The World of Elementary Particles, an Interview with Pattiann Rogers

                                                                                                             -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: In all of these poems you manage to create a sort of internal logic, a certain way of thinking that, in a way, allows the poem to be written.  I’m thinking of those first lines in “Being Accomplished” (“Balancing on her haunches, the mouse can accomplish / Certain things with her hands.”) and in “Justification of the Horned Lizard” (“I don’t know why the horned lizard wants to live.”).  In both cases, these opening lines act kind of like thesis statements, that is, if you think of a thesis statement as that element declaring what a piece of writing is going to be about and how the piece of writing plans to address it.

What do you make of this?

Pattiann Rogers:  First, I make of this that you are a careful reader.  It is true that the opening one or two sentences of a poem can be extremely important to the writing of the poem in its entirety.  Those sentences set the tone, the attitude, the cadence and the music of the poem to come.  But the opening sentence is unlike a thesis statement in that it does not state what the poem is going to be about or how it will conclude, because generally that isn’t fully known by the poet at the beginning of the writing.  The writing of a poem, for me, is a process of discovery.  I’m curious about something and I’m using language as a tool to discover exactly what I’m curious about and how I’m moved or touched by it.   At the beginning of the writing of these poems, I didn’t know where they were going or how either would end.

AMK: I first heard of “Justification for the Horned Lizard” and “Being Accomplished” watching a recording of the reading you gave many years ago for the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.  I was struck by how accessible these poems were without sacrificing music (the horned lizard “propelling blood out of its eyes / in tight straight streams…) and imagination (the mouse that “can pull the hull / From a barley seed in paperlike pieces the size of threads. / She can turn and turn a crumb to create smaller motes /The size of her mouth.”).

What’s most important to you as you write a poem; narrative, music, metaphor, imagination?  At what stage of the writing process do you start concerning yourself with accessibility?

PR:  Any one of the qualities of a poem that you mention in your question could become the most important, depending on the poem.  However, I would hope to consider and employ all of them at some time during the process of the writing.  Most strong poems go through many revisions, 20 0r 30 at a minimum.  It’s not possible to work on every aspect of a poem at once.   I most often want to establish the music of the language first, because it helps me to feel and decide the best words to use, words that maintain the cadence of the music established.   I always want my poems to be as accessible as possible.  I am my first reader, and I don’t want to confuse myself.  I aim for rich, original language and clarity.

AMK: How important is the reader in your poetry?  Do you write with an intended/imagined audience?

PR:  Of course, I just said that I am my first reader.  I want to please myself and surprise myself.  But I have other imagined readers in mind too, sometimes different ones, depending on the poem.  I think it’s very important for a poet to imagine a reader receiving the poem and give consideration to the reader.  That reader can be an editor, a teacher, an admired poet, God, maybe a lover.  Ideally, it should be someone who is an excellent and demanding reader and who understands what makes a wonderful poem.

AMK: What do you think of poetry that asks a lot of a reader?

PR:  It’s all right for poetry to ask a reader for effort and time, but only if the poem actually gives something of value back to the reader in exchange.  I’m not in favor of obscurity in a poem, of course.  Mystery will always be present to some extent, because our language is not so exact as to eliminate it.  A poet’s aim is to make positive use of that mystery, in some instances to highlight it.  

We are surrounded by language that is didactic, or that tells us what we want to hear or expect to hear or reconfirms our prior opinions, language that is geared toward convincing us of a rigidly held opinion or geared toward convincing us to act or believe in certain ways, or language that is so simple it comes into our consciousness and departs quickly and easily.  Poetry uses language differently.  The best poetry uses language in new, imaginative, and original ways.  The best poetry should surprise and stun a reader with a new perception deeply felt and should draw a reader back for re-readings.  Re-readings of a strong poem should continue to be revealing and enjoyable, just as the best music can be listened to with pleasure over and over.

AMK: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on free verse, free verse being a poetry that isn’t set in a traditional form or in any particularly structure.  This interests me because, while your poetry is mostly in free verse, it’s clear that you pay close attention to the formal elements, i.e. meter, rhyme, line breaks, etc.  And many of your poems (particularly the three featured here) read like odes or eulogies to me, which are both sorts of traditional form.

