"Even After the Boy's Palms Were Empty": An Interview with Nathan McClain

Nathan McClain lives and works in Los Angeles. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Quarterly West, Nimrod, The Journal, Toad, Linebreak, and Best New Poets 2010. A recipient of scholarships from Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, he is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

His poem, "Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi," appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Darby K. Price, about botanical gardens, hindsight, and Elegance vs. Beauty.

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of “Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi”?

Well, the cause of the poem (if we’re considering the poem itself as an effect) was an excursion to the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, CA. I’d met an attractive woman, who also seemed attracted to me, and we took this trip together—as friends. As you might imagine, there was good amount of tension and anxiety between us as we moved through the gardens. As a result, my early drafts of this poem, originally a triptych, attempted to explore the sense of anxiety between two people who could potentially become lovers.

A couple things that ultimately helped the poem were time and distance from it. Also, the fact that our break-up (we finally dated) was completely amicable. Months after the whole boy-meets girl-boy-likes-girl-dates-girl-boy-enter-conflict-enter-misunderstanding-girl-waves-goodbye, I wasn’t angry. Normally, hindsight can be a terrifying or terrible thing (because hindsight can often trigger feelings of regret) but, in this instance, hindsight fascinated me as I thought back on the relationship and its burgeoning. It didn’t seem exactly right to look back on the experience with regret, but how should I look back otherwise? Knowing what I already knew? These questions are what the poem sought to explore.

The title gave me some trouble. I wrestled with whether the final iteration was more love poem or elegy (both of which I feel I’m always writing, or attempting to write). But then, why couldn’t it be both?

In reading this poem, one gets the sense that they have been pulled into this very intimate moment where the speaker is both observing the little boy and relaying his observations to the reader. Can you talk a little bit about perspective in this poem?

The best way I can describe perspective in the poem, and you’ve already picked up on this, is liminal; I’m deeply interested in liminal spaces. Temporally, the speaker sits between past and future, going so far as to conjecture at what would happen “again if given the chance.” But furthermore, to my mind, the speaker has actually been to this place, but can’t help returning to this place, alone, literally or through memory.

I think it’s difficult, when feeling an emotion so strongly—sadness, joy, regardless of what that emotion may be—to not see and shape the world through the lens of that emotion. That reshaping is what fascinates me about a poem like “The Glass Essay,” how Carson skillfully uses figuration to show the reader how her speaker is feeling. All of her images are charged with emotion, and teach the reader that her speaker is in a strange emotional space. While I found the details of the Chinese garden striking on their own, to further transform the details into images seemed a more interesting way of getting at the speaker’s emotional state without simply saying “I’m kind of bummed that this thing happened.” Perspective can be incredibly useful as a tracking tool, a way to control the reader’s eye and complicate a speaker’s gaze. I can only hope perspective is doing that kind of work in this poem.

“Love Elegy” has a really interesting mix of lyrical language and imagery (“I like to think they’re pure, / That that’s why even after the boy’s palms were empty, / After he had nothing else to give, they still kissed / His hands.”) and more colloquial language (“But who am I kidding?”, “So dumb.”) What were your goals in balancing the moments of “elevated” language with the more colloquial language?

Good question: my answer is actually two-fold: I’ll start by saying that my goal with language, in any poem I draft, is to create a speaker who sounds real and human, not simply a construct of me the poet. This, of course, is the paradox because the speaker is a construct of me the poet! But that’s the trick of craft and structure, isn’t it—the writer presents something constructed that gives the impression of the genuine?

Secondly, before starting my graduate program, I can say I largely valued Elegance above Beauty in my work; in fact, I’d say I even confused the two! By which I mean my poems lacked a certain sense of counterpoise to give them greater nuance. I think language works to provide such counterpoise in this poem. The instances of lyrical language and imagery, as you point out, could’ve easily allowed the poem to devolve into sentimentality without the instances of colloquial language. I think the colloquial language undercuts that sentiment and, as a result, provides the poem with a sense of counterbalance. Were the poem constructed only of “elevated” language, sure, it may have been wonderfully elegant (And, believe me, I’ve tried writing those poems), but would it be memorable? The colloquial language complicates the tone and causes the emotion to slide more firmly into place within the reader, I think. Elegance, as taught by one of my advisors, resides on the page, but Beauty resides within the reader. I’d like to write beautiful poems.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m steadily drafting and revising poems towards completing my first poetry collection (which is about finished). I’m also working on new poems that seem to be part of another project. Some of those poems are deeply interested in fable and allegory. Also, I recently spent eight hours in a line for tickets to Comic-Con in New York, which I failed to get… and I’m certain there’s a poem forming from that experience, too.

