind of photographic tableau called “The Winter Garden,” where there’s a little bridge and this snowy winter scene, and he’s decimated by the experience of seeing this image. That’s what punctum is, the ability of the photograph to cause actual exquisite physical pain to a person. He goes on in the book to talk about why some photographs have that capability. He postulates that at least some part of the experience lies in the knowledge that, even if someone is present at the moment, the photographic image embodies the notion that they will someday be gone. That knowledge is encapsulated in the moment of stoppage. So there’s a lot of ambiguity in what we consider the stopped moment. And I think that’s why a lot of poets write about photographs, and unfortunately sometimes I think that it’s only to say that it is a stopped moment and that, yes, that person and that thing photographed are gone. But I think what a photograph evokes is psychologically far richer than that.

This notion of feeling a punctum seems in an odd way what the poems in Strange Balloon get at—a sense of spotting a stopped moment which inevitably will continue, and when it does it goes on to its own demise, to a place of looming danger or tragedy. Is this moment or book an allegory for America, for relationships or life in general, or an allegory for something else? And how do you see these poems in the traditions of ekphrastic poetry: do you think they are trying to do something that’s not been done in the form before?

I feel like you’re asking two separate questions, neither of which is particularly easy to answer. I’m going to take the second one first: do I think I’m doing something new? If the author of Ecclesiastes is right and there is nothing new under the sun, then no, I’m not. On the other hand, whatever has been done has never been done by me before, so however similar the poems are to what already exists, they are also uniquely mine. Every poem is a repetition of the word “poem,” but it’s written in the poet’s particular handwriting. The other question is whether the poems are allegorical, and I guess I’d have to say yes. Text, it seems to me, is always allegorical on some level: every word stands for more than its simple self. Some of the allegorical threads that I see in the poems are: death is an indivisible part of every present, violence is shortsighted, men and women tend to see experience differently, and pleasure is fleeting. This isn’t to say these things are explicit in the poem. The poems don’t aspire to explicitness, only to suggestiveness.

There is also a story in the poems about an historical shift in the way art—both visual art and poetry—represent the world. I’ve tried to establish a rough timeline that parallels that shift, beginning with the present moment, in which the death of all art is continually being forecasted, and moving backward through the recent history of art to the surrealists, and even before that to Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a painting Breton described as an “explosion in the laboratory,” art always being a laboratory of one kind or another. Odilon Redon, whose charcoal drawing gives the collection its title, is there as a precursor to surrealism. The penultimate poem is based on an architectural fragment from 1 B.E.C., on which is painted an architectural fragment. I included that to suggest that art has always been concerned with the strange relationship between the thing and its representation. The question of the distance between the two becomes explicit with someone like Magritte, who paints a picture of the pipe and adds the text, “This is not a pipe,” but it haunts all art. The final poem, “What Moonlight Will Do for Ruins,” incorporates both the idea that all is in ruins but that moonlight, which is both a classic Romantic trope and the image of constancy, lends beauty to ruins and, in doing so, makes a kind of art out of them.

Then how does Louise in Love function? You’ve created a character or series of characters that are like a novel. You’ve got these characters, you put them in various places, and you move through time in various ways. How did that book come about? How did you end up with Louise, and Lydia?

I always get anxious telling this, because one time when I gave a reading and talked a bit about it, afterward a friend of mine who was in the audience said, “When you got up there and started talking about where these characters came from, I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s going to let them know just how crazy she is.’” The fact is, I made up Louise the way I think children must sometimes make up imaginary playmates. I was sitting alone in a coffee shop, at a little round table with a triangular arrangement of three chairs, and I began to imagine that if there were others sitting across from me, who might they be? I imagined a couple, a man and a woman, and in a sense I could see them, the way one can “see” the imagined. The woman looked just like Louise Brooks. At the time, however, I didn’t even have that name in my head.

You weren’t actually writing based on Louise Brooks.

