Mark Bibbins On Where Poems Start & Backing Away from the Stinky Dead Beast aka Confessional Narrative [by Martha Silano]

I'm drawn to Mark Bibbins' work because he is not a confessional poet, and also because linear narratives do not seem to be exceedingly important to him. He is, of course, not the first contemporary poet to move away from confessional narrative, but what stands out about Bibbins' work (at least for me) are three things: his attention to and aptitude with sound/rhyme, his use of word play, and the unexpected forms his poems take. Here the author answers questions about his new book, The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon 2009).

MS: You state in your 2009 BAP contributor note that “Concerning the Land to the South of Our Neighbors to the North” gained its foothold when the final line of the poem (“Connecticut! We’re sawing you in half.”) popped into your head.  Is it common for you to get first (or last) lines in your head, triggers that coalesce into poems? Or do poems come to you elsewise?

MB: For me a poem starts with a phrase or a sentence that arrives, usually without warning or preparation, then the rest grows around that. Some wind up as titles, others beginnings or endings; most change their minds and move around as it’s coming together.  I certainly wouldn’t have sat down to write a poem “about” America, as my level of ambition is pretty low. I prefer to let something besides that direct a poem toward or around its subject(s).

MS: Speaking of “Concerning the Land . . .,” it’s a wonderful poem on the first go, but, at least for me,  it only gets better with each re-reading. Can you share a bit about the making of this poem? Did the Necco wafers and New Jersey’s queer shoulder come quickly to you, or did it take several throws to get each state just right? Also, how conscious were you that each state’s stanza is gazelle-ishly distinct? Did anyone read a rough draft, and if so were there any suggestions for revision?

MB: A handful of states came during a train ride through the Nutmeg State, and I picked up again after returning home a few days later—it happened quickly, and the conceit really hustled it along. I like hearing of odd events and foods and landmarks that places are “known for.” It’s preposterous and sweet, sometimes creepy. Also arbitrary, which is why I felt entitled to fabricate, and why it didn’t always matter what information was attached to which state (New Jersey and Ginsberg being, as they so often are, exceptions).

Nobody saw a draft of it. The wonderful Danielle Pafunda had offered to consider something of mine for La Petite Zine, which she was coediting, and I’m grateful for her consideration. I usually don’t show poems to anyone until I feel I’ve finished writing and revising them, which isn’t to imply that I haven’t been given good advice in the past. Nor do I mean to separate the processes of writing and revision.

MS: The Dance of No Hard Feelings is a delightful read, mainly because of its striking use of language (“ice javelins our throats”), its word play (we fly [fly] / will fly / should fly /will have flown / are flying apart”), and its gritty/urban walking-around-on-a-golf-course feel. There’s so much fire and ice in this book—boiling seas and firey angels; snow and ice and freezing. Is the world going to end in fire or in ice?

MB: Right now I suspect it will end in paperwork. That, or water—abundance and/or lack thereof. But the earth won't be ending. It will be editing.


MS: In these poems you seem to continually resist and give into narrative, into a speaker with a past, present and future. What’s your relationship with narrative poetry? Is the confessional poem, or the I poem in general, an old, hairy, dead beast to back away from as quickly as possible?

MB: A quick look at my bookshelves reveals very little narrative or confessional poetry, assuming I understand what you mean by those terms—is “The Day Lady Died” narrative poetry? an I poem? I like it when poems surprise me, and a lot of what falls into the above categories doesn’t do that, mainly because of the style in which they’re executed, not their content. As old as this debate is, it seems the dead beast isn’t going anywhere; that doesn’t mean I want to hover over it, sniffing it and describing the stink.

MS: Explain your use of brackets.

MB: Phantom opportunities.

MS: I enjoyed “Forcefield”—it’s hard to write about breaking up, and you do it well here ([no succor / no syntax / no sleep]. I have to be honest, though: I don’t think I would have enjoyed an entire book of these space-ful, language-y-conscious type poems. A few good ones of this ilk, okay, I’m fine with that. And yet, you seem comfy wearing many different aesthetic hats. Incidentally, are you and Ashbery tight? Which poets have influenced you the most?

