Rachel Zucker Interview with Marist College Poetry Workshop/ENG 311 Students, April 2010
Addie DiFran, Christa Strobino, Elyse Brendlen, Erika Giannelli,
Sarah Dub, Lindsay Blevins
1.) In an interview with Susie Deford with Bomblog, you made the comment that you were interested in "what it means to write political poetry that is not protest poetry." Have you discovered the difference? What exactly does it mean to write political poetry that is not protesting? What kind of political messages are you trying to portray in your poems?
RZ: I’m not sure. I’m really struggling with this right now. I believe, very strongly, that writing personl poetry can be political and yet I find myself wanting to write something that is more overtly political, intentionally political.
I think all writing (political and not political) is a form a protest. I’m not sure yet how this connects to my desire to write more overtly political poetry.
2.) Many of your poems deal with the trials of motherhood and being married. Specifically in the poem, Paying Down the Debt: Happiness. You talk about how you're writing a "momoir" during the day and then having to live the frustrations of your writing when the kids come home from school. The second stanza of the poem deals with some of the daily conversations you have with your children. You say in one line, "Motherhood has taken my I and smothered her to smithereens. I'm bothered. Hot. Lusty. Restless." Was it difficult for you to put these poems out to the public knowing that your children and husband would one day read them? How did your husband react to the poems?
RZ: It was not difficult talking about these things publically. It was much more difficult living them, experiencing the feelings. Admitting to them is much easier. I think my husband likes being noticed. Of course, I may come to regret having been public about our family life. So far, I don’t.
3.) I love the title you used for this book. I always think about what would be in a museum of accidents. If you could visualize such a place, what would it look like?
RZ: Like the Guggenheim but each room drastically different from every other room.
4.) In your life, you have experienced much already: you have taught, you've assisted with births, gotten married, and given birth yourself. Do you find that your inspiration for your poetry comes from inside yourself, or are you inspired by outside sources? If so, what particular things inspire you? Are you ever inspired to write by something you have not experienced before?
RZ: I’m never sure if the “non poetry” things I do—teaching, childbirth education, assisting at births, mothering, etc.—feed and sustain and inspire my poetry or just reduce my writing time. As for the second part of the question—well, I wrote about Persephone going down into the Underworld and I haven’t actually done that! But, seriously, I think I have, in a way. I think we write using empathy so very little is outside our actually experience. I can’t imagine wanting to write about something I had no empathy for.
5.) I really thought your poetry was structurally interesting. The way that a line continues on and on without punctuation, like in "What Dark Thing", was really intriguing. It left a lot up to me as the reader to interpret pauses and stops. Is this type of writing what you have always naturally produced? Or do you find that this has resulted from studying confessional poetry?
RZ: The form of the poems is organic. I’m not sure what else to say about it—I’m sorry!
6.) What is your writing process like? Do you like to plan and organize your writing time (or do you HAVE to with your busy schedule?) Or do you write when you feel called to? What does your writing 'space' look like?
RZ: My writing space is a total mess. Usually is. I’ve got 50 different projects all going on at once and tons of books on my desk as well as broken action figures that are waiting for repair and dental floss and a bathing suit that needs to be returned… oh I can’t even describe it…terrible. Every day is different for me but the weeks are similar. If my youngest doesn’t have day care—no writing. If he does, teaching usually comes first. Writing fits in somewhere. No idea how.
7.) You've written several books before Museum of Accidents, such as Eating in the Underworld. What do you feel the journey has been like from book to book? Is there a connection between each published collection? How is Museum of Accident different from your other collections?
RZ: Museum of Accidents is my freest collection. I cared less what people thought. It was an easier book to organize.
8.) How do you keep your poems fresh and interesting when focusing on common themes? How specifically does working around themes of motherhood, domestic space and love feel bounded and/or boundless and how do you negotiate it? Do you have any special tricks for coming up with concrete images to convey your meaning?
RZ: I’ve never worried about any of that before. I do now because I’m not in the middle of a collection of poems and because I’d really like to do something different. I’ll let you know what happens. So far I feel pretty stuck.
9.)There seems to be a great push and pull in each of your poems. The work seems to want love, but at the same time, it appears to be more of just a hungry, sexual love many times. How do you see these tensions as important to your poems?
RZ: I think that’s just my experience of love and marriage and sex.
10.) In your poem "Paying Down the Debt: Happiness" you say "Motherhood has taken my I and smothered her to smithereens," and mention that "there is no more writing," (when your son is sick). But it seems like when there is writing, it is about motherhood. Has motherhood taken over your writing by force, or is motherhood now your "I"?
