Kathleen Graber's second collection of poems, The Eternal City, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Published Date: June 20, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2012 AWP conference in Chicago. The recording features Brian Brodeur and Kathleen Graber.

Brian Brodeur:

Hello and welcome to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs podcast. I'm Brian Brodeur and I'm here at the 2012 AWP Annual Conference in Chicago with poet Kathleen Graber. Kathleen Graber is the author of two collections of poetry, The Eternal City, which was chosen for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Correspondence. Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Graber's honors include a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Harder Fellowship in Creative Writing at Princeton University and an Amy Lowe Poetry Traveling Scholarship. She has taught at New York University and Virginia Commonwealth University. Kathleen Graber, welcome.

Kathleen Graber:

Thank you.

Brian Brodeur:

I'd like you to start with a poem, if you wouldn't mind. Would you read What I Meant to Say?

Kathleen Graber:

Sure. I'd be happy to. What I Meant to Say. In three weeks, I will be gone. Already my suitcase stands overloaded at the door. I've packed, unpacked and repacked it, making it tell me again and again what it couldn't hold. Some days it's easy to see the significant insignificance of everything, but today I wept all morning over the swollen, optimistic heart of my mother's favorite newscaster, which suddenly blew itself to stillness. I have tried for weeks to predict the weather on the other side of the world. I don't want to be wet or overheated. I've taken out the complete Shakespeare to make room for a slicker, and I've changed my mind and put it back. Soon no one will know what I mean when I speak.

Last month after graduation, a student stopped me just outside the university gates, despite a downpour. He wanted to tell me that he loved best James Skyler's poem for Auden. "So much to remember," he recited in the rain as the shops began to close their doors around us. I thought he would live a long time. He did not. Then a car loaded with his friends pulled up honking, and he hopped in. There was no chance to linger and talk.

Today I slipped into the bag between two shoes, that book, which begins with a father digging, even though my father was no farmer and planted ever, only once, one myrtle late in his life and sat in the yard all that summer watching it grow as he died, a green tank of oxygen susprating behind him. If the suitcase were any larger, no one could lift it. I'm going away for a long time, but it may not be forever. There are tragedies I haven't read. Kyle, bundle up. You're right, it's hard to say simply what is true.

Brian Brodeur:

Thank you. That last line or last sentence, it's hard to say simply what is true really resonates, I think throughout that whole book in a sense. Is this one of the ambitions of your work or larger ambitions of your work to speak the truth about complex subjects?

Kathleen Graber:

Yes, absolutely. I don't have the naive ambition to say them simply, so hence the poems tend to be pretty long and rangy. But I do hope that in that ranginess I get at something, some sort of truth. That is absolutely complicated because the truth is always complicated.

Brian Brodeur:

Absolutely, what I meant to say also strikes an elegiac tone, which is echoed throughout The Eternal City, addressing the theme of lost connections. Would you call yourself an elegiac poet or is this term too reductive?

Kathleen Graber:

I don't mind being called an elegiac poet. I like being sad. I had a lot of loss very suddenly in my life. A lot of people in my family died in quick succession and it was very traumatizing. And so I feel I'm hopeful that this book has sort of provided a way to process that. And not that I think that poetry is really therapy, but I don't want to go on being elegiac forever. I think that this book may be elegiac and I'm hoping to strike somewhat different tones in the future.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, absolutely. Your poems are also concerned with the intersection of mental and geographical landscapes. In the tradition of Charles Wright, your poems often find the speaker gazing at the weather, getting locked out of her apartment or packing a suitcase before poems move into more sublime territory. Could you comment on the merging of the mundane and the metaphysical in your poems?

Kathleen Graber:

Actually, I learned everything about that from Charles Wright. When I first read his poems, I thought, "Wow, who knew a poem could do that? That's terrific. I want to do that." So I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate. It was a long time ago, but I feel that that really stamped me early on with the love of ideas and thinking and big systems, and there's a sort of elegance and optimism to system builders like Hegel or Kant or somebody really ambitious in the scope of their philosophical vision.

