Poetry Talk with Bryan Dietrich (Part 1)
A very odd thing has been happening since I’ve been lucky enough to become an author. As I’ve been out promoting the book (which deals primarily with the subject of Love), I’ve found myself fielding more questions about my various superhero poetry projects than about my actual published book of poems about Love. Somehow, my unpublished superhero poetry manuscript seems to overshadow the Love manuscript which has actually made its way into print.
Strange (yet exciting) days.
One of the questions I’m asked most often is “what or who” inspired me to write superhero poetry. Well, while the answer to the question of what inspired my affinity for superhero poetry is both long and complex, the story of who inspired me to write superhero poetry is short and succinct: Bryan Dietrich.
I came across Bryan’s first book Krypton Nights in my undergraduate studies at UNCW (thanks to Lavonne Adams) and, while the idea for writing superheroes into my poetry had been there for quite a while, Bryan Dietrich and Krypton Nights gave me the “permission” I was looking for to actually begin writing it.
So, it is with great personal satisfaction that I’ve been able to meet Bryan (virtually) and form a friendship. Almost as exciting was when Bryan agreed to field a few questions for me regarding poetry, superheroes and writing in general.
The end result of that Q&A will be presented here in a two-part interview. Bryan’s comments on both poetry and writing were so rich and elucidating that a single post would not have done him justice. (Expect the second part of this interview next weekend.)
For those of you unacquainted with Bryan’s body of work, here’s the skinny on Bryan’s breathtakingly impressive body of work:
Bryan D. Dietrich is the author of a book-length study on comics, Wonder Woman Unbound, and six books of poems: Krypton Nights, Universal Monsters, Prime Directive, Love Craft, The Assumption, and The Monstrance. He is also co-editor of Drawn to Marvel, the world’s first anthology of superhero poetry.
He has published poems in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Yale Review, Shenandoah, Open City, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Witness, Weird Tales, and many other journals. Having won The Paris Review Poetry Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, the Isotope Editors’ Prize, a Rhysling Award, and the Eve of St. Agnes Prize, Bryan is a five-time finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Series and has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart and the Pulitzer.
Now, without further ado, Poetry Talk with Bryan Dietrich (Part 1):
JM: Before we get down to the topic of sonnets, I’d like to begin with a pretty basic question, something to help us get to know a little more about you as a poet: when did you begin making poetry a career goal and what made you decide to intertwine pop culture so intimately with your art?
BD: Let me first say that I always imagined I would be a comic book artist. Ever since I can remember, my life has revolved around comic books and comic-book-like stories—Star Trek, The Night Stalker, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, The Six Million Dollar Man, Man from Atlantis, The Prisoner, etc. What excited me then, and what still excites me now, is that which haunts the edges of the unexplained, the ineffable.
Of course it was a time for that kind of thing; my childhood fell in the midst of the Seventies when the Occult and outer space were king. It was an age of wonder, of reinventing a world become too skeptical of everything Other. It was an age of the great horror films—The Exorcist, Eraserhead, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Shining, far too many others to mention here—an age of sci fi, an age of alternative answers. I remember watching Chariots of the Gods, In Search Of, and The Mysterious Monsters with a kind of breathless wonder supposedly reserved for church, wanting, with a good portion of the rest of America, for it all to be true.
What I didn’t know then, what I know now, is that I was caught up in the modern mania for myth, the deep seated need in all of us to take part in story. The Seventies tried to provide that myth; the Seventies was the beginning of the end of myth. We were at the cusp of the apocalypse of the Word, and, though we didn’t know it, we were watching the millennium eat up the last of the stories we would be able to recognize.
Myself, I was at the beginning of becoming an adult, like America, like the world itself, growing into the mundane. It made me no less hungry. Everything I watched, read, or drew began and ended with old stories in new clothing. Old myths reimagined for an age slowly dying into itself, the death throes of our human love affair with myth and meaning. So, knowing none of this then, I was still a part of myth, part of that storied past that was trying to stay alive through its heroes and harlots, gods and monsters, maidens and madmen, still trying to rise, rise and walk, through harbinger and heroine.
I began writing poetry when I was in seventh grade, or at least began writing something I called poetry. At the time, I still imagined myself a comic book artist, but I had just finished The Lord of the Rings and The Martian Chronicles and had started collecting a comic book mini-series (actually a LOTR knock-off) called Warriors of the Shadow Realm. I was also living in Memphis, going to a school where my hair was set on fire on the bus, where I judged my wardrobe by the size of the belt buckle I would have to wear (my belt, a makeshift weapon I might have to use), where drug deals went down in the classroom, two desks up from my own. I needed escape, I needed to believe in Other, in Else, in a place I could escape to. The tales I had found though—Tolkien’s, Bradbury’s, Moench’s—were less about escape than about the reason behind the need to escape itself. Each was about the end of an age, about growing up, about coming to terms with all that would be left when the magic was gone.
