Adrian Blevins's The Brass Girl Brouhaha won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation Award and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. A new book, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, is just out from Wesleyan. Blevins teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Published Date: April 22, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2011 AWP Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The recording features Brian Brodeur and Adrian Blevins.

Brian Brodeur:

Hello and welcome to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs podcast. I'm Brian Brodeur and I'm here at the 2011 AWP Annual Conference in Washington, DC with poet Adrian Blevins. Adrian Blevins is the author of two collections of Poetry. Most recently Live from the Homesick Jamboree. She won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book, the Brass Girl Brouhaha, and is also the recipient of Aroma Jaffs Writers Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chatbook Award for the man who went out for cigarettes and the Lamar York Prize for nonfiction. She teaches that Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Adrian Blevins, welcome.

Adrian Blevins:

Hey, Brian. You have a beautiful voice.

Brian Brodeur:

You do too.

Adrian Blevins:

You're perfectly seated for this.

Brian Brodeur:

Thank you. Would you mind reading a poem to get us started?

Adrian Blevins:

Sure. This is Dear Reader. Is it just me or am I cooking now? Honey, child, don't believe a word of it. I can't drink champagne and artichokes give me earaches. Even the herb garden is over and done with. It's a waste of time and a pain in the ass. Who cares about parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme? Why are there too many cooks in the kitchen and thunderstorms and moths and bridges and monkeys and shoes? What's the deal with fishing lures and why aren't there enough hours in the day? Why does Terry Gross have to say fresh air the way she does? What is wrong with her? She should be beaten within an inch of her life. She should be shot. I have really got some issues with Terry Gross. Terry Gross really thinks she's hot. Everyone thinks they're really hot. They're driving hot cars. They're buying hot beds.

They're jumping up and down on the sidewalks, going hot, hot, hot. Even him, even he thinks he's hot. He walks like a girl. He shops at the co-op. He peeks in on Elizabeth, who has always thought she was really, really hot. I'm asking you this, who cares about the apricot? Does he really eat free range chickens? And why want his canoe sink? I've got a lot of them on my mind. I'm worried all the time. I've got a migraine, an appointment with a dermatologist, and no time to kill. My mother-in-law is a Jesus freak. She's a walking advertisement for Jesus. Well, maybe she's right. Maybe that's the way to go. Maybe Jesus is hotter than anyone, A hot tamale and hot to Trott. Maybe Jesus ought to come down here right now and show me a thing or two. What would he do? Draw me a bath or make me a cake? I would do something. I would undress him. I would relieve him of his robe. I would get out my camera and take a picture and send it right on down the line to you.

Brian Brodeur:

Great. Thank you. It's quite a provocative image to end the poem with stripping Jesus naked and taking his picture. Many of your poems have this quality of the taboo, of something forbidden being revealed. Would you agree with this assessment?

Adrian Blevins:

I would agree with the assessment, yes.

Brian Brodeur:

And that must be just sort of this thing that naturally occurs in your work when you're writing. I'm sure it's not a conscious decision on your part.

Adrian Blevins:

It's something that I've been thinking about a lot. I was trying to think about, I'm doing this thing at the Frost Place this summer, and I was trying to sort of plan what I was going to do, and I think one of the things I was thinking about was this idea of permission giving poets. I think the overall theme for this one workshop is going to be the mother, father poets, the people who have met the most, who taught us the things we needed to know, and sort of turned that into this idea of permission giving poets, people who somehow gave me the permission to say things that I wouldn't have given myself, especially in the South, especially being female in the south. And so there's a bunch of taboo stuff, and I think that really, there are two main ones.

There are lots of permission, different kinds of permission, but I think CK Williams was one of them. Some of those, it's urban gritty stuff, but it's still, he says things that, and I think he taught me that, and probably Sharon Olds's too early on. And I know it's sort of a taboo word, and Sharon, if you're listening, I say that respectfully, but especially in women's writing about women's, any kind of issue at all, there's a way in which we don't go there. And so that compels me to want to do it.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. Yeah. Sharon Olds seems a perfect example as a predecessor or, yeah, and that's interesting, the idea of poets who give us permission by simply having done something we're trying to do ourselves.

