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BRUCE SMITH  The first time I met Bruce Smith, I was a student in a workshop of his. On the first day, he stood by the door and shook everyone's hand and welcomed them as they came in. I don't think there's a better introduction to Bruce Smith than that. Both on the page and in person, he is one of the most open and caring people I've met. I remember something else from that workshop that characterizes both him and his writing: how effortlessly he strung together a conversation about a redheaded woman hang gliding naked, Emily Dickenson's hand-woven notebooks, great jazz, and the Everyman's book of blues poems. What's amazing isn't the breadth of his knowledge, but how smoothly it's assembled in him, as if all of these disparate pieces of art were really one continuous riff, and it was us who just hadn't realized it. This is equally true of Bruce Smith's poetry, which shoots between as many topics with a musicality that insists that they are all part of some large tapestry. Bruce Smith was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has written five books of poetry, including The Common Wages, Silver and Information Mercy Seat, Songs for Two Voices, and The Other Lover, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has been awarded numerous fellowships and been a recipient of The Nation's Discovery Prize. He currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University. This interview was conducted over the course of a couple weeks via that most wonderful of social platforms, the Internet. We met at a cool café called my Inbox, with bare white walls and a motif that can only be called austere.
Zachary Demby
Oakland, California MARY Magazine: Recently, I sat down and spent some time with your latest book, Songs For Two Voices, which showcases two dominant forms: dual poems spliced together and poems comprised of two parts set side by side. Can you talk a little about how these forms came about, and what your intentions were? Bruce Smith: I'd say beware of statements of intentions, but here's something I wrote to try to explain the form, the endeavor, which comes really from a discontent that the poems I had been writing were being written into the urn of themselves and I had an urge to write the poem that gave witness to a conversation, maybe two voices, even if they were at odds with one another. There is a song and a countersong. A call and response. A duet. The reader may read the poem as two poems—one poem made up of all the justified lines of the left margin and the other poem as all the indented lines. Or the reader may choose to read the poems as one piece whose music and movement is antiphonal. One line launches out and one hesitates, reconsiders, or launches out in its own |
| "I tell my grad students there's a ten-year apprenticeship that might be seven if you are lucky and are ready and ripeness is all." |
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direction. One sings; the other has a story to tell. One voice leads, the other follows—backwards and in high heels, as they said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. If there's a self, there's also a soul. The poem is of two minds. A yoking of history and ecstasy, haiku and hysteria, the text and its gloss, the lie and the truth. The poem read this way is interrupted—but what is not?—so it is partial, but with an abundance of partiality. The groove and the break. The tune and the improvisation. Trembling and transversing. Making (mastery) and receiving (mystery). Purpose and accident. Not just binaries.
MM: You describe your poetry in terms of music—and there is certainly a lot of music in your poems—and this is evident even in your use of sound. I am thinking especially of "Song Of The Least Thing," of the five-act play in "Song Of Loss In The Form Of A Cock Ring." The play of sounds gives a great music to your work. Could you talk about the role of music and sound in your poetry? BS: It's all in the music. Do you know The Roots song from "Game Theory"? Zukofsky suggested that poetry has as a lower limit, speech, and as an upper limit, music. I'd like to think that it aspires to song on the one hand, the constantly recurrent, tragic Orphic song, descending into hell to retrieve something from the darkness. I'm interested in how to give the raw stuff of poetry the music it needs, how to music it. James Brown said, "I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums." In other words he found a way to make a new music that was his deliverance and uniqueness. (James Brown Lives!) I'm less interested in that lower border, of speech, of garrulousness that I find in a lot of American poetry, talking over the cups and saucers. So I'm interested in musicality and I'm interested in music also as an important conversation in poetry, a metaphor for the practice, because trying to write about music is like trying to talk or write about the invisible, the gods, the divine. When the language works to seduce and music us, to move us, when it works its blues on us, bounces us and trembles us, makes us swerve from our upright and rational propositions, when it mothers us out of here, as Roethke says, we are thinking and listening at the same time or really listening and not thinking, like a good song does. Dickinson was a great torch singer, ripping up the hymns to deliver a music that was ardent as it was skeptical of the whole male enterprise. I like her music too, and Whitman's barbaric yawp, and the ballads. Pound said poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. I believe that. And not to have quote-itis, but I like what Keats said, "inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress / Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd / By ear industrious and attention meet." MM: Jazz plays a large role in both the form and content of your poetry. How would you say jazz has influenced your poetry, and more generally, what it has to offer poetry? BS: Jazz on a basic level is the improvisation within the tradition. Doesn't that sound like what you and I are trying to do? And Blake and Bishop and Hopkins. I like the apprenticeship that's implied in jazz. Before you can blow you had better acquire the skills beforehand, woodshed, as they say, which for poets is reading and practicing and failing. Jazz in my mind is also an antidote and adversarial stance to pop music, which, as Oppen said, can only say what the audience already believes. And finally, I came across this statement recently by jazz musician Don Byron: Byron says his highest aspiration is to make people "disturbed, but to like being disturbed." That's a quality I associate with jazz and a lot of the poetry I like. MM: I enjoy your idea of poetry as an improvisation within a tradition, but I sense in it the faint outline of a responsibility behind this