I started drawing images for my own comic, something far too terribly like what I was reading, started writing background tales to underpin my fantasy and found, to my astonishment, that the writing was easier than the drawing. I also found a teacher in an advanced English class (Carol Short) who wanted us to write a story. All my friends complained, said I had too many ideas, made her promise she’d make me start something new. So I did, but of course it wasn’t. Nothing is ever new. All we do, we do from the vantage point of the shoulders of those who’ve carried us. My story, “If Only a Robot Could Cry” was a bad Bradbury clone, but it was a beginning. It led me to poems. It led me to my first prize for writing, a copy of another Bradbury book, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and to a particular phrase that changed my life.
When I read that the main character “like a fall of timber chopped himself to bed,” I knew. I could do this. I had to do this. Fuck the art. Fuck the comic books. Let me do this and all black Betties and belt buckles and burning hair wouldn’t matter. The fights wouldn’t matter. The drugs wouldn’t matter. This would be my drug.
Of course it already was. All my first stories, all my poems, were shaped after what I already loved. Not monsters or heroes. Not starships or morning stars, but myth itself. I have never not written about it. What is modern myth but popular culture? Myth is culture incarnate, and it would not last if it didn’t touch, in ways far deeper than it might at first seem, the lives of the populace.
Superman is Christ, Christ, Moses. Wonder Woman is Diana, Diana, Inanna. Aliens are angels. Elvis our Pied Piper. Monsters? The mind. Einstein? Our Aristotle. We tell these stories because we need them, and we need them even more, now, in a world that tells us the internet is where we should do research, that the library is old fashioned, print is obsolete, our stories and media need to get to the point, good classrooms can be virtual, good TV, reality…. In the shadow of this growing plague, that kid who grew up reading Machine Man knows this, just this: We are not machines. We need myths to keep us free from the Shadow Realm.
JM: Krypton Nights opens with the sonnet crown “Autobiography of a Cape,” Universal Monsters features the crown “The Mummy’s Hand” and features several other sonnets and sonnet-like poems. What first drew you to the sonnet and why do you continue to work so extensively with the form?
BD: Everything we do, we do as a balance between opposites. As Yeats knew, all is antinomy. When I first started writing (terrible) poems, they were all in form. Form was what I thought poetry was. Ironically, some of that early assumption is true, but not as I imagined it when I began. If I am right about this (and I am certainly not alone in my assessment), poetry is the art of language.
Poetry is not form, nor sound, nor line break, nor length, nor topic…alone. Poetry is the act of being engaged, at every level, with every aspect of the Word the poet serves. Stevens writes poetry. But so does Faulkner. Plath writes poetry. But so does Morrison. It isn’t about the form, per se, but when one is focused on language itself, as opposed to, say, story, one is probably edging into poetry, for good or for ill. I don’t write poetry because I like it. I do like it, but it’s not that simple. I don’t write poetry because I cannot write prose. I can (at least I think I can). I write poetry because it is my drug of choice, because it is my calling, because it is all that matters.
When I write poems, I could care less about character or plot (though these, too, take part in some if not most of my poems). What I am interested in, what I crave, is the feeling that happens in me when I am on the cusp of a complete loss of control. Language isn’t math. Auden says, ironically of course, that poetry “makes nothing happen.” In some senses, even in his tongue-in-cheek way, he is right. Poetry is not on the human radar today. Probably, it never was. Read your most recent “Best Of” lists. Read Entertainment Weekly or even The New York Times. Go to a bookstore for God’s sake. Poetry is always, always, at the back of the bus…or, more accurately, left walking. As a self conscious culture, we do not appreciate it. It does not register popularly.
What poetry does, when it does it, is work behind the scenes. It legislates, as Shelley would have it, invisibly, unacknowledged. Culture tends to preference that which can be easily assessed (witness the death of education called No Child Left Behind or, perhaps more insidiously, the move toward universal assessment at every university in this country). Poetry, alternatively, appears to exist, act, and influence off the radar. It does not compute. It insinuates and archetypifies. It draws connections and asks. It never answers. If it does answer, it is not poetry. It is about itself, not what it influences. Its effect is ever and always completely separate from what it is.
This does not mean, ala Auden, that it does not “do,” but that it doesn’t care. So why care about it? Because it can do. Because it does everything worth doing. Because to get it to do what it should, one has to let go. Writing a poem is letting go of what I, as poet, want. And letting go is letting go of me. How, then, does one let go, when all we are is what we are? Personally, as a formalist poet, I let go by supplying the poem a box in which to accelerate, a form against which to rail, a prison from which the language wants escape.
