So, the first question - what do you see as the role of the Holloway poet?
Yeah. So this is an interesting question, because you know that I have a very personal relationship with the Holloway. And we'll probably talk some about that. So besides that, asking about the role of the Holloway poet position is a funny thing because it’s almost self-evident. Right? It's whatever the contract says: teach a class and give a reading. But it's really to be a poet. And I think that’s, again, self-evident but important, because whoever's in this position has an opportunity to represent being a poet in the department. I think something special about the English department here is its fusing of “creative writing,” for lack of a better word, and academic criticism, creative pursuits and scholarship. Those kinds of categories blend and overlap here. Part of the Holloway position is having that presence: you are a reminder of the central place that creative writing and poetry in particular play in the department. And also as a visitor you get to bring in an outside perspective and shake things up a little.
There's also a legacy that you're becoming part of. I mean, you look at who's been the Holloway poet—it's really kind of a powerful list of figures in poetry—and they are often here at the point when they are not totally established but doing breakthrough work. There’s a lot of energy around that. This is something that Berkeley, when I was here as a PhD student, had a reputation of really capturing imaginative and scholarly minds before they hit it big--like they were doing the work but not necessarily fully recognized for it yet. And the Holloway seems to resonate with that. When you're the Holloway poet, you're coming into this legacy and keeping alive this energy and a constellation of creative and scholarly pursuits that happen at Berkeley, which makes it special. It’s an honor to be named in that group.
That seems like a great response to a completely ridiculous question in some ways (a question with too many or no answers at all). There must be a kind of amorphous sense of what it means because obviously it means something different to every person. But it must be exciting to become a part of that ongoing legacy of poets.
I don't think it's a coincidence, as Fiona [McFarlane] was quick to tell me, that she's the one fiction writer of the creative writers. This place slants hard on poetry, no complaint about that. So you're entering that, you're part of that, you're amplifying that.
You mention the sense in which this experience might mean something specific given that you were a graduate student in this department. Could you tell us about your own experience with the Holloway poetry series as it relates to that?
The Holloway for me, when I was here as a grad student twenty years ago, was the space that brought together these overlapping poetic communities. I started right when I came into grad school. Lyn [Hejinian] got hired and took over the Holloway and asked me to be her co-conspirator because she had been my teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop a few years before. I had the privilege of being kind of in charge of it. As a young poet, I had a seat at the table, which allowed me access to all kinds of different poets and ideas about poetry and what it means to be a poet. The Holloway series brought in really exciting writers. And under Lyn, it was a real heterogeneous group. Her work slants, as you know and everyone knows, experimentally and she would bring those experimental writers in but she was interested in poetry in all its permutations. So we would have Robert Grenier and his almost illegible written poems one month, and then we'd have Marie Howe followed by Lee Young Li, and then we'd have Kit Robinson, a poet deeply connected to the local scene.
The Holloway poetry series has this potential to be this kind of conduit for poetry. It has been important because these poetry readings bring together professors and graduate students who are practicing poets and catalyzes Berkeley’s wider poetry community. There is a lot of poetry happening in Berkeley both in the department and outside of it. And again, poets come here for grad school because they believe they can be both poets and scholars as graduate students, which is a tall order. But Berkeley's English department promises that space and so they come. So it’s bringing in all these different lines of poetic engagement and interest into one room – the Maude Fife Room! (laughs). I have to say, though, it's fun to be the Holloway poet as opposed to being the grad student running the thing and getting fruit from Berkeley Bowl for the receptions.
When we talked last time you brought up Lyn’s energy at that moment because she was just coming in and had this let's do this attitude. And that was kind of interesting to me (along with what you said about buying fruit for the receptions).
Well, we got to create it. That was cool, I mean, Lyn was delightfully irreverent. I was actually reading an interview Lyn did for 150 Years of Women at Berkeley where she talked about the fact that she didn't have ambitions to be a scholar. She didn't have a PhD and she was sort of proud of that. She came into the department already very much a poet and very brilliant, and also kind of adjacent and a little suspicious of it all, you know; she was like I'm going to come from this really creative place that matters. And so she wasn't interested in maintaining some tradition. She was interested in disruption and doing what made sense philosophically and politically as well as poetically.
