What I Needed to Do to Act More like a Volcano

A Conversation with Stephen Sturgeon

I recently had the chance to talk with Stephen Sturgeon, a poet whose debut collection, Trees of the Twentieth Century, is primed and ready to leave its footprint all over independent literature. We discuss poetry, the internet, perspective, pronouns, accidents, and what part of a giraffe is good to eat. He is a man with a lot to say.

Ted Powers: You are a hard man to track down via the internet. Tell us a bit about yourself. From where do you hail? Is your lack of an online persona a conscious decision?

Stephen Sturgeon: I grew up outside of Albany, New York, in a place called Cohoes. For the past twelve years I’ve lived around Boston, until one year and a few months ago, when I moved to Buffalo, New York, where I am now. I don’t know how much longer I will be in Buffalo. During the years I lived around Boston, there was a stretch of a year and a few months that I lived in London.

About the internet, it is odd and unfortunate to me that maintaining an “online persona” is the normal state of affairs—odd and unfortunate because not doing so has come to seem odd and deliberate. Staying away from Facebook and Twitter isn’t something I strive to do. Participating takes time, and I just find myself doing other things, participating in other things. For a little while I sent in comments to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, back when they accepted comments there, and that did not go well. Sometimes I’ll write an e-mail to someone I know who has a blog, and my e-mail will become a blog post. I’m not completely absent. I tried running a tumblr account for a couple of months, but fell away from it, it didn’t keep my attention. It’s still up: http://beauxarts.tumblr.com/

More generally, it’s true that I am uninterested in what social networking sites and blogs have to offer. That’s not to say that I don’t value friendship and keeping up with current events and improving my awareness of social and political and artistic issues, the things those sites are advertised as facilitating. It’s to say that I don’t think they facilitate them. I see people I know dealing with their accounts and profiles and sorting through messages and I know it would drive me out of my mind.

TP: You quote Wyndham Lewis in the beginning of the collection: “There is a point beyond which we must hold people responsible for accidents:”. Where do you see that point being? Does that threshold exist in your poems?

SS: Both of the epigraphs to this book, the one from Thomas Hobbes and the other from Wyndham Lewis, are about “accidents.”

One way to start talking about this is to quote from that essay by W. K. Wimsatt from the 50s, “The Intentional Fallacy.” It begins with a series of propositions about the relevance and importance of an artist’s intentions to the viewing and interpretation of an artwork, and the first proposition starts, “A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat.” I like to think Wimsatt was being disingenuous when he wrote that, because the statement does not at all line up with how poems frequently get written, and if Wimsatt thought it true, I find it hard to pair with his good insights elsewhere. Poets take words from outside of their heads constantly. To say otherwise would be to deny something as basic to poetry as allusion, to forget poems like Wordsworth’s “We are Seven,” to invalidate Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Perfect.”

Examples go on. The point is that a poet’s accidental discovery of words that originated from an alien head is an elemental part of writing poems. And that creates a problem. If a poet uses words that are not his own, is the poet not responsible for what the words say, for the consequences of the words? If using one’s own words is not required for the writing of a poem, is the arrangement of alien words into line breaks or stanzas or paragraphs what writing a poem actually consists of? The problem was (maybe inadvertently) taken up recently by practitioners of Flarf and Conceptual Poetry, who tend to take readymade text off of the internet, arrange it (or not), and say they’ve made a poem.

To get to the end of this, I think that there has been a trend since Barthes to regard works of art as the expressions of cultures at large and not the makings of individuals. As a consequence, identifiable culpability inevitably gets thrown out the window. Join that with the importance of accidents to the writing of poems and you start to see a case for letting artists off the hook for what they do. But I don’t believe it. It’s all excuses. Artists are responsible for their creations, regardless of what went into making them. It’s said better and shorter by Geoffrey Hill: “Add that we’re unaccountably | held to account;” (though he’s writing there, I think, of other things).

