An Attempt to Fall
An Interview with Amy Newman
Amy Newman loves words—their meaning, their power, and their mystery. She is a professor and a poet and a great interview. And so we at TDS offer you, the reader, a recommendation: read this interview slowly, perhaps with a dark steamy beverage of your choice. When you finish, take a walk. Come back, link to Amazon and buy her book fall. You won’t be disappointed.
TDS: When did you begin to take an interest in poetry? How old were you when you wrote your first lines?
NEWMAN: The first real poem I wrote was in college and it was pretty much an accident really. I was a dance major taking English courses for my electives, and in one of those courses we got to try to write poems, so I gave it a shot. I wrote about the experience of being with my friend Jayne on a hill, when seemingly out of nowhere, a wild horse emerged from the woods and burst past us. In trying to re-imagine that day, and represent it on paper, I began to think how the horse’s entrance on that scene changed everything about my world since then. It was the intrusion of the power and violence of nature, unexpected and overwhelming. It was in the writing that I learned this.
TDS: You are a professor of literature and often lecture on poetry. How do your students react to studying poetry?
NEWMAN: I think for some it’s hard on them at first. Poetry is a rich language, and very often the students come in having been taught that the reader can construct any kind of meaning when he reads a poem. So all along they haven’t actually been hearing the poem or living in the world of the poem. This might be because it takes time to read poetry—meditative time and thought. Maybe such a luxury of time is not available in high schools anymore. So, these students begin to see that the poem has its own universe of value and meaning, and that stripping the self’s ideas and stepping into the landscape of the poem can be pretty wild.
I love my students’ responses. Last semester one girl just said, “This is unfair. I am blown away.” Another called the experience, “A beautiful headache.” I am surprised, too, by who becomes a favorite in the class. Last semester a bunch of girls absolutely fell in love with Auden—his emphasis on humanity as flawed; accepting that, praising that. It fell the right way for them. They couldn’t get over Auden.
For some reason I always think of the speech Father Mulcahey gives in M*A*S*H about the surgeons who operated under frigid conditions, warming their hands over the steam that comes out of the soldiers’ open incisions. He asks something like, “How can anyone see this and not be changed?” Poetry seems to have that effect on students. Once you allow it to speak to you, instead of trying to impose meaning on it, you can’t really see the world in the same way anymore.
TDS: Some would say poetry is dying. Does poetry need a revival in this culture where speed and efficiency reign and, as Wordsworth says, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility,” is little more than a 19th century axiom?
NEWMAN: Yeah, that’s the thing about poetry. As Richard Howard says, it’s a private art. Howard takes issue with activities like National Poetry Month and those little poetry placards on buses, the sorts of activities that want to have poetry’s best interests at heart, but lose the battle. Poetry that wants to interest a general public has to, by its very aim, remove that which drives poetry. It has to communicate to a culture’s most brief attention span some quick bright burst that’s over in a minute, rather than the slow awakening of thought and depth or creating the atmosphere of the kind of meditative, spiritual, broadening of experience that is essentially poetry.
So they strip the poem down to an axiom, and we’re calling slogans poems. We could perhaps promote a culture where reading and thinking are valued, where the cult of knowledge isn’t so thoroughly dissed. The poem requires that you surrender a bit to its universe rather than bring your universe to power it. In this way, art makes demands. Once you open yourself to that world, you’re thoroughly changed, like the speaker in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” says. Once you really see art, it exposes you … “You must change your life.”
TDS: Assuming you agree that poetry may be dying in the broader culture, can anything be done to help revive it? How do you cultivate a lifestyle that is conducive to quiet reflection when the world is spinning at the speed of iPods and cell phones?
NEWMAN: Maybe you can’t entirely persuade the cell phone/blackberry junkies away from that obsessive sort of activity that eclipses the spiritual, but the arts have always had to readjust when the landscape changes; it’s one of the great and interesting things about art.
For instance, with the introduction of photography, painters had a whole new challenge on their hands. Delaroche declared painting dead, since the photograph could, in seconds, record a moment of reality frozen in time—something the painter had taken months to create. But painting didn’t die, of course. Painters absorbed the technology and responded, learned from the photograph, and understood that with the camera came new ideas in physics and new ways of locating and perceiving reality.