And so we, as far as she was concerned, we were just gonna build it from the ground up. And I was brand new, too. So I had no sense of the culture really either. We're like, okay, well, let's make this into something. And that was great and empowering. On the flip side, to her advantage, she was local. So she had a lot of resources that benefitted the Holloway enormously, right? Because she had international reach but also a grounding here. So she was able to animate the local community but also make contact with national and international writers and bring them here. That was a special synergy and the fact that she was new and I was new, we weren’t following any rules because we didn’t know them. The one rule I was told was how to do the reception – I was given a list of all the places that I had to go shop, which you can imagine was a nightmare. I’m going to the Cheese Board, Berkeley Bowl, and a bunch of specialty shops all in the same day. I had to modify that because that was a little overwhelming and unsustainable. At some point, I decided to buy a bunch of fruit and put it in a basket because it looked nice and it was easy. I probably had cheese and crackers or something, too, but I remember the fruit basket was a big hit because so many grad students were grateful for the fresh fruit and would take it home with them.
Was Lyn the faculty coordinator the whole time you were at Berkeley?
I was only in Berkeley for three years. I was the co-coordinator with Lyn until I left. I’m pretty sure Hillary Gravendyk took over for me and worked with Lyn. I remember the “big revolution” after I left was getting the Holloway a web presence. It's weird given where we are now to imagine this. I mean, they're like, creating a website. And yeah, they reached out to me, saying we want to put your bio in here. They were trying to build this presence, basically at that point, and make the Holloway more visible. I don’t know what really happened after that. I know that when I came here this time Cecil Giscombe had been in charge of it and had guided it through the pandemic, which could not have been easy. What's interesting is that coming back now, I didn't realize when I was quite coming in. Cathy Park Hong, who like Lyn is a powerhouse, is new to the department and this is her first year running Holloway. So it feels very similar to the way it did when I started running the Holloway with Lyn. Things are fermenting and I feel like the series is going to evolve and blow up into something new and interesting and important for poetry.
That makes me think - is your time as a PhD student being duplicated, reproduced or mirrored now during your time here?
Yeah the feeling of deja vu and duplication and revision and return, like all those things pervade my experience being back here. Except last time I was down in the flats by Aquatic Park and this time I’m up on the hill by campus living in the Miles House.
The Holloway poet typically lives in the Josephine Miles house. Is the history of the series bound up with the house itself? Is the house a kind of archive?
From my purview, the answer is yes. They are. The Miles House and the Holloway series are intertwined for obvious reasons. Most of the Holloway poets live in the house. One thing less obvious maybe but important to note is that both exist because of women related to the department. It's Roberta C. Holloway and it's Josephine Miles. And that seems significant to note. Even if the Miles House is used for other things, I think there is a symbiotic relationship between the series and the house that’s important. And, at this point, the series and the house are both storied. They have histories that are significant to American poetry. There's just so many of Josephine Miles’ books and so many of Josephine Miles’ papers that live in the in the house still. And as I said in the first question, the Holloway has a legacy of significant poets, many who became members of the department: Geoffrey was a Holloway poet, Lyn was a Holloway poet. Heather McHugh did teach here for a bit and was a Holloway poet. And there's probably more. Bob Hass, too, of course.
In one of your Boston Review microreviews of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and My Life in the Nineties, you quoted the line “We make our appearance and then define ourselves. Existing never to non-exist again.” I was really struck by the incredibly strange beauty of that second line: the way in which an adverbial negation of “Existing” by “never” then folds into a non-idiomatic sound of “non-exist”ing and then lands happily back on another adverb, but this time of repetition (“again”), rather than negation (“never”).
There are these really beautiful symmetries in her work that do not take the shape of the symmetries that conventionally occupy pre-determined historical forms like the sonnet, right? They're not the same kinds of symmetries - the traditional sonnet has very specific angles at which you can look at it and see things, like you're turning one of those little prisms. Whereas, both here and also in your work sometimes, there was this weird negation happening around adverbs. It was nonlinear, back and forth, mirroring the way thought actually seems to happen in some way. And then there was the additional refraction of seeing some of these things in your work after reading Lyn’s. She’s undermining what Brandon Brown called the “icy music” of the sonnet, as I think you are, too. So I guess the question is, in whatever way it is possible to say this: what has Lyn’s work meant to you as a writer? Is any of this related to "poetic autobiography"?
