Hospital Time

I was nine and away from home for the first time. There was a schedule, but I wasn’t in on it. I started to understand the weird rhythm of doctors—the way they’re never around when you need them or always with another patient or worst of all, in surgery. I went to appointments I didn’t know I had, and always without my parents who were two hours away at their jobs. I began to cultivate irrational fears: the orderly will lose me and I’ll never see my parents again, the nurse will forget to tell my parents I’m having a brain scan and they’ll leave without seeing me, or somehow my roommate and I will become separated and I’ll have to sleep alone.

I could feel the doctor eyeing me when I put on a body stocking. I was mortified by its transparency, the way it clung to my stomach and thighs. He told my father to get a shotgun, to keep the boys away. “She’s that kind of pretty,” he said. I wasn’t buying it.

For Example

Like the time I couldn’t get my underwear on. Like the time I wore a body stocking and got painted in plaster. Like the time I was carried home from the zoo. Like the time everyone was way too nice to me at the birthday party. Like the time I fell off the bleachers. Like the time I ate the gravel. Like the time I stepped on a bottle cap and someone’s older brother carried me home bleeding. Like the time I couldn’t walk across the lawn. Like the time when I got extra Valentines for being “special.”

Pediatrics

My room had still aquarium-like lights and nurses who came in every hour. My sheet felt thin against the hot, dry air. I read my first mystery about a smart boy who wrestled with a falcon and a weathervane on the roof of a church. When I was allowed, I walked to the gift shop and fingered the stuffed animals. Later, during visiting hours, I dropped hints to my parents. “That little penguin is really cute,” and “Did you see that sad elephant?” I skidded around the floor in my standard-issue hospital socks. I was more mobile than most kids, at least in the morning.

My Roommate

Like Jane Eyre, I had a beautiful roommate who was dying slowly. Susan had a pixie haircut and an attentive and ever-present mother who arranged framed photographs on the radiator. At night she whispered in her sleep, nothing I could ever make out. Was it wrong to see her as already dead? Like all good idol-friends, she was blonde, bony, and chic even in her gray-green hospital gown.

Braces

The orthopedist worked out of the hospital basement. My parents came for the fitting. I could feel the doctor eyeing me when I put on a body stocking. I was mortified by its transparency, the way it clung to my stomach and thighs. He told my father to get a shotgun, to keep the boys away. “She’s that kind of pretty,” he said. I wasn’t buying it. I’d met dirty old men before, knew their tricks. But we needed him, so we sat there grim as the concrete wall. The braces were molded out of plastic, made hard in a kiln, and shaped to fit the bottom of my foot, my heel, and the back of my calf. The strap was a thick strip of industrial-grade Velcro that made my leg red and sweaty. There was no quiet way of taking them off. I hated them instantly, and I knew they wouldn’t work.

Some days I walked better than others. Some days, especially late in the day, I couldn’t walk. On those days, one of the doctors gave me his arm for support. I focused on his watch or the tuft of wrist hair poking out from beneath his shirtsleeve, anything to not look at his face.

Judy Blume

Deenie was my favorite book. The heroine, a girl with scoliosis, must learn to accept her brace. But she was so obviously a caterpillar-to-butterfly kind of girl. It was unclear what I was becoming.

Transference

My neurologist was glamorous. She wore high heels with her white lab coat. I could hear her walk down the hall towards my room, calling out to her favorite nurses by name. She carried a flashlight pen and tested my reflexes by running the sharp tip of her house key along the sole of my foot. I hated her for that instant of pain but immediately forgave her. She would cure me — I could tell. “Kiddo,” she said, day after day, “could you walk down the hall for me?”

Spinal Tap

I wanted my mother with me, but she wasn’t allowed in the room. Instead I got the usual efficiently sweet nurse, who I knew was just doing her job. You can’t possibly love me, I thought as she rubbed my forehead with her soft thumb. She asked me to count to ten. When I got to seven, she gently took off my underwear. I thought, I shouldn’t be awake for that, and then suddenly I wasn’t.

