Methods and Materials: The Sojourns of Affinities

In an extended “Q&A,” Lynn McGee (Tracks, Broadstone Books, 2019) and Bill Mohr (The Headwaters of Nirvana: Reassembled Poems, A bilingual edition translated by José Luis Rico and Robin Myers, What Books Press, 2019) discuss their recently published volumes of poetry. Both poets draw upon the lyric as a way to frame the exterior world, and go about the process of assembling materials and arranging themes in ways that illuminate their affinities for each other’s work. This exchange took place in the late spring and summer of 2019.

Lynn McGee: When I opened the padded envelope with The Headwaters of Nirvana: Reassembled Poems, I stood at the kitchen counter reading almost the entire book. I’m thinking now of the pivots and line breaks in “Vallejo,” the precise unfolding of images in “Eye Chart for an Orbiting Space Station.” Of course, I recognize many of the poems, like “Rules for Building a Labyrinth,” which you set into a letterpress pamphlet in the nineties. I also noticed some familiar poems aren’t in this new book, like the one about a roommate who leaves broken glass on the kitchen floor. I know your editors selected the poems for this collection. Did their choices surprise you? What are your thoughts on how to assemble a collection of poetry?

Bill Mohr: The choices that Jose Rico and Robin Myers made delighted me, if only because they left out the poem you mention about the roommate, “Waiting in Line in Pancho’s Tacos.” If I never see that poem anthologized again, it will be fine with me. That poem is largely regarded as one of the signature poems of the “Stand Up” school of poetry, but that kind of poetry does not particularly appeal to poets in Mexico.
What mattered the most to me is that my work would be of interest to poets writing in Spanish. I was especially pleased that they chose “The Trolley Problem.” It’s a reflection of their ability to choose my best work that I could easily give several different kinds of readings using just the poems in Headwaters.
As for assembling a manuscript, I think that’s the easy part. Finding a publisher willing to accommodate your preferences is the challenge. The standard advice is to make the first poem and the last poem in the manuscript be exceptionally strong. One of them doesn’t necessarily have to be the title poem, though as I remember Richard Kostelanetz once saying in a talk in New York City, the mark of an important collection of poems is that it has two or three memorable poems in addition to the title poem. For myself, I prefer to organize the poems so that there is a through-line of imagery and rhythms that help shape the tonal trajectory of the book’s primary argument.

Lynn, I’d like to talk about the title of your new collection. While the cover art reinforces the image of public transportation, the word “tracks” also has the common association of physical footprints. In your poem, “Sign,” the opening image is of your perilous trudge through snow and ice, “feet deep in the prints of those who gone / before me.” On a literary level, one could think of any poet’s work as walking in a similar manner. Are there any particular poets who influenced this project?

Lynn McGee: I can’t speak to poets who influenced the manuscript, as much as events. As I was writing and revising the manuscript, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won the nomination for their parties. Anton Sterling was shot by a police officer while lying on the ground, Philando Castile was shot by a cop as he was sitting in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car, and then five police officers were killed by a sniper at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas. It was a summer that kicked off public outcry, white people’s awareness had begun to rise, and I was getting used to a much longer subway commute, determined not to be numbed by the experience.
In other words, I wanted to stay alert; not in the “high alert” kind of way we talked about after 9/11, but in the sense that I wanted to stay connected to my fellow New Yorkers, to protect whatever humanity we could have together, riding the train. The presidential election of November 2017 loomed as I got out my laptop on the train each morning and grounded myself in observations that became Tracks.
At some point I added to the manuscript, a group of poems about my sister who died of a brain aneurism while driving back to work from the alternative high school where she tutored kids on her lunch hour. I was surprised to see how well those poems fit into the book, at least on the surface, with their train and car themes. They made the manuscript have an arc for me — the grief seemed to underscore the importance of not losing touch with what is best in us.

Bill, you also include in your new book, poems of people you’ve loved and who have passed on. “One Miracle,” about the poet and performance artist Bob Flanagan, who died in 1996, brings to mind for me the flamboyant and loving event celebrating his life that I attended with you at Beyond Baroque — and now more than 20 years have passed. Can you characterize or talk about how your poetry has changed over the decades?

Bill Mohr: My earliest poems are outgrowths of Donald Allen’s anthology and Naked Poetry, after which I found myself an antagonist of Daniel Halpern’s anthology of MFA program. My own anthologies reflect a growing interest in the long poem. By the mid-1980s, I was once again oscillating between two anthologies, but this time the split became more radical.
In 1985, three anthologies were published, and two of them really add a major rupture in American poetry. The best known of these was In the American Tree, in which Ron Silliman cites in a long list of fellow travelers. Indeed, due to the work of poets I began meeting in the very early 1980s, such as Kit Robinson and Barrett Watten, I began work on two long poems.
The other mid-1980s anthology that gives a direct context for my work is Poetry Loves Poetry, which I did a great job editing, but a horrible job on the production end. Nevertheless, that anthology does a far better job than my first one (The Streets Inside, 1978) of showing both how politics and humor were infiltrating the previous decade’s more personal tropes. Since then, the overwhelming number of anthologies I’ve appeared in have been either published in Los Angeles or edited by other poets working in Southern California. From the mid-1980s on, I wouldn’t say that it’s my poetry that has changed, but rather the scenes in this city that it’s embedded in.
My critical writing is what has changed the most the past two decades; at the age of 50, I had to train myself to write prose. I’ve become an academic, not as a poet, but as a literary historian who also writes articles for academic journals. In a certain way, I am more proud of that work because it took an immense effort to learn how to do that.

