Ben Mazer
Interviewed by Robert Archambeau
[Note: This interview will appear as the Afterword in Ben Mazer's new collection
of poems The Glass Piano, forthcoming
from MadHat Press on November 1.]
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| THE AMAZING MAZER, ALWAYS AN EYEWEAR FAVOURITE |
RA: I'd like to begin with
process. Often, poets have spoken of their process as one or another kind of
mixture of deliberation and intuition—whether they call the intuitive element
"the muses" or (in Jack Spicer's case) a radio transmission from Mars.
How does a poem begin for you, and what happens once you have the initial
impulse?
BM: Jack Spicer was deeply
in love with the relatively unknown but deeply brilliant poet Landis Everson,
who in turn, late in his life, fell deeply in love with me, so I not only know
all of the Spicer literature, but have heard many intimate, off the record
stories of Jack's thinking about poetry, and his methods of composition. Like
many of the best poets, he was possessed by words, and his poems came to him as
voices that he heard and recorded without any other guidance than long,
elaborate and strenuous preparations for being able to write poems—when they
came into his head—which must have acted as a kind of net or formal conception
already deeply ingrained in his consciousness by the time he was struck by
inspiration, instinct, and intuition—what he referred to as transmissions from
Mars—so that the poems were deeply guided by a well-prepared consciousness,
with its fully digested lore and ideas, and personal feelings concomitant with
his own rather compendious knowledge in many intellectual areas, such as
philosophy, as well as the knowledge that comes with personal experience, while
at the same time being completely intuitive and unexpected events of
inspiration. I think most poets of a high calibre work in this way to some
degree or other—typically hearing first lines of poems simply come into their
head, sometimes even as heard voices, successively followed by a flow of words,
lines, and passages that come as naturally as leaves to a tree, and are imbued
with what Eliot called the auditory imagination, a deeper level of meaning that
is not contained in the literal meaning of the words, but—on another level—in
the sounds of the words, their origins and accumulated meanings and resonances,
and their emotional suggestivity, until the poem peters out, completes itself,
and the poet knows it. Sometimes the poet goes on too long—maybe just a line or
two beyond the point where the genuine inspiration ends—but the poet is quick
to spot this dead wood and snip it off to give the poem the wholeness and unity
that it must have. There are many descriptions—throughout the history of
poetry—of poets, many of them of the greatest stature—creating poetry in
exactly this way.
I find that this is precisely the way I work when I am
writing my best poems—that they are miracles of inspiration and intuition, and
typically begin with a first line simply coming into my head—something like
hearing a voice that fully forms itself without my interference—and then
followed by another, and another, and so forth. I do, and I imagine other poets
do this also, to a certain extent, realizing what the meaning of the
inspiration is, even if only intuitively, tend to offer it a little guidance
through an act of intense concentration on where I know the poem must lead, or
upon some symbolic image or emotion (what Eliot called significant emotion),
which I know instinctively to be the heart of the poem, and which I know must
be unravelled to its end, even if I don't quite, at least consciously, know
what that end is. I am there to find out what the end is, and I must seek the
path the poem beckons me down in order to find out. This does occasionally
demand a tiny bit of interference on my part: a search for the right word to
convey what I feel to be the object of my attention; an intensified focus—more
meditative and open than merely conscious—on the object of attention; a
determination to get some nuance of what I discover to be the meaning or
quality of the emotional experience of the poem into the poem.
But I possess a well prepared machine or instrument, and largely when real
inspiration hits there is very little or often no need whatsoever for
interference on my part. The best poems simply write themselves, with a minimum
of this sort of interference, and I imagine many people would be surprised to
learn that internal rhyme, end rhyme, and meter come to me without conscious
thought or guidance of any kind on my part—they are simply what the poem itself
wants to say; and I am often surprised myself to discover afterwards how many
connections and meanings and levels of meaning a poem which the unconscious
created can possess due to what is essentially the gift of a possession of a
naturally musical and meaningful consciousness which has paid its dues in
experience and preparation. The most exciting poems of all are those in which I
am swept up entirely by a cascading ocean of words which seem punched through
with an infinite number of levels of meaning, all deeply felt in the act of
composition, and which are above all deeply resonant musical conveyances of
significant emotion. My long poem "Divine Rights" (in my collection Poems) is an
example of this. Another is a poem from the same collection, "The Double".
