from A CONVERSATION WITH B.H. FAIRCHILD

[...]

FOX: What would you say is the difference between poetry and prose? Many of your poems look like prose…

FAIRCHILD: Well, I hope they don’t sound like prose. It is true that I have written prose poems. I wouldn’t like to think that my poem poems are prose, although there’s a big difference between fictional prose and expository prose. Poetry does overlap with fictional prose. For instance, in Melville’s Moby Dick, there are large swatches of Shakespearian blank verse and you find when prose is raised to a certain level that it takes on the quality of poetry. There’s a great novel by James Agee called A Death in the Family which has a preface to it which is about as close as ordinary prose can get to poetry and if you wanted to call it poetry it would be fine. But the distinction is not between poetry and creative fictional prose, because they do overlap. The distinction is between poetry and expository prose. And expository prose is 99.999 percent of our lives; that’s the prose of magazines, of newspapers, and certainly if you’ve read legal prose, that’s one of the purest examples of completely referential expository prose.

FOX: Good point.

FAIRCHILD: The mode, the function, of that kind of prose—and again this dominates our life almost completely—is aboutness. In all of it, the function is to explain about something. And if we didn’t have that means of communication, in fact, we’d still be living in caves, but still, a lot of people are just surprised to think that language could have any function other than being about something. But sometimes—well, like me; when I was a boy, I began to think that there was something missing there. You could read Scientific American and it would explain String Theory but it was talking about it. And what poetry is engaged in, the kind of language it’s engaged in, is not the language of aboutness, it’s engaged in the language of isness. You’re not trying to point to something out there, and talk about it, you’re trying to actually put it right on the reader’s fingertips. The prose in a biology textbook is trying to tell you about the frog; the poem is trying to turn you into a frog. It’s trying to do the very difficult thing of trying to give you a sense of frogness. When you’re using referential prose, the ontological—excuse me for using that word, but the ontological experience and meaning of the thing is always dead to you if you’re just talking about it. There’s a big difference between telling somebody how much their investment has made over the year and putting them in the seat of a new Ferrari and letting them touch the leather and smell the new car and put it in first and feel that rush of power as they go out of the parking lot. I’m sorry, I don’t usually talk about Ferraris because I couldn’t afford one myself. [Fox laughs] I was talking with a friend the other day who owns one. But referential prose, expository prose, which dominates our minds, not only dominates our minds but actually brainwashes us into believing that’s all language can ever do. It can only point to things; they’re dead to you but you know about them. So poetry actually has to compete with that and it’s very hard to do because people whose minds are trained to process expository prose then are stymied when they come to a poem. And it’s not that the poem doesn’t want you to learn something but it wants you to learn it by seeing it and smelling it and tasting it and knowing the weight of the thing or whatever the ontological physical reality of the thing happens to be. So that’s a huge difference. And I think the word ontology is important there because it’s a radically different mode of being. Poetry’s job is to produce in the reader an order of being utterly different from the order of being that he is possessed by with ordinary explanatory prose. It’s a huge difference and it’s an important difference too because if you try to write a poem and you write it entirely in explanatory referential language, you’re going to get an absolutely dead poem. But if you’ve had legal experience you would know the value then of the kind of prose, meaning referential expository prose, that doesn’t bother you with the physical, concrete, perhaps emotionally distracting elements of the thing. As a lawyer you want language that is absolutely efficient, that will produce a clear picture of the interrelations of this particular case, this set of events, and the legal principles that undergird it, right?

FOX: Yes.

FAIRCHILD: You’ve got to have it fast, you’ve got to have it clearly and in an explanatory way. This is not a mode in which the reader gets to lie about, experiencing the excitement of somebody who broke the law in a particularly curious and exciting fashion, something that could be= turned into a drama. You don’t want the drama right now, you want to get to the point. And poetry, or prose within poetry which would be like fictional prose, wants to slow you down. It wants to give you that whole world. It doesn’t want you just knowing that somebody broke the law by shooting somebody else, it wants you to smell the gunpowder. [laughs] It wants you to see the powder burns on the garment, it wants you to see the rage on the person’s face, etc.

FOX: Part of what you’re saying is that poetry is a much richer experience; it’s more all-encompassing.

