“The Mystery of Persistence” // a Conversation about Poetry with G.C. Waldrep, Curated by Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang: I know you’re a “prolific writer.” Tell me what that means for you and the process of your writing?
G.C. Waldrep: I’ve always felt stung by the accusation inherent in that word “prolific.” It seems to imply that one’s work is less than serious: that it can’t be dredged up from some well of deep experience, or that one has not sufficiently crystallized that experience, not precipitated it far enough. I’ve also — often — heard that word applied to Carl Phillips, whose work is important to me — usually in some version of “he writes/publishes too much, I can’t keep up.” As if “keeping up” were a reader’s primary duty. Somehow Phillips’s regular publishing schedule makes certain poet-readers feel both confronted and dismissive, let off some imaginary hook.
Writing is a practice for me, correlative to certain spiritual practices, like prayer. One should pursue it regularly. In my case I also like writing —there’s a thrill in watching a poem (even a minor poem, a throwaway poem) take shape, against the non-shape that is the void. So, I try to write as often as possible. If I didn’t enjoy writing so much, I wouldn’t do it. My sense of wonder in the simple fact that creation is still possible — that it’s still viable, after these thousands of years of human language, to create something out of nothing — remains just as strong today as when I first started writing seriously in 1995. And it is a renewable wonder.
My friend Ilya Kaminsky accused me once not of writing too much but of not throwing away enough. That’s a different problem. I do throw away reams of failed poems that in their individual ways seem finished to me but whose stakes are doubtful or low. Sometimes material from those poems winds up in other poems, but usually not.
Victoria Chang: The reason why I asked you that question was because I do think we can unfairly label poets, but in particular, prolific poets do end up getting read less, simply due to time and I think that this is unfair. When I first started writing, people told me to publish a book once every three to five years, as if there’s some kind of rule in publishing. Of course, we’re talking about writing and not publishing, but it’s related.
In your role as an editor of West Branch, you must see a lot of poems come across the transom. What are you looking for? Or what is looking for you? What have you noticed over the years of editing? How does editing play into your own writing, if at all?
G.C. Waldrep: For two reasons, I take my editorial role very seriously and have done since I worked on the staff of The Iowa Review in 2004. First, unlike teaching a workshop, in which like it or not the focus is so often on what’s wrong with a piece, how to “fix” it, as an editor I get to read for what’s right about a piece, what surprises or thrills or delights me. Second, I then get to do something about that — publish the piece. When I was a young pre-MFA poet living in a rural Amish community, working as a baker and in construction, with zero ties to the creative writing world, there were editors who took a chance on my work. I haven’t forgotten.
There are certain period styles, of course. And certain recurring images and approaches. I suppose I’m always, as Diaghilev said, waiting to be astonished. Astonishment creates its own urgency vis-à-vis an artwork. This seems basic to me, to how and why I go to art and literature. When I was at Iowa, though, in the MFA program, I once repeated the Diaghilev quote in a workshop, and I was surprised by how many of my peers disavowed it. They weren’t waiting to be astonished. As readers, they went to literature for something else.
The thing that most pains me as an editor is, of course, cliché. There are reasons and means of effectively deploying or exploring cliché — more, I suspect, in fiction than in poetry. But I’m fundamentally allergic to cliché. Poetry for me is above all else an art of metaphor and praise, and then a craft of avoiding cliché, of exploring what lies outside or beyond cliché.
It’s funny, but I don’t think editing has affected my own writing at all. As a poet, when a poem of mine is published, I often turn to it as soon as it’s out, not so that I can admire my own poem, but so that I can see the poem or story or essay that precedes it or follows it. I’m interested in literary journals as conversations, fossilized or idealized conversations but conversations nevertheless. Who is talking to whom? I like the idea that poems talk to each other — and that this conversation endures, at least potentially, long after the poets themselves are gone.
Victoria Chang: One thing I admire about your writing is how it varies from book to book, project to project. One of my favorite works of yours is “The Batteries” sequence that first came out as a chapbook, then made it into another full-length book. It seems you’re such a flexible writer. Where does your inspiration come from? Or do you not believe in inspiration?
G.C. Waldrep: I do believe in inspiration. And I strongly suspect that all inspiration feels the same to anyone, the 6-year-old, the suburban grandmother, the tenured poet. What is different are the tools each individual has accrued to occupy the opening we call “inspiration,” to exist within it, for a little while. This goes back to the idea of a writing practice — one keeps the tools supple and sharpened so that when the right moment comes, the craft is at one’s service.
