MICHAEL COLLIER

A Conversation with Michael Collier

Maria Hagan: Michael, since you're here today as part of the Virginia Commonwealth University Graduate Writers Association Spring Reading Series, perhaps it's fitting to have you start by reading a poem from your new book.

Michael Collier: I'd be glad to. Thanks.  “Mine Own John Clare.”

[“Mine Own John Clare” by Michael Collier from Dark Wild Realm, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

David Wojahn: That’s a splendid poem, Michael. How would you say a writer like Clare has influenced you, and recent poets, because a lot of people have written homages to Clare or in one way or another have found that they’ve been inspired to talk about aspects of his career, like the journey from Essex, for example, which a lot of poets have written about.

MC: There are probably a couple things to think about in terms of Clare. The journal from the journey to Essex I think is such an astonishing document. It’s like Nijinsky’s journal. It shows a human soul kind of bared to all the difficulties in the world. There’s a kind of purity about it, that even though troubled and painful, it’s hard not to respond to as a human document.

The poems for me, I think, are important because of the way that Clare pays kind of scrupulous attention to the world, that the world itself kept him alive and whole, the particularity of the world, and that’s what I’ve always loved about the poems. There are so many of them, and so many of them are similar--it seems to me in kind of the emotional pitch--that I don’t respond to all of them. But there are quite a few. I mean, there’s no one who’s described a nest or a burrow the way that Clare has. And then also the other thing about Clare, and this goes along with the sort of purity of response in him, is the humility you feel and the way in which he praises the world for its beauty and powerful simplicity. Those are things that I respond to in the work. And they keep feeding me, because I think he’s a poet you can go back to and regain a kind of balance after you’ve read certain other poets.

I mean it’s interesting that someone like Ashbery finds John Clare such a powerful poet as well and has talked about this and written about it. You wouldn’t think so much that Clare would be his cup of tea, but these are some of the things that he recognizes in him. And then also you just love the madness in him, the fact that after Byron dies he goes to the funeral, which is a huge event, and then starts to finish some of Byron’s work. That kind of wild impersonation that the painful paranoia generated in him.

He’s also kind of astounding in that he’s totally self-taught. That seems kind of startling to me, and I think in some ways hopeful being a middle class kid and beginning to read poetry and literature and thinking that it was so outside of my experience growing up and to kind of wonder how you could ever get there. Clare shows you it doesn’t really matter; it comes from a different source

MH: Well, it’s interesting that you picked that poem because one of the reviews that I read was talking about Dark Wild Realm as “a singing in praise of the strength of the human will.” And David Baker described your previous work, The Ledge, in this way, “Behind the seemingly sturdy and soft-spoken poems is the psyche under great pressure.” You’ve moved, and [in] this recent book, Dark Wild Realm, your tone is more pensive.

It seems to me you’ve almost achieved a perfect balance between language and observation. Its recollected past, ephemeral moments and even the spirits are sort of unconstrained, which is very different from the psyche under pressure in your last book. So it’s a progression. Another critic said, “Accessible though never simplistic, employing meditative feats of mind while remaining grounded.” Which again is what you’re talking about John Clare.

MC: There are times when I wish I wasn’t grounded, when I could do other things, but that feels to me to be the most familiar place from which to write the poem. And also it provides a kind of resistance as well. Knowing where I am, I can then try and move away from it, because I know I can always come back to something and so it provides a kind of resistance in the writing as well. And then also I can recognize certain things that I’m doing, and keep doing them and then put them aside, if they seem too familiar.

MH: Well, another critic was talking about something very interesting: “Only Poe could invent a comparable aviary”—that’s the way he described it. “Collier’s book circles the question like a bird eyeballing its prey”—even implies that your poem, “Turkey Vulture,” is a political poem. I wonder if you have any comments about that.

MC: I don’t. I read that review. This is the review in Seven Days, the Burlington, Vermont . . . [alternative webweekly]. I thought it was fascinating. The guy . . .

