Mowing: a Conversation with Neil Perry about his Upcoming Book Joy (or Something Darker, but Like It)
When asked how we came to write––or do any of the things that we do habitually for that matter––we typically have a well prepared story in mind. One that likely consists of two or three key moments, discoveries, or interactions that brought us out of our blank state of not doing a thing, and into a sculpted, defined being that does a thing.
We tell these stories in this fashion to those who ask for a couple reasons: one, you simply need something to say. You can’t just stand there drooling from your open mouth. You need some way to account for how you have arrived at this moment as a person that does one thing and not another. And, two, more importantly, it is the only way that we can typically articulate the past. Maybe we can feel the past in a more genuine fashion––in its fluidity and messiness and its at times schizoid-associativeness––but we typically do not have the capacity to articulate it in a fashion that resembles this unless we are speaking to the most patient of audiences, which is very often not the case when the question, How did you come to do what you do arrives to us.
But for all the past’s ambiguity there do exist moments of undeniable, near-objective importance within in our how-did-you-get-here stories. Neil Perry, the subject of this interview, exists for me as one of these moments. He was my first writing teacher in college, the first person to show interest in me as an artist, and the first person to suggest that I give writing some serious thought as a life choice. When I displayed insecurity in my work and reluctance to take it on as a serious endeavor (as a lot of young people will, and probably should, when faced with the possibility of art as a career path) he went so far to force my hand and publish a poem of mine without my permission in the student art’s journal to prove a point to me: it was good enough to give a shot. When I graduated he more or less held my hand through the process of applying and getting admitted into MFA programs and ever since has remained an invaluable guide in continuing on in writing and publishing. Sometimes the past is a collection of ghost stories––justifications for our actions by pointing at empty chairs and hallways. Other times something flesh-and-blood real will come along and direct us.
The reception of art and literature can also feel like this. There are many books and films and art pieces I can recall and say that I began to act a certain way because the piece, the thing, influenced me to do so. Something was not known before the reception of the work in question, that once received and understood, life could not go on in the same fashion it had prior. But other times, perhaps more often, it is not like this. A piece’s effect on us will be confusing, mysterious, but haunting all the same. Our actions may change, but it will be gradual and unconscious, a slow shifting of behavior until we are forced to recognize by some accidental gaze into the mirror that something in us has changed.
The way we connect with the art we are presented with is very much the same way in which we connect to the people that come in and out of our lives. We relate to it, we seek commonalities, we project ourselves into it. And we allow it to shape us either by conscious acceptance or unconscious filtration. Yet the way we talk about this process––this process of being shaped by art––can often feel stilted, untrue, and overly scientific. We begin to speak of the qualities of the piece. Or the overall achievement of the thing within the greater context of other pieces. These things, of course, are important, and maybe help explain why a great number of people have been moved and shaped by a given piece, but they do not help us account for, in a truthful fashion, why we, as individuals, were moved. Because that accounting requires more than a simple description of technical qualities and achievements. That accounting requires an accounting of the self as well.
In his upcoming book Joy (or Something Darker, but Like It) Neil attempts to provide such an accounting. It is a book about parenting and being a person as much as it is a book about poetry. Each essay is crafted not simply as a literary analysis, but rather as an attempt to find one’s life within poetry and poems and to use these works as guides. There are very few people I know that have been able to meld their writing life so seamlessly with their actual life, and these essays are a testament to that. And over the summer I was lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with Neil at his bustling nine acres in Farmville, Virginia––a home full of chickens, dogs, kids taking Spanish classes, and many, many books of poetry––and talk about some of these things.
A big part of the first few essays of the book is the idea of wrestling with the poles of experience: the subjective, imagined world bumping up against the agreed upon objective world. And you consider this through the role of parenting, and the tension of allowing your kids to entertain the subjective versus informing them of the greater reality surrounding them. Where discovery can lead you and where it maybe needs to be confronted or railed in. The opening essay uses Edward Thomas as a reference point to this idea in relation to creative curiosity. You use the word interest, and explain it as a pure creative speculation of one’s world for no greater reason than to be dumbfounded. And being dumbfounded for no reason beyond the act opens you up to a kind of self preservation. Maybe you could talk about this idea of interest and its relation to personal sustainability.
I think in the essay I was pulling that word interest out the first poem I was talking about in the piece, which is the poem “Blenheim Oranges”––one of my very favorite poems written by anybody ever––which has the line toward the end of it, when the writer is looking in at empty houses, “I am something like that, / only I am not dead,/ Still breathing and interested / In the house that is not dark” and that rhyme, still, gives me chills on the back of my neck. It just did. The dead and the interested is such an incredible rhyme. But the line made me think why, in that moment, when Thomas is mourning the loss of so much of his world in WWI, and he himself is about to go to war, why would he pull that word out? That word that is so detached and scientific. That he’s interested in the house that is not dark. So, you know, he’s saying he’s interested in life.
And this was one of the earliest essays that I wrote for the collection so I didn’t have the structural way I was going to build all of them out, but they all ended up being centered around an abstract concept like that anyway––like interest, or faith, or doubt, or imperfection––but so I was thinking about how that idea of being interested is like a lifeline. That if you’re not interested, what the hell are you doing here? Like when my students are just sitting in class like bumps on a log with no interest or preparation for class and I feel myself getting bothered. But it’s not because I care what grade they get. That’s not important to me. I just want them to be interested. Like plugged in.
