Vermont Eclogue
Damp patches of mountain fog. Late afternoon
country roads clamoring for sleep.
Light snow, patient as an assassin, through
leafless branches mists your car.
African masks with half-closed eyes
on a living room wall seem disoriented.
House lights flash on like strong-scented
signals. Below, two moles cross a paddock in
opposite directions. A transient sculpture
of blue jays vaults toward a cluste
of white pines. Behind the thickened sky,
the peaks are shy as migrants.
Earbuds fastened in, you sing, don’t disturb
this groove, your voice its own woodland
where a man stands at the edge
of a pond watching crystals dissolve in midair.
— from The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton, 2020)
* * * * *
Tyler Mills: It’s an honor to have this dialogue with you — thank you. Your latest collection of poems, The Absurd Man, wonderfully juxtaposes life’s pleasures — natural beauty, wine, and travel — with its violences. I admire the rich descriptions and how the speaker moves through landscapes while he at the same time reckons with these spaces by noticing the complexities of place, of occasion and of personal relationships. Poems such as “Vermont Eclogue,” which gorgeously leads the reader through a foggy afternoon in the Green Mountains, speak to the juxtaposition of beauty and displacement — and perhaps the impulse to make meaning in a world where, as Camus would say, finding meaning is impossible. I keep thinking about this terrific moment of your poem:
Damp patches of mountain fog. Late afternoon
country roads clamoring for sleep.
Light snow, patient as an assassin, through
Leafless branches mists your car.
African masks with half-closed eyes
on a living room wall seem disoriented.
I love how the poem gives these masks agency, inviting them to be unsettled by the scene in which they find themselves, as though to comment on African diaspora as well as the illusive beauty of fog. The masks in the poem remind me both of the ways persona can work in poetry as well as how your book engages in particular with personae. Gregory Pardlo praises The Absurd Man as “a collision of selves and personal histories yielding a most genuine ore.” When you were writing the poems that would become part of The Absurd Man, how were you thinking about persona? Is there a way that you think about the “I” of the poem tangling with place, with landscape, with setting?
Major Jackson: Thank you for the opportunity to share thoughts about the book. I’m honored to join you, here. I think many of the poems in The Absurd Man are imagined from a biographical sequence of images and memories that are an invitation to journey hopefully to some shared space. Admittedly, nothing radically new in terms of technique. One of the conditions of postmodernity, at least theorized and proffered by some in the middle of the last century, is that human beings are alienated from each other, and most especially from himself or herself or non-binary selves. I gather the sophisticated reader arrives at a poem aware that the voice on the page, even if biographically driven, is mostly a construction, and that persona, or the mask, functions as a way of amplifying this sense of division within the self as a means of repair. How could it not? It’s art! Artmaking ritualizes the mask, and too, its inevitability, a means of reconciling warring selves. The book title directly announces the performance of persona as an important element. The trouble, of course, is when the mask, either in life or art, is mistaken as the true self, then self-presentation becomes an unfortunate way of living which renders even more problematic the space between us. It’s why I stress authenticity so much in the classroom and interviews – why I stress poetry as an aural transcription of one’s imagination and the ongoing conversation with oneself and the world, especially the kind that attempts to move us into our future. Like many artists, I’ve found the practice of writing poetry as a way of listening in, to negotiate and maybe give voice and understand the many dimensions of my own selfhood. I will try not to over-explain “Vermont Eclogue.” You are right to pick up on themes of displacement as figured in the mask, maybe even too, themes of migration and settlement writ large. I have lived in Vermont nearly several decades. Wherever we go, we bring our foundations, cultural and otherwise. The music, art, and literature I consumed in my youth and that which I gravitate to today has allowed me to make a spiritual home. The phrase “don’t disturb this groove” is both an allusion to a song by an 80s pop-synth group The System, but also what I found necessary as a way of adapting to spaces, to move further inward and grow my inner woodlands, so to speak.
TM: What was your writing process like for the poems in the collection that travel the world—such as “November in Xichang” and “Paris” (part xxviii of your “Urban Renewal” sequence)? Are there individual poems or poets who you turn to when you are writing about travel?
MJ: “November in Xichang” owes its early drafts to Joseph Brodsky and his poem “December in Florence.” I have longed admired Brodsky’s dedication to form as a natural outgrowth of the poet’s working through and over his theme(s) but also as a kind of intention of perception, literary genealogy, music, and joyfulness of making. I find so much integrity owed to his distinct virtuosity that synthesizes both literary heritage and an individual intensity of mind. What I borrowed was the nine-line stanzas as well as noncommittal rhymes. Maybe unlike some other translations of his work, in “December in Florence,” he is not constrained by meter, and so there’s a naturalness of voice which I also wanted to achieve. That’s it. Well, not quite. Maybe, too, I wanted to achieve some level of grandeur in the line. Funny, how we are empowered by the literary monuments of our influences? “Paris” is part of the Urban Renewal sequence which I began some time ago. I better stop there — I feel as if I’m marshalling myself.