MH:
John Freeman

John Freeman, who’s a good reviewer, read this book through the lens of the times, and I’ve kind of found it interesting, but in terms of my intention, I didn’t think much about that, to tell you the truth. But then once again you can’t help but pick up the lint, the cultural and political lint of the time. But really I wasn’t thinking about that at all, but I suppose there’s a way in which you could read some of the current problems, political problems in the poems. I found it interesting. It just proved again that when you write something, it goes out, and the few people who do encounter it are apt to do something with it that you wouldn’t expect.

And David, I’m sure that this has happened to you a lot of times. You go into a classroom and they’ve been reading a poem or two of yours, and they start to ask you a question. And they say: “Is the horse in your poem . . . does that stand for heroin?” You know.  And you’re just taken aback. But then also you realize once again, that well this is what happens with language. That it’s so fecund. It also tells you what happens when we read poetry. Sometimes we strain too hard to make something out of it. And I’m not saying necessarily saying that that’s what John Freeman did. I found it to be a really fascinating take on the poems.

MH: I think it is interesting. I think people bring to the table what they are focusing on. I think this goes back to last night when you were talking about Medea; when you were writing these poems at the same time you were working on the translation, that consciously you didn’t feel like it was influencing you, but I can see that all over the book.

MC: Right. Yeah, and so, I did put a section in of Medea that when the messenger comes back to report to Medea. Well, not so much report, but to come back alarmed and—

MH: Would you like to read that poem? I’d love to hear that poem.

MC: Do you want it? It’s a chunk. Okay. So I’ve just titled this section “The Messenger,” but it comes very, very near the end of the play. And the messenger’s, of course, addressing Medea.

[“The Messenger” by Michael Collier from Dark Wild Realm published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

MH: That’s a stunning poem.

MC: Well, Euripides is an amazing poet. One of the things about Euripides is that he doesn’t use much simile. There’s very little figure in Euripides. And I think that’s why I liked translating him. He really tells you what’s possible. You’re not allowed to invent much and as soon as you invent, the rhetorical intensity, which is already high in Medea—I mean it starts out in crisis and it only gets worse.  Part of the difficulty for me, is to figure out how to control what I felt what was melodrama and put a little bit of pressure on it. In translating it, I enjoyed it because there wasn’t much figure and you really had to deal with the text as it was. I think that that helped me—keep me on track in a way—in fact, I made a shorter version by about sixty lines. I did a lot of compression.

MH: Octavio Paz said, “After all, poetry is not merely the text. The text produces the poem, a sense of sensations and meanings, with different means but playing a similar role. You can produce similar results. I say similar, but not identical. Translation is an art of analogy, the art of finding correspondences, an art of shadows and echoes, of producing with a different text, a poem similar to the original.”  That circles back to what you were talking about—the melodrama.

MC: The difficulty with doing something like Medea is that if you try and translate what the play is really about—marriage, customs, and laws—the play is awful. Just as it becomes awful if you turn it into a play about feminism, about a woman, “a Medea,” trying to get revenge on this man who’s left her. The other thing is that Medea is a sorceress. And to make her too much of a sorceress would be difficult for us to believe. But that’s where she gets her power. because she’s halfway to being a kind of goddess; she has the power of a goddess but is a human and that’s how the ancient world viewed her. But that kind of resonance really doesn’t exist for us any longer, so all of these things had to be dealt with, and fortunately, I had a really great classicist that I worked with, and she helped clarify many of these issues.

DW: It’s interesting, too, the passage that becomes “The Messenger” really reflects a certain stance that’s in your own new collection. You know how it is in Greek tragedy, the chorus and the messenger always seem to be the voice of conscience; they don’t want necessarily to do anything but comment on the action, witness the action, and when they issue warnings, such as they do at the end, the messenger really speaks with a great deal of subtlety compared to what the messenger probably would want to say. And I guess it goes back to that issue of the psyche under pressure, trying to maintain within that pressure a particular kind of clarity, just witnessing the facts. It connects to the lack of simile in Euripides as well.

