David Meltzer Interview
by Steve Luttrell & Timothy Gillis
May 14, 2014 via telephone
David Meltzer was born in Rochester, New York, & raised in Brooklyn. He began his literary career during the San Francisco Beat & Berkeley Renaissance period in North Beach, California, & his work was included in the anthology, “The New American Poetry 1945–1960.” At the age of 20, he recorded his poetry with jazz musicians in Los Angeles & also became a singer-songwriter & guitarist for several bands during the 1960s, including The Serpent Power. He is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, including Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957–1992, No Eyes: Lester Young (2000), Beat Thing (2004), & David’s Copy (2005).
TG: Do you write for the eye or the ear?
DM: That’s curious. I suppose both. You can’t really segment that process. I guess usually if it’s really happening, all senses are operating & no one (sense) overlaps the other. You’re depending on all the help you can get. Yes, sound is important, but also the shape of the poem. All these things you think about when you’re doing it.
SL: Your parents were musicians. To what degree is your love of music influenced by them?
DM: You’ve answered the question. When the first thing you hear, after your mother’s heartbeat, is the sound of somebody playing the piano or a cello or a string quartet in the living room, that’s kind of a present. Especially when you haven’t developed any categories or genre or opinions, you’re pretty open & receptive. My dad, who was a classical cellist, liked all kinds of music. Those were the days of the 78s. The bottom shelf of the living room bookcase was stuffed with single 78s in sleeves & clunky albums in no particular order or categories. I was given permission to use the Ainsley-Crosley console Victrola to play whatever I wanted. No ingrained perceptions or divisions, it was all music to me. At a certain point of puberty, you’re trying to create a certain selfhood — & music is something you glom on to. When I was 11 or 12, my music became bebop in the postwar gloom of Brooklyn.
SL: Discuss modal free jazz & spontaneous bop prosody. You seemingly were influenced quite a bit by that.
DM: Modal free jazz — outside of Lennie Tristano’s ’50s sessions for Capitol (notably “Intuition”) — didn’t really fully emerge until the ’60s. Kerouac’s concept came out of the ’50s & his inspiration was via bebop. As I said, I was a precocious kid from Brooklyn & started going to the bop clubs like The Royal Roost & Birdland — sometimes with my dad, other times by myself. Because of the licensing policies of the clubs in Manhattan, kids underage could go to these clubs as long as they sat in this isolated pen & drank overpricey Cokes. We could actually hear, be in the presence of, so many of these now legends, then just these guys.
SL: A lot of that comes out in “No Eyes,” the great poem for Lester Young.
DM: Young lived in the Arvin Hotel on Broadway. He could look across the street to the entrance of Birdland. I heard him there. But in the time frame of the book, Young is mostly inactive & drinking himself to death in his room listening to records on a portable phonograph, especially Jo Stafford. Very strange & poignant, haunted, beautiful man, the musician. As a kid, what do you know? It was all amazing. Charlie Parker was amazing. Bud Powell was amazing. Charles Mingus was amazing. Nobody wasn’t amazing. But that was because I was 11, 12 years old. That was my music. That was the point. & puberty is sort of attached to the music. & if anyone else doesn’t like it, they are outlawed from your little stain of ego.
SL: Tell us about your experience with Wallace Berman & Semina, when you first moved to Los Angeles. For those of us in small poetry, he had an amazing influence on us.
DM: I was maybe 15, & came with my father from the east coast. He was looking for work for the medium that was going to dominate — television. He had been a radio writer &, at a certain point in middle age, that whole thing was turned upside down by the new technology. & with the new technology, as today, young people are extremely comfortable in that framework. He was a person who wrote for you to hear, whereas with television you wrote for people to see. It cut down the potential for wordplay & literacy. I had already been a dissolute school-goer, being raised up in Brooklyn. I was put through these accelerated classes because I had a high IQ. I sort of drifted around, & did meet Wallace & a whole bunch of wonderful mentors & crazoids. When you’re living in the margins, it’s good to have friends.
TG: City Lights published “When I was a Poet” in 2011. Why the past tense in the title? Don’t you still think of yourself as a poet?
DM: Why not? You know how poets are. It’s really about the subjects: Age, Time, Mortality, Was, Is, & also making fun of the concept & at the same time taking it very seriously. I’m still writing.
TG: Discuss your writing process (morning or night? each day or when the inspiration hits? music while you write? what music?) How do you know when a poem is finished? Is it ever?
DM: I have no plan, after all of these decades, unless I’m onto something. No kind of aerobics poetry writing. I admire, & know, many poets who get up & write poems for a couple of hours & go out & feed the dogs. I stopped doing that when I was in my 30’s or 40’s. I started (writing) when I was a kid. I’m not book-driven unless I am. I’m more interested in an idea, & then try to run with it & play it out as much as I can.