Optometry

The orderly wheeled me into the waiting room of another weird basement outpost and receded back into the elevator with a nod. I admired the height of his afro, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if we were supposed to talk. I got out of my wheelchair to look around. The waiting room was empty, and there was no receptionist. My fear of being alone slowly turned into boredom. I stood on the chairs and spun the eye-malady pamphlet rack around until it nearly toppled. I ripped two pages of lion pictures out of a magazine and stuck them in my robe pocket. I called down the hall twice, a faint, “Hello?” I pressed the elevator button, watched the elevator door open and close revealing no one and nothing. Finally, a doctor appeared, nose to clipboard, mumbling, “Yes, yes, you must be next.”

Video Tape

I was a puzzle. I walked down hospital hallways while visiting doctors leaned against the wall to watch. Sometimes they exchanged information about me. You say she’s worse at the end of the day? Or asked a question. Why does the left side drag more than the right? But they never spoke to me. I started to hate hallways—the slippery waxed floors, the sheer length of them, and the way they shaped my sense of myself as spectacle. Some days I walked better than others. Some days, especially late in the day, I couldn’t walk. On those days, one of the doctors gave me his arm for support. I focused on his watch or the tuft of wrist hair poking out from beneath his shirtsleeve, anything to not look at his face. Near the end of my stay, someone—a resident—videotaped me. I never understood what that tape was for—a record of embarrassment, a way into an unknown archive, a testament of sorts?

More Gift Shop

I liked the stationary sets and postcards, which suggested that hospital time was really just a vacation. I wanted the mug with a rainbow on one side and a plump heart on the other. The silver “Get Well Soon!” balloons seemed to float on the air of their own certainty. I even liked the red t-shirts with the hospital’s logo on them. The powdery old ladies who volunteered in the gift shop sold individual postage stamps and monitored the helium machine. They favored hot pink lipstick that clung to their front teeth and wore blue striped smocks over their loose polyester blouses. One even let me man the tiny register while she went outside for her afternoon cigarette.

The Boy

His room was at the end of the hall, farthest from the nurses’ station. He had cancer or a bad heart. We played crazy eights in the afternoon, always in his room. He couldn’t get up; he was attached to machines. I noticed his skinny ankles, his feet bare and chapped. I imagined us on the outside: riding skateboards and getting matching haircuts.

Field Trip

Right before Christmas, the nurses arranged for a small group of us to leave the hospital and see A Christmas Carol. We left in a sleek black van with a broken heater, packed in with extra regulation blue hospital blankets. There was snow on the stage and a flying bed! Afterwards, lying in the hospital bed staring up at the fluorescent light, I wondered how I’d been chosen for the trip. Did my parents sign me up? Did they fill out a permission slip? Maybe I wasn’t as sick as I thought.

Discharge

I didn’t say good-bye to Susan or the boy. They were both at appointments, and I didn’t ask to wait. My father carried my light blue suitcase with the snap latches to the long-term parking lot while my mother talked about my brother who was at home building me a fort. It didn’t occur to me to ask questions. Nobody ever knew anything anyway. I was leaving—that was enough.

Reward

After I got out, my parents gave me a plaid diary with a tiny matching plaid pen. I wrote my first entry about my stay in the hospital. I stuck to the facts (room decor, nurses’ names, and length of stay) and shared it at the dinner table while my brother ran a Matchbox car back and forth across the length of his placemat. I didn’t think then that a diary should be a record of feeling, so I didn’t write about the night the nurse came into to check on me because I was crying. I thought I was asleep. I thought I was only dreaming of crying.

After

I extracted promises at awkward moments. When my mother was drying my hair, I shouted over the roar of the hairdryer, “I don’t have to go back, right?” She smiled weakly and started to use the brush to straighten my bangs. I slammed the door of my father’s car and said into the January air, “I’m done with hospitals.” My father looked across the hood of our blue rusting Volvo and nodded. One January afternoon, when my brother threatened to break the leg of my favorite Barbie, I said to him cool as a spy, “No matter where I go, you can never have my room.”

Hannah Miet’s first collection of poems, Hello, Absurd World, is forthcoming later this year. The book’s publication was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, and the poems within it are addressed in some cases to the individuals who funded its publication through their pre-orders. Miet’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in PANK, The Rumpus, and a recent one-off Kindle edition, among other publications. She’s a frequent blogger and a student in the new media/entrepreneurial journalism at The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

JW: First off, congratulations on getting your Kickstarter project funded. You describe the poems in Hello, Absurd World as a kind of correspondence-in-verse, with each poem written to a specific person within a strict time limit — 5 minutes or less. How and when did you decide that this process had created the makings of a book? And did you give any thought to pursuing publication through the traditional route?

