Nidus: Recently, the idea of audience has been a frequent topic of discussion at Pitt. Do you, in your writing, work with audience (perhaps a specific audience) in mind? More broadly, do you think of audience—and I guess, here, I mean either pre-conceptions of audience or a sort of general acknowledgment of readers—as critical (or, conversely, damaging) to the poetic process?
Kaya Oakes: I think I considered audience a lot more when I was in grad school and working very intensely with a group of poets—including my teachers—on a regular basis. In those cases I knew certain people were going to jump on certain things in the poems, so I'd consciously avoid those tendencies...or perhaps people would like certain things, so I'd often write to that person as an audience in order to get praise. It was kind of masochistic at times because I was worried about whether or not the poem would survive workshop, so I tried to make the poems bullet-proof, which I later realized is pretty much impossible. There were times, as well, when I was single and I wrote poems to guys I was interested in being with, but I learned quickly that poetry isn't much of a seductive tool, at least in my case. Most of the guys I gave poems to thought I was loony.
These days I have a very small audience. There are two or three people who read my stuff with any kind of regularity, and I actually don't think about them as I write. That's not an insult, but a mark of the degree to which I trust them as readers to at least try to follow whatever I bring them. I will take their comments into consideration when I revise, but I've gone pretty onanistic and write mostly for myself. In a broader sense, however, I do think worrying about audience can corrupt a writer's work. Writers aren't people-pleasers by temperament (most of the time), so why should our poems be like that? I don't want to come across as advocating the idea that we don't need readers, because readers are great, especially smart, informed ones, but I think if we try too hard to write to a particular person or group of people, we screw ourselves out of authenticity. Not in every case, but often. Plus, the poetry world is so insular, incestuous, and miniscule that it's hopeless to think everyone in it will like your poems. Worrying about what "people will think" is a short road to insanity.
However, I do have to consciously remind myself now and then to leave a night-light on so readers won't get totally lost in the work. And that's why it is important to have at least a couple of engaged, informed friends who can read your work and be honest about it.
In an old John Berryman interview I read recently, he expressed a none-too-slight horror at being cast as Confessional. There will always be, it seems, a laundry list of words/typecasts that mortify poets. Currently, I think it would be safe to add 'sentimental' to that list (which oftentimes appears to mean little more than 'precious' to today's critics). Still, it seems that sentiment/sentimental is indisposable to poetry. So...my assignment to you: In 150 words or less (and citing examples) defend the sentimental in poetry.
Cheesy as it sounds, doesn't poetry have to have a heart to function? I suppose the idea that sentimentalism, at least in its naked form, is a bad thing has to do with the fact that culturally, intellectual Americans don't like coming across as treacly, and so many of us (poets) are intellectuals. Lots of intellect can repress sentiment in poetry. I don't like sappy poetry, but if we're talking about sentiment-alism in the sense of "sentiment"—that is to say, thoughts based on emotion—that should be endemic to poetry, shouldn't it? Poetry comes from emotion and is tempered by reason, I think, so sentiment is always going to be there, unless you purge it out. As a female writer, though, sometimes you need to tread lightly around sentiment lest you be labeled as "Plath-like", meaning "nuts".
The poetry section at a very well-stocked book store is on fire—You can save five books. What are they?.....Which leads to the more pressing question: How do you negotiate influence? Is it a badge of honor or is it something that must be distanced from the writer in that it could compromise singularity? As constant reading is such a critical component of the writing process, what dangers lurk in an attention to influence?
Let's go for five and a half; I'm strong and have long arms:
Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
John Ashbery, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs
Anne Carson, Plainwater: Poems and Essays
Paul Celan, Selected Poems (the Hamburger translation)
And I'd probably rip a few pages out of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, James Tate's The Lost Pilot, John Koethe's Falling Water, and Robert Creely's For Love along the way.
Now you'll note here how boyish this list is; I admit I need to work at least a couple more women onto the list, but I only got five. I wonder who set the poetry section on fire? Probably a poet. Sometimes I want to set fire to the poetry section....
