MARY

PHILIP JENKS

This interview was conducted via electronic mail during February of 2007. Philip Jenks, author of On the Cave You Live In (Flood Editions, 2002) and My first painting will be "The Accuser" (Zephyr Books, 2005) probably sat at a computer somewhere in Portland, Oregon; I sat at a couple of different computers in the Bay Area. During the interview process, Philip Jenks proved himself to be much like his poetry, which is to say thoughtful, humorous, and consistently human. I wanted to conduct this interview so that those of us who are already familiar with his poems could obtain some sense (however limited) of the person responsible for them and with the hope that readers who are unfamiliar with his poems might seek them out after happening on this exchange. My sincere thanks to Phil for his time, his care, and his generous spirit.

Graham Foust
April 2007
Oakland, California

MARY Magazine: Can you say something about when, where, how, and/or why you began to gravitate toward poetry?

Philip Jenks: Yes. I believe that the verse is inside of every being, so—at the moment of birth. It's evident in sound, song, narrative, and poetry itself. But that's a limited response. It was probably—let's just say circa 1977, Morgantown, West Virginia. I was ten and Rian Murphy's father (Rian was/is one of my closest friends) was alone in the evening and I was walking the dog. Mr. Murphy was to me a very serious, introspective person. I stopped by to say hello. I don't know why. I just saw him there and there was some gravitation. I approached and contrary to what I thought, he was also welcoming, kind, and still . . . intense. He was reading Rilke. I want to say it was . . . Duino Elegies, but they could have been some selected works. Vivaldi was playing on the turntable. He read Rilke to me and then (to steal from the Velvet Underground) "my mind split open." Along with my folks, the entire Murphy family blew apart my consciousness, so by the time the treasured No One Here Gets Out Alive was published, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, the Beats—it all flowed.

"I can't go with Whitman to the point of 'I accept it all' because . . . I do not."

MM: Some poets feel strongly about belonging to a certain poetic camp or coming from a particular lineage, while other poets have no qualms about aligning themselves with, say, both Robert Duncan and Robert Lowell (two writers that you've referenced in your own writing). Can you say a bit about where you come from and/or where you belong? How seriously do you take "schools" or "movements"?

PJ: I came from a political space of identifying others. That other might be a scab, working to feed his family during a strike, for example. There were glaring contradictions, as in many places, between economic classes. People got shot for crossing the wrong line and that's just how it was. Religiously, my father was an Episcopalian minister (now retired) and theologian, and my mother was close with the Jewish community, although she is not Jewish. It's fine for people to feel they belong to something, whether it is a lineage or camp or culture. I've cut down writers who were too mainstream/canonical and thought I was very punk rock. When I was at Boston University, this was a persistent lesson for me. The program there challenged me to engage with writers I had formerly rejected (Dickinson, Ben Johnson, George Meredith, Donne, et al). I did so vociferously. I think at the time this rejection phase was a necessary precondition for the production of the valuation of a specified identity. It was important to assert what I was not. Some cancellation is necessary to move at all. That being said, over time, I came back to those authors and realized that while I was attacking others for their elitism and/or exclusionary discursive regimes, I was enacting the selfsame regimes within my reading and writing of verse. So, cancellation of self opens up the most powerful field. Movements are crucial, but not the telos of the placement of language in the world. It is a relief to remember that you can read and like what you read and like. I come from a space of favoring crossed-out authors, elided texts, marginalized discourses. In terms of belonging, I gravitate towards what Gloria Anzaldua and Patricia Hill-Collins and Chela Sandoval have done with belonging, identity. Schools and camps, insisting on an either/or, makes as much sense as insisting on gender, without bending, without transgender identity. Hill-Collins speaks of this in terms of the both/and. I can't go with Whitman to the point of "I accept it all" because . . . I do not. But I do lean towards valuing both this and that.

MM: You have "formal" training in both poetry and politics in that you have a creative writing degree and a doctorate in political science. Can you talk about the relationship between these two disciplines (or the lack thereof)? Has your work in one area informed your work in the other? Do you think poetry is capable of doing political work?

