Half-glimpsed Visions, Exchanges, and Phenomena-- the poet

as packrat first: an Interview with Nicky Beer

                                                                                            -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: "Avuncularity" starts off as an almost funny sort of commentary on family, how we tend to look at our own flaws and then work backward, looking into our histories for some sort of genetic explanation for who we are.  What I like in particular about this poem is how it suddenly shifts at the end into a poem that's more about our tendency not only to look back but to attempt to connect with those who make us who we are. 

Do you mind taking us through the making of this poem and how it got to that wonderful moment of the "bright nova hovering / over his left shoulder as though something / has chosen that moment to rush into his body?"

Nicky Beer: In terms of the biographical background: I discovered rather late in my childhood—I think I may have been twelve or so—that I had an uncle who had died before I was born.  And around the time of writing this poem, I was also thinking about my father, who’d died when I was fifteen, and the fact that I had younger relatives who were children or babies when he died, and who would never know him, and that, as huge a personality as he had been in my life, he would never be much more knowable to them than my own dead uncle had been to me.  And I wondered if the version of the man they thought of bore any resemblance to the father I knew. 

So the poem really became more about the fiction the unknowable uncle becomes, rather than who he actually is, and yet I think the poem tries to point out that we need those kinds of fictions in order to understand our lives just as much as we need the things that we perceive as stable, objective truths.  The speaker looks to the uncle to serve as a kind of lodestar for the patterns of her life; the fiction she makes of him is the order she imposes on what would otherwise be chaos, or at the very least, a kind of meaninglessness.  She needs to see what’s happened to him, and whatever is happening or will happen to her, as a kind of shared annunciation. 

I was writing this poem as I was reading Dan Chiasson’s The Afterlife of Objects for the first time, and I think his “My Ravine” made a particular impact here.  It begins: “How will you know what my poem is like / until you’ve gone down my ravine and seen // the box springs, mattresses, bookcases, and desks…”  This is definitely an ars poetica to which I can subscribe: how the poem is always, in some way, the reflection of the detritus of our lives, but it’s also an expression of how we refuse to allow something to remain detritus, refuse, flotsam, etc.  Sometimes I think we become writers because we’re packrats first—the world’s half-glimpsed visions, exchanges, and phenomena have a way of staying with us such that we need to write in order to have a place to put all of those things that we carry around with us.  And I think we also make the work to either point to the inherent connectedness of all these disparate things, or else to make the argument that they can be connected by our attention or our imagination. 

AMK: This poem opens with a bold statement: "Every child ought to have a dead uncle."  I think this works really well because the reader immediately asks who and why would someone say such a thing.  As a result, the reader is forced to read the next lines.

Going through this poem line by line, it strikes me that this is how the entire poem operates, with some sort of development that requires us to keep reading if we are ever to come to any understanding of the characters presented to us.  It's sort of a funny (and yet obvious) way to think about writing— words that compel the reader to move on to the next words. 

Is this something you think about as you compose a poem?

NB:  In a sense, yes.  I often find that when I’m composing a poem, I either write or at least conceive of the ending first, and the process of composition becomes finding a comprehensible (or else a pleasantly incomprehensible) path to get to that end.  As I’m writing, the nagging, little kid voice pesters me line by line: “Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?”  And it’s so difficult not to give in to the temptation to rush or force your way to that ending!  Then again, as it was with this poem, sometimes a first line (and, by proxy, a speaker) just shows up, and the poem becomes the answer to the writer’s startled question, “Who the hell is talking here?”  Now that I think about it, it’s not that surprising that so many poets—Yeats, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill—were infatuated with ouija boards and such.  I think your observation that readers of the first line of “Avuncularity” would want to know who would say such a thing and why is pretty much the reason so many of my poems have been written—I’m usually trying to find out the same thing. 

AMK: "My mother is a small submarine" also starts with a bold statement: The hospital room at night / is the bottom of the ocean."  Like a thesis statement, it establishes the trope (extended/controlling metaphor) of the piece.  But it also sets up the basic form of the poem, which presents a common object and converts it into something entirely different.  Such as the tethers as sea kelp.  The heart monitor as a restless eel.  And the morphine drip as fathoms.