Adrian Blevins:

Yeah, it wasn't even conscious though. I didn't actually, because what I tell my students is that if you're stuck in a poem, you need a way back in, so you have a draft, but you're stuck and it's not quite right. Content for me was always a really difficult way back in, so I'll say work on the form, in some sort of way and get back in some other technical way. And so the content stuff happened as a consequence of me, I stopped thinking about content, which opened up content, if that makes any sense.

I started thinking about, I found a different line, this was a while ago, but I found a longer line, and it was really weird. I started out as a fiction writer, and I was a very bad fiction writer. I actually went to Hollands University, and I have a master's in fiction, but I would write stories like the girl gets in the car and she drives and thinks all the way, and she gets a piece, she buys a loaf of bread, and then she comes back, thinks all the way back, no narrative. Completely not, no narrative. So I finished that program. I wrote a book of stories in which nothing barely happens. Then I started writing these poems, and formal concern. Suddenly I could tell a story. Formally I understand narrative structure, and then the content came as a consequence of that, if that makes any sense.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, yeah. No, it absolutely does. I mean, there are so many good stories in all of your poems, but there're also, I wouldn't sort pigeonhole them or classify them as narrative poems, which they are not. They're kind of like riffs or moments of outcry, annoyances, grievances, complaints, praise poems, et cetera. So does narrative just slip into your work?

Adrian Blevins:

Well, another realization I had, and I think these are all things, I'm going to say this in our panel. I think one of the things I'm going to say in our panel, but I really do think that we have to listen to what the poem is teaching us. And so it's not something that I so much discovered is something that poem taught me as I went along the poem said, okay, Adrian, you need to know this. Why didn't you know this before? Here's what you need to know. And one of the things I really realized early on at some point, I don't know, when I was working on the poems in Brouhaha, was that was what I started calling Borg Poetics, you know the Borgs, they're bad, and they're in Star Trek, and they're the species who they assimilate everything and they're bad in Star Trek.

They're kind of evil. But I thought of Borg, the idea of Borg Poetics as being a good thing. That really is sort of a hybrid narrative lyric, speech driven rhetorical poem. So a lot of this stuff is a lot of speech acts. So the idea of the speech act with a story that is also lyric. And so the project sort of came to be, how can I make this as, how can I cohere all these sort of opposing discourses?

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, sure. Or means of speech or means of...

Adrian Blevins:

Kinds of speech.

Brian Brodeur:

Kinds of language.

Adrian Blevins:

Kinds of language, yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Or occasions of language or something like that. Yeah. Well, your first book, Brasco Brouhaha opens with an epigraph from Marilyn Robinson, which I'll just read a part of. So it reads, for families will not be broken, curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Is this how you see your poems functioning as kind of songs made out of the sorrows of the past and sung or recalled in tranquility?

Adrian Blevins:

I just loved, whenever you read anything out of that novel, that was one of my most favorite novels of all time. I think that it is a poem. And of course it took her a long time to write for obvious reasons. And I do, at my very best when I feel like I'm succeeding, which is not very often because another thing I was going to say on the panel is that the minute I'm done with a poem, the poem has taught me what it could teach me. I'm like, oh, I don't know. I'm very down on it for some reason. And it is weird because it shouldn't be so contemptuous. There shouldn't be so much self contempt. It's probably not healthy. But when I am operating at premium or something, I do think that one of the purposes of poetry is that, and that's sort of a lyric idea, although it can be done with different kinds of language, that it hurts to be a human.

And that the older we get, the more we'd lose and the more we suffer. And that poems are an antidote to this when they really are working. And I'll say, okay, I've written one that really does that. But I do think that's one of the things I've been thinking lately about the question about what does a poem do that other genres can't do? So students will say, I'll say it's a lyric poem. Even if it's a narrative poem, it's a lyric. I mean, it's a lyric, it's not a documentary film people, it's not a novel. It is not a short story. It is not a commercial. What is the thing?

