Reading Local Q & A: David Biespiel

I received a very kind, unprompted, but much appreciated note in my inbox a couple weeks ago.  A note which just so happened to be from David Biespiel, one of Portland’s most accomplished and celebrated poets.  And so began the back and forth which eventually led to the interview below.  Biespiel’s new collection of poetry entitled The Book of Men and Women was just released from the University of Washington Press, and previous publications include Wild Civility, Pilgrims & Beggars, & Shattering Air.

Here are a few highlights from Biespiel’s lengthy list of accomplishments and activities:

• In 1999 Biespiel founded the Hawthorne based writers workshop Attic, where he still serves as Director.
• Since 2002 he has been the poetry columnist for The Oregonian, and you can also find him holding court on The Politico’s Arena.
• In 2005 he was appointed editor of Poetry Northwest, and has since turned this once dead publication into “a national venue for outstanding poems and a lively discourse about poetry and public culture.”  Although an announcement regarding this position is below.

Upon finishing the interview below I would highly recommend you also check out his recent interview with Dana Guthrie Martin on her excellent blog My Gorgeous Somewhere.

Reading Local) What do you think draws people to poetry, and is it possible that this same thing pushes some people away?

David Biespiel) Of the many things that likely draw people to poetry, I suspect that one is an interest in a peak experience, & in a more profound sense too a desire for an epiphany where there’s an aesthetic arrest created among poet, poem, & reader. A poem that moves you inspires a physical & emotional thrill–& also a spiritual re-enactment of the eternal connection to the deep human past, insofar as language can approximate that. It’s not a complete connection but a serious, well, whiff of one. Reading a poem that moves you re-enacts an ancient experience–the transformation of experience into & through language back out into a new experience. It’s the experience of that feeling that is addictive to some people. & so they’re drawn to that. For others, they are drawn to poetry because someone they care about gave them an actual poem that crystalizes meaning into language, meaning that is necessary for the receiver and the giver–meaning in lines & stanzas & rhythm. That connection to poetry is more of a shared experience outside of the poem itself–think lover to lover, daughter to mother, friend to friend. It’s a commemorative, & a vital one for human community.

As for what might repel people from poetry? Metaphor, likely. In religious observances, metaphor can overwhelm the experience, the ritualizations can overtake their resonances, & metaphor ceases to be transcendent & becomes, for lack of a better word, fact. Many people, I know, do not suffer through religious observation in this way. But it’s not uncommon. Same holds for poetry readers: When a reader of poetry tries or (as in school) is asked to justify a metaphor’s meaning, you’ve moved as a reader from a physical & emotional connection to the poem to an analytic one–from transcendence to fact. And if you can’t locate the rational fact behind the metaphor, that can be repellent. As Joseph Brodsky once put it squarely: The worst thing a reader of poetry can experience is someone trying to shove the joy of poetry down his throat. The paradox is that poetry is the art of metaphoric realization.  What’s realized? That there is always more to be realized (ha!). That anchorless-ness can turn people off. But it also can be a salvation for many, many others. Poetry is the mythologizing of all things. It’s the metaphorization of metaphor.

RL) How are websites like Read Write Poem, and the internet in general transforming the poetry world?

DB) I’ll have to look at that one…ah…ok…that looks like a fun site. I know some of the people behind it, by coincidence. I like them! I don’t know that they are transforming the poetry world or really poetry worlds. But I hope they are! Read Write Poem seems like a poetry community in that larger poetry world, no? Like a coffee shop in the piazza where you know you’ll run into your friends. If anything, the ethos appears to be that all are welcome & all are priests (or, poets) too. I suppose that’s empowering–& all to the good. I’m for it! What I sense in looking over the site is that one of its ambitions is to generate excitement about the written word–not the published word, but the written word. Like playing the piano & singing in the parlor! It’s a shared & humanizing enterprise. The Internet in general has had the effect of expanding poetry communities. Perhaps diffusing them, too. On the other hand, it has–through social media sites, for instance–been an opportunity for poets to communicate their whereabouts to each other underneath the umbrella of mass (or as mass as poetry can be–within the poetry business) marketing of poetry through advertising for books, conferences, MFA program, readings, & so on. At any rate, the Internet is a good venue for poetry. So is radio. And, so is print. It’s all good!