PJ: The relationship of the two disciplines is one of mutual alienation from the land of verse and politics, respectively. Both disciplines in their current format frequently leave the work of poetry and the work of politics behind, buried (albeit very differently) under a complex system of hyperspecialization. That being said, both are often about working on being keenly attuned to observing meaning and recording it. The parameters for validating those processes are different, but both do attend to the practice of observation, explanation, and . . . transformation.
    I cannot tell you how often I've been greeted with dismay when I let on that I have training in both fields. Frequently, it is seen as a radical disjuncture. From Plato's Republic onwards (though that is a Eurocentric statement—probably from everywhere onwards), there is an ongoing recognition of the power of language + imagination + memory. I have spent the majority of my time as a political scientist studying the nature of power, specifically in relationship to the body. That, in turn, informs and inflects my treatments of experience in poetry. And, of course, recursively: I could not have written "I didn't write you today" in the same way had I not been studying anorexia with Susan Bordo while encountering it on an everyday basis with my sisters (not familial, but more generally) in the world. That said, I can't imagine belaboring the significance of memory in my dissertation had it not been for work with Derek Walcott and Stanley Fish.
    Poetry does political work. It will not do the same work as other acts, but it is necessarily imbricated in the political realm. Language is incapable of not having political ramifications. Verse, which is always written and spoken into the humanly experienced world, may seek to or have the effect of avoiding the political but in so doing, that too is political work. That avoidant characteristic is perhaps the most terrifying (or in some cases, relieving) of all political "work." Can poetry do the work of transforming the world towards a specified intended political end? I would say, to some extent, yes. Poetry fights forgetting, is Mnemosyne, can help ensure that we, as a people, never forget. It also is capable of doing the work of binding people together, the work of the Polis.

MM: In an essay on Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida speaks of the "spectral errancy of words." For some reason, I immediately thought of your work when I encountered this phrase. In an interview, Derrida says: "Whoever has an intimate bodily experience with this spectral errancy, whoever surrenders to this truth of language, is a poet, whether he writes poetry or not." Do these ideas speak to you at all; that is, do you think of language as having a kind of ghostly, errant condition, and/or do you think of "poetry" as not being limited to those things we market explicitly as "poems"?

PJ: Not that I mind, but that's some heavy company. First, I would say that "whoever" (which has its own ghostly inflections) is a poet. She is from the moment of being born into the world, who "in word and deed" is natal possibility—to steal from Arendt. Poetry is not limited to those things we market explicitly as "poems" because it is happening before those lines and after them and because whatever can be said, can also be not-said and in both cases, there can be music. Is. That "spectral errancy of words" isn't "accidental," but it is the case that whatever is said calls into being what is not. Lights and shadows where nothing is, but can fortuitously, approximate. Surrendering to that proximity, that particular truth of language brings forth not a direct discernable experience, but a bodily experience, which is always already, fallible and in flux.

MM: You grew up in West Virginia. What sorts of meaning(s) does that place hold for you now that you no longer live there? What effects has your being raised there had on your poems?

PJ: I place all kinds of meanings, perhaps unwarranted, on the world I live in. That said, Morgantown and West Virginia as a whole has been and will always be central to my consciousness. My parents, one sister, a nephew all live there and I return as able. Now that I don't live in Morgantown, I experience what not-Morgantown is. I thought when I left for Reed College in 1985, that all who lived in the world, lived as I did. Morgantown means to me, a place and space that is both potent and scary, lethal and a space of possibility. It's shot through with history, both personal and not. One thing that never has changed and I doubt ever will is that I often encounter the presupposition that West Virginia (as if it were a unitary, univocal space and culture) is easily summarized. Often the presupposition is that it is conservative (I'd add that Senators Byrd and Rockefeller are not exactly "conservative"), "redneck," and rural (to mention a few). One effect that this has had on me and also my writing is that there are a lot of presuppositions that have been projected onto me in everyday life. I'm not saying that I've had a tough time—far from it—but there has been a struggle for and against . . . identity/s. I tried to speak to this in my last chapbook How Many of You Are You? (www.dusie.org), which is a set of poems based on photos I took in my hometown.

MM: In her comments on your second book (My first painting will be "The Accuser"), Jennifer Moxley speaks to the "utterly aural" quality of your work. I hear what she's saying, but I also always think of your work as being intensely visual, not only because of your often unsettling images, but also in terms of your sometimes odd spelling (in my mind's eye, "eyees" look different than "eyes," "Krakt paint chips" different than "cracked paint chips") and your frequent lack of titles (the poems don't "look like" poems that one might encounter in a typical poetry anthology). Moreover, the last line of your poem "Angela"—"seen, not shown"—reads to me like a sharp revision of the old creative writing cliché "show, don't tell." Can you comment on the aural and the visual in your work? Also, how do visual art and music make their way into your poems?