And I think that there's a great strain of anti-intellectualism in America. People are very suspicious of big philosophical ideas. And they think they have nothing to do with reality, that here are these ideas and they're ivory towered and they're very other from our mundane, ordinary lives. And I actually just don't live my life that way. When I go through my day, I will often simultaneously be thinking about Kierkegaard and thinking about laundry. So they just sort of go around in my head in a jumble.

And so the poems are very much just fixing that sensibility to the page at the most fundamental level. But they also aspire to re-sanctify everyone's dailiness, to sort of say, "No, your daily life is actually in conversation with some fundamental questions about the nature of what it means to be human. Questions that we've asked for as long as we've had language to ask them, and for this reason, they are important."

Brian Brodeur:

Could you talk a little more about the optimism of philosophical system building and maybe how, if this has anything directly to do with your own work, if you see the kind of system building of a book of poems or even a poem itself or maybe a life's work of writing poetry?

Kathleen Graber:

Well, AWP is such a hotbed melting pot of ideas. And so you don't really, sometimes you get very far away from what are actually your fundamental underlying assumptions. What I mean by being far away from them is you no longer realize that you're operating under these fundamental assumptions until someone says something that's-

Brian Brodeur:

That contradicts them [inaudible 00:07:38]-

Kathleen Graber:

... Contradicts them, and you realize that how stupid your fundamental underlying assumptions have been. So when I say this optimistic here might be a code word for naive, because I would say that philosophical trends in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century have really been about dismantling these big systems and sort of saying these sort of categorical structures and binary ways of thinking about the world are flawed. And language is problematic and it is encoded with all kinds of hierarchical power systems, and we need to be suspicious about all these things. And we have to be really careful and nuanced, and even under the best circumstances, it's still all hopeless and going to fail and make some people servants to other people despite our best intentions. And so I have a hard time holding on to that dismantling. For whatever reason, I still have great faith in sense and in language.

And so that's when I say these optimistic system builders, I really think that I guess one way to look at the inevitable failure of mind and language is to write something that doesn't aspire to sense since it can't achieve it. But the other response is to say, I know it will fail, but I'm still going to give it my best shot because both I and the people I share the world with may find some solace and some small bit of meaning in the midst of the meaningless.

Brian Brodeur:

So an antithesis to that essential optimism might be silence in a way.

Kathleen Graber:

Yeah. And so rather than silence or rather than something random, right, because you can think of a very avant-garde experimental poem that might be purely random, or even if it's not random, aspire to make meaning in a non-syntactically normal way.

Brian Brodeur:

Sure. So clarity is a big goal.

Kathleen Graber:

I know, yeah. So I try really, really hard to be as clear as I possibly can about things that is impossible to be clear about.

Brian Brodeur:

Yes, that's a very good way of putting it. I read that in 1994 after years of teaching high school English, this is a shift here.

Kathleen Graber:

That's okay.

Brian Brodeur:

You were inspired while leading a class field trip to the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival to begin writing poems, subsequently earning an MFA. Is this true, and if so, would you mind talking about how you arrived at poetry?

Kathleen Graber:

It is true. Yeah, I was actually teaching middle school, so it's even a sort of more dramatic story if you've ever hung out with middle school students for a long time. A friend of mine asked me if I would chaperone her high school students to a poetry festival in New Jersey, the Dodge Poetry Festival. It's the biggest poetry festival in North America, plugging them. And I said that I would do that and reluctantly said I would do that and sort of said, "Listen, you have to understand I don't know anything about contemporary American poetry." And she said, "That's okay. They give you a teacher's pack."

So I read the teacher's pack and I liked what I read, and there were absolutely very senior dynamic, important American poets to appear on the day I was bringing these students, Mark Doty, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Robert Hass, they were all there. And so I always say that I really don't think that the students came away changed. I think really what they thought of was this was a great way to meet other high school students and hang out on the lawn and do that, get a sandwich. But I went to the tent and really listened to everyone, and actually was when Mark Doty got up and he read a poem called Visitation, and I thought, "Wow, that's contemporary American poetry. I want to learn to do that." I came home and said to my husband, "I want to be a poet." He said, "Yeah, don't quit your day job. Good luck with that. Don't cash in the pension just yet."