RZ: Well, there was no more writing that memoir during that time. But yes, I can’t anymore distinguish between my writer self and my mother self even though they often seem to be in conflict.
11.) In an interview with Susie DeFord, you mention that the woes and worries you had about life before having children have faded, but have also evolved into new anxieties regarding your children and their lives. Which set of issues would you rather focus on: the existential or the physical nature of motherhood?
RZ: I think there is almost no difference between these two.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Interview with Karl Parker, author of Personationskin
Group Interview with Karl Parker
Author of Personationskin, No Tell Books, 2010
These questions were composed by half of the student writers in Professor Graham’s ENG 311/Poetry Workshop during the spring semester, 2010.
Interviewers: Caela Provost, Katlyn Conkey (KC), Nick Sweeny, Nic White, Dan Fleischl, Dani Oh, Kimberly Elizabeth
Q: Personationskin is a title that is ambiguous and intriguing. Is it meant to be interpreted by your readers in its own right, or does it speak along with—and to—the collection of poems in this book?
KP: Thanks, Q. I’m excited to have to think through these things in a hopefully not too roundabout way (too late). Yes to both: The title should do some thinking-work in its own right, as only it sits poised to interact with the whole in a way nothing else can--like titles in general, titles of poems in specific shouldn’t be mere labels, in fact their relations to the “body” [a misnomer] of the poem should/can be productively labile, suggestive, even a phrase in its own right. The title’s the name that frames a number of skins (pages, “leaves”) connected by a spine, which is probably not true ‘cause it’s so sonorous [Laughs]. No really, in this case I’m happy with the flow through/into Person & Nation & Skin and back again, but also their blurrings-together: Personation’s Kin: its family, voices of those ‘who drew near in the day,’ all its language-relationships (right? “older” than any single one of us, etymologically, literarily, historically). But what name to give to such a series as these. How do you name not a face but what it is to have a face at all, how do you try to do that. I’ll have you know, dear Q, I shan’t be so loquatic with the next question, for which I am grate—
Q: Within the poems you frequently use a mode of internal self-correction. For a reader, this is both interesting, and feels like you are re-writing the mode of author versus narrator. What have been other reactions to this way of internal self-correction? Did you have a particular motivation and purpose for doing this?
KP: Now Q, my dear friend, I’m sure some people reasonably believe that that sort of thing’s just not to be done in poetry, perhaps it violates what could be and in fact is called the Fortune Cookie illusion of the lyric exchange, expectations of being briefly irradiated with Truth/Beauty; in every case I have always been in need of great and manifold internal corrections. I think we often think by little twitches backwards, slight rearrangements, and some of us, namely me or/and I like to write poems where these are active/sparky/ shifty [this is technickel lingo, so don’t worry, I’ll cut it out] rearrangements of sound and sense. Often there won’t be “self”-“correcting” moves/word-moments, but swerves, twists or torques, hyperkinetics, deck-reshufflings of all sorts, as the series of sentences any poem is unfolds in its weird and lucid sometimes ludic ways. Couldn’t resist that. How do you keep the relation of reader and writer alive in the moment of exchange or overhearing that reading the poem is? You keep it on its toes, but that sounds awful. Or, literally in other words, you keep them on their toes, all nine of them (readers & writers).
{Silence: Dead laughter, lone titters.}
{Cricketsounds.}
Q: Personationskin evokes fear, excitement, scorn, ease, etc. Were these feelings ever written in a stream—or to quote Wordsworth, a “spontaneous overflow of feeling”? Or was the book written more out of some kind of realization?
KP: {NEXT DAY} Only the realization of the accretion, more or less day by day through a certain phase of writing, of what every once in a while I could do, and sat down and did, with words moved by, really moving on by means of, finding sounds and senses (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, which truly “one” should Never do) that suffice for that day, that time, that intersection of things in really anyone’s, everyone’s lives. I know I’m enjoying answering these too much; yet sound leads thought on, it does, in variable acts of mind, that’s the point. I don’t write about things, though; these are like sculptures in the sense that they result from a series of (the appearance of) thoughtful rearrangements of matters; in my work, the material would be, ideally, the whole spectrum of the human voice—but that would be something other than poetry, no doubt. It’s whatever patchwork of differences appears in a few or more moves of a voice, maybe that’s the way to say how it goes (for m)e.
Q: What was the biggest challenge while writing Personationskin? What did you do to overcome this obstacle?
KP: Me. Everything.
Oh Q, I could tell you some stories, wow.
I speaks what it says.