HM: Thank you, Johnathon. I’m so happy it’s actually happening.

I started to self-inflict a time limit on writing a few years ago. I realized that my journals and emails held more immediate truth than the poems I labored over, erasing and re-writing and tweaking. I began writing to communicate, and began communicating through poems. The idea to compile the poems in a book was a natural extension of that urge to connect. And also, the “Poet Trees” folder in my Gmail had reached over 300 messages.

There are poems I excluded from the manuscript due to the awkwardness of their specificity, their holes that could only be filled by context. But for the most part, I trust that intimacy translates, whether the hook is voyeurism or personal connection.

JW: The letter-poem as a form is fascinating to me, because of how it both solves and conflates that question of audience that all poems have. On the one hand, writing to a single person gives you an immediate context, a shortcut to intimacy. On the other, most of us want our work to be read and enjoyed by more than just one person. I suppose I want to ask how you approached that conundrum of audience, the one vs many. Was it something you thought about? Or did you simply concentrate on the recipient and trust the tendency of the specific to become universal? Also, do you have any favorite letter-poems from other poets? (Richard Hugo’s letter to Charles Simic is at the top of my list.)

HM: There are poems I excluded from the manuscript due to the awkwardness of their specificity, their holes that could only be filled by context. But for the most part, I trust that intimacy translates, whether the hook is voyeurism or personal connection.

It was always a little of both for me. I fell in love with Ginsberg’s discourses with other beat poets. The actual letters, the dedications, the casual mentions of names in poems. The emotion translates, real as fact. But there is also that peeping Tom quality. Creeping behind the curtains of a group of friends in a time period that’s easy to romanticize. (Especially from my Twitter- addicted vantage point.)

It’s not just poetry either. It’s a connection to communication as an art form. I’ve been reading the “Art of…” interviews that The Paris Review recently archived online. The best conversations can be as enchanting as my favorite poems.

Thank you for that Hugo letter. It’s a perfect example of the inherent draw to poetic communication. The words surfacing from some kind of void. “… Dear Charles, I’m glad you avoided the bombs, that you / live with us now and write poems …”

JW: I wonder how much that “Twitter-addicted vantage point” (and you’re not alone — I’m as bad as anyone) contributes to the romantic quality of a letter for contemporary readers and writers, regardless of the time period the letter comes from. That peeping Tom quality exists because the letter purports to be a private, one-to-one communication, but also I think because some of us so rarely communicate one-to-one in writing anymore, at least not at length. We all have email, of course, and email can be one-to-one, but when was the last time you got something substantial and personal through email? My inbox is mostly bills, reminders that I’m overdue on delivering various projects, and notifications from Twitter and Facebook (well, before I deleted my Facebook account, anyway). That’s not a question, but maybe you have a response?

HM: When I receive a physical letter in the mail, I practically come on contact. What was necessity is now fetishized. But in the age of perpetual broadcast, you are right, the romance makes sense.

There’s a bridge between the intimate and the soap box, I think. There’s spill-over. When someone wraps around my mind, they color the things I see. I often read over tweets on my timeline and know exactly who penetrated my thoughts at what moment. It’s the same with the letter poems. Sometimes the recipient is more like a lighthouse in the ocean.

There’s a lot of static in my inbox, but I cherish the conversations that play out at length. There’s a thread that’s surpassed 100 emails and I’m stuck in the depth of it. Sometimes I feel my thoughts growing stronger through letters. Attaching to values, growing roots.

I also just got a notification that says, “some guy is now following your tweets (@Hannahmiet) on Twitter.”

So there’s the dichotomy. I had to share.

JW: Speaking of dichotomies, I see from your blog that you’re working on a graduate degree in digital media / journalism. And that’s fascinating to me, because I fled the beginnings of a career in journalism just a few years ago, largely because as a profession it seemed almost wholly averse to my two favorite things: literature and technology, or, to put it another way, metaphor and progress. (Which, strangely enough, could be seen as dichotomies in and of themselves.) What’s a modern J-school like for a poet, or for someone enthusiastic about the Web?

