An Interview with Ed Pavlić
-by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: When we first discussed featuring "Masqualéro," you
mentioned that this was "possibly the first poem I ever wrote that looked then and still looks to me like a poem."
I find this very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about where you were in your development as a
poet when you wrote this poem?
Ed Pavlić: Where I was? I was just this side of a realization
that visual images matched with the rhythms of everyday speech could teach me things that statements of verbal thoughts would
never find. Whether I knew it or not, I was shedding personae.
“Masqualéro” happened when I’d
given up attempting to make a poem say what I meant (or what I thought I wanted to mean…). The title comes from a Wayne
Shorter composition made famous by Miles Davis’s “Second Quintet” that existed from 1965 – 1968 or
so.
In the song, the rhythm and time signatures slip and move underneath each solo, the song breathes and each
voice (instrumental voice) sounds like itself at the same time each sounds as if the other voices are wound all up in it as
well. From here, I could see it was a kind of private communion. Back then, I didn’t know that but I followed what I
heard and what I thought that music had to do with what I felt like in the world.
I had this passage from Miles’s
Autobiography :
Every night Herbie, Tony, and Ron would sit around back in their hotel rooms, talking about what
they had played until the morning came. Every night they’d come back and play something different. And every night I
would have to react. The music we did together changed every fucking night. Man, it was something how the shit changed from
night to night after a while. Even we didn’t know where it was all going to. But we knew it was going something else.
I also had the rapper Rakim’s phrase, “follow me into a solo,” in mind. I had the visual images
and the rhythm of words leading me out, in, into an open tableau of possible, unframed meaning. I had these two figures (the
characters in the poem) in view. I remember saying to myself, “these two figures need each other and they don’t
know exactly why.” I remember thinking, “they share organs.”
AMK: What, in your
view, makes a poem a poem? What does a poem "look" like on the page? What does a poem do?
EP: I sometimes think I can tell if a poem’s done from across the room simply by the shape
it cuts on a page. Maybe not. But, I do think I can tell if it doesn’t work by the shape. At the same time, of course,
there’s no prescribed shape in a free verse poem. But, something happens to the shape of a poem when it clicks out of
what it was (or wasn’t) and into being itself.
I suppose a poem exists, that’s what it does. One part
of a poem exists when it answers a need in the author. Something has to happen while writing, out of bolt-blue, that answers
a question that didn’t exist in the mind until the answer identified it. Another part of a poem exists when that accident
in the author’s body answers something in the need of a reader. I think readers and writers both come to poetry out
of a need distinct from the ways we approach various kinds of prose. I think we come to it closer to the way musicians and
listeners come to music or the way a painter and a viewer approach a canvas. Poems are made of language held in tension with
its non-verbal properties.
The connection between the needs of readers and writers, in poetry, is elastic but there’s
a relation between them. There’s a mystery in that elasticity that poetry (if not poets) can’t live without.
AMK: What makes a poem remain a poem over time, even as poetry evolves?
EP: What
lasts? The lyric. When an experience (experiences are basically mute) can be made to speak, when it can be literally voiced,
in a way that opens it up (rather than sums it up) into what’s behind it, into what surrounds it, that can last I think.
It’s similar to what makes a song seem to mean more than what the story of the words tell. I think that lasts, but it
can’t be requisitioned or controlled. It’s in the way one can instantly come to depend on the results of an accident.
The best parts of poems are the results of the right accidents; I think that can last.
I think of Catallus writing
about being at a friend's house and then leaving and keeping his friend, the visual, sensual memory of their time together,
under his eyelids. I love the material, literalness, of what he means. I have you, your body, flesh, right here under the
lid of my closed eye. I’ve taught (whatever that means) that poem to third graders two-thousand years after he wrote
it. We read it together and they have no trouble understanding it.
AMK: You are known by some
as a Jazz poet. Can you explain to us what a Jazz poet is?
EP: I love music, that’s
for sure. I’m currently in a friendly (I hope) dispute with a writer about this, actually. Each of us thinks we love
music more than anybody in the world. We’re looking for a way to measure this quantity so we can settle the bet and
pay up.
Seriously, if we could agree that “jazz” is the impulse to search for the shift, the way a
thing has to change to stay itself, then maybe.
