“Palpable Magic” with Gerry LaFemina: A Virtual interview with Owl Light News

Owl Light News: Based on my very brief read of some of your poetry, I might describe it as Lou Reed meets Rumi. Is that a somewhat accurate characterization?

Gerry LaFemina: God, I like that. Can I use that as a blurb for my next book? It’s even better than being “The Iggy Pop of American Poetry” which Jim Daniels once used to describe my work.

I think I respond to your comparison so fully because it’s right in its way—my concerns are both the [urban] underbelly of human possibilities and the sacredness in us all that may be found in that underbelly.

Owl: I was a little curious about something that appears in many of your online bio shorts. You state your belief that “poetry is the highest art form.” Nonetheless, you are exploring the parallels between different art forms/genres, including music – one of your apparent passions.   This includes short stories in Wish List (2009, Marick Press), long fiction in Clamor (2013, Codorus Press) and non-fiction in Palpable Magic: Essays on Poets and Prosody (2015, Texas A & M University Press). Your poetic voice is often rendered in prose, bridging the chasm between fiction and verse. Are you testing the waters for greater exploration of prose fiction or are you continuing to reaffirm your faith in poetry as art supreme?

GL: Every time I take an excursion to another genre (I’ve written long and short fiction, short plays, songs, essays…), it takes me into a new understanding of the potentiality of language, and so it teaches me something about poetry. Ditto, it makes me appreciate poetry more. Once, at a college a few years ago, I was asked if poetry was my wife and fiction my mistress. No. Poetry is my wife and we have an amazingly passionate, faithful, fulfilling, spiritually alive relationship. Fiction is a guy I go to hockey games with.

I also think there’s a caveat in my bio—poetry is the highest art form to me, the way saxophone playing is the highest art form for Charlie Parker or design is for Vera Wang, or playing golf is for Tiger Woods, which is to say, it’s where I find myself at my most excellent; my most transcendent experiences happen when I’m writing poems. I don’t suspect everyone to agree with me. I love art. I love watching people be excellent. Athletes have that expression of “being in the zone” and by that they mean when they’re able to perform without thinking about it. I think all artists can get into the zone in their medium. Poetry is where I am able to get there.

Owl: With Dylan’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature, there has been increased theoretical discourse around the intersections between different art forms. Hybrids are all the rage as artists, like the earliest prose poets, seek to liberate themselves from norms and create niches in an increasingly competitive “marketplace” of voices. As a musician and a poet, can you speak to your perspective on this timely (worn?) topic?

GL: I’ve said a lot on this topic. I heard Bowie once say on NPR when the interviewer gushed about the poetry of his lyrics say quite emphatically that he wasn’t a poet because he got to rely on musical dynamics, instrumentation, etc to make the words work, where as a poet was naked.

But there’s also more to that, which is to say the “marketplace” of literary poetry is much different than the marketplace of pop songs. Songs are built on recurring tropes. When I’m writing a song, and I still play rock and roll and still write songs, I’m trying hard to write interesting and original verses, but I also want people in the audience to have a hook stuck in their heads, I want them to sing along with a chorus. I don’t suspect anybody at a concert goes, “That was a really great metaphor.” I want people to leave a reading going “wow, that was a really great metaphor in poem X.”

We live in a time when literary writers are writing comics and horror novels. We live in a time with genre poetry (horror and sci fi poetry are all the rage). Surely some performance poetry/slam poetry works more like pop songs—in terms of building on trends, working “standard” tropes the way songs, do etc. And I think all those things are important. Boundaries are breaking down that’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean I’m interested in sci fi poetry (I don’t watch much sci fi in general, and read less of it as fiction), but that’s a matter of taste, of what I want from the books I go to. I think it’s great that people are finding poems they want to go to.

Owl: Clearly your urban roots and experiences are central to your literary inspiration, yet you meld historical time periods, spiritualism, fantasy and paranormal themes into your works. Are these merely life glimpses (subway wanderings and childhood memories) expanded upon, or are you pulling from studies and more theoretical/theological roots as well?

GL: Well, I grew up in Manhattan, but I’ve spent much of my adult life living in small towns (8 years in northern Michigan, 13 years in western Maryland), so there’s a lot of dichotomies in my life that I think feeds into my poetry. I’m also not one who’s always necessarily writing autobiographically. There’s a guy talking in my poems that’s named Gerry LaFemina, but he’s a creation, a mask, a metaphor for my experience. My stories don’t interest me much.

