Kevin Prufer, March 2010
Monday, March 1st, 2010
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Kevin’s poems, “Post Script” and “Near Whiteman Air Force Base,” appear in the current issue (Fall 2009, issue 7.1) of Redivider.
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Trying to Make Them Mean That More
An Interview by Assistant Poetry Editor Curtis Perdue
Redivider: Recently, I was lucky enough to attend the Key West Literary Seminar which, this year, celebrated 60 years of American poetry in honor of Richard Wilbur. There were a dozen of my favorite poets. During a reading/lecture, Yusef Komunyakka said that if he wasn’t writing poetry he would be a carpenter. So, a common question: What would Kevin Prufer be doing if he wasn’t writing poetry?
Kevin Prufer: Well, hmm. I just asked the same question of Alex Lemon. He said he’d be a sculptor, that he used to love throwing pots and making ceramic sculpture. Myself? I often wish I’d studied classics. I’d love to be a scholar of Roman literature or history. I grew up surrounded by artifacts–my father was an archaeologist–and we were both fascinated with history, particularly ancient history. I can definitely imagine going into that field if poetry hadn’t caught me first.
RDR: History seems to play a large role in your poems. National Anthem deals with Rome, the American West, Barbarians, and there is even a poem titled “History.” How conscious are you of the content that makes its way into your poems? In a way, it seems like some of your poems are rewriting, even documenting, history. I think what I am trying to ask is, do you find yourself writing about history as a natural, organic impulse (since it was a childhood passion), or is it a project you knowingly decided to take on?
I became, for instance, very interested in the ways classical historians wrote their histories as a means not only of recording and commenting on the past, but of criticizing (in an often veiled way) the present — current leaders, policies, injustices. That is, history for many classical historians (as it is for historians in this country today, though often with less risk) could be simultaneously a scholarly pursuit and a sort of activism. It’s an interest in that double role that has guided me in my own historical writing, though I confess (since I write poetry and don’t pretend to provide ACCURATE accounts of history) to inventing many scenes and anachronistic moments. (Obviously, no surgeon ever performed trepanning on Caligula, nor did an assassin ever try to kill him by pouring poison directly into his brain, etc., etc.)
RDR: Another thing I notice about your work is your use of repetition. In our last issue both poems exhibit this sensibility: in one we experience the transformation of the image of secretaries and in the other the chorus-like ironic chant, America! In the the 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine your poem, “In a Beautiful Country,” repeats the phrase, A good way to fall in love. Repetition can often be draining, but here, and in your other work, it is skillfully crafted and employed. You say you don’t trust poetry as an intuitive art; what would you say to it being a repetitive art?
KP: Poetry is certainly a repetitive art, though not (when it’s good) a merely repetitive one! So much of the poetry I admire employs repetition, if not by repeating whole lines and phrases, then in other ways. Isn’t rhyme a kind of repetition of similar sounds? Isn’t meter (or even mere rhythm) a repetition of sequences of weak and strong beats? I consider my more obvious repetitions to be an extension of that, a way of creating a kind of music in the poem that also, somehow, adds to or complicates the poem’s meaning. Ideally, I think the meaning of a repeated phrase ought somehow to evolve as the poem moves forward, so that it comes, finally, to suggest different possibilities than it did at the beginning of the poem. I hope that the repetition of the word “America!” becomes more and more sinister as the poem moves forward, for instance. This trait in my own work might come from a very early interest in received forms, in villanelles and sestinas and the like. It was those forms that first drew me to poetry when I was in college–their intricacy and the way, in the hands of really great poets, their meanings would evolve and shift. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m still hearing Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Philip Sidney, and, less obviously (because their best poems, while not repeating in traditional ways, still make terrific use of repeated phrases), Frederick Seidel, Paul Celan, or Stevie Smith.
RDR: Awesome! I really enjoyed your answer. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for being willing to discuss your work. Now on to some more general questions about being a poet. To me, How long have you been writing?, is a poorly worded question. But I do think every poet, writer, or artist has a moment when he/she realizes, Hey, this is what I want to do, forever. When was that moment for you, and what sparked it?
KP: I always loved reading stories and novels. My parents read to me and encouraged me to write — and the truth is, most everyone in my family is a writer. My sister was a journalist. My father wrote many books on archaeology and my mother writes poetry. Most of my aunts and uncles and cousins have written books on art history, drama, religion, philosophy, etc. My brother writes about the Maya. Books were everywhere in the house, stacks and stacks of them and, growing up, there was really no question: I was going to be a writer of one kind of another.
Initially, I wanted to be a novelist or a journalist. I thought those sounded romantic and exciting, so, when I finished college, I got a couple journalism jobs in Washington, DC, first at THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY and then at THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER. I didn’t enjoy that work, though, so I applied for a scholarship at Hollins University to study fiction writing.
I can’t really account for why I changed course to poetry. At the time, when I was about 24, I’d written a few poems, but didn’t know much about the craft of poetry. I’d never taken a poetry course in college, never studied American poetry at all. Mostly, I was a a reader; I loved Eliot and Bishop and read a great deal in a dilettante-ish way.
A course at Hollins on Romantic Era poetry sealed the deal for me: I remember being amazed by the concision of language of Wordsworth, by the multiplicity of meaning packed into Keats, by a good poet’s ability to engage numerous conflicting ideas in one neat package. I remember walking to and from the campus (my house was a couple miles away) thinking about how these poets accomplished so much in such a limited space, or things the professor (Eric Trethewey, a very fine poet) said about the CRAFT of poetry, the marriage of sound and sense in a poem.
So, suppose I didn’t have any sudden realization that my life would be, in some ways, devoted to poetry. I drifted into it, but I’m glad I did. I find it to be a constantly engaging, complex, and fascinating field.
RDR: Ok, so two more questions: What is your favorite thing a poem is capable of doing? What are a few books (poetry and/or prose) that you have been reading and/or plan on reading soon?
KP: I love how a good poem can contain contradictions. This is what I admire about Emily Dickinson, for instance: that her poems manage to feel multiple, conflicting ways about ambitious, difficult subjects. To the question “Is there a god?” Dickinson manages simultaneously to say yes, no, and, well, it depends — all with equal fervor and strength. It’s this kind of ambivalence, this feeling strongly in multiple directions, that I look for in poems I read and that I aspire to in my own writing.
I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the work of Dunstan Thompson, a WWII GI who wrote amazing, violent, homoerotic poems in the 1940s, then turned his attention to quieter, often theological concerns in the 1950s and 60s. The poet D.A. Powell and I are now completing a book on his work that will be published soon. And I just finished a terrific book called KB: The Suspect by the Lithuanian poet Marcelijus Martinaitis. It’s a strange, very surreal sequence of poems in the voice of KB, a sort of post-Soviet everyman who wanders through the streets of Vilnius trying to make sense of the changed world, the encroachment of capitalism, the possible complicity of friends and neighbors. Amazing writing, and Laima Vince’s translation is fluid and often very, very funny.
3/1/2010