Lynn, having known your poetry since we were friends in Los Angeles in the early eighties, I’ve been impressed by the ways your work has evolved. I was surprised at how much I was moved — and continued to feel moved — as I read “Sudden Walking Choir in Transfer Tunnel” in Tracks, a poem that centers on the events of 9/11 and references lyrics of the Paul McCartney song, Yesterday: “… a song beloved by tourists / and drunks.”
The differences between song lyric and poetry are becoming more debated than ever in the academic canon, but in this case, I would observe that it took a poet to reveal the flexibility of a song lyric. McCartney’s song shifts from being a song of personal love to one of a group’s love for a city. It’s a remarkable poem, and I can easily imagine it in an anthology of poems about New York City or 9/11, but I would also hazard to guess that it would find itself left out of various anthologies of “schools” of poets based in New York City. Do you think of yourself as belonging in any way to any of those “schools”?

Lynn McGee: The unprecedented and immediate access poets have to each other today is making schools of poetry less geographically based, and more about communities of people who relate to each other’s aesthetic or content.
Poets reach out to each other from a distance, for example, when they’re published in the same journals. That’s how I met Joseph Zaccardi, who lives in Northern California, and sent me a note when we were both published in the Potomac Review. We still haven’t met in person, but he generously wrote one of the blurbs for Tracks, as did a wonderful poet in Santa Barbara, Pamela Davis. Pam, it turns out, has my late sister’s first and last name, and when Facebook first began pushing her profile photo at me, in its suggested array of people to “friend,” I was at first alarmed, then curious. I checked out her profile, and realized she is a poet, a wonderful poet. We became friends, eventually meeting in New York.
This is how poets connect now, and in doing so, begin to populate ‘schools’.

I have to ask you the same question, Bill. What school do you see yourself in? Or do schools still exist, in your opinion?

Bill Mohr: “The Affinity School”! I was mulling over your question — thinking about the debate in Los Angeles over the past half-century about whether there is “a school” of Los Angeles poetry — when your comment about “affinity” suddenly seemed to snap the question into focus.
I’d say that I, too, tend to work at any given moment out of a sense of “affinity.” I have been working on a piece the past week about predicates as the empathic force in the gravitational turbulence of the sentence. Accompanying my meditations on these projects are Paul Vangelisti and Gertrude Stein (“How to Write”).
Maybe the question should be, “Will schools exist in the next decade, and the decades after that?” Assuming, of course, that human beings don’t engage in a form of mass auto-genocide.
Schools, I suppose, represent a visible form of risk assessment. Committing oneself to poetry as one’s major form of cultural work does not require the same degree of risk as it did a half-century ago, let alone 60 or 70 years ago. When young poets today such as Ocean Vuong and Major Jackson are getting near 2050, I wonder what the century since the Beats emerged will look like to them. Maybe “school” will be an archaic notion by then, and some other term will be used to describe the impetus of increments.
The fact remains that even people who have known about my poetry for years have trouble adjusting to its variety. I proceed on a case-by-case confluence of the ideas that might inhere in any given set of emotions generated by an image’s rate of diurnal spin. The registers of light and darkness also influence a poem’s arrangement as much as the rhythmic argument.
That said, I always try to keep in mind the cautionary advice of Thomas Parkinson, a critic whose deserves more attention. In particular, his commentary on the popularity of “organic poetry” in his essay, “Current Assumptions About Poetry” (1981) is still acutely pertinent.
If we’re going to talk about categories, Lynn, and strategies for composing poems, I’ll mention that some of my interest in your writing comes from our mutual commitment to make use of the found material of daily life, which includes other people’s lives just as much as our own.
I’m also thinking of emblematic poems that relate to what we are referring to as ‘schools’. All too often the poem I feel is most representative of what I am trying to do, goes unmentioned in discussions of my work. Do you have a secret favorite in Tracks, and why do you have affection for that poem?

Lynn McGee: I think “Scent” is my favorite. My father pulled the apple out of my sister’s book bag as we went through her things, the day she went into the hospital. He remarked that she didn’t even get to eat her apple that day — and the meaning of life seared me. Writing poems helps me process those moments.

• You can learn more about Lynn McGee at www.lynnmcgee.com, and find information about her most recent title at http://broadstonebooks.com/Lynn_McGee.html.
• You can learn more about Bill Mohr at www.billmohrpoet.com, and find information about his most recent title at www.whatbookspress.com/the-headwaters-of-nirvana.html.

Bill Mohr is the author of The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana, a bilingual collection of poetry from What Books/Glass Table Collective, 2019.  An internationally recognized poet whose work has been translated into Croatian, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, Bill authored Hold Outs,The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948-1992 (University of Iowa Press, 2011). He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego and is a professor at California State University, Long Beach. Editor and publisher of Momentum Press, 1974-1988, his work has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies including Stand Up Poetry, Grand Passion, Wide Awake and Coiled Serpent. His volumes of poetry include Hidden Proofs (1982); Penetralia (1984); Bittersweet Kaleidscope (2006) and a bilingual volume published in Mexico, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos Editores, 2015). 

Lynn McGee is the author of the poetry collections Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019); Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), and two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1997). Her poems are forthcoming or appeared recently in The Tampa Review, Lavender Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Potomac Review, The American Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review. Lynn earned an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University, taught writing at private and public colleges and led poetry workshops in NYC public schools. A 2015 Nominee for the Best of the Net award, Lynn received a Recognition Award from the NYC Literacy Center, and Heart of the Center Award from the NYC LGBT Center. Today she is a communications manager at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York.