Anyone reading my recent posts might notice I've been talking/thinking a lot about David Keplinger's poetry. These last few weeks, his poems have been speaking to me. I see in his prose poems the influence of French surrealists and prose poets I adore, as well as the mystics I studied in college. Also, as someone who grew up on a farm, I love how he writes/thinks about animals. And as a lousy Buddhist, I am a huge fan of his guided poetry meditations. His poems have opened a little doorway in my mind I had forgotten existed. So, I thought I would interview him. I have so many questions to ask him, questions about his prose poetry, his thought process, you name it.
NA: First, I want to post your poem, “Angels and Wounds.”
Angels and Wounds
A play called Angels and Wounds, by David Keplinger, that goes on for years and has no curtain, where the author plays one of the parts. In some scenes it is the wound in him that sees the wound in the other. What is re-enacted is an old disaster. In some scenes it is his Angel that addresses the other’s wound, or it is reversed, and he is the wounded one, drawn to the Angel. Codependence casts its green light on the stage. There is hardly any dialogue except the sound of silverware, bottlecaps, slamming doors. But in some scenes the Angel in him engages the Angel in the other. It’s the same play his parents put on, and he plagiarized everything.
I wanted to start with this poem because I think it is a great example of what I love about your work. It’s witty, a little dark—maybe a little self-mocking. And it’s also serious and universal. I had this silly thought after reading it—I thought I was the only one who keeps re-enacting an old disaster. And then, of course, the last line is perfect. But after reading about your parents, I started wondering about your history.
Could you say a few words about your mother and father: how they influenced you/your work? I guess I’m looking for an origin story. Where did the great poet, David Keplinger, come from?
DK: My parents were two very different people who learned, over the fifty years they spent together, how to recalibrate their often rocky relationship with humor. They were each very funny, but together they were the funniest one person I have ever known. I think my interest in the prose poem happened because I was so immersed in jokes in childhood. In my thirties I read Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, in which he takes many great jokes and just obliterates them by explaining them. I saw the relationship between the leaps required in the poem and the deeply familiar and completely surprising landing of a good joke. I saw how, when you were listening to a joke, the punch line was somewhere incubating in every line. You know it’s coming. You’re laughing already. But how do you know? When the punch line was approaching, I learned to anticipate, I reveled in the being fooled, I hoped that I wouldn’t be able to guess what would happen. When the punch line landed it was nothing like what I expected and at the same time could have been nothing else. I saw that jokes and poems—my kind of poems, that is—exist in the gaps between the broken parts of life. Poems pay attention to the broken parts because that’s in fact the life we’re living in the everyday. I like to say, “every metaphor begins in dissonance and ends in unity.” It would only be through brokenness that we get to what is real…only through the everyday that we could reach the eternal, the way Dante has to pass through the Inferno on his way to Paradiso.
“Angels and Wounds” was a poem I wrote a bit differently than the others here. Most of the poems in The World to Come revealed themselves to me slowly; they opened up before me and my job was just to carefully tear away the wrapping paper. But this poem began with an idea I’ve always had about my parents. Wound-wound relationships, which are so painful, because they feed on mutual resentment. Or angel-wound relationships which are co-dependent. And angel-angel relationships in which both parties are participating in the union as if they are one thing, doing the work for the work itself. I observed all of that in my parents. When they were funny, they were letting go so beautifully, they were becoming, as I said, one thing. When they were funny there was so much love. Even recognizing this, I can’t help acknowledging that I have plagiarized all those behaviors from my parents’ play.
NA: I remember you saying your father loved broken things, and later, I heard you say that grief is something you try to welcome and not push away. In other words, you embrace brokenness. You do this as a poet and as a Buddhist practice? Is that how your book, Ice, came about? It seems to me that the collection has many layers of grief, of melting.