No. Part of the idea behind using the photograph of Louise Brooks on the front is that Louise Brooks is a fiction as well. As a silent screen star, she’s a different fictional character in each of her films. She comes to us as these characters. If we read her biography, she becomes another kind of character, the character of a biography that someone has created by putting selected “facts” together. So the idea that my character actually looks like another character, or in Brooks’s case, many other characters, highlights the fact of her invention. There is also a film, a François Truffaut film, “Jules et Jim,” and the female character in that film is also probably an influence on my Louise, influenced my conception of this woman who looks like Louise Brooks and looks like Jeanne Moreau when she’s playing the character of Catherine in that movie, a woman who also is trying to invent herself.

Did you write this all at once and then move on to the next book, or did you write them simultaneously?

I wrote most of the poems in Downstream Extremity first. One of the aims of those poems in Downstream Extremity was to be stylistically more adventurous than I had been in my first book, Apology For Want. As I read more and learned more and more about writing, I came to feel that I’d been overly timid.

Because the M.F.A. influence and the demands to work for a reader made them approachable?

Right. But I don’t blame the M.F.A. What I blame is my own lack of confidence and the narrowness of my reading. The person I primarily worked with at Columbia was Lucie Brock-Broido, and I still remember a piece of advice she gave me: she told me to expand my idea of what did and did not belong in a poem, and to expand my lexicon. It was good advice.

Yes, but in an M.F.A. people are always saying, “Explain more,” which you never do when you’re out there reading a book by somebody else. You don’t call up an author and say, “I’d really like to know X, Y and Z.”

That’s right. And in fact you don’t want that. You want the experience of putting a book together for yourself, as a reader. Yes, you want sufficient clues, but what’s sufficient for each reader is very different. I had found myself changing, as a reader. I began to see that if I’m able to enjoy the participation of meaning construction, other people might enjoy that as well. As I’ve already described, I came fairly naively to poetry, in terms of not having read a lot of adventuresome kind of work. So after I’d finished that first book I decided I was going to write only for a reader who didn’t want all the facts, or very many facts, one who was more interested in language and the way language worked to evoke meaning. I was going to write for the reader I had become. And that’s how I wrote most of the poems in Downstream Extremity. Then one day, this day at the coffee shop, I wrote this poem about these two people whom I’d made up to sit across the table from me and keep me company. I, more or less, observed them, and as I did, I wrote a little story about them. I had a lot of fun doing it, so I kept conjuring them up and writing more poems about them. But I was anxious about the poems because it didn’t seem like they would mean much to anybody but me, since it was my little fantasy. And then I showed them to someone, and that person liked them quite a bit and said I should write more. And I said, “Well, I think I will, because I’m having a good time.” So I continued to write, and I wrote twenty-one of them, and I put them together with the poems I had already written for The Downstream Extremity, and I began sending them out as a manuscript, but no one would publish them. They kept saying, “I like these, and I like these, but they don’t go together.” I still feel like I don’t understand why: I think I would enjoy reading a book where half of it was one thing and half was another. In fact, since then there have been many people, Anne Carson for one, who have put together similarly varied books.

Do you think Strange Balloon goes even father in challenging your reader’s sense of being in one place, or even on a linguistic level? Or is it more open or accessible than Extremity and Louise?

I don’t know that I can answer that, because you’re asking me something about the reader’s experience that I can’t know. I will say that I never try to obfuscate. I may sometimes sacrifice completion, but when I do, I try to do it in the service of something else that I hope will give equal, or even greater, pleasure: music, or humor, or wordplay, or ambiguity that contains more meaning than the non-ambiguous would.

I like both Louise in Love and Downstream Extremity, but they read so different rhythmically, especially in relationship to the context of modern, contemporary life. The books seem very different. There are parallels, but what is nice is to go all the way into one full world, then go into another full world.