SL: Do you feel that the “Beat” label has been good or limiting for you?
DM: Early on, I’d say, “I’m too young to be officially in these ranks.” & I’m too old to be a hippie. What is going to happen to me? I’m doomed.
SL: The word “poet” works real well.
TG: You wrote last year for Harriet (Poetry magazine’s blog), & you’re teaching a poetry course online. Can you tell us more about that, & how technology has changed writing?
DM: As soon as I figure it out. (laughs) Based on my prior teaching experience, a course would be 15 weeks, & it would be three hours, & it would be both talking & discussing. It gave everyone a lot of room in class. This (new course) is something that’s not interactive. I’ve outlined 10 classes, a basic intro to poetry & poetics. I’m working through — apparently it’s the oldest online site for writers. Each successive cadre of kids who come in is even more frivolous. They don’t read. They specialize in distraction, in the fragmentary contact. Don’t get me started.
TG: Has technology changed for the good, in some ways?
DM: My first great defeat was having to give up my manual Olympia office typewriter, because of arthritis, & from then on it was downhill. But I do see technology’s advantages as a form of personal expression.
SL: Who was Donald Schenker? & how did you come to collaborate with him on one of your first books?
DM: I was maybe 19 or 20. Don was one of the people who worked at the bagel shop, the counter man, & we started talking. We both self-identified as poets. He & his wife who lived up in this area had inherited Weldon Kees’ press. & it was one of these, “Let’s do a book.” It was my first half-book.
TG: How important is humor to you, in your life & poetry.
DM: It’s a stabilizing factor. It’s like a hiccup or a burp or a fart. The moment you experience it, you’re not there. Just for the moment. All the complex mental working, to “get it” & when you get it, you’re not there.
SL: You’ve said Lew Welch taught you about “Poetry & Torment.”
DM: He would know.
SL: Do you think he had a sense of humor?
DM: Are you kidding? Reading with Lew, being on a platform with Lew, just watching him go, for me anyway, was just a great joy. He’d amble on stage like some minor league pitcher, & he would bring in the audience immediately.
SL: I remember Charles Olson telling him “You’ve got a few good poems, here, Lew, but you really need to read more.”
DM: I was there that night, a couple blocks away, preparing for the after-party.
SL: Do you think we write one poem in our lifetime & that all of our poems are fragments of that one poem?
DM: Well, it’s all one life. How many poems are there? That’s always been a good question. Why are poems made? Why are canons foddered?
TG: Wayne Atherton, from The Café Review, said folk singer-songwriter Eric Andersen references you to some degree in his spoken word piece on the “Beat Avenue” CD, in the context of walking the streets in a daze on the day JFK was assassinated. Can you talk about those days? Are you still political? Who will you support in the next presidential election?
DM: I’ve always believed all art practices resist domination. To me, every notable arts movement could be called a resistance
movement. The fine line between resistance & acceptance intrigues me. But you’d have to pay me for endorsements. (laughs)
SL: I wanted to compliment you & your wife, Julie, on the way you each work & then collaborate so well.
DM: Thank you. It’s good for both of us.
TG: What are you up to next, in the world of readings?
DM: You’d think at this advanced age, it would be a piece of cake. I taught at New College for over 30 years. The administration tanked, & one of the things they forgot was to give us guys pensions.
TG: That’s not a good way to retire from teaching.
DM: I’m not retired. There’s social security, but it doesn’t cover rent. We’re always working on something. If we were to wake up one morning & say, “I’ve got nothing left to do,” you’d start hearing funereal music. It would be like a bad movie.
TG: You’ve done a book of interviews called San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets. Are you more comfortable doing the interview or being interviewed yourself?
DM: I didn’t even want to be in it (as an interview subject), but a student pulled me in. That book covers a lot of time. Part of it was published in the 60’s. The rest of it is in the 90’s. But I was there for all of it.
SL: It seems like you’re always in charge of the after-party.
DM: Keep the poetry going & the wine flowing.
Xue Di Interview
Interview with Xue Di on the poetry of revolution, life in the United States, and the precise word
The following phone and email interview with Xue Di was conducted by Timothy Gillis in February 2014. Xue Di was born in Beijing. He is the author of three volumes of collected works and one book of criticism on contemporary Chinese poetry in Chinese. In English translation, he has published four full-length books, Across Borders, Another Kind of Tenderness, An Ordinary Day, and Heart into Soil, and four chapbooks, Forgive, Cat’s Eye in a Splintered Mirror, Circumstances, and Flames. His work has appeared in numerous American journals and anthologies and has been translated into several languages. Xue Di is a two-time recipient of the Hellman / Hammett Award and a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship.