I’m starting to be disingenuous myself, though, in acting like the only reason an artist would want to become disassociated from an artwork is to hide from retribution. There are quite good, other reasons for an artist to want to disappear, to insist on disappearing from a work of art, for readers to insist on seeing a poet as nothing more than sociological vapor, and William H. Gass goes through the varieties of these reasons adroitly in Habitations of the Word. He does go on to say though that anonymity “may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it.” To my head, this is the final reality, one that any aesthetic theory that depends on the diffusion of authorship or artistic responsibility will break up against.

The Lewis quotation ends with a colon, which is fortuitous, because what follows is my poems.

There are other things to say about this. I don’t want to be overlong.

TP: What do you hope to accomplish, both personally and professionally, with this collection?

SS: I would like for Trees of the Twentieth Century to let me get on to brand-new things artistically, but there is no hope of that, because I didn’t accomplish a house-cleaning with this book. There are still a great many lines and stanzas from the years in which I wrote this book’s poems that I think are good and that I want to make into complete poems. I’d like to have no materials at hand and to start writing again with no past and a blank brain. At times the circumstances have that resemblance. That doesn’t last for more than a few hours, and then I am stuck with all of this stuff again.

TP: Were you to achieve a blank slate, in what direction would you head artistically?

SS: The purpose is to have no idea what might be next. When I say “all of this stuff again,” I admit there is not that much material hanging around my ears that’s loudly calling for use, but even that little bit hangs like hell. This is why manifesto-writing, and making art for a long time that’s based on a single complex of ideas, is bizarre to me. It’s bad enough having to deal with a horde of homeless words. Ideas are so much worse. They never shut up. Writing according to a manifesto’s instructions or a theory of language must be like living with a swarm of insomniac parrots bashing off the walls.

What looks ideal is the sort of power Guy Davenport had. He could write something like this, from A Balthus Notebook, and be convincing:

“A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.”

Then he could also write “Ariadne’s Dancing Floor” and “Joyce’s Forest of Symbols,” two essays on Joyce’s symbolic method that seem to me indisputable in their observations and incompatible with each other in their approaches. To write essays like those would be like having two different keys that both open one door — but the scene behind the one door changes depending on the key used to open it. From “Ariadne’s Dancing Floor”:

“Joyce’s symbolism is a mimesis of symbolism: a dramatic perception, ultimately tragic, that man’s ideas, his art, his noblest configurations of sense, are no more than symbols. They are forgeries of meaning.”

From “Joyce’s Forest of Symbols”:

“So complex a fusion of meanings becomes a picture of meaning itself in all its darkness of ambiguity, ironic duplicity, and triumphant articulation of dead symbols, signifying that symbols, like seeds, come alive in due season and place.”

This isn’t a matter of a great critic changing his mind, like Eliot on Milton. It’s having the world multiple, contradictory ways without falling into contradiction. And I suspect that in order to do this, you have to be able to walk up to things you have seen thousands of times before as if you had never seen them. But I have no idea really, and I also suspect these things may not be as important or noteworthy as I think.

TP: How is this collection different from other debuts? What makes it unique?

SS: If you mean debut poetry collections from contemporary poets, mine is probably arriving comparatively late. I just turned 31 and I often see first books out from writers in their early and mid-twenties. I imagine Trees of the Twentieth Century contains poems from a longer span of time than most debut collections — parts of or entire poems from it date back six or seven years, and others were written whole or finished as recently as this past summer. What effect that has on the pitch of the book I have no idea. The adage “Find your voice and stick with it” is horrifyingly bad advice. As it is I keep a hard eye out for unintentional and mundane repetitions across my poems (some things I want to repeat, and do, for the sake of building contextures and so on), but if the voices are varied in Trees of the Twentieth Century, it’s more likely a result of the duration of years the poems cover, of learning and forgetting things as I wrote and changing my mind about what I needed to do to act more like a volcano.

I also imagine the activity of selecting poems to include in my book was probably more laborious than is the case for most debut collections. It only has about 60 pages of poems to it, and I remember in 2009 printing out a portion of the poetry files on my computer and reading through 700 pages or so afterward.