And in the context of parenting your job is to try to model behavior as much as it is to teach it. So I began thinking on how much of that interest is native to us. I think quite a bit. And how much is sort of beaten out of people over the course of their lives? And how much can I model as a father? And I guess the answer is I don’t know. None of the essays, I hope, come with some obvious conclusion on how to parent. Because obviously you make tons of mistakes. Just like you do when writing poems. Because every poem you write, to some extent, is a failure. And so is every move you make as a parent. And so I was trying to think of that interest as an active awareness of the world. But also how do you make sure your kids are plugged into the world and themselves in that vital way? That way that Thomas sees as his last sort of life raft.
A major thrust of the book seems to be an idea of play for play’s sake. Or interest for interest’s sake. And avoiding the pitfalls of over-valuing things like accomplishment and achievement. And this opening essay does a great job of keying readers into this idea of pure activity. Allowing yourself to be profoundly interested in your work or in the world for no reason beyond it is important to do so.
Well I hope it keeps me humble also. I was thinking a lot about the advice you get when you start parenting when I was writing these early essays because the kids were very young at that point and we were reading a lot of parenting books. And the vibe of those parenting books is basically I have this advice that I understand and I am giving it to you so that you can understand it and do things the correct way. And I always felt from the start that just wasn’t really possible. There’s no real correct way to parent. Sure don’t leave them in a house alone when they’re four, but it’s a fallacy to tell someone who’s raising an individual, raising a human, that there is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do. So I wanted to investigate this idea of just being interested in the process. Understanding just being plugged into the world as, like, pretty good parenting. Or as good enough. Because that’s all you can do. Just see if you can keep them plugged in. And stay plugged in yourself.
I want success for my kids, sure. But more than anything I just want them to grow up and be decent, happy people. That’s really the ultimate goal. That’s how you win. Material stuff, what colleges they go to, all of that is of course important, but it’s not the important thing about being a parent.
The other thing behind all of this, one of the overarching goals of writing these essays was being interested––and maybe that’s why I put that essay first ––because that’s how I think about my relationship to poetry. On some level I’m just fascinated with poetry. I don’t think it’s gonna send me into a transportive ecstasy. I don’t think poetry is my religion. I am just really interested in the mystery of what language can do. So in that, I was just wondering what it would be like if I wrote essays where I read poems and pulled something out of them that allowed me to think about my own life. So not doing a reading of the poem where I’m just trying to analyze them from a purely literary perspective, but seeing if there is any way that this poem can teach me anything about being a person. Or about being a parent. I think I said in the copy materials for the book that I’m looking for advice in the poems. Which is maybe hilarious because you probably don’t want to look to poets for advice on a lot of life’s problems, but that’s what I wanted to do because that’s how I read poems. And to some extent I think that’s how everyone reads. Like when I ask a group of students who are completely new to poetry about a poem, almost always someone will say Well, I like this poem because I can really relate to this part of it. And sometimes we dismiss that reaction as immature or ground level but really that’s how we understand most things no matter how much we know. We relate to them.
It’s interesting you bring up this idea of looking at poems with less of a literary perspective when trying to understand them. There is this discussion in the book toward the end about meter that gets at this. Meter and form can be very alienating if you’re approaching them for the first time and you’re confronted with the idea that there might be a right way to read a poem. But the way you discuss them makes them seem much more approachable. And I think you do that by reframing the poem as an artifact of life rather than an artifact of literature. And thus these technical aspects are sort of reframed not as things you need to know to get the right answer, but as things that might just allow you to get a little closer to a piece of life, which, if it is a piece of life, you accept from the outset that you can never harness the wholeness of ever anyway.
In the 90s and early 2000s the word accessibility was thrown around the poetry world a lot usually as a kind of epithet. Like this poem is an accessible poem. And they would be describing someone like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver. And I’m not speaking to their literary quality but to me all poems are accessible. You just read them! It just is there. No one would say a piece of music is more or less accessible than any other piece of music. You just sit there and listen to it. And take away from it what you will. And so I’ve always thought of poetry that way. And probably the main reason that I think people don’t read poetry is that they seem to understand it another way. They think they have to be able to understand some certain thing about it before they’re allowed to access it. And in these readings I just wanted to approach these poems and see if they could help me deal with some things I was dealing with in my life. Notably worrying about screwing up raising my kids.
And it’s not like there are not more complicated things to learn about poetry. You can understand meter or you cannot. And that’s fine. But if you understand the technical things for instance it opens another avenue for experiencing the poem. But it’s not necessarily a greater or better avenue. It’s just another avenue.
There’s an essay in the collection concerned with the idea of craft. You define it in the following way: “If it means merely a prescribed set of skills being used in historically set patterns, like say a weaver’s first true go at a basket, or a carpenter's well lathed rail, maybe not. But if we mean by craft an attention to something other than the self, or maybe an attention to the self as part of a larger process, not as the full progenitor of the process, then we might be onto something.” I think this is an idea on craft––learning the technical aspects of your trade in order to take part in the larger tradition––seems to either get missed by a lot by people or met with a lot of resistance. It really can be a difficult thing to convince someone of, but I think the way you articulate it does a great job of making sense of the reasoning on why you should give it a shot.
I think the primary complaint about form is that it’s an obstacle to saying what you want to say. But I want the obstacle. I’m afraid of what I have to say. I’m afraid if I just say it, it won’t be right. So for me the obstacle offers the opportunity to say it but in a mediated way. For me it’s about removing as much of the self from the poem as possible. And I’m not saying that in some modernist way. Like there’s no such thing as a self. My poems are full of me. But I want to remove the self-importance. I don’t want my poems to just be an expression of me. I want them to be an expression of poetry. And meter lets me mediate that space. But also speak to a larger tradition.
