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Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned in an online forum your attraction to the work of Clark Coolidge and Marjorie Welish; what about these poets, or other contemporary poets, challenges or expands your horizon of possibility for what a poem can do?
RW: I’ve always held these two poets (who are hugely dissimilar from each other) up as shining lights of what I think of as music in poetry. For me music means that the words have a kind of definition to them in relation to one another on the line or in the stanza, akin to what I believe Emily Dickinson spoke of as the words’ having an “aura.” I also think of it as texture, and there’s nothing more useless to me than a poem whose texture is completely indistinct.
Rumpus: Do you anticipate publishing a predominance of poetry in the future at Fence Books and/or more fiction?
RW: More fiction! We’ve published two novels: Joyelle McSweeney’s Flet and The Mandarin, by Aaron Kunin. Next year we’re publishing our first story collection, by Paul Maliszewski, called Prayer & Parable, and I hope to add a fiction title per year. Also some nonfiction. Also a few children’s books. As I go on I get more and more interested in the non-poetry out there in the world.
Rumpus: You’ve worked at several health food stores throughout your life. Do Asher and Margot have favorite kinds of junk food?
RW: Asher and Margot are relentlessly well fed. I’m a total food snob and won’t allow anything with preservatives, high-fructose corn syrup, etc. into their gobbets. Their idea of a huge treat is coconut milk ice cream (it’s delicious), or the occasional gluten-free gingersnap (Asher is on the gluten-free/dairy-free diet for autism, which works REALLY WELL for some kids. I highly recommend it.).
Rumpus: Antepenultimately, a little bit about your background: you grew up in NYC and received your BA from U. Mass, and your MFA in Poetry from Iowa, holding a variety of editorial positions before founding Fence in 1998 and publishing your first collection. Has a peripatetic existence been generative for your poetry? Do find the difference between the verse of poets who never leave academia and poets who have made their home outside the Ivory Tower discernable?
RW: That poet you describe, the one who never leaves academia, is kind of a new breed, I think, and so it remains to be seen what that poetry looks like, in its matured form. I think my generation (I’m 42, almost) may be the last (for now) to contain lots of poets who don’t go the whole hog and get stuck in, in the British sense, to academia, but it’s such a mixed bag of influences/affects, as a culture, the poetry culture. I don’t think there’s any identifiable traits of my poems that tag them as non-academic . . . except, actually, that I have so far resisted and probably will always successfully resist that tendency toward “the sustained project,” as I spoofed in Figment (there’s a section called that which is anything but sustained). Many poets in academia need to have a certain number of books out by a certain time etc. and sometimes they sort of come up with projects that may not be wholly inspired but are at least fruitful and interesting to work on and read.
As for my peripateticness: I wouldn’t have done it any other way but again I wouldn’t think to prescribe it. From the age of 18 till 30 I moved every two years (and got a tattoo every two years). Actually I do prescribe this. One can be a sensation-junkie in those years, and if one’s poetry depends, as mine has certainly, on an impulse to re-create for a reader a sense of atmospherics, then it is more interesting to keep the stimuli changing.
Rumpus: One of the arguments in The King seems to be for the privileging of “feeling” (intuition/sensory knowledge) over “thought” (“It’s better to have a feeling/ than a thought—” the speaker of “The Good-Enough Mother” declares). Elsewhere (in one of my absolute favorite poems, “I live in the rectory”) the speaker sets forth a very compelling case for the rawness of lived experience (versus monastic austerity). Do you feel (think) as Stevens did, that, among other criteria, a good poem should give pleasure?
RW: I absolutely do. This was one of my earliest criteria for work for Fence, actually. I don’t think, though, that pleasure is a felt thing rather than a thought thing. I would argue that pleasure is highly cerebral, and that the highest pleasures of the poem might have to do with moments at which aural or tonal sensation and intellectation coincide, or collide, and are inextricable. I feel extreme pleasure when I am writing lines of poetry. That said, don’t you think there’s a kind of pathos in all that talk about feeling? All talk, no action.
Rumpus: Can you please describe your ideal reader in three words?
RW: Kind of lazy.
Read Virginia Konchan’s review of The King and “Stockholder”, a new poem by Rebecca Wolff, in Rumpus Original Poems.
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October 7th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Rebecca, This is such a great interview! I’d been looking for it ever since you mentioned it was forthcoming. Really excited, too, about The Beginners…