And it was a long, I give myself credit for having had that epiphanic moment and then somehow following through on that 'cause it took years. It takes a long time, the apprenticeship of a poet is a long time, and I certainly exceeded all my expectations and really didn't expect very much. I expected to write a couple halfway decent poems.

Brian Brodeur:

Is a poet ever a master? You mentioned the word apprenticeship. Is this a lifelong apprenticeship, or?

Kathleen Graber:

I think it is a lifelong apprenticeship, but I think there are obviously, we could look at Dante and I think would be undeniably a master. And then there are people in our own time who are, for me, because I got such a late start on poetry, people who are my contemporaries are actually age-wise are contemporary with me, are actually maybe four or five, six books ahead of me in terms of publication. And in terms of struggling through sort certain, I would call them likely to be inevitable crises, even though we may have very different aesthetics, but the desire not to write the same book. And so I can often apprentice myself to texts rather than to the people who wrote the texts.

Brian Brodeur:

In a sense, poetry is sort of like a conversation with the dead in many senses. So yeah, absolutely, apprenticing under the masters without them knowing it.

Kathleen Graber:

Yeah, they don't have to even be alive. That's the beauty part. You're not bothering anybody with a poetic crisis in the middle of the night. You can just open the book and figure it out for yourself.

Brian Brodeur:

So often your poems begin with epigraphs from writers as diverse as Issa, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, William Blake, and Adorno. I actually counted only eight poems in The Eternal City without Epigraphs. Do your poems tend to originate from your own reading of these and other authors? And could you talk about the ways your poems often quote from outside texts?

Kathleen Graber:

Yeah, I'm holding my head in my hands. It's true with the epigraphs, and I'm trying really hard to give up that tick, that crutch. I want so much in the poems and that as big as the poems are and as capacious as their embrace is I find that there's always something that they could contain that I can't figure out how to get in or is it generative? So with the Marcus Aurelius quotes, those are actually generative epigraphs, and the poems are written as sort of riffs and direct response to those epigraphs.

So the epigraphs function differently, even though many poems have them, they don't all have them working in exactly the same way. So the Issa epigraphs, for example, are much more conceptual. They're about conceptually framing the hidden, unspoken concern of the poem. So one is about the moment of conversion when Issa takes his poetic name. And so I actually think about The Eternal City as sort of being the narrative of that transformation in my own life. And so that is the first epigraph actually in the book. And so that's what it's doing there, but it's bizarrely fronting a poem that is about Augustine. So there you go. So I'm not very strict in what can go one thing, can go next to each other.

After I left teaching middle school, I went on to get an MFA at NYU, and I worked for a long time during my studies and then after my studies in the composition program there. And it's a terrific, progressive, compository writing program, and I learned a lot. I learned probably as much about writing the kind of poem that I write, which is a little bit anomalous from teaching composition and thinking about composition theory.

Brian Brodeur:

That's wild.

Kathleen Graber:

Yeah, than actually getting my MFA. And a lot of what I learned was how to cite a text and to provide it with sufficient context to make it understandable to a reader who may be smart but may not know the person you're referring to. And so that's the aspiration of the poem, is to work like an as essay.

Brian Brodeur:

That's interesting. Are there particular compret theorists who really especially informed your work, or?

Kathleen Graber:

That's a good question.

Brian Brodeur:

Peter Elbow or somebody?

Kathleen Graber:

No, really. Peter Elbow was actually at NYU, and that was the name that came to my mind. And I thought that that's really not the kind, he's sort of an expressive person and so more towards self-expression. And I think that I tend a lot more towards logos and almost a kind of really classic Aristotelian vision of persuasion. In fact, I just was on a panel talking about that and sort of about the character of the speaker as being a really important component to the coherence and believability or compelling nature of the poem in the long run.

