Shannan

Sometimes your poems resemble minimalist modern paintings —  objects of delight to be experienced, unwound, entered into. I’m thinking, in particular, about “Selfie” here wherein you open with the beautiful and seemingly cryptic: “How the / hard rings / stack up.” Rings conjures trees, infinity, ecology, and as I frame it with the title’s “self(ie)”, I think of personal responsibility within existence. Like this, these poems weave a braid out of so many varied themes: age, climate crisis, self-discovery, nature, modernism, the grind of capitalism, serenity. I’d love to hear whether you envision your reader entering into conversation with your pieces with a specific map or agenda in mind or if you see it more as a free-flowing practice in co-creating. And perhaps neither of those things align with how you feel your poems ought to or do implicate and involve your readers. I welcome you to touch on any aspect of the ever mysterious writer-reader relationship. 

Rae

I would like a reader to enter the poem with open eyes and mind and no particular expectations, alert as we are in a new space. I don’t intend to make poems ambiguous. I just don’t immediately edit out ambiguities. That said, I’ve often had occasion to tell students that you may be able to read a line or a poem in several ways—but not in any old way.  The adjectives and verbs around a noun will constrain its possible meanings at least somewhat.

       The beginning of “Selfie” is, as you suggest, especially open-ended, even for me. A reader will likely try to think what kind of “ring” is being referred to in the second line. Since “ring” is a word with several possible meanings. They could be tree rings certainly. Rings of ripples in water might come to mind too—but they aren’t “hard.” Rings could be pieces of jewelry, but that kind of rings don’t generally get “stacked up”—or maybe they are. More colloquially, to “stack up” is to be compared with others, to do well—or not. That phrase introduces a note of anxiety into poem. Actually, I was looking at the kind of palm tree trunk that seems composed of scaly rings. They look literally stacked up, like they were built of tinker toys. In the second section, there are “branches” which could confirm the idea that the poem is referencing a tree. Here it seems like a deciduous tree whose branches and twigs grow smaller after each division. That could induce more anxiety too perhaps, a sense of shrinking.

       Then the third section opens with three nouns in a row, three possible subjects. Or are they really one thing called by three different names? We all know what a selfie is—a picture you take of yourself with a camera phone. By itself, it might sound like a diminutive. “Autie” is more obscure. I was thinking of an automaton, a cute little robot perhaps. Ending as they do with “ie” both words read as diminutives (I also remember hearing that “autie” is an affectionate term used within the autism community.) “Bird,” the third term, is the simplest of the three. For one thing, you might expect to see a bird in the trees the poem has invited you to picture. The way the section ends with “thrills itself/awake with chirps” helps dispel the anxieties the first two parts introduced. The bird doesn’t care how it “stacks up” as long as it can go on singing.

       I guess you could say that the various parts of the poem are autonomous, are “auties” (very loosely interpreted) or “selfies.” I hope they work both on their own and together. So, moving from association to association, which is what I do when I write, I’ve provided a sample way to read this poem. I’m sure there are others. I don’t mean to be directive. I hesitate to say what a poem is “about” because, as I’m writing it, I usually have no idea where it’s going. When it’s finished, I can speculate only because I know what I was looking at and generally how I was feeling when I started writing. 

Shannan

You say in one of your interviews that the Vietnam War had a great impact on your becoming a language poet — could you speak more about that? The impact of the war, and also the idea of a language poet per se. Who is a language poet? Is it possible to be any other kind of poet? How do your poems manipulate and create reality as opposed to representing it? Is the war’s impression on your writing still there?