Brian Brodeur:

And it's probably not a book length narrative or epic poem. So therefore it's hard to classify it as a narrative.

Adrian Blevins:

So what is the genre? Go do something, take another class if you want to do those other things. This is a lyric poem. This is about human feeling. This is what those poems are doing. This is what all the best poems really do. They provide us release for this emotional, for the trauma that we have to sort of experience as a consequence of being alive. And Sharon Olds, one of the poems I remember, it's kind of a funny thing, but she has a child, one of the children in one of her books early on just says, I hate being a person. That's one of the lines. She just says, I just hate being a person. And the poem kind of captures that. And I think that's kind of, poems can do that.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, part of course being a person is family history, which is a subject you're keen on. Well, if not keen on, you address often, divorce, remarriage, motherhood, the estrangement of your father, all of these things. So how do you as a poet, make art out of the autobiographical?

Adrian Blevins:

That's the big, that's a $30 question right there. That's the big one. I really have a hard time not writing about my self or not writing about my own experience. And partially, that's my Southern. Now southerners, they say there are famous people who say that southerners are interested, they're interested in domesticity, the landscape. They can't stop talking about these things. And the family. And the family is the most important thing.

So if you have an agricultural background and you need 10 people to run a farm, it probably makes sense, but then it becomes sort of an obsession. I grew up, when I first started wanting to write, I grew up on all those southern pros. I became, just absolutely in love, loved all the great pro stylists, many of them, southerners and they-

Brian Brodeur:

Flannery O'Connor, Lee Faulkner...

Adrian Blevins:

Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. And part of it's the lyricism. Southerners are really, really, and part of it is this idea that the tribe, there's something, the family is the center of the tribe or whatever. And now this is all happening to me. I'm not conscious of being the same way. I think I'm not anything like my predecessors. I'm cool and I'm new and I'm different. But of course, the family becomes the center of my life. And so therefore, it becomes the center of my experience. And I think poems are sort of really good places where two opposing things can happen too. I love the idea of contradiction. And the poem has to actually, I think Robert Haas says somewhere that the poem has to almost mean the opposite of what it says. So even though I'm praising that experience, I'm also arguing about it, and it's very different. It's a very difficult kind of thing to be at the center of a family.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Praise and complaint or yeah, they seem two opposing and forces that work often, absolutely, in individual poems. Yeah, I love this and I hate it, and here's why.

Adrian Blevins:

And I'm bound to it and I'm trapped in it, and this is who I am, and I wouldn't be myself without it. And all these things are kind of happening all at the same time.

Brian Brodeur:

Many of your lines are invigorated by references to popular consumer culture, Batman, boxer shorts, Cinderella, Daniel Boone, Goodwill, Terry Gross, et cetera. What is poetry or maybe just your poetry gained by including these things? What, if anything, does it lose by omitting them?

Adrian Blevins:

That is such a good question. I've had all kinds of intellectual discussions with my students. I remember back in the, I guess it must've been the eighties by now, about the idea. I remember the whole sort of question of using products in fiction and hyper realism in fiction, and was it tawdry in some way or this idea that it was sort of tawdry.

Brian Brodeur:

Or unworthy.

Adrian Blevins:

Or unworthy. It's not high art.

Another discovery that I learned from when I started writing these poems instead of the stories that I was writing before, was that I operated best at a, not a lower diction. That the diction that I spoke in and thought in was actually the diction that I could write the best poem in. Although it's always complicated by other dictions. So I love low diction, and I think that the words low diction, I don't like the idea of saying Kmart, but I like the idea, I like it better than any kind of other kind of Latin word that's abstract. So I think it really was just an effort to keep the diction accessible and to keep it accurate to experience. Although it becomes pop, and there are all kinds of other theoretical ways you could think about it. But I think it's just a matter of just, I read this morning for Wesleyan, and I said fuck like seven times. I'm like, I have got to stop doing this. But the idea is a tone thing.