I wrote “The Batteries” across 26 days in the spring of 2003. I was at a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. But I had been there for two months and not written a single line. I was desperate. So, I got the idea of going around to different points in the national park and copying down graffiti, of which there was quite a bit, some dating as far back as the park’s use as a military base. I was reading Darwish, too, for the first time. What I was writing felt like reckless notebook scrawling. Later, though, I was able to cut and transpose those scrawls into a lyric sequence.
As for where inspiration comes from, in the end that’s a theological question, isn’t it? Same for writer’s block, if it exists. But that’s another, different inquiry.
Victoria Chang: Well, yes, a theological question or a mystical question, but sometimes I can look back and pinpoint points of inspiration.
When reading one of your poems, I always feel that you express something deeply personal by deflecting the personal. I’m not exactly sure what I mean by that, except perhaps that even though there are snippets of autobiography in your poems, a reader might still get a sense of the speaker regardless, through the speaker’s mind. Can you talk more about this?
G.C. Waldrep: I’m never less than deeply personal in my poems. And I’m never, ever intentionally oblique. But it’s true that I often follow the logic of image and/or sound in the act of composition. As far as sound goes, when I was a young man, I trained as a classical singer — tenor and countertenor — with a specialty in early music. Among other things, this meant that I trained to sing in languages I don’t speak or understand. This isn’t considered a problem when singers are performing, say, a Palestrina mass. But in the outwash of American confessionalism it is considered a problem — or at least a baffle, a hindrance, a difficulty.
Some years ago, I was asked at a reading whether the “you” in my poems was the poet, an actual lover, an imaginary lover, or God. Without thinking I blurted “yes.” The “you” in my poems is a shifty, shifting “you”— sometimes I’m not even sure, sometimes for me the act of revision is first and foremost working that out. But the intimacy is always critical and total. I hide nothing.
Victoria Chang: This is fascinating to me because I really do think that, in your case, you say you “hide nothing” but your work has a feeling of hiddenness and also difficulty (the two can be related but not always). Sometimes I think our own perceptions of our own work might be different from what readers might feel.
How does the landscape where you live affect your poems, if at all?
G.C. Waldrep: Landscape is a catalyst for me and always has been. The body moves in the mind the way the mind moves through a landscape — or do I have that the wrong way around? That both body and mind can experience motion as place — as landscape — is something we take for granted.
In the past decade, I’ve spent a surprising amount of time walking in England and Wales. I say “surprising” because I’d never been to Britain before 2009, and because I have no Anglophilia in me. It took me a while to understand what I was drawing from this experience. First, Britain is an island for walkers — the footpath system, which has medieval origins, is extensive. That this footpath system survives isn’t an accident — it’s in fact the politicized outcome of a battle waged across the 19th century. As a result, the body is permitted access to landscape— in ways very foreign to North American norms. Second, Christianity remains embedded in the British landscape: it’s possible to “read” the rural landscape almost anywhere in England or Wales in terms of the enduring legibility of faith and faith’s traces, or vice versa. Here in North America, that’s not the case: faith and landscape are often mutually exclusive fields of reference or experience.
And of course, language is a landscape, too.
Victoria Chang: David Baker said something to the effect that we are the landscape. Something interesting in your latest book, feast gently [Tupelo Press], that mirrors what I know of your robust mind, is the use of the comma. The comma seems to serve as a hinge of sorts to the thinking mind. These prevalent commas evoke a kind of interruption in the poems and mimic how an active mind might work. Can you talk more about this?
G.C. Waldrep: I’m one of those people who find grammar and punctuation attractive on their own terms, endlessly fascinating. It was Carl Phillips more than anyone who tuned my sense of how the comma — period, semicolon, em-dash, line or stanza break — could modulate the music of thought in a poem, and therefore the thought itself. I puzzled over Phillips’s The Rest of Love for a few years before I heard him read from it, and the exquisite modulation of his performance in terms of his punctuation and breaks was a revelation. It resembled a performer working from a musical score — something very appealing to me, given my background in music.
So, if it’s true that my commas “evoke a kind of interruption in the poems and mimic how an active mind might work,” then I have Phillips to thank. And Brigit Pegeen Kelly. But really, I’ve always thought of myself as a semicolon man. You wound me, Victoria.
Victoria Chang: Sorry, semicolons, I just don’t see it! In feast gently, you navigate forms quite widely — there are poems with long lines, short lines, sections, and hybrids thereof. How does form work in your poems?
