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AN INTERVIEW WITH JAKE ADAM YORK
Gregory Donovan:
This is Greg Donovan and I'm chatting with Jake Adam York. We're in
Vancouver at the AWP annual conference, and we thought we'd take this
opportunity to talk with Jake a little bit about the group of poems
he's given us. Many of these poems, Jake, are all from your first collection, Murder
Ballads, is that correct?
Jake Adam York:
That's correct, yeah, that's right.
GD: Is there
a kind of a theme or any kind of unifying aspect that you're after in
this particular book?
JAY: There's
one large theme that is captured by the title, and there are several
manifestations of that interest in the book. Maybe I can just explain
the title and then we can explore a few of those manifestations very
briefly. The title, Murder Ballads, is taken from a type of
music that I'm familiar with growing up in northeast Alabama. A lot of
people know, for example, like The Louvin Brothers, the great gospel
and country duo, who were from northeast Alabama. They're from Henager,
Alabama, just probably forty, fifty miles up the road from where I grew
up.
For a long time I've been fascinated with these songs
that they and other people of their generation recorded that were tragic
songs, the stories they told were tragic; often, there were murders,
crimes of passion, those sorts of things. But the songs couldn't be sweeter,
melodically, they couldn't be sweeter. And I've been struggling with
this aesthetic problem of how to write about history that's terrible
without offending the history, offending the victims of the history.
On the one hand, you want to bear witness to the terror of it with the
terror of your own. But on the other hand, you have an opportunity in
memory, at least this is my feeling, an opportunity in memory to offer
a kind of consolatory vision. That's the traditional work of the elegist.
And I know that for the better part of the twentieth century it's been
common knowledge, or common thought, that the ability to console is beyond
us and that if we don't admit that, that in some sense we're being dishonest,
we're being opportunistic in the moment of the elegy. We're trying to
take someone else's suffering and by addressing it accrue the magnitude
of that terror to our fame as poets, or to our skill.
And I understand the argument, I feel like it's a
legitimate argument, it's a powerful argument, the history is certainly
there and many of the things that we have to respond to are so terrible
that art often has difficulty finding purchase. But as I say, I think
still there's a great deal to be done in terms of offering a kind of
consolatory vision for, or in response to, in these cases particularly,
southern racial crime and the history of racial crime. While I was thinking
through the aesthetic problem and listening to the country music, it
dawned on me, probably many years later that that type of work was a
model. Because if you listen to the words, if you work through the content,
it is clear that the song is haunted and debilitated to a certain extent
by the knowledge of how terrible the subject is. But at the same time,
that desire or maybe the impossibility of not singing in a melodic fashion
is there to offer a kind of compensatory balance. The whole book is an
attempt to do that, to provide a series of poems that are interested
in things that are terrible, while at the same time in their textures,
the sounds, the music of the poems, offering something that is a little
more dulcet.
GD: I think of
songs that I've performed myself, like"Little Omie Wise," which
is a great murder ballad, and in those great murder ballads it seems
like there is something else I detect in your work, which is a part of
the complexity of this process as a modern Southerner, you're trying
to come to terms with the past, and it has to do with taking responsibility,
with the complexity of that, too.
JAY: Well, I
think part of it is taking responsibility, actively embracing the whole
history, but on the other hand, it's also partially just a matter of
recognition. If you're from a Southern family as I am—my family
is six, seven generations in Alabama and before that further up the Appalachian
chain—you're already implicated in the history in so many ways
that you can't know specifically. And one of the things that has motivated
many of these poems is discovering just how closely implicated I've been
in so many of Alabama's particular racial tragedies. The "Bunk Richardson" poem
for example, is about something that happened in my home town, I did
not know about it until that [James] Allen book, Without Sanctuary,
came out. And I'm looking through these artifacts of terror and seeing
this one very heavily damaged picture, and it says, "Gadsden, Alabama." That's
my home town, and I know the bridge, you can see the bridge and I know
it. It's still the exact same bridge with the same foundations and remarkable
to know that in what is otherwise a fairly unremarkable community, that
this occurred.
Shortly after I saw that book a gentlemen at the
local newspaper did an article on that event, the lynching of Bunk Richardson.