What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?

Currently, between reading poetry submissions for Four Way Review, I’m reading Carl Phillips’s Art of Daring, which is wonderful. I recently finished Laura Kasischke’s collection, The Infinitesimals—a beautiful, haunting collection. I relocated to Brooklyn from New Jersey within the last month, and finally got around to setting books up on my shelves. Books I’m looking forward to reading in the coming months? Jericho Brown’s The New Testament, Brian Russell’s The Year of What Now, Gregory Pardlo’s Digest, just to name a few. And Elizabeth Bishop, of course. I’m always rereading Bishop’s Geography III.

"If I Must Belong to You": An Interview with Daria-Ann Martineau

Daria-Ann Martineau was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. After earning a BA in Speech and Hearing Science from The George Washington University (DC), she saw there were more interesting ways to understand language. She now holds an MFA in Poetry writing from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Hospital fellow. She has also received fellowships from the Saltonstall Arts Colony and the Callaloo Creative Writers Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in Narrative, Kinfolks Quarterly, and Almost Five Quarterly.

Her poem, "Pas Toi," appeared in Issue Sixty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about the Caribbean and the American South, independence and ownership, and family history.

How does content play with form here?

I couldn’t really tell you. This poem started out in a very unimaginative, linear, free-verse form and I can’t remember what got me to play with white space. I think, however, it pertains to the ideas of things that connect us and those that separate us. I’m talking about two regions (The Caribbean and the American South) that are so culturally different in some ways and so similar in others. I remember reading Their Eyes Were Watching God back in high school and thinking, Wow this sounds like Trinidad! (my homeland) but it’s set in Florida--and not the West Indian part of Florida.

The form seems to foster a disconnect based in language and communication. What do the spaces represent for you?

Partly that. Again, the things that connect and separate us. Partly the struggle between ownership and independence. Also, the gaps in my family history. I’m the youngest in my family and there are things I don’t know about our past, because of slavery and the way things get lost in translation, but also because of repressed memories. Every family has stories they’d rather not air, I think, and respectability is very important in a lot of Post-colonial cultures.

Who is the “you” that the narrator addresses?

My partner. His last name is Butler. He’s from Mississippi.

What are you currently writing?

Think-pieces. Lots and lots of failed poems, mostly around my relationship, which is shifting in some ways right now. Also a bit around Ferguson. If I have children they will be Black and probably American. As that future becomes more likely, incidents like these resonate with me more than ever.

What are you reading?

I was reading Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning. It’s gorgeous. However I had to put it down when my day-job got too crazy. I look forward to picking it back up and finally finishing over Christmas.

"To Hurry the Rain": An Interview with Fritz Ward

Fritz Ward’s poems have appeared American Letters & Commentary, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and many other publications. His manuscript has been a finalist and semi-finalist for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Prize, the National Poetry Series, The Four Way Books Levis Prize, and several other contests. He currently lives just outside of Philadelphia and works at Swarthmore College.

His poem, "Reenactment as America's Most Wanted #48," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes, about slippery you's, little so's, and houses that eat you up.

Could you tell us about the genesis of “Reenactment as America’s Most Wanted #48”?

I was collaborating with Simeon Berry and Cecily Iddings on a series of doppelganger poems several years ago. “Reenactment” never made it to the collaborative phase of the project, but the initial seeds of the poem were sown while thinking about the implications of inhabiting other personas and voices. An earlier variation of the poem was entirely cast in first person, but over time the first-person approach felt too much like an act. As much as I wanted to climb into the persona I had created, something about it felt hollow. It got to the point where the I in the poem felt more like an actor than a speaker. That feeling lingered for a year or two until I became mildly obsessed with the idea of an actor actually playing the part, and then the idea of reenactment quickly surfaced. Somewhere in this messy timeline, I also started thinking about America’s Most Wanted, a show that held a powerful and frightening place in my memory. The reenactments from that show, along with Emilia Philips poem “Entra Tutto,” about a Civil War reenactment, finally pushed the poem into its current version, which in many ways is a reenactment of that early first-person poem.

