Written by:
Julia Bloch
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 16#5
Lambda Literary Award finalist Amy King’s Antidotes for an Alibi (BlazeVOX) offers a poetic vision that is as styled as a modern cityscape and as intimate as the details that often shape the poems’ otherwise metaphysical reach. In “The Open Box,” King writes, “I hope you sense/the finished and unfinished beauty/in progressive frames of us/inhabiting brick plots.” Invoking what Daniel Nester has called “downtown folklore” and what Charles Bernstein called “the paradise of possibility,” King’s poems love the city they inhabit. King is also the author of The People Instruments (Pavement Saw); she teaches at Nassau Community College and at Poets House in New York, where she has taught a workshop about writing in and on the city.
Tell me a bit about your course “Making the Urban Poetic.” How long have you been teaching it? What has the response been among your students?
Stephen Motika of Poets House recently asked if I would be interested in teaching a workshop there. I had already taught facets of this workshop, but I had not considered designing an entire course around the premise of an “urban poetic” until Stephen’s invitation. It is a work in progress that I am very excited about developing, and frankly after some cursory research, I’m surprised more educators aren’t doing something similar. We have so many amazing poets who make up and continue to create this urban tradition.
I really shifted into gear with my creative writing courses after attending a panel session at AWP in Chicago a few years ago. Cole Swensen delivered a version of her paper “Poetry City,” which has since been published at the Identity Theory Web site (identitytheory.com). In “Poetry City,” Swensen draws parallels between a city’s literal layout with poetic forms and techniques that mirror the sensibility of the city. Some of these techniques include productive obscurity (Swensen’s term), juxtaposition, collage, and compression, to list a few. I simply ran with her ideas. I began looking at how many of our urban poets had used these techniques and how I employed them in my own work as well as how my students used them. They’re used everywhere, and while they are not necessarily urban-only devices, these techniques are not often identified as being used primarily by poets who are strongly influenced by their urban environment.
There’s a real urban sensibility to many of the poems in Antidotes for an Alibi. Is this a new development, or has it always been a thread for you?
I’m so glad you noticed! Actually, my urban sensibility evolved in an almost predictable way. As you may know, I grew up in Georgia in a kind of “backwoods” neighborhood, which meant I was left to my own resources much of the time. I was the tomboy who hung out at the creek catching crawdads and hiding beer in the cold water with the other boys and tomboys. We had acres and acres of sprawling woods and seeming nothingness to fill our days. This nothingness required that we exercised our imaginations — or die from atrophying minds.
When you finally take the girl out of the country and relocate her in one of the busiest cities in the world, it is then that one discovers the wonders of outsider status that so many poets hail as integral to a poet’s growth. I was immediately floored and taken by New York City. Likewise, the city embraced me. Therein lies the beauty: This city is always open and integrates the foreign in her multiple manifestations. There are nooks and corners and basements and rooftops and other assorted literal and figurative niches for so many here. No one is really weird; everyone fits in — strangeness is necessary to combat the homogeneity found in other locales.
People don’t come to New York City for comfort; they come to see something new. They come to be invigorated and surprised. They come, in a sense, to find a new self. I am still discovering and creating my self as I walk these streets, amazed that 9 million very different people move freely together each day with very little difficulty. On these streets and in the face of so much difference, so much that is not you, you must confront your own attitudes and perceptions, or suffer under the suppression. Poetry, in one serious respect, is a way to work through this labyrinthine walk … and flourish. The urban poetic, from where I’m standing, is one of the boldest traditions by which to explore the magnitude of what a person can imagine and embrace.
You’re also quite active politically. How do you describe your relationship between politics and writing?
This question proves the most troublesome, because as we know, the personal is political. But if you’re speaking about politics proper, then a writer always verges on the didactic or being preachy when addressing the politics of the day. You end up writing opinion pieces that attempt to persuade the audience over to your view, but while you might use poetic devices in your article or speech, political writing is never poetry. Increasingly, people turn a numb ear to overt political talk. Poetry, at the very least, causes people to say, “Huh?” Poetry, as I see it, doesn’t preach.