RL) When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a poet?  Did this effect your poetry from then on in anyway?

DB) Not sure really. It’s an honorific–to be called a poet. I published my first poems in my early twenties, shortly after I started writing poems. Publication brought reassurance. That reassurance had an effect. It catalyzed my commitment to keep writing & publishing. For me, I’m constantly striving to attain the status of “the poet” within me, to find the language & sound that mythologize as if to dream or invent experiences into poems. When I think of myself as a poet, to use your formulation, it’s usually extremely fleeting, like a sneeze. I can feel it coming on, then an explosion of lyric consciousness, then I’m left trying to catch my breath. As a writer, I try to sustain the pre-sneeze experience, as it were, for as long as possible because that’s the only part I can have any control over.

RL) Your new book of poetry “The Book of Men and Women” is set to be released from University of Washington Press shortly.  What can readers expect from this new collection?

DB) I’m going to dodge this one & just paste in copy about the book from the publisher! Here goes:

The Book of Men and Women addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global. The first section of the book is filled with the wonderful agitation of spell-making language. The poems are connected to the social & historical world, and yet at the same time, they prepare us for the mythic story about men & women that is promised in the book’s title. The second section is more formally restrained and as such imbues the speaker with the distinction and melancholy gravitas that characterize the collection. We see this in the remarkable and fully imagined tour de force, “William Clark’s Sonnets.”

The book concludes with a series of autobiographical poems that confront the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. These last poems, composed during an intense three-month period of writing…

RL) I read through the “seven-first steps for reading a poem” featured on the Poetry Northwest website, and as a novice reader of poetry I found it incredibly useful.  Do you think though that the existence of “steps to reading poetry” may be indicative of the reason the average reader stays away?

DB) I think it’s also a level of experience. I watch a baseball game with much more intimacy & knowledge & know-how & understanding of the nuances in that game than I do a soccer match. I know nothing about soccer other than kick the ball into the other guys’ goal. I can barely track the game. Baseball…I can anticipate what the players will do & expect to see that happen. I used to coach elite diving, like what you see in the Olympics. A typical dive takes 1.3 seconds. To the untrained eye, it’s a flash! To me, it occurs quite slowly, you know what I mean. Because I can see the parts. I know what the dive is. I know what’ll happen next, and I know what’s transforming in the air before my eyes & whether it’s successfully executed or poorly executed. When I see something go awry in a dive, I can anticipate the consequences–how it could go worse or how the diver can repair the mistake midair. You, not as experienced, don’t look at the dive the same way as I do. Now that doesn’t mean at the end of the dive, when the diver enters the water with no more splash that a teardrop, that you & I both applaud wildly or respond in awe of the amazing dive. We can share the sacred moment where fleeting becomes eternal–just as it we can at the end of reading a poem. But I would want to keep watching more & more of the dives because each dive–read, each poem–is of passionate interest to me. You, on the other hand, or the average reader, as you say, may have seen enough–because we don’t see the same thing entirely (and, true, I don’t see what the non-experienced one sees too–that could be a flaw in my abilities). In any event, that may cause the average reader, as you say, to stay away. But if the average reader kept watching more and more dives, they would find more and more pleasures. And in fact, even if they never attained my level of knowledge of diving, they could still experience a desire for the epiphany, a I was saying earlier. The same holds for me & soccer–if I could watch more I’d encourage better responses on my part. But some predisposition is required too. It’s not a necessity that I enjoy soccer. It’s not a necessity that everyone enjoy poetry, either.

6) Speaking of Poetry Northwest, the website mentions that you will “say farewell to readers” in the upcoming issue.  Did I miss the announcement on this, are you stepping down as editor of this esteemed magazine you helped bring back from the brink?

DB) Um…that is the announcement! I am stepping down as editor at the end of the year, officially. I’m currently working with the new editor this fall to make the transition. My editorial tenure will have run from 2005-2010. That’s sufficient. I’ve had the good fortune of a terrific staff working for me on the magazine. They deserve more credit than me, to tell the truth. Actually, Gabe, also, a correction: I didn’t bring Poetry Northwest back from the brink. It was dead as a doornail, as Charles Dickens might have put it, when I came along. Kevin Craft will be the new editor, and the editorial offices will move to Everett College north of Seattle where Kevin is chairman of the English Department.