The critic Gillian White wrote a book called Lyric Shame where she talks about this––about the fear of the self in poetry. There is basically a throughline of poets being embarrassed about poetry she suggests. Elizabeth Bishop has that quote where she says “There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.” And Goeffry Hill says, and this is one of my favorite quotes, “The goal of the poet should be expressiveness, not self expression.” And that distinction I have always just loved. So that’s what I’m always going for. And the contemporary poetry that I don’t find satisfying seems to be just a kind of self on the page. Without thinking about how the self is engaging with larger traditions. Both of craft or other things. And I’m not saying metered poetry is better than free verse. That’s not true. There are plenty of free verse poets who engage with these larger ideas and traditions in their own way but for me meter and rhyme specifically have become ways to create that mediation. To aim for expressiveness, as opposed to self-expression. Kind of like the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. You’d much rather be righteous.
The Geoffrey Hill essay is something worth talking about as it relates to the idea of completeness within your work. And the idea of achievement. Moving out of the state of creative excitement and making an artistic object. I’m interested in this in relation to seeking satisfaction through achievement. In the Geoffrey Hill essay you talk about this a little. You say, “The true solitude I alluded to earlier, which you might equate with a sort of true faith which often eludes Hill’s speakers cannot be involved with the god of self love.” Maybe you could walk through the development of that essay and the god of self-love that gets proposed and how that relates to the idea of pursuing achievement.
Well I think I pulled that from a Hill poem. From his book Tenebrae. Hill has always been really important to me. He’s the only author besides George Scarbrough that I’ve actually done, like, book collecting for. I think I have all of his books in both hardback and paperback and from both England and the U.S. Besides maybe the first books. Was that me fetishizing an author? Absolutely. But also there is something about his work that really moves me. Part of it is I’m really intrigued by how his work sits in the twentieth-century canon. He’s often accused of being too difficult. And his response to that was that difficulty is democratic. If your poems are purposefully simple, they’re just propaganda, he would say. His poems are difficult, but he would say that anyone can still understand them because anyone is still a human with a brain. That’s his attitude. And I always found that both pompous and fascinating all at the same time. My work doesn’t really resemble Hill’s work because he was just so, so, so much smarter than I’ll ever be, but that attitude and outlook I’ve always found very interesting.
But I also love his approach to belief and to religion. He was married to an Anglican minister but he himself was never a professed Christain. He was a professed unbeliever. But he knew more about Christianity than any other contemporary poet. He’s often referred to as a religious poet even though he was not, by his own admission, religious. But so he was someone who thought deeply about what it means to believe and what it means to not believe. And how doubt can be both generative and also sad. He would often say that he wanted to believe. That it would be very comforting. But he could never intellectually bring himself there. And I think that’s maybe a loose sort of characterization of my own spirituality. I’m fascinated by the idea of mystery and believing in things but I am certainly not a professed Christian. I have gone to church. I’ve gone regularly and even taught Sunday school. But I’m more interested in the mystery that sits in the middle of the Bible than I am in saying all of it is true. Or any other religion for that matter. I find that mystery in a lot of spaces. And Hill probes that uniquely for me. And religion for him I think is a lot like what we were talking about with form. It offered him an opportunity to get beyond the self. And that’s one reason why the doubt is hurtful for him. Because on one level he believes that the doubt means he just can’t get out of his own ego. Maybe that’s where I am too. But with that god of self-love, I think he is saying that some people replace even the generative doubt with just a full belief in themselves. And for him that is destructive.
Because that same book, Tenebrae, is also about Englishness. And about looking back on the imperial history of England and thinking about how that also comes out of a sort of national self-love. And a very, very destructive one.
This idea of faith that’s being brought up through the Geoffrey Hill essay is one that’s not ideal or maybe one that might be difficult to accept for a lot of people. It’s a faith that both understands wholeness is not possible in the pursuit of whatever you’re engaged in, but understands the pursuit or desire itself is undeniable and must go on. Learning to cherish the fact that you’ll never have a whole grasp of the thing but you cannot help yourself from trying to obtain it.
Yeah, and a second ago you were talking about ambition, right? Or wholeness as far as creating work is concerned. And to me that’s how you have to think about it. You have to recognize to some extent all poems are not going to be completed. And if that’s where you put your faith into––if your goal is your own ambition then you’ll never be satisfied. And I know that. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t feel petty. And wish for more success. But you are in the end here for that craft part.
I think specifically with you that question is really interesting. The ambition question. I remember talking to you maybe five or so years ago when I was really just getting going on my own writing life, and I was younger and very hungry and ambitious and was understanding getting better at writing in sort of an athletic fashion. Like putting in reps. Getting to the desk and putting in the hours. And I remember you telling me that you had this house full of kids, a bunch of dogs, a demanding teaching job, and you said basically you weren’t getting to the desk to write as often as you used to.
I don’t even have a desk.
Well it made me think of this story that Steve Yarbrough told me a few years ago about Tim O’Brien who is a friend of his. It was about twenty-five years after The Things They Carried came out and Tim had, at that point, pretty well established himself as a very important figure in the American fiction world. But at that point he was in the midst of a pretty famous hiatus from writing. The last book he’d put out was in 2002. The two of them were at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and having a drink and Tim simply asked Steve if he ever took breaks from writing. To which Steve said something along the lines of, Yeah, little ones sometimes. And Tim apparently said, Yeah, well I’m in the middle of a big one right now. And when Steve got around to asking why Tim had taken so much time off all Tim said to him was that his dad hadn’t been there for him growing up and that he would like to be there for his kids while they grew up. And they left it at that.
