On Stripes and Mysteries: Joanna Fuhrman Interviews Elaine Equi on The Intangibles, Writing, and Life

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In our age when everything is so mapped and measurable, I think it’s more important than ever to value uncertainty.  

– Elaine Equi

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JF:  First off, in the poem, “Like Banners, My T Shirts Hang” you write about your love of stripes. Why stripes and not some other pattern? When did this love start? What does it say about your aesthetics?

EE:  For me, a striped shirt conjures up a notebook page and the subliminal suggestion to write. I still do write all my poems on lined pages in notebooks, often with different colored pens. So, I guess my wardrobe reflects my process. I can’t write all the time, but I like to feel I’m always open to the possibility of a poem happening.

Also, I tend to be rather spacey, and the repetitive linear quality of stripes makes me feel pleasantly grounded. So many artists from Frank Stella to Bridget Riley have been inspired by stripes. Far from becoming monotonous, I’m always delighted by new presentations of the simple straightforward stripe.

JF:  I love the lines in “Mystery Poem”: “Even those who disdain the metaphysical / can marvel at the ability of words to overflow their meaning.” I am wondering if you could talk about this idea. Who are the poets you love who you feel best express this phenomenon? How do these poets and approaches influence your own work?

EE:  I mention George Oppen in that same poem, saying: “even an austere materialist like Oppen was not immune to awe.” I like the way his poems are often infused with a kind of wonder, not in a saccharine sense, but in recognizing the inherent strangeness of things and our inability to explain them: “The small nouns / Crying faith / In this in which the wild deer // Startle, and stare out.” His poems are spare and concentrated but vast at the same time.

Lorine Niedecker is another poet, also an Objectivist or at least part of that moment and scene, who writes very condensed poems that seem to grow and reverberate long after you finish them. I tend to like small poems that focus on the local but also convey a touch of the infinite.

There are so many poets I can think of who do this in different ways. Recently I’ve begun reading Robert Lax. He’s really a minimalist, often creating sequences that alternate and repeat just two or three different words or terms, but the overall effect can be sort of hypnotic, like that of a mantra.

When I think of mystery in relation to poetry, I equate it with work that allows me to enjoy uncertainty. It feels different from being lost or confused. I don’t need to know; I’m happy not knowing. Joe Ceravolo’s poems are mysterious to me. They’re not incomprehensible; they’re evocative – “Like the growth / of a tree / I’m fed into / mysteries of Spring / that have Killed me / more than once.”

In our age when everything is so mapped and measurable, I think it’s more important than ever to value uncertainty.

JF:  Several of the poems in The Intangibles (as well as your other collections) have elements of satire and social critique. How do you balance this impulse with your love of the unsolved mystery? Or is “balance” the wrong word? What I am trying to get at is there is always a sense of lyric mysteriousness to your work, even when it’s being satiric — how do you see the relationship between these impulses?

EE:  One of the sources of my satire is the way certain people think they have all the answers. My attraction towards the mysterious makes me circumspect toward buying into such dogmatism. But usually, the person I most enjoy making fun of is myself.

Besides, from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, being lofty all the time is boring. A little irony or sarcasm is necessary just for variety.

JF:  Most of your poems are short. I have a question about process. Do your poems start out compressed? Or do you edit them down from longer, more rambling pieces? How much does the order change when you are working on a poem?

EE:  I edit a lot as I write, rather than wait until I have a finished draft. I almost feel like I have to be somewhat satisfied with one line, before I can move on to the next one. Of course, that’s not a strict rule, but I do like to look closely at words and the frisson between them. I’ve always been fascinated by short forms like haiku, aphorisms, and concrete poetry because of the importance each word gains in them.

On the other hand, I also write a lot of pieces that are conversational and more influenced by speech rhythms. And a lot that are influenced by my habit of reading novels. It’s fun to indulge in the pleasures of prose and sentence crafting while writing a poem. You know you don’t have to keep it up for hundreds of pages.

JF:  What are your favorite novels? Are there any fiction writers who have influenced your work?

EE:  You know I love lists, and since you asked, I couldn’t resist making one. These novels are my idea of perfection – many happy hours were spent living with and within them.

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yasunari Kawabata

It’s odd that four of these titles have the word “house” in them. Maybe on some level, I think of novels as houses you get to explore. These books are pretty much classics, but mostly, you’d catch me reading more contemporary stuff. I actually do read quite a few mysteries – all kinds. And Kazuo Ishiguro is amazing. His book about clones, Never Let Me Go, made me want to write about them too, which I did in my collection, Click and Clone.

JF:  You have a couple of acrostic poems in your book which you say are inspired by Jonathan Williams. What draws you to the acrostic form? What interests you about Williams?

EE:  I was aware of Jonathan Williams as the founder of The Jargon Society before I knew his own poems very well. He had published books by a lot of my favorites including Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and Ronald Johnson. In fact, one of the reasons I picked up Jubilant Thicket, Williams’s New & Selected Poems, was because I was interested to see the relationship between his work and Johnson’s. I knew they were good friends, romantic partners, travel companions, and part of the Black Mountain movement. As someone married to a poet myself, I was curious to see what correspondences would crop up between their styles.

They’re both exuberant, irreverent, and inventive when it comes to form. I was especially drawn to Williams’s “Acrosticals” series because it offers an unusual approach to portrait making. By listing the various references and associations you have of someone for each letter of their name, you create a kind of index of them. Also, it seems magical. What could be more intimate than looking at someone through the lens of their name?

