Poetry Talk with Bryan Dietrich (Part 2)
As promised, here is part two of my interview with poet Bryan Dietrich. In typical fashion, Bryan amazes.
JM: Talk to me a little more about the sonnet crown. Your history with it, your experiences, your thoughts on its challenges, pitfalls, blind alleys, etc.
BD: The crown is a form I first discovered in graduate school. I was reading entries for the Southern California Anthology when I came across a sequence of poems that blew me away. I recognized them as sonnets, and there were seven of them, but I didn’t know at the time that this was a recognized form. I’m not even sure that I noticed the repetition of lines. It wasn’t until I passed this particular piece on to the head of the program, and he said, “Oh, a crown,” that I had any idea. All I knew was that each of the parts seemed grander than the whole. Even without knowing the form, I had instinctively intuited how each movement, each individual sonnet, built upon a common theme and came to a kind of resolution no single sonnet could have accomplished alone.
Enamored of this strange new beast, I dabbled a bit early on, still not knowing, I think, that the established sequence numbered seven. I wrote a couple of sonnet sequences after this that I liked, but there were not seven, nor, as I recall, did they pick up the last line of the preceding sonnet as the first line of the next. Certainly, the first and last lines of the first and last sonnet were not identical. I did work, however, on building on an idea, on compartmentalizing variations, on extending the meal by dividing it into several courses.
By grad school, I had discovered the full parameters of the crown, but had also encountered far many more practitioners (masters) of the sonnet itself: Shelley, Coleridge, Stevens, Auden, Yeats, and Hopkins, always Hopkins. I discovered Richard Eberhart and Marilyn Hacker. Hacker in particular was practicing not just the sonnet, not just the crown, but long sonnet sequences that took on book form. And though I tend to think his work more surface than substance, Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate also caught my attention for a time. Finally, though, it was Shelley and Yeats, Hopkins and Hacker that influenced me the most.
By the time I’d finished my doctorate and my first two manuscripts (The Monstrance and Krypton Nights), I wanted to do something different. Having recently rediscovered the original Mars Attacks bubble gum cards, I’d also been watching X-Files and thinking about ways of addressing the ineffable through non-comic-book, sci fi tropes when I hit on the idea of a play in verse form, one that would, ahem, take place on the surface of Mars. The speaking voices would be H. G. Wells, Orson Welles, a Martian, the Viking Lander, and, hell, I don’t remember, somebody equally stupid I’m sure. Eventually, I realized the play wasn’t going to work, but I still liked the idea of many voices discussing alien life, alien visitation, alien mythology. I liked the idea very much. It harkened back to my early love of faux-mentaries like Chariots of the Gods. I particularly liked the idea of speaking in the voice of Orson Welles, one of my idols.
Once this decision had been made, it didn’t take long for me to think: Crown. Why not a crown? This epiphany was followed shortly by the concern that one sonnet apiece for seven important voices would not be nearly enough space. So…. A crown of crowns? Had anyone done it? Could I? And how would it work? Seven sets of seven sonnets, each in different voice. Cool, I thought. But as the form works, I would either have to make each crown a completely separate thing, or, if I really wanted each of the crowns to be as intimately interconnected as the sonnets of a single crown, I would have to continue the repetition function of first and last lines all the way through.
Unfortunately, this would mean that the first line of the first sonnet of the first crown would become the first and last line for every following crown, and I’d be stuck with the same line fourteen times. Mother of God. No.
So, what to do? How about the second line of the first sonnet of the first crown? Could it become the first line of the first sonnet of the second crown? And the third line, first line of the third crown, and so on? Yes, but that would mean only the first seven lines of the first sonnet of the first crown would be “re-used.” Shit, I thought, if I’m going to be anal, why not go all the way? How about using the lines after the volta of the first sonnet as the first line after the volta in each of the prime sonnets of the following crowns? That would mean I’d have “used up” the first seven lines, plus six more. The last line of the first sonnet’s octave? Tag it to the end of the final sonnet of the final crown, use it as a kind of parting envoi, an extra fifteenth line to set the crown of crowns singing.
