A
Conversation: Tanya Olson and Phillip B. Williams
written in response to the YesYes Books reading at Studio One on Friday, December 6
“I am rarely
satisfied with a single representation of something, with a single idea.”
-
Phillip B. Williams
“…we use repetition to build our sense of self.” –Tanya Olson
Tanya Olson: I've had the good
fortune to read Burn (YesYes Books,
2013) and some individual poems of yours; Last Friday (at our reading together
at Studio One on December 6th) was the first time I got a chance to
hear you read though. One thing that struck me about your work, both on the
page and in your reading it, was the move from high to low in it. The language
is often very elevated, you have a very formal kind of reading style, but
dropped in to these poems are real low-culture moments— pop culture figures
like Chaka Khan and Smokey Robinson and things like hopscotch, greens, and
roaches pop up in the middle of all this grandness.
It's
a lovely pairing and makes your poems far-seeing but understanding. Could you
talk a little about this high/low pairing and movement that you do— are you
conscious of it? What work do you think it does?
Phillip
B. Williams: O
Tanya, your reading was a fortunate event for me as well. I suppose, to answer
your question, that it has been considered a flaw of mine that I mix registers.
We spoke briefly about poetry
workshops and how useful and detrimental they can be simultaneously. It is
something that I do naturally, as I talk that way and I have no interest in
creating a world in my poems that is not reflective of the world of my mind.
The argument against it is that it reminds readers they have a poem in front of
them, that heightened language is a way of saying "look what I can
do". In some aspect, I cannot imagine anyone ever forgetting that they are
reading a poem. From my experience, just having line breaks and rhyme make it
impossible to get lost in a poem the way I get lost in a novel. I look for what
makes a poem a poem. I enjoy poems that splurge on language. I'm all for beauty
and mix notes and chance-taking that is incredibly unsafe. When I include
"low culture" (don't you just hate that we have no other name for
this?) moments, it is simply me trying to tell the reader that this is what I
know: I know Chaka Khan and I know playing softball with a balled-up jacket as
first base. To separate the high from the low seems disingenuous and why write
a poem that I don't believe in just to make it more convincing for someone
else?
"What other work do you think does this?"— Music
does it, in particular jazz (playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in the
middle of a composition for instance), but the assumption would have to be that
jazz is considered a high-art, and high to whom? For what reason? I see it in a
lot in ballets by Ulysses Dove and Alvin Ailey, how they have this
hyper-technical footwork paired with really soulful, intuitive body movements
that aren't articulated for the sake of perfection and beauty but as a way to
get emotion and empathy translated from their bodies to the audience.
Tanya,
what I really enjoyed about your book—Boyishly
(YesYes Books, 2013)— was the fearlessness of repetition and hearing you read
versus hearing myself read created a sense of "Yes, that is right"
that I rarely get. "Notes From Jonah's Lecture Series" is a
fascinating example of how I feel you and I read the poem in similar ways:
quickly, with a slant of humor in the voice that softens into pathos every so
often, ignoring line-end pauses and periods. It helps that the word whale is
repeated 29 times (but drops out of most of the final stanza). I would love to
hear more about how repetition works for you: what are your intentions, if any,
when using it? Does reading your repetition-heavy poems aloud open up new
possibilities/interpretations for the poem that you were unaware of? Who have
you read that taught you how to do this so well or is this a natural instinct
of yours?
TO: How interesting that your fluidity between low &
high (unfortunate terms, indeed) is sometimes read as a weakness. I really love
it, because, as you note, it is life. And I think your elevated language
doesn't read as "poetic" (in the alienating sense) but as poetic in
the lifting sense. I like your comparison to dance—good dance does that—you remind
us how dance is all around us, how we are already art.
So to answer your question— I think of
repetition as little handholds throughout the poem. I imagine someone rock
climbing, the way your hands & feet must find resting & lifting places
to move, to get from one place to another. That's what I imagine the repetition
does—it provides those places to grab on, to rest, to move from.
I first came to love repetition in Beckett.
As an academic, I wrote about his 1970s women plays— Footfalls, Not I, Rockaby—that are really almost only
repetition. They are beautiful, tender pieces that also show how we as humans
use repetition to build our sense of self. As a poet, I love Stein & her
repetition when she uses it to build meaning instead of hide meaning. So
while I'm less enthralled by Tender
Buttons, I love the Making of Americans.
That's a great piece to read aloud. I also love the way Van Morrison worries a
word or line, repeats it over & over & over as a way to get inside a
line.
My next question for you is also an
"influence" one. I like your "after" poems, especially “See
No Evil, after Patricia Smith.” Could you talk about what the
"afters" mean to you. After style? Subject? Theme?
PBW: I see my poems that
are "after" someone performing for me the task of training. I am
copying theme or style, but usually it is a mix of copying form and structure
when I say "after". I want the information in my poem ordered
similarly as the poem it is after. With "See No Evil", I wrote a
crown of sonnets after Smith's heroic crown "Motown Crown" and also kept
the theme of soul music going. I learn my favorite techniques by writing after
other poets and pushing past my limits that way. I also see the
"after" poems working as homages to poets who have inspired me in
some way.
