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INTERVIEWER
Does this relationship with absence remain the reason why you write poems?
ANEDDA
I write to intensify reality and at the same time to undermine it, as Emily Dickinson does when she says, “Bring me the sunset in a cup / Reckon the morning’s flagons up.” The miracle of this poem is the dislocation of the relationship between the domestic and the universal. The visible is there, but reimagined by the swerve from ordinary perspectives and scales.
I set out to learn everything on my own so that I could become a poet. That was my goal. I didn’t know another way. For a long time—I’d say all of my twenties and much of my thirties—I was simply reading everything I could and trying to assimilate it. I visited a lot of countries, but I had no idea of the larger map. But then at some point—I had already been writing for years—things started to fall into place. I began to sense how things might fit together. I developed some theories. That’s when I decided it would be good to pay something back, to put my learning to good use. I was already a poet and critic, but I also started to reach out and become an advocate.
Poetry partly comes out of dark underground forces. Writing it is a bit like psychoanalysis. You’re supposed to go where it’s psychically troubling. It takes a certain kind of recklessness to face oneself. The more upsetting it is, the more you’re supposed to fly toward it, like a moth to the flame.
INTERVIEWER
What happens between the books? What motivates the next project? A backlog? Anxiety?
HIRSCH
Initially, there’s a terrible blankness, a void. I feel my creativity is over and try not to despair. Slowly but surely, I come back to life—at least that’s how it’s happened in the past. I find something that moves or torments me, something that’s on my mind, something unexplored. My desperation gives way to curiosity and something begins to emerge. I feel I ought to do what I can.
There were flies in every room that summer. Windows open, rolled
pages of newsprint at the ready in our grips.
excerpt from a longer poem
Tiffany’s older brother was more interesting than either Tiffany or her ruffled bedroom. When she introduced us, I felt burnished by his attention, the kind I’d already become an expert at detecting. I could feel a man’s gaze when it sharpened with interest, like the birds who flitted at the feeder in our yard could feel mine. Desire filled my bones with air. Tiffany noticed, too. Later, when she suggested we play truth or dare, she dared me to ask him to join us. Then she dared us to go in the closet. There he kissed me, probing the inside of my mouth with his tongue. As the dresses shifted on their hangers in the dark, I recognized the mix of fear and excitement that fizzed in me. The familiar sense, when he touched me, that I no longer existed. Not girl but vapor. My body a thing in his hands, my mind a balloon bumping the closet ceiling.
I was very low-key and quiet, but I was developing a strength inside. At parties, I wasn’t one of those people who could work a room. I’d be over in the corner by the bookshelf, but I was tuning my ears, my literary ears. I would spend a lot of time working on my writing, and that gave me a quiet confidence. I wasn’t distracted. I am not easily distracted. Eyes on the prize.
INTERVIEWER
What was the prize?
PARKS
Ha! Oh, that’s a good question. I remember one day I was sitting at my desk in my college dorm doing an assignment. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and my desk faced a window and the light was coming in just so, and I was typing, writing a story, trying to figure out what it was about, and all of a sudden it was as if the room was populated by people and all I had to do was listen up and write down what they were saying. I felt like I was in the river, that big river, and I’m in the flow of the stream. After that, the act of writing, the prize, became the chasing of that experience.
So the prize is just the joy of writing, hearing the sounds, hearing those voices. Just being in that river, with the Spirit, having your veins hit the Vein. When these veins in my arm intersect with the Great River and the divining rod goes bzzz. You can feel that thrum. And to come back to it again and again and know that it’s always there and if you work for it, it’s there. The work is the prize.
INTERVIEWER
Do you try to push through a first draft as quick as possible, or do you take your time with it?
PARKS
These days, to stay organized, I outline. Images or actions, actions or dialogue, it’s all the same. In the first draft, it doesn’t need to be written right, it just needs to be written down. I’m listening, I’m watching. And I’m saying, okay, sure, yes to everything, and then at a certain point there’s writing. In the first draft I remind myself, Anything goes. Everything grows. I’m in the garden. Later, in the second draft, I take out my “sword of discrimination” and I put on my favorite music and I cut everything that doesn’t fit.
INTERVIEWER
Did your father ever come around to showing interest?
GURGANUS
When I was twelve, I started selling paintings and he began offering advice. “Double, no, triple your asking price. You’ll sell twice as much in the end. There’s an art to this, I tell you.” Dad feared I would starve to death as a grown-up artist. To prevent that he tried disinheriting me of any stray respect. But this only made me trust art more, him less. Everything he withheld I found quadrupled in a sixty-nine-cent bottle of india ink. Pen and ink became my superpower. I didn’t think of aesthetics as aesthetics but as tactics for survival. When my first book sold, Dad told me he’d assured his golfing partners, “I never doubted it.” I thanked him, knowing better.
GURGANUS
Remember, it was the Summer of Love, and here I was, nineteen, sexually able but with my head shaved and at sea for weeks on end. The best of what I’d done so far and might do just ahead could only be described one blank page at a time. Drawing and writing soon started feeling interchangeable. I could now draw mug shots of my characters, I could write my still lifes. In sketchbooks, I paid studious homage to minds and skills far, far beyond my own. It felt like a religious practice but one freed of tithing to any single God.
INTERVIEWER
You needed to make things.
GURGANUS
I made something every day. Early on, I sensed that—in every art—the ultimate shared subject is human consciousness itself. The more comic-tragic notes you can wrest onto a single active page, the better. I would later suggest to my students that they put something funny on every page and something beautiful on every other. My naive obsession was to shape something so true, energized, and hilarious, it would necessarily outlive me. The goal was not becoming known, it was becoming useful.
INTERVIEWER
You were conscious of a literary immortality even then?
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