Paul Hoover's most
recent poetry collections are
Sonnet 56 (Les Figues
Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that
number,
Edge
and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and
Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005).
A new book consisting of two poems,
Desolation
: Souvenir, will be published by Omnidawn in early 2012. His volume of
literary essays,
Fables
of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in
2004. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated
Selected Poems of Friedrich
Hölderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), winner of the PEN-USA Translation Award. The
two also edit the literary magazine,
New American Writing. With Nguyen
Do, he edited and translated the anthology,
Black Dog, Black Night:
Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and
Beyond the
Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai (1380-1442), published by Counterpath Press
in 2010. He has won the Frederick Bock Award for poems that appeared in the
June, 2010, issue of
Poetry and, with Sharon Olds, the Jerome J.
Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in
American Poetry Review in
2002. Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, he edited
the widely adopted anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994)
and currently curates the poetry reading series at the deYoung Museum of Fine
Art in San Francisco.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
My first book,
Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear
Albert, was published in 1979, and it changed my life to a small degree. I
was 33 at the time, and my students had been asking me, “When are you going to
publish a book?” So they were relieved, and I’m sure I was, too. The book had a
generous blurb by John Ashbery and was “thick” in language, in the sense that
Péret is thicker than Desnos and Breton or Bruce Andrews is thicker than Lyn
Hejinian. The last couple of poems in the book, including “Nature Poem,” turned
toward a more casual, everyday phrasing I would use later on, in balance with
the “thick.” Irony has long been a feature of my writing, but in recent years I
have varied my idiom, from the lyrical tone of
Poems in Spanish,
Edge
and Fold, and the
Desolation : Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012) to the
proceduralist
Sonnet 56 and “Gravity’s Children,” a book-length series of
poems based on the Books of the Old Testament.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My first real
engagement with poetry began when, as a senior at Manchester College in Indiana,
I took the Modern Poetry class taught by James Hollis, who went on to become a
noted Jungian therapist and author. My term paper for the course was on William
Carlos Williams, a useful choice as it turned out. I hadn’t written any poetry
yet and didn’t trust poetry as a mode of writing. I had been writing short
stories under the influence of Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. I didn’t begin
to write poems until I was 25 and working as middle manager at a Chicago
hospital. Based on the ten or so poems I’d produced, I was accepted by Paul
Carroll to the fledging Program for Writers at University of Illinois Chicago.
Two key moments in those years were James Hollis asking me to get a PhD and
return to Manchester to teach with him, and Paul Carroll telling me, beneath an
umbrella in a spring sun-shower, that I was a “true poet” and he wanted to
include me in the second edition of his anthology,
The Young American
Poets.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing
project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do
first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come
out of copious notes?
I keep notebooks, but only occasionally make use
of them. The major instance was in writing a series of five book-length poems,
each in a single 24-hour day. Only two have been published, “The Reading,”
which appears in
Edge and Fold, and “At the Sound,” published by Beard of
Bees as an electronic chapbook. I became more conscious of the structure of my
books when I started writing long poems. The book
Poems in Spanish was
built around a concept: poems written as if in Spanish. In “Edge and Fold,” my
first attempt at the serial poem, I decided with the first poem on a specific
“look” to the page: no caps, no punctuation, each page consisting of
hesitation, application, swerving, and silence. Once I’m engaged in a project,
I’m persistent and work every day on it. As a result, I seem to work quickly.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of
short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on
a "book" from the very beginning?
A phrase or concept is enough to begin,
if I’m open to writing that day. It also helps enormously if I’m working on a
series. In my last three books, I had the concept from the start. With
“Gravity’s Children,” I knew would begin with Genesis and end with Malachi, one
poem for each book of the Old Testament. But I had no idea of the tone of the
book and had not read the Bible to any degree before starting. In a serial poem
like “Edge and Fold,” each page is made to cohere by a lash or knot of language
that also sits well with neighboring pages. All the relatedness comes in the
moment of making, not in advance, by intuition rather than a map.
5 -
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy giving readings and
believe that the best test of a poem is to read it in front of an audience. But
there can be a great difference in audiences, and some poems aren’t designed for
a general audience.
Charles
Bernstein has a lot of fun with this theme in his recent book,
Attack
of the Difficult Poems. The rule is generally: the more avant-garde
your work, the less a general audience can understand you. I prefer to feel a
perfect absorption of the poem by the audience, which can literally be heard as
a silence from the place you are speaking. It’s this exchange of attentions
that probably led
Robert
Creeley to define a poem as “an act of attention.” Difficulty can receive
such attention, too, as long as the poet reads her work in its true cadence and
intention—that is, from the inside, with an active interest—as
Gertrude Stein does in
her recording of “Would He Like It if I Told Him: A Portrait of Picasso.”
When the poet places her feelings outside the poem, attention immediately
wavers, and the audience sends back signals of unease and impatience.