You’re raising interesting questions, and there's something additionally interesting that you're raising for me about Lyn's work with your brilliant reading of her line. Lyn’s presence and her work completely changed and totally reoriented my poetics, which means, because of how I think about poetry, she reoriented my life. When I went to the Workshop, I had a whole different poetic orientation, different people influencing my work. When Lyn came, I took her class, thank God. I took her workshop because I was afraid. I was afraid of her. I was afraid of the Language school, but I was like, “I will take her workshop because that's why I'm here, to learn about poetics I don’t understand and that make me feel out of my element. Ironically enough, I found myself in that workshop, I found my poetic element in Lyn’s class. I went into her workshop thinking I just want to understand this. And then I became it. She opened up poetry for me and helped me recognize what I was trying to do with language by understanding what Lyn was trying to do.
At the time, she was seen as part of a group that contaminated poetry with critical theory. But she was trying to open up the potential and possibility of writing “under the sign of poetry.” She was opening up poetry to all kinds of language practices, including theory, and redefining what poetry was. When I started doing the Holloway with Lyn, I would go to these dinners and have conversations with poets Lyn brought and there were several times where the visiting poets would end up next to me whispering to me about why the Language school was undermining poetry by deconstructing lyric subjectivity or whatever. Yeah. There was some resistance to experiment, at least the kinds of experiment Lyn was interested in, even though they've been brought to Berkeley by Lyn and taken out to dinner and Lyn is running the thing! And they're still having this conversation with me, which I always felt was a little strange. But what I took from it is that the Language school, at the time especially (it was the late 90s, early 2000s), was galvanizing. Some poets, poets working in the modes I was very much working in when I entered the Workshop, felt threatened by it. It was the ways in which Language poetry seemed threatening that became interesting to me, because I always thought those conversations were misunderstandings of the poetics and a misreading of the poems, if the poems were even being read by these poets. I understood where the poets were coming from because I had been there and I kind of thought, you know, like—they would say the language school was cynical, it was just all about language, and there was no self or no identity. But Lyn was just complicating our ideas of what identity is or means in a poem, understanding its relationality to language and to others. Some thought the poetry because of its interest in theory was joyless. And I'm like, what kind of Language school poetry are you reading? So many of the poems were funny, zany, and absolutely joyful. Yeah. There's jokes and humor. The poetry is alive and so full. And it is also not against anybody.
Yeah, I think that binary has always seemed pretty silly to me, and the resistance you’re describing seems to me to (maybe?) be a social phenomenon as much as a resistance to an actual poetic practice or the supposed suppression of categories like meaning, self or identity. These things, in that narrative, are always ostensibly under threat, which I think is a pretty frail claim, and also kind of alarmist in this rear guard, reactionary way.
Exactly. It was a fight about “identity poetics” and the authority of the “I” in a poem as if subjectivity in poetry hasn’t always been elastic and multifarious and unsettled. For some poets it seemed really important that the subject of the poems could be traced back to the author in some sort of direct way…. But I was trying to talk about these positions to address your question about “poetic autobiography” (which ultimately has to do with identity) and what that might mean and what Lyn in particular did for my understanding of its meaning. There's many ironies to what we’re talking about, but the biggest one is that, whatever threat some poets might have felt, Lyn, by bringing them into the Holloway series, was already outflanking this exclusive form of “accessible” poetics – how could Lyn, and by extension Language poetry, be exclusive when you're here, right, like, being included? And it's interesting that you said, “maybe it's a social thing.” I mean, it is a social thing. Lyn once asked me, “Whether it was reprehensible to knock heads intellectually but be amicable socially, to feel friendly emotions toward intellectual enemies?” That’s the way Lyn thought about it. And I’ve pondered that question for years. I’m still pondering it. Lyn’s work, I mean, among other things, there is a very important social component. And yeah, the fact that the argument back then (that I hope is much less or nonexistent now) that somehow the language school and Lyn’s work is in any way alienating was such a profound and for me painful misreading of her poetics that was so open and open ended in every way. Being inaccessible was exactly the opposite and Lyn’s influence has been on poets and on American poetry. Now that’s become very clear.
Absolutely, and I don't think it's really possible to separate what you’re describing from the question about Lyn’s work.
Yes, the Holloway made manifest the kind of poetics that drew me to Lyn and her work in the first place. Because it wasn't poetry per se. It was the poetry series as human beings being brought together and these diverse voices coming together through poetry. These are the kinds of conversations and debates that are supposed to happen and Lyn made possible by bringing all these different poets together. Lyn’s poetic practice, which ultimately was about imaginative ways of being in the world with others, animated the Holloway series.
Can you say a bit about the compositional process that has gone into the last two books? From what I understand, you had a specific durational process that went into the formation of these sequences.
