Recently I was asked by Steven Karl (Thanks, Steven!!) to take part in a round robin interview chain - here is my contribution ---
What is the working title of the chapbook?
This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me
Where did the idea come from for the chapbook?
I started working on the
pieces that became this chapbook while I was traveling, thinking about love and
how it is like reading or like looking, like trying to describe something
objectively in exquisite detail, over time, while the describer is in motion
and in flux. I had in mind projects like Monet’s haystacks seen in many kinds
of light and On Kawara’s paintings of every day’s date for many decades each in
the format of the country he found himself in and Stephen Ratcliffe’s
every-morning practice of writing the same sized poem about the same landscape:
observation as weather. I found myself thinking in particular about describing
a loved object and how this becomes a sort of projection onto a mirror, as
Roland Barthes theorizes in his very mysterious and beautiful book A Lover’s Discourse. Nursing a
distance, looking very closely, but also looking at something imaginary at the
same time.
I found my way to the line
“This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me.” With these ideas embedded in it,
the phrase seemed vertiginous, oscillating back and forth between the position
of the lover and the object of love, projection into a paradox. This
complicated effect of suggestion and identification is I think often a key part
of reading, and certainly almost always writing: hearing someone else’s voice
in one’s head, being infected by feelings. It probes narcissism but in a funny,
raw-nervy way. And maybe a creepy way too – I held on to the image of watching
someone sleep—a kind of strange and special intimate thing to know about
someone that they can’t know about themselves.
Under the
heading “This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me" I started writing, adopting a
diaristic/daybook mode which meant that the poem could become a story of a
relationship over time, dilating and contracting and deepening. I mean the
open-ended relationship of poems and their speakers and their readers but also a
very particular relationship, as I incorporated little jokes between my wife
Farrah and I: our road-trip games, our joshing turns of phrase. We got married
between the time I started writing and finished editing this poem so I couldn’t
help making the poem romantically not only a courtship itself but also the
record of one. But it isn’t so much a poem about falling in love as about being
in love.
Many pieces for this series
formed while I was traveling; sections take place by the pool in the Hotel
Oceania in Santa Monica, in my parents’ cabin in Northern California where I
stayed for a few days by myself in January 2011 writing, going for walks and
reading R. Crumb’s illustrated Genesis,
and (in fantasy at least) riding the Trans-Siberian Railway which I hope to do
actually someday. Somehow Winnie the Pooh and Leo Tolstoy came into the poem.
Rimbaud’s line “Je est un autre” – I is an other – kept occurring to me. I have
been working at the same time on poems involving the Norwegian folk hero Peer
Gynt so somehow with his looky-loo first name like a burglar he jimmied his way
into this poem too.
What genre does your book fall under?
This series of
pieces started out as see-what-happens prose in which the opening phrase was
sometimes a prompt and sometimes a way of complicating or interrupting or
redirecting the flow of an impulse or an idea. As I was editing and looking for
ways to bring more air into the prose I came across a great piece by Brenda
Hillman in Lana Turner #2 adapting a hybrid form called ‘haibun’- mixing haiku
and prose. I think the idea traditionally in Japanese literature is to use to
the prose in a travel diary-memoirish way to situate the haiku pieces so these
little gems of observation and contemplation are presented in a fabric of time
instead if floating in space as they usually do. Haibun’s cut lines can aerate
the prose while prose blocks impart to the cut lines a jazzy sense of
contingency and visibility like a viscous colored liquid imbued with bubbles. I
love how the form foregrounds travel and motion and the sense of a work as its
own commentary, writing in dialogue with its process of creation, a journal of
an adventure. Thus it comprises not only viable haiku-sized poems with a prose
midrash of elaboration but a single long hybrid work in which it is possible
for more unexpected things to happen. Hillman’s contemporary adaptation of
haibun was extremely inspiring to me. (Here’s
a link to her poem, and while I’m googling I just came across another example here.