Q: Gabriel Gudding, a reviewer, said the following about Personationskin: "To read Karl Parker's poems is to revel in the tremendous reach of a mind that, more than any other I've read, can render me awed at the realization that we, each of us, have a person inside our skins with us." When you were writing, did you see your speakers or 'personas' as a representation of "a person inside our skin with us" or rather as a representation of the many faces/personalities/beings that are in one individual?
KP: Gabriel, or--as his “friends” know him, Gabe--Gudding’s a brilliant poet (google him, check him out) but, alas, a compulsive liar (I hear slowly he’s getting over it). This is a perplexing question. I’ve always felt my speakers were voices, just that, and that they could easily and often do have whole other half-imagined lives apart from mine, but that’s it, these must be “my” utterances, but usually when a poem’s unfolding or occurring I’m following them or it by moving on in bodied sound, as now, but often with the added effects linebreaks create. Certainly everyone is multivoiced in their thinking, in their self-representations (but that’s not what thinking’s to me). I wanted, especially in SUNSHINE PROSTHETIC, to make a kind of raw human dance in the disaster & the goodness. Sentences are rhythmic, they move with thought. Sound is a force that’s older than thought. [just occurred to me that this is the drummer in me speaking—that would of course give skins a whole other connection here—in me]
Q: Your poem "Manifestus" is an amazing clash of several very powerful concrete images ('the orchestra,' 'human veins and blood,' etc) with an intense and very moving overlaying theme in the background (losing yourself/letting yourself be killed through the thoughts and opinions of others). When you're constructing a poem like "Manifestus" do you find it easier to begin with images or a theme first? Do you consistently start with one over the other or do you switch? If you do switch, in what ways does the switch change your writing?
KP: Magically, I may have already answered this. [Multicolored flowers spring.] Perhaps not. Though it sounds tautological, I start with whatever occurs to me to say at first, without purpose or plan, and then see where, sentence by sentence, twist & turn & curve & twitch & burn, I & it end up. I want to see where a series of naturally improvisatory language-gestures leads. Though that sounds a bit robotic . . .
Q: Do you feel most at ease when you are writing a poem or editing a poem?
KP: Writing, definitely. I am merely moving from one thing to another.
Q: Did you ever have an ah-ha moment in the clarity of becoming a poet?
KP: I’ve had my whole head open up.
The answer is Yes. (Though I’m partially thinking of Dickinson’s characterization of the physical effect [freezing, which I don’t get at all, yet do] reading genuine poetry had on her [top of head, one’s headtop, comes off]. She was her own private Vesuvius.) I’ve had moments of Yes and more than Yes. And certainly when I returned from a year in Dublin at Trinity College as an undergraduate I knew I would never look back or really doubt what I would do and become as I went on.
Q: What kind of events in your everyday life can inspire your unique images? For example, "A large bird wearing something resembling a hospital gown / flew, or rather sidled, into the flourescent room" ("A Hopsital Bird," 32). What tends to inspire your images?
KP: I can hardly say, except that, really, they occur to me to say. In this particular case that summer in Ithaca I’d been writing a number of weird, wandering little narratives about either insects or animals, or more often children or people with animal-heads—which sort of thing, I’ve often thought, I first encountered in Mexico City in the National Gallery, ancient piece of a building muralled with figures with animal-heads, like leopards, just marvelous.
Q: How is working with Ivy League students different or perhaps similar to the teaching you have done at correctional facilities?
KP: At root the same on my end, though the power of privilege and caste to blind one to a sense of value and meaning should never be underestimated. Oh, unfortunately I’ve lost my Bold Face! I’ll just have to work with this from here on. Of course the work in the prison’s infinitely rewarding.
Q: As writer's we are interested in your writing process. Do you follow any particular routine? Where does a poem start for you?
KP: Once again quite by nonrandom accidents of magic I’ve already addressed, begun to address—have already begun to go on practically forever about—perhaps—this. And there’s that self-correcting, rearranging thing again: it’s repetition with a difference, and that makes all the real difference. But back to the heart of the matter: I am routinely trying to regularize my life, y’know? And I always feel better (not to mention write better) when writing often, though often I’ve been terrible at letting other things get in the way of my giving myself that space, the space of the blank page or screen in which to be and do things again as one only can in words (poetry=spatialized words).
Q: In my experience, one of the hardest steps in writing is starting a poem. How do you find yourself doing this? Do you have any tips you can offer to other writers?
KP: Trust your instincts; sharpen and widen them through amazing works of written (ancient to preFuturist—we can talk about This my movement later, in another interview sometime) and visual art. Learn through your repetitions and experiments what you most like and need to do with words. You literally & simply find “what suffices” by doing what interests you enough to go on despite selfdoubt, general fear. To do this you must at some level engage your obsessions or—as A.R. Ammons put it—your “active difficulties” (in specific poems, and more general arcs through accretions of writing day after day after day and whenever on throughout the years) . You make your way with words. Kafka said this is writing: like a mole moving through a mountain.
