Story-telling, Artificiality, and Suspense: An Interview with Mark Jarman

                                                                                                            -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: "Ground Swell" is a poem that utilizes a number of speakers.  First, we have the voice of the narrator who wants to tell his story.  Then we have a more outside voice, one that is meditating on events that took place in the past.  And, finally, there's a third voice that acts like an editor, asking the other two voices "Is that all you have to write about?"

Do you see "Ground Swell" in this way?

Mark Jarman:   I see it as having at least a pair of voices, in conversation or dialogue with one another, sort of like Yeats’s “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.”  But nowhere near as formal and stately.  Perhaps any pair of voices suggests a third.

AMK: Do you mind shining some light on how these speakers came to exist in the poem?  Is this an element of form…a device that you discovered best told the story you wanted to tell?

MJ: The speakers arose because I found myself writing once again about a subject I often return to, and so asked myself as I wrote if there was anything new for me to say.

AMK: Are these voices something that came naturally or that were developed via time and revision?

MJ:  The voices arose naturally, yes, but once I realized that I could record them as a way of tracking the poem’s own composition, then I developed a counterpoint as I narrated the memory of seeing this older boy from my church out surfing one morning, and remembering that in about a year from that date, he would be dead in Vietnam.  Once that memory arose in my consciousness, I began the artificial work of constructing a poem that would be linked in all its parts.

AMK: I love that moment in the poem when the older boy slides "past like a smooth machine on the water" and stuns you when he mutters your name, which acts symbolically in the poem (and in real life as well I would imagine) as a sort of ushering of the young speaker into a larger, more adult world.  What I like so much about this moment is that it's such a trivial event and yet it speaks to that weird element of the mind we call memory and the things that stick with us. 

Going through this poem, each line works in a similar way, leaping from one small yet significant memory to the next. 

Is this an element you thought about logically as you wrote the poem or something that developed more on its own, somewhere in the background of the mind?

MJ:  Once the memory arose, I saw how narrating it could answer the questions asked by one of the poem’s speakers and also how conventions of storytelling, like foreshadowing and suspense and denouement, could be employed.  I suppose this artificial work, which to me is the most exciting part of poetry writing, could be called logical; it certainly doesn’t occur “in the background of the mind.”  Certain instinctual aspects of craft do come into play from that background, but only because you’ve practiced this craft for a long time. 

AMK: One of the truly touching aspects of the poem is just how believable it is.  There's not a moment when I think that the speaker (who simply wants to tell his story) is being taken over by the writer (who may be more interested in sounding smart or creating a resonant image).  At the same time, however, I never doubt that the speaker in the poem is, in fact, Mark Jarman, the poet writing the poem.  The result is a truly sincere speaker and a truly sincere poem. 

How important do you think such sincerity is in contemporary poetry?  Is this a poem that could have been written from another point of view or by a poet other than yourself?

MJ:  I don’t think about sincerity or irony when I write.  But to me, in this poem, both attitudes are present.  I did want to sound believable, but I also wanted to establish the clear irony that this godlike figure, the older surfer, was going to die, along with the irony that your own sense of selfhood often isn’t clear to you until someone else, someone you admire, acknowledges it.  Isn’t that ironic? 

AMK: All in all, it seems to me that the poem is structured so that the line "His name is carved now / on the black wall in Washington" doesn't leap out as the reader as not "belonging" to the voice presented to us in the previous lines.  As a result of this movement between voices, this line drastically changes the narrative of the poem without being drastic itself.  At the same time, it manages to change the poem from a coming of age story and into a poem that's really more about the writing of poems themselves…how one must face the painful parts of the self to truly write about their experiences.

I'm wondering what sort of poem you think this is.  Is it a coming of age poem, i.e. a bildungsroman?  Is it a poem about writing poetry, i.e. an ars poetica?  Or is it an elegy; a poem in praise of the dead?  Does it matter either way?

MJ:  I hope it is all three of those kinds of poems and more.  But I like it that you are thinking in three’s.  The Trinity is important to me. 

AMK: Thank you.