PR: You’re correct that free verse doesn’t adhere to traditional forms.  But that doesn’t mean a poem written in free verse doesn’t have structure.  A successful poem written in free verse will have a structure that is one with its meaning, a structure, a form, that came into existence as the poem was being written and helped the poem to fulfill itself, just as a tree takes its form as it grows, the form that allows it to flourish,

AMK: How do you choose line breaks in lines like

She can hold the earless, eyeless head
Of her furless baby and push it to her teat.

and

During the dearth and lack of those two thousand

Million years of death, one wished primarily

Just to grasp tightly, to compose, to circle,

To link and fasten skillfully, as one…?

PR: I have many different reasons for breaking lines where I do.  I have broken the lines in different poems for different reasons, but always I have reasons.  Because many of my poems follow a pattern of thought--sometimes laying out a pattern of cause and effect, sometimes following a logic established in the poem, sometimes folllowing a process of experimentation or investigation of an idea or an image or perception--I don’t want the structure or form to get in the way of the reader’s ability to follow that pattern.  So I want a fairly simple, controlled form.  Sometimes I am writing a poem about motion across a landscape, and I want a form that will facilitate or replicate that motion and I want the line breaks to function in a different way.

In the first example you gave above, I would guess, although I don’t remember exactly, that I didn’t want those three adjectives ending in “less” to appear on the same line.  They might call attention to themselves and draw a reader out of the poem.  Also, I’m certain that I had established a definite line length in the poem, and I wanted to adhere to that length unless I had a good reason not to.  I did not want a complicated form as I worked by way through the poem.  Incidently, I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote the last stanza of this poem.  It was sent back to me several times by the editor of a journal to which I had submitted it who urged me to think harder and deeper about it.  He accepted the poem with the last stanza as it is now.

In the second example, a good rule I think about in terms of where to break a line is to try to assure that each line by itself can be interesting, either in terms of a strong noun or a vivid adjective or an unusual word or a common word used in a suprising way or an interesting cadence.  Every line should contain

something of interest.  Similar to the first example, in this one there is a list of five infinitives—to grasp, to compose, to circle, to link and fasten.  That list absolutely had to be broken by a line break so it wouldn’t be seen as ‘over the top.’

AMK: One thing I love about these poems is how there’s clearly a larger story beneath the surface, and, yet, rather than write a narrative poem about, say, a mouse you’ve observed in a field, you meditate on the narrative of the mouse itself rather than the narrative of the observation of the mouse.  It’s kind of like a film inspired by actual events.  The goal in films like this is oftentimes to convey some meaning beyond simply that which took place.  And while I think most narrative poems do this, you go about it in an entirely different way.  How/why do you write this way?

PR:  I’ve never been asked this question before.  So I’m not so sure of my response.  I know that I want to get as close to the subject of any poem as I possibly can.  I’m asking myself questions, “Why am I so fascinated by a mouse?”  My son had pet mice at the time.  I generally took care of them.  At the same time, our cat brought home a mouse from a field nearby.  In order to address my interest and fascination, I started with a mouse, described it as specifically as I could, related as much as I could about it and hoped the poem during this process would begin to open and reveal something to me that I felt but as yet had not articulated.

The same is true of the horned lizard.  One of my sons did capture one, which started my curiosity, although many of the details in that poem came from research on horned lizards.

AMK: Your known by many as a “scientific poet.” I’m hoping to join you there some day.  What is it about science that so fascinates you?  Our existence?  Its lexicon?  Mysticism?  Something else???

PR:  I love the stories science is in the process of telling us about the physical world we live in.  I love the vocabulary science has amassed and is continuing to build as more is learned about the earth and its life, and the universe.  That vocabulary is lyrical and evocative.  The stories science is telling have greatly expanded the boundaries of our experience, down to the world of elementary particles and out to the galaxies in the far reaches of the universe and time.  All of these stories influence our definitions of what it means to be human.  Scientists, when they are doing the work of science, cannot and do not try to address spiritual questions.  They can address these questions as human beings, but science as a process cannot address them.  That is left to all the arts, music, visual arts, poetry, drama, fiction, creative non-fiction, and to theologians and philosophers.  Science affects us in too many ways to be ignored by the arts.  Any expression of spiritual concerns in our time must include the vision of our place in the physical world as revealed currently by science, in my opinion.

AMK: Thank you for your time.

 
PR:  Thank you for you.