I’ve put together other collections of my poetry, too, but never was able to have them published. There is one from 2004 that a few people have read and said they’d like to see in print, and I wonder should I try again with that one. The point is, this wasn’t the first time I’ve worked hard on building and arranging the contents of a book. That doesn’t necessarily translate into aptitude for it on my part — I may very well have stale ideas about how it should be done as a consequence.

That all concerns contemporary debuts. What I really wanted was to make something like The Shepheardes Calender, but that did not happen.

TP: Is there a chronological element to this collection, or are the poems from six years ago tucked in with the ones finished this summer?

SS: The poems are not ordered chronologically. I put them in an order that I thought would make for the most conversation between them, agreement as well as argument.

TP: Daniel Pritchard, editor of The Critical Flame, said you ‘may be the first major poet of this generation.’ Which generation is he referring to? Which generation do you see yourself as a part of?

SS: I turned 31 a few days ago. Dan is, I think, a couple of years younger than I am. He might mean the generation that he and I belong to. But I don’t know what generation I, or he and I, belong to, or if he and I do belong to the same generation.

TP: In the world of your poems, objects often have a vitality to them, and in some cases, such as the black moon, a personality. Where does this stem from? Is this tied into your own perception of the world?

SS: I perceive the world the way most people do, I think. I see and hear things, I believe that they are there, usually they are. I do tend to stare at things for a long time: paintings, garbage, the walls. Never do I mistake them for live organisms. Often they’ll make me think of something else, people or other living things or things that had once been alive. Is that what you mean?

TP: I think that is what I mean. In different poems, you write, ‘In the beginning I was happier’ and ‘The end he wanted was always elsewhere.’ Those feel like big ideas. Can you give us an idea as to what exactly is beginning and ending?

SS: The first line you quote is from “Satan in Heaven.” Satan is talking. The King James Bible begins, “In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and I suppose Satan is talking about that time, the time before he fell. The way that he transfers attention from the event of the universe’s creation to the state of his own personal contentedness in that time is typical of him, and is of a piece with, according to other writers, his overall problem. I see that same characteristic and problem in me, and experience suggests it is in everyone. Who cares about feelings when more important things are going on?

The second line you quote is from “House with Paintings in It.” I’m unsure what to say about it. It’s a way to introduce a variation on the obstinate cliché that satisfaction equals complacency, perhaps — the value of perpetual dissatisfaction to making anything worthwhile, and how grim that is since we rarely get to choose our endings (I don’t mean death).

What exactly is beginning and ending? Everything, we are, constantly and simultaneously. That’s a feeling I have (back to feelings).

TP: Many of the poems employ ambiguous pronouns, a la John Ashbery. How important is it to you to keep pronouns mysterious? What affect should this have on the reader, if any?

SS: The only poetry by Ashbery I’ve read is The Tennis Court Oath. His “Dido” is a good sonnet. I don’t know what he does with pronouns. I don’t know what I do with pronouns, the usual things. “You” in some cases means “you the reader,” in other cases it means “you, the specific individual I have in mind, to whom I am addressing this poem (you know who you are).” “He” in some cases means a man or boy I am imagining whose name did not arrive with him, and in some cases “he” means a specific, real or historical third person whose identity has been sufficiently implied. The same with “she.”

I don’t know how a reader should take that. How did you take it when you read the poems?

TP: “The Grapevine” by John Ashbery is a good example of the way he plays with the ambiguity inherent in pronouns.

In most of your poems, I allowed for the possibility of all forms of the pronoun to exist. For example, I saw the ‘we’ that exists in many of your poems as any combination of the reader, the writer, the narrator, and other characters within the world of the poem. This feels to me like the most exciting way to read a poem.