Rae

I think of “Language Poetry” as a poetic school or movement that took shape in San Francisco and New York in the 1970s and 80s, not as a static form or style that exists outside of time. I moved to San Francisco in 1972 to go to grad school at San Francisco State. I already knew Ron Silliman from our time at Berkeley. By 1975 the group was starting to form. Barrett Watten and Bob Perelman were there and Lyn Hejinian soon would be. Carla Harryman and Steve Benson arrived around that time too. These people were serious about writing and thinking. It was often contentious, but we had fun too. It was a friendship group in which we tried out new ideas. I was by no means a leader, but I learned a tremendous amount. We didn’t call ourselves “the language poets,” by the way. I always thought that was a really dumb name. A local magazine called Poetry Flash started referring to us that way. It caught on and eventually we gave up and accepted it. And, yes, the Vietnam War was dragging on during the early and mid 70’s. That meant that if you read the paper or watched TV you would hear blatant disinformation. Administration spokespeople referred to prison camps for South Vietnamese suspected of helping the Vietcong as “freedom hamlets,” for instance. You heard generals say “we” were winning the war and watched shiploads of coffins unloaded. What did winning even mean?  Sadly, we all continue to have new experiences with war and disinformation. For whatever reason, and this could have certainly been one of them, we ceased to believe that language could be a clear, neutral window on the world. Our movement was interested in examining the medium of language itself, how meaning is constructed within it.  All of this sounds obvious now. It’s also been said that language writing demonstrated how individual, tangentially related sentences and/or, in my case, sections, could exemplify a kind of direct, participatory democracy in which each unit (of whatever sort) was equal and independent. Ron Silliman named this style “the new sentence.” The form’s relation to actual politics on the ground seems like a stretch.

Shannan

Most of your poems are generally written in sections that might not have an apparent relationship with each other — but of course there’s a subtle connection — either tonal or an image that runs through or just the atmosphere created by these little vignettes. Consider “Notes”, the first section captures a small but delightful moment in a garden perhaps or out in nature. We do not directly read of the observer and yet still we can surmise that the speaker who is observing this scenario play out is someone who takes pleasure in these small but shimmering aspects of the natural world. The next note is linked with the previous, in the form of environment — this is “the hottest day”, but the ending line describing the play of “goose, goose, duck” also brings back the childlike wonder of the previous note. The final note is almost self-referential “to liven things up.” I think here the speaker presents herself far more forcefully, despite the “I” never coming into play, because the speaker is directly calling attention to herself as the orchestrator, the individual in charge of shaping emotion. I find this fascinating and even daring, that you do not care if the speaker and the poet are enmeshed for the reader. In a recent interview with Tin House’s Between the Covers, you note how “it’s an unnamed object of perception which I was surrendering to at that moment.” I love how this coincides with the breaks and beginnings of your play with language. Perception moving through personhood and becoming tangible, personal in and of itself. What do you think influences or first influenced you to write poems in multiple sections? What is it about our world, or human thought, that warrants this fragmentary style? I’d also love to hear what thoughts you have as you move through the individual “notes”. 

Rae

I just want to say, first, that I appreciate your reading of this poem and, especially, the way you speculate on the relationship of the speaker to the text. I don’t think that gets talked about enough. It’s true that I’m not crazy about using the first person, for whatever reason, though I sometimes do, of course. Maybe I’m afraid it will bring a sort of bathos with it. Maybe I think it will raise confessional expectations the poem won’t exactly fulfill. A speaker is hovering nearby in this poem, just barely in the background. Yes, I was sitting on my porch watching butterflies chase each other when I wrote the first part. I just don’t feel it’s necessary or useful to start with, “From my porch, I saw the zigs-zags…”. That just introduces several dull, unnecessary words. Anyway, I was writing, as the second section suggests, in those weeks last July when each new day the media told us , was “the hottest ever recorded “ for that date. Needless to say, the weather this year has been somewhere between worrisome and terrifying depending on where you live. I chose to keep the tone light though, at least on the surface. “Duck, duck, goose” is a children’s game—or used to be. I changed the order of the words to read “goose, goose, duck” because I wanted to make “duck,” with its possible meaning as a verb, the final word.

       You’re right to suggest that the first and second sections have some clear possible connections. They both reference the natural world, summer, and play. The third section is a bit more of a leap maybe, though there’s no reason the person looking at the butterflies and, perhaps, reading the paper couldn’t also be listening to music. And I often find Mozart’s music playful. I’m certainly no expert on music, but it seems that classical music, perhaps all music, works through a number of variations and then ends by coming back somehow to where it began. This has a reassuring effect, but underneath I was still thinking about the weather, whether summer temperatures would return to the historical average or just keep getting higher and higher. I’m aware of seeming to, perhaps, introduce my own agency at the end when I talk about going higher in order to “liven things up.” Higher isn’t always good, of course. Higher temps can liven things up in unpleasant ways. Hurricanes are pretty lively. 