MC: Yeah. I think that that’s right. The thing about that speech is that it’s the last—even though the description is violent—it’s the last actually calm moment in the play because the violence of killing the princess has already happened.  It’s over. This is just reporting. And then the next thing that’s going to happen is she’s that going to kill her children. So it’s a kind of pivotal moment at the end of the play. And you understand that we’ve only seen half of the awful violence.

MH: I wanted to talk a little bit about mentors, something that I’d heard you say in another interview. Is poetry being kept alive through creative writing programs? That was the question that was posed to you, and you said that you felt that if creative writing programs are training readers as much as writers, then you believed that they’re doing a tremendous amount of good; however, if one thinks that creative writing programs are making writers sort of fit a form, that there’s a stylistic imperative imposed through that creative writing program, then that’s not good.

Today I counted the creative writing programs on the AWP site, and there are over 300 creative writing programs in this country--which is quite a lot. Even in ten years, I would think it’s maybe gone up by twenty-five percent. So you’re in the trenches—you’re teaching, you’re director of Bread Loaf. I noticed you do summer workshops as well—do you have a heightened sense of the direction poetry is going in? And could you comment a little about the path?

MC: Well, first of all, the thing about the numbers—I think the Iraq War has made us even more aware of the implausibility of numbers. As you were saying, there are 300 creative writing programs, and I was just thinking, well, if you counted up the fine arts programs or the music programs, how many programs would you discover in those fields? I understand that the part of it is that these have grown in the last thirty years, let’s say, last thirty-five—that’s a pretty big chunk of time, maybe the last, year, thirty-five years, so that’s ten programs a year. That’s not so bad. I guess what I’m trying to talk about or maybe have us all talk about.  Why why do they always pick on creative writing? Why do they always pick on fiction writers and poetry as the one creative discipline that shouldn’t be taught or that it’s suspect? That’s one thing I always think about. You know, no one complains too much about the fact that we’re training a lot of painters who will never be Jackson Pollacks or musicians who will never be Yehudi Menuhin or something like that.

MH: I have a teenager and if you have a teenager that wants to get a bachelor of fine arts in painting, you’re probably going to tell your teenager, no matter how creative and how accomplished they are as a painter, realize when you get a BFA in painting you’re probably not going to come out of college with a job as a painter. Particularly if you’re a fine art painter. Maybe you can be a restorationist working for the museum or something like that. That may be part of it. This creative writing program is, are under the aegis of the school of humanities [College of Humanities and Sciences] rather than the school of fine arts [School of the Arts], and VCU does have both. So I’m curious about how you both feel about that, since you’re both directors of programs.

DW: You know there’s a terrific paradox always at play here in that no one would tell you that going to medical school or law school would not prepare you for a career in those disciplines. And yet everybody who goes to law school or medical school will face at one point or another in his or her career some terrific moral quandaries. There will be some challenges. No matter how good you try to be in those disciplines, there will be temptations. And the wonderful thing about teaching someone to write a poem is that it’s a completely benign activity. No one is going to be damaged by writing a poem. It’s particularly the case in poetry because I think most people who study poetry on the graduate level understand that the likelihood that they will be able to have a career in that business is fairly slim, but they love the discipline anyway. And that’s really bracing if you’re teaching, that you’re teaching something that doesn’t really do any damage as far as you can see.

MC: Also that question about whether or not creative writing programs are efficacious comes from the culture itself that says, there’s not a place for poets in the world so maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. And that seems to be even a better reason for doing it. Of course, I teach, so I’m defending my job in a way, but I think that teaching creative writing is no less dishonest than any number of things that are taught. Quite often if you talk to people who go to medical school or law school, they say, “I wish I had done poetry or taken a writing class.” They don’t say, “I wish I’d become John Milton.”

