Obsession, Writing Sequences, and Not Reading Poetry to Write Better Poetry: Niel Rosenthalis on His Poem "Placed"
Niel Rosenthalis
I recently met Niel Rosenthalis at AWP in Los Angeles at the Deadly Chaps Press booth, by chance after missing an author signing (something that seems to happen to me a lot at these kinds of events). We got to talking about poetry and agreed to keep in touch. He wrote me after the conference offering to help out with Primal School, and the more we spoke and I got to know his work, the more honored and grateful I felt for having met this force of a poet. I’ll let the interview serve as proof, but I’ll add that just this week, Niel has been offered the Third Year Fellowship in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. — HLJ
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In your recent interview with Joanna Valente for Luna Luna, you described how in writing your first chapbook collection, TRY ME, you saw “trees, grammar, the mechanical goings-on, etc. as […] a struggle with each other.” That struggle interests me as a reader of your poems; could you tell us more about it?
In that interview I think I was making a point about how I don’t distinguish, really, between the mechanical and the natural, and how that group of nouns came from the process of writing via erasures — mostly of nonfiction books and novels. ERASURE is the practice of making a new text out of an existing one. You look at a text, say, an article or a novel, and you decide to whiten out all the words you don't want, so you're left with the words you do want – and the idea, for me, is to make a poem out of those words. Basically, it's like an enormous ready-made word bank.
In the way that I use erasure (other poets use it very differently), the poems sound the same as poems I might write without erasure. My subjectivity shows through whatever I do. Sometimes the process exposes me to new words that excite me in a new way, and sometimes I use the words I would use anyway, but because I’m working within this formal restriction, only using the words before me, something in me is reoriented. Trees, grammar and the mechanics of the way things work form a part of my Image Bank, I guess — which I’d define as that group of images I find myself obsessed with. Every poet has an Image Bank. And out of this bank, I try to work out whatever is agitating me about my perception of experience.
So I take you keep a notebook to aid in storing that Image Bank? Or do these images come to you in your writing, like a daydream?
Good question – I keep a notebook and write pretty often. Sometimes I sit in a public place and just observe what I see. I take notes when I'm reading poems, essays, scientific articles, books on the history of ancient Rome (or whatever it is I'm doing – I read pretty widely and sometimes deeply and sometimes not, haha). I copy down great sentences and wonder how they work — what makes them pleasurable to me, and so on. I find that I do have a set group of words that comes to me when I’m just free-writing, and so just to push myself, sometimes I'll open up a book (say a book of poems or a random nonfiction book I have laying around the house), and pick ten words that really stand out to me just because I like them. They don't have to be especially complicated, they just need to excite me. For instance, if I turn to the word bank I started recently, I see the words: extension, forward, expanse, proof, rapprochement. I don't think I finished building that bank, but sometimes when writing I say, “Okay, let me see if I can get that word into the poem because I like how it sounds.” I don't have to keep the word, but if it gets me excited on the page, it can generate a few lines that do work well (and often I'll have to go back and cut the word I pulled from the image bank because the line it was in didn't end up working). Which isn't to say the Image Bank makes or breaks a poem! What really makes a poem exciting to me is the tension in it – and poets have different ways of generating this tension. Some use really elaborate syntax, i.e. the way the words in a sentence or a line come together over time. Others simply have a funky Image Bank. Still others prioritize using the page as a kind of field, skipping around and building arrangements of words that challenge one’s sense of how one word follows another. And all poets use some combination of these three tension-generators, because syntax, word choice, and page space all can be manipulated. They form the technical stuff of which poems are made.
Affirming to know I’m not the only one who approaches writing in this way; seeing what words call to me in my reading and finding a home for them in my poems . So many poems are really just houses built of stolen lines, words, ideas… there’s nothing contraband about it when you’ve made something new out of them. And your playfulness with syntax does intrigue me, so let’s talk about “Placed.” Fascinating story behind it: you say the poem was cut from 40+ pages of observation in a time and location? Tell us about that process.
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PLACED
An Intersection
I was sitting at a table outside in the night. The people around me ate and drank in comfort, a few notches below bliss. What else is hammered. Watch your tone. I can’t, it’s like the back of my head.