I suppose that this sweeping statement somehow negates so-called political poetry. This category is something of an oxymoron in my experience. I don’t go to poetry to become informed about the political climate. I read the papers, visit candidates’ Web sites, listen to other voters, etc. But here’s the qualifier: I am only one person, and there is certainly an audience for this type of work. It’s a big world, and there’s room for lots, thankfully.
On the other hand, I am always trying to learn how to implement a political element in my poetry, a process I hope I am improving on. Poetry has more power to change people than politics does. Poetry can make people aware of the subtleties of persuasion, of the nuances of our marketing culture, of the invasiveness of various “isms” (i.e., racism, classicism, journalism, etc.) and the influence they have on how we process the world, and poetry can make the other, against whom we define ourselves, less foreign and more human. Poetry can show how the personal is actually political without necessarily making sweeping declarations. And that’s just a few of the political opportunities that poetry enables.
Several poems in Antidotes are 14 lines. Are you drawn to the sonnet form per se, and if so, why?
Your observation might be a testament to the power of the sonnet: I never consciously write sonnets, though I always have a sense of place in mind whenever I write, which, I believe, is one of the elements of a sonnet. No?
One of the aspects of the book I’m most drawn to is a sense of urgency or energy, such as in “Delicate Tasks” — there’s almost a clipped quality to the lines; not abbreviated, but economical. I’m curious to hear about your process, whether you pare down your writing as you’re finishing poems or find yourself composing in this way from the start.
I think I do both. I collect stand-out phrases, misheard snippets, misread items (I’m myopic), whatever overused slogan has burrowed into my brain, among other miscellany, and attempt to put them together in some fashion akin to collage or pastiche. I’m actually branching out now and doing some narrative work, though it doesn’t feel as successful as the former. Sometimes my patchwork pieces are successful; sometimes they’re complete gibberish. On rare occasions, usually in the middle of the night, I can write a piece in full without referring to any previous notes. They’re usually some of my best, most impulsive poems, but like I said, are terribly rare.
I’ve always wanted to be one of those poets who could submit a request to the muse and write perfect poems in between life’s activities. I don’t want to work at writing. Who wants to face a computer screen solo when it’s gorgeous out in a city that offers so many activities anytime, day or night? I’d rather be out with friends doing whatever nonsense keeps us young and moving. Ron Padgett once told me that Frank O’Hara would be hosting a lively dinner party, get up in the middle of the meal, type out a poem, and sit back down. Ron said the poem was usually brilliant and finished. O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” also attest to his gift. Ashbery has often said in interviews that he only writes about an hour a week and edits very little, if at all. The man completes at least a book a year.
I resist the fact that I am a slow writer and should probably be even slower. I’m getting better at tweaking these economical pieces, as you put it, but they need to sit for a spell so that I can return later and see what needs omitting or elaborating on. Instead I submit work the day it’s written and want to kick myself later, especially if the editor accepts it. Often, the difference lies in letting the poem sit a few days and the rewriting of one phrase, which can turn a mediocre poem into a really spot-on one. Like every good American, I want immediate satiation and nothing less will do.
I’m intrigued by the long poem “Story by Sentence.” It feels as though it could be a collage piece. How did that piece come together?
That poem, in fact, is not a collage piece. I was trying to write a longer piece for another publication while I was editing the book. I would go from the work of editing to writing “Story by Sentence” as a pleasant distraction. I gave myself permission to write a story that indulged in omitting logical transitions, because really, life doesn’t work in seamless ways, so I didn’t feel the need to write according to a traditional audience expectation. Instead, I had a good time and put it in the book at the last minute. It’s probably an example of the problem I cited above: I look back at it now and then and note what I might change if I could. But I like it overall.
Check out Amy King’s poetry, blog and more at http://www.amyking.org
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