TG: When did you begin writing poetry and who or what was your earliest muse?
XD: I was born in China in 1957. Right about when I was six years old, my parents got divorced. In 1966, the Chinese Cultural Revolution started. The whole country was in chaos. The living conditions and my personal life were in miserable circumstances. Back then, China did not allow people to divorce. My parents were punished by the government and the working unit.
I have tried many different things to see in my younger years. I could not find happiness. One day when I was 12 years old (I lived in a dormitory where my father worked), I found an abandoned collection of poems written by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. That was the first time — we had Chinese classical poetry, but this was the first poet — I read it, and it touched my heart and shaped my whole being.
I did not feel love from society, from my family — there was so much nature, and the beauty and the love was there — it was the first time I felt that wonderful thing in my life. That was the first time I tried to write some poems.
Xue Di, as an active member of the Beijing branch of the Chinese Writer’s Association, began to organize resident writers and poets into support groups for the Tian’anmen students’ hunger strike. The Chinese Writer’s Association and an ad–hoc group calling themselves the “Beijing Poets” marched in support May 17–19, 1989, immediately before the declaration of martial law. Xue Di was in the front ranks during these days. In blood, he wrote the word “Save” on the front of his shirt and “Revolt” on the shirt’s back, making clear his political commitment to the democratic movement. He continued to march and wear his shirt in support of the movement until the crackdown on June 4.
TG: How did your poetry change or develop during the Tian’anmen Square period?
XD: At that time, I was not working. Somehow I got early retirement in my working unit. When I graduated from the middle school, all the colleges and universities shut down. That was a part of the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao believed that real knowledge is not from the professors, not from the teachers. It’s from the workers, from societies, from farmers, so the university was shut off. Lots of the professors were sent to the camp. So I could not go to the university. I went into the institute to study film for two years. So I started working there. That’s not what I wanted to do, but I had no choice. Whatever was assigned to you, you had to go or you had no work.
Xue Di’s work involved researching how to make a brighter light bulb that would also burn longer. He was able to gain early retirement.
XD: During the 1989 Tian’anmen Square democracy movement, I was able to participate a lot because I was not in the working unit. In China, a lot of people went to support the students’ movement in groups from the working units. That’s why, when the movement was crashed on by the army, a lot of people got in trouble because there was proof who went there. I was in my retirement so I was able to go. I did organize the writers in Beijing to march in support of the student movement.
When I came to the United States, I wrote a poem to dedicate to the 1989 events. I don’t write a lot of poems like that. The poems have really changed a lot since I came to the United States.
At Tian’anmen Square, everyone was so angry. The poem was an open heart, emotional. While I was in China, a lot of poems I wrote, during the Cultural Revolution, — we felt we were part of the younger generation, we felt our work was oppressed by the government. A lot of my writing back then was emotional, was letting things go out, outwards. Imagine living in a room all closed, no door, no windows. You don’t see anything. You don’t see the sunlight; you don’t see the birds. All of my life was to try to chisel on the wall, try to make a crack, so I can see something, hear something from nature. When you do that you put all your strength and emotion into chiseling the wall.
TG: Art has been a major influence on your writing. Can you discuss its impact on you?
XD: Van Gogh loves nature. In Beijing, there was no nature. Society was very closed. Van Gogh’s paintings really touched my heart so deeply. I felt like Van Gogh’s painting was close to his heart. He did not really care about other people’s judgments of his work, and he madly loved nature. For me, I feel like I was very close with his art work. My living was closed and oppressed. There was no nature. I was crying for all the beauty in life and nature. That’s why I wrote poems dedicated to Van Gogh’s paintings.
TG: Discuss how you write your poems.
XD: I write my poems in Chinese. Before 1990, I did not know English at all. I learned everything after I came to the United States. Poetry is so precise, so subtle. Even with my native language, I work so hard to pull out one precise word.
I speak English every day at work. Somehow I have to find a way to maintain the Chinese culture, to stay close to the fruit of my culture. This is one thing I feel great about, to write my work in Chinese. At least, I’m still in my culture.
I write my work in Chinese, and then I have a group of people who help translate my work into English. My English is okay.
I’ve found once in a while, I can translate my work on my own, but this is only the first step. (The translators) are really loyal to the original meaning.
The first step is literally from Chinese to English. When I worked with Keith Waldrop, a wonderful American poet who is passionate about translation — he would work on the English translation to bring it to a fine poem in English. It’s really hard to find someone who knows Chinese very well and in English, their original language, they are also a poet. I would read the first draft and put in my notes on what I wanted to say. Then, when Keith would work on the final draft, he knew my exact meaning and would work further on it.
TG: What is lost (if anything) in translation? What is gained?