FAIRCHILD: It’s supposed to be more than rich, it’s supposed to transform you. Here’s one way that I try to make this really elusive point—in other words, you’ve asked the question. You’ll go out into the world and you’ll have some really incredibly exciting experience. Maybe you’ve been in a car wreck or maybe you went to Vegas and you lost $50,000 in one evening or whatever it was, or maybe you won $50,000. And you come back to your house or apartment and immediately you’re overcome with the need to tell somebody this. Of course you will be telling them about it, though. So you’ll rush into the house and you’ll sit them down and you’ll say, “The most exciting thing happened to me,” and you’ll begin telling them about it, and pretty soon their eyes will begin to glaze over and then one of you will say, “Well, I guess you need to have been there.”

FOX: Ah.

FAIRCHILD: Poetry is the being there. That’s about as abbreviated as I can make that.

[...]

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

from A CONVERSATION BETWEEN WILLIAM O’DALY AND ALAN FOX

…

FOX: You pay a lot of attention to the musicality of the poem. Can you say more about that?

O’DALY: Well, some people—in fact I’m reading a book right now on the line, the poetic line—believe that what poetry is is the sound of poetry. I mean, the first line of this book—it’s a very nice book—that’s the definition. I’ve always thought, well, what does separate poetry from prose? As poets and editors we think about these things. But so much really isn’t in the literal or denotative meanings of the words, it’s in the relationship between the sounds of the words and the connotations. Once you get beyond the surface, it’s that interplay. And with Neruda, who had one of the best ears of any Spanish-language poet ever, it’s an important element in his work and so I had to pay extra attention to that. It also serves as a good guide when you can’t stay as close as you’d like to what you’re reading in the original—the music will help steer you in a direction that will maintain faithfulness to the original while leaving part of that literal surface behind in order to capture the poem.

But I think the work that I do, the late and posthumous work, Neruda very consciously chose a less—in the words of Robert Pring-Mill, one of his best critics—a less pyrotechnical surface. There’s no pyrotechnics in those works. They’re more straightforward to a degree, in terms of the language as well, but there’s still his musicality, but he’s not pushing it; it’s become so natural to him at this point, toward the end of his 50-year career, that what I had to do is make sure that I was able to maintain the musicality but also not try and pump it up to match the exuberance of the early work. And I think people who translate the late work, where they go wrong in terms of the musicality is that they hear one Neruda. The great Neruda is the exuberant Neruda, even though he repudiated that himself. I mean, one way he was able to keep changing as a poet, morphing and refreshing himself, becoming new, was to say, “Okay, I did that, that was a product of my isolated life as a Chilean consul in the Far East, that’s what I needed to do at the time.” But the Residencias now—the poems are so melancholy, they’re so obscure. I don’t want to be obscure, I don’t want to be programmatically melancholy or isolated, I don’t want to be the poet who feels only his own pain, and so I’m going to write out of the struggles of my people, of the South American continent.

Actually, his experience of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War informed the third and final book of the Residencias, and it was then he began to write as a socially committed poet. Out of that same commitment, he completed a personal transformation by writing the book-length Canto General. After the Canto and one other more programmatically political book, he wrote a gorgeous book of love poems, The Captain’s Verses, for his mistress and third wife-to-be, And then the elemental odes, which in nearly every way are the absolute opposite of the Residencias and in their apparent simplicity repudiate the grandeur of Canto. And Extravagario is probably the book that may be most pivotal for him because everything that had come before came to a focal point and there’s this huge scope of expression within that book; he’s humorous, he’s sad, he’s sincere, he’s exuberant; it all came out, it all focused there. Out of that book came all these other voices. Well, when he gets to the end of his life he’s singing simply, beautifully, and that’s the music I try to recreate. Exuberant Neruda I love, but I love the mature Neruda all the more because the poetry is endowed with much greater wisdom and personal honesty than his exuberant work, generally, and I look to poetry for those, too.

FOX: As you speak, it’s pretty clear to me that you have a very intimate relationship with Neruda, because you’ve lived with this intimately for a long time. Isn’t that one of the bigger rewards of being a poet or being an avid reader of poetry?