To put it an entirely other way: the advanced poet is
likely to know exactly what he is doing, and is unlikely to make a mistake,
even when writing without thought, and by intuition. He is like a jazz musician
in that he either is on target and gets it right the first time, or else he
flubs it, in which case he may wish to simply scrap the entire take as not up
to snuff. Revision is largely, for me, a matter of cutting a line, finding a
single better word (sound being the operative principle as much as the literal
level of meaning), scrapping a weakening stanza, or some such minor alteration.
Consider the fact that revision is as much an improvisatory act as the original
act of composition, and depends just as much on inspiration and intuition. When
the poet is at the height of his powers, revision is often if not generally
entirely unnecessary.
RA: On the question of
revision—you've lavished considerable attention on the poetry of John Crowe
Ransom, even editing his collected poems in an edition that includes all of the
revisions he made over time. For you, is revision something that comes
immediately after composition? Ransom would revisit old poems many years later,
often changing them significantly. Is that something you've been tempted to do?
BM: I've never been tempted
into the kind of forays into compulsive, perpetual revision that absorbed
Ransom late in life, though who is to say what devil might get into me when I
reach those later years. No, generally revision is as I've described in my
answer to the first question: it is a very minor affair, and generally does
come almost immediately after composition, if at all. When I write poems I have
a great conviction about them when I feel I am doing it correctly (that is, in
the way that suits me, and suits the object of my mental attentions), and
generally I tend to feel I have got it right the first time. If one is going to
get it right at all, why not be done with it at the first stroke of the anvil.
When I am writing I have that kind of control over my instrument, again like a
jazz musician who has trained himself in the art of improvisation and
concentration. When I am on, I am on, and I know it, and I know that I can do
anything that the poem wants me to do. The poems that don't work out, the false
starts, and half-successful attempts, I simply toss into the dustbin. It is
easy to see in those poems that the poetry was not really genuine. I try to
explain this to people: if, when it comes, it is genuine poetry, it is not
going to need to be altered. It is just the case that I have prepared my
instrument particularly well and thoroughly. Others may need to proceed more
slowly, more cautiously, and refine over time; that is not my method. If I make
a mistake, I feel I may as well give up for the day. I have a great trust in
the powers of the unconscious to present one with gifts of treasure in the
realm of significant utterance, even if that utterance is not immediately
accessible to total comprehension. Eliot famously told Richards that he felt
his most successful poems were those which elicited the most various and
unexpected array of interpretations, strange and foreign to the poet's own
understanding of his poem. This is a sign of the mysteries. It is the poem that
rules and has authority over the poet, and not the other way around. The poet
is the conduit for the poem. Otherwise we would just be writing what we already
know. And even when we have a reason to write what we already know, sometimes
especially when we have a reason to write what we already know, it is possible
to get it right the first time, and still for the poem to be imbued with
unexpected and rich meanings that the poet was not fully conscious of during
the act of composition, though he is likely to notice them later. It is all a
matter of the poet's capacity for concentration, and of his responsiveness to
the powers of the unconscious mind.
Revision? Sometimes I'll work on a poem for several
days in a row, as I did when I wrote the 41 sonnets in "The King" (New Poems);
here's a case where composition itself is an act of revision through a process
of accumulation. All composition is revision, just as all revision is
composition.
RA: What can you tell us
about the ways you prepare yourself to receive the poems when they come? To
steal a phrase from Yeats, what is your singing school?
BM: Three things. One,
about thirty years of continuous reading in every area of literature, with a
continuous application to poetry and the criticism of poetry, and foraging
forays into philosophy, history, anthropology, psychology, popular culture,
family lore, love itself, and other subjects as well. Two, many years of hard
labour scanning meters and cadences and other technical minutia of the most
accomplished verse one can find, coupled with unceasing attempts to master the
art of writing rhymed and metrical verse until it becomes effortless and as
natural as breathing, so that one can break from or depart from or transmogrify
these things at will or whim with authority, control and meaning. Three,
intensive exercises in the arts of memory and concentration, with particular
attention to the knack of holding an emotional memory steady in the mind's eye.