XD: Poetry is very hard to translate. It’s not like a novel or a short story. For a poem, the word has its own culture and so much history behind the words.
So when you translate from Chinese to English, the beauty of the language, the rhythm of the original language, the culture of the language; these things get lost in the translation: the root of the language, the history, and the beauty of the language, itself. But if the translator does a really good job, the translator actually can catch up the rhythm of the language and put it into the English language. It can flow really well and also can obtain the subtleness, the history, and the meaning of the words into English.
TG: I noticed that you use a poem’s line end as a period or comma at times (without an actual period or comma). It’s very effective in English. How is punctuation handled in Chinese? Do your translators account for this?
XD: For me, I do not want to use them. I feel like when you don’t have the mark at the end of the line, it looks better. The word Xue in Chinese looks like a snowflake falling to the ground. My original name was Bing Li. That was one of the most popular names in China, like John in this country. If I walked along the street, and someone called Bing Li, I would turn around and see another ten people turn around. A good friend came to my house and said you published a poem that was really lousy. He showed me the paper with a poem by someone called “Bing Li” — it was really bad. That’s the reason I gave myself a pen name. When I put the two words together, it was a very unique combination. No one had this name, but unfortunately now, if I did a web search in Chinese, I would see Xue Di as it’s a popular name — a beer factory, a sock factory, even a hotel in Italy, using exactly my name.
TG: Discuss your writing routine: where and when do you write? What is the medium (i.e. pencil and paper, computer?) Do you listen to music? How many drafts does a typical poem go through? How do you know when a poem is finished?
XD: When I write, I usually write in the later morning or early afternoon. When I get up in the morning, I like to not talk to anyone, no TV or anything, and go to writing. My general time to write is about three hours. After three hours, you could keep writing, but a lot of what you write is not high quality, to focus on the poem. If I still have a feeling, I hold the feeling, let it stew.
A lot of writers like to write down whatever is in their minds, then they rewrite, time after time. This is not the way I write. When I write a poem, I need to make the poem pretty much precise in my mind. When I write the first line, it’s pretty much what I’d like to write. I work pretty hard for the first draft, and when I’m finished, it’s pretty much finished. I do rewrite, but that’s not the way that I do my work. I like to write poems not more than 20 lines. They are short, but they are strong. There is more power than if it’s spread out. I write all my work with my hand in ink pen. If I need to cross (out), I cross. When I type them, I polish. When I write, I have all the meaning and feeling and emotion in my head. When I type it on the computer, I see the work. Sometimes it does not look like I like it, so I do change it.
I don’t listen to music when I write. I need no sound at all.
I follow my mind, carefully, closely, and intensely, and also sensitively, so I need no sound. I used to train myself. In China, wherever you go, there is noise. So I would intentionally go to a very noisy place and read a book, just to train my mind. So when I write, I could have less bother.
TG: I’d like to discuss the poems that are in this edition of The Café Review, especially their origins, themes, and literary devices. “New Year” is a poem set in New England. Compare and contrast the holiday as it’s experienced in the U.S. and China. Is the line “The trumpet blows the lips” an intentional inversion? Discuss your family and friends still living in China. Who are they? What are their lives like? Has your poetic success affected them?
XD: China and the United States are both countries that celebrate the New Year with passion. I have more friends in China to celebrate this holiday with than in the U.S. Yes, it’s intentional. To write this way is to also indicate my unusual situation far away from my homeland’s circumstances.
My both parents are still living in Beijing, China, and my younger sister lives in New York City. My parents are getting old and have some health issues. My sister is doing fine in the city. They are all very pleased with my literary achievements. I hope I can go back to China to visit my parents, and spend some time with them.
My last visit was in 1997.
TG: In “Seven Years,” you write about “living / in a city whose dialect I don’t speak.” Discuss your life in Providence, R.I. You also write “Loneliness, then a precise / word.” Can you talk about the loneliness that is assuaged when a writer finds the precise word? What is the “precise word?”
XD: I am a foreigner living in this country. My spirit fits into this land, but my emotions and language are still difficult to mix in. This poem was written seven years after I came to the U.S. Seven years in a foreign land, there are so many things that I could write and express, but I decided to compress all those feelings onto a short poem. To do so, it required very precise words / lines to be created and chosen, and many more things are hidden between the lines, to give the readers a lot of spaces in which to feel the poem. It was challenging, but it came out as I expected. Ten lines for seven years, and as many experiences as possible to be included in this short poem.
To describe loneliness, there are already millions of ways to say, to write about it. How can I create a very unique and fresh
way / imagery to describe it? This must be my feeling and my skill to write about loneliness. So, “Loneliness, then a precise / word.”
