I’ll admit, I’ve submitted multiple panel proposals to AWP, and they’ve all been rejected. Maybe it’s because I can never come up with a pithy panel title. Or maybe it’s that writing the panel description has felt like old Twitter, where you had just 140 characters. And I want to include all the things I find interesting. And in the process I make it sound senseless. Maybe the title for this dream panel could be something about subverting minimalism. Or maturing the lyrical narrative. Or muscular enjambment. I really don’t know. I’ve thought, though, it would be interesting to come up with a few questions I could pretend to ask each of these poets. And maybe some thoughts for why those questions would be of interest.
Panel Attendees Paired with One of Their Books for Discussion
- Midwood (Norton, 2022), by Jana Prikryl
- A Piece of Good News (FSG, 2020), by Katie Peterson
- Fablesque (Tupelo Press, 2019), by Anna Maria Hong
- Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020), by Carl Phillips
Panel Questions
1. How do you use brevity or containment to your advantage?
There are many different ways to use brevity in a poem. There is the incidental poem, where the poet describes a brief interaction they had with something imaginative. And the poems uses exaggeration or understatement to mark the enormity of this moment, ultimately commenting, perhaps, on the inadequacy of language to in any way address reality. There are the short, impressionistic poems, where the length is punctuated so quickly by the conclusion, showing how fleeting reality can be. I don’t know that a catalogue of the many different ways brevity benefits a poem is possible. Or another catalogue of the ways brevity can assert itself as something the reader should reckon with. Like how I’m still reckoning with Noah Eli Gordon’s A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007). Do I read each page as a short burst? A light touch?
The books I would have to this panel are doing nothing like this, though. In Prikryl, the poem is interested in elaborating a scene and then discovering for the reader a fairly specific emotion laying at the heart of the scene or situation. The setting for the poem feels expansive, when, in fact, the poem is this efficient engine of language quickly expanding its position on the page. In Phillips, the poem lays out an emotional complexity articulated further and further, until it’s unclear whether the poem is about a larger emotion like disappointment or the particular way resignation can deepen that disappointment. For all these books, I find brevity contributes to the poems’ surprise. I get lost in the their discursive sentiment, not even realizing how quickly the poems gather their material. And then exit.
2. How would you describe the relationship between individual poems in the collection and the larger context tying them together?
Though this larger context is what I generally read for in books of poems, I find these four books especially involved with an overarching sensibility. There is an unmistakably larger whole enveloping each poem. The Anna Maria Hong might be the easiest illustration of this, as the book’s Fablesque title signals its interest in fables. Additionally, there is the theme of family casting a shadow over the book, with her first poem and its brief family portrait (revealing both who the family is and what the poet thinks of them). It would be interesting to hear how Hong characterizes the intentional sequencing of the poems versus individual poems offering a more general gesture with that larger context. Personally, I find her transition from one poem to the next evoking a more specific and associative relationship intent on sequence. But I wonder how she would talk about it.
In contrast, I would say Phillips and Peterson feel more like an extravagance of mind or a vast painting that’s more about thinking than thinking about one thing in particular. Ordering of the poems might matter, but it’s more about a general interaction with with a thematic sensibility. Like this painting on the right from the St. Louis Art Museum. For me, it’s never been a painting of a column (though it’s called The Columm), but instead a painting of all that sky, the light illuminating everything, that ideally temperate day, given how comfortable the people look dressed like that. The column operates for me as a foil rather than a central subject. So where Phillips might be writing about disappointment, and Peterson about temporality, those feelings are more the occasion to look at all the ways these sentiments influence their world. The poets are accounting for lifetimes of experience that warrant as much consideration as any thematic center.
Granted, this “larger context” I’m writing about is mostly about how it feels to me reading a book of poems. There is a presence connecting the work together. And I have a hard time actually identifying the source of that presence. I was reading Paul de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” and he talked about reading “an intellectual assurance of affirmation” in Baudelaire’s “Correspondance,” how that tone alone is what lends the work a poetic authority. For me, these four books have that “intellecutal assurance,” but I’m not sure they’re interested in “affirmation.” They’re more tentative or inquisitive about the poems’ circumstance, more tender than “affirming.” But, at the same time, the poems are “assured” they have something to say. I like to think of the authority as a sensibility rooted in the poet. Something biographically significant to each of their lives but not needing to be biographically accurate to be true. Because the confidence and complexity of voice makes the poems feel true.
