So…What Is Poetry? An Interview With Damian Rogers

by Alexandra Molotkow

I want to read poetry, but I don’t know how. I’m not even sure what poetry is. So I asked Damian Rogers to explain it to me. Damian, who lives in Toronto but grew up in Detroit and Chicago, is the poetry editor at publisher House of Anansi; the poetry editor at The Walrus magazine; the creative director of Poetry in Voice/Les voix de la poésie, a recitation competition for students; and the author of two collections, most recently Dear Leader, published in May — which I loved, without knowing if I was loving it right.

When we met at The Beaver in Toronto, she’d just gotten back from the AWP Conference. “It would be such a good Christopher Guest film,” she said. “The layers and hierarchies of this tiny subculture that feels enormous to the people in it — like, 12,000 people go, and a lot of those people are people who want to be writers. But then you have people at the very top of poetry, who are still totally unknown outside of this bubble even though they’re walking around like rockstars.” We ordered carrot cake (just kidding, we ordered beet salads) and spoke for several hours. She is both very busy and very patient.

So, what is poetry?
I’ve got a friend, Matthew Zapruder, who’s an American poet — he’s a super generous person, and a great connector of people and ideas. And he’s writing a book, I think Ecco is publishing it, called Why Poetry, trying to grapple with this question. I haven’t read any of it, but I know one of the things I really liked is he’s publishing it without a question mark at the end of the title.

There’s this post-war period in American poetry, where you have this tremendous division between poets who were called the academic poets, at least by those who were not in that particular camp, because, starting in the ’60s, there were these opportunities in the American universities. Poets obviously need jobs of some kind, so we’ll funnel these strange zebra creatures over here, and they can teach or something.

Who would be some of the academic poets?
Probably like Robert Bly. People like Jorie Graham are probably the inheritors of that — these divisions have broken down a lot, but Lowell would have been over there, Snodgrass, even Anne Sexton.

I just wanted to interject that I’m going to be nodding at every name you say, but I’ll probably recognize about 5 percent of them.
OK. And I don’t know how helpful it is —

No, it is helpful!
So there’s some really great writing over there, in my opinion. And then there’s this very boisterous sort of outsider-identified, very politically sort of separated group of poets who were not fit for the universities — at the time, that was the perception. It’s unhelpful, I think, to say “beat,” or “post-beat,” but that is the most familiar access point. So Ginsberg, and sort of the New York School poets.

There were these two giant anthologies that came out around 1960, that were meant to represent what had been happening since 1945 in American poetry. And I could be wrong, but I remember learning in class that the only poet who was in both anthologies was John Ashbery. He could go anywhere. He can do no wrong. And still, people were like, I don’t understand it! They thought his work was an emperor-wears-no-clothes situation. People get like that with Anne Carson.

There’s a line in a Marianne Moore poem that one of the high school kids just recited. It’s called “Poetry,” and it tries to describe poetry, and it starts out with the line: “I, too, dislike it.” It’s great, it’s good to look at. There’s this mini-manifesto in it, where she describes everything that’s kind of wrong with poetry, but she describes it as an imaginary garden with real toads.

That’s beautiful.
Yeah. I like that description.

I watched that documentary Poetry In Motion a little while ago, and that Anne Waldman poem stood out, “Empty Space” — 
 — “Makeup on Empty Space.” Yeah.

I remember watching her recite that and thinking, Oh, I get it! That’s about poetry, right?
Yeah. But I think the biggest block to appreciating poetry is the word “about.” We’re kind of raised to try to unlock everything. That’s why high school kids tend to hate poetry: It’s presented to them as this puzzle to solve, and it’s like — Why don’t they just say that? Why do I have to go through this whole “I heard a fly buzz” thing if the only thing it means is, Seize the day, you’re going to die. Just say that, and I don’t have to spend an hour unpacking this. I think that’s totally legitimate. I think poetry is a terrible instrument for trying to tell someone something. I have no interest in sitting down and writing a poem about something; I’m interested in following a thought and figuring out where it goes, maybe writing toward something, but I kind of feel like if I’m not surprised by where the poem goes, a reader won’t be, either.

I feel like poetry is an experiment with consciousness. And it’s funny, people who are very sophisticated about other areas of the arts feel very shut out of poetry. No one stands in front of a Mark Rothko and goes, What does it mean?! — actually, that’s not true, some people do. But people who would absolutely accept that painting on its own terms, or a Basquiat, something that is maybe somewhat figurative but moving into some kind of abstraction — it’s an experience. They accept the idea that, standing in front of this painting, you experience the painting. It’s not a Rubik’s cube.