Whatever form I provide—be it sonnet or sestina, iambics or syllabics—the language tries to fill that form and overflow. My job is to step back, let the alchemy occur, and help clean up the mess. Trying to keep the two forces in balance is the moment I crave. I have an idea. I have a box. The idea, too big for the box, wants to escape. The box, too rigid for evolution, wants to remain. I, poet, God of this process, get to guide both back to equilibrium.
I say God. Okay, perhaps. But perhaps junkie is more apt. I fill the arm of the tradition with the drug. I watch. I try to prevent a bad trip. Part of what I crave, then, is that control; part, the lack thereof. Invariably, what erupts from the mind of the poem (because by now it is its own thing, not mine), is not in any way what I imagined. I like cleaning up afterward, directing the hallucination as it happens, but the final vision is rarely as intoxicating as the process.
Language is not math. It is as alive as the poet herself. I am only a facilitator. I am the Oracle in Frank Miller’s 300. I will do anything for a glimpse of the sublime as it becomes. Because I am not interested in the outcome, or at least not as interested as I am in the process, I am far more acolyte than avatar. An oracle is not the arbiter. An oracle is a conduit. The language moves through me, I serve it, I tend it, I try to make the path clear for its movement toward what really matters.
What matters? Everything else. Everything else beyond me, beyond, in fact, the poem. What will it do? I do not know. But it will not be about me. Like a child of the true God, the Word will move in the world, it will act, it will inform and influence. But it will never, like its creator, take credit. Words, though they are the incarnate will of those who read them, have no will of their own. Neither do poets. Sonnets, syllabics, haiku, epic, any form for that matter, ensures that I keep my fucking nose out of the business of the future.
JM: The notorious (and beautiful) challenge of the sonnet comes from its limitations on physical space. Fourteen lines can seem a narrow, stuffy prison cell—room enough to scream, but not quite room enough to sing. But you are repeatedly capable of achieving sweeping, deep movements within the fourteen lines, often times within the space of only a couplet or quatrain. How do you approach the challenge of controlling space within the sonnet?
BD: Poetry is not about space. It is about time. Because a story is interested in the tale, in the characters to whom the tale pertains, often it fades as quickly as it is finished. When the popcorn is done, so is the experience. Words interested in their own effect, language designed to resonate over and over on different frequencies, differently with every reading, act differently. They last. They linger in the continuum of meaning in a way simple story cannot. Now, while some characters and elements of story can linger (we call them archetypes), the stories themselves are easy listening. They are the popcorn we eat. They are never the wine.
Poetry is wine. It is hallucinatory. It is the vibration of the tuning fork left lingering long enough in the room to set the wine goblets singing. It is ghost. It is resonance incarnate. If enough things are happening at once in the language, if the focus is on the permanently evolving experience, if the interactions between word choice and sound and line break and meaning continue to hum long after the singer has finished, if, in short, the song outlasts both singer and listener because the notes are more than singular, then the tune touches the ineffable and outlives, outbreathes, the space it claims.
The space, in fact, is probably irrelevant. Time is all that matters in poetry. Will this poem outstrip the space it is packed into? If it does not…if it cannot…it is not poetry. So I am not as concerned, myself, with the space I work with as I am about what goes into that space. As long as the lines and words and references work well beyond the limitations of any space—be it fourteen or forty lines—then I am happy. Having said this, though, it is absolutely true that some of what I want a poem to do, some of what the poem itself wants to do, is hard to have happen in only fourteen lines.
Writing a sonnet, for me, is thus more like sculpting stone than painting in oils. In oil, one can always add too, erase, paint over. Stone is far less forgiving. It mandates a necessary first mind-set of taking away. One must take away all that isn’t essential. Now, I suppose I’m being a bit disingenuous; with poetry, I am, finally, working in ink, and ink far more forgiving. So, clay then. Poetry is clay. I can take away what sucks, what doesn’t move in multiple ways. I can delete and delete, reshape and reform. But it is, nevertheless, a process more of subtraction than addition. The addition can happen and does, but the outer limit—fourteen lines—mandates that what remains remains for a very clear reason.
I cannot say just how many sonnets I have “finished” only to find them terrible, misshapen golems. They almost always need fewer limbs, shapelier heads, a more meaningful secret sign to set them moving. Invariably, I end up with five or six phrases I can cull from the mess, lines which then form the armature for the second (and hopefully better) sculpture I have to build up around them. Everything else is cut away.
How does one approach such a process then? Since it isn’t clay, since the teacher won’t always come to cut away the face I’ve ruined, the form I’ve botched, and say, “Start over, have some more porcelain,” I have to begin with the idea that what I’m doing is tiny. It might not be as tiny as haiku, as tanka, but it is, for me, a very small space that must be as large as space itself. It must be space as space began and, in fact, may still exist. It must be a singularity where time and space break down and become as infinitely vast as it is infinitely small. This means the crux must be clear, the center must hold, the words? Perfect. Nothing can be left to chance.