Brian Brodeur:

You also said too, right? I was reading in a church once, and I had to remind people that you're supposed to laugh at these poems.

Adrian Blevins:

And they were very serious. And I'm reading these and I'm like, these are funny. And that's another thing I discovered too, was that the mixed diction was sort of a way to have a funny, it was a way to kind of make the poems funny. And I think Southerners are good at this. Are you familiar with, have you ever read Lewis Norton, some of Wolf Whistle and the Sharp Shooter blues? Well, he's just one example. There are millions of examples, but just these tragic, tragic, tragic things are happening. And there's so funny, and I think that's really our experience. I mean, Charles Simix says somewhere that the human experience is a great comedy.

So it's either comedy or it's a tragedy. And one of the things I remember deciding too, I remember making this decision in my thirties. At some point I've decided, I decided it was going to be a comedy. It had to be a comedy. I couldn't bear it. I wouldn't be able to bear it otherwise, if that makes sense.

Brian Brodeur:

Of course, it makes sense. So kind of using humor as what? As a means of dealing with-

Adrian Blevins:

Release. There are all these funny things. We talk about death, and we have to, the older we get, the more we lose, the harder it gets, the more senseless it becomes, the more injustice you recognize. You become familiar with your own limits. You become familiar with the limits of others. It's only cool. It's only bearable if it's funny. Now, people, there are great tragic writers too. But for me, I decided that was going to be my worldview that I was going to have to, and it's kind of hard to be funny all the time, but it's definitely my goal to try to, and I think it's cathartic, really, ultimately.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah. You grew up in the South, of course, and were born in Virginia and went to Hollands. Would you classify yourself as a southern writer? Are you comfortable with that kind of [inaudible 00:17:31]

Adrian Blevins:

Absolutely. I went to Hollands and wrote all these stories I hated, and this is a very strange quality to me. I really like it, don't like it after it's done. But before I have written it, I really like it. But then I started writing these poems, and then I was teaching for years and years and years and years that I was teaching. And I was working on these poems on my own. And then I went to Warren Wilson in North Carolina, and then I studied poetry, so I studied fiction and I studied poetry. And both of those are southern schools. And I'm a fifth generation Virginia. And in fact, my mother's like, she still calls the war the War of Northern Aggression. I get depressed. I was depressed recently about Egypt and about Iraq, and I'm like, mom, it's like, this shit is falling apart. This is not good. And she just said, it's not-

Brian Brodeur:

Although Egypt might end up being a really good thing.

Adrian Blevins:

It might be a good thing. All this, it seems like what I think is that we're actually in a time of social change.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right.

Adrian Blevins:

Big social change, which ultimately is good because the thing that comes out on the other side of it, but I'm like, oh, it's just bad. And she said, not as bad as the Civil War, which is what she always says. In a way, it's really comforting. It's like, okay. It's like none of my kids have to send them to Appomattox. So I was the first person, I consciously left the south. I consciously said, I'm leaving. I've done this. I don't need to do this anymore. But I write about it all the time, so I can't escape it. And some people are really upset with regionalism, but the south is a concept as much as a place.

Brian Brodeur:

And a construct.

Adrian Blevins:

And a construct, and yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Absolutely. Well, you've been living in Maine for a handful of years now, way past the Mason Dixon. How has moving so far North affected your writing, if at all?

Adrian Blevins:

I think that the stories, the poems are becoming less narrative, although I don't know that that's true, and I'm very anxious about it. So I'm like, something is happening in the the landscape, and this is at least mythologically, a Southerner's response to landscape, which is that what is happening is not from me or coming from me. It's the landscape. It's the land, Scarlet. But it is a different kind of landscape, in some way it's a different kind of landscape. But I'm from Appalachia, really, which is the part of Virginia that meets with North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. And that part, Maine is really like, I call it Appalachia North.

Brian Brodeur:

I mean, the Appalachian mountains go up through Maine.