  As to why I write in sections—I don’t always. When I do, I think it’s because my center of attention shifts and a new setting or new imagery comes in. If I’m not going to move the reader around with narrative, it seems like the best way to move from one place to another is just to jump. And then I’ve always been interested in the various ways things can be put together and the ways they come apart. 

Shannan

In both “Kinks” and “Necessities”, there is a sense of waiting, longing, and expectation. You write, in “Necessities”: “someone always ready / to carry on from where / you — which one is you? —“, that question broken between the em-dashes feels harsh and yet monumental. A hand reaching out of the landscape of the narrative and shaking us, though gently, by the collar. I love how this sense of confrontation connects with the longing of the simple “Almost summer / Almost Xmas” in “Kinks”. Summer to Xmas is a big jump, but the speaker takes it without a break. There is a desire to face the world, but not necessarily to pass through it without having made some impact in some way despite the “obligatory” nature of “beauty” or “the absence of bees”. Would you please reflect further on how you see the evolution of your poetic voice in connection with the amazing career you’ve had? Are there risks you can take as a poet and person now that might have been unthinkable before? Or do you still move between the longing and confrontation that pulls your poems in opposing yet harmonious wavelengths? Please touch on anything in this question that you find interesting, or any other lovely rabbit hole it might lead you to. 

Rae

This is a big question. Thanks for allowing me to roam around within it.  It’s helpful to see the way you pair “Kinks” and “Necessities” here. They do have a somewhat similar tone, but I’d say “Kinks” is more urgent—closer to desperation than longing. People tell their kids that Christmas is coming soon to get them excited about the future, I think, to hook them into the passage of time. At Christmas you might get presents; in summer you might go on vacation. So in the poem, the good things I mention are almost good, almost within reach, but not quite yet. The world in which this longing is set includes scribbles of electrical wire on a power pole that are “almost pretty.” I mean if that’s the most the scene has to offer it has aways to go. There are also “desiccated exchanges,” and “ritual bankruptcy,” — the world of the poem sounds pretty harsh. In “Necessities,” on the other hand, there are actual roses, actual beauty, but the speaker in my poems seems hard to please. Pretty neurotic, I guess. Hmm, I wonder who that could be. Anyway, there’s a red rose on almost every stem and each rose is made of whorled red petals. It sounds like it’s getting to be too much. The poem wants to know if beauty is based in repetition. That’s a real question. The fugues in the second part are repetitious too. They’re like a relay race. I guess it’s reassuring to think someone will carry on for us after we’re gone. That hope might be close to the “expectation” you mention. But if all this abstract carrying on is a good thing—why is that? The final stanza is a way of asking that question. For me poems are often a way of asking questions about things that trouble me. I’ve said that in other interviews, but it’s still true. I think I like talking about specific poemsrather than answering general questions because then I am less likely to say what I always say—or worse yet, say what everyone always says.

  It’s very hard for me to look back over my writing life and see whether and in what way I’ve changed. I wish you—or someone—would tell me. The things that drive me and my basic modus operandi are the same as they were. Different things seem risky these days, now that I’m old. I suppose, for instance, that it feels risky now to write about my body or about sexual feelings. I don’t want to scare people. (I still do it sometimes though.) I can think of individual poems that seem risky to me. I just wrote a poem called “Islands” where the first half is mostly about my grandmother and her love for the wrestler Gorgeous George It mixes what could be seen as sentimental with what might come off as bizarre. The second part is about how God is too busy working to notice us no matter how gorgeous or outlandish we are. So that poem has something to offend lots of folks. It has really long lines too, which is unusual for me. And lately I’ve been writing some poems that aren’t broken into sections. I find that challenging, though no one else might recognize it as such. Some risks aren’t necessarily evident to others.

Shannan

Thank you so much for these enriching insights, Rae. Because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know your most influential poets.

Rae

The first two are easy. Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. The third is Ron Silliman. Since he is a peer, that requires explanation. We’re friends so I hear his very astute comments on my work. I know my writing looks nothing like his. He writes really long poems and I write relatively short ones, just for starters. And he doesn’t really play with the role of the speaker the way I do—or at least he has rarely done that. I learn from him what I began learning from Williams—the importance of paying attention—actually listening to what you hear, actually looking at what you see. In Ketjak he writes, “Attention is all.” I need to learn that over and over.