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Q & A With BOA Poet Michael Blumenthal
You currently hold the Copenhaver Chair at the West Virginia University College of Law. What exactly are you doing there? How do you see your legal background affecting your poetry, if at all? This semester I'm teaching 2 courses at the West Virginia University College of Law, one called Law, Literature, and Justice, and one called How Not To Write Like a Lawyer. Normally, I teach at Old Dominion in the fall, but next year I will be here at West Virginia for the full school year, and so far I'm enjoying this new experience. I'm not sure how much my legal background affects my poetry. I do think that it gave me a logical mind, which means my poems have a kind of logical motion. It also taught me something about connecting thoughts to each other. When this question comes up, I always think of Wallace Stevens, how he kept his two lives apart. But I don't think my experience in the legal world has been harmful to my poetry, and in fact I probably prefer working in the legal world to working at an M.F.A. program, because I think it's good for writers to know and think about something other than just literature. In May of 2007, you spent a month in South Africa working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation in Phalaborwa. How did you get involved in working with the CARE foundation? Everybody has a secret life and I've been interested in primates since I was a science writer for Time-Life Magazine in the late 70s. I've read everything I can get my hands on about them and it was something I've always wanted to do. I wrote articles about my trip for Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine, but so far the experience hasn't shown up in my poetry. How did the conjunction AND lead to these poems in this form? And how would you describe that form? I think it started with my sort-of perverse interest in language. What's the most interesting word in the English language? To me, it's and. It's the word we use to get disparate things to join together, a segue word. By the very nature of the word and, these poems got more longwinded, kept growing. I found myself saying "and this" "and this" "and this." I didn't give it a lot of forethought or plan it out that way, it was just the way it happened. Then I was happy with what was happening and tried to let it keep happening. How long did AND take to write? Was it written concurrent to other poems or were you only writing in this form at that time? Depending on how you look at it, this book took either 18 years or 2 years. I wrote a poem 18 years ago called "And the Wages of Goodness Are Not Assured" which I eventually chose as the title poem for my book The Wages of Goodness. I though at the time I would write an entire book of these poems, but I tend to be someone who waits for the right moment. Then, in about 2002 or 2003, these poems started to come in big groups and so for about 2 years I wrote these poems, but I also have another poetry manuscript I finished during the time since my last book with BOA, Dusty Angel. So I did write other poems, but during these 2 years I mostly worked on this. At what point in the process did you conceive of this book as this project? I knew from the first poem 18 years ago that I someday wanted or hoped it would happen. But it wasn't until these poems started to come in large numbers and I got caught up in doing them that I saw this as a book-length project. So it wasn't until many years after that first poem, but once 2 or 3 came out I realized what I was doing. Where does the sound of these poems come from? How do the idiosyncratic titles affect tha sound? The titles always came first, and often the titles came without me knowing what the poem would be about or what would come next. I found when I started to write these poems that, because the titles were long, I would start pulling out all the stops and going with the rhythm of the titles, which tended to be a longer, different rhythm than what I would normally write. Something similar happened with a book called Laps I published in 1984, a book of one long poem in 34 sections, except that that poem has short, skinny lines. They came to me mostly when I was swimming, and that's why Laps is in that voice. So AND is the second time I've had this sort of experience writing a book. A certain rhythm takes over and all the poems happen that way, and then it stops. You say in the first poem that "and accretes to itself what it can" How do you see this idea working throughout the book? Did you find yourself surprised at all at what was accreting in these poems? Surprising yourself is one of the great pleasures of writing poetry. The best part in writing AND was sustaining that feeling of surprise, finding out certain things belonged in these poems that I never imagined would be there, moving from one thing to the next, and basically allowing the subconscious room in which to work. Any particular favorites? When I think about the ones that were the most fun to write, there was a poem I wrote in Costa Rica called "And Now You Have Come to the Place in This Life Where You'd Rather See a Monkey Than a Girl" that was very close to me. I also wrote a poem in Budapest, Hungary called "And Here You Are" which later appeared in the New Yorker with the slightly changed title "Here You Are." Also the last poem in the book, "And the World, After All, Is a Good and Gentle Place." For More Information on AND go to: http://boaeditions.org/bookstore/details.php?prodId=214 To find out where Michael Blumenthal and other BOA poets are reading go to: |
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AND contains long-lined poems with powerful, Whitmanic rhythms that celebrate daily existence. The poems share similar titles, and the book as a whole presents a remarkably unified project. These are poems intended to lift the reader up into the sublime, even if that sublime is found in strange places. BOA Editions is proud to release AND, and we recently conducted a brief interview with Michael to ask him about his new book, which will be released in May 2009.