One house lit-up with a birthday banner
in the foyer; the sneezing dogs on their
evening out; a semi-present wish
to stop all this.
Some people pose for a picture. “Wait, guys, let’s get one of us laughing at each other.” Laughter is a form of what kind of thinking. What’s worse: the people or the reclamation of want the people bring out in you.
I kid myself.
I say, “I like my sweetstop tongue.”
I can’t look
to be a part of all this.
An Exchange
On a tour of the city, I was hit by the sight of white dahlias (“Always place description in the present tense.”)
The dahlias were in a toss from last night’s flash flood. The hill they were planted on made them lean. And then I remembered what it was like to see something for the first time.
“What would it look like?”
— A woman with a braid down her back, to her friend at the café.
“I wanted to know what a poodle cut looks like on a person, a kind of mullet…with a tight bun at the back.”
Pausing to fill in, one said, “Well at least it will grow back,” to which (he’d missed the point) she said, “no, no, it was great, glad we did it.”
Be absorbed by minutiae.
He’s aside of this now so if he wants to leave he can leave without walking through a door.
A Separation
The couple in green sat at the table with fries, which their hands went to, then to their mouths, then down to their laps. At times one went for it while the other waited, or both went, or neither. One touched the other’s knee. The other had arms closed together and turned her head this way and that. What they were was how they were. To that end, I watched from my box. (Around me the people sat in theirs such that they could look at or to the street, where the people passed.) Pass the salt, please. One did.
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Yes, it was a summer project I assigned myself. I went to this particular intersection in a neighborhood near me, in St. Louis, a few nights a week – usually around 8 pm. I'd sit at the corner of Euclid and Maryland avenues, and I'd observe for a few hours the comings and goings, the antics, the way people walked and talked to themselves and to each other, etc. I'd also bring books to read and I'd alternate between reading/writing in public and just observing . It was pretty free form, and so I generated I think 47 pages (Microsoft Word) material, and many more that I didn't even bother typing out. Whatever I transferred from my notebook to my computer was the initial stage of editing, and then I started playing with what I had. That summer I had decided to really put reading poetry on the backburner, and I decided to study great prose. So I had Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The American Notebook" with me (I'm named after the guy), and he became my model for fresh, glittering, hands-in-the-earth sentences. I put a lot of pressure on whatever I write, and over time I realized that though a lot of the material I generated was kind of interesting to me, it didn't all do what I think poetry does so well. Which is to: a) use highly tensioned layered patterns in language and b) purposeful ambiguity.
By purposeful ambiguity, I mean a range of meanings available to the reader, a range that feels intentional versus, on the other hand, that not-so-fun confusion when you read a not-so-great poem where the set of possible interpretations is so wide as to be almost meaningless. The poem has to have the kind of presence and authority that makes itself meaningful. It's difficult to describe, but immediately identifiable in great poems.
For instance, in a poem I brought to workshop once, I had a yellow ribbon in it, and I wanted it to indicate the sun. But then the people in the workshop were confused by it – “Is this supposed to be a ribbon around a dress?” “Yellow ribbons tied to a tree,” one person said, “are symbols of war veterans coming home, but that doesn't seem to fit this poem,” and so on... So I've learned to be precise in what I do. And precision creates stronger feeling in the reader.
About deciding to stop reading poetry — what's the story there?
Oh, well — when I came to the program, I’d been writing many poems that were — slyly or overtly — about reading and writing poetry — poems that were clearly informed by the many poets I loved and were about being in a conversation with those poets via my poems. They were about desire and so on, too, but the baroque surfaces were informed by the many ways I knew how to manipulate image and sound and gesture. You can see what I mean if you look at my poem “A Map Poem”— Joanna Valente published it in Yes, Poetry.
So, within a month of starting the program, I met with one of my teachers, and I’d said to her that I felt frustrated by my poems — that I was kind of thrashing about in a dead end. She asked me what I read besides poetry, and I was unsure what to say, because I really only read poetry. So she told me to read about subjects I was interested in (such as geography, and geology--which, I told her, I used to work on as an assistant editor in a publishing company). And so I turned away from poetry, and within a few weeks (I feel like I’m selling zit creme in an informercial here) the problem began to clear up. I’d been reading poetry nonstop for six or seven years, besides whatever I read for school, and I’d acquired a lot of know-how, definitely, but by leaving it alone for a while I could approach writing from a different headspace.