HM: It was much different just a few years ago. It’s crazy to think about that. I saw journalism shifting at superspeed, but shifting in an uncertain direction. That excited the fuck out of me. I wanted a hand in the shifting.

My grad program – to its credit – is new media boot camp. I lose track of my friends while slicing down tracks on Final Cut Pro. But I came here to get my ass kicked. To arm myself to tell stories in every possible medium.

I don’t know about holism. Comfort, yes. Learning what works for you. Holism is something I doubt. It’s different for everyone. Until the mega gadget arrives that streamlines everything and takes over our souls and brings on the apocalypse.

I don’t see myself writing or producing hard news (for the most part) in the long run. The journalistic writing and film that inspires me rides the line between poetry and journalism – and the lines between words and multimedia. I like to write about people and places. Small things that crack open larger issues. I’m a narrative storyteller, but I’m trying to expand beyond words.

JW: Let’s talk about the larger question of dichotomies. In some ways, the whole idea of dichotomies is overplayed, especially print vs digital, a conflict that’s mostly trotted out as a justification for old-world publishers to keep sitting on their hands. (Binary thinking quickly becomes reductive.) But at the same time, lots of my interests and habits frequently seem incompatible. For instance, I know that I can read a novel on my iPhone, but that doesn’t help my reflexive habit of checking my email as soon as I feel the device in my hand. I think some of us belong to an uneasy generation of cultural hybrids, where the love of competing mindsets/tools means we always have to stop and think, even if only for a second, about which approach is best when given a particular task, desire, or inspiration. We always have to decide: is this apology better sent through a letter or email, should this particular idea belong to a poem or a blog post, do I publish my Kickstarter project as a print book or an ebook or both? And those decisions rack up cognitive dissonance (or at least they can), because they’re not just practical decisions, because the decision to publish a print book vs an ebook (for instance) has at least as much to do with whether you inherited your father’s tattered copy of The Elements of Style as it does with the percentage of Kindle ownership among your target readership, which of course ultimately makes it a much harder — a much fuzzier — decision overall. It’s not the kind of decision our parents had to make, and I don’t think it’s a decision that our grandkids will make — at least not as often.

Questions: How do you find and encourage that “spill-over” between dichotomies and competing interests? Is holism possible for us, or should we all get comfortable with fragmentation? Does this make any sense at all?

HM: Oh, you’re making perfect sense. I think we are becoming more particular creatures as our options expand. Sometimes in a way that feels manic and schizophrenic — there are many poems in Hello, Absurd World written from the chaos of choice fatigue and digital entrenchment — but often it’s as organic as shifting our habits into the space where they’re most comfortable. Not just what we read, but how and when.

I don’t know about holism. Comfort, yes. Learning what works for you. Holism is something I doubt. It’s different for everyone. Until the mega gadget arrives that streamlines everything and takes over our souls and brings on the apocalypse. I digress.

I take an aboveground train to school and also consider reading or writing on my smartphone. Instead, I live-tweet the whole damn ride. The subway is my tweeting zone. There’s always a print book in my bag, all dog-eared and ready for me while I directly quote subway preachers for The Internets. I don’t have my father’s Elements of Style but I do have a used copy, it print. I found a first edition Across the River and into the Trees in New Mexico and nearly jumped for joy. Yet I’d buy an iPad if I had the money. My habits of consumption and spit-fire-tweeting would shift accordingly, I’m sure. I don’t think that’s hypocrisy. It’s finding my comfort zone. Or to pass it to Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

And there are multitudes of options that will only continue to grow.

With monetizing, it’s a balancing act. What format will sell the most to your demographic v. what format you prefer. I’m a bookie, but I also thought that my readers, a small group of people who either know me personally or at least intimately through what I choose to share on the internet, would appreciate the tangible form as much as I do. And the spillover from the digital to the tangible, the intimacy of that. So yes, I encourage the spillover. And I contradict myself.

JW: My last question is about doing too much. You, for instance, do too much — you’re a grad student, a frequent blogger, a journalist, a publisher, a poet, etc. And most everyone I admire these days — from Mandy Brown to Craig Mod — does the same — too much. My question is — how do you do that? How do you keep each of your interests inching along without dropping one, without going crazy? Maybe holism isn’t possible, but how do we — how do those of us who happened to be born in the age of the interest-enabling engine that is the Internet — maintain our selfhood? Or if not holism, if not selfhood, then the most basic structural integrity?