Also there’s a really interesting course that a guy at West Point used to teach. His name was Colonel Rick Karen. This course that he taught was on poetry, and every first year cadet had to take it. And what he did was, he taught contemporary American poets, by the book, and then he would bring them up and read to the students, read to the cadets. One of the rationales behind this was that he felt if these cadets who were going to make up the elite officer corps of the army, if they could understand the ambiguities and paradoxes and contradictions in poetry, that it would make them a better fit when they were out in the foxholes. I mean that was his whole thinking behind it.

And he did it for a number of years, until a new head of the English department came in and decided that this wasn’t a good idea. That what they needed to do was teach war poetry, and that’s what they do now. They teach a course in war poetry. There is a little bit of a metaphor for the present state of the culture. But I think poetry does have this ability to help us deal with things that aren’t black and white and make our thinking more subtle. And that’s why I say that if we make readers of poetry as much as we do writers, I think we’re doing our job.

MH: I was thinking that we could talk a little bit about mentorship.

MC: Sure.

MH: And in that vein, you’ve said that one of your mentors was William Meredith and you’ve also said that one of your mentors was a Jesuit priest.

MC: The Jesuits were mentors, pure and simple, but they were all also mentors in contrast to my first mentors--besides my parents--and those were the nuns of the IBVM—the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I had those nuns from first grade to eighth grade. This is not an unusual story, right? But when I went to high school, to a Jesuit high school in Phoenix, Arizona, there was a kind of rigor that the Jesuits taught us and actually the first thing I remember one priest saying is that, “Now, I want you to forget everything the nuns ever told you.” And that was really liberating. And so their idea was that you had to come to faith on your own. The only good faith was one in which you somehow earned it, and it wasn’t one that you had to just buy into.

And also the Jesuits are educated; they read. Part of their training, as you know, is they have to keep a journal—I mean, that’s a crude way of putting it, in which they do spiritual exercises. It’s a kind of spiritual accounting. You can see this in Gerard Manley Hopkins;there’s a way in which they are trained to use language as a way to interrogate their existential situation. So they’re attuned to language.  They believe in it as a tool. And that’s one of the things that I learned from them, was to honor language in that way.

I had a couple teachers in high school who were very important and who I am still in contact with. They were important mentors. Also I think just the whole atmosphere of skepticism—that’s one of the things they taught was to be skeptical and interrogate and not just to accept what was put in front of you. As much as anything I think that was what I learned—and to love that for itself. That one of the things as humans that we have is our skepticism and our doubt.

More traditional mentors—William Meredith was a great mentor when I was an undergraduate. David and I shared mentors at the University of Arizona. I don’t know how you feel about it, but for me they were really important because, Steve Orlen and John Anderson weren’t that much older than we were, and I felt as if I was watching them make themselves into poets, and I wasn’t too much farther behind, that our concerns were similar. Whereas someone like Meredith, who was so established and honored and revered, he was much more of a kind of father-figure in a way.

But Steve Orlen and John Anderson felt much more like contemporaries, and we would workshop poems together, which I could never see doing now. I mean we would all get together. It seemed the right way to do it then; I mean, they were completely open. And as I say, we were closer in age, and I think there was a way we were reading the same people at the same time. And working—especially somebody like Ashbery—that we were all working through Ashbery at the same time.

DW: But they were mentors—I mean, I always felt that they were the leaders and I was learning from them. They were very democratic. There was a certain philanthropy of expertise that they were giving you. It was part of the friendship that they would be able to help you work your problems out as a writer. I value that immensely. Then they were also terrific poets.

MH: Is that possible in the creative writing programs? I know there are several that use mentorship as sort of a guide for the creative writing programs. It seems to be harder and harder, like you say, to do that.