Start, then, with a phrase, a phrase that means far more than what it says: “Home from a hard day’s work.” No. Already, no. If I’m wanting to talk about Superman, his work is not my work, not your work, not any human work. His work must be something vast, important. Okay, “Home from a hard day’s a hard day’s a hard day’s….” It doesn’t come. I work for hours, write six other sonnets. All of them suck. But one line I like, something about Armageddon. Go back. Revisit the scene. Edge back toward the event horizon: “Home from a hard day’s Armageddon.” Yes, this might do. It’s much more Superman, yes, but it also disrupts expectation. Superman is supposed to be all light—all America and apple pie—yet Armageddon is far darker. Good. So….
“Slipping out of spandex and into my suit….” Okay, again no. I want to play with the word suit, but later, later when I’m not just introducing the character. I need more now, something that goes with Superman’s actions, something, since it is a sonnet, I can rhyme later. Suit’s too easy, for now. What is Superman? What does he slip into? Hair? Tie? Glasses? No, actually, it’s none of this that hides him. What hides him is the absolute nerdity of Clark. So how does Clark manage it? How does he make nerd from Nephilim, dork from deity? He makes a mess of himself, no, makes ruin of himself, no, makes, makes…oh, oh yes, makes a spectacle out of himself. He trips over the water cooler, he runs into Lois, forces her to spill her coffee all over him, says sorry, sorry Lois, so sorry. Look at me, look so you won’t see. Thus:
Home from a hard day’s Armageddon,
slipping out of spandex and into spectacles…
I love the pun that allows me address Clark’s true facade, but also the very glasses I wanted to avoid. However, perhaps more interesting than anything else, is that the word calls up another definition as well. More commonly, spectacle means an extraordinary event, something we would more readily associate with Superman, not Clark. Thus this word should trouble the reader, make her think, well, in what way is becoming Clark a becoming of something more Superman-ish. How is Clark more “super” by being less? It should begin the process of the questioning that, I hope, the entire sonnet, the entire crown, and the entire book engages.
I could keep going, talk about the hour or two spent on the next two lines, about the delight I felt in finding the eye rhyme with spectacles—Pericles—about the even greater delight in punning off the word “quit” or the title of Clark’s newspaper, The Planet (another idea cannibalized from those much weaker, much more slack, first tries), but suffice it to say that the same care, the same attention to each word, every comma, every parenthesis, every intentional act of alliteration and pluperfect pun pertains. I wrote the first sonnet of Krypton Nights in exactly this way. Which is to say I un-wrote far more than I wrote.
Sonnets are what I think I do best. Not because I’m good at what I do, but because, like Clark, the truth is probably the exact opposite. I’m better when I am hemmed in, trapped by an identity I have to adopt to get through the day, forced to wear the wire rims in order to let the glory inside the suit finally understand what it is it fights for. Sonnets are my Clark clothes. And, finally, what they contain isn’t mine either. They belong to a power bequeathed me by a dying world. I owe the world, this world, a world I sometimes fear lost, no less.
Unless we reinvigorate the language, unless we serve the language—an art that seems so sadly to be Twittering away—to its fullest, we will arrive in a space no different from what we left. We must transcend time, we must move past “the 28 known galaxies,” to do more than space appears to allow. I believe we must do this or we will find our new home, our Earth endeavor, our world, wordless, sonnetless, meaningless, sunless, and cold. Jor-El sent his son here for a reason. He, we, are meant to write everything as if it were a sonnet. It is no mistake that the greatest power on earth, Superman himself, had first to fit in a phone booth before trajecting outward to save us all.
So, home from a hard day’s writing, here’s the hero, the big red S, the sonnet I wrote, human failings and all:
Home from a hard day’s Armageddon,
slipping out of spandex and into spectacles,
from one high life bold above the abandon
into another (shall we say less Pericles
than Prospero), I find that I suspect
this Superman I’ve become. Dressing down
is easier, the lie somehow less circumspect.
And though this too is dressing up, the clown
suit cum reporter’s wardrobe boasts less blood
between the seams. I don’t mind the dumbing
down, really. Being the neighborhood
god, all guts and gusto, well, it’s numbing.
But here, just another byline for a vast news magnate,
I can stumble, fumble, fail. I can always quit the Planet.
…
This concludes part one of my chat with Bryan. Part two will be posted in about a week, so be sure to check back here!
Also, for those of you interested in finding out more about Bryan and/or maybe getting him to come to your school and do a reading (I’m looking squarely at you UNCW!), here’s Bryan’s website: BryanDietrich.com
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