I thought that was so interesting in relation to you because it’s basically the complete opposite of your thinking. Tim O’Brien saw art as this thing that was butting up against his life. Something that he couldn’t have while also living a full life. Or that it wasn’t compatible with family life and everything else. And sometimes I feel that way too: that I’m clutching to the work and pushing everything and everyone else out because of it. And it becomes this very morbid, isolated thing sometimes. Like an addiction of sorts. But this book, and the way you’ve been talking to me about writing for however many years, is much different from that. And I think these things we’re talking about, resisting the allure of achievement and the god of self-love are tied into that.
But it comes with costs, right? Like right now in the poetry world to get a lot of a certain kind of success you have to be pretty dedicated to hustling. Doing social media, book tours that you’ve either paid for and booked yourself or you’ve paid a publicist to put together for you. And some of that is completely incompatible with having a family. And so, as there have always been, there are structural inequalities for who gets to be a writer. For instance a middle-aged mother of school-aged kids has perhaps a smaller chance of succeeding in the poetry world. But a young childless person has a better shot at it if they’re willing to put the energy into that hustle. But for me that hustle was never feasible. You could call it laziness, or we could pretend it was some higher devotion to art, but I just can’t hustle like that.
During my time being a writer I’ve always wanted to push back about that division you were talking about. Between life and being a writer. I think there’s a lot of fetishization of writing time. And I will admit that fiction takes a little bit more work. Poets don’t want to hear that but it is true. Writing fiction simply requires more butt hours in the seat. I mean writing these essays took a lot more butt hours than writing poems. But I still don’t think those hours are incompatible with living a full life. And a lot of times people will fetishize their writing time, they’ll send their kids to camps in the summer so they can focus, or they’ll have an office in town so they can focus, but I’ve always just much preferred that my life be enmeshed fully with my writing. And if that means I write less then I write less.
And what Tim O’Brien said is, in ways, also absolutely true. One thing you learn when you have kids is that they’re born and it seems like their little-kid-hood stretches forever into the horizon and you can’t imagine how you’ll make it through this time when they’re babies in diapers and then they turn six and you say, Oh shit, I only have twelve years left. And you see them growing into people before your eyes and it all goes into fast forward and all of a sudden they’re fifteen, thirteen, and eleven and you’re thinking in ten years they’ll all be gone. Out of the house. And so maybe it’s not that Tim O’Brien just wanted to be there for his kids, it’s probably that he realized that moment, when your family is in the house, is incredibly fleeting. And if you want to have that moment, you’d better be there for it. Do you really want to look back and say, I wrote a book instead of being at dinner every night?
During Covid we started having cocktail time as an official, like, family thing. So five o’clock would come around and we’d all sit in here and Kate and I would have a drink and the kids would have a soda or whatever and at first they were really resistant to it but now it’s like they remind me. They’ll come up and be like, It’s cocktail time. Aren’t we going to sit? And it’s a really good reminder of what really matters when you’re doing the family thing. You gotta be there. And these essays grew out of those experiences. I mean most of these essays are about things I did with my kids. You’ll find the time to write if you keep that part of your brain lit. Which is probably how I explained it however many years ago; like a pilot light in your head. If it’s on, you’re good. And a whole year can go by so long as the light stays on.
Some people think of it differently of course. They think if they don’t write every day they’ll lose some ability. Or lose some focus. And it would be great if I could write every day but I just can’t. And I would wager that most people can’t. Most people should attend to their friends, their families, their pets, whatever. All those things are just as important as writing. That god of self-love too often appears in your writing as this though. As this necessity to push things away and write.
And that desire, that allure of self-love, will alway morph into the next thing, right? Like when I first started writing stories I kept thinking to myself, if I could just write one good and full story I’ll be good. I’ll have done it. Then I finished one and was like fuck, well I need a collection. If I can finish a collection then I’ll be good. I finished that. Then I was like well it needs to get published. And I need to write a novel too. And I need awards and grants too. And on and on.
And it never stops. Your career goes on and at some point you’ll be like well why didn’t I win the Pulitzer Prize? I know Robert Pinsky, who was my teacher at BU, he was always a little miffed that he hadn’t won it. He’d won everything but was still quietly pissed about that. But it was a good reminder about the nature of ambition.
And maybe that’s a good thing about it too right? Like what good would ambition be if you were all of a sudden satisfied after finishing something? It’s like Hill’s version of belief. Once you do believe, is there not the concern that you’d be ossified in that belief? So in the end, though Hill never put it this way, in some ways you’re better off doubting. You have more to learn if you doubt and don’t believe. Because some of the least curious people I’ve ever met are the people who are sure of what they believe in. And I don’t ever want that. So maybe I can be nicer about Robert (who, himself, is deeply kind). Maybe he was just never sure he was writing what he wanted to write. And maybe that’s how all poets and writers really are.
I think there’s an essay specifically about this idea in the book. The George Scarbrough essay. This idea of accepting what is in front of you as everything and restaining your need to be recognized or celebrated. Maybe you could talk about that and your relation to Scarbrough a little.