And incidentally today I happened to spot that EOAGH just published a haibun by Steve Benson, using
the haiku as part-hinge, part-springboard to leap into a void…) These American
haibun show me how the form could work against essay and normal prose poetry
writing like engine-braking with a gear shift in a car, dramatically changing
the pace by using the text’s own momentum against itself. Similarly, just by rolling forward quickly
enough and forcing the stick shift into gear, it’s possible to get a car to
start.
What actors would you choose to play the part
of your characters in a movie rendition?
Here is a
partial list of dramatis personae for This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me:
A bicycle.
The City of Philadelphia. The City of New York. A salt flat in Utah. A volcano.
The Berkshires. Fog. Peer Gynt. Gertrude Stein. Arthur Rimbaud. Leo Tolstoy. The
mathematician Georg Cantor. Snow monkeys. Sea lions. Anarchists. King Arthur. Calypso.
Ulysses. Gulliver. Winnie-the-Pooh. A
bearwolf. Me. Farrah.
This film is
a fiction autobiopic so everybody can portray themselves – or versions of
themselves (think Arlo Guthrie as Arlo Guthrie in “Alice’s Restaurant,” John Malkovich
as John Malkovich in “Being John Malkovich,” Eminem in “8 Mile,” Howard Stern
in “Private Parts,” Los Angeles in Thom Andersen’s “Los Angeles Plays Itself”).
But like these movies there is a script – this is not documentary or
improvisation. It doesn’t matter whether the actors are good or convincing
actors; in some ways it works better if the self-impersonations are vague and
stylized and somehow unconvincing. The screenplay, like what it is like to be
loved in the poem, is by me.
The
chapbook includes these lines: “The
actors portraying us tell us how we look each morning. They study our trash to
fill us with hope.”
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
This is this is what it is
like to be loved by me.
(These words are what it is like to be loved by me.)
How long did it take you to write the first
draft of the manuscript?
I started
writing pieces for this series on an October 7 – I know because that’s what it
says on the first page of the poem, in the poem. I think it was 10/7/10. I had
gone to Los Angeles for my friend’s bachelor party in Big Bear and afterwards I
stayed near the ocean, writing and getting ready for a road trip of readings
that would take Farrah and me from Venice Beach to Austin, Texas where the same
friend was getting married. One day I took a break from writing for an
afternoon and rented a Segway and rode along the Santa Monica boardwalk feeling
ridiculous. Mostly it was rainy, which was very weird since I thought it never
rains in LA. When Farrah arrived the day before our reading at Beyond Baroque
the weather cleared so we took out bicycles and rode north on the boardwalk to
the edge of Pacific Palisades and Malibu. On our way back we tried to head in
from the coast and had to ford our way through a huge puddle of rainwater in a
tunnel under the Pacific Coast Highway.
I
continued working on the prose blocks that became This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me for the next year and a half, during which my cat died, I went on a
Tolstoy reading marathon, grew out my beard and then shaved it, got
married, and conceived a child with Farrah. The manuscript was finally
finished during the spring and summer of 2012.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My wife Farrah. My friends
and their weddings. The opening line from Dante’s Inferno about the “selva
oscura” – dark forest – in which he finds himself midway through
life.
What else about your book might pique the
reader’s interest?
This chapbook has sex-style
sex in it. It also includes secret instructions for getting into a house in
Sudbury, Massachusetts and the true story of how I met my wife in the Kensington Stables in Brooklyn taking horseback-riding lessons, years before we exchanged even a word. I've also included the rules for
a very fun road trip game we call “zip zip,” which involves scoring points when you spot horses. When you pass a graveyard, you shout out "bury your horses!" and the other person loses all their points. It is ruthless and morbid. When we drove across the country Farrah
and I tried adding bonus points for silos during the long trek across Iowa but
that made it too easy and I don’t recommend it.
Will your book be self-published or represented
by an agency?
Shanna
Compton of Bloof Books has been extraordinarily generous in making an amazing
edition of this chapbook as part of an incredible lineup of chaps from
phenomenal poets. As one of only a couple men published on this great press I
feel particularly honored. I’m speechless and beside myself with excitement.
Tag, you're it.