Adrian Blevins:

And so there's a different accent, people are very quiet. They don't talk as much as Southerners. They don't tell stories in the same kind of way. They're very suspicious, it is very cold. It can be cold.

Brian Brodeur:

I was thinking mentally.

Adrian Blevins:

Oh the people, the Yankees.

Brian Brodeur:

[inaudible 00:20:21] absolutely. Yeah.

Adrian Blevins:

They're definitely,

Brian Brodeur:

I'm from Massachusetts. I can speak to it.

Adrian Blevins:

Well, I freak people out because I say things and I ask, somebody was reading at Colby, and the college radio station was coming in through the mic, and all these people were sitting there very politely. And the poet was reading, and I raised my hand and I interrupted her and I said, excuse me, but we need to fix that. We need to stop. I can't hear you. And I asked my friend who's from Maine, I said, were the Mainers, if they were sitting on spikes, would they just sit there or would they say something? She said they would sit there very politely.

And so when I do speak up, which I just do temperamentally, I just do, they are very, very shocked by it. But I remember when I was watching Katrina on CNN, they were really getting upset because the White House was saying there were no people at the civic Center, and the reporters were at the Civic Center. They had just gotten there and said, there are all these people. And so this guy's really upset. And he said, they started getting really upset and they started cussing and they started just getting very emotional. And I realized I had this moment where I thought it's cultural.

Half of what I think is my personality is cultural, this is something that I have learned from that culture. And it's just different in Maine, I'm definitely considered to be flamboyant. Well,

Brian Brodeur:

Plus you're a poet on top of it.

Adrian Blevins:

Which is even, they don't know what to do. They go-

Brian Brodeur:

Linda Gregerson has praised your poems for harnessing what she calls the vernacular sentence. The poems in both of your books seem beautifully American in their rhythm, syntax, use of slang and their flare for gossip, sass, backtalk. When you first started composing in this mode, how much of a conscious decision did you make to incorporate the drawing sprawling language of every day?

Adrian Blevins:

That's a good question too, Brian. These are great questions.

Brian Brodeur:

Hey, thanks.

Adrian Blevins:

Yeah, I think, it was formal. It's amazing how formal actually I am when I'm kind of writing, I'm like, well, a little bit how a taboo breaker. Okay, here's the taboo, I'm going to break it. So the first taboo is actually how long the sentence can be. And when I was in graduate school, I studied with someone who kept on saying, you cannot, the line cannot be that long, Adrian. And I'm like, have you not read Whitman?

Brian Brodeur:

That's right.

Adrian Blevins:

Are you kidding me? But he was very upset by it, and I said, it's got to be. But I didn't actually know why it had to be yet. I wasn't sure exactly what was happening, but I was extending that sentence, actually, probably she tells me more by saying vernacular sentence than actually, I'm not conscious of it.

I'm conscious of the formal, how long of a sentence can I actually write before it collapses, before it breaks? That was the thing I was asking myself to do and the vernacular. So I would say it was sort of somewhat accidental. And she called it, which is wonderful. But now the problem with doing something is that you're sort of bound to do it. And so then if I tried to write a different kind of poem, which is what I'm sort of trying to do now, it's like, what do you do? You have to start all over again.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right. Well, you struck on something and something that does seem authentically new, I think. And that's right. And so now it's like, okay, well-

Adrian Blevins:

I've done that.

Brian Brodeur:

Do it again.

Adrian Blevins:

Or do something, do something else.

Brian Brodeur:

Get something else that's new. And then, exactly. Exactly. Well, what are you working on now? The new book basically just came out, but are you-

Adrian Blevins:

I joke, I like to tell people that I just wrote a report. I mean, one of the consequences of working so hard, and I love my job at Colby, but I'm getting sucked into this. I don't know what it is, administrative kind of work. And so I just wrote a 33 page report with tables and charts. I almost read it out loud. I'm like, let me read the report.