The result of all of this is much more than a poem in trope, but a poem that creates an entirely different world and that packs within its language a deep, lyrical resonance.  Ultimately, I think this comes down to the line as an individual syntactical unit.  These are just words after all, and each line is an independent collection of them.  But when taken as a whole, the line becomes something much more complex...two-faced in a way…something that must have its own story to tell and yet must fit with all the others who have their own stories to tell.

My question is one of control.  How do you take lines that so richly maneuver within themselves and make them work in the larger context of the almighty poem?

NB: Thanks for that! When constructing a line of poetry, I’m probably considering, mostly on an unconscious level, three different types of pressure it’s always under to perform: 1) it must be basically comprehensible and engaging as a grammatical (or pseudo-grammatical, if you like) language fragment, 2) it must have a certain sonic charisma, 3) it must be justified in how it appears formally (visually) on the page.  I love the moment of uncertainty that comes just after a line break, when the reader needs to turn around and head back to the beginning of the next line, unsure if the expectations created by that line break are going to be fulfilled.  It’s just a little unconscious blip of doubt, I think, but there’s so much mystery in that blip. 

I find that if there is a kind of electricity in the unit of a line, it seems to be an expression of a certain undercurrent of our English language in general.  There’s such an inordinate pleasure in the lexical discoveries one can make during composition—all the assonances, consonances, heteronyms, homophones, puns, slant rhymes, anagrams, the words-hidden-within-words (the parent in parentheses, for example).  And often the formal tasks of lineation and stanza construction and progression are the means by which we can allow the natural play and music of our language to rise to the surface more discernibly.  As for how these lines work within the context of the larger poem, I’d say that the lines are the poem’s vital signs—temperature, respiration, heart rate, blood pressure; the finished poem must read as though it would expire if one of its lines were subtracted. 

AMK: Reading these poems, I'm always struck by the way in which you deal so directly with the difficult subjects you choose to examine.  There's certainly a delicacy within the language, but the approach is "full steam, dead ahead."

Why and how do you approach these subjects so boldly?  Is this natural for you or is it harder than it looks?

NB: It’s always hard.  When I first began writing seriously, I was very conscious of wanting to keep certain intimate subjects, such as the death of my parents, at arm’s length.  But honestly, trying to avoid that kind of foundational emotional experience when you’re writing poetry is like deciding to never use adjectives—it’s just not possible.  I appreciate the compliment that my approach could be considered “bold,” but I wonder if that’s simply a kind of by-product of having tried to write my way around these issues for so long; after trying and failing to circumnavigate, I don’t have any other way to go but directly through. 

AMK: What's most important to you when you read a poem?  An unfair question I know, but I think it's important that we discuss what really works for us as readers.  And, of course, it's always changing.  For me it used to be story: do I get what's going on in the poem and does it interest me.  Then it changed to "How good are the first four lines?"  Now I'm more focused on where the poem takes me and how it takes me there.

What do you think?

NB: I can’t say that there’s any one particular thing that I’m looking for, but I find that an overwhelming sense of envy lets me know that I’m reading something really terrific.  Also, the longer I’ve been a reader of poetry, the more I value the writer who can surprise me without being gimmicky. I think I used to look more for thrills and formal pyrotechnics—these days, perhaps because the culture in which we live seems increasingly polarized, and the discourse more ugly, I find I need a great deal of compassion in the poetry I read.  Many have said it before, but I’m learning more and more that one’s age has a great deal to do with what we seek out in our poetry, or with the kind of poetry to which we return, and I find it extraordinarily comforting that art, whatever form it takes, can be a protean, but steadfast, companion for all one’s living days.

AMK: When you were revising these poems, what did you find you had to work the most on?: When you were revising these poems, what did you find you had to work the most on?

NB: I think each poem had it’s own particular demands, but I do find that a lot of the finished versions of the poems I write are about 2/3rds the length of the original drafts—I’m a big “slash and burn” reviser.  Of course, there’s always a risk of paring away the poem into incomprehensibility with that kind of strategy—I don’t want to get to the point where I’m just trying publish single words I’ve written on index cards. 

AMK: Thank you.

NB: No, thank you!