Poetry is text, and we’re still very attached to the idea that language is supposed to communicate something clearly. But I do think all good poetry does communicate something clearly, it’s just that, for me — and there’s some narrative, very straightforward poetry that I really enjoy, but there’s a lot of poetry that I really enjoy because what it’s communicating to me very clearly is either an atmosphere, or a state of consciousness. A different degree of awake-ness to experience. And that can mean so many different things.

You can’t try to look for a literal meaning.
Yeah, because if all you’re left with is “You’re going to die, seize the day,” if it’s just a puzzle, then it’s not going to last 400 years. Who knows how long anything’s going to last, but you’re just trying to make something that’s alive. That’s how I think of it. I know poets who chisel, and do really beautiful work with language where they’re kind of crafting things very meticulously, like carving marble. I’m not that kind of poet. When I consider poems that I think work the best, as much as I can be a judge of my own work, I feel they’re ones for which I just got out of the way.

That was exactly, I think, my problem with poetry, why it felt so impenetrable to me. I looked at it like sudoku.
But that’s really common. It’s not your fault, that’s how it’s been presented.

Also because poetry is really familiar material used in a very different way. I’ve had a similar block with certain music, like experimental music and contemporary composition. Because what I love so much about music generally is the immediacy and the emotional connection, it’s harder for me to think about music fulfilling a completely different function — it never even occurred to me that I might access music with the part of my brain reserved for I don’t know, phenomenology.

Another thing: I love it when someone quotes poetry at me in context, but facing down an entire page, I feel completely unmoored. I just do not know how to proceed.

Well, it’s so dense, right? I think generally, most people like poems in small servings — people like to stumble upon a poem in a general interest magazine. The National Endowment for the Arts actually did research on how people engage with poetry. People really like it at life events, like a graduation, or a wedding, or a funeral. A couple of lines here and there.

Like a tincture.
But actually, it’s funny — I read poetry all the time, and recently I read an old Margaret Atwood novel. And it was such a pleasure to read something that just pulled me through. I wanted to know what happened next. There’s a totally natural human desire for storytelling and narrative, and to not be conscious of the language all the time.

That’s interesting, the idea of something pulling you through. A story has its own momentum. What pulls you through a poem? Or is it just different?
I think it’s different. What I love about poetry is that it’s totally open, in terms of what it can do. I think poetry lives in your head in a different way, too. I read poetry for work in a way that I think is very antithetical to the way someone should read poetry for pleasure. I have to read things quickly — that’s why people hate editors, because they feel like you’re not meeting the book on its own terms, but it’s actually physically impossible to meet submissions on their own terms. All I’m really able to do at is just try to fall in love.

When I get to read poems the way poems are supposed to be read, it’s a very different experience than reading a novel, generally speaking. And people try to write novels in verse, and — it’s a really weird experience! They’re great technical achievements, but unless they’re sort of so fantastical, like with Anne Carson’s work, that the story couldn’t be told as well in straight prose — the language is just overly aware of itself. My brain wants to get to the next what happens.

Poetry’s about distillation — generally, it can be — and these moments that crystallize in a certain way. With poetry, when it’s successful, these lines carry so much power. There’s such an attention to the sound; it has a really close relationship to music in that way. Not because people set words to music, but because the words on the page have an internal music, that actually gets lost when you set things to music. It’s kind of antithetical to the design of the work. At least the kind of work I like.

We were talking about Will Oldham earlier. I haven’t read his interview book, and if he published a book of poetry I probably wouldn’t read it. But I don’t know if I’d have come to his music were his lyrics not what they are.
Someone like Will Oldham has such a profound sense of musicianship, and he changes the way those lines exist in your body through what’s happening musically, and what’s happening in his voice. In poems, that all has to happen on the page and in your head, and so it’s like another layer of fussiness. It’s like, in either case there are two threads at once, and if you strip one thread away, you have something else. You don’t have the complete experience of the piece of art.

Someone like Anne Waldman I find very interesting — her work has such a strong oral component to it that I can’t read it on the page without hearing her reading it. This is a different talent than, say, John Ashbery, and I perversely love hearing John Ashbery read his poems, because he has this kind of really flat tone. I love hearing poets who are considered bad performers, because it’s their voice, and you get kind of this other layer of information hearing it.

