Poetry Workshop's Interview with Garin Cycholl, October 2009

The poet, Garin Cycholl, author of four books of poetry, including Rafetown Georgics (Cracked Slab Press), and Hostile Witness (Blazevox), was interviewed by students in the Poetry Workshop/English 311 this October when he came out to read at Marist College. This interview is written as a kind of epistolary discussion with the members of the class. The poet addresses the question and the questioner within the context of a larger discussion about poetry and poetic influences.

Enjoy!

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Interview with Garin Cycholl by Poetry Workshop/English 311, Fall 2009

Thanks for your questions here. I’ve tried to address central issues in my poetics. If you’re curious about follow-ups or if you feel that I’ve left any questions unanswered, please feel free to contact me. --GC

In finding a vantage point for writing about place, a couple of comments. First, Colleen, I always find it important to make that distinction between history and hist’ry, one where the poet places his/her own perspective at the center of understanding. Memory is an important element of this perspective, Paige. A good poem here demands a working subjectivity (a voice or persona speaking in place? an occasion?) versus the objectivity commonly demanded by historical research. This requires a great deal of historical research still, but also reading in archeology, geology, economics, and for me, botany. In his “Bibliography for Ed Dorn,” Charles Olson (see his _Collected Prose_) argues that you should get to know one thing (by extension, one place) really well; Olson even cautions that this might take a few years, because you should know it better than anyone else. Probably an impossible demand, but one worth pursuing as you write. Understand Pittsburgh, your backyard, a ditch along the highway with this depth. It’s the “way into place” that makes the poem ultimately (i.e., what you discover along the way) rather than some kind of objective perspective on the place itself. A good example of this kind of writing is Gabe Gudding’s _Rhode Island Notebook_, part of which is a geography of the eastern United States mapped through roadkill.

This could involve some kind of persona, Amy, as Olson does with Maximus in his _Maximus Poems_. It pushes the investigation of the place beyond simple anecdote (i.e., just a bunch of interesting or funny stories about the place). That persona continues to evolve for me. With Illinois, I’ve worked through familial stories so far in my long poems—my great grandfather’s shadowy history with mining violence in southern Illinois, my grandfather’s travels between Springfield and Chicago, my dad’s commute to and from medical school on Chicago’s West Side in the mid-1960’s riots. The developing persona here is some kind of “prairie prophet” who’s speaking in and through my current work. In a sense, Samantha, it’s not so much about mimicking voices, as it is channeling them or giving them voice. It also might be why I read the poems so quickly, Lara; gathering the voices gives the poems a kind of energy. A just-finished long poem, _The Bonegatherer_, does that by including the voices of various doctors, nurses, patients, and neighbors of Cook County Hospital in Chicago---the poem gives voice to how they understand communal dimensions of “health” within a culture of violence. My studies in religion, Christopher, have encouraged me to understand the prophet’s role within a culture. I’m obviously not a prophet in any sense, but that role can give the poem a perspective for its concerns. William Blake’s prophetic poems are an influence here, as are the poetries of Tom McGrath (_Letter to an Imaginary Friend_), Muriel Rukeyser (_The Book of the Dead_), and C.S. Giscombe (_Here_). The classics are also a larger influence here, Heather and Flor, because the georgics become a means of grasping the agricultural moment in Illinois in the light of surrounding political, economic, and societal displacements caused by the dissolution of myths about the “family farm” in our culture. As Michael Pollan asks, “Why, as a nation, do we plant so much corn?”

Regarding your question, Juliann, audience is an important concern here. How much information do you need to share from your research? Two things guide me. I always have a deep respect for my audience’s knowledge; my readers will know and understand things that I never will. They’ll make certain connections and maybe miss others. I hope that the language itself and its play will make those connections to some degree. Also, I hope that the poems will be interesting enough to cause their readers to do their own reading or exploration (i.e., who is Aaron Siskind and what are his photographs about?).

Is this work for poetry or prose? Your questions, Gabbie and Jayne, are very pointed. The book I’d love to write is a biography of Chicago’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley. In that book, you could engage not only Daley’s work in comparison with his late father’s influence as the city’s mayor, but you could also consider the city’s transformation in terms of immigration and money, as well as whatever is happening in the national political moment through President Obama’s election last year. That seems like a prose work for me---I keep encouraging students in my nonfiction workshops to pursue it. Maybe somebody will, although there are any number of books that could explore localities in the Americas that would open similar questions that would connect to more national or international interests. A critical theme here is how “displacement” (social, historical, economic, biological, and even personal displacement) has and continues to define the Americas. How are Chicago, Illinois, and the prairie itself “collected displacements?” It’s the root and continuing influence for my fascination with place.