An interview with Gregory Pardlo

                                         -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: Can you tell us a little bit about how this poem came to be? Is this a poem that was inspired or that you had in mind to write? Has it drastically changed over time? Did it start out in this form, as a sort of address to your father, or did that come with revision?

Greg Pardlo: It was definitely a poem I had in mind to write because the union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), had cast such a long shadow over my adolescence: my father’s role in the union, the strike itself, the poverty, the ostracism my family ultimately experienced as traitors of the middle class. But of course, inwardly it was a source of great pride that my family belonged to this small union, this tribe as I liked to think of it, of Americans whose sense of worth in the public life of the nation was such that permitted us collectively to challenge the nation’s highest public office. As a twelve year-old black boy, this was a powerful identification, because through it I was able to counter almost every stereotyped image of myself I saw otherwise reflected in society. So I intend the poem to be more than an address to the father.

The primary trope of the poem considers the condition of the individual voice in its negotiation with the realities we find before us, the voice in its attempt to influence or alter a cultural and natural universe that resists acknowledging us individually. Speech as protest, the simple act of articulation registering the opposition to silence. Perhaps because of my ignorance of theology, I’ve always (mis)understood prayer as a form of protest. So the poem is meant to celebrate the solitary individual occupying what I imagine to be a tradition of individuals at the mountaintop vainly submitting demands to, in the case of this poem, a secular authority among various types of authority. The poems is also self-consciously aware of the speaker’s own participation in that tradition as he performs the very thing he describes.

Most of my poems begin as prose. I just try to communicate the idea first to myself. Then I begin trying it in different verse forms. There’s a fine line between what feels "right" or organic, and what just feels obvious. This poem is one whose form, the couplets, I’m more ambivalent about in that regard. After finding a form, however, I try to find a voice or tone. Then I meticulously polish and explain and revise. Finally, when I think I have something comprehensible, I take a hammer to the whole thing and start over. That hammer might be a disrupting lyric or rhythmic pattern, an image or a secret rule I apply to the poem.

AMK: It seems that while most poems have a meaning or a number of meanings that operate on various levels, most poets have a particular meaning or artifice they wish each of their poems to take on. Obviously, "Winter After the Strike" is about your father, but what in particular (or not in particular) is it that you hope readers take away from the poem?

AMK: You have a book coming out in the fall. I'm looking forward to reading it. And while this may be a broad question, I'd be interested to know what "kind" of poems you think you write or that we might expect from this book. I say "think" because this is the sort of question that is probably impossible to answer. But I've noticed that a lot of poets can actually answer this question fairly easily, even though the answer changes over time. One of my colleagues, for example said the first thing that came to his mind, "I want each of my poems to be good enough my mother would read them."

GP: Speaking of parents, that is an interesting concern regarding the accessibility of ones poems to "Mom". I grew up in a family dominated by artists and the arts. One of my more formative memories in my relationship to art is as a child being confounded by my mother’s creative process. How does it happen, I thought, this making something from nothing? Of course now I would argue that that "something" is always already there and is simply being rearranged, but I’d have to say it is my mother, a visual artist, who taught me to believe in my own aesthetic sensibilities. Though it is something we often live by, I try not to put too much stock in approval, per se. I’m more into Pound’s idea of "commerce." I do keep in mind, however, what that other blues artist, B.B. King, says: "don’t nobody love me but my mama, and she could be jiving too."