PJ: Moxley's comments are extremely generous and I am grateful for them. Hopefully the poems can be intensely visual and . . . utterly aural! To speak on spelling, the aural, and the visual . . . sometimes the extra or clipped is to accentuate an act within the poem (as in the function of y in the Hydra series) and that function is also connected to voices. I often wonder what accent the line is being read in. Who is speaking? And, even if it is always "the author" or what have you, even one person has a multiple of vocables. Not just to riff, or a high octane register of poem-voice, but just all the different voices that we speak and think in and that think in us. Or, think us. I think whatever work I've done well has happened when I've listened attentively. Completed transmission. I basically want to be like a radio. Hope it's in tune and there's something playing. Maybe a weird station no one expected to get, including me. The contours of that process, how it is designed are also going to involve the visual, without question. And, I'd add, visibility and invisibility are significant in my writing. I'm taken with a critique of ocularcentrism, but one way to get there is engaging the ocular. To speak to the poem ("Angela") on this, even though I initiate the act (in this case, getting naked for a photograph to be taken) and the speaker is there doing that, this does not mean he/she have a say-so in whether the speaker is shown. It's a scene. It's seen, not shown. To revisit that creative writing maxim, that's the same line women are fed all the time by men and masculinist culture. Show, don't tell. Ugh. I know the context is different, but really . . . it's an ideology of blotting out voices.
    Regarding music, I'm surprised when music doesn't make it into anything I am involved in. It is a love, an obsession, a vocation, and the site of some of my closest relationships with God. It's part of my daily practice, both to listen and often try to make music. I didn't get to Rimbaud through what I read in high school. It came through Patti Smith and (I must concede. . . . ) Jim Morrison. Much the same with many of my favorite writers. How are the two (poetry and music) separate? I get the differences, but still . . . it's all verse. That includes orchestral and jazz and percussion, as well as great music involving lyric. It's also the most reliable motivator for writing poetry for me. Visual art is also deeply embedded for me. My sister Elizabeth is a phenomenal visual artist so that was something that was regularly blowing up my brain when growing up. Although I love visual art and enjoy it, there is more of a distance than with music. The one exception might have to be photography, especially portraits. I love what is left in and out, attending to that, trying to always attend to recognizing that whatever I write is leaving something out (see ghostly above).

MM: Would you mind speaking about the whats, whens, and wheres of your compositional process? Pen/pencil? Night/day? Public space/private space? Whatever you feel might be interesting to your readers. . . .

PJ: My writing processes are pretty mundane. I type mostly on a computer, though this year I've been setting pen to paper with revelatory results (not necessarily for readers, but for me they have been). Mostly at night and usually as silent as can be. One matter is that even though the poem per se may be written at night, I spend a good bit of time trying to write down phonetically what I may hear of interest when in public and in private. Again and again, good writing for me usually derives from close listening.

MM: A few years ago, I taught your first book, On the Cave You Live In, in an undergraduate poetry class, and several students commented that it "messed with their expectations" of poetry. What are your expectations of poetry as a reader and as a writer? On a related note, what are your hopes for poetry? What do you hope poetry does? What do you hope to accomplish with poetry? Perhaps this is an "Are you there yet?" addition to my first question.

PJ: I'm grateful that the book was taught and glad to mess with anyone's expectations, of poetry or anything else, because expectations are setups for disaster. Disappointment necessarily connected to expectation. As a reader and a writer, I nonetheless have expectations (despite railing against them). First, I have internalized many of the insanely confining expectations for poetry that were alluded to in your question on the visual elements of my work above. How a poem should look. I get this while reading poems too, especially when reading a lot of prose-poems. Even though I mentioned Rimbaud (thinking here of Illuminations), there are a good number of just terrible prose poems in contemporary American verse. I have expectations too. Great verse, to steal from Bob Dylan, is "busy being born" and that is what it is doing. Alive, thriving, reinventing itself on the shelf and off, ricocheting off of whatever parameters I intentionally or unintentionally put on it. I like it when poems open up the possible. It needn't be a loving space, but the attendance to the process when done so with care generates an illimitable sublime. That happened recently when I read Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women. I hope poetry can be more than a few things, including a space where history is transmitted through memory and because so much verse is read in private spaces of solitude—I also hope that poetry can initiate the imaginary while simultaneously turning loneliness into solitude. Sometimes poetry can function as the voice of a generation or time. Whitman and much of the Beat Generation hit on that. But these are accidents and acts. They are unintended consequences of a diversity of cultural nexes coming into place simultaneously or, at a minimum, becoming that in the national imaginary once the poem is retroactively crystallized and refigured through time accordingly. All this verbosity. Isn't poetry (and this comes back to the political) always helping someone (if it is doing its work)? Perhaps it is making a connection in solitude, transformative contact with All Power, or maybe it is functioning as a figuration of the public realm. I am not there yet on any count. Nor is what I have written. But I do hope that, whatever happens, some of the words I have written were of help to others.