Brian Brodeur:

Maybe the ethos of the poem, too.

Kathleen Graber:

Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. So the ethos of the speaker really matters, and I think in these poems that is often the thing that holds them together is if nothing else hears a voice that is not ironic, really earnest, very engaged, very sad a lot of the time, but also filled with still a love for the world and for the small things in the world and full of wonder. And I like to think that's a likable combination and a trustworthy combination because I think most people have those feelings that they also contain that multitude of sentiments.

Brian Brodeur:

I think the speaker also has the great advantage of being eclectic in her tastes in literature, having this ranginess of using Issa and using Marcus Aurelius, et cetera, putting all these folks together into one poem or one book. Anyway, so you mentioned this issue of the speaker in your poems. So I guess maybe this is a two-part question. One, is this a singular speaker between Correspondence and between the new book and also stuff that you're working on now, maybe? And then two, could you speak to the formation of this voice?

Kathleen Graber:

Oh, sure, I think. This goes to the heart of one of those fundamental assumptions we operate under but are wrong. And one of those would be sort of a unified sense of self. And so I absolutely go through the world believing that I am today in some fundamental way related to the person who went to bed last night. But I realize that we all have multiple selves and we have multiple selves that we show to different people. But that kind of evolving variant collection of selves is very different from what we would call a persona poem.

And so none of the poem, I've never written a truly, I've written persona poems but none of them have ever seen the light of day. But I have tried recently to sort of channel a speaker inside of myself as maybe a little glibber or something. I don't really, I dislike irony, but is a little harder hitting 'cause this speaker is so, I don't know, soft. And so maybe a little more punch just even to the syntax, not necessarily a radical shift in the self, but a radical shift in the expression of the self. Does that make sense?

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, absolutely. So could we talk a little bit more about you're incorporating of disparate material into the same palm and how you sort of imbue that material with an emotional and psychological resonance that it might not otherwise have. How do you decide what should go into a poem and what should stay out? Do you work by accumulation?

Kathleen Graber:

I think when I first started, I hit on the strategy of a collage or assemblage or appropriated text basically as an essayistic strategy because I would always tell my composition students, when you've gotten to the end of as far as you are capable of thinking about something on your own, now is the perfect moment to insert an outside voice that in some way acts like the bumper in a pinball game. I hope anybody, so I hope this is probably the most nostalgic analogy ever, but that you shoot the ball and it hits something and the trajectory of the thought, the trajectory of the shot is altered by this citation it's encountered. The function of the citation is never merely to reiterate what you already knew, but to change your thought and to augment it in some interesting way.

And so I just basically would write a poem and the poem would bog down and I'd get to the end of what I had to say. A lot of people, probably smarter people than me, would just have ended the poem. They call that the end of the poem. But didn't occur to me, I was like, "Oh, I need an outside text. I need fuel." And so I used to figure out, I would write that little bit and then I would think really very consciously about appropriate outside text. And I might even have the outside text first. Like, I love this text, I want to write a poem around this text as the core text. And that was sort of how some poems in Correspondence came into being that way.

But over time, I became more trusting of my associated leaping. And so now I sort of say, "Oh, I've gotten to the end of this. What's the first thing that comes into my head?" And something will pop into my head, something I've read, and I'll be like, [inaudible 00:22:52] and I'll just have at it with that. I may have to go to the shelf and say, "wow, I haven't read City of God in a long time. What do I want to say?" That's what I thought of. So I trust that there's a synaptic pathway that has been traveled at some point before, and I just have to discover why my brain fired that way.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. Can you maybe talk a little bit about your composition process or your process of composition rather? So it sounds like you are actually sitting there and then you're composing and then you say, "Okay, well, I've hit a wall. Popsicles or something," and then you go to whatever that, so could you talk composing?