Influence is necessary. If I hadn't read O'Hara, I wouldn't know how to write about living in a city. Ashbery I came to late in my writing career; I was almost out of grad school and "Leaving the Atocha Station", which we were assigned to do a close reading of, scared the crap out of me, but someone recommended Self Portrait and it changed the way I thought about writing and how writing functions. Berryman's archaisms in terms of language play and his sense of how poems can call out to one another are very important to my work. Carson I've always admired because she's so fucking smart, and she helped open my work up to prose lines. Celan gives me hope when I read a journal or go to a really bad reading and feel like poetry's doomed. Someone who can distill experiences like he did and come out with stunning, knife-like poems has to last beyond his lifetime, and he has.
Most of the writers on my list are of a generation or two before mine, which, I think, makes them somewhat "safer" to claim as influences, being that there's a large distance there. I suppose there's a degree of "old school" style or voice in my poems because of this. In terms of craft and style, there are definitely more contemporary poets whose work I admire, some of whom travel in the same circles as I do, but this is where I distance myself from them as an influence, due to the fact that it's hard to say to someone sitting across the room from you, "you've influenced me" without coming across as a brown-noser. Or a lunatic.
However, I am admittedly a lazy reader. I wait for poems to come to me rather than seeking them out. When my academic work is hard-core, I tend to read magazines and non-fiction and fiction rather than poetry because my brain is fried. Reading poetry demands a kind of thinking that teaching doesn't always leave room for, which is an ironic offshoot of being a writing teacher. Luckily, I have friends who are far more voracious consumers of new poetry than I am, so I rely on them for suggestions. Or there are a couple of decent blogs about poetry that suggest good stuff. And when I am absolutely stuck and unable to think of anything to write, I'll pick up a book of poetry—something I know will grease the wheels—and that helps. Often it's something even more old school, like Donne, or Keats, or John Clare. This summer, I had a pinched nerve in my neck and had to do traction for an hour a day, and I set up my traction kit next to my poetry bookshelf, and I'd just pull randomly from the shelf and read while my neck stretched. It started me writing again at a time when I wasn't writing.
In the long run, the trick about influences is not trying to hide them, but neither is it to wear them nakedly, but rather to work with them in more subtle ways, like collaging. Take a bit of this, a bit of that, make it your own.
How much stock do you put in the contemporary? I mean this in two ways: First, do you feel responsibility as a poet to be topical (and, I guess in the current environment, it's impossible to talk about being topical without really meaning political)? Second, is a keeping up with trends imperative or detrimental to your poetic process? Does it become a source of pressure (a force, essentially that moves you away from your style) or is it a necessary part of being a poet in the current times?
This question reminds me of a story: I was at a reading a while back, around the time when Ellen Degeneres came out of the closet, and one my friends who was reading made a joke that he rarely wrote topical poems, but he was going to open with a number called "When Ellen Told Everyone She Was Gay". There are probably a handful of poems in my book that are overtly topical/political, and in my life outside of poetry—in teaching and in writing for Kitchen Sink—I could probably be labeled as an activist or at least as subversive. But it's hard for me to write topical poetry and to feel authentic about it because I'm a white woman from a lower-middle-class background; I feel a bit phony when I write a poem about the fact that the country's pretty much doomed, because I'm not directly affected by that at the moment: I'm not some kid stuck in Baghdad worried about getting shot; I'm not living in East Oakland and making minimum wage, although I was not very long ago. I may feel differently about this when the feds come knock on my door or when Schwarzenegger finally destroys the California educational system. I do write about people, and interactions between people, and that's colored by my political beliefs, but not to an obvious degree.
As far as trends are concerned, that's more complicated because I live in the Bay Area, which seems to be in the midst of a kind of resurgence of abstraction/ avant-garde, perhaps because of the confluence of writers who live here. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement came out of San Francisco, and right now that seems to be a huge influence on the way many of the writers around here work, at least in my observation of local journals and readings. I like a degree of abstraction in poetry, but not to the extent that it occludes meaning. But I feel no pressure to be more experimental or less, though it does influence what journals I might submit to. I couldn't force a style onto my work if I tried. The work would always rebel.
