By Valerie Bandura

 

Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter 27.1, Fall 2001.

The first time I wrote Steve Orlen I was a prospective graduate student and he didn’t owe me anything. Instead, he emailed me a one-page response, saying his door was always open to any student who wanted to drop by, and then told me how the clouds in Tucson that day (I was in Boston, this was February) were really one cloud, and perhaps only a cloud layer.

Orlen is on the faculty at the MFA program at the University of Arizona, and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson. His new book, This Particular Eternity, was released in July 2001 by Ausable Press. I have met and worked with enough poets to say that Steve is the most personable, generous poet I know, with a big enough heart that when we realized the first interview didn’t tape a word, he chuckled, opened his appointment book, and said, How about next week?

Valerie Bandura: Tony Hoagland calls you “the foremost embodiment of the poetic legacy of Randall Jarrell.” What is it that interests you about Jarrell’s poems?

Steve Orlen: Of all the most notable poets of his era, Bishop, Lowell, Schwartz, he was the most intimate. With Jarrell it’s all people. He tells stories. He's constantly in conflict. Sometimes it’s playful conflict and sometimes it’s more severe and discomforting conflict. The playful parts I found comforting. The severe parts I found revealing of human nature.

I was also attracted to the texture of Jarrell’s verse, all the accentual pentameter and sound echoes that go on. I remember sitting in a cabin in Oracle and reading one of his poems out loud. I heard all these sound effects in each line, and realized I hadn’t paid quite as much attention to that element as I might have. It’s a sensual pleasure. So I went back to the poem I was working on immediately and began looking for synonyms, substituting words so that sound became important and meaningful, hopefully at the same time.

The other thing is that, like me, he’s a poet of identity. He’s trying to figure out who he is, how he’s come to be, and how puzzling it is to be a human being in the world. Because I tutored myself in the school of Jarrell for a long time I learned, for example, how to tell a story, how to find in myself what we call voice—although it’s not a speaking conversational voice, it sounds like a real person is talking to you—I had to put him aside for years because I would read him and I would proceed to write a Jarrell poem.

Valerie: Jarrell is known for how he sounds like human speech and I think especially in your new book This Particular Eternity, the poems sound like you talking. How did you find that speech, because I think that’s very different from your earlier poems.

Steve: It had to do with what Jon Anderson had said to me years ago. He used to live elsewhere and we used to write letters occasionally and he said, “Your letters are great, how come your poems don’t sound like your letters?” Which was an insult in a way, but what he was saying was true. It took me years to find it in myself to write poetry that way. Because I was working on a novel and writing it very quickly, I began composing my first drafts speedily, in the voice of my mind, in a conversation with myself, so to speak, and I found myself straying off the subject, coming back to the subject, because that’s what I did in letters and in conversation.

Valerie: Was this a conscious decision?

Steve: No. It’s genetic. My father was that way and my son is that way. My father’s straying in conversation was irritating. My son’s straying in conversation is interesting.

Because I allowed myself to go all over the place in the first draft of a poem, the challenge then became coming back to the central point—whether it’s the story being told, or the question being asked in the poem. Sometimes it can be done with little poet’s tricks, by repeating a prior phrase or simply by bluntly jumping back to what’s been said before.

It seems to me important to include the whole self in the poem. Everything he/she knows, thinks about, feels, is in awe of or is in conflict with. Allowing myself to go all over the place in the first draft was the first time I was funny in a poem. For example, this was the title poem from The Bridge of Sighs. I allowed myself to go crazy with metaphors about my mother’s feet, which I adored as a child for their incredibly high arches (which, incidentally, caused her great pain). I went further into the comparisons with her foot and ended up with a bridge over water. I realized after I’d written a few drafts that it was actually funny.

Valerie: When did you start using humor?

Steve: Humor was a faculty which didn’t come until later in my life. As a kid, even as a young man in my twenties, everything was serious to me. I could appreciate other people's humor, within some limits, but I didn’t have any faculty in myself for creating funny moments in conversation. I thought that the person coming to the desk to write the poems should be the same person every time, and that person should be earnest and sincere and delicate and sweet, and that the whole poem was for the lyric moment, for the epiphany. That was all right, but I was writing poems, in what I call my lyric phase, that didn’t develop very much. If they were good they had good beginnings and good endings. The first half was the beginning and the second half was the ending. So once I allowed myself to develop poems with many beginnings, many endings and many middles. And they’re all over the place in the poem, and became parts of the incremental development of theme.

Valerie: Do you think This Particular Eternity is a different book for you?