Good. Fine. But damn, now I’d have to write a sonnet from which every single fucking line could be reused. Good luck anal boy. The next three years were spent on this project, a book now called The Assumption which will be out this year. Actually, it wasn’t as hard as I first feared. Ironically, the stickiest wicket was the starting point itself: Mr. Welles. I had no significant problem with the first four voices, “The Skeptic,” “The Crackpot,” “The Astronomer,” and “The Colonel.” Each was more archetypal than specific. Someone who believed in nothing, someone who believed in everything, someone in the middle (imagine a scientist like Carl Sagan), and a Colonel who had lost his men in the Bermuda Triangle. Other than this final voice, none of these figures was based on a real life character with a real life biography. Welles was, I discovered, a special case.
Whereas the first four crowns took a year or so to write, the next took, on its own, more than a year. I got trapped, stuck in a voice I didn’t believe. The blind alley I found myself following had less to do, however, with the crown form than with voice. I began this crown imagining Welles waffling, equivocating for his role in scaring half the Eastern seaboard in his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. I kept trying to make him sorry. It took a year of writing, unwriting, rewriting, unwriting again to get to the point of realizing the Welles I believed in was a bastard. I loved him because of this, not despite. He had to take responsibility for his “Halloween joke.” More, he had to be proud.
Once I realized this, a factor of character development most fiction writers would have figured out in a day, the crown got burned to the ground, reimagined, reformed, and, at long last written. I can’t say the real reason behind a year spent on seven frigging poems, but I can say, if I hadn’t had that required first and ninth line of the first sonnet of this crown, it might have gone differently. If I weren’t working rhyme and variation on a theme, it might have gone differently. If it had been a single poem, speaking in one voice to one purpose, it might have gone differently. As it was, the crown and Orson himself stymied me for many, many Martian moons. Nevertheless, the poems were better for the time off. The voice was stronger, meaner, and, I hope, more interesting. It may have taken longer, but the form found its voice, and that voice propelled the last two crowns toward even higher goals.
The Orson Welles crown, “The Magician,” was my first published crown. It is still probably one of my best, but it is by no means meant to be singular. It has a community it belongs to. The colloquy of voices of which it is a member is a chorus that doesn’t work, fully, without the others. In the same way that a single sonnet from a crown can often be weaker by itself (if not completely obtuse), a crown from a crown of crowns (or, as I call it, a Corona) can sing a bit off tune without its comrades screaming in its ear.
The great strength of a crown, a crown of crowns, a sequence of stories (say, the Martian Chronicles), or even a concept album (say, The Wall or Pink World) is that the whole is greater than the parts. The great weakness of a sequence is that, often, the parts are weaker than the whole. Ideally, if everything works the way that poetry demands, every sonnet is as strong as every line, every word, but every long thing needs, as Coleridge would have it, connective tissue. And the longer the poem, the more attention is demanded of the reader. If a short poem is the universe in small. A long poem is the multiverse.
Few journals today seem to want long poems. The lyric is in ascendance. Thus, unless you’re an anomaly like Merwin or Turner or Ashbery (see The Folding Cliffs or Genesis or Flow Chart), the longest, perhaps greatest, of poems are never seen. Epics are unthinkable. I, myself, want to write a traditional epic. I’ve done something like one in another book out this year, Prime Directive, but it’s only 80-some-odd pages. No part of it (and no part of what I want to write) probably ever will appear in a journal. Journals want water in crystal goblets. With apologies to Milton and Emerson, the sonnet crown may be one of the few ways left for today’s poets to drink wine from a wooden bowl. Until Twitter twitters away, until the society we live in stops wanting politicians to use fewer clauses, if we want to sip from that bowl, the crown must be our epic.