Way to tap into the whole honking universe, moving away from poetry to get back to poetry in order to produce something original. Let’s go a little further into this compression you talk about applying to whatever you write, and which is really evident here; as in "The dahlias were in a toss from last night's flash flood." How did you decide what to keep and what to cut? We might as well discuss the sequence piece of it, too – the ordering, and the fact that it's in three parts?
I first decided that I liked the material in these three particular entries ("An Intersection" was called "May 7th'" for a long time — the other two sections were written in June I think). And then I rewrote them by hand enough times until I was satisfied with what I'd had. Rewriting by hand is useful for me because I'm less likely to let unexciting language carry over into the next draft — when I'm rewriting something, and I'm bored by it, or if it starts to feel hollow, then I know I have to change it. I consider a poem finished when I can rewrite it by hand and there isn’t anything left I want to change, because it’s tried and it feels true. For instance, in "An Intersection", the first paragraph (it's prose), initially read as follows: I was sitting at a table outside in the night. The people around me ate and drank in comfort, a few notches below bliss. What else is hammered. Watch your tone. I can’t, it’s like the back of my head. You know what a comb is, don’t you? Well, yes.
I realized, in revising, that You know what a comb is, don't you? was kind of funny, sure, but it was a step too far in complicating the idea of tone as the back of one's head (i.e. why don't you comb your tone, mister?). The second prose paragraph had another bit that was also a comic dip, but it was a little too on the nose in some way:
Some people in their twenties pose for a picture. “Wait, guys, let’s get one where we’re all laughing at each other.” The laughs are a form of what kind of thinking. Just picture them as monkeys, hairy backs and all. Funny, but you’re reducing. What’s worse: the people or the reclamation of want those people bring out in me.
When I took the 'just picture them as monkeys' bit out, the overall feeling seemed tighter, and the moment after that – 'What's worse: the people...' etc. — felt much more exciting. Delay and deferral are great when used well, but this wasn't a moment to do that — so I cut those two sentences to jump to the more pressing point.
That's the kind of editorial work I've learned to do — to control pacing, to ask myself when something is really working. Most of this is instinctual, a muscle that needs to be exercised. And it's developed by being aware of how a reader reads (this is what a workshop can be good for, if you've got smart readers who can explain convincingly why they react the way they do.)
Sequences are great to write, and they really free you to be obsessive. I can talk about the sequence in terms of 'The Modern Lyric Sequence' which is the term critics and scholars often use — it's that kind of poem that is structured — via sections, numbered parts, asterisked parts, etc — to let the poem return to a theme, an obsession, over and over from different angles. And what it does is it frees you, the writer, to return to something that interests you without having to relay the ground work, the way you typically do at the start of a poem.
And all it takes to do a sequence, really, is to say to yourself, I'm going to stay with this one thing — this image, this theme, this particular noun — etc. Once you spend a lot of time writing about one object, like a chair, for instance, you will begin by describing the chair in ways that most people would. But if you continue doing it for long enough — say, 20 pages — you'll inevitably get to some strange language that no one else has used before. So I decided to study this intersection for a few months, at a particular time — I generated a lot of material, found some interesting moments, and just felt free to wander and observe and muse and be silly and dramatic. And then I went back to it with my scissors haha.
An obsession’s worth of cuts, for sure — and you seem to have done the same thing with one of your other sequence poems, “A Ten-Minute Moment”. When we were talking earlier you called that poem a breakthrough. What was the breakthrough there?
Several things. The poem began as a book-length erasure of the novel Duplex by Kathryn Davis. You can use different constraints with erasure — I chose to only take one word at a time, so as to really maintain a distance from the existing text.
