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INTERVIEW
Excerpts from an Interview with Jeanne Marie Beaumont conducted by Tony Leuzzi in October of 2004. Most of the poems mentioned are in Curious Conduct, which had recently been published.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • About the Interviewer: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Tony Leuzzi: My first impression of Curious Conduct was its international sensibility. The poem "Chapter One," for example, is clearly inspired by Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Elsewhere, several witty, ironic poems reminded me of Wislawa Szymborska.Jeanne Marie Beaumont: Yes, I love the Polish poets. And I love Calvino; he's been a crucial influence. TL: And yet, many of these poems also seem to share affinities with American poets. Your fondness for quasi-concrete line arrangements, for example, reminds me a good deal of May Swenson. JMB: I love May Swenson, too. TL: I'm attempting to find the right language to describe your work. Playful, maybe. Your poems are not gamey one-trick ponies. However, many of them, like "The Project Thus Far," and "Afraid So," seem to be formed or created around one idea or concept that gets played out or improvised. JMB: Yes, they're cumulative, in that something accumulates around a nucleus and I let it go. Not all of the poems work that way, but many of them do. TL: Like "Rock Said." JMB: Yes. That one built up gradually like a rock. I write a lot of my poems quickly in one draft, but that poem was slow; it just kept accruing. A line would come, then I'd wait, then another line, then wait. TL: I'm amazed to hear you write your poems quickly. JMB: Sometimes I do. But a lot has gone on mentally before they're written down. TL: Yes, I get a sense from these that you're carrying the idea around with you for a long time before it comes out or is released. JMB: A lot of my poems start as some weird seed idea. Sometimes the seed develops, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes odd, seemingly random things will be stuck together in my brain but I won't realize why until I start writing the poem. It could be some strange thing that happened on the bus, something I've been reading, something I've been looking at, and all of a sudden I realize these thoughts fit together, and have come together for a reason; I have to figure out what that reason is. TL: It's interesting that you and Wayne Koestenbaum are scheduled to read together tomorrow since I can't think of two more vastly different poets. Model Homes is written in ottava rima, a traditional form widely used a century or two earlier than this, though his direct, confessional voice and personal subject matter departs radically from the way the form has been used in the past. Subconscious associations are worked out explicitly, verbosely, loquaciously. Whereas your poetry, written in either free verse or more muted variations on traditional forms, is reticent. JMB: I'm a very private person. I just don't see my poetry as a means for me to communicate straightforward autobiographical material. To me, poetry is about language and imagination, and it's somewhat an escape from the self completely. That's just where I've located myself as a poet. That's where I found myself as a poet. I used to try to write autobiographical poems because that's what I was reading when I was young. I have so many bad autobiographical poems in my files! But I got nowhere until I accessed this other path of imagination and let myself play. Writers like Calvino certainly showed the way; then I really started to find pleasure in my poetry. You see, I have no way to bring art to autobiographical writing. Others do. Also, I had years of therapy, so maybe I just talked it all out. And when you talk your problems out you lose them. You don't always hang onto that material once it's talked out. I don't anyway. Every day I wake up a different person. TL: That philosophy is reflected in these poems. None of the poems in CC seemed heavy with personal baggage. And I go back to my original observation about the international feel of these poems. JMB: Thank you. I take that as a compliment. TL: Let's use an example. In "The Plenty" you write We were two sticks carried from opposite ends by the same bird. Later as birds we lamented our hands. I studied this passage for a while and tried to figure out why I reacted so strongly to it. In my process of figuring this out I realized I was reacting in part to the paradoxically direct yet impersonal tone of these lines. They could have been written by any number of Eastern European poets, or Greece's Yannis Ritsos, or Chile's Pablo Neruda. The voice, which is collective, readily admits something without confessing it. There's a distance here, but one that is intentional, even necessary for this aesthetic--which is a quality I find in many international voices. Moreover, the form here is patterned more on syntactical choices than on fixed line lengths and metrical regularity; it's a form of