Poetry editor Adam Tavel conducted this interview with poet Roger Weingarten, who contributed a brief lyric essay and poem to Conte 5.2. Their exchange was first published by the now-defunct Emprise Review in December 2010. We are pleased to reprint it here in its entirety.
Your first two books, What Are Birds Worth and Ethan Benjamin Boldt, are radically different in tone and style, but both were published in May 1975. What relationship exists between those two, if any, and what role did they play in your maturation?
When Ethan, my second book, written between ‘71-‘73 & accepted for publication in ‘74 appeared twelve days before Birds, my first, written between ‘67-‘70 & accepted for publication in ’71, I felt my career was a dog track where both efforts were neck & neck trying to nail the electric rabbit.
Birds Worth, a Cummington Press production printed in an edition of 225; Ethan, a Knopf extravaganza, in a first printing of 5000 (No, Mom, it never went into a second, but Story Line reprinted it with an atypical Chagall on the cover & with an intro by Mark Jarman in ’87). Ethan garnering twenty five reviews even made it into a Book of the Month Club newsletter (No Pops, it wasn’t optioned by Hollywood), while Birds was blessed with one tasty review in a southwestern organ, the reviewer buzzed by the contrast between the elegant handiwork (bound in linen with a commissioned etching to kick things off) & the author’s scatological bent. It still pops up at Abebooks.com (Also, look for The Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions, the first short short fiction anthology, edited by Robert Coover & Kent Dixon. In this, my poem “To my mare harnessed to Pharaoh’s Chariot I compare you, my love” appeared as prose, & in New American Review 14, next to Coover’s “Lucky Pierre” short short, it came out of the closet as a poem.)
Back to the track, both Ethan & Birds were nominated for Lamont awards in ’75; & in ‘76—at the time the Lamonters decided their 1st book prize should become a 2nd, Cummington resubmitted, &, though neither took the brass ring, years later one of the judges confided Ethan missed by a nose, & sprung for lunch.
Though Birds’ lyrics were spiked with narrative—then a pejorative term (the since revised Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics judged narrative a 2nd class citizen, even though Dickey had attracted notice for his narrative thrust). Ethan, a book-length poem, complete with family tree Mormons would envy, divided like a novel into named sections, where individual poems drive the story forward, sideways, or off the cliff. In both instances, delight in energetic language & serpentine syntax that makes the dramatic situation & setting felt & palpable is what drove me to the page.
I can see by the look in your eye you’re wondering what’s changed. In Birds, I had this young Turk confidence I could do anything; in Ethan I went into a two year trance, trusting my one-man séance would make this almost three century seven-league boot journey compelling. Both explore complexities; both are marbled with the autobiographical in drag. Have I matured? Has the pope? I just knocked off a three-pager based on personal encounters with arcane maladies I think kicks ass. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception I qualify for Medicare; last week I climbed Hunger Mountain in bathing trunks and sneakers. Writing, brewing compost tea, or running into a high mountain grove of blue bead lilies is what keeps my baby boomer fluid coursing.
Would you explain “autobiographical in drag?”
“Father Hunger and Son”
A pedestal ashtray next to the son who hadn’t seen
man wrapped in a coat, both hands pressed
into a fist between his thighs, the clean shaven
pendulum of his chin muttering under a petrified
tear that magnified the bloodshot corner. Jealous
of his thirty years side-by-side with my father
working the phones for sales, I assumed his grief
was for the tenuous life at the far end
of the corridor suspended between
a bag of blood and a monitor’s
vigilance. I touched his shoulder like a stranger
interrupting another on an empty bus. He’ll be okay.
Who? He answered, as he grabbed
the ashtray and pulled it to him, whispering
through something stuck in his throat
that he’d found an unmailed
letter from his wife to another man
sticking out from under
the car seat as he’s reached to turn the key
that morning in the garage. I want him to masturbate
to death, he said. You can see
your father now, the nurse told me.
After I passed my stepsister and Aunt Delilah, her eyebrows
raised into dollar signs beneath a pale
beehive, my stepmother pulled me aside and said,
Why are you here? You’re not welcome. You’ll kill him
if you step foot in that room. I pushed
my sad cuckold into a cab that dropped us
in the industrial flats under cranes looming
by the revolving bridge of my childhood
over the river that burned once. While we tried
to light it again with matchbooks and wads
of old receipts from his pockets, scraps
of smoke drifting nowhere, he wanted to know
what I thought he should say to his wife. I asked him
if my father loved me. He hunkered down
and stared at his wingtips. When your mother
left him for that other guy, something
died inside of him. I’m not saying he didn’t laugh
or give a shit about anyone. But if
your name came up—which was almost
never—you could see something
sidestep in his face, like he was dodging
a sucker punch. What do I know after thirty years
of lunches and hustle? I worked for the bastard.
