Thereby Hangs a Tale: Interviews

MF: I'm always interested in the mechanics of how people write. Do you lock yourself in a room? Do you have a special pen? Do you write everyday? Have any special rituals?

JW: I don't have any rigid schedule or special rituals, but I do have some tendencies. I jot lines or ideas or thoughts down on whatever's handy. Sometimes I get a lucky pad of paper or a lucky notebook that I take with me everywhere. CVS sells a 6x9 Plain Writing Tablet which has been a good friend at times. I prefer a simple ballpoint pen and unlined paper, but I'm not too particular. Everything handwritten gets dumped in a pile near my computer, waiting to be revisited and attached to other scraps and formed into a poem on the computer. That process, the jigsaw cut & paste, can go on for hours at a time over the course of months, or less. It's also a fairly recent process, for me; formerly I was more interested in composing a poem straight through, making only minor revisions later.

My one constant is physical: my mind is always clearer when I'm a little bit hungry and a little bit caffeinated. I try to capitalize on that sometimes, but I also try to write at other times and in other situations to keep superstition from setting in.

MF: Since moving to Boston, you've had the opportunity to study with some well-known poets. In particular, you were in a poetry workshop led by Jorie Graham. I was curious about that experience on two levels. The first is on learning craft from someone who is well-known and the second is on learning from the cohort of poets that participate in the workshop with you. How did that influence your poetry?

JW: Jorie Graham is an amazing teacher. I've never met anyone who cares more about the ongoing health of poetry and I don't think I ever will. She has read absolutely everything. She understands the structural elements of poems, and she teaches poetry as a serious craft, as you mention. The conviction with which she spoke in class was completely infectious. It was a life-changing experience, really. It made me believe that writing was worth taking seriously and devoting my life to.

As far as my fellow poets, Jorie managed to assemble quite a weird pack of people in her workshop. I wasn't even a Harvard undergrad, nor were about half of us; somehow she padded the class with grad students from other disciplines or just ordinary people, which I was. I met some amazing poets who became and stayed my good friends, and their ideas and advice have had a lasting impact on what I write and think about. I even met the woman who, four years later, I married. So it was a profound experience.

MF: So, now I'd like to talk about Mister Goodbye Easter Island. After reading it, my reaction was how did he do that? I was extremely curious how you got the ideas for some of the poems. It made me want to go out and research some of the subject matter. You have a curious assortment of people such as Groucho Marx, Thor Heyerdahl, and Rasputin appearing in your poems. In Howard McNear Making Love to Two Women, you build a poem around biographical aspects of the actor who played Floyd the Barber on the Andy Griffith Show. What is the origin and development of poem like that?

I used to have a really rotten job in the Accounts Payable department of Harvard (which is partially how I got into contact with Jorie, so I can't complain too much). My job was to feed paper into a scanner all day. While the scanner was eating the paper, I spent time on the internet reading curious stories or doing informal little research projects. I would get interested in a person or place or event and read everything I could find about it. Howard McNear was one of those. I remembered seeing him on TV as a kid, playing Floyd, and being totally baffled and delighted by the way he delivered his lines. Nobody actually talks like that, you know? I started reading about him and found out all these interesting details, his health problems late in life, I think he was in a Shakespeare company as a young man, just biographical details. Anyway, the trick is, what business do those things have cluttering up a poem? It was a kind of a game I'd play with myself, trying to figure out how to write that kind of poem, what to combine with those biographical details to complicate them or shape them. And it was fun to learn about people's lives.

MF: What role do you think humor plays in poetry? Some of your poems have some funny lines and images. Here, I'm thinking of Jacques Cousteau Goes to All the Trouble, which begins:

You got any threes? (I need threes.
His expression, like his blue knit cap,
doesn't change.) "Go fish,"
he says. No wait, I think
it's supposed to be vice versa,
he's supposed to go fish.