AMK: This poem starts with a dedication,
"after Miles." I'm assuming this refers to Miles Davis. Can you explain how this poem is a reflection
of Miles Davis?
EP: Apart from what I’ve already said. I think of Miles’s advice to
young soloists : “Play above what you know, and finish before you’re done.” I think, in “Masqualéro,”
I was able to do that.
He also talked about the shared privacy of instrumental music and about how he didn’t
want to intrude into a listener’s experience of music. There’s something counterintuitive about what he means.
He’s not (as many thought he was…) saying “stay back” or “let’s agree to disagree.”
Some thought he was saying “fuck you.” He may have been saying that, but he was saying something else on that
horn as well. Nothing in his sound supports these fraudulent reductions of what Miles’s music was up to.
I
think what he means is that, somehow, we can hold parts of ourselves (in this case, verbal selves) back and allow other parts
a deeper encounter with each other. Given the history of our country and its present, riven-blind condition, how could it
be otherwise?
By the title and the dedication, “after Miles,” I’d hoped that someone might
listen to Miles’s version of “Masqualéro” and read this poem. I still do that.
AMK:
"Masqualéro" merges the culture of New Orleans ("Esperanto," "one-eyed jacks,"
and "Decatur Street"), mythological figures (Oceanus), and historical settings (Mekong Delta) with twists of image
in lines like "upside down, you watch lilies fall away / a bird's eye vision // of your daddy's parachute"
and language in "A pale gash torn past my lips / leaves the night open."
I think that "understanding"
this poem takes a few readings, but I think that this is one of the aspects of your work (and of poetry in general) that makes
verse fun to read. It is oftentimes difficult and yet delightful and intriguing. For some readers, however,
finding joy in this sort of discovery can be a lot to ask.
I'm wondering what motivates you to write in this
way. Why push image, narrative, and language the way you do? Why ask this of the reader?
EP:
Why play with your back to the crowd? Miles said it’s because the band sounds better to him when he faces them
and not the crowd. That’s simply a matter of the shape of the human ear and the way it sits on our heads. This is before
many stages had monitor speakers. Before surround sound, etc.
If we can say understanding is a kind of intellectual
control that has its uses as well as its limitations, its blindnesses, then I think this poem attempts to exist at the border
of what can and can’t be communicated without fencing in the writer, reader, and the poem. The poem’s set in a
basically recognizable place.
New Orleans is in view, there’s a river, there’s a boat. There’s
a recent past with the American War in Vietnam still in view. These are the children of veterans.
But, their experience
opens out into dimensions that won’t obey the checked boxes on the census reports. There’s also a shifting play
of racial identity afoot in this poem and throughout the book. But, I don’t think there’s one openly racialized
designation near the lyric-pulse of the book. One of the “other kinds of blue” is blackness. This book was, for
me, a way to find what I had and call what’s mine, mine.
That figure, posed, in “a back bend arched
over the bow” watching the water lily blooms morph into her daddy’s parachute in Vietnam. That friend watching
her torso tear the night open…What can I say, every time I read that poem, I can’t wait to get to those lines.
I can’t wait for that comma, and then I get to say “fall out of a lullaby." If I’m the only one in
the room who feels that, it’s an indulgence. If I’m not, maybe it’s not. It’s about what can be shared
and how. Intimate visions, history, myth can be seen as alternate modes of sharing. Geographies.
I should
also thank Andrew Krivak, who was the editor at DoubleTake at the time, for working through the music of this poem with me
before publishing it. I’ve often gone back to the images he convinced me to cut. I miss those images, man. But, the
poem’s better for the cuts. He taught me a lot. He didn’t know me from anyone. He did it for free and he published
my work in (what was then) my favorite magazine.
AMK: “A Brief History of Now & At Least
A Good Elbows Worth of Headroom” is the first poem (aside from the prologue) of your second book, Labors Lost Left Unfinished
and in many ways mirrors "Masqualéro," the first poem of your debut collection, Paragh and Bone & Other
Kinds of Blue.
I may be searching here, but if you play with the first few lines of these poems, “There’s
plenty that think we’re twins. By 18 / we’d both wished secretly that it was true, / & that it wasn’t.”
and “It was heaven there for a minute / without you / but let’s not talk about me,” you get some interesting
results.
What do you make of this? How do you see these poems in relation to each other?