DK: Yes, you’re right about that. It’s not that brokenness is more important than wholeness. It’s that brokenness is the way things appear and wholeness is how they actually are. To use the plural is even misleading, because things “aren’t.” Everything is. The original title for Ice was Is. I decided it would have been too hard to conduct a search for it. Ice, in my book, is is-ness in its blocked state. Congealed state. It begins with frozen bodies of Pleistocene wolves and puppies and woolly rhinos and cave lions recently discovered in the melting permafrost in Yakutia, a region in Siberia. There was one case where a nematode, a microscopic flatworm dating back to the last Ice Age 40,000 years ago, was thawed and brought to life and then reproduced in a lab. An animal that lived while Neanderthals were being slowly exterminated by Homo Sapiens. It lived in a not-alive, not-dead state all that time. These stories of animal bodies struck a deep chord in me. I began to think about the other bodies in me, the bodies of my infant self, my childhood self, my teenager self, and so on. I began to think about the ways they can be activated and rise to the present moment, not knowing that the world around them has changed. This is the trauma response. We think we’re still in the Pleistocene of our childhood, and so we react that way when someone pushes a button. Suddenly out of the ice comes this toddler.
But the ice never really melts. Down they go again when the situation resolves. They might stay there forever. For me, what melted the ice was literature, poetry. It was a light that brought these parts of myself out of those chthonic realms and in the open air. Poetry melted everything. It helped release my embarrassment and anger and pain and resistance and to let much of that go. This is what I must have meant by welcoming grief, looking longer into grief, rather than looking away. Welcoming brokenness, looking longer into brokenness, rather than looking away. Because I begin to see that grief is just frozen love, love that is stuck and unable to be released. Until it is.
NA: I want to talk about another poem or rather, other poems, starting with this one:
Gazebo
On the subject of tenderness, let us sit and discuss for an hour under the imaginary gazebo of meaning. It is like a moment in Pietro Lorenzetti, where what Jesus teaches at the table, the little cat and dog lapping up the extra bread, already know how to do.
As someone who grew up on a farm, I love how you write about animals. You seem to see the animals as teachers. You honor their lives. I really admire your poem, “Reading Gilgamesh Before Going to Sleep,” in which you mourn the loss of your dog, Molly. There’s that the line I keep repeating to myself: “and when I had the chance to live I was distracted anyway—”
I wondered if you could talk a little about this.
DK: You connected the animals in Ice to my general awe of animals, which began for me with Whitman:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
(“Song of Myself,” 32)
And then there were Rilke’s poems about animals like the panther and the insect and the black cat and the flamingos, and of course Mary Oliver’s depiction of the natural world, dogs and bears and foxes, which I came to love in my years of friendship with her and in my admiration of her genius.
The poem “Gazebo” is a little offering about the 14th century Italian master Pietro Lorenzetti. He knew that to make Christ real, right on the seam between the transcendent and the everyday world, he had to create a scene that considered the ordinary people who looked on while the Last Supper took place. It’s a historical rendering of the event. But on the right side of the fresco, it’s all spooky and supernatural. There’s just stars, infinity, space, mystery. On the left side are these two waiters listening through the doorway as they wash dishes, and a little dog laps up food from God’s dinnerplate. And this Christ figure sits right in the middle, the interpreter between the human and the cosmic. It’s incredibly modern. It’s the birth of modernity, I believe. By the 16th century, Breughel has advanced the idea so far that the ploughman practically takes up the whole picture, while the god, now, is little Icarus with his two tiny legs splashing in the waters of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I can never get away from this lesson on the complementarity of the eternal and time. In my poems, the animals are more like Jesus in Lorenzetti; they’re interpreters from a realm before language and history. That’s why I associate them with childhood. But you’re right when you say that the animals are my teachers.
In the Gilgamesh poem you ask about, I conflate the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu (an arrogant king and the wild person come from the woods, each teaching the other compassion and civility, respectively) with my relationship to Molly, a pit mix who was my best friend and who traveled to many places with me over the eleven years I got to be her person. Circumstances had it that I wasn’t present when she died. I went into deep mourning, because I had let her down. There’s a line in that poem where I write, “when she left I walked through oceans of myself/ like Gilgamesh searching for a way to stay in pain forever/ because I didn’t know how else to honor what had died for me.” Now and then, forces flow into our lives which we don’t deserve. The animals visit us in this way. I hope my poetry notices these visitations of grace.
This is very hard to talk about. I see myself as a poet who has to use the words to scoop under the words. The animals are like these Virgil figures who take you there. Now, not to say that animals don’t speak languages of their own—they do—but in the quiet communication between yourself and a great being like a horse or an elephant or a whale or a dog or a cat, you have to dig to a place where sheer, intelligent nature—not words—is the means of contact. They sweep you down into their realm very quickly.