JF:  You mention being married to a poet. How has Jerome influenced your poetry?

EE:  Shortly after Jerome and I met, we started doing readings together. I had a chapbook out, Federal Woman, and he was known for reciting his poems in the garden of a punk disco called La Mere Vipere. We shared a vision of wanting to create poetry that would appeal to a broader range of people than just literary types. It worked pretty well, better than even we had expected. Eventually we ended up reading in L.A. at Beyond Baroque, which was run by Dennis Cooper at the time. There, we met a lot of cool poets –– Jack Skelley, David Trinidad, Amy Gerstler, and Michael Lally –– who, along with Dennis, had their own edgy alternative scene.

As we got older, especially after Jerome and I moved to New York in 1988, we each began developing our individual styles more. But we still enjoy reading together whenever anyone asks us. I think it’s a great luxury to be married to another writer. You’ve got an instant audience for your latest efforts. And when moments of dejection come, as inevitably they do, there’s someone to help adjust your perspective, so you can live to write another day.

JF:  You are known for your “caption poems,” poems that accompany your beautiful photographs. Can you talk about that process?

EE:  I got the idea from Bob Perelman. He said in an interview he had written his poem “China” while flipping through a picture book and imagining his own captions. It sounded intriguing, so I grabbed a book on Pre-Raphaelite art and began writing crazy comments like, “I never noticed it before / but that angel’s feet are on fire!” My finished poem “Pre-Raphaelite Pinups,” got published in The New Yorker, so I was tremendously encouraged to keep exploring the idea of captioning things. Around the same time, someone gave me a camera as a gift, and I began writing lines to accompany my own photos. I did a whole series on candy and I also made a tarot deck of images from old movies (basically screen shots) I took while watching television.

I like the idea of illustration. I’m happiest with my visual poems when I’m not sure if the picture is illustrating the words or the words are illustrating the picture. Also, I’ve always thought of myself as a descendent of the Imagist poets. Pound and Zukofsky had such a slippery way of defining “the image.” Writing that combines actual pictures with words feels like a natural extension of that aesthetic.

Finally, as much as I complain about technology, I have to thank Facebook and Instagram for making it so easy and enjoyable to share this kind of work. It’s hard to find a more succinct prompt than “Say something about this picture.”

JF:  In a lot of your poems, in The Intangibles and other collections, you mention dreams and dreaming. Do you remember your dreams? How does your dream life intersect with your work?

EE:  I do remember my dreams, which isn’t always great since a lot of them are rather dreary in a dreamy sort of way. I’ve written several poems about the monotony of dreams. But I think some of my best dream poems are about the blurry ones where there isn’t much to go on. That way there’s more room to collaborate with the unconscious. I wouldn’t want too literal a record of a dream. I used to joke it would be cool to have a camera that filmed dreams. But I’ve changed my mind.

Recently, I read that scientists already have the capability to make at least a very crude version of something along those lines. It’s in the realm of possibility. I guess it would be good to monitor brain activity in cases where there’s been some sort of trauma. I worry, though, that it could quickly turn into the ultimate loss of privacy. Not to sound paranoid, but someone looking at our dreams – and probably selling them back to us – that’s going too far!

JF:  In The Intangibles, you have a couple of poems about teaching. How has teaching influenced your own writing?

EE:  I can look through any of my own books and see the ghost syllabus of whatever I was teaching at the time. When I wrote Click and Clone, it was a class on minimalism, so there are more aphoristic poems than usual. During Sentences and Rain, I was teaching the Objectivists, and my poems are (not in a bad way) dripping with sincerity. While I was working on this manuscript, I was teaching a lot of sequence poems. I didn’t write any super long poems, but there are a few 3-4 page pieces. For me, that’s epic.

I like teaching. My classes are very informal. They’re more like a book club. And snacks are usually involved. We used to have wine, but unfortunately, schools have become stricter about such things. So now we make do with chocolate. I love the idea that you teach a soup and poetry workshop in your apartment. How did you come up with that? How does your teaching influence your writing?

JF:  Thank you for asking. I had been teaching classes in my apartment for more than 15 years and I always had an element of in-class writing (which is always my favorite part). I was talking to my friend Rosemary Moore about someone she knows in California who teaches a generative writing and pie class, and I liked the idea of having time for eating and talking in addition to writing. Plus, I love to cook.

All of my teaching influences my writing because I am always looking for common threads when I am reading poetry that both my students and I can borrow from, but teaching the generative class has been more concretely useful for me. I am currently working on a handful of poems I started in workshop based on in-class writing activities. For example, last class we did an exercise where we wrote “Things to Do in___________” poems based on Ted Berrigan, and then we remixed our “to-do lists” into non-list poems. Mine became a sort of love poem for my husband. I am also working on a poem that started with an exercise where we used words we heard in a reading of Michael Gizzi (from Penn Sound) as end words for a quasi-ekphrastic poem. By the end, my poem had nothing to do with the Chagall, but I got to use the word “trapezoidally.”

EE:  That sounds fun. I like the idea of combining writing and some other activity. It gives an added element of ritual or occasion. It acknowledges that poems are not just words on a page, but an event. What kind of event is yet another one of those intangible qualities that keep me coming back to poetry.

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Elaine Equi‘s most recent book is The Intangibles from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in many editions of the Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.