Steve: I can’t say no, I just don’t know. Formally, there are two different types of poems. There are those poems that are like “Taboo,” which are tightly written, more controlled, with more or less neat stanzas and end-rhyme, and then there are those poems that read as if they were written in a rush, like “The Painter” or “The Kiss.” And I enjoyed having found that facility to make poems that read as if they were written in a rush. But the tighter poems were written earlier on in the writing of this book. For example, the poems “The Graveyard Shift,” or “Taboo,” because I was starting afresh I felt the “beginner’s” need to polish the poems over and over.

Valerie: It seems to me like most of the poems in this book, over other books, refer to a specific moment of realization, or start from a specific experience. For example, “Reverie: The Graveyard Shift.”

Steve: The subject for the poem “Reverie: The Graveyard Shift” came from the oddity of trading pants. There was this other fellow working with me that night at Spalding Sporting Goods. He liked my pants and I liked his. We were about the same size so we traded pants. I was reading Larry Levis at the time [I was writing the poem]. I’m influenced by whomever I’m reading while I’m writing, and the kind of dreaminess, the floating quality of his poetry had a great effect on me and on this poem. Every poet has a few obsessions, and one of mine is the nature of work itself. So this poem became about work and class differences, about memory, about what is a poet and the training ground for a poet. Auden has a lot to say about “the education of a poet.” It was between high school and college that I took some time off and went to Europe and came back and got this job of making golf clubs in the middle of the night. Those times can be valuable in hindsight because they’re when you rethink what you’ve done in the past and what you might be headed for in the future.

The phrase that became important to me early on is “and because, / I forgot to mention in this syllabus of errors, / I wanted to save up the stories for later, / when I would be a poet.” The abstract, intellectual notion of a syllabus, which is a starting point for doing work, that it would be a syllabus of errors, and that we can learn from those errors. It’s important that we commit those errors.

Valerie: So you don’t start with the moment?

Steve: I may not. I’ll just cut to the chase. I believe in starting at the top of my voice. Because poetry is not something that easy to read or that pleasurable. You need to “entertain” your audience. Like any other medium, poetry has an entertainment value. “A man shoots his gun” for the first sentence of a mystery novel, that’s great. That’s what Raymond Chandler, the mystery writer, tells us to do.

Valerie: There is one poem in your new book with an indulgent use of language, “Learning How To Look: Rilke & Rodin.”

Steve: It is indulgent. I wrote that poem from a word list I had created. When I have nothing better to do, I’ll write about a hundred words on a page and make sure that the vocabulary comes from different parts of our lives: nature vocabulary, Howdy-Doody’s name, my Uncle Bunny’s name, abstractions, objects, and occasionally I’ll begin to compose a poem from the list. But because this poem didn't have anything to do with my personal life it allowed me, or prodded me, into making fireworks with language.

Valerie: I liked how in “Kristalnacht” you allowed the woman’s story to stand by itself, and even in the end you don’t do much editorializing.

Steve: “Crystal Night,” the night of the broken glass when the Nazis broke windows of Jewish shops and burned synagogues and books. That part of the poem is absolutely accurate, my mother-in-law’s experience on Kristalnacht. Other parts came out of the imagination rumbling around. It struck me—the child’s horrible fear that must mark a person. The last few days on TV we’d seen children, Catholic schoolgirls, being taunted and yelled at while walking to school by the Protestant neighbors, and you can see the children cringing and weeping. The pictures of their faces while they’re cringing their shoulders—the rest of their lives are created from those moments.

I’m sure on earlier drafts there was a lot of explication and commentary, and those were the first things that got cut out. I feel like I to have to explain things as I say them, and that’s fine in conversation, but in poetry the structure and the image should be clear enough and stunning enough to stand on their own. So I let the scenery late at night and my mother-in-law’s partly made up monologue carry the poem.

Valerie: People tell me they’re struck by “Cruelty.”

Steve: That comes from a merging of experiences. But the central one is true. I’ve attempted maybe a dozen poems about that subject of a woman overdosing on heroine and dying. It was such a horrific moment. This one worked because I was patient with it. Finally, in a moment of expansive thinking and imagination I was able to write that poem. It’s a self-confrontation poem, as are C. K. Williams’ and Lisa Lewis’ poems, in which you’re really trying to push your face in the mud that you’ve created for yourself. There’s no way out of it—you’re guilty.

Valerie: I love the poem “Monkey Mind” because it doesn’t wander as much as your other poems do, yet you still had a conflict that wasn’t neatly resolved. That you could go about it in the manner of your other poems without doing it the same way.