How did you fall for poetry in the first place?
I had a single mom, and my grandparents helped raise me. My grandmother had done a master’s in English lit, had gone to university in the ’60s, at age 39. She did her master’s on Tennessee Williams, and she used to quote Dorothy Parker around the house, and read me Shakespeare. Language was really important to her. And then my mother, as a high school kid in the ’60s in Detroit, was really into the civil rights movement, went to see the MC5, and she liked to go to poetry readings and stuff like that. She was really interested in the poetry of that era, and had this hilarious anthology called From Beowulf to Beatles, which was published the year I was born, 1972. It’s conflating song lyrics by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen — not his poetry, but “Suzanne” and stuff like that — and the Beatles, with classical and contemporary poetry. When I was 12, and this is the only Christmas present I really remember, my mom made me a folder of like, photocopies of her favorite poems from that particular book.

That’s so sweet.
It was sweet. There was some really interesting stuff in there, too, like Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I did my eighth grade oral report on Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I know next to nothing about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but I love his surname. It sounds like long stringy teeth.
He’s still alive, he’s in his 90s. San Francisco countercultural hero. I think I wrote a couple of shitty poems, or a lot of shitty poetry in high school. For my undergraduate, I majored in poetry, basically — that was just all I wanted to do. And then every time I tried to do something else it didn’t work out, and every time I tried to pursue poetry I fell, like, ass-backwards into some amazing thing. Doors would just fly open for me. I got a job at Poetry magazine when I was 24 or 25 or something. I just kind of met somebody who was like, “What are you into? I want to help you, no one mentored me.” I was taking a French class with someone who worked at the Newberry Library, where Poetry magazine at the time had free office space.

I really like the freedom of the fact that, with poetry, it’s kind of impossible to sell out. I mean, you can try to write a poem that would be the kind of poem that would get published in the place you’d like to get published, but I can’t imagine that sustaining you for very long.

So what about Twitter? I think, when I first read Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter, or like Kimmy Walters’s Twitter, something kind of clicked for me, that you could use words that way. It sort of feels like Twitter has been an entrance point to a form that people might not gravitate to otherwise. But I also wonder if there’s skepticism about that.
Of course there is. But it makes total sense to me that poetry would adapt to these new forms. I’m so interested in the Internet’s effect on poetry, because I feel like it’s a little just outside my grasp, like I’m playing catch-up still.

I think Patricia Lockwood was a poet before she joined Twitter, and I think her following — it’s not like, 6 million — 
But it’s significant.

And more significant than she would have found otherwise.
Well, I’ve heard her talk in interviews about how her Twitter followers will show up at readings, but her poems actually operate very differently than her Twitter. So sometimes they’re confused by her actual poems, or their level of engagement with the poetry might not be the same as their level of engagement with her Twitter.

Which is also analogous to music I guess — like the B-52s, some people liked “Rock Lobster,” some people bought the album and loved the band.
Yes. You were mentioning Ariana Reines earlier, and I was interested in how you found her.

To me she was part of a context that was not poetry. My friend Sarah edits a magazine called Adult, and I’m not sure if Ariana Reines was contributing or just providing some kind of inspiration, but she recommended her to me. It’s kind of an interesting confluence, because even just to see Ariana Reines — Sarah showed me her copy of Mercury, and I looked at the picture and thought, I like this woman! She looks like Dory Previn. I liked her aesthetic. And I started reading her work, or trying to read her work, and I feel like there’s something glowing at the center of it that speaks to me, but I don’t know how to get to it. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I do know what you mean.

She seemed to belong to a world that made sense to me.
Yeah, I guess what the Internet does really well is make those connections.

But I guess that goes for everything. Like, if your fascination was Downtown Manhattan in the ’70s or ’80s, there would be writers like Cookie Mueller or Lynne Tillman, a whole spread of writers and poets you might be interested in because you were interested in, I don’t know, Nan Goldin or Klaus Nomi. A whole cluster of artists working in different mediums united by a general sensibility.
I think that’s a legitimate thing. One of the things I romanticize about Chicago in the ’90s is, I felt like I was in this web that was consistently elevating me and challenging me and educating me in a way that I have not experienced since. Then I moved to New York, at not the best time, and I feel like something I’m still trying to build up again is this feeling of having a network of, whether you know them personally or not, people working in different mediums that share some some unspoken mission. We’re all working on the same thing.

That’s a great point. Ten years ago affinity was limited by geography, and you could be at the wrong place at the wrong time, because you had to be somewhere and not everywhere at once. Now you can be everywhere at once.
That’s huge.