TM: My next question is about poetic and musical inspiration. As you were writing The Absurd Man, were there poems or other texts that you turned to as inspiration — or that you wanted to challenge? Music and musical instruments, as well as works of art, richly texture your poems. If you were to have a playlist for your book, who would be on it? Is there a work of visual art that you found yourself thinking about as you worked on poems in this collection?
MJ: Let’s see. Your question prompted me to meticulously survey the book for what amounts to a gallery exhibition, playlist, film screening and study guide for The Absurd Man — I have put songs next to musicians: the entire corpus of Albert Camus, Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Titian’s Europa at the Isabella Gardner Museum, biomorphic sculpture of Jean Arp, Thomas Eakins rowing paintings on the Schuykill River, early cinematography of Spike Lee’s movies, Walter Benjamin’s essay on Charles Baudelaire, Cubism, Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, John Keats’s odes and letters, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, The System (“Don’t Disturb This Groove”), Plato’s Republic, biblical text, sophist philosophy, Korai at The Acropolis of Athens, cave drawings, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, the poetry of Linda Gregg, Ntozake Shange, Joseph Brodsky, Fernando Pessoa, Federico García Lorca, Robert Frost, and Derek Walcott, Käthe Kollwitz’s lithographs, David Murray (“Ming”), Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers (“Sunday”), Karl Marx, Homer’s Iliad, Goethe’s Theory of Colors, Jay Z’s (“Dust Off Your Shoulders”), Henry David Thoreau, Philip Glass (“Orphee’s Return”), Butoh dancers, The Ink Spots (“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”), Richard Wagner (“The Ride of the Valkyries”), The Confessions of St. Augustine, Marc Chagall’s Over Vitebsk, Dante Alighieri, medieval architecture, film theory, mid-century architecture and Dutch furniture, the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Orpheus, Oracle of Delphi, the oculus at the Pantheon, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, DJ Jazzy Jeff (early high school memory of Jeff cutting Tears for Fears “Shout”) and DJ Cash Money (“It’s Time”), flamenco, Rolling Stones (“Time Is On My Side”), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Ariana Grande (“God Is a Woman”), model and actress Veronica Webb, the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Toomer, Henry Dumas (“Will the Circle Be Unbroken”), Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Curtis Mayfield (“Diamond in the Back”). Forgive this embarrassing index. I rarely waive an ultraviolet light over my books to reveal the psychic life beneath which the above constellated and were yoked together into dialogue.
Tyler Mills: To return to the idea of meaning making and Camus, the title of The Absurd Man borrows from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, which the epigraph quotes:
What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without
negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that
nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his
courage and his reasoning.
I keep thinking about the project of writing poetry in these times — is it in some way like rolling a boulder up a mountain in Hell? I often wonder. Poems in your book take on the question of what it means to be a poet in the era of Trump and throughout history. I keep thinking about your poem “Thinking of Frost” (xxvii in your “Urban Renewal” sequence), which ends with a moment that showcases the racism in New England towns: “I read the scowl / below the smiles of parents at my son’s soccer game, their agitation, / the figure of wind yellow leaves make of the quaking aspens.” Another poem in your book that comes to mind is “The Romantics of Franconia Notch” (Franconia Notch being the name of a state park in New Hampshire), which begins,
Matthew Dickman and I are fond
of resurrecting the spotted faces
of state troopers and small-town police
we’ve met over the years.
We love their melodrama, the way they peel
their aviators in the rearview
of my Jetta as they approach
the car like shy teenagers on a first date
then doff their stiff-brim hats with yellow braids.
The poem engages with humor to cuttingly arrive at the poem’s subject — racial profiling, small town suspicion, and exclusivity. There is also a poem about friendship, camaraderie. For the speaker of this poem, and perhaps other poems in your collection, would you say that subtle yet supercharged modulations in tone become a way of approaching the world with “courage and reasoning” — to quote Camus, and your book’s epigraph? What was your process like when you wrote “The Romantics of Franconia Notch?”