If the old ways were dead, then whatever emerged would be fresh. From this matrix we got, for example, Manet, Monet, the whole Symbolist and Impressionists periods, and from there it exploded. Work that endures from the artistic response to innovative, even invasive technology has to find its own way without compromising what is essential to the art; as much as that sounds like a burden, it’s actually one of the most exiting things about the whole deal.
TDS: Have we as a culture forgotten how to communicate on deep levels? What shifts have you seen in your students’ writings as the culture continues to put more emphasis on mediums that are more instant and iconic than driven by deep thought and reflection.
NEWMAN: Oh, like the mammalian brain, it’s all still there. The exploration of experience, the broadening of experience that is a part of the arts—it’s only a matter of an eye opening, and an ear listening. The poet Jane Miller wrote about the importance of accepting as a part of art the content of what surrounds us, “We have entered the twenty-first century and there is a K-Mart in every forest.”
At first glance, that’s a call to the forever new, which can be exiting for a new writer—an invitation to highlight the relatively avant dimensions of the 21st Century culture. But Miller includes the forest too; we are vestiges of our particular Edens, whether literal or cultural, even if we never believed in the Eden story. We’re wanderers cast out from childhood, with memories, backgrounds, histories, and all those attendant losses. Once you begin to read or write, no matter the approach or the subject, you are an accumulation of the past as much as you are a part of the burgeoning present. Simply opening the book begins that understanding. And it’s not just accumulation; it’s the now of it all, and the whir of your desire to create without arresting time.
Character is a state of ceaseless becoming, according to Bergson, every perception already memory; our present “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.” This is a modernist dictum but it echoes Wordsworth’s sense of the expansion of time. So that is a challenge: to find forms to evoke this sense of the now, of the mind apprehending as it is apprehending, without losing the sense of depth of thought or experience.
The artists at FiveStone just mounted a poem of mine for Born Magazine that is a great example of this. The whole poem takes place in the speaker’s mind just as a bird is about to sing, and the speaker has a series of thoughts that one has in an instant—you know, you have a kind of vertical way of thinking, a kind of simultaneity of thinking that can’t usually be replicated in our horizontal language, but it exists, is real, in the mind. FiveStone mounted the poem and manipulated the text to evoke a sense of this, the multitude of experience that can happen in a second of interior thought. It’s cool, and I’m grateful for it. That’s a good example of how new media offers new approaches.
TDS: To you, what makes good poetry?
NEWMAN: It makes white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.
TDS: You have a new book of poems titled fall. This collection of poems has an interesting format. Can you give us a brief synopsis of fall’s contents and why you chose the approach you did?
NEWMAN: The book is based on the 72 definitions of the word fall. In response to my dad’s request that I write about my mother, who had passed away, I began a few poems and discovered that I couldn’t go further until I’d solved the problem of why grief has to exist. I didn’t solve it, by the way.
I was trying to write about grief—why it’s an essential part of the human experience. I’ve always wondered how grief came into the world and why I don’t think we need it. The doctrine of salvation underlying the world’s major religions says that humanity is in a spiritual condition of pre-fulfillment and that we will return to paradise, etc—that we are imperfect, that our condition is a fallen one. Though this rationalizes the reason we don’t live in a perfect world, it doesn’t satisfy me.
But I wondered: how would the dictionary define this little word with such a huge burden to carry? So I looked it up, and I was amazed. Its seventy-two definitions span a narrative drama—almost like it’s trying to tell the story of how that word came into being. So I used each of the definitions as a title for each poem, and tried to listen to what the word was telling me.
Section one I imagine the beginning of the world, the creation of paradise, and the expulsion, where, it’s assumed, grief enters the picture. Section two focuses on the present world. Those who posit an expulsion from an Eden understand tragedy and grief as part of a larger design—then, I pulled the camera back and wondered: if everything is a part of a blueprint, then when my mother and father got married, did my mother’s cancer already exist, kind of ticking off like a little secret weapon inside her?
It would follow that all conflicts and wars and deaths happen as a part of a grand design, and if that’s the case, then just visualize the scope and span of the dimensional blueprint that contains that information! That kind of Escher-like mid-air blueprint would record homesickness, physical illness and death, domestic, spiritual dissolution, everything, everything.