Yeah so I mean Scarbrough is definitely an ideal in that way. Not that it’s a life I could have lived. By myself in my mother’s house writing poems every day. He had a kind of secular monastic existence, especially toward the end of it. And in fact even his whole life, after his childhood where he was one of seven kids in a sharecropping family, was very isolated. He was gay and never had a lover for any extended time (that we know of) and really just had a lifelong relationship with poetry. And so what were his ambitions? As a writer, it’s really hard to pin down. He published three books with a good publisher in the late 40s and early 50s but something about that wasn’t satisfying. It was the wrong kind of ambition. So instead his ambitions were to have that different life. A different, more intimate relationship with poetry. Now did he still have ambitions to be well known? Absolutely. He published poems in Poetry his whole career. He published more books with Iris Press. But he remained isolated. He never left his part of Tennessee. He never left his mother’s house.
That section over there (referring to a part of the bookshelf where Scarbrough’s collected works are in every edition imaginable) is all the Scarbrough. I probably have the largest private collection of George Scarbrough in the world. Reinhardt University has all his papers. But after that archive I feel strongly that I have the most. There was a period where I was buying everything of his that would come up on ABE books because I was scared that one day they would all just be gone. Like destroyed. So for me Scarbrough sits like a personal myth. I know he was a real person, but for me he sits as a kind of ideal that I would never actually want to be, but because he existed it makes me happy. It makes me happy that there was this person that was devoted to language for no other real reason than the devotion itself. In the way that monks are supposed to be that for religious people.
My second collection of poems is mainly about monks and solitude and thinking about some of these same things. Monks are supposed to be doing the hard work of one-minded devotion to god for all the other Christains who are busy doing other things. But then of course monks are the most intellectual and the most likely to be thinking about the mystery of doubt and belief. The mystical tradition comes out of monks. So in ways, though they are supposed to be the most secure in their faith, monks are often the least secure. And that’s what makes them so smart, right? So for me Scarbrough is like that. His relationship with poetry is like that of a monk with belief. He exists as an almost impossible thing: a gay man in the 1940s in rural east Tennessee, living alone in his mother’s house, writing these poems that I think are some of the best American poems written in the middle of the 20th century, and no one still really knows who he was. Me and Forrest Gander and a handful of others. And that’s pretty much it. But I guess it gives me hope. That if you don’t meet those earthily, boring, petty ambitions that your work can still last.
And on a literary level I just find that his poems are amazing. Incredible. His devotion to art in such a weird way made his poems beholden to no one tradition. At one moment he can sound like Robert Frost. In another he can sound like Ezra Pound. At another he’s Seamus Heany and then he might sound like classical Chinese poets. He’s all over the map. I can’t think of another poet from his time period that so clearly had no singular devotion to a style. He’s just everywhere. And it’s all good. And I want that. Too often I find my writing falling into familiar patterns. Like writing about vegetables. Or writing predictable, metrical patterns that have become the norm for me. And poets like him remind me that it’s okay to break out of that. Like my weird little psalms that you published in the most recent edition of Cult, that’s me trying to do something a little different. Trying to do something that gets me a little outside of my own experience and bring in some less predictable things into the poems.
There’s a really striking line in the Scarbrough essay. And it’s not even really a big focal point. It sort of just appears and leaves very quickly. But the line is “He was dedicated to melding himself with the land, and he almost did.”
I think I was quoting James Galvin in his book The Meadow, where he’s talking about his neighbor Lyle, where he says something along the lines of “He lived a life in which the landscape almost let him in.” That idea that you could become part of a place.
Well it reminds me of another writer who said something somewhat similar. Breece D’J Pancake. There’s this quote from a letter he wrote to his mother back in West Virginia when he was in school at UVA about both the pull he felt to return home and his reluctance to go back. He said “I have left my ghost up in one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave.” I think this ties into this idea of being in the land and it functioning in both these writer’s cases as an artistic obsession. It’s trying to be at home in the land. And it’s the same artistic obsession to create something great or something that creates the wholeness of your experience––
Lois, do you have a class? Okay maybe we should go on the porch. Okay Kate we’re gonna go on the porch because the kids have Spanish.
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Alright wait, don’t sit there because that chair’s broken. Sit there because the internet might be better. Yeah.
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But yeah this idea of retreating into the land as being tied up in the same sort of ambition we’re talking about. Like a form of self-love somewhat.
Hmm, like being connected to the land is a form of self-love? To me it would maybe be the opposite. Like being disconnected from the land would be the result of too much self love.
I guess what I’m thinking about is what is so appealing about art and writing is how much of yourself you can give over to it. How much it can feel like a holistic or religious experience where all of you is there and seen and known. But, of course, eventually you run into moments where you work really hard on something big and you finish it and realize that it’s just a stack of paper sitting there. And nothing more. It rejects you after you finish it. And you’re just there. By yourself. And the land is like that too, right? No matter how much we try to join it. You can be in awe of it, and you can respect it and you can till it, and garden it, and care for it and its creatures but one day for no reason your dog will fucking bite you or a branch will come crashing down on your car. Because the land doesn’t care. Because it’s other.
Well that’s one thing that I admire about Scarborough. And in that way he’s borrowing from Robert Frost, who is the ultimate anti-romantic in that way. Not that Frost didn’t love the Romantics probably as influences but for Frost the natural world was simultaneously compelling and terrifying. For Scarborough, who knows this about the land, the natural world still became the place of his only possible refuge. As I said, he was gay in rural Tennessee and he was ostracized for that. He himself never used the term gay. He would use the word feminine. Or effeminate. Or he would say how his interests lie in books and music and not farming and cars. But he would constantly talk about the ways he did not fit into his family or the world or rural east Tennessee. So to some extent the land was his only possible refuge even though it too was terrifying.