The “you” in poetry is ever shifting, ever being discovered by the reader. In this poem, I felt like the “you” was in a very different mode than I was expecting, until the end, with “Shhhh, you’re only here to hurry the rain // into my heart.” This felt like the “you” was suddenly a beloved. Could you talk about the use of the “you” in the poem?

The “you” is a god-damn slippery creature in this poem. Perhaps because it was absent from the poem for so many years, the “you” still feels a bit surprising to me when I reread the poem. I wanted the “you” to immediately indict/implicate the reader, the speaker, and the other. I wanted to blur those lines to create a measure of ambiguity and discomfort within the false security of the reenactment trope. Since this is a reenactment, we’re not experiencing the actual events but the recreation of them, and yet we’re experience this recreation for the first time. I wanted the “you” to embody this idea as well—of being both the thing and not the thing. I’m not entirely sure what to say about the shift in the final two lines. The poem wanted something tender and ominous, yet sad and yet complicated. I complied.

Even though the “so” at the end of “You stand just // so” is a little word, it’s given a lot of emphasis by being both on its own line, off set, and italicized. Could you talk about this little word and the weight you’ve given it?

I rarely employ one-word lines, but the line break after “just” and the loneliness of “so” orphaned out there on its own line felt absolutely right. It’s a familiar phrase, maybe even a little worn, but placing the emphasis so heavily on “so” felt like it planted depth charges in the phrase and reminded me how hyper aware you can be of someone else’s body language when you’re obsessed, afraid, or even infatuated. The way they stand sends your heart into a manic episode of panic, fear, or excitement depending upon the circumstances.

What have you been writing recently?

I’m attempting to build a house of poems. My wife and I became homeowners for the first time three years ago and I’ve noticed how significantly my relationship to habitat has changed since then. Each poem focuses on one room of the house, but the room is never named in the poem.  So far, I’ve built the kitchen, living room, hallway, and an unfinished basement. It may all collapse in on me at any minute, but until then I’ll keep hammering. Houses eat you up.

What have you been reading recently?

On the poetry shelf, I’ve recently read and loved Bone Map by Sara Johnson, Cecily Iddings’s Everybody Here, and How to Dance as the Roof Caves In by Nick Lantz.

Last month, I got my fiction fix by feasting on How The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor. Also, Dr. Seuss. My two-year old is obsessed with The Lorax right now.

"What We Do Is Normal": An Interview with Peter Schumacher

Peter Schumacher's fiction has appeared online at The Summerset Review and Smokelong Quarterly. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and currently lives in Colorado.

His story, "Mars," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Peter Schumacher talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about genres, humor, and popular culture in art.

What was the original idea that led you to write your story, “Mars”? How much did the concept change from the first draft to the final?

About a year ago I wrote a series of stories about weird habits. I was trying to investigate the extent to which our daily lives are determined by habits. I didn’t revise this story much, but the composition took shape pretty slowly over a period of two or three months. The Mars stuff came suddenly one day and I was happy about that juxtaposition, and tried to see it through to its natural end.

How did you decide that the entire story should consist of one long paragraph? How do you think this choice affects the reader’s experience of the story?

I began to see that the story wanted to express an entire life, but it was achieving this through a very narrow, very focused view. To me, the long paragraph is both maximal and minimal in a similar way. It is expansive, rhythmic, entrancing, torrential, but it’s also completely unadorned and monotone.

What stood out to me as most unique about this story is the juxtaposition of the mundane with the extraordinary. A seemingly inconsequential act, picking the skin off of one’s foot, becomes how the narrator identifies the main character, the “foot picker.” In one part of the story we read a list of this man’s favorite menu items at a tapas restaurant, and in another part he is on a spaceship bound for Mars. What attracts you to this balance of oddity and the everyday?

Well, I like juxtaposition of tone, genre, situation, etc. Genres are like moods or beliefs or perspectives: one day we have this mood, that view, and the next day we’re somewhere else completely.

Also, the more outrageous the juxtaposition, the more fun you can have. I learned that when I was a kid watching The Simpsons, and nowadays I get the same kick reading Cesar Aira.