So I divided the Davis book into five sections and went through it, selecting words one at a time and turning them into strange and jagged and weirdly angled harsh lines. I got a fragmented and interesting sequence, but it didn't satisfy me – it didn't feel inevitable in the way it was ordered, even though many moments were interesting to me. Several poems in my first chapbook TRY ME are erasures – erasure has been a useful way for me to really be precise and controlled in my writing. I started writing around and through the fragments, and found a kind of rhythm. But I wanted to be even more rigorous. (When I add formal rules for myself, it helps me think in a new way and it challenges me to move within the bearings.) So I decided it would be six sections, not five, each section beginning with a refrain, and each section would have the same number of stanzas. And then I thought, why not see if I can make the lines long? (I'd been trying to write in long lines the year before but hadn't managed to do it to my satisfaction.) So then I turned the five-line stanzas into long couplets (the poem is also on a landscape orientation, rather than the portrait orientation which is the norm), and voila — I had a long line, and the rhythm worked even better when carried across a long horizontal. There were other aspects that felt key to me (like stretching it even further to ten sections, each to last a minute when read aloud), but the main breakthrough was that I figured something out about how to construct a poem: that it can happen over a long period of time, that I can layer formal restraints, and that I can really stay with a single speaker for a long time. It's a matter of paying attention, and, as ever, getting paid.
And that leads us me the role of rhythm in your work. I take it that like many poets, you read your lines aloud while revising?
I do read aloud while revising, and I took a class on the music of poetry here in my program, so I've learned more about why different moments in poems I love sound so appealing to me--how establishing a rhythmic norm and varying from it can make a poem emotionally effective (and affective). I'm thinking a lot these days about rhythm, and I want to be even more rhythmically persuasive in my work. Much of my work has had a staccato rhythm (which occurs because I work often with short declaratives, in order to be super controlled, and because the interesting effect, the juxtaposition, of how I write lays between lines, and so there's a quick one-two punch of sorts). But I'm also really interested in a long emphatic cadence, especially versus sharp phrasing, and I think I finally landed moments in that emphatic vein in my poem "A Ten Minute Moment".
There's a lot of work to do and I'm still learning what rhythm can do.
Returning to "Placed"...the speaker in this poem: who is it?
I'm not sure exactly who the speaker is in "Placed," aside from being an observer in an urban environment — which we all are, if we live in an urban environment.
A snap of Niel's world: "The Author is Absent" (featuring Keats, Brian Blanchfield, and David Hockney)
The poem contains elements of both lyric and narrative, so if you could define those two also and how they dance together?
I think of LYRIC as an orientation in the realm of song, of the suspension of linear thinking. (By linear thinking, I mean the everyday lines of logic, as in "I need to buy bread, so I need to have a certain amount of money, which means I need to find my purse, and bring it with me to the corner store.") And I think of NARRATIVE in the traditional sense of adherence to beginning, middle, and end, which are the terms within which writers of stories work. But narrative is everywhere, it's suggested by even the slightest detail. “I left my suede glove on the chair,” for instance, is just a single sentence, but it suggests something about being in a given place, about leaving that place to go do something else, about losing something, maybe about leaving something behind as a signal to someone (kind of like how dropping a handerchief was, at one point, an erotic gesture) and so on. And so I think of lyric as that elastic momentum in a narrative that is intent on reaching after something else.
The sections were developed independent of each other—by the time I brought them together, they were pretty much formed; I did add section titles much later, to unify them as variations on a theme. Again, a small touch—like a section title—can have substantial impact on the reader’s experience of the poem as a navigable space and making the space one that a reader wants to navigate.
So getting back to your question about lyric and narrative, in "Placed," I guess I see them doing this kind of double-helix work, of supporting each other and moving around each other in a general forward-motion. Isn't this true for so many poems? I think it is. I think what's particular to this sequence is the way the title suggests being moored in some way (I originally called the sequence “Place” but then decided that wasn't interesting enough, and “Placed,” is more suggestive), even as that sense of being in a place is never absolute — it doesn't reach into the bottom of the speaker's feet in a way that the questions around him don't not feed into his head constantly.
Those subtleties, so vital. You were telling me how one of your other poems, "Here is a Camera", became "Here is the Camera”.
The change from "a" to "the" was about upping that poem's claim to understanding something about the mechanics of how we perceive each other. And it's a poem that is all one sentence, even as it's a, what, 12 or so lines-long poem? Which I guess maybe was my way of claiming a single moment the way a camera does, necessarily. Or maybe a less corny reading is that the poem's more sinewy syntax shows the movement of the mind wrestling with how, in that moment that a camera captures, information becomes knowledge. The poem came in a rush and didn't need much editing.