There is also the fact of one's background. I was particularly lucky in this,
in that I was surrounded by good books and a family that paid close attention
to matters of aesthetic philosophy (whether they were aware of this or not!).
But honestly, I think at root that it is an innate predisposition to deep
reflection that one is born with, or in some cases scared or scarred into. My
"singing school" is something like an adherence and receptivity to
the ways and purposes of a controlling god. My source is divinity. Or perhaps
it is the art of being transfixed to the point of solipsism. But with the object
of focus the known world. There is more, but I can't recall what it was. I was
six years old. I saw them through the window. The guys in the blue coats fired
on the guys in the red coats, and then they all ran away.
RA: We've been talking
about process, now I wonder if we can relate it to form. I know you have an
affection for rhyme: one of the pleasures of visiting the Boston area is
hearing you and Philip Nikolayev improvising rhymes together as you walk the
little streets around Harvard Square. But rhyme in your work tends to be
intermittent rather than regular, and you've never been affiliated with New
Formalism. What attracts you about rhyme, and what role does it play in your
poetry? Also, what can you tell us about other unusual features of your poetry—the
sometimes irregular syntax, the deliberate use of British spellings, the way a
sentence can sometimes meander. The latter feature accounts, I think, for the
comparisons sometimes drawn with John Ashbery, although I know you don't see
him as a major influence.
BM: I am amused and
intrigued by rhyme, especially intricacies such as partial or near rhyme,
assonance, and internal rhyme, which my work naturally seems to gravitate
towards. It is quite unconscious, and comes from years of reading and hearing
the sounds of poems and language in my head. I rarely set out to write a rhymed
poem—though sometimes I do, with the purpose of attaining a sort of formal
integrity that might aptly suit my subject matter when my subject matter is
largely tonal: the rhymes, both internal and at line ends, come quite naturally
and unconsciously, without my thinking about them. I'm heavily schooled in
blank verse, Marlowe, and so forth, so—as in Lowell's late sonnets—you get a
varied mixture of real rhyme, heavy rhyme, sporadic rhyme, and blank verse
punctuated by occasional rhyme. I like it! It rings the ear with emotion and
pleasure when it hits home and has qualities.
Sometimes it echoes a cadence I have heard somewhere that must be in the back
(or at the tip?) of my mind. This can raise poetic ghosts, and induce
resonances with emotional significance. And yes, Philip and I have had many a
long session of improvising perfectly rhymed sonnets for sheer pleasure's sake—it's
sort of a running theme with us. Again, it all comes from taking apart poems
for years as you would take apart a radio and put it back together again just
to see how it worked: the lesson sticks with you. I played classical piano as a
child, and jazz music growing up, so it is all music and indicative tonality to
me. Sometimes when I listen to people talk all I hear is the rhyme; I must have
a look on my face as though I'm in outer space. I wasn't aware that my poetry
had irregular syntax in it—but I suppose that's because I'm forging an idiom
that correlates directly with whatever it is I'm expressing, whatever
perception or emotion (the two can be the same). It has struck me that my use
of internal rhyme is quite innovative, in fact: something I wait for people to
notice and gather in cafes to discuss. As to the syntax though, I have read far
too much Hart Crane, and perhaps that has something to do with it, as well as
my early obsession with Cubism, which breaks up the syntax of visual
perception, color and shape. It is all emotionally correlative. I follow the thought,
the emotion; what happens as a result to the language is my business, but not my business,
if you see what I mean. The British spellings: my maternal grandmother was
English, and I grew up on English literature as a child; I can't really say
what attracts me to the British spellings; just the offbeat pleasure of it, I
suppose. It's my nod or tip of the hat to English literature and culture; my
turning away from the downgraded cultural atmosphere of our times. I also
misspell words and have no wish to correct them! I feel I am stuck with the
emotional and musical baggage of their peculiar semi-neological resonances, and
can't betray them for a correct word. Joyce of course carried this to the