And the response to it was really fantastic in that it was as if the
hundred years between then and the article had evaporated. People were
calling this guy and giving him death threats and so forth, and he ended
up . . . finished the series, and he ended up quitting the paper and
moving out of town. I thought, this stuff is still living and it's not
so much that people are as racist or as criminal as they were twenty,
thirty, forty, a hundred years ago, but the memory of it is still so
strong that though people would not do the same things now, their response
to it at a distance is such that you can still feel that these problems,
these wounds, these crimes have not been recognized, they have not been
atoned for. And that's what we're still working through.
So, like I said, some of these are geographical proximity,
the "Bunk Richardson" is something that happened in my home
town. "Tallasseehatchee Creek" is actually, it describes an
archaeological excavation that my wife worked on at one time. And these
others are ones that maybe I'm a little less directly implicated in.
And "Consolation," when I was researching Willy Edwards's murder,
I discovered that one of the conspirators was named York, James York.
And the echo of the name was just too much to ignore. And I thought,
this is a poem in which I can imaginatively implicate myself and extricate
myself in a way that both begins to address a need for atonement that
I feel, and at the same time, provide a vision of a kind of flexibility
that I think many modern, contemporary Southerners want. Which is the
ability to feel abashed by what has come before and at the same time
begin to move beyond that. Because it's my feeling, talking, for example,
with my grandparents and people of their generation, that they do feel
terrible about the things that maybe they didn't stop, but at the same
time they don't want to feel paralyzed by a sense of their own criminality.
My grandfather, in fact, he was on a grand jury that had a chance to
indict the murderer of a postman who was doing a one-man march in 1963,
he was taking a letter to Ross Barnett from Chattanooga, Tennessee, all
the way to Jackson, Mississippi, and he was murdered right outside Gadsen.
My grandfather was on the grand jury, and they had the chance to indict
the guy that they knew murdered him—they had the gun, they had
the bullet, they had everything—and for whatever reason they decided
they couldn't make a case. But that is something that when I talk to
him, he's aware of it, he's not denying that he had that part in it that
he played, but he also doesn't want to talk about it very much, and you
can tell. And there's that kind of paralysis that is interesting and
devastating at the same time. And so some of these poems are trying to
get beyond that as well, recognize it, but get beyond it.
GD: That's a
traditional role for the poet, it's an aspect of the bardic role, to
be a recorder of history, but it's not simply, of course, journalistic,
it's [an] emotional and religious and cultural portrait, a kind of a
fabric that you provide. And that, I think it's only in that full context
that you're able to accommodate events with such power, of such import
in a way that is not demeaning or dismissive or merely journalistic.
One of the things I noticed in the language that you're using, for example,
there's a lot of evocation of a religious idea that in fact, you're kind
of achieving a resurrection in these poems.
JAY: Yeah, and
I hope the resurrection is one that primarily comes through language.
There's obviously not anything we can do to bring any of these people
back. But if in imagination, if in language, if in the stories we tell
there is something, a vision that is, as I say, compensatory or consolatory
in some fashion, then we've done the best we can, I think.
GD: Well, it's
a work to be done too, it's a way of, what do we do now, you know, just
sit around on our hands, or grieve about the past? Of the many things
that can be done this seems to me one of them.
JAY: Right, so
in there we touched on . . . I mentioned there were several sort of sub
threads in the book and one of the ones you can see here is—and
these all pretty much follow from that idea of the murder ballad, the
poem that's beautiful and terrible at the same time. "Vigil," for
example, and "Buck Richardson," and "Consolation" are
from a series that talks about civil rights martyrs. And I mentioned
one of the others, there's a poem about the murder of Bill Moore, he
was the postman that was mentioned a few minutes ago. There's a poem
about the murder of Viola Liuzzo, who was a civil rights worker driving
marchers back and forth from Selma to Montgomery. Several other poems,
all in that vein, in the book, and that forms one kind of density in
the collection. "On Tallasseehatchee Creek" is from another
thread that's primarily concerned with other aspects of Alabama history.
I guess it's a kind of rhyme with that series on civil rights martyrs
in that Alabama's history of dealing with Native Americans is certainly
no less terrible. In fact, in some cases, though the victims are not
known because we didn't have their biographies, the things that were
done with them are in some ways more horrific. To read Davy Crockett's
account of the burning of Tallasseehatchee Creek is just absolutely,
it's unbelievable.
