Re:Viewed by Hannah Bonner
Illustration by Em Gray
RE:VIEW
Brink: The enjambment throughout this collection is so deftly rendered. There’s a constant sense of hope that’s undercut by the next line that reminds me of the up and down rhythms of addiction (like the titular poem: “She hates to love / that at least he’s here, quiet as a whale / dying under water”). How do you think the role of enjambment plays in the construction of a poem?
Colin Dekeersgieter: I find enjambment most compelling when it’s a means to shock, and the subversion or undercutting you mention. I mean shock as a kind of jolting awake and I take it to be a—if not the—reason to write poetry. In the construction of a poem the writer sometimes wanders into a realization or a new sense of apprehension—moves from being apprehensive to apprehending. In the same breath, and I guess this is the point, it’s also where the poet can float in negative capability, can accept believing in multiple contradictions at once. The heart of a poem usually rears its head through this kind of enjambment. The lines you isolate were the most shocking for me as they announced themselves. I never touched them after that and had to edit around them to match their sincerity. I emphasize to my students that there are always at least three speakers behind a poem: the writer, a specific voice or tone controlled by diction mostly, and the shape of the poem, controlled by line breaks, which the poem decides. The poet, the speaker, and the shape can each have a different take on the poem’s subject. I usually use Frank Bidart’s “Half-Light” to try to show this. In that poem, the writer Bidart does all he can to write a wistful but grounded love poem to a recently deceased male friend who was married to a woman. Through enjambment the poem does all it can to prove (to us and maybe to Bidart) that the love was reciprocated. We see it in lines like “Bitter / that we cannot ever have // the conversation” or “When I tell you that all the years we were / undergraduates…” Both “the conversation” and “undergraduates” subvert the erotic charge of the preceding line, always plateauing its register at the platonic. The whole poem is really a master class on enjambment; everything that can’t be said is said by the line then taken back by the sentence.
I think that’s where the significance of the rhythms of addiction that you mention come in. Enjambment allows a tension to be expressed that can’t simply be expressed in prose. Some of that is going on in the title poem. The potential of the addict’s death at almost any moment makes being with and by them nearly impossible but essential. And the mother struggles to reconcile her hate for the addict (intensified by the poet’s awareness of his eventual death) with her love for the son.
B: There’s a recurring image of fire throughout this collection. What does that image mean to you in the context of the book?
CD: That is such a big question for me. I was embroiled in Dante during the early stages of a majority of the poems in the book and so the refining fires of Purgatory were on my mind. Dante has to accept walking through fire to be made complete. So it mainly means two things, but there’s a third. The first is obvious in the Dantean context and it’s that the possibility of redemption is built into our pain and suffering. The second is that a promise to oneself to work through trauma both for yourself and others is crucial to love, honest living, and art. Working through for the sake of others is, I think, the crux of “How to Stand Beside Your Mother When She Sets Your Home on Fire” because the answer is to “tell her / you’ve never felt this warm.” Materiality melts and what matters is protecting those we care about. Working through for the self is present in “Immolation” in lines like: “I’m hurt but never better. / My life took the brunt of the burning, / my sight’s pristine as ever.” But that’s also where the third meaning comes in. Dante’s symbols always have their opposites and that idea of pristine sight, or poetic vision, touches on the other side of Dante’s humbling fire, which is hubris. Dante’s very attracted to Ulysses, who’s condemned in Inferno for fraudulent counsel, or the gift of rhetoric, and is encased in a tongue of fire. So pristine sight is a claim to poetic vision that I’m more than reticent about claiming, and which is why one of the “Visitation” poems ends with “Any moment, Apollo will cut my throat.” I mention this in the notes, but that’s a reference to Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Dedication,” which says, “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people? / A connivance with official lies, / A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment….” “Immolation” has a drunken vanity to it (“I want us to look like Mars / and sip nectar”) coupled with an ironic self-consciousness about the rhetoric, namely through a veiled reference to Dante’s Ulysses: “I’m big tonight with aura: I feel a little flambeau. / My hair is going. What a gas. / What a wretch I am.” So there’s a threat in the poem of being consumed by fire, the ghost or trauma of the lost brother, rather than walking through it healed in order to write about it.
