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.