G.C. Waldrep: Poetic form almost always is inherent in the compositional moment, for me — I know within a few sentences or lines whether I am working in long lines, short lines, meter, or lyric prose. I say “almost” because every now and then I’ll run a baggy, recalcitrant poem through a series of jarring formal changes — free verse to prose, then to quatrains, then through syllabics, and so forth, hoping that some iteration will help me understand the essential form it’s working towards.
I draft very swiftly, when I draft at all. It’s revision for me that takes weeks, months, years. And while revision includes editing, what I mean by revision is closer to re-visioning: trying to understand what the poem is aiming for, gesturing towards. Sometimes I’m the last to know.
Victoria Chang: In feast gently, you have the best titles. So many poets struggle with titles — I myself am so lazy that I just use the first few words of the first lines. How do come up with titles?
G.C. Waldrep: Titles are often the very first thing to come, the kernel of the lyric impulse, or else they’re the very last. I have a number of otherwise finished poems on my laptop from 2015-16 that are still searching for their titles. And I also have a file of titles searching for poems. Often, I walk around with one or more of them in my mind.
“The Prescriptivist” came to me in a dream, both the title and the first two-thirds of the poem that follows. I wrote “Candleweb, Thaw” and then asked myself — I used to say, the little man responsible for titles who lives in the back of my brain — what the title would be, and this is the answer I got. “The Fear Was in the Northeast” is the first line of the eponymous poem. And of course, “Their Faces Shall Be as Flames” appropriates a phrase of the Hebrew poet Isaiah, in the King James Version. The poem leapt from my meditation on that verse.
Titles can perform many functions, vis-à-vis poems. I tend to admire titles that permit some sort of invisible electric charge to build in the white space between title and poem, that encourage the reader to triangulate creatively between the title and the text that follows. Things happen in the white spaces of poems — the reader is invited to participate in certain ways—and one of those white spaces is the interval between title and poem. I prefer it to be an activated space.
Victoria Chang: Tell me about your Ph.D. in American history. How does your background affect your poem-making?
G.C. Waldrep: When I was on the academic job market in 2005-07, I was asked this question over and over again. I came up with a stock answer, which ran something like this — as a historian of labor history, African American history, Native American history, etc., I trained to listen for silences, and then to interrogate or explore those silences. That, I said, was analogous to my practice as a poet.
It was a pretty good answer. The truth is that for years now I’ve battered myself against my unsuccess as regards to research-based lyric writing. I was just rereading Muriel Rukeyser’s “Hawks Nest” sequence, as well as poet Chet’la Sebree’s forthcoming debut, and thinking yet again, “You have the historical training, you were a very good historian, why can’t you bridge the gap between documentary research and lyric composition?” But I haven’t yet managed that. I keep trying.
I suspect part of the problem is that for me, as a historian, those silences, though critical as points of inquiry, needed on some level to be respected, too — for ethical as well as methodological reasons. The works of historical analysis that most influenced me in the 1990s were books that wrote around the lacunae in the historical record, that traced those ragged edges rather than trying to write or push through them — books like Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre or, closer to my own work as an Americanist, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale or Winthrop Jordan’s Tumult and Silence at Second Creek.
The only recent book of American poetry I know that attempts this is C.D. Wright’s One with Others. And it’s a valiant attempt, though for me it falls short of Wright’s best work. — No, on second thought I would also nominate Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts, a stunning idiosyncratic work that has never found the audience it deserves.
Victoria Chang: I think I met you at Bread Loaf maybe 16 years ago! How has your relationship with the poetry community, the literary world changed? How do you see poem-making in your future?
G.C. Waldrep: The poetry community! The first poet I ever met was Seamus Heaney, who lived near me in Cambridge when I was an undergraduate, and who once invited me to take one of his classes. I waved him off because I planned on becoming a historian. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. In 1998 or ’99, I took a bus to Pennsylvania — I was then part of a horse-and-buggy Amish community in North Carolina—and met Julia Kasdorf at a coffee shop. And then in 2000-01, I was at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf, all within the same nine months. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in particular is “the poetry community”— or at least the po-biz — in microcosm. It was very instructive. I stood at the far edge — as a waiter, later as a bookstore clerk and office assistant — and watched, mostly. It was good preparation for Iowa and AWP.