GD: It's interesting
that people, generally speaking, find a lot of these memories and aspects
of American history so painful they don't want to ever recall them, they
don't want to talk about them. Like in Richmond, the only person who
could have accomplished this very thing, there's a great deal of talk
about establishing a museum of slavery, and of course it's our former
governor, who was the nation's first African American governor and now
the city mayor, who is trying to establish that museum. But in other
cities in the South they have talked about trying to have some sort of
museums of slavery or museums of the slave trade or things like that.
JAY: I think
in fact, the museum, that is now going to potentially be in Richmond,
it was offered to Mobile and I believe they turned it down, and before
that, wasn't it in Gulfport and they turned it down as well?
GD: Yeah, so
many people find it too painful to even bring . . . including African
Americans, of course, I mean, naturally of course, what a frightening
thing. I always try to talk to white students I have about such realities,
asking them to imagine that moment in a black family's life when someone
has to explain to these young children what's going on, what is the history
of this, why is all this strangeness going on? And imagine the painful
dual role you have to take up of both being angry, and yet you wouldn't
want to terrify your child.
JAY: On the other
hand, it's to a certain extent unavoidable, not just because it's written
in the culture, which it is, and to that extent you can't not talk about
it, somebody's going to mention it, something is going to indicate it
in some way that makes it impossible to avoid it, but on the other hand,
there's an artifactual record, and those things show up in unlikely places.
I remember my wife taking me through the woods and we went by some trail,
and this was a place where she worked as an archaeologist, they had discovered
a lot of shackles. They were chattel shackles, whether or not they were
for African Americans or for Native Americans is hard to tell, but you
know they're there. And there not that far under the surface, maybe there
like three, four inches or something like that, and it's just remarkable,
just right there.
GD: In your work
as a poet, are there things that you feel like this particular project
taught you about your own writing, or you're becoming aware of something
you want to try and accomplish, or that you're struggling against?
JAY: What a question
. . . probably it taught me everything, you know? This is my first book
and I have struggled to find my direction, or as one of my teachers said,
to find my subject. When I started graduate school, it was a little more
than ten years ago, I didn't really think of myself very much as a Southerner.
As I said earlier, I'm from Alabama, I'm six or seven generations in
Alabama. And I guess it's just so obvious and pervasive in my life that
I just never really had the opportunity to think about it. When I got
to Cornell and everybody was pointing out that I was Southern, in this
way or that, it was bizarre at first, but then I felt that I had to accept
the truth of it on some level just in order to be able to have a conversation
with my colleagues about writing and about my writing in particular.
I feel like these poems that are represented here,
which mostly I've written in the last two years, have been probably the
culmination of that kind of very initial phase of my idea of myself and
my work, which probably I resisted in some ways. Because, I just thought,
I grew up thinking I was mostly normal with a few exceptional moments
when my regionality was pointed out to me in a way that was difficult.
And here I was as an adult, kind of hoping, I think, to get beyond it,
but then discovering that it was written in me in a way that made it
impossible to escape from even if I wanted to. Which now I don't. I used
to think about escaping it, in a sense want to, but now I don't think
about it.
So the project has allowed me to embrace the good
and the bad in one package. For me, beyond these poems, the personal
struggle has been, do I speak with an accent or do I try not to? And
I try not to a lot, just in order to get things done. I don't live in
the South currently, though I would like to, and there are many times
when if you talk the family way you're not going to be understood. But
like I say, doing this work has allowed me to take those things that
are bad, like for me it's the accent a lot of the time, and the things
that it makes people think about, and I take the good, which is a kind
of storytelling inheritance I get from my grandparents in particular.
My grandparents are great storytellers, my grandfather, his father was
a preacher, and I think we get some of the preacherly cadence has passed
down through those generations, and it's in these poems here and there.
I feel like that is a key element of my work now, that kind of preacherly
cadence, that some people recognize it as such, there's something Baptist
in it, they'll say, or some people recognize it in a more poetic fashion,
saying that there's a kind of Whitmanian dilation at work in some of
these poems. And I can't imagine writing without that now, it's just
such a part of my voice, my repertoire. And these poems are the ones
where it really settled in, I think, it makes sense not just from a musical
standpoint, but it actually works with the subject.