B: I’m also so struck by the musicality of your work, due in part to your alliteration. In “The Chef and the Wren” you write, “The chef's rapt to the spangle / of a similar music. Ditties / sibylline as snowfall convince him / he too is affixed / to an eagerness for issue.” What’s your process for achieving that kind of rhythm and musicality in your work?
CD: You’ve isolated one of my guilty pleasure poems, which I appreciate. I went back and forth about cutting this poem because it’s music is so out in front. But it’s really how most of my poems begin because it’s how I tend to initially organize language. Like a lot of people I found rap before I found poetry. At a young age, because of my brother and my mother, I grew up listening to Tupac, Jay-Z, OutKast, all the big artists then. But I heard Bone Thugs ‘n Harmony’s E. 1999 Eternal when I was eight or so and I became and remain obsessed with their work. Their voices function as instruments more than the other artists I was listening to. So I found myself almost ignoring the beat and putting my ear as close as possible to the sound of their sentences, which are difficult, and which were pleasingly indecipherable for me. So they were the first art I really studied, trying to parse everything. Their syntax and diction take a lot of work and I think they’re the reason I still gravitate toward difficulty and obscurity and why Hart Crane is a touchstone for me. But as I started writing, I found myself messing with syntax to serve the music and not the grammar of a line, which I took from them. They’ll use elision and inversion and other techniques to float on the beat’s meter or they’ll replace “I” with “me,” which always sounded great but is also significant to their meaning, I think. So they found ways to corrupt syntax and grammar into their own idiom while remaining obliged to a message, which I think great poets do. Emerson said “It is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem.” I don’t think I would know what that means without Bone Thugs. So my ear started with them and a lot of my first drafts lean into alliteration and sibilance. Catherine Barnett and Yusef Komunyakaa were the first to really teach me how to pare down my excessive music to become more approachable, to put whatever message I have a little more in the fore. I’ve had to kill a lot of darlings so I really appreciate you isolating that poem!
B: Bees are also a recurring image throughout the book which makes me think of Aeneas in the Kingdom of the Dead in the Aeneid. There are also so many gorgeous descriptions of landscapes where beauty and violence exist concurrently (like “I've spaded the eaten bird over the fence / into the unclaimed clover” in “Ars Poetica”). What do bees and the pastoral more generally evoke for you in this collection?
CD: The link to the Aeneid is amazing, thank you. There’s a further link to Dante there, too, where he rewrites or resettles Virgil’s damned soul-bees into Paradise. But the link pretty much answers what bees evoke for me: they very concretely represent death. Since I was young I’ve imagined that one sting would kill me and I still haven’t been stung so that possibility floats in the back of my mind—but I’m getting better at not sprinting away from my daughter when one comes near. I know it’s irrational and I can’t say exactly why they have this place in my imagination, but it probably has to do with watching My Girl when I was way too young. Also, with the Virgil link in mind, I connect bees to the spiritual in “Eschatology,” saying “My irrational fear of bees / Is my last relation to god.” The driving allusion in that poem is T. S. Eliot’s conversion poem Ash Wednesday, which references Dante’s climb up the stairs out of Purgatory. I’m only thinking of that because it seems that while bees represent death for me they also suggest religion, which I convince myself I don’t have until a plane ride or a bee comes to challenge that. So they represent both death and the spiritual. With respect to the landscape, this collection started as a very sea-based book because I associate my brother, a central figure in the book, with the ocean. We grew up on a small island off of Miami and my better memories of our life together are there. When we moved to Vermont, he really took to the change in climate and topography, whereas I did not. So I kept my memories of him around the water. But as I wrote more and more, his connection to the land was manifest. He was really someone who had spent the majority of his life happy among mountains, trees, snow, and dirt. One of the hardest lines for me to read is, “The last time I saw him, the earth was beneath his fingernails.” He really loved the natural world. So while there’s a lot of death surrounding the pastoral, as in “Ars Poetica,” it registers for me as a representation of his love of nature.
B: There are so many writers, musicians, and artists referenced in the Notes section of the book including David Bowie, William Faulkner, Dante, etc. What was the process of cultivating the archive of artists you did for this book? If you had to create a syllabus to be consulted concurrently while reading your book, what would be on it?