There’s a poem in his first book called ‘Lost’ and it starts, “Ever been lost? Well I have.” And then it goes to tell this story of being lost in this terrifying, scary woods with the trees reaching out with gnarled fingers for him and then at the end he hears someone cutting timber and all of a sudden he feels like he’s been saved. Because he knows there’s another person there. So in that poem the natural world wasn’t a refuge. So he shows its complexity like Frost does.
But I agree with you, living in the country, I never thought I would bury so many things. These chickens, who have become like pets, they die a lot. And it’s very sad. The kids get very attached to them. And I guess it’s a good lesson in mortality, but it’s a hard one to have to learn over and over and over again. So yeah, when you live out here you see a lot of death. And nature is also constantly encroaching. Like if I don’t mow the lawn the woods will take over. So you’re constantly pushing back at the natural world, in order to live within it. If that makes sense.
Do you feel that in writing too? When I think about writing fiction, and I think about the consistency required by it––getting to the desk and putting words down every day and all that––it does have this feeling of mowing. Mowing the growth of your own mind. And if you mow too much it’ll be bald, so you have to let it go sometimes. But if you let it go for too long it’ll get out of control. Do you see your writing like this too?
I mean Frost has a poem about mowing. Two of them actually. And Andrew Marvell of course has a sequence of mower poems so I guess it’s an apt metaphor. And the Frost poem, “The Tuft of Flowers”, he’s talking about scything a field for hay (this is pre-tractor). A mower has cut the grass around some butterfly weed and leaves the flowers so the next guy that comes to the field can see them. So the idea is that he’s cutting, but he’s not cutting everything. Leaving some random beauty to just exist. And that connects him to the other workers. And maybe for me that’s part of my attraction to form. It’s a merciless mower. It takes my thoughts and forces me to cut the loose ends off. But I also use a pretty loose approach to meter. So maybe that’s me leaving the stand of flowers.
For me writing free verse would be terrifying. It would be like just letting the grass grow and never cutting it. Great idea in theory perhaps, but eventually you get snakes and ticks. So, for me, the meter creates a way to tame, if not control. To keep things at bay. To keep myself, to keep that self-love, at bay.
Talking about meter is interesting in this context. What is poetry at its most basic level? Making organized sounds, right? Just a collection of sounds being pieced together. The big thing I took away from your form essay is this idea of words as non-meaning units. As just sounds. As just variable markers of stress. And there’s a certain manicuring of wildness inherent to that idea as well, right?
Or just thinking of words as units of meaning in and of themselves from just the way they sound. Lisa Jarnot is probably one of my favorite contemporary poets. And a lot of her writing works like this. Some of the poems will seem just like nonsense. But what she’s really doing is including words for their sound for just as much as their meaning. So she’ll have a prose poem that for a while will be about a man standing on a corner in San Francisco and then all the sudden there are avocados and opossums in it. But I think it’s because she loves the way that avocado and opossum sound. And so they belong in the poem. And for me that always seemed like a kind of freedom. And meter lets you do that too: it lets you realize just how fun words can be.
I say this to my students all the time: everyone writes in meter. You can’t not if you’re writing in English. Everyone uses metrical effects whether they know it or not. A poet who is a “formalist”, and I don’t like to call myself that by the way, but a poet who is considered a “formalist” just pays attention to those things and crafts lines around them. But every free verse poem is full of meter. And full of good metrical effects. Because all of us speak like that. So I always try to tell my students it’s not just technical jargon they’re learning. They’re just learning a way to talk about something that is already inherent in speech. And so for me it’s just a way to get into language in a different way. I find it ridiculously fun.
So let’s talk about Farmville a little bit.
Oh boy.
There’s a lot of talk about responsibility in the book. And where the concept of responsibility comes from. In your Robert Hayden essay you write about an uncomfortable encounter concerning race. You got into it with someone from your community band about a Black Lives Matter shirt you were wearing. And you use a really distinct image to describe why you decided to take part in the conflict in the way that you did. You describe the necessity to confront the situation as feeling the presence of a “detached eye” watching your behavior. And you relate this to a religious feeling. You call it “god’s eye” hovering over you.
It’s an interesting time to be living in America with regard to this idea of “taking responsibility” for one’s actions. On the one hand, this is probably the most godless we have ever been as a culture. But it’s also the most anyone has ever talked about accountability and personal responsibility. To the point that it feels almost meaningless to say sometimes. But how do you understand that? Does the concept of responsibility really need to stem from a more divine and detached party than it does the simple relationships that you have on earth?
Yeah, well it’s funny, or not funny, but since I wrote that essay we’ve had this cultural swing––totally predictable but still unimaginably horrifying––away from recognizing the necessity of something like Black Lives Matter. Now you have schools and businesses cutting their DEI programs. And many of the people behind this, the counter-push against the recognition of responsibility, are people who claim to believe in God and have morals founded on religious faith. Yet here they are telling kids that they can’t learn simple facts about slavery in school.
But what you’re talking about, that phrase “God’s eye”, I took from the Robert Hayden poem I’m referencing in the essay. And I was thinking about when you’re assessing your own responsibility you have to get out of the self. I guess that’s a theme here. But for me that means two things: both I try to get out of the self so that I don’t overreact and so I don’t react in the wrong way. When you have kids you’ll find that sometimes you’ll viscerally react to situations and yell at your kids, when if you would have just slowed down, and looked at the situation from a slight distance, you might have reacted a little bit better. My wife is alway telling me that. So in that situation I was thinking about the different ways that we distance ourselves from ourselves in big moments like that. Like when your personal responsibility is being called into action. And I hope that’s how it came across.