And yet trees still bloom pretty blossoms and birds still sing in sounds that seem musical, beautiful. That’s the pulse of the second section, using my family as tiny representatives on that map to stand for this larger study, this attempt to understand how one might define that world, which has so much beauty and also so much that is unbeautiful.
The third section explores the gesture of using words to try to contain such a world, of using this thing called language to find ways to name and live in a world where both the landscape and the language are vividly alive yet saturated with memory and loss.
TDS: One of the poems from fall is titled, “The amount of what has fallen”—a deeply touching poem. It follows “fall for,” a poem that depicts an intense encounter between lovers. Can you lift the veil and help us understand the transition (if any) between the two poems and give us insight into “The amount of what has fallen?”
The amount of what has fallen.NEWMAN: In “—fall for,” a poem from the second section, my parents make love (and this is the poem in which I wonder: “not noticing, because not looking? or / not noticing, because not there yet.”) I’m wondering whether during my parents’ lovemaking, was the cancer there in some little design, waiting to emerge? Did they just not see it, that little tiny bud just waiting for the moment it would bloom and make itself known?
And this one for me, across that other, imagined transom:
the things the lost world says, it says: welcome home.
Mother as thin as the earth’s frail blessing,
out of the envelope of promise,
that day when you left, regretfully, the family,
and hovered, all the sheets were white, all our blood
seemed white in what was lost:
the parting, the divine just taken out of me
from your pale form and she flew into the trees,
above the trees, and gestures:
I only see the shapes: I am not,
she says, I am not but I can only see the shapes
against the curve of this madness, the comprehensible earth,
and its partner, beauty, the world’s diversion:
tree’s bright-limbed intensity against the division of the sky:
the bright shapes of her hair, sharp cheekbone,
the eye of lake, of gentle stone. The first innocence broken,
we could go nowhere else, nor return home.
The breaking of all skin and bone and muscle,
just to reach that castle of a heart: she was my heart,
and when she left, I felt the boat glide off without me:
above me, still, her strands of hair
grow into leaves, to limbs,
and honeyed birds can rest into the sky: what does she say?
But I discern her moves Things
are not as they appear. The beautiful
endures. I love. I am not
I am not trapped here
“The amount of what has fallen,” quoted above is from the third section, tries to reconcile the world as I’m coming to understand it with the beauty I see outside my window, as I attempt various means of adjusting this history into an understanding. The title refers to trying to weigh grief, figuratively, to get a handle on the whole thing, and place that amount somewhere where I can reconcile myself to it. In this poem’s end I’m imagining a place like a heaven, where, if I understand how I’m supposed to perceive heaven, where my mother and presumably all sufferers would be therefore free. Everyone has an amount of what has fallen. Everyone carries an amount.
The last few lines are my mother speaking: I am not//I am not trapped here [.]” It’s simply what I’d like to see, if I were permitted to know a heaven, I guess. It doesn’t last, of course, this rationalization. None do. I do a number of things in the third section to reconcile the sense of human doubt with the story of Eden. At one point I attempt to stop time and go back to prevent that one significant apple blossom, the one that becomes the apple Eve and Adam allegedly use to set our lives in motion—I try to prevent the insect from pollinating the apple blossom, to prevent the expulsion. But you see, according to this particular understanding of ourselves, the apple has to break free from the limb, or we don’t have our world.
TDS: How would you describe your poetry?
NEWMAN: An attempt. A.R Ammons says that poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. That’s a good description.
TDS: Is there a process for writing poetry? What works for you?
NEWMAN: For the most part, each project has grown out of an interaction I didn’t expect. It’s when the mind begins to learn something that the work can open up, after all; getting lost is the first step, and consenting, I guess, to let the language and the world have a say.
I draft in longhand, early in the morning, until I get somewhere that feels challenging, until I get to that place where I have lost sight of the shore, so to speak. Then I go swimming to let my mind work over the piece. I have solved many poetic problems in the lap pool.
TDS: What advice would you give to a struggling poet who is looking for publishing opportunities and wants to establish their voice?
NEWMAN: There are opportunities for publishing all over the place these days; read everything, and send your work everywhere. Listen to the world, and read.
If you enjoyed this interview, you can subscribe to Trap Door Sun via email or using RSS.