"All roads in poetry lead me to other people." -- Catching up with NOÖ [14] contributor Wendy Xu
Wendy Xu gave us the honor of publishing her poem "We Are Both Sure To Die" back in NOÖ [14]. The poem appeared again in her stellar debut collection You Are Not Dead, available here. She recently won a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. We thought it'd be great to chat with Wendy about her recent accolades, her manuscript-in-progress, and the influence of other arts on her poetry.
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Tyler Gobble: Here we are celebrating your recent Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, one of five poets to get the BIG award this year. Well-deserved BIG congratulations to you from myself and all of us over here at NOÖ. Very stoked to see your name shining there!
In an earlier email, you mentioned a new manuscript-in-progress. Can you tell us more about that? You scooted over to me three poems from the project--two at PEN America, another at Hyperallergic--and I was stunned by their subtle sprawl, the ability to nestle on an image--American bison, the window--and deftly, quietly grind deep into it, into the self, the us. What do you see as some of the concerns you're addressing with these poems? How do they differ from your poems in your first book, You Are Not Dead?
Wendy Xu: Thanks! NOÖ was one of my first publications and at a time when I was like "how do you do this," not that I assert to know how to do it now, just that it was heartening and great and my love for NOÖ and Mike Young and now the new staff goes on and on (Titanic music).
I'm working on a second book manuscript called Phrasis, and while its concerns are wide, I started it on December 15th of 2012, the day after the Sandy Hook shootings, and the experience of being unable to look away from that tragedy and the subsequent climate of mass violence in 2013 and 2014 (as if there's an end to this timeline) informs the rest of the book. Phrasis as from eckphrasis, "to speak," and lodged in the tradition of looking at visual imagery and to speak it into being, a classical definition. The images that I feel inundated with are from news media--disaster is always crawling along the bottom of the screen, pop-ups photosets of the fresh calamity. Another guy cashing out on Wall Street. I got the New York Times for the first time that year, and looked at images of disaster almost obsessively. Those became the images that needled their way into everything, my personal life, my teaching, my writing.
The title of my first book sometimes feels painfully, unbearably ironic. I felt a buoyancy of attention during the writing of that book that I do not necessarily feel now, so that as you say of nestling and a "quiet grind into" in these new poems, seems accurate. They stare a little bit longer, perhaps. They're angry with our captains of industry.
TG: And this process, this manner of responding to these nearly-real-time images, contrasts greatly with the tradition of eckphrasis that we're most familiar with--perhaps, for instance, responding to a painting (like Ashbery in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"). Here, instead, you're taking on the act of speaking in response to a very modern means of seeing, the photograph, and even more specifically, not to mention more modern, timely images through the news and media.
There would seem to be a political nature to these responses, natural even, but, purposefully or not, the poems I mentioned above seem to filter the political nature through a lens and voice that's upfront and personal, which was one of the most captivating aspects of your book. Where many poets might attack the central image, might directly high-five the political tentacles of those catastrophes, you have a unique and endearing ability to send forth a response that creates an important emotive aura, inviting us, too, to the house where these images have already entered and become a part of the your life (maybe here, I should say, the speaker // feel free to address this). How do you see politics playing into these poems? Is there really as big a divide between the personal and the political as my assumptions seem to be inserting?
WX: I feel that the distance between the personal and the political (well-covered and originally articulated by second wave feminism as non-existent) in poetry is measurable primarily in mode and manner of address. There are, as you distinguish, various "distances" from which to invoke and engage the explicit political nature of what poems are often responding to. I think the efficacy of poetry is its ability to speak with a different mouth than mass media, to refuse the rhetoric, logic, and language of a 24 hours new cycle. The news comes to us with its single aura of jingoistic despair, incompatible with empathy (read: critical thinking) to say the least. That's not to say that many days I don't doubt (despair of) poetry's efficacy and ethical implications too--when people of color can't walk down the street safely, violence against women seemingly commonplace, and public spaces daily become the sites of mass gun violence it seems absurd to write a poem. But those are our options, no? And to not speak or write seems an oppressive silence.
My house and my life are made and unmade with these images, yes. To be inside my own poem is both a particular pleasure and unavoidable, and the invitation is always there. Ekphrasis from the Greek is "out" and "speak," or as a teacher once put it to me memorably, "to bring before the senses." The news dulls us as best it can, so I find myself thanking god for poetry.
TG: Who are some of your favorite poets / artists / writers who bring the tragedies of life before our senses, who speak and write and create as a counter to the often oppressive silence? Moreover, who (or perhaps what) have been significant artistic influences to these new poems?
WX: I'm going to glance at my bedside table to answer this question and frame it in a vague timeline of "recently." Anna Moschovakis in You And Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, Eric Linsker's brand new first book La Far reaching around to touch brilliantly our tragic state of current events, Emily Skillings who speaks back at the news and the female body, Please by Jericho Brown so aching and necessary, all engage poetry to speak a different experience before the senses, and the various distances and modes they employ are some of my favorites.
Aside from poetry I'm right in the middle of THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING, Naomi Klein's new book on capitalism and climate change (The Shock Doctrine and No Logo are necessary reading, her previous two), and am waiting so anxiously to get Eula Biss' new book ON IMMUNITY, An Inoculation in the mail. Two particularly amazing contemporary female writers who I'm grateful continue to speak explicitly and directly on the issues of our day.
