By Kristi Maxwell
Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter Spring 2006.
The following interview was conducted via email between Cal Bedient and Kristi Maxwell in late September and October 2005. To maintain the melding of the poet’s response, a set of questions will be lumped first.
Kristi Maxwell: You’ve called the lyricism in your work “a sniper’s lyricism, quick reports then deadly silence.” I agree; there is something intense (and even uncomfortable) a reader has experienced by the time she arrives at the end of one of your poems. Do you feel the intensity is a direct result of the density—by density I mean not only the images breaking open new images and newer images, and so on, but also the meticulously accented diction?
The discomfort I mention is of course a good thing—perhaps even a great and necessary thing. Do you think the mark of a great poem inherently involves discomfort?
The role of landscape in your poetry seems often commented upon—one of the things I’m most interested by in terms of this is that the natural world so rarely springs from the landscape as it appears in your poetry—there’s an exuberant irreverence (I’m thinking particularly of “What Was William Painting?”) that becomes its own kind of reverence. I wonder if you agree with this.
Something I admire about your poetry is that it has the kind of intimacy that seems arrived at through a balance of the intellect and the emotional—does this balance hold import for you?
Cal Bedient: “Discomfort…a good thing,” yes. Thanks for that. Reading and writing out of the comfort zone—what alternative is there, except literature as distraction and have-a-nice-day pabulum? Poetry can try to bring out the disturbances by which we know we’re alive, ontology scraping on its own microscopic nerve-strings, the kind it’s lucky and unfortunate enough to be equipped with in the human form. Pluck, ping; it can hurt, it may not even be possible to overcome what Freud called primary masochism. The what-we-came-from is jealous of our separation and wants us back. It sends out call-back signals felt as pain, fear, anxiety, doubt, longing. Well, no; just wait; I have a thing to do first:
Among W. B. Yeats’s many disturbing poems is a powerful but largely neglected poem called “On a Picture of a Black Centaur.” In it, a centaur keeping watch at the edge of a parrot-infested, parrot-crazy wood and stamps its hooves in the sultry mud. Never mind that Yeats’s poems are under those hooves; Yeats himself doesn’t mind: “I have loved you better than my soul for all my words.” The centaur corresponds to the psycho-sensual synthesis necessary to poetry that isn’t just “words.” (This synthesis coincides with what you call a balance of the intellect and the emotions.) One can’t take the pulse of the madly impulsional parrots, with their swings and calls, except to discover an agitation that physicists now think characterizes the invisible, least divisible, unpissable mis-essence of matter. Yeats, in his poem, wants to be right there, at the border of the bearable, which Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror describes (romanticizes?) as “retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being closest to its dawn, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression. Through that experience, . . . ‘subject’ and ‘object’ push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great modern literature unfolds over that terrain: Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Celine.
Yeats evokes as much without skipping a beat, even if he has to write six feet to the line to create a sense of potentially runaway energies:
Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
Unlike some of the other lines in this sixteen-line poem, the first line, it’s true, can be scanned as an iambic pentameter furiously agitated by trisyllabic feet (“at the black,” “of the wood,” “-ible green”). But the point I would make is simple: traditional metrics can open up the void that they might well seem to have been especially evolved to conceal; they can bespeak “the desire for chaos:” as well as “the fear of chaos” that D. H. Lawrence perceived kicking poets around. The desire for chaos, Lawrence added, is the breath of their poetry, whereas the fear of chaos is in “their parade of forms and technique.” “Man cannot live in chaos,” Lawrence says, but neither can he breathe for long in a “simulacrum.” Hence the need to keep perpetual, keep current, the crisis of the black-mud border: a testing experience of danger and trial.
The politics of a literature of discomfort is anti-imperial, even if the “forms and technique” look conventional. Nowadays, of course, there’s an effort by many of the younger poets to devise forms and techniques that neither look nor feel well-behaved. I sympathize with these poets (perhaps it helps that I myself didn’t start writing poetry until the early 1990s and held off going at it hard until I could find a way to surprise myself and still understand myself, if sometimes, I fear, too well). With regard to its technical moves, including its tonal play, my poetry is (I hope) younger than I am.
Some of the “innovative” poetry of today really is innovative; some of it is narcissistic idiosyncrasy trying to pass itself off as the real, original thing. The good stuff is so hard to write: meticulous, dense, intense, metaphorically and linguistically explorative, in contact with something that seems real (or is so deliciously curious that it ought to be real: see Barbara Guest’s “Constable’s Method” in the September/October 2005 American Poetry Review)—in contact at every point and not occasionally trying to get by on empty effects—these qualities, most of them cited in your first series of questions, are, I think, essentials; otherwise one could find oneself mumbling with the shirttail of previous poetry stuck in one’s mouth, instead of serving the art by altering it conscientiously (and I don’t mean from the top of the head). Irreverence? So much has gone wrong with the world, not least the white man’s world, that irreverence is a not unreasonable response and form of defense. Discomfort? To be sure. At which point the answer circles back to its beginning.
Kristi: I like how you treat the “I” and the autobiographical in your poetry, in that it has no more or less weight than any other point from which to jump into metaphoric or linguistic exploration. Would you like to comment on the role of the “I” and/or autobiography in your own or contemporary poetry?
Cal: The autobiographical “I” has become more and more attenuated in the contemporary poetry that feels most “advanced” to me (i.e., least repetitive of past poetic performances). Something else moves in and runs away with it. To change the figure, the contemporary “I” is a hatchery for beings who often speak in fable-language, metaphor-language—beings who never were and never will appear again, unless the poets who hatch them (e.g., Ashbery) take to mirroring themselves, an ever-present danger.
Always prone to extremism, “confessional poetry” has nearly spent itself, but of course it's still around and still faking half its “confession” (and why not?). Autobiographical poetry itself, a much larger category, with various precincts and denizens, will, I think, always remain current, and perhaps should, lest we all appear to have abandoned our personal lives like so many boring or condemned production sites. But writing it can be like trying to climb a ladder while someone—your past—holds on to your ankles. It’s a zone of potential narcissistic drag and limitation. Few would want Frank O’Hara’s work to be any less “naturalistically” Frank than it is, but his was an exceptionally exuberant personality, with receptors on all sides. Other poets may need to go in fear of being an I-in-a-burrow. Forrest Gander’s new book, Eye Against Eye, is a beautiful example of how autobiographical poetry can still achieve a severity and inventiveness that keep it out of the category of “me-ism,” which I think Alain Badiou rightly suspects as a manifestation of the Imperialist provinciality of the West, particularly, of course, the U.S.
We can't go back to O’Hara’s chatty “personalism;” the atmosphere today is comparatively strangling. Something has gone very wrong. We can easily find political names for it. Witness the difference between Jorie Graham's first two books and her latest, Overlord: in the latter, autobiography is awash with toxic tidewaters (the immediate setting is the D-Day coast). Here, “autobiography” ceases to be an adequate concept. Historical being, here, now, is the truer category. Contingent being; the personality on historical overload.
My first book is more autobiographical than the second, and what I hope will be my third collection, Other Wars, is even less so. I’ve got past my own “story,” such as it was, and am not the least tempted to revisit it, or should I say reinvent it: the “I” is anyway always already a fiction of sorts, and nowadays I'm happy if it emerges as (pretty clearly) an anonymous, fabulous “I” (as in fabled and fabling), happy if it springs up equipped with an imaginary psychology of its own, borne as a voice at once familiar and strange, ready to put itself under the magnifying glass of a theme, a mood, an issue, a mystery; ready to burn.
I suppose it was Ashbery who gave us permission to write so.