EP:
The figures have grown up. They’re still entwined. In ways, they’re now the veterans. The world is their
present. The refrain in “A Brief History of Now” is “Let’s talk. . .” which (maybe this is jazz?)
morphs into “Let’s dive. . .”, “Let’s change. . .”, “Let’s ride. . .”,
“Let’s play. . .”, “Let’s ride. . .”, Let’s charge. . .”, “Let’s
surrender. . .”.
For me, between the two poems, there’s a sense of lost romance. Or, traded romance.
Some of the suppleness of silence, non-verbal presence has given way to the impulse to get some basic things said. More than
anything else, Le Roi Jones poem “As a Possible Lover” from The Dead Lecturer altered my approach to this border
between the said and the unsaid.
Interestingly, Paraph of Bone ends with “Guerilla Calligraphy” in
which the two figures in “Masqualéro” return to the scene of their early meetings on the river. Similarly,
in Labors Lost Left Unfinished, the last poem, apart from the epilogue, “A Brief History of Now : Volume II,”
continues, deepens and expands the insistence on conversation at the beginning of the book.
As a book, Labors Lost
Left Unfinished does to Paraph of Bone what “A Brief History of Now” does to “Masqualéro.”
It opens the lens to a wider sense of experience, historical, erotic, political, personal.
The music is still there
(in fact, in Labors I list all the musical references at the back), but the range of music has expanded radically. The presence
of jazz is deepened, the soul voices of Phyllis Hyman, Sade, are joined by Alban Berg, the great oud player Anouar Brahem,
Lhasa de Sela and many others.
AMK: Simultaneously, I see this poem as a sort of declaration.
“A Brief History of Now” really blows wide open the controlled, stanzaic structure of “Masqualéro"
and seems to approach a similar universe with a radically different voice.
EP: Labors Lost Left
Unfinished is a “blown wide open” kind of book. There is a declaration in it I think. If Paraph is a Miles Davis
book, Labors is really under the star of Charles Mingus whose music is vast, chaotic, and (at least in my ear) touches as
wide an array of human intensities as that touched in any other American art. He surfaces by name in the titles and texts
of at least a half-dozen poems in the book.
In terms of structure, I’ve allowed certain images to repeat
from poem to poem in Labors in a way I’d have edited out of Paraph. It’s a bigger book in everyway. I hope it’s
a step forward, you know, down the stairs. I often wonder what my friend Andrew Krivak would think? I broke some of his rules
in Labors Lost Left Unfinished.
AMK: Poet Adrienne Rich (who selected Paragh and Bone & Other
Kinds of Blue for the 2001 APR Honickman First Book Prize) explains in her introduction that your poems are "consciously
shaped…[flowing] from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many
disconnects."
It would be very interesting to know about this "consciousness" she senses
in your work. Do you agree with Rich that poetry should be "conscious;" should have a conscience? Should
poems be aware, in a way, that they are poems?
When you were composing this book, did you know you were doing something
a little bit different from those who, Rich claims, displayed an "absence of poetic/emotional conviction, as if no self-creating,
self-critical personality had conceived them?"
EP: A poem must exhibit a consciousness. Conscience
is something else, I think. But, as I’ve implied above, a poem should be a structure with open windows through which
new things can appear to the consciousness. Which, I hope, is what consciousness is; I hope it’s not a closed system,
a gated community, but a way of participating in the world, a place to house new apprehensions, surprises.
I didn’t
have a clear picture of what Adrienne reacted against in her introduction then; I have a clearer image of it now. Soon after
Adrienne selected Paraph, a friend told me that “there are a thousand poets who’d cut off their arm for that prize.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. It wasn’t that I’d stayed clear of writing programs, conferences, and
the shrill kind of ambition that (I’ve since learned) can accompany them. I simply didn’t know that world existed
and wouldn’t have been able to participate in it if I had. The “denser space” Adrienne seems to have noticed
wasn’t “denser” to me, it was simply a hard fact that had for whatever reason emerged from my life. I wrote
those early poems in a kind of vacuum. At the time, I’d lose hours and hours into that music.
AMK:
Now that you’ve published a second book, what do you make of your first book, of your “early” poems?
EP: I still depend on what’s in (and what I know is just behind) those poems.
AMK:
Thank you.
EP: Thanks.