This is a question for the young/unpublished writers out there: Honestly, how crippling/deflating or (alternately) exhilarating/fun was the process of getting a first book published? Are there tips you could offer with regard to this seemingly insurmountable task?
Honestly? The eight years between finishing my MFA and finding out the book was coming out sucked for my ego as a writer. There were blips of success—I had years when a bunch of things would come out in journals, then years when nothing happened. Even in 2005, when I found out the book had been accepted, I was rejected from six or seven journals. Or I'd get a grant, but only a teeny one. Or I'd enter a contest and be the runner-up, but not the winner. I kept trying to figure out how to play the game—who did I need to know, what conferences should I have gone to, what grad program should I have been in, and so on. It's a fast way to go insane. Once I submitted to a big award contest and got back an illegible comment from the editor that I toted around for months to see if anyone could read it; it said "Kaya: Sorry, it's an (illegible) ms". I figured if I could translate the illegible word, I still had a shot at a career, as long as the word wasn't "execrable".
There's a line in Richard Brautigan's short story "1/3, 1/3, 1/3" where the narrator talks about "pounding at the gates of American literature"; that was essentially my mantra. I really believed, after a while, that some grad student was going to find my work in some obscure journal after I was dead and base a really great dissertation on it. But eventually I met people who were writers but who weren't as consumed by success as I was, who worked outside of or on of the margins of the poetry world rather than being caught up in a scene, and they saw things a lot more clearly and sensibly than I did. Essentially, I had to learn to fail (and fail well, as Beckett says), and I had to re-define success. I was only 26 when I finished my MFA, and being that young had serious drawbacks, because I was not mature enough to deal with the hard knocks of publishing, or failing to publish. And I had to come to terms with the fact that the odds of winning a major poetry prize were about equivalent to my becoming a a jockey (I'm almost six feet tall): ridiculous. It's really a crapshoot, and it's very demoralizing when writers your age or younger are winning all the accolades and you're not. But after a while, you just deal with it. The fun stuff was hanging out with other writers, drinking beer and talking about poetry. And when I finally got the call from David at Pavement Saw, the first people I told were my writing friends, because they contributed so much to the process. But I still worry that the publisher will change his mind and yank my book before it comes out, or I'll drop dead before next fall and not get to have a book party. Sometimes I feel like a total cliche of a poet: all neuroses, all the time.
As far as advice goes, I guess my only message is to believe in your work and stick with it. Don't believe that getting published by a certain age is important; I thought I'd have a book by the time I was thirty, and other writers thought so too, but it took four years after I turned thirty before it happened, and by the time the book actually arrives I'll be thirty six. And find some friends who are not poets. While having friends who are poets is great, if those are the only people you hang out with, your world view will get way too insular. And don't expect nepotism to work in your favor. That's a huge mistake.
On your own writing:
I've seen a lot of young writers making use of the prose line recently, and it popped up in a handful of your poems. Can you trace this back to a model or perhaps an ideological shift in the poet's approach to form (clearly, the prose line has been around for a while, but it seems to be enjoying a higher frequency lately)? What specific liberties does an increased use of the right margin allow poets?
Prose poems became something I wanted to work with when I started writing essays. When we began publishing Kitchen Sink, because we couldn't pay our writers, we had to write a lot of the magazine ourselves, and, at the time, I was editing the literature section, so I started writing prose about the writing process, and about poetry, and that stretched my poetic lines out when I returned to poetry writing. Also, Anne Carson, who I mentioned above, does amazing things with prose poems, and when I began reading her work, I wanted to try the form.