extremes of obsession. Meandering: I suppose by that you mean largely tour de
force enjambment, which has always struck me as the sign of genuine (the
personally unique taking part in the universal) emotion in all the glory of its
flux and flow: its stasis
which has its simultaneous existence as well, as a rounded unity, or a
pervasive extension, mirroring the nature of reality such as we come to know it
in our more observant, less impinged upon moments. Lycidas is a
famous example of how far you can take that (Ransom has a good essay on this in
The World's Body);
but of course it can always be pushed farther, and it is experience that does
it. It's that contained flowing which is so universal, like the bounded and
boundless sea, interminable rain, infinity without cessation (passion and
reverence), one's movements through the world and through oneself, monumental
archetypes of catastrophe and rebirth, the night. No, I don't see Ashbery as an
influence at all. I like his stuff—it always amuses me, and I'm attracted to
"The Skaters"—but it's not a model I would aspire to, or anything I
would want to steal from for my own use. He's merely there, Ashbery. I drove by
Sodus recently. I like that neck of the woods. Nice to think of young Ashbery
emerging from such a place. Seriously, though, the comparisons with Ashbery drive
me crazy. I see no resemblance whatsoever, other than some vague resonance of
the Harvard outsider poetry tradition, which I, too, partook of. The
parti-colored brick and cobblestone, and the grey sky over Mem Hall, kind of
seep into you like damp weather in the autumn. Probably comes from a mutual
love of French poetry and music, Apollinaire and Debussy and so forth, as well.
And the historical moment (which I reject, in order to embrace). Someone said
we are a late blooming generation. But whatever we are doing, it strikes me
that we are making it new. The young crowd in ascendancy now has much to buck
against. Why not simply follow one's own inspiration? And let the rest take
care of itself. Oh, the syntax: it might come from layered and abrupt shifts in
imagery and meaning. The cinematic quality of consciousness. I try to mirror my
thought, or perhaps go further than that. A guy's alone. The skeleton of a
horse is crossing an abandoned railway bridge. Everything in the world is in
its place. But what is that but hunks of color: solipsism or divinity? Or both?
More about the syntax: Sometimes planes shoot off at
oblique angles. Other planes shoot off at oblique angles from those planes, and
others from those. This is the way the mind works: holding perception at a
distance to the point of substitution. How else are we going to deal with the
richness of our memories?
RA: It's interesting that
you mention a "Harvard outsider tradition," since for most people the
words "Harvard" and "insider" go together, like little
cucumber sandwiches and summers in the Hamptons. What can you tell us about
this tradition, and your relation to it?
BM: Poets are poets. You
can't change them. They say nothing, stare into space, or talk like maniacs
about incomprehensible complexities, and sometimes disappear for days on end
without anyone ever finding out where they went. They procrastinate, and can't
be made to do anything but read endless numbers of poetry books. They don't fit
in socially at the Fly Club, they dress funny and don't know how to assert
themselves, and are shunned by all but the strangest of social outsiders. This
is as true at Harvard as any place, and probably even more true at a place like
Harvard, where people are being groomed to be presidents and so forth.
Practical concerns are not their forté. I'm third generation Harvard myself,
but the Mazers were all Jewish (my grandfather Moses was class of '24, when
there was still a quota and there were I think no more than 8 to a dozen Jews
at Harvard at most). I got into Harvard through the back door, as it were, as a
Special Student (an offbeat status which I share with Robert Frost, Wallace
Stevens, and Eugene O'Neill), and then only because Seamus Heaney and William
Alfred (Robert Lowell's friend) wrote letters on my behalf. This was all
contrived so that I could study with Seamus Heaney, but I took advantage of the
situation and took courses with such excellent professors as Derek Pearsall
(Chaucer), David Perkins (lyric poetry), Leo Damrosch (American poetry), and
Donald Bacon (modernism), and was tutored privately by Bill Alfred. The
literary studies at Harvard were brilliant at the time (many people were still
alive who had known Eliot, Richards, etc.)—I don't know what they are now. I
absorbed myself in them completely, and felt that I was entering a tradition.