MJ: Only insofar that we begin each day anew with the possibility of a breakthrough of some kind does the boulder up the hillside seem appropriate, especially in describing that terrifying task of simply facing the day, seemingly full of limitless potential. Sisyphus’s boulder also conjures the necessary strength of mind and spirit to leap forward into one’s imagination (or one’s day) with authenticity. The key difference however is that the poet relishes the labor of breaking through their silence, even if briefly, with some understanding of language, human motivation and desire, truth; so it is a welcomed kind of hell, to employ your words. I love the reckoning that each new day brings. We cannot choose the era we are born into, however, we can choose to address the issues — personal, social or political — that most arrest our imagination and freedom. To slightly adapt Audre Lorde, most of us are likely to “betray ourselves into small silences.” That is the right of any writer or artist I guess. At some point, some of us do not have the privilege of silence, of not naming that which is hurting us. Modulating tone is one of the means by which I both rejoice and critique. I would rather indulge humor than my anger and frustration which is obviously present but in the face of such indignities as chronicled in poems like “The Romantics of Franconia Notch,” I find grace and nuance far nobler and courageous. I should say, too, Sisyphus is a lone figure. His accomplishments, we imagine, is under the gaze of no one, not even the gods. The severity of his isolation is emblematic of our own inexorable relationship to our work; we write because we have no choice. In the absence of fame or recognition, which we can never expect, we are forever wedded to our calling as much as Sisyphus is to his boulder.
TM: I love how your book is structured, where the first poem “Major and I” sets up “The Absurd Man Suite” that closes the book. In “Major and I,” there’s a powerful moment where the speaker (the “I”) splits away from the autobiographical self (the “he,” or “Major”):
His fingers carry the bitter taste of coffee,
which, occasionally, I sniff, for they are
the color of ancient bark. Forgive his pretenses, he
who wrote that last sentence. It is probably
true he wrote most of this, but I am unsure
for I live just behind him, a single keystroke
shy of his many thoughts. Beware
his black rituals.
In this poem, the “I” inhabits the “he,” and there is that wonderful moment where we learn that “I live just behind him, a single keystroke / shy of his many thoughts. Beware / his black rituals.” The “Absurd Man Suite” gives us poems about being a poet, about writing, as well as poems about parenting, about one’s origins — the grandfather, who “would be ashamed / of my hands for they carry nothing and are soft / as downy feathers” in “The Most Beautiful Man Never Performs Hard Labor” — about a relationship, and about art — as in “Paper Dolls at the Met,” where the speaker says, “Keep your good weather to / yourself I tell The New Impressionists, / Your entrance is all wrong — and so much more. What was your writing process like when you were bringing your poem, “Major and I” in conversation with your long title poem sequence, “The Absurd Man Suite?” At what point did you decide that “The Absurd Man Suite” of 25 poems would become the title sequence for your book? Did these poems begin as a sequence, or did they eventually find each other? What do you think a long poem, or sequence, can do in a collection?
MJ: Surveying previous books, I seem to be addicted to lyric sequences and perennially have sought to achieve some kind of thematic or sonic continuum for a reader to enter. I have my models from Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” to Claudia Rankine’s Plot and Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, and so many more. I enjoy how individual poems both refract dominant themes, which Tyler you deftly outline in The Absurd Man, but also claim and demand distinctive readings separate from the larger work and its centrifugal energy. Enough poems in a sequence also generate momentum. My hope is that the suite enacts a cadenced performance of meaning. In writing the 25 poems I was looking for themes that would adhere and tenably satellite together around this constructed figure of The Absurd Man, but only loosely, that is, I did not want the conceit of the persona to overwhelm the project and book. The poems evolved after I wrote dozen or so poems. I realized I could cull them and begin to write towards various themes. The last poem that appears in the book, “Double Major,” literally was the last poem written. So, I worked intentionally to bookend The Absurd Man with a speakerly presence that was self-reflexive and an awareness that could serve as a linguistic event in itself.
TM: And now for a question about the writing process. I’m fascinated with how some poems can take draft after draft to perfect, yet others can come to mind almost like a muse whispers them into the ear. Which poem or poems in The Absurd Man were the most difficult to write? Did any come to you almost finished?
MJ: I can attest with great fervor to both experiences. To my surprise, “Major and I,” along with a few other poems in The Absurd Man, emerged in a single sitting, without much fanfare or difficulty. Normally prone to high seriousness, I find whimsy and humor, which are essential to living robustly and fully, difficult to achieve except when I am poking fun at myself, like I do in this poem and others. Most of us know inspiration emerges from the unconscious. I’ve found the writing of a poem is a kind of plunging, a willful dive below the surface of who I am, that field of mind, feeling, and memories. The poet Robert Duncan understood it as a kind of permission. I’ve developed a very personal series of pre-writing exercises and practices to declutter that inner space. Even beyond the physical aspects of my life where I normally linger when writing, I often seek metaphorical language that could open up possibilities of understanding my nature, all the suffering as well as moments of the ecstatic. That search for metaphor becomes a singular obsession, for it is where, as one noted folklorist suggested, readers experience eternity, where mysteries are revealed. This is when I experience writing most as an immersion into the darkest, sludgy waters. Alternately and inexplicably, some early mornings or late evening writing sessions seem as if I am being shown the way; it feels as if I have yielded myself to those whispers. As I have said in the past, I love being caught in the ritual of writing in which a momentum of seeing, that succession of images, moves me closer toward revelation, one I hope a reader also experiences.