JM: Let’s talk for a moment about sonnets on the larger scale: like all living things, the sonnet has evolved over time, conquering time, language and geographical boundaries. The modern sonnet, with its (often times) more internal, psychological, “I” focus is a stark contrast to Plutarch’s epic journeys into passion or Spenser’s rolling songs of love—their “you” focus—how do you feel time and modernity has affected the sonnet most?
BD: Sorry to be so glum, but I sometimes believe modernity is killing everything. First of all, I recognize there was never a golden age when poetry was beloved by all. Poetry is a less a genre than a way of thinking, and human beings have never been terribly good at thinking. But the stakes seem to be rising every day. Today, even the great academic thinkers prefer assessable outcomes. Thus most criticism today is focused on fiction. The type of criticism in vogue now is cultural. The idea of aesthetics is “outmoded,” “racially charged,” “phallocentrically radioactive.”
Outside of academe, poetry is appearing in more and more forums, there are more books of poems than ever before, more journals than ever before, but most if not all of this growth is ether growth, online, print on demand. Just about anything can get into “print.” The gatekeepers are vanishing. Academe is moving online. Libraries, newspapers, bookstores are evaporating. I don’t know where this will lead. I imagine the first scholar to encounter a typewriter complained in the same way. The first pencil, the first quill probably inspired similar terror, but technology and the modern mindset are changing at a faster pace than ever before. In the same way the Atom was understandably more scary than the Winchester, I believe the Kindle is more frightening than the first press with movable type.
We human beings (now in only the loosest sense) appear to wish to be “done” with thinking, with the longer journeys of thought that have no immediate, practical application. The more dense the writing, the more convoluted or recursive the thought, the less it matters to a culture that craves Headline News. It may seem ironic that one of the smallest of forms, the sonnet, is as abandoned as the rest, but in poetry, as in other things, size does not matter. The sonnet, when done well, is the most infinitely recursive of writing. It takes us back and back and back to a single thought made multiple by language. It takes us beyond the limits of definition and delineation to a way of thinking that makes us more than what we were when we first encountered those fourteen lines.
I have said earlier that poetry is more about time than space. This is another way of saying that poetry is less about language than about thought. The very focus on language itself makes poetry, ironically, less about the language than about the way we use language. It is a type of writing that makes us think about writing, a kind of language that makes us, necessarily, deconstruct language. It is a form of communication that questions communication by showing us symbol in all its possibility. The more the possibility, the deeper the lack of assuredness and, consequently, the grander the feeling of swoon. The less transcendental the signifier, the more transcendent the experience. Poetry teaches us to be deep, and the deeper we get, the more the poetry means. The more the poetry means, the more we understand how cannot understand everything. The less we understand, the more we recognize (and pay obeisance to) infinity.
Poetry is Socrates.
Poetry is the guardian at the gate.
Poetry is our walk with God.
Poetry asks us, who are you, what are you thinking, how do you think, is what you believe what you only think you believe. Poetry helps us understand that language is the least real reality, but, also, that it is all we have. The sonnet, one of the most concentrated forms of this process, is even more of the less we have. I know very few poets writing sonnets today. I know even fewer being published. Maybe I don’t read enough, maybe I’ve been far too implicated in the crime that is our era, maybe I’ve been assimilated into the machine, but I tend to think the world is shrinking to the size of a sonnet.
The problem is, those fourteen lines are full of words that don’t mean much of anything. They say, “consume,” they say, “compete,” they say, “complain.” They say, “hubris” or “hide” or “jihad.” We have precious few poems, and even fewer sonnets, that say anything anymore. And the sonnet that is this Earth? Ming the Merciless wouldn’t even bother.
JM: This is my “high/low” question. You don’t have to answer; I’m just putting it out there: Within your journey as a writer, what has been your lowest point and what has been your highest?
BD: It might seem, given my last “uplifting” answer, that my low is right now. Strangely, it is not. I may believe that the turn the world is taking is the wrong one, that we are trying to take the short way, that we need to relearn what even Dante knew: The long way is the only way. But, then, that’s it. I do believe there’s another side to the pit. I believe we can emerge someday in Paradise. We may have to haggle our way, hand over hand, through hanks of Lucifer’s hair to get there, but I do believe there is a there there.