It also happens that my two books have a relationship to the Holloway series, because the first book I started when I was a grad student here. So that project was coming out of conversations I was having with Lyn and having with grad students in the department, other poets in the department and the poets I was primarily hearing through Holloway. Berkeley was the context for “(N)notes”, which is the sonnet section of that first book, and the impetus for what was to become the impetus for my most recent book, Notched Sunsets. When I started grad school, I was a little worried I’d stop writing poems. So I came up with this scheme where I simultaneously composed a series of 31 sonnets by writing one line a day, writing all the first lines in the first month, and then the second lines in the next month and so on, so that a month went by between the lines.
And so you were worried that you were going to stop writing poetry?
Yeah because I didn't know what the academic and scholarly demands were gonna be. Yeah, I mean, it seemed like kind of an intense place (laughs).
From an external and an internal view (laughs).
Yeah and also I wasn’t getting a lot of financial support. So I was gonna have to be working. I was married, and soon after we got here, my wife was pregnant and we were having our first baby. So at that point, like if I hadn't been afraid of stopping writing poetry before that, then I was. Yeah, there were a lot of big things happening.
Do you mean the fear fed directly into the process itself?
Yes, so the fear created the form. With everything going on, what can I sustain? What kind of durational project can I keep up? Poetry is a practice. And I understood from Lyn, I mean, one of the things she gave me was this idea of durational projects as a form of poetic practice. It's not like Lyn invented this, but this is where and when it became part of my poetic practice. I started to understand how formal constraints and these writing “games” could be translated into something more than just techniques. They could meaningfully express what it means to be in time. “(N)otes” is my first attempt to really, personally take on this broader, formal poetic experiment. And I was, as I know you are, fascinated with sonnets. Using the sonnet form put my poems in conversation with a received poetic tradition and the formal constraints responded to conditions in which I was writing the poems. How poems get made reflects the conditions in which they are written. I mean, to write, to reflect, to think, is fundamental, but also a privilege to have that kind of time and space. So it’s like, how do I maintain some of that space? Guarantee some of that time? Some of that is, I think, what I really wanted. And so I created this way of writing sonnets with a month gap in between each line. And that disjunction was interesting to me and I wanted to see what it did to or how the gap materialized in laguage. The poems were based on Shakespeare's Sonnets. I was basically rhyming through Shakespeare sonnets. So I'd read sonnet 14, and read the first line, and I'd create, like a sonic imprint to assure that there would be a similar rhyme scheme to the sonnet because I didn’t look back at the lines so, besides that, the lines wouldn’t be coherent or necessarily connected.
So you would create the sonic pattern in advance of the content that then filled it? Is that what you mean?
So, for example, with “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” I would write, “the bike lock jams and still we jilt a day.” But it's like I was using Shakespeare to excite or evoke my own line. The line was independent. It was reacting to whatever is happening, like I can’t get my bike unlocked or whatever. So I was just using Shakespeare to keep me oriented.
As a kind of organizing principle?
Yes. At the time, it was simply like, if I’m not gonna look at what I’ve written, how do I end up with sonnets in the end? And at the time I wanted to have a rhyme scheme, so how do I get the rhymes if I'm not going to look at the lines. I was like, well, if I rhyme with Shakespeare's lines, the rhyme scheme will be there. So this rhyme scheme will say these things are coherent while, at the same time, with a month in between, the lines are gonna take massive leaps of logic. I was interested in temporality. I was interested in how poetic leaps–the organization of lines as well as the duration of the writing (and, to some extent, its relation to the duration of reading)– establish a matrix of meanings in and through time? I was really inspired by A Border Comedy, and Lyn had said that it's about forgetting. She was interested in forgetting as a poetic strategy. She was also interested in boredom. Like boredom as a condition of poetic reading. I thought that was sort of funny and cool, and definitely provocative. I remember her insistence on boredom in poetry when we were at the Workshop used to drive Jorie Graham crazy. So I was thinking about how language actually happened, how we actually use it in time, how repetitions in our language happen, and there are gaps. Like the coherent narratives we are always spinning about our lives come after in retrospect. After I finished the poems, I thought they were successful. They did what I intended them to do but it was a little unsatisfying to read them. I liked the poems. I liked the experiment. But…have you read The Unfollowing? If you like sonnets, this is something you should read.
I was going to ask you about that. Where would you recommend (to someone who hasn't encountered it before) starting with Lyn’s work?