And part of it too is, you know when those big moments happen in your life––like a car accident or a child is born or you find out someone died––things that are either major moments or have sudden importance beyond the quotidian. For me when they happen I can’t quite believe that they’re happening. And part of my brain is looking at it with disbelief: like this thing is happening and I have to do this thing. And this is all in the context of a normal day. I remember when my son was born, right when he first arrived I was thinking this is crazy. This is one of the biggest moments of my life but outside I can hear cars honking and people going to the bathroom and walking down the hallway. For everyone else it was just a normal day but for me I was having this life altering moment. So that moment that essay centers around––where I’m in my community band room and a band member is disagreeing with the legitimacy of the statement that black lives matter––this was one of those moments (smaller, admittedly, than childbirth, but still) that my personal accountability was needed. I had to be accountable to that situation based on my own sense of morality. I couldn’t just let it go. And when you’re a white person in those situations, it can be so easy to just let it go. Because it doesn’t affect you. You can just bank back on your white privilege.
And the thing that I liked about wearing that shirt back then, whenever that essay was written, is that it made me uncomfortable. It made me very visible. And I realized just to a small extent what it’s like to be non-white every day. Especially in a place like Farmville which is not very multicultural, like New York.
One thing I’m worried about in that essay, that’ll I’ll probably get raked over the coals for anyway, is that it might come across as me as a white person talking about my successful way for “atoning for my whiteness”. That’s hard to pull off. And not what I’m after. I’m not looking for a pat on the back. Or someone to be like, “You fixed racism by wearing a t-shirt!” But I found it to be, in that moment especially, a way I could do a very small thing which was bring that shirt to Farmville. In that time, like 2019, during those discussions about race, it felt like a very small thing I could do not to lessen my white privilege, but to in some way ameliorate it or lay it bare. So I hope that’s what the essay ended up being about.
But I was also struck in that encounter by realizing that there is just this huge gulf between people right now. Like the distance between the moon and the earth. I don’t know how I could have ever breached that gulf with that guy. You know that feeling? When you talk to someone and they’re just so entrenched. And maybe I’m entrenched too.
Sort of impossible to breach, yeah. Running into someone who is so conceptually divergent from you like that. Because there’s no common ground. Your starting point is just completely different so you’re really not arguing over whatever point, but really you’re talking about a lifetime of thinking about things differently. And that’s a lot to ask of someone to reconsider just in a brief conversation or argument.
And Hayden is such a brilliant poet and gets at race in such subtle ways. Maybe subtlety is how you get across the gap. And subtlety is not exactly prized in poetry right now I would say, so I really am attracted to his poems for how they do this. So that poem, “Astronauts” which on its surface is just about the moonwalk, ends up being about so much more for me. And it made me think of the ways we disappear onto our own moons and hide from our responsibility. It’s like what Robert Frost says in his beautiful poem “Desert Places” where he says basically I don’t need to worry about space, because I got enough terrifying space inside. We have our own responsibilities here. And so that Hayden poem really navigates that for me in a truly amazing way. I love that poem.
The ideas of racism, accepting imperfection in craft and in life, and the idea of maintaining life not as some linear journey but rather a kind of encampment that you’re just trying to keep nice enough for your time here, all culminate really nicely in your Primus St. John essay. You quote him and it echoes something you wrote earlier in the book concerning activating your belief systems in the face of irrationality. Of entertaining the idea of magic while knowing magic isn’t real. The line is “Slavery is the story / Of procreation,/ Of magical religious thinking,/ The androgynous divinity/ Within us.” Maybe you could speak about this connection a bit. Magical thinking and coping with the imperfections of life while also understanding racism not as some curable disease but rather a chronic ailment of human thinking rooted in this same cognitive leap. Something that can probably can’t be eradicated but maybe just be mowed and kept at bay.
I mean in the world around us right now I don’t see any way to fully atone for the things at the root of racism in America. The country was founded on two genocides. How do you make up for that? And to circle back to Geoffrey Hill, a lot of his writing is about trying to figure out how does one be English and also account for imperialism? How does one love or simply inhabit Englishness while still accounting for the crimes of Englishness? And Hill was actually borrowing from Southern American writers like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom who in their better moments are thinking something similar. How does one be southern and account for the history of the south? And we as Americans all have that same question to answer. You see it all around. The refusal to do that hard work. Like the textbook banning in Florida. Instead of accounting for our past they’re just pretending that it was different. So back to your question, back to St. John, the poem suggests that imperfection is our only option. That to shoot for perfection is to lie or to start repackaging the past. That section is quoted from his long poem “Dreamer” which is about John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace” and who started his career as a slaver, someone who bought and sold slaves, and then had a religious change of heart and became an abolitionist. And in the poem St. John is basically saying that, that profound religious awakening, is not enough. You still have to account for the past. And in that accounting is imperfection. Did Newton become an abolitionist? Yes. Did “Amazing Grace” itself become a crucial anthem for both enslaved people and black people in the civil rights era? It did. And yet this anthem has an imperfect history. Because no histories are perfect. I take that from St. John.
