oni'sinterview

MF: You’re both a published poet as well as a performing concert pianist. When people ask what you do what do you answer? Do you consider yourself more one than the other? At some point in their lives, a lot of people would have chosen poetry over music or vice versa, what made you decide to pursue both?

OB: Depending on how deep I want to go into the conversation, I will respond differently when people ask what I do. If I’m very short on time or am fatigued from explaining myself over and over again, I will just say that I’m a concert pianist because it takes a lot less explanation than trying to tell somebody that you’re a poet. Unless you’re speaking to a poet. I consider myself both a concert pianist and a poet, though almost my entire income is related to the piano.

I didn’t really decide to pursue both piano and poetry. What I did decide was that everything else was taking too much time away from my piano practicing and poetry writing, so my decision was really to drop my biology major and my physics pursuits, and forego (or at least adapt) several other habitual interests such as cryptanalysis (and general puzzle solving), song-writing, and constructing elaborate gifts such as the Squirrel Cube, the Magic Blake Ball, an extensive magnet collection of yellow foods, several structural spin-offs of the Advent calendar concept, and other projects too numerous to be named. Also, I decided to be generally absent from all social activities.

Basically, through intensely painful and extremely unpleasant trial and error experimentation (painful and unpleasant for everyone involved), I figured out that I need to be practicing a lot and also I need to be writing a lot in order to stay happy and sane. These are the terms, and I’ve fashioned my life around satisfying the demands of the terms I’ve been given.

MF: Your book of poems, What Animal, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series and was published in October 2003. Many of the poems have animals as narrators and/or personae—yaks, ducks, guinea pigs, horses, pets, and sheep. Other poems that do not necessarily have animals as characters often have animal-related imagery. What did this “language of animals” offer you as a poet?

OB: I didn’t really turn to the “language of animals” as a technical or formal concept, it’s just how I speak and so it’s very natural to me. Every day, I speak a range of animal languages to communicate. Also, I call on any number of animal behavioral and biological adaptations and expertises to help me navigate through whatever pianistic or poetic or topographical or life obstacles I happen to encounter during my day.

I have a huge repertoire of domestic and farm animal languages, including pigs, goats, sheep, donkeys, cows, guinea pigs, cats, and rabbits. I never really speak like a horse but sometimes I eat like a horse if people will hold food for me with a flat hand. I guess I usually focus on mammals for my spoken languages. Birds and lizards have been especially neglected, even more so than certain parasites and microbial organisms. One time I made a toucan sound when I was surprised, but I didn’t appreciate having made it. Other favorite mammals I can speak like or call upon include the two-toed sloth, all the big cats, especially the lioness, tiger, panther, and jaguar (these are especially useful before solo piano concerts), the tapir, the capybara, the mountain goat, the giraffe, the gazelle, the water buffalo, the hippo and the rhino. Marine plants and animals I have sometimes been in the past include the flounder, the clam, the skate, the manta ray, the crab, the shark, the narwhal, plankton in general, some types of algae, the eel, the remora, the sea urchin, the puffer fish, the clown fish, the brittle star, the sea cucumber, anemones, sea horses, and of course whales and dolphins. I can also speak like a snail and like a turtle and I have spoken like a newt, but infrequently.

I am often inanimate objects as well, but that’s not really the question. I find certain people really speak these languages fluently, notably the poets Sabrina Orah Mark, Michael Tyrell, and Michael Dumanis, as well as the fabulous jazz bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, but I think everybody innately can. I mean, my family and friends understand me when I speak to them. I bet Lyn Hejinian speaks all these languages.

MF: You also employ a lot of different techniques—alliteration, assonance, word play, and repetition—in your poems. In addition, you also bind the poems together by using similar images throughout them. For example, I’m thinking of various forms of greenery—prairie grass, alfalfa, clover, dandelions—you mention. While a reader might not consciously notice all of these, they do help provide continuity among the poems. I was wondering if you could talk about how you put a collection of poems together in such as way that each poem can stand on its own and be part of a collection?

OB: I do like greenery, and I guess it shows. But I actually specifically try NOT to think about putting a collection together when I’m first writing something, unless I’ve built a book-length formal structure which is a different story and takes a different strategy of approach. But ordinarily, in a first or second or third draft of a poem, I’m usually playing with and experimenting with words and structures to see what will happen. I think of words chemically, molecularly, atomically. I like to see what words or syllables are attracted to what other words or syllables, and what can come out of crossing different words and sounds, or out of stringing them together. The same kinds of trials and games can be conducted with images and image constellations, tones and tonal constellations, rhythms, tempi, and so forth. It’s just astounding what materials will do if you put them next to one another or on top of one another or inside one another and observe them react. In early drafts, I try to practice observing the materials with an unprejudiced eye, ear, heart—but of course I am always funneling, channeling, selecting, eliminating, discriminating.

As far as building continuity over a group of poems goes, much of the work of continuity is done by my obsessions and/or my parameters of observation, which, if they endure for a span of time, surface again and again in whatever I’m working on at the time and link the poems together. But once I’ve got a stack of poems and want to put them into a “book,” I do spend a huge amount of time finding arcs or patterns or progressions that link the poems in some way.