A precise word is solid, reaches to the core of things, and exists somewhere alone — my feeling of loneliness, even stronger and more alone than that solid and individual word.
A precise word should be one word containing multiple meanings, and when this word connects with another precise word, it would depict so much of life’s experiences. The more precise the words, the lines would be short, but the information and experiences would be richer within the lines.
TG: In “First Love,” you write, “Pain contains me,” “Nightmare clutches me,” and “Love leads me by the nose” — three great examples of personification. What is your favorite poetic device?
XD: Personification is one way to write poems, and those feelings become images. It makes poems sounds poetic. I like to try different ways to write poems and keep myself feeling fresh, not repeating the techniques of other writers, and also challenging my writing and thinking.
TG: Who was your first love?
XD: A girl in China.
Charles Simic Interview
Interview with Charles Simic on Teaching, Translating, and the Mystery of Writing Poetry
This telephone interview with Charles Simic was conducted by Timothy Gillis on October 19, 2013. Simic, 75, is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. Since 1967, he has published 20 books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007–2008, Simic served as the U.S. Poet Laureate. He is a professor emeritus of English who still teaches part time at the University of New Hampshire.
TG: You’ve been teaching at UNH for more than 30 years. How have college students changed over that time?
CS: Students were better educated. They read more in high school. They read more in middle school. We read Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare and lots of stuff like that. Now, there’s none of that. Nothing. Unless, on their own, you know, or somehow they just love to read and got into books. It isn’t just literature they don’t know. There are lots of things they don’t know. They don’t know history. They don’t know the history of ideas, politics, on and on. When I started teaching at UNH in 1973, this was the end of the Vietnam War, and student protests were still taking place, so back then students were “veterans” [i.e. experienced]. They were on the ball. That’s the biggest change.
TG: Tell us about your writing habits. Do you write every day? Morning or night? What’s your inspiration?
CS: I still write each day, but it has changed so much over the years. I’m 75 years old, you know. I’ve had many different habits at different phases in my life. I’ve pretty much covered all the possibilities. I’ve worked late, late at night for years. I’ve worked early, early in the morning, afternoon, midday. As for inspiration, things percolate slowly and then something happens, and I begin to scribble down words or phrases or lines of poetry, so it has evolved as a mystery how these things come about. Most poems that I’ve written I have no idea how they started or why. There’s nothing clear cut. Nothing where I could say, “Yes, this is the way I work.” Writers, artists really need to have habits and routines, but poets are different in how they work. Some have to have a routine, sit at a particular desk with a particular writing notebook, some kind of ritual associated with the writing work. I have none.
TG: No rituals?
CS: Nothing. [Laughs.]
TG: Do you carry a notebook with you?
CS: I have a notebook. I just scribble things. . . . At some point, I use a computer.
TG: Your work was published in The Café Review (10th anniversary issue, Spring 1999) Two poems: “Soup Kitchen” and “And Thou Art My Lord.” What is the importance of the small press as a vehicle to reach an audience?
CS: I think it’s the future, not big press. Not just in poetry — my publisher cut down their poetry listing, not just poetry, but literature, serious literature, has a hard time finding a publisher these days. The future is with small presses.
TG: You write your poems beginning in English, but you have also translated the writing of others.
CS: When I was young I did some French, I did some Russian. It’s mainly the languages of the former Yugoslavia Those published by small presses and grants from foundations — big presses won’t touch them.
TG: Is it possible to capture the essence in translation?
CS: It depends what kind of poetry it is. There are poets who are easier to translate than others. If a poet is influenced by [W.H.] Auden or T.S. Eliot, then you know how it would sound in English because you have an English model. So that’s much easier to do. But if you have a poet who comes from a native tradition, then it’s much harder because then you have to find an equivalent. Some poets are very difficult to translate, some poets are impossible to translate, and some poets are even better in translation than in the original.
TG: Can you think of a poet who gets better with translation?
CS: Well . . . [pauses to consider] I have to think about that. That’s something you want to be very careful about saying. [Laughs.]
TG: One of your poems begins “Monk at the Five Spot.” So you also love the plunk of Monk and jazz music?
CS: I heard [Thelonious] Monk a lot of times at The Five Spot [a jazz bar in New York City]. I used to live three blocks away. On cold, windy nights, in the fall, mid-week, or raining, I knew that if I went there it would be halfway empty. I could nurse a beer at the bar for an entire set. If I had money for another beer, I would listen to another set. I love Monk. He was a very, very strange fellow, and very interesting to look at, his presence, his appearance. I saw him once at the bar, between sets, nursing a beer, and I said, “I really enjoyed the way you played . . . ,” [forgets now what the song was], and he looked at me like I could have said, “I really liked the way to played Beethoven’s Sonata.” You could see that he was seriously detached. He was completely out of this world. I was kind of mortified. It was really troubling. But then, later on, I saw him again and realized he was meant for something special.