chiasmus, where the stanza begins and ends with the "we," while the middle lines mention birds. JMB: That's an interesting reading, especially your distinction between admittance and disclosure. I think it's true: I've spent a lot of time reading Zbigniew Herbert, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz--a lot of international writers. I just find them nourishing, and often wise. Also I live in New York City, which is probably the most international city in the United States. I feel separated from the current mass culture, and I've always felt a little alien in this country. I'd like to be a citizen of the world. In addition to physical travel, I think you can travel through reading and through looking at art. TL: CC definitely participates in a world literature. Initially I read the more obvious, accessible poems, such as "I Brake for Animals" and "Uncorrected Proof"--which, by the way, is very funny--but these are less typical. A poem like "Regime," on the other hand, is typical in that it says so much without saying anything directly beyond the vivid images: JMB: Poems like this are sort of visions that come to me, usually when I'm waking up in the morning. With "Regime" I remember waking with this image of being in bed and having all these canes waiting for me. It was sort of a carry-over from dreamland. I'm a big sleeper. My sleep world, and thus my dream world, is a large proportion of my day. I get a lot of ideas out of my dreams, if I pay attention. There's a lot in the book that came from that waking-up period. That transition period between sleep and waking life is often when I'll realize a title or a first line, something that will accumulate--or has already accumulated--as a poem. And there is a pressure to put it on the page that day, that night, or as soon as I can. I keep a writing book beside my bed. TL: When you get these snatches of inspiration, do you always work them out right away or do you sometimes keep them in your head for a while? JMB: I try to work them out right away. A curtain is open and you have take advantage of it. And I've lost things--good things--either through laziness or by not working them out that day for whatever reason, a memory problem. [laughs] When I spoke about being a different person every day I meant that, as humans we are not computers--none of us can hold on to everything and keep carrying it forward. As you get older, you realize you're taking on new things but you're letting things go, things are dropping out of your mind. Everyday there are different things available to you and you've lost some things, even some things you wanted, and you're making room for new things. So every day you're sort of a different person. TL: And there is certainly an eclectic quality to this book. There is no one "typical" Jeanne Marie Beaumont poem in CC. There is an enormous variety here, a handful of poems that hint towards a more traditional formalism, and many that take on organic forms invented for the occasion. JMB: Yes. Every poem helps invent itself. If you pay attention to it, it will assert itself in some form, but it's rarely in the first draft. I can't think of an instance where a poem's form asserted itself in the very first draft. At a certain point, though, no poem to me is "free" verse, some kind of form asserts itself. TL: There has to be order. Otherwise you have chaos. JMB: And in some cases, the form is prose. I haven't done a lot of prose poems, perhaps a dozen. TL: But you have a conspicuous number in CC with the same title, "Skill." And "The Hungry Bowl" might be one of the best poems in the book. JMB: Ah, that's good to hear. It's actually one of the oldest poems in the book. As for the variety, I see myself as a chameleon. I love Keats, and he said so many things about poetry that over time I've found to be true. TL: Such as his comments about Negative Capability? JMB: Yes, and life as a soul-making proposition. There's a certain negation of the "knowing self" that the poet needs to have. TL: The poems in CC are not ego-driven utterances. JMB: I hope not! TL: And yet they don't appear to be self-deprecating either. So many American poets consider themselves in relation to Whitman's expansiveness ("I am multitudes!") or Emily Dickinson's tendency to see the self as small ("It would have starved a gnat/To live so small as I"). Your poems do not reflect either position. JMB: I think the self often just gets set aside in my poems. The self that writes the poem is not me, or is a different self. It's sort of a language-channeling self. I see poetry as a collaboration with the language. Part of the intelligence in a poem is the language's intelligence, not the poet's intelligence. I feel that my poems are more intelligent than I am. And I credit the language for that. And again that comes from being willing to collaborate, to yield to accident, discovery-- TL: And discipline. JMB: Yeah, but I'm not very disciplined [laughs]. I'm pretty bad at self-discipline, actually. * TL: Do you tend to work in miniature? JMB: I do