The process of ordering a book is just like writing a poem but on a larger scale. And there are always endless numbers of arcs and patterns to discover! After having found a significant number of orderings, I can choose among them based on some set of criteria: which ordering reverberates the most in some way or other, which reaches some wholly unpredictable destination, which reaches no destination at all and just evaporates entirely, which explores a certain formal possibility or a certain emotional narrative or psychological landscape most completely (or incompletely), and so on. As always, some poems in whatever stack I’m exploring don’t fit into some of the possible orderings but do fit into other orderings. Sometimes difficult poems that seem not to belong anywhere end up acting as shoehorns that rupture a smaller ordering arc into something more astonishing in the effort to accommodate them. It’s really a matter of judgment and of allowing the book of poems to fluctuate among several of its most notable orderings before you step in to stabilize it into a single order--or not.

MF: You’ve written a series of poems called The Mandrake Vehicles that have been animated by Flash-animation artist Betsy Stone Mazzoleni and that are currently published online at the Conduit Literary Magazine website. How did you come up with the idea of animated poetry and what does it add to reading and understanding poetry?

OB: Well, I didn’t come up with animated/kinetic poetry, and I don’t know who did, if anybody. Like many poets and other people who love words, I’ve always looked at language as mutable and in constant fluctuation. From the macro down to the micro, from the canon of literature to individual books to pages of text to words to individual letters to fragments of letters, everything contains some other potential or group of potentials that could come to the forefront and eclipse what is most visible, like dominant and recessive genes. The Mandrake Vehicles are written in a form that I invented to demonstrate the fluctuating potentials of the letters, words, and texts present in each vehicle, or as I mentioned above, the chemical properties of these words and letters and their manners of reacting with one another. I actually wrote and designed The Mandrake Vehicles on paper, not intending them to be computer-animated at all, but expecting the work of the text motions to be partly done by the page turns and mostly by the imagination of the reader. In a way, I prefer the paper version, primarily because of its demands on the imagination, but also because the motions of the text are necessarily different each time, in terms of which letters float away first, the manner in which they unmoor and spin off, how and in what order the detritus words fall from the text grid, how the letters in the liquid layers slide horizontally in their lines to cluster with letters on either side of them--a text motion not able to be fully replicated in the Flash version.

However, the Flash-animation versions of the mandrakes that Betsy Stone Mazzoleni has (incredibly) constructed do a fabulous job of demonstrating the form of the vehicles, making it immediately accessible to a broad range of readers. Also, because of her animations, we were able to add an extra color narrative (present in the lift-off letters) which extends through the entire work. Now that Betsy has completed the full Flash animations for all three vehicles, I have been able to take screen shots during the animations and use these stilled frames as reference points in a paper version of the vehicles. Having the selected screen shots on paper rather than the full animation on screen restores some of the flexibility I’d like present in the text motions and it also brings the color narrative of the lift-off letters onto the page.

MF: Of course, any profession a person chooses demands time and dedication. But, musicians generally practice for several hours a day, and depending on where you are in a writing project, that can also demand intense concentration. How do you balance the two? Do you have any projects that combine music and poetry and how do your music and poetry influence each other?

OB: Each of my disciplines fuels the other, which makes me very fortunate and keeps my brain circuitry in constant motion, evaluation, and expansion. I practice for around 5 solid hours each day (this takes around 8 hours of time or more). Practicing at that level of concentration is like thinking about poetic form and line and rhythm and rhyme, theme and transformation, character and image and tone, for 5 hours. So much of poetry writing is thinking deeply about these kinds of things. In a way, after my piano practicing, all the poetry work that’s left to accomplish is the work of “writing into” the words and patterns and images and ideas that have come out of my practicing. I am able to read and write for a few hours in the morning when I first wake up and for a few hours at night when I’m too physically exhausted to continue practicing. Then there are the days that I am traveling to and from concerts, performing, or teaching piano lessons, and those days have their own special schedules. I suppose the main way I’ve been able to balance the demands of these two disciplines is to cut out every extra thing in my life, which becomes a liability when I’ve run out of fodder or experience or inspiration from which to draw. So of course there are times when I need to stop practicing and writing and go do something entirely different to restore some sense of volume and expansiveness to my life.

Besides all of my work which inherently combines poetry and piano, I do have projects where I combine poetry and piano in an outwardly obvious manner. Currently, I’m performing a series of Poetry in Piano recitals whose programs are centered around solo piano music based on poetry in some way, whether on some poetic form or a specific poem or the “idea of poetry” whatever that may be. So I’ve been doing a lot of fascinating research on my piano pieces and their relationships to poetry in addition to learning the pieces for performances.

MF: If you could describe your ideal workday, what would it look like?

OB: My ideal workday would be much longer, so that I would have time to see my friends and family. My ideal workday would include secret folds of hours for sleeping that weren’t accounted for in the 24 hours tallied by the business world. It would include any animals I wanted to see and also five-hour lunch breaks and sunny weather by request so that my husband and I could play tennis and soccer every day or at least go out looking for birds if we wanted. My ideal work day would include a version of me that knew how to surf and wasn’t so afraid of the ocean. And a pocket of invisible time to take a dance class and bright gardens of time behind the normal day in which I could travel and meet all kinds of people and learn to speak a lot of languages fluently.