MC:  I think there’s always, to use that word mentoring, going on. You become a different kind of mentor as you get older. I mean, when I first started teaching, I felt much closer to the students because we were closer in age, and so we would hang out. We had the same interests. And I think I was giving them a different kind of thing as a mentor, a different kind of enthusiasm and passion. Some of it was that I was learning what it was that I loved even as I was teaching. I was learning how to be a teacher. Now I think that one of the things that I do as the teacher, not consciously, it’s just because of where I am and who I am, is to provide a bigger perspective, a greater perspective.

And so in some ways I’m much more accepting now of a range of work than I was twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, I was trying to determine what it was, what kind of poem I was going to write and in doing that I had to make a lot of crude distinctions. Not only for myself, but it got transferred onto the students. It can’t help but do that. But now my goal is much more to see what it is that each student might be headed towards and to help them negotiate that. Many of the students are close in age to my kids, so I have this kind of fatherly—that I can’t help—a more fatherly relationship with them.

DW: I think that was a very valuable lesson I learned—again from John Anderson and Steve Orlen—is that there are a lot of teachers who just want to remake themselves in their students, and some of them can be really charismatic, but from the very beginning, I thought of John and Steve as people who wanted to help me be the best poet that I could be under my own terms and as a teacher that was the most important one they showed me. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about. It’s harder to teach that way, though.

MC: Yeah, it is hard to teach that way. I remember one time when Steve Orlen came over to my house where I was living—and I think John was there too—and he started to go through my books. And I had been in England the year before, and I had all kinds of English poets—Donald Davie and all kinds of more formal poets. And they basically went through my bookshelves and pulled out books and said, “You are not allowed to read these books any longer.” You know part of what they were trying to do was shake up my assumptions and get me to look at things in a different way and that’s what I really needed. I absolutely needed that. I didn’t need to keep writing—my own temperament was to write formally—and my mentors up until that time were poets who were more formal.

Although with Meredith, he was a great teacher because he never said yes or no to anything. It was always—you know he would look at it and ask questions. And then he did the right thing; he would take out a poem that was much more interesting—you know a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—and we would read it and we would talk about it. So to go to Arizona then shortly after that was a good step for me because I was ready for a different kind of intervention.

DW: There’s one aspect in Meredith’s work that always seems to continue to resonate in your work, and it’s, I think, one reason why he’s been a poet who’s been very esteemed but never a fashionable poet. I guess it’s that the goal of those poems is almost invariably celebration. And yet the process in his poems is always to acknowledge how difficult that is.

And when I look at your poems, I see repeatedly through the books—you know, if there’s any one theme, it’s the difficulty of that sort of grace, the difficulty of celebrating the world when you at the same time acknowledge flaws of human character, the way fate grinds you down. All of those things that you examine with a great deal of intensity in order to overcome rather than to mourn, I guess. And that seems to come in some respects from Meredith’s example.

MC: I would agree and one of the great things about fate is somehow that our temperaments were aligned. I think in having gone to school at Connecticut College where he taught, and having sought him out, I was following my nose somehow. And our temperaments got along. And I think that that’s right; I think that’s still at play in my work. I wouldn’t know how to do it, you know,  write poems, except out of that attempt to praise the world even though the circumstances don’t look so promising.

MH: Finally. you’ve said that in all the arts, you have to be in touch with that thing that takes you out of yourself.  I thought maybe you could elaborate . . .

MC: Well, I mean a lot of writers talk about this as a kind of forgetfulness and when you’re writing, it’s not that you forget yourself completely, but at times you feel as if you’re standing aside. Or another way it feels to me is as if I’m purely listening to language, and that’s the thing that I’m completely concentrated on or it’s concentrated in me.

So I lose a sense of myself, lose self-consciousness as well, and you come up at some point in the process and you look down at the page and you seen you’ve written something that is hard to identify, or recognize, in a way. But at the same time it seems—well grace is a good way, is a good word—it seems as if you’ve fallen under some spell, not a magic spell, but the spell of language.