My hope is that the current trends are birth pangs, that something grander awaits, that the internet and e-mail and the death of libraries is the ash from which the unimaginable must arise. Sci fi theorists talk about this as the Singularity, a point at which the future falls away over an unseeable event horizon, but beyond which true innovation we cannot possibly see (much less understand) awaits. As I did when I was a child, I want to believe this. I want to believe in it as much as I wanted to believe in abduction and pyramid power. I want to and I do. This is what belief is. If there were proof, we wouldn’t need poems.
Perhaps, then, my lowest point was when that belief vanished. When I thought that even the poems weren’t enough, that they sucked, that I had been kidding myself since seventh grade. It was 2001, and the twin towers had just come down. I had finished Krypton Nights in 1995 and had been sending it out, in whole or in part, for six years. Nobody wanted the book. Nobody wanted the poems. My second marriage had just ended. The world seemed like it was about to. The relationship I found myself in was coming apart, and I started to lose faith.
For years I had talked to my friends on the phone, telling them, the worst thing you can do as a writer is say, “Maybe I don’t have it, maybe I’ve been misled.” Or, even worse, “Maybe it just doesn’t matter.” After all, if everything I believe is true, then the writing is not about audience or awards, about fame or fortune. Writing is about being, about becoming, about the call to serve a future we cannot for one minute dare hope to save. If it is saved, Booyah! If not, we have walked the walk and become better for having served. Writing is sacrifice and forgiveness. In 2001 I think I had forgotten all this. I had let it become about me. Another reason my marriage failed. Another reason I was letting the fall of the towers lead me to the Shadow Realm.
I wish I could say that I thought or wrote my way out of this state. I did not. What I did do was, by grace, discover a woman who made me forget all I was forgetting. Gina Greenway, now my wife, walked into my College Writing II class that year and everything else ceased to matter. Sharp mind, sharp wit, gifted with both bravado and beauty. Scubadiver, skydiver, motorcyclist, model, she had given up a booming business to return to school and give something back, become a teacher. And she told me her story. How she had nearly died in a skydiving accident, how she fought her way back. How she walked the walk I had all but forgotten. What was my insecurity in the face of such glory? What was my fear of failure in the face of a face that made failure obsolete?
It was that moment—the moment after she sat in my office and told me about the parachute, about the power lines, about her operations and obdurate need to validate the fact she’d been allowed to live—that moment that changed me. I went home and started a sequel to Krypton Nights. Understandably it was called Amazon Days. It was, and is, all about her. It is about Wonder Woman, my personal savior.
Two weeks later, the first sonnet sequence of Krypton Nights was picked up by The Paris Review. A week after that, the same poems won the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. A month after that, on my birthday, Krypton Nights won the Paris Review Poetry Prize and was slated for publication. Three months later I found the strength to escape the bad relationship I was in, talk to my Provost about protocol, and start dating the woman who saved me. In October of the next year, just one solar cycle beyond the lowest point of my life, I found myself in New York at the publication party for my first book. I found myself with Gina on top of the Empire State Building and asked her to marry me. She said yes.
That night, at the party, long after midnight, standing on the roof of a swanky penthouse apartment near the building Kong once climbed, a glass of wine in one hand, first book in the other, looking out over the horizon at the absence of two towers and the presence of all that remained, I watched a falling star and found out the book I now held had been nominated for the Pulitzer.
It didn’t win. But, Goddess save me, I certainly did.
JM: My last question is what I like to call my “flash-bang” question—short and simple but, hopefully, the one that rings the loudest. In so many ways you’ve already answered it but, still, for the sake of all poets (both practicing and potential) I have to ask it: why poetry?
