An Interview with Alan Ziegler [by Aspen Matis]

Alan Ziegler's books include Love At First Sight: An Alan Ziegler Reader; The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes, The Green Grass of Flatbush, So Much To Do, The Writing Workshop, Volumes I and II, and The Writing Workshop Note Book. He is the editor of Short: An International Anthology of 500 Years of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Tin House. As a professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and was chair of the Writing Program. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Ziegler via email about his book-in-progress, Based on a True Life: A Memoir of Sorts. We also discussed his wisdom for young poets, the themes that most fascinate and inspire him, and the “radical” practice of nourishing one’s poetic roots (through notebooks, dreams, and reading as sources of poetic protein) so those roots might continue to branch outward.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life?

Poetry lets my inner life go out and meet my outer life. Interesting things happen when they team up.

Why do you write poems?

George Mallory said he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” I write poems for the opposite reason: Because they’re not there. Yet.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Radical is associated with root; and roots, of course, need moisture. Some in medieval medicine extolled radical moisture as a life force, which—though eventually depleted—could be refreshed to extend life. The most radical thing a poet can do is nourish your poetic roots so they keep branching out. (Nourishment can be provided through notebooks, dreams, reading, and constant vigilance for sources of poetic protein.)

In many of your squibs and prose poems, your deft use of absurdity renders a clear and illuminating picture of human nature and the human condition—where do these squibs come from? Your life and sleep-time dreams? Pure imagination? The news and bygone news? To what degree are they “true,” and to what extent are they nonfiction?

I started writing aide-memoires based on moments of my life that I didn’t want to forget, and images that kept peeking out for no discernible reason. I gave myself an arbitrary goal of 99 stories (long since surpassed), with the premise: “Everybody has 99 stories to tell, and if you know them long enough, you’ll hear them all.” I felt a little guilty about embellishing here and there, until I adopted this William Maxwell passage from Billie Dyer and Other Stories: “For things that are not known—at least not anymore—and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.” I came up with the title Based on a True Life and stopped worrying about it. (A friend suggested I just call it a novel, which I found tempting but unearned.) 

I give equal attention to any memories—momentous or just a moment—that compel me to preserve them in language. The death of a parent and the infidelity of a lover are in the mix with buying a plastic comb in a White River Junction vending machine and having my head shaved when I was eight. They’re all connected: I bought the plastic comb on my way to visit the unfaithful lover; my father was the one who had to shave my head due to an infection.

When David Lehman and Stacey Harwood generously gave me the key to the Best American Poetry blog, I had a space to work through the memory pieces and also mix in prose poems, fables, aphorisms, fragments, etc. They didn’t stop me so I kept on.

What, in your mind, unifies your many distinct squibs—might they someday form a book?

Daniel Nester wrote, in a comment, “please tell me there will be a collection,” and how can I decline after he said please. I settled on the genre-neutral term squibs (one translation of Baudelaire’s fusées) and started numbering them. What had seemed to be all over the place now had a space to occupy, and the task became to organize a subspace that could constitute a book. I tried several approaches for unifying the pieces, and finally settled on a roughly chronological order of autobiographical pieces interspersed with texts that exist outside of time but share sensibilities with the memories.

I’ve been repeatedly buoyed by Best American Poetry Blog compatriots, especially Kent Johnson (who called them a continuation of Kafka’s journals), Mitch Sisskind, and my go-to rabbi David Lehman—all are brilliant writers and I am humbled by their readership. The manuscript is currently under the guardianship of my dear agent Annie DeWitt (The Shipman Agency).

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I’m fascinated by works that have great replay value. Virtually every wonderful painting has it—you’ll never hear anyone say, “We can skip the Vermeer because I’ve already seen it.” There are songs and movies one can experience over and over, feeling a combination of comfort in anticipation of what’s next and the excitement of discovering something you haven’t seen or felt before. Likewise, there are poems that continue to inspire me after dozens of readings, such as Max Jacob’s “The Beggar Woman of Naples,” Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “The Rubber Stamp” from Platero & I, and Wisława Szymborska’s “Going Home.” I think what they have in common is capturing what Cartier-Bresson (quoting Cardinal De Retz) called the “decisive moment.”

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Never tell yourself a preemptive No when you think something isn’t worth writing or you can’t do it justice; Miles Davis said, “I never think about not being able to do anything. I just pick up my horn and play the hell out of it.” Try to get past the “I don’t like writing but I love having written” attitude: love the act of writing (with all the ups and downs of love). I’ve never heard a tennis player say after a grueling match with aching legs: “I don’t like playing tennis but I love having played.”

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

Photography energizes me, whether I’m in Paris or looking out my window. I could be half-asleep on the couch, but if my peripheral vision glimpses one of the local hawks, I’m up and at it. I’m interested in what can be done after the picture has been taken to make something new, such as cropping multiple details from an image and organizing them into a montage juxtaposed with the original image. I’m beginning work on an image/language essay on baseball. And of course more squibs.

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

It is absolutely wonderful to hear Alan's brilliant voice on the subject of poetry. A dancer once said to me, "Dancers live in music, poets live in words." Music, words -- those are pretty sublime houses to live in.

[run 3]

Never tell yourself a preemptive No when you think something isn’t worth writing or you can’t do it justice; Miles Davis said, “I never think about not being able to do anything. I just pick up my horn and play the hell out of it.” Try to get past the “I don’t like writing but I love having written” attitude: love the act of writing (with all the ups and downs of love). I’ve never heard a tennis player say after a grueling match with aching legs: “I don’t like playing tennis but I love having played.”