NA: I’ve only been posting your prose poems here for a reason—I want to hear you talk about the form. You described how you compose prose poems in an interview with Grace Cavalieri– I think you said that first there appeared to you the shape—in the case of prose poems, the shape was a box, then all you had to was fill the box with words. I am picturing a toybox. Can you elaborate?
DK: Ah, it’s such a great topic and a lovely question. I started writing prose poems after working with Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen on his selected poems, which we published in 2007. Carsten names Simic’s The World Doesn’t End as a heavy influence. Me too. We already had a lot in common. We saw the French Symbolism in Simic, not surrealism, but something earlier that reflects the work of Max Jacob or Rimbaud. Once I crawled around in the attic of Carsten’s imagination, I was changed forever. My poetry had a stoop. I’ve written three books of prose poems, the earliest being The Prayers of Others (2006), followed by The Most Natural Thing (2013) and then The World to Come (2021). In all my books, though, there are prose poems. I love the form.
But is it a form? It’s a box, yes. Better to say, I have stripped away all formality here, all ostentation you connect with poetry. I have even stripped away beginnings and endings. Carsten used to say a prose poem “begins in the middle and ends in the middle.” I’m even going to, in some cases, strip away the title. It’s just a window in a tenement, like the gray windows of Edward Hoppers’ paintings. Shadow figures, people sitting on the edges of their beds, reading letters, caught in the middle of the act. A prose poem is shaped like and is experienced like a photograph, a cacophony of images contained in the box of the form. I love how you compare it to a toybox. The toys have no relationship between them, other than that they are contained in this box. And the whole box, all the separate parts in inter-relationship, speaks of the child to whom it belongs. Such a metaphor for the psyche or the world. Mallarme said that things alone don’t carry symbolic meaning, but that meaning is only to be found in the interstice between images. Prose poetry emphasizes this for me. It is an escape from logic, from order, from reason. It is negative capability. It is a disappearing cabinet. It says: don’t look for answers here, but an experience. And that is just how it gets you. It haunts you. It sucks you in.
I have this totally unprovable theory that prose poetry begins with Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude speak in heroic couplets and the rest of the members of the court most often speak officially in verse. Yet when the gravediggers speak, it’s in paragraphs. They tell jokes. They are standing on the margins of the court and yet they know more about what’s going on within than the insiders do. They are free from formality. They’re glum but also joyful. They dig graves, but they are also very light. They are the agents of removal and release. The gravediggers are the voices of the prose poets.
NA: What do you think of Russell Edson’s view that prose poems should be funny?
DK: There’s a teasing smile behind the words. Look at Simic and Edson and Tate, all of them. Somehow, the words are smiling.
NA: Do you have ideas about the shape of a book before you write it?
DK: I usually have no idea what the book will be. Mary Oliver told me after my first book was published that the real work was ahead of me. She said the second book is much harder to write than the first book. In my case, she was right. It took me six years. What happens for me is that the book will take as long as it’s going to take. I wrote the next one (The Prayers of Others) in six weeks. And then the fourth one took me seven years. I have a friend, an artist named Jim Youngerman, who draws by making shapes on the paper until they begin to look like something. Then he draws in the direction of whatever that seems to be. Then, he’ll get into a series using those shapes in different ways. This is very similar to the way I work. Once I know what the book is trying to do (the ice metaphor and the Pleistocene animals, for example), the poems come very quickly. But it might require years of writing before I hit upon the notion or the metaphor that feels sturdy enough to build the book upon.
NA: Reading your books, I wondered if you were a Religious Studies major in college? I recognize so many references from my years of religion and philosophy classes.
DK: What a compliment to hear this. No, I was a poet from the start. I had one philosophy course in college, and I wasn’t interested in those writers until well after, until I started to perceive them as fuel for some fire that was cooking in me. I was twenty-five or twenty-six before I became a very serious reader. I don’t know what happened. As CK Williams said somewhere, I was a writer first, and the reading came after. But when it did, it lit up parts of me I hadn’t known were there. When I was twenty-six, I read Dante for the first time. When I was twenty-seven, in 1995, I left to teach abroad for two years in the city of Frydek-Mistek near the Czech/Polish border. There were only a few English books in our school library and I just ate them up. There was nothing else to read, no phones, no devices, not much television (I learned Czech but not well enough). The nearest internet cafe was forty-five minutes away. I checked email for an hour once per week. There was a movie theater that played Czech films. I loved seeing American musicals on TV because at least they wouldn’t dub over the songs. This was my education. I listened to stories in my broken Czech, old drinkers who told me about their trouble with the communists. I met survivors of the Holocaust in quiet nineteenth century looking parlor rooms. I played music, taught my classes, wrote poems in bars called Café Goethe and The White Raven. I wrote letters by hand. I read books. It was my school. The tuition was silence. My teachers were everywhere.