They were every last one of them outsiders: Tuckerman, Eliot, Frost, Stevens,
Cummings, Wheelwright, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Dunstan Thompson, Frank
O'Hara, John Ashbery . . . They were spooky ghosts on the fringes of that
cucumber sandwich crowd, and never the twain did meet. Few did well in their
studies (Eliot was mediocre as an undergraduate), and many dropped out, or were
thrown out. Delmore Schwartz surprisingly won the Boylston Prize for a
brilliant philosophical essay in 1936. I've written about this before at length
in Fulcrum
(#5, 2006), where I think I summed up the situation of the outsider tradition
pretty well, so perhaps it's best to wrap up this question with a passage
quoted from my essay there:
"It is in fact precisely the poet, more than
anyone, who has usually found himself to be problematic and institutionally
marginal at Harvard, and who has typically had an unpredictable, unconventional
relationship with the university. [. . .] By and large, the best of the Harvard
poets have been far from either staid or academic. They have been poets, with
all the wildness and sensitivity that that implies. What distinguishes them as
Harvard poets or near Harvard poets—as often as anything—is a consciousness of
the tribulations—fugitive, obscure and various—of those who have existed with
them in a continuous tradition: not Harvard's, but poetry's."
RA: Finally, I wonder if
you could say a little something about the place and meaning of poetry in the
world. You've been bold enough to speak publicly about the future of poetry:
what do you see for poetry when you look in your crystal ball?
BM: I discovered Rimbaud
when I was 16. I had played hookey from school and taken the bus into Harvard
Square. In the basement of a very filthy used bookstore, I found an old blue
and grey Pelican paperback anthology of French poetry and slipped it unnoticed
into my pocket. It was a very grey, foggy, and sort of misty or rainy day,
typical New England, and on the bus ride back I happened to have my eye caught
by this poet, Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, who had been about my age when he had
written his poems. I began reading and was immediately transported into some
realm that I had never experienced before, but which I had the sensation of
having always known had existed. It seemed as if words were detached from time
and space. I didn't know Rimbaud was a famous poet, and I thought that this was
my own discovery entirely, something that no one else in the world knew about
except me. Right then and there I recognized that this fellow was me, and had
written exactly what I was trying to write. I became insatiably obsessed, and I
think that right there that was some kind of beginning, or a further beginning
built upon other pivotal reading experiences of childhood such as my
discoveries of Lewis Carroll, Poe, the perfectly circular sentences of Raymond
Chandler, and the clipped and projective syntax of Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot
I had dipped into with a sense of wonder and discovery. Among poets, Rimbaud
was my first true hero. I thought that I possessed an immense secret about an
entirely unknown figure. Through me, I felt, this person was living again. Ah,
the providential reader! Years later, when I discovered the Confessions of
Verlaine on the interminable hold shelf of an antiquarian book store, a book
that was never for sale, and which I wasn't even allowed to look at until the
owner had left the shop for the day, and the girl behind the counter took pity
on me, I almost died of grief when I read, only at the very end of the book,
that Rimbaud had just come into Verlaine's life, the only mention of him in the
book's very last sentence. Why couldn't the Confessions have
gone on! I tried to trace Rimbaud's footsteps in the snow around Harvard Square—and
almost succeeded!
I guess what I'm driving at is that poetry and poets
are for poetry and poets, and only then for the rest of the world to catch up
with, or be stirred by in some way that it can't quite fully comprehend. Poetry
has an endless future, in a way encompassing the entire universe, but I think
that the core of the thing, when you get right down to it, is that, aside from
writing sheerly for his or her self, a loved one, a poet friend, or truth or
God (however fictional the poet's means), the poet is really writing for the
providential reader, that strange young person of the far distant future, who,
with immensely empathic consciousness, will stumble across the stuff and say to
himself, "This person is me."
October 2015
Ben Mazer's collections of
poems include Poems
(2010), January
2008 (2010), New
Poems (2013), and The Glass Piano,
forthcoming from MadHat Press in November. He is the editor of The Collected Poems
of John Crowe Ransom (Un-Gyve Press, 2015), Hart Crane's The Bridge: The
Uncollected Version (MadHat Press, 2015), Selected Poems of
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Landis
Everson's Everything
Preserved: Poems
1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006). He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is the
editor of The
Battersea Review.
Robert Archambeau is a poet and critic whose books
include the poetry collections Laureates and
Heretics and The
Kafka Sutra and the critical studies Laureates and
Heretics and The
Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, among others. He is
professor of English at Lake Forest College.
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