GD: As you're
talking I'm thinking about how, for one thing, other regions of the country,
generally speaking, although there probably are exceptions when I think
about it, individuals from those regions aren't asked to take responsibility
for their regions in quite the same way, or the idea of guilty until
proven innocent basically for all Southerners when they find themselves
in the North.
JAY: Yeah, for
white Southerners. I think you're right, by and large. There are a few
exceptions obviously, the people from L. A. frequently have to answer
for the Watts riot and things like that and people from Detroit as well.
These are places where race riots were very visible. But it's not quite
the same, and I think it's mainly because you don't hear somebody and
say, you're from L. A., and you don't hear somebody talking and say,
you're from Detroit. I would call it a kind of soft minority. Here as
a white Southerner, because you're white, you're in the racial majority
or you're in the racial hegemony, but at the same time you're in a subclass
inside that, that doesn't carry with it any of the rhetorical strength
of being in a minority, and that's a very difficult position to be in.
It's certainly not . . . I wouldn't call it a tragic position or anything
like that, but it's a rhetorically difficult position to be in. Rodney
Jones writes very eloquently about that, and he's somebody who has been
indirectly a very important interlocutor for me, asking questions and
saying things in ways that are important to me.
GD: I think one
of the great things about Rodney's work, too, is that he never loses
his sense of humor, not at all . . .
JAY: What a funny
guy . . .
GD: Yeah, it's
often a self-accusatory sense of humor, but the best humor always is,
I think.
JAY: Yeah, and
I see in that . . . well, first of all, I wish I was that witty and second
of all I wish that I was just that funny. You know, that is just not
something that ran in my family, I'm not accustomed to it. We enjoy a
joke, we're just not very good joke tellers. I think we kind of tend
to be more serious people by and large. But I see in that the way the
humor provides a kind of a mask or shield that also allows the poems
to be very honest and forthright about something. Also a model that has
been useful to me, I would say that in my work, that it's the cadence
or it's the drive of the poem as a sentence that provides a musical shield,
that also allows the poem to be forthright. But there's that idea that
you have to do two things at once in order to do anything.
GD: Are there
things in your education or your own reading that you feel like you're
working away from . . . at one point you had an idea that that might
be a good thing for me to do, and now you feel like, no, that I see now,
that I need to avoid that, or even triumph over it? Is there anything
like that that you . . .
JAY: I want to
say I don't think so, because my primary experience, and this happens
on a very regular basis, is that I don't so much eschew ideas that I
think were wrong as much as I modulate them and make slight changes every
couple of months, and so, remarkably, when I go back ten years and look
at work I was doing as a very young student, I can see the seeds were
the early forms of what I'm working on now, and I don't feel disconnected
from that work at all. The main thing I think that I've moved away from
is that, when I was an undergraduate at Auburn University, in part because
a lot of my teachers were saying, you know, if you've lived in Alabama
all your life, twenty-two years, you probably need some experience outside,
and there was all this encouragement to move north, in particular. I
really felt then, when I started graduate school in Ithaca, New York,
that Southern-ness was something to be ashamed of, in a way. If anything,
that's what I've moved away from. I understand why it's potentially shameful,
and I'm trying to look at that. But in a different way I don't feel like
the idea is gone, it's just being treated in a different fashion. And
I would say the same about all the aesthetic issues or the issues of
poetics as well, that there are approaches I've taken in the past that
have turned out to be bankrupt on a certain level, but the ideas, the
impulses, have not gone away.
An example of this would be something that may not
be visible in these poems, or I should say, audible, and that's the idea
of the place of the accent in the poem. Ten years ago I spent two years
trying to write different kind of dialect poems. I went back in the 19th
century and into the early 20th century in Southern poetry and looked
at different applications of dialect spelling and tried to play around
with that for a little while and, of course, came to the conclusion individually
that we had culturally come to many years before, which is that orthographical
problems of such a poetry are so insurmountable for most readers, that
it's a type of poetry whose usefulness is very minimal, and of course
it's also demeaning. But I haven't given up on the idea of accent, I
feel like I've tried to just a different way to get it into the poems,
and for me, again, the cadence of the longer poems like "Vigil" and "Consolation," for
example, is for me a way of getting a type of Southern accent into the
poems. It's not the Southern accent, but then there's no the Southern
accent anyway.