Author of Personationskin, No Tell Books, 2010
These questions were composed by half of the student writers in Professor Graham’s ENG 311/Poetry Workshop during the spring semester, 2010.
Interviewers: Caela Provost, Katlyn Conkey (KC), Nick Sweeny, Nic White, Dan Fleischl, Dani Oh, Kimberly Elizabeth
Q: Personationskin is a title that is ambiguous and intriguing. Is it meant to be interpreted by your readers in its own right, or does it speak along with—and to—the collection of poems in this book?
KP: Thanks, Q. I’m excited to have to think through these things in a hopefully not too roundabout way (too late). Yes to both: The title should do some thinking-work in its own right, as only it sits poised to interact with the whole in a way nothing else can--like titles in general, titles of poems in specific shouldn’t be mere labels, in fact their relations to the “body” [a misnomer] of the poem should/can be productively labile, suggestive, even a phrase in its own right. The title’s the name that frames a number of skins (pages, “leaves”) connected by a spine, which is probably not true ‘cause it’s so sonorous [Laughs]. No really, in this case I’m happy with the flow through/into Person & Nation & Skin and back again, but also their blurrings-together: Personation’s Kin: its family, voices of those ‘who drew near in the day,’ all its language-relationships (right? “older” than any single one of us, etymologically, literarily, historically). But what name to give to such a series as these. How do you name not a face but what it is to have a face at all, how do you try to do that. I’ll have you know, dear Q, I shan’t be so loquatic with the next question, for which I am grate—
Q: Within the poems you frequently use a mode of internal self-correction. For a reader, this is both interesting, and feels like you are re-writing the mode of author versus narrator. What have been other reactions to this way of internal self-correction? Did you have a particular motivation and purpose for doing this?
KP: Now Q, my dear friend, I’m sure some people reasonably believe that that sort of thing’s just not to be done in poetry, perhaps it violates what could be and in fact is called the Fortune Cookie illusion of the lyric exchange, expectations of being briefly irradiated with Truth/Beauty; in every case I have always been in need of great and manifold internal corrections. I think we often think by little twitches backwards, slight rearrangements, and some of us, namely me or/and I like to write poems where these are active/sparky/ shifty [this is technickel lingo, so don’t worry, I’ll cut it out] rearrangements of sound and sense. Often there won’t be “self”-“correcting” moves/word-moments, but swerves, twists or torques, hyperkinetics, deck-reshufflings of all sorts, as the series of sentences any poem is unfolds in its weird and lucid sometimes ludic ways. Couldn’t resist that. How do you keep the relation of reader and writer alive in the moment of exchange or overhearing that reading the poem is? You keep it on its toes, but that sounds awful. Or, literally in other words, you keep them on their toes, all nine of them (readers & writers).
{Silence: Dead laughter, lone titters.}
{Cricketsounds.}
Q: Personationskin evokes fear, excitement, scorn, ease, etc. Were these feelings ever written in a stream—or to quote Wordsworth, a “spontaneous overflow of feeling”? Or was the book written more out of some kind of realization?
KP: {NEXT DAY} Only the realization of the accretion, more or less day by day through a certain phase of writing, of what every once in a while I could do, and sat down and did, with words moved by, really moving on by means of, finding sounds and senses (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, which truly “one” should Never do) that suffice for that day, that time, that intersection of things in really anyone’s, everyone’s lives. I know I’m enjoying answering these too much; yet sound leads thought on, it does, in variable acts of mind, that’s the point. I don’t write about things, though; these are like sculptures in the sense that they result from a series of (the appearance of) thoughtful rearrangements of matters; in my work, the material would be, ideally, the whole spectrum of the human voice—but that would be something other than poetry, no doubt. It’s whatever patchwork of differences appears in a few or more moves of a voice, maybe that’s the way to say how it goes (for m)e.
Q: What was the biggest challenge while writing Personationskin? What did you do to overcome this obstacle?
KP: Me. Everything.
Oh Q, I could tell you some stories, wow.
I speaks what it says.
Q: Gabriel Gudding, a reviewer, said the following about Personationskin: "To read Karl Parker's poems is to revel in the tremendous reach of a mind that, more than any other I've read, can render me awed at the realization that we, each of us, have a person inside our skins with us." When you were writing, did you see your speakers or 'personas' as a representation of "a person inside our skin with us" or rather as a representation of the many faces/personalities/beings that are in one individual?
