Rodney Jones

Interview

by Francine Conley 

Rodney Jones is the author of ten poetry books, including Transparent Gestures, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Salvation Blues, which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He teaches in the low-residence MFA program at Warren Wilson College and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

 

Francine Conley: There was a panel at the AWP (Association of Writers Conference) in Seattle about the importance of narrative. They talked about your work and the death of narrative in contemporary poetry. Apparently narrative is not hip anymore as a form.

 

Rodney Jones: It’s just idiotic to deny story. That’s been the draw from the beginning. Especially the story of love. Of Oedipus. I don’t know what the big deal is, as though one had to choose. I don’t have trouble loving Ashbery and Dostoevsky. The opposition that people make between narrative and lyric interests me, but it seems a false distinction. Song, story, philosophy: it’s all fair game, and the best writers have frequently written hybrids.

 

Conley: Critics comment on your poetry of storytelling. In your new work, you’re thinking about characters and the stories they hold.

 

Jones: I’m giving myself more to that now. Most of my earlier works are less storytelling than anecdotal meditations. The first poem in The Unborn, “Remembering Fire” was grounded in the particular event of a fire, but its metaphorical underpinning was the notion that the likeliest expectation of the after-life is suggested by pre-birth consciousness. Abyss Studies are important to me, and the reverse narrative of the poem simply gets at that idea. There’s an assumption that the poems refer to a story. I think a writer accomplishes seeing. The single moment of life. But you also have this deductive element that allows you to talk about the story. And to talk about the story in terms of this idea or that idea. It’s a really commodious thing. The pure narrative is rare, but I’m not afraid of it at all.

 

Conley: Say more about “the lyric voice.”

 

Jones: The lyric is the music poem. Whether it is Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, or W.S. Merwin, but many storytellers are also lyricists. Even a narrative poet like Anne Carson (who is hip) has splendid lyric moments. She is interesting because she wasn’t trained in the cabinets where people know everything about the art and are always operating in a rule zone. She tends not to let the lyric get in the way of the narrative. The lyric calls to the static, to the resonant phonic moment that suggests a kind of instant metaphorical awareness. That can get in the way of the narrative. It’s like the Orgasm on the way to the Tax Audit.

 

Conley: I’m thinking about Follain—how he accomplishes this with dense, one-line images that hold repercussions and ripples—the lyric moment as an image you can unfold. Tony Hoagland influenced me to think of the lyric as an image that you can unpack differently from a narrative that starts, “When I was …” or, “And then this happened …” It’s a different experience to read that kind of poem—where there is a promise to bring the reader somewhere specific. The lyric offers something bold.

 

Jones: The kind of lyric I was initially engaged with was the noisy lyric. Stephen Dobyns talks a lot about noise and lyric, and he can do that. He’s a poet of great imagination. The eventfulness of a poem is often lyrical. A sound of a single word that makes a crucial difference. But if you’re charging into a lyric with the idea that you will kill understatement, I’m against that. One of the great accomplishments of music and literature is to suggest what is unsaid, to not play certain notes because they are implied. We all get bored when the mystery is dispelled, when a writer is merely caressing the language.

 

Conley: Can you say more about Anne Carson and how she relates to this as a hip writer with lyrical tendencies, through a degree of incomprehensibility, like in The Glass Essay?

 

Jones: She creates such a large curiosity. She doesn’t kill mystique. She relates complete and definitive moments through concise, definitive and memorable statements until quite suddenly we see the large thing that cannot be said. She is on a quite different frequency from the Scottish poet Don Paterson, who accomplishes a similar minimal but jarring effect through verse. American poets tend to be afraid of verse. Carson, in fact, usually eschews conventional verse and can write a whole book that intelligent readers take for poetry that does not contain one single poem.

 

Conley: Why do you hold Don Paterson in such high esteem?

 

Jones: His aphorisms … his cleverness … his economy—his use of rhymes that are just dead right and clear. Many would eschew those kinds of measures. He’s a poet who tends to get right to the point and is magnificently inventive. His poem about the lie, where he personifies the lie—that poem holds what always surprises me in his work. The mastery of language. He has a target. A purpose—an ambiguous purpose, much of it musical, but most frequently he creates for a reader the discovery of a compelling story.

 

Conley: I am interested in how you manage not just one, but multiple subjects in a single poem. There is the feeling that you’re investigating with a wry sense of humor. In “For My Sister,” and “The End of Communism” and the book Things That Happen Once—you take on everyday subjects but manage to tell something beyond the mundane.

 

Jones: Things That Happen Once is probably my most lyrical book. If the tone is right, many of us know plenty of words to write. These poems were initially written as prose poems. In early drafts, I would pay close attention to lyrical texture and sound as I was making the prose sentences or lines. When I was bored I’d just poof and start another draft. When I had between 200-300 pages of these entries, I went through them with a highlighter and started with the prose poems that seemed to promise the most direct path into a poem with the least amount of revision.