TG: Do you listen to music while you write?
CS: Oh yes. Not all the time, but I listen to a lot of jazz, some classical music too. Country music. I love all kinds of music. Never hard rock or big band music. A huge band, a lot of brass instruments: I can’t do that. I need something quiet.
TG: Would you consider yourself a lyric poet or a narrative poet?
CS: My impulse is the lyrical. I’m a lyric poet, but I also have an interest in stories. The thing is I like to tell them quickly. I don’t mind narrative things, but I don’t like them to go very long. Many of my poems have a hint of emphatic note, there is a slight plot line, but being lyrical, that’s my deep love.
TG: You came to the United States [from the former Yugoslavia] when you were 15 years old, right into high school. That must have been a bit of a jolt.
CS: That’s when you’re a kid, no choice, so you go to school.
TG: When you came to America, who were some of the first writers you were exposed to?
CS: I read fiction: Jack London, Mark Twain, [Ernest] Hemingway, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald. It was fiction. A couple years later, I started reading poetry. The first poet who blew my mind was Hart Crane. I had read [Robert] Frost and the others. But I love Hart Crane. I didn’t understand a thing he said. They are obscure. He was hermetic, and the language was so gorgeous, so I loved that.
TG: Who are your favorite artists?
CS: A lot of people. I wanted to be a painter.
TG: Until what age? When did you shift from painting to poetry?
CS: I continued to paint into my late 20s. And I was really painting when I was 14 and 15. I was interested in, typically: Impressionism, Post-Impression, and Cubism. That was all very exciting to learn about the late 19th century painters: [Vincent] Van Gogh, [Paul] Gauguin, so many other names — paradise, so many great artists.
TG: Many of your poems have enduring images of your life as a young boy in Belgrade during the Nazi invasion. In “Two Dogs,” you write:
A little white dog ran into the street
And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings.
That’s what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.
CS: That’s the thing: if you go to a war, world war, big armies clashing, civil war, bombs falling out of the sky, you learn some things. If you go quietly and sit down in some corner of the world, reflect on a childhood when you go fishing with your dad, there’s not a lot to say [about] when you’re three or four or five. When the entire world is going crazy, and it’s happening all around you, that’s when the memories start early.
TG: From a newer poem, “The Foundlings,” you write “Time’s hurrying me, putting me to the test / To picture to myself what comes next.” You’re 75 years old, still teaching and writing. . . . For Charles Simic, what comes next?
CS: You know, to quote Rodney Dangerfield. He says, “Look, if I take terrific care of myself, watch my health, I’ll be dead in six, seven years.” [Laughs.] Who can tell what comes next for me? I knock on wood a lot, during the day, and I hope I still write a lot of poems.
Note: This is an edited transcript. Portions of this interview appeared previously in the Portland [Maine] Daily Sun.
Ron Winkler Interview
German Poet Ron Winkler Magnifies the
‘Minute, Exquisite, Everyday Things’
Interview and Translation by Nancy Allison
Ron Winkler is a German poet, writer, editor, critic, and translator living in Berlin. Born in 1973, he studied German literature and language and history at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He founded the poetry magazine intendenzen, and was its editor for about ten years. Several of his poems have been translated into 20 languages. In the United States, his work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, Blackbird, Atlanta Review, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. Winkler is the recipient of the 2005 Leonce and Lena Prize for poetry, Germany’s most prestigious award for emerging poets, and the 2006 Mondsee Poetry Award. In 2010, he served as a writer-in-residence in Córdoba, Argentina; the following year, in Venice, Italy. This past summer he was granted a residence scholarship at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby on Gotland, Sweden. His most recent poetry collection is Frenetische Stille (Frenetic Silence), which came out in 2010. That same year, he published a book of flash fiction, Torp. In addition to his work as a poet, Winkler has edited several anthologies: a collection of young American poets; another featuring new German voices; and, most recently, poems dealing with snow. He has translated full-length poetry collections by Billy Collins, Matthew Zapruder, G.C. Waldrep, Jeffrey McDaniel, David Lerner, Sarah Manguso, and Arielle Greenberg, as well as a novel by Forrest Gander. This interview, both conducted in German by Nancy Allison and translated by her, is the first with Winkler to appear in an English-language poetry quarterly.
As a boy growing up in the former East Germany, Ron Winkler learned Russian along with German. He feels an affinity with the language and culture, so where better to meet than in a small bar named for Russia’s space pioneer, Yuri Gagarin? It was a cold spring morning in Berlin, too early for the borscht and vodka on the menu. We fueled up on caffeine instead. The espresso machine blasted off now and then as we set our sights on the planet of poetry.