The
success of Flarf, conceptual poetry, and Newlipo is due in large part to their
perfect accessibility. Such works carry with them a clear announcement of what
they are and what they are not; that is, their concept and form speak in advance
of their words. They declare: (1) I’m a 900-page transcript of an issue of the
New York Times; (2) a series of prose poems employing only the vowel “a,”
“e,” “i,” “o,” or “u”; (3) a poem consisting entirely of language found online
with search engines. Such works may seem easy, because you don’t have to read
them very carefully to comprehend their value. However, virtuosity and
craftsmanship still pertain in the case of
Christian Bök’s
Eunoia or
Harryette Mullen’s
Muse & Drudge. Flarf craftsmanship lies in the sculpting of
tone, conceptualism in the crafting of concept. When conceptualist
Vanessa Place reads her
book-length work consisting of the letter “u,” she gives up after 60 seconds,
realizing that she, too, is bored by it. Such conceptual works are never
fulfilled by performance, but rather exhausted by it. This doesn’t mean they
are any less as conceptual works. Better to hold the weighty book in your hand
and muse silently on its material existence.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying
to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I’m not after anything in my poems that I know how to name,
theoretically or otherwise. Nor do I have questions for the poem. It raises
its own questions. We seem to be at a moment when the materialist motive is
gaining ground and subjectivity is at low ebb. Taking sides in that battle does
tend to prepare the poem in advance by muting or enhancing irony and desire. I
believe that poetry will always remain more or less expressive at base. Finally
there comes a parking lot so dark you have to whistle your way across it.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer
should be?
The rise to political influence of the Mexican poet Javier
Sicilia following the death of his son would never have occurred in the United
States. We say the right things privately, we give money to causes, but,
intimidated by the Homeland Security act and the specter of disappearing into an
offshore torture site, we fall silent. When Maria Baranda, Eduardo Hurtado,
David Huerta, and a dozen other poets of Mexico City announced a march to bring
peace in the war on drugs, 40,000 people showed up in the Zocalo on three days’
notice.
I do believe that writers and intellectuals should have political
influence, as happened when Robert Lowell, Bertrand Russell, and Norman Mailer
headed the march on the Pentagon. Perhaps the problem is that intellectuals
have ceased being celebrities in the U.S. Our most effective political
philosophers seem to be George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie. And
there’s no Dick Cavett or David Susskind in the mass media to remind us how
important our intellectual lives are.
8 - Do you find the process of
working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
There
should be more editing rather than less. When a chapter of my novel was
published in
The New Yorker, the editor changed nearly every sentence to
suit the house style. But I changed much of it back for the novel publication.
Rusty Morrison of Omnidawn is a
good line by line editor and improved several passages in
Poems in
Spanish. Usually there isn’t much in the way of content editing in poetry;
it’s easier to eliminate the entire poem.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You’re
only as good as your last poem (
Dean Faulwell). Run
straight to the heart of the battle as if already dead (
The
Book of the Samurai). The greater the distance, the clearer the view
(
W. G. Sebald).
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.
10 – How easy
has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do
you see as the appeal?
I’ve made several genre shifts from poetry:
writing three plays one summer in the 1970s; writing a novel in the 1980s
(
Saigon, Illinois, Vintage Contemporaries, 1988); writing critical prose
in the 90s (
Fables of Representation, University of Michigan Press,
2004); and translating Hölderlin, Nguyen Trai, and San Juan de la Cruz. Each of
the genre crossings was instructive to my poetry, but translation has had the
greatest impact. Prose doesn’t have much appeal for me right now. I can’t
imagine writing another novel, what a lot of work! The poetry genre is the
fairest of them all, but you would never know it by reading critical prose. You
have to stand in the mirror of a great poem.
11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical
day (for you) begin?
If I’m on a writing project, writing begins the
first thing after breakfast and continues until I have to eat lunch. Then I
work a little more, until around 2 p.m. I’m happiest when I’m writing every
day.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or
return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I listen to
recordings of poets reading their work or open a volume of
Stevens or
Vallejo.
Lorine Niedecker and
Stevie Smith are also
very helpful.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Poison
(Christian Dior).
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come
from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether
nature, music, science or visual art?
Films are inspiring to me, also
gallery visits, especially photography. I rarely listen to music but love good
classical music when I chance upon it.
15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work?
Italo Calvino,
Carlos Drummond de
Andrade,
Fernando
Pessoa,
Emily
Dickinson,
Thomas Traherne,
and
John Clare.
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to Italy.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it
be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not
been a writer?
It would be nice to run a small movie theater, where I’d
have a small windowless office near the concession stand. I enjoy physical
tasks, so I might also have thrived as a welder or carpenter.
18 -
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think
there was ever another option. In the eighth grade, I wanted to be a scientist
because Mr. Blazer, our science teacher, was a very nice man, wore well-tailored
suits, and ran successful experiments. My father used to speak of having a
“calling” in the church. I don’t think one calls on poetry; it appears to you
one day on the street, both arms laced to the shoulder with wristwatches,
whispering something you have to lean close to understand.
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m not
sure it’s a great book, but I loved
Toy Medium:
Materialism and the Modern Lyric by Daniel Tiffany. The most
emotionally satisfying movie I’ve seen recently is the Japanese film,
Departures (2008), about an
out of work cellist who takes a job ceremonially dressing dead bodies, as is the
custom, in view of the family. My favorite movie of all time is
The Last Picture Show.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m between projects,
so I’m tinkering with two completed manuscripts, “Gravity’s Children,” which
I’ve already described, and “The Windows,” which consists of proceduralist
works. I’m supposed to be writing an introduction to my translation, with María
Baranda, of the
Poesías of San Juan de la Cruz, but I’m getting a slow
start due to other tasks like teaching, editing
New American Writing,
judging poetry contexts, and writing a book of essays about the moral aspect of
poetry.