MB: I wouldn't want a whole book of those either—thanks? To me they seem less about breaking up than enacting or embodying a kind of brokenness. I have no idea who or what's influenced me the most; there are so many people and things, and I don’t like to rank them, but I enjoy Gertrude Stein and My Bloody Valentine a great deal (whenever I’m asked that question, I can’t help naming bands). John Ashbery’s writing has amazed me for many years, and I’m happy to call him a friend.

MS: How did LIT magazine come about? Do you enjoy that part of being a poet? Who reads the slush pile? Does being an editor hinder or help your own writing?

MS: We hatched it when I was a student at The New School; the faculty and administration were very supportive in getting it going. We drummed up work for the first two issues mostly by solicitation, and my tenure as poetry editor officially ended before there was much of a slush pile. Current graduate students and the alumni who serve as editors now read the submissions, and I remain safely “at large.” My editorial experiences have mostly been helpful, although I edited fiction reviews at a magazine for a couple of years, which wasn’t.  
 

MS: Finally, the $10,000 question: How did you go from being a kid in love with words (correct me if I’m wrong on that) to Best American Poet? What’s the recipe for best-ness?

MB: You’re certainly not wrong, although a lot of the time I still feel like a kid (not always a great thing). Not following recipes has informed both my successes and failures. Sorry if that’s a $10 answer. Do you need change?

Ed note:  Read another interview with Mark Bibbins here.  Find a schedule of his upcoming readings here.

Comments

[Geoff M. Pope]

Enjoyed the interview, Martha, particularly your comments regarding the appealing departure from narrative/confessional poetry. That aspect resonated especially with me after having recently received the following passage from an avid poetry reader who is NOT a poet:

"In his essay, 'The Personal Heresy in Criticism,' [C.S.] Lewis attacks the widely held view of poetry as the expression of the poet's personality. In its place, he proposes an objective, impersonal theory which defines poetry as the artistic imitation of reality. The true poet reflects eternal realities in his art. His role is not to point to himself but beyond himself: 'The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says "look at that" and points: the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I
can possibly see of him.'"
—from *C.S. Lewis on Scripture* by Michael J. Christensen, p. 46.

Geoff M. Pope
http://geoffpopepoetry.blogspot.com/

[jim cummins]

An "objective, impersonal theory which defines poetry as the artistic imitation of reality" sounds so clear and seems to resolve the messy problem of personality. But think about it: it in itself is an expression of personality, the personality of a person (like C. S. Lewis) who desires that this situation obtain for everybody at all times. When you realize that, then the next and more interesting question is why? Which leads us inevitably into the messy realm of personality, and the even scarier realm of who gets to decide who gets to think what. C. S. Lewis wants us all to be Catholic, too, not to mention that he is someone who by his own admission would like to see less and less of his fellow man and more and more of what Lewis assumes he is pointing to. Assuming of course that whatever that is is the same thing, and means the same, to the guy standing beside C. S. Lewis (further assuming we can still see that person, not just his finger). You just can't say good poems come from this, not that; what you're saying about "narrative/confessional" poetry is that, at this point in your life/career, you don't like this kind of poetry and it doesn't inspire you to write your own poems. That's fair; just don't expect everybody else to be at that particular point in time, too. A further point: not everybody feels this negativity about other human beings that this attitude seems to harbor. If Mark's poem were merely clever, I wouldn't like it nearly as much as I do; I see way more there, an expression of a larger narrative and a large personality.

[Geoff M. Pope]

I agree with you, Jim; this is merely where I am “at this point in [my] life/career.” I’ve been overly subjective in my work -- in my life! But where did you gather in what I wrote that I specifically “don’t like this kind of poetry [narrative/confessional], and it doesn’t inspire [me] to write...”? Did you skim my blog? Compare “Fastball from My Dad” and “Don’t Rush Me” to “The Girl with Rainbow Toes” and “A Couple in Love.”