 

Conley: Talk about your mastery of sound and the sonic muscle in your work that is unique to you and Ellen Bryant Voigt, especially in her most recent book.

 

Jones: Ellen has a perfect ear and she never abandons the lyrical project, as opposed, say, to Robert Hass who also has a great ear, but doesn’t always emphasize it—though when he does, oh my god it’s such a richness—it’s orchidaceous—it feels erotic and exotic. A lot of the sound in Things That Happen Once comes from the poets I was reading at the time. I was reading Merwin’s Travels and Elizabeth Bishop, who doesn’t make mistakes with her lyric. That’s not the only kind of ear. There’s always a little bit of a battle going on between the vernacular and the lyrical ideal, but there’s also a natural relation between the two. So the sentence Darwin will make is kin to the sentence cousin Jeb makes, but to some degree every sentence that is constructed is an image of a previous language. Ellen’s work is singular in the degree that it is tuned to both the register of a single human voice and a musical instrument. I think part of the ear is listening to that.

 

Conley: Who taught you to listen to that?

Jones: I had to sit in long and dreadful Church services as a child. I had to sit in school. Enforced listening. The idea of a class on teaching is ridiculous to me because they put you in this type of prison. The kind ones send you off to a room with a book. I liked eavesdropping, which is a particular kind of listening. I’ve been reading recently Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter, which is a stream of consciousness that also keeps the attention to the moment very well—the physical moment of the world. It is a book that bears a relation to mosaic, to a narrative in pieces. I find it liberating. And isn’t writing about freedom? Getting or coming free somehow. That seems the gate for the best kind of writing.

 

Conley: How do you know you have something to say? It’s a strange thing when you take a step back and ask what compels you to write—about your past, a mother, a tree? Touching on the point of freeing yourself from the stuckness of approach we get locked into in our work—we get a storyline and we don’t drop it. I like to be challenged out of my emptiness—not hold on too hard.

 

Jones: Oh, say it, Sister! I like that. I’ve never thought about it, but right now I’m working on a poem that acquired method as it went along. It has taken the shape of an end but it has not ended. There has to be a perspective that breaks the storyline.

 

Conley: I was thinking of your bit about Merwin … and how differently he feels from the first time I read him. Each time I go back he’s not the same poet. To articulate the difference of such reading—form can change as we rediscover a work a second, third time. The form that a poet takes can challenge me as a reader out of the assumptions I made just because of form. A poet like Ellen Bryant Voigt uses a subject like motherhood, for instance, in such a way that challenges me out of a habit I didn’t realize was a habit of thinking until I read her.

 

Jones: Ellen manages a tension between the elegantly formal and the loose idiomatic and unexpected … even the macabre can come right in and not own the poem because the poem is owned by the lull, the trance, the great sense of holding something to a center.

 

Conley: We were talking about how you’ve delved back into Freud and Darwin recently and enjoy their language as well as the way they compose a particular reality—can you say more about the way in which this kind of turning occurs in you after reading a writer who challenges your sense of what a sentence is or punctuation even if it’s not technically there (as in the case of Ellen’s Headwaters)?

 

Jones: Well, I forget who said, “Get off the tracks when the Faulkner express is coming through.” If I’m reading Nabokov, I begin to assume a different persona and I begin to assume that people are not that different from other animals—crows, apes—and we can learn enormously from others. All of us learn so much from others, and language that is not behavior I cannot do—I cannot learn from. I cannot just internalize facts.

 

Conley: What do you mean language as behavior?

 

Jones: Language that shows something about the nature of the speaker that has been noted by a specific reference. I always loved a friend of mine whose grandmother (she had Alzheimer’s) would often say, “Everywhere I go the same damn dog,” and I thought, a whole world opens under that sentence.

 

Conley: Let’s talk about difficult poems where it’s hard to find a way in, and from there, what is it about your poems that invite the reader in.

 

Jones: You know the trusty thesaurus I use provides the word ‘unnecessary’ as an alternative to ‘difficulty.’ People in the romantic tradition have a hard time looking at a poet as more than a name. We think “this particular person who writes this particular kind of poetry” and the people we remember are those in the mode of Emily Dickinson. Hass can offend me at times but it’s because I read Praise and then I read Human Wishes and feel like my mother had a married a different man. And I realized I was disappointed because I’d formed an expectation of him. I became aware of this by looking at my own biases.
Conley: In Human Wishes, Hass is doing something very different than he does in Praise. There’s an active excavation in Human Wishes—which leads back to this topic of approach.