I think what you’re expressing is what other people felt. But my frustration at the time was that I never imagined that I could write more of these “Louise” poems, because once you exhaust an impulse you think, “Well, that’s that.” And so I had these twenty-one poems, and what was I ever going to do with them if I couldn’t put them in a book with some others?

Are those the first twenty poems of Louise in Love?

No, not at all. What happened was that I finally realized it simply wasn’t going to be. Nobody was going to publish this book, and that was that. Then some time later, I began to write a poem and Louise was in it, and I thought, “Oh, no, what am I going to do now?” Because I’d actually called that section of the book, “A Cake of Nineteen Slices.” There were three sections in the book: 19 of the Louise poems in one, and then one Louise in each of the other two sections. I did that to create the sense of a bridge between the three sections. When I began to write this new poem, I thought this would make a mess of my nice little formal arrangement. But I reassured myself that I could always take Louise out of the poem later and that, in any event, I should just write the poem. And then shortly after, I found myself writing another Louise poem, and then another. At this time, I was about to go off to a residency in Switzerland. When I got there, I don’t know why, but something about the atmosphere was particularly good for writing these Louise poems, and I kept at it.

I remarked on the Europeanness of the book, how it plays off the French. Its sense of the park, for example, is European, older.

That’s right. I was staying in this very old mansion that had once belonged to Voltaire, and I was surrounded by European culture. And surrounded by art books—there was a library in this house with an immense collection of art books. Most of them were in another language, either Italian or German, but the reproductions of the art were all there, and so I started keying some things off that. At the same time I was reading Ulysses and reading the Richard Ellmann biography of Joyce, and that was influencing the poems, too. After that residency I came back home and immediately went to Princeton as a Hodder Fellow and continued to write these poems.

At that time, I also began sitting in on a class at Princeton on the late romantic poets, taught by Esther Schor. So I began reading Byron, Keats, and Shelley and their biographies, and it all got into the poems because I began thinking: what is it about Keats, and particularly the Odes, that still engages? And I began to think: one, it’s the music, and two, it’s those large Romantic themes. And those themes still do engage: what more is there but life and death and memory and reality and truth and time? For better or for worse, those themes are somehow what often compel my writing, somewhat buried or not. So I began thinking: what can I appropriate from that, what still works about the lyric? Because I was having all these issues about whether the lyric was dead, the way the novel was supposedly “dead.” I began to ask myself: what’s still good about the lyric? What is still viable? Because here I am, still reading this late Romantic work, and I’m still drawn to it, so there must be something in it that works. I began to indulge, really, in whatever music I wanted to create. I began to indulge in an investigation of those Romantic themes and to let that come out, as well as somehow appropriating some of Keats’s lines and things that had meant something to me while I was reading them.

Beauty seems a theme which is there and which is large. It’s certainly a large issue in Romanticism.

It is a large issue in Romanticism, and it’s a large issue today. I think it’s possibly more evident, or at least as evident, in visual art as it is in contemporary poetry. I think this question troubles many poets: what is the relationship of beauty to art? At its worst, you have some kind of sofa of painting that coordinates with the colors of the upholstery and the question is, what’s wrong with that? Why does it fail as art? What about that kind of beauty fails to satisfy? And at the same time we’re a sucker for other kinds of beauty and things that may seem trite, like a sunset or beautiful flowers. It’s impossible not to see somehow. As we were talking about before, there can also be real beauty in form and structure, in design.

These questions have been troubling me for some time, I think ever since the M.F.A., and that takes me back to that very original question you asked about influence. When I was still in Chicago, after teaching those initial creative writing workshops in the continuing education program, I went on to teach English composition and humanities for the visual artist at a four-year college called Columbia College. Paul Hoover was there, and I sat in on his advanced poetry workshop and his modern poetry class. He introduced me to the work of people like Clark Coolidge and Ron Silliman, who came and read while I was there. I’m not sure: perhaps I had read some Stein before, but I began reading Stein in a serious way then and have continued up to the present, having read a great deal of Stein by now. I was also reading people who seemed complicated at the time but who seem less so now.