But that's the consequence of putting artists in, we have to find a way to make a living. But my big fear is that you take an artist and you turn her into a bureaucrat, or there's this guy who wrote this book, and I'm not, Mcgilchrist maybe about the brain, where he kind of argues that the left hemisphere is growing, the left hemisphere, which is responsible for language but not emotion and tone, which is coming from the right hemisphere.

He's saying that the left hemisphere is growing bigger and it's actually taking over more of the way we think, and the more it's not interested in context, it's really fragmented. There are all these kinds of things about it. And it really worries me when I do that kind of work. And this is kind of like a form of superstition, but the things that are good, the right hemisphere is interested in context and story and cause and effect. It has a sense of humor. It likes, understands tone that I'm going to lose those capacities if I work in a certain kind of way. So I'm like, I've got to go get on a ship or do something else.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, so do you find that poetry is sort of an antidote to clerical duties to this administrative dross?

Adrian Blevins:

Well, one of the things I know about brain science is that language is from the left and emotion and tone from the right. And so to write a poem, and this is what I would tell anybody who was looking at an undergraduate curriculum at any college that had any kind of question about what we need to teach young people, in order to write a poem, a good poem, you have to use both sides of your brain. So you literally are wiring. And the more those two hemispheres talk, the more you can say you have a whole mind. You can say that. And you can say that you're training people to actually operate more holistically. I mean, that is not an exaggeration to say that. So I'm not really left-brained, and my husband actually did all the charts and tables. I actually didn't do, but I had to get the numbers.

Brian Brodeur:

Crunch the numbers.

Adrian Blevins:

And that's not the part of me that I would like to cultivate. It's just the consequences. And we're all in this situation, I've met a lot of writers who are like, oh, I have to do this, I have to do that. And it is very not the same thing as composing and writing a poem

Brian Brodeur:

And also kind of exhausting in an entirely different way than-

Adrian Blevins:

It's completely

Brian Brodeur:

Well, whereas maybe writing has its own kind of exhaustive qualities, but still you get such wonder and amazing things out of having written something. But having put together a 30 page report.

Adrian Blevins:

Oh God, I mean there's a sense of accomplishment. It's like, look, I've just, it's like it's over. But Auden said that the purpose of the poem is to, the feeling the poem should produce is joy, even hilarity, even if the poem is sad.

And there's that whole idea of release again. And there's this sense that something has been stated that couldn't have been said any other way that needed to be said. And when I go into a class and I read a poem, and of course I don't read my own poems, but I read a poem and I'll say, did you feel that? And you can tell that they're not familiar, especially at first, especially freshmen or I don't teach freshmen, sophomores, they're not familiar with that question. They're not used to someone asking them question. People are saying, do you think we're thinking?

And I'm like, no, just lower it down. Did you feel that? And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can tell that they need practice. And this is education in the arts. This is why it's so important. Robert Blaschke says somewhere that we have ears in our heads and our chest and our guts and in our genitals, and we should listen with all of them. And this is the kind of thing that Robert Blaschke would say, but this is the kind of thing-

Brian Brodeur:

While wearing a mask.

Adrian Blevins:

It's like doing all kinds of things, but it's true. And it's scary when you have to defend education in the arts, we're constantly defending it that we're actually undermining the parts of ourselves that are capable of it in some way, or it's like a fear that we should be mindful of maybe.

Brian Brodeur:

Do you yourself respond physically to poems in your own reading? Do you laugh aloud or cry or sweat or...

Adrian Blevins:

Especially when Brouhaha came out, I would read some of the poems from childhood, which I'm not sure I'm writing as many childhood poems, but I would read them and people would come up to me and say, I'm so sorry. And I would say, it's not factual. A, It might not be so factually true, but I'm glad you're moved by it. I mean, that's good, but I'm okay. I mean, it's like there's a way in which whatever trauma the poem might be sort of trying to find a way to articulate is completely over now. I am surprised by my willingness to say anything. So when I'm reading myself, I'll say, I can't believe I said that. That quality of me where I'm like, which I actually get from my dad, I think a little bit. I'm surprised by that because in some ways I'm actually pretty shy and I'm like, who trained you to say things you're not supposed to say in public? And I think he did. I think my father did, actually. Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, we've talked a little bit about teaching. You're teaching at Colby College, of course now. How has teaching affected your work as a poet, if at all?