 

Jones: A student of mine once said to me, “Everything is magnificent in your poems but I don’t bond with your poems.” It was this bit about bonding that sat with me. There is this thing that is not susceptible to articulation and “bond” was all she could come up. Sometimes, for no reason I can explain, I suddenly relate to one poem where before I felt no connection.

Conley: Ashbery seemed too complicated for me when I first read him, but years later after much living and lying I encountered Ashbery again and was absolutely receptive to the detours he plays with and against in his work. When it works it works, like a good meal you enjoy but you don’t want to make for yourself.

 

Jones: I do too! Exactly. That’s how I feel when I read him.
Conley: What is the take-away here from Ashbery and Nabokov?

 

Jones: You don’t just read; you assume that persona for a minute. It’s a persona you can bear and admire for its balance, its reason, its eroticism—there’s all sorts of things you can take: its balls. You can read Herbert White not to be him but to be the person who constructs the thought.

 

Conley: I was reading Rudyard Kipling to my kid—How the Leopard Got His Spots—and was entranced by the sonic play in his sentences.
Jones: Yes! To me that is ultimately a true and dangerous identification. Identification is much more dangerous than relation. With fiction, what I love is there is a multiple set of characters and those characters may to some extent be alter-egos of the creator of the work and some of them are women and some are men, others are pets—but the point is that you have the capacity to bring a multiplicity that is natural to an individual. We have thoughts that are un-PC, that are Robert Bly—I do like the idea of multiplicity. I think it’s Forester who says the notion of fiction is that we can know another person and can look inside him.
Conley: I’ve been thinking about secondary and tertiary characters—the ones who never come back—and how my own students are bothered with irresolution, like Sebald does—
Jones: I know I worry about that very issue in the work I am writing now, about characters that disappear and maybe should return.
Conley: I love that they disappear! Because I might see you at an airport and have a Rumi Soul Glance with you but also never see you again in my life. That appeals. Likewise, these characters that we want to come back––if they do, they don’t leave me with the task of examining the nature of that need, of my own want—the want of wanting them back—and I’m beginning to wonder at how a resistance to closure some poems or stories can better approximate the slipperiness that comes with an actively dissatisfying life. We need to actively dissatisfy the reader.
Jones: That seems to be a great conundrum … the idea that musical resolution, which is necessary in the art, does not mean what people mean when they say “closure.” I find closure lamentable in written work. It’s the death of a work. It’s what is unresolved that keeps or sustains my interest. I wonder what Keats would write now if he were alive. His few best poems are among the most gorgeous lyric poems ever written. The zaniness he went through … if he were writing now he’d have a larger emotional scope than he targets in his work.
Conley: You make me think about the time we’re born into, the availability What can you say about the trajectory of your path, what you’ve seen in your development as it is in your time, as a poet, teacher, etc?
Jones: It’s an imaginary business, as my old editor said … people work that territory so well now. There are people I know who are so good at self-promotion, but I always kind of wanted to be a recluse. Everette Maddox was my early mentor at Iowa and hated the art of networking and he was an influence. He recognized the game in there, and I remember resisting the game, but then I was taken up with someone who took care of that for me—Peter Davidson. He put my work in front of the right people, and since they liked it I didn’t have to seek out Breadloaf. Though in my resistance to networking I have missed having relationships with some really terrific poets of my generation.
Conley: There are poets like Bill Knott who are not joiners, or Anne Carson.

 

Jones: The work is the work. At some point I had to stop doing blurbs because I just thought it was so much trouble for me to write a blurb because I wanted to be represented but I was also selling the soap and I would find myself turning down books I loved and blurbing books I didn’t think much of, and yet it is an act of generosity submitted to me and I couldn’t do it in return—or it became too much. The point is, if you believe in anything, believe in writing. The business of poetry is, it seems, sort of a paralyzed uncle … it’s a hard sell. Every time I get a publisher to ask me to identify the audience to a book … I feel uncomfortable because all I want to think is this book will find an audience I hope for.
Conley: Who is Anne Carson’s audience?
Jones: Serious readers. But of course many people don’t read her. The popular writers like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver work for the masses. I always bring a Billy Collins poem to a beginning class and they love him. He’s a fine writer. He’s economical, zany, bright. You can’t find a word to cut. He’s engaging people … funny, clever, like James Tate, but Tate is going to rub people the wrong way and do things that spoil the contract and Billy won’t. Mary Oliver finds a huge audience—but she’s not like Billy—she’s more of a writer of mystique, and really of positive feelings, which not many people write about. Why I enjoy something as opposed to why something is so radically fucked up. We poets love that poem, but Oliver defies that. I tend to run into a lot of folks who are nearly nuns or priests, who are serious Sunday School people—who love Mary Oliver.