O’DALY: That may be my favorite question yet. Yes. It’s definitely a reward. Poetry is a pretty isolating act as I’m sure everyone in this room knows—it can be, at least initially—and when I’m translating him or preparing I feel that there’s this intimate dialogue going on. And I think I’m really clear about what translation is, but I love how from the moment I sit down—and this is how translation differs from poetry—the dialogue is just there. And actually it might be more of a triangulation, how we navigate: there’s Neruda, there’s me, and then there’s the translation, this third entity. So we talk to each other, his poem, his voice, as I hear him. I know his work pretty well, most of those 3,000 plus pages, and I know about his life—I’m not a scholar, don’t want to be, I think that might be detrimental—but I’m almost a scholar. And so all of that information is there and must be to translate effectively, I feel, especially over a long period of time and a number of books. But I began to realize—I really didn’t think about it a lot, Alan, but then when I was in Chile absolutely everything was going so beautifully and I’d walk into a bus station and say, “I want to go to Temuco” and they’d say, “Oh, well we have a bus leaving in seven minutes for Temuco,” and they’d pick up my bags—and they don’t do that in Chile—and take them to the bus for me. I mean, they didn’t know my role with Neruda at all. And I would tell Chilean friends this and they’d go, “Well, of course, Pablo’s looking out for you.” [laughs] And they would say this in such a way that the first couple of times it sent a chill up my spine. “Of course things are going well,” they’d say. [laughs] That’s when I seriously started thinking about the question you just asked me. But I thought, “Well, will I miss this?” And I don’t know how long I’d have to live for it to dissipate to the point where I wouldn’t feel I had a relationship where Neruda wasn’t with me…

–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

from A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TED KOOSER AND ALAN FOX

…

FOX: Absolutely. How has the notoriety which comes with being Poet Laureate affected you?

KOOSER: Well, again, basically I’m kind of an introvert. It was very difficult for me to do all that public stuff, but I felt like I was being called to do it and that I better show that someone from Nebraska could do that kind of thing. I was the first one ever chosen from this part of the country at all. So I really worked at it 7 days a week and I made 200 appearances in the 20 months when I was actually in office and did a lot of interviews. And now that I’m getting away from it I can remember what it was like before. One thing that’s dangerous about the notoriety, I think, for a writer, is that I could write a poem right now, right while we’re sitting here, and send itsomewhere and somebody would pick it up and publish it and I don’t want that to happen. So I send out less and less of my work. I don’t send out anything unless I am absolutely sure that it is as good as anything I’ve ever done before. There are poets who haven’t been that cautious, who are publishing on the virtue of their notoriety, people who have achieved some celebrity. Or to publish too much—you publish book after book. It’s not a good idea.

FOX: I would think, at least for me, that better work comes from inside and from the joy of writing rather than “I want to be known, I want to be in twenty different journals” or whatever.

KOOSER: Yes, it’s a field in which you cannot will yourself into success. It just doesn’t happen. You have to accept what happens and do it as best as you can and hope something good will happen. My career as a writer is sort of a serendipitous thing in which I have had little bits of good luck here and there along the way. One of the examples I think that’s so typical of what’s happened to me is that in 2001, the University of Nebraska Press published this book of mine, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps which is a book about living in Nebraska, rural Nebraska, and the assistant director at the time told me before it came out, he said, “You know, you’re well-known in this state, it’ll probably have a pretty good local readership, but we certainly don’t have any hopes for national distribution of this by much.” This was long before Pulitzer and Poet Laureate and all that. So the University of Nebraska Press and all the other publishers go to this New York book expo that year, I think it was in the spring, and here is this huge, I guess, convention center with tables and tables of books from all the publishers. University of Nebraska Press probably does 100 titles a year maybe, so they’re all out there, mine is among them, and here’s University of Pittsburgh and here’s Harper & Row and Random House and all these people are in this room. A woman comes walking along the University Press table and she sees my book and she cracks it open at random to a passage about a cowboy shirt that my mother made for me when I was fourteen that I can still wear and she was touched by this passage. Well it turns out, her name is Jill Lamar, and she’s the woman who picks the books for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers program.

FOX: Whoa.

KOOSER: So there I went. And then Barnes & Noble picks it, it comes in third in their national non-fiction contest, and I’m up and running with that book. And, you know, there have been other things like that where I’ve just been standing—there are so many good writers in this country and lots of them have not had the breaks I’ve had. And who’s to account for that? I mean, I did have to write the poems and I had to write fairly well to do this, it wasn’t as if that was all luck, but to be noticed and so on. And the Pulitzer—Copper Canyon, a very small operation, at that time I think they had nine people on the whole staff and they don’t have a lot of money and it costs $50 to submit a book to the Pulitzers and they weren’t going to submit my book, it’s another $50. And then at the last minute they decided that they’d do it. And they sent it in and [snaps fingers].

FOX: That is real serendipity. I’ve always felt you do the work and what comes of it comes of it.

KOOSER: And that would be true whether you were a poet or an artist or somebody selling neckties at a ready-to-wear store….

–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010