like miniature. If you looked around my apartment, you would see lots of tiny things. Later, I'll show you my secret nook [Later, JMB shows me a small cabinet inside a large bookcase. Inside, she has arranged a room filled with miniature people, animals, and furniture.] I'm really interested in changes of scale. This interest doesn't come across much in the subject matter of my poetry. I think it comes across more in my ability to pay attention to minutiae, and to listen to objects, to notice the small things in the world. I think everything is alive. I start with that as a premise. But certain things force themselves upon you with a kind of urgency. And sometimes those things that stick in your brain are the things you want to honor in a poem. For my first book I wrote a poem about a barometer that I'd lived with for a long time. It doesn't even work anymore. I can't throw it out now because I have a poem about it. Before I wrote the poem, it just haunted me for some reason. Sometimes, things don't become poems for a while. The title of my first book is Placebo Effects, which I thought was a good title but for years I didn't have a poem to go with it. The idea had to go back into the foundry of the brain and get worked on. One day, I was sitting in an office at a pharmaceutical company and the poem suddenly came to me; I had to start writing it. This was when I was still a medical editor. By the way, "Uncorrected Proof," which you mentioned earlier, is drawn from that editorial experience. TL: The unintended wisdom that comes from the bizarre mis-statements is fascinating. "From the Book of the Boot" was also very funny; I actually laughed out loud at some of its absurdities. JMB: Oh, good! I always get upset if I give a reading and people don't laugh at a point in a poem I think is funny. TL: Maybe the Boot poem is funnier when read silently. Part of its humor is its understatement, which may communicate better on the page than if read aloud. JMB: A lot of poetry audiences are afraid to laugh when something's funny because they're afraid their laughter might insult the poet. You have to let them know it's okay. I think it's important that poetry embrace all human responses, and laughter is certainly one of them. It's part of life. Although "From the Book of the Boot" is about the absurdity of relationships, the desperation of relationships, and the deep conspiracy of relationships. TL: More than halfway through the poem the boot as signifier begins to break down: "Many days and nights, not the boot./ Lost boot./ A reputed boot in another county wasn't the boot." JMB: And the articles are very important there. TL: And then finally, "She pretended this boot was the boot." This is a poem as much about linguistic signifier as it is about human relationships. You can also replace the word boot with another word and you get a very different poem. Boot is such a suggestive word. The poem would be more sober if it were called "The Book of the Shoe." JMB: Right. "Boot" is funnier than "Shoe." The sound of the word is funny, but the meaning is darker. I don't remember where I got that boot from! TL: The twelve line poem, "After," dedicated to William Matthews, looks and feels like a reverse Petrarchan sonnet, where you have the sestet turned to a cinquain and the octet turned to a sestet. The relationship between the two stanzas is, like the Petrarchan sonnet, nearly equivalent but asymmetrical, though in this case, in reverse order, with the more compressed stanza appearing first. JMB: That's interesting. The poem is, technically, an acrostic that spells "apple picking." Robert Frost is my muse in this poem. TL: And it can't be an accident that Robert Frost, a well-known practitioner of Petrarchan sonnets, is channeled through a poem of these stanzaic proportions. Do you admit there could be a subconscious connection here? JMB: Yes, definitely. I was clearly drawing on Frost's "After Apple Picking," which isn't a sonnet, but the influence you speak of is very possible. TL: Because of the eclectic nature of the book, it was difficult for me to see this book as a coherent entity. It's sequence, while attractive and effective, could have been re-ordered any number of ways without marring the effect of individual poems. The miniature forms work so well independently, but how they connect on a larger scale is more ambiguous. JMB: That's the problem with writing the way that I do! I was hoping the Neruda epigraphs that introduce each section would in some way focus each section. Apart from those, I had an idea in my mind what each section would be like, but then you always have strays that you have to take in. This disturbs the order a bit. TL: To me, the eclectic, individual nature of these poems was refreshing. And several images run though many of the poems, which hinges them together in a subtle way. JMB: Yes, certain images come back. The dog is one of them. TL: And, as we discussed in the beginning, poems as an improvisation or extension around a nucleus are frequent. JMB: Yes. There are