HM: Christ on a cracker: that’s a good question. I think my “selfhood” has a major (diagnosed) case of ADHD and chronic insomnia. I envision electric wires shooting out of my brain in all directions, latching on to a strand with full focus and then switching to another. The unifying factor in my work is that I want to tell stories that are true. That may not explain my compulsive urge to create a new Tumblr every month. But the storytelling urge will never go away. In my dream world, I am writing narrative magazine pieces, a newspaper column, publishing poetry, and eventually chipping away at a memoir about my brother that is made up of half verbatim conversation inter-spliced with a remembered narrative (an extended version of this story, essentially). In a dream world, I am doing “too much,” but doing so successfully. There is travel involved, sometimes. Maybe following murders around for six months in Idaho, or Iowa. I don’t know. I don’t think that these genres are mutually exclusive. There is a shitload of journalistic insight in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America.” There is a seamless literary quality to Sam Anderson’s magazine writing. Then you have David Carr, who comes out with a journalistic addiction memoir – interviewing people from his past, bravely excavating and examining his own memory in relation to theirs and then posting all the interview footage online. Is that journalism? Yes. Is it memoir? Yes. Is it a brutal stab at the truth that lies in the space between those worlds? Well, fuck, yes.

I know there is a voice that translates throughout the genres I straddle. I don’t think I’ve found it yet. But I will. That’s the secret to doing too much: saying you will, and then doing it. Which reminds me, I need to crack down on this poetry book. My aim is to be finished by the end of 2011. And so I will be. Stay posted.

Kathleen Rooney’s poem “Robinson Sends a Letter to Someone” appeared on Linebreak on May 4. The poem borrows its voice and subject from the work of Weldon Kees, a poet, composer, and painter who disappeared at the age of 41 in 1955. A chapbook of Rooney’s Kees-inspired poems, After Robinson Has Gone, is forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press. Rooney’s most recent book of nonfiction, For You I Am Trilling These Songs, is available from Counterpoint.

JW: What drew you to Kees in general, and to Robinson specifically?

KR: Kees, to me, is a very American–specifically a very Midwestern–personage, but I had to travel to England to even learn of his existence. My tutor at Oxford, the poet Kate Clanchy, had me read Simon Armitage as part of a crash course in UK poetry. He includes some of his own “Robinson” poems in his 1992 collection Kid, and in that book’s sixth poem, “Looking for Weldon Kees,” he writes “I’ve heard it said by Michael Hofmann / that Collected Poems would blow my head off…” So I went and got Kees’ Collected Poems and it blew my head off.

He was stylish to the max. His poems are stylish, his painting, his fiction, and his whole persona. He’s the real deal, the total package. Right up to the way he authored his own end–suicide or disappearance to Mexico?

I’ve been obsessed ever since. The sensibility that underlies all of Kees’ many artistic and literary undertakings is this deeply appealing mixture of quiet anger, bitterness, and hopelessness, combined with persistent optimism, cutting wit, a mastery of form and a sharp sense of humor. In his fiction, his poetry, his criticism, and his letters, Kees is able over and over to look at things and see them as they are–usually pretty fucked and disappointing–but to imagine them otherwise. In almost all of his written output, you get the sense of a person who knows that the world is unjust and will probably let you down, but who continues to show up and try–to be decent and do his best in spite of everything. The letter that I get part of the cento included in Linebreak from, for instance, is a good example of what I’m talking about. It’s from 1938, and he’s discussing “the apparently insurmountable difficulties entailed in writing as one wants, the discouraging business of trying to get your stuff in print, the realization that nobody much gives a damn whether you write or take dope or read the American Magazine.” The sentiment is still super-relatable today, but Kees kept working hard to get his stuff in print anyway; I like that about him. Kees’ friend, the novelist Anton Myrer, called him “one of the last great romantics,” and said “He genuinely believed that sensibility and talent would receive due recognition with time.”

Also? Kees was such a good dresser. And that hair? That mustache? He was stylish to the max. His poems are stylish, his painting, his fiction, and his whole persona. He’s the real deal, the total package. Right up to the way he authored his own end–suicide or disappearance to Mexico?