Steve: I used to think that some people didn’t have an inner life. But my friend Boyer [Rickel] says that everyone has an ongoing monologue in their mind, that they’re always thinking. But I suspect not everyone has an examined inner life. I remember my father, who was a blind man from the middle of his life till the end; he had trouble sleeping because he thought too much. He’d write notes to himself in large letters so that somebody could read them back to him. In the morning they’d be scattered all around his bed. Those notes were all practical: “Get the TV repaired,” “Fix the toilet,” “Call the electric company.” I realized that his inner life was composed of practical things.

I was born questioning things. That’s the school of poetry. Over the years I’ve looked back at some of my old poems and realized that the subject of an inner life has come up many times. That disengagement during engagement—that’s the curse of poets, and I suppose people who aren’t poets, too. That’s a real curse. It means you’re never in the moment.

Valerie: Eleanor Wilner says “I write for the reader and the first reader is me.” What do you expect from your poems?

Steve: Excitement right from the first line so that the reader is immediately taken in. Listen to some of the first lines of the Brazilian poet Adelia Prado: “Old people spit with absolutely no finesse, and bicycles bully traffic on the sidewalk.” I want to read the rest of that poem. Or, “Poetry will save me,” she says. Well, I don’t believe that, I’m thinking, so let’s see what she has to say about it. Or, “I’m looking for the saddest thing, which once found  / will never be lost again because it will follow me / more loyal than a dog, the ghost  / of a dog, sadness beyond words.” Wow!

Also, an excitement in the self-conversation that poetry often is. That requires not staying on the same subject for long. You get boring when you stay on the same subject for too long. And the constant struggle I have with making a line a line. It’s got to have enough information and syntax and sound in it so someone could read that line and it could be, as Roethke says, “a whole poem in itself.’ And that a poem have an identifiable theme, and that the theme be dealt with in as many ways as possible.

That the poem be beautiful. Rhythm. Sounds and music. That it include, as Stephen Dobyns says, the intellectual self, the emotional self, and the sensual, meaning the world as a place to think about, feel, and see.

Valerie: What frustrates you about others' poems?

Steve: That too many poets sound alike. And dullness—they haven’t made me care about something.

Valerie: Stephen Dobyn’s interview in AWP talks about how he doesn’t appreciate poems that don’t allow the reader into what’s going on. And Auden stresses meaning above anything in the poem. Accessibility is one of your interests.

Steve: My obsession is to understand life. Who am I? Who are other people? What are our moral values? How do we violate them? Why do we violate them? What are our ethics? How do you become a better person? Why are we bad or weak or failed people in certain ways?

As for clarity, if I don’t understand something I feel like a moron, and I don’t like people who try to make me feel stupid. So I don’t understand, despite all the talk, much of post-modernism, but especially language poetry. I don’t understand what they’re up to. I don’t understand what it’s for.

The avant-garde can do either of two things. It can teach the middle ground writers what is boring, unnecessary, or flaccid about their poems. For example, the surrealist avant-garde that happened in the mid to late sixties, showed us how tame our imaginations had gotten. So, many young writers, including myself, began to write purely surrealist poems. And many of us, with the exception of the terrific poets James Tate and Charles Simic, realized we (me included) weren’t surreal by nature. But we learned the wonders of the surprising image and how it can break apart a poem.

The other function of the avant-garde is to stretch the limits of language and sense. But the poets who are trying to stretch the limits of language are limiting themselves, because the poems have become about etymology. That’s interesting for a while. But really what we want to learn from life comes from the stories that people tell. They may be presented in some other way than narrative. I always remember that image from a Robert Mezey poem, “A Confession,” which for a while became my reason for writing poetry: “What would I say to a squad car / if it came on its noiseless tires / and picked me out with its lights, like / a cat or a rabbit? That I / only wanted to see how people / live, not knowing how?” My need has to do with trying to figure things out, because everything baffles me, and has baffled me since childhood.

What bothers me is when the avant-garde starts to take on its own machinery and become a swollen part of contemporary American poetry, when it should be a small part. Obviously people need to write those kinds of poems. But I think it’s a mistake for a lot of people to do it because it’s probably not in their natures.

What I found is that a large number of, say undergraduates or graduates, who write that kind of poetry stop writing forever because there’s no necessity for them. To continue writing poetry there has to be need. It’s not just playing around, it’s serious business, it’s like marriage or a love affair, you really have to have the need to keep on with it.