Another aspect that caught my attention was this fourth-wall-breaking moment: “It wasn’t true that his foot picking was a Freudian neurosis with its roots in a cesspool of repressed sexual urges. Nor is this an example of unreliable narration: I am simply stating that it wasn’t a neurosis. The foot picking was bad, it was gross, but it wasn’t a Freudian neurosis.” Why give a mostly third-person omniscient narrator this brief moment of first person? What are the benefits and risks of injecting a story with metafictional elements?

It occurred to me during composition that the story invites a Freudian reading—“Why does this guy pick his feet, and what does this all say about the author?” The metafictional moment is a playful, ironic defense against Freudian readers. A joke!

I’m not above jokes and I don’t think of metafiction as a risky technique. Rather it’s a staple technique—it has been in the fiction writer’s toolbox since the beginning. To me, metafiction is honest. Writers know they’re writing stories and readers know they’re reading them.

I’m also interested in this story’s references to television shows. For example: “He pretended he was a Ninja Turtle, usually Donatello. When he was an adolescent he worried over Donatello's sexual orientation. It seemed to him that Donatello was the gayest of the turtles.” Also: “His favorite shows were Breaking Bad and Mad Men. These were popular shows. The foot picker was impressed with the quality of writing in these shows.” How and why does popular culture intersect with your writing?

Popular culture is normal. That the foot picker liked Ninja Turtles when he was a kid or Breaking Bad when he was a young adult tells us very little about him. It’s only normal, and the same can be said for the vast majority of our lives. What we do is normal. We get up in the morning, eat breakfast, shower, whatever. And yet life feels urgent and mysterious at the same time. We can identify a person as a foot picker or Breaking Bad fan and this may be useful or descriptive to some degree, but ultimately no amount of labeling or storytelling will ever get to the bottom of what, exactly, a human life is. The foot picker is the foot picker, for sure, but that’s certainly not all he is. Identity is restrictive; you select a few pivotal bits of personal history, a few personality traits and hobbies, and there you have it: a sense of self! It’s the same in fiction—we use back story and action and physical detail and dialogue ticks to create a sense of character, but this is always conventional and limited; we’re always leaving out the vast majority of the picture and it’s impossible not to, because there’s so much going on at any given moment. That’s what Tristram Shandy is all about, right? The impossibility of rendering in fiction the totality of an individual’s life, because life always escapes perfect expression. Life is lived and experienced, but it can never be fully expressed through art. All art can do is suggest or point and that’s a wonderful thing, totally enough.

What writing projects are you working on now?

More stories.

What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?

Recently I have read and loved: Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, Eihei Dogen’s Genjo Koan, and Mijenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Stephan Eirik Clark

Stephan Eirik Clark was born in West Germany and raised between England and the United States. He is the author of the short story collection Vladimir's Mustache. A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he teaches English at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Sweetness #9 is his first novel.

An excerpt from his novel, Sweetness #9, appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, he answers questions in the form of excerpts from Sweetness #9.

What is writing like?

He rattled on like some excitable professor, speaking of abortion doctors stalked by pro-lifers and animal research facilities that had been ransacked by masked activists. He knew of a nuclear physicist who’d been blinded by battery acid, and a scientist with the CDC whose work with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines had so enraged the mothers of autistic children that the government had offered him the use of a new name.

"And you think it could be something like that?"

He squirted more cheese into his mouth, nodding.

I wanted to take a knee. "So what should I do? Call the postmaster general?

"Please. A man who deals in lost mail?"

"What, then?"

What isn’t writing like?

Oh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, members of the Twitterati, hear my dolorous sigh. I had awoken at the age of forty-nine, wondering what I could do about my wasted, ill-spent life.

When you do it, why?

He picked it up, ready to dump its contents into the sink, but before he could, his nose passed over the test tube's mouth and he smelled something sweet. Something warm. Something light and somehow pink. He breathed it in a second time, drawing the odor deep down into his lungs, and it was so divine, a sensation so vibrant and alive, that he imagined he might float up out of his boots.

When you don’t, why?

My performance as both a flavorist and an administrator was suffering—so much so that I feared even Ernst must have noticed. I had become a born-again doodler, a man enthralled by open windows and spiders crawling up the wall. I was sure everyone could see it. My coffee breaks had become more numerous, my “working” lunches more lingering, and if I wasn’t coming in late one morning, I was cleaning out my test tubes and driving home early that same day.