What about certain contemporaries, such as Ann Lauterbach? As for the Louise book, there’s a certain tone . . .

I certainly read Lauterbach. I don’t think of her as a particular influence, but maybe in that category of people whom I first read at a particular time in the ’90s. I was reading a bit of everything. I began, in August 1995, to be a poetry editor for Boston Review. For the first three years, I also helped to edit the review section. I no longer do that, but initially I did, so for three years most books of poems that were published came across my desk.

Did that make you more of a critical reader? Did it give you a sharper sense of what was interesting or new?

Absolutely. I had done some editing before that: when I was at Columbia College, Paul Hoover had given me the chance to co-edit a review called the Columbia Poetry Review; it was a combination of student work and work solicited from established poets. He gave us a list of people to whom we could address solicitation letters. That’s the first time I read John Yau, for instance, and Donald Revell and Claudia Keelan and Elaine Equi. I think Ann Lauterbach was on that list, too. Then when I went to Columbia University I got involved with Columbia: A Journal. So I had exposure to a lot of work, and yes, you could get to a place where you could have some notion, at least for yourself, of what was and what was not successful. I couldn’t always say why, but I was getting closer and closer to being able to put words to my experience of reading, and that was very useful.

Does it continue to be useful?

Yes, I have been doing it for a very long time now. I no longer do any of the reviewing, Timothy Donnelly does all of that, but he and I choose the poems and that feature we call the Poet’s Sampler, where we invite a published poet to introduce the work of an emerging poet. I think it’s useful enough that I hesitate to give it up, but at the same time it’s been eight years now and I wonder if I still learn as much from it. It’s not clear to me.

How did you start doing that?

Josh Cohen, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine, was looking for a poetry editor and asked Lucie Brock-Broido to suggest some names. She suggested, among others, Timothy and I together, because we were intense poetry pals. He was twenty years younger than I, but we hung out together and loved talking about poetry. We would read things together. Once we read Dante’s Inferno, taking turns reading the cantos and stopping after each to discuss it. We read it all one winter, sitting on my living room floor. We went up to Boston and spent a couple of hours with Josh Cohen and told him what our vision for the magazine would be, and he told us what he wanted it to be: he wanted the poetry to have more of a national focus than it had previously had. Tim and I said we could do that.

It’s still primarily very well-published writers. Is there a particular importance to that?

I don’t know that that’s true. We do try to pull poems out of the unsolicited manuscripts. Of course, we choose writers whose work we admire and that we want to showcase, but we also read all of the slush ourselves. We have no first readers because we’ve always been afraid that we would miss something if we were to do that. And we read thoroughly and closely, and always hope to discover new work that appeals to both of us equally, because there is that situation where one might like a poem more than the other. Ideally, we would like to have poems in the magazine that we both feel belong. We also have a tremendous backlog, of a year or so, and we don’t publish that many poems per issue, so that makes choosing work even harder.

What kind of advice would you give younger people starting to write, about getting work out into the world?

What I tell young writers is that the most important thing is finding a community of other writers, because I think it is a very hard thing that we do, and there are so many other conflicting demands on one’s time. To sequester yourself on a nice day and write your poem, at some point, you begin to wonder why do it. So although it’s something done in solitude, if you’re surrounded by other people and you get to participate in a community where people are also interested in language, in form, in expression, then there’s some added joy in it. The key is to know other people who are writing and to form a community, even via the Internet. It’s helpful to simply know other poets, to show each other your work, to celebrate when someone gets something accepted, and commiserate when they fail. That’s the first piece of advice I give people.

Do you feel that that community should be a workshopping community?