JW: Humor in poetry is some delicate business. It's usually not even like real humor. By that I mean it's usually not funny. I can't, unfortunately, imagine someone laughing at the above lines--smiling, maybe. Think of any Billy Collins poem: fun maybe, but not funny. When a poet uses humor they're making a charismatic gesture, taking advantage of the audience's assumptions about how stodgy and joyless poems can be and offering the gentle reassurance that the current poem's not going to be like that. There's a friction at work there. There's no friction like that in actual comedy. Think about stand-up, for example. It's just funny for funny's sake or it doesn't work.

Poets are also lousy at tolerating the all-important displacement between a joke and the metaphysics behind the joke. A real piece of humor, something truly hilarious, is metaphysical only later and under a microscope, where it isn't funny anymore. That doesn't matter to a poet. A poet will shove the metaphysics up your nose every time.

However, a poem that avoids humor entirely or pretends language isn't capable of being funny can be equally dead. Nobody wants to hang out with someone who lacks a sense of humor, nor do they want to read the glaze-eyed verse generated by that person.

Everything language is capable of should merit consideration for inclusion in the poem, and that's always enough to humble and surprise me as a poet. For my own part, I'm at a point in my writing where I feel like the empty joke-poem is a bigger trap than the poem that takes itself too seriously, but too much of either is no good. It's a constant negotiation. Something that I really find funny, according to the criteria I use in real life, is always welcome to apply for entrance into a poem, but I have to double- and triple-check it, and try not to overstate its importance or misuse its presence if I let it in.

MF: Your poem, All the Better, is a version of Little Red Riding Hood. In the poem, you review the various endings the tale has had over time. Sometimes Red Riding Hood is eaten, and sometimes a Lumberjack kills the wolf. Your poem ends with the wolf and the Lumberjack beating each other up. A Field Guide to the Jesuses of North America, which takes a hard and humorous look at religion, is set up like an Audubon guide and catalogues a wide variety of Jesuses, such as the Industrial Strength Jesus, Low APR Jesus, and Redi-Serve Jesus. Other poems resemble elaborate jokes, fables, mythology, and confessions. What do you like about playing with these different narrative forms and turning them into poetic structures?

JW: I think it was the process of play that interested me most at the time I was writing those poems. With the Jesuses in particular, I laid down some simple rules and obstacles for myself, and then tried to see how many different paths through them I could trace.

More generally, narrative forms were my earliest and most intense experiences in literature. I was raised on Bible stories in church and Sunday school, and I had little vinyl renditions of fairy tales I'd play on a Fisher-Price record player, reading along in the accompanying book. "When you hear this sound--brrring!--turn the page." So I wonder if I haven't been recapitulating that early influence ever since. I'm still doing it, trying to figure out what narrative sense my own--or one's own--life makes, and whether the sense made of it is in violation of some kind of truth, and whether any of it matters. These are things that every single human being has grappled with in one way or another.

But I love all of the forms you mention, each for their own structural reasons and for the expectations that come with them. As a reader, a participant in the form, you have information ahead of time about the twists and turns the narrative might take. It can give you the illusion of echolocation, the ability to foresee and avoid obstacles in something as blind as real-time. That all participants in the form come away (relatively) unscathed at the end of the story is proof that this echolocation works. I'm somewhat interested in exploring that truth, equally interested in exposing it as an illusion and a falsehood, and most deeply and sincerely fascinated by actual participation in it.

MF: Your second book, Rain, which comes out in 2006, is different in some fundamental ways. First of all, the poems have no titles and the majority of them are composed of three five-line stanzas. There's a question here somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is other than why?

JW: I was fortunate enough to stumble onto a verse form-- five words per line, five lines per stanza, three stanzas-- that organized/generated all of the incoming messages, and bypassed the paralysis and simple fear of writing them down. That form is like a huge funnel, with the widest mouth I've ever found. It allows absolutely everything in, but there isn't enough duration to dwell on anything for too long. Process it and move on, the end is near. Like many forms it has what I think of as a life-like time-pressure to it.

