Interview with Poet Clif Mason, pt 3 Technique & Progress

Clif Mason is an English professor and a poet with four collections published. I reviewed his remarkable debut full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless, here and here (part II of the review). Since then, we've been emailing back and forth the following extensive interview on the art, craft life and development of the poet.

This interview is (or will be) in four parts:

1. Beginnings & Influences
2. Process & Surrealism
3. Technique & Progress
4. Revision & the Future

One of your stylistic penchants is the pairing—often novel or unexpected, often tied intimately in image and sound. Here’s a spectacular one:

There has been another mass murder

in an American town.

I try to expect nothing of flesh or dust

We know immediately what you mean (although sometimes we have to work harder to plot the connections between the sentence/lines/paradoxical pairs themselves. It is simultaneously both amazingly simple and amazingly complex. Here we have images of both life and death that feeds opposingly yet synergistically into the sentence.

How do you settle on a pair? Is it a tedious process of sorting through possibilities, or is it a natural quirk? Can you explain this or a pairing that was difficult to settle on?

These pairings come naturally. Some are suggested by alliteration, some are suggested by image and meaning, as is the case with the example you quote. If one trusts the organic nature of the process, one has faith that meaning will obtain. “Depression” is a poem particularly rich in these pairings, as they flesh out the anaphora that is that poem’s primary technique. That poem flowed out in a single extended rush. I ended up cutting some lines and “trainwrecking” in another poem, but the anaphora parts read very much as they emerged. Some of these make immediate sense, some are still mysterious to me. An example of the latter is these two lines: “of rust & riots, rampages & impulse purchases, / of malarial fevers & red planet hallucinations”. The first of these lines generates speed and momentum and gives the sense of zeitgeist under great pressure. The second line expands upon that but in a way that is more suggestive than perfectly rational. I can’t say that I understand these two lines completely, but I felt they fit the mood of the poem, so I left them in.

Often neglected in discussions with poets is the statement. You have a command of imagery, which we expect in modern poetry, but there’s also the bold statement, the proclamation, memorably worded. Famously, there’s James Wright’s “I have wasted my life” ["Lyingin a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”]—that line that makes the poem peal throughout the images. And of course, William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming” took on the best and the worst: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

One of your memorable statement lines reads:

This is the age of amputation.

We learn to live with less and still less.

How does one come up with such lines? What makes them resonate? Do you have to tinker much with these? Do you find yourself taking many out, or adding some in? How does/should statement function in modern poetry?

I am by aesthetic temperament ambivalent about statements and I try generally to eschew overt didactic statements. That said, there are statements in my poems. The lines you quote flow directly from the four preceding lines, which offer images of missing body parts, including a “trunk of moldering toes.” The direct statement takes these specific images and creates a larger perspective within which they might gain meaning. The danger in such statements is that the larger perspective may be a distortion. If such lines flow out onto the page, one has to pause to ask if they are genuine and real. If one is at all suspicious of their veracity, they should be cut. In this case, I felt that the statement reflected something I felt about the contemporary world, that more and more human meaning is cut away from our lives by economic and political forces before which we often feel more than a little helpless. There is certainly a place for the didactic in poetry. Without it, we wouldn’t have poems like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” Adrienne Rich’s “Rape,” Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” or Rita Dove’s “Parsley”—all of which are necessary and important poems.

I’m interested in your motifs like “stars.” Before I understood what you were up to and discouraged you from using them, did you cut them, did you hesitate, or did you stand up for them, confident in what you were up to (i.e. “That schmuck doesn’t know what I’m doing)? Did you take them out and put them back in? When did you realize this would be an important motif in your works? Did you know what they signified during the composition of the first poem? or after several poems? or as you were assembling the manuscript? How do you know what to keep and what to cull?

The incident to which you refer was when I thought I might be able to use star imagery to link every poem in a book. I think you were objecting to the surfeit of such images. The word “star” began no doubt to cloy on the tongue. That was helpful in that I realized it was perhaps asking too much of a single image to unify an entire book—though Rilke is able to do it with great power in the image of the angel in Duino Elegies. The danger was that using stars in this way could become almost a gimmick. I began as a nature poet, and I realized early on that certain primordial images—rivers, stars, stones, and trees—were an important aspect of the way I approached and processed the world. This is probably rooted in my early years on the family farm and in my high school years in Pierre, South Dakota—a town in which the Missouri River looms large in the consciousness of the people who live there. I hope that I use such imagery in fresh and suggestive ways. So, to answer your question, I certainly took another look at the poems in which stars figured. I didn’t remove them, as I felt they were aesthetically justified, but I certainly re-examined them.

As memory serves, can you guide us through the original stimulus of writing a poem, to composition, to revision for publication, to revision for the collection? (If pressed for a poem, I’d say, “Thanksgiving Song” but whatever you have clear in mind is fine.)

“Thanksgiving Song” was originally titled “Praise Song,” and under that title it appeared in Writers’ Journal. I had entered it in one of their contests, but the line limit for the contest was 24 lines and the poem was 45 lines. I had faith in the poem and thought it might be equally effective if I combined many of the lines. I might say that I’ve never shied from re-considering the lineation in my poems, as attempting new line breaks often reveals new possibilities for the poem to make meaning. The resulting poem came in, as I recall, exactly at 24 lines. In the original composition, the poem flowed out associatively pretty much as it now reads, with one exception. A few years ago, I revisited the poem and cut what had been a whole stanza in the 45-line version of the poem: 

Yet the tree frog

wants praise.

Horned owl and muskrat

want praise.

As do red wolf, mule deer,

armadillo, coral snake.

They feel it, know it,

in blood and ravening gut.

The reason I deleted this stanza was because it seemed flat and prosaic in comparison to the imagery of the rest of the poem. Cutting this stanza improved the poem. It was at that time that I changed the title of the poem. I tried further new line breaks, as I felt that some of those in the 24-line version were somewhat arbitrary. The resulting poem was 27 lines. It was in long blocks without white space, and I felt it needed some room to breathe. So, I tried dividing the poem into three-line stanzas, and that became the poem’s final form.

Lone Willow Press published a very different chapbook of yours in the 90s. You waited twenty years before doing another. What was the delay? What made you alter your voice so drastically?

From the Dead Before was a book that combined some of my free verse nature poems and some of the formal poems I wrote in the 90s as an attempt to create new possibilities for my poems. Brad Leithauser’s books Hundreds of Fireflies and Cats of the Temple were significant influences on my writing at that time, as were the poems of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Amy Clampitt. There are a good many sonnets in that collection, as well as a glose (the title poem). I tried my hand at many other forms in those years, and there was a sense of adventure and a zest that came from the discovery of the demands and challenges of received forms, whether it was a pantoum or sestina, a ghazal or villanelle. However, I stopped writing in received forms when I began to feel that, for me at least, the form should not be the trigger of a poem. As I’ve already noted, my poems worked best when words and images appeared in my consciousness and I allowed them to take shape without loss of their essential mystery. This is what Keats called “Negative Capability,” which he stated occurs, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He thought Shakespeare possessed this quality “so enormously,” and I agree with him. I don’t claim to achieve this every time I write a poem, or even consistently. But I certainly aspire to it.