GD: I think you're
bringing up something that I've noticed that is very important, and I
find that's what the other side of the coin is about. The notions of,
as you're saying, achieving consolations, of facing squarely things,
but the other side of that is something that actually I think I encounter
more in fiction maybe than poetry, where people . . . writers will create
a narrator, say a first person narrator, of a novel, who's a Southerner,
and the way they handle all of this is not even just through humor, but
through making the person a crazy S. O. B., you know, just some madman
or madwoman, and that seems to me to have its own problems really from
the other side, too, that ultimately that is, it's almost like putting
on a form of blackface, or maybe it's whiteface, Southern whiteface comedy,
you know, the cracker.
JAY: It's definitely
putting your hick on, you know, that's what I call it. A little bit of
hickery. And you're exactly right, it's a mask is what it is, and the
mask is offensive to somebody. I was in a meeting—and I hope this
doesn't go too far afield of our conversation—but I was in a meeting
a couple of months ago where I'm on this board and we decide about bringing
people in to perform in Denver and certain locations. And we were looking
at a comedian, you can put that in quotations, a "comedian," whose
routine was supposedly having to do a lot with stereotypes. And the idea
was that by indulging them that they would be perforated and you would
see them as false. In particular, I was really bothered by all of the
Southern stereotypes, the white Southerner and the black Southern stereotypes,
and it's not like it wasn't funny, but I felt like the source of the
humor was shame. Not out and out pure humor, which is supposed to be
rooted in fun, I think, at least I hope that it is. It is a kind of whiteface,
blackface, there're all sorts of faces, and when it's cosmetic you can
feel it, and that's when it feels like that it's being employed as a
kind of lever against you.
GD: Do you hope
that at the end of reading your collection of poems that, do you imagine
a way that your ideal reader would be responding, or feeling, or sensitized
after reading your work? And are there keys that they might keep in mind,
the readers who might come to Blackbird, are there keys they
might keep in mind that would allow them a greater appreciation?
JAY: The main
thing I like for people to feel is, I like them to ultimately feel—I
mean, I guess to think that my poetry could have this kind of effect
is really sort of beyond me—but ideally I would like for people
to feel that you can feel two contradictory emotions at once. Much of
our public conversation about anything has to go one way or the other.
Politics is about someone representing this emotion, someone representing
that one or that intellectual position, which is emotionalized in some
way, and there's not any complexity, there's not any subtlety or suppleness,
and I find that very frustrating because I feel, if we're honest with
ourselves about even things so inconsequential as having a bad conversation
with someone we know, that our emotions are much more complicated and
that's why our public life is complicated. Not because we can't agree
on this value or that value, but it's always infinitely more complicated
than any of our public conversations would lead anyone to believe. I
hope the poems become opportunities for people to feel two contradictory
things at once.
For example, in "Vigil," I mean this is
. . . it's just a pathetic story, as well as a tragic one, by which I
mean . . . just thinking about the facts of it put you in mind of the
tragedy so directly that this type of poem, and any writing that would
tell the story, is automatically on the edge of sentimentalism. And so
there's that sense of a kind of pathetic appeal, I want you to feel sad
as a result of this poem. I'd also like for you to feel angry. I'd also
like for you to feel a little uplifted that the prayer that the poem
is trying to achieve doesn't solve the problem, but it's a response to
the problem at an individual level. I don't feel like I can do anything
culturally, I don't know if these poems can, in a sense they're beyond
me, I have not written them entirely—I wrote them down, but part
of the work comes to me from without. Anyway, if the poems are opportunities
to feel different things at once, then maybe it makes a slight touch
on the way that we talk to each other.
GD: I wish for
you readers who deserve your poems, because that sounds like an aim that's
as old as Keats's negative capability. it's the ability to hold two conflicting
ideas in mind at the same time. And I think it's a quality that I find
in your poetry and it's one that I try to demand from my students, too.
I encourage them in that direction. It's an aspect of what one of my
teachers, John Gardner, who wrote the book On Moral Fiction .
. . people misunderstood what he was trying to do with that book. He
wasn't placing any kind of demand on writers to write in any sort of
narrow moral program, in fact quite the contrary, he was doing much more
of what you're talking about, asking of them a level of honesty that
would achieve artistic and moral honesty, and clarity, and full-fledged
portraits.
JAY: I appreciate
that. I don't know that I deserve readers, but I hope the poems deserve
them.
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