Adrian Blevins:

I remember, the great thing about teaching, and I've only taught in undergraduate schools, and I went to a panel earlier that was, and people were talking about humongous universities. I mean, I just fainted and had a seizure when they said there are like 50,000 people. And I couldn't believe it. I can't believe it. So I don't have any experience in a big university. My experience was all liberal arts. The great thing about the liberal arts, which means small classes, so there are 15 people. The wonderful thing that I got by being allowed to teach, because it's a privilege to be able to, if you have good students, to be able to learn with them. And so I think a lot of my education, they say all poets are self-taught. I think much of what I learned about language and how it works and what can be done with it, I learned as I taught.

So I started out teaching most people. I taught comp. I started teaching. I didn't even want to teach. I wanted to be Annie Dillard and I wanted to live in a cabin and slaughter things and eat them. I don't know. But I just didn't really want to be in the world. I wasn't interested in the world, which seems silly and naive and romantic and crazy, but my circumstances forced me to have to find work. And so I ended up teaching, and it was a consequence of trying to explain to young people, look what can happen, I learned.

So that is the great, as long as we're learning, then education works both ways. And they'll say, I found this. And I'll say, well, I found this. That's really great. I think that it's a great gift. I feel very privileged to be able to work with young people. And I'm so proud of my students. I've got, when I'm run into them here, I'm like, I can't believe it. They're doing well and I'm proud of them, and I love teaching.

Brian Brodeur:

And you learn from your students a great deal, it sounds like.

Adrian Blevins:

Yeah, except for technology. I remember once, do you know the Gerald Stern poem, the Dancing? Very famous.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, yeah.

Adrian Blevins:

So I was trying to show, I was doing a simple thing. I was trying to prove to the students that they had heard the Valeros whatever, Revelle's Valero, whatever it was. Is that right? So all it is a CD player.

Now, this is not very complicated technology. And it was a fiasco. And I'm trying to play the song, and one of the students said, Adrian, how do you get through the world? And I said, I just don't know. And so when it's technology, so it goes from CDs to iPods, it is very frustrating. And the technology keeps moving. I remember eight tracks, I go back that far.

And so that kind of thing I learned, but at a certain point, I don't feel, that I'm not technologically inclined. And I think that we're moving, somebody said that there was this idea of psychic trauma, that we are trying to learn so much new technology that it's fragmenting us in certain ways. And I do feel, in a way, I feel traumatized by it. So my iPod annoys me, but I understand what it does. And I like that. That still annoys me. It doesn't make sense. I prefer records, albums. I say albums, students-

Brian Brodeur:

Well, the sound is completely different.

Adrian Blevins:

Students go, what does she say? She said album. I'm like, it's not like horse and Carriage. It's an album. So they teach me things I don't want to learn sometimes.

Brian Brodeur:

A friend of mine who's also a poet, we were talking about both of your books, and he likes your work a great deal. And he sort of was wondering, he made the comment, which I agree with, which is basically over the course of the two books, it seems like the speaker has grown by 30 years or something.

Adrian Blevins:

Wow, that is so interesting.

Brian Brodeur:

Could you maybe comment just a little bit about you, or at least the speaker as southern woman, a southern wife, southern mother, and how did you kind achieve that progression just from a first book to a second book?

Adrian Blevins:

Such an interesting question. This is why, I don't know. I'm not sure I know the answer to that, except part of it might just be the change in landscape. I feel like I learned retrospectively. I don't know if everybody learns retrospectively, but I feel like, well, actually, I know for a fact that I was diagnosed as a leap learner.

Brian Brodeur:

Okay.

Adrian Blevins:

Very young, first grade. And I annoyed my parents because I wouldn't speak for a long time, and all my cousins were all talking and I wouldn't say anything. And then it was late. It was like I was two, and I said, I would like whatever, I need to go to the bathroom now, I spoke in a complete sentence.