BD: Again, at risk of repetition, poetry isn’t a job. It isn’t a genre. It’s a calling. The more one does it, the more one becomes it. Poetry isn’t what I do. It is who I am. It is the way I think, the way I grow, the way I serve. I thought, once upon a time, that it was extra, that I was destined for novels and short stories, articles and monographs. I remember back in 1989, near the end of my first year as a Ph.D. candidate, I had begun to complain to my best friend that I wasn’t writing anything, just a few poems. He told me, as was his wont, the truth: “Bryan, you idiot. Every time I talk to you, you say the same thing. You haven’t finished story A or novel B. But…you’ve written some poems. Dude, it’s not an afterthought. You’re a poet. Get used to it. It’s what you do. Be that.”
John McKenna changed my life that day (he’d done it at least once before) by telling me what I probably, subconsciously, already knew. I wanted to be A WRITER, but for all the wrong reasons. I was already a poet.
I cannot tell you how many poems I’ve written. A lot. I cannot tell you how many stories and novels I’ve abandoned. A lot. The only thing that keeps me going, keeps me doing, keeps me sane and in touch with all I am and believe is poetry. It has never been a chore. Other kinds of writing are. Writing this, this interview, is a chore (in many ways), but poetry? Poetry is breathing. Probably much of this interview is purple, much of it over the top, but the only way I get through any other kind of writing is by falling into what I fall into when I write a poem. This isn’t poetry. But when it approaches what I do when I write a poem, it’s easier. Another friend, Curtis, calls it a curse. The monograph I wrote after Amazon Days, a book-length study on Wonder Woman called Wonder Woman Unbound, was only written because I found a way to write good portions of it as if I were writing a poem. This, I believe, is not just how I finished it, but why I enjoyed writing it. This is also why my publisher has waffled over it, telling me, quote, you need to cut most of the literary prose. I won’t. I can’t. It is what it is because I am who I am.
My greatest gift, my grace, is this way of writing. I did not choose it. Not any more than I chose Gina, my wife. It chose me. The subject matter chose me. To quote The Shining, “I have always been the caretaker.” If I did what I do for any other reason than “I have to” (say, for the money) I would have to be insane. Because I do what I do, many may already think I am. I know my family does. Many of my students do. But because I write poetry, because I have grown to think like my poems, think in poems, I don’t worry, not about me. I worry about others. I worry about my family, my students, about Fox News. I worry about not writing poetry, about all those others who don’t. About those who don’t read it.
I worry about the future of writing. I worry about where technology is taking us. I worry about the death of literature. And it’s not just a case of “me” and “them.” I, myself, own a Razor, a Stone, and, now, a Kindle. Cell phone, mp3 player, e-book reader. I am just as culpable as anyone. But, I hope, the difference lies in how I use the tools grace has given me. As long as I serve them, may they serve me. As long as poetry lives, may I live well enough to earn the right to serve. Any tool is only as useful or dangerous as she who wields it. Razor, Stone, Kindle. Blade, rock, fire. I may become doubtful and dour about where we’re headed, but the poetry keeps coming. As of yet, the embers endure. The symbols continue to be carved on cave wall.
This interview, should it serve, will appear on the Web, a space spun from silk, bands, strands we secure from inside. I can only hope, in time, it indeed builds what binds.
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Once again, I would like to thank Bryan for taking part in this interview. Whether you’re a comic-book fanboy, sci-fi enthusiast, fiction writer, poet or simply a fan of the written word, I believe Bryan’s provided us with something of merit and wonder.
One Response to “Poetry Talk with Bryan Dietrich (Part 2)”
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What may not be obvious from Bryan’s answers is the growth that he has experienced through his embracing poetry as his form. While each of us travel different paths in this life, ultimately there are only two destinations: one internally, the other externally focused. When Bryan and I met, we were both on a journey to the “Internal”. However, as we have grown, both together and apart, it appears we have found our way to serving the “External”, that which is bigger than any of us. It is amazing how such different paths can lead to the same understanding. I’m looking forward to what the rest of this journey has in store.