The mysterious nature of pronouns extends, in your poems, to signifiers such as ‘man’ and ‘guy.’ In “Thoughts of a Man,” you ask the reader to “Think of a man,” allowing the reader to project his/her image of a man onto the poem. By the end of the first section, the reader is directed to “Think of this man/ of how his nose/ should be his best feature,” making the man someone quite specific. Is this type of ‘pulling back the curtain’ deliberate?

SS: There’s a line from the Henry James story “The Private Life”: “I don’t think I really know when I do things”.

I read my poems not as allegories or fantasies. As I understand them, they do not take place in their own worlds. To cordon off their events and phrases from the world we know would be to sterilize them. It would drain them of consequence.

In poetry, the difference between things that could have happened in the world but didn’t happen and things that could never happen is superficial. Saying “I ate walnuts for breakfast” when you actually ate toast is like saying “I hatched crocodiles out of my alarm clock yesterday.” Neither happened, one could have, the other not, but these don’t matter. What matters is that you can imagine either having happened, and that you can imagine either having an affect on a provided scenario.

Now, I don’t agree with what I just said, about how, in poetry, telling a lie about a possibility is essentially the same as stating an impossibility. I wrote it out that way because I have a very live impulse to think that way, even though I know it is wrong. I struggle with it, and I think it is important, and something that Wallace Stevens wrote in The Necessary Angel and something that the British painter Keith Vaughan wrote in his Journals may help me explain why. From Stevens:

“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.”

From Vaughan (recounting a discussion with Graham Sutherland about a buyer wanting Sutherland to re-paint a section of a picture):

“That led on to the suggestion as a general principle that in all great paintings there was always such a point, a flaw if you like, which had not been completely resolved, and which was in fact essential to the strength and beauty of the whole work. The flaw could not be repaired without the whole painting being damaged. It was as if a painting were trying to approach a complete equilibrium but could never quite reach it; if it did it would disintegrate, the tension would snap.”

Often the “flaw” in my poems, the thing that could be repaired but whose repair would make the surrounding structure of the poem unravel, is the crocodiles hatching out of the alarm clock. For whatever reason, things like that are constantly coming to me without my trying to herd them, but, as Stevens says, the expression of such things does not go very far. And so I go about trying to leave enough of that material in while trying not to oversupply it. Writing in too little would make the poem limp, and too much would make the poem… limp. And I think the mysteriousness you see in my pronouns could very well be a component of the flaw-tension that Vaughan thinks is important to leave in, a component of the unreality Stevens thinks should not be overindulged. I’m starting to get inaccurate again, but this time in good faith. Am I off the mark of your question?

TP: No, you are right on. The balance you are describing seems like a pretty common dilemma for writers, though one that is hard to pin down.

Your poem “Why I Called” really made me laugh. To what extent is applied logic a vehicle for this collection?

SS: I don’t have a good idea of what you mean by “applied logic.” I wrote that poem while walking a few blocks from a diner back to my apartment. I was thinking about my friend Landis, about a conversation I overheard on the steps of Boston University’s Tsai Center in 2000, about Zachary German’s poem “Something Bad Happened Today,” and about some other things probably.

TP: “Something Bad Happened Today” is a great poem. I think by applied logic I mean that the title explicates your intent to explain something, and the poem does explain it, but does so by using a series of logic that does not equate literally to the logic we see in our world. Do you think this is a fair description of “Why I Called”?

SS: The logic in that poem seems sound to me. I think it’s the same sort of logic we have in the world. But the logic is being applied to events that don’t happen in the world. The events are wrong and the logic is right. However I am not a logician. Maybe you know something I can’t. Really what I was thinking most was what it would be like to see Landis again. I was thinking idly though, and the scenario came out as a nightmare. I was least certain of including that poem in the book. Then I thought that it does its work (unreal as it is) and to exclude it would be sentimental. Still, I do hate that poem. I am glad you think it is good.

TP: What is the strangest animal you’ve eaten?

SS: Giraffe’s lung.

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Trees of the Twentieth Century is Stephen Sturgeon’s first collection of poetry. He is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. Ted Powers is the assistant poetry editor of Dark Sky Magazine.