So does that give us a pass? No. But I think too often the idea of perfection keeps us from doing anything. For instance the discussion of reparations. Most people shoot down the idea of any kind of reparations because they say we could never do it. How could we give the right people the right amount of money? And no one is ever going to be willing to pay for that so we just shoot the idea down. But could you imagine an imperfect version of reparations that would make a lot of sense? Yeah, you could. But the ideal of perfection, which is baked into the way that America views itself, keeps us from doing things like that. So that’s what I take from St. John: a subtle kind of chiding. That we’re human. What else could we be but imperfect? And that applies to how we understand race as well.
There’s something sort of Pynchon-like to our inability to act on these things, right? Like legitimate progressivism, or cultural revolutionary energy being undercut by our own narcissism. Undercut perhaps even more than what simple tyranny is capable of.
I love Pynchon. Thomas Merton writes about this too. He was a catholic monk from Kentucky who became famous for his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain when he was a young monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, but his essay “Letters to a White Liberal” from the late sixties is something worth reading as well. Where he not only calls the police out as being a fascist organization––which, of course, it was, because it was rooted in supporting Jim Crow––but he was writing about the problem of well-meaning white liberals making race issues about themselves. Instead of being about the actual problem. So it’s this really beautiful essay on why white people need to not go to things like the march on Washington. Because it dilutes the message and makes it more about a kind of white self-love and removes the immediacy of the crisis at hand. Like look at me. And we still haven’t fixed that problem.
So you could argue: was I doing that by wearing the Black Lives Matter shirt? Maybe? But I did feel like in this particular instance it was different. Like if I wore it around New York it would be a lot different than wearing it in Farmville, more performative. And so that’s the weird line you have to figure out how to walk as someone who wants to do good or at least be good.
I want to return to the idea of permanence. Returning to your hole in the mountain or place in the land. This whole book centers around trying to reconcile the impossibility of permanence with the pretty unrelenting human desire for it. So I wanted to ask you about the act of self-narrativization that occurs throughout the book. Of yourself and of your family. You all function as pretty important binding agents to the book and as the essays develop everyone really does take on character traits that can be expected. Like if there is an instance involving your son, Horatio, you can expect some level of crassness. Or if it is your wife Kate, there is some duality of wisdom and whimsy to be expected––both telling you it’s gross and that you’re crazy for considering touching a dead squirrel because you were convinced, for whatever reason, your touch would revive it, but also sticking her head out of the shower and asking, Well, did you do it? And you even make yourself into a kind of a character in this book. But in this way everyone is fixed in a certain fashion. As characters. As pieces of art. And I’m wondering if you were conscious of that while writing this book, which is so greatly concerned with the idea of human impermanence and imperfection.
When I was in grad school I was taking a class taught by the writer Scott Russell Sanders who had recently published his own memoir. And I remember him saying that after he wrote the memoir he could no longer remember some of the things he wrote in any way other than the way that he wrote about them. Whereas before he had the imperfect, flashbulb memories that you have of your own childhood, but once he wrote them down he could only recall them in the way he had come to fashion them in his work. And that really struck me in the ways in which writing nonfiction is really just writing fiction. There’s really not an appreciable difference. And poetry is maybe the same. When I write about my family I’ll feel it the minute that I’m done writing: that what I’ve made is in the past and is not actually that representative of them or who they are. It’s instead just some weird fixed portrait.
I started writing these essays in 2017 and wrote them through 2022. So it was like five or six years. And the first ones even looked back further to episodes that occurred two or three years before then. So the kids are quite small in the early essays but now here I am editing them to come out as a book and those little children are long gone. So it almost feels like something that happened to someone else. I barely think of those things as happening in my life. Because my life is occurring now. And it’s full of math lessons and barking dogs and grass that needs to be cut. And I just don’t remember what it was like to have a three year old beyond that it was really fucking hard. So the essays are fixed in time, yeah, but they also have become anecdotes that have become even strange to me. In the way that Scott was suggesting. That they had become this crafted thing that I also read with curiosity. Like, Is that how that happened? Or I’ll notice that I’ve fixed someone’s personality in a certain way. My daughter Jane Bell as a three year old I depicted as this small, quiet, innocent kid who’s watching birds and running about, but in reality as a three year old––and she’ll kill me for this––but she was a terror! She was a classic three year old. Throwing things, stomping, yelling, all the time. And so I’ve fixed her both in that moment and as a thing that doesn’t reflect the dynamism of what a small child is.
So have I created a fiction of my life? Probably. But I think those imperfections––I think as St. John would say––are in the service of a larger truth. That’s at least what I would tell myself. That there were little bits picked out of things I remember of my life in order to create something that would aid in a reading of a poem that has nothing to do with my life, in order to tell me something deeper about that life. If that makes any sense. So in a way I’m reading those moments in just the same way I’m reading the poems. And maybe they exist for me just as detached as the poems do.
And maybe I just have a funny relationship with the past. My father in law, it seems, can recall his entire childhood as if it were a novel from start to finish. He can tell you details from every part of his life. Birthdays. Names of people he knew. Everything. It’s like he has a movie of his childhood that he can access at any time. But I’m not like that. I barely remember anything. And my childhood wasn’t traumatic or anything. It was great. I had great, kind parents that did everything for me. But I only recall snippets here and there. Those memories just don’t have a big impact on my mind. So maybe I just file things away and then they’re sort of gone. That’s how my mind works. And maybe this book of essays was a way of fixing some of those things, or bringing them back out, even if improperly preserved. Like bad pickles.
Interview and Photos by Jake Hargrove