I’d say that a good many poems in this book and previous books wrestle with prayer. I wouldn’t characterize my disposition as suggesting that prayer ever goes unanswered, but I would say that prayer as petition has come to seem a waste of time, and perhaps a waste of prayer. If prayer does anything, I’d say it offers brief moments of communion.
The truth is there wouldn’t be much poetry without my faith. It all began when I was living in Beacon in a proto novitiate for young Marianists back in 1956-7. There was a poetry contest given by an order of nuns, with first prize being ten dollars. No one knew much about poetry, so I took out a book which explained scansion and wrote a sonnet focused on Good Friday. Then, at Manhattan College, poems about John the Baptist.
I was pretty lonely as a child. We lived far from town, surrounded by endless rolling wheat fields and tangled pockets of forest. The roads were mostly dirt. Certain trees, abandoned houses, and all sorts of interesting empty places became nearly as important to me as living, breathing friends. Some approximation of all that had to make it into my story. Places have meaning.
I’ve always felt my work centered on the inextricable nature of joy and sorrow. I’d say the selection of poems drew on three aspects: that for me the ordinary world is extraordinary; that what’s extraordinary is we live in a creation that need not be, but is; and that our work is, as Gary Snyder has said, to make the real world as real as possible. To me that involves my attempts, however often I’ve failed, to see the world and not my “idea” of the world, as Wallace Stevens put it. I have always felt the unearthly earthliness of the world I live in and I hope the poems I’ve chosen reflect that in myriad ways.
I find myself writing a lot about the feeling of things coming an end, and so the worlds in the stories inevitably share some characteristics. Things are always breaking down, or are right at the point of breaking down. I don’t try to link the stories or sketch out all the rules, so there’s not much true world-building going on outside the pages. But I wouldn’t disagree that a lot of the stories could share a single imaginative landscape.
This book is primarily composed of love poems that I have been writing for over twenty years for my wife. They are all free verse poems, except for the title poem, made of lines of only three syllables each. Of all the poems I’ve written, probably half my work is in strict forms and half free verse. But this collection, for some reason, has pushed the regular meters/structures away in favor of wilder rhythms and lines. Lastly, this book is almost entirely set in Spain, where we spent a good amount of time in the first fifteen years of our marriage.
I believe that the great poets and writers (and other artists) can be like shamans who show us deep truths about the society of which we are part. That’s why I wrote Legends of the Slow Explosion, which is about various figures who had stories to tell us that were embodied in their lives and times. The people are various—Miles Davis and Hannah Arendt, for instance—but they all fit that legendary profile.
I’d been thinking for a while about the time and place of where I grew up—in rural Minnesota in the 1980s, in the middle of what came to be called the farm crisis. For my MFA program, I had written an essay exploring one or two aspects of the experience. Then right at the end of my program, my father had this huge meltdown, his whole nervous system was just shutting down.
Early on, I recall reading a lot of Robert Lowell’s poems, including his poem “For the Union Dead.” More recently, in addition to a large array of many other poets’ works, I’ve been paying attention to the work of Eastern European poets, including Miklos Radnoti, Milosz, and Adam Zagajewski. This is not definitive, though.
I got interested in captivity narratives when I first read Mary Rowlandson’s in a graduate class. (Captivity narratives are the personal stories of those who have been captured by an enemy. Sarah’s voice in this story is one of those.) Mary Rowlandson was an English colonist who was captured by Native people in 1675 during King Philip’s War and held for ransom. Her account became what was really the first American bestseller.
Like the other two books in your trilogy, The Grand Valley focuses on a single work of art—in this case, it’s fair to say, on a series of paintings. The artist is Joan Mitchell, who many people may not have heard of. Can you give us a “teaser” for the book—why is this artist worth paying attention to?
In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance. With a bit of language, I attempt to give shape to the ineffable, that which is beyond words.
My poetry often wrestles with the spiritual, but seldom through nature. Not formal religion, and seldom through worship. Regardless, I hope that my readers sense that, though the angles at which I approach this subject can be acute and vary widely, their target remains the same. The tension between science and belief is constant. The parallels are striking and have provided a lifetime of points of entry into my poetry.
My interest is in expressing, to the best of my ability, the richness of human experience. When people sum up experience in narrow ways, when they claim sure knowledge of a world that is, in final analysis, beyond human knowing, when they claim that life is void of meaning—though, so often, we experience a sense of fullness every day—they are in a flight from meaning, in my sense of things.
I’ve been reading Mojtabai ever since, as her slim and potent novels have appeared at intervals over the years. Even if we concede that every interesting writer is in a sense sui generis, Mojtabai has had a career that distinguishes her as one who follows her own path. In some respects, she could be said to have had an anti-career, as stubbornly resistant to literary fashion as to the imperatives of the marketplace.
One day for reasons unknown I was struck with this image of a boy riding with his father along a back country road. When I put myself in that boy’s shoes, I couldn’t help but see from the perspective of my own boyhood, which put them in North Carolina, and made the boy’s father a Vietnam combat veteran—someone big, powerful, and dangerous, as my stepfather was (or at least that’s how I saw him at the time).
What I began to do was to pore over the Greek of the original, compare my own impressions with existing translations—where they existed—and in a crazy mixture of line-stealing, argumentation, agreement, and general response to what came to mind as I read the Greek and the English versions, I answered these poets with poems of my own.
I think moments from my own life always find their way into my fiction, but certainly this novel and my earlier short stories blend both personal experience and invention. That’s typical for most writers I know and have read about. The narrator, Joe, began as a character similar to me, but so did his girlfriend Ashley. I suppose they both mirror basic aspects of my life.
There’s a moment in the piece titled “Security” when a number of cultures and religions—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab-American, straight-up American, Muslim, Jewish, Arab Christian and American Christian (!)—are all gathered around an impending meal, and there’s a moment of shared holiness despite the locale and the means by which we arrived at this venue.
Some readers have asked: who is the you? I hope it’s not greedy to have “you” mean multiple things! First it speaks to the reader, the “you” who’s invited into the book. In some of the poems “You” addresses the Divine. And in other poems the “you” is addressed to the friend, a character in the book. Finally, “Matters for you Alone”: not only meant for a single person, but also for someone literally by himself: a solitary reader.