3. How would you describe the role of closure and brevity in your book?
I have a long fascination with Lyn Hejinian’s essay, “The Rejection of Closure” (from The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000)) And all the ways it might mean “opening” a poem. Or softening the conclusion. Or subverting the conclusiveness of the conclusion. Or stopping the poem far short of a “conclusion,” because beginning and ending are so arbitrary. I am someone who reads poems for the pleasure of closure as much as an impatience when the poem’s closure is too tidy. Though a tidy ending can still be admirable in its expert execution.
I say all this, because it felt for many years that a poet was in the wrong place if they spoke favorably of closure in their work. Even poets whose work thrived from the poem’s ending would have rather said they saw their poems at least resisting the moment of closure. It’s like that Natasha Saje essay, “Why Must It Always End This Way” (from Windows and Doors (University of Michigan Press, 2014)), where she argues that Philip Levine’s narrative poetry is actually very discontinuous and fragmented. I like the argument, and I can see how true it is for a lot of narrative poetry. And I recognize the argument is mainly about recognizing the complexity attributed to non-narrative poetry as a quality equally present in narrative poetry, with Saje working the assumption that fragmented poems must necessarily be complex. But I don’t personally feel scattered reading Levine’s poems. And I’m much more interested in whatever the magic quality is that inhabits a narrative poem. How I can be absorbed by the story and not feel the more tense work of language. Like I would rather narrative paper over the gaps than dwell on why the gaps are there.
All of this to say, I would hope that a question about closure in these poems, especially how closure might emphasize or distract from the poem’s brevity, could be considered without the need to “reject closure” as a rule. All of these poems lead their reader to complexity. They are not predictable, like that strain of 90s poetry that made it feel like reading the poem was just useless. Maybe that uselessness was why they were so obsessed with poetry “mattering.”
This dream panel of poets, though, has such a variety of closure. For instance, Phillips’s poems, that often feel so aware of their destination. But then each image, each obsevation, is him avoiding that ending. And the poet will try denying to himself that’s where he’s going. But the poem is leading him there nevertheless. And it’s this crucible of indeterminate motives that helps him refine what he actually thinks of the ending that was supposed to be inevitable. What is ending, then, for Carl Phillips? And conversely what is ending for Jana Prikryl, whose poems feel so formally contained? To the extent I would describe them as an encapsulation. An evocative scene or idea that quickly develops on the page, but it doesn’t signal what about it is driving the poem forward. How does closure work in these poems? And, yes, I recognize I’m leading her to explain to me why I find these poems’ ending so striking. How sudden and conclusive. And I would be curious to hear how she characterizes that quality.
4. If you considered your poem a sculpture, what material would the sculpture be made of?
I’ll admit this question mainly comes from the sensation reading Jana Prikryl’s book. The poems feel so formed. And then I watched a video where Cornelia Parker describes marble sculptures as a series of many violent acts to the marble. Something about Prikryl’s work felt like a marble sculpture, with all those smooth marble lines concealing the coarse and refined revisionary gestures necessary to shape that smoothness. What material would she compare her poems to? Something hard? Malleable? And when I think of the variety among these four books, how I read similar methods of composition (or similar enough to make an interesting conversation among these four poets), I anticipate both intersections and contrasts illuminating their poetry further.
So how would these poets envision their work as a 3-dimensional object? What material? And by material I’m thinking of both traditional and nontraditional work. One sculpture I’ve long admired is by Tara Donovan. The untitled piece, pictured below, is surprisingly elegant, given its a lattice of styrofoam drinking cups.
Perhaps this question is the most selfish of the four questions. And ultimately I think my selfishness is what undermines any of my AWP Panel Proposals. I’m too eager to hear about the relationship a poet has with their poems—a line of inquiry that encourages idiosyncrosy and individual perspective rather than collective interactions with a consensus among the panelists. I would like to think, though, that as each of these poets considers the material or materials they would use for the “sculpture” of their poem, they would discover among one another what makes each of their poems a substantive whole. Some invented material binding the language so it stood on the page or floated, as Donovan’s untitled sculpture appears to do. As I’ve observed, all four poets’ work appears spare on the page. Nodding to minimailism. But only minimally. So how aware do these poets feel the poems are of their brief interaction with language? How do they see this particular material accounting for that brevity, and how does that brevity substantiate such a moment to themselves.