I’m not sure there is a “poetry community.” True community is demanding. It gives and it takes away. What we have — in Bread Loaf, in AWP —is a guild. That’s a different thing. Inside that guild, individuals may form relationships, evolve community. Or outside it. What is hardest, I think, about poetry’s retreat into the academy is that we’re now such a scattered guild, across a large continent. It takes time, care, effort, and determination to convoke true community. But this is just as true in the world outside of poetry as it is in our corner.
Victoria Chang: Guild. Huh. I had never thought about it that way — it sounds so, well, clinical. Even that word, guild, has so many hard consonants, versus say community.
I feel like your poems are so smart, that you’re so capable of writing the perfect poem over and over again. What’s your writing process like?
G.C. Waldrep: I’ve never written a perfect poem, so I don’t know how to answer this. Some of my poems are definitely smarter than I am, though. Perhaps I’ll ask them, and get back to you?
As I said, I draft swiftly when I draft at all. I spend a lot of time waiting. Of course, “waiting” can seem like other things to other people: eating, sleeping, reading, singing, or teaching. But it’s waiting. The only thing that’s not waiting is prayer — that’s something else entirely. Or it’s what happens to waiting when waiting transcends itself, in the service of something larger.
Recently Peter O’Leary described my poetics as “improvisational,” which I balked at. I don’t think my process is at all improvisational in the sense that, say, O’Hara’s is. But it’s true that in the compositional moment I’m always looking for points of entrance rather than egress. For me the question is never some preconceived theoretical framework, anecdotal experience, or idea — the question is that point of entrance, where the sphere takes its puncture, or the sweater begins to lose its thread, and so forth. Sometimes the puncture is in fact an experience that I might have described more forthrightly. More often it’s an image, or a scrap of language — overheard, misheard, or misread — that lodges in the attention.
I don’t think my root concerns have changed much since I began writing — God, all four loves (latria, dulia, eros, agape), language, the body. The only deep change has been the radical and insistent intrusion of illness, of active and passive diminishment, over the past decade. Illness convokes its own ecology, of both language and experience, as Weil, O’Connor and others have noted.
Victoria Chang: A lot has happened to the both of us in the last 16 years! Many not good. But as we always say, we’re still here so that’s something?
What are some of the things you see happening in the poetry and literary world that excite you? That disappoint you?
G.C. Waldrep: What has excited me about contemporary American poetry for many years now has been its incredible diversity, in terms of aesthetics as well as from every other standpoint. Since the late 1990s it has arguably been true that any poet who is talented and persistent in any mode will find a quality venue and audience for his, her, or their work, sooner or later. That’s the exception rather than the rule over the long course of poetry’s history, across many centuries, languages, and cultures. It’s something to cherish and to hold onto.
At the same time, every literary period has its core styles as well as its outliers. Some of the outliers will one day be recast as forerunners. Others will remain outliers. Many will come to seem like dead ends. A few years ago, I found it very sobering to read the “recovery project” Selecteds of Wong May and Michael Benedikt, two poets who were visible and important in their moment and then for various reasons stepped away from the poetry world. I found both collections eerie — this is where American poetry might have gone, but didn’t.
Some of the writers we now think of as essential, and hewing towards the core, will be lasting writers of our time. Many others will disappear into the great stews of verbiage. It is instructive indeed to find an issue of Poetry (say) from the 1940s or 1950s and page through. You’ll encounter names any avid reader recognizes, and even particular poems that have survived a half century or more of scrutiny. But you’ll also encounter many other names, many other poems. I think it’s safe to say this outcome seemed neither obvious nor inevitable at the time. To many of the poets of that moment, those poems seemed essential on some level, urgent — even if those urgencies are now illegible to us.
All of which is to say I find myself moved and provoked, again and again, by poetry’s place as an art in time, that is subject to time and moves within time, even as some poetry, by various means and for various reasons, seems to rear itself out of the stream for a little while. If the wonder of composition — of creating something from nothing, out of language — remains vivid to me after all these years, so does the wonder that poems, the speaking voice of the poem, can survive the bodies and minds of those who engendered them. I don’t mean this in some tawdry sense of poetic immortality, for either poet or poem. I mean it as the mystery of persistence, the speaking voice that remains true and vivid on its own terms. Which are not the poet’s terms, or the time’s terms. Somehow, they stand outside all that, even if they never quite transcend it.
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G.C. Waldrep is the author of six poetry collections: feast gently (Tupelo Press, 2018), Testament (BOA Editions, 2015), Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009), Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), and Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003). He teaches creative writing ay Bucknell University, serves as editor of West Branch, and is an editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review.