I wanted to know how you mix these many voices and
personalities with what I call the open-political in your poems, poems that
seem to have a message that leans towards something social and aware but open
enough to be interpreted differently by the reader. Some of your speakers and
characters so to speak are Muhammad Ali, a "retarded astronaut", wild
animals, Jonah, a young girl names Rose, and Captain Coffin. Some lines that
led me to the term "Open-political" are: "Decapitated mountains
are the price/ we are willing to pay for in America" from your poem
"My Love is Green, America" and the following lines from your poem
"Gates of Beauty":
“The People's Act of Love is for the people.
The People's Act of Love never has enough people.
The people ask for more from The People's Act of Love
but The People's Act of Love is exhausted, frankly,
if you don't mind The People's Act of Love being frank.”
How
do you control the voice and the content? How do they team up in your poems to
leave something very nuanced and, in that nuance, very welcoming, to be read in
numerous ways?
TO: Hmmm, that's a really
interesting question. I have to say it doesn't feel very controlled while I am
writing it, but maybe I am thinking of “controlled” differently than you mean
it. They don't feel controlled because the voice is what drives the poem and
the poem's contents, its innards. The People's Act of Love is weary of all it
does for the people; the speaker in My Love is much more lecture-y. But they
each have the things they need to say related to that voice.
Why
are those things they need to say political or at least political in nature? I
guess because that is how I see and understand politics— as a series of small
decisions we make individually and then collectively. And since I understand
politics that way, the voices in the poems do too. (This I would say is
consistent across all my poems— people analyzing their choices in regards to
bigger forces. And I know not everyone understands themselves or the world that
way, so I am willing to say that shared characteristic probably originates in
me more than it originates in the actual voices themselves.) The voices don't
think of their choices as political choices but they understand they have
implications outside themselves, bigger than themselves. Often the way their
choices resonate is in children, in the next generation. So people tell stories
about things that have happened, stories they think are important to keep
alive. Children interpret those stories into their play. I will say, I like the
term "open-political"; that seems accurate.
My
final, written-down question for you is about what I think of as the
"falling" nature of your poems. I like the way your poems use lists
and the way those lists fall from item to item, in rhythm, in sound. It's
lovely and I think lends itself to the formality of your work (I'm really
thinking of the “Adam and Eve” series here) and drives the reading of your
work. Are you aware of that? Do you consciously construct work that way? If so,
how? If not (or if so), why do you think that happens? What do you think it does?
It's a great technique.
PBW: I had to reread those
poems you mentioned. The “Adam and Eve” series is one of the longer series of
poems in that chapbook and I was curious about looking for "falling"
patterns in a series of poems about The Fall haha. I am aware that I make lists
in my poems but I do not do so consciously. For me I am rarely satisfied with a
single representation of something, with a single idea. I want to include
everything that crosses my mind and for the images to be unstable because that
is how they are to me; creating lists is a way of recreating the blur of my
thinking. I see it mostly in the poem "Minutiae" where the details
gather until the violence of the poem unfolds in a kind of narrative of
accrual. Nothing really happens but there is a sense of building toward a
climax that happens because of the list nature of the poem. I think it adds
speed to the poem to have one thing move toward something else over and over
again. What I hope is that it translates how my mind is not interested in the
singular image, but interested in creating an emotional landscape through many
images and juxtapositions. That I do not use this technique consciously
intrigues me, because it is not that I have not tried, rather when I have tried
to purposely create a list it always fails by rambling.
My
final question for you is what were the most enlightening aspects of creating a
book? What did you learn about your writing habits and poetic eye that you may
not have been fully aware of? This has been great and I thank you for chatting
with me about poetry, yours and my own.
TO: It's a funny but
good question. I'm not sure what I learned by making the book.
I
learned things about individual poems and presumably about myself— what ideas I
worried again and again over the years, the way my understanding of the world
and myself shifted slightly as I got older. I guess the most important thing I
learned is that I had to be in the right head-space in order to be ready for
the book, that a book is like a relationship. You might have books (and
relationships) before you are ready, but you, the poet, the person, has to do
the work to get ready for the moment the real one, the important one comes
along. I believe that doors open and close and if you aren't ready to step
through (or are too frightened to) then that opportunity is gone. There might
be different opportunities, but that one will never come the same way again.
So
I slog through, doing the day to day grunt work, the thinking the writing the
reading, hoping I will recognize the door and its opening, hoping I will have
the bravery to leap through it when it does.
Which
seems like a lovely place to stop on this, the first day of 2014. Thanks so
much for this conversation. It makes me even more intrigued to see what you
produce in the future.
PBW: Thank you so
much Tanya and thank you Casey for the invitation.
Tanya Olson holds an M.A.
in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College, Dublin and a Ph.D. in 20th
Century British Literature from UNC-Greensboro. Her first book, Boyishly,
was released by YesYes Books in May 2013. Her work has been published in Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Review,
Southword (IRL), PANK, Cairn, Fanzine, Bad Subjects, Main Street Rag, Pedestal Magazine, Elysian
Fields, and Southern Cultures. In
2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review
prize and was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Phillip
B. Williams is
a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised
Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes
Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received scholarships from Bread
Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work has appeared
or is forthcoming in Anti-, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The
Southern Review, West Branch and others. Phillip is currently a
Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is
working on his MFA in Creative Writing. He is the poetry editor of the online
journal Vinyl Poetry.