NA: You’ve recently returned from the International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua. Do you find that travel brings you poems?
RW: That depends. I would never travel with the goal of making literature out of it. But travel basically feeds my awareness with interesting stimuli, whether positive or negative. It sets my whole sense apparatus into motion. Flora, fauna, social behavior, shapes or smells, architecture, my sensory reactions — all change me and act on my vocabulary as well.
Travel can lead to poems. I don’t force it. It’s enough if my thinking shifts into resonant oscillations, if my perceptual patterns change, my navigational system is given new rooms, structures, additional connections.
God knows, not everything has to be or become a poem. Anyway, I don’t write for an audience. I account instead to poetry, want to mix new combinations of sound and sense, emotions and empathy, syntax and insight. To take snapshots of the power of a sensitive intellect.
There’s also the question: What reliability or relevance does one’s own writing have in another cultural context? In Nicaragua, I wondered whether the poems I’d chosen to read would be too alien in their referentiality to the world, in their humor, their idiom, their conclusions. Would they, in some unsympathetic way, seem insulated, abstract, escapist, maybe? Who knows,
maybe the audience felt that the sound of the poems was enough, and thereby the whole thing seemed worthwhile to them. But one must also be aware that it’s impossible to write 100 percent global poetry.
NA: What sustains you, keeps you writing?
RW: My sense of self changes, interests shift, topics and their associated vocabulary get worn out. Again and again, a new state of mind takes prevalence, whether that’s irony or fury, brevity or surrealism, a desire for subtlety or for formal, weighty language. Eventually, you hybridize a variety of poetic language that you’d either like to cultivate or abandon — to venture away from that familiar Red Riding Hood path you’ve been treading, at the end of which stands your same old self.
Confusion is the foundation of poetry. It’s easier to write if you can recall the endorphins that your body released the last time a new idea worked out. Experience shows that there, where you began something that felt right, a kind of slipstream occurs. You want to go into it, to encounter aspects of yourself you’ve never met before. That can be interesting for the reader. And of course, it’s also a form of individuation.
NA: Do you work to find poems?
RW: Of course. And it’s hard to imagine someone who seems permanently able to do otherwise. The more interesting question, though, is: when and how the work begins. Is it at that very moment when the pure, unadulterated pleasure of writing turns into something else? When, elated with your progress, drunk on your just-finished draft, you start to revise, try alternative phrasing, consciously stop in the middle of your flow to put in line breaks? Because, you realize, it would be even more work to have to come back after it was all over and try and understand what you’d written in your altered state.
There are texts which are more or less already there, which in a relatively short time emerge and are genuine. But these frequently need adjusting, too. And that’s work. Yet it’s still much simpler than beginning a poem from scratch because there aren’t as many decisions to make or things to think about — for instance, meter, line length, imagery, or the clarity of the language.
The genius of creation is always accompanied by the ingenuity of composition. It’s not enough to have plenty of poetic material. Nor will it suffice simply to have a prosodic structure in mind. Something in this constellation always requires time. How idiomatic will I be, how much pathos will I put in, how will I treat redundancy? These are calculated factors that play an equal role at the beginning of the writing process. And when they click, the work is already there.
NA: You’ve translated several books by American poets into German — I’m thinking of Billy Collins, Matthew Zapruder, Jeffrey McDaniel — and edited and translated an anthology of young American poets. Translating poetry has been called “the double labyrinth.” Why enter the maze? And why choose American poets?
RW: Why go into the labyrinth? [Laughs.] Maybe I’m just really annoying. Maybe I suffer from agoraphobia. My interest in poets who stand firmly in the limelight is limited. Billy Collins is an exception. He’s apart from the herd. The still point in the center, if you like, around which “my” other poets move in their own dynamic ways.
I have a passion for authors on the threshold, from newcomer to instigator. For poetry that’s not yet over-institutionalized or smothered in interpretation. It is, I believe, natural to search after spiritual kin, but also, in general, to seek writers who are out of your own frame of reference, to see how they create the present. To me, translating these poets is less an exotic exchange than a way to record the aesthetic camps that thrive within America. Especially as it — although now struggling to keep its status — was for such a long time cultural icon, foster mother, and rock ‘n’ roll cousin to us. In hindsight, a longed-for paradise.
Translating, for me, is motivated by different things: out of a respect for unfamiliar poetics, from a delight in bringing them whole into my native tongue — not as foreign contraband smuggled into my own writing. I translate what I myself am not and cannot do, but admire. That which doesn’t happen here in our climes, yet presumably can enrich us.