To end, C. S. Lewis was a Protestant; and, as a Narnian, he didn't (I don't think) want “us 'all' to be” _anything_ -- especially not a Cat-ho-lic!

[jim cummins]

I may be wrong (it's happened before!) but CS was a High Church Anglo-Catholic, right? Church of England? Same as TS? That's Protestant (Episcopalian in this country) but not low church (Presbyterian and Baptist in this country). And as for the rest, I was just overreacting; I do that a lot. I didn't mean to target either you, Mark, or Martha; I was speaking more generally; or at least thought I was. And I wasn't implying that you, Geoff, didn't like that kind of poetry, but was reacting to Martha's and Mark's conversation, though filtered through CS, whom I'm not fond of. Does that make sense? It's all language: "confessionalism" is a figure of fun because it's so outmoded it's disappearing from us even as we speak; Martha and Mark are right to dismiss it. But so is the "terminally hip" (which is not to imply that's what anyone here is proposing). Another way of saying it, maybe, is that "the hip" has tuberculosis, and is dying, too. Meanwhile, doesn't Narnia give you the serious creeps?

[[email protected]]

Correction: I was not/ am not dismissing personal/confessional poetry. I was merely pointing out my attraction to Mark's work. CS wants us all to be Catholic? I am 6/7 through the Book of Narnia, and I don't quite agree.

[jim cummins]

Martha, first of all my response was based on the conversation between the two of you. I quote your opening: "I'm drawn to Mark Bibbins' work because he is not a confessional poet,and also because linear narratives do not seem to be exceedingly important to him." Okay, I can imagine a linguistic universe in which that is neither a positive nor negative statement. In this context it seems negative to me. Later you say: "In these poems you seem to continually resist [narrative and confessional poetry] ... Is the confessional poem, or the I poem in general, an old hairy dead beast to back away from ...?" Maybe you're NOT "dismissing personal/confessional poetry poetry," but one could be forgiven for thinking there's a bias here. But the more important point is that you've opened up a line of discussion and I'm more than in bounds to contribute to it. In fact, your reply seems a bad faith desire to choke off that discussion. Mark then says: "I like it when poems surprise me, and a lot of what falls into the above categories doesn't do that ... The dead beast isn't going anywhere; that doesn't mean I want to hover over it, sniffing it and describing the stink." Maybe what's going on here is that you want to be able to damn "n & cp", then protest when you're held accountable for it. Finally, CS Lewis is an Anglican, an Anglo-Catholic, a Protestant. He is a sophisticated and worldly man who is a brilliant proselytizer for the Christian faith. After Narnia, give The Screwtape Letters a try. I said he wants us all to be Catholic; heavens, that I would exaggerate! Like many of his generation he saw the Christian myth as the best defense against evil, rather than our generation which suspects it's more likely part of the problem. How about "godly" instead? That's one of his favorite words, and he certainly wanted it for all of us.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=709713767]

Have you read m/any of my poems? Let them speak to my bias against confessional/narrative poetry.

[David Graham]

It's always stimulating to see the old unkillable arguments taken for another run around the track. I take it that the ongoing uproar about "confessional" poetry (a term I don't much like) is ongoing precisely because it's important, though, and concerns aesthetic questions that are deeper than matters of what's currently fashionable and "hot."

This is the premise, anyway, that underpins the anthology of essays *After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography* (Graywolf 2001) that I co-edited with Kate Sontag. Our book does not push a single thesis but aims to orchestrate a range of views. Poets who weigh in on various aspects of the historical and aesthetic challenges of autobiographical poetry include Yusef Komunyakaa, Alicia Ostriker, William Matthews, Carol Muske-Dukes, Billy Collins, Joan Aleshire, Ted Kooser, Andrew Hudgins, Carol Frost, Brendan Galvin, Stanley Plumly, Annie Finch, and Stephen Dunn.