JW: I like that you mention how you were introduced to Kees — almost everyone I know who admires his work has a similar story. He’s one of those poets you only hear about from other poets. (I learned about him in a workshop with Davis McCombs.)

It’s interesting that you list “persistent optimism” as one of the qualities in his work. I think that’s correct, but it’s probably not a quality that every reader would recognize. The hopeless notes in the poems can be so much louder — I’m thinking of the creeping doom of “For My Daughter” or the exhausted horror of “Robinson at Home” — especially on first read. Where do you find that optimism in his poetry? Is it in specific poems or lines? Or is it more to do with his stance as a disappointed romantic?

KR: An optimist is one of the saddest things a person can be. Kees is a classic example of this paradox, both in his personal stance as a disappointed romantic and in his poetic output, dark as it is. His work is characterized by a bitterness and a disappointment, definitely, but a person can’t become so bitter and disappointed if he didn’t start out full of hope.

Reading Kees, I get the sense of someone who knows full well that he ought to hope for the best and expect the worst, but who can’t quite force himself to do that. Even though he is sophisticated and knows that what he expects is impossible, he can’t help but keep wanting the world to be better than it is–that people should be kinder to one another, that the government should be more just, that humane behavior toward other people should be returned and maybe even rewarded–and inevitably, he keeps being thwarted in these desires. A quick example of this is “Variation 3″ from “Eight Variations,” where he writes:

3.
Ruined travelers in sad trousseaux
Roost on my doorstep, indolent and worn.
Not one of them fulfills despised Rousseau’s
Predictions. Perhaps they are waiting to be born.
If so, the spot’s been badly chosen.
This is a site for posthumous investigations,
Pillows stuffed with nettles, charnal notions:
Apoplectic executioners, bungled incisions.
Indeed, our solitary midwife fondles the hemlock.

We welcomed one poor hackneyed Christ,
Sad bastard, croaking of pestilence. The basement
Holds him now. He has not as yet arisen.
The tickets are ready; the line forms on the right.
Justice and virtue, you will find, have been amazingly preserved.

Here and elsewhere, you see Kees holding the world to a higher standard than it can ever possibly achieve. And even as he cuts his frustration with wit and humor, you sense his optimism lurking around in there. Another example is the last part of his poem “The Speakers,” where he writes:

“This age is not entirely bad.”
It’s bad enough, God knows, but you
Should know Elizabethans had
Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.
The past goes down and disappears,
The present stumbles home to bed,
The future stretches out in years
That no one knows, and you’ll be dead.

You can’t get this frustrated if you didn’t have high hopes to frustrate.

JW: One of the pleasures of reading through your chapbook is seeing how you work in details from Kees’s biography, as well as allusions to specific poems and phrases from his Collected. (My favorite example of the latter is in your poem “Robinson’s Refrigerator,” where “The fridge / light coming on” echoes “the porch light coming on” from Kees’s “1926.”) How did you navigate that combination of the real and the imagined in working with his biography and in combining his language with your own? Were those conscious processes, or were you feeling your way through? Did Robinson’s voice come naturally to you?

KR: I started the project in 2001 and arrived at the finished manuscript in 2009. During the intervening years, I went through periods of working on the project intensely, abandoning it, coming back to it, re-imagining and re-writing it, abandoning it again, re-imagining and re-writing it again and on and on. I worked on it for about eight years, and even during the times when I wasn’t actively writing new poems for it, and/or when I was immersed in writing other, very different books, I’d be thinking about this project–doing research, reading and re-reading Kees’ books, learning much, much more about the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s than I’d ever be able to fit into the completed project, no matter how long or detailed I made it. I wanted to supersaturate the manuscript with texture and detail. My frequent pauses and delays stemmed from my anxiety over being able to settle on a voice that I’d be satisfied with–that would sound like it “came naturally” even if it didn’t exactly–and that would do justice/hold a candle to Kees’ own writing. And to his life.

Poetry is often–not always–about creating an atmosphere or a tone more than a “world,” and a huge part of tone has to do with voice and speech, and speech is used in conversation, so a dialogue seems like a natural result. Conversation seems built into the form.