Well, My Life is a classic and a beautiful book. My favorite book of Lyn’s is A Border Comedy. But The Unfollowing is a good place to start if you like sonnets. And I think it's funny when I saw Lyn and she was working on The Unfollowing, she actually explained the project to me on the steps of Wheeler. I was back in Berkeley for some reason and we had met there and she had described this project of writing in non sequiturs. I've written something about this book because I think they’re sonnets and Lyn would insist they're not sonnets. She really wants it to be about non sequitur. Right, which destroys the volta in the sonnet, which is totally brilliant. Maybe she wanted to obliterate the sonnet entirely? But what I think is really funny now is to realize – I want to, keep wanting to, have this discussion with Lyn so badly – the “(N)notes” sonnets I wrote were, accidentally, also about non sequitur and I wonder if she would agree. It's so hard to write non sequitur. It’s a formal problem because our minds are so well-adapted to making connections and can connect anything to anything. Like you just write two words down and the mind instantly finds a connection. But I was like yeah, maybe I hacked that in my initial attempt at sonnets because I had a month go by and I didn't actually know what I had written before. I wonder what Lyn would think of that because the real genius of The Unfollowing for me is the way they function as sonnets despite destroying the volta, which is the fundamental intellectual turn that makes a sonnet what it is and also, maybe, limits a sonnet’s potential to imagine other ways of thinking and being.
It's interesting, because the space opened by the gap between the first of February and the first of March is its own experiential duration outside of the poem, right? But it also seems like you might describe it as a volta every line, which I think is actually an important intervention in the problem with the form itself going uninterrogated. Because one of the things about becoming an obsessive reader and writer of sonnets is that it’s a little like when you become unconscious with the stick shift in a car. You know exactly how much acceleration to exert against the clutch - at certain point you're moving into second gear without thinking about it. And if you read enough, you might start engaging in a kind of unconscious formalizing of thought itself; the pattern is already there, imposing itself upon cognition rather than acting as a vehicle for it. It seems dangerous to naturalize that fluidity; thinking is much more interesting and capacious than a quatrain. And if you're disturbed or obsessive enough about form, and don't interrogate that, I think it can prove to be a kind of toxic degradation of the process.
Again, a brilliant précis about how sonnets work! As an obsessive about form, yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I hadn't thought about it as a volta every line. I just thought about getting rid of the volta but a volta every line is also true. I mean, I've also thought you could read across the sequence and read all the first lines of the poems and they might feel more coherent and chronological since the poem accrues that way. I’m interested in disrupting conventional ways of reading so I wouldn’t mind if someone read “(N)notes” that way. And yeah, one of the problems with the sonnet is that, and Lyn was definitely on to this, they shape your imagination and your thinking in a very “enlightenment” kind of way. It is this kind of logic, right, that is pervasive and potentially limiting. And so you want to blow it up.
And here we are back at Lyn, right? The rejection of closure.
Rejection of closure – how do I get out of the prison house of language I've created for myself.
So how does this connect to your other book Notched Sunsets?
I wasn't satisfied. There was more than I needed to figure out with the form. I wanted to do it again the same way but look at the lines that came before. So instead of being about these leaps or these voltas every time–which, I mean, I liked that–it was more about lost contexts. It was about imagining a line being something and going somewhere and then it gets taken somewhere else. So it wasn't so much juxtaposition as a kind of discursiveness. Then, also, the other part of that book was thinking about kinds of dissemination. I mentioned Twitter to you? I was putting it on Twitter, and I was playing with just the available technologies that we were all using. I was using Twitter very much the way we used it, like, I wasn't trying to hack it or do anything crazy or turn the technologies into art, but I was just playing with them as they were. I was playing with Shakespeare still, too; so often, I would take some of his words and just like do word searches, just click on the word to find synonyms or put two of his words together and do a spell check to see what came up. Just playing with what's available for material and then taking that material and building lines, which would have sonic and built-in patterned rhythms that would provoke my imagination, you know? I was also living in Germany, so I was surrounded by a language that sounded familiar but that I really didn’t understand. So it was all about the sound.
That second book was a fuller realization of the formal idea. Because having written the first book and done a lot of writing after it, I think I saw other potentials in writing this way. And I don't know. I'm not writing a whole book again, or even a whole series again, but I am playing with this form again since I’ve been back here in Berkeley because, as I said, everything's duplication and revision. So I've come back to it. But partly I’ve returned to it because this formal way of writing just keeps being interesting. I keep finding things in it. We come up with formal strategies and techniques and then they become part of what I guess we call style or whatever. I mean now that I've been writing this way, it is weirdly part of not just my own practice but like my expression, part of my identity as a poet, and ways I perceive the world.