As a continuation in my series of blog posts on the nature of truth, specifically autobiographical truth in poetry, I thought I’d interview Philip Brady whose most recent collection of poetry, to Banquet with the Ethiopians, as well his new book of essays, Phantom Signs, deal directly and indirectly with the questions I have been pondering.
NA: As I mentioned in my recent interviews with January Gill O’Neil, Nicole Santalucia, and Dante Di Stefano, I had a poetry professor once who hated what he called “dishonesty in poetry.” He hated it when poets used the first person, and then described illnesses they never had or divorces or . . . who knows, maybe their own funerals. I am wondering what you think?
In your poetry as well as in your essays, the personal and the mythic are profoundly linked. Do you think of the I in poetry as a sort of myth? The personal as a construction?
PB: Nin, I am completely honest on the page. Naked. Virtually transparent. It is true that I suffer occasional lapses in orthography. Queens, for instance, is spelled, in my father’s hand, “Galway.” And Father himself is transcribed as “Telemachus.” While Mother is indubitably a goddess, she did not prove, regrettably, immortal. And my wife, in spite of being spelled “selkie,” is not in actuality trans-species. These variorums may be addressed in the next edition.
I share your poetry prof’s aversion to doctoring. Untruths inserted in order to enhance status, embellish memory, hide sin, wring sympathy, or gain financial advantage must be censured. If, for instance, a certain University College Cork player signing “Rick Barry” autographs did not actually dunk a basketball against the Cork Blue Demons in Gurranabraher in 1976, any claim to the contrary is bollix. Likewise, if Homer didn’t write the Iliad and Odyssey, he should stop collecting royalties.
NA: In your essay, “The Book I Almost Wrote,” you describe your efforts to write a memoir, and how, after recovering from heart surgery, your concept of the memoir completely changed. You decided to write the memoir in verse instead. Somehow that made all the difference? Why?
PB: Partly it was perspective. Coming back from a near-death experience, I felt far away from the tribulations of a seventh grader in summer camp, where the prose memoir-in-progress was set. As Walter Ong has said, “One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death.” So there was the desire to lift things off the page. Having just emerged from the place of the Muse, I wanted to compose and be composed by a living body, which is verse.
NA: How does verse change the dynamic?
PB: It changes speed, and allows for radical distortion of scale. Since they are margined, sentences must create believable scale and maintain pace. Speed can of course vary, but not in the dramatic way that it can change in lines. Lines can stretch each moment to an operatic recitative. Or they can move so quickly you skip or transpose whole lines. (I squint at any reading that doesn’t dwell on one line and skip another). Homer can take ten lines for a greeting, and flash through ten years of war in fifty days. So lines aspire to render the moment, repeated, varied, flawed with each enactment. Even in print, they retain an aura of private darkness—what I call in one phantom sign a “hex.” Sentences are webbed in the tissue of syntax. But lines are only loosely page-bound; each line is connected to the whole by rhythmic echo, but not necessarily by sense, punctuation, or chronology.
NA: You write in that same essay that you “began to see that there was no home, no element anyone could own or even belong to, except for the moment reaching for a single line.” That sounds very Zen. Could you elaborate?
PB: It’s the condition of utterance that I’m reaching for—the breathing and vanishing moment. I’ve heard that scientists say that that the present is ten-to -fifteen seconds. Maybe that’s why lines tend to be four to six feet. Each line is its own present. Bernard Knoxsays wrote that each of Homer’s dactylic hexameter lines displays the arrangement of the whole poem. Each begins with conflict and possibility, and proceeds through a variety of sounds to fill the metrical requirements. But each line ends with the same strict pairing of dactyl and spondee. The poem is inside each line—from possibility to finality. By the end of the Iliad, the force of the story has been welcomed and displayed sixteen thousand times. Of course lines too are time-bound. They are, in a sense, signatures rather than enactments of this ever-present. They are phantom signs. As a long-time practitioner of the prose poem, Nin, I wonder if you would agree that prose poems aspire to utterance without even the written score of lineation. They yearn to be neither sentences nor lines. They yearn toward the moment reaching for a single line—just beyond the human. For me, this yearning is at the heart of poetry. Poetry is the only art form which cannot be fully apprehended in one species—neither sight nor sound. Perhaps the last three thousand years of written verse is an elegy for a time when lines were conceived and spoken in one breath.
NA: I love what you are saying here. I could never put it in words as you do.
I also love how in your essay, “Are Lives Matter?” you describe the literary desire to escape the confines of one’s identity—even to be no one, meaning to be no one in the way Odysseus tried to be no one. In the way Dickinson wanted to be no one.
And yet those people who become “someone” are somehow owned by history? So their stories are not their own? Again “truth” is not literal truth?
PB: The greatest transformation of identity seems to me in folding three dimensional beings into two dimensions of the page. And as time passes, what we know about those who have made that transition grows less.In all cases, identity is unsustainable. The further back we go, the more it’s corrupted—from history to rumor and finally to myth. We know Einstein’s hairdo and Mickey Mantle’s bourbon. But Daniel Boone? Sappho? Zarathustra?
NA: In your essay, “Lines and Sentences,” you write: “Memoirists are tattooed with sex; they reek of hormones. When people talk about the difference between memoir and fiction, that’s what they mean. It doesn’t have much to do with imagination: memoirists make up as much stuff as novelists do. The difference is that memoirists stand bowel-deep in the stench of their own creations.”
Could you say a little more about this?