Kathleen Graber:

Yeah, that's exactly what happens. I hit a wall and I just either say to myself, "What have you done lately?" Because frequently, even though the poem may seem to be about an instance, a precipitating event that's very local, very temporally local, my experience with my own life is that there's not a lot of distinction between events of a time period. And so if something is happening recently, it's very likely that some shadow of that is still evident in whatever the precipitating event of this particular poem is purporting to be.

And so I might just say, did I see a movie? What have I been reading? What's happening in the news? Or sometimes I have to ask myself, what are you feeling? And I'll be like, "I'm feeling sad. Why am I feeling sad?" And I'll be like, "Oh, Tim Russert died. I'm sad because Tim Russert died. That's so bizarre." And then I'll think, "Well, my mom loved him and I'm probably sad because this is a last [inaudible 00:24:46] I've grieved for her, and now I'm grieving for her grief. I'm vicariously grieving because she can't be here to grieve herself." And so that's one.

But sometimes I write into the poem the process. So in the Drunkenness of Noah, I write, "Just now, I stopped the poem and went to the closet," because sometimes you just get to get out of your chair and you're like, "I'm going to just walk around and hope something strikes me." I've got a house full of really weird random stuff. And so I'm like, "Oh, it's full thread. Oh, open the drawer, look what's in there."

Brian Brodeur:

Finally, what are you working on now? Is there a new manuscript in the works?

Kathleen Graber:

I've been teaching an awfully lot, really, too much though I love teaching and we've talked about it. I've been a teacher of all kinds of people, of all ages of people for almost all of my life. And so that's a big part of my being really. And so I don't mind doing that and it's to a large extent, rewarding and feeding of my poems but I actually am doing too much of that. And so that's about to come to an end in May. I'm going to take the summer off from teaching. I have been working on a little, I guess what I'm saying is I'm not making, the progress is not as swift as I would like it to be. But I thought The Eternal City dealt a lot with the past, the landscape of the past. It's called The Eternal City because it's a metaphor for the mind as much as a metaphor for Rome.

The whole book has an epigraph by Freud in which he says, "Everything that ever happened exists simultaneously in the theater of memory." That is our psyche. And so The Eternal City could reach back to Marcus Aurelius and to these other literary figures, Augustine and such. And that was really where it was looking to make sense of itself in relation to these sort of seminal classic texts. And I think that what I want to do in the new book is to be much more in the present moment. And so there's a series of poems that are direct, I know this has been done before, direct addresses to America, and there'll be a series of those. But I feel maybe I am elegiac, they're elegiac because I think of America as being a very ill, potentially terminally ill relative that you have a vexed relationship with, but nevertheless are sad to see dying.

Brian Brodeur:

And still love.

Kathleen Graber:

And still love. And then that's been really hard, too. That's been a really interesting confrontation because my parents were very liberal, and so I sort of grew up with a great suspicion of nationalism, and my parents were very disillusioned by Watergate and the Vietnam War, and so I was sort of stamped by that, too. And so I've never really would've said that I was someone who loved my country. This is when you get a lot of hate mail. But in fact, when I went traveling abroad, it never occurred to me that I would be homesick. I thought I might be locally homesick for my house, but that I wouldn't be homesick for the American experience.

And it was a great delight to discover that I did in fact miss America, miss American pop culture and this American television and these really mundane things about America and-

Brian Brodeur:

And all of its absurdity [inaudible 00:28:27].

Kathleen Graber:

And all the things that you really sort of think that you hate about your own, really sort of like the Starbucks, and you get to Budapest, "Is there a Starbucks around here? I just want a really predictable cup of coffee. I've had a lot of experience in the place as it is, and I've done all that. But right now, today, I just really need to go somewhere and I need to sit in a room filled with books written in English, and drink coffee from Starbucks so I can remember who I am and feel slightly less alienated and dislocated." Anyway, so the poems tend to be elegiac and also to acknowledge that this isn't bad. The American dream was not a bad dream, that it had aspects that were quite beautiful.

Brian Brodeur:

That's a good place to end. Kathleen Graber, thank you very much.

Kathleen Graber:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning to the A W P podcast series for other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awpwriter.org.