To my knowledge there is no other book like it.

If you're interested, a few links to whet your interest.

My essay from the book: http://faculty.valpo.edu/ebyrne/vprupdate/grahamessay.html

A feature in Valparaiso Poetry Review on the book: http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/v4n1.html

The book's introduction: http://www.graywolfpress.org/Related_Content/Book_Excerpts/Excerpt_from_After_Confession/

Our book is meant to contain multitudes, and features a number of essays that directly contradict others.

But I do have some opinions, some fairly strong. Here's a sampling:

a) It's long past time to retire the term "confessional," which is loaded, inaccurate, and rightly detested by just about every poet to whom it is applied. I prefer the word "personal." But of course there is another nice sturdy word that's been around for quite a while: lyric.

b) Poets who inveigh against the sameness, mediocrity, self-absorption, and so forth of the lyric-I poem are often confusing categories. Most poetry of every era is mediocre; that's a given. So to point out the weakness of the average lyric poem written today is not saying much. It's certainly not news.

c) The lyric isn't going away any time soon, no matter how much theoretical huffing-and-puffing occurs, or how one draws the aesthetic battle lines. Nor is narrative going to become outmoded. Song and story are deep human urges, and poets will keep writing poems that sing and tell tales until the end of literature.

d) I believe that poetic subjects and modes don't become outmoded, though certainly individual poets and poems can lose their freshness. But just when you think the sonnet is dead, or the dead grandfather poem, along comes some frisky new voice to make it new. Don't blame the mode, then; blame the poet. As William Matthews once wrote, "dull subjects are those we have failed."

e) Martha Silano's own poetry rocks. And it is, as she notes, frequently personal in mode.

[Geoff M. Pope]

And if I may -- as a segue to DG's final e) --

My Son Asks 'What's a Torrent?'
by Martha Silano

It's a womb, a swarm of worms, a swirling, untamed horn.
It's our bobbing, bubbling future, the dry leaf careening
beneath its branch as the first fat raindrops fall.

It's a gushing surging, riffling, swiftness; it's here,
where the river turns; there, where we heard the dipper
like water singing;

and now it's splashing, banging banks, swishing
past an overhanging willow like a girl with a comb
pulling and pulling her tangled hair.

Whole trees (it can happen; it happens) unleashing.
It's a swelling and bulging: the Skagit, the Sauk,
the Snoqualmie, the Stillaguamish. What the fishermen call

off color, an every-which-wayness all utterance (short
on restraint, hard to decipher), a violence purely, refreshingly
amoral, as in Now I'll go this way, not that way, cabins and coffins

loosening from comfortable clay. The mystery of mud stains
on three stor y houses. Bursting, confusing, it could be
carrying your books, your wallet, your living room sofa;

it's friction's slurry and spin, the whole big, dark tugging and gurgling
jostle and sway of everything liquid, our roiling,
rapid-riding brains.
____
____

What more could one ask for
except maybe a pumpkin pie
with Gerard Manley Hopkins?

GMP

[Martha Silano]

Dear David,

Thanks so much for posting your thoughts on poems of a personal nature. I agree that the term "confessional" should be tossed out the window, mainly because it equates sharing in a narrative way about life experiences with heading for the confessional to . . . confess. Yuk! Even the best confessional poets were doing way, way, more than confess, so I would argue that the word should be retroactively and presently decommissioned at once.

I like how you boil the whole argument down to good and bad poems, of whatever ilk. Some last, some suck, and the reasons for that have little to do with whether they're personal, lyrical, linear, non-linear, etc. 99% of what's written falls away within a hundred years. Scary thought, but it's also comforting to know that mostly what's well-crafted and socks us in the gut or changes the way we think (or both!) is what survives.

[Martha Silano]

Geoff,

How sweet of you to post my torrent poem. Thanks so much!

[Martha Silano]

And PS to DG: thanks for the kind words about my own often-very-personal poems.