PB: Well, for instance, in your next book, which I’m delighted to say is forthcoming from Etruscan, you conduct a dialogue involving “Nin” and “Orgasm.” Both speak; both are heard. The author is both and neither. There is a fiction at the heart of non-fiction. And vice-versa. There’s something of the memoir, perhaps, even in Homer. Samuel Butler says that considering Homer’s Trojan sympathies, he must have been a Trojan himself—at least on his mother’s side. So, memoirists and novelists are both tattooed with selfhood. What’s different is the position from which they speak: whether author or narrator.
NA: Again, I love what you are saying here, as I love your latest book of essays.
There are so many great poems and essays in Phantom Signs.
One of my favorite lines in the book is: “The first poet to come to nought was Homer.” As a publisher and a poet, would you like to say a few words about that?
PB: Homer, I think, is the perfect example of our yearning to connect myth and time. We don’t know who Homer was, when or where he lived, or if he even existed. Nine cities in Greece claim his birth. Some brilliant and crazed scholars argue he spoke Basque, or that Troy was really in Cambridgeshire. If Homer came to “nought,” it was by way of the process of emerging from myth into time—becoming a chirographic poet. Clearly, that happened—the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down, somewhere by some process. But was it by one person, as “Unitarian” scholars argue? Or by many, as “Analysts” say. Homer walks between two worlds: the world of many, and of one. As a publisher, of course, I am always a “Unitarian.” I promote our authors as individuals—we pitch their bios and credits. Yet, there is something of the “Analyst” too in this enterprise. Writers disappear into the text, which remains fixed even as their authors change. Publishers enable and monitor this transformation. As I say in “Edited,” “Writers don’t make books. They make stories, poems, plays, and memoirs. We make books.”
NA: Again, I love that. I’d like to close this interview with a poem of your choice and/or a brief excerpt from the book.
PS: Here’s a bit from Youtube.
And here’s one of “Nine Phantom Signs.”
Hex
There is a word that I am loathe to say. It sends a small shiver up my spine. Not the usual—fuck, cunt, shit, prick, ass. Nor the sloppy ones like darling, pumpkin, sweetie pie, lambkins. Hearing “Yaddo” always made a friend wrinkle her nose, but I lack allergies to odd-sounding words like firkin or Iroquois. I pronounce with equanimity terms that portend evil, like triglycerides. I am not dismissive of tongue twisters or ululation or jaw harping. I jabber to my cat. I sing alone.
It’s just this one word. It does not relate to sex, exactly, though one of its definitions is a body part. I would not say it out loud to myself, or to others if I could safely circumlocute. I would not have it uttered within earshot. The French version doesn’t squick me, which is ironic since the English is an obscenity in French. It is not a fetish; it does not fester behind a veil of incense and fishhooks. Though I can write the word, to write it while admitting that I would not say it—this I cannot.
I hex this word. I do not curse or swear. I hex it. If I spoke my hexed word you would not cringe. It is not shameful. But to say that I cannot say it would color my humanity; it would divide us, reader, in this particular. Hex is the lust of virgin silence, the tensing of the unfired synapse, the spell between bars of the equal sign. Hex causes and precedes. Sans hex, words perfectly denote. They mean the same to everyone. They lack gaiety.
Every utterance is spun, like a charmed quark, by its hex. If all my hexes were perfectly aligned with Yeats’s, I would have composed “Lapis Lazuli.” Maybe I did. Loopy hexes spat out a book-length tale in blank verse. It zigzagged between myth and time. It opened with a list of everything that happens and does not. On the cover, it says To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet. The name beneath is the same as the name beneath these words. Usually, it’s bad form to talk about one’s own book, but it’s OK here because it did not sell and if my name is on the dust jacket, it is only because none other has stepped forward.
The 265thitem on the list of everything and not reads simply, “Thersites.” So in my phantom sign, that is my name. Telemachus is my father. Homer is a novice scrivener. Fearless is a perfect gay child who lived inside my body and Odysseus and Achilles and Agamemnon are counselors at a summer camp for boys.
The heroes of Thersites’ beach camp
Were Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus.
And so were the heroes of my beach camp.
I named them from the paperback I’d nicked
From a bin outside the Main Street 5&10.
“A Great Adventure Story,” it was billed.
“The Greatest War Novel Ever Penned.”
Perched on a spavined bunk I clutched the book
And when Achilles or Odysseus
Or royal Agamemnon strode by,
I buried my nose till pages came unglued.
Before my book dissolved to my phantom sign it was composed of sentences. Stong and regular, they pulsed across the page, right justified, chapter upon paragraph. Then one autumn afternoon deep in midlife, there was a numbness in the syntax, a dependent clause cracked and then, an explosion.
I died, I think. It could be
A child’s fingers trace the livid script—
A cave figure or totem. It could be
My stitched chest is a chirograph
Metastasizing into memoir.
Thus my body, transcribed, rocks
Backward, washed clean of birth,
Forward into days charted by lines,
Backward like a wave or a half rhyme
And forward into the summer of 265
When I first bent solemn to the page.
The sentences were no longer mine. They were no longer sentences. They were pent up. But they were still colored by my hex. Otherwise they might be “Lapis Lazuli.”
Philip Brady’s most recent release is a book-length poem, To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet. He is the author of a previous collection of essays, By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard, (ForeWord Gold Medal, 2008) as well as three books of poems and a memoir. His work has been awarded the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, the Ohioana Poetry Prize, the Ohio Governor’s Award, and six Ohio Arts Council Artist Grants. Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire, University College Cork, and Semester at Sea. Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor at Youngstown State University and Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the MFA faculty at Wilkes University.
Thank you. While the interview is great—and hello to both you and Nin— best of all is hearing you read. Barb
Posted by: Barbara Brothers | December 21, 2018 at 10:30 AM