Not necessarily. If you want to do that, sure. But I think that, at some point, workshops begin to grate, because you do have that pressure for consensus, when art is something about which you shouldn’t have consensus. But I think that if you have one person or two, or however many who respect your project, they can be very useful in pointing out that you have used “red” five times in a poem that’s 20 lines long, and maybe you’d overlooked that fact. I don’t think you should continue to give your work to someone who has a drastically different aesthetic and who questions the very basis of what you’re doing: that’s very destructive and not useful at all. You should avoid that. Sometimes it’s useful showing somebody new your work, or finding a group where somebody is a little cantankerous.

Do you still work with a reader?

For years I showed my work to Timothy Donnelley, and I still sometimes do, but more and more I have to like it myself. I’m more demanding on myself now. It can be a problem, actually. I came to a point with photography where I asked myself: what’s worth taking a picture of, when there are so many images, so many great images, as well as giant landfills full of snapshots? Why should I muck up the world with more film and chemicals to make yet another image? At that point, I decided that the things worth taking pictures of were my friends, and my family, and I took lots of black and white portraits, and that’s all I basically did. I haven’t found an answer to the question of what’s worth writing about. You know, there’s not enough shelf space on bookstores to hold all the poetry books.

Do you think that the subject is what holds writing together, or is it something else?

I think for me what’s more interesting than the actual subject is the process of learning how to write in a way that will hold a reader’s attention. We were talking earlier about the editorial fatigue one experiences working as a magazine editor. You might read a hundred poems at a sitting for a magazine. After a while, it’s hard to find a poem that can keep your attention, much less truly excite you. Of course, if you continually hold your own poems up to that degree of scrutiny, it can be dangerous to the poem. You can be too demanding, and then a poem is never finished. I think projects are another way of exploring something: there’s a certain relief in knowing you’re not going to be stuck there forever. You can set out a problem for yourself and use the writing to see how many ways you can solve the problem. I don’t know whether that’s a particularly contemporary approach—it may be in poetry—but a novel has those parameters, and visual artists will do that, too: you’ve got Picasso’s Blue Period or you’ve got Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series. You’ve got these things that will hold someone for part of a lifetime even.

When you see a first poem do you think—or did you, with Louise in Love—this is just going to be one little poem, or is it, “This is going to be a book”?

With Louise, it evolved, just as the poems in Strange Balloon evolved. The instigation for those poems was because I found myself in St. Louis where I grew up, and being there after so many years away felt like being in the museum of my childhood. And within the museum of my childhood there is an art museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, a place that had a major impact on me when I was growing up. I grew up in a working class environment with very little exposure to art or literature. In high school, I discovered that museum and found myself intensely engaged by looking at art, thinking about art, learning about art. So within that museum of the museum of my childhood, I imagined someone who was trapped in the museum. There is a children’s book about two children who go to live at the Met, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg. When I began writing these poems, I imagined a woman who goes and lives in a museum, which was, in effect, what I was doing by having moved back to the scene of my childhood. Inside the museum, her life becomes one of entering and exiting these pictures as the only way to escape her reduced circumstances. So that’s how it began, but then it turned, over time, into something completely different, where eventually I began to use pieces of visual art, including more recent kinds of art—installations, film, photographs, video—as a tripwire to create narratives which were no longer about myself at all but about a lot of different experiences, and about art itself.

Do you feel that it is important that readers know which works of art you are writing about in Strange Balloon? That to know both the poem and the artwork makes the piece richer? Is that why you listed the pieces at the back?

I wouldn’t say it was “important” for a reader, but it was obviously important for me. And it does offer another dimension to the poem for those who want to read the poem by the light thrown onto it by the artwork. I think, as a reader, I might be curious to see the relationship, but that’s because I’m interested in these pieces of art. The poems have a certain independence, but at the same time each poem writes yet another chapter in the story begun by the artwork. It begins with the artwork but then goes somewhere new. I guess you could say the artwork becomes a single thread from which an entire cloth is then woven, but a cloth that has its own inherent lapses and ellipses, and its own psychological content. I also listed the artworks because it felt imperative to recognize the debt to the artists: I took their titles, after all, and they created those, as well as the works. I felt that required, at the very least, a respectful nod in their direction.