TM: What are you working on now, or what do you hope to write in the upcoming months? What do you think you’ll bring from The Absurd Man (if anything!) into your next book?
MJ: Save for one book project, most of my work feels marginal, that is, more in the conceptual mode, which frankly, is more satisfying than writing at times because my curiosity is active and alert when I least expect it. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, I have been contemplating “black martyrdom.” The rhetoric of freedom and equality has me contemplating a book-length poem that highlights and give meaning to the imaginative weight of genocide of indigenous people, the ongoing ambivalence and disregard for black life, and the history of scapegoating immigrant people even though they have substantively contributed to the conception of America. But before I can sink my teeth into that project, I am culling all of the Urban Renewal poems I have published in five previous volumes and writing additional poems with hopes that what emerges is a long poem or lyric sequence. The Absurd Man pushed me to be not so solemn and grave. I treasure humor. More than ever before, I am writing with great intentionality and hope. Yet, I hope in my essays and poems are imbued with and reveal layers of critical interest and laughter.
* * * * *
Major and I
hand in hand remove our dark suits, but
the other Major prefers to undress in glass
revolving doors; he is a fan of prohibition
cocktails whose potions afford him time-travels
of the landed gentry. I let Major sport
his dangers which magnify his ambitions
so he can write his grandiloquent poems,
and thus, ours is a compromised relationship:
I, more cautious than a slug, and he,
the sampler of pythons.
Major is a fan of Peruvian folk songs,
wood-paneled libraries, rare colognes, and old
issues of Esquire. I, on the other hand, prefer
American football, treasury bills, and vintage
sports cars. Only once did I try to escape
his clutches, this other Major.
For years I survived his rank
songs which make the Spanish cantors weep.
His fingers carry the bitter taste of coffee,
which, occasionally, I sniff, for they are
the color of ancient bark. Forgive his pretenses, he
who wrote that last sentence. It is probably
true he wrote most of this, but I am unsure
for I live just behind him, a single keystroke
shy of his many thoughts. Beware
his black rituals.
The other Major flies in his daydreams
which means he’s collecting a paradise
of mirrors where I sit studying the prose
of Toomer, Morrison, and Faulkner. Latinate
though he is, master of the outside, he digs
the gangster lean and is more thankful
than a sunroof top. His broken strings, like
his stubble, issue forth a wintry path
at night for white walls. See what I mean?
Major never won attendance awards,
and for sure long ago he left behind
cigarettes and the guarded strips of lotto
tickets but cherishes still the big hit. Admit
his charms and you’ve a friend for life.
He will send you sunflowers (true),
even from his coffin (not true), and although
he never learned to play the violin or the mouth
harp, a radio plays like an all-night Laundromat
behind his eyes, and thus, he lives year-round
in the boot camp of self-redemption;
for this the other Major needs lots
of sky. You are that sky.
The Absurd Man at Fourteen
After church in an empty parking lot one Sunday
facing the Schuylkill, my mother wept
behind a steering wheel. My feet throbbed
in a pair of Buster Browns I’d outgrown
by a season as I looked out the window,
autumn performing its last dying.
He punched her again, a woman called the house,
some yelling then us out the door leaving
the kitchen phone cord swinging.
Morning light burnished the windshield.
Her wet face made her holy. A lone
sculler scissored the river, his silhouette
a shadow in motion. I wanted to say
something but my eyes flamed wild
as reddish orange leaves firing
up the ground. His stony look as we left
said he was tormentor and master.
I let her cry, and felt a new world
of women grow around me,
and when she reached for my hand
instinctively I pulled away, her mouth
open to my fading, unbearable heart.
A Brief Reflection on Torture Near the Library of Congress
Shouldering a bag of great literature, you glimpse spider silk
extruding from spinnerets, signaling into
an orb above a restaurant’s Exit sign. Revenue questions
aside, a diplomat’s diamond shirt-studs
sparkle beside Ritzenhoff Cristal just when you recall
bike-riding as a child behind a laundry truck,
its bouquet of lavender spraying the road.
Innocuous the lightness of transactions,
exchanging hands, cash touching in meetings.
Some memories are made for the hatchet’s blade.
But the dissidents are rioting today, and a cable station away
above the bar in slow motion a player tosses chalk
into the air like a spell and suddenly you smell
newly opened wads of fresh paper bills.
Yours is the study of steam of how the mind
sprinklers, presently irrigating. Somewhere,
someone is screaming for holy intervention
in a military prison. Once, below a cathedral
of trees with signs along the road that read
Chutes de branches, you pictured a torture table.
The bag now feels like a century of offenses.