CD: I teeter between two types of media consumption, the flitting and the obsessive. Everyone mentioned in the notes are artists who fell into the latter category at some point during the 12 or 13 years I was writing the book. There’s usually a personal reason why an artist enters into my obsessive orbit, and if they make it from there to my work, it’s because the essence of their emotional idiom has a kinship with the feel of the poem. For instance, my most recent deep dive was into Talking Heads and “Involuntary Commitment #6” is the most recently written poem in the collection, actually written just before the press wanted a final draft. I realize now that I was listening to Talking Heads so much during the height of my mother’s depression because of the simultaneous feeling of anxiety and cool distance or detachment they evoke. Aside from the feeling, almost every lyric of “This Must Be the Place” touches on how I felt about that time as my mother’s primary caretaker. The love and exhaustion, her and my respective driftings in and out, the inability to flee from damaging love and what I took in moments of frustration as her leveraging of that (“love me till I’m dead”), and the need to be beside her coupled with the overwhelming desire to be home with my wife and daughter instead of in ERs. I was listening to that song going into the ER in that instance and wrote the poem on my phone on the way out. And I realized I was writing a poem of love and detached nervousness or cold acceptance: “This go, / I finished / my drink first and / no one will doubt / had a second.” So that was the tone I found myself in and Talking Heads matched it. Bishop slips in for essentially the same reasons: cool-headed anxiety. And I take lines from her poem “Anaphora” not only because of the idea of repetition—it’s #6 after all—but also because I think of that time as a kind of “endless assent” to the traumas of mental illness.
The syllabus question is very hard. Aside from those you mentioned, a syllabus might include: Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bishop of course, John Berger’s Lilac and Flag, Lorine Niedecker, Alexandria Hall, A.R. Ammons’s Ommateum: with Doxology, Jericho Brown, especially his duplexes for reasons discussed in the enjambment question, John Berryman, Audre Lorde, Forrest Gander, Jorie Graham. I’ll stop there; I think I’m just listing writers I love.
B: We always begin every Brink meeting by asking: what’s exciting you (books, movies, TV, recipes, etc.). So, what’s exciting you in your life right now?
CD: I’m lucky to find myself in a mode of obsessions and those obsessions are Jorie Graham and R.E.M. I’m working on my second collection and it’s taking up some of the human dramas of Opium and Ambergris but putting them against an ecological backdrop. Rereading Graham’s second collection Erosion has been crucial because it does this so masterfully. A poem like “The Age of Reason” is a lesson on how the simplest goings on of nature can represent human purpose while also throwing into sharp relief the senseless damage we almost seem to want to do to Earth, one another, and ourselves.
R.E.M. is a band that has been important to me in fits and starts but never fell into my obsessive orbit until now. Murmur is giving life for the same reasons I love Bone Thugs, really. But thinking of both R.E.M. and Graham now, they share a commonality in ecological and political interests. “Talk About the Passion” is about shutting up and actually directing our energies into humanitarian efforts, which resonates with me. Their later album Automatic for the People has also been on repeat. “Try Not to Breathe” is about someone making the decision to die because they regard themselves as a burden, which Opium and Ambergris takes up and which is very important to me. People who think they’re a burden to their families might describe themselves as a poison or a pollution, and I think they’re exploring this and reaching back to their song “Fall on Me,” which is explicitly concerned with industrial growth and air quality. “Find the River” from the same album is also on repeat. It was apparently written with the young River Phoenix in mind, before he died of a drug overdose. But to me it reads as a poet telling a child about the lack of leadership and guidance they’ll be faced with in the world but how they can focus their attention on the natural world to get through hardship. I have a four year old and my second child will join in December, and so the beauty and frankness of that song has been keeping me afloat in whatever adjective we want to use to describe what we’re living in right now. I’m also getting life from being able to geek out about R.E.M. for a moment, the subject is banned in my home, so thank you!
COLIN DEKEERSGIETER is a poet, editor, and teacher. His debut Opium and Ambergris was selected by Marilyn Chin for the 2023 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Brink, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MA from the CUNY, Graduate Center and an MFA from New York University. Colin is currently a PhD candidate at UNC, Chapel Hill.
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