I go back and forth, though, between poetry and prose, and will sometimes pare down to a really teeny Creely line and then explode into a massive Whitmanic line, but my guess is that a lot of young writers are working with prose poems because we're a long-winded generation. Look at the blog world; there are so many younger poets with blogs, writing about poetry. The discourse has been opened to everyone, whereas it used to be solely for academics. And the more we have to say, I guess, the longer our lines get. That's my crackpot theory, anyway.
Writing to the right margin allows a poet to do more with narrative as well. Narrative poetry's not really in vogue at the moment, but that shouldn't stop us from playing with narrative as a form. People like to hear stories, and poems can tell stories. A lot of the prose poetry I wrote while working on this manuscript actually came about because I was trying to write a long-form essay about my parents, which ended up fragmenting into a series of prose poems. Which ultimately spared me from becoming a memoirist at a very young age (thank god), but also allowed me to tell stories via poems for the first time, a very liberating process.
For me, place is such a tricky element of my writing. For instance, I feel like where I'm writing and what I'm writing rarely gel, and this is sometimes a source of anxiety (a physical divide between process and setting—I can't, for example, look out the window and catch hold of the idea I'm trying to convey).
It seems, in what I read, that place is absolutely critical to your poetry and, in a lot of ways, kind of a problematic idea. There's that beautiful line "If it is the place you love or just the meaning of the place" that I think sums up well how complicated the operation of place/location/etc. is in poetry. In a lot of ways the idea of place is conflated with the idea of motion in the poems that I read, so that it becomes important in its flexibility (there's even a sense, sometimes, of a pushing away from setting in those poems that are very concretely located).
What I'm building up to is: How do you approach the idea of location? In what way is environment (as in, the environment in which you are writing the poem, not in which the poem is taking place) either inspirational or incidental to the poem itself? Do you consider yourself a Bay Area poet and, if so, how?
You're right in seeing that place matters to my work. In editing the manuscript I noticed so many mentions of place, just as word choices but also as ways of grounding the poems. I live in the city where I grew up, which also happens to be the city where my father and grandparents grew up, and my father was a poet, and my grandfather loved poetry, and both of them in their own ways helped me to see how poetry functions in this particular part of the world. California, unlike New York, is artistically in some ways still very new to the country, and it's a place where the writing is polyglot; in one of my writing classes at Berkeley I can have fifteen students with fifteen different home languages. We're still establishing ourselves in some ways, and that allows for a lot of experimentation and freedom.
The danger of romanticizing those relationships between the writer and her home ground, however, is that we can easily sentimentalize place when we wed ourselves to it too strongly. So rather than using actual street names, I tend to obscure them or make them up, or create kind of fantasized versions of actual locations. I can't afford to travel very often, and I hate flying, so I have to imaginatively go to other places rather than physically traveling, if the poem needs that. And while I admire the work of poets who can write about the natural world, the city is far more appealing to me as a setting for human interaction, which is where most of my poems begin, because it's in cities where people are cranked up to the boiling point and interesting things start to happen. Growing up in Oakland attracted me to that idea, especially thinking of Oakland in the seventies and eighties—my "formative years"—when it was less gentrified and glossy and more raw and old and empty. I live in an industrial neighborhood in West Berkeley at the moment, so my neighbors are an auto body shop and a glass factory, and I find it an interesting setting for writing poetry, because the soundtrack is pretty much grinding, pounding, and metal clashing. There's not a lot of silence, so that adds a layer of noise to the poems.
As far as being a Bay Area poet goes, you can see from what I've said above that that's definitely the case. I'm proud of being from Oakland, but I wouldn't label myself as an "Oakland poet", since all writers want to believe our poems work beyond the scope of where's they're composed. Likewise, I don't feel that I'm part of any kind of Bay Area "movement" or "school" or "clique" or "gang" of poets. I know a lot of poets who live here, but it's not a case where we roll deep. However, the name of the book, Telegraph, is also the name of a street that connects Oakland, where I grew up, to Berkeley, where I ultimately came to live and work, so I kind of labeled myself there. I do think of the title in the sense of the verb form of the word telegraph, not the noun, but there you go: Bay Area poet, bred, born, raised and stamped.