But to come back to the double labyrinth: Life itself is a maze. Why should a sub-maze scare us? Anyway, I wouldn’t describe the translator as someone searching for Ariadne’s thread, but rather as someone who casts out a grappling hook.
NA: Let’s get back to your own poems. You received the Leonce and Lena Prize for poetry in 2005 for vereinzelt Passanten (Here and There Passerby). The jury applauded your ability, in that book, “to update the nature poem and make it function as a frame of reference for modern experience.” Were you happy with that statement about your work? Has it affected later poems?
RW: Totally. Initially I was surprised by the “nature poetry” label, because previously, my poems had rather dabbled in the passage of time, dealing with historical icons, epitaphs, dystopias. Yet it was definitely plausible: The source of vereinzelt Passanten was undoubtedly nature. But, aside from my personal delight and expressed emphases, this was nature in a test tube, steeped in contemporary mentality and vocabulary — the same way our perception of the natural is always understood by and rooted in our urban experience of it.
One of my methods was to work with the current changes in the language, bombarding the classical view of nature, as if it were in a particle accelerator, with the foreign atoms of contemporary language. My poetry became increasingly hyper-nature, nature ramped up: more massive and laborious, more absurd. I was itching to crank the volume full blast, in order to make way for something new. My writing is like the movement of a wave: overcharged language followed by minimalist poetics that eventually unfolds into straight sensuality.
NA: When did you know that poetry was your calling?
RW: 1991, 1995, 1999, 2004, and 2007. A little as well in the fall of 2011. [Laughs.] Seriously: The first year mentioned started me off; it was when I wrote my first poem. I was feeling melancholy, in love, and went out to a park and wrote something about trees. That was it for me. In 1995 I published my first poem. Then, in 1999, I won a poetry competition. Fifty lines for a women’s magazine centered around one theme: bad ideas. I had a few. The prize was a new car, a Lancia worth 25 thousand DM [Deutsche Mark ]. I sold the car. In the end, I only got 17 thousand for it, but I saw it as a nudge from fate to start up as a freelance writer in Berlin.
In 2004 my first book was published, and in 2007 my second. In between, of course, I was undergoing psychophysical and dialectical changes. What you refer to as a “calling” isn’t a continuum. There are always doubts, surfeits, and aggravations.
My inner monologue has always been sort of whimsical and peculiar — full of compound words, broken, unconnected layers. My “I” is probably more discontinuous and inconsistent than most brave citizens’. But poetry for me isn’t manufactured artifice. It’s not something I do because it’s admired or sounds good or is successful. It’s natural to me. Poetry isn’t a horse I ride; it’s the legs I have.
NA: As a translator of the late poet David Lerner, you’re familiar with his lines from “Mein Kampf”: “I come not to bury poetry/ but to blow it up.” What do you want to do with poetry?
RW: That changes. But there are a few recurrent themes. For example, to capture the spell of the moment. To try and say things in a unique way. To reflect on what makes us tick. To refer to the inconsistency and discontinuity of the self. As I said before, I love to unify opposites. Contamination is a leitmotif. The blurring of fiction and reality. Once, a critic wrote about poetry by someone that it was “perfect.” But “perfection” doesn’t exist. Still, I strive for something similar. I reach after it. You want a slogan? Here you go: I come to make poetry that magnifies detail in order to reveal being. To intensify the experience of the minute, exquisite, everyday things of this world.
NA: You’ve written a book of prose called Torp, about a curious character whose experiences lead him to question himself and the world and who reports his findings in language that sometimes hides as much as it reveals. Tell me about Torp. Who is he, and how did he convince you to start writing prose?
RW: Torp is my prose likeness. He unburdens me, is a possible form of myself. He represents a world in which other perceptual models apply. The prose that he and his ambient associations depict is micro-fiction. He’s really not so strange a being in my work. He’s a magnet for weirdnesses, even though different ones.
As I’ve said, not everything is a poem, or should be. Which is why there’s Torp — a character who helps communicate very different poetic ideas. Torp is someone who has a strange perspective on the world and who isn’t afraid to make mistakes. He stands for the utopian struggle within a permanent decadence, campaigning with all his eccentricity and disguises, ultimately, for a literary existence.
NA: The poetry slam seems to be a big thing in Berlin. Should poems be spoken?
RW: There is no should. I am happily entertained, but at the same time mistrustful of the exteriority of performing. With songs I am interested mainly in the music, not the lyrics. In poetry I am interested above all in the relationship between the words, not in how someone says them.
As far as performance poetry goes, I’m no expert. I believe that the poetry slam scene here is still very popular, maybe even vibrant. But it’s absolutely separate from what one might call the poetry scene. The thing I admire about performance poets is: They succeed in selling their art as hip in a world where poets are normally seen as parallel-world nerds.
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This is an edited transcript.