NA: So many of your poems make me laugh. Like “Politeness,” which made me wonder if you ever came to dinner at our house. I have four sisters, and when their suitors dined with us, it was just like this poem.
Politeness
I said very little during the meal. She and her father sat watching me. I remember the hard work of politeness, how it is done out of, not love, but surrender. How I sawed and sawed at the meat. How the deer did not flinch on the plate.
DK: Yes, this is the smile behind the words I was speaking about. And it’s an example, too, of how the work reveals itself to me. “Politeness” began several years ago as a poem about ghosts. Now there are no ghosts in it, but only this suitor and the poor deer, both coerced into surrender.
NA: Then there are your translations—I have been reading your translations of the poet, Carsten René Nielsen. Could you tell me how these translations came about?
Hammershøi
By Carsten René Nielsen
It’s been described to me: the way the light changes in the window in the background. But no matter how I concentrate, and as if by a will of its own, my focus is drawn into the picture, moving along the wainscoting, above the gray walls, toward the book on the table, the cut of the chair-back, then resting always for a moment on the luminous nape of the woman in the black dress, who sits turned away and with her head bowed. Exactly at this moment, either the sunlight suddenly changes quality, or someone’s shadow hastens past the window in the background. You hardly notice it, and when you look, it’s already gone.
from House Inspections, translated by David Keplinger
DK: This, too, came about during those years I lived in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s. I was visiting Copenhagen when a friend pulled from his bookshelf the new book of a young and up-and-coming poet. Right there on the spot he translated a poem for me. I was so taken with it, I wrote Carsten via his website, asking if I could see more. He told me there were no poems in English, but would I like to try my hand at translating some? So that is what we did. It took us three years to figure out what we were doing. But when I finally started sending his poems to journals, there was an immediate interest. So we kept going. That was almost thirty years ago. A new book, our fifth, called Miniatures, is set to appear later this year from Plamen Press.
NA: Finally, I wanted to ask about your Buddhist practice. What kind of Buddhism? Why Buddhism? How does practice influence your work? And then you lead guided meditations featuring poems?
DK: I grew up Catholic within my mother’s large Sicilian family. Sometime late in graduate school, I began to become interested (though I don’t know why or how this happened) in Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Father Thomas Keating, Centering Prayer. It’s what led me, finally, to Dante. Then, Buddhism naturally emerged out of that interest in contemplative practices. I’ve been engaged in Buddhism since the early 2000s. I began to see, even back then, that the language I was using for where poems come from had its corresponding glossary in Buddhism. After being a sometimes student of Mahayana, specifically Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, I enrolled in Tara Brach’s and Jack Kornfield’s Mindfulness certification program in late 2020. That introduced me to Theravada Buddhism which bases its practice on the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha. After studying in the program for two years, I founded The Mindfulness Initiative at AU (MIAU), where every Friday in the semester, we sit with a poem for a half an hour. The poets aren’t Buddhists, necessarily. I’ve done sessions on Mary Oliver, Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman, Rumi, and many contemporary poets, including our beloved Myra Sklarew, who passed away last month. I open with a guided meditation in the style of Tara Brach, speak a little dharma talk for about ten minutes on the poem, and then we return to the meditation with a question or a theme gleaned from the writing. Since 2022, the audience has grown. It’s expanded beyond AU. So I have begun to acknowledge that there’s a need for this little marriage of the literary and the luminous. Each week we have anywhere from thirty to fifty people join our group on Zoom. If anyone is interested in visiting or just getting onto the mailing list (where I send each week a link to the recording of the previous session, along with an essay in response to the theme), they can fill out the contact form at: http://eepurl.com/ilpwh9.
Videos archive over fifty of our meetings here: https://www.youtube.com/@davidkeplinger3236/videos
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