MF: The poems also have a much different feel than those in Mister Goodbye Easter Island. In Rain, you have poems about sitting in a restaurant while the jukebox plays and a person waits for food, about going to the movies, being alone, the process of writing, dying, or walking with a friend. Each poem seems to have an emotional core that describes a particular moment, and you write in a way that makes the poems simultaneously seem very personal and universal. How did you arrive at this very different style?

JW: Once the form was in place, it really took over. The conceits of the speaker and the speaker's poem, even the conceit of "the poem," none of it was really necessary for the writing like it had been formerly. I was free to transcribe my ordinary life and the people I cared about and the visions the words themselves suggested and guided. The music-- chopped lines and loosely coupled perceptions--had enough momentum of its own, there was no need to try to engineer it. Before long it was all I could hear and all I could write, one after the other. For about two months in 2002 that was what was happening to me and how I wrote about it. I've been revising them and/or discarding them on and off since then.

MF: I also want to ask about the order of the poems. One of the things that struck me about the poems in Rain is that they can be read both as individual poems and/or as a much longer interlinked poem. You have several recurring themes and images: music--jukeboxes, the Beatles' songs, pianos--eggs; a man named Patrick, who shows up in several of the poems; you mention chowder more than once; and of course, various forms of water--rain, ponds, drains, the ocean. When I was reading the poems, some lines I was reading in one would remind me of lines in a poem a few pages earlier, which would then make a link to a poem in the upcoming pages. When you were working on these poems, which came first--the idea for a series of individual, interlinked poems or did you write some of them and then realize this was a possibility?

JW: I had written all of them and several years had elapsed before I understood that they were interlinked, how the interlinking worked, and how to organize them accordingly. I didn't realize the extent to which the same ideas appeared over and over again. Once I figured that out, the clumps formed on their own, and I started to notice more and more recurrences within those clumps and to revise them in their respective directions. It took me a ridiculously long time to figure it out, though.

MF: Most poets need day jobs. What's yours?

JW: I take photographs of specimens from the Herpetology and Entomology collections of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. They're scientifically important specimens, and the photographs are available to researchers, students, and everybody around the world via the internet. This is the best job and the best work environment I've ever had. The adaptive modification of the basic insect body is something that I'm able to look at closely and enjoy five days a week. Same too with the amphibians and reptiles, which are stored in jars of alcohol, shelves and shelves of them, rooms full. Down in the basement, there are huge piles of old anatomical drawings of snake skulls and tree-frog forelimbs and the like. It's a fascinating place. A guy from a nearby department once brought over his pet snake, which was still alive and which had two heads, so that I could take some pictures of it, which I did.

MF: Who are your favorite poets and writers? I think one can have favorites on a variety of levels--for example, the poets that got you interested in poetry or the poets you admire, who may not necessarily be the same people.

JW: Kafka is my longest-lasting favorite writer and the one I'm always aiming for. I got into him in high school and have stayed into him since. He's got all the mystery and inexplicability one could want. e.e. cummings is a poet that I used to really love as a teenager, though he means less to me now. I had to give a presentation on Charles Olson in a college class and I've loved his work ever since. I'm reading Emily Dickinson right now for what feels like the first time, though it's not. Among contemporary writers, I keep going back to this Graham Foust book Leave the Room to Itself for reasons that aren't obvious to me; it's a very frustrating book. I also read a semi-daily webcomic called Achewood, by Chris Onstad, primarily because of the tightness of the writing--and because it's funny.

MF: What do you think makes a good poem?

JW: That's a big question. If I'm able to get lost in a poem, to really forget the barriers between myself and what I'm reading, that's usually a good sign.

Read Jon's poems

Read poems from Mister Goodbye Easter Island

Read about Rain

Buy Rain

Visit Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology

Read Achewood, a semi-daily webcomic