KP: Gabriel, or--as his “friends” know him, Gabe--Gudding’s a brilliant poet (google him, check him out) but, alas, a compulsive liar (I hear slowly he’s getting over it). This is a perplexing question. I’ve always felt my speakers were voices, just that, and that they could easily and often do have whole other half-imagined lives apart from mine, but that’s it, these must be “my” utterances, but usually when a poem’s unfolding or occurring I’m following them or it by moving on in bodied sound, as now, but often with the added effects linebreaks create. Certainly everyone is multivoiced in their thinking, in their self-representations (but that’s not what thinking’s to me). I wanted, especially in SUNSHINE PROSTHETIC, to make a kind of raw human dance in the disaster & the goodness. Sentences are rhythmic, they move with thought. Sound is a force that’s older than thought. [just occurred to me that this is the drummer in me speaking—that would of course give skins a whole other connection here—in me]
Q: Your poem "Manifestus" is an amazing clash of several very powerful concrete images ('the orchestra,' 'human veins and blood,' etc) with an intense and very moving overlaying theme in the background (losing yourself/letting yourself be killed through the thoughts and opinions of others). When you're constructing a poem like "Manifestus" do you find it easier to begin with images or a theme first? Do you consistently start with one over the other or do you switch? If you do switch, in what ways does the switch change your writing?
KP: Magically, I may have already answered this. [Multicolored flowers spring.] Perhaps not. Though it sounds tautological, I start with whatever occurs to me to say at first, without purpose or plan, and then see where, sentence by sentence, twist & turn & curve & twitch & burn, I & it end up. I want to see where a series of naturally improvisatory language-gestures leads. Though that sounds a bit robotic . . .
Q: Do you feel most at ease when you are writing a poem or editing a poem?
KP: Writing, definitely. I am merely moving from one thing to another.
Q: Did you ever have an ah-ha moment in the clarity of becoming a poet?
KP: I’ve had my whole head open up.
The answer is Yes. (Though I’m partially thinking of Dickinson’s characterization of the physical effect [freezing, which I don’t get at all, yet do] reading genuine poetry had on her [top of head, one’s headtop, comes off]. She was her own private Vesuvius.) I’ve had moments of Yes and more than Yes. And certainly when I returned from a year in Dublin at Trinity College as an undergraduate I knew I would never look back or really doubt what I would do and become as I went on.
Q: What kind of events in your everyday life can inspire your unique images? For example, "A large bird wearing something resembling a hospital gown / flew, or rather sidled, into the flourescent room" ("A Hopsital Bird," 32). What tends to inspire your images?
KP: I can hardly say, except that, really, they occur to me to say. In this particular case that summer in Ithaca I’d been writing a number of weird, wandering little narratives about either insects or animals, or more often children or people with animal-heads—which sort of thing, I’ve often thought, I first encountered in Mexico City in the National Gallery, ancient piece of a building muralled with figures with animal-heads, like leopards, just marvelous.
Q: How is working with Ivy League students different or perhaps similar to the teaching you have done at correctional facilities?
KP: At root the same on my end, though the power of privilege and caste to blind one to a sense of value and meaning should never be underestimated. Oh, unfortunately I’ve lost my Bold Face! I’ll just have to work with this from here on. Of course the work in the prison’s infinitely rewarding.
Q: As writer's we are interested in your writing process. Do you follow any particular routine? Where does a poem start for you?
KP: Once again quite by nonrandom accidents of magic I’ve already addressed, begun to address—have already begun to go on practically forever about—perhaps—this. And there’s that self-correcting, rearranging thing again: it’s repetition with a difference, and that makes all the real difference. But back to the heart of the matter: I am routinely trying to regularize my life, y’know? And I always feel better (not to mention write better) when writing often, though often I’ve been terrible at letting other things get in the way of my giving myself that space, the space of the blank page or screen in which to be and do things again as one only can in words (poetry=spatialized words).
Q: In my experience, one of the hardest steps in writing is starting a poem. How do you find yourself doing this? Do you have any tips you can offer to other writers?
KP: Trust your instincts; sharpen and widen them through amazing works of written (ancient to preFuturist—we can talk about This my movement later, in another interview sometime) and visual art. Learn through your repetitions and experiments what you most like and need to do with words. You literally & simply find “what suffices” by doing what interests you enough to go on despite selfdoubt, general fear. To do this you must at some level engage your obsessions or—as A.R. Ammons put it—your “active difficulties” (in specific poems, and more general arcs through accretions of writing day after day after day and whenever on throughout the years) . You make your way with words. Kafka said this is writing: like a mole moving through a mountain.
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