What interests me is mystery. God is a mystery—by definition beyond human understanding. Physics holds mystery. Love is surely mysterious. What I like about poetry is that it provides me a way of entering into a dialogue that is beyond the self. So there’s some sparks of autobiography along the way, but those sparks set the fire for so much more. And some of it is that I have read a lot, I watch a lot of documentaries, I’m interested in the connection between things. That’s inherently what metaphor is—the finding of connections between seemingly disparate things. The sacred and profane or the opposite sides of the same coin. Ditto, fact and fiction.

Owl: Creating and teaching are very different processes, and it seems that many young people I have met are resistant to editing and improving – they cling to a belief that all art is “good” art, as each person’s emotional experiences and expressive style is unique. What strategies do you use with your students to help them access from within (as you so eloquently state in your introduction to Evensong) ”that which knows what I don’t know I know,” while remaining cognizant of mechanics and revision in capturing exactitude of meaning?

GL: Everyone knows how to use language, and so writing often seems more readily “easy” than say playing guitar, or painting, or cooking. I try to teach my students that first thoughts aren’t necessarily best thoughts, the way the first kiss isn’t always the best kiss (you spend so much time thinking about how to kiss the other person, your heads both tilt the same way, than you both correct, and you often end up kissing them beside the nose, under the left eye, not quite on the cheek).

More accurately, I point out that when they cook, even if they’re following a recipe, they’re spicing for taste, cutting back salt, adding more cayenne, and that the more they eat, the more things they cook, the more those original recipes are likely to change.

The biggest problem is that particularly with student writers, they were praised by high school teachers who were (like mine were) encouraging, excited to have someone interested in writing and reading, and who didn’t know that much about poetry. My job is to keep encouraging my student writers but to teach them standards. Good enough isn’t necessarily good. As Anne Sexton says about Lowell, he taught her taste. In other words, he taught her how to be discriminating. I think, more accurately, it’s about teaching them how to refine their palate. Sexton already had taste, but then Lowell helped her hone it.

 

Owl: Writers today have so many options for how they create. Can you speak to your patterns of work, preferences for tools, methodology for revision and editing and literary quirks that might distinguish you from (or inspire) other writers?

GL: I write poetry long hand. I draft long hand through numerous drafts, each of which I read out loud. I’ll work on many poems at once over the course of 6 months—not all in the same afternoon, mind you, but all at that same time. So it seems like I write “fast,” but nothing is in rush. I believe patience and attentiveness are two core skills for any artist.

I think knowing one’s go-to habits, phrases, images is good thing for a poet to know. Physics, trains, snow, birds, driving: these are things that appear in my poems a good deal, and I often try to edit them out of poems now. Being conscious of one’s gestures or ways out of a poem prevents one from doing the same thing twice, of writing the same poem. A recent poem of mine in an early draft had a homeless woman in being given flowers by the speaker at the end of it. It was fine, but the holy homeless person has appeared in a number of my poems. I had to do something different. In a later draft she became a nun—it changed the whole poem for the better.

I also keep a large number of random reference books at my desk—cheap guides to “useless” science information, mythologies, etc that I can go to for inspiration. I leave the internet alone unless I need something specific. I prefer the possibility of finding something I didn’t know I needed.

 

Owl: Really getting to know an artist requires a lifetime of immersion in his or her works – and even then you are only capturing a whisper of a voice. If you were to choose a single one of your works to pull me away from my unread New York Review of Books subscriptions and stacks of National Geographic, not to mention the daily barrage of news and social media that seeks to engulf us all, what title would you suggest?

GL: If you want one book to read this summer, it’s probably Vanishing Horizon. That said, the forthcoming collection of poems, The Story of Ash, is the best book I’ve written, but you won’t be able to read it till next year.

 

Owl: I look forward to meeting you on June 1st, and will certainly watch for the release of your newest title.   Thank you so much for taking the time to explore our questions and share with our readers.

                 

Poet Gerry LaFemina has written five full length collections of poetry, as well as a novel, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays on poetry. He has also been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.

A noted literary arts activist, LaFemina has served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and has been awarded numerous awards for his work, including a Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs grant and an Pushcart Prize.

LaFemina is an Associate Professor of English at Frostburg State University and serves as a Poetry Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University. He will be reading from and discussing his work on June 1, 2017, beginning at 6 PM, as part of the Dansville ArtWorks visiting Author Series.