Don't we love writing those kinds of poems, the ones that feel like they’ve been “received whole”. On to a few bread & butter questions as we wind down…any advice you’d offer to poets writing and practicing outside of the MFA system?
I resisted getting an MFA for a few years because I was reading the work of many people who had MFAs and found much of that work clear and pared, structurally sound but otherwise dull (there are thankfully also many exceptions). I did have an amazing experience at my program and upended many ideas about the kinds of poems I wanted to make, and I gained a lot of insight into how people read. I would recommend going to an MFA if you can obtain a full ride (Wash U is great because it's a small cohort where everyone is equally and fully funded) and if you like the faculty there, etc. (I’m very, very aware of the rarity of full funding, but I take fiscal viability seriously; I don't think you should go into debt for an MFA, unless you're really prepared to deal with that – and of course there are some wonderful programs, unfortunately, that aren't fully funded.) But MFA or not, the main work is for the writer to read, read, read, and develop an interest in technical matters, because that's what does the heavy lifting in all the great poems you love.
I would add that if all you typically read is poetry, try reading some non-poetry and see how it clears up many navel-gazing problems your poems might have (speaking here from personal experience). And if that's not you, and you read a healthy amount of poetry, then be sure that you’re exploring non-contemporary poetry as well. Poems exist in a tradition (there are many traditions outside of the canonical kind), and I am very aware of all the ways I grow and learn from work that’s outside of my contemporary moment. The poems of the day are produced within a recognizable world of syntactic habits, stylistic trends, and idiomatic range. Leaving the contemporary poetry world behind lets you see it for what it is, just the way that living abroad, immersed in another language, lets you hear and experience your native tongue(s) as the strange linguistic systems that they really are. Of course, poets see themselves in relationship to the history of writing in different ways, and it's up to you to figure out for yourself what that relationship is.
As food for this virtual classroom of hungry poets, got any homework you'd like to assign?
I recommend imitations. They help you examine a poem you love at the very closest levels you yourself need to know in order to write great work. Make a word-replacement imitation of a poem, say, Sylvia Plath's "Crossing the Water". (It's great and it's short, so if imitation is painful for you, this exercise won't be too painful.) Replace each of Plath’s words with one of your own—using the same part of speech. Where Plath uses a noun, put in your own noun. Where Plath uses an adjective, put in your own adjective. Where she repeats a word, you repeat a word. You don't want to insert synonyms for the words; just insert words that are the same part of speech but have a different meaning. Do this imitation work with different poets – I used to do imitations of Elizabeth Bishop poems, Rainer Maria Rilke poems (Stephen Mitchell's translations), Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, etc. I learned a lot and challenged my understanding of images, sound, and sentences in relationship to lines.
It's a lot of work to do these imitations, but they're helpful. You won't get an Original Poem (whatever that is — "to be original is not to be sourceless," said Dana Levin in an essay I read in college). But you'll learn a lot. And you can use the last line of your imitation as the first line of your own poem, just using it as a generative mechanism. And afterwards, see if you still need it. (One trick I learned over time is that when free-writing I often delete the first five or so lines because they are often just a way of warming up.)
My second suggestion is to read through Bernadette Mayer's list of writing experiments. Even if you don't do any of them, you'll find a sense (and a kick) of permission.
I somehow never came upon this list before, so, jackpot. Thank you. And speaking of poems you love, now, tell us a poem you love. Any poem, classic or contemporary.
I love "People" by Gennady Aygi – I've only recently learned about him – a poet from the former Soviet Union; he died in 2006. It ends, "so that I knew / the patches of light on their pianos / had relatives // in hospitals and prisons." It's a visceral poem for me, about that seemingly unendingly interesting noun 'people.' Which is a group of units that go by the names of "I." You can read Sarah Valentine's translation of it in the book just published by Wave Books called Into the Snow.
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NATHANIEL ROSENTHALIS was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware and received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and is about to graduate from the M.F.A. program in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received the T.S. Eliot Scholarship and the Howard Nemerov Award in Poetry. More info on him can be found at nathanielrosenthalis.tumblr.com.