He signed the checks like clockwork every week.
As I started to cry, he said, C’mere, child,
crying too and pulling me
to his sandpaper cheek. I don’t know my wife
any better than your old man. Or anyone else
for that matter. I don’t know.
Your work embodies a very distinct use of the poetic line, and often employs enjambment to great effect. To paraphrase Mark Jarman, it’s almost as if your sentences themselves have a sort of plot. What are the functions of lines and line breaks in your poems?
Jarman dug up Jack Myers’ entry on Syntax in the Longman Dictionary and Handbook of Poetry, where he uses some lines from “Night Signals” to demonstrate how “theme, scene, character, and pathos” are developed in one sentence. Jarman’s making the case my sentence structure is “narrative,” “dramatic,” & my favorite, “tragic.” Makes my syntax sound like it’s falling to its death from a great height.
I don’t think of lines or breaks when I launch—self-censorship, premature organization, who knows. If I were writing a few hundred years ago, the end of the line (pun intended) would probably be at the forefront of my process. Wasn’t the (iambic pentameter) line the basic unit of the poem? In Alan Dugan’s work, the pentameter line, like a line drive, sometimes happens over two or three lines. What drives my free verse is what I call The Elastic Sentence: like an earthworm, it can be short or long, begin or end where you least expect it, have more than one heart; it’s a relativist creature of the Einsteinian universe, while the Line reflects linear or Newtonian thinking. After I’ve wormed my way through lots of drafts, I play Musical Chairs to see what I can find that will assist the reader’s fall into enjambed possibility because of the sentence driving through it.
I guess it’s a little harder to hold on to the concept of Shape when it’s melded into the whole, but what works for me is to work—like a sculptor working shapeless clay while his models are doing a fertility dance around him—with something in hand. Frost, blank verse master, described free verse as playing tennis without a net. Let’s roll, Selah! with that: the court’s still there, players too—still very geometric, no? Harpo’s playing the net like a harp with that daffy look. Bruce Weigl says, “Cudgel me daffy.” It’s what we want, waking to write, calling upon our gifts, whatever they are, to transport us in the trunk of our imaginations. Though no one has a clue who’s driving, we, the poem & yours truly, trust that some ripe entanglement will materialize.
I heard you remark that you view yourself as a “maker of poems” rather than as a “poet.” Is this semantics, or is there a difference in your mind between the two?
Welcome to Weingarten, our voice mail menu has changed. If you know your party’s extension, hang up and dial again. After my Fall 1970 debut reading at Western Michigan, last out of the auditorium, I had my eye on the backs of two colleagues rounding the corner into the little boys’ room as one said to the other, “brilliant, but what a waste.” The other, doubting humor belonged in poetry, agreed.
Humor as Banquo says to Macbeth, “win(s) us with honest trifles.” Robin Williams’ rabbi with a huge frog on his head walks into a bar. The bartender asks, “Where did you get that?” The frog answers, “Brooklyn. They’ve got hundreds of them.” Like guy wires holding up our invisible circus tents, isn’t it part & parcel of what makes poems readable? Humor’s sly trickster guises—between forest fire smoke drifting down from Quebec & shit city in the Gulf—give us purchase. Norman O’Brown said, “Tragedy relieves sorrow.” I say humor won’t get you out of cleaning the toilet, but if you get Netflix, check out the Bob Saget Roast. Irony, or as Barry Goldensohn calls it, “sustained ambiguity,” is what Goethe called “the spice that makes the dish palatable.” Doesn’t humor, like a graveyard, have many rooms? A pal asked Edmund Gwen, character actor, on his deathbed, what it was like. He answered, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard." Believe it’s even harder in poetry, where some of your snoot-cocked audience say it doesn’t belong at all. Worked into the fabric, knock on wood it won’t collapse on you, Dear Reader, but trust me, even if it’s re-readable a thousand times, those boys in the hall still won’t twig to it. Without it, ask your ironic climatologists, where’s the rubber chicken?