But I didn't say anything for a long time. And so my mom actually, she had me tested, and it was leap learning. It was called leap learnings, which means there'll be these plateaus and then there'll be this advancement. Now, no one has ever said that to me about the two books. I know that I'm really anxious about not repeating. I'm very anxious about being boring. I don't want to be boring. And so I think that part of it is just this idea that I don't want to say the same thing over and over again. Of course, we are always writing the same poem over and over and over again a certain way. So I think part of it's just that idea, the Brouhaha, I like the expansiveness of Brouhaha, and I wrote it and I had more time.

So that could be just one of those things. Raymond Carver said that his stories, this is under dispute, but he said that some of his stories were the consequence of having kids and not having time and writing them in his car. He would go in the car, and I have, oddly enough been poor most of my life and done things, I gave a reading in Boston at the school, and they sort of read my bio. And then someone raised a hand. And they said, how did you do all that? And they said, you have three children. And I said, yeah. And they said, how did you do that? And I'm like, I don't know. I just don't know.

I mean, I wasn't on drugs, but for a long time there was a lack of money. There was a lack of time. There was a lack of security, until very recently. And so that forced me to work really hard. And so I told someone recently, I'm like, I think I worked 70 hours for 15 years straight. I just didn't stop. I don't know what that has to do with what's going on, but a lack of time. I think if there's anything that the world can give poets and writers, all forms of writers, it's time.

And [inaudible 00:36:20] one zone and space and money, which I just didn't have. I found myself having to be responsible for kids. In my idealistic world somehow someone else was going to do that for me. I think that was the big shocker. I couldn't just, somehow I had to feed them.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, yeah. That's right.

Adrian Blevins:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

And you mentioned a little bit that you're kind of, I want to talk about maybe what you're working on now. You mentioned earlier that you're trying to write a new kind of poem, something a little different from the long sprawling lines of your first two books. Could you comment a little bit on-

Adrian Blevins:

Well, I tried to write these, I'm looking at motherhood and there are these little complaint poems and they don't sound like me at all. And they completely confused me. I wrote a poem that was, I don't know, I have series of them, like seven lines, really little tiny poems. And people are not expecting those kinds of poems from me. They're like, where's the rest of it? But that's coming out of an anxiety to do something sort of different or sort of stretch myself. But there's still, the content is probably really similar. They're not as funny. They might not necessarily be as funny. Right, this particular moment in this series, I had a poem last year that came out in Gulf Coast called, what was it called? Walking It Off.

Brian Brodeur:

Okay.

Adrian Blevins:

And they're death obsessed. And David Shields, do you ever see the Huffington Post? I think he has a new book out. And he had this little excerpt where he's quoting all these people, but he says that the writer's job is to aggravate the fear of death, which I really love. And he's quoting all these different people, so they're somehow trying to be about motherhood and death at the same time, and they're little, and I am not Robert Creeley, so it's really hard. So I don't know what's going to happen. They'll probably end up in a sequence or they'll end up being put together in some sort of way. But that whole feeling that you have to do something different, that could be false.

Brian Brodeur:

Sure, that's right.

Adrian Blevins:

I mean, it could be not something that I need to do, and I don't know why I'm so anxious about it.

Brian Brodeur:

Look at Whitman-

Adrian Blevins:

Do the thing.

Brian Brodeur:

Wallace Stevens and countless other poets who sort of did, which you mentioned before, write the same poem over and over and over again, which is intensely interesting. Or Charles Wright today, who kind of seems like he's in that vein.

Adrian Blevins:

Yeah, I guess we doubt ourselves. And so we think, oh, what more can I do? But I'm always trying to find a strain to put myself under. And maybe the long sentence, maybe I could find a different sort of strain, but I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. I'm writing reports.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right. Well, Adrian Blevins, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

Adrian Blevins:

Thank you, Brian.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP Podcast series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website@www.awpwriter.org.