We recently spoke with poet Stephen Haven about his new Slant book, The Flight from Meaning

The Flight from Meaning quotes Pier Paolo Pasolini at the beginning of the book, and there are six poems in the collection that begin with lines from Pasolini’s poetry. What role does Pasolini play in the collection?

The poems in response to Pasolini were among the first written for The Flight from Meaning. After admiring Pasolini’s films for many years, and having myself been raised in a working class, Italian neighborhood (in a white-collar Anglican family, on this side of the Atlantic, rather than in Italy), I was drawn to Pasolini’s ability to write from a disparate range of influences—his working-class heritage, his devout religious upbringing, his ability to straddle social classes, his meditations on the centrality of Christianity in the development of Western culture, and his understanding of ways that influence was changing in the post-World War II era. Also, I was drawn to Pasolini’s celebration of sex as a healthy, joyous part of human life (here I am thinking of his Trilogy of Life films, not his nihilist, last film, Salò). I was also deeply interested in his sense that in the decades following World War II, hyper-commercialism was a more insidious threat to Western culture than even fascism.

Those were among the many reasons I chose to read Pasolini so closely. But beyond all that, as a writer I was most fully drawn to Pasolini’s masterful use of the poetic line. I was reading Norman MacAfee’s translations. When I read such lines as “orderly / squads of flowers in the chaos of existence,” I was awed with Pasolini’s ability to pack wide meaning in a single brush stroke. In my sense of things, the poetic line is to a poet what the brush stroke is to a painter. As a writer interested always in working through strong lines, I made a list of individual Pasolini lines I most admired. Rather than try to write poems about Pasolini, I wrote improvisations on individual lines from Pasolini, most of them appearing as titles in my poems. In this sense, The Flight from Meaning started as a dialog with Pasolini. Though I wrote many more, I only kept for my book six poems that begin with a line (or lines) from Pasolini. The improvisational approach to writing those poems likely influenced the mode of composition in my book as a whole.

The title The Flight from Meaning suggests that the book is about a flight away from meaning—a departure from meaning. What is the sense of the title and in what way does it relate to the book as a whole?

That is a complicated question that individual poems might answer best. But I will say that moments in life are rare when we are thinking or feeling in only one monolithic way. Possibly in passionate moments—moments of anger, violence, love, sexual passion, shame—you might feel or understand one and only one all-encompassing sense of a single moment. But most of life is experienced otherwise. We love our children, grieve for their absence when they graduate from high school, and celebrate the adult freedom that their college years bring, all at once, despite any contradiction. More often than not, the artist who wants to portray a believable human experience needs to bring into the language a range of feeling, a range of sense, that might capture the depth and breadth of that moment.

In my sense of things, poems published so often in journals or on the internet these days rob poetry of its own nature when they operate mainly through a flat surface narrative. If there is an argument in favor of poems written that way, it might be that they are more accessible and, in that sense, more democratic. But my interest as a writer is not in being more or less democratic. My interest is in expressing, to the best of my ability, the richness of human experience, in response to people in all stations of life, wherever I encounter them. 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, or when writers offer poems that reduce experience to one-dimensional story-lines, they are in a flight from meaning, in my sense of things.

You have a long meditation, “Filthy Lucre,” on the legacy of slavery in The Flight from Meaning. How did that come about?

That poem was written after my sister researched our family genealogy and discovered that we have slavery on my mother’s side. In my naivete, or through utter cultural denial, that realization came as a shock to me. My father’s family were abolitionists, throughout the nineteenth century. Some men on my father’s side devoted their lives to the antislavery movement through national leadership positions in the northern Methodist Church. That was a story I knew growing up. So, it was disturbing to discover that we enslaved many people in a wing of the family that extends to pre-Civil War South Carolina.

At the time of my sister’s discovery, I was living in Boston. In response to my work community, I remember thinking that this is the side of slavery that progressive, northern Americans tend to ignore. When you scratch the surface of white America you find slavery somewhere. North, South, East, and West. When I shared that idea with my college friend Alan Miller, a writer and teacher originally from Chicago who I refer to briefly in “Filthy Lucre,” Alan said: you don’t even have to scratch.

Prior to the time my sister dug into our family genealogy, I spent three years working out at the Warrensville Heights YMCA, outside Cleveland. That Y was a beautiful, new facility with a 90% African American membership. Two of the seniors there, Al Davis and Sam Wright, became my gym buddies, both of them close to my age. They would check on me by phone if I was absent too many days from the gym. Then we started hanging out a bit after hours, mainly going out to dinner or watching the Cleveland Cavs on TV.

My poem “Filthy Lucre” explores also my friendships with African American members of my childhood church basketball team, as well as my mother’s close friendship with one black family in my hometown—the Blood family—who joined my father’s parish when the African Methodist Episcopal Church failed in my hometown.

The poems in this collection are rooted in many geographies—Beijing, Provincetown, Boston, Cape Cod, Houston, Cleveland, other parts of Ohio, Indonesia, upstate New York. In this book, what role is played by such a wide geographic range?

The geographic center of my life is upstate New York, where I spent my childhood. In my experience, people form deeper friendships in childhood than they do in adult years, especially if they grow up in small towns. Possibly, I write my poems out of a sense of what feels like home to me. One sense of home is the Mohawk Valley, a region rich in American history. Possibly within that central place my father’s church is a more specific sense of home. Within that more particular home there is still another sense: Our homes are temporary. We are visitors on this planet. We are passing through.

In another sense, the Boston area is also home to me, as my family on my father’s side is originally from Massachusetts. Also, during my childhood we spent vacations on Cape Cod and I live on the south shore of Boston today. Even when I was living in Ohio, I often spent a summer week or two at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

In still another sense, China is a kind of home to me, in part because my first wife is Chinese. My daughter was born in Beijing. My son, like his mother, is a composer. He writes avant-garde music in the classical tradition, at least partially through an awareness of his Chinese grandfather, a composer killed in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. I spent two and a half years living and teaching in China, visiting more than fifteen cities and developing friendships with many Chinese writers.

Now I am married to a woman who was raised in Yugoslavia and who came to the United States at the age of forty-two. My poem, “Chagall’s Song of Songs III,” celebrates (among other things) our sense of home in each other. We hung Song of Songs III in our bedroom the day we bought a house together and there it remains. The people and places I write about were not always good to me. I was not always good to them. But if love was there, and it was shared, those places tend to show up in my poems.