several list poems, for one thing. TL: And the tendency in these poems not to make grand statements-- JMB: People love ego so much they're enamored of it, they think it's admirable. This is another thing I feel alienated from in the current culture. The presentation of the self has become so exaggerated. TL: And it's a self that is so generic an audience can say "Hey, that's me." It's about "me," not the work. JMB: I think some poets want to be liked so desperately and that may be good (for them) in the short term, but in the long term I'm not sure that the desire for an intense likeability is very good for literature. Thinking "will people like this?" while you write is not a good way to proceed. TL: Maybe a better question might be "Is this working?" JMB: I try not to ask any questions until later. I try to just go with what's happening. When I'm working on a poem I'm in an altered state of consciousness. It's a real high. I'm completely wrapped up into it. TL: Do you write in long-hand? JMB: Yes, on unlined paper in a sketch book. I feel like I'm drawing the poems, as opposed to writing them. TL: Are you often directed by the physical shape of the poems? JMB: Certain poems, yes. For example, I love the shape of couplets. They're so elegant. And they put such pressure on each line. Every line has got to be good. You can't bury bad lines when you're writing couplets. But not all poems want to be couplets. And it's always fun to me when a poem begins to shape itself in a way I've never tried before. It's as though it's taking me on a journey to a new shape, as well as giving the poem a new place. And it is the sense that each poem creates its own world, and part of the world it creates is its shape, including line length, arrangement, division. Sometimes how a poem is shaped is a great help to me when I revise it. For example, when you write in syllabics, it's a great help when you want to edit later, because you end up with lines where you think "If I could just take one syllable out here this would be perfect..." So, you have to weigh each one. I've found syllabics, acrostics, and stanzaic forms can help revision. But, ultimately, it's the poem that nudges the form. TL: For example, if you are writing in syllabics and choose a six syllable line for every line. If you find, at one point, you've written a terrific eight-syllable line, you'd be a fool to throw it out. JMB: Right. You have to listen to what the poem's telling you. Revision is a collaborative process between the poet and the poem. There's something that happens between you and the poem if you listen to it. When I completed three of the four prose poems "Skill," I was at the stage where I decided to call the book Curious Conduct. I decided to look up the word "curious," and one of the meanings of curious not often used anymore is "accomplished with skill or care." I thought this was a strange coincidence. Did I know this somewhere in the back of my mind? Was that what led me to write the "Skill" poems? Was there something about skill that I linked with care and curiosity? The language speaks to us. I'm a big dictionary lover. TL: Do you come across words that you love so much you want to use? JMB: Sometimes I'm intrigued by a word and will want to use it and, as I said earlier, a nucleus is formed that the poem is created around. What's more interesting to me is when I decide to use a word in a poem and I look it up to see what the dictionary says it means. I'm curious to know why the word came up as I was working. And sometimes, the word's etymology is so interesting it leads me to something else, maybe to better word choices elsewhere in the poem. I use the dictionary a lot to check myself: is this really what I want? Does it have the best connotation? Are interesting etymological things attached to it? Even though it may be something the reader doesn't get right away, the connection is still embedded in the poem. (When I read poems, I do similar searches.) * TL: In the wonderful, final line of "Sleeping with Animals" you write "We are only as happy as our last dream." I've pondered that line and realized the word "happy" troubles me. Why happy? It's a word I least associate with the dream world. "Fascinating," "intriguing," "revealing," "dark," "complex," all strike me as far more likely modifiers for a dream than "happy," which is strangely irrelevant. Just as "unhappy" would be irrelevant. JMB: Oh, but sometimes I wake up from a dream completely happy. There's just some core of deep happiness that's in the dream. Of course it's a little poignant that you wake up and it's not there. TL: Even when I have a horrible dream I'll wake up thankful because the dream, in its way, is a gift, a key. JMB: Yes. And sometimes you're thankful because when you wake you know the dream isn't real. Whatever the case, I'll wish you happier dreams. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Click here to contact Jeanne Marie Beaumont to give a reading or teach a workshop. |
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