The new poems are truly a mess of influences, though I don't know who wouldn't say that about their own work. Perhaps I'll say that the working epigraphs are from John Wieners (a poem for painters, specifically) and Stephen Crane, the realist and naturalist author. Also at some point in the early stages of writing these poems, I was working on a project (that I unashamedly later abandoned) attempting to read all 900 pages of an art history textbook I bought at Grey Matter Books in Western Massachusetts. I felt (and still feel) that I missed out taking some formal classes in visual art, as most of my friends smartly did in both college and graduate school when they could be taken for "free." It was interesting and useful to immerse myself in the language of visual art discussion, though, and to let it bleed into my thoughts about poetry at the time. It inspired in me multiple attempts at form, framing, and containment through formal structure in the new poems.
TG: Always rad to hear how other arts weave their way into folks' poetry. What were some particular parts from that art textbook that stuck out to you, perhaps even snagging a cameo in some of those early poems?
Visual art was one of the last arts I felt drawn to in any serious way, likely because of my geographic location (not a lot of art museums // galleries in small town central Indiana) and my family's total remove from that art. For me, the first "other art" to make a significant impression on my poetry (and my reading of it) was music.
Saw your poem "the years" today up at Guernica and wildly associated it with one of my favorite songs of the same name by a Louisville band called State Champion. (You can listen to it here.) Obviously, I'm not suggesting that song was actually the impetus for this poem, but I am curious now about the influence of music on your poems. You have a particular rhythm, sound, articulation that is certainly musical.
Perhaps in the way that Biss and Klein have inspired you through speaking out on contemporary issues through writing, are there any musicians that influence your writing/reading? How so? And maybe less specifically, what do you see as the intersection between music and poetry (if any)?
WX: Ah, yes I completely understand that. I grew up in Iowa, and I often felt that "art" was inaccessible to me, though I doubt this was the case.
There's a great passage from the art history textbook all about the "autonomous expression" capabilities of color and line. Cue visual art students potentially rolling their eyes at me, but I found it so effecting. And so I wonder, in poetry, about how aspects of a poem express themselves independently from the effect of the whole, which we prioritize. Brian Kim Stefans has a great piece I always think about, “The Dreamlife of Letters,” which extends this line of questioning to a great end, the personalities of individual letters. You can watch it here.
Music and poetry are inextricably related for me, and I always think of Zukofsky's quoted-to-death-but-still-so-good idea that poetry should "approach" music, that it exists somewhere between speech and music. But it is neither, and this seems true to me also--that poetry can be musical, but music is only one of the modes in which it can deploy language.
I don't listen to a whole lot of contemporary music and musicians--my friend Brian Foley used to tell me that he always assumed I "just didn't like music," given that we never talked bands or musicians. He'd come over to my house almost every day and I'd either have NPR on droning in the background while I ignored it, or, I'd be listening to something like Tchaikovsky. He couldn't stand it, which I love him for. The truth is I listen to a lot music, classical piano and violin, and am always trying to fill in my enormous contemporary music gaps.
You know who exists at the absolute epicenter of good music and good poetry? Speedy Ortiz. Sadie Dupuis lives at that intersection, she's an incredible poet and musician and Speedy Ortiz is the gift we all get because those things came together. I know that's not exactly what you were asking about the intersection of music and poetry, but I can't hear that phrase without thinking of her. I mean, No Below.
Sometimes I think about instrumental music the same way I think about visual art--that the deployment of language doesn't give writers access to higher emotive possibilities. It's amazing how these other art forms just don't need it. When a violin cries, or a painting stuns you into silence, its incredible. I suppose music influences my writing in this way--I can aspire to it, but for poetry there is no "reaching it," per se. It reminds me then that poetry must do more than just describe, or try to render with words, or arrange its parts to strike the ear musically. Language luckily drags around its etymological baggage, and can point to the literal world. So where should I direct the musicality of the poem, you know?
TG: Thank you for sharing those things. Brian Foley's name comes up, and now I'm thinking about how involved in the contemporary, small press poetry seen you are. Online, of course, but also in Amherst first and Brooklyn now, the community seems very important to you. I know you and Brian toured together recently, you've continued to make iO Poetry, as both an online magazine and a chapbook press, zoom, and your work continues to show up in some of my favorite magazines. How does community—going to/giving readings, running a magazine, publishing, etc.--affect your work? I was chatting with a later-career poet recently and he said he's just about done publishing, doesn't want to give readings anymore, just wants to be isolated with poetry as a way to truly connect with the history and the spirit of it most wholly. Certainly, that approach could be satisfying for some, but I feel like there is another type of writer, especially nowadays, that can only reach that upper shelf poetry experience in conjunction with being an active member of the poetry world--myself included. Where do you feel like you fit? Do you see that changing as you get older, have been in the poetry world longer?
WX: I want to be an active member, always, though I can certainly relate to the desire to withdraw. Poetry might be the only aspect of my life where I'm not an introvert--participating energizes me about writing and reading and thinking in new ways, stretching myself beyond the borders of whatever my poetry ideologies are at the moment. I'd like to frame the various things you mentioned (supporting others by attending readings, editing/publishing a journal, etc) as literary service, and a reverence for community building which makes the whole thing of making art far less lonely.
Which is not to say I don't regularly romanticize a monastic relationship with poetry, I just always find it lacking, prone to self-indulgence, and frankly boring. All roads in poetry lead me to other people.