power to infinitely create, a responsibility to disturb or sit in opposition to Pop. Could you talk little about that? BS: Yes, that's an excellent reading, Zach, the responsibility to disturb and oppose. Paz said, "Poetry is always dissident." And think of Stravinsky, his great disturbance, the 1913 première of Le Sacre du Printemps, with fistfights among audience members and the police called in for Act Two. Dickinson said, in a less riotous way, "I could not find my Yes," still an opposition, a refusal to accommodate the prevailing culture, which is, as I see it, a large, monolithic one based on wealth and ego and megalomania and television thirst reduction, which sounds like Pop if you add celebrity. But in a larger way, poetry opposes not only Pop, but monotheism, the single way to be or to perceive. Poetry at its best creates other possibilities, a more expansive model of the human, listens to other frequencies, "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds," as Wallace Stevens says. Poetry is not easy listening music designed to make your ears fall asleep as you shop or drive home after a day at the office. Poetry (Jesus, I'm making these pronouncements like I'm Donald Rumsfeld; just slap me) has the opposite effect, I think. It has the "What? Huh" effect. MM: One line that I remember from the book is "two minds of Harlem and Hollywood." I notice this as a common thread through many of the poems, this convergence of black and white. There seems to be something very American about that. Can you talk a little about that? BS: I think being of two minds follows the idea of polytheism in poetry. Why not be of two hundred minds? Why not a male and female mind? Why not a white and black mind? The poems in the book are of two minds; you can see how they are divided. There's a lot of the split you pick up on as Harlem and Hollywood, a black and white split, and consequent possibility. I see a lot of "boys" in the book, by which I mean both in the pejorative, exasperated sense, in the sense in which a woman might say, "Boys," when she's speaking and in the way of certain male behavior and Huck Finn, who finds himself in a condition where he must make sense of America (white, hostile) and become a race-traitor and anarchist and dreamer. He's full of wonder and horror. He must be of two minds, as we say when we're conflicted, or four or forty. Being of two minds. Yeats talks about this. To be alive is to be conflicted (Isn't that the first Noble Truth of Buddhism?) or at least to be receiving a couple of different channels: Whitman and Dickinson, to name two that I listen to on my internal satellite radio. Two minds: the vital personal stuff (the pang) and the world in its tribulation and horrors. MM: I'd like to hear more about this internal satellite radio. What else does your antenna pick up? BS: It picks up (I'm looking at the books on the floor) C.D. Wright's Cooling Time and King Lear and Ishmael Reed's Collected Poems, and Adorno's Minima Moralia, and Dickinson, of course, and two CDs by the Jazz Passengers, and Air Guitar by Dave Hickey and The User's Guide to the Brain, and Wayne Kostenbaum's Cleavage, and Catullus and the Penguin Book of Love Poetry, and Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. MM: I was hoping here you could give a little biographic context to your poems. They go often between Alabama and Philadelphia. How have these places found their way into your poetry? BS: I used to teach for three years in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, one of the antipodes. Philadelphia is my native ground. I try to span those distances emotionally and try to make sense of the American nature of those places. Alabama's troubled history and its spawning of Sun Ra and Willie Mays; it's a place of great racial division and great struggle and mercy. The place of the bombers of the lambs and heroes. Philadelphia is a place to me that's not New York and not DC, a place that's somewhere in between and always becoming. MM: Speaking of biography, how did you become interested in writing poetry? BS: I think I got interested in high school not writing, but reading poems, secretly and copying them out and sending them to a girl I was interested in who lived across town. I started out to woo her and was wooed in turn by poetry itself, its seductive power. MM: This question goes back to jazz, and in particular the idea of the apprenticeship implied there. How does that apply to poetry? BS: I tell my grad students there's a ten-year apprenticeship that might be seven if you are lucky and are ready and ripeness is all. So Miles comes to NYC in 1944 to study at Julliard and to study at the feet of Charlie Parker. In seven years of being in the sweatshop of the band, he plays like no one else and practically invents "cool." He didn't just stand up one night (and face away from the audience) and have what James Baldwin called "the sacred fire" come out of his horn. He had a long apprenticeship. I'll answer the question another way by asking if you have you been to or participated in slams? I've been the judge for a couple, and my beef is that the slam loves the performance and if you are loud enough and have a hurt or a grievance, you can score 9.7. But where's the apprenticeship? Where's the kind of meditation and listening and failing and trying again that writers and jazz musicians do? They woodshed, like monks and nuns. They go into the woodshed and listen to their predecessors (they are that which we know, says Eliot) and then they can wail. They have their talent contested and put through the smithy of the soul and they have some chops and something else to rely on when the talent fails. MM: You also teach at the MFA Writing Program at Syracuse University. How does teaching poetry affect your writing? Your views on poetry? BS: I like teaching at Syracuse. I like my colleagues whose lives and work are exemplary to me. I like the grad students who go poor for three years and devote themselves to their art and learn the craft. I read the poems dispassionately sometimes and forget what all goes into them in the way they are stunned by existence and have a radiance I can't name but like to bask in their reflected glory. I find that I can be hurt and charged and moved by the work. Sounds exaggerated and goofy, but it's true. Otherwise I'd work on the docks or coach football as I used to do. My views on poetry have changed by rubbing up against and sniffing what the grad students are doing and what's out there that I, in my sclerotic ways, might not be aware of. Work by C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander and this new book by Ben Lerner and their enthusiasms for Dean Young or less new stuff like the work of Creeley or Oppen that I haven't paid enough attention to. Brenda [Hillman]'s new work. They help me, the ungrateful little bastards. |