The book combines two opposing gestures. One is mentioning, or tipping the hat, toward the unnamed and vague, the place of the abstraction, as in “the vaguer terms: something, anywhere, every” in “Cursive Landscape.” On the other hand, these poems are so vibrantly visually grounded in myth and pop culture: Prometheus, Minnie Mouse, Alice in Wonderland, Ophelia. How do you see these opposite poles functioning?

The entire sentence from “Cursive Landscape” states, “We were offended by the vaguer terms: something, anywhere, every. Nothing.” I think that expresses the problem of talking about the abstract. That those large lyric themes we were discussing earlier—Love, Death, Memory, Truth, etc.—require particularization to have any real meaning. And for me, visual imagery is a way to try to establish that specificity. Those cultural icons you refer to are also useful because most readers will come with some knowledge about the stories those characters appear in. My hope is that I can take off from that point of shared knowledge and continue my own story, and in doing so, engage in a form of cultural discourse. To some degree, it’s a matter of economy. And you are correct when you suggest that there is tension created by the dual presence of these subjective and objective elements, i.e., the abstract and the concrete. I know I’m always trying to find the visual equivalent for a state of mind, Eliot’s objective correlative.

This new book seems very American, especially after Louise. In particular, it dwells in a space of American consumerism, as in the getting of free products or Minnie Mouse’s question, “Would you love me if I had nothing at all?” Could you comment on that?

The two examples you’ve pointed to do, in fact, allude to real encounters with American culture. In the first case, to an actual ad I read, and in the second, to a found comic book frame. I have recognized, within myself, a more recent desire to represent my own cultural moment in my poems.

Looking back at these four very different books, I was wondering how you saw the ensemble of your work in an American poetic tradition. Would you be able to classify yourself? And is that sort of classification, so often inquired about by readers, important?

The short answer is no, and no. By which I mean that I’m not able to classify what I’m doing, nor do I have anxiety about my inability to do so. Clearly I have lyric impulses, but I have many other impulses, as well. I see my poems not so much in terms of how they might be classified, but as a record of my obsessions and preoccupations. I’m obsessed with endings of all types: sleep, death, the story’s denouement. I’m obsessed by the notion of time. With the complicated relationship between the past and present. With the role of ironic detachment on contemporary art. With the music of disjunction. With narratives where one story bleeds through another. With the idea of “correctness”—how does one tell a story? And how does one tell a story in a way that captures psychological nuance and multiple layers of meaning?

I want to end our talk today with a question I was asked recently when applying for a grant. They wanted to know what I thought were the most important issues in the creative process today. In fact, I keep coming up with different answers. What do you think?

Well, I think it’s very hard to distinguish oneself when so many people are creating, so I think that’s the first issue. And how one does that it is the question that interests me. I know there are those poets who feel that, in fact, one shouldn’t try to distinguish oneself, because that leads to the commodification of your work, meaning you can sell it because people want that particular brand. I don’t feel that way. We talked before (though I don’t think it’s on tape) about my going into the Pompidou Center, where there were all these faux Mondrian paintings that were unmistakable from Mondrian’s. Now you can say, again, that that only supports the complaint that a “real” Mondrian painting will garner a million dollars, and it shouldn’t, because many people can create something identical, or so similar that it may as well have been painted by Mondrian. And that there is something corrupt about a system that institutionalizes that deification of the so-called “original.” But I’m just not engaged by these issues of commodification in poetry: it seems beside the point. There may be cultural consequences, but I’m more interested in the process of making. Nor do I think there can be an answer to the question of creating that’s true for everyone: each person has to invent something for herself or himself. Part of the problem is negotiating the relationship between oneself and one’s imagination and a reader. How one does that takes all kinds of forms, and that’s what’s nice about art. It’s that new things keep being invented, new relationships, new ways of negotiating the impulse to make something.