Writers are constantly re-purposing actual people and historical figures and events for their own ends, obviously, so I don’t think I’m doing anything “new” or unusual, per se, but unlike other projects I’ve undertaken, I had more anxiety over this one in terms of being able to do the things you describe in your question–settling on a balance between Kees’ poems, letter, and stories and my own voice, and doing so in a way that would add up to a book that felt complete in its own right, not just like an homage or an exercise. Or worse, something substandard or offensive to Kees’ fans. I wrote dozens more poems than I knew I would be able to include because I wanted to be able to use only the best ones. I kept imagining what Kees might think of the manuscript if he ever read it. It felt like I was having a conversation with him–an impossible but still weirdly two-sided conversation.

JW: Yes, a conversation. I’ve always thought that poets are much more prone to addressing each other in their work than writers in other genres. (I read Thomas James’s Letters to a Stranger recently, and there he’s addressing Sylvia Plath). As someone who writes in multiple genres, would you agree? I notice you’ve also done some direct collaboration in your books with Elisa Gabbert. Is there something about poetry that makes all this talking back and forth more common than in other genres? Or more noticeable?

KR: You can be reasonably sure, if you’re a poet, that whoever is reading your stuff is also a poet, and that’s not a recent development. So that may be part of it–a desire to communicate within this relatively small but passionate tribe of other readers and writers who, even if they don’t “get” or like your poems, per se, will nevertheless “get” or like the practices of reading and writing poetry at all.

In prose, especially in fiction, part of the goal is to create a distinct and fully realized world that your characters inhabit and in which the action takes place. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, that’s not really the focus. Poetry is often–not always–about creating an atmosphere or a tone more than a “world,” and a huge part of tone has to do with voice and speech, and speech is used in conversation, so a dialogue seems like a natural result. Conversation seems built into the form. And it exists in the history of the form as well–frequently, poetry has historically (Shakespeare’s sonnets spring to mind) been presented as a communication from one particular person to another particular person.

As for actual back-and-forth poetic collaboration, Elisa and I like having the writer and the audience be literally coextensive in real-time–we are always already each other’s fellow author and first reader simultaneously.

In terms of conversationality with dead or other authors in other genres, the personal essay seems like a venue that lends itself to this mode, too, or at least for me it does. In one of the essays in my latest book, For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs, I quote lines and lines of the poetry of John Berryman, and the essay is called “First Person Impossible,” which is supposed to refer to narration from the perspective of someone who could not possibly narrate, such as a dead person. But now that I’m thinking about it (good question) I’d say that in essays, the interaction with other authors tends to feel more like a multi-person conversation, maybe like at a party with a lot of people talking as opposed to just one or two. Whereas in poetry, this interaction feels more like a dialogue–that intimacy of speaking intensely with just one other person.

JW: That small tribe quality of today’s poetry community fascinates me. As many things as its members share — most readers of poetry are also writers, many have been through MFA programs, many help produce a journal or a website or a press — the community can still feel awfully fragmented. It’s at once intimate and divisive. What do you suppose Kees would make of the poetry community today? Would he be sitting on panels at AWP, running his own small press, starting flame wars on Twitter? (Now that I think of it, I’m surprised that no one has set up a Kees persona on Twitter.)

KR: Ha. Maybe now someone will. Maybe you? You should call dibs, so everyone reading this knows you’ve claimed it.

Kees did say from time to time in his letters that he wished he weren’t so broke because he wanted to start his own literary magazine, so maybe, if he were around today, he’d start an online journal or something? Or at least he might have found the way that technology has lowered so many monetary barriers to entry in the world of publishing refreshing. As isolated and misunderstood as he often seemed to feel, it also seems like he might have thrived on the kinds of community endeavors–small presses and forums like Big Other, for instance–that are possible to undertake now. He was always getting together with at least one other person, or a bunch of other people to do projects–in Provincetown, when he was on the East coast, for example, and in San Francisco when he was on the West one–so it seems probable that he would have done the same kinds of things today; the biggest difference really is probably that now he could blog about them.

JW: Obligatory final question: suicide or Mexico?

KR: If I felt like I knew the answer to that, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to write the book. A huge part of Kees’ appeal is that he’s like Schroedinger’s cat or something: he’s both alive and dead–an escapee and a suicide.